Warning: You may want to skip this chapter; it is a detour from the route you have been traveling with me on this journey. As is the case while en route to any destination, deviations from our path can be time-consuming and frustrating, leaving us wondering why we had to get caught up with the diversion in the first place. But, should you follow this big right turn, you might see something you hadn’t anticipated before leaving the well-traveled stream.
Today is Sunday, both literally and metaphorically. The previous nine days made up the longest Saturday ever. The next nine days will hopefully be the longest Sunday ever but we all know what happens Monday, so I think I’ll hang around here on an extended lazy day with nothing much to do at all. Like all Sundays, it will soon become evident that the weekend was far too short, and I will find myself wishing for another day off. Just who came up with this crazy idea that people should work five days and be afforded a mere two-day sojourn to do for themselves what needs to be done so we can repeat another week tending to tasks that often may not enrich our lives – besides the obvious monetary gain? I suppose in a society that derives so much pleasure from being a passive observer, where we use TV, the internet, or cell phones to watch others play sports, shop, eat, have sex, argue, dance, sing, fish for crab, and a multitude of other observable activities, this passive observation absolves us from full participation in our own lives, while also alleviating boredom.
While we may rarely find enough time for ourselves on weekends, we can take a big step away from routine when on vacation – should we be so brave to take that deserved and well-earned respite of recreation and relaxation. It is within our rights, even obligation, to get out and explore new places, though it is now accepted as the norm that many of us will turn over amassed vacation time back to our employer for the extra cash and skip another year of enjoying an extended break from the treadmill. How many of us are guilty of suffering from our own self-inflicted drama of delusion, where we spout that our company cannot function without us? Then there are those who find their work-a-day lives so jam-packed with responsibilities that as the vacation does roll around, the option is exercised to stay at home and “get caught up,” as though this will prove cathartic in satisfying our basic human need to know our world. And when it finally happens that we do take that well-deserved vacation, we are left bored and faced with the conundrum of what to do with ourselves and all this extra time when we have no hobbies or interests outside of our day-to-day routines.
In many of our communities, there are craft guilds, arts associations, and community colleges where we can join others in the quest to acquire new skills. The internet has brought us Meetup.com to find people with similar interests so we don’t have to go it alone. Walmart sells fishing reels 24 hours a day, but rarely will one have to compete for a good fishing hole on a weekday. A minority of us are getting better at managing our exposure to TV programs and are learning when to turn off the cell phone. More of us are practicing yoga, going to the gym, joining hiking groups, learning to play an instrument, experimenting with cooking an exotic cuisine, or brushing up on a foreign language for a trip abroad, but is this enough?
No. We all need more time to play. We need more storytellers, more photographers, artists, poets, and designers who will weave their perspectives, crafts, and knowledge into teaching narratives shared in a new, as yet uninvented, truly global social network with the potential to foster a renewed sense of community. We need to help one another learn to sing our own song, to speak of the poetry that moves us, to paint the canvas that reflects the beauty of our lives and the places explored. How do we best share our journeys and experiences so that we are nudging our families, neighbors, and communities forward?
We can begin by reigniting the passion to learn and explore. The potential gained through greater cultural and intellectual awareness enriches our lives with opportunities that become tangible as our broadened sense of interest grows. This provides us with new possibilities where music, film, foreign lands, exotic flavors, and outdoor recreation offer options to move beyond the worn and well-known. But if idle consumption and passive entertainment remain the method of filling the space between work and other responsibilities, we will continue our hamster wheel existence and never know what is just beyond our cage of routine.
I suggest you go out and document your life, your hobby, and your fun. Create your own living history, author the story of who you have been and where you have gone, and offer a peek into the potential you hold. The age of information and of being a passive observer is coming to a close; we are on the cusp of the age of knowledge and of being a participant.
Need proof? Sixty years ago, only the most intrepid adventurers explored the Colorado River; today, we do, average people. Forty years ago, a small handful of filmmakers and broadcasters created television content; today, the internet and the likes of Vimeo and YouTube are presenting an extraordinary amount of video made and broadcast by us. Thirty years ago, professional photographers, via big publishing companies, distributed their work to a broad audience; today, Flickr gives every one of us a gallery to display our work. Twenty years ago, a few music executives determined what we would hear; today, the sources and genres available exceed our ability to hear it all. Ten years ago, it was up to a small cadre of publishers to decide what we would read; today, independent bloggers on the Internet and mobile devices, such as the iPad and Kindle, are changing this relationship between authors and readers.
