Cornucopia - Preparation & Plenty

 

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

~ Mary Oliver, "The Summer Day” from New and Selected Poems, 1992

         

When it comes to travel and adventure, I’m a planner and organizer. I love it when I have everything dialed out—details researched, decisions made, lists created, piles gathered, bags packed—well before departure day. It’s probably obsessive, but it bolsters my confidence and sense of control when all my ducks are lined up. I’m free to be spontaneous in the midst of an adventure and enjoy the moment when I’ve allowed myself to be obsessive beforehand. 

Of course, this has also been my approach to my memoir writing project, Force of Nature: Three Women Tackle the John Muir Trail. To kick off entering the final leg of this writing journey—the very first steps of the challenging final leg—I'm sharing a chapter that didn't make the editor's cut. Stephen King calls that culling process "killing your darlings." This "darling" of mine is a bit of a prologue to the grander adventure story.

 

 

It was June 2006. I sat on the dark Oriental rug in my living room amidst mounds of the food and supplies that were destined to be packed into four shipping boxes. My food caches would be mailed ahead to specific pick-up locations along the two-hundred-mile trail. One cardboard box, already packed, taped, and addressed to Red's Meadows Resort, where we'd be on Day Five if all went according to plan, sat off to the side. It contained five days’ worth of meals—four planned days of hiking plus one extra day, just in case we didn't make the distance we intended.

I filled in the label on a second box, addressing it to myself at Vermilion Valley Resort, where I intended to pick it up on Day Nine. It contained meals for four days, one for each walking day, plus an extra. Red's Meadows and Vermilion Valley (known among hikers as Red's and VVR) were both commercial campgrounds situated on the border of the wilderness, a short hike off the JMT, and they would, for a moderate fee, provide caching services to JMT and PCT thru-hikers. When I finished addressing box number two, I set it next to number one and turned my attention to the third.

Picking up food cache at Muir Trail Ranch.

Container number three would travel to Muir Trail Ranch. Located halfway along the trail, at about the one-hundred-mile mark, Muir was more remote than Red's or VVR, so charged hikers more for its caching service. They also required supplies be packed inside a heavy duty, five-gallon, plastic paint bucket with a secure lid. It seemed they had a rodent problem, and plastic kept the wildlife out of the people food. I pulled the bucket to my side and began the packing process for the third time.

           I'd started a few hours earlier with several shopping bags filled with the food and supplies I'd purchased over recent weeks spread all over the floor. Slowly the bags' contents became mounds, which were sorted and organized into smaller piles.  

           Then I'd begun organizing the food, measuring and packaging individual portions into bags for thirty traveling and eating days. Thirty little bags of mocha or chai. Thirty of Gatorade. Thirty medium bags of nuts with dried fruits. Thirty of assorted powerbars. Thirty of cookies.  Thirty lunches. Thirty freeze-dried dinners, all pre-tested and chosen for cooking ease and savory flavors. Each of those placed into larger Ziploc bags, one for each of the five legs of the hike. Five little bags of hard candy.

All measurements and calculations were based on a three-thousand-calorie-per-day diet that included plenty of proteins (for keeping muscles strong) and ample fats and carbohydrates (to maintain consistent energy).

            “Three-thousand calories a day. Now that’s a lot of food!” I said aloud, though no one was there to observe me sitting like an island in a sea of Ziploc bags.

I'd learned when hiking I'm rarely very hungry at breakfast time and never in the mood for breaking out the stove in the morning cold, so I planned to eat a pair of protein bars. My chilly morning’s true pleasure came from a steaming hot beverage, so I’d put my efforts into measuring and pre-mixing various coffee ingredients into the smallest Ziploc bags.

For lunch, when I’d be starving, I planned high protein options with lots of carbohydrates. Summer sausage, spicy and fatty, was my favorite backpacking lunch protein, but once opened it would only last two days unrefrigerated. I’d eat it first, then alternate between the tuna and peanut butter.

For dinners, I’d fire up the stove and cook hearty dehydrated entrees. I'd used Enertia brand before and loved their savory, no-mess meals. Hot tea would top off my evening meals. Between meals, I planned to snack on nuts, dried fruit, and more bars. Tangerine-flavored Gatorade and hard sugar candies mid-afternoon would give me that extra energy boost I’d need. I measured, weighed, counted, and packaged until I had ten sets of bulging plastic bags.

Making dinner on the trail.

Nine days finished, two shipping containers to go. Still arrayed across the floor on three sides of me, were twenty-one days’ worth of food in little organized piles. I’d carry six of those remaining in my backpack on the first leg. For leg three’s nine days of walking I prepped ten sets of meals for the plastic paint bucket going to Muir Ranch Resort. That left five for the final box being mailed to the packhorse service.

Just thinking of the packhorse service made me a little nervous. The location along the trail where we wanted the fourth food cache was nearly twenty miles away from any town or supply facility, so we’d arranged for a horseman to pack in our food and meet us right on the trail. Those arrangements were causing Cappy and me anxious concern. The other three advertised their services online, and we’d made arrangements over the phone, but the packing outfit had been difficult to contact. Our first calls went unanswered. When they did respond, their messages were garbled and missing key bits of information. The fee for a horse and rider to make the trip out to the trail was expensive, and meet-up directions were vague. The food drop was a necessity, however, so we were determined to make it work.

