Wild

How fabulous down was for those first minutes! Down, down, down I’d go until down too became impossible and punishing and so relentless that I’d pray for the trail to go back up. Going down, I realized, was like taking hold of the loose strand of yarn on a sweater you’d just spent hours knitting and pulling it until the entire sweater unraveled into a pile of string. Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again. As if everything gained was inevitably lost.

When I left Castle Crags at two—an hour behind Stacy and Rex and a few hours ahead of the couples—I was wearing boots that were a whole blissful size bigger than the last pair had been. “I’m the Bigfoot!” I’d joked as I said goodbye to the couples. I walked up and up into the searing hot day, feeling exuberant to be on the trail, the last dregs of my hangover soon sweated out of me. Up and up I went, all through that afternoon and the following day, though it wasn’t long before my enthusiasm over my new boots faded, replaced by the bleak understanding that, footwise, things weren’t going to be any different for me. My new boots had only chawed my feet afresh. I was passing through the beautiful territory I’d come to take for granted, my body finally up to the task of hiking the big miles, but because of my foot troubles, I sank into the grimmest despair. I remembered making that wish upon the star when I was with Brent in Belden Town. It appeared that I really had jinxed myself by saying it aloud. Perhaps my feet would never be okay.

Lost in a spiral of bitter thoughts on my second day out of Castle Crags, I nearly stepped on two rattlesnakes that sat coiled up on the trail within a few miles of each other. Each snake had literally rattled me back from where I was, warning me off at the last minute. Chastened, I tried to rattle myself back too. I marched on, imagining unimaginable things—that my feet were not actually attached to me, say, or that the sensation I was having wasn’t really pain but simply a sensation.

Hot, angry, sick of myself, I stopped for lunch beneath the shade of a tree, laid out my tarp and reclined on it. I’d camped with Rex and Stacy the night before and planned to meet up with them again that night—the couples were still somewhere behind us—but I’d spent the day hiking alone without seeing a soul. I watched birds of prey soaring far over the rocky peaks, the occasional white wispy cloud traveling slowly across the sky, until I fell asleep without meaning to. I woke up a half hour later with a startled gasp, creeped out by a dream—the same dream I’d had the night before. In it, Bigfoot had kidnapped me. He’d done it in a fairly mannerly fashion, approaching to pull me by the hand deep into the woods, where an entire village of other Bigfoots lived. In the dream I was both astonished and frightened at the sight of them. “How have you hid from humans so long?” I’d asked my Bigfoot captor, but he only grunted. As I looked at him, I realized that he was not a Bigfoot at all but a man wearing a mask and a hairy suit. I could see his pale human flesh beneath the edge of his mask, which terrified me.

I brushed the dream aside when I’d awakened that morning, blaming it on the postcard I’d bought in Castle Crags, but now that I’d had the dream twice, it seemed to carry more weight, as if the dream weren’t really a dream but a foreboding sign—of what, I didn’t know. I stood up, hoisted Monster back on, and scanned the lined crags, the rocky peaks and high gray and rust-colored cliffs that surrounded me near and far among the patches of green trees, feeling a cool unease. When I met up with Stacy and Rex that evening, I was more than a little relieved to see them. I’d felt jumpy for hours, tentative about the small noises that came from the bushes and unnerved by the long silences.

“How are your feet?” asked Stacy as I pitched my tent near hers. In reply, I only sat in the dirt and pulled my boots and socks off and showed them to her.

“Damn,” she whispered. “That looks painful.”

“So guess what I heard yesterday morning at the store?” asked Rex. He was stirring a pot of something over the flame of his stove, his face still pink from the day’s exertions. “Apparently there’s this thing called the Rainbow Gathering up ahead at Toad Lake.”

“Toad Lake?” I asked, suddenly remembering the woman I’d met in the restroom at the Reno bus station. She’d been going there.

“Yeah,” said Rex. “It’s only half a mile off the trail, about nine miles up ahead. I think we should go.”

I clapped my hands in glee.

“What’s the Rainbow Gathering?” asked Stacy.