Taking a Leap

Tags

Canada, Decision-making, leap of faith, Malta, roadtrips, Vancouver, western U.S.

It’s fitting that my blogging and real-life friend Kelly introduced me to the expression “Leap, and the net will appear.” Not much leaping has gone on here for a while, but it was an innocuous message from Kelly a few days ago that launched a swift and thrilling decision to meet her and husband J in Malta just four short weeks from today. That has, in turn, prompted my first blog post in quite a while. Not exactly a high-wire act, but a pretty nice shot of adrenaline after these last few years!

Lake Tahoe: the last place we saw Kelly and J

I go through phases of throw-caution-to-the-wind leaping. There are times like the one where I decided on a whim to cash in my airline miles and fly for 48 hours in order to meet other blogging friends Lisa and Fabio on their sailboat off the coast of Madagascar for a week, and other stretches when I settle into a safer existence in which any sort of impulsive decision-making seems irresponsible or just too damn hard to pull off.

Madagascar: Lisa, Lexie, lemurs!

Jumping back onto the blog feels scary and impetuous, too. I’ve drafted plenty of posts that fizzled out mid-composition in recent months; they just felt boring and uninspired, perhaps because my blog is about travel stories, ideally set in exotic or far-flung locales, and all I had done in the last several years was drive our car back and forth across the U.S. and western Canada.

You’ve read all about my road trip addiction, the pull to the west as summer gets underway, the call of blue byways when the days are long and a sense of giddy adventure rises in my chest as we exit a new hotel on a warm morning. But even the granddaddy of our road trips to date (over 5000 miles, starting in Houston and making our turnaround in Whistler, British Columbia, and in between big chunks of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and Utah) failed to inspire a riveting, or even good, tale. A little follow-up drive of some 3000 miles up the spine of the Appalachians was equally beautiful … and equally devoid of mass interest. You’ve been there, done all this driving with me before!

Sure, it was fun and very scenic at times, and the people part has been great. Lots of family, some more bloggers like Alison and Don in Vancouver, our now-IRL pals Pam and Sean in Oregon, my 29029 gang at Whistler Mountain, and my best high school and college friends in Montana and South Carolina.

Vancouver and Whistler probably did deserve a write-up; they were first-time destinations for me and were breathtakingly gorgeous, but I just couldn’t flesh out a compelling story.

Bend, Oregon was a photographer’s dream, the southeast and Appalachians offered somewhat fresher driving routes, and there was even a new grandbaby visit in there for good (the best) measure! Still, a narrative eluded me, photo essays aren’t really my stock-in-trade, and personal stories have been mostly off-limits here.

In our non-travel life, we’ve been contemplating other big leaps as well. Our reason for establishing a second base in Colorado two years ago (our son’s growing family) suddenly disappeared when he took a new job in Ohio in July. That tipped the east-west scale a little farther to the right, with kids now in San Francisco, Ohio, and Boston, and precipitated a now-endless discussion of whether we should stay put in the middle of the country to be able to fly quickly to any of the three places (really four, since my parents are still in Pennsylvania) or try to move somewhere where three of the four could be reached by car in a day’s driving? With my husband J’s job allowing him to work from anywhere these days, we began to contemplate a relocation, but we know better than to follow peripatetic children, and part of our mostly-practical selves keeps saying to be patient.

I think we can sit on that decision a while longer, but the overseas travel itch was not as easy to push off. Perhaps a sudden or last-minute opportunity is more conducive to decision-making, at least in our household. We can’t seem to make dinner plans with friends or neighbors for months on end, but when one of us suddenly proposes an outing that evening, it works! In this case, Kelly casually suggested we join them, I latched onto the idea, J was impressively open to it, and two days later, everything was booked … I hope she really meant it! Next post from Malta!

On the Road Again

Tags

29029Everesting, Bald Mountain, California, hiking, Montana, Oregon, roadtrip, traveling with dogs, western U.S., Wyoming

It was finally time for a more comprehensive tour of the western U.S., especially now that Covid was on the wane and we had a mini-HQ in Colorado from which to depart. We’d seen a decent assortment of places out west over the years; in fact, no state we would see was a stranger to us, but we had never committed consecutive weeks of time to just rambling around the region.

The Itinerary: Our schedule and destinations were predicated on seeing friends and family in a number of cities, and I had the added incentive of spending some active, prolonged time at higher altitudes to prepare for a mountain event I planned to do in Idaho in the middle of the trip. I drove from Houston to the Denver area in late May, spent a week in our little Colorado abode, and trained in the foothills on my own and with a fellow event participant. I loaded up the pup in early June and headed over the Rockies to Salt Lake City and on to Boise, Idaho, where I stopped long enough to pick up my husband at the airport and walk Boise’s mellow, refreshing Greenbelt for an hour or two before setting off once again to make Bend, Oregon by nightfall.

After three days in Bend, we meandered through southern Oregon to Crater Lake National Park and on to Northern California and the Mount Shasta area. San Francisco was next, a city stay that still featured plenty of hiking in Muir Woods and Angel Island, and after the weekend, we pointed the car east to Lake Tahoe. A stunning drive north into Idaho landed us in the Sun Valley/Ketchum area, where we split up – husband and dog to a nice hotel for work and some play, and me to my Bald Mountain hiking challenge and decidedly less cushy lodging (a tent). Four days later, we followed the Salmon River on a jaw-dropping drive through the Sawtooth Mountains to Bozeman, Montana, and a few days after that, we were traversing the Beartooth Highway, northeast and northern Yellowstone National Park, and then western Yellowstone and the Big Sky area. The incredible Tetons were our final stop before returning to Colorado after three glorious weeks.

Friends and Family: A big part of our motivation to stop in the places we did was to see our kids and some old (and new) friends. As a bonus to start my trip, I overlapped for a few days with our daughter and her husband who were visiting Colorado, and I also got to spend some joyous days and evenings watching our one and only granddaughter try to take her first toddling steps with our older son and his wife. In Bend, we reunited with friends with whom we had done volunteer work in Costa Rica and Mexico, and in two minutes, the twelve years since our last get-together disappeared in a rush of old memories and fondness.

A weekend in San Francisco was our first chance to see our younger son’s new life since a job change during Covid took him cross-country with his girlfriend. In the Lake Tahoe area, my fourth-ever blogger meet-up was a big success; Kelly (Compass and Camera) and I had always joked that we must be sisters from other mothers, and I think our dinner together supported that notion! “The Js,” our two husbands, got along great also – always a plus.

My J got together with an old work colleague and friend in Sun Valley, and I must note that in the first two days without me, he managed to fall and skin his arms and legs on both a trail run and a mountain bike ride (and people think I was the crazy one doing the mountain challenge …). In Montana, we had a too-short visit with my dear, best friend from high school, and we arrived back in Colorado just a few days after grandbaby E became a bonafide walker (hiking with Gigi cannot be far behind!). What a fantastic way to add love, friendship, and context to all the new places we went!

Travels with Tashi: We got a new puppy last spring, and I am still not used to the complications he adds to our lives after more than a year, even after being a former dog owner for fifteen years. The two-and-a-half-year gap between dogs must have spoiled me because now I can almost not tolerate having to think about his schedule and all the gear we have to haul around for him, especially in a city hotel where the car is nowhere near the room.

Still, he was a trooper. Like our other pup, Tashi is great in a moving car, on some days chilling in his crate on and off for up to nine hours while we stopped in small towns and pulled off the road for one of my 7 million photos. We introduced him to various cabins, hotel rooms, and strangers’ houses over the weeks on the road, and he was impressively nonplussed. After a few attempts to hike with this energetic little guy, we gave up and left him in our accommodations while we did the longer trails because he is still in the eat-everything stage, and one night of severe illness was enough to dissuade us from trying that again on this trip.

Yes, he is small, but the chair is enormous!

Hikes Galore: Our goal is always to find a hike or two anywhere we go, and this trip produced the goods. In Bend, our friends pointed us to Smith Rock State Park, which exceeded all expectations by a mile (or five). The climbs were a great warm-up for me, afforded stunning views, and wound us through all sorts of rock formations (see “Monkey Face” below) before a steep descent.

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Crater Lake offered a series of snowy walks, which we had to let Tashi enjoy with us. Being from Houston, he found the cold, wet stuff to be a captivating novelty, and we were happy to give up some longer walks to see him scampering around the rim of this enormous, deep-blue lake. (Hard to ferret out cigarette butts in the snow anyway.)

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Our SF son knows we are not content to just sit around and eat at fun restaurants (which we did both nights), so he took us to Muir Woods to reprise the Dipsea Trail hike we did a few summers ago, and he tacked on a nice, steep descent and climb back up out of a woodsy ravine to end our morning. The next day, he and his girlfriend booked us all a ferry ride to Angel Island, where we biked and hiked the entire island on a crisp, sunny Sunday.

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Kelly pointed us to many, many hikes and other sights in the Lake Tahoe area, and we ditched Tashi again to marvel at the scenic east coast of the lake on the Tunnel Creek-Sand Harbor walkway, hike down into the Emerald Bay area, poke around Sugar Pine Point State Park, and take an easy amble through more historic lodges at Tallac Historic Site at the end of one day.

In Sun Valley, I hiked Bald Mountain more times than I ever need to again (fifteen, to be exact), and J got in some solid elevation on Proctor Mountain and then Bald Mountain himself when my event was over. Like a normal person, he summited once, but he did have to get down on his own, which is a knee-buster of a descent.

Bozeman was my cool-down, but we had to get a few little hikes in, trekking up Drinking Horse Mountain trail for a grand view of the Bridger range in the morning and capping the day with a sunset stroll up Peet’s Hill, a local mound that was surprisingly satisfying and enjoyable … and we even let Tashi do this one with us, lucky little guy.

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In the big national parks – Yellowstone and Grand Teton – we mostly took abbreviated strolls with the dog, snapping photos at turn-outs and walking short distances from there. We did sneak away for an easy four-miler at Taggart Lake one morning at GTNP, and it was a beauty.

Lakes Galore: I knew we had Crater Lake and its deep cobalt waters on the agenda, but I hadn’t stopped to think about all the magnificent lakes we’d ogle on this trip. Lake Tahoe – Big Blue itself – was a worthy rival for the Oregon national park site, and many smaller lakes on the trip caught our eye as well. From serene and still to deep and powerful, the lakes all reflected and magnified the splendor around them and quickly became a highlight of the trip.

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Big Skies and Wide-Open Spaces: The West is dominated by its skies, and we couldn’t get enough of the clouds – from pale, wispy strands to pregnant white poofs to looming gray masses  – adrift on the overhead sea. Entire days passed with us seemingly inside an Old Master or impressionistic painting – the vast fields lime and lemon hued, the pines adding a punch of dark green, the peaks a bit of stony punctuation, and the waters a mirror of that gigantic canopy of sky. The expansiveness got under our skin, and we both commented on how hard it would be to go back to city life and its confined spaces.

Geothermal features: Hot springs and geysers have never attracted me much, but the spectrum of colors and ethereal mists at Yellowstone were a worthy addition to my “geo-art” series of photos over the years. I might have snapped more pictures here than anywhere else on the trip, and that’s saying a lot with Crater Lake and Lake Tahoe’s over-the-top photogenic appeal.

