Beach Bum
/By Bo Jensen, produced by Out There Podcast
Released on May 12, 2022
Welcome to Out There Podcast. Our stories are written for the ear, so for those able, we recommend listening while reading along. Transcripts may contain minor errors; please check the audio before quoting.
WILLOW BELDEN: So, to start off today, I want to share a recording that my colleague Jessica made, while she was on a road trip in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
To set the scene — she made this recording from her travel trailer, and she was looking out at the highest peak east of the Mississippi, Mount Mitchell.
JESSICA TAYLOR: I wanted to make this recording actually on the day I hiked Mt. Mitchell. But it was 18 degrees — and mind you, this is the end of April — it was 18 degrees, and the wind was so terrible, there was no way I was going to be able to get a good recording.
But I wanted to share with you, as I’m on this trip, I’ve really been loving using the app PeakVisor…which allows me to pull up my phone, use AR (augmented reality) to be able to see what the title is of all the peaks, what their height is. There’s a free option, you can use one location a day, and it will show you things about mountains in the area you’re in that you never knew.
WILLOW: PeakVisor is one of our sponsors. Their app is like your own personal mountain guide.
Check out PeakVisor in the app store. You just might love it.
(Out There theme music begins to play)
Hi, I’m Willow Belden, and you’re listening to Out There, the podcast that explores big questions through intimate stories outdoors.
It’s hard to believe, but this is our last episode of the spring season. So I want to do two things. First, I’d love to know what you thought of this season.
So I put together a little survey. It’s very short — nothing like the big long survey we did last year. So if you can, go ahead and pause the episode right now, and fill it out. Just click the link in the episode description.
Your feedback will help us make future seasons of Out There even better. And to thank you for your time, I’d like to offer you a 30% discount on Out There merch when you complete the survey.
The second thing I want to do is give you a sneak peak at what’s next, now that the season is wrapping up.
After this episode, we’re going to take a little break for a few weeks. And then we’re going to give you a special summer treat.
I know a lot of you are relatively new to Out There. So we’re going to share some of our favorite stories from the early days of the podcast.
We have a lot of episodes that have won awards, or that resonated really strongly with listeners. But many of those episodes are too old to show up in your podcast feed anymore.
So, starting on June 16, we’re launching a “season of favorites,” where we share Out There oldies that you otherwise probably wouldn’t get to hear.
If you’re new to the show, it’ll be a great introduction to Out There. If you’ve been listening for a long time, it’ll be a wonderful trip down memory lane.
(theme music ends)
Today’s episode is about how we define ourselves.
Knowing who we are is a big part of leading a fulfilling life. It feels good to be able to say, “This is me” — or, conversely, “That’s NOT me.”
But it can also be problematic to define ourselves too rigidly. When we say things like, “I’m NOT a city slicker,” or “I’m NOT a beach person,” those statements often carry embedded judgment. We see ourselves as superior. As better than the unfamiliar “other.”
So what happens when we realize that we are that “other?”
On today’s episode, Bo Jensen takes us on a journey from the mountains to the sea, and explores how knowing who you are isn’t always as straightforward as you might think.
BO JENSEN: I always thought I knew my own mind. What I wanted. Who I was.
I grew up on a farm, landlocked in the middle of the country. My sense of identity was grounded in dirt and hard work. Getting my hands dirty felt good, felt natural. Work was a source of pride.
(breezy music begins)
In the Midwest, any down time was seen as lazy time, and “lazy” was about the worst thing you could call someone. When I was a kid, my relationship with the land was about showing my grit. I weeded our crops by hand in that intense summer heat; then, covered in bug bites and sunburned, I rode in the back of a pickup down dusty gravel roads to the next field.
By college, I’d moved to Colorado, where I started road biking. My idea of fun involved my muscles burning as I climbed steep hills with fierce determination. As an adult, I bought a jeep to get me where I wanted to go; nothing would stand in my way. I was tough-minded, capable, self-sufficient.
(music fades out)
I wore these identities like badges of honor. Or maybe like armor. It was who I was.
(restless music begins)
As I got married and had kids, I approached family milestones with the same mindset I used in other aspects of my life: I worked at it, wanting to do it right. I had two little boys and was pregnant with a third baby. I took my role seriously, as a wife and mother. But even as I worked diligently at cultivating this traditional identity, something about it didn’t sit right.
