The fiiiinaaaal countdoooooowwwn
Hey all, just a very quick update on what’s goin’ on:
Our final move-out inspection from our house (”the Satellite of Love” on Maryland St) is set for Wednesday of this week. My backpacking trip officially begins in four days(!), on Friday. I’m ready for it all, but my housemates aren’t yet, so I imagine I’ll be spending my last few official days in Bellingham helping them to scrabble around, get the house clean, and hench their stuff over to other parts of town (both Hunter & James will be remaining in Bellingham, just moving to different houses).
I keep saying “officially” because, while I’ll be living out of my backpack starting July 1 as planned, I won’t be leaving the Bellingham/Skagit area for another month now. Kevin convinced me to stay on at the mill through July, and so my last day as a miller won’t be until July 28th, just before my dad & sister arrive for a week-long visit on the 29th.
Making all of that work is going to require a fair bit of improvisation, but I feel that I’m equal to it. So many loose ends still remain untied, though, that I haven’t even had the spare mental capacity to get excited about this final countdown, let alone write about it here. This month has evaporated out from in front of me in a swirl of spreadsheets and checklists. I’m very glad that I’ll have another month or so to ease into a new routine. A new way of life, really.
I’ll try to fill in the details for you here just as soon as I can. Introspection is still tough tonight; it’ll be easier by the weekend, once I’m under way.
D-4 days and counting down.
I’ll have a Royale with cheese
Unexpected benefit of putting together your own hiking gear list: You will learn the metric system. Because trying to add up a column of Imperial weights or volumes will make any rational person want to stab all of Britain.
For instance: I have a 1L Nalgene water bottle and a 3L pack reservoir. How much does 4L of water weigh? Yes, Canadian friends, I actually typed that query into Google, because I am a dumb-ass American. As I imagine any small child in most parts of the world knows: 4 liters of water weighs 4 kilograms, because 1L = 1kg, because metric units are actually based on the dimensions of something sensible.
How many pounds is 4kg? At this point, I don’t even care. Fill up that bag and the bottle all the way, and then lift them up. That’s what lifting 4 kilograms feels like. It’s like lifting four full Nalgene bottles. I lift a Nalgene bottle to my lips a hundred times a day. My hands know what a kilo weighs better than my mind does.
After a week of meticulously weighing bits of backpacking gear with my kitchen scale and plunking them into a spreadsheet, I’m already better at guessing weights in grams than I ever was with ounces. This watch? 20 grams. a light rain jacket? 300g. a heavy rain jacket? 600g. a pair of boots? about a kilogram. my backpack, empty? 1800g. (Bonus round: all of my gear put together, not counting food & water? About 16 kg.)
Later on, I was wondering what that 1L Nalgene would weigh if I filled it with methylated alcohol fuel instead of water, since alcohol is lighter. A quick web search revealed that methyl alcohol has a density of 785 kg/cubic meter. “Huh,” I said, “I wonder what that is in grams/liter? Let’s see, a kg is 1000g, and the volume of a cubic meter is… 1000 liters exactly?… so… divide both sides by 1000 and…” ::facepalm:: It’s 785 g/L.
So, okay, I’m learning. Just… slowly.
Anyway! It’s been beautiful and sunny all week, which of course meant that the weather immediately went back to being cold and gloomtastic again this weekend. Third weekend in a row that NW Washington has pulled that crap on me, but summer is in the air.
Tonight I’m packing and repacking, shaving excess grams off the [gear list]. Tomorrow I’m going out for an overnighter in the Chuckanuts, rain or no rain. Only forty days until July– forty??– but I’m finally starting to feel prepared.
Recovering
In short: I’ve been very sick. Let’s review the timeline. March 3 – March 7: influenza w/ fever, nausea, vertigo, the works. March 8-11 seemingly recovered. March 12 – 20 (today): upper respiratory tract infection w/ sinus congestion, bronchitis and laryngitis.
Looking back, if you lump both illnesses together this has been the worst bug that I’ve ever experienced, even from childhood. Straight up the sickest I’ve been in my entire life. I guess I can be thankful that a prolonged flu is the worst sickness I’ve had to face in my 29 years? I’ve never claimed that I live anything other than a charmed life, you guys. Right now I just want to push all these dull, empty days aside and get back to what I was doing.
Today’s the vernal equinox, “first day of spring”, and it was a beautiful new morning. Some sunshine, warm, a little bit of breeze. As good a time as any to get up and press on.
