Context Part One

We always enter the story of a place through the narrative of our individual lives.

- John Elder

Inheriting Mt. Tom

Orion Spring 1997

I first came to Holden late in the summer of 1988. We were moving back to the Pacific Northwest from Colorado, intending to take a year off before going to graduate school somewhere. Our stuff was boxed up, and we put it in a storage unit. We came to Holden, intending to stay three or six weeks as volunteer staff: we really needed a tax dodge, and keeping our income down was the best way to dodge the tax. We ended up staying for a year. 

Oh, and the tax dodge worked pretty well, too. That was the decade of "live simply that others may simply live." Holden was, and still is, a good place to explore the relationship between simplicity and richness.

That Was Then: 1988

My family was part of the great ‘unchurched’ northwest – people who preferred to spend their weekends out hiking or camping, or on the water: “This is cathedral enough for me.” “I am closer to God out here than in there.” We did go to church; but we knew where we preferred to be…  

I was probably 10 or 11 years old before I realized that other families had tuna sandwiches like we had salmon or steelhead. My Dad and my uncle Jim filled their salmon and steel head cards, and filled our smokers and our freezers. My Dad (still) has a very low five-digit REI number: I remember when REI was two rooms in an old warehouse storefront and the coolest thing was Toblerone and Sailor Boy Pilot Bread (long, long before Clif Bars, I must admit). The second room was up a ramp with wobbly vertical (end) grain fir floors. And Mom & Dad were members of The Mountaineers, too: I was probably 5 or 6 years old when I learned that we do not step on ropes. I thought it was normal to have a copy of Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills on the shelf.  Even then, Holden was well-known in the back-country community as a place to get a shower, a sauna, or ice cream, just a mile outside of the wilderness, but still surrounded by wilderness.

My wife was raised in a Lutheran family, and they knew of Holden as a family retreat destination; but I do not think they had been there. They had been pretty much everywhere else in the Pacific Northwest, though. Like much of our life together these past 32 or 33 years, we traveled to a new place, together.

So we came here, this new but not entirely unknown place: expecting to stay three or six weeks. And we ended up staying a year. This is actually a pretty familiar story plot in the Holden community. Some end up staying 5 or 8 or 10 years. Most of us never leave, not in our hearts anyway. 

This Was Now (or at least it was back in June of 2013)

 An Aside: 

Gearheads with an appreciation for vintage design will recognize an early Kelty Redwing in the 1988 picture: not the original, but a pretty good improvement, and we still have it. We use the latest model for everyday, though. The Redwing is a great design that has continued to evolve but has not lost the core features that made (make) it cool - especially the ski slots. The REI pack had been modified with bilateral Dana Design (Bozeman MT) add-on pockets; the combination approximated the ski slot functionality, but not as well as the Redwing, nor our crazy idiosyncratic frame-less YakPaks. We still have the Dana pockets, but the grey pack is long gone, worn out by grad school, travel and trail.

 In 1988 we could travel pretty lightly - not so bogged down with stuff. But back then we didn't know we would stay the year. This time we are expecting, we are hoping, we are grateful for the opportunity to stay the year, and have packed accordingly. 

We know you can't really go home, and that you cannot step in the same river twice. But when the invisible parts, the intangibles are good enough, and vital enough, and whole enough - why, we don't need to sweat the little stuff, do we.