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The “road” in roadtrips: I love a good non-interstate, and we naturally hit a lot of “blue highways” on this trip and went out of our way to drive others. Highway 75 from Sun Valley to Redfish Lake, Idaho, a twisting ascent up through the Sawtooths and over Galena Pass, was one such treat (secondarily because we had absolutely no cell service for hours, so there was no temptation to be distracted), and it was followed by an equally-isolated drive that followed the Salmon River for many miles and hours. We drove two hours out of our way from Bozeman, Montana, one morning in order to start our Yellowstone trip from its northeast entrance. After that eastern swing landed us in Red Lodge, we hooked back west to drive the entire length of the Beartooth Highway (US Route 12) from there to Cooke City/Silver Gate and into the national park.

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In Summary: The trip brought home our desire to live at least part of the year amid mountains, streams, woods, and open skies. We have taken a baby step in that direction with a small apartment in Colorado, and only time will tell if that is enough … or too much? … with our kids spread from coast to coast, and ongoing jobs and life changes for family members in all four of our time zones. Meanwhile, we have the memories of this brilliant road trip, which I would have been happy to continue for at least a few more weeks. Responsibilities lured us back to our humid home, but we’ve already agreed a western journey will be a permanent fixture on our summer docket.

A Better Kind of Isolation

Tags

Cadillac Ranch, Colorado, isolation, New Mexico, open road, road trip, Texas, Texas Panhandle

For the second time in little over a year, I point my car northwest on a 1000-mile journey, and then retrace it, through some of the bleakest land in the country. There and back in 32 hours last year, and there and back again a few weeks ago, this time sweetened in the middle by a most joyous event: the birth of our first grandchild. That the trip follows on the heels of a solid two months sequestered at home makes it all the more liberating, and I savor the trip almost as much as the heart-bursting reason behind it.

Like the previous trip, I do this one alone and almost in silence – no podcasts for me, or playlists, or even the radio most of the way (there really is no radio reception most of the way!). These are the times my thoughts get to meander as far as the land does, without limits or defined edges.

My mind yawns open like the arroyos out the window; the past and future wander into my head while the present plays out amid the rocking horse oil pumps, the wind turbines, the fields of grain and cattle, the ridges and folds and dusty flats that are palpable beneath my wheels. I point my phone camera out the bug-splattered windows over and over again, trying to capture a strange bliss I could never properly explain.

I savor mile after mile, hour upon hour, of the Texas Panhandle – beige and chalky, then red and earthy, reeking of cows, and beaten by wind. For long stretches I hear what sounds like a thin metal whip flaying the roof of my vehicle. It abates as I slow from 80 mph to pass through tiny, rural towns – a few battered houses, a feed store, a gas station from the ‘50s, a BBQ joint, a Chinese or Mexican restaurant from time to time.

In a few spots, I might catch a glimpse of a strip joint like the (surely beachy) Player’s Bikini Club, or perhaps a big-ass gun shop, or an ad for a steak the size of New York, none of which feature in my daily life and are therefore endlessly amusing to me.

In a matter of seconds, I’m through these towns and back on the open road. Many people would find the sere landscape dull or depressing, but I find its scoured featurelessness profoundly pleasurable. It’s a blank backdrop for old camp songs, writing ideas, life-plan reviews, a phone call here and there. I barely need to turn the wheel, and the hours effortlessly slip by.

I’ve started from barely above sea level, and by the time I hit Amarillo, Texas, I’m at 3000 feet, riding the high plains ever higher, to almost 4000 feet by the time I reach Dalhart, nearly 5000 by the Texas-New Mexico state line. I never feel I’ve left flat ground, though, inching through those feet of ascent ever so slowly.

Deeper into New Mexico, the gradual rise becomes steeper; by the time I get to Raton Pass and thunder down into Colorado, I am at almost 8000 feet, and both before and after the pass, my views become more three-dimensional and colorful. Late spring growth softens the land, and pine trees begin to replace the drier juniper, cottonwood and mesquite varieties. Distant peaks poke out of the corrugated foreground, some still snow-covered, adding a depth of field that I welcome in spite of my contentment with the monotony.

There are even some less natural sparks of color from time to time. My favorite is Cadillac Ranch, a field of half-buried cars outside of Amarillo, a scene I have wanted to see on the first three passes over this route. On the way home, I finally go out of my way to stop.

The installation is surreal – a garish row of spray-painted Caddies with their tail fins rising out of a sun-bleached cow pasture – and I roam the perimeter as much as I can, avoiding the painters who are encouraged to make their own marks on the “sculpture” of ten cars, originally buried nose-down here in 1974.

It is an hour before sundown on a scorching evening; the western rays are blinding, and the hot wind out in the field has me parched within minutes. Still, I walk slowly back to the car, prolonging what will be my last night in the vast emptiness.

As I drive closer to low ground, humidity, and the big city, I don’t want the trip to end. I choose an alternate way into Houston, sticking to smaller roads that bisect horse farms and white-fenced meadows. And then I am back to the 13-lane Katy Freeway, the gauntlet I must run to get home. Muscles tensed and brain overloaded for the first time in weeks, I finally snap the radio on. Already buffeted by stimuli, I figure a little more won’t hurt. I’ll stay in overdrive in my lush green surroundings for the next month, and then … I’ll make the same soothing trip all over again!

Battling a Mountain

Tags

29029, endurance events, Everest, hiking, jesse itzler, Seven Summits, Snowbasin, Utah

Foreword I

I have barely posted here for months, and the biggest reason for that has been my laser focus on something that no one but my husband has known about since early December of last year. For those few souls who have missed my words, here are more than 5000 of them crammed into one post for you to enjoy! (Or skim, or skip …)

Foreword II

How can I possibly explain this folly?

There was nothing – nothing – I liked less than walking up a long, steep hill. I hated to breathe hard, I hated to sweat, and I hated the feeling of being physically and mentally uncomfortable. I do love to hike, though, and I do love to stand on top of mountains, so I have suffered through these grueling, awful ascents for years. I walked slowly and breathed hard, but my modus operandi was to just keep moving. I was almost always slower than other people going uphill, but fortunately, hiking involves plenty of flat, rolling, and downhill sections, where I walk quite briskly, so it has been hard for others (and even me, to some extent) to tell that I completely sucked at walking uphill. I have hiked very, very high (to almost 18,000’) and I have hiked for a very long time (almost 3 straight weeks), but in the midst of those achievements and others, I have been 100% miserable and cranky with myself on every long, difficult climb.

December 4, 2018

So, what do I decide to do when I read an article about an event that involves walking up 2310 very steep vertical feet in the middle of August in high-altitude Utah? But wait, let me expand. I was not just going to walk up that steep hill and then mosey down a few hours later and have a beer. I was going to try to walk up Snowbasin Mountain thirteen (that’s 13) times over a 36-hour period for a grand total of 29,029 vertical feet. In the debut of this event in Utah last summer, only 35% of the participants went all the way. And they probably never truly loathed or were bad at walking uphill. Oh, and I’m going to pay someone thousands of dollars to make this happen.

To put this in perspective, event founder Jesse Itzler told us that elevating one’s heart rate and shredding one’s leg, core, and even arm muscles for 36 hours is like running nine average-speed marathons back-to-back, or doing 2.5 Ironman triathlons in a row. I’ve never done more than a 10K race. When you reach a normal cruising altitude in a jet, look down; that’s the height we are going to have to climb. On my most ambitious hiking days, I’d maybe go up 4000 feet. When I decide to finally test my limits, could I not be a little more reasonable?

I read the article at 7:30 am in Outside Online and almost impulsively sign up immediately. I send the link to my husband, J, and write “I want to do this!” I am so pumped. The year of the event will contain a big birthday for me, and I have been feeling a need to show myself I can still cut it, to go BIG, to escape the limiting thoughts and negative self-talk that have consumed me in the last few years. I click the Chat button and bombard Matt, VP of Sales, with questions. I head out for the day, brain afire, and return afterward and call Matt to talk more. I crunch numbers, I read reviews and testimonials online, and I get more fired up.

This opportunity to face many of my personal fears and weaknesses should be my 60^th birthday present to myself, I decide. And the significance of the number 29029 cannot be overstated. This is the height of Mount Everest – my dream, my fantasy, my obsession for years and years. (Surely you’ve noticed my header photo for the last five years!) I’d like to believe that I could still climb Mount Everest, and I still dream of it regularly, but at my age, with no alpine climbing experience, and no $50,000+ to spare, I have accepted realistically that this is not going to happen for me. The 29029 event lines up so beautifully with the biggest dream I’ve ever had for myself, and it now seems like a bargain basement way to test my physical and mental limits.

December 5, 2018

I’m still high, but I have to face the fact that I probably do not have the ability to do any of this. I have another conversation with Matt. I read more, calculate more, debate more, and then I decide to see what I can even do as a baseline. I try walking the length of one summit hike on the highest ramp on my treadmill (not even close to the real thing), after a full tennis match to simulate tiredness, and then I do all the calculations to account for altitude and slope and the necessary ride back down after each ascent. I figure I’ll need at least two hours per summit, and there are thirteen summits to do. I have 36 hours total, and I will need 26 hours just to walk it all with no major breakdowns. That leaves me with ten hours to sleep, rest, eat, pee, and deal with any screaming muscles, joints, bones, and mental collapses. I can do that!

December 6, 2018

But have I discounted the pain of a real climb? I get on the Stairmaster at my gym the next day and make it about 8.5 minutes before I feel my steps are shaky. I am breathing hard and sweating; I usually stop before this happens (typed sheepishly, but true). I get off and decide this event is likely not for me. Thousands of bucks to do something for 36 hours that I just hated passionately for 8.5 minutes?

Later that afternoon, I realize I can’t give up the whole event just because I am unlikely to finish it or even do well at it. I just wanna be with these people! Colin O’Brady (first solo trans-Antarctica trekker and all-around endurance badass AND exemplary human) has done this twice! Olympic sprinters have participated. NFL players. Duke’s Coach K has had Jesse Itzler speak to his teams. It’s a hell of a lot of money to “just be with these people,” but … can I perhaps lower my expectations? Can I just train as hard as I possibly can and go and do whatever I can? They say it’s about “you versus you,” not a race, and I can buy into that mentality.

December 7, 2018

I tell Matt I am wavering. He sends some testimonials by others – a woman who does the whole thing in Vermont, a different woman who doesn’t make it and still extols the event, a guy who trains his butt off (literally; he loses 45 pounds) and gets it done. Another guy who goes hoping to summit once and makes it up five times (and is thrilled). I am reinvigorated. Maybe I should go to just be inspired by all these people and do whatever I can.

Or maybe I really can train enough to do it all?! F— it – I’m in! I don’t even wait for Matt to respond to my last email; I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and push the Buy button. Holy crap; what have I done? I justify. I can get some money back if I withdraw by late February. Won’t I know by then if this training business simply can’t get me ready after years of half-hearted cardio?

