You’re reading The Hundred Day Reckoning: a Creative Response to Hard Change, in which an award-winning playwright (me) mines ancient dramatic principles and a range of current wisdom to expand creativity, capacity, and freedom in the face of Life Drama (a.k.a. yours).
We are only one month away from the beginning of the Fall 2026 session, live on zoom with me: Day 1: Sept 7th, Day 100: Dec 15th. Explore and inquire here.
Evening session is wait list only. Space available in the morning session and independent version. Join me! - KH
I fear we graduated to adorable granny status this year, at least in the eyes of the pigtailed ranger who checked us in at the Big Oak Flat entrance to Yosemite National Park. She questioned what we planned to do for three days entering from McGurk Meadow, a pretty cul-de-sac of trails split off from the Ansel Adams landmarks. (Folks have been known to sneak over and climb Half Dome, which needs a special permit). When we explained that we would camp four miles in at Dewey Point, with day hikes in between, she let out a melismatic, “Awwwwww. That sounds like a great trip.”
Reader, it was.
Reckoning it wasn’t. And that was grand.
Once a year, Kim, Shala, and I hoist our packs up a mountain, to live briefly out of doors, to test that our ankles, hips, and knees can still make it, to talk books, kids, feminism, and time, and (for me) to glory in a hobby, a fluke, a habit that I never planned to love.
Kim brought me on my first few backpacking trips in the 1990s, casting me as the loopy sidekick in her breakout essay about a terrifying hike up the Columbia River Gorge in Washington State in which we started too early and got lost in the snow:1
“Beside me, clinging to a fistful of grass so she wouldn’t slide
down the hill, was my friend Karen, whom I called Karenina,
because she had a flair for the dramatic.”
- From Disorienting by Kim Todd, 1998
While Kim bucked up and plotted our emergency exit, I emoted for both of us.
“I… wished I could cry to loosen, if only slightly, the bands of anxiety that had wound themselves around my chest. Karen had already cried twice, saying, ‘I’m going to cry now, but it’s okay, Kim, I just do this sometimes. I don’t want you to think that I’m not having a good time.’
And she would sob and the rain would drip off the tree branches
and run down the Ziploc bags, and I would try to think of comforting
things to say, and fail.”
- From Disorienting by Kim Todd, 1998
But we made it home, thanks to Kim’s skills, and (she hints) my puppylike faith.
“Karen trusted the compass. And I think she trusted me. I trusted neither and could only avoid panic by never stopping long enough to think. We stood up and prepared to go back over the ridge. Tree to tree to tree.”
- From Disorienting by Kim Todd, 1998
Not quoted: a fall through some ice, bone-shuddering damp, and the cold cold fear through my guts. I clung to that grass because I thought I might die. But we left mortality on that mountain and began the back half of our twenties.
I might have gone the rest of my life without revisiting the woods, but a different kind of emergency brought about the first mid-life trio hike. Kim’s dear friend Shala survived breast cancer, and they decided to manifest a long-postponed backpacking trip2. Still the willing sidekick, and living not too far from Shala at that time, I got invited along. Shala and I remet – we’d last seen each other at Kim’s 1998 wedding – and despite a night lying awake planning every possible way to back out of the trip, I hoisted my twentieth century backpack and joined my more expert friends in the Olympic National Park.
That was 2017. We’ve since explored the Olympics, the North Cascades, Mt Rainier, and now Yosemite, so inconveniently located that I’d never returned after two young summers of working at a nearby camp, where I fell for the smells, the sun on the pines, views to challenge an atheist. A six-hour drive from the Bay Area where none of us live? No problem for this crew. We lotteried into that McGurk Meadow permit and made it happen.
On the mountain, we meet ourselves. Which does not mean we max out.
As good Gen X women, we excel at gritting through discomfort, overriding pain. We’ve all done our share, mostly off the trail.
But I’ve decided recently that tolerating the intolerable is a shitty special skill.
“We need a new superpower,” I announced this year.
There would be no sprains, no altitude sickness, no over exertion. We would listen to our bodies and pull back before the edge. We would drink electrolytes. We would go gently, not into the night, but up the mountain. At 8000 feet, the altitude is real, and so is gravity, even with newer lighter packs.
