Live Catch

Something was wrong with Christine Blasey Ford’s voice. Maybe she sounded too young. She should’ve been in her early fifties; she’d been in high school in 1982. I did the math as she requested “some caffeine.” Maybe it was the inflection, the valley-girl lilt. Maybe it was the inappropriately complex words, multisyllabic monstrosities like “indelible on the hippocampus.”

I knew her voice wasn’t the only problem with her Senate testimony, but I didn’t know what to do with what she was saying. I wouldn’t have anyone to help me process it for several days. I was two thousand miles into a thru-hike of the Continental Divide Trail (CDT), which runs from Canada to Mexico through the Rockies. As I listened to the confirmation hearing recap on the New York Times’ “The Daily,” I was hiking out of Lake City, Colorado, into the San Juan mountains. For 120 miles—four or five days—the trail would be more than eleven thousand feet above sea level. The few roads it crossed were unlikely to have traffic and bailing down a side trail would involve hiking ten or fifteen miles off course, an almost unthinkably inconvenient detour.

The San Juans were the crux of the CDT. Northbound hikers often arrived before the snow melted and postholed up to their hips for days. Southbound hikers like me raced to make it before the winter weather. I understood I would soon discover if I’d lost the race. It was Sunday, September 30, 2018, and precipitation was in the forecast.

As Christine spoke, I watched the sky. Yesterday, the clouds had been gauzy streaks. Today, they were round and lumpy, tiny but numerous. The breeze occasionally whipped into a cold, wet wind. For days, I’d been waking up to chunks of ice in my water bottle and a scrim of frost on my sleeping bag.

I thought of the women I lived with before the trail. One had an enormous poncho she made from a teddy-bear-print blanket. In my imagination, her poncho-clad arms reached far enough to encircle all of us. I could feel the fine yarn fringe, the crumbs in the big red couch cushions, my friends’ squishy bellies. Pressed together, we’d share the vulnerability. We’d sit with the horror of Kavanaugh’s attack, its arbitrariness. We would sit together. It would be okay.

No poncho hugs awaited me on the CDT, no big red couch. I was hiking into the San Juans with a group: Groucho, Huck, Hot Legs, Didjeridoo, Teddy Bear, and Quadzilla. Years later, I learned that Groucho was nonbinary, but at the time I perceived all my companions as men—six men, and me. 

A full senate vote on the confirmation was expected as early as Tuesday. By Tuesday, the weather was predicted to arrive. I left my headphones in as the credits finished; the muffled landscape seemed peaceful. Yellow autumn grass, a wrinkle of trail winding to the horizon. I passed an abandoned mine. A stream flowed from the mouth. I was low on water, but I didn’t drink for fear it was contaminated.

～

You usually get your trail name at the beginning of your first hike. Hot Legs wore flame-print gaiters. Dij carried a didgeridoo. Quadzilla was named for his huge quads. Huck ate a lot of huckleberries. Groucho was a Marx Brothers fan. Teddy Bear said his name “just came along,” which I took to mean he’d named himself. Naming yourself wasn’t against the rules, but his unwillingness to say he’d done it made me feel uncomfortable and mean. I wondered, even then, if my discomfort was just an evil part of me that saw someone more insecure than me in their belonging and couldn’t help hating their insecurity. 

I named myself too, in a way. I pulled big days, twenty-five or thirty miles, at the start of my first thru-hike on the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT). Another hiker tried to call me Flyby when a fighter jet flew so close we could feel the sound in our molars. I liked the idea of associating myself with the power of the jet, but I didn’t know how I felt about defining myself by speed. It felt immodest. A few days later, a different hiker forgot I was from Vermont and called me Sweet Virginia. He was flirting and I was flattered, so I let it stick. 

I loved the PCT, but afterwards I felt I had unfinished business. It had something to do with the cloying femininity of Sweet Virginia. When I decided to do the CDT two years later, I decided to stop being modest. I would be independent and proud of my strength. I would be Flyby.

