Day one. Early morning. People are bustling out of the gear issue room laden with insulated pants, puffy jackets, hiking poles, and 90 liter backpacks. I spot one inexperienced expedition mate dragging his sleeping bag through the grass, which, judging by the dark spot on the bag’s underside, is covered in dew. Back in the bay, our new paraphernalia litters the ground, as if the rapture had occurred amidst a game of Twister. I crave organization.
Nadine- one of our three instructors – probably felt the same way and announced that it was now time we learned how to pack our backpacks. My expectations were shattered as she proceeded to stuff everything – clothes, group gear, food packed in plastic ration bags – indiscriminately into the backpack hole. I felt most out of my comfort zone when she tossed brownie mix on top of her insulated pants. In the tent that night, I wrote this in my journal:
‘Today, I squelched the obsessively organized part of myself and found, in its place, a strong desire for truth. Starting right now. I admit that Nadine is totally right.’
From that moment on, I was no longer a frontcountry boy. I became a mountaineer.
The trajectory set on that first day would come to define the entire expedition. During the next four weeks, I would not only embark on a journey over crevasse-riddled ice fields, up steep mountain crags, and through dense tundra undergrowth, I would also embark on a journey towards discipline and decisiveness, empathy and communication, big-picture thinking and constant vigilance. I would learn to become comfortable in discomfort and find joy in the coldest of mornings. And I would learn to cherish and venerate the awesome beauty of creation: Landscapes straight out of Frozen, complete with icicles and swirling snow flurries. Electric blue creeks rushing through channels of sparkling ice. Endless crevasses cut deep into the glacier’s core, lethal and wonderful.
There was something very paleolithic about wandering around in a world of snow and wind, packing up camp everyday and migrating to new territory. As provisional nomads, it was only fitting then that we slipped back into the tradition our caveman ancestors established millennia ago: storytelling.
As we shovelled snow blocks, Nadine told me about her Harvard days, about moving to Chile to work with the founders of Patagonia and North Face, how she worked with the government to establish a new national park and helped found a wilderness school for the kids in her village. Curled up inside an igloo, I talked to Asher Uno about being Jewish. He told me about when he was nine and invented the Menurkey – a turkey menorah themed appropriately for the upcoming Hanukkah-during-Thanksgiving anomaly. After the New York times and an impressive handful of other publications printed stories about the Bronx elementary schooler’s novel cultural insights, the White House caught on and invited Asher to attend its annual Hanukkah party. There is a picture of Barack Obama holding a Menurkey. Noshing on backcountry calzones after a long day on rope teams, I talked Kurt Vonnegut, philosophical audiobooks, and early bedtimes with Mac, who otherwise epitomized the incongruous phrases ‘ski-bum lifestyle’, ‘mining town’, and ‘guitar factory’. Snowshoeing through a vast, white valley, Pedro talked about his decision not to become an Olympic kayaker, but to start mountaineering instead. The climbing skills he learned in the process would go on to propel him up the Eiffel Tower for a painting job and repel him into Notre Dame after it was burned to extract valuable works of art.
And so, during a month void of screens and expectations and other social embellishments, fourteen mountaineers discovered each other’s stories, and cherished the human connection that storytelling precipitated. Simultaneously, we also surrendered some of the frontcountry’s stressors that usually barred us from that very same connection: existential anxiety, confusion about identity, worries about what happens next. In fact, Maslow’s hierarchy shrunk considerably. Forget about esteem and self-actualization, if we made it to the end of the day warm, unbruised, full, hydrated, and part of an intact social unit, we won. Many times, I was reminded of Thoreau’s words: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to confront only the essential facts of life”. On the first morning back in civilization, I would go on to corroborate the wise man’s proverb with a sophisticated reflection of my own:
‘It’s 6:00 in the morning. Ten squares of toilet paper line the toilet seat below me. My poop will soon disappear forever into the plumbing and I’ll go wash my hands under hot water and wipe my hands thoroughly on a pair of paper towels. Arriving back from the wilderness, I am immediately stricken by the wasteful traditions of the front country, and I am convinced that it’s totally unnecessary. I ask myself: What do I really need? What are the essential facts of my life? Toilet paper, toilets, towels, running water? No. My phone? Certainly not.’
Later that day, we said goodbye. After performing one last cinnamon roll hug – one of the most sophisticated symbols of endearment to date – we reluctantly climbed into the bus, bound for the airport. We must have been looking pretty sad because Jim, the bus driver, reminded us that it wasn’t his fault we had to leave, and that he was only doing his job. We remembered and did not express our emotions violently. As the eleven members of AKM1 wound one last time through the Alaskan wilderness, I watched the mountains, the trees, ,and the rivers whisk by, and I thought about all the other goodbyes I’d said that year. I remember each of them vividly: waving to Huck and Hanalei in the Whittle’s front garden; climbing into a bus in Londonderry, clutching Cathie’s farewell letter; staying in the stop-over hotel in Ethiopia with Emmaus and Meimei; dragging my backpack up the ramp in Djibouti’s disorderly airport; hugging Steve on his motorbike outside of the San Gil bus station. Of them all, this one feels most comparable to saying goodbye to the group I climbed Kilimanjaro with in Tanzania. It feels so permanent. Sure, I may see Genieveve or Perrin or Mac again, and I’ll likely skate with Knox sometime. But AKM1 is extinct forever. Marcus, Erin, Nadine, Cole, Asher Uno, Mac, Mike, Pedro, Perrin, Knox, Genevieve, Isabel, Sarah, and I will never again be all together. But maybe that’s part of what makes the experience so special. Fourteen different people converged in a certain place at a certain time for an experience that was special because the circumstances were totally unique. Maybe that’s why goodbyes are so powerful and memorable in the first place.