"Resolving the 'Cody Dilemma'"

RESOLVING THE “CODY DILEMMA”

Sometimes things are so ridiculous that all one can do is laugh about them, even if it’s not particularly appropriate. Here’s short story about a real event that I found hilarious, even though no one else involved seemed to share my sense of humor:

About a year ago, my ex-wife Karen called me to say that she’d just purchased a Christmas wreath for my 76-year-old mother to hang on her front door. She wanted to know if the kids and I would like to sign the note to accompany the wreath before she delivered it. (At the time, my mother and I lived about 200 yards apart, separated by a stand of mixed deciduous and coniferous trees. An old rough trail connected the two homes, as did a nearby power line and the confluence of our driveways.) When Karen stopped by on that very dark night to collect our signatures, she was accompanied by her year-old Westie terrier, a cute white hyper 15-pound dog named Cody that she and the kids love. She left him outdoors, tethered by his leash to my front door, while he and my 95-pound golden retriever, Tucson, sniffed each other. When she left, she deposited Cody into the passenger seat of her big black Toyota Tundra and trundled on over to Mom’s place, where she left Cody in the truck and kept it running.

About 10 minutes later, my phone rang. It was Karen, calling from her cell phone. She was standing outside of my Mom’s house and wanted to know whether she could borrow a hammer. Sure, I told her, but Mom had a hammer, too, so there was no need for her to come all the way back over to get mine. She said she didn’t want to go back inside and bother my mother again. She had just come outside to discover that Cody, excited by my dog, who was sitting out in Mom’s driveway, had managed to trigger the truck’s electronic locks. Karen wanted a hammer to break one of her windows so she could get inside. “Don’t you have a backup key somewhere?” I asked. (She had made our daughter Olivia put an extra key under her own car, in case of emergencies.) She said that her backup key was on Olivia’s key ring, which was not good news because only the day before, Olivia had taken her car in for repairs and left all her keys there. Since it was now about 8 p.m., the auto shop was closed. I asked Karen whether she had any other means of getting into her truck, and she said that she an extra electronic opener back at her place. I told her that Olivia could use my car to drive her back to her place to get the opener—a round trip of 50-60 minutes.

After they had been gone for about 20-30 minutes, my phone rang. It was my mother, who gets frantic about a lot of things. She wanted to know if I would come and get my dog. She said that Tucson was stirring up Cody, and she was afraid that somehow Cody was going to put the truck into gear—an impossibility in a vehicle with automatic transmission, since Cody would be unable to step on the brake while simultaneously pulling the gear shift back and down—and smash into her garage. I started to laugh at my mother’s suggestion, but she did not appreciate my joviality. I tried to explain why her garage was safe, but she clearly didn’t believe that I had all my facts straight. I said I’d go to my back door and call my dog, who almost always came running when I called because he usually assumed that I was calling because it was dinner time. This time, however, five minutes of yelling and loud whistling produced no results. It’s possible that he couldn’t hear me over the sound of Karen’s truck engine. I called Mom back and told her that (a) I could put on a headlamp and tromp through the deep snow and utter darkness to her place and grab my dog, or (b) she could open her garage, call my dog inside, and keep him there until Karen and Olivia arrived. She selected Option B.

Sometime later, my phone rang again. It was Mom. Tucson was in the garage, but she was still worried about the smashing power of Karen’s truck, even though she couldn’t see Cody in the window anymore. She wanted to know if it were possible for Cody to unlock the door. I said I thought that was possible but unlikely. She wanted to know if I would I come over and check. I suggested that she walk outside herself and do it since the truck was about 10 feet away from her garage; she did not appreciate me delegating this job to her. So I looked at the clock on my kitchen wall and estimated that Karen and Olivia would be back any minute. I informed Mom, who wasn’t so sure. Then, while we were talking, she saw headlights and told me Karen and Olivia were just driving in.

About ten minutes later, Olivia pulled in to my garage and came inside. “Everything okay?” I asked. “Yes,” she said, “sort of.” After all that effort, Karen’s opener hadn’t worked, so Karen had borrowed a hammer from Mom after all and had broken out a back rear window. Inside, excitable Cody, who had been left there with his leash on, had wrapped himself around the steering column and the seat, and was practically immobilized. I laughed at this image, and my daughter frowned and told me sternly that it wasn’t very funny. If Cody had fallen off the seat, she said, he probably would’ve choked himself to death. Cody is cute and I like him, but this image made me want to laugh even more. I had to go to another room and giggle quietly by myself.

When Karen got home with her dog, her truck and her broken window, she tried her opener again, and for some reason it worked.

Maybe I’m an insensitive asshole, but even that made me smile.

 

 

"Sort of a Winter Wonderland"

A very cold and frosty run. (All photos courtesy of Andrea Hambach)

SORT OF A WINTER WONDERLAND

It seemed like a bad sign.

 I awoke at 4 o’clock on the morning of a race and couldn’t get back to sleep because I was worried about whether I was capable of finishing the event … and, given the conditions outside, whether I was capable of even surviving.

My self-confidence (like others’, I suspect) is prone to occasional bumps and bruises, but my concern about this particular competition was more than just a cold-handed slap. My running partner Yvonne and I had spent the night with friends (and race organizers) Andrea and Dave in Willow, Alaska, for the inaugural Willow Winter Solstice marathon/half-marathon. When we checked the outdoor thermometer at 6:30 a.m., it read minus-32 degrees. The clear dark skies were pinpricked with stars. It was a windless day that promised little respite in the form of rising mercury. We were about three miles from the race venue and at least four hours from sunrise. Normal, rational people would not have ventured outside on a day like this—they would have cranked up woodstoves, snuggled under wool blankets, or wiggled their tootsies inside of fuzzy slippers—but not us. We planned to run in it.

For Yvonne and me, that meant 13.1 miles of ice and hard-packed snow mainly across a series of low-lying lakes, starting at the Willow Community Center (on the western shore of Willow Lake) and turning around in the Willow Swamp 6.55 miles later so we could run all the way back to our starting point. This would be the longest run of my life—if I made it—and, by far, the coldest.

About 50 percent of the 31-person field would be joining us for the half-marathon. The rest would be running a full marathon—26.2 miles, all the way to a tiny island on Red Shirt Lake (in the Nancy Lake State Recreation Area) and then back again. (The marathoners were the REAL crazy ones.)

The route had been constructed and groomed with snowmobiles operated by members of the Willow Trail Committee, and the trails had firmed up nicely in the sub-zero weather. We would run the width Willow Lake, then down a back road, through a pond-and-swamp system known as Emsweiler Lake, then nearly the full length of the aptly named Long Lake, up and down a small hill to reach and cross Crystal Lake, then through another swamp to gain access to the full length of Vera Lake, and on to a patch of woods leading to the Willow Swamp, where a well-insulated Dave would be waiting at the half-marathon turn-around point with a bonfire, a clipboard to record bib numbers, a few samples of GU, some water, emergency gear, and a smattering of extra clothes.

