Accidental adventure Part 3: The mountain speaks

I may be spontaneous but I am not foolish. I research things. Important things. Like what is the best backpack and what is the lightest sleeping bag. And most importantly what are the

best hiking boots to buy when you haven’t hiked in ten years and only have a week to wear them in

Spoiler alert. There are none

But in all my research, which by the way required only “a positive mental attitude and not necessarily good physical condition,” I never checked out the details of our peak climb. If I had, I would have encountered this factoid:

This entire trail is 100% relentless uphill. For comparison, hiking from the bottom of the Grand Canyon to the rim via Bright Angel is 5000ft of elevation change over 10 miles. Desolation Peak is 4500ft of elevation change over 4.7 miles.

No amount of positive mental attitude could compensate for this reality.

However, I was unencumbered with the burden of this knowledge, and as the sun rose casting rays across the lake, I remembered the night before, when alone with one of our guides, I had confessed that I didn’t know what I was supposed to be learning on the journey up the mountain. She looked at me directly and quietly said,

The mountain will teach you what you need to know.

Eager to learn that lesson, when we broke camp I announced I wanted to take leadership for this part of the journey, at least for a little while, so I could practice being a turtle. This was a mountain I would conquer at a slow and steady peace and not burn out before the top. Turning to the trail from the East Bank, I was shocked at the steepness of the trail’s beginning. After a scant ten yards or so, I was already winded.

Less than a half hour in, She Who Needed to Be First called a team meeting. She announced right from the start, “My needs are not being met,” and then launched into an attack of my leadership style. Surprised at the drama, which involved convoluted explanations and further attacks, I simply said, “The lead is yours.” No big deal. I had had my moment in the sun.

Turtle was tired.

Again, I will spare you the nitty gritty of this trek, but about 200 yards from the top, I hit “The Wall,” which I had read about but never experienced. As I painfully took each step, I was flooded with memories of my brother Will’s unsuccessful battle with cancer in his forties. I thought of how every breath he took was so laborious. I thought of his courage and his determination.

If he could fight that battle with so much grace, I could do this.

Not sure of how I could keep going, I took my sight off the trail and gazed upward towards the summit. I was not alone. Another teammate was working her way down the trail after summiting. She looked me over with great compassion and no judgement,

You look tired. Let me take your pack.

It was a statement of commitment and not a request. For once, I did not have the energy to brush off the offer as I would have done in the past, simply to prove I was competent and could do it alone.

I simply thanked her and began to weep.

I wept with every step of those last few hundred yards. I wept when I summited and gazed over the expanse of beauty too wide and too deep to fathom. And then I collapsed on a rocky point and wept again until I thought not a single tear remained.

I missed my brother.

Over the years my childhood tormentor had become an encourager, a fellow explorer of ideas, and, in the end, a friend. The image of him lying on his deathbed in the middle of the night begging me to “Get him out of here,” and calling me by my childhood name had haunted me all these years.

Oh, how I missed him.

One of the instructors came over and quietly asked me if I needed anything.

No. I just need to weep.

And I did. For most of the way down. Every step of the journey down was as excruciating as the journey up. Somewhere about half way down, my knees gave out and my feet lost feeling. And still we journeyed down.

When we arrived exhausted back at camp, the leaders told us not to bother about cooking meals or setting up our tents. First to collapse was She Who Needs to Be First. Several other younger women joined her.

But not the elders. We had all been taking care of the young for years. In our exhaustion and yearning for rest, we did what all mothers do…

We took care of the young.

Several women set up the tents while a few of us started a fire and made dinner. Two of the elders took bandanas and made makeshift napkins and set what would be considered a formal table in the flickering light.

And when it was all done, the younger women hobbled over for our makeshift feast and one of the elders said a prayer of thanksgiving over the meal. I sang a song. Such a tribal feat required a celebration. The elders knew this. And they knew something else as well:

There is no rest until the work of love is complete,

and love, real love, requires community.

