Snow Day

A Little Different

2010-04-13T13:20:00.000-07:00

Apologies; I have been remiss in my duties as a virtual host in that I have failed to offer you the grand tour of these new Northwestern surroundings. To address this egregious wrong, I invite you now to explore the strange familiarity of the Northwest.

I woke up this morning to an almost-familiar Hoot! Hoot! But the sound that would have been a train whistle in my Midwestern hometown was here the bleat of an ocean-going ship. Overseas, you expect things to be stunningly different: fern-trees and kiwi-birds, Greek-alphabet shop signs and Cyrillic train schedules. On this distant shore of our own country, things are not always as familiar as it seems like they should be.

Take slugs. Instead of manageable brown ones inhabiting the cornstalks of my youth, those here grow into juicy six-inch cigars. Also, the chickadees are too small, the gulls are too big, the jays have shaved their crests, and the ducks sport mohawks. Bald eagles soar over the local Wal-Mart, whose front doors boast a first-rate view of a mountainous horizon. Rhododendron-like plants grow as skinny trees called madronas whose bark peels off in satisfying flakes. In backyards, ragged stands of cedars stretch to the clouds like gangly arbor vitae on prescription-strength Miracle-Gro. (Even these are juniors compared to the "grandfather trees" of the deep backcountry.) Below the trees, moss invades yards more militantly than dandelions. Green-rimmed waterways zigzag in every direction so that the air smells of salt and tidal mudflats instead of the algae and marshland of the Ten Thousand Lakes.

The horizon, at least, bears no Midwestern tinge. Olympic National Park, whose crags peek over the western horizon, contains no rolling hills (and very few roads), report exhausted but glowing hikers. The Cascades stretch like a ragged wall across the landscape in the east, separating the temperate rainforests of Puget Sound from the high desert of Yakima and Spokane. But, on a clear day, even these great peaks look only as tall as rough cement compared to the Mountain. When it shows itself, Rainier appears an order of magnitude more massive than everything surrounding, as if someone had erected a giant magnifying glass on the far side of Tacoma. Strange, though, how such a bulk can camouflage itself so easily: its patchy snow blends with the wispy clouds to hide the mountain as you gaze into the distance, until something clicks in your brain and your eyes suddenly register the presence of something vast.

According to Timothy Eagan's The Good Rain, Seattle gets less precipitation than New York, Boston, Washington, Philadelphia, and Miami (p. 49)—it just rains more often, as mists and light sprinkles. Thunderstorms are rare. A dark horizon doesn't always indicate a menacing front. There are all-day rains, but more often, it sprinkles off and on for several days, and it's hard to predict which will happen when. But even on these overcast days, when haze obscures the mountains, the sky puts on a quiet show. The clouds are infinitely creative performing artists. Of the many kinds of clouds Waukesha sees in a month, all of them at once might gather over the Northwest, each at its own altitude, each in its own costume, as if waiting in the wings for its cue to storm into Milwaukee or pour into New York.

Some things remain familiar. As an indoctrinated practitioner of Minnesota Nice, I appreciate the series of commercials that heroize such Northwest characters as the guy who lets everyone else go first at a four-way stop (to the confusion and delay of all, including a bystanding jogger, in the ad). Kudos also go to the socks-and-sandals guy, the guy who camps under a tarp ("You bring your own blue skies"), and the Walla Walla wine wine woman woman. The sponsoring company claims that they are "A lot like you—a little different."

To this wandering Midwesterner, the Northwest is indeed a little different. And the little differences make all the difference in the world.

2010-04-10T22:36:00.000-07:00

Trail Party

2010-02-20T08:43:00.000-08:00

This week I discovered the Washington Trails Association (WTA). WTA organizes groups of volunteers to maintain existing trails and build new trails on public lands throughout the state. Today we worked on Taylor Mountain in the Issaquah Alps, a line of foothills that point from Seattle's Eastside into the Cascades. Most of the land on Taylor Mountain is owned by the county and is designated as a place for "passive recreation," including mountain biking, horseback riding, and, of course, hiking.

Playing in the dirt

WTA is helping to expand the trail system here. This means that WTA volunteers get to play in the mud, haul rocks around, take out aggressions on bystanding vegetation, laugh a bunch, and generally have a great time in the great outdoors. We gather at the trailhead at 8:30 (after driving for an hour toward a Mt. Rainier whose snows are tinged pink by the dawn) and work, more or less, until 2:30. A bucket of candy is passed around at 10:30, picnic lunch at noon, and breathers as often as you wish. Hard hats are in fashion (and if you join five work parties, you get a personalized one of your very own as a self-serving thank-you gift). The WTA supplies the tools—shovels, grub hoes, rakes, loppers, buckets—and once the crew leader outlines the plan, we get to work cutting brush, moving dirt, uprooting shrubs, redistributing rocks, and digging ditches. Turns out there's a lot more to building a durable, water-resistant trail than trimming a path through the underbrush.

At the end of the work day, we gather in the parking area, muddy and spent but in the high spirits of those who have completed a physically demanding but deeply satisfying task. Someone produces a Coleman cooler of steaming-hot washcloths for our hands and faces, and someone else pours plastic cups of hot apple cider to go with a bin of chocolate chip cookies. On these sunny springtime days, we stand around chatting for as long as possible before returning to the real world and its rush-hour traffic.

"Boot-sucking mud-holes"

I've joined two work parties so far. On Tuesday, we began with an abandoned road whose gravel surface had turned into a mud-clogged drainage ditch. (The WTA website uses the term "boot-sucking mud-holes" to describe trails like this one in their pre–work-party state.) By afternoon, we had prodded it into a somewhat wider dirt path edged with the suggestion of a rocky gutter.

The ten-person crew consisted almost entirely of retired men. Flannel and suspenders were conspicuous. One WTA veteran, a small man with a round, grinning, boyish face, had just turned 80 and worked just as hard as I did on the trail. Most of the crew had gotten to know each other through years of trail work and entertained me by trading wisecracks and wordplays and ridiculous stories (including something about "old-growth salmonberries").

The forest transformed

Today (Friday) I returned to the same stretch of trail. Trail crews had been out during the two intervening days, and it was amazing to see the trail's transformation. Where there had been a sketched-out gutter and a rough path, now there existed a well-formed and rockless canal next to a cobbled road. The walkway had been lined with watermelon-sized rocks and filled with fist-sized rocks to give it the appearance of a quaint country lane. A future crew would smooth a bed of sandy soil on top of the rocks to create an even, solid surface that drains instead of turning to mud. The trick is to remove any organic matter, which absorbs water, decays, and turns to muck. This painstakingly built but hidden structure underlies all trails where there is risk that water might seep into the trailbed.

Through the woods

Our job today was to create a gentle switchback from the cobbles through the forest to another trail section downhill. We ploughed through salmonberry bushes and blackberry tendrils, raked away many inches of leaf litter, pried large rocks out of the underlying soil, hacked at inconvenient roots, and moved a lot of dirt. My task was to shovel dirt that others had loosened into a satisfyingly large mound.

This time the women outnumbered the men on the 16-person crew. One sported French-tipped nails, another wore a fashionable hat when her head wasn't covered by her green plastic helmet. Another proudly displayed curly white hair and looks like she could have retired years ago but still kept busy as a physical therapist and avid hiker.

I'll ache tomorrow, but now I feel great.

Browsing the Classifieds

2010-02-14T13:41:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of the Kitsap Sun:

Classified ad:
"Wanted: 1 pair
breeding Lovebirds"

Winter Found

2010-02-13T02:25:00.000-08:00

I found my winter: it's in Canada.

They commandeered our ice and snow to use in the 2010 Winter Olympic Games Opening Ceremonies. As a native of the Upper Midwest and a stalwart fan of cold seasons, the icy theme of this year's Games felt homey: bright white stars in a long, cold night; sparkling snow flurries; and, of course, the flaming ice crystal that is the cauldron of the Olympic Flame.

Other aspects more closely reflected my newest adoptive home. Vancouver is only about three and a half hours from Port Orchard (two and a half from Seattle). What we call the "Northwest" is only a thin border away from southwest Canada. We share a time zone and weather patterns. (It rained all day, here and there.) We both enjoy giant trees, Indian motifs, a mountainous horizon; we have in common an awe of orcas and a fondness for salmon. (Port Orchard even has its very own totem pole, on the waterfront next to the public library. And on every Puget Sound ferryboat are posters explaining how closely boaters are allowed to approach the orcas.)

And yet that thin border has some effect. I wanted to apply for Canadian citizenship by the time the poet described his homeland as the place whose people are renowned for their pleases and thank yous.

But before the echoes of the poet's words settled, NBC cut to a commercial for Marriage Ref—Welcome back to the U.S., where we enjoy watching celebrities make fun of peoples' marriages. So much for please and thank you.

Addendum to the End of Winter

2010-02-04T18:45:00.001-08:00

Note that these photos were taken on February 4. Around the neighborhood, the heather is in full bloom, scraggly cushions of tiny pinkish-purple or white flowers, and crocuses are poking up through the leaf litter, opening their flowers in a kind of squinty way, as if they were still bleary from hibernation. The local outdoor batting cage is set to reopen later this month. Soon state parks and public restrooms will welcome another season's visitors. For a while I wondered why parks closed for the "winter," seeing as no snowdrifts or health-threatening temperatures prevent people from walking around. Maybe they close the restrooms on the off chance that the pipes might freeze, and city codes forbid people gathering in places without adequate facilities? Any other ideas?

The End of Winter as We Know It

2010-01-26T17:09:00.000-08:00

It was a beautiful day in Washington. A warm breeze smelled as green as summer. Outside the grocery store are flats of primroses to plant. Fuzzy pussywillow buds are cracking open their protective shells, and on other bushes, tiny, wrinkled leaflets are slowly unfurling into leaves. Even my spring jacket is hanging unused in the closet. And it’s January.

This seems to be business as usual in the Northwest. On New Year’s, after the local news team covered the fireworks exploding off the Space Needle, their weatherman predicted the “end of winter” for the year. I assumed it was an exaggeration or wishful thinking, or maybe a forecast courtesy of a particularly far-sighted groundhog. But here I am on January 26, hearing song sparrows singing against a muddy but green backdrop that could pass for late March in the Midwest.

That’s not to say that snow and ice are impossible here. We did get a week of sub-zero temps a few months ago (which a chilled classmate declared “crazy cold”). And even today, my sister occasionally has to scrape frost from her windshield when she drives home from work in the wee hours. Proper snow falls in the mountains, although both the Olympics and the Cascades are usually obscured by clouds and a blue haze. Locals even hold a polar bear plunge. But it’s disappointing to hear that numbers were low this year because of the rain.

The North Kitsap Herald sent a reporter into the rain and waves to describe a Northwestern polar bear plunge (Bainbridge Island is a well-to-do island in Kitsap County, northeast of Port Orchard and west of Seattle):

Brrringing in the New Year | 2010 Polar Bear Plunge

Rachel Goes to Microsoft

2009-10-21T22:37:00.002-07:00

The Society for Technical Communication recently held their monthly meeting on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, WA. I spent the evening pretending I was a young professional and spying out this place that some call a bastion of evil and others a spout of genius.

