between haircuts

once i lost a bet and had to get my head shaved. it was a fundraising bet; the kind you hope to lose. the price tag for my hair along with that of another colleague was $15,000.

what wouldn't you do to your hair for $15,000? hair grows back.

it was an interesting experience, being shaved in front of a few hundred screaming adolescents. the striking thing was how breezy it was. the next day was when i started my still-current habit of wearing little round hats. someone asked me that day if i was ashamed to be seen bald.

"no", i said. "just cold."

every evening i took a picture of myself, right up until the night before my next haircut.

roll film.

speed

my mother will buy me sporting goods, but a lot of the time she doesn't want to know what i do with it.

yesterday on the mountain we suffered from the couple days' thaw and refreeze, but even with all that, the conditions weren't all that bad. sure, there were some hard patches where it was hard to get an edge, but even where it was scratchy there was mostly enough soft snow to dig in all right.

and you know those chunks of ice that get thrown up by the groomer? we used to call them "death cookies". they make for bumpy gritty skiing and you KNOW you're going to have to sharpen your edges (which i am at the moment putting off). anyway, they weren't so large that i'd have called them "death cookies"; maybe they were more like "death croutons".

but once i got acclimated, i was able to put some muscle into my turns and carve .

all last week i kept clocking my speed (yes, i was carrying my GPSr. so i'm nerdy. i hope this is not news to you)

-anyway, i was clocking my speed and no matter what trail i was on or what i did, i kept topping out at about thirty-seven MPH.

37.2
37.6
37.4

never 38. so yesterday i thought that maybe i could break forty and i really put some intent behind it.

still only 37 and change. but then i zipped up my jacket and went into a tight tuck.

49.7 MPH!

and i might have gotten a little faster on that run, except that i had a moment when i thought: if i fall at this speed, it's gonna HURT.

and i straightened up just a little and caught the wind.

i took a few more runs, but never did get that fast again. it's tricky to do, partly because when you get to the steep pitch there's always the possibility that people will be entering the trail just below you and you have to scrub a little speed until you can see.

of course if people are there, you have to scrub a LOT of speed.

if conditions are good tomorrow, i'll have to see if i can break 50. boy, that'd be something.

i have to go sharpen my edges.

lange bang

lange bange, maybe? lang bang? well, the second is closer to how it's pronounced.

do they still call it that? my ski boots are lange. my favorite pair ever were san marco, but they quit making them which doesn't surprise me since i have a hard-to-fit foot.

...which means any boot that fits me perfectly doesn't sell so well.

anyway, lange bang is what they call those bruises on the front of your shins; lange boots used to come up high and they were torsionally very stiff, hence the bruises. lange makes more comfortable boots these days but if it's early in your season and you're skiing a little aggressively, you still get it.

it's one of my favorite bruises.

we got seventeen inches of snow so they were deliriously happy up on the mountain and opened up all of the lifts even though it was midweek. which meant i got to ski peggy dow's, probably my all-time favorite. the view from the elbow of peggy dow's is a big favortie of mine, too, and now that i have a newer, smaller camera i'm bringing it along, so if i get ambitious i'll post pictures of that view as the season goes on.

i'm also experimenting with taking video while skiing, which makes me a little nervous, but i'd like to get just one video of one good run. i think it'd be cool.

right now i can't get a nice level picture.

it's cold on the number one chair (what the "new" people call the wilderness chair), and it is, i think, the slowest chair on the mountain. it's certainly one of the oldest chairs, and it's stuck waaaay over on the left side, the only chair that serves ricker mountain. when you're out there you're way out there, and they don't blow snow up there so you get what you get.

if you want to see it, here's the trail map, and here's the satellite image:


View Larger Map

it's contemplative on that chair. i get to think of a lot of things: art, music, lyrics. i have this recurring fantasy that comes unbidden right about at lift tower nineteen; never you mind.

today it was just about there a young man came flying off of that rock in the middle of the trail just as outlaw empties out under the lift.

we could hear him hit, and it was a pretty spectacular fall, with lots of post-impact flying but someone on the lift asked him if he was hurt and he said only his pride was injured, but that it was AWESOME.

and it is, too. the lift is also a place of prayer for me.


praise be to God, who watches the sparrow
God, who makes flourish every green leaf
teach me to love and make me to follow
hold me in joy and comfort my grief.

storm

i was going to go skiing today, but better to go tomorrow.

that was quite a snowstorm. i know it snowed all day, but there was very little accumulation because the wind drove the snow away to wherever it gets caught up, i guess.

the wind drove so hard today that it was a little breezy sitting at my desk, and yes, i have my storms down. not that my windows are all that energy efficient. at one point this afternoon the snow blew right in and onto the sill.

most promising

ok, so i know everyone else is talking about president obama.

but i was watching the inauguration today (and i got to see a LOT of the coverage, because i don't have a job anymore...)

anyway, i'm watching the coverage and i am loving the marine band. i notice particularly that the director has programed all music i like, which is unusual. and there's something vaguely familiar about the director in the way he moves.

a long time ago i stood on a stage with a kid named mike colburn as we accepted an award presented by our state's music educators for most promising senior going on in the field of music education.

it was unprecedented for the award to be given to two students, but for some reason they felt that we both should have the honor. it meant a lot to me.

turns out that he's colonel michael j. colburn, director of the president's own marine band.


i'm a washed-out has-been.

it's easy to see how he got from "most promising" to there, but how did i get from "most promising" to here?

he has one of the coolest jobs in the whole world, a job once held by JOHN PHILIP SOUSA! and he looks so distinguished in that cool nineteenth-century style uniform and it boggles my mind that i knew him when.

and it pains me that my career is over.

and then i think about an old yearbook photo; if you're of a certain place and of a certain age you know the one. i'm standing with another promising young musician. he might have been great, too, but he's been dead fifteen, maybe twenty years. that kid died of AIDS; he was the first person i knew to do so. he got it early on, before they even knew what it was.

i remember hearing the first news story about the mysterious strain of KS. it had to have been a wednesday night because i was on my way home from my lesson in st. a and for some reason i pulled off the interstate at exit 18 to listen.

yeah, exit 18. the interstate exits that mattered: 10, 11, 13, 18, 19. the geography of my life.



promise is a tricky, elusive thing.

baby, it's cold outside

i have a geocache in richford that's near a monument to a survey crew that froze to death up on sutton mountain. i'm only thinking of it because last month i almost froze to death in avery's gore.

on new year's eve i wrote about it to my friends, and i'm posting it here with a little editing:

--

friends;

some of you know this story or part of it already. i want you all to have the full account because you were all in my thoughts up on the mountain.

God is great and merciful.

it was the longest night of the year, and possibly the longest night of my life.

last saturday my friends crashco and dj and i decided to go geocaching in the Northeast Kingdom. there's a challenge out that involves visiting caches in all 251 towns of vermont, along with the four gores. dj and crashco and i only had a handful of towns left, all up in the NEK. if you know anything about the geography of vermont, this will not surprise you. the NEK is remote and wild.

we planned kind of a marathon day, starting with a hike for crashco in hardwick and finishing with four hikes after sundown: warren gore, avery's gore, warner's grant, and holland. only the hike at avery's gore was anticipated to be steep or long. in order for you to find a cache in avery's gore, you have to first be in avery's gore.

there aren't any roads in avery's gore. its official population is zero. to BE in avery's gore, you have to hike uphill a couple of miles from the nearest road. even long lake seems well-connected and cosmopolitan by comparison.

we know about this kind of hiking; we often hike at night, and we often hike in the cold. we know how to dress for it, how to move safely. we know how to check for signs of frostbite and hypothermia and we know that if anyone in the party is in trouble, we turn around and go home.

we were dressed for it properly, and we'd eaten enough. i wasn't maybe fully hydrated, but when i'm out in cold weather i am habitually a little under-hydrated simply because at ten below zero it's a project to drop flaps to pee.

sometimes even when you're properly equipped and properly prepared you still crap out.

i rolled craps.

