Perfect days come in all shapes and sizes. Some people might require a stroll on a tropical beach wearing a sarong, and a fabulous sunset to make the grade. Others might require a Superbowl win for their favorite team and a really good pot-luck dinner while they're watching it on a 102 inch projection style television.
Mine usually involve some combination of a bonfire and an early autumn night, starry skies above and lightning bugs firing in the woods and the hollows at dusk. But I like to be flexible about these things. I had a perfect day just a month ago, and the two things that really made this particular combination "magic" and memorable were a Harley Sportster and a pair of delinquent ducks. I think that at the tail end of the day we even managed to fit in the bonfire and the starlit sky.
But really...it was still all about the ducks.
We're six days into December right now, edging closer to the first official day of winter though the temperatures in the morning have been jump starting me into the winter grumpies. Any day when the thermometer reads "something-teen" as I'm driving to work means that my winter mood has arrived already. And I hate winter.
If it wasn't five months long and didn't involve wind chills of forty or fifty below, I think I'd take it in stride a bit more easily. But this is Wisconsin, and I can still find pockets of snow in my garden in April. When I get cold, it can take me until the next day to really warm up, no matter how much hot chocolate with Kahlua and whipped cream and nutmeg sprinkled on top that I try to cure the chills with. And by the next day, we start the cycle all over again.
For me, the perfect winter would be about two weeks long. Over Christmas, of course, with enough snow on the ground to make a snowman, and some snow angels, and deep enough to make it worthwhile to bring out my snowshoes for my annual snowshoe trek around the edge of the property. Hot cider, cookies baking, fire crackling in the hearth, Currier & Ives feel to the holidays.
And then God can turn the switch to "Spring," and I'm ready to start looking at daffodils and crocuses and bluebirds again. So far he's still waiting on my suggestion.
In the meantime, we took one last glorious grab at a warm day on the motorcycle, and I have faith that it'll keep me going until April.
It was the first weekend in November, of all times, and the weather forecasters were predicting that temps could reach seventy degrees on Sunday. We hadn't had the bike out very often this year, and October had been a complete wash. Cold, relentlessly rainy, dreary, dismal, dispiriting. Forget the expectation of "Indian summer," that appointed time went by under grey skies and cold drizzle. We felt cheated, big time, by the loss of fall afternoons that should have been spent in the yard or on the bike. I walked around constantly grumbling that I wanted a refund for the month of October. Who even cared that we might get a few warm days later on, when the daylight was so short that the yard was dark by the time we cut loose from our actual jobs.
But still, a seventy degree weekend day is nothing to waste no matter what time of year, and we packed up a picnic lunch and broke out the bike. "Let's put the sun in our faces," he said, and I didn't need a second invitation. There's a reason the leather jacket and black boots sit in the closet closest to my front door. I brought sub sandwiches and chips and a cookie apiece, and we took the meandering back roads west to the city of Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. We indeed had the sun in our faces as we rode past fields and evergreens and marshes with tall grasses and cattails bending in the breeze.
By two in the afternoon, we were ready for lunch, and pulled up to a spot beside a lake in the middle of the city. A stretch of raised concrete beside the water was the perfect picnic spot, and we settled in, our legs dangling over the side. A pair of identical mallard hens came swimming over to us as we unwrapped our sandwiches. These ducks were so cute!!!!! Bright eyed and buoyant, curious and friendly, they eyed us with precision and intent.
Our first inkling that something surprising might be afoot was when one of the hens launched herself in a flurry of wing beats out of the water and landed on my boyfriend's lap, then sank her beak into his sandwich, pulling away a chunk of bread. The brazen hussy!! He waved her off and back into the water, and then cracked up with laughter. We didn't get much of a break, though, because first one, then the other, then at times both, kept up in launch mode.
I'd never been that close to a wild duck before, but this was surreal and hysterically funny. I held my arm out to protect my sandwich at one point, only to have one of the hens fly up and land on my forearm like a raptor, balancing on her little wet webby orange feet until I jiggled her off and back into the lake. After the first few tries of lap landing, the pair changed their direct approach to one of landing beside us on the concrete, and trying to sneak their beaks into our laps to nibble at crumbs. At least a couple of times a minute, I'd be fitting my free hand under a duck's warm, feathered chest or tummy, and lifting her up off the concrete and casually dropping (or tossing) her back into the water without ceremony.
Crunching a handful of potato chips and throwing them on the water occasionally bought us a few extra seconds to take a bite or two of our sandwiches without being molested, as the hens scurried after the chips floating on the water like a pair of guided missiles. Though it's it's hard to chew and laugh at the same time without choking. I don't know what possessed me to leave my little digital camera behind, other than the desire to just have nothing to do for an afternoon than sit on the back of the bike and empty my mind as the countryside rolled past.
We eventually made it through our lunch, though I'd have to guess that the ducks made off with about a third of our sandwiches, most of the potato chips, and half of the cookies. Okay, by the time they were nibbling on pieces of macadamia nut cookies, we were officially volunteering the treats. The afternoon started to cool under the bright blue sky, and we finally got up to leave. Tossing our sandwich wrappers into a trash can nearby, I looked up at a small sign hanging in the parking lot behind us warning visitors not to feed the waterfowl.
Oops. It reminded me of hiking at the Grand Canyon with my son a few years ago and having a marvelous, memorable time feeding granola bars to a friendly squirrel, only to finally see the tiny "do not feed..." sign as we were leaving. Oops!
The rest of the day unfolded with familiar joys--cutting and stacking firewood, dinner, a bonfire on an unbelievably warm November evening, and an inky sky studded with stars.
But it's the ducks I'll be laughing about all the way through the long, cold winter, reminding me of a perfect ride in the country on a perfect warm fall day. I hope that bold-as-brass pair of mallards finally figures out the way south with the rest of the flock. That whole "shoreline banditry" thing only works when there are easy marks on a warm, sunny day.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Sunday, October 18, 2009
The Coffee and Chainsaw Connection
I pushed the familiar number on speed dial on my cell phone to let my friend Judy know I was running late for coffee.
This is nothing new, sometimes the "I'm running late" call comes from her end. We have four kids (now adults in varying stages) apiece, and two ex-husbands (one each). She has two grandkids, I have a dog and a cat and a "grand-pug" and two "grand-cats" that sometimes come to visit. Her house burned down about a year ago, my fifteen acres of fields and woods are starting to crowd me and look like something Maurice Sendik dreamed up. We both have things that make us stare at the ceiling in the middle of the night.