Packhorse & Cowboy after delivering food caches.

"We’ll meet the man on the horse without difficulty. I'm sure of it," I told myself out loud like an aphorism—things said aloud sound more certain.

I refocused on packing. Despite my concerns, I was excited. Packing boxes for mailing was a tangible step towards making my adventure dream come true.

I put the food in first, sturdy dinners in a pile at the bottom, then the more fragile lunches on top. I stood the bags containing protein bars around the outer edge, circling the stacked meals. That would hold them tight without jostling during shipment. On top, I placed my personal care and first aid supplies, with the softest bits—undies, socks, and shirt—on the very top. Last, I filled the empty space with crumpled newspaper and sealed the lid.

 

Cappy, Jane, and I planned to step onto the trail on Wednesday, July 19. I’d drive down to Tuolumne Meadows Campground in Yosemite’s high country early to acclimate, on Sunday, July 16. I’d mail my food caches two weeks before D-Day on July 5. So, I intended to have everything ready to mail before the Fourth-of-July weekend began.

 [First two photos were taken by my hiking partner, Caroline. Third photo was taken by "Zoe".]

Fish Out Of Water at Camp Gold

A small stream flowed through Camp Gold. Dammed and widened into a small pond under the shade of tall trees, it was kept richly stocked with trout exclusively for young fishermen and women. Dad and I took part in an organized father-daughter fishing activity one afternoon. A good sport, Dad patiently followed the leader’s directions to guide me through the complicated task of putting a bait worm on my hook — a “night crawler” pulled from a cardboard cup of soil and worms we’d picked up at the camp store where we’d checked out my orange-colored fishing pole. I wrinkled my nose, but didn’t let go when the long, pink worm wiggled and contorted each time I stabbed it with the small barbed fishhook. And I had to stab it a few times to get its long body to stay on the hook. When I’d finished, the poor thing looked like I’d tied it into a big, ugly, painful knot.

Next, Dad showed me how to get the bait and hook out into the water. The trick was to gently cast it into the pond without entangling my line with any of the dozens of other lines being tossed about by the other father-daughter pairs encircling the pond. Inexperienced young fisherwomen sent their lines flying this way and that, and lines crisscrossed first to the left, then to the right, sometimes three and four at a time. It was a bit like a circular firing squad, the result being entangled lines galore.

Miraculously, fish managed to get caught despite the chaos! I yelped each time there was a tug on my line. Usually, it had just caught or been caught by another young angler. But once, the tug came from an actual fish!

Dad, seeing the tip of my pole dip dangerously toward the water, grabbed it halfway up and held it steady. “Reel it in,” he said. There was excitement in his voice, though not nearly as much as there was in mine.

“What do I do? What do I do?” I squealed! I gripped the handle of the pole with my left hand and the handle of the spinner in my right. I was concentrating so hard on the fish and the pole that time seemed to stop and the other people and their noise seemed to disappear.

“Don’t rush now. Very slowly, turn the handle this way,” Dad said, his bushy black eyebrows pulled together in concentration. Still steadying the pole for me, he put his large, free hand over mine and together we turned the handle and began to pull in my fish. After a few turns, he removed his hand, but held it close by at the ready.

When my fish began to emerge from the water, Dad helped me swing the pole to the side and bring the sparkling and wiggling trout to dry land beside us. He grabbed the line, and the fish flopped and thrashed on the ground. “Take it. Take it,” I said, pushing the pole towards my father.

“No,” he answered. “It’s your fish. You get to finish this.” His dark eyes were serious and his deep voice modulated to keep me calm.

Together, we held the wet slippery animal, while Dad worked out the hook.

I don’t remember how we transported my catch to the cleaning area or anything about that messy process, but I remember taking the cleaned fish to the back door of the mess hall. I remember the kitchen staff accepted my prize, wrapped it in white butcher paper, labeled the package with my name, and placed it in an oversized refrigerator.

The next morning, at breakfast in the huge, rustic mess hall, my name was called on the loudspeaker. Dad and I stood and waved from our wooden benches, and a white-aproned waiter wound his way across the room to deliver to me my own cooked catch. Head and tail still attached, its round black bead of an eye staring directly at me, my fish greeted me. Dad showed me how to pull the head, tail, and backbone out with one smooth movement.

“I’ve never had fish for breakfast,” I laughed, my fork poised.

I offered everyone in the family a bite of my prize catch, but I ate most of the moist white meat and much of its crunchy, salty skin all by myself.

Shake, Rattle & Rock!

