The Greatest Adventure
I grew up with my dad telling my sister and I the stories of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. We would take a bath; he would spray No More Tangles into our wet hair and then comb it out. We would sing silly songs and name the “rats” (knots in our hair) to distract from the pain of untangling our long locks. Then he, my sister, and I would climb on my parents’ bed and snuggle up.
Some evenings, we each picked a book for him to read to us. Some nights, he made up stories off the top of his head, about Ricky Ticky Taffy the mongoose and little girls named Kacie and Marisa who went on adventures in India or Roanoke, Virginia. And some nights, he would pick up the tale of Bilbo Baggins and Gandolf, or Frodo and the ring. My dad has a natural storytelling talent. His soft voice would flow easily and soothingly through the tale, a simple, “Well,” with a hint of southern accent heralding a turn of events; a well-placed “and so...” keeping the characters moving. He knew just when to pick up at the exciting parts, how to make drums drumming in the deep in Moria the most chilling thing ever (way scarier than even the movies could portray), when to leave us hanging with, “Let’s stop there for tonight,” at which my sister and I would groan and beg for more.
My earliest memory of The Lord of the Rings comes from before I must have been old enough to understand all that was happening. I think it was when the Fellowship travels through the Mines of Moria, but what I remember is based on a preschooler’s prior understanding of the world: Gandalf and the seven dwarves from Snow White are walking across a bridge over lava. Then Gandalf falls off the bridge into the lava, and this is devastating. (If you have not experienced The Fellowship of the Ring, let me just say this is not really what happens).
As we got older, my dad started reading the books to us. Eventually,I read them for myself. I also loved the Rankin and Bass animated movie of The Hobbit. One of the parts that always fascinated me the most was the part where nothing had really happened yet. They were striking off into the vast world, not knowing what lay ahead, leaving the safety and familiarity of home behind. It was terrifying and exciting and full of possibility.
There was a stretch of the highway near our house that went through the trees at such an angle that the wilderness looked endless, and I would pretend we were striking out ourselves through Middle Earth. I’ve always yearned for adventure like that.
At the beginning of the year, my friend Angela took me on my first backpacking trip. Our first afternoon, we got out of the car and there was snow on the ground, the wind whipped icy rain through our clothes and into our eyes, and we could barely see ahead through the mist. My backpack was so much heavier than I expected; so much so that I had to stop after a little while and take my tent out to carry by hand so my shoulders wouldn’t cramp up. There were moments I wondered what I had been thinking; I thought I was fit, but I wasn’t fit for this. I was freezing, and there wasn’t any heating waiting for us at the end of our hike. I had no idea what to expect.
Our tents and clothes, drying where we stopped for lunch the second day.
But mostly, I felt excited. Even the grumbling I did in my head sounded to me like Bilbo, listing eggs and bacon and all the food he missed. I was on a true adventure, with days ahead of me and only the supplies on my back to keep me going. I didn’t know what lay ahead: elves, trolls, a dragon? That first night was interminable: wet, freezing, and so long because we had nothing to do but huddle in our tents from 5:00 on. I thought about asking to turn back the next morning. But when the day dawned, I decided to trek on, and it ended up being the most beautiful day. The sun came out and burned up the mist, we were able to set our wet things out to dry on a fence at lunchtime, and we explored the mountains, saw wild ponies, and hiked through scenes I’d only seen in pictures before. To me, backpacking became the portal to a world I’d always dreamed of.
I’ve decided this is Bill the pony.
About a year ago, I took a different trip. I’d dreamed for a long time (since college, really) of just taking off and driving, and seeing where the road took me. I was supposed to spend a weekend in the mountains with my boyfriend and his friends, but I broke up with him a couple weeks before. So instead, I decided I would finally go on that trip. I told people my plans, and they didn’t understand. They would say, “Oh, you know, you should really go to X.” Or, “Have you ever been to Y?” Or, “Where are you staying?” I would gently laugh and try to explain again.
I wasn’t looking for a destination ahead of time. I just wanted to drive.
In the animated version of The Hobbit, the songs are all folk-sounding songs. I grew up with my dad playing that sort of thing on his guitar and on his record player in addition to classic rock. To me, they sound like home. There’s one called “The Greatest Adventure.”
The greatest adventure
Is what lies ahead;
Today and tomorrow,
Are yet to be said.
The chances, the changes
Are all yours to make;
The mold of your life
Is in your hands to break.
And in The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf says, “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to” (JRR Tolkien). In my head, driving to follow the road took on this meaning.
So, one rainy day in October, I packed up my car and started driving. I meandered west and south, at first just trying to escape the rain. Eventually, in just the sort of magic turn of events I was hoping for, I picked a town at random and found a beautiful bed and breakfast to stay in. It had a four-poster bed, and a fireplace in the bedroom and bathroom. There was no one else staying there because of COVID, so I wandered the halls, the old wood creaking under my feet. The following morning, I had an elaborate breakfast of many courses on my own in a dining room that was set some centuries before.
It wasn’t a perfect trip. I was running away from my overloaded life, from the Too Much I was living. And I was grieving. Sort of grieving the end of a relationship, but I had chosen that end and felt peace with it. It was more the end of yet another hope. Instead of being with someone, once again I was alone. A state I felt all too familiar with.
