Alexandersmap

    Author: nhcarmichael

    • The Work of Exploration

      “Filling the mind with illusions is not the way to carry out with honor the work of exploration.”
      – Samuel Champlain

      Champlain was a stickler for careful preparation and research. He wasn’t one to half-ass anything he did, especially when it came to sailing across an ocean to uncharted places. He learned from the failures of others, noting failures in leadership, failures in preparation, failures in aligning political alliances to have your back when you were away, and failures in the treatment of the Native American population. And he was disciplined in his resolve to be successful in his own exploration.

      When I think about Samuel Champlain, I think about the guy who famously explored the North American coast and more than anyone helped stake a flag of settlement for France. In New England we live in a culture that rightfully celebrates the arrival of the Pilgrims in America 400 years ago, surely a major turning point for the English settlement of North America, but let’s not forget those who came well before the Pilgrims. If the settlement of Plymouth was a comedy of errors and bad preparation, Champlain’s plan for exploration and settlement was meticulous.

      Champlain found a way to be an invited guest of the Spanish on a trip to their own empire, surveying and documenting the atrocities of the Spanish conquerers with the native population and with African slaves for gold, silver and pearls. He resolved to never duplicate the things he saw, and treated men with respect and honor in his own exploration. And he learned from the brutal religious wars of France between Catholics and Protestants as well, resolving to bring religious tolerance to his own settlement. Champlain wasn’t just ahead of his time, he was helping to pave the way to our time.

      I’ll return to Champlain again in future blogs, but for now I’m lingering on the quote that opens this post. A warning to not half-ass our own exploration. To be prepared and do the work necessary to put yourself in a position to not just survive, but thrive. This is true whether you’re starting a business, changing your career, working to finish a project before a deadline or planning that long hike. Filling the mind with illusions is not the way to carry out with honor the work of exploration. Be prepared, as the Marines would tell you. But don’t just prepare and dream of exploration either. Do the work of exploration too.

    • The Hard Bit

      “You write. That’s the hard bit that nobody sees.” – Neil Gaiman

      “I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found.” – Kurt Vonnegut

      Travel writing is easy by comparison. Experience a place or an event and then convey that bit of magic to others in words. I enjoy travel writing – consuming it and better, writing it. I think fondly of driving about in Scotland close to a year ago or Portugal the year before that and the many adventures I had, most of which never made it to the blog. Writing about places you go is easy. Like you’re sharing tales of an adventure with friends. And documenting it for yourself to remember someday when you aren’t traveling anymore… like now.

      Writing a daily blog becomes harder when you find yourself in the same room for an entire day, with breaks to get the mail or see what the sun looks like. That’s where the hard bit comes in. Tapping into your brain and finding the stories. Doing the work. Some days it goes well, some days it peters out. But I find it easiest when, as with travel, I have something to share with others. A poem that stirs the imagination. A bit of local history that was particularly fascinating. A bear walking in the woods behind the house. Some stories practically write themselves.

      I was talking to a colleague who is struggling with depression. He has much younger children, is used to being out on the road for business and is struggling in this year of years to keep it all together. I’ve heard from several people this year having similar struggles. And I understand. Everything is different, the very foundation of our being sometimes seems to be crumbling. I don’t believe I suffer from clinical depression, but I’ve had moments of despair when the whole thing seems too much. How do you deal with the hard bits? I suppose it’s different for everyone, but for me getting out of my own head does wonders. Walk more. Read more. Have more meaningful conversations with people of consequence. And write it all down. Writing draws the noise out of your head and onto paper… or whatever data center WordPress utilizes for my ramblings.

      I have a friend who calls the blog my “dear diary”, and I suppose there’s truth in that. But for me the writing solves a lot of mind games I play with myself. Processing information consumed in books or translating a poem into my own experience in writing is a form of conversation with yourself, nudged gently along by the author or poet. Long walks solve a lot of problems for me, but so does immersive reading and writing. I read the Vonnegut quote above and understand immediately where he’s coming from. I’m not the only one.

      Gaiman reminds me, whispers in my ear: I’m behind in my writing. Not blogging, but the other writing. And sure Neil; it gnaws at me. Jabs me in the ribs when I’m not looking. It waits impatiently for me to do the other things, the less important things. The easier things. And I look it squarely in the eyes and see myself dodging the truth. I have more to say. More to contribute. And there I am; back in my own head again. Perhaps a walk is in order. And a bit of writing after that. The hard bit.

