Sorry Kiddo

12. Today is the day the bad news announces itself on your lap. Like we said, we are sorry. We wish it could be otherwise.

13. Some boys are throwing rocks in the parking lot of Round Barn Camp site in Maine. You and Liz have the girls in the van; you're driving them a few miles away to spend the day building a  mountain bike trail. As you all pull away, you gesture towards to the rock throwers. "Look! Boys!" The girls throw themselves against the windows, loudly. You say, "They look a little young for you." And Liz says, "Oh, how disappointing."

14. Liz is swerving between potholes the size of bathtubs and you sit talking in the passenger seat. "Those boys must have been really young, like 12 or 13. The boys at New River were so much bigger than that. They weren't boys, really, they were like....little men." Liz is listening, nodding. You feel a sudden wave of fondness for the boys you had at New River. Mischievous, enthusiastic, moody, sulky, funny boys. You think about them for a little while.

And at that moment- that very moment, it's funny how these things work- the phone on your lap vibrates and you look down to see that one of those boys has drowned. 

 15. It's absurd that you'd even get reception out there. You're 20 miles away from the nearest town, down a gutted muddy road that resembles a creek bed. You're a little startled to get a message at all. As it turns out, it's a very confusing message.  Another teacher at New River wrote to say that Stephen Forster is missing. He swam on the North Fork of the Payette River at 4,400 CFS. A swim at that level means-

17. Like a bad novel, this is where the message cuts off. You need to press 'view' to read the rest of it. But Liz has just pulled the van behind a truck from Maine Huts and Trails and you've got to get out and get some directions. You're not sure you want to look at the message anyway. It's a little nebulous, but you don't have the greatest feeling about it. He's missing? You frown at the phone for a second. That doesn't mean he's dead, necessarily. When was this message sent, anyway?

18. You and Liz go out and talk to the trail people, two heavily accented Maine men wearing Carharts and filthy t-shirts. They call you Dear: hello dee-ah.  They're saying things and pointing at a pile of trail tools, but you're not really paying attention. You start to think, You know what, this doesn't sound very good. You think, I should really go read the rest of that message.

You go back to the car and read the rest of the message. 

A swim at that level means drowning. 

19. Unfortunately, we are not able to provide you with the relative comfort of denial at this time. You understand perfectly what has happened. Stephen Forster drowned on the North Fork of the Payette River in Idaho. Yesterday, around lunch time in that part of the country. Around the time you reached for the cooler of food and froze. Stephen was a student at New River the whole time you worked there. You lived with him for a year in Chile, in West Virginia, on the Ottawa river.

20. Stephen was the boy who once filled the kettle with milk, which exploded on the stove and scalded your whole AP class. "Why on earth did you do that?"  You asked, holding your dripping text book over the sink.  "Well I wanted hot chocolate," he said, guilty and laughing, "It made sense to me."

21. Stephen was many things to many people.  Older brother. Only son.

22. You step out of the car and into the woods nearby. Liz comes to ask what's going on. You cry all over her and leave a wet bite mark on her shoulder. She shepherds the girls off to the trail. Alone with this news, the only thing you can do is take a stick and write his name in the dirt. Keeping your hands busy is a good thing to do. Your brain is chasing its tail. The piece that cannot understand is saying I want to see Stephen now, I really really miss him.  And the part that understands because this has happened twelve times before is saying you can't, sorry Kiddo, never again.

Intermission: Golden Gardens, August 6th, 2011

I'm taking an intermission from this story. I'm writing it from memory, of course. I'm not even on the East Coast any more. I couldn't write about everything while it was all happening, for logistical reasons, mostly- I didn't have a computer or electricity or time. Also because some things are so severe in your mind that if you wrote about them fresh, they'd come out all choppy and violent. They may cause more pain to the people who are trying to regain their breath. I want to avoid doing that, but I want to tell this story authentically. The best way to accomplish this is through small pieces, measured, with time elapsing in between. And then something happens like what happened last night.   

*****

It's August 6th. I take my friend So to the beach to watch the sunset. So was one of my best friends growing up. He is a Vermonter who recently moved to LA. I want to show him the best piece of my city. On this cool summer Saturday night, the beach is overflowing with people. Camp fires burn up and down the coast, silhouetted figures throw stones and gather around flames and run up and down the sand. We laugh at the scene, how idyllic it is, urban and tribal at the same time. We sit at the very end, where the long grasses stretch out into the sand, and drink expensive coconut beer out of pretty cans.

"Do you want to see a picture of Stephen?" I take my phone from my pocket. "I'll show you a few." I have been telling him a little about Stephen and everything that happened. I don't want Stephen to become a story; I want him to remain a boy with a face. I flick through photos as So leans over the screen, making nice comments. Then he tells me he's having a hard time conceptualizing drowning. How can it happen? I pull up a video of the North Fork of the Payette at high water.  "Oh...." he says, watching the enormous, sucking, powerful hydraulics. "I can see that now."

The sun is gone, and the Olympic range glows with bars of violet and blue light. At our backs, a passenger trains rushes North. All of a sudden things change around us. From out of nowhere a fire truck veers up to the parking lot, lights flashing, siren blaring. It is followed by an ambulance, then another and another. There are five ambulances and three fire trucks and police cars gathered in the parking lot. One of the engines extends the crane and shines a spotlight out onto the dark water. "Maybe a fire got out of control?" I say, but there is no fire, no panic, very little sound at all.  We wonder, how could we have missed an occurrence worthy of so many rescue vehicles when we were right there the whole time?