My independence lasted ten days. On the PCT, I’d seen at least four or five other thru-hikers daily, not to mention the day hikers and weekenders and scout troops. During my first week on the CDT, I saw nobody—not a single person—for three days in a row. One night, frantic with loneliness, I convinced myself a deer outside my tent was a grizzly bear; I lay awake for hours imagining a six-hundred-pound animal slashing through the flimsy fabric above my head. A few nights later, I made camp in an unlocked cabin. 

When I turned off my headlamp, a metallic scraping echoed across the plywood floor. An elk skull cast eerie shadows across shelves of expired canned goods. What could the sound be? Why wasn’t the cabin locked? I remembered a story about a motel with a floor that lowered guests into a serial killer’s den and I barely slept that night. In the morning, I found the sound’s source: a mouse in a live-catch trap. I thought of the thousands of miles ahead, and I thought about quitting. 

Two days later, I met Quadzilla. When we reached the San Juans, we’d been hiking together for a little over fifteen hundred miles. He was an excellent trail partner. He openly admitted he was grateful not to have to camp alone; I didn’t feel like I was burdening him. Once, he said he’d be down if I ever wanted to cuddle, but when I said no, he never hit on me again. 

I didn’t meet the rest of the group until shortly before Lake City, and our status as a group of seven was new and fragile. Hot Legs and Dij had been best friends for a decade; they’d done the PCT together. Groucho and Huck met during a previousyear on the PCT. Teddy Bear was solo; the CDT was his first big walk. We’d all been seeing each other in town for a few weeks, but when we got to Lake City, we all agreed that if we were going to attempt the San Juans with weather coming, we should do it as a group.

But we didn’t stay together. For two days, the weather had been mild. Groucho strayed ahead and Huck hurried to catch up. Teddy Bear lagged and nobody waited. I hiked fast with Hot Legs and Dij all day, and Quadzilla caught up at night. Hiking apart was normal for me and Quadzilla, but with other people in the mix, it felt awkward.

～

On Monday, rain came in spurts long enough apart that our socks dried in between. Late in the afternoon, Hot Legs, Dij, and I reached a valley low enough in elevation that orange aspen quivered anxiously among the beetle-kill. Quadzilla and Teddy Bear were behind, Groucho and Huck ahead. It was ten or so miles to the next water source, up and over an exposed ridge. Hot Legs smoked a Marlboro Red as we weighed our options. We didn’t want to lose daylight by staying in the valley. The weather hadn’t been bad all day. If we pushed, we reasoned, we might make it to Pagosa by Wednesday morning. Tobacco smoke mixed with wet bark. I left a note for Quadzilla. At the last minute, I added Teddy Bear’s name.

Following Hot Legs and Dij across the marshy valley, I wondered if it would be safe for Quadzilla to follow. But he was a confident night hiker; he’d done huge portions of the Appalachian Trail in the dark. I figured he’d be okay.

Shortly before sunset, we emerged from the trees into a thicket of thin-leafed, waist-high bushes, all orange and scratchy. I looked for Groucho and Huck, but no figures moved in the distance. Rain—or maybe, I hoped, just fog—descended from the clouds in streaky talons. The trail was hemmed in; we couldn’t camp. I wasn’t worried. My socks were still dry.

Then, the rain hit like a wall. My pants soaked through immediately. Wind cut into the wet fabric, snapping it around my legs, but I still thought I’d dry out before we camped.

Dij got cold first. This was strange; he was a ferociously warm person. He stopped to layer up. Hot Legs and I kept walking, assuming he’d be behind. Hot Legs says he remembers the rain turning to snow, but I don’t. I probably didn’t notice because I was finally comprehending that the weather had arrived. I was not going to dry out. I would wear my wet clothes to bed and then the temperature would drop below freezing—and bed was still a few miles away, up and over the ridge in the storm and the dark. 

“Are you okay?” Hot Legs asked.

“I’m just scared,” I said. I did the math: two miles to the ridge. Another mile past that to camp. An hour of walking if we were fast, maybe an hour and a half if the storm stayed this bad. 

