Blistered Kind Of Love (41 page)

Really, I couldn't believe that Angela and I'd argued so bitterly over a slug kiss. A strong dose of unruly Washington weather had cooled us off. Petty arguments were forgotten now that Angela's fingers were turning to ghosts, hypothermia haunted us, and cougars waited around every corner.

The challenge of the Northern Cascades lay in front of us, and I wasn't sure what would stop first, the rain or our hike. We had a little over three hundred miles to go before the Canadian border. I didn't realize it yet, but those miles would be filled not only with rain, snow, and pain, but also with an unexpected reunion.

I COULDN'T MOVE. WORSE, I COULDN'T BREATHE
.
Gasp. Heave. Gasp
. No good. My throat was closing up. “This must be what it feels like to be buried alive,” I thought. I tried to scream but nothing came out. I hyperventilated. I gagged. The feeling of being trapped was overwhelming. I was zipped tight in my mummy bag, swaddled in rain gear, two layers of fleece, long underwear, and two pairs of socks. “If I don't get out,” I thought, “I'm going to die.”

When I'd climbed into my sleeping bag (a new mummy-style bag we'd bought in Oregon in anticipation of Washington's cold weather), I'd been shivering, unable to get warm even after putting on every article of clothing in my pack. Now I was boiling. Rain pelted our tent, which was zipped up, too—like a coffin. The nylon hung heavy and close to my head. I had to get out.
Now
.

Thrashing and unzipping, I wiggled out of my sleeping bag, tore off layers of clothes, and stepped on Duffy's hand as I crashed out of the tent into the rain and mud. My bare toes sunk into the earth as I bent over to vomit, dry heave, and vomit again. In my desperation to escape I'd taken off nearly everything I was wearing. I stood shaking in the darkness. A man camped across Sheep Lake yelled to see if I was okay. I crouched to expel diarrhea and vomit simultaneously and meekly replied, “Sorry to wake you.”

Duffy was dumbstruck. “Chiggy? Chiggy? What's wrong? Are you okay? Come back in the tent, you're going to freeze.”

Still hyperventilating, I paced outside the tent door. I didn't want to go back inside, but my bare limbs were covered in goose bumps and rain. It
couldn't have been more than thirty-five degrees out. Tears ran down my cheeks. What was wrong with me? Finally, dizzy and thirsty, I crawled into the tent and my sleeping bag, but no matter how cold I was, I couldn't put my clothes back on and I couldn't close my bag. I was too scared of that
feeling
.

Tremors plagued me the rest of the night. Lying beside me, Duffy wondered whether we should hike two miles south, back to Chinook Pass, and hitch a ride to the nearest hospital. The farther north we went, the more remote we'd be, and if I were seriously ill, getting help would be difficult.

The next morning, I was tired and dehydrated but capable of moving on. I knew that if we went to the emergency room, we might not come back—with 325 miles to cover in thirteen days, the sand (and dirt) in our hourglass was running low.

It drizzled on and off the entire day, and we covered the twenty miles to the Mike Urich Shelter as fast as we could. As we climbed onto the shelter's large raised porch and dumped our packs inside, the heavens started dumping water. Subsequent thunderclaps were as loud and piercing as rifle shots. Soon, Weather Carrot came running out of the forest, followed within minutes by Chad. As the four of us ducked into the mildew-scented cabin, we rejoiced at our good fortune. The grumpy weather gods could piss the night away; we'd be safe and dry, for the next ten hours at least.

Warming my hands around a mug of our favorite hot drink (hot chocolate mix, an envelope of Sanka, and dehydrated milk), I watched my cabin-mates, including Duffy, drift off to sleep. The Urich Shelter was relatively large, with a high ceiling; still, I was a little frightened of curling up in my mummy bag. I was sure it was going to come back—the sense of smothering—I just wasn't sure when. Eventually, with my body half out of my bag, I fell asleep. When I awoke in the morning the sun was out, and I'd had a peaceful night.

The following evening, however, I wasn't quite so lucky. Leaving the Mike Urich Shelter, we began the two-day hike to our next re-supply at Snoqualmie Pass. That night, in our tent, it happened again. Sweating, panting, shaking, panicking! I woke with a start. “I've got to get out of here,” I screamed. There wasn't enough air. There wasn't enough room.
“Let me out!”
Out in the cold
rain, throwing up freeze-dried chicken with rice and then dry heaving when there was nothing left—this was becoming a late-night ritual. Over the course of the forty-odd muddy Washington miles since my last conniption, Duffy and I had tried to figure out what mysterious illness had stricken me. During the day, while we hiked, I felt fine—a little sleep deprived, but otherwise as healthy as anyone who'd just walked 2,350 miles could expect to be. But at night—well, we weren't sure what to expect.

“I don't mean to sound unsympathetic,” Duffy said as we stepped off the trail to allow a mule team to pass, “but I think it's all in your head.”

