Category: Travel

So flashing back to April 16th, 2013 I was 22 years old, recently started college at CU Boulder, and convinced the only thing I needed in life was a breath of fresh air and a break from reality. It has been three years since I felt that initial urge to ditch the so felt monotony of my everyday existence and chase something a little more meaningful, and I’m proud to say that I finally took a step away from my day to day comfortable, unchanging lifestyle and I jumped into something with a little more risk.

Since 2010 I have held six different jobs, working approximately 15,685 hours, 392 weeks, which is 7.54 years of work in just six years. that’s 1.5 years of working two full time jobs. Aaaannd don’t forget that during these last six years I have have been enrolled in approximately 88 credit hours at two different academic institutions. Needless to say that the exhaustion that I thought I felt in 2013 was lame and has since paled in comparison to what I am calling exhaustion now. But this is not a place for me to complain, just to take stock of where I am coming from. These last six years have enabled me to live thus far debt free, with a car that I purchased almost entirely in cash, and to live an extremely comfortable life. I’ve learned several different skills, meet hundreds of people, and have had thousands of experiences that are all fitting of their own pages and stories.

Just a few random highlights: pulling a man from a burning car in 2011, cutting the tip of my ring finger off in 2012, starting at CU Boulder, renting my very own place for the very first time, loosing my aunt, and falling in love. In 2013 I became a server, bought a car, failed a chemistry class, and realized how much I loved the desert. By 2014 I was most adeptly described as sophmorish, I squandered and partied and was frivolous with no regard to myself or others, I also learned what responsibility to myself actual meant, I became a bartender, worked harder than I’d ever worked. By 2015 I was entering a rhythm and a pattern of success and comfort I had money, time, energy, and was increasingly doing and living with a luxurious style, from visiting friends in different states to spending almost every weekend in the backcountry hiking, exploring, and living well. By the end of that year however, I began to itch again and this time for something more than a break. I’d become accustomed to the life in which I worked hard and played harder, but working as a bartender a job I’d come to love so much no longer held the same appeal to me that it once did. I decided to go back to school starting in January 2016. Six credit hours in the spring turned in 15 in the fall, and my work load never changed but my lifestyle of living and loving in the outdoors took a dramatic hit. By September of 2016 I was set on leaving and doing something completely different come 2017.

I cycled through several different plans and finally settled on the Western United States Road Trip Extraordinaire that I started five days ago on December 24th. Well, on day one of this proposed five month road trip I hit a deer and totaled my car. And just like that I’m stuck only 525 miles from my starting point. That’s about an eight hour drive. I hit the deer just about 40 mi southeast of Evanston, WY which in turn is only about 79 mi away from my father’s house in SLC, UT. At about 6:15pm MST, traveling at about 74 mph in the right lane of interstate-80, I collided with a yearling deer crossing from the right side of the road to the left. With so little reaction time I was unable to comprehend what was happening and thus unable to make any stupid decisions that would have worsened my situation significantly. Instead, after having the airbag gently explode in my face and slowing to a stop on the shoulder of the road realized that I had just hit a deer and was now on a very different type of adventure than I had anticipated.

Before I’m able to take any real action, the sound of my car horn ringing ceaselessly in the  frozen night air, the fog lights of a truck light up my stunned face. Reaching into the back of my overly packed Forester I reach for my down jacket just as a woman from the truck now parked behind me starts to ask if I am okay. Angela and Trevor. These two saw the deer run out in front of my car, saw me hit the poor creature, and ran to my aid when I was fumbling around in the dark for a jacket and a headlamp. Together Trevor and I were able to get the hood of my car open and wrench the horn fuse from its housing successfully creating a silence only broken by the engines and rattling chain-linkages of passing 18 wheelers.

The blood and guts on the driver’s side of my little white Subaru were still steaming, the airbag still smoking, Trevor and Angela’s child in her car seat still sleeping silently as the gravity of my situation seemed to come down on my shoulders. Before I really know what is happening, Angela has dialed the number of a towing company from Evanston, WY the next town down the road. The rough sounding man on the other end of the phone says it will be a while and to get comfortable. Of course it will be a while, it is Christmas Eve and the biggest storm of the year is on its way in from the West and the Salt Lake Valley.

I return to the driver’s seat after saying thanks and goodbye to Angela and Trevor, their daughter had woken up. The airbag hanging down from the disemboweled steering wheel and acrid smell of burning synthetic material in the air as the dust and other residue from the airbag settles into my skin. Lights again, this time they flash red and blue, signifying the arrival of Wyoming State Patrol Officer M. Adams. Officer Adams is a man of about 65 years with a crisp white, well groomed mustache and a receding equally as white hairline. After giving me a once over and realizing that I was fine and just shaken, Officer Adams and I returned to his cruiser allowing me to escape from the physical reality of my situation. After properly filing his report of the accident, we took a short drive back about 100 yards to the scene of the accident to see if the deer had remained in the road. However, we discovered that not much actually remained of the deer at all. We found just the head attached to the fore legs, and beyond that just bits and pieces of the animal’s body scattered over about a 25 sq yard area. We returned to my car and waited for Jim, the tow guy who Angela had so readily called for me. Apparently everyone in the area knew him. Apparently everyone in the area were also not strangers to rough and tumble situations. Officer Adams recounted a few for me; from the time a man in a Geo hit a bull moose and it bled to death on his lap, or the time that he himself hit a deer and a drunk man from a local bar offered to finish it off with a hunting knife from his truck. These short stories normalizing my situation, I was able to begin to calm down.

