Why do we go?

We are just returned from another wonderful weekend sailing in the San Juan's, and just before leaving we were asked by some dear friends about how much trouble it must be to gather ourselves and the boys together to make these trips. In essence, they were asking why we go. Why do we go to all the trouble for just a weekend?

I've heard this question from people before, and I am always dumfounded by it. It is asked with full interest and sincerity, and without any hint of judgment, and yet the affect on me is as though someone has asked me to explain why I breathe air. It is nearly impossible for me to know where to start.

Perhaps you also go, and get asked this question, and feel similarly unable to craft a reply that rings true to what you believe?



Part of the difficulty lies in the fact that my value system is unorthodox compared to the dominant paradigm. For example, time in wilderness is absolutely essential to my well being. I need time as deep as possible in places untouched by human presence. This is not a thing I like, or prefer. It is not an interest of mine. I need it. I need it so deeply that it is tantamount to air and water. If I don't get away to someplace wild with regularity, I am exactly like a caged animal. And because I work in the city, it is especially necessary to me that I get far away from it as often as possible.

This need for wilderness is perhaps not so unusual, but we often hear about it from people who have been deeply hurt by society or are profoundly introverted. War vets famously come home and find they need wilderness as a salve to their wounds. I feel kindred with them, but I have never personally experienced war. And neither am I an intense introvert. In fact, I am rather extroverted and enjoy people quite a bit. It is too intricate and too deep to discuss in this sailing blog (and believe me I could go on for pages and pages about wilderness), but suffice to say that one of the reasons my family goes away so often to sail into remote wild places is that Amy and I both love it passionately and need it for a connection to nature, ourselves and deep time. It doesn't merely make us who we are, it IS who we are.

Another reasons is what I have said before on this blog: that our sailing trips are by far the best time we get together as a family.

Our sailing trips nourish all the best bonds between us. Unlike in our home lives, where we are often doing four different things, on the boat we are confined to a small space for much of the time, and yet are able to get away and play in wild places for truly adventurous small group or solo play. We play together, we talk, we hang out, we get cozy, we help one another. In short, we do all the sorts of things together that cement strong inter-personal bonds, and without the distraction of any other people or technology. We have no TV on our sailboat, not that we watch it at home much, and more importantly, no computers and no internet. We play card games, we read, we talk. We live like it is 1848 at Walden Pond, for all technological purposes.

Elliott is becoming a young teenager, and he especially seems to need these adventurous sailing weekends. For one, he has always been a hyper-social kid, and loves being around us so intensely. But beyond this, on our sailing trips we go to islands where he is free to run around, climb trees, play outdoor games, paddle the dinghy all around, and generally be physically active for hours and hours each day. If there is anything a young man needs it is whole gobs of physical activity and meaningful self-directed challenges, but something deeply wrong in our genetic code leads all of them to prefer lethargy if kept around a house. Event the most energetic kid will spend hours sitting in front of the TV if you let them, and even more hours sucked directly into any computer or online games. Aside from whether those things are healthy or not, they are not physically demanding. Nor do they build character of the type we all need in life. All those coursing hormones and rushes of energy need someplace positive to go, and there is nothing quite so positive to do as to run around in the islands and play around on boats.

And finally, it is also true that Amy and I love travel and novelty in our lives. We simply love adventures of all sorts. Getting away refreshes our sense of living active, adventurous lives. The routines of work and home are all so well understood, and so domestically boring, that to do them week in and week out without change would drive us absolutely bonkers. It is claustrophobic. So we go also because we simply love to go places, to explore and to seek new beauty. I suppose we come to this naturally, even genetically, as we are children of the West. We are descendants of Western folk, who left Europe long ago, and still kept moving West. As surely as lengthy natural selection creates whales and wombats, there must be something to even the micro-evolution of 6 generations of people who never stayed put in one place. We come from cowboys in Texas, Mennonites in Saskatchewan, farmers in Kansas, and further back English, Swedish, Irish and German folks who came to the New World for all sorts of good reasons. Our people, generally speaking, were not the stayers, but the goers, and Amy and I happily wear this legacy on our sleaves with our love of going.

So with this being just a cursory overview of why it is absolutely worthwhile to spend 5 hours getting to Friday Harbor for a weekend of sailing to Stuart Island or Jones or to wherever, and then 5 hours getting home, you can appreciate why I find it impossible to give an appropriately brief and acceptable answer to good friends who ask why we bother to travel so far for such a short period of time.

We are no sooner to Aeolus and have left the slip than we have felt it is all worthwhile.

This weekend saw us on the north side of Jones for some gale winds overnight from the south, and a night in Reid Harbor on Stuart which we had largely to ourselves. We got enough sun on Saturday that I am actually sunburned through some concerted effort to lay around in full exposure. We hiked and explored, ate like kings and hung out. We might as well have been gone a full week before it was time to hop on the ferry back to Anacortes and our car.

We go because going is really coming home.