Reader, blogger, and essayist Andrea Badgley is collecting “Show
Us Your State” stories for her Andrea Reads America website. Submission
guidelines are here if
you would like to participate.
Boris’s Bluff
Boris’s
Bluff. You won’t find it in hiking guidebooks or on topographical maps. Guides don’t take visitors there, either;
tourists wouldn’t be impressed by this rock outcropping, a twenty-minute wander
from our home the two years we lived in the isolated village of Stehekin,
Washington. But Boris’s Bluff awed me.
It
was Boris, our tabby cat, who first led me there. It’s not so much a bluff as
the alliterative name we gave it suggests, but more like an over-sized,
moss-flecked pitcher’s mound. Just beyond the sloping rock, cottonwoods and
pines start their ascent to the foothills and peaks surrounding it. If not for
the slice of sky visible through the canopy, you could believe the world ends
right there.
Stehekin,
translated as “the way through,” was named by Skagit and Salish tribes
migrating between the east and west sides of Washington State. My husband and I
and our two kids vacationed there regularly over the course of ten years. We’d
arrive on a passenger-only ferry that navigates once daily up
fifty-five-mile-long Lake Chelan. Highways were blasted through a stretch of
the rocky lakeshore, but none ever made it all the way to Stehekin and its
cliffed shoreline. Telephone lines never got there either, and the mountains
shooting up from the valley floor block cell phone transmission.
Long
before our move to Stehekin, vacations there schooled us in the way of life in
this village of eighty-five, fringed by North Cascades National Park. We
practiced Stehekin-style grocery shopping—mail your list and blank check to the
Safeway store at the other end of the lake; pick up your groceries at the boat
three days later. We outwitted biting black flies and temperatures in the upper
90s by skinny-dipping in the icy Stehekin River. On a stay during a winter
holiday, we woke to three feet of fresh snow, read by kerosene lamp when the
hydroelectric power went down, and inched a vintage pick-up along single-lane,
ice-crusted village roads.
Early
on in our visits, hikes into Stehekin’s backcountry renewed my zeal for my work
as a public health nurse. As the years went on, though, my fire for promoting
health for the poor and underserved began to sputter; trekking the mountains no
longer re-ignited me. I dreaded yet another referral for a pregnant teen, or
sitting again in a cigarette-smoke-infused apartment teaching a harried mom
alternatives to yelling at her toddler. I couldn’t face more refugees who had
forgotten to take their tuberculosis medications, or hear once more from
supervisors that we had to increase visit numbers. It all weighed on me like an
overstuffed backpack, its straps digging into my shoulders and its heft
pounding my lower back. I began to question if nursing, the work I had felt
called to, was what I was still meant to do.
Finally,
one year, instead of vacationing in Stehekin, my family and I moved there. They
wanted adventure. I sought escape. Hoped for my own “way through.” That first
fall and winter, I filled two journals with run-on sentences of complaint,
criticism of myself and others, questioning of my values, and fear. I didn’t
realize I was writing the textbook on burnout. By the time most of the snow
melted, I had only questions. Had I failed? Or was I being nudged to different
work?
One
spring day, Boris and I again tramped to the bluff. He coiled beside me as I sat on the
sun-warmed stone, his purr vibrating in the windless air. I breathed in
Ponderosa pines and Douglas firs. Reaching a hundred feet upward, their long
history preceded me. At the base of their trunks, saplings signaled new growth.
Snowy peaks towered five thousand feet above, their ridges cascading in ripples
of purple beyond my vision. Unexpectedly, I sensed that Boris and I weren’t
alone. The cement block of worry about the sick immigrants and the struggling
teen mothers lifted from my back. Tears welled as I grasped that I have my part
to play, but it’s not up to me alone. On Boris’s Bluff, I embraced both my
smallness and my greatness.
I
don’t live in Stehekin anymore, but it lives in me. Boris died a couple years
ago. I didn’t go back to the old house, or the old job. My family and I moved to a community on a
rural island in Puget Sound. Here, I balance work as a school nurse with
writing. I’m seeking still—not escape, but attention to God’s presence.
So
here, I climb the saltwater-lashed cliffs
of Iceberg Point
and sit among firs,
their wind-twisted trunks bowed toward the ground.
I imagine the Coast Salish
of the past, fishing for salmon and gathering gin-scented juniper berries on
that “way through” the Cascades, perhaps pausing awhile at Boris’s Bluff.
