My blog has moved… please move with me!

My blog has a new home: www.writeralissajohnson.com.

That’s right. I decided it was far past time to have a URL of my own. My blog will now be published under the name “Wander Home.”

I hope you’ll check it out and subscribe to follow me there. Future posts promise stories from my recent visit to Minnesota (Yowza, the air is thick there! My mom says she could actually see me deflate in the heat…). It seems I really am a Coloradan now. You’ll also find info on summer writing classes in partnership with the Crested Butte Center for the Arts. And, the rest of it will look a lot like the old site–which means you’ll feel right at home. Hope to see you there!

Knowing Your Worth and Asking for It

I drove down to CB South not too long ago to see a friend who’s training to be a life coach. I left the windows down, even on the highway. The sky was a robin’s egg blue, and the aspen on the ridge behind her house showed just the faintest hint of green. Yet all I could think about was money–what I could do to make more.

I wondered if I needed to spend less time climbing and more time pitching. But the thought of paging through magazines to come up with new ideas and clever titles made my throat feel tight. Most of my assignments come through serendipity and chance connections, and I like that. And if I spend more time writing, I want to write stories and essays not assignments.

D zeroed in on this sticking point right away. Any idea that I was simply there to help her fulfill training hours vanished when she repeated my words back to me: “I’m tired of the notion that being a writer means being poor.”

“Tell me more about that,” she said. I proceeded to tell her that I’d never been so poor in my life. It’s nice to make a living doing what I want to do, but I am tired of waking up in the middle of the night worried that my teeth are going to fall out because I don’t have money for the dentist.

“Is that true? You’ve never been this poor?” she asked. Not exactly, I had to admit. There were a few months during my divorce when I was poorer.

Rather than try to change my understanding of poor or tell me I should be happy with my income level, D worked off the notion that I’m not making ends meet the way I’d like. And somehow–in short order and through a sequence of events I can’t really remember–she uncovered the real root of the problem: my trouble is not figuring out how to get paid to write, it’s asking for the right amount of money in return.

That’s right. I’m in my 30s and I still have an f-ing hard time negotiating. I thought I’d learned my lesson during my marketing career, when a colleague and I joked about winning the latest power ball. “That’d be 70 times my salary,” he said. I did some quick calculations–it would have been many more times my salary. My ego does not want to admit this to you, but I was making $30,000 less than my colleagues. (So much for a values-based, women-owned company–be forewarned if you too go from nonprofit to for profit).

I got my raise in the end, but the whole thing left me feeling even more vulnerable about asking for money. Like it was a personal failure. Mix that with one of my biggest passions, and it’s a recipe for doubt. Have I published enough to charge that? Do I write well enough? Will they be satisfied with what they get in return? Can I charge that in a mountain town?

Logically, I know the answer is yes to all of those question. I’m educated, experienced and looking for fair trade. But this isn’t about logic–it’s about self worth.

“Has anyone ever said no?” D asked. No.

“Have they asked for any of those credentials?” No.

“What if they just said no? Would that be bad?” No.

Perhaps, she said, making more money isn’t about working harder. It could be as simple as asking for what I’m worth. And maybe it didn’t need to be complicated:

I know what it feels like to throw out a number that’s too low–before anyone can respond, my throat is tight and I feel tense. So can I  learn to check that sensation before I share my rates? I can feel for the opposite–lightness, a sense of freedom–as a cue that I’m asking for a fair value.

As a girl who moved to the mountains because the very idea of it made me smile, that was an approach I could relate to. I immediately relaxed and felt a sense of optimism that hasn’t waned. I wondered how long I’d have to wait before trying it out.

My opportunity came this week. I won’t pretend I felt easy going and free. But I did ask for more than I would have two weeks ago and it felt right based on how the project had grown.  There was an audible pause–even surprise. I backpedaled in the discomfort of it all, but in the end the check was written at the amount I’d asked for without begrudging.

It was an awkward moment, but it passed. There’s still room for improvement in the communication, but I left with a new feeling: it was fair compensation for the work I had done, and had I asked for less, I would have felt bad. Again.

It was  a small step, but it felt like a step in the right direction.

Some new work: Wilderness News

I was practically born with a canoe paddle in my hand. When my dad held newborn me in his arms, he didn’t see a future doctor or lawyer, or  dream of the day I would walk down the aisle (in fact, before I did that, he offered to lean a ladder against the window so I could elope instead).

My dad imagined his only child paddling a canoe, first with our family in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness of Minnesota, then with Camp Widjiwagan, and one day, even, in the Canadian Arctic.

