I don't camp.
I consider sleeping outside a venial sin -- and that my ancestors worked hard so that I would be able to have all the advantages of indoor plumbing. I wash my face twice a day with prissy stuff from the skin specialists.
And yet, two weeks ago, I hiked into the Gila National Wilderness -- bad back, bad knee, 20 extra pounds and all -- to conduct an experiment. With my pal and soulmate, Lorri Hanna, I was going to see if the wilderness could help the distress and stress I'd been experiencing for the past six months, that had left me hopelss and frightened and terribly sad, even though my family was doing well and my life was relatively stable.
It was not an adventure for the faint of heart. If Lorri had told me where we were going to go, physically and emotionally, I'd have stayed in the car.
Lorri and her husband, Doug, run a company called SolTreks. You can look it up on the 'Web. It has been an outfit that provides therapeutic wilderness experiences for young people -- from 15 to 25 -- who may have dabbled in drugs, or failed in school, or been stuck in grief or anger, or simply have lost direciton in their lives. Each of my three older sons, in their turn, went to SolTreks, 41 days in the wilderness on the Canadian border in Minnesota, mostly because of lingering effects of the death of their father 13 years ago. (Kids, as you may know, grieve backwards from the adult model. Every year that the loved person is gone increases the loss rather than muffling it, as it does for older people.)
Each came back, in varying degrees, wiser and stronger.
I won't say the most naturally gifted of them went to Harvard right away and is now the CEO of his own company. He wishes he were. But he is more loving, more committed to being responsible, has a great job and is the tender person he could not be before. My next son has finally settled down to college and work he loves. The youngest is still struggling with bursts of anger (last night he was joining the Marines, althoug he is a pacifist, for "something to do") but he understands himself better than he could have had he not NAMED his DEMONS at SolTreks. I know that sounds like something you'd see on a refrigerator magnet. But it happens to be real.
That's the trick of it, and that's the rub.
You do know what troubles you. Everyone does. It's just that you can't name it, or your house of cards may fall down. You know when you're using sarcasm to cover pain or fear. You know when you're using denial to cover your unkind acts or your shame. You stay busy-busy-busy to keep from facing it down, even if you "go to therapy."
I knew all those things, but didn't know how to step off the wicked merry-go-round. My kids were suffering. My marriage was suffering. And so was I.
And so I shouldered that 50-pound pack and set off with Lorri and Danielle, a woman stronger and younger than I by many pounds and many years (Lorri is about my age, but looks ten years younger, and also casually does marathons, at age 46). Into the woods we went.
What happened there occasionally was physically harrowing.
There were times when we hiked up and down foothills on rocky paths when I believed that my back would burst into flames. My blisters developed blisters, despite all the tender ministrations Danielle brought to my tortured toes. I once found myself standing in a cold stream, only to look up and into the eyes of a very huffy-looking bull -- with horns -- ten feet away.
And yet, my back got stronger. There were times when I fell, like a helpless turtle, and had to be pulled up. My face and neck were covered with scratches, my arms with bruises.
There were spring squalls (complete with hail). I had brought a sleeping bag that was the wrong weight. When the temperature dipped one night to 10 degrees F. I woke at 4 a.m. shivering uncontrollably.
The difference was, the person I'd been only days before would have shivered until morning, perhaps until hypothermia did real harm (we were sleeping not in tents, but only under tarps tied to trees (I can now tie a clove-hitch by the way!).
The person I became cried out for help. Danielle and Lorrie made me eat some peanut butter (for the first time in my life I saw food as fuel, not my indulgence or my enemy) and a hot drink, and the shivering finally subsided. I slept gratefully between them. I lived until morning. It sounds like misery, and in the moment it was. Later on, it was triumph. I will never forget the frost that covered my hair and my sleeping bag. But now I think of that with pride.
One day, we climbed up to a place called Slick Rock, a sacred place to Indians who lived in New Mexico now and long ago. My grandmother was a full-blooded Cree Indian; and while I don't "keep" my heritage, I have a horror of white people appropriating and "playing" Indian for supposed spiritual benefits. But when I came to the top of Slick Rock and saw "spirit circles" honoring the four directions and the earth, sun and moon -- that had been there for perhaps hundreds of years or more -- I was very moved and something inside me cracked open. Feeling very close to my ancestors, I wept out my disappointment at how I was repeating the patterns of chaos and recovery and denial that characterized life with my parent in my family of origin in the family I was raising.
I was a good mother, yet I was jealous of my husband. He had things I did not: Parents, who loved him to distraction, and the central role as caregiver in my children's lives, which, because of my work. I could only find ways to spend more time with my children. I could never be number one; but I could be "special" to them.
What Lorri did was to stand by, ask questions, and lead me to the places (inside, and I hate that usage) that I needed to visit, dark and dank as they were. And when I walked out of the wilderness, I was lighter, not just in my pack, not just in my body, but in my spirit.
A surprise waited for me at the end of the trail. My husband had come to bring me home. I never saw a more beautiful human.
Why am I sharing this?
It's not because I want to tell about my very, very personal life. This was an extremely private experience and it's difficult even to set down the words. But Lorri and Doug are considering starting a component of their company like the one I experienced -- four couples and individuals in middle age -- and for "older" young people. When they do, I know that there are many of you out there would benefit from it, outlandish as it might sound right now. If you look at the SolTreks.com website, you won't see an "adult" program. But the lessons of the wilderness are the same, if condensed into a week or two instead of 40 days.
Kids usually need the full six weeks away from home because they're not quite so aware of what's going on with them as adults are (although we're not so aware as we believe). And I think that if everyone did something like this, an intense experience that affected both mind and body profoundly, instilling hope and pride in both, many lives would be happier.
In fact, I dont think I even fuly yet recognize all the benefits of being alone, with nothing but my journal and pen, at 7,000 feet in altitude, with only bright air between me and the sky, no phone or computer, no radio, no song but my own voice -- nothing but the lowing of cattle on a nearby ranch, the gabbling of wild turkeys and screech of eages and buzzards and the occasional grunt of something I was glad I never got to see,
I'll get a letter that I wrote to myself, as one of my last acts on my trek, in six months. I wonder what I'll feel then, and what lessons will have lasted. And I'll write to let you know.
The adventure didn't make me perfect. In two weeks hence, I've backslid at least four times. But each time, I've managed to recover before terrible damage took place. Instead of hiding, I've finallly found the words to name what I've done wrong. And that's really the key -- not CHANGING everything, but SEEING it. The changing comes later, and naturally, as a result of the recognition.
Maybe you have a kid who needs a SolTreks. Whatever it costs you, it will be worth it in a life in which you may not know WHAT to do with a son or daughter who seems unhappy, unhealthy and determined to make poor choices. Or maybe, despite the middle-aged body you wear, YOU are that kid. Look at the website. This is no "wilderness boot camp" for delinquents. It's a safe, tough, gentle, loving, challenging experience.
I never knew what my sons went through on their SolTreks. Now I do, and my admiration for each of them has increased by orders of magnitude. I put this out there not because I think it's for everyone, but I know it was for me.
Jackie Mtichard
