Chapter 19
We started the southbound trail in mid-August in windblown, craggy Maine. I’d never been that far north before, and it had a crisp, head-clearing quality perfect for the beginning of our great trek.
On day one, we scrambled up a rocky mountain with full packs weighing heavily on our shoulders and black flies swarming our sweat-coated faces. With each trudge, I thought, I have made a terrible mistake, but I was too afraid to say it out loud. I didn’t want Micah to think I was soft.
By day three, I had decided to quit. We hadn’t even made it off the first mountain yet.
My feet were like raw meat from my new hiking boots, and my soul ached for a hot shower.
I had imagined Micah and I having these endless, roving conversations while we walked during the day and wild, passionate tent sex at night, but we’d barely spoken or touched since we started the trail.
Reality was starting to seep in, and I didn’t like it.
That evening, lightheaded from exhaustion and despair, I studied Micah across the small fire he had built, and for a moment, in a flicker of light, with his head tilted at just the right angle, I saw him once again as a stranger.
I was all alone in the wilderness with this man, and we barely knew each other.
A tight flush crept along the back of my neck, and I shivered in the cool night.
Our eyes met, and he started to shake with silent laughter. At first I thought this was some sort of psychotic episode coming on, finally revealing him as the killer I had missed, and I should run away now while I still could.
But the laughter was also infectious, and I started to laugh, too, the tension releasing from my shoulders against my better judgment.
“This sucks,” he said, when he caught his breath.
“Oh, thank god,” I rasped.
“I’m sorry, you just looked so miserable. I couldn’t help it.” He exhaled slowly into a low whistle. “I feel bad, because this was my idea. I’m supposed to make sure you have a good time.”
I kept laughing and shook my head. “No, no, it’s not on you. I’m the one who thought I could do this.”
He smiled more soberly. “You can. I know you can. We just have to get through this first part. From what I’ve read, it only gets easier.” He looked me in the eye. “Will you hang in there just a little longer? I think it’ll be worth it.”
Leaving the trail had been a seductive thought; its promise was the only thing that had kept me going that day. But the Micah I recognized had returned, and I knew I wanted to be with him. To be the kind of person who stayed, the kind of person he saw when he looked at me.
Fifteen weeks later, our trek led us back to Tennessee.
I was still taken by the wet green of the place; I could feel it in my lungs and on my skin.
Its fresh, earthy smell mixed with my own foul scent, which I’d grown accustomed to over the miles of sweating and nature.
At its most pungent, it reminded me of the rare flowers our next-door neighbors in California grew—a sweetness so nauseating it made my mouth water. Like roadkill, Carl used to say.
Micah and I had walked through ten states together, talking about everything that mattered and everything that didn’t matter, unburdening the thoughts and opinions we’d been holding in for years, and forming new ones.
I could articulate what was inside me in a way I hadn’t been able to before, and I never thought back on our conversations and regretted my words.
We’d crafted our own little world; being with him felt like a home that we carried on our backs wherever we went. A place where I felt like the best version of myself.
On that first day in Tennessee, Micah hiked ahead like he sometimes did, so I was left alone on the trail.
I took off my headphones and walked quietly through the forest, imagining my mother as a child wandering among these same trees, barefoot and dirty-kneed, listening to the music emanating from them.
I stretched my own ears toward them now, straining to hear it for myself.
There was the twinkling of birds, the screech of insects, the skitter of a breeze moving through branches. I stopped, silencing the crunch of my footsteps, and held my breath.
There was a low, unmistakable tone echoing from the trees, pulsing to the rhythm of my own heartbeat thumping in my head.
Is that what she’d heard? Had she made music out of such a thing?
The pulse followed me as I finished that day’s mileage, keeping me company with its beat.
When I came upon Micah waiting at our meeting place, the pulse abruptly stopped, and for a moment I felt lonely, almost bereft. Then Micah pulled me in for a sweaty hug, and I rejoined our little world, content once again.
Near the shelter where we’d sleep that night, an older woman in white braids and a long, flowing white dress stood by the open trunk of her car, offering trail magic to the hikers.
