Wild

I crawled out of it at 8:30 the next morning. Eight thirty was late for me, like noon in my former life. And this 8:30 felt like noon in my former life too. Like I’d been out drinking into the wee hours. I half stood, looking around groggily. I still didn’t have to pee. I packed up and pumped more filthy water and walked north beneath the scorching sun. It was even hotter than it had been the day before. Within an hour, I almost stepped on another rattlesnake, though it too warned me off politely with its rattle.

By late afternoon any thought of making it all the way to McArthur-Burney Falls Memorial State Park by day’s end had been shot down entirely by my late start, my throbbing and blistered feet, and the staggering heat. Instead, I took a short detour off the trail to Cassel, where my guidebook promised there would be a general store. It was nearly three by the time I reached it. I took off my pack and sat on a wooden chair on the store’s old-fashioned porch, nearly catatonic from the heat. The big thermometer in the shade read 102 degrees. I counted my money, feeling on the verge of tears, knowing that no matter how much I had, it wouldn’t be enough for a Snapple lemonade. My desire for one had grown so large that it wasn’t even a longing anymore. It was more like a limb growing from my gut. It would cost 99 cents or $1.05 or $1.15—I didn’t know how much exactly. I knew I had only 76 cents and that wouldn’t be enough. I went into the store anyway, just to look.

“You a PCT hiker?” the woman behind the counter asked.

“Yeah,” I said, smiling at her.

“Where you from?”

“Minnesota,” I called as I made my way along a bank of glass-fronted doors with cold drinks lined up in neat rows inside. I passed cans of icy beer and soda pop, bottles of mineral water and juice. I stopped at the door where the racks of Snapples were kept. I put my hand to the glass near the bottles of lemonade—there was both yellow and pink. They were like diamonds or pornography. I could look, but I couldn’t touch.

“If you’re done hiking for the day, you’re welcome to camp out in the field behind the store,” the woman said to me. “We let all the PCT hikers stay there.”

“Thanks, I think I’ll do that,” I said, still staring at the drinks. Perhaps I could just hold one, I thought. Just press it against my forehead for a moment. I opened the door and pulled out a bottle of pink lemonade. It was so cold it felt like it was burning my hand. “How much is this?” I couldn’t keep myself from asking.

“I saw you counting your pennies outside,” the woman laughed. “How much you got?”

I gave her everything I had while thanking her profusely and took the Snapple out onto the porch. Each sip sent a stab of heady pleasure through me. I held the bottle with both hands, wanting to absorb every bit of cool I could. Cars pulled up and people got out and went into the store, then came out and drove away. I watched them for an hour in a post-Snapple bliss that felt more like a drugged-up haze. After a while, a pickup slowed in front of the store just long enough for a man to climb out of the back and pull out his backpack behind him before waving the driver away. He turned to me and spotted my pack.

“Hey!” he said, a giant smile spreading across his pink beefy face. “It’s one hell of a hot day to hike on the PCT, don’t you think?”

His name was Rex. He was a big red-haired guy, gregarious and gay and thirty-eight years old. He struck me as the kind of person who gave a lot of bear hugs. He went into the store and bought three cans of beer and drank them as he sat beside me on the porch, where together we talked into the evening. He lived in Phoenix and held a corporate job he couldn’t properly make me understand, but he’d grown up in a little town in southern Oregon. He’d hiked from the Mexican border to Mojave in the spring—getting off the trail at the very place where I’d gotten on and at about the same time as well—to return to Phoenix for six weeks to tend to some business matters before starting back on the trail at Old Station, having elegantly bypassed all the snow.

“I think you need new boots,” he said when I showed him my feet, echoing Greg’s and Brent’s sentiments.

“But I can’t get new boots. I don’t have the money,” I told him, no longer too ashamed to admit it.

“Where’d you buy them?” asked Rex.

“REI.”

“Call them. They’ve got a satisfaction guarantee. They’ll replace them for free.”

“They will?”

“Call the 1-800 number,” he said.

I thought about it all through the evening as Rex and I camped together in the field behind the store, and all the next day as I raced faster than ever through twelve mercifully unchallenging miles to McArthur-Burney Falls Memorial State Park. When I arrived, I immediately collected my resupply box from the concessionaire’s store and went to the pay phone nearby to call the operator and then REI. Within five minutes, the woman I spoke to had agreed to mail me a new pair of boots, one size larger, via overnight mail, no charge.