The country outside my window jumbles and bumps along in a way that is distinctly the Tasmanian bush while simultaneously reminding me of a dozen other landscapes. Hard packed umber dirt sprouts bone white trees which reach their branchless arms skyward. A thousand, thousand cheerleaders waving faded green pom poms of leaves into the flat, blue sky. It’s captivating. Foreign and unique the landscape draws the eye to rest upon the details: a jaunty cropping of rocks, a haggard yet epic ridgeline, stepped flats above muddy waters. I want to stare, to understand and know the lands of this southern little island. I want to mash my face into the dirt and let it tell me its stories. I want to spend not just time, but intimacy with this new place. Which, is just as well seeing as Keith and I are making the four hour drive from Hobart to Queenstown Tasmanian via a stop-over at the long-defunct Waddamana Power Station—because that’s just the kind of engineering nerd Keith is.
Forced to slow down on the dirt roads of the bush, I have my time to sit and watch while a half-listened-to book plays in the background. It’s just enough input for my hummingbird mind to slow and allow me to observe my own thoughts. Fall, I love fall, I think. And I think, I might just be falling in love with this strange little island with its cool, crisp mornings and the feeling of being away from almost everything else. The unpaved, barely inhabited interior of the island is away from civilization, yes, but on a global scale the very location of Tasmanian feels isolated in a way that has called to me. We’re closer to the south pole than we are to Seattle and that sense of vastness, of geographic loneliness breeds a curiosity that verges on longing.
These thoughts, but others as well. I think about sitting on my couch in my tiny apartment, about riding my skateboard and joining a gym. About building a routine for myself—something I both resent and know I do better beneath. Part of me, perhaps a larger part, is ready for this trip to be over. And I sort of hate that. In my vision of myself I am the endless traveler who never tires of the road, whose curiosity is never quieted. But honesty, I’ve found, is so often battering when it forces us to confront the actual that we wish and the actual that we are. When I set out on this trip, I thought three and a half months would never be enough. The great New Zealand circus to which I was running away would never grow tiresome. And in so many of the ways that it matters, it hasn’t grown old. The wonder is still there, nestled in its home inside my heart. But I feel that I have grown weary, and in that found myself wanting, not to stop but to rest, at least for a little while.
Queenstown, interior Tasmanian. Because I absolutely forgot to take pictures today.
The Giant Sand Dunes south of Cape Reinga are a monumental wonder. Blown high by roaring winds whipping off the Tasman Sea they march inland like the shoulders of so many hulking soldiers in formation. As I watch Keith scurry towards the top of the tallest dune all I can think is: I really don’t give a fuck. To which I then immediately feel guilty because shouldn’t I like, give a fuck? To be here, in this moment, near this geographic anomaly. Isn’t this worthy of fuck giving? But the guilt fails to overpower my detached boredom and so I turn my back on the dunes and return to the car. Forgoing a sandy scramble for a snack and a nap.
I’m burning out. And the speed at which we’ve been moving across the North Island has become unsustainable.
We’ve been staying in more places for less time and packing in more social engagements so we can be sure to visit with everybody we want to see. And while it has been amazing, it’s hard to maintain the #stoke when you’re not getting enough rest. The small things, once easy to laugh off become an annoyance. It’s no longer cute finding a stranger’s hair in your underwear after using yet another poorly-maintained hostel dryer. Or having to carry around one muddy sock because it somehow didn’t make it into the wash. Or being confusingly misgendered for the thousandth time by a stranger with a lilting accent. As a result, the things that I really would like to give a fuck about lose some of their sparkle when viewed through tired eyes. Not only am I tried, I worry that I’m failing to travel the at the impeccable standard of constant engagement I feel I owe myself.
And here is where another lesson from my thru hike of the Pacific Crest Trail comes in. When you’re burning out on something, especially long-term travel, you have to acknowledge your desires even if they feel lame or embarrassing. And then you have to change what you’re doing in the sake of self and trip preservation. On the PCT that meant changing when we started hiking each morning, taking more rest days, and spending more time hiking alone so we could really decompress. And it worked, we finished the trail by finding ways to make wading through the bullshit and exhaustion more enjoyable so that we’d have more energy to enjoy the reasons we were on that trip in the first place.
Our time in New Zealand is almost over, and as we drive south to Auckland the plan is not to finish the trip with a bang but rather a bed in a nice hotel. We’re hitting the reset and reset button to avoid burnout after so much time on the road. Because while our time in New Zealand is over, the trip isn’t yet at an end. Next up: Australia.
