“… the early twentieth-century liberation of women was about infinitely more than winning the vote. It was about a change of mindset, a new awareness “… the early twentieth-century liberation of women was about infinitely more than winning the vote. It was about a change of mindset, a new awareness of sexuality, a fresh audacity, a new willingness and desire to explore the outside world, whether through working or walking. In their altered consciousness, women began viewing themselves differently within the landscape. They began reclaiming it.”
This was an excellent work of non-fiction. I don’t know how long it would have taken me to discover Windswept if it hadn’t passed through the hands of a coworker friend that knows me quite well: “This looks like a Candi book.” How right she was! This was another book that I packed in my bags on that trip to the mountains. While Canoe Lake was adequately entertaining, this one got me really jazzed up. It’s essentially a book about historical women figures who walked for pleasure among other things. It’s also about the author’s adventures to follow in the footsteps of those women. Annabel Abbs explains it best:
“… I have defined a walking woman as one who walked for pleasure, not drudgery, and who was able to make something of her walking rather than simply doing it of necessity. Sadly, this made it difficult to find historic women of colour or women who walked with their children or impoverished women. These women rarely had the opportunity to head off into the wilds for catharsis, adventure, or pleasure.”
Several women are included in this collection: Frieda von Richthofen (D.H. Lawrence’s lover), Gwen John (the painter), Clara Vyvyan and Daphne du Maurier (Clara was du Maurier’s friend and neighbor), Nan Shepherd, Simone de Beauvoir, and Georgia O’Keefe. The story is rich in the details of these women’s lives as well as their walking journeys. I’m not sure how many thousands of hours and miles of walking were clocked between them all, but it was a significant number! Walking for these women was perilous in many ways. They risked not only physical harm but social scorn as well. Women walking alone or in pairs, in places other than the garden, were perceived as quite odd. So why did they do it? It wasn’t for physical exercise alone that they ventured out.
“These women walked in order to find minds of their own. They walked for emotional restitution. They walked to understand the capabilities of their own bodies. They walked to assert their independence. They walked to become.”
I thought a lot about these women as I strode out the door of my little lakeside cottage on that trip. In my mind, they walked alongside me as I hiked a (minor) mountain peak and traversed some bike and nature trails. As I walked alone, I noted that not once did I run into a solitary woman walking. I observed only families, men paired with women, and women paired with one another, and men hiking alone. Naturally, I’m sure other solitary women were out there somewhere, but my point is that it seemed a rare occurrence. When making my way to the summit of this particular mountain, a couple of women on their way back down greeted me with: “Good morning! Just so you know, there’s a man walking alone a little bit farther ahead of you. You will probably run into him when you reach the top.” I knew they were giving me a heads-up for safety reasons. All was well, but the little warning really resonated with me after reading sections of this book.
“Being alone in remote places makes us feel vulnerable. It’s one more anxiety we juggle as we walk, another emotion in a complicated series of emotions peculiar to women. Will I be harassed or assaulted? Will I arrive before dark? Is this area safe? Can I stop here or should I keep marching? Where can I go to the toilet?”
I’m not going to go into detail about each of these women, but as per my usual habit, I’ll share some of my favorite tidbits. Before I do, however, I have to say that Annabel Abbs not only did her research expertly, but she also writes beautifully. This is a highly recommended piece of narrative non-fiction!
“… backpacking reminds us of the modesty of our needs. Raising the question: If we need so little, why do we spend so long accumulating so much?”
“Remember this: a self is not a thing, but a becoming – on and on until we die."
“… we mustn’t be duped by age-old notions of home, notions readily perpetuated by an industry determined to sell us more and more home trappings… It seems to me that we should think of home not as a castle but as a nest, a place for walking to and from, for rebuilding and relocating when necessary. A place that is simultaneously safe and open. Open to change, to chance, to escape, to return.”
And then there’s this one, which I could imagine Annabel Abbs penning for me (and perhaps for you, too!) Thank you, Annabel, for those valuable words of encouragement.
“And finally, I think about the home I’ve left behind. The empty bedrooms with their neatly made beds, the eerie quietness, the end of motherhood. But in the crease of every ending lies the seed of a new beginning. In the process of casting off, we find a new fortitude, a tentative courage, a renewed curiosity.”...more
That’s a true statement for me right now. I’ve been going on a lot of solitary walks, trying to clear my mind. I’v“Birds as respite. Birds as refuge.”
That’s a true statement for me right now. I’ve been going on a lot of solitary walks, trying to clear my mind. I’ve always been slightly interested in birds. A mockingbird would sit every spring and summer on the peak of my house or one of the adjacent neighbors’ rooftops. I imagined this was the same bird each year and would always say hello upon his return. I’d laugh at his vocal antics. A robin would build a nest in the shrubbery by the front porch every year. I loved watching the little nestlings turn to fledglings and eventually take off. But now I’ve been really paying attention. I bring a pair of binoculars on my walks, just in case. I read about the Merlin app somewhere in a novel that had nothing to do with birding. I downloaded it because it sounded fun. Now I find myself opening it whenever I hear something unusual. It’s the perfect way to distract myself from everything else going on in the world and in my own life.
In any case, this book caught my interest and provided both entertainment and education. Author Trish O'Kane came to birding later in life. She was originally a peace activist and then an investigative human rights activist. A house sparrow and then a gray catbird got her hooked on birding. When I saw and heard my first catbird by actively trying to find one, I wanted to shout “There’s Trish’s gateway bird!” Of course, there wasn’t anyone around to actually hear me. It was fun to learn about her transition from one career to the next, although she found they weren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.
“The phrase ‘detective work’ is what hooked me. So birdwatching is like investigative journalism, I thought. You observe. You listen. You take good notes. You piece together clues.”
I’m not going to get into the details of this memoir, but I will say it was well-written and informative. I give Trish a lot of credit for the work she did in Nicaragua before she took on this new career. She also lost nearly everything to Hurricane Katrina before changing career paths and heading to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to obtain a Ph.D. in natural resources. She’s one strong and neat woman! Her activist efforts shifted to the natural world and involved parks and geese and birding and teaching both college and young people about these topics. I admire her work with the people of her community and the way she tied social justice work in with her nature activism. Here are three key lessons I took away from this that really made an impression on me:
“I’ve been particularly struck by the strategies birds use to fiercely defend their home territories. What if humans employed some of these same strategies to protect the places we love?”
“I remembered the counsel of my most important Jesuit mentor in Nicaragua: that if you want to make a difference in your community, you don’t do what you want to do – you do what the community needs you to do.”
“… I’d learned from catbirds that the idea of just doing nothing is bogus. We’re all managing wild animals by the way we live, by the landscapes we plant, and especially by the way we move around.”...more
