Creative Nonfiction
In the Wilderness
By Jen Hemphill
“Always in the big woods, when you leave familiar ground and step off alone into a new place there will be, along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement, a little nagging of dread. It is the ancient fear of the unknown, and it is your first bond with the wilderness you are going into. You are undertaking the first experience, not of the place, but of yourself in that place.” These words from The Unforeseen Wilderness captured how I was feeling about parenting as I tumbled out of the car into the humid Kentucky night, full of anticipation for our vacation at the Red River Gorge, the very woods Wendell Berry had been writing about in the 1960s.
My husband Brian and I both groaned and stretched, stiff from the six-hour drive from Pittsburgh. The ground lanterns that led the way up steep railroad-tie steps to the cabin allowed me to safely transport a floppy, tired toddler, now dangling from my hip, and an overfull bag slung on my other shoulder. This log cabin was ours for a week at the end of one unseasonably hot September in 2007. Ours— Brian, myself, and our two little boys, along with our friends and their infant daughter.
Old rock climbers and young parents, we’d traveled to the Red, specifically Torrent Falls, in search of paradise: a place where the adults could trade off climbing and child care and the kids could play in the dirt or head back to the cabin for lunch time, nap time or potty time. We needed rocks, not a resort at a beach, not a cruise ship, not Disneyland. We needed the ability to pretend we were in the wild reaches of nature, even if, in reality, a Rite Aid was just one holler over, and the famous Miguel’s Pizza was a hop-skip-jump down the road.
Sandstone cliff bands snake between the trees in low, shady horseshoes or stand high on proud promontories of these rolling Appalachian Mountains. Torrent Falls holds its own horseshoe cliffline located along Highway 11 heading south from the Mountain Parkway towards Campton. We parents felt a desperate need for this cabin in the woods, named the Climber’s Cabin because of its close proximity to over twenty rock climbs. The shellacked log walls of the cabin were a gold beacon shining in the darkness of what could be considered the wilderness of our parenthood.
Here this week, I wouldn’t be the only parent entertaining the kids, preparing their food, or wiping their butts all day. Here there would be an equal division of labor and leisure, and I would have full-time adult interaction. Here, climbing would be added to the daily mix with its own energy and rhythm. We would wake up, eat, and climb; rest, eat, and then climb; eat, rest and then maybe even climb some more; go to bed, wake up, repeat. To me, this simple cadence seemed decadent, as close to vacation perfection as we could get.
The exuberance of my thoughts was only slightly dampened upon walking through the front door. Was this the same cabin I saw on the Torrent Falls website? The kitchen and living area were really one room. The two tiny bedrooms on the main floor were also more like one room with only a curtain between them. The third sleeping area was a loft in full view of the kitchen/living room. No matter. There was running water and an air-conditioner. Roughing it, we were not.
Our toddler Oren woke up the next morning with a runny nose and watery eyes, sneezing, coughing. “Figures,” Brian and I said. We continued as if nothing was wrong. Knowing it was going to be a steamy week, near 90 though it was fall, we decided that Oren’s illness was better off outside. He started out clean, cherubic even: his smooth, round cheeks and chin like porcelain; his straw-colored hair and pale, pudgy appendages almost glowed in the morning sunlight. Not for long.
As Brian and I pulled on our climbing harnesses, buckled them around our waists, and took the climbing rope out of its bag, the dusty dirt that we kicked up into the air was sucked into the morass of runny mucus oozing from Oren’s nostrils. His bright blue eyes were glassy and feverish, but he smiled as he drummed on a short chainsawed section of log alongside his older brother Seb, showing two rows of tiny, white, square teeth. He only stopped to swipe a grubby fist under his mutinous nose and painted a pasty streak of brown clear across one cheek and into his ear. For now, we looked away. I tied into the rope, put my climbing shoes on, and grabbed the gritty sandstone wall with both hands; my feet left the ground as I stepped on rock for the first time this trip.
~*~
When we become parents, even if we have a partner, we step into “the big woods” alone. And, even if we’ve been at it for some time and had multiple children, parenting may still feel like uncharted territory. Though humans have inhabited the realm of parenthood since the beginning of existence, with vast regions supposedly mapped, it seems like there still needs to be a sign, “Here be monsters.” Someone else has already been there, navigated that, right? There’s got to be a book about this, yes? There are books, but they are theoretical, and parenting is one of those things that no one else can discover for us. These are our own wild places, inhabited by our own sometimes wild children. We have to explore our own way, draw our own map. As parents we become cartographers of a sort.
I was thankful that Oren’s birth, unlike Seb’s, had been simple. It happened exactly how I wished it would, partly because my body knew what to do the second time around. I had more confidence in myself. I was only at the birthing center from eight o’clock in the morning until about four o’clock in the afternoon when my mom drove us home.