It’s a damp, greying kind of day, all low clouds and drizzle. It’s a bickering over nothing, irritated at everything kinda day. It’s the kind of day, in truth, that I am always tempted to omit from travelogs and stories told. Filled not so much with painful sweeping truths as grimy little realities of life on the road.
The first hours of the morning are full of Fine. Sure. Whatever you want. Fine.
And then we’re on the road, driving north from little Franz Josef, not so much a town as a dot on the map serving one thing: helicopter tours of the Fox and Franz Josef glaciers. When we stopped there the night before not even the two restaurants in town were open. This morning the streets are empty, as an impending rain storm has shuttered any chance of a helicopter ride. The same storm has also forced us to cancel two additional backpacking trips because of the danger of flooding and becoming trapped in the backcountry; grinding our trip to a halt and leaving both of us frustrated.
But when you’re on the road things don’t stop, they only change direction. So we putter our tiny car into the oncoming rain and begin our drive up the coast. The forecast calls for near-biblical amounts of rain along the West Coast but the storm is late in its arrival and we drive through a landscape ever-changing. One minute windshield wipers flailing against the torrent the next minute the roads are nearly dry and one could be forgiven for describing the sky as just the littlest bit blue. A familiar refrain presses against my lips against the obvious unreality: “what a beautiful day.” But it is, it is a remarkably beautiful day even with the mountains hidden by clouds, the sea blockaded by shrubby green-brown trees. Because bad days happen wherever you are and I’d rather be in a small car on the road than in my small apartment back in Seattle. The joy of being somewhere new, even on the bad days, so entirely eclipses the mundanity of the familiar that I cannot help but say it: “what a beautiful day.”
— We shut off the car in the small town of Greymouth, a former mining town stuck somewhere in the middle of reinventing itself into a tourist town. Too bad there’s nothing to do here.
That night Keith and I lay in bed and watch as the lightning illuminates the sky, bright as a cosmic spotlight but without the accompanying thunder; the melodramatics without the danger. The storm is here but we are safe in our little rented bed for two. A nest of home within each other, not so much us against the world, more like us within the world, a center, a home from which the road doesn’t feel so chaotic.
I am standing in the little kitchen at my parents house. The one that really should be big enough for multiple people to work in but really somehow only accommodates one. Two if you’re just standing, talking as my mother and I are now. When my mother says the smallest thing about how when she was a child she wished she could be invisible.
In that moment I saw something of myself in her, as clear as lightning to the chest. Something dark, forbidden and unspoken. And I knew what she meant in more than simple understanding. I felt it in my childhood core, that desire to be unseen and undone. I wish now I would have summoned the right words. Could have said, in that very moment, “yes, I see you. Yes, me too.”
But the moment was so fast it flitted by me like a startled bird and only now do I have the words and means to better observe what she said, and summon an appropriate reply.
I wonder how many of those poignant moments I have let fly by me in my life.
You see, I spent the winter holidays in Colorado with my family. Talking, and more important trying to listen. As I age I come to understand that my parents have a great deal to offer me in the stories of their lives. And while I was there I tandemly rekindled my love of the Colorado mountains, which instill in me a deep ache. Which, now, with the passage of time help me better understand what my mother said.
Beside that deep ache is something tinged with sadness but isn’t quite. Perhaps longing would better closely capture what I feel. Though longing can take on all matter of secondary emotions such as lust, desire, excitement, and passion. How then, do I convey that I long less to explore those mountains than to be consumed by them. To be, as my mother said, invisible. To be without form or force, but instead as light that plays across the face of a peak. Touching everything but part of nothing. To be as free and simple as a bird. Unencumbered by complex thoughts and bombastic emotions. So strange, it occurs to me now, to hold so dear a dream that will never come true.
In 2014, the Elwah River in Olympic National Park was finally freed of it’s two damns. Allowing the river to return to it’s natural state. In the following years the Elwah began reestablishing it’s flood planes. And as a result destroyed a section of the road that visitors used to access the trail to the Olympic Hot Springs. With swift force the Elwah sliced through the road, destroying it. Suddenly, a 2.4 mile approach to the springs became an 11 mile approach.
