Category: Life Philosophy

How I Got Here

The monkeywrench moments chain.

That’s the thing I’ve been thinking about lately. Not the Monkeywrench Moments themselves — I’ve written about those — but how each one made the next one conceivable. The Philippines venture depended on having already done the nomadic RV life. The RV life grew directly out of the AT thru-hike.

I don’t go from 0 to 100. I take one leap — and that leap changes what’s conceivable next.

We get about eighty-five years on earth (though I’ve promised Inday I’ll live to 100). The world is enormous. I’m never going to see or live or experience most of it.

So I try to live as much as I can.

But not as much as I can in the bucket-list sense. I’m not trying to collect experiences. I’m trying not to waste time.

That’s the driver under the Monkeywrench Moments, if there is one. Not a bigger life. A less wasted one, by my own measure.

When a turn shows up, my head doesn’t run a drama. It runs something closer to this: This is a thing I want to do. How do I make it happen? What do I do if I fail? Can I survive that?

Practical questions. Recovery questions. That loop has been running for decades now, and I trust it more than I fear my fear.

Looking back, my adult life doesn’t read as one long arc. It reads as a series of lives, with transitions in between.

Or maybe those are just chapters, and I’m dressing them up. I don’t know. People talk about chapters in their lives all the time. Am I inventing a grander vocabulary so I look bigger to myself? There are certainly people who live much bigger lives than I do.

I’m going to keep using “lives” and “transitions” anyway, because from the inside the breaks feel real — not page turns in one continuous book, but a change of operating system. If that’s self-mythology, fine. It’s the mythology that matches how the time has felt.

There was a first settled life: job, marriage, car payment, house, child, pets. The life you’re supposed to want. And I did. I wanted it. I loved that life.

Then divorce, and single parenting. I’m still not sure whether that was a life of its own or a transition — the fumbling stretch where you know something has to change but you don’t yet know what.

There was a second marriage. A move to Boston. Condo life. No debt. Travel.

Then a Monkeywrench Moment I can name cleanly: I resigned from a job to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail. I didn’t go back to the corporate world. I started a video business with Jodi. We met people. We grew the business. It was a new world. A good life, right up until the question showed up: we’ve built this — now what?

Another divorce. I drove away from that life in a motorhome and spent nearly five years on the road. That was a life! I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything, as lonely as it eventually became.

Was Johnson City apartment life a life, or another transition? It didn’t suit me. Sometimes that’s how you know you’re still fumbling: you can feel the misfit before you can name the next turn.

Then the Philippines. Inday. The farm. The leap that scared me the most — and the one that made the whole chain make sense.

And ahead of me — and already under my feet — this bi-hemispheric life: America and the Philippines, one existence spanning both.

And it’s not just the geography. It’s the juxtaposition. West and East, side by side in an ordinary day. Carabao and Starlink.

I’m not going to try to explain people who live one life all the way through. I don’t know their insides. I only know mine.

Here’s what I’ve noticed about the transitions.

Sometimes you know a change is needed, but not what the change is. You fumble around for a while until it makes itself clear.

That’s okay. You still wake up every morning and eat breakfast.

The fog isn’t failure. It’s the in-between.

And here’s what I’ve noticed about the leaps themselves.

In the moment, these turns don’t feel “larger.” That word is a rearview word. At the time they’re fitting. The right size. The size of change that’s acceptable in your life, because you’ve made changes before and change is part of your operating system now.

Only looking back do they line up as incrementally bigger: trail, then road, then another country, and now this bi-hemispheric life.

That’s what distance does. I wrote about it in the Distance post — how stepping away from the Philippines finally let me see it clearly. It works the same way with time. You can’t see the chain while you’re inside it. I couldn’t see the Filipino operating system while I was living under it, either. Step back far enough — an ocean, a few years, a couple of lives — and the shape appears.

Limitations, for me, are mostly mental.

I posted a Facebook memory of my dad not long ago. My brother commented on how long ago that was — eight years! And I thought: That was only eight years ago? My God, I’ve lived three lives since then.

