Category Archives: post bucket

Ever since moving to the cities, the Mississippi has left me entranced. It snakes through parkland and cityscape here with equal measure, and every time I cross a bridge I have a hard time keeping my eyes on the road. I have been nervous to take my boat out on her, though. Familiar as I am with kayaking over ocean waves, navigating tides and beach landings, I have no experience at all with currents, eddies, barge traffic or reading river maps. I took a night paddle with a group through a local outfitter back in June and was pleasantly surprised that the river didn’t seem as daunting as I’d chalked it up to be in my mind, but even then there was still safety in numbers and with guides close at hand. But still that siren song wafted through the back of my mind, stronger when the blue water stretched away far below a highway bridge or at my feet while I threw a ball for Ersta along her banks at the dog park.

Two weeks ago, with Pete in town to shuttle cars, I launched a plan for a solo river trip. I had been waffling for weeks, weighing the danger of going my myself against the likelihood of recruiting willing subjects for this navigational experiment. In the end, I decided that if I waited around for company, I would never go. Arguing against his strong reservations and swallowing hard to silence mine, I convinced Pete to shuttle my car down river to a little boat launch near a huge highway bridge outside of Saint Paul – I figured I couldn’t miss such a landmark and my take-out point, despite it’s inauspicious nature. He left me back at the upriver put-in with my boat, sunscreen, a bottle of water and two Clif bars.  I clambered into my long ocean boat and spun downstream, trying to get my bearings in the current. I crossed the river and started paddling, passing the dog park along the banks and startled by how small it seemed as I skittered by, pulled inexorably south. Within minutes, the launch was out of sight and I was committed to this course. A course whose timing and navigational details I was only partially sure of.

I had a melt-down hours before we shuttled the cars and kayak for my launch. All the old demons of insecurity and self-doubt raised their heads, shadowing the perfect, sun drenched summer day and leaving me crying and shuddering in the car in a parking lot near our house. What was I doing? Who am I, with all my failures and shortcomings, to think I could undertake such an ill-advised and potentially dangerous paddle down a huge river, alone, dodging industrial boat traffic and stern wheelers, in a boat designed for the ocean? All my own doubts screamed in my ears and it took everything I had to silence them and go through with the launch.

On the river, I paddled hesitantly at first, getting used to the way the current fishtailed my boat, riding the rocking wakes of passing speed boats. There was a lot of traffic out, between touristy paddle boats full of sight-seers to fellow kayakers making their slow way up the eddy on the far shore. There were families fishing along the beaches, egrets in the weeds and eagles overhead. The current was swift but manageable. I paddled along, more and more confidant, until the first tugboat passed and nearly flipped me in its rolling wake. Subdued, I paddled on past the rough confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers, and the current slowed. Downtown Saint Paul appeared on the horizon of the river, growing with each stroke, and I was paddling hard now to make headway in the seemingly dead water. As I made my way through the cityscape, boat traffic thinned and giant barges began to appear, tethered to the shore on either side. The lush parkland that had rimmed the river so far gave way to scrub and gravel pits, and the river widened and slowed even more. Wildlife disappeared. I was alone in the expanse of water under a screaming early afternoon sun. Passing under a huge railroad bridge, I nearly jumped out of my boat as another tug passed me, coming up nearly silent from behind. I had no time to adjust to its wake, and was soaked as wave after wave broke over my boat and I struggled to stay upright. Crisis averted, although now sitting in a puddle of river water, I turned my bow back downstream and paddled on. Three hours in, three and a half, and no highway bridge in sight. My arms began to shake, and I slowed my strokes down to a more manageable expedition pace – one I should have been channeling from the beginning.

In the end, the highway bridge appeared, along with her busy boat launch. I managed to slip in between motor boats and get out without falling and making a fool of myself in front of all the weekend traffic. I was shaking, but elated. I had done it. I had managed to paddle twenty miles down a historic river, and finished strong. The demons were banished for a little while longer, and hopefully I’m a little stronger to beat them back the next time they rear their ugly heads.