(music fades out)
That third pregnancy was an intentional mistake. The marriage was crumbling; the only thing that could save it, I told myself, was another baby. I was trying so hard to be what I was supposed to be. I was trying to follow in my parents’ and grandparents’ footsteps, on a path of faith, family, and traditional gender roles. I was trying, hard — and I was failing — to be a wife, to be a devoted mother, to be…a woman.
(quiet music begins)
I didn’t dare say it out loud. Even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t. Back in the 80s, I had no words for who I felt myself to be: a man somehow born into a female body. What could I say that wouldn’t sound crazy? Why wouldn’t I let this stupid idea go? What was wrong with me?
I tried to ignore what I knew to be true, bury that male identity that refused to go away — because it scared me.
(music ends)
The man inside me felt so relaxed, easy-going, confidently breaking all the traditional rules just by existing. ‘That’s not me,’ I told myself. I couldn’t face my own reality.
(bluesy music begins)
Even when we don’t want to change, even when we refuse to change, sometimes life intervenes. My husband got a job offer, and we moved to Houston. As I stepped awkwardly out of the car — pregnant, nauseous, my back aching — the heat and humidity hit me in the face like a slap.
(music fades out)
We’d left everything familiar behind — friends, family, cool evergreen hiking trails, the aspen trees turning gold in the fall. I didn’t know how to get my bearings in this strange place. No ridge of mountains anchored me.
There was only water. The Gulf of Mexico.
(sound of waves lapping at a beach followed by soft music)
I had never seen anything like the Gulf. I’d never even seen the Great Lakes, let alone the ocean. The first time we drove down from Houston, I walked out onto the sand and then…I just stood there, looking out. Dumbfounded.
I could sense the depth, feel the weight, of all that water under the surface, spreading to the horizon. Beyond the horizon. It scared me, and thrilled me. Another world existed, fluid, moving, its waves reaching toward me, beckoning.
I was surprised at my own reaction. How was a mountain person like me so drawn to the sea? More than drawn — I felt a connection to it, somehow felt at home there. It was a connection that I didn’t understand. I mean, in my mind, oceans were for luxury cruises and island vacations, bikini babes and long-haired surfers.
(music ends and sound of soft waves hitting the shore begins)
During the months of my pregnancy, whenever my disorientation and loneliness became overwhelming, I would drive down to Galveston, to the beach, and walk along the ocean. I couldn’t explain why, but the waves comforted me. The sea air, the sound of the surf hitting the shore, even the crying of the gulls, soothed me.
Wading in, I was amazed that the salt water could lift me up, help me to carry the weight of the life I’d been creating, for this child, and for myself.
(waves fade out)
We moved back to Colorado after the baby was born, and I ended the unhappy marriage. But old habits die hard. Returning to my landlocked world, I returned to my self-limiting strategies.
(low music begins)
I stubbornly clung to my old ideas of who I was, or who I thought I was supposed to be; I wasn’t sure anymore. I felt like I had failed at my commitments as a wife and mother, so I vowed to try harder. I struggled into and out of two more marriages that didn’t work, two more attempts to prove myself “normal.”
(music ends)
I had become that fiercest of survivors: a single parent. In my case, I didn’t just feel like I had to act as both mother and father — it felt like I was both.
(more upbeat music begins)
As the kids left home for college, moved away for jobs and relationships, I felt my heart leaping into the wider world with them. I was ready to start looking at the rigid definitions I’d set for myself. The opportunity to explore my own life had arrived. The time was now or never.
(music continues for a few moments and then ends)
WILLOW: Hey, it’s Willow. We’ll hear the rest of the story in a moment. But first…
(sound of opening a box)
I’m opening up a new solar lantern that I just got in the mail.
WILLOW: I feel like this is going to be excellent for camping.
WILLOW: This lantern is made by a company called MPowerd. They’re one of our sponsors, and they’re on a mission to transform lives with thoughtfully designed, clean technology.
The lantern they sent me packs down small, and it puts out a lot of light. I think it’s going to be great for reading in my tent, or even just to use at home during a power outage.
You can check out all their solar products at Mpowerd.com. And while you’re there, you can also give the gift of light to someone in need.
Mpowerd is working to get solar power banks and lanterns to people who have been displaced due to the conflict in Ukraine. And you can help them on that mission. Just go to their website for all the details.
Oh, and just for our listeners, you can get 25% off your entire purchase with the discount code GetOutThere. That's M-Power-D.com, promo code GetOutThere.
And now, back to the story.
