One of my goals, when I set out on this “old trunk” project, was to recapture — if even for a moment — the soaring, unfiltered wonder of youth. Like many, I fear I’ve become jaded over the years. It’s as though every experience creates a new lens, stacked one on top of the other until I’m squinting through a kaleidoscope of judgments and expectations as I view the world. It’s so difficult to be present. Mindfulness was simpler when my journal was filled with blank pages, back when I still sought to write an entirely new story and not just add chapters to an established narrative. In its paradoxical way, I hoped that reflecting on the past would help me return to the present with refreshed perspective — eyes and mind open.
This seems to be the core of any midlife crisis — realizing that at this point in adulthood, we’ve chosen a definitive path and there’s no going back. We can move forward, but the branches in front of us are more limited by time, health, relationships, and entrenched beliefs. What if we’ve made the wrong choice? I think eventually this angst fades when we reach an understanding that, although we passed infinite branches, we all must ultimately walk a single path through life. We can’t have all of the “wild and precious” lives. We only have one. If we can’t appreciate this, then we have nothing.
(Side note. I loved the film “Everything Everywhere All At Once” for the exhilerating way in which it explored the absurd possibilities of physically experiencing wildly diverging branches in life. I loved its conclusion that what ultimately matters is embracing Joy (literally and metaphorically) and being present in our chosen path — right here, right now. I hope it wins an Oscar.)
I’ve been thinking about life’s paths in the context of my “Adventure of a Lifetime” — that one amazing experience I thought I’d have before I settled into the vague mundanities of career and family or whatever it is I expected of an entire lifetime when I was 21 years old. Until that point, I’d followed a rigid path through education and work. While I regularly enjoyed weekend camping trips, I had never indulged in such a sweeping act of spontaneity. I was working 50-plus hours a week in two graphic design jobs and actively applying for law schools when a man I was falling in love with said, “Let’s take off for the summer. No, I don’t know where we’re going. No, I don’t know when we’ll get back. Does it matter?”
And I thought. “This. This is what matters.”
On May 24, 2001, I mailed my family a letter with the first concrete details of this adventure we were designing as we went.
Just returned from Zion National Park. We’re heading to the Grand Canyon and have decided to go east from there. I’ve got nothing but time and I am really enjoying myself.
Geoff and I launched our open-ended road trip with a five-day backpack across Zion National Park. Four friends joined us for the 50-mile trek known as the Zion Traverse. The hike had been my idea. The previous summer, I spent several weekends making the rounds on all of the trails in Zion Canyon and decided to extend my goal to all of the established trails in the park. At the time, my endurance range didn’t extend much beyond 10 miles, so a multiday trip was necessary for the more remote trails.
A fierce heat wave swept over the region during that week in mid-May. The nearby city of Saint George saw temperatures in the 110s. As we filled out our permit, the park rangers warned us we’d have to deal with 100-degree heat and grilled us on our knowledge of the limited water sources. It’s funny to think back on these days before GPS. I can hardly fathom holding that kind of blind confidence in navigating when all we carried was a single, sparsely detailed national park map. “Oh yeah, we’ll find that spring.”
The six of us set out from Lee’s Pass in our cotton clothing with enormous backpacks. The trail wound through sandy washes beneath the oppressive sun. Despite heavy loads, we were always low on food and water. Each of us packed a single dinner to share with the group, and it was rare that the dinner we’d planned was adequate. One friend, for example, thought a single box of Annie’s mac n’ cheese and two cans of beans and corn provided calories enough for six people. I had no concept of my water needs and thought a two-liter bladder and a Nalgene bottle would suffice for the once-a-day (at most) water refill. These days I carry a severe phobia of running out of drinking water in the desert, which no doubt sparked here.
So it was a grueling trek, and yet much of what remains is the perfect awe of so many quiet moments: Early morning in Hop Valley with sunbeams seemingly burned into sheer redrock walls. Brilliant green valleys and sculpted sandstone. The black, skeletal remains of a once-ancient ponderosa forest. The joy of locating the spring, the incredible spring, where I could sit in the cool grass and drink to my heart’s content, so satisfied that even the relentless deer flies couldn’t deter a long pause. I maintain that Zion National Park is one of the most beautiful places in the world. If I could somehow wipe all of my memories of the place to once again experience it for the first time, I might make that choice. Still, with only a handwritten letter and a stack of glossy prints, I can still find that spark of awe. Perhaps experience does have more value than innocence.
The trip wasn’t without darkness, though. On the third day, our permit required a trek of 15 miles from our backcountry campsite to a road crossing and a remote car campground at Lava Point. It was an unfathomably tall order of miles for a hot day, and Geoff and I woke up early in anticipation of leading the way with our single map.
Everybody was a few miles behind. We left notes, but after dark only five of the six of us had arrived at camp. Our friend Shane took a wrong turn and didn’t show up all night long.
