My 80 year-old neighbor set the county record one year by killing 76 raccoons.
The strange part is what she did with them.
***
There are smart students who get top marks because they are smart, and there are smart students who get top marks because they frequently (but not too frequently) stop by their professors’s office to offer homemade baked goods and a few minutes of chit-chat in which they will refuse to discuss anything class-related, and will instead insist on hearing about their professor’s hobbies, kids, favorite sports teams, etc.
I won’t say which I was.
All I will say is I graduated with top marks.
Those, combined with a serious knack for interviews, opened the doors to opportunities that any other business student would foam at the mouth for.
Then I became a waiter.
I was fresh out of college with a handsome degree in one hand, and an overpriced tray of pasta in the other.
Did people think I was crazy?
No.
People didn’t think of me at all. But for dramatic effect, let’s pretend they did. (This is how we tend to think anyway, so it shouldn’t be any stretch of imagination.)
Family, friends, and cookie-loving professors thought I was nuts.
Why did I spend years sculpting myself into the ideal new hire, just to accept a job that asked to see my criminal record instead of my professional one?
Because it was all part of the plan. The plan I’ve never openly reflected on until now.
The Plan
Step 1: Save as much money as possible.
Step 2: Buy a backpack, journal, and a one way ticket.
Step 3: Travel far and wide to learn what I can from whomever I can on the subject of Truth.
This plan was born from two simple observations.
From a young age, I looked around and saw that many of the people who were supposed to have the answers did things just to do things without ever knowing why they did the thing in the first place.
Even with my half-cracked pistachio of a brain, that didn’t add up.
I thought life was supposed to be an adventure. There were big questions out there to answer, or if not answer, at least pursue. Yet, I watched most people give up on that as they grew older, and by older, I mean mid-twenties.
That triggered the second observation.
If I wanted to embark on the search for Truth, the time was now. Later wasn't coming.
That is why I made a hard stop before entering corporate America. Not because I wanted to stick it to the man (although that never feels bad), but because the last thing I wanted to do was spend years, let alone a day, competing for a trophy that I didn’t actually want.
That was what the big plan was all about: using my early 20s to learn what was worth aiming at, and why.
My method for achieving this was highly inefficient–thank God–efficiency rarely leads to a story worth telling.
I became a goat shepherd on an island, a cook in a Buddhist temple, a grain harvester in the Atlas Mountains, a writer in Paris, a teacher in Istanbul, a salsa dancer in Colombia, a ranger in the Balkans, a treasure hunter in Kazakhstan, and a few other things I’ll leave out just in case I eventually do end up working for the man.
For nearly 1,000 days, I lived out of a backpack the size of a toaster oven. I never knew where I would sleep or whom I’d meet. I broke bread with hobos and tramps, purred on fine cigars with forgotten barons, and slept on benches, in barns, and beneath blankets of stars. I rode the rails from Seattle to Mexico where I lost half an eardrum diving for lobster. I was mugged twice, nearly forced into marriage once, and ate countless meals at a table for one.
My two most cherished possessions include a box stuffed with thousands of pages of notes scribbled down at those tables for one, and a wool trench coat. The coat is warm and heavy, but releases such an invasive stench of an old man and cheap cigars that I’ve been asked to stop wearing it at nice restaurants. Even the white-glove doormen are frightened to handle the thing. Someone must have peeled it off an old man (or quite possibly a dead man) and sold it to the round babushka in the underground bazaar who turned around and sold it to me. I can’t remember how much it cost, but I do remember the dry cleaning cost double the coat, and well, like I said, it still smells like an old man.
The last few years have felt like a real adventure—the kind I used to read about as a kid.
But let’s get the story straight; I’m not a poet or a hippie. I never traveled for the sake of travel. I traveled for the same reason the frontiersmen did: to find a place worth settling on.
Unlike the frontiersmen, the place I found worth building on was more spiritual than physical, but I did find it, which means:
It’s over.
Travel and I are breaking up. The quest has been completed.
This has been coming for a while, but I didn’t have the courage to walk away. It’s hard to dump a girl you like. Even if you know you should.
I like blending into a city where no one knows my name, and anyone who does know it, doesn’t know that the city I’m in exists.
I like spending a whole day sitting beneath an oak tree, with nothing but a good book and a pack of dry tobacco to keep me company.
I like crashing a stranger’s house for an unexpected feast brimming with elegant toasts in languages I don’t understand. Especially, when there’s a grandma at the table who keeps refilling my plate with foods I might never taste again.
