Let’s Clear the Air

I’m sure many of you more evolved readers recognized, in my histrionic lists of details and melodramatic claims of being the BEST PERSON FOR THIS JOB, the breathtaking arrogance underlying it. I had not, although it has been my practice over the last few years to search within myself for answers to Life’s Questions, and so I knew some learning was on the cusp when this idyll became a hell.

I had already noticed that, at least in some aspects of life, if I’m having a hard time with something the difficulty probably lies somewhere inside me—after all, we can each interpret our environments best only from the internal standpoint. When we humans share communities and families, we also share frameworks and expectations, so when ten thousand pin pricks mar an otherwise perfect picture for me, and I describe those pin pricks, you all can relate, to some extent, to the frustration and disbelief that I’m experiencing.

Pin pricks, however, begin to be comical once they reach the point of caricature—like these ten thousand have. It has really felt to me as though every single thing I’ve done since arriving here has caused or revealed or portended a new problem. Everything.

In addition to the exhausting (if not quite exhaustive) lists I’ve already posted, when I turned out Sikem yesterday noontime, my finger got caught in his halter as I was removing it, and he was behaving like an ass anyway and leapt away, twisting my knuckle and bruising my pointer. “You hurt me,” I cried, with such childlike disbelief and anguish that a part of my brain thought whoa there. Where did that come from? I closed the horses in and sat down, sobbing, on the grass just outside their pen. Spackle knows from long experience that such things will pass, but Tessa and Sadie snuggled in, licking my face and refusing to be pushed aside. This was only somewhat comforting.

Also, yesterday, I decided to fix the indoor environment. It’s been a chilly 65, even with the struggling gas fire (another pin prick was having to learn how to light it, only partly successfully), which is not a temperature I find hospitable. After reviewing, in my mind (another prick—where were the instructions? Why had no one written them down???), the working of the giant wood-burning stove, I lit a fire in it . . . and discovered that it had been not only cleaned, but evidently re-blacked this summer (prick! prick! prick! prick! prick!). Before I asphyxiated inside (it was happening—I could feel it!), I opened a bunch of windows to the then cleaner outside air, also welcoming in the last of the summer’s flies (prick!), turned on several fans, and took the dogs outside while the poisons filtered out. Unfortunately, the fumes had no effect on the flies (an aside about the flies and killing them—I have smashed so many flies that all the other insects in the house I’ve just let be. The spiders, the moths, a strange beetle.)

A called yesterday morning, and I wrote the next couple paragraphs after her call. The rest of yesterday’s post is relatively obsolete and won’t be published, but this helped open me up for some much-needed person understanding:

A. called from central France this morning to check in—the first time they’ve been able to easily access a land line from which to telephone the States. I had thought that their radio silence might have been either of two things—1) they knew that everything would be fine with me, or 2) they suspected things weren’t and wished to continue their trip in peaceful ignorance. Since what’s really going on here is a combination of 1 and 2 (minus, evidently, their suspicions), it hadn’t occurred to me that the real reason for the lack of a call was simply 3) the difficulty of locating an actual telephone. At any rate, A stated, genuinely, that I was free to call Z to come back and take over, or to leave things with G&N and just extricate myself. They did not begrudge me the new pair of work gloves I bought for myself on their account at The Junction when I went in search of heavy horse salt, 30 minutes driving away.

Their flexibility in the care of their place is one of the reasons I am unbegrudgingly, myself, staying here; I know I could leave. But as I stated before, I care too much, and so I’m stapled here by my own moral judgment. And let me tell you, if you haven’t run afoul of my moral judgment yet, lucky you.

Here are the things that I learned about myself yesterday, which finally clarified and coalesced last night, kind of like head cheese if you’re the home butchering sort. If you’re not, you probably don’t want to imagine what that is.

I have a belief that just because I CAN do something, I MUST do it. I’ve recognized this pattern occasionally for several years, but hadn’t realized just how ingrained it was. It first came to my attention when, desperate to have the house clean before guests arrived, although I hadn’t taken the time to do it myself, I had enlisted the help of my mother. She was downstairs, cleaning my toilet, my mother, when I realized that, ability or not, I needed to hire housecleaners. Just because I could clean toilets didn’t mean that I had to, or even that I should (because I obviously wasn’t)—someone needs that money more than I need that work.

Nothing fundamentally different about that out here: I CAN deal with a lame horse, but does that mean I MUST? Yes, but only a conditional yes. I’ve been missing the “conditional” part: Saying yes to something does not always mean that one must follow through to the bitter end—especially when the parameters change unexpectedly or drastically, especially when there are other options available, and especially if the end is looking to be more bitter than it deserves. Not every agreement is a marriage. Contractors charge for change orders.

So, given all that, why was I still here, and why was I still letting myself feel constantly pricked? Then, then I recognized the shadow side. I saw the arrogance, and what it led to, the martyrdom. I was completely blind to the conditional. I had been acting, believing, not only that if I CAN I MUST, but also that what I can do is going to be better than what someone else will be able to do. That’s when I lost my breath for a moment, and felt, suddenly, deeply ashamed. Who am I to say that my ministrations are the ones that are needed? It’s been pretty clear that Snickers is getting better, even though her treatment is a far cry (prick!) from what the vets originally suggested. My torqued finger is fine this morning. The house is pleasantly warm and fresh-smelling; the flies virtually all dead (I’ve become expert with a swatter).

I am not a perfectionist in my own life, for things that I create for me; I am quite happy to leave errors so that Allah won’t be offended. It has been my habit however, when I take something on for someone else, to assume that they expect perfection of me. That the horse must stand calmly and steadily improve in the dictated manner. That I will be able to fix Sadie, who has licked herself raw out of anxiety—months ago and totally unrelated to me—and continues to do so. That I will leave the house sparklingly clean and all ready for the cold season. That I will finish tending to the tree farm. That I will clear important trails. That I will, in short, be better at caring for this place then K&A, who are not only two people, but are the homeowners, the ones who have set up this life to suit themselves. They are just happy to have me fit into it a little, so that they can have a short break. I may have skills that make me suited to be a temporary chatelaine here; but those skills are not unique, or uniquely necessary.

And therein lies revealed the shadows of arrogance and martyrdom. “I AM TRYING SO HARD TO DO EVERYTHING PERFECTLY!” I scream in my head. “WHY IS IT ALL SO DIFFICULT?!?” and, when offered a reprieve, a way out, I declare that “NO, I’m FINE.”  I will stay here—fighting against myself—and continue to beat up myself about it, and ultimately you, even though I desperately don’t want to hurt ANYONE.

Talk about choking environments.

So, here I’ve been, dizzy and ill, stuck in a whirlpool, rudder fouled by my own lines.

I’m not sure the weather out here, uncannily mimicking my internal struggles, has been anything more than an unrelated coincidence—that would be arrogant—but this morning, when I woke, light of heart, the sky was a clear, bright blue, not a cloud in it. You can see for miles.

N.B. I called Z this morning to see if he could take over before Sunday, and he needs to check with his other responsibility to make sure it’s okay with them, and then he’ll get back to me. I am, truly, perfectly comfortable with whatever happens. And Sikem responded well to me today.

Just When I Thought Everything Was Going So Well

Dogs and I—deciding that “Moderate” levels of air uncleanliness would probably be reduced to almost “High-Normal” in the forest primeval, among the whispering pines and the hemlocks, and all their oxygenation powers—had a spectacular two-hour hike this midday. We drove up to where a Forest Service road—I can’t remember which one and am not currently bothering to look it up—splits off from the Jerome Creek road (which is also one, actually, FS 788), hiked up to Jerome City with its roofless, overgrown log hotel (nothing about it says “hotel” expect for K, once, telling about the place), its heaps of gravel, and its incipient creek. Dogs had a brief wallow in the muddy spring, and we headed up hill, on a trail I’ve ridden before, but it’s been awhile and it’s not that easy to get to with unshod horses.