We walk towards the scene, expecting someone to tell us we have to turn around. Nobody does. All of the people on the other side of the beach are pressing towards the water, looking out. A feel a familiar fear prickling at my skin. Police boats are making wide arcs out in the water. Every few minutes one will send a flair into the moonlight sky. The flairs hang and sway like a lantern, sending a bright white light over the water. Then it begins to fail and falls shimmering into dark.

There are little kids children gathered on the bigger rocks on the water. At one point, a mother shouts to her child to stand back and her voice is so fierce that twenty people around her obey.

The story is hard to put together. Rumors run like hot liquid through through the crowd. A kid will point to the white breaking wave and say Shark! Then everyone is saying there must have been a shark attack. But I can't imagine it was a shark, it's just too unlikely. The water is so cold at Golden Gardens that hardly anybody swims.

A hugely pregnant woman is holding her stomach with one hand and pointing with her other, talking to a semicircle of policemen. I can hear a few of her words. "The last place we saw them was---" A few feet away, a man is gesturing towards the water. People lean in closer, squinting. A flat round brown thing hovers beneath the surface of the water, barely visible. Someone runs away and comes back with a group of firemen, who crowd around with radios, spotlights and binoculars. It's a jellyfish. "It's just a jelly," a tiny kid says next to me, comforting his little brother. "Just a jelly."

I finally ask a fire chief if he can tell us what's going on. He is standing there very calm and handsome in a white shirt.  He tells us they are responding to a call of missing people in the water. "So they're lost?" A young woman asks, incredulous. "Are they drowned?" The fire chief shrugs. "We don't know." A diver in a full dry suit walks through, looking bored.

"I think if we're all hoping to find a body floating in the water, we're out of luck." I murmur to So. "It doesn't work like that." Not to be a know it call, but I know a lot about drowning. I can tell you exactly what happens when a body drowns. In the last few weeks I've been doing some research. I've looked at books in the library.

People are beginning to leave.  It's eleven o'clock; in normal situations the park would be closed.  From the pockets of rescue workers we can hear voices over radios, but we can't make out their words. The crane and its light lower. A few of the ambulances turn off their lights and drive away. Eventually they all follow, police and fire trucks, giving away none of their secrets.

We stay there until almost until the beach is empty. I can't stop looking out into the water, which is cold and cut with the sharp reflection of moonlight. It occurs to me that I may not actually know what happens to a body that drowns in the Puget Sound, on account of it being salt water. A police boats glide by. At its bow I can see the black outline of a dredging hook, and again I start to imagine gruesome things, things that would be of no help to anybody.

This happened last night. I'll get back to the story now. 

So Now You Know

 7. In the evenings, there will be long hours with nothing for you to do. The girls will entertain themselves, arranging each others' hair into tiny braids while you read or fall lightly asleep on the rocks. Sometimes you hear them splashing into the river, the collective scream as they pull off their suits under water and crash through the surface, naked and exhilarated.  The camp where they've spent their summers since they were nine has a lot of rules. There are brown and white uniforms and daily activities divided neatly into two hour blocks. It's a traditional New England Institute, celebrating its centennial this year. Each morning they raise the flag and check the girls' finger nails; the girls address all the instructors as Miss. This summer they go with you and Miss Liz, out in the woods for a month, and you let them do whatever they want. Pretty much. So long as they don't get hurt. You encourage them to go ballistic, huck themselves off rock cliffs and rope swings, get covered in mud, stalk animals through the woods and carve pieces of wood. They prove very apt at these things, and more, and staunchly refuse to take showers even when they become available in a few weeks.

8.  Each night, around a fire in the starlit woods, the girls tip back their heads back in their camp chairs until they fall flat onto their backs. Liz points out constellations, a white spray of stars across the black sky. The whole river trip is like this, serene and easy. On the fourth day a canoe tips over, spilling two girls and all the food into the little rapids. You worry about foot entrapment as you wade back upstream to collect the sunken cooler, usher the girls onto shore, but then again you're prone to worrying around water.

9. On the last day something strange happens. You and the girls have hauled the canoes onto shore and are beginning to load the trailer.  You spot a shady spot by the dam which would make a good spot for lunch. You are bent over, grasping the handles of a cooler, when all of a sudden a thought enters your mind. You do not think it, because you yourself do not create the thought. It is just there, suddenly. Something is happening, it says. You pause like that, bent, arms taught, listening.  Something bad is happening right now. The thought is purely factual, an announcement. You have the wherewithal to look at your watch: 2:38pm, Eastern Standard Time, June 28th. 2011. And then there is nothing you can do- this new knowledge makes you aware of some occurrence in the dimmest, vaguest of terms. It does not empower you. There is nothing you can do. You carry the cooler over to spot in the shade, begin arranging food on the picnic table.

You've had these moments before, and on a few terrible occasions, they have been true. More often then not, these broadcasts are nothing more than tricks played on you by your morbid imagination.  You always think the worst thing is going to happen and are left mildly surprised when everything turns out fine. All the time, actually, you imagine terrible things happening. To your credit, you've tried to get this under control, with therapy and Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors.

