Category: Creative

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Outing Club and an Announcement!

Before I get started I want to note that the members of the Purdue Outing Club often refer to their club as the POC. However, in America POC is more commonly used to refer to People of Color. And since it is important to listen to and respect our POC siblings, I will be referring to the Purdue Outing Club simply as the Outing Club. Also, if you are a member of the Purdue Outing Club and are reading this you may want to consider dropping the POC acronym.

Last weekend was my fourth time attending the 2019 Annual Purdue Outing Club ski reunion. Held over President’s day weekend the event consists variously of: miscellaneous outdoor activities, drinking, reveling in the delicious nostalgia of playing Never Have I Ever, drinking while in a hot tub, and watching old Outing Club videos on YouTube.

Imagine a frat reunion and a Scouts of America weekend mashed together and you have some idea of the general atmosphere. Though as folks age, the weekend has become substantially less alcohol infused. There are fewer naked laps around the rental cabin. And more reasonable bedtimes as members of the Outing Club slide into their 30’s. This laissez-faire attitude is how I found myself seated on a messy, shedding IKEA rug at 10pm watching teen-aged versions of the people seated around me throw themselves down waterfalls, clamber through muddy caves, and whip on iconic Red Rock sandstone.

The videos, which are little more than carnage reels set against the bucolic Midwest and accompanied by a 90’s indie rock song are to me, quintessential to what it means to be a young adult. Before video it was film, and before film it was photography and written word. Regardless of the media these efforts are a distillation of what teens have been doing for generations. Expressing themselves through one of the only ways they know how–showing the world the stupid shit they get up to with their friends.

And perhaps I came to love these Outing Club videos so dearly because I too have a series of poorly produced videos of my friends launching themselves off DIY ski jumps or being towed behind cars down snowy city streets.These videos were some of the first attempts I made at visual storytelling. A Coldplay song worth of awkwardly edited clips was the best way I had of expressing what was important to me. And I think more than that, it was a way of drawing like-minded people to me. Because that’s what those ridiculous videos were. Beyond the capturing of adventures undertaken between friends, they were an effort to show the world what really captured my heart.

Being reintroduced to these videos has shifted my thoughts around outdoor exploits being a creative pursuit. People who play outside the way I do, the way the members of the Outing Club do, place the freedom of the outdoors next to their very souls, families, friends. And in making these videos and image we are attempting to show the world this fierce kind of love that comes from the outdoor places we inhabit. Truly, my efforts in photography, video creation, and even this very blog are all born out of those early clips of my friends. And as widespread as my interest have become, capturing the life outdoors boils down to the singular desire to help the world love these places as much as I do.

An Announcement!

Hello lovely readers! How are you today?

I want to let you know that from here forward Wild Country Found will be publishing once every two weeks instead of once every week. The exceptions being when I have a special announcement to make or am on a long hike, in which case you can expect posts more frequently.

The reason being that I have taken on some extra commitments this year (and some exciting news I can’t announce just yet) which has resulted in a decrease in my free time. I was starting to feel like I was bouncing from activity to obligation with no down time for myself. I enjoy writing this blog, and I want to be able to give appropriate time to each post instead of just firing them off. When I looked for things to cut, this blog came up first. But don’t worry, WCF isn’t going away! Starman and I have some amazing adventures in the works and you can look forward to reading about them here.

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Things I’ve Learned From The Trees

When the world seems a dismal place, I like to think about what we can learn from the trees. The value of silently observing the world as it changes around you. The deep quiet of solitude, loneliness, the simple act of standing witness to the passage of time. Being committed to just one thing: growth. Living in a way that does good for the world; and knowing that even the sentinels of the forest are not without their flaws. For even the most resplendent tree casts a shadow upon the ground that keeps the ferns from growing.That it is impossible to live a life that is devoid of harming others, but, tandemly, simply because something is impossible doesn’t preclude it from being worthy of our attention, our efforts.

After all, it was impossible for man to reach beyond our little blue dot and sail to the mood. It was impossible right up to the moment that we decided to test our hypothesis of impossibility. In doing so we move the bar just that much further, set a new impossible, a vast horizon on which we can build and destroy dreams so grand, that from here, their greatness makes them all but invisible.

When I look at the world and see all the greed and indifference, the shame and confusion, I think of the trees. The old giants.

I like to imagine a stand of soaring pine trees which no man has ever seen. Trees that took root before this great democratic experiment, before you, before me, before anyone you’ve ever had the slightest possibility of knowing came into being. When I look at the trees, not the tame, domesticated blooms that adorn our city street and front lawns, but the wild ineffable misers who live out their lives – which are so inexpressibly different from our own –  away from the prying eyes of humans. When I think of these trees – it feels like the greatest form of hubris that we should endeavor to write our stories on their skin.

These trees don’t strive to have their names written in the pages of our history books. Instead, they are the pages of our history books, the pages of nearly every human story, the true and the tabloid, the sweeping epic and the stereo installation manual. And if tomorrow, we are called upon by some desire within ourselves to cut these giants down; to bring their soaring-ever-reaching limbs crashing down to earth, they will not complain, but simply acquiesce to our desires and we will have lost something grand and powerful, and very nearly the closest thing we have on this planet to the divine. We will have lost a teacher.

For the trees know we are small confused mammals with minds that are smaller still. They accept us and our hubris, our carelessness, our ceaseless errors, knowing that these flaws are simply part of our DNA, and they forgive us. And in their silence they hold space for us to learn. To grow not as they do, but in our own way.

The trees teach us that there is an awesome power in growth, in being huge, fat, bursting in our liveliness, and that it does not do to make oneself small. Conversely, they also show us that the notions of who is better and best does nothing but divide us, and that living only to take is not only cruel, but so beyond pointless that only a silly little animal like a human would spend their one fleeting, glorious life in pursuit of this pyrrhic victory.

I like to look to the trees, and know that one day, all of it, all of you, will be gone, as surely and completely as the silence that stood in your place before you arrived. And then what? Just the trees and the dirt will remain, until one day, they too are swallowed up by the gaping maw of space. And we are, all of us, returned to the star dust from which we came.

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Perspective: A Comic

Last weekend I spent two days on a solo backpacking adventure through Sequoia National Park. The experience was definitely one of the hardest things I’ve voluntarily put myself through, but it was also incredibly rewarding, and at times super freaking fun. This lead me to thinking about how everything we do and love, or do and hate is really just based on personal perspective. These exhaustion-fueled musings lead to this little comic.

Also, I apparently write comics now. If for no other reason than to amuse myself.

Look for a full trip report coming later this week.