Formative Experiences – An Introduction

October 3, 2022.

Last week or so, I found myself ricocheting around the inside of my brother Matt’s boat as we churned our way through Shelikof Strait, right above Afognak Island, which is just southwest of the Barren Islands, right smack in the middle of nowhere – a natural habit for formative experiences. You’ll find most formative experiences take place in similar locations. Our goal was to get to Kodiak, which is about a 120 mile boat trip from Homer where we put off. Matt has a 28′ offshore boat which seems huge in your dining room but quite small on the open ocean. As such Matt was eagerly waiting for a weather window to open so the the chances of survival were marginally increased. He finally found two consecutive days where the weather forecast seemed less than angry – sinister, maybe, but not angry, which is all you can hope for out in the middle of nowhere – and eagerly called me and invited me along.

“And that’s why I never buy Econo-Towel brand paper towels anymore. Oh, by the way, I think I’m taking the boat to Kodiak. I guess you could come along if you wanted to, although Marlene (Matt’s wife) would have to stay home and I’m not sure she’d want to…” 

Gasps of excitement were heard in the background. 

“…give up her seat on the boat. We’ve been planning this trip for some time…” 

I could hear Marlene excitedly jabbering about the sudden free time that just opened up in her schedule, like an inmate on death row who just got pardoned.

“…and this chance may not come again so maybe I better clear it with her…”

The sound of Marlene doing somersaults in the background was distracting. Dishing clattering. Light fixtures getting knocked over.

“Um… just a minute. Yea, it looks like she’s OK with that. See you at 5:15 am on Monday morning.”

And that’s how I found myself ricocheting around Matt’s boat. When my trajectory would intersect Matt’s trajectory (mine was completely random while his was more up and down since he was holding the steering wheel) we would have a conversation.

“THIS IS A LITTLE BUMPY.” Matt would shout as I glanced off a window near him. I nodded as I passed by the back of his head although I suspect non-verbal communication wasn’t very effective in that situation. The table in the galley soon redirected me back towards Matt again. “STUPID WEATHER FORECASTERS. I THINK THEY SHOULD BE THROWN IN THE OCEAN LIKE JONAH IF THEY GET IT WRONG. MAYBE IT WOULD HELP CALM THINGS DOWN. IF I ever… and another thing.. this… ..” I was again out of earshot but not for long. Soon the roof smacked me back towards Matt like a Ping Pong paddle smacking a Ping Pong ball. I shot past Matt’s left ear. “SORRY THIS IS SO MISERABLE!” Matt said. 

Mmmm… I thought to myself. This isn’t as miserable as some things I’ve endured. If you could’ve seen past the blur of my flailing arms and legs, you would’ve noticed a faraway look in my eye as I thought about misery and the relationships I’ve had with it over the past few years. The relationship has been a formative thing in my life.

Formative experiences are those stories which people get tired of hearing you talk about. They are the stories that cause you to get a faraway look in your eye as you stare down rows of filing cabinets full of memories. The older you get, the further away that look in your eye becomes because the row of filing cabinets gets so long that you have to start squinting. The formative ones are in weathered folders with dog eared corners and round coffee stain rings all over them. This is because you get them out often while having conversations and the story always gets a little long so you set your coffee down on the folder since you know the story by heart anyway. Also, sometimes you take the folders out when your experiencing what you suspect may be a new formative experience – this usually occurs in the middle of some messy calamity – and you want to take notes to see if you’re experiencing a new benchmark of misery. This is useful because, if what you’re currently experiencing doesn’t measure up to the one in the folder, you know that you’ve survived worse so you’ll likely survive this too. If you’re experiencing a new low, well, I’m sorry about that. At least it’ll make a great story! This constant referral to the folder gets it a little messy but not as messy as the stories inside of it; stories full of pain and occasionally censored information, although the black bars covering up the top secret text just makes the story more mysterious, not less so.

As human beings we like to think our experiences are so formative that others simply couldn’t handle them. The problem is that you’ll inevitably meet someone who was orphaned and fought in several world wars and you’ll find your experience doesn’t quite match up to theirs. This gives us the distinct feeling of being wimpy, which we don’t like very much. So we’ll pad our resume of pain and maybe even fake some degrees in misery. Sometimes we even challenge the laws of physics and hope our audience is too dumb to notice. It’s why old timers walked uphill both ways to school.

Technology has increased the availability of everything except formative experiences. We really are getting wimpier as we get smarter. Sure, that’s because smart people avoid formative experiences in the first place. Why? Because they’ve had enough formative experiences to learn to avoid them. That’s the trick, you’ve got to have them so you learn to view optimistic people and situations with suspicion. No matter how many tales of woe we repeatedly tell somebody – like our kids for example – they need to have their own experiences. I was told that we need to prepare our children for the road instead of preparing the road for our children. This is done by giving our children enough freedom to let them hurt themselves with it, but not much more. This way they’ll have their own formative experiences which are many times more effective than inherited ones.

