It is dawn on Eid al-Adha, and I am remembering being on top of a mountain. When I was seventeen I was already in a lot of pain. I was clearing trails around the Ross Lake area in the Okanagen Forest in Washington State, where I was born and raised. At the end of our several weeks of clearing trails; rebuilding fallen creeks with rock-bars and giant stones on the sides of thin trails up steep slopes, clearing yards and yards of shale that had fallen across the trail, sawing by hand through logs three feet thick, rebuilding Deer Lick Cabin and bridge by hand… we were packing up base camp to head out on a week-long trek up and over “small” mountains in the Cascades with our packs full, covering about 9-10 miles a day. 

While breaking down camp, I was being my usual delegating self, and a male friend who I had been at odds with, reached across the shelter while we were washing dishes and he grabbed my neck. He had been blowing verbal shit my direction, and I had said “Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me,” and he just snapped. The thing is that I just retreated. I went to my tent and hid. Unknowingly, two of the other teenagers had decided to play a prank on me. They collapsed the tent around me. I was about to escape, ‘cool’ yet again, but then the zipper got stuck. I finally got it open and I lost my shit. I yelled at everybody and then ran off into the woods.

We then, that evening, were having a meeting on the dock. The meeting turned into a group session for bashing me for waking up everybody with my guitar at umpting thirty in the morning so that we could get up the mountain on time. I remember lying back on the dock and staring up at the night sky as tears rolled down my face. The leaders wanted to know what was wrong with me, so they called me to their tent that evening. I confessed that Dakota had grabbed my neck and had physically assaulted me. The next day, we all discovered that he was being sent home to Vashon Island. He and I did not say goodbye.

The beginning of the week-long hike was difficult. Everyone was pissed at me for getting Dakota sent home. I guess that is just what teenagers are like. Dakota and I had been at odds for some time, because I had noticed that he had anger issues and was he being aggressive. We had already retreated from each-other far before this event occurred. On the first day, I cried alone in my tent, disembodied, full of grief; this was not the first tragedy that had happened in my teen years. 

So we climbed. We sat by mountain fields of flowers and on snow crested peeks. We drank from mountain streams, and I took showers in small very cold waterfalls. We found ancient little shacks high, high up on the trails, played games, and eventually we made peace as a crew and everyone got over it. We ended by camping at a glorious glacier that we climbed up to at dawn to watch the sunrise over the layers of purple mountains that seemed to stretch on for eternity. I had had a boyfriend during the time we spent working the trails, and he had abandoned me as well. We were distant.

Eventually I returned to Seattle, Queen Ann Hill, and my mother heard the news, as I received a letter in the mail from Dakota saying he was starting anger management. My mother urged me to thank him for the letter. I felt betrayed once again. Fuck him, fuck her… there was no way I was going to acknowledge or thank him for this “apology”. It was going to take a little longer to let it all go, to heal. Here I am 23 years later, and it is finally coming out in the way of writing. I have been through so much trauma in my life with events like this; my boyfriend getting shot, surviving an eating disorder, being hospitalized three times for my mental illness, raped on acid in a tree house, and probably a few that I have forgotten. But it is coming out. I am healing. It all comes out eventually if we make the efforts to heal and we take the time. So I encourage this in you. Find a way to express yourself. You can do it.