SIDELINED

I woke up pretty grumpy this morning.  I have been experiencing some problems with my trusty knees and I finally went to see the doctor about it last week. That’s why I was grumpy today. That and the fact I am sitting in an imaging center lobby at 6:30 am waiting for an MRI.

As a child I was always on the move. That is, when I wasn’t hanging upside-down in ‘my’ tree. Now that I’m 61 I’m still pretty much always on the move. I have learned over the years to honor my energy level by hiking, backpacking, bicycling, canoeing and, if I can’t be outside, by dancing or taking Zumba and yoga classes. So when something sidelines me, I’m just not happy.

Theoretically, I should be staying off my feet as much as possible. My very initial diagnosis (pending MRI results) is damage to the medial collateral ligament of my left knee. Injuries to the MCL may be made worse by activity, such as my usual hiking, canoeing, blah, blah, blah.  Well-meaning friends, researching this on the internet, have warned me of operations and even knee replacements, with long months of recovery. Long months of inactivity and RICE (rest, ice, compression and elevation). This is the point at which I stop listening to my friends and their words sound like blah, blah, blah. But when I really get grumpy, what’s my go-to happiness strategy? Get outside. Go for a walk. Go visit some trees in the forest.

This past weekend, trying not to project months of sitting on my sofa with my knee higher than my heart (part of the treatment strategy according to WebMD), I took myself and my friend Annie up the Catalina Highway to Mount Lemmon. The supposed purpose of the ride was to catch what we Tucsonans have to settle for when fall comes round. Small groves of aspen and a few lonely Arizona ash, gold and red respectively, high on the mountain at the top of Ski Valley. It was lovely. I hobbled the mile or so to The Meadow and felt revived. Although I certainly appreciated the fall color, the mile hike to The Meadow was my way of thumbing my nose at the pain and distress I was feeling about my injured knee. I also spent the rest of the weekend laying on my sofa with my knee higher than my heart.

My recent sidelining has given me a deeper appreciation for injured athletes. In November 2013, Lindsey Vonn, a world-class skier so pretty I would very much like to dislike her, was injured in a training run. Her injury was a knee injury. A few months later, Vonn had to announce she would not be competing in the Sochi Olympics. Now THAT’s a bummer. She is back at the Super G in Lake Alberta Canada in December, staying positive about her chances for the 2018 Olympics. And here I am, grumpy because I am probably out of El Tour de Tucson this year.

This year would be my ninth ride in El Tour de Tucson. Nine times, all but 1 of them in the shortest event, the one that varies between 35 and 45 miles. My 59^th birthday present to myself was a vow to complete the 60-mile, which I did and not dead last as I expected. ’60 before 60’ was my motto. I even rode in the rain last year. El Tour de Tucson is a touchstone for me. As long as I can ride, I can be confident this aging thing has not overtaken me.

Until this morning, I have been unable to accept anything but ‘yes’ as the answer to ‘Are you riding this year?’. I admit that last week, I already began to get used to the idea of dropping back from the 55-mile (a few miles got shaved off this year) to the 40-mile. But this is just a setback but not a forfeiture of my commitment to ride.

My friends continue to ask. Am I going to ride? The short answer is I’m unwilling to forgo the idea I can but day after day of knee pain for an injury that just does not seem to be healing, is poking little holes in my usual confidence. Maybe I can’t.

Lying perfectly still in an MRI is somewhat like meditating – except for the loud noise, of course. But to keep myself from fidgeting, I go straight to my ‘happy place’, the place where streams of thoughts come floating across my consciousness. One stream that I didn’t much care for this morning was my ruminations on how I can participate without actually riding. Just writing that makes me cringe.

Beyond the physical treatments-the operations, the physical therapy, the medications-injuries need positive thinking. I think Vonn is really good at that. World-class skier that she is, she has suffered quite a few injuries in her long career. And every time she is injured, she speaks positively about when she thinks she’ll be back on the slope.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Vonn this morning. About how her injuries don’t mean just a loss of fun and accomplishment like mine do. Hers also carries a big risk of losing lucrative endorsement deals.  Her injuries mean a potential loss of her standing in the ski business. A double whammy. At least I don’t have to think about that.

So I am hoping that my uninvited stream of thoughts about how I can participate without riding is actually a good thing – my brain finally coming to terms with the reality that I am not impervious to injury and that my body, at 61 years old, injures more easily and just doesn’t recover like it used to. Maybe, just maybe, I, too, am on the path to healing. I think you can’t heal what you won’t accept.

