Authors: Laura Fraser
I flew to Greece and stayed as long as Grandma’s money lasted, which was nine months, ten countries, Liron in Israel,
Antonio in Spain, and Julian in London. Each place presented new discoveries and passions, bright and fresh, that dulled the memory of that brief summer romance. I ate just-caught calamari grilled with ouzo, swam in hot springs after work on a kibbutz, went on a camel safari with Bedouins, climbed Mount Saint Catherine at sunset, danced flamenco in Seville, had a Turkish massage in Budapest, fell in love with Italy, and drove through sweet country villages in England. There, Julian was difficult to leave, tears streaming at the airport, but after living with him for a month in Hampstead Heath and getting a job waitressing in a pub, I realized I didn’t want to live in London forever, that the journey couldn’t stop there, not with him. (Recently I heard from Julian, who e-mailed to say he’d read a story I’d written about having an international affair: “We don’t really change much, do we?”)
That trip established my penchant for travel—with its endless art, food, languages, and people to explore—as a distraction from emotional pain. I also realized, publishing my first freelance feature article in the
Jerusalem Post
while I was living on a kibbutz, that you can justify the whole footloose business by writing a few stories along the way. And even when I don’t muster up any serious work, when my career is hardly careening along as fast as it should be, here in my prime, going on trips can be a handy diversion from that very fact. It strikes me that when I’m traveling, I have stories to tell and postcards to send, and I appear to be accomplishing something in life just by going to exotic places. My friends with their husbands and children and carpools and Tater Tot tantrums think I’m lucky, I’m free, my life is immeasurably more interesting than theirs. Maybe I’m not churning out books,
but I’m writing articles published in glossy magazines that they’re happy to read when they finally get a chance to sit down to have their highlights done. It never crosses their minds that I might wish to have some of their cozy and boring stability.
At home, with my suitcase still unpacked, I’m afraid I’ve reached a point in my life where, despite all of my traveling, I am not moving at all.
I
TALLY UP
my frequent-flier miles and consider which friends I could stay with in foreign countries, then search around for tickets, but I can’t come up with anything right. I’m perplexed. If I’m trying to escape my feelings about the person I used to rely on to escape my feelings—or if I’m running off from the uncomfortable realization that I’m always trying to run off—it all sort of cancels itself out. The only thing that’s clear is that I need to go somewhere. But if I went to a foreign city with great museums and restaurants, I’d just miss the Professor.
The one place I could really lose him would be in the wilderness; he’d never find himself anywhere that doesn’t sell Gitanes and a good espresso.
That’s not such a bad idea. My parents used to send us kids off on character-building backpacking trips when we were in our teens, which—when we finally made it to the crest of a 14,000-foot Colorado peak, exhausted and exhilarated—really did improve our self-esteem. It’s not just the physical challenge that’s rejuvenating: in the mountains, you’re stripped down to the essentials of who you are, a friendly human being out there among
the blue jays and deer, and you have no choice but to feel benevolent toward yourself and everyone else. Long before I had the habit of traveling to foreign countries to restore myself, I used to head to the wilderness.
I recall how healing it was once, when I was a sophomore at a sophisticated Eastern college—far from home and intimidated by fellow students who seemed so worldly to me—to send out a rescue mission for my lost happy self by spending a few days hiking around in the Rockies. Right away, I could breathe better. The thing about being out in the wild is that your angst seems so small when you’re surrounded by trees, rocks, and vast, sweeping views. Hiking around, I realized that deep down, just between me and the pine trees, I was absolutely fine. I might not be from New York City, but Colorado smells a lot fresher. There was a whole lot I didn’t know, socially and culturally, about sharp, monied people on the East Coast, but there’s a lot that everyone doesn’t know outside their realm, no matter how smart they may be—a realization that helped me later on as a journalist—and it’s better to admit to being naive and ask a lot of questions than to pretend to be someone you aren’t and end up acting like a jerk. In the woods, you can’t get away with being a jerk, especially to yourself, which is what I had been doing. So I went back to school and focused on what I wanted from college, not on what other people were thinking about me or whether I was sophisticated enough for them. When I returned to school after those days outdoors, I brought along my cowboy boots, and from then on, college was a great ride.
So that’s it, then: back to nature. I’ll leave it to the wide-open
West to mend my heart. I need to find some sort of organized wilderness program, such as a yoga hiking retreat, with massages, hot tubs, and gourmet vegetarian food.
