Note (6/23/23): This was written throughout the month of June, during rare pauses in this eventful summer.
It isn’t long now…
June wrapping up, May come and gone, April leapt by. One of those brief pauses, eddy to the flow. Another crossroads moment, it feels, watershed-like. I rest my paddle and twist in the stern seat, to sun rays trailing my wake, bouncing and shattering into kaleidoscopic pieces. I take in where I’ve been — savoring the journey — and then twist back, eyes to the horizon, to waters uncharted yet familiar…
And it wasn’t long then…
Students settling one-by-one onto wooden seats latticed with thick strips of nylon. Emotions etched all over expressive faces: the anxious, the boastful-but-secretly-anxious, the calm-and-assured, the quiet-and-awestruck. For two weeks, day by Groundhog-like day, we hoist-move-hoist-move giant buttery-tinted canoes and all the hundreds of pounds of gear to outfit them. Life is sweat and strain — our arms, backs, shoulders, voices, crew relationships, 8-cylinder van and trailer, gallons and gallons of fossil carbon power…
Yet it’s an amazing thing. An amazing thing, 1500 more humans brought in communion with water, place, each other — if only for a fleeting moment. The big smiles and growing confidence and youthful energy and two thumbs up and silly games and wildlife spottings and minutes of silence and canoe races… they all work collectively, groundwork laid to greater goals. Many of these are city kids — underprivileged kids — and this is a story of small victories; each unwittingly challenging generational traumas and exclusions with every paddle stroke. In many ways, I’m but privileged observer to this: a facilitator, fulfilled simply by glimpsing in some students small sparks of the passion and wonderment which led me to them in the first place.
Can I ask for much more than that? Because our time in these communities is short. We’re playing the long game, planting seeds we ourselves may never tend nor watch grow. Once more, we’re left simply to hoping. That knowledge of and experience in the outdoors impact formative minds and behaviors. That connections to local environments aren’t severed upon our departure. That maybe just maybe somewhere down the line, these kids-turned-adults in Grand Rapids and Flint, MI — no matter if they ever canoe again — can look back with some real fondness, and tell their loved ones about that one time they paddled their city’s namesake river.
So it means more than he can possibly know when one afternoon in Flint, unprompted in the midst of action and din, one little boy stands and says quietly to himself, “I’m never going to forget this day…”
Thus it isn’t long now…
One more page written, and a big chapter coming swiftly to its end. A bit of a swan song, in a way, this last Canoemobile — last extended outdoor work trip — for the foreseeable future. Passion for this travail — the gamut of paddling, teaching, interacting, improvising, adapting, exerting, traveling, cooking, camping, hiking, playing, joking, resting, reflecting, resetting, repeating — has shaped who I am, and both within and outside of work, much of the last six years of my life.
But it too has set up so well who and where I’ll soon be… this unique, valuable, hard-earned skillset offering flexibility, resilience, patience, curiosity, open-mindedness… or put in sum, adaptation to (and affinity for) change. Whether I come back to outdoor rec/education down the road, I don’t know. But for now I’ll put these skills to use in other ways, other places — with so much change on the horizon.
It certainly wasn’t long then…
A bright-eyed 18-year-old smitten by your first such outdoors experiences. This state, city, campus, they grabbed you, six years later only just loosening their grip. In those early days, you’d sit and listen expectantly in Bruininks Hall, innocently really, thoughts only on spending time in new places with new people.
But much was innocent those days. One was there to be, and learn, and try; sandwiched liminally and blissfully between child- and adulthood. Time was at its weirdest: hours often slow, days fast, weeks slower, months faster… and at last you remembered to put a block in the Google Calendar to look up. It was bizarre, you remember, in a snap finding yourself having been a published writer, in an orchestra, on several outdoors trips, in an internship, dating for six months, taking leadership roles, signing an apartment lease… all that busy-ness masking transience, a time appearing eternal gone in some turns of the Earth.
Yet this too was groundwork, some of your life’s most foundational, and perhaps you caught an inkling of that as you rolled your moving carts out the doors of that red brick dorm, headed right off to the next outdoor adventure, but not before looking back, choking up, and giving silent thanks for all that it represented.
