I took the long way around. I crept up a dirt path, as far from him as I could get as I made my way back to my tent from the campground bathroom. I kept his profile in the corner of my eye but tried not to look directly at him, scared he would notice me purposely avoiding him, my head ducked low and walking fast. 

Not an hour earlier I had been excited to make it to the campsite, after 14 miles of trudging through desert dust with the sun scorching on my back, sweat dripping in my eyes. 14 miles of wondering what the fuck I had gotten myself into, but enjoying it in a weird masochistic way. Suffering with a smile on my face. This was suffering I could choose. Suffering I could control. It was day 2 of my thru-hike of the Pacific Crest Trail, day 2 out of what is typically a 150 day endeavor, hiking from the Mexican to Canadian border through deserts, mountains, fields, and forests. 

Walking into Lake Morena campground on day 2 was like entering a whole new world. I had popped right into the scene of a movie—maybe Yogi Bear—with RVs and campers crowded into every nook and cranny of the massive parking lot, children screaming and running and playing and tossing around footballs, laughter filling the air. Dad’s grilling hamburgers and hot dogs on campsite grills, the smoky scent of meat wafting in the air. Coolers filled with sodas and sliced cheeses and fresh fruit. After even just 24 hours out of civilization, the scene was overwhelming, the sights and scents and sounds almost a sensory and social overload. 

There was supposed to be a designated spot somewhere for the PCT hikers. A corner of the campground for us to all commune away from the normal people, the lunch table in the corner of the cafeteria for the weird kids to sit. I walked in circles around the maze-like lot looking for my fellow people. Each extra step taken felt like a crime if it wasn’t counting towards my total miles for the trail. Eventually I saw a man in bright orange shorts and a cowboy hat putting money into a donation box bolted to a wooden notice board. His ultralight backpack and sinewy calves screamed thru-hiker. “HEY!” I shouted. “IS THIS THE PCT CAMPSITE?” “YEAH!” he shouted back with a smile. Finally. My people.

***

I’d been planning my hike for almost a year, dreaming about it for even longer. The number one question I got when I told people about my hair-brained idea to walk from one border of the United States to another was undoubtedly, “are you going alone?” This was usually said with eyes spread open cartoonishly wide, brows furrowed in, and a slight frown sliding down the mouth. This look of disapproval discomfited me and my roaring need to please, so I did my best to ease their fears and return them back to a reality where women didn’t do things without the guidance and protection of a man. I adopted a response that I repeated so frequently I could perform it in my sleep. “I’m starting out alone…but you usually meet people along the way and make friends and camp together and all that, so I won’t actually be alone!” I’d say this rushed and frantically, my words tripping over themselves as they raced to get out of my mouth, trying to yank back the discomfort I’d accidentally placed whoever I was talking to in. It was like I’d gifted them a beautiful oriental rug but they thought it was ugly, so I had to rip it out from under them and roll it back up before they had to lay their sights on it for one more second. Other times I’d just squeak out a sheepish, “yeah,” not wanting to explain myself. One time I lied to a complete stranger, reassuring him, “No, no! I’m going with a group of people!” 

Implicit in this question—“are you going alone?”—was always the addendum, “as a girl!?” Sometimes it wasn’t even implicit. Sometimes people would stand with their jaws on the floor saying “you’re a young girl going all the way out in the woods by yourself!?” This bothered me. The cool thing was that I was walking 2,650 fucking miles. The thing that was supposed to impress you was that I would be out in the elements for 150 days. Not that I was a fucking girl. I’d been a girl for every other goddamn day in my life. 

And none of this was unique to me—countless other women on the trail complained that “you’re going alone?” was the number one question they received as well. Never once did I hear about anyone being shocked about a male hiker hiking alone. Yet maybe everyone’s concerns were valid. The Facebook group for Pacific Crest Trail hikers was flooded with images of a man named James Parillo, his shining bald head an emblem to women hikers everywhere to watch the fuck out. Parillo, a pathological liar, a con-man, and a goddamn creep had been accused by seven different women of rape and kidnap. Seven. He’s never been charged with anything and still just roams around free, and apparently he frequents the Pacific Crest Trail. In 2018, he had charmed a 62-year-old female PCT hiker into becoming his trail buddy, then proceeded to gaslight, kidnap, assault, and rape her. When she tried to get away, suggesting that she finish the trail solo, he yanked her by the neck and beat her in the head. In her words, “he had a smirk on his face the whole time, like this was what he’d been waiting for, like this was Christmas for him.” She hiked with him for months, too scared he’d “snap her neck” if she tried to leave again. He took the SIM card from her phone so she had no way to contact the outside world. Her family had no idea where she was. He beat her so hard he fractured four of her ribs. He raped her. And all of this took place on trail or in the surrounding trail towns. Women can’t even enjoy nature without getting beaten and raped. 

