JOURNAL

The Universe: it’s a funny place. It throws you some curve balls, it can make you see double, makes you wish you had never been born some days. But with all that ebb there must be flow.

The Universe and I have been going round and round for quite some time now; you could say we’re familiar dance partners. She’s taken me to quite a few places, shown me things I’d never have imagined. The deep crisp of a San Juan Island’s Pacific morning. My hair stand on end while feeling the current of approaching thunder storms rolling across the Tetons. The humility in the heat of Grand Canyon and the relief the Colorado River brings on those days.

This is the life I live, the universe and I strolling hand in hand. I do often find myself wondering just how I got here. I was just a regular kid; good home, good family and all that. I just wanted something different then the rest of the kids my age. I was the boy who thought Edmund Hillary and Magellan were the coolest people on earth (and still do), the type of kid who tried to catch a bus at the age of 8 to take him to Norway just to see if that was where Oompa Loompas really came from. Not to mention the constant tunneling to China. So I guess it was natural that I wanted to pull myself away from the middle class suburban setting I of which I was raised in search of some other kind of destiny. I found it.

I wasn’t sure what kind of life I was getting myself into at first but I found a home in the wild and wonderful world of seasonal employment, and it’s taken me to all corners of this great nation. It’s a life that has lead me out of the “regular”. One month I could be working in Key West and the next in the mountains of Wyoming. I just have to supply the plane ticket. There is nothing quite like it, to think that someone is willing to pay you to live in some of the most ridiculously beautiful places in the world. You can walk out of your front door and only a few steps away be lost in the woods, or climb mountains, paddle your kayak on a misty morning lake, be chased by wild animals, be stung or bitten by any one God’s venomous creatures, all in one day. You even meet guys from Jersey once in awhile. To work seasonally is having the world as your oyster. If there is one thing this adventure of a life has shown me, one thing that this universe has taught me, it’s this: Happiness is where you make it, whether it be the wilds of Washington state or the white tundra of Antarctica. Happiness for me is the adventure, and as a the great voyager Pan once said: “To live would be an awfully big adventure.”