We were used to hiking provisions of Gushers, protein bars, and bags of chips, but her spread was uniquely lavish: bowls of glistening fruit, a pot of honeycomb, tiny glass bottles of moonshine.
I watched her sharp eyes linger on my birthmark poking out from my tank top, and I ignored it. Most strangers couldn’t help but stare.
Micah asked her for “safety supplies” with a knowing voice. She nodded and retrieved an ornate wooden box from the backseat of her car. With her body angled away from passersby, she opened the lid, revealing a pile of dried, curling mushrooms resting on plum velvet.
Micah raised an eyebrow at me as if to say, “Do we dare?” and I nodded furtively. We had discussed doing mushrooms before the trek was over, and while I’d been a bit skeptical, this seemed like the type of thing you shouldn’t pass up. When a forest witch gives you magic mushrooms, you take them.
We thanked her and moved on to the shelter, which was a one-room cabin filled with musty bunks.
Once settled, Micah cut the mushrooms up and laid them on bread slathered in peanut butter.
I chewed quickly through their ethereal, spongy texture and swallowed with a sense of gravitas; there was no turning back now.
It had been a short day, and the sun was still setting, so we lay on our backs in the grass outside. Fellow hikers arriving for the night waved to us but didn’t disturb; they could sense it—we were on our own trip now.
The coming up was gradual, mirroring the dying of the light. I ascended as the sun descended, meeting the night sky as if it was pressed right up to my cheek.
The stars shimmered with greater intelligence—they weren’t just flat pinpricks of light, were they? They were vast heavenly bodies, larger than I could fathom, or they had once been, and now I could only see their shimmer.
That was all I would ever get, wasn’t it? The last bit of shine of something long gone, a bit of shimmer in my periphery, reminding me of what could have been. I felt the old dread open up like a black hole inside me, sucking in all other thoughts with its thick gravity.
“Do you think that woman was a witch?” I asked Micah, attempting to pull myself out.
“Maybe,” he said in a dreamy voice.
“Do you think there are supernatural phenomena that really exist out there? Like stuff that can’t be explained?”
“Of course,” he said, moving his hand back and forth over the sky, creating ripples in the black that separated into the colors it’d absorbed—purple, green, blue, gold.
“Do you think it’s possible, to like, sense something bad is going to happen? To have real premonitions?”
He kept moving his hand and said, “Yeah, I think so.” He hesitated, then continued, “The night before my brother died, I dreamt about my family going to a gathering dressed all in black. And when I looked at my brother, I couldn’t see his face, like it was blurred.”
I could feel my heart beating slowly, and I wondered if my body was getting enough blood or if it was slowly shutting down.
Everything around me seemed to be moving in slow motion, like the world itself was slowing.
“That must have been freaky,” I said absently, drawing out the syllables. But Micah didn’t seem to notice.
“I just pretended it didn’t happen—I’ve actually never told anyone before.” His voice thickened, and I looked over and saw tears running down the sides of his face into the grass. I knew I should comfort him, but I couldn’t take on his sadness right then. It was all too much.
I said, “Sometimes I just feel this intense dread, like I know something terrible is about to happen, maybe not right now or even soon, but sometime in the future. Or all of a sudden I’ll just have this strong impulse to do something terrible, like I’ll imagine the most vile, unspeakable thing I could do in a situation, and the thoughts don’t feel like mine—it’s like they come from somewhere else, or another place inside me, and I can’t control them or get rid of them.
” I took a deep breath, suddenly aware of the act of breathing.
“Does that ever happen to you?” I wheezed.
“No,” he said with fear in his voice. “Does that really happen to you?”
“Um, yeah, I mean, not all the time—”
Micah suddenly sat up, his eyes darting around. “Something feels wrong,” he whispered.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t—”
“Please. Don’t talk about it anymore. It’s putting me in a bad place.
I can’t… I don’t want to go there. I want to think about good things.
This is supposed to be fun.” He sounded scared, but also a little angry, like he was scolding me for not knowing how to have a good trip.
“We need to go inside,” he declared. “It’s getting cold. ”
In the cabin, someone had made a fire in the hearth, and most were already asleep in their bunks. I lay down in my bottom bed, and Micah lay in the top. He said our trips had diverged, and it was best for us to ride them out alone.