Shaggy Moose Story

Like most of you, I’m back from the holidays now, except that for me it’s time to curl up, tuck my hooves under, and slow down for a little nap. Finally. It was hard work this year, but so worth it.

Before I settle in for some much-deserved browsing and a nap in my favorite little stretch of woods, though, I thought I’d come back here for a bit. I really do owe it to you to finish my tale. It’s been a bit of a shaggy moose story, I know, but I’m getting to the meat of it finally and I think you’ll appreciate knowing where all this rambling ends up. I might just point out while I’m at it that rambling is what moose do. You ought to try it sometime – it’s good for the soul and helps your digestion too. Trust me, I know. Birch bark is not easy on the belly, so I’m something of an expert on this.

One more quick diversion before I finish telling you about Porcupine and Purple. It’s really more of a final plea for help and one I hope you’ll take seriously. As you all get back to work and driving the kids to school and picking up groceries, please don’t forget Christmas. We work hard to make it something that will last through the winter and if you hold little bits of it in your heart, you’ll see the magic and the wonder continue to play out to get you through the rest of the cold and dark until the willow buds pop out in a few months. I probably should have asked this at the start, but do you believe in Santa Claus? If you don’t, you should. It matters. Besides, if it’s a little crazy and a little childish, what’s the harm? I could also point out that you are reading a blog written by a moose. Belief in a portly old gentleman in a red velvet suit hardly seems a stretch in comparison.

So here’s what happened with our friend Porcupine – and he is a friend now.  That’s what usually happens when we investigate someone who has been disturbing the order of winter cheer.  It’s kind of like the FBI recruiting hackers to investigate cyber-crime.  Who better to understand how things can go wrong with Yule order than someone who has felt the need to disrupt things himself?  It’s also really common once the warmth and light and joy start flying around to feel a little overwhelmed and want to share.  You’ll see in a bit, but Porcupine is like that – he has good reason to want to share his light now and he’s currently in YRRT training to be assigned to a team soon.  Our big challenge in finding him an assignment, quite frankly, is that he just doesn’t move very fast.  We can’t very well put him on a team of raven and moose and caribou, can we?  Wolves move fast, even by my standards, and squirrels, foxes and hares may be small, but they can definitely get the move on.  Porcupine?  Well, we’re working on it.

Our story really starts back in September, at the fall equinox.  September isn’t a terrible time to be a porcupine.  There’s still plenty of food, lots of places to shuffle through the woods, good ground cover to pad the feet.  And people aren’t out every darned moment of the day with their pesky canines.  Kids are back in school and quiet has started to settle in the woods.  It’s a pretty good time of year.  On the night of the Equinox, though, something happened to one particular porcupine in a patch of woods just outside of Fairbanks.  He looked up from his shuffling into the night sky and what he saw wasn’t the green of the aurora or the bright white blinking of stars.  What he saw was purple, the kind of purple that can only mean piles and piles of snow.  The Equinox, you see, is the night that everything changes.  Mostly, we don’t see it – it’s a little like squinting at one of those paintings with hidden images.  You have to be looking at it just right to see it, but if you do, suddenly the sky is filled with a perfect image of what’s to come.  Porcupine looked up at just the right time (or just the wrong time if you take it from his perspective) and he saw the cold and the dark, felt the frozen and burning pads on the bottoms of his feet.  He saw his blanket of leaves blow away, felt the frost on his snout grubbing for food.  But more than anything else, he saw snow.  Piles of snow, drifts of it several times deeper than the height of an average porcupine.  He looked at the sky and he looked at his little stubby legs and he was very, very unhappy.

That’s how it always starts, with just a little unhappiness when there’s no good company to dispell it.  One little grumpy moment festers and becomes a plot.

So our grumpy friend with the stubby legs stewed a bit, got grumpier still, and started plotting.  He climbed into the hollowed out log he had selected for a den, and couldn’t shake the image of his perfect den drifted full of snow.  He chomped on some slightly wilted skunk cabbage and imagined the taste of bitter winter bark on his tongue instead.  He thought of a late January case of indigestion and started to become very grumpy indeed, feeling his quills quiver in anticipation of a full-on mad.  And mad he got!  Just about the time his quills refused to lay flat any longer and leapt to their full spiky glory, the perfect plan leapt into his mind.  He would just steal all that purple right out of the sky.  Who would notice a porcupine, least cuddly of all the rodents, snuffling around in the middle of the night collecting purple?  Most people didn’t notice him when he was five feet off the trail from them – why would they start noticing him now?  And so the plan was hatched – Porcupine would have to act quickly before all the purple moved across the sky and started making winter happen, but if he managed to secret some away, maybe he could hold off the snow just long enough to show them all.

If you’ve ever been in the woods at night, you may have an idea of how many hiding places there actually are.  Think of every hollow between the gnarled roots of trees, imagine all the misty, boggy thick spots.  In fact, just put yourself into a wooded scene from a bad horror film and you have the idea.  There were plenty of places for Porcupine to hide purple, places where no one with a sense of self preservation would think to look.  The trees didn’t mind.  In their flow of time, a single winter is but the blink of an eye.  The hollows and shadowing places didn’t mind – why would they?  Other animals in the woods were so busy preparing for winter themselves that they hardly noticed and those bunnies and fox with the changing coats, well, let’s just say they’re a little embarrased when they’re half and half and looking like a nightmare of a bad hair day.  They were so self-absorbed just then that they didn’t pay it any mind.  The only ones who noticed were the owls and it was to the owls we went for help.

Life is movement and so is light.  We think it’s the colors that fascinate, but it’s really the sparkling, the sudden bursts and jolts, the streams and shimmers.  When purple starts to spread through the sky to draw in old man winter, you can watch it travel.  It’s like looking at a starry sky, though.  If you live in a city or just don’t think to look up, days and days could go by with no stars in the sky and you wouldn’t even notice.  The movement of changing light across the night sky is a little more subtle and even those of us who understand the way of seeing required to watch it can get disctracted, forget to look up.  By the time anyone realized that purple was noticeably absent, we were well into October with not so much as a flake of snow.

Purple may have been noticeably absent, but Porcupine was noticeably less grouchy.  Our problem, at this point, wasn’t so much that it took a long time for anyone to take notice.  Our problem was the credibility of the first witnesses.  Have you ever met a Boreal Owl?

The thing about owls in general is that they can be a little, well “professorial” would be a nice way to put it.  They don’t mean any harm – they just get a lot of their own company and can be a little stuffy and pedantic in mixed company – mixed species company, that is.  They’re also a little hard to follow because their heads do that weird thing and the eyes are kind of blinky and then you’ve got the arched brows, horns and beaks.  Owls are just a little intimidating and difficult to follow.  Boreal owls are a special case because they’re also small and fluffy and flighty.  Imagine crossing a history professor with a gerbil – like that.  Making any kind of sense out of what they were trying to tell us was like getting a straight story out of the chess and glee clubs combined.  It was a mess.  The thing of it was, though, that the owls had it just right.  They saw what they saw which was strands and streams and burst of purple being sucked out of the night sky into hollow logs, burrows and under tussocks.  I still feel a little guilty for failing to grasp what they were trying to tell us right away, but just go have a conversation with a cute tribble-like fluffy owl and see if you come out with your antlers on straight.

I think you may begin to see how things started to slip out of our grasp.  By late October, we had purple pooled all over the place, owls in disarray, bears starting to wonder whether it was getting close to bedtime, storm clouds drifting through, not getting a toehold and then drifting right on.  The ravens were no help at all – they just thought it was good fun and entertained themselves diving into the pools of light and coming up with a purple glow to their wingtips and tailfeathers.  As more of the change into winter was pulled straight out of the night sky, everyone got more and more confused and agitated.  It was bad enough in the forest, but when the winds started to get confused, well that’s when things started to get really bad.

