All Over the Map Read Online Free Page A

tell the story of how we met on Outward Bound.
    Our leader, Dennis, a thirty-two-year-old mountaineer who isn’t in great emotional shape himself—he lost some friends climbing Denali a couple years back, gained a hundred pounds, and hasn’t been back to the wilderness until now—has us, yes, go around in a circle and explain what we want from the experience. Fifty-year-old Tina, the socks manager, is struggling with the death of a close friend and trying to kick a thirty-year smoking habit, and says she came “in order to cry.” The fifty-two-year-old Midwestern CEO, Bob, tells us he needs to have more fun in his life. The three women in their thirties are variously battling heartbreak, stress, and depression, and the thirty-one-year-old guy has just seen his dot-com dreams fizzle, along with his love life.
    Now it’s my turn. There’s no way I’m going to go into the story of being divorced, having a love affair end, already missing the Professor, feeling stuck at forty, uncertain where to turn, and caught between wanting to travel and settle down. I muster up something vague but acceptably group-sharing about having a midlife crisis and needing to rearrange my goals. I smile nervously at the end, and Tina the socks manager says, “When you smile, everything about you changes—you seemed so tough and reserved before, and now you’re warm and pretty,” which is exactly the kind of comment I fear from a stranger in a small group.
    Just as my eyes tear, Dennis switches gears, announcing our first wilderness lesson. He demonstrates how to take care of our private business in the great outdoors. I didn’t expect this to be quite so Outdoors 101; I thought we’d be rappelling one anotheroff of cliffs by now. Dennis amusingly picks a nice view and pantomimes digging a hole and wiping with a pinecone or a rock. Then he tells us that under no circumstances are we allowed to bring toilet paper along with us. He says he’s going to sort through our personal possessions, too, to make sure we aren’t carrying any other contraband—drugs, cigarettes, hair gel. I’m suddenly feeling less like a midcareer professional than a juvenile delinquent. There is no way a thirty-two-year-old guy is going to paw through my stuff or tell me I’m not going to use toilet paper. I’m a grown-up, I respect the wilderness, and I’ll gladly pack out what I pack in, I tell him pleasantly, with a look that says he can go fuck himself if he disagrees. Tina grabs her package of Wet Wipes in solidarity and stuffs it back into her pack. I give her a big, warm smile.
    We load up our packs with what seems to be a huge amount of food, along with tents, ropes, first aid kits, and helmets. The packs are too heavy for any of us to put on without help, and we stagger to the top of the trail. As we begin to descend from the pine trees to the pink rocky canyon, I try to let go of my grumpy resistance: I have to be with these people for a week and should make the best of it. We stop to learn how to read a topographical map with a compass, something my dad taught me three decades ago, and then inexplicably head toward a place on that map that doesn’t have a trail or water. But I don’t argue the route. When Dennis transfers some of the weight from a lighter, weaker woman’s pack to mine, I don’t complain. I have more experience in the wilderness than any of the other participants, and I’m stronger than the other women, so I’ll shoulder more of the load.
    We bushwhack our way to a campsite, brambles scratching our arms, legs trembling with each heavy step. Soon a couple of the women are crying from the exertion. I’m annoyed that we’ve left a perfectly nice and pretty trail to savage our way through a prickly gulley where no human should ever venture, but I’m determined to be cheerful because if someone isn’t cheerful—especially me—things are bound to get really ugly.
    When we finally reach the campsite, a sloping piece of scrabbly