You feel guilty a lot, as if bad things happen because you've imagined them. We encourage you to dispel this ridiculous notion. Your thoughts carry absolutely no weight, no universal significance. Causing bad things to happen with your brain is about as as likely as causing anything good to happen with your brain. Which is to say, not likely. You tried that last year- books of pop psychology, mediation, yes, if you can think it, it will be! and it was a disaster. Do we even have to remind you.

10. You drive a few hours up to Maine, constantly checking the blank screen of your phone as you hit random pockets of reception. Don't expect to see anything. Whatever happened, it just happened, and it will take a little while until the information reaches you, out there in the middle of nowhere. You turn up the radio on the awful pop songs the girls are begging to hear on 92 Moose, Maine's number one hit music station. When you stop at a grocery store to resupply, you try to sneak expensive coffee and whole cream into the cart and onto the camp budget.

11. For tonight, you may as well forget about what you know. You were right, of course. Something bad was happening, at that very minute you bent over to pick up the cooler. Something unfathomable, yet predictable- you always predict things like this are going to happen. This time it did, and we're sorry. But for tonight you may as well set  up a good camp, sit by the fire, get to sleep early. Despite how angelic the girls are, leading in the wilderness is tiring. After tomorrow, when you're sucker-punched by shock and every little motion becomes gilded with grief, it will become exhausting, something else entirely.

Elizabeth

 3. For the mornings you've brought along a little stove, Snowpeak, a Japanese creation that looks like a metal insect and folds into a plastic case the size of a pack of cigarettes. It screws onto a red, hissing canister of gas and affords you the luxury of making coffee in the vestibule of your tent, without even leaving your sleeping bag. An ideal situation. You wake up gradually, roll onto your stomach and fill the french press with Green Mountain Nantucket blend as the water boils, the bright early light filtering green through the nylon walls. You wait there in the domed calm of your tent, allowing yourself these few peaceful minutes before the day and its many tasks. Soon you will hear the girls are awake, crashing around in the woods getting breakfast ready.

4. Sixteen year old girls wake up with a snap. At six fifty nine AM they are smashed inside their tents (they insist on fitting four girls inside both of the three-person tents, leaving the third tent untouched, which on the first night makes you smile, bemused, thinking this will never last the whole trip, they prove you wrong) faces buried in braids and fleece jackets. One minute later they're up, rolling around and messing with zippers, recounting their dreams all at the same time, at the top of their lungs. Liz is awake as well, already dressed and mostly packed, helping the girls wrestle with the cantankerous Coleman.

5. One thing you should know about your co-leader, Liz: she seems to have very little in the way of human needs. She doesn't eat much, sleeps a moderate amount, wakes up in an instant, does not treat herself to even the smallest luxury that you're aware of.  She does not daydream aloud about food and packs for expeditions like a spartan. This makes you, in your stubbornness and ubiquitous hunger, try repeatedly to tempt her with ice cream or lunch stops when it's just you two in the car, driving the shuttles. She never wants any of it except for, on one occasion, a bottle of Rootbeer. She works constantly, non-stop, even when there is very little to be done. After a certain bit of news reaches your ears and you become forgetful, prone to staring into space for half an hour while camp life whirls around you, she'll do even more work. The crying jags you are careful to keep quiet, hidden inside your tent, but she knows, and she picks up your slack without a word. Liz knows a lot of things about living outside.  It's best to know right now that out of the 32 mild disagreements you'll have over the next four weeks, Liz will be correct on 29 of them.

6. For about 8% of the trip you'll be annoyed with one another, stormy and exasperated. You wish she would control her bad moods, she wishes you'd talk less and work more. For the other 92%, you're inseparable. Neither of you can seem to get enough of the other.  You'll start a conversation at the mouth of the Androscoggin that will last for weeks, up the Coast to Maine, down into Booth Bar Harbor and through the difficult mountain passes of the Whites. The barrier between your private thoughts and the things you share with her becomes micro-thin, until it's really not there at all. Most evenings will be spent with her head in your lap, in front of a campfire somewhere, telling stories in a kind of kid-friendly code. Her lack of desires and your abundance of them ("do you ever think about a hamburger? Like, really think about one?") is ever present, something you bat back and forth the whole time. You cram two dollars in quarters into a machine in Bar Harbor for four minutes of hot water. She never showers, but because of  her dreadlocks and flawless complexion, she barely ever appears dirty. You are always a mess. It makes you crazy. This is your second summer leading with Elizabeth and you wish you could always have her near.

To Begin With

 1.Your job over the next four weeks is to lead eight girls into the New England wilderness and keep them fed. It would be ideal if they didn't get physically banged up at all, but they are a radically uncoordinated bunch so just do what you can. You have nothing to worry about, as you are well aware, because this is entirely within your range of ability, you led the same trip last year, and especially with your newly acquired medic skills you are more than a capable leader. We'll tell you right now- and we're not spoiling any surprises because in terms of the girls there are no surprises to be spoiled- that you'll encounter three nose bleeds, two "sprained" knees, one partial thickness burn (boiling water, dinner, surprising it wasn't worse) and the normal amount of blisters and scratches. On day three in the White Mountains it will rain for eight hours as you march up and down four miles of exposed ridge line at a dazzlingly slow pace, but you and Liz do an admirable job at staving off hypothermia. There are two overturned canoes and, during one unfortunately synchronised spell, about eight times the amount of menstrual cramps you were prepared to hear about at one time. Absolutely nothing to write home about. We will warn you however, and not to spoil any surprises here, that just five days into the trip you'll receive a terrible piece of news- it will quite literally land in your lap- and after that a trembling, unfathomable sadness will slouch its way into your amygdala and dominate every thing you do, down to the last detail. 
 