     “Rumble… Rumble… Rumble… BOOM!”
     I perked up at the first distant sound. Then was swept by a wave of anxiety as the the sound grew closer and louder — like a locomotive approaching the house across the front lawn — like rolling thunder coming from below my feet.
     The deep resonating BOOM was so intense, my bones vibrated.
     The light in the bathroom winked out. The room went black.
     I leaped to my feet, but before I could process one single thought, the Earth contorted. Like it was made of putty, the ground beneath me bent and twisted.
     Reacting on pure instinct, I lurched toward the bathroom door intent on fleeing to safety in Mom and Dad’s adjacent bedroom. The floor rose to meet one foot, jarring me, then fell away from the other, nearly pitching me on my face.
     On the bathroom’s threshold, I gripped the doorframe with both hands.
     The walls moved.
     The floor moved.
     Clinging to the house, I struggled to ride along as it writhed atop the bucking Earth. My right hand moved up with the wall on my right, while my left hand moved down with the wall on my left. Then the right was pulled down, while the left was yanked upward. At the same time, my feet rose and fell with the fluid ground, like I stood atop an inner tube surfing a class-four rapid.
     There was a momentary pause, barely a second, before it all began again. During that brief pause, I released my death grip on the door jamb and ran from the bathroom, through the open door of my parents’ bedroom, and launched myself onto their king-sized bed alongside them.
     The rolling and roiling began anew as I landed. The three of us crawled to the head of the bed and lay staring out the window into the pre-dawn morning. We watched as the water in our swimming pool sloshed back and forth so violently it generated a tidal wave that crashed over the top of the garage, leaving the pool half full. Then the masonry wall surrounding the backyard seemed to faint into rubble.
     All the while, the roar continued. In the foreground of sounds, like a high pitched aria, was the crash of falling objects and the tinkle of breaking glass; in the background was the Universe-consuming bellow of the Earth and everything balanced on its thin skin twisting and groaning and ripping and growling in a discordant, deafening din.
     My sister, who had miraculously slept through the first half of the tumult, was awakened when her small television dove off its shelf onto her bed. I heard her long frightened wail as she ran to join us on the bed. She landed as the quake slowed and quieted and skidded to a stop.

     It was moments after six on the morning of Tuesday, February 9, 1971. I was sixteen and in my junior year at Sylmar High School. I was up early and in the bathroom, as I was every school day morning, because I had an A-period class that began at seven o’clock. When the quake hit at 06:00:41, I’d been fully dressed, fully made-up, sitting at the vanity in the main bathroom arranging the long curls I’d just released from their hot-curlers.
     The Sylmar Earthquake occurred on the San Fernando Fault that ran through the San Gabriel Mountains into the northern San Fernando Valley. It measured 6.6 on the Seismic Scale. Its maximum horizontal acceleration, however, was three times what it should have been, more like that of an 8.5 quake. The “Rumble” came from the 6.6. The “Boom!” resulted from the acceleration. They say the ground and everything on it would have been “weightless” for a moment during that acceleration. At the time, the Sylmar Quake was the third largest in modern California history, after the earthquakes in 1906 in San Francisco and 1933 in Long Beach.

     Immediately after the quaking stopped, we were up.
     “What should we do now, Wallace?” my mother said, as we stood in the dark. Her words were clipped, her face pale, and her eyes just a little wide and wild. I could tell she was gripping her panic hard, trying to appear brave for us girls.
     “Let’s start by getting dressed,” Dad said, as he pulled on the first clothes he could lay his hands on.
     Then he turned to me. “Joan, where’s your transistor radio?” He was sitting on the bed tying his shoes.
     “In my room,” I said immediately. “On my dresser.” I was still shaking, but I found Dad’s directness and obvious plan of action calming.
     I moved towards the hallway. Dad looked at my feet. “You have shoes. Good. There’s going to be broken glass. Be careful. I’ll be right behind you.”
     Slowly I moved from the bedroom-end of the long house towards the kitchen and, beyond that, my bedroom, which decades ago had been the maid’s quarters, so was situated at the far end of the house next to the pantry and service porch. I passed through the living room and dining room. Normally dimly lit by street lights, the rooms were dark.
     Dad came up behind me with a flashlight he’d found somewhere, and we worked our way forward. Nothing was where it was supposed to be — furniture had shifted position, table lamps lay across the carpet, paintings were missing from the walls, books and nicknacks were scattered about in haphazard piles. In the dining room, Mom’s china cabinet’s face-first fall had been broken by the dining table, so it lay suspended at a thirty degree angle. Before tipping over, it had flung open its doors and remnants of Mom’s fancy china dishes lay beneath it.
     At the doorway separating the dining room from the kitchen, we were brought to a halt.
     The kitchen looked like each cupboard had exploded, spewing its contents across the room. Upper and lower cabinet doors hung open. The floor was beyond ankle-deep in shattered jars and bottles, everyday dishes and glasses. Even the drawers were wide open and splattered with debris from above.
     On top of all that chaos, both the double oven and the refrigerator had done their work. First, the doors of the frig had opened, milk and orange juice, fruits and vegetables, salad dressing and eggs had been launched like frosting atop the cupboard contents. Then, in what looked like a battle scene, the stove and refrigerator had toppled over and lay flat on their faces atop the pile.
     The refrigerator completely blocked the door. Dad and I were standing there, staring at the carnage, when Mom and Diane joined us.
     “Oh, Wallace! What are we going to do?” Mom said. The tightness in her voice was back.
     As we stood staring, the rumbling and shaking began again. I grabbed Dad’s upper arm with one hand and the door jamb with the other and held on. Mom threw her arm around Diane’s shoulders and leaned against the wall. The temblor’s convulsions were not as big, not as long, not as loud, so not as scary. Expecting it to go on and on and on, I held my breath until it stopped, then I breathed again.
     “Dad, can you boost me up?” I asked. “Then I can climb over and get to my room.”
     “There’s an awful lot of broken glass in there,” he said, craning his neck to peer over the avocado-green blockade to get a better look at the kitchen floor.
     “I’ll be careful,” I said. I was calmed by having a mission, a purpose. I would feel calmer still by doing something.

