Girl in the Woods

by Aspen Matis

  We fell again, again, again to the other side, landing, landing down onto the damp dirt like dark green clay. We spent more time climbing over tree trucks than walking forward on the path between them.

  In my vision, they became the outside of rabbits’ houses, portals in my mind into a woodland creature’s world.

  These northern woods were familiar, as in a dream or an old nighttime story I’d been told. This was true old-growth woods.

  When I was little, at bedtime, my mommy would read me the Uncle Wiggily Longears stories, set in a fantastical world inside the woods—beautiful old, illustrated books with cloth covers—faded navy, royal purple, burlap brown.

  Uncle Wiggily was an aging “gentleman rabbit” afflicted with incessant rheumatism. Forest inhabitants would work and play. But they were plagued by the wood’s “bad chaps,” outlandish beasts all bent on nibbling off Uncle Wiggily’s little ears. But strong and mean as the bad chaps were, frail old Uncle Wiggily could always escape them.

  I loved The Great Brain books; tales of two young brothers’ escapades, conning other kids and hopping trains—being wild boys. I listened with glee as my mother read me The Little House on the Prairie, enchanted by Laura’s stories of how her family banded together through winters, tornadoes. Their ingenuity amazed me; subsistence seemed a game they all played as a family, always.

  But Uncle Wiggily’s was my very favorite world to slip into as I fell into dreams.

  Dash and I descended into Packwood, through the looming old-growth trees huge over me, rooted in me.

  When I was eight, my mommy gave me A Walk in the Woods, the story of a man who attempts to walk from Georgia to Maine, along the Appalachian Trail—a true story.

  I felt the damp dirt squish under my running shoes, it was imprinted.

  Packwood itself was a damp green town in the damp green woods, a central Washington forest valley.

  We got hamburgers and shakes at the Blue Spruce Saloon & Diner, it was vacant, and the waiter asked us what we did “in the real world” that allowed us to take six months off to hike the trail.

  “We’re in the real world,” Dash responded, not answering. He seemed annoyed. “This is real life.”

  Our waiter, an older man with pure white hair, looked to me; I blushed for Dash. “I’m just a student,” I said softly and then wondered if it was still true.

  “I did finance stuff,” Dash said; he was too loud. He quickly added, “And I’m retired.”

  He was acting like he wished for an end—not the beginning. He’d often spoken of investing and his dream of quickly making his five million “nut,” but he hadn’t yet. “Retired” seemed wrong. He was only twenty-nine, and he didn’t have enough money to retire on. He wasn’t working, didn’t have a job to return to after the trail.

  From the place this trail ended, he didn’t have a plan, he had nowhere he had to go. He looked like a lost man. His reaction exposed his insecurity.

  I felt safer with him in many ways—he was older, felt certain in ways I felt afraid, but in this way I felt this was reversed. While he seemed nervous in our inevitable return to the world off the trail, I was beginning to feel excited. I was ready.

  For the first time, I was not afraid.

  Early the next morning, I went to the Packwood Public Library to print one of my essays to let Dash read. I checked my e-mail; my dad had sent a picture “from a very long time ago,” with a note that said it was “great” and he still loved it.

  I opened it to see. It was a photograph of my old drawing of the Animal Ancestors, the creatures I’d imagined we’d evolved from, all grinning. They were faded now, almost invisible, but I could still remember the Magic Marker colors each had been. The one of Human Man had glasses and a curly beard—Man was the image of my father.

  My dad wrote me, “Please also remember at all times that I love you very much, that my failures toward you were caused by static in my head and not at all by anything you did or said. . . . My hope (and goal) is that someday, not too far off, we can have a wonderful father-daughter friendship.”

  I was stunned to find his message. Printing these words from my daddy, knowing they were mine forever, I felt stronger. I was terribly loved. I was rich.

  He knew he had been absent—he wouldn’t be now. He promised me. I saw new hope for my father and me; closer to equals. This time, maybe we could evolve into friends.

