Trail Mix

The majority of my childhood family backpacking trips occurred in New England. My father’s deep love of the wilderness initiated these excursions, but the whole family came to love how trees and natural waterways calmed us. Making such a journey with four small children was a tall order. In exchange for the extra effort involved for such trips—my mom was already working her ass off at home—my parents negotiated for my dad to be in charge of planning, packing, and cooking. Summer after summer, between Memorial Day and Labor Day, we set forth: to the Catskills, the White Mountains, and the Adirondacks—my dad’s pack piled higher than the top of his head and my mom’s not much shorter. If there were any tension around these trips, my parents kept it to themselves, and naturally I was eager to make similar forays once I reached adulthood myself.

As one of the children, I only had the vaguest notion of where we were going, or where we were once we got there. That was up to the adults. My job was to endure a long car ride and be lured up the trail by cunningly meted-out cheese and chocolate. I was curious about the places we hiked but never tried to locate them on a map. I barely knew the names of towns nearby to my home, let alone how to get to them. To children, the world is vast, and unknowable in its vastness. So I looked first out of car windows, and then at countless pine-tree-lined trails. At the end of each day, I feasted on one of my dad’s hot dinners, miraculously assembled from camping food.

You could say I was primed to associate backpacking with certain things being expected of me; packing what I needed, carrying my pack, putting one foot in front of the other—and not certain other things; planning the trip, looking at maps, thinking deeply about meals. So when my then-boyfriend, Rich, proposed a backpacking journey as part of our trip to Oregon, I was prepared to show up in certain ways and not in others. As fate would have it, he saw no reason to involve me in aspects of the planning, and neither did I.

Which is why, in a cheaper-by-the-dozen-like efficiency move, we ended up backpacking in the Jefferson Wilderness area with nothing but trail mix to eat.

I did initially express my desire for more varied food. I knew what it was like to walk all day, pitch a tent while tired and hungry, and be rewarded with a warm, tasty dinner. I also knew what it was like to emerge from a comfortable sleeping bag into a chill morning and be able to warm up with a bowl of oatmeal and a cup of hot cocoa. But Rich found none of these promised comforts compelling.

After I suggested we have three meals a day and that some of them should be hot, he thought a moment, then said, “But then we’d have to bring a camp stove. And extra water. And plan meals. And shop for the food.” He paused as if listing these tasks could only lead to one conclusion. He suggested, “Let’s just bring trail mix.”

This was the same guy whose favorite make-at-home meal was Kraft mac and cheese with added canned tuna, frozen peas, and corn. He ignored the milk and butter recommended on the box to generate cheesiness from the powdery cheese. Pasta, corn, peas, tuna, all encrusted in dehydrated cheese powder. This was not a man seduced by food; to him it was but fuel for the furnace.

So I did say what I wanted. I believed that the way to get my needs met was to say what they were and ask that they be considered. I was unprepared for the other person to simply ignore them. If I made my gambit and it was rebuffed, well, those were my only cards. Hence, trail mix.

In the developmental model of couples therapy (of which I am a student), my above, so-called strategy arises from a state known as ‘symbiosis.’ Symbiosis describes a phase that occurs in a couple’s life when they are so uncomfortable with conflict that one or both people squash their needs in order to keep the peace. So if, for example, someone wanted food that was quite different from what her boyfriend wanted, in the symbiotic phase she’d have a limited tolerance for being of two minds about that food, and she’d eventually abandon her culinary desires in favor of getting back on the same page.

Except this sort of “being on the same page” is a fiction. It’s as if oil and water agreed to only recognize the hydrogen and oxygen atoms they had in common and ignored the carbon, glycerol, and fatty acids that the oil also possessed. Rich and I weren’t on the same page any more than oil and water. My acquiescing simply buried the fact that we weren’t.

All couples go through the symbiotic phase at the start, that heady, falling-in-love stage where we seem perfect for each other. Many of us have trouble shifting out of this phase even when we start to notice the ways we differ. This difficulty might stem from watching parents who handled their conflicts this way (how could I as a kid have understood the simmering indignation that ran below the surface as my parents tried to keep our trips harmonious?). For women, female socialization, which often emphasizes accommodation, can also contribute to this difficulty. Wherever it originates, one thing always follows on its heels: resentment.

