(This reflection is a bit long, so be forewarned)
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
—Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau’s “Walden: Or, Life in the Woods” is an American classic, both because it is wonderfully rendered and because it has been the subject of considerable second-guessing and mockery, as that is what we do in America. The decision to live solitarily is not to be undertaken lightly, but Thoreau did it and created a fine memoir. Many years ago, a dear friend and mentor gifted me another work of New England isolation living called “The Outermost House”, which tells of a man’s two years in a cottage on an isolated portion of Cape Cod.
The concept of striking off on one’s own has always had an appeal, but there has never been a good time to do it. For the longest time, this vision, this dream, has remained a secret, as the potential for misinterpretation attaching to one member of a committed partnership declaring a desire to separate from the other for a period is not generally considered helpful. The cat leapt out of the bag one day recently when in discussing my oft stated desire to “go somewhere for a month or so, and just blend in, somewhere like a little French village”, my inamorata indicated that she was not terribly interested in the concept. A week, sure, but then she’d want to explore, to move on. Exploring and moving on was NOT what I was looking for, and she understood it. “Maybe you should consider going by yourself?” she offered.
I was flummoxed. Is this done? Would I be permitted? Would I suffer the slings and arrows of the disdain of her friends, our friends, and my friends for the incredibly selfish act of spending a month away? I was not prepared for her serenity and acceptance of this itch of mine, but I should not have been surprised. She made it clear that she fully supported my desire, and so I began to cogitate.
Where?
The approach of the end of one’s working life provides ample opportunity to daydream, and much of the past two weeks has been spent in zooming in on little hamlets in the U.K, Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Scandinavia, Mexico, South America, the Baltics, and the Balkans, all of which seemed wonderful and very difficult to differentiate. No real winner popped out, and I realized that I could spend months on this decision if I didn’t just pick one of these amazing places and get it on the calendar.
So that’s what I did. But first a bit on the process.
I was never going to go somewhere by myself to BE by myself, which is what the authors above set out to do. My trip has always been ME integrating into some other environment for a bit, getting familiar and comfortable with somewhere, maybe to the point where I make a few friends, definitely to the point where I get known in a few coffeeshops and restaurants.
The first decision was when to go. Knowing that late May-September here in the People’s State of Maryland’s Autonomous Agricultural Cooperative (also known as the Eastern Shore) features some of America’s best weather and is a time of year I have grown to love, pretty much blocked that time out. Mid November through early January is also out, as my duties as “Mr. Christmas” keep me very busy then. This left January to May and the fall months as candidates for this trip. And because the prospect of this trip was so incredibly attractive, the thought of putting it off until fall of 2026 (I’d already ruled out another big trip this year) did not thrill me. So I settled on a spring of 2026 trip. More to the point, I settled on mid-April to mid-May.
The second decision was how long the trip should be. That was easy. It would be a month because that has been what I’ve talked about for the last few years when this was discussed as a possible non-solo trip.
The hardest part remained where to go.
A few years ago, we visited Scotland in June for ten days and had quite a bit of cold/wet weather. It was a WONDERFUL trip, but I made a note to myself then that WHILE I WAS STILL WORKING, I would not choose to travel somewhere that the weather would predictably be worse than where I live year round. I inserted the WHILE I WAS STILL WORKING proviso because of my grandiose perception of the value of my time, and so there was no way I was going to waste my time in cold and wet when I take relatively little time off as it was.
But…this was not going to be a trip made while I was working. As of 31 December of this year, I will be fully a man of leisure, and so whatever value I once affixed to my “vacation” time will plummet. Why not get wet? Why not get cold? The biggest activity in your life for the next few years is going to be travel, so why be such a prig about where you travel.
But a prig I was. I decided that for the purposes of THIS trip, this little solo adventure, where I went had to abide by the previous “no weather worse than where I live” proviso. Not that this was very limiting, mind you. There is a good chunk of Europe and South America that falls into this category from mid-April to mid-May, and so Scandinavia, the UK, Germany/Switzerland/Austria, and Buenos Aires fell out. (For those keeping track, Africa and Asia have been excluded from consideration, and this was because I very much did not want to make a trip alone that Catherine and I have spent time talking about doing together.)
While it seemed that I had made progress (when, how long), the choice of destination still seemed hard to pin down. And then came the answer.
Fall 1990
In early August 1990, I was between ships, having left my first ship earlier that summer to go to a Navy school to prepare for the major leagues of Surface Warfare, the magical, wondrous world of AEGIS. I was going to the USS THOMAS S. GATES (CG 51) to be the “CIC Officer", and I was to report in mid August. The ship was very soon after my arrival, scheduled to take part in one of those massive, Cold War-era exercises/demonstrations known as “Teamwork", to occur mainly in the Norwegian fjords. My memory is addled, but there were to be something like four aircraft carrier battle groups participating, and there would be much fantastic European liberty and merrymaking, all in the service of reminding Ivan what he was up against. And then Saddam invaded Kuwait. When President Bush declared that this aggression would not stand, even a 25 year old junior officer could realize that this massive naval armada preparing for a Cold War exercise would be “repurposed”.