Parillo’s bald head was all over the Facebook group the year I hiked, 2021, because apparently he had been spotted on trail again, still walking free. On top of every concern we had—planning out our resupply boxes, locating water sources, making what seemed like a million decision over what gear to buy and, oh I don’t know, obliterating every joint in our body hiking 15 miles a day while facing dehydration and exhaustion, we also had to worry about getting beaten and raped on trail. I guess they aren’t lying when they say the trail is a microcosm for life. 

***

I walked towards a gazebo that stood in the middle of a field around which hikers were setting up camp for the evening, a little nomadic civilization away from the rest of Lake Morena campground. Darn Tough Socks draped over ultralight tents to air out, Smart water bottles being filled up from spigots around the site, the sound of sleeping pads crinkling as they unrolled and were then blown up in breathy puffs of air by the exhausted lungs of hikers. These were my people. This was a community. I picked an empty spot and started setting up my tent, this set-up going much smoother than last night, when I’d picked a spot that was so rocky I could hardly get my tent stakes in, and so slanted that my sleeping bag and I kept sliding towards the zippered door all night, my backpack and all its innards scattered around me coming with us. 

After I set up my tent and scarfed down a protein bar or two, I popped up and bounced to the gazebo, eager to talk to everyone. These were my companions on the trail, the other people in this world crazy enough, or maybe sane enough, to do something like this. In the months leading up to the trail I’d fantasized about the people I would meet. The friends I would make, the connections I would forge, all the people who would be just like me. I had watched vloggers on Youtube document their time on trail, their smiles lighting up as they talked about their “trail families,” strangers interacting as if they had known each other for ages. My heart yearned for friendships like this. 

A lot of people still seemed to be setting up their tents, or were maybe walking the mile down the street to the burger place/convenience store hybrid to fill their bellies and their backpacks with food. But I confidently strutted to the gazebo, willing to be the one to start the party if needed. There were a couple of stone tables, with only two older men sitting at them. One I can’t quite call to mind. He was nondescript, unremarkable. White. Average height, average build, maybe gray-ish hair. The other one is imprinted in my memory. Tan complexion, skin coarse like leather from decades under the sun. Tall, slender but strong. Dark hair, blackish brown, with streaks of gray showing through. It was long, about shoulder length, and wavy. Maybe about fifty years old. I don’t typically make a habit of going up and talking to random men old enough to be my father, but this was the Pacific Crest Trail! Friendship knew no bounds. Age, gender, race, class, education, none of it mattered out here. Or so I thought. We were supposed to be the same—comrades, teammates we could lean on. I wanted to know all of these people, deeply and truly and rawly and organically. 

I sat down at a table with the two men. Immediately the tall, long-haired one set off alarm bells in my gut. No, he wasn’t James Parillo, but he was still creepy as hell. His eyes were dark, but glimmering, shining, open, and there was something revealed in them that felt malicious, predatory, hunting. Or maybe I’m remembering wrong, maybe he didn’t set off any alarm bells immediately, maybe I only pasted creepiness onto him when viewing the memory retrospectively. Or maybe my desire to make friends and connect with everyone overrode any alarm bells my intuition was sending off. 

I stayed at the table and started talking to the men. Well, mostly the tall man. The other one didn’t say much. We talked about drugs. I hesitantly smoked some of their weed, even though I didn’t really want to—weed was prone to making my entire body ache, the opposite of what everyone says it’s supposed to do. But I smoked it anyway, not wanting to seem lame or uncool or like my bark was bigger than my bite after talking to them about mushrooms. I’m not sure why saving face in front of two creepy old men mattered so much to me. 

