| | | Miranda July writes about her 90s feminist film chain letter, Joanie4Jackie | | | | | | | | | |  | | | | January 31, 2017 | Letter No. 71 | | | | | | | | | | | | Hi Lennys,
Have you ever taken communion? I was raised as a sporadic Episcopalian, but my mom was raised, in part, by nuns. She once revealed casually to me in conversation that she is still technically a lay nun in whatever order was in charge of her schooling. And as a kid, everyone in my town was Catholic, so I spent a lot of time hanging out around the side-room door of the nearest rectory, waiting for friends to leave CCD. Even though I wasn't religious, I always instinctively liked the idea of communion: not least because, in the Episcopal Church, the communion wafers taste pretty great and the wine isn't bad, either.
I took a literature of the Bible course in high school (it was a pretty fancy school) and came back to the idea of communion, the meaning of the word. That class was all about reading the Bible as a literary text, reading it for its poetry and for its contradictions. Communion was an idea that seemed like the most beautiful metaphor.
Communion is, of course, about connection and gathering those around you in, to fellowship. This gathering-in is not based necessarily on familial connections or connections with people who look or speak just like you or are the same age. Communion, once we move to the word outside the church, is about gathering together even if you don't necessarily fit right away.
Our newsletter this week is all about that: whether it's Jackie Snow fretting over keeping the connection of a newfound friendship alive, Ottessa Moshfegh and Patty Yumi Cottrell finding communion with the idea of self-sufficiency (fun fact: Ottessa was also at that fancy high school with me, back in the day). It's about the communion of spirit and idea and heart in a romance, as with Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. And communion cannot happen without a faith in your fellow human beings, the kind of faith that drives you to write an anonymous letter to the world, calling forth a community of women artists to come join you, like Miranda July describes in her fantastic account of the video chain letter, Joanie 4 Jackie, that she started as a confused college dropout in the '90s.
As we have seen with the airport protests this weekend, communion can be a powerful thing. If you went out to stand up for what is right: thank you. If you'd like to support those working for immigrants and refugees in the united states, consider donating to the National Immigration Law Center, the National Partnership for New Americans, or the International Refugee Assistant Project.
Kaitlyn Greenidge, contributing writer | | | | | | | | | | | | A Challenge & A Promise | | | | By Miranda July | | |
| (Miranda July by Edward Caldwell, for Sassy Magazine, April 1996) |
In 1995, at the age of 21, Miranda July started an underground movie-sharing network for women filmmakers. Joanie 4 Jackie (formerly Big Miss Moviola) thrived for more than a decade and connected hundreds of women, including Sarah Gertrude Shapiro (creator of Unreal), artist K8 Hardy, and Essence advice columnist/empowerment coach Abiola Abrams. In January, the Getty Research Institute acquired the Joanie 4 Jackie archive. You can see everything at joanie4jackie.com, a complete digital record of the project.
In honor of this historic preservation of feminist history, Miranda is here to reminisce about being young, punk, and on fire.
I remember exactly where I was when I typed up the first pamphlet. It was freezing cold in our all-girl Portland punk house, and I was crouched on the floor over a shared computer.
"A CHALLENGE AND PROMISE," I tapped out. "Lady, you send me your movie + $5, and I'll send you the latest Big Miss Moviola Chainletter Tape. That's ten lady-made movies, including yours."
I had just dropped out of UC Santa Cruz and moved to Portland to live with a girl who was currently in the basement playing guitar and being uncommunicative and problematically sexy. I was all revved up by Bikini Kill, Kill Rock Stars, K Records, Heavens 2 Betsy, and the do-it-yourself Riot Grrl revolution. But I often found myself crying; I was filled with feeling but generally paralyzed. I wanted to make movies, but this seemed like an impossible challenge. So I challenged other girls instead. I typed with a pounding heart:
"Mainstream movies are sometimes moving or scary, but on the whole they, in my opinion, do not inspire women to inspire women to go: I can do that. That is because the movies are usually womenhating … they have nothing to do with the kinds of things women talk to each other about."
