Get Your Gear and Go West.

There’s a scene very early on in the Danny Boyle movie 127 Hours where James Franco (blah) decides to go out hiking and in a montage we see him quickly gather up his gear and toss it in his truck and head out on adventures. Now if you’re familiar with the movie then you know that this whole adventure does not go well for him (He has to cut off his own arm. Long story).  

Be that as it may, I have always liked the gear gathering montage. This is probably because when it comes to outdoor adventure stuff I have always been a meticulous planner. You should see the research I did when I went kayak camping on Catalina island!

Over my last few moves though, I have shed a lot of my gear. I got rid of stuff because I didn’t have much time to use it in grad school or because some of it was worn out or because the technologies have gotten so much better in the last few years that I knew it would be worth the money to eventually upgrade.

Recently I have slowly been putting together a new kit of stuff. I needed a new sleeping pad, a new water filter, a new little light weight tent, a small solar charger, etc. Well over the last few months I have researched those things and rounded them up. As I’d suspected, the technology has gotten better. I found a 1-person single walled backpacking tent that I can get down to less than three pounds if I swap out the tent stakes for titanium. It cost $30 dollars. Now three pounds is two or three times as much as the absolute lightest similar tents out there, but those cost ten times as much. I found a Sawyer filter that is smaller than the one I bought six years ago and cost a third of what I’d paid back then. It really is amazing what the quiet and boring march of incremental improvement can do. The kit I’m going to end up with will cost less than $200 and a similar kit five years ago would have cost (I estimate) about $1,000. 

How cool is that?

My plan has been to assemble a set of stuff that I can toss in my little car on a whim on a Friday afternoon and at least go out car camping for the night. I even have some freeze dried meals and extra Clif Bars and a couple gallons of water. I am good to go!

But then … as always … there is something I forgot. I don’t know where to go.

I live on California’s Central Coast and I’d just assumed that there were campsites and whatnot all around. That is only kind of true. There are some. But the problem seems to be that they are all located on California’s Central Coast and it is August and they are full. I am still getting used to the idea that I live in a place that people come to to vacation and to get away from everything. Honestly, it was easier to find campsites when I lived in LA. 

So maybe the idea was flawed from the outset. Maybe the reason that the gear gathering montage appealed to me so much was because it speaks to this kind of light and free fantasy of being able to grab and go that simply isn’t true of the world we live in. Maybe on some level I knew that. The reason it is appealing is because it is impossible.

But fear not. I’ll figure something out. Maybe it will just require waiting until September, when the tourists begin to ebb away. Or maybe it will mean sitting in front of a computer, refreshing State Park websites like I’m trying to score concert tickets. That seems like an odd way to start a nature adventure: online. 

That getting away from all the dreary things about modern life requires more deeply engaging in those dreary things tells us something about modern life and why we want to get away from it.

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What Are We Supposed to Do Now?

I can feel two different things happening in my head lately. They’re occurring concurrently and in near parallel, but I do think that at some point they’re going to converge.

Like many of us who are vaccinated, I’ve been making some small plans to do some real traveling. Airports! Cities! Adventure!

But at the same time, I still watch the news. I’ve been watching Delta spread, I’ve been watching the numbers as hospitals fill up again. And last night I heard for the first time about this “Delta Plus” variant which is apparently even more dangerous and transmissible than the normal Delta, which itself is even more dangerous and transmissible than the original Covid that send us all into our homes last year.

I go to meetings during the day about returning to work in-person and about campus repopulating. I check my vacation time and look at flights. I look at the calendar and ponder when I could take some time off. I have tickets to Hamilton in October for God’s sake!

And yet, I think back on the trip I took with friends to Washington state in early June. We were all vaccinated of course, but that trip required two airports, airplanes, being around strangers … I felt comfortable about it at the time and the CDC said it was fine at the time and Dr. Fauci said it was fine at the time, and yet … I’m not sure if I would make that trip tomorrow under our current circumstances. I’m not 100% sure I wouldn’t either, but I would really have to think about it.

The thing that really worries me is the recent announcement from the CDC that fully vaccinated people who get a breakthrough infection can spread Covid. That’s really bad. When this all started in 2020, when we first learned that asymptomatic spread was not just possible, but common, I sat myself down and had a little conversation about how to be; what was the ethical way to live? This was back before vaccines and before testing was even reliable. 

I realized then that if it was functionally impossible to know if you had it, then the only responsible way to behave was as if you knew that you had it. As much as that sucks, there really was no other way under the circumstances to protect other people.

So I was pretty responsible about my quarantine. There are a couple things that — in hindsight — I would not have done knowing what I know now, but on the whole, I followed the rules, because that’s how you keep people alive.

