You will know what I am talking about when I tell you the roof from last night's rented shelter lies in black pieces on the parking lot. You will know what I say when I tell you of the smell of mold, sea slime, crushed barnacle, wet iron and rubber and steel wire and rotting cotton of a crab pot, line, and buoys. You will know what I am talking about when I say the minuscule cuts on my fingers will not heal in the constant wet of gear work. You will know what I say when I speak of the rough banter and competition of everyone's best, grossest, most outrageous stories tossed around the moldy cold damp air of any of dozens of gear sheds out here on the November coast.
Crab pots stand five high and skippers dart from boat to shed to Englund to Tacoma or Seattle or wherever buoys or lines or engine parts lie. Deckhands smoke one endless cigarette after another, ash dropping into pots, and live on borrowed cash. Crab scuttle on the ocean floor, feeding and unaware of their fate at the Christmas plate of a hundred heavily decorated Bellevue homes. Families miss their dads, girlfriends miss their men, a few lucky or think they are lucky boyfriends miss their ladies. The reality sinks in for these gals and guys: your commercial fishing lover or spouse is actually a fisherman, ergo is gone for several months at a time, and is gone now. Surfers lift crab pots and count fathoms of line with an eye to the surf and watch dark fall with their hopes of one good wave before the day's work is done. Skiers dream of Crystal's backcountry, chutes and endless pow. Ice climbers count fictitious dollars and dream of Canada.
I find myself on the winter coast once again. There is no desperation. I am not alone. I run in the dark over slick wet pavement puddles against thirty mile an hour winds and feel strong and solid. I might make money, I might not. I might surf, I might just crab and talk and drink and leave. My stories recall Denali, Red Rocks, Vegas, Valdez, Jackson Hole, the Winds, the hard rock of Index and the Cascades, weird hipsters in Seattle, strange parties on boats in Lake Union, unsuccessful fishing in Friday Harbor, La Push, successful hauls in stark green bays in Kodiak. My best friends hail from all corners of this world and fill my life with days and evenings and stories I could never in a thousand years make up. November on the coast is just as stormy as it always has been, but damn wonderful right now. Winds can howl and roofs can fall off, but I'm here, alive, a pocket of vibrant warmth against this early and long night. I love this life and the people in it. I love this forgotten coast and its moldy wet sadness. I fit here. It's so strange to find this. In a way I have never found amongst the brobra ski culture, the yuppie weekender Seattle crowd, (only, perhaps, amongst dirtbag climbers living in the rock places of the southwest) my strange private melancholy hardcore soul fits out here.
As in all things in my life: for now it fits, just for now.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Running
I've been runnin' all my life
I'm still runnin'
I'm still runnin'
I could walk and never turn
Never falter when I fly
and if you give me skies of grey
I'll bring you rain
To wash us clean again
- Po' Girl
Upcanyon somewhere in Idaho in a borrowed Subaru. Friend downvalley celebrating the joining of two ski bums' lives, up here in Stanley far from their snowy winter home in Utah. The Sawtooth jags the horizon, and I have driven in the opposite direction. Idaho's green mountain canyons wind up into open crumbling fields of talus and bright puffy white cloud sky. The landscape's shoulders are at once rounded and severe. The canyons of early fall - yes, the bite of morning frost is here - are private. They fold back and back in surprise and seclusion. The landscape answers my need for the ultimate privacy of solitude. For what, you ask? Reflection, careful consideration of my next best move? Fuck no. I need time to take off as much clothing as possible, sit in tubs of hot natural sulfur water, stretch long-unused leg muscles up valleys with no plan and minimal gear at inadvisable hours of the late afternoon smelling subalpine fir, talking and singing to myself, pika, deer and the bright blue sky. In short, I'm coming back into my found and chosen home. Mountains.
Pain in my shoulder, numb fingers and a re-sprained right ankle remind me (at my structural-integration practicioner uncle's severe admonitions) to slow down, heal, to regroup after an intense summer. Serendipity and a series of small, shrewd decisions unseen to most but myself (you got so lucky!) combined into a brilliantly executed summer of travel in Alaska. To tell the whole story would take a novel, and I tend in my current state of perpetual motion to be a soundbyte/book on tape kind of storyteller. So I offer the following excerpts:
East Fork Kahiltna Glacier, Alaska Range, July 7
Backstory: A contact with Blaine Horner made at the VertiCulture Randonee Race at Alpental this winter led to a stint as a volunteer ranger on Denali. After a few days of preparation, Fairview-inspired debauchery, hip-hop dancing and perpetual twilight we flew in courtesy of Talkeetna Air Taxi. We spent a little under 2 weeks at Denali Base Camp watching warm temps and a fine dusting of volcano ash from the Redoubt eruption melt the range down to rock and dirt. Many stories of rescues, pranks, and mountain mishaps were told by ranger, guide and climber alike. Basecamp in the shadow of Hunter and Foraker. The scale is difficult to comprehend. Clouds 
move in and out, over and through. A few parties trickle in on haggard, stinky ropeteams. They are soon whisked away by TAT planes. Lisa and Mark Westman deconstructed their basecamp a few days ago. The runway is getting too soft to use here. Skis poke up out of the snow; we practice and practice crevasse and high-angle rescue techniques, swap books, nap in our own yellow basecamp sauna tents, covet The Sex Lives of Cannibals and Dancing at the Rascal Fair. Blaine and I set up a slackline with the big I-beams from Mark and Lisa's tent. We walk it with tele boots, try to ski tour, get overheated and spooked by the groan of opening crevasses.
move in and out, over and through. A few parties trickle in on haggard, stinky ropeteams. They are soon whisked away by TAT planes. Lisa and Mark Westman deconstructed their basecamp a few days ago. The runway is getting too soft to use here. Skis poke up out of the snow; we practice and practice crevasse and high-angle rescue techniques, swap books, nap in our own yellow basecamp sauna tents, covet The Sex Lives of Cannibals and Dancing at the Rascal Fair. Blaine and I set up a slackline with the big I-beams from Mark and Lisa's tent. We walk it with tele boots, try to ski tour, get overheated and spooked by the groan of opening crevasses. 
The impassive, impressive mountains watch over all and send forth volleys of snow, ice, and stones unhinged and tumbling rowdy and free in the heat of this endless summer day. The day the mountains poured down to the the sea and the runs of salmon danced up to meet them. They met in a frenzy of post-solstice copulation in that long summer day. They were too tired to care by the time the fireweed had done its celebrating and popped the last pink firework off the top. They languished spent in the shallows. Their lazy tails rotted but they didn't care. The mountains stood blocky, crumbling and naked in the summer heat. They weren't embarrased. Somewhere in the great debauchery of the summer melt they left their dirty sides exposed and lay passive as busy, active gravity stole pieces from their flanks and shoulders. There was little ado and no fuss, much noise and great piles to finally greet the first firming freezing snowstorms that would again blanket and solidify,
beautify and homogenize. Those snows and that freeze would allow those small dots of frenzied carbon to move freely across the landscape. To land the little planes dwarfed against the massive shoulders of wanton, uncaring, beautiful, senseless mountains.
beautify and homogenize. Those snows and that freeze would allow those small dots of frenzied carbon to move freely across the landscape. To land the little planes dwarfed against the massive shoulders of wanton, uncaring, beautiful, senseless mountains.Those busy pieces of carbon are folding up shop by the end of our weeks there. I have met many I know from other places in these weeks, beginning the one abiding theme of the summer: the affirmation that I have indeed built community in the places I have been and the circles in which I have traveled, a roving, mobile community of serious men and incredible women who love mountains and wild places.
By the time we have broken the National Parks Service basecamp into a pile ready for Chinook helicopter transport (highgrading Nutella and fresh foods from the loads flown down from 9 and 14 camp) it is too warm to transport our four human souls plus the high camp patrol (also four) out on fixed-wing aircraft. In swoops Bruce, the Kiwi pilot of Papa Hotel (papa?), to save us from the long walk out sucking smoke from the many fires and glacial silt. After transporting High Camp patrol to Talkeetna the four Basecamp patrollers climb on board for the ride of a season or lifetime, depending. We buzz the Moonflower Buttress, hover at the pass towards Huntington. We nose up to the Harvard Route and my mouth gapes like a dying fish. On our way back down into the green we pass chaotic icefalls, turquoise meltwater lakes languishing on top of glaciers, miles of moraine, huge waterfalls coming off
sidecanyons fed by the melt of major peaks. And return to bright town.
By the time we have broken the National Parks Service basecamp into a pile ready for Chinook helicopter transport (highgrading Nutella and fresh foods from the loads flown down from 9 and 14 camp) it is too warm to transport our four human souls plus the high camp patrol (also four) out on fixed-wing aircraft. In swoops Bruce, the Kiwi pilot of Papa Hotel (papa?), to save us from the long walk out sucking smoke from the many fires and glacial silt. After transporting High Camp patrol to Talkeetna the four Basecamp patrollers climb on board for the ride of a season or lifetime, depending. We buzz the Moonflower Buttress, hover at the pass towards Huntington. We nose up to the Harvard Route and my mouth gapes like a dying fish. On our way back down into the green we pass chaotic icefalls, turquoise meltwater lakes languishing on top of glaciers, miles of moraine, huge waterfalls coming off
sidecanyons fed by the melt of major peaks. And return to bright town.Kodiak (Town), July 24
Backstory: A brief conversation with the captain I had worked for in 2006 and 7 out of Valdez painted a bleak portrait of Prince William Sound's salmon returns. I opted instead for a marathon journey to Hatcher Pass to climb the spectacular route Toto with two Alaska Mountaineering School guides, then an all-night hitchhike down the Kenai to catch the ferry to Kodiak the following day.
Really good day today. Down to coffee shop with overburdened Lisa - as is her style has taken on six big projects, teaching at a camp on Afognak, director of her work leaving next week, preparing for her trip to Mongolia, etc, etc...it took two cups of metal-lined coffee to wake up, then walked around. Geoff from Westport on Beverly J, met all on the dock. Skiffman on Bev. J gave me heads up on a 38 footer, this while I'm talking to Steve at the Aleutian Lady. Later I helped Steve put a bumper - like chafing gear - on the front of his skiff. He bought me a Subway for lunch for this help, unasked for by me. Steve asking casual questions about my life. CILM, (Crazy Insane Luggage Man, so named by Djuna) was nosing around with his small backpack, rolling suitcase, messed up face and a sturdy stick he had wrapped in 100 year anniversary stickers and electrical tape. Hitting stuff and playing with Vicky knives, trying to ask for a quarter or for Steve to also buy him a Subway. Steve's son was asking CILM for a quarter. "Why?" asked CILM. "To buy a Subway." Steve's son really good at quoting from The Perfect Storm - 'fishin' in New Bedfahd on the Grand Bahnks' - in a really good New England impression. The kids on the Aleutian Belle were the ones who told me about the guy walking around with 'Super G' duct taped on his shirt. "What does that stand for?"
