Thinking about defiance

"As life gets longer, awful feels softer ... well, it feels pretty soft to me."
- Modest Mouse, "The View"

Today I walked out the front door with my snowshoes in my hands. I passed the row of pansies in my front yard, crossed a dry street strewn with Barbies and tricycles, and brushed a row of bushes now spiny with spring buds. Signs of summer are emerging everywhere ... cruise ships in the harbor; sightseeing buses streaming down the road; dogs prowling the yards; children's voices in the distance. I fought through a tangle of broken branches, wet roots and mud for a quarter mile. Then I strapped my snowshoes on. It may be the middle of May, but there is still enough snowpack for me to move freely across the soft surface of Douglas Island. I hiked for four hours, and then I went to work. I am happy to be back in Alaska.

I went a little higher, and a little longer, than I intended too. On the way home, I started to feel the usual downhill pangs in my knee. So I focused in, taking each step consciously and asking myself a question that has become almost a mantra - "How much does this really bother me?"

It's a valid question. How can I tell the difference between pain and what may be just a gut reaction to habit and precedence? My mom and I talked about my history of injury last week. Every time I bashed or bruised my knee as a kid, I was prone to hobbling around stiff-legged for days. She would eventually tell me to "just walk normal," and I'd usually protest. "But it hurts," I'd whine. "If you don't start using it, you won't know when it doesn't hurt," she'd say.

I decided before I went to Utah that if I had problems, or if any physical aspect of my vacation didn't go well in any way, that would be the reality check I'd need to turn to desperate measures - complete inactivity. No elliptical machine. No snowshoeing. Maybe I wouldn't even go swimming. Because, obviously, after three months, if those things hadn't worked, they weren't going to.

Well, the vacation didn't go well ... at least, not nearly as well as I hoped. I turned to face the reality of my decision, and met my own inevitable, whining protests ...

"At what point do you accept something as chronic and try to work around, rather than away, from it?"

"What if inactivity doesn't work? Better to be moving at 50 percent than not moving at all."

"How much does this really bother me?"

Maybe I can just decide that it doesn't. I'll just tell myself the little pangs and jolts don't bother me enough to stop. Cowboy up, so to speak, and get back on the bike where I'd like to be. I know I'm still prone to stiffening up after cycling, but that's really my biggest struggle. I made a mistake in Utah of the swift introduction of a 45-mile day after months of 0-mile days. But if I took it in slow doses - one 5-mile day, one day off, one 8-mile day, one day off, etc. ... Maybe that would work better than complete inactivity.

Because my alternative, truthfully, is returning to the binge cycle ... last week, several days of rest followed by a deluge of biking and backpacking; this week, several days of rest followed by a four-hour hike with way too much downhill. I'm like a dieter with boxes of brownies in the cupboard. And since I already know I can't resist, I might as well eat them one at a time.

Yet more Utah pics

These are a few of Geoff's pictures. I'm sure they'll turn up on his blog. But I'm posting them here, because this is my Web site and I'll do what I want.

I went swimming in a White Canyon pool. It wasn't the Colorado River, but it was cold enough. If only there was enough water for me to travel the entire canyon that way, I would have been set.

Dave Nice and I build fire because Utah is cold place.

Pete rides up what I assume is Murphy's Hogback, along the White Rim trail.

I love this picture. I'm not quite sure why. I just do.

Anna in Fry Canyon, shortly before the group hit a dead end that no one was expecting on exit day.

The group gathers in White Canyon. I'm the gimp on the left.

The backpack trip

I never got around to blogging about my backpack trip in Southern Utah. A fairly large group and I - there were 11 of us, total - trekked through White Canyon from National Bridges National Monument to Fry Canyon. It was about 20 miles, three days, two nights, a chill downhill slope, some mild scrambling, and could have been one of the toughest backpack trips I ever participated in ... if it wasn't for my friends.

