My Friends Could Survive the Apocalypse

They forage for food, sleep under stars, and navigate by moss. I navigate by Waze.

“Returning” Art by Robin Eisenberg IG: @robineisenberg

The Zoom background looked like a stock photo, the kind Airbnb uses to make you believe every cabin looks like this. Wooden walls, a window full of trees, and a blonde who looks like she came with the listing.

But it wasn’t a background and she wasn’t a model. She was my friend. It was her temporary office that consisted of a bed with messed up covers and a pillow for a desk.

She sat cross-legged on the bed, her long blonde hair wild and untamed, like her. She was writing from a rented cabin in the mountains for a few weeks. No office, no city noise, no neighbors. Just her, lots of notes, and whatever the wilderness decided to offer up between sessions. The wifi was terrible but she didn’t seem to mind.

I would never stay in a cabin in the woods alone. My idea of roughing it is flying in extra room seats. And yet, the women I’ve loved most in this life have all been some version of her. Wild, untamed, and completely at home in a world that terrifies me.

These are my people. The ones I live vicariously through.

I should be clear about who I am. I’m the woman who can walk into a room of strangers and feel her shoulders drop with relief. Give me a crowd, a podium, a city I’ve never been to, and my nervous system ignites. I’ve spoken to hundreds of people at media conferences and felt genuinely calm. I have walked up to people I’ve never met at parties my entire life without a second thought. And don’t even get me started about New York City. It’s my obsession. I lived there for a year, visit often, and dream of moving back. I’ve compared the feeling I get to heroin. I’ve never done drugs but have been told it becomes an addiction after the first hit.

They have the wilderness, I have New York. We’re all addicts.

But the real outdoors? I wouldn’t know which berries to eat. I would eat the wrong ones and die. And if a bear came at me, I’d run, which is apparently the one thing you are never supposed to do.

And yet, I’m drawn to these women like mosquitos to a campfire I could never build.

I met one of my first wild ones the way you meet all the best people. Unexpected and in a crisis.

Ozzy Osbourne was suing me for libel. I was running an LA magazine with my sister, doing what editors do, deciding which stories to publish. This decision ended with us sitting in a tall Los Angeles building, being deposed on video by his lawyers. One of them looked up from his papers and asked, Do you have a degree in journalism?

No, I do not.

In a moment of either genius or panic, or because I felt like a total loser, I decided what I really needed was a journalism class. After my final deposition, I walked into a local community college, the way you do when your life is on fire, and there she was.

Short skirt. Long dark hair. A raspy voice that sounded like it had lived somewhere interesting.

What’s your deal? she said.

I told her. She laughed and encouraged me to sign up for her class. She was a former music journalist. We clicked immediately.

I was released from all liability in the lawsuit, and she’s the reason I got my master’s in journalism and became a college professor. I want to shout that out loud because it still amazes me. I believe that none of the women in my life arrived by accident. They were placed by something divine.

And here’s what I remember most. We went to New York together for a journalism conference. We drank champagne at a restaurant in Grand Central Station after trekking through the snow, an idea she came up with close to midnight. That part was easy for me, the city girl in her natural habitat. The next day she called me to her hotel room. She had something to show me.

In her bathtub was a wild bird she rescued from the streets of Manhattan.

She hadn’t just found the bird. She spent hours on the phone tracking down rescues, and when she finally found one, she put that wild creature in a New York taxi and delivered it herself.

I should mention that I’m terrified of all wildlife, including birds. Even the pigeons of New York give me the creeps. I would have walked past that bird, said a little prayer for its soul, and never looked back. She nursed it back to health and hailed it a cab.

She once eyed my Louis Vuitton bag and said, “Honey, for what that thing costs I could buy myself a horse.” I didn’t confess that the only time I ever got on a horse, it was at a sketchy pop-up circus, the kind that appear out of nowhere in an empty parking lot. After several glasses of cheap wine on ice and a candy apple, I climbed on that pony and lasted about thirty seconds before jumping off. I was twenty.

When her mother's dementia worsened, she left the California beaches behind for Florida, where she describes her property as “emerald green as far as the eye can see.” She loves the wildlife that wanders onto her property, including bears. We stay in touch the way old friends do. We talk about New York again, or maybe her place this time, sitting on her porch, watching whatever the wilderness decides to send our way.

I’m ready. She just needs to protect me from the bugs, the wildlife, and anything that makes a sound after dark. She’d do it without thinking twice.

And then there’s the one in Berkeley.

