Dogpoet

How murder and mayhem eased my PTSD.

Note: This story also appeared on Human Parts at Medium.

A few years ago, life came at me in a batshit series of events.

Worn down by a lifetime of suicidal depression, I finally got the guts to hire a therapist to help me confront the sexual abuse and neglect I’d gone through as a kid.

At the same time, I found a site online for dudes with similar childhoods, and I sought solace in my chats with distant strangers. I picked up a bit of their lingo, too; they called their therapists “my T” and their abusers “my perp,” as an indication of their ubiquity. Each of us had one of both.

As if on cue, later that year, my perp cornered me in his two-car garage during a family Thanksgiving to tell me about some stories he’d posted online. He had thousands of new fans and hundreds of emails from people who really “respected” and “connected” with his writing. He figured I might be interested in his success, being that I’m a writer and all.

He must have seen something on my face because he stepped aside and let me go.

---

Several weeks later and against my better instincts, I poked around online, looking for his posts during a late night at the office.

My mom had died a few years before and I’d spent those years attempting, despite the childhood abuse, to be a “good person” and to bridge the estrangement that had calcified between me and the perp through frequent visits to his house. It had been a challenge, as he’d spent most of those years questioning my life choices (my career, retirement plan, and city). I’d left every visit feeling irritable and defensive.

I found his posts and discovered that during those same years, around the time of my visits, he’d written and posted to the internet dozens of erotic stories about incest. They were all stories of jerk porn with familiar scenes — acts that had seared my nerves for the past 30 years. I knew without reading the ending where each tale ended up: a man, a boy, a bathroom filled with steam, and clothes in a trampled pile. They were lightly fictionalized versions of straight-up nonfictional events that I’d worked for three decades to forget.

My vision blurred and I clicked off the computer with a trembling hand. I left the office and took the train home, my body shuddering so much that the people near me moved away. When the doors opened and I hit the sidewalk, weird animal noises came out of me.

Why the fuck, I thought, did my perp want me to read those stories? I pictured thousands of his fans reading the stories with one hand wrapped around their pricks, jerking off to the things that had been done to me. I wondered if I knew any of those fans in real life. Within me, in a place past reach or reason, fear cracked open.

Later, I let out an hour-long, guttural scream of indictments at my perp as he hid in the privacy of his two-car garage. I pierced him with words, with three decades of pent-up grudge and rage. I screamed and swore and then I hung up for good. My shirt clung to me wetly. The screen of my phone was flecked with spit. My husband sat on the couch beside me, his face streaked in tears. I was a burnt out match.

---

I wasn’t afraid of my perp. After years at the gym, I’d grown much bigger than him. And anyway, he was an old man now. So I can’t tell you why during this time, my fear spread out past him, out into the world. It was primal, bone-deep terror that couldn’t be talked away. I can’t tell you why, exactly, I bought a combat knife online — delivered to me within two days, free of charge — and carried it with me on the train to work every day.

If a member of my own family could do that to me, then what could a complete stranger do?

I can’t tell you why I’d eke out a half day at work only to lock myself in an empty office, turn out the lights, remove my shoes and belt, lay on the floor, and rock back and forth for an hour. I can’t tell you why I had to take a medical leave of absence and wound up diagnosed with chronic PTSD, or why I shut out everyone in my life, including my friends, because nobody in the world felt safe. I can’t even tell you why I moved out of the bedroom I shared with my husband and slept in the spare room, why I couldn’t trace my steps back into my old life.

I guess the plainest way of putting it is this: If a member of my own family could do that to me, then what could a complete stranger do?

---

Over time, I became a recluse. I coped with the help of true crime. My mild, lifelong interest in the genre now turned to compulsion. It was the only thing I could tolerate, the one thing that fed me a grain of relief.

I consumed marathon stretches of shows on the Investigative Discovery channel. I watched massive, jaw-dropping amounts of true crime television. I inhaled shows with titles like Sinister Ministers, Southern Fried Homicide, and Fear Thy Neighbor.

Whatever your career, location, or income, these shows promised that you, too, could fall prey to something terrible. Thus, I gorged on crime in my bunker (locked bedroom, shades drawn) while playing Candy Crush on my phone, my dog curled beside me, trying to shut down my brain.

Here’s the thing: It worked. The shows held me back from the threshold of that abandoned amusement park in my head, where perps and knife-wielding clowns crouched in wait.

---

That year, while everyone was watching Downton Abbey. I’d grown nauseated by the show’s depiction of a family that stayed steadfastly loyal through multiple hardships.

Bullshit, I thought. Utter bullshit. I lost my stomach for comedies, laugh tracks, tearjerkers, and poignant celebrity bios. It was all crap for delusional suckers. The world was full of horrible people doing horrible things to other people, and anyone pretending otherwise was peddling drivel.

You could argue that watching so much crime only reinforced my trauma. Maybe you’re right. But after hundreds of hours of crime shows, I understood that I watched for the victims and their loved ones. I watched for the survivors who’d brushed death. Their tears, I bought. They made me feel less alone. They knew the wolf at the door. And more often than not, the wounds from their crimes dwarfed mine.

Of course, there’s a problem with true crime: Exploitation is inherent in the genre. Strangers’ tragedies broadcast for our entertainment. Some shows were shameless, with clumsy reenactments and pun-heavy, oily narration that made roadkill out of victims, deified the killer, and inspired the urge to shower.

Still, I watched.

I watched so much Investigative Discovery that I knew every commercial by heart. After watching constant ads for treatment centers, feminine hygiene, and adult undergarments, I wondered what that said about me, demographically speaking.

But watching live cable tied me tenuously to the world; other people watched those same shows and those same ads for rehabs, at the exact same moment. I wasn’t utterly alone. I was an astronaut tethered with one thin cord, oxygen depleting and deep space pulling me out to where, according to the tagline of my favorite movie, “no one could hear you scream.”

---

I left the house only for therapy. For weeks I arrived at my therapist’s office certain that this time, my T would have me committed for my own good. But he didn’t, I lived, and I kept watching true crime.

I chatted with more dudes on the abuse recovery site and read books on trauma, enough to see how much we had in common. Many of the dudes with our kind of childhoods had built elaborately constructed, impressively defended fortresses that could stand for decades. But those fortresses fell apart in our thirties and forties. We worked (if we worked) in stockrooms and empty warehouses. Some of us cashed our disability checks on the third of the month, budgeting for an Uber to our T and for smokes, booze, and Netflix.