we got our caches in norton, ferdinand, bloomfield, lewis and we came to the trailhead for the hike into warren gore. it was a short moderate hike on a wide-open logging road and what struck me was the staggering beauty of the "great big stars" flung out wide over us. my hands were cold and they hurt quite a lot for the first few minutes going up but it was a simple thing, walking, and soon enough my circulation got going enough for me to be comfortable, going with an easy gait.

at the cache we all looked at our GPS receivers and noticed that the next cache, the one in avery's gore, was closer to where we were at the moment than it is to the trailhead from which we were to begin that hike. we explored for a few minutes the possibility that our logging road might take us there, and even the possibility of a bushwhack. it was open woods and wouldn't have been too hard walking we thought, but even though we didn't want to give up our elevation gains we decided not to chance the unknown and the possibility of unseen obstacles.

we went back down to the truck, drove down the road a couple of miles, and found the recommended trailhead for the avery's gore cache. we started on up the trail.

many of you know that i have been feeling my losses very sharply this year; i've been traveling as much to run from the pain of all that as i have been running toward the pleasure of living on the road. it was exactly this kind of travel that brought me into awareness of the presence of a living God, and so it is this kind of travel that reminds me of that presence, that discovery. it is my comfort when all else fails. you may know that this past october when i lost my footing at the richmond church and began to think of leaving it, it was the long journey that gave me safe harbor.

i don't really want to go deep into that story; let's just say that it was my anger with other people that was making it difficult for me to come properly into the presence of God.

the key concept here is salvation as it depends upon forgiveness. every day i pray to be a bigger person than i am, the kind of person who could and would forgive, but i can't quite reach yet. evan and amy, you must know by now why exactly i came into your company, and i want you to know that my time with you was transformative for me. i can feel it moving in my soul but it has yet to bear fruit.

i'm a work in progress.

i remember the first day i walked with the knowledge of the living and present God; everywhere i went, i went with the prayer that i could make every breath a prayer and every step a prayer, and never forget how or why.

so it's not all that unusual for me to pray as i walk, but i remember going up that mountain praying that whatever happened, i would still feel myself in God's hand. and i continued that prayer to be bigger than i am, to be able to forgive.

that's the funny thing, you know? God has been so insistent, so specific about all sorts of things about which i'm just supposed to get over myself and forgive. somehow i'm also given the heart to do it, to want to do it, and God has been strangely silent on the topic of forgiving these two things.

so the three of us are heading up the trail into avery's gore. the time is 2115. the public version of this story can be found here, and if you're looking for an annotated map of where we were, it can be found here. the public version of the story includes some details that aren't included here in the introspective version, and you can read there (with a little following of some links) what crashco and dj have to say about it as well.

we know how long it took previous visitors to get to the cache before the snow fell, and we know approximately our comparable speed. we expect to spend a little over two hours getting to the cache, and an hour or so to come down. we consider the snow depth and quality and decide against snowshoes.

it's slow going on that trail, partly because i don't move all that fast, partly because we're being careful, and partly because we know better than to work up a sweat in this kind of weather. we stop for safety checks along the way. at the safety checks you assess yourself for signs of hypothermia or frostbite, and you share your conclusions with your companions. if there are any problems, or if you don't all agree on the assessments, the hike is over and you head back.

at the third safety check we were just below the crest of the hill. i was warm and dry. i even scrunched my shoulders up, checking to see if my bra was damp from sweat. we were all set to go.

even though there was nothing apparently wrong, i remember asking God to guide and protect me.

things changed fast.

as we crested the hill we were no longer sheltered by the slope and although there wasn't much wind, it was more wind than we'd had so far. i zipped up my hood to cover the bottom part of my face, just to cut down on the amount of exposed skin i had, and reduce my risk of frostbite. we lost the trail, which wasn't that big a deal since we knew where we were and the terrain from here to the cache was level. since the weather was clear we knew we could follow our tracks back if we needed to, and we all had turned on breadcrumbs on our GPSrs.

they call it "breadcrumbs" when you're recording your tracks; it enables you to return to your start point by the same way you came. you can follow your tracks, or you can make a beeline for your start point, which of course you have waypointed.

losing the trail here wasn't the bad thing; the bad thing was that we had come out on a logging landing and all around us there were piles of cut branches. that's hard enough to walk through when you can see it, but there was just enough drifted snow to cover, and so every step had the possibility of letting you posthole in as deep as your hip.

our pace had slowed to a crawl, and now extracting ourselves from holes every few steps meant we had much more contact with the snow and therefore more exposure to cold.

i don't know if we fought through that for ten minutes or twenty minutes, because however long it was it felt like forever even though it wasn't more than a couple hundred feet, and we were just about across it when our path was crossed by a guy on a snowmobile. he didn't slow down or even seem to notice us, but i remember wondering how much money he would want to ferry us back down.

we come out onto groomed snowmobile trail, and the terrain is flat, so even though i now feel a little cold, we think that maybe getting moving again will warm me. i know better than to make this assessment on my own, so i'm talking with dj about it as i'm thinking. at this point i am only just a little bit cold, and it is well within reasonable expectation that i will warm up, but for some reason i tell dj that if i die up here he should call barbara.

"instead of your family?" he asks.

no, just that she will know how to go about some things that my family will not. i don't explain it to him very much.

and there's a thing that i want. it could just as easily be done for me while i'm still alive, but i don't want to go to my grave without it. it's the kind of thing that needs to be done for me, if that makes any sense at all to you. and i know that if i don't live to see it done, barbara will realize it and make sure it gets taken care of.

so as we walk i'm thinking about that, but i'm not telling dj. for a few moments i have this crazy thought that dj will be able to do this one thing for me, that he will somehow understand.

i always feel as if my time for dying is soon, even though things that should kill me never do. it's paradoxical; i have both a sense of my own frailty AND of my indestructibility. i don't know if my time really is short, or whether i'm just supposed to live as if it's short. i know that when my number is up, it's up. i've fallen off a forty-foot ladder. i've been struck by lightning. i've been run over by a truck, and all without harm. one of these days my number will come up. the omniscient narrator from the future know that it doesn't come up this day, but so far in the story it's anybody's guess.

we walk about a quarter of a mile. it doesn't take us very long, but i begin to realize that i'm too cold. my toes and fingers are still warm, but my butt is numb, which is worrying. i tell dj this, and we walk a little farther.

at this point, you should know, we are maybe only two hundred and fifty feet from the cache. crashco has gone out ahead to look for it., because now we know that we're not going to have much time to waste looking. we have come so far only to have to turn around, and i'm thinking that in view of the length of the return trip, an extra five minutes isn't going to make much of a difference.

almost immediately the numbness spreads. i slap my butt, my outer thighs. i can't feel it on the surface. we pass a little house next to the trail, which makes me feel hopeful. and very quickly i can't feel my inner thighs. then i go numb at my squishy bits. i'm having some trouble putting one foot in front of the other. i'm having trouble aiming my feet.

you're not supposed to have to think about aiming your feet.

and your squishy bits are supposed to be the warmest part of you, so i took this to be a very bad sign. i caught up to my boys at the cache location, but then went back a little to have a look at the little house and i realized that i had just down a thing you should never do: wander away from the group with out telling anyone. it isn't very far, but it's not a good idea and i think that maybe i'm losing judgment.

i go back and i say "boys, we either have to break into that little house or we have to build a fire."

the time is now around midnight.

immediately they give up the search and now we're scouring the outside of the house, looking for a way in. crashco finds a second-story window and a ladder which becomes important later but for now it's no good.

there's no way in without breaking a window, so we figure that we'll build a fire. there's a woodpile outside, and we're in the woods, so we'll be able to find kindling,and dj has a spare notebook, so there's tinder, and HE HAS A LIGHTER. i find a piece of stovepipe, which i figure will make a good platform and chimney for our fledgling fire. it's the last useful thing i'm able to do.

dj and craschco get busy building the fire and gathering wood, and i stand useless, afraid to move too much, afraid to handle cold objects for fear i'll lose feeling in my hands. the fire leaps up, bright and warm and dj keeps going off into the woods, gathering wood, coming back and tending the fire.

