The Shape of Freedom

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Some of the world’s most renowned volcanoes appear to stand alone. Italy’s Mount Vesuvius hovers over Pompeii, the once-thriving city buried beneath a tidal wave of ash and pumice. Japan’s solitary, snow-capped Mount Fuji has inspired centuries of pilgrimage and poetry. And on the other side of the Pacific Rim of Fire stands Mount St. Helens whose 1980 eruption reduced her elevation by more than a thousand feet, leaving a mile-wide horseshoe crater at her crown. Still she towers, a lone queen among queens in the Cascade Volcanic Arc—Mounts Rainier and Hood looming in the distance, their steam plumes signaling their own independent ferocity.

Sitting at my desk in Asheville, North Carolina, I gaze out at a congregation of periwinkle mountains, hugging and almost homespun. The Blue Ridge are among the oldest mountains in the world, named for the isoprene released by oaks and conifers in a protective response to heat. In their infancy, they were among the tallest ranges on earth. Now, worn by time and erosion, they cut through the eastern US corridor with the potency of a butter knife, their azure haze rising skyward in quiet contrast to the scarlet shimmer of their volcanic cousins.

My phone buzzes. A text from Tara, my college best friend. She could detect, sometimes before I could myself, when a restlessness was stirring in me, as if heat was gathering somewhere high above my carefully constructed life, threatening to smolder what I had built below. It was a craving for a freedom that I once defined by separation and untetheredness which I mistook in our youth as independent and carefree. A type of freedom that took a lifetime to unlearn, but only a flash to forget what it taught. 

We are often taught to imagine freedom as the capacity to stand apart, beholden to nothing—a solitary peak untouched by the friction of neighboring forces. But the Earth reminds us that even the most solid ground we stand on is in constant negotiation with what’s deep down below.

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In June of 2006, Tara and I traveled to Mount Arenal in Costa Rica which, at the time, was on the tail end of its unrest. We were on a volunteer trip during our summer break, working during the week, spending weekends visiting nearby attractions. 

At the base of the volcano were a string of river-fed hot springs, nestled between torch-lit tiki bars and overgrown gardens. We wove from one pool to the next, the hot breath of the Earth curling up from its cauldron. Don’t be tempted to get more than one drink, Tara cautioned. The heat intoxicates you, plenty.

In one of the lower pools, there was an older man, silver pony tail pulled tightly back, arms outstretched on the wall of the springs, bathing lazily in the company of his son. His whole being exuded a kind of solitary sovereignty that seemed to pointedly ask: Whose life is it you’re living?, as if to pass you both shackles and shears. His son, attractive but cast in the shadow of his father’s glow, caught my eye with a glint of warning.

They had, a few years prior, been on a trip to Costa Rica and were awestruck by its beauty. Not but a week later, the man left his high-paying executive job in Berlin and purchased 400 acres of undeveloped Costa Rican land, and within a few years, transformed it into an ecoranch. He invited me to visit the next day: It’s only a half hour or so from here, he said. I imagined myself dissolving into his world. The hot springs were suddenly a dance floor, this man’s weathered hand reaching out for mine, me placing the arch of my palm into his, twirling inward. After telling our group of my plan to go—alone if no other takers—Tara replied: I followed you to Costa Rica, didn’t I? 

The next morning we boarded a green bus in the town square of La Fortuna, its only two passengers. After over an hour of harrowing mountain roads, we pierced through a shroud of cloud forests and the ranch sprawled into view below. To see it was to know what the man felt when he chose to leave his former life in service to the question of who was living it.

The bus descended into the valley, the road slowly becoming indecipherable as we puttered by a hand-painted sign bidding, “Bienviendos! A self-sufficient organic ranch!” 

We drove by a pond and a micro-hydro system, onward to stables, gardens and orchards, compost bins and rainwater barrels, pigs and cows and chickens, guns and machetes, and finally a donkey who wouldn’t budge off the path. When the bus stalled to a stop, the driver didn’t turn over the engine. We stepped off, no one there to greet us but the ass offering an unblinking stare, sockets widening with each circular movement of his mouth over straw, enough of a spectacle to distract from the bus backing away. It wasn’t until it was out of sight, our hearts pounding—what have we done?!—that our host’s son, Ricky, sauntered up to welcome us. 

In daylight, and out of his father’s shadow, Ricky gleamed. He smiled and gestured for us to follow him. On the way up the hill, he slung a discarded western saddle over his left shoulder, strong and sculpted, suspending a billow of dust over our path to an open air dining hall.

A meal was served, made only from what the land provided. The man from the hot springs surfaced briefly. With a hint of nonchalance, he told us we should stay, not for good, but for longer than we were able. We were on a volunteer trip, we reminded him—it seemed he forgot—and were expected back that night. He offered again. We could work in exchange for room and board, he pressed, adding, I have everything you need. And with that, he was off. 

