Day One — Settling In

AFTER THE BLEACHING SUN AND asphalt of the expressway, Jillian's turn onto Forest Trail was a turn into a world of color. Yellows, greens, browns, blacks, heightened against a turquoise sky. Turquoise! The water, the big lake, must be feeding the sky.

She had driven the busiest route on purpose — taking 23 north from Ann Arbor, 96 around Lansing, through Grand Rapids and on to Muskegon — to remind her, as she headed further and further north along Lake Michigan's shoreline, why she needed ten days alone. More than days. Through days filled with hiking to near exhaustion and nights standing at the water's edge, open to the stars, open to everything the stars had always meant to her, she would listen. She would listen so intently that only the cold water lapping over her toes would remind her she was of Earth, but still part of a great infinite stir.

She passed a huge, brown sign with yellow-gold letters stamped into its painted wood, You are now entering the Manistee National Forest, and she slowed to take it all in: the bright yellow patches of poplar and birch leaves among the darker greens of oaks and pines, and the forest floor covered with ferns, deep greens tinged with rust. It had been an especially hot summer. Even the air flowing through her windows felt saturated with hot and cold and color, and she breathed deeply, smelling the overly sweet scents of wildflowers in the sun, the tang of pine in the shade.

For ten or twelve miles the road cut straight into the woods, and she couldn't help thinking of her typical drive home: from the highway to the land of strip malls and research buildings on Victor's Way; past apartment complexes and condominiums and houses too big for their small lots; to her taupe, two-story house with a dormer, built on a mild hill. Before the neighboring fields were developed, before street lights, they had been able to see some stars.

The road began to bend and as she steered back and forth past the campground loops, the Violet, the Oak, the Orchid, and the Hemlock, she could smell the lake. Occasionally, she spotted dark shapes deep in the woods. Black rounds looked like bears or figures staring back from behind the trees, and they made her think of Jack and Manny and Peia. Motherhood brought so much anxiety and fear. She had become so strong and so responsible for them, but so worn down from her self, and those shadows — tree stumps, she knew — felt like warnings.

Ten Days in the woods was not going to be easy.

But it was going to be.

When Forest Trail ended in the only parking lot for miles, Jillian opened her door, feeling the lake's power gust in the wind. She jogged a pathway of recycled planks, tunneling through trees that rose from dirt as soft as ashes. The dark powder seemed to brew from bulging roots that wove themselves across the ground. Yes, this was a time to rejoice. Time to reconnect with her joy. The path opened onto a broad deck and she stood, overlooking the dip and swell of the dunes and beyond that, nothing but water and sky.

A sky sometimes frustratingly clouded with moisture, but a sky she and Kera had listened to for years, a beautiful, long-afternoon turquoise sky.

She closed her eyes and felt the sand and water and light wrap around her, billions of tiny photons and water and air molecules colliding with her skin from all angles.

Day One, One, One. And I made it.

To her left the Dune Ridge trail began where timbers had been laid into the dirt to prevent erosion. It would be dark soon, under those trees. She had to hurry.

Back at the car she checked her gear one more time. Her roll pack was stuffed with water, pouches of tuna, cheese, protein bars, and trail mix, one aluminum pan, and a tiny coffee percolator. She was roughing it, yes, but she couldn't be without coffee. Her clothes were all set: wring-dry nylon outfits, three bras, three pairs of underwear, tank tops, and a bathing suit. She had packed an assortment of necessities: one hundred feet of corded rope, a flashlight with extra batteries, a simple first aid kit (salve, bandages, liquid sutures), and treated kindling sticks.

She took out her topographical maps — two large sheets taped together — and smoothed them out across the car hood. She could have planned the trip using GPS on the computer, but the quadrangles, each representing seven-point-five minutes of earthly rotation in painstaking detail, reminded her of earlier days when she and her father, and later, she and Kera, headed off into the night with telescopes and a pocket logbook. The act of smoothing out the pale green and white sheets and locating the best observation points had always been the required sufferance before the adventure. And now, her first truly solo adventure would take place in the heart of this undeveloped tract of dunes and forest fourteen miles wide by twenty-four miles long, an expanse of solid greens and blues bound only by the white of Ludington to the south and Manistee to the north. The spot she had marked — 44 degrees, 5.4 minutes North, 86 degrees, 28.5 minutes West — was a four-mile hike away.

At five o'clock, she settled her pack across the back of her hips, clasped the belt, and unbuckled her watch. Here she would live by the sun and the moon and the stars, the water and the wind and the sky. She threw her watch into the trunk and locked the car. Pausing on the observation deck, she said a quiet goodbye to the few people she could see in the water below, their splashes cut by the wind in her ears. As she turned to face the trail, she was acutely aware of the one-after-another density of the trees.

Earlier in the day as she drove across the state, she had pulled into rest areas and paced, reciting her Manistee Mantra:

Ten Years of marriage.

Ten Months of planning.

Ten Days to make it.

And between each, she had whispered, "Day One. One. One."

Already, the act of driving away had weakened the stranglehold of home. Freedom made other things important: the kids' faces, Jack's hands on her...