This time next week, I’ll be somewhere in North Dakota, headed back east, leaving the west behind me.
But back in April, I was sitting in a business lecture, not paying attention.
I was scouring job boards, stressed out of my mind as I watched all my peers shore up their post grad plans. I still had none.
Worse yet, I had no clue at all what I wanted to do. I’d been applying for jobs more or less at random, but the bulk of my applications had been to sales positions.
Easy enough, I figured. I’d done one before, so I knew I could do the work, and the pay was decent, more than enough really, so why not.
As I sat in that class though, staring at the signup sheet for interviewing with a company who seemed like they were desperately hiring, I froze.
Nothing about it was right. I hated the business school and I wanted nothing to do with a job whose sole benefit to me was money.
I’ve never been able to lie. I’m almost physically incapable. To do so at all racks me with guilt and anxiety to a point that I can barely operate. And I knew that taking a position like that was, in essence, a lie.
So, after nearly having a panic attack mid class, I emailed the recruiter back saying I’d taken another position, and immediately started frantically searching for something, anything at all that might sit right with my soul.
I googled “National park jobs” and started looking. Park rangers require some special schooling, so that was ruled out pretty quickly. There were also forest service jobs, literally titled “tree worker,” but those were more in the operating heavy machinery vein, so still a no go.
Finally, I found some hospitality jobs that didn’t pay too poorly, and started applying for those. Talking to people about national parks didn’t sound too bad, and a couple minutes later I’d sent out close to 20 applications for jobs from Washington to California to Montana to Arizona.
A few days and a couple interviews later, I was signed up to move to Montana in just a few short weeks. What was basically the employment equivalent of a shotgun wedding was complete. The rashness of the decision didn’t bother me a bit though; it sat right with me immediately as the right decision to have made. It wasn’t a lie.
Some tears, a degree, and too many goodbyes later, I packed up my beat up Silverado and headed West, still not exactly having processed anything I was doing.
With half the country and a few states I’d never been to prior to that week behind me, I landed in Fuck-all-Nowhere, South Dakota in freezing weather. Laying down in my tent with nothing but cows and dirt roads around me for 100 miles, I finally asked myself “What the hell am I doing?”
The answer wasn’t really clear. I had no clue. I was chasing something, but what, and why, I wasn’t exactly sure.
I ate my sausages and grilled zucchini for the fourth day in a row, letting my tent block the freezing winds that were blowing off the lake next to me, and wallowed in my existential crisis.
I didn’t think it was the wrong decision, but I sure as hell wasn’t sure it was the right one either.
Finally, nature called, and I was forced to get up for a while. While I’d been sitting around, the sun had been busy painting. When I exited my tent, I was greeted with the most beautiful sunset I’d ever seen. Everything that’d washed over me in the moments before washed away just as quickly. I sat and watched the sun set over Lake Vermillion, and took it as a sign that maybe, just maybe, even in no place at all, I was in the right place. As McConaughey would say, Greenlight.
The rest of my drive west was action-packed. Dust flew off the back of my truck as mile after beautiful mile passed in my rear view. Free bird solo ringing out from my blown speakers, I flew down I-90 and countless nameless dirt roads through states most people never go to, loving every second.
Bozeman, Montana was my last stop in civilization before West Yellowstone, population 1000. I fueled up for the last 100 miles of my journey, grabbed the most feminine drink I could find at Starbucks, and headed due south for whatever lay ahead.
I’ve told this story before, but as I drove south, the road slowly carved its way through the Gallatin Range of the Rocky Mountains, with a river on my right, then left, then right once more is it wound its way through the valley.
The cliff faces on the sides of me were taller than even the highest mountains I could remember back east. It was sleeting and freezing, but that didn’t stop the tears from flowing.
It was just utterly magnificent. The full and untarnished nature around me was everything I’d hoped it’d be, and everything I had dreamed up with I first googled “national park jobs” sitting in whatever economics class it was a few weeks prior.
Now, we fast forward a bit.
I’m not sure of the exact timeline of things, so let’s call it mid-July. I’d been working for about a month and a half, and only just now had made one single friend. It was great to have a friend finally, but the feeling of relief I felt was also telling to me. I had been desperate for one.
