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My recent trip to Vancouver: A change in pace, and a reason to come back and clean out the closets. Good to be rousted out of the slowing habits, the routine that sometimes includes procrastination.
On a trip, we do everything we plan to do (if our expectations are reasonable) putting off nothing. What we’re doing is simple: there are no extras, no requirements, no taxes (other than for sales).
Back in life-land, it’s nice to keep an edge to things if possible.(This is said while acknowledging the benefits of electricity, Internet, warm clothes for cold weather, running water, modern hiking shoes, and other frills of the industrialized world.)
Still, there’s an excitement to living without those.
For a few days, I lived deep in woods in northwest Montana, 60 miles from a paved road. We were without electricity and the Internet (at a time of dot-com explosion), and we bathed in a river fed by snow melt.
We filled lamps with kerosene, received groceries hauled by mules (a luxury, even though we couldn’t have bananas (easily bruised) or as many green vegetables as packaged pastas), and delicately fried trout caught in the river.
We were in a national wilderness area, and this was a U.S. Forest Service station.
Coming from New York City, I knew how rare this was -- but I didn’t want to stay.
The work involved using non-mechanized tools -- cross-cut saws and hatchets -- to clear trails of downed trees on steep hillsides, and often involved hiking nearly 12 miles a day on hills. Each "week we labored 10 days, then received four days off. Many of the other workers used weekends to hike up mountains in search of fire-observatory views.
But I was soft. I missed the Internet and my cell phone. I missed baths that were not in the river. I liked thinking, and writing, more than I liked producing change with my hands.
So, I departed. I returned to civilized outer-world Montana. Eventually I went back to another city, Chicago.
In the end, though, Chicago was a bit too far from the deep forests for me. The city was well-planned -- a bit too much, for me. Its only wildness lay in Lake Michigan and in winter winds. I could stand at the lake's edge, but not sail across its surface. There were no ferries, no boats for those who don't spend or have boat-owning friends.
These days, I am trying to keep myself less often in the overheated, overly comfortable rooms of life.
Testing ourselves, I think, is the best way to experience more of the world. If I only wanted the basic necessities, I wouldn't experience the back country of anywhere, from the U.S. and Canada to Bolivia or Russia. It’s the best way to know what others experience.
With that in mind, I’m sharing a list of things I find thrilling:
Going without a jacket until it’s truly cold
Cross-country skiing deep into quiet woods
Standing among northern spruce and other evergreens
Spending time in northern places: Alaska, upper British Columbia, the tops of all the Canadian provinces. Montana. North Dakota.
The snowiest places, and among people who move to these places. The Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Duluth.
When a city’s power is out from a storm and people walk and talk peacefully
The lull after a snowstorm
Bayou country and the Everglades
Diaries and books about pioneers, homesteaders, and explorers
Edward Hoagland’s books about the renegades who lived in far northern British Columbia when he was there in the early 1960s
Spending time at the edge of a continent
Swimming in cold water
What are the things that thrill you?