Tracing the route on a topographic map gave me some comfort. Knowing the conditions did not.

After breakfast (a cup of yogurt with half of a banana and some whole-wheat cereal, chased down with two cups of hot coffee), the layering began. From the waist up I wore an ultralight long-underwear-style T-shirt, covered by a medium-weight North Face long-sleeved running shirt, topped by an old lightweight fleece long-sleeved hiking shirt, surrounded by a thin down-filled Patagonia jacket, topped off with an ultra-lightweight Patagonia Houdini shell. On my back, I carried a CamelBak hydration pack with a half-full 100-milliliter reservoir and a feeder tube, the end of which I stuffed beneath the outer three layers. Inside the pack were snacks, tiny earmuffs, toilet paper, a headlamp, a paper painting mask, and some matches.

Yvonne helps me get ready in the Willow Community Center.

Over my head went a fleece neck gaiter and a thin Buff. On top of my head was my trusty old fleece Mountain Hard Wear hat. On my hands were ancient, tattered pile-fleece mittens, each containing two hand-warming chemical heat packs—one for each set of four fingers, and one for each thumb. At the community center, I added a half-wide strip of dark blue duct tape across the bridge of my nose and tops of both cheeks, and a second smaller strip near the tip of my nose. (I made the error of allowing about a quarter-inch of nose tip to protrude from beneath the second strip.)

From the waist down, the layers were fewer. Beneath my Mountain Hard Wear skiing pants with Gore Windstopper, I wore a pair of cotton briefs and the bottoms that went with the ultralight long-underwear-style top. On my feet I wore a thin pair of calf-high liner socks and an over-the-ankle pair of blue-and-yellow running socks, topped by adhesive toe-warmer strips, my almost brand-new Ice Bug cleated running shoes, and the neoprene gaiters that Yvonne had recently made for me.

Yvonne, who is tougher than I am (and far more experienced in cold weather), wore fewer layers on top but more on the bottom.

At the community center, we met my brother Lowell, whom I had convinced a few days earlier to sign up for the race. He was eyeballing the other runners in the large main room, silently pleased that he wasn’t the only idiot about to venture into the deep freeze, but also wondering whether he had under-dressed. He wore fewer layers than either Yvonne or me and carried no heat packs. His hydration pack was fastened beneath his windbreaker, and his face was more exposed than ours.



My brother Lowell at the end of the race.

Lowell and I had been training hard for the past year. Both of us had dropped weight and body fat. Both of us had added muscle mass and tone and increased our endurance. But Lowell, who is 10 years younger, had set his sights on running mountain races in 2013 and was eager to test his mettle on this day. He had talked about sticking with me and Yvonne for at least the first half of the race, but halfway across Willow Lake he was already putting distance between us. And even though he somehow managed to miss Dave’s trailside bonfire and run perhaps an extra half-mile in each direction, he still finished almost 25 minutes before we did.

One of the real challenges of the race involved the mind-set needed to step outside in the first place. If the temperature inside the community center was, say, 70 degrees, and the temperature outside was minus-30, each runner would experience a 100-degree shift in temperature just prior to race start. Consequently, Andrea made sure to go over the race rules and safety protocols while we were indoors, and after she herded us outside she kept the preliminaries to a minimum. Within two or three minutes, we were tromping down the narrow shoveled path and through a fog of human breath to the wider race course on the lake.

The course was beautiful in the way that monkshood is beautiful—deadly if misapplied. (Only two half-marathoners of the 31 total runners failed to finish. One woman apparently appeared disoriented and hypothermic, and one man running with her seemed to be suffering from frostbite on his thinly covered abdomen.) As other runners ran, Yvonne and I mostly jogged, content in the early gloom to find a comfortable pace. Over the two hours and 45 minutes we were out there, the sky lightened at an almost glacial rate, and the sun crested the horizon at about the eight- or nine-mile mark. It didn’t crest it by much, but the vague warmth did feel good on our faces and was a definite boost psychologically.

At this point, it must be said that I would probably have been sitting at home in Soldotna if not for Yvonne, and I mean that in the best of ways. Yvonne is the one with the endurance experience (she had run the Crow Pass Crossing and the full Equinox Marathon, among other events, earlier in the year), and I was grateful that she had offered to run this race with me. It was immensely comforting to have her by my side through all the miles.

As we ran, I tried to keep my neck gaiter up over my nose and mouth, but my breath formed ice on the material, adding weight to the fabric and causing it to sag. When my lips were uncovered for long, they began to grow numb and non-functional. My eyelashes became moderately icy from my breath shooting upward past my gaiter. Elsewhere, I was sweating beneath my top layers and producing visible frost on my bottom layers. My toes had been cold at the start but were warm enough after a mile or so. My hands were fine, although my mittens later grew wet from perspiration, causing them to freeze hard enough that I could knock them together like blocks of wood.

I stopped once in each direction to pee. (Blame the coffee.) Yvonne and I also stopped at the turn-around to chat with Dave, eat a packet of GU, and drink a cup of water. Dave examined my nose and decided it needed more protection, so he lent me a black headband that he slid over my fleece hat and directly onto the middle of my face. On the front of the band were the white words “Will Run for Beer.” As silly as I looked, I was pleased to have Dave’s offering, and it most likely saved the tip of my nose from further damage.

As we ran back toward the community center, the extra face protection forced more warm breath upward and produced a curtain of ice on my eyelashes, obscuring my vision. Every 15 minutes or so, I used a bare hand to gently squeeze the ice clumps and pull them away. Yvonne, with her longer lashes, was practically blinded at times by the same condition.

Re-crossing Willow Lake was exhilarating because I knew I would achieve my goals of finishing the race and failing to die. Beneath layers of face protection and a veneer of frost, I was smiling as Yvonne and I reached the shoveled trail back to the community center, where Andrea was standing with her clipboard, stopwatch and a camera. She snapped a photo of us running the last few yards together, and then dutifully recorded our times before joining us indoors.

Inside, I began peeling off clothes like peeling the skin off an onion. Off came my hat, Dave’s headband, my Buff, my neck gaiter—all of them crusty with ice. My shell was frosty, my down jacket wet, my fleece shirt wet, my running shirt wet, my undershirt wet. I removed them all and allowed my skin to air out for a few minutes before donning something clean and dry. At a nearby table, we helped ourselves to some post-race chow: Dave and Andrea’s homemade chicken noodle soup and butternut squash chili, each simmering in its own Crockpot next to an assortment of saltines. On a smaller separate table were coffee and some hot water with packets for tea and cider. We warmed our insides as the center warmed our outsides.

I slept much better the night after the race. The tip of my nose was red and sore, but nearly everything else felt good, particularly my self-esteem. I’m not sure that I’d want to repeat the experience, but it’s nice to know that I could.

