Hard Thoughts and a "Hard Sun"

I’m feeling pretty good lately; I have been since late summer. Nevertheless I want to revisit a time, a little more than a year ago, when I was pretty damn miserable and experiencing one wave of a multi-wave mid-life crisis. My mid-life crisis has never been strictly about mortality; it falls into the camp of choices I never made or things I have yet to do. That may seem strange to friends and family who would say I’ve sometimes gone overboard trying to see the world, have adventures, and live fully. Still, I can be a malcontent and I am not satisfied with my achievements (or lack of).

I do this to shine a light upon myself, and the world around me, so I can rekindle the sparks of my life. So, onto last’s year’s misery:

Eddie Vedder’s song “Hard Sun” and its direct association with Into the Wild provoked it. I had read the original story at the time it appeared in Outside magazine (Jan 1993) when I was living in Boulder, and I read the book when it was published. I watched the movie last year when it came out, but it was the song itself that, coupled with my renewed interest in those events of eighteen years ago, drew something out of me. The lyrics of the song speak directly to me, and the simple yet stirring music doesn’t hurt either. I won’t analyze the song here, just listen to it (right here on my blog—upper right).

Whether this is skewed or not by time and current perspective, what the song drew forth was the realization of my cowardice/failure in the face of life in those crucial years right after college.

Bike trip, Tahoe, San Diego, Australia, Southeast Asia. By the time I returned I was two years out of college. While in Australia I had applied to grad school back in the States, and since they gave me a free ride and a stipend, and it was in Boulder, I jumped at it. It was rewarding, Boulder was great, and I met Keely there. A “golden age” like I’ve said to many.

Still. In the height of my miserable reflections last year—with Hard Sun blaring on the headphones—I thought that I had taken the easy way out. Why?

Because grad school wasn’t that challenging, and even when it was challenging it was in a way to which I was accustomed. I had to find a difficult professor and fieldwork in Cuba to truly challenge me—and that challenge lay beyond academics. And when the Master’s was finished I had no desire to continue.

The challenge lay elsewhere and I avoided it: hard work for low pay in the outdoor industry with no approval. I had fallen in love with the West a few years earlier and had fallen in love with everything outdoors as well (my semester with NOLs was one of my life’s turning points). Living in Tahoe I lived as a ski bum, working as a chairlift operator and living with about ten people in a party chalet. That was for one winter. Then I turned towards the backpacker travel abroad experience rather than stay immersed in the West.

I just didn’t have it in me to live permanently as a ski bum, river rat, outdoor guide, whatever. I don’t know why, but I put it down to cowardice in the face of internalized societal and, by extension, familial pressure. It was much easier to go to grad school and take my vacation time to explore outdoors. Just notice that I had been drawn to the outdoor sports Mecca of the States, and in my first semester in school, loaded with courses and a teaching assistantship, I jumped on an evening class to get my Wilderness First Responder certification. And I keep doing this—looking for a compromise between my career and my passion. What a coward.

So how does this relate to Into the Wild? I see similarities in Chris McCandless and myself: both from upper-middle class families, both went to good, private universities; both fell in love with the West; both graduated in 1990 and then went out West. I kept going and ended up in California and then Australia and then on to Southeast Asia, before returning to the safety of a summer in Connecticut and grad school in the fall. He kept going too, but he went deeper with his intentions and experiences. Trust me, hitchhiking through the outback from Perth to Darwin or raving at full moon parties in Koh Samui is cool, but it’s not the same as isolation and survival in Alaska. I was skating along from one backpacker experience to another; he was trying to figure it all out.

I see that he didn’t take the easy way out (I’m not referring to his death here but the path he chose). And I wonder what might have been if I didn’t bow to the pressure I felt to do something I, and people from my socio-economic strata, thought acceptable. Everyone always knew I wouldn’t take a 9-5 office job, but bumming around the West, working just enough to get by and live free, well that wasn’t quite right. Somehow there had to be a semi-acceptable path: go to grad school and become a college professor. Well the first part happened but I imploded before the second. Thank God at least for that.

So I made a coward’s choice. The choice ended up being fulfilling and has led me on and on. I’ve spent ten out of the last twenty years abroad, with an impressive accumulation of adventures. Yet even now I still wish to work at a job that puts me outdoors 200 + days a year. Good luck on that one, Paul.