The last couple days have been fairly busy, with the whole “moving down to Bend in a snowstorm” thing and the “stressing out over the snowboard instructor workshop that will decide if I will be one of a select few to be hired” thing and the “finally trading my Minnesota driver’s license in for an Oregon license and watching an integral piece of my Midwest identity slide away” thing.

We have time for one story so I’ll make it a good one. Out here in Oregon they sand the road with red volcanic rock. When this rock isn’t angry and flying all up in your face and breaking your windshield it is busy getting mixed into the snow and ice. This is the same snow and ice that flips cars on their sides as they drive up to the mountain, and the same snow and ice that collects under your car when you drive carefully to keep your car off its side.

While in Minnesota this cruddy snow is a dirty gray color, out here the magic angry rock turns it a deep red. The chunks build up under cars until they fall off at intersections and start melting in the high-desert sun. Because of their misleading color and speedy puddling, the chunks look like bloody hunks of meat left in the road, and people actually swerve to avoid them.

Over the last few weeks this town has managed to make me really cranky, and I never realized how cranky until I unloaded a full barrage of ranty goodness on a good friend. I feel like ever since November came about I’ve been living in a different town, which really isn’t far from the truth. The process has been a creeping devolution ever since the end of August, when everyone started clearing out of Hood River. Kelsey left for Canada, Sara went back to Duluth, Tons to British Columbia, Bobbie and Randy to Florida (and soon the Caribbean), Wyatt to San Fran, Dills to Dills-Land, Wayne to Baja… all the familiar Bee Dub faces scattered to their respective corners of the earth.

And along with their departures went Karaoke at Jack’s, late nights at Savino’s, and pretty much any act of cronyism that was worth having in Hood River. All these things are still right down the street; I could wander into Jack’s any Friday night and bust out the James Brown, but there’s no point now that my audience is gone. It was a lovely summer no doubt, and it even managed to extend itself rather deep into the fall. I went kiteboarding through October, took a trip back to Minnesota and climbed mountains. But Joe, a rugged pal and the only person that made this fall bearable, cut town for Salt Lake City a few weeks ago and left me danglin’ in the ol’ HR.

The activity level here has all but died, and now that things are really settling in I realize what makes this small town so unbearable when the influx of seasonalists disappear. Brain-drain. I noticed it during the summer but was busy enough playing outside that it didn’t really matter, but now that there’s nothing to do there’s really nothing to do. There is nothing here to challenge me intellectually or creatively. There is no room for growth beyond the thin prescriptions I write to myself, and without the influence of other crazy individuals I’m finding my mind dreadfully banal. When I finish a day at work I have five hours of my own time to fill with whatever I want to do, and I realize that what I want to do isn’t really what I want to do. Everyone else in Hood River goes home to their families and cooks meatloaf and shuttles their kids to late-night mud soccer. I digest music. I read Ayn Rand. I scan the blogosphere. I recode webpages. I fall asleep. These are things I enjoy, but not necessarily on an everyday basis, and not necessarily on an everyday basis all by my lonesome.

The things I do are not activities that are necessarily anti-social. God bless the person who can invent an establishment where intellectual nutcases collect in droves to drink blackberry tea, read beat poetry, discuss nerdy topics like semantic web design and who would win in a fight between Ernest Hemmingway and a monkey driving a monster truck, argue over Altoid flavors, and laugh about the abuse of sus4 chords in epic 70’s rock music. In a town that lacks others of a similar mindset there’s nowhere to go, but more importantly there’s no one to even go there with. What I’ve found, again and again in my travels, is it’s the people that make traveling and non-traveling worthwhile. You need people to travel from, people to travel with, and people to travel to.

And now that my people are gone, all the winds and cliffs and scented pine forests of the Columbia Gorge are not enough to keep me here. Which is strange to consider, because at one time they were more than enough to bring me here. But these things change, everything changes, and with everyone having moved away I feel like I have moved myself. Their lives have taken them elsewhere for the winter, and there’s no reason my life shouldn’t be the same way.

