Last day at the office

I have the best view from my office. True, my back is turned to it most of the time, where I sit facing a wall, planted like a slug with eyes fixated on a screen while my fingers frantically adjust imaginary words and pictures. But on rare (increasingly more rare) occasions, I stand up and walk to the window, where my second-story workplace looks over Gastineau Channel. In the summer, the salmon return to the hatchery across the street. Their smooth bodies churn up the shallow water, a roiling silver mass of gulping mouths and leaping tails. People line the shoreline with fishing poles — snaggers — plucking the fish out of the chaos in fantastic leaps and fights. Sea lions come too, and every once in a great while, orca whales, plying the narrow channel between two civilized towns. In the fall, I watch ribbons of fog caress the mountains, flowing like silk down a thick carpet of spruce trees. Snow creeps lower until it touches sea water, and then I know it is winter. During long stretches of cold, the channel sometimes freezes over. Tiny ice-breaking tug boats guide massive barges through the cracked white surface. The sun arcs low behind Douglas Island, casting the building in near-continuous shadow. Slowly, the sun climbs higher, reaching farther to the north, and then I know it is spring. Snow creeps back up the mountain, children run barefoot through the wet grass, and the return of the salmon is just a few short weeks away.

Wednesday, March 31. Thick clouds envelop the hillside, but there's a break in the west, a shimmer of sunlight, casting a golden glow on the water. I stand on the balcony to soak in the moist air, clogged with the earthy smells and sweet taste of new life. This view, this job, has been the one constant in my life since I first strolled into the office on Aug. 7, 2006. Since then, I've moved three times (at least three times, and that's just counting my permanent residences.) I've lost a relationship. I've watched friends come and go. I've watched co-workers come and go. I've left town myself and wondered whether I'd ever really come back. But the office was always here. It was always waiting for my return.

I breathe deep and realize this may be the last time I'll stand here. I feel a rush of emotion, manufactured maybe, a mixture of nostalgia and mourning for a past that will never return. I realize that once I step away from this office, I will release the last anchor in my life, the last one, and will truly become a vessel adrift at sea. There will be no ice-breaking tugs, no narrow channel to guide me home. There will only be a vast and unbroken ocean, and unlimited directions from which to travel.

Dark descends as I finish up the day's work. I clean out my desk, extracting little trinkets I haven't thought about in three and a half years. There's the hand-drawn sign my co-workers made me when I returned from the Great Divide last summer. There's the glass award I received from the Society of Professional Journalists for best news page design. There's the emergency Power Bar that is at least three years old. I stuff them all in a plastic bag. The office is strangely still, quiet. As usual, I am the last one to leave. The goodbyes have been said. The newspaper has been put to bed. I do what I've done most every Wednesday night for the past three and a half years — I turn out the lights, descend a flight of stairs, and step into the cool night.

As I gaze into your skies

As the reality sets in that this is my last week in Juneau, I find myself obsessing about the surrounding mountains. If the clouds lift just enough to reveal steep, spruce-clogged hillsides and snowy ridgelines, I can't take my eyes off them. In fact, if you live in Juneau and at any time during the next week happen to see a red Geo Prism with four tires strapped to the roof driving down the highway, you should probably just swerve well clear, because there is a good chance I am not looking at the road, but rather gazing up at the towering skyline.

These oh-so-accessible and yet mysterious mountains have long been my favorite thing about living in Juneau. A friend and I went out Saturday night, and I was trying to explain to her my "Juneau Burnout," which I insisted not only existed in my job and living situation, but even singed the edges of my favorite recreational activities.

"That makes a lot of sense," she said. "I mean, how many times can you climb Mount Jumbo, really?"

The statement suddenly struck me, because although I feel almost irreconcilably worn out by the same old roads and the same old trails, part of me feels like I could run up Mount Jumbo 100 times — and, if I count all my partial ascents on training runs, my own four-year total is probably at least half that — and still love it every time. I'm going to miss Mount Jumbo, along with every cornice and sloping contour that I have come to know so well.

My hope before I left town was to climb as many "my" mountains as possible. Since I came back from Fairbanks, reality has set in that I have neither the time nor the physical health to bid these mountains a proper goodbye. My knee is coming around, but it's still stiff. Today I went for a mellow run up the Salmon Creek trail to loosen it up. It probably seems strange that while I cope with an overuse injury commonly called "Runner's Knee," I can run but not ride a bicycle. The problem with my knee isn't an impact thing, it's an angle thing — namely acute angles. The knee starts to hurt when I bend it beyond about 75 degrees. Cycling demands sharper angles with every rotation, while the only time runners bend that much is when they're sprinting or trying to clear hurdles. (Note: I took this photo at the midway point of the trail where I stopped to do some stretches. The leg I'm successfully bending is my left i.e. "good" knee.)

