Chapter Three: A Long Walk

Chapter 3 

A Long Walk

I didn't really realize, when i started writing this, why I was doing it, and I certainly didn't expect folks to read it. But you are. And now I accept its gravity--my life, leading up to and during this very moment, has been a series of magical and wondrous adventures, astonishing individuals and incredibly beautiful memories, marked throughout with pain and contusions generally erupting from the maelstrom that raged only in my own head. These days, my mind feels like it has reached some type of critical mass, and that expunging these memories may be a very basic part of preparing myself for the next inevitable series of events, of wonder, of beauty, the literal action of expressing the old to make room for the new, to allow for transition, for growth, for true healing. I hope only to convey things truthfully, honestly and from my own perspective---but it is in no way to say that my memories are the exact way things were. I have a wild ability to retain things, to recall faces and names, scents and images, but this dictation of my life is only going to be more difficult as I continue writing. It is easy to write about your youth, about your childhood, but as I look back on my life as a whole it seems to have progressed deeper and deeper into places that many people never go, both physically and mentally, and especially into forms of darkness that will hurt me to reconsider. I think they are valuable, and I also recognize that I have created some form of an image of myself that more people than I, potentially, am even able to realize, respect and admire. Some see me as some type of hero figure, a mythic soul--and I do not say that in a self-absorbed sense. I have painted my life and I have been nearly paralyzingly blessed throughout the entire experience, protected both by my fellow man and many guardian angels, some who have taken specific form and nature in the recent days. Until this juncture, honestly the last few weeks, most of my life has been experienced devoid of a real sense of self-awareness and many of the things that happened to me simply happened to me, my part in them like a play that was written by somebody else, for me, and I simply walked the walk as it came to me, finding myself, sometimes, in places that were absolutely not where I should have been. I am quite brave, but that bravery was linked to the presence of ignorance for a great time. Whatever the occasion, though. I saw them all through, to their ends, sometimes bitter and occasionally resulting in death and great loss, and here I remain, at the foot of yet another mountain. I am going to continue relating things chronologically, even though I feel like skipping forward, to the things that seem important in the moment, but, if nothing else, I have a need to put my memories in some kind of order, to give voice to my life in a timely fashion, perhaps only so I can make some sense of it. As John Prine, again, sings, "Just give me one extra season/ So i can figure out the other four." There is never time enough. My two hands overflow with memories, with love, with talent. On top of all that, I feel this incredible sense of urgency about it all so i'm writing this down, as quickly as I can, and sharing it with some people, as quickly as I can, so that I do not forget where I have been as I take steps into a new direction. Pretty simple.

Folks seem to consider my, and many other people's, thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail some type of a feat. I am here to say that walking a very long way, 'specially along a well marked, well traversed and well maintained footpath, boils down to a rhythm that pales in comparison to the hoops and shenanigans of everyday life in town. It is simple. You wake up, you eat, you walk, you eat, you walk more, you eat again, you locate a place to sleep, you do that, and you wake up the next day and repeat the whole thing over again. Follow this equation for an amount of time and, perils of the woods and physical body permitting, you will find yourself standing on a mountaintop a great distance from whence you began. For any thru-hiker of the AT, the moment you stand atop Mt. Katahdin in Maine and look southward, supposing you started in the south and walked toward the north, is something that will live in infamy in your mind for the rest of your days and is, quite certainly, one of those moments that is rather difficult to put into words, for you have accomplished your goal. 

My family, my counselor and myself; we were correct. A long distance walk was something that my soul required at that confusing juncture, but even that did not heal my deep and strange sense of self-loathing, and my bulimia continued unabated for the entire duration of the trail. This is a fact that is astonishing to me. How a person can do something like that, achieve something like that, and still believe themselves unworthy of self-love…perhaps I have been crazy, at least for portions of my days. 

The Appalachian Trail is an incredible thing and, if you've never considered walking it, I recommend it with my entire heart. You begin in Georgia, in the tall pines and the scrub brush, you wander through North Carolina, through the Great Smoky Mountains and all their vistas of shades of blue. I reckoned I would be on the walk in solitude--my first night in the woods there were thirty-five other souls at the shelter. All these people, from all places in the world, all coming to do something so organic and innate to our species--walk. Most folks were in the midst of some great transition; a divorce, a mid-life crisis, the loss of a job or a loved one and, of course, some of 'em were out there simply for the hell of it. Whatever the case, the people I found on that walk through the woods continue to be some of the finest folks I know and they have inspired me greatly. They say, once you've walked it, a day does not pass where you don't think of it, and they are correct. In Virginia I contracted a painful tendonitis in the fronts of my ankles and became, instead, a Trail Angel for many of my friends for a section of the journey, picking 'em up in Samuel Carmickle and driving them home to my pops place in Radford where we ate both cold and hot food and slept in beds of cotton. In the Grayson Highlands, wild ponies nibbled on the ends of my trekking poles, craving the salt that had permeated the cork from the sweat on my hands. I celebrated my twentieth birthday alone on a mountaintop outside of Waynesboro along the Blue Ridge Parkway, toasting the sunset, and another year of life, with an orange that i had been saving for days. In West Virginia I learned about heat stroke.The White Mountains of New Hampshire astonished me with their grandeur and I found myself atop Mount Washington on one of the only crystal clear and warm days in the entire year. I saw my first moose. I swam in lakes and ponds. Again, there were pancakes consumed. I even lost my virginity somewhere along the way, but it wasn't a particularly monumental version of that event. 

