🛶 Monday Morning Microadventure

Letter 169: My front-row seat for turtle sex

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Aloha fellow learn-it-all 👋

Greetings from Northern Michigan!

Goody goody gumdrops, have I got a story to tell y’all (no I’m not from the south but it’s fun to say y’all).

Now, let’s dive into letter 169 from a learn-it-all. Enjoy!

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There are many beautiful summer sights in northern Michigan; fields of cherry trees, slow long sunsets, bald eagles flying overhead, and foot-long turtles having sex…

Yesterday, I kayaked across Walloon Lake in northern Michigan.

It was a Monday morning and I decided to go on a microadventure to energize myself. I took out my dad’s orange kayak for the first time and paddled across Walloon Lake to the stunning swampy creek full of lily pads. It was serene and peaceful seeing logs full of quarter-sized painted turtles tanning and blue herons stalking them for lunch. That was until I paddled out to the mouth of the lake to see splashing on what looked like a rock. I thought maybe it was a sea otter. As I approached I got even more confused about what I was looking at. 

As I saw claws and spikes of a large dark green animal, I kept my distance for safety concerns and wondered, “Did someone release their pet alligator into the lake?”

Then I saw the heads and these were massive turtles. I googled on my phone whether turtles had sex and the results came back that they do for up to 8 hours(!). It looked like they were drowning each other. My microadventure took quite the turn of events!

Adventure is understood differently by everyone. At a recent sailing party, some people from my hometown remarked to me:

“Miss World Traveler has returned!”

“Your spirit of adventure is out of this world!”

“The wanderlust globetrotter is once again on familiar soil!"

It came across like the life I live is somehow exclusionary or that adventure is hard to attain. Myth-breaking time: it’s not. 

I enjoy going places on planes and trains and boats. I’ve learned to not mind hostels. But travel is not essential to adventure. They are not synonymous. While my idea of adventure typically involves travel and physical excursions, travel is only one way of experiencing adventure.

What even is adventure?

Let’s start with what adventure is not. It’s not expensive. It’s not exclusionary. It’s not dull. It’s typically not coerced. It’s not redundant.

Before I go into my personal meaning, let’s go by the book:

🔍Word to define

Adventure: an unusual and exciting, typically hazardous, experience or activity calling for enterprise and enthusiasm (according to Apple Dictionary)

According to Webster’s 1913: To try the chance; to take the risk.

Etymology

From Old French aventure (11c.) "chance, accident, occurrence, event, happening,"

The meaning developed through "risk; danger" (a trial of one's chances), c. 1300, and "perilous undertaking" (late 14c.) to "novel or exciting incident, remarkable occurrence in one's life" (1560s). Earlier it also meant "a wonder, a miracle; accounts of marvelous things" (13c.). (Source: etymology.com)

Adventure can mean so many different things to different people.

Here’s what it means to some of my favorite adventurers:

• Cheryl Strayed, author of the memoir Wild, defines it as "the act of putting yourself in unknown territory, whether it's physical or emotional." 

• Blake Boles
  , author of The Art of Self-Directed Learning teaches young adults how to lead a life of adventure. He defines: “‘life of adventure’ is one centered on novelty, uncertainty, and emotion. Travel, entrepreneurship, and the outdoors are classic flavors of adventure, but that’s not where it stops. A life of adventure is any life free from repetitious drudgery, replete with options, and rich with meaning, purpose, and connection.”

• Bill Bryson, author of A Walk in the Woods and A Short History of Nearly Everything, defines it as "the experience of doing something new and exciting, often involving some element of risk." 

• Liz Gilbert, author of Big Magic and Eat Pray Love, defines adventure as "the willingness to step outside your comfort zone and experience the unknown." She believes that adventure is essential for a happy and fulfilling life and that it can be found in everyday moments as well as grand travels.

Strayed and Boles’ definitions focus on the emotional aspect of adventure, while Bryson's definition focuses on the physical aspect. Gilbert's definition is more general and could be applied to any type of adventure.

In my opinion…

Adventure has an element of novelty and feels somewhat unfamiliar.

