To Shake the Sleeping Self

by Jedidiah Jenkins

  Copyright © 2018 by Jedidiah Jenkins

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Convergent Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. The author is represented by Alive Literary Agency, 7680 Goddard Street, Suite 200, Colorado Springs, Colorado 80920, aliveliterary.com.

  convergentbooks.com

  CONVERGENT BOOKS is a registered trademark and its C colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Daniel Ladinsky for permission to reprint “The Sun Never Says” from The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, the Great Sufi Master translated by Daniel Ladinsky (New York: Penguin Compass, 1999), copyright © 1999 by Daniel Ladinsky. Used by permission of the translator. All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9781524761387

  Ebook ISBN 9781524761394

  Cover design by Jessie Bright

  Cover photograph by Sophia A. Bush

  v5.3.2

  ep

  For my mom,

  who is as giving as spring, as fun as summer, as sacrificial as fall, and as strong as winter. As good to me as seasons are to earth.

  For my dad,

  who taught me to drive down every dirt road, and who loves me the way sunlight loves us all.

  For Phillip Crosby,

  who showed me how to let go of my house when the flood comes, and to build on higher ground.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  THE ITCH

  Part One WEST COAST

  Chapter 1: THE PLAN

  Chapter 2: IT BEGINS

  Chapter 3: THE COAST IS CLEAR—Northern California

  Chapter 4: THE TEMPTATION OF HOME—Southern California

  Part Two MEXICO

  Chapter 5: CROSSING INTO BAJA

  Chapter 6: SOME BACKGROUND AS I LOSE MY MIND—Baja and My Childhood

  Chapter 7: CARTELS AND COCONUTS

  Chapter 8: THE CATHEDRAL SITS ON THE TEMPLE—Mexico City

  Part Three CENTRAL AMERICA

  Chapter 9: WHAT HAPPENS IF I GO HOME?—Oaxaca and Christmas

  Chapter 10: HARRY DEVERT—Panama

  Chapter 11: A NEW CONTINENT—Crossing to Cartagena

  Part Four SOUTH AMERICA for the Most Part

  Chapter 12: COCAINE AND CUTE LITTLE MUSHROOMS—Cartagena and Medellín

  Chapter 13: GOD ON THE TRAIL—Medellín to Salento

  Chapter 14: SEX HOTELS AND HERE COMES MOM—Cali to Quito

  Chapter 15: THE COLDEST NIGHT—Quito to Cusco

  Chapter 16: EMPIRE FALLS TO EMPIRE—Machu Picchu

  Chapter 17: NEW BLOOD INTO BOLIVIA—Bolivia and Argentina

  Chapter 18: ALL BY MY ARGENTINA—Solo Down Argentina

  Part Five PATAGONIA

  Chapter 19: ENTERING THE HOLY LAND—Mendoza to Bariloche

  Chapter 20: ALONE IN GOD’S MOST OBVIOUS WORK—The Carretera Austral

  Chapter 21: MOM AND THE MOUNTAIN—Torres del Paine

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  The story in this book is based on my memory, which is imperfect. Terrible sometimes. There are parts that I have oversimplified or omitted for clarity. Life is damn complex and a lot happened. Also, I changed some names. Read this the way you would receive a long story told over dinner.

  THE ITCH

  The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or perchance a palace or temple on the earth, and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a wood-shed with them.

  —HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  I have learned this for certain: if discontent is your disease, travel is medicine. It resensitizes. It opens you up to see outside the patterns you follow. Because new places require new learning. It forces your childlike self back into action. When you are a kid, everything is new. You don’t know what’s under each rock, or up the creek. So, you look. You notice because you need to. The world is new. This, I believe, is why time moves so slowly as a child—why school days creep by and summer breaks stretch on. Your brain is paying attention to every second. It must as it learns the patterns of living. Every second has value.

  But as you get older, and the patterns become more obvious, time speeds up. Especially once you find your groove in the working world. The layout of your days becomes predictable, a routine, and once your brain reliably knows what’s next, it reclines and closes its eyes. Time pours through your hands like sand.

  This equation has a crummy side effect: while our child brains are absorbing the ways of the world…mislabeled patterns of survival get swept in as we grow. Bad examples. Wrong thinking. Mistaken assumptions. They get caught in the flow of time through adolescence and carried into adulthood, buried beneath everything else. You watch your dad fly into a rage while driving, and your little brain logs it away. You overhear your mom talking about hell, and something rearranges in your head. A building block placed so deep and quickly covered. We show up as adults, confused by our own thinking, and with time running out.