In Tennessee I obtained my trail name from the infamous Miss Janet Hensely--Tomato Gravy, an homage to my vegetarianism and my adoration of her breakfast concoction in my honor. In Port Clinton, Pennsylvania, I learned how Reddi-Whip can be transformed into whippets from the local rednecks and in Vermont, we stayed at a hostel run by the Twelve Tribes, uh, cult? And they asked for only one thing in return for food and shelter--that the hikers assist with a favor in the morning. The six females were asked to slice and dice approximately thirty bananas for the fruit salads, the three men were requested to move a four-burner, cast iron stove and over down a flight of stairs. I also witnessed, first hand, the glorious difference between the genders--by the end of things, in Maine, all the women looked like goddesses, with thighs of thunder. The men, however, clearly had just stumbled straight out of the Holocaust and took to consuming entire blocks of cheese and uncooked ramen noodles with sticks of butter in vain attempts to regain sufficient calories. Ah, the wonders of being a member of the more intelligent sex. Ha! We are built to sustain life more efficiently, it seems. Also in Maine I was diagnosed, at least I think I was, with Lymes disease. I walked across fields, down roads, up and down mountains, forded rivers, laughed in the rain and stood atop rocky ridgelines in the midst of hailstorms, my frozen hair whipping at my cheeks, a great smile on my face. I slept in firetowers, beside campfires, near rivers and drank straight out of every water source I located, including beaver ponds, and didn't contract giardia. I saw my first moose in the wild and realized that moose can sprint away in the dead of night, through the woods, silently. I shared laughter, pace, stories and loudly sang Disney songs while walking with my friends and ended up atop Katahdin, on the last day of the parks open season, October 15th, 2006, with ten other glorious people, in the freezing rain. I am told the view from the top is something to remember, but we couldn't see a damn thing but the inside of a cloud.

All in all, and all in all, it was a great success. I didn't exactly walk the Trail, though, I more like sprinted with stints of sitting in between. I once covered thirty-five miles in one day and attempted to celebrate my victory with a Smirnoff Ice at the bar, purchased for me by my brother Don and resulting in the entire place being shut down and all of us kicked out into the streets for my underage drinking. As I can figure, i was in the woods for a total of six months, but only four of them was I walking. The rest was spent reveling in the great beauty of the seasons, of the heat of the summer and crisp and abundant fireworks of the fall, or renting cars and taking road trips to see Iron and Wine play in an abandoned swimming pool or to the Jersey shorelines where, to everyones dismay, we bared our glorious hiker shorts, socks and t-shirt tan lines. We smelled terrible the entire time and it was utterly glorious. 

And then, you reach the final blaze. Since then, i find myself wishing the rest of life was so well marked; if somebody would blaze ahead and let me know where exactly I am supposed to head from here, that would truly simplify things. But, that's not how this, nor any, story goes, and the mystery lies in that moment when one journey ends.

Stop Calling Me Crazy: Chapters 1 & 2, Becky & Becka

Stop Calling Me Crazy

Chapter 1

Becky

Hello, My name is Rebecca Lee Rankin. I am twenty-seven years old and I was born on June 22, 1986. That makes me the first day of Cancer the crab, Gemini cusp, astrologically speaking, and a tiger in the Chinese zodiac. I am six foot, one and a half inches tall, just like my momma, and I have red hair and eyes who consistently change color. When I was born, though, I was bald and not that tall, at all, and me eyes were labeled grey. I am a C-section baby, due to my head being too fat to successfully pass through my momma's  va-jay-jay, and I'm a smidgen skeptical as to whether or not my astrology means lickety split 'cause of this fact. I reckon you could say I have developed into quite the skeptic about pretty much everything, but more about that, later. It is also important to point out that I am a bit of a miracle child, as my mom brought me into this world at the ripe age of 36, after being told repeatedly by doctors that she was unable to become pregnant and also, according, thrillingly, to my father, to some other activities that a man and a woman can do together to increase the chances of one of them becoming pregnant that my mom and my dad were not particularly keen on participating in at the time. I guess that one night at the beach was really something special. Anyway, I was so much of a surprise that my mom thought she was merely becoming fat due to the proximity to Thanksgiving time and didn't realize she was pregnant with me until around three months. My mom and pops don't recall much about the process of naming me, either, my mom just maintains that "Becky Lee" sounded like a nice person and my Dad differs the naming process as my mom's responsibility, saying it was all her idea. So, I'm not terrifically attached to it, but it is my name. Apparently, mom wishes she'd named me "Haley" as I was born in the year of Haylie's Comet, but she figured that every other kid born in 1986 would have been named that. I recall one friend in high school asking me what my middle name was, reacting in surprise and then responding, "it isn't Moonbeam Rainbow Star-shine?" No, it is not. It is Rebecca Lee Rankin, shortened, until middle school, to Becky. 

