By Laurel Christensen
Winter 2011 Kaplan Award Winner
There were times we all hated it. Our early hiking trips were marked with whining children and dragging feet, our bodies only moving forward when our parents either encouraged us with trail mix or threatened us with abandonment. Our bike trips were a lesson in first aid, children falling more often than the blisters on our hands popped or the cracks on our dehydrated lips split. Our rafting trips were a test of limits, forcing us to look fear and mortality right in the face and still paddle forward. We fell asleep huddled on cold camping nights, dreaming of gruesome bear attacks or poisonous snake bites; morning always came too soon, the dry heat promising to sunburn our young skin before the sunscreen could soak in. And even though at some point on every trip mosquito bites would cover our exhausted bodies, blood would seep from open sores, and tears would run down our dirt-covered faces, those mountains were the only place we wanted to be.
I grew up in Park City, Utah; a small town with a big reputation. It is one of only two democratic cities in the Utah of Mormon notoriety, boasting by far the most bars per capita of anywhere in the state and proudly being the only place where coffee shops are still open on Sundays. But, contrary to what you may think, Utah’s religion wasn’t much of a concern for us Park City locals, our wealth was. The Mormons that I grew up with were affluent and driven; focused more on deserving to one day run their parents’ companies than settling down early to 12 kids in Provo. A Mormon boy I liked asked me to dance in 7th grade; during the slow song he whispered that I could go to church with him the following Sunday if I wanted. When I said I already had plans to ski, he didn’t even flinch, and on Sunday he met up with me for some runs on the mountain after his service. I never felt pressured to convert. Religion wasn’t an issue, Mormons weren’t an issue. But fame and fortune, however, were.
Park City’s prosperity comes from the three highly-rated ski resorts located within five miles of Main Street, and on any given day tourists outnumber residents 3 to 1, pouring money into our mostly local pockets for a vacation of high-class restaurants, gigantic hotels and blissful recreation. Nevertheless, the real money comes in during just two short weeks in January when our snowy mountain town hosts the Sundance Film Festival, now the largest and most prestigious independent Film Festival in the United States. For 10 days, people line the streets hoping to catch a glimpse of their favorite celebrities, not to mention a chance to see the talented filmmakers themselves. Reporters, taxi drivers, entourages, agents, producers and musicians flock to our town to support the celebrities and network with the best; buying ridiculous winter outfits to layer over their California sunglasses and nicotine-infused cell phones. We call them the PIBS, People In Black, and many families leave town for the week to avoid them. It is sheer madness amongst our usual routines. Walking to class one year I passed Jennifer Aniston buying a quick snack from my cafeteria. Another time my friends and I were youthfully waving to every car that passed when the smiling torso of James Franco emerged from the tinted window and waved back. Just this year my friend sold a journal to Reese Witherspoon while I visited her working at our local bookstore. But even after the hoopla in January is over, the mind-set carries over; in Park City, everyone is somebody. Our little town was special, and by association so were we.
We learned early to balance our small-town community with its considerable concentration of wealth. I went to preschool with most of the same friends I graduated from high school with, spending our weekends lounging around in beautiful lodges built into the sides of mountains and looking at my friends’ horses waiting outside walls of windows. On our way to babysitting jobs we’d drive by the winter homes of Michael Jordon, Tiger Woods, and Will Smith, as we planned the games we’d play with the kids on the lush carpets of home-theatre rooms the size of our classrooms at school. Our teachers were liberal geniuses, overeducated and underpaid but choosing to stay anyway for the unspoiled location and driven students. After class we’d bounce from piano lessons to basketball practice to Cotillion classes, learning to drive our usually unlocked cars on snow-tire-tamed sheets of ice and to socialize in hotel hot-tubs. The popular kids threw school-wide parties are their parents’ condos, providing more multi-colored pills than beverages to the underage crowd who had brought their ski gear so they wouldn’t miss first tracks the next morning. The snow was our religion, and wealth was our blessing.
When it came to parents, I was luckier than most. Mine had bought a cheap piece of land 20 years earlier when Park City was still relatively unknown and built our house with a few friends and architect they’d met on a ski lift. The excess or lack of money was never an concern for us; even though we lived comfortably middle class in an area that attracted first. Instead of spotless kitchens and painted smiles, my parents were the kind that taught me to learn by example and live by experience; trusting me to come home when I could and asking to hear about my day at dinner. My mother was the kind I could adolescently yell and scream at until my face turned blue but would still come back an hour later so we could apologize. Her charismatic personality drew her to some social function almost every night, though she could barely operate her constantly ringing cell phone. My optimistic father was never idle; always building or fixing and insisting on growth. He and I volunteered at our local radio station, introducing each other to new music and bonding over reading the weather. My brother and I, he 3 years my junior, got along famously, learning to move quickly through our bouts of teen angst and into discussions about the genetics of memory and the philosophy of Harry Potter. I’d say my family was different than most in that town; working hard to focus on each other more than whatever situation we were in at the time. But our cohesion wasn’t luck, because while most Park City families were vacationing in Hawaii, we were out camping.
