Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

by Aspen Matis

  I saw soft brown bears. A huge one the shadowy color of soil lumbered through dewy fog toward me, the green pines muted, everything quiet, until at last it nodded my way, noticed me, and hurtled back into the silent woods. I was a little sad it had gone so fast. I saw others but none quite as mammoth and beautiful.

  I wanted to come close to fierce wild things. They seemed prehistoric, rare and sacred. The survivors of ancient America’s desert battles. The grizzly is the state bear of California, yet there were none left here. We’d long killed them off.

  In those quiet miles, something disconcerting began happening. I began to hear stories about my name—Wild Child—and felt a nameable danger. Threatening men. One day the granite peaks and alpine lakes suddenly gave way to pumice fields in the shadow of Mount Shasta—the beginning of the Volcano Lands, a hardened lava landscape, stark and shadeless—and I saw something horrifying. It was written in a remote trail register in blue ink. I read it, read it through again. It said that I had tried to seduce Shell at the Motel 6 in Mammoth Lakes.

  It was an anonymous blue note. Beneath it, unknown men called me a slut. One declared me the Paris Hilton of the trail. Someone else said I was young, dumb, and full of cum. I read about Wild Child in this public trail register, and so did men I knew, and so would men I didn’t know, but who believed they knew me now—whom I would meet. Man after man would read these notes, and I would feel it in the way they’d look at me.

  I felt panic, the notes shoved me back to the helplessness of my rape. That same nauseating shame, gutting me again. As if I somehow felt I deserved to have whispered lies obscure me, even though—clearly—I did not. These rumors cut to my older struggles and fears—to camp girls whispering about me, believing I was sleeping: Debby wears grandpa shorts. They brought back memories of being bullied and deemed an outcast when I was small and without my brother. I felt humiliated.

  Dust twirled from my heels as I resumed hiking in the day’s thick smoggy sun. I passed through Northern California, in early autumn’s woods; it was August now. There was a frigid bite in the wind. It was as if I’d slipped from winter into autumn, entirely skipping the span of summer. Fall was sudden. Cold came fast like that.

  I kept walking in this crest of northern desert, the volcanic rock like a husk of dead earth beneath my broken running shoes. I screamed to hear my echo, and with each footfall heard the crunch of gravel. I crossed a field of stones—volcanic rubble. A sunset struck, its curled rim red as lips, and the sky was pursed, smirking down at me, the clouds unclean smears.

  I retraced my path, my steps and my choices, trying to locate where these stories about me had come from, trying to believe that I could finally walk away from them for good, that they wouldn’t be able to follow me forever. Men were telling stories that were untrue. The rumors made me feel dirty as I walked this very trail I’d fiercely hoped would distance me from shame.

  I badly wanted to feel anger—people who would write such things were disgusting, pitiful scumbags. I wished I felt immune to sexual shaming, knowing these were lies that had no bearing—I wanted to see this, but instead these notes about me made me dread meeting other hikers. They caused anxiety and fear and the desire for isolation. The words these strangers had written stung something that I feared was true in me—that I was forever an outcast seen as someone to shame and to change, not to love and accept as I was.

  No hiker had said anything crude like those notes to me yet. I told myself that if somebody did, I would correct him. I would boldly tell him no.

  I promised myself I would.

  One afternoon in a patch of woods where the trees were tall and thin, I came to a homemade wood sign: OLD STATION HIKER HIDEAWAY. FIREFLY AND FIREWALKER WELCOME HIKERS. I followed the post down a dirt road, through an open painted gate, to a sprawling mowed lawn, to somebody’s house, a trail angel homestead. It was whimsical, overgrown with twisted trees, dozens of big faded luxurious carnival-type tents set up, some with giant air mattresses or cots inside, one with a waterbed, for hikers to claim so we could sleep easy.

  A dozen hikers were lounging, sipping Shasta sodas and tossing a beaten-up Frisbee. I felt guarded. I wished I didn’t need to feel so wary. For dinner we devoured sloppy joes and buttery corn on the cob, and Firefly was very sweet to me, everybody was.

