Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

by Aspen Matis

  Slowly I began to picture myself finally walking the Pacific Crest Trail, the 2,650-mile-long continuous footpath from Mexico to Canada, the path through America’s last long, quiet strip of wilderness. The Pacific Crest Trail. In that sad winter that path was the place my mind fixed on. I thought of Goethe: “At the moment of commitment, the universe conspires to assist you.”

  Muir whispered: “Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.”

  I answered yes. Yes! I would go.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE THINGS I CARRIED

  The Pacific Crest Trail crosses California, Oregon, and Washington state—from Mexico all the way to Canada. It would take a person of average height and gait about six million steps to walk the footpath’s length. It passes through twenty-six national forests, seven national parks, five state parks, and three national monuments—the terrain varies wildly.

  Class was nine A.M. to noon every day, and each day straight after, I’d stride past my idle peers to my motel room—my laptop—to google the PCT.

  I learned that ideally the time to hike across the desert was in winter. But then I’d reach the foothills of the High Sierra in the springtime—too early. If I entered into the Sierras prematurely—before mid-June—the mountains would be buried beneath mounds of winter’s accumulated snow—impassable. The time to begin at Mexico was spring, to set myself up to arrive in Sierra Nevada in the middle of June. But I had to move quickly—by October the trail through Washington would be erased by new snowfall, the pine trees bent, snapping below snow’s weight. In late September or early October each year, hikers who haven’t yet crossed into Canada are snowed out.

  That meant I had twenty-two available weeks to attempt to walk 2,650 miles. Five months. I’d have to average over twenty miles per day. But of course I would have to face some storms; I could expect that in the Sierras and Cascades I may have days I could walk all day but only cover ten or fifteen miles. Which meant, on the easier sections of trail, I’d need to hike thirty-mile days. This weather window seemed almost impossibly narrow.

  I googled: “Hike the entire PCT. When to begin?” To my shock I found there was a real answer. It was a send-off party in the remote desert directly on the Pacific Crest Trail, about twenty miles north of the Mexico border. It was called Kickoff, an annual massive party timed to match the melting snow, where people hoping to walk the whole trail began. I wasn’t the only one.

  The party was always in late April, always at a dry campground in the desert called Lake Morena County Park. I clicked through photos of rows of little olive green tents, of red coolers of canned beer, hamburgers grilling, potato salad slopped in tin baking pans atop checkered red-and-white-draped picnic tables—all swarmed by men in sun-faded dress shirts, fueling up and braced to attempt the same journey I had just conjured from this blank-walled shit-motel.

  It seemed so remarkably—impossibly—perfect: a big send-off party for people who wanted to do exactly what I wanted to do.

  I read dispatches from the wilderness—from people I wanted to find and join and walk with north. From this suffocating space I escaped into the Mojave Desert: vast and windblown, petrified, my laptop the only light in the dank dim room.

  There was a PCT vernacular. I wanted to become fluent in it. If you attempt to walk the entire trail through in one continuous hike, you’re called a thru-hiker. Thru-hikers accept help from trail angels, kindly local folks who live in the tiny trail-towns.

  Every new thru-hiker gets a trail name, but you can’t give one to yourself; it must be earned—bestowed on you by another thru-hiker, or a trail angel. You usually get your name from some defining characteristic of yours or from something stupid you’ve done. This was the custom. I read about one man who sewed and stuffed his own goose down sleeping bag, except his stitches were loose and too spaced out, so every morning he’d wake up covered with little goose down feathers. That was Chicken Fucker.

  I discovered a lively online discussion forum on which hikers and “armchair thru-hikers” debated in a frenzy all things Pacific Crest Trail-related. It seemed the most-referenced gear guru was a man named Ray Jardine, the granddaddy of ultralight theory. His idea: less is better; carry just only what’s necessary.

  I joined the Facebook group Pacific Crest Trail Class of 2009. Classes, like college.

