Category Archives: post bucket

Driving through the low costal mountains, the tree bark is covered in moss, branches heavy with it, sagging over the road. The intermittent rain is thrown back up from the pavement by passing cars, making new showers, rewetting the windshield, leaving me fumbling for the wipers in an unfamiliar car. I catch sight of the ocean, finally, over a low hill, a fleeting strip of flat grey after hours of lush spring green. It disappears as the hill bottoms out, behind an ace-hardware and discount barber, walk-in’s welcome. I find signs for a public beach and park. Hopping across the muddy banks of a freshwater creek, there is suddenly a quarter mile of packed, low-tide sand between myself and a mountain of angry, crashing, bone-chilling water. A lighthouse stands sentinel on an outcropping far down the shore to the north. One family in rain boots teases the incoming waves at the margin of the ocean. A man and his black dog wander towards the rocky end of the sand, zigzagging drunkenly across the expanse, following the vagrant path of a wet tennis ball. Each are tiny, dancing smudges of black in relief against the water and sand, the bright, cloud hazed sun reflecting off their varying surfaces. I walk towards the water, obliquely. A direct route to such a force does not seem prudent, given these last weeks.

These days, the dreams wake me in the deepest part of the night and I am afraid to return to them. Yet I do not want to be awake. Even in sunlight, I do not want to be awake. Days that are not full are a threat, darkness crowds the edge of vision but flees when I turn my head. I cannot look this thing full on. Looking sideways as I have been, I cannot see where it goes, or how it will leave us in its wake. The glimpses are enough to set my heart racing. I think I am afraid of what I will see when I finally let myself look at it straight on, without shadow. I know it will be an ugly, monster of a thing. The future will be ragged with its passing. There are no even edges ahead, no clean wounds. So I hold onto the tasks, hands fluttering to find more, and flee the silences.

But standing in the sunset on the edge of the ocean, I want to be brave enough to face this like I am facing that immense, indifferent beast. How will I come out on the other side of what I am faced with walking through? It does not care about me, or how I will manage. It is just a thing that must be faced, be walked, be survived. There is no right answer, no easy way through, no way to pass without scratches, and bleeding, and scars. And I begin to fill with hate for what I was promised, and what I have been dealt instead. I push back against it, believing still that hate directed at fate only saps what energy you have and then falls, ineffectual, in a heap of useless rags before you are through the worst.

Last night, I stayed on a whim at the infamous Sylvia Beach Hotel, a haven perched on a grassy cliff above Nye Beach along the Oregon coast. I have been wandering around the building and its surroundings in a state of barely-veiled bliss since I arrived. I want to stay for a week, or maybe a year. There are couches and chairs, blankets and coffee and tea and an ever changing vista in three directions. It feels like a refuge. The ocean, turning from morning grey into a deep slate blue, is churning on the shore below where I sit perched in an overstuffed chair next to a roaring fire on the third floor, coffee at hand. This feels like a good place to sort through things and gather strength. And there is plenty of gathering needed, these days. I am loathe to leave, though I must. I hope it won’t be long before I can return.

Yesterday, after walking along the beach, I went back to the discount barber, his shop perched in a front room dingy with age and grease. There was a single spinning chair, patched with black tape, a curtain of indiscriminate pattern blocking the hallway. The list price for a new client cut, hand written on yellowing paper tacked to the faux-wood wall, was thirteen dollars. I told him to take off the length, but to leave enough that it could be pulled back. As I expected, he chopped quickly through almost all of it, a year’s worth of growth in a dark pile on the floor and nothing left to be pulled back. I smiled and dug out cash, reveling in the light- headed feeling of all that weight gone. It is not a new beginning. New beginnings don’t exist in the tumbling inevitability of time’s relentless push forward. We are caught up in the flow and there are no do-overs to be had. But it is something.

