Carved Into the Dirt

From the Backcountry Squatters Story Night: 

by Andie Creel

"Initially coming into this I thought I wanted to talk about Inge Perkins and Hayden Kennedy. I learned how to climb with Inge, and this last week and a half has been a shock. But I realized I’ve talked to who I need to talk to, and anything I’d want to say has already been said better by someone else. But with everything, I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationships I’ve formed in this community. And I want to talk about that instead.

In the movies, you constantly see people coming together because of fate. There are all the Romeo and Juliet stories of couples who never should be together but end up together nonetheless. And there are always stories of friendships where sports stars and band geeks becoming best friends. Just by chance, two people who never should have formed any sort of relationship at all become one another’s person.

But I don’t think that exist in this community. Nobody here meets just by chance. I would believe it was fate if there were just two, or three people who became best friends, or life partners in the mountains or on the rivers here. But there is an entire community of people who have met all of their friends, and formed their families in these wild places—in the outdoors. I don’t believe that can be just attributed to fate.

Mountain community relationships are not written in the stars. The friends and loved ones we meet in and through the outdoors aren’t “made for us.” Instead, we’ve all made ourselves, in similar ways.

I think I can assume anyone here has formed a strong relationship with a loved one in the backcountry. And so we all know it’s the experience we’ve shared on ridge lines, where the wind is trying to knock us down but we’re laughing, that makes us partners.  Or it’s during the last two hours of a backpack in, when it’s rainy and dark and you thought you’d be in your tent by now, and yet you don't feel like crying. Or the days you are sad, but your roommate drives you out of town to just sit in the sun. This is how we find our friends. These experiences are how we find our people.

I didn’t fall in love with my partner at first sight. I fell in love with him while lying in the one grassy patch in a boulder field, above a snow-fed lake, after having hiked twelve miles and still having five to go.

I’m not close with my sister because we lived under the same roof, but because we’ve had to simul-climb Galatin Tower on the same rope when my dad forgot the second one. Even when we couldn’t see one another, or hear one another, we moved together.

I don’t love my parents because of blood. I love my dad because, although he’s a professor and I’m a student, we don’t bump into one another on campus. Instead, we bump into one another on morning runs. It’s not by chance we’re both running in the same place at the same time. We’ve both chosen to be the type of person who runs on trails to start our days. I love my mom because she’s the one who taught me how to explore. My sister and I were never restricted to our backyard. Our mom took us to the “beaver pond” that was also a cow pasture. She taught us how to not get run over by cows, then set us free for our entire childhood and we learned how to explore the unknown.

       

I formed friendships with some of the most important people in my life while sharing experiences that these girls have just told stories about.

On paper, I shouldn’t even like some of my best friends. In fact, if you’ve ever heard us in J lot at Bridger you would think we didn’t like each other. But we’ve become siblings during long road trips to go do activities the average person in this world would think of as lunatic.

Maybe it is crazy.

           

But the point I’m trying to make is the community that exists in the magic valley surrounded by mountains is not controlled by fate. The people we love aren’t by chance. We’re not lucky to meet the people we form relationships with. This community wasn’t perfectly made for us, it's been made by us, and people like us, semi-perfectly.

It’s a very specific kind of person who ventures into the cold to warm their soul. It’s a very special kind of person who exerts themselves to find peace. These are the type of people who fall in love while trying to feed the wild that they know is in them.

That's the type of people who are in this room. And that's the type of people who this community is made of. No stars could write these stories. Instead, we carve them ourselves, under the stars, into the dirt.