    • A Bear in the Night

      Sunday night, while sitting around the fire in conversation, a large wild creature moved through the woods, announcing its presence with the crunch of dried leaves and crack of fallen twigs. Not a deer. Not a raccoon or a skunk. Definitely not a squirrel. I quietly walked into the house for the big flashlight and walked out to the edge of the fence and switched it on. Nothing but leaves glowed back at me, but the crunching and cracking continued on and away from us. The speculation on what had visited stayed with us. But we knew.

      The next day someone up the hill posted that three goats had been killed in her yard, and there was talk of a bear up to 800 pounds being the culprit. Was this our visitor? We wondered at the possibility. I walked deep into the woods in daylight looking for tracks, but quickly realized the folly of my search. I’d guess we had a solid layer of leaves blanketing any possible evidence of bear tracks. I contemplated purchasing a wildlife camera set in the woods to track future visitors. It would be good to know the neighbors a bit better. We’ve seen just about everything in our time at the edge of the woods, but haven’t yet seen a bear. But others in town have. This would be our closest encounter.

      Bear encounters have increased in New Hampshire over the years, and there have been three bear attacks over the last decade, including one this year when a man was attacked from behind while getting an air conditioner out of his car. There are reasons for this. First, the bear population has grown significantly over the years as they outpace efforts to cull them through hunting. Second, some people actively feed bears, making them less fearful of humans. And then we have the drought that New Hampshire is currently in, which forces the bears to wander further into populated areas for food. There’s a fascinating article about the increase in bear encounters in the September issue of NH Magazine.

      Bear populations, like squirrels, apparently increased with the bumper crop of acorns a couple of years ago. Well-fed bears want to stay well-fed. And so they come. I can’t help but compare the increase in bear encounters to the increase in Great White Shark encounters on the beaches of New England. Limit hunting seals and sharks and the population explodes in places we’d gotten used to having the beaches to ourselves. Something similar is happening with bear populations (and every other wild animal for that matter). Fewer hunters, more comfort with humans and drought-fueled hunger means more bears in the suburbs.

      Standing in the woods, looking back towards the house, you get the perspective of the wild things. As much as you could I suppose, given my free access to the comforts of a home just on the other side of the border. I considered my desire to get out in the wild so often, and here I was, standing in bear country, 200 feet from my back door. I looked around one last time for tracks and walked back to the other side, closing the gate behind me. But I’ll be back. I suspect the bear(s) will be too.

    • Between the Earth and the Stars

      “Be humble for you are made of earth. Be noble for you are made of stars.”
      – Serbian proverb

      I sat outside last night on a cold evening in front of a warming fire; my body at the line of the radiating heat competing with the sneaky cold creeping up behind me. I inhaled more wood smoke than I should have cheating the line to get just a little bit closer to the fire. Off in the darkness a rustle of fallen leaves in the woods betrayed a wild thing making its way past, and overhead we were serenaded by owls. It was in this moment on the edge of hot and cold, light and darkness that I sat contemplating this quote and the one that follows. Sending an offering to the universe in the form of sparks rising with the smoke. I looked up, following the rising sparks as they climb to join the stars. For who’s to say they don’t reach them, why must they all extinguish on their ascent and return to earth?

      “For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.”
      – Vincent Van Gogh

      It seems that I am a dreamer. Surely this must be so. For my mind rises with the smoke and ashes to meet the stars. We’re all derived from this humble earth, and return there soon enough. But the stars seemingly burn forever. The stars have witnessed many a fire ritual in the scattered history of humanity, and continued their dance across the sky unconcerned about my veneration. But then a meteor blazed through the sky with no perceivable tale, disappearing in the western sky, as if to remind me that stars have a timeline as well, well beyond our scope of reference.

      2020 feels big for all of us, filled with moments that remind us of our small part in the larger game. For the stars, for the earth, it remains inconsequential. And so it must be. But in our time between the two we might derive some inspiration from the stars and make our time on earth a bit more meaningful at a human scale. We too will return to earth, but we don’t have to keep our feet planted on it. We are ourselves an offering to the universe. So burn brightly.