A phone call one summer's evening confirmed it. The Command Duty Officer of the USS THOMAS S GATES was on the phone, my then-wife said, and I knew what he would say. “We are not going to Teamwork, we're headed to the Persian Gulf, and you need to report in ASAP so you can go with us.” I did not know then how transformative this call, this ship, this wardroom, these men, and that war would turn out in my life. (NOTE: One of them, who started out as the Auxiliaries Division Officer and then became my right hand man as the OI Division Officer, will put on his fourth star next month and be our new CENTCOM Commander, Brad Cooper). I only knew that I had four days to mentally prepare my wife and myself for a wartime deployment of undetermined length. All of that is grist for some other day, but we're getting closer to the reason for this rhetorical diversion.
Our battle group formed and headed out, working like one-armed paperhangers to get ready for what we all suspected would be a wartime engagement. As the FNG (F****ng New Guy), I did my best to integrate, in the first two months, working hard to find my place in a remarkable ship with the single greatest man I'd ever worked with (and would ever work with) in command (CAPT--eventually VADM Hank Giffin). Whereas I left a ship where if we really tried hard, we could do one thing well at a time, I joined a ship that did multiple things at a time, flawlessly. It was breathtaking.
We trained as we sailed, first across the Atlantic, then across the Mediterranean. We flamed out an engine along the way, and so had to spend some time pier side in Augusta Bay Sicily while we replaced the engine (you can do this when your ship is powered by airplane engines that can be replaced through the exhaust stacks). This port visit--and the nearby towns of Syracusa and Catania, NEARLY provided me with the idea for the destination for my Walden month, as I scoured over VRBO and Air BNB's of little nests in both places to bed down. Neither quite did the trick.
We eventually fixed ourselves and made the southbound Suez transit to rejoin our battle group in the Red Sea, and about that time, the readiness gurus at COMNAVSURFLANT decided that there were a group of ships that had not fired their Anti Air Warfare (AAW) missile systems within the required time frame, and since we were apparently not in a great hurry to dislodge the Iraqis, would our friends in Gaeta, Italy (COMSIXTHFLT) do a solid and organize a multi-ship missile exercise to make those ships ready? I can imagine how this landed at SIXTHFLT. “You want us to break our balls to create a missile ex for a bunch of ships that you sent forward unready for the operational use of some other commander?” Well yes. That's about it. And so the booger was flicked at SIXTHFLT, who then flicked it at our Battle Group Commander, who then flicked it at his Force AAW Officer, my Captain. So we started to plan our missile exercise, something I had never done before but which--with the help of the brilliant minds I worked with--I played a part.
SIXTHFLT eventually approved the tentative plan, and then convened a detailed planning and range safety discussion in October at the location where the event would be controlled and the targets launched…the NATO Missile Firing Installation (NAMFI) on the coast of Crete. NAMFI required a “SIXTHFLT" representative at the meeting, and neither SIXTHFLT nor our battlegroup could scare up a competent body--so my CO was tapped to do so. He looked around and thought “Who do I have who really isn't that important to my ship but who won't embarrass me?” and I was the obvious choice. I was helicoptered off to some godawful place in Egypt and caught a transport onward to Crete.
The NATO folks there really took care of me, setting up lodging and providing a driver, which was necessary because my lodgings were in the nearest habitation, a small city called “Chania”. I managed to milk this incredible opportunity for all it was worth, spending my days in interminable meetings at NAMFI--which looked a lot like the Chernobyl control room--and my evenings in quaint lodgings near the Venetian port. In the process, Chania made its impression on me.
In the meantime, my ship and the others made a northbound run with the other exercise participants. I rejoined the ship near Alexandria, Egypt after a helo ride provided by the chopper from the USS SAMUEL B. ROBERTS (FFG 58) piloted by good friend from UVA Kurt Schick. We (TS GATES) steamed to and called at the local port, Souda Bay, where I rejoined my shipmates having done a good bit of intelligence gathering as to where the best places to enjoy “Sweet Libs" were. I will rely on their maturity and discretion not to share any of their memories of that time here, as the statute of limitations may not have expired on what was done. Chania was where it all happened. Here are some photos of that time.
And when those memories of that time returned last week, I realized that my Walden was found. Thirty-five years after first setting foot in Chania, I settled on it as my destination.
Chania
And so, while I will not be going “to the woods” as Thoreau did, or to the Outermost House as Henry Beston did, I will be going to Chania. I picked out a choice little spot on VRBO just off the Venetian port, close to restaurants, shops, coffeehouses, markets, anything I need. I’ve zoomed around the neighborhood several times with the magic of Google to get the lay of the land, and having picked mid-April to mid-May, I am reliably informed that the weather will be great but the high tourist season will not have started.
There is chatter around the house that Catherine may take a little Greek Island trip of her own and swing by my place at some point. Given the visitors that both of my predecessors have in their solitude, I think the rules will allow it.
My aim is to “…live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily comfortably and Spartan-like self-indulgent as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner the open, and reduce raise it to its lowest highest terms, and, if it proved to be mean luxurious, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness luxury of it, and publish its meanness luxury to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”
I will keep you informed.
A trip like this sounds like my idea of heaven! I can't wait to hear how it turns out!
What a wonderful choice, Bryan! Kathleen and I spent a delayed honeymoon in Greece, mostly Crete. Magical.
And in my opinion, you are treating Walden correctly. It is not *only* about life in the woods. It is about life.