I only saw my grandparents and cousins once or twice a year, since my parents had both left their families in the Midwest for a life of adventure in Salt Lake City. But as a replacement, my parents built a set of friendships with other ‘orphaned’ couples to spend the holidays with. Before they had kids, the couples spent their Fourth of Julys kayaking down rivers and their Christmases skiing the slopes. And, once they had us, nothing changed. With almost every couple having a girl and then a boy, at all around the same time, this group of six families became a dedicated and determined coalition against the materialism of Park City and the religiosity of the rest of Utah. We spent every holiday, every summer, every spring break, and every three-day weekend together, exploring some mountain, or trying out a new ski resort. I went on hikes before I could walk. I learned to ski before I had all my teeth. We built the most amazing tree-fort while we were camping when I was 6. When I was 9 we skied down an out-of-bounds run in -15 degree weather. I biked 100 miles over a week for a vacation when I was 13. When I was 16, I navigated the family raft through my first rapid. This last year we went to Whistler for a weekend, 6 of us now grown children sharing a cozy room with two bunk beds. For at least the last ten years we’ve spent New Years Eve hiking two hours through the snow to the top of a mountain for a bonfire and to light illegal fireworks someone smuggled in from Colorado. The daughters of my parents’ friends became my older sisters and their sons, my younger brothers. If I ever felt alone, hurt, or insecure(they all lived a half hour away in Salt Lake City), I’d think of them, of everything I’d accomplished with them and how I’d have an extended network of unconditional love on my side forever.
We tried to do a river trip once a year, though for most rivers the permits are given out on a lottery system so there were never any guarantees. After getting the Main Fork of the Salmon River two years in a row, the summer before I turned 16 we were lucky enough to get the 5 day trip down the Green River to the Gates of Lodore. The trip was shorter than we were used to and there were less upper class rapids, but we found out soon enough that the beauty of the Green really can’t be beat. Our guidebook told us that our site on Day 4 had an excellent hike that would take us up one of the canyon walls to see a large cave with Indian pictographs; so even though we paddled in to camp a little late in the day, our parents were still enthusiastic about the hike. Grumbling like the teenagers we were, we wanted to cozy up with our books and play card games much more than a rushed hike to see some old paint. After a brief skunk scare while we washed the dinner dishes in buckets of river water and bleach, my parents and a few others headed up the trail without us.
The girls, like usual, all gathered in one tent to catch up on eachother’s lives and analyze boy encounters. We’d play cards and tell secrets about our brothers, sharing everything even though we hadn’t talked for months. No subject was off limits and it wasn’t uncommon for emotional stories of their struggles being non-Mormons in Salt Lake City to come up. It was always shocking to listen to accounts of being told by Mormon friends that their parents didn’t want them to see each other anymore and how teachers would pick on them in class for being different. I lived in a different world than they did, even though I lived just 20 minutes down the canyon. And while I usually kept my mild and friendly Mormon experiences to myself, this particular evening I didn’t handle their struggle very well.
Caitlin, the girl I was perhaps least close to of the group since she was almost three years older than me rather than two, was talking about how her good friend would be leaving for his two year mission in a few months and come back a completely different person. I tried to sympathize but I kept thinking that if he cared enough about their relationship he wouldn’t go in the first place. In a moment of naivety and theatrics, I declared that if he was my Mormon friend he wouldn’t go on his mission at all because he would care enough about me to stay. Caitlin, as she should have, took this hard and corrected me, “Don’t tell me you’re really that naïve.” I felt terrible immediately, but before I could bring myself to concede, our friend Megan changed the subject to one that turned out to be much worse.
The concept of time is warped when we’re on the river, minutes feel like hours and hours feel like minutes. So the first time my friend Megan wondered why our parents weren’t back yet we didn’t give it much thought. But this time, we were already on edge from my comment and we noticed it had suddenly gotten very dark very quickly. As we searched the campsite we realized the adults who hadn’t hiked were either asleep or unconcerned and confirmed that the ones who had still weren’t back. We tried remain calm at first, gathering our flashlights and coming up with excuses. But Megan wasn’t having it, pacing around nervously and organizing a plan to go after them. We got only a few minutes up the trail before we found the fork, and were forced to reevaluate and split up our search party. Megan started up one trail alone but not before we made her promise to walk only a few minutes before coming back to check in with us here, losing someone else would be the worst thing that could happen. When she came back to see a still parentless campsite, the panic really started to set in. None of us were hysterical, managing to keep strong for our younger brothers, who were now worried too, but we were close. On the river emotions are heightened; without cell phone service or Emergency Rooms the only way out is on the boats, and we only have what we’ve carried if something goes wrong. All we could do was wait.
