Chuck Hoffman is executive director of Holden Village, a Lutheran education center in the Cascade mountains in Washington state.
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Weathering a Pandemic Where There Are No Roads
A trail near Holden Village / Photograph by Andrew Zimmerman
“THERE AREN’T ROADS beyond here; it’s trails and wilderness—wilderness that goes all the way up into Canada.
There’s something to the phrase ‘the pursuit of less.’ We try to live close to the land and what the land is able to do or produce; we live within that rather than our own will of what the ‘good life’ is.
We’re closed to the public and new arrivals until at least the end of August. This is providing a lot of reflection time. There are no distractions, really. There’s no TV, no cell phone services—this is a satellite phone we’re on right now. But the trees and the earth and the animals and all those things are very active—and it’s almost like a reversal.