Salmon
A poem for the comment box.
A Croo of all women staffed our first AMC hut stay last summer. They struck me as plucky, creative free spirits, happier to be in the woods hauling boxes of pasta and cans of beans up a granite strewn trail than in some office somewhere.
Not everyone wants convention, some of us want to be wild and free, to take the path less traveled, to live out of bounds.
I still think about these young women from time to time and how their lives are unfolding. Our last morning at the hut, I wrote this poem for them and tucked it into the comment box. I hope they found it.
Salmon
It’s OK if you don’t
know yet.
A thousand unanswered
questions, no plan
but an itch, an intuition,
a gut feeling urging
you to go
against the flow.
Even when everyone
tells you to
play it safe,
pad your resume,
plan for the 401K.
Don’t let their
fear become your
prison. What they
don’t know: there is
also treasure in
swimming upstream,
braving the bears
and the current.