Quitting, and what you land in

Trailmark 10 · 30 July 2024

Mathew
Ryder

A health check at forty, and the desk never got him back.

Trailmark audio

Episode 10 · 1:37:30

Mathew Ryder reached 40, and by then he had spent years in an office and had been smoking since the age of 16. He went for a routine health check and stumbled into a bit of luck before it was too late. Some would call this a wake-up call, and he was no different. He stopped smoking, moved away from his sedentary job and began his journeys in the great outdoors.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. His first was not elegant. A hundred-mile walk led him to discover the Camino, which eventually steered him toward the legendary 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail. It took him four months to complete. In the middle of his time on the Appalachian Trail, he spent roughly 500 miles wanting nothing but to return home, but kept postponing that fateful decision until the following day. Day after day, that cheap little delay carried him through to the end in Maine.

Now, Mathew's life in the United Kingdom revolves around his career as a support worker, a significantly more flexible position that allows him to put most of his yearly hours into the winter months and leave the long days of summer open for both ordinary and extraordinary expeditions. While the job may pay less than his office career, it gives him the flexibility he was never able to obtain before. It is a meaningful trade-off. Rather than spending the best months of the year under fluorescent lights and around water coolers filled with mundane conversation, he spends months on the trail and time in the great outdoors. His freedom arrived not as an escape from the nine to five, but as a way to reconnect with his health and gain a greater perspective on what it means to have a sense of adventure.

Trailmark 03 · 26 February 2024

Elton
Guillen

Five months on a bike between quitting the plant and keeping a promise to his grandmother.

Trailmark audio

Episode 03 · 49:52

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I found Elton Guillen's YouTube channel a year before I ever spoke to him, researching Surly bikes, and only put the coincidence together the week I reached out. He was born in California to Nicaraguan parents and grew up shuttling between the two countries. Out of high school he went straight onto the manufacturing floor, Toyota first, twelve years of it, quality supervisor and then manager. By twenty-nine he had the house, the cars, the marriage, a phone that would not stop ringing, and a line about it all that he delivers better than I could: he climbed the corporate ladder and realized it was leaning against the wrong wall.

The exit had been waiting since he was twenty, when he and his friends rode eighty untrained miles to the Golden Gate Bridge, one of them in khakis and dress shoes. At the bridge that night, Elton looked at his brother and said, imagine if we bike to Nicaragua. His brother said, you're crazy, and that held for a decade. When the quitting finally came, he bought his gear online a month out and rode away from his own front door, on the theory that there was enough road between California and Nicaragua to train along the way. His wife could not quit her job, so she joined him in Guatemala.

Mexico alone took three of the five months. The border official in Baja welcomed him with the news that he would be killed, kidnapped, or run over, a forecast he heard again in nearly every town, always about the next one, where people kept ruining it by opening their doors to him. He camped at a truck stop behind a little fence that would stop none of the semis parked back there because, as he put it, at least visually there's something there. At the far border he learned Mexico had never stamped him in, three months in the country illegally, and the official fix on offer was a two-week ride back to Mexico City. He was saved by a Guatemalan officer's phone ringing mid-search. She chatted with her friend, lost the thread, and stamped him through. On paper he was never in Mexico at all.

What he landed in was a promise. Before his grandmother died he told her he would rebuild the coffee farm she and his father had started, the one leaf rust took from them along with millions of others. Now he designs the shade canopy, plants his rows in curves against erosion, and films, edits, and posts all of it himself, putting trees in the ground he says he may never see grown. Near the end I admitted I was on the tail end of the same rat race he had escaped, and he asked, kindly, whether that was why I started the podcast. A partial reason, sure. He has invited me down to see the farm, twice now. One of these times.