Jumping into the cold, deep water on command

Greetings from the land of the great, cold lakes. I'm not talking about Minnesota. I'm talking about the land of writing on command. When you're not into it. Not feeling it. When all you're feeling is the hot, fetid breath of the deadline on your neck and the sweet lure of what you'd prefer to be doing calling to you.

I was on the last leg of my roadtrip driving towards Flagstaff, when sweet anchor client lady called and said can I do one little thing today, can I, can I? I tell her I'm going through Albuquerque and of course I can stop off at a little coffee shop and whip it out.

Which is where I am right now, creating an essay on unity, the spirit of oneness and the elephant in the living room (a concept I grabbed on a high hurry from here of all places).

Writing on demand works. But it hurts. The question I sometimes ask is why do I do it? Why can't I just climb out of the deep end and live a normal life like nearly everyone else?

Colorado, trail magic and the tyrolian

Here's what I was up to last week:

I departed Denver on Saturday and headed north and then west towards Nederland, CO. I was warming to the habit of stopping anytime something looked interesting, so a parking lot with two cars and a pile of boulders seemed worth exploring.
Boy was it.
Beyond the innocuous granite was 1000 feet of relief leading to a cataract and ...oddly... A railroad track. I made my way to the edge, but even from a stable position, I felt dizzy and lightheaded. On my way back from the edge a man on another boulder pile shouted "You think it's going to clear up?"
I had a rain jacket tied around my waist, but he seemed to want clear skies, so I answered affirmatively.
Six hours later, I was hanging upside down from a wire in the near dark staring at the river sloshing 30 feet below me.
It was awesome.
How I got to experience a tyrolian is a matter of trail luck. I walked over to where the man and his posse were waiting out the drizzle and after some conversation they asked if I had a harness.
Oh yes, I replied. A harness AND shoes. I come prepared.
We climbed two pitches near the cars. Ron and Randy, the two best climbers, tackled the one that looked for all the world like plate glass. The rest of us did the one with the three separate overhangs. I made it up to the first one, having hit some moves that for me, after a year of no climbing, I felt pretty damned proud of. And then I came down, all four points quaking like the Populous tremuloides growing around us.
This wasn't THE climbing area, though - that was 40 minutes away by foot, down a hill, over and along railroad tracks, across the cataract by cable and back up a hill. There were six of us, including Latifa and her boyfriend Jeremy, both new to climbing but already strong and leading and Ron's sister Deb, fresh off a plane from New Jersey.
Ron was astonishing. He had the kind of face that on a man can be a little too pretty if he didn't take care. And he didn't. He wore his hair in the manner favored by members of A-Ha circa 1987. With highlights. By design, a lock of hair dropped into his right eye at all times. And for all of that (and all of that included a tall, tan bundle of muscles that most celebrities can't come close to achieving), he was a terribly laid-back dude. Just a nice guy. Whodathunk?
So. To get to the climbing area, we hiked down to the the tracks and along them for 1/3 mile. Then down a trail so sketchy that my best efforts couldn't spare me a bashed knee.

The trail started at the mouth of a railroad tunnel. Before descending, Randy, the late 40-something environmental attorney and I walked into the tunnel (along tracks I'd seen at least 6 trains travel already) until neither entrances were visible.
Terr. If. Ying.