     “First, let’s see if we can push the frig over far enough for you to squeeze through the gap, then you won’t have to do any climbing.” Dad handed the flashlight to Mom. Diane and I lined up with Dad, placing our hands on the broad side of the barrier. “On three… One, two, three!”
     We all pushed and the heavy metal box shifted half a foot, bulldozing the pile in front of it.
     “Again… One, two, three!” It pressed against the fallen stove, and they both moved another few inches. The gap opened almost enough for me to maneuver through.
     “Last time. One, two, three!” The gap widened, and I was able to slither into the kitchen.
     Taking the flashlight from Dad, I picked my way across the top of an eight-inch-deep layer of broken dishes and food. There was barbecue sauce and dill pickles and frying pans and juice glasses and salad bowls and olive oil and rice and cookies, all smashed, all mixed together in a slow motion science experiment gone bad. The powerful smells of vinegar and grape jelly filled the air.
     It took several minutes, because when I got past the kitchen to the service porch, I had to shove the washing machine out of the doorway and walk over the pantry’s contents. Finally, I came to my room, and pushed on the normally open, but now closed, door. My dresser had moved away from the wall to bar the door. I pushed and shoved (later I’d tell a joke about huffing and puffing and blowing the door down) until I could squeeze inside.
     My radio, lay in the middle of the floor.
     I picked my way back to the pantry-kitchen door, where I could see Dad and Diane across the kitchen. I held the radio high and called, “Got it!”
     Dad saluted me.
     Diane yelled, “Yay!”
     “Dad, instead of walking through that again, I’m going to go out the back door and walk around. You can let me in the front door.”

This is not our home, as I have none. Photo from USGS.

     It was getting a bit lighter outside. Pale pink above the hills to the east hinted of the impending sunrise. I walked around the house and onto the front porch. Dad and Diane were waiting there, they’d stepped outside onto the porch to watch the sky. Mom stood in the doorway. The sky looked to be filled with smoke, but the clouds were made from dust kicked up by the Earth’s shaking. Several sirens wailed in the distance. Not a single moving car was visible from our corner lot. Not a single electric light shone in the early morning.
     Another aftershock struck as we stood there — not as big, but almost. There was a deep rumble. a long rolling wave, and a final thud. My heart rumbled, rolled, and thudded with the temblor, while I held on to the wall and my breath. Then it was quiet again.
     I switched on the battery-powered radio, extended its antennae, and dialed through the static looking for a station broadcasting news and public safety information. A calm, deep male voice solidified out of the static. He announced that the Veterans Hospital in Sylmar, very near the epicenter, and just a few miles from us, had fallen into rubble. People were missing. He also reported that the Van Norman Dam, sitting in the hills several miles away from the center of the quake, had developed large cracks and might collapse. There were mandatory evacuations of thousands of families who lived in the dam’s shadow. Fortunately, that didn’t affect our neighborhood. He interviewed emergency personnel who directed us to “shelter in place,” stay home, if we could safely do so. The Red Cross was setting up an Emergency Shelter and Distribution Center at San Fernando Junior High, a four blocks down the street from our house.

     “I think I should check on the neighbors,” Dad said. “One of you girls want to join me?” He looked at Diane and me.
     “And your folks?” Mom said, still standing, frozen in hesitation, in the doorway, unsure if it was safer inside or out.
     While Dad and I checked on old Mrs. Greene next door, the Burlieghs across Fifth Street, and our backside neighbors, the Werrings, Mom and Diane stood rooted on the porch.
     A short time later, we all slowly drove the eight blocks to Grandma and Grandpa’s house on Workman Street, where we found them safe and sound, and surrounded by a mess as big as our own.

In the following hours and days the mainstays of daily life I took for granted were altered:

Photo from USGS.

    •    Water mains were broken, electrical lines were down, natural gas was shut off, phone lines were out, and stores were closed. We had to depend on water trucks for drinking and cooking water, stand in line to use the payphone booths set up on corners, and cook meals over charcoal on our backyard barbecue. We and our neighbors flushed our toilets with buckets of pool water, but others used the port-potties placed on every block. For a few days we picked up food packets at the Red Cross center, because supermarkets and corners stores looked like our kitchen.
    •    My school, Sylmar High School, also close to the epicenter, was closed for two or three weeks. The science wing, where the chemistry classrooms and my homeroom were located, was closed much longer, maybe to the end of the year. Diane’s school, San Fernando Junior High School, with its many early century buildings condemned because of severe structural damage, was closed even longer.
    •    Around town, scores of older buildings — businesses, schools, homes — were destroyed or so severely damaged they were condemned, including the beautiful two-story main building at Morningside Elementary School directly across the street from our home and a cute, old, river-rock-sided house on our block.

