The Girls of No Return (38 page)

 

 

I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN THAT A WATCH WOULD BE UNNECESSARY
. If the sun hadn't woken me, the cold sure as hell would have. My fingers were clumsy and slow as I set about making another fire. I could sense my feet moving beneath me, but they felt like ice skates, hard and sure and totally unrelated to my body. I knew that, as they warmed up, I'd feel them plenty. And I did.

I crouched next to the fire, fighting the impulse to stick my feet in it, boots and all. I watched as the light shifted across the campsite, gaining traction, getting brighter.
One night down
, I thought.
One more to go.

I untied the food sack from the tree where it had hung unmolested all night. Digging through it for the instant oatmeal, I found a glorious surprise. Margaret had snuck in some brown packets of instant coffee, with a Post-it note attached that said,
Some addictions are worth feeding.
I wondered what Bev would say to that. Probably wouldn't agree. The note sailed effortlessly into the fire.

The coffee tasted like dirt, and I lapped it up. The oatmeal had the consistency of paste, and tasted about the same. But I dutifully shoveled it in anyway, knowing that everything I ate was one less ounce, one less pound that I had to carry out of there in my pack.

I rinsed my bowl and mug. I hung the sack back up in the tree. I straightened my sleeping bag in the tent. By this time, the sun was canting in the sky, and the fire had died down. I no longer felt like I was walking on swizzle sticks. The day had officially begun.

Sit down. Stand up. Sit down again.

What do you do, when there's nothing to do and no one to hold you accountable for doing it? That's right: a whole lotta nothin'.

Margaret hadn't told us about this part. She hadn't said,
Oh, hey, make sure to bring some knitting or a 2,000-piece puzzle or that copy of
War and Peace
you keep meaning to read. Because YOU'LL HAVE TIME.
Nope, she hadn't mentioned it at all. And what had I brought? Two hats and an extra pair of socks. If it snowed, I thought, I'd at least have a well-dressed snowman, though by then I'd probably have died of boredom.

I glanced back up the spur that I'd come down the day before. The trail we'd all been following didn't end at my turnoff, I remembered. It kept going. Might as well go on a little hike, I thought. See where it leads.

I grabbed my water bottle and the crude map that Margaret had given each of us, and I took off.

The trail roughly followed the creek that ran past my campsite, gaining elevation slowly so that I was far above the water before I ever felt short of breath. I looked down at the tiny stream below, peering for some sign of my tent. All I saw were rocks, moss, a chipmunk scurrying for cover. From there, the path turned away from the water, and I followed it, winding in and out of dense forest.

Now that the day had wedged itself firmly between the cold of morning and the cold of night, I was comfortable, almost too warm in my fleece. I hiked along, letting thoughts come and go at random, remembering pieces of conversations from the past five months and then trying to forget them, paying attention to the world around me without focusing on it entirely.

And that's how I surprised the mountain lion.

The trail had leveled out again so that I was following long, flat switchbacks, gaining only a few feet with each turn. Margaret had said that the Forest Service created these kinds of paths from time to time in an effort to cut back on the erosion that tight, short turns on a trail could sometimes feed. From the crumbling “alternative” shortcuts that I could see connecting each switchback, just about as wide and deep as a boot heel could make them, the Forest Service hadn't done a very good job of convincing rushed hikers to stick to the path. But, honest hiker that I was, I stayed on the trail. And when I rounded one of the long bends, looking up from where I'd been vacantly staring at the tip of my shoe, the mountain lion was right in front of me, frozen with one paw slightly raised in a not-step.

It wasn't quite as big as I'd imagined, just the size of one of those large breeds of dog that I always picture giving toddlers rides at county fairs. Its tail was almost as long as its body, and hung lazily off a soft tan hide that winked as the sun and early afternoon clouds moved across it in patches. It had the innocent face of a household pet. An extremely large, very deadly household pet.

I should mention that, by this time, I was no longer moving.

Margaret had told us about mountain lions during one of our Outdoor Ed classes, of course, adding to the scant information I'd gotten from Ben. Here's what she'd said:

“Most people live their whole lives in the West without seeing one.”

“If you see one, you can be sure that it saw you first.”

“If a mountain lion is stalking you, however, it'll be on your neck before you ever see it.”

“Do not look away. Do not lean over. And Never, Ever,
Ever
Run.”

All of this ran through my head in the five seconds or so that I was looking at the mountain lion and it was looking at me. I wasn't sure Margaret had been right when she said that, if you do see one, it's because it
lets
you see it. The animal seemed just as surprised as I was.

And then it opened its mouth and kind of growled — the sound was a mix between a roar and a hiss. When I saw its teeth — all two billion of them — I realized that now would be a good time to do something.

I squared my shoulders, raised my arms above my head, and waved them around. I made myself look as big as I could. And I yelled — loudly.

“NICE TO MEET YOU!” I thundered aggressively. “OH, NO, NO,
NO
,” I answered myself, “THE PLEASURE'S ALL MINE!” It was the most ridiculous thing in the world to yell, but it was what came to mind, and my voice didn't sound polite at all. I sounded like a quarterback.

It worked. The lion started, turned, and ran soundlessly into the woods off the side of the path, just a flash of gold from its long tail, and then it was gone.

I stood for a long time on that trail, my feet unable to think for themselves. I was sweating. I didn't move.

I was waiting, of course, for it to come back.

It didn't.

After about ten minutes (which could have easily been an hour; the sun wasn't very helpful at this point), I turned cautiously and started back the way I had come. I spoke out loud to myself, to the mountain lion, to the bears and trees and dead leaves and anything else that might be listening.

