Beaten daily by her parents, a pregnant teen ran into the mountains with $27, a bruise across her face, and no plan beyond staying alive. For three days, she stumbled through the wilderness, starving, freezing, 5 months pregnant, until she collapsed on the porch of a hidden cabin that doesn’t appear on any map.
The branch caught her across the face before she could raise her hands. She stumbled sideways, one palm flying to her cheek, the other wrapping tight around her belly. Blood, warm and thin, trickled between her fingers and dripped onto the collar of her jacket. Above her, the pines stood close together like a crowd that had turned its back.
She kept walking. Her name was Nola Price, and she was 16 years old, 5 months pregnant, three days lost in the Cascade Wilderness of Southern Oregon with nothing but the clothes she’d packed in a garbage bag, and the $27 she’d stolen from her stepfather’s ashtray while he slept. The garbage bag was gone now, ripped open on the second night when she’d slipped crossing a creek in the dark, and the current had carried everything.
Her extra shirt, her toothbrush, the granola bars she’d bought at the gas station in Medford, the ultrasound photograph she’d been carrying since the clinic visit she’d hidden from everyone. All of it swallowed by black water and swept downstream into nothing. She had the jacket on her back, a pair of boots two sizes too big that she’d found at a church donation bin six months ago, and a bruise the color of a storm cloud stretching from her left temple to her jaw.
