BURLINGTON, Vt., July 5 — After seven years on the run, one very sweaty and disheveled man on a mountain bike was seen meandering unsteadily through a wooded section of local trails commonly referred to as “Narnia.”
When asked what he was doing there, with midday temperatures reaching a humid 103°F, he said he was simply “trying to find his way back.”
To what, exactly?
“Great question” he replied.
And that’s when things seemed to boil over.
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Maybe it’s because I’m biking through the muggy woods alone in the heat, but the interview I’m conducting with myself in my head isn’t really yielding any front-page breakthroughs. Not yet, anyway. It’s certainly got me thinking, though. And that was sort of the whole point of going biking—to see if I could figure out what happened.
I never felt like I could communicate my thoughts in ways that other people could understand. Year after year, I’d try to get better at recognizing patterns and putting the pieces together in my head quickly so I could share my completed thoughts with others. I desperately wanted to be able to say whatever it was I’d discovered so I wouldn’t get left behind in conversation. The faster I got at connecting the dots and spitting out the results, however, the more distance it seemed to create.
I was so focused on trying to tell people what I thought, I never considered that describing how I got there might be the most helpful thing I could do.
You know the quote “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime?” Well, all the advice piling up online seems to me like the equivalent of pelting people with fish (or trying to).
Telling feels like yelling to me… it doesn’t help people learn to fish. That’s the very trap I’ve spent the last seven years or so trying to claw my way out of, and I bet I’m not the only one.
Who knows.
Maybe I’m irrationally afraid of sounding like one of those people pelting folks with fish online, but it just never occurred to me to try and help people picture my process instead of merely presenting them with the final product. And I’ve been thinking about this a lot; the whole, sharing fully vs completely thing.
Just last week, I went running even though I recently sprained my ankle. I probably shouldn’t have, but I really needed to move after being cooped up on the couch with nothing but an icepack, my laptop, and too many swirling thoughts. So I’m shuffling along, looking at the lake, and the sun-rays are rippling across the waves. I’m lucky to live here and to have access like this.
I know that.
Sometimes, though, I think back to waking up in a tent in front of the Tetons and I actually feel an ache in my bones. I miss it. I miss needing a puffy jacket first thing in the morning in July. I miss running the dirt road out by Spring Gulch, with its snowflakey cottonwoods and sagebrush, or mountain biking in Cache Creek while the sun sinks behind the town’s silhouette below. Don’t get me wrong, I miss big-mountain adventures, too, but what I really miss is that smaller stuff. Not to mention, the heat out there’s just... different.
Sometimes I wonder if I should just go back.
It’s been seven years since my accident and five since I moved. Each has been hard. One new dog, two new jobs, three new home addresses. Not enough sleep. Far too much thinking. In that time, I’ve been trying to be better about sharing fully with the people in my life. And yet, something I haven’t really shared is just how much I wonder if I’m trying to build a life here in Vermont while the universe is nudging me to build it somewhere else. But as my therapist likes to remind me, it’s not like I’ll figure out an answer to that by watching things play out from up in the clouds. I have to be boots-on-the-ground to make sense of that kind of stuff.
All I know is that Wyoming’s the only place I’ve ever felt like I could breathe fully. In a lot of ways, living there was like discovering this hidden little world of possibility and acceptance. I really leaned in… really let myself dream out there.
You know?
Maybe that’s why it felt like I could breathe better.
Plodding along the lakeshore on that run, thinking about life out west, and the version of me who’d been living it, something occurred to me. When waking up in a tent in front of the Tetons, I was usually with a group of people. Needing a puffy jacket in July sticks with me because of the early morning coffee chats with friends spent wearing one, and racing the sunset on a mountain bike was something that became a post-work ritual with my roommates.
Since moving, I’ve done a lot of thinking about how to recreate a life that felt like the one I left out there. Until now, I’ve mostly been searching for missing puzzle pieces to add. Maybe it was the people, though? That might be part of it, but I’m starting to think it’s less about the people there and more that I shared myself fully with them compared to how I’m sharing myself here and now.
That realization became impossible to ignore this week. With my ankle feeling a bit better, but still not fully run-ready, I decided to go mountain biking for the first time in a very, very long time. I thought it might help me clear my head. Instead, I’m being bludgeoned by the humidity, gasping for air, and sweating profusely. Wooof. Winding my way through a section of New England woods called “Narnia,” I’m feeling like maybe I recognize glimpses of an old version of myself somewhere in here.
