I still had about a mile and a half of route finding to do the following morning. I made the mistake of heading in the direction I had seen Fig go the evening before rather than backtracking to where I had last seen some semblance of a path. As a result, I spent an unpleasant hour or so climbing up and over rocks and making my way to better trail.

All that day I noticed that every time the trail got bushy and overgrown I wanted to throw a tantrum. I could feel my little ones inside saying, “no we’re not doing this again.”

I tried to step back and recognize those feelings and acknowledge that the day before had traumatized some parts of me.

Prior to the bushwhack, my feet had been improving. On the morning after that horrendous experience, my left foot was hurting in a new way. I was pretty sure I must’ve twisted it when stepping on all those uneven willow stems and blow downs the day before. Still, even with the slow start in the morning a sore foot, I managed to hike almost 18 miles that day.

Towards evening I passed through one area that had a bunch of huckleberries but was fairly overgrown. I stopped and picked some, but I was so eager to get away from overgrown trail that I didn’t do the usual amount of picking I do when I find berries on the trail.

This got me thinking about how traumas of all kind stay with us and affect both our nervous systems and our behavior. Every human on the planet has experienced at least some trauma and as much as we think we have overcome it, there are times when these events from the past influence our present behavior. The trauma stored in our body never seems to completely go away and often comes back to haunt us. I had been talking about this weeks earlier with someone who said, “It’s kind of like rheumatism.” I like that analogy. Just like with rheumatism which can crop up and cause old injuries to start hurting when the weather changes, emotional rheumatism comes back and haunts us when something changes in our surroundings.

I have been working to become aware of when I start to feel emotional rheumatism and to stay in the present with it, not letting the past takeover. It is akin to not getting worried about what’s wrong with me when the weather changes and rheumatism crops up, causing aches and pains in the body. Just as with the physical pain of rheumatism when I say “oh that’s just the old rheumatism acting up, “and then do what I need to do to take care of my body, I’m trying to recognize when the emotional rheumatism crops up and rather than latching on and getting lost in the feeling, I’m trying to recognize it as emotional rheumatism.

And in doing this, I was aware that I did not want to spend a lot of time picking huckleberries in an overgrown area as evening was coming on and the bears were more actively feeding. So after picking a few delicious berries I kept walking. I wanted to reach a campsite on upper Priest lake even though it was close to a half mile off the trail. It was said to be really beautiful, and after the day before I wanted to add more beauty to this hike.

I pulled into the campsite fairly late and met a group of women who were college friends from years ago. They were doing their yearly kayak/camping trip. They shared a cold drink and jovial conversation with me.

I took in the beauty of the sun, dipping lower over the lake and crawled into my tent in a much better emotional place than I had been the night before. For now at least my emotional rheumatism was in remission.