These days,  I live on a 28 foot sailboat named Dolphin that I purchased in 2007 at the age of 21 (I'm actually typing this as Dolphin and I cruise in a following sea up the West Coast of Florida, wing on wing), but I did my youthful developing in the Appalachian Mountains of southwestern Virginia, sharing time with my mom in Christiansburg and my Pops In Radford.  I am an only child and in spent much of my youth in creeks, rivers, ponds, fields, haybarns and canoes, enthralled by Calvin and Hobbes and schooled in the ways of music by my Pops and art by my Momma. They were divorced when I was only one, but remained great friends and communicators until I graduated high school and my momma high-tailed it to the wide open skies of New Mexico where you can still find her, this very day, surrounded by beauty, much of it of her own creating. I appreciate very, very much all the goodness they imparted to me, and forgive them their misguidances as parents. Pretty sure that's one tough gig and I didn't make it particularly easy. 

All in all, and all in all, my childhood was wonderful. I was a very happy kid, and probably the cutest thing you've ever seen in your whole life, least that's what my mom says. Especially when my hair was carrot orange, and ringlets, and I had that gap between my front teeth that I was real proud to display how I could spit an entire watermelon seed through. My mom made me custom ponies to ride and I spent a good deal of time immersed in my own imagination. It was a 45 minute bus ride to school, after a half a mile trek down a gravel road, and my best friend Kate and I passed the entire time, for years on end, back and forth to school everyday playing games with our hands; our hands became luck dragons, unicorns, evil octopi, characters, and they talked to one another and had the most epic quests and interactions you can imagine, there behind the ugly brown pleather seats of bus number 16. Frances was the name of our driver and I imagine every other kid on that school bus thought we were utterly ape shit, but we were utterly oblivious, which is now reoccurring to me as a wonderful survival tactic. It definitely didn't help my case for sanity when my mom would walk me to the bus stop, especially when she would do one of her favorite things, which was to wait until the bus had nearly stopped in front of us and she would move in as to give me a kiss on the cheek, like a normal parent, and then she would lick me, right up the side of my face, right in front of God and Frances and all the popular kids and everybody. Augh! Dammit, Mom!  

My momma lived in an enchanted glen on Beech Spring Lane, off of Gate road, a right hand turn from Plum Creek. Apparently, she named the lane. Recently, I went back to visit the ol' homestead and the folks living there now have cut down all the trees and flowers and, where there once dwelt iron birds with nests of bowling ball eggs and cherry blossoms beside the Koi pond, there is now, very obviously, an average house on a rather shitty piece of property. Its just one big hill. The house is on a side of a hill. The stumps are stumpy and the cars on blocks are trashy and, without all the magic growing around it, the house itself is awful rectangular. But I forgive them, too, cause maybe they just like it that way. I will retain the memories of the big red barn in the backyard with the refrigerator box in the hayloft that I transformed into a space ship. My dad even filched me a discarded desktop computer keyboard from the dumpster at work (he was a "systems technician" for what was C&P Telephone, next Bell Atlantic and now the illustrious Verizon, but I like to call him a telephone man) and I cut a small hole in the side of me box for the cord, drew a square with a marker on the box above the keyboard, plugged that sucker in and got busy charting courses to infinity, and beyond! We had, like, twelve cats? Or something? I really don't know how many there were, but there was Sookie and Rattle and Tommy and Rosie and Wendy Belinda Red Wings and so on and so forth. There were dogs, also, Lucy the insane German Shepard who showed up at our house with a rope burn around her front leg and an unexplainable (except totally explainable) fear of men and sticks, Bumper the big black dog that died when i was real little and Guinan, my beagle mutt who showed up howling on our front porch when I was maybe seven. She had walked into a corner and was stuck there, couldn't figure how to git herself outta that mess. She was a wonderful dog and me, and especially my Dad, too, loved her a whole, whole lot. Guinan is the name of Whoopi Goldberg's character in Star Trek, the Next Generation. She only appears in a couple episodes, but she's psychic and she's awesome, so I named my dog after her. I had two gerbils as well, named Data and Jeordi, which are also Star Trek: The Next Generation references, because I was a huge enormous nerd, my Star Trek fascination being matched in ferocity only by my love for the playful creature the otter. The gerbils lived in a 50 gallon metal horse watering trough in the middle of the living room. The parakeets overtook the "breakfast nook" and we even lugged a small tree-sized branch in there and propped it up so that the branches reached into the small skylight and the birds could have a real organic, back-to-nature experience. My mom was never one for caging things and, when we did, their cages were absolutely as large as space, and vague logic, permitted, but it seems to me that this near-but-not-quite-exactly style of freedom must have driven all the little buggers slightly bonkers, as the gerbils ended up killing one another (some kind of epic battle where Data ripped out the throat of dear Geordi…and they had been living in harmony for so very long!) and the parakeets were absolutely feral, would bite the snot outta yah if you tried to pet one and I have some foggy memories of the yellow one hanging itself in the cage--an apparent suicide. Either way, I have many fond memories of the parakeets escaping the curtain that we had separating their room from our kitchen whenever i would try to clean their cage (room) and having to chase them all around the house. I had a fish tank, also, and learned that Chichilds can be real assholes, despite their beauty, and will sometimes randomly eat the eyeballs out of the sockets of every other fish in their tank, a rather shocking sight first thing in the morning. We also tended wounded creatures whenever we found 'em, especially memorable was the raven named Rainbow, and had a fun time humanely trapping one by one the family of opossums that lived underneath the house and driving them to other peoples properties and dropping them off. 

