Out of the Store and Into the Woods

Williams Lake, San Juan Mountains, CO

There's something so liberating, and shocking, really, about carrying everything you need on your back. As I backpacked through the San Juan Mountains of Colorado for five days recently, I couldn't help but think, "What's all that stuff back in my house? I have everything I need right here!" Of course, we ate Ramen and wore basically the same clothes for the entire trip, but still, it's an excellent reminder of how little we need, not only to survive, but to be happy, especially when our days are spent doing something fulfilling and soul-satisfying.

So I've returned with a renewed determination to de-clutter our house, to buy and keep only the essentials - though of course "essential" is always relative. Mostly, I want to consciously evaluate what we have and what we decide to buy. Even though J and I think of ourselves as conscious consumers, it is so easy to fall into the trap of believing that material things reflect status and represent a path to happiness (after all, there are enormous forces inundating our lives that are aimed solely at making us believe just that, and I don't think any of us are immune to them). For me, one of the best ways to avoid this, or at least mitigate it, is to leave it all behind on a regular basis, to carry only the true essentials, to sleep under the stars while the cell phone and computer beep and purr alone back at home, and to practice self-reliance.

I left for my Colorado trip thinking that it might be the final journey for my 15-year-old backpack, purchased for my first Grand Canyon hike as a teenager. "I really need a new backpack," I thought, mostly when I happened to be looking at rows of them hanging in an REI store, drawn to their shiny newness like a fluttering magpie. But guess what? When I got out of the store and into the woods, I realized it was nothing a few patches and new buckles couldn't fix. My raggedy old backpack will surely continue to take me wherever it is I decide I want to go, if I only let it.

Columbine, San Juan Mountains, CO

Letter to My Future Self

Dear Self,

I write this on the evening of your first wedding anniversary, May 30, 2011. I don't know what you're doing, but I do know who you are, and I like to imagine that your dreams have shifted and grown in ways so unpredictable to me that I'd be surprised by many things about you and pleased that all the good parts have stayed the same. But promise me this: that you have done your best to love him more, and better, every day. That you remember all the reasons that drew you together in the first place.

Yes, you love hiking together, and riding bikes, and badly describing distant birds. And you probably have even more connecting the two of you now: hopefully you will have made some children together, those mysterious beings of the future; though now they seem the strange opposite of ghosts. And yes, there is probably a house, and careers, and no doubt there has been an ongoing series of poorly behaved cats.

But Self, remember that you love the stories he tells you. Remember that you met along a river in the most beautiful place in the world. Remember the nighthawks that hunted overhead when you revisited that place on your honeymoon. How the two of you just watched as they fell through the clean desert air again and again, so close you could feel the rush of their wings. How the faint smell of water blew in on the juniper wind. How the two of you sat for hours, it seemed, without really speaking, because you knew it was special, even as you knew it wasn't: the show happened every night whether the two of you were present or not. It was a chance brush with the world, a convergence of beings, much like your meeting. You looked up at those nighthawks from a shared point on earth. May you have never stopped looking.

No Little Plans

Make no little plans.  They have no magic to stir men's blood... 
-Daniel Burnham

It's a tricky thing, commitment. You commit to a person, or a goal, or a lifestyle, knowing all the while that there's always the possibility that something beyond your control could change your plans. And so I'm going to resist the urge here to preface the announcement of a recent commitment I made with those hesitant caveats: "Assuming nothing else comes up..." or "If all goes according to plan...." Instead, I'll just come out and say it: Exactly two years from now, in April of 2013, J and I will begin our attempt to through-hike the Pacific Crest Trail.

There. I've said it. You heard it here first. The PCT runs from Mexico to Canada through California, Oregon, and Washington - 2600 miles of soul-searching, marriage-testing backpacking. We're going to do it, and we're going to invite as many of our friends and family members as possible to do some portion of it with us. It will take approximately six months, hiking south-north, starting in April to avoid the heat of the desert and hopefully reaching the high Sierras in early- to mid-summer, when most of the snow has melted there.