That’s what this feels like from the inside. Not one long career narrative. Stacked lives. Dense time. The density is the point.

When I was first exploring moving overseas, I struggled deeply with it. It scared me. Was this too big? Was I too old? If it was a mistake, could I recover?

I even paid an online therapist for an hour just to talk it through. (Worth every penny, by the way. Sometimes you have to say the scary thing out loud to a stranger to hear what it really sounds like.)

The questions were still the same practical loop: How do I make this happen? What if I fail? Can I survive that?

I made the leap anyway. Because it was a thing I wanted to do, and I could see a path, and I believed I could survive being wrong.

So where does that leave the Monkeywrench Theory, years after that first post?

Still the idea that sometimes you throw a wrench into the works, blow up a life, and start over.

Still the choice to lean toward the itch instead of talking yourself out of it with “I have a life; I can’t quit now.”

Still not a claim that my life is big. Only that I keep trying not to waste the stretch of years I’ve got.

As my brother once said to me: “Your life isn’t boring!”

No. It isn’t. One fitting leap at a time, breakfast in the fumbling, and a chain that somehow got me to Inday, the farm, and a bi-hemispheric life I couldn’t have pictured from the first settled chapter.

Distance

What I didn’t expect is how clearly some things would come into focus once I wasn’t inside them every day. How much more I appreciate them. And how little of me is still only American.

I spent twenty-seven months in the Philippines — October 2023 to January 2026. In that time I met, dated, and married Inday. We bought the farm in Dueñas. We developed infrastructure. We built a house for her parents. We lived life.

Then I got on a plane and flew into South Dakota in the middle of January.

That was a shock to the system. Straight from the tropics to a South Dakota winter. I established residency, got my driver’s license, picked up the used F-150 I’d arranged to buy from the Philippines, picked up the Winnebago Thrive 18FBS I live in, and headed south to Texas to get out of the cold.

I spent three months at Big Bend National Park as a Volunteer Backcountry Patrol. I left at the end of April. Had the front cap on the trailer replaced under warranty. Spent a couple of months slowly making my way east to Shenandoah National Park, where I’ve been working as a camp host. I’ll finish here at the end of September, then I have to make my way west to Las Vegas, find a place to store the truck and trailer, and head back to Dueñas for November through March.

That’s the timeline. That’s the frame, not the point.

The point is what distance does.

Inday is at the farm — running things, building our house. I’m back on the itinerant nomad life in the States, volunteering in exchange for a place to park and utilities. We keep the relationship going on video chat and wait for November. While I’m here I’ve also been setting up a trust for my daughter Anju in Connecticut, and gathering the documentation to submit I-130 petitions for Inday and Edrian. Practical life, split across an ocean.

What I didn’t expect is how clearly some things would come into focus once I wasn’t inside them every day. How much more I appreciate them. And how little of me is still only American.

Morning on the farm looks like this: the tubigan — literally “water place,” our riceland — is cultivated with a carabao. Inday gets up, goes outside, and builds a small fire to boil water for coffee. While the water is heating she squats with her phone, and we video chat over the farm-wide mesh network that connects to the Starlink mounted next to the water tower.

Carabao and satellite. Firewood and mesh Wi-Fi. We straddle worlds on the farm. We straddle worlds between the farm and the US.

In the United States, every location has an address. Our off-grid property in Arizona has a 911 address. I had to go into town and show the guys in the county clerk’s office where on their satellite image of my plot the entrance was, so they could register it exactly.

The farm in Dueñas has no address. The address on government paperwork is just the name of the closest named road. If somebody is coming to see us, we tell them to go to the Sawe Barangay Hall, and ask anybody you see where the Kano lives.

I walked into a Walmart not long after I got back. The greeter called out, “Hey Buddy!”

I flinched inside.

I’d grown used to Filipino politeness. Walk into a store with my wife and the guard smiles and says, “Good morning Sir! Good morning Ma’am!” Once we’re shopping, we collect half a dozen clerks who help us find what we need, carry our selections up to the register, wait while we check out, then haul it all out to the truck and load it for us.

