Monthly Archives: August 2015

Today I came home from work to discover that I had time to do everything on a long list begging to be done, and yet I would rather lay in bed and cuddle with the dogs and be entirely unproductive. But today, after work, despite being deeply committed to going for a run and doing some writing on a new project, despite having plenty of energy, despite having tons of daylight left, I found myself laying in bed and simply relishing being horizontal, not binging on netflix, not having the computer on my lap, just listening to the birds out the window and feeling the pups curled up at my feet (and hogging the space down there rather thoroughly). There will be time soon, once school ramps up again, when I will not have the luxury of this time. And I want to be able to drop the expectations I have of myself and just enjoy these moments of repose fully, without guilt, without regret.

Through so many dark periods, bed has been a refuge but also, for me, a symbol of not being able to face the world. Today, it is a place to enjoy a lazy evening without those dark clouds, and I am thankful for it. Sometimes it really is the simple things.

I have fond memories of riding the El in Chicago, heading downtown or north from Uptown to Rodger’s Park to get away from the craziness of my neighborhood for a while. The trains always seemed full, even if they weren’t packed. There was always one crazy person ranting to themselves and a handful of others avoiding eye contact. Most people had on earphones, some read books or newspapers. Every race and color and size and age was represented, no matter what time of day or night. It was a little taste of humanity, packed together in a loud rail car, trundling along three stories above the street, heading somewhere, together.

My experience with the Metro rail of Saint Paul has not not left me in quite as expansive a mood. Today, I walked through a gloriously cool and blustery morning, and missing the train by three minutes (I was still blocks away, but could see it fly past the intersection far ahead without me) I found myself on the platform alone. I waited around for the next train, killing time on my phone. I had paid a rush-hour fare with my new “GO” card, struggling to figure out how to activate a ride, not yet having figured out (as I did this afternoon) that if I am paying full fare anyway, there is no need for button pushing and fumbling around the fare kiosk. When the automated announcement alerted me to a pending arrival, I looked up and realized that, rush hour or no, I was still on the train platform alone. I hopped onto the train, headed downtown (granted this was at seven thirty in the morning) on a nearly empty train. I was one of three people in the large light-rail car. When I got off the train at the hospital, a few stops from downtown, I did so alone and the car was no more full than when I’d hopped on. I was left feeling rather alone and isolated, rather than a part of something bigger, as I always did when riding the El trains around Uptown.

I wonder if it is just that early morning ride that is so empty. I know that the trains must be packed as they head to Twins games in downtown Minneapolis on the weekends? Or are they? I remember choosing to walk back to Uptown rather than attempt to board among the writhing mass after a Cubs came in Wrigleyville. Is it just that this city is more commuter friendly, as my family’s native Houston? Built for cars and not for pedestrians and public transportation? Yet the city has fantastic, fast and clean public available. Do enough people even use it?

A quick google search establishes that the Metro green line transports over thirty two thousand individuals per week, and that the Metro Transit system gave over 81 million (!!) rides in the last year alone. Even if you account for commuters using the train every day, that is still nearly sixty five hundred riders a week as a low-ball, just through our neighborhood. That’s not a small amount of people, especially considering that the cities themselves where the trains sit don’t hold the mass of humanity that is the city of Chicago. Saint Paul herself doesn’t even have three hundred thousand people. But then look at Chicago. The annual rides given by the redline alone in 2012 was eight million. Ridership on all of Chicago’s trains were 229 million that year.

In the end what this comes down to is perspective, I suppose. After leaving Chicago for rural Alaska and then relatively rural Iowa and spending the last eleven years plying that lesser traffic, I have shifted somewhat in my ideas of what an urban landscape is. The twin cities are cities, no doubt. But they are small cities, in the scheme of things. Yet after my years in the woods and cornfields, I was was wowed by her big skyscrapers and fancy eateries and clean trains that I forget what being in a place like Chicago (or Jakarta) with millions on millions of people crammed, living and breathing and eating and sleeping, in such a small space feels like.

It does not feel like that here, this close to cornfields and lakes and woods. But it feels good to be among streets and people and urban life again, even if the light rail isn’t packed full at rush hour every day.

I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately, and how it seems to expand and contract so readily. Just like a watched pot never boils, a watched clock – for instance on a four hour airplane flight – only moves forward by one minute at each glance. And yet suddenly, the trip is over and the memory of the interminable minutes fades as quickly as the discomfort of trying to hold oneself into the micro-seats and not hog the armrest.

