On my 21^st birthday, my father bought me a pair of hiking boots and I held a man’s hand while he died.

We’d been driving on back roads from New Hampshire home to Maine when we pulled over at the scene of an accident. An elderly man in a red truck had gone into cardiac arrest and driven off the road; there was no ambulance in sight. A group of people were standing by and someone helped my dad and me, both EMTs, lift the man from the driver’s seat and lay him down in the grass. He was gasping like a swimmer in the last yards of a race. His tongue was turning gray. His hand was big and warm and stiff, and I held it as if I were about to run across the road in the safety of his shadow, like I used to do with my father’s. The fingers of my other hand gripped his wrist. I could feel the pulse press up and out of the skin. I was losing it, it was beating him. His heart stopped as the ambulance pulled onto the shoulder.

“Back away, miss,” they said. A policeman offered me hand sanitizer. We watched for a while as the men from the ambulance used an AED to help the man on the ground, but not long enough to see them give up. Then we got in the car and drove the rest of the way to Maine.

When I got back and carefully pulled the boots out of their box, my first thought was that they were cursed. They were the kind of boots I’d always wanted: black leather with hooks for the laces and thick rubber soles. , from the famous company in Intervale, New Hampshire, made and sold to us by a man wearing a greasy leather apron. My dad said it was a mark of experience if somebody was wearing these on the trail.

For a long time, I refused to put them on. I wished they weren’t mine. I told myself this was because they were too big, and not because we’d seen that man die. Not because, witness to his death, I’d been unable to help.

All summer the boots sat in the back of my car, in their little cardboard coffin, and I wore old boots to work, with the soles chewed out, and pretended. I was working two jobs—one on a flower farm in midcoast Maine and the other at a nearby —and I didn’t have time to take them back and exchange them. I didn’t have time to hike, either. The boots were bulky and stiff and I didn’t need them.

It was one of my bosses, Susan, who finally convinced me to put them on, lace them up, and throw out the box. She was running a and did arrangements for weddings, but not so many years ago she’d been the first mate on a schooner. I jokingly called her the Air Traffic Controller—she had three kids and as many acres of unruly blooms—and she always knew what to do in a crisis, whether that meant setting up a last-minute carpool or consoling a tearful bride. I’d admitted to her that an unfamiliar feeling of superstition (or was it guilt?) had made me reluctant to try on the boots. We were in the barn, stripping leaves off sticky peonies and listening to NPR.

“The way I see it, they’re probably lucky,” she said. “You tried to save a man’s life, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, but he died anyway.”

It’s hard to look stern with an armload of pink flowers, but she did her best.

“You were there. You didn’t just drive by. You tried.”

I mumbled something about being legally mandated to act because I’m an EMT, but she wasn’t listening.

“Tomorrow, wear the boots.”

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For years I’ve had this coat that doesn’t fit right. It’s a siren-blue Patagonia Fitz Roy down puffy that I got on sale for $49. Enticed by the bargain, I forcefully overlooked the fact that the only size available, a men’s small, ballooned out in the midsection and barely zipped over my hips. It was the warmest thing they had, a winter belaying coat, and I knew I’d be lucky to find something that nice for five times as much. With a vague sense of unease, I congratulated myself on my stoic lack of vanity and bought the thing.

On its first foray into the field—a whitewater canoe trip with my college outing club—I looked like a blue marshmallow Peep with legs, my butt accentuated by the tightness of the hem and my middle puffing out in Michelin Man tubes of down. Even in November, with wet hair and a fogged-window sky promising snow, I was overheating. Early the next morning, I left my tent mates shivering in their sleeping bags, did some jumping jacks, and fried a dozen eggs in bacon grease. The others woke, reluctantly, to a cold breeze cutting through a haze of black smoke.

“Uh, Luna?” one boy pointed out, grinning, “your jacket’s full of holes.” I sighed and looked down at my overinflated stomach and sleeves. The shiny fabric was splattered with grease stains and liberally leaking fluff.

Over time, I learned to compensate for the jacket in much the same way I compensate for all my insecurities—by flaunting them until they appeared intentionally comic. I looked ridiculous in the thing, so I wore it all the time. I took to leaving the bottom few inches of the handy double zipper open to loosen the jacket. I patched the holes with a mix of duct tape and iron-ons. But the truth was I hated that jacket. It made me look like I didn’t take care of my stuff. It made me look fat. Worst of all, I was embarrassed to be embarrassed about the fancy Patagonia gear I’d gotten for a steal.

