Find Your Own Mountains

By Paul Samuel

How do we live a full and satisfying life? How do we know what we can excel at? How do we start believing that we have many options?

 

Find Your Own Mountains is a collection of stories from Paul’s travels and exploits which he diarised throughout his life, and w

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Samuel
• Release date: Nov 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9781911195917

Book preview

1. Stepping Out

Canada and USA

Feb–July 1982

How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step by Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot

I opened the book and chuckled, ‘That’s the one for me.’

How naivety can trump stupidity.

I had hatched a cunning plan. It was to spend a lot of my gap year earnings on a VW Beetle to drive around America. Beetles were pretty simple cars, right?

All I had when I landed in Vancouver on a grey morning in February 1982 was a ticket out from Toronto five months later and a bed and offer of work from some generous friends of my parents, Noel and Valerie. They picked me up from the airport and drove me to their home in a small agricultural community called Ladner and, while I worked in their fertiliser business, living in the comfort of their outside cabin, I developed my plan to storm the States by car. The US didn’t look that big on the map laid out on my bed.

As I set off on my quest, waving goodbye from my Beetle window, a clapped-out radio for company, my suitcase and an old cooler with some food in the back seat, I wrote:

And so the beginning – I’m still not sure whether I have realised what I’m doing and am about to face. I feel a bit pathetic – so many people have done this before so I’m nobody special.

Today was the big day of breaking with family life and protection. I’m writing this from a parking lot in Princeton, a small town up in the Rockies I suppose about 200 miles east of Vancouver. It was a hard drive but the views are fantastic. I suppose it is my smallness and lack of someone to lean on. Noel and Valerie were so good to me, it was really sad to leave them, also considering what is in front of me.

I don’t know what I will do tonight – maybe keep driving till I get tired.

I parked up, got my tent out, rolled out my mat and sleeping bag and looked out into the silent air. Was this how it was going to be for the next three and a half months?

Toronto, 16 July

One week to go! I feel like I’m just about ready for it, though I know that once I get back home, I’ll be wanting to come back again.

‘Boy to man’ was how I later described the experience to people. What happened on that trip around the USA?

***

Los Angeles, 3 June 1982

1 a.m., downtown Greyhound station

‘Excuse me,’ I say, as I try to get by; I don’t want to catch him with my backpack frame. A giant, leaning against the restroom door entrance with his arms crossed, he straightens and looks down at me, a bit bemused or sleepy, I can’t really tell. Still, I need to go to the loo and I have a bus to Las Vegas to catch. Inside, there are half a dozen of his friends just hanging around, leaning against walls, making small talk that I can’t understand but don’t really listen to. The conversation stops as I walk to the urinals.

Strange place to meet your mates for a chat, I think to myself, but whatever. I turn my back to them. The only sound is me urinating… and then washing my hands. I smile briefly at one of them on my way out and leave the guy at the door behind; he has now woken up a bit but still looks confused.

I hand my ticket over to the Greyhound driver, put my pack in the hold, and mount the steps of the bus for what tomorrow will bring. What a couple of weeks.

It had started with me on the side of a road in Yosemite National Park. I had long since realised that America was a lot bigger than I had anticipated and I was already thinking that my ambitions to cross the country by car might be a bit hopeful. Then it started heating up on the moderate hills of Yosemite. I was also realising that the ‘idiot’s guide’ to car maintenance had its limits – or maybe I did.

Time for a rethink. Rather than going on to LA, I got to a phone box.

‘Louise?’ I pushed in the quarter as the phone beeped. ‘Hi, it’s Paul. How are you?’

After pleasantries, I got to the point:

‘I was wondering if you would mind me coming back to San Francisco to stay for a bit longer? I’m going to try to sell the car.’

Louise was another generous soul, a friend of a friend, who had agreed by letter to help me out if I was passing through San Fran. Here I was, imposing again; but she sounded genuine in her ‘No problems’, back down the line.

As I flicked through her local newspaper to look for price comparatives, I came across a cartoon with a cat in it; I chuckled and Louise looked over.

‘Funny, eh? You can get mugs and everything with him on these days.’

While I waited for calls to view the car, I went shopping for a backpack and, sure enough, there in a shop window were rows of orange stuffed cats.

I got the telephone number via a label and made a call when I got back to Louise’s.

‘Hello, I’m calling about Garfield.’ I tried to deepen my voice. ‘I’m from the UK and I am enquiring about the distribution rights. Are they available?’

I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with them, as I was off to university, but I’d worry about that later.

One of the reasons I’d come to America was for inspiration. People talked about it as the land of opportunity, a ‘can do’ place; and it was true. The country buzzed with energy. Maybe some of that had rubbed off.

