Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

by Aspen Matis

  Late in night in darkness, still awake, I asked Dash, “Why are you doing this walk?” I finally needed to know his story too.

  He told me a story about a mother deer. “When I was a kid, deer used a path behind my house, hundreds of deer every evening. I once threw a pinecone and hit one, there were so many I couldn’t have missed. The sound was hollow, it wasn’t made of much. It dashed away from me.”

  “That’s your whole reason?” I tried to see him in the darkness. I couldn’t.

  “That mother looked so big, so solid.”

  “That’s the only reason?” I asked again.

  He told me the story of how he suddenly lost his hearing in one ear. For the first time he realized that his body wasn’t permanent; it could fail him. I remembered the moment in the desert when my eyes were drying, I terrifyingly felt in my body how I was mortal; I understood.

  Jacob had stared, straight-backed, at the ambulance’s turning blue-red-blue. I had sat, silent. Inked minutes had passed, my tears dripping on my thighs, on my fingers and crossed wrists, and I’d felt brittle. Hollow, like an excavated crater. I’d felt I had been erased, whited out like an embarrassing typo, smothered slowly by falling snow, my mouth filling. Jacob had looked at me and said, softly, asking, “Do you want me to beat him up for you?”

  By then, after the wait, the crash and wreck, all I’d said to him was “No.”

  I didn’t want Dash to see me as damaged, and yet I wanted him to see me.

  I took a huge breath in, I slowly breathed it out. My lips were against his neck. I told him softly that on my second night of my freshman year of college, before classes had begun, before I’d removed my colorful construction paper name tag from my dorm room door, I was raped.

  He didn’t flinch. He didn’t ask me “Why?” He didn’t ask me how I was alone with a guy, or how it had happened. He didn’t ask me any question at all. All he did was almost nothing but exactly everything I’d needed everyone I’d told before him to do: he shifted his body to open his arms. He reacted with absolutely untainted compassion.

  I slipped in.

  He held me. I leaned into him deeply.

  When the weight of my head was on his chest and I was sure he couldn’t see my face, my cheek melting into his warm breathing chest, I silently said: I love you.

  These words felt different this time.

  CHAPTER 19

  A HIKER’S GUIDE TO HEALING

  Whitman is my daddy.

  —LANA DEL REY

  A word after a word after a word is power.

  —MARGARET ATWOOD

  When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.

  —ADRIENNE RICH

  Writing is a way to make a living dreaming wild dreams.

  —WILD CHILD’S PCT JOURNAL

  Writing is a way.

  We walked through clouds, breathless, above green valleys and into huckleberries, bushy fields glistening with dew. The fruit was ripe and plump, I grabbed at a shimmering bush and half the berries I brushed fell easily into my hand. I gulped them as feasting bear cubs do. I grinned. We dipped back down into soft white pine woods.

  He talked of times in the future when we would ski down mountains in Colorado, I’d host a 1920s-themed party for my twentieth birthday; we’d live together in sunny mountains, or in a narrow house in Greenwich Village. The shared future he imagined thrilled me. He was presumptuous, saying “When we,” as if the plan had already been made.

  I wanted to make it.

  Often he talked about the amount of money he’d need to earn before he retired. “Everybody has a nut,” he told me. “How much it is depends on who you are.”

  I didn’t fully understand. I asked him, “How much is yours?”

  He answered without pausing, “Five million bucks.”

  I said that was a lot. I thought he seemed so young to me to be planning for the end of work already.

  We sang bad duets, “Me and you, I do, I think about you day and night, it’s only right, to think about the one you love, and hold her (me: him!) tight . . .” We skinny-dipped in beautiful clear lakes, they were freezing cold; I was awake in my body.

  He made us morning tea, the steam dancing like a shadow flame in the bright daylight. There was no snow; there were no trees scorched by fire here.

  I was building our home nightly, it was easy. I felt safe and light, my abilities crisp, making camp—tent taut and motionless beneath the rustling pines.

  The earth was rich and blooming. Slipping toward Canada, through safer terrain, I felt fit and graceful—recently seemingly unattainable strengths, for me. I felt pretty. The woods were damp and smelled of unseen gardens.