INTREPID

INTREPID

As the current swept me further away in my canoe, I held my breath, waiting for Gloria’s head to pop up from the latte-colored waters of the Rio Grande. Her capsized canoe, with two days gear bungy-corded to its yoke and thwarts, was too heavy for her paddling partner Jerry to pull over by himself if he could even see her behind the hull. I heard myself start screaming “Gloria is under the canoe.” John, quickly turning his boat toward the disabled craft, jumped out of his canoe and swam quickly over. Jerry frantically kept reaching around under the canoe trying to find a hand, a leg, anything that let him know Gloria’s whereabouts in the murky, chocolate milk water.

Finally Gloria’s hand found Jerry’s and he knew she was still at least alive. With Herculian effort, John hefted himself on the other end of the canoe to tip the opposite end up and out of the water so we could find our friend and paddling comrade. Gloria’s head was above the water, alive and well, having found an air pocket under the upturned canoe. And that ended the worst three minutes of my recent 2-day paddle down the Wild and Scenic Rio Grande, just east of Big Bend National Park.

I had been working on this trip for months. As an organizer of a Tucson group of adventurists, I think up trips I would like to knock off my bucket list and then I post them on the Meetup page of my group. Max, my organizing partner, and I have done several trips before – I do the logistics and he is responsible for what happens during the trip. It’s a good partnership. We’ve taken 20 people canoeing down the Colorado; we’ve backpacked 25-miles into and out of Shoshone Lake in Yellowstone National Park. But this trip – this wild and scenic trip – was the most remote and potentially dangerous of any we’d done before.

I originally felt confident we could pull this off without incident or injury. The usually calm, wide Rio Grande, the headwaters of which are three states away in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, winds its way down through Northern New Mexico, then past its verdant chili fields near Hatch, turning toward the enormous cattle ranches of West Texas.  Usually it is a pretty sleepy paddle – running generally between 200 to 400 cubic feet per second. Some stretches you might even have to help your boat over a dry or shallow part of the river.

Not this time. Recent rains had pushed the cubic feet per seconds (cfs) up well over 1500 the first morning of our paddle. High water is usually safer but certainly faster water. We were headed from our put-in at La Linda to our take-out a little over 11 miles downriver in Miravillas Canyon, part of the Black Gap Wildlife Management Area. I confess, looking at the quickly churning river from the overlook above La Linda, I began to question the advisability of taking 15 paddlers of differing abilities down the fast-running, muddy river. Was this insane? Was my need for remote, perhaps slightly dangerous experiences foolishly pushing me to drag 14 of my closest adventure buddies along with me on this trip? Would all fifteen of us come back safely?

Honestly, I am too much of a scaredy-cat to try this alone. The Rio Grande is not only CLOSE to the border; it IS the border between Texas and the largely wild and open northern part of the state of Coahula, Mexico. The canyon walls on the American side of Temple Canyon, just east of Big Bend National Park, are pretty dang intimating – enough to encourage me to rent a satellite phone just in case we suffered injury or worse on this stretch of wild river.

In addition to the extremely wild and remote nature of this stretch, several paddlers originally interested in this trip canceled because this particular river, the Rio Grande, has a long history of being the swim for a better life between Mexico and the United States. But the Mexican side of the Rio Grande in the Temple Canon area rises high above the river, defying the most desperate undocumented immigrant and even the most avaricious and determined drug dealer. We were safe from above, I was sure. But were we safe from below?

The rains had made the ‘road’ into the La Linda put-in soft and clayey. My truck, Yiha, as faithful and as good of a truck she is, might get stuck and tow trucks are pretty darn far away. The outfitter providing the canoes would only take the trailer with our 7 shiny red canoes part-way down the alternately powdery or slick, rutted clay path. We had to carry the heavy canoes and all our gear about a tenth of a mile to the actual muddy bank that would serve as our put-in point.

Finally, we were all in the water and headed down river to the beautifully rugged canyon called Temple. Thank goodness the river was wide and smooth for a few miles. Even though most of us had been paddling before, our usual gig is backpacking. Many of us had never paddled with our particular paddling partner for this trip and we all took time to learn paddling together and relearn how to make the boat turn or even stay bow first in the water.

Most importantly, we had to be confident we could keep our craft from crashing into the tall, sturdy and grasping reeds lining the river. And that’s what happened to Gloria and Jerry. When they hit the reeds, Gloria reached up to protect her face, moving slightly up and off her seat and the canoe, precariously perched on the reeds, tipped over, depositing Gloria and Jerry into the river.

Gloria and Jerry’s unplanned swim in the muddy water had the effect of calming us all down. We started to get serious about our paddling – just in time for a series of riffles which call for some hard and coordinated paddling in order to avoid being pulled into the reeds. And then, the magic happened. We began to relax and enjoy the extreme beauty of this rugged patch of Mother Earth.

