On a warm, breezy Saturday, May 15, 2010, Nate and I moved into a rented, historical, furnished townhouse in the tree-lined Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, DC. We’d thrown off the confinement of our basement apartment and taken on a fairly pricey two-story house for no better reason than because we thought we deserved it. Our buying-a-house goal, while still present, had receded in deference to this new trajectory we’d put ourselves on. I’d secured what I’d set out to secure: I worked full time as a fund-raiser for American University and then walked across campus to my masters of public administration graduate classes almost every night, which sometimes lasted until 11 p.m. I was hustling. I was a hard worker. I was miserable.
There were bright orange flecks of powder stuck to the corners of each page in my Management Theory textbook. I’d read a section, take a few notes, highlight a sentence, then eat another Cheeto. After scraping the final dregs of imitation cheese and crumble from the recesses of the bag, I moved on to the Doritos sitting underneath the desk in our guest bedroom. When I wasn’t taking a weekend class, I was holed up in this room studying, with bags of junk food I’d walk to 7-Eleven to buy on Friday nights because I was too embarrassed to put them on our regular grocery list. I didn’t want Nate to know how much of this stuff I was eating.
I can’t say that I cared what I was learning in grad school; I just wanted to put MA on my résumé because I felt inadequate without it. No one told me to do this. Neither of my bosses at WGBH said I’d earn more if I got a master’s, and there’s no direct correlation to advancing in the field of fund-raising. But when I panned my office in Boston, I saw that almost everyone above me had an MA of some sort, ranging from Spanish language to vocal performance to business. And my dad, who had a successful career as a fund-raiser for colleges and universities, has a PhD. I felt like a pseudointellectual without a master’s degree. Cambridge, home to Harvard and MIT (not to mention the 9,109,034 other universities in the Boston area), has one of the highest concentrations of people with advanced degrees in the country. Living there, I was embarrassed by my provincial BA from a university that no one in the Northeast had ever heard of before, unless they were college basketball fans. I wanted to prove myself academically and decided that excelling at my job alone wouldn’t be enough for what I envisioned: a rapidly ascending career commanding respect, a high salary, and good clothes. Never mind my disenchantment with this career; I still saw it as the only way to the top. What I was going to do once I got to this vague “top” remained a mystery to me.
Halfway through my degree program, I’d physically and mentally exhausted myself and, while compulsively eating grapes in order to stay awake during an 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. nonprofit management class one Thursday night, I realized I’d done the wrong thing. I’d wanted to do what other people thought was impossible, work full time while going to school full time, and now that I was in the exact middle of it, I felt like I couldn’t back out. I could not abide the sunk costs. I’d gotten this job expressly for the purpose of earning free tuition. Nate and I had moved to DC expressly for the purpose of me going to this school. I didn’t see any option except to slog through to the end. I hate being wrong, so when Nate suggested I bail on grad school, I screamed that he didn’t understand me. The more he tried to pry me away, the deeper I sunk my fangs into my choice, like a defensive, stubborn leech.
Our townhouse was almost an hour away from campus, so it was easier for me to spend more and more time there and, as a consequence, away from Nate. He, and everything else I used to enjoy, like yoga, taking walks, and sleeping a normal number of hours every night, felt like a distraction from my goal of getting straight As while holding down my job. I had to start painting my fingernails every Sunday night so that I wouldn’t frantically rip them off as I studied on the train into work every morning. The only time I saw Nate was to argue over who should order the groceries that week. Giving up on actually going to the store, we now paid Stop & Shop to bring them up our front steps. Finally, Nate started making the order without asking me to avoid the fight altogether.
My mom and dad came to visit us for Christmas that year because we had an actual guest room for them to sleep in. I was so proud to host them in our home and not in a belowground one-bedroom that had forced them to stay in a hotel. I was thrilled to show them this metric of maturity: “Look! A guest room!” While they were in town, I asked my mom to go to Kohl’s with me because I needed bigger clothes, which I didn’t want to admit to anyone, but was also too depressed to buy alone. Since my mom is the person who took me on the most embarrassing shopping trip of my entire life—to buy my first bra—I felt like she was the only one I could trust. I knew I was gaining weight, but I rationalized it along with everything else: it had to wait until after I graduated. The more grad school stressed me out and crunched my time, the more money we spent. Nate and I were growing less reliant on each other, and more reliant on money to solve our problems. And the more we paid for, the less we communicated and collaborated. Going out to dinner together on Saturday nights became one of the only meals we shared. There wasn’t time for the two of us, between my school schedule and the rota of cocktail parties Nate was expected to attend for his job. I kept telling myself that everything would be different when I graduated. Everything would be fine then.
