It’s NOT a Midlife Crisis

In the spring of 1992 I packed up my Volkswagen camper van with my camping gear, my fishing gear and my dog for a summer-long exploration of Alaska. I called back to my place in Park City, Utah, and heard my roommate’s voice on the answering machine: “…and if you’re looking for Luke, he’s off searching for the meaning of life in Alaska.”

In reality, I wasn’t searching for the meaning of life. Like a lot of 20-something-year-old boys, I was following a woman. She was the first real love of my life — at least from MY perspective it was love — and my journals on the trip reflect the too-cliche teenage angst of what was clearly a one-sided devotion. (Yes, I was in my 20s but it was still teen aged: I was, and remain, very immature for my age. I prefer to think of myself as a late bloomer.) I knew it was over before I even started driving and when she finally lowered the boom in Anchorage — using the line I’d always used: “I’m just not ready for a relationship” — it still hit like a ton of bricks. Despite the fact I’d seen the bricks falling from several stories up, they still crushed my soul and buried me completely. For a time.

You’d think I’d have seen the signs earlier on: principally, the abjectly lousy sex, at a time in my life when what passed as good sex (to a 20-something male) was the very definition of “relationship.”

The irony is that I still had an amazing trip. A life-altering journey. I saw places I’d read about, thought about, dreamed about. And they were REAL. No, Buck and John Thornton weren’t around, but that sense of a young world permeated even the all-too-modern city of Anchorage. And that exploration of a different world ended up guiding my life from then on.

As it turns out, my roommate might have been right because I found the meaning of MY life. That journey set in motion the vagabonding that has been at the heart of the intervening quarter-century. In recent years I’ve slowed down, settling into careers and home ownership and (supposed) upward mobility. But sooner or later I’ve always found my way back out onto the hard edge.

And so I find myself now about to head back out there on lead. Don’t call it a “midlife crisis.” There’s no crisis at all. Quite the contrary: I’m ending the crisis that has been poisoning me from the inside for some time now. And I am assuredly well past the midpoint of my life so that part’s wrong too. Instead, call it a return to innocence. Not that true innocence is ever able to be recaptured, but there is still a semblance of that pure self hiding in all of us. I’ve been blessed that I’ve been able to scratch the surface and find him hiding under just a bit of dust. A shake, a sneeze and a big stretch, and he’s back in the saddle. Or at the helm. Or driver’s seat. Or on the trail. Or…you get the picture.

So now I get me hence. Over time, I’ll recap what has brought me to this current situation, what led me to this most recent — and hopefully final, for-the-rest-of-my-life — departure, but it will likely be all too familiar and thus, all too boring. But then again maybe it won’t. Some of it may even be pretty humorous. Wait and see.

I was nervous yesterday but I’m not now.

5 CommentsNavel Gazing, Personal

North! to Alaska…again

When I lived in Alaska, landing at SeaTac on the way back home was like arriving on the front stoop of my house. Most flights to Anchorage run through Seattle (with some exceptions, of course) and parading through the concourse there always made me realize that I was just one flight — three-and-a-half hours or so — from being back in the Great Land. And that felt good.

So when I landed here a few minutes ago — for the first time in three-and-a-half years — it was comforting to have that same feeling well back up within me. I enjoy my life in San Diego. And I still plan to sail away to the tropics at some point. But I’m a northerner. A FAR northerner. Alaska and New England, of course, but also Montana and Idaho, and even places I’ve visted such as Scotland, northern Norway and Iceland — these are the places that feel like Home.

And while I’m sick about the reason for my first return to Alaska since I left in April 2011 (a funeral for a wonderful friend, Carol Phillips), I am very much looking forward to landing in Anchorage a few hours hence. And then seeing “the light that breaks upon the day” tomorrow.

Navel Gazing, New England, Northern Latitudes, Personal

Fools’ (plural) Overture

August 1982

The Smith men, in Utah in August 1985, following the loss of the youngest Smith male.

Heads up. Here comes a whole lot of navel gazin’. Hey, it’s cheaper to puke on this here blog than it is to pay a therapist to get this shit out…

I’ve chronicled the challenges I faced following my mother’s passing in October 2012. Mom’s passing was a blow, but the real challenges came three weeks later, when my father broke his hip the night hurricane Sandy broke the metro New York City area. I’ve chronicled here, too, the challenges of the months that followed, caring for my father and doing things no child should have to do for his parent. And finally, I chronicled my exasperated escape, when my father’s stubborn nature and disrespect led me to move back to San Diego — pretty much as far away from Plum Island as you can get and still be in the continental United States — in September 2013.

What I haven’t chronicled (in addition to the times since that move) are the pangs and emotions that have wracked me ever since. No, I’m not Catholic and even if I was, I did my part for the cause. I felt wholly justified in departing, and I don’t know a soul — not even my father’s friends — who would begrudge me my leaving.

So why is it that when I hear from my sister this evening — my father won’t talk to me anymore — that my father, after falling and hurting himself, and spending some time in Newburyport’s Anna Jaques Hospital, is now in one of the notoriously bad rehab facilities, that I feel a sudden obligation to jump on a plane and go back to New England to rectify the situation?

My sister’s call came as I was nearing my apartment this evening. I called her back a few minutes later, after I’d walked inside, and she gave me the details. And that urge to head east came over me like some guy whose buddy took a bayonet for him back during the war.

The irony is that if I did fly back, my father wouldn’t agree to anything that would get him out of the crappy home and back into his house. He’s become so stubborn that he turned down food items he normally loves that my brother got him at Christmas, just because HE hadn’t suggested them first. Seriously. So suggest arranging an in-home nurse because it will get him? No. Suggest rearranging the house to accommodate less stairs and simpler living? No way. Don’t even bother suggesting a nicer, more home-like rehab facility such as those he was in in 2012 — those are right out.

I’d reconciled that realization, that his stubborn nature makes my abandoning the life and career I’m building here in San Diego a pointless gesture, over the course of a drive up the coast following the phone call with my sister. I stopped in for some tacos at a joint in Carlsbad and was driving home, content if somewhat saddened, when a song I haven’t heard in years came on the radio.

It was Supertramp’s song, “Fool’s Overture.” It’s a long, disjointed (but beautiful, great, haunting) piece about Winston Churchill and the resilience of the British people during the darkest days of World War II. It chronicles the shabby treatment the Brits gave Churchill, their savior, following the war, and makes clear that country’s debt to such a great leader.

It must be the fact the song references the war that made it hit me so hard on the ride home this evening. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t believe my father ever came home from World War II. He had a career, raised not one, but two, families, and has had a great, long life. But he’s still in the Ardennes; I believe that firmly. He’s one of a generation that we — not just Americans, but the entire world — owe an incalculable debt to. And me, too; I owe him. I still believe I’ve more than paid that debt back, but the anxiety of wondering if I have, and the sadness of watching, however remotely, an ancient man watch things wind down is unbearable.

The fool in Supertramp’s song is Churchill, those who cast him aside, Neville Chamberlain and all Brits who’ve come since 1940. Same goes for my family: we’re all fools. As Prince in “Romeo and Juliet” points out: all are punished.

Navel Gazing, Personal, , , ,