Looking Forward

With the help of some friends, over July 4th weekend I finished clearing out the last of the barn. Selling all my kayaks, moving all my tools to various locations. After 15 years of building a kayak business and an organic farm in this beautiful little town on the edge of the Pacific ocean, I’m sure you can imagine the transition of moving back to the city isn’t the easiest thing. If you work at it hard enough there are plenty of things in life to be upset about, and I can’t afford to dwell on any of them, so I said a small goodbye and decided not to follow my feelings into a quagmire of loss and regret. The stars may not be as clear, and there are no longer deer in my back yard, but moving to Portland, Oregon, is hardly being relocated to a concentration camp.

Before leaving Manzanita, however, I had the opportunity to complete an art show that I’ve been looking forward to for a long time. Scale models of my two most popular designs combined with the best photos I’ve taken over the years. It seemed like an appropriate way to honor the time I spent here and share my perspective. The models sold quickly, which makes me think I should be building more of them.

To deal with the logistics of making an entire boat building shop vanish in just a couple of weeks, I bit the bullet and finally purchased the van Cape Falcon Kayak has been needing for the last 15 years. Finding the used one ton 7.3 Powerstroke Diesel I’ve been lusting after at a great price was a windfall, although the irony of buying the van I need just as I close the business is not lost on me. I’m sure it will see a lot of use as Cape Falcon Kayak transforms over the next couple years.

Another project I’m finishing up on is the Off-Grid Airstream. Due to my health issues, financial constraints, and losing my shop space, I won’t be finishing the final installation of the planned 540 watt photovoltaic electric system, aside from that though, the project is mostly complete and turned out really nice. I’m hoping to sell it by the end of the summer. Here’s a link to the webpage and a photo tour.  www.offgridairstream.net

While I’m still in a bit of a holding pattern while I see how my health issues are going to progress, transitioning the business is something I’m thinking a lot about right now. I’m slowing getting better, but it’s a process and I need to be smart about how I manage things. Presently, I’m still building commission kayaks and I can keep up on that workload. I have to admit it kills me not to be teaching this year, but with luck that will change. Thinking about the future: Cape Falcon Kayak has a solid customer base, excellent designs, and potential to expand into retail, paddling instruction, kits, and instructional media. There are a lot of directions the business can go from here, but I’m coming to realize that I need to partner with someone to move the business forward. Even before I got sick I pushed way harder than I ever should have, and the new paradigm is going to have to include the novel idea of help! So right now I’m just putting out feelers to explore that idea. I’m looking for someone who is a natural teacher, a passionate paddler, a decent woodworker, and has the creative drive and organizational abilities that make any business successful. (at least 3 of those things) If you think you might be a good fit, get in touch and we can talk. In the farther future, I’ll be looking to build a new shop and another small off-grid farm as a home base, or possibly partner with someone with an existing property.

At present, I think it’s likely that I’ll return to teaching classes late next spring, probably traveling, which affords me the opportunity bring the classes closer to people who weren’t formerly able to travel to Oregon, and explore my other passion of visiting and consulting on fledgling off-grid homesteading projects.

As far as my health situation goes, I’m glad to say that things are improving, although in no way thanks to the total disaster of our medical system. After pushing through years of agony to get a partial diagnosis where my complex symptoms and life history isn’t even considered relevant, I finally decided to just drop to doctors. I like my neurologist and my primary care doc, but they’re out of ideas, and our system just isn’t set up for doctors to have hours of free time to catch up on all the latest research and then sit down in a big roundtable and speculate on how my complex web of symptoms might be related and then propose experimental treatments to address the problem. Furthermore, legal regulations and insurance protocols mean that the cutting edge of medicine today won’t be seen in general practice for nearly a decade. People like me don’t have time to wait for that. I have to take a more proactive approach, doing my own research, and building a picture of what I think is wrong with me the same way a detective might build a case. Hypothesize, experiment, evaluate, repeat. The details are way too much to discuss here, and progress is slow, but owing to this strategy I’ve managed to stop the scariest of the symptoms. I’d rather not have a serious neurological illness, but in some ways it’s a fascinating puzzle, and when I do ultimately recover, I’ll have one hell of a story to tell. Again, thank you to everyone who helped with my medical fund. I was a half-dead wretch of a creature last year, and without that money, I wouldn’t be any better right now. I want to note that not a dime of it has gone to anything but medical expenses.

Life right now means doing what I can. Tending to the huge garden we’ve created in my girlfriends front yard, reading a lot, consulting on off-grid projects, building boats in the garage, and being eternally fascinated by the biological workings of the compost pile and the endless swarm of bumblebees surrounding the lavender plants. Yes, I’d like to go paddling, I’d like to be teaching, I’d also like a Ferrari and a million bucks. Things could always be better, and things could always be worse. You don’t really get a lot of choice over what happens in life, but you can choose what to focus on. I’ll keep you posted.-Brian