The Clarity That Comes from Getting Lost in the Fog

When you can't see the way out, you have to draw your own map.

Before we dive in, I want to let you know that I’ve made the decision to turn off paid subscriptions to Wild Story moving forward. As some of you may be aware, Substack came under fire earlier this year for their hands-off approach to moderation that resulted in the company platforming and monetizing Nazis. I have been watching things unfold, and while Substack did eventually remove some accounts, until company executives take a more proactive approach to moderating hateful rhetoric I don’t want to share my revenue with them.

To be clear, Wild Story has always been free. Paid subscriptions are an optional way for readers to take their support to the next level. I cannot tell you how much it has meant to me to feel, in tangible terms, your belief in me and my work. I am a writer by trade. It is what I am here to do. I’ve put everything I’ve earned through this platform back into my writing. Thank you.

This was not an easy decision, but these are not easy times. This is what feels right for me.

The best way to support my writing is to share it with your wildhearted friends. If you would like to financially support this work moving forward, I accept donations via Venmo.

Thank you for being here. I am so grateful to get to walk with you for a while.

Now, back to Wild Story.

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It’s been foggy in Portland, Maine, and you’ve been on my mind. I have started and stopped writing three different posts for you this February and March. One was in praise of winter; one was about touching the divine through music. But then this one showed up and asked to be written, so I’m going to roll with it. I promised myself that Wild Story would be true to the creative process, that I would never force what’s not there so that what is there will have the space to come through. And what wants to come through right now is fog. And maps. Which is to say: a post about trust.

Trust the equipment. Trust your ability to read a landscape, to puzzle out a map. Trust that the giant deposit of iron beneath the earth’s crust that bends your compass to magnetic north hasn’t shifted since you’ve last been out here. Trust your training, that you know how to choose the number that will lead you out of the fog. If all this fails, trust what you know about the arc of the sun, which trees grow near water. Trust your body.

I have never been good at directions. They say that step one to not getting lost is to stay found, but my personality is constantly working against me. I have a short attention span and I am easily dumbfounded by beauty. More than once I have been lost on a mountaintop and made a deal with God: you get me out of this, and I swear I’ll learn to navigate better. I came home, I learned it. I forgot again. Navigation is a perishable skill, use it or lose it.

I want to get my Maine Guide license, so one day soon I will have to fix this. I will take a compass bearing so many times that I’ll know how to do it by muscle memory. It’s a point of pride, a taking-back of power—one of the biggest reasons I never correctly learned in the first place is because of the formative years I spent distrusting my instincts, trying to make myself smaller. In the beginning of my outdoor career, when a more technical job came up—navigating by compass, rigging a hand line to cross a river, fixing gear—it was my male co-guides who rushed to do the work, but it was also I who stepped back, doubting.

If I’m being honest, I’m also a little bit attached to the part of me that’s pulled to wander. We are taught to forget our own knowing, and I’ve never felt so close to my intuition as I do when I’m lost. It’s gotten me into trouble, and it’s gotten me back out of it.

Take this moment from my journey across Finland, for example, which I wouldn’t believe happened unless I lived it. Sick from Lyme disease I contracted from a tick bite, I’d stopped pushing north to nap in a forest on the side of the highway. When I woke hours later and stepped out of my tent, I found moose tracks in the mud. Delirious with fever, in my addled state I decided it would be a good idea to walk—barefoot—away from everything I owned, out into the woods. Of course I got lost.

From the book:

“Mosquitos sunk into my exposed skin. I remembered an article I had read about lone reindeer, how if they get caught away from the herd for long enough the mosquitos can drink enough of their blood to kill them. I could die, I thought, and swatting madly, I rose from the pond and crashed back into the woods. I passed the clearing with the boulders, and then fifteen minutes later, passed it again. I ran in circles, plunging into the undergrowth and emerging somewhere I’d already been, until I’d lost the pond, too.  

“Hei!” I yelled to no one, my voice evaporating into the forest, muffled by moss. 

I sat down next to a boulder and dropped my head into my hands. Thought was a map I couldn’t follow. What if I never made it back? Blueberries. I’d live on blueberries. The mosquitos settled again on my arms and face and feet, pin pricks against my skin. I closed my eyes and leaned back against the rock. I let them come.

“Jenny.”

“Jenny.”

I opened my eyes. The voice was mine. I was saying my own name.

“Get. Up.” 

I got up. 

I stood for a moment looking down at the moss, and for the first time I noticed its beauty. The forest floor thrummed with it. Flying insects buzzed between green feathery strands. Spiderwebs pulled taught across the tops caught dew and light and scraps of bark. Crimson blueberry leaves pushed up through the thick carpet. Blue-gray sprigs of lichen sprouted like tiny trees in the gaps. The air swelled sweet and heavy with approaching rain.

I closed my eyes, held my hands out in front of me, and began to walk.”

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Fog over Casco Bay in Portland, Maine

To this day, I have no idea how I made it back, eyes still closed, to my tent. All I can say is that I did. And I’m doing that same walk of faith with my book right now.

Anybody who’s written a book will tell you they had no idea how to do it until they did it. Or at least that’s what they tell me. The farther I get into this mess, the less I know. It can be beautiful, sometimes, the continuous trust fall; the wandering around in the fog. It can also be maddening.

I’ve been making myself maps. Literally. I bought a pack of colorful sharpies and some children’s drawing paper, and on days when I feel particularly lost I light candles and doodle and scribble all over those big pages, sometimes so vigorously I get sharpie marks on my bedspread or the tablecloth. The problem with the book right now is that I can see where we’re going, but the only one who can take us from here to there is me. The whole me. Every time I unearth another layer of the Jenny of 2014 who chose to follow Petronella’s footsteps across Finland or the Jenny I am still becoming as a result of that choice, I joke that I’ve been trying to write a memoir without myself in it. But that’s starting to sound pathetic, and I am weary of this joke, and anyway the most fun I ever have writing is when I write something so true it gives me full-body shivers. So this foggy, too-warm winter, that is where I’ve been: sketching my inner and outer journeys, listening for where they call out to each other. Pinky-swearing myself again and again that I will not rush, will not come up for air until I’ve dived deep enough to close my fingers around those rare pearly shells. My sister has dubbed them my “scrolls,” the growing pile of rolled-up paper in the corner of my bedroom.

I’ve been performing this ritual for the last six years at artist residencies: scribble, tape ideas to the wall, roll them up, forget. Every once in a while I’ll pull them out and read them again, cut out the most important parts and hang them around my room. Right now, over my desk is a torn scrap of paper that reads: WE ARE MADE TO FORGET THAT WE ARE ALIVE. (How will you remind them?)

The funny thing about the scrolls is that whether they were written years ago or yesterday, they all point to the same things. That’s how I know I can trust them. It’s the book, telling me who she wants to be. Showing me her heart. I laugh every time I’ve scribbled a thought on a fresh piece of paper and congratulated myself for this new stroke of genius, and then before the ink has even dried I unroll an old scroll from three years ago with almost the same words, scrawled in faded marker.

Some higher part of me is guiding me home.