the moon is so full
it is inside out
a noom
peephole into a world of light
sky dark or moon bright
blinding cararact a game of chicken on the tracks
bow your head and lift your brow
avert your eye
from its
its or it’s i never know
when stars fall away from my face
From Nancy, regarding this weekend’s Born To Run ultra trail running extravaganza …in one text like a long drawn out frenzied breath,
“Ahh. Can you go Thursday at all and help me clear and set up tent…bring a prom dress..no cannot take it sooo much shit…there will be a spot for you…i will be going over to watch beginning of race with u in morning..I have an entire storage unit full that includes 3 giant ice chests 3 tables chairs my big tent generator, 20 liters of Coke, 5 gallon thermos decorations tarps that does not include 25 gallons of water and all the food plus ice oh yeah the pop up tents we just bought this 4 by 6 shed and I filled it the next day oh yeah my mountain bike 2 kids swimming pools oh yeah all the costumes and the bedding for my italian guests. F*$k me. Help me get this sh#t over there or put some of the sh%t in your car to bring.
I try to call her but can’t understand a word she says. Her voice but a whisper, I worry that it’s all just too much and then I hear through the soft squeaky whisper, “Laryngitis”.
Somebody help her , please.
This isn’t actually about my nipples or your nipples or anybody’s nipples for that matter. Nipples are generally interesting and fun but rather useless unless you are lactating. Since roughly 2% of the world’s population is lactating at any given time, chances are that 98% of you probably aren’t making milk as you read this. If you are reading this though, you probably know me and if you know me, chances are that you are a trail runner. If you ARE a trail runner, mountain biker, dog walker or hiker then you would be at least as interested in the following as you are interested in nipples. So please, take a second and read it. I apologize half heartedly for throwing the word “Nipple” into the title of this post but it could have been worse. Thank me for my restraint and read on ( even if you’ve got a clamp fetish and this is what googling nipples got you). Just trying to get your attention and keep you from glazing over at words like “amendment” and acronyms like “LMP” and “BCNM”.
The Forest Service has released, for review and comment, the Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) Southern California National Forests Land Management Plan (LMP) Amendment. The proposed amendment would revise land use zone allocations for select Inventoried Roadless Areas within the Angeles, Cleveland, Los Padres, and San Bernardino National Forests.
We’ve got three choices going in the LMP Ammendment. Think of them like three doors to choose from. Behind Door Number One, (Alternative One), you’ve got “No Change”. No change means no additional protection. That’s kind of like choosing the easy way out. Sometimes, frankly, change stinks. It’s hard, it takes a little effort and it can be unsettling. But hey, without it, we’d still be poking sticks in anthills to feed ourselves. Behind Door Number Three, we’ve got Alternative Number Three which calls for additions to “Recommended Wilderness” land designations. As trail runners, this might look good. More Wilderness! Whoo -hah. It’s what we all want? Right? Uhhh…not so much. A bunch of land gets a name change to “Wilderness” and it doesn’t get any more wild. Wilderness sounds good but with more Wilderness, there is going to be less access to the land by a bunch of folks, including the ones that really go out there and battle the poison oak , keep the trails clear, and protect what they love. The cost of trail maintenance will go up, trail maintenance resources will go down, and you’ll be spending more money then you’ve had to before on Calamine, Technu, and oral steroids while having less trail to escape to . Behind Door Number Two, you’ve got Alternative Number Two which facilitates the change of significant amounts of National Forest to the Back Country Non-Motorized (BCNM) designation. The BCNM designation will protect our forests from timber, mining, and oil drilling industries while still enabling us to play in the back country and keep our watersheds protected. Alternative #2 is where it is at.
Here’s a link… you can go to it and show your support for Alternative #2. The letter was drawn up by our friends at SBMTV so you might have to customize it.
http://www.sbmtv.org/get-involved/key-issues/lpnf-lmpchange/
Comments end May 16th so get your hands out of your shirt and get busy.