When we start our lives, our human nature lures us into formative experiences with optimistic estimations of our own abilities. After much pain, we begin to admit we aren’t immortal. This is known as aging. A sure sign of aging is that you are more prone to tell people about your past formative experiences than you are to try and have new ones. The advantage of getting old, obviously, is that you’ve had ninety years to collect formative experiences and distill them down to a truly potent brew of misery and gnashing of teeth. Chances are whatever young person you’re talking to is still collecting the raw materials for their own cocktail. They haven’t even begun to distill it yet. It’s still just a broth of melancholy and mild discomfort and they’re optimistic it won’t get any worse than that. This allows you to revel in their horror as you swish your brown jug full of hard misery under their nose.

But why pain? Why can’t formative moments be benchmarks of euphoria and delight, you ask? Sure, formative experiences can be delightful, but they’re much more formative if they’re not. Pain is an integral part of the learning process because we remember pain. We don’t remember pleasure so much. A few seconds of pain can be far more memorable than a week of euphoria. As such I try to make my formative experiences a family affair because I’m concerned about my childrens’ futures. Camping, for example, is a good way to remove technology and add a layer of formative experiences to your childrens’ lives, kind of like a layer of sand in their proverbial swimming trunks.

You see, people without formative experiences are insufferable. Without any benchmarks of actual misery, people find themselves getting angry over the dumbest things. Their coffee isn’t hot or cold enough. Their car isn’t fast enough. Their couch isn’t the right color. Bah! Who cares? You just want to slap some people so their benchmark of pain rises above such fickle matters. After awhile they’ll be annoyed at their car but happy they’re not being slapped in the face. That is the wonder of formative experiences, they give you perspective on what matters.

With any luck, you’ve already experienced some formative things but if not, well, be optimistic because optimism, just like favorable weather reports, is usually what gets you into formative experiences in the first place.

If you’re the type of person who asks for the manager because an employee’s name tag is crooked, don’t worry. Upon reflecting back on my life, I realized I’ve experienced some formative experiences I can share. Mine aren’t as great as some people’s but I’ve been blessed with the gift of exaggeration so we’ll see if my stories – with some tips along the way – can help you find formative experiences of your own.

The story that pops in my mind has to do with my old red Saturn I bought from dad. That’s the first tip: The proper equipment for a formative experience is usually the most improper equipment you can find for that situation. That’s a pretty deep statement. Let me explain: If you’re hiking on Mount Everest, bring a hammock and flip flops. If you’re hiking in the Sahara, wear thick long johns made from wool. Makes sense? Now, back to the story…

My friend Neatly and I were driving home from a hiking trip in West Virginia. This was the same car I had driven to Mexico earlier in my life.

“Boy am I glad we had a screwdriver in my car,” I said. I nervously fingered the steering wheel as a beat up screwdriver protruded from a tangle of metal and wires where my ignition used to be.

“Yea. We’d still be hiking,” Neatly said, “with our thumbs out alongside the road.” He rubbed a swollen thumb subconsciously as though it still smarted a little.

The trip had been pretty typical, up until the end.

My friend Neatly McPerfect and I had spent the weekend hiking in the Dolly Sods Wilderness Area in West Virginia. Neatly hiked. I plodded and practiced Mongolian throat chanting, which sounds a lot like an obese man in pain. The weather report for the area is typically stormy but we had found a weekend where the weather forecasters promised sunshine and warmer than average weather. We knew we had hit the jackpot and immediately set about packing things. In retrospect, our optimism should’ve been our first clue to avoid the entire situation.

Neatly bought proper gear and packed it neatly and perfectly. He used things like pants woven from butterfly whiskers and a socks spun from spiderweb silk. I did not buy proper gear and my packing was motivated by fear and last minute chaos. What if I run out of food? What if I run out of water? What if I get stranded in the wilderness for three months? I prepared for all those scenarios by filling my backpack with supplies until my worries subsided. While Neatly’s backpack weighed thirty pounds and looked like a parcel wrapped by the old lady at the cosmetic counter, my backpack weighed eighty pounds and looked like a homeless camp fell off, and was driven over by, a moving truck. Despite our differences, we generally got along with each other and found ourselves experiencing water in the finest forms that West Virginia could offer: snow, ice, plain water, raging water, falling water, splashing water, spritzing water, drizzling water, slurping water, oozing water, sleeting water, and driving rain. Occasionally we even found some high spots on the trail where we could stop swimming and do some hiking.

Dolly Sods is a leave-no-trace wilderness area meaning that even your natural bodily functions, though not entirely different from a bear or wolf or squirrel, except for the toilet paper beside it (if you remembered to pack some), had to be buried. Neatly would bury his with his titanium foldable shovel that weighed about as much as a mosquito, though it cost a whole lot more. I would use the Ace Hardware post hole digger I had packed, such was my concern for meeting and exceeding the laws set forth by the U.S. National Parks Service. You can imagine my concern then, when we arrived back at my car after our hike and found, despite my my best efforts, I had left a trace of us along the trail somewhere.

