Zen and the Art of Dwayne Maintenance
So, what is an ‘intential’ life, and can you set out to live one? For me, this trip is about discovery. Finding places which are deeply impacted by the climate crisis, places where the community spirit and bond is strong, places with a collective lilt to their step. I grew up in a small town in Washington state, one in view of Mount Rainier, and until the 1980 eruption, in view of Mount Saint Helens. Rochester had no lilt. It was all agriculture and timber until it wasn’t any more, and some of the kids I went to school with, their parents worked in Olympia for the state. My parents moved back to Centralia where they were from after we moved off to college, and my twin brother Darrin bought their old house. He was a math teacher in Centralia.
As kids, Darrin and I spent summers working in our expansive garden, tending the corn, cauliflower, cabbage, potatoes, beans, broccoli, peas, kohlrabi, rhubarb, raspberries, radishes, strawberries, and many others I’ve forgotten. I loved vegetables owing to my Grandpa Roy. He would let me sit on his lap at dinner and let me try anything he was eating. If he offered something, I would eat it. For Darrin, a great injustice was having to work so hard caring for veggies he hated eating. We also explored Scatter Creek which crossed Township Road a half mile from our home with our friend Marc, who lived a half mile in the other direction. We fished, caught crawdads, and waded upstream past Sargent Road and well on our way to Case Road, which was maybe three miles away. Time slowed down on those days by the creek, and I have crisp memories of that time. We never caught any fish, but never tried very hard either. We did catch enough crawdads one day to take them home in a five gallon bucket and cook them up. Darrin didn’t like those either.
As we got older, we worked with my dad helping him hang sheetrock in new houses and apartment buildings. It was hard work and it helped me get in better shape for football season, and affirmed that I should focus on work that used my brains instead of my body. My dad used to buy a six-pack of Rainier beer to share with his work partners on the way home. Sometimes it was Dale Drop, an old friend of his from childhood. Sometimes it was one of my mom’s brothers, Uncle Jim or Uncle Kenny or Uncle Ray or Uncle Rick. My dad quit drinking before having a few beers in the truck on the way home became verboten. My dad worked very hard, and I suppose that rubbed off on me. He was also known to say “Don’t marry a job,” which was surprisingly sage advise that I ignored for quite awhile.
I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I had initially decided that I only wanted to study at college for two years. My advisor at Centralia College advised against that, suggesting in his humble opinion that I had what it took to get a four-year engineering degree. My attachment to my education path was not closely held, so I switched to a general two-year engineering associate’s degree, which transferred to Portland State University where I completed an electrical engineering degree 3 1/2 years later. That landed me at Intel, where I never expected to work for more than 3 years into the future, at any point in my career. 30 years after my start I did finally leave, retiring in 2018. I took a fellowship to work at Ecotrust, a nonprofit focused on environmentally friendlier fishing, farming, and forestry. That lasted two years, and I was able to try on a bunch of different areas of work. It was a breath of fresh air, and it helped launch my new career with purpose, the path a voice started whispering to me back when I was living in China, and had grown to a roar by the time I made my plans to retire from Intel.
In 2020, Darrin passed away in his sleep. It was early March and just before the global pandemic really got rolling. He’d had a long battle with leukemia, and just seemed tired from it all. If he’d suffered (and he surely had) you wouldn’t know it by talking with him. His wife was a rock as well, and must have been tired too. Twins have a special bond and his passing broke that for me. For the first time since even before my birth, that support was unexpectedly gone. It galvanized my decision to deliberately pursue what mattered to me. With Darrin’s passing, I viscerally saw that life is short and the choices we make matter.
As the next step, in April I took a job as interim executive director with Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center to help them navigate through the pandemic. This distracted me from the grief of losing my brother, and was even closer to the sort of work I was seeking. We were finding our way pretty well, but then faced the Beachie Creek fire over Labor Day weekend 2020, which caused heavy damage to the namesake wilderness and scenic recreation area, and destroyed our little camp almost completely. I stayed on for another year to pick up the pieces of our charred place in the forest, and left at the end of September 2021. In late October, my father passed away, finally free of his construction-battered body, also freeing my mom from the caregiving role which was hard on her, too. We worried about my mom after losing dad, and when we learned that her bucket list top item was to cruise to Alaska, we decided to honor that. We booked a cruise in July of 2022, sandwiched between our loop through Canada and the rest of our trip. Carrie-Ann had loss too, with both of her parents passing in February and May of 2022. So much loss.
Throughout the last 5 years, I’ve read a bunch about the climate crisis, and am now intent on heading more deliberately in that direction. This trip will allow me to get a boots on the ground view of the struggles in the west. I’m hopeful for clarity on my future path toward climate solutions.
So, what is an ‘intential’ life, and can you set out to live one? In some ways this trip is essentially one of exploration both of the west but also of ourselves. It is also ultimately a tribute to our parents who did not live out their years in the ways they had imagined (Darrin). We are deciding to live now, and see where it takes us. We will have challenges and triumphs, and learn some things along the way. I’m looking forward to the discovery of small towns with lilt to their step and places where the climate crisis is looming but they’re in action to do something about it.