And now, it’s time for the last component in the equation to find change – US! It is our time to embrace the tools of eloquence and put them to work in the employ of creating our very own written and visualized body of knowledge and, when appropriate, to incorporate the shared works of our global community that can add a cultural richness through music, images, art, poetry, and story – a kind of collaborative pot-luck of expressive creativity.
First Attempt At Exiting the Detour.
Another beautiful day in this glorious Canyon. Not a lot of miles will be covered today; only five rapids will be run. There are no side canyon hikes, but still, it feels like a full day of action and fun. Caroline opted to ride a raft and joined Katrina for the half-day we were spending on the river. I was on board the Shoshone with Rondo for a leisurely day, floating past the sheer black cliffs of Vishnu Schist streaked with pink granite veins. Considering the epiphanies of yesterday, day 10 is not a foundation shaker, which is fine, as reconciling the largesse and depth of that experience is still weighing heavily on my being. I can’t stop myself from wondering whether Rondo is fully aware of the impact of Blacktail Canyon on some of his fellow travelers. Is he keeping the pace of the day to a minimum, allowing us this opportunity to sink deeper into contemplation about what the secrets of the Grand Canyon might mean?
And so it was, in the days following the trip, while at home and trying to write about day 10, that my mind would be as blank as it was this day on the river. My journal entry is, but a partial page, and my wife’s notes are just as brief compared to other days where line after line of details were written into the margins. If it weren’t for photos and video, much of the day would have been lost in the introspection I was drifting on.
There would be no monumental intrusions into my sense of the aesthetic. It is as though the volume of my mind was turned down another notch. If there was any cognitive activity that might stand out, it would be the question: is this close to where a boatman lives? Meaning, why worry about issues outside of your immediate situation that you have no bearing on and that have no bearing on you? Why analyze this relationship to the Canyon? It is what it is. And why drag who you are when at home and at work down here to the river?
Those are easy questions to answer long after the trip is over. In retrospect, it is obvious that much of who one is should be left at Lees Ferry. While still onshore, stop for meditation and cast off your mental baggage, then enter the dory with a still mind. My fear and anxiety will not guide the boatmen’s oars with any more precision than the experience they bring to their task. Start this journey without thought or expectation, and leave the over-analytical mind at home. Do not lament bad weather conditions; embrace all that presents itself. Even injuries become part of the experience that will be your story down here. As for me, this would prove a gradual awakening of awareness that would only be fully realized after leaving the Grand Canyon.
The brochure will tell you what to bring so that you might be physically prepared, but it fails to inform you of what to leave behind. Worried about the cold water? Who cares?! You are going to get wet, real wet, deep down wet, and deep down cold. But you’ll dry off, and the excitement of having made it through another rapid will distract you from the shivering. Considering using camp wipes to avoid getting into the frigid Colorado River to bathe? Forget about it! You will go in if for no other reason than that you recognize that this unique opportunity may not present itself again in your lifetime. Maybe you’re apprehensive about the metal boxes sitting riverside under the clear blue sky, you know, the Unit? Throw out your worry, walk up boldly, drop your pants midstride, and sing a song to celebrate what you are about to do. Nobody cares that you are using an outdoor, visible-to-the-world toilet, and should you have the gumption to sing, you are likely adding one more moment of magic to the story others will share with friends when they get home and relate the story of the singing crapper who would perch at dawn, chirping a song of glee.
A popular refrain from those we told of our adventure was that they would not be comfortable camping for this duration or – in some cases – any duration! To them, I have to say it is nothing more than the internal dialogue that stops you from embracing the new that stretches you outside of your comfort zone. It is possible that you will never see why you should have broken through your shell of isolation from nature or even your distance from yourself. But there is also a chance that before you pass through this life, you will awaken to this very human desire to connect with nature, to have done something that you thought to be beyond your capability, beyond your fear of the unknown.