“All in a days’ work,” I’d say, smugly, when telling the story of Oren’s birth.
The thing is, just because Oren’s birth was picture-perfect didn’t mean that parenting him would be. A pathetic “We ruined everything!” left my mouth at the end of a day a few weeks into his life. Being parents of the first child did not prepare us for being the parents of the second. Seb had been a breeze for the most part with all of the baby things— aside from the very beginning, when we thought we were going to accidentally kill him because we didn’t know what we were doing. I assumed I’d just remember. I assumed that all I needed was a little refresher to jump right back in, better this time, practiced, at ease. I’d been looking forward to the baby experience again now that my mother-feet were planted solidly under me. This time, I did know what I was doing, didn’t I? Surely Oren would follow in Seb’s itty-bitty baby footsteps like a good little brother, wouldn’t he?
Nope. Oren, unique individual that he was, had trouble with all three baby things— all they do is eat, poop and sleep, right? I thought I was losing my mind with his constant crying— the fourth thing that babies do, oh yeah. I was in the deep, dark woods with this child and definitely felt that nagging dread. Few things have caused me to question my sanity more at this point in my life than being at home alone with a crying baby, three weeks postpartum, in the dark of a winter’s evening.
~*~
“Wild…a word tottering between fear and praise,” Diane Ackerman wrote in Deep Play. “Wild ideas are alluring, impulsive, unpredictable, ideas with wings and hooves.” Wild is the base word of “wilderness,” meaning untamed, untouched, uncultivated. Wilderness is desolate, spacious, immeasurable. Even “a bewildering situation,” according to the dictionary. Something that confuses us, puts us in our place, teaches us hard lessons about ourselves.
Wilderness has long been a place where humans would go to escape civilization, to be tested, to be sanctified. The child of a pastor, I grew up hearing stories of people in the Bible being led into the wilderness where they would learn, or not, to rely on their God. Desolation was simple, but it was hard, and you might encounter the edges of yourself. It stripped away any sense that you could go it alone.
I have a craving for what I consider geographical wilderness. I love being in wide open, vast places that make me feel small. I find desolation in nature alluring, but I think I’m romanticizing what I’ve actually come into contact with. Though I’m a climber, I’m not very adventurous and don’t really like the unpredictable. If I were truly in the wilderness, I’d probably die before I could learn anything about myself. I’m happy to visit the wilderness on vacations, but even then, those places are more wilderness-adjacent, and I’m just a tourist.
Parenting on the other hand always feels wild and unpredictable, something with “wings and hooves.”
~*~
In the middle of the night in the middle of our week, my sleep was punctured by a piercing yell from the tiny room next to ours.
“Is that Seb?” My heart was already pounding.
“Huh?” It always takes a lot more to wake Brian than me.
“Or Oren?” Sometimes it was impossible to tell the difference. Then both boys joined together in a raucous concert of wailing. They were going to wake the baby.
Brian and I, now both conscious indeed, simultaneously jumped out of bed and flung aside the black and red checked flannel curtain that separated us from our yowling spawn.
“What’s wrong?”
The light from the cracked bathroom door illuminated Oren’s screwed up face hovering over the side of the small portable crib. Seb’s cry came from the deep shadows of the top bunk.
“Seba, do you have to go potty?” His cries became yells of anger. Hmm, yes.
Brian lowered him down from the bunk bed on its narrow ladder—a feat of strength even in normal conditions, but Seb fought and flailed, a boy drowning just below the surface of consciousness and didn’t want to be saved. When we had agreed that he could sleep on the top bed, we were afraid something might happen— not that he would fall since there was a sturdy railing, but that he would wet the bed.
“Is he wet?” I futilely yell-whispered to Brian. Might as well talk in a normal voice since every living creature within a five-mile radius was already awake.
“Yes,” came his reply, the s emphasized, the toilet’s roaring flush punctuating it.
While Brian took care of Seb, I tried to comfort bawling Oren, who was now reaching for me, up on tip-toes, both chubby arms beseechingly raised. I didn’t want to pick him up because it would be a fight to put him back down. “It’s bedtime, and you need to lay down and go back to sleep,” I told him. He screamed louder.
Even without a disruption caused by his brother, Oren lost it every time sleep was mentioned so far this trip. Here I was, trying to exude calm, yet with every yell, my nerves twisted tighter and tighter. With every scream the muscles along my neck and shoulder blades squeezed into the base of my skull. I knew that the cold virus he had was causing this distress; however, my body hearkened back to the cold winter nights of his infanthood. Here I was again feeling how easy it would be to let loose— I wanted to scream too. Sleeplessness is truly the desert of the parental experience. The possibility of losing control is a dark corner of parenthood that we tend not to talk about. Here I was again in the middle of the empty, desolate, and potentially dangerous wilderness of parenting. Here I was at the edge of myself.
