Video blog

Since I discovered the motion picture button on my camera, I have become more interested in doing a little video blogging. Not a whole lot - because most home movie clips usually weave between grating and boring and mine are no different. I shot some footage up at Eaglecrest yesterday. I wasn't going to post it. Mostly because video always seems to take something I find scary and exhilarating - such as shimmying through fresh, heavy powder at a barely controlled 10 mph - and makes it look like a flatly lit slog down a ski slope. Plus, I shot an introduction, forgetting that my face was covered in mud from the sloppy climb and my bike helmet was pushed way back because that's what it takes to strap a camera to my forehead. I realized that I've never appeared "live" on my own blog before. This first shot doesn't make for a very flattering portrait. But then I remembered ... I've been doing this blog exhibitionist thing for more than two years. Since when have I worried about flattering or boring? So I'm posting my video blog No. 3. I attached a good song to it to make it more entertaining: "On the Radio" by Regina Spektor.

"Trickster"

April showers

Date: April 8
Mileage: 30.2
April mileage: 229
Temperature: 35

I love spring snow. I've always loved spring snow. But I even love it here in Alaska, where spring snow is not so out of the ordinary.

A thin white blanket settled on Juneau overnight, a temporary shield from the dull browns and wet yellows that dominate the landscape in April. So even though I had scrubbed Pugsley shiny on Sunday, thinking we would not be going out again for quite a while, I couldn't help but drag him up to Eaglecrest today.

Streaks of sunlight danced across the unplowed road, until the drifting clouds finally closed together. In a swirl of flurries I pushed up the slope, right on the trail of a pair of tele-skiers. When I caught up to them, they got a few good laughs. (I didn't point out that I, a post-holing hiker pushing a 35-pound bicycle, had caught up to them.) I did concede that I looked ridiculous, coated head-to-toe in slush and grit as I was, walking a bicycle up a ski slope in April.

"Can you control that thing downhill?" one skier asked me.

"When there's six inches of new snow, not so much," I said. "But the base seems good so it's worth a try."

I turned off at a green run called "Trickster" and kicked off. I don't remember much about the ride down because I was terrified, hearing only the squeal of my wet brakes and seeing only blasts of white, wet powder kick up from my wheels. Within minutes I was back at the road. The snowpack was quickly disintegrating to slush; my 4-inch tires blasted me with so much water I could barely keep my eyes open. There was little I could do but clench my fingers and toes in wet gloves and wet shoes and embrace the full-body pain that is a 20-degree windchill (downhill at 40 mph in 35-degree air) through soaked clothes on soaked skin. I hate it when rides come to this and I should, really should know better by now. I know enough to know that once the chill starts, I only become colder and colder and colder.

I also know enough to know that it's not the end of the world. Biking hard never seems to warm me up to optimal temperature (the faster I go, the harder the windchills cut through), but it does keep the hypothermia at its lowest level. The worst part about a too-cold, wet ride is coming inside once I'm done. I never have the time to warm myself slowly, so I have to go with the rip-the-bandaid-off route: A hot shower. It's the kind of pain that's hard to describe, but easily forgotten - memory is usually merciful when it comes to that level of trauma. If I could realistically remember the way those hot showers feel, I would probably never get on a bicycle again, at least when the temperature was below 60. Descriptions that run through my mind during those intense moments generally follow the lines of "A Million White Hot Needles of Death." That is, when I'm not trying to rip my hair out as a way to feel less pain.

So I took a bad shower and vowed, again, to always, always overdress when I'm cycling in wet conditions. Two more inches of snow fell while I was at work. The sun broke out again as I was returning from my dinner break. Filtered yellow light sparkled on the snow, which coated every tree, every limb, every tiny branch. Snow gave the land a color and depth that I had forgotten in the featureless wash of early spring. It looked so soft and billowy that I wanted to dive right in, and roll around.

It hurt to go inside again, but not in the same way.

Inbetween times

Date: April 6 and 7
Mileage: 12 and 29.5
April mileage: 188.8
Temperature: 41 and 39

I yelped as wet snow soaked through my socks, filling the empty space where I stood in a snowdrift, thigh deep and sinking. It was a struggle to even lift my leg in this slush, so close to liquidation that it had become a solid, like wet cornstarch or quicksand. A deceptive solid. Not solid enough to hold me, just solid enough to trap my foot - soon to be, I feared, trench foot.

I swung around to search for the trail. I had abandoned my bike a mile back to press on as a hike. Now I was swimming. It was time to swim home. Time to give up on this whole snow hiking/biking thing. Time to leave the mountains alone until their permanent surface re-emerged from this rotting seasonal veneer. Time to think about "summerizing" the Pugsley to prepare him for the season of salt water and sand. Time to give up on winter.

So we wait now, for something. Summer, I guess. I know summer only in vague terms. It begins the day the Mount Juneau trail finally clears; the day the first black bear makes a raid on the Rainbow Foods dumpster; the day I can finally wear bike shorts. Geoff, on the other hand, knows exactly when summer begins. He has the date marked on the calendar. April 22, 6 p.m. The day the last spring ferry heads south out of Juneau.

Then I will be alone all summer long, and it's starting to sink in. I remember the last time I lived alone in Juneau, watching 2 a.m. Cartoon Network in a damp hotel room and eating my best meals at the Safeway deli. I like to think I can keep my own bad habits in check. But then I think about the Subway guy who saw me so many times he had my *exact* sandwich memorized and even asked me out, and remember there are fates worse than loneliness.

Geoff asks me every day why I don't just leave with him. "Because I have plans," I say. "Because I have cats," I say. "Because I have health insurance," I say. "Because I have a job," I say.

"Always with the jobs," he says.

"I need to feel like I have a grasp on the future," I say.

"And that too," he says.

When I'm at work is when I feel most content about my decision to stay. It's earlier, when Geoff is elsewhere and my time is only mine, that I wonder why it's so right to aspire to life in front of a computer screen and so wrong to aspire to life on a bike ... even with cats to support.

But then I ride my bike and feel happy. And I go to work and feel content. And the snow will climb higher up the mountains. It will finally disappear. And then it will return. Not every moment inbetween has to be an adventure. There will be time for that later. Always later.