Adventure | Bertram's Blog

The Transition Between Today and Tomorrow

May 6, 2015 — Pat Bertram

(Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.”)

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I’m still camping out on the couch in a friend’s house. I’ve been without a car for more than five weeks, without a house for two, but my friends have been kind to me, not just giving me a place to stay but ferrying me to dance class.

I seem to be always in transition. At my father’s house, I was in transition between my shared life with Jeff and my solitary future, between grief and renewal. Now I’m in transition between . . . I’m not sure exactly. Maybe between a settled life and an unsettled one. Or maybe just between today and all my tomorrows.

The strangest feeling about my life right now is that I’m not blogging every day. Blogging was a daily exercise for almost four years, but now I’m back to the way I started, just posting as time, inspiration, and need permits. For years I needed to write in order to make sense of all the trauma going on in my life, but at the moment I’m just flowing with the stream of chance and change.

Big changes will be coming, but for now life is uncomplicated. There are no decisions to be made because I couldn’t follow through anyway since I have obligations for the next month.

I’m still dreaming of an epic walk, though, and the reality is coming clearer. A friend who has been urging me to thru-hike so she could experience it vicariously has made the commitment to do a thru-hike herself. In 2017, she will be hiking the Appalachian Trail, and she invited me to join her group. I said yes, of course, though it’s so far in the future, there’s no way of knowing if any of us will be around to do it.

(She chose the Appalachian Trail instead of the Pacific Crest Trail because of the availability of water and the marginally easier terrain.)

I hope you are doing well in your own transition between today and tomorrow.

Posted in Adventure, being me, life. Tags: Appalachian Trail, going with the flow, thru hike, transitions. 2 Comments »

Visiting Heaven in Hell

May 4, 2015 — Pat Bertram

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Going with the flow is taking me interesting places, most recently to heaven in hell. (I’m trying to be clever, and probably not succeeding.)

A friend had a conference in Palm Springs, and she let me hitch a ride with her. The weather was hellishly hot, but the scenery was heavenly and made up for any discomfort.

We wandered through the botanical gardens — a veritable treasure trove of cactuses. We admired the statuary arrayed around town. We feasted on old fashioned hamburgers and utterly fantastic malts at a fifties-style diner and nibbled our way around the edges of a casino buffet that featured a huge assortment of vegetable dishes.

And we took the tram to the top of Mount San Jacinto (an ascent of two and a half miles) where I stared at the tops of the trees and wondered if I could ever traverse the nearby Pacific Crest Trail.

Do I really have the courage to live an adventurous life? I honestly don’t know. I haven’t really dived adventure yet. This weekend was more like dipping my toe into a tide pool while the whole of the ocean beckoned to me.

But still, tame though the trip might have been, it was adventure of a sort.