It’s very easy to take myself too seriously. Especially when starting something new like writing a book. After the Central Oregon Writers Guild conference last month, I was totally humbled and walked away from the weekend with my brain full of words and concepts, straining to remember what I could from college literature classes 30 years ago. It took four days and a walk in a tangerine sunrise before an inkling of confidence came back. After all, I’ve been writing constantly for those 30 years; I wasn’t starting from scratch, was I?
Then I thought about my story: the months and years of living the dirtbag hiker lifestyle, discovering my love of strangers in strange lands, and how illness changed my relationship to all of it, and hope returned. I’ve lived through so many hilarious and scary moments that I could easily write an entire book about almost dying – like the time I could have slipped down a frozen ice shoot of snow on the Continental Divide Trail when approaching Gray’s Peak in Colorado. If I can walk across that icy death trap with bald trail runners, then I can write a book, right?
What helps is knowing that I didn’t start this book process just to place a shiny cover on my bookshelf, but to live the life of a writer, and to be a student again. I love the learning, I love the challenge of trying to condense 48 years of living hard into something bite-sized. I mean, how often do we let ourselves start at something new, knowing the journey will be filled with uncertainty and stumbles? Hmmmm, kind of a thru-hike? But what is different this time is that I never questioned my ability to finish a thru-hike. Not even on that first 2,000-mile one in 2002. I knew I would do it. Why is writing a book any different? I’m in a daily wrestling match with myself…but what a luxury to have this conversation with living me, when in an alternative universe I didn’t make it? This is all a bonus. This is all the icing on top.
I was in one of those self-doubting funks when a friend sent me this interview with author Ursula LeGuin, and watching it immediately turned my attitude around.
It lit my brain on fire in a couple of different ways and really got me excited about trying my hand at fiction. There are so many takeaways from this interview, but at one point, she mentioned that you don’t want to talk to a writer at the end of the day if they haven’t been writing. Even the best of us struggle. In a workshop I attended this week with author Cheri Kephart, she rattled off a few other quotes like this one from Hemingway: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed,” and then I found this one from George Orwell: “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.” But then I stumbled upon this Emerson quote that helped: “The only way to write is to write.” True dat. This blog is helping to serve that purpose. It’s giving me something other than the obvious task at hand to have fun with. I keep a running list of things I’d like to explore, or that struck me, and have come to enjoy the cadence of writing a blog post a week, sometimes about writing, sometimes not. I think it’s the writing that is key here. Just doing it.
I’ll leave you with this song that always helps lighten the mood when I’m bogged down by gerunds or trying to wrap my head around how to use the past perfect tense.
Here is my favorite part of the song, 100% Endurance from Yard Act:
“It’s all so pointless, ah, but it’s not though is it? It’s really real and when you feel it, you can really feel it Grab somebody that you love Grab anyone who needs to hear it And shake ’em by the shoulders, scream in their face
Death is coming for us all, but not today Today you’re living it, hey, you’re really feeling it Give it everything you’ve got knowing that you can’t take it with you And all you ever needed to exist has always been within you Gimme some of that good stuff that human spirit Cut it with a hundred percent endurance.”
It’s 0-dark-30 in Pendleton. My room sits eye-level to busy Highway 84, and I try to drown out the sound of trucks breaking and cars racing through the city by turning the fan on high.
I arrived in the late afternoon and shook off the four-hour drive. A pain had just started to take hold of my lower back, but some light stretching and walking helped to ease the stiffness that had set in.
It’s time for the yearly Oregon Outdoor Recreation Summit, and arriving here brings back all sorts of memories of my body last year. What do I mean? Last year, I was in such debilitating pain, still blaming my condition on slow-healing injuries, that I was jacked up on pain meds and moved so deliberately that many people noticed something was wrong. Only weeks later would I be diagnosed with cancer, which explained the constant neck and back spasms that had been plaguing me for months.
The Summit is designed and hosted by the Oregon Trails Coalition, the group I have been leading as Chair of the Steering Committee for the last three years, and this is my final summit in this volunteer role.
That first night I stopped in distillery where about 50 other summit folks milled about. Entering this room was both exciting and daunting. Many people knew of my challenging year because I’ve been quite public about it, but others had no idea. It was as if I was breaking out of a cocoon…a cocoon that had been smashed and thought destroyed, but not. I had emerged on the other side of my brush with mortality to find myself on a similar path I had been on before. It was both exciting and confusing.
But I digress. I wanted to write this blog post to talk about volunteering and how remaining involved in the Coalition has been a vital part of my healing. My fellow board members cheered me on this year, they ran the monthly meetings until I was able to engage again, and gave me lovely gifts like home-made granola, books, and a bright yellow t-shirt that I wear constantly.
To have a purpose greater than yourself and to be of service to your community is a powerful motivator and force for healing. I was deathly ill a year ago, and now I’m walking upright. I still have the glow from the Portugal sun on my cheeks, and am reimagining my future. This summit doesn’t represent my swan song; it’s a re-awakening. It’s a rebirth. BTW, this seems an opportune time to mention Renee means “reborn” in French. How can it be the first time I’m drawing this connection?
So volunteering. Volunteering has helped pull me out of my self-focused fog. Sure, I could have dwelled on my pain, quit the Coalition, and sulked about my inability to backpack, but I decided to use what energy I had to continue supporting, promoting, and advocating for the preservation, development, and stewardship of a statewide network of trails. Using my precious hours in this world for good has always been vitally important to me. When I was faced with a million career options after college, I pushed that all away to become a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa. I wanted my time to mean something to someone. I found that direct aid was the best way to disentangle myself from the rampant consumerism and individualism that modern society primes us for. Volunteering connects us to the collective, much like I believe hiking connects us to the land. And connection is healing.
My mom will be spending Thanksgiving and Christmas at a diner serving dinner to those in need. And with the SNAP benefit disaster, I expect this small act of kindness will have a dramatic impact on her community, and her outlook in the wake of my dad’s death.
Are you volunteering?
My brother has always loved animals, so I’m encouraging him to look into animal shelters in his area and explore if they need help walking dogs or petting cats. Volunteering could look like anything. You could show up for children, the elderly, the sick, or the natural areas around you. You could pull invasive weeds or plant milkweed for migrating Monarch butterflies. It’s endless! And when it feels like everything is falling apart, volunteering can connect you with the beauty of what is working, what is alive around you.
If you are in Oregon, we are in our recruitment period for the Oregon Trails Coalition Steering Committee and Advisory Board. The Advisory Council strives to be truly representative of the Oregon Trails community of professionals, advocates, volunteers, and trail users. It advises the Steering Committee on coalition advocacy positions and campaigns, and helps implement and promote events and programs. The Steering Committee provides oversight and guidance to the Coalition Director, is responsible for carrying out the Coalition’s mission, and generally acts in accordance with the Advisory Council’s recommendations.… and you get to work with fabulous people. Please join us!
I’ll leave you with this post from my friend Jess, and I’d love to hear from you. How do you volunteer? How would you like to volunteer? I bet we could connect you with a meaningful opportunity that helps you see the beauty and richness of an engaged life.
Since commenting has been so buggy on this website, I’ve decided to share these posts on Substack , where commenting will be much easier.
