Be Not Far from Me

Ashley finishes the last of the possum meat and continues walking, thinking that with human expansion, she’s bound to come across some kind of road or trail eventually. She thinks back to the gas trucks that used to drive on the country road past her trailer. She always hated their presence but would love to see one of those gas company trucks now.

Ashley flashes back to the time Davey taught her to spot animal trails. Instead of looking at the ground and searching for the trail, the best way to see one is to look halfway up the trees and see it in one’s peripheral vision. As Ashley scans the trees for the white blazes that mark the hiking trail, she spots a deer path using Davey’s method. She decides to follow the trail and comes across a group of fawns grazing. Ashley knows she neither can kill one with her bare hands nor consume enough of the meat to justify killing one, so she just stops and enjoys their beauty. When the mother deer notices Ashley, the deer doesn’t spook, and Ashley realizes she’s in trouble. She must be so far from people that the deer don’t know to be afraid of humans.

Ashley can feel her body declining. When it starts to rain, she allows herself to stay under the pine where she spent the night because she knows walking in the rain will do her no favors. She knows her mind is wearing thin too; she spent most of the previous day thinking about cheese. As she munches on grass, she feels the way her body is wasting away and her bones are sticking out. She recognizes that her time in the woods has forced her to discover herself in a deeper way, and she knows she wants to survive so that she can make some things right and become a better person. Ashley promises herself that tomorrow she will keep moving, but for now, she curls up with the moldy blanket from the meth lab and what’s left of Davey Beet’s hat and sleeps.

Even though the rain continues into the morning, Ashley forces herself to keep moving. Part of her motivation comes from killing the possum; Ashley refuses to let its death be useless. As the storm intensifies, trees start to fall nearby, and lightning is striking close. Ashley feels like all of nature is set against her, and, in a moment of desperation and raw anger, Ashley tosses aside her walking stick and starts running. She runs blindly through the rain, feeling free and accepting that she will likely die in these woods. Her energy is gone, but her willpower propels her forward, and she continues running even when the storm passes. Eventually, she falls down a ridge and sustains several minor injuries from the tumble. She lies still for a while before starting to crawl when she sees a tent. She hides at first, observing the tent from a distance. Ashley notices that the tent pegs are rusted, and then she spots a faded backpack outside the tent. It is Davey Beet’s backpack.

Ashley gathers the courage to unzip the tent, and she finds Davey’s decayed body curled into a ball. She wonders if some kind of connection was drawing her to find him all this time, and she cries for him, mourning this confirmation of his death. She talks to him and tells him about her time in the woods so far before falling asleep next to his body in the tent.

When Ashley wakes in the tent, she notices a photo of a beautiful blond tucked into the tent support poles overhead. She knows this must be the girl who broke Davey’s heart, causing him to leave for the woods. Ashley wonders what this girl has that she doesn’t and wonders if Davey was ever attracted to her. Ashley sits up and finds the resolve to keep going. She doesn’t want people to say the same things about her that they do about Davey: that she left for the woods and never came back because she was heartbroken over finding Duke and Natalie together. This idea motivates her to leave the tent and press on. She takes a few supplies, including Davey’s hat, knife, canteen, and tarp. She ties a rock to a red bandanna and throws it up in the trees, lodging it there to mark the spot where Davey lies. As Ashley starts to walk, she thinks of her dad. She used to pretend to be asleep so that he would carry her to bed, and he made her feel safe and happy. He also helped foster her love for the outdoors. They spent a lot of time together in the woods, mostly because it was free and they couldn’t afford other activities like bowling or the community pool.

After about a mile of walking, Ashley checks on her foot. She lost her makeshift bandage when she ran through the woods, but she took some socks and antibiotic creams from Davey’s pack. She cleans and dresses her wound and finds a new walking stick to use. Ashley knows she’s a sight—the whiskey bottle broke when she fell, but she still has the broken top tied to her belt loop, her dead foot bulges in a sandwich bag, and she wears the moldy blanket around her neck as she presses on.

The next day, Ashley washes in a creek and, finding a tick on her scalp, eats it. She also attempts to grab a fish from the water with her bare hands, a skill Davey made look easy back at Camp Little Fish. She’s eventually successful, and instead of taking the time to cook the fish, she eats it raw, while it’s still alive. Her stomach can’t take the shock of food, and she vomits. It’s still alive and flops back into the creek before she can grab it again. Ashley is reminded of the biblical story of Jonah, which she heard at summer camp. Ashley makes it another half mile before needing to stop again. When she does, she thinks of the many things she’s done wrong that she wants to make right. She thinks of apologizing to Duke for breaking his nose, telling her dad that she loves living with him and doesn’t mind the trailer, and telling Laney Uncapher that she would have won the race if Ashley hadn’t punched her. She thinks of her friends, too. She wants to tell Meredith she loves her despite their many differences; she wants to tell Kavita how much she admires her strength. Finally, she wants to tell her mother that she needs her and wishes she had tried harder to let her mother take care of her.

Ashley sleeps for an entire day and night, waking only when she feels a squirrel on her face.

Ashley thinks of words from her cross-country coach after the district championship race in her sophomore year. She collapsed after crossing the finish line and couldn’t get up, but her coach told her she couldn’t go home unless she got on the bus herself. She’d found the strength to get back up then, and she does the same in the woods now. Certain she will “[hit] a finish line today” (178), she will either find a way to get back home or die trying. She takes her foot out of its sling to make better time, and after a while, she stops to examine a scrape on her foot from a sharp stick. While she’s stopped, rain starts to fall, and she hears the drops hitting metal nearby. When Ashley investigates, she finds an oil well with a ladder. Upon climbing the ladder, she sees beautiful endless trees, and when a section of mist lifts, she also sees electric lines in the distance.

Ashley feels a renewed sense of hope. She finally has a destination to walk toward, and she focuses her energy on moving forward. She reaches the electric lines before long and loses her balance from staring up at them. She falls facing a utility station and sees people in orange vests moving around it in the distance. She sits frozen for a moment, her limbs so heavy and her energy so depleted that she cannot get up until something clicks inside of her. She has no one to carry her, and she finds herself on her feet, running and screaming toward the people and utility station. They see her and run toward her, and Ashley collapses in front of the man and woman when she reaches them. She tells them her name and asks for help.