[S]he was going to live forever, or die in the attempt.
-Joseph Heller, Catch-22
I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks, which braces my nerves, and fills me with delight. Do you understand this feeling? This breeze, which has travelled from the regions towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste of those icy climes. Inspirited by this wind of promise, my day dreams become more fervent and vivid.
-Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Pleasant Grove, Utah, USA
October 2023
I shiver, pulling my collar tight against the evening chill. The September heat held out as long as it could, with the winter freeze starting to creep its way in. My hair bobs up and down against my neck as I trot to keep up with Zuko tugging at the leash. The black and gray husky is large for his breed, a few inches taller than me when standing on his hind legs. He, unlike me, has been ready for sweater weather all summer, and greets the crisp air at an enthusiastic pace.
As mentioned before, dog and housesitting are a few of the side gigs I run. Allowing me full use of their Netflix (and cupboards), I’ve gotten to know and love some dogs not only as annual clients, but faithful friends. Zuko himself has watched “Dawson’s Creek” with me, chewing his rubber ball with mildness, even while I cry during the season six finale. “Jen deserved sooo much better,” I tell him. And he, being the nice fire-prince that he is, seems to nod in agreement.
But I digress.
On that particular walk, I was still reeling from a conversation from lunch, lunch at the very tasty Cafe Zupa’s. I’m not sure if it’s a chain outside of Utah, but it’s basically made-to-order sandwiches with options of soups, salads, or protein bowls that can be order a la carte or as combos. It’s quick, easy, and most importantly, they believe in the sanctity of seasonal entrees. Their pumpkin chorizo soup was the stuff I’d been dreaming about all night, and was more than eager to repay my friend with Zupa’s so I could enjoy the pumpkin craze like a proper American.
We were there at my suggestion, what I considered a coupon for him getting me a job at his work (remember how I up and quit that fancy desk job? If not, see Part 1 of this saga). The company paid decent, offered health insurance, and while delivering in the frozen tundra of wintry Utah was a bittersweet prospect at best, the best part of the job, IMO, was the schedule. Working rotating days of 4 out of 7, I could focus on my book and stories, something woefully hard for me to manage at a draining 9 to 5.
It was then the conversation took a turn.
“I was reluctant to tell you about the job in the first place.”
That stopped me dead in my tracks. The béchamel I’d been enjoying paused, forgotten for the time being, oozing its creamy goodness on my plate as I digested what he just said.
“I don’t understand,” I admitted. “Why?”
He wasn’t malicious. Wasn’t accusatory, outraged, or even judgmental. he was matter-of-fact in his general tone and demeanor, and here I could see he meant it.
“Amanda, you have a college degree, what are you even doing with it? You speak Spanish, you could be paid so much more as a manager. Why do you settle for so much that is below you?”
“Before you go off and travel again, maybe you should think it through, and see what you can do about your own future so you don’t have to scrape by. Maybe think about growing up.”
Aaaaand that’s when he noticed no, the sun wasn’t in my eyes, those were in fact tears. Strange as it is for me to admit, there was some raw nerve I didn’t know was exposed, and I found out it existed right then and there in that sandwich shop.
Yep. That happened.
And if you ask me, that’s waaaay more embarrassing than getting caught naked in the middle of the woods.
I asked Zuko about it – mentally, of course – and being the goodest of bois, he listened as long as his doggy ADD could handle. We went on walks, watched more DC, but I couldn’t shake the realization that one of my best friends thought I was a loser. Maybe I was. Maybe I had wasted my life, searching for what I had yet to find. I felt the future, its misty breath heating my neck. Reminding me that, day by day, it was coming, and in its wake death closely followed.
Blacksas, Sweden
July 2023
There was no doubt about it: my friends were total and complete babes.
We had just moved the bench by the shelter. Marina, Maria, Ellie and I were up on top, admiring the view. For all of Ellie’s descriptions of what was to come, the view was more spectacular than even I in my overactive imagination dreamed up. A passage from Mary Shelley comes to mind:
[…] the sun is for ever visible; its broad disk just skirting the horizon, and diffusing a perpetual splendour. There—for with your leave, my sister, I will put some trust in preceding navigators—there snow and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe.