Businesses were severely damaged in the 1100 block of San Fernando Road.

    We were lucky. Our house, built in 1930, long before modern earthquake-proof building codes, was structurally undamaged — just a few extra cracks in the plaster. Even the swimming pool came through without breaking. Lots of stuff was broken, though, and the backyard wall had to be rebuilt, but within a few months, everything would be put right.
    The damage was seemingly random — one thing stood steady next to another that fell and shattered. Prior to the quake, Mom and Dad had been painting the dining room. In order to move the heavy maple china cabinet away from the wall, they’d emptied the top several shelves of all Mom’s fine leaded crystal glasses. They’d set the glasses on top of the upright piano in the den, where they’d be safely out of the way.
    During the earthquake, the china cabinet fell over, and the few pieces left inside were shattered. But the upright piano, which stood on caster wheels on a Spanish tile floor, rolled instead of tipping. It rolled away from the wall, it rolled along the length of the wall, and it rolled back towards the wall. The tall crystal wine glasses and goblets on its narrow top rode along. Only one wine glass fell to its death. A top-heavy goblet on the very edge began to fall, but was saved by the wall, where it lay balanced at a forty-five degree angle until we discovered it later that afternoon.
    Over the next days and weeks, there were hundreds of aftershocks, some nearly as large as the initial shock, but most a good deal smaller, yet still terrifying. Each time, no matter the size, I froze, held my breath, feeling and listening for the rumbling sounds and the rolling, quivering sensation. Each time, it felt like my heart stopped for just a fraction of a second before jerking back into its rhythm.
    We spent those days cleaning up the messes, swabbing the walls and floors with buckets of chlorinated pool water only after shoveling the kitchen debris into big dumpsters the city placed on every block. It turned out that some combination of the ingredients that drizzled together down the front of the kitchen cabinets or splashed there after crashing to the floor made an effective paint stripper and linoleum dye.
    I’d forgotten, but my sister Diane reminded me that the National Guard set up roadblocks to prevent looting and keep out looky-loos. Only those with ID showing a residence in San Fernando or Sylmar were allowed to pass. She recalls returning from across the Valley after showering at a friend’s house and being stopped by the uniformed officers, who only waved us through after Dad produced his driver’s license showing our address at 556 North Brand, San Fernando.

    California is a land of earthquakes. As a California girl born and bred, I was familiar with the little wiggling of the ground, the swaying of a chandelier, that momentary sense of unease as the ground shifted. I’d experienced dozens and always dismissed them as no big deal — even laughed at them, considering the gentle rolling of the ground as lightheartedly as a roller-coaster ride. That attitude of bravado was a California teenager’s badge of honor.   
    Until February 9, 1971.
    After The Big One, something in me changed. I suppose in today’s language we’d call it PTSD, but not back then. To this day, nearly a half-century later, my body panics of its own accord whenever the ground rumbles. It could be as simple as the shimmy caused by the passing of a large truck, or it could be the authentic quiver of a small quake, but my body reacts without my permission. My breath catches, my heart skips a beat, a burst of adrenaline shoots through my cells, and I freeze. When my brain catches up to my body, I can tell myself to breathe, and I can laugh at myself, but the initial reaction is completely out of my conscious control.
    There’s something terrifying about not being able to trust the Earth — not being able to know, without a doubt, that the ground will remain solid and dependable beneath my feet. Because, if I can’t trust the Earth, the solid ground, what can I trust?

Phone Call From A Stranger

“People create stories create people; 

or rather, stories create people create stories.”

~ Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays (2012)

Being adopted immediately ensnares the babe in the web of a lifelong mystery story.

~ Joan Griffin, Adoptee

            I was startled awake by the ringing phone. Disentangling myself from the blankets, I was careful not to disturb my sleeping eight-year-old son in whose bed I’d fallen asleep while reading bedtime stories.

            I tiptoed out of the room, then dashed down the hall as the siren of the ringing phone continued. In the kitchen, I grabbed the receiver.

            “Hello,” I said, just as the answering machine’s message kicked in.

            “Hello. You have reached…”

            “Hang on. Hang on,” I said to encourage the as yet unidentified caller to wait for the recorded greeting to finish.

            “… the home of Tom, Joan, and Dean. Leave a message at the beep, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible,” said my own recorded voice.

            “Hello,” I repeated into the now silent line.

            There was a short pause.

            Then an unfamiliar female voice said, “Hi. You don’t know me. My name is Peg Gildersleeve. I’m looking for a Joan Griffin who was born in June 1954 in Los Angeles and was adopted.” She spoke nervously fast, without taking a breath, like she was reading from a statement she had prepared ahead of time.

            In that instant, all vestiges of sleepiness vanished, and I was wide awake, my antennae on high alert. I said, “That sounds like me.”

            My head buzzed. It felt like I was on an old fashioned party line, and every neuron in my body was leaning in to eavesdrop on the phone call.