Neither version is wrong. They’re just different operating systems. After twenty-seven months on one OS, the other feels loud and abrupt in a way I couldn’t have explained while I was still overseas. Distance made the contrast physical.

I sometimes flinch when I think how crude Kanos must seem to Filipinos.

In the US, when you want to make a point forcefully, you raise your voice and speak sharply. In the Philippines, speaking like that is shameful. You’re demonstrating a lack of self-control. It embarrasses everyone who witnesses it. The one who loses control loses face. And you should never cause anyone to lose face.

I knew that rule existed. Living under it is different from understanding it. From here, I can see how often my low-context brain wanted the American move — say it straight, say it hard, get it done — in a world where that move costs everyone in the room.

On the farm, when I talk to builders or the well driller or the electrician, I know the operating system is different. I don’t know how to emulate that OS in my own brain. I know there is subtext being communicated. I can’t read it.

I don’t know when “Yes Sir” actually means yes, and when it actually means, “Yeah, it would be really great to get this done by next week, but you’re crazy if you think that’s really going to happen.”

I’m autistic. I process language literally. I’m a low-context person living and trying to accomplish things in a high-context society. That mismatch was stressful when I was there. From here, I can name it without drowning in it.

Inday has had to step into the role of translating the Filipino OS for me — and translating me back the other way. That’s an unfair burden. I wish she didn’t have to carry it. She does it anyway, often with a smile and some version of “Sweetie, it’s the Philippines!” She saves me from walking into walls I can’t see, and she softens the walls I create without meaning to.

Building in the province is very different from building in the States. There is no detailed price quote. You start with a sort of general idea. I want a house of so many rooms, about this big. Can we build that for ₱700,000?

A “Yes” doesn’t mean they just agreed to build it for ₱700,000. It means, “Yeah, you’re in the ballpark. But it depends. We can get started.”

Then they’ll tell you what they need to get started. We’ll cut your bamboo over there to build our barracks and for scaffolding. We need this much sand and gravel and cement and rebar to build the footings and columns and tie beams. As time goes by they figure out the next step, and the materials and time needed, and then the next step. It’s all incremental.

On the first couple of projects I was always fearing they were playing the Kano to get more money. Over time I’ve learned that this is simply how it’s done in the province, where it’s common to work until you run out of money, then pause until more money is available.

I couldn’t see that cleanly while I was in the middle of it, bracing for the next surprise. From a campsite in Virginia, with time to think, it looks less like a plot and more like a system I didn’t grow up in.

So that’s where I am. Half a world away from the farm. Talking to Inday on a screen while a carabao works the tubigan and a satellite talks to the sky. Parking the Thrive in exchange for volunteer hours. Doing the paperwork that ties the two halves of this life together. Seeing the Philippines more clearly because I’m not inside it every hour. Appreciating it more for the same reason.

I’ll be back in Dueñas in November. The house will hopefully be done. The farm will have its own new list of incremental surprises. I’ll still be the low-context guy in a high-context world.

But I’m not 100% American anymore. We are a Filipino-American family now.

I’ll be walking back in with a little more distance behind me. Sometimes that’s the only map you get.

Fill ‘Er up! No, wait! Don’t!

This morning I hiked out to Laurel Falls, and on the drive out to the trailhead I stopped for gas. As usual, I was going to fill the truck up, but as I was pumping gas I thought “No, wait. You’re not going to use a whole tank of gas before you leave here!” So heck, I’m less than a tank of gas away from leaving. I’ve got about half a tank of gas in the truck. No sense selling it with $50 worth of gas in it.

BTW, when I sold the AdventureMobile last year, it had a nearly full gas tank. At 80 gallons to a full tank, that was a couple of hundred dollars. And it’s not like I got more money from the sale because of it.

Anyway… Two weeks to go. Two weeks until I fly out of here, bound for the other side of the world. I’ve just about go the last few details lined up.