crashco goes up on the ladder to call their wives, not so much to tell them not to worry, because worrying at this point is definitely in order, but to tell them where we are at least, and what to expect.

crashco asks if there's anyone he should call for me.

no. nobody is expecting me at home. nobody will notice i'm missing until tomorrow or the next day, and there's no point worrying my family now, when they cannot help.

our plan for the moment is to warm me up at the fire and then reassess whether or not i can make the trip down. we realize pretty quickly that if i leave this fire, i will die. so crashco goes back up on the ladder and calls 911.

the time is now 0100.

at this point i begin to pray in earnest, and i begin also to think of you each in your turn. i want to call you all and tell you to pray for us, but there's no use waking you up, and there's no use wasting the batteries on the only cell phone we have with us that gets reception in this place.

earlier in the day we had been passing through lyndonville, next to the cemetery and i was thinking of the many hours as a child i spent in that cemetery, making notes and taking pictures; there was a grouping of old graves in the back corner that interested me and i spent hours and hours of my free time at summer camp in the town clerk's office, researching those people.

the cemetery was also the place where doug thornton took us all out one night at midnight by the full moon and we stood on a little knoll around the tallest marker there and we listened to him recite the cremation of sam mcgee, which you can find here.

my friends and i had been laughing about it earlier because i quoted it when the boys were getting in and out of the car and i was not; they stood with the doors open, letting out the heat.

nothing about the poem seemed funny at this point.

crashco gives very specific information to the 911 dispatcher in williston. he gives her our coordinates, and he tells her that we are at this house on the south shore of unknown pond, right on the groomed snowmobile trail. he tells her not to let the team come up on the trail we came on; it would not be snowmobile-friendly even without all the brushpiles.

dj found some pieces of corrugated roofing, and crashco had a space blanket that he was working on unfolding. they used those and the tarp from the woodpile to construct a kind of makeshift shelter around me to reflect the fire's heat and to keep the wind out. it still wasn't all that warm, but it made a difference.

every small thing makes a huge difference out there. if you wear gaiters (i do), not only do you have protection from snow working its way into your boots, but you have an extra layer of protection from cold. they keep your feet warmer, especially if, like mine, they come down like spats over the top of your boot. and waterproofing; periodically i clean and re-treat my boots with an excellent wax-based waterproofing. between that and the gaiters, it means that snow doesn't stick to your boots, and you have less contact with the snow and you stay warmer.

by happy coincidence i had just put fresh waterproofing on my boots the day before. i took a mental inventory of my clothing: smartwool socks, boots, gaiters. mid-weight tights, goretex ski pants. lightweight techwick tshirt, midweight bergelene mid-layer, winter-weight bergelene overshirt, shell. bergelene glove liners, heavy-duty gloves. everything designed to keep me dry and warm.

it's good to go over it in my mind; it keeps fear at bay. it is a reasonable voice in an unreasonable situation.

joyce. you wouldn't know it from here, but i got your letter just before i let the house for three weeks in october. i didn't read it right away, but i saved it for a cold and lonely night. i still haven't answered it because somewhere along the way i tucked it somewhere for safekeeping and rereading later and i keep forgetting to bring it into the house. if i get down this hill i am definitely going to fish that out.

we always said that if something went bad on one of our adventures we were prepared to spend an uncomfortable but alive night outdoors. we never intended to test this premise.

0200 comes and goes. we don't expect to hear the rescue team yet; we know how long it takes to scramble the team when they're not home and asleep. it is perhaps worth noting that crashco is a wilderness first responder, so he knows what it takes to put everybody in the field. by this time we realize that i am not holding my own against the cold, even with the fire.

it's a waiting game. which will find me first: rescue or death?

i remember hearing what i still consider to be the best story i ever heard. i won't tell it to you here, but i will tell you that it involved a man who went down in a small aircraft over the north atlantic. he was an atheist and it was a point of pride for him that in his time of trial he never resorted to praying to the God in whom he did not believe.

i didn't try to puzzle ot any conclusions, and i didn't look for any insights from it. i just remembered him, that's all.

i thought of that terrible thanksgiving when i was part of a cold-weather search and rescue of a missing woman up near appalachian gap. i remembered the state police asking me to call her parents and have them catch the first plane up. i remember having to tell the parents that the state police didn't think we were looking for a living person. i remembered how we found her, cold but alive, how she had gone into the woods with a copy of jack london's to build a fire.

i tried not to think about it.

and i prayed.

you maybe have heard me cry in pain. you maybe have heard the yelp that escapes me when pain sneaks up on me. i can't begin to properly tell you what this pain was like, because it was so extreme and it so completely subsumed me.

you know that sharp pain when your hands get very cold and then start to warm up? it was like that, only it was my whole body. and it was also like blunt trauma. it was like the feeling in your veins when an IV goes bad, or when they pump in something painful. it was also like the kind of burn you get when you bump up against an iron or stove burner, a burn on the surface but also down into the flesh. each seam and zipper of my clothing was a special brand of hell, as if each of them was super-heated and pressing down hard.

it so surprised me when i first felt it that i jumped up involuntarily, tearing at my clothes, yelling "it burns! it burns!"

i thought for a moment that i had caught fire. it only took me a few second to realize that i wasn't really burning, and i was just going to have to get used to it.

i could not pray to God to allow me to live or even to allow me to die, but all i could do was to tell God over and over: "i love you. you are my sovereign, my savior, my one true love."

all this while dj keep going off to find wood that will burn hot. he finds wood, he tends the fire, he goes back out. crashco is watching me, talking to dispatch and scouting the trail, looking for the team.

chuk. tell barbara. tell her to pray.

if i get out of here, i am going to answer gretchen's emails, and if she calls me, i will talk to her. i was being stupid and i'm sorry.

just before 0300 i am sure i hear the sound of machines. i can't say that it's the sound of snowmobiles, and nobody really trusts me to know what i'm hearing. crashco learns from the dispatcher that the ambulance has arrived, which is not much comfort because we know we can't get to it. we are told for the first time that help should arrive in "ten to fifteen minutes".

we are in high spirits. bear in mind that we are only a hundred or so feet from the cache we came to find, so with the fire burning hot and help about to arrive, i tell my boys "go get that cache. i don't want to almost die for a cache we don't find."

so they leave me for a few minutes. they find it quickly, and bring it back for me to sign. we're happy.

they put the cache back. crashco goes out to scout for the team, and he comes back to tell us he hears them. he also brings the heartbreaking news that they're not close by, they appear to be on the wrong trail, and they seem to be headed away from us.

the dispatcher tell him that the team is lost. they have gone back down to try another approach. the dispatcher in williston tells him that the team has attempted to reach us by way of the trail we took to get in, the trail that crashco specifically told them not to take. we learn that the dispatcher in derby line didn't think that was important enough information to pass on.

we are aware that sometimes dispatch won't pass on information that they don't understand or can't confirm, but we are of a mind that they could have passed it on as unsubstantiated information FROM US and let the team draw their own conclusions.

by 0400 i am passing in and out of consciousness. i remain upright for the most part, but i keep blacking out and then coming to.

beause of the windbreak and my need to be where the heat was, i also had to be where i was breathing in smoke. i sat in the windbreak until i had to come up choking for air. warm poison, or fresh freezing air. both painful. both deadly. it's like coming up from drowing, over and over, gasping for a breath and then diving down again.

cough, choke, splutter, retch.

and darkness. blessed, quiet, painless darkness. the mercy of God.

and i'm awake again. i come to, and i realize that even unconscious, i have been praying. i know it because i wake up in the middle of prayer.

and darkness again.

i wake up, and i'm singing weakly, word by slow painful word. i am halfway through "come thou fount of every blessing".

i go in and out. carol, i think, would call this a "powerful witness".

dj tends to the fire, reaching right in and grabbing hold of burning bits if he needs to move them. he is purposeful and ceaselessly moving. as the night wears on he has to go farther and farther from the fire in order to find wood.

i realize that it is the longest night of the year. really, not metaphorically, although it's certainly that as well. i think of andrea, whom i had wished a bright and blessed yule, to whom i had said that i hoped as the days grew longer that the light would grow within her also.