    • Past Peak

      Normally this weekend in New Hampshire is peak foliage season. But a sustained drought has stressed the trees just enough to pull peak ahead by two weeks. So the thousands of people plugging up the roadways of the Mount Washington National Forest were seeing the forest muted in dynamic impact. And yet they came. And they saw enough. For the mountains offer their own ruggedly stunning backdrop. I considered the tourists on my afternoon commute home from a day of hiking. Clusters taking a photo next to the roadside sign announcing you were in the MWNF, picture-taking all around you. Cars parked in odd assortments along the sides of the road, as if clung together by magnets the way the metal dust would clump together in the old Wooly Willy toy would clump into beards and eyebrows with a magnetic stick. Funny what you think about when you observe tourists in the wild.

      To be amongst the mountains is relatively easy when you live in New Hampshire. Less so, I suppose, if one were to live in Florida. But they have that tropical water hugging them on three sides, and I suppose the amusement parks and fresh oranges to consider too. But you can’t swim in a pond in Florida without risk of being dragged down by an alligator. There are no alligators in the mountains of New Hampshire. Maybe the occasional bear or mountain lion, but they mostly want the food in your pack, not you as food. The bigger threat to your well-being are the damned rocks. New Hampshire is the granite state, and as if to hammer that point home every trail is worn down to ankle-bending, knee-twisting rock. And in October those land mines are covered over in a bed of beautiful leaves. So a descent becomes a shuffle of sorts, as you work to avoid catastrophic injury on remote yet well-traveled trails.

      I have a friend who points out my tendency to pick overindulgent goals for myself. Really though; all my friends point this out. Like rowing a million meters on an erg in three months, or taking my family on a hike up the toughest mile of the Appalachian Trail, or peak-bagging three out-and-back peaks in one day, as I did yesterday with Mounts Willey, Field and Tom. I might have taken a hint from my hiking pro friend who refers to these three as the WTF hike. I chose to experience it on my own, with an extra helping of previous injuries I was nursing. WTF indeed.

      The morning after a hike like the WTF hike, the first step is to get out of bed without incident. Plant your feet and gradually put weight on the ankles and knees that you abused so ruthlessly the day before. Assess how much they resent you, and then shuffle to the bathroom for relief and some Motrin. This isn’t a walk of shame as much as a recognition of all you’d done, in the form of some tender moving parts and sore muscles. And I wonder in those moments of truth, am I past peak myself? Or simply overindulgent? I’d like to think the latter. All I can do is keep moving. Perhaps with a bit of moderation next time. I suppose that’s a perfectly reasonable request.

      Past Peak

    • Hiking Mount Willey, Mount Field and Mount Tom (and Back)

      I didn’t think this one through enough. An out and back using the same trail to hike three 4000 footers necessarily means you’re actually hiking five 4000 footers in a day. Ambitious. A bit reckless. A bit exhausting.

      10 miles round trip, with 4400 feet of elevation gain seems easy on paper. In practice the rock scrambles and ladders bridging impossibly steep sections made it a test of willpower. Some of those rock scrambles were borderline ladder territory as well. As wake-up calls go climbing the Willey Range Trail served as a good one. My heart was racing and my layers were shedding in no time. My mood bounced between exhilaration, despair and frustration with myself for not planning this hike a little better. But it was a quickly drafted plan B, and in hindsight, a good hike. Even if I wasn’t mentally ready for it.

      Mount Willey is 4255 feet tall and named after Samuel Willey and his family, who were killed in a landslide in 1926. Mount Field is 4327 feet and named after Darby Field, who made the first known ascent of Mount Washington in 1642. Mount Tom is 4052 feet tall and named after Thomas Crawford of Crawford Notch fame. The three peaks are relatively tame, other than the hike up the Willey Range Trail to the summit of Mount Willey. Approaching from the south, Willey is a tough ascent. It also makes a challenging descent. Starting and ending my hike with this trail set me up for a tough day. But I finished relatively healthy. And healthy with three more 4K’s checked off is enough for me.

      If you go, consider an approach from Crawford Notch or Mount Hale. The people who I ran into didn’t seem to have the same endurance test of ascending the Willey Range trail. For views, Willey and Field have some good observation spots, Tom not so much. But views are only part of the story. Finishing this hike and summiting these three 4000 footers was its own reward.

    • Reading is Autobiographical

      “The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and a thousand other things well.”

      It happens this way, that I’ll pick up some random quote such as the one above, plucked from a James Clear newsletter, and immediately I feel compelled to hunt down the source. In this case Hugh Walpole’s Reading: An Essay. Short enough to devour in a few quick bites, I blew through his essay in no time at all. I suppose it was inevitable, I’ve heard about this short essay for years, but never got around to it… until I read the quote above.