  But travel has a way of shaking the brain awake. When I’m in a new place, I don’t know what’s next, even if I’ve read all the guidebooks and followed the instructions of my friends. I can’t know a smell until I’ve smelled it. I can’t know the feeling of a New York street until I’ve walked it. I can’t feel the hot exhaust of the bus by reading about it. I can’t understand the humility of walking beneath those giant buildings. I can’t smell the food stands and the cologne and the spilled coffee. Not until I go and know it in its wholeness. But once I do, that awakened brain I had as a kid, with wide eyes and hands touching everything, comes right back. This brain absorbs the new world with gusto. And on top of that, it observes itself. It watches the self and parses out old reasons and motives. The observation is wide. Healing is mixed in.

  This kind of attention is natural to a child. To an adult, it must be chosen. The trick is: knowing when we are in fact adults, and when attention is asleep.

  My name is Jedidiah Jenkins. It’s a singsongy name I know, Jedidiah is Hebrew and means “loved by God,” or “friend of God.” My mom was dead-set on giving me a biblical name. I mean, damn. She went straight for a wild one. I was named after Jedediah Smith, the fur trapper and explorer who discovered passages over the Rockies and died at the hands of the Comanche. As a kid I loved it and then hated it and then loved it again. It sounded like a joke, like an Amish preacher. It was my first encounter with being different. Baby boomers would say, “Oh, like Jed Clampett! You must get that a lot.” I’d say, “No, not really.” People my age would say, “Like a Jedi! Are you a Jedi? Does everyone call you Jedi Master? I’m going to call you that.” They never did. On the whole it’s been nice, because people tend to remember it. I have a theory about this. When you have a weird name, one that’s uncommon enough to stand out but not a nightmare to pronounce, people remember you. And when they remember you—especially when you’re young—it builds confidence. You feel special, worthy of being remembered. I don’t know if this is true, clinically speaking. But I’ve always felt comfortable in a crowd, and I think it’s at least in part because
people remember my name. And that I am loved by God and God’s friend, I guess.

  * * *

  —

  AS I GREW UP, this smiling kid with a weird name was paying attention, and making assumptions. I absorbed lessons and language and took them as truth.

  If you were a suburban kid like me, you probably grew up in a school system that wants you to go to college and choose a major and go straight into a job and a marriage and a mortgage. It gives you rungs of achievement: a degree, a wife, a house, kids, golf—whatever—and makes you think these things give life meaning. “Collect them all and win!”

  But the big fancy adults preach the opposite as well. They say, “fall in line” and then, in the same breath, “think different, take risks!” We are told, “follow your passion” and “stay hungry,” at every commencement and graduation speech. This mixture of school and risk is the holy cocktail of American ideals, and for those rare beacons of exceptional success, it turns their life stories into fables. But for ordinary folks, it is a difficult road to walk. Be sensible, but be wild. Be ordered, but be free. Be responsible, but take risks.

  I took this double-speak to heart like any good kid born in the eighties. “Do what you love” and “follow your passion” became foundational virtues. But it’s all so slippery. Do what you love, but stay on the assembly line. There’s no time to find what you love, you should be building your credit score. Take risks, but don’t be foolish. Believe in yourself, but only if you’ve proven you should. Haven’t you seen those idiots auditioning on American Idol, thinking they can sing? Don’t be one of them. Don’t embarrass yourself. Don’t waste time at a job you hate, but magically manifest money to leave that job and chase a dream. Got it? Perfect.

  It didn’t help that my parents were examples of this magic American potion. Both of them were raised poor. Both chased their dreams. Both had success. My parents taught me as a kid that I could be whatever I wanted to be. “You can be a lawyer when you grow up, or a movie director, or a marine biologist. You can be anything you want.” I remember their sweet encouragements, watching their pale, chubby son with a weird name swim with his T-shirt on. “You don’t have to be good at sports, Jed, but it’s good to try. We don’t care what you do, so long as you give it your all. And don’t feel stuck if you choose one thing. You can try it and choose something else later.” This practical optimism gave me the worldview that life had many paths, all there in front of me always.

  The factor that I overlooked was the finiteness of time. This concept is invisible to a child. Kids may know logically that they will one day be old, but they can’t feel it. It sounds like a rumor.

  The carefree timelessness of my youth was rattled in my twenties. A kind of panic set in. Time became visible. Each choice I made began to feel more and more final, as if every choice was the death of all the others. Millions of doors were locking behind me as I passed them in the hallway. I felt that age thirty—adulthood—was coming like winter. Am I missing out? Am I making the right decisions? Am I becoming the person I want to be? It often dawns too late that we have only one life, only one path, and the choices we make become the story line of our lives.

  This is the story of that panic and my response to it. I’d done everything right. I’d spent my twenties going to college and law school and getting a job and being a good boy. But when I turned thirty, I quit my job and spent a year and a half bicycling from Oregon to Patagonia. It wasn’t the job that chased me away, it was mortality. Everything before was exposition. Filling the hero of the story with background and tools. The life before had happened to me as childhood happens to everyone. The mark of adulthood is when we happen to life. Thirty years old. I was now an adult, with or without my consent, and adults are responsible for their lives. I wasn’t going to become someone I didn’t choose to be.