And still, life kept coming. I suffered a divorce, poverty, and an unwilling exit from San Francisco, my home for 18 years that I could no longer afford. But as I bounced around the country in the coming months, my rocks were true crime and a chihuahua. I kept close to both, and I built new bunkers wherever I landed. I found new Ts, shut out my perp, and took jobs that kept me out of reach of the general public.

The one thing that would save me — human connection — was the one thing I couldn’t sustain.

---

I listened to Serial while trimming trees at a cousin’s house in Oregon. I bonded with My Favorite Murder on my three-train commute through Boston. I even smiled once or twice while driving home in western Massachusetts, as the dudes from Last Podcast on the Left broke down the tale of the Hillside Strangler.

I liked the solved cases. I craved the mysteries unknotted, the perps collared and convicted. I wanted a shot of a prison yard wreathed in razor wire, detective offering a hard-won grin, and someone saying “closure” without much faith. True crime was a fairy tale I wanted to believe.

After hundreds (thousands?) of hours, I grew familiar with the patterns of psychopaths and narcissists. Now I’d see them coming, strewing charm and butchery in their wakes. Now I’d steer clear.

I consumed so much true crime that I saw the full spectrum of people who’d lost loved ones to murder. I saw those who’d gotten stuck at the death, those who still looked like ghosts — like they were just existing, gutted by the loss of their only kid, sitting with open bottles at gray kitchen tables in the fading light of dusk. And who could fucking blame them?

True crime was a fairytale I wanted to believe.

But there were others, broken in places that would never heal but still limping forward. They wore scars and shed tears but the inner light hadn’t been snuffed out. They’d found a way. I wasn’t sure how but I doubted it involved slumping on a couch after work, gazing at crime every night. It was like they’d made a decision.

---

Eventually, I snuck out into the world for an hour or two at a time. I let my dog take me on longer walks. I ordered takeout from across the street. I slipped into the back row of meetings where fellow whiskey-thirsty folks gathered in blackly comic camaraderie. I made one friend in my new, strange town and he took me to the top of a nearby mountain.

I got better. Dating, in my small town, was an insurmountable challenge. So with the help of some iPhone apps I tried it long-distance, which kept dudes at a safe distance. I met a couple guys in what is called “real life.” I made mistakes, and I hurt some feelings. I mishandled my own anger — an emotion I’d squelched my whole life, which now came out of me sideways and bigger than any situation required.

Though nothing romantic lasted, I ended up with some good friends. I’d drive to Providence to visit one and we’d watch Friday night episodes of Dateline, with Keith Morrison gravely narrating how the husband did it but — through hubris and the dogged determination of gumshoes — didn’t get away with it.

Another friend in NYC would FaceTime me and we’d trash-talk certain loathsome and moronic serial killers (BTK), roll our eyes when people gushed over the “handsome” and “charming” Ted Bundy, tip each other off via texts about Dahmer documentaries, and scan our family trees to recall the narcissists who’d raised us. Within the rigid boundaries of the true crime genre, our childhood demons could be exorcised — or at any rate, diminished.

Through crime I made human connections, for the first time in years.

---

These days, I’m tethered to the world again. I’m bold — at times — online. I work in an office where the treacherous political waters require skillful navigation. I lift weights at a large, boisterous national gym chain. I see my T every Tuesday. I chat with my neighbors while walking the dog, no knife in my pocket.

I still love true crime. I play the podcasts during my commute. I binge old seasons of Investigative Discovery shows on Hulu. But for a couple of years, I’ve inched into crime’s close cousins of horror and mystery. Now I can even sip comedy in small doses.

I’m grateful for the company of true crime. It kept me, one hour at a time, one crime at a time, from wandering the amusement park in my head where the perps and the clowns lurked. They’re still there, now, but they’re smaller, gaunt from hunger, and hiding from the lights of the Midway, with their charms faded and their greasepaint melting in the rain.

Seeking rescue from a mountain in the midst of a divorce.

Note: This story also appeared on P.S. I Love You at Medium.

A few weeks after my separation, I got stuck in the snow at the top of a mountain.

I’d fled the gut-punch of my husband’s rejection and the ritual monthly sacrifice of $4k that San Francisco now demanded for a one-bedroom apartment. I’d lived there for 18 years, the only place that had ever felt like home. Exiled by the gods of marriage and money, with no real plan.

My prospects were dim. I’d recently kicked over a few childhood rocks to confront for the first time the things crawling around there in the dark. Which had led to cold sweat, family fall-outs, tearful rebukes, and a dogged strain of PTSD, a word one or two doctors had jotted down on my health chart.

I’d kinda lost my mind.

The sickness had gotten strange, skewed, it had spread through my body — I’d begun to cower not from old memories, not from a single villain, not from my perp, but from everyone, from the world outside my bedroom.

I’d lost trust in the benevolence of friends, let alone strangers. I’d bought a combat knife online, black anodized steel with a locking blade, delivered to me free of charge within two business days, and I’d carried it with me on the train, because I still had to go to work. I’d avoided phone calls and emails and texts and consoled myself with marathon stretches of true crime TV, since I’d also lost the stomach for laugh tracks and loyal families sticking it out through boilerplate hardships.

I’d lost my gym-won muscles. I’d lost interest in listening to constructive criticism. I’d lost interest in sex. My husband had grown tired of this new, combined deficit. Tired of coming home to find me in the bedroom with the blinds drawn, watching reruns of Homicide Hunter: Lt. Frank Kenda, unwilling to leave my bunker, sunk down in the brutal fog that veiled those final months of my marriage. I hadn’t known that they were the final months. I hadn’t known that I could get so scared. Me, a grown man. I hadn’t known much of anything, and then my husband kicked me out.

So I packed up a rental truck and grabbed the long-haired chihuahua named Agnes who my husband had brought home and who’d fastened to me since day one, and I left the other dog, a terrier that had always favored my husband. I tried and failed not to think of either of them over the coming weeks and months.

I drove north up the coast to crash with a cousin I barely knew, in a little town in Oregon, to plot my next move.

I didn’t know where the fuck to go. Portland? Eugene? Some small cabin way up in the mossy woods? Where would I work?

My cousin’s little town struggled, broken by the decline of the timber industry. When I arrived it was trying to resurrect itself as a destination for antiques, but the stores were closed more days than not. Deer grazed at dusk in the backyard.

I bought an old 4Runner with a check engine light that stayed lit even after the intervention of a couple of mechanics, a metaphor for something that I’d never discern.

I’d grown too attached to the dog. Thinking about leaving her at home while I worked for eight hours kept me up at night, but registering her as some kind of therapy pet would feel fraudulent. I wasn’t that bad, right? Still, I took her everywhere, smuggling her in a backpack if needed.

