by Laura Fraser
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.
It’s easy for me to be a leader in an Outward Bound group. What’s harder is to sit back, let other people make mistakes and figure things out, and be patient while they stumble along. I probably need to spend this week in the outdoors more or less doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing, letting go of responsibility, resisting the urge to do everything myself, bringing up the rear on the trail. While I’m at it, I need not waste the entire time we’re hiking composing letters in my head to Outward Bound International about how the wilderness shouldn’t be difficult for the sake of difficulty, personal growth need not be puritanically punitive, and four plastic honey bears are way too many for seven adults to carry for a five-day trip. I’m going to have to make this my own Inward Bound and quietly work on being as patient and gentle as you can be with a seventy-five-pound pack on your back.
At dusk we manage to pitch our tents, fluff up our sleeping bags, and, stomping to keep warm, watch the sun set in a pink-streaked sky behind the hoodoo rocks.
On the third day, over instant coffee and oatmeal, we prepare to split up to do a twenty-four-hour solo, a full day alone, which makes everyone else in the group anxious. We go around the circle again to talk about our fears, and while others voice their nervousness about wild animals and freaking out with their feelings, I am silently gleeful to finally get a chance to be off by myself.
Dennis leads each of us to a different spot, where we can’t see one another and from which we aren’t supposed to move more than ten feet in the next twenty-four hours. We’re allowed to bring along only water and trail mix (despite the vast quantities of food we’re schlepping, fasting is supposed to help with reflection) and a journal to write our thoughts. The minute Dennis leaves, I eat all my trail mix, explore my little spot—a slick rock tucked under an overhang—and then read the fine print on my medicine bottles. After five minutes, I have nothing left to do. Now I’m supposed to think about the big picture of my life. I dig into my pack, unroll a pair of socks, and smoke the joint I hid inside.
I eye the boundaries of my spot, which seems to be shrinking. I can’t sit still in one little place for twenty-four hours, so I immediately get up and move. I walk beyond the edge—what the hell, I can take care of myself—and for the next several hours explore rock formations farther and farther away from where I’m supposed to be. This is what I came to Canyonlands for: I love the feeling of the smooth rock under my hands, the dance of shifting weight as I make my way up some boulders, the concentration of figuring out where to place my hands and feet, the feeling of muscles I rarely use. I know the rules of the wilderness: I’m careful to check for rattlesnakes before I place my hands under any ledges, and I don’t climb any higher than I’m willing to fall. When I finally return to my spot, I still have many hours until sunset. You forget how long days are.
Physically spent, I sip some water, deeply regret that I ate all my trail mix already, decide against trying to sneak back to my backpack for some banana chips, and lie back in the shade to take a little nap.
I think about my mother’s Outward Bound trip and the journal she wrote while she was on her own solo, which she shared with me. She never mentioned her family in those pages, which made me feel odd. Instead, she wrote about her group of lively and strong women and about the pleasurable freedom she felt when they all splashed naked in a river to get clean after a tough hike. I suppose it was the first time in twenty years we four kids had been out of Mom’s thoughts, the first time she felt really free to be herself.
It was even more surprising to read the magazine article that came out after the trip, the way the writer described my mother: “Ginny, at 46, has never journeyed away from her husband and children for more than a few days.” It made her sound uncharacteristically timid. The trip was in 1974, during the throes of the women’s movement, and the women in the group were eager to explore who else they could be away from their families—and the writer, perhaps, to exaggerate the theme.
I recall my mother, though, as always being far more adventuresome than the rest of the moms in our suburban neighborhood. In those days, whatever encouraged pleasant, stay-at-home casserole making among most of Littleton’s wives seemed to have an opposite effect on my mom. A fairly recent convert to the Democratic Party, she threw herself into the civil rights, antiwar, feminist, and environmental movements with the zeal of the newly religious, participating to whatever extent she could between grocery shopping, making Sloppy Joes, and going to parent-teacher conferences. Over the course of the sixties she’d changed out of Jackie O. shift dresses, poufy hairdos, and ladylike pumps into bell-bottomed jeans, denim shirts with appliquéd sunflowers, and hiking boots (once, in a restroom at the Four Corners National Monument, a woman in the stall next to Mom noticed those boots and ran out screaming, convinced there was a man inside). Dad was a good sport about all of this, considering himself lucky to have married someone who was willing to go to Yellowstone on their honeymoon, working in the dining room while he was out being a fishing guide. He liked coming home to dinner on the table but otherwise encouraged Mom to do whatever made her happy, which eventually involved a lot of exploration beyond her own little spot.
