A Transformative Trek

backpacking the John Muir Trail

Jail

We can all name times that altered our path. One of mine was the summer of 1975. 

On a morning in June, I saw Yosemite for the first time. Lightheaded, I watched a white sash of water fall from a cliff-edge a half-mile overhead. I was standing on the steps Yosemite Jail, hungover and banned from the park for 30 days. 

Awe gave way to dread. Soon, I’d be packing for military school in Texas. 

Of course you’ve guessed: that’s not what happened. Instead, I spent a wild summer in the mountains and became a different sort of sixteen-year-old. No longer did I see marijuana dealing as a promising career. Something better took root in my mind.

Military training had been my stepmother’s plan. Della couldn’t ship me to the posh summer camp I’d inhabited for half of each summer since second grade, because I’d been banned from it. A year earlier, I’d given marijuana brownies to a fellow camper. We’d been slipping away to hold hands and occasionally kiss. When she spoke about how often she got high, I thought I knew how to impress her. As a “Counselor-In-Training”, I spent a lot of time in the kitchen, washing dishes. Alone there one evening, I baked the brownies. The pot wasn’t potent, but I had a lot of it. I loaded the batter mix with enough vegetation to color it greenish-brown, foreshadowing many poor decisions to come. My girl ended up in the arms of the camp nurse, shaking and sobbing. I was busted. 

Only I wasn’t. The camp’s owners calmed her parents and kept the cops out of it. They’d taken care of me—six weeks per summer—for much of my childhood. They knew me as a troubled but teachable kid. They also wanted to protect their reputation. So they kept a lid on the mess, and I spent my last days at camp in a room above the cafeteria. The small bed took up half the floor space; the walls were dull and beige. I took meals alone and wasn’t allowed to participate in any activities, but I also wasn’t in police custody.

Because she couldn’t send me back to camp, Della had signed me up for military camp, with all the drills and discipline that implied. 

To my surprise, my father intervened. Usually, he let Della steer my fate, but when the officers in Texas demanded a crew cut, he grabbed the wheel. A UCLA professor, he had longish hair himself and wore a beaded headband. He wasn’t about to reduce me from shoulder-length to buzz cut. I’ve wondered since why—with his strongly leftist politics—he cared more about the haircut than the drill sergeants. Back then, I was simply grateful.

A problem remained. Spending the summer around the house was NOT an option. My stepmother would be slamming doors and breaking things unless I disappeared. I’d be lucky if she didn’t poison me. My friend Brad—freshly graduated from high school—suggested we backpack the 211-mile John Muir Trail. I hadn’t heard of it and had no idea what to expect. I told him the trip sounded great!

But then came that morning in June, after our release from a vomit-scented jail. The night before, we’d rolled out our sleeping bags in a Tuolumne Meadows parking lot, so loaded on rum and valium we believed it uncharted wilderness. We briefly woke in a spotlight’s glare and heard barked warnings over a PA system; then we passed out again. When the rangers returned, they shook us awake, searched our packs, discovered our pot, and read us our rights. They seemed pissed off, which I realize now was because they were compelled to drive us to the jail in Yosemite Valley, some ninety minutes away. So they cuffed our hands behind our backs and shoved us onto a narrow bench in the rear of a van. During the long trip we crashed back and forth as the van took the turns at high speed. Once we landed in Yosemite Valley, the rangers booked, photographed, and fingerprinted us. Then they locked us in a cell with four beds. We slept on the two that were empty. 

So here Brad and I stood on a cool Yosemite morning, outside the jail but in the custody of his parents. I walked to a phone booth while the three of them climbed into a Plymouth the color of wet sand. As I dialed, I watched them in the car. In the front seat, Brad’s mother stared forward, blankly. In the back, my friend looked wilted, chin on chest. His stepfather sat in the driver’s seat but was turned toward Brad and shouting. With a stabbing motion, he jabbed his finger toward his stepson’s head. 

This mess was my fault. It was I who’d shoplifted a bottle of rum after the bus dropped us off in Lee Vining. It was I who’d pilfered Valium from an elderly woman’s bathroom, during a break from the gardening work I did for her. Taking the pills on the bus and drinking rum before hitchhiking into the National Park were my ideas, too. 

I’d called home at the time of booking but hadn’t reached anyone. Probably my dad had been drinking with Della in some Venice Beach dive. Now, he was hearing what happened for the first time, minus the part about it being all my fault. I wasn’t worried he’d be angry about the arrest. I figured he’d blame ‘the man’, and he did. My worries focused on what was coming. My first stop would be LA; my next would be Texas. 

Then my dad surprised me a second time. 

Free

“Why don’t you stay?”

I knew my dad. I knew his politics. But this shocked me. Disobey an order from the Feds? 

“The drugs are gone, right? What’s the point of leaving? Yosemite’s a big place; keep a low profile.”

Well…he was my dad. If he said I could stay, why argue? Worries about boot camp faded. A jittery feeling of joy grew inside. 

Talking to Brad and his parents through the windows of their car, I struggled with surges of guilt, shame, and relief. I fought laughter. I fought tears. I fought nausea, a hangover, and rainbow-colored fringes trailing everything that moved. I sank further into confusion when Brad looked glad I was staying, even though he was leaving. Meanwhile, his stepfather ranted. “Your father’s an awful parent! You’ll realize that some day!” When their car lurched out of the parking lot, I took my first deep breath of the morning.

Brad’s stepfather wasn’t wrong. My dad didn’t care much for parenthood. He was also weak on conventions and morals. For him, theft was rebellion. He’d applauded when I stole a sleeping bag from a sporting goods store, the same bag now dangling from my pack. He railed about corruption but drank when he drove. When cars tailgated, he lobbed beer cans from his open convertible, aiming for their hoods. 

He and Della did not model stable domestic behavior. They ate out four or more nights a week. At first I had my older sister for company, but after she moved out when I was in junior high school, I spent these nights alone. I began drinking my parents’ vodka, mixing it 50:50 with orange juice in a large glass. Because I was only twelve, the concoction nearly knocked me unconsciousness, which made my loneliness easier to bear. Months passed before Della confronted me, upset not by my drinking, but by the cost of the vodka and the fact I was using her orange juice.

Sometimes my parents brought people home after the bars closed. The guests roared up the drive on motorcycles, then filled the house with shouts and laughter as they danced to rock music and dove naked into the pool. You can imagine our family’s reputation in that neighborhood of ocean views and Lincoln-Continentals. 

Though I used to feel ashamed of my youthful mistakes, I’ve learned to go easier on myself. It seems obvious my role models made it hard for me to know healthy from unhealthy. Plus, despite the harm it caused myself and others, I now believe being raised without ethical compass had advantages. It meant I learned morality not as a system of rules, but as a natural recoil from the corrosive feel of selfishness. 

Very slowly, I awoke from moral slumber to discover my healthier intuitions and the wholesome feel of goodness in myself and others. I was middled age before this really took hold, yet learning ethics late nourished my compassion. How can I condemn others for their failings, when for so long I behaved so badly? 

As my love of moral beauty has matured, I’ve come to think of it as innate to the human body, like contentment, as biological as breathing.

But in 1975, I wasn’t thinking about morality, or even the consequences of dumb behavior. I thought only this: I was the luckiest kid in California! To keep that luck, I needed to put distance between myself and the ranger station. I hoisted my pack and strode toward the mind-warping waterfall I’d seen upon release. 

By the time I got to its base, awash in spray, I felt stoned even without the pot the rangers had confiscated. Like the fringes of color I saw around everything, this was due—in part—to the LSD I’d deftly swallowed the night before. Intoxicated as I was, I’d managed to open the vial in my pocket, palm the contents, and pop them into my mouth with a fake yawn. My dad would have been proud of me. I’d avoided a bust for more reviled drugs, maybe saving him the cost of lawyer. Now I stood below Yosemite Falls, in glowing awe, on the tail of an acid trip. But beyond the drugs, something else was stirring inside me: a recognition, like the love at first sight I felt when I met Mandy, my wife. Feelings of wonder, like coming home, were repairing my synapses and soothing my heart.

A group of long-haired climbers loitered nearby, and one of them passed me a joint. They were mountainous men, big as boulders. I’d filled out some in the past year, but I felt dwarfed by these guys. It wasn’t their just physical size that intimidated me. I was awed by their thick beards, their coiled ropes and gear-laden packs, the cams and carabiners glinting on their hips. They stood with studied swagger. 

In a zoo some years ago, my wife and I watched a silverback gorilla lumbering around his enclosure with easy arrogance. Even yards distant from him, we smelled his potent musk, thick with pheromones. I watched Mandy’s knees go a little weak in that cloud of testosterone. Though I tried to talk myself out of it, I felt a bit unmanned by comparison. Which is how I felt standing with those climbers beneath Yosemite Falls. With my peach-fuzz beard and stiff new boots, I snuck self-conscious glances at my lopsided pack slumped against a tree. The Boy Scout tent and stolen sleeping bag had slipped their ties and sprawled on the ground in an amateur’s heap.

Whether the climbers liked or just tolerated me, I couldn’t say. But I followed them to a walk-in campground a good distance from the Ranger Station. I stayed two weeks.

Those weeks were fun. I spent the summer days traipsing the Valley with other walk-in campers. Most were older than me, but I was used to hanging with my sister’s friends, six to ten years my senior. A few of us dropped acid and sat on the open upper decks of Park shuttles as they circled the Valley. At night we passed whiskey around overbuilt fires. I slept with a girl who slipped away from her friends and chaperones. We cuddled and kissed, but neither of us tried going further, a fact I didn’t mention when the guys needled me about my tent mate the next morning.

After two weeks the food in my pack began to run out, and so did my money. I’d started with just enough cash to cover two resupplies. Having eaten my backpacking food and spent money on burgers and LSD, there was no way I could afford to continue. 

Rick, an older guy in camp, didn’t have a home anywhere, though I didn’t think of him as homeless. He seemed like a mountain man, living in the wild. When I told him about my dilemma one night, he looked interested. The next day, he said we should trek the Trail together. He said the problem was my belief I needed expensive freeze-dried meals. He’d show me how to backpack on the cheap. 

I knew almost nothing about him, but what could go wrong?  

The day before we hit the trail, we walked the aisles of Yosemite market. Rick tossed low-cost grub into my basket: boxes of mac & cheese, ramen packets, instant oatmeal, pancake mix, dried salami, etc.  We walked out with a two-week supply for each of us. 

The next morning, we embarked near a sign that read, “Mt Whitney—211 miles”. We climbed a trail that hugged the Merced River as it tumbled down a long cascade. Water rolled in vast sheets over boulders as big as vans, roaring its way to the Valley. My body thrummed, resonating with the clamor. By the time we’d topped Vernal  Falls, it felt almost orgasmic. 