“Well, I'll just be going. Yep, here I go. Down the trail. Just walking down the trail.” I inhaled and exhaled, kept talking loudly, and walked as quickly as I could without breaking into a run.

Needless to say, I paid more attention during my hike back. The whole forest was lit up like a Technicolor car lot at night. I saw a small grove of aspens that I had missed before, dried golden leaves hemming the stand of bare trees like fans at a rock concert. I heard the rustle of branches breaking as a squirrel jumped from one tree to another. I watched two juncos making lazy eights around each other before lighting soundlessly on the same branch. And all the while, I took deep, calming breaths, feeling the sharp air sting my nostrils and soothe my throat.

“How much can you control?” Amanda had asked us in Circle Share soon after I'd arrived at Alice Marshall. I hadn't given it much thought at the time, but now I did. “How much of what you might feel the world has done to you can you change? What can you direct?” She'd asked us to think about the way that we thought people saw us. And I remembered thinking,
They don't.
See me, that is. Then she asked us if there was anything that we might be doing to nurture — her word, of course — that perception. “Sometimes,” she'd said, “it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

If I had come around the corner at any other time, the chances are that the mountain lion would have been hidden in the trees along the trail. Mountain lions are elusive; they can make themselves invisible both day and night. Back in Bruno, I knew how to be that animal: Make as little noise as possible, even when eating your lunch. Never raise your hand in class. Wear sweatshirts like flour sacks, in colors that blend into the walls. Don't strike up conversations. Hide your face behind your hair, your smile behind a scowl. Whatever you do, don't make any friends. Oh yes, I knew how to be invisible too. But what about now? There had been no hiding today.

My dad and Terri and I had gone on vacation in northern Idaho once when I was twelve. We stayed in a tall hotel in Coeur d'Alene that looked out onto a small portion of the twenty-mile-long lake. There were entire towns scattered around the lake, little places with one or two stores, a lakeside bar and grill, and a place to fill up the gas tank of a boat; and there was a terrible boating accident while we were there. Three teenage girls were driving across the lake at full speed one stormy night, and didn't see the buoy with its flashing red light, warning them of the rocks ahead. They hit those rocks at full speed, flipping the boat and flying into the cold, black water. One broke her arm but managed to climb onto a rock, where she waited, shivering, for Search and Rescue. One swam a full mile to shore and eventually got help, though she was so disoriented that it took the sheriff an hour before he realized the other girls were still in the lake. The third girl held on to a cooler of beer for the entire night as she floated farther and farther away from the wreckage. When they finally found her the next morning, she had died of hypothermia, one hand hooked inside the handle of the cooler.

This is what I thought about as I hiked back toward my campsite. I thought about that girl in the lake, how cold she must have been as the knowledge of her death crept slowly up her legs. The cold, unyielding fact of it. And how unfair it must have seemed, how ridiculous, to be able to look across the lake —
right there
— and see the lighted cabins. To know that people were enjoying the
Late Show
with a glass of wine, safe and oblivious on their couches, or standing over the sink and brushing their teeth, thinking about the day to come. Any one of those people could have saved her, and none of them would, and this realization probably made her cry out in fear and anger. She had to watch from the chilling lake as the world went on without her.

Back in Bruno, I'd felt that way all the time. It was a loneliness that defied solace. Each day in high school had been a dark night in a freezing lake with no one there to pull me out. As far as I was concerned, all those other students were as inaccessible as lights on the shore.

But hiking back along the trail, I wasn't so sure. I had always believed that I had no people, that no one ever looked for me. And maybe that was true. But maybe, just maybe, I wouldn't have noticed if they
were
looking. Maybe I walked down the halls with my eyes closed, terrified of what it would be like to try, to stretch out my hand and see if someone took it. Maybe those lights had always been within reach. Maybe they still were.

Margaret had asked us to reflect on our journeys so far at Alice Marshall. Not to judge ourselves, but to acknowledge the ways — big or small — in which we'd grown. So I thought about that girl and I thought about my mountain lion, because he was quickly becoming
my
lion, in the way that anything that you experience alone becomes irretrievably
yours
. I replayed those five seconds on the trail in my mind. Would the old Lida have yelled at him? Nope. Would the old Lida have even been on a trail by herself, hiking along for the damned pleasure of it? Hell no. In the past five months, I had found myself buoyed countless times by the pines, the firs, the wind, the calming scent of mud and moss. And it was in those moments that I felt most like myself.

I breathed in the fresh air, letting my lungs expand and contract, and I thought, for the briefest moment, that I wished my mother could see me like this. For the first time, I just let myself think that, instead of adding a litany of self-recriminations crowd my head. I didn't judge her; I didn't think about the
why
s and
what if
s and
wasn't I enough
s. I just thought:
My mom should see me like this. She'd be proud.
And then I kept on down the trail.

By the time I got back to my campsite, it was midafternoon. My hike had taken longer than I thought. I spent what was left of the day sitting next to the creek, looking for tiny fish or frogs and calming down. After the initial fear had subsided, I felt almost giddy with the excitement of having seen the animal. I pictured the way I would tell the story to everyone back at school. I could imagine the look on Jules's face: She would be just
thrilled
to hear (once she was indoors, that is) that bears were the least of her worries. And how I would impress Margaret and Boone, when I told them about the way that I stood up to the mountain lion — literally! — and did exactly what I was supposed to do. And Gia. I tried to ignore the excited flutter in my stomach when I imagined telling her about it. I didn't
want
to want to tell her. But oh, I wanted her to look at me the way I knew she would when I told her.