Our brief lives, as counted by the number of days, may appear short, but the number of moments is incomprehensibly large. Earlier, I explained how we have roughly 29,000 days of life; counted as seconds, this amounts to approximately 2 billion of those fleeting moments. While this is a grand number in comparison, the experiences we extract from them, will often only amount to but a few isolated moments that stand out as extraordinary. If this is acceptable to you, then, by all means, go on about your life of routine, but should this strike a chord and resonate within you, embrace each day, each moment, and make the most of it. If your work is mundane, spend a half-hour a day learning a new skill, craft, or language. Ask for more time off and go on a hike or go skiing. Have you turned 40 and needed something challenging that you never thought you’d do? Take surfing or scuba lessons, and get on a skateboard before your hips and knees stop you from trying. Take cooking classes, learn to edit videos, pick up the harmonica, garden, or learn to knit.
Wondering if you might be interested in a few days of snowshoeing in Yellowstone? Go to YouTube and search for “How to snowshoe.” Think you might have the inclination to better express yourself in the digital realm? The websites Video2Brain.com and Lynda.com offer online training for dozens of creative software titles. Have you ever heard of the John C. Campbell Folk School? Maybe now is the time to check it out and consider learning something about blacksmithing, broom making, tanning leather, woodworking, or a number of other folk arts and crafts. Going to Florida any time soon? Ever been kayaking? There are terrific calm waters on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts to learn on. For almost everything we could consider doing these days, there are free online tutorial videos or websites that will start us on our way.
By The Way – We Are Detouring Again.
The point is many of us sit at home or work dreaming of what we would do someday if only we had the time and money. But what if those two conditions are never in perfect alignment? For my wife and I, this became a matter of forcing the conditions. If the money wasn’t there, we would travel close to home and stay in the cheapest motel in the smallest town we could find. If time was the limiting factor, we would leave Friday night, knowing we would be comfortable driving a maximum of five hours. This would let us spread out in nearly any direction to a distance of about 300 miles. It has not been beyond us to jump in the car at 4:30 in the morning on a Saturday to drive west to California, arriving in Los Angeles mid-morning. We would have enough time to visit Little Tokyo, Chinatown, and Hollywood, and then finish the afternoon with a walk on 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica to find dinner before a quick stroll on the beach. With the evening upon us, we would point the car east for the 390-mile drive back to Phoenix, with several coffee breaks to keep us going. Sure, we were exhausted when we got home, but with only one free day, we were happy to stuff three days’ worth of fun into it.
Once in the habit of extracting more from less, it became apparent that frugality was taking us on a path of riches, while economically, we were surviving on the single income of a web programmer. The thing is – when the two of us worked, we had little free time and even less ambition to throw ourselves at the task of making plans. Downsizing from conspicuous to experiential consumption, our lives found a groove that delivered a more consistent sense of fun and satisfaction. We stopped collecting stuff that only took up space on a shelf and started a more focused effort at finding tools that we could learn from or that would lend themselves to helping us better express ourselves. A loom and a spinning wheel, a fermentation crock, and a food dehydrator moved in. Things that required more than a single push of a button on a remote control became increasingly interesting. Television was becoming less and less important and was finally moved from the backseat to a thrift store. Hiking, snorkeling, exploring our environment, these things were taking the wheel up in the front seat. Our internet connection became our lifeline to determining distances between points of interest. It could direct us to inexpensive lodgings and show us what there was to find in any geographic area that attracted our curiosity. In moments, we knew about the best and funkiest restaurants, favorite trails, and roadside curiosities. Online would also be where we would have our first encounter with dories. That chance meeting was the material of dreams – only not ours at the time. As far as we could tell, dories existed for a class of wealthy people who went on expensive, exotic adventures; to us, this looked distant and near impossible. To our eyes, a whitewater rafting trip with dories on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon was a journey too far beyond our reach and the cost too far beyond justification.
And yet, incrementally and slowly, we ventured further and further away from the thoughts and things that limited the scope of our wildest dreams. Within a few years, we visited 50, then 100, and before long, more than 150 National Parks and Monuments. A visit to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan completed our goal of visiting the entirety of the continental United States – and not just by dropping into an airport. We were becoming familiar with the three coastal regions, crossing (and, on occasion, stepping into) America’s major waterways, visiting the White House, standing in the crown of the Statue of Liberty, or in Lebanon, Kansas, the geographical center of the U.S. – the more we saw, the more we wanted to see. Our overarching familiarity with the breadth of this land awakened our desire to discover more of the granularity of what created the whole.