Three generations of my family have been part of the YMCA and Camp Widjiwagan, so like a typical teenager I resisted. I rolled my eyes whenever my dad announced (to total strangers) how many years our family had collectively spent at camp. I  argued with him at the dining room table, insisting that it wasn’t the camp that made things special but the time out in the wilderness.

I was just being difficult. I didn’t understand that it was the camp that made it possible to explore that wilderness on an all-girls trip, or that I would lead trips there myself, teach environmental education and one day become a program director.

I was ignorant to many things then, including the fact that generations of canoeists had come before me, laying the groundwork for that wilderness to  exist as a protected place. The idea that people argued passionately–and over many generations–about whether to create the wilderness area had never occurred to me.

I got to write about that ignorance in this spring’s issue of Wilderness News, a publication of the Quetico Superior Foundation where I got my true start as a paid writer.

I hope you’ll check it out. My work for Wilderness News taught me to call myself a writer and to see the Boundary Waters–a place that shaped me as a person–as a political and historical landscape, not an over-simplified vision of pristine wilderness. I thought I’d left Wilderness News behind when I moved to Colorado, so it’s somewhat of a homecoming to write for the first issue of a new format, devoted to a place that I will always call home.

A new definition of wilderness

The other day, my mom (who lives in Minnesota) declared that my dog could never move back to Minneapolis–or any city for that matter. I had recently mailed her some pictures of me and Mica from various hikes around Crested Butte and climbing  near Cañon City.

“She just looks so happy surrounded by all that wilderness,” she said.

At Shelf Rd, which I associate with good climbing and a great Thai place in Cañon City.

In many ways, my mom is right. In Crested Butte, most of Mica’s walks are off the leash (thanks in large part to Mr. Disciplinarian, P). On weekends she hangs out at the crag with us, and during the week she goes to the newspaper office with me or the job site with P. This week, the latter meant playing in a river all day and occasionally seeking out P. She bounced in place then, he told me,  as if to say, “Come look what I found!”

(He obliged, more than once–he’s also Mr. Softie.)

But my mom’s use of the word wilderness caught me off guard. Sure, there were mountains and cliffs in those pictures, but I never thought of them as wilderness. In one picture, there were even houses in the background (granted, she hasn’t had cataract surgery yet; even to the clear sighted, they probably look like bushes).

Hiking the mountain (those are houses below).

Perhaps, I thought, I don’t use the word wilderness because I know what lies out of the frame. Like the road that P. and I took to get from the crag to that great Thai Place in Cañon City, or the entire town of Crested Butte at the foot of Crested Butte Mountain.

But then I remembered what it was like to visit Crested Butte for the first time. I poured over maps before hikes, fretting over how much water and food to bring and utterly convinced I was in the middle of no where. I carefully monitored my water intake so the elevation of 9,000 feet didn’t give me a migraine. I looked at the landscape, wowed by the peaks–mountains, everywhere, dominating the view.

I have tried many times since then to explain to Minnesotans that the relationship between people and the land is different in the West. In Minnesota, natural places are relegated to areas like state parks and wilderness zones. They’re places you must travel to–typically by car–and there are no buildings; they’ve been cordoned off, preserved.

A cattle drive on Hwy 135, the main route into CB.

In the West, there are wilderness areas and state parks, but there are also BLM lands, Forest Service lands and plenty of places you can pull off on the side of the road and start hiking simply because you feel like it. Wilderness is a landscape, not a human construct or a place set apart. It’s a stage where people like ranchers still make their lives, and access to that stage is seen as an inalienable right.

Even if you’re a teacher or a doctor or a writer, your life plays out on that stage. Those trails that felt so remote when I visited Crested Butte? I now bike them in an afternoon or an hour after work. I helped build a new one last spring. When I look at the mountains in wonder, I do it on my way to or from work or out my office window, where I do what everyone in a city does, too: meet deadlines and earn a paycheck.

This spring in particular, I look at the way the purple rock of the peaks is already visible–early snowmelt that also leaves our streams running low. I wonder what that will mean for ranchers or summer recreation.

I look upon a wild place, I know, where natural cycles still dominate. But my mom made  me realize that I no longer look out my window and see wilderness as a place apart. I simply see my home.

Mica-dog on Scarp's Ridge

April snows

Brushing snow off the camp stove.

When I woke up in the back of the truck on Sunday morning, the windows were frosted over with condensation so I couldn’t see outside.

“It snowed,” P. said as soon as I opened my eyes. He is often awake before me.

“What?”

He opened the back window just a crack; I rolled over onto my stomach and peered down at the ground, which was indeed covered in white, fluffy snow.

“Oh,” I said, and snuggled back into my pillow, pulled the blanket back over my shoulders. Good, I thought. Now I don’t have to climb. 