"Super Greenhorn"
"You better take that off."
"I think I'll just leave it on."
"Then you might as well make it say Super Gay."
Another funny story - some ten year old kid in King Cove at a bonfire party: "I'm gonna drink a bottle of Crown, smoke a doobie and punch someone in the face. My grandfather was a fisherman, my dad was a fisherman and I'm a fisherman." The same kid was seen later that night in a stolen car with his seventeen year old friend.
Walked over after helping Steve to cannery, then Dog Bay, with Kenny the Fishhugger. He has a company so named in Phoenix where he sells frozen reds for upwards of $20 a lb, promoting sustainable wild fishery harvests. Married with 3 kids, fishes for his share of fish for his business, has been for 14 years. His family is beef ranchers, runs a sustainable amount of cattle on their land. He eats lots of fat and natural honey. Has photosensitive square glasses, a startled blink, a no Pebble Mine hat.
Yesterday Lisa and I took a short run through Fort Abercrombie Park. Her poor truck is ready to shake the back end off. Day before I was driving up partway to the windmills on Pillar Mountain and locked her keys in the car after running in the wind and rain. The guy who unlocked the car was a rather eccentric guy - normal for AK - who runs the antique store. The run was very windy, green vegetation all around at the top.
Picked salmonberries with the Mycological Matrix guy, who said he knew all the healing properties of mushrooms, especially Reishis, and had concocted a brew that would get you wasted and prevent a hangover a the same time. This while picking salmonberries big enough to cap the ends of our thumbs on a steep slope behind the cannery and telling me of the rigors of nursing school.
Me: "My aunt and uncle are really involved in the Oregon Mycological Society. They had a show with all sorts of wild mushrooms and labeled them with red for do not eat, yellow for be careful and green for go ahead and eat."
MM: "And purple for psychedelic?"
Me, deadpan: "Actually paisley."
MM, emphatic: "Yeah, that's right."
Lisa saw me walking with him just as it was dawning on me via the turn in our conversation had taken to psychedelics that this was indeed the Mycological Matrix guy who was all but 86'ed from the Brew Pub for harassing people into trying his vomit-inspiring brew. We exchanged looks - Lisa, I told you all the weird people always find me - and I quickly loaded up into the haven of her red and rattling truck under her sleek sea kayak.
Avoiding little boats, green skippers, tenders, and known non-payers, savoring the respite from Denali's sunburn brightness in the Kodiak rain I told Steve of Aleutian Belle one Friday that I was going to get a job the following day. "I don't see why not," he replied. "Everyone likes you."
Santa Flavia, F/V Carlynn (56ft) July 27-28
Laguna Star, Venturess, Valiant Lady, Erika. We waited in line until 9pm, set, delivered to tender after dinner. 2am bedtime day, but 21k lbs! Great first day! Kenny Fishhugger great skiffman, experienced seiner. Rick Blair a good skipper, calm and confident and experienced though
young. His dad knows the good spots, he grew up fishing Kodiak. Mac is learning but needs a better mentality for boats - very intellectual, nose in book constantly - but seems to be adjusting albeit slowly. Andy an experienced fisherman, Dungies in La Push and knows me from Len and Nell's boat Lady Nell! Told me of a small Puget Sound Dungy fishery that goes on in Oct, herring in Westy. Boat in alright condition, gear works. We caught a salmon shark on day 2, after we caught a rock on the first set. Rough weather, wind came up, rain, a small Dungy crabber Andy's uncle used to own (Chiniak) running for the cover of the bay with its stabilizers down. Fucking hole started in my Grundens jacket, Kenny teasing me to get a new one, me being broke and sensitive about it. Fished till about 10 and watched Boondock Saints until midnight.Day 3 small sets and a fouled web, stern haul. TIME BANDIT a movie star Deadliest Catch boat invited us aboard. Drawer full of candy from fans and fancy electronics. Huge engine room. A sauna! Electric heater. As the salmon slime melted out of my pores in luxurious beads of human sweat I saw a patch of slate blue glowing sky outlined by trees bobbing gently with the motion of the boat. The TIME BANDIT song started to play very loud on speakers just outside the sauna. Paraphrased, it went something like: "We're on the TIME BANDIT, we're gonna go catch a bunch of crab, then we're gonna go to Dutch Harbor and deliver our crab and I'm gonna DRINK A BEER then we're gonna catch more crab because we're the TIME BANDIT. La la la." At times like that I think there is no way I could have ever predicted this.
Uganik, Aug. 1-2
Rough seas crossing from Santa Flavia. I stood wheel watch for first time on this boat. Skiff got shifted by a big wave and guys had to hook it up with single line on hydraulic boom through hole in back of boat. Didn't puke, made dinner in rough weather. What day is it? Uganik, some boat telling us to go ahead for fishing, so we leave and motor on. The south part of the island has fewer trees. The passages we went through last night, Whale Pass included, were forested and beautiful, brooding and hung with fog, like Prince William Sound or Southeast. Here in the north the landscape is sparse, streaks of willow dotted with the occasional tree. There is a clean and open beauty to it - big stretches of water with sodium yellow lights of seiners far off. The bright orange buoys of setnet sites. Beautiful white cones of volcanoes across the water. Varied light and shadow on the steep green sides of mountains. How improbable is it that after two lost years of commercial fishing I could come to this incredible place? We motor to these beautiful bays and capes, so many. I not in a state of jangling disharmony, of blind and determined striving towards redemption from exile from mountains, but rather a state of excited and interested grace, of learning, exalting in this beautiful environment. In the fresh clean smell of seawater as we haul the net. In the delicious heaviness of hearty boat food. In the ache of hard work (not that hard yet) and the sense of space gained in open water. At the promise of the unexpected that lurks at the periphery of vision and knowing in Alaska.Rasperry Cape, Aug. 3
Good day at Raspberry Cape, 35k lbs, dogs and 1 huge silver, 1 huge king about 50lbs. Leads over purseline all day. Yellow flowers starting on hillside, sunny in morning - AC/DC Back in Black 'Givin' the Dog A Bone.'Me to Mac, who had it stuck in his head: "Mac it's your song."
Andy to Mac: "I'll give you a bone."
Tender went by with a guy Andy knows - Crazy Mike - the only person since the 1800's to be charged with piracy on the high seas - for boarding a longliner who had been stealing their gear with Vicky knives taped to buoy poles. Kid on a tender gave me a lead on crab jobs for fall.
Santa Flavia, Aug. 6
Motoring towards Santa Flavia. Town last night, Andy and Rick got groceries, everyone yapped on cell phones. Kenny has endless energy and Mac finally showered.
Lisa off to fieldwork. Geoff brought me chocolate ice cream and gum because I could not leave boat.
Lots of fish at Duck Cape, but we're going to the SE. Rick doesn't like lines. Beautiful weather but very windy yesterday morning at Steep Cape. Difficult to pile net in wind. Kenny doing good job on skiff, he, Andy, Rick very experienced. I lumped in with Mac in 'new guys' and it makes me determined to learn more so I'm not just cork monkey/galley help.
Town, Aug. 8
Saw Djuna randomly at coffee shop, offered her some ice cream float - she got a surprise (a skiff
ride) and did not meet me at brewery for hours. Then beer in sun with friends, joking about Real World Kodiak and Quentin Tarantino pornos - sitting on loading bay of brewery with fireweed and fishing boats and canneries in sight, deckhands walking by. Overheard: "We should just get a keg of beer and roll it back to the fucking boat." Sunny day, treats at store, Djuna's house tall and with many rooms and wood floors, now off to Duck Cape.Ghost Rocks, Aug 13
Big day full of sets at Ghost Rocks yesterday - 45k! Worked hard. Rick: "You guys are on autopilot." Calling out jumpers, the jasmine rice everyone likes, short plunger pole, tied-on seine, fixed net yesterday PM. Incentive - Linnae and co. - best tender ever - so much Dr. Pepper today my teeth hurt - gave us ice cream and pop and groceries yesterday PM - yesterday also averaged 3 dogs per suck and stood at really nice sorting table (flat plastic bottom!) smiling joking as fish went on by.
GHOST ROCKS '09!!!!! (Sometime in late August)
Great hauls last few days, nonstop, up @ 3:30-5:30, set @ 1st
light.Kenny in wheelhouse, jogging sets watching tide rips those lazy humpies want to wake up, yawn, have a coffee, then get going.
Mack growing more competent.
Rick: Get a million lbs, keep going.
'That's why we have a fifth guy I'm not stopping.'
One day deckloaded, 69k lbs! Over $1000 crewshare for me that day. Sunny days last 2, laundry yesterday, conversation about writing with me and Mac today.
GHOST ROCKS 09! Carlynn and Legasea.
God is great, beer is good, people are crazy. Bad wind for fish, blowing from SE, blowing fish out, humpies are lazy don't want to fight it.
The salmon run died quickly. Rick, as efficient in his decision to quit as he was making decisions while fishing, packed up his seine and skiff and he, Andy and Kenny flew home. Mac got on a boat doing silvers. I relaxed a bit at Lisa's (including a not-so-relaxing hike up Mt. Sharatin) and flew home soon after. Chris and I immediately hit it hard and climbed Rebel Yell, a beautiful offwidth on Chianti Spire in Washington Pass. During this climb it became apparent that my nagging shoulder injury was worse than I had thought, so when it came time to go on the 
Idaho climbstravaganza I was pretty well out of commission. That old trickster, circumstance, is again beating me at my own game of always planning and living in the future and telling me to learn balance. For this is my practice as I stare down the latter half of my twenties: learning to balance physicality and contemplation, constant geographical movement and career/community building stints in certain places, brutal honesty of word or expression and a socially appropriate, even friendly demeanor. This injury is even teaching me to balance hard 
work with periods of rest and recovery. Teaching me to think in longer timelines. I'm in this game for the duration.Monday, June 22, 2009
Solstice
Across the flat dark water the lights of Seattle houses shine. Across Puget Sound lights lie low on the flat bowl of the Northwest sky. This is a maritime city. It is a departure point for many journeys past and present. I am standing on the edge of waters that hold the rivers of the mountains that have saved my life. It is the solstice and I am in Golden Gardens park in Ballard. There is not a soul in my sight.