      Written in 1929, the essay references “The War” frequently, and I shudder to know what he didn’t know about the world to come over the next 12 years. There would soon be another war. Walpole would pass away in 1941, well before the outcome was certain. A discretely gay man in a time when discretion was required, he never had children and turned his energy into a prolific writing career. Reading: An Essay is a love letter to his favorite pastime, and I found myself plucking quote-after-quote from it. I’m sure there are plenty I missed, and perhaps I’ll read it again sometime soon. But who wants to get everything out of an essay on the first go-around anyway? With reading, Walpole is a kindred spirit from a hundred years ago. He capitalizes “Reading” as if it were a person or a sacred subject, because of course it was to him. And in his reverence for the topic, the essay felt like a quiet conversation with a friend. So here are a few gems from this short essay:

      “I believe, with the pleasures of Reading it can be nothing if it is not autobiographical, for the only certain thing about Reading is that it is personal first, personal second, and personal all the time, and Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s Divina Comedia may be the twin dominating peaks of a glorious range, but they are nothing to you whatsoever if you happen to be looking the other way.” – Hugh Walpole, Reading: An Essay

      “For the rest of my days there should be always at my hand a land of escape and enchantment.”

      “Reading must be a personal adventure or the salt goes out of it.”

      “Libraries should be penetrated with the love of books, so that when you enter a room where the books are the air is warm with a kind of delicious humanity, and the books have been always so affectionately treated that, like the right kind of dog, they know no fear and yet have their fitting dignity.”

      “I believe that circumstances have altered very little, and that a novel to be absorbing has to have precisely the two ingredients that it had a hundred years ago, a narrative gift (and it doesn’t matter whether the narrative is about a tea party or a murder trial) and the creation of living characters.”

      “There is a kind of luxury in reading which is perhaps the best thing in the world; it is to be captured only, I think, through the old books, books that you know so well that they step out and meet you, take you by the arm and whisper in your ear: ‘Now lie back and talk to us, and then we will in turn tell you a thing or two. There’s no need to be clever this evening, we don’t want you to shine, we’ll have an hour or two together so pleasant that you’ll scarcely know we’re here.’”

      All of this talk of libraries and Reading makes me want to immerse myself in a good book. The house is still quiet, the sun hasn’t risen yet on this cold morning, and there’s time for another mug of coffee and a few chapters before the frenzied swirl of activity begins. If you’ll excuse me…

    • Double Four Time: Dire Straits in Four Songs

      October makes me gravitate to a certain style of music. I grow more reflective and pensive as we move past harvest time and into a time of frosts and falling leaves, and my playlist tends to reflect this mood. Van Morrison, U2, Steely Dan all start appearing more than they did in the warmer months with longer days. And so too does Dire Straits. Four in particular become standards of Autumn evenings, which grow longer by the day. A good time for roaring fires and a dram of your favorite scotch.

      Sultans of Swing
      “You check out guitar George, he knows-all the chords
      Mind, it’s strictly rhythm he doesn’t want to make it cry or sing
      They said an old guitar is all, he can afford
      When he gets up under the lights to play his thing”

      This one has to be there, of course. Perhaps you might make a case for Money For Nothing as the “hit” to include on the list, but I’m partial to their first big song. Packed with relentless energy, this one is a great driving with fallen leaves scattering about behind you song. Or maybe early in the evening before the coals really start glowing and reflecting the truth right back at you.

      Down To The Waterline
      “Up comes a coaster fast and silent in the night
      Over my shoulder all you can see
      Are the pilot lights
      No money in our jackets and our jeans are torn
      Your hands are cold but your lips are warm”

      One of those songs that starts in a moody, almost sultry place. But you know its going to burst into flames of passion soon enough, and it doesn’t disappoint. You know these guys lived the portrait they’re painting in this song, going down to the waterline to have some quiet intimacy. The song ends way too soon, like those waterline visits probably did.

      Brothers in Arms
      “Through these fields of destruction
      Baptism of fire
      I’ve watched all your suffering
      As a battle raged high
      And though they did hurt me so bad
      In the fear and alarm
      You did not desert me
      My brothers in arms”

      As a student of the violent history of humanity, I get a catch in my throat when I hear this song. I’ve never been to war, never been in the military for that matter, but I pay attention when those who have tell what it was like. I’ve heard this song resonates with veterans, and while I’ll never fully understand what they went through, I think I can understand why.

