So Facebook is bizarre, right…and really good at what it does. Earlier this week I was hit with a memory of a kid I sat next to in 3rd grade. He asked me to the Winter Dance in 7th grade – 7th grade when I finally grew my hair out and became the picture of pre-teen stunning for all of five seconds. Awesome. In 5th-8th grade I was close friends with his neighbor. They lived in a culdasac. We played capture the flag with the natural crack in the asphalt as the center line. Once, when we were in high school, I gave him a ride to the gym to lift weights.
He and I were friends, all through growing up, and now, I couldn’t remember his name. After a half-hour of his name not appearing in my brain, I thought, “Alright, our teachers weren’t that creative with seating arrangements, so his last name has to be close to P in the alphabet.” This was the winning train of thought, and voila! there it was.
So, although I have mostly refused to spend time searching for long-lost 3rd grade loves on Facebook, I totally went for it – like a reward for remembering. After a few misspellings of his last name, I found him, asked to be his friend, he accepted. I posted something on his wall about my memory-lane experience, to which he has yet to respond.
While I was on the Facebook memory train, I decided to look at his list of friends to see if there was anyone else I hadn’t thought about in a decade that I wanted to reconnect with or at least challenge my mind to do memory tricks to keep it sharp in its almost 30 years of memory-holding. Low and behold, there was my 8th grade best friend Kris. I was so excited, loads of funny moments returning…so I asked to be his friend and sent him a little message to say hello. And like magic to my luddite heart, he wrote back.
We each wrote brief descriptions of this last decade, where we went to school, what career-type things we’ve done, what our lives look like in general. He lives in our hometown, got married, became a lawyer. He was writing about some of his career and academic misadventures and said, “Getting with my wife is by far the smartest move I've made since high school. I use to worry about whether I was making the right career moves. Now I don't care so much thanks to her. I think they call it Perspective.”
Yes yes yes...Perspective...that is what they call it I think. I thought about this a lot in the hours after I received it from him. In those hours, I went to a surreal natural hot springs retreat in Big Sur with my friend Daniel. Imagine...cement and rock baths on the cliffs of the sea, filled with fresh hot spring water, looking out on the Pacific on the edge of the continent.
Daniel and I arrived at about 4:30 in the afternoon, and sat in one of the baths just above the ocean, watching sea otters play and crack shells open with rocks. I happened into some interesting conversations – two ladies from San Francisco celebrating their 40th birthdays, a guy walking from Vancouver BC to Mexico, another man in his mid-50s who draws people's auras and was apparently the son of some Indian guru in another life (who was actually way more down to earth than he sounds)...these aren’t the kinds of people you generally meet on the prairie in Kansas, my home state, where this old friend continues to live. Perspective.
After dinner I went back to the baths and sat in one of the baths all to myself, looking for stars in the foggy night sky, rain drops falling intermittently. I was thinking about this story I have been writing, about the last five weeks of my life where much has happened and converged...about how I have been writing it as fiction, with 95% of it being true, hinting at so many moments and adventures I have actually experienced...and how it has begun to give me some Perspective on how epic my life has actually been...all this time of wanting it to be so...and it has been.
I also continued to think about hearing from this old friend, how nice it was to hear from someone I have not encountered in over a decade, who has had a very different path than my own, but seems conscious, confident, and pleased in it. I was thinking about the simple thing he said about Perspective...and how he had found it in a big way through his relationship with his wife, with another person.
I have had a handful of important relationships in this last decade, but it seems it is my experiences that have given me the most astounding Perspective. Often, in a moment like last night, when I am in a surreal sort of landscape, an unbelievable kind of moment when I think about growing up in the flatlands of Kansas, the middle of the country, a child of working-class parents, no fancy education – and it makes me marvel at where I am and my life in a very different way. Again, Perspective.
Also this week I have been reading short stories to absorb myself in how other people write fiction in short-story format, how they connect and introduce things, how they deal with time and tone. One of the books I have been reading from is Waltzing the Cat by Pam Houston, a woman who writes about relationships and extreme outdoor and travel adventures. Of course even if I am reading as a study, I am still reading, exposing myself to whatever power or ideas are on the page. There is a passage from one of Houston’s stories (Like Goodness Under Your Feet) that has kept reappearing as I walk along the cliff sides, hike back into the river canyon, sit in the hot springs looking out over the Pacific. The narrator has just moved from San Francisco to a ranch in the Rockies, saying: “I am here, I keep telling myself, as an experiment. I have come to get away for a while from the sharp edge of the continent, to see if maybe I am done with edges generally.”
As I look back over my life, knowing that on Saturday I will be exactly six months from turning 30, knowing that in just over a month I will leave Big Sur, leave the dramatic West Coast altogether and return to Appalachia, the mountains of Western North Carolina for at least five months of leading backcountry trips. I am thinking about this “sharp edge of the continent”, what it has meant for me to be here these last six years, especially this last year of cycling down the coast and living in Big Sur. I am wondering at the idea of being “done with edges generally” as I walk along the ocean cliffs on the ranch, feeling like never before a space and peace in me for settling down in a certain sense, for generating “home” wherever I find myself.
While I was in college I did a semester study program in Western North Carolina, the same mountains I will return to in June. The program was in Outdoor Adventure and Humanities, and it was my first time exploring those mountains and rivers that would become my first true home away from the Midwest. The Director of the program, Jeff, who was also one of our professors and the head trip leader, gave me advice I have lived by since: I was 21, a semester away from graduating college, and trying to decide if I was going to spend the summer sailing in Maine or at a summer camp in the High Sierras near Yosemite for my final internship. I had a long-distance boyfriend who was living in San Francisco who naturally was trying to persuade me to come to California – it was a tenuous relationship, and I kept half-trying to get out of it and half sticking it out for the possibility "it just seems like it should work". Jeff and I were talking about this on the edge of the ocean, our feet in the sand on an island we had sea kayaked to in the Everglades, our group the only ones on the island or anywhere in sight. He said to me, "We just make decisions, and we make them the right ones."
As I think about all of these decisions I’ve made out here on the edges, I am grounded by the circling back around of people and places, and the kind of Perspective we get from the past and seeing our lives from outside ourselves – like writing my own story as fiction or telling the real version to an old friend. It seems that what Kris helped to give me, writing to me simply, about his own life, writing to me from our hometown in the on-and-on middle prairie lands of this country, in this moment of turning toward an “experiment” of time away from this dramatic landscape, this edge of the continent… I think they call it Perspective.
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