Weekend in the woods

This weekend I traveled to Vermont in a too-small car with three of my friends. We stayed at a small and old cabin in the woods which served to protect us from the rain and little else. The accommodations were wonderfully primitive and after a long day of hiking and playing paintball I felt exhausted but in a righteous and wholesome way. I have started a new job and there are many uncertainties in my life, but I am certain that I would like to experience a cold Vermont morning in a creaking and faded cabin more often than I have in the past.

Here are some photos from the trip:

The end of an era

Today a woman fell asleep at the wheel of her car and drove through a red light, slamming into my car as I was driving across the intersection. I saw her silver SUV out of my window a half second before she hit, and I knew with absolute clarity what was about to happen. She hit me on the passenger side of my car near the back, which is probably the best place to get hit by a car, not that getting hit by a car is ever something you desire to have happen. The force of the impact crumpled the rear quarter of my car and spun me around so that I was pointing exactly towards where I had come from.

I walked away with no injuries. I'm so incredibly sad to lose the car. I visited the wrecking yard today to clear out the rest of my belongings. There wasn't much there, a few photographs in the glove box, an ice scraper, and a beach umbrella in the back.

This was my first car. And the beach umbrella was once shared with someone important. And I also remember using the ice scraper on a frigid February afternoon to extract my car from the frozen slush of a college parking lot. And the photograph is creased in the middle, but I look happy in it and I can still feel her in my arms when I wake up in the middle of the night. And she was the first person I wanted to call when I opened my door and stepped onto the smoking, rubber-stenched pavement and I couldn't hear anything.

Here are two photographs I took for the insurance denizens:

Tall trees

Still heartbroken, I bought a paintball gun. This seemed like an appropriately masculine response to the situation. I am fortunate enough to have friends who have the same ideas that I have. This is a rare thing. I brought my paintball gun to them and they brought their paintball guns as well. And together we hiked into the woods and explored. We traced the path of a trail, an abandoned relic of the infinite days of early puberty. When I returned, I had a conversation with another friend. She told me about words in other languages which do not directly translate to English. One of those words seemed especially relevant. Waldeinsamkeit is a German word describing the cathartic sensation of being in the woods and being thoughtful. There seems to be a delight and a purity to exploration and I want to seek it out and be comfortable finding it in myself.

Here's a photograph I took of the hills of Connecticut.