The lonely feeling I had been leaving unnamed was highlighted in inescapable fashion in the appearance of its opposite. I had to admit that maybe, living out in the middle of nowhere wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
Still, things weren’t all that bad, and I figured maybe if I just lived in a bigger town, it’d be fine.
Then, Max called me and told me he had a brain tumor. Things like that have a habit of making the distance between you and the people you care about more acute.
I immediately began looking for flights home, but just couldn’t afford it. It was just too expensive to get home from all the way out here. I felt helpless. I called my parents constantly, but there was only so much I could say or do, and only so much time they had to talk to me between Max’s surgeries, appointments, and visits, and besides I wasn’t the only one they had to tell things to.
Suddenly all 2500 miles between myself and home were eminently apparent, and unlike living on a coast, those were miles that weren’t easily made up.
Eventually I did get to see Max, but only through my parents booking me a flight home, not through any means of my own.
That was a wakeup call, in many ways. There had already been a ton of lesser events that had prompted similar thinking, mostly involving missing out on events my friends had gotten to go to, but none of those compared to not being there when something terrible happens to someone you love.
I’m thankful that Max is doing so well now, but I won’t ever forget what it was like being away for something like that.
So, where does that leave me? Do I regret coming out here?
The short answer: hell fucking no.
My life has kicked ass since I’ve moved out here. Most of the cool things I have done in my life have been done just within the past four months. My camera roll has doubled in size, my national park scratch-off posters went from artifacts of wishful thinking to being the reason for missing paint on sections of my walls, and I’ve proven to myself that I have enough confidence in myself to trust an impromptu decision to move to a state I’d never been to chase a dream I didn’t have a name for.
I don’t regret a single second of the time I’ve spent out here and certainly don’t have any qualms with the decision making that led me here. The amount of “right place at the right time” moments I’ve had since leaving home are probably more than I’d ever had prior.
Still, I’m ready to leave.
What I’ve also realized since being out here is that place only matters so much.
You bet your ass I’m going to miss waking up and being surrounded by the endless expanse of raw nature on all sides of me. And yeah, it’s going to kill me to put the Rockies in my rear-view in favor of the quite a bit less impressive Poconos.
Still, it’s not home, and I’m not sure if it ever will be. Maybe someday, if I’m lucky, but I have my doubts. I’ve been lucky enough in life to have been blessed with something not everyone is, and that is the right people.
I’ve never had to wonder who my true friends are. I’ve never had to wonder whether my family will be there for me in a time of crisis. I’ve never had to wonder if my neighbors would help me out if my truck didn’t start.
There are so many stupid cliches about house vs home, and I’m not going to taint my merits as a writer by using one here. Still, I wanted this to be home, but I learned it isn’t for me.
Montana is the most stunningly beautiful place I’ve ever been. It’s everything I love in concept, all in one place. I can wake up and decide I want to climb a mountain today, and do it by dinner time. I slam my brakes for more bears than deer or squirrels. It’s a fantastic and magnificent place, and is everything I love about the world; still, it isn’t home.
Home is back where my people are, and I know that now.
The primary reason I don’t regret coming here is that I now have an answer to my “what if?”
Before I decided to do this, I thought moving to the wilderness would be a cure-all for my woes. I thought I could up and move to the Alaskan wilderness if I’d really put my mind to it. I thought I’d never use a cell phone again, that I’d become the philosopher I always thought myself to be, and that my anxiety would entirely disappear in the Godly nature surrounding me.
In fact, not one of those things happened.
The book I began at the beginning of the summer is still unfinished. If anything, my screen time has only increased since I’ve been out here. Some weeks I spent more time looking at trees in Minecraft than ones in Yellowstone.
I think I do practice the things I want to of my own accord, but maybe not as much as I formerly thought myself capable.
Now I know: it was, is, and will continue to be the people I have been blessed with in my life that drive me. I need to be challenged. I need to listen to other people present their novel ideas to actually come up with my own. I miss late-night conversations that push me to my intellectual limit.
But the long and short of it is, I know that now. It’s not a mere inkling or a maybe. It’s a fact.
I’ll never have to lay awake at night ever again wondering if my life would be so much better if only I moved to the wilderness. The answer is no, and knowing that is all the difference.
So, if you want a piece of advice I’ve traveled to the tops of the mountains to find, it’s this: stop wondering, and answer your what ifs.
Song of the Week:
The Line 
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