I strip to sandals and wade in. My body is spare and toned by resistance to gravity and lack of superfluous calories. A constant new strength hums in it. There are lines and curves foreign to me. I am seeing the tangible results of my efforts. I am being shaped by the things I do. I once admired lean climbers throwing gear in cars hungry after big efforts. What enervated them to become thus? What were their secrets? What did they sacrifice to look like that – dusty, hollow-cheeked, strong and precise in their movements, muscle and tendon and swollen veins playing under limbs darkened from the sun? How, in my unformed and ill-disciplined body of youth, could I make the passionate need to understand the language of crags and ice and high places match my exterior?
I turn towards shore and dip into the salty clarity of Puget Sound water. Cold. I rise immediately and head to shore to towel off tingling and alive. “Welcome home.” I say to myself. I look back and the dark water shines with the light of the city I have decided to call my stage, resting ground, working learning playground.
Your own history layers upon itself in a city. It was on this beach I walked on a first date that ultimately fizzled. I ranted about the waste of edible plants while picking cress with my ex on a drunken walk from his little rented room across from Shilshole Marina to a punk party with a stolen keg up a closed Golden Gardens Park road. I sat across from my fellow deckhand from the crab boat I crewed on in Westport this last winter at a restaurant on this road as we talked about our own struggles as intense people in a dulled down world and continued the long series of conversations that have made us true friends. It is solstice and I am twenty eight. I am at the height of my powers and at a tangible turning point in this wild young life of mine. This year I forgot my Solstice cleansing ritual until I, reluctant to re-enter civilization, turned on my phone and checked my messages in the familiar comfort of the Ballard house I am coming, with no little surprise, to call home. My best friend’s voice apologized in advance for being sporadically available on the solstice and promised to catch up later. Solstice! I looked at the calendar, and indeed, it was. I had wondered earlier if I would be high on a glacier somewhere by now. This year that was not to be, though in a week and change I will be low on a glacier. In my warm room with Juniper bothering I thought back on my two stellar days of sparkling granite, sunshine, clean abundant flowing water, and alternating heat and cold wind. There were lots of moments when, charging hard from crag to crag, I could have roped my good friend and climbing partner into a solstice swim. The days were seamless, our drive to go up too strong, our banter both New-England caustic and light, our understanding as fellow seasoned climbers roped together for the latest few of many shared climbs solid and growing. We lived for the hold and the piece and the joke and the moment. We lived for the guidebook and the camping spots and the food and water and the friction and crack and temperature and the joy of leading. We lived for nothing more than the moment and I lost time, day, hour, year. I lived in sun and shade, muscle ache and decision point. I was, as has happened so many days this year, completely removed from anything but the exigencies of climbing. This is my happiness. This is perfection. Joy. I forgot about Solstice.
This night now finds me here, hurrying back into a shirt and pants lest someone walk the beach. Uncertainty, by now an old friend, looms bright as the lights at the last point of land I can see before the darkness of open water. Alaska, that mythical word and world-changing state rears its majestic and terrifying head. I am hesitant to respond with the rowdy enthusiasm I have had in the past. This hesitance to embrace the unknown again surprises me, but I know why.
This spring I have learned to temper my intensity and channel it into climbing, into training, into friendships with people who have learned to do the same in their own ways, healthy or not. I have stayed long enough for the Seattle climbing community to open some of its tight-sealed doors. I have calmed enough to keep my demeanor socially acceptable, thereby easing into friendships and climbing partnerships without my usual overwhelming onslaught of Aili-ness. I have turned up the volume by degrees and waited for a response, then ramped it up some more. I love what I have become and I know how to stay this way. I am in love with my friends and my house and Washington’s mountains (and I count Squamish too). I have realized finally that I could change my location a hundred more times but it wasn’t gonna mean shit until I changed what was inside of me.
I feel the change like a freight train and a whisper each time I walk these streets bike these trails or ride these roads in my stinky gassy pickup (anyone wanna buy a truck?). I can’t believe that this place I once derided at the side of my ex as a festering enclave of materialistic yuppy scumwads has become home. Why? Because in the city I can be, say, and do almost anything and most people will merely shrug and say ‘huh.’ Because I am forty minutes from excellent sport crags and two hours away from world-class granite, glaciers, ice climbing, and alpine objectives. Because I can walk to pho. Because I am sick of running and decided it was. The decision still feels arbitrary, as I am indeed going to throw myself to the demon-gods of chance and fate and big Alaskan summer bucks in a few weeks. But I have a place to return to. I have plans in the works to drastically alter my pattern of living and adventure into one that is both reliable and flexible. And I have people already saying “When you get back in September we can do….”
Gunsight Nooksack Slesse Squampton Warrior Wall Index Washington Pass
Those seeds of plans, coming from solid alpine partners, are worth more than any wild scheme.
I strip to sandals and wade in. My body is spare and toned by resistance to gravity and lack of superfluous calories. A constant new strength hums in it. There are lines and curves foreign to me. I am seeing the tangible results of my efforts. I am being shaped by the things I do. I once admired lean climbers throwing gear in cars hungry after big efforts. What enervated them to become thus? What were their secrets? What did they sacrifice to look like that – dusty, hollow-cheeked, strong and precise in their movements, muscle and tendon and swollen veins playing under limbs darkened from the sun? How, in my unformed and ill-disciplined body of youth, could I make the passionate need to understand the language of crags and ice and high places match my exterior?
I turn towards shore and dip into the salty clarity of Puget Sound water. Cold. I rise immediately and head to shore to towel off tingling and alive. “Welcome home.” I say to myself. I look back and the dark water shines with the light of the city I have decided to call my stage, resting ground, working learning playground.
Your own history layers upon itself in a city. It was on this beach I walked on a first date that ultimately fizzled. I ranted about the waste of edible plants while picking cress with my ex on a drunken walk from his little rented room across from Shilshole Marina to a punk party with a stolen keg up a closed Golden Gardens Park road. I sat across from my fellow deckhand from the crab boat I crewed on in Westport this last winter at a restaurant on this road as we talked about our own struggles as intense people in a dulled down world and continued the long series of conversations that have made us true friends. It is solstice and I am twenty eight. I am at the height of my powers and at a tangible turning point in this wild young life of mine. This year I forgot my Solstice cleansing ritual until I, reluctant to re-enter civilization, turned on my phone and checked my messages in the familiar comfort of the Ballard house I am coming, with no little surprise, to call home. My best friend’s voice apologized in advance for being sporadically available on the solstice and promised to catch up later. Solstice! I looked at the calendar, and indeed, it was. I had wondered earlier if I would be high on a glacier somewhere by now. This year that was not to be, though in a week and change I will be low on a glacier. In my warm room with Juniper bothering I thought back on my two stellar days of sparkling granite, sunshine, clean abundant flowing water, and alternating heat and cold wind. There were lots of moments when, charging hard from crag to crag, I could have roped my good friend and climbing partner into a solstice swim. The days were seamless, our drive to go up too strong, our banter both New-England caustic and light, our understanding as fellow seasoned climbers roped together for the latest few of many shared climbs solid and growing. We lived for the hold and the piece and the joke and the moment. We lived for the guidebook and the camping spots and the food and water and the friction and crack and temperature and the joy of leading. We lived for nothing more than the moment and I lost time, day, hour, year. I lived in sun and shade, muscle ache and decision point. I was, as has happened so many days this year, completely removed from anything but the exigencies of climbing. This is my happiness. This is perfection. Joy. I forgot about Solstice.
This night now finds me here, hurrying back into a shirt and pants lest someone walk the beach. Uncertainty, by now an old friend, looms bright as the lights at the last point of land I can see before the darkness of open water. Alaska, that mythical word and world-changing state rears its majestic and terrifying head. I am hesitant to respond with the rowdy enthusiasm I have had in the past. This hesitance to embrace the unknown again surprises me, but I know why.
This spring I have learned to temper my intensity and channel it into climbing, into training, into friendships with people who have learned to do the same in their own ways, healthy or not. I have stayed long enough for the Seattle climbing community to open some of its tight-sealed doors. I have calmed enough to keep my demeanor socially acceptable, thereby easing into friendships and climbing partnerships without my usual overwhelming onslaught of Aili-ness. I have turned up the volume by degrees and waited for a response, then ramped it up some more. I love what I have become and I know how to stay this way. I am in love with my friends and my house and Washington’s mountains (and I count Squamish too). I have realized finally that I could change my location a hundred more times but it wasn’t gonna mean shit until I changed what was inside of me.
I feel the change like a freight train and a whisper each time I walk these streets bike these trails or ride these roads in my stinky gassy pickup (anyone wanna buy a truck?). I can’t believe that this place I once derided at the side of my ex as a festering enclave of materialistic yuppy scumwads has become home. Why? Because in the city I can be, say, and do almost anything and most people will merely shrug and say ‘huh.’ Because I am forty minutes from excellent sport crags and two hours away from world-class granite, glaciers, ice climbing, and alpine objectives. Because I can walk to pho. Because I am sick of running and decided it was. The decision still feels arbitrary, as I am indeed going to throw myself to the demon-gods of chance and fate and big Alaskan summer bucks in a few weeks. But I have a place to return to. I have plans in the works to drastically alter my pattern of living and adventure into one that is both reliable and flexible. And I have people already saying “When you get back in September we can do….”
Gunsight Nooksack Slesse Squampton Warrior Wall Index Washington Pass
Those seeds of plans, coming from solid alpine partners, are worth more than any wild scheme.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Fuck Yeah
Move to city.
Be broke.
Be brokenhearted.
Get a job at outdoor gear company.
Really learn Excel.
Make friends.
Go skiing.
Climb great crags.
Eat shit on a bike.
Joke with new friends about your cage fighting accident while climbing great crags.
Climb sweet new alpine routes while recovering from cage fighting injuries.
Get accepted on a volunteer climbing ranger patrol on Denali.
Write blog.
Bitches.
