Story Frame 56 – A Midnight Mantra Inspires Me to Hike with Trolls & Elves
Come to the edge, he said.
They said, we are afraid.
Come to the edge, he said.
And so they came.
And he pushed them.
And they flew…
Guillaume Apollinaire
One chilly morning in the fall of 2009, I would find myself standing on the edge of Denmark, looking out across a dark sea of chilly water towards a distant Sweden. Dawn was breaking and I was naked. Why I was standing there with no clothes on can be blamed upon a cold winter's night in Appalachia, not long after I moved there.
Although I had gone to various churches (more off than on) throughout my life, I made a conscious decision church would not be a part of my new life in Asheville. But a chance encounter that took place there in (of all places) a church, on Christmas Eve changed my life. The irony of this was not lost on me. I blame it entirely on the Asheville Film Festival.
On Christmas Eve, Leif, Steve, and Nan – the redhead Steve met at the festival – gathered together at my new little home on the mountainside overlooking a bird sanctuary for a holiday meal and exchange of gifts.
Later, as we were relaxing around the candlelit fireplace, I heard Nan say she wanted to go to a church service that night. Steve and Leif immediately expressed no interest. Tipsy on the spirit of Christmas and goodwill toward all mankind, I heard myself say that I would take her.
What on earth?! my startled inner self exclaimed. It's cold and dark out there – just stay home, drink some more wine, and fall asleep by the fire!
But it was too late. As Nan's face lit up with gratitude, I realized there was no way to gracefully back out.
An hour later, I found myself inside a downtown church, along with dozens of others bundled up against the chill, trying my best to tune out the words of the legendary and charismatic minister of the Asheville Jubilee Church, Howard Hanger. He was going through the Christmas story and I'd heard it all before. Bored, I turned my thoughts to what people were wearing and whether or not there were any interesting looking single men.
Preoccupied with these thoughts, I didn't hear any of the sermon until, clear as a bell in the midst of the random clutter of my mind, I heard Howard Hanger say the words:
What if you were not afraid?
He had just gotten to the bit about the angels appearing and startling the shepherds.
Hah, that's crazy, I thought. I can't imagine not being afraid.
“Think about it!” Howard said, as if reading my thoughts. He paused to look intently at each person in the large circle around him, including me. “What would your life be like – IF YOU WERE NOT AFRAID?”
It would be refreshing and life changing, I realized.
So captivating were those words and this different vision of my life, I then missed the rest of the sermon. The idea of being not afraid, the permission to be not afraid, that it might actually be okay to be not afraid, was so alluring that I adopted it as my New Year's mantra for the coming year.
And that was how I ended up naked in Denmark.
My Danish cousin, Karen, whom I’d known since I was seven, had a daily practice of plunging naked plunge into the Øresund, the steel gray waters that divide Denmark from Sweden.
When I visited her in 2009, each morning over cups of hot, dark coffee and fresh bread with cheese and jam in the kitchen of her cozy farmhouse, one of my favorite places in the world, she would look at me and say, “Okay, is this the morning you become a Viking?”
“No thanks,” I said each time.
Jumping into the cold sea in Denmark – uden toj, as they say in Danish – should have been something I would not hesitate to do. But I didn’t love the idea of immersing myself in freezing dark water.
“Can’t I at least wear a bathing suit?” I asked.
“No,” Karen said, laughing. “It is so cold here in the winter that if you wore a bathing suit, it would freeze to your skin the moment you immerse in the frigid waters, and the only way to remove it would be to have it cut off.”
Being the pragmatic people they are, the Danes had long ago decided to do away with bathing suits altogether.
This did nothing to add to the appeal of the adventure.
And then one morning, she said slyly, “If you do this, you will be able to call yourself a real Viking.”
She knew me well. I sighed and, calling upon the mantra I had adopted back home in the mountains of Appalachia, said okay and off we went to the edge of Denmark.
The Øresund was very cold over that morning, but holes had thoughtfully been cut in the ice in support of this peculiar Scandinavian activity. I peeled off each layer of clothing as slowly as possible, placing them in a deflated little pile on the grass beside me. Be not afraid, I whispered to myself. Then, in the midst of a small gathering of other naked Danes, I jumped into the water.
Ohmygod, it was cold.
