By her own admission, Aspen Matis was a “weird, fat mess” when she embarked on the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), which starts in Mexico, winds its way through America and ends in Canada. She felt a failure in a family of high-achievers — her parents are Harvard-educated lawyers and her two older brothers are successful in their chosen fields. Her self-hatred intensified when, on her second night at college, she was raped in her dorm room by a fellow student. She was upset and angry that the college and her family wanted to brush the ugly incident under the carpet.
Walking the famous trail had always been her dream, she recounts in her memoir Girl in the Woods, but it became imperative after she was sexually assaulted. At 19, she dropped out of college and spent five months on the arduous trek. She challenged herself physically and mentally, learnt to rely on her instincts and met her future husband at the 2,000-mile mark.
“I wanted to disappear, to be alone,” explains Matis of her life-changing decision to walk through the wilderness. “I couldn’t listen any longer to other people telling me what to do. My life wasn’t where I wanted it to be, I knew that, and I was the only one who could change it.”
Slender and 5ft 4in, Matis is a slip of a thing who hardly seems strong enough to have walked the entire stretch of America in a summer. She has glossy dark hair, huge eyes ringed by sooty eyelashes and talks in the breathy, little-girl voice adopted by so many young American women. Sitting in her publisher’s office in Manhattan, now aged 25, she is clearly a determined character, but there are hints of emotional fragility too.
She went on the trek in 2009 not only to move past the rape, she says, but to prove that she was an autonomous adult, capable of taking care of herself. All her life, she relates in the book, her overprotective mother pre-emptively made decisions for her, leading her to believe that she wasn’t good at anything.
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“My mom’s intentions were always good but she infantilised me,” says Matis. “She’d come into my bedroom and start putting my socks on, even before I’d woken up. She would tell me, “You will not get to school on time if I do not dress you.” And I would believe her.”
As she got older, Matis would tell her mother to stop. “I’d call her a bitch. I would scratch her. I would kick her. And then she would do it all again the next day, as if she hadn’t heard me. I’d be doing well at school — I was an A student — but her questions would make me feel out of control . . . How much homework do you have? Are you going to finish on time? We developed a kind of sick dance. I’d feel panic.”
Matis had all kinds of neuroses. She was afraid to ride a bike, walk on her own, use contact lenses and swallow pills prescribed by her paediatrician for childhood maladies — they had to be crushed in liquid. She believed she was unlikeable and unloveable.
College was meant to be her declaration of independence, and when it went so badly wrong, it seemed to prove her worst thoughts about herself. After she was assaulted, she says, she asked the boy to sleep over. “He said, ‘You’re f***ing crazy’ and he left,” she remembers. “And then I thought that I must be crazy because I was the girl who had asked the boy who raped her to stay. I was tremendously ashamed and I felt this was evidence that I had terrible judgment and that there must be something wrong with me.”
Matis says she told her mother about the rape, but she seemed dismissive, recommending that her daughter see a counsellor. “She had spent her entire life protecting me and then, the minute I left home, the worst thing that could happen, happened,” she says. “I see now that she was in shock.”
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Her college was also unsympathetic, Matis says. She did not report the rape immediately and after an investigation officials pointed out that she and the boy had been smoking marijuana and there was “inconclusive” evidence of rape.
When she told her parents she was going to hike the PCT, they thought that she was unstable. Nevertheless, they supported her. They paid for her tent and other equipment, gave her a satellite phone and promised to have food waiting for her at remote post offices throughout the trail. Her father drove her to the Mexico border.
Unlike Cheryl Strayed, who walked the PCT in hiking boots and a heavy backpack and who wrote the best-selling book Wild that also became a film starring Reese Witherspoon, Matis travelled ultra-light. Already an experienced backpacker, she knew what gear worked for her. “Most thru-hikers [those hiking a long-distance trail end to end] who succeed are ultra-light because you can’t walk the equivalent of a marathon a day with a 50lb backpack unless you’re really strong and really big,” she explains. “Boots give you blisters but you don’t need them if you’re only carrying a light bag.” She carried 11lb and went through six pairs of running shoes during the hike.