  I Facebook-friended people who had thru-hiked the trail—“PCT Class of 2008,” “PCT Class of 2007”—and messaged them question after question as they occurred to me. Dozens of hikers gave me dozens of tips. I always wrote back and I always said “thank you” and meant it truly. I asked: “What should I carry to filter the creek water—a pump?” (Nothing. Trail water’s pretty clean.) “Is it safe for me to go the whole way alone?” A man who called himself Never-Never had publicly answered: Alone is safe, and then he’d found me on Facebook and requested to be my friend. I’d accepted him.

  He had hiked a long and rugged segment of the Continental Divide Trail, which also extends from Mexico to Canada, but through the states in the middle of the country—and next he planned to thru-hike the PCT. We chatted happily about long trails. I escaped into the stories he told.

  We began to talk on the phone. In the real world he was an aspiring photographer, and also a line cook at a burger joint. He was in his middle-twenties, lived in a coastal town in New Jersey. We talked about our lives, and our dreams, why we didn’t belong where we lived, why wilderness would be better. We were both mountain people in our hearts. The PCT was a solid path out of our lives, a place that existed—and Never-Never knew the way.

  It turned into phone sex. I’d pretend with him that I was wearing sexy clothes I didn’t actually believe I’d look good in. He’d ask me what I was doing, I faked breathy orgasms, told him how I touched my clit, wanting freedom, the mountains, beautiful sunsets and fire, I wanted the world, wanting terribly to be a feral child.

  I liked knowing that it was wild of me.

  In the privacy of my motel room, I’d click through his profile photos, writing him back, as night darkened around my untouched bed, as the cicadas silenced and the streetlights blinked out, sometimes even until dawn. On Valentine’s Day a huge red velvet heart-shaped box of Godiva chocolates came in the mail with a note that said his real name on it: Phillip. Next he sent me two inflated photographs of places I had seen online and said I liked, already framed. He’d taken them. I sent him clear marbles I’d “made” by baking them in the oven and then dropping them immediately into ice water; the insides would crack, the outsides would remain undamaged.

  He ended it. He called our correspondence “too much of a roller coaster” for his heart—and it had shocked me how little I’d felt. I didn’t cry, or even feel like I’d lost someone. In truth, I felt relieved. I had been telling him about other boys who liked me who hadn’t existed. I’d invented them because the idea that I would someday have to meet this man in flesh had begun to scare me. I’d become worried about what he might expect once we met offline.

  I wanted to start fresh when I arrived at Kickoff, a new and unknown girl. I was happy to have stumbled upon a subculture with its own language, vibrant, distant, exotically and seductively different from suburban Colorado.

  The Pacific Crest Trail. I searched for it again. Again the simple red-stricken black-and-white drawing appeared, and I selected it again, a simple path, the original image of the journey I had seen. It was unforgettable: that jagged bright red line through shades of gray. In lonely night dreams I heard the pat of feet on a shadowed forest path leading over slick rocks, past rare ruby birds that would whistle dissonant tunes like the music in dark fairy tales and swoop down to rest on my open palm, a message for me encrypted in their song.

  A tribe of one, I’d cowboy-camp, body relaxed, right on dirt trail, or curl up nights in a field of buttercups glowing gold beneath a snowdrift-colored moon, floating low, impossibly huge.

  The sky in my tinted hallway window blushed, lightened. Days bled into one other until I wrote in my j
ournal, This is my last Friday at CC.

  I was cupping a hot white mug of steaming peppermint tea, and I stepped outside in the same sweatpants and sweatshirt I’d worn the day before and day before that. I walked over a new dusting of snow in my running shoes, happy for the first time since I’d arrived out here for school. I had decided: I was going to hike the whole Pacific Crest Trail. I was done here, free of Colorado College.

  I felt the seed of something strong sprout something real in me and felt a surge. I’d be in the woods, homeless, walking north with my fellow self-exiled desert pilgrims. I’d be a dropout.

  I had nothing left to lose.

  I had many things to determine, and quickly.

  I would set off north from the Mexican border three days before Kickoff, I decided; I could walk the twenty miles from the border to Kickoff with time to spare.