 

 

 

Max had spent some time studying the satellite images of this stretch of the Rio Grande and, confirmed by our informative shuttle driver Tim from Far Flung Outdoor Center in Terlingua, Texas, already had an idea of where he wanted us to stop for the night – atop a wide grassy shelf above the water on the MEXICAN side of the river. Yeah. Mexico. But with no Border Patrol to question our motives. No Park Police to even check our permits. Just us and the Rio Grande and the rock and the sky – and the pissed off wild burros and black-tailed rattler who usually consider this stretch of grassy bank exclusively theirs. We were in heaven.

We all pitched our various tents and prepared for a warm night on the river bank. Shortly after most of us retired, flashes of light crept over the cliff. Somewhere, people were being hammered by lightening. Would we be? Close to midnight, when most of us had gone to bed and just a few were up swapping stories, the wind picked up, pushing the walls of our small dainty backpack tents in and out like bellows, startling even the bugs that had crept into our tents for shelter. Whatever would be would be. We had faced all kinds of weather before; we certainly could live through this. We slept.

In the morning’s overcast light, we checked the condition of the river-several inches higher and it seemed much faster. With only 4 to 5 miles to go and without further incidents, we could get to the take-out lickety split.  Or we could have another boat overturn on the briskly running water and be late to our outfitter’s shuttle.

A third very real option was that we would miss the take-out altogether. Unlike our other paddling trips, if we missed our take-out, a very narrow and steep stretch of mud in a heavily reeded stretch of river, we would be faced with a very long and ill-prepared 98-mile trip down the rest of the Lower Canyons. Ninety eight miles of rugged canyon with no roads or helio pads. No help. No cell service. Miss the take-out and we were pretty much toast.

Back to Max. I am his organizing partner because I fully trust his knowledge and planning on a river or a trail. Every time we passed a likely take-out point, however, I admit to thinking “it THIS it? Did Max miss this?” Then my rational self would kick in and I would remind myself that Max is my partner for a really good reason. He takes his responsibilities to get everyone back safely very seriously. When I saw his red canoe pull over to a tiny, barely perceptible split in the reeds, my trust in his abilities was once again verified. We were at the end of our journey. And as soon as the first canoe was pulled up and out of the water, our canoe shuttle and my trusty YiHa with her ‘driver on loan’ arrived and backed up to get us. Our two glorious days on the Wild and Scenic Rio Grande were over. All that was left was the celebrating.

One thing about this group – they are intrepid. They are the ones you want on speed dial during the Apocalypse.  They have your back and expect you to have theirs. They have fun in the heat, the pouring rain or a blowing windstorm. They have gone with me to other remote and supposedly dangerous parts of this magnificent planet. And as long as I offer the right remote places, they will happily join me again where few others dare to tread – or paddle – or ski – or…...  In language my son would be embarrassed for me to use, they are my ‘peeps’, my outdoor family. Without these particular peeps, I would be in a constant state of wilderness deprivation. I’ve already planned next year’s paddle and they have already hit the ‘yes’ button. They are intrepid.

 

 



I WANT TO COME BACK AS A DOLPHIN

I’m pretty sure I want to be a dolphin in my next life. I observed a pod of dolphin last weekend, skipping across the waves, surfing on the wake of our boat, jumping for joy in tandem. A nice life I think. They are very social creatures and don’t mind at all if someone else is about. They just declare it a party. I like parties.

Apparently, the dolphin regularly escort the Pacific Islander boat from Ventura Harbor to the Channel Islands, taking campers and day visitors to one of its five islands which are now part of the National Park Service. Maybe they want to help get the party started early. And maybe they accomplished just that.

Not that the group I was with has trouble getting anything started. Comprised of hardy adventurists, a group of about 21 of us were headed out to Santa Cruz Island, the largest of the five islands of Channel Islands National Park, for two days of camping, hiking and sea kayaking. And there we were, being entertained by the dolphin, our gear stowed below deck, getting the party started.

The Channel Islands are home to over 2000 species of animals and plants – 145 of them found nowhere else on Earth. We became pretty familiar with one of these protected and unique species, the Island fox, as they were numerous little thieves who had a fondness for smelly hiking socks which our group could supply abundantly. Our hikes and kayak trips gave us plenty of opportunity to see other Island critters too like the Island Blue Jay, sea lions, lots of sea birds and fish. I even had one small brown bug attempt to stow away for a ride to the mainland on my tent only to be summarily removed before packing.

Santa Cruz Island, the largest of the five Park islands and our destination, has a long history of human habitation. Local legend has it that the name came from a priest’s staff accidentally left on the island during the Portola expedition of 1769. A friendly Chumash Indian, one of many living on the Island, found it and returned it, causing the Spanish to name the island “La Isla de Santa Cruz” (Island of the Sacred Cross). Many tribes and clans of American Indians have lived on and traveled between the island and the mainland for over 10,000 years often to mine the extensive chert deposits for tools and ‘shell-bead money’ which was traded among tribes throughout California.

