It’s been a hot second since the last blog post and I unfortunately don’t think I’ll end up doing this autumn justice on Jackson’s Out There. Between grad school and working full time, I’d rather spend my spare time out there rather than writing Out There. Last night we hosted friendsgiving at the house and it was one of those gatherings where everything just clicked and felt right. This fall has been filled with dueling moments of connection and dissonance, highs and lows, exacerbated by the stresses of barely having a damned second. Last week my car was broken, I got blackout drunk for the first time in years, I was overwhelmed with a dreadful sense that I simply am not cut out for grad school and that I was just wasting my time. This week my cars humming along just fine, I got a little wine tipsy and slept like a baby, remembering everything, in one sitting all of my grad school projects for this semester have fallen into place in a neat little line as all the ramblings in my brain finally have decided to spit out something coherent and actionable. I get by with a little help from my friends.
Last time we checked in was September, yeah? October I knew I was frankly going to go insane if I didn’t get out, and so I did. First, a good car camping trip out near the gang’s old haunt ‘round Wardensville to visit their fall festival. It was a good break, even as I spent a good amount of it just attempting to decompress and get back to some imagined baseline, yearning to get back deeper into the backcountry. The next weekend, I got exactly what I wanted, as I headed out to Dolly Sods to go backpacking with Elaine, Mackenzie, and Christine. It was the most fun I’ve had in a long while, I remember as I crested the Virginia/West Virginia border going west on US-33 just crying at the sight of the endless interplay of golden autumnal valleys and mountains and remembering, yeah, this is what I love. Dolly Sods was gorgeous and tumultuous as ever, forcing an early bedtime which led into us yelling from our tents different “deserted island” pitches.
The next day in Dolly we got up to Lion’s Head the… fun way. Instead of simply taking the trail up, I saw a big scramble to the top and figured it could be a fun shortcut. An hour of scrambling later, I was right that it’d be a fun way to the top, but I may have been premature on assuming it’d be a shortcut. We hiked through all the different microbiomes Dolly has to offer, from windswept to tundra to cozy pinegroves, finishing out the day with some well-deserved Italian food in Davis. I meant to do a full Trail By Error report on it but never quite found the time. It’s a shame, but don’t worry, there’ll be more TBE to come.
I alluded to grad school projects clicking. My base concern since the start was that in the 1970s, the boom in outdoor recreation, especially backpacking and climbing, led to issues with overcrowding and overuse, but also to a push in environmentalist and conservation efforts, with recreationists coming together to create a “new trail ethic” to address environmental issues and the ethics of responsible recreation. Good God that’s a run-on sentence. We’ve experienced a similar boom in outdoor recreation now, yet it seems there’s been no corresponding environmental movement, no call to educate these new recreationists on responsible, environmentally-friendly practices. If anything, there’s been a regression, the term “conservation” absent from contemporary discourse. Today I realized that it’s that creation of the trail ethic that really principally concerns me – how did it happen, what did it entail, did it work?
I have more to say on that, but I’ll save it for the stuff I actually have to write. Similarly, though, it’s absolutely clicked academia is not the path I want to go down. I love writing and photography, I love researching the history of backpacking, I love actually backpacking, climbing, paddling, camping, the whole nine yards. What I don’t love is this incessant group-think and deconstruction of everything to fulfill some sense of self-righteousness and intellectual superiority.
I’m a supporter of the humanities, I think a lot of our issues right now originate from folks in tech, business, and government lacking any background in the humanities. Simultaneously, it’s partially the humanities fault. The other week I had a professor say in a manner-of-fact way “Nobody in American Studies believes in American exceptionalism anymore… at least nobody who should be getting grants” and the room responded with insufferable claughter (clafter? Clapping+laughter, it makes more sense spoken ). I didn’t dare say anything, but I think Richard Rorty was absolutely right decades ago when he said the issue with the Left, especially the Academic Left, is that it no longer believes in America as a project either capable of or deserving of being fulfilled. It’s more concerned with deconstruction than construction, it has nothing to offer except sneering critiques that call for the dismantling of everything. Research is done now to prove a point, not to answer a question. We had to write out abstracts for one of our final projects before actually doing the project, and I got crap because I didn’t already know what argument I wanted to make. To me, the argument comes after the research, after the collecting of facts. I worry the humanities no longer wants to answer questions, it just wants to prove a point.
I’d say I got off track there but these posts usually don’t have a track to begin with. Ending with the beginning and also the future, I keep on having things click about the future and unfortunately sometimes I find what’s clicking might be mutually exclusive. At our friendsgiving last night, I gave a bit of an impromptu speech which boiled down to I feel incredibly grateful to have such a good, supportive community of friends. And it sort of struck me at that moment – what if I don’t want to go?
The past few months I’ve really been grappling with where to go and what to do after grad school. Certainly a lot of it will be contingent on job prospects, but I’ve also had a fair share of moments where I’ve felt that no matter what happens, I’m moving north or out west, I need to be closer to the mountains and to go out exploring and get out of Virginia for a while if only to broaden my horizons. At the same time, do I really want to leave these folks that I love so dearly? Sure, wherever I go I’ll probably end up making friends but it’s not necessarily my forte and especially not quickly. I’m very good at being alone but I’ve come to recognize maybe that’s not the flex I thought it was. I know these times won’t last, folks will move away, I’ll still probably end up out somewhere by myself for a while because I do still value that, but I also don’t need to rush anything. Maybe I do love my friends as much as I love mountains.
While the further future remains nebulous, I can speak to the nearer-future. January is nominally my “break” but I hardly plan on being idle. The first full week of the new year is going to be yet another Trail By Error in the North Country and I think this one might be the best edition yet. The week after I head out to Boston with my mom to watch hockey, check out a Winslow Homer exhibit, and listen to some live jazz. After that, grad school will pick up again, but on my spring break I have a couple of ideas. The Trans-Catalina Trail comes to mind. More to come.