I wanted a revolution. I wanted girls and women to make movies that were only for each other; Hollywood was not allowed to see them. I didn't care about "talent" — I promised to include every single movie sent to my P.O. box. Who was I to say what was good? The arbiters of excellence had always been men, so maybe "excellence" was irrelevant here. Maybe you made it bad on purpose. Maybe bad is good.
I put stacks of the pamphlets all over town, the library, the grocery story, the high school. I walked to the post office every day; no tapes. By now I had broken up with the uncommunicative/sexy girlfriend. I was the most alone I'd ever been. I gave boxes of pamphlets to friends in Bikini Kill and Team Dresch, hoping they would get handed out on tour. I relentlessly wrote Sassy and Seventeen, letting them know about the uprising. This world had to exist; I really needed it. My day jobs were getting progressively worse — from waitressing, to stripping, to wearing a cow costume while carrying a sign for Halloween Warehouse. I was placing all bets on my own voice, my ability to send a cry into the night that other women would respond to.
| (Left: The Cleansing Machine, Pat Baum, The Velvet Chainletter, 1995, Right: Ophelia's Opera, Abiola Abrams, Break My Chainletter, 2003) |
Then one day, about six months later, there was a package waiting for me at the post office. The movie was called Not Just a Sidekick, by a girl named Jendria Godlewski. It was tremendously violent and bloody because the filmmaker's personal interest was special effects. Tears of relief rolled down my face as I kneeled in front of my TV. There was life on Earth. I was saved.
"I am one girl in Portland Oregon who has compiled all of these documents, girl's movies, so that I can wake up in the morning and feel like Earth is this place that has to do with me and you. The real you, the woman that is stranger and cooler and smarter and sexier and sadder and more caring than any woman on TV, and you are even a little better than you pretend to be because no one's ever demanding your best. I mean com'on, you think anyone's going to notice if you don't live up to your own high standards?
BIG MISS MOVIOLA WILL NOTICE. HER JOB IS TO NOTICE WHAT IS MISSING. SHE ONLY SEES THE GHOSTS OF ALL THE GIRL'S MOVIES THAT WERE NEVER MADE BECAUSE NO ONE DEMANDED THEM. This is the place where you and I demand to see the missing movies.
One by one, slowly and from all over the country, nine more tapes arrived. A movie about a sixteen-year-old with a tubal pregnancy. A movie about having a crush on Amy Carter. A movie about tits. I called that first Chainletter tape The Velvet Chainletter (after the Velvet Underground). I sent the compilation of ten movies back to the contributors, along with a booklet in which I tried to explain moviemaking, as I understood it:
"There's two variables on the video camera. There's the lens: The eye. This is the same eye that's watching you all the time anyways if you're a woman. Especially in public, but even when you're alone in your room. The eye is programmed into your brain. When you are making a movie you stop pretending that you aren't aware of the eye. THEY ARE LOOKING AT YOUR ASS NO MATTER WHAT YOU WEAR. You stop pretending that you are innocent and unaffected by the eye. You turn and face it: the camera. You look into its eye and see yourself and you say: "I see you watching me." I know you are there and I'm not embarrassed to admit it. I admit the role I play every day in this movie made not by me. I'm not embarrassed because just surviving being watched every day has trained me to be an expert on the eye."
I muscled my way into not just Sassy and Seventeen, but Interview and Filmmaker, writing them letters that always exaggerated the number of movies I'd received. I wasn't selling anything; I was trying to spread the call to action and my address. Letters came from girls all over the country … I wasn't the only one with big plans.
| (Big Miss Moviola pamphlet, cover. Xeroxed pamphlet, 1995.) |
| (Left: 4. Letter from Christina to Big Miss Moviola. c. 1996, Right: 5. Letter from Kira to Miranda. March 5, 1996) |
The Umatic Chainletter (1997), The Cherry Cherry Chainletter (1998), The Break My Chainletter (1999): it was happening. Because YouTube hadn't been invented, I traveled around the country with a video projector, showing the movies at high schools and colleges and punk clubs. At each screening I tried to coax the audience into the medium by inviting them to stand alone in a closet with the video camera and finish the sentence "Nobody ever told me …" At the end of the screening, I played the movie we had made together.