Luis Escobar brought the running community together last night with a photographic essay and story session about the Tahahumara Indians of Copper Canyon Mexico. Those are the guys that Christpopher McDougal slingshot into our consciousness with his book “Born to Run”. The ones that run tirelessly on tire treaded sandals, not for finisher’s medals but as a way of life. They run to each other’s far flung ranches to party, to play and to wager for prizes of real things, like sacks of corn, manly skirts, fermented beverages and honor.
Luis could talk forever about these guys and what they have brought to his life. However, we are a bunch of runners and by definition have a hard time sitting still for any period of time whatsoever. Had we not all started to fidget and dance in our seats, we might have heard even more stories then the ones Luis shared with us. What we heard was good though and Luis had a couple of messages that I think he painted with a brush dipped in awe and humor. The final one was that we would be in a better place, as human beings, if we could remember what it was like to live with less. To shed the skin of a consumer and feel what could be, standing unencumbered by naught except a skirt and sandals.
I’ll remember a couple of other things that Luis said. I’ll remember that if you cross one chalk line on a trail race course, then you are dumb. You cross two, and you are an idiot . Cross three and you are a triathlete.
I’ll remember the oath that he makes us take before one of his races. “If I get lost, hurt, or die …it’s my own damn fault.” I never knew that came from Micah True.
And the prayer he learned in a sweat lodge of the Tarahumara…
Tierra es mi cuerpo
Aire es mi aliento
Agua es mi sangre
Y Fuego es mi espritu
Luis talked a lot about what Micah True did for the Tarahumara and for the rest of us. Someday , somebody will be giving a presentation on Luis and talking about what he’s done for us. He’s formed a community of trailkind and validated our need to be outside, to be moving through fields and forests, and to be relentlessly in search of the strong and the silly. Pretty much, he’s our Cowballs in Belltown. He takes some badass pictures too. Thanks Luis.
I don’t really think that there’s anything to say about what happened yesterday in Boston that’s not stupid and meaningless. Senseless as a blind face with no voice, it happened, leaving us senseless ourselves. Stunned. Rent .Tulmultously silent and silently screaming. How can there be meaning when there is no sense to be found? How can we make sense of something meaningless? Tangled inside, on a revolving door ride, you hope to fall out as a door opens to understanding. Waiting you grope around and find platitudes. They can’t keep us down. They haven’t won. Look at all we’ve done. Don’t look at yourself and wonder why. Look at them , the other. ‘Cause it’s nothing we’ve done.
Tucking my son away for the night I told him that something bad had happened. I’d thought that he would hear about it at school and I wanted to give him something to help. Somebody got angry, I said. People got hurt. There’s nothing that you can do about it except think of the thirty people. Thirty people away from you, there is somebody who might get angry someday too. But if you touch somebody with kindness tomorrow, they might touch somebody someday too. It’s not too much to hope for that your touch can cause a cheek to turn the other way, somewhere , someday, thirty people away. That’s what you can do, I said. I might believe it too.
I turned on the night light and turned away. That’s when I heard it. A small sound like a bomb sound effect going down. And I wondered. What we’ve done.
Today is the tenth anniversary of my hire date as an RN at Cottage . A decade seems like a pretty big deal to me since the only other thing that I’ve done longer than that is parenting. I’ve had a lot of “wow” moments this week thinking of my tenure and did a little bit of math. I’ve taken care of over 4,000 people, if I’ve done the math right and admittedly, math is not one of my strongest subjects so I’m not a hundred percent certain of how accurate that figure is. What I am certain of is that every single person that I’ve been able to care for has touched my life in some way. They’ve taught me who I am, who I want to be, who I could be, who I shouldn’t be. I’ve seen life and love, despair and pain. Acceptance, bargaining and all of the stages of grief. Hope, loss, emptiness, bliss ….all of those things too. And it has all mattered. Every single patient has mattered to me because they have made me feel, by letting me care for them, that I matter. So thank you. Even though you aren’t reading this.
