“When you grow up, your heart dies.
Who cares?I care.”
Continually, people think that I must be naive, my head too stuffed full of rose-colored clouds to really understand the threats I face in adventuring.
“Surely, she doesn’t know what she’s getting herself into,” is the prevailing sentiment.
Rarely, is this voiced aloud.
Usually it shows itself in a quirked brow, a dismissive, conspiratorial laugh. “Gin’s a joke,” whispered what they thought was out of earshot.
I don’t mind this as much when it’s thought about my general preparedness. Who should believe in the success of a quiet, awkward, overweight, license-less 21 year old woman with social anxiety and two duck feet (splayed “halfway to a heart” as I like to describe them when I’m feeling cheeky)? A woman who looks young enough to be a runaway, always flying by the seat of her pants? Who says she’s going to cross continents?
The answer is no one.
No one believes in me, aside from myself, and that is alright.
I don’t care if people doubt my success. What bothers me is when people convince themselves that in order to embark on such adventures, I must be oblivious to the danger.
It’s frustrating to face a wolf headlong, day in and day out, only to have others give me a cursory glance from their armchairs and wonder,
does she even see it at all?
2016, Age 16
As a teenager, fear has a vicious hold on me, its fangs sinking in deep, but with one caveat: it only bites at night. A nocturnal companion, primordial and perverse.
The moment darkness overtakes the sky, like black blood setting into a bruise, my demeanor shifts.
When I go to walk my dog for the night, I swing open my front door with all the stoicism of a woman answering the knock of the grim reaper. When I’m not immediately snatched by a masked assailant, I continue outside with bated breath, my head on a swivel. I avoid blind corners, warily eyeing every bush big enough to conceal an attacker because, hell, they’re all guilty until proven innocent. Rarely, I step more than a few feet away from my family’s apartment before turning tail and fleeing back inside the second my dog pees.
Once inside, I lock the front door and make sure the window shades are drawn. Except — wait — did I lock the doors after all? Time to double check. Once in my bedroom, I peek inside my closet to make sure no eyes are glinting back at me. Same goes for under the bed. Before, I’ve looked outside my window to see how far the fall would be if I had to jump, but that’s something I only need to do once. So, tonight, I’m onto the final frontier: getting into bed itself.
My light switch is like a starting pistol. When it turns off and I’m pitched into darkness, my brain goes, “okay, Gin, time to think of the creepiest possible thing that could lurch from the depths and grab you NOW AAAHHH” and I explode forward in a one-woman, adrenaline-fueled relay that isn’t won until my feet are shoved under the covers.
At least that’s what I used to do.
Then one day I discovered that I could turn my iPhone’s flashlight ON and calmly carry it with me to bed, eliminating the urge to run for my life. (This was a revolutionary change to my nightly ritual, believe me. Phew!)
Now all is well.
Unless I jolt awake from a nightmare and see that my bedroom door is still open, staring at me. The nothingness of such a gaping black hole boring into my head, screaming at me without words, it’s intentions grisly and bare.
Anything could come from that door.
So, every night, I make sure it is shut and locked, too.
—-
I don’t know why I was this way. Maybe it’s like getting the jitters after drinking coffee, a side effect of downing too many true crime shows in middle school, as if they were caffeine boosters. (You know how revved up you can get after watching a horror movie? Same MO.) Or maybe it was from growing up in a household full of women no stronger than I, a single mom and two sister, which felt like standing on a glass bridge, the illusion of danger making it harder to cross.
2019, Age 19
In November, in the great basin desert, the sun slips away so early in the evening. The air is suddenly stripped of its warmth, color leeched from the surrounding sagebrush. The junipers and piñon pines are no longer trees but phantom creatures with spindly, gnarled limbs snaking out to grab me. Each passing shadow is a veiled threat and, each unfamiliar sound, a fast approaching one. Headlights are a blinding burst, there and gone. The world is shuttered. Still. It’s breath gone faint.
And, look, there I am, … older now. 19. Nearly out of my teens. I’m walking down RT. 50 in a dash of desperation, cursing myself for not having the foresight to wake up earlier.
Impassable snow is threatening to fall in the Sierras weekly, and I’m still routinely refusing to roll out of my tent until 10 a.m. Why am I like this? is right. I feel like I am always running out of time, making up for stolen moments.
Every time a car closes in, I switch off my headlamp and veer a few feet off the road, blending in with the landscape until they whoooosh by. I pray they don’t see me. I pray they don’t stop.
Who would want to bother a masked stranger pushing a baby stroller in the desert after dark? I try to reassure myself. I’m a nameless, faceless figure, so unnervingly out of place, like a doll discarded in the woods. To many passersby, I am the scariest thing out here.
Except it’s not the people who are seeing me for the first time in the crux of their headlights that I’m so worried about. It’s the ones who would have seen me earlier in the day to know I’m a single woman out walking, alone, and thought to come back that I am worried about.
When the coast is clear to reclaim the tarmac, I do. I push on, my balaclava masking my fear, and my identity. It’s my surest safety blanket out here, covering the entirety of my face, save for my eyes, in a swath of fleece.
In a space so vast and empty, my mind is my own, and it dances between two painful truths:
If my nighttime self had to be the one to take those first steps out of my bedroom all those months ago, I never would have made it past the door.
And yet, it was my nighttime self who first envisioned walking across America.
It was the stillness and sanctuary of a world gone quiet, stripped of surface distractions, that gave me the chance to dive into my mind, to be honest in my vulnerability, and hear what my soul had to say. It was the darkness that plunged me further into my imagination than ever before, that allowed me to lose myself in a wild, wondrous dream. It wasn’t until I was present in my fear that I could see how to overcome it, by finding something more important than it.
It was the night that revealed me to myself.
On the road after dark, my fear never disappears. An ever-present specter, it waits in the wings, no sign of retreating. And if it could speak it would say, Run, and my rabbit heart would respond, Chase me, but instead, tonight, I think And what if I don’t? Because if its eyes were mirrors, they would show that I would only be running from myself. And what a sad thing that would be.
As the hours stretch on, traffic peters out on RT. 50. The highway becomes an open, beckoning expanse, like a hand stretching out to meet mine, to draw me forward, through a door that never closes. That never locks.
When a sudden rush of light appears behind me, I whip around, expecting to see a car barring down on me, only … it’s not that.
It’s the moon softly rising above the tree line.
In its company, my nerves unspool. The little things begin to stand out. Jets painting wispy white clouds in the sky. Cows grazing among the sagebrush. Cows! In all their glory.
The cold air brushes against my face.
My adrenaline races, like a kid through a field.
I see the city of Fallon, NV, sparkling like stars scattered on the horizon floor, despite being 28 miles away. Holy smokes!
My chest stirs. I laugh.
I am alive.
This blog post is unfinished. Only a third of it is published as of 04/20/22. It is an experiment on writing. Very flowery and disjointed. A smattering of stories about my life. A reflection.
The title is tied to this song.