I wander around my apartment and pick up my favorite photo of my mother, sitting on a slick red rock in Canyonlands, sunning her legs, dabs of sunscreen on her cheeks. I recall that when she was in her forties, craving adventure and some kind of personal growth, she signed up for Outward Bound, a notoriously difficult mountaineering program designed to build character via challenging wilderness encounters. She went to Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park, a vast expanse of bloodred canyons and overlapping rock ledges, to backpack and rock climb with a group of women. Since hers was the first-ever Outward Bound course designed just for women, a magazine writer went along. The fact that someone got paid to tag along on Mom’s trip to write about it was not lost on me, even as a kid.
Curious, I discover that Outward Bound still exists and has a special one-week “Life and Career Renewal” course aimed at adults who feel stuck in their careers or relationships. Without thinking it through much further, I find a magazine to pay my way—to write a mother/daughter essay about challenging yourself at forty—and load up my backpack.
I
FLY TO
Grand Junction and am relieved to be back in familiar, wide-open territory, next to the Western Slope’s red mesas with massive violet mountain ranges in the distance. The sky is Colorado blue, the air fresh, my hiking boots oiled, my sleeping
bag stuffed, and I feel giddy. I can’t wait to hike through narrow, smooth, terra-cotta canyons, scramble on rocks, crawl through arches, and forget about the fact that my heart feels as crumbly as sandstone.
Early the next morning, all the Outward Bound participants, most middle-aged and wearing fleece, gather outside the motel and climb aboard a school bus. I’ve nearly forgotten that this is a group experience, and seeing the others makes me nervous. I’m shy and awkward in small groups, especially when you are supposed to share your feelings. I almost always have the urge to bolt, say something too direct, or cry for no reason that anyone, including me, can fathom. My particular idea of hell is to spend eternity going around a circle in a small group to say who you are, where you’re from, and what you want out of this experience—and right now, I can feel that coming on.
After a couple of hours on the bus, we arrive at a staging area, a mesa above the Needles section of Utah’s magnificent Canyonlands National Park. On the ride, I’ve discovered that most of the others in my group—an institutional food company executive, a manager at a sock-manufacturing company, a venture capitalist, a Realtor, a computer programmer, and a timid, pale recent college graduate—have suffered the loss of a loved one, job, or relationship and are, like me, trying to work their way out of a serious funk. This Outward Bound trip seems like a desperately optimistic measure for just about everyone. A few in the group are in rather poor physical shape, and one gal seems to be verging on anorexia. There is no man in the group who I am going to fall in love with and tell the story of how we met on Outward Bound.
Our leader, Dennis, a thirty-two-year-old mountaineer who isn’t in great emotional shape himself—he lost some friends climbing Denali a couple years back, gained a hundred pounds, and hasn’t been back to the wilderness until now—has us, yes, go around in a circle and explain what we want from the experience. Fifty-year-old Tina, the socks manager, is struggling with the death of a close friend and trying to kick a thirty-year smoking habit, and says she came “in order to cry.” The fifty-two-year-old Midwestern CEO, Bob, tells us he needs to have more fun in his life. The three women in their thirties are variously battling heartbreak, stress, and depression, and the thirty-one-year-old guy has just seen his dot-com dreams fizzle, along with his love life.
Now it’s my turn. There’s no way I’m going to go into the story of being divorced, having a love affair end, already missing the Professor, feeling stuck at forty, uncertain where to turn, and caught between wanting to travel and settle down. I muster up something vague but acceptably group-sharing about having a midlife crisis and needing to rearrange my goals. I smile nervously at the end, and Tina the socks manager says, “When you smile, everything about you changes—you seemed so tough and reserved before, and now you’re warm and pretty,” which is exactly the kind of comment I fear from a stranger in a small group.
Just as my eyes tear, Dennis switches gears, announcing our first wilderness lesson. He demonstrates how to take care of our private business in the great outdoors. I didn’t expect this to be quite so Outdoors 101; I thought we’d be rappelling one another
off of cliffs by now. Dennis amusingly picks a nice view and pantomimes digging a hole and wiping with a pinecone or a rock. Then he tells us that under no circumstances are we allowed to bring toilet paper along with us. He says he’s going to sort through our personal possessions, too, to make sure we aren’t carrying any other contraband—drugs, cigarettes, hair gel. I’m suddenly feeling less like a midcareer professional than a juvenile delinquent. There is no way a thirty-two-year-old guy is going to paw through my stuff or tell me I’m not going to use toilet paper. I’m a grown-up, I respect the wilderness, and I’ll gladly pack out what I pack in, I tell him pleasantly, with a look that says he can go fuck himself if he disagrees. Tina grabs her package of Wet Wipes in solidarity and stuffs it back into her pack. I give her a big, warm smile.