A year into this inhuman schedule, Nate asked me to go hiking with him one Saturday morning. I rolled my eyes and retorted something along the lines of, “Sure I’d love to go hiking while studying for my econ quiz and writing a paper on public administration policy.” He didn’t reply and just looked down at his hands, spread out on the dining room table in front of him, enclosing his coffee mug in the triangle created by his thumbs and forefingers. He was hurt. A gulf had grown between us the whole time we’d been in DC. It was a toxic place for us. Aside from my own terrible work/school decision, DC as a culture operates on how powerful you can make yourself seem. We found it to be a conformist pressure cooker with few extracurriculars beyond self-promotion. Living there and working in the food processor of politics was grinding Nate down. He couldn’t even take refuge in the cocoon of our marriage anymore because I was never around. Beyond grad school being the wrong choice, DC was the wrong choice for us. Before moving there, I’d thought we were a hard-charging power couple destined to climb our respective corporate ladders. We would be driven by our American exceptionalism. But after actually living that way, I realized we were laid-back midwesterners who appreciate authenticity and solitude, two things DC lacks in gross proportions. We didn’t belong there. So I capitulated and agreed to go hiking, even though tromping around in some tick-infested woods sounded like about the worst use of my time imaginable. I’d probably get Lyme disease, which I hoped Nate would feel really guilty about.
I had to wear one of Nate’s exercise shirts on account of the weight I’d gained. I passive-aggressively studied in the front seat as Nate drove to a trailhead in Rock Creek Park, the forest incongruously smack in the middle of urban DC. As soon as we got out of the car, I started an inner monologue centered around the theme of what a gigantic waste of time this hike represented. I needed to study and if not study, do some laundry, which was bursting out of the small hamper sitting next to my dresser in our bedroom. Wait, maybe I should just buy a larger hamper? How long can dirty laundry sit before mold grows? Could I skip part of the reading for my theory class on Monday or would that mess up my participation grade? Maybe I could make some general commentary to make it sound like I’d done the reading. I wonder if my boss thinks I should’ve asked that donor for a bigger gift? I cannot believe I am walking around these woods when I have an econ quiz on Tuesday. This hike was not on my eighteen-point list for today and I have no idea how I’m going to cram it all in before work on Monday. And lunches! I have to make my lunches for this week. And paint my nails.
I nurtured this withering, silent diatribe for at least the first forty minutes of the hike. But after a while, I started to forget about myself. I started to allow the hike to overtake me in the all-encompassing way that only the natural world can manage. Nature is resolute in its age, its splendor, and its absence of concern over my trifling little life. If you ever want to know the true size of things, go walk in the woods for a few hours. I lifted my head instead of staring down at my feet, which were stumbling over roots and rocks. I looked up into the canopy of spring where green leaves and blossoms were suspended overhead. I began to think about my breathing, the rhythmic inhalations and exhalations timed with my feet stepping one in front of the other. I was exhausted, stressed, and out of shape. But I could set that aside right now and think only about walking through this forest. I looked out into the dense poles of hardwoods and softwoods. It was silent except for creatures—squirrels, chipmunks, birds—scuttling through the undergrowth. Nate and I crossed streams. We couldn’t hear traffic, we couldn’t see buildings, we scarcely saw another person. Rock Creek Park is a perfect beginner’s hike; we were basically on a flat trail through some woods the entire time. I was mesmerized by the beauty and simplicity of trees growing out of soil and then staying put in that one spot: observant, omniscient, and without judgment.