Last night in my dreams, there were sled dogs, three teams of fourteen or sixteen each, gearing up to go for a run in three long lines at the trailhead. The dogs were screaming and lunging to go, slamming their harnesses and yipping in anticipation. There was a flurry of booties, harnesses, clips and lines. As I watched, first one team and the next and the next pulled hooks and sped off in silence, intent on the path before them. I was left at the trailhead alone, wearing the wrong kind of parka and hat, with my heart in my throat.

I spend a lot of time second guessing my own dreams, these days. Not the ones that haunt me at night, because I’m beginning to think those are the ones to be trusted. But in daylight, what fills my head are all the ways the logistics, the finances, the practical, day to day mess of having a kennel and running sled dogs full time isn’t going to work out. That it can’t possibly be the thing, that one thing, that is finally going to be it for me. And if I try to make it work, it will end in disaster and disappointment.

The thing. That weird idea that somehow one thing is going to solve it. And maybe that’s part of the problem. There is no one thing that will right all wrongs and heal all ills. And there are plenty to be had that a few dogs and mountains of equipment to fix and dog shit to scoop won’t help. But I know that I dream about running dogs at least once a week, and that my down time is spent daydreaming down trails, my notebooks just as full of sketches of kennel layouts and dog barn designs as they are of the pathophysiology that’s supposed to be filling those pages.

And yet the doubt remains, making me even more discontent with my current situation, stuck here in civilization and unable to pursue what I love, the lifestyle that I know works best for me. I am still by most accounts five years away from being able to go back up north, to start establishing the life I want to have. I know I need to lay this groundwork here, now, but watching these years slip away is like stripping off a layer of skin, some days. I am left raw from it, and vulnerable to the breeze.

So comes the realization that I need to create more contentment, not around what I am doing now, but in what I am going after. For the last three years, I have told myself to hold it loosely. Everything changes. Nothing stays the same. You are only setting yourself up to be heartbroken. But now I am beginning to see that I need to hold it close, plan for it, live in it, so that when I am finally able to go home I will get there with the right parka, the right hat, to be able to jump on the dream I’ve held so carefully and ride it out.

Another solstice has come and gone. Yesterday there were fifteen hours and thirty seven minutes of sunlight in Saint Paul. Fairbanks, where it is hotter and summer wildfires are burning in earnest, got a whopping twenty one hours and forty nine minutes and no full darkness to be had. I have found myself a little more content here, a little more willing to dig into the days and pass them, but I remain as homesick as ever. Jodi is up on the glacier running her dogs all summer (with a brief pause for a burst appendix, but hey, you can’t have everything go smoothly, right?), Jenny is building a deck, tending her huge garden, raising chickens and planning a first puppy litter, Toni is spending her summer learning to navigate the road system on a motorcycle in anticipation of a long fall trip across the country. All under the midnight sun. I’m here, with a few more visible stars, watching northern wildfire reports carefully in case they spring up near our house, and working my way through a packed summer school schedule among other small projects (a sewing machine! and tomatoes! and formal obedience for the puppy with an eye to therapy dog certification!)

I got my first CSA box of the season, and am a little overwhelmed by how I’m going to ingest so much greenery on my own. With Peter essentially gone and the dogs unable to help, I am left with mountains of lettuce and cabbage and spinach and other leafy things I still can’t identify despite intensive internet research. But overwhelmed in a good way. I am starting a new food & exercise program in a week that focuses hard on greens. And I am well overdue for a change. Although doubtful, as usual, as to how well this will go, I am jumping in with both feet.

The last three weeks have been dark ones, despite the sunshine and beautiful weather. Everything has seemed overwhelming, from laundry and dishes to school, and I have for the first time (and for no good reason) considered dropping out. Despite the fact that everything is clicking along smoothly, a combination of frank depression and the constant second guessing of my current trajectory (as always, rimmed with homesickness for Alaska) is making it hard to stick out the endless cycle of clinicals and reading and lectures and labs and the general and constant chaos of a program only in its second year. I’m in a little bit of a better place today, enough to be writing about it, at any rate. But the dark edges remain.

