Katie’s Musings: Hiking Roulette

In the 10 years after I graduated college, I moved a lot.  Probably I was restless, looking for new ideas and new experiences, searching for someplace that felt like my own and never quite finding it.  And whenever I moved to a new place, one of the first things I did was to look for some wilderness I could regularly get lost in.  There’s something rejuvenating about wandering.  I think it has something to do with the way your brain wanders when your body does.  Or maybe it was part of looking for belonging and always finding it in the wilderness.  I don’t know.  At any rate, wandering has always been a habit of mine, particularly when life gets weird.

When I was living in New York, my favorite patch of wilderness was the Rockefeller Nature Preserve near Sleepy Hollow, NY.  (Yes, THE Sleepy Hollow, aka headless horseman territory). One of the Rockefellers had a penchant for simentaller cattle (who knew?) and bought up a huge passel of land in slightly upstate New York on which to keep her herd.  The wilderness around the herd became the nature preserve, a sprawling expanse of hills forested with tulip trees and conifers alike, crisscrossed with running streams and stone bridges and short stone walls that marked old property lines.  It looked like a fairy tale forest, and on a regular basis, I would spend upwards of an hour and a half roaming the woods.

I used to accidentally play this thing I like to call “hiking roulette”… which is not as ominous as it seems.  I would start my hike way too late in the day, sometimes accidentally sometimes not, banking on my long legs and swift walking pace to get me back to start before it got too dark to see.  Or I would look at the ominous clouds overhead and decide it definitely probably maybe wasn’t going to rain.  Most of the time I was right… occasionally I was wrong.  Hiking roulette.  But the paths are well marked and the area’s quite safe, so it never really bothered me when I ran a bit long.

One day, I started out way later than I’d planned.  I was walking my normal route – about 6 miles through the park – and I was 3 miles in when I noticed the sun was sinking really fast.  Which was pretty late even by my standards.  It was probably a coincidence that, at the exact moment of my realization, my iPod shuffled to Darkness Descends by Laura Marling:

You listen to them whine and moan

About everything you can’t understand

Can I just say I don’t feel the light,

But darkness descends once more into my life.

A thought ran through my mind – “Ooh this is a TOTAL Sleepy Hollow headless horsemen moment!”  which was followed by, “Katie, you eedget, this is how people DIE!” … both of which were REALLY helpful things for my brain to have brought up at that moment. I took off running, which I usually try to avoid at all cost.  I rounded bend after bend, going on autopilot.  I’d walked it so many times, I knew the way.  The moon rose high and round in the sky, and as I approached the end, the loudest owl I’ve ever heard began hooting wildly at me.

I looked up and saw him/her perched high in the tulip trees that abound there, large and brownish, staring down at me.  Judging me for my poor judgment.  But in that moment, with that cry, it was fine.  It brought me back to the present.  I knew I would make it.  I could see the lights on the road that ran parallel to the path.  I was fine.  I walked the last mile or so confidently in the moonlight through the wilderness, listening to the stillness of night fall, and feeling, in that moment, belonging.  Belonging to… something.  Someplace.  Myself.

In Braving the Wilderness, Brené Brown describes “wilderness” as the act of belonging so fully to yourself that you’re willing to stand alone.  She talks about the wilderness as a space that feels unholy because we cannot control it… but at the same time, wilderness is the place of true belonging, the most sacred space you’ll ever stand, because you are standing in your own conviction, your own integrity, and your own power.  Sometimes… maybe often? … we need to be reminded of that.  And sometimes it takes a voice in the wilderness to help us remember.

(For the record, I still occasionally play hiking roullette.  Old habits and whatnot.)