TRAVELS - Part 2

TRAVELS: Part 1  <-- Click to read the first part.

My arrival to South Carolina, and the South east as a whole, was oddly welcoming.  The warm air, the insects, the colorful sunsets.  It was all familiar, and familiar was exactly what I needed for the time being.  But the feeling I felt reminded me of the way I felt when I had first landed on the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska, on that small bush plane in the middle of the night.  The landing strip that was covered in snow and ice, the stars removed from the sky by clouds.  It was a place new to me, but at the same time a place imbedded in my memory from its existence in my life years ago, as a child.  I didn't have any clear, identifiable memories of the place, but it was the feeling of knowing I had, in fact, been there before.

I don't know if I'd ever been to western SC as a kid, but the environment was all the same.  For the first time in years, I soaked in the sweet smell of honey suckle. I could taste it in the air.  That yellow flower clinging to small green leaves that as a kid in Virginia, we ate and sucked on for hours as if it was the forbidden fruit in our own backyard.

Honey suckle wasn't the only familiar thing.  One evening, as I walked outside to grab something from my Jeep, I saw a flash of light out of the corner of my eye.  Lightening, I had thought at first.  But then I saw another flash, and another.  Not lightening, but lightening bugs.  Seeing them had brought an unexpectedly large grin to my face.  I briefly thought about running inside to grab a jar so I could frolic in the front yard and needlessly collect the innocent insects.

I chuckled at the thought.  Still, I couldn't help but be captivated by the flashes of light occurring throughout our neighborhood. As I watched, I felt soothed and calmed.  I could not remember the last time I saw lightening bugs.  I had forgotten how magical they looked in a dimming sunset haze.

I didn't watch them for long that night, or any subsequent nights thereafter.  While the numerous things that felt familiar, like honey suckles and fireflys, calmed me and made me smile, they also brought an uncanny sadness to me.  Though familiar and needed, they didn't fill the void that was the feeling of home.  Instead, it was this constant reminder of that void. 

The best comparison I can make is the difference between riding on manufactured snow verses real snow.  Manufactured snow is a perfectly fine substitute.  For the most part, it acts and behaves the exact same way as real snow.  I mean, it is real snow, in technical terms.  It's crystallized water.  And anything you can do on real snow you can do on manufactured snow.  But if you've ever ridden on natural snow, snow from mother nature herself, there's just something about it that's different.  Something that feels better on your board (or skis) as you carve down that mountain side.  Something you can't really describe.  Something you just... feel.

For me, feeling something familiar was like riding on manufactured snow.  Sure it felt great, but it wasn't the same as the feeling of carving Mother Nature's best intentions.  It was true.  Feeling something familiar here in the South was a cruel reminder of how much I missed the feeling I felt where I felt at home: The Rockies.  That feeling you get riding on real snow, something you just can't quite describe -- you just feel it.

I tried to ignore the feeling.  And most days I was successful.  I made a constant effort to set aside my past and embrace this new place.  It was temporary, I knew.  Week by week, and month by month I got closer and closer to it being just another place I had lived and worked.  I filled my countless days with hiking and backpacking, hundreds of miles of biking in the country, research and coursework (a never ending amount of reading), and my new passion - Bouldering.  This new hobby exceeded my expectations of driving home the point that I could make this place work for the time I had to make it work.

But some nights, nothing could drown that exact statement.  The feeling that I had to make it work.  As if I didn't have a choice.  And in a sense, I didn't.  It was make it work, or be miserable.  And half fake happiness equally united with actual happiness seemed much better than total misery.  The few nights I felt hopelessly discontent were few and far between, but the occasional night it did occur was painstakingly depressing.

The discontent I felt, while miserable when I felt it, was also motivational.  Next to my desk I had hung the map I had used to drive to Idaho.  A map of the entire United States that highlighted my route from Eastern Virginia to South-Central Idaho.  The 2,100 miles I had driven, half crying out of fear.  The 2,100 miles I gave up so much for, not knowing what I'd feel when I finished it.  The 2,100 miles that ultimately led me to a place so new and everything unfamiliar, but felt exactly like home the second I placed foot in it.

Though it was a daily disappointment to stare at that map and see where I wanted to be, but wasn't, it was also the daily reminder of what I was working towards.  The idea that where I was truly was temporary, but that I needed it, like all my other temporary locations, to get to somewhere permanent.  Somewhere I wanted to spend the rest of my life.  Someplace like Idaho.