"Nobody ever told me it was OK to look like this," says a big woman, taking off her bra and letting her pale breasts hang down to her waist. "I had to tell myself. I had to tell myself."
Of course I began to make my own movies; how could I not have? Surrounded by so much boldness, it was easy. I made a short movie called Atlanta, about a twelve-year-old Olympic swimmer and her mother (on The Underwater Chainletter, 1997) and one called The Amateurist, about a woman whose job is to watch another woman (on Joanie 4 Jackie 4Ever, 1998).
After making six short movies and compiling and sharing almost 200 movies made by other women, it felt natural to attempt something longer. I gave Joanie 4 Jackie to Bard College so I could focus on my first feature-length film. A group of students, with their professor, Jacqueline Goss, continued the project for a few years, making four more Chainletter compilations. And then, as cell-phone video and YouTube shifted the landscape, Joanie 4 Jackie began the surprisingly fast process of sinking into the past, first obscured and then entirely forgotten.
When my first feature film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2005, it was one of two movies made by women, out of sixteen in competition. I was, frankly, startled. I thought I had solved that problem years ago. I traveled the world promoting Me and You, and every interviewer asked, "Where did you come from?" I couldn't be from Earth, because only men made movies there. I had an answer, but it was too long, and it sounded like a lie, a fantasy. I wished desperately that I had proof of Joanie 4 Jackie, but it was just some boxes in a supply closet at Bard College.
A couple of years a later, in 2009, a student walked into that closet and said, "What's all this?" Vanessa Haroutunian decided to make Joanie 4 Jackie her senior thesis; she made a documentary about the project and then began unpacking and organizing the tapes and pamphlets, with a group of students. With their help, I began making a website and realized that the Joanie 4 Jackie archives were worth archiving properly — history is only what's documented and preserved by those in power, usually men, but in this case: me.
| (Poster for Big Miss Moviola, 1996) |
And now: me and the Getty Research Institute. In January, the GRI officially acquired the complete Joanie 4 Jackie archives. Twenty-seven boxes of tapes, letters, posters, and embarrassing notes were sent from Bard to my studio, where a woman from the GRI quietly inventoried them before sending them across town to their state-of-the-art facilities. There they will be digitized and made available to researchers, alongside the archives of Yvonne Rainer, Harmony Hammond, the Guerilla Girls, and Robert Mapplethorpe, among others. You can browse the digitized materials right now, at the newly launched joanie4jackie.com.
These archives exist only to give you ideas — about community-building, filmmaking, activism … and surviving heartbreak. The woman who starts the revolution is always the loneliest one, the one who has too many dark hours to fill and not much to lose. I started with a pamphlet. How did you start?
Miranda July is a writer, artist, and filmmaker living in Los Angeles. | | | | | | | | | | | | "The Future is Only Fiction" | | | | By Patty Yumi Cottrell | | |
A few years ago I was broke and working full-time at a café in the West Village, a sort of playground for rich white people. One day, an Australian trust funder left behind a copy of The Paris Review. I wiped down the table, grabbed the magazine, and read a story on my break. I was sitting on the decrepit wooden steps of a staircase that would collapse two days later. As I sat on the steps, oblivious to their rotten condition, one story in particular held my attention. The narrator's voice was singular: arrogant, broken, sad, and funny. "I relieved myself outdoors, watching the smoke puff out of the metal chimney like a choo-choo train," says Charles, a 30-year-old real-estate lawyer who has failed to live up to his own expectations. After I finished reading the piece, Ottessa Moshfegh's "A Dark and Winding Road," my brain was altered. Maybe it changed when Charles finds a dildo underneath a pile of blankets. He does what any human would do: picks it up and sniffs it. It was difficult to go back to making coffee and smiling at people mindlessly after that.
