Wild

I’d finished ambling barefoot around my camp and was packed up and ready to go when two men appeared on the trail from the south. Like Greg, they greeted me by name before I’d even spoken a word. They were Albert and Matt, a father-and-son team from Georgia, hiking the entire trail. Albert was fifty-two; Matt, twenty-four. Both had been Eagle Scouts and they looked it. They had a clean-cut sincerity and a military precision that belied their grizzled beards, their dust-caked calves, and the five-foot stench cloud that surrounded their every move.

“Jiminy Cricket,” Albert drawled when he saw Monster. “What you got in there, girly-o? Looks like everything but the kitchen sink.”

“Just backpacking things,” I said, reddening with shame. Each of their packs was about half the size of mine.

“I’m just teasing you,” Albert said kindly. We chatted about the scorching trail behind us and the frozen one ahead. As we spoke, I felt just as I had when I’d met Greg: giddy to be with them, though being with them only underscored how insufficiently I’d prepared for my hike. I could feel their eyes on me, read them as they shifted from one thought to the next, as they registered my preposterous pack and my dubious grasp of the business at hand, while also acknowledging the moxie it had taken to make it this far on my own. Matt was a big lug of a guy, built like a linebacker, his reddish-brown hair curling softly over his ears and glinting golden on his gargantuan legs. He was only a couple of years younger than me, but so shy he struck me as a kid, letting his dad do most of the talking while he stood off to the side.

“Pardon my question,” asked Albert, “but how many times are you urinating a day in this heat?”

“Um … I haven’t been keeping track. Should I be?” I asked, feeling exposed yet again for the wilderness fraud that I was. I hoped they hadn’t been camped near enough to hear me shrieking about the ants the evening before.

“Ideally, it’s seven,” said Albert crisply. “That’s the old Boy Scout rule, though with this heat and the waterless conditions on the trail, combined with the extreme level of exertion, we’ve been lucky if it’s three.”

“Yeah. Me too,” I said, though in fact there’d been one twenty-four-hour period—in the midst of the most ferocious heat—that I hadn’t gone even once. “I saw a bear south of here,” I said to change the subject. “A brown bear, which was a black bear, of course. But it looked brown. In color, I mean, the black bear.”

“They’re just cinnamon-colored down in these parts,” said Albert. “Bleached by the California sun, I suppose.” He tapped the brim of his hat. “We’ll be seeing you up in Kennedy Meadows, miss. Pleasure to meet you.”

“There’s another guy up ahead named Greg,” I said. “I met him a couple of days ago and he said he’d still be there.” My insides leapt when I spoke Greg’s name, for no other reason than he was the only person I knew on the trail.

“We’ve been following him for a good stretch, so it’ll be nice to finally meet him,” said Albert. “There’s another couple a fellas behind us. Most likely they’ll be along any time,” he said, and turned to look down the trail in the direction that we’d come from. “Two kids named Doug and Tom, about the same age as y’all. They started not long before you did, a touch south.”

I waved Albert and Matt off and sat for a few minutes pondering the existence of Doug and Tom, and then I rose and spent the next several hours hiking harder than ever, with the single-minded goal that they would not catch up to me before I reached Kennedy Meadows. I was dying to meet them, of course—but I wanted to meet them as the woman who’d left them in her dust instead of the woman they’d overtaken. Like Greg, Albert and Matt had started hiking at the Mexican border and were by now well seasoned, logging twenty-some miles each day. But Doug and Tom were different. Like me, they’d started only recently on the PCT—not long before you did, Albert had said, and just a touch south. His words replayed themselves in my mind, as if replaying them would wring more meaning and specificity from them. As if by them I could discern how fast or slow I was traveling in comparison to Doug and Tom. As if the answer to that question held the key to my success or failure at this—the hardest thing I’d ever done.