Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

by Aspen Matis

  In eagerness I’d transcribed all these things, read them, scrawled them, and hadn’t absorbed any of them.

  My taste buds were raised, abrading my mouth. My arms felt limp, too weak to lift my backpack on. I felt despair ringing in every sunburnt cell. I was dying of thirst, this water was not drinkable, it would not magically become drinkable, and I needed to—swiftly—change my course to solve this problem.

  I’d been such an idiot for not asking the kind man for some water.

  Shell Oil lists motor oil as a carcinogen, even to the touch. Mechanics should wear latex gloves to handle it. The legal maximum of motor oil in United States drinking water is one part per billion. Or, worse than motor oil, benzene, a gasoline additive, attacks bone marrow. Consuming it can cause anemia or, even, leukemia—cancer of the blood. I feared drinking a slick of it would blacken my vision, still my mind. Yet my tongue felt dry and coarse. I spit up saliva in my mouth and tried to spread it with my stiff tongue. I saw pale copper blotches from thirst.

  I panicked. I had tried to mask that I was incapable, passive and in need of others’ care without doing anything to care for myself better—hiding seemed easier than changing. I still wasn’t self-sufficient. I wasn’t even brave enough to ask for what I so desperately needed. And now I’d bypassed my one chance.

  All I could think was to pray for another car to appear on the highway and notice me. I would wave; the kind driver would glide over, give me a liter of Gatorade, and save me.

  I imagined grapefruit juice, cold, plump pulp that pops into juice in your mouth. On ice. A tall cup of ice. Cold Glacier Freeze Gatorade.

  I decided that that this oil-slicked water must be drinkable, I willed it.

  I said aloud, “Good water, good water.” I would have to drink it.

  The road was rocket straight.

  I waited facing the still moon but another car never came.

  I stood over the purple, green, and yellow shining film of truck-leaked motor oil that slicked the feeble trickle of a wild creek, imagining lemonade.

  I made a decision to use all my energy to fight, to live.

  I stood up straighter on the road—straightened my posture—and went back the way I came. Briskly, back down the lonely highway, back onto the trail I’d needlessly left. My skin was throbbing, my pulse beating beneath my salty skin. I passed the shack again. But this time it didn’t look like a hermit’s old shack. And then I saw a bookcase full of huge water jugs. It stood right on the western edge of the widened trail.

  I blinked, knew this couldn’t be real. I remembered seeing strange lights at the base of Oriflamme, fearing my thirst was warping my heating mind. Maybe I hadn’t been paranoid to fear it. This was impossible. I walked closer to the hut—and its image didn’t waver, only grew closer, clearer. Water. I examined it with my hands. It was a three-tiered rough-wood bookshelf, approximate in its construction. I’d dismissed it as a shadow mirage and passed it, but here it was, undeniably solid. It was real.

  Someone had just sawed a bunch of two-by-fours and eyeballed it. The shelves were thin plywood, warped under the gallon jugs’ weight, and across the top its builders had seared:

  RELAX-ENJOY

  TRAIL RATZ

  DAVE-DAVE-JOHN

  And “PCT,” the acronym, burned inside an equilateral triangle with beveled edges: the trail’s crest. It was incredible, I stared at it in disbelief. The mirage had sustained its presence. I felt it was a miracle with me.

  I’d discovered trail magic, placed here for hikers. My first trail magic.

  Off the eastern edge of the Pacific Crest Trail, a low brown mountain rests, unassuming. It lies like a collapsed balloon, and by day it appears drab as dust and forgettable. But it isn’t what it seems.

  Imagine blue night. Imagine yucca shadows, long and spiny, black on moonlit ground. Imagine you are walking, alone, and a sliver of low-distant mountain in an orange flash is spotlit.

  Thirst isn’t blinding you. This is Oriflamme Mountain, and it is real, and, in night’s flat blue, it does spark. In darkness, it makes its own light. Come nightfall, orange spheres of light drift from this mountain’s still surface like corpse-size sparks. The light is strong enough to be mistaken frequently for an automobile headlight, and, when seen from a short distance, seems to produce a directional beam.

