What the Outdoors Has Taught Me

You’re listening to Miles of Quiet. Episode Twelve. I’m recording this one a little differently. Most of these I write at a table, or in the van with a notebook, thinking it through ahead of time. This one I started thinking about in front of a fire, a few nights ago, out past Bend on a road I won’t name. I’d built the fire the way I talked about last episode, slow, from small stuff, no rushing it. And once it was going I just sat there with a notebook I never opened, trying to answer the question I told you at the very beginning of all this I’d get around to eventually.

What has any of this actually taught me. Not the skills. Those are fine. I can read a river now, mostly. I can fix the van, usually. I can build a fire in the wind.

Those aren’t nothing, but they’re not what I mean, and they’re not why you’re still here. The other stuff. That’s what I want to try to get at. That’s what I want to talk about today. So. I’m Henry Wilder.

I’ve been putting this one off, because it’s easy to talk for an hour about a single fish or a single trail, and it’s hard to stand back and say what the whole thing adds up to. But I’ve been doing this show for a while now, and living this life for four years, and standing in rivers for a lot longer than that. And if I can’t tell you what it’s for, I probably shouldn’t have made you listen this long. So let me try. Here’s the thing about that. When I look back at everything I’ve talked about so far, it all keeps pointing at the same few ideas, coming at them from different angles.

And I didn’t plan that. I planned a pile of episodes about different subjects. Boredom, and fishing, and van life, and solitude, and fire. But when I lay them next to each other, they’re mostly the same handful of lessons wearing different clothes. So instead of a summary, let me just tell you the lessons. The real ones.

The first one is patience, and I know I’ve beaten that one half to death, so I’ll say the part I haven’t said. Patience isn’t waiting. I used to think it was. I thought a patient person was someone who was good at enduring the boring stretch until the good part arrived. That’s not it. The thing I actually learned, standing in rivers and tending fires and walking flat forest roads for four hours at a stretch, is that the waiting isn’t a stretch you endure to get to the good part.

The waiting is the good part. The fish was never the point. The summit was never the point. The four boring hours in the middle of the hike turned out to be the part I remember, and the fish I let go turned out to matter more than any fish I kept as a kid. Patience isn’t tolerating the empty time. It’s finally noticing the empty time was full the whole while, and you were just too busy waiting for something else to see it.

That took me years. I’m not sure I’ve fully got it even now. But I know it’s true, because every time I’ve forced something, a fish, a conversation, a decision, a person, I’ve gotten the same result, which is noise and effort and nothing. And every time I’ve slowed down to the speed of the thing in front of me and just paid attention to it, the thing I was chasing tended to show up on its own. Not always. But enough.

The second lesson is about being alone, and it surprised me, because it’s the opposite of what I expected. I spend a lot of time by myself. More than is probably healthy, if you asked certain people in my life. And I talked a few episodes back about what solitude does to your head, how three days alone in the backcountry starts up conversations with yourself you’ve been avoiding for months. Here’s what I didn’t say then. The solitude didn’t make me want people less.

It made me want them more, and better. When you spend real time alone, the noise burns off. The small social performing, the version of yourself you run for other people, the constant low management of what everybody thinks. All of that goes quiet, because there’s no one to run it for. And what’s left, after a few days, is a person who’s a lot more interested in the handful of people who actually matter, and a lot less interested in impressing anybody. I came out of my longest solo trips not craving isolation.

I came out wanting to sit around a fire with two or three people I trust and actually talk. That’s the connection between the quietest episode I did and the warmest one. The alone time and the fire. They’re the same lesson from two directions. You get quiet enough by yourself to figure out who you actually are, and then you want to bring that person to the small circle of people who’ve earned the real version instead of the performed one. Solitude didn’t pull me away from people.

It just showed me which people were worth coming back for. The third lesson is the hardest one to say without sounding like I’m selling something, so I’ll just say it plainly. Almost none of it has to be epic. I spent an entire episode on this, on how everything outdoors got sold to us as epic, how epic became the floor instead of the ceiling, how a plain good day stopped being enough. And the longer I’ve done this, the more I’ve come to believe the ordinary version of things is not the consolation prize. It’s the actual prize.

Most of my best days outside were not remarkable. They were a decent walk, a gray sky, a fire, a fish I didn’t catch, a night I slept fine. If I’d filmed them honestly they’d be the most boring footage on the internet. And they’re the ones I’d take back if I could take any of them back. Not the peaks. The peaks are fine.

I’ve stood on a bunch of them, and the view is good for about ten minutes, and then you have to walk down the same mountain. The days I’d actually relive are the unremarkable ones, and I think that’s the single most useful thing being outside has taught me, because it turns out to be just as true off the mountain as on it. Most of a life is ordinary days. If you can only enjoy the epic ones, you’ve signed up to be unhappy for the large majority of your time on earth, waiting for the small minority that’s supposed to make it worth it. Learn to like the ordinary day, the flat forest road, the gray morning, the fish that didn’t bite, and you’ve solved most of the problem of being alive. I’m not saying I’ve solved it.

