WordPress seems to have changed my very carefully chosen font and I’m not sure how to change it back. This one sucks, I’m sorry you have to see this.
Anyways.
It’s been a bit since I’ve been able (made the time) to sit down and write one of these, or much of anything. I bought a new journal a few weeks ago, and it’s still sitting empty on my bedside. My nature journal’s most recent update was only a few days after getting here, sat on Yellowstone Lake. I still haven’t picked a place to sit and write weekly like I promised myself I would before even coming here. The thesis whose conclusion I hated has gone unedited since it was submitted in early May. And this blog has gone over two weeks now without a single suggestion of a post.
Unsurprisingly then, I feel a bit out of whack right now. I’m not sure whether my writing output is an indicator of how I’m feeling, or, like I generally choose to believe, if it’s a causal thing that writing less makes me feel worse. Regardless, I’m hoping sitting down to write this finally can put me back on track in at least that department.
Even though I haven’t been as prolific as I might like lately, I have been doing quite a bit. Since my last blog, I flew home and back, saw my first concert since before the pandemic, scratched another national park off my poster, made my first friend here, hiked my first mountain, saw Old Faithful during a full moon, and unjustly became a wanted criminal in the state of Idaho (got a speeding ticket I deserved).
Life feels long this summer. I always thought that would be a purely good thing. Life is short, but you make it long by creating moments. This summer is just over halfway over, and already it feels like something I can look back on. I’ve been to seven national parks (and quite a few more national forests), 12 different states (plus two more if you include airport layovers), and have driven over 7,000 miles. Compared to the rest of my life, that’s just an absurd amount of things to have done so quickly. The past two months feel like an incomprehensible amount of time, and that’s made life significantly more interesting.
It’s also made it feel like longer that I haven’t seen all the people I care about, and longer since I’ve spent any significant amount of time near civilization, or people my own age.
I think last time I wrote one of these I had planned on staying here over winter. I’ve been sitting with it since I made that “decision,” and I really, really do not think I can do it. The winter itself is one thing: -20 degrees and consistently getting four feet of snow dumped on me is at least a new experience, even if a miserable one. But then there’s the reality of living here. This town is already not exactly fun to be in if you’re under the age of 40. For one, it’s like living in an airport; I can’t get a god damn Miller Lite in this town for under $8 (I promise I am not exaggerating). For another, even if I could, there’s nobody here to go get a drink with.
That all gets even worse in winter. Everything except a select few hotels, one pizza place, and the grocery store closes. Traveling to Bozeman, a drive that can push two hours simply because of rain, becomes an “at your own risk” endeavor in the snow. The town’s population that’s already small even with tourists and seasonal workers drops to your high school’s graduating class size (or less).
All this is to say… I can’t do it. I guess I was glad enough to get away from all of the annoying parts of being young when I came out here, but now I’m starting to realize that I actually might have enjoyed them, or at least the good parts that come along with them. I definitely miss being able to go out and have a couple drinks with the luxury of being able to Uber home, instead of having to get a hotel room. Mostly though I just miss being near any of my best friends, and knowing that it’s prohibitively expensive to go and see any of them or for them to come see me. After being utterly bankrupted by my two day trip home, I’ve had to reflect on exactly how completely prohibitive traveling is. I’m trying to remedy this at least a little by getting rewards credit cards and things like that, but in the end with my income level this just isn’t gonna be a solution.
So I guess once my season’s over here, I’m off to somewhere on the east coast once again. This might lose me in-state tuition at Montana State if I do still end up going to school there (which still seems like a great option), but I guess I’ll just have to figure out how to make that difference up some other way. For now, I just know I can’t do a winter with 3:30 sunsets and an average of 2 people spoken to per week, so back east we go.
My poor truck is going to hit 200,000 miles in no time at this rate, but I’ll be damned if that old bastard doesn’t make it back with me, $2000 gas bill and all. Besides, I loosely planned a 19 national park road trip down to where a couple friends live in Florida, and if I visit a couple of the Colorado ones while I live out here to cut that down, it might actually be a feasible trip!
Regardless, I’m finding it amazing how much you can learn pretty much by accident. Just by going and doing things, living and realizing the limits that that mere act of living imposes on you, you tend to pick up a whole lot by accident. That makes writing all of it down all the more important though, otherwise a whole bunch of those lessons and new learning is going to get forgotten and left behind, just to have to be learned again later. That’s my 22 year old wisdom for the week.
Song of the Week:
The Line 
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