The Big Pit

When I was seven, my family went on a vacation to Arizona, which included a trip to the Grand Canyon. As we looked out over this geological phenomenon, this holy site of the Pueblo people, I said, “It’s just a big pit.”

The more my parents simultaneously scoffed and laughed at my commentary, the more I repeated it, as seven-year-olds tend to do. I repeated my quip about “The Big Pit” so many times that it became the title of our Grand Canyon scrapbook page.

I’ll read Wuthering Heights or The Boston Girl or any of a number of other books in which beautiful, complicated child characters will have had a deep connection to the moors they lived near or to the sea, which they saw for the first time when they were 16. I’ll read these books and wonder why, if I am the complex creature I’ve found myself to be, it took me years to feel connection to the earth and to adventure.

Growing up, I didn’t like to be outside; I thought roses were plain and funny smelling; I didn’t care to look out the window on road trips through the Appalachians; and I thought the Grand Canyon was nothing but a big pit. I would have chosen a book over an adventure any day—and I am grateful for my connection to the written word, but I sometimes fret that I missed too many experiences for the sake of getting transition over and done with and getting back to my books.

This may be the reason that I am in love with the Pacific Northwest. I’m soaking in all the natural beauty that I ignored as a child twenty-zillion-fold. In Portland, I could literally stop and smell the roses the entire way to work.

If I ever write an autobiography, it would be dishonest of me to begin by reminiscing about my connection to the maple tree in my backyard or to Lake Michigan. The romantic, English major, four on the Enneagram side of me aches to be able to say these things are true. But the genuine, human, gentle side of me knows that it’s alright that I spent more of my childhood hours reading about adventures than having them and eating McDonalds instead of basking in the sun pockets beneath the trees.

My story doesn’t have to fit the mold of the young girl who intuitively understood her connectedness to the people and spaces around her. My story can be—and is—about the woman who can spend hours walking on the beach on Whidbey Island and jumped off the cliffs at Tubbs Hill with a college best friend. And I can find solace when I remember that there was a little bit of this spunk in me when I was a girl, since I was the one who discovered the hidden raspberry bush in our backyard, I auditioned for countless plays from middle school through high school, I interrupted my teacher in the middle of her rendition of "The Highway Man" because I knew I could read it with more feeling. It just looks a little different than it does in the novels.