April, 2019

Flash forward to the start of our training program. I’ve spent the last four months training for the training program. Sad but true. I’ve gone from ten minutes on the Stairmaster to thirty. I am regularly running hill repeats and trudging uphill on an inclined treadmill. I can now run about three miles at a conversational pace and have found my latest high-altitude hike in Bhutan quite manageable. Easy, in fact, which makes me feel much more confident. And now the real work begins.

April-August, 2019

I’ve become a running fool. My running shoes go with me everywhere. Georgia, Pennsylvania, Northern California, Boston, Arkansas. I run four, then six, then eight miles at a time. I run five miles to my health club, do six hours of stepmill and treadmill workouts indoors, then run the five miles back home. I experiment with on-the-go hydration and nutrition, seeing what I digest well and what upsets my stomach.

This is all well and good, but will it get me up a steep, steep mountain thirteen times in a row? All day and through the night? At 9000 feet of elevation? At up to a 47% incline? Nothing I can do will truly prepare me for this event, I feel sure.

Our trainer Brent says, “the bigger the base, the higher the peak,” and this becomes my mantra. The more miles I put on my legs and feet now, the more ready they will be to go high and far in late August. At the same time, he urges us to “train where you are.” There is an online group for participants, and many are wearing weighted vests and spending hours at a time on a stepmill or a real mountain. We don’t even have hills in Houston. Some are organizing outings to the event venue. Others are doubling the mileages and times. But I plug away at my own pace, trusting in Brent’s reasonable philosophy. At my age, I also have to think about preventing injury; what good will I be at the event if I go overboard now?

Mid-summer brings certain facts into focus. One moment of truth is a grim reality check: after a one-hour run on June 4, in stifling heat and humidity, I try to do the required hill repeats and then my hip mobility exercises, and simply cannot finish them. The incline at my small Houston hill is 40-60%, about the level of the toughest slopes at Snowbasin, and I think I will die if I have to keep going … and this is after only 1.5 hours of exercise. How am I going to repeat that infinitely longer hill for 36 hours? Really, I am a fool to think I can rack up all thirteen summits in just a few months from now. Perhaps I can crunch out five ascents … maybe, maybe go up seven times?

Then again, after I get in the car and come home, I think about how OK I feel after fifteen minutes, and that I might actually be able to go out and start again. Time will tell. But I will need to push myself a lot harder, and that’ll be tough given that I am feeling wasted, hungry, and tired all the time.

A month out from the event, I experiment with the advanced slanted treadmill at my gym. I set the machine at a 20% incline right from the start and walk up 2310 feet in 67 minutes at a fairly comfortable pace and heart rate. If only the event could replicate this! At this pace, I’d have time to ride back down and even take a short rest before turning back up the mountain. Of course, 20% is only the average incline of the real mountain, and the real mountain also has gravel, rocks, boulders, straw, and uneven earth. It has blazing hot days and 40-degree nights. It has sections at double these slopes … okay, so maybe I can still hope to finish in less than twice this time. A two-hour ascent will still let me take a few short breaks, but there goes any chance to actually sleep at night.

By the end of July and into early August, we are at the peak of our training. We have three straight weekends of multi-workout days – days when we run or hike or cross-train for eight, ten, or twelve hours straight. This has become my weekend life, but I refuse to fall into the endurance training rabbit hole. One day I get up at 5 am so I can get the training done and still throw a dinner party for visiting relatives that night. We stick to our plans for dinner with friends at other times, and I attack my food like I’ve just burned it and a few more days’ worth of calories off beforehand (I have).

I feel strong! As I go into the taper weeks, J and I head west to hike in Idaho and Utah for almost a week before my event. I take it easy on my hikes, and I watch my footsteps like I never have before. No turned ankles allowed right now. No sore knees or hips, please. At the end of the week, J drops me at the site. I am a nervous wreck. Ready physically, but how will I ever know if I have the mental fortitude to climb up, up, and up, over and over again, all day and all night for the next day and a half.

I listen to the pre-event speeches, tucking tidbits of information and advice away for tomorrow, settle into my tent for a night of tossing and turning, and set my alarm for 4 am. Tomorrow at 5:45, we will strap on our headlamps and start up the mountain.

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We start at 6 am, in the dark, with headlamps illuminating only the rocky patches of ground beneath us and the already-dusty trail shoes of the hiker in front of us. Perhaps this is good; we have seen the first one-tenth of the hill from the base, and it is beyond daunting. At about a 47-degree slope, the pitch makes our heartrates jump and our calves scream from minute one. When we see the first sign, meant to be helpful but certainly not, it says we have climbed a mere 500 feet. Most of us stop for a breather, a drink and a few hundred calories about 300 vertical feet later, at Aid Station 1. Taking care of our hydration and nutrition will be critical in the next day and a half as we burn thousands of calories and sweat out our water and salt stores with every ascent.

In spite of my careful plan to hike only at my own comfortable pace, I reach the first summit quite a bit faster than I had calculated. As I take the 15-minute ride back down to the base, I feel good. Strong and optimistic. I’ve just saved myself a good 45 minutes over my estimates, I calculate – time later for a nap or a real meal or a mental or physical breakdown. “Stay ahead of the clock,” we were advised. No time to gloat now; I need to keep moving and not even think about those extra minutes I’ve stockpiled.

Getting off the gondola and heading back to the starting chute is an eye-opening reminder that this is not going to be a walk in the woods. Our group of 220 hikers has spread out, and as I approach the board where we brand each ascent into the wood, I don’t see anyone I know, so I trudge to the starting line alone and begin to labor uphill on my own. It is light enough now to see, and I soon realize that the first 750 feet of this hill is perhaps the longest and most difficult stretch of all. It’s a sobering discovery; every time I start over, I’m going to have to find the will to walk through serious discomfort and exhaustion.

But Jesse and other speakers have addressed just this. “Be where your feet are,” we were told. I need to think about nothing but the next step – not the section above this, not the last hike where a steep jumble of boulders almost caused me to tip over backward, certainly not the fact that I have finished only one hike out of thirteen. One-two-one-two, click with the right pole, clack with the left. Breathe calmly; don’t outpace your breath. For me, a key will be to not stop between stations. Others are walking faster than I am, huffing and puffing, churning uphill past me. Minutes later, I am passing them as they bend over their poles, catching a breath, stretching a calf muscle. Already I feel a Zen-like calm, an autopilot rhythm that is propelling me up the mountain.

Last night a few speakers suggested we not put in earphones, letting our own thoughts and the nature around us fill our heads. This was heresy, I thought at the time; my music and my GPS watch have been my security blankets for months of training. Now I realize I have forgotten to push the Workout button on my watch for the first lap and the early part of my second. But by now I know my breath and heart rate patterns; I don’t think I’m exceeding a safe zone, and somehow the lack of music really IS keeping me focused on my feet.

And so go laps 2, 3, and 4, which I decide to do without any real breaks even though my pre-event plan was to stop for lunch after three climbs. Our rewards come in two ways: ascent count and a summit count. We are going for all Seven Summits, and it will take these first four ascents to get me to the equivalent of Mount Kosciuszko (Australia’s highest mountain), the lowest of them all. When I descend after lap 4, I not only sear my fourth symbol into the scoreboard, but I receive a checkmark on the back of my white bib for my first summit.

I take a break from the afternoon heat and sun, stripping off several layers, eating a brief lunch, and switching out my socks. So far I am immune to many of the afflictions my fellow hikers are experiencing: blisters, chafing, altitude headaches, nausea, or intestinal problems. I attribute my early hardiness to hiking experience; I am used to using poles to push my way up a steep slope, my calves and Achilles tendons are accustomed to being stretched this way for long periods of time, and I am very consciously focusing on balanced hydration and getting non-irritating calories into my system.

I head back out for two more rounds, hoping to finish by dinnertime and before it gets dark again. Lap 5 is like most of the ones before it, but by ascent number 6, I am feeling a crash coming on. It’s becoming harder to take a deep breath, even while stopping at the aid stations, and my inner thighs are cramping whenever I stop. I am alternately hot and shivery cold, and I feel certain that my next sip of an electrolyte drink will make me throw up. Slow down, I coach myself; I’ve stayed ahead of the clock all day so far, and I can afford a very slow lap. “Just keep moving,” we’ve been told, “the tents and the lodge are your enemy.”

Somehow, I plow my way uphill for a couple of hours, my slowest hike yet, and collapse into the gondola. I’ve been on the mountain for over twelve hours now, the longest sustained heavy physical activity I have ever experienced. I am thankfully alone on this lift run as I moan and whine like a blubbery child in my own little capsule the whole way down. I think back to my initial goal for the event: 7 laps – one more than half – and still more than doable if I get a good night’s sleep and wake up able to locomote.

I stagger into the lodge at the bottom and drink good, plain, cold water. I eat the blandest real food I can find and settle into a chair before I give up for the night. People are headed to their tents for a nap or a full sleep, with a number of my early hiking buddies saying they no longer feel compelled to go the full way to Everest. I am feeling the same, but somehow I think I have some reserves left today that my friends do not. I sit for longer than normal and catch the eye of one of our coaches. He has run marathons and competes as a triathlete, and I pick his brain about the body’s ability to spring back from a low point like the one I am in. We talk for a few minutes, and when he leaves, I decide to get up and try one night hike; the HQ team has been saying that everyone should try one, and at this hour I’m sure there will be people on the mountain for me to walk with.

I walk stiffly to the start line and look around. The base area is quiet; a group hike has left about thirty minutes ago, too late for me to catch up. No one else wandering around looking for a companion? Nope, this is going to be a solo run; I’ve done a few of them, and in many ways, I’ve liked them better. The less chatting I do, the more I fall into a rhythmic trance and the less I feel the toil of my legs and lungs. But I soon realize this is a different animal being all alone on a huge mountain in pitch darkness. And speaking of animals, I hear noises. I hope that’s the hoot of an owl and not the howl of a coyote. A triangular flag marking the trail edge licks its tongue at me as my headlamp illuminates its flickering edges. Every stick on the trail seems to slither like a rattlesnake as I get ready to place my feet down over and over again.

I want to go slowly to keep my tired lungs under control, and I need to be deliberate with my footsteps among the stones and – higher up – boulders all over the path.  At the same time, I want to race to the next aid station to see other humans, to get close enough to others who can hear me scream if something should happen to me. I crest the ridiculous hill that takes me about a fifth of the way to the top and start to see the lights and hear the thumping rap music that’s been playing at the rest stop all day. I glance at my watch and am startled to see I’ve come up here as fast as I did on the very first fast lap, and this after my near-complete meltdown at the base a short time ago.

I take great encouragement from that and after a two-minute rest I’m back on my feet and starting the long 1.25 miles to the next station. I’m practically humming now, feeling wonderfully resilient and sturdy. I high-five and fist-bump the volunteers at the next waypoint and keep on trucking. I reach the summit under a star-studded black velvet sky and ride down in pure elation. I’m more than halfway done, I’ve reached the summit height of Mount Vinson (Antarctica), and I’m feeling strong and capable.

The roller coaster ride is continuing, though, and by the time I’m at the bottom contemplating one more ascent, I’m back in a trough. My neck hurts from looking down at the path for hours at a time. My upper arms are starting to ache from the pole use, and my legs are beginning to feel rubbery. I find a friend who wants to keep going, and we fall into step in silence. Just having her nearby makes me feel better, and knowing that this fit young woman twenty to thirty years my junior is on the same lap as me makes me feel proud of myself. We struggle uphill together, chatting briefly in the aid stations, and finally separating briefly as we each tackle the final rocky slopes on our own. Mount Elbrus (Russia) – check.