When I was five, Mom sat me down on the lawn and told me that she wanted me to be “more independent” than my three older sisters. When she explained what that big word meant, I was all for the idea. As part of this new independence deal, she said she would not be my room mother in kindergarten, as she had for my sisters, bringing cookies and supervising crafts in class. The trade-off was that I got to go along with Mom when she was out finding interesting pursuits closer to home. When she heard that Realtors in our neighborhood wouldn’t sell houses to African American families, for instance, she got involved in the fair housing movement and took me to demonstrations, meetings, and trials. I missed some school, but our outings are the only memories I can call up from my year in kindergarten. On one occasion, I’m told, we met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., though all I remember is being downtown, holding hands, and singing “Kumbaya” in a circle with a great number of people, many of whom, unlike the people in Littleton, were black. That was a thrilling alternative to a day at South Elementary School
, and it became clear early on that going places away from home was far more interesting than staying put, which was my mom’s view of things, too.
That’s why, not long after, Mom decided to hop a freight train across Colorado. As a physician’s wife and stay-at-home mother, she said she needed more excitement in her forties and vowed to take more risks in her life. When a couple of younger, footloose friends called with this zany idea, she couldn’t refuse. I begged her to go along, probably reminding her that she hadn’t been my room mother in kindergarten and that I was doing a very good job of being independent, but she said riding freight trains was only for big girls. Secretly, she remembers, she hoped my father would insist that no wife of his was going to hop a damned freight train. Instead, appreciating the romance and outdoorsy spirit of it all, he offered to drive her to the station.
At the freight yards, my mother, who hadn’t grasped the nuances of hobo behavior, politely asked a railroad man which train was bound for Grand Junction, as if she had a first-class ticket tucked inside her purse. “That one,” he snarled at her, “and don’t let me see you.” She and the others jumped aboard and watched miles of wide-open western landscape roll by. After a few days, my mother hitchhiked home, but her appetite for adventure hadn’t been satisfied, only whetted. She signed up for graduate school, went to Vietnam War protests, took a horseback trek through the Wyoming Tetons, rode bicycles in Europe, and took us all to Mexico for the summer. The Outward Bound trip seemed to be just another of her many excursions out of the house and into the world. Sometimes my sisters wondered why she wouldn’t just play tennis or join the garden club like the other mothers.
But she couldn’t help it; she got her restless spirit from my grandmother, who had an adventurous streak of her own. Grandma’s husband left her when she was pregnant with my mother—running off to Mexico with a redhead for a quickie divorce—and she raised her child alone, on a teacher’s salary, during the Great Depression. But in the summer she’d pack up the two of them and explore the West, sleeping wherever they landed when night fell—a Navajo chicken yard, a desert gulch, a mountain ghost town. They’d pull out the portable stove and eat pancakes at every meal. “It never occurred to me that we were poor,” my mother says. Between trips, they lived in a Cape Cod–style house in Cleveland Heights, with mom’s grandmother and a maiden Aunt Belle, who gave piano lessons, drinking tea in delicate Haviland china cups and speaking in subdued voices. My doted-upon mother, the only child in the vicinity, stayed within the confines of the house and of proper manners, which surely contributed to her lifelong desire to break away.
Somehow, the Outward Bound trip gave my mother more confidence than her other adventures. Despite the fact that she liked to hike and camp, Mom had never really had to rely on herself in the outdoors. “Dad always took care of everything,” she says. He set up the gear and built the fire, and at the end of the day, Mom was still the one making dinner for everyone, even if it was on tin plates, and washing up afterward. He scouted ahead while she held my hand, the youngest and slowest, pulling me up the trail.
On the Outward Bound course, Mom’s patrol camped on the snow, pitched their own tents, rappelled down rock faces, back-packed dozens of miles, and climbed a pink desert mountain in the snow, appropriately named “Fern’s Nipple.” The magazine writer described the biggest challenge: climbing a steep, smooth rock face, with my mother on the ropes behind her. “When I finally see her face, it is transformed: a battle photo—a face under siege … she flops beside me, bursting into tears.” My mother remembers that crying. “It gave us an incredible sense of euphoria to accomplish something that difficult.”
Later she said that the course had given her some of the grit she needed to face a working world that was still, in 1975, fairly hostile to women. It helped steel her for the transition from being a stay-at-home mom to a part-time adviser at an alternative college and then a full-time nursing home residents’ advocate for twenty years, becoming a nationally respected and beloved figure in that field, inducted into the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame, and, thirty-five years after her work in the civil rights movement, presented with the state’s Martin Luther King, Jr., humanitarian award. She shelved that plaque in the garage with a pile of others, next to a backpack she never wanted to throw away.
