You could say we’ve been lucky when it comes to missing heavy rainstorms during our annual hiking expeditions. Yes, we did hike through a brief thunderstorm while on Surplus Mountain in Maine two years ago, but generally speaking we’ve been lucky enough to be under cover—either our tent or a hard shelter—when the rain has fallen. That luck changed this year on our trip to Isle Royale National Park. On our third night on the island, the rain started at 4:30 am. As soon as dawn came, we packed our backpacks from inside our tiny, two-person ultralight tent and ate our breakfast of protein bars and cold instant coffee—also inside the tent. The rain stopped long enough for us to take down our tent and stuff it dripping wet inside its dry bag. But minutes after we set out on our 13-mile hike, the rain started again—sometimes heavy, sometimes just a light drizzle. Within half an hour, our boots were so full of water that it squelched between our toes with every step.
By 11:30 am, we had covered almost seven miles. The sky started to clear, and, thinking that the rain was behind us, we stopped to wring out our socks and pour the water out of our boots. But then, a violent thunderstorm hit, with winds so strong the rain was coming at us vertically. It penetrated inside our raincoats through the face opening, resulting in cold water running down my back into my pants. The trail through the forest quickly became a river, flooded ankle-deep with water. The closest shelter was six miles away. There was nothing we could do but keep walking, as fast as we could. As thunder crashed around us, we were comforted by seeing that the trees in the dense forest we were passing through were much taller than us.
After about an hour of rain, I heard birds begin to sing and I knew the rain would end soon. Within 30 minutes, the clouds peeled back and the sun broke through. We stopped on a bare rock outcrop on the shore of Lake Ritchie for lunch, took off our boots and stripped down to our underwear so our clothes and boots could dry a little before we pressed on to our final destination for the day, Moskey Basin. Arriving there, we found an empty three-sided shelter on a rock slab with a gentle slope into Lake Superior: A place where we could hang out our clothes and tent to dry, take a quick dip in the ice-cold water of the lake, cook our evening meal, watch the sun set over the ridge behind us and mediate on the quiet beauty all around us. Later, Judy and I agreed that this day was our best day and our worst day on Isle Royale, all rolled into one. We felt lucky—no, something stronger than lucky: privileged—to have experienced what we did.
Is it not this way with so much of life? It seems we cannot fully celebrate life’s gifts unless we are willing to also accept its concurrent pain—or, in less elegant terms, “embrace the suck“. Judy and I recently celebrated our 39th wedding anniversary, and as we enjoyed an exceptionally good meal together in a local restaurant we reflected on the high points and low points of our years together. For her, the high point was the weddings of our three children, and for me it was the birth of those three children. Yet, as our thoughts shifted to the sorrows we have shared, we immediately thought of the death of Judy’s father at age 47 to lung cancer, a year after our marriage and two months before the birth of our first child. We named him Aaron, a name which some say means “bringer of light”, in recognition of the dark time into which he was born and the hope that he would change the atmosphere. Throughout our marriage, joy and sorrow have often been intertwined, but we have had the courage to never allow pain and disappointment to dominate our perspective on life.
I remember a pastor by the name of Vic Gledhill (who was something of an inspiration to me in the formative years of my development as a leader) saying, “Get used to pain and don’t let it be such a big deal in your life.” He said this with reference to the apostle Paul, who said “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.” Perplexed, but not driven to despair: I’m of the opinion that healthy, courageous human beings ought to accept negative experiences and emotions as normal and potentially productive expressions of being alive. Disappointments, tragedies and failures come uninvited into our lives; we cannot change history but we can frame these events in a constructive way and allow them to make us better people. As Stephen Colbert said to Anderson Cooper in a very emotional interview this past summer, “It is a gift to exist, and with existence comes suffering.” Colbert went on to say, “If you are grateful for your life… then you have to be grateful for all of it. You can’t pick and choose what you’re grateful for.”
“It is a gift to exist, and with existence comes suffering.”
Stephen Colbert
It is Thanksgiving Day as I write this. This Thanksgiving Day, I am grateful for all of life: The joyful experiences and the heart-breaking events. That one day on Isle Royale illustrated the ever-so-familiar human dialectic of pain and privilege: One moment, soaked to the skin and feeling dreadfully exposed in the midst of a violent thunderstorm; the next moment, basking in the sun like turtles on a rock beside a placid lake. We were privileged to experience the beauty of the island at all; what was a little discomfort and terror in exchange?
All text and photos © 2019 Edwin Wilson
