Where the author shamefully recounts a moment in his life when he faced death and then had to go to the bathroom

Some folks who had stopped to watch me climb a rock which no one had ever thought of climbing because it wasn't worth it said, "You're pretty much free soloing now" which, as it turns out, could easily be my motto now.  I had gone far enough above the crash pad that a fall would've probably meant a helicopter coming in close and a dude getting lowered in a wire basket with a grim face and wearing flippers and the de rigueur red dry suit like they do on the Discovery Channel.  All I could think as my hands were starting to sweat and cramp and shake and my knees were becoming bitchy poltergeists was if there'd be a camera somehow, maybe in another helicopter nearby, and if I would give the "thumb's up" or not to the camera.

See, the problem is, I suck. I'm the guy that can make the kids section at the climbing gym seem epic.  I'm also after whatever publicity I can get.  I admit that.  I'm writing to no one about completely meaningless misadventures.  And hoping it will somehow be profitable enough someday that I can buy ripe bananas and gas and Nutella and Mara Natha Creamy All Natural No Stir Peanut Butter ("Batch roasted for great peanut taste") and Dave's Killer Bread and live out of my truck.  For astute readers of this blog, I'll be naming these names a lot in an attempt to secure free goods from them since my athletic abilities make the folks at Clif Bar, La Sportiva and even the good relativists loosely known as my "Circle of Friends and Family", cringe.  Y'all are totally welcome to donate still though.  I also enjoy Advil PM for obvious reasons.  No, really.  Though I'm totally open to Calms Forte as well.

Anyway.  The route, if you could call it that, started with a lie back that was easy enough.  But then my feet were there and my hands were here and all I could do was keep going.  So I did.  Doh!  I moved through the crux (which a real climber would think was just a nice place to stop and rest for a minute and maybe play a good game of self-thumb war), and found myself perched on crumbly precariousness twenty-five feet up.  Down climbing was out of the question since I'd tried that earlier and had come screaming off the rock like a body being plunged feet first into the water, you know like in the movies when the mob inevitably dumps the corpse in the river.  Then the words "you're pretty much free soloing now".  Then the realization that I was not Chris Sharma.  Panic. Then the realization that I'd been climbing again for about a week after a five year layoff. A bit more panic.  Then the realization that death was a possibility.  Extreme duress.  Then the realization that I might be featured on NatGeo in the fall.  Comforting.  Then the realization that this was where I found myself in life both literally and figuratively.  Exhale.  So I went up.  And twenty seconds later was walking down around the rock looking for the toilet paper.  Easy peasy.

Life is a series of acts.  What does Yvon Chouinard say (and how do you spell his name)?  Something like "real adventure is one in which you might not come back alive, and certainly come back different"?  That's about right.  (I'll also gladly accept stuff from Patagonia.  They have pretty colors).  Unless you've literally faced the fact that you might die or get hurt real bad any moment now because of what you've stupidly done and what you might do and most importantly what you're doing right fucking now (panic), life doesn't have the same visceral contrast.  I mean, when you're stressed out at work and people are freaking out and your world gets real small, once you've faced your own mortality, even if your mortality is faced on a laughably low rung on the ladder of difficulty, you have perspective.  Perspective and clarity.  Lightness and maybe even a smile grows across your face.  Perhaps no one will understand.  They might think you're nuts.  And you know what?  They'd be absolutely right.  Because you're an addict now.  And you're going to get there again.

Bear Poop and Bajadas

Under ripe bananas suck.  I know this, but peeling this particular banana's cardboard husk back I knew immediately it was going to really suck.  I still ate it.  I'm, among other things, a masochist.  And can somebody tell me why under ripe bananas taste like pennies?

 I arrived in Leavenworth early Friday morning, I mean really early.  But that is another story.  And, having no food other than a jar of Nutella, some peanut butter and a loaf of Dave's Killer Bread, I felt like I wanted something more.  Thus I found myself at Safeway with the swing-shift stockers stocking their unfresh bananas.  At least the sunrise was pleasant between the lifting clouds.

