November 2012 -

27 Nov

Those who walked before

It’s November again and I am Nanowrimoing my little heart out, so I’ll be reposting a few things from way back when, and concentrating on the new novel climbing out of my head.

While I have recently spent a lot of time and thought on women in martial arts history, there have been women pioneers in other areas as well, something I was ruminating on in the summer of 2006.
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.”

As I age, I continue to realize that the people all around me have hidden depths, and that it is important to recognize our elders. I also find it incredibly inspiring to hear these stories of people remaining active throughout their life. After all, growing old is not for sissies!

20 Nov

The Battle of the Grasshopper

dead grasshopper by leticia chamorro via flickr

It’s November again and I am Nanowrimoing my little heart out, so I’ll be reposting a few things from way back when, and concentrating on the new novel climbing out of my head.

This time we’re going way, way, way back, because I was on the internet pretty young and kept an online journal, which you can still see in all it’s embarassingly neon-colored glory (although I didn’t get into animations or midi players, thankfully) on Angelfire. This is a from my freshman year of high school, and emotions were running hot in my family.

As promised, the story of the grasshopper and it’s effects on my life.

I spent the second week of May in New Mexico, which is an entirely different story. However, before I left, I notified all my teachers, except two — my Russian teacher, who would also be gone most of the same week and wouldn’t care anyways, and my biology teacher. Actually that’s not completely true. I had mentioned to my biology teacher that I would be gone, but on the day I told all my teachers that I would be absent and was there any work I’d be missing? I didn’t have biology and therefore never had an official type conversation with him about it.

Time passes and I returned, having missed a full week of biology. On my return to the class, I found I had missed three assignments, a chapter review, an arthropod drawing and the dissection of a grasshopper. I turned in the review, I drew the arthropod (thought it sure wasn’t pretty) and I contemplated the grasshopper dissection. At that time, I did have the chance to make up the dissection.

I decided, hey, what the heck, I won’t dissect the grasshopper. Doubtless, you’ll want to know the reasoning behind this decision. 1) I don’t care what chemicals they feed them, how big can a grasshopper get? It’s gonna be tiny and I won’t be able to tell what it’s insides are, even if I did care. 2) Somebody told me they squirted. 3) I’ve already dissected a worm, a crayfish and a starfish. How big a dent could a zero for a grasshopper make? 4) It’s a smelly, dead thing. I don’t like smelly, dead things.

So, I made my decision, I was conscious of it, I didn’t change my mind and I felt good and control of my life (if only a small portion of it).

Thursday came and 7th hour. Some guy who I know by name only came in to make up a grasshopper dissection. Sitting on my desk and coloring in my tesselation from math, I watched him out of the corner of my eye. The grasshopper was one ugly sucker, about 2 inches long. The biology teacher told me I could join him, if I wanted. “I don’t like smelly, dead things,” I replied, and continued my coloring.

Another day or two went by. The teacher was working on grades. “Bonnie,” he told me, “if you don’t do that grasshopper you can’t get an A.” Fine with me. My world won’t end with a B in Biology.

More time passed (though not a lot) and it was the end of the school year. I got my project reward slips and took them home. (Project reward is a program at my school where if you haven’t missed more that five days of school, or if you have an A or B grade or haven’t been in trouble you don’t have to take exams in whatever classes your parents will sign you off on.) I remembered to give the slips to my mother. “I’m only going to sign the ones for classes you have As in,” my mother said. Shit, said my brain, argued with itself for a while then directed my mouth to admit to having a B in biology. “Why’s that?” my mother asked, “because it’s biology?” (I have a history of hating, not caring about and generally not doing fantastic in science.) “Umm,” I said, and ended up telling her about the grasshopper.

Now, I may think it’s great when I make decisions and do things for myself but my parents don’t agree. In fact, this time, they disagreed with me quite emphatically.

Someday, my mother informed me, when you have a 3.98 gpa and you’re not the valedictorian, you’ll regret this.

