Still moving, ten years hence

This blog was started ten years ago out of exuberance and anticipation and boredom. I’d been laid off from my full time job, the kids were independent teens, and there was no reason to think this lull in life would go on forever. It was a wonderful time, at first.

I wanted to get out and enjoy my “free” time before another significant job came along to entangle me. In fact, I remember hoping that I wouldn’t find a new job right away – that I’d have the summer off, anyway, as a reward for the years of busting ass for multiple employers as well as raising a coven of young practically on my own.

Fortunately I was able to enjoy the summer of 2009 unhindered, giving my outdoors blog a good start. The first few entries were concerned with my job search, but it slowly transitioned from using outdoors activities to cope with unemployment to finding and writing about all of the trails I’d driven past in my working/soccer mom whirlwind of a life that was ending. It was like finding a secret door to another world. This blog gave me some purpose and direction, and it hasn’t lead me astray.

My enthusiasm for outdoors pursuits has not dimmed in 10 years. I just got a (‘nother) “new” (used) mountain bike, ordered my 437^th pair of running shoes (but who’s counting?) and have accomplished one of several significant hikes planned for this summer.

The challenging part is doing everything I want to do on a tight budget because there are few employers clamoring for writers. While I’ve had several decent freelance jobs (lasting a year or more) in the past decade and published three books, I’ve had to significantly reduce my expectations for ever returning to a well-paying full-time job in my field. The field of journalism shrunk by something like 40 percent – shed almost half of all jobs – in the last 15 years. I feel fortunate to still scratch out a living putting words together.

What I do now resembles using stepping stones to cross a brook, planning carefully for my next step and maintaining my balance, because there are no safety nets in self-employment. One big screw-up can cost dearly, whether it’s a trip to the emergency room for getting too daring on the trails (been there, done that) or letting my ambition for travel outstrip my financial resources. My outdoors adventures help with this life planning immeasurably, whether it’s toughing my way through to a goal or turning back and regrouping when the route is impassible.

A big part of the game is budgeting, both time and money. It’s funny in hindsight that I worked at an outdoors retailer and saw firsthand the “gearache” so many adventurers wander into. I don’t bother pretending anymore: I find used bikes and discount shoes. I eke long lives out of old style frame packs rather than buying the latest and greatest stuff. When friends offer rain jackets their kids have cast off, I take them without shame. When you think about it, nobody’s reading the label on your hiking boots or knock-off jacket when you’re on a trail. If the gear fits and functions as it should, who cares if it’s Patagonia or Columbia, used or new?

Also, I’ve stopped spending money on stuff like road races even though I enjoyed them and liked testing myself. After doing the math it was undeniable that $50 or $75 entry fees were just buying me very expensive t-shirts because I wasn’t going to be on the podium.

Lots of stuff happens in 10 years of life: you might travel to countries you never imagined visiting (like Peru), you might fall in love (checked the box there), you might become a grandparent (ditto), and you might hit some rough patches. As far as the latter goes, there’s no salve like nature to soothe broken hearts, tortured psyches, and provide inspiration and direction to aimless, jobless adults. Experiencing nature re-centers a person, reducing stress and from what I’ve experienced, releases endorphins that are better

I would have been happy to finish but I surprised myself and trimmed a few minutes from my half marathon time

how did we ever make it to the top of Carter Dome without special gear??

did I say most of the trails were well-drained?

than an 8 percent ABV microbrew after a long day on a trail.

When I work at my new job, which is speaking on the topics of my published books, including Hidden Gems of New England and Hikes Through History – I am an outspoken advocate of forest bathing, that practice that puts us back in touch with the natural world, even if it’s in micro-doses of 15 minutes a day.

When we find our footing in nature we can begin to take our next steps in life.

Making Reality a Dream

A few years ago I was hungry for new adventure, ravenous for the thrill of adrenaline-pumping experiences. I sought out new trails and eagerly logged them here on my blog.

I was a sweaty mess but so happy the day’s hike was over..

going up thunderbolt

Then life and a significant relationship got in the way, bending my ambition to better suit us rather than just me. Instead of biking, running and skiing dozens of new trails a year I was getting more adept at the few that were convenient to his house or mine… I began to feel the sluggishness of complacency weighing me down. I pined for the wonderful chill of getting lost at dusk, of knowing (from fresh evidence) that coyotes were probably watching me ski in circles in the woods, trying to find my way out. I missed the bruises and the excitement of crashes that only fellow mountain bikers enjoy.

Then last fall a project came up: would I update a hiking book that he’d authored many years ago? He was too busy schmoozing Hollywood stars who made a movie of one of his books. Fine, I thought, this is my opportunity to blow out the cobwebs and explore tons of trails, just what I needed!

I immediately booked several hikes with local groups, hoping to get most of them done before snow made it impossible without snowshoes.

The first one I did was the Skyline trail (above) in the Blue Hills back in November, and I was shocked to find the trails very crowded on a mediocre day. Crowds, what? I didn’t sign up for that!

But the reality of updating a hiking book isn’t quite so dreamy as spending all my time out on trails. He said it’s a waste of time to revisit each of the 30 trails described in my half of the book. Just confirm the details of the descriptions and maps with the rangers on-site .. and spend more time being productive on other projects. That was a great reality check from the efficiency expert but a big letdown at the same time.