The wilds of the world alone are enough to draw me to the outer banks, and once again I stand at the brink of a journey. Wanderlust has ignited my soul and cast my eyes to the horizon. I need to see more, do more, feel more. The plan I have is the same I had half a year ago, when I first blasted across the continent from my midwest hotbed. I will go, and I will do this, and I will see where it takes me. I decided I wanted to live in Hood River less than a year before I ended up here. I decided I wanted to live in Bend less than two months ago. I move there in three days.

I have no idea what the next six months will hold, but I know it will be new and different and exciting all over again. And I know that in its own little way it will decide the next path I take.

The junk is slowly finding its way into cardboard boxes. I leave for Bend in ten days. The only things that remain on my walls are a 2003 Spam calendar and a monkey with text. The calendar has Portland’s Decibully, Guster, Matt Pond PA, Nada Surf and Death Cab for Cutie concerts clearly marked out over the next week and a half. The monkey still quotes my father, who at the start of my western expedition reminded me of my priorities. "Your primary responsibility this summer is to learn how to windsurf," says the tiny rubber monkey with his fist in the air and a tack through his xiphoid.

Moving is the biggest pain in the ass, but fortunately the junk is easy to move. The junk fits in boxes or trash cans or in the neighbor’s lawn with a “Free” sign. The most difficult things to travel with, and the only things that makes travel worthwhile, are memories. There was a time, a year ago come Thanksgiving, when I was sitting upstairs at the computer in my sister and brother-in-law’s house in Madison, looking at satellite photos of this little town called Hood River. I knew, then. My bones quaked with direction and purpose. I pointed at a few tiny and smudged windsurfers who had found themselves taken up by satellite. There.

Just a little bit longer, just a lot more effort, and I knew I would be there. I knew nothing of karaoke nights at Jack’s, of 3:00 am Savino’s, of albino midget pro kiteboarder parties at the Copper Salmon. I didn’t know how to properly downhaul my sail or rescue my hide at Rowena. The first time I had even seen kiteboarding was the August prior. No matter. What mattered at that time were hazy dreams, not specifics. At some point everything would work itself out in its own crazy way, and for now a vaporous idea of what lay before was plenty.

But while the future is born of dreams, memories are born of specifics, and little by little one gives way to the other. And ladies and gentlemen, the time is upon us once again to get a helluva lot more specific.

I go through periods where all I can concentrate on is the specific, and I eventually reach a series of revelations and then all I can think in is the general. It’s always progressive, never regressive, always moving forward to some unknown goal. Recently I’ve been in a specifics stage, and right now I’m on the cusp of entering a general stage. I can look at life, focus on the small things and draw far-reaching inferences as to the nature of reality; how our universe is composed, the best means of arriving at truth, what this elusive “truth” actually is, etc…

Right now everything is related; atomically, molecularly, mechanistically, socially, naturally, etc. I can take what I have learned in many different mediums and apply them across disciplines. I feel like I have lived a million lives since I moved out here, since I left for college, since I was born. I have done so many things that are, on the surface, greatly unrelated, but I feel it is my duty, in order to justify my existence both to myself and to a lesser extent others, to explain how they relate to one another. And from my experience of how they relate, we can infer grand universals of the universe writ large. It’s heady stuff, but it’s important stuff.

“Why do humans do what they do?”

“How does that relate to natural law?”

“What is natural law?”

With this last one I’m not necessarily questioning the premise that there is a natural law, that there is an objective universe. I’m just curious how many layers we need to peel away until we have an accurate representation of that universe. If you’re down close to the Earth the surface looks flat. If you’re on a mountain it resembles a dome. From space it looks like a sphere. Toss in the strange relationship between gravity and a massive body’s ability to bend the fabric of spacetime, and the Earth is four-dimensional. Back away far enough and it is reduced to a pinpoint of light.

