At the start of the new millennium, writer Krista Schlyer was still aching from the loss of her boyfriend and soulmate, Daniel DiTondo, 18 months earlier to cancer at age 28. “Bloodied and disoriented” was how she describes her reaction, and that of her close friends, to the death.
“The constellation of me had drifted beyond recognition,” the Washington, D.C.-based author writes early in her new book, “Almost Anywhere.”
“If I was Taurus before, with Daniel’s death so many of the stars had suddenly ruptured that the remaining collection no longer even resembled an animal. It was a collection of hooves at best. Or at worst, a collection of random quivering lights that resembled nothing, nothing.”
A year later, she had found peace, acceptance and a new direction. For that, Schlyer thanks the time she and a close friend spent communing with nature.
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She and Bill Updike, then her best friend, today still that but also her life partner, sold most of their belongings, and packed what was left and her dog Maggie into a station wagon. Starting in mid-2001, they visited 84 national parks and monuments and 70 state parks, national forests, historic sites and wildlife refuges. They hiked, contemplated nature and reflected on their pasts and futures.
Schlyer and Updike spotted bison in Yellowstone, bald eagles, egrets and roseate spoonbills in the Everglades, a black bear in Vermont’s Green Mountain National Forest and another in the California redwoods, a whale at Point Reyes National Seashore, a loon in Adirondack State Park, a moose on the northwestern edge of Maine, and on and on. They slept mostly in campgrounds and rest areas, splurging occasionally on a hotel.
But the pain of her loss persisted even towards the end of the trip, as Schlyer walked alone in Joshua Tree National Park in the California desert, two years to the day after DiTondo’s death. “I find emptiness in myself and a landscape of indifference,” she wrote.
And, as her recovery from human tragedy progressed, she found herself “becoming acquainted with an entirely new source of grief” — what she saw as humanity’s devastation of the natural world.
“A loss that has been ongoing for more than a century has suddenly become very personal for me,” she says. For her to understand why, it took a visit to a giant sequoia in Sequoia National Park named General Sherman — the world’s oldest living thing at 3,000 years or so old — measuring 275 feet tall with a base 103 feet around.
How she came to her insights about the value and loss of nature is another journey she takes her readers on through the book.
Suffice it to say that she emerged from the trip with a new vocation.
Schlyer holds a 1997 master’s degree in journalism from the University of Arizona. Her mother, Maureen Dowd, not related to the New York Times columnist of the same name, lives in Tucson. Prior to hitting the road, Schlyer was cranking out political stories in the D.C.-based Congressional Quarterly.
On her return, she launched a career in conservation writing and photography, which led to her last book, “Continental Divide,” in 2012. It was one part coffee-table photography book, one part nature essay on the glories of the borderlands desert, and one part polemic against what she saw as the U.S.-Mexican border wall’s ecological destructiveness.
Reached at home, Schlyer, now 44, answered some questions about “Almost Anywhere”:
What led you to write it?
Originally, I was just keeping a journal as I was traveling around during that year I was on the road. The keeping of a journal was for me, as a catharsis, a way of making sense or finding acceptance for the events of those hard years.
I think I was motivated to publish it because I felt I’d learned something important during that year and I wanted to try to convey it to others as much as I could. There is more and more research and discussion today about humans and our connection to and need for nature in our lives. I learned that so viscerally during that year of visiting the parks and other wild places. The experience has gripped my life ever since.
Your book disclosed a huge amount of personal information — your past and more recent loves, your searing pain at losing Daniel, your recovery, yours and Bill’s family tragedies. As someone who has recently devoted yourself to issue-oriented journalism, how hard was it to open up your emotional scars?
I sort of began this process as a very personal narrative, on this parallel course of starting a career as a journalist and photodocumentarian. Those paths have their own lives. Now, most of my work is about natural history and conservation and policy.
I think it was important to finish the project I started. I saw the connections between that journey and what I’m doing now.
Explain the connection.
Around the country, I became very engaged in the stories of landscape, both in their continued biodiversity and their value as places for wildlife and unique ecosystems. ... The book really tells the story of my coming to love these places and wanting to find a way to be a part of the community of people that tries to protect them and help understand them, and now that’s what I do.
Besides Daniel’s death, you and Bill had to cope with an intense amount of tragedy in the time covered by your book: the deaths of Bill’s father, aunt and grandmother, your grandmother’s death and your cat’s death. Did you ever feel singled out?
I think at the time I felt probably put upon and singled out, not just me but the people I cared about. There is probably more than one passage in the book that says as humans, we’re inclined to feel there should be some justice in things like this.
One of the big things I learned on the trip going to these national parks and wild places is if you take a look at nature and the way the natural world works, there’s really no place for self-pity. You just adapt to a change of conditions you experience. Sitting around and feeling like “this never should have happened to me personally” is not a very productive way of looking at things.
What psychic benefits did you get from the wild?
One thing I gained and that people can gain is that when you are in a place that is sort of working in a natural dynamic and filled with wild creatures … there’s a real strength and calm that comes from that connection. That benefited me enormously during that year and it has ever since.
Which wild areas did you prefer — those in the East or West?
In general, I would say the West has a lot more to offer in terms of wildlands. That’s the way the country developed, from east to west. By the time we had destroyed much of the East, we were moving on to the West and we gained consciousness then it wasn’t going to last forever.
How did you cope with being back in the city after a year of gazing at black bears and humpback whales?
In my work, I get to go learn about and write about places where there are still wild creatures and natural spaces. I also live in a great community with an arts community and I do a lot of work in urban wildlife, biodiversity and restoration. I found a good balance.
For Bill, it’s a little more difficult. He works for the city of Washington, D.C., as a green building and climate policy person. It’s still work for conservation, but he’s not spending time in beautiful places.
