Tag: camping

On Roles and Poses

By Catherine DiMercurio

A scene from Wes Anderson’s new film, Asteroid City, keeps playing in my head. In it, actor Jason Schwartzman plays actor Jones Hall, who is playing the role of Augie Steenbeck in a play called “Asteroid City.” Jones breaks out of his role as Augie to tell the play’s director, Schubert Green, played by Adrien Brody, “I still don’t understand the play!” Jones expresses his angst, asking “Am I doing it right?” Schubert tells Jones that it doesn’t matter. “Just keep telling the story,” the director insists.

The film makes use of a multilayered frame narrative. It opens with a scene from a 1950s television special about a playwright (Conrad Earp, played by Ed Norton) and his play, “Asteroid City.” Throughout the film, the actors are not just playing their role in Wes Anderson’s film; they are playing their role as the actors in the play. As actors in they play, they periodically step out of their roles and interact act with one another (as characters in Wes Anderson’s film). Get it? All of that can be a little hard to follow, but it speaks to something essential about the ways we enact multiple roles in our lives, how interconnected those roles are, and how often we find ourselves sitting with that question: am I doing it right? Anderson’s film and his characters are as self-reflexive as we are.

The director’s answer—It doesn’t matter, just keep telling the story—sticks with me, both as an angsty human with a hazy understanding of her own role in this world and as a writer with a similarly foggy grasp of how to approach that role.  

When I was in my twenties and just getting started on my how-to-be-a-writer journey, I had joined a local writers’ group in the town in Illinois we’d just moved to. My then-husband had accepted an engineering position at an automotive plant. The Michigan-based company he worked for often had its contract engineers do a stint out of state for a couple of years before being hired in directly. This was the path we were on. We knew the post was temporary, which made everything feel temporary. There was no sense in putting down roots since we knew we’d be headed home before too long. I knew no one, and had begun freelancing, so I didn’t have a workplace to meet people. So, I joined a writing group. They were an eclectic mix of people. They had an annual gala where everyone read from their work. I was working on a novel at the time. I had never read my work in front of people before, and I was terrified. Yet, I really wanted to belong, to behave as a writer would, so I promised myself I would do it.

At around the same time, my husband and I had also decided to take a yoga class together, a first for both of us, at the local YMCA. Our instructor used to tell us to “relax into the pose.” I clutched this notion like a life preserver as I approached the podium the evening of the writers’ gala. I told myself to relax into the pose of writer. It helped, somehow.

I think of that now because the phrase, which has often returned to me at various points in my life, recalls the themes of Anderson’s film, and reminds me of all the ways we struggle in our various “poses” or “roles.” We ask ourselves, am I doing this right? Because often, it doesn’t feel as though we are. Am I being a good parent, a good friend. Is this the kind of person I want to be. What kind of partner am I. What kind of artist. What kind of me. Sometimes it feels wrong, or strained, or unfamiliar, to be who we are or where we are, or we find ourselves in roles we never expected to be in.

And sometimes we have the opportunity to isolate ourselves from our roles. I recently returned from a solo camping trip. In the woods, setting up my tent, or out on a hike or kayaking, it was impossible to avoid memories of past trips, to see myself through the lens of my various roles. Camping was something the kids and I always used to do together, so I thought of what it was like to be a parent on such a trip. I also thought of a former role, that of “wife,” because I didn’t start camping until I married. After the split, the kids and I continued to take a camping trip every summer.

But now, out there on my own, flooded with memories as I was, I also experienced a whittling away. The memories came and went, leaving me focused on the tasks of camping: gathering firewood and kindling, pumping water from the hand pump, guarding against rain, cooking, and cleaning up. And there was quiet and solitude. I had time to decide based on my own whim what I wanted to do next. Read for hours? Go to the beach? Haul the kayak down to the water for a paddle? Take a hike along the ridge that looked out over the lake? There were a number of instances where I was keenly aware that it was just me, as me, out there.  The absence of responsibility to anything but my own needs was essentially an absence of roles. And in that space, I found that my brain was able to disconnect from the perpetual figuring it out that it is always compelled to do, the spider web of concerns and ideas and emotions I feel daily as a home owner, an employee, a potter, a writer, a mom of on-their-own kids, a mom-guardian-friend to my dog, a friend, a freelancer, a sister, a daughter.

