Our Stories
Wild in the North Country – Part Six
By Michele Oberholtzer
On Ending
Day 44, Mile 700
This morning I decided to wake up early to watch the sunrise from my camp at Moskey Basin on Isle Royale. It was cold and I was tired. I packed up everything but my sleeping bag and curled up in it, leaning against my pack and while I tried to keep my eyes open watching the part of the sky where I thought the sun would come up. It’s funny how, with a sunrise, you don’t know exactly where to look. I waited for what seemed like forever while the sky slowly lit up. Almost an hour passed. Suddenly, a bright spot appeared and once the sun broke the horizon, it rose rapidly. Soon it was a full blood-red sphere in the sky. Somewhere from the deep recesses of my memory, a song came to me and I sang: “I think it’s gonna be alright, yeah, the worst is over now. The morning sun is rising like a red rubber ball.” The words caught in my throat as I sang, it was a mixture of anguish and joy. A few tears fell. I love that this song was somewhere inside of me. I could never have planned it. It was perfect.
I walked down to the nearby beach and skinny-dipped one last time in Lake Superior. I washed the sweat and dirt and blood off my body in the startlingly cold water. I spread my arms out to hug the sky and felt a deep gratitude for this one last taste of true solitude. Will I ever in my life be that alone again? I wonder. I know I was the only person for many miles all around me. I howled as loud as I could. AaaaaaOooooooHHHhhhOOOooooo. I waited for the crying to come but it never did- I didn’t feel sad, I felt great. I hugged my little stuffed animal Lenny. I snapped a few pictures. I packed up my things. I took a good, long last look.
With a stick, I wrote in the sand. Big curvy letters “I did it!” In math, the difference between zero and one is only one, but in life, the difference between never and once is immeasurable. I have done something, really done something, if only once.
What have I learned on this trip? So much more than I can even understand now.
One lesson that resonates with me today is that I can create my own milestones. Life goes by, the sun rises and sets every day. Those events aren’t inherently meaningful unless I weave them into the events of my life. The book Wild could have been just another story I heard about that happened to somebody else, but I used it as a call to action for an adventure of my own. The 45th parallel could have been a photo-op but I used it to commemorate a passage into a new phase of my life, which may prove to be just as imperfect as the one before, but different, nonetheless. Even just the act of waking up early to enjoy a beautiful sunrise was a way to create a milestone. Each of these things were there all along but they became meaningful because I made them so.
By setting so many goals, I simultaneously guaranteed my own success and failure. Inevitably, I fell short on some of them. This trip was supposed to help me convert my flawed self into a higher being. I guess it’s not surprising that this didn’t happen, but it’s still disappointing. Now I know that I can’t just think myself into being someone else. I can’t schedule an epiphany.
But within the confines of my single life, I can do a great deal. I am a whittler and my life is a single block of wood. It has fixed dimensions and limitations but within those, I am free to carve out whichever shape I want. If I pay attention, I can become attuned to the curve of the grain and work with that raw material to make something unique, unpredictable and beautiful.
Michele documented her trip in her “Left of East” journal series. Check out that series and more of her writing at www.oberdoit.com.
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