In some ways, having the freedom to pursue a career after kids, not to mention far-flung outdoor adventures, my mother did eventually manage to have it all. I’m proud of her and grateful for her spirit, but I sometimes wonder if I’m paying a price for identifying so closely with her desire for independence. Now that I’m forty, I feel a vague sense of defeat, as if I’ve done everything backward, starting with a career, leaving no time for a family. What to do next is completely up in the air. All the uncomplaining toughness and competence I learned as a kid, along with my mile-wide independent streak, may have served me well in the wilderness, at school, and at work and has gotten me a lot of things my mother yearned for—an interesting career, spontaneous travel, varied friends. But it hasn’t done much for my intimate relationships.
My mother has always had my father to fall back on, to saddle her horse and dust her off when she got home. My parents have been married for about fifty years, and though they’ve had some bumps along the way, they are best friends, still make each other laugh, and are impossible to imagine apart.
I, on the other hand, have no man in my life to say, “Go ahead, honey, be independent, it’s adorable.”
IN THE EARLY morning, the sandstone glowing pink from the brand-new sun, I pull out my notebook. Normally, I love to sit and write, especially in front of a stunning landscape. But since Dennis told me I had to write and to make it meaningful, I can’t put down a word. That undoubtedly says something about me that would be worth writing about in itself, but I just can’t. It’s pretty here in this canyon, but it isn’t the momentous experience it was for my mother, and my stomach is grumbling.
So I sit in my spot and come up with nothing. Bored, I finally write a list, as far as I can remember, of all the men I’ve slept with. I put a star by the one-night stands, of which there are disconcertingly many, but at least not in the last few years. That has to be personal growth. There was a decade in there where there were only three men, my period of long-term serial monogamous relationships, two with wonderful guys I’m still friendly with—my grand-ex and my great-grand-ex, as I call them—the third being my ex-husband, with whom I am not. After my divorce, I see, the list goes haywire again.
Along with being hungry, this list isn’t doing anything for my mood on this otherwise rosy morning. Why have I been so spectacularly unsuccessful with men, in the long term, especially since my marriage ended? Apart from my sweet and scrumptious rendezvous with the Professor, things have been disappointing and unsubstantial in the romance category. I can’t remember when someone unrelated by blood told me he loved me, much less the last time I dug my fingernails into the side of the mattress, tossed my hair back, and let loose a cry underneath a happy, energetic, sweaty man. Okay, I’m forty, but that’s not so old, and though I could stand to lose a few pounds, one good thing about being forty is that you finally realize that fat is a lot more in your head than in the minds of most men. I can’t fathom what the problem is all about. God knows I have tried to find a relationship, going on dates, writing hopefully witty online profiles, suffering through coffee with men who recite a litany of achievements or bad past relationships, my hopes continually raised and dashed, attracting dull or disastrous men and even one dangerous creep, being appraised and found wanting, suspecting I’m too independent, neurotic, oversensitive, smart, talkative, reserved, tough, edgy, whatever. Who knows. There is no explanation, no reasonable rationale for the vast chasm between my friends, who find me lovable, funny, generous, and warm—if occasionally difficult—and men who guzzle down one Sauvignon Blanc and head for the hills. At a certain point all you can do is laugh.
Dennis twitters like a bird to collect us for breakfast, and we
gather back on a big smooth rock in a circle. I’m surprised at how glad I am to see these people and give everyone a big hug. Over heaping bowls of granola and powdered milk, everyone reads what he or she has written. I’m quite moved at how Tina describes losing her friend, saying this challenge of being in the wilderness is making her feel like herself again. The Realtor does a sensitive postmortem on her last relationship. Gretchen is delighted with herself for making it through the solo, and she seems visibly stronger. Even the CEO of the institutional food company is sweet and self-revealing. I’m the last one to speak, and everyone looks at me expectantly, but I don’t want to share what I’ve written. No way.
“But you’re a writer,” the venture capitalist insists. I shake my head no, embarrassed. Dennis insists that I have to read, since I’m part of the group. So I pull out my piece of paper: “Daniel, Josh, the film major guy, Kent, the short guy from Psi U, Eric …” The group is silent.
Then at last Tina laughs a little. “That’s it? A list? We’re spilling our guts here, and you came up with a list?”