As I look at the way things have been changing in these last few weeks, I am beginning to feel like our situation is getting worse and worse by the day. It makes me angry, because we didn’t have to end up here, but there are so many people who won’t get vaccinated — people whose calculations about proper and ethical behavior are the polar opposite of mine — that I really have started worrying that I won’t get to see my family at Christmas this year either. 

I don’t think that American society has the will or the fortitude to really do another Quarantine. I think that the last year — to say nothing of the last four — has really demonstrated what a feckless nation of petulant children we are. So I don’t know what happens if our collective situation keeps getting worse day by day.

And yet. There is an optimist in me. So I still check on flights. I still make my lists of places I want to go. I still check my calendar. 

I just haven’t booked any tickets yet.

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4 July, 2021: On the Bus.

 Yesterday was the 4th of July and for the first time in literally years, the fireworks were a part of my life. I actually had a good three day weekend. I had people in town and we went exploring. We ended up in San Francisco and then ended up and what turned out to be an entirely sanctioned (re: illegal) fireworks show that was one of the most chaotic and dangerous and American thing I have maybe ever seen. It is certainly on the list.

Probably it is just because we’re gradually coming out of the Quarantine, but I did experience an unusual wave contentedness and happiness about this big, dumb, messy country of ours. Just walking the streets of various cities, exploring new places, and seeing the weird and wonderful and frequently bad smelling mish-mash of people who actually are this country, it left me with a twinge of … I think “patriotism” is too weird of a word after the last few years … let’s go with “pride” … I felt a twinge of pride about this country.  At one point my little group of (fully vaccinated and masked) adventurers road a bus in SF and I really think that you will never get a better idea of what we really are as a population than riding a city bus. Low-key I looked at all the people and (what I could see of) their faces and — while no one was experiencing this emotion but me — I felt like we were part of a community; people who have survived the Pandemic, people who were all out in the city on a nice July 4th, people who were all on that bus at the same time, breathing the same air. Normally it would have been anxiety inducing, but this time — for the first time since early 2020 — it felt good again to be alive and out in the world. 

I have so many mixed feelings about what we have all gone through and my faith in humanity has been so devastatingly harmed by the way people behaved last year, but I suddenly became aware that sitting there on that bus yesterday heading down Haight to the botanical gardens, I was starting to heal a little. I like to hope that maybe every single one of us was.

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Leaving on a Jet Plane (Tomorrow)!

Short post today.

I am doing a half day of work this morning and then this afternoon I am driving up to the Bay Area to meet up with some travel buddies and then in the morning we are driving to Oakland Airport from which we will be flying to Washington state where we will be spending a few days in a beautiful house on the shores of Lake Whatcom, which is basically in Canada.

I know what you’re thinking: Is this an adventure? Because it sounds like an adventure …

Let me ask the judges … Judges???

Judges say: YES! IT IS AN ADVENTURE!

Man, I love an adventure.

I am especially looking forward to this one because of — you know — Covid. While I know that the pandemic is not, strictly speaking, over in America, I am fully vaccinated as are all my travel compatriots. My county is doing great, the county we’re flying to is doing great. We have reached the point where those of us who are vaccinated in this country need to start giving the middle finger to this disease. Vaccine summer, baby!

I have practice-packed and repacked my little black backpack, my travel clothes are ready to go, my devices are charged, my airplane snacks are ziplocked and loaded. Let’s go!

We are getting to that point where life like sunlight after a storm is beginning to break through the glowering clouds of quarantine and I am here for it. Like the swallows returning to Capistrano, I am returning to cheap airfares on budget airlines to go to weird places just for the pure fuck all joy of being alive.

It is good to be alive again.

Not sure if I will be able to blog tomorrow morning, not sure what the morning will be like, but if I don’t just know it is because I am just so busy being alive again.

It is good to be alive again. 

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The kind of day it’s been.

Sometimes I like to take what I call “expedition days”. Today was an expedition day.

I woke up too early for no reason.

Made some coffee.

Took the 8 bus from NorthEast across the river to Old Town.

Walked down to the 20 bus.

Took the 20 up Burnside past the Taco Bell (Hey, we have a Taco Bell!)

Rode to where Burnside goes up into the forest and narrows.

Missed my stop.

Got off on the side of the road in the hills where there was no place else to walk to.

Ran across very busy Burnside.

Tried to hike up the shoulder a quarter mile to the next bus stop in the opposite direction.

Saw my bus coming and threw my hands up in the air, swearing.

Saintly bus driver pulled over next to me where there was no bus stop, picked me up.

