To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret

by Jedidiah Jenkins

You notice every seam and crease. The distances between towns and farms and the height of hills, and the way a road will follow a river or instead cut straight over a hill—you experience it all viscerally. You feel it all fitting together.

I looked around and admired, meandered and felt pangs of love.

What if risking it all was a scam, a selfish worship of the grass being greener everywhere but here?

the last stop sign before the wilderness.

Humans have been scrappy, tough bastards for so long.

Any forward progress felt like work well done.

But it wasn’t pure. It wasn’t contemplative. It was survival. It was heat and simplicity.

But by thirty, I had built a life good enough to miss.

In many ways, I’d exchanged an old routine for a new one.

“There are so many different ways to be human.”

Bits of snow hid in the shadowed places.

those boards and nails that build my house….

I had looked straight at the sun and demanded answers, and I was still standing. And I was not blind.