The summer between my junior and senior years of high school, I took a school-trip-cum-literary-pilgrimage to the East Coast. For you denizens of Calvin’s English department, this may sound familiar, and for a reason: the teacher leading the trip had built it to be New England Saints Lite, an abbreviated version of Calvin English’s flagship off-campus interim. Over the course of the week, I and two dozen other teenagers bought three-dollar paperbacks at countless used bookstores, squatted for photos on the famous duck sculpture in Boston’s Public Garden, dipped our toes in Walden Pond, traded Shakespeare soliloquies with a Walt Whitman impersonator in a Concord pizzeria, and spent three days LARPing the 1860s on a historical farm in Maine.
It was a significant trip for many reasons, as it marked the first time I ever said the word “fuck” out loud, the only time I’ve ever been so angry that I’ve thrown something, and what I consider to be the start of my staring contest with mental health, when one of the teachers chaperoning the trip sat me down on a bench outside the Louisa May Alcott house and said, “Annaka, when we get home, you should go talk to your doctor, because I’ve had depression for twenty-five years and I think you might have it too.”
(She was right.)
The whole thing was a real exercise in accelerated bildungsroman, but it also marked a less angsty occasion: the only time I can remember ever actively disagreeing with that teacher who had carefully built the Walk to Walden trip into something fun and meaningful for high schoolers, even little pedants like me. He was a lot like Mr. Keating in Dead Poets Society but without all the semi-problematic great-man-theory pedagogy and a map of Middle-earth on his classroom wall. He also gave me the greatest compliment I ever received in high school (and maybe since) when he told me that if I had been alive in the 1950s, HUAC would’ve “locked you up right away.”
The Walden trip was his brainchild and the farm his favorite bit, where we traded our jeans for “period” wear rummaged from thrift shops and spent the days without electricity and running water, learning how to make cornbread in a wood-burning oven, thresh wheat with sticks, and milk a cow with nothing but cold fingers. This was the beginning of the trip, still a couple of days before that conversation on the bench in Concord. I wasn’t doing particularly well, though; my journal entries from the first half of that week read like John Green by way of Panic! At the Disco, and not in a good way.
That day, that teacher and I leaned against hoes in a vegetable patch set before the two-hundred-year-old farmhouse where the group had slept the night before. It was early morning, our breath visible in the air even though it was summer. Dew soaked the hem of my thrifted skirt and made it wrap around my legs with each step.
I watched his eyes trace the horizon, his appreciation for the vista obvious in the methodicalness of their gaze, until they suddenly stopped, fixated on a line of stark wind turbines rising out of the fog on a mountain ridge in the distance. They were the only modern thing visible for miles. “It’s such a shame, isn’t it?” he said.
“I dunno,” I replied after a minute, kicking my wet skirt away from chilly ankles. “I think they’re kinda beautiful.”
I felt guilty saying it—like I was betraying nature, and the farm, and the whole spirit of the Walden trip. The teacher paused, nodded, and we turned back to our row of half-tilled soil.
Eight years later, I’m driving on an unknown road near midnight in northern Michigan. There are no streetlights, no town lights, no headlights from passing cars. I’m alone and I’m supposed to have been at my destination—my grandparents’ cottage in Falmouth—half an hour ago. I’m lost because of a construction-forced detour and Google Maps is trying to take me down closed roads; I risk it once and swerve around an orange and black sign reading “NO THRU TRAFFIC,” getting within fifteen feet of the turn I need before my way is blocked by the wide yellow side of a bulldozer. When I turn around, the app funnels me through back streets until I end up in front of the sign again.
I’m not panicking yet, even though I don’t want to keep driving because I’m afraid of going the wrong direction (and deer) but I don’t want to stop and get my bearings because I’m afraid I’ll get murdered. This is how teenagers die in horror movies and women die in the 1970s. And if I did stop, what would I do? Call my dad and say, “Hey sorry for waking you, but I’m on some road between Cadillac and Kalkaska. I’m starting to wonder what would happen if I just kept driving forever. Or just stopped driving forever. Please don’t be alarmed.”
So I pick a direction and go. If I get far enough away, my phone will have to stop rerouting me through the hate-triangle of no-thru roads, right? Right. It is a bit unfortunate that it only has nine percent battery left, though.
The road I end up on is long and straight and dead, with cornfields on either side and dark houses set at long intervals. And there are lights in the sky, red lights, even though there are no cell towers this far off the freeway. My brain registers the oddity a second before I know what they are.
It’s the wind farm outside of McBain. I know how to get home.
I start thinking about the turbines on the mountain in Maine and decide that I was right about them. It’s a manic thought, and a dumb one, but it’s honest and full of feeling. And I haven’t had one of those in a while.
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Once again, Annaka, I love both your candor and your scintillating writing style. You’re not ’tilting at windmills’ (okay, wind turbines); you hit your internal enemies head on. Kudos to you for your intrepid wanderings!
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I don’t know; I might be tilting at windmills a LITTLE, but hopefully not so much that I fall over.
Thanks for reading!
You have such a way with words, sis.
“…and spent three days LARPing the 1860s on a historical farm in Maine.”
“…my journal entries from the first half of that week read like John Green by way of Panic! At the Disco, and not in a good way.”
“Hey sorry for waking you, but I’m on some road between Cadillac and Kalkaska. I’m starting to wonder what would happen if I just kept driving forever. Or just stopped driving forever. Please don’t be alarmed.” –> This has Hyperbole and a Half energy.
You may be slightly biased there, but I appreciate it nonetheless.
Oh, man. I feel like being lost on the road with a low-battery phone and having to actually find a landmark to get your bearings is some kind of modern rite of passage.