I’ve decided recently that tolerating the intolerable is a shitty special skill.
The eldest of four, my parents long gone, I rarely get to be the loopy tagalong, but that’s still more or less my role here. I’ve never supply any group gear (except the trowel) because I still don’t believe I’m really a backpacker. Even my first aid kit got nixed by Shala, an actual doctor, as both bulky and incomplete.
I bring the soft skills. For example when we saw the first bear I recalled we should sing and be loud. I led us in offkey belting the whole Annie album (Karenina’s flair for the dramatic abides). I uncapped my voice for the next days, hollering round the corners, yodeling into the hillsides, vying for echos.
Yet I was too scared to walk in front for the rest of the trip. When we saw the second bear (closer, and blocking the direction we needed to go), Kim directed us off the trail in case the bear used it as an escape route, Shala found a lookout spot to watch the bear, and I reconsidered all my life choices.
In some arenas, I love drama. My program The Hundred Day Reckoning: a Creative Response to Hard Change, and most of this Substack, offer roadmaps for meeting your own life drama, haunting back your ghosts. But sometimes you don’t want ghosts or bears. You want to chill at Dewey Point, dip in a creek, and mosey through late July wildflowers: post peak, but glorious.
Shala Erlich’s first novel Night Float, about a psychiatry resident and her bipolar sister, is forthcoming in May 2027 with Tortoise Books. Her essays and stories have appeared in The Iowa Review, Short Reads, Fourth Genre, The Missouri Review, The Ghost Story, The Florida Review, and others. Her essay, “Lost and Unlost,” published by Southern Humanities Review, is a “Notable” in 2025 Best American Essays edited by Jia Tolentino. Shala grew up in Berkeley, CA. She is a practicing psychiatrist and lives near the mountains and the ocean in Bellingham, WA, where she and her husband raised two kids. She is currently at work on her second novel which follows three outsider medical students through the pre-Roe, Vietnam era and beyond.
Kim Todd’s most recent book, Sensational: The Hidden History of America’s “Girl Stunt Reporters,” highlights female undercover journalists who exposed the rot at the heart of the Gilded Age. Earlier books include Sparrow; Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis; and Tinkering with Eden: A Natural History of Exotic Species in America. Kim also writes essays and articles on topics ranging from the nature of curiosity, to the developing science of reintroduction biology, to the evolving songs of urban sparrows, to lessons from the longest-running predator-prey study in the world. Her work has appeared in Orion, Sierra Magazine, Smithsonian, High Country News, and Best American Science and Nature Writing anthologies, among other places. She has given talks at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, the New England Aquarium, the Getty Museum, the Commonwealth Club, Yale University, Bowdoin College, Wellesley College, the University of California (Davis), and many other venues. Raised in California, educated in Montana, after moving from coast to coast and landing many places in between, Kim now lives with her family in Minneapolis. In the Twin Cities, she is a nonfiction faculty member at the MFA program at the University of Minnesota and a Fellow with the Institute on the Environment. When not writing or teaching, Kim spends time hiking or kayaking whatever trails and rivers she can find.
This Wednesday morning post is free as always. The paid version gets you access to archived writing prompts, and most importantly, subscription fees directly support the independent creation of this work, including paying other artists. I know times are tough. Your upgrade means all the more.
End 2026 freer, lighter, and more alive:
The Hundred Day Reckoning, a Creative Response to Hard Change, live on zoom with Karen Hartman, is open for fall enrollment. A few spots left. Day 1: Sept 7th, Day 100: Dec 15th.
Curious about how this started? Read my very first post: The Hundred Day Reckoning: A Creative Response to Hard Change, Or, How I Turned my Mother into an Ancestor in 365 Not-So-Easy Steps
“Disorienting” by Kim Todd, published in CutBank, 1998, later appeared in the anthology Two In The Wild, edited by Susan Fox Rogers.
Shala’s essay, “Lost and Unlost,” about illness, aging, and the natural world, appears in The Southern Humanities Review.
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