  I was falling in love for the first time. My world was providing for me in abundance because I had finally learned to trust it.

  I’d entered the bliss of Washington, physically and emotionally: eating huckleberries, feeling beautiful and finally in control of my self. Feeling the changing season, my self changed.

  The miles we walked together were beautiful.

  We walked without talking. The trail climbed and we emerged from the trees on a viewless ridge, white and wet.

  A group of mountain sheep appeared, materialized out of the thick curtain of low-hanging fog. This would be an inconvenient place to twist an ankle, a deadly place to fall. We were climbing up to the Knife’s Edge, a tightrope ridge of rock through sky, through this swift wind. Walking closer, we felt the threat of falling. Off the eastern side, a thirty-foot drop. To the west, twelve hundred feet through air to treetops, rocks.

  My hair, knotted in a bun, came undone, long curls whipping my face. My voice was a skipping rock over vast wind and rain, nearly inaudible. Frozen rain struck my cheeks and neck and I shivered. I was wearing all my clothes but my hands wouldn’t close and my stomach wasn’t warm. I couldn’t see straight; if I opened my eyes fully ice-rain stung them. And it was all so white. I tripped over my left foot and scraped my right shin.

  We traversed the glacier—white snow in white air, the huge height we could fall invisible. Now we walked into a scree field, snow-crusted and foggy. And I couldn’t see. And I couldn’t stop shivering.

  And Dash just slipped—fell—probably twelve feet. Tears froze on my cold cheeks.

  I was crying for Dash—I was scared he’d broken a rib or had a concussion.

  I tripped out of the rocks and onto the icy alpine brush, to him. He was standing now and said he was all right. He said we should camp. I heard the words but could not move my mouth the right way to speak. I just nodded and shut my eyes and pressed my forearm to my lashes, frozen, brittle like glass casts of themselves. Through blinding ice-fog we lunged down, down. Prayed we didn’t slip. Found an island of pine trees, the only trees, clinging to the slick and rocky slope. Sheltering a slanted flat of soil. A hundred years ago unlucky seeds blown to this rocky slope had found that one flat spot and been saved. On a ten-by-ten flat soil island, they’d fallen in despair and grown. Four twisted trees like miracle house posts now saved us, gave us a spot of shelter. A place to pitch our tent. Good ground, bulging with roots.

  Dash set up the tent while I shuddered and opened and closed my mouth, hands against my stomach. While I waited, Dash said, I should jump up and down. I couldn’t.

  He got into my sleeping bag.

  I couldn’t ask why—couldn’t talk.

  He told me to undress, to get into my narrow bag with him. I was shaking. I felt jittery, like I was on fire, like fire was consuming me but it didn’t hurt, like I was drunker than I’d ever been. I tugged at my soaked shirt. I was astonished it came off. I shook myself into the bag with him, went limp. Observed my fingernails, which had become lilac.

  My hands heated up against his stomach, and my cheeks warmed against his neck.

  That night he nearly froze keeping me warm.

  I was warming. And I already loved him.

  We woke in the morning on a snow-covered slope, unsure wher
e we were, unsure where the trail passed through. I called my dad on the sat phone, and passed it to Dash—the two of them figured out our route down toward the valley town below.

  Descending the steep mountainside, trying not to slip and fall again, he grabbed my hand at times to steady us both. We lunged together down the slope, cold still, but warming, less snow, frost-studded gravel, down and down. We were alive and warm, walking together through the most beautiful world. And then—thank God!—we were back on solid trail.

  We descended quickly, made it back into meadowed forest by afternoon. I outreached my arm and with my fingers skimmed the back of Dash’s swinging arm. He slowed and stopped for me. I wanted this man. I wanted to be with him forever. I told him this. He kissed my talking mouth, my cold palm.

  Stumbling together, tangled in a hug, we didn’t get ten steps off the trail, lay on the cold wild grass. Peeled off our worn-thin shirts, our underclothes.

