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

by Jedidiah Jenkins

A dream is the myriad ways we could be fulfilled in life using our talents to make beautiful things. But then there are goals. Goals are specific guesses at what we could do or become to fulfill our dream. Dreams are like a compass that points in a general direction, and goals are the islands in the ocean along the way. Goals are just guesses at where to make a home, and when they aren’t right, we try another. It isn’t a death, and it doesn’t negate the dream.

I was scared. I felt the weight of the duty too much to enjoy everything that was ahead of me. What if I hated it? What if it didn’t give me the revelations I asked for? What if I failed? What if risking it all was a scam, a selfish worship of the grass being greener everywhere but here?

“That we need to bring lots of water. And that there isn’t any shoulder on the road, but that the truck drivers are nice, and the people in RVs aren’t.” “Like Big Sur. Those fuckers. Old white Republicans.”

what moral weight does being the beneficiary of my dominant culture place on my shoulders?

I lay there thinking back through my life—how much energy I put into planning, trying to guarantee my independence, but how so many of my best memories have come from the times where I needed help and received it.

I enjoyed feeling like this. But it wasn’t pure. It wasn’t contemplative. It was survival. It was heat and simplicity.

One of life’s secrets is tucked away in that moment. I know it is. It has something to do with contrast.

You’re not mean. You’re just hungry and tired.

But the true despair came from my head.

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

I could marinate on that one image for hours, the way being in love fills your thoughts with the beloved. I was in love with the thought of home.

This happens a lot with people who espouse idealism. We want to feel better about our mediocrity, so we look for the holes.

This is what you wanted, I told myself. To be free. Out here. Living the dream at thirty. And for what? To be uncomfortable? Well. You got that. But who cares? What are you really here for?

(This, in my opinion, is why so many gay people turn to art, music, fashion, or comedy. As the world around them grows hostile, their spirit becomes obsessed with the meaning of it all. Straight people, finding the world designed to suit them, don’t need to explore its meaning in quite the same way. But gay people don’t have that luxury. We must study it, dissect it, reject it, or reshape it. We do this with the thing that was rejected: our heart.)

I was told that I was bad, but I felt like a good kid. I didn’t feel the sin in me, I just recognized that I was supposed to.

“There is no remembrance of people of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them.” “For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even their name is forgotten.” “Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.” Damn! That is some dark shit. It was dismal, an almost nihilistic sequence of wise sayings and rules to live by. It was from the perspective of an ancient king who received all the luxuries of opulent living, and found them empty.

Humans want few things more than to belong.

There is a reason why organized religion has billions of human beings—the majority of us—under its spell. It is because it benefits us. And if it benefits us, it must have truth in it, some clues to the workings of the universe. If it didn’t, it would be unspreadable. And its best trick is to hook you with its beauty, and demand you drag with it all the rest. You come for the sound of the choir, and go home with the weight of the bricks and the golden cross.

I would drift between good cheer and observation. This often happens to me when I’m listening to someone tell a story they’ve rehearsed a hundred times with a hundred different visitors. Their face is not astonished by their own words; they’re not reading your face as they go, to tell if their sentences are landing. They’re bored at the injustice of having to make their case again and again to a deaf universe.

I couldn’t give up on my global optimism. I’ve always believed that the world is far friendlier than it is not, far more loving than hateful. Fear is like a thorn in your foot. It may be proportionally small in relation to the body, but it hurts and demands attention and everything halts until the thorn gets pulled.

Humanity fixates on violence. We’re fascinated by its abnormality; we want to understand it and learn how to avoid it. But the truth lies somewhere in between blood and peace. Most of us will move through life without experiencing the abnormalities of violence, but that doesn’t mean those abnormalities don’t exist.

It’s remarkable how normal moments live on in the middle of chaos and tragedy. People still play chess and drink tea in the middle of war. New inside jokes are born at funerals. Stranded in Nexpa, I saw the locals laughing over beers. Making jokes about the military, about the cartels, about resorting to powdered milk the last time this happened. Human beings have little capacity for sustained horror. I think our minds need to play to survive. Permanently serious people always look so tired, maybe because they are fighting an emotional battle that eats the body alive. To laugh and play while the bombs drop is one way to survive a war, even to win it.

I reveled in people’s astonishment. Now their astonishment made sense. They knew something I hadn’t. What was I doing here?

The monarch, too? I thought of the bees, and what it must mean, we humans ruining everything. We don’t have any way to process how everything we do touches everything else.