We're always trying to cram one too many things into our lives, but we try to make time for coffee once in a while, around hair appointments and sick children and travel plans and work schedules and the assortment of surprises life's always throwing at you. I invariably drink my coffee loaded with chocolate and whipped cream. Judy's the more adventurous one, she'll foray into things with pumpkin spice and caramel this time of year. Thirty years ago or so when we met, Judy was a dead ringer for the actress Kate Bosworth of "Blue Crush" and "Beyond the Sea" fame. I looked thirty years younger then too, and my hair was really and truly brown. I don't look like anybody famous, but I remind a lot of people of somebody they've already met. When somebody I work with told me they thought I looked like Annette Benning, I could have busted a rib laughing.
It's good to have friends who know where the bones are buried and always forgive you for falling off your diet. Because, as we all know, coffee loaded with whipped cream and chocolate will always be the slippery slope.
This morning, though, my excuse was a tad unorthodox, and eight hours later I'm still turning over the particular combination of words in my head.
"I'm running a little late because my chainsaw got stuck in a log."
Good lord, what being single has done to me!!
Now before you start to picture me as Paula Bunyon with a blue ox parked in the garage, picture this. Only two weeks before, I was doing the tango--badly, but with enthusiasm--on a vintage dance hall floor in a polka-dotted silk chiffon dress, magenta suede stilettos with tiny patent leather bows, and a Gerbera daisy the size of a saucer in my hair. I like shoe shopping, I'm absolutely addicted to chocolate, and I really like to be pampered.
Four years ago, when the ink was barely dry on the divorce that had followed a long and very traditional marriage (he worked long hours, I kept the home fires burning and the soccer uniforms washed), I didn't know a hex wrench from a jar of honey. But little by little, necessity being the mother of invention, I've accumulated a few tools and now know how to use them. A cordless drill was the first, sparked by the need to immediately fix a pasture fence to keep the horses in. A tool kit, though to be fair, it's really a pretty turquoise and opaque white fishing tackle box. A level. And the piece de resistance, the rechargeable-battery operated chainsaw. That purchase was made after one windy night when a large dead tree came down across my driveway and shattered, and I had nothing but a handsaw to use on some of the larger limbs. Aerobics classes be damned, that was hard work!
Envisioning yet more dead trees coming down across the driveway at inconvenient times such as when I'd be leaving for work, I took myself shopping and picked out the smallest, most benign-looking chainsaw I could find. It's not much bigger than a blender, though it still carries the requisite air of potential dismemberment that keeps me treating it with a lot of respect. And wearing heavy leather gloves. I remember still how terrified I was when, on one vacation, my ex-husband would disappear solo into the woods for several hours at a time to trim trees and brush on a lakefront lot we had purchased when the kids were still quite small. Death, disaster, life as a widow, all sorts of dire scenarios ran through my head like leaves in a storm until he'd walk through the door again, still in one piece. Now it's my friends who worry about me on the weekends as I wield my tiny chainsaw in the woods, battling nature and, to be honest, losing most of the time.
This morning's hitch came about as I was trying to detangle a Gordian knot of three dead trees that had crashed down on each other in a windstorm a couple of weeks earlier. I'd been working on it every opportunity where there was brief spell of dry weather. If a tree falls in a forest, nobody much gives a damn. But one of these trees had fallen into the beautiful crabapple tree at the edge of my yard that I had gotten from the kids for Mother's Day years earlier. Another rested in the branches of a smaller trash tree twenty feet away. And they had all come down like a giant three-dimensional game of JENGA. One fell east, one fell southeast, and one fell north atop each other, forked branches intertwining. As I cautiously worked on cutting the farthest, smallest branches and clearing out a thicket of leafy vines that obscured those complicated spatial relationships, I stood back often, trying to figure out what I could safely pull on that wouldn't have something else and something bigger fall on me.
I thought I had it all figured out, with several fireplace-sized cuts of wood already stacked on the lawn from my efforts today. But then as the little saw blade gamely tore through yet another good sized tree limb, something further up the line jiggled, and then something else shifted, and then the half-cut tree-limb closed down on the blade and the jig was up. I tugged, and tugged, and tugged some more, but it was hopeless. At least for me. I trudged back to the garage and brought out my hand saw and put a lot more elbow grease into freeing my stuck little battery-operated tool than I ever thought I'd do with a saw again. Then I put everything away and drove to meet Judy for coffee at a frou-frou coffee joint.
There have been a lot of little "self-sufficiency" markers in the past four years, starting with dragging out a ladder to change the light bulb in the foyer (always a source of much cursing by my ex, and, I've discovered, with good reason) and moving on to installing handles on the basement storage cabinets, replacing a bathroom fixture, and fixing a toilet. Twice. Nothing that I'd ever contemplated when my understanding of life roles came down to "his" and "hers." Much has changed since then, some of it still making my head spin if I think about it too much.
I still like chiffon, spike heels, romantic walks on the beach, and bouquets of flowers for absolutely no reason.
But dang it...I like my little chain saw too!!
This is nothing new, sometimes the "I'm running late" call comes from her end. We have four kids (now adults in varying stages) apiece, and two ex-husbands (one each). She has two grandkids, I have a dog and a cat and a "grand-pug" and two "grand-cats" that sometimes come to visit. Her house burned down about a year ago, my fifteen acres of fields and woods are starting to crowd me and look like something Maurice Sendik dreamed up. We both have things that make us stare at the ceiling in the middle of the night.
We're always trying to cram one too many things into our lives, but we try to make time for coffee once in a while, around hair appointments and sick children and travel plans and work schedules and the assortment of surprises life's always throwing at you. I invariably drink my coffee loaded with chocolate and whipped cream. Judy's the more adventurous one, she'll foray into things with pumpkin spice and caramel this time of year. Thirty years ago or so when we met, Judy was a dead ringer for the actress Kate Bosworth of "Blue Crush" and "Beyond the Sea" fame. I looked thirty years younger then too, and my hair was really and truly brown. I don't look like anybody famous, but I remind a lot of people of somebody they've already met. When somebody I work with told me they thought I looked like Annette Benning, I could have busted a rib laughing.
It's good to have friends who know where the bones are buried and always forgive you for falling off your diet. Because, as we all know, coffee loaded with whipped cream and chocolate will always be the slippery slope.
This morning, though, my excuse was a tad unorthodox, and eight hours later I'm still turning over the particular combination of words in my head.
"I'm running a little late because my chainsaw got stuck in a log."
Good lord, what being single has done to me!!
