Thirst. Heather Anderson
gym class.
“Full page from everyone before you leave. Tell me what your current athletic ability is. Your strengths and weaknesses. What you want to achieve athletically and how you’re going to get there.”
“What if I don’t want to achieve anything?” I whispered to Melissa.
“What was that, Anderson?”
“Nothing.”
Everyone started scribbling while our gym teacher continued pacing. I wrote my name at the top and chewed on the eraser. I glanced around. Most of the boys were done within five minutes. I could see the papers of many of the girls and they were almost done too. Most of them played some sort of sport, which gave them something to write about.
I’m not in very good athletic shape.
At least starting out the essay was easy: my many athletic weaknesses took up half the page. I wrote big and simply listed every sport I’d ever tried and failed at. When it came time to list my goals and how I would achieve them, I was stumped. I didn’t have any. I doodled in the corner of the paper as our gym teacher collected pages from two-thirds of the class.
“Go ahead and change when you’re done. You can have the rest of the period free.”
The few kids that remained upped the speed of their writing. I closed my eyes and wondered if he’d keep me late. I tried to imagine myself doing anything athletic. Instead, all I could think of were my failures. My father walking away from me, shaking his head and throwing his hands in the air. Leaving me standing there with the ice skates. With a baseball bat. With a golf club, a basketball, a broken kite . . . the list was long. But, I needed to write something. I let my imagination run wild. I was never going to actually achieve anything athletic, but I could write anything.
If I ever manage to overcome my athletic weaknesses, I want to set a record. Not just any record, but an athletic record. One that everyone will know me for. One that my dad will be proud of. I don’t know what it will be, but I will do it. I have a lot of weaknesses, but I have two critical strengths. I am stubborn and I am smart. I will find a way to be good at something athletic. I will lose weight. I’ll get faster and stronger. Maybe I’ll even go to the Olympics. Whatever it takes to achieve my goal.
I was the last student still in the gymnasium when I handed my paper to the gym teacher. I didn’t look at him and tried to hurry away.
“Wait.”
He was reading the paper right there in front of me. I felt my face growing hot as I stared at my feet. He was going to tear it up and make me rewrite it. I knew it. I couldn’t even pass a gym class essay. He knew I was making up something ridiculous just to finish the assignment.
He lowered the paper and handed it back to me.
“Good job.”
I ran for the locker room. That night, I taped the essay to the wall beside my bed.
CHAPTER 4
SAN FELIPE HILLS, CALIFORNIA
DAY 3 / 38 MILES
I was already awake when my alarm went off at 5 a.m. The throbbing in my legs had kept me up most of the night, the result of the sudden, intense demands I was placing on my muscles. I’d never experienced pain like this before, and hoped it would eventually go away. My arm searched around for my smartphone, the first one I’d ever owned. It was my camera, alarm clock, and navigation system all in one. If there was ever a multiuse piece of gear, this was it.
Between the heat and the grit, I could barely pry my eyes open. Prolonged dehydration was taking a toll, and I sucked on the hose coming out of my hydration bladder. At last my eyelids parted and I rolled to a seated position. It didn’t take long to place my few possessions inside my backpack. Aside from a gray, cuben fiber tent that weighed a mere pound, I carried, among other things, a beat-up sleeping bag that had crossed the country with me on two other thru-hikes, a water bladder, a SteriPEN for sterilizing water, a set of merino wool base layers to sleep in, and my hiking clothes—a white, homemade, long-sleeve blouse and a thrift-store skirt with pink and green candy stripes. A ziplock baggie with antibiotic ointment and medical tape served as my first-aid kit. Mostly what I carried was water and food. Five minutes later, I tentatively exited my tent, thoroughly checking for snakes before stepping out. I was stiff and sore from head to toe and for the first few hundred yards I lurched and jerked like a broken marionette. Eventually, my muscles warmed up and I regained my rhythm. It was then that I became aware of the glory of dawn in the desert around me.
I soaked up the pastel palette and the mellow sunshine. These moments were fleeting—occurring only in the in-between times—early in the morning and just before nightfall. I exulted in the calm, lonesome quiet. Sunlight forced the shadows into hiding as the desert transitioned from the aliveness of night to the desolation of day.
As the morning progressed, I passed a carefully constructed number, spelled out in small stones alongside the trail: “100.” The enormity of the last two days crashed in on me. I had covered one hundred miles in triple-digit temperatures in about fifty-two hours. A surge of empowerment swept over me. Those fifty-two hours had been the most grueling of my life, but I had survived. I wasn’t broken. In fact, I would soon be in Warner Springs, my first resupply point.
A few hours later, after I had covered many winding miles across open hillsides, a coyote dashed away from a stream of thick, mucus-like, green slime running next to the trail, and disappeared. I looked down at the water it had been drinking and shuddered. Despite the fact that I was completely out of water—and had been for miles—there was no way I was going to even consider drinking that. I was so tired of being thirsty. So far, my estimates as to how much water I would need had been dangerously wrong. I had the capacity to carry a gallon of water and maybe I needed to do just that. I collapsed my reflective shade umbrella as I passed into the natural shade of a tree-lined corridor. It only cooled me a fraction.
I reached a deserted road and strode purposefully along the heatsoftened tarmac. It was sweltering. A community center a short distance from the trail was supposed to have water available for PCT hikers. I walked up to the building and rattled the door. It was locked, even though the sign in the window said it was open. Knowing that the Warner Springs resort, another mile down the highway, had closed in 2012, I left the community center parking lot and focused all of my energy on reaching the post office in town—and on ignoring the sandpaper roughness of my dry throat.
Entering the small building, I felt immediate relief as the air conditioning washed over me. I slid my ID across the counter and asked for the box I’d mailed from home.
“Is there anywhere I can get water?” I asked the clerk when she returned, “The community center seems to be closed.”
“There’s a picnic table behind here and a hose on the side of the building you can use,” she said.
I took my resupply box outside and walked around the building. There was a picnic table . . . in the full sun. After opening my box and dumping the contents out, I pawed through the cookies, granola bars, and candy. The M&M’s had melted, but I ate some of them anyway. Most of the food I slid into a pile to leave behind. I was tired of carrying things I wasn’t eating.
The water from the hose tasted disgusting. I imagined the number of chemicals off-gassing into it while it lay in the sun. A man who’d passed me in the post office appeared from the other side of the building and handed me a bottle of Gatorade.
“I heard you were out of water.”
I thanked him profusely and drank it in two giant gulps. Then I went inside the post office and dumped two-thirds of my food into the hiker box—a free box where hikers can leave behind gear and supplies they don’t need for other hikers that do—and walked back down the road. I was only eating a few snacks a day and, although I hated wasting supplies, I hated the idea of carrying pounds of food I wouldn’t eat even more. My lack of interest in food was