Toddlers in the Backcountry, Essays, Rhubarb

Hi, readers,

For awhile, I’ve considered starting a newsletter to send updates every month or two on what I’ve been writing (and reading and doing). If you have questions or comments or suggestions for the newsletter – or just want to say hi! – feel free to reply. I’d love to hear from you.

I wrote an essay about challah and marriage for Longreads. The difficulty of this piece lay in finding a balance between conveying the challenges I’ve experienced in long-term partnership while also honoring our very real love and connection. Deeply grateful to David for trusting me with this one.

I wrote a lighter piece for HerStry about a six-week, 300-mile traverse of the Brooks Range David and I did right before we got married. We didn’t take a honeymoon, so we called it our “Tundra Moon” (this, despite the fact that our hiking boots were often frozen when we put them on in the mornings and our idea of a “date night” on the trip was to take a break from hiking and make cheesy instant mashed potatoes).

I contributed a chapter to an anthology called Women Travel Solo. My essay is about skijoring 500 miles up and down the Kobuk River to reach a remote hot springs. Writing this piece meant dipping into some nostalgia for the determined 25-year-old version of myself who set off for almost a month with three dogs, a pair of skis, and a red plastic sled (which I still have and use!). Nighttime temperatures plunged to -30, and I knew extremely little about winter camping prior to the trip. Here’s a link to the book, which, amazingly, Oprah recommended on her site.

In late June, I found myself with a toddler strapped to my chest and an 85-liter backpack on my back as I pushed apart alder branches, trying to squeeze my way through the dense brush without waking the babe from her midday nap. It was raining. Her father and I were making bear calls, trying our best to notify wildlife of our whereabouts without rousing her slumber. She seemed content, sometimes nestling a cheek closer against my sunshirt or smacking her lips then continuing to snooze. She fell asleep before I could put my raingear on, so I spent some of that day carrying a trekking pole in one hand and an umbrella in the other, trying to shield her face from raindrops.

At that point, we had turned around – for neither the first nor the last time of the trip. We were climbing back out of the brush after scouting a river crossing we’d prefer not do while carrying our child. Think waist-deep cold water, fast current, thick brush on either side of the banks. We ended up climbing up to the headwaters of multiple creeks, adding on miles as we crossed tundra and talus and snowfields, trying our best to avoid obstacles that, again, we’d rather not do while our child was strapped to my body.

When she woke, we took a break on a tundra slope to feed her date-pecan balls and peanut butter-oat goop. She sipped water from the straw of the reservoir. David and I tried to focus on things other than our frozen toes (we did have to cross some creeks with frigid water). She crawled around, lichen sticking to her fleece booties, and we took turns holding her hands so she could “trek.” As the trip went on, her sense of adventure grew, and passing any of the many snowfields still lingering up high involved balancing her desire to posthole through those snowfields with our desire not to (especially once our socks were dry).

When she went back in the carrier and we began walking again, we sang a lot of songs. That day we rerouted through the alders was our longest; we ended up hiking for nine hours. I tried incorporating the landscape into nursery rhymes: old MacDonald’s farm soon had dogs, moose, rivers, brush, mountains, and wind; the wheels on the bus turned into the creek in the valley, the birds in the sky, the rain in the clouds. For days after, even when she was napping and I was walking or cooking or gardening or checking my phone, the track that ran through my mind was: where oh where are baby’s fingers, where oh where are baby’s toes… I used to think about, I don’t know, books, politics, romance, the past, the world.

As we wrapped up the trip – a seven-day loop through the northern Talkeetnas, during which time we saw no other people – both David and I felt a strong sense of pride, not to mention surprise. I think we both imagined that our trip would involve more base camping and tundra lounging. We did some of that, but because we had to change our route several times due to snow, we ended up moving camp most days. In the end, it felt like a real adventure – reminiscent of the kinds of adventures we took before I got pregnant.

When we used to talk about having kids, I often returned to the phrase, obliteration of self. I was terrified of losing myself as a mother. Terrified that the things that made me special, unique, and myself would be gone. In particular, I pre-grieved the change in my relationship with wild places. Before becoming a mom, I spent months every summer working as a field instructor for NOLS, leading students on 30-day expeditions hiking, sea kayaking, and mountaineering around Alaska. When not working in the field, I also planned challenging personal trips; I took several skijoring trips in the Arctic that involved skiing hundreds of miles, did a 250-mile ski through the Brooks Range in March, completed a 15-day solo backpacking and pack rafting trip without seeing another person, spent six weeks traversing the tundra with David just before we got married. I assumed that the person who had done all those things would disappear in motherhood.

