Closing my eyes and peering deep into the fog of memory, through the eyes of my crow, circling down, swimming through swirling currents of wind between cold and warm air, the clouds parting and thinning, a dark-blue dot on the ground looming ever larger, gliding down onto the branch of an evergreen tree, I see my past self sitting at a campfire by the shores of Lake Wallowa. My white Subaru is parked nearby, the last car I will ever own.
I’m wearing a trucker hat and holding a fire-poking stick, alternately gazing up at the moon and the stars and back down again at the landscape’s near-perfect reflection in the water. This lake, which is 1,300 meters above sea level, is a bathtub for giants, carved millennia ago by an Ice Age glacier and ringed by forested mountains for privacy.
I was halfway into a six-week work sabbatical, moving up the map from San Francisco through redwood forests and gold rush mining towns and deep into the wilds of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Having an automobile with four-wheel drive meant that I could traverse snowy mountain passes that were still frozen solid in June. I could bring not just a tent but stacks of wool blankets to soften the hard ground and pile on top of me for extra warmth. There was plenty of space left in the hatchback for a camp chair and firewood, a cast-iron pan and a cooler of beer, with fresh food from the supermarket jumbled up in paper grocery bags.
I ate better on that trip than ever before while camping. Pan-fried T-bone steaks, couscous with sautéed zucchini and onions, two fat Idaho potatoes wrapped in aluminium foil and dropped near the coals of the fire – one for dinner and one for breakfast. When you bake a potato, you steam out the excess water, which makes them perfect for grating and frying into crispy, golden hash-browns the next morning.
Campsites were plentiful, especially at higher elevations. With no competition, I wandered wherever my fancy took me, along rivers and creeks beginning to pick up their paces, rushing and bubbling with snow melt, stopping to bed down wherever there wasn’t a sign warning of bears or cougars.
Being paid to take a six-week sabbatical seemed inconceivable. Weren’t those only for academic professors? Hadn’t that practice slowly died out in the US years ago as academia, like nearly every other facet of American life, was mercilessly corporatised? This paid sabbatical was one of the many luxuries of working in the San Francisco tech world, an especially attractive golden handcuff. I’ve since only heard of a handful of companies that offer them. They can be life-changing.
I was taking this idea of a sabbatical seriously, embarking on a long journey of quiet reflection with the intention of using the time wisely and the expectation that somehow, by the end of the trip, I would have answers to questions that had been increasingly on my mind.
What do you want to do with (the rest of) your life?
The immediate question: Did I want to spend another four years at the same company and be rewarded with another sabbatical? They re-upped the sabbatical every four years. Four years is a lifetime in the San Francisco tech world, where employees regularly leap-frog from opportunity to opportunity.
Whenever I spoke with friends who were unhappy with their current job, I always encouraged them to flee, bragging that I’d quit nearly every job that I’d ever worked at, whenever I got bored or tired, usually without a new job lined up. Somehow, it always worked out for me. I always found a better job. “The hard part is deciding that you must change your life and then acting on that feeling,” I’d say smugly, looking them directly in the eye on a lunch break while spearing a cherry tomato from my fancy overpriced salad.
Easy for me to say. Not everyone is as foolish and risky as I am. Then again, there’s no reward without risk.
A more important question that I had for myself under those shining stars: What are you going to do after Henry goes away to university? In less than two years, my son would be gone. I wanted to confront the empty nest problem directly.
I supposed that I could live in my rent-controlled San Francisco apartment next to Golden Gate Park until I died, although at that time the city was already sliding into what is now called a “doom loop”, with homelessness and drug use in the streets reaching epically sad levels. Not that I hadn’t already seen plenty of mean streets. When I arrived in 1996, I lived in a gritty neighbourhood where prostitutes gave blowjobs in the same alleys that drunks pissed in. A lot has changed about San Francisco in the last twenty years, but it’s always had its rough spots. And tough times.
Close to twenty years as a parent for me was an entire lifetime for my son. But his conception of time would soon be speeding up. He was already imagining life 3,000 miles away where his passion, rowing, was still practiced at Ivy league universities. Not that he had the grades (or we, his mother and I, the money) to attend those schools. But I respected his ambition and encouraged him to go far and explore, whatever the costs may be.