But how did I get even here?
A few years ago, this bike I’m riding had been stolen from me, right out of my garage, in the middle of the night. It took days for me to notice. Before I could actually track down a receipt or any other proof of purchase, I had to scrounge through old emails and bank statements.
A few weeks later, I got a call from the officer assigned to my case. They’d found my bike. Apparently, someone spotted it in the parking lot of a local grocery store after seeing my facebook post and called the police department with the tip. An hour later, I was driving home, dumbfounded, with my bike strapped to the rack on the back of my truck.
When I first bought it, that bike had been worth multiple thousands of dollars—a pretty big purchase for a guy in a depressive funk who was coming off of a lengthy Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) recovery from a snowboarding accident. The irony is that, for as long as I’d been immersed in the world of outdoor sports and mountain athletics, I’d made a point of actively avoiding mountain biking out of fear of getting hurt. Friends had repeatedly tried talking me into trying it, and I’d always resisted. So I really have no idea why I chose that moment to relent and give in.
But I did.
Within a couple of months, my friends also managed to talk me into joining them on a bike trip to Moab where they planned to ride a very technical route, called The Whole Enchilada. It starts at ~11,000 ft in the La Sal Mountains before dropping ~8,000 ft down to the Colorado River.
Yes, I went.
Yes, it was terrifying.
But it was also completely exhilarating and it stirred something in me I hadn’t felt since before that snowboarding accident and TBI.
As I’m pedaling through the tame woods of Vermont, sweat’s melting off my nose while I shake my head in a mild huff. It’s been almost seven years since that Moab trip. In that time, it’s felt like I’ve just sort of been caught in this… growth spiral? It’s like I’m moving forward, while somehow circling the same problem over and over: how to find a life where I can share my full self all of the time, instead of just some of the time.
In the early 2000s, I was big-time into both snowboarding and writing. Years of posting an array of outdoor adventures and cultural commentary on social media led me to start my own website in ~2017. I figured that was a step toward becoming a real writer, more or less. In the years that followed, I posted stuff there somewhat sporadically. Even though I ended up getting a few pieces published in print, I was still trying to find my voice. And if I’m really honest with myself, it was less about finding it and more about letting it out of its cage.
Spoiler: that’s a pretty hard thing to do when you’re not comfortable with who you are.
Not knowing how to show people what I’m thinking has been really, really costly. Even though I felt like I had trouble connecting with folks for most of my life, it was only really in the last few years that I started to recognize the actual amount of distance I’d wedged between myself and others. Telling people what I thought first, and backing into why, if asked, seemed to fit the mold of what people expected of me in the moment.
What’s more, that snowboarding accident and TBI scared the shit out of me. Like, to the point of changing my entire life.
I pivoted out of the outdoor industry altogether.
I got sober.
I moved across the country.
I started writing regularly as a way to heal.
Later, after pedaling my way through Narnia, I’m at home putting away my gear and I’m thinking about how normal an occurrence that used to be… returning from a post-work ride though the Tetons with my roommates on some random weekday. We’d have sweaty gear sprawled across our entire place, blending in with the rest of our living-room-meets-gear-shop aesthetic. Now, seven years later, and on the other side of the country, I’m standing in my living room that’s just a living room, forced to face just how long it’s been since that were the case.
Hunching over my dining room table with my laptop open in front of me, I’m still in my sweaty bike shirt and shorts looking for an email I’d once written to a friend about that Moab trip. After just a few clicks, I’m reading through it and my shoulders start inching lower as I weave from one line to the next. I’d basically sent my first-ever newsletter without even realizing it. Well, first one that was both from me and about me, rather than for some brand or company.
“[It] started with a backpacking and winter camping trip into the Wind River Range in Wyoming… My buddy and I weren’t sure just how much snow there’d be, so we didn’t know whether or not to bring skis/splitboards as a mode of transportation.”
Ha!
A friend and colleague had emailed me about something and asked what else I’d been up to, sort of as an afterthought. Maybe I just wasn’t used to people asking me what was going on in my world, but I ended up writing a sort of trip-report style response, complete with photos and everything.
