To Shake the Sleeping Self

by Jedidiah Jenkins

  Finally, I turned around and pressed on to catch up with the girls. We had decided to regroup at the halfway point, where a refugio served food and hot chocolate. For the next two hours, we hiked mostly straight up. The trail wound along bluffs and then entered an old-growth forest. Under the towering trees, everything gleamed wet and fresh. Ferns grew from black soil, and fallen logs sprouted mushrooms and lichen. A rain shower came and went, but the canopy of the forest kept us dry.

  Willow, Milla, and I made it to the refugio, a dark green cabin on the river with a large deck and lots of picnic tables. At this point it was late afternoon. Hikers there were stopping on their way back down. A young Australian working behind a counter told me we were halfway, and that we should hurry. “You don’t want to be hiking after dark.”

  After forty-five minutes, Mom strolled up brandishing a new walking stick, and pulling little rocks from her fanny pack to show around. Each had a story. I told her we shouldn’t rest long.

  From there we crossed a log bridge over rushing snowmelt. The ground was black and moist. Moss and green ferns grew everywhere. It had begun to drizzle or mist or that strange in-between place where water seems to float in the air and collect on your face and sleeves. Mom was getting tired, but she kept up a pleasant conversation anyway. She pointed out delicate ferns and flowers. One little collection of flowers looked like chubby maids in white and yellow bonnets, and my mom squealed in delight and knelt down to take a photo. Twenty photos. I told her we needed to keep moving.

  “If I can’t enjoy the trail, what’s the point in the hike?” she said.

  I started walking on ahead again, letting my thoughts drift back over my trip, thinking how far I’d come, wondering whether or not I had changed at all.

  I had. I knew I had. But how? These walkabouts, these rites of passage, these spirit quests are meant to transform. We want to meet Jesus on the road, to be stopped in our tracks by a white light or a burning bush. I didn’t get any of that. I got the erosion of the shoreline of a river, one pebble at a time. I wanted to change. I wanted to be born different. To be replaced and born again. New. Forgotten and remade. I don’t know how that happens. I guess you have to completely erase your past, which I wasn’t ready to do. So I carried it with me, no matter how hard I ran from it.

  Clunking up the trail in my boots, I was making great headway. By now, the girls were somewhere up ahead, out of my view, and my mom was somewhere behind. These stunning monoliths of Torres del Paine would mark the true end of my journey. The trip felt like forever, but also here I was, in the present, with the moment rushing past me as though I were a stone in a creek. Time didn’t quite move like I’d thought. I had wanted to slow it down. I wanted to be aware of every moment passing, in reflection and contemplation. I wanted to leave my office life in order to feel time passing in some more holy way, holding it in my fingers and studying each minute like a prayer bead.

  But that isn’t how we experience life. The first miles in Oregon, I had been self-conscious in the extreme. I had felt my knees and hands and breath. On our bikes, Weston and I rushed through the pungency of sea foam and evergreen, crazy with euphoria, sure the newness of it all would be eternal. But then we slid into living the trip, and my awareness dulled into routine. I had been reborn into a different life, a different normal. The bicycle, the camping, the two-lane highways, the people and cultures had become patterns I could predict.

  I had wanted slowness, but I got life.

  An older couple, perhaps in their fifties, came from around a bend ahead of me. They were headed down the mountain. I asked how close I was to the top, and they said “perhaps another hour” with German accents. It was now 6:00 p.m., and it got dark at 10:30. I kept myself calm by thinking that the walk back down would take half the time. I waited for a few minutes for my mom to catch up, then decided to keep going. She was going at her pace, and she asked for that, and I would go at mine.

  The trail got steeper. How was my mom doing now? I got it in my head that she had fallen, that those Germans would find her and think me a terrible son. But I kept hiking. “This is your trip, your finish,” I told myself. “You go, and she can catch up. If you don’t see those towers, those Torres del Paine, you’ll never forgive yourself, or her. She asked for this hike. She doesn’t want the end of your adventure to be babysitting.”