European exploration and ranching has occupied the island in the last 150 years although the first Spanish exploration began around 1542 in the area of Scorpion Ranch. Evidence of ranching is everywhere when you first approach the island. Rusting ranch equipment lines the walk to the Visitor’s Center which is an old adobe ranch house, usually unmanned, but with several very informative displays about the island’s history and wildlife.

The Park brochure says the landscape reflects what Coastal California would have looked like before all the houses and people. Santa Cruz, like a lot of islands, has a high point which is Montanan Ridge, draining water across high plateaus both north and south creating deep canyons. For us hikers, these truly beautiful grassy plateaus were a delight, with views that stretched literally as far as the eye can see.  Although the Island is only about 66,000 acres, quite a few trails, usually old ranch roads, provide foot access to places with names like Smuggler’s Cove and Potato Harbor. These trails are only difficult if you happen to be starting down in one of the canyons – which admittedly pretty much everyone does. Plateau up; harbor down.

We camped in Scorpion Canyon, a mile up from the Pier at Scorpion Anchorage. One of our first house-making tasks was getting our own gear out of the boat and onto the pier. We then formed a human chain to get the gear off the pier and onto the land for the one-mile schlep to our organized campground in Scorpion Canyon. The campground has the ubiquitous composting pit toilets found throughout the National Parks and is one of only two on the Islands that actually provides potable water. Thank goodness. Even though hiking in a mile with your bedroom, kitchen, living room and closet on your back for two days is a mere distraction for this group, if uber heavy water needed to be toted too, this minor distraction would have become much more annoying. None of our favorite gear companies have figured out a way to freeze-dry water yet.

After setting up our tents and settling in, we did what we always do – find some like-minded friend and head off in all directions. I headed straight toward the beach, anxious to get the kayak in the water and explore the shoreline.  The kayaks were all sit-upons with which I had no previous experience. I like them for short shore trips although they are not nearly as sleek and beautiful as sit-in kayaks. Nonetheless, my kayak partner Caroline and I explored much of the coast to the east and west of the Anchorage over the next two days, floating into huge caves under the cliffs and paddling to ‘bird islands’, small rocky escarpments above the water which provide the pelicans, gulls, cormorants, guillemots and murres a solid resting place in a sea of moving water.

Sometimes, Caroline and I dropped our paddles onto our laps and just let the sea float us up and down. Sometimes we caught up with others of our group, grabbing onto other’s kayaks to form a moving conversation. And, naturally, Caroline and I couldn’t resist going through an arch through the cliff as the wave action bobbed us up and down, bringing our heads within a few inches of the arch’s roof. It felt a lot like a Disney ride with no lines. And yes we did it again.

For me, a highlight of the trip was a short 1.2-mile hike up from the campground to Cavern Point to watch Brother Sun dip below the horizon. Something about the humidity maybe – or possibly smoke from California seasonal fires – made Brother Sun a bright orange as he traveled further away from the night. And if I travel with this group, I always know there is at least one other (and often more) person willing to have that same experience. It is always a plus when the people you are with are part of the pleasure of the trip.

Nearly everywhere I go I always think I will visit again. To be honest, though, there are so very many beautiful places on this small planet and I would love to see them all. But perhaps if I get a chance to visit this very special place again I will take it, visiting the even more primitive islands for a few days. The Channel Islands provide the solitude I crave and only are a short distance in time and a world away from the busy bustling city. And frankly I want to play with the dolphin again.

GET OUTDOORS THEY SAID

Southern Arizona is full of ghosts and ghost towns, high desert grassy plains (yes really) and relics of old mines. It has mountains, lakes and chaparral, cacti and willows. It is full of history, romance and violence. Hollywood loves its high grassy plains (did you know Oklahoma was filmed down near Patagonia Arizona?) and its craggy mountains (the west slope of the Tucson Mountains formed the background for High Chaparral).  And I live here. Lucky me.

Yesterday was National Get Outdoors Day, with free admission to Parker Canyon Lake, possibly the most remote of the Southern Arizona lakes which are big enough for boating. Yes, there is boating in Southern Arizona. Yesterday, in the spirit of GO Day, my friend Annie and I took a day trip that celebrated just about everything Hollywood likes about a place that most people think of as a barren desert, the Sonoran Desert.

Our first stop was Parker Canyon Lake some 40 miles south of Sonoita, a thriving ranching and horse community on Highway 83, between I-10 and the border. Highway 83 is a fine, well-maintained road as one leaves the interstate, weaving past the Santa Rita Mountains to the West and the Whetstones to the East. Highway 83 continues south from Sonoita but the road gets narrower as it winds through Sonoita and Elgin’s wineries, eventually leaving these pleasant, high-desert rolling hills to become the road you would expect in a no-man’s land of canyon, rock, dust and cattle.

