How I Lost My Bearings

The shadow fell without warning the evening we stayed at South Mowich River Camp. 

The campground was pebbly, invitingly perched right next to the river’s clear currents, and bathed in that same kind of golden light that colors precious childhood memories and which I’d barely felt during that dread-soaked year—the previous two days of this backpacking trip being a rare exception. 

Funnily enough, I hadn’t even wanted to go on the excursion. Like many things, the woods quietly terrified me for various reasons I didn’t like to think about, and I was none too enthusiastic about disrupting whatever equilibrium I had left that summer. I entered them mostly so as not to let down my sister and cousin, who had been planning the trip for a while—and then, less than 48 hours later, found myself in a remarkable mode of existence I’d barely remembered I could escape to. Maybe the bugs just weren’t biting as much, but the usual cold dread simply wasn’t there. I was feeling unusually good, forgetful and present. 

After setting up our tents and eating dinner, our trio began to poke around the modest site. Our investigations soon turned to a covered, three-walled log shelter of uncertain purpose that we had passed earlier. Walking up to it, we were surprised to find its interior walls completely covered in etchings of names and dates ranging from 2020 back to the 1960s: 

SEAN ’03. 

Mack and Jean, ’77. 

JOY N RON.

Apparently someone on the same trip around Mt. Rainier we were on—five or six decades ago—had decided on this format, written their name, and then, gradually, year after year, hundreds of people had followed suit. It probably didn’t take long for the structure to fill up enough that it became impossible to find the original name, as a number of signatories didn’t date theirs, instead letting their mark float around dreamily in time. Certainly it was impossible when we stood there. 

Such impressions of this fairly routine phenomenon flitted across my mind—then abruptly shattered with the impact of a familiar chill that wrenched me right out of whatever warmth I had been feeling those past few days.  For there was no apparent age difference between a single one of the carvings. Fifty-year-old and two-year-old etchings had the exact same appearance. You could tell me someone yesterday scratched out both in one go and I would believe you. 

And, for some reason, seeing that the span of my life could fit two times over between two identical-looking carvings—clearly and without seeking it out—struck a massive gong in the pit of my stomach, and sent the terror reverberating painfully through my skeletal frame.

If I were to try and break this feeling down into its components, I could tell you that it is, in part, terror at the immensity of the woods and passing time—themselves microcosmic of that of life and the universe, which have the power to destroy and even to end without any of us being able to do anything about it. It doesn’t stop there, though, just keeps splaying out into all the things I find unthinkably large and scary.

There’s the terror of love, for one—of offering myself totally and earnestly to another person, losing my bearings in their wilderness, and still being abandoned. There’s the terror of behaviors I am powerless over not performing in order to forget and avoid terror. Terror of family members dying. Terror of the feeling that arises when I sincerely think of my own imminent death—made easier by standing next to that wall of inscriptions—and what might happen if I, who have watched the values I thought I had fall apart in the face of fear before, ever actually faced a moment that I knew with certainty to be my last? 

My fear of what might happen in such a moment is perhaps the crystallization of the entire barrage—for it is simply the fear that I will be rent apart by changes that I cannot overpower; that I will watch the familiar masks, possessions and will I consider myself to be disintegrate as all that promised refuge is engulfed by the unknown.

I sat on a petrified log jutted out over the river for a long time after this, the current rushing past underneath. I gazed at the confining shadow which once again filled the horizon of my future like a storm-cloud and accented the broken lands of my past. I sat and despaired the endless effort that would be required to keep trying to escape its intrusions—all with exhaustion already in my bones, and sins already committed. How does this shadow become the most powerful force in your life? And what kind of life is that?

· · ·

Sixteen years before I encountered the Mowich river, my father underwent chemotherapy for treatment of a brain tumor. 

I don’t consciously remember too much from this time: hospital halls, weekend stays with my cousins in Portland, a family friend who’d also had cancer coming over to visit at the beginning of the process—the atmosphere during that visit being charged, something palpably wrong, however difficult it must’ve been for me to imagine that my father could actually die and disappear. But then I also distinctly remember visiting my uncle in an east coast hospital the year before, of him offering me chocolate pudding, and then attending his funeral some months later, and I don’t know what that little kid was able to grasp and not.

