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“I’m tied to this tree… and I’M NOT LEAVING!!”, I yelled at my parents. The year was 1994… I was 13 years old and my parents were running around our campsite in Glacier National Park, trying to take down our 6-person Janssport Tent and magically compress our Slumberjack Sleeping Pads into bags that were designed far too small for them. Our family had been on the road for almost 5 weeks and we were about to begin the long drive back to our home in Pennsylvania. I was not ready to go home. I was not ready to give up my nightly bowl of Dinty Moore beef stew. I did not need to sleep in my bed ever again.
My entire family got into the mini van without me, and I think my dad might have even attempted the infamous bluff drive away maneuver. This is a maneuver, not dissimilar to a bluff charge from a grizzly bear, except that it involves pretending to drive away from a campsite while leaving your protesting 13 year old daughter tied to a tree. But have no fear… they didn’t leave me there. Regrettably, my parents pulled back into the campsite and my dad, retrieving his trusty pocket knife from in his back pocket, cut me away from the tree.
When we had left for our trip about 5 weeks prior, my mom had taken a sheet of printer paper and written the words MONTANA OR BUST on them and taped them to the back window of our 1990 blue minivan. We had left our home in Pennsylvania at ‘O-dark-THIRTY’ (my dad’s words) and had begun a trek of epic proportions for a family of five.
We drove endlessly… or at least it seemed that way. The forested hills of Pennsylvania gave way to barren plains as we crossed the Mississippi river. On and on the minivan sped — towards places that I only knew about in words, not photos. There was no internet… no Instagram hashtags with recent photos. When my mom said that one of our first stops was The Badlands, I had no idea what to expect. Since this was the 1990s, my sisters and I begged my parents to let us take off our seat belts. “Once we are on the highway”, my dad would say. Because apparently taking your seat belt off when you are driving on a highway without a speed limit is the safe time to do it. My sisters and I would crawl around the back of the minivan, stretching our legs as we listened to yet another chapter of Herman Melville’s, ‘Billy Budd’, which I admittedly did not understand at all. “His sentences are too long,” I would complain.
We arrived in the Badlands on a day in August when the air was dry and hot. We stepped out of our car at a lookout point and I walked out to an overlook with my family and saw the enormity of cream-colored buttes stretched out endlessly in front of me. Never, in my wildest dreams, could I have imagined that a place like this existed. I looked around at the other families — most of them quickly snapping a photo and then jumping back into their car. I felt secretly proud that my family was going to spend the night in the campground. What secrets would this desolate place reveal to me?
That night, we set up our tent in a campsite that had no shelter, save for a small manmade sun shade. The campsite was exposed and our tent was battered by the wind. In the middle of the night, a thunderstorm rolled through and lightning that was somehow bigger than any lightning I had ever seen before stretched its shiny fingers across the sky and lit up the buttes and pinnacles in the distance.
The next day the storm had passed and my parents decided to take me and my sisters on a hike. My mom read the trail description for a trail called The Notch Trail:
Moderate to strenuous. After meandering through a canyon, this trail climbs a log ladder and follows a ledge to "the Notch" for a dramatic view of the White River Valley. Trail begins at the south end of the Door and Window parking area. Watch for drop-offs. Not recommended for anyone with a fear of heights. Treacherous during or after heavy rains.
“YES!!”, my sisters and I exclaimed. A ladder? Treacherous? We were 100% invested in this trail. My parents (shockingly) agreed, and our family headed to the Notch trail. When I think back to that day, the thing that stands out to me is that there was nobody else on the trail. It was just us. We approached the wooden ladder and my heart started to pound. As a 13 year old child, this ladder was the biggest, coolest thing that I had ever seen in my life. Slowly and methodically, I started ascending the rungs to the top. I looked down, and watched as my family members, one by one, started to ascend. After all five of us had ascended the ladder, we traversed a narrow ledge-like trail that felt ‘mostly secure’ until we reached the infamous Notch — a saddle in the buttes that looked out over the White River Valley.
This is what I remember from my first time at the Notch: I remember closing my eyes and I remember feeling the sun. I remember feeling a sense of nothing and everything that I could not, at the age of 13, articulate. I remember feeling like I was a part of something — which was not something that I had felt very often. I remember that it was brilliantly sunny that day. I remember that I felt at ease and at peace and I remember feeling like everything was possible. I held onto the feeling as we descended that ladder… and as we continued our trip to Montana. Each new place we explored was another moment that reminded me: You belong. And that, friends, was why I tied myself to a tree at our final campsite in Glacier National Park. I didn’t want to go back to a place where I wasn’t sure who I was.