“I’m done for a while,” I tell her on the ride down. I’m not only physically tired but I’m mentally fried, and I’ve got to rest my head and neck more than anything else. “Not me,” she says, “I feel like I’ll be better off just going all night.” It’s after 1 am, and I stumble to my tent, frozen to the bone. My teeth are chattering uncontrollably, and my legs feel disconnected from my torso. I slip as quietly as I can into my tent. My tent mates are slumbering as I lower myself to the edge of my bed, wincing at the pain in my screaming quads, and peel off my filthy clothing. I re-dress in tomorrow’s hiking togs and take a futile stab at cleaning my dust-covered feet with a wet wipe before crawling under the covers. I’d hoped for more than a few hours of sleep, but it’s almost 2 am by the time I set my alarm for 4 and try to relax.

I must have slept because the alarm startles me, and I rise quickly to my feet to stave off any attempt to lie back down. No contact lenses going in at this hour; I throw on my glasses and hat, bundle up in a few more layers, pack my waistpack, and unzip the tent flaps in the chilly pre-dawn air. I walk alone to the base, already calculating my chances of finishing. I’m on the murderous first hill by 4:30 am, and by the time the sun has begun to lighten the eastern skies, I am already on the way down. I barely remember the climb at all; half-awake and fuzzy-headed, I have cranked out lap 9 like an automaton and picked up two more of the Seven Summits – Denali and Kilimanjaro – with little pain at all. I catch a glimpse of my nighttime friend in the lodge; on the lap after I left her, she pulled a groin muscle and is done, joining the scores of others who have dropped out of the event for all sorts of reasons.

Aconcagua is another quickie. I’m astonished at how awake I am now, and I turn out one of my fastest laps since early the first day. I’m beginning to visualize snagging all of these peaks, and I alternate between wanting to laugh out loud and sob. This is not a situation I imagined. Me? One of the oldest participants here, still walking strong, with no injuries or complaints of any sort beyond bodily exhaustion. I’m highly emotional as I get my last red check mark on my back, knowing that I only have to walk up two more times before I get the coveted red bib, the outward sign to all that I’m on my last ascent.

The hubris! Did I celebrate too soon? Each climb is no joke, and the euphoria I feel as I climb into the gondola at the top quickly dissipates as the truth sets in back at the bottom. “Only” two more until I get the last bib? Umm, that’s three more total, almost a third of what I’ve already done. And there will be no more peaks to bag between Aconcagua and Mount Everest; I’ll have to take comfort in simply branding my board each time I do one more lap.

I don’t remember ascents 11 and 12 well at all. I am slowing down, but only by about two minutes or so with each new climb. The red bib is nigh, and once again I feel an outpouring of emotion combined with some sort of hysteria, surely brought on by sheer exhaustion mixed with jubilation. I am truly filthy at this point, and I’m down to a sleeveless tank, trying not to torch my arms, neck, and face as I climb higher and higher into the thinner air. I’m getting reports of people dropping out, oxygen masks being applied, knees being wrapped, and stomachs being emptied at the top of the mountain.

Although I have not traditionally been good at blocking out negatives or dealing with pain, I plod on and before I know it, I have arrived at the next-to-biggest moment of the weekend. The event announcer sees me disembark the gondola for the 12^th time, doing a herky-jerky walk back toward the starting chute. I can barely extend my legs by now, my limbs heavy with lactic acid, my muscles aching and tight, my feet clenched in my trail shoes. An event volunteer ties the red bib onto me, wishes me well, and tells me she’ll see me in a red finisher’s hat when I get back down. It sounds so imminent, but the minute I enter that chute for the final time, I know this will be the hardest lap of all. Luckily for me, I have plenty of time, at least four hours to do what has never taken me more than two, even on my one very slow climb.

I try to enjoy that last ascent, pausing to snap (terrible) photos of the signs and a bit of the scenery. It’s impossible to capture the intensity of the slopes or the feel of the loose stones under my feet; I will never be able to truly convey the energy of the aid stations with their upbeat music and encouraging volunteers. I chat with everyone I see on that final lap, but I find myself alone and utterly drained on my final trudge up the relentlessly uphill fire road at the top of the mountain. As I pass the last ¼-mile marker, I see a hiker twirl slowly as if in a ballet and then crumple onto the gravel. I rush ahead to offer help or to send a medic back down, and only then do I fully absorb what I have done – climb just over 29,029 vertical feet, the height of Mount Everest from sea level, a feat that only 139 of us would eventually accomplish that weekend. From what I understand, I am the oldest woman to finish.

Of course, I’m tremendously proud of my effort over the 30-some hours it took me to complete this challenge, but I’m also unendingly grateful for the chance to have even done the training and, as I expected from sign-up day, to have the opportunity to spend a weekend with the kind of people who want to see what their own Everest looks like. Even those who did not make all thirteen summits fulfilled certain goals for themselves, and there was not a cynical or disappointed heart in the house that evening. I have no need to replicate my journey here, but I am a believer in the mission of the challenge. “I am strong. I am capable.” Colin O’Brady’s words to himself on his Antarctic crossing ring though my head. I have a very different notion of what I am made of and what I can do in this world. I have battled a real, physical mountain, and I have owned it. Time will tell what I make of that on the other hills of my life.

Two Fleet Feet Out the Door

Tags

outdoors, road trip, running, summer

I’ve largely disappeared online, and that’s mainly because both of my feet have been (literally) running all over the country in recent months.

My days have been filled with physical activity, and my time in front of a screen has correspondingly shriveled. There are a few things I miss about that (for one, my novel has been stalled at about three-quarters done for months), but I am filled with vigor as I travel across the country and put some ground under my feet at every stop.

With more to come on this topic later, I have been putting many miles on my running shoes the last six months or so. Much of it is hiking-specific training out on the streets, running paths, and trails both here in Houston and wherever I am traveling. It served me well in Bhutan, and I expect it to show even stronger returns during almost two weeks of hiking this August in Idaho and Utah.

There’s no better way to get to know a new place, or to poke into different parts of a known town, than to run or walk its streets and trails. Here at home, I’ve investigated new running routes many times a week, often in the very early morning (another new discovery for me!) because of the sweltering temperatures and humidity.

J and I have ventured out to other spots in our own state, like cute, little Brenham, historic Nacogdoches, and beer-lovers’ Shiner.

On my own, I’ve plied the usual summer roads to and from Georgia and Pennsylvania, as well as some little diversions en route:

More special trips included a glorious four days in Colorado where one of our sons lives with his wife, with lots of fresh mountain air and sunshine, family and good food. I learned that running at over 5000 feet of elevation is a snap compared with running in 90% humidity, and we all put in several solid days of hiking in the foothills nearby.

A four-day trip to the Bay Area/Marin County was another huge winner, with jogging and biking paths at every turn, as well as a chance to do some nice, long hikes, including the 15-mile round-trip Dipsea Trail, several 10-mile days in Golden Gate State Recreation Area and the Marin Headlands, as well as some city time, which of course included a walk over the Golden Gate Bridge and back.

I squeezed in a girls’ weekend in Boston where our daughter is living for the summer, and on Saturday we cranked out a 5-mile run and a follow-up 10 miles of walking in blissfully cool temps in the city, both excellent compensations for all the pizza, ice cream, wine, and lobster rolls we consumed in two days!

A four-day holiday work break for the 4^th of July found us in the oldest town in Texas, surprisingly charming Nacogdoches in the Piney Woods of the eastern part of the state.

I once again explored on fast feet by morning and at a hiking pace all afternoon for a few days here and in Ouachita National Forest in central Arkansas as we moved north. We finished off the weekend in Fayetteville and environs, once again relishing Northwest Arkansas’s natural beauty and quirky little towns.

When my feet have finally been propped up for the evening, I’ve tried to keep up with your blog posts and happenings. Some days I may have mustered a mere “Like” (or not, if you don’t have that button), but please know I have still been reading and keeping up with your adventures. The more I have focused on what is here in front of me each day, the less I have been able to keep up with social media. It’s been very freeing, and over time, any stress or guilt I’ve felt about it has dissipated as well. My Instagram time has contracted to nearly zero hours per day (and Facebook was already dead to me), allowing me to read blog posts, which I find much more fulfilling, as well as all the other literature I consume on a daily basis, while still spending much of my day out in the real world.

As summer and the tug to be outside wane, I’m sure I will reappear more regularly in this space and in yours. Meanwhile, happy summer to all from wherever I am at the moment!

Aloha, Unknown Beauty!

Tags

beach, Hawaii, hiking, islands, misperceptions, Polynesia, sun, vacation

We put Hawaii aside in our minds years ago, dismissing it as a destination for people who didn’t like to be as active as we did. Old people, we thought. Maybe corporate conventioneers. Let’s use our fit and functional years to climb steep paths and take 15-hour flights and sleep in tents and apply for difficult visas, we reasoned. Hawaii will be there when we can no longer do all those things, when we want to go sit on a beach with an umbrella drink in hand.

What changed? I don’t know really; all of a sudden, we just got an urge to see Hawaii. It helped that our adventuresome son had recently raved about his trip, our lively parents had loved the place, and so many of our energetic friends had returned multiple times to the islands.

So, no, we didn’t get old or lazy, but we did have two big birthdays to observe early this year and had narrowed our celebration spot to Namibia or Hawaii (slightly different choices, I know!). Hawaii won.

We’re so glad it did. And we were so wrong in our previous thinking. Maybe some people hang out on beach chairs sipping tropical cocktails for a week in Waikiki, but we were able to find more than enough to do on two of the lush, green islands that make up this chain of volcanic dots in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

We started on Oahu. With the main Hawaiian airport, skyscrapered Honolulu, jam-packed Diamondhead, and yes, clichéd Waikiki on its shores, Oahu was routinely dissed by many friends who gave us travel advice. It’s too urban, too touristy, too congested, many tsk-tsked. But a close friend who knows Hawaii well convinced us to head directly out of Honolulu upon landing and hightail it to the quieter North Shore. A little research turned up more hiking options there than almost anywhere else in the islands, and we spent four days in an area with very little of the built-up feel of the southern shore or the other islands with strips of resort hotels.

We passed our days on a series of coastal trails, among them a long, sandy stroll to the northern tip, Kahuku Point;

a rough, windy walk out to far-west Kaena Point;

and a pine needle-laden path to a huge, old banyan tree and on to a World World II pillbox near Kawela Bay.

We ate from a shrimp truck, a local sandwich shop, and a 68-year-old shave ice stand in surfer-town Haleiwa while we admired the surfboards (and a few surfers, too – sorry, J) standing up against many a brightly-painted building. We watched those colorful boards in action, too, at the Banzai Pipeline, where young and old alike unfolded their tanned torsos in the curl of a huge wave pounding toward shore.

Our next stop was the Big Island, this one recommended by many who had found the land mass the most ecologically diverse and the “real Hawaii,” as we heard more than once. The first claim was easy to prove: in the next four days, we drove from lava fields to verdant gardens to ranch lands to desert scrub to one of the most serene and stunning beaches we’d ever seen. And back again, more than once, through these variations.

