Wild

The first time I saw her, at a rest stop on a Pacific Crest Trail, I was taken aback.

Her clothes were streaked with mud, her face shining from perspiration, carrying a monster pack on her shoulders. She emerged out of the craggy formation of rocks, some frozen over with ice and snow, and staggered to the ground. 

I wasn’t in the best shape myself—after nudging myself toward on a stretch of the Pacific Crest Trail, just to experience something challenging, I was exhausted, out of breath, and delirious with effort. Still, she looked to be in worse shape than me. 

I hobbled over to her. “Are you all right?” 

She lifted her head, her dirty blond hair falling over her eyes. “The fox,” she whispered. “It’s gone.” 

I wasn’t sure of what to say. “What fox?”

“I can’t explain it,” she said shakily. “All I know is that—“ she broke off, her voice hoarse. “A fox came, and I felt like my mother was there.”

She sat on the ground. She was tanned and strong, it seemed, from weeks and weeks of exertion. Yet she looked weak in the moment, staring at her hands as if she didn’t know what to do with herself. 

“I lost my mother,” she said, in a cracked voice barely above a whisper. “I lost my mother and I’ll never be able to get her back.”

Later that night, we set up camp together. We huddled around our tents and settled in the sleeping pad,  while she told me the story of how she came to lose her mother in only a couple of agonizing weeks. How she got wildly lost, with the men she was with and with the substances she started abusing. At the core of this all was the deep-seated ache that gnawed at her; the fact that she had lost her mother; it was something that was irreparable and permanent. 

Did I miss my mother? I guess I should have. As much as I wanted to call myself a free spirit, I missed feeling the caress of her soft fingers as she knelt alongside me and stroked my hair. I missed her trying to reach out to me, after all these years, trying to make up for my father’s taciturn silence. I missed her warm presence. 

And yet when she heard about what I’d done That Night—after the neighbors’ gossip got around to her—she had turned a cold shoulder to me. I caught her glares from across the room, the disapproving silences. My entire family, in essence, had shunned me. 

Was it worth going back for them? During this entire journey, there were times when the homesickness was so acute, so painful that I yearned to be back in the safety of my little home, surrounded by a serene, peaceful quiet. 

What I wanted most was for my family to take me back again. To accept me for who I was. To love me the way they did before what I did shattered their perceptions of me, the perfect daughter. 

I didn’t want to be like this woman, heartbroken and motherless.