Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

writing

Stuck in a shallow creek

A few years ago, I decided to start saying “yes” to more things that used to make me afraid. Not like scary Halloween kinds of things but things that other people seem to enjoy that my anxious self could only envision turning into disaster. Living with anxiety makes even potential fun seem dangerous and I lived that way for a long time. Anxiety medication has helped me get over the hesitation of saying “yes,” which means I say “yes” more often now to things I might not have considered saying “yes” to before. 

But that doesn’t mean everything turns out perfectly or that I still don’t have some moments where I regret the “yes.”

My most recent “yes” that challenged me happened on a beautiful creek in the mountains of Pennsylvania on a typical fall day–a little sunshine, a little rain, a little chilly temps, leaves turning just a bit. I was away from home for the weekend with a group of friends from book club, our first such getaway since I’ve been part of the group, a chance to get to know each other better and connect with nature and just take care of ourselves for a time. (We love our families and we’re exhausted. Maybe you can relate.)

We arrived at the cabin (think modern conveniences, not rustic camping) in the dark so it wasn’t until the next morning that the full scope of our surroundings was evident. I looked out the window and almost gasped. (I say “almost” because others in the house were still asleep.) I made a cup of coffee, slid on my flip-flops, walked the short distance from the house to the creek’s edge and marveled. 

I feel peace just looking at the photo

How could such beauty not only exist but be so accessible? I dream of places where I can walk out on a balcony or porch and be faced with natural elements like water and woods. This was breathtaking.

I had already told my companions that I was not much for water sports and there was talk of kayaking the creek, if it was high enough. After wandering out to the banks of the creek, I decided I wanted to get to know that creek better. I had never kayaked before, so it was a chance to say “yes” to something new and experience nature more closely. This is why I love hiking because I feel more of a connection to nature when I’m walking through it and on it rather than viewing from afar. Kayaking, I thought, would be a similar experience.

We divided ourselves into two groups–there were five of us and three kayaks–and I was one of the first three to go. Among the group of three that I went with, one was an experienced kayaker, the other had not done it in a long time, and I was the newbie. Kayaking always looked fun and peaceful when I saw people’s pictures on socials, so that was my expectation going into it.

Expectations are unreliable sometimes.

We hauled the kayaks from the barn to the bank and I not-so-gracefully stepped in to the vessel and situated myself. 

Photo credit: Yaya Lee

I hadn’t gone far when I got stuck on the rocks. The creek was low but we thought it would be higher closer to the mountain side of the creek on the other side. After a solid push, I was on the water.

Photo credit: Yaya Lee

The feeling of being in the middle of the creek with a mountain on one side was soul-fulfilling and wondrous. We saw a heron right away and as we glided by, I was in awe of how close we got to it without scaring it. The creek carried us downstream and I enjoyed the pace of the journey.

The bottom of my kayak kept scraping the rocks and I worried I would get stuck. We hadn’t been on the creek long when we approached a spot I want to call “rapids” but that seems dramatic. The water flowed over and around some large rocks making for some tricky maneuvering I wasn’t prepared for. I worried about tipping the kayak and falling in the creek. Even though it was shallow, I don’t like to be wet without intention (like in a shower or a pool). I made it through the first area like this and breathed deeply, suspecting that maybe I was not on the sort of peaceful journey I was expecting.

As we went along, we saw two bald eagles soaring above us, landing in the trees nearby.

There’s an eagle in that tree to the right.

The sun peeked through the trees and I was reminded again of the beauty and peace this place had to offer.

This might be the most beautiful picture I have ever taken

And then I got stuck.

The kayak scraped the bottom and I ran up against a large rock and I could not get free. My two companions were farther up the creek, and I didn’t want to disturb the peace, so I didn’t call out for them. I wasn’t worried about getting lost or not finding them at the end of the journey. I knew the creek would lead me to them. 

But I did panic about being stuck. I wiggled and jiggled myself in the kayak trying to shimmy it loose. I poked my oar in the creek and tried to leverage it to push myself out. I exerted great effort. I cursed the creek I had just admired in wonder. I could have gotten out and pushed but I worried about slipping on the rocks and hurting myself. The negative soundtrack in my head started to play: you’re not strong enough for this. You’re not fit for kayaking. Maybe if you weighed less you wouldn’t have gotten stuck. Why would you ever try something new? Didn’t you know it would turn out like this?