At first, I drove right by the entrance, an unmarked, curved road through a veil of forest. The campus itself reminded me of 3M's campus with a touch of suburbia. Newly paved roads curved past scattered buildings surprisingly restrained in both size and corporate identity. Small signs directed drivers to the numbered buildings in classy but subtle silver and granite-grey. The internationally recognized Microsoft logo, which might have been emblazoned on every reasonably flat surface, appeared only rarely, and even then small and understated—for instance, on a placard stating the regulations in the parking structure where I left my car.

Building 37, my destination, blazed the company colors only in the form of a handful of streetlight-hung banners reflecting the "I'm a PC" campaign. A security guard opened the locked glass doors and directed a woman and me to a nearby conference room. A man behind us was either wildly lost or an exceptionally poor spy, and the guard took him aside for questioning.

Inside Building 37 stood a row of modernistic, discretely serious security gates made of thick transparent doors at hip height that would retract at the flash of an electronic security badge. Beyond the gates opened a modern atrium rising maybe four stories tall involving lots of glass and balconies.

Our meeting was held in a classroom-sized space outside the gates. At the door sat a large man distributing nametags. Inside, forty of fifty people mingled around tables chatting, eating sandwiches, and asking each other where the sodas were. I found a rare open chair next to a girl about my age engrossed in text-messaging.

The presentation began with administrative announcements given by important people from a podium bearing a silver Microsoft logo. Next, there was some amount of fumbling with lights, proving once again that technical difficulties can plague even a room full of technically minded people.

The presentation itself, entitled "Writing for Mobile Devices," should have been named "Microsoft Competes in the Mobile Device Market—No, Really." It was given team-style by a programmer–writer and a technical writer, both of Microsoft, who either were married or had been working together too long. They described in broad terms the many roles of writers in Microsoft's mobile-device development process, smoothly avoiding the word "iPhone" and substituting "Bing search" for their Googley-eyed competitor. Unfortunately, Microsoft secrecy prevented them from going into the detail that would have made their talk useful. In fact, the user-assistance group (the group that writes manuals) wasn't allowed to show even their style guide to other Microsoft teams.

The one valuable take-home point: Microsoft values tech writers throughout the device development process not only as writing experts but as user advocates. That means that tech writers sit in on the design meetings when the mobile devices are being developed and are allowed to suggest, for example, that a device use icons instead of text, or an uncluttered screen instead of a complicated one, or a clearer navigational system over a confusing one, all in the name of usability. This is a newish identity for tech writers: instead of being manual-publishing machines who jump into action just before the devices hit the shelves, now some tech writers are applying what they've learned about humanity through manual writing to influence how things are designed. They hope that these new devices will be so intuitive that manuals will be less necessary.

Afterwards, one of the important people noted that the usual gift to speakers is a Starbucks gift card—what else in Seattle?—but because one of the perks at Microsoft is free coffee, these speakers got coffee mugs.

We clapped, engaged in another round of networking, and left. It looks like I'll have to wait until next time for my Bill Gates sighting.

Greater Milwaukee Racquet for the Cure

2009-10-21T18:51:00.000-07:00

Way to go, RFTC 2009! The amount of money raised will be officially announced next month when the committee presents the check to the Milwaukee Affiliate of Susan G. Komen for the Cure, but the event was a great success by all accounts. Read all about it on their website (the creation of which, by the way, has been my pet project lately, as you've probably heard): www.gmracquetforthecure.org. Take that, breast cancer!

Mr. President's Light Saber

2009-10-10T20:44:00.000-07:00

More photos, and an explanation, on the blog of Tim Morehouse, Olympic saberist:

President Obama and the First Lady Learning to Fence in Support Chicago 2016!

Cool Pictures and Press from President Obama Fencing!

2009-09-22T15:49:00.058-07:00

Ithaca to Seattle
in 4,000 Miles or More

August 15: Ithaca, NY

The last rent is paid. The apartment’s walls are bare except for the shadowy marks of masking tape and empty nail holes. All of my worldly possessions are packed in boxes scrounged from Cornell University Press and Triphammer Wines & Spirits. Mom has performed her special voodoo to make everything fit in one mini van and half an Acura, and Mai and Bruce, experts at moving, have whisked away superfluous junk. I’ve said my good-byes to the hearteningly enthusiastic Varna fencers and emptied my locker in Stifel Salle. Time to reset the odometer, reset my life, and head westward to see what happens next: through the cornfields of the Midwest, the grasslands of the Great Plains, the sagebrush of the West, the passes of the Rockies and Cascades, and, finally, Seattle. Here’s to a grand adventure across the Land of Opportunity.

All you map-people out there are invited to
view a reasonably sized version of this map.

We begin on Route 13 through Ithaca, reversing the route of my arrival four years earlier. A parade of landmarks rolls by:

The view across sparkling Cayuga Lake to the Museum of the Earth, whose basement I reorganized, and Cayuga Medical Center, whose cafeteria I patronized thereafter.

The Sceincenter’s chain-link fence, which I ripped a decade’s worth of greenery from and spraypainted black.

Ithaca Bakery, the source of the chocolate croissant in my passenger seat.

The Friends of the Library warehouse, site of the nation’s largest used book sale.

The Big Orange Box. No tears shed.

Dirt roads leading to the Finger Lakes Trail, Upstate New York’s section of the North Country Trail. Theoretically, one could walk from Pleasant Grove Road to North Dakota, but not with a dresser and coffee table. We’re driving.

Arnot Forest, where the STS Department holds its annual retreat in a flimsy cabin used mostly by Scout troops.

The overlook from which, four years ago, I first saw Ithaca, the hilltop towers of Cornell and Ithaca College poking through the trees and Cayuga Lake curving into the distance.

I-90 stretching toward the setting sun.

August 16: Bear Lake, MI

August 19: Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, MI

Vertical sandstone cliffs dye Lake Superior a Caribbean blue here in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Between cliffs, the land slopes down to meet the water at sandy beaches. Forty-two miles of the North Country Trail (New York to North Dakota) follow the shore, offering backcountry campgrounds every four or five miles.

When I pick up a two-day backcountry permit in Munising, MI, the campgrounds two, five, ten, twelve, and thirteen miles away were all full. A site fifteen miles away was open due to a cancellation. Thankfully, fifteen miles on professionally maintained, high-traffic, relatively flat trail is a reasonable tramp. I take eight hours, including lunch and photography stops.

Sand is everywhere. The trail itself is sand: loose beach-sand, good for exercising the ankles, for the first few miles east of Miners Castle Trailhead, then compacted sandy soil in a sunny Eastern hardwood forest. How pleasant, to walk in a place full of familiar beeches and trilliums and grouse that I’ve come to know so well on Ithaca’s Finger Lakes Trail.

On the second day, it rains. What an appropriate segue from East to West.

August 22: Waukesha, WI

Amy's Feast is the stuff of legends. Its praise will be sung for generations.

August 27: Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN

Food on sticks, pegs in wood, people on ropes, and the mythical Source of Post-Its: My intrepid college roommate and I spend the weekend eating our way through the Minnesota State Fair (second-largest state fair, after Texas, and, well, it's Texas), learning cribbage, hanging out (ha ha) at a climbing cliff at Taylors Falls, and visiting the 3M company store. Minnesota, hats off to thee...

September 1: Boundary Waters, MN

Someday we’ll tramp the length of the Kekakabic Trail, from Snowbank Lake just east of Ely, MN, thirty-eight miles east to the Gunflint Trail, but not this year. This year, we go east for two days along the Kek, then return by way of two short loops. Campsites range from beautiful lakeside clearings with room for a Scout troop’s tents to one particularly underused site featuring a sapling growing up through the fire grate and a privy lost to the woods. Trail quality also varies. The Kek itself does a good jungle impression. Often we can’t see our feet for the underbrush, and the greenery reaches for us from either side. There may once have been trail signage. Now, the trail is visible only as the ancient remains of a logging road, a marginally open space between mature trees, overtaken by saplings and shrubs. Trail quality decreases from there. The remoter stretches of the loop trails have us climbing over, crawling under, and bushwhacking around uncountable treefalls. But that’s what we get for hiking in canoe territory.

However, we do see surprisingly many other hikers. One older man interviews us on a tiny camera looped around his neck about our impressions of trail conditions. He represents the Boundary Waters Advisory Committee and suggests that we write a report to the Forest Service about our difficulties. The more hikers the Forest Service hears from, the more they realize that we do exist and that we do appreciate trail maintenance.

Highlights of our tramp include:

Perfect weather.

No ticks.

Eating flattened Little Debbie cupcakes in the middle of the wilderness.

Discovering that my dirty socks stick to tree trunks, useful for drying laundry.

September 8: Theodore Roosevelt National Park, ND

The rolling prairie drops away on the western border of North Dakota, revealing a messy pothole of badlands. The Little Missouri River wanders through the bottomlands, creating a muddy strip of cottonwoods in this otherwise dusty land of juniper, sagebrush, and grasses. Colorful but pale, striated cliffs rise to dry, hillocky grassland. Here graze bison, elk, wild horses, and mule deer, and prairie dogs chirp from cities of holes that sprawl across flat valleys.

What a change from the jungle-like Boundary Waters. We can see for a mile on our day hike but occasionally loose the trail because the grass grows too sparsely to define a path. In other places, the trail has been eroded by feet, hooves, and gushes of sporadic rainwater into a two-foot-deep gorge, a miniature of the surrounding cliffs. Part of our trail crosses a wildly meandering creek half a dozen times. Unfortunately, it rained yesterday. By the time we give up jumping across and march straight through the ankle-deep water, our boots are caked in thick, slimy clay from slipping and sliding on the steep banks while clinging to prickly juniper and sage roots in hopes of keeping upright. To bad the opaque water does little to wash our boots.

September 9: Montana

Here, in Montana, is the West. Most highway exits bear "No Services" signs. Many are labeled simply "Ranch Access." On- and off-ramps have cattle grates.

This is also the fabled origin of I-94. This familiar highway has taken care of us for so many miles and so many years. As children, we traveled on it between home and our grandmother’s house in Detroit. It got me to fencing practice in Milwaukee and tournaments in Chicago. It ferried my sister and I to college in Madison and Minneapolis. Today, it has escorted us safely across the Great Plains and must now leave us in the hands of another. At Exit 0, just east of Billings, Montana, we left I-94 and merged smoothly onto the Great I-90. Stretching from Boston on the Atlantic to Seattle near the Pacific, I-90 is the longest interstate highway in our wide country. It appears as a tollway across Upstate New York and joins I-94 for several miles in mid-Wisconsin, so we know we will be okay. I-94 becomes yet another familiar thing I am leaving behind in order to make my way in the West.

September 10: Eastern Washington

The West is dry and hot. The never-clouded sun sears our left arms. Our sweat evaporates as soon as it contacts the air.

Idaho rolls by around midday in the form of a deep-blue arm of the sprawling Coeur d’Alene Lake, filling a maze of steep-walled valleys. Spacious houses line the forested banks, probably weekend homes for Missoula and Spokane residents, and pleasure boats throw showers of spray. Oh, to be immersed in clean, cold water! But we need more miles behind us today.

After Idaho, the terrain flattens to a tabletop and colors evaporate from the landscape. Only dead-grass-yellow and sagebrush-grey remain—hardly the "evergreen state" advertised by the state license plates. Instances of civilization appear rarely: a sun-bleached farmhouse huddled next to the only two trees in sight, a patch of cell-phone towers crowded onto a very slight rise several miles away. Even cattle ranchers seem to avoid this desert plateau. My nose and throat feel dry and gritty, and invisible dust coats every surface.

