Matis - Girl in the woods: a memoir

JUNE 18, UNKNOWN PLACE, THE NORTHERN HIGH SIERRA, MILE 1170

I emerged from trees to a field of dense snow sheened with ice. I walked out onto it, feeling exposed, stepping carefully across the uneven sun-cupped surface of last years snow, an ocean of shallow bowls, slippery and round. I tried to step only on the pockmarks glossy rims. The holes bottoms were soft snow, melting out. Step there, and you might fall through.

I was in the High Sierra. I had walked into this snowy spill of mountains from desert. Two months earlier, Id stood in the shadow of the rust-brown corrugated metal fence that rippled along the Mexican border as far as I could see. The desert dipped and swelled like the sea, and among the dusty waves I saw no one. Id begun at the soundless place where California touches Mexico with five Gatorade bottles full of water and eleven pounds of gear and lots of candy. My backpack was tiny, no bigger than a schoolgirls knapsack. Everything I carried was everything I had.

From Californias deserted border with Mexico, I had walked more than a marathon a day. Yesterday I had hiked twenty-five miles. Today Id hiked seventeen miles, already. The miles flowed beneath my quick feet, a river of pale gravel, a river of branches against sky, of stones on stones, of snakes, of butterflies and inchworms and dead leaves that smell as sweet as black rich mud. For days Id seen no one. But I wasnt scared of the solitude. Peopleless wilderness felt like the safest place.

The snowfield sloped downhill, and I began to run. My gait was wild now, careless, heels punching the glassy ice. My hard steps shot cracks through the ground like a hammer to windshields; my impact shattered the world again, again. I was enjoying the pop sound of cracking ground, the jolt of breaking through that extra inch.

Then I fell through, into the snow, up to my neck.

My heart stopped. I wriggled to free my arms. They wouldnt budge. The snows coarse grain abraded me, tearing painfully into my limbs. I had to make it out of this girl-deep hole. I struggled. I squirmed. I needed to fight. With all my power, I had to free myself.

And then in one slick thrust I popped my two arms free. They were throbbing, snow-scraped and red. I was wearing only thin black running spandex and a polypro short-sleeved shirt. I hadnt planned to be stuck fifteen minutes in the snow.

I tried to push myself the rest of the way free, but my legs were stuck. I couldnt shift my feet, even an inch. I couldnt feel my heels. I thrashed; it did no good. I pressed my hip left, into the snow; even as it burned me, I held my core against it until the hole melted wider, harder, into dripping ice. As the hole widened my body heated; my right foot cooled, freezing and then burning. I struggled to move a toe, feel the brush of one shifting against another. I knew how easily I could lose my foot. In an instant the mountains had morphed from my playground into my death trap. Even with all the survival skills Id mastered in my thousand miles of walking, past basking rattlesnakes Id stepped over like sticks, the glass-eyed bears, the shame and weight of my secret, after everything, this silly threatless snowy spot could be where Ijust nineteen years old, a dark dot of a body in boundless whitenesswould end.

I violently wanted to live.

Chinese proverb says that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. This journey had begun with the coercion of my body, with my own wild hope. Id walked into the desert alone in search of beauty and my innocence lostand strength. I had taken two and a half million steps in the direction of those things, to get to here. Now, up to my neck in a hole in a field of snow in remote mountains, all I felt was stuck.

This is the story of how my recklessness became my salvation.