The air was lovely in the woods, and we all swung along through trails and roads, and finally found a road that I’m pretty sure led to a trail that I’ve been trying to connect with for the last few years. It’s a trail that I rode most recently about 7 years ago? Maybe more? And so, if no one else has been on it, it’s probably vanished. I at least, today, identified the old logging road that led to it, though, so there’s some hope of connecting the two later this week. Why? I don’t know. Because it’s there. It’s outside. It’s with dogs. It’s exploration! And I can’t hear the whinnying gimp, anxious for her grazing herd.

I had put Shadow and Sikem out in the yard the last two days because they’d at least be closer to Snick, and I held her on a lead yesterday and the day before and let her graze in their vicinity while her leg iced, but today when I opened the yard-side gates of their pens, Shadow stepped outside, looked around her, and went back in and stood by her other gate. Nope, she was not interested in being in the yard today, even though there is plenty of graze. I had no idea catering to her whim would become such a problem.

Dogs and I played in the pond for 15 minutes after we returned (Tessa’s return wallow at Jerome City, just before getting back into the car [but not into the house], made her look all the more hog-like. She’s a bit of a fatso, but not like some four-square fat labs—she just looks meaty and bacony) and then, STARVING, I came inside and heated up some tomato soup and made a grilled cheese sandwich. Right as I finished preparing lunch, and was sitting down to eat, Sadie started to grrr at something out on the road, and I heard Snickers begin to whinny, and I looked out and saw the silly thing trotting back and forth in her pen, whinnying and snorting and pooping, throwing her head around, completely disregarding the fact that she is in pain and on bed rest.

Snickers wasn’t even just trotting; she was dressage trotting. She looked like she was dancing. I had not experienced such lightness of foot while riding her, and was surprised and alarmed to watch it in a lame horse. I immediately abandoned my lunch and ran outside. Sadie, it turns out, was barking at someone who had parked a truck and stock trailer in the road just outside our driveway. He was collecting up the last of his free-range cattle before hunting season begins in a week, but the strange, slow, agitated movement of cattle and machinery was very alarming to the resident animals.

 Snickers continued to whinny up the hill where the rest of the herd presumably was having a big party that they hadn’t invited her to, glancing wild-eyed at the road, and really angrily calling to her mates. I had never heard just that quality of whinny before, and so I grabbed Snickers’s halter and went into her stall/pen to collect her and try to calm her down; right as I was finishing up with the buckle of her chin strap (after following her around for several moments trying to get her to stand still), she threw her head up and almost knocked herself out on the eave just above, stumbling around very (obviously) close to me and my ill-chosen footwear (wool Haflingers—I wasn’t in flip flops, at least). I decided that unhooking her lead rope—easier than taking the halter back off—and getting myself out—was probably the best bet. I threw her a flake of hay to distract her.

I retreated to the house and called up W, and we decided that, when I bring in the other horses in about 30 minutes now, I’ll take Snickers back down to her outside pen. If she’s trotting, clearly she can make the walk. Also, if she really has done damage to her tendon (although I am tending, after this afternoon’s display, to believe that much of it was histrionics not unlike that displayed by Italian footballers), maybe she’s been getting too high a dose of the pain killer. We decided that I will not administer tonight’s dose of bute, and that, depending on how she looks in the morning, I will turn out all three horses in a little corral along the creek, where it’s unlikely any of them could get up to much of a gallop. I’m debating about the bandages. I think I’d just have to leave them off, since she’d be walking through water.

I verified the bute and transfer with the vet’s assistant (the vet will be back in tomorrow, and I’ll call to update her then), gave Snickers the rest of her afternoon hay in her bag, and came back in to eat my lukewarm lunch. At least the salt I have to carry back down to the pens is the slightly licked, not quite 50-pound one instead of the new one.

Dogs: two thumbs up!

Horses: meh.

The Last Gasp: A Rant, and A Coming of Age

It’s not hunting season yet here in Jerome Creek; it’s fire season. The area immediately around me here, with all the logging and National Forest land, seems to be relatively well-managed and we haven’t had too much in the way of local fires (I guess there was a small one, about two miles away, that burned for a week or so, but it was out before I got out here). A. had said to the previous house-watcher, Z., that in case of wildfire, open the gate for the horses, take the dogs, and get out. While that is excellent advice, it doesn’t do anything to protect us from the general air quality, which is listed for the weekend as “Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups,” meaning “everyone should limit exertion outdoors” and implying, I suppose, that those such as me, with cancer/pneumonia-scarred lungs, should limit exertion. Full stop.

I suppose, also, that the trail clearing I did for a couple hours yesterday afternoon, frequently sawing with my arm fully extended above my head, and sometimes perched on rotting spars, hanging onto a stronger limb with my non-sawing hand (bathed in sweat under my daypack)—I suppose that counts as “exertion”, and I’ve probably fulfilled my quota for the . . . ever.

By way of comparison, the air quality in Beijing today, as measured by the US Embassy, is listed at 192—which means you’re about to die. Out here, it’s only in the range of 101-150. These numbers are based on some measure of particulate matter as well as, perhaps, the type of particulate matter, but who knows. At any rate, it looks like it would behoove me, as well as my hooved charges, to stay close to home today, and by that I mean inside typing or knitting. Me, that is. The horses can stay out, or penned in, as is the case with Snickers. More about her later.

It’s hard for me to see the sun shining (well, glowing through the haze) and stay inside—being from the Pacific part of the Pacific Northwest means, in general, clean, wet, rainy air—and so no rain means go outside, yes? Yes, for most of the year, although the bowl of the city between two mountain ranges means that, by late August, heavy, filthy air pools over town. Flying in, you watch yourself descending through a dun-yellow layer. The layer was particularly dismaying this fiery September, returning to smoky, smoggy Seattle on the 12^th, after a generous week in the crystalline late-summer air of watery Sweden. The rising sun on the 13^th was End-of-Days Red. It was a bit of a drag being home—like taking a puff on a cigarette. My skin immediately began to feel dirty, my nose stuffy. As I slowly encrusted with a limn of filth, becoming dun colored myself to match my surroundings, I realized how much a creature of water I really am. Coming out here has not made that observation less acute.

Note: I went outside briefly to tend to Snickers and I wore one of my headscarves over my face. I didn’t bring my oxymeter along with me this trip, but I’m definitely staying inside. It’s bad out there.

I have also discovered that I am an aging creature of water—maybe not quite a 300-year-old sturgeon yet, but definitely not 30 anymore. And so, when Snickers immediately came up lame, my first morning here, I was not thrilled to be given yet another opportunity to show off my rancher’s skills.

In the case of Snickers, she was lame with a stone bruise on her right front hoof for a few weeks (?), up until the day K&A left for their trip (Europe, 11 Sept-4 Oct). She was given sturdy shoes on the morning of the 11^th, with pads built in so that the rocky terrain wouldn’t continue to injure her sensitive soles, and then she was turned out with the other horses and went galloping off up the hill—after weeks on stall rest—and K&A left, she went out daily for a week, and on the 19^th when I went to let the horses out, Snickers couldn’t put any weight on her right leg at all.

SIGH.

This is where 1) having some knowledge about horses and 2) loving this family and their animals, are MAJOR inconveniences. I let Shadow and Sikem out, and brought Snickers up to the Garagemahal where I found her last recovery stall still recognizable as a sick-bed: there is a deep, soft layer of sawdust in Sikem’s stall and pen, the nearest one to the house. I stumbled upon wraps—evidence of leg-care—on the work bench in the garage. I gave Snickers some hay, then came inside to call W, K&A’s daughter in Seattle, who knows the place in and out and is also comfortable issuing directives about her parents’ animals. We decided to have the vet in.