Moshfegh's short-story collection Homesick for Another World is one of 2017's most anticipated releases. Her stories are brutal, unflinching, and subversive, covering a wide range of territory: profound alienation, Chinese prostitutes, acne, alcoholic schoolteachers, delusions, and desire. Occasionally, her characters get what they want, and it turns out to be shit; it's revelatory. A couple of weeks ago, Moshfegh and I met at a cafe in Los Angeles to talk about politics, how to have confidence, and obsession. Before we met, I told her I wasn't feeling very well and she recommended listening to Gamelan Degung. It worked.
Patty Yumi Cottrell: How do you think you will — or will not — respond to the current political climate?
Ottessa Moshfegh: Unless I'm going to move to the woods, I'm going to be living and responding to my environment. And what's happening politically, culturally, and socially in my environment is always going to show up. So certainly I'm going to be writing about it, in terms of what it's teaching me or not teaching me. And the book that I'm writing now is a very political book. Some people will probably dismiss it as a female narrative. Politics have become institutionalized in a way; when we say "political," we mean conversations about Trump and the economy, for example. But everything is political. Including world events and the things that we read about in the New York Times bullshit. So the older I get and the more I'm awake to what's actually happening, the more it's going to be driving me in my work.
PC: Is that different from how you as a person will respond?
OM: I did not vote in this election and I had every right not to vote. It's a privilege that I didn't vote and I knew it was because I'm a registered voter in California. But I didn't want to vote. I didn't want to play in the game. Part of that is, I don't want to participate in the institutions that are ruining the world. I would rather be an outsider and an observer and objective so that my work can be bigger than the snapshot of the culture that I'm currently living in.
PC: What have you been obsessed with?
OM: I've been thinking about Philip Roth and Don DeLillo. I've been thinking about health stuff. I've been kind of obsessed with money this year, and as I'm finishing this next book, I'm thinking … Eileen came out in August 2015, the collection comes out in January 2017, and I'm finishing another novel. I'm exhausted. I can't keep writing a book every year. I mean, I probably can, but I know that it's going to fuck me up if I need to write a book every year in order to live a self-employed writer's life. So, I don't need a fabulous life, but I've been thinking a lot about what it means to feel financially free and also having made this decision to … I don't give a shit about getting married, I don't even like men — I've made this decision to be celibate the rest of my life. I don't care. I'm not having children, so I'm thinking about my life in a different way than the way I was brainwashed to, and money has become a very high priority because it is what is going to guarantee my freedom and independence in the material world. If I think too much about it, I become a slave to it.
Writing a book is like tripping on acid but really, really, really slowly. I would like to feel I could take my time. To not feel the pressure. I could also just move to the woods. And I think about doing that all the time.
PC: Could you talk about the last story in your collection? "A Better Place" felt really different, like a departure.
OM: Yeah, that's probably my favorite story in the collection, although I don't think it's going to be a crowd-pleaser. It's the most personal, and it's kind of a folk tale, and it basically describes what my experience of being alive on Earth has felt like up through my early 30s. Kind of until recently. It just doesn't make sense that I'm here. How did this happen to me? How did I get here? How do I go back to where I will feel good?
And when I wrote that story … I felt I never needed to write a story again. I had absolutely nailed the existential problem that I was trying to solve through writing these short stories. And the answer to my confusion is just that there is only fiction. The future is only fiction. The last scene of the book is an invitation … or whatever cruel or amazing fate might be revealed. In finishing the book that way, I was introducing myself to my next phase of my life. And then I started writing the novel I was telling you about.
I feel I'm in a very different place. I'm much more confident. The scope of my optimism and cynicism has widened. I've become way more cynical and way more hopeful and optimistic.
PC: How do you have confidence?
OM: I just have it.
PC: How did you develop that?
