Easter weekend 1999 in the Tonto National Forest of Arizona... The clouds were different. .. I had been living in the wilderness for a year... I had never seen clouds like these...In that year I had spent more time in the desert under the stars than in civilization... My eyes used to hurt in grocery stores, and I slept better on the floor than in a bed. It was... so free... so needed... so life altering... it is a time in my life that i day dream about and wish i could go back to... but not enough to actually do it... it is a great piece of the past.
the clouds... they were not rain clouds... so i almost didn't build a shelter that night... when the boys asked if they should build shelters i just said, i am... just in case... do what you want
over the next two days that little part of the Arizona desert was covered in 3 feet of snow. It was April in Arizona... I had only packed a pair of shorts, a t-shirt and one long sleeve shirt...on the morning that we abandoned camp i remember being buried under my tarp, but i was warm... i had to pee so bad it ached... i couldn't sleep from the pain in my belly, but i wasn't moving from my little tanya snow cave because i was warm... i knew leaving my shelter meant exposing my self to the elements... and that the space that my body occupied would quickly cave in with snow as soon as i left it...
finally Jeramey Beals came over and said we were hiking out of camp and leaving everything behind... everything... i didn't even have shoe laces because i had used them to build my shelter... so we left... everything... including my little journal...
about four months later Melissa's group hiked across our once abandoned camp... she retrieved my journal, another book and a few pairs of wool socks.
my little journal... the pages had been eaten away by something... but i have it now... and today i was reading it... and i really like a line from the last entry... i am not sure what i was referring to... i tend to say something without saying anything when i journal...
but it says...
freedom is walking with nothing to hide from or behind
i don't know how free i am right now... but every day, week, year... i am getting better and better at walking with nothing to hide from or behind...
3 comments:
Deep. I like this entry and I'm amazed they found your journal after all of that. Wow.
I still can't believe that happened - the snow - and 3 FEET! That's how I used to think - in the trail days - in my off weeks I would wake up in the morning and observe the weather and feel for the people on the trail, imagingng what that meant their day would be like. It was cool to be connected to the basics - what you needed to do to survive. I think that's why it was so therapeutic to go out. The dumb stuff in my brain was all pushed out by the air and necessity of it all.
I just can't believe it snowed. You all were legends who endured that. I felt proud to know you!
Tanya,
Great post here. Your details carry a meditative weight. The snow storm was great. I was in Germany that week; I went back out on the trail the next rotation, and, except for muddy arroyos, you couldn't really tell anything had happened.
That's cool that Melissa found your journal. A little treasure.
Elizabeth's group was feared dead that week. They couldn't get radio contact and just kept hiking through the snow that whole week. The Anasazi people called and left a message on her parents' answering machine that went something like: "Your daughter has been lost for a few days; we have search teams out, but we don't know if we'll find them."
Her parents didn't get the message until after the group emerged, though, so they were blissfully ignorant of the whole thing.
I'm glad I wasn't out there that week, but in a way I'm also sad. It was such a momentous occasion.
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