Driving along 240 south from Taos (or north from Taos, given your fancy) gives truth to the sentiment printed on many of the passing license plates. Not the bit about chile peppers, the part at the bottom of the plate. Driving back to Española from Taos, I watched mountains rolling in the distance, and gaped at the sheer cliffs looming over the road. Taking a curve on an incline I noticed some sightseers and glanced up into the rear view trying to figure out what they were looking at. Running alongside us all along was the Rio Grande gorge, a deep canyon carved by one of the most important rivers in the South West, one that defines the border between Mexico and the US and permits agriculture in this arid region.
The setting sun’s red rays lit the gorge’s rim on fire and I stared agog. It was easily one of the most beautiful places under such striking circumstances I’d ever seen, until I we rounded the road’s arc and returned to its edge, descending from the highlands until we raced alongside the river’s rushing waters. But I did stare into the mirror too long, and, if my copilot hadn’t already made it clear in Colorado how upsetting my mountain driving was, careering toward a cliff edge through the oncoming lane of traffic whilst admiring the scenery presented another (taken) opportunity.
If I recall correctly, it was an episode of The Allusionist that introduced me to the underused and unexpected verbal definition of career.
Grape stomping in a gorgeous place forever
We’ve been picking lots of grapes. We’ve been raking more fallen apples than anything, probably, but we’ve been picking lots of grapes because harvest time for them, the more profitable crop, has come. Some grapes are destined for the table, but most are fated fungal food: prewine. This takes a lot of processing. On a family farm, a lot of manual — and pedal — processing.
The ingenuity of farmers should never be underestimated. A broken mesh shelf had been repurposed for destemming. It worked so well. Running a bunch of grapes over the metal grid several times left mere stems. Once we had about 20 gallons of grapes, we scrubbed our feet, and hopped into the tub, stomping and squishing the grapes, their juices sloshing about our shins and knees, rinds sticking between our toes. Our first time in we made a ball of it, turning on some music and dancing together in the grapes. Our third time around, so many bees had whiffed the saccharine notes on the wind that my partner stomped alone while I ran around the tub chasing them away to avoid any harm coming to my partner the bees the wine, tbh (a crushed bee would impart potentially off-flavors!)
Now the must rests. I check on it occasionally, watching the rising foam from the yeasts busy digesting the sugars. I don’t agree with all of my hosts' fermentation approaches, but part of what drew me to this place was for exposure to others' methods. It’s more an art than a science.
Leet hax
I’ve spent the last decade of my life in software development. I love coding up solutions to problems. I don’t really care to code for coding’s sake, however. That sounds like a carpenter not really giving a shit about tables, but just really liking to swing a hammer. No, that’s a weak analogy. Swinging a hammer is undeniably fun, whereas typing is no fun at all. But nobody pays you to code, anyway, they pay you to solve problems (that they assume are most efficiently solved with code).
So the question of why I’ve thrown it all away to cut, stem and stomp grapes probably bubbles up like CO2 from a happy wine culture. I don’t think I have. Perhaps we’re at a difference of words. Resting in a hammock on the Rio Vallecitos during a weekend off, I spent time considering this, a train of thought continued from my introduction to the verb career back in Wyoming at the beginning of the month.
In retrospect
What is one’s career? My professional life has not always been leveraging my skills in software development. Does that mean I changed careers? If someone moves from a programmer role to a product manager role or perhaps founds a software startup as acting CEO, did they change careers? Is a career merely a role? Is it a domain? I have jumped from government to private industry in the same role. From finance to security. I spent several years doing event planning before I became a software developer more strictly. I say strictly since I spun up bespoke databases and marketing websites to facilitate some of this logistical work. And before event planning I was doing software development full time for a community. So when did my current career, or most recent if it has indeed stopped, start? Have I just been pulsing forward in an uncontrollable fashion: careering my entire adult life? Can I even accurately describe my career yet?
How can a man write his life unless he is virtually certain of the hour of his death?
— Thomas Pynchon
In that hammock, whence I answered to none (save, I suppose, the kind, if gently eccentric, European expat hosting us), in a brilliant cynical flash did the answer occur to me. My career is not mine. It is not something I possess. It is a record, a history, to be presented in whatever order or under whatever degree of censorship one sees fit to present the proper narrative, of who has owned you. The State. The Company. The shareholders.
I related this idea to my partner and they were suitably appalled. Who wants a career, who wants to have been owned, or even to flaunt it? This is a very appropriate if superficial interpretation of the statement. But then one’s mind wanders to homebrewing…
Why would this not be part of my career under such a definition? My hosts give me food and internet and shelter and a washing machine and a shower and a real toilet not one of those bags filled with enzymes you have to squat over behind a rock screaming in simultaneous triumph and shame. That’s how every paychecked job was compensating me, just by a single degree of removal through the abstraction of currency.
Part of the reason I wanted to go on a long journey again was to properly cleanse myself of the rhythms that had informed my life before. Would I continue to hack and code if I didn’t have the opportunity, or even incentive, to sit at my computer all day? What if I could eat grapes in the shadows of the mountains and their clouds all day: would I still want to make video games? Would I worry about the stock market if I were a socializer in a hostel, mixing drinks and connecting people to each other?
People frequently only find their proper métier towards the end of their lives.
— Mikhail Bulgakov
Recently I went to Meow Wolf in Santa Fe and visited the House of Eternal Recurrence. The Eternal Recurrence part is an idea from Nietzsche, simplified to: if you learned you had to live out your life, every single moment of it, repeatedly, indefinitely, would you be happy continuing with such? Another formulation of the same idea, attributed to Confucius: “We have two lives. The second begins when we realize we had only one all along.” I can’t say I haven’t loved my life, my career, I can only say that it’s not big enough, that there’s so much world out there, I don’t know how I can possibly decide and commit to one sort of day/week/month/year for my entire life. Perhaps I’ve only ever lived that one day my entire life, but to choose it, consciously, over a universe of potential, seems arrogant.
The river washes dumb thoughts away
I didn’t waste too much time on such stupidity, fortunately. I was too invested in the comings and goings of birds, the dramatic lives of fluvial crayfish, and the intimidatingly furrowed bark of the cottonwoods sheltering me from the sun.
Did the river also teach this secret: that time does not exist?
— Hermann Hesse
