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My Own True North * * * There was a time when the only fires I experienced were those safely enclosed behind glass in the posh restaurants where I dined as a rising associate in a Baltimore law firm. I would often become mesmerized, losing myself in the dancing flames when I should have been paying attention to the “important” issues being discussed by the partners and other associates around the table. It was confusing to be so drawn to the fire, rather than to the job I had worked so hard to attain. I was proud of myself for getting this far, for finishing in the top five percent of my law school class. I had pulled all-nighters, missed holidays, neglected my social life and amassed tens of thousands of dollars in law school loans. I knew I should stop gazing at the fire, join the discussion, and get back to work in my office high above the Baltimore harbor, with its wall of windows, a secretary I could buzz and a high-backed leather chair that swiveled.Instead, one afternoon, I went for a walk and ended up buying myself a pewter bookmark that quoted George Eliot: “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” * * * On the plateau above the river, Misha calls out that he has found a spot for our camp. He is the Russian-born director of the non-profit wilderness education school I am working for: Kroka Expeditions, whose motto is “Where consciousness meets wilderness.” Misha speaks quietly and deliberately, like the forest. I think of him as a large basswood tree, his mind as open as the branches, his words falling like leaves, importantly, into the world. Though he is only in his late thirties he seems to me to be an old soul. He is handsome, with the lean yet muscular body of a gymnast and strong, weathered hands. His eyes, azure blue and wide, contain both an abundance of wisdom and a twinkle of mischief that matches his broad, almost goofy smile. He sports perpetual bed-head, because he believes “hair is self-cleaning,” and most of his clothing is torn on both the left shoulder and the right knee from his pattern of kneeling to make fires and carrying boats. As he leads most of the group in carrying our gear, I take a few paddlers further up the mountain to find dry wood.* * * At my first Associates Luncheon at the firm, I sat at a long conference table with my fellow associates and a few senior partners. We were debating the settlement value of a case in which we defended a home for developmentally disabled adults that was being sued by one of the residents for the horrific burns he had suffered all over his legs and genitals, from a scalding bath. His attorney sought a large settlement based on the victim’s pain and suffering and “loss of consortium”, a generally lucrative claim meaning that he can’t have sex any more. We went around the room, each associate stating what he or she thought was a fair settlement amount and why. The figures were astoundingly low, and I found the rationale even more frightening: as one colleague put it, “the loss of consortium claim is worthless -- the guy’s a retard, he isn’t going to have anyone to have sex with anyway!”* * * Thank God for my fancy lawyer chair. If I heard a partner walking down the hall, I spun to the books and the briefs, looking busy and consumed with work. Partner gone. Spin to the sun and seagulls. What might I be? If only I could find the answer as fast as I could spin.After a year and a half of having my nose pressed against the glass, I quit, moved to Washington D.C. and became a bike messenger, of all things. Maybe it wasn’t what I might have been, but it was the farthest thing from what I was. * * * Education, according to Yeats, “is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.” When I was a child, my family lived in Germany and spent our vacations camping out of a beat-up white Volkswagen van, our trusted, rusted, busted bus, as a way of seeing Europe on the cheap. My parents slept in the back, my sister in the coveted pop-top loft and me in a cot that spanned the front seat. Attached to the sliding side door of the van was a tent so large that my six-foot four father could easily stand up in it. We stayed in comfortable campgrounds in France, Italy and Switzerland -- campgrounds with hot tubs and gourmet restaurants. We were hardly roughing it.One spring when I was about ten my father and I went on a camping trip to the Black Forest. It was unusually cold so we brought along our toboggan in hopes of finding enough snow for some sledding. What we didn’t expect was a full-fledged snowstorm, a storm that dumped over a foot of snow on us overnight and made the roof of the tent sag down so low that I had to duck to get inside it. Right up the hill from our campsite we found a narrow trail to sled on. My father lay down on