Ammi Midstokke: Life is not a line you’re waiting in
I have this friend who has not spent much time in the forest. In fact, most of the time spent in the forest was likely the result of me withholding information about where we were going and what we were doing. And perhaps a little bit of blind trust on her part, if not a great measure of willingness.
In the last golden days of summer, I invited her to go camping. She’d been “camping” before – the kind where there’s a log cabin, but the city folk suddenly feel like pioneers because there’s no flat screen on the wall and a bare 40-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling. In which case, much of my childhood was spent camping.
Actually, in the summers I was given my own tent so my parents only had to share the one-room cabin with one of us three kids. But I was prone to sneaking in food, which meant raccoons were prone to sneaking in their families. Let’s just say it was not ideal.
This time, I took my friend real camping and I lured her in with my optimism about the easy trail and classic underestimation of elevation gain. I did not start to worry on her behalf until she said, “We’ve got to be halfway there, right?” at about 10% of the distance. This is why it is important to always control the maps – so the people you’ve suckered into an adventure don’t get discouraged by something as disappointing or unhelpful as the truth.
On this day, we began our trek into the Selkirk Range in the perfect warm temperatures of the season, snacking on huckleberries from start to finish. My friend took breaks when she needed them, cursed me when she needed that, laughed, and plodded on. She schlepped her pack and sometimes we helped her schlepp it (mountains are no place to be prideful). Step by step, she climbed through the trees, and then above them.
I’ve waited years for that moment and it did not disappoint. She marched up a slab of awkward, steep granite and turned around to see where she had been. It wasn’t just the folds of canyon she’d climbed, or the thousands of towering pines she’d navigated. It was a lifetime of waiting. A lifetime of thinking she was not, in one way or another, enough or worthy of this experience. I watched her eyes light up with the expanse of the horizon, maybe the possibility of her own expanding life, and my heart nearly exploded.
It has come to my attention that many people make the assumption they are not capable of a thing or that they must somehow earn their way to the thing along a predetermined path of socially acceptable suffering and outdoor gear purchases. This is categorically false. You do not have to be a hiker to hike. You don’t have to be a runner to run. And you don’t need to own an ultralight setup à la the cover of an REI catalogue to go into the backcountry.
Granted, some of those things can make your experience more pleasant and I’m not suggesting you hire some naïve young men to haul your oak chests and lanterns like Lewis and Clark. What I am saying is this: If you think you’d like to do a thing, then do the thing.
Do not wait.
Do not wait to be fit or thin enough. Do not wait for the right friends. Do not wait for the spring, good weather, motivation, or something as responsible and gross as money. Don’t wait to quit smoking. Don’t wait for them to make gear the same shape as your body, or worse, for your body to get to the same shape as the gear. Don’t wait for life to slow down, the kids to grow up, or the house to be cleaned.
Someone once told me the life we wish we were living is happening right next to us on a parallel track. All we have to do is step onto it.
For the first time in her life, but certainly not the last, this woman sat at the edge of an alpine lake tucked beneath the granite peaks, a reflection of trees and sky and stars. She tasted huckleberries, saw the sun go down, slept beneath the visible waving arms of our galaxy, breathed in the mineral scent of rock and dust. She heard the way the wind moves through those pines, how the lake can be stealth and silent in the early morning, what it sounds like when a solitary fish breaks the surface.
She was courageous in herself and trusting of others, which I’m pretty sure is how we survive this wild ride of life anyway. And she had stopped waiting to live hers.
Watching her be in that moment fully was as deeply satisfying and humbling as the landscape itself. I know it was to her, too. And it was also a painful reminder of an elitist culture in which we behave as though some of us have more of a right to nature than others, or that others have to earn it with the right layer of merino wool or the right body.
These are precious days, the few we have. Do not waste them.
Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com