I leave early in the morning on Wednesday, October 25. On Monday, the 23rd, some folks will be coming to get all of the furniture and kitchen stuff in the apartment. I decided to just give everything away, rather than deal with the logistics of trying to sell everything, while also needing it all since I’m living here until the last minute. So it is all going to end up going to an international student at ETSU who apparently is living in a mostly empty apartment.

Tomorrow I’ll be heading over to the local Ford dealer to hopefully come to an agreement for them to buy the truck on Tuesday, the 24th.

The only other final detail left is to sell the washer and dryer. I’m going to try to make that happen on the 23rd as well, so I can leave here with all my laundry clean.

So on the 23rd all the furniture goes and the apartment will be empty. I have a hotel room reserved for two nights starting then.

On the morning of the 24th I do the walk-thru of the apartment with the management company, and they give me all the bullshit reasons why they won’t be returning the full security deposit.

That afternoon, I drop the truck off at the Ford dealer, and take an Uber back to my hotel.

And finally on the 25th, I get an Uber to the airport, and I’m off for the next insane adventure.

It’s All About The Pizza

Have I complained on this blog about the sorry state of pizza in most of the United States? Maybe not. But it is a sorry mess. Having grown up in Connecticut, halfway between New York and Boston, and 20 minutes from Wooster Street in New Haven, I thought everybody had access to great pizza.

Boy, was I wrong! After spending 5 years wandering all over the country, I can report that most Americans have absolutely no idea what good pizza is. And having lived here in Johnson City for over a year now, I can attest that that holds true here as well. There is a local place that claims they have “New York style pizza,” but judging by the product they turn out, nobody who works there has ever been to New York.

But… there is hope! I have found a place outside of the Northeast where there is genuinely good pizza. And you’ll never guess where it is. In Iloilo City, in the Province of Iloilo, on the island of Panay, in the Western Visayas Region of the Philippines, is Giuseppe Pizzeria and Sicilian Roast. And they have phenomenal pizza!

So I’m moving to Iloilo City.

Am I really moving? Yes. Am I really moving just for the pizza? No, of course not. But it’s a nice bonus!

Do you remember why I call this blog Monkeywrench Your Life? If not, you can read the reason why here. And I’m going to do it again. I’m selling the RV. I’m selling the motorcycle. I’m selling the bicycle, the truck, all the camping and hiking gear. I’m selling everything but what I can fit into my two suitcases, and I’m getting on an airplane and moving to the other side of the world. Because, why not?

Change is scary. It scares the bejeezus out of me. It makes me uncomfortable. And I mitigate that as best I can by researching and planning meticulously. But ultimately it makes life exciting. It keeps me engaged. I know there are going to be times when I will wish I had never done this. But Iloilo is a beautiful city, and the people are amazingly friendly. People talk to me when I walk down the street, and those who know me know that I don’t really have a warm and welcoming face by default. A Filipina told me “yes, they all look at you because to them you are an alien.” Well heck, I’ve felt like an alien my entire life! I’m made for this role.

So yeah, there will be lots to write about and share as this latest adventure unfolds. For now, I’ve got another 3 months to dispossess myself of all my things and get ready to fly out of here at the end of October.

This is where I will be living my first month in Iloilo City

It’s 2023 Already?

Okay, this’ll be a short one. It’s 2023 already, what the heck happened to 2022? A lot happened in 2022. At the same time, not much happened in 2022.

I tried to settle down here in northeast Tennessee. I rented an apartment. I bought some furniture. I traded in the AdventureMobile on a travel trailer. I tried to hike with the local hiking club, but didn’t really click with them. I took some short trips with the new trailer.

And it doesn’t work for me. Settling down; ugh.

In a couple of weeks I’ll be hooking up the trailer and making my way to West Texas, where I’ll be doing volunteer backcountry patrol at Big Bend National Park again, from February through April. That will put me back in Tennessee in early May. Come June, my brother Dana and I will be taking a motorcycle trip on the Mid-Atlantic Backcountry Discovery Route.

I have some nascent plans for after that, and if they work out the way I hope they will, I’ll be throwing a monkey wrench into my life once again, and starting over. Starting over is exciting. And scary. Stay tuned.