Potholes State Park, today's destination, is a man-made oasis. The park uses water from Potholes Reservoir in its underground sprinkler system. On one side of the road, RVs lounge on lush, squared-off lawns. On the other side, pale sagebrush and tan dirt-dust cover the land. After hastily pulling on swimsuits, we head straight for the beach—where our dreams of refreshing water are dashed on mucky mudflats and algae. How we miss Pewaukee Lake, fifteen hundred miles behind us. We give up and return to the shade of our campsite’s artificially healthy trees.

The Potholes region is, incredibly, farming country. Tractors drive through potato fields trailing plumes of tan dust that hang in the still air. Farther on, we stop at a refreshingly colorful fruit stand in the midst of a strangely green orchard. The farmer gives us samples of sweet, juicy melon, and we buy peaches and nectarines and pears. The farmer explains that he moved here from Detroit "when the water came"—when they dammed the rivers to bring agriculture to the desert. From there to the Columbia River, we follow a truck so full of onions that they bounce out of its topless bin onto the roadside. Apparently the dams have also brought surplus and waste to the desert.

September 11: Mount Rainier National Park, WA

Along our route, the Rockies have been mostly a series tall hills surrounding long, flat valleys. The Cascades, though, are true mountains: jagged peaks, dizzying drops into narrow river valleys, glacier-capped volcanoes. Rainier itself looks down upon so much of Washington’s population that its portrait graces the state’s license plates.

We camp in a crowded but quiet place on the northeast slopes of "The Mountain." Thin, scraggly pine trees are full of Steller's Jays, the West's black-headed answer to Blue Jays, and a bold flock of scavenging Grey Jays. We fall asleep to the rushing of the White River, a small stream whose opaque, grey waters must fill its broad, rocky bed with whitewater in the springtime. Several groups of climbers pass our site, ice axes, crampons, and helmets strapped onto heavy-looking packs, heading cheerfully toward the mountain and quietly back from it. In the morning, we hike around Sunrise, where Rainier gifts us with a cloudless sky and overlooks of too much depth and breadth for our overworked cameras to capture. If I were superstitious, I might have imagined that I was making a pilgrimage to Rainier as the patron-spirit of the place that I hope to call home.

September 12: Port Orchard, WA

After 4,353.05 miles and nearly a month of travel, the brave little Acura rolls safe and sound into my sister’s apartment complex in Port Orchard, Washington. I smell pine and saltwater. The Olympic Mountains provide a jagged horizon in the northwest. Seattle is hidden behind the many peninsulas of Puget Sound. I'll travel there soon enough on the search for employment, but for today, we simply enjoy not driving.

Thanks to everyone for being so supportive of this crazy adventure and for providing me with housing, entertainment, and friendship along the way. We'll see what happens next.

Happy (Sustainable) Holidays!

2008-12-05T06:17:00.020-08:00

Book Report: A Walk Across America,Peter Jenkins

2008-08-07T06:39:00.003-07:00

Peter Jenkins has reaffirmed his place as my almost-hero with his book A Walk Across America (1979).

It is quite obviously his first literary effort. The reader has to wade through gratuitous exclamation points and corny, unnecessary dialogue. His metaphors are either trite and empty or over-elaborate and clunky, rarely adding to the meaning or mood of his descriptions. He uses a new adjective before his dog’s name every time the dog is mentioned: “brave Cooper,” “powerful Cooper,” “playful Coops.” I wondered whether Jenkins had been studying Beowulf and its poetic epithets. The book reads like an unabridged adolescent’s diary.

If you manage to ignore the style, though, the underlying story is redeemingly amazing. Jenkins had just graduated from a small college in Upstate New York and was recovering from a dizzying marriage and divorce. He felt like he needed to go somewhere and considered traveling abroad because, along with the rest of his generation, he saw too many faults in America. A wise, old friend suggested that he see for himself whether America was worthless or worthwhile, and Jenkins decided to do just that. He would walk across the country with his dog, getting to know its people and places for himself, before passing final judgment.

This book follows him from Alfred, NY to New Orleans. (A sequel takes him the rest of the way west.) At first, he simply enjoys the act of walking through the peaceful autumn countryside. He becomes comfortable sleeping amidst the Halloween-sounds of the nighttime woods and builds the stamina to walk 20 to 30 miles per day. Once snow begins to fall, Cooper’s puppyish enthusiasm with jumping through snow banks energizes them both. He spends a few days on the Appalachian Trail but turns off when he remembers that his goal is to understand local people.

When he runs out of money, Jenkins stops in friendly towns to find work. He lives with a black family in their trailer in the Appalachian foothills. He spends a few weeks in an old-fashioned Southern plantation and on a commune. He wins the trust of a notoriously crotchety hermit, surprising nearby villagers, who placed bets on whether Jenkins would return alive. He shakes hands with Governor George Wallace. He ends up in a seminary in New Orleans to write a memoir for National Geographic. He is honest about his stereotypes of people and places, cultivated in a buffered, Eastern upper-crust suburbia, but he is willing to march through his phobic preconceptions and discover what life is really like at a Christian revival and on an Appalachian farm. Again and again, he is surprised by the friendliness and generosity of the people.

Jenkins’ epic story wraps itself up as nicely and magically as a fairy tale. By the time he reaches Louisiana, he has found not only faith in America but also a career as a writer, religion, and a fiancé. He has lived through a tornado, drunken brawls, small-town suspicion, a deadly strain of influenza in a backwoods cave, and even the death of his beloved dog. Having read his 2001 Looking for Alaska, I am reassured that both this second marriage and his writing career flourish (and that he learns to conserve exclamation points and euthanize strained metaphors). The moral of the story: if you trust your instincts and trust other people, the rest of life will fall into place.

How perfect: the hero journeys away from home into the unknown wild-lands in order to have many adventures and find his place in life. Joseph Campbell would be proud.

That’s the kind of heroic challenge I’d sign up for. Even though I’ve fallen in love with Ithaca--wacky, liberal, smug Ithaca--I feel like I’m waiting for something. Maybe that’s a consequence of perennial unemployment, or maybe I’m getting anxious after living in one place for so long. I spend my days fencing, hiking, biking, journaling, and daydreaming. I have no epic project to work on, no heroic goal to aim for. Earning a degree would fit into that category. For some people, performing on Broadway or competing in the Olympics also fits. Maybe raising children does, too. I’m ready--desperate--for something to dedicate myself to, even something as senseless as walking across a continent.

Any suggestions?

Logbook Wisdom

2008-08-06T10:18:00.003-07:00

Leave a blank book in the middle of the woods for a year, and what happens? It becomes a Rorschach test for hikers, except the hikers leave the inkblots. The books are part community message board, part graffiti canvas, part group diary, and part rainy day diversion. Most entries record little more than names, dates, and destinations, with occasional musings on the beauty of the surroundings, but here are a few other uses that hikers thought up:

Thank-you card: “Dear lean-to adopters and trail maintenance crews...”
Autograph collection: What would your trail name be? I followed the exploits of the likes of the Rondackers and Bachelor Bob. A string of letters and numbers followed some names: NTP 2004, LT 99, AT, GA-->ME 06-07. This code is the hikers’ version of adding Ph.D. or F.R.S. to their names, like medals of honor, or brief resumes of the trails they’ve walked. Bachelor Bob followed his name with alphabet soup, which lent weight to his frustrated criticisms of signage and trail maintenance issues. Since I was walking in his footsteps for a few days, I could only commiserate in my own entries.
Travel guide: Most NTP hikers walk northward, so the rare southbound hiker reaps a harvest of cautions and recommendations about the trail ahead.
Opinion forum: Hot topics include the necessity of fire bans and the tension between historical preservation, public accessibility, and the wilderness aesthetic. Also popular are impassioned essays against the inevitable lean-to litter.
Breadcrumbs: A rescue party can play connect-the-dots until they find where a missing person’s entries leave off.
Directory: Entries noted the best firewood-gathering grounds and the most productive fishing spots.
Confessional: A gay couple confessed to accidentally “showing off” while skinny dipping to a Boy Scout Troop. Unsurprisingly, such incidents happen on an apparently regular basis.
Religious testament: Spiritual moments strike people often in the wilderness, but I was confused by the praises to God’s aesthetic sense at Duck Hole, a reservoir.
Sketchbook: A few disturbingly practiced adolescent drawings wait patiently among entries, hoping to shock unsuspecting browsers. Elsewhere, innocent illustrations retell hikers’ adventures in graphic-novel style.
Backwoods girl talk: “When Aunt Flo comes calling a few days early, sphagnum moss offers a comfy and absorbent solution.”
Weather monitoring station: Dripping wet hikers need somewhere to vent their weather-related frustrations.
Wilderness survival guide: “Remember the computer game Oregon Trail: meager rations and a grueling pace means everyone dies!”

The Pantry According to Rachel

2008-08-05T08:01:00.013-07:00

To be recited prior to the ceremony of the Ingestion of the Animal Crackers.

1 Praise Thee, O Circus Animal Crackers!

2 Never before this Day have You been so anticipated through such Tribulations and through so many mud Puddles.

3 For you are the perfect Union of refined Sugars, enriched bleached Flour, red Dye #2, partially hydrogenated palm kernel, soybean, cottonseed, and/or canola Oil, and traces of Peanuts.

4 No multitudes of pestilential Blackflies nor host of bloodthirsty Mosquitoes can dissuade me from partaking of Your pink and white Frosting.

5 Your cookie Center imparts Strength unto weary Muscles, and your multicolored Sprinkles bring joy to heavy Hearts.

6 This Day the very Weather turned against me, but through this Flood, You have remained at my Back (specifically, in the confines of my Pack).

7 May you be forevermore my Source of Sustenance in the Wilderness!

Food Poetry

2008-08-05T07:36:00.001-07:00

Oatmeal, oatmeal, perfect food,
Breakfast, cookies, lifts my mood.
Gorp, granola, raw or stewed,
Fills me up with fortitude!

Sing Along

2008-08-05T07:30:00.004-07:00

To the tune of the Scout camp "Swimming Hole" song,
composed during a rather wet day over a mountain pass.

Hiking, hiking, on the mountaintop,
Wet's the day, but stay and play
In the muddy glop!
Uphill, downhill, tramping 'til you drop,
Don't you say this mountain day
Should never, ever stop!

Musings from Blackfly Season

2008-08-03T20:18:00.001-07:00

When I squish blackflies on my face, is their cause of death blunt trauma or drowning in saltwater?
How many calories are in a blackfly? There’s not much meat on one, but think of them like grains of sand on a beach. With as many as I caught in my tent each night, I could have had a hearty meal. They already flavored my oatmeal and pasta. I’m surprised I didn’t choke by breathing them in.
Do blackfly guts count as hair-care products? After a few days, I had more of that on my scalp than shampoo.
If humans are 80% water, how much water is in a blackfly? It sounded like it was raining when I sat in my tent, but it was the ticking of many dozen blackflies throwing themselves against the tent wall. I put on my raincoat to go outside, with the hood up and the sleeves cinched tight around my wrists. I used my scarf more for insect protection than for its intended purpose.
Do insects make inter-species alliances? I could usually escape blackflies by jumping into a river. At the Cedar River Flow near Wakely Dam, however, I was nibbled above by flies and below by fish. That was not fair.

Blackflies Versus Customers

2008-08-03T18:33:00.011-07:00

I quit my retail job to go hiking in the thick of blackfly season. This is why.

