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Unhandy Man

By Ken Wright

" Indeed my steadiest employment, if such it can be called, is to keep myself at the top of my condition, and ready for whatever may turn up in heaven or on earth."

- Henry Thoreau

". . . I have become an unskilled laborer. A jack of no trades."

When I was a kid, I thought my dad could do it all. I wasn't far off, since he could do most of it: He was the consummate jack-of-all-trades, a regular redneck Renaissance man - he could tear down a motorcycle engine to its elemental parts then reassemble it; he bought several old houses, in which he then spent years worth of nights gutting and rebuilding, doing the carpentry, plumbing and much of the wiring himself; he was a hunter, fisherman, woodsman, and champion archer; he drew, painted, and whittled statuettes of old fishermen with a pocketknife; and he read voraciously, shaping himself into a self-taught historian on our New England homeland.

As a kid, I was, of course, ever his pupil and apprentice. I learned to repair my own motorcycle, to wield power tools, to eat off the land - "If you ever get lost, I expect to find you fatter than when you left," he'd admonish - and to appreciate the history in the towns and landscape around us. And even though I've since traded my Suzuki for a bicycle, bow for skis, hammer for laptop, paints for words, and the Appalachians for the Rockies, I to this day maintain a warm and deep gratitude for the many skills he imparted to me. I also know that that act of passing on those skills sealed a sacred exchange fathers and mothers have shared with their children for thousands of millennia.

Along with an appreciation for that experience, though, and magnified by that sense of primordial parental duty, here in my own middle age and with my own kids, I find that I also carry a keen awareness of the shortcomings in my own skill-imparting skills.

I know this is largely due simply to the differences in my and my father's personalities. Also, though, part of my inadequacy stems from our disparate life paths. My dad had a kid when he was young, and so had to sharpen his skills at skill-learning in order to build a life from the ground up. I, on the other hand, chose to head out across that ground rather than to stay and build on it. So I've spent my adult life traveling. And in that traveling life, those technical skills I learned as a teen have slowly degraded and faded from lack of practice - or, as I prefer to see it, were exchanged for seeing lots of places, for meeting many people, for being outside as much as possible, and for working (as little as possible) at a lot of odd jobs to get by.

This includes the years I've spent ostensibly "settled down" - but really still traveling, just more deeply than widely - in my adopted homeland, here in the Four Corners country. Which is how, I suppose, I got here today.

It is a lovely Saturday morning, and I and a couple of friends are climbing up a gleaming slope high in the San Juans. We have skins on our skis, avalanche beacons on our bodies, and packs on our backs stuffed with things like extra layers of clothing, collapsible shovels, summer sausage and cheese and bottles of water. We climb to the base of a broad band of silvery grey limestone bluffs, drop out packs, unleash our skis, and sit, the angled snow conforming to the shapes of our tired, happy bodies.

There on that snowy slope, with the high-altitude winter sun sending a searing light ricocheting around the high-country basin, my fellow middle-aged ski/river/mountain/desert bums and I pass around chunks of cheddar and processed meat products. And we stare - just sit and silently stare, for a long time - at the ragged winter glory all around us.

This, I have come to find in the middle of my life, is what I do. This, and float on rivers. And run down trails. And hike up canyons. And paddle across lakes. And sleep outside of walls every chance I get. And spend time with a lot of really good people - as many as I can - who like to do that kind of stuff.

That's it, really. That is what I do.

And that realization is somewhat unsettling. For as the window of opportunity slowly - although less slowly by the year, the week, the day - passes for me to be that skill-bearing parental figure my father was, I am taken aback and little embarrassed to find that I possess few real mechanical, artistic, pragmatic, or trade-worthy skills to spend my evenings bestowing upon my two young adolescent acolytes. Because of my choice to focus my life on just getting out and experiencing the world, it appears I have become an unskilled laborer. A jack of no trades.

What am I good at? Well, I'm good at this. What I'm doing now, here on this mountainside. I'm good at savoring. At presence. I'm good at actually getting out - and at finding lovely, dramatic, powerful places to get out into.

Taking note of the fine friends who have joined me today, I'll say I'm good at surrounding myself with caring, thoughtful, happy, fun, and active people.

More? Looking back at the wandering, wayfaring life I've lived thus far - and see no immediate end to - I'd say I'm good at enjoying my days and letting go of most of my worries. Almost to a fault some might say, but so be it - because I'm also good at having faith in the flow of the world. And in that flow, I seem to be pretty good at adapting to ever-changing circumstances and doing whatever it takes to get through. (Hence my "career" vita of a multitude of mundane and multifaceted jobs, my dearth of savings, and my lack of retirement plan.)

Most of all, though, I hope I'm good at being a father and husband and member of a meaningful, rooted community - that "traveling deeply" thing.

Note in that list, though, no specific and practical skills that a father and son or daughter can work on together in the garage or in the backyard or around the woodstove at night.

Still, I wonder. Can exploring the world be skill? How about loving to use your body? Just being present? Can exploring and knowing and savoring a place be a skill? Being a good friend, lover, or elder? How about simply enjoying life?

Could, perhaps, those things - place, tribe, even your self, and even living itself - be turned from nouns into verbs? Into activities? Into studyable, improvable, communicable skills?

Lunch done, we rise from our frozen recliners and set about preparing to descend: strip and stow away skins, repack packs, check beacons, click into skis. Then one of my companions is off, diving down the uncut slope spilling out below us, his body riding the glide of his curving, carving skis. Then my other friend drops, and I watch him, too, as he dances with his descent down the mountain.

Before I join them, I pause for a moment. A long, deep, tangible, tactile moment in which I am just there - just there as good as I can be just there. Better than the last time I was just somewhere. But not as good as I'll endeavor to be the next time I'm just somewhere.

And right then I realize that if skills like this are practicable, then perhaps they are, after all, also teachable. If so, then they'll have to be "taught" the way my father taught me how to hunt, to tear down an engine, to draw, and to study my place: not through any plan, program or curriculum, but by just doing them, and doing them together, regardless of where that doing takes place.

Because doing itself may be the best skill of all.

Ken Wright does stuff in and around his home in Durango.