The PCT, I learned, was a continuous wilderness trail, 2,650 miles long, that traversed the entire length of California, Oregon, and Washington, passing through national parks and forests through deserts and mountains across rivers and highways. On a shelf I saw a book called The Pacific Crest Trail: Volume 1: California. Three and a half years later, I was at an outdoor store in Minneapolis. I was wrong about it being impossible for my mother to die: She lived only 49 days after learning she had cancer. Not just the parts of her that I knew, but the parts of her that had come before me, too. But now that she was dying, I knew everything. And she’d told me, laughing and asking why on earth I wanted to know. All growing up I’d asked and asked, making her describe those scenes, wanting to know who said what and how, what she’d felt inside while it was going on. How, when she’d broken the news of her unwed teen pregnancy to her parents, her father had dropped a spoon. I knew how she met my father the next year and what he seemed like to her on their first few dates. I knew she’d lost her virginity at seventeen with a boy named Mike. I knew the names of the horses she had loved as a girl: Pal and Buddy and Bacchus. She’d been so transparent and effusive and I so inquisitive all my life that we’d already covered everything. On good days she sat in a chair and talked to me. I cut my classes down to two days a week and afterward drove the three hours north to be with my mother. if it killed her, she said, and we laughed and then looked at each other darkly. She herself needed to complete only a couple more classes to graduate she would get her B.A. I wanted to quit school, but my mother insisted that I still get my degree.

Cheryl strayed vogue