the little fellow on the beach

We were down at the beach, having just about the finest picnic a girl could hope for, and the boys were talking about airplanes. They were sitting there talking about airplanes and tracking the airplanes that flew across the sky. I wasn't listening, I prefer boats to planes, I was looking out over the water. It was a grey evening, coming on the heals of an equally grey day, and the couple of fires that smoldered on the shore made it smell like autumn and New England.

But there we were, at the Northwest edge of the Northwest corner of the country. Jake and Seth and Tyler were wearing flannels and wool hats in mid May, after all, and we were all gazing at the black outline of the olympic mountain range as it melted against the sky in the twilight.

I've now lived here in Seattle longer than I've lived anywhere else.

When the sky was clear of planes, we poured wine into coffee mugs and went for a walk down the beach. That's when Tyler spotted a little seal swimming to shore. It was swimming like mad. We were all laughing because it's funny to see a seal gunning it towards you in the water. And then right in front of our eyes the little guy put both flippers on the sand and started wiggling up onto land.

I used to work as the most uninformed naturalist Glacier Bay has ever seen, but I do know there are some pretty strict laws when it comes to getting close to marine wildlife. But this guy was coming to us, determined, flopping and struggling through the sand until it was directly next to Tyler's feet. So Tyler bent down and Jake just happened to have an old fashion disposable camera in his pocket, and together man and seal posed for a photo.

Then the little critter turned around, pulling its smooth round body through the sand with tiny little flippers, and it slipped back into the water and disappeared.

We were all sort of speechless until Tyler said, "That seal literally came up on land just to give us a thumbs up!"

So we returned to our picnic and ate some sandy milanos, and nobody had much to say, and life was good.

The mostly photos report on Squamish

My final year at my beloved and beleaguered high school, the Academy at Adventure Quest, I lived out of a tiny, bright orange, one person tent. It was really no more than a bivy sack with a single curved pole that kept it suspended above my head by a few inches. Most nights I'd drag my sleeping bag outside and sleep under the stars, but when the weather was bad I'd lie on my back in the tent,  staring up at the orange nylon, listening to my discman and eating squares of Black Forest chocolate. I was an extremely content in there.

We spent our final semester in New Zealand. There were only eight of us kids by that point, the school limping towards towards the cliff of its unsettling demise. We were six boys and two girls, and by this point in the year, the boys had turned mean.

One week we did a trek in the Southern Alps. It rained all day, every day. We camped the second night on a hilltop overlooking a massive blue and white glacier. A fierce storm blew in that evening, kicking up wild winds so strong they ripped my English teacher's tent in half. She staked the shredded corners to the ground and to her ankles, and lay splayed on the ground for the duration of the night, a human anchor.
My little tent was stuck to the earth by five tin stakes. Each time the wind blew them out of the ground, I'd hop out and try and shove them back in, but it was no use. The rain fly flapped loudly, like a lose sail. Inside the tent, the fabric pressed so tightly against my face I could feel it against my nose and mouth. It seemed as if the whole thing was going to lift off the ground and blow into the glacier, taking me with it.

That night, I was not content sleeping alone in my tent. I was tired and almost frightened and everything was soaking wet. I remember that the splendor of the storm, the adventurous thrill that should have consumed me at the moment, was lost in a dismal sort of loneliness. The howling winds made it sound like I was the only one on the planet.

What a completely different situation it would be if I had a girlfriend lying next to me, and the two of us were trying to hold down the tent, and if we went sailing over the cliff into the ice, at least we'd be shrieking together. Sleep was out of the question, so I tried to write in my journal. With all the melodrama of the sixteen year old girl I was, I wrote "I'd give my right eye to have a friend with me right now."

I was thinking about that night last week, when Amber and I were falling asleep at the climber's camp beneath the grand wall in Squamish, BC. Our two dogs were curled up at opposite ends of the tent. The climbing that day had been phenomenal, perfect cracks and clean faces, but I'd been fighting off thoughts of Andrew the entire time. The sight of the big walls he'd told me so much about made my stomach flip with the memories of our multi pitch days together. That part of me, the part still tethered to him in my mind, is a real fucking bother.

But finally, after a very lively evening, I lay in the tent next to Amber and the memory of that night in New Zealand came bubbling up. We'd been talking for about an hour in the dark, and I felt a sudden stab of affection for her, of pure, almost giddy gratitude. The connection between old boyfriends (and all the rejection and unworthiness that comes with them) and climbing is dissolving, and once again the sport is starting to belong to me and my friends and the girls I would have, apparently, traded my eyes for twelve years ago.
::::
We went to Squamish! Four people, three dogs, three crash pads and one car. We left on Thursday night at 8:00pm, were hopelessly lost in Vancouver by midnight on the dot, passed out at the camp site by two in the morning.

