No bucket list for me in Daydreaming on the Porch

Every time I’m in a Barnes & Noble and see a new iteration of the popular and bestselling travel and wish-list guide, “1,000 places to see before you die,” I avert my gaze quickly and move on. It’s not that the book itself is not a gorgeous presentation of some of the most beautiful places in the world to visit, it’s the appallingly cringe-worthy title. Do we have to be reminded that we’re going to die so we can hurry up and visit as many places as we can? There are other quarrels I have with this type of book but more on the title first.. For one thing it’s morbid and outrageous to think that anyone could possibly choose among all those destinations and then start ticking off a bucket list of them, cramming in as many as possible before they (to say it crudely) “kick the bucket.” I always hated that term. Yes we’re all going to die in one physical sense, but we live on in so many other ways. We have a soul, a spirit that is eternal. I believe I’ll have plenty of time to experience all the beauty and mystery of time and the universe, or universes, in the next life. So talking about bucket lists seems a rather small-minded and feeble way to use the time we have left here on Earth. And it’s merely “time” after all, something we don’t understand that well anyway.

Another reason these types of books with similar titles offend me is that we’re limiting ourselves to other people lists and dreams and places. I’ve always preferred to research and read as many sources as possible when I was planning my long solo road trips a across the country many years ago. And there were infinitely many beautiful and fascinating places to visit right here in the USA. Most of us can’t afford to go around the world to see the Taj Mahal, Mounts Fuji and Kilimanjaro, Buddhist temples in Thailand and Tibet, or take photo safaris in Africa, or travel far into the interior of the Australian desert to see the majestic rock outcropping, Uluru. Yes I’ve always wanted to go to Australia, but I seriously doubt I’ll get there. I might but I’m not getting any younger..

Now here’s a place you won’t come across in “1000 Places to See Before You Die”: Harold Warp’s Pioneer Village in Minden, Nebraska. I love history and Americana and this place is a dream come true. Perhaps two dozen buildings house hundreds of thousands of artifacts from the pioneer days on the Great Plains, everything imaginable that tell the story of how people lived in those days. Mind-boggling. This is just one of many places I visited in Nebraska.. In fact this “flyover state, “ I discovered in my research, has so many diverse areas of great natural beauty as well as historic sites, that I could spend not just days but weeks and weeks in that one neglected goldmine of a state.

On my travels I was quite content to visit national parks, historic sites , ghost towns, vast, wind-swept plateaus in Wyoming, desert streams and rivers in Arizona and mountain ranges higher than anything I experienced in the East.

My one and only nephew is a 20-something engineering graduate student who grew up in the Seattle area and attends school in California. He’s long experienced the grandeur and beauty of the Pacific Northwest where I had the privilege of extensively visiting years ago. But he has no desire as far as I can tell to see much of anything in this country beyond the Pacific Northwest. He’s had many opportunities he’s worked for, and I commend him. But where does he choose to travel? Japan, Vietnam and Thailand for starters. Yes I’d find Vietnam and Japan fascinating places to visit, but I’ve never had the time or means to go to exotic locales in Asia or anywhere else outside this country. My niece has traveled to the Galapagos Islands and lived in Argentina for awhile. Young people are adventurous and free spirited, I get that, but I have no regrets about not having seen those and similar places. In 1978 I was fortunate enough to spend a week in Paris and it was one of the most unforgettable experiences of my life. But I’ve not been to any other counties except Canada since then.

Bert Keller, a retired minister, is one two writers who pen the very excellent column in The Post and Courier called “Aging for Amateurs.” I keep thinking back to a column he wrote in April titled “Something better than a bucket list”. What he wrote about is something I deeply relate to. He says what’s really important as we get older is not all the places we’ve briefly visited but the few places near our home that we really get to know and savor after many visits to the same place. His favorite place where he and his son used to take long walks is Caw Caw County Park near Ravenel, a 600-acre expanse of swamp, marsh and woodland with miles of trails and the kind of solitude and peace one yearns for and finds there in abundance.

He wrote: ”Thanks to Caw Caw, I’ve learned something about paying attention to the place where I am and what’s happening around me with no compulsion to make anything happen…Instead of piling on new, exotic adventures to stimulate my life,Caw Caw helps me learn to process daily experience slowly, intentionally and carefully.” He added that bucket lists may drive us to pre-planned thrills or sensations or fill in gaps in our experience and that there’s a place for that if we can afford to do it.

For Keller Caw Caw is a place where the mind can slow down and be content “thinking long thoughts about things grown familiar.”

I love the way he expresses the truisms of getting older. The slow brain is the wise brain and we elders cherish the time we have in retirement to process all the experiences of our long and fully-lived lives.

I too love and deeply appreciate Caw Caw and have been going there for long walks since it opened in 2000. I’ve been there in all seasons, mostly in the colder months. I know every section of every trail and path and where the benches are to sit awhile and absorb the stillness and listen to the wind in the marsh grasses and the birds which are everywhere. Birds love this place as much as I do. On many an afternoon over the years I’ve thought my own long and deep thoughts in that place of great natural beauty and even wrote a long poem about it.

As familiar as I am with Caw Caw there’s always something new and different to experience there. There are so many different habitats: upland forest, maritime forest , cypress swamp, brackish and salt water marsh. I would easily look forward to visiting there for the rest of my life. So too with my other special places here in the LowcountrySeniorCenter of SouthCarolina: Magnolia Gardens, Charleston Towne Landing State Historic Site and Hampton Park, which is closest to where I live. I’ve extensively photographed all of those places. If I move from here, and I soon might, the hardest part would be leaving the special places I’ve just talked about.

As for the endless books promoting faraway and exotic locales, I think I’ll look into one I just found out about. It’s titled “101 Places Not To See Before You Die.” These include such delights as the Beijing Museum of Tap Water, the Grover Cleveland Service Area on the New Jersey Turnpike, Superfund toxic waste sites, and North Korean gulags. These and other travel misadventures likely make for some interesting reading.

One final note, some years ago I came across a book titled “Happiness is… 500 things to be happy about.” This must have been the precursor to the bucket list books. I looked through it and quickly became exhausted and overwhelmed. I’ll be happy enough in a place like Caw Caw where I can dream and think those long thoughts that help me make sense of my now long life and experiences. At home I’ll sit in the rocking chair on the porch at 2 am when nothing is stirring and think really deep thoughts. Happiness and beautiful places are where you choose to find them and where you keep returning to over and over again.

Last updated October 25, 2019