I spent a lot of that trip crying over past losses. Over the story in my head of how I’d gotten there, how everyone I loved, left. I mourned the world we’d lost in the pandemic. I ached over the future I didn’t know if I’d ever get and the one I feared might be lost for my son.
Looking back, I didn’t smile more than this in any of the photos I took.
If you’ve never traveled alone, you should. It’s an intensely vulnerable experience. If you don’t know what to do or how to handle something, there’s no one to ask. All the things you use to distract yourself from whatever it is you want to be distracted from, are gone. There’s no one there to pull you out of your thoughts by asking if you want to stop for lunch or chattering about their life. There’s no work to do to keep you from settling into long-standing or brand-new grief. There’s no little one to keep it together for. I found myself crying for people I’d lost years before, hoping for things I didn’t even know I still hoped for.
That all might sound awful, but it’s not, I promise.
In between the weeping, I laughed on my own at the Crematorium/Coffee Shop I passed and the bar whose window had a picture of a ghost and said, “2020 is BOO SHEET. Drink More;” I listened to the music I wanted to listen to and sang along; I watched the scenery in a very present way because I didn’t know where I was going so I couldn’t just zone out; I processed; I chose where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do from moment to moment; and I wrote (voice-to-text, so it came out pretty garbled, but still). That first night, I settled into my beautiful four-poster bed with my pizza and beer and watched TV. I felt spent with tears, but also intensely happy to be on my own, doing exactly what I wanted to do.
I kept writing that weekend. It hadn’t been my original intention, but my friend Ginny, who is also a writer, put it in my head. I kept stopping at intervals to take pictures on hikes and write what my mind was churning through. I could do that because no one was waiting for me to keep walking. I followed a road that looked interesting until I found a lake in the middle of the mountains. I stood by geese to take pictures for as long as I wanted and breathe in the blue sky and fresh air. I chose a waterfall to go to based on the name (it was similar to the name of a character in my book)—and Ginny’s recommendation helped—and then hiked around it to find an abandoned set of buildings at an old dam. I sat on a log next to a cinder building with a tree growing out of it and cried some more, hidden in the trees. Then I wrote. Eventually, I felt better and hiked.
Alone was good and bad. It meant I could eat lunch at 3 pm, but it also meant I forgot to eat lunch until 3pm and was shaky by the end of my hike. It meant I was alone to think my thoughts through to their conclusion without interjections about Minecraft from a ten-year-old, but it also meant I was alone with my fears as the 2020 election loomed closer, alone with the knowledge that we were living in a strange post-apocalyptic COVID world.
I tried to find a magical place to stay the second night, hoping to camp, but all the campsites were taken. Good news: I was alone, so I wasn’t disappointing anyone else. Bad news: I ended up in a motel that had reviews about how clean it was, but I spent the evening fighting a losing battle against a housefly infestation. Still, I found a little downtown to eat dinner in the square at sunset, and I turned the fly battle into a funny episode of Gilmore Girls in my head.
I woke sometime in the middle of that night and couldn’t get back to sleep. I watched The Kindness of Strangers, about a single mom, and it soothed me in a way. The next morning, I was too weary to do much, and while I’d promised myself I’d do a CG Games virtual event again, I didn’t. I sat in the parking lot of an Ingles to eat breakfast looking at a mountain. Then I went to drive home. But the road had other plans, and I ended up wandering alongside a river for hours before I left, mourning at first, and then, somehow, not. Instead, I came back to the car seeing myself in a different light. As I was getting closer to home, I found myself feeling freer. Lighter. More optimistic. I started to suspect that the future I longed for was ahead of me, I just didn’t know how far.
That trip changed my mindset. The following month, I was so full of optimism, surety, a sense of abundance in the universe. I built a playlist about abundance. I did yoga with affirmations about it. I felt good on my own. Beyond good: I was happy. I’d felt that way some that spring, but this was even more so. It faltered a bit as the darkest days of winter set in and the holidays hit (always hard as a single parent), but then came the backpacking trip.
I could smile this year, so maybe I am figuring this out.
And so I find myself on another solo trip. I planned where I was staying this time, but I’m still waiting to see where my feet take me each day. I’m sitting on the deck of a tiny cabin on the edge of a cliff. There’s a painting inside that looks like Treebeard. I feel like in some ways I’ve reset to where I was at the start of my trip a year ago, but maybe worse. It’s been a year of losses, especially the past few months. There are new things to grieve. The old storylines keep coming back.
But my life is different in many other ways, and I’ve boiled it down to the important things, getting away from quite so much that didn’t fit or was Too Much. Those trips I mentioned helped me realize that my life is in what happens outside of my obligations and routines as much as how well I try to fulfill what’s needed of me. I’ve built new boundaries and I understand myself even better. I cut out expectations that didn’t fit me, and I cut off my hair. I looked forward to doing this trip completely alone.
Change is so hard, especially changes you don’t choose. Sometimes changes feel like losses. Sometimes you think you’re on one road, but then it veers sharply in another direction, or you have to choose to step off. I have an intense dislike of uncertainty, and the path before me is pretty vague to me right now. All I have is a general sense of a direction to go. But I keep reminding myself that the greatest adventure lies ahead.
I’m here to think and to hike, but also to write, because I’m no longer running away from the knowledge that that is what I was put on this earth to do. I’m hoping this trip will work new magic for me, as I follow new roads. I don’t intend to keep my feet. With any luck, I’ll be swept off again.