Today, with a couple hours to kill before the next ferry leaves for my family’s house on a not-so-remote Maine island, I take the jacket in for repair at the local Patagonia outlet. The woman behind the register has Midwestern charm.

“Girl, we’ve all had a rough year,” she says conspiratorially. â€Ŕá’m just gonna get you a new coat.”

â€Ŕá did get that one on sale,” I stammer, but she’s already heading to the back.

“Don’t worry about it,” she says loudly. “Everything’s on sale right now! It’s our practice to replace or repair anything that hasn’t stood up to normal wear and tear.”

Suddenly I feel like my dirtbag gear philosophy—that big companies are always trying to rip you off—has been turned on its head. The woman must have thought the holes in my jacket were the result of ordinary use, not an overzealous fry cook operating in the glow of a headlamp beam.

She comes back, lays a spiffy new jacket on the counter: Gore-Tex shell, powder skirt, 800-fill power. It’s a tasteful navy.

“This one retails for $799, but it’s been marked down twice, and it’s the only one with comparable warmth in a men’s small,” she says. “We have to give you the most similar to what you initially bought.”

“Are you sure? I mean, I know I should have worn a shell over a coat like that. Probably my fault it didn’t hold up better.” I trail off.

She’s already punching it into the system. “Don’t worry about it!”

So I walk out with an $800 jacket, only mildly nervous that I’m going to have a fatal accident on the way home as a result of my newly damaged karma. Impulsively, I zip it over my fleece, tags and all. It fits. I stuff my hands into downy pockets, turn a corner to reach my car, and catch sight of myself in a shop window. Stop. Stare at my reflection a moment in the glass. And then I’m hurrying back to the store, unzipping as I go, making sure the jacket is off before I come to the door.

“Excuse me, I’m so sorry to bother you, but could I please have my old coat back?” It comes out all in one breath. Then, quietly: â€Ŕá changed my mind.”

A different woman is at the register now, reserved and matter-of-fact. She pulls my old jacket out of a hamper and takes back the new one. I receive the blue puffy like I’ve been handed a baby or a very full mug of tea. I slide my arms into the sleeves a little wonderingly, a little apologetically. Zip the too-tight zipper. Then get the hell out of there.

After the pandemic began in early 2020, I went home from college for three months. My dad and I did our best to pretend that the nebulous quality of our days was a choice rather than an imposition. We stuck a New Yorker cartoon to the fridge that showed a man on the phone, telling whoever’s on the other end, â€Ŕá’d love to, but I have a million lonely ritualistic things I need to do.” Friday night movies became a solace, a source of conversation, and a marker of the days.

By the time I was home again, the New Yorker clipping was browning around the edges from the sunbeams that came through our big kitchen windows, making it look like a neglected pancake. A summer had passed, and a fall living with friends and taking classes remotely. I found, as I often have since high school, that coming home after a long time away is an exercise in stuffing my new self back into the dimensions of my old one. Increasingly, I do not fit.

We continued the ritual of watching old movies together. My dad and I are both fiercely proud, insistent on proving that we know more than the other about various things that interest us. Any subject of overlap is a competition zone. Kayaking. Books. My aspirations to work in outdoor education. The movies gave us common ground that was impersonal, less fraught. We laughed and talked easily, the way it used to be, about lives not our own.

During Christmas break, on a comedy kick, we watched Diner, the 1980s classic about five friends in their twenties and the diner that provides the touchstone for their diverging lives. The impending marriage of one of the guys, Eddie Simmons, and his insistence that his fiancée pass a test about the Baltimore Colts before he’ll go through with it, drives the plot. Afterward, we stayed up talking.

I wondered why you never see the face of the bride. Everything but her voice and hands were omitted, and I’d assumed this was to show that her inclusion in Eddie’s life wasn’t certain yet. I’d been sure that the final scene, the wedding, would be a big reveal—the pretty bride, the happy groom, his doubts forgotten, the viewer’s sense that the camaraderie cherished since childhood had been forever changed. Instead, I was disappointed and confused.

As I ride home on the ferry from my unproductive trip to the outlet, something sticks. I’m standing outside on the deck to avoid fellow passengers, as I have no matter the weather since spring. There’s nobody to talk to, and flipping pages with mittened hands is impossible, so I’m watching the water again. Thinking about how my life rushes on like the waves churned to cream in our wake, changing too fast to fix my eye.

I’ve lost friends this year to distance, but I’ve also gained some through proximity. For months, five roommates formed the whole of my social life. Because they were all I had, I accepted them. I learned to swallow the bad and wash it down with the good. I came to love them not because of something in myself that drew me to them, but for exactly who they were. Like family.

