I wrote this piece back in April, but never posted it. I think I kept waiting for additional “ah-ha” moments to strike before I shared what we learned on this trip. But the longer I wait, the more these lessons seem relevant. Perhaps there will be another round of insights that strike our family in the coming months, but this will do for now. Wishing all of our blog subscribers as safe and content fall! Carolyn
Multiple people have asked about the lessons learned on this trip. Some of the inquiries are idle curiosity. Some of them come from people wondering if they too should try a trip like this. And I suspect a few of them come from people who find the concept of the trip academically interesting but very unappealing on a personal level. A year in a tiny house with your family does have its challenges. One of my girlfriends was complementing our hutzpah which I misinterpreted as envy. When I told her that she too could orchestrate the same she was quick to correct my assumption. “No, I wasn’t saying I envy you; I am saying that I am impressed you did this – nothing would possess me to do this.” Fair enough.
Most of the questions come from our friends and family, but I have received a few from perfect strangers who somehow happened upon the blog. I am not sure what people expect us to have learned, but buried deep within the questions are, I think, assumptions that we will finish this trip and pack in a “normal” life. Maybe move to Bolivia to farm alpacas or something similarly beatnik. Or perhaps just downsize and take an early retirement.
I know some of my friends and family expect me to launch in a new career direction. Several people have suggesting I try writing. I know others think I should ditch Corporate America for something more meaningful (their words not mine!). I’m not sure if Dan’s tribe have expressed similar thoughts to him.
The thing is though, we were relatively happy before we left. There were aspects of our respective companies that we didn’t like – neither one of us wants to go back – but I am old enough to know the grass is never as green as you think it is on the other side of the fence. Generally speaking, we both found tremendous value in our work and in the people we worked with. The kids were happy in school. We were happy in Charlotte and starting to build the kind of friendships we enjoyed (and still retain!) in Nashville. The trip was the result of many years of planning – not a reaction to life.
So, as I sit here typing up my thoughts, I drift between satisfaction with the lessons I did learn and wondering if there are deeper lessons still percolating in my subconscious. I can’t answer to the latter – at least not now. Maybe those lessons, if there are any, will make themselves known down the road. In the meantime, I can share the ones that are front and center today. Hopefully, they will have some meaning for you too. If nothing else, I hope our trip makes you feel braver. It made me feel braver – open to new possibilities. Life is short. Being brave might be the best way to maximize the time we have. I go back to a quote I posted on our website at the start of this trip. “Get action. Seize the moment. Man was never intended to be an oyster.” Amen.
Happiness requires very few possessions
I knew this intellectually – I am sure you do too. But living with very few possessions for one year was eye opening on so many levels.
Many of you are familiar with Moore’s Law which essentially posits that computer speed doubles every two years while prices drop proportionally. I would make a similar, inverse law that states happiness is inversely correlated to possessions, assuming you have basic standards of living covered. My point more broadly is that at some point your stuff starts to weigh on your contentment. I am not sure where that tipping point is, but there must be one because I just spent the last year of my life living with a fraction of my normal “stuff” and can’t say I was less happy as a result. Weirdly, as we quarantine in my mom’s South Carolina home I have been stressed out by the variety of cookware available to me in a traditional kitchen. I finally put most of it away and transferred my few kitchen tools from the RV to the house. Happiness, it turns out, is one 10-inch cast iron skillet, a high quality 3.5-liter Dutch oven and a medium saucepan. I don’t need multiple sauce pans or salad spinners (put your salad in a clean dish towel and swing it wildly about your head – it does the job and makes you smile, two birds with one stone, plus you don’t have to clean that complicated spinner). I don’t need a double boiler or a Bundt pan.
The same goes for clothes. I started the trip with a small allotment of RV clothing storage: two drawers – about 3 feet wide by 8 inches deep – and a half height closet about 3 feet across. I ended the trip needing half that space. It turns out I spent most of the year in the same clothes – a few tank tops, shorts, sweaters and jeans plus a denim shirt and a light puffy coat. I literally wore my jeans out. Two pair are so full of holes they aren’t suitable for public any longer. I did get use out of a few specialty items – a blazer and boots I brought along served as my “downtown” look. Jeans, tall boots and a black blazer can take you almost anywhere.
My point is that fewer kitchen tools and clothes made life so simple. If a recipe called for some exotic tool I either improvised or moved to another recipe. If a restaurant called for something dressy then it probably exceeded our trip dining allowance anyway and we chose another restaurant.
I’m not sure how we are going to translate this to our lives when we return. Our present house is much too large for us – and I knew that before we took the trip – but we love the property it sits on and love to use the space to entertain friends and family. So, we probably won’t sell it (although we have certainly thought about it). My kids have suggested that we adopt some siblings for them – which would help us with space utilization – but that seems a tad radical. Essentially, we are left with clear observations about the level of stuff we need to be happy – but less clarity about how to apply those observations to our “normal” life. Maybe just knowing is good enough for now.
The journey IS the point
When we started this trip, we had a few stated goals outlined on the “route” section of our website. Chiefly, to see all 48 contiguous United States and the parks therein. As I look back on these goals, I find it a little ironic that they are so destination focused. Certainly, we had implied goals of experiencing all of these places, but I think it’s funny we didn’t explicitly say that. It’s funny because the genesis of the trip was our realization 10+ years ago that our financial plan was organized around a destination (retirement, college, etc.) and not around the journey itself. That desire, to honor the journey, was reinforced on this trip 100-fold.
