Fall Quarterly Meeting 2023
One of the key benefits of aging is having old friendships. When we moved back from Oregon to North Carolina 10 years ago, one of the things I was most excited about was spending time with friends from Kentucky that I had missed dearly from the west coast. Before I even made it to North Carolina, I stopped in Kentucky and went for a hike in Red River Gorge with 3 of my oldest and closest friends. That started a tradition of what we call “Quarterly Meetings” wherein we try to camp together once a season. Typically a quarterly meeting involves arriving at a campsite friday night for a fire and reconnection, hiking all day Saturday in some type of nonordinary state of consciousness, and then making plans for the next meeting over breakfast on Sunday before getting back to daily life. This ritual has been a source of healing and support for over a decade in my life. These friendships began prior to any of us having children and now, as our kids get older, we have begun devoting a quarterly meeting or two a year to bringing all of the kids along. This fall’s gathering was amazing and I really enjoy passing along this curated version of fellowship along to the teens and tweens. Friendship is a skill that’s easier and more fun to model than to teach. I’ll include our preparatory letter, photos, and the minutes from this season’s meeting jsut because I enjoy these gatherings so darn much.
Fall Quarterly Meeting: Agenda, Equinox Edition (Please burn after reading)
As we finish our tenth year as a corporation and look toward the coming decade, I want to take few minutes to reflect on our mission and the profound progress that we have made as an organization. Especially as our younger members begin to grasp the importance of our mission, I think it particularly important to have a common vision of our trajectory.
In late 2013, in the wooded hills of Red River Gorge, 4 fathers set out to change the world through the simple act of hiking and talking. The weather was not good, the food was what it was, and the trail was longer than the day. But the difficulties of the day were like a forge for our intrepid hikers, painfully shaping them into the white hot tip of a spear pointed at the heart of a beast known as boredom.
As middle age reared its forgettable head and parenting dulled the once sharp edges of the father’s minds, it became apparent that there were only two paths ahead. Either willingly join the lemming’s bellyflops into oblivion or turn our faces into the crowds rushing toward the cliff and ask them if they’s seen that beaver!
[editor’s note: this beaver reference relates to Ryan successfully distracting a legal authority by pointing at an imaginary beaver and sharing his love for the industrious rodent. No naughty genitalia reference was implied]
In the decade since, we have seen our organization congeal into a laser-focused group of ne’er do wells with vague and unsettling intentions at best. We have shown time and time again that we are unafraid of idly dreaming the day away beneath the falling leaves of a tree or wasting time with sushi on grand overlooks. At times it has been a struggle; beer can be heavy and driving can be boring. But now, as 2023 draws to a close, we can look back with calm certainty that we have done little and enjoyed immensely. And it is precisely this daily quarterly commitment to an absence of purpose or direction that has gotten us where we are today.
The fall 2023 meeting promises to be splendidly disorganized, potentially rivaling the great Christmas-bear, post-op, miniature-golf extravaganza of 2018. Set in the mountains of mulletted Asheville at the Cool-du-sac Sub-bourbon retreat center, we can expect a near complete disregard for propriety and at least four different fake accents. Attendees are encouraged to begin a regime of deep knee bends and melodic gargling at least one week prior to arrival; there will be little time for warming up once festivities have begun. Please see the preparatory guide and agenda below.
Friday
5-7 pm: dinner. opening remarks and snickering
7-8 pm: downtown: super secret opening ceremony thing
Saturday
8-9 am: breakfast and caffeination
9am: depart for mind bogglingly awesome and triflingly dangerous hike (1 hour drive) 5pm return to Asheville for foods, beers, deserts
7pm: porch fire equinox celebration and night hike
Sunday
9am: Founders hangover hike (40 and over only) 12-2pm hugging, weeping, carrying on
To bring:
Sleeping bags, pads, hiking shoe, water packs (you will need your hands free on the hike), head lamps, one marginally silly outfit, one bad poem about possums
[Editor’s note: after a schedule is published it is often changed or ignored, because we are easily-distracted, drug-addled, middle-aged fathers. However as you can see in the finding published after out meeting, we did pretty well]
Fall 2023 Quarterly Meeting: Summary of Findings
This year’s fall meeting was one of the best attended and well-enjoyed company meetings on record. We gathered over 8 attendees for a weekend conference in the mountains of western North Carolina, or northern West Carolina, depending on your perspective. While the names of attendees remain confidential, we can report several interesting breakthroughs from our experimental consciousness division as well as some interesting findings from the department of provisions and intoxicants.
In keeping with a tradition as old as the company itself, we began the quarterly meeting with travel decompression after synchronized parking. Beginning at White Duck Taco, in downtown Asheville, we tested the limits of taco efficiency, at one point having tacos arrive to the table prior to the person who ordered them. This brings into question some long held assumption about the time/taco continuum and the possible role that premixed margaritas play in restaurant navigation. Initial findings suggest that the fabric of tacos themselves may be subject to distortion when passing through a tequila-based logic disruption field. Obviously future research is required, but the implications in beer and potato chip dynamics are intriguing.
