It is late, and I was up early, but I’m trying to think what I can do over the winter, and there are a lot of positions I feel I should apply for, but right now at this very instant what I want to do is this.

I’m still reading my solo women in the wild essays on the bus, though I’ll be done soon. I am guiding. I was thinking about what things I have wanted to do in the past, and remembered that I wanted to coach crew, and I wanted it badly, even though on some level I know I only wanted to keep rowing myself. Today I took out two little girls in the triple kayak, granddaughters of a friend of el presidente, for a kayaking lesson. The older one figured things out, the younger one isn’t quite old enough to understand and pay attention to keeping the paddle straight as it goes into the water. And I’ve been saying for a while now that rock climbing should be my winter sport.

I’ve also been saying I’ll go back to school, but maybe, when it comes right down to it, I still do not feel any certainty about what I should be studying, what I should be aiming for. Field research in the Russian Far East, which is based entirely on the concepts that a) I want to be outside and b) I don’t want to have spent nine years studying Russian for naught. The thing is, I would blindly join research of Siberian segmented worms if I thought it meant I would be able to go camping in Siberia and ask the locals where to find said worms, and then I’d probably just be miserable. And in Siberia. With worms.

I just found a wee, deceased spider on the table. Next to my bowl of yogurt. I am disturbed, yet puzzled as to why it expired on our dining room table.

Theme song for the week: Ella Fitzgerald – Too Darn Hot
Methods for staying cool:
1. At work, hang out in water barrel, wade in ocean and prolong launching of kayaks
2. At home, wear bikini, visit apt complex pool frequently, cold showers
3. Eat popsicles, ice cream, chilled pasta salads
4. Attend volunteer shift at the Aquarium, where vast amounts of ocean water keep the building cool

As Seattle temperatures remain high, so does the temptation to return to Alaska

It’s a long road to Portland from Seattle, when you’re on a bike. Longer, I imagine, if you were the one on the unicycle, or the scooter, or the tricycle.

It was a lot, and it is all in my head together. I close my eyes and I can see the long pace lines passing us, the rest stops with lawns coated with bicycles, the tree-lined highways, the slow curving slopes, the the roadside repairs, the bridges, the traffic. Too much to process effectively. 213.5 miles, in total, because we stayed slightly out of the way on Saturday night, in Toledo High School, where we slept on the floor of the library. Specifically we slept in the reference section, next to books on the Constitutional Amendments and career paths for people who like to travel, play sports, want to be nurses, etc.

The start line was a line-up, en masse in what looked like a cattle chute. Fortunately no cattle prods, just a few speed bumps on the way out of the university parking lot.

The steepest hill was in Seattle, getting out of Seward Park. Or it may have been the last sneaky little hill before we got into downtown Portland. Either way, neither was more than .2 miles long.

I learned a bit of group riding communication skillz: “car back!” – there is a car coming from behind. “car up!” “on your left” – I am passing you and it would be nice if you shifted over so I don’t have to go into traffic. “slowing” “stopping” – I’m warning you so you don’t run into me. Then there was the occasional “road hazard”, but mostly people just point down at the grating or dropped water bottle or whatever

As well as roadkill there were a number of flattened energy bars on the roadside.

I can still go fast at the end of the day as long as I have a goal in mind. Last twenty miles to spaghetti. Last hour until spaghetti. Six miles to pasta. Less than two miles to food. Last two hours. Last thirty miles. Last sixteen miles. The more people I pass, the less people in line before me for massage.

The last seven miles were pretty easy, because with seven miles to go, I ran over a staple. An inch long, staple gun staple. We had a bit of a rest stop changing the tire using the screw-driver heads on mine and Alex’s multi-tools, because we didn’t actually have tire levers.

Actually, the route was overall very flat. The vaunted BIG HILL was a little long, but not steep. Its length and my refusal to go slowly did make it the only place I approached lactic acid, though.

On the bus ride back, we listened to part of an audio version of ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,’ and noticed pretty much nil of the return scenery. We saw a lot of it close up already.