Falling
I open my hands and grab at fistfuls of air
the moon calls blithe and pitying
over sublimated mist and rotten snow
under wet dark trees
black moss beards
broken old pine needles
last year’s sticks
winter winds
tore down those
Hours before
I stood on the dull knifepoint
of my own steel and rage, held,
an asterisk against sky
blood muscle tendon bone kept
warm dry balanced
sky
air
and the adjustment of light
between narrow dark streaked rock wall,
all
mica fleck shining beneath sodden spring glove,
no ice to help us on our way
It was true what she said
about me being first,
first to talk, to walk
too soon –
doctors whispered abuse
and she said
of my split lip, my grandmother
crying out from fifty feet below shaking hemlock limb
‘make her come down!’
I can’t,
she said,
how can I?
What she didn’t know in her helplessness
or maybe did too dark and well
is this:
The times I have fallen have not been in mountains
Twin scars crescent eyelids closed hood up spindrift falling
the sheer will required to exert physical force against
the abiding law of earthly gravity
is effortless
next to the force exerted
against the hard concrete glass unrelenting
which has slashed my face
and wakes me up
back down again
in warm horrible soft red beds
grasping
at fistfuls of air
Be broke.
Be brokenhearted.
Get a job at outdoor gear company.
Really learn Excel.
Make friends.
Go skiing.
Climb great crags.
Eat shit on a bike.
Joke with new friends about your cage fighting accident while climbing great crags.
Climb sweet new alpine routes while recovering from cage fighting injuries.
Get accepted on a volunteer climbing ranger patrol on Denali.
Write blog.
Bitches.
Falling
I open my hands and grab at fistfuls of air
the moon calls blithe and pitying
over sublimated mist and rotten snow
under wet dark trees
black moss beards
broken old pine needles
last year’s sticks
winter winds
tore down those
Hours before
I stood on the dull knifepoint
of my own steel and rage, held,
an asterisk against sky
blood muscle tendon bone kept
warm dry balanced
sky
air
and the adjustment of light
between narrow dark streaked rock wall,
all
mica fleck shining beneath sodden spring glove,
no ice to help us on our way
It was true what she said
about me being first,
first to talk, to walk
too soon –
doctors whispered abuse
and she said
of my split lip, my grandmother
crying out from fifty feet below shaking hemlock limb
‘make her come down!’
I can’t,
she said,
how can I?
What she didn’t know in her helplessness
or maybe did too dark and well
is this:
The times I have fallen have not been in mountains
Twin scars crescent eyelids closed hood up spindrift falling
the sheer will required to exert physical force against
the abiding law of earthly gravity
is effortless
next to the force exerted
against the hard concrete glass unrelenting
which has slashed my face
and wakes me up
back down again
in warm horrible soft red beds
grasping
at fistfuls of air
Thursday, March 12, 2009
City
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
-William Wordsworth, 1807
I never thought it would happen. Driving down into Ballard on a sunny spring day, going to see my honey, I cursed the pavement and held my head a little higher for my imminent return to some softer growing place. He and I would walk the street holding onto each other, he showing me cafes, me not really caring, eyes on trees, eyes on bohemians, eyes on him. The city was the place I went to see a man. In an earlier era, alone, I had come screaming off the sky sunburned and wanting pho, (fuh for you who don’t know how to say that), wasted by movement and altitude and snowfields, shocked to see green, wanting gear. I’d roll into Ballard back then partnerless, friendless, in perpetual transition, eat and go to Second Ascent, get some used CDs, freak out and drive through gridlock to loud music, crash out on a dirt road on the way to the next climb exhausted, resupplied, and grateful to be out of the grid.
This winter crashed around my quivering, still-standing form. All of you who have played a part you know who you are (actually ‘you’ means my ex, the one person in this wide world who still thinks I am a piece of shit). All of you who have talked to me for hours, climbed with me, watched me take those looong newb ice leads, laughed at my jokes, listened to my tears, bought me some dinner and shared the best advice you had to give – to all of you, you are my friends, or family, or both. You are my lifeline and wonderful people, all!
It is the worst year for Dungeness crabbing in recorded history. I pick up this story in the blue-sheet bunk on the F/V Betty Lee, a 72-foot black-hulled crabber out of the bigtime Dungy port on the west coast, Westport. I am lying there on the morning we are slated to sell our crab in port reading a climbing philosophy book by Mark Twight, shaking with frustration and drive and too much coffee and knowing full well we are not making a red dime. He channels punk philosophy with pen on fire, scorning the weak, training hard, cutting out what is not important to his goals, climbing until he finds that mind/no mind connection with the mountains and living to tell about it. A lot resonates in my small, determined frame, aching but animated by the singular drive needed to stay at it on this job. Mostly his writing makes me miss the mountains, miss my climbing partners, miss the ice climbing I only just discovered prior to this useless endeavor on this bleak boat.
It wasn’t always like this. I chose to crab because I wanted to pay off my student loans in one shot. The current education system is a form of indentured servitude. We take out these loans in the face of the big bills racked up by our current higher education system. We do this not really knowing what we are signing up for. When the total comes due we make more conservative decisions based on our need to pay back massive debt. We are coming out of the most radical years of our lives – we have just been exposed to lots of new ideas and have a strong desire to make a change in the world through our actions, our work, our art. Yet we have to compromise to pay off the debt. Bam. There goes your idealism, suckers. “Reality” hits. What reality? The one that has been constructed for you. You get ‘educated’, you join the ratrace. Three hundred, four hundred a month. You pay.
The economy is collapsing around us. Our friends and family are getting the big layoff (or getting harassed until they quit, or getting ‘fired’ for dubious reasons, or getting ‘early retirement’, or getting promised jobs that never come through).
Unemployment insurance is a long time coming. When I walked down Float 3 in Westport past the big crabbers I set my aching, numb little shoulders forward and towards Big Red, the promise of some cool-sounding Burner roommates, and the unknown job market of Seattle. Some equally skuzzy deckhands came walking down the dock in sweats and hoodies that smelled of as much or more bait than mine. They nodded chins in my direction and said hey. Early in this season people looked at me like I was a space alien. Now they greeted me with the weary familiarity of fellow deckhands who don’t know and probably don’t care to know each other. I made the cut. I survived the first few weeks.
And none of it fucking mattered because we didn’t catch any crab.
Being broke sucks. Being broke is scratching and it grates on your soul. Serendipity or perhaps my natural good nature intervened a few times but the weeks of scratching in Seattle were awful. I rolled into the city with two hundred bucks and a credit card and checked out a house I had found on Craigslist. It was set behind some dark and protective pine trees and smelled of wood floors and sunlight. I liked the people. The room was small but the house warm. There was an affectionate border collie and a friendly cat with big eyes and a little jump to meet my outstretched fingers. It was night, but according to the orientation of the building I could see that the morning sun would flood the living room with light. The roommates liked me. One asked where I was staying that night, and as my two good friends in Seattle were both occupied I replied that I would sleep in my truck. “That’s not acceptable in our world.” She prepared a mattress with sheets on the floor of my new room. I slept there that night and am writing in that room now. So it was with Little Black Kodiak. So it has been with the places I was meant to live.
The job search began. Fishing left my mind. I had told the captain I needed six hundred dollars a month to pay my bills. “You aren’t going to get it here.” Right. I returned to the boat later to get the last of my things – raingear, bedding, cast iron skillet – and heard his friend bitching about ‘these young guys’ who want to get the big bucks and won’t stick it out during the bad years like real fishermen. I suppose that means I am not a real fisherman. It’s not in my blood like it is for some of these people. My friend and fellow deckhand said earlier this year during a night of infamy that the successful fishermen like it and stick with it for the sake of fishing. If you like something else, he said, go do that thing. Don’t waste time making money on the ocean. You will get caught always spending it, always wanting more. You will get stuck.
I hit the pavement hard. Bike, car, up, down, resumes and Kinko’s, resumes at the library, dozens of resumes. I applied to landscapers, law offices, gear shops, factories, retail stores, restaurants, Montessori schools, housekeeping positions, deckhand jobs, even an ad to jump out of a cake. I strung together some shifts at cafes and knocked on doors hanging flyers. I sought the solace of good friends via phone. I alternated between hope and despair. I was grateful my car was paid for and I was ready to climb.
I made a systematic canvas of gear shops in Seattle. I walked into Outdoor Research one day, tired yet crisp resume in hand, and took the elevator to the seventh floor. I was told there was a position open in sewing if I had industrial sewing experience. I did not but what the hell. A tall, bearded employee led me down to the sewing floor where it soon became clear I was probably the only one who spoke English as a first language. I took the sewing test despite the warning of the sewing supervisor, an older Chinese woman who was concerned I would sew my finger through. The industrial machine whizzed through the fabric and I failed miserably. I think they admired the fact that I tried. I cried a few tears and shrugged, walking out with the same person who showed me in. “I guess I can’t sew.” “It’s alright. I’ve been unemployed before. I’ll call you if anything comes up.”
I have always been able to throw down and find a job. I have worked at so many things to perpetuate the wonderful unfolding adventure that is my life. Yet these few weeks in Seattle stripped my faith in my own abilities and my sense of worth in a way I can barely describe. It is not unique to me, this desperate reaching out. This grabbing at fistfuls of air. It is our national anthem right now. We grasp and find nothing. That grabbing is our societal role. We are raised on the dictum of more and OUR bill has come due, as a nation, as a people. As left or right or radical or anti- as you say you are this mentality has affected and shaped you. And it’s collapsing, right now. Adjust.
Two weeks later I was riding a train back from climbing and taking care of business in Oregon when I got a call from OR. “We need your help.” “When would you like me to start?” “One o clock tomorrow.”
Lucky. Gutsy. Just like that things changed around.
I roll a half block to the bus stop and read books on climbing and training on the morning bus. I sip tea. I sell my day and ride away to town. Skyscrapers look small and faraway at first. The hills of Queen Anne and Magnolia rise above the concrete din of the immediate and assert their geographical prominence. Topography wins until the eighteen bus rolls into the canyons of steel and light. People walk among soaring buildings. I can’t help but look up. I think of a photographer who spent years photographing people working alone at night in highrise offices and wonder what it must be like to work on the fiftieth floor. “There was so much money to be made.” One of his models said that. Stale air. Must get old.
Everyone has old tattoos and useless little shoes. Fancy women wear point-toed heels that could double as a self-defense weapon with one well-aimed kick. Men have man purses. People are pale and look tired. Thirty year olds look fifty in a different way than deckhands and climbers who spend lots of time outside look wrinkled and older. I think I like the other form of premature aging better. This bulgy, pale, vaguely fungal city version just scares me. People read the hot books – Omnivore’s Dilemma, something about vampires – or click into little machines. Unlimited texting. Woo hoo.
