Wild

“AH!” I shrieked when my eyes landed on the snake coiled up a few feet away from me. If I’d been able to jump, I would have. I jumped but my feet didn’t leave the trail. Instead, I scrambled away from the snake’s small blunt head, yowling in terror. It was a good ten minutes before I could work up the courage to step around it in a wide arc, my entire body quaking.

The rest of the day was a slow march, my eyes scanning both the ground and the horizon, terrified at every sound, while also chanting to myself: I am not afraid. Shaken as I was, I couldn’t help but feel grateful to glimpse a couple of the animals that shared this place that had begun to feel a tiny bit like mine. I realized that in spite of my hardships, as I approached the end of the first leg of my journey, I’d begun to feel a blooming affection for the PCT. My backpack, heavy as it was, had come to feel like my almost animate companion. No longer was it the absurd Volkswagen Beetle I’d painfully hoisted on in that motel room in Mojave a couple of weeks before. Now my backpack had a name: Monster.

I meant it in the nicest possible way. I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprising of all, that I could carry it. That I could bear the unbearable. These realizations about my physical, material life couldn’t help but spill over into the emotional and spiritual realm. That my complicated life could be made so simple was astounding. It had begun to occur to me that perhaps it was okay that I hadn’t spent my days on the trail pondering the sorrows of my life, that perhaps by being forced to focus on my physical suffering some of my emotional suffering would fade away. By the end of that second week, I realized that since I’d begun my hike, I hadn’t shed a single tear.

I hiked the final miles to the narrow flat where I made camp the night before I reached Kennedy Meadows in the familiar agony that had been my constant companion. I was relieved to see that a wide fallen tree bordered my campsite. It was long dead, its trunk worn gray and smooth, shorn of its bark ages ago. It formed a high smooth bench, where I sat and removed my pack with ease. As soon as I got my pack off, I lay on the tree as if it were a couch—a sweet respite from the ground. The tree was just wide enough that if I lay still, I could rest without rolling off either side. It felt spectacular. I was hot, thirsty, hungry, and tired, but all of those things were nothing in comparison to the burning pain that emanated from the knots in my upper back. I closed my eyes, sighing with relief.

A few minutes later, I felt something on my leg. I looked down and saw that I was covered with black ants, an entire army of them, making a conga line from a hole in the tree and swarming my body. I shot off the log, shouting louder than I had when I’d seen the bear and the rattlesnake, batting at the harmless ants, breathless with an unreasonable fear. And not just of the ants, but of everything. Of the fact that I wasn’t of this world, even if I insisted I was.

I cooked my dinner and retreated into my tent as soon as I could, well before dark, simply so I could be inside, even if inside only meant being surrounded by a thin sheet of nylon. Before I began hiking the PCT, I’d imagined that I’d sleep inside my tent only when it threatened to rain, that most nights I’d lay my sleeping bag on top of my tarp and sleep beneath the stars, but about this, like so much else, I’d been wrong. Each evening, I ached for the shelter of my tent, for the smallest sense that something was shielding me from the entire rest of the world, keeping me safe not from danger, but from vastness itself. I loved the dim, clammy dark of my tent, the cozy familiarity of the way I arranged my few belongings all around me each night.

I pulled out As I Lay Dying, put on my headlamp, and positioned my food bag beneath my calves while saying a little prayer that the bear I saw earlier in the day—the black bear, I emphasized—wouldn’t bust through my tent to steal it from me.

When I woke at eleven to the yipping of coyotes, the light from my headlamp had grown dim; the Faulkner novel was still open on my chest.

In the morning, I could barely stand up. It wasn’t just that morning, day 14. It had been happening for the past week, an ever-increasing array of problems and pains that made it impossible for me to stand or walk like a regular person when I first emerged from my tent. It was as if I were suddenly a very old woman, limping into the day. I’d managed to carry Monster more than a hundred miles over rough and sometimes steep terrain by then, but as each new day began, I couldn’t even tolerate my own weight; my feet tender and swollen from the previous day’s exertions; my knees too stiff to do what a normal gait required of them.