Having recently read WILD, by Cheryl Strayed, and now engrossed in TRACKS, by Robbyn Davidson. I am allured by decisions of these women and many others to meet life head-on, as it were, and chose to launch themselves on jaw dropping adventures that literally change their perspective of life as they know it.
There some moments in life that are like pivots around which your existence turns – small intuitive flashes, when you know you have done something correct for a change, when you think you are right on track.
Robbyn Davidson – TRACKS
WHAT’S MY INTEREST
Beyond the obvious “woman against the elements,” there is the iconoclastic breaking of gender expectations in what still is largely a male dominated culture where women carry the burden of being sex objects and not recognized as individuals of substance. Beyond these well worn topics is the fact that I come from a family of strong women. My mother, raised as the daughter of a Texas Panhandle dust bowl Cowboy farmer and his wife, was the only daughter in a family with three male siblings. She excelled in sports open to women: basketball, tennis, and swimming. Competitive to the core she would climb the fence at Barton Springs, an ice cold artesian swimming hole in Austin, while completing her Masters Degree, to display prowess racing a male friend. She played on the first female basketball team of the University of Houston, shellaced me in almost every tennis match we ever played. Standing nose to nose with white judges on behalf of truant black kids during integration, she found herself between black “grandmamas” who did not want to risk bucking the system and white administrators who really did not want blacks in white schools. She would go into the “piney” woods of Walker County to find kids she would learn about, bring them to school, see that they showered and received school clothes and take them home if no other transportation was available. In retirement she developed a Head Start program, and took High School girls to Europe, Great Britain and the Mediterranean.
If grandma’s spirit could find home in progeny, her grand daughter spent a year teaching English in the Equadorian jungle, no others to rely on and later led summer trips of High School students to Equador, and Costa Rica. Likewise the no nonsense competitive spirit finds it’s clone.
Inner strength, competitive spirit and SUBSTANCE are prominent qualities in ALL my children, nieces, nephew and grand children, and thus draw me to stories of the same.
Adventurous Women in Many Fields
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/whmbios13.html
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TIME LINE OF WOMEN ADVENTURERS
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/125/timelines/women-explorers/
Why So Many Women Adventure Chronicles Now?
http://adventure-journal.com/2015/03/why-are-there-so-few-womens-adventure-films/
Ann Bancroft Polar Explorer
http://www.yourexpedition.com/the-team/ann-bancroft/
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