To sum up: Snickers’s right foot seems to be fine, although with a slightly suspicious swelling in a spot on the coronet (just above the hoof). This could be related to a deeply cystic stone bruise; it could be nothing. Her tendon between the pastern (ankle) and the knee (knee), however, is swollen and sore. To help her heal, she is having both front legs wrapped (note: by me), with big puffy bandages and leg-wrapping material, that I’ve had to tape on because the wraps don’t have Velcro or anything else (I had to go in search of tape). Snickers was not happy to hear the startling sound of duct tape unrolling under her belly the first night. These bandages are essentially support hose.

Twice a day, although for my own peace of mind it’s going to be once a day, she gets a cold-pack for 15-20 minutes, which means unwrapping and wrapping and unwrapping and wrapping her right leg.

(An aside: Tessa just farted a BIG ONE in the kitchen. I feel that that is, truly, the final insult. I can’t go outside; and now I’m about to expire inside as well. Stupid dogs.)

Since Snickers is in a stall, I have to feed her morning and evening, and it’s better to feed her from a bag, which hangs and she doesn’t have to bend down, putting more pressure on her front legs. The bag was difficult to find, but I did find it after about an hour. It also takes me about 5 minutes to feed in a hay bag, instead of 20 seconds to chuck hay over the side of the stall. Today I have to toss down another bale of hay from the loft (I think these are smallish, 75-pound bales, but I haven’t tried to move one yet), which I’m sure is going to freak the horse out. I’m thinking I’ll try and toss it out onto the driveway . . .

The water in the barn is turned off, for some reason, so I had to go search out hoses with which to fill her water tank every day (note: her water is also Spackle’s favorite outside drinking water source.). I had to bring salt up from the outdoor pens (about 45 pounds left in the 50-pound block) which meant I had to go into town and buy more salt for the pens. That was fine, however, because I also had to go into town for the medication that I have to administer 2Xday. I had tried to get the oral injectable version, which is like a big syringe of worming goop that you squirt behind the molars, but the vet was out so I ended up with an orange-flavored powder (the vet: “Orange, yeah. Horses don’t eat oranges, so I’m not sure about that.”) that I have to mix with syrup and grain (so the powder sticks, and so she’ll eat it). This is messy, and the powder is “not to be used on horses meant for human consumption”, which, the way it appeared in two lines on the jar, made me think at first that they were saying “Not to be used on horses; Meant for human consumption.” This was briefly confusing for the internal linguist, but I figured it out. Note to readers: do not ever eat Snickers, horse-version. She’s had a lot of bute.

AND, finally, because she’s now in a stall, I need to scoop poop every day and because she’s much closer to the house with all her poop, the flies have come back. I’ve probably killed at least 60 flies inside in the last 4 days. This starts to get disgusting, after a while.

I’m not sure if I’m done listing ALL THE THINGS I HAVE TO DO, but I’ve gotten very bored with it and so I’m going to stop. I was feeling quite resentful of K&A yesterday, that I was out here doing A LOT of work, when really all I wanted to do was ride, wander, and write—at Shadow’s pace, which has slowed considerably this year, as I’d wished for mine to do as well. But the fact is, K&A are going to be SO GLAD that I was here, and SO SORRY anyway, that I had to deal with all this, and they are wonderful, dear people who have enriched my life in immeasurable ways. So, much as I am tired of the hassle and covered with dirt and smoke, inside and out, and disappointed that this visit isn’t the vacation in paradise that I have come to expect—although, part of my previous definition of paradise INCLUDED being able to solve problems difficult for the standard housesitter, and that definition is clearly changing—even though all of that is true, I am unbegrudging in my care for these animals and this place. I, too, am VERY GLAD that I am the one here right now.

But . . . as Shadow ages, and as K&A age, and as I age . . . my standard of spending weeks here, year after year, is coming to a close. I could see another, shorter trip next June, maybe, when conditions are the perfect blend between wet and dry; and a long weekend in the late fall, maybe for a couple more years . . . but life is moving on for all of us who love it out here.

Two valuable lessons that have come from Jerome Creek: I will happily rent out my pastureland to livestock owners who will be entirely in charge of their livestock. Also, I will buy a grand piano long before I’ll buy a horse. I think Ian will go along with me on these. 

Stringing Me Along

The last time I was in Stockholm several parts of my life were unraveling, and all the silky, curly yarn from Gotland sheep was not going to be enough to knit me back together. Ian and I had been traveling for three and a half months in limbo, having sold our cars and rented our house; our tie to Seattle and home was the first loosening thread. Through the summer, throughout Europe, we were continuing the process of procuring visas to move to New Zealand (note: although we refer to this time of our lives as “when we moved to New Zealand,” the process of visa acquisition ultimately ground to a lengthy, bitter, fatal end, and the move never actually happened.).

The first three months of summer 2007 were relatively laid-back as travel goes; three weeks in Greece, a couple in Scotland, and about five in Portugal (including 10 restfully domestic days at a loaner house on the Atlantic coast), punctuated with a glamorous weekend in Ravello, Italy, some stops in London (new friends!), a quick trip to Phoenix, AZ—me—and Oxford, UK—Ian (where we had completely opposite meteorological experiences).

And then we went on to the Baltics. We hadn’t been to the Baltics before, and so we became, for two weeks, true back packers, traveling from Riga to Šiauliai to Kihnu and back, staying no place longer than a night or two, and moving on with, in my case at least, about 70 pounds of gear lugged front and back (I don’t travel lightly for a week; of course I needed an entire household for four months). Not surprisingly, this was exhausting for mid-30-somethings, particularly me, whose health was another of the increasingly errant threads. 

By the time we reached Sweden, we were spent. The language, even though my linguistics graduate-school friend G had created a brilliant workbook for us to help us begin to learn it—or at least say please and thank you and excuse me—seemed as opaque to me as Sanskrit. Some family members met us at Arlanda upon our arrival and we drove north, to Härnosand, where G and his lovely wife A were living at the time. I’ll conclude this multi-paragraph introduction/background by saying that, by the time we all left G&A and reached Stockholm, for the end of our trip, that family tie was unknotting as well.

Jump forward just over five years, and it turns out that Swedish, although still virtually incomprehensible to me in spoken form, is a Germanic language with tons of cognates recognizable (in printed form) to seasoned travelers (one being a dilettante linguist) with backgrounds in English and German. Also, every Swede we talked to spoke easily intelligible English. G&A are now residents (at least part-time) of Södermalm, Stockholm’s hippest neighborhood (it reminds me a lot of Park Slope and environs in Brooklyn), and G gave us an exhaustive (and really tiring, as we were still not quite over our jet lag) tour when we first arrived from Lysekil, and the next day with A home the four of us continued our tour with a 6-hour circuit of much of their island (punctuated with stops for coffee and lunch).

Set free on Monday and Tuesday, Ian and I did our best to shore up the (it would seem already relatively strong) economy of Sweden by hemorrhaging money for clothes of the knitted and work-wear styles, effortlessly traversing the city on clean, frequent buses, shown the way by helpful locals, as G and A went about their respective jobs in Uppsala and Falun (university professors both). It was a tremendous intellectual pleasure to spend time with G (and without the soporific effects of long-term Amelia friendship, which I’d necessarily cut off before international travel).

This last week many of those old threads and a couple new ones—combined with the glow of Stockholm in late summer—knitted back together into an exquisitely detailed, warm, intricate, and stimulating cloak of many colors. Stockholm is one of the most attractive, easily toured cities I’ve ever been to, and spending a few days there helped me weave together my evolving understanding of home, health, and family; just as I stitched in the ends of my latest hat on my return flight. Home is wherever I am. I love Seattle; but I have become a global citizen.

Pictures from Lysekil

We go to Stockholm this morning, back to mass transit and city bustle. Please enjoy pictures of glowing air and shining water here.

