The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon: A Stephen King Short
Over the weekend, I indulged in a short novel written by Stephen King. Although he is an author who is mostly known for his horror novels, this was a simple one about a young girl lost in the North American woods. Going into it, I had no idea what to expect, aside from something with baseball! 😂 For anyone who is unfamiliar, Tom Gordon is a famous American baseball player, who pitched for the Red Sox at one point.
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⚠️ There will be spoilers in this review
Our story unfolds upon a 9-year-old Patricia (Trisha) MacFarland. She is lost in the forests of Massachusetts.
Prior to this happening, Trisha recalls how she was just riding in the car with her mother and 14-year-old brother, Pete (her father would be present, but her parents divorced not but a year ago). It is June of 1998, and the three of them are going to hike 6 miles of the Appalachian Trail.
I recall a fond memory of my own divorced family as Pete and their mother argue in the car, with Trisha
"listening to them argue and wondering if she herself might cry, or actually go crazy. Could your family fighting all the time drive you crazy?"
"To escape them, Trisha opened the door to her favorite fantasy. She took off her Red Sox cap and looked at the signature ... It was Tom Gordon's signature."
Similar to Trisha, my sister and I experienced our parents' divorce when I was 3-years-old; my sister and father were the ones who constantly bickered 😅 As such, I often had to cope by locking myself away in my room, and if I couldn't escape, I would try to drown out their fighting.
Eventually, the MacFarland family makes it to the trail parking lot.
The three put on their backpacks as they make their trek into the woods. Pete and their mother continue their argument unfazed, unintentionally ignoring Trisha as they do so... Because of this, Trisha decides to venture off without telling either of them. She needs to pee, and she chooses to do so privately, off the main trail.
The moment put a smile on my face:
"The trick, her mother had told her on that better day in the woods two years ago, wasn't going outdoors ... but to do it without soaking your clothes."
If you're a girl/woman, then you know! 😂 Trying to pee standing up is quite different for a girl than it is a boy--we don't get to just "whip it out"! As such, it takes a certain amount of skill to urinate without soaking your clothes. You need one hand on a tree to steady yourself while you squat, pants down to your ankles, push your clothes back, lean forward a bit, and then you can go for it!
Anyway, when Trisha finishes, she decides to hike onward instead of back, believing that she can rejoin the main trail quicker this way.
Trisha eventually loses her bearings and cannot locate the trail.
She continues to trudge along, making it "a mile, at least." She decides to sit down to examine the contents of her backpack:
"Here was her blue plastic poncho, and the paper sack with the lunch she had fixed herself; her Gameboy and some suntan lotion ... her bottle of water and a bottle of Surge and her Twinkies and a bag of chips."
Trisha also discovers the little doubtful voice in her head: "How could anyone have such a cold and scary voice inside them? Such a traitor to the cause?"
Finally, she accepts that she is lost in the Appalachian forest...
The bugs begin to swarm, and Trisha begins to panic, breaking out into a run.
She realizes too little too late that she is headed for the edge of the cliff! Her only saving grace is a fallen tree dangling over the edge...
Trisha does eventually let go of the tree and lands back on solid ground. After she does so, she faints!
When Trisha awakens once again, it is to a thunderstorm.
She decides to take cover, digging out her poncho then searching through her pack once more:
"In her lunch sack was a hard-boiled egg still in the shell, a tuna fish sandwich, and some celery sticks."
She settles on eating the egg and Twinkie. There is an unexpected surprise as well: she finds her working Walkman!
(Image by WikimediaImages from Pixabay)
(Remember these?! 🤩)
Once she finishes eating, Trisha sets off again, keeping some advice in mind:
As she follows the mountain bluff, Trisha notices a stream about the bottom of its descent. The following few pages detail Trisha's ordeal...
Trisha finally lands at the bottom of the slope; a little beat up, but still in one piece! Her mind suddenly travels to the worst place as the doubtful little voice tells her she must have broken her Walkman... After opening her pack, Trisha finds the Walkman in one piece as well! 🤩 She turns it on just in time for a news report...
"A Sanford woman hiking a Castle County section of the Appalachian Trail with her two children has reported her daughter, 9-year-old Patricia MacFarland, missing and presumably lost in the woods."
Trisha has officially been declared missing...
After devouring her potato chips, Trisha resumes her journey once again. By dusk, she has made it into a clearing, where she decides to stop for the night. She tries to pray to God, and in doing so, remembers the time she asked her father if he believed in God...
"They had been out behind his little place in Malden, eating ice cream cones from the Sunny Treat man, who still came in his tinkling white truck."
Her father went on to say:
"'I'll tell you what I believe in. I believe in the Subaudible. ... That's because you got used to certain sounds. ... Like the traffic goes by outside. We hear those things all the time, so most of the time, we don't hear them at all. They become... Subaudible.'"
This particular part stuck out to me:
"... the little swing-n-gym set he had set up for his son and daughter (Pete had outgrown it, and Trisha really had too, although she still swung or would go down the slide a few times when she was here, just to please him)."
I felt this sense of pity while growing up with divorced parents as well, especially since I only saw my father every other weekend. It felt like I had to make amends to him for being absent from so much of my childhood...
After this, Trisha takes out her Walkman. There is a baseball game playing at Fenway Park. It occurs to Trisha that she has been on her own for 10 hours... As she listens to the game, she indulges in half of her tuna sandwich, a Twinkie, and a few gulps of Surge.
Suddenly, Trisha hears that Tom Gordon is about to step onto the field to pitch the top of the ninth. She has a comforting thought:
"If we win, if Tom gets the save, I'll be saved."