  Firefly set me up away from the men, high in a bunk bed in a stained-glass tree house that her husband, Firewalker, a retired firefighter, built. I feared she must have heard something about me. Or maybe she sensed the low hum of threat I felt. But she was lovely, she’d fed me and let me bathe in her old classic claw-foot tub, perched gracefully on metal feet like tiptoes. That night I slept soundly in the stained-glass tree house, in woods, under stars, above boys and men.

  Nothing bad happened.

  In the morning I packed up and slipped inside Hiker Hideaway’s little whimsical kitchen in the small house Firewalker had also built. I helped make breakfast and felt nourished, clean and feral, strong, happy.

  Until two young Mormon brothers I’d seen but didn’t really know told me softly that they felt sorry for me.

  I didn’t ask why. Instead, defiant, I made a pancake for my breakfast in the shape of a penis.

  I ate it without sitting, feeling the brothers blushing. They squinted at me, believing they hated me. They didn’t know me. I thanked Firefly and Firewalker and quickly walked away from the boys I didn’t want to explain myself to. I tried to, but I couldn’t forget the way they’d said they felt sorry, as if I were truly damned.

  Within a mile all the trees had vanished. This was Hat Creek Rim, Northern California’s crest of desert: dusty pebbles, stones sifting into the hole in my shoe’s mesh, torn when I’d fallen. The ground became unstable.

  When, the next day, I found myself again unhappily alone with a male thru-hiker, a teenage boy with a dirty nose named Pig Pen who hardly knew me, but who asked me, quickly, only part-joking, if I’d ever given head for ice cream, I didn’t dignify him with an answer, but I asked back, “Where are you hearing this?”

  I wished I could be clear and cutting as a shard of glass, but the question of the source—the violator—was all that filled my mind.

  He answered me without hesitation. The answer was Never-Never.

  All the rumors, the lies that trapped me, had leaked from just one faulty source: the man I had, in my fading innocence, seduced and then in the reality of meeting, rejected. Our relationship had existed exclusively in e-mails, in our minds, online in the air and in pixels in the cloud. He’d never even touched my hand. The first time I’d ever really seen him, after the single time I had made love to Icecap, we had hugged each other, it was a terrible hug, and that was the only time he’d ever touched me.

  That night in the cluster of woods just south of Burney Falls State Park, sitting beside my tent on a soft bed of pine needles, a field mouse chewing at my shoelaces, I cradled my Moleskine notebook over my crossed legs and wrote a letter to Never-Never. I told him that at college I’d been raped. I told him I assumed he hadn’t known this. But now he did. So he could stop. Because his stories about me were hurtful; he was lying, calling me all the things I felt about myself after the violation.

  His lies stung, I really wasn’t shocked. I had secretly expected it was him. And for the first time in my young life, I saw how someone I once believed I’d known could be so different from who I thought he was—and the huge magnitude to which a relationship could change. Relationships aren’t static, they’re fluid; poorly rooted ones are as unretainable as water in bare hands. I was stunned by this old half-friend’s unkind intentions. It was my first lesson in the fragility of attraction.

  I wrote madly. I was trying to discover what I truly thought about him and what he’d done. His accusations and words locked me into a shame I hadn’t asked for, an imposed shame I was here to grow from; the accusations themselves were unfair because I hadn’t earned them—but I saw now these truths were only the beginning of the light I was grasping. Som
ewhere in the sun-washed space between Southern California’s hills of sand and the present desolate volcanic sprawl I was crossing, my legs had strengthened, but—invisibly—so had my will. The wisdom of my body had cultivated vibrantly since those sadness-drunken months after the rape when I’d felt so numbed by the hurt and shame that I didn’t move further. No longer. The way I felt about being sexually shamed had changed. Now I was angry that others were trying to shame my sexuality in the first place.

  I flushed—this time not in shame—but in rage. Even in my incredible assertion of my power, I was being reduced. It was maddening. But I was stronger than it, now.

  Never-Never had intended to shame me, but now these accusations angered me instead.

