On the other end of the line my mother’s phone was ringing, but the familiar tones sounded distant, thin and faded. When she picked up and said “Hello?” her voice could have been coming through a child’s tin-can telephone. I held the satellite phone tight against my ear and tried to stand as still as possible, double-checked that the antenna was pointed skyward, to the circling celestial bodies that made it function.

Our conversation was brief, and stilted by a long delay on the line. “Are you having fun?” she said even as I said “I’m having fun,” and we both paused, and then broke the silence right on top of each other again. “Is everything okay?” “Yeah, I’m having a good time.”

“Really?” Even through the tin-can effect I could hear her surprise. I told her in delayed bursts that the terrain was beautiful, the people were great, the food was good and the sun was shining.

“You’re really enjoying it? You haven’t been upset, or angry, or scared?”

I paused. How many days had it been since I’d spent my lunch break sitting frozen with my bear spray unholstered in my lap, safety catch off, listening to a loud rustling in the buck brush a few dozen feet away? And how long since I’d flopped down in a tangle of evergreens, tilted my head back and screamed my throat raw, letting my exhaustion and frustration bounce off the mountainsides and down the creek drainage I was working, knowing there was no one close enough to hear?

“Yes,” I finally said, answering her first question. “And yes. Yes, yes.”

*

For a long time, “outdoorsy” was an abstract that I aspired to, the way that some people want to be “fashionable” or “witty.” It was about how I wanted other people to see me as much as it was about anything I actually wanted to do; it was also about how I wanted to see myself.

I was like someone who claimed – telling others, telling herself – that she wanted to become a chef, having hardly set foot in a kitchen. As a kid I read books about wilderness and adventure, shipwrecks and survival – Jack London, Huck Finn, Robinson Crusoe – in the urban confines of our third-floor apartment, and I climbed in the house-high snow banks that the ploughs pushed up on the edge of the football stadium parking lot, pretending that they were mountains. But the real thing was a mystery to me.

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