Four days gave us just a taste of the unending sport and trad routes of that little town on the road to Whistler.  We even spent a half day engaged in the insufferable sport of bouldering. I'm really not into it, it's too hard and tedious for me, but my friends are obsessed, I don't know, they're crazy. But I will say they look good doing it.
This never happened.
Amber Jackson Photo
Things got real interesting when we roped up, as we didn't have a guide book, and when we did find a guide book we didn't know how to read it. We put up some ridiculous difficult routes. By accident.
Amber leading the 5.11d we thought was a 5.9
Sunshine taking a stab at the crux
The result
Me leading a 5.10d we thought was a 5.8 
Amber lent me her tights.
Like any climbing trip, the rewards...
I've been climbing for seventeen years now, in nine countries, and Squamish was some of the best rock I've ever put my hands on. 
As for everything else. Bolt by bolt it gets easier. That long night when I was 16 did not end up with me being swept alone into the blue glacier, and neither will this one. 

All in a week


This week was almost entirely work, typing, computer screens and running. Here are the few precious moments I was not at my desk: 

1. grey sunset beach picnic 2. sundress weather 3. one lap of the loop trail and two rounds of margaritas with Mackenzie 4. Seth at the summit of Rattlesnake Ridge 5. evening stories in a hazy field 6. misadventures in raw eating 7. Friday evening in the woods 8. writing for 25 cents a word with 25 cent refills at Fiore 9. three to six miles a day on this one perfect trail 10. white wine, Jake in a jacket 


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My life is a raw, three layer disaster

I decided to become a raw vegan. It's the thing these days. It will give me glowing skin and tons of energy and make me a round the clock delight.

This is the right lifestyle for me and I thought it would last, and I was very excited.

I was messing around online, lost somewhere on Facebook, which incidentally has become a form of consensual torture, when I came across a recipe for raw, vegan peanut butter and jelly bars.

They looked fantastic. For three nights I lay awake in my bed fantasizing about them. On the fourth day I decided to go for it.

They say you ought to do one thing every day that scares you, and I've decided that for me, once a week is good enough, and this would be my thing.

So I made a shopping list, and I even remembered to bring it, which made me feel very put together and on top of things. At Whole Foods I bought what amounted to a savagely expensive deconstructed coconut. I bought coconut oil, coconut butter, coconut meat, coconut flakes, coconut nectar, coconut water, coconut milk, and on top of that I bought just a whole coconut. Later on I had to google how to slaughter it.

I hadn't been paying too much attention when I'd jotted down the ingredients in my kitchen that morning, but now that I was on the front lines I started to feel a little dazed. Besides the dizzying panoply of coconut, the bars also called for 34 whole dates. That felt like a lot. But I bought them.

I bought everything, reasoning that since I'd gone raw, I'd need all that stuff in the pantry anyway. Absolutely the only thing in my cart was ingredients for the dessert, and as I edged towards the check out line I could detect disaster in the air. The ingredients added up to 85 dollars, so the check out man said "your total is 85 dollars!" Cheerfully, as if it was okay to spend that much on a single afternoon of baking. Not even baking.

I've become good at playing very cool in the grip of catastrophe, so I slid my card with a little "sure sure no problem" smile, but inside my head I was a ten year old flying over the handlebars of her bike, feet kicking madly in the air, arms akimbo.

I'm not sure how it began but everything has gone completely off of the tracks.

It was far too late to back out. I went home and I constructed the thing, and it turns out that the one recipe used nearly everything I bought, with nothing but a few cups of raw cacao and some coconut oil leftover. But I did end up with massive, massive amount of raw peanut butter and jelly bars, so that's good, until I ate a piece and discovered I'd just created the world's most calorically dense substance on the planet, and I wouldn't need to eat again for five weeks.

So I just stood there, and stared down at the pan in awe and bewilderment. What have I done? These bars are worth 85 dollars. This is my cell phone bill. This is 3/4 of the plane ticket to Santa Fe that I didn't buy. This is three pieces of a trad rack I could be quietly accumulating so that one day I can be in the Patagonia catalog and die a fulfilled woman. This is my life in a raw, three tiered disaster.

This is essentially a well disguised coconut.

Pride and common decency kept me from scraping it into the compost, lethargy kept me from utilizing the freezer; I had no choice but to take it on the road. My dessert and I, a traveling sideshow.  I brought it from house to house, I fed it to my friends and I watched their reactions. They were decidedly mixed, ranging from the forced and determinately cheerful, all the way to the neutral, the bluntly apprehensive and those who vocalized regret upon first bite.

And in the end, I did end up in my kitchen, alone in wool socks, scraping it all into the compost bin, gritting my teeth and repeating to myself that we all make mistakes, we all mistakes, we all make mistakes.

All in a week

1. a late night picnic with Connor before he is snatched away by Alaska 2. Sunshine in Canada, meal planning 3. Amber and Chai head for home on the last day 4. the freelance life with Seth 5. she has the tiniest shadow 6. a last minute back yard BBQ 7. wearing dia de las meurtos tights on cinco de mayo 8. chalking up 9. ella fix in the park 10. the Squamish crew- all I'd said was 'Smile!' 