  How I got to the bike really started after law school.

  My first lawyer job was working for in-house counsel at a cruise ship company. Not on a cruise ship, unfortunately, but in an office building in the suburbs. I needed money and I needed a job. Any job. The company was huge. Thousands of employees. I spent that entire summer removing duplicates from an employee spreadsheet containing 13,000 names. I reworded memos and sat through hours of HR training about the proper way to shake someone’s hand and the appropriate distance one should stand away from a coworker. I remember my supervisor called me into her office and said, “Jed, we need to talk. We have a policy of no more than three exclamation points in any e-mail. And you have five in your greeting of ‘hello!!!!!’ That’s not acceptable.”

  She wasn’t joking. Now, in my more sober adult years, I can see how I don’t need to be shouting in my e-mails with so many exclamation points. But in my twenties, this kind of reprimand terrified me. I seemed to be always in trouble. And I hated being in trouble.

  I’ll die if I work here. If they don’t fire me first.

  In my moment of despair, my old friend Jason reached out and offered me a job. He had made a documentary about war in northern Uganda, and it had become a big deal.

  “Jed. We’re turning our documentary into a nonprofit. It’s becoming a movement. We’re growing like crazy. Thousands of high school and college kids are starting clubs based on the doc. Come work for us. We need an attorney. We don’t know what we’re doing. Imagine working with your best friends and changing the world. You’ll make like no money, but it’ll be fun and important.”

  In that moment, I pictured myself working in the cruise company’s office for decades, bowing to the shareholders, hating work and therefore buying things, a house and a nice car, and having kids and sending them to private school. Raising them to chase their dreams, and lying with my life. That frightened me. I told my friend yes. I’d figure out how to make money later. For now, I’d be poor and happy.

  * * *

  —

  I WORKED AT the nonprofit for five years and enjoyed it. We did national tours, setting up clubs in high schools, building fund-raiser campaigns for students each semester—so even though I was out of school, I still felt time pass in semesters.

  As thirty approached, and “youth” was passing into “adulthood,” the terrible reality of time hit me like a wet rag. I looked back on my twenties and realized that every time there was a crossroads, I took the first and safest path. I did just what was expected of me, or what I needed to do to escape pain or confusion. I was reactive. I didn’t feel like an autonomous soul. I felt like a pinball.

  Let me add another layer to my thinking at the time: my faith. I loved God and Jesus and believed I was a “friend of God.” He had a plan for my life. A plan to make me prosper. A legacy to live in testament to Him. I was raised this way. It added a glaze over every choice. It was God’s plan for my life. And with the creator of the universe pulling the strings, how could any of it be mundane? So my fear of thirty, my anxiety over missing my “calling,” carried with it a dull guilt. Was I trusting God enough? Were my ambitions self-serving? Was I doing enough in the service of the Kingdom? Was I laying my life on the altar of His will? I didn’t know. But I knew I wanted to do right, to live right, to be good.

  This confluence of motivations and choices had taken me through a good education and into a bad job and then a good job, and I’d learned a lot and had fun and collected some skills…but I couldn’t shake the thought: it wasn’t really mine. It was happening to me. I was making steps toward myself, just trying things out, as my parents had taught me. Nothing has to last forever, Jed. Try it and then try something else. Sure, that works for a while, but sooner or later, that’s not cute anymore. You can’t keep jumping ship.

  * * *

  —

  LOOKING BACK NOW, my discomfort with career and time and choices was the smoke of a deeper fire. An important part of me was covered and squirming. It had something to do with my faith. In doubts and questions. There were deep parts of me that were wounde
d by Christianity. There were also deep parts of me that loved Jesus and gave Him credit for everything good in my life. This created a tension. And because I was taught that salvation rested on belief, on saying the right words and believing the right creeds, doubt was akin to cancer. Treat it or it will kill you.

  I couldn’t have said it then, but now I know: my soul was afraid of dying. Not simply from loss of salvation, but from loss of self. If I really was “loved by God, a friend of God,” I wanted true friendship. Friends do not walk blindly, one behind the other. They walk shoulder-to-shoulder. I wanted clarity from my friend. To hear answers to my questions.

  When you don’t know what to do, you travel. You go out and see. You have to rattle the bed, shake yourself out.

  I wanted to start my thirties like I started life: wide awake. I didn’t have kids. I didn’t have a mortgage. I felt like this was my last chance to crawl into the driver’s seat of my life.

  Eventually, an idea took shape. It was 2010, I was twenty-seven years old. I was talking with a coworker who’d been hired to run our nonprofit work in Uganda. I had just met him and I was asking him simple questions. Just really the small talk of getting to know a new hire. His name was Andrew. He was tall and rugged. His skin was brown from loads of sun. His crow’s-feet were deep from squinting. I asked him what he was doing before he came on board.

  “I came straight to Uganda from Patagonia,” he said. “I rode my bicycle to Argentina from New Jersey.”