I could tell the other girls were all struck by a similar feeling: of vastness, the great expanse around us, and our own intimacy as a small collection of humans in the otherwise untouched wilderness. I snapped a few photos, of their silhouettes against the sky. All of them were gorgeous in their own rights, and I was content to be a mere mortal.
From the shelter’s lookout, Roberto’s tent was a colorful dome against the gray rocks. He brought his tent for a test drive, the gear recently purchased for his solo trek up Kungsleden. Kungsleden is a 467 kilometer long trail (translating as “The King’s Trail”) through Sweden, connecting and trailing all the way up into Lapland. Covering nature reserves and reputably spectacular sights, it takes about a month to cover on foot. When I was in an all-girls room at the hostel in Stockholm, two of my roommates were a mother and daughter packing for the hike up into the wild north. Roberto wasn’t planning on covering all of it, but he was going to go as far as he could for as long as would serve his research purposes. If the King’s Trail was even a portion as breathtaking as Blacksas, then even one day would be worth a trek.
Francesco was below, making good use of the community guitar. Most of the songs he played I knew the lyrics to, being American pop hits. Olle and Victor started the fire, Olle shaving sides of dry wood for kindling. The tinder I brought with me, dryer lint from the farmhouse, a camping hack from my girls camp days. S’mores are an American staple for any outdoor excursion, and for an international group between several countries, somehow the gooey burnt marshmallow against the crunch of the graham cracker brings us all together.
Courtesy of the midnight sun, the ebbing violet and blue sunset was late in the evening, giving us all a chance to settle in. My sleeping bag was already set up on the roof, and as we all walked en masse to the cliff’s edge, I could feel it waving to me. “Have fun kids,” it seemed to wave to us. “But don’t do a ninja jump,” it bade as a caveat.
For those of you who have never gone hiking in Southern California as a volunteer Christian missionary, that last bit of advice would seem far-fetched. I for one lived through this cautionary tale, and have indeed some strange things to tell. One day a group of about forty of us went on what we thought was a harmless romp up a waterfall. We finished by taking photos near a cliffside. One missionary thought it would be cool to take a photo jumping in the air doing a ninja kick. Needless to say, he was not careful in the slightest, and plummeted to his death a hundred feet below. As I saw him fall, my scream echoed in the canyon.
At least, he would have died, if it weren’t for what honestly had to be the hand of God. He did plummet, did fall the one hundred feet, landing on his back. He even scraped his head on a piece of jagged rock on the way down. But against all odds, he didn’t die. Didn’t have a broken bone, save his ring finger, where his hand grazed a hard surface on the way down and ricocheted off of his metal CTR ring. I didn’t know any of that at the time, taking my companion and fellow runner and booking it down the trail to get enough cell reception to call 911. We subsequently met the medevac team to point them in the right direction up the trail. But that’s a different story for a different time.
At that time at Blacksas, my friends were considerably smarter than that one dumb missionary, as well as considerably more creative. We took sooo many photos (as seen by the Charlie’s Angels one). But the best by far was of our attempts to stack six humans in a pyramid, with Olle using the photo timer. We made sure we were well away from the edge from any rogue tumbles, and to our credit we all did pretty well. Because Marina had experience as a cheerleader and in gymnastics, her knowledge and the boys on the bottom made a solid basis. Our photo of that never quite panned out, but the video footage of the event is immortalized on several collective Instagram videos, and will remain one of the seminal events of this summer to date.
From down below, lights winked in the splaying darkness. “It’s Oke,” Olle explained, pointing to the lights. Oke and Maria were down below, signaling to us from their spot below, visiting their children, I think. Ellie was more than happy to signal back, practicing her newfound knowledge of the SOS code on the flashlight. It was nice; to be with others, gazing into the beyond; to be young and free; to be on the brink of something that was unknown and terrifying in something that can only be described as exquisite.
