Out of Myself I Go: Prologue

Theodore Roosevelt National Park

 “ ‘Out of my country and myself I go*’. I wish to take a dive among new conditions for a while, as into another element. I have nothing to do with my friends or my affections for the time; when I came away, I left my heart at home in a desk or sent it forward with my portmanteau to await me at my destination. … I have paid all this money, look you, and paddled all these strokes for no other purpose than to be abroad…”

                                                                                -Robert Louis Stevenson, An Inland Voyage

Once it is in the past, 2020 is a year that will live large in many people’s memories for so many reasons, but with one, persistent, connecting cause: COVID-19. I won’t go into a timeline, or commentary on the virus, just to know that it is a stark reality which cannot be avoided or wished away is enough. For the past five months, the world’s collective reaction to it has changed all our lives drastically. I refuse to say that our current methods of social interaction–video conferencing parties, meetings and virtual everything–are the new normal, but they have come in very useful during this time of prophylactic self-isolation. I and so many others, bereft of our usual person-to-person meetings, now understand more completely that humans, no matter the personality, need real, face-to-face, social interaction or we become … buggy. 

I was never called back to my part time job after March. Media and Facebook acquaintances so constantly urged me to “Stay Home, Stay Safe” that it started to sound like a rebuke–as if I made a regular habit of going out and licking handrails. In reality, all I did for 3 months was go to the grocery store, masked and covered in hand sanitizer. (I did take long solitary walks along rural back-roads, too, but rarely came within fifty feet of anyone.)

At this point in my life, I have come to understand that my mind is very dangerous place to be confined to. Encountering other people, besides my family, and encountering different challenges, brings me out of myself, leaving all the over-self-introspective neuroses that nest in my mind to wither and die.

 

“I swear to you gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness.”

                                        ― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

Jordan Peterson, in his 12 Rules for Life, posits that when monumentously** bad (or good) things happen to you, it’s as if you loose your place, don’t know where you are or who you are because such fundamental things in your life have changed. In a word, you are lost. Your mental and sometimes physical landscapes become unrecognizable, things are not as you thought they were. COVID feels like that. Like floating in the air, ungrounded, with no point on the horizon, going up, then down–uncertain. Things are planned, then canceled, planned, canceled, closed, shut down. A glimmer of foundation shines on the horizon … but then, it disappears and hopes for normalcy are dashed again and again. All one is sure of is consciousness inside of one’s own mind. 

I found myself so self-reflective, self-thoughtful and obsessive of COVID statistics that frankly, I came to be utterly exhausted with my own company. I’m sure my family was a little tired of me, too. I am a Myers-Briggs introvert, but even then, I need other people. 

Even as I write this, it seems that everything is still in reference to COVID–from the first time you step out the door until when you get back home to wash your hands raw. And we still don’t know what to expect, when it will wain, or if we just have to ride it out and do the best we can when people get sick until, and if, a vaccine is developed. 

Even if you do not have to leave your home, it is changing so much about your life and your interactions with others, that you are in a different place. You may be getting used to this place, you may even like it or you may still be lost and frustrated. This is what COVID and its consequences did and is doing to so many people, including me and my family. 

So when the trip to Boundary Waters Canoe Wilderness in northern Minnesota, which I had planned to go on with a group of acquaintances was not canceled, I weighed the risk: mental degradation and despair against risk of coming down with the virus. My personal and very subjective decision: I was willing to risk it. 

My trip to Boundary Waters interrupted metaphorical and existential directionlessness, and replaced it with a better directionlessness; the real, physical challenge of trying to navigate ( in reality, help navigate) through a strange watery, literal-wilderness marked with very few man-made landmarks, and a landscape (and map) that appeared to be all the same, in every direction. But when I looked closer, and was given a hint by someone who had been there before, it started to make sense.

Admittedly, I spent most of my time in the canoe trying to match the landscape with my map and failing, but there were times when I knew where I was–physically and mentally–and that brought a sense of certainty of place which was refreshing. 

This trip came exactly one week before a significant change in my family’s future, directly an outcome of the COVID economy. The immersion into physical survival mode in Boundary Waters–carrying everything you need for the week on your back or in your canoe–of large expansive vistas of nature, of the absence of any sign of COVID, was therapeutic to my soul, strengthening me for what was in store when we got home. 

Later this summer, Bjorn and I decided, in a possibly extravagant move, to keep our travel plans as written earlier in the year. Like so many people, we decided to go to a less-popular place, the least visited states, possible to travel to by car: The Dakotas. Apparently many people thought the same, as not less than five families I know made a similar trip. I intend to document our trip despite the repetition, because the impact travel makes on a person is personal, subjective, unique to the particular traveler. We went to the same places, observed many of the same things, but saw them all differently.

We changed a few of our travel habits due to COVID. We backcountry camped two nights, one night in Theodore Roosevelt National Park, another in Badlands National Park. We brought at least half of our meals with us, ordered take-out and ate in our hotel rooms many other times. We disinfectant-wiped all the touch points in our hotel rooms. We wore masks indoors, and on crowded trails even when most other people weren’t. We went, we managed risk, we explored, we discovered and we got out of ourselves for a week. And we didn't contract COVID.

                                                                                                    –"Astrid"    

A dragonfly nymph (the empty skin, bottom, left) must get out of itself literally; it must shed its outer skin in order to grow, to let its wings inflate and grow strong, so that it can become the flying insect-eating terror that it was created to be (adult, just emerged, with wings still folded bottom, right). 

*“ ‘Out of my country and myself I go’" This phrase was quoted in the text of An Inland Voyage. It wasn't footnoted in the book, and I don't know if it is Louis's original or he is quoting it from some other text. 

**I made up this word, apparently.  I can't find it in the dictionary.