  On approaching it, the experience is again that of walking into the “eye” of a headlight, but when one reaches the supposed point of origin, the light disappears. It may appear at any hour of the night, may come several nights in succession or be absent for weeks at a time, and there is nothing purposeful in its movements; it goes here and there as a bird or a wandering animal might do or perhaps like a person out for an idle stroll.

  The mountain’s sparks have ignited legends. They were said to lead to gold. The restless lights were originally noticed by the Indians of the area; they believed it was “a spirit light . . . the ghost of a chief who died.” The spirit light might appear as an orange spherical shifting shape with a light in its center, or as highly reflective metallic-looking spherical configurations. As blobs of orange, red, green, white, light. Blue huge stars, resting in brush. A drifting spark. A flock of sparks. It was known to the smugglers and gold miners in the area, too, “a strange light that appears from time to time in a remote valley of Southern California. . . . A curious light.” Every culture to observe it has developed myths to explain it.

  The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research reported in February 1940, “It is known, too, that Malakia [Oriflamme Mountain] was once a ‘hide-out’ for smugglers of Chinese (from Mexico) and supposedly the scene of various acts of violence.” As if violence could make light. Maybe violence could make light.

  What I’d really seen that night was the magic that would save me.

  In the aftermath of destruction, a silence settles—the stillness of fresh loss. People’s cheerful chatter is fainter, the blue color of sky dimmer; now that horror is undeniable and feels inescapable, the value of life seems lessened.

  Rape had shocked me like white electricity and left me hurting. All men after looked three shades darker. Small tasks became too exhausting to attempt, all good efforts seemed futile. The wound, flushed with the heat of blood, pulsing, was all that I could feel. I was swallowed inside the mute darkness that follows loss, I was fading in it. I could have passed my life staying in it.

  But some slim nameless cord inside tugged me. The harsh dimness that follows loss isn’t static, but charged with the energy of immanent change. Hurt, I was left with a choice: wallow and stay in the dark, or seek light and fight to reach it. These two paths emerged. I had this choice to make.

  Loss is the shocking catalyst of transformation. I saw that this mountain valley, haunted by senseless murders, darker, had absorbed unthinkable violence and turned it into mesmerizing light. My rape became my catalyst. Rape gave me cause to flee the muteness—forced me into making a bold and forceful change. I chose to fight to find a way to leave to seek my own strength and beauty.

  I was searching to find the way to make light.

  There’s no scientific understanding of why, at night, Oriflamme Mountain sparks, but there are people who wish they could know for sure. The general term for the phenomenon of nighttime mountain-fire is earthlights. The International Earthlights Alliance seeks a scientific explanation. It’s fringe science. They go to the sites with cameras, magnetic detectors; they’ll stay on-site for weeks. They still don’t have an answer.

  There are things about the world that I miss, can’t understand and cannot see. I had long ago accepted this. But here was something I remembered that was not what I’d thought it was—a dry mountain that made light—and I never would have known it.

  And the idea of light unexplainably produced out of nothing was haunting, it shook me. A flat drab mountain could produce its own light, no one in this whole world knows why, and if that was possible then of course there must be other things that seemed impossible bu
t weren’t, and so anything—great and terrible—felt possible to me now.

  I wondered what else there was out in the world that I had never seen through my lenses. I had speculated about the destination of a nonexistent desert road, I’d kept going. What other magic had I wrongly explained away? I felt like I’d lost something I hadn’t ever had.

  A thousand things I didn’t even know existed had to exist.

  I wish now that I had stayed. I wished I’d made camp and watched the strange lights dance and let myself wonder.

  This light was not something everyone will get to see. People tend not to see what they’re not looking for. The truth is, if you’re not looking for it, it is invisible.

  That was the blackest night of my life and I saw nothing.

  CHAPTER 8

  HOLLOW WORDS

  I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.