  It was heartbreaking to realize how we can fail the people we most love without even trying.

  I thought: I’m still young. It’s not too late.

  I hadn’t talked with my brother Jacob since the High Sierra. Our last conversation had been our call long ago when Icecap and I had parted paths and I had found myself alone. I’d been so comforted by his story of first love lost; it meant a lot to me to hear how he understood. In the language of lovesickness, we could understand each other clearly.

  I missed him. Completing the entire Pacific Crest Trail required just the kind of dedication Jacob had shown me—I was remembering how important he’d been to me. We shared our childhood, spaghetti with meat sauce and pet names, secret jokes, adventures in our yard under the red canoe. That game he made up that was called Monster.

  I remembered how when I was in kindergarten and he was in fifth grade, he’d wanted me to learn Spanish so that we’d have our own language our parents wouldn’t be able to understand, like a secret language. But somewhere in my childhood, a fundamental fissure in the foundation of our connection had formed.

  We grew up together, and it made me sad to see we’d become strangers.

  I longed to tell him how my days on the trail were exhausting but sweet; I’d found a lovely strength, walking thirty miles in a day with ease now. I hiked hard by day and wrote late into nights, feeling like a child playing pioneer for real, young and full of promise. Divorcing my mother, mourning our sweet love lost, I found myself still comforted by the existence of my brother: pro baseball player. Though we had parted paths, our trails seemed parallel and both wonderful, it meant a lot to know he was playing hard too.

  I reached deep into my knapsack for my valuables, the place I kept his image. I had carried it with me all this way. When I found the photo, I saw it was white and fuzzy at the edges, dissolving from abrasion against my driver’s license. He was difficult to see clearly now.

  I loved him hugely; he loved me badly, too.

  In Jacob’s dissolving image I could see that I’d done more to fuck up my relationship with my brother than I’d ever admitted to myself.

  I know it wasn’t fair of me, or rational, but I’d been angry at Jacob for more than how he’d reacted after my rape. I’d been angry with him for leaving when I was thirteen to DC, for college. For not wanting me with him as badly as I wanted to be with him. In reaction, I’d become distant with him first.

  I was cold, I was rude; he was absent more and more. It was a cycle beginning long before the night I told him I was raped.

  I hoped he was doing well. I wondered how baseball beyond Newton felt to him, if he felt that it was right for him, if he’d connected with someone there, a coach or an impressive fellow player. If he was finding it fulfilling and promising and exciting—and if he feared the time when it would end. I hoped he knew that his little sister was thinking of him, hoping that he was finding the fulfillment and beauty we’d dreamed of from the safety of our lawn, so much happiness. I was so curious to know.

  From Canada I would call him.

  I carried my essay back to meet the man I loved at a coffee shop, still in shock. I was grinning wildly. Immediately he put what he was reading down. He finally read my writing. Dash’s validation was necessary and important; I trusted him. I wanted it. I needed him to love it.

  I couldn’t even look at him as his eyes moved though my story. It was the story of how I’d traversed the High Sierra. For simplicity I’d bypassed Aspen Meadow, the wooden sign and Muir Trail Ranch, Bonnie’s kindness there; instead I’d written it as if I’d made it throu
gh entirely on my own. I’d hoped to publish the story in There & Back Magazine in Colorado, and didn’t want people to enter the Sierras unprepared, believing they also could depend on the ranch.

  When Dash finished he told me with a solemn stare: he was relieved. “It’s incredible. Wild Child. You are a fucking writer.”

  I felt an intoxicating thrill. He saw in me a genius.

  He called me a writer, I was a motherfucking writer. He saw me the way I wanted to be seen, and so would others. I was giddy—euphoric.

  I stepped outside, so Dash couldn’t hear, and called back home to Newton on the sat phone. I told them I had met a man who was going to move with me to Colorado.

  Dash had never said it, it was technically a lie, but I knew it would be true. We were a drifting island. We could go anywhere, we had no jobs, no ties, no responsibilities or friends, but we had money, we had no plan at all, and all I felt was glee.

