Wild

“Which direction you headed?” he asked. His body odor was so strong I almost coughed, though I guessed I smelled almost as bad as he did. In spite of the bath I’d taken the night before at Frank and Annette’s after dinner, I was still dressed in my dirty clothes.

“I might stay in a motel for the night,” I told him.

“Don’t do that!” he bellowed. “I did that and they put me in jail.”

I nodded, realizing that he thought that I was like him. A drifter. An outlaw. Not a so-called college girl, or even a former one. I didn’t even try to explain about the PCT.

“You can have this,” he said, holding the paper bag out to me. “It’s bread and bologna. You can make sandwiches.”

“No, thanks,” I said, both repulsed and touched by his offer.

“Where you from?” he asked, reluctant to ride away.

“Minnesota.”

“Hey!” he cried, a smile spreading across his grubby face. “You’re my sister. I’m from Illinois. Illinois and Minnesota are like neighbors.”

“Well, almost neighbors—there’s Wisconsin in between,” I said, and instantly regretted it, not wanting to hurt his feelings.

“But that’s still neighbors,” he said, and held his open palm down low so I would give him five.

I gave him five.

“Good luck,” I said to him as he pedaled away.

I walked to a grocery store and wandered up and down the aisles before touching anything, dazzled by the mountains of food. I bought a few things to replace the food I’d eaten when I hadn’t been able to make my dehydrated dinners and walked along a busy thruway until I found what looked like the cheapest motel in town.

“My name’s Bud,” the man behind the counter said when I asked for a room. He had a hangdog expression and a smoker’s cough. Tan jowls hung off the sides of his wrinkled face. When I told him about hiking the PCT, he insisted on washing my clothes. “I can just throw them in with the sheets and towels, darling. It ain’t nothing at all,” he said when I protested.

I went to my room, stripped, and put on my rainpants and raincoat, though it was a hot June day; then I walked back to the office and handed my little pile of dirty clothes shyly over to Bud, thanking him again.

“It’s ’cause I like your bracelet. That’s why I offered,” said Bud. I pulled up the sleeve of my raincoat and we looked at it. It was a faded silver cuff, a POW/MIA bracelet my friend Aimee had clamped onto my wrist as we said goodbye on a street in Minneapolis weeks before.

“Let me see who you got there.” He reached across the counter and took my wrist and turned it so he could read the words. “William J. Crockett,” he said, and let go. Aimee had done some research and told me who William J. Crockett was: an air force pilot who’d been two months shy of his twenty-sixth birthday when his plane was shot down in Vietnam. She’d worn the bracelet for years without ever taking it off. Since the moment she’d given it to me, neither had I. “I’m a Vietnam vet myself, so I keep my eyes out for that sort of thing. That’s also why I gave you the only room we got that has a tub,” said Bud. “I was there in ’63, when I was barely eighteen. But now I’m against war. All kinds of war. One hundred percent against it. Except in certain cases.” There was a cigarette burning in a plastic ashtray nearby that Bud picked up but didn’t bring to his lips. “So I’m gonna assume you know there’s a lot of snow up there on the Sierra Nevada this year.”

“Snow?” I asked.

“It’s been a record year. Entirely socked in. There’s a BLM office here in town if you want to call them and ask about conditions,” he said, and took a drag. “I’ll have your clothes ready in an hour or two.”

I returned to my room and took a shower and then a bath. Afterwards, I pulled back the bedspread and lay on the bedsheets. My room didn’t have an air conditioner, but I felt cool anyway. I felt better than I’d ever felt in all of my life, now that the trail had taught me how horrible I could feel. I got up, rummaged through my pack, then reclined on the bed and read As I Lay Dying while Bud’s words about the snow thrummed through me.

I knew snow. I had grown up in Minnesota, after all. I’d shoveled it, driven in it, and balled it up in my hands to throw. I’d watched it through windows for days as it fell into piles that stayed frozen for months on the ground. But this snow was different. It was snow that covered the Sierra Nevada so indomitably that the mountains had been named for it—in Spanish, Sierra Nevada means “the snowy range.”