Most of my memories of my momma involve wandering into her studio and watching her paint, draw or create something or another, and staring around at the piles of glazes and screens and oil paints and fabric squares in awe and wonderment. She is a most exceptional and truly gifted artist. One of the best I have ever seen in real life. The big red barn in the backyard was especially magic in the upstairs studio where she occupied herself making stained glass pieces until she became endowed with yours truly and decided, most graciously, that the lead smelting process involved in the binding of stained glass pieces, combined with the glorious amount of broken glass, probably weren't the best things to be surrounding ones pregnant self with, so she took up being a seamstress, instead. Felt is safer than lead. There is a lesson there somewhere. She sewed prancing Andalusians onto sweatshirts and spun three foot high unicorns with flowers in their manes--my mom has a penchant for horses, which later transferred into the presence of a couple real horses in my life; Pinecone, the nearly dead, foundering brown pony and the elderly dapple grey that lived in the upper field and wouldn't let me touch her. Real pleasures, these horses, as my mom always maintained we were too poor for an actual horse. I still question if all the horse related memorabilia strewn about the house (eBay threw a party the day my mom discovered typing "horse" into that search field) couldn't have been sold and transformed into more than enough cashola to equate to a real horse, but I get it now. Glass statues of horses never die tragically and break your heart. 

My pops taught me to drive in his stick-shift Volvo, took me fishing in nearly every lake and river in the vicinity and sang a helluva lot of songs. He plays piano and guitar and has the ability to remember all the lyrics to everything, ever. In fact, I could gauge my dad's happiness level by how much and how often he would sing--when he was dated Diane and then, later, when he married that crazy Peruvian woman named Bahariah, he didn't sing much at all. These days, he sings a lot. Dad is also a fan of books and Nilla Wafers and birds. This is a story I wrote him when I was a child that describes everything my dad loves, "There once was a hawk that lived beside a river. Everyday, the hawk would dive into the river and catch a fish. He would eat the fish, and then he would take a nap. The End." I would go into greater detail about what an awesome dad he is and how much i love him and how i hope his back doesn't ever hurt again and that everything he ever wanted comes true because he's so goddamn great but I would start crying and I can't see the computer screen. When I come home, whenever I have a car, sometimes my Dad meets me in the driveway with newspaper, vinegar and a squeegee in his hands saying to me, quoting John Prine, one of the greatest lyricists of our times, "broken hearts and dirty windows make life difficult to see, Beck." You are so right, Dad. 

Every year, until i was in high school and became "too busy", my dad and I would go to the Outer Banks in our big green Chevy van with the aluminum canoe strapped on the top on another "Great Adventure;" we ate a lot of pancakes and we caught a lot of fish. We visited friends like Eddie and Kay Mayor; Kay taught me the game of Pounce, always ate cookies and tea at 3:30 in the afternoon, had far more books in her home than she did pairs of shoes and recently passed away at the glorious age of 94, in an armchair, with a fresh novel in her hands, open to the first page. She was a quiet woman. My dad is also a big fan of silence. My father is an incredible human being. In all that I've done, and all of my weirdness, he has supported me, one hundred percent. His presence in my life, and my gratitude for it, an utterly humbling desire to make him proud, have colored my entire existence. I am a very, very lucky human being to have been raised the way I was.