I wore a Sponge Bob Squarepants jersey (child’s L) for the ride. Early in the day Saturday we were going through a small town, and two little girls were standing on the corner trying to get high-fives from the riders. I slapped their hands, they saw my jersey and yelled ‘Sponge Bob is awesome!’ or something similar.

We counted roadside casualties, during the first couple hours it was averaging around one every five minutes. The first day we saw about thirty-five, and the second day another fifteen or twenty. After we got to Oregon we finally got to the point where the number of casualties was higher than the remaining miles to Portland.

There was a definite gender imbalance amongst the riders. This meant that anywhere the bathrooms were gendered (rather than just port-a-potties), there was a long line for the men, little to no line for the women.

I found myself thinking a lot about rowing, and racing, and racing two or three times. Don’t think about the next race, my coach always admonished us. This about this race, and give it your all, and when the next race comes around, you will find the energy. So I spent the first day thinking not much further ahead than the next mini-stop, and the second day took care of itself, energy-wise. Probably the whole ride was similar to a steady state workout, 82%, eight and a half hours.

Besides the requisite bruising of my derierre, I was in remarkably little pain. Even sleeping on the floor didn’t make me feel stiff. My lower back hurt in the morning of the first day, after the hill bit, but I took some ibuprofen and iced it at lunch, and it was fine after that. By the end of the first day as well, I had a pain in my right shoulder, near my neck, which stopped when I stopped, but crept back while I was a pedaling, and continued the second day. There was also occasional tingling and numbness in my left hand, but overall no screaming muscles at the end of the day; I did not exceed my muscular or cardiovascular limits. After we got off the bus in Seattle and reclaimed our luggage and bikes though, once we got on the Burke-Gilman trail to head towards food, shower and bed, my knees hurt and Alex suddenly discovered pain in his Achilles’ tendon. We made it a mile, then walked up to the Ave, got food, and took a bus the rest of the way. Coming home this morning, I went another quarter mile on the bike, and knees still less than happy, so I took some ibuprofen (Vitamin I!) and will wait and see.

The most amazing thing was the bridge over the Columbia River, the border between Washington and Oregon. This a serious bridge, a big freeway bridge. To one side they corraled off the cyclists until they had a large group, three or four hundred. Then they stopped the south-bound lane of traffic, and let us bikers go. En masse. The bridge, of course, is basically a hill in shape, so it was a very slow up with the crowd, then finally the apex, cheering for the ‘Welcome to Oregon’ sign, and the downhill. It spread out, but I stayed slow because there were a couple of nasty grates, perfect to catch a bike wheel and kill you, then we were over the bridge, and the freeway sweeps down, and the southbound exit to Portland is a wide clover-leaf, swirling down to the right to make a 270 degree turn, and there’s a line of bikers zipping down it. It was like an amazing vision of human powered mass transit, freeway covered with bikes instead of cars.

The best jersey I saw was probably the South Park one – red on the back, with Cartman and the words ‘Oh man, you guys SUCK!’ And I developed a yearning to be a part of the ‘Blue Monkey’ team, because their jerseys had a blue monkey on them.

Saw and/or talked to riders who were from Ireland, Australia, Florida, New York, and a number of points in between.

Ate quite a few clif bars, and quite a few cookies.

Don’t think I would go another five miles today, but give me a few months, and I’ll sign up to do it all again next year. ‘Why do we do this to ourselves?’ Alex asked me.

‘Because it feels so good when we stop.’

Today I failed to give my seat to an older woman on the bus. Now don’t get me wrong — I tried. She was probably sixties-ish, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and a cream-colored scarf with orange flowers on it tied around her neck. The bus the was full. I got up, I offered my seat.

“Oh, no,” she said, continuing toward the back. “You’re more tired than me, I can guarantee it.”

“All right,” I said, and sat back down, feeling rather awkward. I was on my way home from work, I was pretty obviously dressed for biking, but riding the bus, I did a kayaking trip this morning… but how was I obviously more tired than she?

The bus merged onto the freeway, headed north to the University district. I glanced back, she was standing just before the snake joint, looking unconcerned. I was afraid to make eye contact, but I noticed the line of a muscle in her arm as she swayed to the side.