We reached a trail junction and Dij hadn’t caught up. Wet wisps of hair stuck to our faces. We stamped our feet and strained our eyes. Where was Dij? We could only see twenty or thirty feet around. Had he fallen? Was he hurt? What would we do if he was? Camp here, in the wind and the ice? Try to move him? Hot Legs, I knew, was low on water. He hadn’t wanted to carry more than strictly necessary. If we camped here, he’d be out by morning. 

“Do you want to go back?” I asked.

He peered into the rain. The bushes and cairns were shadowy and smudged.

“You don’t have to come.”

“I’m not going to keep going alone.”

We turned around.

～

I knew better than to go into the San Juans; I knew better than to push miles that evening. I knew that mountain weather could change quickly. I knew a risky decision endangered not only me, but a rescue team. Even back then, if I’d been guiding a trip, I would never have gone into unfamiliar mountain terrain with a storm in the forecast. If I had been alone, I never would have gone.

But when I was young, I loved stories about girls who pretended to be boys so they could be squires and then knights, cabin boys and then pirates. I devoured books like The Woman Who Rides Like a Man by Tamora Pierce and Bloody Jack by L.A. Meyer. The books were meant to be empowering, and I suppose they were: they taught me I could do anything. On the other hand, they also taught me that the things most worth doing were the things men did, and if there’s one thing men on long trails did consistently, it was making wildly irresponsible choices—swimming swollen rivers with sleeping pads or bear canisters as flotation devices; crossing private property in the gun-toting rural West; traversing exposed ridges in thunderstorms. I knew a few guys who’d paid dearly for their decisions. One had skipped bear spray to save weight and had to jump off a cliff to escape a juvenile grizzly; another broke his hip when he slipped crossing a snowfield without an ice ax. But mostly, they seemed to get away with their risks. Quadzilla slept with his food all through grizzly country and didn’t get attacked; Hot Legs didn’t filter his water and didn’t get sick. Huck smoked so much weed one day he forgot his phone on a break and didn’t notice for eight miles; he jogged back, got his phone, and caught us the next day. 

I didn’t think they were smart, exactly. But I thought they could probably make it through the night alone in a cabin without convincing themselves they were about to get butchered by a serial killer. Something felt off about my perceptions of danger. So, in Lake City, when the guys were all acting like the San Juans were a reasonable risk, I didn’t talk about how unprepared I felt. I hardly even let myself think about it. I wanted their fearlessness. I traded my water filter, which would break if it froze, for chlorine tablets. I downloaded extra maps. I brought bread bags to cover my hands. I didn’t mention how nervous I was to not have rain pants, or that the zipper of my rain jacket was busted and repaired with dental floss. I didn’t talk about how I was wearing only sneakers. Why should I when we all were? 

～

Dij had left his pit zips open. It had taken him a long time to change into his fleece. Hot Legs reached him just ahead of me, and when they materialized, they were huddled over Dij’s phone. They looked warm and calm. I felt flimsy. I wanted to keep moving.

“So, Fuh-ly-by.” Hot Legs said my name like bad news was coming. “We could camp here, or we could go over the ridge to the lake. It’ll be lower.”

Why was he asking? I knew he wanted to keep going. There were good reasons not to stop. We were exposed. There was no drinking water. Hot Legs and Dij would have trouble pitching their tarps without trees. There were bad reasons, too, which felt like good reasons at the time. We weren’t considering backtracking or taking an alternate, so the closer we got to our next town stop in Pagosa Springs, the safer we’d be. We’d already hiked this far, so if we didn’t keep going, we might as well have stayed in the valley. And I was cold. I couldn’t stand still much longer; I didn’t care if onwards was ultimately more dangerous.

But it was two and a half miles, at least an hour more. I didn’t want to walk another hour. My legs stung and ached. My shirt was wicking water onto my belly. I didn’t let myself name the dangers, but I can now: someone could fall, someone could get cold, we could lose the trail. It would only take the tiniest bit of bad luck—an unnoticed rock in the path, a moment when fog obscured the cairns—to create a life-or-death situation. If I were alone, I would’ve camped. But I wouldn’t have come up there alone. I would’ve stayed in the valley. I wouldn’t even have come into the San Juans. 