  I immediately felt guilty for the thought. That she had taken care of me and raised me and I was inconvenienced by her slow pace.

  When the forest ended the trail came to a giant pile of boulders, an uphill cascade of gray stones, each one larger than a car. The trail snaked around and through them, but it was easy to lose. Any young climber would have simply crawled and scampered up and over the giant rocks. I was almost to the top. But the end was the hardest. I sat down on a rock and waited again. I didn’t want to see the end without Mom.

  I waited there for thirty minutes. She must have stopped. She wasn’t coming. Maybe she was too tired. Maybe she went back to the refugio for hot chocolate. Maybe all this waiting for her, which she told me not to do, was actually slowing us down. The sky was dimmer and grayer and I was so near the end of the trail. The end of my trip. The girls must already be at the lake, at the granite spires of Torres del Paine. I decided I had to go on. I couldn’t wait for my mom, because she wasn’t coming.

  I climbed full speed up the boulders, crawling over them like a lizard, and entered layers of mist that came and went. It would mask the trail ahead of me in total gray whiteness, and then be gone, like a paintbrush dragging the ground. As I climbed, for a moment, the higher fog parted and there were the towers, each one the size of the Titanic turned on its stern. Maybe bigger. Truly giant spears striking at the sky. No wonder this was a destination. It was holy in its grandeur. I kept climbing to reach the end of the trail, which, based on photos, was a lake at the base of the three spires.

  The air was cold. But by now I had slipped into my animal brain. I was looking from rock to rock, boulder to trail to hand-hold, focused only on what was before me. My hands are cold. Put them in your sleeves and don’t touch the rocks with your bare skin. Climb over this boulder. Put your right foot here. Breathe through your nose. This boulder is wobbly, step lightly and watch your ankles. It was meditative.

  I rounded a massive boulder, and suddenly there I was, at the top of the boulder pile, staring at a lake. It looked like the top of a volcano, a hole scooped out of the summit. The scoop was filled with perfect blue-green water. Lining the lake were the three granite towers rising up like God’s fat fingers above the lake in the palm of His hand. Photos made it seem so approachable. It was not. It was mighty. The sheer scale of it reminded me of the Old Testament God, a God who struck fear in the hearts of men. A humbling, respectful terror. For me, only mountains and canyons have this effect on me. The ocean, much bigger than any mountain, lies flat to the horizon. The flatness doesn’t have the same effect on me. But seeing a mountain, I am frightened by the giant standing over me, looking down at me with indifference or maybe love. Or with a canyon, I am frightened by the cliff, the ease with which I could lose my mind and jump. Experiencing those things leaves me properly reduced. I think it is a good feeling. The fear of God.

  Willow and Milla were down at the water’s edge, taking pictures. When they spotted me, they yelled with excitement, but the wind tore the sound of their words away. We were the only people up there. I walked clumsily to join them. My fingers were freezing. The wind penetrating between my socks and my pants, that one tiny millimeter of skin, chilled me all over. I stared at the giant Torres. I took photos. I posed with the girls and we hugged and they were so excited for me.

  “Your trip is done!!! Soak it all in!” Willow shouted. I filled my bottle from the lake so that I could make coffee in the morning with the lakewater. I wished my mom was up here. But I imagined her sipping warm hot chocolate at the refugio, deep in conversation with an Australia
n or an Argentine.

  I had reached the Torres del Paine. The peaks that had fired my imagination since high school. The holy calling. I was there. The trip had dismantled me. But I didn’t feel lost like I had been. For the first time in my life, I felt that my only allegiance was to the truth. Not to tradition. Not to safety. Not to what I had been taught. But to whatever was true. And that made me feel strong.

  I tried to meditate on the beauty of the place. I tried to love it for its worthiness and grandness. I sat there, smiling at the rocks, the water, the spires, and said thank you. Thank you to God, to the whole universe, to the atheists, to the weirdos, to the conspiracy theorists, to the unpaved gravel shit, to all the miles. I let the whole place sit on my heart for a minute. I let the cold get too cold. I wished my mom had been there.

