What’s Worse?
Stagnant Water or a Stagnant Life?
One of my favorite parts about traveling is actually the return home; the stocked fridge, infinite (tankless) hot water, my mattress. Should I have flown rather than driven, I also return to my alpaca blanket — a remnant of a time when I was younger, yet actually far more fiscally sound, which is an odd experience I am unsure many can relate to.
Yet regardless of whether the passenger seat in my truck is empty or the row on the airplane is vacant, there is often a visitor that tags along.
Inside me, a deep-seated fear of stagnation. Not a fear of sitting still . . . no doubt the most profound moments of my life have occurred while sitting still in nature; under a swarm of pines in Tennessee or cliffside above the Colorado River. Rather the fear is based in the idea that I would become ‘idle’ in life itself.
Buckler Burn — dangerous & polluted with old mining material, yet the promise of an old hut with bunk beds on the far side — the trail over my left shoulder — led me and my friend Tyler down for a swim, and then up the opposing side.
Imagine an existence in which I assume the position the world gives me — NOT the position God has demanded I go or even the position I want, but instead the position that is most readily available or comfortable, and though miserable, easy.
A miserably easy life, but actually a miserably easy death, because an easy life is no doubt worse than death.
Can you relate?
I currently sit at work — ‘work’ being the surf shop which has, thus far in it’s 8 hours of being opened, welcomed perhaps 20 guests — texting longtime friend Alex, also of South Carolina, who I met via Instagram and who, most notably, offered me dinner at a steakhouse when we both happened to be in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
I told him I would some day buy him a steak dinner, but as it goes, I have yet to stumble not only upon riches, but actually any notable amount of cash at all.
One evening, and night, spent high up above the Pacific in New Zealand . . . a crashed car that had not been there the day before.
Alex is currently deep into rural Idaho, and I, having no doubt too extensive a knowledge of such an obscure and distant place for any reasonable 22 year old, gave him objectively fantastic directions to an extraordinarily scenic hotspring.
In the background of the shop now plays Torren Martyn’s ‘Calypte’ — a soon to be iconic surf film. In it he traverses all of Southeast Asia with his then-girlfriend now mother-of-his-child in pursuit of surf of any decent caliber, all under the guise of helping his father move his sailboat from one port to another.
That seems like a just life to me.
But I truly fear the opposite; docility. It seems inevitable among men — how do all of these stories end? ‘Well, all the wild adventures ended at 25…or 30…’
That was the story from the older gentleman who just left the shop. Telling me stories of some undiscovered break he used to surf (Trestles…) in his youth . . . but that was his youth. While I can see so much benefit to a sure home, and steady schooling, and a predictable dinner schedule, I would hold myself in such low regard should I trade this deep seated longing for a life relatively long but more importantly full of adventure for something… much more mundane.
One sunrise from the Mueller Hut, Aoraki, New Zealand — most only spend one night, we spent two.
I am reminded of Chris Burkard, a world renowned photographer, who once, years ago, posted on Instagram of he and his two sons bikepacking through some part of California — one frame, swimming in deep, fast flowing swimming holes, next frame sipping a stagnant puddle through a lifestrpaw. The taste was, as far as I could tell, atrocious.
But that life, which of course I am idealizing right now, of endless adventure is an ideal I hope to not only never forget, but eventually achieve. Perhaps beginning a marriage not with a 2 week honeymoon in Cancun but rather 2 years on the road, or should I be a man of such intense merit, raise kids who rather than take the yellow bus from street corner to classroom instead, should the sun protrude from the clouds, leap from homeschooling to run barefoot into a stream, or if I am to become blessed enough, may swim in the Tasman or the Bearing and then rinse under a waterfall only accessible at low tide, that drains into the very sea in which I have discovered portions of myself.
Evidently this is no easy feat. Of everyone I have ever come across on the planet, only two I know of have achieved that which I am now recognizing as a desire: the aforementioned Burkard, and William Finnegan, staff writer at The New Yorker who authored ‘Barbarian Days: A Surfling Life’ which is the greatest documenting of the lifestyle I now humbly request from God.
Until next time. . .