What Happened When I Decided to Live Out My Ultimate Escape Fantasy

I was 56, happily married to the woman I'd met at my 50th birthday party, father to three wonderful grown children and -- in our now-blended family -- delighting in my wife Janet's equally wonderful grown daughter. Raised in Midwestern farm country, I was living a comfortable existence in Washington, D.C., long since adapted to the constant tumult and jerky rhythms of big city life.

Yet here I was, standing in my bedroom that evening more than a dozen years ago and announcing to Janet, "I've got to go to the wilderness. Alone. It's been something I've been carrying in the back of my mind most of my life, and if I don't do it now, while I'm still able, I'll never do it." Now, if this sounds like something very akin to a midlife crisis, then -- looking back on it -- I'd have to say, as cliché as that sounds, there's some truth to it.

But there was more to it than run-of-the-mill midlife angst. I felt that my busy life had nearly swallowed this transplanted Iowa boy whole. It was as if, in the words of the old Tennessee Ernie Ford ballad, I owed my soul "to the company store." Like so many of the people I knew, I'd slipped into some sort of Faustian bargain, in which the seductions and satisfactions of my regular routine had removed me from feeling I had any connection to the natural order of things. Sure, my life was full, but maybe too full -- like a warehouse continually being restocked until it was bursting at the seams.

At the same time, having come to within hailing distance of the age that my father, the longest-lived of the Anderson men, had died, I felt ever more keenly the temptation to keep any awareness of my own mortality at arm's length by stuffing my life with ever more activity. But I'd begun to suspect that, at least in my case, life could be too full, and perhaps it was time to clean out the clutter and create some personal space.

There was also that little voice inside that had never gone away. It was the voice of the 10-year-old son of my fundamentalist minister dad, who'd fantasized over and over about that biblical passage telling the story of Jesus' going into the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights. How cool would that be?! All by yourself in the wilderness. Just you and your thoughts -- and, of course, the lions and bears and wolves.

Somehow at 56, I still sensed that the mountains, lakes, rivers, and valleys might hold the answer to some yearning -- some ageless longing that stirred me to my depths. That yearning had never really left me. It had been there all these years -- like an unnoticed passenger in the back seat of my mind.

So a dozen years ago, I began making an annual two- to three-week pilgrimage into the wilderness, leaving my city life completely behind to strike out for the unknown, to reacquaint myself with the rivers, mountains, and lands that we share with fellow creatures, and -- in this vast expanse of silence -- to do something I don't normally do in my busy life: just stop and listen.

Discovering My Old/New Self

In August of 1998, I set out on my first extended-wilderness trip to Minnesota's Boundary Waters. Despite my regimen of distance bike riding and occasional visits to the gym, I soon learned that I wasn't quite ready for the rigors of the journey. It took only two portages to realize the physical price I'd paid for spending decades of my work life staring into a computer screen. Hauling two 50-pound packs and a 65-pound canoe -- plus paddles and miscellaneous gear -- over trails sometimes as long as half a mile -- was a formidable undertaking for a glorified desk jockey. I had to make three separate round-trips, trekking over root-stubbled, rock-strewn trails, which were frequently overgrown with low-hanging branches -- first taking one pack plus the paddles, then the other pack, and finally the canoe.