Alchemy: From Small Ideas to Big Decisions

I never was much of a reader in high school. Other than assigned reading for English classes, there was little to no reading for pleasure or reason for me to believe that books could provide value. The only two books that I remember enjoying and actually reading in high school (rather than using spark notes to pretend like I read) were Into the Wild and Catch 22 . It never occurred to me that reading could have much practical value other than getting me a higher GPA or supplying modest amounts of entertainment.

In college my mindset on reading changed. I made a friend named Wen from Cameroon. He moved to America when he was 10. He talked about how much reading had changed his life. The energy he said it with was palpable. It was so matter of fact, as if everyone knew that reading changes your life. Talking with Wen about reading made me want to reconsider my bias.

It took until sophomore year for the allure of reading to properly capture me. I explored a few books my freshman year but rejected any serious introspection. I was too self absorbed and insecure. By sophomore year things changed. I learned to use my college’s interlibrary loan system. This meant I had access to every book in the Florida public university system. If our library didn’t have it, surely one of the other 12 public universities did. I could borrow books from UF, FSU, USF and many others for no money at all and have them sent to me for months at a time. How cool! I began checking out books like crazy and exposing myself to new ideas I had never before encountered. In that period two books changed my mindset about how I was living my life and how I might want to reconsider.

One book was Excellent Sheep by William Deresiewicz. He argued the importance of a true liberal arts education and eschewed the hoop-jumping that young adults go through to get to various prestigious colleges and careers. He warned against chasing ambitions blindly without ever looking around and asking yourself if this is the game you want to be playing in the first place. The book urged students to use college as a time for self-discovery of their true values and own measures of success, not the ones assigned to them by parents and society. This book made me feel an urge to create my own educational experience in college. One where I would seek out classic works of literature that weren’t assigned to me in college or high school. It provided me with the agency and belief that I was the architect of my own life. I was free to choose what values I wanted to live by and what truths I wanted to pursue. The feeling was both riveting and terrifying.

The other book that had an outsized impact on the trajectory of my life was The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead by Charles Murray. It was a pithy book with advice from someone who had spent a lifetime in both corporate and academic settings and wanted to impress lessons he found to be important to the newest generation of workers graduating college. Although seemingly unremarkable, there was one piece of advice that fascinated me as I read it. He encouraged college students to work somewhere completely new over the summer-an unfamiliar state where you knew nobody and would be outside your normal cohort of peers. He claimed the virtues of working a service job as opposed to some unpaid internship were twofold: The first was a lifelong appreciation for service workers that cannot be obtained until you work as one. The second was contact with people from all walks of life and social classes. Working such a job forced you to interact with people from different backgrounds and social classes in ways that internships would not. He offered waiting tables in Montana or helping bait hooks in Minnesota as examples, claiming there was an array of jobs available during the summer and all you had to do was look for them. He suggested applying for them in the winter to fill the summer slots. His book planted a seed in my mind that I just HAD to go out west and experience something new rather than going home for the summer. 

Winter of my sophomore year I began my search and ended up looking in a variety of places. At first, my limited imagination thought I had to work at a summer camp for some odd reason. It didn’t take long for me to realize I didn’t have experience working with kids or much of a desire to. Eventually I stumbled upon a website called coolworks. It was exactly what I was looking for-a seasonal job database that allowed you sort job options by season and state. I picked three areas to apply to, all of which were located in states I had never been to and knew little about. One was at a cabin in the backwoods of Minnesota’s boundary waters, a remote area near the Canadian border and mostly out of phone reception. It’s level of remoteness both intrigued and scared me. One was at a family-owned grocery store near the Tetons in Wyoming. At the time I had never heard of the Tetons or even knew which state they were in. After a quick google search I learned that it was close to Yellowstone and reasoned that it must be pretty neat. The last one was to a job at a state park in Wisconsin.

After putting together applications and applying, it became pretty clear that the job in the Tetons was the best option. They had employee housing available and a meal plan included for only 300$ a month (insanely cheap for Jackson Hole) and could accommodate the dates I wanted to work. After a few calls it was decided that I would work there from May 15-August 15th, aka my entire summer break minus a week or so on either side. I was ecstatic and brimming with curiosity at what living out west would be like.

I decided to break up the road trip on the way out. Rather than trying to tackle the entire 34 hour drive in some ridiculous sleep-deprived push, I would break it up into 5-6 days with stops. I scheduled stops in Atlanta to crash with my sister, St. Louis, Kansas to see an old high school friend, and Fort Collins before my final push to Wyoming. Until that trip I had done lots of traveling by plane but not by car. For the first time in my life I had a proper appreciation for just how huge and diverse the USA is. It made me eager to do more road trips and curious as to what I had been missing out on in preferring travel by plane. As I pulled into Wyoming on that final day it was snowing. Snow on the second week of May?! My Florida brain couldn’t comprehend. 

Once I arrived to the tiny town of Moose where I was to spend my summer, I’ll never forget how amazed I was at first sight of the Tetons. They certainly earned the title of grand. They sat there snow capped and majestic in all of their glory. My new home sat perfectly east of them to where the sun set over them everyday as if to say goodnight to our tiny town. They evoked feelings I had never felt before and still am trying to make sense of today.