I scampered as lowly as I could out of the tunnel and down to make my appointment with the rock that bashed my knee.
Our destination was a wire where each of us would perform a mysterious maneuver called a tyrolian. To get there, we hiked over slick, down-tilted rock above an exceptionally ugly looking set of rapids. I'd lost faith in my aging Chacos by now - they'd failed me and my knee only moments before.
And getting three or four solid points was nearly impossible. My consolation: five people had just successfully made it over. They were waiting. I could to it too.
The setup: A thick cable. A pulley. Someone's rack of quick draws for pulley ballast. And a fluorescent pink string. Ron slid over and Randy reeled the pulley and its stabilizing ballast back over with the string, each of them in turn clipped their harnesses into the pulley until it was just Randy and me. They made it look so easy.
And it really, really wasn't.
"Ok," Randy said, "Just clip in, flip upside down and go across."
I sputtered with incompetence. He took pity and hooked me in. I went across, taking what felt like frequent smoke breaks and nearly gave up 8 feet from the end. My stomach muscles were scorched. I made an out loud promise to myself to start doing sit-ups.
The trip across the river yielded a beautiful walk along the river. Wildflowers profused. One stretch could have doubled as the set for A River Runs Through It. I could hear my erstwhile sweety, Art, yelling "Trout!" He would have loved being right there, and he'd trained me well to spot a good stretch of trout river. The climbing area, alas, was not along the river. It was 1000 feet back up the canyon wall. I led the way up, thanking the sweet lord that I'd hit my inhaler before leaving the parking lot. Call it instinct.
We set up two ropes. These were ostensibly easy climbs but everyone seemed to find them challenging. Not a good sign for little ol' me.
We ate snacks; I watched them climb and when it was my turn, I hit the harder route. I tried the true line for a while without success and then went right to accomplish some actual ascension. I made it up to a crack and jammed my right foot in it facing east. And headed west. My foot was completely stuck and the line of the rope led away from it. I was feeling rather screwed for a moment and then I got it unstuck and scrambled over to a ledge. I looked down.
Down went on and on.
My nerve fled and after some arguing with Randy, who was belaying me, about whether it was a good time to quit ("It gets really fun right there," he said. Right there was an overhang), I came back down to the sweet, solid earth.
It was getting dark. Latifa was still cleaning a route that her boyfriend had worked very hard to lead. I watched her with admiration until Randy gathered me and Debbie up to make the first flight across the river.
I was to go first, which meant I'd have no one to receive me at the other end. Fear was fast becoming the day's regular theme. But it had to be done. Halfway across, I realized that pushing off with both arms yielded less painful results. It was a good thing, too, because the string broke and I had to come back.
With the string reattached, I started back across, but it was knotted and I could go no further. I rested in my harness. Thank God. Sitting in the harness, I surveyed the river upstream and down. This doesn't suck, I decided. It was deep twilight and there was nowhere, nothing, better than this.
Debbie and Randy untangled the string and I made it across and was freeing myself just as the second flight arrived. Randy came over, then Deb. He sent us up the uber-scary, knee-basher of a trail with Latifa following close behind. At the top, my two new friends and I peed together. Very bondy.
Walking back along the tracks in the dark, I think we all felt some strain of adventure accomplishment, cut by varying degrees of exhaustion.
The trail led off the tracks and uphill to the left. Ron and I were in front (for my part because I wanted to avoid the use a a headlamp - hate hiking with lights even in the moonless dark). Ron tripped and fell - a fairly spectacular occurrence, given his size. At the top, I dressed his thumb which was bleeding freely. He fretted about the 5 hours of massage he had booked for Sunday. Don't know if he was able or not.
In the distance I heard one of them say, "I thought she was a writer." Ha!
_______
We parted with the ritual exchange of cards and I drove to Nederland in search of a friendly spot to camp.
Both Randy and Latifa had offered to put me up, but I was adamant that i wanted to sleep outside. Driving up a road labeled the way to Caribou, I started wondering if I'd turned away the proverbial two boats. My concern only heightened as I turned on a narrow double track with an apparently endless drop off on the right side.
Fear again. I thought about backing up - I'm good at that - but with the spare tire/bike combo, I wasn't feeling the love. I could back up in the morning if it came to that. Forward. Trees pushing into the road on the uphill side, black abyss on the downhill. Two boats.
Bits of terror. Finally, a spot on the left allowed me and my car to leave the road. A bit of flat beyond that served as my bed. All was well and the critters that night never approached.
In the morning I awake in a field of flowers with wild asparagus growing near my head. A good day.

Moab and the illogic of friends

Made it to Moab, spent a couple of hours working on a commercial project at a coffee shop and proceeded to the Amasa Back Trail for some true slick-rock riding. I can't explain why I feel this way, but I will never, never again ride Moab by myself. I mean, it's not like my bailing off a cliff is going to hurt less — or be any less fatal - if there's someone friendly there to watch it happen. But there you are.