  My parents answered me. My father: “It’s a pretty wild place to meet somebody.” I could envision his eyes smiling.

  My mother said, “It sounds like you’re in love.”

  Ascending out of town, rain poured in sheets, softening the trail. The world shone in gray light. Dash and I shouted over the downpour; he asked me “what next” and I answered him: “back to school. I guess.” He said we would make it to Canada before it snowed, “And then you’ll write a book.”

  I wanted to kiss him. The sky was white smoke, patterned with inky tree tops. We were drenched and I was so happy, I couldn’t speak. The trail was a muddy stream; we splashed through it. The evergreens smelled sweet, of sap and clean wood.

  Then Dash asked what my real name was. I almost half-lied and said, “Deb,” but then I added the truth.

  I asked him back: what was his? He said, “Justin Matis,” and I liked the way it sounded.

  That day we met a stranger on our trail, and when the man asked me what I did, Dash answered for me: “She’s a great writer.”

  It was startling—he used the same words my father had once used to affirm me, naming me what I wanted to become. He stated so bluntly what my father had seen so long ago: that I was talented. I wished my dad had wanted to cultivate it in me the way he wanted to make Jacob great.

  In the deafening downpour, I whispered, “I’m not sure.” My doubt was inaudible.

  The rain thinned into drizzle, and then only mist.

  He told me I could make money as a writer. The wild faith he had in me seemed crazy.

  Through the nights in our tent, I wrote. Day’s thoughts coalesced; I couldn’t sleep. Hiking, writing at night, not stopping—my ambition met talent met hard work, and he saw them all in me, conversing, surging: things no other man had shown a sign of recognizing. With Dash I didn’t need the eyeless world: these endless woods.

  I no longer needed to peel myself of my skin, or to hide. To Dash the colorless ephemeral things that existed just beneath my surface were as vivid as the beauty marks he traced on my cheek.

  We were able to speak about everything in a way I’d seldom talked about anything. Our wildest dreams, our hopes. Our futures.

  He told me I should be in New York City. He told me it wasn’t as unaffordable as people say. All the fancy grocery stores throw out cheese and bread that’s still perfectly good; he would Dumpster-dive for us. He’d forage. “It’s worth it for you.”

  He told me he would read everything I ever wrote.

  I felt I’d learned a sneaky trick while walking, something I’d apply to my life off the PCT, for the rest of my life: choose people who don’t put you in the position of always saying no. Choose friends you truly want to say yes to. Dash’s presence, his age, wisdom—his care for me—opened up so many possibilities. I didn’t have to do what was expected of me around him, I could do what excited me.

  I hadn’t changed my submissive tendency; I’d found someone who could harness it to guide and protect me. I could see that Dash was leading me somewhere worth going, nearer to myself—closer to the self I wanted to embody.

  We began to plan a life together. I could see—Dash was the person to get me closer to the person I’d found I wanted to be—a writer. He made me feel so secure in his love. He made me feel we were on a team and always would be.

  When I was hungry he would set up his stove on a rock and cook me quinoa or pasta or even something with meat. He gave away his best food to me. I was always hungry then.

  When I cried (I did, sometimes), he held me. He kissed my head and neck and didn’t stop until I stopped.

  I wanted to be with this man whom I loved and go somewhere new and exciting, either somewhere really remote in the middle of the wilderness or a metropolis of artists like Manhattan. Nowhere suburban. Nowhere in the middle. No compromises. He made me feel we were living in this society’s loopholes, savaging—us against the Man—taking care of each other.

  We called ourselves the Twilight Tribe, because we often hiked through sunset, into dusk. Our love grew stronger and stronger. I grew happier.

  Together we decided we should rename me: “Like a pen name,” Dash said. “You can do better than Deborah Parker.” He was right—I knew it the moment he said the words. I realized that I’d been feeling this need for a new name for months now, but hadn’t yet understood I could do something about it. Debby was the name of the girl I was before I’d walked. I would find a name that better represented me now. Wild Child was a name I’d taken in the context of who I was when I began this walk through woods—it reflected the girl I’d been when it was chosen.