Lysekil, Sweden

Contrary to how it appears to be pronounced if you're a native English speaker--an elided, furtively mumbled version of License to Kill--the name of the town is actually pronounced something more like "Lees-uh-sheeul", with the "sheeul" part said deep in the back of the throat. Swedish, as spoken, is definitely a language I have little experience with.

We're here at this resort town--about 1 month post-summer season (and yes, it's 7 Sept)--for Ian to teach another course in AD Model Builder, a stock assessment software that was originally developed (I believe) by one of his PhD advisors, and which he has now taught in Chile and Japan, as well as here. I, of course, given any opportunity to fling myself out into the world beyond Seattle, am here to . . . well . . . be here.

It turns out that Lysekil at this time of year is a perfect place to clear out any sort of gunks, cobwebs, old habits, and thought patterns that have long since lost any value and are just circling tiredly around the same decaying mind-tracks. That's true, at least, if nature can get into your psyche, and let me tell you, it can.

It is starkly bright in the day times here, with a blinding white-gold sun, glinting off sparklingly clean buildings and streets. The streets also sparkle because of the high quartz content of the locally produced paving stones. Walking with Ian and his co-teacher, A, to the Institut every morning is a bit like walking along a path strewn with diamonds. Even with my sunnies on, I'm squinting a lot.

The light may be so dazzling because of the latitude and time of year--58 degrees north, approaching the equinox, whereas Seattle is about 47 degrees (equal with Munich, for some perspective)--but the atmosphere is also shockingly clear. There are not many people up here, and not any industry, and no hint of pollution. The sun stabs right through not only the sunnies and the clothes, but flesh and bone and long-held secrets.

It has also been, except for a delicious few hours yesterday morning, windy. Really windy. Like, blow your knit stocking cap off your head windy. In part, for me, that's because I've decided to let my hair grow back and see what state it's in, and so it's too long to act like Velcro with my hats any more and instead is like fine, slippery threads of silk, but really it's the wind. Once the sun has exposed your innermost fears and shames, the wind races in to scour everything clean.

We're on a peninsula here at the mouth of a fjord opening into a branch of the North Sea. One characteristic of fjords is that they tend to be shallow at the mouth and deep up inside, because the glaciers that formed them, when they finally melted, left all sorts of debris near the sea. What's left of the land after that ice age bulldozing, at least here, are rounded granite hillocks, deeply veined with pink and orange and silvery quartz. An enterprising man in Lysekil's history quarried much of the stone for building in the town; fortunately, his wife recognized the beauty and uniqueness of the area and got him to stop, leaving a nature preserve at the very tip of our peninsula. I spent yesterday morning's calm meandering along the shoreline and up over the tops of these mounds.

The clarity of the water and the abundance of light make it possible to see deep down, to waving grasses and tiny fish. There are hardly any barnacles on the rocks, very few mussels that I've seen, and occasional schools of teeny fish, but the richness of sea life along the rocky shores in the Pacific Northwest is almost completely un-duplicated here. I finally made the connection by the end of my meander yesterday--by some weird aquatic physics, there is no tide to speak of, and so no inter-tidal zone, and the pools of water shining amongst the granite mounds are either from spray (when the wind blows, it blows water), or from the occasional downpours (the third arm of the cleansing atmosphere is torrential rain). We asked someone at the celebratory feast last night if she knew anything about why there were no tides--it's not a lake; it's not the Mediterranean--and she said "I really don't know anything about tides. We don't have tides here; I never thought about it."

Earth is a fascinating place.

The Anti 9-to-5

Being out in Idaho is different this time. In part, I was here relatively recently, in the middle of the depths of winter (even though it was March), and I didn’t ride horses at all then, so maybe I’m out of the habit. I’ve only ridden twice in the 6 days I’ve been here—a far cry from one visit, long ago, when I was here for three weeks and rode a horse every single day—yes, 21 days in a row. I hold that summer in my mind as one of my pinnacles of happiness. It’s that memory, as well as other beliefs I have about myself and horses, that make me feel I’ve been lazy here, only riding Shadow because I don’t have to saddle her, and her only once since K&A took off Wednesday.

The weather is different this year though, as well.  It has been non-conducive to riding—the parts of riding where you have to wear long pants, and sit on a hot back, or a hot saddle, and chafe your hot under parts—with temperatures in the upper 80s and humidity (which is rare here) to match. Contrarily, it will be a lovely temperature—around 70—but then there have been accompanying Heavenly Histrionics (thunder, lightning, rain, and hail), that have made it very clear that inside is the correct place for Girl and Dogs.

Dogs. That’s another thing, obviously. No Hoover. I think Sadie is sad. Only because I’m here, of course, because I’m supposed to have brought him along; I’m sure she’s relieved for the lack of Hoover in day-to-day life. He packed a punch of energy and excitement about things though, that dog, and we’re sort of rudderless out here without him—not that he was much of a straight-line sailor. One impetus for me getting on a horse before was Hoover needing and wanting all the exercise he could get. As it is right now, these three dogs, even Sadie, are fine with whatever I’m doing without horses, and seem to be okay with my limitations. Which are definitely not confining—yesterday, which was 70 degrees AND clear—the perfect day to ride—I just didn’t feel like bothering. And so instead, we took a hike (over an hour) in the morning, and then another one  (maybe another 2 hours) in the afternoon—lots of time outdoors, none of it saddling a horse (Sikem) who would have to be convinced that going out was fun, anyway. And I know he’d like it once we were out—just as I would—but I didn’t have enough oomph to chivvy us both. 

Tessa is a complete stinkerpants at the moment—really, really smelly. She was, a moment ago, lying in a pool of sun near my feet . . . and then her milk-chocolate coat started to heat up, and the next thing I knew the batty ghosts of an abattoir were wafting around my head with sunken eyes and ragged wings. Fortunately, the dog got up and moved across the room before I passed out. In the summer when she’s out a lot, Tessa supplements her food with any stinky thing she finds lying about—horse or cow shit, and probably worse things. She smells like it.

I do have a framework here—the Anti Nine-to-Five Job, , so it’s not like we wander aimlessly all day. In the morning right after I get up I let out horses and feed dogs, then I go up the hill and check on other horses, and pigs, and chickens, and cats (I swear, those two cats must spend all night long in their litter boxes—I mean, really, seven poops and pees in EACH BOX overnight? For only two average-sized cats? I haven’t owned cats as an adult, but is that normal?). Then I come back home, have breakfast, and the day—well, about 8 hours of it before everyone gets brought in and fed again—stretches before us, a blank slate. Possibilities for activities are, of course, endless, but our focuses here including knitting a cashmere cap that I can wear while I’m still virtually bald; writing on various subjects, reading likewise; hiking; horseback riding; cooking; driving around the neighborhood; N’s piano (really out of tune, sadly), sunbathing; farm amusements (fixing gates and fences, fetching with dogs in the pond, etc.). Evening events include food prep and eating, chats with Ian when he’s within cell range, and the potential for video watching. So far, the video potential hasn’t been realized.

It really is summer vacation out here—slow, sultry, few requirements except reading. It’s giving me a lot of time to reflect on just what I do want to do, at this point in my life, almost 40, and mellowing out. 

Dessert!

one-fingered on my phone

Yep, Vegas BABY.

This has been, so far, the perfectly right place for me to be. I'm a little drunk right now, appropriately, because I just had a Manhattan with Maker's 46, which I assume is specially aged or something, upgraded for free at the bar where I've been eating my solitary, absolutely delicious, dinners. "It's smoother," said the bartender, who grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, and was a teacher for some time before realizing he could make ten times a much tending bar at the Mandalay Bay.  The fancy Maker's and the two cherries certainly made a very lovely dessert.

It turns out that, if you're alone, people chat with you, tell you stories about themselves, ask you what you do. I have yet to tell anyone that the bulk of what I spend my time on is cancer abatement and management, and I've enjoyed being just a slightly odd hotel guest.

