Confessions of a Serial Hobbyist

This week I thought I might talk about the menu for my upcoming trip. Which got me thinking of the time, several years ago, that I created freeze-dried dinners for nine people for five days. It was for a backpacking trip into the Rockies with good friends and family. I assembled, prepped, mixed, and packaged 45 meals, 5 different dishes, for our group. I had gotten the bug to start making my own meals for camping. For several months prior, I had invested time in learning, testing recipes, tasting, and a fair amount of cash in buying large cans of freeze-dried ingredients. The 45 meals were the culmination of that obsession. They turned out pretty good. At least my test subjects said so. But then I got, well… bored with the whole process and moved on. Kind of a pattern for me.

Anyone who knows me is aware that I don’t do things halfway. Oh, things I don’t care about may get short shrift, but if I get invested in an idea, I tend to dive in with both feet.

I took up woodworking at one point, acquired the hand tools and machines to build most anything, and I did. I made furniture, toys, a wooden wagon, all kinds of stuff. But I gradually lost interest, got bored, sold most of my tools, and moved on.

Rock climbing is the same story. Over several years, I worked my way up, literally and figuratively, until I was able to climb a multi-day big wall climb in Yosemite. But shortly after that, jobs, life, and boredom intervened. I gave away my climbing gear and once again moved on.

Back in the late 1980s, I was an engineer and doing fine, working on interesting projects, but I was becoming, you guessed it, bored. I had thought I might want to become a doctor. After getting my wife’s permission to give it a shot, I spent the next year working full time as an engineer and studying full time for medical school entrance exams. And I was lucky enough to get accepted. I was 40. I worked like I had never worked before, and it was hard, demanding work for the next four years of medical school. Surviving that, I plunged into residency, working even harder for three more years. All in all, I spent 23 good years in medicine, but toward the end I finally had to admit I was burnt out. Maybe even bored. So, I retired, but then took up long-distance hiking.

But did I start my hiking career with something reasonable like a hundred-miler that would take a week or two to finish? No, I decided my first trail would be the Pacific Crest Trail at 2,660 miles that would take nearly half a year to complete. As I said, nothing halfway.

Even within my long-distance hiking obsession, I had sub-obsessions. I was hiking the Arizona Trail and was 500 miles along when I injured my foot pretty badly. I limped the next 100 miles to Flagstaff. From there, I “only” had 200 more miles to go, although it was down through the Grand Canyon and up across the then snow-bound north rim. But I was obsessed with completing the trail. So, I decided to go for it and try to limp my way across the finish line. Still, my foot was screaming, “No!” I reluctantly made some tentative arrangements to exit my hike when I got a call in my motel room at 3 a.m. from Scatman. He had read between the lines of my blog for that day and figured I was in trouble. He counciled me to stop, get off the trail, heal up, and return later to finish. That shook me out of my obsessive mindset, and I did what he said. He saved me from myself. But I did return several months later to complete the hike.

Rock collecting, coin collecting, sewing, writing and illustrating books, genealogy, car repair, cartooning, guitar, cycling, video editing, and many other things were all passions of mine at one point or another.

Some of these things I was pretty good at, and others, not so much, but when I decided to give something a try, I always went at it full bore. My wife calls me a serial hobbyist. And I guess I am. Luckily, I haven’t gotten bored with long hikes yet. And speaking of “long,” I’ve rambled on way too long, so I will bring this to an end.

As to that menu I was going to tell you about at the top of this article, I’m afraid it will have to wait for another post. I need to move on. 😄

Until next week, safe travels and happy trails…