Rabid has just been released as an e-book and is available through this link for $5: Libby Zangle has been busy finishing her trail memoir. We are very happy she has been sequestered away day and night writing frantically with her porcupine quill and headlamp. As a result,has just been released as an e-book and is available through this link for $5: http://www.amazon.com/Rabid-Pacific-Trail-therapy-working-ebook/dp/B00JVGFMT8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1398899139&sr=8-1&keywords=rabid+libby+zangle

The Prologue has been included below and an initial excerpt was posted on March 15th on this website.

The trees were tall. They actually were taller than me. Probably taller than most humans I have met. I mean, people don’t usually reach a hundred feet tall, and if they did, it would be super hard to find boots that fit.

But the trees didn’t look all that tall from where I stood two thousand feet above them. They actually looked small, because of this funny thing called perspective that I was learning about in my adventures on the Pacific Crest Trail.

Moments before, a hiking boot had flown from my open hand into those trees. It had bounced several times on the sharp volcanic rocks first. Then it kept falling, pulled downward by this other funny thing called gravity.

I still held the other boot in my hands. It was a big clunky thing made out of skin from a cow and also Vibram. Like most objects made out of matter and influenced by a gravitational field, it had weight. It had laces made out of nylon string. The boot did not fit my foot and it probably would have given me terrible blisters if I had tried to wear it.

Because it wasn’t my boot.

I didn’t wear boots. Like most PCT thru-hikers, I wore La Sportiva Wildcat trail running shoes with Frixion soles and rubber-coated mesh uppers. I never got any blisters from those babies. Oh yeah.

The orphan boot that I held in my hand was useless, as directionless and alone as me. I looked at it thoughtfully, using wisdom and insight to relate the plight of this boot to my own tragic life. Then I sighed dramatically and chucked it over the precipice with all my might. It spun a few times and after several seconds of freefall it landed on an unfortunate marmot. The boot was out of my life.

Its owner was out of my life now too. I stole his boots while he was taking a nap and I brought them to this cliff. He would not be hiking with me anymore. I would no longer have to listen to his jokes or endure his skunky marijuana smoke or look at his greasy locks and his half-buttoned shirt that revealed his yucky tan belly. He had no shoes, and so he probably wouldn’t be able to keep up with me. I laughed to think about how he’d be reduced to making slippers out of duct tape.

I was alone. I was in running shoes. I was unemployed. I had a savings account and a stock portfolio. My mom was still alive. The only things that had to die to get me out here were five percent of the federal budget and a child’s down coat.

In the days before I stole those boots and threw them over a cliff, I’d stolen myself and thrown me over a cliff too. Figuratively. My cliff had brought me to a world that was 2,669 miles long and between one and twenty-four feet wide, but that was only if I never left the trail. A world that would somehow inexplicably give me a brain makeover and cure my depression and compulsive sexual behaviors without the assistance of conventional healthcare providers.

A world that would fix my poor writing habits like using sentence fragments in their own paragraphs.

A world called the Pacific Crest Trail. Dun dun dun! A world that needed some sort of orchestraic chord to emphasize its intensity.

I’d first heard of it only seven years before, when I was asking a classmate for ideas about more places to go backpacking. He told me that the Pacific Crest Trail was pretty cool. It was really long, but I could hike short bits of it, he said. I ignored his suggestion because there were trails that went through higher-quality wilderness in Olympic National Park, and those were closer to my house anyways, and I could hike in a loop there and not just in a straight line. The Pacific Crest Trail went through vast stretches of second-growth forest and crossed lots of logging roads and skirted settlements and went under powerlines and through clear-cuts and past ski resorts. It wasn’t a wilderness trail.

But years later, I met some other people who had friends who had tried to thru-hike the whole trail. None of them had made it. Excessive weight loss and overuse injuries had pulled them off the trail early. My friends told me that the trail was hard. I became a little more interested in the PCT after I learned that. Was I good enough to complete the route?

Then one springtime, I decided to make the trail my back-up plan in case I did not get the park ranger job that I wanted that summer. I was living in an un-insulated house in the Rocky Mountains with an unemployed snowcat driver and a graduate-level poetry student. I was trying rather unsuccessfully to be a competent ski patroller. I learned I was better suited to being a geology student. A national park volunteer. A quiet high school misfit with a bizarre sense of humor. The daughter of two doctors, unaware that food and housing were expensive until I had to pay for it myself. As a child I trespassed on the forested land of my neighbors and built forts and explored ravines. Just as my parents divorced and my father’s childhood sweetheart moved in, I left my household to attend a notoriously gay women’s college where I would become a gender-rejecting androgynous outing club rat.

It seemed like ninety-seven days ago that I had flown south to San Diego, seeing in two hours from my airplane window the landscape that would require me five months to walk, counting the broad powerline corridors south of Mt. Hood and wondering if I would ever manage to reach them.

Now I was in the middle of the wilderness, looking out across those high voltage powerlines and across the treetops and the cow pastures and the logging roads. I looked north. Because I was trying to go north. Not south, like some other hikers. I considered my options. There was only one.

To keep walking.

Or maybe sit down for half an hour.

Or try running or skipping or jumping for the next mile, or hide in the trees and giggle quietly.