But OR is a great office to work in. Tuesday was employee ski day up at Crystal – one of the best powder days of the year! In the office talk of the Spearhead Traverse in Canada drifts around with weather reports and sales talk, how sore someone is from exercising exhaled in the same breath as the TPT report findings. The tasks I have been given so far are straightforward but require thinking and organization. Lots of Excel. Thank goodness for all those labs in Landscape Processes.
At night I dodge traffic from Sodo to Ballard, blinky red light telling cars to fuck off, and go to the climbing gym. I work boulder problems. I obsess over NWAC’s website and read route descriptions in books and online. Dreaming of weekend glory.
That’s my city life.
There have been ice climbing weekends, a rock weekend, and a delightfully informative and somewhat random day of making anchors on a staircase in Discovery Park. Who knows what I will do next. The dirtbag life is great because I can spend a lot of time outside with no financial security. Financial security is great but I don’t end up taking extended trips where my skill improves drastically. Right now I am balancing several options, as just as fair, and waiting for the tipping point that will help me decide. Getting, not spending, gathering in my powers. Noticing imminent buds on cherry trees and a waning moon full just a few days ago. Smelling salt on the breeze and finding nature where I can.
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
-William Wordsworth, 1807
I never thought it would happen. Driving down into Ballard on a sunny spring day, going to see my honey, I cursed the pavement and held my head a little higher for my imminent return to some softer growing place. He and I would walk the street holding onto each other, he showing me cafes, me not really caring, eyes on trees, eyes on bohemians, eyes on him. The city was the place I went to see a man. In an earlier era, alone, I had come screaming off the sky sunburned and wanting pho, (fuh for you who don’t know how to say that), wasted by movement and altitude and snowfields, shocked to see green, wanting gear. I’d roll into Ballard back then partnerless, friendless, in perpetual transition, eat and go to Second Ascent, get some used CDs, freak out and drive through gridlock to loud music, crash out on a dirt road on the way to the next climb exhausted, resupplied, and grateful to be out of the grid.
This winter crashed around my quivering, still-standing form. All of you who have played a part you know who you are (actually ‘you’ means my ex, the one person in this wide world who still thinks I am a piece of shit). All of you who have talked to me for hours, climbed with me, watched me take those looong newb ice leads, laughed at my jokes, listened to my tears, bought me some dinner and shared the best advice you had to give – to all of you, you are my friends, or family, or both. You are my lifeline and wonderful people, all!
It is the worst year for Dungeness crabbing in recorded history. I pick up this story in the blue-sheet bunk on the F/V Betty Lee, a 72-foot black-hulled crabber out of the bigtime Dungy port on the west coast, Westport. I am lying there on the morning we are slated to sell our crab in port reading a climbing philosophy book by Mark Twight, shaking with frustration and drive and too much coffee and knowing full well we are not making a red dime. He channels punk philosophy with pen on fire, scorning the weak, training hard, cutting out what is not important to his goals, climbing until he finds that mind/no mind connection with the mountains and living to tell about it. A lot resonates in my small, determined frame, aching but animated by the singular drive needed to stay at it on this job. Mostly his writing makes me miss the mountains, miss my climbing partners, miss the ice climbing I only just discovered prior to this useless endeavor on this bleak boat.
It wasn’t always like this. I chose to crab because I wanted to pay off my student loans in one shot. The current education system is a form of indentured servitude. We take out these loans in the face of the big bills racked up by our current higher education system. We do this not really knowing what we are signing up for. When the total comes due we make more conservative decisions based on our need to pay back massive debt. We are coming out of the most radical years of our lives – we have just been exposed to lots of new ideas and have a strong desire to make a change in the world through our actions, our work, our art. Yet we have to compromise to pay off the debt. Bam. There goes your idealism, suckers. “Reality” hits. What reality? The one that has been constructed for you. You get ‘educated’, you join the ratrace. Three hundred, four hundred a month. You pay.
The economy is collapsing around us. Our friends and family are getting the big layoff (or getting harassed until they quit, or getting ‘fired’ for dubious reasons, or getting ‘early retirement’, or getting promised jobs that never come through).
Unemployment insurance is a long time coming. When I walked down Float 3 in Westport past the big crabbers I set my aching, numb little shoulders forward and towards Big Red, the promise of some cool-sounding Burner roommates, and the unknown job market of Seattle. Some equally skuzzy deckhands came walking down the dock in sweats and hoodies that smelled of as much or more bait than mine. They nodded chins in my direction and said hey. Early in this season people looked at me like I was a space alien. Now they greeted me with the weary familiarity of fellow deckhands who don’t know and probably don’t care to know each other. I made the cut. I survived the first few weeks.
And none of it fucking mattered because we didn’t catch any crab.
Being broke sucks. Being broke is scratching and it grates on your soul. Serendipity or perhaps my natural good nature intervened a few times but the weeks of scratching in Seattle were awful. I rolled into the city with two hundred bucks and a credit card and checked out a house I had found on Craigslist. It was set behind some dark and protective pine trees and smelled of wood floors and sunlight. I liked the people. The room was small but the house warm. There was an affectionate border collie and a friendly cat with big eyes and a little jump to meet my outstretched fingers. It was night, but according to the orientation of the building I could see that the morning sun would flood the living room with light. The roommates liked me. One asked where I was staying that night, and as my two good friends in Seattle were both occupied I replied that I would sleep in my truck. “That’s not acceptable in our world.” She prepared a mattress with sheets on the floor of my new room. I slept there that night and am writing in that room now. So it was with Little Black Kodiak. So it has been with the places I was meant to live.
The job search began. Fishing left my mind. I had told the captain I needed six hundred dollars a month to pay my bills. “You aren’t going to get it here.” Right. I returned to the boat later to get the last of my things – raingear, bedding, cast iron skillet – and heard his friend bitching about ‘these young guys’ who want to get the big bucks and won’t stick it out during the bad years like real fishermen. I suppose that means I am not a real fisherman. It’s not in my blood like it is for some of these people. My friend and fellow deckhand said earlier this year during a night of infamy that the successful fishermen like it and stick with it for the sake of fishing. If you like something else, he said, go do that thing. Don’t waste time making money on the ocean. You will get caught always spending it, always wanting more. You will get stuck.
I hit the pavement hard. Bike, car, up, down, resumes and Kinko’s, resumes at the library, dozens of resumes. I applied to landscapers, law offices, gear shops, factories, retail stores, restaurants, Montessori schools, housekeeping positions, deckhand jobs, even an ad to jump out of a cake. I strung together some shifts at cafes and knocked on doors hanging flyers. I sought the solace of good friends via phone. I alternated between hope and despair. I was grateful my car was paid for and I was ready to climb.
I made a systematic canvas of gear shops in Seattle. I walked into Outdoor Research one day, tired yet crisp resume in hand, and took the elevator to the seventh floor. I was told there was a position open in sewing if I had industrial sewing experience. I did not but what the hell. A tall, bearded employee led me down to the sewing floor where it soon became clear I was probably the only one who spoke English as a first language. I took the sewing test despite the warning of the sewing supervisor, an older Chinese woman who was concerned I would sew my finger through. The industrial machine whizzed through the fabric and I failed miserably. I think they admired the fact that I tried. I cried a few tears and shrugged, walking out with the same person who showed me in. “I guess I can’t sew.” “It’s alright. I’ve been unemployed before. I’ll call you if anything comes up.”
I have always been able to throw down and find a job. I have worked at so many things to perpetuate the wonderful unfolding adventure that is my life. Yet these few weeks in Seattle stripped my faith in my own abilities and my sense of worth in a way I can barely describe. It is not unique to me, this desperate reaching out. This grabbing at fistfuls of air. It is our national anthem right now. We grasp and find nothing. That grabbing is our societal role. We are raised on the dictum of more and OUR bill has come due, as a nation, as a people. As left or right or radical or anti- as you say you are this mentality has affected and shaped you. And it’s collapsing, right now. Adjust.
Two weeks later I was riding a train back from climbing and taking care of business in Oregon when I got a call from OR. “We need your help.” “When would you like me to start?” “One o clock tomorrow.”
Lucky. Gutsy. Just like that things changed around.
I roll a half block to the bus stop and read books on climbing and training on the morning bus. I sip tea. I sell my day and ride away to town. Skyscrapers look small and faraway at first. The hills of Queen Anne and Magnolia rise above the concrete din of the immediate and assert their geographical prominence. Topography wins until the eighteen bus rolls into the canyons of steel and light. People walk among soaring buildings. I can’t help but look up. I think of a photographer who spent years photographing people working alone at night in highrise offices and wonder what it must be like to work on the fiftieth floor. “There was so much money to be made.” One of his models said that. Stale air. Must get old.
Everyone has old tattoos and useless little shoes. Fancy women wear point-toed heels that could double as a self-defense weapon with one well-aimed kick. Men have man purses. People are pale and look tired. Thirty year olds look fifty in a different way than deckhands and climbers who spend lots of time outside look wrinkled and older. I think I like the other form of premature aging better. This bulgy, pale, vaguely fungal city version just scares me. People read the hot books – Omnivore’s Dilemma, something about vampires – or click into little machines. Unlimited texting. Woo hoo.
But OR is a great office to work in. Tuesday was employee ski day up at Crystal – one of the best powder days of the year! In the office talk of the Spearhead Traverse in Canada drifts around with weather reports and sales talk, how sore someone is from exercising exhaled in the same breath as the TPT report findings. The tasks I have been given so far are straightforward but require thinking and organization. Lots of Excel. Thank goodness for all those labs in Landscape Processes.
At night I dodge traffic from Sodo to Ballard, blinky red light telling cars to fuck off, and go to the climbing gym. I work boulder problems. I obsess over NWAC’s website and read route descriptions in books and online. Dreaming of weekend glory.
That’s my city life.
There have been ice climbing weekends, a rock weekend, and a delightfully informative and somewhat random day of making anchors on a staircase in Discovery Park. Who knows what I will do next. The dirtbag life is great because I can spend a lot of time outside with no financial security. Financial security is great but I don’t end up taking extended trips where my skill improves drastically. Right now I am balancing several options, as just as fair, and waiting for the tipping point that will help me decide. Getting, not spending, gathering in my powers. Noticing imminent buds on cherry trees and a waning moon full just a few days ago. Smelling salt on the breeze and finding nature where I can.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
How Are You Lately?
This is how I have been.
The Absence of Blue
Odysseus and Penelope both
she can defend home
as she searches for it.
as she makes her way back.