  —JACK KEROUAC, ON THE ROAD

  APRIL 23, SCISSORS CROSSING, DESERT, MILE 77.4

  As I drank the bookshelf water, my mind switched back on like power after a storm. Black holes I saw were swallowed by light blue sky. Cactus needles glinted, and I saw I was sitting in pooling daylight. I looked down at my body, dusty from dry earth. I was unsure if I’d passed through night lying in dirt, or if the blackness I’d taken to be night had only been my own vision made dim and colorless by thirst. My heart was galloping, I had no sense of how long I had been lying there. Maybe really it had been daytime all along.

  I needed to remember precisely what had happened. It was April 23. An empty late spring day at Scissors Crossing. I looked out at the desert around me, from pale rock to pale rock, from pebble of sand into the glare of sun calm and still. Wind and sunlight dried the water on my upper lip, and from the low eastward place of the sun, I discerned that it must be a new early morning.

  The lost hours scared me. They were opaque like a vodka blackout. I didn’t know where the boys were, and I wondered if they were near me.

  I had just nearly ended my life through my neglect. I was freshly—so massively luckily—alive and here in the sunlight, out of death’s lightless nightshadows, and all I could seem to feel was a relaxing mounting drowsiness. The only thought I could conjure was stillness. The word death was empty of weight. I could feel no fear—and no gratitude.

  I imagined how my body would be aching to be sated with bright water if this bookshelf of water hadn’t been placed here. I would have slowed, then laid down to rest. My hands would unclench passively, relax into sleep. Nineteen years old and alone. Twenty feet from a paved road that no one seemed to travel. I pictured my dying skin, turning copper in hard sunshine. The warm wind lifting dust onto my resting body. In my sleep I would be singed into a soft endless bed of dust. And that’d be it.

  I shivered a deep shudder. I hadn’t seen the boys, they would likely discover me. The loveliness of my daydream of death disturbed me. I romanticized death, I was unfeeling. I was learning for the first time that I wasn’t invincible. The risk was unpredictable and real and I didn’t always pass it by unnoticed. Sometimes, I was discovering, it bites.

  Death was not a drifting spark in the night I could simply turn away from.

  I had left the boys, sure that solitude was safest. I’d rather be alone—other people were not the answer. I was proving my mother wrong, systematically—I could care for myself. This was all very true. But it was also true that if I were still with Icecap, he would have helped me. My wild aloneness had led to this desperation. If I was going to put myself into a situation wherein I had no one to depend on, I needed to step up and be the one to actually take good care of myself. The universe wouldn’t simply do it for me.

  My mind slowly explored what might have happened if the bookcase weighted with water had been a mirage—the terror. I tried to conjure death.

  The sunlight heated my face, the air tasted brassy, and sun-swallowed hills glared like intent eyes blankly colored. I looked at the dusty one-gallon plastic milk jugs of water. They were tied loosely to one another with an orange nylon rope, bright and solid. I saw an image of my mother this Sunday morning lunging from table to sink to dishwasher, cooking, feeding and swiftly cleaning. Moving through the old house, organizing but in truth pacing, in the evening circling from kitchen phone to bedroom phone, waiting for me to call and say I was safely going to sleep.

  My god, what would my mother feel when she didn’t get a call?

  I felt sick with myself, my thoughtlessness.

  Every cell of my living body felt at once sunburnt—enflamed—and absent. I wished to be back safe at home cupping my mother’s Sleepy Time tea, watching the world pass from safety.

  What was I doing out here all alone and un-fucking-prepared, as I’d known for so long, seen in that list of Necessary Things back in the post office-general store—fearful—but passed over like some naive and blind child. I kept walking anyways.

  I wanted myself to remember in my body what I only very abstractly intellectually knew: that death is not a pretty flower that had almost pricked me. It was not a small annoyance I could simply bypass and quickly disregard. It was really The End.

  Water was liquid silver, water was gold. It was clarity—a sacred thing. Drinking was no longer something to take for granted. I’d never needed to consider water before. Go to the sink and pour a glass of water, it’s the easiest thing in the world, but it had become what my new world revolved around.