Every day and every weekend became precious. We knew to request the days before and after long Holiday weekends well in advance – before coworkers figured out what they might be doing at that time. At Christmas, we put in for days off around Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. In early spring, we requested a couple of days off around Labor Day. Near Memorial Day, it was time to request the days off around Thanksgiving, and as Independence Day rolled around, we put in for time off at Christmas and New Year’s. We often had no idea what we would be doing on these short four-, five-, and six-day vacations, but now we had something to plan toward. Holidays that fell on Thursdays and Tuesdays, when the company was likely to kick in Friday or Monday as a bonus day off, became coveted holiday weeks. Our determination never waned when thinking of making another request, the three days before or after the holiday, that would give us a nine-day window for a vacation that only necessitated taking three days of personal time off. With proper planning, we could turn 17 days of PTO into 45 days of vacation during a single year. Add the occasional weekend, and we could find ourselves traveling between 60 to almost 80 days a year exploring the U.S. – and who says Europeans get more vacation?
Attention: Numbers Ahead.
So here we are; we figured out the time part of the equation, but what about the disposable income? My wife and I have yet to own a cell phone, nor do we watch TV anymore. These two facts alone have saved us no less than $25,000 since the year 2000. We do not look at expenses as monthly occurrences; they are yearly, decadal, and lifetime costs to our happiness. Here’s the breakdown: two cell phones at $70 per month cost $1,680 per year, that is $16,800 every ten years, assuming zero inflation, or a cool $100,800 from the time you turn 20 until your 80th birthday.
We make do with one car. At times, this is an inconvenience, and on occasion, situations have arisen requiring us to rent a car, sometimes for a month or more. Still, we have learned how to coordinate appointments, activities, and even work schedules during the many years of our long relationship. Here, the savings have been extraordinary. If we had indulged ourselves in owning two cars over the last decade, more than likely, we would have had to replace that car at least once. Thus the car purchased in the year 2000 would have been replaced around the year 2005. Had we purchased cheap vehicles costing $15,000 each and not financed them but instead paid cash, we would have committed to a $30,000 outlay – there are already enough numbers here without adding finance charges. Add $7,000 for insurance during those ten years, plus $120 of gasoline per month, adding up to $15,400 of fuel costs per ten years. With oil changes, tire replacement, brake jobs, car washes, routine maintenance, and other miscellaneous costs, you add at least another $500 per year. The sum of these costs: a whopping extra $57,400 for owning a second car. I appreciate that this is not tenable for a family of four with doctor appointments, school programs, pets suffering an illness, and all the other demands put on us by busy schedules, but I also have known many a young family to overextend themselves with pricey cars that serve demanding egos more than any transportation needs.
Look at the total cost of owning and maintaining a second car, the cell phones, a cable bill, TV, and these things for the two of us would cost close to $75,000 – every ten years. Thinking you don’t earn that kind of disposable income? Consider that if you make, on average, $25,000 per year from the time you turn 25 until retirement at 65, you will have earned $1,000,000 over the course of your career. Your lifelong contribution to the financial world is quite extraordinary; it should be to you, too.
How many people in America have $75,000 put away for retirement? How many people spend that every ten years on vacations? Because incremental monthly expenses fit into people’s budgets so easily, they are considered to be a minor ding to their overall income. One day, the consumer pays a contracted fee of $50 or $60, followed by 29 days of pleasure – the equation is simple. And this is what the vendors and corporations who supply these services need us to feel: that the costs we incur are but a small fraction of our monthly budget and, hence, are worth it.
Warning: Dangerous Curve. Seriously, This Detour Is Far From The River.
Sorry, just one more indulgence with the numbers. As an exercise for myself and, subsequently, a blog I was ghostwriting for, I looked at the cost of conventionally and organically grown foods versus processed frozen meals, along with restaurants, both sit-down and fast food. I wanted to know just how much more expensive it was for my wife and I to eat locally grown, all-natural products. What I learned shocked me.
I, probably much like many others, thought I was spending a good premium to indulge my palate with organic foods. Anyone who has ever shopped at Whole Foods knows what a single bag of groceries can cost there. It would be folly to argue otherwise, or would it? My first step was to find what I thought was the cheapest possible meal, starting with what is typically our biggest meal of the day – dinner. Don’t suggest the dollar menu – three items and tax is over $3.00. I needed to go to the king of low prices – Walmart. At the time I wrote my article, a Marie Callender’s frozen meal of Salisbury Steak with Potatoes and Green Beans was costing $2.77 on sale. How could anyone compete with a fourteen-ounce box of frozen instant gratification? Well, let’s look at what your money buys; two and a half ounces of meat, almost eleven ounces of veggies, the rest I assumed was the gravy.