I had fairly well cooked my right knee during the couple of easy bike rides I did in Moab over the weekend. It had seized stiff by Monday morning. I was more frustrated with my physical state and my inability to participate in the simplest activities than I have been yet in this injury cycle, now going on three months. But I made it through ... mostly on the backs of people who were willing to lighten my load, hoist my pack, lend me hobble sticks, and offer a hand over the boulders. These are the people who essentially carried me through White Canyon:

This is my friend, Anna, and her husband, Nate. They live in St. George, Utah. Anna and I met during Spring Break '99, when she was a freshmen in college, I was a sophomore, and we both harbored the grand dream that we could change the world by testing the turbidity of the Tualitin River. I have since become an adopted daughter-in-law of sorts for her whole family, but Nate and I just met. That didn't stop him from carrying my pack, along with his, over a couple of miles on the first day and the tough scramble up and out of the canyon on the last. He had to wrestle it away from me the first time, when I was still unwilling to face the shame. Thankfully, he overpowered me pretty quickly, because he's Superman.

On the left is my friend, Dane, a former Utahn exiled to grad school in Vancouver, B.C., and Chris, a therapist in Salt Lake City who clocks a minimum of 70 hours each workweek. In 2004, Dane took a 40-foot fall in Little Cottonwood Canyon when a rock he was scrambling up broke off the mountain. He endured a six-hour search and rescue effort and a shattered wrist that had for all practical purposes been severed clean. But he's back in action, and as healthy as ever. Chris works so much he hardly gets outside anymore, which is strange to me, because in college he was as close a personality to Edward Abbey's Hayduke as anyone I have ever met. Now he's monstrously out of shape, and he'll admit as much, but he never complained out it, even when what was supposed to be an easy five-mile last day turned into more of a 12-mile scramble epic. These guys were my inspiration.

Paul and Monika, standing on the left, drove all the way from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to hang with us. They're both grad students, Paul in law school and Monika studying social work, and both were on their way west for summer internships. I met Paul and Monika during Spring Break '00, back when we still harbored the grand dream that we could change the world by ripping up lupin plants on the sand dunes of Arcata, California. Now they just study all the time. The seems to be a reoccurring theme with my old friends. College environmentalists with a talent for endurance - of all kinds.

Geoff, left, took away all of our shared food after the first day and carried it the rest of the trip. I went really light on the water - it's not like I was hobbling hard enough to work up a sweat, anyway - and ended up carrying a pack that only weighed about 15 pounds. Mike, right, and I literally just met during the trip. He caught some wicked stomach flu the day before we left and still backpacked with us. Then he had to help pull his girlfriend, Jen, through the hike after she caught that same bug during our first night in the canyon. These people are troopers. I felt like such a wimp.

Jen, right, and I met way back during the beginning of college, sometime in 1998. She's the reason I met Geoff. She grew up with him in central New York, and now varies her time between ski season at Alta, Utah, and working some tourism job in northern Idaho. It was great to see my old friends descend from all corners of the United States (and Canada) to come together in a remote but all-encompassing spot. Our lives are very different now. As a result, we're all very different. We were once a small tribe. Many of us lived together in a commune-type house for years. We understood the nuances and each others' lives. We cleaned together, shopped together, ate together and travelled together. We were inseparable, once. But now our combined stories comprise only of e-mails, rumors and the random phone call.

Some of my old friends read my blog. I thought because of it, they would know more about me than ever before, but that didn't seem to be the case. They think I'm all hardcore now, some kind of an endurance junkie with a competitive streak. I think they were surprised to discover I was actually the weakest link, humbled by the ever-widening scope of their lives versus the scope of my own life, leaning on people who owe me nothing and yet were willing to give me anything.

I am not always as strong as I'd like to be. Sometimes, I'm weaker than I ever thought possible. But it's in these places, these situations, where I find my friends.

Santa Barbara

If you are a person of an impatient persuasion, you probably hate commercial flying. If you are a person of an irrational phobia persuasion, you probably hate commercial flying. And if you are a person of an "I am not livestock" persuasion, you probably hate commercial flying. But if you are a little of all three, you would probably let a day-long, three-legged flight with a four-hour layover in Santa Barbara make you really grumpy.

