Backpacking Guide
This is not a full career story because the Editor has no information about the storyteller’s complete family background, formal education and any training or licensing requirements in BL’s chosen career. But the life-coping lessons learned by the storyteller may be helpful to someone else who has experienced similar circumstances of abuse and suffering.
Much of this story is told in a conversational way in the storyteller’s own words.
CHILDHOOD
After my parents divorced while I was in elementary school, I was living mostly with my mother but sometimes stayed with my father on weekends and during school vacations.
When I was 15 (in 1987), my school counselor called my estranged parents to tell them that I was suicidal, after I’d given away my skateboard. My counselor told them that giving away my skateboard was ‘a call for help.’ I told them it wasn’t true – I had bought another board and since my friend broke his, I gave him mine.
It didn’t matter – I was admitted the next day – involuntarily – to a psychiatric hospital for children.
PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL EXPERIENCE
I spent 11 months sitting in a chair, facing the pastel-colored wall of my room, sometimes for up to 12 hours a day. The staff called it “chair therapy.” They said I was supposed to think about my problems.
Most days I was forced to eat alone in my room, with a tray of food resting on my lap while I stared at the wall. I wasn’t allowed to go outside, touch anyone, or speak privately with my parents or other patients. I eventually grew so sensory deprived I could smell rain or sweat on the incoming staff’s clothing, even from a distance.
By the time I left the hospital, I was the scattered wreckage of a teenager. The chaos and noise of the world filled me with a superheated rage. I spent most of high school fantasizing about publicly hanging myself from the rafters of the gym.
Years later, I learned that the psychiatric hospital was owned by a company that eventually pled guilty to paying kickbacks and bribes for patient referrals, leading to the largest financial settlement ever between the federal government and a health care provider, at the time.
Editor’s note – Hopefully the hospital experience of BL is not typical for any modern psychiatric patient. But it was very real for BL and what he describes may be like other extremely abusive living situations so the life-coping lessons could still be helpful to others without the exact same experiences.
RECOVERY STARTS WITH FINDING ONE DAILY JOY
The one thing that brought me genuine happiness, that quieted my flashbacks and intrusive thoughts, was being outside. After nearly a year of living in the equivalent of solitary confinement, even the sight of a few finches splashing in a rainy puddle brought tears to my eyes. Every detail of the natural world seemed surreal now.
ASSESSING YOUR INTERESTS AND ABILITIES TO CHOOSE A CAREER PATH
Before I was hospitalized, I’d long believed that other people were better or more normal than me. I had spent most of my adult life avoiding people because before I became an outdoor guide, I’d been a victim of fraud by evil businesspersons.
Only a handful of my friends knew details of my past, that I’d watched the hospital staff strap kids to beds, sometimes for weeks and months at a time. One of my closest friends from the hospital unit had been tied to his bed with leather restraints for nearly a year. Angry red bedsores surrounded his wrists and ankles when he was finally released. He needed physical rehabilitation before he could walk again.
Having discovered joy in being outdoors, I decided to become a backpacking guide – I could enjoy the meadows, the forests, the streams and rivers, the vistas and the animals and point them out to people while not having to get too involved in personal conversations about my earlier life. Seemed like a perfect job.
TYPICAL DAILY ACTIVITIES OF AN OUTDOOR GUIDE
I’ve worked as a backpacking guide in Yosemite National Park and Point Rees National Seashore for over a decade. On an average workday, I’ll walk for miles, often over difficult and sometimes dangerous terrain, pointing out special features of nature, in between meal and tent preparations.
It would not be unusual to patch a client’s blistered feet in the rain, shoo away bears and make daiquiris for folks using rum, Kool-Aid, and snow.
Of course, a guide needs to be proficient with first aid and always ‘weather aware.’
COPING WITH MY PAST
It wasn’t until I began spending days in the backcountry with clients that I realized I wasn’t different from them; they weren’t better or more normal than me. Some were alcoholics or cutters or parents who had alienated their kids. Some had lost siblings and spouses to cancer and suicide.
Once, early in my first season, a freckled woman from Boston, with the accent to prove it, broke down in tears while we were carrying water back to camp. “My dad died last year,” she said. “He won’t be here to walk me down the aisle. He’ll never be a grandfather to my kids.”
Her partner was on the trip with her. He had proposed the day before, at the foot of Yosemite’s Bridalveil Fall, hours before meeting the group I’d be guiding.
I stood there, dumbfounded, listening to her grieve the loss of her father. She was sitting on a log in front of an enormous Ponderosa pine, its graceful branches hovering over her, as if her father was trying to comfort her again.
I knew at that moment that I’d found my place in the world, and that I needed to come to terms with my past, but I never would have found the courage without the serenity of nature and the help of my clients. Week after week, trip after trip, we explored different portions of the park, always coming to rest in some beautiful campsite at the foot of one of Yosemite’s towering granite peaks. Together we’d build a fire and then cook dinner and talk about our lives.
Slowly, over those first few weeks, I began sharing portions of my past, only to discover that no one thought any differently of me. They didn’t scream and run away. They didn’t stare at me in silence. Instead, they hugged me and wept with me. Some of them even understood what it was like to witness abuse and suffering, and to be helpless to stop it. By the end of that first season, it wasn’t only nature that seemed surreal, but also the kindness of people.
CAREER SATISFACTION
Years ago, just weeks after I’d been hired, my boss invited me to go on a backpacking trip with her and two of her closest friends. “Think of it as your orientation,” she said, tossing her pack on her back at the trailhead. It turns out one of the men on the trip was her mentor: a 70-year-old, retired biology teacher who looked like a gold miner who had gotten lost in the mountains. On the last morning of our trip, while we were sitting by a small lake in the shade of some alder trees, I asked him for a bit of guiding wisdom.
What he gave me was hope.
“Just keep all your folks on the trail,” he said. “They’ll show you the way.”
Today, after guiding hundreds of clients, I’m still mentally wounded. I’ve learned there is no finish line for healing, no complete erasure of the past. But my wounds have meaning now – that I am a survivor and can find beauty almost anywhere, at almost any time. For that, and for the people who have made it possible, I will be forever grateful.
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This story of a life challenge is based on a story written by Banning Lyon, published within The Washington Post on 1/31/23.
