The Art in Having Toys

Its been over a year now since I handed in my keys to my last apartment. I left Denver then with a pack weighing in somewhere around 65 lbs complete with a bow fire stick, snow shoes, and a compact military style folding shovel strapped to my pack. All of these little "accessories" I knew were extraneous in the back of my mind, but my dreams of living out Survivor Man for the year were wrestling with my practical knowledge on road walking travel from years earlier.

I bussed a good 60 miles, walked 20 or 30, and hitched somewhere about the same in the first four days before Todd in our mutual impatience to "finally get going" scooped me up for 257 miles of the 392 mile trek from Denver to Santa Fe. It was a glowing example of me shaking off the dust of stable living and basking in false glory of becoming a Road Dog. When we left Santa Fe about a week later I watched Todd go through the same giggling some to myself at that ridiculousness while still blind to still thoroughly acting the same way in my own right. And we both would for some time after our departure, its arguable that I'm still in those throes.

Anyway, I felt like writing about all this now as I was roaming around tech store to tech store in a car and comparing my wishes and wants of last year with this year. The past year has been far from 365 nights tucked away in shrubbery and backwoods, foraging for nuts and berries, wrestling bears to the ground for simple sustenance and survival. In fact, in December, while staying at my friend Stacey's house for three weeks in Massachusetts, I tried to count out how many days I actually spent sleeping in my bivy. I think I came to 51 nights from April 1 to mid-December. Since then I can tack on another week in Slab City and around the Salton Sea in California, a night outside Tucson, 3 nights around El Paso, TX, and 2 nights on my way out of Texas in February. All told about 2 more weeks in the past four months.

Survivor Man would be ashamed of himself to call the way I'm living now "outdoorsy", or worse "survivalist". The interesting thing, however, is that although that living style does intrigue me, this past year has been a realization that its not a priority to me. Having reconnected with 20 to 30 friends from all ends of my life whom I completely lost touch with over the past decade or two surfaced as the real meaning behind why I enjoy this way of being. These friends pepper the country, as well as a few other countries, in such a random pattern that keeping in touch with them on a face-to-face basis would be neigh impossible.

About six months ago I stopped updating this blog of my day to day activities. It was around that time that living this way stopped feeling like "a trip" and began feeling more like this was just what I was up to, in the same way that life changes if you go from a stationary job to one that ships you all over. I keep about three or four other personal journals along with this occasional blog and what I was writing just started seeming redundant. I think I also was falling into more of a nesting phase with the onset of winter which left me not wanting to be more private with my life. Once I returned from Europe at the end of November I slipped into a much more private way of being, slowed down my roaming speed considerably, and started adapting to making my life more comfortable while still keeping the freedom I had.

This was an incredibly interesting process to me that I was only half conscious of at the time. I also distanced my contact with Todd around that time as well. Half out of annoyance with him and what I perceived as his judgment and negativity, and partly because I felt like I didn't have much to report and was tired of reporting it all anyway. Not just to him, but to everyone at large. All of this feeling of need to report, of course, was completely self imposed, and compulsively so. A daring to keep up with the open book policy of self probing Todd set up for himself and a refusal to admit I wasn't up for it and it was wearing me out trying stupidly to compete, if you could even call it that. With this winter withdrawal I started looking over everything else I missed and was stubbornly refusing myself.

One of the things I was teased about in those first six months of travel was that I was jumping lily pad to lily pad in reference to always having yet another destination to see yet another friend somewhere else, or be present at birthdays scattered across the country. I didn't like this notion, or at least the teasing, at first while I was still claiming to be King of the American Outback. I reckoned in my head that these were just necessary, convenient, or rare opportunity stops to see people important to me or those I hadn't seen in a while. While in Europe, though, I began to recognize more of what I wanted, and what I was doing, was sewing up this vast network of friend strewn about over my years of wandering to start forming a base for me to finally settle down. Suddenly I really took a liking to that term hopping lily pad to lily pad.

Europe was an introduction to true detachment. My plans to head south into Latin America still run strong, despite seeming to always be pushed back a few months at a time, and hitching through the French countryside was a stark introduction to what jumping in a car is like when you can't speak coherent words to the driver. The very first ride I got was with a guy who spoke only French, and me only knowing English with spatterings of Spanish. We drove, chatting away animatedly, for a good ten to fifteen minutes having only the vaguest hints of what the other was saying. It took me quite a bit to figure out we were going no further when we reached his destination. Down south this will be a far more serious problem with the conditions starkly different along with the language.

The next day I caught a ride with two French girls going in the complete opposite direction that I was intending, but hey, they were cute. One of them spoke English and I ended up at a party with them in Lille where I resorted to breaking out a computer for an online translator. I spent a few hours talking with another French girl through typing it into the translator and interpreting what the funky translation was saying she was saying into what it was she likely was really saying. Such luxuries will doubtfully be found often in Mexico, Nicaragua, or Peru, and this was the height of my mingling with the natives over there. Down south I'll know no one as I did in Europe and my lily pads will dry up quickly.

As I said above, when I got home from all of that I had that winter feeling of nesting along with much to chew over. What was I doing? Why was I doing it? Should I bother to keep doing it, or have I uncovered what I was after?

On my walk cross country I had a moment on the second leg when Angie and I broke up on the side of the road. After she hitched home I walked another two days coming to the conclusion that I'd found what I had set off for and was stubbornly letting it get away. What felt like a courageous soul searching march suddenly felt like an escape to lick my wounds in the wilds and build a few more walls of isolation around myself. I called off the walk, went back to Denver to win her over again and three weeks later discovered that was completely premature. Not because we didn't work out, but because I had left yet another thing incomplete. I'd half assed just one more thing, and when I set off on this sojourn I made the same promise to myself to complete it as I ended up doing with that walk. The difference being that there was the distinctive end to that by hitting another ocean. This goal is far, far more vague and intuitive based.

What I concluded over December and January was that I was far from done seeking what I was after. Sure I'd reconnected with a ton of my friends and even family I'd lost track of, but it was clear that was just the first step to whatever I was doing. What I found myself picking over more was what I could do to fill in the gaps of what I felt was missing in my life wandering that I take for granted when stable.

The joys of being stable is the comfort, something I'd come to see as a dirty word. I'd been knit picking over anything in my pack to lighten the weight of it up, but had stripped myself down to a very Proud utilitarian lifestyle. Now the balance was to figure out what I needed, what toy or gadget did I need that could make this feel more like a life and less like something to grunt through as a sort of purge quest. It introduced weighing in what it is I'm valuing about travel life against stable life and how to blend them.

I miss movies, diners, late nights out with friends, I miss being able to talk to whoever I want to talk to when I need to and not only on Saturday. I also don't like having to call everyone I know in one day whether I feel like being on the phone that day or not. I like the freedom to go where ever I want to go, be at whatever event I want to be at whenever I feel called to go. This agility I will be very slow to give up again, but it goes in the face of anything like the home and coffee shop I've started decorating and day dreaming about in my head.

In the past few months I've considered revamping all kinds of things about how I'm doing things. I was considering a car at one point, carrying a netbook around with me to ease up the restriction in communication, and replacing my cell with Skype and a headset.

Its an interesting little internal conversation I've found myself in. How to live a practical nomadic life in a world designed with hard lines for settlement living. Lately I've taken to alternate history books which has gotten me thinking about what would political boundaries, and life in general, be like had any of the Native American nations, particularly the nomadic ones, been able to keep the advancing western armies back east.

Anyway, these are my ramblings for now. This coffee shops closing so its time to go.