Returning to New Mexico a couple years later, I joined fellow teachers on short hikes. In cross-country skiing, I learned about cardio and the quiet of a snowy mountain. Downhill skiing, I felt the exhilaration of speed and, initially, the fear of a tumble as I approached the end of a run and didn’t know how to stop. I also met others who enjoyed outdoor… excursions. (One had just backpacked the John Muir Trail, a two hundred miles trek from the Yosemite Valley and to the summit of Mount Whitney.) In addition to hiking mountain and desert, we went spelunking and rock climbing. With a borrowed backpack I joined them on a weekend trip, learning the thrill and exhaustion of carrying all one’s gear.
Soon after, I bought a cheap frame pack, a decent hip belt, and a good sleeping pad. I only used the pack a handful of times but I relished visiting wild places while challenging myself in ways I never had before. Having joined a few trips, one July day I headed to California. My powder blue Escort rebelled at the dry heat of Death Valley. Every twenty minutes I’d pull to the side of the road and let the radiator cool enough to add water before continuing. Finally reaching higher country, I spent the next day waiting as a mechanic procured, then installed, another radiator. With the car again dependable, I toured Devils Pilepost one day, then walked the path up and down Mount Whitney another, jogging the last mile or so before dusk became dark (and me with no flashlight).
After partaking of these and other light romps, I drove to Yosemite, registered at a ranger station, threw the pack on my back, and started walking. If you missed it I was alone, my first, and only, solo backpacking trip. Glorious! I’ve never since been so present in my skin as to recognize by touch whether that brush of contact on the arm or neck was a mosquito, fly or spider’s line.
Being small in stature, I’d opted not to add the weight of a tent to my pack. The second morning, my left eye was swollen shut from an insect bite. On what was to have been the third of four mornings, I awoke to find that I hadn’t slung my food bag high enough up the tree to evade bears. A few grains of rice, two dehydrated peas, and some bright red crumbs on the ground below were all that remained. I’d enjoyed freeze-dried strawberry slices the night before, savoring the sweet-tart zing on my tongue. Wanting the prolong the experience, I had left half the package for the next night’s supper. I wished I’d eaten them all! That day, as the chocolate chip cookies in the car called to me, I hiked twenty miles downhill, arriving at the parking lot around 10:00 p.m.
Until quite recently, that trip marked the end of my great outdoor adventures. Within three years I married, had a child, bought a piano, and got a mortgage. I settled into a traditional life, learning a little about plumbing, paying the bills. The American dream. To say that I failed would be inaccurate. I may have done poorly in marriage (I’m too close to assess) but my kids are amazing and I wouldn’t trade them for a world of adventures. Those years, both the good and bad, made me who I am.
But that was The Box, and not my box. Stepping out of it, I began peeling back layers of assumptions and wrong beliefs, slowly coming to know myself.
Recently I was instructed to ask each morning, “What does Jayneann need?” Sometimes a response comes easily. Other times I have no answer. In those moments I remind myself that re-membering is a process and that as I continue to reclaim who I am, more often I will know.
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