You really can go to a train station, check the departures, buy a ticket for the next train headed nowhere, and then find the foggy-windowed tavern and order two mugs of something cold while you listen to the old man tell his story from the start.
My days as a vagabond were the best of my life. They defined my life. They were crisp air to my lungs, cold water to my mouth. Only the others who have lived in the way of the road will understand.
I liked being a vagabond. Almost as much as much as Pauline liked her chickens.
Pauline was a widow and a Mormon, and like most widows and Mormons, she was as independent as a three-legged street cat. She also made a good peach cobbler. What I remember most though, aside from the cobbler, is how much she enjoyed her chickens. They were her best friends, and her favorite food. The latter part she shared with the local raccoons, who once night fell, would creep into her henhouse in search of a feathery snack.
Pauline really didn’t like that, so she set live traps all throughout her backyard. In the mornings after breakfast, she’d load her .410 and then unload it into whatever was moving around in those traps. At the end of one summer, she’d killed 76 raccoons.
‘How does one dispose of 76 raccoons’ is a question very few of us have to answer. Our sweet Pauline was one of the few, but I don’t think she really gave it much thought. You see, after the morning massacres, she would grab the lead-filled rodents and toss them over the fence and into the ditch.
Pauline was my neighbor. And as my neighbor, her ditch was my ditch. And my ditch was my favorite way of passing hot summer days.
You could smell the ditch before you saw it, and once you saw it, you couldn’t see through it. That describes every ditch out in the farmlands, but especially the ones with rodents decaying on the banks. Farmers also used the ditch as a drainage for their fields full of fertilizer, which didn’t exactly help with the smell.
But guess what? I didn’t care!
Things like that never bother a country bumpkin who’s just looking to cool down after a long day of climbing trees. I was more concerned about a leech getting stuck in my belly button than I was about marinating in rodent carcasses and fertilizer.
Oh, and for the city folk reading, fertilizer is just a fancy way to say cow shit.
That ditch was all I knew, and I was very happy with it. At least until I was introduced to a public pool.
That irreversible transition I experienced as a kid is the same transition I’m going through now, except this time, the dirtied water is being traded for an alpine lake that’s endlessly deep and infinitely wide.
The ditch water was life as most know it: a mindless stampede towards goals that were set for us long before we could question if they were worth chasing. This never-ending race is so demanding that we either grow too weary to seek the questions that matter or simply forget such questions ever existed.
If we persist in searching for truth, which is a matter of life or death, we face resistance on all fronts. We are told its nature is subjective or impractical for the common man, and thus, pointless to pursue.
Discouraged and disoriented, we cling even tighter to warped reflections of what our lives could have been, with vague hopes that at the end of this impersonal path, we might finally find peace.
But instead of finding what our soul longs for, we are met with a grim realization: the goals we spent our lives chasing not only brought no lasting satisfaction, but even worse, in pursuit of them, we became the architects of our own golden prisons. Within the confines of thoughtless habit, material comforts, and half-baked ideologies, the spirit that once yearned for answers has weakened. It is terrified of the possibility that much of its existence has been wasted on distractions and trivialities. Next thing we know, someone is saying that there is no truth, or if there is, it’s impractical for daily life—and that someone is us.
Traveling was my escape from this ditch. Free from a starving consumerist mentality (decaying racoons) and the pressure to submit to paths deemed worthy by the masses (cow shit), I was able to resume the search for truth that had stopped somewhere in my early adolescent years.
This journey led me across dozens of countries and into hundreds of conversations, where I encountered varying philosophies on life and how it should be lived. Being alone meant I could spend days, or even weeks, digesting these ideas without distraction.
Never was I bored. It felt like I was living in a library; people were books and places were genres. Many nights I fell asleep with a pen in hand, trying to capture the day’s lessons before they were buried under whatever came next.
This is why I’ll always be an advocate for slow, deliberate travel.
Not because it guarantees you’ll never be the dry conversation at a cocktail party, but because it condenses years of life philosophy into a matter of months. What an accelerated PhD program is to academic mastery, deliberate travel is to the school of life.
However much I praise it, there’s no denying this lifestyle has hefty taxes. A public pool may be cleaner than a ditch, but it’s still pumped full of chemicals and warm piss.
As the months turned into years, the solitude I once enjoyed turned into loneliness, which dragged into bouts of what folks used to call melancholy. I had a recurring thought that this path would lead me to what was worth aiming at, and why but not before it killed something. Would it be my relationships with people I loved? Or my sense of home?
Whatever it was, I’d seen enough expired travelers to know this path had a shelf life.