i thought of amy and little gregory and the whole band of them, knowing that they'e be waking soon and wanting more than anything to ask them to pray.

i thought of karen, who had been there to turn the med lock and let the painful meds flow into my veins, and how her kindness made it just that much easier to bear.

and linda, in her new studies. i call out to her in the night.

the darkness enfolded me and each of you was with me, like in the old chinese story where a man survives his night on the mountain because he can see in the distance a fire lit for him by a friend.

around 0600 i became lucid again. crashco and dj and i were sharing our outrage over the dispatcher's failure to relay the important information, and the stupidity of the question: "what color is the house?"

what color is the house? you wouldn't notice the color any more than you would notice three people and a large fire on the front lawn, especially in the darkness. the omniscient narrator from the future knows that it is the ONLY house up there. you can see it on the satellite photos. it's house colored.

we learn from the williston dispatcher that the machine sounds i'd heard around 0300 had been the team trying to cut through the brushpiles with a chainsaw. they had turned back only about a quarter mile from us.

crashco goes off on a rant about the delorme atlas, and how if you have one, you can see exactly where we are and how to get to us. being mad about this is a nice enough diversion for a little while and it probably saves me as much as any other thing; it puts a little life back in me even though i can tell my core temperature is still dropping.

i joke about running a pool to guess how low my core temperature is, but three people won't really support a pool and i look up and notice that the sky is turning that steel grey of cold mornings and at 0700 we hear the sled.

the team is happy to see us and surprised to find me still alive. i'm surprised by it myself.

they don't waste a second, but they half walk, half carry me over to the sled and lay me down in it. they open my clothes and lay in hot packs before bundling me up and strapping me down.

it's a rough ride, bumpy and very painful but i am so glad to be on my way out i don't care. the EMT riding with me keeps apologizing, saying "i'm sorry for the bumpy ride darlin', but we can't spare any ponies." he tells the driver to go as fast as he can. he's a very large, gentle man, and in that time i love him as much as i love anybody.

they put me in the truck, and nobody's ever started an IV on me in an ambulance, but they have to try. it is interesting hearing them call for a second truck for my boys; they don't think they'll need transport, but they call for every hot pack available to be brought.

they strip off my clothes all the while noting what very good gear i have, and how properly i'm dressed for the weather. they feel every layer, and declare each one in turn to be too cold. it's all hot packs and warm blankets but nothing feels warm to me and they still can't get an IV started, so they just roll the truck.

jean-pierre is very nice and i like him just fine, but one thing i notice is that he is not praying while he works on me. i miss that feeling powerful much.

in the ER they still can't get an IV started, but they put me under a forced-air blanket, which beside being interesting to look at is toasty warm. after an hour of warming my core temperature is still south of 96 by a wide margin and they still can't get an IV in.

it's hard to get an IV in me if i'm fully warmed, fully hydrated, a nd i've prepped the site with an emla patch.

they try more than a dozen times, in all sorts of places. they even go for the knuckle over my index finger. that's very painful. i ask if they couldn't try the inside of that finger, where i have no feeling anyway, but there's no vein there.

i want to know what the big deal is, and why they can't just give me a cup of tea and be done with it. the nurse is careful to explain that even though i'm here in the ER, i'm still at risk of dying; being that cold for that long makes your system kind of brittle. your elecrtolytes go out of balance, shivering takes its toll on the muscles. you're at risk of systemic failure.

so what will they do, i want to know, if they can't get an IV started?

well, they'll lavage me. they'll put tubes where they can and pump warm water into anyplace that'll hold it.

that don't sound so good to me.

at 0930 i ask for my friends to call the church, since it's sunday morning, to ask the congregation to pray.

there's no answer.

somewhere between the one thing and the other my urine tests (they still can't even draw a little bit of blood) come back clean and they decide to let me have the hot tea. they bring me tea and two kinds of broth and hot chocolate and they let me know i'm expected to drink all of it.

fine. it's lovely.

every hospital has that one IV nurse who can get blood out of anybody; that's who they send. she looks at the failed spots, the blown vein, the pricks and the bruises adn she says "anybody ever try your feet?" well, no, they haven't. she hunts a little, ties me off, and preps a spot.

'this is going to hurt", she says.
"more than when they go over the knuckle?"
she thinks for a moment. "no. about as much."
"ok, then."

she sticks me once and i barely feel it. she gets ten ccs right off. later crashco will say that she should have done both feet, so i'd have a full set of stigmata.

he's funny.


my bloodwork comes back clean, too, which is an apparent surprise to everybody. the doctor comes by to make sure i understand that i should stay inside at least until the next weekend. he wants to be ABSOLUTELY SURE that i understand that if i get chilled in the next few days that it will very probably be fatal.

it's been all hot food and lots of naps for me. for a few days i cried very easily. in quiet moments i'm still haunted by those hours of darkness and pain and i go over and over in my head how i might let that work in me, how i might use it to get over myself and forgive. one of you sends me an email asking how i will thank the God who loves me so much, which hits me like a two-by-four in the face.

everything i have in me, every story, every song i come across instructs and informs me that it really does come down to forgiveness, but even through all of that i still can't quite reach and the only conclusion i come to is that i'm not meant to reach just yet. it's not that i'm permitted to give it up; i will still pray to be a better person tomorrow than i was today. i will still pray to be the kind of person who would forgive those two things; the kind of person who can and does forgive them, but for now i'll try to accept that the time will come when it comes and that maybe the holding of it, as painful as it is will present me with some tool or opportunity that i can use later.

tonight many of my friends, including dj and crashco, are gathered around a bonfire in a forest somewhere to see in the new year. i couldn't join them; it feels too much like that other, much less festive fire. but tomorrow we'll meet and together we'll go off into the NEK and finish up the two short hikes we missed. we will be the first to complete the challenge.

before my illness and all my losses of the last year or so, i had been strong and resourceful, quick to meet the challenges and often the first one to the finish line. it was hard being just an also-ran, and harder not even taking a start a lot of the time.

to go with my friends and be the first across that line together means that there's recovery from every darkness, every coldness. i'm going to get to stand and claim my place in the sun.

so may it be with you.

bless

it's turning out to be a harder week than i thought.

it's been a year and i don't feel any better about it. if you don't already know the "what", you'll be a little confused by that statement.


it cuts too close.

anyway, you know that at night for evening prayer i am in the habit of lighting a candle or two. one always for myself with relation to bob, but sometimes one for someone else as well. if there's a lot on my list, it's more like a small inferno.

but for a while there have been two. as long as it still means something, there will be two.

but a while ago for reasons not yet known to me i started saving the burnt-out ones and then something someone said clicked it into place and i had this idea for what to do with them.

letting you eavesdrop; a disordered mind speaks to God

i wrote this to Barbara one night after evening prayer. it was a pretty close transcript of that conversation. i ran across it last night and decided to post it here.

hey, bob,

O Great Gracious God
gaping, grinding, glowering
gibbous grinning

it isn't so much that you have a sense of humor
as you are the sense of humor

you'd have to be
otherwise there's no explaining the platypus.

you are so awesomely awesome

and i know i railed against ticks
and suggested maybe you were having an off day
and i swear i heard you laugh

but someone pointed out to me
how marvelously made
is the tick;
an animal that can live eighteen months
without a meal.

and today when i went to kneel at the altar
and managed to get tangled in my own feet
and fall quite painfully;
i asked you rather pointedly
if it was your idea of a joke
and if it was
i didn't think it was funny
and i know you heard me laugh
anyway.

maybe slapstick
is simple enough
for both of us to understand
together.

i went to sing you a song
but giggled right through it
and i like to think
you didn't mind.

yesterday i was feeling my wounds
and didn't feel much like singing
but we sang anyway
and i laughed
just because you ARE.

these days
loss
just heaps up on loss
except that i feel myself quite firmly in your hand
and if i get lucky
i can feel you in my hand

and i might as well laugh.

it's OK, you said.
just think of me, you said.

so all right; i will.

i will, i will, i will.

