SPEED

(Peak Wilderness, Day Nineteen)

With only two days left before this trip is over, I should be feeling better.

I am feeling different, but not better.

In some ways I am feeling worse, because when I go home, the rest of my life starts. Peak Wilderness has created a transition, a before and after. And so the next thing is after. This makes me anxious.

But I don’t have much time to dwell on my anxiety, or anything else, because on Day Nineteen we run our first “official” rapids.

We know they’re official, because Bonnie makes us put on the helmets.

From a distance the rapids look pretty, and not particularly worrisome. But once we’re in them, it becomes a crazy, rocket-speed, death-defying experience. We have only the smallest amount of control over our canoe, over our panic, and the wrong move, or the wrong rock jutting up in front of us, could be disastrous.

Ally is brave and strong and decisive. But Jin gets motion sickness and wigs out completely, curling into the bottom of the canoe, leaving Ally and me to do all the paddling and navigating.

“Remember this!” I shout to Ally as we go through it, her in the front, guiding us. “Remember when you get back, how you kicked ass at this!”

She raises her fist for a moment, between strokes, and pumps it.

Tavik and Harvey capsize, soaking everything that’s not in a dry bag, and nearly losing one of the packs. Our canoe is the only one close enough to help them, and we somehow manage to do it—rallying Jin, then rescuing the sinking pack with a paddle, helping them to right their canoe.

We get wrapped around a rock immediately after, but luckily Ally is able to get purchase with one of her feet, and manages to push us off.

It’s intense, fast, breathtaking, terrifying, full-on. And when it all goes right, and we make it through a tough patch and live to tell the tale, it’s . . . a little bit amazing.

Terror mixed with amazing is, of course, followed by yet another portage. Jin and I have the gear, and Ally has the canoe.

I trudge along, my rapids-induced high fading, and hum of going-home anxiety ramping up. I’m wishing for the out-of-body feeling to come back, but it seems it can’t be summoned at will.

Whatever. I just have to get through this day, and then the next, and the same for every day after that, once I’m home. I am settling into this train of thought when I realize everyone in front of me has slowed down, and then stopped.

We’ve only just set out, but the path has disappeared.

Ended.

And it has ended because the forest we were walking through is completely burned down from where we are, forward.

What’s left is a charred field, littered with blackened stumps and root systems, leafless trees toppled onto one another in a gruesome tangle of death, and ghostly trunks—the few that are still upright—standing bare, blackened, and pointing toward the sky like needles. The ground is charcoal-colored mud with nothing growing out of it. The smell is foul and sharp—ash mixed with rot.

It’s shocking, sickening, stark. It hurts to look at.

“Forest fire,” Bonnie offers into our silence.

“Uh, yeah,” Jin says, but she’s not even trying to be sarcastic.

“Probably happened in the spring, or we’d already see vegetation coming through,” Pat adds. “They just let them burn up here—nature taking its course.”

“So no one even reports it? Puts it on the map to warn travelers?” Seth asks.

“This area’s not traveled that often,” Pat explains. “We’ll report it when we get back.”

“How . . . do we get across?” asks Ally, eyes wide.

“Very carefully and with difficulty,” Pat says, but not in his fridge-magnet voice this time.

Together we study the map, trying to guess where the trail should be. Then Pat pulls a compass out of one of his many pockets, and he and Bonnie attempt to give us a general trajectory.

“Watch your step,” Pat says, and then picks up his and Bonnie’s canoe and takes the lead. I find this both alarming and reassuring, given his usual insistence on our figuring everything out on our own.

Ally’s nervous, so I offer to take the canoe.

I hoist it up over my head and walk out into ankle-deep charred mud and discover quickly that there is no sure step to be found. Ally and Jin stay close, packs on their backs, one in front, one behind, and reach up to help balance the canoe multiple times.

Dark clouds blow in, making the already bleak scene even bleaker. My every muscle is tensed, and soon sweat is dripping from my face and down my back from the effort of balancing the canoe with such unsteady footing.

We climb over multiple stumps, huge trees. Jin’s in the lead and therefore trips and ends up on her knees in the mud a few times, and on her face once too, but she does not complain. We’re silent except to warn one another of obstacles ahead. It takes ten minutes to progress ten feet.

I am thinking of nothing except what my body has to do in the immediate future and whether I can keep doing it, which seems doubtful.

I said I was looking for a sign. . . .

If this is the sign I was looking for, it contains a dismal message—something about the necessity of going through hell, obviously. It’s not even a sign with rays of hope—tiny shoots of new vegetation poking through, a single flower, or a pretty bird chirping in the middle of it. Nothing. Probably there’ll be a pit of fire at the end.

And it gets worse.

As we approach the approximate halfway point, we see a pair of antlers rising up out of a pile of ash, and a little further along, what looks to have been a family of raccoons trapped under a fallen tree and burned into blackened statues.