Just in time for Jim. Jim was everything but normal in my experience. Jim was 74 years old with a big gray bushy beard, tanned and weathered facial features, and the smoothest and softest hands I have ever shaken on a man who clearly has toiled laboriously for a living. The size of the tobacco chew in Jim’s lower lip was the size of large egg, and everything he said was muffled and stumped of times incomprehensible. quickly loading the truck with my damaged subaru, carrying my entire life on the back of his flat bed wrecker, Jim drove me 42 mi to the Motel 6 off the first exit in Evanston. It was there that I’d slowly, over the course of 36 hours, come to terms with my situation.

The first night was sleepless. I arrived at about 8:35pm to room 124 the second room in from the the furthest Northwestern point of the cheap brick hotel. The room was a combination of cheap linoleum disguised as hardwood, and cheap rattling appliances. The sound of the freeway clearly audible over the constant harassment from the mini-fridges air compressor. I went in and out of the quiet room several times that night, continuously looking at my poor little car as if it would some how miraculously all be back to normal the next time I looked at it. Laughing hysterically at my situation, desperately trying to see a silver lining in what was quickly turning into the single most disappointing accident of my life. Disappointing because everything was actually fine, all my things were fine, my car was drivable but most likely totaled, more importantly I was fine, Trevor and Angela and their daughter were fine, the deer… well that was pitiful sure. But I was 100% okay. Something that seems to have happened to so many people was taking a toll on me emotionally and physically and I didn’t know how to respond. I felt angry that it had happened to me, then I got mad for feeling selfish knowing that millions of other people had suffered far more severe car wrecks and in the schemes of hiccups this was minor. But the longer that I sat dwelling on why I was so upset the more I realized that I was upset because the car that Bambi and I had just wrecked in tandem represented the fruits of my 15,685 hours of hard work. The car had been my freedom, it was the thing that I was taking my road trip in, it had been my reprieve when I only had two hours between jobs and went for a hike, it had been the single largest physical representation of my success as an individual.

I wish realizing this made me less upset but the truth is that night I stayed awake until 4am periodically wiping away a tear or two from my eyes and choking back my self pity. It wasn’t until the next morning at around 10am that the sense of self pity began to diminish. With the rise of the sun came the instinctual urge for task oriented action that I’ve grown so accustomed to. I went to my car and procured food, clean clothes, and other items for the day. I ripped the broken plastic from the front of the car, and turned over the engine; looking and listening for potentially harmful sights or sounds, there were none. I tied up the dangling wires, removed shards of glass and plastic, pulled the entire front bumper from the two remaining pins holding it in place, tied the wheel wells into place, and tied the hood of the car down. as far as I was concerned I was ready to drive again. That was my plan after all. But on Christmas Day, as much as I wanted to be 80 mi along down the road sitting around a table with my family, the storm that had been brewing in the west was starting to wreak havoc on interstate-80 and my plan of driving the rest of the way to SLC was shot down my mother nature herself.

As many of you know for the last 4.8 years or so I’ve been working at Tahona Tequila Bistro, a tequila bar. And on my last day had been given a bottle of my favorite, Tonala four year extra anejo. Aged for two years in sherry barrels and two years in white american oak, Tonala has a smooth, sweet, oaky taste that to say the least brought me a warm and rather disorienting sensation after I drank half the bottle in about three hours.

I awoke face down on the hotel bed, sweating bullets, with a raging headache, and roaring stocmah. Walking outside to the car in search of more food I began to see the actual humor of my situation. Nothing like 4pm hangover to put things in perspective. I had been on hour seven of a 5 month road trip and had wrecked my car, escaped unscathed, and was stucked due to inclimate weather 80 mi away from my family, which would be the first time all of us would be together in one place in the last two years. But nothing ever goes the way we think it should.

In 25 years of life that has always been one of the most consistent lessons I have learned and relearned. Once we think we have something figured out or mastered, under control, or predicted, planned or otherwise have our thumb on it, life seems to slip away and smack us upside the head as if to say remember don’t get comfortable. My friend Sabine once told me that kids from divorced or homes often times abhore change in their lives. They look for stability and consistency. The truth in my life seems to be that we all seek stability and consistency, which is grand and fine thing to have. It’s incredibly luxurious to not have to stress about where your food is going to come from, where you are going to sleep, how your are going to get to work, how you can mean something to the world. But like any adventure in the beginning stages of any grand journey I must acknowledge that the reason I am leaving is because the stability that meant so much to me, that I spent 7.5 years of working time to build, has become suffocating in its own way. And that while no one wants to hit a deer and total their car, I would rather have to learn to deal with that and any other number of traumatic, inconvenient, destabilizing and morality punishing activities than to stay stagnant and never know what I am capable of.

My name is James Hansen, this is day five of my five month long road trip and as of now I still don’t have a car. But I’m not stopping.