As we had on Oahu, we sought out some small communities, like Volcano Village, a street of about ten buildings near Volcanoes National Park, where we stayed in an old YMCA camp-turned-inn. After last year’s eruption of Kilauea, the world’s most active and dangerous volcano, parts of the crater rim drive were devastated and the breathtaking lava lake at Halema’uma’u crater collapsed and drained, leaving a vast field of dried-up, smoking lava.

The effects of Kilauea’s huge 1959 eruption are still eerily visible as well, making the visit to the park both mind-blowing and a little disappointing (in spite of our good fortune that its federal employees had kept it open during the government shutdown).

We also particularly enjoyed tiny Hawi on the northern edge of the island, where we caught an impromptu hula performance by a group of senior citizens and ate at a kitchsy restaurant that was part of Hawi’s rebound from ghost-town status in recent years. Near here, we took our steepest hike of the trip, picking our way slowly down a pitched, root-strewn path into the Pololu Valley that started with this panoply of warnings:

We felt secure enough in our footwork (and stayed hard to the non-cliff side!) and were rewarded with a misty, black sand beach … and then the long climb back up and out. It was the workout we were looking for, and the views may have been the most remarkable of the trip.

A shorter down- and uphill trail took us through the Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden just outside Hilo. Given its internet presence and lofty name, I expected a major tourist attraction but was very pleasantly surprised to drive in on a 1½-lane, S-curve road and find a magical oasis that was the result of one man’s 8-year effort to clear and replant this Onomea Valley hillside in the late 70s.

We had our nicest dinner of the trip in crisp and cool Waimea, Hawaii’s higher-elevation ranchland that felt a little bit Outback, a little bit Texas in its look and spirit. We made the drive from sea level to 3000 feet and back a couple of times, never tiring of the vistas in either direction.

On the Kohala coast, we happened upon the Ala Kahakai National Historic Trail, a 175-mile network of seaside walking paths that ran near our hotel. After hiking the section nearby, we re-joined the trail twenty miles down the coast toward Kona a few days later, where we wandered through Kekaha Kai State Park one morning.

We picked our way through clots of hardened lava for several long, hot slogs, rounding a corner every once in a while to a new viewpoint where, I must admit, I found myself saying “Oh, it’s just another beach.”

Nine days in paradise may have made me sound jaded, but Hawaii is far from ho-hum. There are so many brilliant flowers, so much ambrosia-like pineapple and other fruit, and so many postcard-perfect palm trees bowing down to white sand beaches that I can barely imagine the days when I thought it would be an uninspired destination.

I never really thought about the fact that I could stay in the U.S. and be in Polynesia at the same time, surrounded by South Pacific motifs and visages, Aussie and Kiwi accents, and signs and menus in Japanese, to mention just a few of the cultural treats throughout our travels. We made a point to try and see the “real Hawaii,” on two feet as much as we could, and we think we succeeded. We ate breakfast with barefooted surfers on the north coast of Oahu, had to nix a hike when the only parking was in a seedy neighborhood crawling with cop cars, and missed getting some musubi at a 7-11 when a guy out front decided to take his pants off, scaring us off.

But we also stayed at a couple of beautiful oceanfront hotels, watched the sun rise and set over palm trees and limpid seas, swam in the ocean, and drank coffee in a warm and breezy open-air restaurant every morning.

We spent our last day in … yep, Waikiki, and we loved the whole loud, lit-up place. J wore the Hawaiian shirt his dad brought back decades ago, I wore more sundresses in a week and a half than I have in years, and one day at the pool, wearing the pink and orange flowered flip-flops gifted by the hotel, I ordered my own tropical umbrella drink with no shame at all. Mahalo, beautiful state – we will be back for more!

A Snowy Beach Day on the Moon

Tags

desert, dunes, geology, moonscape, New Mexico, sand, White Sands National Monument

We drove, astonished, down the hard-packed road, a crust of white stuff on our right and a mound of it on the left. It was 70 degrees and sunny, but everything else suggested an Arctic landscape.

Leaving the car a few minutes later, the opposite impression was formed as we climbed a dune line under the hot sun, fully expecting the sea to appear as we crested the small hill. The heat, the snow, the coastal ambiance; where on earth were we?

You likely did not guess New Mexico, and we never would have either. But there we were, less than two hours outside of El Paso, Texas, getting the equivalent of a ski trip, a seashore vacation, and maybe even a short lunar excursion one day last weekend.

I read about White Sands National Monument a few months ago, and the stark beauty had pulled at me ever since. Quick, reasonably-priced flights from Houston to El Paso allowed me to convince husband J to get away for a long weekend to west Texas and New Mexico, where we started at White Sands and worked our way back east to Guadelupe Mountains National Park and Carlsbad Caverns.

The otherworldly dunes at White Sands did not disappoint. Spread across hundreds of square miles in the Tularosa Basin, the great white waves of gypsum sand rise and fall, in some areas burying yucca plants that fight back by extending their flowering stalks skyward.

Tufts of hardy desert grasses cling to the ground beneath, and even the occasional cottonwood tree perseveres, helping provide shade for the creatures that thrive in the desert. Shrubs and wildflowers add a spot of pale color here and there.

Driving farther into the park led to more wintry scenes, however, with higher mounds and long stretches of open sand unpunctuated by flora, looking every bit like powdery snow. We had much of the park to ourselves in early November, but we caught sight of a few sledders, walkers, and photographers as we trudged into the whiteness, noting any possible landmarks to guarantee our ability to retrace our steps, not an easy task in the monochromatic expanse.

Unlike most deserts, White Sands holds onto much of the water that falls during the summer monsoon season. It lies just beneath the surface of the sand, itself formed by the wind-whipped gypsum flakes that have been driven into this basin in the Chihuahuan Desert for the last 10,000 years.

The sand is as fine as that on a Caribbean beach, but it is also wet enough to pack down into roads and is much cleaner than the organic sand found on tropical beaches around the world.

It sweeps like whipped cream, then folds and gathers in ridges, shadows forming in the corrugated surface that turn it into anything your mind can imagine –  the Sahara, the Atlantic coast, a pockmarked moonscape.

This unspoiled preserve and all its permutations captivated me all afternoon. We stuck around for sunset, when rosy hues melted into cloudless blues, all forming a colorfully striped background for the now-pastel dunes in the foreground, and drove away reluctantly only after the sun had completely disappeared from this strange little patch of Earth.

0 for 2

Tags

aging, disappointment, failure, hiking, Mount Mansfield, Mount Washington, mountains, New Hampshire, summits, Vermont

Over the hill, past my peak, on my last legs, going downhill: all of these hackneyed expressions for aging floated through my mind – quite appropriately for a mountain hiker, I might add – as I tried and failed last month to reach the summits of two of New England’s highest hills.

J and I were on an 8-day road trip around New England, starting in Stowe, Vermont. Our goal was to hike for at least five of those days and attempt to reach the tops of Mt. Mansfield, the uppermost point in Vermont, and Mt. Washington, whose elevation of almost 6300’ is the highest in New Hampshire and all of the Northeastern U.S.

The first was in our grasp – easily in J’s, and probably in mine with another thirty minutes of good, hard slogging. With a slightly too-late start, intermittent rain, and my exasperatingly slow speed on the steeper, rougher ascents, though, we found ourselves on the final pitch above Taft Lodge in the early afternoon, calculating how long it would take to finish getting up, maybe slip and slide back down, drive back to the hotel, take showers, and waltz into a wedding on time.

Our guess was “too long” and we were correct, showing up only shortly before the bride came down the aisle. While I was very exasperated with myself for this failure, and remorseful at holding J back, I grudgingly gave myself props for kicking off the hiking boots after all those hours and managing high heels for the remainder of the day and night!

Between Mansfield and Washington, we did not just sit around eating Ben & Jerry’s, Cabot cheddar, and maple candy (and looking in vain for cider doughnuts) although those fuels may have been consumed in larger quantities than usual. But we worked them off, and more, on other trails in the two states, all in an effort to prepare for the big one – a hike up Mt. Washington, an assembly of tree root- and boulder-strewn paths with about a 4000’ elevation change to reach the summit. As it turned out, all those hours going straight up and down in the woods may have burned me out.

Juggling my absolute desire to at least BE on the top and to reach it on my own two feet, I vacillated on a plan. We contemplated going up on the first cog train of the day even though everything we’d read said we were going to need 9-ish hours to climb up and back down, and this would delay our start. We toyed with hiking up and catching the cog back down, but that’s the only ticket they will not sell you because there is never a guarantee the train will run if the weather changes suddenly, and it often does. Attempting the hike first and failing might mean we’d not see the view from the top at all as the trains stop running at 2:30 pm.

Dilemmas, dilemmas … and we’d already shot our chance to take the cog train the day before because we just didn’t want to rush through our shorter hikes and other rural sightseeing. We were there to relax and enjoy the scenery as well as conquer heights, we reminded ourselves.

And so we didn’t conquer heights, at least not fully and on foot, the way I’d wanted to. J didn’t even care that he hadn’t reached the summits, which he could have readily accomplished; he was thrilled to simply be out in nature and exerting himself. I, on the other hand, radiated disappointment and felt an impending doom, a portent of trail failures to come. I was always the hiker; I’d walked up iconic mountains all over the world, and J got dragged along the first few times. Now he was whizzing up the trails while my backpack felt heavier, my knees more quivery, my confidence shakier.

“It’s the journey, not the destination,” say books, friends, and inspirational posters. Bah! I enjoy the woods; I love the fresh air, and I adore walking all day long. But I don’t pant and scramble, claw and sweat for an entire day just for exercise or for fun. When I work that hard, it’s for a peak, or at least some target. By the time I realized we would not summit Mt. Washington on foot, I set the goal of simply getting above treeline, but we failed – I failed – even at that, spending hours and hours in the long green tunnels that characterize a lot of eastern hiking. We’d been wrapped in the woods for four days straight at this point, and I was sick of it. The forests that I generally love began to close in on me, and then my thoughts did the same, rendering me a crabby old lamenter of my departed youth.

We had ultimately elected to take the cog train that morning, which was a consolation prize of sorts. While it probably cost us the chance to chug to the top under our own power, I’m thrilled that we saw the summit views and meandered on the upper slopes for a short time on one of the sixty or so clear days the mountain gets per year. Score one after all.

 

Better Blues

Tags

blue, bluebonnets, nature, road trip, spring, state flower, Texas, wildflowers

Get out of town, I urged myself. A mini roadtrip is always a balm, and my Sunday drive a few days ago was no exception, a country comfort for my bruised urban soul. I aimed the car west, alone, in the late morning, looking to find the sea of blue that sprouts this time of year in central Texas.

In late March and early April, the bluebonnets arrive. At least two forms of these lupines are native to Texas, but an ambitious Highway Department program in the 1930s to beautify the landscape spread the delicate state flower ever wider.

Five species now border many major highways in the state, and they are joined by numerous other wildflowers, like Indian paintbrush, pink evening primrose, and Indian blanket.