Lacking any better sense Starman and I decided to snowshoe into the springs and have a relaxing weekend sitting in the murky, sulphur-smelling water. Actually, we tried to ski into these same springs last weekend and I was too tired, and we’re moving too slow to make it so we bailed four miles in. Then we spent the rest of the weekend in the sound-side town of Port Angeles sitting in a hotel hot tub, eating pizza, and watching garbage television. It was incredible. And I am so glad we took a weekend to mellow out. That being said, we both still wanted to check out the Olympic Hot Springs.
The approach to the springs is long and low. When gaining 3,200 feet over 11 miles you’re always sort of climbing, but it’s never steep aside from the one very short scramble that is the reroute trail directing hikers above the washout. Additionally, the views are nearly non-existent, you’re basically following a road through the woods for all but the original, last 2.4 miles of the hike.
These are the perfect hikes to spend zonked out in thought, watching the sun trickle through the trees all day. I’m working hard enough hiking in the snow to draw some of my attention on the monotonous task of not falling on my ass. But this means the rest of my mind can just wander off, following odd doors and strange left turns through the Escher painting of my brain. You should try it some time.
This hike kicked off our spring training as we work our way back from a fall and winter spent healing from thru hiking, relocating, finding work, and not moving very much. Big trips are not simply built out of grit. They are cultivated through training hikes and weekly gym sessions, as much as passion for the outdoors. Starman and I are absolutely head over heels in love with living in the Northwest, and with each other, too (Hi mom, Hi Carol, I know you’re reading this). And part of this adoration of our new home comes in the form of a galloping desire to explore this land. We have some big objectives this year both near home, and abroad that I’m really stoked on.
Right now Starman and I have trips to the Virgin Island and Puerto Rico, ski touring in the northern Sierras, and a hike around Mont Blanc in the works. In addition I have a week planned off-trail scrambling in British Columbia with a hiker I met on the PCT last summer. Plus we’re looking to climb a couple volcanoes, backpack a ton, and explore this great glorious gorgeous gem of a place.
In addition to hitting the gym, the plan is to go on progressively longer backpacking trips over the weekends. These weekends away are something that I love as well as something that takes a huge amount of time and planning. I know that going out every weekend is far from how the average American spends their 48 weekly leisure hours. But these trips help define the weeks of my life, they remind me that time is passing and to see the planet while I have the chance. To revel my self against her multitudinous skin. Which brings us back to this weekend.
Between the forest walk and the time spent sitting in the algae filled hot egg-fart water like the preposterous great ape that I am, I had a nice opportunity to think about some intentions for how I spend my time. I have recently started a new job as a Copywriter and Video Director at TomboyX (though my actual title is the somewhat meaningless Content Manager). Additionally I’m going to be making an exciting announcement over on my Instagram this evening about an upcoming photography project that I’m excited about, but can’t say more about right now. Which means that the blog is going to be changing, again. Ten points to Ravenclaw if you saw that coming. I know I just said this. But first let me explain why and then I’ll tell you how as well as what you can expect to see here in the future. Because Wild Country Found isn’t going away completely.
I have fallen into the busyness trap. I have a full time job, plus freelance writing, volunteering, working out, planning and going on training trips, creating content for this blog and Instagram, in addition to doing all the other shit like changing my car’s oil and feeding myself! I have bought the line told to us by capitalism which is that we are only as valuable as we are productive. And in doing so, created more work for myself than I can handle. And it’s stressing me out. I want to read books again. I want to have down time to go for a walk or make a cup of tea and look at the spring sunshine. I am no longer interested in trading hours of my life for internet popularity. I will write when and what I want. Boundaries. I’m learning to set boundaries.
So many of you have been kind and supportive over the life of this blog. And for that I am so, so grateful. Your comments have made me smile with pride while others have been beautifully candid about your experiences. Thank you for that. Truthfully, I have agonized over this choice simply because of the kind comments I have gotten here, I read and appreciated them all. But I need time for me. Time to reform my life into an experience instead of a to-do list. So here’s what you can expect.
I repeat: Wild Country Found is not going away. On all my longer hikes I will be writing daily blog posts for each day of the trip. These will publish shortly after I get back from the hike since all my trips this year are shorter than two weeks. In addition to that I’m working on a new photo series profiling women, trans and nonbinary, POC, and disabled folks who get outside and what draws them there. You can expect these to be released like seasons, each with six profiles and portraits, probably only a couple a year. I’m creating the first series now so if you or someone you know (who lives within four hours of Seattle) want to be a part of this series, or future series, please let me know.
