Wild

“I can’t get the time off of work—I’m an attorney,” he said. He tossed the uneaten half of his cone into the garbage can and wiped his hands on a napkin. “What are you going to do now?”

“Go to Portland. I’m going to live there awhile.”

“I live there too. I’m on my way there now if you want a ride. I’d be happy to drop you off wherever you’d like.”

“Thanks,” I said. “But I want to stay here for a while. Just to take it all in.”

He pulled a business card from his wallet and handed it to me. “Give me a call once you settle in. I’d love to take you out to lunch and hear more about your trip.”

“Okay,” I said, looking at the card. It was white with blue embossed letters, a relic from another world.

“It was an honor to meet you at this momentous juncture,” he said.

“Nice to meet you too,” I said, shaking his hand.

After he drove away, I leaned my head back and closed my eyes against the sun as the tears I’d expected earlier at the bridge began to seep from my eyes. Thank you, I thought over and over again. Thank you. Not just for the long walk, but for everything I could feel finally gathered up inside of me; for everything the trail had taught me and everything I couldn’t yet know, though I felt it somehow already contained within me. How I’d never see the man in the BMW again, but how in four years I’d cross the Bridge of the Gods with another man and marry him in a spot almost visible from where I now sat. How in nine years that man and I would have a son named Carver, and a year and a half after that, a daughter named Bobbi. How in fifteen years I’d bring my family to this same white bench and the four of us would eat ice-cream cones while I told them the story of the time I’d been here once before, when I’d finished walking a long way on something called the Pacific Crest Trail. And how it would be only then that the meaning of my hike would unfold inside of me, the secret I’d always told myself finally revealed.

Which would bring me to this telling.

I didn’t know how I’d reach back through the years and look for and find some of the people I’d met on the trail and that I’d look for and not find others. Or how in one case I’d find something I didn’t expect: an obituary. Doug’s. I didn’t know I’d read that he’d died nine years after we’d said goodbye on the PCT—killed in a kite-sailing accident in New Zealand. Or how, after I’d cried remembering what a golden boy he’d been, I’d go to the farthest corner of my basement, to the place where Monster hung on a pair of rusty nails, and I’d see that the raven feather Doug had given me was broken and frayed now, but still there—wedged into my pack’s frame, where I placed it years ago.

It was all unknown to me then, as I sat on that white bench on the day I finished my hike. Everything except the fact that I didn’t have to know. That it was enough to trust that what I’d done was true. To understand its meaning without yet being able to say precisely what it was, like all those lines from The Dream of a Common Language that had run through my nights and days. To believe that I didn’t need to reach with my bare hands anymore. To know that seeing the fish beneath the surface of the water was enough. That it was everything. It was my life—like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me.

How wild it was, to let it be.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Miigwech is an Ojibwe word I often heard growing up in northern Minnesota, and I feel compelled to use it here. It means thank you, but more—its meaning imbued with humility as well as gratitude. That’s how I feel when I think about trying to thank all of the people who helped me make this book: humbled as well as grateful.

It is to my husband, Brian Lindstrom, that I owe my deepest miigwech, for he has loved me beyond measure, in both my writing and my life. Thank you, Brian.

I’m indebted to the Oregon Arts Commission, the Regional Arts and Culture Council, and Literary Arts for providing me with funding and support while I wrote this book and also throughout my career; to Greg Netzer and Larry Colton of the Wordstock Festival for always inviting me to the show; and to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference for giving me meaningful support along the way.

I wrote most of this book while sitting at my dining room table, but crucial chapters were written away from home. I’m grateful to Soapstone for the residencies they provided me, and especially to Ruth Gundle, the former director of Soapstone, who was particularly generous to me in the early stages of this book. A profound thank you to Sally and Con Fitzgerald, who hosted me so graciously while I wrote the final chapters of Wild in their beautiful, silent “wee house” in Oregon’s Warner Valley. Thanks also to the incomparable Jane O’Keefe, who made my time in the Warner Valley possible, and both loaned me her car and did my grocery shopping.