When Darryl Strawberry steps up to bat, it happens--Gordon strikes him out, he gets the save! The Red Sox win against the Yankees, 5-4, and the chapter ends on an unsettling note; something has been watching Trisha...
"A puff of air moved through the woods, ruffling the leaves, shaking the last of the rainwater from them."
The next day is spent once again trudging through the woods, Trisha ever so paranoid that something continues to stalk her...
She begins to imagine that Gordon is lost with her, and she uses this "hallucination" as a sense of comfort. More memories are recollected:
This received another smile from me. I can vividly remember being 11-years-old, just starting to experiment with clothes and a little bit of makeup. One night, before leaving the house to go out with my friends, my dad remarked that I "looked like a stripper;" that comment has stayed with me to this day! 😭
Back to the story, Trisha finds that her stream has turned into a mucky swamp...
"There still seemed to be only two choices: stay put and hope rescue would come, or keep moving and try to meet it?"
"There is a point at which people who are cast upon their own resources stop living and begin merely surviving. ... Trisha MacFarland approached this borderline between life and survival as her second afternoon in the woods wore on."
She decides to cross the swamp. While doing so, she comes across a little "island," filled with Fiddleheads (a type of plant)! But before she can indulge, Trisha notices the severed head of a deer... This causes her to take off!
Trisha manages to follow the stream the rest of the way, until she finally comes across some "clean" running water! Unable to stop herself, she takes a huge drink before finally deciding to settle down for the night. However, a sickness quickly takes hold of her, and she begins to puke.
By the time morning arrives Trisha realizes she is quickly running out of strength...:
"She had to stop twice on the way and give her pounding heart a chance to slow down; she was appalled by how little strength she had left."
Tom Gordon has become a reoccurring hallucination of Trisha's, as she also realizes that she has been missing for over 48 hours.
She eventually makes it to some checkerberry bushes (edible berries, just so you know! 😄) Trisha gorges herself on the sweet, tart fruits. While doing so, a family of deer suddenly emerges from behind the bushes; they have been eating beechnuts (again, something edible! 🙏)! Finally, a feast fit for Trisha! 😂
During the night, Trisha notes that, whatever the thing in the woods is, is still following her...
"Trisha put her arms over the back of her head and waited to be torn open by the thing's claws and stuffed into its fangy mouth."
However, the thing never arrives, and in the morning, she fishes for trout. She is able to catch one using only the hood of her poncho!
Following the stream once again, it dawns on Trisha that it will possibly lead into another swamp. Her stamina is too low for such a daunting task.. Instead of moving forward, she goes in the opposite direction...
"By Tuesday night, the boundary between reality and make-believe had begun to disappear.
By Saturday morning, after a full week in the woods, it was all but gone."
"The girl who had gone into the woods had weighed 97 pounds. ... now weighed no more than 78 pounds."
With such little strength and little motivation, Trisha trudges on. At some point through her endless wandering in the woods, she trips over something and barely has the power to get back up. Before she can stand up, she notices that she has tripped over a long forgotten post... The post was once to a gate--man-made things!
"'This is your last chance, you know. ... It's the late innings now. Don't make a mistake, Trisha.'"
Trisha starts to follow the now-invisible path.
Trisha finds "a truck, or the cab of one, rearing out of the matted undergrowth."
She is slowly but surely making her way back to civilization, although not without its continuing challenges.. For the thing continues to follow her...
"Trisha saw something with slumped shoulders standing on the far side of the road, something with black eyes and great cocked ears like horns. ... It was a god. It was her god."
Terrified, she takes shelter in the truck cab, convinced that the thing is finally going to eat her.. Yet again, she awakes to morning, and finds that the creature had marked the ground where she had slept with a circle..
Trisha continues her journey. A cough irritates her lungs, and when she pulls her hand away from her mouth, there is blood; Trisha is getting worse... Just when it seems that all hope has been lost,
"a sudden rough rattle of distant explosions split the still, morning air ... She knew that sound; it was the rattle of backfires through an old muffler. ... There was a road up there."
With a newfound sense of hope, she moves ever onward... only to finally come face-to-face with the creature.
The God of the Lost instructs Trisha to run if she wishes to live. Trisha knows that she does not have the stamina for such a feat... She knows this is her last chance; she needs to close.
Trisha "strikes out" the bear right on time for a hunter to arrive. A gunshot rings out and the bear takes off--Trisha got the save!
In the end, she passes out, and awakes to her family in the hospital. She discovers that she has pneumonia in both lungs... but she is going to make it :')
"Trisha tapped the visor of her cap, then pointed her right index finger up at the ceiling. ... Game over."
This is a short suspenseful novel whose entirety takes place in the Massachusetts woods. Despite this, Stephen King is still able to create such a rich, vivid environment, is still able to keep the reader intrigued the whole way!
The reader truly roots for Trisha. Her victories are far and few between, but when they do occur, one cannot help but connect with her even more. She is a fragile, sheltered 9-year-old girl who has probably never even been home alone, let alone lost in the woods! 😵
The subtle hints to relate to the reader is also appreciated. Again, there were quite a few moments that had me reflecting on my own childhood and smiling. Like Trisha's memory of dressing up for Halloween with friends, only to have her mother freak out over her "skimpy" outfit 😂 One couldn't tell that it was written by a middle-aged man!
All in all, it was a quick decent read 👍 Not a favorite, but for what it was--a story of a girl lost in the woods--it served its purpose! We witnessed the hardships, the victories, the horrors, but ultimately, we received a happy ending. That's all we could have hoped for 9-year-old Trisha MacFarland.