In season, you can find organic green beans for about $3.00 a pound, organic carrots as low as $1.00 a pound, and organic potatoes sell for the whopping price of $1.50 a pound – compared to conventionally grown potatoes that are often on sale for as little as $1.00 for a ten-pound bag, or just 10 cents a pound. Conventionally raised chicken is cheap at $1.59 a pound when compared to those free-range organic pullets yanking $4.25 a pound from your wallet. From all-organic ingredients, I prepared a meal similar to the frozen dish for comparison: thirteen ounces of fresh veggies consisting of four ounces of carrots, three ounces of green beans, and six ounces of potatoes, plus a four-ounce piece of chicken, small but probably reasonable. This calculates to 42 cents for the carrots, 56 cents for the green beans, 66 cents for potatoes, and $1.06 for our happy all-natural chicken. This fresh, healthy meal costs us $2.70 – how can this be? We saved seven cents compared to the Marie Callender’s meal and are eating organic food that has never been processed or frozen. This is about a pound of food for dinner. How much would we pay for this meal in a cafe? $7.95, maybe $10.95? If it were organic, like I prepared here, this meal would likely cost us between $12.95 and up to $21.95 if the chicken is bathed in a 60-cent drizzle of honey balsamic reduction.
For the sake of truth, our $2.70 cost is indeed on the pricey side, as the meal prepared with conventionally grown meat and produce costs only $1.55 a portion, or about the cost of a medium order of fries from McDonald’s. One more example, and I’ll stop this part of the number stuff and start to bring this all together with a point. Maybe you have heard of Meatless Mondays? The initiative was started by marketing professional Sid Lerner in association with the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health back in 2003. The idea is to focus on making healthier decisions for our diet one day a week, with the side benefit of greatly reducing the impact on our environment due to the water and energy needs of supplying meat. But there are more benefits than just those. Let’s concoct a mostly organic Meatless Monday meal plan, starting with a breakfast of two eggs and four ounces of potatoes for a cost of $1.19. At midday, we’ll have a grilled cheese on 9-grain bread and a banana; lunch costs 69 cents. Dinner for our hypothetical Meatless Monday will be 3 ounces of sautéed green beans with onions and garlic, 4 ounces of sliced tomatoes, 2½ ounces of steamed carrots, a side of roasted peppers, and a few ounces of steamed brown rice for a total price of $3.04. Our food bill per person for a Meatless Monday would be $4.92, while that Number One Combo of Double Burger, Fries, and a Drink at our favorite burger joint costs $5.75 plus tax – for one meal.
Maybe I’ve grabbed your attention, and you are starting to wonder if this could be true; as Mr. Reagan said, “Trust but verify.” Without being saints and living in strict austerity, we can make changes, dramatic changes, in our food budget while eating healthier. Maybe we only start with Mondays, but if we were to seriously consider how we are spending our food dollars, we could begin to save thousands per year and start moving away from convenience and closer to healthy. The added benefit is that we will find more money in our bank accounts for the really important stuff.
Of course, there are the time requirements to shop, cook, and clean, which I have not added to my calculations – but I’m not looking for convenience; I’m looking for luxury. If we can learn to live comfortably, and one of us in a relationship has the time to visit local farmers markets, cook, care for the car, take care of banking, laundry, house cleaning, and the other household necessities while our spouse or partner is at the nine to five, we then find the time to research cheap motels for a weekend getaway and monitor cheap flights to New York City, Florida, Seattle, Paris or London. We can find upcoming events or workshops that are happening in the next few months. Classes, concerts, opportunities to volunteer, or other means that can enrich our lives can be found and planned for – with this, I’m on a path to luxury. This is obviously more difficult for a single person. Better time management might need to be practiced. Take a weekend a month to prepare a couple dozen meals that can be frozen. Connect with like-minded people who can share travel, entertainment, education opportunities, and tips for what’s coming up in your community. Tell your friends to tweet about useful stuff and forget telling you about the trivialities of the day.