After her father dropped her off at the Mexico border, Matis ran the first few miles, so anxious was she to get away. She describes her feelings of euphoria that she was entering a gorgeous world where nobody knew her and she could start over. “I would walk off my fat, my sadness, the year of my rape. The PCT would lead me to an otherworld, through the sadness I felt here, out of it,” she writes.
On the trail she met a diverse bunch of characters who had given themselves names such as Mystic, Silverfox and Magic. She called herself Wild Child. “You don’t decide to be homeless and sleep in the dirt and deprive yourself of plumbing and all the other comforts if you are super-happy with your life in the real world,” Matis says. “Almost everyone had something they were fleeing or trying to find.”
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She teamed up temporarily with a young walker called Icecap and had sex with him in his tent. She slept alongside him for several weeks but refused his further advances. “In retrospect, I feel terrible. I saw him as a safe place to test boundaries. If I say no, can you hear me? Will you respect it? We’ve stayed in touch and I think he forgives me,” Matis says.
Walking on her own, she nearly died when she ran out of water and food. She stepped over rattlesnakes. She also encountered the legendary “trail magic”— gifts of food and water left on the path by well-wishers and accepted offers of accommodation and transport.
About 400 people started the PCT with her and she says she was not popular in the small and isolated community. She made inappropriate remarks that alienated her from some of the male hikers and saw most of them as predators. One of the hikers circulated untrue rumours about her.
After hitching a lift with a truck driver who took her to his home, she felt unsafe and demanded that he took her back to the trail. She describes this incident in the book as a kidnapping, although she came to no harm.
The high point, Matis says, was falling in love with Dash, a handsome thru-hiker. “It was the first time I’d been in love and it felt meaningful and special. I had my first good sex with him, and my first orgasm. I felt impossibly lucky meeting this handsome, charming, brilliant man who was doing the same pilgrimage as me,” she says.
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The book ends on a high note as she completes the walk. A year later she and Dash got married.
Matis began a writing career and described why she sought healing on the PCT in a New York Times Modern Love column. She included that she had asked her attacker to stay over, bracing herself for judgment, and hundreds of women wrote saying that they had done the same. “What I thought was my own particular shame was actually incredibly common,” she says. “In the aftermath of a trauma, you try to carry on as if it hadn’t happened. I thought that if he slept over and was nice to me then it wasn’t rape. Maybe I could retroactively correct it, but you can’t.”
Girls’ star Lena Dunham said Matis emboldened her to look back at one of her college experiences and see it as rape. “I’m so glad that she can exhale and speak openly and honestly because silence has the rusty taste of shame,” Matis says.
Strayed, who completed 1,000 miles of the trek in the wake of her trauma, has been “warm and encouraging” to the younger writer. “She’s just a true light and she’s given me wonderful advice. Our stories are different; the only commonality was that they both occurred in the same place,” Matis says.
One day her husband walked out of their apartment in Greenwich Village and did not return. He was missing for 43 days before his family tracked him down to a small town in Colorado, where he was living off the grid. He and Matis never spoke again and they are divorced.
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“It was devastating,” Matis says, her voice faltering. “It hurt terribly for about a year, but he helped me to go forward in many ways. I don’t regret it.” She has since dated other men. She has also changed her name from Debby Parker to Aspen Matis. Her new first name refers to an incident on the trail and she has kept her husband’s surname.
Ultimately, her problems were not solved by hiking the PCT. “Nothing is fixed simply by walking in the woods. On the trail I felt strong, fit and in control of my body and myself, but the trail has to end,” Matis says. “On the walk, I got to know myself much better. I discovered what I needed to do to be happy and what my path forward was, which is to write.”
Because she is working on a novel, she has not been backpacking since 2013 but would love to go out in the wilderness again. “I’m ready to do it, but I don’t plan on walking from Mexico to Canada again,” she says.
Girl in the Woods, by Aspen Matis, is published by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, £16.99