Paralyzing fear of the greater world or not, I was running out of cash and needed a job. Thinking I could maybe make this small town work for me, I applied to a bunch of forestry jobs and landed an interview at a state park on the other side of the Cascade Mountains, which rose to the east of my cousin’s place.

I set out on a cool summer’s day with Agnes, riding shotgun in her little elevated seat, taking a road that skirted the mountains, listening to the radio, singing a few lyrics in falsetto, which always made her tail wag.

An hour later I stopped in the shade of a tree overlooking a park station, cracked the windows, told Agnes to wish me luck, and went inside, weightless and awkward in my khakis and dress shoes. My interviewers wore inscrutable masks as I tried to persuade them that my past office jobs fully prepared me for working in the woods (they’d offer the job to someone else).

I shook their hands as I left, exhaled in the driver’s seat of the 4Runner, the rest of the afternoon empty and waiting. I scratched Agnes’ ears, and told myself not to be afraid. You can drive. Just drive. You can spend another hour in the world outside your bedroom. Just put your foot on the gas. I set off with a vague plan to explore Mt. Bailey, in the Umpqua National Forest, back near my cousin’s place.

I took roads that twisted through the thick and shaded woods, cruising alongside a glassy lake and over creeks running fast from snowmelt, glancing now and then at my phone’s GPS, which grew erratic.

The sun was fading but I still felt calm, guessing at which roads to take, which only got me farther away from my cousin’s, farther up towards the peak, where snow still clung to the ground beneath the trees.

An hour after leaving the interview, I came to a spot where the trees thinned out, the GPS went blank and my phone’s four bars had long ago faded. I hadn’t passed another car in a good chunk of time.

Up here at the beginning of June the air was cold and crisp and I steered around a curve which led to a large patch of road covered in snow. I eased the car to a stop and considered the snow, trying to gauge its depth, thinking it looked passable; I’d grown up in Minnesota, after all. I was a pro. All I had to do was hit the gas and barrel thr –

I got stuck halfway through the patch.

Adrenaline flooded me as the tires spun, throwing snow and mud in the air. The truck worked itself deeper into the snow that had looked so thin from a few yards back. I went nowhere. I threw the car in four-wheel drive for the first time ever, but they spun without purchase, getting me good and wedged at the peak of a mountain that now felt as ominous as an alien planet.

I took my foot off the gas, sweating and cursing as Agnes cowered beside me. I rocked the car back and forth. Nothing. I climbed out into the fading light, found a few pine branches, and threw them under the wheels. I shoveled snow with my hands. Still I got nowhere.

Panic throbbed in my blood. I sucked big gulps of cold air and leaned, light-headed, against the truck. Old ghosts drifted through my brain.

Just tell me, I’d told my husband¸ if you don’t want to be with me.

I don’t want to be with you, he’d said.

The friends I’d abandoned. My credit card debt.

Me, nine years old and friendless, crying at the edge of the woods at soccer camp.

Waking from sleep that same summer to the sight of my father, walking across my dark bedroom, naked. Closing my eyes at his approach. Pretending to sleep.

My breath billowed out and drifted up in the clear dusk. I climbed back into the truck and rubbed the chihuahua’s soft fur. Everything’s okay, Daddy’s mad at the snow, not you. I held her till she stopped trembling. My breathing evened out. “Little Girl,” I told her, “we’re going nowhere.”

I had no map of the mountain. My phone was useless. The radio full of static.

In a few short seconds my brain had indexed the 500 reasons I was unprepared for the real world.

I sighed. A few days ago, I’d tossed a sleeping bag and a heavy wool shirt in the back of the truck. So at least there was that.

In the morning we’d walk for help, but tonight we were stuck.

I shared cold French fries with Agnes that I‘d picked up earlier that day, which she took from my hand with tiny and precise teeth. I let her pee at the edge of the road. Overhead, distant stars and one mute satellite.

I picked her up and crawled into the back of the truck, where I kicked off my dress shoes (who the fuck wears dress shoes to a forestry job?), pulled on the wool shirt, and crawled into the sleeping bag. With the back seats down, I just barely fit. Agnes curled up at my chest and I told her how good she was and how I’d try to get us out of this, knowing that in the morning I’d have to do the hardest thing imaginable: break out of my bunker of delusional self-reliance, and ask a stranger for help.

The night came on cold and fitful. Every hour I climbed back in the driver’s seat and let the engine warm the car, trying to conserve the last quarter tank of gas. Agnes burrowed deeper into the sleeping bag. A few minutes of sleep here and there. I imagined my voicemail filling with my cousin’s calls. At that moment, nobody in the world knew where we were.

Maybe I’ll get us through this. Probably. This is America — I’ll find cell coverage a hundred feet down the road.

I shifted in the sleeping bag as wind howled against the car. Every night, as I hovered an inch above sleep, the things my father did to me as a kid would shove me awake. I’d lie there thinking how, thirty years later, he’d written a series of stories about the things he did to me as a kid, packaging them as some kind of sexual “awakening” or moment of true father-son “connection”, and then he’d posted the stories to an online site devoted to amateur erotica.

For hundreds of thousands of readers, whom I pictured reading with one hand wrapped around their junk; he’d received thousands of emails (fan mail, he’d called them, with no trace of irony).

He’d cornered me in his immaculate, two-car garage in the Carson Valley of Nevada during a Thanksgiving visit to tell me about the stories, which he was sure I’d appreciate because I was a writer; and the utter wrongness of this divulgement had seemed entirely lost on him.

I’d later found the stories online, one night at the office, late, after everyone else had gone home, and my body had shook and grown slick with sweat while reading them, and weird, animal noises had rattled in my throat.

In the coming days I’d begun to wonder who out there had read those stories. Where were they, these masked men all over the world, jerking off to my rape?

How many of them did I blindly run across every day?

I’d begun to fear leaving the house, and bought the combat knife online, and Agnes shifted at the bottom of the sleeping bag and I came back to a car stuck in the snow at the top of a mountain in the dead of night.

Please let me sleep, I said.

Morning came. The snow at the peak looked blue and the trees gray in the heavy mist that clung to the mountain’s peak. I found a small trickle of stream and we both drank.

I thought back over my entire life, and couldn’t remember having ever sipped from running natural water. I was a man of indoor plumbing.

We set off down the mountain, sticking to the road. I figured we’d hike an hour, maybe a little more, till we crossed paths with some smug ranger who’d save the inept city boy and his lap dog from the mess of his own making.

We descended at a slow gait. My feet slipped in the dress shoes, and my heels blistered in a few short minutes. I was bound for pain. Every step a reminder of bad decisions.