  I know now that they were asking me because they respected my opinion. If I’d told them I wanted to camp, they would’ve joined me. And regardless, I could’ve set up my shelter and made ramen and gone to sleep alone. Instead, I said, “Let’s keep going.” 

“Are you sure?” Hot Legs asked.

“I’m just scared,” I said. I turned and led the way.

～

When I was in seventh grade, a University of Vermont student named Michelle Gardner-Quinn left a bar and never made it back to her dorm. Disappearances like this were uncommon in Vermont, and Michelle’s had the right features to go viral, or at least as viral as things could go back when most of the state was still on dial-up. She was white and middle- or upper-class enough to be going to college. Her face was everywhere. 

The search meandered east for a week until they found her body near a swimming hole in the town next to mine. She’d been raped, beaten, and strangled. They arrested a man who’d been caught on video walking with her up Main Street in Burlington the night she went missing. All the evidence indicated that she’d borrowed his cell phone and that she’d let him walk her home. 

That’s how it begins, and then you’re in drivers’ ed and your teacher is showing you how she slots her keys between her knuckles so she can poke would-be carjackers in the eyes. You make key-claws, too. You don’t bat an eye at the spike tampons or the nail polish that changes color if your drink has been drugged; you get used to the handheld mace, the call me when you get home and text me when you’re leaving. Always, in the back of your mind, you’re conducting a forensic investigation, preparing for your disappearance: the last cell tower you pinged, the last person you passed, your last trail register entry. Make sure someone you trust knows your location; lie to someone you don’t know that your husband is ahead, that you’re turning at the next junction. Statistically, you should be most cautious in your own home, around your intimate partners, but you’re not. What you fear most is being a woman in transit.

By the time I was on the CDT, I understood the real world wasn’t like my lady-knight books. There weren’t explicit rules saying women couldn’t do things. But in the four months I spent on that hike, I met only four other women doing the full trail, all with boyfriends or husbands. Something was keeping us from thru-hiking alone, and it had to do with the stories we whispered at slumber parties about uncles and stepbrothers and neighbour kids, with the self-defense keychains we got for Christmas, with the way I knew—because we all knew—that Chanel Miller’s cardigan was beige and Christine Blasey Ford drank one beer. You have a fundamentally different relationship to risk when you’ve been taught since childhood that you can be blamed for the worst possible thing that might happen to you.

～

Hypothermia dulls the mind. Racing up the ridge with Hot Legs and Dij, my thoughts collapsed around one idea: get to the lake. Cold water squelched under my soles. Get to the lake. Pain radiated in dull circles from my nose ring and earrings. Get to the lake. It was nearly too dark to see. Get to the lake. We were still climbing, switchbacking up something steep. Surely we’d reach the top soon. The wind kept changing directions, slamming me into the mountainside and then pushing me towards the abyss. Were we on the edge of a cliff? Get to the lake, I thought. I didn’t talk. 

When I had been silent a long time, Dij said, “I’m worried about her.”

I’m not sure how I heard. He and Hot Legs were far; they sometimes disappeared into the fog. I’m not sure what worried Dij either. He couldn’t have seen me shivering. It could be that I was small, or that my pants had wet through, or—though I hate imagining this about my friend—that I was a woman. Whatever it was, something within me settled. I was determined not to be restricted by fear, but if my body was shutting down enough for Dij to notice, that was a valid limit.

I slowed to let them catch up. We were descending. Hot Legs lit the way with a tiny handheld flashlight.

“Dij,” I said. “Can I sleep under your tarp?” It was big enough for three.

“Yeah,” he said, as though I’d asked something obvious, like, “Dij, is it raining?”

We found a gap in the bushes by a marsh with a drinkable pool. Hot Legs helped Dij pitch his tarp. I wanted to help—I was good at tarps—but the guylines didn’t make sense. I paced until Dij gave me his ground sheet and told me to lay it out and get in my sleeping bag.

I couldn’t stop shivering. Normally, I would have been decisive and quick. In minutes, I’d be out of my wet clothes and in my sleeping bag, making a hot meal. Instead, I thought about changing clothes, then looked at my stove and considered cooking dinner. All those steps though, and did I have enough water? I ate cheese off the block. Fat would keep me warm. I shivered. I remembered my clothes were soaked and replaced my shorts with long johns. Should I make dinner? I was shivering too hard to screw my stove onto the fuel canister.