I walked 4 miles to a Barnes and Noble today, for example (evidently really odd, not just slightly), and discovered that the wasteland that is Las Vegas isn't just confined to the Strip and all its casinos and crowds, but is multi-layered and complex, with not only hundreds of families and small children about (the "beach" here is shoulder to shoulder tipsy humanity and its offspring), but also tract after tract of barren, trash-strewn desert (and occasional trash-strewn, empty canals).

And yet, as a lone traveler, I'm far from ignored, and I have to admit, the weather that I was desperate for, has been hugely in evidence. Ah, the warmth!

I'm so glad I don't go home until Wednesday.

one-fingered on my phone

Wherein I Begrudgingly Admit That Jerome Creek in March is Not Entirely Devoid of Value

The first thing I’ve discovered since returning home is that I seem to be back up to a pretty good level of fitness after my China Flu.  This, I am sure, would’ve taken much longer if I’d been in my own house, with only my two dogs (or even only Spackle, which I did when Ian was in Hawaii during my recovery). I would’ve left them to their own devices, or at most given them nominal walks, just enough so that Spackle could poop outside his yard (Hoover is, alas, much less fastidious). But with four dogs, two of whom are high-energy indoor wrasslers if not properly exercised (and I have yet to exercise them too much, even if my estimates of them running up to 60 miles in a day are correct), I really would only get peace if I wore them out. Yes, this wore me out too for the first couple days, but by the end of the week, I could charge up a hill at a fast clip for much longer without getting short of breath. And my riding lesson yesterday, even the day after chemo and Herceptin, was fun and a workout, and pretty much like my lessons were BC (before China). So, yes, my week-long boot camp did my body good.

Also, Seattle’s spring is advanced somewhat in vegetation and temperature (no freezes at night anymore, although the days are not as warm as many days last week in Idaho), but by no means dry, and I learned last week that I am not, it turns out, the Wicked Witch of the West. I can get wet without melting. And so Ian and I put on boots and rain jackets today and drove the dogs up to Carkeek Park, which has a lovely, steep woods criss-crossed with trails and few dogs (and those we encountered just went right on by while Hoover made a fool of himself. And, I suppose, us.). Spackle is much more lively in the woods, as I believe pounding the pavement is hard on his hips. And Hoover can roam a little on his expando leash. Ian and I plan to continue taking advantage of Seattle’s excellent outlying parks, for our own good too.

And, I was given a good opportunity to examine my rose-tinted future plans for home and farm on Orcas. Do I really want horses of my own, let alone other livestock? There are seasons on Orcas as well as on Jerome Creek.  Am I interested enough in horses that I want to ride them several days a week to keep them fit and healthy? There’s a lot more involved in getting a horse ready to go than leashing up a dog. Even two dogs. And/or do the work to get the horses back in shape every summer if I give them a few months off? Further, do I really think there will be a time when I will no longer be interested in weeks’-long overseas travel? And that I would be young enough when I’m done with travel to still reasonably own horses? If there’s anything I’ve been learning about myself lately, it’s that I am not currently interested in doing one thing all the time. Dogs are relatively portable, and compared to horses, relatively cheap (well, Hoover so far is).

Lastly, sun is important to me, which I knew, but it’s become important enough that I now know I will need access to it regularly throughout the year, not just 6 weeks of Seattle’s glorious summer. I may not always choose Las Vegas as a retreat, but I’m looking forward to being completely anonymous poolside for a couple days. And completely warm.

So, thank you K&A, you have again done me a huge favor in letting me be the supervisor of your peerless domain.  

Last Wintry Jerome Creek Pics Posted

I posted the remainder of the slightly more interesting pictures of my Jerome Creek stay, with captions. The last six pics are a series, taken almost every day that I was there.  Hoo boy golly am I looking forward to that sun in 10 days.

https://picasaweb.google.com/nilact/JeromeCreekMarch2012?authkey=Gv1sRgCObJxL20w8eObA#

Vegas, Baby!

I have decided to take my need for sun into my own hands, and yesterday I booked an Alaska Airlines Vacation package to Las Vegas. I’m going to be staying for 3 nights at the Mandalay Bay Resort, which has 9 (NINE!) pools, including a wave pool, a water park, and, as Ian pointed out when I told him of my plans, a million-gallon shark tank full of interesting Selachimorpha. But, as he said, it’s MY trip, not his, so I only have to go look at the sharks if I want to.  One interesting things about having been married for more than 10 years is that I’m planning to go have a look at the sharks simply because I can’t tell anymore if I would like it, or if Ian’s likes are now so deeply embedded that I can no longer tell the difference between his and mine in some cases. Anyway, it looks like the weather will be in the upper 70s (hot for a Northwesterner steeped for months in 42-degree rain, with cubes of blistering cold thrown in for spice), and I will have no one and nothing to distract me from full hedonistic egotism.

There will be no bills to pay, or taxes to figure out, or endless tidying to do. I won’t have to cook or clean up after myself. There will be no dogs to walk, or hike with, or have to manage in any way. No muddy footprints--after THOUSANDS OF THEM. There will not even be an Ian, although considering how little time we’ve spent together in the last couple months (me in China and him in Mexico, then him in Hawaii, then me here in Idaho, then, now, me heading off to Vegas), I’m not sure I remember any longer just how much, and what type, of management my relationship with him takes.  But I’m sure it’s something, and I’m equally sure that 2 ½ days to be warm and completely self-indulgent will go far toward recharging my dangerously taxed internal reserves.

And then I can go back home, refreshed, and let Ian and the dogs indulge me more.

Demoralized

Last night it POURED rain most of the night. At 8:00am when I got out of bed, it was gray and dismal outside my window, with the hillside mostly brown, and the temperature hovering just over 30. Okay, so, not AWESOME, but not bad.

By the time I was dressed, however, about 2 minutes later, it had started to snow. Again. Heavily.

My limbs felt leaden as I pulled my rain pants on this morning, preparing to let the horses out into the mess. I noted that the rain I’d heard in the night had, in fact, caused the water in both White Trash Creek and Jerome Creek to rise by several feet, and I wondered, not completely idly, if I should park my car on the other side of both the bridges leading out of the yard. They look pretty sturdy, but then, this IS, by all accounts, a particularly wet spring (okay, I made that up. But by MY account it SUCKS.).

The mostly brown hillside outside my bedroom window is slowly turning white again. After China, this is just insulting.

I don’t think I can wait until July 5 for summer to begin in the PNW. I’m looking at a long weekend away to Vegas, which is pretty much the exact opposite of where I am now, and where I can have a pool to lie beside.

That’s how bad it is.


To add to my distress, I took a picture of raging White Trash Creek in the snowstorm, and even though Blogger and Picasa are both Google products, they don't speak to each other. They claim they are going to, but they don't. And so if you want to see what it looks like here today, you can't just look at it on this blog. You have to take an extra step and go here. 

Better

Before I go into how today is a better day (still no horses, aside from rubbing long, dense wisps of hair from Shadow’s rump as she tore into her morning hay), I want to add a postscript to my post about Sadie. Last night for dinner, after having eaten nothing all day, including the little cheese heart I gave her when I left for the morning, she again turned up her nose and made no attempt to eat her food, the presence of other dogs having absolutely no effect on her. No, she had devised a new plan for their, and MY, as it turned out, mortification: she got me to put a serving spoonful of lamb stew onto her dinner, in the presence of the other dogs. Then she deigned to eat.

Having been sufficiently shamed last night, it was a simple act for me this morning to add another scoop of soup, this time fortified with rice (my own dinner last night was quite tasty and filling), to Sadie’s bowl, without even attempting to get her to eat beforehand. However, I pulled one over on her by giving Spackle an equal scoop of soup on HIS breakfast.

I am so whipped.

