Wild

I was here. I walked into it, catching views of the peaks of majestic Mount Shasta to the south and the lower but sterner Mount McLoughlin to the north. I hiked high on a ridgeline, coming to short icy patches of snow that I crossed with the help of my ski pole. I could see cows grazing in the high green meadows not far below me, their big square bells clanking as they moved. “Hello, Oregon cows,” I called to them.

That night I camped under a nearly full moon, the sky bright and cool. I opened J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, but read only a few pages because I couldn’t concentrate; my mind wandered to thoughts of Ashland instead. It was finally so close that I could bear to let myself think about it. In Ashland there would be food, music, and wine, and people who knew nothing of the PCT. And most important, there’d be money, and not just my usual twenty bucks. I’d put $250 in traveler’s checks into my Ashland box, originally believing that it would be the box that greeted me at the very end of my trip. It didn’t contain food or resupplies. It had only traveler’s checks and a “real world” outfit to wear—my favorite faded blue Levi’s and a slim-fitting black T-shirt; a brand-new black lace bra and matching underwear. It was in these things that months before I thought I’d celebrate the end of my trip and catch a ride back to Portland. When I’d changed my itinerary, I’d asked Lisa to put that small box into another of the boxes I’d loaded down with food and supplies and readdress it to Ashland, instead of one of the stops I wasn’t going to make in the Sierra Nevada. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it—that box within the box—and spend the weekend wearing nontrail clothes.

I arrived in Ashland the next day around lunchtime, after hitching a ride from the trail with a group of AmeriCorps volunteers.

“Did you hear the big news?” one of them had asked after I’d climbed into their van.

I shook my head without explaining that I’d heard little news, big or small, for two months.

“You know the Grateful Dead?” he asked, and I nodded. “Jerry Garcia is dead.”

I stood on a sidewalk in the center of town and bent to see an image of Garcia’s face in psychedelic colors on the front page of the local paper, reading what I could through the newspaper box’s clear plastic window, too broke to spring for a copy. I’d liked several of the Grateful Dead’s songs, but I’d never collected tapes of their live shows or followed them around the country like some of my Deadhead friends had. Kurt Cobain’s death the year before had felt closer to me—his sad and violent end a cautionary tale not only of my generation’s excesses, but of my own as well. And yet Garcia’s death felt bigger, as if it was the end of not just a moment, but an era that had lasted all of my life.

I walked with Monster on my back a few blocks to the post office, passing homemade signs propped in store windows that said: WE LOVE YOU, JERRY, RIP. The streets were alive with a mix of well-dressed tourists pouring in for the weekend and the radical youth of the lower Pacific Northwest, who congregated in clumps along the sidewalks emitting a more intense vibe than usual because of the news. “Hey,” several of them said to me as I passed, some adding “sister” to the end. They ranged in age from teenager to senior citizen, clad in clothing that placed them somewhere along the hippy/anarchist/punk rock/funked-out artist continuum. I looked just like one of them—hairy, tan, and tattooed; weighed down by all of my possessions—and I smelled like one of them too, only worse, no doubt, since I hadn’t had a proper bath since I’d showered at that campground in Castle Crags when I’d been hungover a couple of weeks before. And yet I felt so outside of them, of everyone, as if I’d landed here from another place and time.

“Hey!” I exclaimed with surprise when I passed one of the quiet men who’d been in the truck that had pulled up at Toad Lake, where Stacy and I had been searching for the Rainbow Gathering, but he replied with a stony nod, not seeming to remember me.

I reached the post office and pushed its doors open, grinning with anticipation, but when I gave the woman behind the counter my name, she returned with only a small padded envelope addressed to me. No box. No box within the box. No Levi’s or black lace bra or $250 in traveler’s checks or the food I needed to hike to my next stop at Crater Lake National Park.

“There should be a box for me,” I said, holding the little padded envelope.

“You’ll have to check back tomorrow,” the woman said without concern.

“Are you sure?” I stammered. “I mean … It should definitely be there.”

The woman only shook her head unsympathetically. She cared nothing for me. I was a dirty, smelly radical youth of the lower Pacific Northwest. “Next,” she said, signaling to the man standing at the head of the line.