It’s four in the morning and I’m driving north on the first day of the year. I live closer to the city than where I want to be, so I’m more concerned with drunk drivers than deer or black ice. By seven-thirty I’ll be at the trailhead putting on my snowshoes, my breath crystallizing in the day’s first rays. I wonder if the trail will be packed down by earlier adventurers or icy given the recent mild temperatures that preceded today’s cold start. 

I’ve been hiking since I went to summer camp in the Adirondacks, where I had the best of times. In one game we played, we took unclaimed socks, filled them with lime chalk, and threw them at each other. In another, we celebrated the Fourth of July by throwing tennis balls in rowboats and canoes. We played a scavenger hunt game that involved finding jugs in swamps and giving our best Vanilla Ice impressions. My favorite camp song ended with the thing we like the best of all is James’ Ice Cream. I ended up having a son named James and I still recall the song when he eats mint chocolate chip. Over my years at camp, the games changed, but what remained was my fixation on the mountains. I had a need to belong and achieve just like I had a need to call everything the best. My camp had deep roots in the ADK 46-R club. To join the club one had to climb the forty-six mountains originally surveyed at over four-thousand feet. From campers to counselors to the camp family–there were club members everywhere. Every member of the 46-R club has a number based on when they joined. I wanted in. 

To begin 2022,  I made a New Year’s resolution to get involved in the online writing community. Before I did, I felt intellectually atrophied and emotionally isolated. I started down this new path by reading short story submissions at Five South. I had to read ten pieces a week, put in a few comments and mark yes or no. This turned out to be more challenging than I anticipated. What I didn’t realize was that up to this point I had only passively read published pieces and that meant they were accepted, edited, revised, and polished for print. Now I was being asked to make decisions on pieces that did not have the help of the editorial process. It wasn’t until after I volunteered for a few issues at Five South that I began to understand the work that goes on behind the scenes. It was like going to a lumber yard and trying to picture a finished desk. So, I got by with a little help from my friends. I read the comments from other readers: Did the story build tension throughout, did it have a complete arc, developed characters, resonance? I learned that a pandemic piece with a character watching Netflix on their couch the whole time is not a story; characters have to solve problems through interacting with other characters. 

I felt sympathetic for the writers whose stories were not quite where they needed to be and couldn’t receive directions on how to get there. I heard about PencilHouse, a volunteer group that provides free detailed feedback, so I signed up. There I had to stop reading for approval and start reading for improvement. To help show how to improve, I looked for stories that were like the submission, but better. Haruki Murakami’s “Confessions of Shinagawa Monkey” became a mainstay for the surreal submissions I read. Murakami’s story illustrates how to make a talking monkey plausible (“hold on a second. What was a monkey doing here? And why was he speaking my language?”). Murakami presents the possibility that a monkey could steal a person’s identity without determinism (“‘You may not believe me,’ the monkey said.”). 

“The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida,” from Flannery O’Connor, remains the opening that I use to show how a writer clarifies a character’s desires and frames the story. O’Connor starts the story at the point from where everything else hinges and the line poses more questions than it answers – why not Florida, who is this grandmother, and who wants her to go?  “A Good Man is Hard to Find” delivers on the opening line as the reader finds the grandmother got what she wanted in the end, she didn’t go to Florida. In my own writing, I struggle to begin the story at the moment that everything else hinges on and this line remains the touchstone that recenters my narrative. 

I learned that a pandemic piece with a character watching Netflix on their couch the whole time is not a story; characters have to solve problems through interacting with other characters. 

From my first hikes towards joining the 46-R club, I took mental pictures of the routes because I knew that twenty-six of the mountains had no trails and many of those that did were more fun going up a fresh rockslide than a maintained trail. In the early nineties, the herd paths and slides were kept secret. I remembered the cairns and forked streams because I planned to return. 

I learned by doing. Hiking didn’t seem that complex or arduous when I was clean and dry and sitting at camp and looking at the mountains on a map. I could picture myself walking up to the summits when I viewed them from the comfort of a van. When we planned for hikes, I could only imagine for the best possible outcomes, sunshine, and smiles. It wasn’t until I was far away from camp, in the middle of the woods wet, exhausted, out of breath, that I began to appreciate the struggle. Sometimes ducking under a fallen tree that blocking the path (blowdown) or sliding down a rock face (scrambling) proved more challenging than the ascent.  

