Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
This poem is impressive in and of itself, but what makes it all the more incredible is the story behind it. Henley was sick with tuberculosis from the age of 12, and in his early twenties, had to have a leg amputated. Notoriously well-spirited and hardy, he persevered. In fact, he was so resilient that his friend, famed author of Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson, used the tough, one-legged Henley as the basis for the character of Long John Silver.
His sickness wouldn’t stop there- a few years later, the tuberculosis would return to claim his other leg.
In the face of this overwhelming adversity, most people wouldn’t have blamed Henley for despairing or giving up. Henley wouldn’t have it, and it was during the three years he spent in the hospital after his surgery that he completed his most famous poem. Invictus is now widely considered to be among the most inspirational poems ever written.
Ultimately, you are responsible for where your locus of control lies, and, to quote the band Rush’s song Freewill,
“If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”
What will you decide?
In the Desert,Ch. I
I recently moved to Reno, Nevada to start working at the Tesla Gigafactory (it’s worth a Google.) It was a seventeen hour drive from where I had been living in Pueblo, Colorado, although it didn’t feel that long. On the way, I passed through Salt Lake City and learned that there is, in fact, a lake there. I don’t know, I had always thought that it was just salt.
Go figure.
If you ever get the chance, I highly recommend you go see the salt flats, they’re incredibly beautiful.
After you get through the salt flats, it’s essentially just miles of the Nevada desert. I personally love the desert. I’m originally from Camp Pendleton in Oceanside, CA, and we had tumbleweeds that would blow by my elementary school, to give you an idea of the climate.
Speaking of tumbleweeds, I managed to hit one with my car at ~95 mph in the desert. On the bright side, they weigh virtually nothing and the only evidence that I hit one was a stick lodged in my car’s grille. On the other hand, hitting anything at ~95 mph is a decidedly unpleasant experience and I wouldn’t recommend it. Moral of the story, tumbleweeds are dangerous and they’re coming for you. (Or something like that.)
The only other notable part of the drive was the pizza I got in Elko. I could not think of any other reason for you to stop in the town of Elko unless your car is going to explode, because it’s boring as hell. However, if you are anywhere near it, stop what you’re doing and relocate yourself immediately to the Pizza Barn there. I am not exaggerating, world’s greatest pizza. It almost makes sense that they hid it in a restaurant that I actually regretted walking into immediately. Keeps the rabble out, I think.
I got into Reno on Friday afternoon, and proceeded to immediately pass out in a hotel room. However, I only had the hotel for the first night, after that, it was just me, my tent and I.
One interesting thing that I learned in the past few days is that 67% of the state of Nevada is actually designated Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land. This matters because, unless there’s a conflicting law, you can camp anywhere you want on the land (allegedly for a period of 14 days, then you have to find a new spot and wait a certain amount of time before you come back.) That means that two-thirds of the state is fair game to live on. You can shoot wherever you want on BLM land, too, as long as it’s not considered a “congested area.”
Much to my chagrin, I learned yesterday that because of Nevada gun laws, I won’t be able to buy my own peacemaker. Damn. If I get attacked by a swarm of homeless people or some sort of desert moose, I want you all to know that it’s the government’s fault. On an unrelated note, if you know of a store in the greater Reno area that sells Mad Max-style baseball bats with the nails and barbed wire on them, let me know. Or a machete, I can deal with that.
Again, totally unrelated.
I spent a few hours the first afternoon trying to find a place in the area to camp, but most of the BLM land is hard to access or unsuitable for camping. The sun had gone down and it was getting darker by the minute, so I decided on an easy camping spot called Moon Rocks. I didn’t know this at the time, but nowadays, the phrase “moon rocks” doesn’t mean what you’d think it does. Blissfully unaware as I was, I asked some dude at a gas station where I could find Moon Rocks and he tried to sell me some weed. At this point, I remembered that this is why God invented Google Maps.
Moon Rocks was about 45 minutes north of Reno, and it turned out that the last ten miles were all offroad. I drive an Acura RSX Type S, and as much as I love my car, by the time I got there I was physically shaken. She’s a beautiful, fast little car, but not built for dirt roads. I wish I had learned something from all those country songs I never listened to. Thanks for nothing, Kenny Chesney.
Somehow, my car managed, and I got there as the night settled in. The spot was pretty busy, and there were at least twenty people parked in various spots around the area. There was a wagon fort of RVs set up in a semicircle around the eponymous rocks, and someone was projecting what I believe was Blazing Saddles onto the face of the formation. The setup was complete with impressively good surround sound. This was all very cool until I tried to go to sleep, at which point I realized that the score to a 70’s western comedy was, in fact, not something conducive to sleep.
Welcome to the West.
I set up my tent for the first time, which fortunately was very simple, and the tent proved to be very windproof. (Remember that, this is foreshadowing.) The only two other camping accessories I got were a nice flannel lined sleeping bag, rated at 30 degrees, and a small foam mat that rolls up. These two things and the tent only set me back about $100, and they’ve definitely been worth every penny so far.
