Dispatch #40: An Escape Plan, Poorly Executed

You're reading Dispatches from East McJesus. Living in East Machias, Maine, can be a bit lonely, so I write to save my sanity. The mission may not succeed, but let’s try to enjoy it.

I don’t plan it. No one ever plans a permanent, dignified retreat into the woods. If they say they do, they’re lying, because these things only happen when your life has suddenly become so burdensome that even the trees start to look like a reasonable support system. I think to myself, if I am asked to do one more thing for my mother, I am going to lie down on the floor in the fetal position and wait for Geof to squirt vodka into my mouth with a syringe.

So instead, I leave.

I don’t pack much. I grab a coat that may or may not be seasonally appropriate, fill my water bottle, and whisper to myself that nature is supposed to fix things.

The woods are all around me. Still, you would think there would be some kind of sign. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. But no. It’s just . . . trees, standing there, judging silently and offering up only lichen.

I step in. Immediately, I feel weightless. The cool air. The quiet stillness. No cell signal, no notifications. No background hum of expectations. Just wind, leaves, moss, mushrooms and the faint, barely perceptible sense that I have removed myself from the civilized world in a way that might make me difficult to pin down with more responsibilities.

Good. I walk. At first, it’s purposeful and brisk, the walk of a woman who has made a decision and is absolutely not spiraling. I have a destination, which is “away.” I am very committed to it. Eventually, I sit down on a rock. This is a mistake. Sitting suggests staying put. Staying put suggests feelings might catch up with me, and I have worked very hard to shove them into the darkest recesses of my soul.

But fine, I sit for a while. There is a moment — a small, fleeting one — where I feel something loosen, like a belt notch released after a very big dinner of other people’s needs. “This is nice,” I say out loud to no one.

I consider my options:

1. Stay here indefinitely. Become a person who lives in the woods and is described by others as, “she seems happy, but in a way that concerns me.”

2. Return to my life, but with a new, nature-infused calm that will last approximately eleven minutes or until my phone rings again, whichever comes first.

3. Continue walking until I become a legend. “She just . . . went in and never came out.” There will be a podcast, perhaps by Cheryl Strayed.

I stand up and walk a little further, because leaving immediately after sitting down would feel like admitting defeat, and I have standards. At some point, I realize it’s getting dark and I can’t find the path. This feels on brand. “Okay,” I say to the trees, “We’ve had our time. I’m hungry. Where’s the nearest road?” No answer. It’s just a rhetorical question.

I’m lost. This is where things get interesting. The woods have conspired to erase any evidence of my brief, ill-advised liberation. I walk for miles, and at some point, I have the painful apprehension that I may have successfully fled my life only to end up needing the Maine Warden Service.

“Why were you out here?”

“Just . . . fleeing.”

“From what?”

“Everything.”

They love that.

Eventually I see a thinning of trees and hear the sound of cars. It’s my unavoidable return to the world of people. Civilization, with all its demands and expectations, reclaims me, whether or not I agree to participate.

I step out of the woods to no applause. There has been no transformation. Not even a small woodland creature to hand me a cocktail on my way out and say, “You are better now.”

I check my phone. Sixteen notifications. I stand there for a moment, at the boundary between the quiet I briefly borrowed and the noise I apparently own. I take a breath and look back at the woods. Then I walk back toward my life, already mentally scheduling my next escape, likely by kayak, with more than a fishing rod.