New Year, New Life?

In my last post, back in September, I talked about my yearning to settle down. As it turns out, that wasn’t just idle talk.  I’ve slowly come to realize my discontent with nomadic life comes from a pretty deep-seated loneliness. As a deeply introverted person, it takes me a very long time to make friends. The constant moving doesn’t allow for that. I think if I had a partner to travel with I would feel very differently about the nomad life, and would probably not give it up until I couldn’t see to drive anymore.

I’ve spent a lot of time since that last post researching options in my chosen area. I was really attracted to western North Carolina, but when push came to shove, rents there just proved too expensive for my modest income.

So I moved my search across the mountains to eastern Tennessee. As of a couple of days ago, I’ve committed to a small apartment, with a big garage for my motorcycle and my bicycle and all my outdoor gear, in Johnson City. It should be available for me to move in around April. There is tons of hiking in the area, and I’ll only be a half hour drive from the Appalachian Trail.

As always, big changes are both scary and exciting. My biggest fear is that my years of wandering have ruined me for being stationary, and it will turn out that I can’t be content with either life. I do plan to sell the AdventureMobile, but I also plan to buy a smaller RV, something I can tow with the pickup, so I can still travel when the urge strikes.

Now that I’ve settled on a course of action, I’m really anxious to execute it. I’ve never been good at patiently waiting. I’ve got another month here at Big Bend, then in February I’ll head back to East Texas to get the cracked windshield on the AdventureMobile replaced. I’ve got reservations to spend my birthday on the beach in far southeast Texas. Then I’ll slowly start moving east.

Happy New Year everybody!

Is It Time?

The basic theme of Monkeywrench Your Life is not being afraid to make big changes when you recognize the time has come to do so. That time may have come.

The AdventureMobile has been my only home for more than four years now. I’ve been all over the US, all over Mexico, and have explored a bit in Canada. And all the time, people have asked me questions like “What’s your favorite place” or “If you were to settle down, where would it be?” And I’ve always said that those questions miss the point entirely. I didn’t want to have one favorite place. I didn’t want to settle down. In fact, the whole idea used to make me shudder. Movement was the point.

But suddenly, I find myself yearning for exactly that. The idea of having a fixed address seems so simple and comforting. My mail wouldn’t have to chase me around the country. I could subscribe to a magazine or two. I wouldn’t have to plan doctor appointments a year in advance, for the next time I manage to be in the state. I could go backpacking for a week or a month, or load up some gear on the motorcycle and take off for a trip, and just lock the door and come back afterwards and everything would be just as I left it. The simplicity of it is very appealing.

Of course, the change didn’t actually happen suddenly. I’ve been struggling with discontent on several fronts for a good while. It’s the realization that this is what I want that was sudden.

But where? Where do I want to live, and perhaps more importantly, where can I afford to live? There are lots of affordable places all across the country, but I can’t imagine spending the rest of my life in most of them. I miss trees and green grass. I miss the mountains, easy access to lots of hiking, and hiking culture.

The obvious choice might be New England, as it has all of those things, and it’s where I spent most of my life. But I can’t afford to live in New England, and I can’t deal with the long, cold, dark winters there. The last decade or so that I lived there, I suffered terribly with SAD in the winter. I can’t do that again!

My first thought is the southern Appalachians. Eastern Tennessee or western North Carolina. Yes, they have winter there, but it’s relatively mild and short. But that’s just my first instinct. Someplace else might bring itself to my attention. In fact, if you have a suggestion I’d love to hear it.

Nothing is going to happen right away. I’ve got commitments for the next four months. I’ll be in Livingston tomorrow, and I’ve got doctor and ophthalmologist appointments lined up. I’ve got to get the truck inspected. The usual stuff I take care of every year while I’m there. Then in three weeks I’ll head west to Big Bend National Park, where I’ll be volunteering patrolling backcountry campsites for three months. When I leave there at the beginning of February, maybe I’ll head east and start checking out possible places to settle down. Or maybe I’ll change my mind entirely. Who knows? Only time will tell.