BO: Trails lead us places, away from well-traveled roads. Now, at age 51, I was finally stepping off the beaten path. I was abandoning my responsibilities, my work ethic, all the rock-solid security I had built, on what looked like a whim.
But I didn’t care. I sold the empty house. With money in the bank, I quit my job, and boarded my first international flight — to Spain, to walk the Camino.
(quaint, Spanish music begins)
The Camino de Santiago is a historic pilgrimage route that people have walked for centuries. You follow in the ancient footsteps of saints and sinners and everyone else in between, seeking answers, or forgiveness — some kind of reckoning. Maybe with God. Maybe with yourself.
The trail is over 500 miles long, and it’s not easy. This was not a vacation. Here, I was just another seeker among the many thousands. Still, I didn’t take the usual path across the middle of the country. I took the Camino Norte, the route by the sea. After all these years, the ocean still called to me.
(music ends)
For six weeks, I backpacked up and over mountains, then down to the beaches of Northern Spain. Mountains and sea, mountains and sea. The high peaks were rugged, and required me to set my mind to the task. But the beaches…how I loved descending to the beaches.
(sound of water splashing as cheerful music begins)
Grinning like a kid, I would dump my pack, yank off my sweaty clothes, and splash gleefully into the water in my underwear. It was like reconnecting with an old friend.
Beach after beach, I waded out, dove in, and played in the ocean. I learned to body-surf short distances, riding the tops of swells. Sometimes, I ducked low instead, and watched the waves roll in overhead. I learned the salty taste of the sea, rich and intense, spitting with satisfaction as I rose from the water.
Walking out onto the sand, I would lie down on my towel and nap in the sun until I was dry. Then, feeling refreshed, I’d get dressed, lace up my boots, pick up my pack, and hike on.
(music fades out)
It suddenly hit me one afternoon, like a wave of delight, and I laughed out loud: for all my mountain summits, I was a beach bum at heart. I was happy to drift with the tides and go with the flow. I was an easy-going, relaxed guy, confidently breaking all the rules I’d thought I needed to follow. And I really liked this part of myself. I had never known, because I had never allowed myself to let down my guard and just be…me.
(soft piano music begins)
Floating lazily on my back, the ocean waves felt so mellow.
(sound of seagulls and gentle waves)
I stretched out my arms, looking up at the soft clouds, and I just let go.
I just let it all go. All the hiding, all the denial, all the trying to be who I thought I was supposed to be. I was finally free.
(music fades out)
All my life, I had been defining myself within predetermined contexts — responsible homeowner, compassionate public servant, dutiful mother. “Bloom where you are planted,” they say, and that’s a fine sentiment, as far as it goes.
But that rootedness doesn’t take into account the way life moves and exists with fluidity. I am more than those set labels. I am responsible, and freewheeling; compassionate, and irreverent; dutiful, and radical. I am a mother, and a father.
I don’t have to choose, one side or another; I don’t have to define myself by negation, saying, “I’m this, not that.” That sort of self-definition may initially feel liberating; but too often, we let it become limiting. I embrace the totality that is me, unique and nonconforming, be that my approach to home and work, or my non-binary gender identity. Call me mountaineer, or beach bum — I’ll answer with an emphatic “YES.”
(upbeat music begins)
The work I do now is traveling around the country, exploring wilderness areas and writing about what I experience there. I find my eyes drawn to the horizon wherever I go. I watch in fascination as it shrinks or expands, depending on the surrounding terrain. Again and again, the horizon shifts as my perspective changes.
It’s all a continuum. We live in a world of spectrums: the colors of light, waves of sound, the hues of human skin tones. When does the mountain become the foothill, and the foothill become the plain? When does the dune become the beach, and then the seafloor?
(music ends)
Last winter, for my 55th birthday, I gave myself a gift: a grand tour of beaches.
(piano music begins)
In Massachusetts, at Salisbury Beach, I strung shells into banners, and collected smooth stones. On Cumberland Island off the coast of Georgia, I walked under the live oaks hung with Spanish moss, following the wild horses down the beach. On Sombrero Beach in the Florida Keys, I sipped spiced rum on the white sand, squinting through my sunglasses at the impossibly turquoise waters.
And at Padre Island National Seashore, back at the Gulf, I hiked 20 miles down the beach, carrying my mountain backpack, to camp on the sand near the dunes.
(sound of wind and waves)
All night, the wind blew over my tent, and the waves rolled ashore. In the morning, I found that fog had enveloped the land and the water and the sky. Everything was white, clouded. Undefined.