As I have experienced the destruction and reconstruction of my body this year, I’ve had to face the hard truth: I will die. My dad died this year. We are all going to die, some sooner than others.
Writing through my illness has helped me focus on what is left: life. I am still alive, my mom is alive, many of my friends are alive, and even though the world looks different through that lens now, I am still alive, so how am I going to live with the knowledge of death?
We all have to face this, no matter how much we ignore the simple fact that humans don’t live forever. Add in some other truths: like many other systems around us are on the brink of collapse as well, and the futility of it all easily opens the door to despair. I struggle with it, and I know many of my friends struggle with it too, so when I saw a link to this video, I clicked on it more out of curiosity than out of the expectation of an answer.
I came away electrified. Sarah Wilson had come to the same conclusion that I had with my cancer.
As Sarah said, “I feel more alive and connected than ever before. The urgency of what is going on has forced me into living fully and living fully now.”
Yes. This.
Conveniently, on my “living fully now” list, is the desire to create my own TED talk. I don’t love public speaking, but over the ten years I spent developing the Oregon Desert Trail, I gave at least 100 presentations about the trail and faced my fear of forgetting how to talk in front of crowds of people. I still get sweaty palms, but by speaking in front of strangers, I have been able to build connections and foster curiosity in others, something that compels me to keep going. A TED talk is on another level than speaking at a small library… it could get filmed and posted like Sarah’s was (if I’m lucky), but I’m not going to let that stop me.
There is something here I want to say, and I’m still figuring out how to say it. The workshops, conferences, and books I’ve immersed myself in the last month are helping me pull memories and insights from the fog of my experiences and throw them into the soupy mess that will become my memoir. I think creating a TED talk will help me solidify my intent while putting pen to paper.
Luckily, the Bend TEDx conference is coming back next year. I will apply, and if chosen, will try out some of the content I’ve been working on for this book project. Deadlines can cause panic, but they can also force action, especially when I’m in the formless shape of an unstructured life. I definitely strive to bring structure to my days, but sometimes that all falls apart and I’m left a puddle on the couch, staring at the wall.
So if you find yourself staring at the wall too, overwhelmed by the impending collapse of everything we know, it is helpful to ask yourself:
If this was my last day, last week, last month, what would I want to do?
And then do one of those things. And write them all down on a list, and do more of those things, and so on and so forth. Before long you may be living fully in the present or maybe you will discover you have already been doing that. What I’m trying to say is, please do those things now instead of waiting to act until the day when everything is perfect…that day may never come. It’s cancer; it’s a climate catastrophe in your city; it’s an authoritarian government that takes your rights away. It almost doesn’t matter what it is.
Live now. It’s all we have.
Since the commenting has been so buggy lately on this website and an upgrade would be very expensive, I’ve decided to share these posts on my new Substack where commenting will be much easier. So head over there if you want to leave me a message.Note: My substack is free, I am not accepting payments at this time, so feel free to choose “no pledge”.
Moving forward is the theme of the year, my next years, my foreseeable future. It always has been, but sometimes you need a big event, like almost dying – but not, to wake you up to the day-to-day reality of what it means to be healthy and alive. The moving forward theme is very convenient for a thru-hiker, especially me, as I’ve had a very deliberate and physical shift from hiker me to writer me since coming home from the Camino.
I’ve turned the office where I built and ran my long-distance trail consulting business into my writing studio. I moved all my hiking and business books out, and my writing books in. I obtained a new cozy rocking chair to read in, and finally transitioned my trusty cancer cart that would move around the house with me into a bookshelf that now houses all of my medications, the books you all have sent me (there are still so many I have left to read!), and notecards.
Why do this? Because I’ve decided that I am writing a book next. That is my forward, and I’m very excited about it. Yes, I do want to create more Camino-style hiking opportunities in the States. Yes, I plan to continue to explore and adventure without a backpack until the day when I can start putting weight on these shoulders of mine, but I decided that I will be making decisions for the short-term me for now. I will transition back to the business of hiking phase once I’m certain that I’ll be around in 5 years to work on a 5-year plan.
I have always wanted to write a book. When I was a kid, I wanted to be an author. Others want to be astronauts or doctors, and I wanted to be a writer. I talked about it and thought about it endlessly. I specifically remember designing the cover (in crayon of course) for one of my early books, named “A Story Within a Story,” but did I actually write it? I don’t recall, but I do remember thinking I could write anything if I really wanted to.
I think I wanted to be an author so bad because I love books. Love them. Growing up, I read books like there was no tomorrow. Now that I know what no tomorrow really feels like, the metaphor holds up. Reading was and always has been a desperate thing. I would gulp down words as if they might disappear from the page. I wanted to read them all right now. Even today. The feeling I have of walking into a library or Barnes and Noble has always been one of longing and regret. There is no way I can read everything.
I think my desire to consume words has always really been about the desire for adventure (adventure with a side of escapism). Hmmm, escapism….Zogore in Burkina Faso comes to mind. After college, I got what I asked for. The adventure of living in West Africa for my two-year Peace Corps service was completely overwhelming at times, and I read through my bewilderment and frequent existential crises. I dealt with the reality of being the first foreigner, not even the first Peace Corps volunteer, to live in that dusty and dry sub-Saharan village by escaping into my books. Hundreds of books. Note: I learned to adjust to the rhythm of it after the first year…there is something to the idea that deep time in a place softens you up to accept its imprint on your person.
Since I started reading, I’ve been ingesting all of these stories and sagas, and those words have been sifting and percolating. And it turns out, I had been writing the whole time…just not books. From English class haikus in grade school to my dissertation in grad school: The Eco Interplay Ethic, I wrote a lot. But it took on another dimension when I started hiking.
When I started hiking, I knew I wanted to keep a daily journal, so my nightly scribbles on the Appalachian Trail in 2002 became part of my daily routine. I have no idea where that journal ended up, but I transformed my written journals into digital ones on my next few thru-hikes, including the West Highland Way, Pacific Crest Trail, Colorado Trail, Arizona Trail and more. Then over the last decade, as cell phones hit the trail, I’ve been typing with my thumbs on the 12 different long-distance hikes I’ve done since then…that’s about 12,000 miles of mornings. Early mornings became my witching hour. Early mornings are when my thoughts are most crisp, and even after sipping on the first dregs of my hot coffee in my sleeping bag, the night clings on just enough to bring some of its poetry back into the world.
Writing a book is a much bigger task than writing every day for 5 months on a trail (a la PCT or CDT). How do I start? I guess by writing every day for five months, and then five months more, and another five on top of that. Maybe I’ve started with this blog post.
Over the last month or so I started by reading about writing. (Can I give myself a self-directed MFA?) I want to study the craft. The structure. To learn how to weave different elements together in something as gigantic as a book. Like John McPhee says in On the Writing Process, start at an exciting part and circle back around (Note: revisit his structure in the story about the canoe and a bear). Add a little humor like Stephen King does in On Writing. Do the daily writing prompts like Suleika Jaouad does in The Book of Alchemy, and follow the 12-week program like Julia Cameron suggests in The Artist’s Way.
Of course there is no one way. I could just start writing.
