Adam's Cool Website

Counting the Days

I'm not a numbers-driven person, but for years, I've tallied my ski days, and now my paddleboarding days. Why?

This year, I started tracking paddling days on the back of my "Ski Days" sign too.

Hanging in my garage is a simple wooden sign that's ruled my winters for the past six years. Up top, it says "Ski Days" in black marker; below, I've tallied my annual Alpine, backcountry, and Nordic outings every season since 2017. From A-Bay's opening to closing days, I do my best to add to the tally, and while it's not my main motivation to hit the slopes, I'm always keenly aware of where I sit.

I'm not the kind of person who carefully tracks my time outside. Despite being a rock climber for more than a decade, I never had an 8a.nu or climbing logbook, partially because the moment I start quantifying how much I climb, I'll transform into a creature made of pure, incandescent OCD. Hiking, I track my pack weight closely when I'm trying to slim my gear down ahead of a big trip, but I usually do it on scratch paper instead of a spreadsheet.

Still, I've found tracking my ski days remarkably gratifying, even though the number isn't that impressive (last year I notched 41 total, 22 downhill and 19 Nordic). This summer, I’ve been tallying my paddleboarding days too. I can’t help but wonder why that is. An uncharitable explanation would be that I’ve let our culture’s obsession with productivity infect even my free time. A more generous one would be that I’m just trying to pack what adventures I can into my limited time. But I think there’s something deeper to the urge to count time.

In September 1978, a Taiwenese-American performance artist named Tehching Hsieh locked himself in a 103-square-foot wooden cell he had built in his New York City apartment. In a artist’s statement beforehand, he recorded his goal: He would stay in his cage for a full year. During that time, he would not read, write, watch television, or even speak with the visitors who were periodically allowed inside the apartment to observe him. Every day he drew a mark on the wall. For 12 months, he reduced his existence to simply counting time.

It was the first of what Hsieh dubbed his five “one-year pieces.” From 1980-1981, Hsieh punched a time clock every hour, on the hour, 24 hours a day; from 1981-1982, he stayed outside through one of the coldest winters in New York’s history, only once briefly entering a building when the NYPD arrested him; from 1983-1984, he and fellow artist Linda Montano tied themselves together with an 8-foot-long rope, vowing to stay in the same room at all times but never touch each other. Finally, from 1985-1986, he refused to interact with art at all: He didn’t make it, read about it, talk about it, or even look at it. Today, Hsieh says his art was about “wasting time,” or as he put it in an interview, “I want to showcase the idea that one year is one year, no matter you waste or fulfill it.. the quantity of life is the same for everybody.”

Something in that resonates with me. However much or little I get out, whether I live sunburned and wind-chapped or piss away the season on my couch, the year turns over just the same, a fact I become more keenly aware of the older I get. Maybe I just want some record that it did happen before that memory wriggles away from me, even if it’s just a set of hash marks on a sign in my garage.