It was a balmy day in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The sky was cloudy, the wind from Lake Superior was howling, and the air was cold enough to make you shiver if you stayed still for too long. With a 30-odd pound backpack strapped to my back and waist, I stumbled over the edge of Log Slide, a sand dune 175 feet above the lakeshore. The ground was as good as quicksand. I was convinced that my feet would sink deeper and deeper into the pale sand, that I would be dragged down by its vertical surface and that I would never be able to climb out.
***
I decided to go backpacking over fall break with a group of five other students through the Michigan Backpacking Club. It seemed like a great idea at the time, but as the trip got closer it started to feel like a big mistake. I’m not an outdoors person. I was born and raised in Manhattan. Even though I’ve never lived in Ann Arbor, I feel more at home on the streets of Detroit than in the small town of Ann Arbor. The bugs were so loud that the thought of giving up my plumbing job for four full days scared me. “Anything goes,” I told my editor, complaining about my upcoming trip.
There were many valid reasons as to why I was nervous about going to the Upper Peninsula. The trip leader didn’t give us any information about the trip or what we needed to buy until the day before we left. That week he had two impending midterm exams. And according to his grandfather, there was a good chance I would die of hypothermia. But deep down, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to keep up, that I’d be “bad at backpacking” and thus slow down the group as a whole.
I decided the only way to ease that feeling was to plan, plan, and plan again. I bought a canary yellow, water-resistant notebook especially for this trip and wrote down my list of things to bring. One entry says “warm long sleeves.” “Flashlight?” is crossed out in favor of a headlamp. My grandfather, a well-known world traveler and backpacker, would take me to his REI to buy rain pants, dehydrated food, and various other items. Even though I had all the tools I needed, I still didn’t feel ready. We had no idea what the terrain would be like, whether it would rain, or whether we would have all the parts we needed for the tent. What happens if you leave your stake behind? What if someone breaks a leg in the middle of the backcountry? What if a bear eats our food? What if I get hypothermia and turn into an icicle and die on the shores of Lake Superior? The green Osprey backpack that my grandfather’s friend had donated to me sat on the closet floor, radiating all these questions but no answers.
At the beginning of the first day, I stared at the log slides in horror, intending to be completely humbled by the sheer stupidity of my choices. But the first day was surprisingly easy. We had to hike 15.4 miles to our campsite that night, mostly along a man-made wooden trail above a babbling stream, overlooking Lake Superior and Michigan’s famous fall foliage to our right. . Sure, Zack was heavy, and his shoulders and hips were sore by the end of the day, but the discomfort was tolerable and the change in slope was minimal. I had some trouble keeping up with the rest of the group as we sped up the last few miles to get to the campsite before sunset. He could do the one foot in front of the other exercise for over four hours and I was completely satisfied. After he runs for 15 minutes on the treadmill, he usually feels monotonous. I usually hate being alone with my thoughts or stuck in repetitive activities that I don’t enjoy, but this time the discomfort somehow melted away.
As I walked through miles of sand dunes, streams, and colorful forests, my mind became completely clear, free of worries and thoughts. I hummed “99 Beers on the Wall” a few times and then inevitably forgot about another stunning view of the Caribbean blue water imprinted on the sand, hundreds of feet below my hiking boots. None of the thoughts seemed to stay in my mind for long and it made me really anxious at first. Let’s think about the examI said to myself during one hike, and all I could think of was the idea of going in one ear and coming out the other. Are you feeling stressed? Why don’t you feel stressed? The goblin in my head roared at me as I was swept away under a torrent of golden leaves and crystal clear water. Nothing pierced the calm I was feeling for more than a few minutes. We walked in single file, almost in silence. The only grounding and reassurance I needed was the sound of footsteps following me and the thud of footsteps following me.
The second day not only calmed me down but also made me feel euphoric. We easily hiked 7.5 miles in about 2 hours, had a classic lunch of peanut butter tortillas sprinkled with trail mix, then set up camp and headed to the coast. Martin, one of the most experienced backpackers in our group, adjusted my rock jumping technique. After an hour of work, I lay down on the sand and fell into what can only be described as a trance, feeling happy to be able to stand up. I wasn’t completely asleep, but I wasn’t completely awake either. I could feel the sun breaking through the clouds and warming my knees, but it was only in the distance, as if the feeling had been translated several times before I could truly process it. Afterwards, we headed back to the lake and watched the sun set over the rim of Lake Superior, painting the sky a glossy pink color in the process. After gathering around a campfire and refueling through the night, we met up with another Michigan backpacking group and lay back and gazed at the stars. I have never seen so many stars in my life as I did that night.