But up next I’m going to take a workshop with Cheryl Strayed this weekend who wrote Wild (you know, the PCT book that wasn’t really about hiking the PCT). She rented a tiny house at the base of Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge (along the Oregon Desert Trail!) to write her book. I figure it would be silly to NOT take her workshop.
Then I’m going to the Central Oregon Writer’s Guide Conference in Bend. And after that? Maybe take a masterclass, maybe look into some residencies, maybe start on a quest to find a room with a view where I can go to for a week or two at a time, take in the landscape, go on walks, and write this thing. (If you have any ideas of cheap places I could rent, spots I could park the camper, or people who need house sitters, let me know!)
What is one of the most important elements of becoming the writer I’ve always wanted to become? Time. I have the time. I need to keep reminding myself of this because I’ve been feeling pressure to start thinking about work (Note: this is my own pressure, it’s not coming from any of you). Writing is work, right? If I’m not going to die immediately, I should be working, right? I’m fighting with myself there. Why does existence have to be productive? The gift my friends and family and the disability social safety net have given me this year is the permission and cushion of time to heal. To get better. Working doesn’t necessarily have to be part of that equation, but it also gives me a reason to be…especially when the reason is writing to process this new life I find myself living.
Work also brings up the question of: “how do I make decisions now?” As I mentioned earlier in the blog, until I can be more confident of being around at the end of a 5-year plan, I’m not going to work on a 5-year plan. I’m going to work right now. I’m going to work on the immediate future. It’s tough, though, when I got the scan showing me I didn’t have any active cancer this summer, I suddenly could see a longer life… so does that mean I start saving for retirement again? Can I even entertain the possibility of retiring? All the while, I still need to make it to 5 years…and the odds aren’t quite in my favor, but then again, I’ve always excelled at exceeding the odds and have had good luck trusting the world.
I don’t know the answer friends. I guess I’ll keep going forward and find out.
Since the commenting has been so buggy lately on this website and an upgrade would be very expensive, I’ve decided to share these posts on my new Substack where commenting will be much easier. So head over there if you want to leave me a message.Note: My substack is free, I am not accepting payments at this time, so feel free to choose “no pledge”.
With so much uncertainty these days – both with my illness, my dad’s illness, and in the world – it seems the most logical thing to do is to focus on each day. What in the day makes it a success? What is there to be grateful for? It’s as if the most cheesy sentiments are my mantras these days…and they keep me going.
I’m halfway across the country right now, down in Lafayette, Louisiana, visiting my parents for a few weeks.
This is the first time in years that my three brothers and I have been with my parents in the same place at the same time; it has been a wonderful visit.
Before I left Bend, I had a barrage of doctors’ appointments, and once again, things are promising! The neck surgeon gave me the best news of all, my neck (a constant source of concern and soreness) is healing well, although I’ll probably have the neck soreness for the rest of my life . But the collapsed C7 vertebrae hasn’t progressed, so I have the go-ahead to start increasing movement.
I just have to use pain as my guide.
Easy to say, let pain be your guide… I won’t know it’s too much until the pain comes on, but there is hope in that guidance as well. He said the only things I need to avoid are axial loading activities, like standing on my head, and I can safely say I will be doing no such thing! I’m even starting to consider putting on an empty day pack and slowly adding weight over time. If I can walk with a day pack, the world seems much more doable…and my plans of a Camino journey even more likely.
The best outcome from these doctors’ appointments was the clearance to walk a section of the Camino this fall. More to come on that as I start to put that trip together, but I will be heading to Portugal for a few weeks in September! I’m thrilled at the prospect of stretching my legs along the coastal path, all with a bed to sleep in each night, coffees and cafes along the way, and meeting people from all over the world. Yes, I’ll be going solo, and I’m excited about the prospect of trusting the world in this next journey. I’ll be blogging daily again on that trip, it will be just like old times!
I’ve been sharing my story with a wider audience too. The National Brain Tumor Society asked to feature my writing on their blog, so they put together a wonderful little feature from my blog this year.
What else is new? I did my first water aerobics class yesterday, and wow, am I sore! I had to modify my moves in the pool…too much jumping is still quite jarring to my spine…so I slowed my roll as needed with the lovely older ladies that were in class with me. My cousin Amy helped me get a pass to her pool because I quickly found that going for a walk in July in Louisiana was WAY TOO hot and humid for a comfortable jaunt. I either have to get up before the sun or head to the pool for any exercise while I’m down here.
I have a busy, busy schedule when I get back to Oregon. A ton of doctors’ appointments await me, including a full body PET scan…cross your fingers for me that all my tumors are still getting smaller! Then it’s Kirk’s birthday, a visit from my Aunt Barbara, a Burkina Faso Peace Corps Reunion, a trip to see some friends in Eastern Oregon, PCT Days in Cascade Locks, and maybe even a trip to the Oregon coast. It may be too much, but I like to be optimistic and ambitious, so we’ll see! All the while, I need to ramp up my miles so I have hope of hiking 5-10 miles a day on the Camino in September.
I’m taking each day as it comes, but also giving myself things to look forward to. And I have so much to look forward to!
I saw the neck surgeon this week to evaluate my collapsing C7 and look at my C4 three months post surgery, and I got the all clear! The doc said the C7 doesn’t have to be addressed, and that I can live with it (we didn’t talk about backpacking, I have a feeling a full-weighted backpack might paint a different picture). I then took some x rays which showed that my C4 is appropriately healed. So that means I can start taking my c-collar off. Get ready for some neck!
So the last few days I’ve been spending more time with it off, getting used to the weight of my head again. I’m practicing turning my head and nodding again, all things I haven’t been able to do for three months. A bulk of the work will come to play with my PT. I’m transitioning away from the in-home PT to an outpatient situation, and it’s like I’m graduating or something…I’m slowly being positioned to live without daily doctors appointments and check-ins. We are also looking at decreasing my meds…I’m already off the steroids and we are looking at the pain meds next. Am I in pain anymore? It’s hard to say. Are the meds masking pain or do I even have pain any more? I have discomfort for sure, but pain?
All this is coming as I look at making my first trip to the trails summit in Wisconsin in three weeks. Can I be ready to walk around without my collar most of the day in three weeks? Can I have a glass of wine at a happy hour in three weeks? Can I sleep without an adjustable bed in three weeks?
The rash is still rashing, but it’s not getting worse, I guess it’s clearing up, maybe a little?
I still feel the cancer in my spine and in my ribs. Is the tagresso doing it’s job? Maybe a little?
I’ve been sleeping a lot. Like half the day away, but again, I’m not fighting it. But I feel like I’m in a bit of a daze all the time. Sleeping so much puts a dream-like quality to everything. If I’m not myself right now it’s because I’m a dazed and dreamy version of myself.
I’m struggling with the habit of productivity. I went on a walk with a friend yesterday and we talked a bit about it. She wondered if it was a mid-western quality…this need to always be moving some ball forward, even when dealing with stage 4 cancer. What am I trying to be productive about? Well, writing here for one, diving into my past for two, and putting out there that I want to write a book (Really! Sometimes that just seems insane), and then writing thank-you cards for everything. That it’s ok to let some or all of it go. I know that it is, but the blog serves as a processing time as well, and it is keeping you all in my life, which I really need these days.
