Life without stresses

I live a pretty basic life, meeting my own needs and mostly playing in my free time. I’m exhausted and sore from playing hard the last 4 of 5 days. I’ve been out skiing and loving it. Day one of this long week started with a Sunday at Canyons resort. As I rode up the lift with a guy from Manhattan we got to talking about all sorts of things. I explained my career and lifestyle, that it was more or less stress free, that my boss called in more often than I would, and that everyday was good. He talked about his and how he’d lived in the busy life of a NYC businessman.

I remember when I used to dream of that lifestyle, when millions of dollars were my interest. I never thought then that I’d be a 30 year old ski bum. But even this man, having lived that life said that it was more or less only worth it because he could come out to Utah or Colorado to ski. When he was younger and had been fired by his father’s partner he went out to Aspen and lived a ski bum life, eating only peanut butter and honey sandwiches for 3 months.

While the money would be nice, I’d rather just have the mountain and me. All those years I would have lost working for money, hours each day that I could never reclaim and at the end all I could say is that I worked and had money. I work now so that I can play and that’s my only concern. I don’t feel the urge to follow the path of responsible humans, having a solid career, health insurance, or having a family. At least not yet.

I don’t worry about a whole lot. I don’t have to go very far to live the life I grew up in and have also chosen for myself. I surround myself with other like minded people. We all play, riding bikes and skiing together. It keeps me healthy and keeps me sane. My life is too good to give up, for nearly anything.

Throwing down at a ski park

So it seems like a long time ago when I was born. When I was born my town was a small place to me. My world consisted of mom and the house, short and random trips, once in a while escapades to Disney Land, and a youth full of skiing.
I grew up skiing. It’s something I hold onto with ferver and cannot let go. It is so prevalent in my life that I make room for it an any circumstance. It’s worth every minute.
Escaping the life of working and city street to glide on snow is essential to life. Few of us get to enjoy it all year round. Consider me lucky. Consider my life the life you wanted. But really I don’t get to go as often as I’d like.
I got out of my truck and prepped for a couple hours of park play on the mountain when low and behold there was a couple of gorgeous girls driving the Redbull mini my way handing out beverages! Great start to the throw down!
I got up to the park and found it difficult to clear anything with the run-in so I just went in cookin! And sent everything! Awesome!
Go throw down. It inspires life by adrenalin. And it is a way to forget your troubles at least for a day or two.

How it grows cold – Shattered Dreams and Lost Hopes

There are times that come upon us when we make the sad realization that we did not take the course in life that would lead us in the direction we wanted to go. The realization comes when we step back and look at what is happening in our lives isn’t what we planned, isn’t what we wanted, and is definitely not where we want to be. These are the crucial moments to decide whether or not you’re too far down the line to consider options for outing the current situation.

When being who you wanted to be is impeded by surviving you start to see the condition of your situation. That’s not the life I wanted for myself. Yet here I am, living a pretty good life working as a technician for my favorite sports, but without the means to have a fulfilling lifestyle. Working all day everyday used to be appreciated and I should love that I have enjoyable work. But I didn’t start working in my industry to be disconnected from the life that the industry raised in me.

I grew up starting at the age of 3 skiing. I’m not exactly sure where the first run was or with whom but I know I was little. I can still see the edgie-wedgie stuck on my two little skis in front of me. 27 years down the road I ski a whole different way, snowboard, and telemark ski. The last half of my life, so far, I have also become a skilled cyclist, mountain biking specifically.

All I wanted to be able to do when I grew up was be able to ride my bike and ski all day. Or even just a portion of the day. But here I am, working all day so that other people can do what I was wanting to do. That doesn’t make sense. The problem is figuring out how to get on the other side of the table.

It is at this crucial point that I decide that I have 2 options, let it get me down and die this way, or find a way to make my dream possible. I’m not getting any younger and I can’t turn back. There really isn’t anything to lose by trying anew to achieve this selfish dream of being able to have freedom of time.

Inside it is trying, as you might imagine, as I try to gather the pieces of this dream and put it into a tangible picture. And then deciding where and how to start to paint it into reality.