Old Man Chinook is nobody’s fool.  He’s been doing what he does for a really, really, really long time.  But Porcupine’s stunt really threw him for a loop.  Let’s go back to our discussion about light for a moment and about purple pulling green.  If we’ve got a bunch of purple pooling and streaming around at ground level and starting to accumulate in underground hideaways, what happens when green follows?  Warm winds, thaws, a remembered scent of new buds on trees.  That’s like home cooking in the kitchen to Chinook and no sooner did he get a whiff of all that green than he started blowing…and blowing and blowing.  He blew down trees and took the roofs right off of houses.  He took what little snow had managed to fall and scrubbed it right off the forest floor.  In his laughing and huffing and puffing, he brought beach blanket weather right up to the Far North.  And that’s when the humans started to get really confused.  Anyone who has been up here through breakup knows the feel of Chinook’s breath against bare hands and cheeks.  Some of the older ones just shook their heads and muttered about Chinook causing trouble blowing through town on the wrong side of Christmas while others could do no more than just look up into the trees as if they might catch a glimpse of Chinook there and ask him what the heck he was thinking.  Some just celebrated one more day of t-shirt weather and didn’t think too much about it.  Between the slightly nervous energy of those who knew something was afoot and the slightly manic energy of the ones celebrating a few more precious days before pulling out the puffy coat, things were definitely and decidedly out of balance.  And Thanksgiving was starting to approach – without some signs of winter by Thanksgiving, cranberries don’t taste right and that’s the beginning of a very serious downhill slide into a less than stellar Yule experience.  We had a very serious problem on our hands.

More on Friday night…

Hannah and the Porcupine

I know I haven’t been in touch much since last year, but I took on a new role at work and things have been even nuttier than usual.  As most of you know, last year I was on the Anchorage Yule Moose team and just starting to consult with other teams from around the country and even around the world.  Did you know that crows in Europe aren’t all black?  Imagine my surprise when I heard someone call out to me in Raven – it’s one of the 12 languages I speak fluently and comes in handy up here in the frozen tundra.  I turned around to see a sleek gray vest across the usual black feathers.  The gentleman to whom I was speaking seemed to object slightly when one of his colleagues pointed out that he was a Carrion Crow who like to speak Raven to put on airs.  From my perspective, he was smart as a whip and a real help in solving that sticky puzzle in Prague.  

As usual, I’m rambling a bit, but I’ll try to stay on task here.  Since I last visited to share news of the world of Yule Engineering, I’ve been promoted to a Yule Rapid Response Team or YRRT (pronounced “yurt”).  The team is made up of Yule scientists across a number of different disciplines and we travel around the world to respond to crisis situations.  As you might imagine, there are emergency situations that actually threaten Christmas – these are quite serious and can involve several response teams working together.  There are also smaller threats throughout the winter that can compromise the inner warmth that keeps us all going during the cold and dark months.  Imagine, if you will, a storyteller with writer’s block, a starry sky that’s been behind clouds for months on end, a tone deaf town with no carolers – the list goes on and on.

A few of you were somewhat skeptical when we talked about Yule Sciences last year.  I hope that as a result of getting to know me and my work, your skepticism has lifted a little.  I’ve never personally had to get through a winter without the magic our integrated Yule approach creates, but I do know that there are those who can’t see it, feel it, smell it…or believe it.  If you’re still in that category, let’s talk more.  I wouldn’t want anyone I know to live through a winter in such a deprived state.  .

Back to the science.  In my new role as a YRRT member, I bring two really essential disciplines to the table – Light Sciences and Child Whispering.  Light Sciences may make sense to even the most skeptical among you.  We all know there are different wavelengths of light and that only a very small spectrum is actually visible to the human eye, though not all creatures are quite as limited.  We also know that the energy from the wavelengths not visible to us still has a profound impact – as with ultraviolet radiation, for example.  If we want to depart just a bit from what you humans consider the strictly scientific realm we can think about the emotional impact different colors have on us and that may be the easiest way to start understanding how I study light. 

A lot of what I do deals with lights in the sky and how they affect the collective sense of things for an entire population.  Let’s delve into this just a bit.  How does a harvest moon affect you?  What does it mean?  Why is a pink and purple sunset romantic?  And why is a shaft of nearly pure white light piercing through a break in the clouds inspirational?  We could even talk about how different qualities of light can be used to predict weather.  What farmer doesn’t know that purple clouds mean snow?  I don’t know how it is where you live, but I know our local weatherman would do better to get his nose out of the scope and just look outside.

I could bore everyone right into a long winter’s nap by describing all of the different tests and metrics and calculations, but here’s the point.  Light affects everything from how we feel to what our senses tell us, and if you’ve ever had a sunburn, you know that you can use your skin and your sense of touch to feel beyond the visible spectrum.  Light even has an influence on which direction the weather will turn.  No purple clouds, no snow.  It’s as simple as that – even the most pregnant cumulus won’t let go of a single flake if purples are missing from the spectrum.

That’s where our story really begins…

To really understand what went so terribly wrong for Porcupine, it’s helpful to know a little bit about snow.  The simplest way to think about it is that the further north you go, the more important snow becomes.  If you live closer to the equator, you get lots of full spectrum light in the form of sunshine.  Every degree of latitude further north takes you into longer and longer winter nights and less time in the sunlight.  This isn’t a bad thing, mind you.  Northern folk are the best singers, dancers and storytellers in the world because they know how to fill long winter evenings with light and energy.  The thing about snow, though, is that it it carries light, makes it dance, shifts its direction and purpose.  If you’re not quite sure what I’m talking about, Google Aurora Borealis or simply imagine a classic Christmas card image of a lighted tree on a snowy night.  Crisp, cold winter nights and blankets of snow are absolutely essential to the movement of light through a winter night.  And for north country folk who don’t get our their full spectrum light all in one place, the magic of individual reds and greens and violets goes a long way toward filling the world…and the heart…with light.

Now let’s consider Porcupine.  He’s nocturnal, and that can’t mean anything good in terms of him feeling rested and refreshed during a time of year when it’s night for 18 to 20 hours at a go.  He doesn’t get a pretty winter coat like the foxes and snowshoe hares do.  He doesn’t get to hibernate like the bears and he’s not long and lean and leggy to get through drifts of snow like we moose are.  And let’s face it – when was the last time you saw a cute picture of a porcupine stringing up Christmas lights?  It’s the racoons and squirrels and smaller birds that get that honor.  No, through the entire winter, Porcupine gets no attention, has no new pretty winter coat to wear and doesn’t even have the solace of sleeping through it all.  Here’s the worst part – your average porcupine has about an inch and a half of ground clearance and the first inch and a half of snow is on the ground by the end of October.  Not considered a warm and cuddly critter in the best of circumstances, porcupines can get downright cantankerous by the middle of December.

The other thing about porcupines is that we forget all about them.  So, when my YRRT team was called in to investigate a massive theft of purple along the west coast of Canada and up into Alaska, it never occured to us to consider porcupines as a threat to Yule security.  Let’s face it, they may not be the cuddliest of creatures, but unless you’re a Golden Retriever, they’re rarely troublemakers either.   

We first started watching the Purple situation carefully back in November.  Different YRRT’s monitor contributing factors across most of the human experience to try and predict problem spots where Yuletide Joy might be affected by something as simple as the inability in an entire community to smell cinnamon and nutmeg.  And in case you’re wondering, yes I am speaking from personal experience on that one.  A wolf of my acquaintance spends hours howling into the night checking the resonance of sound in the night air to assess shifts that could affect communication, mood, even weather.  A wolf howl consists of up to 12 harmonically related overtones, so they’re just as perfect suited to working with sound waves as moose are to working with the dream currents of small humans.  

But I digress again.  I suppose I’m skirting around talking about purple because it’s really quite complicated.  Purple, you see, is one thing but violet is quite another.  Purple pigment can be reproduced using blue and red whereas violet is a distinct spectral wavelength.  Feelings about purple can be complex as well – it’s the color of both royalty and passion.  Purple velvet drapes, for example, might make a human uncertain as to whether she was in a throne room or a brothel.  Bring to mind all the different purple flowers you know from the simplicity of a pansy to the tough tenacity of  a thistle (yum!!) to the grace of an orchid and that will give you an inkling of how complex it can be to monitor the behavior of purple.  To reinforce the feelings of hope, community, joy and so on that make up the yule spectrum, we work quite a bit with weather and seasons, so I’d like you also to imagine a color wheel.  If you haven’t looked at one for awhile, purple is across the wheel from green – just as green is a color that brings light and life into the world in spring, purple is a color that guides us safely into the dark of winter.  Simply put, it’s the Equinox color and without it, we’d be hard pressed to turn the corner from fall into winter.

