Monthly Archives: August 2015

My friend Toni rolled in to town tonight on her new motorcycle. She took a class in April back in Fairbanks, bought a bike, quit her job and left Alaska headed for the Florida keys a week and some change ago. Tonight we feasted on crab rangoon and sipped margaritas, while she regaled me with stories of people she’s met on the road south. And how she is already planning an around-the-world-trek for the near future, addicted to life on the road with just these few days’ worth of a taste. Watching her, glowing from the journey, I realized that she is a badass, and I am so happy to have her passing through my house today and as a permanent fixture in my life in general. She’s as close as family, but in the meta-narrative that runs through everything, she motivates me to dive in and grab what’s possible, from stories of her peace corps days to a recent solo journey hiking through Manchu Picchu, to this latest journey on her own road.

A couple of days ago, Jodi came off the glacier for less than twenty four hours to grab food and a real shower. She’s been up on the ice living in a tiny wall tent with one other person and forty dogs since she was forced to come down for a burst appendix last month. Thirty days on the ice, sutures fresh out, running dogs, moving camp, digging out of blizzards without so much as radio contact with the rest of the world. And when she came off the ice? Of all of her myriad friends and acquaintances and rabid fans … I was shocked and humbled that I was on the other end of that call, discussing hired help and pedicures and directions to REI to get new sunglasses.

Sitting with Toni tonight, I realized that I am surrounded by women who are bad-asses. And that I have surrounded myself with them. Terri & Andrea, Jenny & Jodi, even Aliy & Paige to a lesser extent … women who have had hard hands dealt at times, but have come out fighting, making a life for themselves and living it well and fully. And this is what I need, what I want to be surrounded by. Women who I wish to emulate, whose drive and will and ingenuity have gotten them to the places they’ve wanted to go and beyond. And I have done so, because I want to be them. I want to be the person with the courage and strength to go after my crazy dreams, no matter how implausible or impractical they seem on the ground in these days full of nursing texts and clinicals and a far too complicated life.

So with Toni sleeping upstairs tonight, her bike in the garage and road-gear in the hamper for tomorrow, I hope I can keep these friends close. To be reminded of what I am aiming for, and gather what I need from them to go after it myself. And do it well and fully, as they have done, before me.

Every time we move, we purge things from our stash. Yet every time we move, we fill up the basement with tubs and boxes of items that can’t bare to be thrown away: camping gear we may yet use, trinkets from the past that trigger memories we don’t want to lose, specialty tape, hardware and odd bits that we may just need at some point after all. Sometimes we throw away things and regret it, sooner but usually later. How many times have we decided we don’t need the deep frier, only to buy another on a whim a year later when a fish fry is the only thing that will do? And how may times have we bought something, when its twin lays unremembered in a box stacked somewhere out of the way (I’m looking at you, pancake griddle.) Pete has been bringing up a load from Iowa every weekend for the past two months, and I have been horrified as all the extra available space in this little house has slowly been filling up with the things we apparently cannot part with. There have been several trips to goodwill, and there will be more. I wrote about my own uneasy relationship with moving and purging here, on the other side of our big move from Alaska to the lower 48 in 2012.

This summer, I am struggling to wrap my mind around a new kind of waste. This one is born of cooking for two people for the last ten years, and suddenly finding myself shopping and cooking for one for most of the week. Already prone to cook too much for the two of us, I am now finding myself (no thanks to the CSA, among other things) with far too much food on hand. And especially in the heat of the summer, that food tends to go bad and quickly. I am slightly mollified knowing that the waste is at least going into the city composing program and isn’t contributing to the landfills, and yet the fact that I am contributing so much at all does not sit well with my soul. How can I buy less, so that less will go bad? How can I cook for one responsibly? Especially as I try to balance a new nutrition program that I only stick to half the time (buy chicken and broccoli, get sick of chicken and broccoli, throw bad chicken and broccoli out, feel guilty, resolve to do better, rinse, repeat) this new normal is not working for me.

Although I talk a good game about trying to be intentional in my life, I am beginning to think that I need to start acting with much more intention when it comes to the food that I bring into my home and the food waste that goes out of it. Being food-rich is something that I am loathe to take for granted, but I find myself taking it for granted anyway. I need to begin to treasure each meal, each component of each meal, and do so with more discipline and attention to detail than I have to this point. I need to be grateful, each day, that I have enough food on my table, and endeavor to be sure that it is just enough, and no more.