It soon began glowing, and all the world turned soft and rosy before my eyes.
Hearing the waves, the salt water of the ocean and my own blood calling, I waded out. Into everything.
(music continues)
WILLOW: That was Bo Jensen. They are a writer, a mountaineer, a beach bum, and a parent. Currently, they’re writing about living by the Atlantic Ocean for a year. And yes, there is a beach right out their front door.
If you enjoyed this story, check out the episode Bo did for us back in 2020. It’s called “Passing,” and I have a link to it in the show notes at outtherepodcast.com. I also have a link to the places where you can read more of Bo’s work.
(Out There Favorites music begins)
It’s time now for Out There Favorites. This is the part of the show where we share some of our favorite resources. Favorite apps, favorite books, favorite podcasts, gear…
These are not ads — we’re not getting any money from the things we recommend. It’s just a chance for us to spread the love.
JESSICA: Hi, I’m Jessica Taylor, and I’m the advertising manager at Out There Podcast. I’m excited to be sharing my three recommendations with you today.
I recently quit my job, and I have not been working, because I’m trying to reset and allow myself time to figure out life, and what is important to me in resetting.
So my first recommendation is a book called Essentialism. It’s by Greg McKeown, and it is teaching me to concentrate on saying no to the good things, and saying yes to the great things. And it’s been really encouraging and freeing to have this permission to say no to things, and give myself the freedom to play, and openness to the changes in my life.
My second recommendation is the podcast Mindset Mentor with Rob Dial. Episodes are short — they’re only about 20 minutes long. And they really help me when I’m driving in the car to reset and rethink about things. I tend to be an overthinker, and these episodes have helped me take a step back and work on making myself a better person.
My third and last recommendation is the “Do It For The Process” affirmation card deck by Emily Jeffords. This is a little deck of cards that has a beautiful picture on one side, and encouragement on the other side. They’re just little, one sentence, short quotes that give me encouragement throughout the day, that I can concentrate on as I move forward and try to make myself a better person.
That’s it. Those are my three recommendations. I hope you have a lovely day!
WILLOW: Again, that was Jessica Taylor, the advertising manager for Out There.
I have links to all the things she recommended in the show notes at outtherepodcast.com.
(music ends)
If you haven’t already taken our survey, I’d love to hear what you thought of this season. Just click the link in the episode description to share your thoughts. And as soon as you complete the survey, you’ll get a discount code for 30% off Out There merch.
(folksy music begins)
I’d like to give a big thank you to Michelle Stahl, Caitlyn Bagley, Phil Timm, Doug Frick, Tara Joslin, Deb and Vince Garcia, and a listener who asked to just be identified by her first name, Sheila.
These listeners support Out There financially. Their gifts make the show possible.
If you’re interested in supporting Out There as well, go to patreon.com/outtherepodcast. Patreon is a crowd-funding platform for creative endeavors. It lets you make monthly contributions to projects you care about. Like Out There.
Whatever amount you give — whether it’s $5 or $50 — you will be making a big difference for our little team.
Again, that’s patreon.com/outtherepodcast. Or click the link in the episode description.
Thank you so much for your support!
(music ends)
OK, time for a pop quiz. How many mountains are there in the world?
Any guesses?
Turns out, there are 1,187,049 peaks that have names. And even more if you count the ones that don’t have names.
If you’re anything like me, you probably like to know what mountains you’re looking at when you’re out on adventures. But a lot of times, it’s hard to figure it out. Because hiking maps usually only show the immediate vicinity.
Lucky for us, there’s an app out there that can help. It’s called PeakVisor.
PeakVisor is one of our sponsors.
Their app provides information on more than a million summits all over the world.
The way it works is that wherever you’re standing, you just open up the app, and it’ll show you a panoramic picture of everything you’re looking at, with all the peaks labeled. Plus, they have intricate 3D maps to help you plan your hikes.
Check out PeakVisor in the app store. You just might love it.
(Out There theme music begins)
Today’s story was written by Bo Jensen. Editing and sound design by me, Willow Belden. Out There’s advertising manager is Jessica Taylor. Our audience growth director is Sheeba Joseph. Cara Schaefer is our print content coordinator. Our ambassadors are Tiffany Duong, Ashley White, and Stacia Bennet. And our theme music was written by Jared Arnold.
Have a beautiful day, and we’ll see you in June.
(theme music ends on a last whistling note)