My friend, the experienced kayaker, stopped up ahead when she saw I was behind. I thought I was ruining the trip for my companions. 

Finally, I got free, but instead of enjoying myself, I was now angry.

“Are you okay?” my friend asked when I caught up to her.

Through tears (I was now crying) I said, “No, but I will be.”

—

As long as I can remember, I have been drawn to water. I don’t know what this says about me, if it’s a product of growing up in a place with a river literally running through the middle of the town or if it’s got anything to do with personality or astrology, I just know that if there is water, I want to be near it. Lake, ocean, creek, pond, river … I’m not particular. Water does something for my soul.

When it comes to being in the water, I am much more hesitant. I am not a strong swimmer. I fear drowning. Water is a force that could easily overwhelm me and I like to be in control. I love being on the water as long as someone else is driving the boat. When we’re on vacation, we try to take a ferry or some other kind of boat ride every year as an unofficial “requirement” of the trip. Some day, I think I’d like to take some kind of cruise to experience the vastness of the water. I don’t think I need all the cruise ship entertainment, just the ocean and its endlessness. Maybe an ancestor of mine was a sailor.

Being on the water with someone else powering the vessel is relaxing for me. I can literally sit back and take in the beauty all around me. 

This is what I thought kayaking would be.

Instead, it was a lot of work.

—

Why was I crying?

I don’t think tears are good or bad in and of themselves, but I do think they can be indicators. Something rose to the surface in me while I was struggling to get the kayak unstuck. What was it?

The answer was clear and completely uncomfortable: I resist taking charge of my own life.

I relish being a passive observer. At least, I think I do. That sounds easy and if something goes wrong, then it’s not my problem to fix, especially if someone else is at the helm. I’m perfectly content to let life happen to me and all around me.

Because being an active participant in your life takes work. And sometimes it’s hard. And sometimes you get stuck. And sometimes it’s frustrating to try to get yourself unstuck. And sometimes I want someone else to step in and come to the rescue and fix whatever is broken with a snap of their fingers.

But that’s not how life works. At least, not in my experience.

And that’s not really what I want. When I turned 40 I made a list, not of things to do before I die but just of intentions and experiences and things I want to do. Period. I don’t want a literal deadline on these things because I want to experience life for the pleasure of now not for the fear of the future.

When I made that list, it was so that I wouldn’t have any excuses or regrets for living the kind of life I wanted. So, when did I drift back into the passive observer mode?

This is what surfaced while I was stuck in the shallow water of the creek: I was on my own to get unstuck. There was no one to rescue me. Not my friends who were farther down the creek. Not my husband, who was more than three hours away. Not any member of my family. Not even a stranger or another kayaker. It was just me and the creek and my stuck kayak.

And I was terrified that I didn’t have the skills or the strength to get myself out of this situation. I was faced with the fear of my own inadequacy. And I realized that most of the time, I only try things that I think I’ll be good at or that won’t prove overly challenging because then I can’t fail. It’s really easy to look like you’re mastering life when you don’t take on any kind of challenge. When you always choose the path of least resistance. When the easy road becomes the comfortable road.

I stopped running when it got more difficult.

I don’t work on my novels because writing is hard and the payoff is unseen, at best, unknown, at worst.

I quit trying to learn sign language because it’s frustrating to learn a new language. (Of course it is.)

I don’t even want to try to buy a house because the process is terrifying and change is complicated, even when it’s good.

I choose the easier things because they are easy. I’m not saying I want my life to be hard, but sometimes it has to be challenging to get to the next spot on the journey. Am I wrong about that?

—

After I freed myself from the first shallow point and let my tears out, I tried to focus on the beauty of the scenery. But then I got stuck again and I wanted to give up. I was real close to throwing my paddle in the creek, which would not have helped my situation at all. Later, I realized that I might have been trying too hard to get myself unstuck. That maybe the flow of the creek could have helped me if I could have just relaxed and trusted the flow around me. Instead I wore myself out with my struggling, and I ruined my enjoyment of the trip. By the time we reached the spot where we had parked the truck, two miles downstream from where we started, I was not sure I ever wanted to kayak again.

I can see the difference in my posture in this picture. I am NOT having a good time.
Photo credit: Yaya Lee

I was proud of myself for trying because I would have been disappointed if I hadn’t tried at all, but I didn’t think I’d had a good time. I didn’t want my experience to ruin it for the next group, so I tried to be vague about it when we got back.