2. The trip begins with a four day canoe trip across lake Umbagog and down the Androscoggin River in New Hampshire. Everything is serene and pleasant and the girls are doe eyed and eager and brand new at everything. You and Liz, but mostly Liz, teach them the practicals of camping- how to prime a stove and light a blue flame without blowing themselves up, how to get a fire going in the evenings and properly stake out a tent. Your imparted wisdom is less pertinent but, you contend, may be very important one day. It is important to keep a severed digit cool by wrapping it in wet rag and storing it in a waterbottle, you tell them over dinner, holding up a half full Nalgene and shaking it. However, do not submerge the digit fully in water, it will decompose. They gamely absorb this and other information you dole out, and over dessert they beg to hear your adventure stories. They think you're funny, one of the most exciting people they've ever met. If the world were comprised of sixteen year olds, you think to yourself as you hold a marshmallow stick over the fire, you would be a very famous person, although you're faintly aware that the full ramifications of that statement are not entirely positive towards you.

Image One

Stephen

The wilder coast will be silent for a little while as we cope with the drowning of Stephen Forster. Please lend your thoughts to his parents and his younger sister Elizabeth during this hard time. Stephen, you are in every breath I take.

The Rescue

Sadie's legs were burned from the knee down to her ankle, deep red and charred black like hamburger meat. Looking at them as I threw a sleeping bag over her, I knew she'd need extensive surgeries if they were not amputated at the thigh. The rest of her body seemed remarkably unscathed, considering she'd just survived a plane wreck. David held C-spine as I tried to do a physical exam on her without moving her legs. It was nine o'clock at night, almost completely dark, and my headlamp cast a pitiful beam over her shaking body. She was crying without making a sound, answering all of my questions in breathless, two word sentences. When I rolled her onto my knees to check her back, she cried out in pain.

I took one of her hands and told her to make eye contact with me. I told her to breathe in and out with my breath, as if she was a mother in labor. This is the one thing I knew how to do.

I forget who the other rescuers who joined me, but soon there were four of us gathered by her side. We got her onto the spine board which was tough- she was lying on a steep hill. "I'm sliding off, I'm sliding off" she kept telling us, and we'd have to inch her back up. We got her strapped down with a neck collar on, and I told her we were going to carry her down to where the helicopter would take her to the hospital. She squeezed my hand tightly. "Are you going to stay with me?"

They warned us earlier that as soon as you make eye contact with your patient, you belong to them. You are no longer a objective rescuer- that person is the person whose life you will fight for. I had no idea- no idea at all- what they were talking about until the moment when Said begged me not to leave her. And when I said "Yes, I'm staying right here until they get you on the helicopter," I knew that nothing could tear me away.

We got to the landing site and the other rescuers took off to help more victims, but I stayed. One rescuer has to remain with each patient, mainly so if they code you can give them CPR and if they throw up you can clear their airway. I hovered over Sadie, stroking the hair from her face, asking her questions, trying to keep her from focusing on the screams still coming from the forest, the chaos of rescuers running around. And then one of my instructors, Phoebe, appeared at my side and whispered that I was going to have a seizure in two minutes. "Me?" I asked, pointing at my chest. She nodded, the trace of a smile on her face.

For two more minutes I reassured Sadie that she was going to be okay and that I wasn't leaving, and then I threw myself into a seizure at her side. I was pleased myself at how authentic a seizure it was- I had recently seen one in a video. It only lasted for about ten seconds, but I thrashed about so much on the rocky trail that I decided I had a neck injury. Sophia and Darren dropped to my side- if they were thrown by this unexpected twist in the plot, they didn't show it. Sophia held immobilized with C-spine and Darren started checking me for injuries, and it was so much fun that I threw in a second seizure.

By this time, word of "rescuer down" had reached the others. Most of the victims were either cared for or already dead, so the rescuers were checking in on me, appearing as floating headlamps above my face. Some were totally rolling with it, others asked aloud if I was actually hurt. I could hear Sadie asking for me, wanting to know what happened, and I started yelling that someone hold her hand and keep talking to her. We kept calling for one another and it was all wildly dramatic until another instructor appeared, pointed at Sadie and said "Alright, you're out of the scenario." She was quickly unstrapped, rose from the spine board rubbing her makeup heavy legs, and disappeared.

They kept me in the scenario till the bitter end. The other rescuers carried me out of the park in the litter, singing a marching song as they passed me between their hands. When it was all over, we sat outside the darkened classroom with the dozen or so bloody, burned, basal skull fractured victims, mostly comprised of employees from Remote Medical International. And my friend Colin. A tough bunch, they said we actually did a pretty good job.

Late that night, we went to the Boxcar and drank pitchers of Hazelnut Ale. I thought to myself, I bet rescuers drink a lot of alcohol. Then I started counting on my fingers how long it would take to save the 3,000 dollars I'd need to take the Wilderness EMT Class, feeling like I may have found another thread.