And my colleagues. You aren’t my colleagues. You are my family and you are my friends. You make me want to be there. To be a nurse you’ve got to be tough, flexible, smart and caring and you are all of that. All of you. For that, I love you and I respect you . You have to have an insane sense of humor to get what you’ve got to get done and keep smiling. I think that I laugh more at work than anywhere else. When you’re up to your elbows in excrement giggles become sustenance and you guys, you’ve sustained me. I’m sorry for being crabby every day at 4:00 when I haven’t eaten and my blood sugar is 2. I’m sorry for those days when I’m resource and I really don’t feel like starting that IV for you or walking the strips over to 4 Central. I’m sorry for accusing you of eating the cookies that I left in the breakroom. I’m even sorry for repeatedly yanking on the bathroom door handle to let you know that , yes, I am still waiting in the hall when you’re trying to have a private moment. The feeling might not be mutual, but I hope that I have another ten years with you all.
We’ve all heard that the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over expecting different results. With that in mind…for this year’s Tough Enough relay I piled the usual suspects into the “Fun Bus”. The Fun Bus has been most aptly described by Jim Kornell as, “Kind of like that relationship with that person with the intense inner life, who was brilliant, then morose, then brilliant and in either state was never all that reliable . But a van instead of a person.” That’s what he had to say in 2011 about the Fun Bus and I’m sure he was merely commenting on the vehicle, not suggesting anything about any of the people transported within it. Two years ago the Fun Bus broke down somewhere en route to pick me up at the end of leg 6…you know the one down the back side of the dirt road off of West Camino Cielo . The one that ends in BFE with no shelter , food, water, or especially……..no toilet paper. This year I assigned the same leg to myself and set off with one bottle of water and no snacks . Lightning never strikes twice. Right.
I had an absolute ball running along the ridge with the ocean to my left and the valley off to the right. My friend Nancy was riding her mountain bike alongside of me, the flowers blooming were beautiful in a high definition “OHMYGODTHEYARESOFREAKINGPURPLE” runner’s high kind of way, I felt great and the headwind didn’t bother me too much. It was an excuse. I can’t stand up in a strong wind much less run against one. As I ran I could hear myself crowing a the finish, “Yeah! Sixteen runners passed me on that leg but there was a HEADWIND!!!” I couldn’t have planned it better. We all need those excuses. Like, “You know , I ran 100,000 miles this week so my legs weren’t fresh!” or “I had Thai last night, food poisoning. Lost five pounds in vomit weight but decided to run anyway.” Who doesn’t shove an excuse into their pocket before a race?
I had started out a little fast since John, Sara, and Dana had rebelled against my steadfast insistence that we run for fun, not speed. They’d put us in the top five and I didn’t want to be the one to lose the early advantage. Cursing them, I had pushed the first two miles and then spent the next two trying to get my heart rate to recover. I kept trying to explain myself to Nancy but it was hard to get the words out what with my heart rate somewhere around two hundred and sixty. Still, she kept saying things like , “fskf hdhifh mmmm m fsfs.” Perhaps if I’d turned down my i-pod I could have heard her but maybe it was better that I didn’t . Sometimes a pacer’s encouraging words just beg for a good ol’ slap and that just wouldn’t have been nice to do to Nancy who was after all, being a good friend and pacing me. As good as a friend as she is though, she makes a poor wind break. Her 99 pounds was doing nothing for me.
Leg 6 is 8 miles, at least according to Jim in the course directions . Every year my GPS flashes “9 Miles” at the handoff but what’s an extra mile of arduous uphill? I hit 8 miles after giving as much of my all as I was willing to give and looked excitedly toward the handoff spot for my teammates. I got nothing. I yelled in horror at Nancy who was doggedly riding her mountain bike alongside of me giving me pointers that I pointedly ignored. Nancy was sure that they would be around the next corner for maybe six corners in a row. Dying a little inside I mentally kissed goodbye the visions of Corona with lime and vinegar potato chips that had been dancing in my head. I could smell the singed hair burning on my arms from that second strike of lightning. Realizing that no toilet paper was forthcoming, I screamed at the Groundhog that it wasn’t $%#$$# spring and kept on going.
Apparently, the Fun Bus had RUN OUT OF GAS.
