Verge: An ode to time spent outdoors
By Annalise Grueter
“I am — really am — an extremist, one who lives and loves by choice far out on the very verge of things,
on the edge of the abyss, where this world falls off into the depths of another. That’s the way I like it.” – Edward Abbey
In August 2011, I went off into the woods — to live my Thoreauvian dream, you might say. I spent two and a half years anticipating, dreaming of and wishing for the experience. Naturally, it turned out to be something completely different than I had expected. Why does a person choose to “go into the woods?” I don’t really know. I think the appeal might have been some strange, masochistic impulse to tightrope walk the figurative guardrail between paved road and skull-crushing river rapids, or to deliberately get lost. In the forest. By myself. The academic semester I participated in was about community, but I went to the Adirondacks for myself; to be by myself and seek things that in the past terrified me.
I wonder if, having grown more comfortable with, and more adept to, “extroversion,” gapless schedules and quasi-neurotic type-A involvement on a college campus, I really was just desperate for some alone time. That’s bullshit.
A wonder? I know, I just don’t like admitting it. Being energetic and friendly and forward around strangers and even friends is something I was doing basically every day, but it is something I taught myself over years and years. Something that, even at age 17, I was not comfortable doing outside my own group of friends. This isn’t false, exactly. Yet, my childhood friends know precisely what I reference when I call myself “shy.” People who’ve met me in more surface contexts, even friends, disbelieve. At heart, I’m an introvert, and I let myself get far too burned out spending so much time with others and so little time really with myself. The inner quiet girl, too timid to surface while I was molding myself into sociability and charisma for the sake of career and social success at university, was silently begging for attention.
When I was 13 years old, I came around a corner too quickly on my bike and onto a bridge covered in gravel. The wheels locked and skidded at 25 miles per hour. I found myself, still attached to the machine, barely balancing in a terrified struggle to keep from toppling over the guardrail and off the bridge into the rocky, rushing river below. I spent the rest of the afternoon disoriented from the near catastrophe, memories blacked out.
A few months later, I found myself wandering alone, rain-soaked and hypothermic, in the sublime backcountry of the Colorado Rockies. It was 2am and the middle of a 24-hour solo outdoor education experience with my school; and I had no clue where to find the teachers responsible for my group. Earlier that evening, I experienced hail during a lightning storm, so immediate that the thunder clashed as bolts of electricity whited out my surroundings. I had never been so cold, so isolated, so helpless, or unwillingly independent. I trudged on for hours in the inky, damp, predawn blackness, hoping — in a calm beyond panic — to find an adult. At the time, it was the most terrifying experience of my life. Now, I take pride in it. Because it was such an intense situation and remains so vivid and because, clearly, I survived.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been trying to prove myself. The basis is some kind of preoccupation with accomplishment, some manifestation of creating “self-esteem” in the most literal sense of the phrase. Selfish, and yet the focus is equally directed outward as well as inward. It’s ridiculously neurotic.
There is this fixation I have to be as skilled and successful as possible, both in the realm of animalistic survival and within human society. A desperation to succeed and excel at surviving — at living. To use simple, painfully-trite college slang, I want to be good at life. So, at university, I joined as many organizations as I could cram into my schedule.
In my twenties, I pushed and pushed and pushed to gain skills, work experience and network ‘til my hands trembled and my brain buzzed with caffeine and nervous energy. To be good at life. To have a career — strict ethics and childhood dreams be damned. I strove desperately to be “good enough”… But by whose definition was I not? Only my own, and a deep-rooted anxiety of not having been so in the past.
That led me to taking my childhood pleasures and ecstasies and heading off into unknown forest; just another in a chain of occasional reckless decisions (which included deliberately attending a university isolated from everyone and anyplace I knew). The inner girl rejoiced. She finally got to breathe again, with fewer expectations to meet and less to accomplish. The outer young woman wasn’t so sure how she felt and the lack of distractions might have created time to actually contemplate whether or not she was good enough …
To be continued …