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.
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I asked myself, how do I get into these things? How did I find myself in the middle of a desert, with nothing but a gas station for over a hundred miles, in the searing heat toting a backpack that magically gained weight the further I went?
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We didn’t know the beauty we would find there. It wasn’t an obvious dazzling beauty. It needed to be unearthed, searched for. Our clothes stuck to us as we ambled off the plane. The heat and strong odors of others, of ourselves, pressed in on us. We cranked our windows down in the taxi as broken Soviet buildings rushed by. Their gray concrete stark against the sharp neon green of the trees and grass.
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The airplane skims over a monotonously beautiful carpet of lakes, clouds, forest, and fields. The Land of Midnight Sun (well, actually, one out of five possible Lands of Midnight Sun; each Nordic nation with its twenty-four hours of summer daylight technically qualified to claim the title) reveals itself to you in puffs of white, geometries of emerald, bowls of aqua. It’s only a matter of minutes before you land and have to start apologizing.
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I had no inklings, only longing. I wanted her to be a girl so much, I'd convinced myself of the crazy notion that if I didn't find out ahead of time, I'd get Sabrina. That would be her name.
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