What happens when a sheltered, middle-class, mildly neurotic 33-year-old embarks on her first backpacking trip?

When my friend Stuart invited me to go on a seven-day backpacking trip in the Sierra Nevada, my first instinct was to politely decline. I am, after all, what could be called a Protestant Princess. I used to require a nap after a trip to the grocery store. I once made my father drive six miles to flush a terminally ill goldfish because I couldn’t bear to touch it…even with a net. “Adventure” to me meant trying to make it to work and back on less than a quarter tank of gas. So, even though I knew better, I agreed to accompany Stuart and his friend Richard, and before I knew it I found myself shopping in stores with tents pitched in the middle of them, patronized by people who could distinguish Gortex from polypro.

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The media’s late-December offerings are bulging with how-to messages for 2011: How to have a better body, be a better person, live a better life. How to…be better. The assumption, I suppose, is that our 2010s have been frittered away in some nonstop competition to see how much we can eat, how little we can exercise, and how successfully we can ignore nonprofits by withholding our charitable contributions. In 2011, we’ll be better!

You can take all that advice if you like, but I have just four words to offer you which, depending upon on how you live your life in the present, may potentially change your life in the future. It starts with a story….

In 1986, I went on my first-ever backpacking trip, tagging along with a 27-year-old self-described Renaissance man and his best buddy. My comic adventures are set out in “The First 43 Miles are the Hardest,” which I sold to Sierra Life magazine and was published in their May/June 1987 issue. But there was a darker side to that trip which, until this moment, has never been revealed. (How’s that for a tease?)

At the time of the trip I was freshly hurting from the end of my 10-year marriage. I’d met “Stuart,” the backpacker, in a theatre production. I had a mad crush on him and when he nonchalantly asked if I wanted to accompany he and his friend “Richard,” I couldn’t decide whether to go until my girlfriend told me over the phone, “Are you nuts? The man of your dreams just asked you to be alone in the mountains with him for a whole week! You HAVE to go!” And so I went.

From the outset, things did not go well. I allowed Stuart to drive my little Capri up to the Copper Creek trailhead which was the access point to our Kings Canyon destination; Richard met us there. As set out in my story (subtitled, “What happens when a sheltered, middle-class, mildly neurotic 33-year-old embarks on her first backpacking trip”), there were bears, there was a forest fire and, on the last day, there was a terrifying 10-mile run down the mountain to escape the fire, resulting in patellar tendonitis in both my knees.

But more than that, there was me, having absolutely no control over my own life. Stuart and Richard had been hiking together for years. They had their own routines and preferences and whatever they said, went. Example: We hiked 5 to 7 miles daily and I, a high-energy person in the mornings, would have preferred to start those hikes right after breakfast so that we could stop and make camp by mid-afternoon. Instead, the two of them chose to hang around camp until almost noon, starting our daily hike so late in the day that more often than not we were making our dinner and pitching the tent in total blackness. Frequently while hiking they would decide to stop, shed all their clothes, and go swimming in an alpine lake. Lovely as that sounds, I hadn’t known them that long and wasn’t about to get nekkid with them, so all I could do was hope they’d hurry so we could get to our camping spot before midnight.

And then there came the day when Stuart told me he and Richard wanted to take a day hike that would of necessity exclude me because it was beyond my novice hiking ability. Did I mind staying by myself all day while they took off? Clearly, they were in charge of the expedition and I was subject to their every whim. I followed, I sat, I obeyed, I waited, I tagged along. For seven. long. days.

The last day of the trip, during that seemingly endless 10-mile run to the Copper Creek trailhead parking lot, all I could think about was my Capri. My car, my beautiful little maroon Capri with the tiny orange pinstriping, was waiting. And, crazy as it sounds, it became symbolic to me of my freedom. Because once I got behind the wheel, then I was in charge of my own expedition from that moment forward. I absolutely could not wait.

We arrived in the lot late afternoon, stashed our gear, and said our good-byes to Richard, who was going to follow us down the mountain in his little truck. By now there was a good deal of tension between Stuart and me. I didn’t even wait for a discussion as to which of us was going to drive home. I opened the passenger door for him, got in my Capri, and we took off. I was stopping for nothing and no one. It was my car. My life. My expedition. About halfway down the mountain, Stuart was looking at the view in the east and asked if I wanted to stop and take some photos. “No.” He looked at me curiously, because it wasn’t like me to be so brusque.