  I was scared, tight. I thought of the few times I’d had sex before this—one of them with Junior, resisting him—and I felt my face get hot. I panicked. Yet I wanted this. I knew so solidly that I wanted it, it hurt my body a little bit—I was naked on a grassy mound, freezing and flushed, my heart pounding, bouncing off the walls of me. Like a molecule of oxygen, frantic, its heated state disorder.

  Sex had always hurt me until now. It hurt this time too, but less than before—it was bearable now. The pain was giving into pleasure. I felt relief, like sex before him had existed just only to get the pain I’d feel out of the way. I’d never had sex with anyone more than once, but I knew that could change, now.

  This was the first time I didn’t bleed at all.

  Then Michigan Paul walked up on us, saw us through the narrow trees on our green mound. We froze. Another hiker’s footsteps clomp-clomped, sped up; he looked away.

  Dash said we were zero for one.

  Cool soil against my naked side, his heat. The air feverish against my racing heart, my shame passed quickly—I didn’t care who saw. I was happy. I kissed him.

  He rubbed sunscreen I’d missed into my face. He told me I had the cutest little nose.

  “What.” I said.

  “You have a little nose. It’s so cute.” He didn’t seem like he was joking.

  I felt I had never seen myself in a mirror.

  He traced my face with shiny fingers that smelled of camp and the Cape: my childhood summers. It didn’t matter that we’d been seen this way. I cared about nothing as much as us together.

  I was starting to fall in love with the attention that he gave me, the way his skin smelled. I felt safe and secure with him. Dash accepted me, made me accept myself more. I told him I was raped; he had hugged me. I felt I could tell him anything, and he would still like me, and he’d have wisdom for me. I had never met anyone like him. I was in good hands.

  We lay together in the stillness under the canopy of tall rustling trees. That cool evening on the dirt, in the clean sunlight, all he could do was keep running his hand up and down my body.

  We would stumble together off the side of the trail into the forest and make love, and make love, and make love; sunscreen spot I missed, he rubbed it in, making love; it became our ritual.

  The verdant town of Trout Lake was dotted with white llamas, they wandered the endless fields of huckleberries. Men in the fields picked them, filling up white buckets. Pounds of berries sat on the general store floor. The gas station sold the “World’s Greatest Huckleberry Milkshake,” and so did the coffee shop across the road, too.

  The town’s small hotel was full, and the motel was full. The woman at the general store wherein everything except huckleberries was exceptionally expensive told us that an L.A. entrepreneur who’d become a Buddhist monk opened a monastery in town, and he sometimes let hikers sleep there. She called him for us. In fifteen minutes he pulled up in a shiny new white Escalade. We rolled past more huckleberry fields, more men picking, the hills beyond them golden with sun, it was beautiful.

  That afternoon, we sat in silence at meditation in the temple, and then climbed spiraled stairs to our bedroom. We made love, even though I was on my period, and, rolling over each other, we imprinted the white linen sheets with blood.

  Dash spot-cleaned the sheets with bleach as I walked with the monk, picking snap peas and cauliflower from the monastery’s organic garden to cook for our dinner. After we ate, Dash and I began to clean; I confessed I’d never actually done dishes before. My face heated, I feared he’d see me as a child.

  The water was steaming, Dash was running it. He smiled, told me, “I picked you underripe.”

  That night we did the dishes together.

  Descending a ridge one chilly morning, Dash told me a true story about the tropical expat phenomenon: young men who move to Thailand and live off the money they’ve already made for the rest of their lives. In Thailand they’re rich enough to have a girl wash their bodies for them as they shower on the beach. Massages cost only one U.S. dollar.

  I wondered what he was telling me in this story. I asked, “That’s what you want to do?”

  “Their brains get squishy,” he said. He grinned dopily. “They rot.” He switched topics and told me instead about the work he had done in finance in New York City. He’d been paid a lot of money to calculate the probability of different natural disasters and estimate the value of insurance against them.

  He then said that really he was more interested in what I wanted to do. He wanted to show me the hidden swimming holes in the river gorges of Ithaca, in upstate New York where he’d studied math. He wanted to take me to the glaciers in Waterton National Park on the Great Divide Trail in Canada; he told me it was “more beautiful than the American side.” The American side was Glacier National Park—revered for its beauty. We’d road-trip up there, it was too stunning a place to look at alone. He wanted to tell me everything he’d figured out, show me all the beautiful places he’d found. We talked about places we might go together at the end of September. We spoke without ever asking if going together was what the other wanted; it was.