you are the pratfall, the knock-knock,
the elephant joke
signed for the deaf
you are the whole of the punchline

and you know i always said i'd be a lot happier
if someone would only
tell me the punchline.


in the night
while i sleep
and during the day
in every breath

you are there

to whisper it in my ear:

the whole of the joke

spinning, swirling, staid and stalwart
breaking waves of sound and taking
leaving light and coming running
caving stillness, starfish sunning
light and leaning loving laughter
you are before and also after

you are
you are
you are

i know you are;
i heard you laugh.

going in reverse

i know it's a little late, and you already know that i'm home from my trip.

so i think i'm just going to post the pictures and leave it at that.

home and away

presidential politics

the republic is dead and it doesn't matter who the next emperor is.

secession! rebellion! anarchy!


overpay all your bills by a few cents every month. hack into email and phone accounts and delete all messages on one particular topic, but leave the rest. hit the road and leave no forwarding address. send bulk mail to people who don't exist. sign all your public officials up for free samples and trial subscriptions. organize large protest marches over things that don't matter, or don't make sense. hand out flyers about the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide. apply for permits that you never use. go to government offices and stand in line for a few hours, but only if you have no business to conduct. lie down in crosswalks. find areas that have no ordinances regarding public nudity and walk around naked on main street. if you smoke, stand on a busy intersection and smoke legal and harmless herbs. pretend it's pot. sell little bags of powdered sugar and oregano. insist loudly that it's ONLY powdered sugar and oregano. reverse shoplift: take merchandise you own and sneak it INTO stores. buy an armload of flowers and try to give them to people on a busy street. do not accept payment. buy traffic cones and distribute them randomly on busy streets during rush hour. stand at an intersection wearing raggedy clothes and try to shove five dollar bills INTO people's cars. organize a marching band and have an impromptu parade. order elaborate cocktails that don't exist. when the hostess seats you in the restaurant, insist on including your invisible friend in your party. campaign for public offices that either don't exist, or else aren't filled by election. commit reverse vandalism: sneak out under cover of darkness and fix something. start a nationwide campaign for splenectomies in all household pets. mark choice parking places as being reserved for the "morally handicapped", or for "people with herpes". take those magnetic ribbons on people's cars and rearrange them. correct the punctuation on commercial signs. start a petition drive to save a landmark that isn't in danger. list yourself in the phone book under a fictitious name. purchase billboard space and have it say something nonsensical in an obscure language. make reservations in other people's names, and then don't keep them. attempt to bribe the bagger at the supermarket. go to a burger joint and ask why they can't just open a can of soup for you. turn your cell phone off, but pretend to talk into it anyway. if it gets confiscated, continue to talk into your hand as if nothing had happened. invite a large group of people over to someone else's house for a party. go to city council meetings and cry loudly. stand at bus stops. don't get on any busses. hire an ASL interpreter to follow you around all day. go everywhere your state legislator goes; strew rose petals in his path. claim to have committed crimes that predate your birth. have large appliances delivered to the lobby of a public building. tell the police you'll show them where all the bodies are hidden. take them to a cemetery. go to a public place with a bullhorn and announce with alarm that you have discovered the air in this area is nearly 80% nitrogen and advise everyone to leave.

gum up the works.

smile.

forward, then back

ok, i'm still writing my geocaching logs from my trip and i'm still organizing the pictures, and when i'm done i want to organize my thoughts and tell you about it.

in the meantime, i'm playing ikariam, and i'm playing on the iota server in case you want to look for me there. i'm playing as flask, which ought to be a no-brainer.

so last firday night (i think it was friday) i get an incoming message that i am under attack. for starters, i cannot imagine why anyone would attack me unless they really wanted trouble. i keep plowing my cash and resources into development, so i don't have a lot for anyone to steal and besides, i have good defenses, including the fact that i belong to a powerful alliance that protects its members aggressively.

i look this guy up. he clearly hasn't done his homework. he is a quarter of my size. his army is a quarter the size of mine. his alliance is a quarter the size of mine. additionally, the way things are stacked up, if he's done the math, he would have seen that the attack was going to cast him more than he was goign to get from me.

so i sent him a note telling him to call off his attack, or else i'd be forced to retaliate.

i do not know why you attacked me, but i'm bigger than you. i have a bigger army than you and my alliance is much bigger than yours. you will notice that you are under attack from members of my alliance.

nobody has been silly enough to attack me until you came along, so now i have to figure out how to deploy troops to your cities.

members of my alliance are already sending troops to (to use their words) flatten you. the reason i have never yet attacked you is that i do not as a rule attack active cities. you are about to lose your entire military.

my allies will stop their attacks if i ask them to.

at this point you should apologize nicely and send lovely gifts.

he did not back down. instead this is what he said:

hey i probably know you are mad...but i didnt get that much from you anyways

wasnt even worth it

ill send you effen shit back

so i said:

see now, all i was hoping for was a nice apology and the rough equivalent of the 1,200 gold you took plus a little extra, say, 1,400 total as a nice gesture.

but now my friends are mad at you because you weren't nice. a little communication could have really helped.

the mathematics of it are this: you might feel all full of yourself 'coz your'e a top 100 alliance, but we're a top 10 alliance. we have a couple of guys who don't like to pick on people, but they really enjoy the chance to go after players that have attacked us.

it's expensive, maintaining really big armies, and they don't need much of an excuse.

at this point i think one of my allies is attacking you because he "doesn't like your name".

it would have been better for you to make a nice apology, and certainly much less expensive.

the names of all his cities are amusing sexual innuendos. amusing if you're, say a twelve-year-old boy. very clever stuff.

ok what the hell do you want

let's review:


you got stupid and attacked a player four times your size, with an alliance four times the size of your alliance.


when offered the chance to make a nice apology and pay a small amount in restitution, you failed to do either.


at this point what i want is to farm you regularly and to prevent you from building any military at all.


ever.


you still have yet to learn manners and as far as i'm concerned, you are now my pet.


additionally, my alliance views with suspicion any member of your alliance or any player with whom you have regular communication. we do not have any set policy regarding this, but we're keeping our options open.


in short, you should have taken the opportunity to get the whole thing called off when you had the chance. i believe i described to you exactly what was going to happen as a result of your choices and now that these things have happened, there's no point complaining about it.

just telll me what you want

sorry, puppy, but you had enough opportunity to be polite and failed to do it at any time until now. we also did not like your friend johnlilly, who was very rude to one of our alliance members.


if you time your production right, you'll hardly notice that i'm farming you unless you try to build a military.


if you go back in your correspondence you will notice that you had two opportunities to apologize and send lovely presents.


because you did not take advantage at any time of these excellent chances, i'm just going to take what i can get from you from now on.


helpful hint: when you pick on someone four times larger than you and they ask for an apology, you should do it right away.

i tried to ask you what these lovely presents but you never told me what they were

can we make a compromise....ill try to send you 500 of something everyday

something along those lines

just please stop attacking....leave me alone

i wont pillage anymore

oh, sure. NOW you're learning some manners.


let me break this down for you.


traditionally nobody was stupid enough to attack me, so i didn't have to maintain a huge standing army.


then you came along and i had to increase the size of my army and that costs me more. surely you don't expect ME to pay the extra cost?


you are correct to observe that you're not going to pillage anymore. not only are you not going to pillage me, but you're not going to pillage anyone else. i don't trust you as far as i could throw you while i was sitting on you with a piano in my lap.


you had plenty of opportunity to be polite, but if you go back in the correspondence, i think you'll see that you were never apologetic or even courteous until it was too late.


now you are my farm, my pet, my puppy. you are my drive-through, all-night ATM.


in addition to monitoring your income and your armies, i have also been monitoring your communications and any player in an alliance with you, in regular communication with you, or trading with you will be seen as suspicious and therefore also a possible target.

just fuckin leave me alone

this isnt fun anymore

its not that serious...its a damn internet game...people make fuckin mistakes...ive learned

just leave me alone

just stop this is getting stupid

for you, maybe.


for me, it is both fun and profitable.


ode to bush:


my sweet and lovely sugar lump

who pays to stock my ammo dump

not smart enough to take advice, apologize or just play nice.

