My days on the Garden come to an end, as do my definitive plans. I’m not sure where exactly I want to go next, but I know without a doubt it’s not back home. I head farther north still, my mind’s eye seeking Lake Superior several hours ahead of me in all it’s crashing waves-, supremely cold-, astoundingly deep-glory. I am keenly aware that it is a holiday weekend and that without any set plans or a reservation, I could end up sleeping in my vehicle. I’m okay with that.
I had cell service for about a split second one afternoon while still at Fayette, and sent a text to my daughter to let her know I was okay and heading farther north. Just these few days living cell-free has made me feel more in tune and less agitated about keeping in touch, but it has been on my mind that she might be worrying about my lack of contact. I think cell phones are great, and yet, I think we’ve lost some innate ability to tap an intrinsic knowing that our loved ones are just doing their thing when we haven’t heard from them, and to trust (like we used to in the olden days) (when we used to say “olden” instead of just “old”) that they will be in touch with us when they are able. My amazing daughter, true to form, shoots a text immediately (of course) in response thanking me for being in touch and wishing me well. She’s grown up in the world of cell phones and constant contact, but somehow she still gets it. What a gift her quick response and subsequent dismissal are!
On the way to the northern shoreline of the Upper Peninsula, I swing into the Seney Wilderness Area, a 25,000-plus acre portion of the 95,000-plus acre Seney Wildlife Refuge. The mosquitoes are in fine form, as are the flies (black, deer, and pesky). I turn my jeep onto the 7-mile loop through the Wilderness Area, which is basically a one-way, 10mph two-track. You don’t really get to turn around once you head in.
The sky is dark, and the ponds look deep and foreboding. I pull off to take photos here and there, and hike into the wilderness periodically. For being a refuge for birds and waterfowl, the refuge is very quiet, eerily so. No other cars or people in sight for very long periods of time, I feel as if I am the only person in the world. It is both an incredible and desolate feeling. I wonder how the experience would have differed had my guy chosen to accompany me on this trip. There is simply no way to know, I realize, because he didn’t.
He hasn’t accompanied me on a number of my trips. In fact, my feeling without having kept track is that I am very often hiking alone, biking alone, camping along, traveling alone. This is an ongoing theme in my life – being alone. Perhaps I attract that reality, being a rather solitary person, or maybe I just attract the type of guy uninterested in accompanying me on my adventures. It’s quite possibly a combination of these things, as well as probably a thousand other things. We know maybe 1% of the truth in any given situation, and I recognize that my perception of being low on his priority list may well be totally wrong. But it feels that way – I feel I am unimportant to him, and that is a crappy feeling indeed. I am in the midst of spending my 50th birthday week alone in all my favorite places, after being deliriously excited about sharing these places with him, finally having a partner to share them with. He of course had no way of knowing how excited I was because I never told him how important this was to me. I simply gave him the dates of travel and assumed he would see the significance. He didn’t see the significance, and here I am, alone again. Self-sabotage at its finest, perhaps.
Mulling over all these angles as I maneuver the two-track through the refuge, I acknowledge that it’s highly likely I didn’t press the dates of travel with him, I didn’t spell out in bold, bright, colors that I wanted him with me, because there are bigger problems between us, and we are most certainly nearing the end of our relationship. While it may only be early July, we are in the autumn of our union, and winter is coming soon.
