Another perspective

Date: Aug. 23-24
Mileage: 47.6
August mileage: 777.1
Temperature upon departure: 57
Rainfall: .55"

Our friend Amity from Palmer, Alaska, is visiting us right now. She is the first friend from Outside (Juneau) that we actually talked into coming to visit. She had never been to Southeast Alaska before.

Yesterday we backpacked to the Windfall Lakes public use cabin, a backcountry luxury spot complete with a canoe and a propane heater. We made pasta with pesto sauce for dinner and it was about the worst thing I have ever ingested (a combination of salt overload, MSG, starch water and more than a hint of melted plastic from the cheap bowl I was eating it out of.) I opted to eat it rather than pack it out, even though I had already packed in two magazines, a huge edition of the Seattle newspaper and two cans of Diet Pepsi (hey, you have to have priorities.) We floated on the lake for a while while Amity "fished" and Geoff and I were rained on. It continued to rain the entire night. We played Texas hold'em, betting mini chocolate bars just like children do. Amity cleaned both Geoff and I out in about a dozen hands. I read the most recent edition of "Backpacking" - the "Global Warming Issue" - from cover to cover after Geoff and Amity went to sleep at 10 p.m. I don't recommend reading it unless you want to feel really depressed about the state of things you can not control. Especially if you are trying to sleep on a hard bench in a public use cabin, and every uncomfortable minute of alertness means you are either thinking about your sore back, or you are imagining the beautiful sea of grass that is the sandhills of western Nebraska turning into a Sarhara Desert in less than 20 years.

All in all, though, a fun trip. It's always interesting to see your hometown and your habits through another person's eyes:

On tidepooling: "There's nothing tasty in this one."

On fishing from a canoe: "I'll cast it out front so I don't hook you in the eye."

On the spawned-out salmon that were laboring along the shoreline: "They're really not so bad. They taste a little bit like whitefish."

On Juneau in general: "I just didn't realize it would be so wet here."

Geoff and me

Date: Aug. 22
Mileage: 22.1
August mileage: 729.5
Temperature upon departure: 53

So Geoff bought me a copy of "24 Solo" for my birthday. I found the film entertaining enough, but I think Geoff took its motivating message to a farther extreme. Ever since we watched it, he has been scheming about adding even more events to his already overfull schedule. And since the place we happen to live is the isolated hamlet of Juneau, Alaska, I think it may be safe to assume that he's going to be gone, well ... all of next year, at least. Happy birthday to me.

I keep trying to tell Geoff that I am really not interested in following him into the madness. I don't actually want to live homeless in the scorching heat of a Mountain West summer. I don't want to subsist on sponsor snacks, or train eight hours a day, or set out to ride a sub-24-day GDR. That is really not my bag. That is way beyond my bag. That is a bag that belongs to a climber on Everest compared to my K-Mart bookbag. I like my domestic, balanced life. I like employment. I like income, and shelter, and the ability to purchase food. Geoff seems to think these things are optional.

It's funny, because I think most of our Alaska friends believe Geoff and I originally connected because we have similar "nutjob" qualities and a mutual respect for the other's rabid individualism. But that's really not the case at all. We met because I was inexperienced and naive, and Geoff had this compulsion to do beyond-the-call-of-duty good deeds for complete strangers. It's a good story, actually. And I'm going to tell it, because this is my blog and I'll do what I want. (Sorry, Geoff)

We had a mutual friend who invited me to visit her in upstate New York for the New Year's 2001. I didn't really take the offer too seriously. The next day at work, I was playing around with priceline.com, one of those Web sites where you name your price for just about anything, but you're held to it if your offer is accepted. I entered an offer for a plane ticket to New York City ("All those Eastern states are small. How far away from Syracuse could it be?") on Christmas Day ("That must be a busy day for flying anyway") for the crazy low price of about $150. Imagine my shock when the offer went through.