Envious of all the young families plopping their Easter-clad children in the flowers, I returned home in the late afternoon, picked up the old lady pooch, and settled her into her own blue bed right here in Houston’s Hermann Park.

From highway berms to private farms, Hill Country towns to city parks, Texas is awash in wildflowers this time of year. The best are yet to come, but this little glimpse put a big smile on my face.

A Sorry Excuse for a Story

Tags

burglary, story, theft, trees, Weekly Photo Challenge

Tell us a story, said the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge this past week. I have a sorry one to tell.

Once upon a time, there was a trusting and naïve woman making a happy new life in a fresh house and city. Last week, that life was shattered like her kitchen window, rendering her, in rough order, terrified, nauseous, paranoid, agitated, irritated, stoic, and resolved. In one week, she has fortified the house, bought new electronics, and begun the daunting task of recreating the documents, both physical and virtual, that will allow her to step back into the world.

When she does, she may return for a little peace to this magical grove of trees, discovered the day before the intrusion that sent her days into a tailspin.

Hope to be back to happy travel posts soon.

Summer Interlude

Tags

beach, driftwood, Georgia, out of this world, St Simons Island, summer, Weekly Photo Challenge, youth

A seasonal time warp dropped me into a brief summer idyll last week. In the day and a half it took me to drive nearly halfway across the lower U.S., I transitioned from late winter rain and fog to luminous blue skies, cottony clouds, and soft, warm air.

In the early hours, the atmosphere was thick with fog and the greasy refinery stench of East Texas, Lake Charles, and Baton Rouge. As I pushed on, the petrochemical panorama eventually gave way to tangly brown swamps crouching below the causeways of Louisiana.

For me, it’s always an eerie part of the drive – a divided road propped up on pylons above the brackish water, followed by bridges over the Atchafalaya Basin’s Henderson Swamp, an enormous and ghostly pool of water in which half-buried trees appear to be drowning. Billboards hawk boudin and cracklins for miles, neither of which tempted me to stray from my path hard east.

The mist slowly lifted, and so did my spirits, as I spied skeins of birds unspooling over the low-country wetlands of Mississippi and Alabama and, later, a shimmering expanse of water dancing with hard white points of light near Pensacola.

The second morning, fields of bristly marsh grasses appeared, my sign that coastal Georgia was near. I-10 straight east, Houston to Jacksonville, and then a short northern jog. That’s all it took to land me in a hot summer milieu that smelled just like childhood.

It lasted all week, a gift of lightness and the very best kind of nostalgia. “School’s out!” the fresh air cried, and we flung the windows open and popped in the screens at my parents’ sunny house. It was summer break in mid-February, and I hungrily inhaled the sweet and earthy scent of grass and warm soil. I marveled as flowers and ferns began to sprout from one day to the next. A chorus of birdsong was my morning wake-up call, and cheeping insects serenaded the dog and me on her last trip outside each night.

I pedaled an old bike into the wind, savoring the delectable mix of hot sun and cool air on bare arms. In the company of my parents and younger sister, we revisited old pastimes, ducking into the DQ for long-eschewed treats and lolling on the couch with the NY Times crossword in the evening. The aroma of fresh shrimp and veggies rose from the grill, and a hint of chlorine, fertilizer, and light mildew – all smells I strangely love – put the finishing touches on my olden-days reverie. The years and cares that had been piling up rolled away, and if my birthday hadn’t been at the end of that exquisite week, I might have been convinced I was several decades younger.

Which leads me to graceful aging …

A highlight of the week was a walk on Jekyll Island’s Driftwood Beach, a popular, well-loved shoreline that had somehow eluded my acquaintance in many years of being so close by. It was immediately obvious this had been a terrible oversight!

Jekyll’s northern beaches are slowly eroding; each year, more and more sand is pushed by the sea and dumped on the south end of the island. In that process, centuries-old live oaks and pines are uprooted and scattered across the hard sand that is constantly pounded by ocean currents and then baked by the sun.

A few trees remain rooted but most are sun-bleached carcasses strewn about like sculptures in an outdoor art exhibit. While the otherworldly scene has become popular for wedding shoots, my sister and I used it like the children we had regressed to, climbing barefoot on trunks, branches, and toppled root systems as our father amusedly looked on.

The driftwood has an admirable, simple beauty, a spare look that’s enhanced by the blue of the ocean beyond and the pinkish tinge of early sunset. We roamed aimlessly for a while, climbed some more, took our photos, then slipped back through the ferns and palms to the road. Like the buffed and whitened old trees, my own troubled edges were scrubbed clean by my week in the sun, and I came home rejuvenated, eager to reclaim the simple pleasures of summer and youth, every day.

Home again

 

Roughing It

Tags

Enchanted Rock, Fredericksburg, hiking, Hill Country, Texas, weathered, Weekly Photo Challenge

On our recent Texas road trip, we spent time both going and coming in Fredericksburg, an old German-influenced town in the Hill Country near the center of the state. Even before I moved to Texas, I had always loved the soft patina of Texas limestone, the predominant building material in this area. Paired with rough wood siding and beams, the pale yellow stone has a naturally weathered look that I’ll always identify with central Texas. Equally weather-worn is the split wood siding on a few historic log homes and even a few newer doors and walls.

Speaking of weathered …

Always seeking a quick hike wherever we are, here we decided to climb Enchanted Rock, a huge dome of pink granite that rises from the earth just outside Fredericksburg. A billion years ago, this rock was a pool of magma, parts of which pushed up through the earth’s surface, cooled and hardened, and turned into granite. Over time, the surface rock and soil wore away, forming the domes here today. We were fascinated to read that the domes are but a tiny part of a huge underground sea of granite. The entire batholith covers 62 square miles, but most of it is underground.

Enchanted Rock has numerous eroded layers, with pieces expanding and falling off even today on the curved surface. At the high point now, the main dome is 425 feet high, and the entire exposed rock spans 640 acres.

And that’s it for our three-day getaway a few weeks ago. I’m on my way to Ecuador now for some much higher climbs, so stay tuned!

Inscrutable Marfa

Tags

Art, Donald Judd, Marfa, Marfa Lights, road trip, West Texas

A year-end drive, planned very last minute to stave off post-holiday gloom, took us to the Hill Country in the central part of the state, and then farther west to the empty expanses of West Texas. 

Our ultimate target was Marfa, a small town that defies easy description. Other writers have used words like hipster, artsy, curated, minimalist, fake, expensive, cool, and overrated. Every one of these adjectives can apply, but Marfa is a place you have to feel, not just see or try to put into words, and it takes more than dropping in for an afternoon to do it. On the surface, Marfa could be small-town anywhere – in prairie Iowa or rural Cuba. Half-century old cars and faded pickup trucks sit in small patches of scorched grass, vintage Airstreams glint among the sepia tones of the vegetation, and low-slung houses with chipped-paint fences hide courtyards and more from clueless passersby. This is what you see, and are meant to see, before (or if) you have your cultural epiphany.

But shimmering elusively in the plainspoken, down-home facades and pastoral landscapes are the half-hidden intellectualism, the artsy aesthetic, the foodie vibe, and (if you are the cynical type) the pretension that a visitor has heard is there but has to slowly discern. Inside some of those modest-looking dwellings live wealthy L.A. movers and shakers, up-and-coming or already famous artists, and well-heeled couples both young and old who seem to have been beamed in from Brooklyn or Seattle. There are infinity-edge pools hiding in there, and stainless steel kitchens, Eames chairs, and alpaca throws. We know this later, when we flip through books in the shops, but what we see are dusty streets with kitschy awnings and rusty screen doors.

On our first pass through town, we do not recognize a single gallery space on the two main streets; the buildings are nondescript and any signage or advertisement nonexistent. When our hotel receptionist points to the map and tells us where things are, I keep shaking my head, thinking I must have the map upside down or am otherwise disoriented. We went down that street, I say, there was nothing there! I think J and I are both thinking we drove 600 miles for nothing.

But no, a second pass reveals discreet signs, and simple iron doors open to reveal rooms containing, for example, three huge Andy Warhol paintings, or tablesful of art glass, or a “September Eleven” installation. Even our hotel surprises us: this unadorned, rectangular carton right off the railroad tracks shelters a hopping, see-and-be-seen bar, highbrow local bookstore, and Architectural Digest-worthy room décor.

Some of the trailers in town (and more than a few rentable teepees) are part of an ironic-chic camping complex. A plainly unattractive bluish-gray building contains just about the best pizza I’ve ever waited an hour and a half to get. Another old trailer dishes out “Marfalafel” and other Mediterranean goodies for visitors like Beyoncé, you, and me, and it takes us well over a day to even locate another popular restaurant that is tucked up against a random house with a teeny tiny sign.

We walk through a field filled with a kilometer-long string of concrete … things. Apparently some visitors mistake these for unused highway barriers. The minimalist blocks are the work of the Marfa art scene’s founding father, Donald Judd. Like the town itself, the sculptural art at first inspires some eye-rolling and disappointment, but after a slow walk from one end to the other, with the morning sun catching the blunt gray edges and illuminating the surrounding prairie grasses, the piece begins to appeal. We pose with our senior dog in the openings; this would have made a much edgier Christmas card!

It’s hard to tell if the locals want us there or not. It’s clear that the burgeoning art scene has kept the town alive; many other small settlements we pass through out here in the desert look one more economic dip away from extinction. But we feel the ambivalence of both the hip crowd and the locals. Many places are only open on the weekend, shops close when they feel like it even then, service is sluggish, and a shrug might be the best answer you get to any question.

It sounds a bit unlikable, doesn’t it, or at least difficult to fully appreciate? Why does anyone drive hours and hours (and you have to) to see this place whose most famous work of art, the fake Prada store, is another 36 miles outside of town? Whose other claim to fame is a set of mysterious lights that bob out on the desert at night? Whose essence can only be guessed at or seen in a book?

I can tell you why we did it – because it’s there! – but I can’t fully explain why I loved it. I need to go back and spend more than a day and a half browsing the galleries around town, to get a second shot at the Marfa Lights which failed to show up for us, to take the full six-hour Chinati Foundation tour, to try the Marfalafel since the food truck guys decided to close right when I walked up, and to try to more fully grasp the unlikely appeal of this tumbledown town.

I can tell you that after the first few hours, I thought Marfa was the dumbest destination ever, nothing but a sad little place, or maybe a joke on all of us. That after eight hours, a little of the mystery had gotten under my skin. That after a day, I was all in – hook, line, and sinker. I can also tell you my husband did not get past stage 1.5 of that thought evolution; he thought it was sort of interesting and enjoyed watching my gradual enthrallment, but I’m guessing my next trip will be solo!

Driving the Blues Away

Tags

2017, Hill Country, New Year, road trip, Texas, West Texas

The year I got my groove back was almost at an end, and the kids had come home for a short time and, just as quickly, were gone. I was newly bereft.

My own annus horribilis, 2016, had segued into a very good year overall. I went to Cuba at just the right time this past January. We hit a sweet spot for American citizens; things were smooth-ish, somewhat figured out, and not yet confused by the current political climate, and Cuba was still its enigmatic self.