By afternoon, we’d reached the top of Nevada Falls and entered Little Yosemite Valley, an area crowded with campers. This wouldn’t do. I looked for a spot away from the masses. Walking the edge of the Merced River we’d been beside all day, I reached a spot where it sluiced down a tilted slab of granite. The river was broad at this point and little more than ankle deep. It flowed smoothly, clear as glass. The smooth shore on the far side was nearly deserted. I dipped my hand in the water; it was icy, but so what? “Let’s camp over there! We can wade across!” 

“Sure,” Rick said. He sat down and watched me unlace my boots. I stuffed them with my socks and tied them together. The smart choice was to move fast. I’d clamber across before the freezing water grew too painful. I strode three of four sure steps, then stopped, uncertain. My feet burned with cold. The river didn’t seem so shallow anymore. It surged against my legs and curled into a wave that rose above my knees. The flood of melted snow pushed hard against me, nearly knocking me down. I teetered on the slick granite, vainly trying to grip the rock with my toes. I took my first good look downstream. Fifty yards on, the smooth slab broke into a jumble of jagged rock. What was swift, clear flow above churned as white water below. The rapids roared at me. Chills rattled through my body, and it wasn’t just the icy Merced that caused them. 

I inched backward, time nearly frozen as I eased toward river’s edge, feet numb and hurting. When I reached safety, I noticed Rick in the same spot, boots still laced, resting his back against a gray boulder peppered with black flakes. 

I felt uneasy but hushed my doubts. Surely, I thought, he was psyching himself up for the cold water. I hadn’t waded very long; a few more moments, and he’d have followed me. I acted nonchalant, laughing about the damned cold water. I said nothing about nearly losing my life.

My boots back on, Rick and I hiked to where everyone else was camping. We pitched our tents near a Boy Scout Troop, then sat around their fire. The heat settled my chills. My urge to sleep far from others was forgotten. For now, it felt good to be in a crowd.

As darkness gathered, a scout leapt up and shrieked, “BEAR!” The  rest of us swung toward where he pointed just as the beast rose on its hind legs and yanked down the food I’d hung from a low branch. In the shadows, it looked bigger than a horse. It dropped to all fours, then lumbered away with a sac in its jaws. Without thinking, I gave chase. I ran and screamed until my throat was raw, while the bear loped upslope and out of sight. I kept pursuing, though my resolve began to flag. Just as I was about to give up, a ripped nylon bag caught my eye. 

In the fading light, I surveyed the remnants. The bear had gulped down all the brown sugar, leaving only a cleanly licked piece of the box. It had bitten holes in two cans of spam and ripped open my pancake mix. Nothing was left of the salami but shreds of oily paper. After wrapping the tattered sack around the punctured cans and remaining pancake mix, I returned to camp in defeat. 

Shouts of “Way to go!” and “Awesome, man!” greeted me. Scouts slapped my back. They promised to give me food so I could continue the John Muir Trail. After the ruckus settled down, and we’d circled back to the fire, their leaders leaned into this teachable moment: my sacs were hung too low; it’s dumb to chase a bear; what was I thinking? The lecture vanished like smoke as the scouts and I yammered into the night.

Still

Before summer camp and Yosemite banned me, the Boy Scouts also sent me packing. 

Della had signed me up when I was two grades younger than the official minimum. The scoutmaster had been happy to oblige the pretty, buxom flirt who claimed to want the best for her stepson. 

I liked Mr. Wendt. He didn’t care if we wore uniforms or not. When we gathered with other troops for the annual Jamboree, he told us to have fun and not stress about winning. So we goofed around during the semaphore competition, sending nonsensical messages. In a contest about lashing poles together, we built a wobbly, purposeless sculpture while other troops built  bridges and watchtowers.

Then a new Scoutmaster replaced him. He inspected our uniforms and taught us to march in formation. “Left! Right! Left!” I didn’t take any of that—or him—very seriously. One time, a friend and I found the controls for the PA system in the YMCA gymnasium where the troop met. Moaning into the microphone, we filled the space with funhouse noises, interrupting a lesson in knot-tying. Other pranks followed. Soon came the ultimatum: earn a Citizenship Merit Badge or be expelled. 

By then I’d gotten what I needed from scouting. I’d gone on monthly outings with them for years, mostly to drive-in campgrounds, but sometimes backpacking. The troop would leave on  Saturday morning and reach a trailhead by noon. We’d hike some miles through one of the mountainous areas near LA, pitch camp, and spend the evening around a campfire. After cooking breakfast the next day and running around a bit, we’d pack up and head home. I’d felt blessed to be free of Della and living outdoors, if only for a weekend. 

But now I knew enough to camp on my own. I was only fourteen, which might have prevented me from getting to the backcountry, but my new friend Brad was old enough to drive.

My dad cheered when I told off the oppressive scoutmaster. But we both knew Della demanded breaks from my presence. By this age, I wanted to get away from her as much as she wanted me gone. So Brad and I began planning monthly trips together. Just like the Scouts, we went car camping and backpacking. Unlike them, we loaded up with pot, booze, quaaludes, and mescaline.

My first day on the JMT reminded me of a weekend trek with the Scouts or Brad. Sure, there were minor differences: my bear of a pack, the 3000’ climb, nearly dying. But it felt familiar to hike a handful ofmiles and sit around a campfire with boys. 

That was days ago. Since then, I’d lugged my gear forty miles and over three 10,000 foot passes.  Blisters had formed on my heels, then broken into open sores. My toes jammed into each other as they battled for space in my too-small boots. 

Worse, my backpack was hurting my shoulders and spine. One of the earliest full-sized internal frame packs, it was ahead of its time. The store had displayed it under a glossy poster, too sleek and futuristic to resist. It was also too conspicuous to steal, so I paid for it. But now the thing sagged heavily, so I had to lean forward to stay upright. It felt like an over-loaded duffel bag edged with aluminum bars, which is a fair description of its design. The hip belt lifted some of the mass off my shoulders, but it slipped often. 

There were better-designed backpacks, but all camping gear was heavy in those days. Empty, my JMT pack probably weighed six pounds. My sleeping bag weighed nearly the same, and the tent even more. Nowadays, I go out with a fully loaded pack barely heavier than the combined weight of those three items. But in 1975 I also carried a steel stove the size of a brick, an entire gallon of white gasoline (a quart would have sufficed), a 25’ of coil of thick rope I never used, a fishing pole, an 8” knife in a large leather sheath, and a pile of other gear, much of it useless. The total came close sixty pounds. Food pushed it beyond that.

I even packed a bible. Della had enrolled me in Sunday school for years, as part of her program to keep me out of her house. The local church gave each of its charges a paperbound copy of the Old and New Testaments.  Volunteer teachers guided us through scripture readings, hymns, and bible-themed craft projects. They even wrote scripts we used to act out gospel stories. (Hollywood was just a short drive up Sunset Boulevard.) The teachers did their best to inspire me, but my father outgunned them with his atheism, Marxism, and sarcasm. Still, while packing for the JMT, I’d tucked that bible in with my gear. 

Now I was camped by a lake beyond imagination. The inspiration of scripture wouldn’t have added anything to my awe. From our site on a bluff above it, I gazed across a large alpine lake that had been snow and ice just weeks before. Rocks peppered its surface. Some were round, the size of basketballs; some were huge and flat, like a giant’s stepping stones; others were oblong and big as buses. Patchworks of bright green grass and broad, gray stone decorated the shore. To my left I heard the rumble of the creek that drained the lake, a familiar sound by this point, after so many trail segments next to mountain streams. Beyond the lake’s far bank, a peak shaped like a dog’s molar yawned toward a cloud-streaked sky. As the sun moved behind it, a halo of golden-white light fringed its silhouette. In the glassy water around the scattershot islands, the lake’s surface mirrored this hallucinatory view.

My body fluttered with joy, wilted with exhaustion, and breathed deeply in the thin atmosphere. My back groaned and my feet felt wrecked, but my thighs were growing muscle and my soul was gaining strength. Clouds of mosquitoes swarmed us, but I barely cared. They were as common as sunsets at summer camp, and I’d learned to ignore them. Rick wanted to pack up and escape their bites. I needed a rest. 

I stayed three days. Rick stuck with me, grumbling often.

Thousand Island Lake, broad and reflective, awakened a wiser part of myself, a part that wasn’t proud of getting banned from summer camp and Yosemite. 

Even the Boy Scout rejection troubled it. Deep down, I’d enjoyed wearing a tidy uniform. A part of me had felt comforted marching in unison with others. As the landscape melted into me, with its soaring granite and fragile grass, it inspired me to expect more from life than a march toward ruin. I didn’t know it yet, but I was feeling weary of my baggage and disarray. 

The mountain rivers sang to me, especially as they ran over rapids. I recognized the experience. I’d been in whitewater since birth. My memories of my parents before the divorce are memories of conflict. When I was four, their raging relationship hit a rock and split into two streams. Soon after the separation, I contracted pneumonia and spent weeks in a hospital, submerged under an oxygen tent. Eventually I returned to a home where my mother struggled to keep her head above surges of grief. Too often my swirling, boyish energy seemed to exhaust her. 

A year passed, and then another as she slipped further and further underwater. Stays with my grandparents grew commonplace as she sought harbor in psychiatric wards. She left and returned, left and returned, a little more lost each cycle, as if caught in a whirlpool. Then depression’s cold waters claimed her, and she sank out of reach.

Two weeks after her death, I was shunted to my dad, who dropped me into the care of the woman he’d married after the divorce. Ever since, I’d been losing bits of myself to Della’s glacial resentment. I was like the mountains of Yosemite, carved and broken by ice. Jan, my older sister, fared no better. At age eleven I’d nursed her through the torrents of psychosis. 

Every summer since my mom died, I’d  been flushed across the continent to live at camp and with relatives. I enjoyed the trip to places and people who treated me well, but always the return trip loomed at the end of summer, like a plunge off a cliff.

Whitewater felt familiar, yet something inside craved stillness.

Earlier in the day I’d stood on the narrow ledge of a trail that dynamite had blasted out of solid granite. Below dropped a near-vertical slope that ended in a moraine. Burdened by ill-designed gear and pains in my neck, back, and feet, I’d looked down and tried to trace the path ahead. After the first few switchbacks, it disappeared into a moonscape of gray rock. 

The way forward wasn’t obvious, yet I knew it was there.

Love

I was in love. I did not know it.

What I knew was awe. Once freed of their boots, my feet caressed meadows sprinkled with flowers like small gems. My eyes gazed at sunrises that set flames on granite spires, then brushed them downward. With all the hiking, my legs had strengthened, yet they sometimes grew weak as I stood before landscapes like I’d never seen or imagined. My few prior trips to the Sierras had been in winter, when all was frozen and the weather limited time outdoors. Never before had I seen the high country in its summer glory, not even in pictures.