Easy for me to say, but a difficult promise to fulfill considering the astronomical price of a college degree in America.
He would soon row away from San Francisco towards a different ocean, faster and faster to catch up to new experiences, while I shrank further and further into the distance (not waving but drowning). My role as father in his life story was about to be downgraded to supporting actor with younger and more exciting characters taking center stage.
The road last travelled
Thinking about my son’s possible future naturally got me to thinking about my own past youthful adventures, and perhaps the most life-defining one of them all: my cross-country road trip 25 years prior when I finished school at the University of Georgia and left Athens for the west coast of America. I departed with two suitcases and a computer, a pizza box Mac that I had bought from my boss Dave when he upgraded to a new computer.
I hitched a ride with a fellow restaurant worker, a hippie mama who was going as far as Phoenix before she headed north to meet her boyfriend, a painter whom I also knew. He was currently picking corn and playing banjo that summer in Wyoming, slumming it as a migrant field worker, probably wearing overalls and drinking moonshine.
We drove cross-country through hot and dusty deserts with the windows down in an old manual-transmission VW bug, taking turns driving, eating at roadside diners, embarking on a few “shortcuts” that led us through curvy desert mountain passes with orgasm-inducing vistas and sphincter-clenching downhill runs where I swore I could smell the brakes pads wearing thin on that rusty, manual-transmission VW bug.
She had a small selection of cassette tapes to listen to, mostly hippy music. When it comes to jam bands, I’ve always felt that after a half dozen songs there’s a fine line between a groove and a rut, but road trips are maybe the perfect time to listen to the Grateful Dead.
I had a religious experience late one chilly New Mexico night while communing with the Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid soundtrack, driving down dusty backroads in the high desert while she slept in the passenger seat. The outlines of the hills surrounding me slowly revealed their details when the sun began to rise, with a collage of red, orange, and yellow lighting up the sky behind me. I rounded a corner and let up off the gas as I spotted a herd of elk not 50 meters away, above me on the crest of a hill, nostrils steaming as they turned to look at me. I killed the engine and let it roll. I didn’t want to spook them. We glided down the path into a valley.
Would my son take a wandering path like I did, or a more direct one?
After I hopped out in Phoenix, I flew the last leg to Los Angeles, which I wasn’t sure was the right place for me, but what did I know? I had barely left the south since I was a kid. I was intent on getting as far away as possible, and LA was about as far away as I could go. I figured I should give the place a shot – three months at least – but I only knew one person in LA, a production assistant for a TV show whom I had dated briefly in college. She set me up with a job as an extra.
The city of angels. The boulevard of broken dreams.
There is a curious subculture of people in LA who enjoy being extras on TV shows. They are usually older and bring their own folding chairs and reading material. They gossip among each other around the craft services table about all the people they don’t actually know and share stories about all the breaks they never got. Fascinating, tragic creatures.
I excelled at the role of ace cub newspaper reporter on the crime drama Murder One, whose plot seemed to revolve almost exclusively around juicy and revealing scenes depicting dramatic courtroom testimony. For the first day, we filmed the arrival of all of the characters at the courthouse, so I walked down the same hallway again and again, in many different choreographed variations, traversing around the principals and supporting cast while being spied upon by three people behind a moving camera. Just another day at the courthouse for this Sisyphus in a suit and tie.
For the rest of the three weeks, I sat in a mocked-up jury-room pew, acting like I was studiously taking notes with a pencil and notepad to ensure there were plenty of blurry heads in the background when the judge yelled, “You’re out of order, counsellor!” I wrote silly poems and letters to friends.
Because I had a pulse, other roles ensued. I was reveller at a back-yard pool party on Clueless The TV Show. It was a very quiet party run by draconian sound engineers, who were laser-focused on making the most of the Valley-Girl-inflected conversation between the teen characters, some of whom were played by 30 year-olds. Most of the actors were throwaway wanna-bes, though a few were actual rising stars who had appeared in the movie. But they were hard to take seriously while so comically over-dressed.