Today has been a better day, though, because I slept much better last night then I have since arriving here. There weren’t any whumps off the roof in the night, as it hasn’t snowed enough again to cover the roof, and so there were no panicked barks from Tessa on the porch. Spackle has made it clear that he doesn’t want to worry about a long, slippery span of stairs at night with tired hips and so stayed on his bed down here without me worrying about him, and Hoover kept me company upstairs in the guest room. I woke at 7:30 rested instead of resentful, and enjoyed the trudge/slog/wade over the hill to Maple Creek Meadow. Someone’s been doing some logging over there, and there are a couple large piles of shorn timber waiting for a melt. And then a dry. So, several months from now.

There is another sound I had to learn to identify, before it scared me too much when I’m out in the wilderness alone with 4 dogs (who are a dubious comfort). For the first couple days, the sound kept making me think of Yetis, or creatures from another dimension stepping in and out of mine: a subtle, broad sound of snow being crushed, or stepped on, by a massive foot just behind me and often to the side, and out of range of my peripheral vision. Freaky, no?

This is what I think is going on: as the days lengthen and warm, the ground has been thawing and water running under the drifts of melting snow, and creeks, puddles, even ponds are forming between the snow and the earth. At night, when the temperature again drops to well below freezing, the underside of the snow drifts refreezes, although in a somewhat different place, perhaps an inch above the earth, than it had been. As I tramp around through pristine meadows, I occasionally step where this underlayer hasn’t yet melted again, and a series of fractures races out from my foot, like throwing a rock into a lightly frozen pond or through a window. Those fractures allow the heavy, wet snow to settle, sometimes over quite a large area.

It is preternaturally silent out here, in this place where the subtle sounds of my digestion can send sleeping dogs leaping up, barking hysterically at the door. Not a good place for the paranoid.

Diva

Sadie sure knows how to work the system for maximum attention—when SHE wants it. She is also good at taking herself out of the mix when she doesn’t want attention anymore, going and lying down on her bed on the back porch, or standing pointedly at the door there if it’s closed.

She is an Australian Shepherd, not a Lab, and so tends to be, or would like to be thought, a dainty eater. Working under the assumption that she, the delicate, pretty, sensitive thing needs protection from the ravening competition, wolfing down its food and then turning to her and breathing hot stinky breath down her neck as they hover over her food, K&A tend to feed her in the kitchen, away from the other dogs.

This seems to work well enough when it’s just Sadie and Tessa, because Tessa can be fed on the porch or outside, and in five seconds when she’s done, she can come back in, but there are people around who can help Sadie protect her food long enough to eat it (up to some hours or not at all, if you, as the person, get tired of waiting for her and simply take it away). “She doesn’t like to have the other dogs around,” says A, and I used to believe her. Not so much anymore.

For the last three mornings that I’ve fed the dogs, Sadie has wandered around the kitchen studiously avoiding her bowl while the Labs are gluttoning outside. The moment the Labs are let back onto the porch, Sadie goes on the alert. The Labs all know that her food is off limits, though, and have known it for a long time, and so they pretty much ignore her. This does not suit her at all, and she gives a sharp bark to draw their attention to her full bowl, because up until now she has not eaten one bite. Hoover or Tessa, more willing than Spackle to eat things that aren’t theirs, will come into the kitchen to investigate, at which point Sadie puts one paw in her bowl, bares her teeth, and snarls. She then slowly, delicately, begins her meal.

Sadie eats one piece at a time, chewing carefully, taking her time, gauging the reaction of her audience. There is no danger of her throwing up a stomach full of not only undigested, but mostly unchewed food. She is a chewer. It’s more frustrating for the other dogs that way. When the one-piece-at-a-time method gets boring for the observer, who still knows that the human in the room will help Sadie finish her meal, and the observer wanders away, Sadie issues another sharp bark, and someone else comes gamely in to watch. This time, Sadie removes food from her bowl, three pieces at a time, and drops it on the floor next to the bowl. The predator Lab looks to the human for permission, at this point, to eat those pieces. After all, they’re not in the bowl. But no, they are still Sadie’s, and she eats them carefully, smugly, one at a time, chewing completely each piece. This demoralizes the Labs more than anything a human could do.

Thursday evening and yesterday morning I fed Spackle and Sadie together in the kitchen, since I’d changed Spackle’s food, and thought perhaps he’d chew better if he himself wasn’t dogged by Tessa and Hoover, but mostly he was distracted by being in the kitchen, and when he wasn’t wolfing, he was wandering, at which point Sadie immediately launched herself at HIS bowl, not at all above stealing herself if offered an opportunity to do so, which I assume she never had been before. I had to point Spackle back to his bowl and Sadie back to hers multiple times.

This morning, Spackle half-heartedly ate his food, but Sadie wasn’t interested in hers at all, even when the other dogs came back in, and so she’ll get it for dinner. She did have the runs on the walk today (wasn’t that pretty on the snow!), and I probably have been giving treats slightly more than the farm dogs are used to, so Sadie probably didn’t need the calories. We’ll see how dinner goes in about an hour.

Her behavior is not limited to mealtimes, however; after we returned from our trudge today I gave each dog a tiny rawhide stick. The Labradors each found a comfortable bed to lie on and munched until their sticks, within two minutes, were gone. Sadie wandered through the kitchen and dining room, hers in her mouth like a cigarillo, and would not sit down. Kit, K&A’s useta dog (a designation I accidentally coined long ago trying to describe a former dog of my mother’s, who used to be around), would take rawhide out and bury it in the manure pile; I actually saw a piece retrieved once, and it was the strangest translucent, rubbery, rectangular thing dangling from Kit’s teeth. Anyway, I was trying to forestall the treat burial, so for a couple minutes I wouldn’t let Sadie outside. But then I relented, told her it was a gift for her, and she could do with it what she chose. She trotted outside and I closed the door.

Less than a minute later, she gave a peremptory bark, and Hoover gamely got off his bed and went to the door. I opened it to see if Sadie wanted to come in, but no, she wanted Hoover to go out. I guess she showed him where she stashed her rawhide, but she wouldn’t give it to him, so after a couple desultory minutes he gave a bark to come back in. Sadie, after another minute or two, barked again, and this time came back in when I opened the door and went to her bed, rawhide-free.

After another short time, Hoover got up and asked to be let out. Sadie immediately ran to the door, pushed him aside, and preceded him through, reappearing with her rawhide in her mouth again, looking askance at Hoover. “Okay,” I said, amused with, but also bored of this drama, “you can have this another time,” and I took the rawhide from Sadie and put it on top the fridge with her breakfast.

All dogs are now snoring in blissful, exhausted peace. 

Trudgery

So . . . after three days of working my sweaty way over white and melting, then crunchily ice-limned, then slushy, and occasionally just muddy, ground, I have decided that early spring is not a time I like to be in Northern Idaho. All I can do with the horses is watch them walk by (or groom them, which I may do tonight, although, meh), and yet the dogs need huge amounts of exercise ANYWAY, and they seem to need it from me (i.e. an audience is necessary), and so there I am, hobbling and crunching and sliding my way up and down wet, snowy hills, wearing snowshoes that occasionally become splatchers. I know it’s excellent exercise for the dogs, particularly Spackle, who really has to use his aging and somewhat debilitated hips, and who is obviously enjoying himself so much that the struggle isn’t a struggle. It’s all fun for him.  Hoover launched himself into barbed wire today and yelped like a puppy, but got himself out (which was good because it would’ve taken me at least ten minutes to plow through the 25 feet of drifts separating us—that’s the distance, not the depth, which is almost embarrassingly small for the amount of effort it requires.). He left drops of blood in the snow if he stood still long enough, but as that happened a total of one times during our outing, and the rest of the time he was leaping about, I decided not to worry.