Yesterday I was reading a book of essays called Going Alone: Women’s Adventures in the Wild. I believe the title is quite self-explanatory. One of the essays was called “In the Tracks of Old Ones,” by a Geneen Marie Haugen, who writes about an overnight backpacking trip with her two dogs, and reflects on being an aging woman in the outdoors.

I was already witnessing how some women my age were extricating themselves, in increments, from the outdoor experience. First, no more swimming naked; then, no more submerging the face or hair. First, no more backpack trips without a man. Then, no more backpack trips at all. Then, no more sleeping on the ground. Then, no more sleeping outdoors. I was terrified that this would happen to me, this slow and seemingly inevitable closing down that apparently had less to do with physical ability than with preset cultural programming.

A woman who’d heard I was going backpacking asked, “Geneen, how old are you? Don’t you remember how hard that is?” I couldn’t bear to believe that a time would arrive when what I remembered about large or small adventures was that they had been difficult, uncomfortable, or frightening, when I forgot that joy had always balanced, if not outweighed, the pain.

Last weekend, when I was hiking with my boyfriend, he was telling me about a professor, several times married, who he had once overhead complaining to someone, “Once they hit fifty, you can’t get them to sleep outside anymore.” The last time I can concretely remember my mother sleeping outside, she was 48. If I’m not old yet, is it too early for me to start resolving that I will still sleep outside occasionally after fifty? After seventy? Will I stop enjoying the gentle sensations of swimming naked?

What happens to athletic women who get old? Growing up in Alaska I heard plenty of tales of the grizzled old backwoods men, the fishermen, the homesteaders who kept right on going into their eighties, until that last fall, that last storm, or until younger descendents coerced them into dotage, but not nearly as much about women who had followed the same trails.

Geneen writes about being passed over by saleswomen in the mountaineering store she’s been shopping at for twenty years:
For some time now, not one had asked if I needed assistance, or even appeared to notice when I was in the shop. I suppose one adapts to being a cellophane-woman, but I wasn’t there yet, and I was still surprised–no, shocked–to find that if I approached, the clerks would eye me skeptically, as if to ask: What could you possibly need in a mountaineering store? A woman might be accustomed to dismissal from a “go big or stay home” kind of man, but these youthful Amazons did not seem to realize the trail had been partially broken for them by older women adventurers–women who might, in fact, still occasionally need a topo map or a new pair of boots for a hobble into the wildish world.

The woman I tried to give my seat to got off at the first stop in the University disctrict. “That was very kind of you,” she said as she passed me.
“Thank you,” I mumbled.
“But young people are allowed to be tired, too.”
“I suppose so,” I said, still quietly, still feeling confused and awkward. I decided she must be psychic, and somehow knew that tomorrow is the first day of the Seattle to Portland bike ride, and that I’m planning on getting up tomorrow morning and starting off at 6 am for 125 miles.

I also considered the fact that she may very well have been right, that being younger did not make me less tired than she. Perhaps she was someone like Geneen describes, a woman who, despite a proper upbringing and a fondness for wearing silk scarves, goes on white water rafting trips, or maybe horseback expeditions in Patagonia, and I am simply a naive young Amazon, unaware of the trail-blazing Amazons who have come before me.

I met another old woman today, who was probably much closer to eighty than to sixty. My place of work, besides sending people out in kayaks, also rents bikes and skates. Last week we got a bunch of landrollers, which have two large wheels and can go over grass. I haven’t tried them, I haven’t really tried rollerblading. But this old lady was looking at the landrollers, and finally asked me about them. I told her the spiel as I know it, and we started talking. When she was younger, she said, she roller-skated everywhere. When it was cold and snowy outside in the winter, she would skate in circles around the dining room table. ‘My mother had a linoleum floor,’ she said proudly.

‘Where did you grow up?’ I asked. (It doesn’t get snowy in Seattle.)

Minnesota.

It sure was nice, she said, to see the young people out on the skates, but she was too old for it anymore. She shuffled away, and I went back to cleaning kayaks.