Anyone who has lived or worked with me knows that I am a checklist person. I think I would die a slow death if I couldn’t make checklists. They mark accomplishments, they keep my life on track in a mysterious way and keep me sane(ish). And so sub-consciously, at some level, my experience of this trip had to involve a checklist. Great Basin, pain in the ass to get to but get to it we must, check. Iowa, no parks but we must visit it to make our goal, check. Isle Royale, spending 6 hours on a ferry in whiteout fog for a 90-minute hike because it was the only way to get to the park, check. Most of the places on our itinerary rose above check the box mentality, but these were not those places.
But when I stand back from our year, and think about those “check box” experiences, they are all filled with meaning. Great Basin rewarded us with a pristine stream, lined with blooming primrose in an isolated part of an isolated park. I can still smell the air from that day – it smelled like rain with a dash of icy water. I will never forget how sacred it felt to be in that place at that time. The stop in Iowa delivered a charming evening in a 100-year-old barn on a bison farm/winery listening to a jazz band under rafters lit by strings of lights. I briefly felt connected to Iowa, maybe even more so than when I actually lived there 15 years ago. And the Isle Royale trip? That trip furnished some of my favorite photographs of the entire year, exploring the island in a heavy mist heightened the mystery and sense of adventure – like we might run into a moose at any time (we almost did).
I think the lesson here is that life is filled with check the box moments – but if you keep an open mind, they might turn out to be small journeys in disguise. Trips to the farmers market are opportunities to appreciate the abundance of our farms. Going to the umpteenth soccer game is an opportunity to see my girls develop confidence. Squeezing in that business trip I don’t want to take might introduce me to an interesting new colleague or let me spend time with a friend I rarely get to visit. Nothing original about appreciating the moment and valuing the journey, but a reminder I needed.
We need to jealously defend wild things
Warning, this is less a lesson than an exhortation. Spending a year in this country’s wild places was a privilege. The trip reinforced for me the absolute right for wild things to exist. So often we think of wild things as being in “our space” both in the country (wolves prey on cattle) and in the city (pigeons make a mess of our parks). Wild makes rivers flood their banks and forests catch fire. Wild is the enemy. Wild needs to be tamed or fenced in some way.
Wild things don’t have a formal Bill of Rights, but I now think they should. I don’t think the “wild” Bill of Rights supersedes a human Bill of Rights, but I think both must coexist in a more equal setting in our imagination and maybe in our application of justice. This really hit me in both Badlands National Park and Glacier Bay National Park. The Badlands park is choke full of rattlesnakes. When you enter the visitor center there you are greeted by a stuffed rattler taxidermized in such a way that it looks like it is striking out at you, fangs bared. But the truth of the matter is less dramatic. Most rattlesnakes want absolutely nothing to do with you. They bite when threatened (so, I would point out, do we – at least in a metaphorical way). At a trailhead in the Badlands, we met a group of women leaving the trail who had encountered a rattlesnake. They said they threw a rock at it to scare it away. Our first reaction was somewhere between “great, you probably made it mad and it is waiting for us” and “good, maybe you scared it away.” But the more I thought about it, the more I thought “this is their house, why are we throwing rocks at them in their house.” When we finally had an opportunity to see a rattlesnake on the trail, we found him/her coiled beneath a bush taking a nap or waiting for a mouse to happen by. I highly doubt it was curled there in some diabolical plot to attack hikers. Even Dan, the most snake averse amongst us, was grateful to see that snake in its natural habitat. It was a privilege. We were in the snake’s house and trying to abide by the house rules. Hiking books, long pants, look where you step/touch, don’t willingly harass the occupants. Throwing rocks sure seemed like an ungrateful way to repay our hosts.
Glacier Bay, up in Alaska, had its own lesson. In Glacier Bay we were lucky to see the most glorious glaciers (my first experience seeing them) in what is a rapidly eroding glacier field. When I say rapidly, I mean pictures from last year don’t look like pictures from this year. That is how rapidly they are retreating. And that retreat has clear linkages to habitat, food supply and human wellbeing. An overwhelming majority of scientists think this retreat is due to human impact on the environment. And yet we seem oddly reluctant to listen to them. If I put aside all of the political rhetoric for a moment and think about this from a purely selfish point of view, then I think the glaciers probably need some kind of Bill of Rights that coexists with my own. We need a clearly defined way of thinking about the glacier and the person as being related in this complex web we call the earth. One probably can’t exist without the other. I realize this might sound like a stretch compared to the rattlesnake observation, but I think they are essentially the same observation. I don’t think we can continue to throw proverbial stones at the glaciers without getting bitten. Would we survive? Maybe. Antivenom works, but it can have lasting side effects. Why not just avoid getting bitten in the first place?
What does this mean for us in our “normal” life? The next time I buy a car it will be an electric one. We will continue to compost, wash out plastic Ziplock bags for reuse and recycle everything we can. We will eventually investigate an investment in solar for our home. We had great success with it in the RV. And, I have started focusing my landscaping efforts on native species. Some non-native species are terrific and garden worthy, but generally speaking our native birds, bees, butterflies, etc. don’t get a high degree of nutritional benefit from them. Healthy native birds and bees = fresh peaches and tomatoes and peppers and a hundred other foodstuffs my family values from local farmers.
For what it’s worth, these are the lessons I take away from this year. I put the question out to my family too to see what they made of the year. Ava offered up her observations that it was nice to spend time with the family and that getting outdoors was “an absolute necessity.” Beyond that though my family is relatively quiet on the subject. Maybe its too early. Maybe the real lessons won’t sink in until the trip is many months in the rear-view mirror. Or perhaps the lessons learned won’t change, but the way to apply them will become clear. Either way, it was amazing to listen to the universe for awhile. To lean into bravery just a little bit.