  But she was having hot chocolate at the refugio, befriending the Germans. Of course. I held it all in my chest. I grinned and took snapshots by blinking slowly. I had done it. Willow, Milla, and I headed down the mountain.

  * * *

  —

  AS WE CRAWLED down from boulder to boulder, we were all talking about how perfect the place was. Then, at the edge of the woods a few hundred yards down, I saw a bright red raincoat.

  Red raincoat? Mom? I thought, “No way.” There was no way she was still coming. There was no way that she had made it this far. But as I got closer, I noticed her poof of brown hair coming out of her hood. I noticed her walking stick.

  “MOM!”

  She stopped and held up two walking sticks in triumph. She had added another, and was using them like ski poles. She had kept on hiking, at her own pace, mostly alone, for all these miles.

  I scrambled down as fast as I could. When I reached her, I could see she was struggling to breathe. But she was ecstatic, too. “Oh, honey, it’s so beautiful,” she said. We hugged and laughed. There was no time now for her to make it all the way to the lake—at her pace, that would’ve taken another thirty minutes.

  But she had made her own summit.

  “Mom! Look, you can see the towers! Do you see?”

  “I see the towers. I made it,” she said between huffs.

  I looked back and the towers were covered with fog. Maybe she hadn’t really seen them. But she was happy. “I’m just so thankful to God for my walking sticks,” she said.

  “Okay, Mom, we need to head back now.”

  “Yes, honey. I’m so glad”—she took a deep breath—“that I made it to the finish with you.”

  We turned to go down. I was worried. “We may end up walking in the dark if we don’t hurry.”

  “I can’t hurry. My knees are really hurting me. Real bad. Have to go at my pace.”

  “Mom. It’s dangerous to be out here if it gets dark, we could get lost,” I said. I was overcome with the desire to protect her. To care for her. “We’ll go as fast as we can.”

  “I’ll try,” she said, tired.

  The rain started again. Not the misty mountain rain from before. Real rain. Pouring. Willow and Milla looked at my mom with obvious concern. Seeing their faces made me worry more.

  “Y’all go on down, I’ll stick with her,” I said. “Just go on to the car. I’m sure it’ll go by fast since it’s all downhill. We won’t be far behind you.”

  As we walked, I asked her about her time on the trail. “How was it, Mom? I’m sorry I didn’t wait and walk with you. I should have.”

  “No, honey, this was your trip.” Her words came in quick, breathy spurts. “I’m here to support you. I’m glad you got to go and see it at the top. That’s what I wanted. I’m just so thankful to be out here, thankful for my walking sticks.”

  The light was gone from her voice. She was exhausted and laboring. “Did you enjoy this hike, Mom? You’re so strong! I can’t believe you’ve done this. I wonder how many sixty-seven-year-old women have done this?”

  “I took breaks. Looked at flowers. Took some great pictures,” she said. I could tell that she didn’t want to talk. It took too much energy.

  So we walked. I stayed right beside her. And I kept talking, trying to take her mind off the walk and how cold it was and the rain. So much rain. Pouring now. Sometimes she would say, quietly, “My knees.” She said it to herself, hoping I wouldn’t hear. There was fear in her voice.

  When we reached the refugio, it was nearly dark and we still had three more miles. But now the rain was howling. This time, we didn’t stop.

  I led the way, worrying that once we left the forest, the trail would be more difficult to see in the darkness. I was shivering, my hands in pain from the cold. My hiking boots were now wet inside, and my feet felt like ice blocks. My poor mother.

  I heard her voice soft and weak behind me. “I’m just so thankful to God for giving me this opportunity,” she said. “How am I so lucky?” She was praying.

  “Mom, we have to speed up.”

  “Honey, I can’t.”

  I couldn’t help it, I got annoyed. This hike was too much. Too dangerous. Why did she want to do this? She was going to get hurt or we were going to get hurt together and we shouldn’t have done it. I should’ve been a man and stood up to her and said no.