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Sea Baby

It was time to take a trip alone, so the dog and I set out to the North, headed towards the Straight of Juan de Fuca. It was just past tulip season, but the drive to Anacortes was beautiful enough to crush on the heart of two creatures thinking of moving away.
We took a long ferry ride, and because of the canine we were banished to the unheated outskirts of the vessel. The cold made us slightly drawn in and contemplative. 
Mostly.
When we reached the town of Friday Harbor, on the island of San Juan, we were greeted at the terminal by a blond birthday girl named Jen. Jen writes Baby by the sea, (careful not to sink too far into her photos, you'll have a hard time emerging for a few days) we've never met, but I'm learning that doesn't really matter. Jen's a New England born writer, and so am I. She knows everybody on the island and drinks and desserts are forever on the house. We sat watching the sun sink as she ate oysters and I drank three rounds of island margaritas.   
That night we lay on the floor of her wide open, book-lined living room, listening to vinyl and talking about writing. We were old friends who haven't seen each other for twenty eight years (or more) so we had a lot of catching up to do. 
The next day was Saturday, and it was raining on the island. I walked with her family to a T ball game for her middle girl, Lucy. 

As the morning progressed, I looked around and categorized my surroundings in my head, as I find myself doing a lot these days when I'm untethered and deciding. 

Life on the San Juans felt verdant and safe and idyllic, so similar to my own childhood in Vermont. I hugged my sweatshirt tight around my body as the rain got heavier, standing there alone amongst all the couples who looked like me, and dressed like me, their six year olds running bases and toddlers crawling through the damp grass.  

I looked at all the fathers in their Patagonia fleeces and Pacific Northwest beards, standing patiently near the playing, hauling little bodies in the right direction as kids flew in random zig-zags around the bases. The fathers made me at once hopeful and morose. This type of men, are they born or created? Did they always want this, or did it just happen, did they wake up one day on a little house in the Pacific Ocean with two kids and a wife and wonder how they got there?  

Is a good life the result of extremely hard work, or does it just happen, and the best you can do is stay out of the way? If you know the answer to that, please let me know.
Jen and Luke, with Betty and Lucy and Olive and the dog in tow, took me around Friday Harbor, the early summer farmers market, the anchor-and-crow themed coffee shop and the secret rooftop with a view of all the boats. This is the town where the Endeavour docked a year ago and I spent the whole day leading passengers to the dentist after all their teeth cracked at once, bizarrely. 

The biggest medical issue you'll run into on a ship could be dential, the Alaskan Paramedic had said when we'd lived in the snow in Leavenworth, and how right he'd been. 

Five months later the Endeavour was back in Friday Harbor, all teeth in good condition, and the crew ran around, euphoric, back home in Washington (how we love Washington!) the season over, the days easier. 
At the end of my stay, Jen and I drove out to the coast and went for a run. I chased after her. She took me to a secret beach and we gathered sea glass; she found a giant piece of blue, which is getting scarcer and scarcer to find where I live.

I'm getting lots of requests for blue, and I could never say no, and I could really use some myself as well. If you know of a place frequented by Vodka swigging sailors who throw their empty bottles into the ocean, please let me know.  
I said goodbye, and the dog and I ran last minute onto the ferry, and we crossed the chill waters again. Then, because I'd been thinking about Connor and the Alaskan paramedic, I drove to Bellingham for the night to see them both. It was the Alaskan's last night before he left for a stint on a boat somewhere off of South America, and Connor's last weekend before he got back on the Endeavour, headed North to Friday Harbor, through the straight of Juan de Fuca to Alaska. 

Boats keep taking my friends away!

Sometimes I want to go away too, but where would we go? Washington is a cold paradise laced with friends and islands and rocks, what could be better?

 If someone knows to the answer to these questions, please let me know.  

All in a week

1. our beautiful childhood friend Jeneen came for a visit 2. these days 3. evidence of summertime 4. I went to the islands to see Babybythesea 5. Anacortes 6. on the ferry with my girl 7. a late night drive to Canada 8. lost in Vancouver at midnight 9. climbing trip plannings 10. Squamish bouldering 

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Sarah

Happy birthday Sarah. I forgive you for giving me a concussion with your elbow if you forgive me for being so far away the moment you left us. Thanks for peeing in the back of my ex-boyfriend's truck after he cheated on me, and that time you took off your underwear and flung it onto the windshield of the car that had parked you in was fun to watch, too. I like the way you lived: completely, totally, utterly fearless, without apology, covered in tattoos and married to the boy you loved so desperately. He's doing really well now. I try to emulate you every day, you've made a real, palpable difference in my attitude and choices, and I think you would be really proud of me.


Spring Update, Beach Magic

The iron sky winter is melting into a spring that is bright and cold, full of early lilacs and already the biggest full moon I've ever seen rise over this city. I'm happy these days because I like my job; the constant fret of money worries has been suspended, at least until this time next year. There is a crisp satisfaction to paying the bills on time, perfectly, little rows of numbers marching neatly down the checkbook.

Over at Fisherman's Terminal, crews are returning to the boats, they are crowding the Highliner after work, they are charting their course back to Alaska, happy to be back sleeping in tiny berths with their friends. Part of me remembers the camaraderie, forgives the drudgery and forgets the long days, and wishes I was returning with them for another season. Sometimes I join them for cans of New Belgium Shifts or bottles of Amber Ales, brewed in Juneau, but we live now in such separate worlds I don't always have a lot to say.  Which is okay, I've learned recently that if I just shut up for a moment, people will tell me some interesting things.
I have been getting rid of a few of my possessions,  just like I said I would, and as my things go I feel an emptiness in my head and in my chest as well. There is nobody to think about for now. That's good. It allows for freedoms. The days of the week skip from one to the other, with not much to worry about except what to eat and what to write, and occasionally where to go.