  I scrawled to him, again communicating in writing, the form in which we’d bonded, and I felt better having written out all the anger, the shock, I’d been unable to speak. I was pointedly showing him where his wrongness lay; showing myself. I felt better seeing that I reacted this way, this time. I was beginning to see the importance of my words. I felt my strength.

  Then I slept soundly in my tent, away from the men and boys eager to believe I was available for them to take, happy to be entirely alone again, feeling madder, smarter than I’d been at college.

  I was still in shock Never-Never would do that to me.

  I thought this would make him see how blind he was.

  But in morning it felt wrong to give him the letter. I thought: I wouldn’t waste it on him. I needed to do something good, for myself, but more than that—something bigger. To say something, to make a statement—make a change. Silence had the rusty taste of shame. Jacob had told me how this walk was self-indulgent. My post-rape shame and pain endured, and I finally needed to do something productive with it.

  I had a plan. Instead of giving Never-Never the letter, I recopied it, altering it slightly here and there, boldly directly addressing it not to a man whom I now hated but the people I most loved: my family.

  This letter was for my mother and my father, Jacob, my oldest brother Robert, and Grandma Belle; Grandma Dorothy, Grandpa Mel, my cousins, in-laws and uncles and aunts, everyone who mattered, the people who loved me and could finally help. The letter explained that I’d been raped at college; I needed everyone to finally know. I was sorry I hadn’t called them. I asked them to donate to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network on my behalf, in honor of my walk. A penny a mile would be $26.50. A dollar a mile would be $2,650.00, a value that astonished me. It would be such a relief to know they finally knew.

  I didn’t mention that my parents and brothers already knew, or that they’d already disappointed me.

  I carried that letter in my journal, stepping faster, feeling stronger, despite my broken shoe’s flapping, the pumice-pebbles sanding my feet raw, abrading me, blistering me—veered onto the road that guided me to Sierra City, to the new running shoes my mother had mailed.

  In town, a local trail angel named Slueth had paid for the upstairs of the Buckhorn Motel for ten days, so hikers passing through could stay for free. The place was Spartan but festive, wooden floorboards and rafters, a communal fridge stocked with gallons of vanilla ice cream, and hot dogs, a huge plastic jar of sauerkraut, and potatoes baked in foil, all free. Slueth’s generosity made me giddy. But then I saw the faces of the people who were eating: On a worn corduroy couch, Shell and Never-Never, and Silverfox, again together with Boomer. They were all staying the night. I breathed, I said hi.

  No one acknowledged me. Everyone was cold, and I felt uncomfortable and unwanted. I walked back down the wood stairs, into the cooling evening.

  My shoe was desperately broken, but I hiked back the way I’d come, out of Sierra City. Past the post office that held my new shoes, now closed. I left without confronting Never-Never—and without waiting for the post office to reopen so I could mail my letter to my family.

  That night I called my mother to ask her to have the running shoes and food forwarded to the next town to the north. I still carried both letters in my knapsack, my shoe was practically disintegrating; everything felt half-finished. I felt unsettled.

  I walked without breaks, slept through nights without waking, inhumanly smooth—a small machine—until I reached a highway and caught a quick hitch down into the next blip of civilization, descended, the highway snaking, slashing the rock mountainside. We glided into a microscopic town in north-central California surrounded by pine woods called Etna.

  I hopped out of the car and walked into it.

  The pine trees at the town’s edge were dark. I was in a shadowed valley in the mountains. The Masonic Hall loomed. The churches loomed. I walked past an overgrown cemetery, past the old Alderbrook Manor, past the Etna city limits sign, crossing into the town of Etna, proper. I followed Main Street down. There was something sinister about this trail-town, although I couldn’t name it yet.

  The soda fountain/pharmacy was marble with high ceilings and worn wood counters, lovely, airy and vacant. This town was too silent. If I closed my eyes, I could forget where I was. It was strange. Already I missed the unbound beauty of the High Sierra, unredeemed, unneeding of redemption. A cold wind pressed. I should have known that something bad would happen.