It was around 8:00 PM when I went to sleep, and right about 3:00 AM when I woke up. I felt fantastic, a camping first for me. As a number of my friends from NC State are well aware, I have not historically had very good luck with camping. That is a story for another time, however.
That day, I again spent a few hours searching for some BLM land to camp on, and I finally found a spot. The upside was that it’s exactly halfway between the Tesla factory and the Planet Fitness where I’ve been showering (Protip: it’s only ~$20 a month to get a membership to every PF location, meaning a shower in nearly every city in America.) The downside was that it was on top of a large hill with a flat top, and the winds were upwards of 30mph.
If you’re the kind of person that’s ever flown a kite, and I feel like you are, you’ll understand that a tent is a lot like a kite. They’re similar in the sense that the material is almost the same, if you have the $15 kite and not the crappy $5 kite. If you have the crappy $5 kite, I’m sorry your parents didn’t love you enough. Tough luck. Anyways, much like a (very large) kite, a tent on top of a mountain has the surprising tendency to catch wind and want to fly. Unlike a kite, you (presumably) don’t want the tent to fly.
What ensued was about 45 minutes of wrestling with something that only the night before took 10 minutes to set up. Oh, what a difference a day makes. Eventually, after a degree of emasculation that I did not know it was possible to receive from a large sheet and two poles, I put nearly everything in my car in the tent as ballast and managed to stake it down. With my masculinity restored, I proceeded to check the weather.
It was projected to get down to just below freezing, so I added another layer to my sleeping bag and proceeded to pass out. Despite the weather, I slept even better than the first day. As I write this, it’s about an hour before my orientation for work, so this will have to be where I leave you all for now.
In the Desert, Ch. II
When I last left off, I had just started orientation for Tesla. Due to certain confident
iality agreements, I have to be very careful about what I tell you. That being said, this is what you need to know:
● Tesla is less of an Elon Musk cult than I had expected it to be. That was disappointing because I brought my robes and ceremonial Elon action figure. What a waste.
● The taco truck that I went to at the Gigafactory was really good, but they forgot one of my tacos, and for that, I will never forgive them.
● All of the toilets in the Gigafactory flush uncomfortably fast. I don’t know if that’s supposed to say something about the cars, but it’s certainly making some kind of statement.
Camping the first two nights of the week wasn’t bad at all, even when I woke up to 26 degree weather. I’ve gotten to the point where I can get the tent and my bag set up in less than twenty minutes, and I can break it down in less than ten.
One of the cool parts about sleeping outdoors is the fact that you can go to bed at seven or eight at night without feeling like you’re wasting your evening. I have routinely stayed up until one or two AM for the past few years, and if you asked anyone that knows me whether I would voluntarily get up early, they would laugh in your face. However, I’ve been waking up naturally at about three in the morning every day.
The benefit of getting up so early is that I can drive the ten minutes to Planet Fitness, work out, shower, get breakfast somewhere, and then come to the Starbucks down the road and write, all before five or six in the morning. In the past, it was more like wake up at noon and get out of the house around four for a few hours, then come home and watch Netflix until I passed out. Without the luxury of having a living room, I have been forced to be much more productive with my time.
The only privacy I get is driving or camping, everything else is a public space. What’s interesting is that, because the norm for me here is being alone (which is fantastic and I highly recommend it,) I’ve started to enjoy the random interactions I have with people more- chatting with servers in diners, talking to store clerks, and so on. I never used to like that sort of thing, but now that I have as much time to myself as I’d like, it’s become refreshing. Things have been going great, and I’m loving the adventure. That is, until last night.
I never should have gotten out of the tent.
It was unusually warm (almost 50,) which may have had something to do with it. I can’t be sure, I’m neither a meteorologist nor a HAARP scientist. Regardless, something was off. It was too nice out- I even took the extra layer out of my sleeping bag. I went to sleep sometime around 7:30, I think. It didn’t start until midnight.
I know I made a point of talking about how windy it was in the last article. Yes, it was embellished, and maybe this was my punishment for that. I was going for that Gonzo journalism thing, you know? Regardless, let me clarify: when I said it was windy last time, compared to what I am about to describe, it was like a light breeze.
Midnight rolls around and I am awoken by the sounds of the tent whipping in the wind. At this point, it’s about as bad as it was my first night on the hill, so I’m not terribly worried. I hadn’t been staking the tent down very thoroughly, because the stakes I have are totally shit and the hill that I’ve been on is essentially made of gravel and un-stake-able.
Needless to say, the stakes were high.
You’re welcome.
The tent seemed to be unstaked, but I figured, hey, I can sleep through this. What I didn’t realize immediately was that the wind was coming from the opposite direction this time. I had been putting my duffel bag full of clothes on the windward side, but now that wasn’t helping at all. In my half-asleep state, I started to realize that the side of the tent was lifting up and smacking me in the face. Shrugging it off, I turned myself 180 and put my feet in the corner to hold the tent down.