Highway 83 finally winds up to a small village called Lakeside which overlooks the Lake. Parker Canyon is much smaller than Patagonia Lake, its sister lake to the north. Since Parker Canyon allows only low-speed motors, it has become a favorite of flat-water kayakers and paddlers. The lake, which offers hikers a 5-mile trail around it, is large enough to provide a challenging experience but, with the low-wake policy, it is safe enough for even inexperienced paddlers. And it is beautiful, nestled as it is into its small canyon in the foothills of the Huachucas.

To honor Get Outdoors Day, the Forest Service had invited several vendors and organizations to set up near the marina including a traveling exhibit on the reptiles and arachnids of the region. Annie and I got to handle several beautiful and non-venomous snakes of the region. Since I often see snakes on my hikes and backpacks, I like to handle them in safe surroundings in order to reduce my discomfort at seeing them crawling across my trail. After visiting the various booths, we were ready to take off on our short hike.

A warning -the first view of Parker Canyon is deceptive. Looking north where the lake extends beyond its dam, you can’t even see its many fingers. So when someone tells you the trail around it is 5 miles, you are going to be tempted not to believe it. Believe it. And although it is well-marked (mostly), the lowering water volume has left parts of the main trail far away from the actual shore and subsequently many wildcat trails over parched dry lakebed have naturally been created. We sometimes took a trail only to find that it lead to a cliff or a fishing spot. The main trail, if you manage to stay on it, winds up and down with the terrain, often in the trees above the lake and is most certainly at least 5 miles. Of course there were the usual birds and lizards one would expect along the trail, but we also saw unusual plants, huge balls of leaves bundled in spider silk and wild turkeys.

Once back to the marina, we had a choice – return the way we came or head further into the remote high desert to the south and west, eventually arriving in the outskirts of Nogales, the nearest legal border crossing. Border Patrol and Forest Service personnel we spoke to affirmed we could easily make the trip over the primitive roads in YiHa, my trusty truck, but they warned we might encounter undocumented immigrants in this wild country.  We saw an imposing Border Patrol presence and absolutely no undocumenteds.

We followed 44 up and over the mountain finally arriving at an incredibly beautiful high desert plateau with prairie grass as high as my hip. For a few miles, this area is owned by us, the people of the United States, but after a few miles, the plateau becomes range with branded cows and their small calves, black and brown and glossy from the high desert feed. This is country where the road signs point to specific ranches and the roads are numbered rather than named.

Eventually, we come to our first stop, a tiny village named Locheil (named by its Scottish owners) that used to have a border gate and Border Patrol presence until the early 1980s. What is left of this once thriving ranch and mine hub are a few adobe structures, some more modern homes, a well-preserved one-room schoolhouse, and a bright white church high on the hill. No Trespassing signs abound.

Up the road from Locheil is a somewhat dubious monument honoring Franciscan Fray Marcos de Niza, said to be the first European to enter this area west of the Rockies in the 1500s. I found the derelict wind mills and some rusting farm equipment behind the monument more interesting but the village is the perfect example of the kind of environment early settlers would have claimed. Desert willow and sand proclaiming the existence of water not too far underground, low trees to provide shade and open areas perfect for a few gardens.

 

Next stop was Duquesne and Washington Camp, two old mining towns which were so close together one resident reportedly declared that when “Duquesne’s tail was stepped on, it was Washington that barked!” Washington itself shows little of its history but is the largest settlement south of Patagonia with a number of more modern structures, some of which are clearly inhabited. In this case, modern encompasses old mobiles and deteriorating tin sheds. We chose not to leave the road on which we were traveling to reach the ghost remnants of Duquesne. However we were lucky to travel past some relatively intact mining structures which are part of the complex just a little ways up the hill from Washington Camp on the road to Nogales, locally and conveniently named Duquesne Road.  A little further beyond the plant and off to the south we could easily see the large Duquesne mining complex in the valley below.

 

Once we were past the Duquesne and Washington ghost towns, we began winding down out of the cooler high country, coming upon the outskirts of Nogales in just a few short miles. We stopped at Tubac (one should always at least consider stopping at Tubac because I have a friend who owns the Deli there and it is a good place to wash the dust of the road from your throat) for a quick snack and cold drinks before hitting I-18 home. We baked in the sun, girding ourselves for the even hotter streets of Tucson.

 

On short day-trips like these, I sometimes feel smug that Arizona has so much to offer. But in reality everywhere I have lived, from Missouri to Colorado to Texas to Arizona to New Zealand or Montana, has similar day trips into history and great beauty. Get Outdoor Day was just a reason to go but the adventure of a back road, witnessing wild creatures, traveling under a canopy of trees can be experienced any day, any place. YiHa has nearly 140,000 miles on her and I’m convinced she loves bouncing down primitive roads as much as I do so we'll meet you down the road.