Now before you start to picture me as Paula Bunyon with a blue ox parked in the garage, picture this. Only two weeks before, I was doing the tango--badly, but with enthusiasm--on a vintage dance hall floor in a polka-dotted silk chiffon dress, magenta suede stilettos with tiny patent leather bows, and a Gerbera daisy the size of a saucer in my hair. I like shoe shopping, I'm absolutely addicted to chocolate, and I really like to be pampered.
Four years ago, when the ink was barely dry on the divorce that had followed a long and very traditional marriage (he worked long hours, I kept the home fires burning and the soccer uniforms washed), I didn't know a hex wrench from a jar of honey. But little by little, necessity being the mother of invention, I've accumulated a few tools and now know how to use them. A cordless drill was the first, sparked by the need to immediately fix a pasture fence to keep the horses in. A tool kit, though to be fair, it's really a pretty turquoise and opaque white fishing tackle box. A level. And the piece de resistance, the rechargeable-battery operated chainsaw. That purchase was made after one windy night when a large dead tree came down across my driveway and shattered, and I had nothing but a handsaw to use on some of the larger limbs. Aerobics classes be damned, that was hard work!
Envisioning yet more dead trees coming down across the driveway at inconvenient times such as when I'd be leaving for work, I took myself shopping and picked out the smallest, most benign-looking chainsaw I could find. It's not much bigger than a blender, though it still carries the requisite air of potential dismemberment that keeps me treating it with a lot of respect. And wearing heavy leather gloves. I remember still how terrified I was when, on one vacation, my ex-husband would disappear solo into the woods for several hours at a time to trim trees and brush on a lakefront lot we had purchased when the kids were still quite small. Death, disaster, life as a widow, all sorts of dire scenarios ran through my head like leaves in a storm until he'd walk through the door again, still in one piece. Now it's my friends who worry about me on the weekends as I wield my tiny chainsaw in the woods, battling nature and, to be honest, losing most of the time.
This morning's hitch came about as I was trying to detangle a Gordian knot of three dead trees that had crashed down on each other in a windstorm a couple of weeks earlier. I'd been working on it every opportunity where there was brief spell of dry weather. If a tree falls in a forest, nobody much gives a damn. But one of these trees had fallen into the beautiful crabapple tree at the edge of my yard that I had gotten from the kids for Mother's Day years earlier. Another rested in the branches of a smaller trash tree twenty feet away. And they had all come down like a giant three-dimensional game of JENGA. One fell east, one fell southeast, and one fell north atop each other, forked branches intertwining. As I cautiously worked on cutting the farthest, smallest branches and clearing out a thicket of leafy vines that obscured those complicated spatial relationships, I stood back often, trying to figure out what I could safely pull on that wouldn't have something else and something bigger fall on me.
I thought I had it all figured out, with several fireplace-sized cuts of wood already stacked on the lawn from my efforts today. But then as the little saw blade gamely tore through yet another good sized tree limb, something further up the line jiggled, and then something else shifted, and then the half-cut tree-limb closed down on the blade and the jig was up. I tugged, and tugged, and tugged some more, but it was hopeless. At least for me. I trudged back to the garage and brought out my hand saw and put a lot more elbow grease into freeing my stuck little battery-operated tool than I ever thought I'd do with a saw again. Then I put everything away and drove to meet Judy for coffee at a frou-frou coffee joint.
There have been a lot of little "self-sufficiency" markers in the past four years, starting with dragging out a ladder to change the light bulb in the foyer (always a source of much cursing by my ex, and, I've discovered, with good reason) and moving on to installing handles on the basement storage cabinets, replacing a bathroom fixture, and fixing a toilet. Twice. Nothing that I'd ever contemplated when my understanding of life roles came down to "his" and "hers." Much has changed since then, some of it still making my head spin if I think about it too much.
I still like chiffon, spike heels, romantic walks on the beach, and bouquets of flowers for absolutely no reason.
But dang it...I like my little chain saw too!!
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Ship Out of Water
A trip to the Milwaukee Art Museum is always such a visual treat, long before you even get to the artwork on display inside. Part "ship out of water," part mechanical giant butterfly, with a Dale Chihuly glass "tree" inside the lobby that looks like it's from "under the sea" and giant aspen leaves that never fall just down the street at Discovery World at Pier Wisconsin, it's always an excuse to grab a cup of coffee and just stop and stare for a while...
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Tough Enough?
The scene in the courtroom still haunts me ten years later.
I remember the tears that sprang hot to my eyes as I shut the door behind me and walked down the corridor, thinking "I am not tough enough to do this job." I was a law student then, a seasoned criminal prosecutor now. And from time to time, out of nowhere, still comes that memory. It is seared into my consciousness, a testament to "collateral damage," and a mother's grief--two mothers, in fact--and consequences reaped by horrific acts, and how nothing in life, either evil or good, ever happens in a vacuum.
But first, a bit about my job. For the past nine years I've been unbelievably fortunate to work as a criminal prosecutor in a part-time capacity. When I got hired, I felt like I'd hit the jackpot in terms of balancing life and work and family. I still do. I had four kids at home when I'd started law school, and still had three kids living at home when I finished. Getting to do the work I loved in a half-time structure meant that I could still make it to soccer practice and gymnastic meets and find the time to bake team cupcakes decorated like tennis balls and help with homework and volunteer at school and cook dinner on a regular basis. Okay, a semi-regular basis. My kids really got quite sick of "rotisserie chicken" and potato salad from the grocery store deli every Tuesday night.
This was a new position, not only for me, but for the District Attorney's office as well. And so little by little, my job duties evolved to make the most use of my time there and my previous background as a writer. While no one I work with would, I think, dare call me the politically incorrect "miscellaneous backup chick," I make sport of it myself. One cop, introducing me to another, described me as the office's "utility person." I have my areas of specialty--appellate work, child support prosecutions, seizing assets from drug dealers, responding to requests by inmates who are unhappy that their probation or parole has been revoked and want the trial court to overturn that administrative decision--and then I just get thrown into a lot of things with little warning. It comes with the job. I've argued four cases before the state supreme court, I've been admitted to practice before the United States Supreme Court...and I handle a lot of speeding tickets as well.
But being the part-timer means that for the most part, I don't handle the big cases from start to finish. I may review their police reports, I may issue the charges, I may even brief or argue a pre-trial motion, but I'm rarely there for the finish.
Ten years ago, I was simply a spectator in the courtroom. And it has stayed with me every step of the way since then.
A young man's life hung in the balance. His was the last sentencing hearing of a trio of young men who had, months earlier, kidnapped and savagely victimized a young woman in a highly-publicized case. There were no reporters in the courtroom this time, no television cameras, no members of the public. Just the routine players in this type of drama. A judge, the defendant, a prosecutor, a defense attorney, the courtroom staff. And the families. Both his and hers.
