Linda Weltner: Liberation in the Wilderness

Liberation in the Wilderness
Linda Weltner
Ever So Humble Column
Boston Globe
Aug. 22, 1996

My husband and I set off for southeast Alaska on a kayak trip led by a Zen Buddhist from Clinton, WA, named Kurt Hoelting. I had misgivings. I knew that living in the wilderness would offer challenges, and I wasn’t sure I was up to them.

Here’s my scorecard: I thought I couldn’t do without a morning cup of coffee. We were each given a cup of hot tea before beginning our group morning meditation session, and it was perfectly satisfying. Waiting an hour for a hit of caffeine seemed like nothing compared to the task of adjusting to the fact that the night air usually made my underwear damper instead of drier.

I didn’t think I could be wet without being miserable. The secret of happiness in a temperate rain forest, I found out, is great gear. With wicking long underwear and socks, which draw dampness away from one’s skin, fisherman’s rubber boots, and a waterproof rain coat that didn’t make me feel as if I were zipped into a plastic garment bag, I was a far cry from my usual sweaty, wet-sneakered, self-pitying, soggy self. You can be prepared.

I was afraid that I couldn’t sleep on a thin rubber mat. If comfort were the secret of a good night’s sleep, no-one in America would ever have insomnia. Our pup tent was too small, our mummy bags were confining, the mats were hard, and my sweater made a lumpy pillow, but I discovered there’s only one prerequisite for a good night’s sleep – physical tiredness. I fell asleep the moment I hit the ground.

I thought I’d hate being dirty.
I have never felt cleaner than after my every-other-day quick dip in icy salt water. I have been cleaner, but I’ve never felt cleaner. The reason? The contrast between before and after. Without a mirror, the state of my hair vanished from my consciousness. I doubted I could survive without my usual distractions. These activities filled up the hours of leisure time each day: discovering cloud faces in the sky; scanning the water for signs of jumping salmon or feeding seals; bird watching; taking walks; looking for eagle and raven feathers; digging clams for dinner; doing laundry; starting a fire; exchanging thoughts with another person. I discovered the joy of doing one thing after another instead of four things at once. The interplay between my consciousness and this remarkable place was compelling enough to occupy every hour.

I worried I’d feel ill at ease in the wilderness. Within an hour of pulling our kayaks up onto a deserted island, we’d colonized it. Lori Wilson, our cook and kayak teacher, created a kitchen by hanging pots from trees and using enormous beached spruce trunks for counters. Kurt, our spiritual guide, set up a large tent where we meditated when the bugs occasionally got bad. We pitched our bedrooms along the shore, strung up lines on which to hang our wet clothes, and built a fire pit where we’d place our kayak cushions on a circle of rocks in the evening before eating dinner and talking late into the night. Before we knew it, the island was our home, as familiar as any of the houses we’d left behind.

“Isn’t it strange how we’ve made these places so cozy?” I asked Rick, a fellow traveler. “No,” he said, “we’re human.” I may never fly by float plane into a wilderness area again, but in testing my self-imposed limits, I discovered an unexpected flexibility in myself. Serendipitously, Lori had brought along Tibetan Buddhist Pema Chodron’s book, “Start Where You Are,” and she introduced me to this passage: “This moving away from comfort and security, this stepping out into what is unknown, uncharted, and shaky – that’s called. . . liberation.”

We usually think of ourselves as having a solid identity. We operate as if our personalities were fixed in time and space, but thrown into new circumstances, we have the opportunity to discover that the patterns we’ve imposed on our lives can shift and dissolve leaving us to wonder how many more aspects we identify as our “self” are as impermanent as the imprint of an eagle against the sky.