 

"Elephant at Home"

ELEPHANT AT HOME

I love my daughter dearly, but having her home for the holidays is somewhat akin to inviting an elephant in to stay. Elephants are wonderful, talented, intelligent creatures, but they leave in their wakes concrete evidence of their passage. Nothing subtle

What Olivia lacks in elephantine bulk and grandeur, she more than compensates for with pachydermal disregard for delicate surroundings. It is amazing to me sometimes that a young woman so graceful on cross-country skis, so precise in swimming lanes, so body-aware on dance floors, and so keenly intuitive in classrooms can lumber so lummoxedly through the environs of my home without apparently noticing—or perhaps not caring to notice—her own destructive force.

Within moments of her arrival, messes were already being made. Piles of debris quickly began to form. Across the kitchen counter. In the hallway by the stairs. In the living room. In her bedroom and bathroom. In the garage. Within minutes, she had also made a cursory examination of the place and had begun determining strategies. Her future actions were buried in her many questions: “Whose ice cream is that in the freezer?” (I found the empty carton in the garbage later that day.) “Is Kelty going to be taking the Jeep to school tomorrow?” (She had somewhere to go and wanted personal transportation.) “Do you still have the movie Pleasantville?” (She later dug through my closet of films to find what she wanted.) “Are the dishes in the dishwasher clean?” (She systematically began leaving dirty dishes and food wrappers all around the house—on a desk in her bedroom, next to the sink in the bathroom, on the carpeted floor in the living room, and, of course, scattered throughout the dining room and kitchen.)

Suddenly toothpaste smears appeared on bathroom counters, yogurt smears on the knobs of kitchen cupboards, makeup smears on mirrors, dirty-hand smears on light switches. Each room she entered, she left little doubt of her presence.

I came home from town one day to find water in my coffee maker—but no filter, no grounds; she had decided to use the coffee maker to heat water for her tea, heedless of the fact that a teapot nearly full of water was sitting atop my stove. Other changes were more subtle: For instance, the pillows on my bed had been moved so that she could be more comfortable while she watched television upstairs, probably while eating. Bits of cereal crunched beneath my feet as I walked down the hallway to her bedroom to wake her in the morning. There were more spill stains in the kitchen, tiny scraps of colored paper left on the living room floor after she had finished wrapping Christmas presents, and many, many cupboards and drawers, doors and boxes, left partway open as if to advertise that someone had recently peered inside.

I’ve told Olivia many times that she should never become a thief because she has no idea how to cover her crimes.

Perhaps more than anything, however, my daughter is “guilty” of disrupting a routine I’ve established in her absence—of cleaning up after myself more regularly and promptly, of streamlining activities by using less of the house, by following the actions of one child instead of two. In this regard, Kelty helps—most of the time—by confining his movements primarily to the living room, dining room and his bedroom, where he eats and does homework, plays video games and watches television, and sleeps. He’s not the neatest child in the world, either—and neither was I, as my mother would be the first to shout—but he’s decidedly lower in decibels than his sister and spreads himself considerably less thin. Other than the inevitable wadded-up pair of socks and perhaps an empty cereal bowl—oh, and a pile of crumpled dirty clothes behind the bathroom door after he takes a shower—Kelty leaves few signs of his presence. Even his appetite is less wide-ranging. Blandly forging ahead on a diet of cereal and milk, soup and crackers, iced tea, an occasional cup of yogurt, clumps of sandwich meat, and as much fruit juice as he can find, he is a predictable eater, whereas Olivia harvests on a whim. Whatever springs to her mind, she seeks to consume or prepare. Consequently, foodstuffs disappear randomly or sporadically. Pickles the first night, for instance. Spoon-shaped gouges out of my expensive cheese the next night. Then a third of a container of fresh tortellini.

Granted, Olivia has just spent four months at college practicing her independence; I expected her to be more assertive and grown-up. Her actions at home, however, have been reversions to form. This Olivia is still the Olivia that was.

But despite these complaints about my daughter, I am delighted to have her home. Despite her galumphing around my house, and her bull-in- china-shop movements, there are nice touches, too: more-adult conversations; face-to-face updates (versus Skype, texting, emails, and telephone calls) about her life and interests and plans; a more-willing companion for physical exercise (such as boot camp or skiing) and spur-of-the-moment activities (such as movies or shopping or making snow angels).

First-born Olivia is a big presence—like an elephant—and when she’s gone, it’s difficult not to notice.

 

 

"Beyond the End of the Trail"

One-year-old Clark in the arms of his father watches his mother battle a grayling at Crescent Lake.
 

BEYOND THE END OF THE TRAIL

For a long time, I believed that Crescent Lake was the end of the trail. And for a long time, literally, it was.

My parents fished for grayling there with me when I was only a year old. My father escorted our whole family up there when I was in my surly teens to camp along the upper creek and cast flies for hungry fish. In my 20s, when I was working for the Peninsula Clarion newspaper, I tramped up there with colleagues, again for fishy purposes. In my 30s, I more than once rode my mountain bike to the lake and back for exercise.

But then the year I turned 40 I was surprised to hear that I could travel beyond the creek outlet, that the route had been extended, that a primitive trail had been added around the lake’s southern shore to connect with a branch of the Carter Lake Trail. The traverse, I was told, comprised about 18 miles. Immediately I was interested.



Clark and his brother, Lowell, above upper Crescent Lake
in the late 1990s. They are on LV Ray Peak, with Madson
Mountain to their left.

Crescent Lake curls like the blade of a scimitar in a nest of mountains. Imagine a big smile of a lake, with the corners of the mouth at west and east; the bottom edge of the smile is the southern shore, the top edge the northern shore. According to the Chugach National Forest website, the Crescent Lake Trail runs 6.5 miles along Crescent Creek (and between Right and Wrong mountains) to the stream outlet on the lake’s western end. The primitive trail then travels the southern shore for 4.2 miles to the Saddle Cabin, and then another 3.54 miles (along Madson Mountain) to the eastern end of the lake. From there, a better-maintained trail takes hikers 3.4 miles past Carter Lake and LV Ray Peak to the Carter Lake trailhead. Altogether, says the website, the hiking totals 17.64 miles without any detours, so the foresters call it an 18-mile hike. (My best-guess estimate before reading this information was 18.5 miles, so I feel pretty good about my accuracy in tracing all those squiggly lines on my battered topographic maps.)

In June 1998, Kent Peterson and I decided to check out the route by making an exploratory mission. On a day that constantly threatened rain but only occasionally delivered it, we hiked to the bridge at the lake outlet to find a new sign denoting a primitive trail and began to follow the damp, grassy, uneven path, uncertain at times what we’d find. In the end, we traveled about half of the full 18 miles before deciding to turn around because (a) the weather looked bad, and (b) we had no vehicle parked at the other end of the trail.

So we came back the next year.

