Category Archives: post bucket

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.

When we found this little house to lease in the heart of Saint Paul, I was surprised and a little wary that the price was so far below every other fenced-yard rental I had come across in my search thus far. It was closer to what might fit our two-in-school budget, but I was worried about what I might find when I went to take a look back in March. On approach, it was a nice enough little place in a nice enough looking neighborhood. The inside was charming with big windows all around and friendly colors on the walls. The kitchen was dated and without adequate counter space but had a coveted gas range an a cute pantry with shelves to the ceiling. The yard was big enough for the dogs to sprint through, and had a space already cleared for the garden that has now been taken over by the tomato apocalypse. For which I refuse to take responsibility. At any rate, I was sold on the first pass and working hard to convince the realtor to let us jump the gun and secure the place right then and there.

It wasn’t until my second-pass that I realized what was missing. It was March and a beautiful day. The radiators in the house were on, but the outside temperature held a taste of spring. It was the inevitability of summer that finally occurred to me. There was no air conditioning unit on the outside of the house; no cooling thermostat anywhere to be found. A house without air conditioning with a muggy midwestern summer on the horizon (and two cold-weather dogs) was a risk I would have to consider carefully. Oh, but the price! After a quick consultation with Pete and a few others, I was told it wasn’t so bad here in the summer. A few fans and things would be perfectly manageable, not to worry. And so we signed the papers, and signed on to what is otherwise a perfect little house, a house we would happily purchase if we knew we could stay for a few more years. And then began the anxious wait for the heat.

And heat came. Although it’s hasn’t been a particularly bad summer, it has been downright muggy at times and I have found the little house to be a furnace unless the windows are opened early and the fans used aggressively throughout the day. Coming back from a run a little too late in the morning can be a disaster, and deciding to mow the lawn at noon with nowhere to cool down has done me in more than once.

A decade ago, I spent a sultry summer in an unairconditioned room with a handful of other girls, all working on urban issues projects through college summer programs, all giddy and hopeful and sure we could enact change in a place that wanted nothing to do with us. Somehow I remember the endless sirens and the crazy neighbors in the hostel-come-commune of a building we shared, the gunshots down the street and the trash rolling along in the breeze off the lake towards the train tracks, but not the heat. My parents remember differently, claiming that the awful heat was all I could talk about when I called home on the payphone (oh, we still used payphones back then!) in the lobby.

Now that temperatures are mellowing here, the sweat isn’t slicking my skin by eight in the morning, the dogs don’t lay panting through the day, sprawled in front of fans on the living room floor. I wonder if the slow-roasting feel of the overheated days these last weeks will fade as quickly, with only visions of endlessly watering tomato plants left in their passing.

When I moved into this house in May, my first act of residence was to put in a small garden. I had heard about a local garden center and before the first box was unpacked I had brought home a load of baby plants: tomatoes, peppers, cilantro, basil, zucchini, sugar snap peas, sunflowers and black-eyed susans. There was so much hope in moving to Saint Paul, to being established in a graduate school program, to being further north and closer to true wilderness, to getting out of Iowa and away from the dark cloud of malaise that has followed me for the last three years. Planting seemed the thing to do and tomatoes were the most likely culprit. I only came home with two zucchini, four peppers and a handful of spices, but the tomato plant count, to my chagrin, wound up at ten.

I have watched the tomato plants go from little seedlings to wild bushes over the course of the short summer, and their fruit has started to ripen this week, first one, then two, and now more than I can count and keep track of. I have found myself scrambling for tomato-heavy recipes and passing around containers of cherry tomatoes at clinicals to try and lighten my load.

Last week, one of the dogs went after a rabbit in the yard. He ended up in the middle of my small garden with her in his mouth, spinning with the pleasure of the hunt, mowing down all of my careful plantings, now nearing fruition of their own. For all the destruction wrecked, not a single tomato plant was touched, and they continue to shower me with new ripe fruit every day.

In addition to my enthusiastic embracing of the garden, I signed up for a CSA in early spring. Even though we have always had trouble eating all of our CSA shares the few times we’ve experimented with getting them, and even though I am here alone for most of the weeks these days, the hope and goodwill I felt in finding a likely local prospect and depositing my money for a summer’s worth of fresh produce felt like a positive step towards being here, being in this place which I have endowed with so much hope.

The CSA has proven, as that little voice deep down warned me, to be far, far too much. There is no way, even on my best weeks with salads at nearly every meal and veggies roasting in bulk in the oven (in this steamy, unairconditioned house!) that I can consume all I have committed to. I have had a whole cabbage go bad for want of using it, and the weight of failure to eat so much green has been heavy and growing these last weeks. It is assuaged somewhat by the presence of a fantastic organics composting program in the city, so at least these slowly rotting veggies aren’t contributing to a landfill, but the truth remains. I overstepped my own capabilities as a consumer by signing up for the bounty of this particular harvest.

