Author: Martian Joe

I have not left my mountain, save for hikes and snowshoe adventures, for several weeks now. Learning is still part of living here, and where to put a vehicle, and when, is not something I have fully learned. I have neighbors quite close to me for most of the year and I have been observing their patterns in an attempt to learn. Much is discovery. I was given much advice before moving here, but experience is teaching me much, of course, aimed by the wise advice received.

This mountain is like no other in my history. This snow, equally unique, but I am more than pleased to call this my home. Whilst inside, warm, safe, and dry, with high speed internet, normal electrical power, even though generated from the sun, running water, laundry, vacuuming, etc. inside… all is normal, I could be in lovely hand built cabin anywhere, in any subdivision in nearly any region of the west. All one need do, however, is take a single step outside, and the world changes.

The outside world is devoid of much – maintained roads, buildings, human noises, electrical lines, and even people. The dog and I walk daily, I wander this area with snowshoes, we drift, we explore. There is no one here. Elk, coyote, bobcats, hawks and ravens, but absolutely no one else is here. I am already on a mountain top the minute I step outside. The solar grid solidifies remoteness. The five foot drifts in the road proffer the same. I can turn in a full circle and see nothing but mountain ranges surrounding me. I could not be more pleased.

When I first landed here last August I met many folks and the reaction was always the same. The huge, surprised eyes, the pull back, the exclamation, the examination. Was I really going to spend the winter out here? Did I know what it was like? Did I realize no one else would be here? Yes, yes, and yes, thank you very much. Nothing to do with our newly masked nation, it was a dream to return to the rurality from childhood, sans the bad stuff. I will survive the winter. Spirits are high, even with the wind down from work, perhaps because of. Days are less relevant, the dog reminds me twice daily what time it is, and thusly, in the interim, I unwind, explore more of this snowing mountain range, and just be.

I hope all is well with you, wherever you are.

Had company over the weekend. You surely could hear them coming, and wow, what a ride! Super nice folks, and I’ve had fresh omelets daily since they left!

Moon Bug looked a bit like a toy, sitting next to this orange monster.

One of my readers sent me a list of 40 English words for snow (thank you). One of these new words I have seen precipitate out here a few times thus far. Today, is new word day, potentially.

Graupel: looks a lot like sleet or small hailstones, but the small balls are made of snow, not ice, and they are white. They almost look like tiny Styrofoam pellets.

This form of precipitation starts as snowflakes, then those snowflakes grow larger and larger as supercooled water funnels up into the clouds and bonds to the flakes. You can tell the difference between graupel and hail or sleet by picking up the tiny snowballs — if they’re soft and easy to crush, it’s graupel. In fact, graupel is often referred to as “soft hail.” It often bounces and breaks apart once it hits the ground.

Not every story can be told in a timely fashion. Some must complete themselves and only then can they be revealed. This ruse began about thirteen years ago, working in a dying programming language and desperate to hop my career into another. I was managing a software division at the time, and preferred to go back into coding. Too much time, energy, and resources were spent (it seemed), so I was struggling learning a new language whilst still performing adequately at work.

The solution? For the first time ever, I lied on my resume, and lied in interviews, claiming to be knowledgeable in a language I knew little about. I shopped my resume, went to many interviews, picking up key words along the way. I finally landed a job at a small Boulder branch of a seemingly unsuccessful company. Not only was I hired to perform in this new language, I was hired to train the existing staff, who were also converting to the new language. What could go wrong?

How do you train staff in a language that you don’t know? All I could do was turn the tables; for lesson one, we introduced ourselves, our strengths, etc. and what projects we were about to embark upon. I put the onus on my students to tell me what they would like to learn, what they wanted to cover, what they thought was helpful. Every day, we made an agenda for the following day’s training session. Every night I would go home and work upon their lessons, teaching myself, and writing sample code, for what I was going to teach my students the next day.

Some nights I didn’t sleep at all. Some nights I only worked until midnight, but every morning, I would walk into the office with two thoughts in my head: 1. today is the day they find out I’m a fraud and 2. at least I know enough now to get a job elsewhere. This pattern repeated, every week day, for several months. (They never did find out, and sorry, Julie, that’s why our first project was such a mess.)

At three months in, I was sent to other offices to start training others on Design Patterns (again, learned only in the middle of the night). At my six month anniversary, I got promoted to the framework team to help design software for the company’s developers, nation wide. Several teams, jobs and titles later, I retired from this company earlier in the week. Thirteen years older (and hopefully wiser), I still say it was a great ride, a scary jumping off point, but it all worked out in my favor, even though I am still saying that lying isn’t good.