I can’t remember if the conversation naturally reached an end, or if I somehow found a crack through which to weasel my way out, but we stood up to say our P’s and Q’s—nice to meet you’s and all that crap. The whole time the tall man’s beady eyes were staring into my soul, like he was somehow having sex with me from the inside out. The next words he said sank like a rock to the bottom of my stomach, “I’m a hugger.” Next thing I know I’m either being pulled into a hug or walking willingly unwilling into one. His hands are on my hips and they’re stroking me in a way that’s way too sensual and the hug is going on for way too long and god is anyone else seeing this?! My fight or flight response had been kindling in my nervous system the entire conversation and now with the contact of his hands on my body it's been ignited. I’m freaking out and I leave the gazebo to go back to my tent, but I don’t go straight to my tent, I take the long way around, making a pit stop in the bathroom first so that maybe he won’t see me go into my tent and that way maybe he won’t know which tent is mine and the whole time my mind is whirring into overdrive, I’m hot like a laptop overheating and I’m calculating the likelihood that if he does know which tent is mine he will come in in the middle of the night and rape me. I collapse into my tent and I text my friend and I cry. Now I hide in my tent for the rest of the evening even though I just wanted to meet new friends and I comfort myself with more protein bars even though I need to save them for the next week of hiking before I get my first resupply box. Now I tie the strings of my tent zippers together in a knot on the inside so that it can’t be opened from the outside, as if anyone with a pocket knife or even a sharp stick couldn’t rip through the thin mesh of my tent inner. Now I think about the hatchet that the tall man is carrying on the trail with him, the one that everyone was making fun of him for bringing because his base weight is over 40 pounds and that's about 24 pounds more than an ideal base weight and 24 pounds is a lot of extra weight to carry around all day in the desert heat of Southern California. Now that hatchet follows me for my entire next week on trail, the image of it burying into the back of my head as I walk, or as I sleep. Now I glance behind me as I hike, nervous and on edge, a prey being stalked. 

***

If it was possible to outrun your own femininity, I would have done it already. But it always seemed to catch back up to me in the end, the hatchet chasing me down the trail and embedding itself in my skull. In grade school teachers used to stand in front of the room, hands on their hips, saying sweetly, “Okay now, I need a couple of strong boys to carry this down the hall for me.” This being a stack of chairs, or an overflowing recycling bin, or some box of junk. 8-year-old me was already fed up with gender roles but didn’t know how to articulate it. 8-year-old me was already fed up with gender roles and wanted to reject the ones she’d been given. “I’M STRONG,” I wanted to shout from the top of my desk. “I can carry your chairs and your bins and your boxes!” I resented the way that the boys’ hands would shoot up in excitement, eager to show the whole class just how strong and tough they really were. Their desire for masculinity repulsed me. Their desire for masculinity was my own. 

***

In a video vlog I took the next day I described my interaction with the creepy man as “a weird…experience.” I’m sitting on a giant pale boulder, lips chapped and baking in the sun, glancing around nervously saying that “nothing really happened, it was just like some…unwanted closeness to me.” I try to phrase my words as carefully as possible, like I’m blindly walking through a room full of tripwire. I’m planning on uploading these vlogs to YouTube, and I don’t want to sound dramatic, or like I’m being difficult or silly or like I asked for it. So I tone it down and make it seem minor. I suppose it was minor, externally anyway. It’s not like he raped me or groped my breasts or slapped my ass. He just touched my hips. Stroked my hips. But internally he broke a dam, releasing a current of fear that chased me down the trail. I make it seem minor because I’m already going to get enough judgment from everyone who thinks I’m a stupid naiive girl who has no idea what she’s doing on trail. I make it seem minor because all of my friends and family were so worried about me hiking this trail alone as a woman and making it seem major is an admission that maybe they were right—it’s only my second day on trail and already I feel unsafe, the punishment for the crime of existing in a female body. Maybe they were all right, I have no idea what I’m doing and it’s not safe out here for me and it’s my fault this happened and I walked right into that damn hug and why didn’t I slap his hands away and why didn’t I say what the fuck do you think you’re doing?  

