What are you supposed to be?

When you're a kid you can eat amazing amounts of food. Just candy. That's all I ate when I was a kid. The only thought I had growing up was 'Get candy.' That was my only thought in my brain for ten years of human life, just: 'Get candy get candy get candy get candy get candy.' Family, friends, school - these were just obstacles in the way of getting more candy. [...]

So the first time you hear the concept of Halloween when you're a kid-- you know the first time you ever heard about it, it's like your brain can't even... What- what is this? Who's givin' out candy? Someone's givin' out candy? Who is givin' out this candy? EVERYONE THAT WE KNOW IS JUST GIVIN' OUT CANDY?? I gotta be a part of this! Take me with you! I- I want to do it-- I'll do anything that they want!
...
I can wear that.

- Jerry Seinfield

This evening I met many a witch, princess, pirate, ninja while giving out candy in the town of Camp Verde. (And at least three Michael Jacksons. Really, guys?) It was great fun and I nearly gave myself a stomach ache eating too much candy and pizza and hot dogs and junk. Lovely! Pictures potentially forthcoming. There was such a contact high from all the kids ecstatic about dressing up and being out late and the anticipated sugar rush. In this context, it felt very appropriate to be Peter; I want to always be a little boy and have fun. Though if I'm honest with myself, I'm more a lost boy - gaily pretending, immersed in the game... most of the time. And most of the time tonight was one of those times. I'm glad they still exist.

I didn't sign up for this.

Today.
It.
Snowed.
In.
Arizona.


What?

The Sky has Broken

Yesterday I got my autumn.  My housemate Laura and I attempted to climb to the highest point in Arizona - Humpreys Peak, pinnacle elevation 12,633 feet.  We certainly didn't make the top, though we hiked all day and gained 2,000 feet in elevation.  It was a whole chill day in the quiet woods, from early morning breath-steam through to the diffuse light and creeping numbness of twilight. 


The trail wound past tall aspens who had already lost their leaves - lithe elegant pinstriped Dia de los Muertos skeletons - and over well-worn knobbly roots like fawn legs.  The ground was covered with downed aspen leaves, bright amber against the gray deadfall.  Surprisingly for that altitude, we also walked through quite a bit of hip-high dry grasses which whispered in the breaths of air and reminded me of the softness of unbleached flour.  At midday when the sun warmed patches of the forest it smelled like Sisters, Oregon - all volcanic dust and pine sap.  And then again in the shadows, when the wind chilled my nose and the tips of my ears and I crushed the needle of a stout little fir between my fingers, it smelled exactly like Christmas. 

We'd stop to rest and snack and rehydrate along the way and more than once I almost fell asleep with a belly full of may-I-just-say delicious homemade trail mix (heavy on the coconut and chocolate chips) and the sun warming my feet through my boots.  We good-naturedly gave up mid-afternoon and our morale (and our pace) improved dramatically on the way down.  After viewing a vast sunset shot through with gold we stopped for a celebratory beer and ice cream in Flagstaff: Oktoberfest and pumpkin flavored, respectively.  Fall, fall, fall.


Today in more familiar climes the wind was certainly kicking up its heels.  We at the Castle celebrated Teddy Roosevelt's 151st birthday with cake and commemorative pens and a special interpretive program.  Wind clapped our cardboard T.R. cutout so hard on the back that he was knocked over, but the ol' roughrider recoveredstoically.  The sky's been a boiling pot of miner's laundry all day; the water in the Well was choppy and ruffled and made the ducks laugh like debauched old men.  Tomorrow this storm is supposed to be fully upon us, just in time for my first day staffing Tuzigoot, our ridgetop pueblo with the great view.


As always, the wind animates me like it does the rusty leaves scuttling along the ground.  Between the quietude of the mountain and the brushed metal feel of today, I feel like some of the thoughts I've been thinking since my arrival have gained new space.  I'm not sure if they will diffuse like smoke or flit about like sparrows, but finally my soul hath elbow room.  I can breathe now, even if the air is thinner and it is rough like fir needles in my chest.  It's a scrubbed clean, raw feeling and I don't want to lose it - though by its nature it's not something I can hold tight to.  I've also regained easy access to the parallel worlds that always present themselves to me in fall: the Sweet Alice Preserve, the farm, the House of Elrond, the savannas of the mulefa, the Heron Program survival shelter.  They are all painted in the same honeyed hues and blow into my awareness on playful blusts.  I chase them.  Darting with my eyes streaming, breathing hard, my feet slapping the ground - all sounds blur in my ears into a rush and a roar.  Because I can.