While trekking the JMT in the summer of 1975, I didn’t connect the word ‘love’ with how nature was making me feel. The word was in my vocabulary, but I didn’t know what it meant. For most of my upbringing, I’d felt unwanted. My grandparents and sister said they loved me, but their support was unreliable. My grandparents sent me back to my stepmother at the end of every summer, and my sister too often switched from sweet to hateful. Years later she was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)—which causes unstable moods and troubled relationships. But I didn’t need the label to know she had problems with love. And, of course, my mother’s depression and death had made me deeply skeptical of it. 

My family’s unreliability made love seem unreal, but so did my own emotions. Like my sister, for much of my life I suffered mercurial moods and intense reactions, which meant I was barely more capable of reliable love than she was. I too was eventually diagnosed with BPD (along with other mental health conditions). Though my case was less severe and debilitating than hers, I’ve long struggled to meet social challenges without losing my cool. 

One of my prior trips to the Sierras happened when a junior high school friend invited me and some other boys to join his family in their A-frame near Mammoth Mountain Ski Resort. Though I’d taken but one skiing lesson, my companions led me into a gondola that took us to the top of the black diamond Cornice Run. As I timidly approached the precipice, an older skier swooshed by and exclaimed, “My God, he’s snowplowing! He’s going to die!” Luckily, there was a curved path that bypassed the ice ledge and gave me non-suicidal access to slope below. More terrified of losing face than risking my neck on the run, I navigated down by skiing one way across the slope, sitting on my butt, flipping my skies, then standing to ski back the other way, over and over. At every moment there was risk of losing traction and tumbling down the steep, slick mountainside, but I made it to safety. I’d hoped to prove myself to my schoolmates, but my performance was so poor, I wasn’t surprised when they greeted me with taunts. 

“It took you forever!” 

“You looked stupid, dude!” 

I felt as humiliated as if I’d chickened out and taken the gondola down. A happier kid could have bounced back by making a joke or something. I remained silent and tried to forget what happened. But then, during dinner with my host’s family, one of the kids suggested—in a bland and possibly kind tone—that I needed more lessons. Something exploded inside me, and I screamed, “Fuck you! Fuck you! FUCK YOU!” The table went silent. 

My experiences in my family and episodes like the one above frightened and confused me. They taught me to hold back, to think of love, affection, and friendship as mere words. With no experience of people committing to my wellbeing, I learned to be careless of others’ feelings and my own best interests. 

So the love I felt for the mountains was something I recognized only later, when reflecting on that summer. Yet it seems very real with that retrospect. It gave me new energy for living and helped me feel enthusiastic about my future.

I’d spent plenty of time in natural landscapes before, and I’d enjoyed them. But feeling a loving connection with nature had needed the intimacy of days and nights in the world of Life: the delicate meadows, the rivers of snowmelt, the granite mountains, the thin blue sky. Standing before earthscapes that baffled mind and heart, I fairly swooned. It was almost as if my lonely, virginal, adolescent self was granted a chance to spend weeks alone with the girl of his dreams. 

In a few months, I’d enjoy exactly that experience with Marion, my high school sweetheart. Through quirks of chance, we’d spend weeks alone together, each of us feeding the other’s vast need. With her I’d enjoy feelings similar to those in the mountains, but electrified by companionship and—of course—sex. Yet, despite the power of the love I shared with Marion, the love I shared with nature lasted longer.

The two were related. Completing the JMT and spending so much time in bliss helped me feel bold enough to bond with Marion, so the word ‘love’  began to mean something for me. The nearness in time of my passions for both her and the mountains mixed the two together. 

To this day, my love for Life feels romantic and intimate. Equally, my love for my wife and other dear ones feels like a force of nature. Because of these associations, I’ve come to feel genuine relationship with the world of Life. It offers me the reliable support my family did not: its air surrounds me, its warmth enwraps me, its solidity upholds me, its food and water sustain me. I sometimes even suspect Life loves me in the sense of feeling positive regard for me, but I always know it loves me in the sense of supporting me. I thus feel a loving relationship with world of Life that must be similar to the relationship religious folk feel with an ultimate power, often called God. 

In Alcoholics Anonymous, spirituality is important, and it’s framed as belief in a ‘higher power’. For many, that power is God, but AA allows for anything. I have come to understand that Life itself is a higher power. It is so supportive, so ever-present, so creative and intelligent, it is—in fact—much like the God of religion. In humanity’s hunter-gatherer days, nature was surely understood as the power that created and destroyed. It was both the source of the body and its final destination. It surrounded all beings and all activity, a part of everything through all of time. It was the source of any and all gods that might have been worshipped. Only when we separated ourselves from nature did we need more abstract and distant deities. Until then, our central relationship was with the ecosphere, who was (and is) our Mother. 

Those understandings came later. In 1975, falling in love with the mountains simply inspired a dream that never faded, even as intimate partners, friends, and other relationships came and went. While camped beside Thousand Island Lake, every morning seeing Banner Peak painted with sunshine, yawning its granite tooth toward the sky, I began to imagine a future beyond drugs and chaos. I could study the world of Life; I could commit to it and build my future around it. Though often obscured by confusion, fear, and sorrow, that dream never left me. It is in view right now, motivating me to tell this story despite the weariness born of discouragement, despite self-doubt.

In penning tales from my past, I’m trying to show what Life taught me about itself. It turns out these lessons have been studies in love, a startling fact that motivates me to proceed even though it means revealing shameful secrets. But Life has been too generous a teacher for me to keep its lessons inside. Besides, doesn’t love make everyone a little reckless?

Aim

In my earliest memory, I am sitting on the seat of a firetruck the size of a large dog. It is a fine toy, but I don’t remember feeling the joy of it. Out an open door, I see yellow sand. 

The house was a rental near Malibu. My father worked at RAND Corporation while the University of Minnesota was on summer break. He’d spent time in Los Angeles during the war, in boot camp at Fort Ord. The sun and beaches called him back. So did the edgy bars and group sex parties. 

It was paradise for my dad but hell for my mom. Though I don’t know when she first became depressed, I believe she must have been sad when I sat in that firetruck. Because despite the exciting toy, that little boy felt dread.

When I was a teenager, my sister told me our mother had been raped during that drunken, hyper-sexed time in Malibu. I suspect the firetruck memory was after the the assault. A sudden, frightening change in my mother would explain its desolated feel.

When we returned to Minneapolis, I dashed through a lawn gone to seed, its grass as high as my thighs! But someone had thrown a rock through the picture window, and I picked up on my parents’ dismay. This was the beginning of a pattern that lasted decades: sparks of ecstasy against a backdrop of gloom. In my forties, psychiatrists gave this pattern a name: Bipolar Disorder. 

But early in my life, those moments of high spirits didn’t seem like illness; they sustained me. And they often connected with biology, though I didn’t call it that. Instead, I thought of it as ‘outdoors’, ‘nature’, ‘farming’, ‘the body’, or ‘animals’, all of which excited me.

When I was eight, we settled in Pacific Palisades, a coastal town between UCLA and Malibu. Our house enjoyed a view of the Pacific Ocean, the coastline from Santa Monica to Palos Verdes, the downtown skyscrapers, and—on a clear day—the mountains ringing LA. The beach was an easy bike ride away. I could escape to watch the rolling breakers until I was old enough to swim in them. I spent many afternoons in the sage-scented coastal mountains and their shaded canyons. I often felt high in them, long before I found the relief of pot smoking. Life outdoors was a refuge from the mess at home.

During the summers, I’d live a month with my grandparents on the Indiana farm where they went to retire. Usually, I was the only kid around. I spent a lot of time with my grandfather, helping him tend the squash, tomatoes, and melons in his garden, or making repairs. Other times I hung by his side, bored, as he talked shop with the man who planted and harvested the crops. Sometimes I’d go on solo walks in the woods beyond the fields, pestered by clouds of mosquitoes but happy to be outdoors. Or I’d swim in the small pond and sunbathe on its shore, hearing the occasional plop of small fish jumping. For kicks, I’d run naked through rows of corn stalks that rose above two feet my head. The days weren’t exciting, but I felt safe. Sometimes I’d break out laughing for no reason I could name. 

At camp, I often signed up for the nature class. We met in a greenhouse that enclosed a whole ecosystem, alive with waxy leaves, black soil, and small pools sparkling with minnows. The earthy aroma intoxicated me. Once we rode a few miles in the back of a truck, then watched a tractor push a dead horse into a ditch and pile dirt on top of it. Our counselor must have thought the bloating, stinking carcass would teach us something. If he wanted to give us a visceral understanding of death and rot, he succeeded. Few of our lessons were that unsettling, but all of them spoke to me. Most days we’d go on walks, for instance by the shores of the camp’s lake, where startled bullfrogs leapt toward the water, long legs trailing. The counselor cautioned us to walk wide circles around the venomous water snakes undulating in the shallows, but I wanted to get close, to see them better. 

Once, when I was only five, my grandfather took me to a place that sold chickens. The birds were kept in a pen in a small warehouse, and he asked me to pick one out. A worker carried my selection out of view. I heard a loud thump followed by a manic rustling sound. Then came the roar of machinery. For the first time, I took stock of a long steel box that ran along the back wall. The worker returned and fed the dead chicken—headless and dripping blood—into one end of it. A tubular vent blasted feathers out a window, where they settled atop a pile of down. Soon, a plucked carcass emerged from the far end, on a conveyer belt. Later that day, Grandpa opened the carcass with a gleaming knife. He pulled out multicolored guts and held up a slimy tube for me to examine. At one end was a fully formed egg, but at the other were mere hints of eggs, smaller than peas. Between the two was a succession of ovoid forms, Life coming into being. It was my first formal biology lesson. 

My dad, the professor, provided more conventional lessons. He bought me science-themed toys, like the ‘Visible Woman’ model of human anatomy, complete with a pregnant uterus that could be swapped in and out at will. His compassion for animals colored my curiosity about Life. Once, during a visit soon after the divorce, he told me to redirect a spray of water from a hose. My little self was pointing it toward an ant colony, and he didn’t want me to hurt the tiny creatures. 

In LA, my elementary school had a ‘gifted’ program that taught us about nature. One day the teacher cracked an egg in a shallow bowl. Floating on the surface of the yolk was a fan of blood vessels. At its center drifted a comma-shaped embryo with a tiny beating heart. Most of my memories of elementary school are vague, but that chick embryo is vivid in recollection. 

Some years later, at camp on the frontier of puberty, I watched wide-eyed as a stallion mounted a mare. When it pulled back, I gawked at its eighteen-inch erection, from which a ribbon of semen dripped. I felt a mix of adolescent fascination and scientific wonder. 

With such experiences, I grew infatuated with the facts of living, with nature in all its death, rot, predation, copulation, and growth. Somehow, despite the chaos in my upbringing, events gave me the gift of an interest that—eventually—lent stability and direction to my life. 

