What a Body Can Do (a free post!)

Even when it thinks it can't

I do not need to explain myself to you, but still, I will. I’m in the fifth week of a terrible flare of a chronic issue I deal with and to a greater degree than ever before. Most times I keep it at bay, lull it to sleep, or at least my own awareness of it to sleep—it’s always lurking, waiting to turn my insides out—but this summer, I awakened it by simply enjoying life and its summer bounty (i.e. vegetables!). Fellow gut-issue-havers will understand the careful balance. I will say no more.

Except this, the pain had me to the ER and then curled up in a fetal position for weeks, weeks, I say, subsisting on bone broth, ginger/mint tea, gelatin, and more popsicles than I ever want to have again. We had a dinner with friends in the midst of it (a lovely, lovely dinner!) and I curved over in my chair and moved food around my plate for the entirety of it, nibbling bits of watermelon, mashing them to smithereens in my mouth before swallowing. The next day, I curled back up on the couch and watched hours of off-grid subsistence Alaskans (you can take the girl out of the prepper, but…), too many Eater videos to count, and sourdough bakers.

At some point the irony of watching people plant, harvest, fish, procure, hunt in forests and farmers markets for food to serve to customers or loved ones, while I curled, clutching my side and sucking on clear fruit popsicles was not lost on me.

This was before the age of capturing every experience on one’s phone. This was, if I recall, taken on a disposable camera by a camper. I’m in the red lifejacket, we were at the end of a week long canoe trip in the ADK.

For a few years in my teens and then another longer stretch through my twenties, I worked at summer wildness camps. I began as a lifeguard at 15, taking my certs two days past a wisdom teeth removal, moved into counselor positions, then to another camp as head counselor in my twenties, then as a program director and sometimes canoe guide at another camp, then to the largest and final camp where I worked as a ropes course facilitator and lifeguard for its wilderness water-park.

For nearly ten summers, I was outside on the water, in the water, around the water, on, in, and around the woods, taking groups through flying squirrels and zip-lines, Jacob’s ladders and puddle jumping ropes two stories high, teaching team building skills on solid ground to middle-schoolers and character building skills to college students tasked with caring for middle-schoolers. I loved it.

In my freshman year of college, as an English major with enough electives for a minor in outdoor education, for our final grade, our class split off in groups of four where we winter-camped fifty feet from the summit of one of the ADK 46ers. We snowshoed up, built snow caves to sleep in, cooked over an open fire, and slept, pressed against one another in body shaped ice pockets in -30 temperature. When we finally emerged two days later, we found out we were the only group of four to stay out on the mountain for the entire weekend, even the forest ranger deserted us for the heated cabin at base camp. I was on my period the whole time.

I say this because sometimes I forget that there was once a me who was tough and resilient physically. When I am curled in the fetal position, sipping bone broth because my gut rejects fiber of any kind for weeks straight, I have to remind myself that I once did hard things and I loved them. My body was not my enemy then, even if she was always curved out in ways I didn’t like. She was still my friend. She carried me up mountains and through bogs and down cliffs. She once carried an injured third-grader on her back down a steep rocky mountain in the Poconos for two hours. She had strong thighs—always with the thighs!—but they were rippled with muscle and she didn’t mind so much.

A few things happened in my twenties, a few things I don’t really want to talk about here, but things that took me out of my body and put me into my brain. My brain was the only way to survive and I was rewarded for it, and it has been the worst thing to ever happen to my body.

I can trace a through-line straight from the last time I worked at an outdoor camp to today, someone who is heavier than ever, someone with chronic health issues, and someone who relies heavily on her brain to only imagine what her body can no longer do.

I dream of it though. I dream of 40 day canoe trips with girls and wild swimming and fishing Alaskan rivers and walking the Camino. Sometimes I imagine it vicariously through documentaries of those doing it.

One of my favorite poems is by Jane Kenyon and she describes her relationship with her body as “this difficult friendship,” and I’ve never resonated more with something. I love this body because I know what she is capable of and I sometimes hate this body because she keeps me from doing the things I have most loved, and somewhere between that love and hate, there is a kind of friendship, a kind of sometimes indifferent love, a forgetfulness, some attention, some obsession, but it is friendship in a way, I suppose.

Many of us who great up in the clutches of purity culture were taught to hate our bodies, despise their curves and the ways they moved through the world. I had plenty of that, but I loved camp because at camp I didn’t hate my body. If I thought of my body at all, it was with love. But mostly I didn’t think about my body, I moved with it, I worked with it, I swam strong with it and rowed hard with it, swung long with it and stepped high with it.

People talk of runner’s high and I’ll never know what that feels like, but I do know the high of standing on a mountain summit, of finishing a week-long canoe, of cooking out on an open fire, of sleeping deep with nothing above you but the canopy of trees and the stars, and I miss it.

I haven’t given up on doing these things again—though at 44, I know some things are not for me anymore—and in times like the past five weeks, I dream of them more than ever.

You know what it feels like to have your muscles remember doing something you loved? The way Nate’s body lurches forward when he watches steeplechase and remembers his days running for the University of Texas, the way I clench my buttocks and lift when I watch show-jumpers throw themselves over fences in an arena. The ways our bodies remind us of what we can do, what we once did, what we want to do again, and perhaps someday will.

Me, a few years ago, in my happiest place, on the water.