At the beginning of the hike, before the two days’ worth of resentment and trail mix had built up, so to speak, I looked forward to my first adult attempt at backpacking. We looked clean and energetic in our obligatory at-the-trailhead photos, then we put the camera away and set out.

I’d done this same hike to the base of Mt. Jefferson with my family as an older teenager. Both times we’d gone with other families whose children were much younger, and I remembered the hike taking an entire day. I hadn’t factored in the fact that two twenty-somethings could hike much faster than families with small children. The hike took half the time we’d allotted.

Late snow-melt made the ground a patchwork of dry and damp. We tramped around the soggy meadows at the base of the mountain looking for a place to pitch our tent, which is when the mosquitoes appeared. We stopped walking long enough to scope out a potential site, and word got out among the biting insects that two warm-blooded creatures were standing still long enough to be attacked. A curtain of mosquitoes grayed the piercing blue sky; thousands arrived eager for a feast.

“Let’s get the tent up and get away from these bugs.” Rich slid his pack off. We got the tent up quickly and scrambled inside. For a while, we hunted the mosquitoes that had gotten trapped in the tent. Then we looked at each other. It was 5:00 p.m. We’d have full sun for at least two more hours, and partial sun for two more. We’d brought no books. There was nothing to do, no food to prepare.

We passed the bag of trail mix back and forth and stared at the slowly diminishing day while mosquitoes whined and plastered themselves against the outside of the tent.

We spent a miserable night. Outwardly, we were in this together. Inwardly, I blamed Rich: for the trail mix, for the mosquitoes, for the slowly seeping damp beneath our tent, for my bad night’s sleep, for the mosquito bites on my ass from leaving the tent to pee in the middle of the night.

The sky brightened early. Following a terse exchange, we decided to eat “breakfast” once we were hiking. We packed our damp tent and sleeping bags, hoisted our packs, and set off toward the ridge to the north. Rich said that, according to the map, it intersected a trail that offered an alternate route back to the car. We saw the ridge from far off and wound our way toward it, weighing our hunger against the much-diminished appeal of the trail mix.

My resentment waned as the sun warmed the day. My muscles loosened and the trees began to thin. We made good headway toward the ridge and I looked forward to the view. Then suddenly we were above the tree line, taking in a vista from the ridge more spectacular than I could have imagined. The blue sky stretched so far and clear that from one spot I could see Mt. Hood to the north and then, with a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, one of the Three Sisters. Their snowy peaks sparkled in the early sunshine and here we were, one bead in the string of the Cascade Mountain Range. Out of the mosquito-breeding bogs and above the trees, maybe the effort had been worth it after all.

When we came off the ridge and hit the first unexpected fork in the trail, Rich unfolded the map and I looked over his shoulder to offer my opinion about which direction to take. But nature refuses to stand still. It is always shifting and morphing. Trails become obscured, or somehow don’t look the way you expect, given the map. Was this where we were supposed to be? Were we on the trail that eventually curved back to our car, or one that would spit us out miles from the right trailhead? Neither of us could tell.

“If we’re on the right trail,” I said, “it looks like we should come to a gentle right and then a sharp left soon.”

Did we encounter such a configuration? It was hard to say. The right-and-then-left looked different in person than on the map. I didn’t know how to factor in scale. The emotional high I’d felt on the ridge was a distant memory. In its place, demoralization settled across my shoulders as heavily as the lump of trail mix in my gut. I wasn’t sure if we were on the right path, and I didn’t know how to get more sure. If we took only downward-angled trails, eventually we’d reach a road at some point, and only then would we know for sure where we were. Only then would we know if we’d taken the wrong trail.

Rich and I remained slightly above the tree line for nearly a half hour, then the trail descended gently before dropping precipitously. In just a few strides, we were deep in the forest, surrounded by hundred-and-fifty-foot Douglas fir trees. No need to wonder any longer if we were on the right trail: this was the trail we were on, wherever it might lead.