Last week, I went back to The Badlands National Park for the first time in almost 30 years. I had driven through South Dakota when I moved to WA in 2004, but I hadn’t taken the time to stop at the Badlands. I still remember driving by the exit for the park on Interstate 90. A friend had offered to accompany me for the drive across country, and I pointed out the window, “Those are the Badlands!”, I exclaimed…before going into a detailed description of the Notch Trail and the ladder up the side of a cliff. I wondered, even then, if the trail was as special as I had remembered it when I was 13 years old.
For the past three years, my dad has invited my husband Aaron and I on a fishing trip with him and my mom. For the first two years, we went to Montana for the trip, but a few weeks ago, we met my parents in South Dakota for a week of hiking and fishing. “We have to hike the Notch Trail!”, I had told my parents while we were planning the trip. And so, on September 24th of last month, we drove to the Badlands. This time, however, I was not unbuckled and flailing around on the floor wearing a pillow case on the top of my head while fighting with my two sisters in the back of a minivan. This time I was a driving a premium SUV from a rental car company, which was an upgrade from the compact SUV that I had rented, presumably because I was polite to the overwhelmed woman at the Alamo rental car counter.
A lot has changed in almost 30 years since I hiked the Notch Trail. For one thing, I’m not 13 anymore. I’ve had a few lifetimes of random jobs: lifeguard, mystery shopper, hot dog cart girl, Trauma Unit nursing assistant, marketing assistant at a print shop, warehouse employee, Park Ranger, Railroad Police Officer, and founder of an outdoor gear company. I graduated from college. I got married. I got un-married. I got re-married. I almost screwed that marriage up too. But then I didn’t. I have saved people’s lives. I have seen things that I wish I had never seen. I have almost died. I have climbed mountains… a lot of mountains. I have spent more nights in a tent than I can count. I have lost touch with friends. I have been hurt. I have been loved. I have been forgiven. I have experienced every up and down that life has been able to throw at me. And through it all, this trail has been here…. just being here. Just looking out over the valley below. Changing and unchanging, all at the same time.
As soon as my feet hit the trail, it doesn’t matter who I am anymore. It doesn’t matter that I’ve screwed a billion things up or gotten a zillion things right. It doesn’t matter if I’ve sold Kula Cloths or that my fabric is lost on some pallet somewhere in some warehouse and who knows if they will find it. None of it matters. It’s just me and my mom and my dad and Aaron and I’m walking ahead of the group with a little skip in my step, because I know what’s coming and it’s the ladder that I’ve dreamed about so many times since I was 13 because it was so big, and I’ve wondered about it so many times since. Is it still as big as I remember it? We round the corner and there it is… the ladder. But this time, there are a lot of people around… and a lot of people who are having a hard time making it up and down the ladder, because, wouldn’t you know it… it is steep. One person is really struggling to make it down, so I walk up to try and help them — but their tractionless shoes slip on the loose, rocky terrain and they opt to butt-slide down the slope next to the ladder. I look at my parents… my dad is now in his 70s. Is this nuts to take my parents up this ladder? I don’t say it out loud.
We start climbing. I grab the rounded ladder rungs and start pulling myself up the ladder. The angle is gentle at first, but close to the top, the ladder is nearly vertical. The rungs are smooth and slippery from years and years of use, so I hold onto the thick metal cable that holds the rungs together. The ladder is secure, but it isn’t stiff — it’s flexible, so it bounces and moves as you walk on it. I can feel it start to bobble as my mom hops on near the bottom of the ladder and starts her climb to the top.
Mercifully, the climb up the ladder is uneventful. My parents are agile and adept at being dragged on adventures with me, and they navigate the ladder and the exposed ledges beyond the ladder with ease. My heartbeat quickens as we approach the famed ‘Notch’. And then, suddenly, we are there. The White River Valley extends endlessly in every single direction. The view feels even bigger than I remembered it.
We don’t have any photos of our 1994 hike of the Notch Trail. In fact, the only photos that I have of our family in the Badlands are the few that I’ve shared in this post. When we got home from our 5 weeks of adventuring in 1994, my dad accidentally washed his pants with the rolls of film from our trip in his pocket. The still images from our family’s ‘trip of a lifetime’ … were instantly erased. Since smartphones didn’t exist, we don’t have any videos either. As much as I would love to see a photo of that day on the Notch Trail… a part of me is glad that we don’t have the photos. Do you need proof to show that you’ve been somewhere? Do you need a photograph to say my feet stood in this spot? Or do you just need to know? Does the earth itself hold those memories? And, if so, why have we lost the ability to trust that?