So I loved the outdoors, and thanks to the Boy Scouts, I knew how to camp in it. My father liked to trundle his jeep over rough fire roads above the coastline, and he liked walking through tide pools. I learned a lot from his scientific explanations of what surrounded us, but he only camped in Mexico, on trips he did with Della, not me. My grandfather taught me about farming, about cultivating growing things. Our times together are some of my fondest memories, but he’d given up camping when he quit hunting after retirement, so I never got to learn wilderness skills from him. No, it was the Boy Scouts of America that taught me to camp. My ejection from it notwithstanding, I harbor fondness for the organization. It pointed me toward a past time I’ve enjoyed my entire life.

Because I entered so much younger than the boys around me, my early years scouting might have led me to dislike camping. For the first couple of trips, I felt excluded at best and bullied at worst. Then luck rescued me. 

Our troop was camped on an avocado ranch owned by a fellow scout’s family, in the desert east of LA. Aside from the lush, irrigated orchard, the land looked bleak, the vegetation scraggly and sparse. While other kids ran up and down the straight rows of trees, I hung back. I felt too small, ignored, and shy to join them. Some of the boys took turns driving a tractor. I watched from a distance.

Then the gun appeared. The landowner stuck empty bottles into dry silt on the far bank of a wide wash. He handed a .22 rifle to the older kids and showed them how to chamber a round, sight, and shoot. Sitting off to the side, I watched them raise puffs of dust at random spots, missing nearly every time. These boys were surfers, not hunters. 

Shyly, I asked to shoot the thing. The others looked skeptical. Maybe I should wait a couple of years before handling a gun. But the rancher let me try. 

I’d been shooting rifles at camp for years. I’d even won awards for marksmanship. Sitting on the bank opposite the targets, I steadied the bolt-action .22 with my elbow against my knee. I lined the bead up with a point a little above an airplane-style vodka bottle, hoping to compensate for distance. I shattered it on my first try. The boys whooped wildly, proud that one of us had scored a great shot. At last, I was part of the tribe.

My marksmanship was good enough, but I was unfamiliar with the rifle, and the bottle was both small and distant. My hitting it surprised me. The fact I did feels like grace. It made my early times with the Scouts much more fun, so our monthly camping trips became highlights of my school year. 

A lucky pull of the trigger helped me enjoy camping, which set me up for my John Muir Trail trek. And without that, I might never have gone to college, much less found the spirituality that lives in biology.

Lone

I walked most of the John Muir Trail alone. The plan had been to hike with Brad, but I ended up with only myself for company. Maybe Life built me for solitude; it provided a lot of it. 

When Della became a stepmother, she insisted “the kids” must be sent away as much as possible. So each summer my dad paid for airfare to the midwest and six weeks of camp. He sent me to my grandparent’s farm for a month and arranged visits with other relatives to fill out the time. Della dropped me off at the airport the afternoon classes ended for the year. My dad retrieved me from LAX the day before they began in the fall. 

Della also wanted breaks from me when I was living in her home. In her opinion, school let out too early, so she forbade me to enter her house until shortly before my father came home at 6:00 pm.

During my first year with her, we lived in Minneapolis. Most afternoons, I leaned on classmates to take me into their homes. That usually worked but sometimes failed. During the brief autumn, wondering alone outdoors posed no problem. But then snow fell. The first time I couldn’t find a home to enter after winter was in full swing, I returned to Della’s house and told her there was nowhere for me to go. She kept the door locked until just before my dad’s car pulled up. It didn’t trouble here if I sat on that icy stoop for hours; what mattered was that she had the indoors to herself. I must have found other solutions after that, but I don’t remember them. 

Once we moved to California, staying outdoors got easier. We spent our first year south of San Francisco. For some reason, for the first few months we lived there, Della told me to stay out of the house but within the front yard. She assigned me the chore of pulling weeds from a patch of junipers. At first there were many to pull. But after a week or so, I was reduced to searching for seedlings that had sprouted overnight. Eventually, I gave up the hunt and spent long hours alone, sitting in the dirt. 

The next year we moved to Los Angeles, and the policy reverted. I was to spend my afternoons out of sight. A more outgoing kid would have made friends in some playground or park, but I was too shy. I leaned inward instead. I’d spent part of the time walking in town or on the fire roads that laced the coastal mountains around the neighborhood. For the rest, I’d find a secluded spot to sit until I was allowed to return. 

I’ve not practiced Zen Buddhism, but I’ve heard that in some centers, the only instruction is: “sit”. If simply sitting counts as meditation, I did a lot of it during those afternoons. Books provided some company, but my daydreams took less effort and carried me to landscapes I could control. Sometimes I hid very near Della’s house, but in my mind I was far away and in charge of my fate. This wasn’t meditation, but it was inner work of some sort.

I was primed for solitude by the time of my JMT trek. The first part of it I hiked with Rick, but we weren’t friends. And over time we tired of each other, until I felt increasingly alone on the trail. Then we got in a jam that ended our time together. 

After that, I trekked in solitude. But backpacking in the mountains wasn’t like my afternoons in LA. There was no need for daydreams, because the scenery was more magical than my fantasies. My inner world grew obsessed with nature. Then it became part of it, so my mind was just another feature of the environment, like the marmots, trees, and flowers. 

Pot

You might have noticed: marijuana caused me problems. It led to my arrest in Yosemite. Before that, the summer camp banned me because of it. 

The first time I smoked it, a friend shared a joint of Thai Stick with me. We toked behind the local cinema, before entering to watch Woody Allen’s ‘Bananas’. We annoyed the audience with outsized laughter, but that didn’t trouble me. I’d found relief! 

Before writing this, I wasn’t sure of my age when pot took over my life. But looking up the movie’s release date tells me I was twelve. 

My dad forbade my sister from introducing me to me drugs, so my first high wasn’t with her. But once I’d smoked on my own, the rule ceased to apply. 

Jan would be graduating in a few months, but already she wasn’t home much. She’d run away countless times since we moved to California. Now that she was coming of age, my dad ceased trying to control her. He didn’t drive me to Venice Beach to find her anymore. He didn’t me send me into the shadowy apartments where she hung out, so I could lead her to his car for the sullen drive back to Pacific Palisades. 

Instead, I followed Jan into those places and didn’t try to extract her. In those days, Venice looked worn out. True, the apartments fronting the beach were well-maintained, colorfully painted, and nicely landscaped. But seedier places dotted the blocks further from the sand. Though I loved spending time with my sister, those dark, crowded rooms unsettled me. Smoke hung in layers below the ceilings; bottles and ashtrays crowded the end tables. People wearing suede vests, halter tops, and head bands squeezed together on dingy sofas. They gazed vacantly or talked too loudly. Here and there couples groped each other. I’d call them kids now, but back then I thought them full-fledged adults. 

After I’d tried pot on my own, Jan gave her friends permission to pass me joints. After that, the apartments grew less threatening. I withdrew into a transformed mind. One place had a wall of irregular chunks of sandstone mortared together. Even now I can picture how the rocks bulged and throbbed as I stared at them.  

When Jan and her boyfriend rented a place in Santa Monica, I began spending most of my weekends with them. My pot smoking increased, and I began drinking. The first time I combined the two the room spun, like a carnival ride. That was fun until nausea took hold, until I staggered to the bathroom for the inevitable vomiting. I learned the lesson. After that, I stepped outside for walks whenever the floor began to sway.

For two years, pot smoking was something I did on weekends, with Jan. At age fourteen, I began attending the Palisades High School, which served students in tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades. I soon met Philip, a neighborhood kid who also attended Pali High. He had recently moved from New York, and his accent, slang, and Bob Dylan haircut struck me as odd. But he invited me into his home, and soon I was spending my afternoons smoking pot with him while watching Star Trek reruns. From then on, marijuana was my daily relief. I toked in the morning before school, during lunchtime, as soon as school let out, and before going to bed.

Pot slowed my thoughts, brightened my world, and soothed my heart. It also brought less happy consequences. 

The first week of tenth grade, shortly before I met Philip, an English teacher handed out a list of 300 vocabulary words. We were to work through the words during the semester, with a quiz on twenty each week. I’d never been given such a long list before. I scanned it a few times and discovered that the words and definitions stuck easily in memory. I never looked at it again but aced the quizzes anyway. The next semester, when the teacher handed out another three hundred words, I’d been smoking pot four times a day for months. Now they didn’t stick the same way. Now I needed to study each week before the quiz. Memory loss was the first side effect of my new medication. 

Other problems followed. I soon knew Marijuana was a poor solution to my angst, but it was the only one I had. I clung to it for the next ten years. 

On the John Muir Trail, pot led to my second arrest, even though I didn’t have any in my possession. Rick and I hiked off the trail to Lake Thomas Edison, a reservoir with roads and high tension lines connecting it to Fresno. A large campground abutted the lake, with a store and post office at its center. Though we were camped a mile or so away, we visited daily. On each trip, I inquired after a package I’d asked my sister to send when I spoke to her by phone at our prior resupply stop. 

While in Yosemite Valley I’d smoked every day. The rangers had taken my stash, of course, but there was always someone willing to share. It probably wouldn’t have been hard to find a seller, but I didn’t need to and didn’t try, not even as I prepared to set out on the JMT. I’d decided it was time to kick the habit. 

I’d decided this before. In fact, I’d tried to quit many times. Always the habit had other plans, and I ended up caving in to cravings.

As usual, after a day or two of abstinence on the trail, my desire for pot grew fierce. By then I was in the high country, with no dealers in view. At that first resupply stop, I’d called Jan in desperation. I begged her to send me a bag of weed, and I looked forward to that package with something close to lust. 

Yet day after day, the campground postmaster told me no parcel had my name on it. Even though I began to suspect Jan had let me down, I continued to go in daily, delaying departure from Lake Edison. Each trip to the campground brought another disappointment.

Our food supplies dwindled. I called Jan again. It took some doing, but I got her to admit she’d never sent anything. She blamed her lapse on fear of the law, but consequences had never troubled her before. I realize now that she—like me—struggled with so-called Attention Deficit Disorder. I didn’t know that term as a teenager, but I knew my sister was unreliable. I should never have expected her to work out something as tedious as wrapping and mailing a package.

It was time to give up. I told Rick we should hit the trail after stocking up again at the market. But he’d spent all his money. I didn’t have much myself, though I wasn’t broke. A kinder kid would have bought food for two—and anyway I’d bought food for Rick before. A wiser kid would have realized it was time to split from him. But to the kid I was, it seemed logical to urge him to steal food from the campground store. I’d been shoplifting for years and had never been caught. I suggested he load a stuff sack with supplies, then duck out the door when no one was looking. 

The plan might have worked, but we had a reputation. One night we’d raided campground coolers for booze. We’d also scored a couple of big steaks, which made a great meal but led to our downfall. They belonged to a policeman on vacation. He did some detective work, worked out who had probably stolen his goods, then figured out where we were camped. He related his suspicions to the local ranger. So after the store owner reported a theft from his store, the authorities knew who was responsible. We returned to our tents and saw the ranger, the steak owner, and two uniformed cops waiting for us. 

