Dear Reader: This is Your Call to Adventure
I started our honeymoon eating a hot, soggy sandwich with mediocre fries. Which would not be that great of a story except that some 12 hours later, this series of events led me to have massive amounts of gastric distress on the side of the tallest mountain in NY State. This, dear Reader, is your call to adventure.
Dear Reader:
I want you to know that I thought of this blog post while pooping in the woods off of the trail ascending Mt. Marcy—New York State's highest point. You're welcome.
I suspect you're wondering more about how this came to be. Or why I was doing... that. Or why I'm still talking about this (I'm sorry if you've left this article already). There is a story here, I promise, and it goes a little something like this:
We started our honeymoon rolling into a small Adirondack town at around 5 p.m. on a Monday. Just in time, we thought, to grab a lovely, fueling dinner before our big long hike planned for the next day--the headliner event to our little getaway. It took us only about 2 minutes into town to realize that everything was closed. Mondays in the fall in the ADKs was the day when every restaurant shut down to recuperate from all of the leaf peepers out en masse each weekend. Cheers.
I should have known this. I'm from a similar ADK leaf-peeping town and I spent my first working years at the mercy of seasonal tourism and its ebbs and flows. But, through space and time, I simply forgot. And instead of our romantic, fueling, tasty meal, we spent most of our evening calling restaurants and driving and calling some more until we found a 40-minute wait at a brewery two towns over, when I devoured a hot, soggy sandwich with mediocre fries.
Which would not be that great of a story except that some 12 hours later, this series of events led me to have massive amounts of gastric distress as we made our way up and down the tallest peak in our home state (and two other mountains because I'm a doody-covered masochist, apparently).
Would you like to know what I was thinking while my new husband sourced the perfect leaves for me to wipe myself with while I dug my 13th latrine of the day?
I thought "Now this is a fucking adventure."
“Now this is a fucking adventure.”
When we were considering our honeymoon options we had barely looked past the end of our hiking poles. Had I not thought to hike Mt. Marcy—a goal we had both had for years—I don't think we would have put an effort into honeymooning at all. We weren't the type of people to hop on a jet plane to go sit on a beach somewhere in front of a $1,200 hotel room. No shade to those who are—we just prefer simplicity, and practicality, and, frankly, a little bit of action.
So, when I began to occupy my brain while I squatted among the mountain trees, I started to consider all of the events that led me to that moment. Would I regret taking the simple route? Were we in the middle of a honeymoon nightmare that, in the remaining two days, would only get worse? Would every story about our honeymoon culminate in the woulda shoulda couldas?
And I also considered what we're sold about the perfect life. About adventure. I thought about how many business books I've read are totally designed to allow us to be digital nomads—teach us how we can work anytime, from anywhere. Spain. Portugal. China. A van. This, we think, is the life of adventure—the break we need from the monotony, the 9 to 5, the life in one place. We can see everything. We can be everywhere. And it will all be Instagrammable. Which you can then also use to make more money.
And yet here I was—a 9-to-5er with a steady job, married to both a person and a property, barely interested in leaving my house let alone the country—laughing as my husband hands me fresh maple leaves warning me to do a good job less I chafe.
Sure, adventure can be selling all of our worldly possessions and heading to Ibiza. But do you know what else is an adventure? Climbing a mountain. Starting a business. Raising a child (seriously—creating functional a human—if that's not adventure....). Learning a new skill. Being in a club. Taking a class. Reading new books. Pooping in the woods.
We're so wired to the adventure means travel thing that we can't see the call to adventure in our everyday lives. And I can't help but think—in the world of self-reflection and gratitude journal and tantric whatever-the-fuck—that we should be addressing this misconception as well.
Hence this article.
In case you're wondering, we made it off the mountain by headlamp, just late enough to receive text messages from my mother threatening to send in the National Guard to save us, or at least recover our bodies. I was dehydrated but mostly unscathed. And my husband? Well, he's one step closer to canonization.
For more From the Dear Reader Series:
Liz’s Dear Reader series is the rawer, ranty-er version of Liz’s writing, sharing every day experiences and diving into the deeper meaning of life. But like… funny.