That drive, the 2,100 miles through 10 different states, a drive that took me through 1/5 of the geographical boundaries of the United States, somehow represented exactly where I was now.  A long, long journey through so many things I'd never comprehend.  That map stood for something both incredibly beautiful and disgustingly ugly. The map was greed, envy, success, and accomplishment.  It was the sweat and pain that goes into achieving something truly unachievable.  Something that comes with a price.  Not a price of monetary value.  The monetary cost on that map was negligible.  No, the cost I mean is the cost of giving up something to achieve something intangible.

When people ask why I feel such a connection to Idaho, I can't answer the question.  I try to explain it, which turns into a lengthy verbal spout that maybe leads that person to some understanding, but at the end of the discussion, I shake my head and tell them that still doesn't explain it.  It's something someone from the outside can't comprehend without experiencing it and feeling exactly what I felt.

South Carolina felt good.  Don't get me wrong.  It truly was a place of opportunity.  The recreation was beyond amazing and the people that shared my passions were not only within reach, but willing to recreate with me.  The research I was doing was top-notch as well.  I had no doubt that at the end of it, whenever that actually would be, would lead my professional career in a direction that was unstoppable.  I wasn't sure how much I actually comprehended that statement, but I believed it whole-heartedly and would fight anyone who would dare disagree.

Somewhere between my current position in South Carolina, a place familiar and needed, and my distant past in Idaho, a place that felt like home, laid Alaska.  Currently, the days were getting rapidly shorter.  Nights were filled with the aurora borealis and days were undoubtedly filled with autumn colors, ripe berries, and mammals feasting as they prepared for a long, cold and dark winter.  Alaska was also filled with memories of him, but for the most part, my time in South Carolina distracted me from those.

With every passing day, I thought more of Idaho and the future that awaited me there, than of him.  Somehow, that final embrace was nothing more than a memory that every now and again entered my head, more by force than by casual chance.  I had moved on quicker than expected and was focused on more important things.  My research being my number one objective; getting back west, a close second.

My research was a work in progress, something that, like a child, would require my constant attention and affection.  Getting back to the west coast was simply a dream at this point.  It was something I could obsess about, but something I had no control over right now.  Staring at the map, I set down my west coast dreams and locked them in the same mental box I had put that embrace in Alaska.  Both were simply memories.  An existence in my head I could neither change nor manipulate, no matter how hard I tried.

For the next 2 years, my life would consume the Carolina's and the research and lifestyle that existed in those boundaries.  Like the map, it was something incredibly beautiful and disgustingly ugly, though in this case, I wasn't sure as to which side it leaned more towards.  All I knew was I had a choice: to live with it, or to not.  But it wasn't really an option.  My only choice was to live with it, and so that's what I did.

Temporarily, I told myself.  Temporarily.

TRAVELS - Part 1

I was quickly brought back to reality as I came into the office Monday morning, my last Monday, and finished writing over 16 pages filled with short write-ups, protocols, and site descriptions.  I checked back over entered data and analyses, enjoyed beers and pizza as a final huzzah, and before I knew it I found myself saying my goodbyes to supervisors, co-workers, and new friends – People I’d likely never see again. 

As I packed up my final things in my small cabin, I sunk myself on the couch and nestled in close to my friend.  With his arm wrapped tight around me, I soaked in a feeling that would end all too soon.  I closed my eyes and briefly imagined my plane that would take me back to Virginia to ultimately spend the next 2 and a half years in western South Carolina, conducting the research I had always dreamed of.  I missed him already.  I imagined the time spent there that would be devoid of travels to unknown locations, new people, and him.  Instead, my soul would devour text books about statistics and ecology, write papers through midnight and at the end of it all, supposedly be qualified and prepared to make wildlife management decisions.

I thought back to the things my next years would be devoid of.  I knew I was being dramatic.  But after a year a half of rustic travels and adventures taking place in dry cabins and my backpacking tent, settling back into the bustle of a college town in an urban southeast environment somehow felt displacing.

