Santa Barbara

If you are a person of an impatient persuasion, you probably hate commercial flying. If you are a person of an irrational phobia persuasion, you probably hate commercial flying. And if you are a person of an "I am not livestock" persuasion, you probably hate commercial flying. But if you are a little of all three, you would probably let a day-long, three-legged flight with a four-hour layover in Santa Barbara make you really grumpy.

I completely forgot about that first leg, and told my mom I wasn't flying out until 4:50 p.m. We were planning the day together and everything. But when I actually checked my itinerary, I realized I was flying at 11 a.m. After we rushed to the airport, I wandered around the Salt Lake terminal for a little while looking for a map of the states. I get all of the San's and Santa's in California confused. I thought Santa Barbara was in the Central California/Sacramento/Purgatory area. But I was wrong. It's right on the southern coast.

The Santa Barbara airport is small. Smaller than Juneau's. And judging by the reaction from the TSA people, I don't think anyone in the history of the world has ever caught a connecting flight there. When I showed one Horizon Airlines employee my Delta boarding pass, she just kept telling me I was at the wrong airport. "But you flew me in here," I kept insisting. It was like arguing with an automated teller. It took a while to square all the confusion away, but afterward I still had nearly four hours to kill at a six-gate airport that had one snack bar and essentially no waiting space. Outside was a blaze of sunlight at 65-degree dry air. It seemed a good opportunity to go for a walk.

Airports are usually tough places to walk away from, but I am wary of hopping on public transportation when I'm whittling away a layover. Luckily, I discovered a bike path almost immediately. I crossed the Goleta Slough and quickly found my way to the beach, where I kicked off my shoes and socks and laid tracks across the warm sand like the little lost bear I followed earlier this week. I felt comfortably out of place among the baking beautiful people, with the sun scorching my pasty Alaskan skin and my SPF 45 stowed somewhere far away in my checked baggage, hauling a Camelbak carry-on and a Gap bag full of Goldfish, likely illegal fruit and my ancient camera. I was really tempted to go for a swim in the surf, but I unfortunately chose to wear white underwear that morning. Dang.

I made my way up to UCSB to find an Internet connection and lunch. Both searches turned out to be fruitless (I forgot how bad college food is.) I was eating my Goldfish and a grapefruit, drinking a jug-o'Diet Pepsi and reading a section of The Salt Lake Tribune in the campus courtyard when a guy that couldn't have been older than 19 or 20 approached me to ask if I was in his Cultural Anthropology class. "No," I said, "I'm not a student here."

"Oh, too bad," he said, then smiled and walked away. I think he intended to hit on me. It's hard to tell with the kids these days. Either way, I don't think that happened to me before, even when I was actually in college. I chose to feel flattered.

After lunch, I ditched the Gap bag and worked my way further down the beach, away from the groomed lawns and beach umbrellas, to the seedier part of the coast. With sand bluffs towering overhead and wind whipping up the beach, it reminded me of Homer, Alaska ... with palm trees. Without a watch or any real clue of my timeline for finding my way back to the tiny airport, I sat on the rocks and looked north up the coastline, even further away from home than I was this morning, guiltlessly enjoying a vacation from my vacation.

I think they call this kind of thing Serendipity.

Noncyclist, interrupted

The first day I went into the desert, I rented a bicycle. Two days cost more than I paid for my first commuter bike, but it seemed wrong to go into the desert without a bicycle in tow. I told the people at Poison Spider that I wanted a hardtail. Rigid if they had it.

"Where are you going to be riding?" the bike shop guy asked.

"Probably just the road above the White Rim," I said, not even trying to mask my disappointment in that statement. "There's going to be some fast guys and I'd like a chance to keep up with them for 10 miles."

Bike shop guy just crinkled his nose as if to suggest he had never heard of anything more boring. "Well we don't have hardtails here," he said. "We only have full-suspension bikes. But if you want, I'll rent you my fixie."

I was meeting Geoff, Dave Nice and our Utah friend Bryan that afternoon at the Sovereign trail. I didn't tell bike shop guy that bit of information because I didn't think I'd actually ride with them much at all. But they were such a dedicated group, I couldn't resist the pull. Dave endured hours on a Greyhound bus all the way from Denver just to ride with us that weekend. Bryan chose to fight a nasty case of Bronchitis while plowing over slickrock on a Trek he rarely rides anymore (Bryan is currently a "roadie.") Geoff was preparing to bust out his first dirt century the next day, but everyone wanted to hit the Sovereign singletrack. Compared to that group, slight gimpiness was hardly a good excuse to skip a short ride.

Falling back into the flow of mountain biking happened surprisingly fast. I haven't ridden a dirt trail since September; not that it mattered anyway, because I hadn't really ridden a bike since February. Motoring along effortlessly at 10 mph, standing the whole time to avoid the pain angles and timidly stepping off my bike at most uphill obstacles, I still felt like I was flying across time and space. The trail was a mob scene - I think I saw more mountain bikers in those 10 miles than I have seen throughout thousands in Alaska - but I didn't care. I probably had some kind of silly grin stretched across my face for the entire wavering, pain-streaked, overcrowded ride. Self deprivation is a powerful thing.