Why Blackflies are Preferable to Customers

The police don't have to get involved when you squish the life out of a blackfly.
Customers are there all year round.
Blackflies are supposed to have the IQ of an insect.
They both carry diseases, but the bite of a customer is more painful.
I've never had a blackfly become belligerent when it sees through my attempts to fake a full working knowledge of hedge trimmers.
Blackflies don't care whether the surrounding plants are perennials or annuals.
In polite conversation, it is acceptable to refer to blackflies as part of the local wildlife.
Blackflies prefer to stay downwind.
There's a spray for blackflies.

How to Avoid Adirondack Bears

2008-07-12T07:41:00.095-07:00

Post Title

Adirondacks

And this is where the post will set up camp.

Chez Tramper

2008-06-06T06:43:00.019-07:00

Welcome to the Chez Tramper! Here, all of your hiking-day hunger will be assuaged by a multitude of gourmet grains, gorps, granolas, and chocolates. Our resident menu crafter has spent many hours meticulously counting calories and proportioning carbs, proteins, fats, fruits, and all-too-rare veggies into weeks of satisfying meals to tame your tastebuds. In fact, she has donated 85% of her apartment floor space to our establishment as a preparation and staging area. (She also hopes she did not frighten the maintenance guy during his recent unannounced visit, although she’s pretty sure she left a path between the door and the fuse box.)

Our menu crafter takes her job seriously. She begins by modifying the familiar food pyramid to meet hikers’ special caloric needs as well as weight and bulk restrictions. As a veteran of many a raisin overdose, she balances fiber with particular care. She supplies carbs liberally. She believes that pretzels are a fine addition to gorp, assuming they are passed through a mortar and pestle, and that ramen noodle dust is just as nutritious, easier to eat with a spoon, and certainly more convenient to pack, than ramen in its pristinely wavy form. For special occasions, she might suggest splurging on a liquid sauce to add to the night’s rice or pasta. A packet of palak paneer from the Indian foods aisle might be worth its unfortunate heft for its spinach-infested greenness on day 10 of your journey. Homemade granola is her specialty.

Protein is easier to bring to the woods than many imagine. Peanut butter and mixed nuts are longtime standbys, as are beef sticks and jerky. A trip to the natural foods co-op reveals multiple flavors of dried bean mix, and even everyday grocery stores offer vacuum-sealed packets of precooked chicken hidden among the tuna cans. Some protein also comes from the cheese in your macaroni and parmesan and from your crackers and Swiss or sharp cheddar.

You may soon come across the Chez Tramper brand off the trails. During the course of experimenting for ever-better tramping food products, our intrepid team of food scientists has discovered many substances new to epicurology. Entrepreneurial specialists are currently working to find alternate markets for these innovative substances. For example, our head research chef, deviating from a recipe for hardtack (bland but rugged crackers), discovered a process by which hockey pucks may be manufactured. Our peanut butter granola bars will be marketed to dentists as saliva sponges: pop a crumb in the patient’s cheek, and the good doctor won’t have to bother with his spit vacuum.

We offer a sampling of our fine menu below. Recipes are available upon request. Shipping and handling fees apply in addition to the basic per-meal cost and all applicable taxes.

Le Menu

Breakfasts

*Homemade granola

Choose from Maple Nut, Honey and Berry, and Apple Cinnamon.

*Instant oatmeal

Fortified with brown sugar, fruit, nuts, and powdered milk.

*Pop Tarts

Note: Must pack your own toaster.

Lunches

*Peanut butter and jelly

Additions to this classic include candied ginger slices, Nutella, or chocolate chips.
Note: Available on your first few days; available subsequently on an experimental basis.

*Pretzels/crackers with beef sticks or pepperoni and Swiss or Seriously Sharp Cheddar

Allow us to suggest our homemade hardtack. These thick, crisp crackers, subtly flavored, can survive long periods of in-pack abuse. In case they are not eaten, they double as heirloom mementos of your trip which you can pass down to your children and grandchildren.

*Peanut butter, cracker crumbs, and dried fruit

A fine alternative to classic PBJ.

Entrées

Mix and match the following grains, proteins, and flavorings:

*Grains

Rice, ramen, pasta, couscous, buckwheat.

*Proteins

Meat stick slices, pepperoni, grated parmesan cheese, dried bean mix, precooked chicken packets.

*Flavorings

Bullion (always a classic)

Italian herbs (basil, oregano, garlic powder, onion powder)

Tabbouleh (parsley, garlic powder, onion powder, and a hint of mint)

Various other powdered and liquid flavoring packets from the baking and international foods aisles

Snacks

*Banana chips

*Salted mixed nuts

*Dried fruit

*Crumbs

Available in cereal, pretzel, or cracker flavors.

*Crumbled gorp

This gorp cousin was born from the leftovers of our menu crafter’s kitchen and includes pretzel and Corn Chex crumbs studded with chopped pecans and dried tidbits.

*Variations on the theme of gorp

*Various granola and energy bars

Desserts

*Hot chocolate

*M&Ms

*Chocolate-covered sunflower seeds

*Chocolate-covered candied ginger

Ticks and the Post Office

2008-06-01T04:39:00.003-07:00

I called several Adirondack post offices recently in order to check up on the procedure of food dropping. These calls required almost as much planning as the rest of the trip. It’s possible that out of everything that makes me anxious about this trip (chiefly ticks, bears, and starvation), what I’ll have to worry about most is coordinating my arrival at post offices to fall within their business hours. Trickiest of all is the hour, or two, in which each closes for lunch, staggered apparently to avoid some Adirondack-wide stampede to the best lunch counter this side of Lake Champlain. I offer a sampling by way of example:

Piseco (pop. 200)
Mon-Fri: 9:45-12, 1:45-3:45 (Perhaps suggested by a random number generator?)
Sat: 11:30-1 (Note to self: avoid obtaining a pen pal from Piseco.)
Blue Mountain Lake (pop. 146)
Mon-Fri: 8-11, 12-4:30 (3/4 the size of Piseco, with double the PO hours... perhaps a town of dedicated catalog shoppers?)
Sat: 8-12
Long Lake (pop. 852)
Mon-Fri: 8:30-12:30, 1:30-4:45 (I assume they close early to avoid the excruciating Long Lake 5:00 rush hour?)
Sat: 9-12
Lake Placid (pop. 2638)
Mon-Fri: 8:30-5 (This bustling metropolis is far to cosmopolitan to shut its doors for lunch.)
Sat: 8:30-12:30
Keene (pop. 1063)
Mon-Fri: 8-12, 1-4:30
Sat: 8-11
Keene Valley (pop. ?)
Mon-Fri: 8-1, 2-4:45
Sat: 8-11:45

However inconvenient their eccentricities, the postmistresses make up for it in helpful friendliness. At Blue Mountain Lake, she answers the phone in that typically dull voice indicative of business phone veterans with a mouthful of spiel to get out while the caller patiently waits their turn. But as soon as I mentioned that I was a hiker and not, say, some local adolescent calling to ask how much a one-cent stamp cost, inflection breathed life back into her words and she became chatty like only a bored, small-town PO worker can be. She explained in detail how to address my care package: “General Delivery--Hungry NPT Hiker,” with an approximate date of arrival and a phone number to call three days later, because she won’t have hikers lost in her woods. We discussed weather reports, blackfly densities, and trail conditions. She asked politely about my plans and became inordinately cheerful when I told her I’d be alone. She explained that she was a determinedly pro-girl-power Girl Scout leader. How strikingly different from the last time I told a post office worker my hiking plans. The lady behind the window in Wellington responded with, “You know that hikers die in the mountains when they’re alone, don’t you?”

As an afterthought, I asked about this year’s tick forecast. “Oh, we don’t have much trouble with ticks,” she replied. The only people she’s known to have picked up ticks caught them down near Albany. Could this be so? I laughed out loud when I hung up the phone. You mean I won’t have to watch the silhouettes of ticks patiently and methodically scaling the tent walls as I lay down to sleep? I won’t have to pry tick mouthparts out of my flesh every hundred feet? (Part of the tick oogey factor must have to do with the use of the term “mouthparts” and descriptions of how they break off and remain embedded in your skin if you’re not careful. I intend to be very careful, thanks.)

The trip suddenly felt almost too easy. In the last few weeks, I’ve been coming to terms a succession of anxieties. First was bears. Once I convinced myself that bears don’t regularly munch on tent poles at 3 a.m. unless the tent’s inhabitants have been frying up salmon steaks by their bedside, I was free to worry about food. Once I planned out filling meals and ample snacks delivered via several mail drops, I wondered whether my feet would be able to keep up with my tramping schedule. After a few ambitious local hikes, I decided I could make myself walk forever if need be, unless the trail was infested with ticks. And now I’ve run out of gripping concerns.

Now all I have to worry about is breaking an ankle in the next two weeks. Or unknowingly dropping the car keys into a beaver pond at mile marker 54. Or spending my end-of-trip bus money on salad and chocolate in Long Lake, because the bust stop at the Noon Mark Diner doesn’t accept credit cards. Or arriving at the wrong post office at 4:50.

Shindagin Hollow

2008-05-15T14:32:00.035-07:00

The Tale of
Shindagin Hollow

Coming Soon!

The Plan: Rough Draft

2008-05-14T10:24:00.006-07:00

For the last week, maps of various regions in the Northeast and Midwest have covered the floor of my apartment like intricate Girl Scout sit-upons after a particularly rambunctious meeting. Now there is a plan, and it follows the Northville-Placid Trail (NPT).

View Larger Map

This track won the bid for several reasons. The region garners rave reviews for its scenery and size. It’s also the right length for my time frame. The current draft of the plan calls for leaving on Tuesday, June 10 and returning to Ithaca sometime around June 30 so that I can spend July 4th on Pewaukee Lake. That gives me three amazing weeks, making me feel rich with good fortune, even if I am an unemployed bum.

Plus, the trailhead is close, 170 miles or just over 3 hours away, assuming I don’t miss a turn in Ephratah or Herkimer or Fink Basin. Google’s directions might as well be a journey through the villages of Dr. Seuss, written in the format of an epic free-verse poem.

By the last stanza, I should be on the south end of Adirondack Park, a conglomeration of wilderness areas interspersed with squares of private land and tiny hamlets that takes up most of northeastern New York State. If you open Google Maps in just-plain-map mode, it’s that big green splotch upstate. In terrain mode, it looks like a rough-textured green scab. These mountains were made differently than the ancient, eroded Appalachians, which take the shape of narrow, curving ridges snaking up and down the Eastern Seaboard and were created by tectonic collisions. The Adirondacks are more of a fat, warty toad than a snake. They are still growing by a couple millimeters a year, being pushed skyward by an ambitious bubble somewhere below the Earth’s surface.

Officially, the NPT begins in the little town of Northville just inside the southern border of the park, but the trail follows the road several miles to Upper Benson before disappearing into the woods, and that’s where I’ll begin. (I feel no need to be an end-to-end purist if it means a day of roadwalking.) The trail wanders 133 miles north, skirting or passing through the villages of Piseco, Blue Mountain Lake, and Long Lake, before finally petering out on the southern outskirts of Lake Placid Village. Along the way are lean-tos or huts like the ones I saw in Shenandoah: three sides, a roof, double-decker sleeping platforms for 6-8 people. Usual amenities include a privy hidden away nearby, a spring or stream for water, a fire ring, and tent sites. Trail maintenance should be noticeable, although the beaver population sounds eager, as they are, to fill the trail with water.