I'm sleeping alone in a vacant house in New Hampshire

In case I go missing, this would be a good place to start looking. I'm in the library with the door closed. I'm a little uneasy, but mostly I'm just fine, and I'm talking and talking to this Owl, who looks down on me. It's raining very hard outside.

Ouch

I black tagged my first patient today.

World Says Go

I was on a bus two nights ago, propping my head on my hands, feeling rag tag and heavy. It was a black, starless New England night outside, thick with humidity. The land we pushed through pulsed with familiarity and loneliness, and emotions swam through my head as if on an endless thread. Not sure which one to indulge, I put on a song called Beautiful World and closed my eyes for a few minutes.

All at once, I found myself easing back into the world around me, settling down in a way I've been too tightly wound to do for months. Beautiful World is song written and sung by my friend Darren Guyaz, and incredibly kind and talented man I met in WFR class. Darren is on Kickstarter right now, and his debut album is hovering on the verge of being funded. He has nine days to go. He's offering some enticing prizes for donating at all levels- if you donate 12 dollars, you get a digital download of the whole album after it's been recorded. So in effect, you're not really donating, you're just pre-buying.

Please let me know if you give to Darren's album! I'm staring into a year of hard work, late nights, deadlines, search and rescue and scrambling to make it all happen. We're all staring into this kind of year, as far as I can tell. I want to listen to an album that will help me come down from it all. If you contribute, I'll send you one of my photo cards with a hand written letter, thanking you for helping creativity thrive in a daunting economy.

Click here to give his music a listen and help him out if you can. Even if you can't spare a few bucks, and not all of us can, definitely check out his music and spread the word. Help keep underground, homemade music alive, and thank you.

Remote and Far Away Now

We did it! My classmates and I all became certified Wilderness First Responders on Sunday. We went to the Boxcar to celebrate at 3:30 in the afternoon, got drunk enough to hang all over each other make about a thousand plans for future trips, climbing, rescue squads and EMT training. We all confessed our deepest love and admiration for one another and then, seven and a half hours and 16 pitchers later, mostly fell asleep at the table.

I woke up at 5:00 am the next morning, finished packing, and took the train to the airport. It turns out my flight was at 12:00 noon, four hours later than I'd thought, so I fell into a reasonably satisfying sleep at the gate. On the airplane, I opened my laptop and worked on articles until we landed in Boston. I tried to keep writing on the bus up to Vermont but my brain kept twisting me in different directions and fell forward, asleep, onto the keyboard.

Today I submitted my articles, ran errands, tried to pack, sat out in the field with my dogs and tried to feel all the stuff I should be feeling but all I could feel was tired, and calm, and very aware of the crickets. I changed my cell phone ring in Seattle to be the sound of crickets, so it could remind me of summer night in Vermont. Now I'm back in Vermont and it's a summer night and the crickets make me think of my phone ringing.

Tomorrow I'll write one more article, then drive to New Hampshire and start doing gear inventory and tracing maps for a month long expedition into Maine. On Thursday, we take off. Some day soon, I'll relax and be able to write without using run on sentences, think without veering off into a hundred side roads. Someday soon, I know it.

Half alive across the country

I'm checking in from somewhere in New England, on the last bus between Boston and Hanover, New Hampshire. It's completely black night outside. The past two weeks have seen very little sleep for me, and my head is sagging forward onto my chest as I try to keep working on this empty, overheated bus.  In the last few days my life exploded into a thousand diamonds and now it's my job to make sure I catch all of them before they melt.

This song is getting me through this late night, first leg of my trip: click here and stream the first song "Beautiful World." I think you'll find it suits you.

Injection

I have no time to write. I underestimated how all consuming this class would be. When we're not doing night rescue simulations, I get home around 7. I try and eat dinner, pack a little for my trip, and then work on articles due for trailseldge until about midnight. My latest, A Guide to Crag Side Flirtation, the first of a three part segment, went really well. Actually, it got more attention than my last two which went viral, but I don't have the time to follow it. Right now it's got 73 'likes' on facebook (none of those was me). What a funny industry/world/job that success is measured in a little thumbs up icon.

The two articles I'm writing for this week are due Sunday at midnight and while they're both pretty far along, I have no idea when I'll finish them. No idea. Someone asked how long tomorrow's (Friday's) night rescue would go on, and the instructor just said, "Bring a shelter for yourself."  Saturday morning we'll be up bright and early (some of us are contemplating sleeping in the park after the rescue) for class, Saturday night will be spent studying for this test I'm determined to pass, and Sunday will be the test. Sunday night we're celebrating, and I'm hell bent to celebrate, then Monday morning I get on a plane for Boston and drive to Vermont. On Wednesday night I begin my job guiding in New Hampshire, then Thursday I take my group to Maine or a month in the back country. Somewhere in there, I've got to write my third and final installment on this rock climbing romance piece. I have no idea where all the time went.

To make up for no writing and, when there is writing, it being terrible writing, here are some photos from the class. It's too bad that I have no time to write, because I've never had so much to write about. Learning about wilderness medicine is like finding out I have a new organ inside of me and it has all these crazy powers, and enables me to do all this stuff I never thought I'd be able to do.

For example, today I gave my very first injection, to my very brave friend, Chris. He returned the favor right afterwards.