Only once did I say that I was thirsty on a hike. #2642 told me to take all the saliva in my mouth and suck it into the center. I said, “Ok, I’m doing that.” Then he said, “Now swallow.” Ok. “Doesn’t that make you feel better?” On the side of Hough Peak, I learned the meaning of suck it up. I learned how to see a goal through to completion, to push through rough patches, and that anything worth doing is going to have uncomfortable moments. 

Halfway down Redfield, I fell headfirst into a stream. #1791 told me that every time I see someone fall, tell them they’re ok, don’t ask if. Now every time my James falls down he says, “I’m ok.” 

#566 told me my body is a natural radiator, so wet clothes will dry faster if I wear them. My wife loves it when I wear wet clothes around the house and offer that truth as an excuse.

In 2022, I kept my resolution in terms of involvement, but in terms of writing, I was still sporadic. So, I made a new resolution – I would sign up for SmokeLong Quarterly’s Community Workshop (“SmokeLong Fitness”) to force me to write at least one flash fiction every week. In doing so I was writing outside my comfort zone and taking on new challenges. The group aspect helped me better traffic in feedback because I’m receiving four or five comments on everything I write and reciprocating. I was mostly still reading pieces that wouldn’t be published, so I joined The Lit Mag Reading Club where every month we read one magazine in depth. Then we have a Zoom roundtable discussion before an interview with the magazine’s editor. Sometimes contributors join. I’ve met so many beautiful people in these endeavors. 

The thing about writing is there is no club. Writing is the qualification. Not volunteering, publication, or payment, though they help. I must create a piece with my words on my page, my own trail to my own writing peaks. I’m a writer by doing. In my head or my page, one situation I can’t imagine is writing when I was an adolescent. My younger self needed clear guidelines and rules. That self constantly searched for status and validation. That need drove me to join the 46-R club and everything else. 

Some of that need remains. The fact that I’m writing about it is part of that. Another part of it is on the last Saturday of every month, I post on the Lit Mag Brag Substack whatever I’ve published. This year I’ve had eight flashes, three poems, and a short story. This is an improvement for me. My college writing teacher used my first essay as an example of how not to write an essay.

The thing about writing is there is no club. Writing is the qualification.

One of my favorite things I ever wrote was my letter to #8 explaining that I had completed my quest to climb all forty-six mountains and asked to be let into the club. In my letter, I listed Couchsachraga as my least favorite mountain. Its name means dismal wilderness in Algonquin and the mountain lived up to it. #8 told me that I’d climb Couchie again and appreciate it. I did and she was right. I found new least favorites on my second and third rounds. I found a mountain’s experience depends on my approach – my route, my company, my fitness, my day. Mountains don’t change like rivers, but I’m different every time I set foot on one. 

This August I forgot to mention a flash in my lit mag brag. I lost track. I didn’t know it had been published. The social media platform we used to rely on for notifications tumbled downhill, loosening other structures, gaining momentum, and taking an increasingly wider swath of development down with it like a rockslide in the Adirondacks after a deluge of rain. Despite the destruction, I’m glad I missed it. Acceptance still matters but validation matters less now than when I became #3662. 

At the trailhead, the mountains waited for me to assemble my snow gear and begin. As the sun climbed, the rockslides shimmered in the distant glitter. After my first summit, I decided to climb once more. I felt strong and had daylight, but then I found myself in a place where I couldn’t gain enough traction to pull myself up over the ice-covered rocks. I looked around the sides of the path, but the spot was almost vertical, sheathed with ice and guarded by impenetrable krumholtz full of hobble bush in the crevices. I was beat. I accepted that because I got further than planned and had a lovely day. I turned around, but then a squat man appeared at the top of the ice sheet. I hadn’t seen anyone in hours. He lifted me up by one wrist like I was a child and showed me how to get down on the way back. 

Dave Nash (he/him) listens to jazz sampled by hip-hop hits while he types. Dave is the Non-Fiction Editor at Five South Magazine, and he typed words that can (will) be found in places like Jake, Atlantic Northeast, South Florida Poetry Journal, Hooghly Review, miniMag, Roi Faineant Press, and Boats Against the Current. You can follow him @davenashlit1.