I got a card from a stranger, a hiker that has been reading my blog for years but I’ve never met, and I needed to read that card that day. It made such a difference in my morale and mood. I need all of you in my life, so I want to be productive enough to update the blog to keep you all informed and close. I need all of you.
I got another card recently from a volunteer that came on one of my trail work trips last year. I only met her that one time, and she wrote the most beautiful card with gifts of song and book recommendations. I love that, that kind of thing fuels my day, and I’m thrilled to add to my reading list too 🙂
So all of this to say, I don’t know where my need to be productive comes from, but I don’t want to give up the need to write, and sure maybe I’ll stitch some of this together into something that could be called a book, but I do want to give up the idea that I’m going to come out the other side of this looking for a publisher. I want to give myself time to just be. And right now that looks like a lot of sleeping. Not as much reading as I’d like (reading puts me to sleep right now), but I’m just going to let it be and not fight against it.
You will probably have to remind me of that from time to time!
In all honesty, I’ve seen a lot of change this week. For one, I’ve been sleeping! Something flipped last weekend and suddenly I was sleeping most of the night and sleeping throughout the day. I couldn’t sleep enough. I was in a dis-combubulated haze of sleep for a few days there, and didn’t fight it. I don’t know if it was transitioning from Trazodone to Magnesium Glycinate and a sleep THC/CBD tincture, or maybe it was decreasing the steroid I was taking, or maybe it was my body saying, “enough,” but it was time.
I’ve also been seeing changes in the form of some of those side-effects from my new mutation drug, Tagrisso. There was a line about adult acne in the list of side effects, and a few days ago my legs erupted in a red rash of something. It’s not really itchy, but it looks bad. Real bad. I had a consult with the docs this week and they prescribed a steroid cream for it, and my acupuncturist suggested drinking celery juice for it’s anti-inflammatory and cooling qualities (Note: for those of you suffering from high blood pressure, try some celery juice!) I fully believe that food is medicine, and hope to be learning more and incorporating more food medicines through this journey of mine.
What else has been going on? Oh it’s winter again, or it was for a while this weekend. Snow and ice have covered the ground and curtailed some of my daily walks…I think that has added to my malaise.
And I’ve lost my taste for coffee…I’ve gone several days without it, which is very odd. Oh and my stomach is a mess. I can’t seem to digest anything.
So in general I’ve been living in a foggy state of existence this week. I’m not sure if I’m snapping out of it? I woke up at 1am this morning and got up, so we’ll see.
As for shows, Kirk and I just finished season 1 of Severance, and just started season 2. Go Mark and the Innies!
In general all the changes seem to be not so productive. I haven’t seen a big difference in my pain levels, in the feeling in my spine and ribs. I hope the new med is working, but I guess we won’t know for a while. At least I don’t feel like the cancer has changed course since I started Tagrisso, but who knows.
I don’t think I’m going to deep dive into past stories today. Not feeling it.
Instead I’ll open one of those books and read until my eyes can’t stay open and then go to bed again.
I woke again about midnight. I haven’t been staying in bed until 3am like I promised all of you a while ago. Oops. Instead, I keep getting up and reveling in the quiet early morning hours to read, write, drink my coffee, and enjoy the quiet. I just like it, ok?
But my new med makes me quite tired during the day. I’ve struggled to keep my eyes open even when visiting with friends, and the extra napping is probably compounded by the short nights. That has been the main side-effect of my new mutation med so far, sleepiness.
This morning I was scrolling on Instagram when I decided to post a TBT image. TBT, you know “Throw back Tuesday” where you post a memory photo.
Then I started reading my blog posts from the Owyhee packraft trip and remembered that my favorite place to write isn’t at 2am at home when I can’t sleep from the cancer in my bones, it’s writing at 4am in my tent or spread-out cowboy-camping style on my tyvek when I’m hiking.
My tradition since starting to blog on my hikes many years ago is to write every day. Get up in the dark, make my coffee, and write. Write for hours even! This is the beauty of solo hiking too; I don’t have to work around anyone else’s schedule, I don’t have to keep quiet so I don’t wake them up, I don’t have to start walking before I’m ready, I can write and nap, and make a second cup of coffee, and write some more, and eat breakfast, and then hike out when I’m ready.
If you browse back through some of the many adventures that I chronicle on this blog, the routine is the same. I write every morning. That is my jam. That is my happy place. To be alone in nature, writing as the day breaks. I know I’ll get back there, I know it in my bones, so I have that to look forward to. This writing at home is the abnormal part. This writing at home is a placeholder for me in the dark in my tent.
So, instead of recapping this incredible adventure of packrafting a 175 miles of the Owyhee River as a water alternate to the hiking route, I’ll just link to my blog posts here for you. This trip did a great job of encapsulating what I love most about adventures….the going out and not knowing if something can be done, but trying anyway. I didn’t know if one could packraft the Owyhee river in July at 135 cfs, but I wanted to find out, so tried. That is true adventure, and the kinds of adventure I hope to get back to…and by going solo I have learned to rely on myself. I have learned to trust my instincts, trust my training, and trust the world to get me through.
I trust the world to get me through this cancer too.
So here are the posts from my 2-week Owyhee solo packraft trip. Enjoy!
Read about my full Oregon Desert Trail section hike here. (I was the 10th person to complete the route after getting the job to establish it the year before. I had to hike it to know what I needed!)
Hanging out in Burkina Faso. I spent hours and hours and hours with these guys playing cards.
I have the feeling that I’m very quickly going to slide into the next phase of this cancer journey…the phase where I start feeling better, start leaving the house more, start interacting with the outside world, and slow down on the updates. I’m already missing you and these blog posts.
What will this blog turn into then?
As you all know I love writing; maybe I’ll continue to devote time to words, maybe I’ll lose interest in the middle-of-the-night journaling thing (especially as I start sleeping more), or maybe I’ll dive into trying to put all of this into a book project (oooo, I said it out loud!).
No real secret here, but I’ve wanted to write a book since I started reading books…writing and reading have always been two of the most important things in my life, and I revere authors. I do! I’m so lucky to have many friends who have written books, and that makes the prospect achievable and a bit less daunting.
Here are some books that friends of mine have written:
Wow, I know some talented people! Making this list is also reassuring; I have a lot of resources and knowledge to turn to should I need it. These peeps have gone through traditional publishing houses and self-published. It runs the gamut. I’m not sure which way I would go…but I’m open to your suggestions and stories if you have them. Please check out the list above; I hope some of you find a new book or two to read. And here’s a plug for independent booksellers: buy from Bookshop.org if you buy online, or your local indy bookseller in person.
I think a book project will be worth it even if I write something that three people read (I’m looking at you Mom and Dad!), so maybe I’ll start putting something together that could be considered a book. (BTW, what are some good books about the writing process that you know of? I like John McPhee’s Draft #4: On the Writing Process, and Stephen King’s On Writing.)
If I’m diving into writing and reading in this post, I may as well talk about the time I read more books than ever…that’s the two years I spent sweating in my village of Zogore, Burkina Faso where my coping mechanism was reading. I read well over 200 books during that time and spent many, many hours hiding from the sun (and myself) by reading in my mud hut.