SLEEPING ON THE GROUND AT SIXTY

I turned 61 this morning. The larks, woodpeckers, threshers and quail in the lush wash behind my house were the first to offer their birthday greeting. Last year I was in Yellowstone for the summer working for a Park concessionaire. This year I am unable to work for the pay package which offers lower wages and beautiful views. Since returning from Yellowstone some seven months ago, I have been reorganizing myself in order to be able to get back into the woods and on this birthday am hoping to celebrate my 62^nd back in the woods.

In many ways, it’s been a difficult year. It is so very easy to get used to stepping across your threshold into fresh air, stunning views and entertaining animals. My little wash behind the house is so tame compared to rutting bull elk or encroaching grizzlies. Once in a while a bobcat quicksteps across my back patio or a snake slithers through the cactus along my back wall. But I really do miss the feeling of literally gorging on wilderness.

One of the ways I have kept myself from packing a bag and heading north is hiking, camping and their combination-backpacking. I have been backpacking since my early twenties with just a few years off here and there to accommodate motherhood or injury or illness. But backpacking has been my particular escape this year as I mourn the loss of what feels to me like my real ‘home’.

As I get older, backpacking becomes more difficult. A sprain is likely to take months instead of weeks to heal. The weight feels heavier than it did 40 years ago, the pack belt more likely to chafe. But the need for the wilderness only seems to grow stronger-perhaps fueled by many adult years living in the city, with just the one 5-month break and a few months living in a farmhouse in New Zealand.

For an outdoor girl like me, my hikes, campouts and backpacks have been my salvation and my playtime. I belong to a group of likeminded folk, eager to get out in the woods or the desert. Our members are greatly varied in age, political viewpoint, professions and skills but we pretty much all agree we must “take only memories; leave only footprints”. A good group indeed.

I actually am what we call an ‘organizer’ for the group which gives me the right to post activities I would like instead of waiting for someone else to put something together. A few weekends ago, I herded eight other backpackers down from the summit of Mount Lemmon at 9000 foot elevation (where we parked), down the Samaniego Ridge trail to Shovel Springs at 7500 feet and on down to Walnut Springs at 7300 feet. The first day we hiked nearly ten miles altogether, although we were able to stash our packs about 4 miles down the trail in a delightfully shady glen near the trail near the junction to Shovel Spring.

The Samaniego Trail suffered greatly from the 2003 Aspen fire and in the intervening years the underbrush returned in force due to the loss of forest canopy, increased sunlight and greatly reduced foot traffic. It took years for the trail to be cleared and even now, 12 years later, the trail can be a bit brushy past the junction to Shovel Springs. On the trail to Walnut Spring and back, we were happy to find fairly well-marked trail even though creeping or downed vegetation slowed our speed in some spots. I have loved this kind of trail-finding since my rather rough and tumble childhood – scrapes and scratches and bruises have always evidenced what for me has been a really good time.

By the time you reach your sixties, though, that kind of evidence takes longer to heal. Skin becomes less elastic and thinner. Bones become more easily and more permanently bruised, leaving deeply dark spots that are reminders well beyond the fall on the rock. Hiking poles become a must and the Cadillac kind, with springs to cushion a misstep, become a necessity rather than a luxury.

Unless I am seriously hurt (which is very rare), the night on the ground sleeping only with my sleeping pad and bag under the stars (we call that ‘cowboy camping’) makes everything – the brushy trail, the scratches, the pine needles stuck in my underwear – worth it. Nothing can compare to a canopy of stars and the melody of the wind through the treetops as a lullaby.

But where the going down is easy and the down means an elevation loss of 2500 feet, the return almost always proves more challenging for an almost 60-year-old with asthma and bad knees. I am always the tortoise and not the hare on these hikes but our group defaults to allowing for the slowest rather than the speediest. Hence, my group has quite a few backpackers that are even older than me. It’s nice to not be the last one up but when you are the organizer, it’s your job to make sure that the last one makes it to the parking lot – a wonderful excuse to sit and rest, watching the sun dapple the trail while you wait for your few remaining packers to catch up.

I believe I will be backpacking as long as my bones can stand the weight (I have made great strides at ‘light packing’ lately) and my body can take the stress. For me, the journey IS the destination. Mother Nature abounds all around in the woods and the desert if I just open my eyes to the beauty and my ears to the symphony of wild places. It is Mother Nature’s way of saying Happy Birthday to me every time I arrive in her embrace.

WE BUILD; WE FIGHT - A SEABEE'S MEMORIAM

My Dad tried to be a good dad when he thought about it. I remember him mowing the tall grass in the back yard into a geometric pattern, making a ‘game’ board for us to play the Fox and the Chicken. He was always the Fox at first.  I remember him alternatively preparing spaghetti and a dish he called SOS (chipped beef in a white sauce on toast from his days in the Navy) the entire week of my whole young life that Mom was in hospital. I remember him walking my sister and me down to school bus stop on super cold Missouri winter mornings bundling us up in blankets so we wouldn’t get frostbite.

