The Adventure That Wasn’t
Like The Unsummit (almost a year ago), not every attempt achieves completion. Unlike The Unsummit, this time the goal was scrapped before we began.
Long weekends are an opportunity to go further afield than normal camping trips, so for fall break we planned a trip to Lake Powell with two other families. We rented a boat, packed our tents for beach camping, fishing poles for dinner gathering, and binoculars for poking around all the nooks and crannies of the flooded canyons of the Colorado River. Lake Powell had been on my list of places to go since we moved here and I couldn’t wait to have the experiences that would properly check it off.
Then came the forecast
Then came the forecast
At first, it was only going to rain one day. Whatever, we said, and threw a deck of cards into the waterproof storage boxes with all our gear. Then, it extended to two days and the temperature dropped twenty degrees. We could still do it, said a few in our group, maybe in a different place? There were suggestions of a lake further north, then further west, and then it became clear that this storm system covered everything within a nine-hour drive.
We called it quits the morning before we were supposed to leave and suddenly I had a four-day weekend and no plans. This is both an incredible luxury and a source of some stress for me, as I am a fan of plans. I like the structure and knowing that I’m using time well, especially with my boys at the age where they still want to hang out with me and a body still healthy enough to adventure.
“I recognize the narrow corridor in which I exist and feel a pressing need to use it well. ”
But every circumstance said nope, girl, not this weekend. Weather at home also meant the activities I’d normally pivot to weren’t available either. Wet trails meant my playground was closed.
It was the adventure that wasn’t. A holiday weekend that felt unused, in a way, and certainly one that doesn’t look good on social.
The adventure FOMO was strong and made me sit with the discomfort of idleness (with a scary little “boo” from aging mixed in.) It doesn’t take much to make me feel like I’m not enough, including the step count on my watch, what I ate for breakfast yesterday, how many times I didn’t empty my water bottle, the words I haven’t written, and the clothes that feel too tight.
But “not enough” is also a really powerful driver. It’s pushed me up miles and vertical feet and through hours driven. It’s the reason I’ve seen sunrises and made the alpine starts and asked people I don’t know very well to go for hikes or runs or bikes. I’m grateful for it but it has a runaway side whose volume I didn’t understand until this cancelled weekend. It’s a good and a bad thing, this urgency: a ridgeline to balance.
We ended up putting the first fire of the season in the woodstove. At yoga, the rain pinged off the metal roof for an hour. The clouds sat in the divot between mountains, low enough that if I were on the trail from last week I’d be inside of them. I passed a moose when I was up there so I wondered where she was huddled with her calf, the first raindrops in months hanging on the tips of her fur. I used the binoculars to see if the wildfire burning a few miles away had slowed down. We did some sitting, some staring at each other from the couch. Some looking out our window. Some being bored (surprisingly scary). We did not make the best use of our time. We weren’t very productive or constructive or useful.