Dij had been boiling water. He handed me a small, warm Nalgene bottle. 

“No, you,” I said, but I took it and put it against my belly.

“You guys,” someone yelled outside. “That was so scary.”

Quadzilla had followed. He was shouting. We were all shouting. His glasses had iced over. He’d almost walked off the cliff. I could only see his bare legs. All his hair was standing up. 

Soon, he was in his sleeping bag beside me. I loved being wedged between my two friends. I couldn’t stop shivering, but now it was hilarious. A wave of violent tremors descended on me, and Quadzilla, laughing, still inside his sleeping bag, rolled on top of me. He rubbed my arms until the shaking slowed, then rolled away. We were thrilled. We were safe. We were so stupid to go out there. We loved being stupid.

～

I was seventeen the first time I led a backpacking trip. I went to a high school with a wilderness program and, apparently, a disregard for litigation culture. I was set loose in Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, with eight other teenagers, a set of thirty-year-old-maps, a walkie-talkie that should have been able to reach an adult but turned out to be broken, and an eighteen-year-old co-leader, Ethan Fields. 

It went all right until the last day when we were supposed to follow a drainage cross-country from a dirt road to a huge canyon. Mid-morning, Ethan announced we were at the gully. I pretended to peer at the map to double-check, but I was bad at spatial reasoning and Ethan seemed so confident. If I had bothered to count the contour lines, I might have noticed the drainage was too small—and if I had bothered to orient the map, I might have noticed it wasn’t going the right way, but instead I just followed.

I might never have noticed we were lost. But a few hours later, Ethan figured out we’d been heading southwest instead of northwest. He climbed out of our drainage and triangulated our location while I cooked hashbrowns and tended to the blisters and sore knees, and he led us along a bearing to our destination. 

Eight years separated me from that trip when I hiked into the San Juans; I’d walked over five thousand miles and had worked for four years at my college outdoors program. I felt far away from the girl who didn’t believe she had anything to contribute in the presence of a confident, outdoorsy man. For one thing, if Hot Legs or Quadzilla had started leading us down the wrong drainage, I wouldn’t have hesitated to speak up. 

And yet, “I’m just scared,” I kept saying, all up and down that ridge, in the ice and the dark, as though my fear was entirely irrelevant. In a way, it was. I understood that living as a woman had made my perceptions of danger go a little haywire. I found it impossible to feel safe when traveling alone, and I was jealous of the men around me who seemed to feel differently. 

Camped by the swamp, laughing hysterically, grateful to be safe and warm and among friends, grateful for that little taste of nature’s immensity and indifference, it seemed I had been right to be jealous. It felt good to prove that I could hang with the guys. It felt like confirmation of something I’d long suspected: that women were missing out, that growing up in a violent world kept us too afraid to access a certain type of self-actualization, a certain contact with the sublime. There, I thought, at the edge of safety and comfort, the thru-hike did its most important work, making me braver, stronger, cooler. 

～

We dilly-dallied in camp on Tuesday, but eventually there was nothing left to do but hike. The rain had dwindled. Mist rose off the ponds and wove among the orange and maroon bushes; the landscape smelled clean. I felt optimistic, and proud I hadn’t quit. 

After a few miles, we crested another ridge, and a salvo of raindrops smacked our jackets. The mountain had been protecting us, but now nothing separated us from the weather. We were again in the belly of the storm.

I put bread bags over my gloves and hiked with my hands in fists. To keep the water out of the open bag ends, I held my arms aloft across my chest. Each time I reached for my water bottle or adjusted my jacket, droplets slithered down my wrists.

“We should stick together now,” somebody said.

We walked one mile, maybe two, maybe three. I’d given up on my wind pants and was wearing shorts. The rain became stinging slivers of ice. The stinging grew into burning, and then the burning became deep pain. Green veins branched on my purple thighs. 

Hot Legs and Dij fell behind. Quadzilla and I kept moving to keep warm. I held my mouth shut to keep the water out. I half-turned every few hundred feet, arms still crossed, legs still walking, to check on Quadzilla. The fog around us snapped open and shut. 

