While climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania in 1997 at age 57, Harriet Kimble Wrye came to the realization, after decades of working as a psychoanalyst, that it was time to take a sabbatical and see the world. Her kids were grown and her second husband, Jim, whom she married in 1983, was a retired banker, and enthusiastic about the prospects of touring the globe. Wrye, a longtime Palisadian and adventure junkie, didn’t travel much as a child or during her first marriage. ‘I had a pent-up longing to actually see the world,’ she says, ‘but as a psychoanalyst, I didn’t have time to go to the way-out places we wanted to go.’ ‘My father was a geologist and he was always traveling, so on a vacation the last thing he wanted to do was get on an airplane,’ Wrye recalls. Instead, he ‘loved to go to the ranch,’ in the Eastern Sierras, between Yosemite and Sequoia, which has been in Wrye’s family on her mother’s side for 125 years. The first journey on her two-year sabbatical, which began in 2000, was to Irian Jaya (West Papua, New Guinea), where she and Jim became familiar with penis gourds and traditions of various ancient tribes. Other trips followed, including six months visiting Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela, where their explorations included trekking over 15,000 feet in Patagonia and paddling tule reed boats around Lake Titicaca. During her sabbatical, Wrye studied with Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh in a monastery in the South of France, and is an ordained Member of the Order of Interbeing. She now furthers her practice at the Santa Cruz Zen Center, near her post-Palisades home. She writes about her experiences in ‘Pulling Up Stakes: Stepping into Freedom,’ a travel memoir, meditation of sorts, on the many experiences she has had, including the sudden death of her mother in a car accident, health struggles and vivid descriptions of native people in a multitude of countries, from salt-gathering women in Indonesia to the Litang Horse Festival in Tibet. Wrye and Jim went rafting, diving, hiking and trekking in jungles, deserts, mountains and waters in exotic locations everywhere. ’Pulling Up Stakes’ is Wrye’s honest look at her life. She discusses the ongoing struggles she had with her son, the arguments with her husband, the many accidents she and her husband endured, including his being hit by a car on PCH while riding a bicycle (when he was supposed to be home cleaning the garage). Wrye attributes their above-average number of accidents to the fact that ‘most people aren’t doing all the things we’re doing.’ The former English teacher at Beverly Hills High School returned to school in the early 1970s, when her two children, Gabriel and Ariel, were little. She received a Ph.D. in social-clinical psychology, and has spent much of her adult lifetime dealing with her external and internal struggles. She attributes her Buddhist meditation practice with helping to deal with the trials and tribulations of life. After 40 years in the Palisades, Wrye now calls Santa Cruz home, and has traded in ocean views for a redwood grove. ‘I miss the ocean and gorgeous sunsets,’ she admits. ‘We now live in a valley, across from an organic farm, with a meditation grove where I take clients. We have our sessions in our grove. The trees do a good part of the work. It’s pretty hard to want to go back.’ The couple chose Santa Cruz because ‘another great-grandfather settled here,’ Wrye says. ‘The family has a beach house here and I would come here as a child. It’s still in the family, and we share it among 13 different families.’ Wrye, a fourth-generation Californian, is proud that her grandchildren are sixth generation. Despite her many journeys to all ends of the Earth, Wrye considers ‘the whole journey as a pilgrimage. That was kind of the overarching theme’really letting go to all kinds of attachments, all the things we think we should do, or we need, to be happy. I needed to peel the onion, and unload the accoutrements of my life, examine the core.’ Wrye has enjoyed the diversity she has experienced, and the contrasts in different locales, as well as the richness and diversity of the many cultures she has observed. When pressed as to why she would leave the Palisades, where she raised Gabriel and Ariel, both Palisades High graduates, Wrye says, ‘After you’ve been to many of these places in the world, and then you come back, the traffic is just staggering. When I bought the house there was The Hot Dog Show, across the street was a movie theater and there was no Gelson’s. It was a sleepy village, pumpkin fields, no mansions, none of the houses filled up the lot line.’ She and Jim even brought their llamas down from their ranch in the Sierras, and would run with them at the beach near their Castellammare home. ’I loved being in the Palisades for many years, but I just feel really sad about the overdevelopment and increasing traffic.’ Though Wrye has been told social media is the most effective way to sell books, she is ‘much, much happier actually meeting readers and potential readers in person. My husband and I are now in our 70s. We decided to make the book tour the next adventure, and to go to places we wanted to go,’ which included recent stops in Boston, New York and Pacific Palisades. Wrye says they meet people who can fill in gaps in her stories, such as the man who was able to explain why her llama lost his footing in the Sierras, almost causing Wrye and the animal to plunge to their deaths. She and Jim are now planning their next trip, a two-month journey to South America beginning in February, which will include visiting indigenous tribes and participating in a shaman ceremony. For more information, go to pullingupstakesbook.com.
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
