extraction

“You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need.” – The Rolling Stones

The first time I tried—in a big-picture-of-life kind of way—I was 15 years old. A few months earlier, my parents had completed a bitter yearlong divorce that brought to an end 22 years of rocky marriage, and I was adjusting to a new lifestyle that began the day my father, driving me home from his apartment across town, told me with a strained voice that I was old enough to choose which parent to live with but there wasn’t really a choice, because he didn’t think my mother would make it if I didn’t live with her. Perhaps 15 years later, as I cried over my frustration with her ever-worsening depression, which I believed started the same year as the divorce (though he tells me it started earlier), he bemoaned his role in creating the burden he felt I’d had to carry all these years, supporting my mother through her long-lasting post-divorce bleakness of heart. Despite participating in a lot during high school—from playing tennis to being an outdoor education leader to editing the school’s literary magazine to becoming student council president my senior year—my teenage years were far from carefree; I grew up quickly due to the heart break of having parents who only communicated with each other through me, and always in angry voices, with no censorship of their feelings toward each other. It felt as though I, too, had experienced a failed marriage—loving these people so dearly, often feeling deeply loved by them, but also resenting the hell out of them for their seeming inability to work it out, or even work on it.

          
In tenth grade, I began to get blinding migraines, not long after I began to fail a class. I had, since my first year at Westminster at age five, only ever gotten As. During high school I would eventually take nine AP classes and ace the rest of them. But AP chemistry—my first introduction to chemistry of any kind, as we were placed in the class based not on previous experience with the subject but on our success in physics the previous year—was not what I had the mental capacity for at that time in my life. I found predicting the color two liquids would turn when mixed together completely irrelevant to anything. When my teacher kindly gave me a C in the class despite multiple failed tests, my unfamiliarity with struggling in school compounded with the hard-to-ignore detail that all four of my grandparents were chemists (three with PhDs in the subject) to make me feel as small as small could be—until my grandmother told me that she’d received her first D her freshman year of college and thought it was wonderful that I was getting the (in her telling of it, inevitable) experience of flailing academically out of the way so early.

Perhaps it was that visit from my grandparents, who sat at the kitchen table perusing my chemistry textbook and assuring me of how much too advanced it was for anyone’s first learning of the subject, that inspired me to hope that I might find a way to exit the intense stress that my life had become. Sometime that winter of my sophomore year, I’d gone to a lightly attended presentation in the school auditorium about a semester-long program for high school juniors on a farm in Maine. The older sister of a friend had just come back from it, and after the presentation she told me about helping the farmers birth calves on a beautiful fall day with crisp air and New England colors all around. She glowed as she described it. I decided that day that the Maine Coast Semester on Chewonki Neck in Wiscasset, Maine, would be just my ticket.

But when I looked at the application, I fretted over the cost—one semester’s tuition there was the same as a full year at Westminster, which my dad sometimes had to borrow money from his father to cover, especially now that my brother was in college. So I didn’t tell my parents about the opportunity, and I would’ve let it go altogether, except my uncle happened to call the night before the application was due, and I happened to mention the opportunity, and he happened to insist that I worry about the cost later, if I got accepted, and that I go ahead now and apply. I remember hanging up the phone in our computer room and immediately starting to type. I don’t remember what the essay question was exactly, but I wrote a response that multiple teachers later told me made them excited to meet me when I arrived. I wrote about the drive into my favorite place on earth—the town in Rhode Island where my grandparents live and where I went every summer—and I captured minute details of scenery, smells and sounds, and emotions that apparently stuck in the teachers’ minds. I don’t remember how long I had to wait to find out if I was accepted, but I do remember how certain my parents were when I told them I got in that the cost would not be a problem. Just imagine how relieved they must have been as parents to be able to give this child a breather; they too felt it would be a well-earned break.

The semester I spent in Maine was affirming, nourishing, invigorating; it was life-altering. I learned skills I never expected to have—from milking cows to birthing lambs to spinning wool to chopping wood to coring trees to identifying the calls and songs of 75 types of birds. I experienced all sorts of newness—like four-foot-deep snow and sub-zero temperatures and layer upon layer of long underwear and the music of thawing snow run-off in the woods in April and the resulting forget-me-nots that covered the hillsides and canoeing from island to island on a five-day trip through Montsweag Bay and doing a solo in the woods and the regret of submerging myself in 45-degree water. I made close new friends—so close that they became committed to eliminating my migraines, and one day three of them did so by sitting on the floor of our cabin and massaging a terrible one right out of my skull while talking to me quietly. As well I bonded with nature in a new way—having always loved all aspects of the geography of the South and the northeastern ocean, now I knew of the sparkling blue diamonds that snow seems to be composed of when moonlight shines across a broad landscape of it; I knew the soft brush of hemlock needles against my skin; I knew of the time of day called the gloaming; and I knew the immense contentment of sitting quietly by a large, still bay—whether with my best friend or just my walk-man and an Indigo Girls tape.

At Chewonki I also fell in love with natural science—determining, after conducting a month-long research project in the woods, that forest ecology and natural history would be my focus in college. This decision, as well as my newfound love of New England in seasons other than just summer, propelled me a year later to apply only to colleges in the Northeast, and only to ones with environmental science programs. So much in my life since has cornered on my choice of a college and a major, but Chewonki altered the course of my life in another way that seems by far the most important.

Coming back from Chewonki was an adjustment, with only one of the friends I’d known since childhood (who attended the program alongside me) having any clue what I’d just been through. I had the summer to get used to the idea of returning to Westminster for my thirteenth year there, and by the fall, I looked forward to doing so—because extracting myself from the totally overwhelming life I was living wasn’t an escape, it was a reboot. I had learned how to reinvigorate myself.

Sometimes it can feel that life controls you, that you are locked into whatever you have. What I learned through the experience of identifying the need to do something new, and then doing it, and gaining from it along the way was that I do have enough control of my life to radically alter it when my body and spirit need to find a new approach to living in order to thrive. I reaffirmed that learning when I quit my job in Boston one random summer day seven years ago and moved to San Francisco with no job, just a whole lot of optimism. And I hope that I am reaffirming it again right now, having driven myself 1,000 miles away from a job that I love and am proud of and believe is unhealthily all-consuming in order to write a work of fiction that is about exactly these ideas of extraction and reinvigoration. But whether or not I succeed at writing this knowledge into a novel, I am so grateful that I have written it into the very veins of my skin.