OM: I was born with a confidence about something very specific, and I've just focused all my confidence on that one thing. And I'm head over heels in love with this part of myself. Nobody can fuck with it. I've given it all this room, so it just lights up my entire life. That doesn't mean that I don't struggle sometimes. But I have no insecurities about my talent and worth as a person. When I was younger, I had been really brainwashed and thought that one of my priorities was being one of the most beautiful women in the world, one of the thinnest and most perfect, that that was the way I was going to feel empowered. I had to let go of that, and sometimes I get confused when I get caught in an Internet blackout. "Oh, no, wait, that's actually a cult I was in that was really misogynistic." It's very invasive, that cult is everywhere. I need a lot of reminders.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Patty Yumi Cottrell lives in Los Angeles. | | | | | | | | | | | | Daily Affirmations | | | | By Amy Rose Spiegel with illustrations by Cressida Jambov | | |
Amy Rose Spiegel is a writer and editor and the author of Action: A Book About Sex. Her interests include irises, style guides, and meatloaf. | | | | | | | | | | | | A Literary Love Affair | | | | By Chanya Button | | | |
For Virginia Woolf, her fantastical biography Orlando was an act of strength. Orlando was inspired by Woolf's long and intoxicating relationship with the mercurial poet and aristocrat Vita Sackville-West. Theirs was an emotionally hedonistic union that ran wild in the letters they exchanged from the moment they met in 1922, right up until Woolf's death in 1941. At the pinnacle of their romance, words would both be the conduit for their love and consistently fail to express the ferocity of it. Vita wrote to Virginia in 1926:
"I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia … I miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. So, this is really just a squeal of pain."
Woolf's literary reputation remains haunted by the specter of the emotional and psychological challenges she faced, challenges that eventually resulted in her suicide. For someone who wrote so vividly about what it means to be alive, I have always felt it something of a betrayal that her death has become a defining part of her identity. This is why the work that Vita inspired stands out for me as a profound triumph. From the moment she dipped her pen in the ink in 1927, "body … flooded with rapture and … brain with ideas," what Woolf did with this work was take control.
Vita's allure was clear: with her rich aristocratic lineage and life filled with riotous romantic escapades, she arrived in Virginia's life a ready-made character. Stoked by the fiery, androgynous, passionate contradictions at the core of her relationship with Vita, Woolf brought to life an imagined history in the character of Orlando, a protagonist who shifts between gender, time, and social class throughout the novel. Summoned as a brazen and vigorously male Elizabethan courtier, Orlando hurtles toward us through 300 years of history and lands as an Edwardian woman on 11th October 1928 (also the book's final words).
Orlando indelibly marks a moment where Woolf used her creative genius to process and overcome an emotional experience that could have consumed her. Who among us hasn't been so inebriated by love — so frantic and shallow-breathed — that we find ourselves desperate to drown in the heart that pushes us away? With Orlando, Woolf made an active choice to dive deeper into Vita, and the result was both a creative and personal victory.
When Vita and Virginia met in 1922, their impressions of each other were not favorable. Vita was a best-selling writer, diplomat's wife, and member of an ancient aristocratic family. Virginia was upper-middle-class intelligentsia, married happily to Leonard Woolf, a socialist, and a prolific member of the avant-garde Bloomsbury group of writers and artists.
Virginia thought Vita "brash," "hard and manly — like a grenadier"; and Vita leveled the accusation at Virginia early on that she had no "grand passion," that she was something of an opportunist who coldly saw everything and everyone as potential "copy" for her work. The irony was that Vita would become that grand passion. When Orlando finally meets Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, the man who becomes her husband at the end of the novel, language once again fails, as Vita's "squeal of pain" cried out from her letter in 1926. It almost seems a direct statement from Woolf to Vita that at the moment they fall in love, Orlando and Shel don't exchange a word. Woolf refuses to pin their love down with language, to exploit it as "copy," as Vita accused. They know everything about one another in a matter of moments, and so Woolf leaves a blank space on the page:
"Really it would profit little to write down what they said, for they knew each other so well that they could say anything, which is tantamount to saying nothing."
Vita and Virginia were warned off each other almost immediately. Virginia's circle was wary of Vita's promiscuity and infamy, and derisive of her populist novels. Those around Vita warned her of Woolf's bouts of mental illness, her left-wing politics, and the community of bohemian artists with whom she lived and worked.