“No way,” I said. “Whatever's going on, it's real.”

“I'm not saying it's not real. I just think it's more complicated than the stomach flu. I think you're probably having panic attacks.”

A panic attack is roughly defined as the abrupt onset of intense fear which peaks in approximately ten minutes and includes at least four of sixteen possible symptoms, the worst of which are sweating, trembling, choking, nausea, fear of going crazy, fear of dying, the urge to flee, and intense dread that something terrible is going to happen.

Although we don't hear about panic attacks very often (besides on HBO's
The Sopranos
, in which they plague mob boss Tony Soprano), the “spells” are fairly common. In fact, one out of every fourteen people will experience a panic attack in his or her lifetime. In Tony's case, the attacks are precipitated by an inciting event, such as eating antipasto that reminds him of a gruesome finger-chopping incident. In many other cases, the attacks seem to just come out of nowhere.

Although a panic attack in itself is not dangerous, it is terrifying, and people who've had attacks often live in fear of them. Such dread can lead to phobias, depression, substance abuse, medical complications, and even suicide.

No one really knows what causes panic attacks. Some research suggests they occur when a “suffocation alarm mechanism” in the brain erroneously fires, falsely reporting that death is imminent. Why this happens is unclear, but according to the American Psychological Association, there does seem to be a connection with major, potentially stressful life transitions such as graduating from college, getting married, or having a child. Looking back, I wonder
whether our imminent return to the “real world” after a summer of adventure triggered my attacks, or perhaps it was fear that, given the weather conditions, we might not reach Canada at all. Certainly Travis' warnings about mountain lions (also known as cougars or pumas) didn't help to put my mind at ease about anything.

Snippets of a dream I'd had just before my first panic attack were coming back to me. In it, I am hiking alone in dark woods, the type of woods where evil might lurk. I feel small and vulnerable, like a lost child. Suddenly, I can see myself from a great distance; I can also see a cougar, eight feet long from nose to black-tipped tail, creeping behind me, occasionally stopping in a crouched position, all the while intently staring at the back of my neck. His tail is twitching and his ears are erect. I realize that he's been stalking me, stalking me for miles. His legs start pumping gently up and down as he gets ready to leap. I scream to warn myself—and then wake up, screaming.

Over the past few years, mountain lion attacks in North America have increased dramatically. Between 1991 and 1999, there were thirty-six recorded mountain lion attacks in North America. Seven of these were fatal. Two major theories are used to explain why such incidents are on the rise. First, as suburbs continue to sprawl, mountain lion habitat is disappearing. This means that more and more humans and lions find themselves in the same place at the same time. Second, conservation laws that prohibit the killing of any mountain lion except in self-defense are blamed for allowing the population to grow and to become increasingly aggressive.

According to the Mountain Lion Foundation of Texas, mountain lions are more likely to prey on people who are less than four feet tall. Children between the ages of five and eight have been the targets of greater than sixty percent of mountain lion attacks on humans. Additionally, the majority of lion–human confrontations occur when a person is alone. Given that Duffy and I often hiked a hundred or more yards apart, this fact did little to alleviate my fears. Neither did the knowledge that while I was over four feet tall, I
was still rather petite (weighing in, at the time, at a meek 105 pounds).

One of the things that scared me the most about mountain lions was that they have a nasty habit of silently tracking people, sometimes following hikers for days. During this time, if the opportunity arises for the kill, a mountain lion will do so from behind, with a bite to the neck that severs the spinal cord.

While statistics may show that an American is ten times more likely to be killed by a domestic dog than a cougar, more and more PCT thru-hikers are seeing mountain lions. In fact, in an informal survey of articles written about the trail, I found that the majority of hikers interviewed mentioned at least one mountain lion encounter, often occurring at twilight, one of the cougar's favorite hunting times.

I didn't think that my fear of lions was causing my panic attacks, but I did think it contributed to stretching my nerves tight—so tight that, sometimes, at night, they snapped.

The forty miles between the Mike Urich Shelter and Snoqualmie Pass are said to be the ugliest on the entire PCT, a checkerboard of clear-cuts, punctuated by muddy roads deeply rutted and churned by logging trucks whose wheels have jagged, earth-shredding teeth. We tried walking on these roads for a while, thinking they'd get us through the tortured landscape a little faster, but due to the shoe-sucking mud and crevasselike tire tracks, our progress was slow and we returned to the overgrown trail instead. Weather Carrot's constant banter occupied us for a while, and as long as the wind was blowing the right way, his company was a pleasant diversion. Still, we tired of fighting our way through dense huckleberry bushes that dumped water down our legs and into our shoes. My toes started each day white and achy then turned blue and became so cold that I couldn't feel them at all. We needed to get to Snoqualmie Pass, the lowest and busiest pass in Washington's Cascades, quickly. There we would find a motel.