Wild

“Let me try at the post office again,” I said, loath to take her up on her offer, grateful as I was for it. I returned to the post office and stood in line, disappointed to see that the same woman who’d told me my box wasn’t there was still working the counter. When I approached her, I asked for my box as if I hadn’t been there only a few hours before. She went into a back room and returned holding it, pushing it across the counter to me without apology.

“So it was here all along,” I said, but she didn’t care, replying that she simply must not have seen it before.

I was too ecstatic to be angry as I walked with Stacy to the hostel, holding my box. I checked in and followed Stacy up the stairs and through the main women’s dorm room to a small, private alcove that sat under the eaves of the building. Inside, there were three single beds. Stacy had one, her friend Dee had another, and they’d saved the third for me. Stacy introduced me to Dee and we talked while I opened my box. There were my clean old jeans, my new bra and underwear, and more money than I’d had since I started my trip.

I went to the shower room and stood under the hot water scrubbing myself. I hadn’t showered for two weeks, during which the temperatures had ranged from the thirties to the low hundreds. I could feel the water washing the layers of sweat away, as if they were an actual layer of skin. When I was done, I gazed at myself naked in the mirror, my body leaner than the last time I’d looked, my hair lighter than it had been since I was a little girl. I put on the new black bra, underwear, and T-shirt and my faded Levi’s, which were loose on me now, though I hadn’t quite been able to fit into them three months before, and returned to the alcove and put on my boots. They were no longer new—dirty and hot, heavy and painful—but they were the only shoes I had.

At dinner with Stacy and Dee, I ordered everything I desired. Afterwards, I went to a shoe store and bought a black and blue pair of Merrell sports sandals, the kind I should’ve sprung for before my trip. We returned to the hostel, but within minutes Stacy and I were out again, headed for the Jerry Garcia memorial celebration at a nearby club, leaving Dee behind to sleep. We sat at a table in a little roped-off area that bordered the dance floor, drinking white wine and watching women of all ages, shapes, and sizes and an occasional man spinning to the Grateful Dead songs that played one after another. Behind the dancers, there was a screen upon which a series of images were projected, some abstract, psychedelic swirls, others literal, drawn renditions of Jerry and his band.

“We love you, Jerry!” a woman at the next table belted out when an image of him appeared.

“Are you going to dance?” I asked Stacy.

She shook her head. “I’ve got to get back to the hostel. We’re heading out early in the morning.”

“I think I’m going to stay for a bit,” I said. “Wake me up to say goodbye if I’m still sleeping tomorrow.” After she left, I ordered another glass of wine and sat listening to the music, watching people, feeling a profound happiness to simply be in a room among others on a summer evening with music playing. When I rose to leave half an hour later, the song “Box of Rain” came on. It was one of my favorite Dead songs and I was a bit buzzed, so I impulsively shot out to the dance floor and began to dance, and then regretted it almost as quickly. My knees felt stiff and creaky from all the hiking, my hips strangely inflexible, but just as I was about to leave, the man from Michigan, whom I’d met earlier in the day, was suddenly upon me, seemingly dancing with me, spinning in and out of my orbit like a hippy gyroscope, drawing an imaginary box in the air with his fingers while nodding at me, as if I knew what the hell that meant, and so it seemed rude to leave.

“I always think of Oregon when I hear this song,” he shouted over the music as I moved my body in a faux boogie. “Get it?” he asked. “Box of rain? Like Oregon is a box of rain too?”

I nodded and laughed, attempting to seem as if I were having a fun time, but the moment the song ended, I bolted away to stand near a low wall that ran alongside the bar.

“Hey,” a man said to me after a while, and I turned. He stood on the other side of the waist-high wall holding a marker and a flashlight—an employee of the club, apparently manning the territory in which you could drink—though I hadn’t noticed him there before.

“Hey,” I said back. He was handsome and looked a bit older than me, his dark curls skimming the tops of his shoulders. WILCO it said across the front of his T-shirt. “I love that band,” I said, gesturing to his shirt.

“You know them?” he asked.

“Of course I know them,” I said.