the old orange toboggan and I climbed on top and wrapped my arms around his neck. I still remember the smell of the wet wool of his Army parka as we careened down the hill. At one point the sled hit a rock, stopping both my father and the sled, and I continued on, airborne. I ended up face-first in the snow, exhilarated and scared and so cold that I cried. I experienced the outdoors in a new way on that trip -- I relished the happiness found in sleeping in the pop-top for once, and I discovered the beauty of the forest and the pain of the cold. * * * I began collecting outdoor adventures the way some people collect old coins. Among my favorites: paddling over a sapphire waterfall at the headwaters of the Actopan River in the mountains of central Mexico; seeing a black bear and her cubs at close range while hiking in the Appalachians; scuba diving among Caribbean reef sharks in the Bahamas; surf kayaking the turbulent, wintry waters of the Atlantic shore; awakening at three a.m. on Mount Shuksan’s glacier beneath the glory of the Northern Lights. Every so often I pull a memory out of my collection, dust it off and hold it in my hand.Even as a bike messenger, an interlude which quickly depleted my pail of savings and forced me back into law for four more years, I felt the ache in my legs and the wind against my face as I pedaled the grimy city streets. Maybe I was just spinning my wheels, the way I had spun my fancy chair, but at least I was in motion. * * * While the rest of the group splits wood and sets up the tent, Chris and I carry the large cooking pots down the hill to gather our evening’s water. We take a different route down to the river so we don’t trample a path in the fragile vegetation; later in the season these banks will be covered by delicate fiddlehead ferns that we’ll sprinkle with olive oil and salt for a wilderness salad. We dip carefully from the river, gently tilting the lip of the pots to avoid getting a pot full of river silt. I look out over the dusky White, one of the last free-flowing rivers in Vermont, the water slapping and hiccupping as it careens through the boulder garden just upstream from our campsite.* * * When I am in my kayak, hips snugly in the cockpit, I am wearing the boat. I am the river. Paddling a difficult rapid reduces my world bit by bit, to a river, then a rapid, finally to a moment, with room for nothing else. There is only me, trying to figure out how to best use the current to make my way. Even when all the water is rushing toward a deadly obstacle -- a downed tree straining the river, or a dangerously undercut rock -- it is only by using the current, not fighting it, that I can avoid the trap.I notice the feel of my paddle slicing through the water, in at my toes and out at my hips, rotating my torso, my breathing matching the rhythm of my strokes. The early morning fog whispers low across the river; it will later give way to the smell of sun-baked boulders. I try to remember to look where I want to go, not at what I want to avoid. Where the eye goes, the boat will follow. Lifting my edge, I skid into an eddy. I am tossed upside-down in a hole, like a lone tennis shoe thumping around in the dryer. Rolling back up, I’m eager to see where on the river I am, not knowing which direction I’ll be facing when I finally surface. Relaxing at the end of the rapid, as the lens backs out, zooms out, wide angle, my world again becomes the river, the mountains, the sky. It is as close as I ever come to religion, to knowing God. It was all these rivers rushing through my veins, the current building up against me, that eventually dislodged me from my indoor job for good. * * * I first stumbled upon Kroka Expeditions through an Internet search for a summer whitewater kayaking job. Misha hired me for a two-week expedition to northern New Hampshire and Maine. We paddled by canoe and kayak, up the Androscoggin River and across choppy Lake Umbagog, to the mouth of the Rapid River. We camped on a tiny, wooded island and spent our days paddling the whitewater of the Rapid, swimming in the lake and making primitive shelters in the forest.The expedition was incredible, so different from anything I had experienced before. Misha does more than just impress his values about the earth and community living upon the kids; he encourages them to figure things out for themselves, and to be free to disagree. The students don’t wear watches on our trips and the “what time is it?” question is always answered with “a good time for kayaking” -- or hiking, or cooking, or whatever activity is going on at that time. After a while, they start answering the question for each other and eventually they stop asking. What I found most striking about the trips is the space -- both physical and emotional. There is room to have free time, to watch the