We trudged for miles along a broad mesa that had burned in a wildfire a year or two earlier. The charred trunks of ponderosa pines towered overhead as we scraped past tangled deadfall, baking and ravaged by deer flies. I drank the last of my water hours before we arrived at camp and agonized over my thirst. All of us hiked alone for much of the day, a product of group fatigue and the drive to put these daunting miles behind us. I scanned every wash for a puddle and thought of nothing else until slumping into camp in the early evening.
Geoff had arrived an hour earlier and already set up our tent. Jamie, Jen, and Amy came in not long after me. It was Shane’s turn to make dinner that night, so we were beginning to feel irritated when sunset approached and he hadn’t yet arrived. As dusk settled, we grew worried. Geoff volunteered to run back down the trail and look for Shane. In hindsight, one of us should have run ahead to see whether he missed the short spur to the campground. But all I remember is feeling shattered, lying face in my arms on the picnic table, and nursing my pounding head with sips from my Nalgene. The water bottle was bottomless here at this car campground. I never wanted to leave.
Geoff returned, headlamp bouncing in the darkness, around 10 p.m. There was still no sign of Shane. Jen and I found the ranger's residence at the campground and pounded on the door. The bleary-eyed ranger let us in and grilled us with questions as we filled out a missing person report. What was Shane’s profession? What was his mental state? Most of the ranger’s questions veered in this direction. We were, after all, in a prominent campground that only had one trail leading in or out. It was hard to miss. So what the ranger suggested to us, without saying so, was that Shane had intentionally wandered off into the desert. Or we left him there. Either way, we were complicit.
Shane was one of the quieter members of our friend group, which contained a diverse mashup of personalities all connected through the environmental club at the University of Utah. I didn’t know Shane well, but he was always kind and contemplative, rarely saying anything unless it was brilliantly funny or profound. Maybe he just wanted some alone time. Still, the unknowns haunted me. It had been such a hot day. I felt vulnerable when I was out there by myself. Dizzy. Disoriented. If I had lost my grounding, I might have lost the ribbon of trail, which at times was little more than sand slicing through the sand. It wouldn’t have taken much to become irrevocably lost.
The night dragged on. I lie awake on top of my sleeping bag, coated in layers of dust, sweat, and sunscreen, blinking at the wall of the tent. I was hungry (we swapped Amy’s dinner for Shane’s. But it was another small portion that only accentuated the gaping void in my gut.) I was frightened.
Geoff and I were out of the tent at first light. He took off running up the trail while I prepared to rouse the ranger for the search. Unenthused as the ranger had been, it wasn’t too much of a shock that there wasn’t a full-scale helicopter rescue underway by sunrise. But Geoff returned within the hour. He’d found Shane a mile up the trail. The predicament was predictable — Shane did indeed miss the junction and hiked another four miles before it got dark. With only a small flashlight and uncertainty about whether he’d missed the campground, he did the smart thing and hunkered down, hungry and thirsty as he was (he didn’t eat the group dinner he was carrying. I remember being flabbergasted by his restraint.) At dawn, he turned back the way he came and soon encountered Geoff.
There was much rejoicing. Shane didn’t think it was a big deal. He had a tent, he had food. He even had water thanks to smart conservation. He knew he’d find us eventually. In the scheme of things, it was a benign mishap. But when I read the letter I sent home about the incident, between every line I can still see all of the wild scenarios I dreamed up during that sleepless night when I was certain we’d lost Shane. All of the rumination and agony, all over nothing. But it is interesting how those emotions — sharp and unyielding, even if unwarranted — also stick in my mind.
I had to dig up that letter to remember most of the details of this trip. The awe still returns when I look at the grainy photographs. But without any record of the night, I still sharply remember what I smelled (sage and diesel exhaust), saw (the green tent fabric backlit by the dim light from the ranger residence), tasted (saltiness on my tongue), and felt (terror that my friend was dead and we would all have to live with our abandonment of him.)
It is interesting, isn’t it, how our memories are calibrated to hold onto joy, but in the shadows, and also likely in our bodies, we also store countless little traumas. How do we reconcile this over a lifetime? I don’t know, but what I do realize is that there’s never been a time when I was truly “innocent.”
Thank you to the readers who reached out after my last post and offered to pay for a subscription. I didn’t want to make this a subscription-based Substack because my contributions have been and are likely to remain sporadic, because it’s a personal and not commercial project, and because I too have fatigue over endless media paywalls. The content on this Substack will remain free. But if you feel compelled to throw a few quarters in the tip jar of yet another random writer, I will always be grateful.
Thank you.
Great insight! Have reread this 3 times and still find it spurs tangents of thought and refection. Thanks!
Your opening paragraphs are profound, Jill