All of my life, I had valued my solitary competence above all other attributes. Like a two year old insisting on putting on her own shoes, I had lived a personal mantra of “I can do this all by myself, thank you. No assistance required.”

But self-sufficiency is an illusion.

And what I learned that day on the mountain was that being “self” sufficient does not mean doing it alone. It requires a tribe of encouragers, in this realm and in the next, who see your unspoken needs and extend the right amount of help at just the right time to get you through.

That night it seemed even the stars shone brighter. On my back, choosing to sleep underneath those flickering star lights, my body felt heavy as stone, incapable of the slightest movement.

The Turtle had survived. Slow and steady. One step at a time. Tomorrow would be another day, and fears of what damage had been done to my body this day started to crowd my brain.

But then, as the sky deepened, the Milky Way began to appear once again across the entirety of the sky. Choosing sleep over worry, I remembered,

Tomorrow will bring enough trouble of its own.

And that trouble would not discriminate between the turtle and the hare, the leader and the follower, the plan and the unexpected journey.

Accidental adventure: Part 2- Lessons on an ant hill

The honeymoon ended before the second day dawned.

By the time day one was over, I discovered I was allergic to iodine tablets used to purify the lake water, I had developed heat stroke rowing across the lake to Big Beaver Creek, and I had crossed over into weakest link status in less than 24 hours.

So proud.

Having met so many milestones in such it short time, day two, it seemed to me, would have to be an improvement. Trying to repair my battered image, I volunteered to be first for the canoe rescue training, though my water phobia was still in full bloom at this time.

The goal was simple. Row out into the lake, deliberately flip your canoe, and then, after righting the canoe, put one leg into your canoe and one into the rescue canoe and maneuver yourself back in using the second canoe for support. Voila!

Please keep in mind my admitted lack of physical prowess as you imagine the scene. Canoe flipped. Check. Canoe righted. Check. One leg hoisted into my canoe. Check. One leg in rescue canoe. Check.

What was supposed to be a quick maneuver failed as my lack of upper body strength prevented me from hoisting my then ample form back into my canoe. Despite the cheering from onshore and my desperate need to reclaim some dignity, every attempt resulted in my falling back into the water with my upper body while my legs remained in two separate canoes.

And then the canoes began to drift apart. I will spare you the blow by blow battle, but when I finally completed the task, exhausted, and returned to shore, I dubbed the maneuver “The Gynecologist,” which, given the crowd, did not have to be explained.

Because women understand these things,

and women are different.

The difference became glaringly apparent after our lake crossing when the summer sun was high and brutal. Upon landing, our fearless leaders declared they had a task. We were led to a dirt clearing and after following instructions to form a circle, we were told to cover our eyes with a bandana. Then the instructors wound a rope in an irregular pattern through our hands and told us to find a way to unwrap ourselves.

Voices wove in and out of the task, trying one thing, then another. Time passed. No progress. We were given permission to use our hands to remove the blindfolds. Still no progress. And, as luck would have it, our extended presence on the dirt clearing had caught the attention of the hoards of ants under whose control it lay. And, as luck would have it, they were finding the bare skin on our legs too tantalizing to ignore.

Frustrations mounted as ideas flew in the increased ant activity until finally one of the younger members, a woman from India, suddenly snapped and forcefully grabbed the reins of the task. We were all admonished to be quiet. In only a few moments, she had untangled us logically, and grateful, we broke ranks to set up for the night.

Later that night, we asked our leaders why we had to endure that task.

It’s because none of you were willing to take leadership.

Normally, in a mixed group, those who want to be leaders emerge quickly, they explained. My guess was they were mostly male. But in our group, they noted we kept acquiescing leadership to others and being continually helpful and putting others’ needs first. So they had put us in crisis mode to force leadership to the surface.

As we sat and watched the flames die out, I couldn’t help but ponder the attributes of my new tribe.

Helpful

Not demanding of leadership

Putting others’ needs first.

