Dear Readers,
Happy Sunday! We’ve made it to the final installment in this essay series (go read part 1 and part 2 if you haven’t already). I’m so appreciative of all the feedback you’ve given me so far, so please reach out if you have thoughts, comments, or ideas.
I’ll be back next week to take you on a new journey.
-Michelle
Far away turns out to be the high sierras of California.
The first night at camp we sleep outside under the stars. We are a clump of counselors swaddled in sleeping bags and giggling past curfew. I’m afraid a bear is going to ramble through the woods and place my head in its maw, but then dawn comes and the birds flitter through the trees and we all wake up without a roof over our heads.
For the first time in a long time, I feel equal.
Living in the wild for a summer quickly strips away the things I thought mattered (wifi, electric lights, beds) and gives me room to grow. I take up singing while walking through the woods to warn bears I’m near. I learn to love sleeping outside so much that I never sleep in a tent, except when it rains.
For a week I take a camper’s clammy hand in mine on walks through the pines because her dark eyes go calm when I do. I squash a spider that I want to keep alive and paint a mustache on my face and cinch a million life jackets on little bodies. I do it because it’s my job, but also because it gives me purpose.
On the last night before the counselors leave, after all the girls have gone home, we walk to the far end of the big lake and leap in naked. The water, black and slippery around me, feels like a hug from someone who loves me.
In the moonlight that reflects on the steady ripples I decide that I am always at home in the wild.
As long as I show up, it will take me into its arms.
*
Being without a home teaches me that worthiness is not a trait you earn.
Worthiness is a thing you learn how to hold inside yourself.
*
The day before I got lost in the desert, I got dizzy.
We’d walked down a short path to peer up at the petroglyphs, centuries-old messages whose meaning turned to mystery within the bend of time.
After a full morning out in the desert, the bake of it had started to wear on me. I felt the nausea first in my head, the way a migraine makes my mind feel like a boat in a storm, the throb in my skull like a metal hull hitting against its dock.
I moored myself in the cave, on the cool sand beneath the red handprints, where a tiny crevasse opened up like a black mouth and let out a cold wind, gently, in cycles, like a quiet breath.
I let it guide my own.
I clenched the loose earth in my hands and sipped water, slowly, like it was the last of it. I liked the thought that people had lived here, gathered here, dined here. This shady respite from the melting yolk of a sun. This ancient resting place, a gift from the same earth that rendered my being. I drank it all in, healing from the inside out.
*
On the new trail in Canyonlands, I find someone who’s seen my friends. Then another. I am on the popular route now, the real route. The hikers point me down, down, down the path until I see them scattered across a long thumb of an outcropping. Mutual relief registers as I lock eyes with my sister. She is sitting, exhausted from my absence. I climb up to the rock where she’s perched.
“We thought you fell off a cliff.”
From there I see the point where I’d been standing, though it was so far away I would’ve been just a speck to them.
“I was just over there,” I say, pointing to the nub of rock where I’d laid and looked at the sky.
I wasn’t gone for long, but it was enough. Enough to understand how easy it is to become gone for good. Out there, a second is as long as an entire day. This is how long it takes to disappear.
*
On the ride home I wonder how many missing people are indeed trying to leave the world they know, but only for a moment, when an encounter with weather or animals or confusion halts their journey home.
Maybe, like me, wandering is necessary to escape ruin; getting lost a means for survival. Losing myself in the desert revealed this truth to me: I stray not because I want to be gone, but so that I can give myself the act of return.
When you’re the only thing you recognize, you must believe that you are worthy of saving. That is how you walk back into the world renewed—but only if you’re lucky enough to find your way home.
Discovery is expected, but never guaranteed.