Secretly, I was tickled. Life seems more of an adventure when the basic human needs on Maslow’s hierarchy aren’t met. I might not feel the same way if I should end up homeless someday but for now…. it only makes me laugh. When the next leg, (John Voorhis’ leg which I was running while he was partying mountain top), had been mostly run I saw a car approaching with John inside. I assumed that this was a rescue vehicle sent by one of my teammate’s significant other and that the rest of the car’s inhabitants were the remainder of my team. Thinking this, I gleefully raised my arm high into the air and gave John the bird. Right here, right now, I would like to apologize to those strangers in the car who did nothing more than be Good Samaritans in trucking John out to meet me. Really, I felt a twang of remorse when I energetically flipped you off. Please forgive me.
I started to stammer to John that he should let me finish that leg and just take the next but before I could make a cohesive sentence John was off and running ( downhill of course) with Nancy trailing behind him. I found myself alone on the side of the road. Still without toilet paper.
For the life of me , I couldn’t figure out how I was going to make it to the end of Leg 7 to relieve John for Leg 8, my next assigned piece of the race. He’d left me in the dust but somehow I had to leapfrog ahead of him to the start of Leg 8. As I was mentally bending the laws of physics trying to get myself two miles down the road, Josh and Laura drove by and let me into their car. I subtly felt them out to see if they were willing to feed or hydrate me but my delicate requests of, “MY GOD I’M HUNGRY AND THIRSTY” were met with the comments that all of their food and drinks were in the back of the car. I repeated myself a couple of times to make sure that they got it but they were both so, (understandably), focused on gettng to Taj that I felt obliged to bail out of the car.
After sticking out my thumb again I was picked up by the Care For Paws people. Thankfully,they were happy to take me to the start of the next leg . Driving towards the next handoff we passed the stranded Fun Bus and they let me out to grab supplies. I clambered into the back of the bus, dropped my headphones, lost my water bottle, forgot to get Gus, stole somebody else’s headphones and heard the Care For Paws people yelling that we HAD TO GO. Running back to their car and leaping in as they tried to zip off without me, I realized that again I had no toilet paper.
We arrived at the handoff before I realized that we were even driving and I saw John coming towards me. Luckily I’d had all of 14 minutes to recover from my 11ish hard miles and was fresh and ready to go. John and I sneered at each other, I counted this as a high five, and took off down the steep backside of the mountain. Nancy was beside me again on her bike and she let me know, in an attempt to be calming and reassuring ,that there was a fast chick coming up on my ass. I did my best to be at one with gravity but the fast Care For Paws antelope passed me anyway. I tried to grunt something friendly as she free fell on my right but what I was really thinking was that she was being silly. That part of the course is not very driveable, few cars pass on it and if you want to slow down a bit, nobody would ever know. Excepting the presence of a large mountain lion, there is absolutely no reason to be doing 6 minute miles down that slope. As a matter of fact, even IN the presence of a large mountain lion, the only time you would need to be running 6 minute miles there would be if you were running with somebody who was running a 6:01 mile.
Happily I found my teammate Becky waiting at the start of Leg 9. Running the flat land through Solvang would have been a little like traversing the bowels of hell by that point in the day and I was relieved not to have to even contemplate it. With Becky on her way, I turned to see John wearing a ladies jacket. According to him, his warm clothes were still in the bashful Fun Bus which had yet to reappear. I suspect that he has had a long standing desire to wear women’s clothing and that Saturday’s fashion show delighted him. The Care For Paws people agreed to shlep us to the final leg and we squeezed into their vehicle for the trip. It was starting to dawn on us that we wouldn’t be seeing Sara for the final leg of the relay. The last leg is 3.5 miles and after much bitching and moaning John agreed to run the first half of the 3.5 miles. He insisted on taking the first half because he and his girlfriend had dinner reservations at 4:30 and she was going to come pick him up at the side of the road and whisk him away. The GPS tracking device in his leash would facilitate this plan. John warned me that he would just get into her car and go if I wasn’t around to relieve him for the last leg and with those sweet and altruistic words, he was off.Hopping into another stranger’s car, I convinced Eric, Megan R.’s husband, to set his odometer to zero and drive me to my appointed spot. We noticed with smug satisfaction that the first part of the last leg was a steady , painful looking incline but one that leveled off at exactly 1.7 miles. I told Eric that I would give John the last 0.05 miles and relieve him a bit early to gain the pleasure of watching him enjoy that last sprint uphill.