You get to Leavenworth a couple ways.  The most scenic is to take Highway 2 from Everett east over Stevens Pass.  The highway descends from the pass skirting the Chiwaukum Mountains and the northern flanks of the Stuart Range.  Eventually it joins the Wenatchee river and the two snake through the post-apocalyptic firescape of Tumwater Canyon.  In 1994, two fires burned more than 17,000 acres and threatened the town itself.  Nearly twenty years later much of the area still looks like a nuclear bomb had been detonated.  Husks of Ponderosa pine and Silver Fir stand rigid like days-old stubble way high up the sides of the mountains, eerily.  And the hills are covered in granite, or, more specifically, Paleozoic quartz diorite (yes, I cheated and looked it up to sound more fancy.  In fact, the rest of this paragraph is pretty much cribbed from several readily available online resources, so there).  You are constantly reminded here, maybe more acutely than other ranges I've spent time in, that you are standing on a gigantic rock.  The Cascades are a young range and young ranges are always more spectacular visually..  But the North Cascades in particular, the area that has as its southern boundary I-90, is even more resplendent because of Holocene glaciation, indeed there are more glaciers here than anywhere else in North America (Alaska excepted).  There are garage-sized black granite blocks hiding, literally, meters off the road.  Three thousand feet above are haunting towers overlooking vast talus slopes and here and there, the quickly retreating remains of glaciers.  It is an absurdly beautiful place. 

And, then there's the running.  There are several great trails that I've spent time on, but the landscape is so clear from the fires still that you can simply grab your shoes and just go with little fear of getting lost unless of course, concepts like rivers running downhill (and thus east in this canyon) or the fact that the sun tracts roughly east-west seem alien to you.  One morning I got up early and ran directly from my campground (Eightmile Campground) up a wash a couple thousand feet (I reckon).  Another morning I ran down Icicle Creek Road and explored all the little climber access trails which can be steep and technical.

As an unhappy-but-forever-working-on-leaving Seattleite, the weather in Leavenworth could not be more different, and more welcome.  It is dry, sunny, and warm for the months of the year that you'd expect it to be - roughly April through October.  The forests on the eastern slopes of the Cascades have a piney smell that I can't get enough of too.

So why bear poop and Bajadas?  Well, I cannot seem to go into the woods lately without intuiting the presence of Ursa or encountering it outright.  There was the "huckleberry incident" last summer when we surprised each other and he/she climbed up a tree fifteen feet away from me and we made eye contact.
This trip was no different.  I woke up one night tweeked out on Advil PM after a day of seriously thinking about getting a tattoo of Ursa Major, looked up and directly overhead, perfectly enclosed in a break in the trees, with the Lyrid Meteor shower arcing through it, was Ursa Major.  I can't tell you how powerful this was. And it simply spun on that spot in the sky throughout the night, never moving out of my line of sight. And then there was the morning while scrambling around that I heard what I thought was the familiar grunt (I remember from last summer) but I wasn't sure.  I felt something though.  A few moments later I came across fresh piles of bear poop.  Steaming.

I mention Bajadas because they provided adequate protection for my feet as I ran as fast as I could back to the car.  Not really.  Maybe.

The more I go into the wild, and off trail particularly, the more I am reminded how connected everything is.  I was not brought up this way.  I was not raised to view the natural world with awe and intimacy, like a lover.  So it has taken some time.  But, as the forays start to add up, and my legs get a little stronger, and the tendons and ligaments that once complained again take up the work they were made to do, and my brain starts to not recoil from inconvenience and change and discomfort, the more I become feral.  The more I live.  And, it's not quite happiness in the hour of vision, in the zero moment when the ego falls away, it's connection and love and vigor.

The Wild is a funny and unforgiving teacher.

Bear poop, real fresh.

A blue butterfly.  Duh.

Your standard Glacier Lily.

Me.  With Sun.

Trusty (and stylish) Montrail Bajadas.  Is anyone from Montrail reading this?  Wait.  No one is.

The Solace of Empty Voices

I woke up this morning malnourished, dehydrated, exhausted.  There were about six hundred times when I felt like finding an excuse to not go out the door for a run and another six hundred or so once I did to go right back to bed.  Life seems unbelievably difficult right now, for many reasons.  As I consciously forced myself to move forward, the world, as it always does, melted away and existence became merely the sound of my breath.  It was a profound relief.  I slowed way down (which is a revelation in itself) and found deep joy in it.