And yet I don’t regret either of these things. I have tomatoes coming out my ears, but I am relishing every delicious home-grown bite. And the overburden of vegetables from the CSA has forced me to attempt things in the kitchen that are far beyond my comfort zone. With, generally, good success. For all the moments I feel overwhelmed by the amount of fresh things in my kitchen, I am as grateful that I’m in a place where such bounty is both possible and welcome.

A Starbucks is a generic enough space, but a Starbucks nestled into the dead-space just inside the automatic doors of Target is far worse. Even the most cookie-cutter free-standing Starbucks is still pretending to be a neighborhood coffee shop with comfy chairs, maybe a fake fireplace, people studying and chatting. Inside Target, the illusion is gone. There is a case of pre-sliced cheese and ham and rotating lines of giant red plastic carts next to the coffee line. The pastry cabinet is mostly empty and those left are dry and crumbled, the cake-pops sagging on their little sticks. The only people sitting at the too-crowded tables are harried moms feeding cranky toddlers an emergency snack to get them through the groceries, or dads on awkward dates with their pre-teen daughters, munching away on cardboard pizza from the little microwave cafe a few feet away.

On Monday, I shouldn’t have been getting coffee anyway. I’ve been trying to give up mochas, but on days with exams and papers due (of which there have been far too many lately) I give into the temptation for some caffeinated chocolaty comfort far too easily. And with a midterm looming that evening, I found myself in line with the harried moms and gaggles of teenage girls asserting their independence through commerce. As I waited for my order to come up, motion in my peripheral vision caught my attention. In the middle of the empty seating area was an elderly woman, dressed all in black with slim silver bangles. Her hair was perfectly done, and her demeanor was that of a socialite, well and duly out of place in low-end corporate box store like this. Polite, but wary of engaging strangers as always, I sidled over within hearing distance and leaned towards her.

“I’m a psychic, you know!” she exclaimed in a half-whisper. I forced my face into neutral.

“Oh, really?”

“I’m a psychic, and I could see you standing in line there! You are different! I had to talk to you.”

I waited, not sure what you say to someone who calls you over with that declaration, much less a woman in her late seventies who looks as if she could out do your own socialite mother at a dinner party full of strangers.

“You remind me of my Jennie. She’s like you. I’ve never seen anyone who reminds me of her like you do. You look nothing alike, of course, but you … you are just the same as her. You … you are smarter than you are giving yourself credit for. You need to quit with that.”

“Um, thanks?”

“And you are a traveler, are you not? You are a traveler, I can see it! Africa is in your future. Be ready for it.”

“Yes, I do travel as much as I can.” But Africa? It’s not even on my bucket list. Galapagos, Mongolia, Goa … but Africa? Well, sure. Why not?

“Do you have children? I’m sorry I’m asking personal questions. But I’m a psychic, did I tell you? Are you going to have children?”

“No.”

“Well, anyway. You need to start writing every day. Every Day, do you hear me? Quit trying to write that book, and just write every day. The thing you need to write will come out of that. And you owe it to us all to get it out of you.”

The entirety of the interaction was, of course, much longer and more convoluted than I have represented it here. There were questions about the astrological signs of my parents “A Taurus and Aquarius … but who cooks dinner?!?” And my own “Oh, dear. Dear, dear.  A Gemini? That *is* problematic …” as well as repetition of several questions due to the onset of age related short-term memory loss. But the insistence on writing every day continued, as did the assertion of my status as a traveler.

From my early days in the conservative church, I was taught that psychics had real power, but that it was from a dark consort with demons or the devil himself. They were dangerous and looking to woo unsuspecting, weak individuals with their charms to bring them into the dark. On the flip side of that coin, a friend of mine, still deeply religious, has taken up tarot card reading under the auspices of religious prophecy. Now, as a rationalist, I have believed self-proclaimed psychics to be intuitives at best and tricksters at worst who manipulate the hopeless and gullible by spinning half-truths into webs of deception with no substance behind them at all.

Does that make me a hopeless and a gullible? I have never interacted with anyone claiming such direct supernatural insight, and have never looked to. Yet this strange old women, as riddled with dementia as she appeared to be, spoke things to me that I badly needed, or at least wanted, to hear. All unsolicited, all without any prior insight except whatever she managed to glean from my own half-patient standing in a generic line at a generic coffee shop in a generic box store with a bag full of avocados and cilantro.

And so I shall endeavor to write every day, even if it means this space becomes less polished for a time. Because if I’m opening up my soul to the devil, after all, it might be about damn time.