Yet, besides the obvious background fill, there's a reason I'm relating all these childhood memories. Because, at some point, that little girl who was fascinated and curious and interested and wild became a nervous wreck. The world, lately, has been disparaging to my inner child's spirit, and my inner voice is sometimes as muddy as the Alabama waters I am sailing toward. It's because of pain, of heartbreak, and not just my own, but everybody's. The loss of the innocence we once knew in the harsh light of reality--its not a new story. its one version of some people's perception of the process of "adulthood." If that's what I'm moving toward, and that's what i'm shopping for, I'm not buying, man. Not anymore. 

There's something going on. There's something in the air, in the people, in the land, and its a sickness. I'm not wrong about this. It is the sickness of fear and anxiety, of depression and loneliness. It is the sickness of the natural world as she suffers at our hands. It is the sickness of the hearts and minds of our fellow man. It's all around, there's no denying it, and it hurts me, its hurts that little girl I just described, and I miss her.  I love her, she is amazing. 

What was encouraged in my childhood was my imagination. As I have grown, folks have either perpetuated this imaginative state or tried to nip it in the bud with their personal perceptions of the importance of "facing reality" and accepting many a standard for life. What is dawning on me, in my twenty-seventh year, is that your reality is directly related to your ability to imagine it. The more you are capable of imagining, the bigger, the grander, the wilder; s'long as you are capable of taking the steps in this reality-based society to transfer that imagined existence into something you can touch, and sometimes those steps really fucking suck and are incredibly hard and based only in manual labor, you can have whatever kind of life you want. Our imaginations never have to shut down and they mark one of the things in this world that is truly limitless, infinite. They don't have to get less just because we get older, they don't have to become less vibrant, even if we are assuaged with pain and lies. They just don't. But they do. And we get put in cages we didn't even know we were in, and folks lie and we struggle and it just becomes so disheartening 'cause people can be such huge jerks. Huge, asinine jerks. It isn't their fault that they are that way, but it is their fault that they remain that way. Anybody can overcome anything, 'specially with the freedoms we have in this country. Freedom of thought is probably the biggest deal. Understanding your person is a life-long experience. Get started, right now. If you don't understand yourself, you will never, ever be able to understand anybody else.

Chapter Two

BECKA

One day, in sixth grade science class, I made a change. I said to Kristen Brugh, probably with my hands on my hips, "Kristen, you may now call me 'Becka.'" That's right, I was done with this "Becky" nonsense. It was time to turn over a new leaf, the dawning of a new day, a personal evolution! Kristen shrugged her shoulders and said, "all right," and that was that. Clearly, Kristen underestimated the magnitude of the transition, but its ok. People often misunderstand each other and you usually have to tell them directly why something is important to you or they might not even notice. 

The people did not struggle as mightily as one might assume with the "Becky" to "Becka" transition and it caught on like wildfire amongst the five or six people who actually gave any sorts of damns. As did the "stankin Rankin" nomenclature, a very clever rhyming scheme developed by a boy named Zach. I am fairly certain I did not actually stink, but I was basically raised in a barn, so I can't be too sure. Either way, middle school was pretty all right. I had some great friends and we wrote a lot of notes back and forth, I had some crushes on some kids like Tyler Johnson (who I recently saw again and is very gay and very beautiful, good for him!) and went to my very first concert--The Backstreet Boys in Charlottle, North Carolina. That's right, I loved them. Still do, and i'm not too proud to admit it. Have you watched the "Everybody" video? It's absolutely cool! Unsurprisingly, A.J. McClean was my favorite member of the band. He is now, from what my internet stalking tells me, recovering quite splendidly from a long stint in rehab and the Boys are preparing to do a tour with Avril Lavinge. I tried to pass this thrilling news on to my friends these days and was shocked and appalled by their lackluster reactions but, again, you can't control the emotions of others. They simply don't know what's best for them, sometimes. Anyway, the Backstreet Boys concert was fucking fantastic. The stage in the center of the circular amphitheater rotated on its own axis and, at one point, the boys were attached to wire cables and they actually literally flew around the venue. I was only miffed because Nick Carter was flying around above us, and he's my second to least favorite, after Howie, obviously, who really had no purpose in the band in the first place. As I type this, I am realizing that my obsession with boy bands as a teenager has absolutely transferred into my adult life and I am a major groupie to a few modern bands full of ruffian men, like the Hackensaw Boys and the Morgan O'Kane band. Amazing. I never made that connection. Other than the Backstreet boys, though, I also had a fanatical obsession with the Spice Girls who, I maintain to this day, were one of the most awesome things ever to happen in the history of music. Those girls killed it! They were saucy, spicy, fun loving, beautiful and great dancers. Pretty cool role models, until Ginger Spice went and acted a selfish brat and tried to go solo (a failure), ruining everything wonderful that the spice girls were. But the message was strong and the message read: Spice up your life! Hell yeah!