“Thank you so much! You’re the best!”
“Yeah, I look out for people on the side of the road up here.”
“I think I got off at the wrong stop.”
“I think so too.”

Got off at the right stop.

Dashed back across busy Burnside.

Hiked up steep, narrow, sidewalk-less roads to Pittock Mansion (kinda Portland’s Hearst Castle).

Crested the hill at the top.

Misunderstood how the line for the bathroom worked.

Paid $11 for entry after misreading the website and thinking entry was $1.

Followed the footpath around the house as it opened up to one of the most breathtaking views I have ever seen, looking down the tree-y mountain to the heart of downtown Portland, the thicket of buildings, the river and bridges beyond, then the eastside of Portland growing house-y then hilly then mountainy, then distant and blue toward the steep peak of snowy Mt. Hood up above the horizon line.

Wandered through the mansion. A big house made of many small rooms: the music room, the dining room, the library, the butler’s pantry (a narrow hallway with a beautiful sink and amazing view), the sewing room (round), the writing room, the social room (oval), the west sleeping porch, the master bathroom (round and amazing views from the bidet). I studied the steampunky showers, with hinges and nozzles and tanks for mixing hot and cold water. I played with the antique intercom phones until the docet told me not to. I climbed up the marble grand staircase and then down the otherside and then down to the basement and then up the otherside and then down again and then up again and then watched tourists take adorable pictures, one of them on each step.

Wandered back out to that amazing view and took more pictures.

Began to descend the narrow road again and saw a trailhead for Wildwood Trail, which I’d hiked part of before. Considered that I had no water and only 44% left on my phone. Decided to go for it.

Hiked down and down and around and then I was in the woods. Down and down and around. Took off my overshirt. Took off my hat. Began to talk to the squirrels, “This goes to downtown, yeah?”

Through quiet forest. Then noisy forest, dead ending at bust Burnside again.

Dashed across busy Burnside again.

Then down Wildwood again, then down and around. Map-less faith in my feet and the good weather and the fact that all trails eventually lead somewhere. Tried to whistle a Billy Joel song (Moving Out) but discovered I only know the chorus.

Ended up on the shoulder of the road somewhere near Hoyt Arboretum.

Completely suddenly randomly got pulled up on by the Washington Park free shuttle and hopped on.

“You headed toward the MAX train?’
“Yep.”
“Cool.”

Rode down past the Holocaust memorial (Been there before, it is quiet and beautiful and stark. The stone walkway littered with weathered brass sculptures of discarded suitcases, the type that would have been left behind in stacks at German depots. Striking. Definite. Accusatory. Hard.)

Rode down past the Japanese Garden, the test rose garden, war memorial, toward the zoo.

Climbed off the shuttle. Into the big elevator. Down underground. Into the windy train tunnel. Slipped onto the Red Line to the airport. Zipped up through the longest underground train tunnel in North America. Blasted out into sunlight again somewhere west of Downtown.

Got off by the Target. Wandered through Director Park, a European-style town square with cafe tables and fountains and little kids running barefoot. Under the glass pavilion there was a hopscotch dance panty of some kind going on. I watched for a while, thought about that Gilmore Girls episode.

Walked south on 10th to the Safeway and bought two corn dogs and ate them on the sidewalk walking to the university.

Went up into the library to charge my phone and work on my book about avocados.

Work. Avocados. Work. Avocados.

Walked out to Broadway and hopped on the 8 bus, back across the river, back to where I live right now. Back to where I started.

That’s the kind of day it has been.

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The Polish Adventurer.

So I am reading this Atlantic article about Baron Roman Fedorovich von Ungern-Sternberg (who was a White Russian who sort of took over Mongolia in the 1920s) and in it the author Nick Danforth

drops a mention of a Polish guy named Ferdynand Antoni Ossendowski who is described as

an “adventurer and reputed fabulist” and I am left sitting here wondering how the fuck I get that on my business card.

I mean, let’s be honest here, I basically am an adventurer and fabulist, but I have really got to turn it up to eleven if I’m going to get other people to describe me that way.

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Busy-Busy-Busy.

In all the busy-busy-busy go-go-go of life lately, (there has been a lot of busy-busy-busy go-go-go BTW), I realize that I have completely lost track of a couple of things.

For instance, it is October and I had a birthday. It was terrible! Without belaboring the details, I am now old. As where before I was just kind of getting old, I am now old. Luckily I decided some time ago that standard metrics of life success were not for me, because otherwise I would be feeling pretty silly and sad about some of my life choices right about now.

Also, I have been teaching for real for a few months now, but I have been so busy teaching that I haven’t gotten to savor very much the fact that I am teaching. I really enjoy it. I have no earthly clue if I am any good at it, but since I am so good at all the other things, it is safe to assume I am good at this one … that’s how these things work, right? Go I hope that’s how these things work.