We load up our packs with what seems to be a huge amount of food, along with tents, ropes, first aid kits, and helmets. The packs are too heavy for any of us to put on without help, and we stagger to the top of the trail. As we begin to descend from the pine trees to the pink rocky canyon, I try to let go of my grumpy resistance: I have to be with these people for a week and should make the best of it. We stop to learn how to read a topographical map with a compass, something my dad taught me three decades ago, and then inexplicably head toward a place on that map that doesn’t have a trail or water. But I don’t argue the route. When Dennis transfers some of the weight from a lighter, weaker woman’s pack to mine, I don’t complain. I have more experience in the wilderness than any of the other participants, and I’m stronger than the other women, so I’ll shoulder more of the load.
We bushwhack our way to a campsite, brambles scratching our arms, legs trembling with each heavy step. Soon a couple of the women are crying from the exertion. I’m annoyed that we’ve left a perfectly nice and pretty trail to savage our way through a prickly gulley where no human should ever venture, but I’m determined to be cheerful because if someone isn’t cheerful—especially me—things are bound to get really ugly.
When we finally reach the campsite, a sloping piece of scrabbly ground, we’re exhausted. I go into action, firing up the stove, since I’m the only one who knows how to do it except Dennis, whose only advice is to learn to survive in the wilderness already. I’m inwardly cranky at the others for bursting into tears and kvetching about their packs and realize I’m missing a good party in the city tonight. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to come. I’m not sure when I got derailed from that yoga spa idea, doing morning sun salutations on a mountaintop, followed by water aerobics, deep-tissue massage, flirting with fit eco entrepreneurs over organic cuisine, and slipping into high-thread-count sheets at night.
Gretchen, the pale young recent college graduate, is watching me assemble a wind barrier, pump the gas, and light the stove, and she asks me how it works. We are all tired and hungry, and it would be a hell of a lot easier if I just did it myself, and how could she have signed up for Outward Bound without ever having lit a camp stove anyway? That’s like driving a car without knowing how to change a flat tire, nothing my dad would’ve ever let any of us do. I wipe my face with my bandanna and realize I’m sounding a lot like my
über-competent
dad, here in my brain, and one of the reasons Mom went on Outward Bound was so that she
could learn to light the damn camp stove herself. I turn the stove off, disassemble it, and hand it to Gretchen. I explain it to her step by step, rubbing my mittens together to stay warm, and when she finally lights it and puts a pot of water on to boil, she’s thrilled and gives me a big hug.
Tina is still sniffling and counting the scratches on her arms when Gretchen and I pour a package of powdered potato soup into the boiling water, which turns the soup bright blue. Tina looks at the soup, the strangest thing, and her tears dissolve into laughter, which makes her tears flow faster. When Bob tells her, “You said you came here to cry,” she laughs even harder. After our neon blue dinner (someone remembers an elementary school experiment where iodine, which we used to purify the spring water, turns potato starch blue), Tina rubs my shoulders for having wrangled the stove, and I relax a little. At least I’m getting a massage.
It strikes me, as she digs deep into my shoulders, that Tina, Gretchen, and the other women here need an experience like Outward Bound to tap their inner reserves of strength, just as my mother had. They need the confidence that follows overcoming a tough challenge. My parents, on the other hand, raised me to carry a pack in the wilderness without complaining and to be competent in the outdoors and everywhere else. I spent a good part of my childhood playing the home version of Outward Bound. As a result, I’ve never been able to use the charming helpless card with men, to let them feel heroic or even useful, because I can manage almost anything perfectly well on my own. I’m sure I intimidate a lot of men with my competence, and I’m tired, among
some women, of always being the strong and reliable one (which in my twenties tended to attract some really crazy friends, who always needed to be rescued; it took me years to realize that not only were they draining me, those energy vampires, but that only they could rescue themselves). The last thing I need right now is an experience that’s supposed to teach me to be tougher and more independent, developing my I-can-do-that-myself spirit. I have a strong suspicion, in fact, that those are the very qualities that will be the least helpful in getting me out of my private wilderness.