How did I even end up going into the Peace Corps in the first place? I can solidly place that portion of my life into the “I want to make a difference in the world” phase. (Hmmm, have I ever left that phase? Debatable.)
I can tell you what prompted me to turn in my application…
During my junior year of college, it was time to get an internship and put into practice all of the classwork I had been immersed in, which included a smattering of graphic design, communications, and writing courses. I wanted something creative, so I found one of the most creative positions I could in one of the least-creative industries: tractors. Peoria, Illinois was home to the Caterpillar tractors world headquarters at the time, and I found an illustrious position writing for the parts and service support newsletter.
I don’t want to knock Caterpillar. Many of my friends have worked or currently work for Caterpillar (including my brother Jeff), and there are many, many ties between the company and Bradley University. It was a natural fit to find an internship there (and I remember it paid really well!), but as I reported to my cubical in Morton, Illinois, in a sea of cubicles the same size, I quickly became disillusioned. I had a creative gig, oh yes! And the team of people I worked for were some fun creatives as well, but the output left something to be desired. I interviewed people, took photos, wrote articles and I had the great privilege of updating and designing the CCTVs around the Morton facility with the current day’s lunch menu. I alone could choose font colors and fun backgrounds. Fun!
Many of my classmates were gearing up for jobs in advertising agencies, PR firms, or ones like the Caterpillar gig, and I couldn’t be more turned off (sorry, not sorry). At Caterpillar, I worked in a cubical the same size as a guy who had been there 40 years, and I just couldn’t see myself there, so when the Peace Corps popped into my awareness, I jumped at it.
The application process was long. There were essays to write and letters of recommendation to get. There were medical tests to schedule and interviews to sit for. Honestly, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I wanted to have a grand adventure, and I had no real idea what being a Peace Corps volunteer would mean other than it was the exact opposite of the Caterpillar internship. Joining the Peace Corps would be a giant leap into the unknown, and if there is something I gleaned from reading thousands of books over my lifetime, it was that I had an eagerness for the unknown.
It was during spring break of senior year that I got the news of my Peace Corps assignment; I was going to the francophone country of Burkina Faso. I eagerly grabbed the first world atlas I could find, and there was no Burkina Faso. Hmmm. I had no idea what continent it was on…and couldn’t find it on a globe either. Where was I going???
It turns out Burkina Faso used to be Upper Volta until its name change in the 1980s, and the references I was using pre-dated the name change. (This was before the internet was everywhere…we had to wonder a lot before we had computers in our pockets!)
Zogore was about 15 kilometers west of Ouahigouya.
Ok, for the sake of time and effort (and a bit of laziness on my part at 2:02am) here is a chat GPT overview on the history on Upper Volta/Burkina Faso:
“Upper Volta, a landlocked country in West Africa, underwent a significant transformation to become Burkina Faso in 1984. This change was spearheaded by Captain Thomas Sankara, a charismatic and revolutionary leader who came to power in 1983 through a coup. Sankara sought to break the country’s ties to its colonial past and foster a sense of national identity and pride. The name “Burkina Faso,” meaning “Land of Incorruptible People” in the Mossi and Dioula languages, symbolized this vision of integrity and unity. Sankara implemented sweeping reforms, including land redistribution, promotion of women’s rights, and campaigns to eradicate corruption and improve health and education. Though his presidency was short-lived, Sankara’s renaming of the country remains a lasting legacy of his effort to redefine its future.”
Upper Volta had been colonized by the French, and Sankara successfully kicked out all the colonizers until his best friend, Blaise Compaoré, killed him and rekindled the foreign influences once again. “The coup was fueled by internal dissent and external pressures from powerful nations and regional actors who were uneasy with Sankara’s radical reforms and pan-Africanist stance. Compaoré’s takeover marked a sharp departure from Sankara’s revolutionary ideals. He justified the coup by accusing Sankara of endangering Burkina Faso’s international relationships. Under Compaoré, the country reverted to policies more favorable to Western interests, prioritizing economic liberalization over the socialist-inspired policies Sankara had championed. Compaoré ruled Burkina Faso for 27 years, during which his administration faced accusations of corruption, repression, and growing inequality, leaving Sankara’s vision of a self-reliant and equitable society unrealized.”
Peace Corps and all the other international development NGOs that typically blanket African nations didn’t start coming back until the 90’s. Our group of 1999 volunteers was only year 4 into the return to the country, and it was an interesting time to be in Africa. Overall, the Burkinabe welcomed us, they weren’t as jaded and corrupted by foreign influence as some of the neighboring countries, and the people still carried the pride of Sankara with them. They were an independent nation for a minute, they were going to be the future of Africa, they were a sign that things could be different.
But it was poor and struggling too.
“In 1999, Burkina Faso was ranked as the third poorest country in the world, with the majority of its population living on less than a dollar a day. The country’s economy was heavily reliant on subsistence agriculture, which employed around 80% of its workforce but remained vulnerable to erratic rainfall and desertification. Cotton was the primary cash crop, but fluctuating global market prices and a lack of industrialization limited its profitability. Burkina Faso’s economy also faced significant challenges, including a lack of natural resources, underdeveloped infrastructure, and limited access to education and healthcare. Despite its poverty, the country received international aid, and efforts were underway to implement structural adjustment programs encouraged by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). However, these reforms often placed a heavy burden on the rural poor, as subsidies were reduced and public services were privatized, exacerbating inequality and slowing progress toward sustainable development.” (thanks again Chat GPT)
So, 1999. I was going to Burkina Faso less than a month after graduating from Bradley; getting on the plane was one of the hardest things I had ever done to that point in my short and sheltered life. As I wrote about the other day, we had a few days in Washington, DC to get oriented before we left the country, and once we got there I just remember the heat. The plane door opening felt exactly like opening the oven door after baking a cake. The rush of hot air was overwhelming, and immediately after disembarking I remember one of our group immediately turned around and decided to go home. That rush of hot air was all it took for the reality of what we had signed up for to rush over her. I think we only lost one volunteer that day, but more dropped off as the three months of training went on. And plenty more left during the next two years. I think we showed up as a group of 45 in June of 1999, and left as a group of 25-30 in the summer of 2001.
Collaine and I with our host mom during training.
I was surprised to find that I was one of the younger in our group. Many of my fellow volunteers had been working for a while, or were mid-career. Some were on their second Peace Corps tour, and several were quite a bit older. I was very naive about it all; I had envisioned that all of us were there to make a difference and to help make the world a better place. In reality, many of the other volunteers were there for their own personal reasons, and some even joined for a resume builder. These people were the most shocking to me. As soon as these folks got into med school or law school they were gone. I couldn’t wrap my head around it.
All in all, we bonded hard, that class of 1999. We came from all walks of life and from all over the country, and I still keep in touch with quite a few folks (hello all of you reading this!!)
Geoffrey, Cindy & Anne in Ouahigouya
So what was my job?? This is a great question. What is the job of the Peace Corps volunteer? It turns out they take the pressure off and consider ⅔ of being a volunteer as a cultural exchange. That means ⅓ of your job is being an American in the country. ⅓ is talking about your experience when you return (I’m working right now!) and ⅓ is the actual job you have been assigned to do in country. I was slated to be a health education volunteer, while many others were teachers. I wasn’t just a health education volunteer either…there were a small sub-section of us that were selected to help eradicate Guinea Worm. I’m not sure why I was selected for this special task, and I was literally freaked out by the prospect.