Stayed the night in Moab and woke up with the burning desire to get some miles behind me. And so, after a couple of days in Utah, I rolled into Denver where I've been working on commercial projects in my friend Bill's sensory deprivation tank/apartment ever since.

I think that after several months of romance crazy, moving crazy, and what-the-hell-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life crazy, I just needed a quiet place to crash and be isolated.

But tomorrow I head back into my life and into the great wide open. I'll keep you posted.

Mountain biking is a laboratory for life process

In June, I told everyone that I was going on a roadtrip. Then I house-sat for three weeks and forgot I told everyone I was leaving. Fast forward through a bunch of surprised reactions at Prescott's coffee shops, stores and pubs and I've finally hit the road.

The framework: An open-ended (anywhere from a week until I draw my last breath) driving trip aimed at places I can ride my mountain bike.

I rode the Rocky Ridge trail in Flagstaff on Wednesday. Unlike the lonely trails of Prescott, this trail swarmed with people. I saw an 8-year-old kid going over technical terrain on a bmx. Impressive.

In any case, for a while now, I've pondered the similarities between mountain biking and navigating my way through life. Or at least the lessons mountain biking offers.

Disclaimer: Mountain biking, while fun, is a singularly selfish, self-serving sport, so don't imagine that I'm trying to elevate it in any way shape or form.

That being said, it comes down to this. When you mountain bike, you MUST look where you want to go. Choose to look where you don't want to go and you go there, typically with painful results. Even if you want to go elsewhere, you'll always go to the exact spot where you put your attention. I'm pretty sure this holds true in life as well, but it's less noticeable because you don't break a collar bone every time you focus on what you don't want.

Also, sometimes when you get into a hairy spot, the only way to avoid disaster is to not only keep pedaling, but pedal HARDER. Do that, and you often surprise yourself by getting over something you would earlier have told yourself was impossible.

I'm in Moab today, so I'll keep you posted on the life lessons of slickrock.

Packing and moving and writing among the ruins

The nice thing about having a computer-based business...I mean career (but let's face it, business) is that you can do it anywhere and at any time. Right now is a case in point. There's hardly any furniture left in the house, but I can still hunker on the floor with my array of legal stimulants (am) and depressants (pm) and type away.

The not-so-nice thing about having a writing business is that the deadlines give not a damn about my moving, how ruinous my life looks or whether the cat has to be micro-chipped before his release among the rockpiles of West Prescott.

So forgive the lack of posts. I have lots of great ideas and can't wait to start posting more, but have to catch up on the following:

• Meaningful sleep
• Meaningful protein consumption
• Deadlines for my lovely anchor client
• Deadlines for my news site
• Deadlines for getting out of my lovely, erstwhile abode

A note: What I have more than nearly everyone I know is boatloads of freedom - I'll be in Moab in a week- so don't take this post as complaining. It's just that...you know...dare I say it...freedom isn't free. Oh God. My therapist is waiting.

What I want to be growing up at 33, and still writing

I'm fixing to go on a road trip (Goddess willing and the creeks don't rise) and want to blog about it. I've been getting seriously into FaceBook (here's my profile - be my friend!) as a creative outlet, but want to be able to write more and do more.

The other thing is that after I dragged my magazine out to the woods and shot it, I've been flopping around trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. It's come back to this. I want to be exactly what I am, a creative writer, focusing mainly on non-fiction. My beat is essentially finding out what people are most passionate about and where they get their meaning and purpose. And so what I write about tends to focus on conservation and social issues.

Little by little, I'm clearing away the things in my life that don't support my purpose in some meaningful way or another. That means I'm no longer marketing myself as a copywriter, for example. Back in 2005, when I stubbornly went homeless to focus exclusively on writing, I wrote the following journal entry. I'll probably reproduce it in full one of these days. It pretty much sums it up. Writing's what I do, and I do it full-time and full of life. So stay tuned!