Appalachia, Summer/Fall 2010
A mother ponders the nature of wildness
Kristen Laine
For many years, when I told my story of how I became a climber, I framed it as a story of breaking free—breaking out from my family and from history. I understood it as a standard tale: the rebel who runs away from staid society into the mountains, seeking wilder possibilities. I was amazed, each time I told it, how it happened at all. Nobody would have picked me to be a climber when I was a kid growing up in the Midwest in the 1960s. I wasn’t strong or bold. I wasn’t even that drawn to the outdoors. My mother was always flushing me out from some indoor reading nook and locking the door behind me. I climbed trees, but with a book tucked under my arm. From those leafy perches, I mushed sled dogs in the Yukon with Jack London, rode the South Pacific currents with Thor Heyerdahl on Kon-Tiki. Only in books and my imagination did I travel to wild places.
And I was a girl. More than that, I would grow up to be a woman—and women at that time had even less chance of real adventure than treeclimbing girls did. From everything I knew of my family and from what I could see around me, even in the books I read, a young woman’s choices narrowed as soon as she crossed the threshold into adulthood. Her rush of childhood dreams was forced into a docile stream directed toward marriage, children, and home. Like Jo March in Little Women, I resisted growing up, but also like that young dreamer, I continued to imagine ways that I could enter the wider world.
Work and education offered two options. My father’s mother had scrubbed other people’s floors to pay for her son’s better life. As a measure of that better life, my mother didn’t need to work for money. In high school, I started thinking about what I might do, and talked to my high school guidance counselor about possible careers. I ranked at the top of my class. His imagination stretched only as far as secretarial school, and he enrolled me in typing and shorthand. His notions of proper work for women left me feeling diminished, but I had no words to tell him so.
My parents had more imagination than that, and supported me in a college search that ended at Harvard and Radcliffe. A few years earlier, the Radcliffe president had welcomed freshmen by hoping that their classes would “prepare them to be splendid wives and mothers” and suggesting that the reward for their education “might be to marry Harvard men.” My father wished the same for me. I couldn’t explain to him, either, that I dreaded a life
so narrowly defined. While I was in college, in the mid-1970s, the second wave of feminism crested over the cultural landscape. It surged through those docile streams, flooding their banks, sweeping away barriers and rickety notions of what
women could, or couldn’t, do. The flood carried me away, too. It deposited me in uncharted territory, a pioneer at the edge of a new land. Three years after Title IX passed, I rowed on Radcliffe’s crew, discovering muscles I hadn’t known I possessed. I traveled alone in Europe. When I looked beyond college, though, I saw a disorienting, trackless expanse, with no models or maps to guide me. Searching, in the spring of my senior year, I read Coming into the Country, John McPhee’s Alaskan travelogue. The book described actual women in an actual frontier, and drew me north. I lit out for the territories, got as far as Washington State, saw Mount Rainier’s towering majesty and the Cascades’ glaciated peaks, and stayed.
In that wide open landscape, I met other women whose trails converged in the same wild places. We learned to climb, traverse glaciers, ski off the rims of volcanoes. I learned lessons that went beyond hard skills to organization, decision making, leadership, courage. Through the 1980s, I followed the climbers’ circuit: desert rock and Yosemite granite in the spring and fall, alpine peaks in high summer. I lived out of a backpack and slept in a tent for months at a time, working only enough to fund my next trip. In 1986, the year I turned 30, I organized an expedition to South America and climbed to 19,000 feet in Peru. I ascended vertical walls, clipped myself in, and faced out, my legs dangling over hundreds of feet of nothing but air and freedom.
Kristen Laine writes the “Great Kids, Great Outdoors” blog for the Appalachian Mountain Club. Her first book, American Band, won the 2007 PEN New England/L. L. Winship award for nonfiction.
This excerpt is from the Summer/Fall 2010 issue of Appalachia. To order this issue, visit the AMC Online Store.