My room in middle school looked like a 90's teen music magazine vomited inside it. I wall-papered the entire space, including the ceiling, with photos and posters of the bands I so adored. Also, I slept on a futon bunk bed but had a day bed sized mattress, so I crammed the excess space between the mattress and the bed frame with stuffed animals. There was a giant tiger, a herd of Banilly Goats (Dole, in the 90's, developed an entire line of banana-based stuffed animals and it was brilliant). I had lava lamps and an enormous otter collection and plastic rainbow dangly door beads and fish tanks and did tons of shopping at the mall in Claire's during their 10 for five dollars sales so, in a 12'x12' space, basically there was just a whole lot going on. I have always had a penchant for creating a wonderland cave. I'm told its something to do with my cancerian nature. My room was awesome and middle school was pretty cool; I transitioned through a lot of hobbies, blazing from ballet to karate to the swim team. Be all you can be, so says my folks, and i did a mediocre job of pursuing a variety of hobbies while sledding down huge hills spotted in dangerous and lurking frozen cow pies, swimming in ponds full of snapping turtles and playing the silver flute in the middle school band. This also marked a time of general bad clothing and bad haircuts. I was a fan of the stupendous combination of wind pants, usually teal or purple, flannel shirts over extra-large t-shirts adored with pictures of cute sea otters doing cute things, hiking boots, a side ponytail and mismatched earrings. I was a fucking style icon and that is due directly to the complete lack of fucks that i gave about it all. The windpant choice was concreted as wise beyond my years when, once, at Girl Scout camp (I was eventually kicked out), Gwen Rader and I were climbing up the side of a hill and managed to climb overtop of, disturb, be attacked by and then slide back down overtop of again a yellowjacket's nest. The bees could not obtain purchase on my windpants. They slid off as though my legs were covered in grease, saving my lower extremities from the pain and torment to which my upper body was subjected. Thank God for Mrs. Shadel, as she came dashing through the goddamn woods and ripped off my shirt and threw me into the creek. Gwen had an allergic reaction later that night and her neck swelled up and she almost died. Girl Scouts were fun! 

I reckon maybe things started changing in high school. This is a huge newsflash to you, i am sure, as I am positive I am the only human being in modern history who has ever began to experience the dawning of an age of confusing shit in high school.  Anyways, a few things happened. I was wildly productive, for one thing. I was involved in cross country and ran sometimes as much as 15 miles a day, eventually developing shin splints and stress fractures. I was in the marching band, where i played flute for the first two years and then switched to the louder and more exotic trombone, I was president of the Student Council and the astronomy club and I took every Advanced Placement class I possibly could. I was on the soccer team and my only responsibilities were to kick the ball real far and knock other people down. We lost, I'm fairly certain, every game we ever played. The marching band, however, was sensational, thanks largely to the semi-militaristic regime-like direction of a very small blonde woman by the name of Miss Gross. This must be where I learned my dedication and, also, how to take orders from someone I didn't like very much who had a megaphone. I have since neglected that ability. At the end of my high school years, I encountered personality conflicts with my momma, not completely unrelated to my discovering that she loved smoking that mary jane mara-ja-juana and my conclusion that I didn't even KNOW MY OWN MOTHER and that she was a drug addict. Gee thanks, D.A.R.E. program idiocy. But, my mom was pretty depressed as well, so I moved into the big house with my pops in Radford. This transition meant I now had a  30-45 minute drive to school everyday. That was fine, because my first car was a 1964 Oldsmobile Dynamic 88 that dad and I enlisted the awesome, and completely illiterate, mechanic up the road from my mom by the name of Ronald Tweedy, to paint baby blue with a white top. We didn't even wait for it to dry properly before I crammed all my friends in it and took her to the local drive-in movie theater (which we totally had) and my friend Russ Zokaites sat on the hood for the duration of the film and etched his ass in permanency onto my car. The Olds was a total pleasure, comin in at 15 1/2 feet from bow to stern and sporting bench seats, an 8-track player and a steering wheel that must have been two feet wide. Not to mention the engine, a  394-cubic-inch Rocket V8 with a two-barrel, 250 hp (186 kW) , when you were floating down the highway at 70 mph, if you put the pedal to the metal your head would whiplash backward into the bench seat, the gas gauge would visually drop and the world was yours for the taking. The car was awesome, but I was broke and I think it averaged between 6-12 mpg, so we sold it to a Marilyn Monroe impersonator and I started driving my dad's Volvo sedan around. This went well until my junior prom when, coming home at 4:30 in the morning with my hair still all fancied, I fell asleep at the wheel, drifted across a lane of traffic and smashed the driver's side corner of the car into a fire hydrant, dragging the hydrant down the side of the vehicle and shoving the entire car out of alignment. Fortunately, the hydrant did not erupt in torrents of gushing water and, thanks to the incredible safety standards of Volvo (bless up!) and their vehicles that are actually made of metal, I did not die. I did, however, feel very ashamed that I had fallen asleep at the wheel and decided to tell my dad that I had swerved to miss a deer. He, at the time, made out as though he believed me. Later, when I asked him about it, he informed that it was not the time of year that any deer would have "a giant rack of antlers," as per my description, and he knew all along that I was lying, but he also knew that i was ashamed so didn't bother correcting me. That's the kind of awesome my dad is. 