Climbing on Saturday had gone much like climbing the weekend before, only this time six of P.’s closest friends got to see how shaky and frustrated and unkind I could be on the rock. Plus, I was tired of being scared.

When we got out of the truck an hour or two later, four inches of snow coated the picnic table, the camp stove and the cooler we’d left outside.

“I don’t think we’re going to be able to make you coffee this morning,” P. warned me.

Standing 'round the fire.

But S&R, some of P’s closest friends and my old neighbors, got a fire going in the fire pit. They boiled water on the stove inside their Sprinter van, and we drank coffee, made jaffles (Australian sandwich pockets) and watched Mica-dog run in happy, crazed circles through the snow.

My feet were cold, but the heat of the fire and the rising sun kept us warm and before long, P. and R. stood at the edge of the campground, examining the cliffs on the other side of the narrow valley. P. came running back across the snow.

“The sun is melting everything out,” he said. “We can climb!”

By this time we were saying good bye to the other climbers in our group, and we all just stood there and stared at him.

“We’re serious,” he said.

In the end, only four of us returned to the cliffs–me, P, and S&R. I agreed because of the way P. had looked so excited, like a kid at Christmas. But I hiked in back, falling behind because my boot came untied four or five times. I followed their muddy footprints along the snowy path and promised myself that I would stay relaxed and not freak out, even if to meant belaying P. all day and never once getting on the wall.

Hiking to the Cactus Cliff.

By the time we reached the first climb, we were in shorts and flip flops and the dog was looking for the last patches of snow to roll in. I didn’t stay off the wall, of course, but I did things a little bit differently.  When. P. pretty much had to hoist me over an overhang, I focused less on my lack of strength and more on the sequence of holds I’d follow if I did have the strength.

“Well I just don’t have the guns for that,” I said in a southern drawl when I reached the ground.

“Girl, we gotta get you some guns,” R. drawled back, and we all laughed.

When P.  took on a route clear beyond my ability, I declined to give it a try and waited instead for an easier route–LaChoya Jackson, which got three stars in the guide book. I’d climbed it once before, in January, and it left me hanging helpless in my harness (I might have actually tried to hit the rock that time…). But this time, I climbed the whole thing without stalling, without getting help from P, and when I rapped back down to the ground I said something I hadn’t said about climbing in a while: that was fun.

“And you think you’re not progressing or getting better,” P shook his head and hugged me.

We did another easier route after that, and again I could see the moves and actually do them. Again, it was fun. So fun that I rushed back to where S&R were climbing to get on a route I knew to be at–or slightly beyond–my limit. As soon as I got on the wall, I was breathing hard and grunting from the effort of getting up it. My finger started bleeding around the cuticle, and I left tiny smears of blood on the rock. The sun had given way to dark rolling clouds and scattered snow flakes, and we were minutes from packing up and hiking out. But I was determined to get to the top of the climb.

“You’re doing it!” P. called from the ground. And while he did help me over the crux, I made it.

More importantly, I relearned a couple of things that might be even more important than giving myself permission to fail: I don’t have to climb everything everyone else does–I only have to climb what I want to climb;  and what’s most important is remembering to just have fun.

Happy at the end of the day.

Two tiny, insignificant and yet show-stopping words

Last weekend, I attempted a climb called “Left Hand Crack.” It’s overhanging–the wall leans out, so you’re more than vertical as you climb–and the rock is slippery. I watched P. attempt the crux three times and then fall on the fourth (my first real experience catching a fall–I’m relieved to report that I didn’t drop him!)

Even after all the trouble P. had, I thought I’d give the old Left Hand a go and that I might just make it to the top.

Mica's perch.

A few feet up the climb, I jammed my right hand into the crack above me. I grabbed a small pillar with my left hand and leaned back, walking my feet up the wall. To my amazement, I moved higher. But my right shoulder–the arm that was jammed into the crack–felt funny, like every ligament and muscle was about to tear. Because I was on top-rope I let go, bouncing into my harness.

I swore and swung my arm as if to hit the empty air in front of me, which sent me twisting in the wind. Not exactly the effect I was going for…

“Whatever you do, just don’t hit the rock,” P. said.

It was a bluebird day, the sun shining high in the sky and the sound of our friend’s voices bouncing off the cliff around the corner. All I wanted to do was bounce right off that route and call it quits.

I gave it another go. I pulled myself up and my shoulder did not tear; I reached the next ledge. The ledge where the rock starts to overhang and the crack is wider than my hand. I stuck my hand in the crack and cupped it, trying to make it thick enough to fill the empty space. But the rock was oily–I could feel my hand slipping, and my mind filled in the rest: hand slides out of crack, I peel away from the rock and fail… er, fall.

