Adventure

I have been thinking the whole trip about adventure. In addition  to the adventures we are having, we have been  listening  to other travel adventures, much more risky than our own, but covering the same ground. We listened to Ken Burns' companion  to the Lewis and Clark series, drawing  from the diaries  and other documents from the westward exploration. We also listened to 7 of the 9 Laura Ingalls  Wilder books about her little houses. I am also reading Patrick  Leigh  Fermor's books about his walk across Europe just before WWII. Those were serious travel adventures. In those stories, there was novelty, but the resolution was never clear and a happy ending was far from assured.  The contrast got me thinking about 'adventure.' I remember from my master's  thesis that the word is related to luck or chance, and when I looked it up again, it also has connections to risk and daring. We think of adventure as novelty and spontaneity,  but don't generally think of it as risk and chance. The travel adventure stories we heard were dangerous. Not just inconvenience,  but death was over the next hill. Our travel adventure had a lot of novelty and spontaneity, and it had some minor frustrations. We struggled with the learning curve constantly. We were not very experienced campers, and though we travel a lot, and for 4-6 weeks at a time, we usually go a long distance and then make a home, so we are unused to constant travel. We were also constantly in a new place, trying to figure out how that place worked, and how to get what we needed from it. We were living a very physical life, filled with 5 mile hikes and loading and unloading our shelter so we were physically tired in ways we were not used to. We were adjusting to working together,  and to being a family of 4 instead of 5. All of it kept us out of our comfort zones. I don't mean to complain, I am just thinking about how unused to a real adventure we are. The problems were tiny, really just inconveniences of time when we got lost or picked an place to stay without understanding  the local geography or had a longer drive than planned, or of money if we waited too long to get a hotel reservation. They irritated us, as if they were actual problems. Compared to the problems of health and safety  or starvation and ruin that the trailblazers faced, they were not worth mentioning. Ours wasn't an adventure on the same scale of risk,  but it points up the level of comfort we are used to, so that in modern parlance, the very word has lost its connotations of risk and danger.  We thought we couldn't see the outcome, and that was where a lot of the frustrations lay -- would we find a hotel or camp? -- but after all, it was pretty clear: we would eat at least 3 meals, sleep somewhere, maybe just be a bit wet or cold, but only a little. We tend to get upset and stressed when something goes wrong, though if course our problems are really quite small, especially now, when a little extra cost or some lost time is a big deal only if we make it so. I feel like that is part of what travels teach us, if we are really traveling, as opposed to being tourists.We are very used to being in control. Here we had to let go to some extent.

I learned about work, too. This was not a vacation. We didn't  rest. Again,  I am not complaining,  just observing that our regular life is very easy, again because of the contrast with the stories as also  with the work we had to do. It took at least an hour to set up camp,  and another to organize the car, every day. Phil did a lot of it since he gets up earliest by several hours.   

We also learned a lot about ourselves as a family, and we also had to adjust as we changed from 5 to 4. We had a lot of jokes, and kept falling into patterns of behaviors, like going to bed at dusk when camping, or each falling into a particular job. Ellie specialized in tent poles. Phil organized the car. I was in charge of schedule, and also most of the dishes and keeping  Ellie clean. Jeremiah played pied piper and kept all the kids busy with football or Frisbee or jackpot. I think that this long adventure has been refreshing for sure, and good for us as a family. Isn't it funny that it was refreshing to work hard, and to live a less certain life for a few weeks?