After some passing around, a lady finally said, ‘I’m sorry sir, they have already been taken.’

I thanked her and resumed my repacking. That solves that one, I said to myself.

My luck was that Louise lived a mile from one of the richest universities in the country, and Beetles still had a Californian coolness to them. So even though mine was a little beaten-up and had British Columbia number plates, I got more for the car than I had paid for it.

All of a sudden, I had transferred all my kit from an unruly spread across the back of the car to the front drive of Louise’s house. I filled my backpack; what didn’t fit had to go. In a few days, I went from car and tenting to bus and hostelling.

It changed my life.

Getting out of the closet of the car altered the dynamics of my trip completely. I had to talk to my neighbours, and once I started to talk, it nearly always led somewhere. I met people with such varied backgrounds, dreams and perspectives, but all with a common interest at that one point in time; there were always things to talk about, even if it was just swapping stories and advice or recommendations. From this common point, all sorts of discussions came about…

People are in transit. They are there to experience, see and learn, and this fosters an overall interest in others’ perspectives. My diary changes much from San Francisco onwards; I rely less and less on calling people for a bed and more and more on finding my own way. Increasingly, people of different nationalities and different points in life come into the text. They brought huge colour to my trip. It was an explosion of experiences every day; not just amazing places but the variety of people. I had had a lid lifted.

***

‘The bigger you make your world, the bigger it will make you.’

My diaries, Antarctica 2005

‘Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.’

Attributed to Mark Twain

Dear Kate,

I wonder how you’ll feel as you get closer to heading out on your gap year. It is a big symbolic event, leaving the bubble of home, school and local life for the first time.

I don’t know what you see in me when you look at me today, but what I am now is not what I was when I was your age. If I seem reasonably together and comfortable in my own skin now, then it is a result of a lot of bumps and blind alleys on the journey, as well as, of course, many great experiences. When I was at your age, I was as green as a Cheshire field in spring; between an insulated school life, a stable home on a farm and most of my holidays being in North Wales (and no overseas visit further than Ibiza), I hadn’t seen much of the world physically and I had no worldliness about me.

I was very shy; parties were often hard for me unless I knew everyone, and approaching girls was the hardest thing without Claire to help. I was confident enough in what I knew or could do but wouldn’t willingly try something new; if I had to, I would certainly give it a good go, but I needed leading or pushing into anything that I didn’t feel comfortable with. I think that is one of the reasons I bought the car; it was a kind of protection or layer between me and the outside world so when I shed it, many things changed.

My time in the States was an eye-opener on much and launch pad for more. The single biggest learning was that my life was up to me. It sounds obvious but when I was on my own, it really brought it home. Where I went each day, how I went about it and how I responded to all the unforeseen situations I found myself in, that was my call. Nothing happened without me making a conscious decision to do it.

When she was eighteen, Dame Ellen MacArthur sailed solo around Britain in her boat Iduna.

‘I grew up on that trip around Britain… I forced myself to make decisions which I’d never taken before. I had sole responsibility for myself and for every move we made. I know now that there are no magic methods for making a situation better, you just have to stay calm, do all you can and believe that things will improve. You can’t really anticipate that feeling sitting at home alone. It’s not just the fact that you’re on your own, but the safety decisions; do I go or do I wait? There is never an unquestionably right answer – except of course with hindsight.’

‘I have no choice…’ is a phrase said sometimes to try to justify a position or a path, sometimes to avoid responsibility or blame. But when I went round the States, I realised a situation might be someone else’s fault, or just some bad luck, or random event, but so what? What was I going to do about it? The car was overheating in the middle of California, 10,000 miles to go. If that were to happen again on a road in the middle of Nevada, I could be in trouble. I had to make a decision. It gets even clearer when you’re out in nature. The autopilot has gone on the blink in the middle of the North Sea? Fix it or find a way round it but doing nothing is not an option. ‘I grew to realise that there is no one to blame’, as MacArthur says.

It is the difference between being a driver or a passenger in life. The driver has to be continuously aware of what is happening around her and make decisions as matters arise; the journey may be planned but any manner of things can happen unexpectedly during the trip. The driver will be able to recall many features of the route and probably retrace the journey without need for maps. A passenger, on the other hand, rarely can recall the route or the journey; he has passed the responsibility for the trip to another.

I learnt in the US to accept that we have choice at any moment and that it is our responsibility what choices we make, even or especially if it is just carrying on as is. Not making a decision is still making a decision. And when we make decisions to do things (however big or small), we are taking control of our life. Give up or not accept that freedom of choice or personal