This feeling of being unmoored, of sailing along alone and in peace, will probably last about as long as the temporary break in my financial worries.  I'm enjoying them both while I can.

::::
Jesse and I had a beach picnic last week, the laziest of all social engagements, yet still all the organization I could muster. I slow-cooked a brisket all day while I worked from home, and Jess brought bread and tomatoes and beer. We invited everyone we knew and gave them about five hours warning, knowing that if no one showed up we'd still have a nice evening.

But they did show up, not many people can resist the water after a day as warm and clear as that day had been. They came and went, bringing beer and dogs and bicycles; they said hello, sat for a while or stayed all evening. We were treated to a deep hued sunset and a beach full of fires and paper lanterns drifting North towards the Straight of Juan de Fuca.
If I left, the way I left last year on the boat, I would miss all this. I'd miss Jesse, and the sound, all the dogs and all the bicycles. Yet still I find myself tapping my foot under the table, when I'm at home and it's only me, looking around the room in the silence, not entirely trusting myself just to sit still for a moment.
This post is dedicated to Megan and Cary.

Matt came to visit, it had been a few years

Matt came to visit. It's been two years since I've seen him. The last time was at Stephen's funeral, a bewildering few days in Connecticut; I spent the whole time scraping my finger nails against my skin trying to peel off the layer of dirt that covered me. In our grief we were strangers to one another. I drove away angry and pretty certain that I would never see Matt or Tino again. And that was it for me and kayaking, for a long time, if not forever.

But two years passed, and those ragged memories faded. Now I can now think about Stephen and our days on the river without crying. I think about Matt and remember months and months on the road and our ludicrous job of keeping everything together, from South America to Canada, the siete tazas, goats drowning on the Rio Achibueno, campfires on the banks of the Ottawas, jokes we used to make about coffee which made my boyfriend at the time angry, that we'd be sharing jokes like that, although now I can't remember what they were. Or how they could illicit anger.  

Matt and I have a friendship sealed by working for that school, a strange and wild place based on a river in West Virginia, by our mutual devotion for all the kids who went there, and in particular Stephen, because we'll never see him again.
I had only been back in the pacific northwest for one day when I went to collect Matt from the train station. Funny, I'd been thinking of leaving, but now that I had a visitor I couldn't remember why. I felt so proud of my home, the place that felt so decidedly mine: my city, my beach. We had a few dark, rainy days and then a break in the clouds, a patch of clear, colorful days when my heart almost burst with pride at the sudden, severe beauty of the place- the mountains out in astounding clarity, Rainier impossibly huge on the horizon, white ships gliding on the blue Puget sound.

Even Matt paused a few times, struck by the grandeur of the place, and he's not one for moments of sincerity. Matt is half loner cowboy and half West Virginia cynic, six feet six and darkly hilarious.
I showed him the classics- pike place market, the Ferris wheel on the dock, capitol hill in the evening, the rancid gum wall and open fields of Discovery. We ate every meal at a different restaurant. We lay around a lot and talked a lot, and when I dropped him off at Kings Street station I said I hope we don't go years without seeing each other again.

But we probably will, and it probably won't matter.  Some people in your life, they're just cemented in place.

All in a week


1.brooding Matt on the Puget Sound 2. we rode the ferris wheel 3. wednesday's bonfires and floating lanterns 4. coffee and catching up after two years apart 5. an outdoor barbecue 6. Sunday brunch at Essex 7. Ella on the front lawn 8. every meal outside 9. something we found on a Capitol Hill stroll 10. Monday's wine gathering 11. pike place market

Recently I've been asked whether I print or sell my photos. The answer is yes! If you're interested in a shot, email me at thewildercoast@gmail.com and we'll take it from there. Thank you for the interest. 

when the bird hit the plane

Saturday evening, out in West Asheville, we danced under christmas lights to some bluegrassy swing music and I drank a cocktail called The Tattooed Sailor. We ate at a backyard barbecue full of kids and kayakers and undercooked game hens; my friend threw up a quail later that night. I felt right at home.
My wallet went missing the next day. I was running to meet up with my friend Kim at a rooftop bar in the center of town, and it was just gone. This may come as a surprise to you but I've never actually lost a wallet before. It's one of my reoccurring anxiety dream, however, to lose it on a business trip, so as I was digging frantically through my bag, checking the same pockets over and over, the panic felt strangely familiar.

I sprinted through town, swearing and praying, retracing my steps to absolutely no avail. Everything about Asheville become incredibly irritating as I ran around like the mad hatter, all those people strolling through the narrow sidewalks, all those people who were not having a big crisis, the drum circles- the drum circles were the worst.

Eventually, I had no choice but to slink back home. The wallet was gone and I was done for; I had no ID and no money. I would have given up and moved permanently into Yonton's basement, and that wouldn't have been the worst thing, but I needed to get to New Jersey for business in less than 48 hours. If I didn't, I was certain that I'd lose my job. Damn it, New Jersey!