I think that’s why we started seeing the signs in November.  At first, there was really no sign of fall coming to a close, at least not in the trouble spots we’d been monitoring.  Even as far south as Seattle, Portland and to some degree San Francisco, there have been bizarre alternations of lingering warm days with unseasonable cold.  Meanwhile up in the Far North, winter just didn’t come for awhile and then when it did, it was in the form of record snowfall – big fluffy piles of it all over the place.  It was almost as if there had been a blockage in the snow pipeline and when it blew free, all of a sudden huge sweeps and drifts dumped out all over the place.

This is, by the way, exactly what happened.

You may be wondering why on earth we were concerned about too much snow when I spent so much time last year investigating the theft of our Anchorage snow by the Wheedle of Seattle Space Needle fame (he’s been recruited, by the way, for the Pacific Northwest Division of the import/export YRRT.  The “products” they oversee movement on are a little different than what you might imagine inside a standard shipping container, but the idea is a lot like Port Authority.  

We were concerned not so much by the amount of snow as by the vast movement  of it.  It’s not just that there was a lot of snow – everyone launched into full Christmas spirit well before Thanksgiving and though no one realized it at the time, there’s always a price to pay for this.  It’s a little like getting drunk instead of tipsy – may be enjoyable for a bit, but the hangover is hell.  Well, the hangover did come and then some. 

Let’s go back to that clogged pipe idea for a moment.  Let’s suppose for a moment that some evil mastermind could actually hold back the snow, but his power failed him, the dam broke and everything came gushing through at once.  What kind of force would all that built up energy create?  I can tell you using the color wheel – a glut of purple stored up, hoarded if you will, in one place will, when freed, create a giant surge of energy that will pull green along for the ride.  In the case we’ve been following for these past weeks, the sudden tug on green even confused the poor Chinook.  Thinking from the huge swoosh of green energy that it might be spring, he woke up and started blowing…60 to 90 mph.  And that would be gale force warm wind sweeping across all that snow and sweeping across all those people who were feeling a little hung over from a glut of purple.  It was disastrous…and it was right before Christmas.   

Stay tuned for more from Hannah tomorrow!

Top Ten Among the Lost Souls

For the second year running, I scored a top ten finish in my October marathon.  It’s easy!  All you have to do is register in a race that either a) has fewer than 10 entrants or b) has fewer than 20 and enough first-timers to ensure some carnage in the second half.  I wasn’t necessarily thinking top 10 when I registered for the Lost Souls Marathon, but I had a good idea that it was a small enough field to at least ensure an age division awared for making it from the start to the finish in one piece.

There’s actually quite a bit of fodder in just the idea of finishing as the 5th of the Lost Souls.  Perhaps I should write nothing at all and just leave you to contemplate, as I did in some of the lonelier miles through the woods, exactly what this might mean.  As it happens, though, there was plenty of good entertainment throughout the day that I’m eager to share, so share I will.

The Lost Souls Marathon was actually part of a suite of races produced by my friend Mike Halko as part of Zombie Pirate Fest.  Runners are a little on the nutty side, race directors more so and Mike is so far off the charts that friends find it difficult to describe even a simple conversation with Mike without adding the phrase, “well you know, it’s just a Mike thing.”  He signs his e-mails with things like Mike-eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, Zombie Zulu and Race Director to the Undead.  He draws course maps on the backs of coffee house napkins while in an overcaffeinated haze (at least we all hope it’s caffeine) and anyone who can understand Mike-Speak well enough to know what the heck he is talking about is drafted immediately into service to help with one of his wonderful and zany race productions.

Yes, Virginia, there are zombies.  They leap from the woods at you in all the darkest corners of the first mile of the race.  As I caught sight of Mike in the morning mist zooming down the trail on his bike, I spotted also the wood stakes in the trailer behind his bike and wondered idly if one was destined to be driven through my heart later the in the race.  The stakes were attached to the directional and mile marker signs to be posted further down the trail but having been chased by zombies in the pre-dawn early miles of the race, my imagination was ready to follow darker paths.

The real party was the half marathon, but being a glutton for punishment and a big fan of early morning running, I decided on the 26.2 mile distance.  A couple dozen of us huddled out in the pre-dawn cold on the trail – the Lost Souls and then our farther gone trail companions, the 50K Be Damned runners.  Along with a few others, I disregarded the race instructions to run with a buddy.  First, I don’t know anyone who would get up with me to start a race before dawn in October in Alaska and next, I was a little taken aback by the race directors instructions about the self-supported course – “no feed stations, but if you get peckish, just rip off your running partner’s arm and chew on that for awhile.”  I thought it best to take my chances with the moose and bears.

I love the sight of headlamps bobbing along the trail – it somehow speaks of both adventure and comfort to me.  There’s a special kind of kinship among people who share the trail and doing so in light dim enough to warrant a headlamp draws little huddles of people closer together as your instincts kick in and you feel drawn to the safety and companionship of a small group.  It’s not a sense of danger so much, at least not if you live up here where a good deal of your time on the trail is spent in the dark.  It’s more an instinct to share resources – six headlamps light quite a bit of trail where one alone is little more than an annoyance.  I suppose it’s just as simple as the hope that light represents and hope shared, even in the form of an LED headlamp, is something worth celebrating.

This was a fairly fast pack with some truly exceptional runners leading the way – there’s an unmistakable grace and ease in the movements of a someone who was truly born to run that even dim pre-dawn light can’t hide.  I settled in with a group just one click faster than my most comfortable pace and drafted off a couple of big, solidly built guys.  You don’t have to say a lot to get to know people on a run – I know how their day went nearly as well as I can recount my own race.  None of us missed much about what the others were doing.  One of my favorite moments was at about Mile 10 when the big guys chased a young moose off the trail about 20 yards ahead of me and then ran on through, leaving me by myself to deal with the possibility of a now grumpy moose hanging out in the willows.  

Funny, never thought of just yelling “scat!” and lunging at one.  Maybe that’s only a good strategy for burly guys.

In the interests of getting this posted before next October, I’ll just hit the highlight film:

Cool air, sunny day, trail littered with birch leaves…

If you count moose like stars in the Mobil guide, and you know I do, this was a three moose outing…

BIG splashy windy high tide coming back along the Coastal Trail toward downtown – it sounded like river rapids…

Got to leave a runner half my age in my dust going up one of the hills – nothing for a young buck quite like getting “chicked” by an old lady…

Can I even describe how an hour of thick, blissful, indulgent solitude in the woods feels to someone who spends so much time in airports?

Really good blues band at the finish with just room enough in front of the stage to dance…

Good friends, old and new, none of whom I expected to see – hugs are really the best sort of surprise, especially when dispensed by those who love you enough to not care that you’re sweaty and covered in trail dust…

I always fail to describe what a marathon really is and why I do them.  I suppose I’ll just keep trying until I get it right, but with this one, a childhood memory keeps popping up that I think comes close.

The next generation up from me on my father’s side of the family all swim like fish.  The kids had a pool growing up and when my generation started feeding into the clan, my grandfather had a pool for us too.  I don’t swim gracefully unless I’m under water and I definitely don’t swim with technique or form or speed.  I can, however, go all day and I came by that ability simply because when I was a kid I couldn’t bear to be inside while I could hear any kind of splashing or yelling or giggling going on outside in the pool.  I’d get in there with my cousins until my legs trembled, until I swallowed half the pool, until I was so tired and had been in the water so long that I could still feel waves of it splashing against my skin long after I got out.  I would stay in the pool after 9:00 when I was young enough to have an 8:00 bedtime. 

Now that I’m a “grown up” and get to see kids play from a slightly different perspective, I know that most kids are that way about being in the water.  The thing of it that strikes me now, though, is that I grew up that way period.  Whether it’s the swimming pool or the high school marching band or the 5-star hotels where I’ve “worked” or any other area of play and creativity in my life, I just can’t bear the thought that one of my buddies might be out having fun without me.  That’s the marathon obsession in a nutshell.  If my buddies are out – and trust me, they’re all my buddies – I just can’t be anyplace other than on the trail.

So, if you’re a lost soul like me, I hope you’ve got a marathon in your sights.

Happy trails!

I’ll Take Mine in a Doggie Bag, Please!

