The Wilderness Within
Once, a woman stopped me at a trailhead in the Wallowa mountains in eastern Oregon and begged me not to hike the short, easy trail. The grass was tall and the afternoon light brushed it honey and amber. The mountains rose blue and mysterious above the golden prairie. In the distance, I could just see the mirror of the lake reflecting the sky.
Her fear vibrated through me like a rattle. She didn’t give a reason, but I understood her perfectly: I was a woman, alone. In her mind, I had no business being by myself in the wilderness. I was not supposed to want to hear only the sound of my breath mixed with the sighing of the trees. If I forgot my fear for a moment and let myself wander away from the safety of other people, the protection of men, something bad would happen. And in many people’s minds, it would be my fault for not listening to fear, for not letting it rule me.
I nodded politely as I listened to her, but when she finally got back in her car and drove away, I started walking. The sky was a smooth blue bowl cracked at its edges by the jutting shoulders of mountain peaks. I could smell the sweet hay of the prairie and an occasional whiff of pine. The only sound was the rippling breeze and the cawing of a raven. Yet my heart hammered in my ears, and I kept expecting a half-crazed man to jump out of every bush. Fear had sucked any pleasure I might have gotten from the hike, and I was gripped in its clutches too tightly to tell which anxieties might be real and which were only imagined. The line felt blurry, and I didn’t want to take any chances. I turned around.
Back at my car, I sank into the hot, stale air with a mixture of relief and disappointment. I watched the sky turn peach, gold, and crimson through my bug-splotched windshield.
*
Hiking alone has always been a balance between fear and delight.
Delight: the heavy, cold humidity of the Cascade rainforests; that golden, late summer light over miles of dark, breathing wilderness. Douglas firs, hemlock, and western red cedar piled on top of each other, bark perfumed with moss and rainwater. Over the ten years that I lived in Oregon, my boots took thousands of steps on trails that were muddy, dusty, full of roots. Sometimes a rivulet of water from a wayward creek flowed across the trail and off down the mountain, finding its way back to itself.
Fear: the constant looming feeling that something bad could happen at any moment, whether it was a sprained ankle, a tumble down a cliff, dangerous men, wild animals, a broken-down car, or no cell service if I needed it.
I hiked by myself often, discovering new trails, new views, new limits to my bravery and my legs’ ability to carry me. I hiked alone in the Willamette National Forest, Mount Hood National Forest, the Wallowas, the Santiam, the Columbia River Gorge, the Gifford-Pinchot, and the Huckleberry Salmon Wilderness.
Sometimes I hiked alone because I worked multiple part-time jobs and couldn’t find friends who were free at the unconventional times when I was. More often, I hiked alone simply because I loved the feeling of it: I became quiet enough to notice the sun sifting down through the dense canopy and finding my face, birdsong not drowned by human speech, the wind on my skin, and the vast open space when I reached the summit, mountains and rivers and trees all humming with aliveness, and me—a part of it. On the trail by myself, something crumpled up inside me unfurled itself.
Perhaps the scariest thing about hiking alone were my own thoughts. I couldn’t always tell when my fear was a sign that something bad was about to happen, or when it was just the anxious scurrying of my mind. Often, others amplified my fear, reinforcing the message that it was unsafe for women to hike alone. My friend Jenn was one of the most adventurous people I knew; she loved the outdoors and went hiking, kayaking, mountain biking, whitewater rafting, and mountaineering with other people, yet told me with a shudder that she’d never hike alone.
Ever since I was a child, my intuition had been strong. It had protected me countless times: from car crashes, abusive men, and more mundane challenges. But there were many other times when I had ignored my intuition or its voice had been so quiet that I didn’t know how to listen. On the other hand, my fear was impossible to ignore: a ragged, insistent companion.
What was the difference between fear and intuition? How could I listen to myself with all the fears of other people crowding in around me? Was I truly safer in the wilderness when I was with others?
*
Several years after the incident in the Wallowas, my friend Sarah and I went camping on Labor Day weekend. We hadn’t thought far enough ahead to make reservations and everything was booked. Sarah said she knew a spot on Black Lake, ten miles up Mount Hood on a logging road full of jagged boulders, a road her old VW Jetta had no business navigating. I didn’t have a good feeling—my guts were pinched and I kept clenching my jaw and gnawing at the skin of my lower lip—but I let her talk me into it. After all, the cooler was loaded, our gear was packed, the afternoon sun was already dipping, and the last thing I wanted was to head back to Portland, defeated. I had done so many solo excursions that it was relieving to finally have another person beside me. It made me feel invincible, as if I no longer had to listen to the wearying voice of fear, constantly trying to discern whether it was intuition or just a passing thought.
We crawled up the mountain, the ten miles taking half an hour, each boulder an agonizing challenge, the car wheezing, our bodies tensing when metal screeched on rock. When we finally got to the pocket-sized lake, we saw half a dozen other cars crowding the small parking lot, including a souped-up, topless red jeep. Within minutes, we heard its owners, two scruffy men who floated on inner tubes in the middle of the lake with a full bottle of tequila between them, their voices bellowing and boomeranging off the rocks and trees.
Sarah and I stiffened, our gear half-unloaded, heavy backpacks in hand.
“I don’t know about this,” Sarah said quietly, eyeing the men. Now I was the one talking her into staying. My backpack was dragging on my arm, and I was frustrated, sweaty, and exhausted. We couldn’t have made it up that agonizing road for nothing, and the thought of doing it all over again made me queasy.
