Back at base camp, I mustered the courage to tell the story of my day over our evening campfire. It felt freeing to be honest and even better to laugh with everyone over the image of me harrumphing around the forest all day, convinced that my life was over if I didn’t find the ideal spot for my vision quest. We all shared our final hopes and fears before settling into our sleeping bags and hammocks for our last night in the group.
No sooner had I gotten comfortable than I felt a raindrop. Then another. I barely had time to gather my backpack and sprint to Sparrow Hart’s tarp before the sky opened into a downpour. The rest of the questers had had the same idea, and we formed a pile of bags and shivering bodies under the narrow tarp.
“Wait’ll I tell my friends that I slept with six women on the quest!” Sparrow crowed from somewhere deep in the muddle.
The next morning dawned damp and chilly, and our mood was somber as we filed down the path to a nearby clearing, from which Sparrow would send us on our way. Lighting a stick of sage, he called each of us into the circle individually, smudging the air around us and reciting a brief poem, prayer, or song.
“Mother Moon, Father Sun,” he smiled as I entered the circle’s center, “Your daughter has arrived. Protect her this week from hurt and harm and from her own fears.”
“Amen,” I thought, taking a deep breath of sage.
Outside the clearing I waited for my “buddy,” Len. A burly, good-looking man in his mid-forties, he was to be camping closest to me, in a spot mid-way between base-camp and my beaver ponds.
We walked in silence, passing his sacred spot and continuing until we found a large boulder in the path. This would be our checkpoint, where he would come in the morning and I in the afternoon to leave a small rock as an indicator of our success in remaining alive.
We regarded each other soberly for a moment, then joined together in a hug. There were no excuses left; once we parted it was off to our respective spots, with no company but our own for the next four days.
And what company it was!
I managed to spend the first hour or so in relative harmony with myself; I said a few words to the forest as I crossed over the stepping stones into my swampy, mosquito-filled thicket, commemorating the beginning of my inward journey.
I headed to the driest area I could find and set to work stringing up my tarp, tying twine to four equidistant trees and storing my backpack, filled with first aid supplies, sunscreen, and an extra fleece, below.
Finally, I tied up my hammock between two birch trees overlooking the lake. It was a cheerful, windy spot, and as I tested out my hammock I felt my first surge of excitement; four days with nothing to do but hang out in the woods. This might actually be fun!
But it didn’t take long for the myriad of internal voices I apparently possessed to come trickling in. Now that I was alone in nature, with no sound but the wind and waves to distract me, I was forced to confront them. There were four main players who I got to know well as the days went on; Appreciation, Cynicism, Panic, and Hypochondria. The latter two I envisioned as a pair of Siamese Twins looming constantly over my shoulder, just waiting for an opportunity to strike.
“Are you sure you’re filtering that water correctly? Are you pumping slowly enough? Gah! What are those little black things in the water! BACTERIA!!! Don’t drink it! What was that sound? A bear? GAH! Good god, now your heart is palpitating! What if you’re getting dehydrated?! We need water! WATER!” And so on.
And then there was Appreciation. “Look at that lake. Isn’t it beautiful?! The trees are beautiful. I am beautiful. LIFE is beautiful! Namaste.”
Appreciation had relatively few cameos in comparison to the other three, since I could only stand its nauseating self-righteousness for only so long. In fact, being Appreciative made me much more nervous than Panic or Hypochondria ever did.
It was amazing the rapidity with which the voices changed shifts. One moment Appreciation would be waxing on about the luster of the water, when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, that old bullying tenor of Cynicism would come sweeping in, telling me I was an idiot for gathering up stones for my ritual, I mean, look at me- shaved head, GI Joe hat, sincerely believing that a make believe ceremony would somehow improve my pathetic life.
I couldn’t help but agree with the critique; here I was on my vision quest, the defining experience of my transition into adulthood, and I spent half of my time calculating how much weight I was likely to lose, and the other half wondering when to take my next nap.
I had expected constant paranoia and hunger pains, not to mention unwanted visits from animals, earth-shaking thunderstorms, lucid and terrifying visions and dreams, and, on the other side of the spectrum, moments of absolute bliss and rapture, providing clarity as to my life’s purpose. Maybe I’d even learn to talk to trees!
But the thick white birch to which my hammock was tied kept silent, the sky stayed clear and monotonous, and so I ended up settling into the state of mind I seem to maintain in life no matter the situation. Annoyed, and slightly hungry.
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