In "Blowing in the Wind," Diana Hume George recounts her treacherous climb on a trail in the White Mountains of New Hampshire as a way of examining various paths her life has taken. She contemplates her relationships with her former husband, her current partner, and her father, whose death by falling from a great height haunts George even as she climbs and is nearly blown off a rock ledge by the wind.

The essay was motivated by two powerful forces, she says-"An urge to wrest meaning from a devastating encounter with my limitations, and an editorial deadline.

"The second motivator sounds dryly professional, but it was not," she adds. She had nearly finished a collection of feminist essays on nature and travel, but she was seeking a final piece; the hike, she'd thought, would represent a victory over her fears of risk-taking and heights. The hiking trip had been planned with writing in mind-she'd packed a tape recorder and other equipment-but because she had nearly fallen to her death on the mountain, writing a triumphant piece was not so straightforward.

"My challenge as a writer inverted," she says. "Instead of recording my victory, I had to write about defeat. And it's a good thing, because I learned about limitation instead of strength, boundaries instead of boundlessness. Without writing, I might have processed this event as a personal defeat of resounding proportions."

As George approached the process of writing the essay, she says, "I could find nothing to say. But slowly the writer in me won out, with help from editors." The editors' deadlines focused her energies and forced out the creativity and imagination she needed to make meaning out of her experience on the mountain.

George figured out what she wanted to say as she went along-through writing-rather than before she started. "As is always the case for me, I literally did not know what I thought until I wrote about it. I never do. The inscription process itself is a thought."

Transcripts of her notes taken on the trip look nothing like the finished essay. "The composition of the final piece bears little resemblance to the facts I narrated during the adventure itself--Wordsworth's 'recollection in tranquility' was necessary."