I quivered on the couch and called my live in artist in Seattle, who just happened to be home. (I call her my live in artist because she's very talented and she only wears black.) Colleen dug through my wreck of a bedroom (it's something I'm working on) and finally found my passport, then ran two blocks to the Sip n Ship where she literally intercepted the Fed Ex guy, James Bond style, who was making his very last pick up of the day. While I slept fitfully that night and dreamt sad visions of unemployment, my passport hurtled through the sky, and the next day Yonton hopped in his car and tracked down the fed ex driver after the delivery was late and I'd begun pulling my hair out.

I tore open that package like a dog. I had an ID now, miraculously, but nothing else.

Not one to give up, Yonton suggested we comb through town, search every back alley and every dumpster. "It's a mission!" He said as he threw back the lid of another trash can, his voice lilting with a barely detectable middle eastern accent. "It's fun!"

Then he took me to the CVS and bought me some Visa gift cards so I could have some money. I just looked at him, wordless in my appreciation, so happy that the world was generous and put us in the same funny disaster of a boarding school thirteen years ago. A lot of bad things happened at that school, one of the boys had just in the past week been awarded five million dollars for what he had endured. But everything that ever happened to me there was good.

Almost everything I guess.

The next morning I said goodbye to him, and Kristen and David, and I found myself once again at the Asheville regional airport. I was flying into Philadelphia and had planned on renting a car to drive to my next work site, some forty miles from the airport, but without a license I'd have to think of a new plan. I decided to worry about that later, and sank gratefully into a seat at the gate, my wild and whirlwind trip to Asheville finally over.
The tiny house, the one Rachel had driven me to, had been too tiny. I could have lived there in that quiet, shady neighborhood, but I would have had to eat my dinners in bed. I'd turned it down. Now I was leaving, no any papers signed, no promises, no impulsive decisions, and in just a few more days I'd be home on the West coast.

Then a handful of police officers showed up at the gate, and after a few minutes it was announced that our inbound plane had struck a bird and the plane was broken. "You do not want to get on this plane, ladies and gentlemen," said the woman behind the counter. "This plane will be broke for a while."

So I wasn't getting to Philadelphia after all, and I didn't have to worry about hitching a ride into New Jersey. We were turned loose onto the hot pavement outside the airport and told to try again tomorrow. Hauling my giant duffel bag, I climbed into the nearest taxi.

It was the same drive who had picked me up a week before.

"Hey, it's you!" He said.

"It's me, Chris. Take me downtown. I've got some things to think over."
Add caption
En route, I got a call from the Lexington Ave Brewery. Someone had turned in my wallet. I went to retrieve it and sat there for a while drinking a cold beer. There was nothing missing from the wallet. I thought some things over.

That night I sat outside on David's porch. The smell of hydrangea and drying kayak gear swept over me. When I was younger and more adventurous and less rigid, that smell used to be everywhere, plastic and neoprene mixed with the metallic tang of rapids. I was thinking about the plane crashing into Asheville, my ID disappearing and reappearing, Rachel on the street corner, that country song we listened to in the car. I pictured the plane that was supposed to fly me out of there, the bird smacking into the windshield.

Ok Asheville, I thought. I'll think about it.

The End

The most frequent question I get from readers is about Stephanie Jones. People kindly and cautiously asked how she's doing, whatever happened, if she's still here.

I love stories with a happy ending. Steph lived. She got better. Then she had an Ella.
 It was her birthday on Sunday.  Happy birthday to a warrior. I love you, couldn't live without you.

Rachel at the Confluence

I spent a few pleasant days in North Carolina just walking and talking with Kristen, Yonton's girlfriend. She was a very gracious tour guide, and lucky for us the weather was in the low eighties and sunny. The whole city was blooming before our eyes. She showed me lots of places, including a bookstore champagne bar where I drank a blood red mimosa out of a tall, skinny glass, and we talked about a lot of things.

The next day she sent me a link to a house for rent. I wasn't particularly interested in looking at houses, seeing as I live 3,000 miles away, but the description of the place was undeniably perfect.

This tiny house, available immediately, would be perfect for a long term visitor of Asheville. It would be ideal for a writer looking to simplify.

I had to see this tiny house.

I called the landlord and set an appointment to drop by in the afternoon, just out of curiosity. I took a taxi into town and decided I'd walk the remaining two miles to the address. But the taxi took much longer than I thought, and I got mixed up between Merimon and Broadway and completely turned around. This happens to me in Asheville because the whole city looks identical.

I was going to be very late. It was hot out, and my computer bag dug an angry red streak into my shoulder. After a few futile minutes of staring at the tiny map on my phone, I stopped walking. There's no point in getting there late and stressed, I reasoned with myself. There's really no point in going there at all. Why was I looking at a tiny house in North Carolina anyway, when I lived happily in a spacious apartment in Seattle? The description of the house had been eerily perfect, like the house was meant to be mine, but obviously it wasn't if I couldn't even get there.

I needed a ride, but everyone I knew in Asheville was working. It dawned on me that I could just knock on the window of any car with a whitewater boat on top, and chances are they'd know Yonton, and I could probably just ask for a ride. Being friends with Yonton is like holding a key to the city.
But there were not kayaks on top of cars at that moment, so I turned and began to walk back downtown. If I was really supposed to get that house, to make the spontaneous and rash decision to uproot (again) and move to the other coast, then someone would drop out of the sky and give me a ride. That's how these things work, when they work.

