All Over the Map Read Online Free

doesn’t know outside their realm, no matter how smart they may be—a realization that helped me later on as a journalist—and it’s better to admit to being naive and ask a lot of questions than to pretend to be someone you aren’t and end up acting like a jerk. In the woods, you can’t get away with being a jerk, especially to yourself, which is what I had been doing. So I went back to school and focused on what I wanted from college, not on what other people were thinking about me or whether I was sophisticated enough for them. When I returned to school after those days outdoors, I brought along my cowboy boots, and from then on, college was a great ride.
    So that’s it, then: back to nature. I’ll leave it to the wide-openWest to mend my heart. I need to find some sort of organized wilderness program, such as a yoga hiking retreat, with massages, hot tubs, and gourmet vegetarian food.
    I wander around my apartment and pick up my favorite photo of my mother, sitting on a slick red rock in Canyonlands, sunning her legs, dabs of sunscreen on her cheeks. I recall that when she was in her forties, craving adventure and some kind of personal growth, she signed up for Outward Bound, a notoriously difficult mountaineering program designed to build character via challenging wilderness encounters. She went to Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park, a vast expanse of bloodred canyons and overlapping rock ledges, to backpack and rock climb with a group of women. Since hers was the first-ever Outward Bound course designed just for women, a magazine writer went along. The fact that someone got paid to tag along on Mom’s trip to write about it was not lost on me, even as a kid.
    Curious, I discover that Outward Bound still exists and has a special one-week “Life and Career Renewal” course aimed at adults who feel stuck in their careers or relationships. Without thinking it through much further, I find a magazine to pay my way—to write a mother/daughter essay about challenging yourself at forty—and load up my backpack.
    I FLY TO Grand Junction and am relieved to be back in familiar, wide-open territory, next to the Western Slope’s red mesas with massive violet mountain ranges in the distance. The sky is Colorado blue, the air fresh, my hiking boots oiled, my sleepingbag stuffed, and I feel giddy. I can’t wait to hike through narrow, smooth, terra-cotta canyons, scramble on rocks, crawl through arches, and forget about the fact that my heart feels as crumbly as sandstone.
    Early the next morning, all the Outward Bound participants, most middle-aged and wearing fleece, gather outside the motel and climb aboard a school bus. I’ve nearly forgotten that this is a group experience, and seeing the others makes me nervous. I’m shy and awkward in small groups, especially when you are supposed to share your feelings. I almost always have the urge to bolt, say something too direct, or cry for no reason that anyone, including me, can fathom. My particular idea of hell is to spend eternity going around a circle in a small group to say who you are, where you’re from, and what you want out of this experience—and right now, I can feel that coming on.
    After a couple of hours on the bus, we arrive at a staging area, a mesa above the Needles section of Utah’s magnificent Canyonlands National Park. On the ride, I’ve discovered that most of the others in my group—an institutional food company executive, a manager at a sock-manufacturing company, a venture capitalist, a Realtor, a computer programmer, and a timid, pale recent college graduate—have suffered the loss of a loved one, job, or relationship and are, like me, trying to work their way out of a serious funk. This Outward Bound trip seems like a desperately optimistic measure for just about everyone. A few in the group are in rather poor physical shape, and one gal seems to be verging on anorexia. There is no man in the group who I am going to fall in love with and