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.

Accidental activist

Human suffering when reduced to sound bites and headlines is easily dismissed.

Perhaps that is why a friend’s lunch guest could announce that the death of a young migrant boy from dehydration was “the mother’s fault” for taking him on the journey.

Perhaps that is why heavily armed vigilante citizens roam the back roads of known migrant routes to pour out the water left at critical drinking stations along the way.

And perhaps that is why institutions have systems that create simplistic “solutions” that ignore the cost to human dignity and safety and, all too often, to life itself.

No one I have met since moving to the borderlands of Southern Arizona moved here to become an activist.

I know I didn’t.

But then something small happened. And then another small thing. And bit by bit, those experiences piled on until it was impossible to NOT see the inhumanity and suffering in this beautiful but often inhospitable landscape.

For one, it was the knock on a back door in the heat of summer…a worn face…an unmistakable desire for a cup of water even in an unknown tongue…a thirst that, if not quenched, would lead to death.

For another, it was walking a desert trail in the neighborhood and finding a dusty, worn child’s backpack under an ocotillo, a well-loved stuffed animal hanging from the unzippered opening.

For another, it was driving home from a favorite canyon walk and noting a young man suffering by the side of the road and feeling compelled to bring him to a local Mexican restaurant where the staff could discover his story and help him recover from weeks of walking in the desert alone.

For yet another, it was the trusting hand of a small child in a shelter in Mexico asking without words to come sit under a mesquite in the desert sun and draw pictures together in a brand new coloring book, The Wall at the border visible in the distance.

For me, it was sitting in a federal court in Tucson with a woman confined to a wheelchair who came nearly every day to bear witness to the tragedy of our legal system as deportation hearings were held.

Young men, brought in chained together like common criminals, were now facing felony charges for what used to be a misdemeanor. None spoke much English. All had translators who valiantly tried to make sense out of complex legal options being presented to those who were so hungry for opportunity in America, they were willing to risk even this.

Experience, up close and personal, has changed all of us. We no longer see headlines without being able to put a human face or story behind each. We can no longer hear statements that dismiss the human suffering around us without sharing our own encounters in the desert. And we can no longer allow lies to be circulated freely without correction.

We all do what we can now.

Some hike into the desert carrying the burden of heavy water jugs to supply the thirsty. Some sit in wheelchairs in courtrooms and are simply present and praying over the lives consumed by the justice system. Some take the stand of truth in the face of rejection by their own families and in their own faith communities.

And me? I listen to stories and commit them to paper and to music and try to put human faces to the headlines. It feels inadequate in the face of so much suffering, but like the widow in the Biblical story,

it is the only coin I have left.

I will die if I don’t eat.

As a child, every morning upon rising, I recall my mother’s first words:

I will die if I don’t eat something when I wake up.

I think truisms from our youth get absorbed like sun rays on the skin, changing our color into a new shade of desperation. And so I too became convinced that imminent death awaited those who did not eat upon rising.

Perhaps this self induced anxiety contributed to food issues later in life.

For my own children, though, not wanting to become my mother, I moderated the declaration:

I cannot function if I don’t eat first thing in the morning.

Somehow that seemed closer to the truth for a gypsy mother raising children, which I considered a step up from the wolf mother who raised me. Lest you find that a harsh description, bear in mind this is the mother who declared her entire lifetime that she adhered to the parenting practice of benign neglect. Her pride in having mastered that technique was palpable. The fact that it horrified everyone who ever heard her declare it always escaped her attention.

For some reason, many of her truisms were sustenance related.

If you drink water, you will get worms.

Every child needs to eat a pound of dirt a year.

When you are young, these truisms get internalized, I think, often in ways too deep to be easily recognized by our daily, conscious, functioning self. But since I am no longer young, I have been experimenting these last few years testing the hypotheses that have ruled my existence for all of my life. And here is what I have discovered:

I do not die if I don’t eat when I get up.

Every sunrise finds me walking on a coffee fueled adventure, and my dead body has yet to be left on the trail. I have not had to drag my calorie deprived body down the trail nor boost it into my car. Some mornings, I manage to hike without even having coffee in my system.

The world is full of miracles.

In fact, I have found that I don’t die if my lunch happens at 3 pm instead of noon, or my dinner at 7 pm instead of 5 pm on the dot. So much anxiety in my youth was fueled by what would happen if meals did not occur on a regular, arbitrary schedule, regardless of connection to actual hunger.

I might also point out that though I am a copious water drinker, I have yet to be diagnosed with worms. To be fair, my mom did grow up in a time when water purification was not a priority, so this may have been true for her. But we were raised in a time when a simple turning of a handle on a faucet brought unlimited, safe drinking water.

The world is full of miracles.

And as for the pound of dirt? Unless you count the dusty expectations that were never met, or the shifting sands of my own perceptions, I believe I am pretty dirt free.

Of all the truisms, though, that infiltrated my developing soul, the most damaging was this:

Mitchell women are different.

This was usually uttered when confronted with a woman who seemed put together and strong and confident. Mom would let me know in no uncertain terms that women like this were shallow and not worthy of imitation.

Since everything admirable in other women was met with derision, I stopped observing or emulating to protect myself from her disapproval and thus never learned the language and culture of women until I spent a week in the North Cascades wilderness on the first all women Outward Bound journey.

That is a story for another time, but I will tell you that the most valuable lesson from the journey was simply this:

Mitchell women are women,

part of a tribe characterized by courage, compassion, and grace, and linked forever together by our shared experience in a world that fails on far too many occasions to notice and acknowledge our strengths and our innate competence, individually and collectively.

We are the glue that holds the world together, whether we dress in designer clothes or tattered jeans. We are the heart and soul of humanity, whether we have monthly pedicures or leave traces of hand clipped toenails on the worn carpets that cover our floors. And we are the conscience of this human existence, whether we run board meetings or cry ourselves through another diaper change, exhausted and alone.

We are women, regardless of our last names or upbringing, and we are a better tribe when we celebrate each other and lift each other up, disdaining the eye of judgement and embracing the heart of acceptance for our unique abilities and passions.

So go forth, tribe members.

Eat breakfast whenever you want…or not. Drink lots of water without fear. And don’t worry about the dirt. Leave it where it is on the ground.

It was never meant for you anyway.