It is through a blindfolded night
she screams
and waves weapons at the sky
steers her steel skis
soft with the schwush
through powder snow
slices the moonlight
into barely audible beams
of rainbow
with all colors drawn out
but the absence of blue.
It casts the world now
in perpetual twilight;
still she sweeps
on up, click in down
crunching ice, feasting
fasting, fucking, breathing
lured, kept
then dashed on rocks
then risen proud, wet
with ice, melted blood
following always
low visceral silent beating thump
grouse call drum beat
siren song
of high lonesome open
territory defined by sky
the endless terrain
of indrawn air
of home
The Industrial Ocean
Among the grease grime
of the oil stove
salmon slime, empty time
among the screamers’ cries
harsh and high
like a seagull eating eyes
of dead humpies at low tide
among the constant hum
of diesel, sweat
come the words
that we hold
safe through the set
the string
the delivery
to the tender
the cannery
the loadup at the fuel dock
the grocery run
the manic hazy nights
on shore.
We don’t know why.
Bewildered as a salmon
reaching his returning time
we keep these words
for the weather days in coves
nights dry in a smelly bunk
before six hardcrashed hours
pen trailing on paper
and well-used.
We save them for the flight home
the long boring
other deckhand’s wheel watch
Playboy and VHS and sleep
exhausted
across the Gulf of Alaska
save them
for the tiny corners of solitude
we find
when no one’s looking.
We know the same whips of song
blow through steel rigging
as did through hemp rope
iron ring, linen sail, clacking claw
frantic slapping fin.
We write because we hear
the same secret song
as the chants and groans
of whaling oarsmen
in the coughing growl
of a running Cummins diesel
hydraulic block whine
mike key beep
of the VHF
in the quotas and dramas
and legend and lore
love for the life at sea
and disdain for the shit on shore.
Later we will raise our voices
out in rowdy public houses
where we’re the same as any sailors
bringing ancient singing forward
reek like diesel stumbling wasted
walking heavy pavement laid
above the tracks
of older docks
full of grateful music
meant for
all we see returned to shore.
Out there we
keep quiet
let
the industrial ocean
sing its new
and ancient song
and
in our work
we sing along.
The Absence of Blue
Odysseus and Penelope both
she can defend home
as she searches for it.
as she makes her way back.
It is through a blindfolded night
she screams
and waves weapons at the sky
steers her steel skis
soft with the schwush
through powder snow
slices the moonlight
into barely audible beams
of rainbow
with all colors drawn out
but the absence of blue.
It casts the world now
in perpetual twilight;
still she sweeps
on up, click in down
crunching ice, feasting
fasting, fucking, breathing
lured, kept
then dashed on rocks
then risen proud, wet
with ice, melted blood
following always
low visceral silent beating thump
grouse call drum beat
siren song
of high lonesome open
territory defined by sky
the endless terrain
of indrawn air
of home
The Industrial Ocean
Among the grease grime
of the oil stove
salmon slime, empty time
among the screamers’ cries
harsh and high
like a seagull eating eyes
of dead humpies at low tide
among the constant hum
of diesel, sweat
come the words
that we hold
safe through the set
the string
the delivery
to the tender
the cannery
the loadup at the fuel dock
the grocery run
the manic hazy nights
on shore.
We don’t know why.
Bewildered as a salmon
reaching his returning time
we keep these words
for the weather days in coves
nights dry in a smelly bunk
before six hardcrashed hours
pen trailing on paper
and well-used.
We save them for the flight home
the long boring
other deckhand’s wheel watch
Playboy and VHS and sleep
exhausted
across the Gulf of Alaska
save them
for the tiny corners of solitude
we find
when no one’s looking.
We know the same whips of song
blow through steel rigging
as did through hemp rope
iron ring, linen sail, clacking claw
frantic slapping fin.
We write because we hear
the same secret song
as the chants and groans
of whaling oarsmen
in the coughing growl
of a running Cummins diesel
hydraulic block whine
mike key beep
of the VHF
in the quotas and dramas
and legend and lore
love for the life at sea
and disdain for the shit on shore.
Later we will raise our voices
out in rowdy public houses
where we’re the same as any sailors
bringing ancient singing forward
reek like diesel stumbling wasted
walking heavy pavement laid
above the tracks
of older docks
full of grateful music
meant for
all we see returned to shore.
Out there we
keep quiet
let
the industrial ocean
sing its new
and ancient song
and
in our work
we sing along.
Friday, January 23, 2009
No Pity
As long as you have a safety net you act without commitment. You’ll go back to your old habits once you meet a little resistance. You need the samurai’s desperateness and his insanity.
Burn the bridge. Nuke the foundation. Back yourself up against a wall. Have an opinion one way or the other, get off the fence and rip it up. Cut yourself off so there is no going back. Once you are committed the truth will come out. - Mark Twight, Kiss or Kill
A slate blue stained glass hole in the evening sky hangs over the water as the boat turns for our eighty third? Forty eighth? Hundred and seventh? buoy setup of the day. Black/orange stripe, blue tag, little yellow reflectors, peanut (trailer), keg, diver…Marty’s buoy’s for sure. Dave taps on Marty’s window with the long bamboo buoy pole. He pulled out his wrist wrestling difficult buoys earlier but still seems able to work. I hope he is. He has four sons at home, one just born back in December. He is a good block man, fast and safe. He reaches the pole out and snags a buoy line. His hands fly up the bamboo as I guide it back with an open grip. At the moment he releases it my grip tightens and I slam it down onto its place on the sorting table. It will be there when he reaches for it, next buoy setup.
The buoys come flying at me, thrown with the quick intense violence of working fast on a crab boat. I throw them back towards Jeff and reel in the ganyon, past the taped carrick bend, until I have the shot in my hand. “Pull it tight!” I reel faster with an angry internal cringe that quiet Dave had to say something. Pull up the wheel on the coiler, slam the line in.
“GO.”
High pitched whine. Line flying under the coiler’s rubber tire. I try to guide it into the garbage can into which it spills with my hand but it is too fast. The coiler does a good job of making loops upon loops by itself. The carrick bend that ties the 33 fathom shot to the bottom shot comes through fast and fine. The thicker bottom shot coils in neat circles up the sides of the trash can. The ascending whine from the line in the block says the pot is near, so I watch coils and stand ready for it. Pot at the rail. I pull the line coiler up, grab the bottom shot, turn to land the pot. Why did I bother? Dave grabs one end, I the other. We balance it on the rail. I unhook the latch stretched with pieces of cut-up rubber inner tube across the top of the round crab pot, three feet in diameter. We open the door and slam the crab out of the pot in one tilting, rocking motion. Eight females and a pathetic, softshelled, undersized yearling fall down onto the coca mats. Dave’s expression is drawn tight. We lay the pot flat. He fills the orange Scotty Diner, a small cup with holes in it and a screw-top lid suspended on the inner tube rubber bands, with squid and I fill a flea jar, a larger square jar hanging from the lid on a hook, with ground-up mackerel. I turn backwards. Jeff has already coiled the line from the pot to the trash can. I pick up the can and slam it down on the top of the closed pot lid. Dave folds the lid back and I step back. Jeff grabs the pot as Dave grabs the buoy pole and I stand ready by the coiler for the next pot.
Jeff’s stack leans forward. We pull and coil more pots. We dump undersized crab and females onto the bristly coca mats amidst a pile of spent slimy bait dumped from the pots already fished. Night falls. Far off glowing yellow sodium lights ring our horizon. Other crab boats, grinding as we are. The only boats doing well have a shallow draft and are fishing the beach. Sunshine and flat calm seas made what crab there are go to the beach. In a stormy year the crab would be in the deep and bigger boats would be the only ones able to fish them in the rough water. Not so this year. Big boats, such as F/V Betty Lee, are shit out of luck. As Marty, the captain, says: “We’re getting our asses kicked by little boats.”
Still, these little boats only have about twenty thousand pounds. On a normal year that number would be doubled or tripled in this first intense seven days of fishing. Why are the crab not here? Where are they? There are no conclusive answers. This is a very political fishery; some people blame the Indians. According to the Boldt Decision, a 1972 court ruling interpreting what ‘legal and accustomed fishing grounds’ meant in the world of modern fishing, Washington tribes were given fifty percent of all commercial and non-commercial fisheries in the state. The implementation of this in the Dungeness crab season means that natives fish for 40 fishable (good weather) days before the ‘white’ season starts. If natives do not reach 40 days by January 15th, everyone else starts anyway. The tribes (Quinault, Quileute, Makah) then have ‘boxes’ near their tribal lands that only they can fish. Natives usually fish the white grounds first, then move into their boxes. I do not know if their catch ends up being fifty percent of the total Dungeness take. I do know there is a lot of hatred for these implementations of treaty law amongst the non-native crabbers in Westport. The natives did not have a good year.
Where are the crab? Biologists don’t really know. Marty says they are here, but buried in, not feeding. Biologists say next year will be big, as there are so many small crab. Every next year seems to be a big year in fishing. That’s how it traps you. The quick money traps you, when it is there. The debt you go into waiting to fish and spending in anticipation of the big bucks traps you. The hard work on the water – which I admit I love with that still-kicking poetic corner of my older wiser wayward soul – traps you with its freedom from the nine to five grind. Five months to do as you please with no work to do traps you. Fucking up and celebrating too much before, during, after fishing (of this I am guilty) traps you. Gillian Welch sings a traditional tune, One More Dollar:
One more dime to show for my day
One more dollar and I’m on my way
When I reach those hills boys I’ll never roam
One more dollar and I’m going home
Problem is this: where is home? I call this blog dirtbag heaven. That's where I live: not so much a place but a state of being. A life of adventures and explorations into realms of society and the natural world I had no idea existed growing up in suburban New England. Life stays fresh and new. But there are rough stretches, too. There are tipping points one might not even realize as such when in the midst of them. These times of great uncertainty, of blank future, are very very important. It shakes me out of the comfort I found in gliding season to season through my fun transitory life, figuring out living situations and health insurance and gainful employment along the way. This is the first time in a long time it has not worked. I took a gamble on some crustaceons and lost. This is from 1995, a year not unlike this one. I worked ski patrol at Crystal Mountain until the Pineapple Express melted our base and we all got laid off.
The Trade
Living wild and free
at the edge of nothing
is to dance fully alive
with the terrible taste
of destruction rising like bile
under your tongue.
Onward, it says,
inertia shall be your demise.
Though I have known
more than most ask
of many lifetimes
I live
within the fear and promise
of never having enough
to survive.