This would have been a total nightmare for anyone who didn't like needles. I'd aim the needle right at Chris's arm and he'd wince and get ready, then our teacher, Phoebe, would correct something, over and over, so I was essentially hovering this needle over the poor dude's arm for about a minute, faking him out. He said I poked him with such precision that he didn't feel any pain.

Lisa accidentally stabbed herself with the needle when she pulled it out of the package. Before she poked it into Micah's arm, thankfully.

After it was over, I realized I had really, really liked it. I told Chris, "I just want to keep giving you shots." Something about it. It's awesome.

As we gain more and more information, our scenarios are getting crazier. Today we dealt with a mass causality incident that was essentially a pile of 10 people all heaped on top of one another, with sticks coming out of their bodies, a dead infant, screaming parents, blood and head wounds all over the place. We were learning to triage and 'black tag' the patients. One of our teachers, Kate, told us something I'll never forget, about her time working in Haiti after the earthquake. "You know how you hear on the radio, about the people found alive under the rubble after two weeks?" She asked us. "The truth is, there is usually not resources to save those people after they pull them out, and they get 'black tagged', which essentially means they are being left to die." Today we had to decide who amongst our mock-patients we would black tag and leave for dead. We learned that once you make eye contact, it's impossible to do anything but fight for that person's life. So, in essence, be careful with eye contact.

When I was 15 I decided I wanted to be involved in mountain rescuer. I essentially talked myself of it when I moved to Seattle and learned what  a tough road it would be. Because I'm a 'creative' person (whatever the hell that means) I thought that I was incapable of learning any sort of medicine. This class has turned that all around on me. I'm back on the road to being a search and rescuer and mountain rescuer, to repay the debt I incurred eleven years ago. I haven't felt so alert and involved in the world in years.

The Wilder Responder

Only the third day of my Wilderness First Responder class, and already I've been kicked in the kidney by a horse, shattered my wrist mountain biking, split an artery and gone into shock at least four times. And I'm still able to perform an initial patient assessment on my cousin at the end of the day.

The class it ten days long, 80 hours total, provided by Remote Medical International. We take a lot of notes, but most of the time we're outside in the woods setting up bad ass scenarios with stage make up and learning how to bandage a sucking chest wound with a plastic glove. Every evening I arrive home staggering with new knowledge and exhausted.

Meeting midnight deadlines for original articles has been tough. I thought I'd be able to a little bit of outlining during class, but no way. In the first five minutes, I understood that I'd spend each moment in class in rapt attention. Every single thing those three instructors (all women, I'll add) tell us is vital. Absolutely no time is wasted.

These last few nights, I typed with one hand and held my eyes open with the other. Once I finally fall asleep around 1am, I'm pretty damn proud of myself. Tomorrow after a full 8-5:45 day, we're getting a break for dinner and then returning for our first night simulation. This is the best class I've ever taken, the most exciting things I've ever learned, and I hope I never have to use any of it.

Five Hundred and One

 Evolution is Strikingly Slow

I've reached a weird new stage of my writing, uh...."career". Probably for the first time, my work is getting some buzz from people who don't know me. I feel like the tadpole writer is starting to grow legs and drag itself up on shore, which is thrilling because the tadpole was starting to feel sort of wretched about itself, swimming circles in the primordial soup and constantly begging friends to 'leave a comment for Godsake so I know you're out there!'

It's important (extremely important! vital! imperative!) to note that I am not talking about this blog, which started acquiring a good following about a year ago, compiled of readers throughout the country who have never met me in person. But this is my personal blog, meaning anyone who reads it instantly loses their title as 'stranger'. The only girl on earth who is invested in this blog's existence is me. Meaning I get to star in it. (Just like Mindy Kaling, who writes for but also stars in The Office. Just like her!) That's how personal blogs work- you just can't read it and not be aware of who writes it.

I'm also not talking about print magazine articles. People buy those magazines, take them home and read them, but I'll never know about it. So beyond being kind of perpetually thrilled that an old issue of Canoe and Kayak with my name in it is probably stacked on the back of someone's toilet right now, I don't think much about it.

Yes But....What about Me? Hello?

So, I'm at this new stage where people read my articles and comment and tweet and share the links on their mytwitface pages. And even though this is all small time stuff, I actually feel pretty legitimate. For the first time. I also feel invisible. Not in a bad way, but definitely a surprising way. I never stopped to consider the disconnect between a piece of writing and its author. Well except once, when my friend Tyler asked me what I thought of a really popular movie and I said the script was terrible! And he said hmmmm my friend wrote that. For the rest of the day I thought about the writers behind everything- newscasts, television shows, cereal boxes. Then I woke up the next day and forgot about it.

I'll write something for SoulPancake, and Rainn will post a link to it on his fan page, which is fantastic, and he'll get a million responses. For example he posted a link to my SP post "What will do you if you end up alone?"

People wrote things like "Such a great question...." and "Oh Rain, you won't end up alone!!" And I'm sitting there thinking, hello, Rainn didn't write that! I wrote that! Where are the strangers telling me I'm a beautiful man? Where are my fans creepily asking my birthday so they can play the numbers in the lottery?

Can You Guys Hear Me Through the Screen?