At the time, I was 21 years old. I had never flown by myself or even traveled by myself. Only briefly had I ever even travelled east if the Mississippi, at age 15. I had no idea New York City and Syracuse were more than a five-hour drive apart. I had no idea how to find transportation. And I wasn't surprised when my friend said, "No, I can't make a 10-hour trip to pick you up at an airport on Christmas Day."

For a while, I thought I was just out $150. But then my friend told me that a friend of hers who was in Syracuse visiting his family might be able to come pick me up. I had met him briefly on several occasions because he had recently moved to Utah, but I hardly could say I knew the guy. The plane touched down at La Guardia airport at 12:05 a.m. on what was by then Dec. 26. It proceeded to sit on the tarmac for another 60 minutes, waiting for the all-but-shut-down airline to open a gate. By the time I stumbled off the plane, it was after 1 a.m. The airport was so empty you could hear clocks ticking, and I knew there was no way this random guy was actually going to be there waiting for me. But I turned a corner, and there was Geoff, calmly waiting for me in the abandoned corridors of a distant airport on the wee hours after Christmas as though he did things like that every week.

The cold in New York City that night cut deep, close to 0 degrees, the kind of temperatures that drive even the most sleepless cities into darkness and silence. We pulled up into Times Square and parked right on the main drag, the only car to be seen for blocks. Everything was closed for the holiday. All the lights were dimmed, turned off, subdued. There wasn't a single other person on the sidewalks ... no transients, no teenagers, no homeless people, no one. It was a though the nuclear bomb had finally hit and we were the only people left alive in this vast and unknowable city. It felt completely natural.

Geoff and I crawled Manhattan for the rest of the night, talking about the everything and nothing of our lives. I think I could count the cars I saw - all taxis - on one hand. We circumnavigated Central Park as I shivered in my jeans and light cotton jacket, hatless and gloveless, slowly becoming a true solid. The deep freeze settled in so completely that I could scarcely keep enough blood flowing to my legs to continue walking. But I continued walking, because I was so enthralled by the very idea of New York City, and winter, and Geoff.

Can't exactly say it was love at first sight. But it was on those deserted city streets that a younger and much more naive version of myself first planted that seed. At the time, it was my grandest adventure. And it was only a foundation.

Mellow hikes and bikes

As I was rolling into Skagway on Friday, I remember feeling on top of the world, still stoking a decent reserve of energy, and thinking "I could keep doing this ... tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day."

Who knows? Maybe I could have kept going at that rate. But it's funny ... when you set these specific goals for yourself, your mind says "time to stop," and your body says "OK. Stop I shall." And that's it. It's like irreversible shutdown.

So the past few days have been a lazy sort of slog through the fog. I don't have any residual soreness from my long ride, but I think my mind is just tired. I went out for a short ride yesterday and just couldn't amp it up. It never hurt ... it just never had any fire. Also, similar to the week after the 24 Hours of Light, my job also has chosen an inopportune time to became particularly high-stress. There isn't much left to me but fumes; I feel like I burn those well, but a high-performance vehicle I'm not.

I've ambled along a couple of mellow hikes that have been really nice, though ... social walks in the woods with friends; actually getting out just to "get out." It's a nice way to start out the next month. My aim is to become a more proficient hiker. I'm planning to hike the Grand Canyon from the south rim to the north with my dad in late September. Before I moved to Alaska, this dayhike was becoming an annual fall excursion for us. I've completed the trail in worse shape than I'm in right now, but I definitely have some concerns for this year. For one, my heat acclimatization is awful right now (Since I nearly passed out in 90 degrees last week, I figure I'll need at least six gallons of water to survive 100 degrees.) For two, walking downhill seems to be the main holdout of my old knee injury. I'm far more worried about the prospect of pounding down 6,000 feet in elevation than I was about a 370-mile bike ride. So this month is going to be about more quad strengthening, and more hiking to get used to that motion (although hiking in Juneau, where single miles often gain/lose 1,500-2,000 feet in elevation, takes downhill strides to a whole new level.) The inevitable gallons of rain mean there will still be plenty of biking, but I have a new focus this month. I'm actually pretty excited about it. Health will be mine.