A Ghostly Fellow Traveler

In a couple weeks I set off on another ridiculous adventure. There have been so many over the past six years, I’ve lost count. I guess it’s just one big adventure, right? Right. Well for the next trip and probably for those to come I thought I’d start posting here. I’ve tried this before, gotten lazy, given up, and ultimately deleted the whole thing. It’s happened a couple times. And there’s a high probability it will happen again. However, for the sake of trying (and a total lack of risk), let’s do it again. 

Posts will basically just be edited versions of my journal entries, a sort of travelogue. I’m going to Iceland and Greenland, and when I get back I’ll write separate posts for each day of the journey. You are welcome to read along, all three or four of you that feel like it (hi mom!), but I think the target audience is just me.

Plotwise, there’s no plot. I’m going to drive around, walk around, see things, do things, and come home. The narrative will be based on a true story, though I reserve the right to change names, places, time sequence, events, and the underlying nature of reality whenever I deem necessary. You’re dealing with an unreliable narrator, but trust me, it’s all true.
(That’s your first test.)

I won’t write much about travels of the past on here, primarily because it hurts my head. Too much has happened to go back and cover it all and selecting little bits to share while discarding others seems wrong somehow, like picking favorites. Moreover, to me it seems a bizarre exercise to try writing now about things I experienced years ago. A different person – who I was then – is the only one qualified to tell you about that. In his coast-to-coast book River-Horse, William Least Heat-Moon wrote:

"I thought how far I was from where and when this journey began, how I was so distant from the fellow passing for me twenty months ago, the one so eager to learn the secrets of river passage. Could he - the me of that moment - and I sit down together, he would want to know what I knew and absorb what I had experienced, and he would regard me enviously, just as I do those men who have returned from the moon. But there would be forever a difference between me and him: I went and he did not. He set the voyage in motion, but he could not take it. Just as I, who lay on the Dakota hill, could never know whether Nikawa would reach the Pacific, he could never see the outcome of his preparations, unless somewhere, on some far other side, time permits us to meet our past selves, all those we have been. Our physical components change every seven years, so our brains are continually passing along memories to a stranger; who we have been is only a ghostly fellow traveler.”

For the most part, I’ll leave that particular ghost alone and seek out others. However, in order to get this story started I suppose some narrative exposition is in order. So here is a brief history of my traveling life up to now:

In 2011 I graduated from KU and left the country for the first time. I visited the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, got hooked on travel, and began saving money for future adventures. After a road trip to Florida I wound up living with my sister in southern California. I worked at a Hollywood nightclub while I was there and became pretty miserable. Before returning to Kansas, a friend of mine visited me and we went up to Seattle and onto Vancouver, British Columbia. That was a really good trip at a crucial moment in my life. When I got home I worked two full-time jobs: days at a department store and nights at a factory until I had enough money to fly down to Tierra del Fuego in Argentina and hop on a ship to Antarctica. Again, that was a very important series of events for me.

Neko Harbor, Antarctica

The spring and summer of 2013 I traveled around Ireland, Germany, France, Malta, Greece, Egypt, Kenya, Nepal, Singapore, and Taiwan. A month of that trip was spent volunteering on a farm in the foothills of the Himalayas. I also had my first experience with political riots, tear gas, molotov cocktails, and tire fires in the streets of Cairo. And I’d managed to set foot on all seven continents before my 25th birthday. The whole journey was wild but when it was over I knew where I wanted to be: the arctic.

Nuwakot, Nepal

I spent five months above the Arctic Circle in Alaska, surrounded by mountains, rivers, the northern lights, and really, really interesting people. The job I had at that time included free food and housing, so I spent nearly nothing in that five months and all of my income was saved. When the season was over, I spent my entire savings on two trips: one to the Galapagos islands and another to Iceland and Svalbard (an arctic island of Norway). Luckily, after all of that I landed another seasonal job.

Aurora over the Central Brooks Range, Alaska

This time it was in the deserts of southern Utah, where I learned a lot but didn't really enjoy my time. I wandered around canyons, read lots of books, and dreamed (as always) of being somewhere else. I took buses through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma on my way back to Kansas and somewhere along the way I emailed the animal shelter in my hometown. When I arrived, they had a job for me. That was nice. But my time in Utah had already paid for an expedition into the Peruvian Amazon and a six-week overland journey through Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Belize. So I did that, then came home to my job.

View from La Puerta del Diablo, El Salvador

Summer rolled around again, as it tends to do, and I started looking for new places to explore. I took another seasonal job in 2015 at Mount Rainier National Park in Washington, which was yet another really amazing time and place. To get there I took the train to Chicago, then across the northern states all the way to Seattle, where I was transferred to Mount Rainier. I wish I had spent more time at that park, but I left the job early to attend a field school in paleolithic archaeology in Serbia. When that course was complete, I celebrated with a trip to Switzerland and a hike across the Aletsch Glacier (where three members of my team, including me, were pulled into a crevasse and nearly killed). I flew back into Seattle, took the train to Glacier National Park in Montana for a few days, then back to Seattle, and all the way south to L.A. where I visited my sister again and checked out San Bernardino and Angeles National Forests. The last part of my crazy train circuit was the long ride from L.A. back to Lawrence, Kansas.

Aletsch Glacier, Switzerland

Home, I worked at the animal shelter again and adopted the craziest, coolest dog ever: Hero, an American Bulldog/Boxer/Pit Bull/mix conspicuously missing his front left leg. He became my road trip partner. We've been to all eleven physiographic regions of Kansas and we're always looking for new routes.

Hero at Pillsbury Crossing, Kansas

In the fall I took a two-week trip to hike Torres del Paine and Los Glaciares National Parks in the Patagonia region of Chile and Argentina. In 2016, I stayed in the U.S. for the entire year, for the first time since 2011. My dog and I road tripped to Rocky Mountain National Park and Roosevelt National Forest in Colorado, Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks as well as Devil's Tower National Monument in Wyoming, Black Hills National Forest and Badlands National Park in South Dakota, then down through Nebraska and back to Kansas. During that trip, I received word that a naturalist position was open at the nature center in my hometown where I’d been volunteering. I seized the opportunity and came home to another new job. I’ve been working there for about a year and a half now.

Black bear in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

Last September I flew to Oregon, rented a car, and road tripped for a couple weeks. This year (2017) I used the same strategy for the North and South Islands of New Zealand. Most recently, my buddy from the Seattle-Vancouver trip and I kayaked down 60 miles of the Mississippi River in Minnesota.

Picton Harbour, New Zealand

...Which brings us to now.

...What now?

Back to Iceland! To parts of the country I missed the first time I was there.
And onto Greenland! That big island with few people and lots of ice.

I have two weeks before I leave and the trip will be a little over two weeks itself. I won’t be posting here until I’m back home. But when I do, there will be stories and photos.

So until the end of August,

Jared from Kansas.

Over and out.