Maybe our neighbors can view our imperialism around the world, our bloodstained hands, with more understanding than I ever did as a kid.

I wonder how many millions of relationships are alive because of this, avoiding conversations.

Yet some spiteful teenager inside me wanted to poke at her.

She would ask me the same questions over and over with different words, as if the act of talking was the goal, not the exchange of information.

“Jed, I remember my dad was a real asshole. I remember he took me out in a boat, when I was a teenager, and he had been real bad to my mother, and he said, you can hate me, or not, but that’s up to you, I’m the only father you’ll ever have. You can hate me, but I’m just doing my best. He took me out in that boat and gave me permission to hate him. Took the rage right out of me. So, I’m sorry. But I’m tired of being sorry. I took all the blame with the divorce from your mother. And that’s fine. But I can’t take it anymore. I’m not sorry anymore. Life is really complicated. I hope you won’t hate me.”

This was life? Quitting the fight and accepting yourself, flaws and all? I don’t want to accept my flaws.

“Be ever at peace with your neighbors, ever at war with your vices, and let every year find you a better man, that’s ol’ Benjy Franklin!” he said, and cheersed his beer, splashing it high. In a moment, my thoughts were beyond the party, floating above us. “Ever at war with your vices.” It didn’t say “let each year have you conquering a new vice.” No. It wasn’t about winning. It was about fighting. Continuing the project of improvement. The intention and effort was what built character. Not success. That changed a lot of things for me.

The politics of family, my dad staying at the farm, my sisters avoiding him, my brother avoiding conflict and not taking sides, the expectations of Christmas and family harmony, the things unsaid and the hurt buried—I didn’t like it. It was like a squirming thing under the covers on a bed. It made me remember why I liked living in California, free from the odd feelings of family obligation and love.

I could return to the bike, knowing that all the comforts of home would be waiting for me when I was ready. I was also reminded of what I was looking for. A shaking-off of that film over my body I feel at home. Of confusion. Of self-loathing. Of constriction. I had to peel it back and see myself clean of what I had been told.

You know someone best by traveling with them. When someone is outside their comfort zone, when they are hungry or exhausted, and when money is involved, you see the sides of them that are often covered up in social niceties. Weston and I were slamming all of that together. And it wasn’t easy.

I don’t have access to money like you do.” “Access? I saved money up,” I protested. “Yeah, but if you run out, your parents can bail you out. You know that no matter what happens, you’ll be okay. I don’t have that. If I needed a hundred bucks, I wouldn’t be able to get it from my family. I mean, they’d find it for me, but it would hurt them. That insecurity fucks with my mind. It’s a different existence.”

It didn’t feel like life in paradise. It felt like poverty tourism.

I suddenly understand why he loves experiences like these. For a few hours, the world makes sense. Everything has meaning. Everything is alive, in perfect friendship with everything else.

some of these backpackers must have developed brain damage from the choke-snoring they were doing.

I later researched the pointed hats and robes and learned that criminals were forced to wear the cones in humiliation as they were marched through town and pummeled with rotten fruit and mud. The Spanish Catholics adopted the pointed hat and cloak as a sign of guilt and humility during Easter week and marched through the cities as penance for their sins. The Ku Klux Klan co-opted the hood, for reasons unclear. Maybe in reference to holiness. Maybe to look like scary ghosts to intimidate blacks. It’s fitting that those hoods were meant for dunces and sinners.

As a kid, it never dawned on me that my mother was overwhelmed or frightened or worried about the job she was doing. It never occurred to me that she had complex motives.

Exposure to them seemed to expand what she found acceptable. It reaffirmed my belief that exposure creates empathy.

I was finding that so much of my life had been about avoiding the feeling of being in trouble.

We slid right back into the joy of adolescent, worry-free existence.

I always thought I didn’t need comfort, but the trip had taught me that that’s something comfortable people say.

I realized that my goodness was closely tied to my plainness.

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

Even after all this time, The Sun never says to the Earth, you owe me, look what happens with a love like that, it lights the whole world.

Jesus saves. But you gotta accept Him real quick or He kills.

they looked at me with a smile and smiling eyes, but no connection beyond that. I know they had a deep communication among one another, and over the next few days I watched them joke and laugh among themselves, but with the language in our eyes, our cheeks, our eyebrows, we said very little to each other. It made me feel strange.

It all depended on this one word: Christian.