Jedediah

Memory, Study JS1

mixed media on paper, 2017

8" x 10"

I told myself I could do it.
And I did.

Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, May 2017.

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I've spent most of my life acknowledging a truth I discovered at a young age: people, and being around them, cannot quell the aloneness one feels living in the world.  It seems, however, nature can.  And it has.  

I've traveled alone before.  Committed to one-person road trips in the past.  When I decided to embark on my first solo camping experience--driving six and a half hours north of San Francisco, three hundred and sixty-some odd miles away--I wasn't so much weighed down by the fear of being a female alone in the forest.  Instead, I was exhilarated to fulfill a year-long desire to walk among some of earth's oldest coastal redwoods.  

About thirteen months ago, I read Richard Preston's The Wild Trees, a non-fiction narrative about key individuals who have dedicated their lives to climbing and exploring redwoods in order to better understand and preserve the species.  It quickly became one of my favorite reads of 2016, perhaps even of all time.  It was in this very book that I was introduced to Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, as well as some of the oldest redwood groves along the California-Oregon coast.  Unbeknownst to me then, thirteen months later, I would begin reading Cheryl Strayed's Wild, a memoir of the author's long-distance hike on the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), a journey brought on by a heartbreaking period in her life in which she was left feeling devastatingly lost. 

Which is how I've been feeling these days.  People and failed relationships of every kind aren't the reason(s) I've lost my way; they're merely a decoy to the slow-but-sure collapse of the person I once was, the things of which I once was certain.

I was introduced to both books by way of fate.  And both books left me with an overwhelming desire to seek . . . more.  Of what exactly, I'm not sure.  In a way, my decision to camp alone and somewhere far enough away was more than conquering a self-imposed challenge.  It was an attempt to re-engage myself with the girl who lived before this person--this aged, jaded, and self-deprecating person.

When I arrived at the campground and staked my site, the sun, which appeared now and again from behind encroaching clouds, was only beginning to set.  Slants of golden rays found their way through the towering redwoods and onto the nape of my neck as I pitched my tent.  I turned around and tilted my head toward the sky; a stillness blanketed my being, warming me from the outside in.  I had made it here.  To Jedediah Smith.  To a place I had read and dreamt about for over a year.  And I was by myself.  And I was fine.  Because strangely enough, in that moment, I did not feel lost.  I did not feel alone.  I was exactly where I needed to be.

For I was among my wild trees.

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