After lunch, Ricky led us to three quarter horses tied to a fence, bony, bridled, unbothered. We were told this was the best way to see the land. Like the green bus before, we mounted. 

There were no roads, no paths, just landmarks only Ricky recognized. Soon, we were wading through the river on horseback, their legs our own, hips trusting backs, hands clutching manes. We serpentined around the bend to a sandy bank and fastened the horses to a branch so we could swim ourselves. Ricky pulled his shirt off; Tara immersed herself fully clothed, so I did the same. I ducked my head under, and in the moment of submergence, I felt my left contact lens disappear under the weight of the water, rendering me half-blind.

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In high school, my friend Amelia and I snuck out with a boy we barely knew for a midnight swim in the Shenandoah, underestimating the river’s current. Halfway through, drops of rain began to descend like fury, and I saw Amelia’s strokes falter and her face go pale. I screamed for help. The boy turned, panicked, suddenly sober, and hauled Amelia toward shore. As the distance between us widened, the river all muscle against my own, I felt a God not of prayer or surrender but of water itself—vast and impartial to who makes it across. This was not a moment of faith but survival: no one is coming. You save yourself or you don’t. So I swam. Stroke, breath, kick, reach—again and again—until I collapsed onto the beach. I pressed my back to the earth and opened my arms to the night sky, feeling the gasp of a single question: Is anyone out there? The night ended with a resolve that even if there was, I didn’t need them. A self-decreed deliverance that hardened like igneous rock.

A year later, Amelia and I traveled to Italy, making our way to the ruins of Pompeii, a finale of mortality preserved and on display. Along with fear and grief, there was a look of warning in the townspeople’s eyes as if to say, don’t let your life solidify too soon. 

A fellow tourist told us about a Randolph Rogers sculpture based on Sir Edward Bulwe-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii. It depicts a blind girl on the day Vesuvius erupted plowing through the debris, leading two others to safety. In it, she holds a walking stick in her right hand, with her left palm raised to her ear, as if searching through sound. Behind her, one can imagine the rest of the city blanketed in darkness, sharing in her blindness but not her ability to listen. 

In Costa Rica, on the outskirts of another volcano, the river and its current and the pulse of the rainforest all seemed to illustrate: nothing survives in isolation. The Earth had been attempting to teach, sometimes through the same lesson, the choreography of being alive. And that if I closed my eyes and listened for it, I would see, the world responds. 

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In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, Michel Foucault contends that freedom is a practice of self-creation, not something to be possessed, suggesting we pursue the liberatory work of constantly reinventing ourselves. This requires a praxis of response—a parley of evolving versions of self—past, present, and what’s possible—as a way to shape oneself within and through the forces that shape us. 

In the beginning, we explore shapes in the womb, tumbling over and under, pushing against organs and muscles and the uterine wall. And not much long after we’re delivered to the world, we fill the shapes of what the world then delivers to us: institution, expectation, norm, language, often mistaking social order for natural order. And then through mind and mouth, we form our own frontiers and borders, relying on our eyes, if we allow them to stay open, to keep watch on the perimeter of our experience. 

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On the banks of the Rio Negro, a wisp of grey clouds gathered above. Ricky followed my gaze to the sky. Looks like rain, he said, but the best view is just ahead. Tara replied, We should head back, our midnight curfew looming. 

When we finally arrived at camp, we asked when the bus would be coming. It was creeping on 5pm; our group had surely left La Fortuna without us, and our homebase was another four hours south from there. Ricky looked casually up the road and muttered that he didn’t think the bus was due back. It was Sunday, he said, like we should’ve known. No one was coming. Tara emerged in all her South Jersey glory, insisting, no, we had to get back and what were our options, her tone sharp, delivered with tightly crossed arms and a rigid stare. I knew, though Ricky didn’t, that the pose was a method of restraint, a way of, literally, holding herself together. If she let go of the grip on her arms, there was no doubt they would flail, body and choice words to shortly then follow suit. She looked from me to him and back to me. People are expecting us. Need us, she added, a slight to the place that claimed to need no one. Meanwhile, we saw the barn staff and the gardeners and the cleaning crew begin to gather for dinner.

Ricky didn’t tempt a second reproach from her and, as the sun began to dip behind the hills, a plan was made. A ranch hand appeared, duffel bag flung over his shoulder, hands caked with earth, twirling a set of keys to a jeep. He needed supplies from San Jose—less than an hour from our volunteer placement. Ricky had an apartment there and would return a few days earlier than planned. They would drive us. 

