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.
Suddenly it was October. It felt like I woke from a fever dream and suddenly it was October. Somehow. But how? Somehow the spanning months between February and October had slipped past me like a fast flowing river, depositing me on the far side of a lake. Filled with torrential grappling, struggling against my flailing mental health the months dragged and bounded past me. Psychiatry and therapy appointments, medication changes, dark days, brief spiraling highs. Somehow it was already October and I wondered where the year had gone.
July 13th. Happy Birthday to me. The dour, tumultuous moods that had followed me since February persisted and now I was 31. My gift to myself was a solo backpacking trip to the Enchanted Valley in Olympic National Park. Following a long, river-cut valley, the trail meanders along until finally the valley widens below glacial ridges. The hike is dotted with little idyllic river-side campsites, each one called my name, entreating me to stop. My energy levels were failing, a physical manifestation of the illness in my brain, I desperately wanted to stop.
When things fall apart I cling to normalcy. Convinced as I was that faking it until I made it was the only way through I pushed on my hike. Eventually, eventually I made it to my valley floor campsite with a view of the river where I sat under a tree and tried to draw the darkness in my brain. It helped. Drawing almost always helped. It became central to how I understood my mental illness and I never left home without a sketchbook.
The next day I hiked out, I drove home. Driving into Seattle I pulled into a tattoo shop. A spontaneous birthday present to myself. A simple, short phrase but the pain of the tattoo needle along my ribs was exquisite. Maybe that’s why I chose the spot, chose the phrase: never too late. That night, in the darkness of my bedroom I ran my fingers across the raised skin on my side. As though touch they would give me strength. As though by inking the words onto my body I would remember what they said and I would make it through this ceaseless storm. Never too late.
August. The Loowit trail runs a low, bobbing loop around the base of soaring Mt Saint Hellens. But on this trip the decapitated peak was hidden from view by low drizzling clouds. As I hiked the 32 mile circumnavigation I struggled to dredge up the elation I used to feel at these weekend trips. The clouds, like my mood, hung heavy and damp. Unenthusiastic emptiness, grey and bland.
Underneath my apathy roared spikes of outrage. Though quickly tampered they demanded to know why I could no longer connect to the joyous child within me. The part of me that rushes headlong into the natural world eager to look, to see, to breathe in the scenery through my very skin and be made whole by it’s embrace. I was out here but I was trapped within the cage of my skull. I was miserable. But the joy of hiking is that you can’t quit until you are back at your car. So I walked and waited for the trip to be over. The well I was trapped in was dark and deep and at times I felt certain I would never make my way back to the surface.
September. The rumbling plane swept me eastward towards the European continent. Starman sat beside me. We were on our way to hike the Tour du Mont Blanc. A 108 mile circumnavigation of the Mt Blanc Massif running through France, Italy, and Switzerland. In the weeks approaching the trip I knew something was wrong. I knew that despite new medications that something had never been made right and it was getting worse by the day. But I wasn’t on this trip for myself, I was on it for Starman. Normalcy. Just pretend to be normal I told myself. I wanted nothing more than for Starman to have a good time, after all his planning, after months of worrying after me I needed this for him more than I wanted health for myself.
And I did make it through the trip. There were minimal tears and no fights. I saw Starman snap photos and drink beer. We stayed at refuges, met chatty Brits, ate fondue. It was good, but inside I was struggling to hold on. From one hour to the next my mood would surge and the drop out below me. For half a day I would be in tears only to be laughing and joking with strangers over dinner. It may come to be one of my greatest regrets that when I looked upon the Alps for the first time I felt a hollow, buzzing nothing. My head was a fluorescent bulb, at once too bright and sickeningly empty.
Then it was mid October and one more wonder drug in my cocktail and I was stable. I did everything and nothing and somehow things got better. I was elated. I was enraged. How could everything simply get better with one drug. I felt impotent in my health, I could take no credit other than having lived through the ordeal. Though perhaps that is credit enough.
The episode was over. The summer was over and with it came the rains. The clouds closed in around Seattle like silence, and I marveled over this glorious blue dot. The indecisive weather left me in the hinterland of seasons. I felt I had missed spring and summer, I had missed so much of 2019 it felt like a personal loss. In October I walked through the city and waited for winter to come. In October I began to look forward to the coming snow. In October I was glad that I could look forward to anything at all.
We leave Reykjavik under a heavy sky that is just beginning to lighten. It is 10am. Starman pilots the car through endless roundabouts as we make our way north out of the city. After 40 minutes the low buildings of Reykjavik drop away and we are deposited into rolling countryside, hemmed in one one side by an expansive ocean while the other rises quickly to mountains ground flat by immense glacial rivers.
This land feels desolate and removed from modern time. Only the occasional gas station with its neon lights creates a tenuous link the present. Though Iceland has only been inhabited for 1,000 years, the remote hamlets and farms feel ancient beyond scale. The world is pale grey sky, black rock and umber grass.
I dream about living here, alone and distant. In this fantasy I occupy a small cabin, just a single room with a loft for sleeping. Warm wooden walls and a fireplace to heat. In the summer I would walk in any direction I chose, climbing mountains, following streams and drinking from their cold waters. I would grow a garden under the endless sunlight and in the evenings, sit on the porch and watch the sun dip lazily across the southern sky. Feeling the Earth turn as the seasons march forward.
In the winter I would draw myself close against the dark and biting cold. During the short days I would ski slowly and without intent across the land, returning home in the evenings to melt snow for water and watch the wind blow patterns in the snow. I would marvel at the changing face of the land, both familiar and born anew each season. I would read and write and burrow into my solitude like a warm bed. Contented and held by the land, by the desolation of this small, imaginary cabin.
And in the spring I would re-emerge into the sun and into a life with people. Having been healed by time and space and loneliness.
I have been in Iceland for less than 24 hours and already this land calls. Speaking a language I didn’t remember knowing. Something in my bones aches to be ground down by the wild remoteness of this land, I wish to be unknown as I come to know this place. Perhaps, I think to myself, it would be possible to live here one day.
On our second day in Iceland we drive to the black sand beaches of Vik and I pretend that I am standing at the end of the world. The Atlantic stretches like gunmetal to the horizon. A brutal, cold sort of beast whose mere proximity stirs something desperate in my mammalian chest. Danger and awe. I am fragile and impotent standing next to such a force. I relish its power to destroy me and I am smothered in the presence of vastness, of enduring authority, of power without scale. Water not for play, but as a vast mote around a small island.
The water takes many forms in Iceland but none is as captivating as the waterfalls. Foss, as they are called in Icelandic. Gullfoss, Iceland’s most iconic and popular waterfall drops like curtains into a gaping maw of a canyon. And we stand on its rim and oggle like children at the size, the urgency with which the water flings itself forward and down through slot and sluice. The roaring of the falls is seconded only by the wind. That perennial Icelandic wind, pushing at our backs as we run to the car. Feet slipping in the mud and snow Starman and I laugh until we are gasping. Past the accusing eyes of tourbus pedestrians we fly. Each step a leap of faith that we will come back down to the ground. Any moment we could be carried away by the wind and set free.
Like any first attempt at love it is over too fast. Eyes widened and cheeks wind-burnt I find myself at Keflavík Airport. It is time to go home.
The flight path to Seattle travels north over the arctic and from the window I can see the mass of hulking white below me. The vast, craggy expanse of the arctic is enchanting in the dregs of daylight. I cannot help but stare and wonder. Wonder what it would be like to walk day and night across the ice until northbound travel becomes south. And I become nothing more than a laugh on the wind, alone in these northern places that call to me.
For more photos find me on Instagram @karaontheoutside