This is the very opposite of running from your problems.  I think that as runners, we can run into our problems.  I think the act of running itself is a kind of mindfulness that can be extraordinarily beneficial.  It is mindfulness after all which soothes an aching heart, an angry heart, a lost heart.  The voices of the world lose their timorous sound and merge with my own breath and the cadence of my legs and I become indistinguishable from anything else.  Running isn't a consolidation of self, it is a renunciation of it peacefully.  Running is solace.  Is protean.  Is restorative.  Is, with eating and drinking, a link home for us.  We're upright, beautiful, and have brains that are much too large for their own good.  Or at least mine is.  Life distilled is simple.  Joyful.  Uncertain.  Uncomfortable.  Perfect.  And as I carry around the world with me all clamoring in my head and heart I know that briefly, every day, I can run into the middle of it and let it wash over me.  And that I can do it tomorrow too.

Our bodies are wild.  Problem is, our brains are too.

You are my center when I spin away out of control...

I've been having this on-going conversation with a dear friend lately.  It runs something like this:

People have the spare time to go to the gym nowadays.  Stop and think about that.  People have the time in a day to go to a place (usually inside, always inside? but with really nice views of the city) to keep their bodies 'in shape'.  People have time also to get drunk.  People have time to stalk about and sell drugs, and to take them.  People have time to go to a baseball game.  Once a week.  Or to watch a movie.  It wasn't really that long ago that people had to work just to keep food on the table.  Much of the country still does. Seriously.  Either on a farm or in a factory or both, most hours of the day were and are devoted to staying alive.  Spare time?  Time enough to be a drunk?  Time enough to be 'healthy'?  There were drunks, obviously.  But of a different kind.  You just couldn't sit at a bar all evening every evening getting piss drunk.  Lack of bars, lack of money, lack of time.

My grandfather lived drunk for many, many years.  One day after he'd almost killed himself in a car crash he quit, cold turkey.  That was thirty years ago.  He's a farmer.  A link to the old days, so to speak.  You either live or you die.  It's a choice.  The modern world with all our spare time and extra money seems to create confusion about what's living and what's dying.  There's certainly more gray area now than there used to be, at least from my perch here, feet squarely in the modern world.  You can choose to be dead-in-life.  What does Thoreau say (not Thoreau again, you asshole)?  Something like "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation"?  It's still true.  

What on earth does this have to do with running?  Well, while out on my daily this morning I was thinking about how lucky I am to have the hour (and more!) to do nothing but put one foot in front of the other in the morning.  The morning!  I don't have any chores.  I don't have to make sure the livestock are alive.  I don't have to punch in to some degrading and pointless job, at least until a little later!  Nope.  For a moment I can be free (free in the Gary Snyder sense of living happily with what's uncomfortable, mutable, protean, and spontaneous) and not pay any price other than the possible random injury.  I'm not going to go hungry.  I'm going to be able to pay my bills this month.  I have the totally unique choice to actually opt-out of working if I want to.  Unique in the whole of human history for the non-elites.  As just a lower middle class dude in this time and place I can just decide to live in my truck if I want to and run or climb or write or just sit there staring out the window with NO REAL CONSEQUENCE.  That's unique.  That's lucky.  Buddhists say how damn lucky it is to be born a human (considerably more fortunate than being born a fly) in a place that provides the liberties to perfect yourself.  Don't waste this opportunity.  Work less.  Live better.  Do something today and be thankful.  Or don't.  You have that choice.



In the spirit of reflection, check this out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kCKob1YKOU&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Say 'hi' to my little friend.

My little yellow foam roller is the perfect companion.  I roll all over it two or three times a day grunting in agony and selfish ecstasy and it never complains.  It does get a little depressed.  Who wouldn't?  After a thorough and sweaty 'session' my weight will have literally created a depression in it which takes a while to work itself out.  It's just a little too thick though for anything else.  Ahem.  Story of my life. Just kidding!

Seriously though, my little yellow foam roller has made it possible for me to run again  You see, I have a little something called ITBS.  ITBS stands for something, but really it stands for "I'm in This predicament Because of Stupidity".  Basically, late last year I thought it would be cool to run twenty-eight miles.  Problem was, I hadn't really run anything of any appreciable distance in a couple years.  In fact, my longest run EV-ER until then was, I think, thirteen miles and that was as a seventeen year old.  But I did it.  This was me afterwards...