Once on the plane, I watched an Alaskan landscape get smaller and smaller.  I longed for the spruce, the glaciated braided rivers, the barren landscape that challenged man and animal all the same.  I was glad when we finally got above the clouds and I couldn’t see the green beneath me.  I didn’t want to yearn for a landscape that would never be mine.  The clouds below me were pink with the glow of sunset.  They undulated like giant icebergs in a frozen ocean.  I wondered what they felt like.

I ordered a whiskey coke and began to read “Faith of Cranes”, a novel about a man finding his way through a changing Alaskan landscape.  Not a story about finding yourself in wilderness, per say, the way Christopher McCandless did, but instead finding yourself in, well, yourself.  The man in the book traveled searching for something he didn’t know.  He fell in love with a rural foreign environment that would never be his and left it to return to his home town in southeast Alaska, but the contrast between busy urban cities and the loneliness he experienced in remote villages still didn’t fill the void inside him.  In between it all, he fell in love with a girl, but was too absorbed with finding himself and being independent to ask her to stay, even though he knew she would have.

The story felt too familiar.

 “Although it was slow to take root, Uramuro planted the idea that moving would keep me from ever finding the contentment under my feet.”

As I re-read the line from the book, it resonated in my head.  I sipped my whiskey -- my second one of the night, this one stronger than the first.  The bitter taste of whiskey on my tongue surprised me.  I put the book down and returned to my airplane window where I watched pinks fade to orange and orange fade to an empty gray.  Behind us, towards the setting sun, a fire red glow skimmed the horizon, but towards the front of the plane, towards the fate that lied ahead of me, was a cold and dismal dark blue expanse.

I sipped my whiskey again, then breathed deeply.

I knew the book was right, the idea that continuously moving would keep me from being content.  It was part of the reason I wanted to escape seasonal work and begin the progression towards something permanent and stable. I was tired of never feeling complete.  I had been traveling my entire life.  First, following my dad as a military child, oblivious to any other kind of life style, and then for seasonal work during college summers and again after being handed my undergraduate degree.  My more distant travels began the very day I got my degree.  Seasonal work was great.  It was filled with endless adventures, no rules, and a great community.  But it was always filled with inevitable goodbyes.  The constant search for the next position and accompanying location. The persistent stress of packing, moving, unpacking, and starting over somewhere new just to know in a couple months, you’d be leaving.  But the memories and experiences are well worth it.  I don’t regret a thing and wouldn’t change my challenges for anything in the world. 

Through my Dad’s travels we moved from South Carolina to Vermont to Alaska to Washington to Virginia to Alaska to ultimately retire in Eastern Virginia.  This is where I called home.  Through my own travels, I moved from Eastern Virginia to western Virginia to North Carolina to Indiana to Idaho to southern Alaska to interior Alaska just to find myself headed to South Carolina – right where I started.  But I had needed all of that to get to exactly where I was now.

A plane, headed home – Temporarily.

Temporarily.  I played with the word in my head as though it were something malleable in my fingers.  It made me smile for the first time during that long plane ride.  Maybe it was the whiskey.  I sipped it again, this time a long, refreshing drink.  It no longer tasted bitter.   I continued to play with the idea of “temporary” and everything it stood for.  Opportunity.  The cold and dismal dark blue expanse in front of us was hidden opportunity.  I repeated the idea in my head and challenged the words as if it gave the sentence difference meaning.  I smiled again.

My thoughts were interrupted as the stewardess asked if I wanted another whiskey.  Red no longer lined the horizon and I found myself holding a glass filled only with melting ice.  In the dark and quiet airplane cabin, I nodded and silently mouthed yes please.  I was one of the last ones with eyes still open.

I wanted to be upset about leaving Alaska.  I wanted to be angry at myself for supposedly settling for a south east urban journey and leaving everything I loved and pursued in the west.  I wanted to feel like I was giving up.  But I couldn’t.  It didn’t matter I was leaving the tallest mountain in North America and the 6 million acres that surrounded it.  It didn’t matter I was leaving the tundra, the grizzly bears, the caribou.  It didn’t matter I was leaving him.  I looked out the window.  It was dark outside.  A faint glow separated the sky from the clouds, barely.  None of it mattered because it would all go on the same without me. The same way I would go on the same without them.

