In 2014 I almost bought a house. It was a very modest home coming in at 1000 square feet, priced under 200k. It was at the end of a questionable street but was in a village I loved, minutes away from everything I desired: hiking, skiing, swimming, and plenty of friends. The house had flooded just 3 years earlier, a yellow (or red) flag that should have stopped me right then. But I forged ahead, convinced I was wasting money on rent and that this was my chance at the “American Dream.” I went under contract, but the home inspection (a norm back then) discovered a problem that I couldn’t push aside: the roof structure was compromised. I asked a roofer friend to take a look, and he concurred: the entire roof and its structure needed to be removed and rebuilt. I’d need to take off the entire top of the house and replace it. I backed out of the contract, bought my roofing friend a round, and thanked him for saving me the trouble.
I’d already given up my apartment lease, and at the end of that July I found myself homeless instead of a homeowner. With my hard-earned down payment still in the bank, I was all of a sudden free to go wherever the wind took me. No mortgage, no lease, no relationship, while working a per diem nursing job with a side hustle as a hostess at a local restaurant. The day that my lease ended I moved the largest of my belongings - snow tires, a snowboard, and some second hand furniture - into a small storage unit. I opened a PO Box for my mail and went to work that evening at the restaurant.
My shift wrapped up at 10pm, and after eating dinner at the bar I drove twenty minutes or so to camp in a state forest. The local campground was full, so I camped in the woods. By headlamp, still in my black hostess dress, I hiked as far in as I could (there are rules around how far off the road one must be), set up my tent, and slipped into my sleeping bag for the night. I didn’t know what the next day or week or year would bring. I didn’t sleep much, trading rest for the rush of feeling alive.
Being without bathing facilities wasn’t suitable for showing up well groomed to either of my jobs, and so I moved my tent to the local campground which, while solidly booked on weekends, had sites available Sundays-Thursdays. For the next three weeks I’d show up on Sunday, rent a tent site, and check out on Thursday, finding friends or family to stay with on the weekends. The campground just so happens to sit next to a large body of water, as well as some hiking trails, and I was peachy keen to spend much of August living outside when I wasn’t at work. I kept quarters in my toiletry bag for showering at 5:30am, and found that I had the bathhouse all to myself before 12 hour shifts at the hospital. I’d return at night to a small wooded site that held my tent, a picnic table, and a camp stove. I fell asleep to owls hooting and awoke to loons calling across the water. For that season of my life, I had everything that I needed.
That autumn I would find myself in California on a travel nurse assignment, followed by a stint in Alaska from February to early summer. I did more camping by myself, more hiking (in brown bear country!), and expanded my horizons in ways I never would have had I bought the house with the compromised roof structure. I returned home in June of 2015 to celebrate friends getting married, and found myself yet again camping near that large body of water I’d spent so much time at the summer before. But this time, I’d have a new beau by my side, and we’d paddle an old Grummond canoe (traded for a six pack of beer) to remote campsites dispersed along the water’s edge. In those days the sites were first come first served and we’d paddle in after work on a Friday, trying to find a site with the luxury of a composting toilet! Cell service didn’t yet reach the backcountry sites, and we’d disconnect from the busy world, the owls and loons once again singing my lullabies.
Ten years have come and gone, and we’ve paddled out to camp for a couple nights every year since. Some years, like this one, we just barely squeeze the trip in during a few nice days in October. Always, we’ve made it happen.
Some things have changed. The place has gotten busier. Other people, like us, found this gem, and you must now reserve a site ahead of time. Cell service reaches many, if not all of the sites, requiring one to have the discipline to turn their phone off or put it on airplane mode. One perk of change - every site now has a very well built and user friendly composting toilet!
I’ve changed too. Once free as the wind, I now have a full-time job, run a photography business on the side, and hold the responsibility of tending to a fixer-upper home and the surrounding land. This past year has been especially busy, and I’m sure you too can relate to such times. The ones in which we haven’t been out doing the things we love as much as we once did, as we find our time whittled away by adulthood’s responsibilities.
As I sat along the shoreline this year the stress of modern day life once again melted away amidst the lapping rhythm of the water. Ten, eleven, now twelve summers in, I thought about what draws me back to this place. Why do humans sometimes return to the same places year after year, even as they change and lose some of what once made them so special? Why will I put everything on hold to paddle out onto what I’ve failed to tell you is actually a man-made reservoir?
Nostalgia and memories, yes. Peaceful moments in nature, yes. A break from the grind - yes of course. But more so, it’s the knowing of a place’s unpredictable predictabilities: the loon that might call or show up near the canoe, but when and where we never know. The casting of a line that some years lands us fresh fish tacos, but many years, leaves us empty handed, yet our cups spilling over. The sky that shooting stars might streak across, or maybe, like this year, will harbor a full moon rising above the mountains, our own private show to watch as we paddled across the water.
My responsibility as a human, when I go there, boils down to simply being, to taking notice, to appreciating, and to leaving the place as if I never was there at all while taking my refilled cup forward into the world. And perhaps that is all we need to love about a place to keep going back. It’s unpredictable predictability. Familiar patterns despite the change. The reminder that each year the place is still so much the same, even if different. And that I too, while ever changing, while different than ten years ago, am still so much the same, still free as the wind - if even for just a few days, at a manmade shore, now a loon friendly ecosystem.
Thank you! Relatable and beautiful reflections, musings and reminders! 🫶🏼