My AI friend tells me: “Guinea worm disease, a parasitic infection caused by consuming contaminated water, plagued many rural African communities in the late 20th century, trapping millions in cycles of pain and poverty. By the 1980s, the disease was particularly prevalent in countries with limited access to clean drinking water, including Ghana, Sudan, and Nigeria. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and the Carter Center took on the eradication of Guinea worm as a major humanitarian mission starting in 1986. Through their efforts, the Carter Center collaborated with local governments, health workers, and international organizations to implement education campaigns, distribute water filters, and improve access to clean water sources. By the end of the 1990s, the eradication program had achieved remarkable progress, reducing the number of Guinea worm cases from an estimated 3.5 million in 1986 to fewer than 100,000 by 2000. This initiative highlighted the power of targeted health interventions and grassroots partnerships to combat neglected tropical diseases.”
One of the chief’s of village had guinea worm…even the chief’s got it!
The Carter administration had invested A LOT into the eradication efforts, and our Peace Corps group was essential to that goal. I was assigned to the small village of Zogore in the northern part of the country (not too far from Mali), and had 15 satellite villages under my purview. All of us volunteers were given shiny new green trek bicycles to get around our villages (riding mopeds was a no-no!), and my job was to help out the small health clinic in Zogore, and make progress in guinea worm eradication. I was also taught to do a health needs assessment and generally be of service to the community.
When I arrived in country, there were about 30 cases of guinea worm in the 15 villages I was in charge of, but the villagers really didn’t see the worm as a problem. You see, guinea worm usually proliferates during a rainy season. In the rainy season, there are more water sources that can be infected, and because the villagers were primarily subsistence farmers, they would drink out of these puddles, some becoming infected. Over the next 9-12 months the worm would grow in the infected farmer and burrow through muscle and tendons, growing about three feet long (ew!). From there it would form a hot boil in the foot or ankle just about the time of the rainy season the next year. To relieve the heat and pressure the farmer would walk into the fresh puddle and the worm would sense this and burst out of the body, sending millions of eggs into the water source, again, creating a nasty infected worm puddle for the next farmer to drink from as he was watering his crops. Essentially, worms were the sign of a good crop year. Worms popping out of the foot meant there would be water for growing food, and food meant there would be eating.
So we had to work against the tide of villagers not really seeing the guinea worm as a problem.
How did we fight the worm? Sometimes we just passed out simple filters in wooden frames…even filtering the pond water through a t-shirt would be enough to remove the worm larva. Then we had educational materials like picture books that we would bring with us to the villages which showed the life cycle of the worm.
A side note here: communication was tough. Basically, I had to learn French to communicate with the village health staff, and then the health staff had to speak the local language to the villagers. I walked around with a French/English dictionary most of the time, and got really good at talking around something when I couldn’t find the right word. Most of the villagers didn’t speak French, it was the colonizer’s language after all, they only learned French if they went to school, and many of them didn’t. There were over 50 different local languages in the country, and my region spoke Moore. I did learn some Moore, but not a lot. Not enough to tell them about the life cycle of the guinea worm and why it was a good idea to put your foot in a bucket when you felt the worm blister coming on. If you put your foot in the bucket until the worm popped out, then you could throw the worm juice onto the ground and not infect the rainy season puddles again.
Interestingly enough, the worm burrowing through the body wasn’t the main health concern, it was the open wound and inevitable infection that would form after the worm popped out. Picture a strand of angel hair pasta coming out of your leg. That’s about how thin the worm was, and the three feet of it didn’t leave the body all in one go, no. It took a few weeks for it to fully exit the leg, so common practice was to wrap the worm around a stick and give the stick a turn or two a day until it had fully come out. Pulling or cutting the worm out wouldn’t do any good…it would then calcify in the body and cause other problems, so the stick method was the way to go. And because these folks were farming shoeless in the dirt, infection on the foot or ankle was all but guaranteed.
Fighting the guinea worm was a challenge. It was an elusive and slow-moving fight. Sometimes, people would show up from the ministry of health with some chemicals that we would pour into a known infected water source, and sometimes a foreign NGO would just show up in the village to build a pump that would bring up clean water, water that couldn’t be infected. But usually, we just had to talk about the life cycle with our picture books and make visits to check in on people.
Let me tell you, it was crazy how foreign development worked in Burkina. People from random countries would just show up and do things, or build things, or drop things off for the villagers. There was little to no communication ahead of time, and they were often surprised to find a white 20-something american living in the village. Sometimes I would benefit from the visits and get a fun treat or chocolate or something, but often I was a distraction and didn’t fit into their neat narritive of coming to the rescue.
I loved visiting these guys on market day. They had been scooped up and served in WWII on the front lines before being returned to Burkina.
But, back to my job. The guinea worm stuff didn’t take up a lot of my time. When I did my needs assessment and really spent some time talking with the villagers and observing what many of them came into the health center for during the week, I determined that the greatest health needs of my village were very simple. Many of them came down to keeping the health center clean and reporting the right information back to the Ministry of health.
Nursing was a civil service job in Burkina Faso, and students from all over the country would go to school then get assigned to a village for a year or two to be a nurse. Same with the teachers that were often found in village. The nurses and teachers were usually not from the area, and they were some of the only other people who could speak French, so they became our friends. But because the nurses weren’t from the village, they didn’t always care so much about the villagers and doing their jobs.
My first nurse Abdule was a great guy
Overall, I wanted the health clinic to be much cleaner, it was often disgusting. There were bats that roosted in the ceiling and bat droppings would fall onto all the surfaces. The paperwork was usually not filed in an orderly manner, and I spent many hours trying to straighten up and clean things. This was all important because when a villager did come in for a health reason, I didn’t want them to go away with an infection because of a dirty examination room. This was the most pressing health concern.
But the villagers didn’t always come. Many days, I would show up at the health clinic, and there was no one there. I would bring my book, or break out cards to play with the dudes that always seemed to show up and hang out around town. There were no set hours to keep, and no one cared when I showed up or didn’t show up, but with my American, type A personality, I went to the health clinic every day, even if the nurse didn’t leave their house. I would sit under the tree and at least be there. Many, many hours were passed during the two years just sitting under trees. It became difficult at times to feel like I was doing anything of importance, so would console myself in the ⅔ ratio of my job. I was doing ⅔ of my job just by being there! It was ok! I wasn’t failing!
Drinking millet beer on market day
Actually, making a difference during the Peace Corps was kind of a joke. We volunteers often felt useless. The teachers, too. Sure, teaching was important, but was an American volunteer displacing a local Burkinabe teacher who could have the job? Probably.
So I read books. I read a lot of books. There wasn’t much else to do. I drank millet beer, played cards, goofed around with the teachers, road my bike, and read. That was about it.
