04.21.2010

Essay from 9.21.2008
After driving for 11 1/2 hours, Allen and I arrive at the marina in San Diego and board the boat that we will be spending the next three days on. We will be diving around the Channel Islands in the great kelp forests, amongst quadrupeds and garibaldi. My birthday is soon and this is my present. I am also trying out my twin doubles for the first time in the open ocean. The last time I dove with doubles was a disaster. Allen and I signed up for a deco/nitrox course and went down to Florida to dive in the fresh water grottos there. Long story short, I was woefully unprepared for the rigorous, military style dive boot camp. The instructor had a big van with F.R.O.G labeled on the side of it. Good first impression, I like frogs well enough. Then I found out it stood for, Fully Relying On God. I should have taken that as a sign from the Universe that this class was more then I was ready for. The next day brought more demoralizing frustration then I had felt since junior high math.
There are people everywhere on the boat, talking loudly, laughing as they haul gear on board and try to find a place to put it. I have been a little apprehensive about the number of other folks that are going to be sharing this boat with us. Whenever I am around more then 5 or 6 people I begin to feel as if the others are breathing all my air. Soon gear gets all sorted out. People begin to file to the upper deck into the dining area for a briefing before we head out. After introductions and some common sense rules we are allowed to mingle and socialize. I follow my husband down to the sleeping bunks and we get toothbrushes and go back up to the deck. Soon four or five people are brushing their teeth. I wonder if we are aboard a boatful of lemmings.
Our bunk is on the very bottom, ie. The floor. We crawl in and close the curtains. My sea sick pill is starting to kick in with a vengence. I had carefully timed taking it an hour before we boarded. Alas, I am a land lubber. A desert rat from western Colorado, transplanted to Salt Lake City. I have been sea sick before, and have no qualms about better living through pharmacy. In addition to quelling nausea the pill makes me drift off to sleep, actually enjoying the movement of the boat as it rises and falls on swells. I have dreams about being an owl and flying in the mountains, and then I’m awake, and we are out to sea.
A minute or two passes before the cold water starts to trickle down my back. I bob in the ocean like soap in a tub as I wait for the Allen to jump in. The current takes me away, and I have to kick to get closer to Allen before we begin our descent. As the cold water slips over my head my world becomes quiet and blue. I find my neutral buoyancy and begin my way through the giant kelp forest. As we sink gently deeper the cold water presses against me. I glance at my dive computer and see that I have 2800 psi, full tanks, I clear my ears and sigh with content. Girabaldi swim up to my mask and peer into it wondering what lies behind the reflective surface. There is reef structure that reaches down so far I can’t see the bottom. We glide along the structure taking our time, checking out the little nooks and crannies for critters. I pull ahead of Allen and turn upside down to watch my bubbles rise to the surface. The twin doubles feel unruly and I struggle with my neutral buoyancy. As I come back around to the prone position I notice that my reg is breathing a little hard. I make a mental note to ask Allen to look at it when we surface, and then I breathe the tanks dry. No Air.
Allen is about 15 feet away. He appears to be inspecting a long frond of kelp.
I watch him, willing him to feel my gaze as I slowly blow tiny little bubbles through my reg. The trick works and he glances at me, I signal to him that I’m out of air, a brisk stroke of the hand across the throat. Apparently he doesn’t quite believe me, and he mimics the signal back to me as a question. “What, You’re out of air?”
I can see through his mask that his eyebrows are lifted in a question.
Yes, goddammit, I’m out of air! I signal back to him. At the same time it dawns on me that I have an alternate reg. I think it might be a good time to try it while Allen is kicking over to me. I forget to purge it and toke on some icy sea water. I’m feeling a little air hungry now, and Allen seems to be moving in slow motion. I give the octo another suck and find that it has been cleared of water. I take a really really big pull of air on it, and then another and then another. Allen is by my side and I show him that I’m breathing now. According to Rick, the dive nazi, there is no longer an emergency, after all I’m breathing. I still feel as if there is an emergency however. I have a firm grip on Allen’s arm, and my face is very close to his. His eyebrows are all frowny now and I can see his mind whirling, trying to figure out what is going on with my rig. I signal, with authority, that I would like to ascend. We begin to slowly kick up, purging air from our BCD’s as the gas expands. At 15 feet we stop and hang for a three -minute safety stop. As we break the surface I realize that I can’t inflate my BCD. Hmmm…? One regulator is dead, no joy for the BCD. Wonder if there is something wrong with my manifold? I reach back and fiddle with the valve. I feel and hear the rush of gas from one tank to another. Everything makes sense now. My isolator manifold was in the off position. Who ever had filled my tank apparently shut it, and filled only one tank. I feel some relief, and then I feel really really stupid because I did not check my valves before hopping in to the water.
After clamoring back aboard the boat Allen and I debrief and talk what had happened and why. Allen tells me that my eyes were very wide open down there. He snickers to himself a little bit. I take note of my eyes and feel as if they are still wide open. Even out of the water, with all that lovely breathable air swirling around me I feel anxious and a little short of breath. I wonder about the propensity of humans to toe the line and try to be where they really don’t belong. I think about how breathing is really underrated and quite a fine thing in itself. I think about how pleasant it is to feel my lungs full of air.