I drove to Seward from Fairbanks and back again, a nine hour drive one-way on a perfect day with no traffic or construction. However there was a lot of construction this year, especially around Denali – which added approximately two hours to the trip between slowed traffic and wait times. I broke up the drive on the way down, camping south of the park at a little campground by a lake that I’d passed dozens of times but never stopped in. It was raining, and the campground was nearly full – mostly of RVs – even in the middle of the week. I had been struggling to stay awake, and decided at the last moment to spring for a campsite instead of just sleeping in the back of my truck on the side of the road as I’d planned to do. I’m just getting too old for that, plus I figured I’d sleep better without trucks flying by inches from my head all night. The next day, the relatively short jaunt down to Anchorage seemed to take forever, and every time I glanced at the clock only a few minutes had gone by. By the time I was an hour away, I was frantic to pull over and take a break and ended up calling a friend to see if she could meet for lunch last-minute, instead of pushing on to Seward. I just couldn’t stand the thought of one more insanely long minute in the truck.

And just as suddenly, in my memory, I was in Seward, with the long two-day drive behind me. And without a second thought of having to repeat it in a few days. The drive back was just as much of rubber band, and I remember being so frustrated that the miles weren’t passing. I felt like a hamster in a wheel on that highway, and yet, just as suddenly, I was at the Parks Monument and then back in town and it was over with.

I know Radiolab did a piece on the expansion and contraction of time a few years ago, and I remember listening to it while I was running dogs in Goldstream. (Radiolab is fantastic for passing the time on long mushing runs!) It’s been years, and I don’t remember the crux of the piece, but I do remember a discussion of the phenomenon of one’s life passing before one’s eyes during a near-death experience. The expansion of those few seconds, and all the thoughts that can be contained in them, is in some ways beyond comprehension. And yet it is a common enough experience that the idea has its own phrase. The mind seems to be able to take time and bend it to its will (although that will may not be *our* will in moments that seem to stretch on).

The last three years in Iowa have passed slowly, and I can remember clearly sitting on the couch in Mason counting minutes as they went by. And yet those three years are gone, now seemingly in a blink. And yet somehow each minute was sixty seconds long, just like the last. I don’t feel like I’m writing very articulately about all this at the moment. But it’s been on my mind so much. I still have nearly two years of this program to pound out, and the future of being in school for that long seems almost incomprehensible. I was in Alaska for the last eleven days, and anticipated that trip with an intensity that I cannot put into words here.  The wait felt impossibly long. And now, a day from coming home, that time seems to have passed in a nanosecond.

How can I spend my time, these minutes and seconds that pass uniformly and yet expand and contract at will during their passing in in my anticipation and memory, well and fully. How can I be in the moment, even those moments that I don’t want to last, or the ones that pass too quickly, without wishing those moments away?

There was mud covering my jeans and shoes as I went through the TSA checkpoint tonight. I am three hours early for my one AM flight, but I don’t have anywhere else to go here as Jenny has to put Sawyer down for school tomorrow and most places in town close at 10pm. After I left Jenny’s – and left the truck parked on her extra lot – I went to Big Daddy’s and had a last supper of wings and three delicious margaritas. While waiting for a cab, a new resident of Fairbanks, newly employed in the kitchen at the one Greek restaurant in town (which is also fantastic, especially the mixed drinks and calamari, although the thing that is the most amazing there are their opulent bathrooms) and clearly nearly out of his mind. He regaled me for a good twenty minutes, while I waited for my cab to the airport, on the wonders of the Fairbanks support system. “You know you can get what you need here? There is a women’s shelter! And a food bank! And a place to get hot meals!” Yet, dear. And I’m flying to Minnesota in four hours. But he would not be deterred in his enthusiastic helpfulness, and making sure I knew where I could get whatever help I needed. Eventually, and wobbily, he half mounted his bicycle and skipped off down the sidewalk. The cab did not arrive in time to rescue me.