Let's see. Between my junior and senior years of high school I went to a couple summer programs that were fairly formative--Virginia Governor's School for the Humanities and Virginia Girl's State. I don't remember much about either one but, apparently, it was an honor to be chosen for them. At Governor's School my friend DeCarol Davis and I wowed everyone with our personally choreographed dance to Nelly's "It's Getting Hot in Here," as I slowly, with great annunciation, narrated. DeCarol went on to become the nation's first African American and lesbian valedictorian of the United States Coast Guard Academy. So I was in fine company. One thing that I know I didn't pay much attention to, at all, in high school, was boys. I mean, I think I liked them, but I certainly wasn't distracted by them. I recall one of them saying once to me, "you see what she's doing? that is called flirting. have you ever tried it?!," as though he was insulting me, and my blank stare in his direction and then immediate return to whatever art project I was working on. Apparently, my obsession with love came a little later. 

The most interesting thing about high school was the issue of deciding what to do afterward. With a resume that glittered like gold, including a recommendation from my Principal, stunning scores on all my standardized testing ,a most impressive list of after-school actives and a 3.96 GPA, I was flat out rejected or wait-listed from most every college I applied to, including William & Mary, the University of Virginia, Darmouth, etc. I think Mary Baldwin accepted me. Thank God I didn't attend. Anyway, it seemed rather odd, and everybody was up in arms. I had guidance counselors making phone calls to admissions offices and, with some of my less-qualified friends being accepted to the same institutions, the only explanation that was offered to me was that I was a victim of the flip side of the affirmative action coin. I was, quite simply, one of way too many over-qualified white girls. I think something else shoved its hand into play at this juncture in my life, but the awareness of the mystery didn't come in for a long time and, instead, this was pretty devastating to me. 

In the throes of having no idea what the fuck I was doing with my life (good thing I totally know that, now) I went to visit my friend Cheryl Heatwole. She attended this university called Eastern Mennonite in Harrisonburg, Virginia and, when I visited, I had a pretty good time, so I filled out an application and they accepted me. Being that they were, basically, the only ones who did, I accepted their acceptance and loaded up my Volvo Station Wagon, which I acquired somehow post-fire hydrant catastrophe, named Samuel Carmickle and went on up the road to pursue my higher education.

Freshman orientation was when I realized I had signed up for something that I wasn't totally aware of. We were put into groups and sent off into different locations to pursue varieties of actives that would accelerate our bonding. Our group followed behind a tractor as it tilled a filed of potatoes and nabbed all the potatoes and put them in baskets. I'm pretty sure this was a genius move on the part of the relationship between the farmers and the educational institution and some form of modern indentured servitude thinly veiled as freshman orientation. It was like hazing, but way more productive. Anyway, i was no stranger to hanging out in the dirt so it didn't really bug me, nor strike me as odd. My friend Zelda leaned up against the exhaust pipe of the tractor during the trip photo and burned the ever-loving shit out of her hand, I do remember that. 

I had plenty of experiences at Eastern Mennonite University, most of them rather odd. Obviously, this is a theme in all of my life. I attempted valiantly to uphold a relationship with Jesus Christ and praised and worshiped with my hands in the air and everything. I was the resident advisor of my sophomore year hall in the all-girls dormitory called Northlawn. I played soccer, badly, again. I continued to run. I learned about black and white photography development in the darkroom and became enamored. I took Playwriting 101 and was exposed to the best professor I have ever had--a Sir Patrick Reynolds, who had found himself working at EMU just as unexplainably as I found myself attending as he was hailing from the Ivy League Cornell and proceeded to piss everyone off as they failed his classes left and right. I failed his class, too, but it was out of some strange refusal to succeed. He thought I was a genius, and I revolted in some way by refusing to complete the final assignment for the class, which was to pen a one-act play and like sixty percent of the final grade or something, so I failed. I still owe him that play. I did, however, continue to nurture my penchant for writing and wrote a couple things that I would love to find again someday, including a stirring 15-minute Gonzo theatre monologue from the violated perspective of a piece of bubble wrap. Also, my friend Matthew Pearson and I were responsible for the Sunday Morning announcements at chapel and came up with some hilarious skits including, but not limited to, he (Matthew Pearson is 6 foot, seven inches tall) dressed as a giant baby sitting on my lap and I as his grandmother, an impromptu lyrical version of the announcements with Matt at the piano and I askew across the top wearing a red dress and blonde wig, and a particularly embarrassing attempt to combine aerobics and the delivery of said announcements. I wore a sweatband. 

