It was Saturday, March 29, 2014, and I was looking at our reflection in the coffee shop’s front window while bending down to drink, without hands, from my overfull, steaming latte. Nate had the early scruff of a beard and my short nails, on long-fingered hands gripping my knees, were painted dark purple. I was wearing $285 leather boots; Nate had on skinny jeans. While I sat staring at the people city life had transformed us into, Nate was unspooling a mental blueprint for a radically different existence. Starting from the premise that we’re both happiest when we’re hiking in the woods, Nate drew the obvious, but previously taboo, conclusion that we should find a way to spend a larger percentage of our time in the woods. Namely, by moving there.
Nate and I’d had many versions of this conversation since we’d started hiking, usually on mountaintops. But this Saturday in March it was no longer the half-baked follow-your-dreams bluster of a college sophomore deciding to study surfboard construction in Indonesia in order to “find myself.” Nate had been tinkering with our financial projections, and shared his findings using his fingers to enumerate each idea. First, he said, pointing at me with his thumb, we have a pretty high combined income. I nodded. Second—his pointer finger stabbed the espresso-redolent air—we’ve been saving at the fairly high rate of 40 to 50 percent of our take-home pay every month, not including our 401(k) contributions and mortgage principal. I was listening. What he’d figured out was that if we ramped up our savings rate and maintained our incomes for several years—he estimated three years and five months (you know, roughly)—we’d have enough money to move to a homestead in the woods-filled countryside of Vermont, rent out our Cambridge house, and get lower-paying jobs. Or better yet, no jobs at all. Nate was rhapsodizing in a way wholly divorced from his standard engineer’s economy of spoken word. At that point, I think I would’ve agreed to anything that would break us out of our entrenched corporate routines. In the last year, it’d become obvious that Nate and I were repeating a failing pattern: we’d move to a new city, get new jobs, and expect different results. But with each move and each new first day of work came higher and higher expectations coupled with less and less patience for life to start clicking. We hadn’t been back in Cambridge for even two years yet, and I’d already suffered the paralyzing realization that I’d likely never feel adequately fulfilled or happy, or whatever it is you feel when you’re living the life you’re meant to live. It just wasn’t going to happen for me via my well-paying but ultimately energy-sucking nine-to-five cubicle job. Didn’t matter the job; didn’t matter the city; didn’t matter the house we owned; didn’t matter the dog we’d adopted. We were both, without a doubt, unhappy.
We walked home from the coffee shop holding hands, not talking. Nate had exhausted his voice having spoken more words than is normal for him in about a week, and my face was on fire with brain overwork. I felt like I’d just woken up from a late afternoon nap, hazy from dreams and stunned by the realization that it wasn’t morning. I needed cold water. We canceled our plans to go out to dinner that night and instead ate frozen pizza while poring over the spreadsheets Nate had assembled with projections ranging from how much money we could save each month to what we could charge in rent for our Cambridge home to purchase prices for rural properties to standard stock market returns for our portfolio of low-fee index funds. Midway through dinner, I told Nate it was a go. After four hours of hearing him talk with more passion than I’d heard from him in the last seven years, I knew there was no way we could zip this dream back up. It was out like an air mattress, expanding by the minute, never to be stuffed neatly into its factory-issued carrying case ever again.
I was breathless about this novel life path, but I had a nagging feeling that, in a way, I’d failed. At twenty-two, I was consumed with crafting a meticulous career. And I’d done it. Now, at thirty, I was preparing to abandon everything I’d worked for in favor of, let’s be honest, a pretty bizarre idea. I didn’t know anyone who’d opted out of conventional success. Was this even allowed? Despite my confidence in Nate and in the math, I was unsettled by my own compulsion to follow the rules. I knew there was no way I could’ve embraced this path right after college because I was obsessed with traditional metrics of success then. But I felt so let down by the conformist path I’d followed up to this point that I was willing to take a leap. I was starting to accept that for me, fulfillment didn’t come in a paycheck envelope. I’d done everything you’re “supposed” to do. And I hated it. The idea of not having a pat answer to the question, “What do you do for work?” had haunted me for years. Now, I was ready to move out from underneath these constraints I’d imposed on myself.
Nate and I don’t fester in unhappiness and we don’t abide regrets, as we kept proving to ourselves by moving every few years. When we want something different, we act on it. For approximately three minutes that evening, we discussed moving to the country immediately, but we both knew that wasn’t the right choice for two research-driven, cautious people who won’t even leave the house without bringing water bottles and snacks, no matter where we’re going. Girded by pages of spreadsheet machinations, Nate and I agreed on the strategic, decisive three-year, five-month timeline to allow us to save up enough money and prepare ourselves to blow up our lives. Starting the process right away was the only thing that made sense to us. There’d be no delaying until the following week or until our next paychecks; we started that night. And we never looked back.
As it turned out, the financial elements and their corresponding timeline weren’t the totality of Nate’s plan. Nate already knew that his interests were fully incorporated into his projections. For his entire life, he’s wanted to be some sort of modern-day mountain man/lumberjack/hiker/engineer out in the wilderness. When he was a toddler, his grandparents called him the little man, and in high school, his parents couldn’t stop him from going on solo camping trips and storm-chasing tornadoes by himself through the Kansas prairies. He was born with a desire for solitude, self-sufficiency, and nature. I, on the other hand, was a convert to the whole woods thing, and while it’s true I love to hike, we weren’t going to hike together all day every day. Nate thought I needed a vocation to lure me into a remote corner of a mostly wooded state with a smaller population than our neighborhood in Cambridge. In his mind, in order for this to work, I had to be impassioned. And so, Nate divulged that he’d bought me something: a domain name. For a blog. That he’d already set up and designed. He beamed while explaining that it was just waiting for me to write something. I was furious, to put it mildly.
Being told what to do, even by the person who usually knows me better than I know myself, rankled my independent core. I told Nate I didn’t appreciate that he’d presumed to know what I needed and that I would’ve liked to be privy to this little decision of his. But Nate already knew this too, and that if he’d left it up to me, I would’ve spent five months dithering over a name for the blog, and another two years second-guessing whether or not I was a good enough writer to type something into a computer and hit “publish,” subjecting myself to the harsh, erratic judgment of the Internet. He’d taken a gamble that he could backdoor me into writing by making me feel that I’d be hurting his feelings, not to mention wasting the time and money he’d invested in the site already. He was banking on my obstinate hatred of frittering away sunk costs. And he was right. Sometimes it takes the perspective of an outsider (even if it’s just your own spouse) to tell you what you need the most.
Back in college when I decided to change my major to English, my true passion, I was worried that creative writing wasn’t employable-sounding. To combat this, I tacked on a more employable-sounding double major in political science, because all of my friends, Nate included, were majoring in it. In the eight years since graduation, I’d barely written a creative word. I’d labored over a few atrocious short stories that I hope are irretrievably lost somewhere on my computer, lest I die and someone actually read them. And of course, I’d hacked out my grad school coursework in Cheetos-fueled frenzies along with countless unread thank-you letters from the confines of my varying shades of gray cubicles. Nate and I had two failed blogs already—one about public transit, which never got beyond being something we talked about after two glasses of wine—and an anemic, dull rendering of navigating life in Cambridge. Given this lusterless résumé, I wasn’t optimistic for an oddly named blog about what I viewed as the most uninteresting thing about me: my frugality. Prepared for my rebuttals, Nate flung me another motivator: we’d have to explain the whole situation to our families, and we both knew it would come across more coherently and less like we’d lost our minds if I wrote it out. I couldn’t disagree there. After listening to me bemoan my failure to write for years, Nate decided I needed to be forced/encouraged into, well, writing something. The morning after we decided to have a really early midlife crisis together, I stared at the empty WordPress website Nate had named Frugalwoods. If you’d asked me to think of a more lunatic moniker, I could not have; but I trusted Nate’s instincts. I used to pick at Nate’s nonconformity, haranguing him for his refusal to wear khaki pants and button-down shirts like everyone else. His sense of the offbeat is on point, and I think the offbeat is what populates the cubbyholes of the Internet.
To get me over my crippling fear of bad writing, Nate assured me that nobody would read the blog. I decided to write anonymously, mostly so I could disavow having ever written it if it was terrible (which my neurosis and perfectionism assured me it would be). Thusly coddled, I started writing. And Nate was right; I did know frugality. It was how I’d made it through college with no debt, lived in New York City for a year on $8,000, and bought a house at age twenty-eight. But I’d never tried to explain it to anyone else before. Once I started writing, it flowed like the release of steam from a pressurized cannon. I could not stop. I published my first post on April 9, 2014, and nearly four years later, I haven’t run out of words yet.