I completely forgot about that first leg, and told my mom I wasn't flying out until 4:50 p.m. We were planning the day together and everything. But when I actually checked my itinerary, I realized I was flying at 11 a.m. After we rushed to the airport, I wandered around the Salt Lake terminal for a little while looking for a map of the states. I get all of the San's and Santa's in California confused. I thought Santa Barbara was in the Central California/Sacramento/Purgatory area. But I was wrong. It's right on the southern coast.

The Santa Barbara airport is small. Smaller than Juneau's. And judging by the reaction from the TSA people, I don't think anyone in the history of the world has ever caught a connecting flight there. When I showed one Horizon Airlines employee my Delta boarding pass, she just kept telling me I was at the wrong airport. "But you flew me in here," I kept insisting. It was like arguing with an automated teller. It took a while to square all the confusion away, but afterward I still had nearly four hours to kill at a six-gate airport that had one snack bar and essentially no waiting space. Outside was a blaze of sunlight at 65-degree dry air. It seemed a good opportunity to go for a walk.

Airports are usually tough places to walk away from, but I am wary of hopping on public transportation when I'm whittling away a layover. Luckily, I discovered a bike path almost immediately. I crossed the Goleta Slough and quickly found my way to the beach, where I kicked off my shoes and socks and laid tracks across the warm sand like the little lost bear I followed earlier this week. I felt comfortably out of place among the baking beautiful people, with the sun scorching my pasty Alaskan skin and my SPF 45 stowed somewhere far away in my checked baggage, hauling a Camelbak carry-on and a Gap bag full of Goldfish, likely illegal fruit and my ancient camera. I was really tempted to go for a swim in the surf, but I unfortunately chose to wear white underwear that morning. Dang.

I made my way up to UCSB to find an Internet connection and lunch. Both searches turned out to be fruitless (I forgot how bad college food is.) I was eating my Goldfish and a grapefruit, drinking a jug-o'Diet Pepsi and reading a section of The Salt Lake Tribune in the campus courtyard when a guy that couldn't have been older than 19 or 20 approached me to ask if I was in his Cultural Anthropology class. "No," I said, "I'm not a student here."

"Oh, too bad," he said, then smiled and walked away. I think he intended to hit on me. It's hard to tell with the kids these days. Either way, I don't think that happened to me before, even when I was actually in college. I chose to feel flattered.

After lunch, I ditched the Gap bag and worked my way further down the beach, away from the groomed lawns and beach umbrellas, to the seedier part of the coast. With sand bluffs towering overhead and wind whipping up the beach, it reminded me of Homer, Alaska ... with palm trees. Without a watch or any real clue of my timeline for finding my way back to the tiny airport, I sat on the rocks and looked north up the coastline, even further away from home than I was this morning, guiltlessly enjoying a vacation from my vacation.

I think they call this kind of thing Serendipity.

Noncyclist, interrupted

The first day I went into the desert, I rented a bicycle. Two days cost more than I paid for my first commuter bike, but it seemed wrong to go into the desert without a bicycle in tow. I told the people at Poison Spider that I wanted a hardtail. Rigid if they had it.

"Where are you going to be riding?" the bike shop guy asked.

"Probably just the road above the White Rim," I said, not even trying to mask my disappointment in that statement. "There's going to be some fast guys and I'd like a chance to keep up with them for 10 miles."

Bike shop guy just crinkled his nose as if to suggest he had never heard of anything more boring. "Well we don't have hardtails here," he said. "We only have full-suspension bikes. But if you want, I'll rent you my fixie."

I was meeting Geoff, Dave Nice and our Utah friend Bryan that afternoon at the Sovereign trail. I didn't tell bike shop guy that bit of information because I didn't think I'd actually ride with them much at all. But they were such a dedicated group, I couldn't resist the pull. Dave endured hours on a Greyhound bus all the way from Denver just to ride with us that weekend. Bryan chose to fight a nasty case of Bronchitis while plowing over slickrock on a Trek he rarely rides anymore (Bryan is currently a "roadie.") Geoff was preparing to bust out his first dirt century the next day, but everyone wanted to hit the Sovereign singletrack. Compared to that group, slight gimpiness was hardly a good excuse to skip a short ride.

