Wild

“We knew we were going to catch you today,” said the one with the intense eyes. “We saw your tracks on the trail.”

“We’ve been reading your notes in the trail register,” added the tall one.

“We were trying to figure out how old you’d be,” said the blond one.

“How old did you think I’d be?” I asked, smiling like a maniac.

“We thought either about our age or fifty,” said the one with the intense eyes.

“I hope you’re not disappointed,” I said, and we laughed and blushed.

They were Rick, Josh, and Richie, all of them three or four years younger than me. They were from Portland, Eugene, and New Orleans, respectively. They’d all gone to college together at an insular Minnesota liberal arts school an hour outside the Twin Cities.

“I’m from Minnesota!” I exclaimed when they told me, but they knew that already, from my notes in the trail register.

“You don’t have a trail name yet?” one of them asked me.

“Not that I know of,” I said.

They had a trail name: the Three Young Bucks, which they’d been given by other hikers in southern California, they told me. The name fit. They were three young and buckish men. They’d come all the way from the Mexican border. They hadn’t skipped the snow like everyone else. They’d hiked over it, right through it—regardless of the fact that it was a record snow year—and because they’d done so, they were at the back of the Mexico-to-Canada thru-hiker pack, which is how, at this late date, they’d met me. They hadn’t met Tom, Doug, Greg, Matt, Albert, Brent, Stacy, Trina, Rex, Sam, Helen, John, or Sarah. They hadn’t even stopped in Ashland. They hadn’t danced to the Dead or eaten chewable opium or had sex with anyone pressed up against a rock on a beach. They’d just plowed right on through, hiking twenty-some miles a day, gaining on me since the moment I’d leapfrogged north of them when I’d bypassed to Sierra City. They weren’t just three young bucks. They were three young extraordinary hiking machines.

Being in their company felt like a holiday.

We walked to the campsite the store set aside for us, where the Three Young Bucks had already ditched their packs, and we cooked dinner and talked and told stories about things both on and off the trail. I liked them immensely. We clicked. They were sweet, cute, funny, kind guys and they made me forget how ruined I’d felt just an hour before. In their honor, I made the freeze-dried raspberry cobbler I’d been carrying for weeks, saving it for a special occasion. When it was done, we ate it with four spoons from my pot and then slept in a row under the stars.

In the morning, we collected our boxes and took them back to our camp to reorganize our packs before heading on. I opened my box and pushed my hands through the smooth ziplock bags of food, feeling for the envelope that would contain my twenty-dollar bill. It had become such a familiar thrill for me now, that envelope with the money inside, but this time I couldn’t find it. I dumped everything out and ran my fingers along the folds inside the box, searching for it, but it wasn’t there. I didn’t know why. It just wasn’t. I had six dollars and twelve cents.

“Shit,” I said.

“What?” asked one of the Young Bucks.

“Nothing,” I said. It was embarrassing to me that I was constantly broke, that no one was standing invisibly behind me with a credit card or a bank account.

I loaded my food into my old blue bag, sick with the knowledge that I’d have to hike 143 miles to my next box with only six dollars and twelve cents in my pocket. At least I didn’t need money where I was going, I reasoned, in order to calm myself. I was heading through the heart of Oregon—over Willamette Pass and McKenzie Pass and Santiam Pass, through the Three Sisters and Mount Washington and Mount Jefferson Wildernesses—and there’d be no place to spend my six dollars and twelve cents anyway, right?

I hiked out an hour later with the Three Young Bucks, crisscrossing with them all day; occasionally we stopped together for breaks. I was amazed by what they ate and how they ate it. They were like barbarians loose upon the land, shoving three Snickers bars apiece into their mouths on a single fifteen-minute break, though they were thin as sticks. When they took off their shirts, their ribs showed right through. I’d lost weight too, but not as much as the men—an unjust pattern I’d observed across the board in the other male and female hikers I’d met that summer as well—but I didn’t much care anymore whether I was fat or thin. I cared only about getting more food. I was a barbarian too, my hunger voracious and monumental. I’d reached the point where if a character in one of the novels I was reading happened to be eating, I had to skip over the scene because it simply hurt too much to read about what I wanted and couldn’t have.