  I passed the Scott Valley Drug and the library, the museum and the hardware store, found a place called the CCTG—described as a “hostel,” though there was neither a check-in nor a fee. It was a complex built within an elementary school that had been repurposed. The place was funded entirely by donations.

  Inside the odd young hippie lounged—people about my age, everyone from Germany and Korea, the Netherlands, and Prague. They were convening, planning something. The “trainees” were all young, in their early twenties, and they all wore hemp bracelets and wooden beads. There were dildos everywhere, a big black one prominent on a purple-and-gold-painted bookshelf, a smaller rubber green one on an old fake-wood particle board folding table for education purposes. There were condoms and also lube, left in old cubbies, placed between kids’ picture books. The thru-hikers stole these “free” sexual things. The CCTG had no telephone to use, and weirdly it was a cell-service dead spot.

  It also had no beds, but hikers were welcome to sleep on the couches, on the floor or on the porch, and the deck had some couches out back, faded and sunken. Everything felt a little bit sticky.

  The complex hosted hikers, but it was really a training and education center for volunteers who were going to Africa to distribute birth control and spread the dark word about AIDS.

  I dropped my bag on an ancient concave couch and walked to the post office, my shoe-side flapping open with each step, the sole of my foot raw and reddened, burning. I’d walked way farther than I should have wearing these broken shoes, wrecking my left foot, but this was the end of it. I couldn’t keep going. If my mother had failed to send the new shoes I needed now, I would be stuck here in Etna.

  Entering the post office, I realized I was limping.

  I asked the mail clerk if there were any packages for Wild Child. She produced them; they were sealed and tidy, miraculously here for me. Seeing them, my trail name drawn in my mom’s familiar handwriting in the same cheap blotted blue ballpoint she’d always used, I felt relieved. My mother’s support of me touched me in this eerie town’s post office, which felt as removed from Newton as a Norman Rockwell drawing. The smaller of the two boxes contained running shoes. They were brand-new and smelled of clean carpet. The shoes on my feet were blackened with soil and six hundred miles of dirt, my right toe poking a hole through the reinforced silver mesh, entirely exposed. I looked like a little feral hobo-child. My mother had sent the shoes from a running store in pristine suburbia, the same one she’d shopped for me at back in high school. I exhaled deeply. Right there in the little post office, the only patron present, I put on my new shoes and dropped my blackened wrecked ones in the trash.

  Before I threw it out and left, I checked the empty shoe box’s top-flaps. I saw she’d had it overnighted from Sierra City, just
as she’d told me she would, though she could have saved the money and just had it forwarded priority mail, and they’d still have arrived here days before I did. Her rush to help me was unnecessary, but it made me smile. I felt loved.

  I slept that night on the rug at the CCTG, surrounded by hikers and also trainees, uneasy. The next day my body was still exhausted, but my feet were beginning to heal. I decided to stay in town just one more night and got a room of my own at Motel Etna.

  I had a plan, I had a plan.

  I paid for the room with the card my mom had given me, knowing she would understand—that she’d actually want me to get some rest somewhere I felt comfortable and safe. I showered, put on Sublime, then Dylan, sat on the carpet to sort the food and vitamins she’d sent me. The best food of any thru-hiker I knew. She took good care of me. This was her way of showing she supported what I was doing. I could count on her. At last I sat on the bed. I dialed my mother. I was doing something good, finally, I knew it.

  She answered quickly. She was very happy and relieved to hear from me. I was calling on my cell phone, not the sat phone, and it occurred to me I’d forgotten to call the night before, from the CCTG’s floor, the AIDS education center that was strangely off the grid.

  “Did I forget?” I asked her, knowing I had.

  “It’s okay, sweetheart,” she told me, though I was sure she’d waited up, she probably hadn’t slept, and I felt guilty.

  I sat at the very edge of the bed, my bare feet against the carpet, which was old faded golden. My big toes were swollen. My left foot’s left side was a massive blotch of blisters. I felt very close to her, fully and wonderfully loved, but I also felt the risk of wrecking it. I felt nervous to speak. I didn’t want to chill our warmth.