bear with me

image by joanna nix-walkup

Bear with me. I want to tell you something about freedom.

I am twenty-two years old and working as a travel writer for Let's Go: USA.

Everything I need is in the internal frame backpack my mother got me at Eastern Mountain Sports on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston.

Two pairs of shorts, five t-shirts, one pair of Levi's, one dark gray Shetland wool sweater, and a windbreaker. Socks and underwear in the two long, tubular pockets on the side of the pack. Toiletries; a youth hostel sleep sack; my swim gear; the previous year's edition of Let's Go: USA; and a writing pad.

I walk in heavy-duty Brooks running shoes.

I walk everywhere.

Flaming Gorge National Park in Wyoming, the streets of Salt Lake City, the Badlands in South Dakota, and at night, nervously, in Duluth Minnesota, the only time in six weeks that a man eyes me and I feel scared.

It is the strongest summer of my life.

Tan legs, muscles, every day new; the Rockies; the teacher who takes me white water rafting; the theologian I meet at a bus stop outside the Boundary Waters Canoe Area.