The official NPT guidebook, put out by the Adirondack Mountain Club (ADK), offers sample 10-day and 15-day itineraries, but it’s frustratingly impossible to determine how much ground I’ll be comfortable with covering on each day. I can compare mileages from previous trips, make sensitive measurements from 1:60,000 topo maps, and even walk the entire length of the trail virtually courtesy of Google Earth’s three-dimensional fly-thorughs. Even high technology can’t tell me how often I’ll loose an hour by mistaking an old logging road for the trail, or whether an impending thunderstorm will persuade me to set up camp early, or whether I’ll have a series of high-energy, keep-going days. I do have a few rest days built in that I can convert to mileage make-up days if need be. What I mean to say is that all proposed schedules come with emphatic disclaimers.

If I spend the first two weeks on the NPT, I can spend the remaining week wandering thought the High Peaks, the crowing glory of Adirondack Park. The High Peaks are a particularly topographically intense area just southeast of Lake Placid containing New York State’s highest mountain, Mt. Marcy (1,629 m/5,344 ft), a member of 46 summits in the area over about 4,000 feet. The spectacular scenery has made it the most popular area of the Adirondacks. A visit is required of every upstate resident, preferably at least once a year. Because of the popularity, the local bears have become wise to the ways of hungry humans and their flimsy bear bags. Bear cans are required here by park regulation.

Food is the limiting factor. If people didn’t have to eat, our packs would weigh nothing and we could roam the wilderness endlessly, besides instantly and conveniently solving world hunger. Unfortunately, this is currently not the case, and so I’m stuck with the logistical challenge of resupplying about every six days and crunching my Ramen into noodle dust in order to fit enough non-perishables in the bear can. One popular resupply method is to mail yourself packages care of local post offices and then making sure you end up in, say, Blue Mountain Lake (pop.: 146) on a non-holiday weekday morning or afternoon, but not when the PO closes for lunch.

The last major roadblock, or rather trailblock, remains transportation. There is no set shuttle service from Lake Placid to Northville. I could take an all-day bus ride to the town of Gloversville on the south edge of Adirondack Park, but I’d still be 20 miles away from my car at 9 p.m. in an unfamiliar town. Walking a giant loop back to Northville would require more time than I have, extensive roadwalks if I want to avoid retracing my steps, and scratching the High Peaks from the schedule.

Assuming transportation works out, here’s the rough draft plan:

Date	Day	Miles	Where to
Tue 10	1	7.1	Ithaca to Upper Benson to Silver Lake Hut
Wed 11	2	10.4	Hamilton Lake Stream Hut
Thu 12	3	10.7	Through Piseco to Fall Stream Camp
Fri 13	4	9.6	West Canada Lakes Huts
Sat 14	5	0.0	Rest Day
Sun 15	6	4.1	Cedar Lakes Huts
Mon 16	7	11.8	Wakely Dam Campsites
Tue 17	8	8.5	Stephens Pond Hut
Wed 18	9	7.9	Past Blue Mountain Lake to Tirrell Pond Hut
Thu 19	10	10.6	Through Long Lake to Catlin Bay Huts
Fri 20	11	5.9	Plumleys Huts
Sat 21	12	7.3	Seward Hut
Sun 22	13	7.0	Duck Hole Huts
Mon 23	14	8.9	Leave NPT for the High Peaks and Scott Clearing Hut
Tue 24	15	0.0	Floating Rest Day
Wed 25	16	9.5	Whispering Pines Campground near Lake Placid
Thu 26	17	???	High Peaks
Fri 27	18	???	High Peaks
Sat 28	19	???	High Peaks
Sun 29	20	???	High Peaks
Mon 30	21	???	Back to civilization, or at least as far as Ithaca

Farewell Party

2008-04-25T05:08:00.007-07:00

If I keep my fingers well and truly crossed, and maybe if I do all my chores and finish my brussels sprouts and promise not to stick my tongue out at my sister, there’s a possibility that Home Depot Girl might be able to hang up her orange cape forever. I’ll find out in May whether I have an alternate employer, to start sometime in July-ish (although nothing’s gonna stop me from being on Pewaukee Lake for the Fourth this year).

If this happens, I’d like to give HDG a farewell party. I’m thinking of having the theme be “endangered animals.” I could bring HDG to the middle of some deep, dark woods and release her into the wild, never to be seen again.

This requires taking off the month of June and planning a long-distance tramp. But where to? Which woods or hills would you, gentle reader, visit if you had three weeks to kill? Am I forgetting anything critical, like an appointment I penciled in three years ago for June 15, or the fact that without a timely intervention, I will be tramping pantsless? (Which is true. There’s an inopportune hole in my current pair. I imagine hoards of ticks crawling through and writing to all their friends about how they found a nice, cozy spot in the shade on the banks of an artery, and that they’re thinking of building a tick hotel with maybe an amusement park and guided tours to my ankles.)

Ice Age Trail
St. Croix Falls, WI (just opposite Taylor’s Falls, MN) to Kettle Moraine State Forest to Sturgeon Bay

It was many, many years before my first real tramp, when I naively assumed that a lively day hike was the epitome of outdoors enjoyment, when I was first introduced to the Ice Age Trail. Mom and I would hop on our bikes and spend a day on the Glacial Drumlin Trail for sundaes at LeDuc’s. En route, where the bike trail skirts the north edge of Kettle Moraine State Forest,a wide, inviting path is mown through a grassy field and disappears tantalizingly into the trees. My bike, although willing and loyal on pavement, balked at the wildly uneven ground on the path, so its origin and destination remained intriguingly mysterious. Mom told me once that it was the Ice Age Trail and that it meandered all over the state, from top to bottom and side to side, following the southern extent of the glaciers. If you started walking, you could keep going almost forever. How gripping to a Covault, to whom turning around on a trail is considered an admission of defeat and often requires multiple dire warnings of slow and painful deaths to hikers who proceed. I vowed someday to follow that broad, sunny, seductively welcoming path into the woods, not stopping until I ran out of trail.

It turns out that my imagined trek wouldn’t have been as epic as hoped. At present, according to its website, the IAT looks more like a dotted line than a solid trail. Longish stretches cross state forests (including Kettle Moraine) and jump through state parks, but between these scenic stints are many miles of roadwalks and shortcuts through towns. The trail seems to beg for forgiveness by passing miniscule county and city parks on the way, like a desperate tour guide in a land with no word for “tourist.”

I think my ten-year-old self would forgive me for skipping over the IAT, for now. There are bigger mastodons out there to spear.

North Country Trail
Eastern New York State through the Fingerlakes Trail to Ohio’s Buckeye Trail, up Michigan and across the UP, over Minnesota and ending in the middle of North Dakota

I didn’t realize until a year or two ago that it’s possible to walk home from Ithaca on trails. Within 20 minutes’ drive of Pleasant Grove Road, I can find trail markers bursting proudly with the compass-rose-cum-northstar emblem of the North Country Trail along with a tiny map of the seven states I could cross if only I kept walking. The NCT tries its best to cross half the country, taking advantage of many established trails along the way, but there’s also plenty of roadwalking between public lands. Since I’ve already seen most of the Ithaca-area NCT where it coincides with the Fingerlakes Trail, I was considering jumping ahead to the UP to see what the land of Blackjack looks like in summertime. The NCT wanders through the Porkies and through Ottawa, Hiawatha, and Superior National Forests, finally jumping the Lakes at the Mackinaw Island Bridge. I’m told the bridge is quite impressive. I’ve been there once. My sister and I oohed and ahhed at the pea-soup fog as our severely disappointed parents described the stunning vistas allegedly surrounding us.

Other pluses include a relatively peaceable bear population (as opposed to that of the Adirondacks, which essentially behave like a fat breed of dog and expect to be fed like one) and the perhaps tenuous possibility of pressuring friends and family into chauffeuring me to and from trailheads. There’s topography but not in the extreme, and the Northwoods always seem serenely inviting, even in winter.

On the other hand, it’s hard to tell, without buying the various guidebooks, how much of the NCT is physical trail and how much is either roadwalk or even a dotted line gestating in someone’s imagination. Plus, as long as I’m in the East (and who knows how much longer that will last), I might as well see the Eastern sights while they’re relatively convenient. And it might be easier to cut my long-distance teeth on a more established trail.

Appalachian Trail
Georgia to Maine

This is the obvious choice. It’s solid trail for as long as I have time to hike. Ammenities include huts and latrines and a plethora of information on the quirks and how-tos of each mile.

But I hesitate to step on Andrea’s bootlaces. That’s her and Tony’s quest, later this year. (Happy tramping, sister!)

Long Trail
Crosses Vermont from Maryland to Canada, coinciding with the AT for the southern half

It takes 270 miles and about 30 days to cross Vermont the long way. The Green Mountains, like all mountains in the East, stand in remarkably narrow ridges, leaving little room for multiple north-south trails and therefore little opportunity for loop hikes, requiring creativity for trailhead and trail-end transportation.

Still, mountains tend to make for good scenery, and there are plenty of huts along the way. But there might also be plenty of people, of course.

Northville-Placid Trail
Northville, NY through the Adirondacks to Lake Placid

It borders on criminal negligence to have lived in New York State for as long as I have without having climbed Mt. Marcy in Adirondack Park. (It’s not precisely clear to me what sort of “park” it is. It’s not national, nor state, nor local. It’s just a big green blob on the map, as if an intern at the cartographer’s spilled a glob of green ink and then wrote “Park” on the splotch, glancing repeatedly over his shoulder to make sure that his mentor was still busy in the next room. Due to its ink-drop origin, this area has one particular bonus: it’s round. This opens the possibility of multiple north-south trails, meaning a loop might be made. I’m still researching the reality of this possibility. I haven’t yet found a trail map of the whole park. It’s too big.

But nowhere is perfect. Possibly because of the legions of outdoors enthusiasts who make their Mt. Marcy pilgrimages in summer, hiker-bear relations have been deteriorating recently. At least one clever bear has figured out how to pop open the bear-proof food canisters of the model I took to Shenandoah. Bear canisters are required and must be a park-approved model. And I’m terrified of any bear not behind bars in a zoo. Maybe some bear exposure is exactly what I need to put this fear to rest. But is it worth the price of several days’ worth of food and a chewed-through set of Tupperware-on-steroids?

Anywhere Else?

This weekend I’ll visit EMS and chat with Cornell Outdoor Education, and maybe post to the Cornell Outing Club list for advice. We’ll see. Any suggestions or comments from the audience?

	Solid Trail	Loop	Easy Trailhead Transportation	Low Bear Density	Low People Density
IAT			X	X	X
NCT	?		?	X	X
AT	X		?	?
LT	X			X	?
NPT	X	?	?

Tramping Shenandoah

2008-04-01T19:40:00.012-07:00

March 18 - 21, 2008

Let's try something new. Google Maps offers map editing tools into which you can embed text and photos, which sounds to me like a useful storytelling technology. Below is a link to my Tramping Shenandoah map. My route is marked as a blue line, and you can click on icons along the way for photos and explanations. Begin at the blue car in the northeast and follow the blue line south (clockwise) over Buck Ridge.

Enjoy your virtual tramp!

(Alternately, you can see the same blurbs and photos as a blog.)

