That Bliss Thing

Like many, I moved during the pandemic, and in the end, regretted it. I’m unpacking that bit by bit. Here’s one bit…

People mindlessly say, “just follow your bliss.” Well, this can also be a perfectly terrible idea. Here's the "why."

I love the outdoors, and have since I was a little kid. I am fortunate enough to share this deep obsession with my wife/life partner.

In the midst of the Pandemic lockdown, having completed roughly 10,000 jigsaw puzzles and blind from staring at the walls, we discovering a real estate opportunity we could not pass up, in a place where social distancing had been a fine art for several thousand years.

We moved to the middle of the freaking desert; more specifically to Sedona, known for its red rock vistas and for being one of the best day-hiking spots in North America. It was, admittedly, a bold thing to do.

Retired, it was an "if not now, then when" sort of moment. San Francisco was shut down. Even the parks we hiked in were shut down. So, we felt that one of the best things we might do, not just for our sanity but also for the planet, was to do a complete scene change.

It was.

Once there, we signed up with a local volunteer group that assisted the Forest Service in several important capacities. Day to day our duties mostly involved walking the trails, somewhat like volunteer park ambassadors: helping visitors enjoy the trails, sharing advice on hikes and loops and other places to go, picking up the random piece of trash here and there, and just being sort of a friendly, visible presence for the visitors. Pretty pleasant stuff!

In doing this, the theory went, so we would scratch our public service/volunteerism itch: helping people enjoy the outdoors and helping the Forest Service protect the fragile ecosystem from the hordes.

That was the idea. That’s how it started. But unfortunately, the reality became something different.?

REALITY BITES

Each year, Sedona gets about 3.4 million tourists a year. That's like the visitation one gets in a popular National Park like Yellowstone or Yosemite. This equates to a bit over 65,000 tourists per week. And while Sedona has a lot of hiking trails, most of the hikers go to about six of them.?Total. As a result, these very popular trails, trailheads, bathrooms, roads and visitor facilities get extremely overcrowded and sometimes terribly overwhelmed.?

It’s a red rock Disneyland, for better and worse. Visitors to this little slice of scenic desert typically come for a day or two… and then move on. Most seem to come merely for the surface thrill: to bathe in the dramatic and accessible rock formations, and… to get that all important “social proof” selfie. The motivation and ethical orientation is, alas, not much different than your average visitor to Disneyland has to Space Mountain.?

OUR POTHOLED ROAD OF GOOD INTENTIONS

Putting it into perspective, we were like those poor rangers you see in Yosemite or Yellowstone. Only we were without any backup, and kind of on our own out there.

While we were motivated to volunteer with the Forest Service in order to help both people and the ecosystem, our day-to-day reality became something else again. When we hiked, we spent our energy not in relaxing, or talking about life, or enjoying the rocks and each other’s company. No. We had a job to do. And frankly, we felt like overwhelmed Resident Advisors at a college dorm.

Existentially, this Forest Service gig became almost comically brutal and felt never-ending. I wanted to go all "Nicolas Cage" a few times, but my patient better half always talked me off the ledge. But yeah, it was both insane and at the same time, pretty funny.

One visitor asked if the rock cairns that held up our trail signs (rocks piled into barrel shapes) were in fact trash cans -- there to more safely contain the rocks so that people did not trip on them. Like I said, there was humor in this insanity, too.

After all, when walking the trails, the two of us were the default hosts of a never-ending party of revelers, bachelorette parties, mountain biking bro-fests, et cetera… We were guides and greeters. It was our job to smile, say "hi". give directions and maps, and to monitor the trail with “professional” eyes, taking in the visitor load, assessing the parking lot situation and bottlenecks, the user experience… and scanning for obstacles. We were noting hazards and reporting them in via our slick mobile apps. Documenting graffiti. Reporting wildlife issues. Looking for (and often pulling) invasive vegetation. We were picking up (quite disgusting) trash and excrement, scanning for and sometimes revising trail markers that were out of kilter, hunting for out-of-place cairns… and eliminating the hundreds of 'fun little modern petroglyphs’ that ill-informed folks seemed to continually etch into the rocks… all the visitor-caused things that needed to be done in order to keep the place from becoming utterly trashed.?

We spent the time undoing the same things over and over, setting things right and going home exhausted and, after a while, dispirited. And no matter what we did, the next day the same trail looked as though we had not been there at all. The trash was back. The graffiti, back. The noisy, frat-party atmosphere… still there. Again, and again. Cleaning up after Sedona’s never-ending onslaught of tourists felt like trying to hold a genteel tea party at Animal House.?

Yee-haw.

While this Forest Service volunteer gig began as an earnest and well-intended effort, the constant and ever-repeating battle to keep it nice, and protect the trails around Sedona felt as futile as trying to push back the tides of the wide ocean.??

So, we cut and ran. We gave up the ghost. We just quit. Everything. The crush of tourists made it virtually impossible to enjoy the trails, so first, we quit?hiking. Then, we quit?volunteering?with the Forest Service. And eventually, even though we had only moved there two years previous, we decided to quit?living?there. We timed the market, sold our house, and simply moved away.

SOMETMES WE’RE SLOW LEARNERS

Maybe I am an idiot. But, maybe like other people, I had to re-learn lessons I had once known, but had forgotten.

Once before, I had experienced this sort of thing, in Montana. In my youth and early adulthood I had been an occasionally obsessive downhill and backcountry skier. Loved that sport and almost everything that had to do with the mountains. Lived every winter weekend for several years running up at a big ski area in the Sierras, reveling in it. In Montana, to my huge delight, I got a work assignment in the outdoor recreation industry doing both winter and summer mountain sports marketing. It began as a blending of work and bliss. What could possibly go wrong??

At first it was quite a rush, feeling a part of the ‘in’ crowd, and working in the outdoor recreation business, hanging out with other similarly-obsessed humans, getting to camp, and ski and raft and hike a lot of the time, as a part of my job. But over time, things changed. I could not relax. I could not chill.?

Like the gig in Sedona, when I was “on the mountain,” I was watching the visitor experience, worrying about accommodations, about guest services, about figuring how to make things even better – for the magazine writers (who we were constantly showing around), and for the guests. But not for me.?It stole my relaxation.?It stole my very favorite depressurization system away from me. It stole skiing, for good. I never did get that back, even when I shifted to other businesses.

Hard Lessons Learned:?So in the end, if you have a known path to?bliss, please note this cautionary tale. Please consider a different slant about your bliss. My advice is to follow your bliss but make sure to protect it jealously. Guard it?like a treasure map, or risk turning your bliss into a dreary, never-ending to-do list.?

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