I want you to have an experience with these posts; there are links to songs, videos, other websites, and many various adventures. So here is your invitation to leave the tab open and return to find the link to the podcast or watch the movie. Take a walk and play the song. Think some thoughts and make some notes, or just leave space to let them emerge as the morning or afternoon unfolds. You may need an hour, or two…sometimes you might need a week for your brain to untangle and release. At least that’s how I work. You do you.

Today’s song is Frank Sinatra Jr’s Black Night. If you liked that one, you also might like The Ocean by Richard Hawley, The Rip by Portishead, or Empire Ants by The Gorillaz. The crescendo of each song echoes somewhere deep inside. You know how I wrote about using sound vibrations earlier this year to help kill the cancer? I think that’s what these songs do too. They vibrate something vital inside me, and the result is elation and joy. I hope for you too. 

Today I want to talk about creativity as a force for survival.

When my neck started spasming last year, the aspen trees in the glaciated gorges of Steens Mountain had just started to turn gold. I was leading a trail maintenance trip for National Public Lands Day, and I knew something was very wrong. I was due to fly out the very next day to start a 400-mile thru-hike of the Pinhoti Trail, which I would connect to the Benton MacKaye Trail, turn east, and hike to its terminus at Springer Mountain (also the start of the Appalachian Trail). I planned to bookend the hike with a visit to Pinhoti Fest before I started walking, and finish with the Benton MacKaye Trail Association’s Annual Meeting and Hike Fest at Unicoi Lodge in Helen, Georgia. I intended to make further connections with the founders and stewards of both trail organizations to explore how I could add my expertise to their trails with my long-distance trail consulting business. This was a working hike, but also my vacation. Where do I stop and my job begin? I’ve never really known, having always (or most of the time) worked within a passion.

That beautiful fall day changed everything. Once my neck started to spasm on the last evening of the trip, the jolts continued to shock me, racing from my brain, down my spine. I had no clue what was going on, and quickly said an early goodnight to my volunteers as tears streamed down my face. I thought rest and lying down might ease the bewildering condition, but no. My neck spasmed about every five minutes during the long, late-September night. I cried with fear and pain, hoping the others couldn’t hear the extent of my anguish. Something was very wrong.

I avoided facing the truth even after I managed to make the five-hour drive back to Bend and directly to an urgent care. An exam showed nothing of concern, so we blamed the spasms on a few nights of a poor pillow. I could still hike, right? Meanwhile, on the East Coast, Hurricane Helen had just hit land, tearing up the communities, towns, trails, and mountains where I had planned to hike. I rebooked my flight for a few days hence to see how my neck and the storms would play out.

This wasn’t supposed to happen, to my body or the inland communities along the Appalachians, but one thing was clear: much of the region I was planning to hike in was devastated. On the bright side, the Alabama portion of the Pinhoti Trail was spared, but it seemed in poor taste to frolic down the trail when people were suffering just a short distance away in Georgia. 

The east coast hike wasn’t going to happen, so I fixated on the Oregon Coast Trail. This 413-mile hike was close to home, had many towns (meaning I could find an easy out if my neck continued to give me grief), and I had already planned to be away from work for a month, so I threw myself into last-minute planning to walk a month along the sea. 

I planned to travel to and from the trail all using public transportation; it would be a cool experiment! Since my passion is my work, I started to turn this trip into another opportunity to evaluate the resources and infrastructure of the trail to see how I could improve it from a hiker’s perspective. I decided to start my hike a week out from that urgent care visit, which would give me time to get a few sessions of acupuncture and massage, and push past the pain in my neck to keep going and hike anyway. I’ve done it before, hiked through fresh and recent injuries, that is. 

The day before I started my October groundtruthing hike of the Blue Mountains Trail in 2020, I walked out of the house barefoot, and a stray nail sticking up from the door frame tore a fourth-inch chunk out of the sole of my foot. The flapper was deep enough that I had ripped through a significant portion of skin and callus. I panicked, immediately cleaned out the wound, put some antibiotic ointment on it, and elevated my foot until Kirk came home from work. I shook as I showed him the wound, but slowly convinced myself and him that I could keep it cleaned and protected as I hiked for a month solo on a difficult backcountry route in north eastern Oregon. And I went, and I was fine. So I’d be fine this time too, right?

After a week of treatments, I was convinced this Oregon Coast Trail thing was a go. Kirk and I decided to head up to Waldo Lake for the weekend in our camper so he could foilboard while I read in a chair in the sun. I still wasn’t 100 percent, but I had convinced myself I would heal on the hike, much like I had done on the Blue Mountains Trail. The morning we were set to leave, I was stretching when something twinged in my back and I instantly knew I wasn’t going hiking anywhere. All the progress I thought I had made was gone in that twinge. I didn’t tell the rest of my body, though, and I packed up my backpack and headed out for the weekend. Over the next two days, it was apparent that I was having trouble moving normally. Carrying much of anything caused more pain, and I finally voiced out loud that I wouldn’t be hiking the Oregon Coast Trail. I returned home in a slump. Two hikes had now been thwarted in the last week. 

Now what?