It's both exhilarating and terrifying to have committed to this journey. I'm not so concerned about the physical effort as I am about the mental exertion - six months is a whole lot of time doing nothing but walking. And the next two years is a lot of time planning something that - let's face it - could easily be derailed by the rest of life.

I often find it difficult to strike a balance between flexibility and commitment, and this trip is no exception. We have to be fully committed to this goal if we are serious about accomplishing it, which means spending many hours and not an insignificant amount of money just in the planning stages. We have to be willing to quit, or at least take extended leave from, our jobs, and we assume that we'll be as able - economically and psychologically - to do that two years from now as we think we are now. And we have to be prepared to change our plans, to adjust to the ever-changing current of things completely beyond our control, like the health of our family members or the future economic situation.

In the face of all that ambiguity, we choose to make plans anyway. We want to turn our talk into commitment, and finally to turn that commitment into action. Getting to each of those points with any given dream seems to me one of the keys to a fulfilling life.

And so, we commit without caveats. A river guide once told a group of paddlers I was with, as we headed into one of the largest rapids in the Grand Canyon, that as we paddled we needed to be not just involved, but committed to the experience. "What's the difference between being involved and being committed?" he asked. "Well, it's like bacon and eggs. In bacon and eggs, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed."

Cave of the Bells

A couple of weekends ago, J and I had the opportunity to visit Cave of the Bells, which is in the Santa Rita mountains southeast of Tucson. Although we'd been to this cave before, we'd only explored a few hundred yards into it. This would be the first real caving either one of us had ever done.

Yep, that's me, caving!

After a short hike, we reached the entrance, and our guide, a grad student who studies caves, paused to give us her "caving guidelines." These consisted of things like, "try not to touch the pretty stuff," "there's no shame in crawling," and finally, "don't die." ("That's not a guideline," she said, "that's a rule.") Good God, I thought, what have I gotten myself into?

The first obstacle was a squeeze that served as the true entrance to the cave. It took us away from the light- and breeze-filled first chamber and into the steady 71 degrees, 100% humidity, and pitch blackness that would be our environment for the next four-plus hours. These conditions are constant in this particular cave: as I write this, Cave of the Bells sits like a buried dragon, hollow and moist at 71 degrees and 100% humidity.

Gorgeous formations, Cave of the Bells, AZ.

It is strange to think of this vapid space as just existing, with no knowledge of itself. Something about the cave's darkness caused me to project some kind of consciousness onto it while we were there. Perhaps it was my sense of us as invaders, or at the very least explorers of a highly inhospitable and indifferent environment. Perhaps it was easier to think of the cave as something that cared about us, or at least knew we were there. Perhaps it was the influence of House of Leaves (a novel I highly recommend). In any case, though I knew it was crazy, I thought of the cave itself as something alive.

We moved along slowly, admiring the stalactites and stalagmites, the crystals formed all over the walls, and the utter darkness in which our eyes, for lack of stimulation, seemed to create things to see when we turned our lights out. Thick, slippery mud covered every surface. We climbed up and slid down slopes where the cave bottom dropped away on either side into what truly seemed to be oblivion, and what truly was far enough to seriously injure anyone who slipped. We followed an increasingly perilous path, all the while with the knowledge that the only way out was back the way we had come, through belly-scraping squeezes and hand-over-hand mud-covered scrambles. We knew that one slip of a foot or hand would result in a serious fall and probably serious injury. Caving, I discovered, is not for the faint of heart.

More formations, Cave of the Bells, AZ.

Once we had visited each of the research sites, we decided to do one final route through the cave that we hadn't seen yet, a loop. As soon as we began, it became apparent that this route was far more technical than anything we had done; it also became apparent to me that I was very tired. My arms and core were shaky from climbing and from the tension of maintaining my balance in an almost continuous sequence of precarious positions.