What will be going away are the semi-weekly posts. So if you want to follow along I encourage you to subscribe. That way you’ll know when I post. Plus, I never give your information out to advertisers and I’ll never spam you. If you want more regular access to my writing I can be found on a few websites around town. Or you can pop over to my Instagram which I post to more often.
Again, thank you for being here. Look for some more trail writing and cool profiles in the future. Sport Bastard out!
There are endless articles written about how to avoid looking like a tourist. How to fit in, feel like a local, and conceal the fact that you don’t know everything about a given destination. Some of these articles focus on concealing your lack of knowledge for the purposes of safety. But far more promote the idea that to be a tourist is to somehow lack in an essential sort of cool reserved only for locals.
I’m here to tell you the opposite of what all of those articles say. I think you should embrace being a tourist whether you’re visiting or a recent transplant. There is something special about visiting the sights that cities promote as essential parts of themselves. Yes, the Space Needle is expensive and a little cheesy. But it’s also an engineering marvel that offers visitors a wonderful way to orient themselves in a city full of funny shapes and lakes that must be navigated. And sure, the Seattle waterfront is a little kitsch but it’s also teaming with smiling faces.
This weekend I decided to embrace everything that is touristy about this new place that I’m lucky enough to call home. Because enthusiastically taking the same picture that 1,000 people before me have taken doesn’t mean I had any less fun.
On our first day I took Lisa to the Ballard Locks where we stood for hours and watched boats come through the canal into Lake Union. The Locks are one of those activities which sound lame but inevitably captivate people. Watching the engineering necessary to control something as powerful as water, the competent boat hands, and the surging blue of the water itself.
Puget Sound, which nestles against Seattle’s western flank, is shot through with islands to explore while it’s dark waters conceal an entire world of life that is lost to those who live only on land. Both Lisa and I grew up in Colorado, a land locked state where water mostly came in the form of fast moving ice melt that was as deadly as it could be fun. Because of this neither of us have ever been much comfortable around the wet stuff.
But ferry travel is something I find inexplicably delightful. To use waterways as a means for public transit. To connect one city to another by gliding across an open sound. Incredible.
The Space Needle. Seattle was kind enough to give us some wonderful weather this weekend.
Lisa’s last day in town we walked out along the water front and watched the sun set. The sky faded from a bland white-blue to a riot of colors in an instant. Music played from every store front, blending into a cacophony of white noise that was easy to ignore.
Paula Schwimmer is a slight woman in her late 60’s whose close cropped salt and pepper hair scatters around her round face. Twinkling eyes shine out from behind her horn rimmed glasses as she escorts her husband Rafe down a Seattle sidewalk. They hold hands as they navigate the city so that Rafe doesn’t get lost. Since his Alzheimer’s diagnoses four years ago Rafe is prone to wandering off and not being able to remember how he got there.
When her husband’s illness began to necessitate full-time care Paula left her 40 year career as an educator to take care of him. “It’s a different kind of closeness now. When you’re married for so long, you envision growing old together and traveling, doing stuff with the grand kids,” she says. The couple have been married for 38 years. “It wasn’t what I had expected for our retirement,” she says.
——
Days after reading Paula’s words I am lying next to Keith in our dark bedroom; we’re talking about the future . The various adventures that we want to go on this year and in those to come. Dream trips, future locations and where our lives might one day take us. The conversation is punctuated by the phrase “wouldn’t it be cool if” as we circle through mountains to climb, trails to hike. The experiences around which we want to build our lives. And equally importantly, the things that we don’t want.
“Part of being alive is awaiting the revelation” of who you’ll become.”
At 30 I am entering the part of my life where people are less likely to describe my choices as phases. When I tell people that I want adventure instead of children fewer people assure me that I will change my mind. Though, not all. Only time and the eventual onset of menopause will ever render this point moot. Until then, I must endure the pitying looks of aunts and criticisms of unbelieving strangers who believe that, of course, I do not know what I am talking about. People have a propensity for defensiveness if your choices differ from their own. I have long since accepted that a person’s incredulity is rarely about me, but rather about what my choices might say about them. Motherhood still stands as the central definer of womanhood. But I have weathered the endless choruses of disbelief for two decades now and I am used to the storm that comes with taking the path less followed.