It’s been more than ten years now since I walked away from Christianity, with fewer and fewer backwards glances as time has rolled on. But even so, the season of Lent still resonates with something deep in me. In fact, the very first post of this blog was written on the night of the first Easter Vigil I spent apart from the church when I still wasn’t sure if I had the guts to live a life apart from the thing that had defined it so thoroughly up to that point. The last several years of my Christian engagement had been deeply entrenched in the Anglican liturgical traditions, where Easter and her celebrations are paramount. And I embraced them wholeheartedly. I loved the dark, brooding Ash Wednesday services with their physical manifestation on the foreheads of the faithful. I embraced the lenten fast and self-reflection born out of abstention in the physical world. I reveled in the build up to Holy Week, moving eagerly into the emotional cycle of grief at Christ’s betrayal and death and joy at his resurrection.

I hate to define myself as anything now, but when pressed I tend to fall back on the catch-all of agnostic and certainly find myself well within the broad confines of secular humanism. I believe in science, in facts and in the redemptive power of skepticism, rational inquiry and respectful discourse. And despite having eschewed Christianity along with all of her festivals and traditions, I still find that there is a place in life for abstention and reflection. Because, as is intoned in services across the world tonight, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” The phrase, credited to God as he threw Adam and Eve out of the garden of Eden, and used today to remind believers of their fallen state before the perfection of their creator, ironically rings particularly true to those of us who believe neither in the first story or the second framework.

I believe that this life is all we have. We have one chance to make of it what we will, to find and give kindness, and joy, and hope to ourselves and those around us. We have one chance to make the world around us a better place, and fight against the things that make it a bad one. And when our chance is used up, to dust we shall return.

One of the first major hesitations I felt regarding a whole-hearted embrace of Christian theology came when I was confronted with the Pauline idea that all humans are, when left to themselves, depraved creatures, repositories of evil, destitute of anything good. A significant proportion of Christian thought hinges on the belief that God is the only good, and ultimately the only possible source of good in the world. All good comes from God, and can come from nowhere else. I believe that this is a dangerous way to see the world, and in particular a dangerous way to view the people in it. I firmly believe that each person has a capacity for good and a capacity for evil and that finding the balance is a fundamental piece of what it means to be human. And that learning to live with the dichotomy of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (which are problematic terms themselves) within oneself is part of the adventure and challenge of a life well lived. But this life is all we’ve got to figure out the balance, before we return to our composite elements.

For, as the venerable Carl Sagan reminded us, we are each made up of stardust, after all.

Two weeks into graduate school. Two weeks into a sudden onslaught of reading, papers, projects, assessments and stress. Some moments feel like a dive off a cliff in the dark. I’m enjoying the feeling of my heart in my throat, and the challenge ahead. I’m also terrified. The thing I’m realizing as I plunge in is that I am scared in a way I have never been scared before. Specifically, I am terrified of failing. I think it’s something akin to the realization, as an adult, that you are mortal. That you can be hurt. It’s born of a loss of that youthful certainty (despite even a rational knowledge of the truth) that you are invincible, immortal. During my undergraduate studies, I don’t think it ever occurred to me that I wouldn’t do well. Granted, I often didn’t do well, but even reality didn’t seem to phase me much. Things have changed, now, and I am finding that my inner monologue these days is one of fear, not confidence.  I am afraid of failing, and I have found myself seeing each new quiz, test, paper and project as an opportunity to let myself down rather than a chance to shine, or at least progress relentlessly forward through what is going to be plenty of challenge in the coming months and years.

Although some of this is just first-week jitters, to be sure, it is also a way of approaching the world that has been settling in, of late. It comes from dropping out of graduate school once already. It comes of not living up to the high expectations I had for myself and my life as an starry-eyed idealist over a decade ago, now.

When I started writing about running sled dogs, I decided to call the blog Overflow because overflow was something I was initially terrified to encounter on the trail, and running a dog team nearly every day was a way to force myself to face very concrete fears in a kind of metaphysical and yet very physical exercise in personal courage. And just as, when I finally ran through overflow alone and miles from home and not only survived but had a fantastic run despite being soaked and cold, I hope that this new exercise in forced fear confrontation turns into a graduate course in learning to meet every challenge, even the unwelcome ones, not with fear and anxiety, but with excitement and with hope.