We made slow, tedious progress around the loop. At one point, as we chimneyed across a ravine with our feet on one side of it and our backs on the other, I looked down into the blackness below me and decided that this experience had just passed the point of fun, passed a healthy pushing of my comfort zone and moved firmly into the realm of the stupid. The thing about caves, though, is that once you get yourself in, you have to get yourself out. So this realization was of little consequence aside from provoking my annoyance with myself for voluntarily getting into this situation in the first place.

Finally, one last squeeze stood between us and the climb back out to the cave's entrance. We had been climbing up a formation that required relatively technical climbing skills (considering that we weren't roped in), and I could feel my whole body trembling with fatigue and the day's steady stream of anxiety. I began to make my way into the tight vertical space and quickly realized that my head could barely fit through. For some reason, the scraping of my helmet along the cave walls and the wedged, trapped feeling created by my immobile head felt like the last straw, and I felt panic begin to rise up as if from the darkness all around me.

A scuba diving instructor once told me that "panic is the genie you can't let out of the bottle." I've always remembered that image, and it's true - especially underwater, where panic is very often fatal. And although I'm not an expert, I imagine that it is almost as dangerous in a cave.

My method for dealing with panic is to attempt to detach myself from the situation and try to remove my thoughts from the physical circumstances of my body. I know that mind's power to influence the body is extraordinary, and indeed, I don't think there is any true separation between the two. Of course, I didn't actually think about any of this as I attempted to jam my head through an eight-inch crack God knows how many feet underground. I took a deep breath, mentally removed myself from the situation, hissed, "Get your shit together, Tory!", tilted my head just right, and squeezed through.

I don't mean to over-dramatize this adventure. Not a single bad thing happened, and I'm sure that for the experienced folks in our group, it was just another great day of caving. But it pushed me to my psychological limit - something that I normally enjoy, or at least look back on fondly, but in this case, I just think was stupid. I wish that I could say that I conquered some kind of demon, that there will always be another cave for me to explore. That would be a satisfying, if clichéd, ending to this story. But the truth is, I'm not sure there was ever anything that needed conquering. I bow with utmost humility to that cave, unconscious and thoughtless as it is, and leave it to others. I admit, for once, and with great difficulty, that some parts of the earth are better off left unexplored -- at least by me. 

Safe, mostly sound, and pretty damn dirty after a day of caving.

Reflections: Organ Pipe National Monument

A small tinaja, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, AZ.

A raven is cruising the campground, sweeping by and landing with trills and squawks and all manner of raven-speak. They are one of my favorite birds - so iconically Southwestern, they always make me think of the wild desert places I've visited, lived in, loved. Where do they find water here? Come to think of it, where do the many birds here - Gila woodpeckers, Northern flickers, cactus wrens, desert quail - find water? They're here, so it's somewhere. But apparently it's easier to find on two wings than on two feet.

Craig Childs writes about this general area in his book, The Secret Knowledge of Water (he focuses on Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, which is just west of Organ Pipe). He has traveled through many arid places, always on foot, in search of water, and in this region he says you must go to the mountains to find it, where it is stored in tinajas, or waterpockets within the rock. If you just understand the lay of the land, the geographic circumstances required for such catchment, you will find it. This knowledge has been passed on, from generations of indigenous people and even to Spanish missionaries like Father Kino, who explored a large portion of this region in the early 1700s. But now, people cross this desert under dire circumstances and can't find water, because they don't know where to look for it. It can't be found along what seems to be the path of least resistance: the mesquite flats crisscrossed by dry washes that flash during storms only briefly, and then only a few times a year. The water is stored in the mountains, but to traverse them would make an already difficult journey both longer and more dangerous.

For all the beauty of this place, it has become impossible to ignore what's happening along the border. As we drove back from a hike yesterday, we came across at least a dozen Border Patrol vehicles, parked at angles along the dirt road, not an agent to be seen. Clearly they were out on foot. Any consideration for the fragile ecosystem is lost completely in the pursuit of those who, at best, simply wish to pursue economic opportunities that are made readily available to them once they cross the border, and at worst, are smuggling drugs that current US policies have made highly profitable.