  Children believe they are immortal, death is an empty word like the name of a country they’ve never been to on a time-faded map. I wasn’t a child anymore.

  I felt a fierce and sudden need to protect my parents. I didn’t want them to know that I had felt death’s presence; I didn’t want them to know the daughter they loved could die.

  I was a damn lucky girl, but I knew that I might not be so lucky next time.

  I got up from the hard dirt, the air shadowy, the sun full and white. I unscrewed another gallon jug and filled back up all of my dented, dusty Gatorade bottles, arm shaking, trying to hold the gallon steady. I chugged and drained each bottle empty again, drinking the whole gallon’s worth—eight pounds of water. I let my head cool, feeling full and chilled and fed.

  Slipped between two sandy jugs on the top warped shelf of the bookcase leaned a thin black binder. Inside I found computer-printed copies of The Water Report—that list of places along the trail to find drinking water—for hikers to Take One. I did. It was my vivid map to water, the treasure, charting the best way and I would read it carefully from now on, rely on it. It would lead me to a clear puddle thirty feet down a faint trail; to a well; out to a spigot in the shade behind a vacant and rotting house. It would prove to be reliable, and soon it would save my life.

  The other item in the binder was a composition notebook sealed from sandstorms and rain by a Ziploc bag. I pulled the bag open, opened it. Yogi Beer, Miss Information, Silverfox, Strider, Boomer, Prison Jim, the Stumbling Norwegian. They and dozens of others wrote “thank you,” made dumb jokes and told stories, and signed the notebook with new trail names. Each person had just walked through what I had just survived.

  In one entry, a hiker named Jack Rabbit described the earthlights phenomenon—it mesmerized me. It also seemed he had actually met the Trail Ratz at Kickoff. Someone else wrote about meeting the famed Hendersons, a husband-wife team of trail angels who live alongside the trail to the north up in Green Valley and run the oasis known as the Casa de Luna. People who’d celebrated at Kickoff seemed to have inside jokes, and I was jealous. I wished then that I hadn’t skipped it. I read the book of names, each entry marked with the date and time the writer had passed by—the last was April twenty-third, this morning’s date—and I felt newly alone. I wished I had met a woman on Kickoff’s grounds that day, not Icecap.

  I skimmed the list of hikers, up and down, looking for a girl I’d like who would like me back. I scanned the trail names. None of them were familiar to me. It was tough for me to discern gender, most people could go eith
er way. Silverfox as a girl could be sweet and pretty; as a guy, the name seemed predatory, like a silver-haired professor who slept with students. I didn’t want that. I wanted someone cool to hike with, a lovely girl, funny, who could make a joke of anything. She’d be light as a bird; her name would be Sky Blue. She’d have a pixie cut, perfect even out here, and a compass tattooed to her foot, and she’d ask me, “What’s to worry? What to wear today?” and look down at her one pair of shorts and shirt, clinging to her, sweat stained and dusty. She and I both would have only one set of clothes. “Oh! Good choice,” she’d say at it, making me smile. She could make me laugh at the heat, the deergrass, the absurdity of our quest, the endlessness of our pain. Together we could sneak rocks into the packs of mean hikers.

  I would find a partner to walk with, I decided, and she needed to be another girl.

  I was feeling better, drunk on water—high on the huge kindness of faceless people. Generous strangers were somewhere out there, loving, plotting to help. I was in awe: real trail magic exists. I hadn’t been imagining things at all. Euphoria struck me. My aloneness led to this desperation, and it was people who had saved me.

  The notebook filled with names and notes was called a trail register—my first of many. I’d find them along the walk, some in coolers full of warm cans of soda, some just on a flat rock or at crossings. In this endless desert where cell reception was rare—dead spots can span long days—registers would tell me who was ahead, who was close. Whom I could catch up with and by when and where he’d be. These baggie-sleeved notebooks would become the hikers’ telephones. I’d soon learn that, unfortunately, registers were also men’s best tool for smart Pink Blazing—the act of following female hikers they wanted—tracking.