There’s this game folks in Utah play, called “Murder in the Dark.” It involves storytelling, and the group trying to solve a murder mystery with a mafia, cop, and doctor. Personally, I’ve never gotten into it at game nights, one of the reasons being the storytelling was done by those who thought they could but just plain sucked. Francesco, however, was a different story. He was the classic example of a Renaissance Man, which, given his Italian origin, made a lot of sense. He came to Sweden to volunteer and travel while working on his mathematics thesis. With other skills such a cooker of delicious dinners, trickster of cards and sculptor of sands, spinner of tales should also be rightly attributed. Marina and Maria had a version of Murder in the Dark where the characters changed into a witch, Francesco then taking it and making one of the characters into a princess. For once in my life I drew the lot of princess and let me tell you, there was a lot of pressure to save the townspeople and stop the monster werewolf from yet another nightly killing spree. Victor did die in the game, but the townspeople were able to figure out the monsters, thus ending the reign of terror.
Unfortunately, Victor’s real-life story was currently a mystery: somebody had stolen his dinner. Since we all packed our dinners together, each one of us had our tupperware containers in our packs. I for one ate mine earlier, and I did that “Did I do that?” moment by gaslighting myself into maybe I mistook it for mine. But no. Nobody had eaten an extra, and confirming he had indeed packed it on the way up, nobody could locate it now. My suspicions were with a Swedish teenager we had chatted with earlier. His floppy hair and furtive glances seemed all-too suss in the aftermath of theft.
Maria and Marina had whipped out their playing cards, and a round of Cuadrado was beginning. It was a happy gathering in the warmth of the shelter, its warmth not at all from the temperature, which had dropped, but the merry group of companions in our midst. About here I retired, climbing up the bench step to the roof. Lining Oke’s sleeping bag with a lighter fleece, I was fully insulated from the evening chill.
The last thing I heard was Victor finding his dinner. It was under a pile of blankets. “I don’t even care if it rains tonight, I’m just happy I found my food.”
. . . . .
Havasupai, White Pine Lake, the rolling hills of Virginia backcountry. I’ve slept under the stars before. (Stockholm would have been under that count, really, if that one drunk Norwegian guy hadn’t interrupted, but that’s neither here nor there.) But as far as sleeping under the stars goes, for something you think would be the same, it really is different every time.
I only woke up twice, so cozy was the spot up on the tin roof. Once, to Ellie shivering under her parka. The blanket she had was nowhere near warm enough for the temperature drop. I think the others were down below, taking more photos. Unbeknownst to me, my phone had been getting notifications from my sisterly Facebook messenger group, and we had been chatting up until I drifted off. The tab for YouTube was also pulled up, frozen where I had enough sense to push pause. It was “One Week,” a movie I rank up there with my top 5 of all-time favorite films. Ben, the protagonist, narrowly avoided hypothermia, and was rescued by a camping chick out in the wilderness. I knew the scene by heart. The song I knew, Un Canadien Errant, though my French pronunciation could use some work.
The second time I woke up was because of the rain. It was pouring now, and my sleeping bag, though warm, was nowhere near waterproof. We joined the others scattered in the shelter, their prone bodies fitfully shivering in the misty morning.
I wouldn’t say I slept in the damp shelter, but I did doze on and off. Ellie ad Francesco similarly woke early, before the others. With late the late night and no responsibilities the next day, there was no rush, so while the others rested, we chatted and snacked on the popcorn trail mix Ellie had the foresight to pack. we discussed slang words from each of our homelands. I wish I could remember the phrases we shared, but I do remember in detail describing what exactly a douchebag was, in slang and in practical use.
When the others woke, we packed out things, Roberto joining the huddle. In preparation for the journey down the trail, and because of the rain, Victor formed our gallivanting playlist of rain-themed song we all took part in choosing. Fueling each step was the desire to no longer be cold, as well as the prospect of McDonald’s. The boys had been talking about it the night before, and it was all but spurring me on down that mountain. The trip to McDonald’s was tasty, and surprisingly enough the McVegan burger hit the spot. A perfect ending to wrap up a perfect time.
. . . . .
Help me love myself the way you love me
So who I am tomorrow is who I’m meant to be
If I could love myself the way you love me
I’d be bad and bold and beautiful and stronger than I think
The song plays on my phone, on loop. Those Swedish days seem far away, the colorful leaves crunching underfoot, reminding me how quickly the seasons may change.