Predictably, John struggled up the hill with a look on his face that betrayed his realization that I was enjoying how things had panned out. He inched slowly up the hill and I waited, not really extending my arm for the hand-off high five but stretching it out behind me to give him an extra second of running. Chesire grin in place I set off for the final section of the course. Off to my right I saw John climb into the girlfriend’s convertible. As they rode off into the sunset, he raised his middle finger in a final salute and had what he thought was the last laugh.
Running into the finish hurt badly but it was a good hurt. I saw Jim there and knew that I’d get my hug and maybe even a cool Horny Toad Shirt. I knew that pizza would be forthcoming and that somewhere in the park there was a room that I could rest in. Funny enough, John and his girlfriend were at the picnic tables reveling with our runner Becky. No Fun Bus in sight, I crossed the finish without my team. They were busy drinking in the park and in the bus.
Twenty minutes after I finished I saw the Fun Bus roll into sight. With a sigh of relief I headed off to the restrooms. Which were…. out of toilet paper.
I can’t wait until next year’s Are You Tough Enough.
Today I really needed to deal with my taxes and clean my neglected house so I went and ran Snyder trail back off of Paradise. I was taking it easy, saving my legs for Tough Enough this Saturday and was riking. That’s running mixed with a bit of hiking, not admitting to jogging today or ever, so let’s call it riking. After a couple of days of running at work, having friends over last night, working with third graders and then melting into the Daily Grind with two of my best friends and one of their mothers this morning I was in the mood for some alone time and I was getting it. There wasn’t a human soul around. Lizard and tick souls maybe, but no people. As such, I felt like it would be okay to play my music loud enough so that I couldn’t hear my own singing through the earbuds.
So I did, knowing that inevitably a mountain biker would come around a corner and catch me in a compromising position. I was wrong though, it was five mountain bikers that startled the bejesus out of me. They were all sweet, wearing bike bells and looked great from behind. ( Not that I would notice, being old enough to have mothered all of them.)I grabbed my dog and tried to move gracefully off to the side to let them pass. They gave their thanks and went on their way.
Realizing that I wasn’t going to make it back to town on time to pick up my offspring I picked up my pace a bit and tried to take advantage of gravity. When I got to my car, the bike boys had just loaded their bikes into a truck to head back up to Knapps for another run. One of them rolled down their truck window and said, “You got from way up there to down here THAT fast?”. Totally tickled, having never been accused of being fast before, I did a nonchalant head cock, shoulder shrug, ponytail flip and paired it with a self effacing “Yeah”.
It felt great to be a badass, if only for a moment.
uninvited poppies riot in a mad clamor toward the sky
like dragons in a chest of broken glass
swiftly tilting back and forth upon the edge of slender yellow hills
balanced
at any given distance, except from where you stand
There’s something about a road trip that makes you think a little more than ordinary. A least for me it works that way. I can get into my car with a duffel and a destination and fall to pieces of paper somewhere between here and there. I jot and scribble and careen across the highway, drop my pencil into that no-man’s land between my seat and the console and hurl a few epithets at the dashboard when my searching fingertips dip into that old apple core that I’d been smelling but not consciously acknowledging.
Roadtrips do the same for my little one and I love hearing what goes through his mind as we’re going down the road. He gets quiet and then I hear, “Mom..you know what I think?” and when I hear that I turn down the music and get ready ’cause I know it’s going to be good. Today, I heard the prelude. I was happy to hear it , I’d already covered twenty or so scraps of paper with meaningless, fragmented, illegible thoughts and was frankly, tired of being in my own head. Here is what he said.
“Mom……you know what I think? I think that it’s stupid when people say that they can clear their mind. Humans have evolved so that their brain is always seeking patterns in hearing and smelling and feeling and thinking. Unless you’re just a bloodyless nothing, you can’t clear your mind.” And then he affirms himself, “Mmmhmm.”
He’s nine.
I really should have waited for a big gust of wind before I let him fall from my branches.