            “I think I’m your birthmother,” the stranger said.

            I leaned against the long pantry cabinet. My legs let go under the weight of this information. My back slid slowly down the smooth wooden surface until I was sitting on the tile floor, knees to my chest, the phone a firm pressure against my ear.

            “Tell me again. Who are you?” My brain had downshifted and I was having difficulty processing the disruptive meaning of her words.

            “My name is Marguerite Brinker Gildersleeve. Friends call me Peg. I was twenty-three years old in 1954 when you were born at the Florence Crittenden Home for Unwed Mothers in Los Angeles,” she said, her voice quavering a bit.

            This was the elusive reunion I had fantasized about since I was eight years old. That night, at thirty-eight, my excitement was mixed with an equal measure of fear. After all these years, what did this woman want?

            “How did you find me?” I asked. My adoption had taken place in an era of “closed adoptions,” meaning all legal files were sealed, their contents permanently secreted even from the participants.

            “I hired a private detective. It took him only forty-eight hours to locate you,” she said. “I don’t know how he did it.” That little piece of data surprised me. A sense of vulnerability swept over my skin.

            “I want you to know, Joan, that not a day has gone by that I’ve not thought of you. I always wondered where you were and what you were doing. As a baby, you had wisps of reddish hair, so whenever I saw a girl with red hair about your age, I wondered if she was you,” this stranger who was my birthmother said. There was something in her voice that resembled a plea.

            “I have two questions that I’d like to ask you, if you don’t mind,” she said. “They’re two questions I’ve thought about for years.”

            “Okay…” I said. “Sure.” For some reason that request made me uneasy.

            “First,” she said, “did you have a happy childhood?”

            “Yes,” I said. “Very.” Then I did a quick summary of my family and my Wonder Years-like suburban upbringing. It’s actually difficult, when under pressure, to do the mental gymnastics required to review, prioritize, compose, and then deliver the “elevator talk” promotional version of your whole life and make it sound both coherent and “Very” happy.

            An audible sigh came through the line. I’d obviously succeeded in giving her the answer she was seeking.

            “That makes me so happy to hear,” she said, her voice more relaxed. “My second question is, did you go to college?”

            “Yes,” I assured her. Rather than feeling pride in sharing my own accomplishments, I felt like I was being held up for comparison to some ideal. I was not only having to prove myself worthy, but I was somehow being offered up as evidence of my Mom and Dad’s worthiness, as well.

            “I went to UCLA. I earned my BA in Psychobiology in 1977. Then I went back to get my teaching credential just a few years ago.”

           

We talked for nearly an hour, me sitting unmoving on the cold tile floor of the kitchen the entire time. By the end of the conversation, I felt a bit more relaxed, comfortable that she intended no harm. Yet, I retained the sense that my parents and I were being judged. I’d succeeded in passing the test, whatever it was, but we had indeed been measured.

Before hanging up, we agreed to communicate again.

She wanted to dive right into the deep end of this new relationship. She wanted to get together. She wanted me to meet her husband and my two half-siblings. She wanted to meet (and thank) my parents. She wanted to get to know my husband and son (her grandchild).

I preferred to wade slowly into the shallow end, testing the waters with each new step. My inner turmoil held me back. I wanted to maintain control of the relationship. I wasn’t ready to open up my life to this person who had walked away from me on the third day of my life, and thirty-eight years later wanted to walk back in. I needed to keep her at arm’s length for a while, until I could clarify for myself how I felt and what I wanted. Besides, I had a personal origin story, painstakingly created over my lifetime, to reconstruct in my mind.

I insisted that we only communicate through written letters for a while, until we got to know one another better. Until I felt comfortable.

            I stood, stretched my stiff back, and replaced the phone’s receiver. I felt simultaneously befuddled and wired to the gills. I wanted to tell someone, share my galloping emotions with someone, begin to sort out my feelings.

            I looked at my watch – it was a little after nine. My husband, Tom, wouldn’t be home for an hour. He was at an evening class.

I paced.

            Who can I call? Who can I talk to?

            Though I wanted to talk to my folks about the phone call and this Peg Gildersleeve, I wasn’t sure if, at that moment, I had the stamina necessary for what would have to be a long involved conversation with my mother. I needed to do a bit of mental sorting first.

I paced some more.

            Who else can I call at nine o’clock on a school night? All my friends were either teachers or parents of school-aged kids or both. It was too late to call any of them that night.

I paced towards the phone.

I had to talk to someone.

            Lifting the receiver again, I dialed my parents’ number. I knew they’d be up and awake. My need to verbally process what had happened outweighed my anxiety about telling my mom. I just had to trust her.
Copyright 2018  by Joan Griffin

Peak Experience

"We do not take a trip; a trip takes us."

~ John Steinbeck, Travels With Charlie: In Search of America, 1962

July 20, 2006

Donahue Pass — 11,056 feet

  

The sky emerging from behind the ridge was black and boiling with angry clouds that towered over the eleven-thousand-foot pass where we stood frozen in place. I don’t know what we had expected to see when we crested the granite ridge, but we had not anticipated the storm clouds would be assaulting the very ground we needed to cross.