Moreover, the stars were unlike any I had ever seen, even bigger and brighter than their twinkling representations in planetariums. The Milky Way shone above us, cutting a wide swath in the pitch-black sky. The night was so deep and dark and the stars shone so brightly that I felt like the sky was going to swallow me whole and suck me into its inky maw. With no light pollution, everything became clear. I realized how insignificant I was, and so was everything I had ever worried about.
***
During my first year of college, I decided to practice meditation more consistently. The main reason for that was that two of his friends, who were very important to me at the time, were very keen on meditation. I always avoided meditation. It didn’t come naturally to me. And I hated doing things I wasn’t good at. Moreover, I couldn’t find any way to improve it. When I focused on my breathing, I often found myself hyperventilating and thinking things I shouldn’t be thinking about. It seemed like a cycle of unfulfilling struggle without any of the emotional release that everyone always talked about. In fact, I never believed that meditative state actually existed. The lies my friends and family were telling me to feel like I had some control over my negative emotions seemed like lies. Still, several times a week, the three of us would hole up in our dorm rooms at Bardsley Hall and all meditate. When their minds went blank with worry, I imagined my happy place. It’s a nameless beach somewhere on the east coast with waves crashing onto the sand. Even if you can’t daze, you can at least pretend to be peaceful for a few minutes.
I’ve never been as obsessed as the two of them, but since I tried meditating, I can no longer separate the formation of my breath from the structure of ocean waves, the deep curves of oxygen flowing into my body. Before reforming to its apex, the diaphragm undergoes a constant ebb and flow, curling up, unrolling, and curling up again, forever. Inhale, exhale, and inhale again.
On the afternoon of the third day, after completing a 12.5-mile hike, I sat with my legs dangling where Chapel Falls meets the raging waves of Lake Superior. I watched as two bodies of water collided, receded, and collided again, creating ridges in the rock with all the handiwork of a master sculptor. As I listened to the sound of water, my thoughts and emotions seeped out and mixed with the waves in front of me. I was not involved in the process at all, just observing it calmly.
At this moment, I was shocked. This was the emotional release I had been looking for ever since I started trying meditation years ago, but to no avail. This is the state all my friends have been talking about finding, this place where nothing can touch you unless you let it, an unreachable, unshakable stillness. As I watched the waves crash against the waterfall’s spray, I couldn’t help but feel the bruises on my collarbone and the swollen hunger in my stomach. All I felt was the wind on my face and water in the air. All I could see was the waves. All I had to do was breathe. Smash, regroup, smash. Curl, unravel, curl again. Crest, break, crest. Inhale, exhale, and inhale forever.
It’s not that the hikes were always easy, but rather that the tranquility and blissful peace I found with them persisted even when the going got tough. Even if our route begins to get longer and more difficult. Even if the days are long and you wake up feeling sore. Even when I tripped over a tree root and sprawled, even when I went limp with blisters and slowed the group down to a crawl–what I feared the most–I knew I was there. I was overjoyed to be able to do it. In fact, when I started crying due to dehydration paranoia (as I had promised my editor and cameraman I would do at some point during the trip) it was from laughter. I tried it and couldn’t have been happier.
I don’t know what made this revelation possible. Whether it was physical exhaustion, lack of external communication, or what felt like the waves of Lake Superior rushing into every crevice of my soul. But I know that I have always felt a deep connection to water. My freshman year’s diary details how I felt at the time (free from my own sense of self), a feeling I attributed to not being able to go to the beach the previous summer. It was thought that there was. Every day, our group joked about taking a cold plunge, but if I hadn’t been informed about the risks of hypothermia beforehand, I might have just taken a dip. If it were me, I would have let the cold burn my breath from my lungs, taking the last vestiges of anxiety with it. If you believe in such things (which I don’t), then you are pseudobaptizing. Always rub your face with a handful of ice-cold water every time you leave your face.
As I unpacked and changed out of my sweaty gear at Miner’s Castle at the end of my final day’s hike, I felt nothing but comforting warmth and a sense of accomplishment. It was nothing but that gentle clarity that I had long suspected existed. I still don’t quite understand how I was able to find such peace while doing something I’m sure I’ll hate. But as I gazed out over the gray-green waves of Lake Superior, hundreds of feet above Miner’s Castle, I realized that I had made the right decision to go backpacking, no matter how far-fetched the idea may have sounded to begin with. I was sure.
Statement correspondent Lucy Del Deo can be reached at ldeldeo@umich.edu.