Geneen has a number of examples of women who refused the cultural programming that would keep them from swimming naked or sleeping outside:

In 1924, Mardy Murie honeymooned by dogsled up Alaska’s Koyukuk River with wildlife biologist Olaus Murie, with whom she worked passionately on behalf of wilderness. When I told Mardy–who, with Olaus, was largely responsible for establishing the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge–that she was one of my heroes, she said, “Why? All I did was follow that man.”

Once, upon returning from backpacking in the Beartooth Mountains, I ran into Mardy’s dear friend Inger Koedt, who’d also just come home from backpacking. When I asked where she’d been, she named a lake high in the Tetons, far from any established trail. Inger reported that her trip had been altogether fine except that in one particularly exposed spot she had asked her son to rope her up for safety. Inger was past eighty at the time.

The more I think about it, actually, the more examples I know myself. I have a great aunt who was a ski instructor in Colorado in the 1950s, and who is still more prone to expeditions than vacations in her seventies. Another friend was recently telling me about her great aunt, who started kayaking in her sixties, and goes on a yearly paddle trip. One year to Iceland, one year to Alaska, one year to South America… Back home in Alaska I recall the example of Frederica de Laguna. Her obituary in the New York Times probably best describes her exemplariness in this context: “An authority on Alaskan prehistory, Dr. de Laguna was part of the first generation of women to succeed in the rough-and-ready, ultramasculine world of early 20th century field archaeology.”

In the meantime, I’ve googled Geneen Marie Haugen. She doesn’t appear so old as I might have thought. Young enough to still roller skate, should she so choose. Young enough that I wouldn’t think to offer my seat on the bus, but obviously old enough to make me think about whom I offer it to…

Incidentally, she also began her essay with the best canine description I have seen in a long while: “It was eighty-eight degrees in the shade when I locked the car and staggered toward the trail with my dogs. They had big paws and cold noses, but it was all a disguise. I knew their true identity: happiness in fur coats.”

So after a night a delirious dreams about the various ways the tour I was supposed to lead today would be canceled or somehow reduced to two from twelve, I convinced myself that I had to go to work even though I could hardly eat half my breakfast, it hurt to swallow, and I kept feeling nauseated. Once I got to work, I burst into tears and said I couldn’t go out. It’s cool, says my boss, I’ll take them out and Julia will be my assistant. Then Julia shows up with an ice pack on her hand, having dropped something large on it at her other job.

Long story short, el presidente took out the twelve people (and the water was flat and beautiful! a bad day for me to feel like something the cat hacked up) and I made my long-suffering way home. I took out my nuvaring (having decided it is the birth control that is making me cry about everything) took some pills and went to sleep with my down comforter. It took two hours for my toes to warm up, despite it being in the upper seventies in my room.

I had some more delirious dreams, the most vivid being that I was in a giant auditorium and it was full of people and it was some sort of police state thing and they were extending mind control over everyone. At first I was sitting in the middle, and when they said something I would shout ‘That’s not true! That’s a lie!’ at the top of my lungs, but I was entirely ignored. More and more people started chanting and shouting and they were turning into these large red abstractions of people, two long red cylinders with a round head on the top. They were called Zogs, and we were sopposed to be shouting ‘Zogs! c’est something something nuit’ but I’ve always been rotten with French. Someone near me said it meant ‘into the night!’ There was an adjective for night but now I forget. The beings on the right side of the audience had transformed into a swaying mass of inverted white exclamation marks, and the rows in front of me kept shifting forward and back rhythmically; there would be a line of people walking up towards the back on the seatbacks, then they would all shout Zogs! and reconvene. I moved to the back row, and there was some sort of guard there. I was sitting next to an elderly man, and the guard came over, put a towel over the man’s lap, then reached underneath it and pulled out three pill bottles, which he put into a special holder in a white five gallon bucket.

I started sassing the guard, telling him I would rather be fishing, then asked him if I could go to the bathroom. He let me, but said he would take away my shoes. ‘I don’t need them for fishing,’ I replied, ‘I was going to give them up anyway.’

There was a small restroom just off the auditorium, institutionally tiled, and in the first stall there was a female guard (in blue) writing something in a notebook. I got the feeling that she probably wasn’t as into the spirit of things as she was supposed to be, but I woke up.