  I needed to decide what I’d carry with me for the next five months, what weight was worth bearing on my back. The daunting reality was that, in order to keep moving and slip through the narrow weather window, I would need my backpack to be very light.

  Thru-hikers need to carry base weight—the heft of everything in your fully packed backpack that isn’t edible—plus the weight of all their food and water. The amount of water on my back would vary from none (where frequent streams gush) to up to a gallon—eight pounds!—in the desert. I estimated each day I’d need to eat roughly two pounds of food, maybe an ounce or so less. So my starting pack weight each leg of the hike would be my base weight plus two pounds of food per day and that day’s water weight. The strain of additional weight rapidly makes backpacking painful and, in some cases, damaging to tendons and ligaments. So every ounce, every gram of weight you carry has to be necessary.

  The question is: what is necessary?

  The trail-alumni’s list of things I shouldn’t carry was exactly everything I’d believed I’d need:

  1.Don’t wear hiking boots. If you walk in heavy leather boots, three pounds each and stiff, you will get blisters. Thru-hikers wear modified running shoes that weigh one pound apiece.

  2.You don’t need extra food, extra water, extra clothing for extra warmth—anything extra. You don’t need soap or deodorant.

  Everything you carry you should need daily. Take an ultralight sleeping bag, know you’ll be chilly some nights, leave the sweater home—if you’re cold you’ll get into your sleeping bag. No change of clothes or a bar of soap (which pollutes the streams)—everybody will smell like themselves.

  The only item worth carrying that won’t be necessary every day is a heavy-duty trash bag with a head hole cut out. This is “rain gear.”

  3.Don’t bring a stove or a pot—the type of freeze-dried food you could have cooked on the trail is disgusting and not as nutritious and calorie efficient as nuts, cheese, dark chocolate.

  4.You don’t need a headlamp or a flashlight, or batteries. You don’t even need a knife, or a first-aid kit.

  5.You don’t need maps. No compass. The path will be clear.

  That one perplexed me.

  I’d just have to trust that one.

  I doubted I could survive in the woods without these very basic things to help me. It seemed like a tremendous leap of faith to forsake the tools I’d always been told I needed.

  And yet leaving college to walk was such a massive leap of faith already, and nothing I’d ever trusted and believed in seemed true any longer.

  There was someone whom I did still trust, though. He came to me and I felt instantly safer.

  John Muir.

  I rushed back to Muir, his books, maps of his treks. I found that when Muir hopped cities’ fences and ventured up into foothills, to mountains, he took with him just a blanket and a loaf of bread and sometimes a small “quantity of tea.” He made it sound so easy. Clean and simple. It sounded impossible, impossibly liberating. I felt the pull of ultralightness, desire to not need things, to go light, to be lighter. I was drawn to John Muir’s minimalist approach to preparing for adventure, the faith, the magic: trust the mountains and they will foster you.

  I was five feet four, and weighed about 120. My comfort weight was about twenty-four pounds. That was all the weight I could bear to carry to Canada. That meant my base weight should be eleven. In reality, if I carried a burden much greater than Muir’s, I wouldn’t make it.

  Me, and wilderness, and eleven little pounds of things.

  With so little to depend on, this walk would teach me how to take care of myself. I’d learn to build my tent and sleep in the shelter I had made. Each cold morning I would dress myself. There’d be no one to do it for me. I hoped through all this, I would lose the post-rape fat I’d gained. I hoped to learn why my mother couldn’t hear me. I’d felt despair and needed her wisdom and love. I wanted the trail to carry me to answers that would restore everything sacred, obliterate my confusion and my shame.

  Already, this little-walked gigantic trail through my country’s Western wilderness held in my mind the promise of escape from myself, the liberation only a huge transformation could grant me. This walk would be my salvation. It had to be.