I knew the ranger. A pretty young woman, she’d been kind to me. I’d found her blond-haired, gun-toting image romantic. But she was frowning now. The thefts weren’t her beef; what pissed her off was our smoldering fire pit. I tried to convince her we’d doused the fire, so a buried ember must have reignited it. She waved away the lie and let the police take charge.

The retired cop took me aside. He was a big, stern guy with a mustache the size of a squirrel’s tail. I tried not to tremble as he confronted me. I felt mad at myself: why aren’t I tougher than this? The guy seemed plenty angry about the theft of his steaks, but he told me the other cops had decided not to arrest me for receiving stolen goods from the store, and he wasn’t going to press charges. Everyone knew I was guilty, but they weren’t going to bust me for my role in the thefts. I’d be taken to Juvenile Hall as a ‘minor out of control’. I was getting off easy. 

These days, we’d say this wasn’t a lucky break; it was privilege. I was a white teenaged boy from a wealthy neighborhood. As I learned about my relative good fortune, I glanced over at Rick, the young adult with no fixed address. Handcuffed and kneeling in the dirt, he wore a bleak expression. We were only in this mess because I’d insisted on waiting for a package of pot from my sister, a package that never came. It was hard to ignore the parallel with the trouble I’d caused Brad back in Yosemite. I felt raw discomfort, which I’d later recognize as morality trying to get my attention. 

The uniforms pulled Rick up and walked him down the trail. One led and one followed as he stepped awkwardly on the rocky path, hands cuffed behind his back. The cop in front carried his pack, holding it by a shoulder strap like an unbalanced suitcase. I was permitted to don my own. The ranger hiked ahead of me while the retired policeman brought up the rear. As we exited the site, I noticed Rick’s walking stick leaning against a tree. It looked more like a club than an aid for hiking, but it was important to him. He’d carved it with abstract designs and often fondled it as we sat in camp. I asked the ranger to carry it down for him. She hesitated, recognizing it as a crude weapon, then picked it up and brought it along.

Boys

After our arrest, Rick and I rode down the mountain in separate cop cars. I’d thought of him as much older than me, but he was only nineteen. Yet that made a difference. I landed in the Fresno County Juvenile Detention Facility, while the police booked him in an adult jail. 

We’d headed down the winding roads in the afternoon, but by the time I made it to Detention, the skies were dark. After a repeat of the fingerprint and mugshot routine I knew from Yosemite jail, two uniformed guards walked me through two locked gates made of steel bars, then down a long institutional corridor lit by fluorescent tubes, some of which flickered. They told me to strip and watched me as I showered.  I joked, “Hey, this is the first shower I’ve had in weeks. Feels great!” 

“Just hurry it up,” one said, flatly.

After I toweled they shined a blinding light at my face and ordered me to open my mouth. Then they told me to bend over and spread my butt cheeks. After the cavity search, they gave me institutional clothes and marched me to a cell walled with cinder block. They pushed me inside, and I heard a heavy ‘clunk’ as the thick iron door locked into place.

In the morning, daylight shone through a ten-inch window of glass brick, up near the ceiling. The cell soon opened, and I followed thirty or so boys down the corridor to a dining hall. After a breakfast of runny eggs and dry toast—better than trail food—the guards released us into an  exercise yard the size of a basketball court. The cell block enclosed two sides; a high fence topped with razor wire walled off the others. One group of boys shot hoops. Another sat against a wall and watched. They called me over. 

As the only white kid, I was a curiosity. “Wha’d they bust you for?” I told them the story of coming out of the wilderness, needing food, stealing booze and steaks from a cop, and conspiring to rob a store. They laughed. I felt pretty good about myself. 

Then I asked them the same question. Their replies came easily: “Armed robbery.” “Aggravated assault.” “Murder”. They chortled at my wide eyes. “You’re in high security, bro.” The vibe was easygoing and friendly, not threatening. But I felt anxious, even so.

A guard interrupted us, towering in front of me. “You! Meecham! Get in there and clean your cell! NOW!” 

Huh? I was supposed to clean my cell? Why? I shrugged after the guard stomped away.

I was from a wealthy suburb. Earlier that year, when a vice principal readied to paddle me for mouthing off, I’d refused to bend over his desk. I’d been paddled before, but that since then I’d finally mustered the courage to stand up to Della. 

She had beaten me countless times over the years. But a year earlier I’d grabbed her arms to block her from striking me. I’d pushed her against the wall and shouted into her face. “You goddam bitch! Don’t you EVER hit me again!” Then I stomped out of the house.

Leaving by the front door took me past the kitchen. Behind me, Della ducked into it and rushed out with a butcher’s knife. She charged me, but I saw her coming. I was young, slim, and fast. She was middle-aged and slow. She had no chance of catching me, but she chased me down the driveway, both of us screaming. If I had stumbled or not seen her coming, I am pretty sure she’d have stabbed me. A few months earlier, her brother had been stabbed seventeen times by his ex-wife’s boyfriend. His death had plunged Della into a darker-than-usual place, part grief and part fury.

I didn’t return until dinnertime, which happened to be one of the times they were eating at home. Della acted normal during the meal, so I did too. But from then on I slept with a hunting knife under my pillow. It was an uneasy victory, but it seemed my victimhood was over. 

Compared to her, the Vice Principal posed no threat at all. I felt no fear and was ready to fight if he tried to force me to submit. 

“You’re not hitting me. Not this time.” 

Red splotches formed on his cheeks. “We’ll see about that! I’m calling your father.” 

When my dad arrived, he told the VP he never hit me and didn’t want me hit at school, either. I grinned, which turned the guy even redder, but he couldn’t do anything. All he could do was mete out the milquetoast punishment of suspension. 

His revenge would come later. 

For years, the violence at home kept me submissive toward Della. But I felt free to do whatever I wanted in school. I was disruptive in class and defiant toward teachers; I defaced, broke, and stole District property. I’d been disciplined many times, but the punishments felt trivial compared to what I endured at home. Now I’d learned my dad would back me if I refused corporal punishment. I wasn’t taking any shit anymore. 

So that morning in Fresno detention, I ignored the guard’s command. Of course, he returned, standing so there was no space between his boots and my crossed legs. He said, “final warning” in a flat voice, then pivoted and walked away.

A latino youth hissed, “don’t be stupid”, but I didn’t budge. He stared at me, shook his head, then stood. “I’ll do it.” 

I hesitated, then followed him to my cell. He made my bed and mopped my floor. I felt grateful, but the anxiety I’d been feeling grew stronger. Why had this tough barrio kid scurried to save my ass? What had he saved me from? 

Lockup in High Security didn’t fit the charges against me, and it ended after lunch. A guard led me through a series of steel doors, barred gates, and checkpoints, then down another hallway lit with fluorescent lights. He deposited me in a unit where the security was no more intimidating than a wooden door with a deadbolt. I’d arrived at the ‘home’ for minor offenders and those awaiting foster placement. The setup felt familiar, like camp. The boys slept together in big rooms, not alone in cells. The walls were smooth-surfaced and beige-painted rather than gray cinder block.

An easygoing guard dressed in street clothes showed me around and left me by my bed, a narrow platform topped with a striped mattress. Folded sheets, a pillow, and a gray-green blanket were stacked on it in a tidy pile. No one told me to make my bed, but after my experience in High Security, my persona shifted from the one who rebelled at school to the one who submitted at home. Shaken by the near catastrophe in the other block, I was anxious to show obedience. I  spread out the sheets and smoothed them. I covered them with the blanket, then tucked everything in place. I put the pillow in its case and set it at the head of the bed, perfectly centered.

A group of white boys moved toward me. I’d noticed them watching and listening while the guard showed me around. Their leader was the same height as me but was bulkier and looked tougher. He snarled. “Aw, look how nice you did your bed. Just like a girl!” Though my skin was the same color as theirs, I felt no kinship. My shoulder length hair set me apart. So did the fact I’d been raised by a professor and spoke like it. Pacific Palisades was a long ways from Fresno—culturally even more than geographically. I froze, uneasy, not knowing how to respond. The ringleader laughed and one of his gang shouted: “Pansy!” 

I was used to making social missteps. I was used to being seen as odd. But I wasn’t used to feeling so threatened. At school, I’d been ignored but never bullied. My rare but explosive bouts of rage may have protected me. And my upper middle class neighborhood wasn’t known for violence. But juvie seemed more foreign and dangerous than anywhere I’d ever been. The fury that sometimes saved me seemed out of reach. I was too afraid. 

At home, daydreams insulated me from my social stress. In one, I rode horses. In another, I sailed  boats. Usually an imagined girlfriend rode or sailed with me. These were pleasant fantasies, and I remember many of them as clearly as my actual memories. But in Juvenile Hall, escaping into fantasy wasn’t an option. These kids were in my face. The best I could come up with was turning and walking away. It hid the rising color in my face, but it showed weakness. I tried to ignore the laughter behind me. Inside, a felt a rising dread.

Relief came when, after lunch, I was summoned by the Youth Probation Officer! She was a kindly woman, motherly in her shapeless dress. She had already spoken with my dad. He must have charmed her, because she sounded almost apologetic. “You shouldn’t be here. It sounds like you were hiking with a troubled young man. It’d do you good to finish the trip you planned.” 

Once again, my dad surprised me. He’d talked her into letting me go back into the mountains. She even offered to drive me to the main road that led to the campground.

An hour later I walked out of Detention wearing my backpack. I spotted the PO waiting by the curb in a squat, lime-colored Pinto. When she saw me, her expression wavered. My ragged, filthy clothes and lopsided pack gave her a new picture of who I was and what I was up to. She didn’t say much as we drove to the road that headed into the mountains. She said a quick “goodbye” after letting me out, then wheeled away. I hitchhiked up the road, back to the site of my arrest. Once in the mountains again, I felt giddy. Hours before I’d been worried about an aggressive bully and his gang in Juvenile Hall. Here, I felt safe and at home. 

Weeks later, back in Pacific Palisades, I met a kid who mentioned spending time in juvenile detention. I told him about my stint in Fresno but glossed over its brevity. “Hah!”, he retorted: “Then you know the drill: The judge says, ‘You have the right to a jar of Vaseline…’” I laughed but didn’t sort out the joke until later. In Fresno I’d worried about getting beaten. Thoughts of rape never occurred to me. In my world, Della was the threat; I’d given little attention to the danger of peers. That they might be equally cruel caused me to feel a new sort of uneasiness. I thought standing up to her would be the end of my problems. 

Rick was waiting when I arrived at our campsite. He greeted me without warmth. We both agreed we should head back to the trail right away, even though it was already late afternoon, and we didn’t have much food. He said we could make meals using a book he carried about edible plants. 