I had taken three steps when a Subaru with Washington plates pulled up next to me. The girl in the driver's seat was my friend Rachel, from Seattle.
The last time I'd seen Rachel was at the opening party for The Seattle Biscuit truck in a flowery back yard in Magnolia. My boat was docked at the Fisherman's terminal just down the street. It was a really lovely evening with Andrew and his friends, bottles of cold beer and biscuits, lots of little blond kids running around. Rachel had just paddled the grand canyon and gotten engaged at the confluence of the little Colorado river. I fawned over her ring, and spent the rest of the evening mulling over two thoughts- one, that I'd once been at the same exact spot in the canyon with Will, where the bright candy-aqua swirled into muddy brown, and two, that I was not going to marry Andrew.
I'd always been really drawn to Rachel. She's extremely warm and outgoing; people like that tend to stand out in the Northwest. And now here we were, at the same street corner outside of a town in Western North Carolina. I opened the door and jumped in.

"Hi Rachel." I said. "I really need a ride two miles up the road." She gave me this look, and then she drove me there.
What I didn't know at the time was that since I'd last seen her, Rachel and her fiance had moved to Virginia. I didn't even know that she was from Asheville originally, or that her parents lived just a few houses down from the tiny house I was going to look at.

All I knew was I really needed to get somewhere, and at that precise moment my friend from Seattle shows up and took me there. It seemed to make sense.

Somnambulist

I need to decide what to take with me and what to leave. Where exactly I'm going doesn't matter so much right now, that will figure itself out along the way; what matters is what I choose to claim as my own from now on- what I want, what I need, and what is no longer serving a purpose.

I went to my hypnotist, Kristin, and together we decided to take an inside out approach. To make changes that will stick, I need to change what I'm composed of, to gently break down old patterns and reorganize my thoughts towards a new goal. I needed to sit down and sift through my thoughts as if my head were a closet and a long winter was drawing towards an end.
I'm half asleep in the big chair in her tiny office in the rain soaked city. I am what they call a somnambulist- I respond very well to hypnosis. When my long winded and genetically predetermined struggle with sleep intensified following my breakup last October, I came to Kristin as an experiment, an indulgence, like a very expensive massage that could result in either magic or fraud.

It was magic. That night was my first night in months without the agony of insomnia, my first morning without the thick, slow-headed, heavy-eyed hangover of sleeping pills.

Completely, unabashedly drawn in, I wrote down everything that I needed help with and I saw Kristen again and again, ticking off the things we'd worked on like a grocery list. We fought shame and procrastination and fears of all sorts and heartbreak and self defeating habits. I kept sleeping. I didn't need to bucket through the Ambien like I'd been doing. Kristin was like a therapist, only she did most of the talking. And she always knew exactly what I needed the outcome of our sessions to be, even when I was stammering and excited and talking in circles.

There is a sudden change after each session, an overnight change, but nothing feels jarring or dramatic; you've been slightly reprogrammed, and suddenly the behavior you exhibited just two days before no longer makes sense to you. It doesn't even interest you. You fall asleep at a normal hour, you stop eating when you're full, you go for a run even in the pouring rain because you know it's going to make you feel better.

Good decisions come easily, and the burden and influence of toxic relationships in your life float away, so easily you barely notice. You study the bars and bars of text messages between you and the boy you were briefly and barely involved with, he's one of those self identified assholes, flippant and rude and constantly disappointing and debasing you, and you scratch your head, wondering why on earth you ever engaged with such a person. You delete his number and go back to making breakfast, or driving, or talking to someone at a dinner party or whatever it is you were doing that did make sense. You delete him from your life without a second thought, without so much as a moment of triumph or self congratulatory spark- you just slap whatever needs slapping, like a mosquito on your leg, and you move on.
When I realized, fuming in the kitchen with the dishes piled up on the counter and the spoons scattered across the floor, that I needed to clear the air of my life, I pulled off the yellow rubber dishwashing gloves and I called Kristin.

Curled up on her reclining chair, I told her about how heavy everything feels, how it takes me forever to leave the house,  and even though I feel buried under stuff I still buy stuff every day.

"Nothing is acute here." I tell her. "I'm not a hoarder, I don't have a shopping addiction and I don't have any social phobias, I'm just pretty pathetic with money, and I can't keep my room clean, I can't even keep sheets on the bed if I'm being totally honest, and I never go to sleep feeling like I've been an award winning employee or friend or daughter or writer or climber or anything."

 I exhale slowly, frustrated at my own in eloquence. "And I eat a lot. When I cook it's healthy, I do a lot of raw stuff, lots of kale smoothies and that trendy stuff, but I'll make like, a whole entire blenderful, enough for five people, but since I live alone I just drink all of it. Yesterday I drank like, three avocados in one day. It's fine, but it's getting really expensive."

(I think about how hard I will laugh about this one day, probably somewhere far from here, on the floor laughing about the time I saw a hypnotist because I drank too much fucking spinach.)

