Wild

I nodded and let go of his coat.

7 THE ONLY GIRL IN THE WOODS

“Cheryl Strayed?” the woman at the Kennedy Meadows General Store asked without a smile. When I nodded exuberantly, she turned and disappeared into the back without another word.

I looked around, drunk with the sight of the packaged food and drinks, feeling a combination of anticipation over the things I’d consume in the coming hours and relief over the fact that my pack was no longer attached to my body, but resting now on the porch of the store.

I was here. I had made it to my first stop. It seemed like a miracle. I’d half expected to see Greg, Matt, and Albert at the store, but they were nowhere in sight. My guidebook explained that the campground was another three miles farther on and I assumed that’s where I’d find them, along with Doug and Tom eventually. Thanks to my exertions, they hadn’t managed to catch up with me. Kennedy Meadows was a pretty expanse of piney woods and sage and grass meadows at an elevation of 6,200 feet on the South Fork Kern River. It wasn’t a town but rather an outpost of civilization spread out over a few miles, consisting of a general store, a restaurant called Grumpie’s, and a primitive campground.

“Here you go,” the woman said, returning with my box and setting it on the counter. “It’s the only one that’s got a girl’s name on it. That’s how I knew.” She reached across the counter to me. “This came too.”

In her hand was a postcard. I took it and read it: I hope you made it this far, it said in a familiar scrawl. I want to be your clean boyfriend someday. I love you. Joe. On the other side was a photograph of the Sylvia Beach Hotel on the Oregon coast, where we’d stayed together once. I stared at the photograph for several moments, a series of feelings washing over me in waves: grateful for a word from someone I knew, nostalgic for Joe, disappointed that only one person had written to me, and heartbroken, unreasonable as it was, that the one person who had wasn’t Paul.

I bought two bottles of Snapple lemonade, a king-sized Butterfinger, and a bag of Doritos and went outside and sat on the front steps, devouring the things I’d purchased while reading the postcard over and over again. After a while, I noticed a box in the corner of the porch stuffed full with mostly packaged backpacker food. Above it there was a handwritten sign that said:

PCT hiker FREE box!!!

Leave what you don’t want!

Take what you do!

A ski pole was propped behind the box, precisely the thing I needed. It was a ski pole fit for a princess: white, with a bubble-gum-pink nylon wrist strap. I tested it out for a few steps. It was the perfect height. It would help me across not only the snow, but also the many stream fords and rockslides that no doubt lay ahead.

I walked with it an hour later as I made my way along the dirt road that went in a loop around the campground, looking for Greg, Matt, and Albert. It was a Sunday afternoon in June, but the place was mostly empty. I passed by a man preparing his fishing gear and a couple with a cooler of beer and a boom box and eventually came to a campsite where a shirtless gray-haired man with a big tan belly sat at a picnic table reading a book. He looked up as I approached.

“You must be the famous Cheryl of the enormous backpack,” he called to me.

I laughed in agreement.

“I’m Ed.” He walked toward me to shake my hand. “Your friends are here. They all just caught a ride up to the store—you must have missed them as you were coming—but they asked me to watch for you. You can set up your tent right over there if you’d like. They’re all camped here—Greg and Albert and his son.” He gestured to the tents around him. “We were taking bets who’d arrive first. You or the two boys from back east coming up behind you.”

“Who won?” I asked.

Ed thought for a moment. “No one,” he said, and boomed with laughter. “None of us bet on you.”

I rested Monster on the picnic table, took it off, and left it there, so when I had to put it on again I wouldn’t have to perform my pathetic dead lift from the ground.

“Welcome to my humble abode,” Ed said, gesturing to a little pop-up trailer that had a tarp roof extending out its side with a makeshift camp kitchen beneath it. “You hungry?”