My time in Alaska went quickly, as much as it didn’t. There were evenings that dragged out and were punctuated the acute loneliness I felt so that it seemed I would be there forever in the long cold dark, and now that it’s over I mostly remember the blue arctic light and sunshine and it feels like it all passed in a blink. I spent glorious days (and nights) running dogs with Jodi, scooped mountains of dog shit and dolled out gallons on gallons of cookpot and kibble, talked endlessly about checkpoints and feeding and snacking and booties and lameness and training and conditioning and routines and strategy and learned just how much it is I have to learn if I really want to do this someday. I had one of the most transcendent days of my life, running dogs for seven hours in the mountains as a full moon rose over the peaks and the northern lights danced above my team and I, alone with the scrubby northern spruce and the silver light casting their shadows across the trail. I enjoyed sinking my teeth back into EMS education, teaching basic medical and trauma assessments, traction splinting and shock management, over and over again to different groups of students, reveling in it while at the same time confirming to myself that I want something more, professionally. This confirmed that shifting from prehospital medicine into nursing is a move I am ready to sink my teeth into, as daunting as a full-time masters program feels now that it is looming over my head like a specter.

White Mountains Training Run

And it is looming close. Orientation last week ran like an upscale version of scared straight, and I have a daunting pile of reading due before my first class on Monday. But I am looking forward to the challenge – to being challenged – instead of just plowing through prerequisite material. In addition to school itself, there will be the challenge of commuting two hours north twice a week, living in the basement of a stranger’s house (with Ersta, a puzzle herself, these days) for half the week, finding and then moving into a new house somewhere in the twin cities by the summer, and keeping up with everything else in the mean time.

I know that I have a tendency to worry too much about the future. As in, constantly. I find my mind racing from the time I wake up to the time I (try) to sleep with plans, contingencies, scenarios (usually worst-case,) options … every moment seems spent, at times, obsessing over how things (or, on more negative days, if things) will work out. And the thing is, they always have. I firmly believe that the future is what you make of it, with your own grubby hands. That we are responsible for making our own opportunities, regardless of if that means taking the initiative to create them or working to become the person that is *capable* of taking a hold of those that present themselves seemingly by chance.  Yet the constant worry is working towards neither of those ends. I need to find a way to swing back from my constant, obsessive preparation for future to live more in the moment – both to enjoy it, and to embrace and tackle the challenges each moment presents. And there will be plenty in the coming months.

In the few weeks before I left Alaska, when there was finally enough snow to run the dogs on sleds, I found myself in a familiar yet unaccustomed mental space. I had grown used to having Jodi around to chat with on our hours-long training runs in the truck, but suddenly I found myself alone on the sled again, just the dogs and the wind with me and Jodi far up ahead. I often had to force myself to stop thinking about starting graduate school in a month, or about the run planned for next week, or class the next day, or even the next worrisome corner down the trail, and remember where I was – on a sled behind good, strong happy dogs, in the mountains  – exactly where I wanted to be. Given my proclivity to fret, it took some self-discipline to simply revel in that, but it was a good exercise in presence and peace – one I hope I can continue to draw on as the unknown future marches out ahead.

*Photo Credit: Jodi Bailey*

The nights are dark now, around the new moon and with snow clouds blotting out the stars but not releasing the powder we need for the trails. At least the ground has finally frozen, so chopping wood is easier. The marshes and black spruce forests are slowly opening up for exploration as the muskeg solidifies for the winter. The ice on the creek below the cabin is solid enough finally that I no longer hold my breath when Ersta runs across the snow-dusted glaze, slipping a little but now without the danger of falling through.

In the mean time, there are other things to worry about. Specifically the barely-a-puppy anymore and my ability to be patient with her teenage phases of defiance and selective deafness. There are secrets I have kept close about the puppy. Particularly that I have never been sure she was a good idea at all. I didn’t get her on a whim, exactly. But I also knew that the timing wasn’t ideal, and stubbornly brought her home anyway. Her little personality, thoughtful in the midst of her energy, people-oriented despite a million distractions for her little puppy brain at the breeder, was too good to pass up.

First night home at 11 weeks.

A rare pause from puppy antics.