I can only assume I dozed off, because the next thing I realize is that the crossed arch of the two tent poles has now become something more like the shape of a playground slide, with the high end where my head was and the rest of the tent being molded to my lower body by the wind. By now, the gusts outside are audible and the flapping of the tent is approaching the volume of applause. Undeterred, I brilliantly decided to continue trying to sleep. I flip over to my side and, slowly, the only part of me that’s not covered by tent was my face.
As I rightfully deserved, the tent gave me the camping-equipment-with-no-hands equivalent of a bitch slap. Feeling diminished, I concluded aptly that I’m probably not getting back to sleep tonight. It’s about two at this point, and after a few minutes of frantic searching through the wreck of my tent, I check the weather on my phone. What was a cloudy morning last night was now a 70% chance of rain.
Let me clarify something- I’m all kinds of down to camp and enjoy the outdoors and whatnot, but I’m not doing that in the rain. No way, no sir, not happening.
I fumble for my shoes, now bouncing around the ever-shrinking interior of the tent, and manage to throw some pants on as well. Trying to sit up and put clothes on in a completely unsecured, wildly flapping tent was one of the most awkward and unpleasant experiences I’ve ever had. With my self-esteem dropping steadily, I had no choice but to try and break the tent down. I opened the front flap of the tent and stepped out.
That’s when the night went from good to great.
I don’t know if you’ve caught it from context, but that’s actually not when the night went from good to great. They say it’s hard to convey tone through text, so I want to make sure you know that I’m being facetious here. Shit hit the fan. It was bad. All clear? Cool.
So when I say that shit hit the fan, I mean that “my shit” was hit by “the fan of nature,” or whatever. It’s an imperfect metaphor. Regardless, as soon as I stepped out of the tent, it immediately caught about eight feet of air and flew twenty feet towards the sheer face on the side of the hill. Remember, this is the one tent that I have to live in and it’s containing my sleeping bag and a duffel bag with every article of clothing I have.
I sprint towards the edge of the cliff and grab it. Due to my present superstition about embellishing, I want you to know when I say that I “literally dove through the air and caught the whole 50 pounds of it while hanging from one hand over the 200 foot drop,” that I’m completely lying and that I actually managed to get it before it got too far away. I know, I like the first version better, too.
The hard part, it turned out, wasn’t grabbing the fairly heavy tent full of stuff, it was actually dragging it back to my car. As soon as I started pulling it, the door flap flew open and the whole thing ballooned like a parachute. I’m not huge on doing resistance training or cardio, so I was understandably displeased by this development.
Back at the car, I’m trying to load all of this stuff in my trunk as fast as possible. The wind is so strong that it’s actually blowing over the hood of my car and pushing my hatchback closed. While frustrating, that was actually kind of impressive. I try to appreciate the little things, you know? That momentary appreciation of the power of nature was interrupted by my realizing that both of my tent poles are destroyed. One snapped in half and the other’s elastic inner cord broke and the segments all flew away. Not a great thing to have happen considering that those poles are the frame for my house. Fortunately, my rain cover was miraculously still intact, and I don’t think I lost anything.
Car packed, I got the hell out of Dodge. As I merged onto the highway, it started drizzling. “Perfect timing as always,” I said to myself, trying in vain to restore the ego that had blown off into the night.
I’m not one to give up that easy, so my thought right now is to go build some kind of semi-permanent shelter/wind barrier on the hill. It is my weekend from work, however, so I may just drive down to Lake Tahoe and relax, but where’s the fun in that? Assuming I survive, I’ll let you know.
In the Desert, Ch. III
After I finished writing last week, I went to Lowes for two reasons. The first is that it was the only place that was open at 8:00 in the morning on a Thursday. The second was in o
rder to find a shovel. I was down to about $40 at this point, but after the events of the night before, I figured a $5 shovel would be a worthy investment, if only for my sanity.
Of course, it was not. I drove back to my hill and spent about 15 minutes trying to dig a ditch in what I quickly learned was a mountain made not of dirt, but of rocks. Like, just rocks. You would think the desert would be full of sand, but then you’d be wrong. Feeling sadder but wiser, I decided to go back into town. Historians would later term the decision I made at that exact moment as “a bad call.”
I got about a mile down the frontage road. Just when I thought my day couldn’t get any better, I hit a pothole. Actually, let me rephrase that. My front right tire fell into an abyss that, to be fair, I didn’t notice. I got a good couple vertical inches of lift when I hit the other side of the hole, and because this was a car and not a basketball player, I knew something was wrong.
Immediately, I heard the tell-tale flapping noise that you’d be familiar with if you’re the kind of person who has ever blown out a tire. Conveniently enough, I am the kind of person who has blown out a (great number of) tire(s), most recently my front left, only a week beforehand. The last time before that was two years earlier, when I was heading home from Raleigh for Christmas. I ended up having to get four new ones, which would turn out to be the gift that kept on giving (hint, hint.) I don’t know what I did to Santa, but I’d much rather have gotten some coal.
MasterSelf Year One Page 2