The enduring magic of making plans
plus pitch opps and friends who write
When I was nine years old, a friend and I decided we would run away to Yosemite National Park.
My family had recently relocated from Virginia to Northern California for my dad’s work, and I was struggling with the transition. On the first day I showed up to a trailer classroom surrounded by hot asphalt at Rancho Las Positas Elementary and retreated into myself; everything was so different from the school I knew, where we padded down narrow hallways in quiet, tidy lines. Kids were free to roam noisily in this big new place, and it terrified me. Which is a little strange, because I would soon seek even greater freedom.
I met a fellow “new girl” at some point; her family had recently moved from Canada, and we bonded over our newness and our disappointment in “the golden hills” which were actually, most definitely brown.
Our new town was almost always dry and hot and the sun had no where to hide. I was always a little sad—until those joyful playdates with my new best friend. We both missed our friends and our extended families and the greener places from which we came. But we had each other, and we had vivid imaginations. So we hatched plans to escape to a place with bigger trees and greener grass. For months (it seems, from this distance in adulthood, but perhaps it was only a few days) we plotted running away to Yosemite National Park, where we would become wild and free and live peacefully among the animals, roaming through lush forests and fields, scaling boulders, and hiding from the humans who visited the park. Those poor park visitors who brought cars and cameras—we would watch them with pity and trepidation and then retreat to our new home in parts of the park they’d never know.
We read about plants and animals that thrive in Yosemite. We checked out books and made lists of things we could eat.
One night, my friend’s family had dinner at my family’s house. (We both come from very loving families, by the way. Our plans had little to do with escaping them. We were simply meant for greater backdrops than concrete cul-de-sacs.) After the dishes were cleared, we escaped to the gravel driveway which we deemed perfect for training our skin to endure the harsh surfaces we’d encounter in the wilderness. Crawling up and down the driveway on all fours, we pressed our palms and knees into the little lumps and daggers of what could have been granite, a crushed up version of the rock we’d encounter if we were to ever actually run away to Yosemite—which of course, we did not. I can still feel the rock, cool and sharp, on my skin.
Our failure to ever steal away to the wild place that called to us was never discussed. Our planning felt thorough and in tact and would remain so until life quietly dispersed those plans into many days, weeks, and years of a reality in which Yosemite was on the other side of tangled highways, and we were children who were easily distracted by new imagined lives that wouldn’t put our real ones in mortal danger.
But the planning propelled me into a happier place. There was so much joy in the scribbled details and the anticipation of maybe doing something so big and wondrous. The plans pulled me out of my scared, quiet self, into a future that I could control.
It is very hard to make plans right now. And that is something I’m struggling with. When I think about stories I want to write, I also think about places I want to go and people I want to meet and so many things that are now more complicated than any of us ever imagined they could be. I want to flip the calendar away from this moment and see a coastline I’ve never walked along or a city I can get lost in.
But all of our plans have been taken from us, like the universe discovered them stuffed in our desk and deemed them a distraction from the lesson on the chalkboard. Here we are now, sitting at home, with the stalled anticipation of landscapes and lists, unfamiliar streets and crinkly maps, still craving the tactile pleasures of living through them.
I had never even gone camping when I made those plans to runaway to Yosemite National Park.
I wouldn’t sleep in the wilderness for another two decades, when I moved to Portland, Oregon where everyone camps and hikes and does all those things I always suspected I’d love. And I do love them. I started writing about the outdoors, and about parks and sleeping outside, not long after moving to Portland.
That plan is lodged somewhere inside of me, and I’ve found some ways to follow through. Every time I drive away from the city and go sleep in the woods, and every time I write about those experiences, I’m honoring the little girl who wanted to run away, simply for the sake of something new and unknown. I’m still searching and scheming. I bet you are, too. It’s what writers do. (And we will get out there again for more of it, soon.)
So what if plans are tricky right now? I hope you keep making them.
We all have a future to grieve, and a new one to imagine, which is scary, but also kind of exciting, because without the guidelines of our regular, dependable lives, those plans can be a little more ambitious—a little more wild.
Even if they don’t pan out as you’d hoped, even if they don’t pan out at all, your plans have a point. And like most good stories, it’s not always clear until you get there.
Meet a Friend Who Writes
If you signed up for Friends Who Write, you should have received an email introduction to a new writer friend on Monday. If not, please let me know and I’ll send you one! If you have no idea what I’m talking about, but think it sounds interesting, check out the post with all the details.
Recommendations of the Week
“Cell phones have destroyed the sense of the occasion of a call, the magnitude of picking up and hearing a familiar voice on the other end who has something significant to say.” Phone Call in the Age of Coronavirus (Longreads)
“As I lie in the MRI, eyeballs vibrating, I sing pop songs in my mind, trying not to think of the future for a writer who cannot write, a student who cannot study.” Carrot Bread (Granta)
“The night may be dark and occasionally filled with terrors, but it’s also filled with beauty, with fireflies and other nocturnal life too timid and human-averse to show its face during daylight, with this mesmerising web of streetlights mapping out the daily lives of 340,000 strangers, and far above the orange glow of the city, with a sky of constellations hanging at all the wrong angles for my English brain to comprehend.” The Long Con of the Great Indoors (Fevered Mutterings)
Pitch Calls and Opportunities
and One More Question…
What would the childhood version of you be most excited to write about?
That’s all for now! I’ll be back on Friday with a Q&A.
If you enjoyed this post, it would mean so much to me if you shared it on social media or sent it to a writer friend.