In spite of the many forms of snobbery gnawing like disapproving termites at the roots of their burgeoning relationship, Vita pursued Virginia, and over the years that followed, an intense friendship grew. Theirs is an example of the deep, nuanced bond that can grow between women, and it should be celebrated. We so often associate women of the past with oppression, bound by the duties of marriage and domesticity, but Vita and Virginia offer an example of a relationship where they bent these institutions to their will.
Despite her marriage of over a decade to British diplomat Harold Nicolson, Vita was keen for the relationship to go further. Vita proffered a constant stream of invitations to elope together, but Virginia had always had a complicated relationship with sex. It is wrong, however, to presume that Virginia's sexuality was in a state of total disrepair — her writing was always preoccupied with the body; it is visceral and sensory. She was also wry and provocative with language in her letters to Vita. In a letter to Vita in 1927 (when they were making a trip to get their ears pierced), she wrote: "Are you making an appointment to be penetrated on Friday?"
During a visit to Vita's ancestral home in 1927, it was in fact Virginia who initiated their physical relationship. But, in a moment many of us will feel all too familiar with, when Virginia finally found herself able to give herself in body and soul to Vita, Sackville-West pulled away. The sheer intensity of Virginia's giving seems to have been too much for Vita, who had spent a life refracting her passions across a community of lovers. As Vita pulled away, Virginia felt intoxicated, frantic. However, in despair she found inspiration, "like a fin rising from the water." Woolf clung to Vita with the idea for a novel inspired by her, using it as an excuse to remain in intimate contact — literally and imaginatively. She used her work to pin Vita down, to take possession of her through fantasy.
Embarking on the novel in 1927, Woolf wrote to Vita: "It's all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind … Also, I admit, I should like to untwine and twist again in some very odd, incongruous strands in you." Vita replied, "Any vengeance you ever want to take will lie ready to your hand." The battle lines were drawn as the artist and her muse undertook a creative endeavor fueled by their personal history, through a series of interviews and portraits.
For the first time, Vita found herself an object of scrutiny, and the shift in the power balance did not sit easily. As her work continued, Woolf's intentions evolved; she came to understand that she was sparking a kind of literary revolution with Orlando. Herself the daughter of a diligent biographer, Woolf thought that biography had always sought to capture the things that happened to a person, but never the essence of the person to whom those things happen. It was this pane of glass between a person's context and their essential nature that Woolf found herself about to smash with Orlando.
During the writing of the novel, Woolf's literary fascinations overrode her personal feelings for Vita. Her dedication to disrupting the genre of biography with an explosive work that blended history and imagination grew like a vine around her romantic feelings for Vita, eventually overwhelming them entirely. It was as if she were exorcising Vita from her heart and enshrining her in literature. But the novel would never have been possible without her feelings for Vita; she announced herself as muse, and she beguiled and romanced Virginia with her words in their letters.
In 1928, hot on the heels of the success that surrounded Orlando's publication, a parcel arrived at the home Woolf shared with her husband, Leonard; a copy of her novel, feverishly annotated. It was from Lady Sackville-West, Vita's mother. The word sex had been violently underlined, spiteful margin notes had been scrawled in outrage, and a photograph of Woolf had been pasted on the inside of the front cover with a note:
"This is the awful face of a mad woman whose successful desire is to separate people who care for each other. I loathe this woman for having changed my Vita, and taken her away from me."
Matriarch of an aristocratic family whose history stretched back to William the Conqueror, Lady Sackville-West had a reputation for histrionics. She thought Orlando — Woolf's best-selling novel to date — a vicious book, declaring, "You have written some beautiful phrases in Orlando, but probably you do not realize how cruel you have been."
However, years later, Vita's son Nigel Nicolson referred to Orlando as "the longest and most charming love letter in literature." It both honored and satirized its subject. The discordance in how Vita's own family interpreted Woolf's imaginative biography of their kin reflects the complex and provocative nature of Orlando: the book both buys into and opts out of literary and societal norms, just as Vita and Virginia did. They were women who forged a romance and a friendship all at once, while both were also committed to functioning marriages with men they loved and respected.
