I reread and reread and reread the ending, always in denial. Each time I read it, I wanted things to work out, for their weird intense hermit love to last forever. She married a hermit who lived in the town but didn’t go to the school or work, though he called himself an inventor. It was about a girl who went to Cornell in Ithaca, New York, to the same school Dash had gone to. I said, “Most of them.”“What’s the best one?” He asked if any of the stories were good. I told him I was walking because I just wanted to have an adventure. I was reading THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2008. His eyes were lit with intent curiosity as he waited for my words, as if he wanted to find in me someone worth loving.I didn’t want to tell him anything that would ever kill it.And so instead of answering, instead of telling him about my rape, I evaded his questions about my history and told him with enthusiasm that, more than anything, I loved to write. For the past four months, the pair had been within a few days’ walk of each other, trekking northward in near-perfect sync.This excerpt begins in the midst of Matis’s first night in a hotel room with this fellow drifter - the man who would become her husband: He was also walking from Mexico toward Canada, also tracing the Pacific Crest Trail: the identical route. Aspen Matis’s memoir, GIRL IN THE WOODS, chronicles a five-month trek that was ambitious, dangerous, and transformative.Four months into her solo-hike, at a small-town library in a river valley in the Oregon pinewoods, Matis met a man named Dash.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |