"You can't miss him if he doesn't go away," Michelle Zettel advised Jessica Mudd, soon to be McCallum. Jessica was 21 years old, pregnant with our first child, and I was headed out on the first of 12 week-long river trips. This just a month after I had returned from a 40 day bike trip across the Southern Tier. So those words may have seemed like a not so hilarious statement of the obvious. But like so many ancient aphorisms, when you apply the words to your daily reality, suddenly they reveal their tremendous depth. That summer, we waited all week to see each other for a day underneath the Sawtooths. We waited for the summer to end so we could stop waiting. Those 12 days over the course of the summer are worth far more today than 3 solid months together have ever been.
Every year since we started the bakery, we take a break, sometimes two, from the business. We close the doors and go. This year, we went on a 17 day river trip, from Boundary Creek on the Middle Fork to Spring Bar on the Main. 210 miles of river, or as I call it Idaho's Grand Canyon experience. We hit the hotsprings on mornings when the water pails iced over. We heard elk bugling and packed out meat. We put on our rain gear and looked for blue sky. We stopped at Buckskin Bill's and learned about kleos, or, how to treat the wayward traveler on a cold, wet October day (You put the pot on to boil when you see boats pull in, not even knowing who it is). We went hungry. We ate. We got tired. We slept. We worked. We played.
Every year when we come back from our vagabonding, a new year has begun. Everything is familiar, yet somehow new. We can smell the bread again and remember those ancient times before the bakery opened when making a starter from scratch was a miracle and every loaf had an individual soul. I can't recommend this practice highly enough. Taking a break, whether it be from eating, from work, or from the ones we love, always makes the food taste better, the work more meaningful, the love deeper.