Agnes trotted jauntily along, sniffing the air, as if we’d set off on some well-mapped, fully-hydrated adventure. She scooted ahead of me, following her little nose.

The thing about dogs is that you have to protect them from the world. They run ahead following a scent, all fur and slobber and immediacy, and you have to call them back. You know what they don’t. You know what could come around a corner.

I called her back. The sky was cloudless, the air clean. Ahead of me, a small stretch of curving road, and to the side, miles of white peaks and dark forests. Hawks spun in the air.

We passed an overlook where yesterday I’d picked up Agnes and snapped a selfie, planning to post it to Facebook so my husband could see with a bitter pang how brave and content I looked. Fully geared for a new life.

We crossed below the snowline as the sun climbed in the sky. Thin-skinned and weary from no sleep, I peered over cliffs to see the road switchbacking down the mountain, vanishing into thick lines of trees. No cars. No cabins. No cell signal.

The glint of a creek, hundreds of feet below. My stomach flipped from vertigo.

The wind gusted, crows sparred in the trees overhead, and I thought about throwing myself from this very great height.

That thought and many thoughts like it had taken up a back room of my brain. For months I could hear them fighting, fucking, thumping across the floors. They’d grown louder and more urgent over the weeks. Closer. Passed out on my front stoop.

Agnes sneezed, and I snapped back to attention. I studied her for a moment — the curl of her tail, the silky hair of her ears, her little front paws that turned out like a ballerina, She squinted in the wind. I scrutinized the chihuahua because that’s what I did when those thoughts knocked drunkenly on my door.

She glanced up at me, her tail wagged, and I stepped back onto the road.

My feet burned but we kept moving. An hour stretched into two. I pulled out the phone to no avail. How far down the mountain till the bars come back? How about one? One bar. I limped along the road, wondering how the fuck could you still get lost in the woods of America. So many horror flicks opened with scenes like this. City folk in the woods like cows to slaughter.

Where was everyone? No sounds save for the wind through the trees, a demented squirrel chittering in the underbrush, and the scrape of my shoes on the pavement. My stomach grumbled. Maybe the apocalypse had come in the night.

And wouldn’t that be easier? My biggest problem would be which store or home or field to loot. First stop: food and water for me and the chihuahua. Then band aids and hiking boots.

Easier — a life without other humans, and the complications they dragged behind them.

A pine cone fell and knocked through the branches of a tree onto the road, where it rolled to a stop. Agnes hurried over to sniff it with suspicion. The wind picked up.

I remembered sitting in restaurants with my husband, in awkward silence, fidgeting with chopsticks or forks, waiting for the food, waiting for him to ask me about my day, as I’d asked about his. Maybe that was the problem. I should have just told him about my day. But I’d wanted him to ask. I’d wanted him to wonder.

Five hours. Agnes and I drank from another stream and she sat and gave me the look when I tried to coax her back on the road. My feet hurt so badly that I feared that if I stopped, I’d never get up again. So I slipped her into my backpack, where she huddled in accustomed and agreeable silence.

Trees and more trees. Streams. Thick beds of pine needles in the shade. Cracks in the asphalt. Forcing each step, moving, trying to get off the godforsaken mountain. I could only guess at the miles we’d covered. Ten? Twelve? It felt like 50.

Agnes got restless and pawed at the backpack, and I scooped her out and lowered her to the ground.

I remembered my lonesomeness, and the deal I’d made with myself. I’d settled for the goods. The house and the car and the future in Palm Springs. The gas bills paid in full every month. The vanishing debt.

I could sit in silence in restaurants for the rest of my life, right? In exchange for that?

Agnes trotted beside me, taking a dozen little steps for each of mine. She’d been scooped from the mean streets of central California by animal control, and brought by a rescue group to San Francisco, and eventually to me, and now to here. Agnes of Bakersfield. Her unflagging optimism. Her dutiful companionship. Her implicit trust in me, which at the moment felt so misplaced that it nearly made me cry.

My husband would always tell the dogs, “We’re going to take care of you forever and ever,” and I said this to her now. I pledged to myself that I’d never disappoint her. Not like I’d disappointed everyone else. Not like the others I’d abandoned.

I’d protect this little dog, this four-legged trooper who’d, in the coming months and years, stick by my side. We’d sleep in the car and motel rooms and spare rooms in basements. We’d cross the country near-broke, and I’d stop and take selfies with her all along the way. As we pinballed from state to state I swore to myself that no matter how many hard turns life threw at us, I’d be her rock.

I’d keep breathing for her sake.

Forever and ever, he’d said.

The dress shoes dug into my blisters. I wanted to cut my feet off. I wanted to eat a squirrel. I wanted to throw the fucking phone into the woods. We’d been walking now for eight straight hours.

My heart skipped at the sight of yellow lines appearing on the road. That meant civilization. I prayed for a ranger station or a stalwart hiker. I prayed as we covered more miles, wincing with each step, my stomach now singing a full chorus.

When I heard the car behind us on the road I turned, but suddenly got embarrassed — the old fear of strangers and small talk and hidden motives rose up alongside the shame of my predicament, and I froze in place. A moment later I grabbed Agnes and waved my free hand, locking eyes with the woman riding shotgun in the Mustang. They zoomed past. My hand dropped in humiliation and I muttered at the tail lights.

We kept walking till we came to a sign: Oakridge, 24 miles.

24 fucking miles? I’d thought I was near town. Tears sprang to my eyes. The afternoon was fading. The sun would slide behind the mountains.

I checked my phone again. Nothing.

I heard the truck before I saw it, coming up fast behind us. I held Agnes and turned and before I could even raise my hand, the rusted pick-up slowed and the window lowered and a young man behind the wheel asked if I was okay.

“No,” I said. “I’m not.” I told him about my car and the long trek to town.

“Hop in,” he said. “I’ll take you.”

A cool, clear relief flooded me, and I climbed in beside him. I set Agnes on my lap, but she immediately scooted across the bench seat into his lap, put her paws on his chest, and licked his cheek.

“Sorry,” I said. “She always gets right up in your face. Agnes­ — ”

“All good.” He pet her head.

I rested my burning feet on the floorboard, and we set off for Oakridge.

He told me his name was Jeff, and he was shirtless and beautiful in that way that young men with scrawny mustaches driving trucks in small towns can be. He told me about growing up in the Cascades, and all about his favorite places to camp and to fish and to four wheel. He offered me his Dr. Pepper and I was too thirsty to turn it down.

“How’d you end up at the tip top of Bailey in a pair of church shoes?” he asked.