Of course, the impact on the ecosystem, though at the forefront of my own mind having just hiked through it, pales in comparison to the crisis of violence and meaningless suffering that currently pervades the borderlands. I am often struck when hiking in this area, comfy in my synthetic, wicking clothing and three-liter Camelbak full of cool water, by the level of desperation that would motivate someone to cross this landscape in the summer, in the dark, in second-hand tennis shoes and with a gallon jug of water painted black to avoid detection. It's an unimaginable journey. (I should say that I'm referring here to migrant workers, not drug smugglers - that's a whole different issue.)

I sometimes long to just forget it all, to see this place as one of simple and immense beauty, and not as symbolic of a conflict born of economic disparity, in which I am both complicit and on the privileged side. I want the natural world to transcend the muck of human affairs, and I want it to take me with it. And yet, that would be deny the interconnectedness of all things: of humans to the natural world and of it to us; of me to the Gila woodpecker and of the migrant to me. And so here we are in the muck, without answers, except the knowledge that the paradox of pain and beauty represented by such a place is surely one small, inescapable piece of being human.

The Trail Awaits

Recently, I was struck by the realization that I have been mountain biking for approximately fifteen years. Since I was a teenager when I started, this was followed by the realization - and these are becoming more common - that ready or not, I am almost thirty. I'm not at all depressed by this development, but I am surprised, which I suppose is only natural. But it's still strange to think that it's been fifteen years since I took my first tentative pedal strokes up Schultz Creek Trail on... what? I don't even remember my first mountain bike. All I remember is my absolute terror of crashing, which undoubtedly made me tense and rigid and therefore led to more crashing, and my dad's limitless patience with me as he taught me to overcome my fear, trust myself, and just let go and ride.

I don't really know what the public image of mountain biking is, but I have a feeling it's of a bunch of heavily gear-laden adrenaline junkies shredding noisily down the trail, spooking horses and taking out tranquil groups of birdwatchers. This may be, unfortunately, a partially deserved reputation, but it is certainly not my own, or the only, experience of the activity.

When I ride my bike on a trail, there is nothing but trail, bike, and body - everything else falls away. I love to climb hills, to fall into a rhythm of breathing and pedaling, only to have it broken by an obstacle - a rock or a root - that requires all my strength and concentration to overcome. One can never maintain the same pattern or expectations for too long while mountain biking, for something new always awaits, whether it is a hairpin turn in the trail or a tarantula crossing in the dusk, each thick leg slowly negotiating the thorny path.

Like so many things in life, mountain biking requires a balance of control and release, of hard work and finesse. Just putting your head down and grinding away will only get you so far; you must also relax enough to dance with the bike, to softly embrace the terrain. Too much tension will cause the body, and by extension, the bike, to be rigid and tight, and inevitably lead to stops or crashes, just as too much control exerted over life can result in inflexibility, missed opportunities, disappointment. Especially when an obstacle appears unexpectedly, the ability to at once relax and push forward, to exert focused effort and simultaneously relinquish the attempt at absolute control and let the trail take you where it may - ahh. That is the ultimate satisfaction, the place where bliss dwells. Bliss on a bike, bliss in life. The journey toward that moment, toward a series of those moments - that's a ride worth taking.

Things I'm loving right now...

The only relationship among the following things is that I'm thinking about them. Stream-of-consciousness, not quite Faulkner style, but fun nonetheless. (And not nearly as much work, I hope, for the readers, or for the writer!)

1) Getting rid of asphalt and planting trees. I have an awesome job at Watershed Management Group, and yesterday we installed stormwater harvesting basins (actually, we used underground infiltration chambers fed by round "cores" cut in the side of the curb, so that stormwater will flow in as it goes down the street). Someday I'll write about the technical details of this, but the bottom line is, we got to plant native trees and grasses where there used to be only asphalt, and those plants will be fed by the stormwater that is normally treated as a waste product. Bringing nature back into cities is one of the major reasons I went into urban planning, and I feel so lucky that I get to do it in my work.