The first wave crew. I’m smiling.

“How was it?” one friend asked.

“I’m glad I tried it,” I said, but my frustration must have been written on my face because she immediately picked up on my lack of a good time.

After a cup of tea, a snack and a shower, my perspective changed. I thought about all these feelings that kayaking had stirred up. I think I got a year’s worth of therapy out of a trip down the creek. Later, I talked with others who were more experienced kayakers and they encouraged me to try again in deeper water, or even on a lake.

I don’t think my kayaking days are over.

And I’m still thinking about how I need to challenge myself more in healthy ways in order to grow.

Unrelated to kayaking, one thing that happened as a result of this trip is that I printed out three of my fiction works-in-progress and am gradually letting people read them and give feedback on the stories. One friend read a good chunk of one story during the weekend and her comments have encouraged me to keep going. Other friends are enthusiastic about my writing at a time when I am having trouble being enthusiastic about it myself.

Three very different manuscripts in very different states of progress

In order for something good to happen with my writing, I’m going to have to take action. Me. Not anyone else. And that’s scary. Like so many things that require my active participation, I might ache afterward and be tired and grumpy, but will it have been worth it?

I’m still hoping to answer that question with a “yes.”

What we can imagine

The kitchen grew steamy as I chopped four pounds of tomatoes we’d picked from our garden over the weekend. I had only a few days left before going back to work for the school year, and there are only so many tomatoes you can eat in a day. I’d already made fresh salsa and sliced up a few to accompany meals. So, it was time to can a few jars–to “put them up” for the winter as they say around here. (Do they say that other places?)

It took hours by the time I washed and diced the tomatoes, filled the canning jars, located the canning supplies and processed them. Those four-ish pounds of tomatoes only made four pint jars and a part of me wondered why I go to all the effort. We planted the seeds months ago. We watered and weeded and tended the garden all that time. And here now I was spending more time creating something that I could easily drive to the store and buy. It’s not even about saving money when you count the cost of the plants and the time spent.

Why? Why do I go to all the effort to can four jars of tomatoes to use this winter?

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

—

A day earlier Phil and I went to the store. It was a quick trip after dinner and back-to-school night at the elementary school. We needed milk for breakfast the next morning, which always leads to more purchases in the dairy aisle. This seems to be the reason we go to the store most often, to replenish things like milk, cheese and yogurt.

Only self-checkout lanes were open when we had finished our list. This is usually fine with me. I prefer the self-checkout most of the time, but I found it odd that there was no cashier working at all. Granted, it was late in the day and there are staffing shortages everywhere, but it almost felt eerie.

“This is how the robots take over,” I said to Phil as we crossed the parking lot. I was joking. I think. There’s a fine line sometimes between dark humor and cynicism and I don’t always know the difference.

As we watched baseball that night after the kids went to bed, a commercial came on for a rowing machine that offers picturesque backgrounds and encouraging coaches, the rowers’ answer to Peloton, I suppose.

“We’re never going outside again, are we?” I remarked. By “we” I meant “humanity.”

Now, let me be clear that I don’t find fault with anyone who buys and uses such a machine. I’m all for health and fitness however you can manage it. I use empty juice and milk jugs filled with water as my dumbbells because I hate the idea of going to a gym to work out and there was no weightlifting equipment available for purchase that was in my budget during the pandemic . When my kids were little and sometimes even now in the dead of winter or on a rainy day, I think I would give almost anything to have a treadmill or other kind of exercise equipment in our house. That we have neither the money nor the room for such a machine is only one obstacle. Personally, I prefer the outdoors, even when it’s cold and rainy.

Maybe humanity isn’t on the brink of collapse because of self-checkouts and virtual rowing machines, but in the midst of a pandemic (yes, we’re still in the midst of it), it’s not hard to imagine a world like this–where machines provide our connection to humans or replace them all together.

I don’t want to live in that world.

—

Photo by Iñaki del Olmo on Unsplash

I recently read Glennon Doyle’s latest book, Untamed, and there’s a lot I could say about it, but one of the chapters that stuck with me had to do with imagination. She says that when we look at the visible order of things happening around us–violence, injustice, that sort of thing–and believe there is a different way, that’s faith. “This is not how things are meant to be,” she writes. “We know that there is a better, truer, wilder way. … Perhaps imagination is not where we go to escape reality but where we go to remember it.”