With a lifetime in the pool ending nowhere I wanted to go, and a return to the ditch seeming like a good definition for hell, I was at a loss for what to do. That’s when I did what peasants and kings have done for centuries when faced with a serious predicament: I drank, heavily.
Coffee that is.
Then I did the other thing peasants and kings have been known to do when confronted with the biggest questions: I went to the monks.
It was there, within the walls of ancient Orthodox monasteries, that I finally discovered a pure body of water. One that was instantly recognizable as the source.
From there, truth flowed freely, like streams from an alpine lake quenching the thirst of life below. Questions I had wrestled with for years were answered with simplicity. Questions that arose out of doubt were answered with humility. Everything I intuitively believed as true in the various philosophies and religions I previously studied, was rediscovered here, but now in fullness. Truth was no longer some abstract entity only to be found in leather-bound books and mystic teachings. It was right there in front of me, embodied by those who seek the ultimate truth unto death.
If you think this lake sounds refreshing, you are nearly as naive as I. The truth is terrifying, freezing, and perfectly clear yet immeasurably deep. The first time I dipped my toes in, I jumped back in fear, and retreated to the warmth of the public pool where the noise of the crowds drowned out the sobering thoughts that had begun to take root.
The chlorine ensured everything in the pool was safe, sterile, and predictable. I could see the bottom, touch it, and understand it. There was no mystery, no unknown. Everything was either quantified or objectified, or even both.
Free of discomfort, I could sink back into a leisurely way of life and soak in artificial bliss. If my curiosity was ever so bold as to wander beyond the pool, something (or someone) was always there to quickly coax my attention back towards the warm, numbing waters.
I knew these comforting trivialities were nothing but distractions, sirens luring me away from the source, and yet I welcomed them.
Anything was better than facing the reflection that awaited me on the still, pure surface of the lake. My experience at the monastery had shown me who I truly was, and I was appalled.
It was like going to the doctor and getting told you had cancer. A cancer that spreads rapidly through your organs and into your soul. The doc said that there was a remedy, and I could live, but it would take a serious sacrifice. He wanted me to cut out ice cream, white bread, and liquor. If the list ended there, maybe I would’ve been more receptive. But it continued with things like idle talk, gossip, ambition, sloth, passion and pride. At some point, I stopped listening and walked out.
The remedy wasn’t just a serious sacrifice—it was a crucifixion! What was the point of living if you couldn’t really live?
In all of my ignorance, I had yet to discover the meaning of life and the path required to achieve it.
***
When I first asked myself what is worth aiming at I didn’t realize what I was really asking was: what is worth dying for?
Because for something to be worth living for, it must be worth dying for.
So what is worth dying for?
Truth. The fullness of truth, undiluted and absolute. The alpine lake.
Dear reader, it’s not out of laziness that I haven’t and will not describe what that truth is. It’s out of blunt awareness that in my flawed state, it is quite impossible, and even detestable for me to utter a word on the subject. I fear I have already gone too far, which is why this is my last essay for the time being.
Nothing else is interesting to write about, and the one thing that is interesting, is so far outside of my experience and knowledge that I’d feel more comfortable writing about life as a teenage girl in the 4th century Byzantine Empire.
But it would be even more detestable for me to leave you with nothing, so allow me to instead offer the little I’ve learned about what the truth is not.
The truth is not hidden. It does not conceal itself behind esoteric or occult practices. The truth is not for sale. It can never be purchased, or sold. It will never remain exclusive for the affluent, or any other single demographic or ethnic tribe. The truth can not be grasped by intellect alone. It exists beyond human reason and is discovered through experience, not mental gymnastics. The truth is not malleable. It exists outside of man and time, thus can never be manipulated or changed by modern thought and cultural trends influenced by men. The truth is not impersonal. It’s not an abstract concept to philosophize about from a distance. It’s a unique relationship that requires the transformation of self through the pursuit of virtues. Virtues like patience, love, and humility.
Now to the second half of the question:
Why?
Why is the truth worth aiming at and dying for?
Because ultimately, as long as one remains in the public pool—that is, the safe and comfortable world built on pillars of self-worship, materialism, entertainment, and an insatiable appetite for more—the full nature of truth will remain incomprehensible. Not because it’s hidden or doesn’t want to be found, but because it is so very simple. And simple things remain a mystery to those who’ve forgotten how to be simple.
In other words, without discovering the alpine lake, or at least having faith in its existence, you’ll continue to drown in piss-filled public pools and ditches full of dead raccoons and cow shit, thinking all the while how pleasant life is.
