I was tempted by the thought of simply dropping my resume into this page. That is, until I realized that I have never in my life written or possessed one. My “career path” has been sinuous, to say the least, and most of it composed of projects that did not involve employment applications. Those that did were mostly in my teenage years and include dunking frozen French-fries in very hot oil at a place called “Captain-D’s” while wearing a funny hat, driving a forklift and watering plants at a nursery, and assisting in everything from cage-cleaning to radiology and surgical procedures at a veterinary clinic.
Then came a long string of rather unfulfilling self-employment projects. “College Fund Landscape and Lawn Maintenance” was the first, and I cut a lot of grass, the proceeds from which mostly funded climbing excursions which I suppose were at least educational in their own way. After that came “Tip Top Tree Service” which involved the purchase of a dump truck and a chipper and some chain saws and ropes, and my first actual employees, an adventurous couple of years to say the least. Up next was my first attempt at partnership running a company called “Solar Concepts” which I started with a friend in the hope of building beautiful greenhouses out of cedar frame timbers and double pane glass. We ended up building a lot of retaining walls instead, and I got bored with that pretty quickly. Then things got considerably more interesting with the launch of “Syzygy Productions”, originally intended to produce a single documentary film in New Zealand and Nepal, but with that project castrated upon our arrival in Auckland by Sir Edmund Hillary’s second wife (long story) converted into a marketing communications company that took me all the way around the world shooting videos and taking photographs and building websites that for the most part helped companies I didn’t like sell products I didn’t think anyone needed in the first place. So I tried some import/export stuff with another company we named “Witt Wright Merchants”, and some print media publishing under one that we named “Town Crier Media” and on the thing went like that until finally I had just run into one too many existential dead ends.
It also didn’t help (or perhaps I should say it did help) that my brain decided to literally explode. A little part of it that is, in the form of an aneurism in its left temporal lobe, and I very nearly died. These experiences often shed light on the discrepancies between who we are and how we live, and this one combined with a few other supportive circumstances eventually resulted in my selling almost everything I owned, packing a backpack, flying to Cape Horn, and walking vaguely North through the Andes all by myself for about seven months. I include that detail only because all of the business interests were among the things I sold or gave away, and as such I experienced my first period of unemployment since becoming an adult.
Realizing upon my return to the United States that I would have to find some way to at least feed myself I decided to focus more on the question of how I spent my time experientially rather than what use of it might render the greatest fiscal return, and as such I began to row boats down rivers for a living, helping people catch fish on flies. I also began writing, and when the things I wrote started to get published people paid me for that as well. Neither of these activities pays much compared to what most Americans would call a career, but spending as much of my time as I do in the company of moving water more than makes up for that. Nowadays I run both an outfitting company/guide-service in Patagonia and a booking agency that helps people plan trips to other destinations for fishing around the world. I also continue to write, and to constantly dabble in other business projects that appear as always out of “left field”.