Instead of tumbling over the brink, I took a deep breath and knelt in front of his crib to give him a loose hug over the side, and said, “Oren, buddy, you’re okay.” I rubbed his back and pressed my cheek against his. He gently twisted his fingers through my hair and quieted down.
In a few minutes, Seb was snug on the lower bunk. “Call us if you need to go to the bathroom again.” We cautiously backed out of the room. We left the bathroom light on, the sliver of light sliced through the pitch-black hallway. We crawled into bed, staying completely still under the covers, holding our breath. Oren whimpered and then settled to sleep. The whole cabin was finally quiet. Slowly my own body relaxed into the bed. My neck released, and my head sunk into the pillow. At last, I heard Brian’s breathing slow into sleep. Then it was my turn.
Above us the baby cried out, and my eyes flew open again.
~*~
Wendel Berry was also right when he wrote, “Modern Americans…are crowded and stifled in the cities, and are therefore most excruciatingly in need of recreation. And what is the form of this recreation? Why, it is to be crowded and stifled in the country.” It’s true, most modern people have been removed from nature in daily life. Many of us do live in the concrete wilderness of the city. I love living in the city. It’s noisy and busy, which is okay, but occasionally we need to get away. Therefore, we look to nature to provide respite. I think this is good, but when so many of us are looking for a break in the same places, nature ends up suffering.
This area of Kentucky has been designated Daniel Boone National Forest, but feels less like wilderness than tourist attraction. It could be said that rock climbers are among the largest group of tourists to support this region of Kentucky, though we don’t like to be called such. I don’t know of any other group of outdoor enthusiasts who can swarm an area quite like we do when the climbing is labeled World Class. We come in groups. We come from out of state and around the world. We bring our kids and our pets. And in the busy season when the weather is cool, we congregate, lining up to stake a claim on our favorite routes. We stay for a weekend, a few weeks or months, or maybe we just buy a place and move in.
Climbers learn to love a place they aren’t from in a very specific way. By paying close attention to focused swaths of rock, learning how to move our bodies along its features to reach the top, we get to know a part of nature intimately. It’s easy to think of a route we’ve invested time, energy, blood, sweat, tears, and skin on as our own. And often the areas which house these rocks get mapped into our bodies and brains. We become bound to the rock itself, but also to the place, to the curves in the road that we drive down again and again to get pizza at Miguel’s. We care what happens to it and that it remains available to us. Sometimes it feels like the place stakes its own claim on us.
Some climbers would agree that part of this claim is spiritual. Bill Ramsey, in his foreword to an old climbing guide to the Red River Gorge said, “Religious philosophers often point to signs of ‘intelligent design’ in the natural world as proof of God’s existence—arguments that I generally scoff at. But the nature of climbing at the Red sometimes makes me wonder.” Despite campgrounds full of huge RVs, that weird reptile store, and souvenir shops where you go for coffee, it is felt, but hard to talk about. How do you explain the feeling you get when you walk up to a cliff and find places to put your hands and feet so that you can move along its face, when you realize you’ve become a part of a choreographed dance that is not human-made and doesn’t feel accidental?
The owner of Torrent Falls at the time of this particular trip in 2007, Dr. Bob, as the regulars used to call him— who is now deceased— closed this area to the public in the early aughts because of climbers’ overabundant recreational enthusiasm. Torrent was almost loved to death. Since then, only people renting one of its cabins or staying at the bed and breakfast are allowed to be here. Sunday was the one day we saw a lot of other folks climbing. The River Gorge Climbers’ Coalition, a climbing advocacy group intent on keeping climbing areas open in Kentucky, held its weekly meetings here and then members could stay to climb for the rest of the day.
Later that afternoon when everyone else left, Dr. Bob sat on a log near the cliffline and talked to us about Torrent’s vegetation, how quickly it was coming back. Nature has a way of doing that when left alone. When we weren’t climbing, we took short hikes around to the horseshoe at the back of the property where there was usually a waterfall to walk behind. We kept to the trail and tried to diminish our impact, which can be tricky with a four year old who was more in touch with the “dominion” of nature than its “stewardship.” In the heat of autumn, the waterfall had dwindled to a trickle even though the air was thick and moist. Dark green moss covered the ground and the boulders and the base of the oozing cliff. Whining mosquitoes and gnats did fly-bys past our ears and tried to eat us alive, quickly chasing us back to the air conditioned cabin. Like I said, we’re just tourists.