Think about this: is life supposed to be about convenience, or should we bask in luxury? Down in the Grand Canyon, we sacrificed some convenience in order to live in luxury. To spend more than a week snowshoeing in Yellowstone two years in a row, my wife and I had to make sacrifices – each of them usually around a convenience. The person who wants to start their own company knows success comes from sacrifice, little convenience, and lots of hard work. Shortcuts typically do not work when one is striving for accomplishment. To get to the top of Everest, there is but one path. So why is it that when it comes to our private lives, we can justify our lack of inertia with a litany of reasons why we must indulge our cravings for convenience? Convenience is the biggest impediment to finding luxury unless you are already wealthy, with a bank account full of idle cash.
What kind of unrealistic life expectations do we entertain, and what are the repercussions of living under the tension that instant gratification should always be within our grasp? Is happiness really just a purchase, a candy bar, or a beer away? Can isolation, depression, or tragedy be fended off by exercising the credit card on late-night internet shopping? Does splurging for dinner, or even a cheap fast food drive-thru after a hard day, offer anything more than a momentary convenience of immediacy that will be nothing more than so much excrement in 24 hours?
Wonderful experiences are not forgotten in an hour or a day; should we be lucky, they will pay dividends to the memory by enriching our lives in the years ahead. Who forgets what it was like learning a major new skill like skiing or snowboarding or the first time they went to Disneyland? What about that first concert we went to as a teen or our first love? Experience is everything, but if we become distracted by a habit of convenience, giving in to moments of instant gratification, our ability to focus on longer-term projects, plans, and epic adventures are never realized. We are conditioned to want and demand our pleasure with an unrealistic immediacy. We want it now.
Patience, persistence, and prudence bring us closer to realizing big dreams. Big dreams are the domain of humanity. During the long history of our developmental stages, humankind has acted like a giant, nearly cohesive unit, building the tools that have allowed us to explore our world and invent processes that have delivered shelter, clothing, warmth, running water, and better access to food. Communication on a global scale is being transmitted by invisible frequencies rippling through the air around us, and the world of knowledge is brought directly into our homes via little copper wires or pulses of light through a strand of glass. But things are changing. We are moving away from the mass of bodies that once were required to build railroads and ships; we no longer employ swarms of people to cultivate crops. The big dream of the new frontier is self-actualization through experiential economic activities and greater personal expression. If an aspiring author wants to bring a story of, say, “Mountain Biking in Mongolia” to the social network of knowledge, it will be with the understanding that instead of buying another energy drink and a pack of smokes, this person is going to have to recognize the value of those $9.00 in bringing them closer to their goal. Humankind has always made sacrifices to succeed, and the last few decades have witnessed many of us losing sight of that struggle – and its rewards.
The newest new economy, from my perspective, will be that of experience and sharing our intellectual resources. It will be our spin on how we perceive where we have been and what we have accomplished, given our limited resources of time for learning and experience. We will move away from the consumption of stuff that fills our homes to buying the tools that allow us to explore our minds and, in turn, offer our perspective to others who may not have access to a wealth of creativity and resources that would allow them to travel our world, or visit diverse locations to learn new arts and crafts. Maybe you have a favorite village and pub in Ireland you think your friends might enjoy – why just speak of the details privately? Why not tell the story in photos, video, the written word, and music, all wrapped up in a digital multiformat narrative? Our opportunity for distribution is global. We no longer require gatekeepers, publishers, or agents, as the internet is allowing everyone to enter the world market.
Should we find ourselves in Peru, watching weavers working their backstrap looms, how will we share with others how these artists exercised their craft? Mind you, we need not go far from home. Maybe near our neck of the woods, we have a rails-to-trails program, where an old, unused rail line was replaced with a foot and biking path that meanders through a beautiful corner of our community. Just because you know it is out there doesn’t mean others know it exists. Who will share it with those people from around the world who may never have the opportunity to visit such a place in North Carolina or Cambodia?
Let’s bring all this together. We have limited amounts of time and money. We have the potential to participate in and find new experiences. Many of us spend an excessive amount of our lives giving in to convenience and instant gratification. What will it take to bring us to the recognition of what the value of play is, and how can we begin to move away from the complacency of routine? When will we embrace the precious commodity of life we have been allotted and see the value in the tools of participation that might allow us to achieve a more dignified means of expression than the addition of a beer tap in the man cave?