Our first night, he cooked up a plant he called ‘wild onion’. As we were eating, his dish slipped out of his hands and his meal landed in the dirt. I offered to give him some of mine. “No, it’s my problem. I’ll be OK. You go ahead.” 

Later that night I awoke with cramping pain. I shifted position, which helped at first, but soon I was writhing, unable to find relief. I moaned loudly but Rick didn’t wake up. I tried to stand but was too lightheaded and nearly fainted. Then came the nausea. I’ve always hated vomiting, and I fought it as long as I could. But soon the retching started, once, then twice, then in violent waves. It felt punishing, but it eased the misery. An hour or so later the stringy stuff Rick had fed me quit coming up, and shortly after I passed out. 

In the morning, I awoke to see Rick packed and getting ready to head back down the trail, with his carved walking stick in hand. I said good morning, and he grunted something. He didn’t ask how I felt. Then he explained, “I’ve got to go back for court. I’m an adult, not a kid, like you. Do you know what that means? I’ve got a criminal record. Because of YOU!” 

I met his glare, then looked away. I was stunned and—once again—afraid. I was standing by now and began pulling on my pants. I noticed that my back pocket was empty. I looked on the ground for my wallet, but it wasn’t in sight. I asked Rick if he’d seen it. “Nope.” He adjusted his pack and hiked away.

I found out later there’s a highly toxic plant that can be mistaken for wild onion. Did Rick know what he’d fed me? It seems possible he did, but it was years before I suspected him. 

I had trouble reading people and was unusually naive, even for a sixteen-year-old. I’d seen plenty of poisonous behavior. The issue wasn’t sheltering; it was the opposite. I’d come to Della after my mom’s suicide. In need of mothering, I imagined Della cared for me despite how many times she proved she meant me harm. 

I was also socially anxious, a common effect of abuse compounded—in my case—by an environment that made it hard for me to develop interpersonal skills. Della and my father had few connections with other families. They didn’t entertain in ways that brought me together with other kids. Most of their friendships were formed in bars and focused on drinking, or drinking plus sex, from which I was (thankfully) excluded. We also lived in a different town each year until I was ten, and after that, I spent school years in LA but summers in the Midwest. Relocations can help an outgoing kid grow better people skills, but I was too shy to adapt. My lifelong difficulty recognizing faces—technically called prosopagnosia—added to my social ills. 

I was an awkward adolescent, edgy around others and confused by human cues. I felt unsafe around people and preferred to stay away from them. So I’d leaned into solitude. 

My time on the JMT after Fresno gave me a lot of that. I was glad to get away from the social stress of Juvie and Rick. I was glad to be alone. Within days, I’d learn that fasting can make alone time even more powerful.

Food

My last ten days on the John Muir Trail were the easiest to hike and the hardest to endure. My legs and lungs had grown strong from carrying the heavy pack over high passes, while ticking off the 211 miles. But my newfound strength was offset by hunger.

After the mess that landed Rick and me in Fresno for a night, there wasn’t time to buy food before heading back to the mountains. Besides, we couldn’t return to the store we’d robbed. And when Rick left me soon after, he took a big share of our supplies with him. 

Using the leisurely pace I’d settled into, I figured it would take me about ten days to cover the remaining 100 miles. I had trouble grasping what that would be like on two days worth of food. So I simply rationed what I had and hoped for the best. I ate three pancakes each morning. For the first couple of nights, I enjoyed a dinner of ramen. But once the ramen packets were gone, it was morning pancakes only. And because they were but the size of silver dollars, my hunger grew fierce. 

Just now, I looked up the calorie count of a full-sized pancake: estimates range from 60 to 180. What are the calorie needs of an active teenage boy? 3,000 - 4,000. A sixteen-year-old hiking in the mountains with a 50-60 pound pack may use more calories still. So toward the end of my trip, I was—in effect—fasting.

I carried a fishing pole, and many of the alpine lakes were stocked with trout. But despite lots of time spent hanging lures in the water, I succeeded only once. By the time I killed and cleaned my two 6-inch trout, their lives gave me only a few bites of protein. 

I grew ever more obsessed with thoughts of burgers, fries, and shakes. I looked hungrily at the abundant Marmots. So I set a trap. I tied a string to a stick, then used it to prop my largest cook pot above a precious chunk of pancake. I stretched out the string and waited, partially concealed by a boulder. Can you guess how many marmots were dumb enough to fall for that?

The JMT wasn’t as busy then as it is now, but other people weren’t rare. Most kids would have told a passing adult they needed help, but I hesitated. Only on the next to last day did I give in to my body’s howl for food. I told a group of boys my age and the dad who was leading them that I’d run out of food. They gave me a freeze-dried dinner. Why did I wait so long? 

This brings me back to Della, the stepmother who figures so prominently in these stories. You won’t be surprised to learn she wasn’t generous toward me. My dad earned the household income, but she controlled it. Sometimes she’d spend good money on me, like by sending me away to camp. But unless it served her interests, she viewed every dollar spent on me as a dollar wasted.

Shortly after we settled in LA, she and my father returned from a trip to Eureka with a five-gallon bucket of peanut butter. They’d bought it at a hippie commune, and it was supposedly organic. It was dry, chunky stuff that couldn’t be eaten without plenty of liquid to wash it down. Nearly every day for the next several years, my lunch was a peanut butter sandwich from the stuff in that tub. And, of course, there was no jelly between the slices of cheap, spongy bread Della bought me. 

The tub was stored in the garage, next to the pool chemicals. Before going to school each day I made a sandwich with goo harvested from that tub. I placed it in a paper sac along with a dark green Granny Smith apples, the only type Della would buy. This was a lunch I learned to hate. The bread had no flavor, the peanut butter caused me to gag, and the sour apple puckered my lips. 

I wasn’t otherwise well fed. Della struggled to keep her weight under control, which meant she didn’t like to keep food in the house. There were never any sweets, and I wasn’t allowed to eat much of what she kept in the refrigerator. Her cheese and orange juice were off-limits, for instance. Most evenings I ate a TV dinner. These were oily and salty enough to be tasty, but they weren’t filling. On nights when my dad and Della stayed home, the fare was low calorie and vegetarian. My father grumbled about the lack of meat and potatoes, but I knew better than to complain. 

It wasn’t all bad. I am thankful Della raised me on meatless meals. It made it easier for me to adopt a vegetarian diet in later life. She mustered a lot of creativity to cook without meat in that era before to plant-based imitations. Her substitute for animal flesh was eggplant. She cut it into rounds to make burgers, into strips for fritters, and into cubes to mix with tomato sauce and pour over spaghetti.  Her ratatouille and eggplant lasagna were delicious, but the other recipes were merely edible. Despite memories of growing sick of that fare, thoughts of bulbous purple vegetables now make me smile. Maybe it’s Stockholm Syndrome, but I find it touching to remember how hard Della worked to make home-cooked vegetarian meals.  

My diet at home left me hungry at school, but I couldn’t stomach my sack lunch. So I began trading with other kids. No one wanted my sandwich, but sometimes the apple worked in barter, even though the sourness made it a tough sell. Often I simply begged. On my more outgoing days, I’d make a show of clenching the sandwich in my fist and squishing it to the size of a golf ball, then dunking it into a trashcan, basketball style. The performance often earned me a treat. Some girl or boy would hand me half of an actual PBJ sandwich, or some string cheese, or maybe even a Twinkie. Inside I squirmed with shame, but I needed to eat.

After school, hunger added to the discomfort of wandering the streets of Pacific Palisades, waiting for the hour I was allowed to return home. I dug through trash cans scavenging glass soda bottles I could turn in for deposits, often finding enough to buy a packet of Fritos or chemically-preserved pastry at the liquor store. I must have been a strange sight on those well-groomed streets: a skinny white school boy with his head buried in a decorative waste bin. On rare occasions, I’d break down and ask passersby for spare change. But that required a lie about needing bus fare or money to call home. I surely couldn’t tell anyone the truth about my home situation; Della had frightened that impulse out of me. And since I was in the same neighborhoods every day, begging wasn’t something that felt safe to do often. I couldn’t risk an adult getting concerned and calling my parents (Child Protective Services didn’t exist until 1974). It didn’t help that I’ve always had trouble recognizing people, so it was hard to be sure whom I’d already approached. Given my anxieties, trash cans were safer.

No wonder I was cast in the title role of an Oliver Twist production when I was ten. I was more-or-less living the part and more than capable of acting it.

These memories seemed distant when I was on the JMT. I’d been happy to stay away from home ever since starting high school two years earlier. But they lurked in my psyche, and despite intense hunger, begging for food was a humiliation I did not—could not—stomach. So I held off until my body made it impossible to resist. 

The fact that hunger was familiar made backpacking with so little food easier than it sounds. It may have even helped me experience the mountains in the mystical way I began to, feeling myself merge with them. That sense of oneness began before the calorie deprivation, but hunger heightened it. In recent years, I’ve participated in many fasting quests in the desert. As aboriginal people the world over understand, lack of food and alone time in nature evoke mystical states. As an adolescent I stumbled upon the power of wilderness fasting through selfishness, stupidity, and luck. But I found it just the same.

At this stage, the experience of fasting feels to me like a karmic pattern. I am agnostic about whether or not our actions lead to consequences across multiple lifetimes. I’m agnostic about multiple lives. But potent themes have recurred in my life, and one of them is hunger. It’s taught me a lot, and that seems significant.

Not only did I deal with needless hunger in childhood and nearly drop from calorie depletion on the JMT, there was a time in my early fifties when my body quit digesting food. 

The cause was an internal hemorrhage that obstructed my intestines just below my stomach. The cause was another karmic pattern I’ll get to later. But the effect was food deprivation. For the first two weeks in the hospital, no calories entered my body. For another three—mostly spent at home—a white liquid trickled into my veins at night but I took no food by mouth. Intravenous feedings don’t leave one sated, especially after two weeks without nourishment. So daily life left me surrounded by food but excluded from dining, and beset by constant hunger. Everyone around me went on preparing, eating, and talking about meals. Ads and scenes of food in the media struck me as nearly pornographic, they so grabbed my attention. I was overwhelmed by how often food was in my face, as if taunting me. 

As a man with many ‘issues’ around sexuality, I am all-too-familiar with the power of sex as a biological drive. But hunger amidst plenty has shown me that food has even greater power to upend consciousness. This truth is easy to overlook if one never nears starvation. 

As I’ve mentioned, I spent a good part of my upbringing in wealthy suburb of LA. I did not inherit my father’s estate, but I just looked up the house he owned: it’s now worth about 5 million dollars. Few white boys who grow up in such houses experience intense hunger. The pattern is hard to ignore. I can’t explain it, but I find meaning in it. My bouts of food deprivation help me empathize with people who face food insecurity, and they inform my biology-based spirituality. Beyond that, they foster a sense of vulnerability that—when I let it—helps me surrender to the power of Life.