I laughed without joy. Where to start? My cousin’s place? The interview? We had 24 miles to cover, so I went way back.

I mentioned the break-up, and the move, and the job search, and I refrained from saying the word “husband,” because I didn’t want to scare the shirtless and beautifully unguarded boy. He confessed to me that he’d just been dumped by his girlfriend. “It’s awful,” he said.

“The worst,” I said.

“I’ll tell you,” he said, then glanced over at me. “My head sometimes goes to dark places.” His abrupt confidence should have felt strange. But he was our literal savior, a shimmering angel in an old Chevy, and instead it felt preordained.

We were fated, the chihuahua and I, to catch this ride.

“I know dark places,” I said, which sounded corny, so I let it just sit there. There were too many things I couldn’t say to him. I thought about the man I’d slept with behind my husband’s back. The man my husband found out about, because that’s what husbands do. How much of my predicament — how much of my life — was my fault? Likely all of it.

I’d protect the boy in the truck from my personal avalanche of batshit. I’d keep my mouth shut.

“I’m kind of lucky, though,” he said, “I’ve got Jesus Christ on my side. Do you believe in Jesus?”

Fuck, I thought. 19 more miles.

I sighed, looked out the window, shook my head. I told him the truth. “I don’t know what I believe,” I said, thinking about the higher power I’d lost faith in at some point in the recent past. Gone for good, I was pretty sure.

I held my breath, waiting for the sermon, the sales pitch, the promise of a protector that could never protect me.

I didn’t need Jesus. Just a ride down the road.

He seemed to consider me for a minute in silence. Then he let the subject drop, and he told me about the time he got stuck at the top of a different mountain, and the time he’d nearly drowned in the whitewater of a Washington river, and I relaxed and felt my feet throb as the miles passed.

We talked longer than I’d talked to anyone in months.

We coasted into town, and my phone vibrated with a half dozen voicemails from my cousin, each one escalating in fear, and I told Jeff he could drop me at the first restaurant, which turned out to be the same DQ I’d stopped at on my way up the mountain.

I slipped Agnes into the backpack, shook Jeff’s hand and thanked him as profusely as I could without embarrassing him. He nodded. “God bless,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “God bless.”

I watched him drive off, then ducked inside, where I ordered a massive amount of food before calling my cousin from the safety of a booth, over by the window, in an air conditioned, national fast food chain where bad things weren’t permitted through the door.

The next day, after a small band of second cousins towed my car out of the snow with a truck and a chain, I’d watch the numbers roll by on my dashboard as we drove back down the mountain.

Agnes and I’d walked together for 25 miles. Which must be 152 for chihuahuas.

But for now I stuffed my face and cooled my heels, slipping French fries into the hole in my backpack, and she took each one politely with her tiny teeth. I pushed a cup of cold water through the flaps and held it still while she sipped.

Maybe it was a mistake, her trust in me. I wasn’t cut out to rescue anyone, even a chihuahua. I’d only fail her.

But it was too late. There was no back door to this day. No return to San Francisco or the mean streets of Bakersfield. No re-dos on my many mistakes. Agnes was stuck with me. All I could do was keep her company, and watch for the things coming around the corner. Maybe that much I could manage.

What an online hater taught me about creativity.

Note: This story also appeared on The Startup at Medium .

The email popped in my inbox with the subject line: “Saw You Online and OMG!”

This was a few years ago, before those words had become a spammer’s ubiquitous tease. Before I’d learned that those words never lead you someplace good.

I took the bait and found my own face smirking back at me. My face and belly, annotated.

I didn’t recognize the email address. The pic was shot by some roaming photographer at the Folsom Street Fair, California’s third-largest single-day outdoor spectator event, which draws a quarter million “fetish enthusiasts.”

Though the street fair had grown in popularity and widened in its demographics, it’s rooted in the gay community, and anyone with a passing acquaintance of (a certain privileged segment of the) gay male culture knows that we’ll strip off our shirts with little hesitation at events for which straight people normally remain clothed. (Brunch? Check. Bowling? Check. Book club? I’m down.)

Anyway, I’d been drafted to sling beers for charity and had been to the gym that week, so I ended up shirtless on the internet (sorry, Lowe’s). When I stumbled across it, I promptly grabbed the pic for an online profile, which may have helped me land a date or two (thanks, Lowe’s).

Since half my life is online, I had no idea which site the troll had pulled it from. I had to Google “turistors” to confirm that they’re luggage. Baggage, bags, etc.

It stung.

With the help of Photoshop, he (I assumed it was a fellow gay dude) had zeroed in on the body parts that gave me shame (two of them, at least). The parts that made me hesitate when stripping off my shirt or posting a pic. Parts to filter. Parts to obscure.

Like he’d jimmied open the back door to my brain and shone a Maglite on the one dark corner where I stash my ego. I could speculate on his motives, but that’s a dull path to take.

I could call myself, with all sincerity, my own worst critic. I didn’t have to internalize the shame he meant to provoke — it had been there for years. The call was coming from inside the house.

But seeing that critic’s thoughts (i.e., my own thoughts) scrawled over my face and body and concretely seconded by an anonymous observer (who may have known me in real life) was arguably worse.

Everyone knows the risks. Sad sacks haunt forums and chat rooms and comment sections, trailing poison with every keystroke. I’d been writing and blogging for years, and I knew the number one rule: DON’T FEED THE TROLLS.

They live off the bloodshed. They feed off the left hook/right hook of threaded comments and retaliatory emails. Faced with no response, they wither to bones, or sniff out the next sucker.

It was a rule I held to for years. I didn’t even read online comments, following one soul-debilitating presidential election cycle. But that night, wounded by the red scrawls staring at me from my inbox, I couldn’t help myself:

Sorry you’re such an unhappy person, I wrote. Good luck with your miserable life. You’ll need it.

Lame, in retrospect. I’ve never thought fast (or cutting) on my feet. Still, it was short, bitter, and to the point.

It didn’t make me feel better.

Two minutes later I got a new email with the subject line: Saw you online and again what the fuck??

Inside was another of my pics:

The bruise on my chest is a good story for another time.

He’d named this pic, “SheThinksShesAllThat.jpg” which, again, was remarkable in its precision cutting.

The thing is, I’d never in my entire life thought I was all that, about anything. At all. But I’d done something I was a little proud of. A lifetime ago, I’d arrived at college weighing 128 pounds. I’d been called Toothpick and Bones so often that if a genie had granted me three wishes, I’d easily blow the first to look “normal.”