"Also, just in general, I use too many words." 

Kristin is smiling at me, she's bemused, lots of people are bemused by me. But she also is with me on this, my teammate. She doesn't get overwhelmed. She says, "I understand. Why don't we start at the most basic level. Let's start with what you eat."

From now on, you only put something in your body if it makes sense to do so. If you're hungry for food. It doesn't matter if it's healthy or unhealthy, good or bad, bought or made- it does not make sense to put anything inside your body when you don't need to. 
I should point out that I don't have a particular problem with food. I don't have an eating disorder, I'm not overweight, actually I eat really well. But I don't pay any attention to the extras- coffee and alcohol and dinners out, the cost of anything, the reason I'm even buying it. I see something and if I want it, I take it, almost defiantly. I deserve this.

That attitude is an invitation to weight, to extraneous, unnecessary stuff. There is throwing back two glasses of wine to melt the stress of a not particularly stressful day, meeting up for my fourth dinner out in one week, not because I really care to, but because I don't know how to say no thank you. A third cup of coffee because I'm bored. Produce wilting in the refrigerator drawers where I've forgotten about it.

Then there is all the hidden politics of food, the threats and headlines and ubiquitous fear of Monsanto, preservatives and paleo fads and all the insufferable conversations about where you get your protein?

I'd rather eat well and simply and avoid all of that altogether, as easily as stepping over a stream.

After this, says Kristen, all of this will be easy for you. As simple as yes or no. You will recognize when you are hungry, you'll eat and you'll enjoy it, it won't even occur to you to do otherwise. 
The idea, I suppose, is that when you peel back all the extraneous stuff, what you really actually need will be provided, because finally there is some room for it. Room in the house, in your head, in the back seat of your car and in your schedule, and on your hard drive and in your stomach and between your breaths. Places to fill with light, air or time. Or absolutely nothing, if that's what you think you need.

This was my first step in what's shaping up to be some sort of big multifaceted ill-conceived and oddly timed adventure. That and I sold my skis.

All in a week

What a week for our country. I spent it between both coasts, my heart with Boston. 

1. afternoon run in southern sunshine 2. work took me to this neighborhood in New Jersey 3. moody cloud sea above Newark 4. leaving Asheville 5. passed out in a taxi on the way back home 6. the dog deep sea diving at the Ballard Surf Shop 7. back to Fiore espresso and the cold beach 8. blue grass swing dancing on Saturday night 9. Yonton and Rupert 10. geese at golden gardens 11. a back yard birthday barbecue in North Carolina 12. spinach, frozen pineapple, oranges and chia seeds soaked in coconut water- detox after two weeks on the road. 


And finally, Dad sent me this photo, me in Boston's Copley Square on May Day in 1993. This terrorism is so personal- the familiar neighborhoods, my family on lock down, my cousin on NPR talking about his experience boxing with the older of the suspects, now dead. (And oh yeah, he once punched that asshole in the face, and you don't want to be punched in the face by Chris Coogan, he's terrifying. I love him.)  

Unbearable

I've identified the source of the struggle, what's causing me to walk around with a short circuit. It's just weight. It's extraneous stuff. I'd be more specific if I could, but I can't, because it's every kind of stuff you can dream up. It's real and imagined, it's physical and emotional and philosophical, it might even be spiritual but I recoil from that word. It's the way stuff builds up over time, like plaque, innocent and natural and harmful, and it's heavy.

There's no simple solution to something so vague and omnipresent.

The air in Asheville, by contrast, was warm and light. When Yonton burst through the door into my hotel room and threw his arms around me I felt warm and light, too, for an instant. And by the time my friend David and I drove around in the middle of a wicked thunder storm it had stuck, I felt light as a biscuit, I thought I might lift away.

I met first David, a boy of spectacular style and ease, years ago when I shored up in North Carolina to see William. It was late October, Obama was on the cusp of his first election, and I was just over a year free of college.

A few weeks before, living in a Seattle in a studio apartment in somebody's basement, I'd felt the weight creeping up on me. The same weight I feel today, only back then it sounded like debt. I didn't have any at the time, and I still don't, but the very idea scared me. It would be so easy for me to accrue, such a glossy road that would begin with a credit card and a better apartment and all the new things I'd fill it with. It wasn't a ludicrous idea by any stretch of the imagination. The easy way all my friends let it roll off their back made it tempting, "Everyone's in debt," they'd say, throwing down a card to pay for coffee. "I'm 28,000 in debt from college, what's another hundred?"

I didn't have any student loanst, although I never brought it up, but I didn't have a real job, either. That's been the biggest difference between them and me. I've always worked, cobbled together writing, waitressing, front desking; I worked for a year at a failing kayak shop until a good looking rep pulled me aside and warned me that if I ever wanted to make it in the outdoor industry I should separate myself from that place immediately. But my friends- a lot of them- they really work, within the golden trifecta of Seattle employment: Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon. Their debt was big back then but their paycheck was bigger.

I once made it all the way to the final interview in a six month long process with Amazon only to have a jeweled encrusted woman shake her head and say, "We've decided to go in another direction."

To which, today, I have the wherewithal to say Thank God.