“No,” I repeated. “I’m going home.” I gripped the wheel more tightly, staring straight ahead, thinking You’re along for MY ride now, buddy.

And that is how I came to this moment, and my four words of advice. They mean, as much as possible in 2011, take control of your destiny. Don’t allow others to lead you down any path you don’t want to be on. Make your own journey and take charge of your own expedition in whatever way that may be meaningful to you. The four words are: Drive your own car. And don’t let anyone stop you until you’re home.

I have opinions. Probably this became apparent when I created a blog. But sometimes, for whatever reason, I’m not able to adequately express my opinions. Perhaps it is a topic about which I feel too passionate, or about which I’m not well-informed. All I know is that sometimes, all I can do is the written equivalent of sputtering.

That’s when other writers come in handy. Part of the great fun of being a reader is that, very often, you will encounter the perfect turn of phrase which tidily, eloquently and impressively sums up precisely how you feel on a topic. What usually happens is that the writers who are able to elicit from us that “Oh-my-god-that’s-exactly-how-I-feel!” reaction are the writers who become our favorites. I’ve found that Jon Carroll and Leonard Pitts, Jr. often access that place in me. Others have been Adair Lara, Ellen Goodman, and the late, great Molly Ivins.

Back in the 80s, before cutting-pasting and social networking made sharing so easy, I used to clip out this-is-how-I-feel columns and tuck them away into a manila folder marked “Good Stuff.” I think my fantasy was that someday I’d be in an argument with someone better equipped to verbally spar than I, and I’d whip out, say, a tart Miss Manners response and read it as my comeback. Take that!, I’d fantasize. Of course, it never happened, but good writers make me want to do that — borrow (but never plagiarize) their words in order to impress, inspire awe, or even to win a particular argument.

Which is why I got so excited this morning while reading Nancy Franklin’s November 15, 2010 New Yorker review of Sarah Palin’s upcoming TLC show. I have strong feelings about Palin which I’ve never been able to put into just the right words. Therefore, I’m seriously considering clipping the following excerpt and keeping it in my wallet. Ms. Franklin writes:

“When it comes to Palin specifically, there is the fundamental problem that some of us don’t want to see or hear any more of her than we have to. And there are those whose objections have a physiological basis as well as an ideological one: the pitch and timbre of her voice, the rhythms of her speech, her syntax, and the way she coats acid and incoherence with cheery musical inflections join together in a sickening synergy that distresses the listener, triggering a fight-or-flight reaction. When Palin talks, my whole being wails, like Nancy Kerrigan after Tonya Harding’s ex-husband kneecapped her: ‘Why? Why? Why?‘”

If anyone ever wants to know how Sarah Palin affects me, I will whip out Nancy Franklin’s words and reply, “What she said.” Franklin is my new mouthpiece.

Thank God and grace for giving us those whose ideas, words and interpretations make us nod, smile, and cut-and-paste. I realize my tastes lean left; others may become enthused by David Brooks and that’s okay, too. But if you’ve ever put something on Facebook with the Status Update, “This is a must read!” then you know how I feel. We owe it all to our writers, those wordsmiths who take our opinions, polish them, remove the rough edges and extraneous punctuation, and hold them up for the rest of the world to appreciate — or dispute. It’s sharing — and America — at its best.

Recently on a hot summer afternoon I padded around barefoot in the backyard doing my chores, reveling in the warm pavement/cool grass contrast, and letting the hose water dribble on my toes when I filled Geronimo’s drinking dish. Later that night I was in the bathroom standing on one foot and then the other, using soap and a washcloth to render my feet sheet-worthy, and suddenly I was nine years old again, sitting in a tent at Hat Creek, taking my evening bath.

From the time I was very young, my parents took my brother and sister and me camping at Hat Creek, situated near Mt. Lassen. That was before Interstate 5 up to Redding was built, so traveling meant a long, hot dusty ride up Highway 99, the smell of alfalfa blowing in through the opened windows (out which, occasionally, my sister’s and my feet were sticking — this was before seat belts). The names of the towns charmed me, even as a child — Corning (Olive Town!), Richfield, Maxwell, Arbuckle — as did my parents’ vacation rituals, such as my Mom’s warning that “It’s going to be hot going up through that Valley!” and my Dad’s vacation morning, “Let’s get this show on the road!”