If my wild women friends make wildness look natural, this one makes fearless sound like a starting point. She operates on a frequency I can’t access. She has a house on an island in Canada that she describes as magical. Before you picture a ferry or a sturdy bridge, let me stop you. Getting there requires a seaplane. One of those small planes that lands directly on the water, which I’m told is perfectly safe and which I do not believe for a second. I can barely summon the courage to fly on a commercial plane with two engines and a beverage cart stocked with vodka. She island-hops on something that floats.

She invites me to the island every year. I really want to go but I’m not sure I’d survive the trip.

And here’s what tells you everything you need to know about her. When she needs a ride, she doesn’t call a car or rent one. She makes a sign, hangs it on her body, and stands somewhere until a stranger takes her where she needs to go. Something that requires a level of trust in humans that I’ve never had. This lifestyle has resulted in hundreds of friends she’s made along the way.

I recently went to her birthday party, a moveable feast across four houses with more food and friends than I could count. Her friends are a bunch of eclectic Berkeley types ranging in age from their twenties to eighties, every single one of them a story. She was dancing in the center of all of it, lit up like sunshine in human form and completely in her element. She doesn’t find her people, she accumulates them.

But the one who has been there the longest, since we were sixteen and the world was already complicated, is my best friend. The Italian one. Calm, loyal, and sometimes a little scary, but in a good way.

When I went through my second divorce, she handed me the keys to her house. No discussion, no conditions. She fed me, got me drunk, and made it clear that nobody was getting near me without going through her first. There was a gun in her closet. She mentioned this once, the way you mention where the extra towels and Italian cold cuts are kept. She knew how to use it. One night the security alarm went off. I saw her shadow standing in the hallway, dark hair loose, white silk nightgown, gun in hand, calm as a woman who has already decided how this ends. And where was I? In bed, covers over my head, hiding. Luckily, it was just the Santa Ana winds.

She had a chicken coop in her backyard in a city where chicken coops are not allowed. Three chickens who gave her eggs and good conversation. One of them was named Peg, after my mother. I don’t have the words for what that meant to me.

We’ve traveled together and every single time she takes care of me the way only she knows how. I’m terrified of flying, gripping the armrest, bargaining with God, holy water in one hand and a mini bottle of vodka in the other. She’s a former VP of a private jet company, which means she knows every trick, every workaround, every bump. She makes sure there’s food and booze, even when they say there isn’t. She has bought me proper suitcases, travel packs, a warm throw, chargers, and everything a person needs to feel safe in the air. She holds the chaos at bay so I don’t have to.

She was doing this when we were sixteen. I was jumped by a group of girls in high school and she was there. This new friend, this girl I had just met, stood by me without hesitation. She visited me at the hospital. She told my father who did it. She knew who he was and she knew he'd take care of it. I’ll leave it at that.

Decades later, she’s still standing there.

I fear her and I love her, in equal measure and for the same reasons. She’s the kind of woman who would kill someone with her bare hands if they hurt the people she loves. No one has tested her. God help whoever does.

She is my person. She always has been.

She dreams of leaving the suburbs north of Los Angeles for the Pacific Northwest. A farm. Land. Room to be as wild as she actually is beneath the civilized Italian girl who is waiting for permission. I believe that one day she’ll do it. I also know that when she goes, a part of me will grieve it like a small death. Having her close by has always been my comfort. She would take a bullet for me.

So why am I drawn to these types of women? I’ve asked myself this question, usually while watching one of them do something that would leave me hyperventilating.

I think it may be that I know who I am. I’m the city girl who loves the crowd. The sound of sirens makes me calm. I’m at home in the kind of commotion that has sidewalks, a wine bar, and a good hospital.

But there’s a part of me that has always known there’s another way to live. Wilder. More unafraid. Less concerned with what comes next and more awake to what’s right in front of me, like the bird on the street, the stranger with a truck, or the island you can only reach by landing on water. I could never access that part on my own.

So I found them instead. Or maybe they found me.

They have let me live through them. The one writing in a cabin with terrible wifi, the one who made lifelong friends from a handwritten sign, the one with chickens, a gun and decades of showing up. They’ve taken me to places I would never go alone, protected me from things I can’t name, and loved me anyway, Louis Vuitton bag and all. I envy and celebrate their wildness.

Some people collect adventures. I collect the women who have them.

*Author’s note: A special thank you to the incredibly talented artist Robin Eisenberg for graciously allowing me to use her stunning work in this story. From the moment I began writing these women, I pictured each one as a Robin Eisenberg drawing. Her art doesn’t just depict women; it celebrates them. And it’s no surprise because Robin herself is beautiful inside and out.