six times a day at every town

i'll pillage you and smack you down

you are my favorite little boy

my rare and cherished squeaky toy

you fought me once; here's your reward

i'll keep it up 'til i get bored

but i'll be staying for a while

to pillage you

just makes me smile.

would you please fuckin stop...this is getting ridiculious...i just want to play the fuckin game

my dear little man:


you ARE playing the game. this is the part of the game where you pay for your poor choices.


i believe i warned you what would happen to you if you crossed me, and yet you persist.


you can beg and plead all you want; i simply forward your messages to my alliance and we all have a laugh over it.


your choices inconvenienced me and my friends and now you're paying for them. i have a schedule to keep with regard to pillaging you, and i mustn't fall behind. according to my calculations, all of your cities are have entered into a new cycle and are therefore due for pillage, each in their turn.


are you familiar at all with the early days of the romanov empire? if you knew anything at all about history, you would understand why it just isn't practical for me to leave you with a viable military or any resources to speak of.


additionally, i had to upgrade my army in order to deal with you, and now someone has to pay for its upkeep. you have been nominated for this honor.


at this point if you do not wish to have me keep explaining this to you, you will simply stop sending me messages about it.


i'm busy; i have pillages to conduct, many of them on you.

im fuckin done...this is fuckin bullshit...im fuckin abandoning all my fuckin colonies...im done with this fuckin game...i hope you are fuckin happy

yep, that's kind of what i was getting at.


if i find you playing under a different account i will go after you equally aggressively.


thanks for playing, and don't let the door hit you on the way out.


*smooch*

but it turns out that he does not quit the game. he has a second illegal account that he stupidly sets up on the same island. and he has a little potty-mouth friend who decides to attack another of my allies which has the effect of a teacup poodle trying to fight a pack of wolves.

just leave me the hell alone

i have decided that from now on when you address me, you have to start with "mother may i?" or i'll send out an immediate pillage to your most convenient city.


i am tired of your profane little diatribes.


twenty minutes from now i have a ship coming in. i haven't been raiding you so much today, because there's not much left to take and because you haven't so much as made a peep. but now that you're talking again, i'm afraid i have to return to pillaging you.


how often the good humor truck comes around will depend on your behavior.


forget to say "mother may i?" = 1 immediate pillagge.

use of profanity = 2 pillages at earliest convienience.

construction of any military units will result in immediate resumption of full-bore-six-times-a-day pillage on each city whether or not there's enough for me to take to make it worthwhile.


love 'n' kisses.


now go be a good boy.


*smooch*

i have not heard from him since.

jiggety jig

home again. it's very strange to be indoors. my rooms seem so expansive in comparison with what i've known as "indoors" these days. but now i have a ton of pictures to process, and some video, and i'm going to try to tell you about it.

a little, at least.

if you'll allow me to skip backward, i was down in hoosick falls and all of a sudden i thought: better get up into the adirondacks if i'm going to go to that party.

but i stopped at a few caches along the way and it nearly broke my heart, but practically on op of one of the caches was a small but viable patch of morels. MORELS! do you have any idea how long it's been since i found any of those?

and i had no way really to cook them, because although i am equipped for boiling water, that's about it. if i'd had a traveling companion i might could have improvised a little chowder with some salmon, but not for just me. i had no way to cope with dishes, or leftovers.

so i got out to hoel pond, and there's a snag at the back of my campsite. i know i've been taking pictures of the back of my campsites for you, but hoel pond is just about the prettiest and there are a lot of pictures of it.

second leg

st. john in the wilderness

the snag is wide enough to sit on, so that's where i spend a lot of my time sitting in prayer, or just sitting. it is sweet and good to sit and listen to the water lapping up all around me, and to listen to the loons calling.



periodically of course, i do leave the campsite to go find geocaches and maybe even try to switch sites, but the good sites on other ponds keep being full, and hoel pond keeps being deserted.

saturday afternoon i was so whipped i didn't have the energy to walk a couple hundred feet to find a cache, so i just went back to the campsite, left the tailgate open and facing the pond, and slept for several hours in dappled sunshine. spring breezes. that lightly toasted smell of balsam and sand.

it's hard to get any better than that.

and i was at this cache, called pirate treasure, or pirate loot, or something like that, and very near to the first stage i found some lovely but inedible mushrooms. the containers were an awful lot of fun and i was having a rollicking good time until i lost my glasses out there.

now, see, i wear glasses all the time because i don't see well without them. it is not easy for me to find them if i'm not wearing them, so when i take them off, i habitually put them in the same places so i can find them again.

they're very nearly the color of pine duff anyway, so that was only heartbreak on top of heartbreak.

but i found them.

which is happy, because i knew where my cell phone was, and i know NFA's phone number, so you know who was going to have to come out and find them should all else fail.

i decided to splurge and buy me a meal indoors, at a restaurant, and went to tail o' the pup. i'd been by it dozens and dozens of times and never gone. too cold, too rainy, too touristy...

but it was good. and afterward i smelled strongly of barbecue and had to wash up pretty carefully.






in the morning i went to the caches on the old bloomingdale rail line and THEN went to do "bloomingdale station", which is somewhat of a mistake. it was nice anyway.

remains of the deer

and i headed home.

backstage pass

i'm very near the site of the flash mob event in saranac lake, which coincidentally is on the shores of lake flower and not saranac lake as one might think.

uh, anyway. i've been parked here, being part of the scenery for abot an hour and we are now thirty minutes away from zero time, so it is conceivable that other participants are already lurking nearby.

it is very much like being backstage before a play, but also it is not: until the hour arrives, it will be impossible to tell who is here for the party and who is just passing by.

originally i had thought that the "event identification" was going to be party hats, but it turns out that it's red foam clown noses.

all right. i see a guy wandering by the lake shore. i bet he's here for the party. he's very studied in his casualness.

last time i wrote to you i told you about going to the old north church in bennington, but i don't think i told you that afterward i went up to monument circle and sat there, for a while, too. it was sunny and the trees had just leafed out and i just say and looked up and the monument and basked in gratitude. if you've been following the story for a long time you know that i have been up to the monument before and it was an amazing thing to be there and feel the difference.

again into the unknown.

so my lazy day turned out to be quite a full day of "stuff". at noontime prayer i happened to have been here, and ordinarily the church wouldn't have been open, but there was a guy doing some work and he didn't mind if i sat a while.

then i went over into NY, where i was pretty lazy and didn't really want to walk a whole half mile to get to a cache, and almost didn't, but then i felt that little "tug" and i went.

it was beautiful, too, and about halfway out i met a woman coming the other direction and between us was what i thought was her dog. she thought it was mine. on closer view, it rippled too much to be a dog. it was way too slinky.

woodchuck!

and then i wasn't going to do that multi in town, because i normally hate the "write down all of these numbers" type of cache where you spend hours wandering from insignificant point to insignificant point, but once again, little tug.

and i was confused more than once by the layout of the coordinates, and at one point the number that the directions seemed to indicate was -6. you maybe don't think about this, but no set of coordinates includes negative numbers.

so i decided that 6 would be just fine.

and i was having trouble counting the churches on church street, mostly because i was having trouble finding church street. i walked five, maybe six blocks on that sucker before finding a sign telling me i was on it. the complete lack of churches on church street was a little confusing, as well.

but it turns out that i am standing right where i need to be right when i need to be there as the woman comes walking down the street whistling "la donna e mobile", which you don't hear on the streets so often these days.

i can whistle pretty good, and i know that aria, too. so i joined in, which surprised her rather a lot, i think. so we stood and talked for a long time. she's elderly, has epilepsy, and is none too wealthy besides. she uses a vagus nerve stimulator, which was interesting to me.

then because i had been talking to her instead of looking for waypoints, when the time came for afternoon prayer, i happened to be standing at a place where was written many times:

may peace prevail on earth.



i didn't think i could do any better than that,so i didn't try.