stars, to burn the dinner, to cut yourself while carving, to get the entire group lost, to make mistakes. As a result, the students are responsible, capable, thinking beings, but are still kids, which is wonderful. And, as an instructor, I gained far more than just a paycheck for playing outside with these students : I affected their lives and they affected mine. I am both a teacher and a student. * * * Years ago I thought that environmental law might be the answer to my career dilemma and that I would be happy using my legal skills to protect the wild places I love. What was missing from that picture was the experience of being outside, of living a life connected to nature. I didn’t want to spend eighty hours a week in pantyhose, fighting an uphill battle to protect the environment. Stealing bits and pieces of wilderness time on weekends and holidays was not enough, and I hated watching the passing of seasons from behind office glass.When I moved to Vermont at the end of March, it was warming up in Washington but there were still four feet of snow on the ground in Vermont. My first task was to help finish the new office being built on the second floor of the barn. My desk, which I sanded myself, is made of a salvaged door with tree branches, the bark still on, as legs. I don’t miss my leather lawyer-chair at all. * * * The fire must be started, and Lauren, one of our two cooks for the day, carefully begins to prepare. She works intently, patiently peeling the many layers of a piece of birch bark into papery-thin strips before rolling them into curls between the palms of her hands. She sets two bunches of kindling on end, leaning against each other, and sets the nest of birch bark in the space below. She strikes a match on a rock, lights the bark, and leans down low to the ground to blow life into the tiny flame. The fire catches the kindling and flares up for a moment before beginning to die out. Misha kneels down and tells her, “Don’t stare at it, feed it. If you are not afraid of it, it will not burn you.”* * * Before Kroka, I worked for two seasons at a camp in the Shenandoahs where D.C. private schools sent students for wilderness adventures. It was sterile, pre-packaged, canned adventure -- we herded the kids through high ropes courses, man-made climbing walls and trust falls. Even a simple pleasure like cooking s’mores over a campfire was over-instructed, with the assistant director giving a nightly s’mores speech: “Tonight we’re having s’mores -- if you can be mature and follow directions. So, everyone (not right now! Sit down!) is going to go into the woods and find a stick -- and not just any stick. Hold out your arm. The stick must be longer than your arm. Hold out your pinky; it must be thicker than your pinky. Hold out your thumb, it must be thinner than your thumb. When you find your stick, come sit on the benches around the fire pit and wait for your marshmallow to be handed out. Do not wave your stick around -- keep it pointed toward the ground at all times.” It was as if the speech had been drafted by a personal injury lawyer.* * * Over the hot fire a pot of water boils for our dinner. We are having rababu, a favorite Kroka dish of rice, lentils, tamari and cheese. Well eat it with the spoons we’ve carved out of cedar and hollowed out by burning the bowls of them with hot coals from the fire on our first night of the trip.I’m thankful now for my improvisational culinary skills, developed during my underemployed days as I discovered the joys of being penniless. I dig through our food buckets, pulling out onions, cabbage, several cloves of garlic, leftover kasha from breakfast, cream cheese -- every leftover item from the past few days that could possibly be added to the stew. It is dark in the forest and we are cold and hungry. * * * Shortly after accepting Misha’s offer of year-round employment, I went on a paddling trip to Pennsylvania’s Youghiogheny River with my friend Jaime. Over beers at Uncle Tucker’s Pub, I told him about my plans. Jaime, who owns a successful business, couldn’t believe I was leaving behind the financial security of the legal profession for a guiding job. “I couldn’t do it,” he said. “Have you considered sticking it out as a lawyer for another ten years or so, saving your money so you can comfortably pursue an outdoor career later?”My answer came surprisingly easily: Life is too short for that. I eventually became more comfortable handling questions about my career from curious strangers, and even from my mother. “Isn’t it about time,” she worried, “that you stopped playing in the water and got a real job?” When going out with friends I found myself tuning out during discussions of the features on someone’s luxury car or the expensive granite countertops one of them had ordered for her home. I didn’t feel judgmental