So this is my last adventure post for 2020. And it sucks. But some weeks you have the magic, some weeks you don’t. I guess I lost my “mojo” in more than one way. Until I get it back, let’s just get through this, I have a day. A week, actually.
Climber Emily Harrington climbed her way into the history books on November 10th by becoming the first woman to free-climb the Golden Gate route of Yosemite National Park’s El Capitan in less than one day. She topped the 3,000-foot mountain last Wednesday in 21 hours, 13 minutes and 51 seconds.
That’s pretty badass. I envy her reckless streak. I want it. Harrington says she has this constant itch to be on the move, and has to constantly remind herself to be still, take her time and breathe. Her mantra is “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.”
I can relate to the itch part.
One morning in Scottsdale, my friend Laurie and I were lounging by her pool. I felt anxious. Unsettled. Twitchy. It was 9:00 a.m., a chilly desert morning, and we were settled in snugly on deck chairs with blankets and hot cups of coffee. I could see the mountains in the near distance, and I think I muttered something along the lines of “Urmmph.” Laurie looked up from her book.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
I slammed my book shut.
“I’m bored. I don’t feel like sitting here. I came here to hike.”
She closed her book.
“That’s fine,” she said, “then let’s get ready. It’s early, though, we have all day. I thought you wanted to read for a bit.”
“I did. But I’m bored. I can’t take sitting here anymore.”
She stood up and looked at me steadily.
“Mary, you’re like a toddler I have to tire out to get any peace in my day. Let’s go.”
(Wow. But she’s not wrong. Bad things happen when I have nowhere to channel my energy. I twirl my hair. I bite my cheeks. I eat doughnuts. I apply for crazy jobs. I threaten large conglomerates and the federal government. It’s best to get me out).
Two summers ago I visited my friend Tracey in Vermont, and we played around in the Adirondacks- hiking, zip-lining, you know, the ilk, and one day, after a full days’ play, we stopped at a bookstore.
The greatest bookstore.
Once you’ve been to a really great bookstore, you realize that Barnes & Noble sucks ass. Hey, I patronize B&N too, but the fact that they cater to only bestselling books published by the same three or four gigantic book publishing houses who happen to publish 90% of all books published in the world just irks me. My statistics may be off, but you get the idea. So many great books do not get the attention they deserve and ultimately, die small deaths, deteriorating in anonymity.
This expansive Adirondack bookstore featured only nature, travel and adventure books, which tells you something about the wonders of the Adirondacks. I stood in the women’s adventure section for an hour drooling all over my adventure heroines- Cheryl Strayed, Robyn Davidson, Dervla Murphy, Isabella Bird, Martha Gellhorn, Wanda Rutkiewicz, Anne LaBastille…
Anne LaBastille’s book Woodswoman chronicles her life in the Adirondack Mountains. After her divorce, Anne built a log cabin with her own hands, and her independence and self-reliance cause me to pause and reflect on my own. Well, lack of my own. Anne says on page 91:
Camping has become one of my most beloved pastimes. I take a fierce delight in swinging a pack on my back or into a canoe and heading for the hills or lakes. In my opinion, camping can be the greatest expression of free will, personal independence, innate ability, and resourcefulness possible today in our industrialized, urbanized existence. Regardless of how miserable or how splendid the circumstances, the sheer experience of camping seems a total justification for doing it.
You said it, Sistah.
I love slinging my backpack across my shoulders and taking off on a hiking trail alone, with only the most rudimentary of resources and my own common sense. But there is a problem with that theory.
It turns out I have no common sense.
(Pause for a laugh and a head nod from everyone who knows me….)
I almost got lost on a desert trail in Sedona five hundred yards from my chalet. I panicked when I lost the trail, and the roof of the resort office was barely out of sight. Just this past weekend I mistakenly left the groomed path and somehow ended up on the Appalachian Trail. On the AT, white blazes are the standard color while a blue blaze represents a spur/offshoot of the main trail. I must have been admiring the scenery, because I missed the insignia. I walked an hour in the wrong direction before it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen another living soul on a well-trafficked trail on a perfect weather Saturday morning. The backtrack was brutal.
I have dozens of these examples.
I am working on my self-reliance not only in nature but in life. And until any woman has tried going out alone into the wild as a vulnerable female, she can’t possibly grasp the badass insanity of what Cheryl Strayed did in the book Wild. I love this book so much, I love Cheryl Strayed so much, and I love her writing so much, that I throw it across the room when I am re-reading it for the umpteenth time, because her talent and bravery not just in the wild but with the written word just overwhelms me.
I don’t think, no, I know for sure, that I do not possess that kind of courage.
Yet. But as I said, I’m working on it. The push-pull thing. The east-west thing. The sunrise-sunset thing. The fear thing.
So that will be my goal for 2021. Letting go of the last set of fears I have. Most have fled, as you know, if you read my blog. But I know there are still a few, hunkered down in there, just waiting to cripple me when I least expect it.
The rest of this year will be filled, as it is every year, with family. Food. Celebration. Giving thanks. Looking forward to a new year. Many people rue 2020. But I don’t. I started it as one person, and I have ended it as another. Stronger. More grateful. More able to withstand life’s blows. Resilient. Strong. Sure. And in 2021, I will keep up my pace, and look for those markings.
Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.