Outside of the tiny town of El Bolsón in the Argentine Patagonia, five hours down a rocky path to a canyon in the Andes Mountain range, I met an 18-year-old Hawaiian girl named Julia Douglas.
Julia is a tall girl with cropped blonde hair and sharp blue eyes. She’s quick-witted, incredibly well read and she smiles totally unreserved, like she’s never tried not to.
Julia didn’t follow the prescribed trajectory of entering university right after high school. The year before I met her, she was finishing up her senior year and working the night shift at a McDonald’s in Honolulu. She worked from 8 p.m. to 1 a.m. during the school week with the express purpose of saving enough money to last somewhere for a year on her own. While friends packed dorm kits, Julia loaded a backpack.
My journey to Julia included losing access to my U.S. bank accounts, hitchhiking for four days to El Bolsón, finding work with a crazed carpenter with whom I hiked to a mountain refuge and found Julia— my refuge at the refuge.
She and I wandered off to explore glacial pools and talk about all of the things you talk about when you meet someone cut of your same cloth. We talked about how Julia wanted to hike into Chile on a horse trail, about her hoping to find work on a sheep farm and about how she would get to Antarctica. It was a Trekkie-meets-someone-else-who-speaks-Klingon moment.
We parted ways with the intent to keep in touch (the importance of which is paramount! And worth a column of it’s own) and several months later, I saw Julia’s first pictures of Antarctica and got word that she had made it.
Julia’s story only got wilder after El Bolsón. She did hike into Chile on a horse trail; she doubled back to Argentina and found work on a sheep farm. By what was late autumn in the Antarctic, she hitched to Ushuaia, Argentina, a harbor town where boats bound for Antarctica were waiting to take off.
The docks were gated and guarded, so she waited until the guards changed shifts and snuck through. She asked the crew on at least ten different boats if she could work, clean and/or sleep in a closet in order to go with them. All of them told her to keep moving, except one— a Norwegian cruise line that had, by coincidence, been waiting for someone (a new employee, a passenger?) to show up. They thought it was Julia and ushered her onto the ship. After talking further, they realized Julia was not the person they had been waiting for, but she pleaded to come along, offering to help out with anything. They conceded and told her to gather all of her things because they’d be leaving in two hours.
(Photo of Julia provided by Alex Baumhardt)
Julia went to Antarctica with them twice in one month. She was instructed to keep passengers from hassling the penguins and to bear the title Assistant Expedition Team Intern; they even dropped her off in Buenos Aires on their way back to Norway. In Buenos Aires, she found a one-room apartment with sometimes-electricity and a job as a waitress. She spent two months there saving money and living like a porteña before hitchhiking through Bolivia and Peru all the way up to Ecuador.
I don’t mean to underscore Julia’s age as the prime reason that this story is wild, though it plays a large role. What I hope to underscore is that there are young women doing this. That despite the downbeat stories we are inundated with about young women who travel alone, people who don’t go straight to college or what can go terribly wrong when you are young and far from home, there are still Julia’s out taking those risks. A large portion of the time, they experience the world like Julia: discovering incredible opportunities, weird and/or wonderful people, new languages and different paces of life.
Just last week I talked with Julia and was brought right back to that little canyon in Argentina. We talked like we did when we were thousands of miles away hidden in the Andes Mountains, only now Julia has started her first semester at the University of Montana in Missoula and I’m on an island in the North Atlantic. As a nineteen-year-old college student, I imagined Julia trying to grapple with being in just one place again or getting to know kids that had never learned to live alone or be survivalist resourceful. It was all in vain. Just before our call, Julia and a friend had barreled back to Montana on hitched rides after a weekend of hopping trains to Idaho. Her clothes were still covered in train exhaust, she had class the next morning and nothing mattered as much as the next place she was scheming up to reach.
Alex Baumhardt is a freelance writer currently based in Iceland, where she is writing for The Reykjavik Grapevine. She has worked for the Land Stewardship Project, and her writing has appeared on lostgirlsworld.com, the Matador Network, Global Journalist and German-based Retomag and has been recognized by the Missouri Press Association and her grandma. Follow her adventures @AlexBaumhardt.
