After a few days with the Kosher’s, I headed off to visit my friend Susan in Minneapolis. As I drove, I became aware that not knowing about my future was opening up all sorts of thought trains for me. One of these was wondering what I would do as I aged. The house I live in has a large property that I don’t feel able to keep up with. In addition, there’s an old house on the property that’s been used as a storage shed for some years. It is in the process of falling down. I want to clear this out, along with the pole barn which fell down a few winters ago and the barn which fell down a few years before that. Both of these latter are now covered in golden rod and saplings. I always marvel at the speed with which nature reclaims things in a climate with plenty of water.

I heat my home with wood, which means cutting and stacking wood every year, before hauling it into the house to keep the stove going almost continuously for six months out of every year. In dry years, the spring, which is the water supply to my house, runs dry. Sometimes I have to haul water for as much as four months. Because I am used to living with minimal water as I backpack, I don’t mind hauling wood nor water, although I do miss being able to take a shower. But hauling these things on an injured foot has become another challenge.

I’m aware that as I age, I might not want to be hauling water or cutting wood. I love the rural nature of my house, but I’m also aware that it’s fairly isolating. Continuing to live there as I age requires being able to drive or to have someone who would do a lot of driving for me. The rural dirt road I live on makes for a pretty drive, but in some seasons of the year, especially winter and spring mud season when the roads turn to something like chocolate pudding, it’s difficult to ask someone else to make the 8 mile climb up the mountain to drive me around. I enjoyed working hard as a farmer for many years, but I’m beginning to want my life to be easier, and I’m recognizing that I can’t wait for someone else to make it easier for me. If I want an easier life, I have to be the one to create it.

In some ways this was a real revelation for me. Growing up in an abusive family, which left me with serious posttraumatic stress and dissociation, made it difficult for me to feel I had a choice in anything. Although I always had fighter and rebel parts, parts of me grew up feeling I was a powerless victim to what was happening around me. In addition, living with dissociation, never knowing when I might be triggered into a dissociated alternate reality, left me with a sense of powerlessness over both the future and my own behavior. When people ask me what it’s like, I try to explain it by talking about someone who returns from a war zone and upon hearing a car backfiring, crouches down, ready to pull a gun and fire back at what they perceive to be incoming bullets. In those moments, when the dissociated past is reactivated, it is hard to separate the past from the present, and many childhood abuse survivors live in a world where the abuse feels like it’s never ending.

Exacerbating the sense of powerlessness for me was the fact that many of my parts split off when I was young and so continued to live as if they were very young children, feeling all the powerlessness that comes from being young and hoping that somewhere there would be a mommy to save them. It’s only been these last few years, as I’ve been adventuring and healing my traumatized, dissociative splits that I’ve stopped looking for someone external to save me.

Surviving lightning storms, crossing raging streams and narrow snow-or-scree-filled ridges, being chased by grizzly bear, and making daily progress when in considerable pain, have taught me I have the ability to take care of myself and make choices in how my life will go.

I knew I wanted to be off the North Country Trail when I was in so much foot pain. I knew I didn’t have to feel like a failure, although I had to keep reminding myself that. I had to continually work not to compare myself to other hikers and to listen to those who reminded me that the fact that I had hiked at all this year, on a newly burnt foot, was a major accomplishment. For much of my life, many parts of me were extremely concerned about what other people thought about me. Other parts craved recognition as a way to feel good about themselves. Stopping a hike before I planned to, challenged all of those parts to begin to think differently.

As I pondered my future while driving to Minneapolis, I recognized I had to approach it like I do any trail, one step at a time, not trying to figure it all out at once and trusting that as long as I move forward something would reveal itself.

I knew I wanted to find ways to be of service to as many people as I could and that I wanted to increase my sense of community, especially in my living situation. Other than that, I didn’t really have an idea of where I would end up in the future. I knew some of this pondering is common for many long distance adventurers as the adventure comes to an end. I also knew that some of my questions are part of the transition into older age, when people look at downsizing to make life more manageable as ones body slows down. The severe burn injury to my foot and the subsequent inactivity left me feeling old and wondering just how much more I could do. I sensed I had a choice to give into this and let myself go downhill or to really pull deep within and keep trying to move my body as best as I could. I tried to let these thoughts pass and not grab onto them with any sense of worry, hoping they would percolate and eventually bring me some insights into what direction to go in.

I had a lovely visit with Susan. She is more active than most 88-year-olds I know and is one of my role models for good aging. She is involved in a wide range of activities. While I was there I went with her to her local library where she helps oversee a nature program for children. I also went with her to an Isaiah meeting, which is a group that works to advance racial and economic justice. At this particular meeting, they were discussing ways community members could ensure free and fair elections for all sides. Together we went to a local community event celebrating the neighborhood. Susan showed me her small garden where she has a number of tomato plants, herbs, and greens growing. We shared many really healthy meals, such as scrambled organic eggs with turmeric root and steamed kale. We went to a concert together and Susan played some pieces for me on her full-size keyboard, including one that she composed herself. We attended a community birthday party in the building of about 300 apartments during which they celebrated all the people in the building who had birthdays in the month of August. In addition to all these activities, Susan writes poetry and has one book of poetry published called Such Days as This: Collected Poems. She sings in her church choir, does exercises with weights for her body and online for her brain, and teaches Qigong at her wonderful senior cooperative which is in a community in Minneapolis where she can walk to almost everything she needs, including church, beautiful parks, the grocery store, library, hardware store and some small restaurants. She says she often feels fatigued from long Covid, yet when I look at how much she’s doing, I hope my energy matches hers when I am 88 years old.

I thought I’d never consider living in a big city, but seeing her in her cooperative living situation on which any given day she can choose to be surrounded by community or choose to do her own thing without a car has made me wonder if a city like hers might be an option for me at some point. It reminded me once again to remain open to all options, willing to look at the pros and cons of all sides of something before making a decision.

I love that in Susan’s neighborhood, many people have turned their lawns into wildflower gardens, nurturing, many beneficial, insects, and birds. In fact, I saw an entire flock of turkeys hanging out in some of these gardens right in residential Minneapolis. On the other hand, It was sobering for me to see signs on a number of street corners saying “ICE took three of our neighbors from this spot” or “four of our friends disappeared from here due to ICE.”

After close to two weeks of waiting to hear back from the Mayo Clinic, I called, only to learn that they still hadn’t gotten the referral from my doctors office. Once again, I was in the morass of trying to get medical care. I knew I was lucky to have the mental capacity and determination to keep pushing for what I needed. Even though this process sometimes brings me to tears, I really feel for those who have an even harder time dealing with the medical system.

Toward the end of my time with Susan, I finally began to feel some improvement in my hip. I sensed I might need to be off the trail before answers about my future life would come to me, but I wasn’t yet ready to throw in the towel on my current North Country Trail hike. I wanted to see if there was a way I could take Marty up on his offer to slack pack me through Wisconsin, and so with that in mind, I said my farewells to Susan and headed back to Wisconsin.

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