Wild

Jubilant, I walked away to take my pack on a trial run on the dirt road that made a loop around the campground. Mine was still the biggest pack of the bunch—hiking solo, I had to carry things that those who hiked in pairs could divvy up, and I didn’t have the ultralight confidence or skills that Greg did—but in comparison to how my pack had been before Albert helped me purge it, it was so light I felt I could leap into the air. Halfway around the loop I paused and leapt.

I made it only an inch off the ground, but at least it could be done.

“Cheryl?” a voice called out just then. I looked up and saw a handsome young man wearing a backpack walking toward me.

“Doug?” I asked, guessing right. In response he waved his arms and gave out a joyous hoot, and then he walked straight up to me and pulled me in for a hug.

“We read your entry in the register and we’ve been trying to catch up to you.”

“And here I am,” I stammered, taken aback by his enthusiasm and good looks. “We’re all camped over there.” I gestured behind me. “There’s a bunch of us. Where’s your friend?”

“He’ll be coming up soon,” Doug said, and hooted again, apropos of nothing. He reminded me of all the golden boys I’d known in my life—classically handsome and charmingly sure of his place at the very top of the heap, confident that the world was his and that he was safe in it, without ever having considered otherwise. As I stood next to him, I had the feeling that any moment he’d reach for my hand and together we’d parachute off a cliff, laughing as we wafted gently down.

“Tom!” Doug bellowed when he saw a figure appear down the road. Together we walked toward him. I could tell even from a distance that Tom was Doug’s physical and spiritual opposite—bony, pale, bespectacled. The smile that crept onto his face as we approached was cautious and mildly unconvinced.

“Hello,” he said to me when we got close enough, reaching to shake my hand.

In the few short minutes it took for us to reach Ed’s camp, we exchanged a flurry of information about who we were and where we were from. Tom was twenty-four; Doug, twenty-one. New England blue bloods, my mother would have called them, I knew almost before they told me a thing—which meant to her only that they were basically rich and from somewhere east of Ohio and north of D.C. Over the course of the coming days, I’d learn all about them. How their parents were surgeons and mayors and financial executives. How they’d both attended a tony boarding school whose fame was so great even I knew it by name. How they’d vacationed on Nantucket and on private islands off the coast of Maine and spent their spring breaks in Vail. But I didn’t know any of that yet, how in so many ways their lives were unfathomable to me and mine to them. I knew only that in some very particular ways they were my closest kin. They weren’t gearheads or backpacking experts or PCT know-it-alls. They hadn’t hiked all the way from Mexico, nor had they been planning the trip for a decade. And even better, the miles they’d traversed so far had left them nearly as shattered as they’d left me. They hadn’t, by virtue of their togetherness, gone days without seeing another human being. Their packs looked of a size reasonable enough that I doubted they were carrying a foldable saw. But I could tell the instant I locked eyes with Doug that, despite all his confidence and ease, he had been through something. And when Tom took my hand to shake it, I could read precisely the expression on his face. It said: I’VE GOT TO GET THESE FUCKING BOOTS OFF MY FEET.

Moments later, he did, sitting on the bench of Ed’s picnic table, after we arrived at our camp and the men gathered around to introduce themselves. I watched as Tom carefully peeled off his filthy socks, clumps of worn-out moleskin and his own flesh coming off with them. His feet looked like mine: white as fish and pocked with bloody, oozing wounds overlaid with flaps of skin that had been rubbed away and now dangled, still painfully attached to the patches of flesh that had yet to die a slow, PCT-induced death. I took off my pack and unzipped a pocket to remove my first aid kit.

“Have you ever tried these?” I asked Tom, holding out a sheet of 2nd Skin—thankfully, I had packed more into my resupply box. “These have saved me,” I explained. “I don’t know if I could go on without them, actually.”

Tom only looked up at me in despair and nodded without elaborating. I set a couple of sheets of 2nd Skin beside him on the bench.

“You’re welcome to these, if you’d like,” I said. Seeing them in their translucent blue wrappers brought to mind the condom in my back pocket. I wondered if Tom had packed any; if Doug had; if my bringing them had been such a dumb idea after all. Being in Tom and Doug’s presence made it seem slightly less so.