In July 1999, Kent, Adam Tressler and I completed a leisurely traverse on an overgrown trail in warm, mostly sunny weather in approximately nine and a half hours. On that trip, we figured out the trail basics: Stage One took us from the Crescent Lake trailhead to the lake itself in about two hours of steady walking; the trail in this section was solid and easy, and none of the hills were particularly taxing. Stage Two took us from the bridge to the Saddle Cabin; this was all primitive trail and involved stretches that were easy going but also places peppered with stinging nettles and half-hidden rocks. There was also one stream that was difficult to cross without wading; if the water was low enough, a jump completely across was possible, but usually crossing the creek meant temporarily shedding one’s shoes. Stage Three was the rest of the trip—nearly seven miles of moderate ups and downs, across a few avalanche chutes, and a definite shoe-shedding creek crossing at the upper end of Crescent Lake. After hiking past Carter Lake, the rapidly descending path to the trailhead was a hard-packed, gravelly old mining road that usually pained the knees and feet after all the previous travel.

On Monday, June 26, 2000, Kent and I returned for a third attempt, and we found the trail in good shape, the weather mostly sunny again, and the traveling much swifter. We arrived at the Carter Lake trailhead after only seven and a half hours. It was at this point that I became determined to complete the traverse in under seven hours. I didn’t know that it would take me two more attempts to achieve that goal … and that it would be another decade before I bettered it.

As a matter of course, it became routine to make only two major stops on the entire hike—for a quick lunch at the bridge over the Crescent Creek outlet, and for a long snack at the Saddle Cabin. Factoring in those stops (at 20-30 minutes each), I decided that it was possible to arrive at Crescent Lake in less than two hours, eat and be on the way to the Saddle Cabin. Two more hours, I hoped, would see us already done with our snack at the cabin and on our way toward Carter Lake. The rest was all up to the determination and endurance of the hikers.

Or so I thought.

It turned out that nature had a say in this as well.

Kent was tired of doing the same hike, so I took Karen Brewer on the first of what would be five consecutive years of completing the traverse together. After I regaled her with stories of good trail conditions and the possibilities for a record travel time, she and I made the attempt on Thursday, June 14, 2001. The weather started out partly cloudy but very warm. We arrived at Crescent Lake in two hours and took a 30-minute break at the bridge. Two hours later we reached the Saddle Cabin, where we spent another 30 minutes relaxing. With five hours already in, I thought it might still be possible to complete the traverse in just two more hours. Instead, it took three hours and 15 minutes, and I’m still surprised that it took only that long.



Clark leaps over a creek in 2003.

By the time we reached the far end of Madson Mountain, we had gone backwards in time. The upper end of Crescent Lake was still frozen. An avalanche from the previous winter had poured debris over the ice, and all those trees and rocks and branches and dirt were still there. The Carter Lake valley itself was filled with wet snow ranging from one to four feet deep; the trail there was impossible to find. And the descent from the far end of frozen Carter Lake was a trough of mud and running water. We slogged in the snow. We post-holed in it. We splashed down the creek-filled final stretch of trail. But we did finish, exhausted, in eight hours and 15 minutes.

I told Karen it couldn’t be that bad two years in a row.

On July 10, 2002, in warm, sunny weather and on a dry, somewhat overgrown trail, we completed the traverse in six hours and 55 minutes.

On June 21, 2003, we took friends with us and decided to just relax. Under overcast skies that occasionally spit rain, we finished in nine and a half hours. On June 21, 2004, Karen and I were cruising toward another record-breaking performance when the temperature climbed to at least 80 degrees in the valley and sapped our energy; in the heat, we finished in seven hours and 40 minutes. And on my last traverse with Karen—on Oct. 11, 2005, in temperatures that never rose above freezing—we finished in approximately eight hours.

Karen Brewer on the Crescent Lake primitive trail in 2004.

After that, injuries and other plans kept me from the traverse until 2009, when Curt Shuey and I made the attempt on July 1, 2009. I was using the traverse as a training hike to prepare myself for a six-day, 60-plus-mile journey with buddies in the Banff area of Canada, and I was babying an ankle that was still weak from a sprain months earlier. During the first mile of the traverse, I re-sprained the same ankle. Despite Curt’s protests, I resolutely refused to turn around and go home. We pressed on under partly sunny skies and finished the traverse. I failed to record the time, but I know it was in the eight- to nine-hour range.

Joe Charbonnet crosses a chilly creek in 2010.

On June 26, 2010, I led a Kenai Peninsula Outdoor Club hike of the traverse, making no pretense about setting any records. It was overcast, breezy and occasionally rainy, and the four of us finished in about nine hours.

But this year, on Nov. 3, Yvonne Leutwyler and I broke my old record, despite partly to mostly cloudy conditions, temperatures that ranged from 20 to 35 degrees, and up to four inches of fresh powdered snow on the last third of the traverse. We jogged and walked (resting about 20 minutes at both of the usual places) and finished in six hours and 43 minutes.

Yvonne and I early on the trail during our 2012 traverse.

We were aided by low water at both major creek crossings, but we were hindered at the biggest avalanche chute by dangerously thin ice over rapidly moving water, so we were forced to descend closer to the lake to find a safe way across.

Challenges exist in every attempt at the traverse. Sometimes it’s the heat, sometimes the cold. Sometimes it’s the mud, sometimes the snow. Sometimes it’s a trail so overgrown that tripping becomes the norm. Sometimes it’s the wind or the rain … or injuries … or waiting for a black bear to leave the trail. It’s best to be prepared for anything.

But a lot of the success in completing the traverse has nothing to do with personal records, and much more to do with personal goals. Sometimes it’s simply more fun to just take one’s time and revel in the beauty of that amazing place than it is to race against the hands of the clock. So I’ll be back.

 

"No Less of a Man"

NO LESS OF A MAN

Given the vastness and remoteness of Alaska, it is understandable that most Alaskans have traveled so little of it. Given the comparative smallness of the Kenai Peninsula—and its proximity to the population center of Anchorage—it might seem strange that most Alaskans have trod on so little of it, too. After all, the peninsula makes up only about 2-3 percent of Alaska’s 663,300 square miles, but a closer examination clarifies the situation. The peninsula, comprising some four million acres, contains few transportation corridors, most of them north-south passages on the western side, plus a west-east crossing or two over to the communities of Seward and Whittier. Much of the rest is mountains, lakes, streams, swamps, and mammoth masses of ice and snow. To travel these areas without roads, one must have certain tools—airplanes, boats, perhaps a bicycle or a pair of skis, or a good pair of boots—and certain characteristics—determination, fortitude, and a willingness to be uncomfortable in beautiful surroundings. The Kenai Peninsula can treat its travelers severely at times.

I have lived in this place for more than 50 years—I grew up here—and yet it seems that I have traveled so damned little of it. Perhaps that is because I have never owned an airplane, a boat with an engine, a four-wheeler, an all-terrain vehicle, or even a snowmachine. Consequently, what I have been unable to cover in the confines of an automobile, I have covered mainly in watercrafts I could paddle, on mountain bikes, or on my own two feet. And although I have seen plenty in my travels, I am reminded almost daily of how much more I have yet to see.

