If reading was to later become my anchor, then it started as a ship, one my mind would take to leave whatever boredom stalked me at home. I was twelve. I avoided school and homework with dedication, spending afternoons distracting myself with friends, video games and running around town. And then one day I did something unthinkable: I walked into the school library and checked out a book. Before then, reading meant my mom reading Harry Potter out loud before bed when I was a kid. None of my friends read, so whenever interest in a book would enter my brain I’d push it out. But one day during a class when we had to use the computers in the library, I couldn’t resist picking up a book. From that day on I was hooked.
Books were my means of escape. I liked my life but nothing ever clicked for me like reading did. I stopped caring about team sports early on, and snowboarding, my favorite activity, was only available on the winter weekends. But there could always be a book in my backpack that I could pull out and read, transporting me somewhere else. Free time was spent in the wizarding world, 1940’s New York, post-apocalyptic wastelands… anywhere but math class. Reading was the key to ignoring all the unnecessary detritus that seemed to surround me, my ultimate and favorite distraction.
When high school came around and I was trying to become serious, reading flipped the on-switch in my mind and cast off the cloudiness that had stormed it. Reading Catcher in the Rye as a freshman was a fidgety, awkward experience that forcefully jolted me to think within the parameter of a double period class. Plot became secondary; it was all about themes, diction, intention. We spent classes discussing Salinger’s tone through the irritating and profound Holden Caulfield, contemplating the use of the word fuck and drawing our ideas of what the hell the “Catcher in the Rye” was on the board. It wasn’t just eye-opening, this was revolutionary. Each word, each sentence and each paragraph were previously just the guided trail to the end of the road, the climax, the resolution. Now they became individual points on a map to discover and rest at on their own as I trekked through each page. I devoured literature that year, and I’ve only stopped reading since because of a snowboarding accident that resulted in a concussion.
For my junior year, I left for the first semester to attend a school in Leadville, Colorado. It was a happy semester made up of happy times with friends, more than a few solid moments of learning, and backpacking trips through the mountains of Colorado and the canyons of Utah. And with that, I managed to fit in some of the best reading I’ve ever done.
Free periods in Colorado were casually sacred, hour and a half windows without cell phones. There were some that were spent with friends, listening to music or playing knockout. But there were other periods where almost everyone was in class or doing their own thing. These were small, quiet moments during loud, busy days. I spent a lot of those free periods going on bike rides on the county road loop. The loop stretched up a hill, slowly towards Mount Elbert and Mount Massive and then circled back downhill towards the Leadville Fish Hatchery. Past that was an open stretch, across from the school off to the left and open land to the right, with the old mining town a couple miles in front and more mountains even farther back. The sun would glare down and wind would roll through with occasional clouds, while I tried to pedal through it all without my hands on the handlebars.
The free periods were also when I found time to read, and I remember finishing On the Road, by Kerouac, vividly. It was on the deck of the school, on another sunny but cool morning with very few clouds. Most were in class. I sat and read outside in the chilly mountain air with a cup of tea, in front of the tallest peaks in Colorado. It was just twenty minutes, a quick sliver of sitting still during four months of going back and forth from the school and the backcountry. But I can still taste the peppermint tea on my breath, feel the wind brushing up against me, and hear the pages rustle as I turned them, as Kerouac’s characters kept going across and around the country and back again.
The following summer I went on another backpacking trip, the last one for a while. It was a month in Alaska, where in July the sun would stay out for most nights and bear spray would be strapped to my chest until I went to sleep. For this trip I brought a Game of Thrones book with me, a big bloody book with a hefty, dramatic plot, which wouldn’t elicit much big thinking on my part. I lasted a few days before trading it with another guy in the group for The Brothers Karamazov.
I finished the Dostoyevsky on one of the few actual night times I experienced in Alaska, where the moon was the dominating force in the sky and the sun was pulled behind mountains for a few hours. It was the end of one of the last days of the trip. We were splitting up the group to hike without the instructors and the person whom I wanted to spend the final days out there with was in the other one. She was going one way and I was going another. That was that. So I sat out on the tundra finishing off that dense Russian novel for good while everyone slept. It was the latest I stayed up during my time in Alaska and I was close to pushing past midnight. It was shockingly cold out, with the moon lighting the sky for a change. It had been out a few nights before, but this was the first time I had noticed it. It seemed bigger and brighter. I sat in all my layers and in my sleeping bag, my face the only uncovered part of my body. Caribou Creek, our handrail for travelling to this campsite during the day, flowed twenty or so feet down from me, smacking up against rocks in its way. I read for an hour or so, my breath brushing against my coat sleeve, the pages and my flashlight steadily, until I finished the book and went to sleep. The next morning I woke up and hiked eight miles west of the creek towards a peak.