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.

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.

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.

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.

I don’t want to speak up until it’s an absolute certainty, but there’s a good chance I’ll be moving next month into a classic 3rd-floor studio apartment downtown, just like I’d planned. That alone will make all this work worth it.

Otherwise, I’m just playing things real, real mellow. Not pushing myself too hard. Doing everything I can do to save money w/o compromising on basic principles like buying organic groceries or staying involved with my friends.

If it seems like I’m being even more quiet than usual, it’s because I am. If it seems like I’m focusing an unusual amount of energy towards just earning a living, it’s because I am. If it’s seems like I’m ignoring my cellphone on a regular basis, it’s because I am. There’s not much more I could say about that except “please continue to be patient”.

I’ve set ahead of myself a definite finish-line at Labor Day, after which I promise I will collapse in a tired heap like a marathon runner and go back to sleeping-in on weekends again. But Labor Day is still a long ways off. So I continue to plod on…

Whenever I feel slightly over-worked or stressed, I tend to go into hermit mode. It’s my basic means of coping with stress. I don’t answer my phone unless it’s important. I don’t go out; I try to avoid spending any money at all on anything other than absolute necessities like food & soap. I lay around at home. Play some Emmylou Harris records. Surf the net. Kinda like I’m doing now. It’s not so bad.

Today, all the windows & both doors in the house are wide open. It’s a gorgeous summer day. Mid-80s, blue sky sunny. The city I live in, Bellingham, sits at the foot of a massive snow-capped volcano called Kulshan (or Mount Baker). On a clear day, it seems impossibly close. Like walking distance. It’s always startling to be in shorts and t-shirt– barefoot even, maybe down by the bay– and look over your shoulder to see this barren, icy white glacier looming right above the town.

Something about looking up at Koma Kulshan seems symbolic of my whole situation. It’s certainly wonderful just to be down here at bottom, but I can’t help thinking “Wouldn’t it be cool to be up there on the peak right now? I wonder if I could manage that climb… What gear would I need? What training?” I don’t want to belabor this metaphor too much, but you see what mean.

Let’s talk goals again. That’s what this is really all about. I’m a lazy person by nature; I wouldn’t be working nearly this hard if I didn’t have some definite, attainable goals in mind. If you’re wondering what I’ve been so intensely focused on, well, here it is:

Short-term (as soon as I can save-up the cash):

1. Buy a bike.
2. Buy a futon.
3. Buy a guitar.
4. Get my passport.

Mid-term (by August 31st, 107 days and counting):

1. Move into a studio downtown. (I currently share a house with two other guys and I’m really looking forward to having my own space again)
2. Decide on a permanent 2nd job and get hired. (My current side-job at the greenhouse only runs through the summer. As it stands now, working 2 jobs is the only way I’ll be able to afford the rent if I move into my own studio.)
3. Park my car for good. (I only drive about 50 miles a month as it is. With a little extra effort– and a decent bike– I could drop that down to zero.)

Long-term (by 2012. One year into a five-year plan. None of these have changed since 2007):

1. Finish my long-putoff Bachelor’s degree, become a scientist.
2. Meet a girl. Fall in love. Get married.
3. Payoff all of my debts to zero.
4. Buy a sailboat.
5. Walk the Pacific Crest Trail from Canada to Mexico.

Somewhere in there I’d like to write more. Somewhere in there I’d like to travel around and meet see all of you again. Somewhere in there I’d like to carve out the time & energy to at least return my voicemails promptly.

For now, I’m sorry. Please forgive me for not making it a higher priority. I’m happy out here, but the life I’ve set in front of me is fairly challenging. Give me time.

Crossing my fingers that the one last thing on the checklist that’s out of my control– getting the carpet cleaned– goes smoothly.

Last day of work tomorrow. Last day of Phoenix tomorrow. California here I come.

Wish I had more time to blab about it here, but unfortunately there’s still a lot of items on the checklist at the moment. I’m confident I’ll have ‘em all checked off by Friday, though. All systems are go.

My daddy-o called a couple of times with album suggestions for the trip out to California. Dierks Bentley. Traffic. The Allman Brothers’ Eat a Peach. Great music for lost highways. Like I told him, the man’s never steered me wrong. My dad & I have similar taste in tunes, due in part probably because I grew up listening to the sound of his classic LPs rumble through the house from his desk upstairs. Music is timeless.

I posted my first [Craig's List] ad last night, in the “free stuff” section, and was bowled over by the response. I must have gotten 30 emails in the span of 15 minutes, when I had to pull the ad back down to stem the tide.

So the rest of my day this evening was spent fielding emails and briefly meeting a string of random hipsters of all ages, who’d graciously agree to haul away some of my unnecessary baggage– coffee table, desk, lamps, a monitor,…– and were stopping by to pick up their merch. Outstanding.

I feel lighter already. Let the journey begin.

Have a kickin weekend, ladies and gents.