I've been hobbled since.  Until, that is, a yellow foam torpedo and this weird thing called 'stretching' came into my life.

But why twenty-eight miles?  For me the answer gets complicated.  Distilled, and to borrow a phrase from someone eminently more qualified, "because it is there".  There's not always a Mount Everest near you but from the moment we're born there are twenty-eight miles in every direction around us waiting to be explored.  Or fifty.  Or a hundred.  Or three hundred and fifty.  Or one.  Doesn't matter.  As bi-pedals (am I saying that right?) we're pretty much obligated to walk and run around the areas surrounding us.


"Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see."  Do yourself a favor and go read this.  It's called "Walking" and you can find it in its entirety all over the internets.  Thoreau can be read for pith or wit or both.  He isn't really flowery (unlike his neighbor, the sometimes-impossible-to-understand Emerson who write things like "In conversation we pluck up the termini which bound the common of silence on every side") and most of him is a ridiculously fast read and contains lines throughout which will accumulate in your mind like molten lava...if molten lava could accumulate in your mind.  It's too hot but whatever.  The point is, the world that always surrounds us - always - is too vast to ever be explored thoroughly.  We are just as territorial as your common bear or marmot or something.  Stay in a landscape for long enough and you'll find this out.  I hope we all can find a landscape that resonates with us deeply.  That it becomes a language through which we both speak its beauty and ours.  Humans divorced of such a place are halved.  But it doesn't have to be like this!  Even if you live in the concrete jungle.  Though I rail against it sometimes, I have a deep connection to my little spot on the littorals of Puget Sound.  And when I leave, which I must for sanity someday, I will miss it.

Hey, it's sunny again today!  Oh my god!  Two days in a row!

Here's a parting shot of my little companion.  Go get yourself one if you want.  I'm going to roll on mine now.

Running With Scissors, Again.

In Seattle, except for the months of August and September when it's mostly nice, if it's sunny there's a manic energy to GET OUT!  GET SOMETHING DONE!  YEAH!  LET'S GO!  REI FIRST AND THEN, THE TRAILS!  or at least LET'S JUST DRIVE AND SIT IN TRAFFIC!!

Just kidding.  It isn't really that bad.  But it feels like it.  Today, the skies parted early, and though a north wind has been keeping temperatures cooler than it looks, it has been glorious.  We say sometimes, "if Seattle were like this more often we'd stay".  Or my favorite, "Seattle is like being in an abusive relationship.  Long stretches of neglect and downright torture interspersed with moments of sublimity."  I've been living here off and on for, jeez, seven years now.  I've been coming here for almost twenty-five.  There are so many things that make this place first-rate in terms of places to live if you're a trail runner.  Big mountains relatively close, rather mild winters, a strong community of like-minded weirdos, an REI every seventeen miles, a really good beer every three, and really, really good coffee every other block (and not Starbuck's either who, with no disrespect, brews coffee from charcoal).  Multitudes of restaurants, access to unusual and wonderful ingredients if you're the cooking type, and a general hippie-holier-than-thou mentality that actually works pretty well.  But goddamn the weather!  When a sunny day makes you verklempt with the thought of the coming week of overcast, you know shit's out of whack.  There's no sun here.  This is an example of hyperbole.  In coming blog posts you'll encounter a lot of hyperbole.   There's sun.  I'm sure there's someone out there who will parade out a sexy stat from some climate center somewhere touting our perfect balance of cloudcover and blue sky.  Good on ya.

For comparison Boulder gets 300 sunny days.  Seattle gets 60.  I know that's true cause I Googled it and Wiki answered.

Anyway, I ran some miles early this morning and then I drove The Truth out to Tiger and hiked up to T3.  Not all the way, but mostly.  When I got to 2300' I stopped to tie my shoe and my fingers wouldn't work.  Couldn't tell if it was from the air temps (low 30s and I was in a t-shirt) or from dehydration (had not had any liquid other than a cup o' coffee).  Then I tried to text and that was just funny-stupid.  Figured it was safer to turn around.  So I did.  2.5 hours.


Pretty little guy...

View on the mountain this morning...