Aspen or Bust: The Eleventh Hour

Four days out. Zero percent packed. One hundred percent optimistic.

The time is nigh to start packing for our three-week run into our first leg of the Dinosaur Diamond excursion. I have known this day was coming since March. April too. Also May. And yet here I sit, staring at a truck bed that looks less like a staging area for a serious expedition and more like the aftermath of a yard sale that nobody bought anything from.

This is going to be a full camp. That means I’m bringing everything–stove, kitchen sink and tables–lots of tables. Wait, the stove broke last summer. I don’t own a stove. With that much crap in the back of the truck, being organized is not a preference. It is a survival strategy, and I am not even close to being organized. I barely know how to get to the campground we have booked.

“Difficult.” That is, in fact, the actual name of the campground. Difficult. I did not choose it for the metaphor — but that is how I am using it.

Aspen is the destination for the first leg of this journey. The campground that will receive us sits south of town, perched in the shadow of the Elk Mountains. To be fair, naming a campsite “Difficult” in a town that sits at the base of Independence Pass is a particular kind of honest that I respect. The nineteenth century miners who weathered that area did not mince their words. I’m looking forward to learning more about them.

Now the truck.

All winter long, my camping gear has been stored in the truck bed under a tonneau cover, which is a polite way of saying that everything that will be instrumental in my day-to day existence by the end of the week has been marinating in its own filth since October. There are layers out there. Archaeological layers. The condition of the truck is, well, dusty. As I write, layers of dust are covering every corner of the truck bed and all my camping gear along with it.

Hugo, for his part, has already conducted his own pre-trip inspection. He walked to the driver’s side door, hopped up to his seat, and looked at me. This is his way of saying he is ready, and I am the problem. He is not wrong. He is never wrong about this particular thing.

I told him we had four days. He blinked slowly and looked forward through the filthy windshield–again stating with a finality that he was ready.

Here is the thing about procrastination that I have come to understand in my six decades on this earth: it is not laziness. Laziness is simple and honest. Procrastination is something more complicated. It is the paralysis that comes from caring too much, from wanting the thing to go right so badly that no starting point feels right — like the moment it could all go wrong. Every trip I have ever taken has started with this exact feeling — the mountain of logistics looming larger than any mountain I was actually going to climb.

And then, reliably, I start. I pull one thing out of the truck bed. Then another. Then the headlamp falls on the ground, and I pick it up, and somehow thirty minutes later the tonneau cover is off and the staging has begun and the momentum is real. That is always how it goes. The hardest part is the first reach into the mess.

We are going. That part is not in question. In four days, this truck is pulling out of Kemmerer headed south and east toward the Colorado high country, toward the first of what will be many legs of the Dinosaur Diamond research. Hugo will have his head out the window as we hit the highway. The new stove will be in the truck bed alongside my many tables, my journals, and my future realizations of whatever I forgot until the moment I need it.

The mistakes are going to happen. What I need to remember is that I can solve them when they do.

Updates to follow. Possibly from inside the truck bed.

Story Arc

• Establish scene: Truck is a mess, I have zero motivation.
• Inciting incident: I have four days until departure – I have successfully procrastinated till the eleventh hour again.
• Conflict: I have no doubt there will be one.
• Climax: I prevail and get the damn truck packed, and me and Hugo are ready to hit the road.
• Resolution: We pull away and start our adventure

This seems like an appropriate destination for the first leg of the first trip of the season. At this point, nothing about this seem easy and everything seems more like a mountainous chore.