His mother went first, a lioness trying to protect her son. She walked into the courtroom with a bearing that was so precise it was almost military. She was a flight attendant, and wore her navy uniform proudly, crisp white accents with glints of gold, her hair pulled severely back. The courtroom was a high security place, which meant that in addition to armed bailiffs being present as a matter of course, the "gallery" was separated from the court by walls of glass and wood. Sound was amplified and conveyed by microphone and speaker.
For nearly a half hour the young man's mother spoke before the judge, passionately pleading for mercy. Sometimes her voice was strong, sometimes it broke with emotion. In her hand she held copies of papers and artwork he had created in grade school that had hung on her refrigerator door years before. She told the tale of his life, which was in large part a tale of hers as well. Of a severely abusive relationship that she had finally found the courage to leave, of her struggle to claw her way out of a life of despair and establish herself as a professional in a field that leaves nothing to chance and relies on absolute accountability and responsibility. Her son's failings were not all his, she argued. He had been such a good child. But a cousin--one of the other defendants, in fact--had often led him astray as he was growing up. And she, in her job, had not always been there to counterbalance the influence.
And then the victim's mother spoke. The girl herself was not in the courtroom, but her mother and some other people were there to stand up for her. This mother was, on the outside, less crisply glamorous, more plain spoken than the woman who spoke before her. But she spoke eloquently about her child nonetheless, about a wonderful and responsible young girl who was the first in her family to go to college, who had a life bright and shining with promise and optimism. And whose life had been utterly broken by no fault of her own. Her daughter had had so much taken from her, and would never be the same. There needed to be justice here.
The prosecutor spoke then too, and the defense attorney, though I remember little of what either of them had to say. Real life and real heartaches trump the speeches of professionals most of the time.
And then it was the judge's turn. The words of the law fell heavily in the windowless courtroom. Punishment. Rehabilitation. Protection of the public. Concepts that judges apply every day in courtrooms across the country, elastic in their application but fixed in their importance as guiding principle.
But the moment that stays with me was one that was happening on the other side of the glass, in the gallery that separates the official participants in the case from everyone else. As the judge began to speak, the mother of the young man who had done such wrong walked around to the first row of the gallery, and knelt in front of the young woman's mother and put her hand on the other woman's lap. "I am so sorry," she said, and bowed her head, and then the two of them listened together for a verdict delivered in the pursuit of justice that would never make either of their children alright.
I fled the courtroom at that point, though not before hearing a sentence handed down which ensured that the young man would never see an ordinary sunlit day outside of a prison for most of his life, if not all. "I am not tough enough for this job," I thought as I wiped the tears away with my hand and then left the building.
It's been ten years since that day in the courtroom, nine years since I started working as a criminal prosecutor. I've had by victories and I've had my defeats, and none of them have shaken me to the core as much as this one did. I look back and still wonder whether I'm "tough enough" for the oath I've taken.
If I'm very lucky, I think and pray, I'll somehow make it to retirement before I ever find out.
I remember the tears that sprang hot to my eyes as I shut the door behind me and walked down the corridor, thinking "I am not tough enough to do this job." I was a law student then, a seasoned criminal prosecutor now. And from time to time, out of nowhere, still comes that memory. It is seared into my consciousness, a testament to "collateral damage," and a mother's grief--two mothers, in fact--and consequences reaped by horrific acts, and how nothing in life, either evil or good, ever happens in a vacuum.
But first, a bit about my job. For the past nine years I've been unbelievably fortunate to work as a criminal prosecutor in a part-time capacity. When I got hired, I felt like I'd hit the jackpot in terms of balancing life and work and family. I still do. I had four kids at home when I'd started law school, and still had three kids living at home when I finished. Getting to do the work I loved in a half-time structure meant that I could still make it to soccer practice and gymnastic meets and find the time to bake team cupcakes decorated like tennis balls and help with homework and volunteer at school and cook dinner on a regular basis. Okay, a semi-regular basis. My kids really got quite sick of "rotisserie chicken" and potato salad from the grocery store deli every Tuesday night.
This was a new position, not only for me, but for the District Attorney's office as well. And so little by little, my job duties evolved to make the most use of my time there and my previous background as a writer. While no one I work with would, I think, dare call me the politically incorrect "miscellaneous backup chick," I make sport of it myself. One cop, introducing me to another, described me as the office's "utility person." I have my areas of specialty--appellate work, child support prosecutions, seizing assets from drug dealers, responding to requests by inmates who are unhappy that their probation or parole has been revoked and want the trial court to overturn that administrative decision--and then I just get thrown into a lot of things with little warning. It comes with the job. I've argued four cases before the state supreme court, I've been admitted to practice before the United States Supreme Court...and I handle a lot of speeding tickets as well.
But being the part-timer means that for the most part, I don't handle the big cases from start to finish. I may review their police reports, I may issue the charges, I may even brief or argue a pre-trial motion, but I'm rarely there for the finish.
Ten years ago, I was simply a spectator in the courtroom. And it has stayed with me every step of the way since then.
A young man's life hung in the balance. His was the last sentencing hearing of a trio of young men who had, months earlier, kidnapped and savagely victimized a young woman in a highly-publicized case. There were no reporters in the courtroom this time, no television cameras, no members of the public. Just the routine players in this type of drama. A judge, the defendant, a prosecutor, a defense attorney, the courtroom staff. And the families. Both his and hers.
His mother went first, a lioness trying to protect her son. She walked into the courtroom with a bearing that was so precise it was almost military. She was a flight attendant, and wore her navy uniform proudly, crisp white accents with glints of gold, her hair pulled severely back. The courtroom was a high security place, which meant that in addition to armed bailiffs being present as a matter of course, the "gallery" was separated from the court by walls of glass and wood. Sound was amplified and conveyed by microphone and speaker.
For nearly a half hour the young man's mother spoke before the judge, passionately pleading for mercy. Sometimes her voice was strong, sometimes it broke with emotion. In her hand she held copies of papers and artwork he had created in grade school that had hung on her refrigerator door years before. She told the tale of his life, which was in large part a tale of hers as well. Of a severely abusive relationship that she had finally found the courage to leave, of her struggle to claw her way out of a life of despair and establish herself as a professional in a field that leaves nothing to chance and relies on absolute accountability and responsibility. Her son's failings were not all his, she argued. He had been such a good child. But a cousin--one of the other defendants, in fact--had often led him astray as he was growing up. And she, in her job, had not always been there to counterbalance the influence.
