Paddleboarding at Baker Lake, Washington

I disabled the last of my social media accounts this week. It might be the most freeing thing I’ve ever done.

I don’t know exactly what’s gotten into me lately, to be honest. Gumption? Sensory overload? Pandemic fatigue? Whatever it is, I’m just a completely different person than I was pre-pandemic, and there’s no going back to life as I once knew it; that includes my social media habits.

I think I noticed that something was different while we were on our recent trip in September. After our day in Port Townsend (see previous post here), we traveled by ferry to Burlington. We spent the next day driving through Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest until we reached Baker Lake to go paddleboarding. (When we Thompsons discover a new hobby, we really commit to it.)

I thought it couldn’t get any better than Lake Crescent, but I was wrong.

Baker Lake is utterly otherworldly. It was like I had been seeing in black and white my entire life and was suddenly seeing color for the first time. The lake was a translucent, bright, almost blinding turquoise under a cerulean sky, surrounded by fuzzy green forest and snowcapped mountains. It was too perfect to seem real. As the influencers say, no filter needed.

And I didn’t really feel the impulse to post it online.

In the moment, all I wanted to do was just be. Be present. Be still. Be in the moment and soak it all in through my eyeballs and not a smartphone screen. I realized that, up until that day, I had always felt so much pressure to document our experiences that I forgot to actually experience them. But Baker Lake was different. I still took some pictures and video, but I no longer felt the pull of social media calling me out of the moment and into a lesser virtual reality. It had lost all of its appeal.

There’s just something about marveling at something marvelous in real time, in real life, that will free you of any inclination to settle for a two-dimensional replica in a tiny Instagram square, hashtag blessed. It makes anything else seem dull. Sitting in the middle of the lake with no one but my family around me, with nothing but the sound of rippling waves and the occasional trout jumping out of the water, I just knew I couldn’t go back to all the societal noise when our vacation was over. All the soundbites and opinions and influencing and ambition and flaunting and bullying and trolling and clickbait and doomsday reporting and bickering over all the current things no longer seemed entertaining or relevant or even desirable.

We had an enjoyable simple picnic by the lake after more than two hours of paddling, and I decided then that my smartphone and social media habits had to change. This was the kind of high-definition I needed. I needed to be more connected to nature than the Internet. I needed more unplugged, adventurous moments like this. I needed to make a regular habit of marveling at the marvelous.

I’m not the only one in our family who felt like a new person after that trip. The best highlight of the day? Our middle son asked if he could be baptized in the lake. He had been considering it for a while, and we’d had many conversations about what it meant, but his anxiety would creep in and he’d back out. But he decided that was the perfect time and place, so Kelley baptized him beside the boat dock with a handful of strangers looking on.

I did unashamedly video that moment, and you can watch it here: