[pct-l] Life's meanderings

[Jeffrey Olson]

I was feeling sad.  Ione strode about the house making notes about what 
to give away and what to store, and what to take with us.  Even though 
we'd been planning for three years - since the beginning of the 
depression - and were totally comfortable with our decision to move to 
the road, I was feeling really disconnected. 


We'd spent so many hours talking about what we wanted to do with our 
late middle years, agonizing and getting euphoric, that the reality of 
the final steps seemed to have a momentum all their own.  I watched the 
love the of my life noting our possessions, eventually moving them them 
into three different parts of the room, into three different futures.  
She was so clear about what we'd decided. 


This process had been going on for weeks, over a month actually.  We 
were down to little things now.  Did we need the set of postcards we 
send every year around Christmas wishing everyone good cheer?  Would we 
write Christmas cards, these cards, or would we find a way to make new 
ones that expressed the different life we were leading?  I didn't know, 
and at this moment didn't feel like going there.  This is really, really 
hard... 


I'd spent two years putting together the bus, crafting our mobile home.  
One of our greatest joys as a couple was to go sit in the bus, or when 
it was stripped down to bare metal, to walk around the shop and talk 
about what we wanted to do, what we would need, how we wanted our home 
to support our next few/many years.  We'd hang out for a week or two, or 
longer, and finally come to a shared vision of what we wanted about some 
aspect of our home, and I'd go about making it.  The Subaru engine was 
in the bus.  I'd replaced all the 30 year old electrical and cooling 
lines.  I'd installed new larger capacity brakes and new master and 
slave cylinders and all brake lines.  The gas tank was new as were the 6 
ply tires and shock absorbers.  All the rust and dirt was stripped from 
the body and I sealed everything with rubberized coating and coated the 
interior sheet metal with POR 15.  The exterior was ready to paint.  All 
the interior body panels were insulated with foil covered bubble wrap.  
We'd settled on how the bed and interior would be set up and I'd built 
everything to our vision - revisiting it of course as shelves and 
compartments were installed. 


It'd been a heady process this throwing off one life for another.  I 
remember the moment three years ago we'd sat down at Sweet Melissa's in 
downtown Laramie and Ione had looked at me and said, "What are we going 
to do now?" 


I'd looked at her with bemusement.  This woman I'd married and loved 
kept me constantly wondering.  As soon as I figured out where she was 
coming from, she'd already left and was exploring another world.  I 
sensed this was one of the times that she was exploring something big, 
not just whether we should buy a couch, or where we'd backpack for a 
month that summer. 


Most of my male friends thought she was flighty, insubstantial, 
emotional, and irrational.  When I first met her I thought the same 
thing.  We were both part of a roving singles group of 30 to 60 year 
olds that met every month at someone's house for wine, a potluck dinner, 
and conversation.  Sometimes people paired up and that was ok.  They 
were still welcome.  But for the most part, we were 20 to 50 friends who 
enjoyed each other's company. 


 From a male's point of view, one who didn't know her, Ione was a bit 
too intense to be considered beautiful. At 52 the lines in her face were 
crafted from intense investment in her life, and the knowing look in her 
eyes stemmed from a wonderful weaving of emotional and intellectual 
intelligence.  My friends were a bit scared of her - before we'd become 
a couple she'd had the reputation - one that was never spoken about by 
the way - of having a world that was a little bit larger than us guys.  
She  played with us and we either played or kept our distance.  Most of 
us that tried to play crashed and burned in our own insecurities and 
black/white emotionality. 


I was attracted to her fiery beauty and played.  How many times in those 
first months I felt like I was barely treading water while drifting 
downstream towards a waterfall.  I had to trust that I would go over the 
falls and pop the surface.  I did - many times. 


I knew why she was single at 52.  She presented such an intense, 
substantial reality men simply couldn't find their footing with her.  
Those that did apparently fell by the wayside at some point, unable to 
keep up as an equal.  Her presence is that strong... 


I'd realized early on in our relationship that I had to maintain my own 
life in order to be with her.  I couldn't sink into her vibrance and 
energy and beauty.  If I did, I felt as deep as I can feel I'd lose her, 
that she would simply move on, and that would be that.  I realized this 
early  in our relationship and was healthy enough to maintain my  
directions and interests.  When I didn't waver when she did get 
emotional and irrational and flighty seemed to reassure her.  My own 
emotions and wondering wanderings were fuel for her fires.  She so loves 
to ask me five word questions that have me roiling emotionally to 
express what I feel.  She doesn't waver either... 