All my lives, my millions of lives, all seem to have at least one thing in common. Me. It is a clumsy concept of me (as Hume pointed out in his Bundle of the Self theory), but I insist that there is something mental, spiritual and physical (keeping these words conveniently undefined for the moment) that is constant and forms a cohesive whole of my doings, my experiences and my memories. Me. And what have I done? The list is extensive, and is absolutely incredible for the short amount of time it has all taken place in. And now with Bend on the horizon, the list only stands to get longer.

And it’s already so long that I can’t keep it all straight. My mind often finds itself befuddled over its history. No matter, though. Look forward. Live in the now. Recall the past, but don’t dwell there. If you remember neat things, like tossing frisbee with Bee Dub friends at the Sandbar on your second day in Hood River, cool. But don’t get hung up trying to conjure memories. It’s too much work, and it just gets in the way of creating new memories.

Taken individually, nothing I have done is all that impressive, but really to have an accurate understanding you need to look at everything in context. Pulling them out and looking at accomplishments on a plain white background is conducive to analysis, but an abstraction of real life. In real life we’ve got concerns like hunger and hydration and stress and bad memories and good memories and states of euphoria… all things that indeed make up our own personal realities, but are all variables that need to be momentarily forgotten during the analysis phase. And maybe that’s why my brain feels so fuddled; that to evaluate my experiences I need to detach them from the very things that make my experience. Lunacy, indeed, but it is a thought. Maybe I don’t need to try as hard as I think I do. Just relax, breathe deep, and let the life flow through you.

The experience of climbing Mount Adams was unlike any other. Waking up at 1:00 in the morning, donning our headlamps and crampons, trudging up glaciers and false tongues to the Lunch Counter, and then starting the brutal ascent to the false summit. Yikes. To think that a year ago I was in my apartment penning an essay or something, with mountaineering nary a glimmer in my eye. We humans are more adaptable than we give ourselves credit for, we are, we are.

But I remember the feeling as we climbed towards that summit and my lungs ached to keep oxygen in my body. There was no sound but the crunch of my crampons, the sound of my breath and the rush of blood in my ears. The only sound was what I carried with me, a personal biological orchestra. I remember those last struggling steps to the summit, atop a huge ampitheater of ice, as I rested and gasped for air every ten feet.

I remember that there was no fanfare at the top, there was no rush of emotion. There was no energy left for it. The pictures I managed to fire off were exhausting and irritating at the time. Relief did not come at the summit, as there was too much exhaustion to waste precious energy on emotion. Physical relief only came after we reached the car and threw down our packs, but the spiritual lift didn’t strike me until later, after my body had recovered. The mental fed off of the physical, which was busy denying emotional responses that should have been present in times of great accomplishment.

So much of climbing is a mental game. There were times when Joe was completely convinced that he couldn’t make it to the summit, and times when we flipped and I wanted nothing more than to give up… the desire to be back at home in bed with a mug of tea. "Why can’t the mountain be just 1,000 feet lower?" you ask yourself, even though you know the answer. Because it can’t be. You are here because it is the exact height it is, and realizing this you are forced to shoulder right up with reality and accept your fate.

In mountaineering, existence becomes binary. You can either go up or you can go down. There’s no question of whether you want to bake muffins or make an omlette or eat out, or maybe skip breakfast entirely and go kiteboarding. It’s the lack of options that makes mountaineering alluring, the brutal simplicity that exists when you have sealed your fate in making the summit. You’ve already set the pieces, learned what you need to know, packed the right gear, chosen the right climbing partners… now you just need to take everything you’ve got going on inside and channel it to the top of the world.

And that, my friends, is the rebirth of Universality. As in Mountaineering, as in Hood River, as in Life. There is a logical structure to all things; the question is only whether or not we have enough time, patience, reason and interest to figure it all out. You only get one shot at the whole deal, so you best make the most of the time you’ve got.

And troublesome questions like these should not plague your everyday life, but should be set aside in moments of intense consideration, in an attempt to improve your direction and passion in the things that matter the most to you. Because ultimately, that is all that matters.