Stirred to move

For the longest time I’ve felt nothing in the way of real emotion, something that stirs me deeply into movement. I don’t know when it happened. But I feel that I know why. I was left alone in a trying time, love abandoned and wandering without clarity. I had found a girl that I couldn’t have but for a moment. And she became everything in a short time. I guess that when you know what you want and she steps into your life things change instantly. You know that she’ll love you forever. Then, for some reason I didn’t understand, she was gone.

Life steadily fell apart from there. All my hope vanished and the rest became self indulgence and survival. A year later I’d be bankrupt as well. It was about that time that I lost feeling. I lost the drive to seek anything better. And slowly I fell away into an emotional netherworld. The world of color faded into a sepia and grays. Motivation became a foreign word. From there I became a pile of ruin. Three years ago now.

Painting this picture is dismal. But the point has to be made. I didn’t think I could actually care about anyone or love anyone again. I didn’t believe that I could do anything. And for the first time today I felt stirred to movement. Today I realized that because of this darkness that I’d been living I may have missed the best opportunity to love again, and be loved by someone who draws light from dark places.

The moment I made this realization was when I also realized that I’d give up an entire lifestyle to make the sacrifice; just to know if this one would be the one. But who am I kidding? I might have missed this train already even though it has much time before it will pass. The critical stage for her is far ahead of where it goes critical for me. It makes me sad.

And if it makes me sad, I’ve been made to feel. I’ve been made to wake. Even if not in time for her.

What I should have learned a long time ago is that what I define my life to be when I wander alone will determine if I can parallel someone else. Suppose I just got lucky crossing paths like a wet noodle thrown at a wall attempting to overlap a straight line in at least one spot. That’s how hopeless I’ve been left to feel about this all.

I’ve also been left to think about how I want the next encounter to be. With whomever it will be.

Snow in reminiscing

It’s that time of year when snow is coming down enough to be trivial for skiing but consequential for riding bikes. So today I took a drive to look into places to ride the snow bike and to do some backcountry skiing in the eastern hills. I found an awesome road to do some winter bike riding on. The snow on it was so packed that I could drive my truck up it without trouble. Should have had the snow bike. I had my truck so I went up there.

That was a spur road off the main highway that leads over the mountain to a little valley where some old time farmers still live, Tabiona. I’d like to get up in there just to check it out. The town lies in the middle of a national forest with no major highway passing through it, just a county road.

As I traveled along the grey sky began to let snow fall. It was reminiscent of winter days, traveling through desert places and touring through canyons and across slopes to find high ridge lines and peaks. In those moments I moved across the snow in an almost ethereal daze feeling the energy of being alive. At peak’s pinnacle I could gaze across mountains and ridges to vast expanses of deserts and in the other direction to vast ranges of other mountains. In the moment hiking up a bootpack path on the knife edge of a steep ridge through four feet of fresh snow I feel closer to something; something I’m unsure how to explain. I’m unsure because I don’t know if I even know what it is.

It’s like this for me when the snow is just right. I’m happy at the chaotic situation and ecstatic to be alive in the chaos. If, on those days, I’d been at home missing the experience, I don’t think I’d know what it is to feel alive. When the snow is like this and I am moving through it I cannot help but feel that I have a purpose, that adventure is my sole reason for being. It’s like traveling through wilderness has always been for me. I am at home. I feel good about it.

And as I move through snow and wild I’m left with myself and a few close friends in a world far removed from the nests of civilization and economic structure. It is there, in those moments that living relies on the ability to stay alive. It means more than going to sleep, waking up, washing vegetables from the store, fresh linens, and knowledge of what the poverty stricken people half way around the world are dying. It becomes my survival. If I hesitate or deviate just a little, it could mean the end. It requires just enough.

But is that really why any of us go? There has to be something more. That’s not what Everett Reuss was after. There must be something more.

Darkness of camp

In the darkness of camp, among the junipers and sand, we had a fire which burned hotter and hotter in the chilling air. It was our light and our warmth. There, in the middle of the desert it was the comfort that we had in the dark of the night and the cold of the coming season.

