Gone home

Date: Nov. 25
Total mileage: 15.0
November mileage: 227.9
Temperature upon departure: 42

One of my favorite authors, Thomas Wolf, is given credit for coining the phrase "You can't go home again." I think about it every time I come home to Utah, when I struggle with the cognitive dissonance caused by the fact that I can, and all too easily.

I think this actually happens to a lot of people, because those who thrive on change can find the things that don't change slightly unnerving. So when I go to my grandparents' house on Thanksgiving Day, with the same early 70s cottage wallpaper I have always looked at, and the same mashed potatoes in the same bowl on the same table, and the same picture of me at 16 years old on the wall, and suddenly one of my cousins walks in and she's 10 years older than I remember her being, well ... it feels like ... unraveling.

But this is Thanksgiving for me. I easily become unraveled when the life that's my life now and the life that was my life sometime in the past collide. That's sort of what my week has been like so far. I thought I was starting to come out of it today - I helped my sister move into her new condo; then I borrowed a friend's mountain bike and tore through the singletrack that weaves between South Mountain neighborhoods. It felt like my life, only in this louder, sunnier place. But then I went to visit an old, good friend tonight. I had tracked down a rare CD on Amazon.com that I was going to give to her for an early Christmas gift. It's a 1996 release of a band we used to request ad nauseum on our favorite radio show, KRCL's Static Radio on Saturday nights, because we could never find it at music stores. It was a used CD, so I popped it into the stereo on my way over to her house. And suddenly, there I was again, driving down State Street on a Saturday night in the same 1994 Toyota Pickup I used to prowl streets in as a teenager, pumping Guv'ner and suddenly wondering if this whole Alaska thing, this whole adulthood thing, was really all just a strange dream.

Anyway, the involuntary melding of real and nostalgia isn't the only thing that happened to me since I flew to Utah. I played the Alaska card quite well last night, when a cop pulled me over after my friend Jen and I left a bar to head home. I was driving her truck because she had had a couple of drinks. I was trying to figure out a strange steering wheel and some intense blind spots when I spotted flashing red lights in the sideview mirror. I have to insert here that the truck is equipped with difference license plates than the ones actually registered to it, supposedly (Jen tells me) because the old ones are rusted on. Anyway, the cop of course asked me to get out of the car to take a field sobriety test. I thought for certain I was going to fail, because even though I was sober, that hasn't stopped me from failing field sobriety tests in the past (call me a bad driver with poor balance.) He was examining my driver's license when he asked me if I knew why he pulled me over. I shook my head. "You have a brake light out," he said, "and you were driving really slow."

"Slow?" I asked.

"About 15," he said.

I didn't know how to respond to that, but it all came spilling out anyway. "I'm from Alaska," I said, noting that he was still holding my license. "I don't do a lot of driving where I live and I'm not used to all these wide city streets and cars and lights and ..." I rolled my neck like gave him my best overwhelmed-wilderness-dweller smile.

He handed my license back to me. "You have a smart friend to let you drive," he said. "But just remember that here, you need to go at least 35."

Then he took off. No ticket for the illegal registration. Or the tail light. No field sobriety test. It was my best cop experience ever.

I guess I never even got around to talking about my bike ride today, but it's late and I should go to bed. Also, I don't think I'll have any pictures for the next few days. I'm pretty sure I've tried everything. Hope you all had a great holiday.

Time for a vacation

Date: Nov. 21
Total mileage: 15.0
November mileage: 212.9
Temperature upon departure: 18

This seems to happen every year. The onslaught of winter arrives hard and fast. I have a minor freak-out and do something nutty like buy tire chains or decry the beautiful barrage of snow. There’s a short period of confusion when I wonder how in the world I ever learned to steer in powder or spend less than 30 minutes dressing to go out. And then suddenly, without even focusing, everything becomes clear. Images of green leaves and flowing water fade into the recesses of my memory, and the monochrome world in which I move becomes a place of beauty and ease. I throw the tire chains in the trunk, slap on random pieces of clothing, and go for a bike ride.

I’m finally completely comfortable with winter. So it’s a bit funny that I’d pick this time of year to take a vacation home. No self-respecting Alaskan heads south at the beginning of winter. But it is Thanksgiving, which is at least a semi-legitimate holiday, and since my employer has decreed that I will work Christmas, it’s now or never.

So I’m headed to tropical, sunny Salt Lake City for the next week. My plan is to eat without remorse all the turkey, cranberry sauce and homemade coconut cream pie I can stuff down (and skip all the other crap.) Then I will try to burn off all the T-day guilt with an ill-conceived run. Then I will spend the better part of a day trying to overhaul my little sis's old 10-speed. I will use it for most of the week to get around town, until a massive failure of the bottom bracket will force me to abandon the bike near the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon, where I will then hitchhike up to Brighton and finally get around to doing some real snowboarding. Yup. That's probably what'll happen. I can't wait.

I'll let you know how the 10-speed tune-up goes. Until then, Happy Thanksgiving all.

I stop being such a wimp

Date: Nov. 20
Total mileage: 36.0
November mileage: 197.9
Temperature upon departure: 19

The first rays of the 8 a.m. sunrise nearly filter through a mass of featureless gray that has become the sky; it's nearly cold enough to ensure hardpack and it hasn't snowed in nearly four hours, so it seems like a good morning to ride.

I swerve across the unplowed street as my gray-faced neighbors dig through mountains of snow. Some are looking for their newspapers, some for their cars, some for their kids. Most regard me with surly grimaces, but the few smiles I see are like a shot of Red Bull. It is early, and Monday at that. I head north beyond the idling garbage trucks, the hulking snow plows, chained-up tow trucks and the cars they're pulling out of ditches. After eight miles, I'm far enough north to be almost completely alone.

Blocks of ice and chunky snow keep me on my toes, but I ride as hard and as fast as the drifts will let me because the cold sweat against my skin feels good. Thick clumps of snow drip off tree branches like gooey cake frosting; across the flat muskeg, powder mounds remind me of air-puffed marshmallows. It doesn't surprise me that I'm thinking about sugar, but I do wish I remembered about they way water bottles can freeze shut in a nanosecond. So instead of dwelling on thirst, I think about the way the landscape reminds of my childhood, walking through a Christmas tree lot with row after row of white evergreens, the kind coated with spray-on permafrost. I laugh about the way the real thing makes me nostalgic for the imitation.

A man in a big truck stops just to ask me how I can ride through the snowy shoulder. I show him the studs on my tires and explain that with one-wheel drive, the thin powder actually adds traction over the glare ice on the road. "Yeah, but you can't do any hills, can you?" he asks, and I tell him that I just came down a 1,300-foot drop from the ski resort, and I still have the gravel in my teeth to prove it. He doesn't seem to believe me; he probably still thinks I'm crazy, but I think our short conversation will leave him with a different understanding about the ease of winter travel.

On the way home I still see people digging out their cars, and I start to think that I'm not the crazy one after all.