Happy Birthday, Dude!

And thanks for hooking me up with this sweet job.

Oh, also:

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Mountains out of Mole Sauce

Picture it: Sicily, 1912.  Wait, no-- Basha's Grocery Store: 2009.

You may or may not know, but the aisles of a grocery store have always been treacherous places for me.  Maybe it stems from my childhood Speak-and-Spell commanding in its stentorian voice:  

 "Spell 'isle,' meaning island."


and ever since the homophone clicked into place, I took to feeling marooned in a sea of unintelligible packaging and adverts.  I'm sure I inherited a genetic discomfort with shopping in general, and these two predispositions sometimes chemically cohere into a cement that prevents me from moving a mental muscle.  Then folks will politely -- Excuse me.  Oh, sorry. -- edge past me to make their milk selections, as I stand at the doors fogging up the glass peering to compare prices-per-unit, expiration dates and locations where my dairy items were Manufactured Proudly.

I'm not-so-good with the little decisions, you see.

Similarly, a Day Off is a day full of possibilities.  Lately they have felt extraordinarily overfull.  Do I spend the day relaxing in my yard reading and doing blissfully nothing?  Do I reorganize the kitchen so I can finally reach my food on the top shelf?  Do I sit down with some markers and a journal and make some art?  Do I blog, write a postcard or two, do my laundry, work on my interp. program, go hiking, watch The X-Files with my housemates, bake cookies, futz around on the internets, take an online class, run errands, figure out what and where I want to be when I grow up?  Do I eat dinner??

So far, most of the answers to that bourgiest of dilemmas have been NOs (except, resoundingly, for the last.  I have come to love and live for my meals).  You see, I went to Arizona because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.  However, living in the bright white sun hasn't made an angel of me yet, and I'm no transparent eye-ball.  I still don't floss or make my bed; I'm not up at dawn saluting the sun with my down-dog.  I don't bake my own bread, or harvest local ingredients for my meals.  I put clothes back in the drawers that I deem "mostly clean."    There aren't enough hours in the day (even here, where Daylight Savings is a myth and a rumor) to fit in all the stuff I want to do, yet still enough hours to for the stuff I wish I could have left behind to sneak in the cracks.

I understand that I am the worst of complainers, splitting hairs that El Dorado is really more of a bronzey color than a gold, now that I really look at it up close.  I don't actually remember what kind of illusions I had before coming out here - cactus-filled visions, certainly, and sun, and ranger hats - but  I never looked into the futurevoid and saw myself doing anything like grocery shopping, or waiting in an uncomfortable chair to get my flu shot.  Or wasting a day sitting on the couch.  Regular things.  Daily grind things.  Though I may not write too much about them, those are happening too.

I'm unsure whether one can live the entirety of one's life having the peak experiences I've been highlighting here.  My first instinct would be to say no, of course not.  You need to have moments of mundane preparation before you can be physically or logistically ready for the joy of wild abandon.  The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single... afternoon of clicking around on the internet to get the best deals on plane tickets.

But on the other hand.  I feel like I've gotten Icarian-close to finding some kind of meaning, lesson, amusement in even the more tedious of tasks, as long as I grade them on this learning curve I am currently on.  I mean, when I weigh options like 'create art vs. explore the outdoors' or 'hang out with friends vs. learn some science' and become paralyzed at the crossroads because this is the minutiae of my life!  How privileged am I!

Anyway.  Gone to climb another mountain.

BRB.

The View from the Top

(No relation.  Well, only slightly.)

When we left our intrepid, altitudinal heroines, they were nigh the pinnacle of a daring trek.

Essentially:

 

and hoped to stay that way.  The summit was, as expected - and at that point, perhaps, as deserved - spectacular.  Recall that there was a strong wind, so the triumph of attaining the end was mitigated with relief at not continuing to go up, which in turn was cut with a healthy dose of fear of getting blown off a mountain, and sprinkled with trepidation due to looming spectre of the climb... down.

Solid ground never seemed so precious as when there was so little of it to hold on to.

I took some photos with Dad's old manual camera and actually (I admit a bit sheepishly) changed film on the top of this blustery peak.  So we'll see how that turns out in a few years when I get around to developing it all.  Kelly took these, and I'm glad she did:

And this image is not from our moment (wrong light) but it sums up the spirit of the thing:

Dude, we were so high.