After taking attendance and belching a brief taco benediction, we wasted little time in achieving a non-ordinary state of consciousness as required by corporate bylaws in the initial charter. Given that this season’s meeting included younger attendees, a novel intervention was required to avoid running afoul of both state laws and maternal regulations. Consequently, we subjected the entire group to a sound healing ceremony.
Lying comfortably on blankets on the floor in the dark, attendees were subjected to almost an hour of gongs, didgeridoos, broken umbrella shaking, rattles, and bing-bongs under very controlled circumstances designed to produce maximal brain weirdness. Results were immediate. One of our youngest attendees stated, “I mean I retained a sense of my surroundings and felt safe but otherwise is was indistinguishable from a dream. It was like forever. It was like everything was true but I just hadn’t learned it yet.” Similarly, another attendee echoed these sentiments, saying, “That was bad ass!” Another participant described the event as feeling as if he was starring in a movie about a failed Tibetan romance with a stunning soundtrack. In the subsequent fireside integration session, almost all attendees reported visions of distant landscapes and conversations with past selves and ancestors. Specifically, there was a strong grandfather theme and a notion of intergenerational continuity.
Lodgings at the Cul De Sac retreat center were adequate and well priced. The food was plentiful and tasty. In keeping with tradition, each adult attendee purchased and brought enough alcohol for the entire event, ensuring that sobriety could be safely held at bay without concern.
After integrating both perceptual distortion of sound healing and the gastric distention of tacos, attendees retired to their lodgings to further contemplate the mysteries of sound and salsa and to prepare themselves for the next days trials. Adventure is a requisite component of quarterly gatherings and this year would prove no exception.
While our membership requirements are strict and highly exclusive, it does make for a highly organized and effective group. At this season’s first breakfast, we beat a long held record and had a group of 3 adults and 6 adults-in-training fed and in the van by 830 am. Thanks to the bluegrass division of the company and their ability to manipulate the forces of consumerism with mutually reinforcing charisma fields, we were able to obtain a 15 passenger van for the price of a minivan, allowing us all to ride together to the wrong places. The driver was reprimanded for driving to the wrong trailhead and there were rumors suggesting that the prior night’s lecture on “bourbon and its effects on cognitive fortitude” may have impacted navigational competency. Investigations are still pending.
Despite the delay, our entire group arrived at Grandfather mountain amidst high winds and cooler temperatures than expected. Although a well-known pilgrimage, the trail to McCrae peak is not for the faint of heart. (In general, members who’s hearts have ever fainted are placed on kitchen duty and offered a pacemaker.) Once again, our stringent membership requirements showed their value as each attendee successfully and eagerly summited the multiple exposed ladders strapped to rocky outcroppings. McCrae peak was stunning, but fierce winds limited the amount of time we could spend surveying the surrounding grandeur. We returned via the lower trail which had fewer ladders and kept us somewhat sheltered form the winds. Trailside communion was performed with a bottle of Jesus juice and some snack bars.
We exited the trail and headed to the mile-high swinging and singing bridge. The gusting wind jostled the suspension bridge and set up beautiful harmonics in the suspension cables. Similar to many of our quarterly adventures, there was mythic symbolism in the “Grandfather” and “random noises” theme that carried over from sound healing to trail. Clearly, fate was conspiring with us as it is required to do when unified minds apply themselves to intentional silliness, derring do, and snacks.
At sunset we celebrated the equinox with a circle of gratitude for both the joys of summer and winter.
After the days planned events, attendees retired to the black lit porch for snacks, drinks, some idle wandering about, and socializing. This years creative theme was “bad possum” poetry but only one attendee braved the challenge and emerged the winner. She will be henceforth referred to as “P-awesome” and her poem will be placed in the company filing cabinet next to the embarrassing pictures of Ryan losing his shoes in a creek in the middle of winter, which is completely confidential.
“Opossums in the dead of night
Crawl thought forests of the countryside
Looking around with tiny eyes
They drag their tails to a place to hide
A possum walking on the road
Gave a driver quite a scare
His car had to be towed
It landed in a ditch after flying through the air
An opossum in the dead of night
Wasn’t thinking about where it went
It came upon a nice campsite
And set up camp inside a tent”
On the final day of this season’s corporate retreat, there was a foundering fathers walk. These walks remain shrouded in secrecy and arcane ceremony and little is known about their purpose.
This season’s quarterly closing was heralded by bottle rockets, hugs, and beer redistribution.
2023 has been a stellar year from our winter kickoff at the groundhog quarterly to this fall’s wrap-up event. Rumors suggest the possibility of spring waterfall explorations combined with salt cave meditations. One unsubstantiated report even suggested that an experimental waffle technology could be used to produce novel types of ice-cream sandwiches, but this has been denied by the department of applied toastering.
