Pictures from the Past Few Weeks

I’ll get around to a real blog this week eventually, I swear…

Proof that my sister Mary was actually here a couple weeks ago.

Zach, Christian and I took a day trip to Johnson's Shut-Ins and Elephant Rocks State Parks.
I'll tell you more about them later.

Christian, me, Ivy, and Zach at the coolest place in St. Louis: City Museum.

Ivy and me at another awesome place in St. Louis: The Art Museum.

Seven Things I Learned Last Week

Hello, dear blog readers! As you may have noticed, I didn’t post anything last week. My editing job just started up, and between 37 students and spending time with my sister-in-law who’s visiting from Oregon, I’ve decided to let blogging fall through the cracks. Today I’m stealing time from editing to say a few things, though. Namely:

1. My sister-in-law Ivy is awesome. Not only do we get along fantastically, but she’s a beautiful person who’s really fun to talk to. Whether discussing theology or crying over Mufasa’s death in The Lion King, we have bonded a lot. I can’t believe that I not only got an awesome husband, but an awesome family of in-laws, too.

Christian, me, Zach, and Ivy, ready to head to City Museum.

2. I have a hard time balancing life and work. Even though I don’t work that many hours a week, I find it hard to finish my deadline and get anything else done. I don’t know how I ever juggled 40 students with 40 hours of farm work a week.

3. Autumn is the best season ever. Actually, I didn’t learn that this week— I just remembered why it’s true.

4. Frozen custard is, in fact, the Platonic paragon of soft-serve dairy dessert.

5. I really really really like having someone around the house all day, even if she’s reading and I’m editing papers. Although I enjoy mostly solitary activities, I hadn’t realized how much I love having another person in the house. 

6. I’m proud of my city. I hadn’t really realized this before, but in showing Ivy around a bit, I recognized that I feel happy to live near St. Louis, and I love St. Charles very much. Despite the awful weather, these cities have a lot to offer. I’m proud to live in them.

7. I’m going to start working on a novel again. My 2011 NaNoWriMo novel Dreamer was a pretty darn good rough; it just needs an overhaul and some fine-tuning. I’m probably not on the road to publication with this, but I realized that writing novels is not a career for me: it’s a way of life.

~~~

Dead tree, Weldon Springs Conservation Area, Missouri

Sunrise, Emerald Isle, North Carolina

100-Word Memoir: Nearing Autumn

Laying on my back on a blanket at my brother’s football practice, I looked at some trees across the park and realized I’d remember them forever. 

They stood motionless, hard tree-shaped sponges. The late afternoon light painted them intensely green with crisp shadows.

They looked just like the trees across from Grandma and Grandpa’s house, which I could not forget either. Breathless and stone-like. Solid. They seemed detached from my other senses, like a photograph.

I rolled over onto my stomach and draped a coat over my back. I didn’t like lying exposed under such an open sky.

~~~

Other Random Photos of Orcas Island

Yesterday I blogged about Orcas Island, and I realized that I had too many photos to jam into one blog. So here are some more.

These trees were strung thickly with spiderwebs. The forest felt like something out of a fantasy story.

I liked this pier.

I want to live on this street!

Here we see Orcas Island's main exports.

I wish I had taken more photos of the view from Ship Peak.

This is the road I walked back to the ferry.

Scenes from Orcas Island, Washington

I mentioned a while back that I might post some more stuff about the San Juan Islands, a little group of islands in Washington state that captured my heart on my first solo trip. 