“Where are my keys?” I asked Neatly, trying to quell the panic that arises when someone realizes that they broke a U.S. National Forest Service guideline.

“How should I know?” Neatly seemed to indicate it wasn’t his problem, even though it clearly was since we drove into the middle of the wilderness in the same car.

I dug everything out of my bag but didn’t find my keys, just reinforcing my theory that no matter how much you pack, you’re always one item short of what you need (a variation of Patrick F. McManus’s theory that any length of rope is 6″ too short).

I had dutifully locked up my car. We were way outside of cell phone range. This was going to be a fine formative experience! A quick search of the area turned up nothing but sticks and rocks but with the ingenuity of a Neanderthal, we made it work. We used a rock to beat a stick between the door and the car frame thereby bending the door open slightly, allowing Neatly to wiggle his arm in far enough to unlock the door. I suspect the rain trickling down his arm made it slick and thus easier to slide in and out, even though it still wasn’t easy at all. Of course, the rain also made the moss covered rock hammer a little slippery which is why sometimes the rock had missed the stick and hit Neatly, who was holding the stick and grimacing comically. It wasn’t the first time I hit his thumb with the rock, after all. Here’s a tip: Don’t keep your formative experiences to yourself. It’s good to share and really, depending on who you invite along, your friend may even work up his own misery which he’ll gladly share with you, probably even without asking.

We were delighted to be inside the car but it was too early for high fives. That’s another thing, no matter how formative your experience is becoming, don’t celebrate until you get out alive. Early celebration always invites extra disaster. Unless, of course, you’re experience isn’t satisfactory yet, then you can say things like, “Well, this can’t get any worse.”

Even though we were in my car we still needed to start my car without keys. Fortunately our toolset expanded to whatever was in my car: old McDonald’s cups, crumpled foil gum wrappers, zip ties, speaker wires, dried bugs, and some screwdrivers. Screwdrivers! A flat screwdriver had the vague shape of a key and, if pressed hard enough, I bet the ignition would agree with me.

“Are you sure?” Neatly seemed a little incredulous with my idea, maybe even hostile.

“Yes! I’m willing to sacrifice my ignition for a ride home.”

“Who cares about the ignition? I’m not holding that screwdriver!” Neatly was nervously sucking his thumb, which is very strange for an adult to do. But after some sobbing, Neatly pulled his thumb out of his mouth, held the screwdriver in the key hole, and began grimacing. “Fine!” he said, “I’ll hold the screwdriver. Just stop sobbing. It’s embarrassing.”

I began convincing the ignition that the screwdriver was a key. Unfortunately the ignition wasn’t as stupid as I thought and it resisted my arguments. Still, if you beat anything hard enough with a rock, its IQ will begin to slump dramatically.

What sounded like rhythmic heavy artillery echoed through the woods. THUMP! THUMP! THUMP! We were trying to time our activities so that other hikers milling around the trailhead wouldn’t see them. We didn’t want them to call the police about the theft they thought they were witnessing but weren’t. That would be pretty embarrassing for them, even though it’d likely be a minor formative experience. Even though a few people did see what we were doing, they must have realized that my car wasn’t worth stealing thereby assuming there was another explanation, one which they didn’t wish to know, and kept walking. Or they were from high crime cities and were used to this sort of thing. Whatever the case was, we eventually smashed the ignition mechanism to oblivion and managed to start the car. We drove home carefully, not wanting to get pulled over and suddenly required to explain why there was a screwdriver sticking out of my ignition. It was a long story and I’m sure you guys are already tired of it, even after hearing about it only once. It’s embarrassing when people yawn as you recount what you thought was a major formative experience in your life.

Also, I was suspicious that if the screwdriver slipped out of the ignition then my steering wheel was going to lock and prevent me from steering. It’s amazing how fast 70 mph is when you suddenly can’t steer. Here’s another tip: If anyone ever mocks your slow car, and they happen to be riding in it while doing so, simply grab the emergency brake, crank the steering wheel, and then mock them for screaming like a sissy even though your car is so slow. It’ll likely be a formative experience for them and they won’t do it again.

Shortly after the hiking incident with Neatly. I broke my windshield trying to replace a windshield wiper motor. Why the engineers designed it so that you had to break the windshield to fix your wipers, I’ll never know. Stupid engineers. I sold the car for scrap and was delighted to find my $600 car had experienced only a $200 loss in value over the six years I had driven it.

Soon after that Neatly bought a house and I rented a room from him, proving that handing him money on a monthly basis could improve our relationship. I know it did because when I forgot to do it for several months, our relationship soured. Some people are so fickle.

I have much more expert advice and along with real world examples but it’s simply too much to put in one post. That’s why, randomly and without warning, I’ll write another post and continue my series on formative experiences. In fact, two horrible experiences pop right in my head… they took place in Mexico and China and, well, I’ll save that for later.

Until then,

Josh