So I’m getting up and pressing on. We’re rapidly coming up on 100 days until July 1, the day I leave town. This afternoon I took a stab at drafting a final gear checklist over on [the page I have for that]. Looks like I’ve collected about 60% of the items I plan to take on the walkabout. Or, coming at it the other way, in the next 100 days I’ll need to shed thousands of possessions that I won’t need and acquire the thirty-odd things that I will.
Looking over the list, I keep reassuring myself that all of the big-ticket items have been bought and paid-for, but there may still be lurking gotchas in there if I don’t keep an iron hand on the budget. I’m starting to regain a little of that unstoppable feeling along with my health, but this vagabond transition in July is still going to be a close-cut thing.
Tomorrow: back to the mill. This Friday: first night of camping in the Hennessy on Chuckanut? Ohmigosh that’d be amazing. Hope the weather (and my constitution) holds up.
The big news
So, I won’t bury the lede here. The big news is this: On Friday July 1st 2011, I will be leaving Bellingham. I’ll be leaving with a backpack, a change of clothes, 30-odd pounds of carefully selected and tested gear, and some boots. Good, well broken-in boots, because my car will be staying here. I’ll be leaving on foot.
I’m planning to take a shakedown hike through the San Juan Islands, then later in July I’ll be meeting up with my dad and sister at Sea-Tac and I’ll spend a week touring around NW Washington with them. After that I intend to hike the PCT from Mt Rainier to Cascade Locks, and west up the Gorge to Portland. From there, I’d like to hike farther south on the PCT from Mt Hood to Crater Lake. From there, who knows. I see trails, trains, and many long-missed friends and family members in my future.
I’d like to end up Back East eventually– I’ve never seen many of the east coast states, and most of my family lives in Florida now. I have old friends in the Carolinas and in Maryland who I haven’t seen in half-a-forever. Of course I’d love to get back to Michigan for an extended visit too. I likely won’t be able to fit all or most of that into this year, but starting this summer I aim to have lots of time on my hands and few obligations, and thus fewer excuses not to keep right on travelling. With luck, that’ll carry over well into next year and beyond. Remember: it’s always summer somewhere.
I plan to get back to Bellingham eventually– I love it here, after all– but it won’t be for quite some time, and it probably won’t be to stay.
I informed Kevin (the miller / my boss) on the first of the year; I’ve told my sister, mom & dad, a bunch of my local friends. They’ve all taken the news quite well. That’s been incredibly encouraging, thanks you all. (I’d been wanting to tell the rest of you all weeks ago, but haven’t had the time or energy to write this properly until now.)
I’ll try and explain my motivations more in later posts, but it all comes back to old ideas of living simply combined with post-industrial ideas about making a living through ingenuity. To quote [an influential document]: “Appropriate technology, green thinking, machines doing what machines do best, people doing what people do best.”
Those of you who know me know that I’ve been harboring such notions for quite some time. The big news isn’t that I’m leaving town on an extended backpacking trip to tromp around the States on foot. The big news is that I’ve picked a date.
July 1st 2011! Fourth of July weekend, baby. My phone has a little home-screen display that I’ve programmed to countdown the days. Today is D-165. Only twenty-three and a half weeks until July. In the meantime, I have a lot of preparing to do.
As I cryptically alluded last time, I have a New Year’s Resolution going to sleep outside one day out of every 7. Every Saturday, to be precise. It’s been coooold the past two weekends and I’ve chickened out, but this weekend I’m hoping to drive up to Lynden with some gear and camp out in a friend’s backyard at least.
This week I’ve also started switching my everyday diet over to trail foods– natural dry milk, good ol’ granola, organic dehydrated potato flakes, trail mix. Not a huge stretch away from my usual diet really, but I may as well start now.
I’m also leaving my car parked at home again this week and getting back to my daily routine of taking the commuter bus to Burlington then walking from Cook Road Park-N-Ride to the flour mill each morning. That’s about a 1.5 mile hike along the railroad grade– or 3 miles round-trip every day, with a light pack that I’ll gradually be filling to full travel weight. I put up some photos of my daily commute on Flickr yesterday; it’s actually quite a lovely walk most days (and of course I’ll be saving hundreds of dollars in gas money in the process). [Have a looksy].
In five and a half months, I aim to be ready to leave my cozy home here in the top-left corner of the map and get back out into the wider world again.
Marathon summer
6 weeks since my last update, and virtually nothing has changed. My 7-day workweek has turned this summer into a long tunnel of labor. We’re coming up on the halfway point between spring and fall now, Read more