How many of us justify our possessions as a reward for our efforts and sacrifices made due to what we see as the demands of a job robbing us of our time? We ourselves rob this time by not demanding more financial discipline and better management of our personal resources. Many people will remain in a state of dissatisfaction while putting on all the accouterments we are being told will bring us to consumption nirvana. And when those things don’t deliver, it’s too easy to turn to pharmaceuticals that can massage the way forward to happiness. But for many of us, this isn’t working. And it isn’t working because we are creatures with two legs and two eyes, who are incredibly well adapted to learning and exploring and then using our powers of recollection and language to tell stories and grow. Many of us are not doing this today. We are sitting around, postponing the big things so we don’t have to make an effort while floundering in instant gratification and conveniences, waiting for that wonderful something that never arrives.
The story from a reality television show or a Super Bowl should only have a brief place in our lives. It may be a nice distraction for a short time to share this collective, cohesive moment in a large community, but don’t forget that we are also individuals worthy of our own personal television shows featuring the best of our reality, our lives, and our families. We could document our own version of the Super Bowl in which we present our best moves and our best performances. These would be living documentaries chronicling our adventures. Upon our passing, they would find a place in our family heritage, adding depth to our descendant’s understanding of who their ancestors were. We then become the heroes of our own stories and encourage others to be as well. Grandma’s wisdom would live on.
The quality of what I offer here may not measure up to the entertainment brought on by the words penned by J.K. Rowling, the art of Van Gogh, the narrative of Ken Burns’ documentaries, or any of the number of unknown artists yet to present their palette of expression. These are my reflections on a time when a man found himself in the middle of wild nature and was inspired and compelled to record a representation of that image. These words are my petroglyphs, my cave paintings, my mark on history.
Back To The Story – Again.
Following our leisurely morning, we have one big rapid to run before making for shore to fix lunch and set up camp. Deubendorff, also known as Dubie, is an awfully long-looking rapid that stretches far and wide in a broad expanse of the Canyon. During the fall, when days are short, the cold river most always carries a brisk slap to the senses. But where the sun falls upon crew and passengers after leaving a rapid, its warming rays keep the shivers at bay. Rondo expertly delivers the Shoshone with expert aplomb, allowing us, fore and aft, to remain dry and toasty. We pull into Stone Creek Camp at mile 132. This will be a layover stop, so not only are we at camp early, but we’ll stay here two nights, allowing us to relax, take in a hike tomorrow morning, and have that rare opportunity to become a little more familiar with our surroundings.
While the crew prepares lunch we busy ourselves to once again find the perfect campsite and pitch our tent. The beach here is enormous, giving everyone ample room to spread out. Having the rest of the day free, we are moving rather slowly. The trumpeting conch shell calls us to the lunch table for sandwiches, fruit, and cookies. From midday to early evening, the second half of this day creeps on by. Besides doing some laundry and Caroline catching her second river bath in ten days, we are doing pretty much nothing at all. Looking back now, I can’t recall if we reorganized dry bags, talked with fellow passengers, or just stared at rocks. Probably stared at rocks – and prepared for the evening’s festivities.
Halloween in the Grand Canyon does not preclude the need to don a costume; we had been warned a couple of days ago. No costume, no dinner. Suppose twigs in the hair may have sufficed as being in the costume of a bush. Lucky for us, Kenney travels with a large overstuffed duffel bag filled with bits and pieces of costumes and soon has set up shop on a large tarp for anyone in need of special attire to join in the party. Pirate Rondo brought along plastic Jack-O’-Lantern heads complete with battery-powered lights. Caroline and I had been hiding a pumpkin head filled with candy in our dry bag just for this day. With us campers now bedecked in our frightful best, we grab the candy-filled squash to storm the camp of a private trip, not far upriver, and do a reverse trick-or-treat by giving away our hoard of sweet treasure.
After dinner, our neighbors, rafters from Maine and Canada, join us around our large fire. The luxury of having two guitars, a mandolin, and more than one singing voice makes for a great party. Things get lively, and with drinks, fire, dance, song, and merriment, we celebrate on the eve of All Saints, bringing the last day of October to a close. Tomorrow will be Monday for many outside this Canyon, but it will be another Sunday for those of us down here. Long live the perpetual weekend.
–From my book titled: Stay In The Magic – A Voyage Into The Beauty Of The Grand Canyon about our journey down the Colorado back in late 2010.