in from the cold

all right, i'm not sure where to pick up the narrative, or how far to go. let's just start with i'm actually indoors, sitting in a chair. at a table. and i'll be sleeping in a bed tonight! i will have a shower, and wash my whole body at once! i have just had a nondescript sandwich for dinner, but dessert (a lovely bar of chocolate)is provided by the motel. i am not in the habit of making endorsements in this space, but i'm at the knotty pine in bennington, where some friends of mine stayed a while back and we all hung out for a while in one of the rooms and i remembered it was pretty nice for the cost and the location. besides, i could find it. they let me check in this morning at about 0830, which meant i could use the room as my base and catch up with some housekeeping chores.

having a whole room to myself seems very deluxe.

i woke up this morning and realized that my car smelled very much like i had been living in it for a week, which coincidentally is what i had done. handy tip: unless your laundry bag is airtight, after enough days on the road it contributes a lot to the general ambience.

you want to have some fun? someone ought to run a pool on where i'll be next time i log on.

so. i spent a couple of days cranking back and forth over route 9 in VT and route 2 in MA, mostly because everything there is within pretty easy reach of my campsite. i am in love with the campsites at somerset lading strip, even though they're stark and bare, as if someone just happened to punk down a dozen and two outhouses on an old airstrip. i found it by accident once when i was desperate for a place to pull over and sleep.

and every night this week a woodcock has been "peenting" very close to my car, but he doesn't do the rest of his display, which i really want to see. he's so close i can see him moving on the ground. and last night, finally, for about an hour he went through the whole display, over and over. it is quite spectacular, especially if he's nearby. "good luck, buddy." i tell him. "i hope this really impresses the girls."

it sure impresses me.

so. i'm out on the road and i have little or no direction except that i am making geocaches the loose framework for my days. i am stopping for prayer at fixed intervals, and the balance of those two structures is very pleasing.

and i keep ending up at the perfect places at the perfect times. i'm getting to a lot of cache locations i don't like the look of and i just don't care. granted, i love a highway pull-off as much as the next person and i'm a guardrail enthusiast, but some of these little things i'm just not hunting.

what i WAS hunting tuesday around noon was a good sandwich and i just happened to be in charlemont, MA at christopher's and it's a little hole-in-the-wall and i'm not sure it's all that promising but i'm starving and it has a public restroom and an outside picnic table.

i order the #12 wrap and the guy brings it out to me at the table: freshly breaded eggplant with a little tomato sauce and mozzarella with grilled onions and peppers and the onions are perfectly carmelized and it comes in a sundried tomato wrap and it is so good i could just cry.

and the guy comes out to ask me if it's ok.

is it ok?

it is, i tell him, the best sandwich i have had in months, maybe ever.

and i make use of the open network to settle on going up the hill to do the davis mine loop caches; seven micros in the woods, each giving an all-important digit toward a final.

it's a nice walk, and the caches are nicely placed, but somewhere along the way i made a wrong turn, which i am blaming on stupidly angled trail signs. i'm pretty far away from the right trail when i realize my mistake, but it turns out i'm only .18 from the cache, so i decide to bushwhack.

at first it's open meadow and then open woods and then it becomes apparent that i am on the wrong side of a beaver pond. but below the dam (as there often is) there is a bog that will in places support my weight, so i pick my way carefully across that and come out right at the honkin' cache, but it takes me a while to regain my bearings and find the wretched little thing.

and then at subsequent stages the trail appears and disappears with a frquency and capriciousness that suggests to me the trails are a lot more used in winter than in summer.

and just as it becomes time for afternoon prayer, i come to a place where a blowdown has been sawed up. one of the pieces is so flat and smooth it is almost like someone had taken a plane to it.

so i sat there.

the theme seemed to be doubt, which kind of echoes all the lost trails and wrong turns of the day.

and i wondered about my journey into faith: is this the moment i was afraid of? the moment in which i realize my foolishness and that there really is no God after all? the moment in which i realize that i only believed because i wanted to believe? needed something to lean on?

and after a long while, i heard the voice: enough of this. you have heard my voice. what else do you need?

and Jesus? i asked.

i'm here.

and although my body hurt, my heart was light as i made the return trip to my car, almost a mile. a song started to form in me. back at my car i celebrated by washign my hair, an activity best done while it is still light out and before the day cools down too much. that was so good, i washed my feet and changed socks, too.

on my way "home" i found a grocery store with ripe avocadoes. the night was fine and clear and i took the opportunity to shave.



and i realize i'm kind of going on at length here, but there's still wednesday to tell you about.

when it was time for mid-morning prayer, i just happened to be on the green by the west brattleboro congregational church, so i grabbed my guitar and went in. and then i wandered down into greenfield and did a lot of those guardrail caches i'd declined the day before, making up a little story about a lifetime wish to drive across massachusetts, stopping every .3 miles.

but then it was nearly time for afternoon prayer and i was in shelburne falls. i had been there once, but it was luminaria night in november, so it was like being there the first time.

i just happen to have been at the potholes at the appointed hour, so that's where i stopped.







and then i continued on foot to the other caches in town and just across the river. every step of it was perfect, the kind of perfect where you're really, really glad to be alive. the kind of perfect that binds up the broken places and makes you whole.

and before i crossed over on the bridge of flowers, i came to this incredible set of windchimes.



and then it was dinnerime and i realized that i wasn't so far from he place that made the perfect sandwich, so i bet they'd make a decent pizza and i went there. from there i went "home" to my little woodcock friend. as of this morning the snow hadn't melted all the way at the campsite; i wish i could predict when that will finally happen.

and today again i was in the right place at the right time and i'd like to tell you about it, but it's late and i'm very much looking forward to having a shower.

it is a life of surprise and delight, a life of luxury.

going out

for some reason my hands are very dry, even though i keep putting on lotion. i've been camping at a site off of forest road 71 in the green mountain national forest, at the somerset landing strip. it's pretty out there, and last night there was a woodcock "peenting" about forty feet away from me. i didn't feel like "cooking", but i couldn't find a ripe avocado or a pizza place, so it was a bowl of udon for me. it wasn't too bad; it was cold out, but i felt good.

instead of telling you a lot, i'm just going to skip to the photos.

on the road

arrr, matey.

who would have thought there were so many open networks all around? if i'd have known they were all over down here, i wouldn't have put my game on hold. i'm playing ikariam, but that's another story.you can look for me on the iota server if you've a mind to.

right now i'm just waiting for my haircut appointment. the great thing about that is that i won't have to wash my hair myself later, and that on subsequent days it will take a lot less shampoo.

after i get my hair done i'll go find some geocaches, i think. the weather is clearing. this morning i went to worship at the east arlington federated church they're UMC and UCC, so i'm right at home. i was among them one sunday a couple of years ago when i was camping up on kelly's stand and i promised them i would visit again. so they're why i stayed up there last night, instead of a different campsite not as scenic but with better amenities.


last night it was pretty chilly on the mountain, and although i forgot to bring the comforter that goes over the whole mess of other bedding, i was still warm enough. it rained pretty hard in the night, and the sound of the rain is soothing to me. the campstie itself is a place where to mountain streams converge and it's so beautiful you almost don't know what to do with it.

i don't know where i'll end up tonight, but i at least know where i can stop to rest, and maybe have a pizza besides.

in the old days i used to cache more frenetically, but this living on the road which used to be a means to an end is now the end in itself. it is a concentrated way to live, out of my car.

today at church i was talking to a gentleman who heard me say i was staying in my car and made sure to ask me if i needed help, to tell me that there would be help for me and that i need not be ashamed to ask.

very sweet of him and i hope i would behave similarly in the same position, but i assured him that although i am presently living in my car, i do have a home of my own to which i can return when i'm done traveling. and i do have a church home to which i will return as well.

they told e again as they told me last time to come back and visit. i promise i will.

peregrine

thursday i took off on the road. it's not anything like roughing it and in fact i won't be really roughing it ever, i guess. it's pretty posh living in the back of my car, which i'm not doing yet even.

so far i've been staying with the flyingfishers, which is familiar and good. flyingfisher makes a very good turkey soup. yesterday i actually went caching with flyingfisher, my first caching in a looong time.