That was all it took to send my mind into a panic. I made P. lower me to the ground, my arms crossed over my chest and looking for a fight–which I got. (Just picture me standing by the rock wall and not talking, and P. standing by a boulder ten or fifteen feet away and also not talking).

I wish I could say this was the first time I flipped out during a stressful climb. But it happened just the day before, and it’s happened before that. Things get tough, and two little words surface in my mind: I can’t.

It’s amazing how persistent those words can be. They’ve left me crying on an uphill bike ride or getting off my bike and walking it over a rock I know I’ve ridden over before. They seem to elicit an even bigger reaction when I’m climbing; everything is magnified by fear.

But whatever I’m doing, “I can’t” turns into “I should”–as in, I should be able to do this by now. What could have been a great climb or an awesome ride becomes an emotional battle with none other than myself. I don’t find out if I can get over that ledge without falling because I don’t even try.

It’s tempting to point back to my childhood and say that I was never an athlete, so I never learned to power through the tough moments. Or to say that I ran during my 20s, training myself to set a careful pace and take it easy. But I suspect that “why” doesn’t matter.

What matters is a little nugget I learned from L., who’s a track coach. She recently told one of her runners there’s no room for “should be…by now.” You are where you are. Look where you want to go, and figure what you’re going to do to try and get there.

I’m going to practice that idea this weekend. P. and I  are going to Shelf Rd to climb with friends, a climbing area known for leaving you stiff and sore the next day. The wetter looks iffy, but if I get on that wall I’m going to set a simple goal: go for it and see what happens. I give myself permission to fall.

What I Learned from the Man Who Quit Money

Daniel Suelo looked more like a hipster than a man who lives in a cave: fitted plaid shirt, thick black glasses and the kind of shaggy hair that looks like it comes at the hands of a stylist.

He looked no different, really, than my writing mentor, Mark Sundeen, when the men walked into Maria’s Bookshop in Durango. Only Mark’s hair isn’t as shaggy and Daniel likely found his clothes in a dumpster.

Daniel gave up money in 2000. When Penguin books asked him to write a book about his story, he told them sure. But it would have to be written for free and given away for free, too. So the publishers called Mark, who once lived in Moab where Daniel resides in his cave.

I read a couple of early drafts of chapters while I was in grad school. On one day in particular, after I had sent Mark three or four essays in a row–on a mission to get my thesis done–he emailed a chapter back to me. Your turn, he said.

I was curious to see where the book had ended up, and there was good climbing outside of Durango. P. and I made the trip, visiting a friend of his in Silverton (they grew up together–hence, the kind of friend P. can talk, and talk, and talk to. His friend was still sitting on a chair talking at 1:00 a.m. The lights were out, and P. and I were both under the covers of the futon. Still, he talked.). We climbed, dealt with the dog after she rolled in human poo (some things don’t change?), and had beers with some of my friends from Minnesota. Then we headed to the reading.

I was nervous. I hadn’t seen Mark for a couple of years. What would he think about my new boyfriend after he’d watched me wrestle with life in my manuscript? Would he ask me why book wasn’t published yet? And most of all, what if we went out for beer afterward and Daniel was there?

I had no idea how to hang out with someone who doesn’t spend money. Offer to buy him a beer? Let him sit there, not eating or drinking while I imbibed?

Of course, the night wasn’t about me. Mark and I didn’t talk much about what I’ve been doing–when he introduced me to his friends, he just took credit for my decision to drop my “high power minneapolis job” and move to the mountains.

The night itself belonged to Mark and Daniel, who answered questions for two hours–and that’s where I got my biggest surprise. Daniel isn’t out to save the world or live outside of society. He simply believes that money is a poor way to value and judge our lives. He’s more interested in giving freely to others, and accepting freely, too. He hosts dinners in his cave, volunteers at the women’s shelter in Moab and house sits if he’s asked to. He loves music and really likes going to shows when he can get in for free. And he’s learned that when we give up struggling–stop pushing and pulling and trying too hard–the universe provides.

Daniel was thoughtful, articulate–everything I didn’t expect him to be. And he did go out for dinner with us, and because everyone was excited to meet him and spend time with him, he had plenty to eat and drink. I understand now that it was my mistake in the first place to think of him as a man who lives in a cave instead of someone who did a lot of soul searching and then made a lot of really big changes. I’m not ready to give up money (though I feel much more relaxed about it since hearing him talk), but I can relate to that. In that, there is a lesson for all of us.

Check it out. It’s worth a read.