My first two articles for TrailsEdge were hits and I was proud of them and also relieved as hell. I wrote 5 Ways to Fake a Sponsorship, and a few days after it went up I got a message from the editor saying there was some 'momentum' on the piece and could I double it to Ten ways? I had to write it right then (which I did) because the momentum was probably going to die off by nightfall (which it did.) In the short time that I've been writing for them, the editor has been ON IT. Prompt, organized, easy to work with. All I have to do is write the stuff, and he takes it from there.  

I'm not used to having my writing go viral without me having to do anything. To learn that one article got, say, 50 reposts on Facebook and only 4 of them were me my friends? I like it! It's weird! It means my stuff may be starting to speak for itself, and people read it because they want to, not because I'm shoving links in their face all the time. (Speaking of, um........10 Ways to Fake a Sponsorship and What your Apres-River Brew Beer says About You.) It also means I now spend afternoons banging on the computer screen going, hey! Hey that was mine! Did you wonder who wrote that? Did you click on my name and read my little bio? Do I fascinate you? Do you want to give me some money?

I was really thrilled when I saw this tweet: 

Kyle Dickman is one of the editors at Outside Magazine. It's clear he works in the industry and knows how to treat writers well. He used my full name, and even bothered searching for me on twitter so he could link it. What a nice guy!

Err, and This One 

Well I've been featured on a new site, Seattle Backpacking Magazine. I wrote a tidy review of my tent, the Mountain Hardwear Sprite. Then my tent breaks, and when I go to REI to replace it I find out that Mountain Hardwear hasn't manufactured this tent for years. So my review won't be very helpful to anyone.

Five Hundred and One

Finally, this post marks my 501 post on The Wilder Coast. Woohoo! A few weeks ago I started a Facebook page for the blog. You should 'Like' it! You'll get access to behind the scenes stuff, like photos of my dog and empty coffee cups that represent my brain or something. You'll also get to marvel at photo albums with all the pictures I don't have room to put up on the blog. Yeah, you should click "Like". It's pretty much a party there 24/7. And I could see who you are, and maybe we could, you know, thumbs up eachother's statuses!

Finally, thank you. I'm excited this little piece of the Internet has lasted for 501 posts, and there's no chance that would have happened if you weren't reading it.

The Woman Who Said I was a Wh0re

Please excuse the intentional misspelling of certain words in this post. I want to protect my blog from questionable Google searches.

I am walking with my sister and my mother through the University of Washington campus. It's one o'clock on a bright, early summer day.  My brother in law has just defended a brilliant doctoral thesis on water fleas, and the three of us are waiting for his committee to release him so we can move on to the part of the day where we drink champagne and eat Safeway cookies outside his laboratory.

I've never been as nostalgic as some when it comes to my Alma Mater, but I did spend five happy years here, and the campus is almost unreasonably beautiful. I'm always proud when I can show my mother around, which is not often because she lives in Vermont. Because it is the end of final exams, Red Square has a quiet, almost vacant feel to it.
 
We get some lunch from a cart and sit down on the benches in the center of the square. In front us, pacing back and forth in the area created by the four benches, an old man with a bow tie rambles away about  evil and sin and repenting. He is dressed all in white, like a tennis player, and swinging around a gilded bible like a racket. There is an unfocused sheen to his eyes, as if he's only half there. The half dozen people sitting on the benches ignore him, heads bent over their text books.

As we're eating, a haggard woman with long strings of grey hair shuffles into the space besides the man. They seemed to be a pair, although of the two the woman has a much sharper demeanor, the wicked focus of a predator.  She is walking in jagged lines, shrieking, and stabbing her finger in the air. And then her eyes rest on me.

As I have mentioned more than once before,  I often find myself the recipient of the sort of attention I'd rather not receive. If a chattering crazy man climbs aboard the city bus, he'll scan the seats and wait to sit down until he finds me. They always find me. It's because I look terrifically, chronically friendly. Even on my bitterest of days, I seem to radiate the same harmless glow of your favorite cousin.

"Little girl!" hisses the woman, her voice like nails scratching. "You're not wearing any clothes!"

Here it comes, I think. Hold on tight.

"Look at you! You're dressed like a SL UT!" Her voice is raising in volume as she gathers momentum. "You looked like A CHILD SLUT! You are dressed LIKE A WH0RE! YOU ARE MAKING ALL THE BOYS LUSTFUL!"

My face is very impassive as I register her words. Lamentably, what she's saying is inaccurate. I have not made any boy lustful for a longer period of time than I'd like to admit. 

"BOYS ARE GOING TO GO HOME AND M@STURB@TE TO YOU!"
Now whether or not that's true, I can't be sure of.

It's at this point in the event, when the word "m@sturbate" is flung out into the ring, that my mother realizes it's me who is being targeted. Yes my mom- my mom who could have gone her whole life without having to consider the lustful boys m@sturb@ting at home to her daughter but alas, did not. She flies up and lands crouched forwards in pounce position, like a cat given an electric shock. "Don't you DARE SPEAK TO HER LIKE THAT!" Her voice is loud and reverberating, and I feel for one minute a pulse of admiration, of gratitude that someone in the world is ready to so instinctively spring to my defense.  

The old lady turns her spitting face towards my mother and continues to scream. "You SL UTTY little girl!! What are you, SIXTEEN?"

