Rooted and Restless: Four Months Into Life After My Tech Career

The award for the most surreal experience in the last two weeks goes to the meeting I had with my replacement at my previous company. I left on good terms and I wanted to make sure the transition was as smooth as possible once they hired someone, so I had offered to provide some support and help with on-boarding. My previous title was Software Architect, and over my 10 years at the company I had overseen a lot of change and led some large shifts in the system architecture. What’s strange though, is that over the three and a half months I had been gone, I had barely given any of it any thought. Ten years of work, countless hours and effort that went into building that system, and as soon as I stepped away, it was as if it had never existed in my mind. The day before the meeting, I logged on and looked over an email I had sent to the team before I left with a list of recommendations. Reading that was like reading something written by someone else entirely. That person was an insider, had a sense of ownership and responsibility for this system. He still had skin in the game.The person now, preparing for this meeting, was an outsider. I had some knowledge, but no longer any responsibility or investment. This thing that I had put so much of my energy into now belonged to someone else. It definitely came with some mixed emotions, but it was also nice to make a sort of formal handoff, to cut ties officially. The hour long meeting over Zoom went well, and I think the system and team are in good hands. After we finished the meeting, I closed the laptop, went outside, and weeded the strawberry patch.

The rest of my time the last two weeks has been a mix of time spent at home in the garden and working on small projects around the house, volunteering, and some outdoor adventure with Jocelyn and Asha. The perfect Pacific Northwest Springtime weather has continued. Dry, warm, with cool evenings and ample sunshine. The days are getting longer, but the nights are still cool. Everything is green, the Spring flowers are in full bloom. It’s a beautiful time of year here. Here’s a look at the last couple of weeks as my post tech career journey continues.

Volunteering

I got out for three volunteer events with Bark over these last two weeks.

The first was a Groundtruthing 101 training where I learned a bit about the history of the Forest Service, forest regulations, and Mt. Hood National Forest specifically. Bark’s grountruthing program sends staff and volunteers out into the forest to survey proposed timber sales and collect data to assess the accuracy of the Forest Service’s reports and to look for rare or threatened species that the proposed logging could impact. I’ve been on a number of groundtruthing outings already, but had never been to one of the formal trainings, so it was nice to get more of the legal and theoretical underpinnings of the work.

Next, I went out for a beaver habitat survey that took us to the far Southern end of the Mt. Hood National Forest. Bark’s beaver program seeks to find suitable areas to re-introduce beavers into the greater Mt. Hood ecosystem to help with habitat restoration and fire resilience. We headed out on a sunny Wednesday morning with a diverse group of folks ranging from university students to retirees. We spent the day wandering in wetlands where we found some sign of past beaver activity including an old dam and a very promising area for putting in beaver dam analogs in the future to back up a stream to create some suitable habitat to re-introduce a beaver family.

Finally, I went out for my third time to help with the Parrot Creek Restoration Project, a collaboration between Bark and the Cultural Ecology Program at Parrott Creek to restore an 80-acre site in Clackamas County. We spent the morning and early afternoon clearing Himalayan Blackberry, an aggressive invasive species here in the Pacific Northwest, to free the lone native Oregon White Oak on the property along with some Hazelnuts surrounding it. While we worked, I had a lovely conversation with one of Parrot Creek’s newly hired coordinators working to bring native communities to the land there to reclaim their cultural practices. We talked about human relations to the land and how we can build a new culture of care and stewardship based on indigenous knowledge from cultures around the world, including my own ancestral Celtic one. They are doing amazing work here to heal both the land and people, and I’m honored to be able to be a part of it.

Home and Garden

In our home garden, I worked on our own habitat restoration and invasive plant removal project on our little 1/4 acre slice of the world. A couple years ago we started the Backyard Habitat Certification process. We had someone come out and evaluate our yard and garden based on criteria around native plant concentrations, invasive plant presence, and general suitability of habitat for birds, mammals, and insects. At the time, we were close as we have a fair amount of native plants that we’ve added over the years, but we did have a little too much invasive plant presence, particularly English Ivy and Himalayan Blackberry. We’ve gotten rid of most of the Blackberry, but there was still some Ivy in one corner that I spent a day pulling and digging up. Hopefully it’s finally gone and we can get that certification sometime in the next few months!

A few other things I did around here in the last two weeks:

• Painted the ceiling in the bathroom. We started a bathroom renovation last year by replacing the tub, tile, and floor. I’m slowly working on finishing up the painting.
• Continuing to do the majority of the shopping and cooking. Some highlights were a delicious miso ramen soup with fresh asparagus from the garden and a honey-herb glazed salmon dish.

White River Camping

We got out for our first camping trip with Jocelyn, Asha, and I since we returned from our Baja trip in February. We went to one of our favorite places on the East side of Mt. Hood in the White River Wildlife Refuge. It was at a spot that I discovered some years back while out there deer hunting and had marked as a potential camp spot and it did not dissappoint. The Ponderosa Pine and White Oak Savannah in this area are some of my favorite landscapes in Oregon. Something about those gnarly old trees, the open spaces with the snow capped Cascade volcanoes in the distance, and the wide array of wildlife, from turkeys to lizards, found there appeals to me on a deep level. We had our own private waterfall to frolic in, a bounty of Miner’s Lettuce we added to our taco dinner one night, and even a solitary Morel. We enjoyed beautiful sunsets, each other’s company, and getting back into the simple pleasures that even a few days back on the road brings. Amazingly, Asha seemed to settle right back into the life of an adventure cat as well, even after some weeks away.

As the days and weeks go by in this new life, I sometimes start to feel like I’m losing the plot a little bit, like things are a bit aimless. I’m working on sitting with this feeling as I think it’s perfectly natural given the magnitude of the change and the relative recentness of it. However, upon reflection, I did a lot in these last two weeks, and in general it’s in line with how I wanted to be spending my time. I’m contributing to something larger than myself, building community in the real world and nurturing relationships, and spending much of my time outside in nature.

Yet, the mix of activities these last two weeks between adventure and domesticity also has me thinking about the tension between the desire for rootedness and for wandering. I found myself day dreaming while pulling ivy of long term travel, perhaps the Pan-American Highway or a long distance hike like the PCT. Other days, I dream of really rooting down, maybe on a farm, or just here and making this garden produce as much as it can, nurturing my relationships here, and enjoying the bounty of beautiful landscapes the Pacific Northwest has to offer. Now that I have the freedom to actually pursue either of these paths, the contrast becomes even more stark. I don’t have any answers yet, but this tension and how I manage to resolve it, will undoubtedly shape my path ahead.