And then the victim's mother spoke. The girl herself was not in the courtroom, but her mother and some other people were there to stand up for her. This mother was, on the outside, less crisply glamorous, more plain spoken than the woman who spoke before her. But she spoke eloquently about her child nonetheless, about a wonderful and responsible young girl who was the first in her family to go to college, who had a life bright and shining with promise and optimism. And whose life had been utterly broken by no fault of her own. Her daughter had had so much taken from her, and would never be the same. There needed to be justice here.
The prosecutor spoke then too, and the defense attorney, though I remember little of what either of them had to say. Real life and real heartaches trump the speeches of professionals most of the time.
And then it was the judge's turn. The words of the law fell heavily in the windowless courtroom. Punishment. Rehabilitation. Protection of the public. Concepts that judges apply every day in courtrooms across the country, elastic in their application but fixed in their importance as guiding principle.
But the moment that stays with me was one that was happening on the other side of the glass, in the gallery that separates the official participants in the case from everyone else. As the judge began to speak, the mother of the young man who had done such wrong walked around to the first row of the gallery, and knelt in front of the young woman's mother and put her hand on the other woman's lap. "I am so sorry," she said, and bowed her head, and then the two of them listened together for a verdict delivered in the pursuit of justice that would never make either of their children alright.
I fled the courtroom at that point, though not before hearing a sentence handed down which ensured that the young man would never see an ordinary sunlit day outside of a prison for most of his life, if not all. "I am not tough enough for this job," I thought as I wiped the tears away with my hand and then left the building.
It's been ten years since that day in the courtroom, nine years since I started working as a criminal prosecutor. I've had by victories and I've had my defeats, and none of them have shaken me to the core as much as this one did. I look back and still wonder whether I'm "tough enough" for the oath I've taken.
If I'm very lucky, I think and pray, I'll somehow make it to retirement before I ever find out.
Saturday, August 29, 2009
The Vigil
The air streaming out of the grocery store cooler is dry and cold and bracing. I stand in front of an assortment of premium gourmet ice cream in single-serve cartons with high calorie counts and higher prices.
What flavor to buy for a dying man to coax him into taking a little more nourishment, a few more molecules of fat and sugar wrapped in the dulcet flavorings of Haagen-Dazs? Chocolate? He has quite the sweet tooth. Coffee? He loves his morning coffee. Dulce de Leche? Oh why the hell not? I buy two of each, then drive a few blocks further to a liquor store.
I am waging a war against death, and my pathetic weapons are ice cream, chocolate pudding and German beer.
It has been nearly a week since my eighty-six year old father, already afflicted by dementia and Parksinsons disease, was admitted to the emergency room for the second time in a month with a perfect storm of converging handicaps—untreated diabetes, cardiac arrhythmia, a blood clot in his leg running from hip to knee, a raging bladder infection, and a foot in serious trouble from circulatory problems. Unable to speak articulately for months before this, he was unable to tell anyone the things going wrong in his body this time until they had reached critical mass.
He has now made it more than three days past the phone call from the hospital telling me—as I stood at the counter of a German gift shop buying him some more CDs of folk songs from his native land—that he would probably not live another half hour. This old soldier is tough…but he is still wasting away. He is now in hospice care, a method of care designed to ease suffering rather than aggressively try to change nature’s course. Treating him with something even as simple as an IV line for fluids and nutrition has been complicated by his dementia—he has spent most of the past month in hospital beds with restraints to keep him from tearing the IV lines from his arms. A hospice worker who knows nothing of the man wondered aloud whether he had pulled his IV lines out because he wanted no further treatment to prolong his life. No, I retorted, given that he spent four years as a prisoner of war, three of them working miserably in a French coal mine, I think he was more likely simply trying to escape.
The conundrums are many. Enough pain killers and sedatives to dull the pain in his tortured foot keep him too sleepy to eat enough to regain some lost strength. Intravenous fluids would require readmitting him to a hospital and placing him in restraints again, which must be a horror to him. The difficulty he already has swallowing make it more difficult to get any measurable amounts of food or liquid into his stomach.
And yet…I know I have made small inroads. A half cup of ice cream one day. A half bottle of German beer yesterday, a full twelve-ounce bottle this morning, sucked down through a straw to the accompaniment of German soldier songs on the boom box. I knew I was on to something the day before when I lifted the straw to his lips and he tentatively drew in the golden liquid. Afraid that he might take too much at one time, I pulled the straw away. He tried to speak, and I leaned closer to hear. It was one word. “Again.” Again what, daddy? More beer? Another single word answer. “Beer.” I look into his hazel eyes that still light up sometimes with recognition when he looks at me, and I know I will keep it coming. There is no “bar time” at this place.
I feel helpless to change the larger workings of fate, and so I focus on the smaller things that I can do. A promise to bring some Bitburger beer, an evening ritual from a family reunion in Germany a few years ago. The collection of German songs, which he sometimes taps his foot to or tries to sing along with. I try to remember to wear bright, colorful shirts, and perfume, and long dangling earrings to catch the light. My boyfriend, who speaks a little Deutsch from his time overseas in the Air Force, sat with us and spun a tale of taking my father to Berlin for Oktoberfest. We set up a bird feeder on a shepherd’s hook outside his window, and watched as goldfinches, bright as lemons, came to feed only minutes later.
I’ve brought my old chocolate lab to visit, tossing a bright yellow tennis ball around the hospice room to keep him busy. At one point I searched the room for the ball for another throw, but could not see it anywhere on the floor. It was only when I straightened up that I realized Bandit had placed it on my father’s bed beside his elbow. I don’t think my father knew this at all, but I still patted my retriever on the head in gratitude. “You’re such a good dog,” I told him.
This evening as I leave the nursing home I feel an inevitability settling in, a waning of hope. The odds are long against him.
And yet, as long as he’s still breathing and still smiles at the sound of my voice, I will keep trying to fend off death, one spoonful of ice cream, one Oktoberfest beer at a time.
What flavor to buy for a dying man to coax him into taking a little more nourishment, a few more molecules of fat and sugar wrapped in the dulcet flavorings of Haagen-Dazs? Chocolate? He has quite the sweet tooth. Coffee? He loves his morning coffee. Dulce de Leche? Oh why the hell not? I buy two of each, then drive a few blocks further to a liquor store.
I am waging a war against death, and my pathetic weapons are ice cream, chocolate pudding and German beer.
It has been nearly a week since my eighty-six year old father, already afflicted by dementia and Parksinsons disease, was admitted to the emergency room for the second time in a month with a perfect storm of converging handicaps—untreated diabetes, cardiac arrhythmia, a blood clot in his leg running from hip to knee, a raging bladder infection, and a foot in serious trouble from circulatory problems. Unable to speak articulately for months before this, he was unable to tell anyone the things going wrong in his body this time until they had reached critical mass.
