Vagabond Life - Or How Home Became Base Camp
I laughed. But it might have been the most insightful reflection of my way of life. I had to guess at what "mad props" might be, but they seemed to be cool.
She wasn't wrong. For years, my life was organized around a bright green North Face Base Camp Duffel bag — large, indestructible, perpetually half-packed. Not a suitcase, which implies some civilized notion of departure and return. A duffel. The kind of bag that says: I have made peace with this. While everyone around me traveled with their TravelPro's, Away, Tumi and Rimowa bags, my life fit in a cavernous bag more suited for the Inca Trail. Cinched down, it usually fit in the overhead, and with decently comfortable backpack straps I was hands free.
The rhythm went something like this. Six o'clock Tuesday mornings, I'd pull out of Door County in the dark, the bay still flat and black through the trees, and point the car south toward Chicago. Four hours of interstates. Milwaukee at 9AM. Office by ten. Then: four compressed days of meetings, flights to somewhere else, hotel check-ins, hotel checkouts, expense reports compiled in airport terminals. Friday evening, the long exhale of the drive back north — 250 miles of Wisconsin unwinding beneath me — arriving just in time, if I was lucky, for a beer at the brewery with my local friends and maybe a fish fry.
Saturday felt like recovery. Sunday felt like bracing. Monday was remote, but from the comfort of my garage-loft office.
And then Tuesday again.
Door County was always where I was from, in the deepest sense — six generations of my family have roots in this peninsula. The lake and bay. The orchards. The particular winter light when the sun does not climb high in the sky. But for a long time, it was less a place I lived in than a place I returned to. There's a difference. I felt it every time I crossed the county line, back into that familiar Dolomite geography and noticed how my shoulders dropped, how my breathing changed — and then noticed, too, that the pull of work, never let me sink into the comfort of the place I held so very dearly.
My Chicago life wasn't all hardship. Friends, family, endless choice in restaurants, the electric hum of a city that never fully stops. I'm not complaining about any of it. But there was a low-grade impermanence to that chapter of my life — a sense of living between things rather than in anything. Relationships with colleagues that were genuine but always scheduled. Hotel rooms that all begin to look alike. The particular loneliness of evenings in a rental house in Downers Grove.
Vagabond life. I wore it because I had to. I was good at it.
Someone suggested once that "home" wasn't quite the right word for what Door County was to me during those years. "Base camp" was the better word.
I've been thinking about that ever since.
There's something honest in the distinction. A base camp is not where you live — it's where you return to. It is safety. It's the place that makes the expeditions possible: the anchor, the resupply point, the tent you trust will be there when you come back down the mountain. Climbers don't so much stay at base camp as orient from it. They leave it, and it holds them while they're gone.
For a long time, that's what Door County was. My base camp. The place that made the vagabond life bearable, because it meant the vagabond life wasn't everything — there was something to return to, something that waited.
I'm not sure whether that's poignant or pragmatic. Probably both.
I'm sixteen months into retirement now, and I am packing for another trip. The green Base Camp duffel isn't going this time. It's smaller sibling is. I'm less a vagabond now than before, but I'm still leaving the peninsula regularly. Just on my own terms rather than the demands of a job I was falling out of love with.
But base camp is becoming home now. Slowly, the way real things do. I have new routines and rhythms. I am making friends. I will never stop traveling and exploring, but maybe for the first time in a while, I'm not in a hurry to leave.
Do you have a base camp? A place that holds you while you're away? Reach out via my Social Media Links and let me know.
