Soleducs

Soleducs

I had my first serious travel adventure of the year this past weekend, and a chance to work out some of the bugs in my car free diet. For fifteen years now I've been part of a men's group that meets once a year on the Olympic Peninsula on the first weekend of January. It has become an annual ritual that we plan our year around, and it is rare that any of us is absent. Our group of eleven includes a range of professional backgrounds, including an attorney, two ministers, an architect, a psychiatrist, two commercial fishermen, a veterinarian, and a carpenter. We range in age from mid-forties to mid-seventies, so we also represent different stages of life and career. We call ourselves the "Soleducs", named after the house on Sequim Bay where we have traditionally met. Our gatherings always include a blend of outdoor adventure and in depth conversation about the years' issues, projects and passages. We are an ordinary group of guys who have build an extraordinary legacy of friendship that feels all too rare in today's world.

This year the sixty mile trip to Sequim Bay was my first major excursion off island since I began my Circling Home experiment. It was a stormy day, with gale force winds that nearly shut down the ferry from Whidbey Island to Port Townsend. We had a wild ride across Admiralty Inlet near the confluence of Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. While the rest of the guys carpooled, I made my way by bike, ferry and bus, arriving sometime after the rest of the group. 

On the way I visited my friend Nathan Gilles at his carving shed in the Jamestown-S'Klallam Tribal Center on Sequim Bay. Nathan is a premier carver in the Northwest Coast native tradition. The carving shed where he works produces some of the most spectacular totem poles anywhere on the coast. 

It is a highlight of my year just to be in the presence of such monumental work, which still carries within it for me much of the soul of Northwest culture. Nathan showed me around the works in progress, describing some of the differences between the Haida and Bella Coola native styles that he is currently working on.

After my visit with Nathan, I rode the last five miles to our retreat house in a driving rain and gale that threatened to blow me off the road. It was an exhilarating ride. I couldn't resist hooting and hollering as I made my way in fading light to the outer end of the peninsula. What a way to kick off the New Year. My friend Rick Jackson had stayed back at the house to wait for me, and we immediately headed out to find the others, who were far out on the spit celebrating the storm. John Muir couldn't have asked for a better welcoming party.

As a shared project this past year, each of us had written a short meditation on "hope". We spent time together assessing the results of our work, which we self-published in time for Christmas as a gift for our families and close friends. The results were so satisfying that we agreed to further polish the work in the coming weeks, and make it available more widely through our websites and networks.

There were definitely some unexpected challenges for me. With no bus service on Sunday, I had no choice but to stay over Sunday night after the others had left. I turned this solo time into a mini-writer's retreat, and stoked the fire late into the evening as my writing juices kicked in. The next morning I rode my bike back out to the highway in plenty of time to catch the morning bus to Port Townsend. But I discovered that being on top of planning and scheduling isn't always enough. I went to the wrong bus transit area, only to watch the bus go barreling by without slowing down. 

I couldn't believe this had happened, and I was furious. The first thing I did, of course, was curse and jump up and down and shake my fist at the bus disappearing down the highway. That didn't seem to produce any results. Then I called the transit lady and chewed her out for not having the bus stops more clearly marked. She told me not to talk to her in that tone of voice, and that the next bus was in three hours. 

So what do you do when you're stranded twenty five miles from the ferry you need to catch, you can't hitchhike, and you have three hours to wait for the next bus? I thought about finding a cafe to wait it out, but that wouldn't get me home until late in the evening, and I was too frustrated to sit around for that long. So I climbed on my bike and started riding. It wasn't what I had in mind at all, but it turned out to be a good choice. It took me a little over two hours to get there, and I made the ferry after the one I was scheduled to take. I definitely worked my frustration out on the ride. This is, after all, what I signed up for, right? I ended up tired but happy that I'd had this unexpected adventure, and this chance to experience the Olympic Peninsula in a more intimate way.

  

Livelihood

So how am I going to pull this off from a livelihood standpoint? It's one thing to decide I need to make some changes. It's another thing to figure out how to support myself through the change. I have no easy answers here. Being self-employed with an unusual blend of skills is both an asset and a liability. It is an asset in that my time is my own to allocate as I will. I have well-honed skills as a commercial fisherman, carpenter, wilderness guide and meditation teacher. Different as they are, each of these skill sets continue to play some part in my livelihood structure, and I can configure them as necessary to meet changing circumstances.

The liability is that the moment I back off on the throttle of my work, as I am this year with my Circling Home experiment, the money stops flowing. There is no salary to tie me over. I can take a sabbatical if I want, but nobody is going to pay me to do it.

Staying local for the year means I won't be going to Alaska for the summer. This cuts me off from my main sources of income as a commercial fisherman and wilderness guide. I could kick back in as a carpenter, but that would defeat the purpose of my primary intention to explore and write during the coming year. On the other hand, my career as a meditation teacher is on the upswing, but it pays poorly, and has been taking hold mostly outside my home region, so it rests heavily on jet travel. It is this growing weight of travel, and its indisputable connection to climate change, that has prompted my decision to stay local this year.

So no matter how I slice it, I am going to have to dip into savings to make this work. I am fortunate that my wife has a good source of income, that she supports my intention and is willing to help pull up the slack financially.

I'll be using this year to ramp up my teaching in local venues, including work I am doing one day a week at the Veteran's Hospital in Seattle, teaching meditation and yoga as components of stress reduction. I'll also lead some contemplative retreats at the Whidbey Institute and North Cascades Institute, and see what else emerges. 

The other leg of my livelihood stool this coming year will be a month of commercial salmon fishing next fall with my partner Dave Anderson on the gill net boat we recently bought for Puget Sound. This may be a departure from my low-carbon diet, but it's what I have to work with, and it has the added advantage of teaching me about my home region from the vantage of working on the water. For so many years I've traveled a thousand miles to the north to experience what used to be the heart and soul of my home region. While many of the salmon runs in Puget Sound are badly depleted, the chum salmon run is still strong and commercially viable, and the fishing lifestyle is an excellent way to become better acquainted with the ecological fabric of the Sound. Fishing for salmon has been basic to livelihoods in Puget Sound since the retreat of the last ice sheet. It is a way for me to bridge the skills I already have with the place I actually live.

There is no point in shying away from the contradictions and points of friction that all of us will be facing in our efforts to reinvent our lives in response to climate change. There is no magic bullit. We all will have to do the best we can with what we have to maintain reasonable livelihood options, even as we strive to change the way we live and work. One of the obvious challenges for me this year then will be to strike a realistic balance between ongoing livelihood needs and an honest break from patterns of work that are no longer sustainable. My "sabbatical" will really be a number of mini-sabbaticals sprinkled in among bits and pieces of work to keep me going and keep me grounded. I hope to gain some insights into how this might be accomplished on a longer term basis, closer to home, by the time this year is over.