Two Roads

Okay, so one of my favorite poets is Robert Frost. I know that's not very original for a former English instructor, but there's a reason he's so famous. His poems are really, really good. And I've been thinking a lot lately about this one:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

More of a green than a yellow wood, but whatever.

I have heard many a student suggest that "The Road Not Taken" reflects some kind of march-to-the-beat-of-a-different-drummer, make-your-own-way ethos. The road less traveled is the better one; that's what this poem means, they say.

But they're missing the point entirely. I can't say specifically what Frost's intentions were, but it's clear to me that the poem is about the narratives we construct retrospectively. Notice that even as the speaker suggests that one road looked better than the other, he neutralizes that statement. The paths were pretty much equal, from what he could see. He had to pick one. And it is only in the future, when he is looking back, that he will create the narrative that he chose the "less traveled" road. Of course the path he chooses will make "all the difference," but as he stands at the crossroads, he cannot know what that difference will be.

T and I are standing at a crossroads, looking down two paths and trying to decide which we should take. From where we're standing, they look in many ways equal, and we cannot know more about either without picking one, which will preclude our ever taking the other.

This happens to all of us over and over again in our lives; we encounter crossroads multiple times a day. Standing at a crossroads can be an exhilarating but also, sometimes, an excruciating and anxiety-provoking position. But T and I must choose a road soon, and I'm sure there will be sighs. We'll think back on the road we didn't take. We'll know our choice made a difference without knowing exactly what that difference is. I just hope we can avoid regret and enjoy the journey along each path that we choose.

On camping

My husband loves camping. Over the years, he's slowly been collecting more and more camping gear, although the truth is that the two of us have only gone camping together a handful of times.

As an Alaskan, T has a particular definition of camping which he sometimes struggles to widen enough to encompass what passes for camping down here in the "lower 48." My impression of his definition of true camping is that it must involve the following four features: 1) Trekking some distance and carrying all of one's camping gear along, 2) absence of other humans, 3) absence of bathroom facilities or running water, and 4) the possibility of bumping into large carnivorous animals. T asked his dad for a list of essential camping gear, and it was 7 3/4 pages, single spaced, when printed out. Camping is serious business for him.

T is happy after setting up his new tent for the first time, at Susquehanna State Park.

I am largely unfamiliar with this method of camping. As a Midwesterner, for me camping involves loading up a camper with easy-to-cook food, life-sized cooking and eating utensils, suitcases, maybe even a bicycle for each person, and driving some distance (maybe as little as just a few miles), and setting up the camper at a camp site. Alternatively, one might load up a car, truck or van and "rough it" in a tent, but that tent is likely to be the size of a room or even a small apartment.

Throughout the years of our marriage, T has been under the impression that I hate camping. I guess I can understand why he thinks that, given our very different definitions of what constitutes camping and our differing tolerances for different aspects of camping, which I can illustrate with a discussion of our most recent camping trip (and the first in at least two years) to Susquehanna State Park in central Maryland.

A Nebraska homebody does a lot of moving

Here are the relevant facts of my life thus far:

I spent the first 5 years of my life in Omaha, Nebraska, but I did my "growing up" in a village which, according to the 2010 census, has a population of 171 (although when I was a child, it was bustling with over 250 residents, if I remember correctly).

I went to high school in a nearby "big town" that has almost 3,000 residents. Out of the 55 students in my graduating class, two of us went to college out of state. We went all the way to Iowa.

After college, I got married, and then things picked up a bit. In our nearly 11 years of marriage, T and I have lived in 9 different homes or apartments in 4 different states and 2 different countries. We have lived in four distinct regions of this country, in cities and small towns, near mountains and swamps. We have grown accustomed, at different times, to seeing alligators, deer, bighorn sheep, or monkeys on drives and hikes. The longest we have lived in one domicile is 3 years.

And yet I still claim to hate--nay, detest--moving. I dread packing. I abhor unpacking. New situations are very stressful for me, and not in that "I love adrenaline" way that they seem to be for some of my friends and, perhaps, my husband. I am an introvert. Making friends is very difficult for me.

I certainly would never say that I have wanderlust.  I don't even like to travel. But I do like having traveled. So after assessing the facts of my life thus far, I have come to the conclusion that I must have wanderlike. And because I sense another bout of wandering coming on, I have preemptively begun this blog for chronicling my adventures, both the exciting and the mundane.

Please stay tuned!