I Can't Go Away With You on a Rock Climbing Weekend
What if something's on tv, and it's never shown again?
It’s August, which means the annual family trip to my aunt and uncle’s cottage is coming up. My family, my parents, and my brother and his family all descend on the somewhat remote two bedroom structure that my grandparents built on a Quebec lake in the 1970’s. My uncle and aunt own it now and have modernized it in small ways that have made an enormous difference. Gone is the outhouse that used to terrify me into drinking zero liquids after noon lest I have to get up and slink through the dark to pee in the middle of the night. A comparatively civilized compost toilet is now housed in the actual cottage itself, with a tap that brings lake water up to a sink beside it. Luxury!
Solar panels allow for actual lamps to be turned on when the deep darkness of the wilderness* creeps in. The fuss of lighting kerosene lamps to read by has been eliminated. As a child staying at the cottage I would wake in the middle of the night, unable to see anything and just stare into the thick blackness, quietly freaking out.
The areas around the lake have been built up in the past few decades, with more cottages going in, which has made the place feel less remote. It even has wi-fi now (!) which quells some of my anxiety regarding being unconnected to the rest of the world.
Readers may be sensing a theme here, and that theme is, I am terrified of anything woodsy, outdoorsy, or remote. Terrified is maybe too strong a word, since I do go to the cottage once a year and enjoy it. Especially now that we don’t stay overnight. I like to be outside, like, in a park, in the middle of a city. Or in my backyard. In the middle of a city. Or on a lake for one very pleasant Sunday with family.
When I was a young teen going to the cottage with my family, I had a few ways to make it all more enjoyable for myself. One was, predictably, my Walkman and cassettes, which I played with care, lest I run out of batteries too early in the week. I’ve written about my childhood Walkman obsession before in this space, and in that post I even featured a photo of me at the cottage in question, sitting as indoors as possible, listening to music. When my Walkman batteries ran out, I was drawn to the battery powered radio that provided background noise and pertinent news coverage, courtesy of CBC. If there were shows (like Definitely Not the Opera or Sounds Like Canada) that played music and featured various interviews and/or storytelling, that was the jackpot for me. It was a connection that allowed me to think and daydream about what could happen after we left the wilderness.
In one of my more out-of-character moves, at age 21, I took a job tree-planting in Northern Ontario. We slept in tents for weeks, working, eating, and resting outdoors. It was the first time in my life that I’d slept in a tent for longer than a night of girl guide camp. Middle-aged me has no idea what young adult me was thinking when she applied for this gig, but my best guess is that it was hard to get summer jobs in the late 90s and also my best friend was going.
Again, it was music that kept me from losing my mind during that arduous summer of physical labour. I’d plug my earbuds in under my bug mesh and play whatever music would keep me moving, even if it was a dubbed copy of Dave Matthew’s Band’s Under the Table and Dreaming that my boyfriend had given me. I remember also repeatedly listening to a mixtape from my friend Mona which had a bunch of upbeat songs by British pop artists on it, which was a perfect manual labour companion soundtrack until the last song which was a very, very slow version of “Moon River” done by Morrissey (we didn’t know he was an asshole back then). I listened to it again as I was writing this, wondering if it was as slow as I remembered and oh boy it certainly is. Not conducive to keeping one’s spirits up while planting hundreds of trees in a clearcut surrounded by black flies, that’s for sure.
I’m happy that I have tried cottaging and tree planting and even spent the night in a tent cabin with my family a few summer ago (the kids wanted to try “camping” and I wanted to be a game and adventurous parent but I ended up staying up all night, unable to sleep, listening to episodes of If Books Could Kill on my phone) but one of the beautiful parts of middle-age is that you can just recuse yourself from activities that you now sincerely know you don’t enjoy. And given that what stands out to me about those times spent trying to be outdoorsy is whatever I happened to be listening to on my headphones, I think I’ve determined what’s really important to me anyway.
*I fully acknowledge that a lot of what I refer to as “wilderness” in the post is probably not considered actual wilderness by my friends who are actual outdoorsy people.
August 2024 - Songs
The title of this post comes from the song “The Outdoor Type” by The Lemonheads (another band whose cassettes frequented my Walkman in the 90s) and it is a song that I felt deeply in tune with from the first time I heard it. “I’ve never slept out underneath the stars/closest that I came to that/was one time my car/broke down for an hour in the suburbs at night…”
Another song I enjoy about camping etc is “Provincial Parks” by Susie Ungerleider which mentions “dirty tents and filthy feet” which seems very true to my limited tent-related experience. She has one of my favourite singing voices of all time, so whether you love or hate camping, this is worth a listen.
One of the songs on that treeplanting mixtape from my friend Mona was Lush’s “Ladykillers” which is a decidedly urban song (probably why I enjoyed listening to it during that woodsy summer) that I think was very ahead of its time, lyrically. I was also happy to re-listen to this one because Miki Berenyi’s memoir is currently on its way to me via my friend Megan who is vacationing in Scotland and, because they are the best, asked if there were any books I wanted from the UK.
August 2024 - Feelings
I’m back to my usual reading volume after a slump, and it makes me feel like a stable, rooted human being again, thank goodness. These two books got me back to normal. I will admit that Happy Place took me a few tries to get into. I don’t like hardcovers because they’re heavy to carry everywhere, so I didn’t buy it when it first came out, but I did get the audiobook from Cloud Library. I couldn’t get into the “second chance” trope, but I also wondered if maybe I preferred to read Emily Henry’s books as physical books. So a friend loaned me her copy and I tried again, but set it aside. Eventually I went back to the audiobook and then it finally hooked me and I raced through the last two thirds, up late with it playing through my dorky sleep-mask headphone contraption, crying as quietly as possible so I didn’t wake up my husband. This one is so full of emotion and feels so real, I was just so moved.
In another bid to get myself back to consistent reading, I picked up Jane Fallon’s Over Sharing. Regular newsletter readers know that Jane Fallon’s books are like catnip to me, and this was no exception to that rule. I literally gasped out loud at the last sentence of part one, then had to lie down on the sofa for a moment to recover. As with all her books, this one features a flawed protagonist who makes bad decisions that lead to unpredictable twists and turns. The main character in this one becomes obsessed with the woman who her ex-husband had an affair with, who has become a famous influencer. Chaos ensues. So good. I couldn’t put it down.
My own book, Make Me a Mixtape, is now available for pre-order at whatever bookstore you enjoy hanging out in. You can also request copies on NetGalley for review if you do that sort of thing, and/or add it on Goodreads.
Thanks for reading! See you next month.
J.W.
Instagram : @JenniferWhitefordWrites