I’ve heard distance runners and the even nuttier people who find it necessary to write about distance running talking about the emotional state – singular – of a runner in motion.  Maybe it’s singular simply because it’s too difficult to write about too many things at once or maybe it’s because other runners are just a little more focused than I am.  Mind you, I tend to nod my head in agreement with most of their observations.  Runner’s high?  Absolutely!  Mental stability of a two year old?  You betcha.  Zen-calm, totally accepting of all that is?  Well, I get that one less often, but sure.

What occurred to me on Sunday as I ran the Equinox trail…again…is that the entire marathon experience is really a bit too much.  It’s a kind of gluttony of the senses as you see and hear and experience more than you can recount afterward.  The physical effort and the emotionally charged energy of the people around you conspire to create an experience that is way over the top and self-indulgent in a way I don’t know that I’d allow myself in any other area of my life. 

You may be reading this long after I wrote it, but I can see you shaking your head.  I know, most people wouldn’t use the term “self-indulgent” to describe a marathon.  But I’m here to tell you, it is. 

So I was bopping along the trail somewhere in the vicinity of Mile 6 on Sunday, having already experienced several eye-popping views, the hysterical cheering of friends and strangers and an opportunity to commune with the reindeer when I had a thought:  “This is too much for me to digest in one sitting, I’ll just take mine in a doggie bag, please.” 

Just pack up my marathon in a go-box and I’ll slice it off in bite size chunks and polish it off all week, taking time to savor each morsel.  It seemed like a really good idea at the time in those early miles of the marathon with so much still ahead. 

When I started running, I thought I was slow.  That’s not a completely unjustified perception – every one of us is, after all, slower than someone else.  I’m starting to understand, though, that I’m not actually slow.  I’m easily distracted.  A few years ago, a Team In Training coach accused me of being a sandbagger and at the time, I was really offended.  “I’m doing my best!” I said.  He just laughed – “not even close.”  The overachiever in me was hurt and ashamed.  Now, at least on a good day, I wouldn’t sacrifice making conversation with the reindeer for the sake of picking up the pace.  And I certainly wouldn’t sacrifice one moment of seeing a friend’s grin out of the corner of my eye as we share the kinds of stupid jokes that are only funny in the context of 26.2 miles.

So as I headed a little further down the trail, I started thinking about that doggie bag.  Maybe this thing is more like Thanksgiving dinner.  You start out with homemade muffins and coffee in the morning, then taste and sample and test while delectables are cooking and baking and roasting all day long.  Finally, you sit down to the table knowing full and well that you’ll be putting a dollop of whipped cream on your pumpkin pie even when the pie itself barely fits in your belly. 

It’s like that – the experience is one to savor and there’s something to be said for sampling an overabundance on really special occasions.  I hope I never lose that feeling, the understanding that a day spent running with a good friend is an overabundance and a special occasion.

The Equinox Marathon is unique in any number of ways and anyone who has ever run it will be happy to give you a list – you may be sorry you asked.  It’s difficult and never really gets any easier.  It’s irresistible and pulls you back year after year, long after you know how your quads will feel for the rest of the week.  It captures your imagination and you entertain hopes of bounding through the Out and Back and cruising into the finish stronger and faster than the reality of your training and preparation would ever allow.

It really hit me on Saturday, though, why this race is unique for me and holds such a special place in my heart and mind.  Some communities have a meeting hall or town square – Fairbanks has the Equinox Marathon.  It’s my chance to see everyone, to give them sweaty hugs, to see all my peeps before snow flies and be sure that they’re well and have slogged their way through another year.  It’s really a way to touch everyone without being strange and creepy about it, although you may be reading this thinking “ick!” over the sweaty hugs.  My sister the dog lover would say that I need to run with my pack to make sure the pack is intact.  Doing that right before winter sets in makes an uncommon amount of sense.

The Equinox Marathon is like a year of births and deaths and weddings and gossip all rolled into one day.  Since I don’t like to dress up for weddings, it’s a much more efficient way of connecting with the people I care about.  I ran my slowest time yet on the Equinox course this year and yet the running of it was far and away the most powerful of the five I’ve run – and that’s saying a lot.  I wonder how I’ll feel when I run my 20th Equinox? 

So, no thank you to the doggie bag and bring on the extra helping of pumpkin pie!

Whales and Puffins and Otters, Oh My!

It’s been such an action-packed few weeks, I hardly know where to begin. Do I write about seeing puffins for the first time on a crystal clear day in Seward? Or about banging knees with two of my not-very-grown-up friends on the Mad Hatter’s Teacup ride at Disneyland? Maybe the more interesting giggle was the throaty laugh of sandhill cranes flying overhead on the Coastal Trail. In just a few short weeks, I’ve been on the run from Las Vegas to Seward to Fairbanks to Anaheim and while sleep has been in short supply, I have not wanted for friendship, connection and experiences that make me want to nudge the person next to me, saying “Look! Over there – you won’t believe what I just saw!”

A quick caveat before you read on – I do sometimes get carried away. In Disneyland on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, I jumped out from behind the wheel of the truly fine motor car asking my friend and colleague Amanda, “did you spin the steering wheel coming around the turns?” Looking puzzled, she said “I thought it was fake, right?” “Yes, exactly!” I exclaimed. I guess that’s the theme of this particular stretch of the journey – some of what has made me laugh and gasp with delight in the last few adventures has been very real while other moments have been pure flights of fancy. The alternation between the two has left my head spinning and seems to have gotten me unstuck. Imagination and absurdity, deep connection to places wild and wonderful, uplifting joy and heart-wrenching fear and loss – it’s not that I don’t have the words because I’ve been in too many places, it’s that I don’t have the words because I’ve been in too many places.

If my drawing skills were up to snuff, I’d make a map for you, but they’re not, so I’ll just ask you to close your eyes and imagine the trajectory lines created by recent travel – Las Vegas to Anchorage to Fairbanks to Anchorage. Short hop down to Seward and back, then Anaheim and I’m now somewhere over British Columbia on my way home. Even the round trip Anchorage to Anaheim went through Seattle one direction and Portland on the return trip. For those who might think of Seattle and Portland as one place (my sister and I used to call it the Specific Northwest), I’m here to tell you it just ain’t so. Even at the level of spending an hour in the airport terminal, you get to experience two very distinct cultures in Portland and Seattle, something akin to siblings who share some common experiences and patterns of speech and thought but who are so different as to make you wonder whether one of the pair is actually a changeling or the offspring of the postman.

Now that you’ve got that set of lines etched in, zoom in a little and pencil in the ground-level scurrying. The more action packed my life is, the more I cling to the ritual of the daily run. Add some more squirreling around for running errands, schlepping things back and forth at races and zipping around road closures to find lost duckies on a marathon course. Finally, add in a layer of unnecessary back and forth created by the fog of fatigue and the fact that there have been several stretches lately when I’ve counted myself lucky to remember my own name, let alone the reason I made a trip to the grocery store. Right now, I’m thinking Spirograph – big wheel, little wheels, different color pens. There are, of course, a few of those little shaky spikes jutting out from the drawing where I got going too fast and lost control of the pen and wheel. Was it just my Spirographs that had those?

So with that as background, on to the people – Whales and Puffins and Otters, Oh My! The wild things in this story really don’t need description. As soon as I say “moose”, you conjure up images and feelings and, if you’re fortunate…or unfortunate…enough to have had direct experience with moose, you also conjure those up. Everyone has a frame of reference, even if that frame is summed up in a Bullwinkle cartoon. Just for the record, I do consider the wild things in this story to be important people, teachers of the lessons I’ve learned. Forgive me for dipping a little toe into the waters of spirit and inner life that I normally leave as better experienced than discussed.

The human people in the tale of the last few weeks are about as varied and unique as the puffins and whales and otters that set me on this track. I wonder whether I need to change the names – or do I need to leave them be so that you can experience a flash of recognition when you meet?

I’ll start with Ivan, name most emphatically not changed to protect either innocence or guilt. A trip all the way to Seward just to see Ivan and have a chat over a crepe would be travel time and miles well invested. And I mean that regardless of whether you happen to live in Anchorage, Albuquerque or Albany. A trip halfway around the world just to see Ivan would be a journey well worth taking.

