Wild

I believed I was going to Golden Oak Springs, but by seven o’clock it was still nowhere in sight. I didn’t care. Too tired to be hungry, I skipped dinner again, thus saving the water I’d have used to make it, and found a spot flat enough to pitch my tent. The tiny thermometer that dangled from the side of my pack said it was 42 degrees. I peeled off my sweaty clothes and draped them over a bush to dry before I crawled into my tent.

In the morning, I had to force them on. Rigid as boards, they’d frozen overnight.

I reached Golden Oak Springs a few hours into my third day on the trail. The sight of the square concrete pool lifted my spirits enormously, not only because at the springs there was water, but also because humans had so clearly constructed it. I put my hands in the water, disturbing a few bugs that swam across its surface. I took out my purifier and placed its intake tube into the water and began to pump the way I’d practiced in my kitchen sink in Minneapolis. It was harder to do than I remembered it being, perhaps because when I’d practiced I’d only pumped a few times. Now it seemed to take more muscle to compress the pump. And when I did manage to pump, the intake tube floated up to the surface, so it took in only air. I pumped and pumped until I couldn’t pump anymore and I had to take a break; then I pumped again, finally refilling both my bottles and the dromedary bag. It took me nearly an hour, but it had to be done. My next water source was a daunting nineteen miles away.

I had every intention of hiking on that day, but instead I sat in my camp chair near the spring. It had warmed up at last, the sun shining on my bare arms and legs. I took off my shirt, pulled my shorts down low, and lay with my eyes closed, hoping the sun would soothe the patches of skin on my torso that had been worn raw by my pack. When I opened my eyes, I saw a small lizard on a nearby rock. He seemed to be doing push-ups.

“Hello, lizard,” I said, and he stopped his push-ups and held perfectly still before disappearing in a flash.

I needed to make time. I was already behind what I considered my schedule, but I could not force myself to leave the small verdant patch of live oaks that surrounded Golden Oak Springs that day. In addition to the raw patches of flesh, my muscles and bones ached from hiking, and my feet were dotted with an ever-increasing number of blisters. I sat in the dirt examining them, knowing there was little I could do to prevent the blisters from going from bad to worse. I ran my finger delicately over them and then up to the black bruise the size of a silver dollar that bloomed on my ankle—not a PCT injury, but rather evidence of my pre-PCT idiocy.

It was because of this bruise that I’d opted not to call Paul when I’d been so lonely at that motel back in Mojave; this bruise at the center of the story I knew he’d hear hiding in my voice. How I’d intended to stay away from Joe in the two days I spent in Portland before catching my flight to LA, but hadn’t. How I’d ended up shooting heroin with him in spite of the fact that I hadn’t touched it since that time he’d come to visit me in Minneapolis six months before.

“My turn,” I’d said urgently after watching him shoot up back in Portland. The PCT suddenly seeming so far in my future, though it was only forty-eight hours away.

“Give me your ankle,” Joe had said when he couldn’t find a vein in my arm.

I spent the day at Golden Oak Springs with my compass in hand, reading Staying Found. I found north, south, east, and west. I walked jubilantly without my pack down a jeep road that came up to the springs to see what I could see. It was spectacular to walk without my pack on, even in the state my feet were in, sore as my muscles were. I felt not only upright, but lifted, as if two elastic bands were attached to my shoulders from above. Each step was a leap, light as air.

When I reached an overlook, I stopped and gazed across the expanse. It was only more desert mountains, beautiful and austere, and more rows of white angular wind turbines in the distance. I returned to my camp, set up my stove, and attempted to make myself a hot meal, my first on the trail, but I couldn’t get my stove to sustain a flame, no matter what I tried. I pulled the little instruction book out, read the troubleshooting section, and learned that I’d filled the stove’s canister with the wrong kind of gas. I’d filled it with unleaded fuel instead of the special white gas that it was meant to have, and now the generator was clogged, its tiny pan blackened with soot by my efforts.

I wasn’t hungry anyway. My hunger was a numb finger, barely prodding. I ate a handful of tuna jerky flakes and fell asleep by 6:15.