  We walked. I tried to set the pace but she was moving very slowly. She was in pain. It was pouring rain. It was soon pitch black. I tried to use my phone’s flashlight, but couldn’t. The rain was dumping so hard that the light only lit the falling water droplets; it looked like a blizzard, and anyway, the water would ruin my phone. I put it away and tried letting my eyes adjust. Time was crawling. I cursed my old wish for it to slow down.

  I tried talking loudly about nothing as I walked, to make sure she could hear me. Behind me, she whispered, “Oh, my knees.”

  Now I couldn’t see the trail at all. I had to drag my feet to feel the pebbled path. As I walked, if my feet hit dirt or bushes, I knew I was off trail. The rain stung my face. Was it hail? How far did we still have to go? It felt like we had been hiking for days.

  Eventually, we came to a bridge over a noisy creek. I remembered this bridge. It was one of the first things we had crossed. I looked back and didn’t see even the silhouette of my mother. Where was she?

  Then I heard her.

  “Jed?!” she cried out from the dark. The tone of her voice pinged something visceral in me. I had scuffled ahead too fast and left her too far back in the dark. She couldn’t hear my feet or steps anymore because of the creek.

  I responded with an annoyed and loud “What?”

  “Help! I can’t see!”

  I had never, in my thirty-one years, heard her voice sound like that. Frightened. Calling out for help. A scared girl. Something jumped in my heart. My stomach. My being. My mom was scared. She didn’t know where we were, that we’d reached the bridge. She was in pain. My mother, the direct spokeswoman for the God I feared, was frightened and needed my help.

  I held up my phone and turned the light on to show her how close I was.

  “I’m right here, Mom!”

  When she caught up to me, she said, “I got frightened. I lost you.”

  “I got you, Mom. We’re almost there. We’re close.”

  I felt an incredible strength of purpose rising in me. I had to get us home. The rest of the way, she walked right behind me and I used my phone light. I didn’t care if it broke.

  We came around the final bend and we saw the lights of the lodge where we had parked the car. I’ve never been so relieved to see anything in my whole life. I was shaking from the cold but tried to hide it from my mom. As soon as she saw the hotel, she burst out with praise. “Oh, thank You, God, thank You for not abandoning us, thank You, Jesus.”

  We were as wet as rats in a flood and we sat down in the lobby. It was after midnight. Willow and Milla were there waiting. They hugged us with their dry and warm bodies. They laughed and didn’t seem to know how scared we�
��d been. The restaurant in the hotel was closed, but upon seeing us, and feeling deep pity, they brought us both hot toddies.

  My mom sat down and closed her eyes. She wasn’t laughing. She wasn’t making light of it all. She had always laughed through the hardest things. She had never complained about anything in her life. Never shown weakness.

  She was too weak to put on a face. She closed her eyes and sat in the deep relief of being alive and inside and warm and out of the rain. She had both of her walking sticks, leaned against the table.

  “I love you, Mom. I’m so proud of you.”

  She smiled, half opening her eyes at me, blinking slowly. “I’m so proud of you,” she whispered.

  I sat there, exhausted and watching her, and I didn’t think about my trip. I didn’t think about ten thousand miles. About Oregon, Baja, or Argentina. I didn’t think about my identity or my faith or my loss of it all. I didn’t think about Jesus or sex. I didn’t think about Weston or my father.

  It was over. My trip was done. On my thirty-second birthday. And I was wet and frightened and shaking. But the claustrophobic kid who needed escape, needed approval, needed hatred or fire, was not there.

  Acknowledgments

  Special thanks to Lincoln City Fellowship from the Speranza Foundation and Kathy Treat for believing in artists and believing in me.

  Thank you to David Kopp, Derek Reed, and Ashley Hong for reading my every word, teaching me what I’m really saying, and being my therapists.

  Thank you to Tina Constable for threatening me with greatness, for telling me my potential before I would even daydream it.

  Thank you to Bryan Norman for seeing a diamond in the Dumpster. You honestly changed my life.

  And thank you to these friends, family, and heroes for giving me the wings to write. You didn’t even know what the book would be, and you said, “Write it.” That is brave and beautiful. Thank you,