If you want to go to a good school and get scholarships you need to work. (oh yes daddy, I’m such a slacker, of course) The people who get scholarships are the people who work and who don’t give up. (I’ll never let go dad, I’ll never let go…)

And it was decided by the Powers That Be that I was an evil child and would be taking the biology final. The Powers also decreed that for ever grade below an A I would be off the computer for an additional week. Addictional to off till the end of school, but although school ended of Thursday, these weeks will end on Saturdays, the Powers told me.

All arguments against the Powers are ignored. But if I’ll be majoring in English, why would one bio grade matter? What science scholarships would I be applying for anyway? Isn’t it my life? (Not till I’m 21, as I was informed by my male parental unit, several arguments ago. It might have been nicer to have been slapped.)

Two things remain on the tip of my mind. Should you have the right to ruin your own frickin’ life? and It’s a B! What’s so frickin bad about a B?

Looking back now, I can see it more from my parents’ point of view, but I also still feel a bit smug, because I was salutatorian in my graduating class and went to a perfectly nice liberal arts college with my 3.98 GPA. And I’m more interested in science these days, but I have no regrets about that grasshopper, and I don’t think that I’d jump at the chance to dissect one today.

15 Nov

Adventures with Wildlife

Mutski dog wants to know
what you did with that squirrel.

It’s November again and I am Nanowrimoing my little heart out, so I’ll be reposting a few things from way back when, and concentrating on the new novel climbing out of my head.

One of the privileges of living in Alaska is the numerous furry and feathered creatures which populate the Great Land. Also the weather, which is grand. Due to the summer heat (yes, heat. like 80 F.) we’ve been leaving the door to the deck open. This allows the dogs, breezes, hornets and mosquitoes to freely move in and out, though we’d rather somethings stayed more out.

This afternoon the cat and I decided the best way to putter through a Sunday afternoon was to take a nap. I dozed off and was later woken by noises from the living room — barking dogs and a squirrel screaming bloody murder. I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter, away down the hall I flew like a flash, and there are the two dogs sniffing at the corner of the window sill, and there is a little squirrel clinging to the molding and Christmas lights above the window, no doubt deeply regretting the decision to step in our door.

I could see but one course of action. “Mom!!” I yelled. “Get a net!”

She came upstairs and agreed we needed to get the poor beastie outside. “He probably has rabies,” I said uncharitably.

“Honey,” she said, looking me straight in the eye, “I went to ag school. He does not have rabies. Small furry morsels do not get rabies because if something with rabies bites them, it eats them.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m sure he has other diseases.”

“He probably has fleas,” she told me matter-of-factly, and went to go get the dipnet.

The dogs quickly lost interest in the window sill; the squirrel had stopped making noise and they couldn’t fathom where it had gone.

They went out on the deck to look for it.

Back came my mother. “Maybe we should get a towel or something,” I’d decided. “He’s going to fall off.” The mesh of the dipnet could easily fit two or three squirrels per hole. (Salmon are generally much bigger than squirrels. No, really.)

My mother, however, put the edge of the dipnet up to the squirrel and prodded him gently. He had by then decided that this was the worst day of his tiny little life, and nothing worse could happen. He transferred easily from clinging to the top of the window to clinging to the rim of the dipnet.

“Wait! Let me get a camera!” I got a few digital pictures once she had him out on the deck. The dogs suddenly realized where he was and became very interested in what my mother was going to do with him. She took him to the edge of the deck by the wood and lowered him down so he could get on the railing.

That little squirrel scrabbled on the railing for half a second, leapt, sort of glanced off one tree and shot up another, chattering for all he was worth. The dogs waited for him to come back for a long time, but I’m sure he went straight home, or to the bar, wherever he could get a stiff drink quicker!

12 Nov

From an Alaskan point of view

Roughly equivalent, right? Maybe??

I sent another story through critters.org and got back a lot of helpful commentary. Isobel and the Mammoths is going to be a teaser for the series I am currently working on – Isobel the Bear Eater. This particular project is going to be an interesting one. I am from Alaska, and have a degree in Russian, which gives me an insider view to the pan-Arctic culture that I am both borrowing from and creating, but leaves me really open to making references that are obvious to me but obscure to most everyone else. The critters pointed that out several cases where I had done this.

