If you’ve never read the book “Into the Wild” you should. The movie was ok. The book did a better job of telling the story of a young man who decided to follow his wanderlust to Alaska (and without sharing too much, I will stop there).
This was my second time in Alaska for work travel. The first time, I didn’t see much- just rain and fog. This time, however, expecting terrible, cold, snowy conditions, we were surprised with sunshine and wildlife (moose, bald eagles, salmon, and a wild bear cub). Michelle joined me during the week I was in Anchorage, and we took full advantage of the time between college recruiting events to see the sights.
Exploring this rugged terrain (and mind you, just a small sample of Alaska), I can see why the young man from the Into the Wild story was smitten and determined to live his life there. He read books, studied maps, and followed the lives of previous explorers to come to the conclusion that I came to myself on this trip: There is nothing like experiencing it for yourself. There are no words to describe the beauty and the majesty. I told Michelle that the land seemed magical.
Our friends Margie and Gary (parents of a buddy from college) were so kind to lend us their cabin, located on a private lake in the middle of the wilderness. They warned us that the cabin had no modern conveniences, but I was shocked to find it sublime and perfect. This cozy, two-story log cabin (built themselves) sat on a plot of land over looking a the most serene lake I have ever seen in my life.
You could feel the intentional love and care they had put into the place, sense the memories of family get-togethers and late night bonfires, the overwhelming sound of silence. When it was dark, you lit candles. When you were cold you put more logs in the fire. And when you needed to relax, you had a hot chocolate and marveled at the stillness. With Michelle there, unplugged from work, the world, I could have sworn it was some small glimpse of heaven. (Thank you Margie and Gary. Words cannot express how awesome the experience was!)
We do a “Jumping Jedd” picture for every place we travel to.
Alaskans must think we are pretty funny as we made loud noises and clapped our way through trails. In our defense, we did see a baby cub brown bear fishing in a stream….who knows where mama bear was….
Just walking through a park on the path, talking, minding our own business and suddenly, I grab Michelle’s hand and we both were amazed that ten feet to the side of us was a moose. We didn’t know if they would charge but he apparently felt pretty comfortable with us being there. Ps. Moose are LARGE and can be surprisingly chill.
SPOILER ALERT: I won’t tell you exactly what happens in the Into the Wild story, but I will say this, other then acknowledging how beautiful Alaska is, there is something else that the boy in the story and I have in common; we both have come to realize that there is something so beautiful and special about sharing incredible moments with someone- that we were meant and intended to be in relationship. Somehow the story- and our lives- seems so much better this way. You can say you drove to the top of the mountain, tell people of the amazing view, the way you felt breathing in the cool crisp air… Or, you can remember it with someone you love. Anyways, it’s difficult to take a picture trying to make the “A” and “K” of Alaska on your own…. 🙂
For many of you who know me, you know that I am an idea guy. While some of my ideas are pretty creative (at least I think they are) and some might be considered good or even great, I do have a pretty good streak of idiotic or crazy ideas. This “Challenge” is probably one of them.
The choice in front of us was that of buying a house. At first, the values that came into play were not only financial (how much of our income and savings we were willing to sacrifice to own a property) but also what kind of environment we’d like to live in. As we often tend to do, we seemed to have opposite views on these subjects only to find out later that deep down, we both wanted the same thing.
favor. Well, we came very close. But it turned out that there was a complication in the closing process that caused us to step back and re-evaluate if we valued the house enough to hang in there. It was another intense moment in our relationship where I was very unsettled and thought Jedd was on a completely different page about the situation. But it wasn’t so. We looked at our values. Yes, we value investing in a community and being somewhere that challenges us to reach out. Yes, we are committed to Portland long-term. Yes, we would prefer for our monthly home payment to be invested into our own house rather than go into a landlord’s pocket. But we’re two young, entrepreneurial people in the midst of life transitions. Who knows what we will be doing in two years? And we still have a lot of traveling and adventuring we want to do. We concluded that although we’d love to be in that house some day, right now we value the “freedom to ch
ange” even more. Freedom to pick up and volunteer abroad, freedom to spend a short chapter of our lives doing something else, freedom to take an opportunity when it comes at us and not have to worry about being committed to a certain place or a mortgage payment. We’ll sacrifice some rent payments to have those freedoms until we know we’re ready to really dig deep into a neighborhood and not be so mobile.
have been meaning to start a blog/website/newsletter about our lives a long time ago. Of course this project took a backseat with everything happening in our first year of marriage. However, as the title says, there is no day better than today to start- anything- and so with this, we are going to try our best to fill you in on the latest.
Simply Intentional 