Sing your song again
Go make a mess and call your friends
Swim the ocean, climb a mountain
Don’t you worry how it ends
I read once about the importance of mulling. That some people don’t know if they’ve really lived or not, and I want to know the answer to that question long before the end. So I mull. Because I want to know long before the end. And the end, though its chilly breath is ever over my shoulder it is not a frightful thing. Rather, it reminds me of its presence so I may remember, and act not in fear of the unknown, but in hopeful possibility of what may be.
So I sit with Zuko, mulling over what John just said to me. The soup and sandwich was a full day later, and the big husky and I were re-watching season 6 of “Dawson’s Creek.” And amid my questions of was I wasting my time, was it all worth it, was I insane for being in debt for a plane ticket and running away across the globe as a flight risk, art once again provided me with the answer. (I have transcribed the scene below, Joey’s dialogue italicized, with Eddie’s in bold print. Note: while I will die a believer in Team Pacey, Eddie’s moment here I give an acknowledging indebtedness for his words.)
All I’m saying is, no matter how romantic and magical running away together seems at the time, it doesn’t solve anything, okay? So, whatever it is you’re running away from — whether it be circumstances, or geography — ya now fate, another person — it’s always gonna be there when you get back.
Okay, so what would you suggest to solve these problems? I mean what do you wanna do, just ignore the opportunities that come our way?
No. I’m just — I’m trying to be practical.
Which means what exactly?
Maybe we should just wait. Ya know, scale back a little.
Scale back? You’re only willing to do something on your own terms.
Whose terms am I supposed to be doing this on? If ‘m going to be throwing my life totally off course for the chance —
Off course? — What are you talking about? I’m not asking you to throw your life off course. I’m talking about a summer here. All I’m asking is that you take a leap. Come away with me.
Like Saul Bellow, “On the Road”? Those are just stories. Poems. Little pieces of unreality that we’re not meant to base our lives on. Eventually we always have to come back and deal with the real world.
So what, what do ya wanna do, ya wanna just sit here for your entire life, waiting and hoping for the world to come to you? Because the point of those stories Joey, is that people’s lives, their real lives only begin when they step out into the world. And when you do that, when you meet it head on — maybe you change the world, maybe you don’t, but the point is that it changes you. And that is what people mean when they talk about growing up.
So what, if I wanna be with you, I’m supposed to just throw all of my previous life experiences out the window? I’m just supposed to stop being who I am?
Who you are is not some scared little girl who’s afraid to take chances on anything. Who’s afraid to really love someone because of the risk or the pain. That does not define you as a person. Or maybe it does.
The episode goes on, citing pieces of Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Joey’s lit professor, the one she has a love-hate relationship with, tells her he thought her interpretation of the novel’s end was a bit dark.
This man, confronted with the absolute absurdity of the human condition — I mean, he’s terrified to his core — he takes a leap of faith. He chooses life.
“They’ll have to try like hell to catch me this time.”
“They will try like hell. And even if they don’t find you, what kind of way is that to live? You’ll always be alone; no one will ever be on your side; you’ll always live in danger of betrayal.”
“I live that way now.”
“But you can’t just turn your back on all of your responsibilities and run away from them,” Major Danby insisted. “It’s such a negative move. It’s escapist.”
Yossarian laughed with a buoyant scorn and shook his head. “I’m not running away from my responsibilities. I’m running to them. There’s nothing negative about running away to save my life.“
. . . . .
So, I tell Zuko, rubbing behind his ears, what have I done so far? Am I loser who missed her chance at a stationary, normal life?
Maybe I did run away to Europe for a summer. But I made that choice not out of fear, but hope. I was choosing life. And it may be an unconventional one, but it is so, so exquisite. So who gives a shit about being “normal”? I think of my own errant ancestors, who were themselves exiles from Canada, exiles sent to the United States, where they wandered not with sorrow, neither with regrets, but with courage and hope for their futures, even — and maybe especially — in the midst of uncertainties.
I’ve met beautiful people.
I’ve seen beautiful sights.
I’ve done the 9 to 5, and sitting in a chair with a 10 inch radius while knowing there remains a whole world to be explored? That is madness incarnate.
This is the one life I get. I’ve made choices, I’ve done things and gone places. There are things I regret, big time. Most of them being not getting out sooner and seeing more.
Maybe I haven’t changed the world. But the world, one Swedish sunrise at a time, sure has changed me. And, with any good fortune, for the better.