Falling back into the flow of mountain biking happened surprisingly fast. I haven't ridden a dirt trail since September; not that it mattered anyway, because I hadn't really ridden a bike since February. Motoring along effortlessly at 10 mph, standing the whole time to avoid the pain angles and timidly stepping off my bike at most uphill obstacles, I still felt like I was flying across time and space. The trail was a mob scene - I think I saw more mountain bikers in those 10 miles than I have seen throughout thousands in Alaska - but I didn't care. I probably had some kind of silly grin stretched across my face for the entire wavering, pain-streaked, overcrowded ride. Self deprivation is a powerful thing.

The next morning, I was stiff but unwilling to completely give up on the White Rim. I planned this ride back in February, back when I still believed that recovery was an easy process. By the time it became obvious that my presence on the ride would only serve as a huge liability, Geoff had already signed on, as had two hardcore riders who are training for this year's Great Divide Race, Dave and Pete Basinger. Talk about a cool group. I was drooling with jealousy. I thought if I could set out toward the edge of the rim, I would almost be able to taste a trail just out of my reach. I thought that 20 miles of pavement would be better than nothing at all. So I set out with the crowd at 6 a.m., rain clouds hovering on the horizon and temperatures dipping below 40 degrees. With tailwinds and a downhill slope, it seemed to be over before it even began. I watched the three disappear over the Schaefer trail, in my mind filling the void with my delusions of competence and a gnawing defiance held back only by the presence of Bryan, who was preparing to ride with me back the way we came.

By noon that day, the rest of the group of friends and I had already shivered our way through the nature walk above Dead Horse Point and were looking for a better way to kill an afternoon. I convinced myself that the best way to shuttle Geoff back to Moab that evening would be to leave our vehicle at the trailhead and pedal myself into town - only 27 miles, mostly downhill. And as long as I had a full-suspension mountain bike, I reasoned, I might as well take the Gemini Bridges jeep road - catch a few technical moves and maybe a nice view or two before frittering away the rest of the day at the Slickrock Cafe.

I recruited my friend Monika to ride along. She rode my friend Jen's neglected Trek 4300, corroded and in need of a multitude of adjustments that I was too lazy to fix. Monika and I took it painfully easy, coasting down the road and stopping at scenic points along the way.

We hit a short, 300-foot climb about two miles from the highway. I pedaled the hill hard at first because it felt good to take quick gulps of the cold desert air, but fairly quickly slipped back against the pain streaks. I hopped off my bike to walk the last stretch. A couple of approaching motorcyclists stopped beside me.

"Are you having a hard time pedaling your bike uphill?" one asked.

"Um, no," I said. "I'm just walking for a bit."

"Because you know, you have gears on that bike that you can shift to make it easier to pedal," he said, pointing to crank on my rental ride, which was currently fixed on the second ring - where it needed to be, since I rode the entire day off the saddle. I couldn't tell if he was serious or just being a jerk, but either way, I didn't want to invite further condescending treatment by telling him I was walking because my knee had an owie. Instead, I got a three-minute lecture about the basic mechanics of a geared bike and how the levers work. All the while, I just smiled, nodded, and dreamed of the alternate universe where healthy Jill was riding her own bike on a 100-mile day jaunt down the White Rim trail, and this doofus had run out of gas somewhere deep in the desert.

The day clocked in at 45 miles, plus 10 the previous day, which I guess is arguably half as healthy as I'd need to be to ride the White Rim. Except for I wasn't healthy. I was an Aleve-popping hopalong who still had a three-day backpacking trip to complete. But I'd think back to plummeting down the sandy slopes of Gemini Bridges road, with a foreground drenched in a blaze of spring green and slipping effortlessly into the blur of motion, and I'd decide it was all worth it.