toward these people, just disconnected and hungry for something more real. * * * The steady rain has tapered off to a light drizzle on us as we finish washing our dishes. I toss a handful of fragrant hemlock needles into a pot of water for our nightly “tea” and we pass around some squares of chocolate for dessert. Though we’re exhausted, we’re not quite ready for bed yet. Something draws us closer to the fire, something beyond its warmth. No one wants to leave until the embers die out -- it would be like leaving a show early. Standing around the fire, we begin to making music without instruments. One person is clapping, another clucks his tongue, one girl swishes her hands along her rain pants in time with the beat. I feel blessed to be here, part of this unique tribe.* * * I am lucky to have two homes these days, one in the wilderness and one back in civilization, in Putney, a village of 2,000. The landscape of Vermont speaks to me, with the humpbacked Green Mountains growling softly and the West River jostling its way to its confluence with the Connecticut River. There is a certain slowness here, with people moving in accordance with the flow of the seasons rather than abruptly bumping up against them. It sustains my need for a sense of place and community, a need created, perhaps, by a childhood spent moving from place to place every few years. Once, while hitchhiking after an afternoon of kayaking on the West River, I met a man who, like me, had moved here from Washington, D.C. “There’s no slower place to raise children,” he said.My home, when I am not in the forest, is the yurt attached to Lynne and Misha’s house. Modern yurts are based on traditional Mongolian dwellings, which are true mobile homes, bigtop-shaped tents made of yak skin that can be disassembled and transported from place to place. Lynne and Misha’s yurt is twenty feet in diameter, with canvas walls stretched over a lattice frame and wooden supports for the pointed roof. It has hardwood floors, a kitchen area with sink and stove and a separate bathroom with a composting toilet. An old, wood-burning stove in the middle provides heat and light. I love my yurt home. I love its thin walls through which the calls of the owls and other night creatures enter. I love the shadows of the big maple trees swaying above the roof. The lightest rain shower sounds like a downpour on the canvas roof, and when it really storms it is impossible to carry on a conversation without yelling. I love the sound of the wind as it approaches like a wave, building up on the mountain, roaring toward the yurt, and then fading away down toward the creek. I arrived here with only a carload of belongings, leaving the rest in Virginia until later in the season. I had a trunk full of clothes, a few books and photos, and one bowl, one mug, and two sets of silverware. It was only a fraction of what I owned, but I needed nothing else. * * * I remember a cross-stitch from my childhood that said, “Home is where the Army sends us.” I wonder, in leaving my old life, whether I have run from something, or toward something. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. By moving north, to Vermont, to Kroka, I have discovered my own true north and my home.* * * I was settling into my new life here in Vermont, thinking that I had avoided, or experienced and worked through, an early mid-life crisis. Then, to my surprise, I learned that my mid-life crisis might actually be late. The day after I drove the rest of my belongings from Virginia to Putney in a U-Haul, I was diagnosed with advanced cancer. I felt as though the rug had been pulled out from under me, just when I had finally fit all the pieces of my life together in a meaningful way. I must return to Virginia for treatment, leaving behind Kroka and my new life -- at least for now.Soon after my diagnosis I received a package from all the students from last summer’s expedition . Lauren had made sketches of all of the paddlers, and wrote me a letter that read in part, “This Earth has been so much better since you lived in its woods and paddled its waters, and we all love you for that, but we also love you for all the smiles and laughs, caring and teasing, fun and games and all that makes you you. That is what we love now and will always love because we know we will live it again.” * * * Snap, clap-clap-clap . . . swish. We go on like that for a long time, each of us quietly keeping rhythm in our own way, illuminated by the flickering reds and oranges of the campfire. As the fiery embers begin to cool in the night air our music slowly fades out. We quietly file into the old round canvas tent, where our damp socks and long johns will steam on a line overhead as we sleep tightly bicycle-spoked around the woodstove. |
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