Jason and jenn

We closed. We bought a house in Berea, Kentucky. We are home owners. We don’t quite live there yet. In fact, i only seem to vaguely remember what it looks like on the inside. Seems a bit strange huh? Surreal seems more like it. The only thing I really notice about home ownership so far is that our bank account is empty.

So as we waited to close on the house, we tried to occupy ourselves with other things. We took a trip to Moab where we climbed and hiked and generally just hung out in the 70 degree sunshine. It was great to escape to the desert for a few days while Pinedale was experiencing it’s first accumulating snows of the season. The next week I spent time in Salt Lake City at the National Recreation and Park Association conference. That was a good time and reconfirmed that I have chosen the right career path for myself. I’m not sure that “community recreation programming” is my niche, but it’s good to have gained valuable experience in it.

The Science Rockets played a 2 night stand at the Silver Dollar in Jackson, and just played a couple nights in Pinedale, most recently playing at a benefit for the Pinedale Fine Arts Council, which brings in some amazing productions. This town does not disappoint in it’s dedication to arts and community. Sometimes it’s a backwards place, but with the quality of the productions and talent they bring to town (not to mention the local artisans that are amazing), it often feels like we’re living in a much much larger community, only without the traffic and bloated infrastructure. My friend John calls Pinedale the “Center of the Universe” and sometimes we agree.

Now we’re getting ready for the Haunted house at the Aquatic Center. It’s occupying all my time and thoughts. We sold 600 tickets last year (our town has 2000 people) and expect just as many if not more this year! Jenn is starting a couple new jobs. She’s teaching an awesome fitness class at the PAC and it is being very well attended. She’s also going to wait tables a day or two a week in anticipation of her BLM job ending soon.

Time is flying. Ski season will be here soon. Jenn will be leaving for Kentucky to get her Wilderness First Responder and to spend some time with the house.

We tend to say that we are “closer” to realizing our plan, but we’re not sure that’s the right word. We are simply living within it. There is no final destination, only the next one.  Close to what? It’s not as if we plan on stopping somewhere, saying “Oh well, we had a good run with all that adventure stuff, pass the remote.”

Instead, we choose to believe we are simply living in an adventure story, writing a new page daily, and we are trying hard to make sure the story is a good one. Hopefully not too epic, but one that we will be proud of in the end. Whatever that word means.

Seasonal life in the van was quite possibly the most fun, freeing, and horrible experience of our lives. The horrible part was that we had no real feeling of rootedness, or rather we felt completely ungrounded.

Here in Pinedale for the past year and a half, we get the groundedness, but miss the fun and freedom of seasonal work. We liked that kind of carefree existence. Work is rewarding. Having a place is rewarding. Consistent friendships is rewarding. But we miss the wandering.

The first thought here is that you can have one or the other, and it may be irresponsible to ask for both. As Eric Beck said, “At either end of the social spectrum, their lies a leisure class”, we felt like we neither wanted to be at the bottom end forever or to ascribe to the idea of getting rich in order to enjoy a life where you get more than 2 weeks of vacation a year. We also like this country (with all it’s hurts) and don’t desire to move abroad just to get more vacation time.

Then we came up with The Plan. we’ve had many “plans”, but this one was The Plan that we decided to go for. It was based on the desire to defy the logic of Eric Beck (who was just a yosemite climbing bum anyway), by falling somewhere in between.

It is simply this. Step 1: Buy a home somewhere we like living and where there is a culture of sustainability, responsible growth, and “local”ism. Somewhere that has sustainable energy and water resources and good gardening opportunities. Our old Kentucky home seemed to suit this bill well. Berea Kentucky in particular seemed ideal given it’s ties to the college and Wendell Berry followers like ourselves.

Second step is paying for this home without having a mortgage debt that forces us into the rat race. We’ve accomplished this (though with no help from our horrendously managed lending institutions).  We should have our home completely paid for and own outright by June of 2010 barring loss of jobs or breaking too often from our spending plan.

Step three is to learn to live as responsibly as possible within the framework of our kentucky home in addition to seasonal summer work in wonderful western parks and locales. Maybe there’s a month or two of volunteer work in the winter that allows us to both serve and to ski. Then there is the idea of overseas social justice work, working on making our home truly ours, graduate school in public administration in order to work with non-profits who do good for this planet and it’s peoples.

There might be a garden in there, possibly a dog. We’ll see where the plan takes us. We’re dedicated. We’re smart. We think it’ll work. If not. There’s always another plan just waiting around the corner.