Wild

I rested in what shade I could find, fantasizing in intricate detail about cold water. The heat was so intense that my memory of it is not so much a sensation as a sound, a whine that rose to a dissonant keen with my head at its very center. Despite the things I’d endured so far on the trail, I’d never once considered quitting. But now, only ten days out, I was done. I wanted off.

I staggered north toward Kennedy Meadows, furious with myself for having come up with this inane idea. Elsewhere, people were having barbecues and days of ease, lounging by lakes and taking naps. They had access to ice cubes and lemonade and rooms whose temperature was 70 degrees. I knew those people. I loved those people. I hated them too, for how far away they were from me, near death on a trail few had ever even heard of. I was going to quit. Quit, quit, quit, I chanted to myself as I moaned and hiked and rested (ten, five, ten, five). I was going to get to Kennedy Meadows, retrieve my resupply box, eat every candy bar I’d packed into it, and then hitch a ride to whatever town the driver who picked me up was going to. I would get myself to a bus station and from there go anywhere.

Alaska, I decided instantly. Because in Alaska there was most definitely ice.

As the notion of quitting settled in, I came up with another reason to bolster my belief that this whole PCT hike had been an outlandishly stupid idea. I’d set out to hike the trail so that I could reflect upon my life, to think about everything that had broken me and make myself whole again. But the truth was, at least so far, I was consumed only with my most immediate and physical suffering. Since I’d begun hiking, the struggles of my life had only fluttered occasionally through my mind. Why, oh why, had my good mother died and how is it I could live and flourish without her? How could my family, once so close and strong, have fallen apart so swiftly and soundly in the wake of her death? What had I done when I’d squandered my marriage with Paul—the solid, sweet husband who’d loved me so steadfastly? Why had I gotten myself in a sad tangle with heroin and Joe and sex with men I hardly knew?

These were the questions I’d held like stones all through the winter and spring, as I prepared to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. The ones I’d wept over and wailed over, excavated in excruciating detail in my journal. I’d planned to put them all to rest while hiking the PCT. I’d imagined endless meditations upon sunsets or while staring out across pristine mountain lakes. I’d thought I’d weep tears of cathartic sorrow and restorative joy each day of my journey. Instead, I only moaned, and not because my heart ached. It was because my feet did and my back did and so did the still-open wounds all around my hips. And also, during that second week on the trail—when spring was on the very cusp of turning officially to summer—because I was so hot I thought my head would explode.

When I wasn’t internally grumbling about my physical state, I found my mind playing and replaying scraps of songs and jingles in an eternal, nonsensical loop, as if there were a mix-tape radio station in my head. Up against the silence, my brain answered back with fragmented lines from tunes I’d heard over the course of my life—bits from songs I loved and clear renditions of jingles from commercials that almost drove me mad. I spent hours trying to push ads for Doublemint Gum and Burger King out of my head, an afternoon trying to recall the next line to an Uncle Tupelo song that went “Falling out the window. Tripping on a wrinkle in the rug.…” An entire day was spent trying to piece together all the words of Lucinda Williams’s “Something About What Happens When We Talk.”

My feet on fire, my flesh rubbed raw, my muscles and joints aching, the finger that had been denuded of its skin when the bull charged me throbbing with a mild infection, my head broiling and abuzz with random bits of music, at the end of the blistering tenth day of my hike I practically crawled into a shady grove of cottonwoods and willows that my guidebook identified as Spanish Needle Creek. Unlike many of the places my guidebook listed that had falsely promising names that included the word creek, Spanish Needle Creek truly was one, or at least it was good enough for me—a few inches of water shimmered over the rocks on the creek’s shaded bed. Immediately, I shed my pack and my boots and my clothes and sat naked in the cool, shallow water, splashing it over my face and head. In my ten days on the trail, I’d yet to see another human, so I lounged without concern for anyone coming along, dizzy with ecstasy as I laboriously pumped the cold water through my water purifier and guzzled bottle after bottle.