Wild

Her name was Trina. She was a fifty-year-old high school English teacher from Colorado who’d begun her hike only a couple of days before. She’d left Belden Town, hiking north on the PCT, only to be met by enough snow on the trail that she’d returned. Her report filled me with gloom. Would I ever escape the snow? As we talked, another hiker walked up—a woman named Stacy who had also begun her hike the day before, coming up the same road I had to reach Three Lakes.

At last I’d met some women on the trail! I was dumbfounded with relief as we exchanged in a flurry the quick details of our lives. Trina was an avid weekend backpacker, Stacy an experienced trekker who’d hiked the PCT with a friend from Mexico to Belden Town the previous summer. Stacy and I talked about the places on the trail we’d both been, about Ed in Kennedy Meadows, whom she’d met the summer before, and about her life in a desert town in southern California, where she worked as a bookkeeper for her father’s company and took her summers off to hike. She was thirty and from a big Irish family, pale, pretty, and black-haired.

“Let’s camp together for the night and make a plan,” said Trina. “There’s a spot over in that meadow.” She pointed to a place visible from the store. We walked there and pitched our tents. I unpacked my box while Trina and Stacy talked on the grass. Waves of pleasure came over me as I picked up each item and held it instinctively to my nose. The pristine packets of Lipton noodles or dehydrated beans and rice that I ate for dinner, the still shiny Clif bars and immaculate ziplock bags of dried fruit and nuts. I was sick to death of these things, but seeing them new and unsullied restored something in me. There was the fresh T-shirt I didn’t need now that I had my Bob Marley shirt, two brand-new pair of wool socks, and a copy of Margaret Drabble’s A Summer Bird-Cage, which I wasn’t quite ready for yet—I’d burned my way through only about half the pages of The Novel, tossing them that morning in Paco’s fire. And, most important, a fresh supply of 2nd Skin.

I took off my boots and sat down, doctoring my chawed-up feet. When Trina’s dog began to bark, I looked up and saw a young man, blond, blue-eyed, and lanky. I knew in an instant that he was a PCT hiker by the drag of his gait. His name was Brent, and once he introduced himself I greeted him like an old friend, though I’d never met him. I’d heard stories about him back in Kennedy Meadows. He’d grown up in a small town in Montana, Greg, Albert, and Matt had told me. He’d once gone into a deli in a town near the trail in southern California, ordered a sandwich with two pounds of roast beef in it, and eaten it in six bites. He laughed when I reminded him about it, and then he took his pack off and squatted down to get a closer look at my feet.

“Your boots are too small,” he said, echoing what Greg had told me back in Sierra City. I stared at him vacantly. My boots couldn’t be too small. They were the only boots I had.

“I think it was just all that descending from Three Lakes,” I said.

“But that’s the point,” replied Brent. “With the right size boots, you’d be able to descend without hashing up your feet. That’s what boots are for, so you can descend.”

I thought of the good people of REI. I remembered the man who made me walk up and down a small wooden ramp in the store for just this reason: to make sure my toes didn’t bang up against the ends of my boots when I went down and that my heels didn’t rub against the backs when I went up. They hadn’t seemed to in the store. There was no question now that I’d been wrong or that my feet had grown or that there was any denying that as long as I had these boots on my feet, I was in a living hell.

But there was nothing to be done. I didn’t have the money to buy a new pair or any place to do it if I did. I put on my camp sandals and walked back to the store, where I paid a dollar to take a shower and dressed in my rain gear while my clothes washed and dried in the two-machine laundromat. I called Lisa while I waited and was elated when she answered the phone. We talked about her life and I told her what I could convey of mine. Together we went over my new itinerary. After we hung up, I signed the PCT hiker register and scanned it to see when Greg had passed through. His name wasn’t there. It seemed impossible that he was behind me.

“Have you heard anything about Greg?” I asked Brent when I returned wearing my clean clothes.

“He dropped out because of the snow.”

I looked at him, stunned. “Are you sure?”

“That’s what the Australians told me. Did you ever meet them?”

I shook my head.

“They’re a married couple on their honeymoon. They decided to ditch the PCT too. They took off to go hike the AT instead.”