Chasing a Feeling
By Keely Dickes
When I graduated college and people asked me what I was doing, I was shy about it at first. Beating around the bush. Delaying the inevitable reveal that no, I was not chasing a career of any kind, and no, I did not have a job or a plan. As much as I tried to tell myself differently, a part of me was ashamed: ashamed to not be applying to jobs with a stable salary, ashamed not to be apartment searching in a city, ashamed to not be living the life expected of me.
"I'm driving out west to rock climb and work on my writing," I'd say, emphasizing the writing.
Home on the road.
It's not a lie. I do want to write, in some fashion. "When I choose a place to live, I'll bartend to pay the bills," I'd add. That way, even if they disagreed with me or thought I was crazy, they couldn't think of me as impractical.
No, I'd be taking care of myself, whatever I did. The plan was this, and it's more or less come to fruition: live out of my car, drive across the West with my best friend from college, and sleep in a tent every night.
Since we began in mid-June, we've hit rock climbing hot spots like Rifle, Bishop, and Yosemite. We've climbed the Grand Teton in Wyoming and I've run on many trails at many different elevations. At night I have a beer, she smokes weed, and we watch the sky turn from pink to red to purple around our tent. If there's no phone service at camp (more often than not) we read before bed by the light of our headlamps.
I've fallen back in love with reading. I have no desire for a screen or a fast-paced plot. Reading is slower, richer, the words sinking into me like the sunlight on my back. Reading fits in with the mind I've gained out here and the self I've lost.
I've written less than I'd planned and explored more. I sometimes have anxiety about the future, but I have no regrets. Somewhere in my chaotic, high-achieving, university-student past, I made the conscious choice to live by passion. The choice happened slowly, then all at once. It began, I think, when I found rock climbing and realized I could feel more in my waking life. I felt more present and more alive up on the wall.
Since then I've been, quite literally, hooked on a feeling of freedom and being present. I protect this feeling by doing what I'm doing—making an atypical choice, doing the bold thing, the perhaps stupidly brave thing. Like a flame that needs oxygen, my freedom needs rock and mountains and hills to stay alive. I made the impulsive choice to not be stifled.
The author atop the Grand Teton (13,775 ft), Wyoming.
But the more time I spend out here, in quiet places where there is no sound but the wind racing over the plains or whipping through the canyon, the more I realize the feeling isn't as simple as presence or freedom. I've found both already.
I've found presence working my body across a gap in the rock on the Grand Teton, legs bridging a sheer drop of hundreds of feet.
I've found freedom climbing the last few hundred feet to the top of the mountain, entering a strange heaven of thousands of red butterflies. I found freedom in my body as I stood there, on the summit, almost fourteen thousand feet high. I had done it. I had hiked and walked and climbed thousands of feet until I had arrived on what felt like the top of the world. My world. There was a warm stillness all around me and in me. At that moment, I lacked nothing. This, I thought. This.
Sunlight in the Sierra Nevada, California.
Trail running in the Sierras, a couple of weeks before the Grand Teton, I thought I had entered paradise. The green valley of pine trees ahead of me seemed infinite, needles glinting in the early afternoon sun. Sometimes I'd pass a stream running over rocks, each stone bathed and shiny, or catch sight of a pale granite wall in the distance. I suddenly wanted to follow the trail as far as it went. I wanted to run beside the still, tall evergreens until I hit the granite cliffs in the distance. The more I ran the more it felt like the landscape was a part of me, as if I had dissolved in it. I felt myself smiling. I felt as agile as a deer, strong as a horse. I leaped over a rock in the trail and curved around a bend, moving with the rhythm the hills were giving me. I felt happiness so pure that it was like white light had broken open in my chest.
I wondered at this feeling and I wondered at the world.
It was a couple weeks later that I finally recognized perhaps a proper name for what I was feeling, that feeling that was neither freedom nor presence, but something entirely different.
We were camped at City of Rocks in Idaho, and I left the tent at sunset after a nap. I wanted to see what the sky was doing—a desire I hadn't had time for in my college days. I quietly unzipped the tent and slipped out, wanting to be alone. The sky was doing something, as it always is. The light was fading and in the distance it was rosy, light reflecting against fluffy white clouds, making them glow pink. Eyes wide on one cloud in particular, I walked towards it. I had a feeling like longing and satisfaction all at once, looking at that cloud, and I still don't understand it. The feeling ran in me as deep as the cloud was far away, and I hungered after it, wanting more. I walked to where the campground road ended and climbed on top of a picnic bench to see as much of the sky as I could.
As I looked at it my eyes watered, and I felt stupid to be so impacted by such a little thing. But the more I thought about it the more I realized it wasn't just the cloud. The feeling was gratitude. I was grateful to be here, living outside, where I was not separated from the wind and the sun by walls. Grateful for time on the rock, with the world small below me, grateful for time on the trail where I felt motion and stillness at once. I was grateful to be in places and doing things that allow me to feel grateful like this.
I felt for the first time that maybe it wasn't such a terrible thing to chase what I was, and still am, chasing. Maybe it wasn't as shameful as I thought, to be following true gratitude, and connection that makes my heart beat faster and my eyes grow wider. I'm not just chasing embodied being or endorphins or the sweet rewards of adrenaline. I’m chasing what it means to me to feel alive. I’m chasing awareness, happiness, and the most unexpected feeling of all—gratefulness.
Keely Dickes is an American climber and writer, formerly an intern for the climbing magazine Rock and Ice. Follow her travels on Instagram @keely.dickes.