——
Despite my bullish urge to resist, the changing of the year has brought me into a period of reflection. I’ve been thinking a lot about choices lately, and which ones I should make to become the person I wish to be. Even though that woman often feels a long way off I feel compelled to dig through the sand to find her, no matter how often the endless gains slide back into place.
“…we aspire to self-transformation by trying on the values that we hope one day to possess…”
The days are getting longer. Just a little, but I can see it in the evening sky as I drive west into the mountains outside Seattle. As I drive I think about Paula, a woman I have never met. A woman who was not even the focal point in the article in which I read about her and her husband. And yet her words “it wasn’t what I expected from our retirement” pierces a barb straight through my heart and I haven’t been able to get her out of my mind.
For better or worse I have always been distinctly aware that death comes for us all. When I was a child I would lie on my bedroom floor, and with eyes closed try to remember what it was like before I was born. My aim was to dredge up memories of life before my life. In doing so I was confronted with a stretching darkness. In the way that all children experiment as a means for learning about the world around them I too was attempting to reconcile my place within the prodigious expanse of time. As an infant might drop a spoon from their high chair again and again just to see how many times their parent will fetch it from the floor, I too was searching for the bounds of what is.
My searching rendered me a devout atheist by the time I entered middle school. What I discovered behind my eyelids revealed that before I was born I was nothing more than a formless, unconscious bundle of dispersed atoms. Presumably, I reasoned, that would be where I would return to.
I have spent the intervening years attempting to answer the question that the beloved, and now lost, Mary Oliver asked of us all: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Apparently, at least in part, the answer is that I will leave the office early, drive west into the coming gloom of dusk and ski uphill in the dark just for the delighted play of sliding back down across the grainy snow.
Nestled next to my heart I carry a small but heavy stone. One that begs me to look upon the beauty of the world in the knowledge of the fact that one day it will all be lost to me. Some days that stone feels so heavy that I worry it might break me right in two. But it also fills me with a resolve to not spend my life in the pursuit of shoulds. I find myself lucky enough to be entering a fourth decade on this planet I am called to pursue the freedom that comes from time spent in the mountains chasing sunsets across ridges and forever wondering what is just beyond the horizon.
Goodbye sweet Mary, you were a light upon this world who called us to see the wonder that is all around.
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across landscapes, over the prairies and deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, in the clear blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting- over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
The first tenuous glow of morning light creeps into the bedroom. Lighting the walls from darkest blue to grey. Revealing the small tidy bedroom I share with Keith, where at the foot of the bed sits: nothing. There are no ice axes propped against the closet, nor backpacks packed and sitting ready to be scooped up at the first blare of an early alarm clock. The emptiness is a promise of calm. Outside a cool, rainy day is blooming into being while I luxuriate in the idea of having nowhere to be. Nothing on the agenda other than the chores that help adult life chug slowly forward.
“In the age of internet over-sharing I have fallen prey to the idea that we must constantly be documenting and sharing in an effort to convince internet strangers that I lead an epic life.”
I have been slow to appreciate these weekends spent indoors. Guilty of the self imposed need to fling myself forward at full speed, never ceasing until illness, injury, or burnout bring me careening to an inelegant forced halt. It has taken time to embrace days spent caring for, or rather about, the less share-worthy aspects of life. In the age of internet over-sharing I have fallen prey to the idea that we must constantly be documenting and sharing in an effort to convince internet strangers that I lead an epic life.
Yet I am growing, learning that there is a sort of gentle joy to be found in moderation and silence. That in caring for things beyond the outdoors I can collect more happiness in my daily life. A novel contrast to the previous two years where preparing for and completing my thru hike of the PCT consumed so much of my attention. To have reached Canada and be released from that singular consuming goal feels like being moved to the passenger seat. Where, without the need to keep my eyes on the road I am free to look around at all of the things I have been missing.
This morning I will drink coffee in bed while reading. I will make breakfast for Keith and myself taking the available time to cook the kinds of foods you can’t eat on the trail. A cheesy omelet with sauteed peppers. Chocolate chip pancakes with strawberry jam on top. While I cook I listen to Vanessa and Casper of Harry Potter and the Sacred Textdiscussing expectations. I delete Instagram off my phone, thus removing any expectation I might place on myself to share, tell, post my life for the benefits of others. Thus removing my own expectations to be good at social media.