What I am wearing does not need explanation, just as anyone who is harassed or abused should not have to explain what they wear, because women should be allowed to wear whatever they want without comment. What's worth mentioning about my outfit, however, is that it is brand new, purchased the day before specifically for my brother in law's defense. I put it on at the store- pinstriped editor pants and a lose, ribboned shirt, and spun in a pleased circle in front of the mirror. My mother and Angela, the store owner, told me how unusual and pretty it was on me. That was yesterday, when I lived in a nice, soft place, before I was identified as a child slut.

My mother is still screaming her head off at the preacher woman, and the preacher is screaming back. "ARE YOU HER MOTHER?" She demands, incredulous, and my mother screams "NONE OF YOUR GOD DAMNED BUSINESS!" And the woman screams "WELL I HOPE YOU'RE NOT ANYBODY'S MOTHER WITH A MOUTH LIKE THAT!"

At this point, my vision narrows. My world shrinks until it becomes just me, my mother, the maniac, and the boys in their houses jerking off to me. No one had ever, ever said something insulting about my mother in my presence. Why would they? All of a sudden, as they say, it gets personal.

"DON'T YOU DARE SPEAK TO HER LIKE THAT" I yell, heart beating, arms waving. There are people watching silently on the sidelines. I don't care- I want to grind this woman into the pavement. It's my sister who has the sense to start herding us away, gently pushing my mother and I towards the staircase that leads us out of Red Square even as she fires off a litany of her own  over her shoulder. When it comes to swearing, my sister is a star.

Once we reach South Campus, It's very quiet. I can hear my heals clicking on the ground. I point to a building on our right and manage "....and this is where I had my astronomy class."

*****

The officer who meets me outside the lab has me repeat every word the lunatic screamed.  Then he says, "So, it's safe to say she was pretty impolite to you."

I  bite my lip. "I'd say she was a bit more than impolite." I remind myself to stand up straight, uncross my ankles, stop leaning to the side, look him straight in the eye.

"My partner is up there right now, and he sees a woman matching your description and she's wearing green. Was your woman wearing any green?

I can't remember now if the woman was wearing green. I say, "No, she was all in white." Then I say, "Well, maybe there was some green."

The police man tells me I need to tell him exactly what she was wearing, and I tell him I guess I can't remember exactly, and he seems fed up. He asks if the woman threatened to harm me, and I say not exactly, he asks if she said any hate language to me and I say, "well she said sexual language to me," and he says "that's not hate language." Did she prevent me from leaving the scene? No. Did she point at you? Yes, she pointed at me. Was that all she did?

Then he asks me if she publicly humiliated me. I answer honestly that yes, I suppose she did, although I didn't feel humiliated. I told him I don't want  her to be able to do that to somebody else and couldn't he do something?

He can't do anything. "There's no crime here," he says, shrugging his shoulders. "Her freedom of speech is well protected. This is a liberal state. My partner can say something to her- tell her that with free speech comes responsibility. That's all we can do."

Well, that will really resonate with her, I'm sure.

He takes off and I'm left standing next to a steam vent, my back against the brick wall. And for a moment, I see it. A tiny, tiny piece of a broken world, where help is buried beneath miles and miles of bureaucracy, where fear and shame and helplessness become a thick chord tied around your stomach.  For just one second I feel a glimmer of recognition with the people whose terrible stories you read about in the newspaper- and then it is gone, and I walk back up the stairs to the celebration, back to my soothing, easy life.

The Party Parlor

I'm in charge of decorations for Brooks' doctoral defense party. 

I'd categorize it as somewhere between 'festive as shit' and 'dangerously pathetic.'

3 Ways to Fake a Writing Career

Here's some of my recent work lately. I really like the spread I got in the Journal of American Whitewater.  Two pages? Four photos? Color? What?! It's good to know I've gotten somewhere since my first print magazine article, when I had to beg the editor to tack on an extra 25 words to my 400 word allotment so the thing could make any sense at all.

I have a new writing gig! I now write two articles a week for Trail's Edge Online Magazine, which features humorous outdoor writing.  My first article is headlining today: Five Ways to Fake a Sponsorship.  I may or may not be an expert on the subject.

And finally, my favorite Soul Pancake for a while. I broached a subject  I've always been timid to touch: How would life be different if you were better looking?

Enjoy!

Get Away from Me, April

Out here on the left coast, May is showing some signs of developmental delays. May is acting a whole lot like April. Now it's almost June, and it's too late for a spring, so we're just holding our breaths for a summer. Although really, I'm a bit detached, since I'm jumping ship in a few weeks and going back to New England.
This past weekend, Memorial day, was one of my last excursions in the Northwest until August. Here are some images from the long weekend in North Bend, 40 miles outside of Seattle, where living has officially become an underwater experience. 

It was a freezing few days, rain heavy, watery and slick. We sought out semi-dry lines that zig-zagged between waterfalls; at night we lay side by side in the smokey orange light of a roomy moutaineering tent. The rain's constant tap-tap on the walls muddled us into a trance, until all conversation was replaced by long stares and distant comments. The whole weekend went by like this: a deep, vivid, aquatic trance. I'm not sure this will make sense to you, but it was an elegant few days. I saw a lot of turquoise. 

 

Leading climbs was luxurious. I could feel the blurry inside me begin to crystallize. Do you know what I'm saying? It means I stopped thinking about general shit and I only think about the shit that's going to get me to the next bolt.

 So, that's all I'm going to think about from now on. Deciding what the next bolt is going to be, and getting there.