Alpine Start
The subtle art of beginnings
You know the feeling: At first, it’s just a whisper. A shadow. A knot in your stomach that you can’t quite untangle. You fall asleep un-tired, skin too tight. You blame your lack of exercise, the changing season, your stressful week at work, but you know it is none of these things. There is a secret in your body that your mind doesn’t want to hear. It doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t make money, and it’s a little bit selfish, and anyway it would be a terrible risk. Everything would change if you knew it, and someone might get hurt, and you’re comfortable in the container you’ve fashioned out of other people’s expectations, so you have a glass of wine with dinner, which dulls the ache for now, and then you switch on the T.V. and get lost in someone else’s problems. Life is fine—you’re doing just fine!—and you have nothing big to complain about.
For a while, this is you. It’s a smaller, contorted you; a you that suspects life could be bigger, more satisfying, but still. You fill up your calendar to drown out the whisper. Work harder, get a promotion. Plan trips that take you elsewhere, but the glow you bring home doesn’t last. The tired eyes in the mirror are still yours.
And then one day you get caught in the rain. You notice a sugar maple sliding into crimson outside your window, smell its sweet decay as you walk by. You pocket your phone for long enough to catch a kind word between two strangers on the bus. Venus twinkles through electric blue dusk, alone on the horizon. And suddenly, you can’t move. The knowing is blooming inside you and there is nothing you can do to stop it.
The only thing left to do is follow.
- Finding Petronella draft-in-progress
I’m writing this from the early morning hours in Georgetown, Maine. The Big Dipper is glittering over the Back River, and I’ve lit two candles, and it’s 17 degrees outside. The wind is pushing against the windowpanes, and the mourning dove who dive-bombed my head when I opened the front door last night is the only other one awake, cooing from the pine boughs. Winter has come to Maine at last, at least for now, and this is my favorite part, the magic dark. The frozen world. The moments before the sun comes up and time starts again. The gloaming.
I am in Georgetown teaching a 3-week creative writing and winter adventure intensive for college and gap semester students at Seguinland Institute. When I joined the faculty the founding director of the program asked me to design my dream course (what a gift, to be asked such a thing!) and “Wintering” was born. I have spent plenty of cold, gray seasons just trying to muddle through, but somewhere along the way I have become a person who deeply, wildly loves the winter. This season is an invitation to slow down, to sync up with rhythms of quiet and dark, to go inward. In Wintering, we build fires and ice fish and go dogsledding and hike and ski out into the snowy woods. We ask big questions about the good life. We do yoga by candlelight and drink hot chocolate and write, and share, and write. The challenge is always the same: To lean in. To open instead of close. We’re nearing the end of the course, which means that soon it will be time to teach my students how to put the finishing touches on their pieces. Which is, in part, to say: It will be time to teach beginnings.
I find this hilarious—me, teaching beginnings—because it’s taken me years, many of them, to write the beginning of my book. Hell, I’m still writing it. Beginnings are intimidating. One of my grad school mentors forbid me (she used that word, forbid) to go back to the beginning one more time until I’d drafted the story all the way to the end. I had it in my mind that if I could only get everybody and their complicated backstories to sit nicely together on the page, I’d unlock the rest of the book. I tried to listen. Skipped all around, circled back, and back, until I realized the real problem was that I wasn’t being honest about the nature of beginnings. I was trying to draw a straight line from my choice to walk across Finland to my reasons for doing it, which, while there were plenty of valid reasons, wasn’t entirely truthful.
Beginnings aren’t logical. They’re gut feelings, tiny internal clicks. The real beginning isn’t the first actual step, but the silently shifting moments before it. An invisible current ran through me in those early days: the way my heart wouldn’t stop pounding the night I met Petronella, the way I pulled like a moth to the idea, as if it was inevitable, as if I already knew that I would go, for no other reason than it was exactly right.
In outdoor guiding, there’s something called an alpine start. It’s technically a mountaineering term, but it can be used to describe anytime you wake in the dark and push off before first light. You take an alpine start when you’ve got a lot of miles ahead and need to get a jump on the day, or when you want to treat the sunrise like the main event it is, or when you’re trying to con yourself into doing something hard before common sense kicks in. On one side of the sky the moon is sinking into blue; on the other the sun blushes the horizon. The transition feels vulnerable, almost like you should avert your eyes. But you watch. For just a minute you’re suspended, breathless, in between. And then you dip your paddle into the water or step onto the trail and the day begins.
Let me tell you something embarrassing. My common sense didn’t kick in until over a year after I met Petronella, when I started walking from Helsinki with a heavy red backpack and 1,140 kilometers in front of me. I got about ten minutes down the path, put my backpack down on a bench next to the highway, and said out loud, “Why the fuck am I walking across Finland?” It was such a ridiculous question that I laughed. I laughed. And then I bent over and wept.
Bless the overactive imagination, the dream you get lost in. Bless them.
In most pieces of writing, the real beginning is already written. It’s buried somewhere in the pile of what you thought the beginning was supposed to be. You have to find it. The real beginning feels hot when you run your hand over it. It’s sharp, direct. It comes from the place inside you that began writing before your brain kicked in and started arguing with your heart.
I guess in a sense that’s what this work is: helping my students touch what is already simmering inside of them, that holy fire. Asking them to let that lead.
Each of us has a beginning inside of us right now. A wild journey we need to begin. A truth we need to tell somebody. A question we need to answer. Maybe this magic dark, this alpine start, is where we find the courage necessary to risk, to adventure, to write. Or maybe it’s not courage at all. Maybe it’s just waking up early enough to fool yourself into going before you’ve had a chance to change your mind.
You know the feeling I’m talking about. The hairs on the back of your neck standing up. The lean into the cold. Your heart, beating yes, yes, yes.