Time is relative, as we know. For example, believing ourselves to be lost can deeply impact our perception of time. Being lost multiplied by countless steps equals a snail’s pace. Those countless steps took us further and further from an easy view of the sky. Beyond the trees, a clear, sunny day persisted, but in the forest it might as well have been dusk. Branches and boughs, hungry for light, filled every conceivable gap above our heads.

I can’t believe this, I thought. How hard is it to know where you’re going? It’s not rocket science, planning a backpacking trip. My dad did it all the time.

My back hurt, my legs hurt. A bubble of panic lodged behind my sternum. I imagined myself fragmenting into a screaming, hysterical mess. I would have been one of those pioneer women who completely lost her shit crossing the country in a covered wagon. These woods went on and on and on. Back then, forests went on and on a thousand times over. My pioneer woman would wonder if the forest would ever yield. Would she ever see the sky again? In all directions, only the winding trail interrupted the dense, towering expanse of Doug firs.

Instead of de-compensating, I had to put one foot in front of the other, without cheese or chocolate to motivate me. I had to find my motivation within the fact that the forest would be a supremely inconvenient place to have a nervous breakdown. Silently, I rained curses upon Rich’s head with every step until my aching knees and oozing heels—did I mention the blisters?—required all my attention, at which point I didn’t even have the energy to think of what a loser he was.

Hours later, the forest spat us out a mere twenty feet from the car. The familiar normalcy almost made me weep. We drove the three hours back to our rooms in complete silence.

*

We’re used to thinking of the word symbiosis as it relates to infant development. In the earliest days and weeks of infancy, the baby is not only completely dependent upon its caregiver but in fact, as a result of this close bond, experiences the caregiver as an extension of themselves rather than as a separate being. Only as their brains and bodies develop do they come to understand that, in addition to there being a ‘me,’ there’s also a ‘you.’ They don’t have to think about emerging from symbiosis into the next stage; it’s a natural process that simply happens as the brain and body continue to grow.

Unlike childhood, in order to grow out of symbiosis in our adult relationships, we can’t rely on aging to bring automatic growth and development. We have to deliberately reach for that growth. We can have all the trappings of adulthood—a job, a long-term relationship, maybe a house, or a retirement plan—and still be stuck in symbiosis. To remain stuck is not only painful but stagnating.

Remaining stuck also robs us of enjoying the next stage of development: differentiation. How might a little differentiation have transformed this backpacking trip? Rich and I would have valued each of our positions equally. If neither of us could genuinely be won over to the other’s side, I might eventually have said, “I know that having a variety of hot food will enhance my experience so I’ll pack the camp stove and the extra water and food in my backpack.” I would have realized that, since this was my desire, it was reasonable for me to decide how to fulfill that desire. Just as I’d never ask oil to be water, I wouldn’t have thought it was Rich’s job to make my agenda happen when his differed.

With a little differentiation, we also would have understood the importance of both of us being responsible for knowing where we were going and how to get there. Of course, the ‘maps’ that might teach us how to get where we’re going in our relationships seem even more mysterious than a backpacking map. Maybe that’s why I keep trying to become more familiar with the terrain, looking for the landmarks that will keep me and my partner on the right trail and prevent us from getting lost. Rich and I did get lost; thus, ex-boyfriend. But maybe getting lost isn’t always a bad thing. Maybe getting lost is what helps us to get better at reading maps so the next time, perhaps, we know where we’re going.

-Katrina Gould

Katrina Irene Gould has spent thirty fulfilling years as a psychotherapist in Portland, Oregon. In 2024, her personal essays and stories appeared in Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, The Adanna Literary Journal, Hot Pot Magazine, Glacial Hills Review, Literally Stories, and Writing in a Woman’s Voice. A review is forthcoming in February at Ink Nest Poetry. Steve Almond says, “Writing is a forgiveness racket.” Gould writes in hopes of demonstrating that we can examine our complicated human experiences, and in so doing create more compassion for our struggles - since often the person we most need to forgive is ourselves.