Ivan is from Belgium and was a deep sea diver. He doesn’t dive now and because of a back injury, he tells you that it will be four minutes in the back prep room of his farmhouse kitchen to slice the strawberries for your crepe. “One minute to slice, one minute and a half each way to pretend I can still walk”, he says, and the mild observation is absolutely without bitterness or regret. Ivan is an everyday guru. He knows about parenting and community and building log houses. He knows about love and fear and hardship and about the people who through love make the fear and hardship so much easier to bear. He has an opinion or two. He’s raised a large family, several not related by blood, and has rescued more duckies than I’ve yet met. He’s an expert on the virtues of Nutella. And the thing that’s most extraordinary about Ivan is that you have to be awake and wide open to see him at all. He met us for an hour and treated us with deep respect, love and kindness yet the people at the table next to us missed him entirely. Their loss.

Come to think of it, why don’t we have tour books that talk about the people you need to go visit? Why is it food and buildings and spots on the map when the best stories are all about the people who really make up the fabric of a place? Imagine if your annual copy of Milepost had notes in it about all the characters along the way…wow!

I can’t think of anything to follow Ivan, though I think what’s most coming to mind right now is that I”m doing well to capture event a fraction of what I experience there’s literally no way to capture this stuff. As I move this along trying to get it out of the drafts folder, I’m sitting in another airport watching more human drama unfold. Imagine the scene in a movie where they shoot the moving walkway in an airport as a visual rendering of transition and usually of a journey taken too fast – the scenery blurring by at a speed that’s too fast for feet. It’s like that – stories breezing by me all the time, big things in people’s lives happening every moment of every day and even with my closest friends, I often see only a glimpse and a blurred one at that. Maybe that’s why I need anchors and focal points. Maybe that’s why we all do.

Here’s to your daily adventures in the hopes that today at least, they involve more Ivan and less anonymous blur.

Cranes Over Stonehenge

I live about a 6 minute run from the Tony Knowles Coastal Trail.  If you’ve been to Anchorage, you may know that the Coastal Trail is one of the most beautiful and highly acclaimed recreational multi-use trails in the country.  If you’re a runner or skier and you’ve been to Anchorage, you have undoubtedly laid down some miles (or kilometers) on the Coastal Trail.  For those of us lucky enough to live within walking/biking/running/skiing distance of the trail, it represents the single biggest quality of life bonus about living in Anchorage – the ability to get out (and to feel like you’re far, far out) within moments of ending your workday, finishing a chore or closing the books on whatever mundane daily life bits come between you and having fun.

When the weather gods gift us with a fresh blanket of new snow, I can literally ski from my front door to the Coastal Trail.  During the day, I can gaze out at Sleeping Lady huddled under her blanket of white, hair fanned out beside her.  On a clear day, I can see Denali and Foraker.  At night, I can see moonlight skipping along the water and lighting up the silty ice like diamonds.  Apparently, the moose like the views as well – it’s unheard of to be on the Coastal Trail more than two or three days in a row without seeing a moose.  Cleaning your skis almost always involves scraping off a little of the birch and willow roughage that keeps the moose regular and their output in the form of nuggets.

There’s a wide variety of bird life along the Coastal Trail.  Ravens figure prominently near Point Woronzof, where they like to play and show off their aerobatic skills in the updrafts along the bluff.  Eagles like to hunt there too, at least when the gangs of Ravens aren’t harrassing them just to prove they can. 

Closer to Westchester Lagoon, there are ducks and geese and loons.  On the way to Kincaid, little redpolls flit around, dashing from tree to tree in an aerial shell game, always trying to mislead the untrained eye as to where they will finally land. 

Then there are the magpies, looking something like the uptown tuxedoed version of their cousins the bluejays.  They seem to love darting in at eye level right in front of you, showing off their flashy blue and green overtones.  I’ve heard that magpies are smarter still than the ravens and to see them work together, I’d believe it. 

There are so many more and the real birders can tell you who they all are.  I only know the ones who most like to play on or around the trail. 

There’s nothing quite like a crane, though, to stop you in your tracks in awe and admiration.  There’s such grace and majesty about them and something ancient, almost pre-historic at the same time.  Seeing a crane in flight sweeps any other thought or image clear out of my mind.  The thing of it is, though, that it’s relatively rare to see a crane in Anchorage.  There are huge flocks of them in Fairbanks and seeing them prepare and then eventually set off on their southward migration is amazing, but here we just don’t see very many. 

One day last year, I spotted 9 of them feeding on the mudflats along Cook Inlet.  The sight was so out of context that there were several near misses on the trail as runners and dog-walkers and cyclists did a double take – “Are those…cranes??”  It seemed impossible, yet there they were, picking their way along the mudflats exposed by the low tide.  All along the trail that afternoon, we all greeted each other with the same question – “did you see the cranes?”  They stayed for a time, but never got as close to the shore and the trail again as on that one afternoon.

I’ll come back to the cranes in a moment, but first we need to talk about jumble ice…

It takes a while for all the ice in Cook Inlet to break up.  It’s never frozen solid and in the winter, you can easily see the tides come and go by watching the huge blocks of ice move along with the current.  At low tide, it’s stunning to see them all pile up – they look deceptively small moving along with the tide but when they pile up, the scope and scale are a bit more obvious.  And sound when they collide – WOW!

As things start to warm up in spring, the big chunks break up into smaller chunks and the surface of each melts in the sun and then refreezes overnight in the cooler temperatures.  Over the course of a few weeks, the jagged blocks – “jumble ice” – smooth out and become a little more rounded.  It’s like watching stones age and wear down under wind and water, but in the hyperspeed of the time-lapse photography.  You really don’t notice the interesting shapes at first because by April, it’s the same piles of ice you’ve been looking at for nearly six months now.  But then one day, the angle of the sun or moon hits it just right and the same old gray, silty ice you’ve been looking at for weeks hoping to see more water soon becomes something else entirely.  In the dim moonlight, figures emerge out on the mudflats – monoliths, circles, enclosures, gates, portals to…is that how the cranes got here?

And so it is that on an otherwise dull and dirty gray spring day in Anchorage magic happened and we got Cranes over Stonehenge.  I don’t have words to describe the two mysteries colliding in the most unlikely of places – it stopped me in my tracks repeatedly over the course of three or four days until the ice melted down and shifted a bit more and Stonehenge was no more.  As if on cue, the cranes disappeared into the woods and now they’re back there in the marshy bits, taunting us with their laughing call. 

I know I’m prone to flights of fancy, but I promise this one wasn’t just me.  I know by the narrowly avoided crashes on the trail that others were captivated too.  And I really hope that our cranes aren’t just taking a layover on their way to Fairbanks.  It would be great to have another summer of ”are those…cranes?”

Chicken in Galoshes

Occasionally, a non-running friend will ask me what I think about when I run.  There’s never a quick and easy answer to that in part because there are long, beautiful, blissful stretches with no thinking whatsoever and in part because the pathways in my brain opened up by a run have very little resemblence to what most people call “thinking”. 

My run this morning started out, as many do, with a simple “aaaaaaah” sound filling the empty spaces in my skull.  It’s a uniquely satisfying sensation to feel your brain uncramp at the same time your lungs fill with air.  Aaaaaaaah.  The next “thoughts” are more along the lines of the body asserting itself and wanting to record feedback.   Ouches or hissing sounds may fill thought space as the physical elements that aren’t quite aligned on any given day make themselves known.  There are some glorious sensations that assert themselves into full conscious recognition too – the feeling of cold skin warming up with bloodflow, the tingling of muscles remembering what to do, the unintentional acceleration that’s the runner’s equivalent of a hungry woman gobbling food.  As the run begins to unfold, thoughts range from ”mmmmmh – nice” to “wheeee!”  to “WUHOO!!!”  And they’re still not thoughts exactly, more just impromptu expressions of apprecation as the body finds itself completely in charge for the only time all day.

On a good day, this is where conscious thought stops for a little while.  You notice things such as wildlife, wind on your face and random human drama, but none of it engages you enough to get a train of thought rolling down the tracks.  I suppose if you were of a New Age persuasion, you’d call this “being in the moment.”  That description of this kind of awareness is a bit like saying chocolate is sweet – we all know what is meant, but it doesn’t describe anything at all.  I’ve heard the term “Zen Runner” quite a bit lately and that touches on it, but what we’re really talking about here is a nice little slice of time outside of time when the word Nirvana is fully understood through every cell and every fiber of your being.  It’s heaven on earth, reunion, you name the spiritual target – that thought-free zone is IT.  