11:47 a.m Sunday
I am sprinting after a rubber ball in the rain. My lungs are burning and I know my legs will be inconsolably sore tomorrow after having abandoned any attempt to take it easy as I learn this new game. Gaelic Football, a confusing mess of a sport akin to soccer, basketball, and rugby all rolled into one. But fun, undeniably fun. The delight I take in team sports is being rekindled after such a long absence. Saying yes to thru hiking meant saying no to a great many other things. Because you just can’t have it all. At least not all at the same time. The longer I live on this twirling blue rock the less I am even inclined to try.
Monday 8:17am
 During the bus ride to work I am scrolling through the newly re-installed Instagram. Comparing hashtags and looking at the success of my last few posts. I am debating captions and filters when a little voice in my head reminds me that I don’t have to do this. The outdoor industry as it is portrayed on the internet is not a club I necessarily want to be a part of any more. As I slide past the billionth picture of a thin, conventionally attractive, white person standing with their back to the camera as they look at a mountain peak with a caption about following your dreams I almost throw my phone out the damn window. Luckily they seal bus windows to prevent these exact morning existential rage meltdowns.
The further I scroll the more the images look the same. Each post about sending it. Crushing it. Conquering a climb. Being stoked. Living the dream. Epic to the max. Type 2 suffer-fest fun. Beautiful people in beautiful places saying nothing much at all.
On the internet the outdoors is for escapism, not activism. Full of people who quickly become defensive at any political comment or critique that the community could do with a little diversifying. I cannot begin to recount the number of times I have heard a fellow white person say “I’m not here to discuss politics, I’m here to escape it!” And while we are all entitled to take space away from the quagmire of political vitriol, I find that those who are the safest in our society are those who can best afford to check out and get out. Both emotionally and financially.
And here I have a choice. And so do you.
I can continue to post image after image of the beautiful images I have been privileged enough to visit, toss in an inspirational caption about freedom, maybe a questionable quote from Edward Abbey. I can continue to portray the outdoors community as white, able, thin, and wealthy, continue to consume media from accounts and brands who do the same. Or, I can make a different choice. The reality of which, isn’t much of a choice. Because hard choices come when you have something to lose. Sure, I want people to read what I write and I want them to like the pictures I take but it’s not the end of the world if they don’t. I’d rather be honest and unpopular than promote an ideal I don’t think is helpful.
“…if you don’t know something, you can’t love it. And you won’t bother saving something you don’t love.”
As a lifelong member of the outdoors community I can say we could do with a little growth. And the first thing I’d like to see us do, as a community is to be more transparent about what it means to get outdoors. There will always be the athletes doing first ascents in wild places where no person has ever been. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t also room for walking 100 feet down a trail and sitting on a warm rock in the sun. Or going on your first overnight trip. Or your first hike period. You don’t have to be outside at every opportunity, fair weather hikers are still hikers. It all counts. We should celebrate it all.Â
By opening up the definition of what it means to be an outdoors person we will be rewarded with a more diverse community of folks who know that they have a place in the outdoors, who love these wild spaces. Because if you don’t know something, you can’t love it. And you won’t bother saving something you don’t love. And folks, this planet needs our love, needs saving. So let’s lower the standards of admission into the outdoors and let everybody in.
The ground below me feels perilously steep. A long white chute of snow dropping away towards the valley floor. I step, and step again and the snow beneath my boots shifts a little and my whole body tenses. Far below me Keith is watching my painfully slow process. His mountaineering confidence and skill allows him to move quickly and easily across the same terrain I am clinging to like a frightened cat. Moments before, as he plopped on his butt and prepared to glissade out of sight he offered these parting words. “Remember” he said, “if you do have to self arrest lift your feet. If you dig your feet in while wearing crampons you’ll probably break your leg.” Casual, good pep talk.
I step, and step again. Repeating to myself “French step, French step, French step.” I am not even doing a proper French step–a mountaineering move in which you cross one leg over the other as you zig zag across a face–but the phrase focuses my mind. French step. French step. Ignore the dozens of ski tourers shuffling up the face around me. French step. French step. Ignore the couple having a shouting argument, the woman at the bottom of the hill too scared to go on, her boyfriend above me too ignorant of her fear to do anything helpful. French step. French step. The hill levels out and I stare around in wonder. It is so beautiful here.
