The quote that serves as the title for today’s post is from Abraham Verghese, best selling author of Cutting for Stone and The Covenant of Water, works of fiction about life in Ethiopia, where the author lived as a child. I came upon the quote when I was trying to learn more about him and found an interview in which the author was asked about the source for his writing. The question surprised me. Of course he writes about Ethiopia and for the same reason that I write about hiking. How could I write about anything else? It is my destiny.
This idea started me thinking about what my life would have been like if I had not grown up in western Washington, going for camping trips in the summer with my family, discovering mountain trails when quite young, and watching my mother stir fresh huckleberries into syrup over a campfire. These things were normal to me. I suppose I have taken them for granted over the years. But I wonder. . .
If perhaps I had been born in New York City, I doubt very much that my father would have caught fresh trout in the Hudson River. I cannot envision my mother baking biscuits in a reflector oven by a campfire in Central Park. And what if I had looked out my bedroom window and seen skyscrapers instead of Mt. Rainier?
I ask myself these questions, but I am completely unable to come up with answers. It is like asking who I would be if I were not me. These experiences, these places, are more than just happy memories for me; they are who I am.
I was a little girl who went on nature walks with my mother by glacier fed rivers. I was a teenage girl carrying a heavy backpack around Mt. Rainier. I was a young woman trying to figure out life on my first solo treks into the wilderness. I am an old woman lightening my load so that I can make it over that mountain pass. And I do.
The Sufis tell a story about the Mullah, a figure sometimes described as a kind of trickster. He once spent the night in a crowded dormitory and feared that he might awaken during the night and be unable to find his way back to his own bed, so he tied a string around one of the bedposts. During the night the man in the next bed decided to play a trick on the Mullah and moved the string to his own bed. When the Mullah awakened the next morning and saw the string on his neighbor’s bed, he had this question for the universe: “I can see by the string on your bed that you are me. Who then am I?”
Fortunately this is a question I can answer with ease. I am the woman with her backpack leaning against the wall in the living room. I am a woman who hikes. This is who I am and who I have always been. This is my destiny.
The Solitude Trail 