It pushes a personal boundary by exploring a new edge of uncertainty. This makes it implicitly risky but not always.

Adventure is subjective since the baseline of everyone’s comfort zone is different.

Sometimes adventurers get more comfortable that they become addicted to the rush of adrenaline that prompts aliveness. Amelia Earhart defined adventure as the feeling of being alive. She certainly felt alive before she went missing at age 39 in 1937 somewhere in the Pacific while trying to break the record for a circumnavigational flight of the globe. For Steve Irwin, it was hunting crocodiles until the day he was stung by a stingray. These are extreme examples of pushing a personal edge to the limit of survival.

Ultimately, what adventure means is up to the individual. Because of this, we each get to celebrate choosing our own adventures. In other words, what is a risk for me, might not be a risk for you. An adventure doesn’t need planning. But if it is comfortable to be spontaneous, and it’s your norm, then that’s not actually that unfamiliar to do. 

I value adventure and being outside, so it feels obvious to me to make nature a part of my life, but to folks who are afraid of planes or heights, blisters, poor sleep, or being seasick, that seems like an awful time that isn’t worth it. It’s not comfortable but I feel more alive after pursuing an adventure that might involve these discomforts. It makes me feel empowered and more capable. 

Though, there are other types of adventures that don’t need to involve being outdoors. For some people, it might be a physical challenge like running a marathon on a treadmill. For others, it might be an emotional challenge like moving to a new country. And for others, adventure might be entirely different.

Something that’s worth an experiment is going on a microadventure.

Alistair Humphreys defines a microadventure as “an adventure that is short, simple, local, cheap – yet still fun, exciting, challenging, refreshing and rewarding.” These are experiences that can happen in a day and are accessible to anyone.

Eight microadventures I’ve gone on this past week:

1. Joined a running club and finished dead last with shinsplints on a 5-mile route

2. Swam in open water with a buoy attached to me (instead of next to a buddy)

3. Swam my longest distance across a lake at 3000 yards in less than an hour

4. Being in the front row of an intimidating new sing-along yoga studio

5. Put red pepper flakes on my mushroom pizza

6. Met someone from the Internet for a date

7. Standup paddle boarded three miles for the first time across Deer Lake

8. Dipped in the lake amongst new friends at 1 AM post bonfire 

Eleven microadventures I am planning for this summer:

(also on my summer 2023 fucket list)

1. DIY sprint triathlon that I design on my own in Petoskey

2. An outdoor concert at a vineyard 

3. Enjoying a day of reading in a foreign genre of fiction: Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

4. Swimming 2.4 miles in a competition in Grand Rapids

5. Another 12-hour walk along Little Traverse Bay

6. Taking the ferry across Little Traverse Bay

7. Cooking a zucchini for the first time

8. Learning how to play a JJ Heller song on the piano 

9. Rigging a foreign dinghy sailboat and teaching friends to sail

10. Driving golf balls at a range for the first time

11. Going on a blind date that my late grandma’s best friend set me up on

Seven microadventures that I’ve witnessed from others around me:

1. A competitive athlete doing a solo half Ironman for fun

2. A mom taking her toddlers to the grocery store

3. A cook learning to speak up to her manager

4. A coworker retaking a fitness program despite her health condition 

5. A lover of peanut butter eating zero foods that contain nuts

6. An anxious twenty-something confidently parking a powerboat

7. A job searcher interviewing for a job despite feeling underqualified

What matters is that adventure is something that pushes a personal boundary by taking some level of risk allowing you to experience something new. It doesn’t need to be huge or life-threatening. It's a chance to learn and grow and to come back with a new perspective on life.

We live through adventures every single day that aren’t grand adventures but that’s only because it’s up to us to notice them. 

My Monday morning kayak wasn’t meant to be a grand adventure, but my curiosity to paddle up close to the suspicious splashing rocks and catching those footlong turtles getting it on turned my more mundane microadventure into a noteworthy and fascinating fun time. 

Maybe, just maybe, we can all inject a spirit of adventure into our daily lives that have been hiding from us without needing to be grand globetrotters.