My Dad was responsible for fishing-related duties and packing the car, my Mom was responsible for cooking, cleaning up, and taking care of the three kids, which included our nightly “sponge baths” in the tent, usually by flashlight — the lantern turned off to maintain our modesty lest our silhouettes be broadcast against the canvas. It always felt so good to climb into my sleeping bag at night after a hard day’s play, the sweet smell of Ivory soap filling my flannel cocoon as I drifted off to sleep in my sleeping bag, the grown-ups’ voices outside at the camping table lulling me to dreamland.

But the memory which flashed back to me as I stood in my bathroom washing my feet was the concept of “traveling clothes.” My mother took pristine care of her kids, even while camping, making two hot meals a day on her Coleman stove (lunches were sandwiches and cream soda) and, as mentioned, seeing to our ongoing hygiene. And one of her cleanliness rituals was making sure that, tucked at the very bottom of the suitcase, was a fresh set of traveling clothes for her children.

The traveling clothes were the shorts and shirts we weren’t allowed to wear for all the weeks of camping, because on the last morning, after our final wash-up, on would go the clean socks and fresh shorts outfits, usually smelling of cool canvas from being at the bottom of the stack. And getting into these outfits would be the last thing we did before clambering into the Mercury to make the long sad trip from the mountains down to the flat, treeless East Bay. I guess my Mom’s thinking was that when we stopped at gas stations or rest stops (I don’t recall ever eating at restaurants), her children were going to be scrubbed and well-dressed. When I think about the effort she put in to making that happen, my heart does something funny inside my chest.

I loved childhood camping with my parents more than any other thing. So, many decades later, I was shocked to overhear my mother say that she never enjoyed those trips — too much work. Well, yeah! Of course, why didn’t I think of that? We were all playing and “vacating” while Mom was doing the same work she did back home, except without hot and cold running water, bathtubs, refrigeration or a washing machine. But not once, not ever, did I hear her complain about it at the time.

I don’t know if our everlasting gratitude could ever make it up to her. It sounds a lot more romantic to say, “My Dad taught me how to catch and clean a trout” than it does to say, “My Mom taught me how to give myself a sponge bath in a pitch dark tent in the middle of the wilderness.” But to me, the latter is no less a skill.

These are some of the things I think about, when I’m in the bathroom, washing my feet.

I’m worried for us. This morning I was thinking about the many distractions which surround us on a moment-to-moment basis — no longer does television alone vie for our time and attention, we have available to us a variety of screens and gadgets. You know them; I need not name them.

And I began to wonder how many inventions and discoveries have been made across the ages by people who were…merely sitting. Thinking, pondering, reflecting. Have you heard of the German chemist Friedrich von Stradonitz? Apparently he was daydreaming about a snake forming a circle, and that led to “his solution of the closed chemical structure of cyclic compounds, such as benzene.” This story, by the way, hails from a Wikipedia entry on the concept of serendipity.

Another well-known story is that of Archimedes getting into his bathtub and noticing that the water level rose; by contemplating this he suddenly understood that “the volume of water displaced must be equal to the volume of the part of his body he had submerged. This meant that the volume of irregular objects could be calculated with precision, a previously intractable problem” [Wikipedia]. I don’t know how many of these stories are apocryphal but the question is still valid: Are we not doing enough sitting, thinking, staring, daydreaming? What do we know today because someone was perched on a hillside, looking up at the stars, noticing?

I’m no technophobe; I’m not suggesting a bonfire of iPhones — I just think it would behoove us to set aside a bit more porch-sitting, navel-contemplating time. Otherwise, I worry that our attention spans will narrow so perilously that we will become a culture without great thinkers, inventors, composers. And perhaps I’m worried for nothing; it could be that because these communications devices are relatively new and novel, we are like a child on Christmas Day, wild-eyed and grabbing for our toys and unwilling to put them down even to eat Aunt Edna’s turkey frittata brunch. Perhaps eventually we’ll get bored, discard our devices, and wander outside again, looking up and around us. There’s so much yet to discover — if only about ourselves. The inspiring poet Mary Oliver understood the importance of connecting to soul through the universe, and I’ll close with her perfect commentary, entitled “Sleeping in the Forest.” It makes me think that, when we are ready to put down our gadgets and walk outside, we will be welcomed back. At least, that is my great hope.

“I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects,
and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water,
grappling with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.”