When Obama had been elected we'd felt hope like so many starving 
progressive types had.  When the recession officially became a 
depression in the winter of 2010 and the blame began to shift from the 
Reagan to Bush decades to Obama, Ione began to get uneasy.  I don't know 
what she sensed, and she couldn't put it into so many words.  But I 
trusted her intuition and the unease she felt about where the world was 
heading.  Looking back it seems like much of our lives were caught up in 
long conversations with each other and our friends about how to live the 
rest of our lives.. 


The backdrop to our angst was a deep uncertainty about the power of 
vision and ideals in public life.  We'd gone as far to identify young 
leaders emerging from local to the national scene, and none of them had 
the cachet Obama had had during the year before his election and the 
year after.  No one was rising above the lowest common denominator to 
express a vision of a possible better world.  The rifts between 
ideological positions had hardened into unbridgeable spaces between 
ideologues on both sides.  The "filled with hope" now seen as a naive 
search to bridge the ideological divide in bipartisan politics generated 
an ethos of "I'm in this for myself" across America's landscape.  
America's position of power, now maintained by military hardware, was 
giving over to the Chinese century. 


Ione kept asking what I wanted to do in our late 50s and early 60s.  She 
was perfectly satisfied working at the county hospice center even though 
it didn't pay much.  She said she was open to hiking for as many years 
as I wanted to, that she was open to moving to a different kind of 
lifestyle not based in a house and job, that she would like to see 
Alaska and Tierra del Fuego - saying this knowing my history with VW 
busses.  I knew she had a preference, but that it was one that would 
evolve with my preferences.  It was a totally humbling experience to 
live with and love someone who was so in tune with me that she'd 
travelled the paths of imagination I would travel before I did. 


Ione's question "What are we going to do now?," asked three years ago, 
bore the fruit of an 85 VW bus, totally tricked out into a mobile home.  
We'd saved enough - $80,000 - on top of retirement to spend three to six 
years living out of the bus and doing interesting things.  One of the 
greatest debates, sometimes an argument, that we worked our way through, 
concerned medical insurance, our retirement, and our belief in the 
system that we would spend our 60s, 70s 80s and perhaps 90s within. 


We liquified all our assets.  We sold our home, liquified our 
retirement, and put everything into cash.  This took place before the 
depression hit its bottom and these kinds of cash transfers were 
restricted.  With the $400,000 I got in inheritance from my folks, and 
the $250,000 Ione got from hers when her mom died a year ago, we figured 
we had enough to last us til our deaths.  We realized how privileged we 
were to have this cash nest egg.  Neither of us had children, and for 
five years or so, we fully intended to explore the world from within the 
bus.  Ione was already asking about what I thought we'd do when we got 
sick of playing.  I, the dutiful straight guy, was wising up.  I said I 
didn't know, simply because I didn't.  What I did know is I wanted to 
spend my late 50s into my mid-sixties at least, hiking and biking and 
rafting and driving from Prudhoe Bay to Tierra del Fuego. 


Before I'd met Ione, I'd already planned a number of years to hike the 
PCT and CDT, end to end, to bike the Continental Divide Mountain Bike 
Trail, to learn to oar a raft well enough to guide a raft down the Grand 
Canyon, to hike the Arizona Trail, the Great Divide Trail in Canada, the 
Grand Enchantment Trail in the southwest, and maybe the PCT again.  That 
she wanted to do these things too still amazes me.  I'm so lucky. 


However, today, watching Ione putter and organize and build the momentum 
leading to our new lives, I am experiencing grief, a real sense of 
loss.  I quit my job at the college and a satisfying career.  I will no 
longer play raquetball twice a week with Mike.  I won't play tennis 
three times a week with Dan and Gene.  I won't hike the Headquarters 
Trail above Lincoln's head at the highest point on I-80. 


I watch my mate move in her confident, self-absorbed way about our home, 
and I hurt.  In an important sense, Ione is my doppelganger.  I'm 
cutting myself off from pretty much everything I know.  Without her 
strength and resolve and directed vision I probably wouldn't have made 
the choices we've made.  This scares me.  I've always realized that Ione 
is with me because I have had my own vision, my own dream.  I satisfy 
myself in my day to day life, and we are good together.  But I have a 
deep, unalterable sense that my life is bigger than me, that my destiny 
is not something I choose.  Right now I'm feeling small in my life, 
overwhelmed and tentative.  The choices I've made that have led me to 
this moment, to living on the road, to hiking and rafting and biking for 
as long as it takes to do them - is this reallly what I want to do???


Jeffrey Olson
Martin, SD