Lost and Found

In my younger years, there was only one thing on my mind: freedom, and holding on to it. From my late teens into my mid-thirties, I periodically hitchhiked around the country and went on solitary backpacking trips into Colorado’s mountain wilderness. My romantic relationships were short-lived, and I made sure to work only jobs that didn’t interfere with my life, like cab-driving, bartending, and copywriting. It wasn’t rewarding work, but as long as I could keep having adventures, I figured life was pretty good. But eventually, I began to realize that I’d been living a different kind of rat race: always trying to outrun depression. I went on to do two years of psychodynamic therapy, followed by two years with a Jungian therapist, navigating the wilderness of my unconscious. I learned that my desire to love and be loved was stronger than my fear of it, and gradually recalibrated my internal compass. A few years later, as I approached my 40^th birthday, I met Sandy. It wasn’t long before we got married and had our baby daughter, Alex. But five years later, I began to feel the tug of adventure once again, and planned another solitary backpacking trip. This time I decided I’d hike through New Mexico’s Pecos Wilderness, topping off the trip at a Jungian symposium in Santa Fe. Little did I know, I’d never make it there.

On the first day of the trip, I met with a local wrangler I’d hired to guide me deep into the mountains. We hadn’t gone far before I realized that I’d overestimated my abilities. My middle-aged, suburbanite body could no longer handle high altitudes the way it had in my younger years, and I’d forgone a topographic map for a simple one for tourists. It was virtually useless, since the Pecos trails weren’t nearly as well-marked as the ones in Colorado. I also hadn’t known that several backpackers had already gotten lost in the Pecos that season—and one was never found.

Barely an hour into our horse ride, I strained a groin muscle. No problem, I told myself. I’ll just pitch my tent at the drop-off point and save the exploring for another trip. The solitude will be plenty. Before the wrangler left, he pointed to a spot in the distance where I could pick up the trail. Then I was completely alone–exactly what I’d come for.

Camping was miserable from the start. Maybe it was the altitude sickness, or maybe the civilized routine of fatherhood had sapped my appetite for adventure, but I had no desire to eat and couldn’t sleep at night. Even worse, I didn’t realize I was suffering from altitude sickness, including its most insidious effect: brain fog. After a second day with barely any food or sleep, and feeling the weight of depression, I decided to leave camp early and limp my way back to the wrangler’s ranch. But after walking for hours, I ended up uphill, not downhill as I should’ve been. Then the trail suddenly ended, and now I was even more lost. My pulled muscle throbbed. Desperate, I dropped my backpack and tent to lighten my load and pushed through the overgrowth in search of a different trail. I need to get out of here, my mind raced. Soon, the sun began to set. My body began to shiver uncontrollably, and I ripped branches from the trees to cover my body for warmth so I could make it through the night.

The next morning, suffering from exposure, I began to hallucinate. I heard imaginary dogs barking and pushed forward blindly, following phantoms. Coming across a river, I stooped down for a drink and looked up to see someone sitting further down the riverbank. It was me.

“I’ll only be a minute!” I told myself.

“Take your time!” the other me shouted back. “Everything’s okay!”

As a father and therapist, I knew how to be reassuring.

Later that afternoon, I pulled a pen and a scrap of paper from my shirt pocket and wrote a goodbye note to Sandy and Alex. I tucked it back into my shirt, but when hail began to fall and my shirt got soaked, I hung it on a branch to dry. Later, cold and delirious, I couldn’t find the shirt.

As the sky grew dark and a second wave of hail began to fall, my misery and hopelessness melted into a feeling of peace. I expected—hoped—that I’d slip into a coma that night, and that dying would feel like crawling into a goose-down comforter. Then, I saw another hallucination: Alex’s face, floating in the air a few yards away. It lingered so long and looked so clear that I felt it must’ve been a telepathic message. Slowly, her expression melted from innocence into fear, and then into sorrow as tears began to roll down her cheeks. Now, instead of welcoming death, I feared it—not for myself, but for Alex. I feared leaving Alex without any final words. I feared leaving a permanent hole in her life. I realized that I didn’t have the right to allow myself to die. As Alex’s face faded, I noticed that I’d begun to rub my hands together to warm them. Over the next few hours, I used my hunting knife to dig a trench and buried myself from the neck down, determined to stay warm enough to survive the cold night.

I made it through the night, and the following morning I excavated myself and stumbled back toward the river for water. When I got there, I saw it: a rescue team. The rangers spotted me, and as they approached, I fell into someone’s arms, surprised to see tears in their eyes.

After a few days in the hospital, l flew home to Chicago. Alex knew I’d been lost, but she didn’t know that I’d almost died—or that I’d decided to live because of her. I worried that at barely five years old, she was too young to shoulder such knowledge. My role, as I saw it, was to support her as she grew and figured out her own path, not to burden her with the idea that she owed her development to me.

Life went on. Sandy and I got divorced the next year, a culmination of disappointments, different life plans, and growing disagreements about how to raise Alex. While Sandy wanted to provide more behavioral oversight, I wanted to leave space for Alex to follow her heart and find her own way. As time went on, I’d found it increasingly difficult to compliment Sandy’s parenting in front of Alex, and would often praise her with subtle qualifiers.