Most people who know me may have the impression that I am constantly afoot and on the move. For instance, I have climbed nearly every roadside mountain from the northern edge of the Sterling flats to the junction of the Seward and Sterling highways, and yet each time I have ascended to the top of one of those peaks, I have spied another valley that I have never worked my way along, or a sea of other mountains beyond those I’ve climbed. The peninsula contains hundreds, if not thousands, of lakes and ponds on which I have never floated when they were in a liquid state or strolled across when they were frozen. I have never traversed the Harding Icefield, never summited the peninsula’s highest peaks, never walked the slate-strewn east-side beaches outside of Resurrection Bay and Passage Canal, never hiked more than a few miles of the myriad trails across Kachemak Bay. On and on. I’ve seen so much, but there’s so much more to see.

And again, the Kenai Peninsula is just a fragment of the entire state—a state in which I’ve barely and rarely strayed far from the few asphalt ribbons that connect many of its major communities. I haven’t even traveled all of its roadways.

Is this a lament? Perhaps somewhat, but not entirely.

Is this a manifesto of my intent to mend my ways and expand the field of my Alaskan experiences? Not exactly, but the notion of change is refreshing. I’m growing ever more ready to open my eyes wider to the rest of the world.

Do I plan to purchase an airplane and take flying lessons? Learn to navigate a power boat and maintain the intricacies of its engine? Not likely, but I also have no wish to be limited by a dearth of machines in my life.

I’ll get by somehow.

Besides, as Shakespeare said in Romeo & Juliet, the world is broad and wide—and my desire to travel more of my birth state is endemic of my desire to travel more of the whole planet if I can.

I am not less of a man for having seen so little thus far, nor will I be more of a man once I have seen more, but the limitations of the past (self-imposed or not) do not have to be the limitations of tomorrow.

Perhaps this is some sort of declaration. Perhaps this old dog is ready for some new tricks.

 

 

"More Than a Pleasant Surprise"

MORE THAN A PLEASANT SURPRISE

The possibilities are endless: A splash of unexpected color in autumn foliage. An architectural improbability in nature or a cityscape. A nearly perfect blend of clothing style and human form. An evocative odor that forms a link to some distant past. A stretch of sudden syncopation that defines a musical sensation. A person whose personal vision alters our perception of the everyday world.

Occasionally in our travels through life we stumble upon something or someone special.

Sometimes the impact of that discovery lasts mere moments, other times a day or a week, a month or a year, or perhaps even forever.

We may notice the beauty in a mountain ridge that we’ve taken for granted before.

We may hearken to the silence of a calm winter morning.

We may detect an arresting aroma, relish a new taste, heed an unfamiliar texture, feel an unaccustomed warmth upon our flesh.

Or we may notice the difference that a kindness makes, the uplift we feel at helping someone else.

We may also sense a void left by people we have lost and more fully appreciate the good fortune we had when they were present in our lives.

Sometimes the significance of our discovery dawns upon us slowly, while other times the importance registers with lightning speed.

And sometimes the best discoveries are the ones we were never looking for. They may knock us temporarily off our stride, but on occasion our strides may require disruption.

For me, the best discovery I have made in a long, long while caught me unawares, and it took a few months for its significance to fully sink in. Now, however, it is difficult for me to imagine my life any other way.

About a year ago, I took my golden retriever and met up with a woman named Yvonne for a bushwhacking snowshoe trip along a series of lakes in the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. Yvonne and I had hiked before—once previously in roughly the same area, once up a mountain in Seward, once to an old mining area near Hope. We’d also performed chainsaw-powered trail maintenance together on a little-known trail. But on this particular excursion, I noticed something different. What I noticed was the way I was beginning to feel.

I had insulated myself socially in recent years—after my father’s death, my retirement from teaching high school, my failing marriage which ended in divorce—and I was only beginning to find my way back into some sort of social mainstream as a single father who was beyond middle age and just starting to rebuild himself into some semblance of physical fitness after too long a sedentary spell.

Truthfully, I barely knew Yvonne at the time. She was somewhat reticent and protective of her past, while on the other hand I was nervous and acting like a virtual Chatty Kathy. But as I calmed down, I began to see what I had in this new friend and outdoor companion. I began to appreciate her determination and her toughness, her creativity and her perspective on life, her enthusiasm and her smile. I began to really like it when she smiled at me, and I loved the peal of her laughter.

At the end of that trek, I stayed behind with my dog and our snowshoes while she hitchhiked in the semi-darkness back to retrieve my Jeep, but she was undeterred. In later outings I annoyed her by taking dozens of photographs, but still she seemed to enjoy my presence. At times I rambled almost non-stop through a litany of observations and old stories, but she never rolled her eyes or asked me to be quiet. In fact, we continued engaging in adventures—and with greater frequency. By early 2012 we were meeting semi-regularly—a walk down to the river, snowshoeing treks into the hills, doing trail-prep work for a winter challenge race, staggering through a blizzard on a glacial lake, watching the aurora from a hayfield near my house, ice-fishing for Arctic char, meeting every Tuesday for a mountain-trail climb.

And on and on.

Both of us could feel our relationship changing, but it didn’t change rapidly. Progressing in baby-steps, we edged forward, and along the way we cast aside shadows of the past to enjoy the sunshine of future possibilities.

It’s hard to say that I “stumbled upon” Yvonne, but—whether our union is pure chance, a mystical confluence of personal pathways, or something else entirely—I consider myself blessed every day by her presence.

 

"No Longer Pretty, I Guess"

NO LONGER PRETTY, I GUESS

REVISED FROM A DECEMBER 2000 PERSONAL WRITING

Almost every day when I was teaching at Skyview High School, I ate lunch with Dave, one of my colleagues, in his classroom. Sometimes, when we weren’t planning outdoor adventures, pining for freedom from paperwork, or bitching about something that had upset us that morning, we’d get kinda philosophical. And one of our biggest topics back in the middle of the 2000-2001 school year was the aging process. One day, Dave was saying that one of the most disconcerting things he had noticed about growing older—he was 43 then, a year older than me—was that the visual effect he had on people (especially those of the opposite sex) had changed. He was a pretty handsome guy, accustomed over the years to attracting a certain amount of female attention, even among women much younger than himself. In 2000, however, he said he felt sometimes as if he was invisible, as if younger women who once might have “checked him out” were looking right through him, as if he had reached a stage in life at which he simply had ceased to matter to them. He could have been a piece of old furniture or part of the wall, as far as they were concerned.

Of course, this led him to the realization that many times he himself had done the same thing to older women—women who may still have appeared vitally attractive to older men. And this realization led the two of us to a discussion of the many people (men and women) whom we daily passed by and gave no second thought—perhaps not even a “first thought”—because they were older, fatter or uglier (or different in myriad other ways) than the people to whom we preferred to direct our attention.