I sipped my Whiskey.  It was strong again, but didn’t taste bitter this time.  My thoughts wandered.  I no longer knew what to think about.  I was sad to be leaving the last frontier, but I was happy to be embracing the new opportunity and lifestyle.  I was scared to move to the southeast and begin rigorous graduate level course work, but I was excited for my trip back west in 6 weeks for a wildlife workshop and the start of west coast networking.

I thought about him, briefly, but stopped.  I knew the momentary embrace we felt on that couch in Alaska would be our last.  Despite our summer romance, we had departed as friends.  Just friends.  We had joked about the lack of attraction and connection we felt that summer, but I think we both knew better.  I knew better.  My return to Montana in 6 weeks for the workshop, and possibly seeing him again, wouldn’t matter though.  It’s time and distance, he had told me.  Time and distance.

It was 1:27am.  I stared at my mostly empty glass of whiskey next to me and thought of my Dad, the one man in my life who never cared how far I traveled or for how long I was gone.  He loved me unconditionally and always welcomed me home with open arms and after 9 months in Alaska, I was excited to see him waiting for me upon my arrival at the airport at home. 

My Dad taught me everything I know, which always surprised me considering how often he was deployed overseas during my impressionable childhood years.  In the stories my mother told me, it seemed like he was never there, but in my memories, he was never gone.  I wondered if, as an adult, it was the same for my dad, if my persistent coming and going and the months I would be away without stepping foot even in the same time zone as him went unnoticed.  During my travels, I called him often, bouncing ideas about life, work and sometimes just for company.  My favorite phone calls were the ones where he seemed to need to company as well, and I was glad to oblige. 

My dad is the one constant in my life.  He taught me how to be strong when everything is going wrong.  How to fish, how to camp.  How to gut and filet a flounder.  How to chop wood for the fireplace.  He taught me how to grill and encouraged creative cooking in the kitchen.  He pushed me while learning to snowboard and became my strongest influence when I began slalom racing in college.  He taught me to dream big and to believe that the unachievable was always achievable; you just had to want it.  He taught me to believe in myself, to be independent, strong willed. 

When I got into graduate school in the south east, a vast distance between where I wanted to be and where I was ending up, he was the first to remind me that I wasn’t settling, but instead that I was making the right choice.  He reminded me it was exactly where I needed to be to get to where I wanted.

I hoped he was right.

The stewardess took my glass devoid of whiskey.  With my headphones clinging to my ears, I saw her lips mouth if I wanted another one, but I silently shook my head no.  Three strong whiskeys and I barely felt a thing.  I silently cursed the Irish in me and wondered if I would sleep at all on my redeye headed for Minneapolis.  I suspected not.  Not without another drink, at least.

I once again stared out at the dark landscape through my airplane window.  Sparse city lights and white expanses of snow covered earth just barely glowed under the full moon.  I longed for stars.  This dark landscape felt foreign to me.  It was the first time I had seen absolute darkness since April.  It was now August.  At the same time, I longed for the aurora borealis.  Mostly, I just longed for something familiar.  Something constant.  Something that, like the moonlight, I knew would always be there, no matter where I went.

I thought about my Dad.  Then I silently laughed as I thought about the lack of whiskey in my hand.  But I couldn’t stop staring at the landscape below me.  The all too soon replacement of spruce for yellow popular.  Snow for waterfalls.  Culture based on survival replaced by civil war reenactments. I felt abandoned in my own mind.  I knew the book was right.  I knew my dad was right.  I knew temporary meant opportunity.  I knew that one day, I would be back.  But as we continued to fly east, past everything I had lived and breathed for the last year and a half, I still felt sunken.

I thought back to that last embrace on the couch.  The way I sunk into his arms and let myself feel vulnerable to the changing world around me.  The way he kissed my forehead like we weren’t departing in a couple hours.  The way we casually said goodbye as if we’d see each other in the morning.

I didn’t long for that moment the way I thought I would.  I longed for something, but I didn’t know what.  Staring into the dark expanse that was my new future, I propped my pillow near the airplane window and closed my eyes.  I wandered in and out of light sleep until my mind finally rested with me.  I slept, gently, and dreamed of nothing.

The sound of silence

Silence.