And it isn’t long now…
Innocence writ large is a scarce commodity these days. Foreseeably, that world of six years ago will never again be possible. The developments have been swift, incongruous, destabilizing, disheartening. That Earth keeps heating and many of its environments keep fundamentally worsening. That societal stability and cohesion have fallen this way, too. Before were the pre-times: of pandemic, of nuclear-adjacent war, of the scale of tech-driven mental health epidemics and misinformation and social erosion, of AI risks growing tectonically, of droughts lengthening and water depleting and extremes of all type intensifying.
Dozens more code-red reports released; heeded by precious few. But we weren’t built for this kind of calling… we meaning our bodies and brains, and this no poor-sounding excuse but simply evolution’s unintended cruel joke. Trapped by the present and near-future, our time biases tending valiantly towards the status quo. To progress, growth, personal wealth, success, well-being.
But will enough times ever be enough? When just this month wildfire smoke turns the east coast post-apocalyptic, and for two days gives my own city the worst air quality on the continent? When we awaken to the true possibilities of nuclear escalation, generative tech domination, ecosystem degradation?
Or maybe, just maybe realizing that despite it all, we’re only getting started… and this year will be probabilistically the coolest and least apocalyptic of our lifetimes…
We failed… failed to respect the fragile gift of stability when we had it, and it isn’t long now — if not already — until that stability will be dearly missed…
So it wasn’t long then…
These sobering thoughts bouncing around in such dissonance with all else peaceful surrounding. It was long overdue, being with my family in places of such significance to this period of my life. A sunset dinner on the shores of Grand Marais; lake walks along Canal Park; quiet drives up and down 61; trekking along the Superior Hiking Trail, the same section as my first ever Outdoors Club trip in 2017.
Northcountry steeped in memory of who was once with me and who I then was: boyfriend, friend, backcountry guide, OutD officer, solo traveler, day tripper, backpacker, freshman turned senior turned mid-20s…
Likely one final time up there for a good while, and full circle to do it with them. Because change isn’t only intensifying for me. I’m so excited for my brother to take the baton, transferring to the U of M this fall, on the verge of creating his own unique path and experiences. My parents face questions about their careers, and what’s next in empty-nesterhood; my dad maybe moving on from his journalism career, my mom wondering where to finish hers out. My grandparents are deciding how long to stay in a big old house, and where looks best to be near the rest of us.
And many college friends have reached their own similar crossroads to mine — moves cross-country, abroad, into new relationships, jobs, futures — yet rooted, well, here: a formative shared space and experience from which the time has now come to spring from.
And at last it isn’t long now…
The moment I found out will never leave me. Back home in Milwaukee, the New Year a few days old, and this notification flashes on my phone just after breakfast: Peace Corps Invitation to Serve: Response Required
Everything catches for a moment — my breath, heart, time. I’m able to move trance-like to the living room couch, and as I sit I’m stunned by a wash of déjà vu. In a different lifetime, it seems, an eerily similar header landed in my inbox: Senegal Program Suspended: Departure Required
I fumble to unlock my phone, heart very much back drumming, and instantly choke up as I read the words I so hoped for: “This letter is your formal invitation to serve as an Urban Agriculture Extension Agent in Senegal departing September 23, 2023.”
Now almost six months later, it all feels surreal as ever. I’m a cocktail of emotions — nervous, thrilled, nostalgic, impatient — but probably most strongly grateful. If being pulled home from study abroad was maybe the most difficult departure of my life, this will most certainly be the most full-circle return. And for that, I’m so thankful.
In my final study abroad blog, I wrote how “I have no idea when I’ll return to Senegal, or if… It’s up to me, and perhaps a little fate, to find a way back in.”
I’m not naive about the many challenges Peace Corps will throw at me, nor expecting it to somehow resemble my experiences in 2020. After all, I — and the world — have changed a great deal since then. But it can’t not feel a little fateful, innumerable twisting life paths leading once more to such a watershed moment. So much and so many have been a part of this journey. And whether here or there, then as now, I’ll do my best to keep them all right alongside me.
Jake Marble 
So lovely, as always ❤️
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