I love my roles. They, and the absence of them, make me who I am. I exist both in relation to the people (and dog!) and activities in my life as much as I exist in relation to no one. I think these two modes of being are in dialog with one another, under the surface, in ways we don’t comprehend or have an awareness of. And maybe what I have been trying to do my whole life is to connect with that awareness, that unity that hums beneath it all. Sometimes there is a sense of fracture, the feeling that we are broken apart into pieces, fragments of ourselves. There’s an undercurrent of anxiety or urgency at times, one that is hard to put a finger on, where things feel off, misaligned. Sometimes it seems that our various roles are disparate, independent identities but they are all yoked to the core of who we are, and in that way, are connected to each other. Though, we live in a world where it is not always encouraged or advantageous to bring our whole selves into everything we do, so the prickly sense of fragmentation persists.

After all the afters—after the kids moved out, after I moved out of my old house, after my last breakup, etc.—there were moments I experienced a specific kind of hollowness. The roles I’d been playing to that moment all needed to be redefined, reshaped. But, I wasn’t entirely clear how to do it. I tried to figure out if the roles themselves—understanding them, inhabiting them—were supposed to be my purpose, or, what was the game plan, what did unity and alignment feel like now?

Consequently, I often ask myself am I doing this right? Is this how it is supposed to be? Is this how you do it? Is this how I do it? To see Jason Schwartzman’s character in Asteroid City asking the same questions was piercing, enlightening, and a relief.  I always feel as though I’m trying figure IT out. My role. Life in general. The nature of purpose and being and doing. Trying to understand it all feels at once vital and futile, as if, at birth I was assigned a quest that it was not humanly possible to complete. I do not remember a time when I did not have a sense of wonder and confusion about the nature of self, in all its fracture and unity. Trying to wrap my head around what I was and what I was doing here is in fact one of my earliest memories. I don’t think I’m supposed to stop doing that. I’ve realized lately that I don’t want to stop doing that, that I don’t need to. For some time, I wondered if, in the ceasing of that effort, some sort of peace or perpetual happiness waited. Maybe it does, but to get there I have to stop being who I am, and if that is the path, it is not one I am ready to be on.

At the same time, doing all that gets exhausting. It often doesn’t feel like I’m relaxing into anything. Which is why I knew I needed the break that camping provided. Where whim was the guiding force, where all of the talking and wondering and chatter in my brain quieted down. I am getting more in tune with how that balance works for me, between the busyness of figuring out how all the roles exist and talk to one another, and the quiet, blank-slate absence of roles I know I can find when I need to.

I don’t want to be any other way than how I am, when I think about it. Maybe I have more figured out than I think I do, maybe we all do, and the issue we deal with is that this world is loud and full of messages that compete and contradict and confuse. It is full Stuff to Deal With. Jobs that pay the bills but also sap our energy, things that go wrong, that fail in our houses and cars and bodies and hearts.  It is so easy to get shaken up, shaken off course, shaken to the bone. Of course we’re going to wonder if this is how it is supposed to be and if we’re doing it right. How could we not wonder that?

Maybe the secret is not to eliminate the questions and the angst, but to stop resisting it. We need to make room for it, get comfortable with it. Relax into it. I think in the end, that’s what was so freeing and elating about the director’s response to Jones’s question in Anderson’s film. It doesn’t matter. Just keep telling the story. It was permission. As if someone gave me, gave us all, permission to not have the answer. We can keep trying to figure it all out, if we feel compelled to, if we like it, if that’s the way our brains work, but we are allowed to not find the answer; there is no failure in not coming up with a tidy explanation or an essay on synthesis. We’re allowed to just keep telling the story. It’s our story after all. We can tell it any way we like.

Love, Cath

A Cross-Country Road Trip with Teens, Part Two: Camping in California

By Catherine DiMercurio

After driving for four days, we had finally landed at our final destination: Crescent City, California, and the nearby Del Norte State Park Mill Creek Campground. Once we had breathed in the ocean for a while, we decided we had better go set up camp. This was, after all, our annual camping vacation. We had set up our small, easy tent twice on the way out instead of getting a hotel room. But now that we were settling in for the week, it was time to pull out the roomier tent, our home away from home for the next five nights.

The campground was located south of Crescent City, up a winding, steeply climbing road about two and a half miles off the 101. I had read that it isn’t a drive you want to make to and from camp too many times a day, and I agreed, but this distance and height did leave us far from any traffic noises. It was still and quiet within the park, aside from the noises of other campers, and the early morning squawking of crows.