Existentially in need of a project, I may have overstepped myself when I picked the project of a working German Shepherd with search prospects. I am starting graduate school, Pete has sunk deep into the abyss of medical school, we don’t have a fenced yard anymore, we will be moving at least two more times in the next two years. Her hyper-alert interest in the cat has left me worried and wary, back in Iowa. Many times over the last nine months, having her and her energy bounding through my days has felt like too much. And I was right about it being too much in many ways, but on the other side of it, I have had more time to spend with this little black ball of fur in the last nine months what with our move and my subsequent lack of regular employment. She has had more attention and training and one-on-one time, more road trips and socialization, new situations to learn to deal with nearly every week, than she ever would have had if I’d been working full time and we’d been in a stable location. In many ways, given her early stages of development, this has been ideal.

Snow Bear

My expectations for her and for myself with her are high, though, and I have certainly not lived up to them. She is a ball of working-dog energy, and is, at times, much smarter than I give her credit for. At others, she acts dumb as a brick, though lately I wonder (know!) if it is willful stupidity she uses to try and get her way.

Visiting Texas at five months.

She is a sweet little beast, with an attentive, mellow temperament clear even through the gamboling antics of her puppyhood, especially for coming from working dog stock. We play fetch constantly, honing on her ball drive and work on basic obedience almost every day, but the almost haunts me. Am I doing enough with her? We have worked on find it games and occasionally a run-away when I can find help … but is it enough? Am I engaging her fast growing puppy brain to the extent it needs, or is all the kennel time required of her (and my lazy days just playing fetch instead of real games) damaging what she could be figuring out, learning, doing … will I ever know?

With Janelle’s kids at nine months.

Or is all my anxiety about her simply another manifestation of protestant guilt? She is, after all, just a dog. And a good dog, no, a fantastic dog. But she can still be overwhelming. Last week, she decided that she doesn’t like getting into the truck in the morning, and refused to do so as we were leaving for work. And refused to be caught, of course. She never ran away, but stayed out of reach for nearly an hour as I cajoled, tempted and tried to trick her into getting close enough to lay a hand on her collar. The command “come” which she knows perfectly, which I have spent cumulative days drilling into her little puppy brain, she now clearly also knows isn’t mandatory. My things were in the truck, and she wanted to keep playing, not be confined for another day. And she suddenly realized she very well didn’t have to be.

Leashed for the rest of the week, she never protested our morning hike out to the truck and, clearly without another option, jumped right into the cab like it was her favorite place in the world every day. Saturday, I decided to play fetch with her before truck time, thinking a week of leashed walks out and no protest meant we were past a short phase of truck defiance. I was ever so wrong. As soon as she got wind from my body language that I was done playing fetch and ready to load her up, even though she was nearly worn out, she dropped the ball and sat just out of reach. For another half hour, we played the game (to her) again of keep-just-away. I was so flustered and frustrated and disappointed that I could hardly think straight to figure out how not to reinforce this behavior. And I doubt I did a good job of it, although when I finally did catch her it was all praise and love and sweetness and not a direct walk to the truck, even though I was shaking and angry and wanted badly to just throw her in her kennel and then have a good frustrated cry.

So what of this? I have a dog, now over ten months old, that I feel unworthy of. Whose energy, some days, many days, feels like more than I can handle given everything else on my plate. With whom I’m still not sure how I’m going to manage once graduate school starts and my weeks are more full of commuting and school work. Yet so far, she has also been a savior of sorts, forcing me out of myself and out of the house when all I wanted to do was sit on the couch and sulk. Making me think when we hit walls in training, forcing me to learn hard lessons in patience with the same brick walls didn’t seem breachable, giving me joy when we have a breakthrough and move suddenly forward in leaps and bounds. Her cold nose on my face in the mornings cuts into the requisite loneliness of being here, away from Peter, away from Pico and Duncan.

Arriving in Fairbanks at 10 months.

My self-doubt about Ersta, though, is really only a jagged piece of the bigger puzzle of self I am constantly trying to put together. The demons of my own inadequacy to live up to the expectations I have of myself seem always perched on my shoulder, whispering in my ear, darkening the sky. The writing projects that sit stagnant. The hours of footage that have yet to be edited into usable clips. The gym only occasionally visited. The kayak sitting latent in the garage for the second half of the summer. Cards left unsent and email unwritten. Projects on standby. Laundry piled up. There are whispers about everything from the epic (when was the last backpacking trip?) to the mundane (how long have the dishes been neglected in the sink?) Yet these are the things that weigh heavy, a paralyzing force that is a challenge some days just to push through.