My innocent and naive childhood years were spent in Alaska, just South of Fairbanks on Eielson Air Force Base.  Most of my memories take place outside, from winter to spring to summer to fall, and everything in between.  What I don’t remember, is ever hearing silence.  My winters were filled with snow machining and the steady traffic that occurred on base.  We would sled on the small but steep hill behind our house and scream as we played king of the mountain while we crunched snow with our feet and our hands.  Summers were spent nonstop camping under a midnight sky consumed with buzzing mosquitoes, and as a family of 5 we were always making noise.  The popping of an evening fire, the gas stove boiling water, the crisp flop of a deck of cards on the picnic table.  Even while fishing I remember the sound of the casting and reeling of our rods and old men cracking old men jokes on neighboring boats.  In-between all of that was the constant reminder of living on a military base: the roar of Fighter jets, a noise that as a military brat, I loved hearing and still do to this day.

When I moved to southeast Virginia during my pubescent teen years, the noises changed, but I still never remember silence.  Living in the suburbs of Hampton Roads meant the endless noise of man-made sound pollution.  Blaring low bass that made your organs vibrate, the berate honking of a road raged driver.  I was fortunate enough to live in a smaller town moderately separated from it all.  Our house was situated at the end of our road, nestled gently beside an inlet that led to the ocean.  It was only ever temporary relief from the urban monstrosity I was forced to call home, but it was relief nonetheless.

 

Spring and summer in our small town were filled with crickets, the moaning of bull frogs, and the constant hum of motor boats cruising in and out of our small inlet.  Noise from our distant neighbors echoed across the water as the sounds bounced back and forth like unanswered conversation.   Most of my winter memories are on the ski slopes, listening to my snowboard carving fresh corduroy, the chairlifts crank and pop as they passed over us, and the sound of starting buzzers and cheering when I began slalom racing in college.

My world was rarely, if ever, silent.  Not the real silence at least.  The kind of silence that is so quiet it’s almost deafening.  The kind where when you stand still, you hear your own ears ringing.  The kind of silence that is peaceful, but at the same time, absolutely terrifying.  This breed of silence was unknown to me and I was convinced it didn't exist.  Maybe in movies where emotions and perceptions were created for you, but not here.  Not in this place.

After spending almost 10 years in southeast Virginia, I decided to leave the big cities and began seasonal work in South-Central Idaho.  Most of that summer was spent in the desert surrounded by sagebrush in all directions for as far as the eye could see.  I camped on the job, miles away from the nearest city, and on the weekends I hiked and backpacked the wilderness of the majestic Sawtooth Mountains.  Desolate dirt roads, high alpine lakes, and the persistent smell of Ponderosa Pine entered my soul and never left, even when I did go into town.

I had found a peacefulness and serenity I had never experienced anywhere else and for the first time I thought I had experienced true silence.  Leaving the city filled a void I never knew needed filling and I smiled as I embraced this new perception.  But as I sat to enjoy a peaceful lake on one of my many hikes, I realized I had only escaped the man-made noises.  Aspen trees shook in the wind, birds and squirrels exchanged gentle conversation, and the streams gurgled with the snow melt that continued well into October.

My sensations tingled with every step I took.  Even here, my world was not silent.

I pondered the difference.  Sound is sound, no matter the source.  It's still the tingling sensation you get in your ear that provokes an emotion.  One that makes you close your eyes and mindlessly drift into a world all to yourself, peaceful, serene.  Or one of anger, an explosion of uncontrollable outrage and impulsion that leaves you shocked and dismally disappointed.  That tingling sensation that brings about perception.  What's jargon to me is another man's treasure.  But what's guilty pleasure for me is another man's empty noise.

With my seasonal work ending in Idaho, I began new work in Southern Alaska on the Kenai Peninsula.  My long plane ride, filled with a constant coughing, crying, and whispering, left me wondering if I would find the same peace I had discovered in Idaho.  A perception of sound that made my ears smile.  I looked out the window as we flew over the west coast and ultimately the Pacific Ocean and stared down at hundreds of thousands of miles empty of man's footprint.  I wondered what sounds existed between the valleys, the mountain peaks, the rolling waves.

My job on the Kenai, ironically enough, was going to be to listen.  To explore the different parts of the vast Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, and simply listen.  To try to separate the anthropogenic noise from the biological sound.  The chorus of birds from the whine of a snowmachine.  The trees displaced in the wind from the hum of a bush plane.  The soft tracks of an elusive mammal from the voices of man.