There is actually a time during a run when loopy little daisy chains of thoughts start forming, but they’re not linear and because they’re springing out of that nice Zen space, they’re not coming from ego or conscious self.  It’s all random association and processing of whatever flotsam your subconscious feels like tossing to the surface that day.

Between 11:30 on Saturday night, Alaska Standard Time and 4:00 on Sunday afternoon, Eastern Standard Time, I travelled approximately 3,630 miles, and that would be just the air miles.  I get a few bonus miles for the mad dashes from terminal 1A to terminal 3X on those funny moving walkways that are an invitation to vertigo.  In those miles, I flew into the dawn and then back into a sunset.  I flew through two snowstorms and a thunderstorm, over big cities, mountains and open fields.  I sat next to a cast of characters that could easily populate a sitcom for several hit seasons.  Where I’m heading with all this is that over the course of a journey so long, you experience a great deal and yet life moves so quickly that pausing to actually understand or appreciate any of it is a near impossibility.  I think this really started to sink in on the shuttle to the hotel where I was seated with a group of private jet pilots who were talking about flying one of their CEO’s into Haiti.  Hearing what they had witnessed and experienced as we watched the perfect suburban homes in White Plains roll past the windows was almost more of a disconnect than my poor exhausted psyche could tolerate just then. 

The thing about the run, though, is that I don’t think about the plight of people in Haiti while I’m running.  I think about chicken in galoshes so that my heart has room to hold the people in Haiti.

Back up a sec.  Chicken in galoshes? 

One of the stops on my trip was a meeting where I got to hang out with a bunch of computer geeks.  I’m not talking about system admins here – I’m talking about the people who don’t show up on any contact or distribution list, the ones we refer to when we cop out and say “no promises, but I’ll talk to the developers about that.”  I actually feel a little tingle of privilege and honor that I know the names of some of these people without names. 

So our work group was chewing away at a problem that involved some sticky bits of business process, some interpersonal and systems interfaces that either don’t exist or don’t work and to make matters worse, no one at the table was even speaking the same language.  At the point it became clear to me that we were all talking about the same thing but using different language to describe it, I had to say something.  ”Hold on!” I said.  “I think we’ve got the classic problem with the three blind men and the elephant.”  One of the developers jumped right in:  “No, it’s way worse than that, it’s chicken in galoshes.”  Huh?  Come to find out that what he meant by that is that the object of our study was in and of itself absurd, making any of our assumptions or discussion about it yet further off the mark.

So here’s the problem with chicken in galoshes.  I invite you to imagine a chicken in galoshes.  Now see what I’ve done?  It’s like a song in your head – you won’t be able to rid yourself of the image now.  The only hope is to replace it with a different chicken in other shoes.  Worse?  Could be, just like the endless croon of Barry Manilow replacing the sickly sweet of Donny and Marie.   

The thing about imagining a chicken in galoshes is that it so perfectly expresses the utter absurdity of any given day in the life of…who?  You, me, Aunt Martha?  The phrase and the images that flow along with it, though are the perfect expression of both what I think about when I run and why I do.  A random thought or image can take miles and miles to unwind and in those miles lies the temporary release from all the very real troubles in the world.  We need a break from them, I think, to restore our full compassion and humanity.  Chicken in galoshes could well save the world – it’s really no more absurd than some of the other strategies we’ve tried.

Communication by Casserole

I’ve been living up to the bonontherun moniker lately, dashing around from place to place, most recently Paris and then London.  There’s really no way to describe everything from the trip, so let’s shortcut it all.  Just close your eyes, think “Paris in April” and let your imagination run wild.  Food played a major part in the trip.  In Paris, I stocked up right away on bread, cheese and fruit and really only ate one meal the entire time I was there.  The rest was grazing, with chocolate croissants figuring heavily in the mix.  Perhaps it was the croissants that inspired my very rusty college French to return to service without complaint.  There was a fun moment in London when I was able to help a lost and befuddled French couple find their way to the Houses of Parliament.

The food in London was just as good as in Paris.  I had a smoked haddock pie with a tomato and feta salad at the cafe in the National Galleries that will stand in memory just as surely as the Cezanne that followed.  Sacrilege, I know, but it was a really good meal with more tomatoes assembled on one lunch plate than I’ve seen in total the last six months.  Pardon me while I close my eyes and let my imagination run wild…

Perhaps food stands out as the peak experience on this trip because I was fed in so many ways – history, art, long walks, beautiful spring days and most important of all, connection.  While living in Alaska is not exactly the isolation it once was, it still stands true that we’re a long way from anywhere up here.  If the norm is seven degrees of separation, we’re only about a degree an a half from each other up here and the sense of community can be both powerful and occasionally overwhelming.  As interesting as our local color may be, though, we’re but one small tile in a complex mosaic.  Conversations struck up on the trip with complete strangers far from my normal stomping grounds reminded me that there is, after all, no such thing as a complete stranger.  The effort of speaking in French, the experience of smelling different flowers and eating different foods, the empathy felt with the history of another place – it’s all connection every bit as tangible as a touch on the shoulder or a hug and air kisses.

I bought a book on the London Blitz and read it on the flight home.  I remember this from my time in France in college as well – the need to understand the incomprehensible, to not forget.  There were several photos of rubble and smoke, of people somehow both dazed and determined, that were taken on spots where I had stood the day before on a rare sunny day.  I still remember my host family in France all those years ago pointing out the ruins of a building still standing watch, a jumbled stone and brick reminder of our essential choice to be either destroyers or creators.  Was it waiting to be rebuilt or hoping not to, wishing to stand as a monument and reminder of dark times and of the hope and determination that shone through?

On the way home, I got the news that someone very close to me has been diagnosed with cancer.  I imagine more details will come forth as she makes her choices about how private or public she wishes her journey to be.  I know many people reading this have experienced the so-called “cancer journey” as one of the many travelers along the road – patient, friend, family, supporter, caregiver.  I understand why we use the word “journey” to describe what happens, but I’ve never really liked it.  It’s one of the things I get angry about from time to time.  Confronting a cancer diagnosis is, on a day to day basis, more like being a refugee than it is like a stroll down a country lane.  The word “journey” is far too tame.  That being said, it does describe the sense of separation, other-ness, disorienation.  It also can describe the hope, strength, victory and joy that comes along the way. 

Sensing ambivelence?  Yep, that’s it in a nutshell.  People huddled in those makeshift London bomb shelters had concerts, reading groups, plays and created a whole life around running underground each night only to emerge in the morning and survey the altered landscape.  The average oncology waiting room has some remarkable similarities – puzzles, cheerful banter, knitting projects, laughter – yes, LAUGHTER and above all buckets of hope and heaps of love and support.  Fear and hope and determination all bundled into one confusing package. 

I know that at one time I had a very different reaction to the news that someone in my circle had cancer.  I have vague memories of what that might have been – wanting to know more, fearing too much knowledge, nervousnous about knowing what to do or say.  Now I know more and my response is more in the form of images.  I have snapshots from other journeys that absorb a little of the shock, that give me a bit more of a roadmap for the trip ahead.  I know now that a cancer diagnosis is a down the rabbit hole experience, so I’m no longer surprised when the Mad Hatter shows up.  Reading these words, I wonder if they sound cold.  They’re not – it’s just the opposite.  I now know that there’s an endless supply of real understanding and compassion in the strange places we need to go with each other and I respond now with the emotional equivalent of simply packing up a duffel bag to hit the road.  Based on what we know now, this particular trip is going to be along a shorter and easier route and will take us to a really good place, but I’ve packed my rinse out in the sink, quick dry pants just in case we all need to be flexible. 

I’ve gotten better at understanding what to do, how to help.  I can even make a few suggestions:  Follow through on offers of help and don’t suggest anything you’re not prepared to deliver.  Ask questions, ones that make it clear you want to listen.  Allow room for fear and anger as well as for hope and strength – both have to be expressed.  There are hundreds of little things you can do to help, most of them completely mundane and all of them more helpful a month or two down the road than they are right now.  Offer to clean house or do laundry or give rides to appointments and after you’ve done this once, make a note on your calendar to offer again in two weeks or a month.  Don’t make assumptions about feelings or progress or outcomes – it’s possible to feel choked off  by the helpful and hopeful when what is really needed is a tearful breakdown and release of the pressure.  Most important of all – understand that the equal footing we come to expect in all our relationships and interactions breaks down completely under the weight of cancer treatment, or any other major life challenge for that matter.  Don’t expect things to be equal – they’re not.  The person you’re supporting is more important than you are, at least for the time being.