I turned to check on Quadzilla and he wasn’t there. I didn’t stop.

Should I wait? The question came slowly. The trail was just a smear in the grass. Cairns marked the way, but often they were too far apart to see in the mist. Ahead, I glimpsed a post marking a trail junction. I would stop there, I decided. 

At the post, I shivered and stomped. It was ten in the morning. I had two map sets on my phone. I looked as I waited. I told myself I was just researching options, not looking to bail. The trail that intersected the CDT led east off the ridge. It appeared to connect to a road that led to a highway, but the intersection was in a blurry space between the maps. It would be a risk to take an unknown trail. Was it more of a risk than staying on the ridge? I couldn’t tell. I wanted someone else to decide. 

Quadzilla caught up. He’d gotten a cramp in his hamstring and had been unable to walk. I told him about the trail off the ridge. 

“I don’t mind that idea,” he said. “This is getting a little too intense for me.” 

But he wanted to wait for Hot Legs and Dij. By the time they arrived, my lips felt stiff, and my cheeks were sore. My explanation was half-hearted and uncertain.

“I don’t know if I’m ready to bail yet,” Dij said.

Hot Legs asked to see the map. I showed him the blurry space where we might have to bushwhack.

“Let’s go up the trail, out of the wind, then decide,” he said.

I could’ve argued. I could’ve said, “But the junction is here.” Instead, I crossed my bread-bagged hands across my chest and led the way.

I’d been colder in my life. Growing up, I regularly waited for the school bus in below-zero weather. But this was different. I didn’t know if the temperature would drop or if the trail ahead was more exposed. I didn’t know if I’d be able to keep warm that night. The laughter under Dij’s tarp felt far away; the anticipation I felt in Lake City was gone. That dream of keeping up with the guys, of being the toughest and most confident, badass person in the mountains was gone. I was scared, and I was ashamed. Was I really the weakest one out here? 

You will probably not die, I told myself. I did the math: thirty-seven miles to Pagosa Springs. Eight more hours of daylight today, six to eight tomorrow, then town. I decided I would survive fifteen minutes at a time, but fifteen minutes felt unfathomably long. Ten seconds at a time, then. I counted to ten. You will probably not die. I cried tiny sobs. I didn’t want my shoulders to shake. I didn’t want the guys to see.

Even then, even as I was calculating the odds of my survival, I didn’t trust my fear. I kept leading the way, as though it was my choice. I wanted it to be my choice. But every step felt like a negation of myself. All at once I understood I’d consented to something I didn’t actually want. 

I spun. “Quadzilla, will you bail with me?”

He did, and he’s never seemed to resent it. The wind calmed as soon as we got off the ridge. For a while we were still engulfed in fog, but we could hear elk bugling below. We dropped out of the storm into a scorched valley. The trail hadn’t been maintained since the burn, but it was easy enough to follow. Sometimes the clouds parted and for a moment we were in sun—actual sun!

Quadzilla and I ran into Teddy Bear in Creede; he’d descended Monday night. On Wednesday, we all hitched to Pagosa Springs, where we found Groucho and Huck. They’d left the CDT Tuesday morning. We dried our gear, ate French fries, drank whiskey. In the company of so many others who’d made the same choice, I began to feel okay about bailing. 

Hot Legs and Dij arrived that evening. On Tuesday night, as Quadzilla and I blasted the heat at our motel room in Creede and I read the latest news on the Kavanaugh hearings, Hot Legs opened his pack and discovered his down quilt was soaked. If he’d been alone, he would’ve had to walk all night to stay alive. Instead, he borrowed Dij’s stove and heated water once every hour to keep warm and somehow shivered until morning.

Mostly I’m glad that I bailed. Mostly I’m grateful to be alive to write about it. But Hot Legs and Dij told us something else when they made it to Pagosa: on Wednesday, they awoke and the storm had broken. This, still, is hard to tolerate. They survived and they were out there, on the edges of things, in a landscape reborn, sparkling and harsh. I let them have all that to themselves.