Ally gasps.

Jin stumbles away and vomits.

I squeeze my eyes shut.

Jin rejoins us, and we march on. There are tears streaming down my face now, along with the sweat. They’re from the physical pain. They’re from all the pain. Sometime since we started across, every last shred of my inner fortification has burned away and I feel everything; all the memories, all of my pushed-down, blocked-out joys and sorrows and regrets lick up and down my insides, matching the searing of my muscles, the agony of a forest burned to the ground, the awfulness of the mother and baby raccoons. I weep and walk and climb and stumble, and my arms and shoulders and abs and back and legs and feet scream.

To the left of us, I see Tavik actually throw his canoe over a fallen tree, walk under the tree, and catch the canoe on the other side.

I have a moment to appreciate how cool that is before I take a bad step and my leg buckles. I go down, landing on hands and knees as the canoe falls on top of me, the front bench cracking over my mid-back and knocking the wind out of me.

My breath is returning as Ally and Jin lift the canoe off me, but instead of getting up, I pound both my fists into the mud and howl with frustration.

“I can take the canoe,” Ally says.

“Or I can,” Jin says.

I pound on the ground one more time, swearing, then push myself up to my feet.

“We’re almost there,” I say, swiping at the sweat and tears and only managing to smear mud across my face. “I’ll carry it. I want to.”

“But—”

“Let her,” Jin says, cutting Ally off.

They don’t ask me whether I’m okay, because whether or not I am is irrelevant. We have to get across. And then we have to go back two more times for the rest of the gear.

The three of us emerge from the final crossing with our arms around each other’s waists to keep from face-planting, and then fall into a messy, muddy hug.

When everyone has had a short time to recover, we get everything together and head the short distance to the top of a nearby hill to find out where we are. Luckily, the river we’re aiming for is on the other side, bubbling along below us. Unluckily, the way down is essentially a cliff.

“Of course,” Jin mutters, and Ally and I laugh hysterically.

This time Pat does leave us to figure it out ourselves, and the final result is that we basically drop the canoes, and then the gear, onto the beach twenty feet below us, and cross our fingers.

The collective logic of a group of people this tired is obviously suspect, but it works, and everything plops down to the sand without breaking.

Jin says she is tempted to do the same thing with herself.

But instead, one at a time, and wearing our canoeing helmets and using rope as backup, we pick and scramble our way down the steep rock face, to the beach.

Dear Mom,

I get it now. Peak Wilderness is geared to breaking down your barriers—physical, psychological, mental. Bringing you face-to-face with the best and worst of yourself, teaching you things you didn’t know about yourself, facing your demons.

My demon is you.

My best and worst is about you: how I need you and fear for you, how I fear for myself if I lose you, how I have let myself be defined by you.

The demon . . . is also what you lost, and the thing that took you down, over and over. Every time it happened, you stopped living, Mom. Stopped wanting to. I wish I could make you feel what that did to me, see how it changed the way I take every single breath.

I tried to live so lightly, so carefully. I tried to be someone you would love enough to stop letting yourself spiral down. I lost my voice, too, trying to keep you alive. But living like that is death, Mom.

And I want to live.

I felt it when Peace shoved me underwater. I felt it in the mud pit, on the trail, in the face of the bear, and in the devastated forest today.

I want to live. I want to sing, and tell stories and be connected with something larger than myself. I want to give everything I have, even if it hurts, even if it leaves me beaten down and hollowed out. I want it.

But I cannot make you want the same things for me, or for yourself. I cannot help you let go of your pain, or tether you to me, or keep you here.

If I continue to choose you over me, I don’t live either, not truly.

So we both die, Mom.

How does that make sense?

I kept my promise to do this trip. I chose that. And now I choose to live.

Love,

Ingrid

Everyone jumps in the river, and I stay in until I am practically blue, somehow enjoying the ice-cold water on the heat of my sore muscles, and the many cuts and bruises I acquired today.

The nights are getting cold, the sun is setting earlier, and this is our second-to-last night. Hard to believe.

I put lots of layers on once I’m out, and sit cozily between Ally and Jin for dinner and circle.

Later, I watch Tavik saunter down to the narrow sandy area beside the river that’s too narrow to be called a beach . . . and find myself following him.

He turns, dark eyes glittering in the bright moonlight.

“You look . . . better,” he says.

“Ha! I’ve never been so beat-up and bedraggled in my life.”

“It’s your eyes. In your eyes you look better. Fast rivers and slow forests seem to agree with you.”

“I heard you whooping and cheering like a maniac on the rapids.”

He grins. “I like to go fast.”

“That’s obvious.”

“Maybe you look better from talking to me every night. . . .”

“Maybe. I’m almost all talked out, I think.”

“Too bad.”