on the way to one cache we came across a vernal pool where there was a huge -and i mean huge- mass of frog eggs, in two clumps and the tadpoles, very, very teeny, were just emerging from the eggs. and then we saw other movement in the pool and we happened to catch newts mating.

of course we aren't -or weren't- up-to-speed on the particulars of that act, at least as it applies to newts, so when we got home of course we had to go look it up.

you can go look it up if you want. what was interesting was that we weren't exactly sure of what-all the steps were, and which players were which. we speculated as to the behaviors and the mechanics of this species' fertilization, and whether those were additional males and whether they would compete for mating rights.

turns out that after some courtship (which may or may not occur, depending on the laziness of the male and the receptiveness of the female), the male drops a packet which the female picks up (or doesn't) and manages for herself.

there are some available articles about this arrangement and how since the female not only has total control, but that she typically will accept packets from three males, there isn't any significant competition among males for mating rights.

as for diet, we learned that these guys will eat anything that's living and mouth-sized, which explains why the whole thing took place amount the hatching frog eggs.

who among us hasn't ever been toasty for a snack afterwards?

so everything we saw down at the pool was explained for us very nicely and flyingfisher got some good pictures and i got a few seconds of video.



and we had a lovely dinner of take out indian food.

i slept too late in the morning, but it's rainy and i'm not in a very big hurry to get to my campsite down south.

even so, it's time for me to get on the road, maybe get a haircut and find a place to go to church in the morning.

where have you been?

well, it's been a while.

and i cut most of you out of the loop, but i wasn't writing anyway.

a lot of stuff happened.

there were some hospital stays, and i lost my job, and Barbara has left our church.
that's all pretty fresh and i'll probably have some things to say about it, but not just yet.

tomorrow i'm hitting the road and going on peregrination, which david says is a lot like pilgrimage, except with no fixed destination.

i have some waypoints loaded and i'll probably spend some time in the ADKs and central NY, maybe going as far south as NJ. we'll see.

small slice

i know it's been a long time since the last time i wrote. an awful lot of stuff was going on over here and a lot of it cut too close to center, if you can imagine that. i didn't want to talk about the depression, which was bad. i didn't want to talk about the very bad thing that happened, nor the prophetic dream, nor the worse thing that happened, nor the couple of weeks in the hospital.

i don't think i'll ever talk about the very, very bad thing. i'm still having a hard time getting over it.

but with all this stuff i didn't want to talk about, you can perhaps imagine how it was that i had a hard time getting started writing about the things i was willing to talk about.

so i think i just want to tell you about a small sliver, about an hour and a half from this afternoon.

i don't know what the weather was like today at your house, but here the sky was clear and bright blue and it was chilly out until the sun warmed up the places where the sun was shining. so a walk down the road was warm and cool and warm and cool and so on.

i have gone on at length elsewhere in this blog about the fact that i live in west bolton, a place i have loved with all my heart ever since i was sixteen. downtown west bolton isn't much more than a four-way stop. nashville road (halfway down the road are four houses and an intersection with a dead end. this is nashville. it says so on the map.) anyway, nashville road is the main approach from more populated areas. it's mostly straight and mostly flat and it approaches our downtown from the west. to the south (i'm heading counter-clockwise, or widdershins if you prefer) - to the south is stage road, the only alternative that isn't a dead end.

i live up stage road.

the eastern arm of the intersection is short and steep and it would go right up the mountain, but it stops pretty early on, but there used to be mills up there. to the north is cemetery road, which used to go all the way through to underhill (although they have a different name for it on their side) only now its cut off just past the cemetery by the giant NO TRESPASSING signs. actually, it's kind of weird coming up cemetery road because for most of the way there are tall fences and barbed wire and no trespassing signs on both sides, all the way up to the cemetery.

i set out from my house in the early afternoon, tossing not-my-cat (more about her some other day) out onto the porch. while i was in the hospital i developed the habit of going for walks as often as i could. my shoulder hurts a lot and i don't want to ride. but it was very pleasant, all the way to what we call downtown.

we're not being funny, calling that one intersection downtown; in the last years of the nineteenth century it was a boom town. there were mills and stores and smithies and farms and granaries and houses. lots of them. but in the early years of the twentieth century the government bought some of the land west of cemetery road and north of nashville road. at the beginning of world war I the army bought more of the land and used it for a training encampment.

then it kind of waned for a while, but eventually the government decided to make it more of a permanent training facility. they use it for a firing range for both small arms and large artillery. it has world-class nordic skiing trails. it is one of the nation's foremost training grounds for cold weather rescue and law-enforcement officers from all over the US come in winter.

all through the twenties and thirties the government acquired most of the farms and buildings. there was much talk later on that the government had forced out the residents, but the truth is that it was all hardscrabble farming and it was the depression and the government was paying a little more than market value.

the buildings were bulldozed and the debris cleared. everything along one side of the road was now firing range. except for this one long corridor up to the cemetery, which is still active.

when you get to downtown, the millbrook (once again, not just a fancy name. if you walk along it, you will see the ruins of some of the mills.) anyway, the millbrook is just a little bit down cemetery road. a narrow bridge goes over it. i went down the little path to the water, and i thought i'd look for a holed stone to give to Barbara. it's supposed to be lucky to find a holed stone, and lucky to receive one as a gift.

i found four.

and there's this collection of big rocks under the bridge. well, not really huge, but big enough to sit or lie down on, and i like these rocks very much on their own merit, but i also like them because they remind me of a day when i came here with Flyingfisher and Tharagleb. my favorite picture of Flyingfisher is one in which she's standing in the sunlight against the bridge abutment.

i want to get over to those rocks, but i have to go up and over the road. there's a little red eft sitting very still on the top of one of the rocks, but he has this bug on him and i think it will do him a favor to take it off.

but the eft falls into the water, in a place that has to be the rough equivalent of me falling off of niagara falls. he's teeny, and in comparison this little part of the rapids looks HUGE. i'm so saddened, but there's nothing i can do, i think, having considered plunging into the water to try to save him. and i'm just sitting on the rock when the miracle happens: i see him swim up to a crack in the rock and once he surfaces it takes him a while to climb out and he doesn't seem worse for wear.

the miracle, of course, is not that he swims to safety; that's what they do. they swim. the miracle is that i was there to see it.

i lie back on the rock for a while, staring up. my favorite color is that particular green of leaves against a blue sky. then i sit up for a while, looking upstream at the swimming hole and the falls above it. i listen, maybe for God's voice, maybe for something else. i've been struggling with bitterness in my soul and the chatter of it is overwhelming a lot of days.

quietly, i come up from the streambed and keep walking up the road. in a few minutes i am at the ruins of the baptist church. i stay there for a few moments, facing the center of the church, where some of the larger trees are larger around than i could reach.

i get up to the cemetery. there's a blue car parked up there, but i don't see anybody. i open the gate and go in. it's an active cemetery, although there are many graves from the early nineteenth century. the veterans all have fresh flags on their graves, except for richard bacon. usually he gets a fresh flag, but for some reason not this year. maybe someone forgot? he is unusual for a vermont hill cemetery because although he was a civil war veteran, he served with the confederate army. they give him a confederate flag.

i walk around and pay my respects and i notice with some alarm that they seem to be running out of space there at the back of the cemetery. i want to be buried here, i think. i'd better get jumping.

but then i go an lie down in the shade of a tree, near some of the union veterans and i hear gunshot, whic would not be unusual, since this is a firing range, except i thing this is illegal firing -probably just target shooting- because it's coming from the wrong direction.

huh, i think. good thing i'm on the ground.

so i keep my head down and i'm enjoying the relative peace and i hear the boys come out of the woods and they're talking about stuff, getting ready to go and i know they can't see me and they don't know i'm there, which scares me a little when they squeeze off a couple more shots and then the really startling thing happens: from the OPPOSITE side someone shouts "HALT AND CEASE FIRE!"

and the boys peel out down the road and i'm standing there wondering what will happen if the guard comes my way.

they don't. i assume that they hear the departure of the car and turn back.

i figure it's as good a time as any to brush the moss off of me and head for home.