I’m stuck on this idea that when we picture the world in a truer, more beautiful way we aren’t just daydreaming, we’re remembering.

She continues: “Let’s conjure up, from the depths of our souls: The truest, most beautiful lives we can imagine. The truest, most beautiful families we can fathom. The truest, most beautiful world we can hope for. Let’s put it all on paper. Let’s look at what we’ve written and decide that these are not pipe dreams; these are our marching orders. These are the blueprints for our lives, our families, and the world. May the invisible order become visible. May our dreams become our plans.”

—

This brings me back to the tomatoes and the canning and the virtual rowers. In the truest, most beautiful world I can imagine, humanity reconnects with the earth. There is something almost magical about growing a tomato then saving it in a jar for later. Tasting a canned tomato from summer in the middle of winter is a kind of remembering because no red-looking tomato in the store in December tastes as good as one fresh off the vine in August. 

“Ah, yes,” my tastebuds say. “This is what a tomato tastes like.”

Photo by Avin CP on Unsplash

Most of my food comes from a grocery store, it’s true, but sometimes I need to be reconnected to the source of that food. I need to go to the garden and pick the vegetables we eat for dinner. I need to know the farmer who raises the meat I eat. I need to learn where the food I buy comes from, what impact it has on the environment, how I can be a responsible consumer. I need to remember that food does not magically appear in the grocery store. That there is a long line of people involved in the process–from the grower to the picker to the factory worker to the trucker to the stocker.

And I need to see the world around me, not just in pictures and not just through my phone screen, but really see it. And smell it. And feel it. I can listen to the ocean waves through my earbuds and it calms me, but until I see it in person, I forget how vast the ocean is. How small I am. My soul is lifted by pictures of trees, of forests, but nothing compares to the damp, woodsy smell. How my lungs expand taking in the fresh, oxygenated air provided by the trees. When I walk through the woods, my feet remind my brain that this world is not new, that generations have walked these paths before, that we do not own the earth. The land does not belong to us, and how we use it says a lot about who we are.

Even “ordinary” woods are magnificent to me

When I touch the earth–balancing on a rock or running my hand through a stream or sifting through the soil–I remember that this place where I live, this planet that sustains life, is itself alive. And I have a responsibility to care for it.

In the most beautiful world I can imagine, humanity is in harmony with the earth. 

—

In this world I can imagine, I am a creator. Words become sentences become stories. And not as a commodity. At least, not just for that reason. In the truest, most beautiful world I can imagine, I create for the sake of creating.

Photo by Rachel Struve/Rachel Struve Photography

I think of this sometimes as I sit on the couch watching TV and completing cross-stitch patterns. I do this as a way to occupy my hands while I’m engaged in a screen, and because I like watching a blank canvas become something, little by little. I don’t create my own patterns or sell my creations. I’ve given a few away as gifts, but mostly I do cross-stitch just for the sake of doing it.

I do not yet see my writing this way, but I’m trying to imagine it.

Could I create a story for the sake of creating, without the expectation that it will someday be something to sell and market? (I don’t know if I can fully separate this latter thought from my writing because I still feel like writing is meant to be read.)

But like the canned tomatoes, there are easier ways to fulfill my need for story. Reading what other people have written is like buying canned tomatoes from the store. It’s more convenient than doing it myself.

But it’s not as fulfilling.

Something happens inside of me when I take that tomato off the vine and bring it into the kitchen, when I collect pounds of them and fill several jars with diced tomatoes. I feel good. Confident. Like I’ve tended something in my care and tended it well. Preserved it for the future.

Could I say the same for my words?

Could I pluck them out of my head and fill pages with them, preserving them for some future use? It takes more time and effort, yes, but something happens inside of me when I do it. It’s part of what makes me alive.

—

I know that for a lot of us, what we can see in the world right now doesn’t look true or beautiful. And that can cause despair. Or indifference. Sometimes it’s easier to look away than to look at the hard things directly. Sometimes it burns like when we stare at the sun.

But what if we looked at the world and said: It doesn’t have to be this way.

And if it doesn’t have to be this way, can we imagine the way it could be?

What kind of world can we picture when we let our imaginations run free?

And how can we make it so?