Returning to an old challenge

In 2013, when I was 9 years old, my dad and I hiked the Jordan River Valley Pathway in northern Michigan. It’s an 18 mile trail (according to the Department of Natural Resources, though we’ve always thought it was closer to 20) that requires two full days of hiking and a night of camping in between. Parts of the route overlap with the North Country Trail, which runs from Vermont to North Dakota, and others overlap with the Deadman’s Hill loop, a nostalgic three-mile day hike that I’ve walked more times than I can count. The JRV trail has always felt appropriately sandwiched between the two, as it oscillates in difficulty between flat meadows and steep, root-laced hills.

At 9 years old, completing this hike was the hardest thing I’d ever had to do. I wore green Keen sandals and my feet burned with blisters by nightfall. On the second day, I cried on the trail, wishing I could just go home and take off the shoes that seemed to have melded into my feet. Toward the end, as the distance between each mile marker seemed to grow larger and larger, we stopped for a moment. My dad pulled out the map to check where we were, and I laid down on the dirt, my head resting on a moss-covered rock. I closed my eyes, hoping that when I opened them, I would be back at home in my warm PJs reading a book on the couch. But I was still in the same spot in the woods when I sat up, and as I struggled to get walking again, my dad said to me, partially sympathetic and partially exasperated, “There is no other way out of this. We are the only way out of this.” It was exactly what I needed to hear.

In the years since then, I continue to think about that day and my dad’s sentiment, especially when I find myself hoping that some magical entity will be able to pull me out of difficult situations. In these moments when I’m feeling perfectly incapable, my dad’s words help me find a near-superhuman level of strength and confidence, reminding me that I am the only person that can get myself through. It works when I’m stuck while writing an essay, it works when I’m having a difficult conversation with somebody and it worked on the trail. When you tell yourself that there is no other option, you have to believe that you can figure it out yourself, and your body and mind will follow through accordingly.

I had a wonderful experience walking this trail 11 years ago, and it’s one of the most cherished memories of time spent with my dad. But, if I’m being completely honest, the second day sucked. 

The sheer beauty of the latter 10 miles of trail was overshadowed by the pain I was experiencing, and thus when I reflect back on those days, I think of two things in conjunction — the soreness of my muscles and desire to be home, alongside the euphoric moment of glory when the trail gave way to a scenic overlook of the valley at the end. 

A year later, during summer 2014, my dad and I returned to the second leg of the trail. My grandpa dropped us off at a trailhead by the Pinney Bridge Campground, almost exactly where we would’ve begun the second day’s hike the year before. Unsurprisingly, I found it much easier to enjoy the trail without a previous day of hiking weighing heavily on my muscles. It was a gratifying experience to be able to try it over again, to pay more attention to the woodpeckers and haphazard river crossings in the ways I wished I had the first time. 

Coming back to the trail a year later showed me that you can return to old challenges and approach them from a perspective newly informed by time and growth, and in doing so, modulate the way you remember the original experience. There’s a profound sense of power in being able to return to something, knowing that you can have an imperfect experience and later find the opportunity to redo the bad parts. It’s not that the bad things aren’t worth remembering, rather that creating good memories alongside them adds nuance to your memory of a place or an experience, making it more complete.

Over Fall Break, having just turned 20, I returned to the Jordan River Valley with my mom to complete the entire hike for a second time. I’ve wanted to return to this trail forever — partially because I’m a hopeless nostalgic, and partially to see if I would face it with the same level of difficulty that I had when I was 9.  

Unsurprisingly, there was a lot that was different. In 2013, my dad carried the bulk of the gear while I carried only a soccer bag’s worth: My sleeping bag stuffed into the ball net and a Bath and Body Works “Bat Bite”-scented hand sanitizer clipped to the zipper. This time around, my mom and I both carried full packs, complete with a four-ounce stove and bottles of Aquamira. When I was 9, I relied completely on my dad for all of the planning, technical know-how, bear fighting skills, etc. At 20, it was the complete opposite; I have more experience and know more about backpacking than my mom does, and I took the lead in making sure we were prepared. 