In fact, it was something far beyond cold – something so cold I’m pretty sure the word to describe it has not yet been invented, even in Danish. For what seemed like a life-threateningly long time, I was unable to breathe. When I eventually realized I hadn’t died, my breath came back to me in the form of gasps and sputters.
As I emerged from the water, my skin felt astonishing, as if it was lit from within by a thousand fairy lights – a Scandinavian mermaid.
In the high that accompanies an unexpected flirtation with danger, it occurred to me that perhaps the magic lies in not feeling in control.
Two years later, I tested my midnight mantra again by signing up for ten days of hiking in Iceland with REI Adventures – an adventure just extreme enough to feel I was testing my limits without a reasonable expectation of dying in the process. I didn’t know a soul in the country, or on the trip, and although I speak a little Danish, I don’t speak Icelandic. They are not the same. I would definitely not be in control. Of anything.
After signing the paperwork and sending in my deposit, I spent a ridiculous amount of time worrying I might not be able to keep up with the others on the trip. I’d spent a week hiking and camping in Yellowstone National Park with my high school boyfriend when I was in my twenties. But that was three decades ago.
Even though I was now hiking regularly in the Blue Ridge Mountains in my mid-fifties, I had visions of twenty-somethings scaling the landscape in athletic leaps and bounds with me slowly trudging through ice and volcanic ash, some distance behind them. What if I ended up a middle-aged den mother to a bunch of adventuring young jocks?
Rather than face this sure humiliation, I very nearly backed out of the trip. But then, just in time, I remembered my mantra – Be not afraid.
The trick was, how not to be afraid? And so began an interesting mental dialog inside my brain as the logical, rational part of me tried to calm the freaked out, irrational part of me by framing the trip as a photography assignment. By appealing to my creative, artistic side, the ruse worked.
For many reasons, the trip to Iceland was the trip of a lifetime. Each morning began with a new adventure I could never have imagined – soaking in warm thermal waters after long hours of strenuous hiking through a landscape of rainbow-colored peaks; walking along black sand beaches; photographing colonies of puffins; boating through a glacier lagoon; watching a herd of wild Icelandic horses run by; exploring a waterfall rumored to have a chest of gold hidden behind it; camping in the highlands; drinking cold Icelandic beer bathed in the light of a midnight rainbow. These and all the other adventures that filled the more than twenty hours of daylight each day.
Much to my surprise, I was out-hiked each day not by twenty-somethings (there were none on the trip), but by a trio of sixty-somethings. How inspiring was that!?
There was also the flat-out exhilaration of being a part of a group of intrepid souls hiking Hekla, an active volcano, hoping we would be able to make the two-and-a-half-hour descent through fields of snow and razor-sharp lava rocks in a breathtakingly inadequate half hour window, should Hekla happen to erupt, which was due to happen, they told us, any day now.
And of course, there was a film involved. The road to Hekla was closed off because director Ridley Scott was filming the opening scene for Prometheus close by, forcing our driver to figure out another route in through the highland tundra.
I came back from Iceland changed. A post from The North Face outerwear company reminded me of what I had gained from being not afraid – that the truest version of ourselves stands well beyond comfort’s perimeter.
My new midnight mantra was the perfect antidote to the earlier years of worrying about paying bills, the late-night trips to the emergency room with Zoë or Leif, no ‘real’ job, and keeping a roof over our heads. After all, I had made it through.
Not long after adopting the ‘Be Not Afraid’ mantra, I solo-traveled in Africa, tracking down a trail of letters my grandmother had written during the years she and her husband lived in the dusty highlands of Ethiopia, researching a dual memoir I was writing about her adventures there. I was afraid, but I went anyway.
Thank goodness Steve and I went to that film festival where he met Nan, who in turn introduced me to an evening with Howard Hanger and those adventure-inducing eleven words:
What would your life be like if you were not afraid?
[Photo of me hiking Landmannalaugar in Iceland's Fjallabak Nature Reserve in the Highlands, by Anne-Marie Davidson]
Kristin Fellows is a published writer, world traveler, and a well-seasoned documentary film consultant. When not writing, Kristin can often be found listening to someone’s story or behind the lens of one of her cameras.
More about Kristin @ kristinfellowswriter.com