Career success, however, I can readily deem more valuable than telling a company a fib or two.

Today’s topic is a bit more personal and introspective. Feel free to scroll for the pictures and move about your day. If you are staying, however, a new, large, exciting, and unknown chapter is unfolding before me. Life is changing as it never has before. I officially retire from full time, normal societal employment today. No more boss, no more schedule, no more IT based career for this man.

I grew up poor, dirt poor. My first manual labor job left me sitting in a field crying at eight years old, not wanting to do such things. Left alone, a half mile from the house, told not to return until the job was done. (For some reason, eight was the magical year we children were old enough to start buying our own clothes and shoes.) When you top this off with a mother that secretly stole her children’s earnings? There is a darkness there we shall leave for her own judge and jury.

It has been a repetition of working, scrapping and fighting to make ends meet and build security. As children we gathered the firewood, chopped and stacked it, weeded the garden, harvested the garden, did the laundry, the dishes and the yard work. The word ‘allowance’ was a pipe dream for television kids. I left for college with a pat on the back from my father, who placed a twenty dollar bill in my hand; not enough for gas to get to campus. With such a powerful send off, and already laden with a student loan for semester one, I was quite aware just how on my own I was long before my young mind hit campus.

I quit college after two financially draining years. I am an autodidact and managed to carve out a small slice of life for myself. I borrowed books I could not afford to buy. I fixed computers for people so that I could also use them, I took any job that let me learn. I eventually became a leader in my niche of the software field. It took much sacrifice. It took much time, often stuck, building things childhood should have provided as a basis for life – security of spirit, safety to trust oneself, optimism to dream, learning to invest, using your wealth to grow your portfolio, be it financial, educational or emotional. Teaching yourself the simplest of life skills (things others readily knew) in regards to happiness, freedom to express, how to be your authentic self. Skills that would have been proffered by any parent of merit.

I no longer need to work for anyone. I have no heirs to leave a package for, so I shall unwind from this relentless, life sucking pursuit to achieve, ‘make it’, succeed, insert your own term here. There is nothing to prove on my resume. There is nothing to prove to long disappeared parents. There is nothing to prove to society. There is nothing to prove to myself…. I can just…. be.

It is freedom I know little of. Cannot yet grasp the power of. For a man who has worked seasonally since eight years old, for the family since the same, for an employer since fifteen, and sacrificing pleasures for security for the forty years since?

It will take some time. Some adjusting. Some realizing that all is really okay. The struggle, the ignorance, the deception and the abuse that drove the child to push so hard into manhood? He can relax now. All is well. All is provided for. He can explore life on this fabulous mountain, life with his newly freed being, and provide himself the childhood never allowed.

I’m not going to start quoting the Don Henley song that just popped into my head (you’re welcome), but it is in fact time to learn to be still. I intended an outing yesterday, as in out of the park. I have teas, books and an electronic gadget stocked up and waiting for me in the UPS bin. Nothing urgent, just pleasures and learning items for the long, interesting, snow filled winter that is upon me. Today makes three weeks since I’ve seen a human; a spell I did not wish to break, but the idea of more fresh eggs, whilst off the mountain, also felt enticing.

Yesterday was a blistery, wind filled day in which snow migrated from dawn til dusk. I chose to sit still, watch the weather, wait and let nature do its thing from west mostly, the winds rearranged much of the snow that had landed, and been relocated, in the days prior. It was a good day out here, even with the wind. I could not alter it, nor was it wise to fight with nature, so let it be, and just… be.

This morning, all was settled, my prior tracks filled and gone, but a quiet weather day for travel presented itself. Moon bug did not fair well with all the drifts. She got deeply, deeply buried in the piles in front of the Ortega cabin. I had to dig out around her, down three feet and fully beneath her, building a ramp to back out of the hole; if you break the pack, as I did, you are quite literally sunk.

Ninety minutes of digging, and she humbly returned me to the homestead, less than 25% through the outing. I am unsure if the packing of the trail is wise. There are so many drifts that, if you lose the pack as did I? You bottom out in the snow-that-won’t-bond. On my next attempt, I will stay local, and try for deeper still drifts that have not yet been packed. I need to learn if Moon Bug is in fact the winter machine for this lifestyle. She tried, but this snow is an enigma still, and there is much learning to do. Been in snow my whole adult life. This… we need a new word for whatever this stuff is.