How many people, we wondered, were living vital, rich lives but somehow had seemingly fallen beneath our notice? And how would it feel to live most of one’s life that way? And wasn’t it a shame that we didn’t give some people even a ghost of a chance to influence our lives simply because we “dismissed” them before they ever had that opportunity? And just how much of life were we missing out on because of such preconceptions and actions, whether they were conscious or subconscious?

Our talk that day reminded me of a master-teacher with whom I had  student-taught back at Soldotna High School in 1986. She had been a teacher of mine back in the early 1970s, and by 1986 she was just a couple of years away from retirement and probably somewhere between 40 and 45 years old. In fact, she was likely about the same age I was during the discussion Dave and I were having in 2000. In 1986, she was an attractive, athletic woman entering middle age, and she had noticed the way that a few of the young girls at the high school attempted to flirt with me. (I was then in my late 20s.) Almost wistfully, she said one day, “Enjoy the attention now. It doesn’t last long. I can remember when many of the young boys used to flock around….” And I knew that her nostalgia wasn’t prompted by any sexual desire for those boys of those bygone days, but more by a desire for the acknowledgement of her own vitality, and what she perceived in 1986 as her own fading physical desirability.

I understood intellectually what she was talking about back then, but 2000 I had internalized her message personally. I’ve never been a “pretty boy” or the object of considerable female interest, but by the turn of the century I had certainly noticed that I was dropping beneath the horizon line. The important thing, I know, is to be happy with one’s self.

Aging men and women don’t need the attention of attractive younger men and women to make their lives worthwhile or meaningful, but having a little of that attention is better than seeming invisible, and it even feels good sometimes.

 

"This Memory Stinks"

THIS MEMORY STINKS

For eight years, until I retired from the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District, I told this story to my students, making many of them queasy in the process. Now I offer it to a more general audience:

On Wednesday, June 28, 2000, at approximately 1 p.m., I picked up my children at Ridgeway Preschool, where they’d just finished another day of a summer-fun session set up by Susan Larned, the school’s owner and main instructor. Olivia, at age six, was actually too old for the program, but she was eager (like Kelty, who would turn five in mid-August, and just loved Mrs. Larned) to go and play with some other kids, to make some art, to work with plants in the preschool greenhouse, et cetera. The day was partly sunny, with just a hint of a breeze, and the air was warm by Alaska standards. I had to run an errand in Kenai, and the kids were hungry, so we worked out a compromise: If they followed directions and behaved appropriately while I ran my errands, we’d stop at Burger King (which had a playland for kids) and grab a bite to eat. All in all, this describes the makings of a pretty ordinary afternoon.

And it stayed that way … for a while.

I ran my errand, the kids were good, and we soon found ourselves in the Burger King, where I made my children wait with me in line until I’d confirmed their orders. Then I sent them to the playland section while I ordered my own food and wrote out my check. While the kids played, I gathered up the cups I’d been given and ambled over to the serve-yourself drink station to dispense our liquid refreshments. A couple minutes later, I was shuffling to the playland area at the back of the restaurant when Kelty came racing past me. “Gotta go potty?” I astutely asked. “Gotta poop,” he confirmed without stopping. He zipped on through the restaurant and whisked himself through the door of the men’s restroom. I placed our drinks on a table near the tubes and nets and ladders comprising the playland equipment, where Olivia was still busily and obliviously scrambling, and then I headed back out into the main part of the restaurant to wait for my order number (#44) to be called.

Suddenly Kelty was back, shuffling sheepishly from the bathroom and stopping directly in front of me. Suspicious, I asked, “Done already? Did you wipe? Did you wash your hands?”

“Daddy,” he said, “I pooped in my pants.”

Just then, my order was called.

Almost immediately afterward, Olivia strolled out from playland to see what Kelty and I were talking about.

I ignored Olivia. I turned to Kelty. “Very much?” I asked. He nodded sorrowfully. “A lot,” he confirmed.

“Let me look,” I said.

He was wearing a long white t-shirt and summer shorts with Batman underpants underneath. I lifted his t-shirt and started to pull out the waistband of his shorts when I noticed with some trace of horror a soft brown, egg-sized turd stuck to the top of the waistband, sort of teetering there like a gooey boulder in Feces National Park.

“Number 44, your order is ready!” a worker called again.

“Oh, gross!” said Olivia.

I went into action: I made Kelty hold up his t-shirt but stand so that no one else could see his “surprise.” I told him to stand perfectly still. I told Olivia to calm down, and walked up to grab our food. I put our food on our table and told Olivia to sit and eat by herself (and play with her Kid’s Pack prizes) until I returned from the bathroom with her brother. Then I hurried back to Kelty and scurried gently with him back to the men’s room and into the only (and, thank God, unoccupied) stall, where I found another soft brown, egg-sized turd on the tiled floor, about two feet away from the toilet.

Now it needs to be said at this point that I have an excellent and active gag reflex, and it began to kick into high gear when I bent down with a handful of toilet paper to scoop up the turd from the floor and then the one from Kelty’s waistband. Both turds were barely more substantial than whipped cream, and it was a scientific wonder that they held together at all….

Next, I helped Kelty drop his shorts down to his ankles and his underpants down to his knees, and I was gagging a bit, and trying semi-successfully to say encouraging things to him because I didn’t want this to be for him any more traumatic than it already was. “Don’t worry, buddy. It’s gonna be okay…. (cough, cough) Man, that’s a lot of poop. Are you feeling okay? Does your tummy hurt?” (He said it didn’t.) “It’s gonna be all right…. Hey, can you bend over a little more? You’ve got some down your leg…. There, that’s better. I wish this bathroom had some paper towels.” (It had an air-blower for drying hands.) “We’re sure using a lot of toilet paper. Good thing there’s a lot here…. Hey, good job of coming out and telling Daddy you needed help. You’re being a big boy about this…. Wow, that’s a lot of poop in your underwear. I don’t think I can get all of that (cough, cough)…. Okay, bend over some more. I’ve gotta get as much as I can out of your crack, buddy.” (It was packed in there so brown and tight that it appeared like mortar in need of excavation.)

Then finally Kelty himself had something to say: “Dad?”

“Yes?”

“This sucks!”

Bent over him, examining his butt cheeks, I began to laugh, not only because what he said was so true, but also because I’d never heard him use that phrase before, and it sounded funny coming from him.

“You know what, Kelt,” I said, “you’re right. This DOES suck. That’s usually not a very nice thing to say, but THIS time you’re right.”

I got him cleaned up enough (including a thorough scrubbing of our hands) so that he could go eat and play, and when we returned home his mother helped him out of his poopy clothes and into the shower.

And a perfectly ordinary afternoon became an event that I may never forget.

 

"An Ancient Behemoth"

AN ANCIENT BEHEMOTH

REVISED FROM A LETTER WRITTEN ORIGINALLY IN JULY 1998

When George Pollard offers to reveal something that very few people have seen, it’s best to take him up on the offer. George doesn’t lightly make such gestures.