Orlando is a bid for freedom, it is utopian: it frees its protagonist from the confines of time, gender, and history. It is the only one of Woolf's novels with no deaths, and it proposes the idea of a new, modern freedom for its central character. But it is the story behind the creation of Orlando that resonates with the modern reader most poignantly, echoing in the chambers of every heart that has been broken. In writing Orlando, Virginia Woolf did not slay the dragon that was Vita Sackville-West but used her creative genius to tame her so she could remain in her life forever.
Chanya Button is a writer and director, whose debut feature film, Burn Burn Burn, is available on Netflix. She is set to make her second feature, about Virginia Woolf's relationship with Vita Sackville-West, Vita and Virginia, in 2017. | | | | | | | | | | | | Friend at First Sight | | | | By Jackie Snow | | |
I have had only one crush at first sight. It was 2013 and I was in Paris to watch my husband run his first marathon. I was hanging out with friends at a hole-in-the-wall wine bar talking about my day. Behind me, I heard, in a lovely Scottish brogue, "Excuse me, you said you went to Shakespeare and Company? So did I! What did you buy? I got The Federalist Papers." I turned around to see a smiling woman about my age, with a blonde bob and swollen feet from running the marathon.
Little did she know hearing a Scot talk about a foundational primary source document from American history was the way to my heart. Her name was Zaineb. I insisted we become friends on the spot. I talked with her that night, delighting in finding out she was also a journalist and charmed by her dry humor that came out about everything from using Tinder in Paris to how she had looked hobbling around the Louvre earlier in the day. She finally begged off, still exhausted from the marathon she had run the day before. I even tried to organize meeting for breakfast before flying home, but between the wine and my bad French, I didn't give Zaineb the name of the right café.
Zaineb lived in Abu Dhabi and I lived in Brooklyn, so our friendship for the first few years was mostly Internet-based, plus dinner that one time she was in New York for a wedding. It was frustrating to have met someone I liked immediately and be too far away to get to know her well. Typically my friends have to cajole me into leaving the house, where I'd otherwise spend hours or days happily alone. I found myself wanting to make that effort for Zaineb, but I felt offering to fly to Abu Dhabi seemed a bit presumptuous.
Zaineb took care of that. Last year, she emailed asking if I wanted to hike the West Highland Way. She wrote, "It's Scotland's version of the Appalachian Trail, but shorter and most likely wetter, and definitely with more whisky."
I said, "I do."
I had mostly traveled with my husband to urban destinations over the last few years, but I was ready to see some countryside and get to know Zaineb. I was nervous about my ability to hike almost 100 miles over five days, and more than a little nervous to spend it with Zaineb, on an extended first friend date. If we ended up not having anything to talk about, or worse, didn't actually like each other, I had no way to make an exit. My hiking boots were new and not broken in as much as I would have liked. Also, my camping experience had always been at campsites, so figuring out how to take a shit outside was also a point of concern. I started obsessing over every possible combination of problems: emotional, physical, and metaphysical.
It wouldn't just be the two of us, which eased some of my nerves. Maryam, Zaineb's younger sister, and two of her friends would also join our hike. The first day was an unusual Scottish day — it didn't rain and was warm enough to take off our jackets. We took breaks to snack and take photos with the huge, long-haired Highland cows along the way. We stopped early, after covering only thirteen of the twenty miles planned, thinking it would be easy to make up the mileage the next day. I popped my first blister, situated on the bottom of my right foot. Talking with Zaineb through the hours of walking was easy. We had plenty to chat about, but I found even when we were hiking in silence I was at ease.
The second day, I learned the joys of trying to keep things dry while breaking down camp in the rain. Within the first two miles, we were hiking up a mountain, and the rest of the morning and afternoon had us going up and down hills, still in the rain. We didn't stop for lunch until after 4 p.m., demoralized, tired, and soaked. We called a bag courier service to ferry our heavy packs from stop to stop. Even without the weight, we walked until 9 p.m., covering 25 miles.
That evening, I learned the joys of trying to keep things dry while setting up camp in the rain. The bandages that Amazon reviewers had assured me would work well for hiking had not helped, and my blister had split a further painful half-inch.
