From the Tasting Room to the Outhouse

The minimalism genre tells you to pick a level of comfort and commit. The actual skill might be moving between them.

Holding my “welcome wine,” looking out at Okanagan Lake

I was brushing my teeth outside a travel trailer in the British Columbia woods, rinsing my mouth with bottled water and spitting onto the dirt, when I noticed I was thinking about the dessert.

The dessert had been a caramelized chocolate cremeux with garden lavender foam set on a blueberry puree, served on the terrace of a winery overlooking Okanagan Lake. The sommelier had paired the courses. The bell tower above the vineyard had rung as we arrived — five full minutes on the hour, the kind of welcome you don’t really get unless someone is making a point of it.

That had been six hours earlier. Now I was rinsing toothpaste into pine needles.

I should say upfront that I wasn’t unhappy about either of these locations.

A bell tower, a sommelier, a chocolate cremeux

The winery sits at the top of a wheat-colored hill above the lake, the kind of architectural setup that doesn’t happen by accident. Steve and I were escorted to the entry arch and handed a glass of crisp pinot gris — the welcome wine, which we sipped as we wandered the grounds. They seated us on the terrace, vineyards in the middle distance, the glassy lake beyond that. Beef carpaccio for me, chicken with morels to follow, each course paired with a wine the sommelier had chosen and brought out himself. He suggested a reserve bottle. We saw the five-hundred-dollar price tag and declined.

The whole place was quiet in a way I want to describe carefully. It was early in the season, before the tour buses, and the people on the grounds moved through it almost reverently — the way you walk through a cathedral you didn’t expect to find yourself in. It was a meditative kind of quiet, manufactured but not insincere. The bells rang. The lake didn’t move.

We drove out toward Princeton around mid-afternoon, with the dessert plate still vivid in the front of my mind.

The drive

The road from Kelowna to Princeton is two hours of lonely, winding highway. Remote ponds. Cow pastures. Cabins set back from the road that look like they were built in the early 1900s and never quite kept up. The houses going by were cozy but never luxurious. The blue sky stayed clear all the way out. The landscape rambled in a relaxed kind of way.

The shitter’s full

Our friends own a small off-grid cabin at Kennedy Lake, just outside Princeton. We’ve been many times. As we came up the dusty dirt road, the group was out in front of the place — checking oil in the ATVs, unloading hot dogs and beer from the back of a couple of trucks. We had a few hours of daylight left, which we spent on the four-wheelers, riding up to lookouts in the mountains. The fire ban had already started, weeks earlier than last year. Mosquitoes swarmed around our heads in great wheeling clouds. The lows would be in the forties overnight, and the highs the next day would be in the high sixties, with enough sun that I didn’t need a jacket.

Back when we could have campfires — the outhouse in the background

The travel trailer that doubles as a guest house has no water hookup. The generator runs sometimes. The outhouse is a wooden building with a hand-lettered sign inside that reads The shitter’s full!, which it isn’t yet — there is a system involving ash, lime, buckets of snow in winter, and water in summer to keep the smell manageable. The neighbors run their own small generators, and one of them gives off a high-pitched alarm when the battery dips below a voltage threshold. We heard that ringing somewhere across the trees more than once.

The motion-sensor solar-powered light outside the outhouse came on every time I walked toward it in the dark. I didn’t need a flashlight. The cabin’s quiet was not the cathedral quiet of the winery. It was the regular quiet of woods — dog-barking-at-dusk quiet, with the occasional distant generator alarm laid over it like a misplaced ringtone.

It was, I want to be clear, just as good.

The contrast we laughed about

We laughed about it as we drove out at the end of the weekend. The five-star winery in the morning, the backwoods of Kennedy Lake by suppertime. Fine dining… to paper plates. Sommelier pours… to a Coleman cooler. Caramelized chocolate cremeux… to a hot dog. I’d brushed my teeth outside a trailer with a bottle of water and rinsed out onto the dirt.

The minimalism genre — the one most of this kind of writing sits inside — would have framed one of those days as the right one and the other as the deviation. The default framing tends to assume you have to pick a level of comfort and live there. Luxury and modesty get pitched as opposing teams, with a moral grade attached to the team you choose.

Neither place felt morally graded to me. They both felt good, in different ways, by different mechanisms, and what made them both good wasn’t the comfort level at either end.

The view from our lunch table on the terrace

The flexibility underneath

The clinical-psychology word for what I think both days were drawing on is psychological flexibility — a construct developed largely by Steven Hayes and colleagues working in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. The short version is that flexibility is the ability to shift your behavior, your expectations, and your attention based on what the situation actually calls for, rather than running the same internal script everywhere. People who score high on it report better mental health across a wide range of measures. People who score low tend to be rigid in a particular direction — they want every situation to be high-comfort, or every situation to be low-comfort, or every situation to look like the last one they were good at.

This is what most minimalism content quietly misses. The skill is not the destination. The skill is the range.

A person who can sit through a four-course tasting menu without restlessness and use an outhouse the same evening without distress is not contradicting themselves. They are demonstrating a single underlying capacity — the ability to be at home in different conditions because the home isn’t built out of the conditions. I’ve written about this before. The address keeps changing. The inner work and the sense of home doesn’t.

What both places were offering

What I noticed, in the part of the drive home where Steve and I started talking about why we’d liked both of them so much, was that neither place had been about the level of fanciness it had achieved. They had both been about the same two things — being with people whose company we liked, and being somewhere that wasn’t asking anything of us we couldn’t give.

The winery wasn’t asking anything of us. It was offering. The cabin wasn’t asking anything of us either. It was offering, just different things.

The fancy place gave us a kind of attention you don’t get most days — the sommelier explaining a pour, the terrace arranged so that the lake sat at exactly the right height past the vineyards, the dessert that had clearly been thought about for a long time before it ever reached the plate. The cabin gave us a different kind of attention — friends working on the ATVs together, mosquitoes that demanded a hat, a motion-sensor light that recognized us in the dark.

Both places were giving us something we needed. A connection to nature, in different ways, and connection with each other. Both places were doing the work that places do when you let them.

After

The drive back to Kelowna was the same lonely two-hour highway, the same winding curves, the same cabins set back from the road that nobody had quite kept up. We didn’t stop for dinner. The dessert was no longer on my mind. We made grilled cheese in our Airbnb kitchen when we got home, and ate standing up at the counter, and that felt about right too.

I don’t think the takeaway is that comfort doesn’t matter. It does. I don’t think the takeaway is that we should aspire to be people who can be anywhere. There are settings that are bad for human nervous systems, and the work is not to make ourselves indifferent to them.

The takeaway is just that the minimalism content has it slightly off when it pitches luxury and constraint as opposites. They are two extremes on a continuum of conditions for life. People who get the most out of life may be those who can appreciate both.

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