But despite the calmness and the soothing peace of a fire there in the middle of the desert my friend couldn’t leave her life behind. We were in range of cell phone service and that meant she could check Facebook and listen to her music. While I wasn’t greatly annoyed by this I was awakened to the increasing need for distraction among the living because our lives, as odd as it seems, don’t seem to interest us without the prolific use of our gadgets to stay “connected,” as it were.

I like being connected as much as the next person but I have absolutely no inclination to tell the world what I’m up to when I’m out and about, tramping around the wild places of our small planet. Maybe when I’m done. No one seems terribly interested in my adventures and that’s ok. There are some of you who will benefit from them as you finally open your minds to a non-civilized life of mindless wandering. People are interested in going to parties in Vegas. I’m interested in the empty and abandoned towns that are the iconic wild west.

When you’re out there, leave your world behind. Find peace in the stillness of wilderness. Find your stillness. Realize there is no need nor urgency to be part of the civilization that breeds headaches, smog, and insurrection. Friends will be home when you’re home. They’re always there. Live in the moment around the fire. There’s no need for games, phones, or discomfort. Share stories and read stories. Wonder. Become part of the world you’re in.

Trails that lead away from here

I took a couple of days to wander with a friend out around the desert in search of relics of the past. We found some. But I won’t be sharing many of the photos with you. Certain places are special and certain places require that you visit personally to enjoy what’s left of the past. 

We found the past in the mountains like many ghost places and abandoned mining camps of Utah. Sometimes I’ll come across things long forgotten whose stories that exist only in the cobwebs of the old and dying. When I find the evidence of towns and workings of a people 3 generations dead I wonder and the intrigue grows like a hunger from deep within. The town was abandoned long ago but not before it made a few people very rich. When the mine played out so did the luck and everyone left slowly over time.

It’s the same story everywhere I go. Young people don’t know it and the present generation of labor class has forgotten the stories. But it’s a simple one: the opportunity was only around for a little while and when the dream died so moved on the dreamers. While some stayed and worked with what was left it was only a matter of time before they gave up and left as well. When the last ones finally abandoned their homes and their hopes the only stir was the breeze in the wild grasses that soon reclaimed the land.

All paths led away from this place. They moved on to a different life reminiscing to friends and grandchildren with a sparkle in their eyes: “Those were the days: wild days and most memorable. But the day finally came when the place no longer needed us. It was a somber feeling and a sad moment when I took your mother, no older than you are now, and her brother and we walked away to find a different life because there was nothing left there. Only your granny’s memories.

“We built that town. It’s where I met your old granpa. It broke his heart when the mine closed. His cafe is where he’d hear the stories that I’ve told you. The miners would come in and have a drink and eat and tell these wild stories from beneath the earth… When you create something, as we’d built that town, it’s like losing a child when you have to walk away from it and leave it to whatever fate nature or man has for it.”

Kurt Vonnegut

I just finished reading a book by Kurt Vonnegut: A man without a country. I’ve never read anything by him before and I’m kind of happy to have an author to add to my list of preferred reads. I feel that what Vonnegut has to say is useful and thought provoking. When you read the lines in this book you start to see the image of the man that has thought near too deeply about what is going on in this country that has led us all to a state of fear, under-education, and indifference.

It is true, for the world does live in fear; fear of war, death, illness, injury, confrontation, scarcity, and so on. That fear is used by the powers that be to influence the direction of the labor force. If I am afraid of death I won’t go too far from home and if I am scared of injury I won’t leave the house except to go to work or get food, and other essentials. If I am afraid of confrontation I won’t talk to new people. If I am all of this, then I won’t have a reason to do anything but work.

If that is my life then I have turned myself into a slave of the machine of economics. If I do nothing but work then I have no life of my own. If, then, all of this is true, then I have given myself over to the designers of this system. They are who they are, maybe the super powers of the economic system. Control by fear is a theory put forth by anarchists and others. But this is not new. Societies have risen and fallen and all have had this issue.