Damn the maintenance
of this vital heat! I say,
make me pure spirit,
banish the sacrifice
of the flesh,
the trade we make
for being alive.
Back to the slate blue window into the sky. Back to the beautiful ring of crab boat lights. Back to the flat green water sliding by the powerful warhorse of a 72-footer. Back to this anomaly standing five foot nine in pigtails and a Grundens jacket with ice tools drawn up into a heart on the back in permanent marker. Out over that water a desolation stretches something in my soul tight as a rubber band, ready to snap. The sun will come up when we work through the night and Rainier will stand floating in the dawn’s new light. Old light. Same light from the same sun and the same round earth that doesn’t care what little decisions we puny walking piles of carbon make in our day to day that determines the course of our all-consuming self-important lives. Out on the ocean, sans big bucks, I am yes a woman doing this Dungy crabbing and yes the only woman doing it on the biggest fishing port on the west coast and yes I suppose this makes me strong and hardcore and all the things people want to call me and yes I also suppose it makes me flighty and seasonal and unsettled and yes it is all true and none of it is. It depends on the lens through which you view the actions which comprise my life. That lens is yours to use and there are as many as there are people. Use it and enjoy.
I am here. I have anger and frustration but no pity for myself or these circumstances. I don’t want any from you. I have made a choice and this is what happened. I am fucking here and going to make the best of it. I decided to do this. I am going to do it until I can afford to step into something else without taking any more of a financial hit. In this stark naked warm coastal night, twelve miles offshore, truth bites as hard as a crab claw in the soft of my hand between thumb and forefinger. This was for money. This was for challenge. This was to see if I could crab at all.
I can. Whoopdee fucking doo. If there is no money I don’t want to be here. This is not what I love. Being on the water does not make that thing without a name rise up in my chest and fill me with the total satisfaction of using everything I have to the end result of not wanting to be anywhere but where I am, when I am, who I am. Climbing does. Writing on a really good story, words coming so fast it feels like I am but a channel through which they flow, does. Fishing is great but I am not quite sure how I got so far into this. I remember a young man my age who I knew in Alaska. He was a New Hampshire kid who had reinvented himself as a survivalist and trapper. We shared some time for a few weeks before he found out I didn’t hate queers and n---ers and Mexicans and etc, and I found out he did. At one point he was showing me a hunting rifle of his. Showing me his life. “I’m way deep into this.” The look on his face said it all. He was. Have I gotten that far into anything? I’ve danced around climbing, waiting for the approval of better climbers, of guide companies who might hire me, before I go all in. I’ve written and published a poem here, a little article there, but never fired up the big guns and gone for it with all my energy. I’ve worked and fucked around with my friends and fun and some microbrew beer and the surprising knowledge I as an adult am popular and loved and socially acceptable. I’ve told myself I am setting up a life in which those two things that make me feel alive can take the forefront, a nice comfortable life where someday in the magical future I can somehow write and climb and have plenty of what I need. I’m so sick of waiting. Fuck it. I’m going for it. Nothing else matters because nothing else really makes sense to me. Dumb inspirational posters tell you to follow your bliss. From that you’d assume that following your bliss will be blissful. Bullshit. It’s hard work. It won’t always feel good.
I’m a couple grand in the hole in a broke-ass fishing town on a bad year.
I’ve got a degree in something useless but for my unwritten novel.
I’ve got ice tools, ropes, pro, skis, shovels, probe, partners, mediocre ice lead and good rock lead and great ski experience and half a winter left.
This is it. I’m against the wall. Fuck fishing. I love mountains.
I’m ready for it.
Burn the bridge. Nuke the foundation. Back yourself up against a wall. Have an opinion one way or the other, get off the fence and rip it up. Cut yourself off so there is no going back. Once you are committed the truth will come out. - Mark Twight, Kiss or Kill
A slate blue stained glass hole in the evening sky hangs over the water as the boat turns for our eighty third? Forty eighth? Hundred and seventh? buoy setup of the day. Black/orange stripe, blue tag, little yellow reflectors, peanut (trailer), keg, diver…Marty’s buoy’s for sure. Dave taps on Marty’s window with the long bamboo buoy pole. He pulled out his wrist wrestling difficult buoys earlier but still seems able to work. I hope he is. He has four sons at home, one just born back in December. He is a good block man, fast and safe. He reaches the pole out and snags a buoy line. His hands fly up the bamboo as I guide it back with an open grip. At the moment he releases it my grip tightens and I slam it down onto its place on the sorting table. It will be there when he reaches for it, next buoy setup.
The buoys come flying at me, thrown with the quick intense violence of working fast on a crab boat. I throw them back towards Jeff and reel in the ganyon, past the taped carrick bend, until I have the shot in my hand. “Pull it tight!” I reel faster with an angry internal cringe that quiet Dave had to say something. Pull up the wheel on the coiler, slam the line in.
“GO.”
High pitched whine. Line flying under the coiler’s rubber tire. I try to guide it into the garbage can into which it spills with my hand but it is too fast. The coiler does a good job of making loops upon loops by itself. The carrick bend that ties the 33 fathom shot to the bottom shot comes through fast and fine. The thicker bottom shot coils in neat circles up the sides of the trash can. The ascending whine from the line in the block says the pot is near, so I watch coils and stand ready for it. Pot at the rail. I pull the line coiler up, grab the bottom shot, turn to land the pot. Why did I bother? Dave grabs one end, I the other. We balance it on the rail. I unhook the latch stretched with pieces of cut-up rubber inner tube across the top of the round crab pot, three feet in diameter. We open the door and slam the crab out of the pot in one tilting, rocking motion. Eight females and a pathetic, softshelled, undersized yearling fall down onto the coca mats. Dave’s expression is drawn tight. We lay the pot flat. He fills the orange Scotty Diner, a small cup with holes in it and a screw-top lid suspended on the inner tube rubber bands, with squid and I fill a flea jar, a larger square jar hanging from the lid on a hook, with ground-up mackerel. I turn backwards. Jeff has already coiled the line from the pot to the trash can. I pick up the can and slam it down on the top of the closed pot lid. Dave folds the lid back and I step back. Jeff grabs the pot as Dave grabs the buoy pole and I stand ready by the coiler for the next pot.
Jeff’s stack leans forward. We pull and coil more pots. We dump undersized crab and females onto the bristly coca mats amidst a pile of spent slimy bait dumped from the pots already fished. Night falls. Far off glowing yellow sodium lights ring our horizon. Other crab boats, grinding as we are. The only boats doing well have a shallow draft and are fishing the beach. Sunshine and flat calm seas made what crab there are go to the beach. In a stormy year the crab would be in the deep and bigger boats would be the only ones able to fish them in the rough water. Not so this year. Big boats, such as F/V Betty Lee, are shit out of luck. As Marty, the captain, says: “We’re getting our asses kicked by little boats.”
Still, these little boats only have about twenty thousand pounds. On a normal year that number would be doubled or tripled in this first intense seven days of fishing. Why are the crab not here? Where are they? There are no conclusive answers. This is a very political fishery; some people blame the Indians. According to the Boldt Decision, a 1972 court ruling interpreting what ‘legal and accustomed fishing grounds’ meant in the world of modern fishing, Washington tribes were given fifty percent of all commercial and non-commercial fisheries in the state. The implementation of this in the Dungeness crab season means that natives fish for 40 fishable (good weather) days before the ‘white’ season starts. If natives do not reach 40 days by January 15th, everyone else starts anyway. The tribes (Quinault, Quileute, Makah) then have ‘boxes’ near their tribal lands that only they can fish. Natives usually fish the white grounds first, then move into their boxes. I do not know if their catch ends up being fifty percent of the total Dungeness take. I do know there is a lot of hatred for these implementations of treaty law amongst the non-native crabbers in Westport. The natives did not have a good year.
Where are the crab? Biologists don’t really know. Marty says they are here, but buried in, not feeding. Biologists say next year will be big, as there are so many small crab. Every next year seems to be a big year in fishing. That’s how it traps you. The quick money traps you, when it is there. The debt you go into waiting to fish and spending in anticipation of the big bucks traps you. The hard work on the water – which I admit I love with that still-kicking poetic corner of my older wiser wayward soul – traps you with its freedom from the nine to five grind. Five months to do as you please with no work to do traps you. Fucking up and celebrating too much before, during, after fishing (of this I am guilty) traps you. Gillian Welch sings a traditional tune, One More Dollar:
One more dime to show for my day
One more dollar and I’m on my way
When I reach those hills boys I’ll never roam
One more dollar and I’m going home
Problem is this: where is home? I call this blog dirtbag heaven. That's where I live: not so much a place but a state of being. A life of adventures and explorations into realms of society and the natural world I had no idea existed growing up in suburban New England. Life stays fresh and new. But there are rough stretches, too. There are tipping points one might not even realize as such when in the midst of them. These times of great uncertainty, of blank future, are very very important. It shakes me out of the comfort I found in gliding season to season through my fun transitory life, figuring out living situations and health insurance and gainful employment along the way. This is the first time in a long time it has not worked. I took a gamble on some crustaceons and lost. This is from 1995, a year not unlike this one. I worked ski patrol at Crystal Mountain until the Pineapple Express melted our base and we all got laid off.
The Trade
Living wild and free
at the edge of nothing
is to dance fully alive
with the terrible taste
of destruction rising like bile
under your tongue.
Onward, it says,
inertia shall be your demise.
Though I have known
more than most ask
of many lifetimes
I live
within the fear and promise
of never having enough
to survive.
Damn the maintenance
of this vital heat! I say,
make me pure spirit,
banish the sacrifice
of the flesh,
the trade we make
for being alive.
Back to the slate blue window into the sky. Back to the beautiful ring of crab boat lights. Back to the flat green water sliding by the powerful warhorse of a 72-footer. Back to this anomaly standing five foot nine in pigtails and a Grundens jacket with ice tools drawn up into a heart on the back in permanent marker. Out over that water a desolation stretches something in my soul tight as a rubber band, ready to snap. The sun will come up when we work through the night and Rainier will stand floating in the dawn’s new light. Old light. Same light from the same sun and the same round earth that doesn’t care what little decisions we puny walking piles of carbon make in our day to day that determines the course of our all-consuming self-important lives. Out on the ocean, sans big bucks, I am yes a woman doing this Dungy crabbing and yes the only woman doing it on the biggest fishing port on the west coast and yes I suppose this makes me strong and hardcore and all the things people want to call me and yes I also suppose it makes me flighty and seasonal and unsettled and yes it is all true and none of it is. It depends on the lens through which you view the actions which comprise my life. That lens is yours to use and there are as many as there are people. Use it and enjoy.