I did, however, come to respect the people who worked behind the scenes. If I wanted to stay in LA, that would be where I ended up, as part of the crew. I had some fun conversations with them, and the wardrobe people approved of the clothes I wore to set. They didn’t redress me, figuratively or literally, which I took as a high compliment.
It was a solid week of standing around waiting while the production crew endlessly fiddled with gadgets and lighting, waiting for our command to engage in bubbly, pretend conversation, red party Solo cups in hand. Miming with strangers.
Friday was the climactic dance-party ending, which stretched far past midnight. Everyone was exhausted. On cue for the closing shots, we, the extras, danced with as much enthusiasm as we could muster after a week of 16-hour days.
The director huddled with the crew. He wanted one final improvised shot that wasn’t in the script. Soon, a production assistant offered a few of us extra money to jump into the pool with our clothes on. Oh hell no. Saying yes would have felt like the first of many compromises I would be asked to make if I wanted to pursue a life in Hollywood. I had my standards.
But the pay was enough to afford a mostly empty, squalid Sunset Boulevard sublet apartment. I enjoyed my time exploring the city and meeting interesting people. A lot of fun things can happen on an LA summer night. Sushi in Silverlake with the cast and crew. Hiking up hills for outstanding midnight valley views. Bowling with rock stars. But ultimately, I couldn’t connect with the people I met, who not-so-secretly wanted to be famous or married to someone famous or find their way into becoming some sort of cog in Hollywood’s wheels. I didn’t meet many lovers of literature.
I did, however, apply to join the Peace Corps.
Set a course for adventure
As an only child, I was an avid reader, and adventure stories taught me a few secrets about the path from boyhood to adulthood. The plot of most coming-of-age stories, from the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to Great Expectations (and Lassie Come-Home, for that matter) is about setting off on an adventure, either through raw ambition or because unfortunate circumstances have suddenly forced you to flee your existing life, heading out with almost zero planning but somehow making it because you have the right combination of determination and grit… plus a little help from the friends you make along the way.
Unfortunately, in these stories the hero also usually gets waylaid by bandits early in the trip and forced into slavery on a merchant marine ship. Then the pirates show up. All before Act II.
I liked all things about islands and the sea, especially a good Man vs. Nature book. I can still remember my paperback copy of Thor Heyerdahl’s The Kon-Tiki Expedition: By Raft Across the South Seas, his 1948 account of building a raft out of balsa trees and sailing it from Peru to Polynesia with a crew of five Norwegians and a Swede, a radio, and a green Spanish-speaking parrot named Lorita. They wanted to demonstrate that the South Pacific could have been populated by peoples from South America. Spoiler alert: the parrot drowns halfway there, and it turns out there’s not a lot of genetic evidence to support Heyerdahl’s theory. But what a trip.
While working as an extra in LA, I was reading Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls: True Stories of Castaways and Other Survivors, which is full of first and secondhand accounts of wrong turns on the high seas from throughout history. A few of these men lived idyllic lives after successful mutinies, settling in among native tribes and marrying the locals, but most of them perished after horrific years on uncharted South Pacific islands, choking down seaweed and collecting rainwater in upturned turtle shells to survive.
Islands are weird places. They sometimes drive people mad. But I’ve always wanted to live on one. I could hack it. After all, literature had prepared me for island life from an early age.
I made an appointment with the Peace Corps.
Your mind on a new romance
A few nights after the interview, I met a cute girl at a dive bar who had been an English teacher in Japan the year prior. She was just starting her first publishing job in LA as an assistant editor at a local magazine. We had a lot in common. We were both sarcastic Gen Xers, slackers who had recently read and enjoyed the book Generation X, which we both also knew was set not too far away from LA. We had both graduated at the tail-end of a recession. We compared notes about the slim chance of finding meaningful work as an editor or writer with a liberal arts degree, especially this far away from the center of the publishing world, New York City.
I told her about my promising interview a few days earlier at a magazine publisher, only to find out when I arrived that the opportunity was more downmarket than expected. The arm of the vast multimedia empire where they wanted me to work was a very masculine and muscular arm: a fleet of magazines that revolved around automobiles, motorcycles, and recreational vehicles. The only thing that sounded worse than owning and driving a car in Los Angeles was editing articles about them. I had my standards.