“We drove down to, and camped at, the trailhead of our hike at night, figuring we’d assess in the morning with daylight and see how much snow we were dealing with. We ended up leaving the skis/boards behind and, although there was a decent amount of snow, I’d say it was the right call.”
Cracking a smile, I close my laptop and finally head off to shower.
After I’d written that email, I remember feeling like it probably sounded like a jumbled mess. I’d been tired and had been way less filtered as a result. Reading that email now, though, these many years later, I’m smiling at the realization that I’d accidentally shared my full thought process—the how instead of just the what. I hadn’t rushed to connect the dots and I hadn’t been just trying to quickly spit out an answer.
I took the time to share myself fully.
Turns out, I’ve been searching all this time for something that’s been right there.
///
When asking once more if he found his way back, the sweaty man in his thirties blinked, still breathing heavily, and nodded slowly. Pausing to gulp some Gatorade, he said “We’re all just trying to find a life where we can share our full selves… you know, but all of the time, instead of just some of the time.”
After seven years on the run, he certainly seems happy to be back on his mountain bike. If these humid 103°F temps won’t keep him from making his way through the woods back to “Narnia,” it’s likely that nothing will.
onward.
PS - If you’re curious, here’s an excerpt of that “first newsletter” I unknowingly sent to a friend in 2019.
Jackson, Wyoming is such a commodity for tourism that it creates seasonal bubbles throughout the year. What I mean by that is that summer and winter see major spikes in visitor traffic due to the national parks (Grand Teton and Yellowstone) and due to Jackson Hole Mountain resort. This leaves spring and fall as “off-season” time periods where Jackson resembles a ghost town; the majority of businesses and restaurants literally close for a month to six weeks and locals either visit some tropical destination or family back wherever they’re originally from.
My recent travel started with a backpacking and winter camping trip into the Wind River Range in Wyoming to the Cirque of the Towers. My buddy and I weren’t sure just how much snow there would be so we didn’t know whether or not to bring skis/splitboards as a mode of transportation. If the snow was deep enough that we’d need to hike through it and be sinking up to our thighs, we’d rather have been on skis/ boards to glide across the surface instead. We drove down to, and camped at, the trailhead of our hike at night, figuring we’d assess in the morning with daylight to see how much snow we were dealing with. We ended up leaving the skis/boards behind and, although there was a decent amount of snow, I’d say it was the right call. It was a blast! This are was normally pretty popular for hiking, but we had it to ourselves given the “off-season” timing.
The snowboard season also started in Wyoming right around the same time... which I happily took advantage of before heading to Salt Lake City, Utah, then onward to Moab.
My reason for visiting Salt Lake was two-fold... My friend has been working on an adventure film series with 10 Barrel Brewing, DPS skis, and Backountry.com for the past year and was putting the finishing touches on their premiere episode before doing a live screening for the Salt Lake home crowd. So, I went down to support before heading further south to Moab, Utah for a desert camping and mountain biking trip.
The friends that I was with were covering Red Bull Rampage for Teton Gravity Research, and after the event was over we stayed to bike and camp off-grid in the desert for a few days. We rode The Whole Enchilada, which in my humble opinion might be the coolest mountain biking trail in the world. It’s a 30 mile downhill trail that descends 8,000 vertical feet from the 11,000 foot peaks of the La Sal mountains to the valley floor of the Colorado river. That was a mind blowing experience for me since I’m relatively new to mountain biking. It was one of my favorite trips that I’ve been on in a long time!
Next up, Bozeman, Montana where I spent Halloween and visited a friend from college. Between cranking out work on coffee shop wifi, we still managed to get into Yellowstone and swim in The Boiling River (a geothermal hot spring that acts like a hot tub in the middle of a flowing river).
I squeezed in some splitboarding at Bridger Bowl ski area since they have snow but aren’t open yet, and then we made our way to Missoula, Montana where we spent a weekend exploring local breweries and seeing a concert featuring The Futurebirds and CAAMP.
Now, back in Jackson, my time is spent in the gym prepping for the snowboard season, on my mountain bike (but don’t tell my snowboard) and working between some freelance marketing projects and scheduling some public speaking appearances. All while I patiently wait for Jackson Hole Mountain Resort to open where I’ll be coaching again this season.
Here’s hoping for snow and lots of it!
If you enjoy reading my writing, I publish short reflections like this each day as part of my daily column, Kickturn.
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