After an hour and a half on the trail, I began crying with relief. I hadn’t known how badly I needed this reprieve from my stress. My legs ached; I was sweating, breathing hard; and I could feel a blister forming on my left little toe, but I was overcome with a sense of calm. I was wholly focused on my body’s mechanics and the silence of the woods surrounding me. I felt an absence of pressure for perhaps the first time in my life, certainly for the first time since moving to DC. I wanted nothing while I was on the trail. I didn’t need to impress anyone. I didn’t need to do anything but walk. When we looped back to our car, I was already filling with the fevered enthusiasm of a convert, so we set off on another circuit. By the time we drove home that evening, watching dusk settle over man-made monuments to power, which seemed pointless and profligate in a world that contains hundred-year-old trees, all I had to say was, “Can we do this every weekend?” I don’t think it’s an overstatement to call hiking my salvation.
Nate and I texted each other all week long about where we wanted to hike on Saturday. It was the first time in years that we’d shared the intimacy and urgency of a common goal. We kept our word and went to Great Falls Park in Virginia that Saturday, and to Sky Meadows the Saturday after that. We discovered the Shenandoah National Forest, which is just a few hours from DC, and started making our way through its trail system. After mastering the flat hikes, we began climbing mountains.
We transformed into other people on the weekends. We escaped the tension and anxiety of DC politics, of work, of school. We were simply Nate and Liz, reliant on our bodies and each other to scale mountains. After two months of hiking every weekend, we decided we were ready for Old Rag, an infamously challenging nine-mile loop of rock scrambles with 2,415 feet of elevation gain. We weren’t sure we were physically ready, but we wanted to do it, so we did. Sitting at the summit, eating our peanut butter sandwiches, we finally talked about something other than who would order the groceries. Hiking didn’t have any of the things I’d spent my young life chasing—success, accomplishment, notoriety—and it was liberating.
Nate and I developed rituals around hiking. We started going to bed early on Friday nights, so that we could get up at 4 a.m. in order to reach distant trailheads in time to summit and descend before nightfall. I loved those early mornings of driving through the still-sleeping city, sipping the thermos of coffee Nate had packed for me, my shoes off, my legs folded underneath me in the passenger seat. I always felt like we were getting away with something, like we’d stolen time. We never went hiking with anyone else because it became our private, sacred time. It was the time when we weren’t beholden to other people’s schedules or demands or requirements. It didn’t matter how long it took us to climb a mountain; we weren’t competing against anyone. When we were on the trail, time was immaterial. The only thing that existed in our universe was the two of us and the woods. We’d occasionally pass other hikers, usually also silent, reverent, and engrossed in the spirituality of our pursuit. Nate and I rarely spoke during our ascents.
Climbing a mountain isn’t easy and the physicality pushes out unnecessary, clogging thoughts. In the most literal sense possible, it clears the mind. There is no space for anything other than where you can get a foothold in a rock ledge and which tree branch you can grab on to for balance. Cresting the final few miles to a summit is a transcendental experience. On peaks that are high enough, trees don’t grow after a certain elevation. You cross that tree line and are on bald, rocky mountaintop with scraggly, hardy brush snaking its way out of crevices, somehow surviving as icy winds whip in your face seemingly from every direction. I was my most intensely focused at this stage because my legs were tired and I needed to maintain good balance in order to not slide down the rocky face of the mountain. Sometimes I would drop to all fours, lowering my center of gravity, which made me feel more secure. And then, in what felt simultaneously like hours and mere seconds, you’ve summited. Standing on the peak of a four-thousand-foot mountain that I’ve climbed is all the exhilaration and achievement I’ve ever needed. On every single summit I’ve ever climbed my life feels small; not insignificantly so, but reassuringly so.
I didn’t quit school or my job, but somehow, I made space for our weekly hikes. I came to understand a maxim that guides me to this day: I can make time for whatever I want to do most. Full stop. My grades didn’t even slip because I had the mental decompression and energy reset of strenuous exercise. Hiking gave me what I’d always lacked: self-confidence, perspective, and acceptance. It was the first time in my adult life that I prioritized something that didn’t have a clear benefit or route to productivity. I felt like everything else I did was in service of the external metrics of a person’s success. Hiking was all my own. It was what brought me peace. I know the exact date of our first hike together, May 21, 2011, because as it turns out, that day changed the rest of my life.