To every thing turn turn turn....

The first thing I thought was, Why didn't I read this when she was dying? After i was halfway through the book I wished I had read it even earlier, before my mom was even sick. That way i would have known how to grieve. I would have had directions, a map to follow so that I could see which way to go.
There were questions that should have been asked. Answers and explanations were missing. There was so much that went unsaid. Even after she died words that went unspoken got backed up and stuck someplace. I'm still bewildered by these piles of things left unsaid. Like log jams stuck high up in a slot canyon, the words all tangled and stuck together,confused. She would look at me and say 'I love you Beck', and I would say ' I love you too Mom". Then there were all these other things that went unsaid.
Are you ready to die? Do you want to go to the hospital and get a tube put in your nose to feed you? Do you want to be poisoned with chemotherapy that may prolong your life for years, or may not? Do you want to go anywhere? Is there something you want to tell me? Oh, so much stuff unsaid.
The day she died my Aunt Jeanie and I had been trying to amuse her and keep her comfortable. After painting toes bright pink, and putting on Vivaldi, Mom relaxed and was snoozing a little bit. all of a sudden she called out my sisters name. "Julie... Julie where are you?" My sister was far away in Florida. She couldn't come out because she had life to live, daughters to take care of.
She had spent a week with us after Mom's first surgery and couldn't come out again. When mom had died, breathed her last quiet breath, I called my sister to tell her that she had died. her response to me was, are you sure? Did you listen to her? I am a nurse and my sister a PA, so often we were able to hide behind clinical verbage and diagnosis and prognosis. Again, so much stuff left unsaid. My sister is my strongest ally now. One huge gift that came about from the death of our Mother.

The book is 'Refuge', by Terry Tempest Williams. I'm learning how to grieve from this book. I'm asking my mom the things I should have, and I'm getting the answers from the mountains and the desert and the moon, and the changing seasons.

Autumn

Waiting for a change. The first chilly morning that smells of dusty warmth as the furnace burns for the first time in months. The October light slants, and casts long shadows in the afternoon. Shivering in the sunshine. I want to wake up to cold cloudy skys and weather. I want to eat hot soup and bundle up in blankets. I want to go for a walk at night and smell woodsmoke and feel chilled. I know that soon enough I will be complaining of cold feet. I will be longing for the deep, dry heat of the Utah desert. For now though, I'm waiting for winter, waiting for change.

I'm going on my first road trip in years next week. No husband, no dog...just me. So much time has passed since I've spent time by myself. In a sense getting married ruined being alone for me because now I have someone that I miss when I don't get regular doses of him. Before marriage I used to spent huge chunks of time alone. Days could by without speaking because there was no one else there. I was seldom actually lonely. The Hubba's been out of town all this week, and although I've worked most of the days, the few that I had off made me connect with that part of me that loves solitude. I won't be spending my whole trip alone, just the 'getting there' part. Once I arrive an old friend and I, and perhaps one or more of her kids, will go to the coast and look at tide pools and swim in the ocean and hike. When that trip is over and I return, the Hubba will go away again for another climbing trip. For some reason I like being away from him long enough to miss him. I like thinking about him and thinking about missing him, rather then being annoyed at him, for one reason or another, which has been happening a lot lately. I like the anticipation of seeing him again.
Ed Abbey writes, '....in these hours of solitude I hope to discover something, to renew my affection for myself, and the human kind in general by a temporary, legal separation from the mass.' ( Desert Solitaire, pg. 155)
Thats how I feel. For some reason solitude is a necessary thing for me. I need it to remember who i am and where I am going. I need it in order to know myself and to remember myself.

Chaos

Chaos (derived from the Ancient Greek Χάος, Chaos) typically refers to unpredictability, and is the antithetical concept of cosmos. The word χάος did not mean "disorder" in classical-period ancient Greece. It meant "the primal emptiness, space" (see Chaos (mythology)). Chaos is derived from the Proto-Indo-European root ghn or ghen meaning "gape, be wide open": compare "chasm" (from Ancient Greek χάσμα, a cleft, slit or gap), and Anglo-Saxon gānian ("yawn"), geanian, ginian ("gape wide"); see also Old Norse Ginnungagap. Due to people misunderstanding early Christian uses of the word, the meaning of the word changed to "disorder". (The Ancient Greek for "disorder" is ταραχή.).


Chaos is the complexity of causality or the relationship between events. This means that any 'seemingly' insignificant event in the universe has the potential to trigger a chain reaction that will change the whole system. A well known saying in connection with this issue is "A butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world can cause a hurricane on the other side of the earth." This is also known as the "butterfly effect".[1]
*Both definitions obtained from that reliable, ever present entity of Wikipedia*

For the last few days our peaceful world has been shattered each morning by the rumbling of trucks, pounding of hammers, rapid fire speech in spanish......
Finally it feels as if things are getting done. I hope the butterflys are all OK in China!