Previous to this little misadventure, I was at Jenny’s for a couple of hours. It was pouring rain, and we all huddled in the dog pen with the puppies who have miraculously quadrupled in size since I arrived (and they arrived) a week ago. Four of the five are just black with white markings, and those who have their eyes open are showing ice-blue. I was in the only clean clothes I have left, but they did not last long. The puppies coated them in sawdust and probably a little dribble of pee, and their mother, looking for affection and attention after caring for the little suckling beasts, started my jeans on the slippery slope by implanting her muddy paws all over my thighs as I held and cuddled her little three-pound squirming pups. Then, I followed Sawyer, with a precarious bucket of water, down to the dog yard, where Jenny insisted that I inspect Xtra Tuff’s sore foot and the weird cyst on Gypsy’s chin. Xtra Tuff’s feet were caked in post-rain mud, and so on my hands and arms were covered. Before I even got ahold of her feet, her constant pacing circle had my jeans and pants well splattered. Gypsy’s chin was more clean than Xtra’s feet, but she spared no time in imprinting her own muddy paws on my pants. It was a losing battle from the start.

We then made our way to the chicken yard, where Sawyer caught and cuddled the older hens and we discovered a new baby chick, hatched in secret by one of the mommas, stuck in the feed bin of the younger of the brood. We quickly created a new space for momma and chick, with feed and water and shelter in an old dog house, away from the other chickens and the potential predators outside the fence. But along with this task came more mud in the slick chicken yard, and I was soon regretting packing my boots instead of wearing them. Jenny and I chatted some over chickens, gardens and Sawyer’s attention-seeking antics and eventually we packed up and left the house so she could drop me at wings and Big Daddy’s.

That little barbeque joint is as familiar as a warm blanket to me. I have spent myriad evenings there, chowing down on their dollar wings (dollar fifty now, damned inflation) and fresh squeezed ritas. And there, surrounded by the familiar and the comforting, and inundated with more and more tequila, I being to wonder if my dreams are actually possible. I begin to imagine a dog team. A dog barn. A sled. Trails. Training. Races. Sponsorships. I wonder if Big Daddy’s would ever honor my obsessive loyalty to their smoked chicken with a sponsorship; even if it was just in-kind sustenance through the training season. The fantasies become more and more real to me as the drinks come. But soon the bar is closing, and I have nowhere to go but the airport. Until well after midnight, and with precious few places to charge my cell phone.

What I am trying to forget is that I have been fighting tears all day, but especially on the drive away from our home and back to Jenny’s after dropping off some camping gear and sundry stuff in the shed there. I miss that place, and every time I see it (full of stranger’s gear, and wood that we have not gathered) I fight the urge to quit my life and move back in. It is the place I want to be, the nascent place that I want to develop as my own. And walking away from it, again and again, is a kick in the gut. As is driving through the rainy, overcast night, in a town that I have claimed as my home, away to the airport, to fly far away again. For who knows how long. I am left leaving tonight, long after the midnight sun has set, with the muddy paw prints on my jeans and imbedded in my brand new running shoes. And I hope it won’t be too long before I cam come back, not for a visit, but for good.

Michelle’s chickens greeted me in the driveway, and did not scatter when I stepped out of the truck. They gathered around me in a little semi-circle, and then followed me up to the front porch steps of her home. The warm little wood structure stood at the start of a clearing in the aspen trees, with a big lawn flowing up the hill behind it. I passed a sleeping sled dog, and my knock was greeted by more dogs barking from inside the house. I saw her wave me in, and stepped through the door into a generous arctic entry where I removed my shoes, then into the little livingroom with it’s heavy wood beams and woodstove in the center, wide windows opening out on the lawn at the back and, I could see now, a huge circle of a fenced garden taking up the rear of the yard.

We toured the house, sauna, workshop and garden, including a greenhouse overflowing with tomato plants that were Godzilla to my healthy crop back in the Midwest. Her basil leaves were nearly the size of my palm and the rhubarb harvest was two full arm’s worth, waiting to be brought inside. The chickens, which she had hand-raised, followed us everywhere, unperturbed by the dogs who had calmed down and were now sniffing around the garden. The garden itself was enclosed by a neat fence, reinforced by old cross country skis, cross-braces of which also made the two gates into the circular labyrinth of green. Dinner was salmon, cauliflower and spaghetti squash, a bountiful harvest.

It was like walking into a waking dream of the life I want, the life I feel like I had to give up to follow Peter to Iowa. It is a vision of what I want for our land, our space, when we return. It was a pleasure to be able to sit inside my hope for the future for a few hours tonight, as the late arctic sun set over the trees, and let my feet sink into her soil, my hands run over the backs of her chickens, my teeth sink into the flesh of the salmon that my own life will hold someday. At least, that is the hope I am holding on to tonight.