Hence, the descent.  In my opinion it was much harder because you had to look and lean down as you went, instead of putting your weight in care of the mountain as on the way up.  I moved much slower this time, scuttling around crab-wise like Gollum but with less certainty.  Again was the strange experience of continually confronting Fear - in this case, a primal deep-in-the-bones fear - and having to decide what to do with that.  Being in the middle of a "hike" as I was, my options were limited:  Keep going.  Or...?  Pee my pants and become too petrified to move that I need to be airlifted down?  No.  I knew it would only get better if I kept moving.  Kelly's mantra for that leg of the journey (which I found very helpful) was "Just keep swimming!"

Kelly and I both being bibliophiles and well aware of the dangers of hubris, we celebrated only after reaching the beginning of the chains again.  And all day thereafter.  Would that I had a dollar for every time she or I would look up into the distance and say,

"Sh*t, I can't believe we did that."  Rough estimates would then project me as a bajillionaire.

Now, let me be clear:  I retain the lessons I learned about hubris.  And I don't believe I conqured a damn thing.  Not that hike, not my fear, not the mountain, nothin'.  If anything, I think I met something up there (and by 'met' I mean something more like a tie game of tic-tac-toe than any more epic battle): Fear in another guise.  "Heights, Falling From" was a form I hadn't known fear in before, but she is a trickster and has many outfits, subtle or gaudy.

I don't consider myself brave to have found her again; foolhardy, certainly.  Reckless, maybe.  When I stop to consider the situation, I realize that in the past three weeks, I have:

• climbed aforementioned peak
• gotten awful close to a scorpion (alive this time)
• searched for a missing hiker
  
• met and said goodbye to new friends (the latter part sucks)
• held a rattlesnake (Hi Michele!)
• handled thousands of dollars in cash 
• slid down a sandstone channel filled with very cold water
  
• And addressed fifty 4th graders for half an hour without a script.

Because it Needs be Done.  That's why.  Because now I have these experiences not as notches on my belt where I have triumphed, but as constant companions to remind me of important things further down the path.  Fear as I have grown to know her is a persistent little demon, but she has some good advice sometimes, and she keeps me from going forward blindly.  In these Western Wilds where so many experiences are vast and novel; and my mettle is new-forged and untested, I could do worse for a co-pilot.

Think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?

    - Thoreau, "Ktaadn"

States of Unbeing

I think I figured out what the ! in Utah! is all about.  It's the same reason for the i in math: it denotes a quantity entirely imaginary.  Now, I consider myself quite a creative person.  At any given moment, my head is populated by muppety-faced monsters, people sprouting wings, unintelligible languages and magic of all sorts.  But I was awed - in fact, overawed - by this recent trip, and trip is exactly the right word for it. 

Originally, Kelly (my housemate) and I had planned to go to Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon National Park, Cedar Breaks National Monument and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon in 4 days.  So we begin already with an untenable plan, destined for some kind of upheaval (i.e. destined to be severely scaled back to just Zion).  But the beginning of the drive quickly and conveniently provided scenery that was amazing.  I give you The Vermilion Cliffs:

which were red and stripey, as promised, but of a scale that was only the first of many overwhelming sights.  Zion was similarly red and stripey and huge.  I couldn't quite grasp that what we were seeing wasn't really Maxfield Parrish painting a backdrop for an epic opera.  The light matched, the majesty, the sense of wtf:

It was incredible.

After a campsite-finding fiasco, Kelly and I tooled around on the sheeple-movers (i.e. the tourist tram system that bridges the ideological and aesthetic gap between Thoreau's "Ktaadn" and Disneyland's Jungle Cruise) doing easy but beautiful hikes until dusk and a delicious pizza dinner in the nearby "town."

The next day we set out to do what I, at least, had come for: the 5-mile, 4-hour, 1488-feet-elevation-increasing hike up Angel's Landing.  To be honest, I think I have put my body through harder things.  But my mind was a bowl of jelly once we got past Walter's Wiggles (a ridiculous name for a series of switchbacks) to the first false summit, and the last respite for my pounding heart.

Maybe I haven't quite built this up enough for those who, like me, hadn't really heard of this hike before getting it in my head to go to Zion.  Maybe I'm trying to mitigate the wrath of my Mom when she sees the pictures as proof of the ridiculously foolhardy thing I did.  Maybe I still get vertigo from some of the pictures of it I see online, particularly this one, which makes my skin seize up.  Let me try to illustrate a bit more.

Note: Most of the following pictures aren't from my camera.  I was a bit preoccupied with trying to Not Die.

