This is the ninth in a series of stories and essays from the Pacific Crest Trail—a 2600-mile hike from Mexico to Canada. If you’d like to support Dressing Like a Kangaroo, share this post with someone who will eat your snacks.
“How was it?”
My eyes glazed over while I receded into a dense thicket of recent memory. Prone, trained on the ceiling of an old garden shed, unable to sleep while my toes rotted from the cold. Collapsed in tears of joy watching golden morning light play in a silver field of knee-high grasses. Bored enough to spend hours mimicking seagull cries. Squatted under a poncho, praying to the god of lightning, promising to never again attempt outrunning the weather.
“It was good,” I said.
I hated it as soon as it slipped from my mouth. It wasn’t a lie, but it was wrong. It left me uneasy, as if each time I said it I was rewriting another memory to just good. And yet, I kept doing it, and it got easier each time. How was it? It was good.
I stepped off of the train into the last heat wave of summer. Blue bird skies and a line around the corner at my favorite bakery, same man busking on the corner just a little bit older and a little bit thinner.
Six months earlier, to the day, I stood on the same train platform attempting patience. The headlights rolled through low clouds a mile away and the train whistle echoed through the valley.
From the other direction, a young woman arrived on bike, blonde hair racing in the mist, despite how I begged her to wear a helmet. She had wool socks on her hands as mittens because she couldn’t find her gloves, which made it hard to hit the brakes. I rarely saw her use the brakes anyways.
The sidewalk was soggy from six months of unrelenting drizzle, shimmering with stray neon from Sorry-We’re-Closed signs. Moss crept out of the cracks.
She carried with her a powerful elixir steaming in a Starbucks coffee cup. My french press was in a cardboard box in the attic of a house I wasn’t sure I was coming back to. She passed off the cup as I stepped onto the train. On the side of the paper cup was a poem by Pablo Neruda, probably K’s work and not the barista’s. It goes:
I love the handful of the earth you are. Because of its meadows, vast as a planet, I have no other star. You are my replica of the multiplying universe.
She thought this might be the last she saw of me, and I couldn’t tell her otherwise. The piece of earth that I was would crumble just a bit into the wild and feral. It’s hard to say what shape it might come back in, or if it might return at all.
K has been there, so she knows. She is a bit feral herself if you can’t tell by the socks on the hands, all gas, no brakes.
That train did laps of the Pacific Northwest from March until September, and when I returned. She never asked me, how was it?
Because she knew that was nonsense. She told me as much while we were laying on her couch, my head in her lap. I told her how some nights I thought it was funny how the stars were so unbothered with our whole existence, and how other nights I looked up and wished I believed that someone was looking back.
“And all they care about is how many bears you saw,” she said.
“Yeah.”
I had that exact same conversation north of a hundred times. How was it? good. Did you see any bears? As if my six-month absence could be summed up in bears. It’s the burning question on everyone’s mind.
I saw five bears if you must know. But let me tell you a thing about bears (lone black bears, at least; grizzlies and mamas being a different story). Bears are lumbering fools motivated by one thing: snacks. Portrayed aptly by cartoons. They will eat your snacks if you are foolish enough to serve them up. But bears are lovers, not fighters, lovers of snacks, not man-eating wrestlers.
The black bear is not the high watermark of adventure. It is a fiction of danger that city folk have cooked up. I stumbled within twenty feet of a bear, sitting on his ass, rummaging for grubs in the dirt. He lifted his head, looked me in the eyes, and let out a powerful sneeze before returning to the dirt.
If you asked me now, did you see any bears? I say that if you want to feel truly powerless, try protecting your food from a determined mouse. And if you asked me, how was it? I’d tell you, each day felt like a year.
When I returned, K gifted me another poem. That had been gifted to her upon her return a year earlier.
The Return by Geneen Marie Haugen:
Some day, if you are lucky, you’ll return from a thunderous journey trailing snake scales, wing fragments and the musk of Earth and moon. Eyes will examine you for signs of damage, or change and you, too, will wonder if your skin shows traces of fur, or leaves, if thrushes have built a nest of your hair, if Andromeda burns from your eyes. Do not be surprised by prickly questions from those who barely inhabit their own fleeting lives, who barely taste their own possibility, who barely dream. If your hands are empty, treasureless, if your toes have not grown claws, if your obedient voice has not become a wild cry, a howl, you will reassure them. We warned you, they might declare, there is nothing else, no point, no meaning, no mystery at all, just this frantic waiting to die. And yet, they tremble, mute, afraid you’ve returned without sweet elixir for unspeakable thirst, without a fluent dance or holy language to teach them, without a compass bearing to a forgotten border where no one crosses without weeping for the terrible beauty of galaxies and granite and bone. They tremble, hoping your lips hold a secret, that the song your body now sings will redeem them, yet they fear your secret is dangerous, shattering, and once it flies from your astonished mouth, they-like you-must disintegrate before unfolding tremulous wings.