Summertime, And The Living Is… Easy?

This time last year, when I was in Louisiana at Black Bayou Lake and looking ahead to the summer of 2019, my plan was to work and earn some money. In fact, my plan was to again work as a camphost for the same company I worked for last summer, but in a different location.

Then I saw something online about an upcoming WIN circuit that would travel across the country stopping to ride various bike trails, and that caught my imagination. I rather instantly decided that that was how I would spend the summer, and dropped my plan to work. This whole spontaneous plan making thing is new for me; it’s never been part of my personality, and I think is a facet of this mobile RV life that has most surprised me.

Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone National Park

But even that simple plan didn’t work out quite as expected. I had to be back in East Texas in early February to see my doctor and my ophthalmologist, and then I was going to head west to Quartzsite to finish the electrical upgrades I had started the year before by having a larger inverter installed and the inside wiring modified. And while I was there I also made a quick detour south so I could cross the border into Los Algodones and see my dentist.

The plan after this was to start heading east and meet up with the WIN group in April at the start of the circuit down in the southeast. But instead I had to be back in Livingston at the beginning of April to deal with some more medical stuff, and then, happily, Aoife had a chance to fly in for a week and we decided to explore New Mexico, so when I left Livingston I headed for Albuquerque where Aoife was flying into. Long story short, I didn’t catch up to the WINS until May 1 in Jefferson City, Missouri.

But wait, there’s more! When Aoife and I arrived at Bandelier NM and I put the slides out, the full wall slide made some unpleasant noises. I think I put the slide out one or two more times after this, and the noise got worse and worse, so by the time I had arrived in Jefferson City I was leaving the full wall slide in. Living with it in got old really fast, and after a week or so with the WINS in Jefferson City, I left the group and headed up to the Winnebago Factory Service Center in Iowa to get the slide dealt with and to have them check out an issue I’d been having with the hydraulic leveling jacks.

It takes months to get a service appointment with Winnebago, so instead I showed up without an appointment and was a “walk in” service customer. This means they worked on my rig as time allowed, so it took several weeks to get things taken care of. By the time I caught up with the WINS again, in South Dakota, it was the end of May. I stayed with the WIN circuit as we explored the Black Hills of South Dakota and then on to Grand Teton National Park, in the middle of June.

In Grand Teton the cycling circuit met up with another circuit spending the summer touring the northwest. The combined circuit was big, far too many people for me to comfortably deal with, so it was time for me to head out on my own again. Since it was only the middle of June I decided I would spend the rest of the summer touring some of the National Parks in the region, so I spent the next 3 weeks in Yellowstone, the movesd up to Glacier National Park for 12 days, then crossed into Canada to visit Banff for a week before coming back to the states and visiting Craters Of The Moon. From here I visited some state parks in Idaho, then headed west to visit North Cascades National Park.

Tuolumne Meadows from the summit of Lembert Dome, Yosemite National Park

This brought me to Labor Day, and not having made reservations 6 months in advance, there was no way I was going to get into any park anywhere so I sat out the weekend in a casino parking lot just outside of Olympic National Park. After the holiday crush I moved to another boondocking spot while I checked out Olympic NP, then made my way toward Crater Lake and another free spot for a week.

In mid-September Aoife had another vacation week. Whenever she comes for a visit the conversation always turns on where she should fly into. This time I said “fly into San Francisco and we’ll go visit Yosemite!” Now the Bay Area is an expensive place, and RV park prices hover around $100 per night. Not being a fan of RV parks or of paying that much money, I managed to find a county park in San Mateo, Coyote Point Recreation Area, that had 4 RV sites along the edge of a parking lot on San Francisco Bay, and only a 15 minute drive from the airport!

We made a day trip from here down to Monterey, and explored a couple of beaches along the coast on the drive home, then the next day we headed east and up to a Thousand Trails park just outside the west gate of Yosemite. Yosemite is amazing and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves until it was time to get Aoife back to San Jose to catch her flight home.