I told her my two months in LA had quickly taught me that nobody, indeed, walks in LA. Wouldn’t it be nicer to be strolling along the sandy shores of the ocean under the pale moonlight, I lamented, segueing into the story of my recent Peace Corps application. I told her how when the recruiter interviewed me, they made it very clear that not everyone was accepted, that you didn’t always get sent to the place you requested, and that it could take a very, very long time to be placed, if you were placed at all. It sounded like they were politely giving me the brush-off.
“You could go to Malibu instead,” she said. “But not without a car.”
Her experience proved that you could teach English in another country without even speaking the language. She had picked up a fair bit of Japanese just by forced assimilation. We agreed that both her recent experience and my possible future represented a kind of indentured servitude, whether paid in yen or charitable thank you’s. But she had no complaints about her time in Japan and didn’t rule out going back. The only misgiving she had was realising early in her Kyoto adventure that she would never be able to truly penetrate the culture and be accepted as a native.
I hadn’t thought that far ahead. If I moved to Fiji, would the locals embrace me as an exotic delight, or tell me to go the fuck back home? What did Fijian even sound like?
A week later, a large envelope arrived in the mail. The Peace Corps wanted me to teach English in the Fiji Islands.
Vaccinations ahoy!
I collected my thoughts and read through the reams of documents and diligently filled out carbon-copy forms, not an easy task for a left-hander. As you write, your hand smudges the ink through three sheets of carbon paper. I scheduled appointments for typhoid and yellow fever vaccinations, but when it came time for the doctor’s physical, I found out that I had a hernia, a malady of which I was then completely ignorant.
I learned that it was probably from performing too much physical work, which, come to think of it, I had been doing since I was practically a kid. My first job was as a paperboy delivering massive Sunday editions, but I had mowed thousands of miles of lawns well before that. I graduated to fast food flunkie, moved boxes around warehouses, and drilled water wells with scary-looking machinery that 16-year-olds were most certainly not supposed to be operating. I stocked shelves at K-Mart and made pyramids out of toilet paper. Most recently, as a cook, I regularly unloaded food trucks, carrying countless 50 pound boxes of cheese up two flights of stairs at Depalma’s Italian Cafe in Athens. (Get the breadsticks).
I also learned that the Peace Corps is not in the business of giving hernia operations.
When I arrived, I told myself that I had to give any city at least three months to see if it was the right place. As that deadline approached, I explained the predicament to myself in the bathroom mirror, weighing my pros and cons, concluding with a simple statement: I don’t love LA.
I left three months to the day. I rented a car and drove north to San Francisco with my two suitcases and Mac computer. But I still needed a job. And an operation.
In America, those two are closely intertwined. No job, no operation.
In the misty moonlight, by the flickering firelight
A blanket of mist was forming on the surface of the lake. The moon would soon sink behind the trees. The stars twinkled brightly. I poked the fire.
I was grateful that Fate had not chosen Fiji 25 years earlier, that instead I had found a job in San Francisco. And an operation. And then still better jobs working with creative and interesting people, living an exciting life in a unique place that enjoyed a special time in history. The young hero grew into adulthood through that adventure, which led to becoming a father and living a meaningful life, thanks to determination and grit… plus a little help from the friends he made along the way.
Would work be as important to my son as it had been for me? I sure hoped not. My hard work had rewarded me – was rewarding me right now with this sabbatical – but I wanted Henry to treasure his time at college. Find something worth learning and embrace it. Defer work for as long as possible. Maybe even stay a bit longer at school than was necessary… as I did, I thought to myself.
That night on the lake, I could already see my fiftieth year approaching on the horizon. Next stop: Fatherhood’s End. Time suddenly seemed much more limited, decisiveness more necessary. How would I spend my time after Henry left? When he went off to college, where should I go on my own adventure?
Wasn’t the hard part deciding that you must change your life and then acting on that feeling? I still wasn’t too old to join the Peace Corps, I thought, chuckling out loud, which only seemed to intensify the silence around me.
Europe. Definitely somewhere in Europe.
[Ready for Chapter 2? Read it.]