Maybe the memory of seeing my father in his room when he finally got home has something like the quality of breathing a sigh of relief, of trying to forget that what a small voice had threatened might happen could maybe have happened. I am told that he had to quarantine when first released from the hospital, and that we had to wash our hands carefully before going in to see him in his altered, head-shaven state. I know that he looked different, that things felt and were different in our family after this.

I know that within a year I began having recurring panic dreams of immobility, and started to engage in private little behaviors that I could not easily explain to anyone: needing to touch door handles a certain number of times, or else face the attack of a strange chill. Needing to keep my prized toys, drawings and books cleanly organized, and falling into distress if anyone disturbed them. Needing to keep my shirts free of dirt, my skin clear of bug bites, my hand-washing excessive, frequent, but never quite sufficient for years and years after the nightmares began.

With my upbringing, the obvious solution to these anxieties and quirks was God. 

Family members, teachers and clergy alike told me he could lessen my tears in this world, and take them away in the next following Jesus’ soon return. Though this prospect seemed nice enough, and I never questioned it, I didn’t really pay it much attention until the end of fourth grade, when my two best friends announced to me that they were moving away. This was, of course, distressing—more than I could admit to myself—but for a while I was implacably certain that something would happen to intervene and make it impossible. No, I couldn’t actually lose the only two people in my tiny Seventh-Day Adventist world who corroborated the meticulous imaginative realms I’d learned to use, like hand-washing, as a balm for my chills. It didn’t make sense.

But summer arrived, we said goodbye, and I was suddenly left with evidence that the possible losses of the future could be made real. With this came all sorts of awful possibilities. Foremost among them was the newly-felt weight of the world ending in Christ’s Final Judgment, and of my actions either preparing me to face it or not. 

Really grappling with this for the first time, I soon began to compulsively beg God to please end history before fifth grade arrived and I could fuck things up, or—since he was omnipotent—to maybe do me a favor and let me repeat fourth grade eternally in a little time loop so I could always be sure I was prepared for what was coming. I sometimes muttered these prayers under my breath for hours at a time, jittery and distressed, hoping that if I said them just right they might be heard and accepted.

But fifth grade arrived without delay, and on an uncomfortable, subliminal level I began to suspect that God didn’t really come through for people who faced the shadow. Indeed, it started to seem pretty clear that fear and pain always tore right through whatever sense of security this faith was supposed to offer me and those closest to me. Besides, even if there were some kind of relief for those who could muster the endurance it took to walk the straight and narrow, I came to understand, it was not at all guaranteed for people like me: too often I got most excited by insufficiently holy things, was embarrassed by my family‘s weird religion, and worried that I, like the unclean secular world, perhaps doubted the existence of any redemption at all—even though I always knew in my heart of hearts that this was an equally untenable position.

For even when I finally did renounce belief in God a few years into non-Christian college, after a long period of doubt and disillusionment, I never stopped seeking salvation from my own incessantly broken-feeling life. Secretly and miserably I searched for it in new compulsive thoughts, obsessive note-taking, hoarding, philosophies that never stuck around or changed anything, and false, shame-inducing grasps at intimacy. 

Each of these would usually bring a moment of forgetting—but only a moment. None of them rescued me from my endless search for a feeling of safety that seemed to have been thoroughly scared out of me.

Instead, as my would-be solutions steadily failed, the number of material and human witnesses to my bullshit steadily rose, prickling at and accusing me however hard I tried to avoid, forget, and rationalize them away. The most pronounced sense of indictment, though, didn’t come from the people who would call me out or punish me, but from those who simply really did have faith in something, like my Papa. 