As I started to allow the images and feelings to flow after getting this news, one bit became a magnet for my anger and frustration.  No matter how many times someone you love tells you “I have cancer”, the anger and disbelief always comes - I like to break pencils when it happens.  Anyway, the detail that jumped out and got me going on a rant was the perrenial favorite response to crisis, the casserole.  What on earth makes us think that tuna noodle will help heal anything at all?

As a symbol of community and fellowship, the casserole is also confusing - it delivers mixed messages.  When I moved to Ohio for grad school, neighbors brought me casseroles to welcome me.   We bring casseroles to celebrate new homes and new births but we also tote them along in times of trouble.  Thankfully, jello molds are not as common as they once were, but I clearly remember experiencing a sort of sick fascination with a particularly wobbly and cheery jello mold with mandarin oranges slices and marshmellows presented in pride of place at the center of the table at a wake.  Is there a secret code to all this that I just don’t have the language skills to interpret?  Does tuna noodle celebrate something positive and hopeful while baked ziti is ambivalent and pea salad seeks to heal deep pain?  I’ve never figured it out, but I can still feel that awful moment watching the red jello with the slices of what looked like blood orange jiggling in the middle of the table.  It was like something out of a horror movie – I actually had to step back and shake the cobwebs out of my head to realize it was just food.

No one has offered casseroles yet in response to this particular crisis – it’s just typical of where my mind likes to go when it needs to stretch its legs.

This really all comes back around to people being good-hearted and trying to take care of each other when we don’t know what to do.  We communicate our affection for each other by fixing up favorite dishes or baking treats and we celebrate special occasions with food done just so.  If I were more British, would I be able to withstand anything life dishes out by taking a cup of tea?  Perhaps Starbucks has influenced the modern American version – so many of the most difficult conversations in my life have been soothed by conducting them over a latte. 

So the poor casserole became the topic of my angry and powerless ranting over the course of a couple of days.  What do we think we’re doing?  Why don’t people understand what’s really needed?  What kind of idiot thinks that food made with Cream of Mushroom soup as a sauce is the correct response to a really big and complicated problem?  For all my knowledge and experience, I was behaving in the classic way that we all do – sick with worry for someone I love, I had to find a target to blame so I could unleash my fury.  My duffel bag is packed, you see, but as I haven’t been asked to hit the road yet, I have to do something.  Getting on my soapbox for a nice, satisfying rant felt pretty darned good.  It felt good, that is, until a friend pointed out the error in my logic.

The casserole, it seems, has a whole symbolism I’m as yet too young to have experienced.  My friend, who has also been down the cancer rabbit hole, understood my need to focus on something trivial and therefore understood the rant.  He also understood the need for laughter and told me about his mother.

Statistically, we all understand that women tend to live longer than men, but how often do we really think about how that all plays out?  If I’m 80 or more, as my friend’s mother is, and I’ve lost my husband, what do I do about companionship of the opposite sex?  Since I’m assuming that my fundamental nature won’t mysteriously change as I breeze past 75, I assume I’d want to give my grief time to heal and that I’d eventually start testing the waters with a little light flirting.  Apparently, my ideas about this are right in line with what my friend’s mom is up to.  Some time has passed and healing has happened – now it’s time to dip a toe back into the pond.  Here’s the rub – many, many women in her situation and far too few men.  Here’s where the casserole comes in. 

The first phase of the casserole conversation is exactly what we all expect – sympathy in the form of soupcan sauce food.  When you’re in your 80′s it appears that losing a husband rates a tuna noodle or perhaps a sheppard’s pie or a chicken pot pie.  All of the women in her community have been schooled by the women who came before them to show affection and sympathy and support in this way.  I even do it and am in fact so well schooled in baked sympathy that I intuitively understand that blood orange jello mould is in poor taste. 

The part that got me going, though, that brought the laughter bubbling back up through my fear-choked throat, was this:  Apparently the really good casseroles only come out when an older gentleman has lost his wife.  Now we’re talking lasagna and stroganof and generations-old secret recipes for warm, creamy, spicy delectibility.  Dessert, of course, is included.  The poor guy doesn’t stand a chance surrounded by the siren song of “food, glorious food!” fashioned by temptresses who have invested a lifetime in perfecting their favorite recipes.

I’m grateful to my friend on a number of counts:

For knowing that laughter doesn’t actually get your mind off things – it gets your feet back under you so you can focus again, but now in a positive way.

For opening my mind to a new perspective on the much-maligned casserole.

Perhaps most important of all, for giving me a leg up on the day I may want to be the most tempting of the octagenarian sirens – I’ll be putting a little more effort into my green chili enchiladas and blueberry pie – you never know when they might come in handy.

Royal Pigs at the Sunrise Cafe

If you’re ever on the Sterling Highway in Cooper Landing, take time to stop at the Sunrise Café for a buffalo burger.   The coffee is good, the conversation better and if you’re lucky enough to be there when the summer tourists aren’t, you can also enjoy a bit of local wit and wisdom.  The coffee will warm your hands, but the people will warm some harder to reach places.

The Sunrise was built at the same time as the highway, in the early 50’s.  It fits all the basic requirements of a modern day roadhouse – good spot right off the road with eye-popping beauty all around, lodging, gas, plenty of good hot coffee, people who will chat if you’re so inclined and leave you alone if you’re not.  The café menu has no mochas or lattes and only a small token handful of “upscale” items.  Chipotle is misspelled, the fries are marvelously greasy and burgers have American cheese instead of cheddar. 

A century ago, I would have relied on carefully placed roadhouses to ensure my safety and in fact my survival as a traveler.  It’s unlikely that I would have been traveling alone and even traveling in the company of others, my gender would have assured me of an uncommon roadhouse luxury – a room of my own.  Of course, that room might only have been a corner near the stove with a curtain drawn across, but deluxe accommodations still compared to the men’s bunks. 

The Sunrise Café is a roadhouse run by women, one in particular by the name of Sue.  The red and black plaid flannel and gum boots don’t quite square with the collection of Betty Boop salt shakers, but there you have it.  Welcome to Alaska.

The collection of salt and pepper shakers at the Sunrise actually branches out far beyond Betty Boop.  My table featured black bears and the adjacent table had roosters with a matching lamp.  Strolling around the café looking at the eclectic collection, I was reminded of my family’s turkeys – a joke gift to grace the table of the unwed daughter without children.  My sister and I started bidding for the turkeys in our early twenties, each wanting to outdo the other for black sheep status.  I wish I knew what happened to the truly hideous turquoise turkeys – they would have been perfect for the Sunrise and I suspect Sue would have appreciated their pedigree.

Salt and pepper sets meeting Sue’s rigorous tableware standards were in use throughout the restaurant while other more delicate items were in a shadowbox display.  There was a moose with a fly rod standing in a boat and a pair of hogs (she had lipstick and a leather bikini bra) on a Harley.  Sue doesn’t actually remember how the collection got started, just that she had one pair of odd salt and pepper shakers and then before she knew it, there was this “thing.”  Customers give them to her all the time now and she recently had a good looking 35 year old man come by and ask if he could swap out her Betty Boop set.  Apparently his thousand plus collection of Betty Boop memorabilia doesn’t include anything like Sue’s salt and pepper set. 

There’s even a clinic for injured ceramics – a box under the counter lovingly labeled “Sue’s Clinic.”  I was sad to see two pair of moose in there but glad to see that they were getting the best standard of care available. 

Just after I put in my order (buffalo burger with American, no onions) three old women came in and headed straight toward what was clearly “their” table.  They had just been snowbirding in Arizona and had brought back a pair of pigs in capes, royal pigs with crowns and jewels.  The new arrivals were quickly filled and promptly installed on a nearby table next to the pigs in underwear.  The royal male pig in his purple cape seemed strangely appropriate stationed next to the pot bellied pig in polka dot boxers scratching his butt. 

OK, a bit of creative license – there may not have been actual polka dots on the boxers, but I swear I don’t make this stuff up.