***

I’m really susceptible to other people’s judgment. As much as I like to think I’m independent, a free thinker, I know my opinion is swayed at the drop of a hat. My friend thinks the boy I’m talking to isn’t very cute? I suddenly keep forgetting to respond to him. My mom thinks my outfit looks funny? Blink and I’ve undergone an entire wardrobe change. It’s not even just the opinions of people I know, either. A stranger on the Internet thinks the new show I’m loving has bad writing, is predictable, unrealistic? Yeah, I actually wasn’t liking it all that much anyway. Being someone who soaks up opinions like a sponge, I can only imagine how deeply societal and cultural ideologies are ingrained inside my brain. They’re probably etched in there like carvings on stone. So it didn’t take long for the world’s messages for women to seep into me. At age 8 I was already trying to prove myself to the patriarchy, trying to show that I was strong, I was capable. I could carry things down the hallway and I could play four-square and kickball as well as any boy in my class. I didn’t want to _____ like a girl (see: hit, throw, run). I’d already learned that doing anything like a girl was bad. To be feminine was bad. To be like a boy, to be masculine was good. I was already internalizing the misogynistic bullshit shoved down my throat since I learned to talk. As in, literally it’s ingrained in our language. Actor/actress, waiter/waitress, God/goddess. The male is always the main thing, the default, the woman is the other. Open up a video game and you’ll get spawned in as a male; if you want to change your avatar to female you’ll have to go into the settings and take your pick from the 2 female options, each one with abnormally large tits. Hell, Eve came from the rib of Adam. Then she ate the apple that doomed us for eternity, the damn whore. 

In linguistics, this phenomenon of one thing being default, and the other being, well, other, is called markedness and unmarkedness. Julia Serano examines how this applies to misogyny in her essay “He’s Unmarked, She’s Marked,” She describes it:

When perceiving and interpreting the world, we (all people) tend to unconsciously place human traits and behaviors…into one of two categories. Some traits and behaviors will remain unmarked in our eyes—these are the things we expect to see or occur and that seem normal and mundane to us. For this reason ,we generally consider such things to be unremarkable, unquestionable, and legitimate. In contrast, traits and behaviors that we find atypical, abnormal, or unexpected are marked—they seem to stand out to us, and we will pay them extra attention. (Serano 53)

On my first day on trail I got called a “lady hiker.” I guess I should say it was meant as a compliment, just like it’s meant as a compliment when men tell you you look pretty when you smile or that you’ve got nice curves. A man said, “I just love seeing all these lady hikers killin’ it out here!” And it really was meant as a compliment—the guy was impressed. But latent in his comment and his awe is the insinuation that, once again, men are the default. To be a male hiker is to just be a “hiker,” to be a female hiker is to win that extra label, “lady hiker,” marking them as other. Same as Girl Boss and SheEO and mompreneur. We don’t need the extra label. 

***

​

When I finally posted my YouTube vlogs, I received a comment about my “weird experience” with the creepy guy on trail, just as I anticipated. John said, “Hi Cara! Had to tell my sister to be careful not to send out mixed messages, as you may unwittingly attract male attention.” What I had said in my video about the incident had been so intentionally vague—how the hell was this guy automatically assuming I had done something to cause this? And what the hell does “unwittingly attract male attention” even mean? Like women are some sort of light bulb shining in the night sky that all the nasty moths and gnats just can’t help but be drawn to? The only way to get the bugs to go away is to turn out the light. How many women dull their lights everyday out of fear and discomfort? 

This is what society does. It places the burden of protection on women. It says: it is your job to keep yourself safe. It is your job to be hypervigilant, hyperaware, hypercautious, and hyperparanoid at all times. My mom bought my sister and I one of those Birdie things. It’s a little device you put on your keychain, and if you yank it hard enough it starts flashing lights and wailing obnoxiously like a siren. It’s meant to call attention to you if you’re getting grabbed off the street. Too bad I’m more likely to get groped in front of a crowd of people than in the back alleyway of some street. My mom was so excited when the Birdies came in the mail for us, but I resented them the minute I saw them. I hated that my sister and I got one and my brother didn’t. Hated even more that I rationally knew there was no good reason for my brother to have one. It was only grudgingly that I agreed to carry mine on the trail with me. I saw it as a token of my own victimhood. Carrying one felt like giving in, like admitting that I needed extra protection. I didn’t want to protect myself. I didn’t want to concede to reality or accept what it meant to walk in a woman’s body. But I carried both my Birdie and my pepper spray on my backpack, right on my front strap where I could easily access them. At night I’d have my Birdie, pepper spray, and pocket knife lined up right next to my pillow. I was always afraid I’d roll over in my sleep, get pepper spray in my eye, impale myself on my knife, and set off my Birdie, its siren scream slicing the night, the scream of womanhood drowning out my own.

