Last month I featured a picture of my fans and others I invited on a float fishing trip on Alaska's famed Kenai River. The outdoors is like therapy for me—a place where rushing water, eagles in the cottonwood trees, and men and women focusing so intently on what's happening at the end of a fishing line that all of life's stresses disappear.
This month, allow me to introduce you to the extended version of that experience. Last weekend I returned from a nine-day fly-in hunting and fishing trip at the family cabin, two hours by air from our Anchorage home. We spent a week working on things—old-fashioned hammer and saw and wrench and screwdriver things. A fifty-year-old log cabin requires a lot of TLC. Trucks and boats that sit idle seven months of the year age quickly without maintenance.
For all of us, days of working with our hands, away from email, scheduled business meetings, clients, classes, kids' soccer games, and measuring life against a business plan worked even better than a day of fly fishing for resetting one's head, heart, and attitude. What I'd forgotten was the other part of a long wilderness trip.
We got lucky and harvested a nice bull moose on the third day. With about five hundred pounds of organic meat in the meat house, the pressure was off. All of us spent a great deal of time curled up in chairs or on the large couch under the picture window overlooking the river...reading. Getting lost in a story is almost as good as finding a wild place to sit and watch nature. Books from my Gritt Family and Team Walker series were passed from person to person. Other books—from science fiction to crime thrillers and even books recounting historical explorers' trials and tribulations—had their fans.
It was a great reminder of why I write. It's special to open a book and instantly be transported to an exotic place, with exciting people doing good and bad things we might never experience in person. Even more special is when those moments reading the works that authors spend so much time crafting are not interrupted by "regular life." One of my guests, a financial planner from California, offered, "I'd forgotten what it was like not to be wound tight."
I love to share my getaway strategies: reading, outdoors, fishing, and extended time away from normal civilization. All of us are better after we take time to recharge our batteries. I love my career writing stories that I know take my readers to places they might not even know exist. In a way, I share those moments away from everyday life with them, and that makes my life richer.
Allow me to thank Brad Thor for a copy of his latest book, Edge Of Honor, which he dedicated "To the patrons of Beaver Creek cabin." One of the best things about being part of the writing community is collecting signed copies of other authors' works for the cabin library.