Shivering in my sleeping bag with my foot throbbing, I was sure I couldn't go on. I was going to lose face in front of Zaineb, who hadn't complained once.
When I woke up the next morning, it was still raining, so like I often do on long runs, I made a deal with myself. I'd hike until lunch, and if I was still feeling awful, I'd call it quits. I just had to get to the afternoon, a goal post in the foreseeable distance. One of her friends gave me a better bandage, and I dressed my blister the best I could.
By late morning, the sky had cleared, and I was running ahead, laughing as I jumped over obstacles and using my hands to drink from streams. I could do this. At the small restaurant where we stopped for lunch, I ordered the haggis, a classic Scottish dish made of sheep innards and spices. It was delicious, and I felt it even fortified me to continue the hike.
I didn't just continue, I triumphed: I became the taskmaster to ensure we would reach the next campsite early, so we could be done by dinnertime. Day four was "short" — only 13 miles of hiking in eight hours. We set up camp early enough to enjoy a double rainbow. On day five, we walked through the biggest uninhabited forest in the United Kingdom. It was drizzling, but it was beautiful and contemplatively silent, so I didn't mind.
Through the hours and hours of walking, I would fall back and talk with Zaineb, who was keeping pace with her lagging friend. We would discuss the walk, family, friends, the television show Outlander, a historical drama set in 1740s Scotland, which I had told myself I had to watch in preparation for the trip. Since we are both journalists, we talked about stories we were working on and ones we would like to do. She teased me that I liked her sister better, walking out ahead with Maryam for hours. I promised myself to slow down and walk more with Zaineb.
We set up at a campground near a pub connected to an ice-wall climbing gym on our last night. One of the instructors, perhaps bored or most probably allured by a group of five young women, came over to talk to us. He introduced himself as "Magnus from Michigan" and asked us about our hike. "Was it type-one fun or type-two fun?"
Type-one fun, he explained, was "something you do that's immediately great, like eating ice cream or getting a back scratch," while type-two fun is something that's "perhaps stressful at the time but fun in retrospect," like skydiving, a family reunion, or six days of hiking through rain with an increasingly growing blister. We looked at each other. "A little bit of both."
A few hours later, we reached Fort William, the town that marked the end of the West Highland Way. The 96-mile hiked ended up being closer to 125 miles, once we factored in some wrong turns and an ill-fated detour. We considered capping it off with climbing Mount Nevis, a usual addition to the hike, but by that point there was a blister in my blister, and we already felt accomplished. The train ride through the countryside that we took days to walk through got us back to Glasgow in a few hours.
We spent the next couple of days recuperating, eating, and staying off our feet. We ventured out for Zaineb and Maryam to show me Glasgow. We watched Pitch Perfect 2, which we did not like, before watching Zoolander, which had us laughing at all the same jokes. I went with Zaineb, who has alopecia, to pick up her new wigs. I got both sisters to try bubble tea from a pop-up market in downtown Glasgow that ended up being terrible. I promised to get them a better one next time they were in New York.
People move across cities and countries for romantic relationships, but with most long-distance friendships, you just put in the work from afar. There is ego involved with choosing a friend whom you deem important enough to your own happiness that you are willing to put in more effort than usual. When you find someone you like, who likes you and lets you be you without judgment, you are coaxed into acknowledging your own self-worth.
The West Highland Way trip cemented my friendship with Zaineb as someone who's worth the effort of keeping a long-distance friendship with. Since the trip, we have been as inseparable as two people who live nearly 7,000 miles apart can be. At the end of 2015, I stopped by Abu Dhabi before a temporary move to Singapore. Last June, we went to Sri Lanka with my husband, taking trains throughout the country and going on yet more hikes. Next summer, we are planning an even longer hike in Europe. When I stayed with her in Abu Dhabi, Zaineb guiltily pointed out her copy of The Federalist Papers, a book she said she had not gotten around to reading yet.
Jackie Snow is a multimedia journalist based in DC who has read only parts of The Federalist Papers. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
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