a history of solitude

[this is a section of an originally longer post]

So, I have to admit, I had my apprehensions about this trip. Living in a van and roaming around the country doesn’t exactly scream “airtight security.” Especially with my budget – I had weighed my money heavily towards being on the road longer with less comfort – there were any number of things that could go wrong. Sure, I had passing images of myself leaning against a broke-down van in the Mojave Desert as buzzards circled overhead, or of ending up bloodied, facedown in the toilet of some sketchy backwoods rest stop, but ultimately, those extreme scenarios didn’t really stick to the wall. What did was solitude.

...

Almost immediately, van life revealed itself as a true pleasure. All around me, American life rolled out, people woke up in the morning, went to work, lived, went to sleep at night, and the whole process reminded me of the natural drama I found in the woods in middle school. Like any kind of living, van life allows you opportunities to pursue the white whale, but the chase is not impersonal as it is in a world of books or full of adversity as it is in the woods - it’s simply pleasurable. In the long hours between stops, time stretches out, your mind relaxes, and your thought rate decreases. I found I had inadvertently traded in the nonsense intellectual flurry that so characterizes modern living for something slower and truer, a thought every fifteen minutes; enough time to take it and hold it in your hands, regard it, understand it. Spend enough time at this pace and the whole world settles into finer focus, your mind and soul fit into a clarity of thought and feeling. I felt no additional loneliness as the days stretched into weeks with little human contact. Instead, what contact I had was cast into a bold relief. A simple interaction, exchanging money with a toll clerk, ordering a plate of wings, whatever, somehow sprang from thoughtless two-dimensionality to meaningful, three-dimensional nuance; it became a room you could walk into and look around. Longer conversations become invariably profound. Avdo, a Bosnian construction worker and a marvel of human decency and innocence, overturned a year of study at Princeton in the course of a conversation.

My gaze turned outwards; with fewer deadlines to meet and personal challenges to fulfill, I began to look outside and around me, to open my eyes and ears again to what was immediately present. Freed from the absurd self-orientation that college practically demands, I thought less of myself and more of my environment, less time wondering who I was and whether I was fit to belong, and more time simply being – and belonging.

...

All things considered, it’s not entirely surprising that finding real solitude again should produce reconciliation of mind, soul, and purpose. This was first made clear early in my travels to Acadia National Park. I shot up to Maine straight from New Jersey, intending to spend the rest of the fall trickling down through the northeast. I ended up spending most of my time stuck up there at the top of New England, unwilling to leave. Acadia National Park is a strange place in many ways; it’s hard to say what keeps bringing people back there, where the magic lies. There is no single, sweeping vista, no grand canyon or Niagara Falls, the grandeur is never overwhelming. But few places in the country have such a history of human investment; Acadia National Park has in some way been protected land for over a century now, and is currently one of the most popular nature reserves in the country. It is not quite wild; in the 1920s, Rockefeller created a series of walking trails and beautiful bridges throughout the island, and before a great fire in the 40s, it was dotted with magnificent estates of the super-rich. Now it’s less exclusive, and a ring road along the coast of the island permits people from all over to get a quick sense of the landscape, and to dig deeper only if they so desire. My life there was idyllic; I spent about a week and a half driving into the park before dawn every morning, watching the sun rise over the ocean, going for hikes, recording and exercising in the van, swimming in the clean, salty water, watching, listening, soaking it in, and leaving only after the sun went down over Cadillac Mountain. My favorite place to sit and think (or not think) were the rocks above Otter Point; I spent hours at a time there, watching the waves come in and the crows somehow find food amongst the cliffs. Then it was off to Sand Beach to get the blood flowing again. Here, at the only natural sand beach on the rocky coast of Maine, the water sometimes gets up into the fifties in the summer, and while I was there in October, I could sometimes feel ice crystals in the water. I would change into my bathing suit in the van and then take off at a run from the parking lot, down the hill, over the beach, straight into the water, never stopping until I could no longer touch the ground and I was far out in the chilly surf. Then I’d turn right around and do it in reverse, moving hard to keep my blood from freezing. I went religiously, once a day. Sometimes the surf was high and brown, sometimes the water was like polished glass. Sometimes I’d do it alone, other times there’d be bemused tourists gaping. “He must be training for something…” an old lady confided confidently. “How’s the water?” a big man asks in a Southern old-boy drawl as I shoot past, arms pumping, little wet droplets shaking every where. “Very cold,” I reply, not pausing to stop, “very good.”

Later, back in Pennsylvania, I had an interesting conversation about Acadia with someone who had grown up in Maine. I mentioned my uncertainty about the attraction of the place, the sense that it was truly magical, but how I wondered why. “It’s because humans and nature have grown up together there. We found it long ago, and lived there with respect for the place. When the fire burned everything down, we recovered with the land. Now it’s not really wild, but it’s not really human either.” That made a lot of sense to me. It’s a place humans can go not to test their might against the wild, or marvel at wild natural spectacles, but to rediscover Eden. Acadia is a new garden, a place still somehow unfallen, where humans can leave the cities to find mountains not made by the hands of man, but where nevertheless, man still somehow belongs.