Read Me: Looking for Alaska by Peter Jenkins

2008-03-13T19:39:00.003-07:00

For writing this book, Jenkins is almost my hero. He managed to turn his occupation into moving to Alaska and having as many adventures as possible in one year, then writing about it. Sign me up! But the book wasn’t really about moving to Alaska as much as it was about Peter Jenkins moving to Alaska. The popularity of his previous books, especially A Walk Across America (1979), enabled him to sell this book idea to his editor. (Side note to Tricia: Well, it looks like a smidgeon of fame isn’t all bad after all...) Granted, he does a good job of letting his interviewees do the speaking and inserting his own humble narrative voice only to give color and perspective. Still, I wouldn’t mind crossing the Lower 48 by foot if I got to write a successful book about it afterward, and then move to Alaska.

I say that Jenkins is almost my hero because the book that I would write after a year in the (original) frozen tundra would be radically different than Looking for Alaska. People fascinate Jenkins. He travels in order to collect relationships, to experience different ways people live, to learn how people cope with and thrive in so many situations. What he likes to remember about a place is that slower-than-necessary drive down that empty road, listening to a local granny recall a lifetime of stories. The very middle of nowhere, an extended snow machine ride off the vehicularly harsh Haul Road, is represented by a surprisingly civilized house and its quiet inhabitants. The far north, near Barrow, means Native whaling expeditions whose leaders read the ice as if it was a Shakespeare sonnet. Jenkins’ Alaska is less the stereotype unpeopled wilderness than a space dotted with villages, in a glass-half-full kind of way. Parts of his book go almost too far, becoming laundry lists of the admittedly interesting characters he meets, as if to prove that people do in fact live there: mountain-man backwoods bachelors dressed perpetually in flannel; strong, gun-toting women; knowledgeable children on whose chores rest the livelihood of their families.

All good reading... although an Alaskan tradition is for Outsiders to move there in order to avoid people, not to seek them out, which is the camp I would join. People like Jenkins can go anywhere on Earth and find interesting people just waiting for someone to ask them to tell their life stories. And when people like Jenkins do so, I’m quite willing to read the resulting books, because I’m unlikely myself to walk into some arctic fishing village and pretend to be interested in the details of someone’s broken marriage (even if it is a broken Alaskan marriage). Instead of experiencing people, I would visit Alaska to experience the land: midnight sun and noontime darkness, unimaginable cold, northern lights, suicidally obedient sled dogs, neighborhood herds of musk oxen, omnipresent bears, tundra, taiga, mountains, a thousand versions of ice, and hiking through as much of it as possible.

(But then, who would read a book whose theme is “isn’t that a pretty mountain?” No one wants to read a book devoid of people. That would be either a natural history textbook or a nature walk pamphlet. Some authors get around it through personification: talking pigs, haughty housecats, dragons that behave like flamboyantly-dressed circus fire-eaters. And why not? We can’t possibly know how a pig really thinks, so authors must necessarily imagine and project people-thoughts into the piggy heads. I barely know what my own self is thinking half the time. As we await scientific consensus regarding the inner lives of African grey parrots and apes using sign language, I’m stuck writing the book All the Neat Scenes Rachel Saw on her Summer Vacation until I learn to dull my distaste of small talk long enough to hone interviewing skills.)

Still, I give Looking for Alaska a thumbs up for accomplishing one of the goals of any book, allowing me as the reader to have vicarious experiences I would not otherwise have—with the added bonus that the interesting parts about bears and kayaking and the Iditarod and near-death experiences aboard various bush planes are all distilled from the dreary small talk and dead-end leads Jenkins had to wade through.

Surprisingly, the book dealt not only with Jenkins’ dealings with his new Alaskan neighbors, it also talked about his relationships with his own family. His wife lived with him in Seward between his frequent road trips. Various other family members made long visits or traveled with him. His college-age daughter, Rebekah, made regular appearances. Jenkins brims with pride for her as he watches her find her place in the world as a writer, just like Dad. He even gives her space in his book to write about her own Alaskan experiences (in prose as pleadingly flowery as the Teleflora delivery truck on Valentine’s Day morning, which is to be expected for a wannabe writer not far out of high school). He also brims with parental advice—not suggestions on helping your kid avoid teen angst or quieting an infant at 3 a.m., but rather advice on coping with your children’s successful coming of age. Jenkins notes Rebekah’s newfound self-confidence, developed during a recent NOLS outing and exercised during various Alaskan exploits. He is proud that she is growing up and becoming independent, but it is inevitably a bittersweet pride for giving up his “little girl” and relinquishing his role as protector. He struggles to tame his parental shielding instinct in order to send Rebekah to a tiny village above the Arctic Circle to live with two guys he knows only from emails and a handful of telephone calls. She can take care of herself now, even alone in the arctic with strange, lonely men.

While reading, I felt a bout of anti-homesickness coming on. Reading reminded me of what it feels like to move far away for a year, that excitement for constant newness and daily opportunities to explore. Everyday tasks become adventures. Planning a trip to the grocery store elicits eager anticipation. If you include navigating public transportation systems, the possibilities for epic expeditions become infinite. By the end, you can say with conviction that you have accomplished something that year. You’ve learned. You’ve been faced with daily challenges, many of them quite bizarre, and survived.

Sure, there’s lots to recommend staying put and becoming deeply familiar with one place, developing a history with a place. And there’s something to be said for the ability to work on long-term relationships instead of continually answering where you’re from and what brings you here. (Wouldn’t it be more efficient to print out that introductory speech on business cards to give out?) There are vast differences between talking to someone who’s known you since birth versus chatting with the insta-friend in the next hostel bunk.

But I’m greedy, I have to see every inch of the planet before I can decide where the ideal spot to settle down is. Or maybe that’s being thorough. All I know is that my brain feels good, as if it got a subcutaneous massage, when its exploration cortex gets exercise.

I had to wonder whether Alaska deserves the top spot on my Ideal Future Home list. I think I’d have to go find out for myself. Anyway, I’m now itching to go somewhere. And writing a best-seller about it wouldn’t be half bad, either.

Read Me: Tales of a Female Nomad, Rita Golden Gelman

2007-11-27T23:34:00.001-08:00

An antsy bookstore gift card led me to the travel section one day, where Rita Goldman Gelman’s Tales of a Female Nomad (Three Rivers Press, 2001) caught my eye. It turns out to be a diary of Gelman’s life since her divorce at age 48, when she abandoned a glitzy life among the elite of LA in order to get to know the rest of the world. By smiling often, sampling every food she was offered, and asking everyone she met about their children in a genuinely interested tone, she inserted herself into communities in Mexico, Nicaragua, Israel, New Zealand, and Indonesia. Serendipity is her guide. She typically picks an intriguing country almost at random and flies there on the meager profits of her children’s books (which include such colorful titles as More Spaghetti, I Say! and Stop Those Painters!). She then places herself in the remotest backwater village she can reach and chats with locals until someone invites her to stay in their home. She absorbs the local culture and language from her hosts while helping out with chores (preferably in the kitchen) and giving English lessons. When her visa expires, she moves on.

Most of the people she called friends in her old life believe that her divorce severely traumatized her. They accuse her of running away from the situation, making up for her husband’s withdrawal by insisting on being accepted by everyone else she meets. Or of purposefully removing herself from any possibility of long-term relationships by refusing to settle in one place. Gelman responds that she is not running away from anything, and instead she is running toward something. (Funny, that’s the same response I once gave when someone asked me why in the world, as it were, I was going to spend a year in New Zealand. And I thought I was being so smart, turning around his accusation like that.) Is it so crazy to want to be liked and accepted by strangers? Or to be curious and crave challenges? There are worse ways to deal with curves in the road of life. Gelman chose to go off-roading. Her book’s purpose is to explain how positive a nontraditional lifestyle can be. She hopes to be an inspiration, especially to older, divorced women. They still have a lot of living to do, and they might as well spend it on adventures, new friends, and a renewed sense of helpfulness.

At times, though, Gelman makes her life sound impossibly idyllic. She marches into remote corners of the world, making devoted friends out of whole villages on nothing but a smile. Her determined optimism finds ways to tack happy endings onto even the most revolting bad luck. (She succeeds in turning an ugly bout with a whole-body skin infection into a beautiful snake-shedding-skin allegory.) Plus, to make her modest ends meet, she gets to be a writer. She conducts research simply by living. She rarely admits to a wistful thought. But there must be something undesirable about her life. How does she handle so many long-distance relationships, particularly with her parents and children? Does her bank account ever run threateningly low? Does she ever spend five minutes passionately hating children’s books before settling down to finish a story about an exuberantly grinning monkey dressed in a floppy red hat and a gold necklace? How does she plan on living when she’s 90? Does she ever get antsy at the keyboard like I do, itching to go out and collect more neat experiences instead of sequestering herself away to write about the past? Does she ever wish that her life was even a teeny bit different? Her book is an advertisement describing the absence of regret in her nomadic life, a kind of so-there letter to her baffled former friends. But it sometimes sounds as exaggerated as the second half of a drug commercial, after the actress has gulped down her pills and now is running for president. It’s a premeditated strategy for encouraging potential nomads, but if I were seriously considering selling my silverware for a ticket to Borneo, I might want to prepare for the tough parts as well as look forward to the wonderful ones. (Then again, mystery is part of the adventure... Still, the book remains unbalanced.)

If her own life is idyllic, the lives of the people she visits are less satisfying. She prefers the company of indigenous communities whose lives are entwined with tradition. Her hosts are often relatively poor and live in developing countries. Gelman struggles to balance two noble goals: on one hand, wanting to help improve her friends’ lives, and on the other, respecting traditions which are often wonderful but sometimes troublesome. She strives to accept new cultural frames and to see life through the eyes of the locals. When she sees one host family throw their food wrappers to the wind during a roadside picnic, she resists her urge to find a garbage can for her own litter, forcing herself not to judge their actions by the standards of the culture she grew up in. But what would you do if you watched your drunken host beat his wife, knowing that it was “culturally acceptable?” (Acceptable by whom, I wonder?) What would you do if you recognized a great artistic talent in a kid whose destiny it is to wash windows in the family woodcarving gallery? Gelman gave this kid a carving kit, with which he created inspired sculptures, but she stopped short of asking the family to give him time off to develop his talent, fearing that her request would be seen as meddlesome. “Interference” is a slippery concept whose definition slides into that of “helping” without obvious borders, made even more difficult to discern when surrounded by an unfamiliar code of manners and lurking local politics. Fearing that she wouldn’t be able to stop herself from “interfering,” she decided it was time to pack up and continue her journeys. She interprets her urge to interfere as a sign that she has been somewhere long enough, that she has settled into her surroundings enough to feel comfortable passing judgments and suggesting changes. (Then again, maybe she just needs an excuse to keep moving, to feed her addiction to newness.)

After a bit of internet research, I see that there is a small but growing community of older, typically divorced, women travelers. How exciting, and reassuring, to discover a new kind of freedom at an age that we whippersnappers associate with dentures and canes. I almost wish I were 60 right now, so that I could join that crowd, confident with the wisdom of years—and the bank account of years. Or at least a promising work-from-“home” business idea. Sigh, I just hope that a long and boring career from which to launch such a business isn’t a prerequisite for world travel. I wonder how Gelman would advise younger women who are making, instead of remaking, their lives?