It wasn’t until I was on a morning walk recently that last year’s hiking (or non-hiking) saga gained more shape. I headed out into the frosty morning with freshly charged earbuds in place and strolled along my normal route along the Deschutes River. That morning, I listened to Rich Roll’s podcast featuring author and fellow cancer navigator Suleika Jaouad, and I saw my decisions in the wake of my physical limitations in a new light.

Suleika has experienced survival as a creative act. I read her first book, Between Two Kingdoms, this year, shortly after my diagnosis, and quickly pre-ordered her second book, The Book of Alchemy. The more I learned about her story, the more I identified with her struggles. When I heard her leukemia returned for the third time before the launch of her new book, my heart just bled for her. For us. 

Back to last October: when I realized that I would not be hiking the Oregon Coast Trail, I decided to go ahead and do it anyway, but from home. I decided to embark on a virtual journey and pretend that I was out plodding through the sand and feeling the rain sting my cheeks in groves of old-growth trees that rim the bluffs over the Pacific Ocean. I would virtually hike the Oregon Coast Trail.

Ever since I set foot on the Appalachian Trail back in 2002, I kept a daily journal. Those hand-written missives from the AT are lost, but from then on, I wrote and posted them online. From my hike during a break from grad school along the West Highland Way, to my thru-hike of the Colorado Trail and the culmination of my summer of leading trail crews, I chronicled the rain, sleet, and snow. The blisters, spider bites, and those few times I caught myself on fire from my beer-can stove. Yes, there were multiple times. Over the years, I shared my joys and struggles with a small group of loyal blog-readers, but more importantly, I found great joy in writing for the love of writing. I didn’t care if anyone else read about day 56 on the Pacific Crest Trail or day 5 on the Sunshine Coast Trail, I loved waking up in the early morning and capturing the feeling of the day before. 

So when my body wouldn’t let me hike last fall, I decided to wake up early each morning, read the guidebook (shout out to Bonnie Henderson and her excellent resource), reference the FarOut app for real-time updates from other hikers, study the weather, decide how many miles to walk, where I would camp or find lodging, where I would eat, what interesting things I’d see during the day, and how I would navigate the many gaps in the trail. I wanted to turn this virtual hike into a visual journey as well, so I planned to create a story map that I would build on, publishing each new day on the story map as I would on an actual thru-hike.  The Oregon Coast Trail is a logistical melange of hazards like high tides, which make certain sections undoable, or eroding cliffs from a perpetually stormy sea. I wanted to experience those hazards, even if remotely, and decide how I would proceed if I were actually there.

Story mapping had become another passion by this point, and over the past few years, I had been creating them professionally for other organizations. The medium harkened back to my college days where I dove into multi-media projects, combining images with prose, sounds, and even videos. And since my virtual hike was quickly becoming another work/passion project, I decided to add on elements from a second business I had started recently, called Intentional Hiking. 

Yes, the title gives it away – with Intentional Hiking, I hosted several conversations a month about ways hikers could cultivate a deeper engagement with the world around them as they were out for a day hike, week-long backpacking trip, or a long thru-hike. I invited experts to talk about things like collecting data for Adventure Scientists, learning how to identify plants and animals to contribute to research projects on iNaturalist, or even how public land management agencies are integrating Traditional Ecological Knowledge of indigenous peoples into federal planning processes. To apply this to the Oregon Coast Trail, I decided I would identify several aspects hikers (and I) could engage with as we walked. Those items were categorized and marked on the maps as: Fun Facts, Trail Stuff, Environment, Military History, Exploration History, Tribal Nations, Art and Culture, and Take Action. Each morning, I would wake at my usual 4am, spend the next 4-5 hours researching, writing, and adding on to my story map, and publish that day’s hike on my blog. 

By the second week, my creative act had become a bit oppressive, given the sheer amount of time it was taking me to create each day’s exploration. The added weight of my painful body didn’t make things much easier. After my morning creation, my days were filled with appointments. They ranged from sessions with a physical therapist, massage therapist, chiropractor, acupuncturist, and my primary care doctor, with little result. I could barely move. 

I kept going because that’s what I do. I finished the project on October 31 to reflect when I would have finished in real time. I remember my neck and back were feeling a hair better…in fact, everything was feeling a tad better, that is, until I slipped and fell on a wet floor while shopping on November 1. It was the kind of fall that you knew would be bad on the way down. As my feet flew out from under me, I had long enough to notice the “caution wet floor” sign by my right leg, and also know I was in trouble. I landed hard on my right glute, whiplashed my head, and passed out. 

I will tell you the rest of the story another time, but needless to say, my troubles were only getting worse, and I was still about two months out from my cancer diagnosis. Life sucked, but it sucked less when I could focus on things like the virtual Oregon Coast Trail by ignoring my pain as much as I could to do something that brought joy.

I want to say many more things about how the creative act is survival. Many of you have seen it play out in real time through my blog this year, so stay tuned as I unpack more layers of pain and being so that I can continue to not just survive, but thrive through my creativity.

Slueika was in remission for 10 years before her cancer started growing again. The road ahead seems so long that I think the only thing that can get me through this is exploring what it means to be alive, creatively. And what a gift to the world that Slueika and her husband and musician Jon Baptist are giving to the world by doing the same. 

Check out American Symphony on Netflix if you want to learn more about these two, they take my breath away.