Not only did this wall of weather block our forward motion, but charging directly at us on an icy wind, it was moving so fast and furiously that we had no time to retreat to lower, safer ground. Instead, we three women would be forced to play out a scene from a clichéd disaster movie and hope that the experience didn’t end badly.

            Turning on our heels, we scurried back down the rocky path we had just labored up, backtracking to a small patch of green a few feet lower than the top of Donahue Pass, and prepared to hunker down and let the storm pass overhead.

            “Okay, Girls, what exactly are we going to do here?” Cappy shouted over the sky’s wild roar. Her eyes darted about, scanning the terrain.

            “Hell. I’m dumping this pack and anything metal I’m wearing. Then I’m going to that grassy spot to lie down,” I said, pointing with a tip of my head. I threw my hiking poles on the ground beside a waist-high slab of granite, unbuckled my pack, and wrenched it off.

            “It’s not much lower here than it was at the top!” Cappy shot back. She had already tossed her pack against the same broad boulder.

            “It’ll do,” Jane assured us both in her steady voice. Though she spoke calmly, Jane kept an eye on the rapidly changing sky as she rifled through her open backpack.

            I pitched my shiny new pack roughly against the rock slab and dug helter-skelter through its contents in search of any and all warm and waterproof clothing, scattering undesired items about on the ground. To my left and right, my two companions worked on the same mission.

            “All my warm clothes have metal zipper pulls and snaps,” I said. “Is that a problem?” No one answered. Maybe I hadn’t said it aloud. I thought the metal might attract the lightning. In the moment I stood considering, I realized how cold the air and my heart had gone.

Stripping off my shorts, I yanked on long underwear, layered myself with fleece and waterproof rain gear top and bottom, plus gloves and hat. I abandoned my watch and glasses, both metal, and zipped them into a small pouch on my pack.

Huge drops of rain began to splat around us. The wind brought the pungent zing of ozone, a sure lightning identifier, and shoved the rain horizontally with each gust. The black wall of clouds had followed us over the pass and hovered nearly overhead. Gray fingers reached downward from the clouds towards the spot where we dressed.

Together, we dashed to the deepest of the slight dips in the landscape, really no more than a low spot in the dirt. Huddled between a tiny snowmelt pond and huge piles of granite boulders, we ran down our lists of sage backcountry do’s and don’t’s.

            “I know we’re not supposed to stand under tall trees,” I said. Not a problem way above tree line. “But I also think we’re supposed to stay away from water and big rocks!  So, should I be closer to that pond or these rocks?” I couldn’t decide; I couldn’t move.

            “I don’t think it matters anymore. The storm is on top of us! Just spread out and get down!” Jane said. She threw herself down on the wet ground ten feet from Cappy. Unfrozen, I dropped into a shallow dent in the dirt.

Tugging my thick fleece cap down around my ears, I pulled my rain hood up and cinched it tightly around my face, leaving only a small circle for my eyes and nose. I curled myself into the fetal position, drawing my knees to my chest. Around us, engulfing us, the sky was battleship gray — the early summer afternoon had turned to night. The rain grew to a deluge that pounded the ground and drowned out all sound save the roaring thunder. My gloved hands covered my ears.

Lightning rent the clouds. Slivers of electricity, high above us, leaped from cloud to cloud, making intricate webs of light in the darkness. Thicker bolts slashed vertically to and from the twelve-thousand-foot peaks that surrounded us on all sides.

Each time Thor’s hammer slammed down, the Earth shook and the air reverberated with thunder. Light and sound struck simultaneously, not a nanosecond between them.

Flash, BOOM! 

Flash, BOOM!

On and on and on it went, my heart booming in rhythm.

Flash, BOOM!

At the peak of the storm’s fury, icy winds whipped around us, coming from all directions at once. Rain froze into a pelting hail that created a white carpet. Icy bullets shot from the sky, stinging through my layers each time they struck. Encircling us, the clouds grew thick and blinding. Wrapped in a ten-thousand-foot-high fog, I was alone. I could barely make out the lumps that were Jane and Cappy just a few feet away.

            I covered my face with my hands, peaking out between my gloved fingers in momentary bouts of bravery, slamming closed my finger-shutters with each repeated round of Flash, BOOM! Still, I witnessed plenty. 

            “What am I doing here?” I shouted in my thoughts, trying to hear myself over the storm. “What are three smart women doing in this predicament?  We know better than this!” 

            Prayers, pleas, and promises flew like charged liquid from my mind. I urged them upward and outward, hoping they would penetrate the ion-filled sky and find a sympathetic reception with the Powers That Be.  I visualized a golden igloo of protective light arched over and around us three, as we huddled, vulnerable, on that small patch of grass in the sky.  Repeating my words over and over like a mantra, I held the golden image steady in my mind’s eye, the wildness of the weather battering the glowing dome that protected us.

            “Protect us, keep us safe.

            “Protect us, keep us safe.

            “Protect us, keep us safe,” I chanted.

            Cold to the bone, even in my layers of fleece and plastic, my body shivered and convulsed. Gritting my jaws couldn’t stop my teeth from chattering.