At the edge of the ranch lies the Children’s Eternal Rainforest, a roadless and dense entanglement of pulsing wilderness. If you make the trek to San Jose often, you know that to go through the forest cuts down your journey time, and you might even know, after persistent trial and error, with a prayer for the light of the moon, the paths you can forge to do so. But as we entered into the black, wet night, the forest was all belly: hollow, hungry, holding—the glow of Arenal’s bright vibrant flare a distant memory. 

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I once went on a tour of the Longhorn Caverns outside of Austin, Texas. The entrance descends from the blazing sun into the cool, humid opening of the Earth’s mouth. The tomb is lung-ish, damp and soft, adorned with narrow arteries sculpted by an ancient, now extinct underground river. This chamber was once used as a speakeasy during Prohibition, the guide remarked, clusters of calcite crystals dangling above. I imagined it: dresses and suits pressed close. Music and bodies spinning; laughter vibrating off limestone. We moved to the deepest cave, all of us huddled together, with the guide instructing us to turn off our lanterns. He raised his own below his chin and, face aglow, whispered: if you went without light down here for more than three days, you would go blind. Then, without warning, he switched his light off and exclaimed with portentous glee: Welcome to TOTAL DARKNESS! 

The dark rose up through my ears, inviting me to relinquish the illusion of self-containment and, for a few moments, I couldn’t tell where my body ended and the cavern’s began. 

Before there were maps or borders, the earth learned two ways to breathe. One was loud and radiant, exhaling through a force of fire and ash. The other was quiet and patient, letting water pass through stone until hollows formed. One announced itself. The other waited to be discovered. We learned to call the first freedom. We did not yet have a name for the second.

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In the rainforest, the headlights of the jeep bucked against the uneven mud-slicked terrain, catching glints of dew and an occasional flash of movement through the brush. I kept reminding myself that I only had half vision, maybe it wasn’t as dark as it felt, and clutched onto Tara’s shoulder who sat up front with the ranch hand. In the backseat, Ricky slid closer with every lurch, slowly but deliberately closing the distance between us. He whispered in my ear, Guess this isn’t what you were expecting, huh? followed by something in Spanish I couldn’t make out. I smiled weakly. How was there time for anything like subtext and translation when the howler monkeys themselves were screaming at us to get the hell out of their house?

Ricky placed his hand on my knee, as if to steady me. It became clear that what stirred in me was not a magnetism for him, but for the charged field of his attention. He moved with a subtle authority of someone accustomed to being followed, without reciprocation. He belonged to the land in ways I did not. I was a visitor with a return ticket, seduced by his daily intimacy with what the terrain represented, opposed, perhaps, to what it was.

Did I know, yet, that the plates had already begun their slow convergence beneath me? In a vehicle I wasn’t driving, in a jungle that was unknown, with a man whose hand was now on my thigh, to whom a currency of intrigue had already been exchanged, I started to recognize the cost of servitude to a type of freedom that no longer served. A freedom I had defined as not needing anyone—as if I could stand untouched—rather than seeing that, like the earth itself, I am formed in contact, in pressure, and in the slow collision of what I ultimately release.

Night gathers in folds both heavy and yielding. Caverns cradle it; volcanoes pulse beneath it. In the shadows, we learn how to move with what we cannot see. Only in that dark rehearsal do we earn the morning. 

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Slowly, the medicinal scent and spell of the rainforest began to dissipate, and the milklight from the moon spilled to reveal a clearing. I moved away from Ricky’s wandering hand, inching closer to Tara’s seat. We found our way to a road, and then a petrol stop where Tara pulled me aside. What if we had gotten stranded out there? she asked. No one knows where we are. Not even us. 

No one was coming, I thought. Yet here we are.

After filling the tank, Ricky informed us they wouldn’t be able to take us the full way. It was late, he said. We could spend the night in San Jose; he would drive us in the morning. Before I could part my lips, Tara spoke for us: We’ll need the number for a cab, then.

In San Jose, we got a cab. In the cab, we held hands. In our hands, we were whisked twenty years to a text exchange, me at my desk in Asheville, Tara in New Jersey, sensing me on a ledge of my midlife, questioning its shape, anxious about what could be liberated, mourning what might need to be burned down. 

I imagined the couples who once danced underground, bodies moving in tandem through the darkness, no one leading, only yielding to one another, not to or from or against, but with. I remembered walking through Pompeii and pausing in front of two plaster bodies preserved in an embrace. I thought of how volcanoes live in relationship—to pressure and release—their eruptions not freedom from influence but expressions of it: a half-blind self-betrayal that yields to revelation.

I apologized to Tara for all the times I tried to go it alone. She replied, I will follow you, always. And in that tectonic shift of time and place and personhood, in the backseat of a red taxi, Tara’s hand in mine, and mine in hers, I responded back: me, too. 

Well past curfew, tethered together like mountains, we snuck into our homebase, both late and early enough to stay up to see the sun rise the next morning, earned and magnificent.