I could dig up countless stories, we had adventures, sure we did! We took vacations to the Ivory Coast where we got caught up in the coup of Christmas 2000, we went to Ghana and Togo. I had to get a root canal and they flew me to Senegal to the dentist! We survived Y2K on a beach, and I lived through stepping on a dirty hypodermic needle in one of the largest hot spots of AIDS in West Africa. Oh, there were the sicknesses too. I got Giardia about 5 times, amoebas, and other such parasites too. But mostly it was me and the books. I became really good at being alone. Sure, I was lonely and thought the world was passing me by, and had to constantly remind myself that I was the one having the adventure. That reading my 134th book was the adventure.
Actually, reading a book led me to my next big thing, hiking. I picked up There are Mountains to Climb during one of the first months in my village and instantly knew that hiking the Appalachian Trail would be my next thing. I only had two years to wait and think about that one!
But much like hiking, the best part of the whole experience were the people. In fact there is supposed to be a Burkina Faso Peace Corps reunion this August in Portland! It’s not just for our class either; it’s for all volunteers that were in the country, so that should be a blast.
I don’t really know how to think or feel most days.
Many of you remark on my positivity and resiliency, but I think a lot of that comes down to what my body and mind’s basic operating principles are: to be optimistic and hopeful. I think a lot of my current mental state can still be chalked up to denial, or disbelief. I truely can not conceptualize that I have Stage 4 cancer (at some point I said it was Stage 3, but really it’s Stage 4 due to the levels it has spread in my body…this is all an imprecise science…but at this point I don’t think it’s useful to pretend it’s better than it is).
I had another biopsy last week to try and figure out what mutation I have and determine the best course of treatment, but somehow that went awry and they sampled plain old bone that doesn’t have tumor. I’m not sure how that’s possible given the CT scanner that was used to try and target the tumor for sampling, but I’m left with a useless test and no more answers than before. I haven’t talked to my oncologist yet about the bum test, I’m sure he’s NOT HAPPY, so I’m not sure if I’ll get scheduled for another, or if he will have enough information from the blood testing that was done a little over a week ago.
Regardless, I’m left in the hazy in-between state of not knowing. I’ve been in this not-knowing place for many months now, and it forces me to live in the present like never before. I really want to plan my year. Typically I would have multiple hikes, trips, local river adventures, etc. mapped out for 2025, but all I can really do are pencil in some ideas about what Kirk and I would like to do, if I’m able, later this year. I am really good at going with the flow, but I’m also a lover of spreadsheets and calendars and get a lot of joy and satisfaction out of planning. For now I’m planning for the maybes. Why not map out a 2-week Portugal Camino walk just in case I can do it at some point this year? Why not think about river trips we might be able to take this year if I’m stable enough? That gives me something to look forward to, and a reason to keep on despite the not-knowing.
The not-knowing is also a great place to look-back. The looking back at past periods in my life has been a fun adventure, and I’ll admit, a challenging one. I posted my PCT video montage a few days ago, and had a complete break-down when I got to the northern Washington section. It probably had a lot to do with my music selections (Phish’s Swept Away (sob!) and David Grey’s Slow Motion (), but also it really brought home the fragileness of life now, life then, and the fact that some people don’t make it out of this cancer journey. Some do pass on to another state. I keep not believing that’s my path, so it’s overwhelming when some of that pierces through my optimism.
I’ve lost people. Missy, my best friend in high school and college lost her cancer battle (lung cancer in a non-smoker!) a year ago in October. It was fast too. From March to October we rallied around Missy (me in my typical disbelief) as she and her wonderful husband Garrett and cutest young son ever, Parker, and her family did everything they could to keep her going. Our group of friends were able to have a video call with her just a week or two before she passed, and I was so grateful to have had that time to connect with her again. I didn’t believe she would actually go, or that I would find myself dealing with something similar a little over a year later. So today I’m going to go back to explore my time in Wisconsin; Missy’s Celebration of Life was the last time I visited Wisconsin in October of 2023.
Here are a few photos of my dear friend and I:
So here I am, feeling a bit more raw than usual on this Monday morning in March. Wisconsin has always been an important part of my story, and I credit my time(s) there with helping me become the person I am today.
Wisconsin can be broken down into two phases:
Childhood (I was born a cheese head and lived there till I was 12)
Post Peace Corps (I moved to Madison for about 7 months in 2001 after I returned from the Peace Corps)
Most excitingly, I have an upcoming trip to attend the International Trails Summit in Madison in mid-April too! I really hope I’m healthy enough to go, and if any of you cheese-heads are reading this and want to connect while I’m there, please let me know! I have a bit of time on the front end, and would be willing to tack on a day or two on the other end as well…
Childhood
No trip back to my birth would be complete without explaining how my adventurous and amazing parents ended up in the Midwest. For all of the non-traditional life paths I have taken, a pretty big deviation from the technical and engineering-focused life choices of my three brothers, hearing more about the early Wisconsin years puts a lot into context. My folks did a great job of showing me that anything is possible, and that idealism can be a good way to make decisions in life.
My dad grew up in California in the San Jose area, and joined the Air Force after college. He was stationed in West Virginia when he met my mom in the 70s. My mom found her way to West Virginia from Lafayette, Louisiana when she took a job as a nurse and moved out of the south with her brother, my Uncle Al, also in the Air Force.
Legend has it my uncle was planning to introduce her to a dude named Steve at an Air Force party. She met Steve and it was a quintessential head-over-heels love affair, but as it turned out her Steve wasn’t Uncle Al’s Steve! Didn’t really matter though, my folks were quite taken with each other. The wedding happened a short while later, and that’s when the adventurous spirit that I inherited from them both appeared.
I will probably get some of these details wrong, but essentially my Dad had decided to leave the Air Force, and the plan was my folks would get in a car, road-trip across the country, and find a place to call home along the way. That place happened to be Wisconsin. They made it to central Wisconsin, and happened upon an old farm house in a very rural part of the state that spoke to them. Somehow, the idea of living like the Amish, a kind of back-to-the-earth ethic, was strong at the time, and the white-washed old farm house with apple orchard in the rolling glaciated idyllic Wisconsin was going to be the setting for their new start.
The nearest big cities were Stevens Point (where I was born), and Waupaca (where I went to school), and the farm house was bracketed by the small little towns of Almond and Wild Rose. I mean, just the names sound so picturesque. I don’t remember a ton about the farmhouse, but stronger memories remain from when my folks bought some property and started building their own house by hand a few miles away when I was about 5. Community and friends were a huge part of their (and my life) during that time. My folks formed some strong bonds with other young couples, and we spent many hours together as our the families came together for cider pressing and chicken plucking parties. Many of the families were also doing a homesteading-back-to-the-earth thing in central Wisconsin, and we 70s kids benefited.
Then there was the earth-bermed house. My parents were very interested in energy efficiency and sustainability at the time, and decided to build an earth-bermed house. It would face south to get the passive solar rays, and have dirt mounded against the sides and back of the house to the roof to help create a stable temperature inside. This earth-bermed house would later be eclipsed by the house they built in Illinois a few decades later, a real earth-ship! The Illinois house was completely ensconced in earth (about 5 feet on top of the poured concrete structure) complete with solar tubes to bring some light into the back corners of the house. My dad called it the hobbit hole, and it was about the coziest place around. They left their hobbit hole in 2020 when they decided to move to Lafayette to be closer to family as they aged, but those houses and the memories of living close to the earth and the natural rhythms of nature left strong mark.
