It all started with so much promise. I had the summer off with no work and nothing but time. I found myself back on Mount Rainier for the first time since I’d slipped and almost fallen on that second summit attempt in 2000. It spooked me so bad I never went back. But here I was on the same trail headed back to Steamboat Prow. Somewhere I had the essay I’d written and those microcassette recordings. I could rewrite the story of my first summit 25 years ago! But instead I spent most of the summer training for a backpacking trip on the PCT, listening to Neil Young, watering the yard.

Writing about my time on Rainier wasn’t as easy as I thought. The story flittered around and didn’t excite me; my voice lacked the punch it once had and I worried I sounded old. And the microcassette player would not play.

I turned down an opportunity to ghostwrite blogs for Microsoft because they wanted someone to start the next week and I had plans to backpack with our oldest daughter, Lily. I’d been wanting to do that trip with her for two years since she’d left home for boarding school. I’d dreamt of taking her to that spot on the Washington coast and now I had the chance. It was like making up for lost time.

I also had plans to do a section of the PCT with Brad, and to see my mom in Germany at the end of August. I hated passing up work because as a contractor you never know when your next gig will come. But I did know life is short, and spending time with friends and family would only get harder. The work would always be there.

I sat in our yard identifying bird calls with my app and watched the bees flit about the lavender. All the grass had turned gold and the lupine were flopped over on their sides. Eberhard texted, the Austrian Alps climb we used to do in August at Montafon was canceled, there’s no Gebirgsmarsch, he wrote. I met a Swiss guy on the PCT at the Oregon border and asked if he knew about that climb and showed him a photo of it on my lock screen. There’s a place high on the trail that marks the Swiss-Austrian border; they have the names of the countries painted on the rocks, just an “O” and an “S.” Lily crouched and peed there the first time we hiked it, when she was 10.

I’d fallen out of writing and decided it was okay but of course it wasn’t. I’d stopped using my phone to draft posts, thinking the laptop was better, but sitting at my desk felt too much like work and required discipline. Besides, since I started posting on LinkedIn I learned I could get a lot more views there. I had to decide which mattered more: reaching a wider audience, or writing what I wanted to write.

When I started this blog it seemed like I could do anything and that kept me going for years. I hoped I’d be discovered if I just kept producing content. If nothing came of it, there’d at least be a record of my life for my kids and anyone who cared. And I could be remembered the way I wanted, as a writer. But it wasn’t the same thing, and after 15 years of blogging I’d finally accepted that. I’d fallen out of love with the sound of my own voice and knew for a writer, that’s a problem.

So I went back to my love of the outdoors. The look of the river in the mountains in the early morning when the sky is pink and it makes the water look the same. The sound of the river, that gives a sense of everlasting. The soothing sound of that as I walked up the trail surrounded by quiet, soft-spoken life. The forest teeming with it, and me just another presence.

It’s a somber affair cutting down the daisies at the end of the summer. They line our driveway and I stake them up with twine so they don’t flop over. I thought long and hard about my time hiking and writing and decided I would focus more on discovering myself than waiting to be discovered. There was enough material to last me the rest of my life. And if it rang true it could help someone else find a part of themselves too.

Categories: Memoir, writing

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, pacific northwest