“There is one more thing you might find interesting. A couple of months ago I took an ax to my garage.”

“What?” His shock is so extreme that I actually start laughing.

“Oh my God, it was worth telling you just to see your face!”

“Wait. What . . . an ax? Are you serious?”

“Dead serious,” I say, and my laughter stops as abruptly as it started. “The garage was really old, built more like a shed. Big enough for a car, but barely. Anyway, I was upset. It was still light out—a little after dinner. I was . . . on a break from school at the time . . . but my best friend had convinced me I should go to the spring dance. Be social. Have fun. So. I had a dress and everything—I’d even put it on— but when it came to it, I couldn’t make myself go. If I went, I was just going to stand there hating everybody and feeling like a freak. I was messed up.”

“Because of your mom.”

“That, and I heard Isaac was bringing some girl to the dance, and . . . somehow it all became too much. I just felt this . . . incredible force driving me to do something. Anything. So there I was in this fancy dress and fuzzy slippers, and I went and got the ax. It sounds crazy but it made perfect sense in my head. Chop down the garage. I just picked up the ax and started whaling on those old boards, and it felt incredible. Pretty soon I was covered in sweat and probably crying. I had a stepladder out there so I could hack at the roof, too. I wanted to take the whole thing down and I didn’t care how much trouble I was going to get into.”

“No one came to stop you?”

“Spring in the city,” I say with a shrug. “People mow their lawns in the evening, and there’s constant renovation—digging basements, building and fixing stuff over the weekends.”

“So you just chopped away, no one saying boo to you.”

“Yep. It was hard work, actually. Of course I’d never used an ax before, so I lost my balance mid-swing on the stepladder and chopped myself in the leg.”

“Jesus.”

“I know. In hindsight, it’s almost funny.”

“Not really,” Tavik says.

“No, you’re right. Not really. Anyway, I screamed, and my stepdad—my dad, that is—came running out of the house. It wasn’t as bad an injury as we thought at first, but of course we left the garage—it was half down at that point—and went to the emergency room and I got stitches.”

“Did your parents freak? About the garage?”

I swallow, shake my head. “Andreas bought a second ax the next morning and helped me finish the job. We did it together.”

“Your mom must have thought you were both nuts.”

“She’s half the reason we’re nuts.”

“Sure, but—”

“We didn’t give her any say in the matter,” I say with a sudden harshness.

“Wow.” Tavik backs up a step. “All right.”

“So. Now you know—I’m a delinquent too.”

“This was just a couple of months ago?”

I nod.

“How’s your leg?” he asks.

“Wanna see?” Without waiting for his response, I sit on the sand and pull up the leg of my pants. Tavik kneels, peering at the scar in the moonlight.

“Still looks kinda angry,” he says, and gently runs his fingertips over it.

My breath catches in my throat.

“Does it hurt?”

“Only when I’m upset. Which makes zero sense.”

“Huh.” He places his whole hand over the scar, and warmth seems to radiate from it, into my leg and up through the rest of me. “What about right now?”

“No, it feels . . . fine right now.”

He takes his hand from my leg, and without thinking about it, I catch it in mine and put it back.

“It feels good there,” I say, seeing a shift in his eyes and feeling a shift in myself as I move from the edge of one precipice to another.

“Careful,” he says.

“Of what?” I say, eyes locked on his.

“You love that boy . . .” he says, his hand nevertheless slipping around to the back of my calf.

“He’s not here. He might be with someone else. I might never see him again. Meanwhile, you . . .”

“I what . . . ?”

“You are something beautiful,” I say, on my knees now, face-to-face with him.

He exhales a laugh.

“What?”

“No one’s ever said that about me,” he says.

“I’m saying it.” I place my hands lightly on his shoulders, then drop them to his chest. His hands are at my waist, fingers on my skin.

“You want me to help you forget,” he says, tugging me close, so close that I am up against him, hip to hip, chest to chest.

“I want you to help me feel something good,” I say.

“Ah. I might be able to do that,” he says, one hand traveling smoothly up my back and expertly unhooking my bra, at the same time as his lips lock onto mine.

He smells like soap and fire, and he tastes like chocolate, like firesmoke, like the river. My hands can’t get enough of his bare skin, my body can’t pull him close enough, and mother-of-god, he knows what to do with his mouth and hands.

Tavik is not sweet and warm and careful like Isaac.

He likes to go fast, knows where he’s going and how to get there, and soon we are no-holds-barred, on each other, shirts up, zippers down, hands everywhere, hot gasps exploding into the night air.

We stop short of complete nudity and actual sex, but it goes way past “feeling something good” all the way to feeling something very deliciously bad, to feeling ridiculously, explosively, desperately good.

Eventually we tiptoe/stumble our way back into camp, and I sneak into his lean-to with him and fall into a deep and heavy sleep.