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❓Four adventurous questions to answer

1. What is your definition of adventure?

2. What’s a microadventure that makes you just uncomfortable enough to also be exhilarating and more alive? 

3. What’s an obstacle that’d stand in the way of that experience? 

4. What plan do you need in order to make that microadventure happen?

❓Four adventurous questions to ask others

According to OKCupid Dating data patterns, answering the same to the following three questions will show how compatible you are with your partner:

1. Do you like horror movies?

2. Have you ever traveled around another country alone?

3. Wouldn't it be fun to chuck it all and go live on a sailboat?

All three questions are indicative of being an adventurous person. They’re more subtle, less awkward ways to ask if someone’s adventurous (found via listening to David Perell getting interviewed here).

4. “What’s new?”

The editor-in-chief of Outside Magazine Christopher Keyes likes to ask this while conversing with usual small talk to take it to a deeper level. (source)

📖 Reading

Three Recommended Books

1. Vagabonding by Rolf Potts

2. A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

3. Wild by Cheryl Strayed 

Four Recommended Articles

1. Outside Magazine’s Best Microadventures of 2023

2. Blake Boles
   on Teaching Adventure

3. Charlie Becker
   on Sandcastles and Wanderlust

4. Cissy Hu
   on Hard things, good people

🎬 Watchlist of Ten Movies

1. Up

2. The Sound of Music

3. Divergent

4. Into the Wild

5. Mulan

6. Secret Life of Walter Mitty

7. Devil Wears Prada

8. Soul Surfer

9. The Princess Bride

10. Adrift

📜🖋 Poetry Corner

I was rereading some parts of the book Vagabonding by Rolf Potts. He mentions Walt Whitman’s work numerous times throughout. Here is an excerpt from the ninth stanza of his Song of the Open Road:

Allons! whoever you are come travel with me!
Traveling with me you find what never tires.

The earth never tires,
The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first, Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first,
Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop’d,
I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.

Allons! we must not stop here,
However sweet these laid-up stores, however convenient this dwelling we cannot remain here,
However shelter’d this port and however calm these waters we must not anchor here,
However welcome the hospitality that surrounds us we are permitted to receive it but a little while.

You can read more about Whitman here. Four things I found surprising is that Whitman:

1. Self-published Leaves of Grass in 1855. I mistakenly thought self-publishing was something that Amazon started. Silly me.

2. Spent most of his professional life writing, rewriting, and expanding this collection until his death in 1892. Even once a text is published that doesn’t mean it’s final. You can have eight editions still after. The limit truly does not exist.

3. Had few fans of his work in America during his lifetime since he openly talked about the taboo topic of sex, presented himself as a rough-working man, and his innovative style choices. Yet, they came to his funeral once he was dead with over 1000 people to view his corpse.

4. Ditched the regular meter and rhyme patterns of those before him to be “influenced by the long cadences and rhetorical strategies of Biblical poetry.” (Source: The Longman Anthology of Poetry)

🌟Quotes to inspire

“We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment no matter what.”

— George Santayana (from: “The Philosophy of Travel” via Vagabonding)

"A ship in a harbour is safe but that is not what ships are built for"

— most commonly attributed to John A. Shedd, a prominent American author and businessman

📸 Photo of the Week

It was my first time making it to the annual Pink Party that one of our neighbors throws up here in Michigan. Here’s clan Vermet (minus my sister Stephanie). Thank you Mom for painting my toenails pink. That’s the first time for me since high school.

Eleven months of sobriety and still in the clear despite the “rosé all day”. Hallelujah for pink lemonade, so I wasn’t empty-handed.

🙏 Shoutouts

• To friends for their feedback including

  Michelle Varghoose
  ,
  Dan McGlinn
  ,
  Matt Yao
  , Alex Liebscher, and Foster friends Chris Angelis, Katarina Bohle Carbonell, Yashimi Adani, and Nicolas Forero

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I appreciate you reading this!

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Never stop learning 😁

Mahalo 🌺

Jen

PS - if you’re curious about what snapping turtles look like while having sex, I’ve uploaded it here.

PPS - in case you missed last week’s ⛵️Adventures Afloat: The Windswept Triumphs and Trials of Yacht Racing

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