Sometimes the trauma of being a female is too much for me. It’s collective and it’s individual, it’s generational and institutional and personal and historical. I dampen it down in my mind, it hurts too much to think about. At the time that I write this, the news is flooded with the Supreme Court’s leaked draft decision to overturn Roe. v. Wade. I avoid the news like the plague. I can’t think about what that means. I can’t think about what this all means. Women everywhere are screaming.

​

***

​

In another YouTube vlog I talked about a run-in I had with a lone lumberjack on the trail. I’m just a wee little solo female hiker (and that’s so dangerous, remember?) so I stayed on my guard as I approached this grown man with a giant ax and several other sharp tools that could impale me or slice me in half. He stopped me to have a conversation with him, and I didn’t want to be rude—I felt bad for the poor guy all alone in the woods all day and figured he just wanted someone to talk to. He asked me some questions about the trail, but I honestly couldn’t tell you much more about the conversation because my eyes were glued to his ax the whole time. The guy seemed nice enough, if maybe just slightly off, and his hand kept creeping back to the handle of his ax, which was embedded in a tree stump between us. He might have just been fiddling with it absentmindedly, but each time his hand drifted back to it, my cortisol levels shot up and I’d tense myself up just a little more, ready to pounce into action at any moment. Each time I took a step back it seemed like he would take a step forward. I slid my hand into my pocket and clicked open the pocketknife I kept there, visions of myself stabbing him in the jugular playing through my mind while he droned on about the trail. Finally I got myself out of the conversation, and continued on the trail, now glancing behind me every few steps, once again being chased down the trail by the image of a sharp object being slashed into the back of my head. 

Afterwards I thought it was funny how I was so concerned with trying to play nice with this guy, while I also had my knife in hand in my pocket, ready to murder him if he attacked me. It had felt like I was split in half, two versions of me from two different timelines, each one ready to jump into their role depending on which scenario played out. It was a balancing act—be nice enough to not seem rude, but not so nice that you seem like you’re actually interested in sticking around for the conversation. In the vlog I took I phrased it as, “well I don’t want to be rude…I also don’t want to get murdered.” To what extent do we play nice at the risk of our safety? When do we stop trying to not hurt men’s feelings, hurting ourselves in the process? 

The whole damn being a woman thing is a giant balancing act. It’s being friendly, but not too friendly that you “unwittingly attract male attention.” It’s wanting to attract male attention, wanting to step into your sexuality and be appealing because you’re hot and you know it and that's just god damn human nature, but it’s also being absolutely repulsed by the male gaze, it’s wanting no male eye to ever lay gaze on you again. It’s loving your femininity because it’s divine and gentle and ethereal, and rejecting your femininity because it’s “less than” and it’s preyed upon and it’s taken advantage of. We are trapped between two worlds, claustrophobic in boundaries we didn’t ask for. We are the marked—we are othered, questioned, doubted. We are controlled and beaten and raped. But maybe this does make us remarkable—not our deviation from the “unremarkable”—our lack of maleness—, but our ability to stay afloat in this tedious balancing act. Our ability to do everything that a man does while crushed under the label of the other. Maybe it is more impressive to hike the trail as a female, what with being under the constant threat of assault or scrutiny or plain old mansplaining. Maybe it does take more courage to be a solo woman hiker, with the ax constantly chasing down the trail after you, waiting to embed itself in your skull. But do not mistake this perseverance for acceptance or for complacency. The scream of womanhood is loud. It is loud and it is angry and it pierces the night. It’s been screaming since Eve bit that damn apple, and it won’t stop screaming until the ax finally stops chasing us down every trail and we don’t have to take the long way around anymore. We are remarkable, but damn are we tired of having to be.