At this very moment, I’m camped somewhere in Utah. It’s well below freezing outside but I’m comfortably burrowed in my little off-road teardrop camper, tapping away at this keyboard.
We ordered this camper back in the spring of 2020 in anticipation of being able to hit the ground running once I jumped into an early retirement in the spring of this year (2021). Well, that was the plan, but the pandemic hit and all the global supply issues meant our little camper would be stuck in the build queue for almost 17 months. As frustrating as it was, I can say with all honesty it’s been well worth the wait.
We finally picked it up in late August and as of tonight, it’s night 17 on my way to a goal of 20 nights for 2021. With the snow falling in the high country back home in Colorado, I decided to come west where it’s at least a little drier. However, as I’m figuring out it’s only marginally warmer.
In the roughly seven months since I’ve retired, I’ve come to some realizations about how I want to spend my time and who I want to spend it with going forward. That’s a nice way of saying I’m starting to realize just how much I love having time to myself AND how much I like doing whatever I want, whenever I want. I guess I never realized how accustomed to “noise” I’d become working in an office for all those years. Maybe it’s similar to living in a large city and not noticing the honking and sirens after a while. Some people find comfort in the noise of life and constant interactions with people. I do not. Sometimes I just need space to think and chase creative ideas around.
I think one of the harshest realities of this whole COVID thing has been its actually forced people to be by themselves. For a world so connected to everyone else, I’m sure that’s probably put a large part of our society in a very uncomfortable place. I’m also pretty sure there are people who aren’t liking what they see when they are forced to look inward instead of only outward.
I for one was built for this isolation. As a matter of fact, I tell people all the time that I’ve been training for this very thing since 1961. I’ve always loved having time to myself, even as a kid. I could occupy my time for hours by simply throwing a stick in a creek and following its journey downriver. I could sit in the desert and stare into the distance for hours, trying to pick up as many details in the vastness as possible. Part of becoming an Eagle Scout required I spend a couple of nights all alone in a tent out in the desert. For some kids in my troop, that was a traumatic experience! For me, it was utopia and I never wanted it to end. I knew the Troop leaders knew exactly where I was, but it was fun to pretend I was completely off the map and not a sole on earth could find me.
Since getting the camper, I’ve humourously started thinking of it as an invisibility cloak. I can hitch this thing up and simply disappear for a few days. No internet, no social media, no news, no stupid politics, no calls, no texts, you know, just like being invisible. Other than my wife, I didn’t tell a single person I was leaving town, much less where I was going and how long I’d be gone. I quietly hitched the invisibility cloak to my Tacoma under the cover of darkness and drove away. I’m sure once I get back home I’ll have lots of emails and texts to delete, but until then, I’ll bask in the joy of being invisible.
So, now that I’ve sufficiently disappeared, my only plans for the next few days are to shoot some desert photography, explore some new trails and roads, sip a little whisky by a campfire and catch up on some reading. My only regret being off the grid at the moment is I can’t connect to my Spotify account without cell service, but at least I have my old iPod Nano for just such an emergency! I guess that’s a small price to pay for the privilege of being under “the cloak”.
And now I hear the pitter patter of light rain hitting the roof…just as my laptop battery is dying.
Invisibility cloak…yeah, thanks Harry Potter and Hiker Trailers, I’m totally diggin’ it.
Time for some sleep.
Adventures In The Slow Lane 