It was bright out today, too—not sunny per se, enough to actually use sunnies—and much of what I see in the brightness are some floaters in my right eye, resulting from the injection of Decadron I had there two weeks ago. I don’t really notice the floaters when I’m inside, or when I’m looking at colors, but they are QUITE obvious against a backdrop of pure, glowing white. Plus (I’m looking out the dining room window right now), as the snow ages it becomes discolored—by mud, but also by pile after pile of dog poop and seemingly endless piss holes in the snow. It’s not pretty.

For the first time that I can remember, I am feeling much more like I’m doing K&A a favor than that they are doing me one by letting me be out here. But that’s okay—I am thrilled that they get to go to Australia for the first time ever, and I really am one of the best, if not THE best, person to care for this place in their absence. And Hoover’s continuous joy out here, regardless of whether or not horses are involved, does give me (however begrudgingly) joy as well.

But don’t expect another series of posts from here (this series will continue) until June at the earliest.

White or Wet?

Yes. Both white AND wet. This is the earliest in the year that I’ve come to Jerome Creek, and it’s snowing, but it’s only just hovering around freezing, and the ground is so super-saturated that White Trash Creek, normally a narrow, gravelly, dry ditch bisecting the yard, is a raging torrent of 33-degree water. It snowed during my last darkening hour of drive out here on Wednesday evening, from 7pm to 8pm and Colfax to here; it continued to snow through yesterday morning; and even though it stopped for much of the day yesterday, it started up again last night, and is falling now. K&A were THRILLED to be getting away from it to head off to Australia for a couple weeks, and I can understand why. This winter was not one in which I spent many long days soaking up the sun in the southern hemisphere (Kenya in November and December was pretty chilly, actually, for being an equatorial place), and I’m feeling, like most Northwesterners, as if I’ve been huddled under a damp rock for several months: stiff from the cold, half-alive, moldy, and blue-pale. My friend L charmingly pointed out my silvering temples at lunch Wednesday before I hit the road, and I realized that my latest haircut had removed the last blond ends from my hair, thus removing the last gray-hair camouflage from my year of sun, Nov 09-Nov 10, when I spent northern winters in the southern sun of Valparaiso, the Seychelles, and Australia, and of course northern summers back home. It turns out I like having a tan, and baby-blond hair. And a marrow-deep warmth.

Dogs and I had a long, slow slog through the snow yesterday, which was not without its joys (I will be posting pics on Picasa), particularly for them. Sadie kept thrusting her snout deep into the snow, presumably searching for ground squirrels just like in the summer. Hoover ran hither and thither, seemingly in slow motion as he flowed through the snow like a dolphin, arching in and out of drifts. Spackle and Tessa lumbered around, large Labrador grins on their faces. Tessa threw herself to the ground in several places and gave herself serious backrubs, and even though the ground was 99.99% white, managed to come home with a mousse of something smelly giving her neck a spikey style. Spackle had not done well with yesterday’s slightly different breakfast food, puking it all up (much of it un-chewed) before we took our walk, but he seemed to have enough energy for our outing. All dogs have been MUCH more sedate this morning (particularly Tessa, who had a long night of warning us about invaders as snow warmed and slid off the metal roof).

I did make a trip in to Moscow yesterday to replace Spackle’s lamb, rice, AND VEGETABLE food with pure lamb and rice, which is what he eats at home and what he tolerates most easily, and I managed to buy an awesome pair of Wrangler’s at Tri-State, Idaho’s Most Interesting Store. Spackle managed to keep down both dinner and, so far, breakfast, so I’m hopeful I won’t have any more huge piles of puke to clean up. I won’t be doing any riding until I can at least see a road surface, so everyone keep your fingers crossed for some sun!

Photos here.

Death Warmed Over (but not by much)

The first half of my time in China was cold—COLD—like I thought I would die just going outside. I was a walking advertisement for Smartwool, or would’ve been if the Smartwool actually kept me warm. Certainly I wore a lot of it. My typical outfit was ski socks, long underwear, jeans, faux fur knee-high boots, a tank top, a long-sleeved shirt, a sweater (or two, either short or long), an almost-full-length Patagonia down sleeping bag with the hood up over a handknitted scarf wrapped around my neck and around my face, a handknitted hat, and mittens that I both knitted and lined with fleece.  My palms, in an attempt to heat up my body, I guess, were sweaty pretty much 24/7—which meant that my mittens started to get damp, which meant that my hands sweated more and my mittens got damper. There was not a single other piece of me that sweated AT ALL, though, for the first half of the trip, even on our hike up Black Mountain to the aerie-like temple on top.

So I just reread (scanned) my first entry about China and see that I already talked about my typical outfits, and how cold it was. Yeah. Well, it was cold.

Anyway, midway through my trip, the day we left Dalian for Beijing, the air quality (which had been lovely and clear for the first several days) went south the way I’d been expecting it to from the start—the vistas from the penthouse faded into murky distance, the sun turned orange at midday, and I began to feel tight about the chest. S also felt tight about the chest, and we decided that, indeed, the air was bad.

Alas, we were only partly right.

We were SICK, and as our days in Beijing progressed through the chill of national monuments and open-air markets, we got sicker. And China is not a place you want to be sick. As my chest filled with grit and phlegm and I hacked my way through successive tourist stops, sucking on green tea and heated BPAs from the plastic cups and straws, I asked about codeine. “Nope,” said S. “Pain killers are illegal in China. Even after surgery. For surgery, you get a local anesthetic; when they send you home, you can take aspirin but that’s it.” No codeine cough syrup for me, then, and so my nights were spent sitting up in bed against my pillow, taking Tylenol PM and clonazepam that I’d brought myself, and eating through a tin of Fisherman’s Friends, trying to rest. When my fever reached 101 I started the antibiotics I’d been clever enough to request before leaving Seattle; but all the Levaquin did was give me explosive diarrhea and lingering joint twinges in my hands.

Levaquin, by the way, is a scary antibiotic: its side-effects can cause death, and you’re supposed to seek medical attention immediately if you have any of the severe ones. That’s comforting in China. I stopped taking it after two doses. I won’t take it again.

The runs aren’t fun ever, but some of the peculiarities of public facilities in China made my runs so ridiculously inconvenient as to be almost humorous. Or at least that’s what I kept telling myself. There are a lot of public toilets around, which is great. They are universally unheated, however, which is sucky, and they are almost universally squats, which are facilities you want to be really careful with ANYWAY when you’re wearing 17 layers of clothes and thick coats that you need to hold out of the way. Adding diarrhea adds the comedy. Or at least the resignation. In the hutongs, where we ate our Peking Duck lunch (yum!) and where our hostel was situated (blessedly updated, as I’ll get to), the public facilities consist of 4 or 5 squats all in a row—no heat, no paper—but also NO SEPARATION BETWEEN SQUATS. That’s right, Ladies and Gentlemen, whatever you have to put into that hole, you put in publicly.  C and S said on more than one occasion that I was the only person they knew who could really handle the situation. I just figured I didn’t have a choice. The WC (as it was signed) closest to the duck restaurant did also have a grim, icy metal toilet, and I waited until the woman in the nearest squat left before using it. It seemed only polite.

The hostel we stayed at in the hutong, the Fly By Knight, (S took care of all the money and arrangements during this trip and I happily followed her around like a duckling and let her) was one of the best parts of the trip, and was a perfect oasis to be ill in the middle of a cold wasteland. My bed was one of the most comfortable I’ve ever had the pleasure to sleep in, barring not even my bed at home (in fact, my nights since I’ve been home have been studies in imperfection, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to fix our domestic slumbers). The headboard was padded and upholstered, so that I could, in fact, lean my pillow against it and sit up and still be as comfortable as was possible with the hacking and the fevers. Breakfast of sausage, egg, hash brown, bacon, toast and peanut butter and jam was included, as was hot or cold filtered water, and alcohol or noodle bowls were available for cheap. On our last evening, S and I, coughing dismally in bed, were treated to a guitar and singing concert (through the wall of our ensuite bathroom) by one of the other hostel guests; it was just what we needed to pass our last, sadly uncomfortable hours together.