In that vein, here’s a blog I posted on September 29th, 2009, about a day trip to Orcas Island. My total walking distance (shortened slightly by some hitchhiking I forgot to mention) was 12 miles— a distance that became pretty routine later on in my traveling. Oh well. I had to start somewhere.

~~~

“Can you walk 1.3 miles?” I asked myself, staring at the trail ahead.

“Of course,” I answered myself. “That’s like walking to the depot. No problem.” But still I balked, staring up at the trail that meandered through the pine trees at a gradual slope. Sure, I could walk 1.3 miles. Never mind that it had taken me five-and-a-half-mile walk to get to this point. None of that mattered now. I could walk 1.3 miles.

There’s a reason people make analogies about life being a road. The trail immediately got harder, sloping up to a 45º angle as it wound between rocks bound up in lichen and feathery moss. I trudged onward, sometimes collapsing in exhaustion, but always moving upward, always asking myself, “Can you walk 1.3 miles?” How many miles I’d walked before didn’t matter, and how many miles I’d have to walk afterward didn’t matter. I only had to walk 1.3.

I did indeed reach the top of Ship Peak and took in the scenery. I didn’t stay there long; the view was breathtaking, but I only felt the need to take it in for ten minutes or so. I sat in the shade of a pine and listened to scores of tiny birds making all manner of chirps, whirs, cackles and twitters, like a musical box. Then I headed down for the long walk back. After the initial slopes, which taxed my knees and back, the ground leveled out and my feet knew how to walk again. It was an easy walk back, as I constantly asked myself, “Can you walk until you reach the harbor?”

Orcas Island is like a dozen islands in one, for the landscape changes quickly even at a walking pace. I walked through dark evergreen forests, where silence was a sentient presence so thick that no birds sang. I hiked past woodland pastures with small run-down farms and cream or brown sheep grazing, rather like West Virginia. I passed West Bay, which boasts a marina and several ranch houses, and I explored the beach for a bit, feet crunching on the pebbles and shells. I found several tide pools with limpets and barnacles, and discovered three dead jellyfish, each one’s umbrella the color of grape or strawberry jam. The bay stayed constant on my left for much of the walk, and I marveled at the Pacific madrone trees: tall for beach growth, with the twisted thick tangle of twigs common of ocean trees. Their bark is thin as crepe paper and brittle as parchment. The wood beneath the peeling layers is skin colored, but the bark nearly glows in the sunlight: a shocking burnt orange-red. 

I felt like I was receiving a lesson in the various habitats of the northern pacific islands— and all this in a three-hour hike.

~~~

Travel Tip Tuesdays: Dealing with Culture Shock When You Come Home

"Here I am just returning from my life-changing
experiences as an organic farmer, and I resolve
to hold weekly square dances and grow an herb
garden and raise my own honey and…"

When people think of culture shock, they usually think about something that happens on the road (see last week’s blog). However, there is a second, and often unexpected, kind of culture shock that occurs after a long trip: the shock of coming home.

This happened to me almost every time I returned from a multiple-week trip. Everything at home seemed familiar, yet I didn’t experience it in the same way. After a few weeks, I was always frustrated that I didn’t seem to have changed as much as I thought I did, and that I just fell back into my normal patterns when I was home again— and yet things still seemed off or different. My perspective seemed skewed, or changed.

Being home semi-permanently has been a huge shift for me. I face the question that many just-graduated college kids face: away from the social constructs of travel, how do I make friends and develop meaningful relationships? These are not easy questions, and I’m still working on answers. But in the meantime, if I could follow my own advice, these are the things that would help the most.

Give yourself time to adjust. Don’t come home from a long trip and expect to hit the ground running. Allow some transition time. 

Accept that other people have changed. People grow up without you (sometimes quite a bit), so you need to brace for this. Remind yourself that change is okay. However, even more importantly…

Accept that you’ve changed. This past week, my sister visited from California. I hadn’t seen her in half a year. I thought it was strange how much she had changed in that time— until I realized that I was the one who had changed more. Changes are sometimes so imperceptible that you don’t notice them.

"…Never mind."

Accept that you’re still the same person. On the flip side of this, it can be disappointing to return from a trip and immediately revert to the way you’ve always been. This usually happened to me— after swearing to be forever changed by these incredible life-shaping experiences, I’d find myself being the dumb shy kid who eats a lot of fried chicken. No matter how much you change, there will always be tendencies and personality traits you’ll have, and that’s okay.

Don’t try to force things to go back to the way they were… and don’t freak out if they do. In other words, one of the best traits to nurture in your life, whether you’re on the road or at home, is flexibility. Go with the flow. Live in the present. Embrace change and cherish stability. Or, as I said in a previous blog on a similar topic: “My travels have taught me that you have to constantly adjust to your environment. That includes being home. You still have to seize the day, enjoy the moment, and look for opportunities to learn and experience new things. The little joys and opportunities are all around us, no matter where we are. Sometimes, you just have to create your own adventure.”

~~~

Depths of Summer

In St. Louis, summer and winter both strike an arbitrary point where being outside is unbearable. In winter, a wet coldness sets in, dumping bucket-loads of half-frozen slush into the streets. In summer, a wet heat swamps the city, making a minute-long foray outside feel like stepping into a sauna with a broken thermometer. In these respective times we stay cozied up indoors, drinking hot chocolate or eating popsicles, dehydrated and trapped in our mercifully climate-controlled houses.

On days like this, when the weather breaks, the humidity falls, and the temperature that seemed unbearable at the beginning of summer feels downright cool, I feel like I can begin to start living again.

I’m going to take a walk now.

~~~

Seed pods, Denver, Colorado