When the few take power among the many, the few control the many and then populations of the earth are grieved with the burden of survival and driven to action by fear. Clouded by fear of loss of everything a society can be driven like cattle to the bidding of the cattlemen.

Wilderness within if you can find it…

Words by Utah Phillips, a folk singer. In one track he was talking about an address he was to give to a group of graduates. He was to be followed by a representative of the Chamber of Commerce. That’s when he stood up and declared that the graduates were about to be called America’s most valuable natural resource. He asked them if they knew what they do to “valuable natural resources”.

I had a good laugh. But he’s right. And a look now would tell you that society is full of individuals being exploited for their knowledge and ideas for the advancement of private purposes of the government. Phillips is an anarchist at heart I have come to believe. And I agree with a lot of his ideas. When one embraces the idea he becomes less a part of the machine of “progress”, something which Edward Abbey always reported.

Progress is what builds roads and dams and airports; strip mines and open pit mines; computer chips under our skin and retinal scans at every glance. Progress is what we do with valuable natural resources.

Human nature is to usurp power and to harness even more. That power is controlled by the few and the elite. What is the rest of society to do? There in lies the conundrum. What is the first emotion felt by those who have no more control, or who feel they have lost it to higher powers? Hopelessness.

Billy Corgan has expressed this in more than one way. And he truly believes it. When I listen to Evanescence, Amy Lee believes it too. They’ve rooted themselves in a belief that they are something less than gods but more than human, something that men can have no power over. They pour out their feelings in a maddening rush of rhythm and sound that go unequally in their genre that I dub alternative gothic. I love the sound and both bands have stirred me because they truly believe what they are singing about.

There are others though and they don’t all play music. On the entirely other end is the world of a terrorist. Lost in delusions that there is no more hope in living things, that their god will welcome them if they die to destroy the human powers that rob them of their freedom and ability to hope in a better life.

They’re all expressive of chaos. This world breeds it. Finding the wilderness within is about finding peace with things and breaking free from being a “resource” to the powers that be.

Then there are those who are looking in all the wrong places for belonging and they embrace the darkness of fiction.

Vegas

I grew up in a resort town called Park City. It was around the time of my birth that I discovered I was alive. It was the strangest thing. Also, my mom discovered that she was a mom again and things changed for us both. I went from not to living and breathing and mom went to work to feed two. And she did it well. She took great care of me. Thanks mom!

So this little resort town became that around the time I was born. It had formerly been a mining town with an elaborate complex of mine tunnels that were dug so deep and so extensively that they crossed paths and as a result lawsuits ensued. As the price of silver declined so did the highlife of mining and the people started to leave, which is what happens to towns when the work disappears. Slowly the ski lifestyle was catching on and then it became a full one ski resort town with 3 ski areas in such close proximity to each other that they’ll one day connect with no effort.

In this town people don’t mine for a living anymore. They live to play and work to play. They make a good living. But most don’t fall into that category that me and mom did. So, growing up in a resort town I ended up learning about life outside and found mountain biking on my own by the age of 14 or something. I’ve been at it since. As a result of this I started to learn to work on bikes and have been working in the cycling business off and on until 2009 when I decided it was the career for me.

This takes me places. This year I went to Vegas to the bike tradeshow called Interbike. There we had an interestingly unique experience as VIPs at the Mandalay Bay. I met gorgeous women, what runs Vegas by the way. I found it amazing and the glamour was exceptional. And you get to thinking that they live this way to enjoy themselves like the girls of Park City, who are equally attractive. But the story is different.

In talking with them, I found that some were parents and some were just in love with the most interesting story. They weren’t there to be glamour models. They’re there to get through life the best way they know how. In Vegas, the means are different, and so are the ends, than you’d expect. I was impressed.

The society of America is very much self indulgent but what I found in Vegas, the host city to whatever debauchery you can think of, was full of people just trying to have a normal life. For some reason, that’s not what I’d imagined.

Inside the man there is wilderness and the only home he’ll ever know is the love he finds in this life.