I understand, suddenly, why we never get a glimpse of the bride. Because it matters very little what she looks like, even who she is. In the end, though she fails the football test, Eddie gives her the benefit of the doubt and marries her anyway. It’s his commitment to her, the imperfect bride, and his circle of friends’ grudging choice to accept her, that makes this ending a happy one.

In a few weeks I leave for Denmark, and my brother’s apartment, where I’ll complete another semester taking classes remotely. I’ll get a job for the summer. Then I’ll move in with friends for senior year. I’ve made it, not just to the promise of a vaccine but to the end of being stuck at home. And yet I hope I’m not too quick to exchange the months restricted by the pandemic for a newer model. I wanted the old coat back because, for a moment in a shop window without it, I didn’t recognize myself. That inconsequential exchange taught me that having something to make the best of can be better than having the best. While so much time at home has made me feel more acutely the ways I’m constricted by my dad’s love for me, the torn parts in our relationship, it’s also forced me to mend what I can and accept the rest.

When I pack, I stuff the coat in last. Not because it’s the only thing I’ve got, but because it’s the warmest thing I have. I also carry the memory of stepping off the ferry that day and hurrying up the hill toward home. How opening the door to our cluttered mudroom was like sliding my arms into an old jacket, familiar and worn.

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It’s April on the coast of Maine, and I’m upside-down underwater again. The ocean’s surface is a green gauze curtain swaying in the wind, and I can’t tell sideways from up. Think. I force my numb hands to loosen their grip on the paddle and let it float upward, finding the edge of my kayak. I’ve run out of air to blow through my nostrils, but I can hold my breath a little longer. Remember the steps.

Inside the cockpit, my knees grip the underside of the deck. My thoughts are frozen sludge, like honey moving to the bottom of an overturned jar. I touch the blade of my paddle to the gunnel, wrench my shivering muscles forward until my nose is nearly touching the deck, and sweep the paddle forward and out, pulling against the surface like it’s something solid. I feel half my face touch dry air and gasp, taking in a mouthful of water before I crash down again. Panicking, I abandon the paddle, tear my spray skirt off the combing, and lunge for the surface, kicking my legs free of the boat. Then I’m floating, straining against the tight gasket of my drysuit to suck air. Twenty feet from me, snow is erasing the beach.

It took me five months to learn to roll a sea kayak dependably, and from either side. It took another two before I could do it in surf. The first time I tried was in the warm Pacific waters off Baja, with a NOLS instructor shouting advice from the beach.

â€Áč±đ±ô˛ąłć, Lunita, you will never get it if you come up too fast!”

Every time I came within reach of the surface, I’d jerk my head toward air, twisting my torso and stopping the momentum of the rolling boat. Again and again I wet-exited and came up coughing, the salt water searing my eyes and throat. Three weeks before, on the first day of NOLS’s kayaking section, a storm stranded us on the beach. From beneath the snapping hem of a tarp, I watched as my instructor waded out into the whitecaps, smacked his bow through the confused chop near the shoreline, and began to surf the long, rearing swells as they tumbled and broke. Whenever a wave sent a grappling hook of heavy water over his gunnel, tipping him into the surge of foam, he’d roll back up on the other side of the break. I watched the instructor get pushed by the white crest of a wave like a sled gathering speed; it was the most graceful thing I’d ever seen.

I wanted to achieve the same elegance, to be unafraid. Right then I felt the opposite. I was doing this course because I’d taken time off from college in Rhode Island. But something wasn’t working. When obstacles came at me, I let them knock me down. What would it be like, I wondered, to be able to balance on the tip of a wave? At 19, I’d left the safety of home, the protected Atlantic bay where I grew up, and I was terrified. I couldn’t chart a course for fear that it would be the wrong one. I thought only of turning back.

Most activities in the outdoors have a make-or-break skill built in, which you reach when you’re no longer a beginner and are becoming something more. Get to this sticking point and there’s a daunting, sometimes dangerous task that you have to get right before ducking the rope marked experts only.

Depending on where you are and what you’re doing, you might think about this transitional phase in a different way. When I was learning to backpack, a barrier for me was map-and-compass navigation. For skiing, it was jump turns. With both, I made progress only when I cared enough about mastery to keep failing until I got it right. I think this is true for many people knocking on the door of proficiency.

“Being bad at something gives you perspective,” says Michael Easter, author of . “Any time we learn a new thing, it rockets us into presence and slows down our sense of time. Facing stressful situations can actually be good for us, because it helps us adapt to challenges later on.” Easter knows plenty about facing down stress: in one memorable part of his book, he shoots a bull caribou during a monthlong expedition in the Alaskan backcountry—his first time hunting.