He has now made it more than three days past the phone call from the hospital telling me—as I stood at the counter of a German gift shop buying him some more CDs of folk songs from his native land—that he would probably not live another half hour. This old soldier is tough…but he is still wasting away. He is now in hospice care, a method of care designed to ease suffering rather than aggressively try to change nature’s course. Treating him with something even as simple as an IV line for fluids and nutrition has been complicated by his dementia—he has spent most of the past month in hospital beds with restraints to keep him from tearing the IV lines from his arms. A hospice worker who knows nothing of the man wondered aloud whether he had pulled his IV lines out because he wanted no further treatment to prolong his life. No, I retorted, given that he spent four years as a prisoner of war, three of them working miserably in a French coal mine, I think he was more likely simply trying to escape.
The conundrums are many. Enough pain killers and sedatives to dull the pain in his tortured foot keep him too sleepy to eat enough to regain some lost strength. Intravenous fluids would require readmitting him to a hospital and placing him in restraints again, which must be a horror to him. The difficulty he already has swallowing make it more difficult to get any measurable amounts of food or liquid into his stomach.
And yet…I know I have made small inroads. A half cup of ice cream one day. A half bottle of German beer yesterday, a full twelve-ounce bottle this morning, sucked down through a straw to the accompaniment of German soldier songs on the boom box. I knew I was on to something the day before when I lifted the straw to his lips and he tentatively drew in the golden liquid. Afraid that he might take too much at one time, I pulled the straw away. He tried to speak, and I leaned closer to hear. It was one word. “Again.” Again what, daddy? More beer? Another single word answer. “Beer.” I look into his hazel eyes that still light up sometimes with recognition when he looks at me, and I know I will keep it coming. There is no “bar time” at this place.
I feel helpless to change the larger workings of fate, and so I focus on the smaller things that I can do. A promise to bring some Bitburger beer, an evening ritual from a family reunion in Germany a few years ago. The collection of German songs, which he sometimes taps his foot to or tries to sing along with. I try to remember to wear bright, colorful shirts, and perfume, and long dangling earrings to catch the light. My boyfriend, who speaks a little Deutsch from his time overseas in the Air Force, sat with us and spun a tale of taking my father to Berlin for Oktoberfest. We set up a bird feeder on a shepherd’s hook outside his window, and watched as goldfinches, bright as lemons, came to feed only minutes later.
I’ve brought my old chocolate lab to visit, tossing a bright yellow tennis ball around the hospice room to keep him busy. At one point I searched the room for the ball for another throw, but could not see it anywhere on the floor. It was only when I straightened up that I realized Bandit had placed it on my father’s bed beside his elbow. I don’t think my father knew this at all, but I still patted my retriever on the head in gratitude. “You’re such a good dog,” I told him.
This evening as I leave the nursing home I feel an inevitability settling in, a waning of hope. The odds are long against him.
And yet, as long as he’s still breathing and still smiles at the sound of my voice, I will keep trying to fend off death, one spoonful of ice cream, one Oktoberfest beer at a time.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Back Away from the Bunny!
It's the dog days of summer, and that can mean only one thing.
It's time to go to the fair.
I've been to two this year so far, the county fair and the state fair. Marvelous opportunities to people watch, eat food on a stick, pay way too much for alcohol, weigh the relative merits of things you'd never make at home like deep-fried s'mores, deep-fried cookie dough and chocolate covered bacon, and traverse the midway looking for more and more inventive ways to spend $20 to buy a stuffed animal worth two bits. I spent only six bucks this time, coming out ahead of the average, using a mallet to pound a catapault flinging a succession of rubber frogs into a barrel with rotating lily pads, and winning a tiny white stuffed tiger which I promptly surrendered to my boyfriend's daughter. She's eighteen. What, I should keep the toy for myself? My traditional prize-winning duty done, I passed on any further opportunities to win goldfish, throw darts at balloons, toss basketballs, fling plastic rings at upright soda bottles.
Because for me, the fair's not about the games, the food, even the music. The essence of a fair on a hot summer day is ... the animals.
Oh, the black and brown Clydesdales gleaming like dark satin under the floodlights in their jingling ten-horse hitches, silky white "feathers" floating around their hooves like cheerleaders' pompoms as they thunder around the coliseum, tons of beribboned and disciplined muscle on the hoof. Oh, the incredible assortment of chickens, some weirdly resembling poodles, other looking like eccentric characters in a British barnyard comedy. Oh, the cows, spotless and brushed and shampooed, nearly odorless, chewing contentedly in their stalls surrounded by perfectly clean straw, while the calves nestle together as cute as a basket of puppies. Sigh... I could go on and on and on.
It's not like I haven't seen cows before. Or horses. Or chickens. Or rabbits.
Over the years, I've been in the position of living with and cleaning up after all of them, in ways that left lasting impressions. At seventeen and Chicago-bred, I'd been privy to an abundance of bovine company when living on a once-working farm with my family in northern Wisconsin. Call it a social experiment gone awry, for a few years we nonetheless packed our decrepit barn with a horse and some ponies and some calves and some geese and some chickens and ducks and a pig. I could drive the route to the feed mill blindfolded. Noah's Ark meets Green Acres. The barn swallows moved in on their own.
When it came time to milk the cow my parents brought home from an auction one day, I was the only person brave enough or stupid enough to step up to the job that evening with a bucket between my knees and a wooden stool to sit on. We named her "Queenie," and the two things I remember most are the fact that she came with some wicked-looking horns ... and she didn't like to stand still during milking. The stool didn't have wheels. It was quite the sight, watching me scoot my rear on my little stool to follow her, the milk sloshing back and forth in the pail, and quite the job to perform twice a day.
But milking was by far the friendlier task. What goes in must go out, and after hauling bale after bale of hay into the barn and shaking it out in front of Queenie's nose, I recall shoveling mountains of ... by-products ... from the trench behind where she stood into a wheelbarrow and out the back door of the barn to a large, fragrant heap. A lot of what I was doing back then fits in the "character building" column. I've been told that I'm quite the character.
Likewise, when it came to the two horses I owned for more than thirty years. Yes, I just loved to look at them in a summer pasture, their tails switching back and forth as they grazed, their ears swiveling like semaphores at every sound. The sight of a horse grazing in the sunlight on a warm summer day can still make my heart skip a beat in fond remembrance. But again ... I was no stranger to cleanups, and medications, and fly-repellants, and near-death experiences at night in freezing barns, and hauling heavy hay bales and fifty-pound sacks of horse feed around.