            Had it been an hour?  How much longer would I be able to stay curled up on the ground before hypothermia set in? 

            I wiggled and rubbed my extremities in an attempt to raise my body temp, but to no avail. The shivering and chattering went on and on. The weak link was my feet; I was still wearing my Teva hiking sandals with thick, sopping wet socks.

            My ears pricked up. Did I imagine it? Or was there the minutest of pauses between the flashes and the BOOMS?

            I raised my head to watch the sky. The heart of the storm was moving to the north. We remained wrapped in clouds that sat on the rocky pass cloaking the peaks, but the violence and wildness was moving slowly away.

            At precisely the moment those thoughts filled my cold-addled brain, Cappy’s voice rang out, penetrating the storm’s din. “Let’s go! It’s moving north! Let’s go!”

            Galvanized, our three bodies leaped up like one, moving with focused energy. In mere moments, we had packs on. In the same way that distraught mothers are able to lift cars off the crushed bodies of their children, we tossed onto our shoulders, as though they were now filled with feathers, the very packs we had struggled mightily to hoist and buckle earlier in the day. Faster than I could have imagined possible, we scuttled southward across the broad granite pass, peering through the rain to find our way down the other side.

Frozen feet, impossibly sure-footed, rock-hopped downward over a huge ancient talus slope, the remains of an old landslide. The trail lay hidden somewhere among the acres of automobile-sized boulders and vast expanses of snow that spread across the steep slope before us. Hurdling downhill, I scanned the gray and white landscape for any sign of a trail — rock cairns, patches of brown, anything — but saw nothing, not the slightest hint.         

“See that tiny green square at the bottom edge of the talus?” Cappy shouted over the pounding rain and retreating roar of the storm. “That’s our destination, Rush Creek.” A thin gray ribbon of a river sliced through a postage stamp-sized green meadow.

Trail or not, my feet did not care, they fairly flew over the rocky rubble toward the distant spot of green, so eager was my body to “get down off this damn mountain!”

 “I have to stop!” I called out, halting on a flat rock slab. We were only halfway down the mountain, but I couldn’t take another step. My feet had been completely numb for over an hour, and my legs felt rubbery with exhaustion. With the immediate danger of the lightning and thunder past, and my adrenaline surge used up, my feet had become lifeless clubs, and I feared stumbling in the rock maze.

Jane and Cappy, hearing my shout, joined me where I stood.

“I can’t feel my feet,” I said. “I need to put my boots on and warm up my toes.”

The sky, still filled with clouds, had grown lighter and paler. The rain had calmed to sprinkles and showers.

Scanning the sky, and seeing its change, Cappy said, “My feet are freezing. I’m changing, too.”

Cappy and I sat atop a wet rock, the size of a bus, while Jane, who had worn her boots all day, scouted around for some suggestion of a path.

Though the trailing edge of the storm continued to sprinkle on us from high gray clouds, the hour-long run down the mountain had warmed my body. Only my feet remained frozen and unfeeling. I peeled wet socks from my prune-wrinkled feet and massaged my bare toes between gloved hands, encouraging the blood to flow into the clammy skin, but numbness persisted. I tugged on a new pair of plush REI hiking socks and pushed my feet deep into dry boots.

            Before I’d tied my laces, Jane called out, “There it is!” Standing on a broad slab of gray stone a few yards away, like a sailor on the prow of a ship shouting, “Land, ho!” Jane pointed with her whole arm and its attached hiking pole extension towards the green spot we’d been eyeing all the way down the mountain.

            “See how that thin brown line cuts straight across the meadow?” She paused, waiting until our eyes had caught up with her words. “Halfway between us and the spot where it disappears into the rocks, you can see a brown patch of trail… and then another patch a little closer… and a third.” All the while she was pointing downward at a series of brown splotches among the rocks.

            Cappy and I leaped up to see better. Sure enough, like a connect-the-dots puzzle, the trail stood out from the rock-covered slope as a brown dotted line pointing arrow-straight towards our perch.

            “I see it!” Cappy said, a smile growing across her face.

            “Wow! It’s right there!” I answered, breathing a sigh of relief.

            With warming feet, I felt my confidence return as I navigated the leaps and bounds over and around the heaps of stone. In response, my body stopped gripping itself so tightly, and my breath came easier. Pressing forward, we moved steadily toward the square, green bull’s-eye beckoning to us from a thousand feet below.

            Despite the day’s harrowing events, despite our blundering mistakes, and our utter exhaustion, we had survived. We had climbed up and over our first High Sierra pass. We had twice lost the trail, but had found it again both times. We had responded appropriately to a dangerous situation, partly of our own making, and come out unscathed.

            In the days to come, we would find ourselves repeatedly challenged by the physical demands of the wilderness through which we journeyed. There would be more mountains to scale, more rivers to ford, more mishaps to overcome. All that was to be expected, of course. Little did I know that afternoon that it would be my inner journey, where I would face my own personal mountains to climb and secret rivers to cross, that would prove to be the most daunting. 

             [Copyright 2018 - Opening chapter of my in-progress JMT-adventure-memoir.]

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