As I watched the three ladies order their pie and coffee and settle in for a nice Saturday afternoon chat, I found myself wondering how long they had been friends.  They had a way with each other – a perfect balance of lively chatter and companionable silence.  It made me feel safe and content just being in their presence, or was it the truly superior buffalo burger that made me feel  just so?

They were so different – one in a slightly fussy embroidered pink sweater trimmed in satin ribbon, another in a purple and turquoise tie-dye t shirt under a very lived in blue fleece.  The third was wearing all American colors, literally head to toe red white and blue but for the gray sleeves of a sweatshirt popping out from under the cuffs of her jacket.  I was just thinking “Eddie Bauer catalog” when I saw the label flash from the back of her jacket. 

There were three pies available at the Sunrise today – peach, blueberry and apple.  The three aunties, as I had started to think of them, were careful not to order the same thing.  For some reason, it was important to them to get all three types of pie represented on the table.  It wasn’t that they sampled or shared, just a need to strike pie harmony.

An odd thought crossed my mind when Sue brought out the generous slices of pie.  Could I match the woman with the pie?  It seemed obvious that tie-dye with unruly curls would be blueberry, carefully coiffed pink would be peach and all-American girl would be apple.  Too obvious?  I wasn’t able to get a glance at all three plates without appearing rude, but I know I got Ms. Clearly Blueberry right.  You could call it a lucky guess, but I know a kindred spirit when I see one.

Lest you think that there were no adventures in this adventure, let me just say that there’s no way to even begin describing what I saw and experienced today on my trip to Kenai, so I’ll just put all of that in the category of things you have to do for yourself and not settle for the armchair version through me.  There was one particularly magic moment when a bald eagle swooped down about 15 feet in front of the car, right at eye level.  I don’t think it’s much of a flight of fancy to say he was showing off for me. 

So I’m writing about roadhouses instead of eagles and moose, about slices of pie instead of swirling snow eddies and frosted trees.  It may be that I no longer need a roadhouse as a safe place to come in from the cold after each day of travel, but I do still need one to punctuate my journey. 

Next time you’re on the Sterling Highway, stop by to pay Sue a visit.  It may be a long way to travel for a hamburger, but I know it will be worth the trip.

Do You Know Where Your Suitcase Has Been?

My big red roller bag went AWOL this week.  While I normally would have just accepted the fact that lost luggage is an irritating but fairly minor obstacle in the adventure of life, when my bag and I were reunited I saw the telltale signs – sand in the wheels, a popped strap, a new smear that smelled suspiciously of coconut.  How do you prepare for this moment?  What questions do you ask without seeming like you’re “that person” suspiciously questioning your luggage?  Are you reading too much into the situation, or do the telltale signs point in the direction you’ve always feared?  Do you know where your suitcase has been?

When I checked in for Flight 62 to Juneau on Thursday morning, everything seemed to be going according to plan.  I loaded up Big Red with all the usual supplies needed for a Team In Training Info Meeting – shirts, registration forms, pens, brochures and a smattering of purple bling.  The bag and I rolled out of the house together and headed for the airport.  At check in, Big Red weighed in at 50 pounds 4 ounces, but that’s really only one t-shirt over the limit, so I never dreamed it would cause the rebellion that followed.

I waved Big Red off down the conveyor belt and with a caffeinated jaunt in my step, pivoted around and headed for security.  50 minutes and a carmel latte later, I was in the air on my way to Juneau.  Thursday was bright, clear and cold and the flight was breathtaking – some of the most beautiful scenery I’ve yet seen in a land known for its eye-popping glory.

The first signs of trouble came when I landed in Juneau and didn’t see my big red fireman’s bag rolling around the bend at baggage claim.  I was mildly concerned about doing an info meeting that evening without supplies, but it never even crossed my mind to be concerned beyond that.  I have to confess here to a bit of a rookie maneuver – on impulse I had tucked my puffy coat into Red’s top pocket and was now without a coat in temps just a touch below zero but 30 mph winds that drove things solidly into the “brace yourself before you go outdoors” range.  My big bright Andean sweater, snuggly indoors, wouldn’t do much for me against the winds.  But still, the bag would probably come in on the afternoon flight, right?

Here’s where the fun really began and during the search for Big Red, I learned more than I ever wanted to know about how bags disappear.  Red is no dummy and even before I saw beach sand in his wheels, I suspected that he might have been just clever enough to work the system. 

You know the stick together tags the airlines put on your bags?  Visualize yourself pulling one off the handle of your luggage when you return home from a trip.  Not easy, is it?  That’s what makes me think Big Red had a partner in crime helping facilitate his escape.  He travels a lot – does he have luggage handler friends on the ramp in the same way I know all the gate agents and flight attendants?  I know the answer, and I wonder just which one of the burly characters in the yellow safety vests helped plan the caper.

However the tag came off, it did, and that allowed Red to step off the radar screen and roam freely around the Anchorage airport.  We do know he never got to Juneau and during the time we spent trying to figure out whether he flew through to Sitka or Seattle, he had plenty of time to roll onto another trailer and be loaded onto another flight.  I’ve heard you can make it to Hawaii for a day trip – just have to route through Seattle either coming or going to get around the Tuesday/Thursday schedule.  Big Red knows the schedules as well as I do…but no, I’m being suspicious again and I really should just trust my bag.

I won’t bore you with all the details of the two day search for Red, but I gleaned some fascinating knowledge through the helpful comments of the Alaska Airlines baggage staff in Juneau.  Here are a few of the real gems:

“Seattle is a big airport, you know.  Your bag could be anywhere.”

“We didn’t tell you it was on the flight, we just said the flight was coming in – there’s no guarantee of that, you know.”

“We don’t know where your bag is.  In fact, you probably know more than we do at this point.”

“I’m not sure how they do this, I’m just filling in and it’s really kind of guesswork.”

“We know where the bag is when someone calls to say they’ve found it.”

I also am left with lingering doubt because I never did learn what a TTY is.  TTY’s seem to be the key communication piece in finding lost bags, yet no one seems to know what they are.  Totally Treasonous Yardwaste?  Tracking, Tracing and YoYoing?  With all the other doubt and uncertainty, I really need some help with this TTY thing – it’s putting me over the edge.

OK, deep cleansing breaths and back to the Bag.  I’m dreading having “the talk” with Big Red, so I’m not sure of anything at all, but here’s what I think happened:

Red went AWOL on Thursday morning and hopped a flight to Lihue.  I think there was a stroke of defiance in the move, as to say “Sane people occasionally take a weekend off and go to Hawaii to blow off some steam.  I’m outta here and I suggest you do the same!”  Was it the last 4 ounce t-shirt that put him over the edge or was it simply being packed up yet again with work supplies rather than bikinis and board shorts?

Once freed from his tag and enroute to the islands, Red set his mind on surf and sand, even plotting to use my puffy coat as a beach blanket.  The seashells in the stash pocket are a dead give away and I’m pretty sure that feather poking me this morning is the umbrella from a tropical drink rather than just a really large feather in the down. 

Knowing that I would be back late Friday night, Red knew he could grab a flight back to Anchorage via Seattle and be on the 6:30 from the Emerald City, landing in Anchorage at 9:13.  Even with a headwind, he’d beat the Juneau flight by just enough to pull off the innocent look and the appearance that he’d been in Anchorage the whole time.  He even had his partner in mayhem put him in “lockup” so it would look like he had just been abandoned in baggage claim for two days.  All fine and good, Red, but what about the cocunut suntan oil?

So where do I go from here?  Do I need to take Red on vacation?  Is it a climate thing?  It was cold and windy in Juneau this week – maybe he knew and just couldn’t deal with more cold and biting winds.  Should I have fixed his broken wheel?  Can I still make it up to him? 

I know this sounds like the ravings of a lunatic (or of a guilty conscience) but I rely on Red and I can’t imagine what would happen if this prank were repeated.  Imagine a Team In Training event weekend without puff paint and purple sharpies – it is just too horrible to consider.

So if anyone out there has advice on how to handle this kind of broken trust and doubt in an otherwise sound relationship, please speak up!  Red has done me proud on countless occasions and has carted everything from peanut butter to fairy wings faithfully and without complaint.  Just tell me what I need to do to make things right and I’ll make it happen.

May the adventures continue soon…hopefully with Big Red taking a starring role.