Dad took my sister and me on a couple hikes – one down along the Missouri River and the other through the closed golf course of our country club. I fell down a hill and gashed my knee and Dad wrapped my bloody knee in a dirty oil rag from the trunk of the car. Mom was not pleased.

Dad worked as a journeyman electrical lineman for the local electric utility, a couple of those years spent as the night ‘troubleshooter’. We grew up with hard-drinking, hard-gambling guys with nicknames like Shorty and Red. We grew up with Mom, us girls in tow, picking up the paycheck on Friday so Dad’s earnings would make it into the bank account instead of on a game table or a bar bill. My Mom mostly raised us. Dad honestly wasn’t around too much.

My father was raised in a family where the ‘future’ only existed as some fuzzy concept for somebody else. He was born shortly before the Great Depression and his father, a railroad man, died on the rail yard when Dad was 11. This was long before any public welfare system; any food or clothing my grandmother was able to provide to her fatherless brood of seven was through church and charity.

My Dad told me he was playing baseball in a sand lot when he heard about Pearl Harbor. Whether through patriotism or a sense of adventure, he wanted to sign up right away but wasn’t quite old enough. As soon as he graduated from high school (the only of his siblings to do so), he enlisted in the Navy.

My Dad served in the brand new SeaBees established in WWII to build air strips and Quonset huts in the jungle, clear minefields, build roads….any construction required in the Pacific Theater in a war that was being played out on sea and on land in very different battle fields than ever before. The Pacific Theater was brutal and hot and sweaty and dirty. And very, very exotic and far away from the poor white trash Kansas home in which my Dad grew up.

For my Dad, the reality of war was very different than the one portrayed on enlistment posters. My Dad was a sensitive man, aware that whoever he killed or witnessed killing may have been the enemy but was also someone’s brother, son, or father. He saw things so terrible that anything that vaguely looked like a gun – including pop guns and water pistols – were taboo in our house. Once he told me probably the single most horrific thing he saw during the War was the beheaded body of a Japanese soldier. Dad told me the Aussies sometimes did this because the body had to be intact to enter the Japanese equivalent of heaven. A final brutal act intended to demoralize and terrorize the enemy.

Dad was a hugely intelligent man with a complex and rather tortured personality.  I remember Dad being really moody at times and often quick of temper. But it wasn’t until I was much older, until friends and family members were coming back from that war they called Viet Nam, that I was able to put name to his torture. At some point I knew he suffered from ‘shell shock’, the term they used for PTS before the events of Viet Nam made this a disorder and methods for treating it began evolving.

Memorial Day is tomorrow. Origins of the event vary widely among historians. Civil War historian David Blight believes Memorial Day as we now know it had its origins as a one-time celebration to honor Union prisoners of war that had been buried en masse without ceremony in the South. On May 1, 1865, over ten thousand mostly black residents of Charleston gathered to clean up and decorate the forgotten field of the Union prisoners’ burial ground. This astonishing event was covered by the New York Tribune and other national papers. For those attending, it was their way of saying thank you to these fallen soldiers for their recent freedom from slavery.

It took years for my Dad to come to terms with his own war experiences. I’m not sure he ever completely did. I know my nephew, who came back from Iraq a few years ago disabled and unemployable, will spend the rest of his life living with the trauma, physical and mental, of the explosion and subsequent firefight that disabled him. That’s what soldiers do. Soldiers are not extraordinary people at the start; they become extraordinary people because of the extraordinary pressures and horrors of war.

In a way, Dad lived the SeaBee slogan “We Build, We Fight” until he died. He built all kinds of things in his working life and he spent his whole life fighting really hard to heal himself of the effects of War on his spirit. On Memorial Day, it is appropriate to honor our fallen. We ask them to kill others so that we may live in peace and security, far away from the horrid mess of battle. They responded to the call of duty. It is our duty to properly remember their response to that call.

YOU GOTTA’ HAVE ART

I can picture our very early foremothers and fathers picking up a piece of charcoal (this is after they found fire of course) and thinking “Ugh…what do to cave walls?” I can picture them trying to describe their journey’s circuitous path by drawing a map in the dirt with a stick. I can picture them drawing what looked like a rudimentary tent for a mountain, delighted with the ability of others to instantly understand that one tent meant that mountain and two tents meant the one with two summits.

At some point, we humans began drawing even more intricate figures. We drew figures of pregnant goddesses, lightning bolts, stick figures that may have been ‘aliens’ or indigenous peoples. By the time of the Pharaohs, our ability to depict our reality had become incredibly intricate and we used a vast array of materials. At some point, drawing for recordation or clarification morphed into our need to adorn ourselves and our walls with figures and pigments that were purely ornamental. And we called this ‘art’.