2) Blind Descent, by James M. Tabor, about the exploration of "supercaves" - really big caves that people spend days (and weeks of in-and-out expeditions) exploring. It's truly unimaginable. As a scuba diver, sometime-canyoneer, and sporadic rock climber, I can relate to a lot of the things these cavers are doing - except I think that's a little like saying that because you've run a mile, you can relate to what it would be like to run in the Olympics. They are climbing, backpacking, diving, rappelling, sleeping on Porta-ledges... in the cold, wet, and dark. Not just dark, but in the absolute absence of light. Oh yeah, and in the constantly gusting wind creating by these huge caves. If you're into reading about the limits of the human experience, I highly recommend it.

While on the topic of books, I also just finished Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow by Orson Scott Card. I don't consider myself much of science fiction person, but these books transcend the genre. Card is a master of plot and pacing, and I once again found myself astonished at how people can sit down and write fiction.

3) The fact that the hubs has started homebrewing again, filling the house with the warm smell of yeast and the promise of delicious beer in a few short weeks.

4) The hummingbirds that I've been seeing around town (they're back, I guess?), as well as the resident vermilion flycatcher we spotted this morning in the park across the street. Just the name vermilion flycatcher makes me happy.

5) Our plans to check out the Whitewater Draw Wildlife Area and the sandhill cranes tomorrow - pictures soon, I hope!

2011: The Year of Living Locally

Mountain biking under the desert moon near Colossal Cave, AZ.

Things have been a bit serious over here at the Porch Swing lately, and for good reason. Strangely, I started this blog on the morning of the Tucson shootings (before they happened), and that event has occupied my consciousness, and therefore my writing, quite a bit in the last week and a half. And while I intend to try to post some serious writing here, I also intend to have fun. So here's something on a lighter note.

Due to various school, work, and life overlaps and obligations, it looks like we won't be traveling abroad this year, which is something that I really wanted to do before my husband starts graduate school (which will hopefully be soon). We love to travel, and I tend to have an unbearable sense of urgency about it - if we don't do it NOW, we'll never do it! - whatever adventure "it" may be. But the other night, we sat down and looked at the calendar and realized that an extended trip abroad just isn't in the cards this year. So rather than dramatically lament our fate - "we'll end up having kids and then never doing anything" (ok, I might have said that) - I have dubbed 2011 our year of living locally.

Granted, we will still be leaving Tucson, and Arizona, plenty - a Colorado backpacking trip and my sister's wedding in Door County, Wisconsin, for starters, and knowing us we'll squeeze something else in there. So don't feel too sorry for us. But this attitude is about more than staying home. In fact, it's not really about staying home at all, but about exploring all the amazing things our region has to offer. Jason and I have both lived in Tucson for six years, and while we often get out and about, there are still so many canyons unexplored, so many creeks un-birded, peaks un-summited, mountain bike trails un-shredded. It's time to get out there.

I think as a culture, we tend to sacrifice short trips and weekend adventures in the name of one long, glorious, two-week vacation in paradise, and I'm not sure the one is really worth the sacrifice of the other. (I'm all for nice, long vacations - I think two weeks of vacation a year is a crime - I'm just saying that shouldn't be it.) Work fifty weeks and play for only two? Life is way too short for that. This, of course, speaks to a larger cultural issue of workaholism, but that's a rant for another post. The point is, we can have adventures, travel to places we've never been, learn something about our own culture or the natural environment or ourselves - all in a local day's play. Sometimes, we get so focused on the big plans that we forget the small ones, which can be just as rewarding and can happen every weekend: little shots of adventure, of novelty, reminders that the grand world is actually right outside our door.