“If we go, it will be too late to find another place to camp,” I said with a sigh. “Why don’t we set up the tent and just see what happens? Maybe they’ll leave.”
Sarah hesitated but finally agreed. Black Lake was a small, undeveloped campground in the middle of nowhere, but at least we were surrounded by other people. How dangerous could it be?
The men leered at us from their inner tubes as we set up our tent, pointedly avoiding eye contact. They kept up their loud conversation until the bottle of tequila was empty. Just before sundown, they tossed it in the water, packed up their jeep, and peeled out of the parking lot. As they roared off, we heard a loud crunch. We hurried to the parking lot and saw they had smashed into Sarah’s car on their way out, leaving a dent and a dangling front bumper.
We were shaken. Some of the other campers gathered around making sympathetic noises, but there wasn’t anything they could do. It was then we noticed a column of smoke darkening the previously clear sky.
Summer in Oregon always meant forest fires, and with the grim acceleration of climate change, there were more each year. But the closest ones to us were many miles away and mostly contained. No new fires had been reported before we had left town earlier in the day. I didn’t have phone service, but Sarah found a tiny corner of the parking lot where she could call the forest fire information line. After listening to the recorded message for a few minutes, she told me that a new fire had started at Eagle Creek, about six miles west of us. There had been no other information or order to evacuate. No one else around us seemed worried, and the plume of smoke was thin. Once again, we decided to stay.
We cooked dinner on our camp stoves, then sat in the soft darkness drinking whiskey and talking. Finally, we went to bed and fell into an uneasy sleep.
I woke in the middle of the night. I gradually became aware that something was wrong, but what? I hadn’t put on the rain fly, but the inside of the tent was pitch black. Suddenly, I realized what it was: I could no longer see the stars that I had gazed at while falling asleep. Then I smelled smoke: thick and choking. I sat bolt upright, straining to see through the heavy darkness. The lake was only a few yards away, but I couldn’t make it out: only a cloud of smoke hovering in the trees.
I woke Sarah, and this time, we were both in agreement: we ran. We stumbled back and forth along the rooted path between the tent and car in the hazy darkness, our hearts pounding. A couple in their camper van woke up as we stuffed our gear into the trunk. We told them how bad the smoke was getting and said that they might want to leave as well. But they murmured a noncommittal response and retreated back into the van.
We drove the agonizing ten miles back down the mountain, unsure if the damaged car would make it or whether flames would block the road at any moment. Too scared to talk, we sang. Praying and chanting, we strung our terror into words or sometimes just humming. Sarah’s fingers were tight around the wheel, mine clasped in my lap, our eyes scanning the hazy forest for signs of flame.
After what felt like hours, we were back to the highway. I had never been so happy to see blacktop. As the sky lightened into dawn, it stayed gray, choked with smoke, the mountain covered in an angry black cloud.
On the outskirts of Portland, we found breakfast at an all-night diner. We finally had service and checked our phones, anxious to hear the news. The fire that had been just a trickle of smoke the previous evening had grown into a monster, already shutting down the freeway.
It had started at Eagle Creek, one of the most popular hikes in the area. Near the trailhead, a fifteen-year-old boy had thrown a firecracker into the forest. The resulting fire had trapped 153 hikers on the trail. The terrain made it impossible to evacuate them by helicopter, and they were forced to spend the night in the forest, huddling together for warmth, before rangers were able to rescue them the next morning. The fire would force evacuations from surrounding towns and leap the vast Columbia River and move into Washington. It would burn for three months, destroying 50,000 acres and closing many trails in the Columbia River Gorge for years.
We ended up safe that time, but barely. If only a few small details had been different, we could have been the ones huddled on a trail, the ones engulfed in flames, the ones watching our houses burn.
*
I learned the raw, terrifying power of the wilderness that night. But more than that, I learned that humans promise false safety, when they are often the most dangerous things in the wild. I saw with cold clarity how the presence of others could make me doubt myself, clouding my intuition like smoke.
Fear and intuition are not the same thing, yet they both have wisdom. Fear is not always accurate; it can say more about our own minds and the culture we live in rather than providing an accurate barometer for how much danger we are truly in. We must respect our fear, be curious about it, do what we can to soothe and befriend it. Yet if we listen to what our fear says without question, we’ll miss the stillness of an old-growth forest, the rush of wind through the tops of cedars, the feeling of getting to the summit and sitting perfectly still on the sun-warmed rocks, our legs trembling as we look across the distant, snow-capped peaks. We’ll miss our life.
Intuition is different. It feels like a clear, present knowing. Like a soft, steady voice in my ear. One moment I’m going about my day and the next, I know something that I didn’t before, as simply as I know the feeling of the earth beneath my feet. Intuition is softer than fear and easily missed. It can be drowned out by so many things. It takes practice and dedication to hear it. To believe it.
After the fire, I began to see my intuition like the wilderness itself: quiet yet powerful; dangerous when disrespected. A voice that always lives within me.
After the fire, the message was clear: I must listen, listen, listen when it speaks.
Contributor
Rebecca Jamieson
Rebecca Jamieson's writing has appeared in Entropy, The Offing, Hunger Mountain, Rattle, and elsewhere. Her chapbook of poetry The Body of All Things was published by Finishing Line Press in 2017. Rebecca holds an MFA in Writing & Publishing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives on traditional Ho-Chunk land in Madison, WI, where she teaches creative writing classes grounded in mindfulness through her business Contemplate Create.