I hadn’t let my illness keep me from seeing the main sights of Beijing, in part because it was increasingly obvious to me that I would not be venturing back any time soon (read: in this lifetime) and on Sunday morning, the last full morning, before C and Little P and A returned to Dalian, I ventured out with them to the outdoor Dirt Market, one of S’s favorite places to go for interesting tchotchkes and possible antiquities (S, alas, stayed behind with a pounding headache). Even though I arrived ready to puke and pass out from the taxi ride, I rallied with an exquisitely beautiful glass of green tea and professions of love and support from my dear friend C, whom I’d met in my dorm room on my first day of college as a callow 17-year-old. It’s amazing how much the love of friends can assuage all kinds of hurts.

Comforted and sustained at least for a short time, the Dirt Market outing yielded traveler’s gold to me, too: I bought a horse, probably bronze, possibly old, certainly very, VERY awesome, and I bargained the seller down from 600 kwai to 275 (about $90 down to $40). Little P bargained for a unique stone 4-faced Buddha head for S’s birthday which was, of course, the next day—and she was going to be spending it hacking up her lungs at the airport in Seoul because her relationship as one of two mothers isn’t recognized by China as a legitimate dependent relationship, worthy of being on C’s work visa.

The climates of China—political, social, and meteorological—are all profoundly inhospitable. But that didn’t keep my last taxi driver to the airport, after dropping off S at her terminal for her forced fleeing to renew her visa, from walking my heavy bags the quarter-mile through the garage to the international departure gates at my terminal. He had noticed I was on my last legs, and so China, or at least one small part of it, took care of me at the end.

I had upgraded to business class for my flight home and so was able to sleep, and the flight attendants custom-mixed orange and apple juice for me and gave me my own two-liter bottle of water so that I could hydrate whenever I awoke, so that wasn’t so bad, and my sweetie-pie met me at 7:00am when I arrived last Monday morning at SeaTac. I slept for 40 of the first 48 hours home, my mommy came and made me lots of soup, and I was able to drag myself out of the house for chemotherapy on Thursday. I lost something like 7 pounds in China, though, and as I was a lean, mean, mountain-goat machine before I left, I am now pretty much skin and bones. About the only fat remaining on my body is the modestly-sized fake boob I’d recently downgraded to.

I’m still very glad I went, but the charms of Hawaii or Mexico in late winter are reasserting themselves into my psyche. I may make some different travel choices in future.

For the best of my pics, go here.

a couple China pics

 I'm having some trouble with the technology here, so I can't turn this picture around. Nevertheless, it is me and the lovely Miss P, with North Korea in the background. It's colder than it looks.

 C in the distance and A running, on the Great Wall of China!

 C and A on the wall--We climbed up a pretty steep, scary hillside to get to where the pic was taken from.

 Bruno and the frozen stream. The pics I took did absolutely no justice to the utter exquisite beauty of this frozen canyon.

A pagoda on the canyon hike, up Big Black Mountain.

China!

I am here in Dalian, China, a small city of, according to friend C, 6.5 million people (from the US we'd heard 8-9 million, but really, by the time you get to that number, it's kind of splitting hairs). C and S and their daughters have been living/working here for about 2 1/4  years, and are going to be heading back to the US at the tail end of June, and so I got my visit in just under the wire.

First off, it is bloody cold here. Like, even wearing my new Patagonia down sleeping bag, plus long underwear, knee-high (faux) fur boots, Smartwool ski socks, jeans, a tank, a long-sleeved T, a calf-length sweater, fleece-lined wool mittens, an extra-long scarf twisted around my neck and face, and a hat, I was still shivering, even climbing the steep stairs of the Wall. Cold. Nose off brass monkey cold.

Inside their luxuriously posh 29th-30th-floor penthouse apartment it is, blessedly, warm. I can be quite comfortable in normal Smartwool socks, no long underwear, and the sleeping bag hanging over on the coat rack.

Anyway, C has been working hard helping Intel start up a chip plant in China, and we met her for lunch today (quite a fine soup I had), whereas S has been the Intel wife, hanging out with all the other Intel wives, and taking lessons in Mandarin, which has really paid off! I am pretty much flabbergasted by how much Mandarin S uses, and how comfortable she is in this utterly un-Western society. We shop at markets for veggies and fruit which are another flabbergasting thing: there are tons of both, and where are they coming from? There are, in fact, lots of hot houses along the peninsula between Dandong (which is about a 3-hour drive away and directly across the river from North Korea) and Dalian, which is on the tip of the peninsula. I can only assume that at least some of the masses of pears, apples, longan, bananas, pineapple, tomatoes, carrots, lettuces, onions, garlic, and dozens of other things both recognizable and not--way more than we find in US supermarkets, even the fancy ones--are grown in those hundreds of greenhouses.

Quickly, what I've done so far has been:

1. Hike some of the Great Wall at Dandong
2. Eat at a North Korean restaurant, also in Dandong, run by the children of high officials in the North Korean Government so that they can improve their Mandarin.
2a. Look, from a lounge near the top of our Dandong hotel, through a conveniently-placed telescope, to the drabness that is North Korea during the day, and the almost complete (and completely opposite of Dandong) blackness that is North Korea after sunset. We saw one van driving from NK into Dandong when we were out walking along the river, and were avidly speculative about what it might mean.
3. Go to four different offices (three of them police, one immigration), taking 2 1/2 hours, to register as a tourist staying in a private home for four days (this was three more offices than had been necessary for the last visitors).
4. Go with S to pick up cashmere sweaters that she'd had made to size (from spools of yarn!), and observed her pointing out discrepancies and requesting changes, all in Mandarin.
5. Buy a gift for my grandmother in an amazing, huge mall--a mall somewhat like the bowels of Pike Place Market but on opium and steroids--a mall reached from the street by, essentially, pushing through an unmarked, nondescript weighted plastic butcher's curtain that spills you into steamy Asian mayhem.
6. Buy yards of fabric and order shirts to be tailored for a friend back in the US, from a sample I brought with me.
6a. Eat hot pot for dinner where you get to cook everything at your table--why do we not go out for that more often at home?
6b. Have an I N T E N S E massage, where C and I were both in the same room--essentially, a couple's massage (but quite normal here, and not exclusive to couples, or even people who know each other at all)
7. Hike to a Buddhist temple, up a steep gorge peppered with pagodas, next to a frozen cataract, with two of the other Intel wives and the dog of one.
8. Eat a delicious dinner of, essentially, gyoza (I'll get the proper Chinese name later, if I remember to do so--jiao zi, says C) made by the maid of C&S (they also employ a driver, who is a really nice young man who takes really good care of us--both driving, and talking when S isn't quite sure she's made herself clear), with some Intel friends, and with fresh strawberries (!) and (my contribution) molten chocolate to dip them in for dessert.

I am SO HAPPY to be here. I keep saying it, and it keeps being true, every time I turn around. I love that I am getting to live a week in my friends' shoes (not really, as they're all MUCH smaller than mine), and that they are showing me places that they haven't been to here in their current home town. And I just love these people so much--yesterday S and I went to pick up the girls after school and after their ballet lessons, after A's, but during P's. A (who is 5) was running around playing in another dance room outside the classroom when we arrived and went to chat with other mothers; all of a sudden, the sweetest thing ever happened--there were pounding feet, then A slammed into my back and flung her arms around my waist in a huge hug. Did I mention that I am SO HAPPY to be here?

On the morrow I walk with the girls to their school bus (with S), then I have an appointment with their Chinese doctor, because my back is giving me pains after the flights and all the time in the van from Dalian to Dandong and back again. I may get some acupunture; maybe some more massage. I'm really looking forward to it. Tomorrow night I'm making us lentil soup, just like at home in Seattle.

I like my life.