The City
It’s Monday and I’m sitting at a red light watching cars stream past my driver side window where, through a combination of rain water and grit clinging to the glass, they melt into undistinguished blobs of light and motion before passing out of view. Above me, warm lights shine down from so many apartment buildings, glowing indicators of their invisible inhabitants. A reflection of a building, a city, a world full of so many people. Seen from the reverse I suppose I am just another invisible city dweller as indicated by my car’s headlights. In the span of a breath I feel my entire life collapse around me and I am left wondering how I came to be here. In this life, in this city, sitting in this body at this traffic light on this night. The light turns green.
“…is happiness a choice or a gift or a circumstance.”
As I drive through the rain blackened streets I perform a series of invisible yet impressive mental gymnastics. I think about the temp job I am working. I try and parce my feelings from each other but like a tangled ball of twine I cannot figure out what each string connects; what everything leads back to. I wonder if I am happy; is happiness a choice or a gift or a circumstance. I think about money and student debt and about the small apartment that Keith and I share. The choices of comfort and the resultant financial responsibility. I think about an alternate life, one in which I didn’t go to college, didn’t incur this wet blanket of student debt just to squeeze myself into the trap of specificity. I wonder if this other self would be happier. Or maybe I’m am simply dousing an imagined life in nostalgia, staring through rose colored glasses at a path not taken.
Or maybe it’s all irrelevant because I did go to college and graduated with all the accompanying debts and privileges and options and trappings. And now here I am in this life, in this city and the only option is to move forward. It’s the only option that is ever available to any of us.
The Plan
Before I found myself standing in a snow chute trying to French step my way off a mountain I felt the pull to escape the city. Our plans began as they so often do, as half formed ideas on a Thursday night which, by the miracle of the internet would be fully formed by Friday night only to be rethought on Saturday morning and finally acted upon.
 “A brilliant last hurrah in celebration of a day before the world turned to black and we were forced to scurry into our tent like the small burrowing mammals that we are.”
On Saturday we left my car in an empty parking lot in Mount Rainier National Park and climbed up the shoulders of the giant sleeping beast. Above us was only a grey bowl of clouds and in the distance we could hear small avalanches sliding off the Nisqually Glacier.
We climb up up up towards the clouds into a land of white until all of a sudden the sky dropped away and the world was flooded with a pastel dreamscape sunset. A brilliant last hurrah in celebration of a day before the world turned to black and we were forced to scurry into our tent like the small burrowing mammals that we are. Bundled in the misty interior of the tent we laughed and ate half frozen snacks, taking unflattering selfies because one day I’ll want to look back and be able to remember this. Because one day I may no longer be able to. Sitting inside the tent felt like a return to normal, a shedding of all the trappings of society until we could simply be. Away from the myriad people and needs of a city. It felt like being back on the PCT, like tentative normalcy.
The Process of Starting
It’s been a little over two months since Keith and I finished hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. In that time I feel like I have arrived at the start of what can whimsically be called the next chapter of my life. I worry that it’s going to look surprisingly like the last chapter. Weeks spent working in a large city, apathetically trading hours of my day for money. While on weekends we flee to the mountains to press the reset button on contentment. I wonder if it will be enough.
At 30 I have somehow found myself at a crossroads between the two world views with which I was raised. When I was a child I was told to follow my dreams, to pursue passion and to live a life of intensity. At the same time I was taught that the American dream way my responsibility and right to pursue. The house, career, car, and children were the epitome of normal, of expectation. So was the high flying life of dirtbagging adventure. However, it doesn’t take an overly skilled observer to see that these lives are at odds with each other. Be risky and responsible, daring and dutiful, adventuresome and adherent. And I did it, I did what was expected of me.
I have spent time dedicating myself to my career. Spent weekends in the office and burned the midnight oil. Then, I spent a glorious sun-drenched summer following my passion for the outdoors and living a life or irresponsible freedom. In the end I found neither to be sustainable. I have checked the boxes, been a good worker bee and an inspirational traveler. Put my nose to the grindstone and wandered in the woods and after all of that I am left with nothing more than questions.
I find myself in the muddy middle ground of life after an epic adventure. At the start of the narrative that so few bother to tell. Where expectations give way to honest desires and the realization that I am not entirely sure what those desires are. But I think change first comes from the willingness to open oneself up to possibilities. To look around and imagine that things might be different than it is even possible to know. So while I stand on the banks of a future I cannot see I will allow myself the grace to be happy with hitting the reset button of contentment each week as I escape into the mountains. I don’t know if it will always be enough. But for now it is. It’s enough.
