I can’t hear the birds is what she said to me, although they were clearly present at my end of the phone. I asked her if she was outside in a forest because the varied torrent of chirps was so prominent. “No” she replied, “I’m in my room”. I thought this to be so amazing that all of those birds could be heard from no further than the window of her room. I was not in her position of hearing them every day from sun up to sundown, hearing their proud songs was new and exciting to me. She had been there for many months and had become used to the songs, the birds had become just another day.
This idea of not being able to hear the birds really struck me as odd, to me they were so vivid and foreign, yet to her, they were nothing more than average. This chord had been struck within me firing off all sorts of thoughts as I attempted to sort out a world without bird songs. I came to realize I had been plenty guilty of this in the past, not necessarily about birds but of other aspects of my life. The keyword of my findings was complacency. A position of such comfort that you let your awareness down and events, actions, or sounds can slip by without second thought.
Complacency was introduced to me before I was aware of the word existed, I simply said “taking things for granted”. The two are very closely related, if not the same, depending on your definition or context of the two. I was complacent about the fact that I grew up in a wonderland of the outdoors, The Columbia River Gorge. I took it for granted, all of it. The mountains, sunsets on Mt. Hood and down the Columbia River from the front porch, access to lakes, rivers, forests, small-town life. All taken for granted. I suppose I thought that everywhere had similar features, except for the midwest, particularly Kansas. When I moved to Idaho to go to school, I was thrown dab smack into the Palouse, treeless rolling hills, agriculture fields and a town bigger than I had ever lived. I missed home, I missed my 35-minute drive to one of two national forests for recreation, I missed a lot. Unfortunately, it was not my last time being complacent.
Complacency was introduced to me through my work as a wildland firefighter where it is hammered into your skull “Complacency Kills”. The slogan is serious and just as easy as it is to say, it is easy to forget and once again be complacent. In that line of work, complacency has a different ring to it because it implies that one is being lazy, letting down their awareness, and complacent errors can have much higher repercussions in a high stakes environment. Luckily for me, I saw nothing serious happen although the complacency bug had struck me or my crew on multiple occasions. I never thought I’d look back on those days and miss them, for one, I thought I would always be an employee of the Forest Service, working my way up the GS scale until….well until something. Plans change, injuries happen and it sort of resets the declination on your life compass.
Taking for granted is the term I will use for my summer spent on Kodiak Island in Alaska. I enjoyed it, sure, but there was some grungy feel about it that wore on me like a wet coat. I was a bear tour guide on Kodiak Island and in Katmai National Park, it was and still is the best job I have ever had. As long as the weather would allow the planes to fly, we would be out in it, downpours, howling winds, bright sun, you name it. I would guide clients through mud, rivers, streams, forest, and fields so that we could get a nice close and personal look at Coastal Brown bears and Kodiak bears. I was six feet away from a thousand-pound plus bear as it waded upstream past me. Work was what I lived for, back in town, on the other hand, was my demise.
The Island of Kodiak limits your driving to approximately seventy miles of roadways, not all of it paved. The 13,000 people that live there are packed into these areas and solitude is often hard to find. Garbage litters the roadways and parking areas, the beach after the 4th of July is left in a shameful state, and more than once was a changed diaper left on the park picnic table. The bars were filled with the fisherman who’d been out for weeks, looking to get a fix as they lit up cigarettes at the bar and played pool. I even once found a crack pipe on the sidewalk in front of the hotel. Kodiak was not the place for me, yet here I was, stuck on the island wanting nothing more than to be working amongst the bears or road-tripping back home.
They say you only remember the good times that were had even though a majority of your experience may have been rough. I find that to ring true in my memory as I sit here now. How lucky I was to have so many amazing memories from my time spent fighting fires or guiding clients amongst some of the largest bears in the world, but when I really have a good critical thought about those times I find an error. Throughout my time at both seasonal jobs, especially my last two years with the forest service and my year in Kodiak I drank heavily, smoked a lot of weed and smoked hundreds and hundreds of backwoods cigars. It would not be uncommon for me to drink a bottle of wine, smoke some weed and a few cigars at night after work and do it again the following day. My self-medicated lifestyle was numbing, and at the time it was exactly what I thought I needed.
I now have changed my ways since my seasonal grind, although I still am semi-transient, I have a steady job that I have held longer than my previous jobs. I no longer use substances to get me through my weeks and I appreciate things in a more wholesome manner. I have lost 30 pounds since I stopped binging substances and have taken up hobbies that I probably would have never gotten into. I appreciate when I am alone or with friends and don’t feel the need to drink or smoke. I have a new perspective on sobriety and how it impaired me in the past.
Be aware, be present and take notice. I like to think about this every day because there is so much stimulus that I would overlook while being in my own world. I unplug my headphones and listen to the birds, close my laptop and watch the setting sun, or simply enjoy a meal in silence. I have missed out on too much in my past and I have now come to realize my mistakes, my complacency, and I now strive for a better, lasting experience. As it is said, “You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone”.