It's time to go to the fair.
I've been to two this year so far, the county fair and the state fair. Marvelous opportunities to people watch, eat food on a stick, pay way too much for alcohol, weigh the relative merits of things you'd never make at home like deep-fried s'mores, deep-fried cookie dough and chocolate covered bacon, and traverse the midway looking for more and more inventive ways to spend $20 to buy a stuffed animal worth two bits. I spent only six bucks this time, coming out ahead of the average, using a mallet to pound a catapault flinging a succession of rubber frogs into a barrel with rotating lily pads, and winning a tiny white stuffed tiger which I promptly surrendered to my boyfriend's daughter. She's eighteen. What, I should keep the toy for myself? My traditional prize-winning duty done, I passed on any further opportunities to win goldfish, throw darts at balloons, toss basketballs, fling plastic rings at upright soda bottles.
Because for me, the fair's not about the games, the food, even the music. The essence of a fair on a hot summer day is ... the animals.
Oh, the black and brown Clydesdales gleaming like dark satin under the floodlights in their jingling ten-horse hitches, silky white "feathers" floating around their hooves like cheerleaders' pompoms as they thunder around the coliseum, tons of beribboned and disciplined muscle on the hoof. Oh, the incredible assortment of chickens, some weirdly resembling poodles, other looking like eccentric characters in a British barnyard comedy. Oh, the cows, spotless and brushed and shampooed, nearly odorless, chewing contentedly in their stalls surrounded by perfectly clean straw, while the calves nestle together as cute as a basket of puppies. Sigh... I could go on and on and on.
It's not like I haven't seen cows before. Or horses. Or chickens. Or rabbits.
Over the years, I've been in the position of living with and cleaning up after all of them, in ways that left lasting impressions. At seventeen and Chicago-bred, I'd been privy to an abundance of bovine company when living on a once-working farm with my family in northern Wisconsin. Call it a social experiment gone awry, for a few years we nonetheless packed our decrepit barn with a horse and some ponies and some calves and some geese and some chickens and ducks and a pig. I could drive the route to the feed mill blindfolded. Noah's Ark meets Green Acres. The barn swallows moved in on their own.
When it came time to milk the cow my parents brought home from an auction one day, I was the only person brave enough or stupid enough to step up to the job that evening with a bucket between my knees and a wooden stool to sit on. We named her "Queenie," and the two things I remember most are the fact that she came with some wicked-looking horns ... and she didn't like to stand still during milking. The stool didn't have wheels. It was quite the sight, watching me scoot my rear on my little stool to follow her, the milk sloshing back and forth in the pail, and quite the job to perform twice a day.
But milking was by far the friendlier task. What goes in must go out, and after hauling bale after bale of hay into the barn and shaking it out in front of Queenie's nose, I recall shoveling mountains of ... by-products ... from the trench behind where she stood into a wheelbarrow and out the back door of the barn to a large, fragrant heap. A lot of what I was doing back then fits in the "character building" column. I've been told that I'm quite the character.
Likewise, when it came to the two horses I owned for more than thirty years. Yes, I just loved to look at them in a summer pasture, their tails switching back and forth as they grazed, their ears swiveling like semaphores at every sound. The sight of a horse grazing in the sunlight on a warm summer day can still make my heart skip a beat in fond remembrance. But again ... I was no stranger to cleanups, and medications, and fly-repellants, and near-death experiences at night in freezing barns, and hauling heavy hay bales and fifty-pound sacks of horse feed around.
But the animals at the fair--they're like what Playboy centerfolds are to real women, what Marie Antionette's little hobby farm at Versailles was to a working farm in the French countryside. For the rest of us, not the hard-working exhibitors, these are purely eye-candy! Fantasy animals! Hollywood-groomed and ready for their close-up, Mr. DeMille!
Really, what little girl or boy watching the Lone Ranger and Tonto thunder across the mesa in pursuit of bad guys ever thought that Silver and Scout might throw a shoe? Or need a hay wagon following somewhere behind in the badlands? Did Timmy ever follow Lassie with a pooper scooper? Did Wilbur ever lift a shovel behind Mr. Ed?
So with that frame of mind--voluntary and total suspension of reality--I stepped into the fairs. Oooohhhed and aaaaaaahhhhhhed over the flashy Clydesdales as they threw their weight into harness. Chuckled at the chickens, cooed over the newly hatched baby chicks. Debated just where, on a "cuteness" scale, human babies fell in relation to puppies, kittens, and fuzzy ducklings. (The jury's still out on that one.)
Walking past the dairy barn at the tail end of the evening, I passed by a lovely Brown Swiss heifer placidly chewing her cud. She was spotless, she was dust-free, she could have stepped right out of a Gainsborough painting. My arm immediately crossed over the low wooden fence to stroke her neck, and in an instant I was enveloped by the smell of fresh hay and memory and in some ways much simpler times. My hand found its way up to her ears and her forehead, and the recollection of just where to scratch to make a happy cow came flooding through my fingers. The heifer leaned into it as I worked my scritching around the nubs of her horns and around the base of her ears. If cows could purr, this one would have sounded like an Evinrude motor.
It was a delight. Still, when I go to the fair, I know I'm in no danger of acting on impulse and bringing home a horse or a cow or a goat or a camel. The rabbits, however, are another story.
For decades of fair-going, the rabbits have been my real weakness. So soft, so plush, so cuddly looking, so clean, so touchable! Blank slates of fluffy goodness. I did, in fact, succumb the siren song of cuteness a few years ago. Wandering past rows of "Mini-Rex" rabbits, my oldest daughter, soon bound for college, stared longingly at a perky brown rabbit that looked like the Velveteen Rabbit come to life. "Oh, if I was going to have a rabbit, that's the one I'd want," she said.
About three weeks later, we had a rabbit living in a crate in our kitchen. Yes, he was extremely cute! But she left for college about a month later, and for the next three years reality hopped around on my kitchen floor with inevitable surprises. I think we could have weathered just about anything else, but this bunny came with, ahem, personal hygiene issues that were truly dispiriting. I think that if someone had invented bikini waxes for bunnies, he might still be with us. But eventually, the routine of giving a fat, kicking rabbit haircuts in unspeakable places proved to be one too many things for me to juggle at the time, and he was routed to the local humane society, along with all his gear, food, crate, litter box, yogurt treats and toys. The cat has since taken over his job of covering all surfaces in the house with gossamer fluff.
