Like a bucket list, but better for you. Words :: Jon Turk // illustration :: Lani Imre.
Four wheels and a motor. Van life. My third winter in the Arizona desert.
Yesterday morning, as usual, I set out with my shovel, toilet paper and burn can to take care of business. I hid behind a mesquite tree, dug my hole and squatted down. And there, right in front of me, I saw a pile of yellowish-brown pottery shards in the yellowish-brown dirt—the remnants of an ancient Hohokam pot, shattered. The pieces in a neat pile as if some child had dropped the clay vessel yesterday, not a thousand years ago.
And this is what I love about living in the desert, that you might walk by something a million times and not see it, that there is so much quiet wonder out here waiting to be discovered. An owl hooting from the top of a saguaro at first light, a bumblebee on a cholla flower, the first shoots of green grass rising after a rain, frozen drops of dew on the spines of a prickly pear cactus on a January morning. And you experience these treasures only if you keep your senses open and your mind still. Presence.
People ask me which national parks I visit on my journeys. I answer, “Nope. None of them. They’re all on my Chuck-It List.”
Certainly, each of those parks is spectacularly beautiful—no argument—but it’s almost like cheating. The lofty panoramas are so in your face that you don’t have to work to see them. You don’t have to remain open to the possibility that there may be a treasure in the dirt, anywhere, anytime, hiding but not hiding, right in front of you, even while you are taking a crap.
The lofty panoramas are so in your face that you don’t have to work to see them. You don’t have to remain open to the possibility that there may be a treasure in the dirt…
I am attracted to spending time in nature because I seek to escape the over-crowded, oil-soaked, consumer-oriented, internet-crazed, politically wacko world we live in. And what do I get in the parks? Unfortunately, tragically, I find long lines, reservation systems, traffic, parking lots, restaurants, souvenir shops and rangers with ticket books and guns. Okay, I’m sounding crotchety and old, but that doesn’t mean I’m not right.
Instead, I say search your map apps and Google Earth, sharpen your dirt-road driving skills, fill the rig with gas, groceries and water, and head out for the hinterlands. Oh, and be sure put on your road- tripping playlist:
Head out on the highway
Looking for adventure, and whatever comes our way
Nope. Not happening. Put Steppenwolf’s sentiment on the Chuck-It List, too. Same with adventure… Chuck it…. OK, OK… Let’s back up and ‘fess up.
I spent forty years as a professional adventurer, working the trade shows for a pro deal on a pair of goggles. And to score those pro deals and sponsorships, I had to do things so outrageous that others hadn’t done them before, because no one before me had thought of it—or they were too afraid or too sensible to do it. I loved those years and those adventures. The night I washed out to sea in my kayak with luminescent algae sparkling in the gale-driven waves washing over my head. Or arctic ice crashing against the cliffs, showering sparkling crystals that danced rainbows in the sky. Or the ski lines, the vertical rock. Those adventures formed me and made me who I am today. I would do it all over if I were young again and had another go-around.
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But now I’m looking through a set of free goggles that anyone can acquire, even without that pro deal. And I realize what should have been so obvious all along: That life-threatening adventure is only one way to experience the outdoors. An idea often attributed to Canadian explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson is that adventure should only happen when things have gone wrong, because you made a mistake, not because you intentionally seek it.
So many times, in so many interviews, over so many years, I repeated the cliché that by intentionally putting myself on the ragged edge, with my life on the line, I artificially created a do-or-die situation that forced me to become present. And all the while, I ignored the alternative that I could have embraced presence so much more simply without all the danger and hoopla. I failed to recognize that presence arises out of simplicity as well as complexity.
Back to the road-trip playlist, I prefer The Grateful Dead’s take on the highway:
Going down the road feeling bad, hey hey hey, yeah
Not bad as in evil, or bad as in badass, but bad as in giving the big Chuck-It List middle finger to so much of what goes on out there in the “real” world today. And then once you have made your escape, you can just hang out in the desert, or in the forest, riding your bike or doing whatever you like to do. Is that so radical? Or just so simple?
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