The Beginning & the End
Words by Sabrina Flagstad
Photos by Jesse Barber
This article was originally published in The Goodland Journal Volume 3
“It feels like I’m sitting in an old movie theater, watching a movie, but I’m watching my life.”
Sitting on a faux-leather couch across from my therapist, I described my depressive dissociation just like that. Aside from being a self-deprecating 18 year old girl, there were many factors which contributed to me falling further away from myself: I was pursuing a degree I didn’t care about, at a college I didn’t like, and I felt unknown to myself. At that time, I thought my life was irredeemably over.
A common sign of depression is engaging in risky behavior. Some people turn to drugs or sex in an attempt to feel something. For me, there was no more extreme behavior than veering away from my socially acceptable existence, dropping out of school, and living in the backcountry of one of the world’s most desolate locations.
I arrived in Patagonia in September. With my sixteen new expedition mates, all strangers, we embarked on an arduous three month journey, kayaking through steep, verdant fjords, and summiting glaciated peaks.
Three weeks into our expedition, we finished up an average day of kayaking and made camp on the first suitable cove we could find. The water was calm and our paddling was rhythmic. Overhead hung a blanket of blue, sporadically splotched with patches of gray. The lake-like conditions we paddled through began to reverberate our day’s energy as soon as we dragged our boats on shore. We set up four tents on the left side of the stream, one on the right. As the gray pillows condensed into a blanket of fog, we all returned to our respective tents. Some played cards, others read books. I slept.
I awoke in the early night to my tent mate Ethan hurriedly packing up his sleeping bag. “What’s going on?” I drowsily mumbled.
“Camp’s flooding!” he replied, as he continued to hastily pack.
Displeased from being roused from my nap, I begrudgingly poked my head through the small gap I had unzipped in our tent. Upon further inspection of the world outside my snug sleeping bag, I found the creeping white cloud that had previously carpeted our fjord had transfigured into a concrete wall of downpour. The glistening and seductive little water source that lured us into camp had gulped up the showers, and had grown into a fat and raging torrent, at least twenty feet wide.
My expedition mates were scattered along the beach, clad in yellow rubber dry suits. Obscured by mist, they appeared to me like indiscriminately highlighted blurbs in a second-hand book. I could not see the panic, but I certainly heard it. The terse instruction from my over-reactive companions to “pack your shit - now!” only provoked more annoyance at the situation. While my team struggled to haul technicolor kayaks into the silver-edged darkness, I stood in place, transfixed by the hysteria painted against the setting sun. Laggardly, I broke down my tent and packed away my belongings.
In the now obsidian night, twelve groupmates vanished on kayaks into the fjord. Through the mist, their waning headlamps were the only identifying symbols of safety. I counted . . . nine, ten, eleven, twelve bouncing beams crawling up the adjacent shore.
Four of us remained on our long stretch of beach, left to pick up the pieces of camp overlooked by the twelve defectors.
The only way to dry and unaffected land was to cross the stream’s powerful current. I was the last of the group to change into my dry suit. After grabbing and stuffing what we could into our canvas boat bags, we awkwardly slung the handle loops on like backpacks and approached the raging current.
To my surprise, the three triangulated men were deciding on how to transport me across the river. Similar to the boat bag, they had me latch onto the back of our seasoned instructor, Corey. With each movement, he carefully inspected the river bed to find a stable next step, despite the thigh-high current trying to rip us down. I held on. Once I was dropped off, the men made multiple trips back and forth to recover as much gear as possible. On Corey’s fourth and final trip, his legs finally gave way to the waterway’s powerful surge. Corey was swept downstream, to the mouth of the river. The only reason he survived was a jagged tree branch he had managed to cling to, preventing him from disappearing into the eternal fjord.
Once Corey had been rescued, the group swarmed to him, boiling water to prevent hypothermia and administering first aid on his torn hands.
Seemingly unphased by the events of the night, I set up my tent and went back to sleep.
I went through the next two months this way. Any ounce of inconvenience or danger that presented itself, I refused to acknowledge. Turning off my feelings had always been an easy approach.
It wasn’t until our last week in the backcountry, trekking in a smaller group of six along the border of Argentina, when I realized I had been going through this journey disconnected from my emotions just as I had been before.
We needed to backpack 100 km in a matter of days, but still we found the time, energy, and inspiration for a sunrise summit. My Casio went off at 4 a.m. And in the deliriousness of the early morning, five of us started on our 2 hour uphill chase for the pinnacle sunrise.
I don’t really remember what the ascent looked like, as I was quite focused on getting to the top. I do remember soft pinks of the rising sun and thinking how the ice patches were misplaced in the emergence of the South American summer; the warmth of the steam escaping from the boiling water we used for our oatmeal and the red hues of the jutting rocks, reminiscent of Mars.
Charlie and I raced to the peak together first. Based on the rock cairn, we discovered we had in fact not made a first ascent. Once Charlie had added his rock to the growing mound, he went on to study some nearby boulders. Jesse was the second to approach. Though he was only 150 meters away, he opted not to summit.
I waited for the last two in the long, angular, early morning shadow of the rock cairn trying to discern whether I was in an intense state of clarity or delusion. With the frigid western winds whipping my face, I forced myself to sit and reflect on the feelings I had been avoiding.
In this state, my repressed emotions surged into coherent thoughts just as our trickling water source filled into a raging current.
Throughout my life, I had confused the strength of tolerating pain with the strength of confronting my emotions. My intention for the trip was to break myself down, an ego death of sorts. I wanted to feel the pain and difficulties of the outdoors so intensely as to rebuild myself. The very reason I decided to disconnect was to escape my disoriented life. But even traveling six thousand miles away didn’t strip away my innate tendencies; I had to consciously work at fighting them.
At the end of those eighty days, I did feel changed. Since going back to school to pursue environmental sciences as a major, I have started my career in sustainability, which I love, and I’ve been able to apply what I learned to better myself and those around me. Not only has this experience given me a career and life path that I’m passionate about, but also I’ve started to do more things because I want to do them and not because I feel like I’m trying to prove anything.. For one, I’ve continued my practice of becoming a well rounded outdoors-woman: I led my cross country teammates on the Trans Catalina Trail, taught my boyfriend how to layer on our winter trip to Bryce Canyon, and found my community in bouldering around California’s Central Coast.
Having found a home in the outdoors, I am constantly reminded to refocus, recenter, and trust myself.