Setting Up Camp, Contemplation, and Coziness

Setting up camp is a pleasure after a long drive, as long as you aren’t setting up when people are hungry or it’s dark or raining. We had staved off hunger with snacks, and the sun was bright. The kids took a walk to purchase wood for the campfire while I finished loading the tent with our sleeping gear and duffel bags. Inside the empty tent, I had one of those moments, those aching pangs, when you see all so many memories of the past jumbled together. I think this must be a fairly common occurrence for parents of teens. I suddenly recalled camping when the children were little, when our party numbered four instead of three. I took a deep breath, watched a few of the memories as if they were a slideshow, and decided to put them away. I wonder, in the aftermath of moments like these, how other people navigate these twists and turns of memory and the churn of emotions that accompany them. I wonder how others regard the past and its often discordant juxtaposition with the present.

We sat around the campfire that night. Because of the risk posed by bears, we had been instructed to keep our campsite “crumb clean.” Normally, camping for us includes a lot of campfire cooking. Here though, we had to be extremely careful with food preparation and clean up, and having traveled so far, it had been inconvenient to travel with perishables. So we had purchased a lot of instant meals. We warmed up some water over the fire and gobbled up soups and noodles. The night was chilly and the fire and warm meal gave us a heightened sense of coziness. There are few things more wonderful in this world than sitting around a campfire with your kids and enjoying a heightened sense of coziness, especially when you’ve journeyed far from home and are finally at your destination and beginning the next part of your adventure.

Exploration, Relaxation, Laughter, Listening

In the days that unfolded, we explored. One day, it was at the sandy beach, where we brought books and snacks but mostly just played with the ocean. Another, it was on a nine-mile hike through redwoods. We also explored tide pools and little used book stores in town, and the campground. We played games and read our books and laughed.

Seeing the redwoods and the Pacific Ocean had been the goals of trip, and they did not disappoint. Photographs cannot prepare you for the redwoods. Our first glimpse of them had been driving south from Oregon, as the highway wound through Jedidiah Smith State Park, home to some of the most stunning old growth groves. Our own campground was formerly a heavily logged area. The grounds were fully of massive stumps and secondary growth redwoods—not as old, and not as big. Living here for a week, sleeping among new giants and the remains of their fallen ancestors, one cannot help but think of what we’ve done in the name of “progress.” One can also not avoid thinking of the wild, walking and talking trees and tree spirits—the Ents of Middle Earth, the Dryads of Narnia. Being filled to the brim with wonder is entirely unavoidable. Our hike, on a long trail through old-growth redwoods, was nothing short of magnificent. I’d been nervous about navigating the trail, knowing that often, things are not well marked. There were some steep portions, but nothing too technical, and though our map deviated from what we experienced, we stayed on course. The route culminated in Stout Grove, a stand of particularly enormous—and, as the name implies, girthy—redwoods. Side note: trust your ranger. When he recommends one trail for its peace and beauty over another more crowded trail, take his advice.

And the ocean. To spend most of a day, sitting and listening to the churn and crash, to feel the wet sand on your bare feet, daring the next wave to reach you, to crouch among shells and seaweed and driftwood—these are among the most soothing and joyful experiences I’ve shared with my kids.

We weren’t ready to leave. We weren’t ready for the drive home. We avoided thinking about it for as long as possible.

Reconciliations and Compensations

There were several occasions on this trip where the past demanded to be attended to, a crying baby waiting to be soothed. Maybe that’s why I can’t simply ignore memories or griefs of the past when they bubble up. I’m not one to let babies cry it out. While I have a fairly high tolerance for my own physical pain, when something in me from the past is crying out, I have to stop and look and see what’s going on. It’s possible that it is easier to have more compassion for our past selves than for the present-day versions of ourselves. That’s not really fair, is it? Sometimes, the look back brought me happiness. Other times, it forced a contemplation, a reckoning of sorts between the way I thought things would be and the way things are.

Sometimes such disharmony sets our teeth on edge. But maybe, if we listen closely, we can hear a soft melody underneath. Perhaps the shock of the discontinuities we experience keeps us from recognizing the compensations afforded us. For me, despite the losses and the griefs, I have truly and wonderfully close relationships with my son and my daughter, and I see how connected they are to each other. That is a gift, a balm, but sometimes such gifts seem hidden from us when we are so busy thinking of how different life is from how we expected it would be. Hence, the drive toward conscious noticing. The practice is more easily cultivated, I found, away from the loud hum of everyday life. The quieter moments and moods of vacation—sitting in front of the ocean, or softly winding through redwoods—inspire introspection, and hidden things reveal themselves more readily when our minds are calmer. Whispered melodies are easier to hear.

On our last morning we rose before dawn, having packed up most of our gear the night before, I thought of all the adventure stories the three of us liked to read, and how they always say things like “We’ll leave at first light,” and I tried to think of the way home as just the next part of the adventure, rather than an ending.

Love, Cath