Sure, it was not a recipe for a quick escape from an anthill, but from my vantage point, these were strengths.

In the flickering flames I could discern the face of She Who Needs to be First and wondered what lessons she had gleaned in the hot sun.

Had I known I would provide her next lesson, I might have tapped out of the experience. But hind sight is 20-20, and the beauty of the Milky Way painted the night sky with a false sense of peace as I nestled into my sleeping bag to contemplate the challenge of the mountain waiting for us at the dawn’s first light.

Accidental adventure: Part 1-Turtle talk

I use the term accidental adventure a lot. But I realized recently that what I actually encounter are accidental opportunities.

Let me give you a prime example. In my forties, I was in the doctor’s office waiting for my physical, and there on the table was an edition of Outdoor Magazine. Now I was seriously under exercised at that point, working full time and raising a family, but outdoor adventures always sounded kind of fun.

A woman can dream, can’t she?

As I turned the pages, a full page ad caught my attention. The first ever all woman Outward Bound trip was happening in my neck of the woods, the beautiful North Cascades, in two weeks.

Normally, I would not have considered this trip knowing my lack of conditioning and any equipment related to backpacking and canoeing. But here’s what caught my attention. Under the details it said,

Good physical condition not as necessary as a positive mental attitude.

Well, score on both counts! Filled with memories of my backpacking days, I did what all idiots of a certain age do when about to embark on a new backpacking adventure in the wilderness. I bought all new equipment right down to my REI leather boots, telling myself a week would be plenty to wear them in.

And then, in the doctor’s office when my blood pressure reading was too high, I asked her to take it a few more times until I could meditate myself into a lower one, and she could sign off for my “physical” for the trip, just another example of my “positive mental attitude.”

But there was another adventure that whispered underneath the surface of this physical adventure. It would be all women…no men to immediately assume leadership due to their anatomy. No loud, rough voices to drown out the dialogues and opinions of the women in their presence. And no fear of safety, no intrusions into my body space that was mine and mine alone.

And maybe, just maybe, I could learn what it was to be a member of a female tribe, to learn the language and customs of my culture that was as foreign to me as the jungle tribes of the Amazon.

On the start of the trip, ten of us gathered from all over the country and boarded a bus to a group campground near our starting point. Placing our packs on the ground, our two guides told us to dump everything out. They were about to teach us what “essentials” meant, and by the end of the lesson, crates of “critical” supplies would be left behind and our packs lightened considerably by the lesson.

We were a motley crew of varying ages. But one stood out to me from the start. She was young, athletic, a former Outward Bound leader, and she filled the air with a brash confidence that suggested the rest of us would never measure up. I dubbed her, “She Who Needed to Be First,” and kept a wide berth.

My goal was much simpler than hers: to not be the weakest link on the team.

Spoiler alert: I failed.

Dropped off at the top of the trail, I placed myself at the rear of the pack, which I deemed would be best for observation of others and which would position me to not be noticed. The forest was filled with summer bird sounds and the buzz of insects. But more beautiful than these was a new sound that filled the air on the rocky path:

The sound of women’s voices.

It was musical and soft and filled with laughter and camaraderie. It was welcoming and joyful and free. And it beckoned to me as though an adopted child from another culture, I had finally traced my roots and found home.

She Who Needed to Be First led the pack, a position each of us would be encouraged to take on during our week of canoeing and backpacking. It was made clear that none of us would be asked to do the job…we would just have to step up and claim the leadership mantle.

But for now, I was content to just wallow in the voices drifting up the trail. I knew a time would come when the internal pressure to step into leadership on the trail would overtake me, and I made a vow that when it did, I would be The Woman Who Walks Like A Turtle.

Slow and steady would be my mantra.

Slow and steady wins the race.

In the distance, She Who Needed Be First had stopped and waited for the rest to catch up. Her disappointment at the first hike’s pace was palpable. But it was, as in all adventures, the honeymoon phase.

And something told me this was going to be a short honeymoon.