A few months ago, I re-made a bracelet that I used to have in college. The bracelet has four bands, and a fifth tying the four together. The main bands stand for courage, wisdom, discipline and compassion. Tied together with hope. It’s a bit of a cheesy sentiment, but also a concrete way to keep the things in mind that I strive for. These days, the thing I need most is the hope.

In this program, we have clinical weekends a few times a semester. We spend all weekend with a patient, and then write an exhaustive 30+ page paper on them that is due just a few days later. I have found that this drives me nuts. You know this massive paper is due, but there’s nothing you can do to start working on it until the clinical weekend starts and at that point you are too busy and exhausted to do much writing until Sunday night. And then you have three days to hack out a short novel, detailing everything from the (cited!) pathophysiology behind the patient’s admitting diagnosis to their hourly bowel habits, and all the connections you can find between. But it’s the days of waiting, knowing this massive thing is due and there’s nothing you can do about it, that is messing with my head. I want to start, to get working on it, to make some progress. But I can’t. It becomes the looming shadow of a thing, and nothing can be done to banish the shadows until Friday night at 5pm, when we get our patient assignments for the weekend.

Similarly, I have been waiting to get the keys to the new house for nearly two months. I have been anticipating this new place, the fenced yard for the dogs, the gas stove (oh, bliss!), the wall-to-wall windows and old wood floors. The peace of having my own space in Saint Paul, and having internet to work on school or watch movies during down times, being closer to school and to the hospital. All these things, I have been anticipating. I have also been trying to piece together the details. What do I bring on this first trip up? What are the essentials to camp out in the new house comfortably for the first few days? A mattress. A french press and coffee mug. Kibble. I have been stressing over these things for weeks and weeks, although until today, there was nothing I could do. And until tomorrow, I’ll have to hold my breath and see if I packed the right combination of things in the truck.

All of this is to say, that at the ripe old age of nearly thirty-five, I am still not very good at waiting. I want to get things done now, have things settled right away, not have to worry about them. But I am being forced, by time and circumstance, to wait. This was true in the lead up to Alaska last fall. And to my acceptance into graduate school late last summer. And for all I can tell, I’m not getting any better at it.

How can I find that middle ground, that space of eager anticipation that welcomes the waiting as well? A space that lets me keep my excitement for things to come but with peace about the waiting that lets me sleep at night and spend my days doing things other than obsessive fretting. I’m not sure, but I’m hoping that two years of anticipation-clinical-paper cycles will teach my mind to settle a little bit more, until it really is time to get down to business.

The coffee in Portland is a revelation. The taste of it is like no other coffee I’ve had in my life up until now. As if every other mocha was only a mocha through a glass darkly.

This week has felt like an escape, in the same way that moving into the house in Saint Paul in less than a month seems like a new start. Even though I am shaking nothing off as I edge my way a little further north, I press on with the futile hope that a new geography will somehow transform the messy life I’m dragging along with me, even though I know only time will begin to unravel and straighten things, not location. But maybe a new location will make the necessary passing of time a little more bearable? There is hope in that thought, a more realistic hope, if couched in disheartening reality.

I am staying with old friends while I’m here, in a perfect little wood-floored apartment on the third floor of an old brick building with windows opening onto thick-barred fire escapes and a view of Mt. Hood, a claw-foot tub tucked into the tiny bathroom. The apartment is in the middle of everything, a pleasant walk to Powell’s Books and more artisan coffee roasters than you could hope to reasonably try out in a weekend, or perhaps a whole month. Every third person on the street is walking a dog and the drivers on the highway are polite about merging. The ongoing west coast drought means sunny skies and dry clouds soaring overhead, despite Portland’s damp reputation. It feels like heaven, even though deep down I know it is just another place with bad drivers and rude hipster baristas, a mass of humanity with all her foibles, as everywhere. Yet the temporary escape from my life, at least for today, seems like a real one. I do not want to go home.