Also, another crucial element to the story of my life is that, when I was 18 years old, I inherited the sum of forty thousand dollars from my grandmother on my mother's side who died when I was little. I met her twice, her name was Leoma and she was absolutely beautiful, talented, utterly drunk and depressed. The money was gifted with the only stipulation that it was to be used for "educational purposes," and that's how I was able to spend any time at all at EMU, an institution who's price tag and religious propriety still seem fairly damn hypocritical, if you ask me. Also, between my freshman and sophomore years of schooling at EMU I used grandma's money to attend flight school at the local airport, Shendoah Valley Regional in Weyer's Cave, and became a privately licensed pilot. My mom's house was in a flight pattern and I was one of those kids that would sprint outside at the sound of jet engines and try to ID the plane overhead. F-16 Tomahawk's were my personal favorite. Flight school was fantastic; i had a wild instructor who recognized and honored my skills as a pilot (the fact that I have never been horrible at anything I have attempted is not lost on me) and coached me in some things that folks are no longer taught in their first forty hours in the air, including spin recovery and how to land a single-engine plane during a hailstorm with 30 knot crosswinds. Since then, I have chased elk and dove into the Rio Grande gorge in New Mexico, spied farmlands in Virginia, co-piloted from the Virgin Islands to Puerto Rico and, my life's dream, flown both over a glacier and landed a seaplane delivering salmon roe in Alaska. I await with bated breath that moment that comes in the movies where somebody yells "CAN ANYBODY FLY THIS PLANE??!" and I stride forward, stepping calmly into my role as hero. 

It seemed, I am told, from the perspective of everyone else that I was having the time of my life during my years at Eastern Mennonite. Their outside perspectives and my memories are entirely separate beasts.  

Somewhere along the way I picked up bulimia. I don't recall my initial decision to harm myself in this particular manner, but I do remember many, many a long hour spent in this one bathroom in the dorm. It's fucking disgusting, and my stomach hurts just typing about it. I am uncomfortable and suddenly very itchy. The amount of time and energy I put into that illness, and also into self-loathing, was incredible, and the things that you do, and the habits you develop when you are bulimic are utterly shameful. One piece of the puzzle was the all-you-can-eat buffet style cafeteria at EMU combined with my already present awkward physical nature. Its strange to be a girl over six feet tall, and you are gangly and ridiculous for a long time. Anyway, I gained some weight and maybe the basis of the bulimia was sheer vanity, I don't know. But, at the end of my time at EMU, i was vomiting at least eight times a day, if not more, and had starting doing all sorts of crazy things like hoarding food and driving from fast food joint to fast food joint, eating in a manner that I understood, by the purposeful patterning of solids and liquids, would be easy to regurgitate. Like I said, fucking gross. Come on, man. 

Anyway, during the holidays between fall and spring semester of my sophomore year, my friend Kristen Jones and I bought two Amtrak North American Rail passes and set off on a train trip in a circular motion around the entire country. The rail pass is a pretty cool thing and allows you to travel on Amtrak as much as you would like for 30 days and we went all over the place, even into Canada. It was a great ride, but I was bulimic all the way. I'm pretty sure nobody else ever knew this and, if they did, they never said a thing. Such is the nature of the beast. When we returned to EMU, I wrote my mom and dad and told them what I had been doing and then dropped out of school, two weeks after declaring my double major in English and Photography. I returned home to Radford for a few weeks, where I went to a therapy and made my next big decision about how to heal myself and what to do with my life, which was to attempt to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail, a footpath that runs from Georgia to Maine. For whatever reason, everyone, including my therapist, thought this long walk was a brilliant idea and my decision was supported with glee. Grandma's money made it easy to acquire the tools i needed for this endeavor (a pack, a sleeping bag, etc) and the definition of "education" continued to loosen in my, and my family's, minds. In April of 2006, my dad drove me to the top of Springer Mountain, Georgia and dropped me off, alone, in the middle of the woods. "I love you!" he yelled, as my eyeballs filled with tears and I stood there with my seventy-pound backpack on the top of some hill, 2,176 miles between myself and Maine.