The maps you make ❤️

I lost the map to life when I lost my mother. And it was on my mountain bike, in the woods, that I started to find my way again.

I was surprised to feel no fear suddenly, of being alone. It was awful in a way - had I lost my ability to feel? But it was beautiful too - it set me free. With grief as my companion, I saw more of the trees and the lakes and the skies than I'd ever seen in my life.

I rode and rode all the two tracks and foot paths and horse trails and actual trails around Lake Dubonnet, Lost Lake, Christmas Tree Lake, Mary’s Lake, Bronson Lake, Lake Ann, all the lakes. Hours upon hours, just dumping out and following trails until I recognized where I was and then, picking my way home. I learned to turn back when I was cold or it was getting dark, but in those first few years without my mother, I went until I couldn’t.

I was mapping out my life in this new way, with tree roots and oak leaves and sandy back roads, leaving behind family dinners and traditions that I no longer had. I didn't look at any maps. Instead, I would turn right and remember, or try to remember, the break in the old pine tree, its top knocked off in a wind storm. That was my landmark, and, if I bore right until the end of the lake, I could then go left until I hit that old two-track that cut along the swamp. Yes, that should connect.

And I would go, to see if it did.

Sometimes fear would still crawl up in my throat. If I was a long ways from any house or well-traveled road. If I fell or got hurt, I wouldn't even be able to say where I was. But I didn’t have a cell phone, then, to call for help. I was on my own. I sometimes scared myself that I got so lost, so alone.

But, always, something would happen, and I'd feel rooted to the world again, when I felt uprooted in every other way.

One afternoon, I came upon two turkey vultures fighting over a carcass in the middle of Mud Lake Road. They scrapped below a stand of big, old trees that were half dead and no longer bearing leaves. Above, a dozen more vultures roosted, waiting.

I knew there was nothing to fear. They wouldn't hurt me. They are scavengers, and I was still, mostly, alive. But their sharp red faces were so close and their black wings so broad, that I slowed, a small upright movement in my spine, a sitting back, a hesitation that came from instinct.

The two in the road didn't fly away until I was close, very close, reluctant to give up their meal. One flew at me, up over my head, missing me, barely. The second one bore left, close enough that I could see his beak. I startled from the non-impact of their impact. In response, the entire flock in the trees took flight in unison, a roar of black above.

It was like a chorus of death.

My grief beat in their huge, dark wings. This, this was how it felt to live without my mother. The thundering, the chaos, the darkness. But, also, the will to live, to survive, to scavenge what was left. It wasn’t pretty but somehow, it was beautiful.

I stood and watched them go, and - they took a layer of my grief with them.

I never passed that point in the road, a new point on my map, without remembering the grief that day. The release, too.

Other points soon appeared.

Another day, I came across dozens of just-hatched snapping turtles on an early September morning. The dirt road was filled with their quarter-sized shells, some still moving, most not. They had dried up en route to life, born too far from the lake.

I stopped my bike.

“Oh no, no, no,” I said. I walked through the morgue, poking their shells with my shoes and, finding some still alive, picked them up two by two with fingertips sticking out from my bike gloves. I ran them over to the lake, (scared to step on an unseen one, I ran on tiptoes), and placed them in the edge of the water.

“Go now, there you are!” I said, flicking water on their tiny shells, wondering if it was too much, too late. Not sure if I should submerge them, I just put them with a tiny toe in the water, a start.

I returned many times, delivering patients in pairs, but finally gave up. The rest dotted the tiny road, stranded. What should I do? I wondered. If I left them, they would be run over by a passing pickup truck or eaten by the birds.

I decided to leave them, to let nature take its course. I had done what I could. I stood still in a moment of silence, out of respect for the cycle of life, here on this quiet, unremarkable dam. And I thought of those little turtles, no momma now, trying to get life going, one toe in the water.

Another spot on my map.

In other places, it was the rocks and logs where I stopped to rest. And to cry for my mother. Places you'd never find on any map. Places only I knew. My map filled like that. Bit by bit. Mile by mile.

My grief was so huge, I couldn’t hold it inside. And it was maybe that - being outside, riding and falling and climbing, over endless miles in the woods, day after day. Running my grief out, wearing it out. Pushing and pulling, forgetting and remembering. Each dirt path another little vein of who I was becoming. Every outing, a healing.

The things I saw along the way became points on my map, a new little world I was building, a world that I was doing ok in. Because I was learning that for every awful thing, there was something beautiful, too. I was finding my way again.

❤️