Scary Snowman, Winter Lassitude

Scary Snowman
Originally uploaded by Emma. x

Oh! Is there no cure for the middle-of-the-winter blues? I can't run far enough to get away from it. I can't ski enough to leave it behind. I can't seem to out sleep it, or out work it. Why won't this month go away!! i am struck down by the lassitude, the failure of my imagination. I can't see beyond the next skim milk, cold watered down sunrise. I try to dream about the dry heat of the dead of summer. I can smell the sage and sandstone baking in the sun...but, I can't feel the warmth. And then in my dream, when I turn around, there is a giant evil snowguy, running towards me, threatening to avalanche on me. Fucker...

One Fine Day

I breathe in and my nose hairs freeze. I snort in surprise and they melt. I knew it was cold out, but frozen nose hairs? Brrrr…. The silence is broken only by;. swish, squeeeak, swish, squeeak… A magpie monitors our passage. He calls out just as we pass around a bend, he’s trying tell us something. I don’t speak magpie, so I don’t understand him. We ski out into a clearing. A pristine white hill stretches out in front of us. Tele-vators go up and we begin to climb. My toes had started to go numb, but now they warm up and start to burn a little. My heart starts to tick along. My nose hairs unfreeze and stay thawed. We continue up and up. I plod along behind the Hubba. There is a false summit in front of us. Even though I know it’s not the top, I still get that feeling of anticipation. There will be a VIEW ahead, a chance to stop and catch the breath. Maybe have a drink or a snack. Ten more swish/squeaks, and we reach a small saddle and there is a VIEW. We stop and look across the clear, cold valley to the peaks on the other side. We can see people waiting to get on the lift at the resort. We have no company, other then a magpie.
Drinks are slurped, snacks are scarfed, and we head up again, just a little bit further. Just as we are about to the top, a small airplane zips into view. He’s not so far above us. He does a fancy little roll as I wave cheerfully and as the Hubba yells his disgust and flips them the bird, two handed even. My Hubba is a back country purist, ( that’s read, SNOB!). He won’t ski at a resort these days. A motorized noise in the backcountry is like a fart at a tea party as far as he is concerned. I’m thrilled by the acrobatics. Looks like fun!
We attain the top of the ridge and carefully peer over the edge. Just to the right of us a huge cornice bends over dripping icicles. To the left another cornice looms over the slope below. Today is not a good day to temp the fates. Instead, we stomp the cornices. At my hubba’s insistent stomps, a cornice lets go and silently slides, collecting more snow as it goes, gaining momentum until it spills onto the flattened ground at the end of the slope. Some friends have joined us and the cornice stomping begins in earnest. A rope comes out of a pack and soon a make- shift saw is made, and we create an even bigger slide. Such grace and power in that snow rushing down the hill. After all the big cornices are down, we stand at the edge making our plans for the exit out. To the right of us is a void where the steep hill goes down, down. We chat about which hill we will ski down and then there is a small poof, and a breath of icy air. The ground beneath my right foot gives, and I instinctively shift my weight to the left, falling into the frozen fluff. I scramble even further towards the trees. My Hubba and our friends are in pretty much the same position. We all laugh, a little bit nervously. We peer over the edge and see that most of the previous edge has let go. All present are wearing beacons and all have shovels and probes in our packs. We are lucky though, so none of those things need to be used. I know that I certainly feel humbled and more respectful then I did five minutes ago. My Hubba and his friends still laugh. They are all veterans of this backcountry. They all know what it is that I am still learning.
With one last glance over, the Hubba and I head south just a bit, still on top of the ridge. We strip the skins off our skis and tuck them into our packs. Then we get to head down at last. The slope that will lead us out has evidence of early risers but there is still plenty of untracked snow for us to ski. The Hubba lets me go first. I genuflect and can barely feel the resistance of the snow against my legs. I find my own rythmn and feel like I’m dancing down the slope. My quads start to burn, and I realize I’m not really breathing. I suck in the fresh cold air and I’m pretty sure I know what it’s like to be in heaven.
Later that night, pleasantly tired, on the edge of sleep and snugged into mounds of down blankets and pillows I hear my Hubba breathing funny. His hand, which is resting on my hip, squeezes and then relaxes and then squeezes. Chasing rabbits in his dream I guess. I think back to the edge of that ridge, the silence, the cold. I remember the suddenness of the edge falling away. One minute the earth is frozen and solid under me. The next I’m off balance, and there is air beneath my foot. I am reminded of the fact of my insignificance. I am reminded that wild things need respect and consideration. They don’t demand it, it is just something that is. That is one reason why I love it so, why I need it. I drift off to dream land. Tomorrow is another day. I will wake up early and head to the hospital. Patients there don’t know what it is like to taste wild freedom. I know. I hold that knowledge close and it makes me smile in the middle of the day.