I’d be embarrassed to compare my experiences of hunger to what those who suffer true food scarcity endure. Still, they have taught me something, so I mention them. 

Hungry on the JMT, I wasn’t thinking about karma or meaning. With a sense of urgency, I hiked toward the end of the trail and the meals that waited beyond it. Yet, fatigued and hypoglycemic as I was, walking in solitude, I felt the dizzying landscape crack all sense of solidity. Sure, my thoughts obsessed about burgers, but the rest of me became granite, meadow, lake, and sky. 

Change

For years I saw the John Muir Trail as my turning point. I set out escaping responsibility and came back to accept it. I left focused on drugs but returned focused on nature. 

Reality is more complex. My aspirations began changing months before the trek. 

Getting kicked out of summer camp hit me harder than I admitted to myself. Adding up all my weeks there, I’d lived in a refuge of sailing, riding, canoeing, and nature for a total of nearly a year. The owners of the camp had been kind to me. I felt safe and accepted there. I knew my dad warehoused me at camp because Della didn’t want me around, but my times there were fun. I was sad and ashamed when I got kicked out. 

When my grandparents picked me up, they knew something had gone wrong. I was leaving early, right? But though the camp owners told my dad what happened, they didn’t tell my Grandma and Grandpa. I felt too embarrassed to talk about it, so a wall of silence kept me isolated from the two people I trusted most. I knew there were problems with my decisions, even if I couldn’t name them. 

A month after leaving camp, I embarked on a road trip with my sister. By the time it ended, I had more reasons to question my choices. Jan and I headed west from our grandmother’s house in Detroit. Jan had been there all summer, even though my dad was paying rent on her apartment in Santa Monica, where she sometimes attended college. I’d been there two weeks, the same amount of time I’d spent there every year since my mom died.

Our grandmother had called her son in a panic. According to Gross Pointe gossip, Jan was hanging with the wealthy neighborhood’s heroin addicts. Our grandmother had only one barely-sighted eye, and she was used to ignoring the alcoholism that runs in our family. Even so, she could see Jan was in trouble. Our dad flew in from LA and issued the command: “Jan, you’re driving home! Tomorrow!”

“Fine. I’ll leave.” 

He must have figured she’d circle back as soon as he returned to LA. So he added a safeguard: “Take your brother with you.”

While in Detroit, Jan had purchased an Austin-Healey Sprite. It must have looked flashy when new, but Michigan’s weather had dulled its shine. A skirt of rust spots dotted the body where it met the chassis. When the top was up, you couldn’t see out the back; the plastic window had turned brown. The car left oil spots wherever it was parked. 

At age fifteen, I didn’t worry about the vehicle. I didn’t care why I was sent on the trip. With only a learner’s permit, I was driving cross-country! 

Jan and I loaded the tiny car with our suitcases and headed west. My father gave me $60 for the journey, which even in those days wasn’t enough money for a 2200 mile road trip. So we slept by the sides of highways and shoplifted many of our meals. The cash we reserved for essentials, like gas and vodka.

We spent our first night near the intersection of two farm roads outside Lincoln, Nebraska. Jan’s Detroit boyfriend had given her directions to this point, because marijuana grew wild along the side of the road. We arrived after dark and slept under tall bushes. 

In the morning my eyes widened to the sight of seven-foot pot plants looming above me. They formed a dense stand between the road’s shoulder and a field of corn. We spent an hour or so stripping branches off the lanky plants and stuffing them into two garbage bags. Jan didn’t like the effects of pot. She was doing me a favor, helping me resupply the stash that had run out shortly before we hit the road. 

We didn’t know that wet vegetation would mildew if packed in plastic and stowed in a car’s trunk in August. When a moldy smell started wafting from the back of the car, we splurged on a motel. We hoisted the heavy bag into the room and hung the branches everywhere we could. They dangled in wilting green masses from rods meant to hold up the shower curtain, guest clothing, and drapes. Though the room was warm already, we cranked the heat. We then went out to score dinner. When we returned, the air was so pungent—even outside the door—it might as well have phoned the cops. I felt uneasy, but Jan seemed unconcerned. We slept in an overheated room surrounded by drying marijuana.

My first taste of the herb came the next day. A branch near the heater had dried enough to ignite. Excited, I rolled some crushed leaves into a joint before we left the room. I fired it up when we hit the Interstate. I smoked the whole thing and felt…nothing. In those days most of the marijuana available in the US was very mild compared to what’s sold now, but the Nebraska pot wasn’t just mild, it was useless. Only when we climbed toward Rocky Mountain National Park did one of my joints cause a barely noticeable high, though it might have been altitude sickness. We should have known: our ‘marijuana’ was hemp that escaped cultivation. I’m not sure why we kept it with us. I wish we’d left it in a dumpster.

We made our way west. A stop in Bryce Canyon became the highlight of our trip. Jan’s withdrawal symptoms had eased, and the multicolored sandstone spires looked psychedelic. I smoked some hemp, imagining it was making me high. Jan laughed at my folly, but in a kindly way, and I laughed with her.

That good day was soon followed by a bad one. With Jan driving, we set out on a two-lane road through a rust-colored terrain of massive buttes and little else. As miles clicked by, the heat grew intense, and we grew thirsty. We broke out bottles of vodka and tomato juice, which was all we had to drink. It helped for a time, but soon we were badly drunk. The booze and heat made me nauseous and irritable. 

We switched places, and I began driving. I looked down and saw the gas needle below the quarter-tank mark. The map didn’t show any towns for a long distance. I doubted we could make it. We asked traded accusatory questions. 

“Why didn’t you check the gas?” 

“Why didn’t YOU?”

“Why didn’t you pack water?”

“Why didn’t YOU?”

The needle drifted further down as massive buttes drifted past. I felt worried and no longer enjoyed the scenery, but Jan seemed unconcerned. Her nonchalance frustrated me. 

“Why don’t you HELP?” 

“By doing WHAT?” 

Partly because I was drunk, but mostly out of anger, I listed the ways she fell short in my eyes: useless in a crisis, taking so much LSD she ended up in a mental hospital, hanging out in drug dens, getting hooked on heroin. I stopped—too late—only when she turned toward me, her eyes brimming. We’d fought plenty over the years, but this time I’d crossed a line. 

A stall seemed inevitable. 

I tried to guess whether it would be safer to wait with a disabled car or start walking. We’d last longer if we stayed put. 

“But what if no one comes?” spied an intersection with a white building shimmering in the heat. It turned out to be an antique but open petrol station. We pulled in and let the owner fill our tank. He started asking about our travels, but a closer look pulled him up short. He called for his wife, who took in our ragged appearance and ducked back inside. She came out with a pitcher of lemonade, beckoned us to the stoop, and filled us each a glass. 

The trip continued for another week. We rode through Reno at night, marveling at the neon signs along the Strip, like kitschy galaxies. We spent two days in San Francisco, where we stayed in a filthy hotel near Union Square, with a view of a brick wall. We could afford this luxury because our dad had wired us a little more money back in Nevada. We drove to the University of California hospital where—ten years later—I’d enroll in medical school. Jan wanted to take a look at the nursing program, but the giant buildings intimidated us. We drove by without stopping. 

We didn’t talk about what I’d said in the red desert. We acted like we were back to normal.

We took the winding Coast Highway south toward LA. The views were gorgeous, but the engine ran poorly. Soon it began making a click-click-click sound. Even so, it kept limping down the road, so we kept driving. Just north of Santa Barbara, the sound grew louder: BANG, BANG, BANG. Soon the engine sputtered and died. 

There was nothing to do but leave the car by the side of the road. We walked to a phone both and called our dad. He told us to hitchhike home. 

The next day Jan and I drove back to Santa Barbara in our father’s convertible Mustang. My friends Philip and Brad rode with us. We linked the Sprite to the Mustang with an ten-foot tow cable. Then Jan drove the front car with Philip, while Brad and I rode in the back one. I sat in the driver’s seat, steering the Sprite and keeping my foot poised above the brake.

It was an insane setup. Even at age fifteen I understood that. I told Jan to stay in the right lane and drive as slowly as possible. But when we pulled onto the Ventura Freeway, she hit the gas. Soon we were whizzing along in the left lane. My speedometer read 70 mph. Frantically waving to get my sister’s attention, I watched Philip light up a joint and pass it to her.

I’m amazed the Sprite didn’t slam into the back of the Mustang. I must have had good reflexes, and there weren’t any sudden stops. If the Highway Patrol had seen us, they’d have had plenty to work with: pot smoking, an illegal towing rig, a trunk load of what looked like (and the law would consider) marijuana.

My sister used our adventures as fodder for funny stories, but I felt things had gone too far. When Jan rolled the Sprite a month after our return, my unease grew stronger. She was lucky. Aside from huge bruises, she’d not been harmed. But even she wasn’t laughing this time, and I felt scared for her. 

Soon after starting school, I sold the Nebraska hemp to a kid in school. Fully dry, it weighed a pound and looked like regular green weed. He smoked some before buying, but he was probably already high, because he didn’t notice the product carried no punch. Why I thought it acceptable to sell worthless leaves is something I’ve struggled to understand. 

One influence is clear: my dad’s moral blind spots. Shoplifting? Stick it to the man! Throwing beer cans at tailgaters? The assholes have it coming! Infidelity? Marriage is  unnatural, a plot to keep the masses in line. The only behaviors I was sure he frowned upon were animal cruelty and capitalism. 

The fact I’d been raised with neglect, loss, and abuse must have figured in, too. It made me focus on raw survival, and I wasn’t benefitting from an environment of fairness and generosity. But that formative effect is harder for me to grasp. These days, writers like Gabor Maté help us understand how unresolved trauma alters interpersonal style. But even so, our hollow, damaged bits feel like personal failings. When I look back on my moral choices, I feel shame. It helps to know why it took me so long to develop a sense of morality, but a measure of shame remains. 

Before I sold the hemp and defrauded my classmate, I’d focused on how the sale would help me to buy a pound of something better. I divided the new batch into lids and peddled to schoolmates. It seemed like a good plan. Smoke for free and make money. I remember feeling twinges of conscience. Defrauding that kid hurt my reputation with the stoners, and dealing pot hurt it with everyone else. But I was used to tuning out pain. 

You might think I hid my dealing from my dad, but I gave him and Della one of my bags. I’d often dipped into the huge stash they kept in their bathroom. I’d never told them about my pilfering, but now I made a show of repaying them. My father accepted the lid good-naturedly. Della scowled. 

To deal, I needed a scale to measure out the bags I sold. So I’d stolen a torsion balance from my chemistry class. It was a fine device, gleaming with gray enamel. I was proud of it despite the ‘Property of Los Angeles Unified School District’ warning riveted to its case. When the guy who’d bought my worthless hemp to asked to borrow it, I lent it. His refusal to return it afterward surprised me, though it should not have. Anyway, I simply stole another scale from the same classroom. A beam balance, the second wasn’t as elegant as the first, but it did the job.