Gelman does reach her goal of inspiring potential travelers and showing us how easy and rewarding it is to connect with people who seem, at first, so fundamentally different. Granted, near the middle, her narrative turns into a straight-from-the-diary list that could be entitled “Neat things that happened to me this month:” this is what I cooked on that day, then I flew there, here’s how I found a house, these are the people I went to that ceremony with. Passages that emphasize important events and tie them to Gelman’s life-philosophy become shorter and rarer. But despite my few critiques, I’m ready to hop on a one-way flight to the deepest jungle where no one’s ever heard of English. (Don’t worry, friends and parents, I wouldn’t thrive in Gelman’s shoes. First of all, she can have the tropics, give me a good snowfall. Besides, she repeats that her passion is people, whereas mine is landscapes. Her expertise in chit-chatting opens her doors, literally. I, on the other hand, would head for Nowheresville in order to leave it and go hiking nearby, so I guess I’m still searching for a role model. Still, writing books while hiking around Vatnajökull Glacier sounds sorely tempting.) There is, apparently, more than one way to live a successful and rewarding life.

More Info:
www.ritagoldengelman.com

Other Eye-Catching Titles:
Not So Funny When It Happened (ed. Tim Cahill, Travelers’ Tales 2006)
Madam, Have You Ever Really Been Happy? (Meg Noble Peterson, iUniverse 2005)

Currently on my coffee table:
Tales from Nowhere (ed. Don George, Lonely Planet 2006)

Two Thumbs Up:
Into the Wild (Jon Krakauer, Anchor Books 1996)
Southern Exposure (Chris Duff, Falcon 2003)
Rowing to Latitude: Journeys Along the Arctic’s Edge (Jill Fredston, North Point Press 2001)
A Walk in the Woods (Bill Bryson, Broadway Books 1998)

The Adventures of Home Depot GirlEpisode XXXVYZ: Open Sesame

2007-09-08T19:46:00.000-07:00

HDG may not have many outstanding superpowers, but yesterday she did encounter a young man who discovered supernatural abilities of his own. HDG was minding her own business (and not the business’s business, oops) while organizing a file cabinet drawer of owner’s manuals for display models. (It’s a kind of manual graveyard, complete with literally moldering booklets and amputated spare parts, although no one leaves flowers. Not on purpose, anyway. Sometimes, though, a few blooms break off from the potted mums and get trampled to the concrete nearby.)

HDG looked up when she heard the command, in the confident voice of a five-year-old boy, “Open sesame!” There he was, standing directly before the automatic door behind HDG, arms half-raised in a stance of power, but not quite close enough to trigger the door’s sensor. He tried his command again, arms a little higher, channeling the sorcerer’s apprentice. HDG couldn’t help herself. She stepped casually backward into the sensor’s range, triggering the door to open. The kid was delighted. He seemed to genuinely believe that he had developed the power to open doors using speech alone. He skipped back to his mom to report his success, grinning and giggling. To HDG’s disappointment (but with no apparent decrease in the kid’s enthusiasm), Mom was oblivious to her son’s recent magical achievement. (In her defense, I wonder just how many other doors Little Merlin had verbally opened since breakfast.)

Not to be deflated, the kid returned to the door, this time demanding, “Close sesame!” Sadly, even HDG couldn’t help him with this one. He was on his own. All HDG could do was stand still. But his incantation served him well, and the door obediently slid shut. He continued to practice until his mom wandered off in search of some mums that were still connected to their roots.

It all goes to show that there really is magic out there in the everyday world, even in the mundane environment of a big box store, if only you are willing to notice it. That kid will never know how much HDG, an unknown bystander waging constant battle against the forces of boredom, appreciated his magic that day.

Adolescents with Swords

2007-08-05T22:49:00.000-07:00

Evidence suggests that I’ve survived another summer fencing camp. The ten straight days of two or three practices per day were well balanced by the three hot, all-you-can-eat meals per day in the best college cafeteria in the nation. Let’s take a moment to imagine, if you will, two tables piled with desserts: fruit pies, several flavors of cookie, slice upon slice of sweet breads, double troughs of pudding, a freezer stocked with ice cream treats, and of course, cakes: carrot, oreo, white, and chocolate, all doused with sugary frosting. The frosting looked as smooth and fancy as on store-bought cakes, and I ignored the vision in my mind of some basement classroom where unfortunate hotel school students attended their nutrition science lab, icing cake after cake long into the night, until at last the professor deemed them capable of producing an acceptably uniform flower on demand. Oh, and the entrees were good, too.

A typical day had three sessions. In the mornings and afternoons, we had warm-ups and conditioning in an room with spongy artificial turf that’s great for running but less great for certain varieties of push-ups in which elbows remain on the ground. A friend noticed that his skin was having a minor allergic reaction to the artificial turf. He shrugged it off as an artificial reaction and kept jogging. After we were warmed and conditioned, we switched to a basketball gym for footwork and blade drills. If there was time, we would free fence or play bouting games while the coaches gave individual lessons. Coach Iryna imported four impressive-level coaches, and a few other Cornell fencers dropped by sporadically. Evening sessions were short, only an hour compared to 2 ½, and low-key. We watched videos of Olympic fencing, played dodgeball-like games with soccer balls (somehow without major injuries), went for a nature walk, or just watched a movie. Kids and coaches alike were pooped by then.

The kids were mostly high schoolers, although we had some younger ones, too. I made early friends with a particular 11-year-old who was quick to work into the conversation that he was from Oklahoma. I suspect that his motivation for attending fencing camp was so that he could return home and beat up on his brothers and friends with tree branches. The fighting style he had already built while practicing with branches in his backyard didn’t help him much on the strip. He seemed to have fun, though, mostly, until his attention span finally sputtered out during the last few days, when he complained variously of blisters, “pulled” muscles (read: sore, because he didn’t understand the purpose of stretching), electric shocks to the heart by the scoring machine, and circulation-stopping socks, all of which miraculously evaporated when it came time to fence someone he thought he could beat. Then he became a chivalrous young man. Pointing to one of the beginner girls, he shouted across the room to me, “Can I fence her? I can cream her, but I’ll let her win after I get the first four points!”

I was secretly terrified of the kid, and only partially because of his full-arm parries. Harry Potter 7 came out during the first few days of camp, and it wasn’t long before the campers, including my Oklahoman friend, started carrying around the distinctively orange tomes. I was convinced that I would overhear someone reading aloud the very last page. Whenever the radio so much as said the word “Harry,” my hand darted toward the off switch in a panic. I had visions of some lunatic galloping down the street, yelling out a synopsis of the plot through a bullhorn in order to make a point about the dictatorial powers of mass marketing. I had come so far, six Hogwarts years, without hearing a leak that it would be cruel for someone to reveal anything to me now. Logically, the bullhorn guy was unlikely, but this 11-year-old kid could too easily spill the beans accidentally. It’s like when my parents tape football games. They avoid the very presence of certain friends before they watch the tape due to the disappointing eloquence of those friends’ facial expressions: a grimace means we lost, for example, and a smiling nod means that it was close, but we pulled through with a field goal in the final seconds.

Magic was still on my mind the day we introduced some particularly complicated coordination drills. The goal was to fling your fencing glove into the air in various awkward ways, then catch it in a lunge. Keep in mind that an interest in fencing does not necessarily coincide with outstanding coordination. Adolescence doesn’t help, either. The kids’ clumsy, unnatural movements and expressions of confused concentration struck me as the same ones I had imagined showing up in Apparition lessons at Hogwarts. Our high-ceilinged basketball gym became the airy Great Hall, the kids’ gloves became wands. Coach Iryna was the official Ministry instructor, demonstrating the simple-looking task, and I was a minor teacher, keeping an eye on my students to be sure they didn’t splinch themselves as they lunged.

As it happened, I overheard mostly nothing about the book from either him or anyone else, bought my own copy within hours of the end of camp, and read the last word three days later. That, and a slice of chocolate cake, were my rewards for surviving another year of fencing camp.

My Shelf

2007-06-19T20:16:00.000-07:00

Today I made a Shelf.

That was my task when I showed up to the museum this morning: “This high table needs a shelf underneath it halfway to the floor to store all these fancy display lamps. Feeling handy?” Sure... I assured her that I could cobble something together, assuming beauty was not paramount. Thankfully, the table stands in a corner of the already disorganized tool shop, so the shelf’s potential aesthetic merits would likely remain unnoticed in any case.

So, building a shelf. No problem. I have spatial reasoning skills. I get along with drills for the most part. I’ve watched Mom create a picnic table and a swing set from a pile of wood, neither of which are in danger of collapsing any time soon. (In fact, their monumental sturdiness is sure to grant them heirloom status someday.) Growing up, I always assumed I inherited woodworking genes, and now was their chance to express themselves. Why, just the other day I took apart a mini-golf hole with a sledgehammer and a crowbar and felt satisfyingly Tool Time. On the other hand, that was destruction, not construction.

I stood in front of the inferior table for a while in what I hoped was a “thinking” pose. I stood in front of the shelves of wood for a little longer, then took inventory of the tools at hand: a cordless drill, baggies bristling with used screws that looked only vaguely similar, a battery-powered chop saw mounted on a Rubbermaid-style plastic base, and a portable table saw too small, and with too short a cord, to be useful for its intended purpose. Finally, I decided that my plan of action would likely include some sketching and measuring. While investigating the shelfless table's dimensions, I concluded that its original creator had been no more a master carpenter than I was. It was a solid piece of furniture that served its purpose, but its legs were haphazardly spaced and lacked any supports to ensure their verticality. Well, my Shelf would give it support! No longer concerned about defiling the already-cobbled table, I began to cut my wood.

And I did it: It took all day, but I did create a Shelf! It fits snugly between the diverse legs with clearance below for plastic storage bins and above for fancy track lights. The surface is what appears to be part of a repurposed chalkboard, which is supported below by rows of sturdy beams. Those fancy lights won’t fall off any time soon.

And now, I feel unusually successful. There now exists a newborn Shelf in this world because of me. Hopefully, years from now, people I will not have met will take that Shelf for granted, putting things on it and taking things off, because of me. Tomorrow, when I drive down the hill to work, I can gaze across the lake, through the trees, to the museum, and know that it is a better, more efficient place because of my labors.

I think I’ve finally graduated from Legos.

Weeding the ScienCenter

2007-06-17T18:07:00.000-07:00

I am a natural disaster. I am the sudden, unpredictable obliteration of an entire habitat. There was a healthy patch of clover between the ScienCenter mini-golf course and the brick wall of the building. Now there's not. Now, instead of lush greenery and bulging purple flowers, there's a strip of dirt, ugly and bare and hot and dry. Not only do the clovers vanish with a few waves of my callous hands, but also the spiders, centipedes, aphids, bees, wasps, ants, and all the other bugs that fly and crawl and dig become immediately and inexplicably homeless. Some are scattered into unfamiliar lands by clinging desperately to the doomed vegetation. Spiders skitter several inches up the newly exposed wall, then halt in disbelieving bewilderment to survey their unrecognizable homeland. Worms and centipedes writhe fiercely in silent panic until they find shelter under ragged clods of the freshly scarred earth. I've never seen insects run so fast.

I am as abrupt as an earthquake, as destructive as a hurricane. I am environmental annihilation personalized. I am one unit of humanity playing out humanity's instinctual duty to raze nature. My strip of former clover could be a miniature subdivision in its infancy, all ready to pour concrete roads and driveways and basements.

When that deed was done, I went to the other side of the building to plant geraniums. That reversed my conscience.

Mostly.