Instead, over those many years I’d worked hard to build up to 185 pounds, and if I wasn’t all that (I wasn’t), maybe I was some of that? A slice of that? Enough to encourage moments in which beautiful strangers might want to make out with me in dive bars, Toyotas and shirtless bowling alleys?

Like I hadn’t learned my lesson. But I could taste blood. In 70 words-per-minute haste I shot back:

The image of you spending your days and nights photoshopping other people’s pictures is cracking me up. Fortunately you still have your mother to tuck you in at night, since you’re living in her basement. Please keep spending your time sending me pictures of myself. It’s flattering.

I waited, checking my email every few minutes as I made a dinner that I’d chew in glum righteousness. But that was the last I ever heard from the troll.

I didn’t feel as though I’d won. The emails had wounded me despite the deft construction of a sweet and affable personality. I’d long avoided any fusillade of criticism, forever scanning the horizon for threats, fashioning armor of helpfulness and self-deprecation, to keep me safe. I was nice to dogs and exes and I donated to charity.

And still it came for me.

Women fear being killed by men. Men fear being laughed at by women. I don’t know the top fear of white, privileged gay dudes, but having your shirtless internet pic annotated for laughs could rank high. I should add that including these pics here is the wound that keeps on bleeding. I don’t want you to see them.

As the hours passed, the sting faded, and I began to mull a fellow blogger’s tagline, which I will paraphrase: “If you post anything on the internet, expect criticism.” I have no love for this motto, though I get it.

It’s a stretch to draw parallels between beefcake pics and works of creativity that are posted with less selfish motives than future hook-ups. But that’s where my brain went on the Night of the Troll.

You make something and put it up — a blog post, a painting, a song, an idea — hoping for praise. Hoping, maybe, to connect.

You can labor on it for days, weeks, and longer, dogged by doubt and the multiple calls coming from inside the house. But to post it, to share it, to strip off your shirt — that jump takes guts.

Many never make that jump.

You run the risk of the Facebook take-down. A hundred hours of labor met with a single, Twittered, “Meh.” I’d written online for years, and every time my mouse had hovered over the “Post” button, I’d think:

This time you went too far. This time you said too much. Worse, you said it unskillfully. You’re a crap writer. You’re naked and ugly and they’re all gonna laugh at you, Toothpick.

But somehow I’d jump. Not because I had guts. Only because other writers and painters and musicians had made that jump before me, making me feel, through their best work, less alone with my flaws and faults. The luggage I’d rather hide.

I’m not all that, I don’t know much, but I’d rather exit this life having added one or two things to the world, than dwell in the basement of trolls.

Make it. Post it. Be naked and afraid. Connect with beautiful strangers when they stumble across your creation. Make them feel less alone with their deformities. Make out with them in their dark bedroom, their phone on the nightstand chirping as their inbox fills through the night.

I am a fraud.

The thought shoved through my front door, late one night, hours after I’d come home from a 12-step meeting where a friend had asked me to pass out the chips.

You know chips. The plastic or metal coins ex-drunks and ex-pillheads carry in their pockets that signify how long it’s been since they last got wasted. This meeting focuses on newcomers, and since newcomers struggle to stay clean, and often end up, after six days of continuous sobriety, forging three or four prescriptions for Oxycontin and stealing their nephew’s Xbox—this meeting keeps its overhead low by passing out the reasonable, cheaper, plastic type. So we carry around poker chips. (What do they hand out at Gamblers Anonymous? – Ed.)

My new friend asked me to pass them out at the end of the meeting because he knew that I’d polished off a handle of whiskey a few nights before, that I was new to the meeting, that I couldn’t seem to win friends and influence ex-drunks in the valley or the rooms of local recovery, and that it would be a good way for them to see me as a member of something. That I might even see it for myself.

Like a kind and considerate friend, he ambushed me three minutes before the meeting started, so I had a good hour to sit there and obsess about standing up and talking in front of a large, bleak church basement filled with 125 straight bros who say things like “wicked smaht.”

Then another thought hurried in, like a criminal rushing though a condo security door that an attractive resident in a miniskirt just unlocked on her way in.

The thought that I’d need to give myself—up there at the front of the room—a newcomer chip.

Those chips stand for 24 hours of sobriety, or are reserved for those who slip into the back row with only a mild and conflicted desire to stop drinking. The teetering, terrified, fog-headed folks who lurch up to take the coin and a hug (or a handshake for the misanthropic) and get the full, thundering applause, because every one of us has been that skinny, trembling squirrel, and because we know that without them, we’d be unable to help them, and helping them is what best guarantees your chances of squeezing past squirrel status.

Problem was, I was the squirrel. Again. After 15 years of sobriety and another four years of failed attempts to claw my way back. I don’t care what anyone says about one day at a time—your ego gets attached to that 15. Or mine did. And my fumble of it made me a dud.

Those thoughts spun through my addled brain during the meeting, and whenever I’d picture myself fishing the newcomer chip out of the plastic box and announcing in a voice loud enough to be heard by 125 straight bros that I couldn’t give the chip to anybody else because I had to give that particular one to myself—every time I pictured it, tears ran down my face.

Because I knew that keeping the secret of my whiskey guzzling only shoved me farther into the dark corner I’d painted myself into. If I wanted to squeeze past squirrel, I had to come clean.

And the end of the meeting came way too quickly, and I went up there and with shaky hands handed out the chips to those with greater lengths of sobriety than I’d lately managed, working my way back down through the months, from 11 to 9 to 6 to 3 to the end. And as I fished out the newcomer chip my voice fucking broke and I fought back fucking tears and said the words I needed to say. And the thundering applause followed me back to my folding chair, where I put my face in my hands as a dozen unseen straight bros slapped my back. Because it had been a very long four years of the loneliest days I’d ever known, and I was fucking tired.

Later, at home alone with the walls down, in the company of a chihuahua, the feeling of fraudulence fell upon me.

Oh, hello, I said. Old friend. Hello, old pal.

I knew fraudulence. For 15 years it had followed me home from every meeting where I’d told my story of transformation. It reflected off my laptop screen every time I posted a blog. The truer the tale, the harder it hit. You just fucking lied your ass off, bro, the voice in my brain sneered.

But it was true, I’d reply with wavering confidence. (Um, when have you ever had anything but wavering confidence? – ed.)

You lied like a motherfucker lying liar who gets paid by the lie, it would reply.

And it said the same the night of the chip. I hated him—the inner critic or bitter queen or belligerent and self-righteous Patriots fan or whatever fucking metaphor works best here. I hated the dude. So I’d always block and ghost him.

