Cheryl Strayed - Wild

“Wow,” I gasped because it seemed to be our word. It stood in for what I didn’t say, which was that for a guy who wasn’t much of a conversationalist, he was ass-kickingly good in bed. And I hadn’t even fucked him yet.

Without a word, he took a box of condoms from the Safeway bag and ripped it open. When he stood, he reached for my hand and pulled me up too. I let him lead me across the sand to the gathering of boulders that formed a cove and we circled back into it, to what passed for private on a public beach — a cranny among the dark rocks in the broad light of day. It wasn’t the kind of thing I was into, having sex outside. I’m sure there’s a woman on the planet who’d choose the outdoors over even the most slipshod and temporary quarters, but I haven’t met her, though I decided for this day that the protection of the rocks would suffice. After all, over the course of the past couple of months, I’d done everything else outside. We took each other’s clothes off and I reclined with my bare rump against a sloped boulder, wrapping my legs around Jonathan until he turned me over and I gripped the rock. Alongside the remnants of honey, there was the mineral scent of salt and sand and the reedy scent of moss and plankton. It wasn’t long before I forgot about being outside, before I couldn’t even remember the honey, or whether he’d asked me a single question or not.

There wasn’t much to say as we made the long drive back to Ashland. I was so tired from sex and lack of sleep, from sand and sun and honey, that I could hardly speak anyway. We were quiet and peaceful together, blasting Neil Young all the way to the hostel, where, without ceremony, we ended our twenty-two-hour date.

“Thanks for everything,” I said, kissing him. It was past dark already, nine o’clock on a Sunday night, the town quieter than it had been the night before, hunkered down and settled in, half the tourists gone home.

“Your address,” he said, handing me a scrap of paper and a pen. I wrote down Lisa’s, feeling a mounting sense of something that wasn’t quite sorrow, wasn’t quite regret, and wasn’t quite longing, but was a mix of them all. It had been an indisputably good time, but now I felt empty. Like there was something I didn’t even know I wanted until I didn’t get it.

I handed him the scrap of paper.

“Don’t forget your purse,” he said, picking up my little red stove bag.

“Bye,” I said, taking it from him and reaching for the door.

“Not so fast,” he said, pulling me toward him. He kissed me hard and I kissed him back harder, like it was the end of an era that had lasted all of my life.

The next morning I dressed in my hiking clothes — the same old stained sports bra and threadbare navy blue hiking shorts I’d been wearing since day 1, along with a new pair of wool socks and the last fresh T-shirt I’d have all the way to the end, a heather gray shirt that said UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY in yellow letters across the chest. I walked to the co-op with Monster on my back, my ski pole dangling from my wrist, and a box in my arms, taking over a table in the deli section of the store to organize my pack.

When I was done, Monster sat tidily loaded down next to the small box that held my jeans, bra, and underwear, which I was mailing back to Lisa, and a plastic grocery bag of meals I couldn’t bear to eat any longer, which I planned to leave in the PCT hiker free box at the post office on my way out of town. Crater Lake National Park was my next stop, about 110 trail miles away. I needed to get back on the PCT and yet I was reluctant to leave Ashland. I dug through my pack, found my Strayed necklace, and put it on. I reached over and touched the raven feather Doug had given me. It was still wedged into my pack in the place I’d first put it, though it was worn and straggly now. I unzipped the side pocket where I kept my first aid kit, pulled it out, and opened it up. The condom I’d carried all the way from Mojave was still there, still like new. I took it out and put it in the plastic grocery bag with the food I didn’t want, and then I hoisted Monster onto my back and left the co-op carrying the box and the plastic grocery bag.

I hadn’t gone far when I saw the headband man I’d met up at Toad Lake, sitting on the sidewalk where I’d seen him before, his coffee can and little cardboard sign in front of him. “I’m heading out,” I said, stopping before him.

He looked up at me and nodded. He still didn’t seem to remember me — either from our encounter at Toad Lake or from a couple of days before.

“I met you when you were looking for the Rainbow Gathering,” I said. “I was there with another woman named Stacy. We talked to you.”

He nodded again, shaking the change in his can.

“I’ve got some food here that I don’t need, if you want it,” I said, setting the plastic grocery bag down beside him.

“Thanks, baby,” he said as I began to walk away.

I stopped and turned.

“Hey,” I called. “Hey!” I shouted until he looked at me.

“Don’t call me baby,” I said.

He pressed his hands together, as if in prayer, and bowed his head.

Crater Lake used to be a mountain. Mount Mazama, it was called. It was not so unlike the chain of dormant volcanoes I’d be traversing on the PCT in Oregon — Mount McLoughlin, the Three Sisters peaks, Mount Washington, Three Fingered Jack, Mount Jefferson, and Mount Hood — except that it was bigger than them all, having reached an elevation that’s estimated at a little under 12,000 feet. Mount Mazama blew up about 7,700 years ago in a cataclysmic eruption that was forty-two times more voluminous than the eruption that decapitated Mount St. Helens in 1980. It was the largest explosive eruption in the Cascade Range going back a million years. In the wake of Mazama’s destruction, ash and pumice blanketed the landscape for 500,000 square miles — covering nearly all of Oregon and reaching as far as Alberta, Canada. The Klamath tribe of Native Americans who witnessed the eruption believed it was a fierce battle between Llao, the spirit of the underworld, and Skell, the spirit of the sky. When the battle was over, Llao was driven back into the underworld and Mount Mazama had become an empty bowl. A caldera, it’s called — a sort of mountain in reverse. A mountain that’s had its very heart removed. Slowly, over hundreds of years, the caldera filled with water, collecting the Oregon rain and snowmelt, until it became the lake that it is now. Reaching a maximum depth of more than 1,900 feet, Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the United States and among the deepest in the world.

I knew a little something about lakes, having come from Minnesota, but as I walked away from Ashland, I couldn’t quite imagine what I would see at Crater Lake. It would be like Lake Superior, I supposed, the lake near which my mother had died, going off blue forever into the horizon. My guidebook said only that my first view of it from the rim, which rose 900 feet above the lake’s surface, would be “one of disbelief.”

I had a new guidebook now. A new bible. The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 2: Oregon and Washington , though back at the co-op in Ashland, I’d ripped off the last 130 of the book’s pages because I didn’t need the Washington part. My first night out of Ashland, I paged through the book before falling asleep, reading bits here and there, the same as I had with the California guidebook in the desert on my first night on the PCT.

As I walked during those first days out of Ashland, I caught a couple of glimpses of Mount Shasta to the south, but mostly I walked in forests that obscured views. Among backpackers, the Oregon PCT was often referred to as the “green tunnel” because it opened up to far fewer panoramas than the California trail did. I no longer had the feeling that I was perched above looking down on everything, and it felt odd not to be able to see out across the terrain. California had altered my vision, but Oregon shifted it again, drew it closer in. I hiked through forests of noble, grand, and Douglas fir, pushing past bushy lakes through grasses and weedy thistles that sometimes obscured the trail. I crossed into the Rogue River National Forest and walked beneath tremendous ancient trees before emerging into clear-cuts like those I’d seen a few weeks before, vast open spaces of stumps and tree roots that had been exposed by the logging of the dense forest. I spent an afternoon lost amid the debris, walking for hours before I emerged onto a paved road and found the PCT again.