  I told him of Colorado, where I lived before the trail, below the mountains there: red clay and the smell of dank river mud, and of thunderstorms: dust rising. Pikes Peak snow-faded like a permanent ivory castle. Together we’d ski it. He had ski-raced at Cornell. With him, I’d be fearless.

  He seemed intrigued and excited.

  He told me he had always wanted to live in Colorado—Co-lo-rado.

  I thought it was lucky that I’d lived somewhere he always wanted to go. Anywhere I went with Dash would be good, because I would be with him. And really I still loved Colorado Springs. I had always loved the beauty, I hadn’t forgotten my childhood memories. The Bluffs, the red rock dirt; I couldn’t think of anyplace better to go: I could return, even alone. I understood: I could. It couldn’t be bad this time, I was immune.

  I wouldn’t run away from that pain, the rape. I was done running. I felt tremendous. Junior felt like the outsider. Junior didn’t seem to belong with my memories of the Springs, he seemed disconnected from Colorado. I understood now that he could have been anywhere, he didn’t taint the state. I had nothing to run from. Really I still loved Colorado Springs. It was my childhood Eden, nothing could kill that love.

  And for the first time on the trail, I began to feel excited to return to my life off the PCT. I would return to Colorado Springs—with Dash. I saw that I was still in love with it. I grinned at the thought of kissing in winter’s cold light in our sparse apartment, cloud light resting on the wooden floorboards, a snowstorm whiting out the world outside. High on the North American continent’s continental divide, living inside our glass-walled box of home.

  I began to lust after our conjoining life.

  One day Dash asked me directly about my mother. “What does she do?”

  There were mammoth truths I still hadn’t told Dash. I hadn’t been in control of my life, my self. In her shadow, I was muted, fainter. We all want to feel like our own p
eople, otherwise we feel chained and trapped and like we are out of control of ourselves. Which in many ways I felt I was.

  But I couldn’t say any of this yet. No one answer felt it could contain anything close to the truth about her. My thoughts of my mother were wild chaos, I didn’t know how to tell him we’d been enmeshed for as long as I could remember. I told him, flatly, “She’s a lawyer.”

  A lawyer.

  In a way this whole walk felt like an answer to the question, “What does your mom do?” My mother spent my lifetime telling me I was not capable of controlling my life, of taking care of myself, and therefore was forever bound to her.

  I told Dash about how my dad spent hours upstairs in my old room, writing, years of his life. He’d written more than a dozen novels, I’d lost count. I’d only been allowed to read “Desk Carvings,” “City of Children,” A Game for Everyone”—the few written for children. He said he wouldn’t want to be edited; he was doing this for himself. He said, “You wouldn’t ask someone who learns to play the piano why they don’t perform at Carnegie Hall.” He was learning to write books. He’d never sent any of them out to try to publish. I told Dash how excited my father sometimes was to go and write.

  Dash said, “He sounds like you.”

  I wished my father could see what Dash could.

  I realized none of the wild plans Dash was imagining for us involved my writing. He didn’t have any faith in it because I hadn’t yet shown him any of it.

  I wanted him to see how huge my potential was, to read my stories and the letters in my journal and to see that my writing was brilliant, as my father could in flickers see: I was a writer.

  If I wanted him to see me as a writer, I would need to finally show him.

  “What is your dad like?” I asked him.

  He kissed me; through happy kisses he whispered, “He’s a physicist.”

  When I asked him about his mother, all he said was, “Aloof.”

  I wondered what stories hid beneath his answers.

  Dash and I descended toward the Cascade Range town of Packwood. It was drizzling, the sky draped like a blanket of white fog. We climbed over the trunks of massive fallen trees, knocked down by mountain storms. They were seven or nine feet thick, the roots at their bases a tangle like branches, but brittle; old dry dirt still clinging. We were morphed forest creatures.