Happy (belated) Birthday to Me!

Yours truly, the Dilettante Traveler, turned 33 Wednesday November 9^th. There was actually much more ceremony than I expected; several friends and relatives braved the rains and traffics of mid-fall Seattle to fete me with stories, a monkey sticker, and excellent vegetarian South Indian food at the local Udupi Palace. After dinner, I went off to a jazz singing class I’m taking with my childhood friend Sonja and several other women ages 17 to, oh, around 50 . . . or 40 (I don’t want to be ungenerous about ages—I’ll be there soon enough). We had a raucous round of Happy Birthday, several in fact, with stamping and harmony and general craziness, then a homemade (by Sonja) chocolate cake with a frosting of raspberries mixed with cream cheese, mascarpone cheese and a little bit of sugar. This doesn’t sound much like travel, however, and I admit that it isn’t (although the psychological, musical and emotional journeys I’ve taken in jazz class have been significant and probably worth a blog in their own right).

I did travel on my birthday, though. As regular readers know, I have an obsession with this one farm along Jerome Creek outside of Harvard, Idaho. More to the point, I have an obsession, which I will openly admit, with the three horses that live there. This is why I don’t visit the farm in the winter. My excuse is that it’s a long way to drive on icy roads . . . but that wouldn’t stop me if I would be able to ride. But even I admit that riding up and down steep, wooded slopes on narrow trails in 2 feet of snow and 0 degrees is more hardship than pleasure. So fall is my last season for visiting, and what a great way to spend one’s birthday, I thought.

Nature, not (evidently) knowing me very well, tried to thwart me. I was planning to go for only two nights, leaving early on the 7^th and returning on the 9^th. A lesser (or more practical) person might have been deterred when, overnight on November 6^th, several large rocks—some the size of refrigerators—fell on westbound I-90 just east of Snoqualmie Pass and the road was closed. I was immediately obsessed with the image of refrigerator-sized boulders falling onto the freeway (no one was injured). When I see those “watch for falling rocks” signs I assume they’re referring to pebbles that may scratch the paint on the roof—irritating—stones that may crack the windshield—annoying—or perhaps fist-sized rocks that could cause a blowout if you drive over them—really seriously irritatingly annoying. I am certainly never . . . correction, I was certainly never expecting to be crushed by something the size of a refrigerator. Now I’m not so sure . . .

Fortunately, Washington State has multiple choices for cross-mountain travel. In the winter, those choices amount to 3 in total: closed Snoqualmie Pass on I-90 with a minimum of two lanes in each direction and virtually right on the straight line from Seattle to Jerome Creek; Stevens Pass to the north; and White Pass to the south. Seattle drivers know that the Ship Canal divides the city into essentially two cities—North Seattle and South Seattle—which, depending on the time of day, can be 45 minutes apart from each other. I, living in North Seattle, chose the Northern route.

Partially because I was excited, partially because I wanted to beat what traffic I could on Highway 2, I left town at 6:45 in the morning, coffee in hand. I had packed the car for any eventuality: snow boots, blanket, extra water, snacks, in addition to the jumper cables and flares that I carry all the time. I drive a 4-Runner with 4-wheel-drive and new tires, so I felt confident of making it through any road conditions. What I failed to remember is my morning ritual of coffee—then piddling. I work from home, so can get up and use the bathroom whenever I want, which is apparently frequently. Somewhere around Monroe, I started to have to go. Concurrently, the highway started to narrow and climb. No, I won’t stop at this gas station; I have plenty of gas and I’d like to get to Wenatchee. I drove on, climbing into the snow line (there’s a ski resort at Stevens Pass which was scheduled to open two days later), keeping both hands on the wheel, listening to Lloyd Alexander stories, and passing people moving more slowly than me. My need to pee grew with the altitude. Finally I hit the pass and started down the other side. By this point, I had to piddle so badly I was distracted from my story (which was written for kids . . . not too terribly complex a plot but still more than I could follow), and I started to think perhaps that level of distraction was not so good for driving down a steep, narrow, winding, snowy mountain pass in the presence of way more traffic than usual. I also worried that I would pee my pants at the slightest provocation—you know, a minor slip of the tires, break lights ahead of me, an unexpected event in The High King, which I hadn’t turned off. Then, a sign seemingly from the gods appeared: REST AREA 10 MILES. Such a relief! I knew I could make it ten miles—I stopped worrying about poisoning myself with piddle that was supposed to be released (can you do that?) and starting counting down the miles. Around the next bend, I hit the traffic. Cars and trucks, now heading downhill and having only one lane (the extra passing lane is for uphill traffic in our passes), had slowed to a crawl. We would, literally, make the 10 miles in about 45 minutes. There was absolutely no way. I started to seriously panic, and made a mental list of the pants I had with me, and the dog towel, and whether or not it would be safe to dig out the towel and somehow sit on it while driving in winter conditions down a mountainside. After four increasingly fraught miles, a semi up ahead pulled off into a wide spot on the side of the road and a yellow-tinged light bulb went off in my head. I could just pull over! So I did, in the same turn out as the trucker. I skidded to a stop next to some scant underbrush and a creek, dribbled, bent over, out of the car, ran haltingly into the trees, dropped my pants, and piddled one of the best piddles of my life, while I watched the long line of cars slowing easing past down the hill. Yes, that’s right—I was in view of the road.

From experience on that road, I will say that probably none of the drivers—the careful ones, at any rate—saw me; they were too busy watching for black ice. But I also have to say that intense need acts as a screen for one’s modesty (at least from one’s own perspective), and that the relief of peeing not in my car, and not in my pants, but in a snowy wilderness, was so great as to transport me to another plane of reality where I no longer believed I was visible to the other drivers on the road.

After that, I made it to Othello with no more problems, and was in Jerome Creek by 2:15 pm, only driving 2 hours longer than usual. I had time to muck out stalls, feed horses and let them in, and decide on dinner before K&A, who had been in Seattle over the weekend for family birthdays and had thus encountered the same travel conundrum I had, arrived (having taken the southern route).

As for the rest of the stay, K, A and I went for a 2 or so hour ride on Tuesday, up into a part of the area they hadn’t been in awhile and up a trail they hadn’t taken at all. We climbed into the snow line, and I was very glad to be bareback on Shadow, where I could take advantage of a heated seat, particularly when wet snow flipped off branches and into my lap. Still, we were all very cold by the time we returned home.

The next day, my birthday, K and I rode alone (I rode Sikem with a saddle . . . and long underwear, and a hat . . . ), for about 1.5 hours, then I hit the road back.

By this time, I-90 was opened, one lane in each direction, so I decided on the direct route home, and sped along faster than usual to make sure I had an extra buffer for crossing the pass (there was a brief incident west of Othello where I was passing a car—with plenty of space, I’ll point out, but toward a line of traffic coming the other direction . . . and the car at the head of the east-bound line was a cop . . . who flashed his lights at me . . . which freaked me out and made me pull back in a little faster than I otherwise would have . . . but honestly, he was far enough away when I started to pass that I couldn’t tell he was a cop, which is pretty far . . . anyway, no harm done and I drove the speed limit for the next 30 miles until I hit the Columbia River and I-90 . . .), and I made it home in 5 hours. Which is less time than usual. And then to dinner and singing and cake, oh my.

In all, a good birthday.