I’m saying I finally know what the problem is, which is more than I could’ve told you five years ago. I haven’t said much about the van, and it’s the thing people ask about most, so let me close that loop too. I left a good job at thirty-eight to live in a van, and I told you the honest version of that a while back. It wasn’t brave. It was the thing I did when the other thing stopped working. And people want that story to have a triumphant shape, where the guy escapes the cubicle and finds himself out on the open road.

That’s not the ending. The ending is more ordinary than that, and better. What the van actually did wasn’t set me free. It stripped my life down until there was very little left to hide behind. When you live in eighty square feet, you find out fast what you actually need, and how little of it there is. You can’t accumulate your way out of a bad day.

There’s no room for it. You can’t outrun a hard feeling by buying something, because there’s nowhere to put the thing you bought. So you just sit with the day you’re having, in a small box, in a big landscape, and you deal with it. The van didn’t give me adventure. It gave me a life small enough that I couldn’t avoid myself inside it. And it turns out that’s most of what I needed.

Not freedom. Fewer places to hide. And the fourth thing, the last one, isn’t really a lesson. It’s more of a posture, and it runs underneath all the rest. Show up without an agenda. Everything I’ve talked about on this show, the fishing, the walking, the boredom, the letting the fish go, the sitting around a fire, it all comes back to the same move.

You go to the place. You don’t demand anything from it. You don’t need the fish, or the view, or the breakthrough, or the story to tell afterward. You just show up, and pay attention, and let the place be what it is on that particular day. And nine times out of ten, when you stop demanding something, the place gives you something anyway. That’s not mysticism.

I don’t think the river cares about my posture. It’s just that you can’t actually see a place while you’re busy making it perform for you, and the second you stop needing it to perform, you can finally see it, and there’s always more there than you thought. I learned that one backwards, through peak bagging, which I did plenty of before I knew better. For a few years I hiked with a list. Summits I wanted, boxes I wanted checked, a running tally of things I’d done so I could say I’d done them. And I did them.

And I can barely remember most of them, because I wasn’t there for the mountain. I was there for the checkmark. I was so busy demanding the summit that I walked straight past everything the walk was trying to show me. The days I actually remember from that whole stretch aren’t the peaks. They’re the times something went sideways and the plan fell apart and I had to just be where I was. A storm that pinned me down for an afternoon.

A trail I lost and had to find again. The agenda got taken away from me, and only then did I see the place I was standing in. Now I try to leave the agenda at the trailhead on purpose. It took me years to learn to give up the thing I used to drive two hours to go get. That’s the whole trick, if there is one. That’s what four years of this comes down to.

Slow down to the speed of the thing. Stop needing it to be more than it is. Take nothing, or take less than you could. And show up often enough, and pay attention long enough, that the ordinary starts to look like plenty, because it is. I told you at the start I wouldn’t tie this up too neatly, and I’m not going to. I don’t have it all worked out.

I still force things I shouldn’t. I still feel the pull to make a good morning into a piece of content instead of just living it. I still catch myself waiting for the epic version and missing the ordinary one right in front of me. The lessons don’t stay learned. That’s the honest part nobody puts at the end. You don’t arrive.

You just get a little better at knowing where to go when you’ve lost the thread again. And that’s the thing I’m actually the most grateful for, after all of it. Not that the outdoors fixed me. It didn’t. But it gave me a place to go, a river to stand in, a fire to build, a long boring road to walk, where I can get quiet enough to find the thread again when I drop it. Which is often.

That’s what these years have really given me. Not a set of answers I get to keep. A reliable way back to the question. And I’ll say one more thing, because I’d feel wrong ending without it. None of this works without the land. Every river I’ve stood in, every road I’ve walked, every fire I’ve built, almost all of it happened on public land, ground that belongs to all of us and none of us.

I don’t live the way I live because I’m free. I live this way because that land exists, and because somebody, a long time ago, decided it should stay open to a guy with a van and not much money. I don’t take that for granted anymore. I used to. Standing in enough rivers cured me of it. Take care of the places that have taken care of you.

That’s not politics. That’s just paying a debt. Thank you for spending this time out here with me. I mean that. It’s a strange thing, talking into a microphone about standing quietly in rivers, and the fact that anybody wanted to listen still surprises me. Go find your own version of this.

It doesn’t have to be a river. It doesn’t have to be a van, or a fire, or a mountain. It just has to be a place quiet enough that you can hear yourself think, and boring enough that you’re forced to. I don’t have it figured out. But I think I know where to go when I need to think about it. That’s what I’ve got so far, and I expect I’ll keep finding more of it.

Thanks for coming along, genuinely. I’m Henry Wilder. This has been Miles of Quiet. Go find your miles, wherever they turn out to be. And then let them be quiet.