This left me with just over a week before I had to be in Death Valley for the start of my time here as a volunteer camphost, so I headed to Lone Pine to hang out and explore that area.

So that was a long recounting of “I went here and then I went there.” What’s my point? What is to be concluded from all this?

One one hand, I’m glad I did what I did this summer. These northern parks aren’t places I would go with my RV in the winter, so the only reasonable time to visit is in the summer. And I had a wonderful time and have memories of some amazing hikes.

So am I going to do something similar next summer? Nope. I’m going to find a seasonal job and settle in to one place and earn some money and avoid the summer crush of RV travelers. There are far too many RVs on the road in the summer. Everything is crowded and it’s hard to find places to stay. I experienced some epic traffic jams in Yellowstone, on the Going to the Sun Road in Glacier, and I shudder at the memory of trying to get to Lake Louise in Banff (I went back the next day, before dawn). I enjoyed some amazing hikes in the parks, but in order to do so I was getting up at 3 or 4 AM to get to the trail-head at daybreak to beat the crowds.

It’s okay to go on vacation in the summer, where you’ve planned everything out months ahead of time and made reservations, but that’s — maybe surprisingly to those who know me — not the way I travel. The bottom line is that winging it in the summer is rather a hassle.

Am I Still An Easterner?

When people ask me where I’m from I have several answers I might give depending on the context, and sometimes just my mood. I might say “Wherever I am, that’s where I’m from,” which is my I’m-a-full-time-vagabond-free-from-the-confines-of-everyday-life answer. Or I might say “I spent most of my life in New England,” which is my I’m-a-proud-New-Englander answer. Or sometimes if I just want to end this conversation I’ll say “Texas,” as Livingston, Texas is now my official residence.

For the most part I do still think of myself as an Easterner, and more specifically as a New Englander. I remember telling someone last year that while I loved being in the desert it was not my native habitat and to feel really at home I needed mountains and trees. I enjoyed my time in the Rockies of Colorado last summer, but of course those are different mountains and trees than those I grew up with in New England. In the West, everything is on a much grander scale.

When I left Colorado bound for Connecticut last September, I was quite excited about heading “home.” And I do remember the excitement I felt when I hit Pennsylvania and things started to feel like home. Even the heavy northeast traffic, and tolls, and constantly watching for low clearances, felt like home. For a while.

I spent three weeks in Connecticut. It rained. A lot. I enjoyed seeing family. I enjoyed showing Aoife around the places I grew up. And then I headed south. Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania. Four states in one day! The next day; Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia. Holy crap, it takes me four days to drive across Texas.

I spent a few days in Shenandoah National Park, and a few more at Carolina Beach down in North Carolina, then I headed west to Livingston, Texas. After a week or so there, I headed back east to Louisiana where I spent nearly three months at Black Bayou Lake NWR. It was all nice, but it started to feel so small and cramped.

I left Louisiana a couple of weeks ago. After stopping back in Livingston for a few days to take care of some medical appointments, I finally struck out for the West again. It took four full days of driving to cross Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and get just across the border into southern California. Big, wide open spaces. Desert sunsets. It feels good. It feels like home!

When I first chose Texas as my domicile and “moved” there, it felt pretty far west to me. But now Livingston, which is in the Piney Woods Region of eastern Texas, feels like the East to me. I want to be farther west. Maybe I should move my home base to Arizona. Well, that’s something to think about for a while.

I don’t think I feel like an Easterner anymore.

Speedgoat Karl

The beginning of the Approach Trail to Springer Mountain. March 16, 2009.

The summit of Mount Katahdin. Sept 25, 2009.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last night I was browsing NetFlix (love my satellite internet!) and came across Karl Meltzer: Made to be Broken; a documentary about Karl’s 2016 run that broke the then record fastest time to complete the Appalachian Trail. I enjoyed this on so many levels.

First was just seeing spots along the AT and recognizing them from my own thru-hike. It’s amazing how many places I recognized, and even thought to myself “I know exactly where they’re standing to get that shot.” Continue reading “Speedgoat Karl”