But in the days that followed the night of the chip, I caught the barest glimmer of light from the crypt he’d crawled from. And this time, I followed it back, broke in, ate its porridge and slept in its three beds and left in the morning like a guilty trick.

I know where he lives now.

Do me a favor. Think of the spontaneous types of the planet’s citizens. The fun-loving, free-wheeling, I-just-go-where-the-night-and-the-next-Uber-take-me types. Now picture their opposite, and you’ve got my selfie. A pic picked from 75 similar pics and put through a dozen filters.

Naturally, I blame my childhood, but I’d always hated not knowing what was coming around the next corner. So for every interaction of every day of my entire life, I’d rehearse. I’d plan my steps. Repeat my lines until they’d lock in. Run optional scenarios. “And, five, six, seven, eight…” I’d write a dozen drafts before hitting “post.”

And spare myself possible pain and probable humiliation. Because looking like a fool in front of others is the greatest sin of life. Duh.

And I’d done the same the night of the chip, sitting on a flimsy folding chair and plotting my words for an hour. And it was the rehearsal that spoon-fed the dude. It kept him dressed in Dockers and paid the rent on his crypt.

Because if I’d rehearsed my lines, then they were void of spontaneity. Which meant that I was insincere. Because spontaneous expressions were the truest expressions. Everyone knows that.

Rehearsals were blatant attempts at manipulating the better people of the world, you fucking drama queen. Stop auditioning for applause. Sit down and fiddle with your phone like everyone else.

So says the dude.

The dude is not me. Just the drunk in my head. He works hard to cull me from the herd, whines from the backseat of the Honda on my way home from work that it’s bottle-time. “Let’s go home, lock the door, mute the ringer, and binge-watch Who the F#$? Did I Marry?“

I’m all you need, he whispers from the far end of the couch, then passes out, face-first, in his Value Meal.

I can hear myself think then. I’m not the dude. This is the seventh draft. I’ve cut 300 words and replaced hundreds more. I pick them for effect. To manipulate you. To keep from falling flat on my face. And it’s okay. Rehearsed truth is no less true than spontaneous truth. Human connection works. Late-night calls with other lunatics sustain me.

He snores on the couch. I throw the dog’s fleece blanket over his feet. Brush my teeth and wonder if I could kick him out, or if he’s hard-wired to my head. If the bulk of my life was spent hiding my flaws, my little, incestuous flowers in the attic, then maybe now I can unlatch the trap door and let them roam the house. Give the dude the spare room, rent-free. Just wipe down the kitchen counter, I’ll tell him, give me a check every few months for utilities and maintenance, obey the quiet hours, and keep your hands off the chihuahua.

Not long after my separation I got stuck in the snow at the top of a mountain. I’d fled San Francisco due to my inability to pay $4k a month in rent, and by my very selfish need to live through my forties without five roommates. With no real plan, I drove north up the coast to crash with my cousin who lived in a little town in the middle of Oregon.

My prospects back then seemed slim – after picking up a diagnosis of chronic PTSD, I’d pushed everyone out of my life through neglect, and now that I’d run out of options there was nobody left to turn to, save for this incredibly gracious relative that I’d only recently gotten to know.

So I packed up a rental truck, grabbed one of our two dogs, and hugged my soon-to-be ex-husband goodbye. He had tears in his eyes because he worried that I wouldn’t make it far in my compromised condition – guided by a head full of dark things and surrounded by a brutal fog.

“I’ll be fine,” I told him. “I’ll be just fine.”

I didn’t know where I wanted to live. Portland? Eugene? Some small cabin way up in the mossy woods? Where would I work? My cousin’s little town struggled, devastated by the decline of the timber industry. By the time I’d arrived it was attempting to resurrect itself as a destination for antiques, but even those stores seemed closed half the week.

I bought an old 4Runner that got me around even with a check engine light that a couple of mechanics couldn’t fix, a light that remains on two and a half years later, and that probably stands for some kind of metaphor that I won’t discern until I trade the truck in.

Adding complexity to my job search was my over-attachment to Agnes, the long-haired Chihuahua who’d picked me a few months before and who I couldn’t stand to be apart from for any real length of time. Thinking about leaving her at home while I worked for eight hours kept me up at night, and registering her as a support animal felt like an embarrassment.

Thinking maybe I could make this small town thing work for me, I applied to a bunch of forestry department jobs and landed an interview at a park on the other side of the Cascade Mountains, which rose to the east of my cousin’s place. I set out on a cool summer’s day with Agnes, who rode shotgun in her little elevated seat, taking a road that skirted the mountains, and an hour later I stopped in the shade of a tree overlooking a park station, told Agnes to wish me luck, and went inside, weightless and awkward in my khakis and dress shoes.

My interviewers held inscrutable expressions as I tried to persuade them that my past office jobs fully prepared me for a job in the woods (they later offered the job to someone else), and with the rest of the afternoon empty and waiting, I set off to explore Mt. Bailey, in the Umpqua National Forest, back near my cousin’s place.

Using my phone’s GPS, I navigated roads that twisted through the dark heavy woods, running alongside lakes and over rivers, driving for an hour or so until I reached an area high up the mountain where the trees thinned out and where my GPS and cell coverage failed. The sun was beginning to fade but I did not yet panic. I kept driving, using my own faulty sense of navigation, which only got me further up towards the peak, where snow still clung to the ground beneath the trees.

Up here at the beginning of June the air was cold and crisp and I steered around a curve which led to a large patch of road where the snow clung. I eased the 4Runner to a stop and considered the snow, thinking it looked passable; all I had to do was hit the gas and barrel thr –

Halfway through the patch the car got stuck, and adrenaline flooded me as the tires spun, throwing snow and mud in the air, working the car deeper into the patch that had looked so thin from a few yards back. I went nowhere. I threw the car in four-wheel drive for the first time ever, but all four tires spun helplessly, getting me good and wedged at the peak of this fucking mountain.

I took my foot off the gas, sweating and cursing as Agnes sat confused and frightened beside me. I rocked the car back and forth. I got out into the cold fading sun, found a few pine branches, and threw them under my wheels. Still I got nowhere, and the light now was fading fast and my phone was searching for reception and I thought back to the last time I’d actually passed another car, a good 45 minutes behind me, 45 minutes when I could have chosen another fucking road.

The sky darkened. I tried to assure Agnes that everything was okay, Daddy was mad at the snow, not at you. I held her till she stopped trembling. My breathing evened out. “Little Girl,” I told her, “we’re going nowhere.”

