For Fun's Sake
I know two posts ago I dissed sports. But maybe fun is good. Maybe I need it. But what even is fun anymore?
We used to be fun.
By high school I’d learned that I could get long-lasting high from climbing a mountain and sliding down it on a snowboard. By the end of high school, I knew I could get that high in the summer from rock climbing. Between coasting from the last adventure and looking forward to the next one, I could get through the school week in the winter, and trips working on commercial fishing boats in the summer.
By college, I’d learned having a partner on those adventures left me feeling more full and alive. Alone I tended to look down on everyone from a peak, succumbing to an angsty mix of superiority and underappreciatedness. With someone else, that adventure became a point of connection. And I’d learned that if that person was a she, maybe we could share the rest of our life like that too. Mariah and I have shared adventures and everything else since April Fools’ Day 2011.
But our focus on fun has had its ups and downs (and I don’t just mean going up and down mountains on skis). For a while I fell for the false fun of drugs and alcohol. First, it seemed that anything fun could be made more fun by smoking weed and drinking whisky. Then it seemed that anything that wasn’t fun could be made fun by smoking and drinking. And then it seemed like nothing could be fun without smoking and drinking.
When I finally admitted I needed to give up drugs and alcohol, what helped take their place was more good old-fashioned fun. I fell in love all over again with sliding on snow and climbing rocks. And fter seeing more typical job prospects in the lower 48, I came to fully appreciate commercial fishing, something I’d taken for granted growing up in Alaska.
Then Mariah and I got married, and learned we would soon have the chance to buy the commercial fishing boat that we’d both been crewing on in Bristol Bay, so we started working the rest of the year to start saving to pay for it. Mariah worked as a substitute teacher and I started driving school buses. Kids seemed fun, so we decided to have one. Then we needed a more child-friendly place to live than Mariah’s 100-year-old family cabin. We wound up having a kid, buying a house, and buying the boat in the same year.
Still, I didn’t decide to stop having fun. What I thought I could do was have fun while doing productive things, like commercial fishing, cutting firewood, home improvement, writing, and getting our son to nap by wandering around the woods with him on my back. The things I called fun had shifted from almost all selfish to almost all wrapped up in what my family needed.
That had been a conscious decision for me. Mariah, though, didn’t get to decide. Having a kid (and then another) took an unavoidable toll on her body and mind, effectively ruling out all sources of fun for her, even fishing for a few years, since she couldn’t leave a 4-month-old, or even a 16-month-old, for months at a time. Fun had been taken from her, in more ways than we could have foreseen. Maybe that’s why she was more forceful about finding fun again.
As a stay-at-home dad, I only bought a jogging stroller when Mariah asked for one for Christmas. She asked me by finding one on craigslist and sending me to get it. But I was the one who became obsessed with it. Running refreshed my brain beyond what sleep or quiet could (other luxuries for new parents). But that feeling wasn’t enough to justify running to myself. I rationalized that I was training for the hunting that I would someday do. Even now, I feel selfish running or cross-country skiing without my two kids in tow.
And as for extreme sports, I wonder if kids are just my excuse now, to save me from finding out if I can even physically do that stuff anymore. Or that I can. Mariah pointed out that she’s afraid of finding out that she’s as good as she ever was at things like skiing or mountain biking, because that would mean that she’s been missing out on those things for too long. I thought that could be part of it for me as well, the fear that I will love extreme sports more than ever and get sucked back in, despite my decision to be more responsible.
A couple weekends ago I got invited by two separate groups to go skiing up Crystal Mountain. My senior year of high school, I decided not to do track and field because it would interfere with my climbing Crystal Mountain every weekend. Sometimes I camped in my tent or built an igloo. Sometimes I just climbed it back to back Saturday and Sunday, over an hour through the woods before the slopes opened up, and usually another hour to the alpine ridge. For maybe five minutes of uninterrupted turns downhill. Time ceased to matter then, though, because the joy of those five-minute bursts filled me to bursting and kept me full for the school week ahead, and even through the summer. I remember running hills for cross-country running practice in the fall, pushing through the pain by focusing on my happy place of powder turns on a snowboard.
Many days I’d had Crystal to myself, and it had been a rare luxury in high school and college to have a partner that could keep up. Throughout college, I brought my snowboard or skis home for winter break to make my pilgrimage up Crystal.
I don’t think I’d ever been asked to ski Crystal the same day by two separate parties. It had snowed a few days before, and it looked to be a clear Sunday, both weather-wise and prior commitment-wise. Mariah was out of town. I could have asked my parents to watch the kids as an early birthday present, but I didn’t. Not because I was afraid of getting sucked back into extreme sports, but because I’d almost completely forgotten why I’d been sucked in to start with.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Fishing for a Reason to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.