Amazonian at Work

2007-06-10T20:51:00.000-07:00

The other day I was called “some kind of Amazon woman” at work, while hefting 40 pound bags of dirt (and manure--just because it’s composted doesn’t make it less messy--first one to develop a tear-proof manure bag gets an A+ and a lollipop), apparently making the bags look like the world’s filthiest (and least comfy) pillows. I took it as a compliment. Later, when I was called over to help another lady, she squeezed my upper arm before allowing me to load her dirt. An elderly couple even tipped me $2 for transporting a single bag from the shelf to their cart a foot away to their car idling on the sidewalk (the cash was in two $1 gold-colored coins featuring George Washington, the first in a presidential series, so it’s one tip I won’t be spending). There have been plenty of other puzzled looks and comments upon my approach, from “But you’re only as big as I am!” to “But I thought they’d get one of those big strong men to help me...” Thanks to the wealth of muscularly underdeveloped female gardeners out there, at least I can skip going to the gym.

Summer on the Green

2007-05-23T19:01:00.000-07:00

Ah, these warm and sunny summer days... The time of open windows, sprouting gardens, overflowing shopping carts at Home Depot, increasingly frequent laundering of fencing apparel (or at least increasingly frequent olfactory reminders of this need), and golf.

Now, I tend to use golf courses mostly in winter, because my skis don’t slide nearly so smoothly over the sand traps in the heat of August. Also, I’d rather not disturb the nice people with bagfuls of clubs. My spindly ski poles, I suspect, would not put up much resistance against an enthusiastically wielded 9-iron.

This summer, though, I’m spending two days a week out on the links. No, Spaceballs fans, I’m not working on my putz. I’m working on my putt-putts. You see, my course of choice is of the miniature variety. Specifically, it is Galaxy Golf, the science-themed mini-golf course in the side yard of the local children’s science museum, the ScienCenter. I work for its greenskeeper.

Keeping the grass green is rather easier here than on traditional courses. Cut the sod into rectangles, add a few staples in strategic locations, reattach the edging, and you're good to go for years, no mowing or watering required. There's no driving range to worry about, unless you count the parking lot.

Wily groundhogs are less of a pest than spray-paint-wielding teenagers in the night. They're the only ones who make divots. (They can smash our bright blue loop-de-loop on Hole Seventeen and plug up the Black Hole with stones, but they haven't yet managed to break into our ball reservoir on the last hole!)

The biggest concern is making sure balls don’t get stuck. They occasionally disappear down the PVC pipes that lead from a higher green to a lower one. I wonder whether the balls do the same things in those pipes as I used to hear what happened in The Tube on the playground of Rose Glen Elementary... Balls also sometimes pause on their spiraling descent down the DNA model, and once in a while the black hole hole lives up to its name. Although balls don’t get stuck on Hole Two, its blatant ignorance of several basic theories of geometry nevertheless causes the greenskeeper no small amount of vexation.

Mostly the work involves renovating the holes after the winter, the sun, and the children and teenagers have taken their respective tolls. One of my first tasks involved replacing the mesh netting barrier between the holes and the parking lot. This gave me no end of glee when I went to practice that night because I got to tell people that I did fencing in the mornings and then I did fencing in the evenings. I didn’t tell many people that, come to think. It got a disappointingly cool reaction. But it made me happy all the same.

If you’ve never been Galaxy Golfing, I’ll take you on a verbal tour.

The Front Nine:
1: Ricochet your way around a carbon ring.
2: If you hit the ball straight, in theory, it should bounce off the parabola at the end and land in the hole at the parabola's focus.
3: Starting at a plastic owl, make your way down the food chain, past plastic squirrels, plastic insects, plastic "grass" (that was once an ugly doormat), and a wobbly wooden sun.
4: Putt through a slice of a very large tree.
5: Change your ball's potential energy to kinetic energy by putting from a platform into either a shallow or deep valley.
6: Putt just hard enough to keep your ball on a curved, borderless embankment.
7: Putt left-handed. (No easy outs for you leftys—try it right-handed.)
8: Your ball is now a giant particle of pollen, which you must hit up a ramp and into a giant flower.
9: Starting at Pluto, putt through a scale model of the solar system (complete with gravity wells around the planets [but not, of course, around Pluto]) and into the sun.

The Side Nine (They’re on the side of the building):
10: Choose the slippery plastic ramp or the frictionful turf ramp. This one’s called Science Friction.
11: Putt up a ramp and down the double helix of DNA.
12: Forget your club in favor of a catapult! Fling your ball onto rubber, metal, concrete, or sand to bounce into the hole.
13: If you can manage to putt a nice, narrow parabola, your ball will roll over the top of a barrier on a wide ramp.
14: Escape from the black hole by rolling your ball down a large funnel (like the kind you roll pennies down), aiming for the escape hole in the side instead of the event horizon hole at the bottom.
15: Avoid three pendulums, each with a different length and therefore a different period.
16: Get your ball through a narrow opening before two magnets fall slowly through metal tubes and block the way.
17: Try putting past a bee hive while wearing "bee goggles," kind of like strapping a kaleidoscope to your head. Now you know how bees see the world.
18: Putt onto a checkerboard of positive and negative numbers. You only get to aim at the hole when all the numbers you've landed on add to zero.
19: You made it! As a bonus, you get to send your ball down a sloping grid of bells. If it falls straight down the middle, a free game for you!

Fooled You!

2007-03-29T19:04:00.000-07:00

Well, maybe not you specifically, gentle reader, but I sure did pull the wool over the eyes of my agriculture students last semester. You see, I finally got up enough nerve to request my student evaluations. Overall, the statistics were fairly average, not phenomenal but also not embarrassing. The students learned neither “a great deal” nor “nothing” from discussion sections; I neither “stimulated great interest” nor “destroyed interest, was boring.” My lowest score, 2.96 out of 5, regarded the amount of criticism of the term papers—only half of which I read. The rest the professor read, so of course that half of the class is going to receive “too little feedback” from me. My highest score, on the other hand, was 4.38, in response to the question, “Was the TA willing to provide help for students who needed it?” ...Not that I had even a single student show up to office hours over the entire semester. But not for lack of letting them know that the opportunity existed, apparently.

The part that made me laugh out loud for a good long time was that my second-highest score, 4.18, belonged to the question, “Did the discussion leader (TA) seem knowledgeable?”, which mean that I was 0.82 points away from “[knowing] the content very well.” I wonder how I managed to give the impression that I actually knew what I was doing? Silly students. Little did they know that I was learning the material right along with them, and in many cases, they had already known vastly more about agriculture by the time they were five than I ever will. Silly students, they make me laugh.

New Jersey Isn't ALL Smelly

2007-03-27T17:41:00.001-07:00

I can't speak for Newark, but my olfactory experiences at Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area and in Madison at Drew University, and even at Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, which are where I spent Spring Break this last week, were altogether positive. In fact, the smelliest thing I encountered was a gymfull of ripe fencers, and that certainly isn't endemic to New Jersey.

Before I got to the fencing, I spent a few days on the Appalachian Trail (AT) in Delaware Water Gap NRA, on the border of New Jersey and Pennsylvania (and nowhere near Delaware). The AT is a hiking trail on which, if you have a few spare months and an insatiable craving for gorp and pasta, you can walk from Georgia to Maine. I've got about ten miles of it under my belt; to complete the entire trail, I've got 2,090 miles to go. Which means I'm 0.005% of the way done. Almost there!

Unfortunately, the last remnants of winter (and of a cold) made camping inadvisable, so I made two day-trips. Both began at the Gap, a narrows in the Delaware River pinched between Mt. Tammany (above) and Mt. Minsy (where the above picture was taken from). The first day took me north from the river, skirting Mt. Tammany and onto a ridge paralleling the river. Most of the way was wooded and quiet, and the slush underfoot was soft enough to cushion my steps so that the bottoms of my feet didn't feel pounded flat by the end of the day. Despite the snow, the sun was warm, so I only needed a light jacket for the cold wind on the ridgetops. Looking up, the sky was remarkably cloudless and populated by hawks, vultures, and a pair of gliders. Looking out, the river and its ridge was surrounded by relatively flat farmland. My turn-around point was Sunfish Pond, one of the "seven wonders of New Jersey," according to a pondside sign. It's a nice little lake, and I got to scramble over (snow-laden) boulders on one side, and I can imagine that it's a great spot to swim (illegally) in warmer weather... but I'm not sure that those features are unique enough to earn it the title of "wonder." It doesn't bode well for the impressiveness level of the other six "wonders" if qualifications may include "pleasant spot to pump drinking water from" or "doesn't smell like Newark." Still, it is a nice spot for lunch.

The second day took me south up to the summit of Mt. Minsi (1,463 feet) and along a ridge of radio towers. In my dislike of retracing my footsteps, I returned via access roads and country backroads. The houses I passed either were the country homes of well-off residents of New York City (about an hour's drive away), or had collected enough old vehicles to start a used car lot. Some of them looked impressively antique.

Then, it was on to Drew University for the NCAA National Fencing Championships. Still, I had a few afternoons with enough daylight to wander around in the nearby Great Swamp NWR (above). Most of it is off-limits to people as a wilderness, but there are a few boadwalk trails with bird blinds and feeders. I saw my first Ringneck Duck. I think. It was far away. And mostly under water. And didn't have a ring around its neck. But that's okay, because neither did the picture in the bird book.

Back at Drew, even the (tiny) campus was pleasant to walk around, which you could complete over a lunch break. The buildings are modestly sized and conservatively designed--lots of rock and stone, no all-glass monstrosities or Star Wars-esque curiosities, and certainly no "reflecting pools." And no major streets between them. The ample green space between buildings is nearly a forest of silvery, mature trees.

Oh, and the fencing was neat, too. I was put to work as a score- and timekeeper, and in return, I got a front row seat (sometimes a few inches too close for comfort) to some of the best fencing in the country. Most of the others were nonfencing Drew athletes whose coaches made them volunteer, and who had never seen this strange sport before, so I got to practice my "what is fencing in three sentences or less" speech. The ones who came for the morning shift got a comprehensive lesson in how to mark up score sheets, what buttons to push at what times on the scoring machine remote controls, and why the referees keep waving their hands in the air while speaking French. The afternoon shift, though, got brief on-the-job training before the morning shifters ran off to lunch (ideally, assuming the morning shifters hadn't already wandered off between rounds). Some refs had more patience than others... But we survived. Since I actually knew what I was doing, I was asked to scorekeep for the women's championship bouts. So, if anyone out there has forgotten what I look like, you can refresh your memory by tuning into CBS when they televise the gold medal bouts. I believe it's May 5, but I haven't managed to track down the time yet.

Happy Spring!

SNOW DAY!

2007-02-15T19:18:00.000-08:00

Note: No cars were hurt in the making of this snowstorm. Or rather, no little blue Acuras with Wisconsin plates who live in this parking lot. There was a bit of backbreaking labor involved in reversing the snowstorm in order to free said car. These pictures were taken on Wednesday evening (Snow Day! School Closed and Everything!). By Thursday, I had to dig out the license plate. With a saucepan. Cause in apartment life, you're generally able to leave the shoveling, and the shovel, to the landlord. A nice random bystander from Minnesota offered his help, and his plastic trash can lid, so it only took 45 minutes to uncover the car and excavate a 5-foot path from its back wheels to the plowed lane.

I knew that if I believed in winter hard enough, it would finally come to visit.

2007-02-15T19:11:00.000-08:00

This is a test. This is only a test. Don't panic. Don't go back to your regularly scheduled programs, they're boring. Have a snow day instead.