FIRE and Frost

Posted On November 26, 2023

I hung out with a few friends recently for a kid’s birthday party. My friend has a nice set up in his backyard, perfect for hanging out. Fire pit. TV mounted on the wall. Nice furniture. Well built deck. The weather has turned colder in recent days out here in the Bay Area and we had the fire pit going. A few cold drinks. Hot pozole soup. Conversation turned to how cheap travel trailers and RV’s have become. It looks like a good percentage of those who bought their travel trailers during the pandemic en masse, are now starting to sell their toys. The local market is now flooded with an excess supply of trailers and RV’s. One person at the gathering bought their trailer two years back for around $30k new. Now there are some of the exact same model, used of course, going for $12k.

Most of the people sitting down talking with us owned trailers. Some of them are pretty nice. The convenience of having a trailer seems amazing. Having everything already stocked up and ready to go has gotten me daydreaming from time to time as I load and unload my truck on my tent camping trips. They spoke about joining a “camping club” where you pay an entry fee of a few thousand dollars to a specific campground, then hundreds of dollars a month to have access to campgrounds situated nearby on the delta. These campgrounds are little more than parking lots right off the highway. No trees. Flat landscapes. Levees abound. There’s pools for swimming. More like a resort than a campground.

That sort of camping doesn’t captivate me personally. I like to go out as deep as I can in nature, away from people and with limited luxuries.

My opinion is not the correct view, it’s only my opinion. But for them, they very much enjoyed this camping style. They liked to “get away” and be outdoors with family and enjoyed the convenience of hooking up to electricity and wifi. Watching ballgames and playing video games while “camping” does look like a good time. A different kind of camping fun, but legit fun nonetheless. Drinks, family, eating grilled food, water nearby to swim in.

They showed me photos of some of their set ups and surprisingly I felt a sense of jealousy.

Why couldn’t I have those kind of cool set ups too? Cool string lights. Gas grills. The area in front of their trailers all decorated out with fake grass and lounge chairs.

They all owned big trucks to pull their trailers. That too sent me a vibe that they were somehow more successful than me because they could afford these things. I don’t own a truck. Hell, I only own one car at the moment. They all sat around talking about what they were going to buy, where they were going to camp, it left me feeling a bit left out as well.

Most of them used to tent camp right along with me. But now it feels as though age and money have played a role in changing that mindset. Most of the guys are now in their forties and late thirties. Convenience takes precedence. I get it. The last time I was camping I had a hell of a time loading up my vehicle.

Since that day at my friends house I’ve been thinking a lot about why I suddenly had the urge to want what they wanted. Maybe wanting to fit in. Maybe wanting to humbly show how successful I am by the material things I own.

Ah, yes. Success. Owning expensive things does convey success. No matter if the thing is owned outright or with borrowed high interest money. I won’t delve too much into the money aspect of this, because it’s such a cliche subject.

But success. That seemed to be what it was. What exactly is success? It can mean whatever you want it to mean. Success is defined as the accomplishment of an aim or purpose. The thing is we all have different aims or goals, so success varies from person to person, culture to culture.

I just have different goals. A different vision for my future than my friends and most of American society. And that’s kinda sad for me to think about. Sad because I don’t talk much about my goals to my friends. It’s as if I have some secret plan that I’m keeping to myself. Every time talk comes up about the future I keep kinda quiet. To think that I plan on drastically changing up my lifestyle in the next two years without their knowledge of my true plans, feels shady in a way.

FIRE is by its nature, a sort of a secret club, for me it is anyway. Yet the edges of this lifestyle do bleed out into the view of others. The questioning looks when I pinch pennies. The odd comment that I can afford “xyz” so why am I worried about the price? The sitting quietly when everyone else is talking about the bigger and better thing they will buy next.

I’ve brought up my plans to retire early to a few select friends, and they’ve sort of laughed it off to me maybe having some crazy pipe dream. The subject doesn’t last too long because I don’t push it unless they have legit questions. They’ve asked how I’ll afford it and I tell them stocks, then the conversation sort of falls off a cliff there.