Helicopters

Several years ago, I was backpacking off the North Rim of the Grand Canyon when my party came across another group. It was one of the hottest among many hot days I have spent in that canyon, and the heat radiated off the ancient, black Vishnu Schist with what seemed to be a special ferocity. Sweat dripped like water as we made our way along the beach, bodies hunched beneath our backpacks, next to the booming Colorado.

We met the other party shortly after we had left the river and started up a side canyon. They told us they had separated from the rest of their group, that one of the others was struggling and moving very slowly. This first party was heading to the river for water. We wished them luck, said we'd keep an eye out for their friends, and moved on.

We never did come across the struggling hikers that day. We made our camp up the side canyon, next to the creek, beneath the cottonwood trees. The North Rim is famously remote - far fewer people visit or hike there than the more populated South Rim. We had driven an hour on a dirt road off a basically deserted highway to get to the trailhead. And so we speculated: perhaps they'd turned around to attempt to hike out? Maybe they were camped somewhere above us? But there was nothing, really, for us to do about it.

We sat in the shade and played cards into the afternoon, the encounter largely forgotten. But toward sunset, suddenly, we heard it: the unmistakable rhythm of a helicopter, the sound reverberating off the canyon walls. We stopped what we were doing, looked at each other. This part of the Grand Canyon is one of those treasured places our constant human ruckus has not reached, and for days we had heard nothing but birdsong, rushing water, and our own voices. But now this, all too familiar: the sound of trouble. It was distant and low and distinctly human. And to us, with no way of communicating with the outside world and the acute knowledge of our own isolation, it was foreboding. To the man being rescued (we found out later he was evacuated from the canyon, severely dehydrated, but fine), that sound was no doubt a symbol of safety and rescue. But to us it had the tenor of human affairs gone deeply awry - of rescue, yes, but also of combat, of emergency, of something being ushered away.

For five days now, helicopters have gathered over my hometown. They are amassing at the site of a great rift - a lurch, it seems, in the quiet way of things. They hover above the hospital where the victims of Saturday's shooting lie recovering, where the rows of news trucks, satellites aimed at some distant orbit, broadcast Tucson's tragedy across the world, and where the shrine to the victims every day grows larger, the entire scene more surreal. They wasp above the University of Arizona, where, as I write this, people are gathering by the thousands, twisting in lines across the campus, to hear the President of the United States speak some comfort to a shocked community.

The world has cleaved open a bit, and the helicopters are here, not so much to tend, as to record, the wound. Perhaps we long for them to carry us away, to bear rescue and hope rather than sorrow. But really, though it will take time, I think what we long for is silence, for a clear, blue Arizona sky, punctuated every so often with something both mundane and magical, something to remind us that the world is, once again, as it should be. Something clear and ordinary, like birdsong.

Coming Home

The only time I miss real winter weather is when I snowshoe or cross-country ski. The snow-laced trees, the frozen world, the blue, blue sky that holds a sun amplified again and again over ridges of white. My breath heavy and released in visible puffs, the stinging of my hot cheeks as I move through the sharp, freezing air. Traipsing uphill with that ridiculous, splayed-ski waddle.

We started out the new year on cross-country skis, and it made me long for something different. For an adventure, a new life in a new place where I could cross-country ski every day. Surely my life would never become routine or boring if only I had snow over which to cross-country ski.

This slump of longing (which was only a few steps short of a full-on pity party, and which I knew all along to be founded upon false premises) lasted for a few days after I got home to Tucson. And then, of course, I remembered how much I love this city, the desert, and my life here. I remembered the water harvesting projects I've planned around the house, the garden I'll grow, the creative life I'll make. Having plans and ambitions for the future inspires me, invests me in this place as my home. But being fully aware of the present, with all its quirks and blessings -the cats on my lap, the fridge full of food, a Gila woodpecker outside the window - that will sustain me wherever I go.

So cheers to the new year (arbitrary though it may be), to the desert, and to coming home; but most of all, cheers to this moment, the one that none of us will ever quite experience again.