  In spring it rained. Mornings in the Cinder-block Palace I awoke to a threatless blue sky and by afternoon each day the sky was bruised with clouds and dark. Then it would rain fat drops. The biggest raindrops I’d ever seen. This smacking would last for two hours or maybe three, and on the third straight day of afternoon rain I came home from class and the carpet was marshy from halfway down the hall, water spreading from under my locked door. I opened it. What seemed like a foot of water poured into the hall. My lamp reflected in the carpet like the moon.

  I called my mom.

  In the rain I told her my room had flooded—I was yelling so I could hear myself—and to hold on, hold on; let me get under the sheet-metal awning, here, the gas station. Okay. Yes, Mommy, come.

  She said she loved me and she missed me all the time, and of course she would come back out to me. She’d get a ticket to Colorado, the next available.

  Then I yelled over the downpour, an afterthought, a thought I’d had a thousand times but now intensely believed was the truth: “I’m leaving school, Mom. I’m going hiking on the Pacific Crest Trail, ’kay, ’bye!” I hung up before she could answer.

  I jogged through the warm rain, huge drops breaking, breaking on me, hitting, harder, mixing with my streaming tears, entirely obscuring them.

  From the shelter of the student union I called my father to tell him I was unimpressed by school and cold in Colorado, even in April. It still felt like December. I told him I needed a physical task, something concrete to do. I had never talked about my rape with him, but I assumed he knew. I believed that my mother would have told him. I told him flatly that I was dropping out. I was quitting college to walk from Mexico to Canada and be alone.

  My father inhaled, exhaled loudly; I waited. He inhaled again, everything suddenly audible, the student union was largely empty—pool table set up for play, the colored balls balanced in a tidy triangle, poised to be hit—and I felt like I was shrinking. “You’re doing that,” he said finally. “Debby, tell me what you expect will happen.”

  What did I expect. I had to make a case. There were a thousand past permutations of me that I hated. I thought immediately of my body. I wanted to shed it, be fit, transform: revert backward to what it had once been. I wanted to traverse America’s wilderness—great and fresh, unblighted, unredeemed—and become powerful.

  I wanted to shock my mother. To terrify her; that satisfied me. I felt wickedly defiant. I’d shed my dependence on her, would fully, purely and completely escape her.

  Yet I also wanted to revive my bond with her. I wanted her to once again see me as her Doll Girl, beautiful again, lovable. Not damaged, marred and shameful. I saw all the best moments of my childhood. The trail seemed the only path back to them.

  The raindrops had stopped falling. I stepped out of the student union’s glass doors, someone had propped them open, out to the open green. By the
brick admissions building, desert roses were opening, the softest silky pink, beads of rain on their curled petals glistening like gems in the new sun. The ivy that gripped the brick had turned electric green.

  The shock of spring saddened me. This was the time of year I’d be studying madly, being tested, excelling, elegantly completing my first year away with As. I felt robbed of all the achievements I’d failed to earn. All the friendship and the love I hadn’t found.

  I answered my father only, “I expect to become happy eventually.”

  A cold wind gusted and the tiny roses rained. I wondered at what point in our call the downpour had finally stopped. To my shock he answered that he’d drive me to the Mexican border.

  Then we said goodbye and also said, “I love you.”

  I slept that night on a couch in the common room of the old big freshman dorm where I’d been raped, feeling immune, my time here ending.

  I woke to my phone ringing. It was my mother; she was already here for me. She’d flown directly into Colorado Springs’ tiny airport and arrived on campus before I’d even woken. From the minute I’d called, it had taken her just twenty hours to get to me. “Doll Girl, good morning Deb-Deb,” her voice cooed.

  I was prepared to tell my mother I really was leaving.

  My parents, both lawyers, had four advanced degrees between them. My oldest brother, Robert, was in law school. Jacob graduated from college an All-American and was promptly drafted by the New York Mets. I thought how both my parents and both my brothers not only went to school but earned prestigious distinctions, whereas I couldn’t even finish my first college year. I wasn’t finishing. I was dropping out of freshman year with only just five weeks left. I would be the family dropout, the failure. I was fucking up the whole family legacy.

  My mother would resist. Any mother would. I knew I’d have to fight her. This time I had to beat her.