Additionally, it is October and that means next month is November and every year in November I attempt (and usually fail at) doing NaNoWriMo (which is National Novel Writer’s Month) and, oddly, while I am in a writing program and know plenty of writers, almost none of them share my enthusiasm for the project, the goal of which is to write a novel of at least 50,000 words in one month. It is a nearly impossible goal and I have only ever succeeded a couple of time, but I always learn something from the attempt. I wonder why no one else does this though. Probably this is owing to the fact that many of the writers I know are younger than I am and/or learned how to write from going to school, so they don’t conceptualize writing as a grueling marathon that one competes in completely alone. Learning to write in college teaches you that you produce short, tight work and then you show it to other people. I didn’t learn to write that way, I learned to write more or less alone, not knowing (or really caring) if anyone else would ever lay eyes on a single word. It is an act of love for me, but also I guess, a kind of compulsion or, at the very least, something that I make myself do because I know that it is something I should do. When I go running a lot (which I have not been doing enough of, on account of the disgusting heat the past few month) I feel a feeling similar to what I feel when I make myself right; it is hard, but becomes less hard through repetition and ultimately there is a tremendous feeling of pride in having done it.

Anyway, NANO is coming up next month and I don’t have any idea what to write about. A couple months ago I did read a fascinating book called Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky and I still find myself thinking about it just about every day. It was a bizarre and beautiful little book about remote islands. Each island was described in a couple of pages, but it was haunting and strange and kind of inspired. I would love to write something broken up into misshapen pieces that way. Or maybe that is just the kind of mood I’m in.

Also in November I am going to Colorado for a few days. I’m doing it primarily because I found an insanely cheap flight to Denver. It is on Frontier Airlines, which is one of those airlines that’s so cheap the planes only have one wing and half the amount of fuel required to get to the destination. My roundtrip from LAX to DEN was $76.

Let me say that again: My. Roundtrip. LAX to DEN. Was seventy-six dollars.

The wanderlust adventurer in me could not allow that to go by.

It works out nicely though because I’m thinking of applying to the MFA program at Colorado State University, which is an hour from Denver in Ft. Collins, so I justified the trip to myself by selling it as a way to visit their campus, which is a responsible thing to do. Got that? I am being responsible!

There are a million other things going on, but those are the only ones I want to write about right now. Though I should mention briefly that I have found myself mentioning a lot lately that I write a blog. I’m not bragging on it (any asshole can write a blog) and I’m not trolling for readers (I have long since given up on the idea that anyone reads this thing), but it has come up in numerous conversations lately about my “craft” of writing (which means that frequently lately I have found myself ambushed into conversations about “craft”, ick, gag me with a spoon). It turns out that part of my “craft” is simply to write a lot. I don’t write every day and I don’t write as much as I would like, or should, but I look back over the past few years and I realize that I’m almost always writing, either for fun or for school, or for this blog. I realize how useful it has been to me to have this place where I can write something and then send it out there into the world. Even if that has not improved my “craft”, it has certainly helped me do away with things like “standards” or “a sense of decency” when presenting my writing to the world.

Occasionally people who care about me have suggested that I temporarily set this blog to private so that prospective employers or students or what have you won’t stumble across it, but I have always been reluctant to do that because I’m choosing what I put out there into the world. My sense of decorum may be a little different than some people’s, but it's not like this is a blog of dick pics or anything, it is a blog about the writing life and the way in which writing is a way of attempting to understand the world.

And cat pictures. This is also a blog of cat pictures.

And pictures of buildings.

And other cool things that I “find”.

And I find a lot of cool stuff.

That is all I have time to write about right now. I have a bunch of busy-busy-busy go-go-go to get back to after all.

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Happy Happy Go Times.

I am now in the first hour of a ten hour overnight train trip. I have claimed a nice seat on the observation deck. I have some whiskey. I have a book about D. B. Cooper. Sleepy Southern California is rolling past my window and the train is making that very satisfying thrumble that trains make. I am a happy camper for once.

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The 360.

I am in Union Station in downtown LA waiting to get my seat assignment and I'm noticing the bizarre plethora of humanity arrayed around me in the waiting area and I'm struck by the fact that not a single average seeming person will be taking the train with me out across the desert night. These are some of my travel companions:

Guy in camo overall shorts

Fat version of a rockabilly friend of mine

Samuel L. Jackson's soft spoken younger brother

Infant with an iPhone

Germans

Amish teenagers

Very old woman with arm cast

Obese rednecks talking about their trip to Paris

Dirty hippie with no shoes but two guitars

An aggressively large number of people wearing Hawaiian print clothing.

