Methods of Survival
a million ways to return
Hello folks,
Last time I wrote to you, I was in Anchorage, Alaska, hours from embarking upon a monthlong expedition into the backcountry. I write to you now, on the other side of adventure, from a garden at a cafe in my home of Durham, North Carolina, where the heat index is set to break triple digits this week. It has been two weeks since I arrived back home and still I am struggling to reconcile what feels now to be a newfound split in my life: who I was before these mountains and who I am now, after.
I write often in this newsletter of home—seeking it out, finding it, leaving it, returning again. I have called many places home—I am lucky to have had opportunities to live in over six countries, at least for short periods of time—but the South—unexpectedly, beautifully, resentfully—has always been my longest home, the place where my familial roots lie. I glimpse the South in all the places I roam: in the gentle sway of pine trees, in the press of the burning sun on a hot day, in the slope of a mountaintop bursting green with color. Alaska is no different; I felt, many days, as if I was there most to survive, to push through, to accomplish the hard thing at all costs. I knew the experience would change me, but in the thick of it, I did not know how, or why, or at what cost. There is a sense of clarity I always feel when I am backpacking, when my daily tasks shrink down to feeding myself, choosing a campsite, getting from point A to point B. My mind is simplified in this state, able to focus on the tasks at hand and reserve extraneous energy to put it towards what matters. In my month in Alaska, I hiked nearly 100 miles off-trail through the brush, carried 60+ pounds on my back, read over 1,500 pages of new books, debated politics and philosophy with my trailmates, spent countless hours in leadership and wilderness first aid classes, crossed some rivers, climbed a peak, got snowed on, trekked through mountain passes, ran out of food (twice), cried at the beauty of a landscape I had never seen anything like. It was one of the hardest physical experiences of my life. It was beautiful.
In the months leading up to my Alaska trip, T and I binge watched old seasons of Survivor, mostly because we love Survivor but in my brain, I told myself it was half preparation for this trip. I signed up to go to Alaska on a whim, following a dream I’d had since I was a teenager and defending Chris McCandless and Into the Wild in AP English class. I quit my job five days before leaving for Alaska and T moved all our things into our new house while I was gone. I funded the trip through grant money and airline mileage points. I did one of the things I have been best at in my life: leaving everything behind. There is nothing more thrilling to me than the wide span of an open horizon, the new world stretching out before me. I love airports. I love long drives. I love trains. I love the feeling of leaving, of exiting willfully from the world. I say this with a certain amount of shame, because leaving is often messy, difficult, full of hurt. It is so much easier to be the one who leaves than the one who is left behind. But I can’t help it; I have been chasing this rush for years.
Becoming a scholar of the South—and in doing so, investigating my own complicated relationship to home and place—has taught me much about leaving. More than anything, it has taught me how to come back. Curving around my left wrist is a tattooed bracelet made up of pine needles, which I got for my 25th birthday and which serves as a reminder to me to be like the pines: rooted but in flux, strong and stable even while moving in the wind. From the South, I have learned how to leave with grace, my namesake (I have gone by my middle name, Spencer, since I was a child). I have learned how to root deeply and with purpose and I have learned that being rooted feels different than being stuck. When I was younger, running away at will, collapsing relationships in my wake, I was so afraid that calling a place home would mean getting stuck in it. In particular, in returning to places that had once been former homes, I worried that doing so would make it feel like my ability to make a choice about my home would be removed. I worried about home not being a place that others would find exciting, that in order to be an artist I had to live in a city that the art world respected. I wasted so much time and so much energy avoiding home, neglecting it, turning away from it at every moment. I was surviving, but I was not living. I was offering the bare minimum of myself to the world and in turn, I often failed to feel I was a part of the world at all.
Two years ago, in an assignment in my first grad school course, I was asked to write a poem in the style of George Ella Lyon. Here is an excerpt:
I too know the endless winter, the damp and the dark. I'm from hedging bets and losing minds, from memory slipping away like water. I am from all the women who came before me, who did this alone, and who were beautiful, even then, even now. I'm all grit and callus; I was taught to be tough if I wanted to survive this. I'm from shipwheels and Cadillacs, made and then made again in an airplane, over an ocean, in the middle of the lake. I'm from words you won't hear outside of this place and an accent I thought I had to lose to make it there. I suwannee, I swear, I have never known where to call home. I've been born in every place I ever lived.
Three weeks ago, I dove headfirst into an ice-covered lake tucked behind a rocky mountain in the Southern Talkeetnas. The water was so cold it took my breath away and still I dunked my head beneath the surface. I emerged onto the shore, running barefoot in my underwear, my mouth wide with laughter. My legs were bleeding from where the ice had sliced me open, spots that now pucker red with scar tissue. The sun was bright overhead and the day was warm, late spring giving way to early summer. I had never felt so alive. I had five more days left in the Alaskan backcountry. I was hungry and bruised and cold and I was beyond survival. I was alive. Home now, in my living room, on the trail, sitting on the shower floor, I hold to that feeling, bringing it back with me.
Thanks all for bearing with our hiatus while I went upon aforementioned adventure. It’s good to be back. Please bear with me as I work through my email inbox and get back into regular programming with this newsletter. There’s a few announcements heading your way in the near future, so stay tuned.
Below, some photos from the Southern Talkeetna mountains, where I was very lucky to spend the month of June living and exploring.