Consequently, when George told my father and me in late May 1998 that he’d like us to accompany him for a brief adventure on the far end of Tustumena Lake, we readily agreed.

Tustumena Lake is an unpredictable mass of watery silt that sits like a giant turquoise gemstone in the heart of the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. George Pollard is a family friend who at the time was in his early 70s; he is one of the few old-timers actually born in Alaska, a claim rare among white men with no Russian or Native Alaskan bloodlines. George was born in Anchorage in the mid-1920s, when Anchorage was little more than a squalid town along Ship Creek, and when his own father (like mine, nearly four decades later) was a pioneering Alaska dentist. Formerly one of the longest-serving hunting guides in this part of the country, George now lives alone in Kasilof, in the same home he has occupied since the 1930s, not far from the big lake.

George invited me and Dad to cross the length of the lake in his red-and-black, 15-and-a-half-foot inflatable Zodiac on a blustery Saturday afternoon to see one of his treasures, something that had been shown to him back 35 years earlier by a long-time area gold miner named Joe Secora. The treasure was an ancient cottonwood tree, thought to be the oldest tree in Southcentral Alaska, perhaps even in the entire state. The tree once was aged (by an amateur named Von Phillips who took a core sample while volunteering for the state Division of Forestry or the U.S. Forest Service one summer) at no less than 900 years old. A decade or so later, after the base of the tree had begun to hollow itself out, a professional forester named (I think) Borg arrived to take an official sample, but it was incomplete and inconclusive because of the hollowing. The forester determined, however, that the tree was at least 600 years old and could be much older. (That more conservative measurement means that the tree was alive and at least a century old when Columbus sailed the ocean blue.)

I was very eager to see it.

The three of us motored out of the landing on the Kasilof River and began the mile-long run up to the lake at about 1 or 2 o’clock in the afternoon. Typically, it takes about an hour to run the 26-mile length of the lake. Today was not to be the case. We encountered small rollers after just a few minutes on the lake, indicating the possibility of a strong wind blowing off Tustumena Glacier and the Harding Icefield at the far end of the lake. Soon the rollers were growing larger and arriving closer together. Occasionally the front of the boat went airborne and crashed down. The wind lashed at our faces. Windblown water splashed us, saturating our rain gear. Sometimes the sun broke out from the clouds; sometimes the sky hinted at rain. Halfway there, we encountered white caps, but George kept plugging ahead, zigzagging doggedly forward, find the proper angles to safely cut the waves. Dad and I eyeballed each other; with anyone else at the helm, we would have asked to turn around and go home.

The trip up the lake took an exhausting two and a half hours—the calmer return trip later that evening would take only 90 minutes—and we beached the boat near a clear-water stream pouring its dark blue payload into the light turquoise of Tustumena. Dad and I then followed George’s slow, methodical walk of nearly two miles toward the cliffs he used as a landmark to guide him through the spruce- and alder-infested moraine that contained small streams and ponds only fragmentary game trails. He arrived about 50 minutes later within a few dozen yards of our target--a moist, secluded grove of cottonwoods, which at first appeared very normal in size because they were all so large that they skewed our perspective. All of the cottonwoods there were ensconced in a tangled, prickly bed of Devil’s club, all in a declivity of rolling hills, kissed only lightly by the winds that battered the trees beyond the grove.

“That’s it,” George announced, when we were about 40-50 yards away, and then he pointed to one tree obviously stouter than the rest. At first I was disappointed. It didn’t seem so big. But as I walked closer, I realized that this specimen dwarfed every Alaska cottonwood I’d ever seen. Eighteen and a half feet in circumference at the base, it would take more than three men with my six-foot wingspan touching fingertips to reach all the way around it. The cave-like hole in its trunk had bear hairs stuck in the bark near its entrance.

I crawled inside and could almost stand up in there. This behemoth, like some of its younger, smaller cousins nearby, stood straight as a flagpole, nearly all of its branches and leaves at the top 60 to 80 (perhaps 100, who knows?) feet in the air. The gnarled bark of the average large cottonwood contains innumerable grooves, usually an inch or two deep near the base of the tree; the grooves on this giant may have been three to four inches deep.

The cottonwood grove, in obvious black bear country and protruding from mossy ground laden with large ferns and spiky plants, had a primeval, almost spiritual quality, enhanced by the shafts of sunlight spearing through the leafy canopy overhead, by the burbling creek about 20 yards from the big tree, by the alder-draped cliff of shale we could glimpse rising high above us, and by the windy turmoil we knew existed elsewhere.

It was, after all, just a tree. But the experience of that tree was more than that, and the journey to that tree was also something more.

 

 

"Birthplace"

BIRTHPLACE

In the photograph, a tow-headed boy of perhaps four is standing next to the open back door of a blue Ford station wagon of late 1960s vintage. The boy, with his crew cut, maroon-gold-and-white cotton short-sleeved shirt, and brown corduroys, is smiling and pointing at the backseat. Although the photo itself does not make this clear, he is pointing at the behest of his father, for whom this simple gesture is simultaneously humorous and deeply meaningful.

The boy is my younger brother, Lowell, and our father was Calvin Munson Fair. On what is likely an early spring day in 1971 or 1972, the station wagon is parked on the somewhat snowy garage apron in front of our old homestead house (which at that time wasn’t so old, having been completed in late 1967). On the far-right edge of the photo appears the back bumper of our other family car, a brown four-door Dodge Dart Swinger, which is parked inside the garage. The photo is indicative of the progression of our family: First, Lowell was the third and last of three Fair children (after me and our sister, Janeice). Second, the appearance of two cars is important because for many years we had only a single vehicle, which meant that my mother was often left without transportation (other than our 1948 Ford tractor) on the homestead when Dad traveled in to Soldotna to work at his dental practice. Third, the big white colonial-style house replaced the single-wide trailer that we had lived in since October 1960. Fourth, inside the house was the family’s first telephone (a rotary-dial affair on the wall of the mud room) and first color television (replacing our old Zenith black-and-white set), and somewhere roaming around outside was the first family dog (an independent-minded German short-haired pointer named Queen).

But when it was taken, this photograph was more about looking backward than looking forward. Dad had captured the image to forever remind him of a story….

On a cold and stormy Jan. 25, 1968, Dr. Paul Isaak was preparing his single-engine aircraft to carry two passengers on another flight to the Seward hospital. Isaak had made hundreds of such flights—in fact, in 1983 he would estimate that he’d made at least 2,000 such trips—through Resurrection Pass between his medical practice in Soldotna and the peninsula’s only full-service hospital in Seward, where he often performed surgeries, delivered babies, and responded to emergencies.

