Off The Grid
It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? Watching the world crumble through the prism of a screen, an unseen plague taking over, the political landscape in turmoil. Working a minimum-wage pub job and hauling myself on 3k runs for 5 interactions on Strava. “Addiction” no longer referring to pints with my mates or social smoking, but a nefarious void of opportunity online. Over 200,000 fatalities in the UK. False dawns, broken promises, and 18 months of the NHS being brutally flogged like a Ladbaby Christmas single.
If all of the above is true, then why do I miss it so much? Being stuck in a rut for so long allowed me to recontextualise a lot of my late teenage years, and realise that, infectious global disease or not, I’d likely have been in the same position. Depressed, penniliess, and living at home. Two years on, I remain penniless. If you’d have told an 18 year old Jesse that the key to mental salvation was 5000 kilometres away, he’d have scoffed. I’m glad 20 year old Jesse listened.
I’ve always loved nature. Rolling fields, endless skies, and a dense undergrowth full of life — you name the vista, I’ll gain some form of enjoyment from it. Maybe it’s the visceral microcosms of human society that are reflected in all that surrounds us. Or maybe it’s simply a nice view, a rest for the eyes after years in the urban greyscale and brutalism of living near to the Barbican.
Regardless, nature. Good and evil. All that surrounds us. Light work. The pandemic allowed me to reopen my heart to nature, and have a relationship with the world around me in a way I hadn’t since I was a blissfully unaware youth. My experiences with the local woodland, from those aforementioned daily staggers on Strava, to nighttime walks just because I could, or attempting to forage for mushrooms and being left with nothing but something so poisonous it could kill a bear. All these experiences happened in my local parkland. And I was living in notoriously placid England. For all our picturesque hills and farmers’ fields, our ecosystem is not a particularly diverse one. The most exotic thing you’d come across in the English countryside is the local drunk talking about border control and how he misses Geoffrey Boycott and Michael Vaughan on Test Match Special.
I traveled to the Canadian wilderness in June 2021, in need of an aperitif before heading into my final year of University and all of city life’s ugliness. When I returned, it was the worst 9 months I’d had in a long time. Despite a deluge of free clothes, meeting countless kind, good-hearted people through retail jobs, and rekindled friendships, London never felt like home. I know it used to. Instead of thriving, I was a destructive mess, and sought to blow up everything around me in a benign fury of self-isolation and neglect. It was as if I was walking the plank above the Mariana trench with concrete shoes on. I needed to escape. Amongst this ocean of malaise though, certain things started to click into place, cogs began to glacially rotate, and I scraped through University by the skin of my teeth. Brilliant. Now can we never talk about those three years again?
A large reason for the basal slippage in my mind was not the melting ice caps, but the Canadian wilderness. Aside from being surrounded by an amazing community of people that wanted the best for me, the main standout was nature. You are at the mercy of the gods out here — Scorching sun, Arctic cold, and everything in between. You name it, rural Canada has it. It is a kaleidoscope of emotion and expression, brooding between a very large lake and a thick tree line.
The first part of my quarantine was spent meticulously combing through Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Border Trilogy,’ for me a love letter to frontier life, and the vast expanse of nothingness made into something through the mind of our Protagonist. John Grady Cole or Billy Parham, it didn’t matter to me. The true narrator of the book-cum-doorstop was nature, and how humans fit within that. My time on the fringes of society has allowed me to become existential, and then talk myself back down again. Allow me a second to indulge myself — I spent most of my evenings from June to September staring at a lake and listening to film scores. Thinking back, this was probably a perfect example of my ability to commit social suicide, but hindsight is 20-20. The waves reminded me of myself, in an odd way. For every hour of tempestuous rage, there was an hour of tranquil calm. Just because I paid more attention to the heavy waves, does not mean the opposite was any less valuable. What I learned in those evenings is a sense of peace. A peace that was very much needed in my life, as up until that point I don’t think there was much happiness in my life. Not to say peace in itself brings happiness, but it certainly brings understanding. In an age where everything is taking place at a breakneck speed, if you can afford the time to slow down, it is well worth doing so - You never know what you’ll reveal about yourself.
I’ll remain in the wilderness shoveling snow for the next few months at least. I’m not entirely sure why I chose this path, but I’m content knowing it’s just that - my path. Maybe it’s due to my ongoing love affair with Mr McCarthy’s prosaic ramblings, a desire to be ‘The Kid’ within my own story. More likely, it’s indecision. All my degree taught me is what I don’t want to do which really set me up for life. But, enough negativity. There’s been enough of that in the world in the last few years. I know now that whatever I choose to do will be right for me. I will always be grateful to nature for helping guide me through the fogginess, into the light.