I lived in town.  Snow machines, snow plows, and low flying airplanes were a constant reminder of civilization.  I longed for the emptiness of the desert I once knew.  Darkness came earlier here than I remembered as a kid, but it never masked the noise.  Even on the job, I was surrounded by an uncanny amount of sound.  Packs shifting, snowshoes crunching snow, the heavy breathing that inevitably occurred from our winter hikes.  Even when we turned off our Arctic Cats, there was a persistent ringing left in our ears that we couldn't escape.

Other sounds filled the air too though.  The chatter of boreal chickadees, who sounded defeated compared to their southern counterparts.   The low mournful song of a great horned owl summoning his mate.  The wind caressing the trees and the snow brushing the ground.

It didn't matter my perception of these sounds that embraced my ears, both the sounds I tried to listen for and the ones that slipped in unnoticed.  Silence felt impossible.

When I wasn't in the field, I was stuck inside, listening.  We recorded sound for days at a time, sometimes months, and it was my job to listen to every single recording and document what we heard. Snow machines, airplanes, ravens, chickadees and wind were all common occurrences that came to me as no surprise.  They were all things I heard on a regular basis.  What did surprise me though was the amount of silence I documented, which easily made up the majority of the "noise".

On our recordings though, silence wasn't recorded as silence, but instead as white noise.  A jargon of sounds unpleasant to the ear.  Silence created the same noise as a TV not on a receiving channel.  A blur of absolutely nothing.  It caught me off guard.  Silence had a sound.

I wondered silently in my head if in my search for silence, I had been going about it all wrong.  If sound was perception based, maybe silence was too.  What if the idea of silence had been conditioned in us.  What if we had been brain-washed by school teachers, parents, and Hollywood hits that silence was this unchanging idea, something locked in time for years.  I had assumed if the idea of sound was a tingling sensation in my ears, that silence would be a lack of that sensation.  That was my naive perception of what silence was.  That's what I had been searching for all these years -- A lack of feeling.

So I made it my goal to find this silence that I heard.  On our next outing, once my coworker and I reached the end of our hike, we sat, closed our eyes, and we listened.  It was the dead of winter.  Early January, no wind, but a bitter negative 23 degrees below Fahrenheit. I was convinced we were the only animals stupid enough to be on the rocky outcrop, exposed.

A part of me was bitter.  Reaching that rocky outcrop was no easy task. We had snowshoed uphill for over 2 miles, breaking trail and post-holing two feet deep with every step as we wandered Alaskan Wilderness, oblivious to the man-made trail that sat well maintained in the dirt below us under more favorable conditions.  Despite my core being warm, my fingers and toes were numb but nothing seemed to warm them.

At the top of the hill, we were greeted by break taking views of Skilak Lake and the distant Chugach Mountain range.  Despite the bitter temperatures, sweat beaded on my forehead and I removed my headband not only to release the heat I had created, but to allow my ears to be at their full capacity while I searched for silence.  I realized in that moment that I had never searched for silence.  I had never stopped to find it.  My intake of sound came without trying and I had expected the same to come with silence.

I still wasn't sure exactly what I was searching for and I still wasn't convinced silence, true silence, even existed.  But I thought maybe if I changed my perception of what silence was, I would find it up here on this bitter rocky outcrop, while exposed to the Alaskan winter that most people justifiably avoided.

The air was still.  Even the ravens hid in unknown places.  Small cumulus clouds scattered the skies horizon, but today they didn't dare whisper.  No airplanes hummed, no songbirds sang, no snowmachines whined.  I grasped my poles to help keep my body still.  I listened.

I heard nothing.

There was no white noise like the recording suggested.  But instead, for a moment, my entire world was paralyzed.  All my senses ceased to exist.  I heard nothing. I smelled nothing. I tasted nothing. I saw nothing. I felt nothing.  And that's when the silence became deafening.  

I began to hear a ringing in my ears.  It reminded me of how I felt after loud concerts, only there was no music playing.  My entire body shook from the feeling of my heart beating rhythmically as blood was pumped continuously and I could literally feel my breathing slow.   My ears tingled at this new but unknown sensation.  I opened my eyes, but my entire world was frozen. A photographic image in my head that even as I looked around, didn't move.  It didn't feel real, and it wasn't until a solemn raven coasted past that high ridge line, silently, that my world came back into focus.

I had experienced silence.