When worlds collide

Toward the end of Day 2 in White Canyon - so far south you can almost smell Arizona and so deep in the desert that those invasive plants that plague the Colorado Plateau (tamarisk and Russian olive) still haven't found their way in - Chris walked back down the trail to tell us he saw bear tracks.

"Uh huh," I said, my voice probably wavering between disbelief and indifference.

"I said bear tracks, not deer tracks," Chris said.

I shrugged. "So?"

Chris just chuckled. "Um...." Above us, sheer sandstone cliffs cut out the sky, stark blue against a red rock streaked in slate black varnish. Cottonwood trees dripped in spring greens I have probably already missed seeing in Alaska, and I realized then how far from home we really were. Me and the bear.

I dropped my pack and hobble sticks and stumbled up a side canyon, where my friends were already following the well-laid footprints. I struggled to keep up with the group but found myself slipping further behind. Their echoing voices faded up the canyon until I was alone with the silence, tracing the steps of a ghost bear in the sand, and losing my concentration to the mystery of it all. The canyon twisted and narrowed, casting the wash in shadow, threatening yet another dead end, and still the bear moved on.

It's been an interesting experience to come together in this place - together as a group of old and new friends now spread between all corners of the continent; together as Alaskan and black bear in the Utah desert. Such strange collisions could only happen in a space so wide open it closes in all the empty spaces, a place so beautiful it bleeds light, where time moves like the waves in a river - constantly curling back toward the past.

I had a great vacation despite a nearly continuous struggle with an uncooperative body. I'm back in Salt Lake City today after driving between the hours of 10 p.m. and 3 a.m., all hopped up on gallons of Diet Pepsi (which is my excuse for still being awake and also for this strange post.) I owe my sore knee to some misguided mountain biking and unintended canyoneering, but I owe the great vacation to old friends, open spaces, and a little black bear that must have been a long way from home.


To be continued ...

Finally going to the desert

I'm just killing some time while Geoff takes a shower after his latest double-digit-mile run and protein shake breakfast. I just rolled out of bed about an hour ago. Yeah, I'm becoming a blob.

My knee feels pretty good after three days of absolute inactivity. Probably a good thing, because I'm going to absolutely thrash it in the next five days. Carrying my 35-pound pack down the stairs yesterday reminded me just how grinding it's going to be hoisting that thing down to the bottom of Natural Bridges National Monument. At least I have until Monday to worry about that.

In the meantime, I am mentally preparing for mounting a mountain bike for the first time since February. I am borrowing a friend's bike for Sunday's ride. She is 4 inches shorter than I am. I don't remember what kind of bike it is. Something in the $400 range. I fixed the tires for her when I was out here last November, and she told me yesterday that she hasn't ridden it since. Whatever happens, it's going to be an adventure.

So it seems every time I come to Utah, I bring Alaska weather with me. Last week, it climbed above 80 degrees in Salt Lake. Yesterday, it rained all day and here on the benches of the Wasatch Mountains, dropped pretty close to freezing last night. Brrr. We were going to hike a slot canyon in the San Rafael Swell called Black Box. But because we'd rather not die of hypothermia in the desert (Black Box involves a stretch of over-your-head swimming) or drown in a flash flood, we're probably going to nix that. Just as well, too, I guess. I hate prolonging the inactivity, but I think it's doing me some good.

I realized this morning that because I lost my good camera with the real memory card, I only have the ability to take 20 pictures this week. I guess I'll have to make them good ones. Secretly, I'm hoping it falls into a slot canyon so I'll have no choice but to buy myself a new one. But the most likely scenario is that I'm going to hobble back to the airport next week with a throbbing knee, second-rate pictures, and the same war-torn digital camera that I've had since 2002.

Have a good weekend, all. I'll post the blurry-photo, over-dramatized flash-flood report when I return.

P.S. Nykole, I can't get my e-mail to work. But if you see this, I'd love to meet up Friday. I'll get in touch with you next week.