Luckily, after only a few more minutes we heard people coming. Running out to meet them, we found my father and Megan’s mother helping my mother limp slowly down the path. She had sprained her ankle on a tree root in the twilight rush back down the canyon wall and it was heavily swollen. Finally seeing her face was already enough for me to breakdown in tears, and her injured ankle just made everything worse. By the time I calmed down enough to hear what had happened, I realized that Megan’s dad hadn’t come back with the rest of the group. They told us that when my mother hurt her ankle he had taken off ahead to let us know everyone was on their way, and that he should have been back by now.
Megan’s dad did this kind of thing often; leaving the group for a reckless adventure just because. Out of all of us he was the entertainer and the extrovert of the crew, the one who always had bandages on his hands and feet from improperly planned decisions. It wasn’t uncommon to find him passed out on the beach in the mornings after one too many cocktails the night before, or hear him yelling from some distant place about his next greatest idea. So when we heard that it was him who wasn’t back, half of us thought the worst and the other half knew he’d be fine; he always was. Megan, of course, thought the former and in carefully controlled panic looked out at the trail head for her father, debating whether or not to go off on her own rescue mission. The rest of us set up chairs at the entrance and tried to talk of other things to pass the time, but Megan’s eyes never left that trail. I don’t know how long it was before we heard the sound of footsteps.
He came up to all of us from behind, making some joke about how not all paths lead home and sitting down in a chair next to us before we could all register that he was actually here and fine. Megan took a good look at him and stormed off to her tent, so relieved that her worry had turned to anger that he didn’t expect her concern. Turns out, he had taken a wrong turn on the trail heading back and ended up a half mile away at an empty campsite; and apparently our skunk problem was nothing compared to the mosquitoes of that place. But as the adults filed off to bed, us girls stayed up, still wired from the action and knowing we needed to check on Megan. The four of us crawled into her tent and listened as she vented about how irresponsible her father was and how scared she had been. Our two other friends talked about how strong Megan was and how it was nights like this that proved we’d be friends forever. I apologized to Caitlin, assuring her that her friend wouldn’t change while he was away and she said that she would always love me no matter what I could say. Knowing she meant it, the five of us fell asleep together in the undersized tent; completely loved and completely secure.
All of our trips have a story like this, one where someone gets hurt or left behind or lost and then in our panic we find security and comfort in our friendships. The lows are low in the wilderness, but the highs are even higher. Those moments when we overcame whatever disaster had us worried are why come back to the outdoors. We camp to test our limits and overstep our comfort zones; to get away from convenience; to learn to rely on ourselves and appreciate each other. The clarity we find from camping allows us to go back to society and better face our struggles with wealth and religion and everything else that comes our way.
Lately all I can think about is us playing cards by the light of our headlamps next to a campfire; watching the full moon rise above the canyon wall as we laid back on the pontoon of our boat, slowly bobbing up and down with the current. I remember that blissful feeling of finally showering off the mud and crawling back into clean soft sheets, my body truly appreciating a pillow that wasn’t made of dirty laundry. I lose myself in memories of falling asleep next to my brother to the sounds of peaceful crickets, our tent a warm hideaway from the animals who’ve leased us the land for the night, or waking up to a breathtaking sunrise, sipping coffee in serene silence next to a best friend, and warming our hands over the still crackling coals from the night before.
I haven’t been able to get these images out of my head, mostly because I don’t want to. And I’m realizing that if I want my life to be this, to be like theirs, I have to make it so. My parents were my age when they met the friends they would raise their children with. And while lifelong, the friends I’ve made in my four years here in Seattle won’t be the ones I camp with. The people in my life here don’t hike, don’t ski, don’t know the mountains; I made sure of it when I moved out to see if there was anything I had been missing. And while my friends here are starting to realize that the mountains are a greater part of me than I’ve let on, I don’t know how I’m going to explain that the mountains are the whole part. That if I have to, I’m going to choose that way of life over a life with them.
I know I have to choose the mountains. I know that hiking makes me tired and biking makes me sore, that rapids make me face my mortality and skiing is best when its cold enough to barely function, but I know I have to choose them. Maybe it is this difficulty that makes it so worthwhile, maybe it is the being away that makes it so great, and maybe it is just that the rest of the world is all wrong, but I know it is the being there that lets me know I’m home. Because the mountains are me, are my family, are where I belong.