Reentry

I am lying in the bathtub, soaking my muscles in hot, salty water, knowing something has changed but unable to say exactly what. What happens when I spend three days in the forest, precisely? What was happening when I laid in a field thirty years ago, staring at my feet? Even at sixteen, I knew in that moment that I was changing and I took a picture of my feet to mark the place in time when I recognized it. I still remember it when I look at that snapshot, now a middle aged woman. I still see in that color photograph that there was a part of me that wanted to be recognized, wanted to be acknowledged, wanted to be seen and heard and felt. It was the part of me that was completely and utterly happy to be lying in a field under a perfect blue sky. The part of me that wished I could stay there all day and night instead of having to be back at the barn to do chores in time to get cleaned up for a big dinner. I wanted to stay in my horse-smelling jeans and cowboy boots forever. I wanted to sleep in them, outside, in the grass, with the horses who were grazing next to me.

Instead I am part of the civilized world. Born and raised in the city, I still call myself a city-girl and though I have always fantasized about escaping it, I also wonder how I would fare. I lie in a bathtub after an arduous hike up a steep hill, relaxing tired muscles in a large white bathtub, in a big house. Tonight I will sleep in my comfortable king size bed with my husband. We will remark about how nice it is to be home and joke about cutting a hole in the ceiling so we can see the stars like we did last night and the night before.

I left some part of me back there in that magnificent landscape. The one we took in with big gulps of breath as we hiked down a switchback trail that hugged the face of a mountain, descending a thousand feet in a mile stretch. Pristine wilderness, mountains covered by trees and divided by a river stretching out for days. The kind of wilderness you have to drive a long way down a desolate road to get to the edge of. And then hike in for many miles down steep trails and across rivers and open meadows and through burned out woods to get to the camp. The kind you fall in love with every step of the way because it is so damn beautiful, so clean, so magnificent in it’s untouchedness.

But what happened there? Did I bring some of it back with me? Of course I did. I have the feathers that were presented in a great pile for me to pick a few from. I have the square shaped piece of granite. I have the small chunk of wood that termites carved their tiny hieroglyphs into. I have the images, carefully recorded on data machines and in paper notebooks, of the snake in the river, the black dragonfly being eaten by the yellow spider, the coyote that crossed our path, the bear that huffed behind a bush, the trees turned to charcoal by forest fire, the hawk and the eagle, the butterflies and the birds. I brought all of that out with me, carried like the garbage we made and picked up on the trail, packed it out like a good hiker. But there is something, still, that I don’t quite get my hands around. If the wilderness is where I find myself again, why does it feel like I left something of me behind?