[pct-l] Life's meanderings

[Stephen]

Yes.  
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jeffrey Olson" <jolson at olc.edu>
To: <pct-l at backcountry.net>
Sent: Sunday, February 15, 2009 6:43 PM
Subject: [pct-l] Life's meanderings


>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
> 
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