A few months later, I left a cold and corrupt state after twenty-six mostly amazing years; if that sounds like a contradiction, it’s because everything there was perfect until it just wasn’t anymore. Although I wept leaving my home and friends, it was time to uproot ourselves from a life of diminishing returns. I settled into a semi-tropical, warm, and green new city. In my fertile new environment, I re-bloomed, making new friends, finding some rewarding writing work, getting fit, and starting fresh in myriad ways.

What didn’t change in 2017 was that I drove all over the place, and that was a good thing. I punched out day trips into the Texas countryside, a near month-long land cruise across half the U.S., a multi-week swing through five countries in Central and Eastern Europe, and a year-end sadness-subduing ride out to West Texas in the final days of the year.

 

 

As we took down the tree a few days ago, re-made the beds, and put away ate all the leftover cookies, I realized I had to get out of here. Everything was making me cry (or fat). The home-made ornaments with the kids’ little faces on them, the snowman in the powder room, the lights and candles that had made the house glow for a few weeks, all the chips my sons overbought. So we packed up the car, the dog, and our bags, and we aimed the car west. Far west. Six hundred miles west. And I started to smile again.

The farther we ventured into the heart and then the outermost reaches of Texas, the lighter the human touch and my heart became. There is no one out here, we marveled. Maybe it was a post-holiday lull, but beyond the Hill Country in the middle of the state, we saw perhaps one car every half hour or so. On a lonely stretch of US-90, through the Chihuahua Desert that runs along the Mexican border, we counted fewer than ten passenger cars all of New Year’s Eve day.

What we did see were miles and miles of post oak trees and creosote bushes in a faded terrain also dotted with yucca, mesquite, agave and prickly pear cactus, all broken up by a series of small mountain ranges and occasional canyons.

The route from Houston to Marfa, our destination, rises ever so slowly; when a low-grade headache and increasing thirst hit us after a day and a half, we realized we’d gone from barely above sea level to almost 5000 feet in elevation.

Human and man-made activity was limited to long, lonesome trains and Border Patrol stations and vehicles, and as we passed through farms and tiny towns, we took in a scattering of simple windmills, taco stands, rural post offices, and a disconcerting number of taxidermy shops and deer processing facilities.

As the West Texas wind whisked the dust off the roads, my mind was swept clean of the tumbleweeds of despair, of living far from my children, parents, and siblings. It didn’t make sense, but being out there in the vast emptiness took away my own feelings of hollowness. The spare vistas and pared-down life were palliative, and the resilience of the flora springing from rock and dry dirt was uplifting in its own strange way.

As the new year dawned halfway back, in the Hill Country, we were ready to leave our last cozy lodging and drive home. Scrubbed of the nostalgia and wistfulness I’d loaded into the car when we departed, I returned ready to start again, to try to make sense of this modern American life that keeps us all on our own paths, fulfilling ourselves where we can until we’re able to be together again with those we love.

After the Flood

Tags

#houstonstrong, Buffalo Bayou Park, flood, Houston, Hurricane Harvey, resilient, temporary, Texas, Weekly Photo Challenge

Buffalo Bayou Park was the first thing I fell for in Houston when we moved here in early spring. Less than a mile from my house, it was my walking, running, and biking track until the Gulf Coast summer humidity put an end to extended outdoor exercise. We still took visitors to the park for a stroll and a view of our shiny city rising up from the greenery, but I had taken a temporary break from the park a few months before Hurricane Harvey hit in late August.

Now I’m hoping the current state of this beautiful riparian playground is just as fleeting. Harvey’s floodwaters, as well as the emergency release of upstream reservoir contents, wiped out the banks of our urban stream, uprooting trees, drowning plants, stripping away ground cover, and coating the lower paths in a thick layer of silt and sand that has yet to be fully shoveled away two months later.

The dog park was annihilated, and the kayakers have disappeared. Plastic bags cling to dead tree branches, steep banks have collapsed into the water, and the always-murky waters have turned an even muddier brown.

At the Shepherd Drive Bridge, pictured below, the water was nearly 40 feet (yes, FEET) deep inside the park and washed up to and over several of the pedestrian and vehicular bridges that cross the bayou.

As in many places all over this resilient city, though, life is returning to Buffalo Bayou. Ducks and blue herons tentatively paddle and perch on those felled branches, ferns and mondo grass spring from ragged ground, new green growth pushes up insistently from the sand mounds, and people on foot and bicycle have re-emerged to take advantage of perfect fall days in the park.

It’s great to be back in the park.

Road Trip – U.S. Variety

Tags

Art, central U.S., driving, eastern U.S., museums, road trip, travel dogs, U.S. travel

I could have driven coast-to-coast (and more) if I wanted to rack up 3500 miles on my odometer last month, but I took a little east-central oval-ish ride instead, tooling along back roads and some major U.S. interstates over the course of three weeks. Everyone – family, friends, strangers – thought I was nuts to load my 14-year-old pup into the car and set off (essentially) alone on an elongated loop through twelve states and the District of Columbia.

Traveling north out of Houston, the roads offer sights of both natural beauty and man-made mess. The pine trees look and smell delicious, much more so than the scruffy BBQ joints, and occasional glimpses of small, pretty lakes are a nice counterbalance to the scrap yard scenes that litter the outskirts of many a small town along the main route up through East Texas. The roads are mostly local access, so while screaming along at the posted speed limit of 75 mph, you have to be keenly aware that those same small towns and their hapless drivers may suddenly appear, and be ready to slam on the brakes at every at-grade crossing for the first five hours.

Entering Arkansas, it’s a bit of a relief to get on an interstate for a few hours and, unlike many larger highways, I-30 heading northeast toward Hot Springs and Little Rock has some very attractive scenery – more of those towering pines and azure lakes, with the junk hidden away beyond the exits. I make an impromptu 30-minute stop to say hello to my son in Little Rock and then power on through Memphis, feeling good, bouncing in my seat, waving my dance hands, and writing my novel in my head. Damn, I love driving.

A few hours later, my mood has crashed; it’s gotten dark, I’ve stopped singing, the dog is restless, and I’m counting the miles to the exit for the small town in Tennessee where I’ve booked a room. Twelve hours in, and I’m whipped, so I have little energy to make a change or a fuss when I check into a dirty room up three flights of steps that are sticky with badly disguised vomit stains. This is a stairway I have to navigate four times to get the dog, her stuff, my stuff, and the cooler into the room. Who loves road trips now?

I do; I still do! It’s a cool, dewy morning as I leave Jackson, Tennessee the next day, and my spirits have trampolined right back up. I’ve blown through Nashville before my coffee buzz wears off, and just as it does, I have some relaxing horse country to meander through for a while in Kentucky. Once in Ohio, I feel I’m in the home stretch for the day and after a brief roller coaster ride on the trestle bridges of West Virginia’s skinny northern panhandle and the harrowingly thin gauntlet of I-70 soon afterward, I’m home in western Pennsylvania, my stopping point for a while.

Because 1500 miles is mere child’s play, I throw in a round trip to DC for good measure a few days after arriving in the Laurel Highlands of PA. I find Washington quite charming now that I no longer reside there, and I poke around Logan Circle and my old haunts for a day before returning to the mountains. I never tire of the route down or back through rural Maryland, and my heart leaps like it’s the first time I’ve seen the multicolored patchwork of farms that spread out below the plateaus I’ve traversed for decades.

I finally settle in at our house in the mountains, helping my parents with household tasks, walking in the woods, taking in several art exhibits in Pittsburgh, and sleeping with the windows thrown open every night, something impossible to do in Houston almost any time of year. One night, my mother calls down “The neighbor kids are having a bonfire – come see – it’s huge!” My father and I are talking, and we take our sweet time getting up to take a look. I immediately know it is no bonfire; in fact, I am sure the house next door is engulfed in an inferno. I see a structure burning inside the flames, flames that are suddenly twice as high as the house. We call 911 and await the fire engines from whatever VFD might respond way out here in the country. It’s a good 45 minutes and several small explosions later that the hose trucks finally arrive, and we learn that a camper has burned down to its frame, torching two other vehicles and consuming nearby trees in its fiery frenzy.

I eventually leave the mountains and peaceful farms of western Pennsylvania for the mind numbing drive west to Chicago. There are no two turnpikes more deathly boring than those in Ohio and Indiana, and this is the only stretch of my thousands of miles that I would happily give up. I engage in painful nostalgia for several days in Illinois, even daring to drive past my house of 20+ years, but I also get a lot of things done that need doing. It’s a bittersweet stay, but I leave feeling okay that this is no longer my home. I have foolishly and poorly planned my driving days and end up viewing an 85% eclipse in a Walgreen’s parking lot instead of being in the zone of totality in southern Illinois, which I will drive very near the next day. (I’m usually a planner extraordinaire: I am clearly slipping.)

The next day is a driving delight once I’ve passed St. Louis, itself one of those perennially stirring city visions as you first spy its famous arch from a bridge over the Mississippi. Southern Missouri brings the Ozarks and a winding highway carved into rough layers of limestone. There are other karst features to ogle, like springs and caves, but I can’t get enough of the stone cliffs that jut out of the heavy tree growth. I am in no hurry today, even knowing I have a long way to go to get into Northwest Arkansas. The old dog is a trooper, snoozing away in the back seat miles and weeks into our journey, as I dawdle down the highway.

I’m filled with energy as I pull into Bentonville, Arkansas, nine hours later, so I decide to feed the dog and ditch her in the hotel to try to get into the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art before they close so I can view the Dale Chihuly outdoor sculptures at dusk.

 

The art in the woods is indescribable; how do you adequately explain glass balloons that peek out of tree limbs or a stand of purple light sabers in a clearing? Art ensconced in nature is my newest obsession, and I got two doses on this trip, the first in Pittsburgh’s Frick Museum greenhouse. Bentonville itself is picture perfect, probably because the Walton family helps keep it that way (I think cynically), and once again, I’m falling for Arkansas against all odds.

The final day’s drive is a revelation – new ground for me, with the middle patch a rough and remote route. I mosey through university-town Fayetteville for an hour or so, scoop up my son from a business meeting, and then hug the western border of Arkansas as we head due south, later hopping the state line into Oklahoma and entering an unexpected world. We’re on some kind of old logging road that alternately climbs and then barrels downhill at irregular intervals, making my ears continually pop and my stomach lurch as we round each new bend and see jewel-toned valleys beyond precipitous drop-offs. If I’m lucky, I can squeak by the huge trucks piled with felled tree trunks; if not, I chug behind them on the uphills until they thunder ahead of me just over the crests. I see my first Cherokee Nation license plate, and I do not see a gas station or any services for many miles. It is a dramatic and wild expanse, the narrow road a gash in dark, forbidding hills, a segment where I am glad for some human company today.

But soon we’re back in north Texas and we eventually reconnect with the crazy rifle-range of a road that leads us back into Houston. Tonight, the traffic headed south is quite thin; it is the night before Harvey is due in town, and I celebrate these last hours of driving freedom before the deluge.

Next week we are off on another road trip, this one of the European variety (sans dog) … be back soon!

When Will We Turn the Corner?

