All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [10]
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