Seeking shelter

Gray weekend. Steady rain, lazy to the last minute, and then, Sunday morning, just as three days of wind and rain strengthened to a howling peak, I went for a ride. Booties and a fleece hat in August, and after the precipitation soaked through, water streamed down my cheeks and into my mouth. It tasted familiar. Like salt and melon-cucumber shampoo, with hints of peat moss and rotting salmon. The taste of early fall.

Low tide. Chum salmon flopped around in a few inches of water at the mouth of Fish Creek, their bodies bleached and flaking, their mouths gaped and gulping at the soaked air. The rest of their lives could probably be measured in minutes, but by nature's cruel design they had already been dead for a while, struggling mere feet from the ocean they were born to escape. I wondered what their offspring would find when they returned here. Would they see the same dead end?

Heavy fog. Fishing boats flickered in and out of the clouds like ghosts in a postmortem search for kings. Rain pattered on the hidden surface of the ocean. A foghorn blew from sources unknown. The little boats circled the quiet chaos, where sky and water melted together in a gray mass, without even a faint line to draw the horizon. The ships could have been flying, but the kings were buried deep.

Rainforest Trail. I disappeared beneath the canopy where raindrops echoed but didn't fall. Spindly spruce trees dressed in moss towered over an explosion of devil's club, fully developed and blazing with red berries, the kind that develop just before the yellow wither of fall. The front wheel dipped down a narrow strip of gravel. I took in gulps of gravity as my body reflexively pendulated through a maze of sharp turns. The forest spit me full-speed onto the beach, with the bike clattering over a carpet of broken shells, and ghost boats skimming the fog, and still-alive salmon leaping toward the sky. Before I could even slow down, the trail turned back into the dark and sheltered woods, and a steep, winding climb, where gulps of gravity turned into gasps of air.

Within minutes, I was back to where I started, the crest of a mile-long loop. So I did the only thing I could do to stay out of the rain - I continued straight and circled, again and again.

Enjoying the break

I am still for the most part staying off my bike. I got out for a 30-mile ride the other day and felt Achilles pain toward the end. To tell you the truth, the pain's not even that bad. But my heel doesn't seem to hurt at all when I walk, and right now, I'm really enjoying the walking. For this super-short window of time between when the snow melts and falls again, so much new terrain opens up that it seems almost a shame to hold yourself to bikeable trails. In Juneau, if you really want to get out, you have to go where your bike can't.

Yesterday, my friend Abby and I headed up to the Douglas Island Ridge via the Dan Moller trail. Dan Moller is one of my favorite winter bike trails, well-used and often even groomed by snowmobiles. It's not so much a trail in the summer as it is a wooden staircase followed by spongy tundra.

Abby is a super-fast runner who can only drag herself down to my speed by schlepping around her 1-year-old son, Elias.

Even as the bushwhacking dragged on, Elias just slept or mumbled something or pointed to trees and rocks. I've never seen such a well-behaved baby. We hiked for three hours; he ate half a cracker, never fussed, and giggled when Abby said things like "look at all the pretty flowers." I told Abby, "You're in trouble. You've got an adventure kid on your hands."

Last night, I had a crazy dream where I was climbing the Mendenhall Glacier with ice axes and crampons as the glacier melted beneath me. As the ice sank I just kept climbing, frantically chipping at the wet ice as roaring streams of meltwater gushed down crevasses. It was one of those dreams that frustratingly had no resolution, so it lingered in my mind long after I woke up. So without ever really making a conscious decision to go there, I found myself out at the West Glacier Trail this morning, scouting the route to Mount McGinnis.

I walked for an hour and a half without breaking treeline. That is certainly a long, meandering trail, and hard to follow. On the way back, I lost the faint, rocky path and ended up on the ledge of a cliff the glacier had carved out millennia ago. Now the glacier is a shadow of what it once was, and noticeably shrinking every year. I'm still trying to figure out what that dream meant. Perhaps it doesn't have to mean anything.

Goals

Thanks to those who sent me nice e-mails and comments after my post yesterday. I really do make an effort to not get too personal with my blog, because I recognize that my boss, distant ex's, and a fair number of strangers peruse it. But sometimes I crave the catharsis of a private journal keeper, and my only real outlet is this blog.

It felt good to whine a little. Now it's time to take action. I was moved by Elden aka Fat Cyclist's latest post, "The Funeral and What's Next." Because the World Wide Web of blogs is in fact a small, tight-knit community, most probably already know that his wife died last week of the cancer she has been fighting for years. Having recently met the man, I was upset by the news, but deeply moved by his strong resolve to move forward. I thought, "If he can find the courage to move on with his life, I certainly can."

So in an effort to avoid flailing around in uncertainty, I've decided to set 10 goals for the near future. Some are quite ambitious and others are more doable, but all are things I find myself thinking about from time to time:

1. Be more focused about my housing hunt. I really need to find a place to live and get settled before I can move forward with much else.

2. Not be so stressed about my personal life: So I've dabbled a bit in the dating scene. It's been a real long while since I've actively tried this. It seems the rules of the game haven't changed much in the past decade, but I haven't really improved in my savvy at following said rules. And I'm a decade older. But I've resolved to just roll with it, and not constantly picture myself in a scene from that movie, "He's Just Not That Into You."

3. Work on a book proposal. I'd love to write a nonfiction book about the history and array of intriguing individual stories behind human-powered travel on the Iditarod Trail. I've been chewing on the idea for two years now, but I'm intimidated by the huge amount of research it would involve, the time it would take, and the prospect of interviewing (and finding) all the people involved. But I believe I could take it on with the both objectivity of a journalist and the insight of an insider. And I do think a compelling book about this tiny niche adventure sport could appeal to a wide audience. It's just too much work to do it "just for fun." Thus the need for a proposal.

4. Plan B, more realistic book project: I would like to create another "Ghost Trails"-type autobiography about the Tour Divide. The problem is, I had somewhat selfish, cathartic reasons for writing "Ghost Trails." I formatted it around issues that would not stop churning around in my head during summer 2008, until I wrote them all down. It's hard for me to think about a new project without viewing it in a similar slant. Maybe that's appropriate. I don't know. It certainly would be good for my mental health.

5. Fall Golden Circle tour: For two years now, I've embarked on a two or three-day bicycle tour of the 370-mile route between Haines and Skagway. I'd love to do that again this year, and I think I may even be able to coax a couple days off sometime in September.

6. Hucker trip to Carcross, Yukon: On my regular weekend, I'd like to travel to Carcross at least once to soak in white-knuckle runs down some really well-built mountain bike trails.

7. Klondike Road Relay: Yes, 'tis the season to make good use of the Alaska Marine Highway System. The relay is September 11 to 12, and involves running (yes, running) 10 or so miles of the Klondike Highway (at a relaxed, "casual costumed" pace.) Jenn, do you still have room for me on your Whitehorse team? I think I can swing it.

8. 2010 Susitna 100: I would love to approach this February race as a winter focus and really try to "race" it. And by race it, I mean not just finish it, but finish it as fast as I physically can. So for this winter, I am going to try to set up training that is more focused on speed and high-effort endurance, as opposed to my Iditarod training, which was focused on survival. I don't want my training to be too focused, though, because this is also the winter I plan to rediscover snowboarding.

9. New bike! By spring 2010, I'd like to be in possession of an awesome new mountain bike, and I'd like to force myself to do the research so that it's as awesome as possible, and I'd like to hunker down in a cheaper apartment and save some of my income so that I don't feel guilty about its awesomeness.

10. Future winter ride across the entire Iditarod Trail to Nome: Ha, ha, just kidding, Mom ... maybe.