Aug 4, 20235 min read

The First Few: VT, Ecuador, Boston. July

I flew out of Boston like a barn cat with it's tail on fire -- or some other good first line for this thing.

Anyway, at the end of June the school year ended, and so did my time as a gainfully employed, respectable 20-something with a daily routine and a fairly strict nutritional plan. I left the high school -- my place of work for the past two years, where I'd been teaching English as a Second Language to newly-arrived students from Central America -- and I left my apartment in Cambridge -- which, although it had an in-unit washer and dryer, did not have outside space, and made me feel like a hamster in a wheel -- and I left the city of Boston -- where I'd done a few things I was proud of, a few I regretted, and most everything in between -- and I drove to Hartford, Vermont, just across the Connecticut River from Lebanon, New Hampshire.

I like Vermont. I didn't like Vermont as a kid, but I like Vermont now, as a, well, adult (?). One of the things I have enjoyed about how the brain's plasticity solidifies as we age is that I've been able to figure out what I like. I figured out I like the quiet, I like being around a few people I know well, I like going on adventures, being outside, running, wide open spaces (and that song by The Chicks), not feeling like I have to keep up, freedom from judgment, project-based learning, time well-spent, broccoli, helping others, swimming in fresh water, etc. So when my friend C (keeping the mystery by not giving his full name) told me he had purchased a house in Hartford, and had a series of projects he would like completed, and I could stay as long as I liked (with the implicit message that I could stay as long as I liked as long as I kept busy), well, I was tickled pink. The crowning achievement -- we need to build a deck, about 40 feet long, 8 feet wide, and 5 feet off the ground, by the end of the summer.

So I've been in Hartford. I've been running during the day. I found a cinderblock under the little porch that I've been using to work out. There's no one around. There's no judgment. I did some interior painting, learned how to fix doors that won't close, put in a dimmer switch, built a fence. I cut the grass and picked the raspberries. C comes home and we work on projects and make food, and we hang out with his friends from Dartmouth, and we swim in the Connecticut River by campus, and it's a little slice of funemployed paradise.

I'll be here until about mid-September. That's when I'll start what I hope to be a year of backpacking, beginning in Mexico and going southward until I run out of land or the way is blocked by a brood of emperor penguins who have mistaken me for a walking whitefish. If the money holds out, which I'm sure it won't because I don't really have any, I'll head to the other side of the earth, and try to work my way through Oceania, Southeast Asia, and Europe before coming back. And I suppose when I'm back, I'll do the things that everyone else does and that I was thinking about doing before I decided to run away for a year -- find a place I can live in for the long-term, find someone I can live with for the long-term, find growth at my place of employment, contribute to things I care about. I started doing those in Boston, for what it's worth. It felt like warm, black water rising.

(Jokes aside, and I'm sure this is something I'll touch upon more as the departure date comes closer, I do feel a true sense of trade-off from doing this trip for a year. I recognize that everyone around me is starting to build a life, and I was getting there, too. I know I'll miss the stability because I already do in some ways, and I'll especially miss the feeling of working towards something -- for me it was the job, the school community, the kids. There's a real satisfaction in doing your best at something, and learning and getting better at something, and even more so, I think, when it's for someone else. In a lot of ways, this trip feels sort of selfish, self-indulgent. At the same time, I recognized that I just couldn't dedicate myself fully yet. Cold feet. Itchy soles. Whatever -- so it goes.)

So, July and the next month (August!!) are really for two main things:

1. Planning this trip, which includes:

Hopefully finding a way to teach online and make money as I go
Getting vaccines...rabies and the like
Figuring out what to do with my car
Writing out a last will and testament, if you believe my family who lives in upstate New York about the omnipresent, inescapable danger of every city, town, street corner, and stop sign in Central America

2. Building a goshdarn deck!

A couple of other notes from the month:

July 8th -- ran the Back Cove Backyard Ultra in Portland, Maine. Drove up the morning of, started at 10AM. The Backyard Ultra race format is a 4.16-mile loop run every hour on the hour. So a lap at 10AM, then 11AM, etc. I ran 13 loops, putting me at 54 miles for the day. It felt good. I brought a sleeping pad and a lawn chair and ate about 30 peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches. The guy that won did I think 116 miles. A fun, strange event.
July 10-19 -- Went to Ecuador to see family. The city (Cuenca) has changed so much (I was born there, and studied there for a semester in high school). Seems like it's being modernized, but still keeping the colonial, Andean feel. It rocks. Lots of food and drink and party with family. A few fun runs, too, including finding a wild herd of llamas.
July 23 -- wedding. Very beautiful and fun and lovely, nice to get dressed up and run the dance floor with the family.
Mondays -- I have to be back in Boston for 6 Mondays to finish my last graduate school class at BU. The first time I drove back into the city, after only 3 weeks or so away, I had the windows down, and I cruised down Storrow Drive, and the smell was so...striking. I don't know if all cities smell the same, or something happens to your nose holes when you go somewhere else, but I swear it was a smell I've smelled before in some sort of similar context. The smell of returning to a place you once called home. Don't tell Yankee Candle yet.