To think that my path is slowly starting to diverge from the path of my friends does make me ask if I don’t truly want to somehow tame my wander lust and just accept that what I have now as a victory. I would lie to you dear readers if I didn’t say it’s tempting at times to think, that if I wanted, I could just stay in my house, enjoy my pre-inflation 2.8% mortgage rate, stop hardcore investing, and accept that I don’t need to be constantly wanting more than I have. I get the feeling I’m playing with house money yet I’m still putting all the chips on the table. Gaming for the next win in life. The next big exciting thing. Why not take my winnings and leave before I blow it? Why this pursuit for something out of the ordinary, even from a FIRE standpoint?

I feel as though I’ve hit some crossroad in my life. I’m standing right now between two roads. Not just for what kind of life I will have, but for the kind of life my kids will have, and their kids will have. I’m a product of my grandparent’s decisions, if they’d never crossed the border I’d be living somewhere in Mexico right now.

I feel that weight. That weight of my yet to be born descendants on my shoulders.

Robert Frost does a better job of explaining it. So I’ll pass it over to him for a few lines:

The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

The easy interpretation of this poem is that the less traveled road leads to better things. But I get a sense of regret in the poem. A warning maybe?

I ask myself where this want for adventure comes from. This want is why I joined the Navy during wartime. Why I quit work twice to travel around the world. It’s why I still try to travel off the worn path when camping.

I blame reading.

I blame Patrick O’Brian, Joseph Conrad, Hemingway, and Wilbur Smith. Tolkien and Le Guin aren’t innocent either.

I blame my love of history.

Reading about those who’ve traveled. Those who’ve written about exotic far off places, imagined or real, were like seeds planted in my mind at an early age, back when I thought anything was possible. Even now, at the age of forty, far away still calls to me. The knowledge that our lifespan is but a twitch of the eye compared to the long history of humanity fuels me. I still read about old empires that have lived and died. These dead empires, some of the most powerful nation states in the world in their respective times, lasted hundreds, even thousands of years. Waging wars. Improving science. Creating fantastic art. Pushing boundaries in all directions. And yet most of us today have forgotten their existence. The individual people who’ve lived and breathed in these past times are even further forgotten.

Reading history gives me the perspective of what a life is in the grand scheme of things. Centuries are casually thrown around in history books without acknowledgement that generations of everyday regular people like you and me, actually lived their lives in these periods. Surely these forgotten people, our ancestors, must have loved the same way we do. They must have had dreams and wants. They must have loved their children and feared death. Enjoyed good food and music. A peaceful night’s sleep. Wanted for security and a warm future. They must have wondered if history would remember them, if not, certainly their nation and country would be remembered.

My life will be forgotten like theirs. Yours too. Dust motes between the chapters of new history books. Our lives will be relegated to stereotypes and brief paragraphs of life at the turn of the 21st century. We will live between world events like the War on Terror, the Covid-19 pandemic, the end of the Cold War, and whatever major events will occur in the coming decades.

This knowledge somehow fuels my lust for wanting to see and do something different. Something out of the ordinary. An outlier, even if I’m the only one who will ever know it, in the generic label I’ll be given by historians who will specialize in this time period in history.

When I see a shiny new travel trailer passing by me on the freeway, being pulled by a nice big truck, with a happy family inside; I see a mirror shining back at me. I see a narrowing of choices. But worst of all, I see myself truly enjoying a travel trailer and everything that owning one entails. A steadiness. I see a good life staying in my house for the rest of my life, medical insurance covered by my union, life long childhood friends for my kids, a steady climb up the ranks in my career. I see a joy in never leaving the comfortable life I’ve built around me in the expensive Bay Area.

Sitting there at my friends house while kids were running around, the fire pit with its flames wagging about, laughs and jokes just as warm as the fire before us, cold beer stinging my fingers between sips, my wife whispered to me, “You won’t miss this if we leave it all and go traveling?”

I shook my head no and crossed my arms.

But I wasn’t so sure.

I would miss socializing with my friends. I would miss this life. I’m attached to what I have right now, whether I admit it or not. Some cultures say attachment is the root of all suffering. To grasp onto something means you have less control.

Still, it makes me wonder if this audacious goal of mine was influenced a bit too much by the extreme lack of everything during the pandemic. This question made me take another look at that ‘other road’. The road with the easy looking path, flat, sunny, stretching out as far as I could see for years. Why does that dark and shadowy road with its mysterious turns and thick brush call to me so?

Is a predictable road such a bad thing?

As 2023 draws to an end, I’m standing here where my road diverges into two, and sorry I could not travel both. Yet extremely grateful that I even get a choice.