Almost every Wilderness Passage reaches its crisis in what screenwriters call an “All Is Lost Moment.”

We’ve talked in these posts about various intervals or periods of our lives being Wilderness Passages. Can it be that life itself, start to finish, is a Wilderness Passage?

My friend Charlie is training now for sea-kayaking solo around Ireland. The passage will take weeks. Charlie will paddle 10-15 hours a day, camp ashore each night, then set off again the next morning. This will be no modest or risk-free enterprise. Seas, even in summer, can be monstrous off the rugged Irish coast. As Charlie himself admits, you have to be a little nuts to conceive of, and then live out, this kind of wild-and-woolly adventure. 

The psychic geography of a wilderness passage goes something like this:

You and I may think, in the depths of our Wilderness Passage, that the ordeal we’re undergoing is unique. And it is, in the sense that our passage is ours alone; no one else has ever, or will ever, go through the same initiation.

We were supposed to get 500 hardbacks of my new book, GOVT CHEESE: A Memoir, on 12/1/22 to sign and ship to readers who had preordered. Guess what? The books are sitting on a truck in Simi Valley, California today, 1/4/23.

You can have a great career, a loving spouse and family, the respect and envy of all who know you … and still be in the Wilderness.

What are we running from when we find ourselves in the Wilderness?

We on our wilderness passage are blind. We’re acting out. We’re clueless.

If you’ve ever studied land or celestial navigation, you know that both systems are based on reference points. From our frigate HMS Surprise off the coast of Patagonia, if we take a compass bearing on that headland off Rio Gallegos and another on the summit of Cerro Norte and scribe them both on a nautical chart, where the lines intersect is our position.