It was fall this time, too. Not only had I not attempted this hike since I was 9, I also hadn’t seen it with fall colors in full swing. For the most part, the summer greens were gone and replaced with picturesque crimsons and golden browns. As we descended into the valley and meandered to and fro across the river, through barren winter landscapes and lush mossy forests, I felt like I was experiencing the Jordan River Valley for the first time.

Still, there were moments of similitude. We experienced that same, frustrated feeling of dejection as mile markers continued to show up much later than anticipated. Just like when I was a kid, I found that every rotted stump looked like a mama bear and her cubs. The old water pump at camp still made my hands smell like pennies. The trail still let us out to face the most breathtaking view of the valley, each tree a different shade of green and red and orange, ridges gently outlining where the river snakes below unseen. My mom and I emerged from the woods to see a grown man standing on the wooden railing and leaning out to get a better look at the valley, like a kid fogging up the glass of a toy store window. It’s an appropriate reaction.

It’s funny what your body remembers and what it forgets. I remember the campground being tiny when I was there as a kid; I thought there were only two campsites, but there are actually 15. Everything seemed bigger this time around. I remember there being this gigantic rock (my favorite glacial erratic in the whole world) toward the end of the trail when it joins up again with the Deadman’s Hill loop, but it wasn’t there. I’m sure the rock is just at an earlier point on the trail, but still I wondered how I could’ve gotten these things so confused.

As we walked, my mom and I talked about how female bodies are conditioned to forget the pain of childbirth after it happens, drawing a parallel between our aching feet and the knowledge that as soon as we took a hot shower we’d want to do the hike again. This idea about childbirth turns out to not be entirely true, but still, the general sentiment remains the same: Memory is fickle and can be distorted over time. 

My memory of this hike from the first time around was so dominated by the big emotions my 9-year-old self endured that I lost my grasp of the smaller, more subtle ones in between. I will never forget the blisters on my feet after the first time and how much they hurt, and I will never forget crying on the second day, the same way I will never forget how much fun I had and how overjoyed I was that my dad let me tag along with him. But it seems that I had forgotten what it felt like to get on the trail after a night in the tent or why I carried three books with me and how many chapters I actually read.

It makes me kind of sad that I forgot so many of these little details. There were parts of the trail that felt familiar, like when the path crosses the 45th Parallel and when we walked along the river, but there were more parts that felt completely foreign and unknown to me. At the same time, this was exactly why I had craved returning in the first place; I wanted to return to the exact place where the original memory was formed and reshape the way that memory lived and grew and shrank in my mind.

Hiking inspires a lot of good feelings for me, even when it’s hard. Food becomes nothing more than fuel for the miles I want to walk; it doesn’t have morality attached to it, or distract me from my surroundings. If my body can do hard things and carry me up steep paths, then it’s good enough. My clothes don’t need to look pretty as long as they keep me warm when it drops below freezing at night. I like when these parts of myself can be reduced down to their practical value. It frees up headspace to notice more, like the tiny whirlpools in the river and the initials etched into wooden benches along the way.

In this way, returning to this hike was an act of tribute towards my nine year old self who was too young to be fully immersed in a culture of self-loathing. As I reexperienced the trail, I reexperienced what it was like to exist and move about without being conscious of what my body looked like and the multifaceted pressures of grown-up life that exist outside of the valley. These feelings were some of my favorites to return to this time around. They were a constant, acutely felt sensation throughout both JRV experiences. 

I care so much about this trail and am so protective of the memories I have on it. I’ve always felt proud of myself for having completed this hike so young, but there were still regrets I held onto about the way I handled the second leg of the hike. Now, I’ve had the opportunity to absolve 2013 me of any guilt she was feeling. It’s like my older self is looking out for my younger self, bearing the weight of what she couldn’t do and giving her a helping hand while recharacterizing the memory of this trail — the good, the bad, all of it. This fills me with an even greater sense of pride that extends between my 9-year-old and 20-year-old selves, like they’re holding hands and standing at the overlook, staring out at the valley together.

Statement Columnist Katie Lynch can be reached at katiely@umich.edu. 

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