(Let's be fair, this was a 5 AM flight. But it pretty much sums up my adventure face.)
I just finished Wild by Cheryl Strayed this morning, and for the first travel memoir I've read she set the bar high. Her writing is incredibly descriptive and beautiful, but it's really her experiences on the Pacific Crest Trail that make Wild the incredible story that it is. Strayed makes me want to hike through the heat and the snow along the PCT, to look into the depths of a lake so deep it only reflects the sky and leave the pain of past experiences in the dusty, weather -beaten trail.
Except, not really.
I've been trying to improve in the last couple years but I'm not even close to being an outdoorsy person. The closest I came to camping was sleeping on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro at WYD13. Falling asleep wasn't bad, actually. Waking up was hell. My yoga pants were damp from the humidity, the sand was wedged hard around my body and was everywhere - in my clothes, in my hair...ugh. Plus, I wasn't alone. Half of my group of thirty-six or so had opted to sleep on the beach (the smart ones stayed in our hotel), and then were an additional thousand or so around us. I felt like a refugee. A very sandy refugee (it took me months to get all the sand out).
I could never walk the PCT. Even if I factored out the extreme temperatures, occasional creepers and countless rattlesnakes.
I'm better at being a mental traveler: i.e. imagining scenarios and creating stories. I guess that's every writer, but the first to come to mind is Karen Blixen, author of Out of Africa. She could come up with incredible stories from a single sentence, and she was even more of an extreme indoor person than I am. When she moved from Denmark to Kenya she brought an entire trunk of china and crystal place wares. I don't even own that kind of stuff.
But living in Africa changed Karen's lifestyle and made her more of an adventurer than a mental traveler. She took over her husband's coffee farm when he left her. She went on safari and was nearly attacked by a lioness. She flew in a biplane with her lover after he had learned to fly the day before and was able to ensure that her workers would be cared for after the farm burned to the ground. Although she had to leave Africa following the fire, she wasn't the same woman who arrived in Kenya with trunks of crystal. She was an adventurer.
Like pre-Kenya Karen, I'm afraid of getting out of my comfort zone. I could never go on the trail alone or face vicious wildlife. I'm scared of going even a couple hours away from my family, my boyfriend or my closest girlfriends. I can dream up all the extreme scenarios in the world, but when it actually comes to taking that first step I pull back.
So I'm asking you, my readers, to give me the courage to get out of my comfort zone and become an adventurer. Share in the comments what inspired you to take that leap into the unknown, or give me a challenge (within reason; I'm paying off student loans here...). Thanks :)
"Not all those who wander are lost." J. R. R. Tolkien
Cheers,
Victoria
No comments:
Post a Comment