I'd dedicate my first book to Amazon for the simple fact that they recognized that I did not belong there.

I didn't have the income that so many of my friends had, but I sure knew how to spend like they did.

Until I didn't. I remember clearly sharing a plate of nachos with three friends after the climbing gym, and one of them raised his glass and said, "What do you think, guys-heli skiing in Japan for new years?"

And I thought, uh oh.

If I were to be honest, I couldn't pay for the portion of the nachos I was eating.

But before I could jump in, before I could apply for a credit card I couldn't pay off, before I could really think about what I was doing, I packed up my things and I left. I moved back to the East Coast, then drove on a frosted October day from Vermont all the way down to a mountain town in North Carolina called Boone to see a boy I'd met on the grand canyon.

Regardless of the boy, regardless of anything, that trip changed everything.

My second night in town there was a band playing at the App State auditorium, and Will and all his friends dressed in suits and fancy hats and we all had a lot to drink. That's the first time I met David Clarke. He had straightened his boisterous red curls for the occasion.

I remember being aware that night that things here were very different.  Different in a way I might get along with.
It wasn't about the money, or anything I could put my finger on, but when I was down there in North Carolina, I felt this incredible buoyancy. Everything was new, and the town so small and perfect, and Will and his friends so unusual to me. Storytellers, adventurers, laid back and creative and funny.
At the time I wasn't sure what exactly made me make that snap decision to leave Seattle, to leave a mountain of good friends and connections, my university, most of my things. I just detected a weight, something building up that I wasn't quite prepared to take on. So I made the right decision and I left before it could get me.

To some degree the weight and the stuff is inevitable. Especially if you've lived in one place long enough to know a lot of people, and kiss and love and lose and break and cure and crush and long for a lot of people. Especially if you ski and you have to pack and unpack boxes and boxes of synthetic layers every time you move.

Especially if you live in a city with six month leases and impossible apartments and big competition just to find a place to sleep, and you have to move all the time.

Every day is a marathon. That's how I feel when I wake up on my mattress on the floor. If I can just be good today, and fill every possible second with what needs to be done, maybe by the end of the day I will be caught up.

But the phone is ringing, there's a crisis at work, if I could just clean out my closet, the dog wants to play, I can't find anything, not my keys or my sweatshirt, if I don't work out today I'll lose my good body and I'll be completely undesirable and then what. And on top of that, the lease is coming to a close and I need to find a place to live again in a city that is growing less affordable to me by the second. And I miss my friends. I live in the same city but I don't get to see them in the way I wish I could.

This is why I threw the spoons. That, and the fact that it's been six months since I broke up with Andrew, since I ran to Montana, and I still don't want to go back to that neighborhood, or to the climbing gyms. Even now, when it would be really nice to see him, it would, but exhausting, in its own way. And I'm already exhausted.

I went to Asheville on business, someone above pulled a few strings I want to say, even though I don't believe in such things. And then my boss asked if I could hang out there for a few more days and then go straight to New Jersey to lead another training. I said yes. And so I had a string of days in North Carolina with no work and all my meals comped.

David and I had dinner on the second night.
By the time I moved to Boone David had moved to Costa Rica, and he only came to visit for a week.  Will and I sat outside on the porch and he rolled cigarettes and poured out rum and cokes and we listened to bad South American pop music.  Then we went rafting down the Nolichucky on a spring day that I remember as one of the funniest, happiest days of my whole life.

That was over three years ago.

In Asheville, we have dinner and David offers to drive me back to Yonton's house where I'm staying. There's a huge, soaking, violent rain storm. The streets are flooding and the blue ridge mountains in the distance are flooded with white lightning. "I have to play you this song," he says, "it's a country song but it's a Nelly remix."
It's the song Cruise, some ebullient country song I love, a ridiculous hip hop remix. He blasts it over the speakers in his car. I ask to hear it again and again. The storm is drawing closer to us, the lightening changing from white light to violet strokes. I'm hit with the sudden feeling of peace, a happiness like that funny day on the Nolichucky, like a stone has been removed from off my lungs. Isostatic rebound at the cellular level.

As we drive I imagined all of my things evaporating, my apartment in Seattle getting knocked over and turned into condos, just as planned, only I haven't moved out yet. All my possessions are gone, and I don't care. I shrug. I'll buy a new set of skis one day, if I can. I think of all that weight disappearing in an instant. David and his unheard of red curls is singing along and driving me through the twisted streets of Asheville and I'm struck once again with that feeling of buoyancy. The potential lightness of life hits me suddenly and I sit up straight, as if I've been struck.

I think that the weight and the stuff and the debt does add up, inevitably, as you get older.

But I'm not old yet.

I'd completely forgotten that I'm not old yet.

Hometown

I'm learning what it's like to have your hometown bombed. Two blocks from where my sister and I went to elementary school. Right through where my mom walks to work every morning. I guess every place is somebody's hometown, and Boston is mine.

I flew from Newark to Seattle last night and the whole time, all six hours as the plane flew West I kept thinking "What are you doing? Turn around. Take a train, or a bus, or walk, or more likely run, go home to Boston, to mom and dad and Anna and Brooks and your cousins. Go home. Now." But of course I just sat there, and eventually I fell asleep.