Man with a gambling problem who claims to live in a condemned lighthouse near 3rd street in Laguna Beach.

Guy who I swear to god is Powers Boothe

Asian Jennifer Lawrence

Man with apparently one tooth

Dude in khaki-colored jeans and straw hat and beard who can only possibly be a paleontologist.

Emma Stone if she dyed her hair that great shade of dark red and wore Hello Kitty sweats and, you know, rode on trains

More Germans

Dude who ... I don't even know how to describe. Looks kind of like a wolf wearing a black Panama hat with a red feather in it, and suspenders, and a gray sweater that can't possibly fit him tied around his waist, and the combat boots his pants are ducked into.

Neck tattoo guy in mesh Dogers jersey.

A lone glossy black electric guitar, apparently left behind but sitting in a chair in the waiting area trying to be as dignified as it can be under the circumstances.

Woman with birthday balloons

Old leathery skinned couple with matching windbreakers

Duck Dynasty lookin' motherfucker

Black British hipster

Amtrak employee announcing that at any moment the power may go out ... that's odd, right?

(Here is the view from inside the waiting area.)

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Either Or.

So I am sitting at the bar in Union Station in downtown LA. I'm waiting for a train to show up and then take me to Tuscon. The drinks are WAY overpriced but the music is okay. The bartendress is very talkative but thankfully she is talking to the couple next to me who look shockingly like Rush Limbaugh and Oprah. If they can find love while looking at each other, then there may just be hope for the rest of us.

In the twenty minutes I've been here the bartendress has claimed that she sang backup on a Mariah Carey album and that she was accepted to Harvard Law School. I would be willing to believe either of those things, but not both.

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Underground Hot Air Ballooning!

I like a good adventure as much as the next guy and that is why I WANT TO DO THIS! 

And just to be clear, “this” is underground hot air ballooning Read all about it here. Or you can just watch the video below.

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I DARE YOU.

Below is a short piece of writing I did for my Creative Non-Fiction class last week. It is not particularly good. It is tricky though because I DARE YOU to read it and not be fooled into thinking it is good. It has all the hallmarks of good writing, however, on the whole, it just is not very good.

Anyway, the writing prompt for this one was difficult because it was vague: write about a trip you took alone when you were young.

This was also tricky because I do not want to write a memoir and have no interest spending my time writing mini-memoirs, but I am a dubious student and I do what I am told and - to be honest - part of the reason I am in school is so that I will be forced to write stuff I wouldn’t normally write.

So then, please read on! (And remember that I warned you that it is not actually very good.)

Oh, and just to prove the veracity of some of the claims made below, here is a picture of me at Pear Lake in Sequoia National Park (See?! I do go on adventures.)

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Burning Ship.

Bertrand Russell wrote: Adventurous men enjoy shipwrecks, mutinies, earthquakes, conflagrations, and all kinds of unpleasant experiences.

I found these lines rereading one of my favorite travel books, called “Vagabonding” by Rolf Potts. He’s a mild mannered guy who spends his time getting into trouble all around the world while living on a shoestring. If it ever turns out that I’m updating this blog from Macau, then it will be his fault. The man leaves wanderlust in his wake the way snails leave a sticky trail. Youtube him and you’ll be amazed by how much of a dork he is. Read his book and you’ll be impressed by how fearless he is. I wish someone had put his book in my hands when I was a decade younger. But I also wish that I wasn’t suffering from advanced male pattern baldness and I also wish that floating unicorns distributed Butterfinger candy bars. These wishes are neither here nor there. I’ve learned to rock male pattern baldness just as I hope to make good on wanderlust. As a thirty-four year old grad student, I have long since given up on doing things the way I was supposed to, and there is something kind of liberating about this existence. Though no word yet on the floating Butterfinger unicorns, but I am keeping an eye out.

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Oh! BTW, that beautiful painting above is called “Burning Ship” and it was painted by Frank Bodilly. He was just a boy from Cornwall who became a barrister and served as a judge in Calcutta in the 1890s. He retired back to Cornwall but died in Sicily, which ain't that bad a place to die of old age. He was a lawyer first and an artist second and not of much note in either direction, but I like that painting even though it is hard to tell that the boat is on fire.

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Pictures of Life.

 Here are some recent photos from my life.

A recent lunch that I had.

Initial sketches/thoughts for my shipping container home!

Water bladders hanging to dry after a hike. I like this picture very much because it is what the end of a good adventure always looks like.

What your humble author looks like in a lady’s denim jacket.

 (Thanks Sarah O for this!)

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