With sea kayaking, the stress of rolling was only a preliminary to the shock of cold water—a reminder of the stakes involved if I capsized and was unable to get back in my boat. On the ocean, calm conditions can turn deadly in minutes anytime you’re exposed to open fetch—an uninterrupted stretch of sea without the shelter of land. For me, learning to roll was a prerequisite to venturing into deeper waters. I sensed that nailing this skill could make my old, everyday fears seem small. The ability to roll would give me self-reliance, both in and out of a boat.

In Maine, on one restless day to­ward the end of April 2019, I decide to paddle alone around the island where my family lives. The swath of sea the house faces, ringed by the mainland and a fence of islands, is smooth when I start out, but as I round the northern tip of the island and enter the sound, I hear surf crashing on the rocks. I’m paddling the length of what island dwellers call the backshore; during winter storms, sea foam covers the road. I could, and should, turn back. I haven’t once managed a successful roll, and no one knows I’m out here. I keep going.

I’ve always loved the color of the winter ocean—silver and crumpled, like the foil from a chocolate wrapper, each swell a fingernail scraping the surface smooth. All the times I’ve watched the waves from behind win­dows or the curve of the road, I have never really seen them, not as I’m seeing them now.

I must get better, I tell myself. I must get better so I can do this without the need for fear. Right now, though, I’m just stroking as fast as I can, trying to outstrip the rising wind. I can feel the sweat start down my back, my hands gripping the paddle too tightly. Behind me the swells arch their backs and hiss, whitecaps forming on the crests. I’ve made it around the southernmost point of the island now, and I’m racing through the channel, swells catching my stern and sending me hurtling through the gap. It takes all my strength and focus to keep my bow pointing perpendicular to the waves as they push me from behind. Each one is a fist opening, my boat the offering in its palm.

When I come within sight of the gravel beach near our house, it’s all I can do not to shout with relief. It was a mistake to paddle on the open-ocean side of the island—alone, without the skills to self-rescue. I feel this in my locked knees and aching arms, in my heart still beating in my throat. I’m cold and tired, but I’m not finished yet. I stop short of the beach and tip myself into the water. I have two tries to right myself—maybe three, if I have the energy.

And suddenly I know that I will learn this someday. Accepting the inevitability of failing is teaching me to right myself with grace. I realize that I don’t care if I get it today. My blundering, the cold and the constant drip of salt down my throat, the choice to do it at all—they’ve given me a new way of being on the water, of dancing with forces that are beyond my control. I’m out of air, so I reach for the surface and twist my hips—my ear cradled in my shoulder, the back of my life jacket flush with the deck of the boat—and roll up. I’m so surprised I almost tip onto my other side. My numb cheeks stretch into a smile.

I returned to college in the fall, after transferring to a school in Maine. To my surprise, I loved it almost immediately. Not because the new place was so different, but because I was different. Learning to roll had trained my muscle memory in the motions of recovery, but it was more than that. The practice of rolling taught me to love that moment of instability, the thrill of not knowing if I’d remain upright. As a paddler—and as a person—I’d pushed past the sticking point.

Now when a wave comes that might be too big for me, I don’t fight it. I choose to capsize, trusting that I can right myself. Knowing that, for me, there is a joy in this. A wave is a wing extended, downy feathers ruffled in the wind, and I circle beneath it like a rising eddy of air.

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Instead of a bilge pump, I brought lupines and daisies. Stupid, I thought. Twenty years old and you think you’re invincible, think your life is some romantic story. Ahead of me, terns swerved in and out of my circle of vision, blurring into the fog. I’d left just minutes before, but already I couldn’t see the mainland. My yellow plastic kayak, pink and white flowers tied down where there should have been safety gear, looked cheerful and garish against the gray ocean. I heard a lobster boat grating into gear somewhere ahead and to my right.

Scared in my mind but not in my body. I felt like shouting this to the wind, but my grip on the paddle was slipping with sweat, even as my shirt darkened in the cold, wet air. I stroked right, settling the compass near 185 degrees, and glanced at the flowers, stems ragged from where I’d torn them off by the road. If I’m headed to Portugal, I thought grimly, at least I’ve brought flowers for the funeral. Then I laughed, with relief and something else, because I’d hit the landing of the four-acre island straight on, the metal ramp to the dock glinting under a dark smudge of trees. I freed my bouquet, now wilted, lashed my kayak to the float, and climbed up slippery pink granite to the trail. They’ll be all right, I thought, once I set them in fresh water.

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