For Papa was a person whose face didn’t reflect my fear, but instead glowed with the same kind of golden light that I’d felt at certain anchoring points in my life, and which told me that no judgment would ever be found in his presence. You could see It shine out through the constant mechanical repairs he was always doing for family and friends; in his love for wildlife photography and grizzly bears, whom he visited in a pilgrimage to the woods of Hyder, Alaska every summer throughout retirement; in his mental library of clear, perfect bird whistles; in his unflagging patience and peace with his life circumstances.

I instinctively sensed It in him from childhood, loving and regarding him nearly as a saint—and for that same reason kept my distance as I got older, never quite revealing to him my surely unacceptable real feelings about things, however hard I always worked to prove myself to him when helping with renovation projects, or tried to see what he saw in the woods that nevertheless filled me with a quiet dread. 

Sometimes I idolized him, and tried to turn what he had into a “perfection”—a notion I could easily understand but was not what he had. For knowing from contact with people like Papa that there might actually be a path to something like real faith, but one that lay beyond the meticulous personal defenses formed by intellect and willpower and even religion, was something I hardly dared let myself believe. 

It scared me even more than the lifetimes of stifled desperation of other avowed believers, because if it was not something acquirable or controllable by my own hand, then it was out in the woods. And what might happen if I turned away from my endless fighting and fleeing for even a second—exposing myself, it seemed, to potentially irreversible collapse—was not actually something I wanted to know at all.

The thing about irreversible collapses, though, is that they happen whether you want them to or not.

Sometimes you find yourself living back at home six months after visiting the shore of the Mowich river, having finished a degree mid-pandemic and burnt out, taking hours and hours of suddenly-available time to grieve the life you wished you’d had. You at first try to cover up the shame of your failure to attain it by making new plans and resolutions, but the falseness of this reaction is so obvious by now as to be almost unbearable. Instead you look wearily at the disquieting moments you’ve always skipped over, and the shadow that swelled in each of them.

You think of the log shelter at South Mowich River Camp. The things you’ve never been able to voice out loud or say “no” to. That person you wanted to love but were too scared to stay with. All the mistakes you’ve made, the people you’ve hurt, out of fear.

More painful than most, you think of senior year of high school when Papa died of a heart attack and you didn’t get to say goodbye, and you felt so little that it scared you, and wondered for a moment whether love had died inside you—if you could ever experience it or offer it again. 

You wonder what the hell could have replaced it when you remember it once being a natural result of being in the world, and why. In many ways you feel like a child who has never learned to walk, or speak, and like you now have the options of either learning to do so or continuing to flounder until you actually die.

So you try drugs for the first time in your childhood bedroom. You meditate impatiently. You try fasting for three days. And then, one day, heart racing, not knowing what’s about to happen, you make a call and ask earnestly for help from other human beings for the first time in your life. 

The shadow falls and you fall asleep, exhausted, finally admitting that the woods of the world are all around you—that you have always been a resident of them and they a resident in you.

· · ·

I’ve had a few adult-life experiences I would describe as remotely “spiritual.” One was, after a few intentional months of asking for help, sitting down with the person I had been too scared to stay with and telling her exactly what was in my heart, and what had gone on during our time together. During that conversation I could feel the rush of fear and self-consciousness that peaked as I uttered the first truthful words—not knowing what they would lead to—utterly drain from my body as she told me without pretense what had gone on in her, and what was going on in her now. For several strange hours after our goodbye I was startled to find music more intense and touching than I’d ever heard it before, and clouds somehow more vivid and mysterious.

Another time I was swimming in a beautiful lake and, in perfect ignorance of what was happening around me, simply worrying about shit—specifically the prospect of losing a particular friendship out of negligence, and so a particular self-image. And it was in these throes of fearful dislocation that I suddenly noticed through my goggles a pair of gorgeous, multicolored fish swimming very near me. Distracted, I instinctively reached out a hand to touch one of them. The fish, suddenly also seized by fear, jerked back and eyed me wearily. 

Observing this, I immediately saw and felt very strongly that I, like my scaly reflection in that moment, am just a creature—made of flesh, somehow animated, not quite fully described by any specific name or classification, and profoundly related to all other enfleshed beings by a great interlocking chain going back to our mutual beginning. My labored breathing slowly began to relax as I perceived the same accepting compassion for my own limitations as I naturally did for the fish’s—as I would for any creature, seen clearly. And I fleetingly knew that whatever it was that happened, it would be okay.