One of my favorite songs to listen to and to dance to is a song called Overthinker, by INZO. You can listen (and dance) to the song here:
The song features some of the words of Alan Watts, a philosophical writer and ‘entertainer’ of sorts. The lyrics have always spoken to me because, particularly in an age where nobody seems to be able to go more than 3 minutes without checking their cell phones, his words pierce the heart with a truth that most people don’t want to hear:
Most of us would have rather money than tangible wealth And a great occasion is somehow spoiled for us unless photographed And to read about it the next day in the newspaper Is oddly more fun for us than the original event This is a disaster For as a result of confusing the real world of nature with mere signs We are destroying nature We are so tied up in our minds that we've lost our senses Time to wake up
I can’t hold a photograph of myself at the Notch Trail in 1994, and I don’t need to. I don’t need proof that I’ve been to a place, because that place is in me. It is in all of the times that I have thought of that Notch and imagined the wind blowing through my hair as a small, 13 year old girl who hadn’t yet been told that her adventures weren’t realistic or possible. Maybe a photo would have lied to me… maybe it would have said, “You stood here… and you took a photo on a sunny day… and that was it.” My memory doesn’t tell me that. My memory and my heart tell me something so much more — something than no photo could capture. My memory reminds me that the sun hit my face that day and that I felt a sense of something bigger than who I was, but something I couldn’t speak about because I didn’t understand it. Two weeks ago, I felt the same thing. I laid down in the Notch and I closed my eyes, and I let everything drift away — my business, my job, my ‘responsibilities’, my story… all of it… whisked away into the valley below with sandstone dust and the footprints of everybody who had ever visited that Notch and felt the same thing.
A lot has changed since that first visit to The Notch, but the important things haven’t changed. My favorite quote from A Course in Miracles is this:
“Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.”
I am not a religious person. I was raised Catholic, but never understood the ‘Santa Claus’ like figure of a glowing ‘man’ named God sitting on a cloud who was watching everything that I did. It has only been in the past 10 years of my life that I’ve developed a new, clearer picture of what the word God actually means. I still don’t quite understand all of it — and probably never will — but I do know that when I’m sitting in nature, I can feel it. I can feel that the things that don’t matter drift away… replaced by the things that do. I can feel the peace that exists below the surface. I can close my eyes and I can sense a loving energy that connects all of us. I can understand why a 13 year old girl would so desperately have wanted to tie herself to a tree, never to return to a world that told her she didn’t belong there and that she needed to be different than how she was.
The places we visit become a part of who we are. Just as we leave our gentle footprints on the ground — invisible reminders that whisper, ‘I exist and I was here’ … so too, those places leave their own footprints in our hearts. The film of our lives is rich and beautiful and sad and joyful and confusing… there are images we want to see on that film, and images that we do not want to see. We can’t hold them in our hands like a paper photograph, but we do hold them. Someday, those images will wash away too… and we have to trust that what will be left in their place is the one real thing that does exist… love.
Friends, thank you so much for being here and for taking the time to read my words and to support my Kula Diaries project. I hope that you can find a small moment today to close your eyes and sense who you are — far beyond the thoughts and the images and the story. You are something truly special, and I am so grateful that you are here and that we have the opportunity to share a small slice of life together. Wherever and however you are right now - have a beautiful week.
Love,
Anastasia
P.S. Can you believe that this is my 19th weekly post? Phew!! Thanks for being here! If you are new - make sure to scroll at the way back to the beginning to read or listen to all of them.
P.S.S. If you have any questions, comments or just want to share something fun with me, you can do that using the Kula Diaries Google Form here… submissions are anonymous, so if you’d like a response, please include your e-mail address.
30 years before your first trip my family headed West from Pennsylvania in a VW bus with a tent and a Coleman stove. First memorable stop...the Badlands! That summer we went on to Yellowstone, Glacier, the Tetons, and beyond. I was 6 years old and knew that someday I’d live in the West. Fifteen years later I moved to Oregon.
What fun to see your parents with you at the top of the ladder. So cool that you returned.
Thanks for sharing.
I love that we can all circle back to a place/event/music or even a work of art and feel it and appreciate it again and again. Returning to hike the Notch Trail with you after 29 years was even more fun than I remembered!