I’ll be working to make things clear to a general audience, of course, but there’s a part of me that delights in these small confusions. It’s payback, you see, for when I was reading stories as an Alaskan child, and there were plenty of references that were alien to me. (Except for maybe the Moomin Trolls. But obviously the Finns understand.)

What was a firefly? A toll bridge? A badger? A thirty-story apartment building? How could you tell a garter snake from a rattlesnake?

Robin Hood was always hunting deer, an animal I knew only from brief glimpses when visiting relatives in Pennsylvania, part of that vast territory that Alaskans refer to as the “Lower 48” or simply, “Outside.” I enjoyed Beatrix Potter, but it was moose that ate things in our garden, not rabbits, and I understood that hedgehogs were like porcupines, but smaller.

Botanical references were off, too. I never saw a weeping willow until I went to college in Connecticut. Tulips grew the floral department of the grocery store, not in fields. There were no cultivated fields – we never went on road trips and drove past fields or corn or cows or anything. Dogwood is a flower, maybe 8 inches high, not a tree. And while we’re at it, flowers on trees? What is this madness?

Dogwood versus Dwarf Dogwood. Wha?

One of the pieces of advice I see over and over is “write what you want to read.” So that’s what I’m doing. I want to read something in a world familiar to me. A world where summers are blinding light and endless adventure and winters are a time for telling stories next to a wood stove. A world with bears and berries in the woods, with salmon and sea stars in the ocean. Grumbling porcupines. Roiling ash clouds. Long crimson sunsets over the ocean; clouds streaked fluorescent orange over the mountains in the morning. Sea otters rolling in the water, scrubbing their hair just like you do in the shower. The way that cold snow squeaks underfoot or the spaceship noises that ice makes.

I could go on, but I think I need to get back to Isobel. There’s this spirit-fox that has been following her and she’s trying to figure out why…

11 Nov

Kamchatka Fall Festival «Alkhalalalai»

Art imitates life.

I am a good chunk into this year’s NaNoWriMo project, the first in a series of stories about Isobel the Bear Eater. Briefly, the series is epic fantasy in an alternate history Siberia. Although I have been doing a fair amount of research on the mythology of the indigenous peoples of Siberia and the Russian Far East, as well as drawing on my own experiences growing up in Alaska, there are quite a few things I am muddling. Like adding obvious magic, and fiddling a bit with geography, and, well, you don’t care because you don’t know the story.

But here’s something I thought I was making up – an end of summer festival to say “yay! we have enough food and we’ll probably make it through the winter, so let’s have a dance party!” – and here’s a Russian news story on, well, an end of summer festival to say “yay! we have enough food and we’ll probably make it through the winter, so let’s have a dance party!”

If you don’t speak Russian, here’s the gist of it:
The Itelmen, Koryaks and other native groups on the Kamchatka Peninsula thank the spirits for a plentiful harvest during a festival called “Alkhalalalai.” It’s pretty much a sin to do any work during the holiday, instead everyone shares all the food they’ve gathered. There’s also a dance marathon, with strict rules – if you stop for more than 3 minutes, then you’re out. There’s singing and dancing with drums, and also throat-singing. (That’s the seagull imitation.) Close up quote from woman: “Now I understand how important it is for people to dance, because it’s not just physical movement. There’s a spiritual connection between people.” The dance marathon lasted for 16 hours and 10 minutes. The spirits should be satisfied.

08 Nov

Seattle to Portland 2006

It’s November again and I am Nanowrimoing my little heart out, so I’ll be reposting a few things from way back when, and concentrating on the new novel climbing out of my head. Specifically, right now, I’m concerned with how my protagonist will react when a child under her care just gulped down a little fish they found while tide pooling.
While I work that out, here’s an acount from summer 2006, when I hopped on my bike, along with 8999 other people, and rode from Seattle to Portland. STP happens every year, put on by Seattle’s own Cascade Bicycle Club. If it sounds exciting to you, you can sign up for 2013 in January.

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.’

If you know me, you probably already know that I totally signed up to do it all again the next year. But the scenery didn’t change, and there are plenty of other places to ride, so I only did it twice.