  Living as Wild Child, I could no longer be Debby Parker comfortably—this name that I’d been given at birth that defined me before I’d had the chance to define myself.

  Every new person we met, Dash introduced me: “She’s a great writer. We can show you her stories. It’s the best stuff I’ve ever found.” He believed it.

  People were always skeptical. I was young, and maybe because I didn’t look quite the way that they imagined writers do. But Dash got people to look at my work—to see me more fully. He saw me as absolutely unique. He saw me as independent, my own girl—just as I’d always wanted to be seen. He wanted to read my writing, all of it, to know everything about me and fully see me.

  He gave me certainty in the merit of my work.

  Maybe I fell in love with the confidence he gave me, the fury with which he affirmed me. Reflected in his eyes, I saw how beautiful I would be soon. His eyes were lit with incredible warmth.

  It seemed he believed in me with an intensity no one I’d ever loved had.

  His feelings for me changed the way I thought about my world.

  I wondered if my bliss and the gratitude I felt was tied to him, or if it grew from within me.

  One night, I saw that Dash had a pair of glasses in his hand. I’d never seen him wear them, but he’d been carrying them this whole way.

  “You need glasses?” I asked him where they’d come from.

  He slipped them on, squinting, and explained that he had nearly perfect vision. “I carry my glasses on the trail just so I can see stars.”

  About a week after Packwood I finally tried to answer Dash’s question about my mother—who was she—the deeper reason of my walk. The thought of him not knowing who I actually was became more unbearable than my fear. I’d found the person I wanted to love me; I had to confess my secrets. I needed him to know who I was.

  I opened my mouth and this time told him about how my mother dressed me until I was sixteen, because she didn’t trust me to get to school on time without that help from her. He said flatly, “I’m impressed you’re wearing pants.” I laughed and he opened his warm arms, let me step in, and closed them around me.

  We were walking along gorgeous ridges across Washington, above the timberline: alpine log flower fields in mountains before mountains before mountains. This beauty we’d emerged within felt limitless. I felt fit and strong, we were hiking fast. I stopped to take pictures of an alpine berry field; I wanted to remember.


  Dash’s neck flopped back; he tightened, hard-angled like cut stone. “Less breaking,” he called back to me, “and more walking.” His posture had stiffened. He wasn’t looking at me.

  I knew that the huckleberry photo wasn’t really what frustrated him. My pausing captured in a moment the true problem: my walking pace was consistently slower than his. Dash’s legs were longer than mine, he was six foot two, and I was five foot four—and his natural speed was about three and a half miles per hour, while mine was closer to just three. Hiking pace determines compatibility on the PCT. He was waiting for me again, getting cold, and once again I felt I should be rushing. He was frustrated. He criticized me, calling me slower.

  It wasn’t true though. In fact we’d been moving north at an almost identical rate for one hundred days before we’d even met. I told him we were hiking the same number of miles per day, we were just following different rhythms.

  He squinted forward. “You’re always breaking,” he said.

  A thousand miles ago, I would have let his frustration hurt me. Now I didn’t. This snap of anger couldn’t move me. I knew it wasn’t about me—

  But now I had no time for what I had no time for.

  I was hiking to savor, not wanting this part of my life to be over.

  “I’m not six feet,” I said. “Walk your pace, I’ll walk mine. We don’t need to always be together.” I handed Dash our tent; he took it. I told him, “I’ll see you where you want to stop tonight.”

  His lips parting again, his jaw released its tension. The sun was going down to a big, beautiful blue flat dusk. He took the tent and walked ahead.

  I walked the high crest’s snaking trail toward shelter alone. The fronts of my toes and my heels were softly throbbing. Lately I had noticed something strange—I’d worn a size eight running shoe since freshman year of high school but now that size was suddenly too small. It seemed impossible—but all the miles of walking had caused my feet to grow. They craved more space.