Tags

Arkansas, Art, Crystal Bridges, Dale Chihuly, flooding, Houston, Hurricane Harvey, Texas

I remember reading with childlike wonder Bama’s recent post about the watery paradise of Inle Lake in Myanmar. Never did I imagine that weeks later I would be living in similar surroundings or that my liquid world would have arisen due to a Biblical deluge that has left my city crippled for months and years to come.

Thankfully, my own home is still safe and largely dry, but our fellow citizens here in Houston are swimming out of their family homes and onto boats. Some are hacking through their attics with axes to reach their rooftops to wait for rescue. Our airport runway photos show wavelets reminiscent of the Mediterranean Sea, and our 10- and 12-lane interstates, viewed from above, could be river deltas.

The beautiful park I wrote about in my first weeks here is now submerged up to the treetops, and more water is expected in the bayous today, both rainfall and a controlled release of reservoir water to save upstream dams. When will it end? We had heard that the worst would be over by daybreak today, but there are sheets of rain lashing our windows as I type, and the Army Corps reservoir release has only just begun. My phone continues to blare out flood warnings, and the trees are whipping and waving dramatically hours after the last tornado threats.

We have all seen such horrible images on TV, in the papers, and online, so I leave you with some happier scenes from the last day of my recent 4000-mile road trip, completed as I pulled into the garage mere hours before Hurricane Harvey arrived. These Dale Chihuly sculptures are nestled in the forested trails of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. Around every corner was another marvel – brighter, happier scenes for my troubled mind.

Let’s Talk About Arkansas

Tags

Arkansas, bridges, Little Rock, southern U.S., stereotypes, Weekly Photo Challenge

At the edge of your seat? That’s what I thought. Here in the U.S., Arkansas does not get a great deal of respect outside its own borders. As one of the states ranking lowest in education, highest in levels of obesity – and perhaps because of the stereotypes based on those two facts – one of the least-visited states in the country, Arkansas strikes some as a sad little backwater full of banjo-strumming, catfish-eating rednecks down south somewhere. Don’t believe it.

I’ve always gravitated to and been a champion of underdog locales, so I’m here to dispel some of the myths about Arkansas, one of the most naturally beautiful states in our country. Yes, it is; it really is! I started traveling to Arkansas a few years ago when my youngest son took a job in Little Rock, a place where he didn’t even want to interview but, once there, he embraced this artsy little city and threw himself into local affairs. Every time I visit, I find more to like, and it begins with the scenic appeal of the undulating, verdant topography.

The Natural State has millions of acres of national forest land, including two mountain ranges, the Ozarks and the Ouachitas. There are miles and miles of streams and rivers, the two biggest being the Arkansas and the Mississippi. Trails and campsites, dozens of lakes, caves, and even hot springs draw visitors and entertain locals alike. Boating, canoeing, fishing, and hiking are accessible almost from border to border with national and state parks galore, including one of the oldest and most visited parks in the country – Hot Springs National Park.

Arkansas’s appeal goes beyond the great outdoors, though. Its capital, Little Rock, is a quirky little city, with quaint throwbacks like a streetcar system and ’50s era drugstores and barbershops side by side with spiffy bespoke tailors and well-groomed suburban shopping malls.

Its distinctive neighborhoods are connected by a few main thoroughfares, and many are worth a drive-through and a stop – perhaps a morning farmer’s market in SoMa (the up-and-coming South Main Street area), then on to a Cajun lunch or taco in tiny Riverdale, a late afternoon latte in boho Hillcrest, dinner in the more stately Heights, then back downtown for a nightcap or some music.

Farther west, the houses are huge and the lawns are manicured, but the hilly roads are a constant, dipping and curving amid the ubiquitous tree-covered greenery, and biking and walking paths are also given all over the city, especially along the Arkansas River.

Little Rock’s compact downtown boasts an array of live music venues, including a picturesque riverfront amphitheater, as well as a few tall corporate headquarters that assert LR is a real city, the usual mix of small local cafes and fancier big restaurants, art galleries, and new tech spaces. Old warehouses have been converted into stylish lofts, chic new condos and apartments are popping up here and there, and everything is a short walk away. For those so inclined, those strolls can take in the Clinton Presidential Center and Park, as well as the impressive Heifer International headquarters building and information center.

Like any river town, Little Rock has a plethora of bridges – old railroad trestles, sparkling new spans, and my favorite (and best-named), the Big Dam Bridge. The latter is an engineering marvel to view and, even better, it’s in an area of woodsy trails and pedestrian bridges just minutes outside of downtown.

There is much more to discover in Arkansas, and I have every intention of doing just that. Tops on my list is the Crystal Bridges Museum, a glass jewel box of American art nestled into the forests of Northwest Arkansas. Nearby is the charming town of Eureka Springs, as well as Fayetteville, home of the state university and a city I’ve always wanted to visit ever since novelist Ellen Gilchrist made it the home of her main character in The Annunciation (and herself in real life). In my mind, Fayetteville is a classic college town of bookshops and art stores, cafes and boutique shops, set amid the same rolling landscape I’ve already raved about, and it sounds like a perfect little base for the museum and hot springs visit, too.

If Arkansas is languishing near the bottom of your travel list, don’t be afraid – it’s not all razorback hogs, hillbillies, and moonshine! Come on down here and check it out – it really is a great blend of small-town charm and natural beauty.

A Sunday Drive

Tags

Bryan, countryside, France, Houston, politics, reflecting, road trip, rural, Sunday drive, Texas, Weekly Photo Challenge, Williams Jennings Bryan

It’s a summer weekend several decades ago, and my dad is seeking company for his customary Sunday activity: a drive in the country. As usual, I am the only taker. Sometimes we look at houses, occasionally we explore new areas, but most of the time we just drive out into the country and admire the rustic fences, the barns, the crops, and above it all, the sweeping sky. We chat or we don’t, and we inevitably end up at a Dairy Queen for a twist cone at the end of the day. These yawning days are among my favorite childhood memories.

***

Flash forward, and there is still something about an unscheduled Sunday that cries out for a jaunt in the car. Yesterday I answered the call, and we loaded the vehicle with the dog, some water, and a few snacks, and headed northwest from Houston to enjoy a spectacular spring day on the road.

Our destination is the perfect distance away (less than two hours) and has an additional attraction; a town called Bryan, Texas, named after my distant relative, William Jennings Bryan. Three-time presidential candidate (and perpetual loser), secretary of state, famed orator, and attorney both admired and ridiculed, Bryan is a direct ancestor on my father’s side of the family. Hailing from Illinois originally, but a long-time resident of Nebraska (where my grandfather was born), Bryan somehow left his mark quite deeply in Texas, where he owned a winter home and farm.

The journey itself ends up being the enchantment. The sky is a blue bed of white puffballs, and the early crops are a cheerful lemon-green. Rural fences always rope me in, and today is no exception. We see white pickets, split rails, and dark wood dividers on both sides of the road. We get off the main highway as often as possible and keep swerving off onto the berm to photograph the ranch gates, both simple and elaborate, along the way. We follow the web of farm-to-market (FM) routes, observing the network of roads that physically connect rural America to our large cities.

My husband eats a Texas-sized beef brisket sandwich at a popular BBQ joint at 11 am, halfway through the drive out, and is still sated when we arrive home in the late afternoon. We stop at a famous rest stop/gas station to fuel up at bargain prices and peruse the outlandish array of paraphernalia available there, from fresh fudge to hot dogs, homemade kolaches to every bag snack you’ve ever heard of, stuffed animals to camouflage gear, and the “cleanest restrooms in America.”

The historic town of Bryan is closed down on this Sunday afternoon, which is fitting given William Jennings’ religious bent later in life. We wander through the downtown streets for a few blocks anyway and then load the old pooch back in the car and retrace our route back to the big city.

We’ve accomplished little, but we’ve temporarily cleared our heads in all that fresh air and sprawling land. Unfortunately, mine is now spinning with thoughts, reflecting on presidents and populations, of byways and barriers. This is what most of America looks like geographically, even as the majority of our population moves into urban environments.

In Bryan’s day and our recent past, this dichotomy did not seriously threaten our cohesion as a nation; in fact, those FM roads connected more than just farmers and our city tables. But now our differences, the other kinds of fences we have put up at home and around the world, have helped to create the calamity of our current leadership.

While I was piloting and pondering, France was rejecting a vision of the world where a nation can only house one type of person, where only the market-makers matter, and where outside interference can amplify those differences and scare people into a frightening, reactionary decision. We were not so careful or clear-headed here, but my hope is that the strong French results will somehow nudge the world back onto the kind of road that connects rather than divides.

Happy in Houston – Part 1

Tags

Buffalo Bayou Park, Houston, surprise, Texas, urban hikes, urban parks, Weekly Photo Challenge

After almost a month in Houston, I am surprised and not surprised at how quickly I have regained my happiness. Houston is one of those cities – and Texas one of those states – that elicit sneers and grunts from those who don’t know them. I endured my share of puzzled reactions when we excitedly announced that we would be leaving Chicago and Washington, DC, for the Bayou City, so my goal is to surprise my readers with some of the great things about my new hometown.

One of my favorite first impressions is the incredible outdoor link between my neighborhood and the city. Buffalo Bayou Park is a green space stretching for about two miles from the Montrose neighborhood to the edge of downtown Houston. There are bike paths, walking trails, a skate park, kayak rentals, disc golf, a dog park, and more, all nestled into a ribbon of land on both sides of Buffalo Bayou. Houstonia magazine called the park, finished less than two years ago, “Houston’s new front porch,” and that it is; from morning to night, people ply the paths, sit on the benches, and otherwise savor the outdoors here, just in front of the skyscrapers that stretch for block after block downtown.

My new morning routine is becoming a short walk or drive to the park, followed by a brisk hike, jog, or bike ride within the green confines. I can spend 30 minutes, an hour, or longer winding my way through the spring wildflowers on the banks of the bayou, watching dogs frolic in the Ritz Carlton of dog enclosures, or passing under the Waugh bat bridge, where thousands of Mexican freetail bats emerge and soar against the city backdrop each evening. I can stay low and close to the water’s edge and disappear into nature, or I can ride higher on the paths, closer to street level, and stop at any of a number of sculptures, fountains, gardens, or memorials.

One of the coolest surprises here is that the park was designed with the knowledge that it would flood. In Houston’s tropical climate, rains can be heavy, and the bayous and streets flood numerous times each year. Engineers took into account the fact that waters would rise up to and occasionally above the top of the bayou banks, so they placed electrical lines above the floodplain and used materials like raw concrete and galvanized steel that could hold up under water.

The lower paths are often sandy after a downpour, but the walkways and bike lanes were designed to be easy to sweep clean. Buffalo Bayou Park is built along a natural body of water that is an integral part of the city’s drainage system, so park planners also planted native grasses, trees, and wildflowers whose roots would absorb water underground.

Beyond the practical results of all this planning, the design and flora create a natural habitat for wildlife and make the park feel like a real refuge from urban life. The biggest and most wonderful surprise of all, though, is the moment when you crest one of the graceful park bridges and see before you a bucolic, riparian scene: a trio of kayaks slipping away from a rough, natural shoreline, framed by flowering trees and bordered by shady pathways – all reflected in the shiny spires of the city skyline. The city and nature coexist here in the most surprising and wonderful way, and this park has fast become one of my favorite parts of my new life here in Houston.