Outdoor Retailer - Winter 2020 - 69

And then I would run down the cellar stairs again to get something
for my mother, or go back to playing the piano or reading my book as I
waited for her next call.
All the adults in my huge extended family tried their best to keep me
safe. They meant well. I always believed that. But many of them had
come from the old country in search of security, and they'd all lived
through war and the Great Depression. Fear reigned in their lives.
Instead of, "Try it and find out," their advice all smacked of caution:
Watch out! Don't go too far (in the ocean)! Don't go there-there are
snakes! Girls shouldn't do that. It's too dangerous! They didn't stop me
from applying for the study-abroad program in college, but only because they knew I wouldn't qualify. But I did.
I was 19 when I flew for the first time, to France for my junior year of
college. I'd never been away from home alone. Yet when I looked out the
window of the plane as we banked over Paris, I felt I was going home.
The granddaughter of Europeans, I was returning to a continent I'd
never seen, a place I'd heard about all my life from all the grownups who
sat together in groups at family weddings and funerals, reminiscing
wistfully about the old country in a language I'd begun
to pick up. And while I lived there for a year, I explored.
In Switzerland, my best friend Geneviève led us on
a hike that turned out to be more than we'd expected
(the Matterhorn). We survived being lost, following a
trail that no longer existed in the guidebooks, leaping
across noisy, icy rushing streams. We even managed to
walk across the top of a tall, endless cement dam, with
gray glacial water roaring on both sides of it about 25 feet below us. That
was the day I began to learn to dig deep and keep going, despite the fear
in my head.
I sought out the outdoors whenever I could after that, despite my
city-focused life and "civilized" occupations, despite all the people
around me who considered nature too dangerous to befriend. My love
of the natural world was an anemic friend I fed as often as I was allowed.
Although I was already 20, I wasn't making my own choices in life yet.
That wasn't the "old country" way. So my hungry friend stayed in the
background, waiting, tempting, teasing, ever hopeful.

on estates (his and my father's), writing legal documents, teaching, managing, remodeling, and eventually selling several houses on both coasts.
But, like a salmon chasing its unknown yet yearningly familiar life
upstream, I began to surface, slowly, knowingly. I learned about the wilderness from my kids, both conservation-minded adventurers. Once I
tried climbing-with harnesses and ropes, not on lampposts or trees-
the wild outdoors finally became a bonafide, healthy part of my life. All
my life I'd known it was out there, waiting patiently. Now, finally, it was
allowed, even encouraged. And I embraced it.
If my parents were still alive, they'd be horrified by some of the places
I go now, the things I do. Aunt Helen would be saying the rosary for my
safety every day. They would all surely have tried their best to keep me
away from El Capitan. But that's probably the most valuable thing I
learned from my childhood, my marriage, my life: You can learn just as
much from a bad example as from a good one. Maybe even more.
Pani Profesor, "Madame Professor," taught Polish at UCLA; she was
the worst teacher I ever had. But from her, I learned what not to do in
the classroom when I became a teacher myself, and that experience

WILDERNESS IS US. EACH OF US COMES INTO THIS
WORLD PRE-PROGRAMMED WITH A CRAVING TO
BE WITH OUR MOTHER, THE EARTH.

THE BIGGESTTESTCHALLENGES,THOUGH, STILLLURKED. MYHUSBAND
loved mountains. Unfortunately, he loved them to the exclusion of all
else, including people. Which included me. Even the most intensely
beautiful places in California's Sierra Nevada were powerless to mitigate
the emptiness I felt, the abandonment I experienced with him at home
and in those beautiful places. I began to associate the places we explored
as a family with the confusion, the anger, the overwhelming emotional
maelstrom I experienced with him. I hated them.
Nature still made me whole, still fed my soul when it was permitted,
but not in those places, not with him. Never again in those places, I vowed
many times. When he died suddenly, life overwhelmed me even more;
instead of seeking the natural healing that the outdoors had always offered me, I had to spend all my time-weeks, months, years!-working

helped me make many classroom decisions throughout my career. From
observing my parents, I learned how not to parent. I would no doubt
have raised my children very differently if I hadn't learned from those
observations. From my empty marriage and the abandonment of my
husband, I learned so much about the loving relationship that marriage
should be, can be. While I was processing all those hard lessons, my anemic friend never gave up on me.
Wilderness is us. Each of us comes into this world preprogrammed
with a craving to be with our mother, the Earth. My growth into the
outdoor life was a slow, natural progression that happened in spite of,
not because of. The wilderness saved my life. Studies abound about how
getting out into a garden helps medical or psychological patients heal.
I knew these things, but my preprogramming also included massive
doses of obedience and duty.
I'm the oldest woman to go up the face of El Capitan. I could have
made the climb decades earlier (the Mile Rocks could have led me
straight to it). Along the way, though, I had other successes, for which
I'm grateful. Learning can be hard-but ultimately you can learn from
any experience, positive or negative. If you're open to the lessons along
the way, no matter how long it takes, you and your earth mother can
wind up very happy together. O.R.
-Dierdre Wolownick is the author of The Sharp End of Life: A
Mother's Story.

Winter 2020/ OUTDOOR RETAILER 69

Outdoor Retailer - Winter 2020

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