a canyon runs through it

the wilderness pages of a younger self

What I know about the me who wrote the words I’m sharing below is that half our lifetime ago she wanted to be a writer. Declared it, attempted it, promised herself she’d be it, come hell or high water. She didn’t see the next set of or’s, less high water than she’d come to expect: jobs scrubbing bathroom floors and hauling wheelbarrows of humanure in the Pacific Northwest rain, the slowly swirling to-do cycle of so many eddies pulling her away; do any of us see muddy water in our future?

That me wanted to pick up the frayed, long-dangling thread of her being that she’d dropped when she thought she should grab something else.

She’d used her get out of jail free card to escape a box canyon disguised as a marriage: by then the thread was like something a cat had batted across the floor and under the bed, so she worked on unraveling it. Had a close call with a career she would have been good at, with a pile of law school debt as the reminder when she’d dropped out to help pay for a parent’s care; the thread pulled so tight those days it disappeared, and she believed she’d lost it.

She was still rowing the canyon, not realizing how quickly a chapter can end, or how to end it and keep the story flowing. What she knew was that when she wrote the light shifted from a broken mirror glare to a narrow clearness, like a cleft in a canyon wall funneling the light. Maybe she was thinking the writing would help her hold onto that. She had Powell’s famous lines taped inside her journal just in case. She believed every word, because it felt like her life. If that made her a drama queen, she applied he standard approach: game on.

We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls ride over the river, we know not.

Some of what is below sounds like us, but who am I to say? There’s something in letting our younger voice untie the knots. I didn’t edit her writing other than to make it fit each page, though hell yes, definitely, embarrassingly so, I wanted to. The formality I know is just her way of being thoughtful. That college boyfriend who told her you think too much had barely seen a snippet of just how much thinking. She’d been through some things. The kind of things that make us think. Was wise enough to know these things are life’s double-sided stickiness. She wrote all this as someone who is so much younger than we are now, and I’m grateful she did.

ps. I’d read this via a browser, old-school style, not by phone.

I’m on the left. My friend from Idaho on the right rode along on a canyon trip as my guest.