~*~
The wall of rock visible from the cabin’s kitchen window was creamy white in the morning sun. Pockets of every size and thin brown rails of iron-oxide coalesced to make up the undulating texture of the cliff face. It looked as if the rock had once been in motion, swirling, mixing, bubbling. Trails of chalked holds were visible, and if we looked hard enough, we could spot shiny bolts here and there, permanent anchors drilled into the rock face that help distinguish one route from another.
If we looked. But we were not looking out the window the morning after that sleepless night. We adults were haggard. We grunted to each other while strong coffee brewed. The boys ran around giggling as if last night was a figment of the communal adult imagination. They sang silly songs to the baby. She laughed and kicked in her bouncy seat. We glared at them through the steam rising from our now full coffee mugs.
The moms were given dibs on escaping first. Kathy and I hurriedly gathered our things and flew out the front door before anyone could change their mind or start to whimper. With the click of the latch we entered the stillness of the front porch, and I blew a sigh of relief. The boards creaked as we plodded down the steps to the trail. The fresh and dewy outside air was instantly invigorating. A breeze stirred the surrounding trees. A motorcycle choppered its way down the 11.
I wore flip-flops for the tiny hike. My harness, climbing shoes, chalk bag and water bottle were all I carried. Kathy brought the climbing rope and other gear. We brought no toys, no diaper changing supplies, no Kleenex to wipe runny noses. We turned our backs to the cabin and faced the rock. I put on my harness and shoes and tied into the rope as the first climber. Kathy put on her harness and strung the rope through her belay device as my belayer, so that she could catch me if I fell.
Soon the air around us was accented with the small sounds of climbing: the clatter of a quick-draw— two carabiners connected by a loop of heavy-duty webbing— being clipped into the bolt, metal to metal; the plink of the bottom carabiner gate closed behind the rope. I climbed slowly, stretching out my stiff muscles, pausing to breathe deeply, refreshing the layer of chalk on my fingers. My breath was the loudest sound in my ears as I concentrated solely on what my body needed to do.
We said little. I only communicated to Kathy what she needed to know: when I needed her to feed me rope (“clipping!”), and when the rope was securely clipped into a quick draw (“clipped!”) every few feet. With my mind focused on reaching the next hold, how the grit of the sandstone gently stung the skin of my already tender fingertips and palms, the sanguine smell of it, my discontent seeped into the rock, the forest, the ground.
I needed this. There would be time later for more athletically challenging climbs, climbs that might even bring on “feelings of curiosity and excitement,” and maybe “a little nagging of dread,” climbs I will have to learn and map. But for now, warming up on something familiar, climbing was meditation. Breathing deeply and climbing higher, I found space. At the route’s end, though only fifty feet high, my spirit opened up, became less oppressed, less bewildered. Up near the treetops, the trouble of parenting appeared smaller, more manageable. Up here I was able to connect to something outside of myself, and also with a part of myself I let diminish in order to care for my boys, a part that I still needed to acknowledge now and again.
Below me, Kathy held the rope; she watched me along the way, a necessary partner even if the climbing itself was a lonely endeavor. And after she lowers me to the ground, it will be her turn to climb— then I will belay her as she navigates the rock, catch her if she falls. She’ll follow the rope I put up and see which way to go, but she will have to figure out her own way to reach the top, the best way for her own body to do the moves.
This wasn’t a thunderclap revelation. It was just a quiet reminder. Fifty feet of altitude change was what I needed to get the lay of the land in the small corner of my wilderness. As I hung from the rope at the top of the route, the boys’ high happy voices and the lower rumble of the dads’ reached me from the cabin porch. The boys loved coming outside first thing in the morning. They sensed freedom out here in the dirt and the sun, the freedom to yell, to be dirty and wild.
Seb called to me as he ran up the trail, “Mommy, mommy!” And when he reached the base of the cliff, I saw him looking up at me, squinting in the sunlight, grinning. “Mommy, you climbed so high!”
“I am high up, aren’t I?”
“Why did you climb up there, mommy?”
“It’s so pretty up here and everything down there looks so small.”
I called to Kathy that I was ready to come down, and she slowly lowered me back to the ground.
Jen Hemphill
Jen Hemphill is from Pittsburgh, PA, where she lives with her husband and two cats. Her two sons are now young adults, who live and work locally and come over for dinner as often as possible. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Chatham University in 2009, and has a collection of essays on rock climbing and motherhood which she hopes will be published soon. She writes regularly at Pull-ups in the Basement. A list of her previous publications can be found here. She cut her rock climbing teeth at the New River Gorge in West Virginia where she and her husband are still known to romp, 30 years later. They now have a four wheel drive truck just so they can go to the Red River Gorge in Kentucky more often.