I’m working as a farmhand out in Livingston, Montana with my girlfriend this summer.

I start the two-thousand mile drive out there as soon as I finish finals in a couple weeks. From there it's three months of five-AM wakeup calls and living in a camper without electricity.

I can’t wait.

Doing this has been a dream of mine for a long, long time. But whenever people ask me why I’m so anxious to give up creature-comforts in exchange for hard labor under a hot sun, I can’t seem to come up with a good, cogent answer. Instead, I offer them a series of vague platitudes about personal growth. I talk about the transformative power of the openness of the American West, and the freedom with which it has always been associated. I mention the need for solitude and quiet in any sort of genuine introspection, and the increasing difficulty of finding either solitude or quiet in a contemporary American society saturated with the intrusive clamor of social-media. I tell them the belief that money begets food, if you really think about it, is nothing more than an inducted superstition. I tell them that convenience is a cheap trick, and although we do less, we aren’t any happier; I say that everything not directly necessary for physical, intellectual, and emotional sustenance (i.e. food, and books, and love) is not only superfluous to life, but maybe even an active impediment to finding any meaning in this world.

But when I say these things, my voice runs thin and I can’t help but feel like a phony. Because that’s exactly what I am, regurgitating a bunch of half-chewed mush I’ve read, and heard, and felt, but never experienced; I’m like a coach who’s never played the game. I don’t actually know if any of the platitudes I offer are true—and when I say them, it’s clear that I don’t know, that I’m bullshitting, that I’m exactly the kind of person to whom most people don’t like to listen for very long.

Still, I speak because I have a hunch that my words hold at least some truth-- hell, I desperately hope that they do, because anxiety has always tipped the scales against meaning in this upwardly-mobile life I’ve been taught to live, and I don't see it getting any better without some sort of radical change. I suppose the possibility of finding truth in the spew of my words, even if it’s only a kernel, even if I’m going to need to look for the rest elsewhere, is why I’m willing to sacrifice comfort for three months of hard work. I also recognize that I imagine Montana as Arcadia, and I know that there are plenty of wake-up calls in store for me this summer. I’m sure that physical labor is largely miserable; I’m sure that solitude is both lonely and boring; I’m sure that simplicity is not only inconvenient, but unglamorous, too. But I don’t know these things, either. I don’t know what is true, and what isn’t, and that difference is exactly what I hope to sort out.

So, the best answer for why I feel the need go to Montana, an answer that thus far I’ve been unable to articulate, is that I want to go so I can answer that same question myself.