Today, as I shuffled up Salmon Creek, a beautiful blue sucker hole revealed the looming mass of Observation Peak. That 5,000-foot, broad pyramid of rock is a place I have wanted to visit for four years now, but weather or time limitations have thwarted every attempt. And now, with one bad knee and no hope of going there in the next week, I could only stare wistfully at Observation, now a monument to missed opportunity, mocking my narrow definition of Burnout.

"You think you've been everywhere in Juneau," the mountain whispered. "You haven't been anywhere. You haven't seen anything."

And I could only breathe loudly in resigned agreement. Much of my self-identity, and much of my happiness, is based in discovery. And much of my excitement about moving has little to do with the location and more to do with the fact that everything will be entirely new — new roads, new trails. New mountains. And yet the more I discover, the more I understand that there is infinitely more to be discovered — as Ani Difranco sings, "Try to keep your eye on the big picture; the picture just keeps getting bigger."

I am not done with Juneau, not by a long shot. But I do feel strongly that I need to step away for a while, if only to appreciate all of the spaces I'll never truly know.

These last days

This post-race week has been more than a bit of a blur. After I rolled into the finish I waited nearly four hours to catch a ride back to town. At first I just sat in the "heating" tent and shivered; then I finally wrestled my boots back on and schlepped the 500 frigid yards to John's wind-blasted truck to grab my winter sleeping bag. I sat in a camp chair and cocooned myself in a -40-degree down shell and completely passed out as finishing racers, Arctic winds and commotion swirled around me.

Chris and I caught a ride back to Fairbanks with Robin Beebee and her husband, and we each succeeded in catching about a two-hour nap before John arrived at home and it was time to eat a half dozen meals and swap race stories. Skiers shuffled in and out of the house all day, telling tales of the trail, showing off battle scars and trying to remember faces and names as the line between consciousness and dreams became more and more blurred. I was up chatting with Ed and company until nearly 2 a.m., and at 4:30 I was suddenly awakened by a call from a taxi driver, asking why no one answered when he knocked on the door. I was so completely fargone that I stood at the window for several seconds, wondering why this yellow car was waiting for me and where exactly I was. And then I remembered — I was supposed to be up at 4! I have a 6 a.m. flight to catch! Thank you, Mr. Taxi Driver, for not abandoning me when I slept in!

By 10 a.m. I was back in Juneau, where six inches of wet snow coated the Mendenhall Valley. My Juneau taxi driver became stuck in my driveway and I had to help push him out. I spent an hour shoveling out my car and much of the lower half of Hughes Way because my knee was locked up and there was no way I could bike commute to work, and anyway, Pugsley was already on his way to Anchorage. I finally succeeded in freeing my car and then I went to work. I've been a gimpy zombie ever since.

Actually, I've just been preoccupied with packing, sorting, showing up on time for various appointments and visiting friends. With the exception of my knee, the after-effects of the White Mountains 100 wore off quickly. The feeling came back to my fingers by Wednesday morning. I finally got a full night of sleep on Wednesday night. My shoulders felt pinched, but beyond that I had no muscle soreness — a habit from my Tour Divide days, where I tend to ride at a pace I'd feel physically comfortable sustaining for 24 days, even though it would make sense, in a one-day race, to push for a pace I might only be able to sustain for 24 hours. I'm OK with that, though. I had a super fun race and it's nice, despite the crazy travel schedule, not to emerge from it feeling fully wrecked.

My right knee, though, has a few problems. I have been very gentle with it since returning to Juneau, icing every night, applying blue goop, taking Advil, massaging and stretching. Today I finally went to the gym and tried a gentle spin on the elliptical trainer. It loosened up nicely, but I haven't yet gained back the range of motion I'd need to ride a bicycle. Gah! I genuinely thought I was out of the water with this knee, being that it survived the 24-day Tour Divide without issue. But obviously there were things I failed to do, from my limited bike training right down to the adjustments for my Pugsley (I rode the race with my seatpost low because of all the 'techy' maneuvers.)

Not much I can do about it now but recover. I've made enough improvement in the past few days that I do think I'm not in for an extended recovery. And now is really an good time to take it easy anyway. I have to move out of my apartment by March 31, which means I have three more days to figure out how to transfer all of the belongings I wish to keep into the compartment of a Geo Prism (I love this part of moving: Prioritize, simplify, and purge.) Then I'm going to float around for a few days before catching a ferry out of town on April 4. There were lots of things I wanted to accomplish before leaving Juneau, but the combination of my Angry Knee and a rather dismal weather forecast may mean a more subdued goodbye to the beautiful Southeast.

Either way, I am really going to try to soak it all in before this, too, fades to memory.