I am here. I have anger and frustration but no pity for myself or these circumstances. I don’t want any from you. I have made a choice and this is what happened. I am fucking here and going to make the best of it. I decided to do this. I am going to do it until I can afford to step into something else without taking any more of a financial hit. In this stark naked warm coastal night, twelve miles offshore, truth bites as hard as a crab claw in the soft of my hand between thumb and forefinger. This was for money. This was for challenge. This was to see if I could crab at all.
I can. Whoopdee fucking doo. If there is no money I don’t want to be here. This is not what I love. Being on the water does not make that thing without a name rise up in my chest and fill me with the total satisfaction of using everything I have to the end result of not wanting to be anywhere but where I am, when I am, who I am. Climbing does. Writing on a really good story, words coming so fast it feels like I am but a channel through which they flow, does. Fishing is great but I am not quite sure how I got so far into this. I remember a young man my age who I knew in Alaska. He was a New Hampshire kid who had reinvented himself as a survivalist and trapper. We shared some time for a few weeks before he found out I didn’t hate queers and n---ers and Mexicans and etc, and I found out he did. At one point he was showing me a hunting rifle of his. Showing me his life. “I’m way deep into this.” The look on his face said it all. He was. Have I gotten that far into anything? I’ve danced around climbing, waiting for the approval of better climbers, of guide companies who might hire me, before I go all in. I’ve written and published a poem here, a little article there, but never fired up the big guns and gone for it with all my energy. I’ve worked and fucked around with my friends and fun and some microbrew beer and the surprising knowledge I as an adult am popular and loved and socially acceptable. I’ve told myself I am setting up a life in which those two things that make me feel alive can take the forefront, a nice comfortable life where someday in the magical future I can somehow write and climb and have plenty of what I need. I’m so sick of waiting. Fuck it. I’m going for it. Nothing else matters because nothing else really makes sense to me. Dumb inspirational posters tell you to follow your bliss. From that you’d assume that following your bliss will be blissful. Bullshit. It’s hard work. It won’t always feel good.
I’m a couple grand in the hole in a broke-ass fishing town on a bad year.
I’ve got a degree in something useless but for my unwritten novel.
I’ve got ice tools, ropes, pro, skis, shovels, probe, partners, mediocre ice lead and good rock lead and great ski experience and half a winter left.
This is it. I’m against the wall. Fuck fishing. I love mountains.
I’m ready for it.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Howl
Huge moon rising above jagged doug fir. Howl, howl, howl till I'm shaking, howl, howl till I can't see. Shaking arms god i'm stronger than this but no I'm not and this is release and I don't want to crash the car and I pull over. Arms straight over the steering wheel and head down I release it all. Screaming rage, high keening wail. This is no serenade to the rising moon. This is animal misery. It is the timeless keening of a woman left alone. It is a death chant with no death but the one that occurs between two people. It is an ululation and a tribute to what is still wild in me. Somewhere between the screaming and the long piercing howl there is indeed acknowledgment of the full rising moon. Not like before - before him - where I found all my magic alone in rivers and moons and canyons. Somewhere between his arms and the rope I've shared with so many climbing partners, the long beeeep of a 457 mHz transceiver first turning on before a day on the snow slopes my joy and exaltation in the natural world has become a shared thing. Even when skiing and climbing with others I would share it with him, wherever we had both flung ourselves to that day, then pick it apart with him. I have loved his sharp mind like I've loved his big warm sturdy body - consistently throughout the entire time I've known him. I brought my stories back and we would pick them apart, as we did with his, laughing at the ridiculous, snarling at the inane. I understood my dynamic with all my friends and climbing partners. I would analyze what I had and hadn't done right. There was clarity and what felt like no compromise.
But here I am, keening to a cold moon over Elma alone at the helm of my chariot, red. Big and red and long and lean, the best damn pickup you've ever seen, T-Rizzle, T-Red, Toyota T-100, camper shell white (a huge camper shell procured for a hundred bucks). Tires ridiculously aggressive. Engine rebuilt and ready to roll. Later this night one of our mutual friends will say of my momentary lamentation of my rootlessness: 'at least you can still have a a truck.' At least. What I mourn this night is the loss of my heart. I'm not so tough that I can do this alone, no mother, no guiding siblings, no best friend stopping by to check - the lack of these have been near-constants, but now no lover. No lover. He is down in his new city and I am alone with the dulled steel knifepoint of my curiosity and drive in a town full of arrogant fishermen and tweakers. Meth and crack. Cut down trees and diminished returns. Where's the honest day's work in sawing a log that doesn't exist? In catching a crab that isn't there?
I hope the crab are there, I've staked my winter on it. Hung my hope head-high on the hooks in the galley so it can dry from the hard and constant Westport rain. I hate the town the way I hated Valdez. It's an industrial fishing town with the same seedy bars, politics and hangers-on as Valdez, with nothing to recommend it in the way of mountains or nightlife or a way to keep from drinking too much and saying or doing something I regret with a less than nice young man out of sheer loneliness. Yet here I am, stubborn solo female deckhand, lining up for the last scratches of a once-booming crab industry. Why? Because it is hard, and I can make money. The kind of money that doesn't make sense - a thousand dollars or more a day, in a couple of hours. If the crab are there. Just need to keep strong, unhurt and awake while lifting heavy things and letting the Pacific brutalize my delicate, aching, sturdy body. I fish because I like money and hate the nine to five. I fish because I can't rationalize getting paid 9.50 an hour to pull rich gapers off the ski hill or answer phones and wish I was a heli-ski guide. The service industry knows I disdain it by now, so every time I get sick of working with racists and meatheads (and the occasional, as this crew is turning out to be during gear work, straight up guys) big ego yahoos and god's gift to the industrialized ocean harvest I turn my hopeful, fresh-scrubbed face back to them. But there's fish slime behind my ears and critical, humorous disdain behind my tight pressed smiley lips, just oozing out. People know that. People know I'm not the type to lick ass to get the good trip or the good acclaim amongst my fellow workers. In the outdoor industry the fact that you get to go to work on a ski lift is, in the eyes of resort and business owners, payment enough. Anything else is a bonus. This means that without family money, investments, a lucrative off-season job, or the willingness to live in a dorm or your vehicle with no health insurance and bad teeth you're gonna be eligible for food stamps. Will you take them, surrounded by a culture of wealth and play? Will you 'grow up', go back to grad school and get a real job? Will you become management? You come here because you loved skiing (climbing, rafting, etc). Resort culture, it's fun, it's a big party but - what happened? When did your love of nature and the sports you played in that arena become something you had to sell to survive?
Survive. I observe the tops of trees from the platform of my outstretched arms, over the steering wheel. Fucking angry. Going crabbing. Not sure if I miss a man or a mountain more. It's all mixed up in this heart and I am poised to jump away from gear work into the Rockies and climb ice. To crab. But it's not what I want and a taste is not enough. Tears fall until I shudder them finished with a long sigh. I drive.
props to allen ginsberg, the dead dude who let me steal his cool title
But here I am, keening to a cold moon over Elma alone at the helm of my chariot, red. Big and red and long and lean, the best damn pickup you've ever seen, T-Rizzle, T-Red, Toyota T-100, camper shell white (a huge camper shell procured for a hundred bucks). Tires ridiculously aggressive. Engine rebuilt and ready to roll. Later this night one of our mutual friends will say of my momentary lamentation of my rootlessness: 'at least you can still have a a truck.' At least. What I mourn this night is the loss of my heart. I'm not so tough that I can do this alone, no mother, no guiding siblings, no best friend stopping by to check - the lack of these have been near-constants, but now no lover. No lover. He is down in his new city and I am alone with the dulled steel knifepoint of my curiosity and drive in a town full of arrogant fishermen and tweakers. Meth and crack. Cut down trees and diminished returns. Where's the honest day's work in sawing a log that doesn't exist? In catching a crab that isn't there?
I hope the crab are there, I've staked my winter on it. Hung my hope head-high on the hooks in the galley so it can dry from the hard and constant Westport rain. I hate the town the way I hated Valdez. It's an industrial fishing town with the same seedy bars, politics and hangers-on as Valdez, with nothing to recommend it in the way of mountains or nightlife or a way to keep from drinking too much and saying or doing something I regret with a less than nice young man out of sheer loneliness. Yet here I am, stubborn solo female deckhand, lining up for the last scratches of a once-booming crab industry. Why? Because it is hard, and I can make money. The kind of money that doesn't make sense - a thousand dollars or more a day, in a couple of hours. If the crab are there. Just need to keep strong, unhurt and awake while lifting heavy things and letting the Pacific brutalize my delicate, aching, sturdy body. I fish because I like money and hate the nine to five. I fish because I can't rationalize getting paid 9.50 an hour to pull rich gapers off the ski hill or answer phones and wish I was a heli-ski guide. The service industry knows I disdain it by now, so every time I get sick of working with racists and meatheads (and the occasional, as this crew is turning out to be during gear work, straight up guys) big ego yahoos and god's gift to the industrialized ocean harvest I turn my hopeful, fresh-scrubbed face back to them. But there's fish slime behind my ears and critical, humorous disdain behind my tight pressed smiley lips, just oozing out. People know that. People know I'm not the type to lick ass to get the good trip or the good acclaim amongst my fellow workers. In the outdoor industry the fact that you get to go to work on a ski lift is, in the eyes of resort and business owners, payment enough. Anything else is a bonus. This means that without family money, investments, a lucrative off-season job, or the willingness to live in a dorm or your vehicle with no health insurance and bad teeth you're gonna be eligible for food stamps. Will you take them, surrounded by a culture of wealth and play? Will you 'grow up', go back to grad school and get a real job? Will you become management? You come here because you loved skiing (climbing, rafting, etc). Resort culture, it's fun, it's a big party but - what happened? When did your love of nature and the sports you played in that arena become something you had to sell to survive?
Survive. I observe the tops of trees from the platform of my outstretched arms, over the steering wheel. Fucking angry. Going crabbing. Not sure if I miss a man or a mountain more. It's all mixed up in this heart and I am poised to jump away from gear work into the Rockies and climb ice. To crab. But it's not what I want and a taste is not enough. Tears fall until I shudder them finished with a long sigh. I drive.
props to allen ginsberg, the dead dude who let me steal his cool title
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