“So what prompted that?” my brother would later ask. It was a good question, and a simple one. I wish I had a simple answer. In fact, the reason is as complicated as the ebb and flow of my life.
Once upon a time, I used to sleep in a tent quite often. When I was a teenager, it was Boy Scouts. As a 20-something, it was solo backpacking along Lake Superior’s North Shore. In my early 30’s, it was motorcycle camping all over the Western United States. Different camping activities for different eras in my life. My circumstances would change and so too would the nature of my wanderings in the great outdoors. But the outdoors were a constant presence in my life.
But then I got married, and the babies came, and I thought we would camp as a family. It was only then that I realized my wife loathes the very idea. Her idea of roughing it is three stars instead of four. So the family era blew by like a tornado. There were birthday parties and soccer games and swimming meets and volleyball and family vacations and shopping … so much shopping … but whatever wandering I did outdoors was infrequent … and without the family.
Not that I didn’t want to wander. It’s just that I had other priorities. The long era without a tent was so long that it’s no surprise people assumed I was done with all of that.
But one age ends and another begins. The kids got older, one left for college, the other started classes in a local community college, and I just wasn’t needed as much any more. At the same time, the F150 I’d used for all those family years was getting long in the tooth. I waged an internal debate with myself: What should I replace it with, what did I want from that vehicle, what did it have to do? Among many many requirements, the most important one was this: it had to enable me to wander.
I’ll spare you the agony of that long internal debate. In early 2019 I found myself broken down yet again on the side of the road. Irritated, I’d had enough. So I put the debate away, and I dumped the pickup in favor of a Jeep Wrangler JLU Rubicon. And then I promptly came up with excuses why I couldn’t go wandering.
I really can’t explain the dithering. To be sure, there were nameless fears and all the wrong kinds of inertia. Beyond that, there were job pressures and family pressures and, honestly, I really wasn’t feeling well. I was badly overweight. And there was a cough that wouldn’t go away. Every time I attempted exercise, I ended up doubling over practically passing out. As the year went on, the problem got progressively worse. The doctors I saw about it didn’t help. They certainly didn’t explain. Until, finally, in early 2020 I found a doctor who gave me a correct diagnoses: adult on-set asthma. She gave me an inhaler and told me to use it twice a day, no missing.
It worked. The cough went away, and a true miracle it was too. I immediately set out to lose at least ten pounds by walking it off. Three pounds down, and I got slammed by gout. I no sooner found out why my foot was swollen agonizingly to three times it’s normal size when the whole damn world got locked down due to Covid. Like everyone in every corner of the planet, 2020 was off to a truly shitty start.
Those were dark days.
But a funny thing happened in those early weeks of the pandemic. I couldn’t really do anything because I couldn’t walk. And even if I could go out, there was no where to go. But dealing with the gout meant changing my diet which resulted in unexpected weight loss. Two pounds, week after week after week. Eventually the foot got better, and then I got a jump rope, and a kettlebell, and I started putting myself back together again, and all of a sudden I was 30 pounds down. It was summer, and the Covid rate was barely above pandemic levels. Things were looking up. I started to plan a first camping trip with the Jeep… Modoc County was calling to me.
But then all of California turned into an apocalyptic forest fire hellscape. I exercise outside in these Covid times. Now the air quality was about as good as the mouth of an industrial smokestack. And I have asthma. I had to no choice but to sit down and ride it out. Weeks went by. Then months. The fires wouldn’t stop.
But that wasn’t enough. No. There was the presidential election, which was no one’s idea of fun. Silicon Valley social media turned their algorithms on high — the ones designed to piss everyone off, and so keep eyeballs glued to their site. So of course everyone was on edge.
Somehow summer drifted into fall but it seemed like things were only getting worse. Work was no better. Simultaneously, all at once, three different departments at work, none of them my own, slammed me with, uh, “surprises” that left me stressed, sleepless, and, frankly, rather unpleasant to be around. Finally, one night, after a midnight call with people 12 time zones away, I stared out the dark window in my home office, and I felt the walls closing in, and the ceiling was pressing down, and the pulse was booming in my ears. I was distracted. Inefficient. Forgetful. The simplest things were looming large and impossible. None of it made any sense.
I used to laugh. I wasn’t laughing anymore.
Really. 2020 was the worst year of my life. My guess is it was pretty rock bottom for you too. I know that plenty of people had it far worse than me. People knew illness, people knew economic ruin, people knew death. I actually had it good in comparison. Even so, I don’t want a do-over.
Sitting there in my dark office, late at night, exhausted, I looked at weather reports, and I looked at a map, and I looked at a calendar, and all the noise and excuses fell to silence. Fuck it, I thought, I’m going to Death Valley.
Time to wander again.