Here’s how (in the book Once Upon the Kenai) Isaak described the Jan. 25 flight: “I was going to take one of my obstetric patients and her husband to the hospital in Seward for delivery. This man was a prominent citizen in the community, and it turned out that when we got about five miles out of Seward, the weather deteriorated rather rapidly and I was unable to continue, so we turned around and came back. And so he [the prominent citizen] drove to Seward, and about seven or eight miles out of Seward she [the obstetric patient] decided that she was going to have that baby, and indeed did have it in the back seat of the car. Fortunately, I had some of the bare necessities with me to manage the delivery in the car, even though it wasn’t the most ideal situation. Everything turned out fine for mother and baby, and they spent several days in the hospital after that experience.”

Of course, it’s no great surprise (given my set-up in this story) that the “prominent citizen in the community” was my father, and the “obstetric patient” was my mother.

Even now, my mother is terribly embarrassed by this story, despite the nearly half-century that has passed since it occurred. For the last two or three years, I have been wanting to write about this story in my local history column (the Almanac) in the Redoubt Reporter newspaper, but my mother has forbidden me to mention her name or to use the photograph of Lowell. I realize that I don’t technically need her permission, but I would like her blessing.

Her response: “You can write about it when I’m dead.”

On Oct. 10, 2012—unbeknownst to our mother—my brother told the story in Anchorage as part of a presentation for his Toastmasters group. A couple of years ago, I told the story in the newspaper, but I left out all the names and the crucial photograph. Writing it up in this blog is probably the best I can do right now.

But I do have to add this: In the photograph (displayed above), my brother is gesturing toward the backseat of the family station wagon because my father had (a) opened the back door, (b) stationed my brother there, and (c) told him, “Lowell, point to where you were born.”

I can imagine him laughing almost too hard to press shutter button. And I can imagine that when his yellow box of slides came back from the Kodak Company, he laughed again. (He may or may not have shared the photo with my mother at the time.) And I know he laughed when I placed the photo in a special photo-memory book that my siblings and I created for Dad’s 70^th birthday back in 2002.

My mother, however, still is not laughing.

"One Day's Difference"

 

ONE DAY'S DIFFERENCE

On a Tuesday morning in early August 2007, I was reveling in the fact that the weather had finally changed from rain and wind to bright sunshine, that my current diet (instituted to combat some lingering health issues) had left me about 20 pounds lighter than the previous winter, that we had finished our mowing jobs earlier than usual that week, that meteorologists were calling for a string of beautiful days, and that I had only a get-together with friends (on Thursday) and my son’s 12^th birthday (on Sunday) as firm commitments for the rest of the week. (The start of my 20^th, and final, year of teaching high school was only one more week away.)

 

Full of energy and enthusiasm, I set up a moderate hike for Wednesday, and then a longer, more difficult hike for Saturday. The Saturday excursion, up Cecil Rhode Mountain in Cooper Landing, was one I had completed several years in a row and was particularly looking forward to. It includes over 5,000 feet of climbing and spectacular views of the Kenai Mountains, Mystery Hills, Kenai and Cooper lakes, and much of the upper Kenai River valley.

 

Then, when Karen said that she was taking the kids to go mountain biking up on the Tsalteshi Trails at Skyview High School, I said I’d go along. Skyview sits atop a large forested hill just across the river from the city of Soldotna. In the surrounding hills over the years, crews have constructed miles of meandering, undulating trails for cross-country skiing and running (and also mountain biking, snowshoeing and walking). And so we pulled our vehicles into the school parking lot, extracted our bikes, donned our helmets, and headed out into the warm late-morning sunshine. For about an hour on the trails, I enjoyed zipping easily on the dirt paths, climbing and coasting, rolling along, until it was time to go. Then, as Karen cruised down a long ridgeline trail that skirted the school grounds, I told her I was taking a shortcut and veered off the main trail.

 

I headed down what, in the earliest days of Tsalteshi, used to be the main entrance to the trail system but was now abandoned. I took this route because I could see my son biking below me on an open grassy stretch of the main campus, and I thought I could easily catch up to him that way. The old trail descended fairly rapidly and was overgrown with tall grass and fireweed. As I started down, I saw what appeared to be the tracks of a previous biker, which gave me greater assurance that the trail was still okay.

 

But it was not okay.

 

Another trail had been cut with a Caterpillar blade perpendicular to the bottom of this one, chopping off the base of the hill and leaving a sudden drop of perhaps two feet right at the end. I did not notice this drop at first because I was traveling swiftly, was looking out briefly at my son, and was unable to see the drop-off until I was nearly on top of it. I’m not sure whether I hit my brakes. I think that my front tire simply dropped off the ledge and propelled me over my handlebars. Regardless, I inverted in mid-air and landed on my head. I heard a crunching sound and then I twisted over and slammed to the ground.

I knew instantly that I’d really hurt myself. Images of movie-star Christopher Reeve and his broken-neck fall from a horse flashed through my brain. I saw him in his wheelchair, paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of his life.

 

Honestly, besides the pain and the fear (that I might have broken my neck), what I felt most at that moment was anger because I knew that all my sunny-weather hiking plans had just been blown out the window.

 

I forced myself to try to move. As I heard footsteps racing toward me, I rolled to my left side and curled into an agonizing fetal position, pleased with the movement, regardless of the pain.

 

Then Karen and Kelty were there. Karen assessed the situation and ran into the school to find a custodian and get a bag of ice. Kelty tried to give me some support and keep me comfortable on the ground, but I struggled to my feet, anyway, straightened myself the best I could, picked up my bike and used it like a crutch to hobble back to the car.

 

About an hour later, a naturopath told me that my neck was out of alignment but didn’t appear to be fractured, that I had pulled the middle section of my right hamstring, and that I had also twisted my lower back and sprained the middle and ring fingers on my right hand. He recommended lots of ice and an adjustment on my neck after a week of allowing the swelling to subside. (Later at home, I realized that I had also pulled my left hamstring and hyper-extended my right elbow. And even later, an MRI revealed that I had herniated two vertebrae in my lumber region.)

 

I felt achy everywhere for days and had a mild but consistent headache. It’s possible that I had suffered a concussion; I know I wasn’t thinking clearly. For days, I found it very difficult to sleep comfortably or even change positions in bed. But the biggest problem—other than the psychological disappointment involved in sitting or lying around doing nothing while the sun shone brightly—was that I was having muscular or nervous spasms around the top of my right hip and I knew I was in for some extended medical treatments.

 

It took me weeks to heal up superficially and—with decompression therapy and chiropractic treatments—months to heal up completely. As the culmination to a three-year period of health problems that had included pneumonia, mastoiditis, hives, and more than two years of a terribly itchy body-wide rash, the injuries left me wondering whether I’d ever feel truly well again—and also doubly determined to take fuller advantage of opportunities when they arose.

 

Still, old habits die hard, and it was more than two years (and a divorce, and perhaps even some depression) later before I seriously embarked on real change. (See related stories concerning some of that change.) A shocking experience can prompt a transformation, but the heart and mind must unite in action before any meaningful alterations can occur. I’d spent so many years making excuses that I needed time to establish newer, healthier patterns.

 

“Carpe diem!” doesn’t sound so trite to me anymore.