I had no map of the mountain. My phone was useless. Even the radio was out this far up. I’d been multitasking, busy inventorying all the ways that I’d fucking fucked up getting myself into this fuckery. The countless reasons I was unprepared for the real world, especially alone. I could find only one bright spot; a couple of weeks back I’d tossed a sleeping bag and a heavy wool shirt in the back of the car.

In the morning I’d start walking for help, but for tonight I was stuck. I shared some cold French fries with Agnes that I‘d picked up earlier that day in what felt like a different life. I let her pee outside in the dark before picking her up and climbing into the back of the 4Runner, where I took off my dress shoes (who the fuck wears dress shoes to a forestry job?), pulled on the wool shirt, and crawled into the sleeping bag. With the back seats down, I just barely fit. Agnes curled up at my chest and I told her how good she was and how I’d get us out of this mess.

The night came on cold and fitful. Every hour or so I climbed back in the driver’s seat and let the engine warm the car, trying to conserve the quarter tank of gas I had left. Agnes moved deeper into the sleeping bag. Chihuahuas, I’d recently learned, love to burrow under blankets and pillows, and I softly pressed my feet against her, trying to warm us both.

A few minutes of sleep here and there. I pictured my cousin’s fear as the hours passed and I failed to return. At that moment nobody in the world knew where we were.

Morning came, and the snow at the peak looked blue and the trees gray in the heavy mist as we set off together down the mountain. I figured we’d hike an hour, maybe a little more, till we crossed paths with someone, some local or some ranger who’d rescue the stupid city boy and his little dog too from this mess. My feet slipped a bit on the decline in the dress shoes, and blisters rose quickly, barely thirty minutes into our walk, and I knew that I was bound for pain. Every single step.

I stopped at a stream that ran cold and clear at the side of the road and we both drank. Agnes ran ahead of me and I called her back, sure that at any moment a car or a truck would come around the corner. They’d come and save us. The sky was cloudless, the air clean. Though I could only see the stretch of road ahead of me, to the side I could see for miles, the white peaks and the dark swaths of mountain trees. Hawks spun in the air. Sometimes the brush alongside the road would rustle, and Agnes would freeze in place, her tiny nose sniffing the air.

We crossed below the snowline as the sun climbed in the sky. I peered over cliffs to see the road switchbacking down the mountain, disappearing into the thicker line of trees below us. I passed an overlook where yesterday I’d taken a selfie with Agnes, and I thought how young and naïve that man had been, clueless to what lied ahead.

Every step hurt. An hour stretched into two. Every few minutes I’d try the phone without luck. I limped down the mountain, wondering how the fuck could someone in America find a place in the woods where they wouldn’t cross paths with another person for hours. I thought of how many horror movies start out like this.

Five hours. I slipped Agnes into my empty backpack. She rode quietly for a few minutes, then got restless to walk again. Trees and more trees. Streams. Pinecones. I had to will each step forward, stopping rarely, trying to get myself down this godforsaken road. I could only guess at the miles we’d covered. Ten? Twelve? It felt like twice that.

Agnes trotted dutifully beside me, taking a bunch of tiny steps for each of mine, and her trust in me nearly made me cry. My ex used to say to the dogs, “We’re going to take care of you forever and ever,” and I said this to her now, silently pledging that I’d never disappoint her. Not like everyone else in my life. Not like the others I’d abandoned. I’d protect this damn little dog, this little trooper who would, in the coming months and years, be at my side. We’d sleep in the car and motel rooms and spare rooms in basements. We’d cross the country near-broke, and I’d stop and take selfies with her all along the way. As we pinballed from state to state I swore to myself that no matter how many changes life threw at us, I’d remain for her the one true constant.

The dress shoes dug into my blisters. I wanted to cut my feet off. I wanted to eat everything. I wanted to throw this fucking phone over a cliff. We’d been walking now for eight straight hours.
Yellow lines appeared on the road, and I prayed that they indicated civilization. I prayed that way for another couple of miles, wincing with each step, my stomach now singing a full chorus.

When I saw the first truck behind us on the road I suddenly got embarrassed, and I froze in place for a second before grabbing Agnes, turning, and waving my free hand, locking eyes with the woman riding shotgun. They zoomed right past me. I kept waving but the truck never slowed. I cursed at their tail lights till they disappeared.

We kept walking. Eventually we passed a sign: Oakridge, 24 miles. I’d thought I was actually close to the town. I nearly cried again. The afternoon would soon pass into evening. The sun would go down behind the mountains. Checked my phone again. Nothing.

I heard the second truck before I saw it, coming up fast behind me. I held Agnes and raised my hand and the truck slowed and the window lowered and a young man in the driver’s seat asked if I was okay.

“No,” I said. “I’m actually not okay.” I told him about my car.

“Do you want a ride?” he said, and the relief that flooded me felt like the cleanest, purest river, and I nodded, and climbed in beside him. My feet burned in my shoes.

We set off for Oakridge. He told me his name was Jeff, and he was shirtless and beautiful in that way that young men can be, and we talked for the next two dozen miles, and he told me all about his favorite places to camp and to fish and to four wheel, and somehow the subject of my impending divorce came up, and he confessed to me that he’d just been dumped by his girlfriend.

“It’s awful,” he said.

“The worst,” I said.

“I’ll tell you my head goes to dark places sometimes.” Our sudden intimacy didn’t feel strange, in light of the fact that he was my literal savior. I told him I knew exactly what he was talking about.

“You do?” he said. I nodded. “I’m kind of lucky, though,” he said, “because I’ve got Jesus Christ to turn to. Do you believe in Jesus?”

Fuck. Here we go.

I told him the truth – that I didn’t know what I believed. I thought about the higher power I’d lost faith in somewhere along the way. I wondered if I could even get it back. Strangely, wondrously, he let the subject drop, and told me about the time he got stuck at the top of a different mountain, and then we were coasting into town, and my phone vibrated with a half dozen voicemails from my cousin, each one escalating in fear, and I told Jeff he could drop me at the first open food place, which turned out to be the same DQ I’d stopped at on my way up the mountain.

I slipped Agnes into the backpack, waved at Jeff, then went inside, where I ordered two huge value meals before calling my cousin from the safety of a bright red booth by the window. The next day, after more of my cousins towed my car out of the snow, I’d hit up Walmart for maps and a bunch of camping gear including a portable stove and some freeze dried food, all of which I stored in the back of the 4Runner, and later at my cousin’s I’d check the distance and discover that Agnes and I’d walked together for 18 miles.

But for now I stuffed my face and cooled my heels and waited for rescue, slipping French fries into the hole in my backpack, and she took each one politely with her tiny teeth. “Good girl,” I said. “You’re such a good girl.”