Instead by Maria Coffey
What's It About?
Maria Coffey’s "Instead" is an enlightening, masterfully crafted memoir celebrating her indomitable spirit of adventure and childfree life that should enchant and captivate the reader.Maria Coffey can fairly accurately be described as a nonconformist, pioneering, globe-trotting explorer and extreme expedition-leading kayaker who lives her life on her own terms, exuberantly to the fullest, then writes award-winning books about her voyages of discovery and spiritual quests. Having recently entered her eighth decade (which begins at age 70), she has written a bold, frank and inspiring memoir: Instead (Rocky Mountain Books), subtitled Navigating the Adventures of a Childfree Life.
She made the fraught decision not to have children at an early age but only after careful consideration. Her two older brothers married, produced several grandchildren between them, had successful careers and remained in England, their home country. This was insufficient to pacify her Irish-Catholic mother who subjected her daughter to a relentless barrage of verbalized and written grumblings expressing her disappointment and stern disapproval. While her intent was designed to wear down her daughter’s resolve by inducing guilt and producing change, it ultimately seriously damaged their relationship.
Instead of satisfying her mother’s oft-stated desire for her to be photographed in a white wedding gown posed under the blooming hydrangeas at the end of the drive to mirror her First Communion and following up with a grandchild delivered within a year, Maria followed her heart with unwavering certainty. She listened to the advice to attend college and became a schoolteacher after graduating from the University of Liverpool.
However, instead of remaining with a village school and limiting her traveling to vacations, she moved to a remote part of Vancouver Island, British Columbia on a one-year teacher exchange program in 1985, met outdoorsman, photographer and large animal veterinarian Dag Goering, her future husband, and made a tiny Canadian island her home base. They now also have a more accessible condo in Victoria and also home in a village in Catalonia, Spain.
Life Path Influenced By Tragedy
Maria’s choices and life’s path were influenced by two profoundly impactful traumas. At 21, she nearly drowned after being caught up by a treacherous riptide in a deceptively quiet cove in Morocco. A few years later, she became part of England’s extreme mountaineering community as the girlfriend of Joe Tasker, one of the world’s foremost climbers. Their intense 2.5-year relationship ended tragically in May, 1982 when he and fellow mountaineer and best friend Peter Boardman vanished on Mount Everest. The men were attempting to scale one of the highest pinnacles nicknamed “unclimbed ridge” on the Tibetan side of the mountain.
Boardman’s body was recovered a decade later but Tasker’s has never been found. To help assuage her grief and bring some closure, Maria Coffey traveled through Tibet and made a pilgrimage to a 21,000 foot elevation base camp. Her first book, Fragile Edge: Loss on Everest, published in 1989, documents this cathartic experience. The book won several awards and firmly established the author as an outdoors journalist.
In 2005, she continued the theme with Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow: the Dark Side of Extreme Adventure about the emotional toll and devastating effect on families and loved ones left behind to mourn the deaths of their risk-takers. This book was awarded the Jon Whyte Literature Prize for Mountain and Wilderness Literature in Banff in 2003.
Explorers of the Infinite: The Secret Spiritual Lives of Extreme Athletes and What They Reveal about Near-Death Experience, Psychic Communication and Touching the Beyond published in 2008 completed the writer’s mountaineering trilogy. Through multiple interviews, she asked why extreme athletes take death-defying risks and examined their spiritual encounters thereby attracting the attention of Oprah Winfrey who interviewed Maria Coffey on an episode of her Soul Series webcast.
Adventures with the Author’s Husband
There are five additional acclaimed travel adventure books co-authored with Dag Goering, her husband of nearly 40 years, along with four children’s books penned by Maria. Once she overcame her paralyzing fear of deep water, she became an expert kayaker.
In 1999, the couple embarked on a ten-week kayak adventure to circumnavigate Vancouver Island which is 283 miles in length and 62 miles wide at its widest point. The west coast is situated on the Pacific Ocean, not the calmer inland passage on the eastside; notorious for monster waves, choppy current and frequent storms. Their spectacular photographs and alternating journal entries chronicling their hazardous journey celebrates British Columbia’s less populated side in Visions of the Wild.
Together these intrepid adventurers have made multiple harrowing voyages through the Solomon Islands, down the length of the Ganges River, and all along the coast of Vietnam via kayaks, small boats and bicycles. In 2000, they founded a company, Hidden Places Travels, specializing in adventure travel offering a wide variety of guided expeditions to exotic, far-flung corners of the globe led by local professionals. Customized trips can also be crafted for small groups for special occasions or corporate outings.
Maria Coffey and Dag Goering continue to lead tours when not off on their own explorations. Learn more here.
Unanticipated extreme hazards have included dodging marauding hippos, coastal bandits, venomous snakes and raging water among other hair-raising episodes as documented in their oft humorous travel tales. Many of their adventures would have proven to be impractical and incompatible with parenthood for this intrepid couple. Although choosing a childfree life is unfathomable in many cultures, not all women aspire to, dream of nor would be fulfilled by the home, hearth and children.
Instead: Navigating the Adventures of a Childfree Life begins with this quote by notable Canadian scholar, lecturer and author Sheila Heti:
There is something threatening about a
woman who is not occupied with children.
There is something at-loose-ends feeling
about such a woman. What is she going to do
instead? What sort of trouble will she make?
Maria Coffey’s Instead is an enlightening, masterfully crafted memoir celebrating her indomitable spirit of adventure and childfree life that should enchant and captivate the reader.
About Maria Coffey:
Maria Coffey is an internationally published and award-winning author of twelve previous books. Fragile Edge: Loss on Everest won two awards in Italy, including the 2002 ITAS Prize for Mountain Literature; Where the Mountain Casts its Shadow won the Banff Mountain Film Festival Literature Prize in 2003 and a National Book Award in 2004. For these titles, along with Explorers of the Infinite (2008), Maria was awarded the 2009 American Alpine Club H. Adams Carter Literary Award. She has also written extensively about her worldwide travels and expeditions with her husband, Dag Goering, who is a veterinarian and photographer. Together they founded Hidden Places (hiddenplaces.net), a boutique adventure travel company, and its conservation branch, Adventures for a Cause, which fundraises for endangered species. Maria and Dag are based in Victoria, British Columbia, and in Catalonia. (Photo Credit: Dag Goering)