Not long after, my chemistry teacher approached me. In his German accent he asked, “How does that scale work for you, eh?” His voice was soft, his gaze penetrating. Normally clueless about people, I read the message easily. This teacher knew about my crime and was letting me get away with it.

That threw a switch. Unease had been building and building. What happened at camp, the way I’d treated my sister in a life-threatening situation, the madness of using a tow cable on a freeway, Jan’s subsequent car crash, my vague feelings of guilt about deceiving a classmate, all of it had been working on me. When the teacher made clear he knew what I’d done, I felt genuine remorse. 

As an act of contrition, I began studying for his class, which I never had before. I went from getting middling grades on my chemistry tests to getting top ones. I started doing better in other courses, too. 

One day, I brought the scale to school in a paper bag. While the other students were busy with their lab projects, I retrieved it from my locker and put it back where it belonged.

The chemistry teacher’s kind attention made the difference. His compassion startled me enough to start the process of change. The John Muir Trail only took things further. 

The dominant flavor of my upbringing had been neglect. It’s likely my mother suffered from postpartum depression. And it’s certain she was already suffering from it by the time I started forming memories. She felt overwhelmed and wasn’t able to be the sort of mother she wanted to be. Her hospitalizations after the divorce left me feeling even more unwanted, and her suicide pushed that to an extreme. After she died and Della took over, I faced years of coldly calculated abuse. But the fact my father refused to admit it was happening or do anything to stop it affected me even more deeply. I knew Della was sick, and I knew she wasn’t my parent. But my dad? 

I spent nearly every school day afternoon alone. After Jan left home, I ate most of my dinners alone too. Only rarely did anyone seem interested in what I felt or wanted. And materially, I lived in a state of manufactured poverty, eating substandard meals while my parents ate in restaurants.

The neglect wasn’t continual. My grandparents fed me well and helped me feel safe. The owners of the camp were kind to me. But because I was sent back to Della year after year, I didn’t end up feeling wanted, or even seen.

So when the chemistry teacher made clear he knew what I’d done, and that he saw my pain and didn’t want to add to it, he unearthed my desire to cooperate and connect. It’s an adaptive biological tendency all of us are born with, however deeply our experiences have buried it. Thanks to that teacher’s interest in my welfare, I grew more concerned with it myself. I studied more and rebelled less. 

This was a huge change, but it was incomplete. For one thing, I continued to steal, and I was regularly taking and selling drugs. For another, my improved study habits were oriented toward pleasing my teachers. I felt little inner drive to learn for its own sake, or even for the sake of my future. Still, change was underway, and the JMT hike cemented that change by inspiring both passion and plans.

Growth

When I picture myself in childhood, I don’t see a child; I see a tiny adult. It’d be nice to remember childlike trust and playfulness, but I don’t. I was locked in seriousness, and I stayed locked in for too long. These days, I’m beginning to grow beyond it.

At least I came by seriousness honestly. My memories of early life revolve around monitoring others to prevent harm. In toddlerhood, while my mother was still alive, I monitored her moods and tried not to trigger a trip to the psychiatric ward. 

She was touchy. Once she had a breakdown because I’d left a cup on a piece of furniture, which caused a water mark. Another time, she returned from a hospitalization with a gift for me. It was a hand-painted wooden jigsaw puzzle that she must have crafted with love. But it was easy to put together, and I grew bored with it almost immediately. She became so distraught, my grandparents drove her straight back to the hospital. 

After her suicide, when my sister and  I moved in with our dad and his new wife, I learned to monitor my stepmother’s mood in order to anticipate her cruelty and—if possible—grovel enough to derail it. The need for this was dire. The one time my sister and I complained to our father about how she treated us, she came into my room that night, awoke me, then squeezed my neck tight with both hands. She hissed, “I’ll kill you if you say anything again, you little shit!” From then on, strangulation was a go-to punishment whenever she was extra angry or unhappy. I never doubted she was capable of homicide. Monitoring her moods—and molding my behavior to soften them—seemed a small price to pay for survival.

A few year later, at my dad’s insistence, I started monitoring my sister. There was little I could do to protect her, but I tried. She suffered a psychosis in her junior year. At first she just seemed a little wilder than usual. Then she began talking of angels who spoke with her. It scared me when she said they had messages for me, so I didn’t ask what they were saying, despite my curiosity. Talking about angels was a big change for Jan, even with all the LSD she took that year. But I did not tell my dad. More often than not, protecting Jan meant protecting her from his anger, which seldom failed to trigger some self-destructive impulse in her.

My dad soon figured out something was wrong even without me tattling. Jan’s speech and behavior were growing ever more unhinged, to the point he no longer could ignore the problem. As he arranged for a psychiatric bed at UCLA’s neuropsychiatric Institute, he told me to keep an eye on my sister as she sunbathed in the backyard. After hanging up, he came out and saw her staring at the sun.  I hadn’t even noticed, but he screamed at me. “You CAN’T let her do that! She’s going to go BLIND!” I felt stricken. First, by fear for my sister’s eyesight. Second, because although he often got furious with Jan, he almost never did with me. At home, I was too compliant a kid for that, and I felt unprepared for his rage.

Life seemed so serious, I lived in a state of high alert. Anxious and stressed, I found it hard to interact comfortably with peers. And because my family didn’t spend time with other families or the local community, I lacked opportunities. Meanwhile, getting relocated annually led me to see relationships as temporary, unreliable, and not very satisfying.

Social interactions confuse me still. Chatting amiably? Kinda hard for me. Interpersonal resonance? That’s difficult. I often feel cut off from others, as if in a fog. As I grope to connect, I tend to be either too revealing or too reserved. Psychiatrists tell me my interpersonal difficulties are partly due to ADHD. The diagnosis helps me understand my social impediments but doesn’t help me overcome them. Though I’ve improved in recent years, I am still learning skills most people master in childhood. 

Much of this will sound familiar to those who suffered abuse, loss, or neglect. Much goes missing. 

In my case, one missing ingredient was play. Children learn interpersonal skills by playing with others, yet I never got the hang of it. The only part that made sense to me was competing. I liked to win. When instead I lost, I felt shattered. I’d sulk or blow up. 

At age seven, in Minnesota, I walked a long ways home through the snow after losing an elimination round in a marbles tournament. When I entered my stepmother’s house earlier than expected, Della didn’t ask what had happened. Of course she didn’t care. She ordered me to go back—not because facing the setback would be good for me, but because she didn’t want me in the house. The humiliation of returning—cold, lonely, defeated, and scared—didn’t teach me to play less seriously.

Another missing ingredient was good modeling. My father lacked interpersonal skills himself (I suspect he had what used to be called Asperger’s Syndrome), and his viewpoints were anti-social. He mocked people who conform and obey the law. He prided himself on breaking norms and encouraged me to do the same. I admired his independence, but his recklessness scared me. Though his throwing beer cans at tailgaters has always made for a good story, I felt frightened and embarrassed when it happened.

I followed my dad’s lead unevenly. Often I was defiant. I yelled at teachers, shoplifted, bought and sold drugs, and drove while stoned. But when frightened I grew timid, eager to please. I wasn’t a kid who could sustain the rebel persona. My fear always lurked nearby, and it undermined my boldness.

No doubt my memory is biased. There must have been lighthearted  times I’ve forgotten. And, if I’m honest, there are some I remember but don’t dwell upon. Even so, it seems obvious my childhood self was more serious than was healthy. 

Thus, prior to the John Muir Trail trek, I was intense and competitive, and I remained so afterward. But I was also unfocused, and my only ambition was to become a pot dealer. I wasn’t seeing life clearly, and I didn’t have the social skills to gain perspective from peers. 

I was old in terms of hard knocks but young in terms of emotional development and sense of identify. 

With  its adventure, exertion, wildness, and fasting, the trek triggered a psycho-spiritual growth spurt. When I returned home, I felt proud of myself. I started paying attention in class and striving for good grades. My competitive spirit kicked in, and I began standing out scholastically. I still felt isolated from my peers, but at least now I was liked by teachers. Because I hung out with stoners, I wasn’t a typical geek, but I began to frame my social unease as a smart kid persona.

All this was largely positive, but it came at a price. The playfulness and adventure of being in the mountains faded as I focused on study and grades. My seriousness deepened. When I got to college, I didn’t live in a dorm or join a fraternity. Instead, I bunked with my girlfriend. I adored her, and our time together did my heart a lot of good. But relying on her for companionship made it easy to avoid connecting with people outside our household, so my social skills remained stunted.

As the years passed, inspired by charismatic friends and mentors, I went through phases of attempting more sociality. I’d attach myself to a group and try to fit in. I’d work to cultivate friendships. But I was morose, insecure, intense, and self-absorbed. My efforts generally ended in disappointment and feelings of rejection.

I’m still serious and fairly isolated, but I’m noticing a shift. For the first time in my life, I have multiple friends. Even better, I’m learning to lighten up, to play a little.

Not long ago I spent a weekend at a  “Spirit of Play” retreat. The leaders set up tables of art supplies, and one was stocked with colored play-dough. I made a nest filled with spherical eggs of orange, yellow, and plum. Its base was surrounded by a ring of forest green leaves. On top sat a tiny blue bird, dwarfed by the eggs below. 

The nest was inspired by a gift I received from a colleague long ago, when I still worked as a surgeon. It was little glass bird, with a card that read, “The Bluebird of Happiness”. The message was needed, but I wasn’t ready to heed it back then. 

I might be ready now. Since the Spirit of Play retreat, I’ve reflected on my priorities. I’m thinking about what went missing long ago. It helps that it coincided with my 65th birthday, meaning I’ve reached official retirement age. I feel inspired to focus less on growing up—studying and producing—and more on growing down, into my original self, beneath all the pain, beneath the defenses. I feel playful roots reaching toward a long-buried childlike joy. 

Today I’ve written about seriousness, and in other entries I’ve described harmful choices. It’s easy to feel shame about all this, but I honor the truth that I was the product of an unhappy family and burdened by trauma. My seriousness and poor choices resulted from causes and conditions. I am not to blame for how life sculpted me in childhood. Nor, of course, is anyone.

I also honor the truth that ever since the John Muir Trail, when I see a path toward growth, I step onto it. Sometimes years go by when I don’t see one, but eventually—I’ve discovered—one always appears. And I’ve been good about following it when it does.

Maybe that’s what the JMT gave me above all else: the experience of a new and beautiful trail that took me places I hadn’t imagined. Following one such trail taught me to watch for others. After many setbacks in midlife, the idea of Mindful Biology began to form in my mind, and I knew it could be salvational. It became the path that saved me from myself and lent meaning to my Life history.