Wild

“All right, then. Here’s what I want you to do: pack up that thing just like you’re about to hike out of here for this next stretch of trail and we’ll go from there.” He walked toward the river with the nub of a toothbrush in hand—the end of which he’d thought to break off to save weight, of course.

I went to work, integrating the new with the old, feeling as if I were taking a test that I was bound to fail. When I was done, Albert returned and methodically unpacked my pack. He placed each item in one of two piles—one to go back into my pack, another to go into the now-empty resupply box that I could either mail home or leave in the PCT hiker free box on the porch of the Kennedy Meadows General Store for others to plunder. Into the box went the foldable saw and miniature binoculars and the megawatt flash for the camera I had yet to use. As I looked on, Albert chucked aside the deodorant whose powers I’d overestimated and the disposable razor I’d brought with some vague notion about shaving my legs and under my arms and—much to my embarrassment—the fat roll of condoms I’d slipped into my first aid kit.

“Do you really need these?” Albert asked, holding the condoms. Albert the Georgia Daddy Eagle Scout, whose wedding band glinted in the sun, who cut off the handle of his own toothbrush, but no doubt carried a pocket-sized Bible in his pack. He looked at me stone-faced as a soldier, while the white plastic wrappers of a dozen ultrathin nonlubricated Trojan condoms made a clickety-clack sound as they unfurled like a party streamer from his hand.

“No,” I said, feeling as if I was going to die of shame. The idea of having sex seemed absurd to me now, though when I’d packed my supplies it had struck me as a reasonable prospect, back before I had a clue of what hiking the Pacific Crest Trail would do to my body. I’d not seen myself since I was at the motel in Ridgecrest, but after the men had gone off to nap, I’d taken the opportunity to gaze at my face in the mirror attached to the side of Ed’s truck. I looked tan and dirty, despite my recent dunk in the river. I’d become remotely leaner and my dark blonde hair a tad lighter, alternately flattened and sprung alive by a combination of dried sweat, river water, and dust.

I didn’t look like a woman who might need twelve condoms.

But Albert didn’t pause to ponder such things—whether I’d get laid or not, whether I was pretty. He pushed on, pillaging my pack, inquiring sternly each time before tossing another item I’d previously deemed necessary into the get-rid-of pile. I nodded almost every time he held an item up, agreeing it should go, though I held the line on both The Complete Stories and my beloved, intact copy of The Dream of a Common Language. I held the line on my journal, in which I recorded everything I did that summer. And when Albert wasn’t looking, I tore one condom off the end of the fat roll of condoms he’d tossed aside and slid it discreetly into the back pocket of my shorts.

“So what brought you out here?” Albert asked when his work was done. He sat on the bench of the picnic table, his broad hands folded in front of him.

“To hike the PCT?” I asked.

He nodded and watched as I pushed the various items we’d agreed I could keep back into my pack. “I’ll tell you why I’m doing it,” he said quickly, before I could answer. “It’s been a lifelong dream for me. When I heard about the trail I thought, ‘Now there’s something I’d like to do before I go to meet the Lord.’ ” He rapped his fist gently on the table. “So how about you, girly-o? I’ve got a theory that most folks have a reason. Something that drove ’em out here.”

“I don’t know,” I demurred. I wasn’t about to tell a fifty-something Christian Georgia Eagle Scout why I decided to walk alone in the woods for three solid months, no matter how kindly his eyes twinkled when he smiled. The things that compelled me to hike this trail would sound scandalous to him and dubious to me; to both of us, they’d only reveal just how shaky this whole endeavor was.

“Mainly,” I said, “I thought it would be something fun.”

“You call this fun?” he asked, and we both laughed.

I turned and leaned into Monster, threading my arms into the straps. “So let’s see if it made a difference,” I said, and buckled it on. When I lifted it from the table, I was amazed at how light it felt, even fully loaded with my new ice ax and a fresh supply of eleven days’ worth of food. I beamed at Albert. “Thank you.”

He chuckled in response, shaking his head.