Since becoming a parent, I haven’t ended up grieving those activities as much as I thought I would. Maybe I got it out of my system ahead of time. Or maybe I’ve just been too consumed and taken with what I’ve gained in becoming a parent: kissing all my daughter’s toes when she wakes in the morning, joining her to see who can yell louder until we both erupt into giggles, giving her a look at herself in the mirror after a bath and watching her point at herself with glee, coming up with nonsense jokes about the President of the Naked Baby Club. In short, the tenderness, silliness, and clarity of purpose that has come with motherhood.

On this recent backpacking trip, though, I realized that the person “I used to be” is still alive. The one who gets randomly set on objectives and is willing to endure a lot to reach them. The one who is energized by opportunities to get to know a new landscape. The one who becomes more playful and present when cell service and Internet recede and navigation, simple meals, and intentional time together become the focus.

That person may be buried deep during this season of life, but she’s still there. Of course, the trip was different than those I did before motherhood. We were much more cautious. We didn’t go as far. We sang way more songs. And our goals were more centered around having quality time as a family than getting somewhere in particular or trying out a new route. Still, we navigated dense brush, snow fields, steep terrain, river crossings. We had some new experiences, too, like the late nights we spent in the tent as our toddler enjoyed the bouncy house of our inflatable sleeping pads, body slamming and giggling on top of my sleeping bag, staying awake until nearly midnight after she’d had a too-late nap and the tent never got dark. And we were especially grateful for our two sled dogs who accompanied us, carrying their food in and her dirty diapers out.

Not only can my old self still exist and emerge, but she can now share these activities with kids. (Oh, it is perhaps worth noting that on this trip I was four months pregnant, which turned out to be a serendipitous sweet spot in pregnancy: I was no longer feeling as depleted as I had during the first trimester, but my belly was still small enough to wear the hip belt on my backpack and carry our kid on front.)

We tried once or twice to have her travel with her father, but unfortunately, if I am an option, she often wants me. I took most of the volume of our stuff – sleeping bags, clothes, extra diapers, etc. – and he took the dense heavy stuff – food, water, fuel. It worked, but was quite uncomfortable. As I breathed through the pain on the top of my left shoulder, I was reminded again of that old self, the one so intent on completing a trip she’d do so with blisters the size of silver dollars on her heels, or a pack so heavy she had to slip her arms through while lying on her back, flip to old fours, then stand. I desperately wanted to be out there. Even if being there involved a very particular pain on the top part of my left shoulder.

Rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb. RHUBARB. If you live in most parts of Alaska, or the PNW, or probably the midwest and northern New England, you know that RHUBARB is in these early weeks of summer. Our favorite local ice cream shop (Wild Scoops) even trades people their backyard rhubarb for ice cream so they can make a very delicious seasonal flavor that is bright pink and perfectly tart.

In the past, I’ve made rhubarb simple syrup to mix with fizzy water or cocktails and rhubarb “muffins” with a streusel top that were basically cupcakes. This year, I’ve been making several batches of rhubarb compote, vaguely following Melissa Clark’s NYT recipe, except my ratio of rhubarb to sugar has been 8:1 (about half the sugar she suggests). I mix a spoonful of the compote with Greek yogurt for a quick snack. Highly recommend – easy and delish.

Also, about ten years ago, I got into making snacks for backcountry adventures. I hated the way store-bought energy bars (Clif, etc.) required so much plastic and trash. Plus, they were expensive, had ingredients I wasn’t sure of, and when winter temperatures dropped, they froze so solid they could (and would) chip your tooth. I started making peanut butter balls, wild blueberry fruit leather, homemade snickers, energy cookies, caffeinated brownies. In my attempt to make savory snacks, I briefly forayed into making homemade Cheez-its (basically pie dough plus cheddar) before deciding that, in some cases, it is worth it to just buy the processed version.

Now, it turns out I’ve been honing a skill for a purpose I didn’t foresee: making toddler food. On this trip, I was nervous about what we’d feed her. The two winners among our snacks were date balls made with cashews, pecans, coconut, and tahini (simple formula is equal parts dates and nuts, plus half as much coconut) and peanut butter balls made with oats, chia and hemp seeds, almond flour, and dates. I also brought some carrot almond-butter muffins, as I’ve been obsessed with toddler muffins after the revelation that the baby “smash cake” recipe we made for her first birthday tasted like delicious banana bread but had no added sugar – but the little lady did not want muffins on this trip. One lesson? I didn’t need to spend so much time shaping the snacks into “balls;” squashed in Ziplocks inside the hip belts of our backpacks, both date and peanut-butter versions turned to blobs. But “date blobs” doesn’t have the same ring to it.

If you’ve made it to the end of this newsletter – thanks for reading! If you’d like to see some of my past work, you can go to dianasaverin.com. And if there are others who you think might be interested in reading this newsletter, please consider forwarding it along.

Happy summer,

Diana