Moderation in all things. Amen.

The first time I encountered my neighbor, I was coming in from visiting a friend and had a slate of things to do before the afternoon got too far ahead of me. He called to me through the thick lilac bushes that border our yards and asked if we were renting, or if we’d bought the place. I peered through the leaves but couldn’t get a good look at him through the greenery except to figure out that he was in the process of digging up a stump on his side of the border. I answered and politely asked if he knew the owners, if they had ever occupied the house? I soon found myself stuck there on the other side of the bushes while he told me about the entire later part of his life, which included bicycle-touring through Myanmar and China and working as a parking lot attendant for years downtown. By the time I managed to make a smooth exit, most of the afternoon was burned away and I had an earful of adventures to ponder but no face to put with it. Also, I found out that I share my name with his wife.

Flash forward a month, and these neighbors are undertaking and enormous landscaping project by hand, tearing up the earth around the foundations of their home. The wife, covered from head to toe against the sun and listening to podcasts on her laptop balanced precariously on a rock next to her, is dismantling the current footing stone by stone and placing each fragment in a bucket. I can see her obliquely through the screen as I nibble my breakfast each morning. When I take out the recycling, we make eye contact and I have a flash of inspiration.

“Hello! Say, would you like some tomatoes? I have more than I can possibly eat!”

A thin old man, all muscle and sinew, grey beard trimmed perfect and short, emerges from behind the cover of lilac bushes by the back of the house. His cargo pants are held precariously by a belt notched as small as it can get. I can see the veins running up his lean arms from across the yard.

“Honey, would you like tomatoes?”

“Well, sure!”

I dodge back into the house to lighten my load, and return with a target bag full of the red plague, only to be regaled for nearly an hour with stories of landscaping, re-roofing and bidding on a garage while his wife listens next to us, eying her project, weighing eagerness to get back at it with politeness to her husband’s monologue and my presence. I see that she is probably from India or Bangladesh. I learn that they have been married for going on twelve years. I also learn all about how important soffits are to keep a roof from sagging, and that the peeling paint along a window behind him is from a terrible leak that occurred last spring, and that he likes to keep business “in the family.” I try not to shuffle my feet in impatience to get back to my own desperate day of cramming for final exams, or procrastinating from such a task, as the case may be. But when I finally wrench myself away, I wonder what other stories would have been forthcoming if I had been patient enough to listen for a little while longer.

Today, a little three minute video of Aiailk bay popped up in my facebook feed from my old kayak boss who has his own outfitting company in Seward, now. Some clients of his put it together, and it captures a perfect bluebird day heading out of Resurrection Bay, passing breaching whales, sea lions, and sea birds, kayaking past towering cliffs, tidewater glaciers, and rookeries. Watching the clips, I was reminded of all the perfect days I had the summer I guided, the icy cold breeze on my cheeks in the mornings, taking a boat across the bay with a load of kayaks and tourists. The slow burn of paddling for eight or ten hours along the shores and into coves looking for wildlife and pointing out hanging glaciers in the mountains above. The acrid smell of wet neoprene, used for too many days, wafting up from a pile of gear on the shore. The cold trickle of arctic water on my hands, escaping over the little o-ring around the paddle shaft. The weird heat of the inside of the kayak as I stuck my head in upside down to adjust foot pegs for client after client for weeks and months on end. Watching a family of mergansers grow from tiny chicks to gangling adolescent birds over the course of the summer.

It is easy to remember the idyllic pieces of that season, especially looking forward to my own return to Seward in a week or two. But the hard parts of that summer, and of that job, seem buried a little deeper than the good ones now that that more than ten years of road separate us. The owner of the company I worked for was downright crazy, hiking into the woods where I was camping in the middle of the night to rattle my tent and accuse me of stealing her new puppy, firing employees on a whim in front of a boat full of clients and threatening everyone else’s jobs daily. Tourists could be cranky and stingy, festering family conflict bursting out in the open once they were stuck in a kayak together. Everything I owned molded in my tent, and when I moved into a tiny shack on the other side of town to put some distance between myself and the high proportion of crazy at work, it was literally falling apart around me and rats went through my food in the cabinets at night while my dog and I cowered on my cot and I threw shoes towards the noises in the dark. I was a lonely soul that summer, not cool or confidant enough to hang with the other guides. Enough of an introvert that I didn’t mind the social isolation for the most part, I still struggled to fit in with a crowd that was wilder and more party-prone than I am and mostly ended up on my own on my days off, wandering the town and local trails, avoiding my place of employment and residence, both.