The next morning, I was stiff but unwilling to completely give up on the White Rim. I planned this ride back in February, back when I still believed that recovery was an easy process. By the time it became obvious that my presence on the ride would only serve as a huge liability, Geoff had already signed on, as had two hardcore riders who are training for this year's Great Divide Race, Dave and Pete Basinger. Talk about a cool group. I was drooling with jealousy. I thought if I could set out toward the edge of the rim, I would almost be able to taste a trail just out of my reach. I thought that 20 miles of pavement would be better than nothing at all. So I set out with the crowd at 6 a.m., rain clouds hovering on the horizon and temperatures dipping below 40 degrees. With tailwinds and a downhill slope, it seemed to be over before it even began. I watched the three disappear over the Schaefer trail, in my mind filling the void with my delusions of competence and a gnawing defiance held back only by the presence of Bryan, who was preparing to ride with me back the way we came.

By noon that day, the rest of the group of friends and I had already shivered our way through the nature walk above Dead Horse Point and were looking for a better way to kill an afternoon. I convinced myself that the best way to shuttle Geoff back to Moab that evening would be to leave our vehicle at the trailhead and pedal myself into town - only 27 miles, mostly downhill. And as long as I had a full-suspension mountain bike, I reasoned, I might as well take the Gemini Bridges jeep road - catch a few technical moves and maybe a nice view or two before frittering away the rest of the day at the Slickrock Cafe.

I recruited my friend Monika to ride along. She rode my friend Jen's neglected Trek 4300, corroded and in need of a multitude of adjustments that I was too lazy to fix. Monika and I took it painfully easy, coasting down the road and stopping at scenic points along the way.

We hit a short, 300-foot climb about two miles from the highway. I pedaled the hill hard at first because it felt good to take quick gulps of the cold desert air, but fairly quickly slipped back against the pain streaks. I hopped off my bike to walk the last stretch. A couple of approaching motorcyclists stopped beside me.

"Are you having a hard time pedaling your bike uphill?" one asked.

"Um, no," I said. "I'm just walking for a bit."

"Because you know, you have gears on that bike that you can shift to make it easier to pedal," he said, pointing to crank on my rental ride, which was currently fixed on the second ring - where it needed to be, since I rode the entire day off the saddle. I couldn't tell if he was serious or just being a jerk, but either way, I didn't want to invite further condescending treatment by telling him I was walking because my knee had an owie. Instead, I got a three-minute lecture about the basic mechanics of a geared bike and how the levers work. All the while, I just smiled, nodded, and dreamed of the alternate universe where healthy Jill was riding her own bike on a 100-mile day jaunt down the White Rim trail, and this doofus had run out of gas somewhere deep in the desert.

The day clocked in at 45 miles, plus 10 the previous day, which I guess is arguably half as healthy as I'd need to be to ride the White Rim. Except for I wasn't healthy. I was an Aleve-popping hopalong who still had a three-day backpacking trip to complete. But I'd think back to plummeting down the sandy slopes of Gemini Bridges road, with a foreground drenched in a blaze of spring green and slipping effortlessly into the blur of motion, and I'd decide it was all worth it.

When worlds collide

Toward the end of Day 2 in White Canyon - so far south you can almost smell Arizona and so deep in the desert that those invasive plants that plague the Colorado Plateau (tamarisk and Russian olive) still haven't found their way in - Chris walked back down the trail to tell us he saw bear tracks.

"Uh huh," I said, my voice probably wavering between disbelief and indifference.

"I said bear tracks, not deer tracks," Chris said.

I shrugged. "So?"

Chris just chuckled. "Um...." Above us, sheer sandstone cliffs cut out the sky, stark blue against a red rock streaked in slate black varnish. Cottonwood trees dripped in spring greens I have probably already missed seeing in Alaska, and I realized then how far from home we really were. Me and the bear.

I dropped my pack and hobble sticks and stumbled up a side canyon, where my friends were already following the well-laid footprints. I struggled to keep up with the group but found myself slipping further behind. Their echoing voices faded up the canyon until I was alone with the silence, tracing the steps of a ghost bear in the sand, and losing my concentration to the mystery of it all. The canyon twisted and narrowed, casting the wash in shadow, threatening yet another dead end, and still the bear moved on.

It's been an interesting experience to come together in this place - together as a group of old and new friends now spread between all corners of the continent; together as Alaskan and black bear in the Utah desert. Such strange collisions could only happen in a space so wide open it closes in all the empty spaces, a place so beautiful it bleeds light, where time moves like the waves in a river - constantly curling back toward the past.

I had a great vacation despite a nearly continuous struggle with an uncooperative body. I'm back in Salt Lake City today after driving between the hours of 10 p.m. and 3 a.m., all hopped up on gallons of Diet Pepsi (which is my excuse for still being awake and also for this strange post.) I owe my sore knee to some misguided mountain biking and unintended canyoneering, but I owe the great vacation to old friends, open spaces, and a little black bear that must have been a long way from home.


To be continued ...