Looking back at these moments now, I think about how, in a recent conversation with my mom, she shared with me that Papa—quiet and calm as he was—had long lived with anxieties as intense as any I’d ever been familiar with, and had hardly talked about the darkness that plagued his own father, who passed away when he was a teenager. 

I think about my own darkness, and how I unconsciously got addicted to fighting it because, however wretched I felt doing so, it at least gave me a sense of control over my own place in the world. And I reflect on how the many bumpy months and years I’ve now spent learning to accept that I never had such a thing have occasionally made me feel like I’m dying, watching attachments I didn’t even know I was trying to preserve myself with dissolve in the light of reality.

But then I remember how this process has also gradually proven to me that—the same way asking for help is the first step to embracing life in solitude, and that acknowledging the shadow is necessary for knowing the light—dying is the cost of really living. And facing it deeply dissolves fear of it. For these woods we might feel lost in are also, at last, our home. 

I’m reminded of what happened to my friend Carlos as he once stood stranded on a mountain in Colorado at dawn, freezing, waiting for a rescue team to find him, genuinely realizing that he might be about to die of exposure and yet only being able to think about how beautiful a place he was about to die in, and how grateful he was for the life he had had.

I can’t say that my fearful chills don’t still often threaten to close in again, jostling and frustrating me in the unpredictable, mystifying face of what must be. But they increasingly frustrate me in the way that an apprentice might get annoyed by a master artisan’s arbitrary-seeming training exercises, while still ultimately knowing that the whole baffling process can be trusted. Because often, following backsliding and confusion, something will happen, like a dream where I will find myself sitting at my family’s backyard patio table with my late Papa.

Knowing in an inexplicable dream-logic way that this situation exists in the present and is not a vision of some past memory, I will be astounded and overwhelmed to see my grandpa again, looking around the table at my family for confirmation that this is real—and receive no reaction at all from them, who merely continue to talk amongst themselves. It will become clear after a moment that it is only I who can see or hear him. 

Papa, always the most even-keeled man I’ve known, won’t seem to realize this, nor the strangeness of his presence at the table, and will instead be in a rare extra-jovial mood, making an effort to pepper comments into my family’s conversation and chuckling bemusedly as they slide by unacknowledged. Stunned, it will take a moment for this absurd and sad scene to sink in before, erupting out of me without warning, I begin to cry with grief and longing. 

I will throw my arms around my grandfather, sobbing, and repeat the words, “I love you, I love you, I love you,” over and over. And I will know, with gratitude, that I really do. 

Confused but touched, Papa will wrap his arms around me in turn, and we will hold each other like that until I wake up in my bed crying. It will take me several minutes to process what I have just experienced, reflecting on how, though Papa was surely as human as the rest of us, the mystery he put his faith in was the realest thing. And I will feel a strong, new sense of gratitude for everything that has happened in my life, because it led me to such a moment where I can for a second touch the center of the wheel, and think, “Oh, of course.”

· · ·

We went to bed early that night at South Mowich River Camp. We got up before sunrise, packing up and heading across the log bridge by the light of headlamps so that I could be sure to get home in time to do a job that would stress me out continuously until I finally quit the next year. 

I was too groggy for my brain to put much energy into its familiar idle zone of worry, though, as we trudged trancelike under the weight of our packs up and down mountain switchbacks. Through the deep, humid dark they gradually lifted us out of the river valley.

And then slowly, as we hiked, the sun peeked over a distant mountainside to greet the damp morning, illuminating fog-strewn trees first with an almost imperceptible grey, then a cooler, serene blue, before finally breaking into a gold that turned the forest canopy into a chapel, draped in quietly glowing clouds of mist. 

None of the three of us dared cheapen our journey through this sacred place by speaking about it—just steadily continued on our path in the presence of the same warm, persistent light that has sustained everything that ever lived.

LUKE ‘22