“Your mother loves you,” I’d say. “She’s had to figure out how to be a mom all by herself. You know what her family was like.”

In her senior year of college, Alex went abroad to study in Italy for six months, and toward the end of her stay, I decided to pay her a visit. As she led me through Bologna and Cinque Terre, ordering our meals (in fluent Italian!), deftly pointing out hidden gems and steering us clear of tourist traps, speaking with the wisdom and authority of someone who’d lived there for years, I felt proud of how much she’d grown. After dinner that evening, we stumbled down a steep hill toward the shore of the Tyrrhenian Sea. It had been more than 20 years since I’d gotten lost in the Pecos, and now 60, my knees were weak and my balance shaky. Alex reached for my hand as I lumbered over the rocks. “I’m okay,” I assured her—even though I wasn’t. Finally we reached the shore, and I gratefully took a seat on a nearby rock. Alex took a seat next to me, and we sat in silence, looking out at the water.

“Want to smoke a joint with me?” she asked. We’d never smoked together.

“Sure,” I replied, even though I felt awkward about it. Smoking dope together would be our little ceremony, something to mark how much she’d grown. I took a puff. It was mediocre grass, which I’d expected. Fathers can appreciate the difference between knockout and low-grade dope. By my third toke, I realized that it was actually powerful creeper. I declined the fourth.

“That’s really strong grass!” I muttered.

Age had tattered my night vision, but I was pretty sure I saw Alex smile. I glanced back at the yards of uneven, canted rocks I’d eventually have to climb to get back up the hill, hoping I could manage it stoned. The last thing I wanted was to give Alex a great story about how her dad had broken his leg because she’d gotten him high.

“It’s kind of weird, us being together in Italy,” she said.

“Yep,” I replied. Seriously stoned, I’d lost the ability to dispense any sage advice or wisdom, and my therapist’s talent for deepening conversation had completely disappeared.

Alex started to tell me about the time in her sophomore year of high school when she’d told her mother she wanted to go on birth control pills.

“At first, Mom seemed to take it really well,” she said. “But the next day she ambushed me. When I walked in for breakfast, the table was covered with pamphlets about birth control, safe sex, and STDs. There wasn’t even room for plates.”

“Your mother’s always wanted to be the best mother she could be,” I said. I wanted to add, “She loves you,” but I was dealing with an ambush myself: I’d begun to tear up, and I worried that I wouldn’t be able to say another word without my voice trembling. Sitting on our separate rocks, looking out at the moonlit water and listening to the slap of the sea against the shore, something had finally cracked inside me, almost 15 years after the divorce: I wanted to praise and appreciate Sandy, without any trace of condescension, qualifiers, or irony. I felt grateful that there was enough darkness to hide my eyes.

At the gates of deeper intimacy, I wondered if maybe now I could tell Alex why I’d chosen to go on living that late afternoon in the Pecos. But as we often tell ourselves when courage fails us, the timing didn’t feel quite right. What to make of the Pecos experience? Was it some sort of hero’s journey? No, that felt like undeserved self-praise. A cautionary tale? Too patronizing. A story of love? Too saccharine. In the end, I decided to stay quiet. I knew my silence had more to do with self-protection than some nobility of spirit. But I also knew that whenever I’ve backed away from emotion, I’ve never been able to forgive myself afterward, so I resolved to tell her before the trip was over.

The next day, over lunch in a small trattoria, I ordered the pasta special. “Buona scelta!” the waiter exclaimed as he placed the dish in front of me. I thought of that scene in Lady and the Tramp where the waiter plays “Bella Notte” on an impossibly wide-stretching accordion while Lady and Tramp slowly chew at separate ends of a strand of spaghetti and meet in the middle. It was time.

“I never really told you about why I survived in the Pecos,” I began. But almost immediately, I began to rush the story. I could feel myself tamping down the emotion, diluting it into a mere anecdote. Alex shivered when I came to the part about seeing her face floating in the mountain air, but I felt more embarrassed than moved. The moment I’d waited so long for seemed to dissipate. The rest of the dinner was mostly small talk. I paid the bill, and we left.

Later, while waiting for a train in the afternoon heat, Alex and I sat on a nearby ledge. Tired from the combination of walking and wine, I could feel myself getting dizzy. I knew there was a wall somewhere behind me, but I wasn’t sure whether it was close enough to stop my fall if I toppled backwards. The world began to spin, and my consciousness began to fade. I opened my mouth to speak, but no words came out. I was going to faint. As I began to tilt, I felt a pair of hands grab me, and realized that Alex had reached out to steady me.

“Whoa!” she exclaimed, holding me in place.

I rubbed the sweat from my eyes. “Man, I thought I was going to pass out.”

“I’ve got you,” Alex said, her voice shaking. “Don’t scare me like that!”

As I regained composure, I realized that Alex had removed her hand from my back, and now both hands were holding my forearms, just strong enough to hold me up.