Wisconsin and our little slice of paradise was the perfect place to grow up. I’m a solid generation X kid, and a true product of the 80s. I don’t think we got more than a few TV channels until I was in high school, and even the VCR got very limited action in our house. My three younger brothers and I spent the majority of our childhoods running around outside, climbing trees, building forts, riding bikes, reading books, and finding ways to entertain ourselves.
My parents were still quite ensconced in the community vibes of the area after the new house was built, and we had multiple families with kids our ages within biking distance in all directions of our house. We had acres of woods to explore, and there were lakes and ponds and creeks and corn fields that featured heavily in our play. We lived close to several Amish families, and when their horse and buggies would drive past the house, we would play dodge-the-horse-poop on our bikes. Sometimes we would visit them to buy fresh eggs and marvel at the peacocks that would parade in their yard. My parents let us on a looooong leash, and we would often spend all day adventuring with our friends in the woods. Because I had three younger brothers, I would need to find my own escapes, and would often climb a tree with a book to find some quiet. I became quite attached to reading books outside…one of my great loves to this day. I 100% believe this upbringing is what paved the way for me as an adult to be so comfortable outside, with being alone in the wilderness, with change and uncertainty…I learned how to occupy myself. I learned to find awe and wonder in nature. I learned how important friends and community were, and grew up with the wisdom of Mr. Rodgers and Sesame Street guiding my upbringing. It was as good as it could get.
When I was 12, my Dad, who had been working in computing at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, took a job at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. I remember this time with excitement and anticipation… perhaps that was because I was on the cusp of my teenage years and the premise of moving to a larger town with malls and more boys was quite exciting. I was solidly into my New Kids On the Block obsession phase, and did I mention boys?
Post Peace Corps
It wasn’t until 2001 that I returned for my second Wisconsin phase, the post-peace corps pre Appalachian Trail time. It was all because of Cindy that I returned to Wisconsin. Cindy was a fellow volunteer, and I remember meeting her at the beginning of our Peace Corps time. We spent a few days in Washington DC in the summer of 1999 when we all had to report for the start of our service, and got whisked around town for a few days getting LOTS of shots and going through various orientations. It was a bewilderment of activity…but I remember sitting next to Cindy on the bus and discovering our Wisconsin connection.
Fast forward to training…we lived with host families in Bobo-Dioulasso during the first three months while we were in country. Cindy and Mia’s family lived fairly close to us (I roomed with Collaine…and fun fact, all four of us are currently Oregonians!), so she became part of my core friend group…which was cemented when we received our village assignments and were both sent to the far northern part of the country. Cindy and I both traveled to the regional center of Ouahigouya to get things like mail and interaction with other volunteers. We spent long hours playing cards, drinking beer, and sweating under the hot hot sun. More to come on the years we were in Burkina Faso, but it was during the first few months of my service that I had decided that I would hike the Appalachian Trail when I was done, and somehow convinced Cindy to hike it with me.
When our time was coming to an end in 2001 and I was still planning to hike the AT in 2002, Cindy convinced me to move up to Wisconsin and spend the fall/winter in Madison as we prepared for the hike. It was an easy sell…I found a job at the university, moved into a group house with some of Cindy’s college friends, and embraced my cheese-head origins for a short while.
How would I characterize this second Wisconsin phase? To start I’d encourage you to play Brian Eno’s Ambiant 1 Music for Airports.
The house I lived in was off of Monroe Street (near the football stadium and Lake Wingra) and was pretty crunchy. What do I mean by that? My housemates listened to records, we didn’t have a TV, they brewed beer and were very wholesome. A record I played over and over and over was Peter’s Ambiant Music for Airports. This became my musical touchpoint for this phase of life.
I got a job in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Wisconsin Madison, and while I didn’t really have a background or much interest in landscape architecture, it was a very Wisconsin department to work in. I ended up really loving the professors and faculty that I worked with, and this is where some seeds were planted in my brain, or the seeds of influence started overlapping. There is a big conservation ethic and history to Wisconsin, and several influential people like Aldo Leopold and John Muir were also cheese-heads.
Leopold was extremely important to the Landscape Architecture department as he experimented with the revolutionary notion of restoring ecosystems damaged by human activity, both on his own land along the Wisconsin River and at the university’s arboretum. In his book, A Sand County Almanac, he weaves science, history, humor, and prose to articulate the bond between people and the natural world with the hope that people would treat the land with love and respect…an ethic and operating principle that I now hold central. I seek to use long-distance hiking as a way to deepen our connection with the natural world. If we can understand that we are a part of nature, and that what happens to the natural world is happening to us, we will act differently.
So this Wisconsin time was fruitful. Ideas and influences were taking root. Philosophies and ethics were germinating, and this whole time was one great meditative and contemplative phase for me. Cindy was living in Milwaukee at the time, and we would meet occasionally to hike and talk about gear (neithor of us really knew what we were doing with the whole hiking/backpacking thing), but we kind of figured some things out that winter. I didn’t know many people in town, so spent many hours walking the city, reading books, visiting coffee shops, and generally flaneuring my way around town.
I didn’t have a lot to do as a student liaison in the Department of Landscape Architecture, so I took it upon myself to find useful projects to keep my brain busy and help out. I decided to redesign their website, so I taught myself web design using Dreamweaver (the platform of the day) and had great fun designing the website after a technical landscape architecture rendering. This was when I started to apply my design skills to whatever I happened to be working on, and credit a lot of my creativity and out-of-the-box thinking to trying to be useful and learn something wherever I happen to be. I also took it upon myself to archive the department’s records, which stretched back decades. I carefully organized and catalogued file box after file box of papers and materials that choked the office. It was a way of keeping myself busy, which was the main goal. There is nothing I hate more than having to pretend to be busy or occupied. I’d much rather give myself a daunting and impossible task than have nothing to do.
All in all, this second phase of Wisconsin life was fairly short and sweet. In the spring of 2002, Cindy and I made our way out east and started hiking the Appalachian Trail…something that obviously has become the passion and obsession of my life.
My April trip back to Wisconsin is going to be a wonderful overlapping of all of these worlds. The nonprofit American Trails puts on an International Trail Summit every two years, and their Executive Director, Mike Passo, happens to call Marshfield, Wisconsin home (Marshfield wasn’t too far from where I grew up). I’ve been getting to know Mike and Candace at American Trails since I started my consulting business two years ago, and gave a webinar presentation through their weekly series right after I started. Give it a watch if you like!
When I started my second business, Intentional Hiking, in the fall of 2023, I hosted American Trails during my launch event and our connections continue to this day as they might take on some of the work I had planned for 2025. More to come on this come, but I’m very grateful for the work American Trails does!
So for all of you Wisconsin people that may read this blog post, like I said in the beginning, if you want to connect while I’m there, please let me know asap and we can try and make something happen.
It’s about time for either another cup of coffee or a green tea, so I’m going to sign off and see about this Monday.
. But the collapsed C7 vertebrae hasn’t progressed, so I have the go-ahead to start increasing movement. 
), but also it really brought home the fragileness of life now, life then, and the fact that some people don’t make it out of this cancer journey. Some do pass on to another state. I keep not believing that’s my path, so it’s overwhelming when some of that pierces through my optimism.
She-ra Hikes 