As mentioned, at the start the trail is a regular ol' steep-ish trail, around some corners and up a canyon where the wind just howls almighty.  Very cool, great views.  Then the top, where you meet this guy:

who must just be breakdancing, right?  Getting really into his air guitar, standing on some cookie crumbs? Nothing's wrong here.  Everything is just fine.  No one is even remotely falling off a cliff.

...Then you get to the chains.  God bless the sweet, sweet chains for connecting me to the mountain through my sweaty, steely grip.  God damn the chains for making me think that their presence here made this whole endeavor humanly possible.  The chains facilitate a series of bad decisions, namely one's progressive steps along a trail which gleefully varies from about 2.5 feet wide to, well--

 that.  And this:

And some of these:

                               

Sorry, Mom.

Then, in some places, there were no chains.  And that was terrifying as well.  And let me not forget to mention the buffeting wind, estimated by one of our fellow hikers at 40 mph on the high ridges.  On each false summit - each relative widening and plateauing of this narrow path - hikers sat, took a breath and a photo and decided whether or not to press on.  I probably would've been happy with my efforts had I gotten even part of the way up (the precursor-to-terror trail was still a physical challenge that left my thighs shaking long before Mr. Stick Man started rockin' out), but I honestly didn't think about it much.  Truth be told, I didn't think about much more than what was right in front of me - trying hard as I was NOT to think of what was to the left, right, or - God forbid - beneath me.  I suppose I'd expected thoughts more emotional, metaphysical, or even Zen calm would've been nice.  Instead, my brain put this song on repeat, and my body followed - all the while shaking my head in disbelief.

I think this face about sums it up:

Next Time:  The summit, the descent, looking up from the bottom.

Soon

"In his absence things are usually quiet on the island.  The fairies take an hour longer in the morning, the beasts attend to their young, the redskins feed heavily for six days and nights, and when pirates and lost boys meet they merely bite their thumbs at one another.  But with the coming of Peter, who hates lethargy, they are all under way again: if you put your ear to the ground now, you would hear the whole island seething with life."

- Peter Pan, The Island Come Alive

Bear with me folks.  I'm taking some pains finding the right words and images for everything.  I'll be along soon, with a story that I hope will please you.

I Returneth

Back.  Alive.  Breathless.  Speechless?  Hope not (doesn't translate well for a blog).  There's lots of "Wow." to be had - get ready.  Pictures and attempts to scribe it all very soon. 

A brief sketch:

Man, I'm bushed.  Two days training in Visitor Services, learning how to not completely screw up cash register transactions.  It'll become second nature before I know it, but for now it's like translating a foreign language in my head - I'm a half-step behind the other rangers, and the foot-tapping visitors who have no inkling and less of a care of the mental gymnastics I'm throwing.  (PS: Be nice to your service professionals, please.  Just.  Do that.)  One day of this was enough to drive me home belting out an a cappella version of "9 to 5" that would make Dolly smile politely but cringe inwardly.

My head has grown three sizes - it is approaching proportional Cabbage Patch dimensions.  I'm learning everything, everywhere, at every minute.  My learning curve is so steep that yodling cut-out man on the Price is Right would demand to speak to his union rep at the sight of it.  But I love it.  I feel like a really inquisitve kid (and I do know what that feels like), or a fish out of water-- strapped into a tiny cyborg walking suit, then given a map and electronic translator.  On the moon.  With Steve.

Ridiculous metaphors aside, I'm learning and experiencing new things in nearly every single dimension of my life right now.  New environment, people, job, skills, place to live, ways to teach...  Before, when I was deciding whether to do an SCA position or return to my beloved job in elementary school, I wrote in my journal that the possibility of Arizona felt "like a brand new body."  And really, I said to myself, terrifying though it may be, how could I pass that up?  Well, ladies and gents, let me provide you with lotto numbers, because my powers of prognostication have not failed.  I feel brand new in so many ways.  Not entirely divorced from my life of before, but it's quite a sharp turn my path has taken.  And the view is so very different here.

Friday through Sunday is an aberrant four-day weekend, so off my housemate Kelly and I go: to Zion, Bryce and the Grand Canyon's North Rim.  Utah!  Climbing!  Camping by the seats of our pants!  Vistas too ridiculous to be true!  If I return, I promise pictures.

Show me something I've NEVER seen before. Something never before set to film. Something that neither I nor anyone else has ever conceived of. Give me a first rate, world class "Wow" from beyond my wildest dreams. 

Take. My. Breath. Away.