Thinking about pain yesterday brought to mind the variable flagrancies of memory. Sometimes I can’t even remember the specifics of conversations I had yesterday, much less the details of ten or fifteen years past. And yet some of those things are burned into my memory, little images and moments that come unbidden some days and flood my mind when I let them. And that summer was certainly one for creating indelible impressions. But it is the darker side of these remembrances that make me anxious about going back, make me question the bright sunny days in my memory, the competence I thought I had much younger in the world. I am more aware of my own vulnerabilities now, and more unsure of my place in the lives and circles of others that I have not encountered in years. I wonder, tonight, how this place so long imagined after leaving her, will stand up to my memories once I’m on the ground.

I used to consider myself a runner, but it has been years since my shoes have seen any significant milage. It was a status I was proud of, even though I was never fast. In high school, I ran cross country and only made the varsity team my senior year (much to the chagrin of my coach) because all the fast kids graduated and they needed to fill the spot. I wasn’t appreciably faster then than my freshman year, only gaining a few seconds over those years running through the tropical heat.

Five years ago, I started noticing that my legs were cramping up badly when I ran up hills. Soon, they were cramping up when I was running at all, then locking completely. I went from running three miles a day to barely being able to walk up a hill without pain, and with no explanation forthcoming from doctors or physical therapists (it’s your soleus muscle! and we don’t know why!) I have been left to stagnate in frustration. I ran my last 5K in the spring of 2012 and was in so much pain that I crossed the finish line in tears. I have tried to ease back into running several times since then, slowly and with lots of stretching, but always ended up with crippling pain when I ran for more than a few minutes at a time.

Lately, I’ve taken up a different kind of exercise to try and get back into the shape I lost with this mystery condition, some video workouts that I can do in the basement while the dogs watch. They are no joke, I can barely keep up with them, but they seem to do the trick. Once I had some conditioning back, I decided to try and ease into running again. Somehow, for the last five weeks, the combination of strength and flexibility training has held my mystery muscle locking at bay.

Until today. I don’t know if it was because I pushed a little further and harder than I have so far, or if my new running shoes aren’t doing the trick that my old shoes did, but for about half of the run, the pain was shooting fire up my legs and causing my already plodding pace to slow to a hobbling shuffle. And yet, I managed to get through the whole half hour run, something I couldn’t have imagined doing even two months ago. In the past, the pain has been so bad I’ve had to call Pete to come pick me up. Not so today, and for that I am grateful.

Pain is a funny thing. As soon as I stopped running and gave my calves a little stretch, the searing sensation that had been consuming my thoughts and emotions (so frustrated! and disappointed! with every step on this last run) disappeared completely and I could barely remember how badly I was hurting or how despairing I had felt for the last half hour. I’m already looking forward to trying again tomorrow, and hopeful that I was just imagining how badly I was hurting today.

We talk a lot about pain in nursing school, about how to manage it with methods from drugs and more drugs to movement,  aromatherapy and breathing, to frank distraction. We talk about how it affects not only people’s lives, but their emotions and outlook. Theories of pain have evolved over the years, but it is intriguing to me that we still don’t know exactly how pain works, or how acute pain evolves into chronic pain, or how conditions like fibromyalgia leave patients having pain triggered in their nerves and brain before any physical stimulus occurs.

For myself, as frustrating as this mystery condition has been, I know I am incredibly fortunate that it is one that can be managed. I am not in pain all the time, and it seems that I am slowly working my way around it so that I can still do the things I enjoy. But that nagging fear of chronic pain, of a lifetime of being unable to escape its burning grasp, is still around every corner, every twinge of muscle, every time I climb a hill and feel my legs begin to cramp and set themselves on fire or get out of bed and feel my calves locked down to leave me hobbling for half and hour in the morning. I have seen what that kind of debilitating pain can do to a person, and to a life.

But despite today’s twinges, I am hopeful for the first time in a long time, that my legs can relearn to do what they loved to do for so long, and let me run without pain for a long time to come.