Wildheart

On aliveness, finding the gaps, and becoming the person who can carry your weirdest dream into the world.

For the first ten minutes, the way to Lapland felt exactly as I hoped it would. The Vantaa River, dark and smooth and speckled with lily pads, crawled through the outskirts of Helsinki along a sandy path. Birch leaves whipped in the wind, showing their white underbellies. Wildflowers bloomed in the fields on my left: spiky nettle, white yarrow, purple lupine, dandelion. The air was thick with the smell of rain. I was struck by the feeling that I had arrived in exactly the right place, that all the months I’d spent writing and wondering and fretting and dreaming about this moment had, after all, led me toward something good.

Then, the path hit Highway 45. Tractor trailers drowned out the whisper of grass. A tangle of roads stretched into the flat, gray distance, choked with cars. I felt cold, and a bit dizzy, as if I’d just startled awake on a train and stepped off in a place I wasn’t supposed to be. At the intersection, I set my backpack on a wooden bench and took my map out of my pocket. The map was already ripping at the seams where I’d folded and unfolded it so many times. North was across the river.

I’d made it less than a kilometer. My shoulders were already tight from the weight I was carrying. My feet hurt. Mosquitos sank into my bare arms, my neck.

“Why the fuck am I walking across Finland?” I said out loud to no one. The fuck came out a sharp exhale, like I’d just been punched.

I hadn’t trained my body to walk 800 miles. I couldn’t speak Finnish. Things had gone haywire in Helsinki, my search for Petronella just leaving me with bigger questions, and now I was following a vague constellation of clues toward a remote wilderness I knew nothing about. This was the beginning, the real beginning, and suddenly I had lost my nerve.

I laugh at all the wrong times, like in the middle of a first kiss, or when a friend falls through the ice, or when I’m in danger. It’s a fear response. There on the riverbank, only a few steps away from where I started, I leaned against my backpack and I laughed. I laughed. And then, because nobody was around and I didn’t have to pretend anymore, I bent over and I wept.

When I look back, I will always remember that moment as beautiful, though it wasn’t. It was wretched, actually. I had stepped all the way over the edge and the dream had shattered. But there was the taste of wet asphalt in my throat. The sky, darkening to the East. There was the soggy hem of my pants, and the way I leaned into the road despite myself. The space, opening inside me.

I folded up the map and slid it back into my backpack. So what if this was all a huge mistake? All I wanted was to walk, to crack open. To shake up my life until it rang wild again. Until I stopped being so afraid.

Sometimes, the moments we are most alive do not feel good at all.

But alive was everything.

Alive was the whole damn point.

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Jenny walking out of Helsinki, June 2014. Photo by Tiina Kujala.

If you’re new here, or even if you’re not, let me introduce myself.

We live in a society that’s obsessed with credentials, so here are mine: I’m an adventure and outdoor writer, wilderness guide, environmental storyteller, and professor of creative writing. Most importantly, I am a woman who’s obsessed with living her life like she’s alive.

The excerpt you just read is from the first draft of my forthcoming adventure memoir, Wildheart. (This is the first time I’ve gotten to type the word “forthcoming.” I’m kind of losing my mind.) I chose that one to share because it was a leap into a new beginning. Like now.

The thing about credentials is that you never start out with them. I’ve gotten here by living fiercely in the direction of whatever it is that lights me up. When I began walking North that day from Helsinki, the only credentials I had were “fairly inexperienced outdoor guide” and “woman who took one writing class in the city and became obsessed.” I’d gone to one writers’ conference, during which I’d had an entire conversation with Gary Snyder without the faintest idea of who he was; and gotten rejected from a handful of MFA programs (of course I did! I didn’t know how to write!). I was calling myself a writer, hoping that it would eventually make me one.

The plan was always to write a book about my journey across Finland, but I didn’t know what that meant, not really. I told my friends and family and Kickstarter supporters it’d be done in a year. I figured I would send them a pdf, or something I printed out and bound in a plastic cover like a third grade book report. Never in my wildest dreams did me of 2014 imagine that I would still be writing this book a decade later; that the process of writing it would grow me into the writer—and the human—I was meant to become. Never could I have guessed that I would sign with an agent and end up publishing with a multinational imprint of Penguin Random House. Nope, nope, nope.

I signed the book deal last week.

Sometimes, the way we become is by finding the gaps.

When I met Petronella van der Moer on her deathbed in 2013 and learned of her legendary 1949 adventure across Finland’s Arctic Circle, deep down in a place beyond words I recognized that I’d just touched something I badly needed. Petronella was bold and free in ways that I could only dream of. A wild part of myself had gone missing a long time ago. I set out on that journey to get her back.

On one level, Wildheart tells the true story of my solo 800-mile journey of self-discovery following Petronella’s footsteps into the wilderness of Finnish Lapland. There were challenges, dangers, and plot twists: Lyme disease, freak thunderstorms, moose in the underbrush, Finns who rallied to help me when I lost my way (which was often). I competed in the Finnish National Goldpanning Championships, ate reindeer, sweated in more saunas than I could count, slept in a tiny wooden cabin by the river. I shoveled with the Lemmenjoki gold prospectors in their claims and listened to their stories. We scattered Petronella's ashes across the barren, rolling fjelds that she loved. I backpacked 116 kilometers into the wilderness on Petronella’s trail with a stranger I met on a riverbank. Called Petronella's name into the wind. Followed her ghost across a country.

Morgamoja gold claim in Lemmenjoki National Park, where Petronella lived in 1949.

None of this is what took ten years to write. It’s one thing to tell a good story. It’s another to understand its heart.

It actually took launching Wild Story to find that.

For the rock climbers out there: if Wildheart is the whole wall, Wild Story is bouldering. It’s where I come to work things out, to sharpen my voice, and to surprise myself with the things I believe but never consciously knew. It’s about connection, and curiosity—I never know when I sit down what I’m going to say. I write without a publication in mind, or any other voice in my head. It’s just you, right here (thank you), keeping me honest.

Writing these two things alongside each other has crystallized my understanding of what I’m here to do: To remind us all (myself included) that we are alive, tender, awake, and connected. That our joy belongs to us. That we don’t get to live on this planet for long. And that staying wild in this world is a conscious choice.

It feels strange and dissonant to be bringing Wildheart into the world during a time of tech-fueled disconnection and rising authoritarianism, when natural spaces and human rights in the United States are under attack. But the more this book arrives on the page, the more I realize that this is exactly when she is supposed to be born. It’s an experience of deep joy and humanity; an immersive journey through nature; a call to the wild spirit; a reminder that we can step outside of the broken systems and beliefs that don’t serve us and thrive. It’s a thread back to what is real.

When I am finished, if I have done my job well it will sing through you. You will not only remember your own wildness but feel it, pulsing inside of you, that happy expansion. You will look up at the stars and remember what you are made of. That you belong to the earth, and to each other. That you’ve always been wild. And nobody can take that away from you.

Thanks for being here. I am so lucky to walk this road with you.