What I Found in the Desert

There was one day when I lost the trail path during one of my hikes. I had veered off course a little to examine some interesting-looking plants and when I turned around the trail had vanished from me. While most of the trails were fairly well-marked, this one was a little tougher than the rest. I tried to look for some footprints on the sandy path, but I kept making more of my own footprints and getting confused. There were not a lot people in the park, much less on the trail I happened to be on, so I decided to sit on a rock and wait until another hiker passed by. I knew that if I tried to find the trail again, I would walk around in circles and get completely lost. So, I said to myself, "Just sit here and trust that you will be fine."

The sun was shining, the sky was this most amazing shade of blue, and I was completely alone. And I was so happy, in a way that I have not been happy in ages. I sat there for about ninety minutes just thinking, remembering Cindy and how pissed she would have been that we were lost, humming, eating salmon jerky (thank you Katie and Laura), and reading my astronomy guidebook. Eventually, I spotted a couple walking a distance away. So, I shouted over to them and asked if they could stop where they were so that I could catch up to them and get back on the trail. They were totally nice (from England in fact) and were more than happy to let me walk with them the rest of the way. During our walk down together, we spoke about the best time to visit the Lake District, why Piccadilly Circus is better than Times Square, and of course, the election and how we finally got it right after eight years.

What I found in the desert was my survival instinct. After Cindy died, I have to say I did venture into some dark thoughts and I lost my ability for a while there to visualize how to move forward. Everyone kept saying "breathe," "put one foot in front of the other," "take it one day at a time," but none of that computed in my mind. I had to somehow get back to what I knew before Cindy had the aneurysm. And being from NY and DC, I used to be pretty good at knowing how to take care of myself and survive. It was foreign to me to not know how to survive or to even want to. Surviving should be as easy as breathing, as eating when you are hungry, as going to sleep when you are tired. But when you lose someone that is your entire life, your love, your future, you temporarily lose your most fundamental instincts.

Being out in the desert, on my own, I was reminded of those instincts. I knew to not freak out when I got lost, I knew to bring 2 liters of water with me, I knew to bring warm clothes for when I reached the top. By the end of my trip, when I took a moment to reflect on it, I realized I wanted to survive and I had remembered the tools you need to employ to do it. What was once vague and lost to me was now as instinctual as putting one foot in front of the other, breathing, and getting up each day. I know there will be more times where I feel lost, but I know deep down, somewhere inside of me is a survivalist mindset and sometimes I just need to refresh my memory on how to tap into it.