Still, the book needed a handful of new trail guides created, so I geared up to visit each and earnestly record my impressions of the wildlife, the history, and the enjoyment of the destinations accurately and completely. The book was still an excuse to get out and hike, bike and ski new places again, just not as radically as I imagined.

One was Massasoit State Park, a woodsy area including several ponds between an airport and a golf course that the state apparently stopped funding as a park more than a decade ago when a storm blew out power to the old campground. I’m assured the park is being funded again, thanks to a handful of local residents who made enough noise to be heard in Boston, but for now you’re flying without instruments because the trail markers are nonexistent and there are trails in places where none exist on maps. Still, the glacial hills and absence of root-strewn trails made it great mountain biking, especially the zippy waters-edge trails around the small ponds.

Another of my “new finds” for the book is an interesting 1,600-acre parcel in Hanson controlled by the state Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, called Burrage Pond. It consists of white cedar swamp, open reservoirs, defunct cranberry bogs, active bogs and woods. Because it’s so flat and wide open it has a distinctly different feeling than Massasoit, and bird watching there must be great in season. I loved skiing the overgrown causeways between the old bogs, it was like going through a tunnel.

This definitely wasn’t my dream book, but it’s a start. Maybe my next will be about crossing Patagonia or the Continental Divide. For now this one may suffice to help fund those future trips. And it got me out to some new places during the dull winter months. Now I just have to keep the momentum going.

 

 

3 to read: romance, resilience, resourcefulness

On Valentine’s Day I offer you a treat: three reviews of great books worth reading — no added fat, sugar or artificial ingredients.

The common theme is exploration and survival, and the books are Joan Druett’s Island of the Lost: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World; Paul Theroux’s The Happy Isles of Oceania; and The Long Walk, The True Story of a Trek to Freedom by Slavomir Rawicz.

In brief, each of these books will exhaust the reader because there’s so much to  digest.

RESILIENCE: In The Long Walk, the author, Rawicz, was a Polish army officer falsely accused and sentenced to the Russian Gulag. Even the first few chapters of the book are so incredible and appalling that they’re unforgettable: frozen, emaciated prisoners taken to the end of the railroad in Siberia, then put on uninsulated trucks for hundreds more miles — and THEN forced to walk hundreds of miles chained together with little food, poor clothing and no shelter. They finally arrive at their prison, so far from anything that the urge to escape is muted by hours of painful work in the woods (with little food, poor clothing, etc). Until amazingly, Rawicz develops an escape plan, putting in motion the Most Epic True Survival Story I have ever read. He and others basically WALK 4,000 miles to India: through the Gobi desert, over the Himalayas (where there’s a bit of a surprise for the reader), skirting civilization the whole way to avoid being returned to the Gulag. If you like survival stories, this is a must read.

RESOURCEFULNESS: Druett’s Island of the Lost is my second favorite because there’s nothing like the sea to create extreme isolation and desperation. Back in the early 1800s, four men set out from Australia (or New Zealand? I can’t remember!) to scout a distant island for mineral mining. In the beginning the book is a little slow, spelling out all of the hoops they have to jump through to get a sponsor, secure and provision the boat, etc. Fast forward and they’re shipwrecked on the island with prospects for rescue unknown (weather, sea conditions are so awful there that it’s amazing they were rescued at all). Apparently this particular island frequently hosted shipwrecked sailors because there was some evidence of previous inhabitants — but sea lions comprised most of the population. Aside from having to approach massive sea lions and club them to death in order to survive (can you see yourself doing that??) one of the men kept a concise diary of their activities, including step-by-step accounts of repurposing parts of their boat to build a shelter, foraging for edibles when sea lions/seals were not in season (there were times that the creatures left the island completely), finding other shipwrecked sailors on another part of the island, building a new boat.. I was so impressed by the knowledge and skills they possessed that I was convinced that NO ONE living today would have been rescued alive from that island, as they eventually were. (Except if you’re Steve Callahan, who documented his survival on a life raft in the Atlantic in the book Adrift — also highly recommended.)

ROMANCE: The Happy Isles of Oceania by Paul Theroux started out as a fun read because it’s a contemporary account of someone, like me, who seeks the unexplored as a solo traveler — and uses humor and wry observations to color his narrative. Starting in Australia, Theroux went to some of the least-traveled areas and talked to anyone he found, obliquely to explore the national identity of the enigmatic and apparently elusive Aborigines. With humor similar to author Bill Bryson’s (A Walk in the Woods), he has no schedule to keep, and lots to explore as he paddles a collapsible kayak among islands of the South Pacific, including visits to Tonga, Fiji, Tahiti, Somoa and many more seldomly-discussed nations, examining the culture along the way. Although I’m not finished reading this book yet (it’s about 600 pages and frankly his observations of different islands are starting to sound alike) I can say I’d recommend it for the physical and cultural exploration he does and for his interesting comparisons between our romanticized views of that part of the world and their current (circa 1992) realities. It’s refreshing to read an outdoors travelogue that includes many references to literature and history rather than dry observations (although his are more wry than dry).