I do not have a creative bone in my body. I’m pretty sure I was reading a book somewhere and forgot to show up when God allotted the creative gene. Nonetheless, I love all kinds of visual art. I take photos in order to capture my memories and sometimes I even frame them. But generally, I am relegated to admiring, and sometimes purchasing, art from others.

I started collecting art even in college. I bought a watercolor from one roommate and a hand-woven basket from another. I lived with a photographer for a time. His beautiful black and white ‘available light’ photographs filled my apartment walls – until I found out he felt his nude models would be more comfortable if he were nude, too.

As a young adult, my then husband and I started going to ‘free dinner’ art sales held by Park West, a gallery in Michigan with an aggressive marketing strategy. My husband and I were pretty broke but we managed to buy a few serigraphs and lithographs for our walls by people we had never heard of but whose images we fell in love with.  It made us feel sophisticated and besides, we just liked the art.

Over the years, my artistic tastes and knowledge matured as did Park West’s marketing strategies. As they built a solid clientele, they made their events more exclusive and even halted their ‘land auctions’ completely for a time as they opened satellite galleries and moved their collecting events to the  cruise ships. With the business generated by the cruise ships and with their enormous ‘mother’ gallery in Southfield Michigan, Park West is now the largest gallery in the world.

I no longer attend free dinners to buy art. As one of their long-standing collectors, every six months or so I am invited to an entire weekend of art collecting in some flash Arizona location that provides ample opportunity for relaxing and enjoying the company of other art collectors.  I can’t always go, but when I do, I get to talk and learn about art and artists from other collectors.  But the main attractions of these weekend events is getting to meet the very artists whose work I already or will collect. Last weekend I attended one of these collecting events at the historical, gorgeous and luxurious Wigwam Resort near Goodyear, Arizona.

‘Provenance”, or the history of a thing whether it is wine or artifacts or art, provides the ‘story’ of the piece. Of course with art it is helpful to know where it was purchased, how the art came to that gallery or seller and approximately the date the art was completed. But honestly, there is no better provenance than all those things and the story of its creation directly from the artist who created it.

Imagine Picasso sharing with you over dinner how he eventually sank into depression after his friend Casagemas committed suicide, settling into his rather morose “Blue Period’, painting an entire series of monochromatic blue and green canvases with dark subjects like prostitutes and beggars. Imagine Vermeer relating the story of how his painting the innocent Dutch girl with the pearl earring came to be. Stories are important. But stories directly from the artists? That would be Provenance on steroids.

This past weekend, my friend  Margaret and I met three internationally regarded artists. All three, joyous and fun for the most part, had their own stories to tell about the original pieces that were available to us that weekend.

Peter Max, an immigrant from Berlin and undoubtedly the most well-known pop artist in the world, related his need to reach out to his community of friends to save Lady Liberty from her structural deterioration and to the families of the first responders of 9/11. He told of the constancy of yoga in his life and its impact on his art. He talked about his association with the Beatles and told stories of his long friendship with Andy Warhol.

Marcus Glenn, showing musicians in a way that virtually flows across the canvas and an artist I have collected for several years, shared his joy and astonishment at being selected the Grammy Artist for 2014. He spoke of his amazement at being gathered into the fold of the enormously famous and talented musicians at the Grammies.  He reminded us he couldn’t get very uppity about that because his wife Yolanda would be quick to remind him that he was still just Marcus Glenn, a working-class kid from Detroit.

Victor Spahn, a Russian immigrant now living in Paris, whose art depicts movement in sports and dance in ways no other artist has accomplished, shared a clip he filmed on his phone camera of his friend, a world famous opera singer, as she played and sang on the piano in his living room. He spoke of his painting technique which gives impression of movement on a flat canvas. He shared his love of cars and his enchantment at being allowed to be the official painter for various car manufacturers including Lexus. He confessed he loved American cars and told us he had a Smart Car for driving around in Paris.

Living room talk. Kitchen table conversations. Bar confessions. Meeting and learning about your artists has a lasting impression on the way you view the art hanging in your home. I can hear that smoky note of the blues singer in Glenn’s work, the pound of the hooves of the horse in Spahn's horse race. I can feel my heart quicken as I glance at the image of the Statue of Liberty and know that Max actually made it possible for my children and grandchildren to see that very Lady in person.

Before they leave, you get to stand next to these great artists to have your picture taken with them, giving you time to tell Max you love the joy in his work and you now understand, because you are also a devotee of yoga, how it came to be there; to get a ‘snog’ by Marcus Glenn who you have told with shining eyes that his work moves the music within you; and to get a warm hug from the boyish Spahn who has appreciated your interest in how he has been able to get the mud from the track up into the canvas.

Provenance my friends. Can’t get better than that.