      On Every Street
      “There’s gotta be a record of you someplace
      You gotta be on somebody’s books
      The lowdown, a picture of your face
      Your injured looks
      The sacred and profane
      The pleasure and the pain
      Somewhere your fingerprints remain concrete
      And it’s your face I’m looking for on every street”

      Haunted by someone you once knew, or wanted to know. If The Police’s Every Breath You Take was a “stalker song”, this is a song of longing unfulfilled. And who hasn’t felt that? As Mark Knopfler guitar songs go, this one is right up there on my list of favorites, along with Sultans of Swing and Wild Theme from his solo catalog.

    • Vigor (and a Smile)

      Eddie Van Halen passed away yesterday. And so it is that another chunk of my childhood drifts away into the otherworld. I was never much of a guitar player, but it isn’t hard to see Eddie Van Halen playing his guitar Frankenstein and see a virtuoso at work. I suppose there are other guitar players I personally love listening to more for their particular style, but there was no better guitar player on the planet than Eddie Van Halen. That he never learned to read music amazes me, but it shows the difference between knowing the music on paper and living the music in practice. You don’t have to be great at everything, just your particular thing.

      My own life is about as far from the life that Van Halen lived as anyone’s. I’m a New Englander, he grew up an immigrant child in Los Angeles. I dabbled in bass guitar and put it aside when I started college, a victim of my overall casual approach to any form of discipline at the time. He latched onto music and went all in. In the ten years from 1978 to 1988 he was about as big a rock god as you could find. I quietly went about my life, stepping stone to stepping stone, from kid watching Star Wars to high school and college. Completely different life tracks. A pity he always had that damned cigarette burning away. Those would kill him eventually, just as he was entering his elder statesman stage of life.

      I suppose the big lesson with Eddie Van Halen is to put in the time necessary to master your craft. Don’t half-ass your work. But the thing that sticks out with him is that huge smile when he played guitar. He was a guy in love with his craft, exuding joyous electricity. And that love of craft was exactly why he put in the insane amount of time necessary to become one of the best guitar players who ever lived. If you don’t love your craft, why the hell would you do it? And that’s the difference between a craft and your job. You work to make money to feed the family and pay for the stuff of life. You perform your craft to extend some of your life force out into the world. That’s true whether you’re knitting a pair of mittens or writing a novel or playing guitar.

      So a fair question to ask as you follow your muse then is will this pursuit make me smile like Eddie Van Halen playing his guitar? If yes, proceed. If no, well, find another way to express yourself in the world. For if Eddie taught us anything yesterday, it would be that life is too damned short to flitter away your life force on other things. Pursue your thing. And do it with vigor (and a smile).

    • Vif d’Esprit et de Corps

      To be quick in mind and body – vif d’esprit et de corps – that is the goal. In this year of years I’ve seen many recede into dark places, or spritzed with wine or spirits or awash in binge-watching Netflix, or worst of all following the every move of the orange narcissist. Or maybe all of the above. I find myself sliding into these darker places, la détresse, when I’m too immersed in Twitter or Facebook. So I took a 30 day hiatus from Facebook beginning Sunday and just deleted Twitter for the next five days to force a reset of the brain. I’m doing the same five days off without alcohol, just to show it who’s boss.

      Where are you most alive? Doing what? To be quick-witted and vibrant requires work, but the work doesn’t have to be tedious or painful. It just requires consistency of effort. Who makes you feel most alive? Why aren’t you spending more time with them being so? What gets you invited to the dance? Raising your own game, of course. Becoming more. Doing more. Seeing more. Learning more. Not for water cooler talk (virtualized for the foreseeable future), but for a hand up on the climb. I view the next 20 years as the climb of my lifetime, and I’d better be mentally and physically fit enough to squeeze as much of the zest out of the experience as possible. And after the next 20? Well, I’ll worry about that when I get there, but it will have to start with a strong base.

      Ultimately, it becomes a matter of how do you live with yourself? What makes you interesting enough to hang around this being for any amount of time? What is the next act? Immersion in a French or Portuguese-speaking culture? Knocking off peaks and waterfalls and old castles? Chasing dark skies? Visiting every fascinating country on the list? Sailing across the pond? Building (or building on) lifetime friendships with choice adults, children, grandchildren (should they come) and dogs? Finally finishing those dusty classics taking up space on the bookshelf? There’s time for all of these things, and yet no time to lose. And no time to waste on the stuff of little consequence.

      To be quick in mind and body, vif d’esprit et de corps, begins with this next step. And the one after that. Let the adventure begin.