And yet...I felt that dangerous surge again this year as I dawdled past rows upon rows of rabbits in their cages, clean, odorless, non-threatening, fluffed and brushed and fed, with ribbons displayed proudly beside their name tags. Nary a rabbit dropping to be seen underfoot. No hygiene issues here. The pull was magnetic, nearly tidal. I could feel common sense fall away at the possibility of owning one of these lovely, cuddly little animals again. I could feel myself falling in love-at-first-sight all over again--that ridiculous moonstruck phase that never really lasts but fires that brain chemistry to dizzying heights nonetheless.
I shook my head and forced myself to take a step back from the cages. Focused my mind not on the bunny in front of me but the one that had hopped around my kitchen for three years, leaving deep scratches on my arms every time it was bath time at the kitchen sink. Recalled litter cleanup and bunny hair tickling my nose and the necessity of running interference between a six pound rabbit and a sixteen pound cat. I stepped out of the small animal barn and back into the sunlight. I had escaped!
There's one more fair to go to before the end of summer, and so I'm not out of the woods yet. Looking into the rabbit cages, for me, is like an alcoholic staring at a bottle, or Elizabeth Taylor staring at Richard Burton. Oftentimes surmountable, but sometimes not.
I just hope that next time, I'll continue to conjure some common sense to balance out the endorphins and optimism that no doubt will start up all over again. And if I can't, that whoever I'm with will just take me by the arm, give it a tug, and say...
BACK AWAY FROM THE BUNNY!!
Saturday, August 8, 2009
The Volcano Diaries
"You can always turn back!"
Not the most encouraging advice ever given to a hiker thinking about setting off on a trek up the side of a dormant volcano where the trail began at more than 8,000 feet above sea level and the difficulty rating for the 2.4 mile hike in the national park brochure was "strenous."
Gulp.
But then, I really hadn't been looking for encouragement. I'd been looking for validation ... or any other form of an excuse to not climb the mountain.
My son and I were on a week-long traditional mom-and-me vacation on the West Coast, a trip of particular poignance because he's the last of the brood and his departure for college means my nest will be empty for the first time in twenty-eight years. We'd stopped at Lassen Volcanic National Park in northern California at the suggestion of a middle-aged couple we'd met at Yosemite when I volunteered to take their picture a couple of days earlier. I'd only planned for the first three days of the trip, figuring we'd make it up as we went along, and so we let ourselves be carried to higher altitudes on the descriptive phrases of our newfound acquaintances. This was my most wing-and-a-prayer vacation since I'd gone to Ireland for a month at the age of twenty-two with a backpack stocked with Carnation Instant Breakfast packets and a bicycle that I had to reassemble once I landed and the phone numbers of a few of my Irish relatives.
This time I was (much) older, and (much more) out of shape, and without the resiliancy of youth to cushion my missteps. And my left foot had been hurting like heck for the previous four months, making a reusable ice pack and a microwavable heat pack and a bottle of Advil part of my packing essentials.
My son and I had scoped out the park the evening before, after checking into our remote little motel that had been recommended on the fly two hundred miles before by the young man who had carved the bear I bought at a gift shop. Are we finding a theme here? One of the most memorable things my son said to me during the entire vacation was, stepping back into the motel room after phoning his girlfriend at twilight to chat, "Mom, I think I just heard a cow get attacked by a bear. Do you want to come outside?" What's a mother to say? Of course I stepped outside for a listen. And when the porch lights went out behind us, you wouldn't believe how fast we beat it back into the room!
But while he was outside on the phone, I'd been poring over the pamphlets and maps we'd picked up by the visitor center the night before. And by the time I went to sleep, I was convinced that between my lifelong acrophobia, and the troublesome foot, and the vivid description of altitude sickness that usually sets in at lower altitudes than we were even going to start hiking at I was going to chicken out in favor of a more leisurely walk half the distance to see a pretty waterfall.
All I was looking for when we pulled up to the park entrance the next morning was an excuse. I pled age, I pled infirmity, I pled forty extra pounds, I pled an appalling lack of stamina ... and then I threw in the vertigo and fear of heights for good measure. The heights thing is no laughing matter for me, in fact. I get dizzy if I climb higher than the first step on a ladder, and it's been like that for most of my life.
But the cheerful young lady in the Smokey the Bear ranger hat kept trying to steer me in the direction of optimism. Hikers of all ages and sizes were known to have made it to the summit, she said. Drink plenty of fluids to stave off altitude sickness. And remember, "you can always turn back." I didn't even have to turn my head to know that my son was grinning at the exchange.
We drove on to the base of the trail leading to the peak of Lassen Peak, topping out at 10,457 feet above sea level. We packed water bottles and granola bars and extra clothes in the backpack he'd be carrying. There were snow fields below where we even started. I felt out of breath at the first switchback, which was still so close to the parking lot it didn't even list how far we'd traveled. I wasn't going for glory here, just endurance, and so I just kept putting one foot in front of the other, watching my son's heels to keep from feeling dizzy just as I had hiking down the side of the Grand Canyon with my daughter a few years earlier. (It was a very character building experience.)
We met a delightful pair of teachers from Florida, Pat and Jackie, who went on hiking adventures during their summers off and decided to tackle Lassen this time. They each had a good dozen years or more on me, and were taking this adventure in stride. I didn't want to wimp out while they were watching, and so we overlapped each other's rest stops along the way up. They called out a lot of encouragement to me on the way up.
The higher we climbed, the more breathtaking the views became. The Sierra Nevadas were distant blue hills under a nearly cloudless sky. Lake Helen gleamed azure in the park below us. Snow fields were striped pink and white, but the air was still warm. The forests below looked as tiny as the shrubbery on a model train display. As we scrambled over loose gravel and larger rocks and tree roots, a doe picked her way across the side of the mountain above us, twin fawns scampering quickly behind her to the cover of some brush.
Continuing in the vein of being practical instead of heroic, I took plenty of rest stops along the way, chugging water and letting the faster hikers pass us by. And sometimes Pat and Jackie! There was usually a tree or two that I could sit under for shade, but inevitably we began to leave the tree line behind. Still, I kept going, watching my son's feet in front of me, occasionally getting a hand up over the rougher patches. And then, with less than a mile to the summit, I came to one more switchback and stopped. Up to my left, I could see the trail cross back and forth upon the bare mountain face. And to my right, I could see nothing but open sky.
Right then and there, my fear of heights suddenly nailed me to the side of the mountain. "Robert, honey," I said, "I'm sorry, but I just can't take one more step!" Of all the things that I thought would have shut me down long before--the extra pounds, the thin air at 9,000 feet, the gimpy foot--it was such an anticlimax to call it quits because of this!
Still, there was no going forward for me, and I sure wasn't going to go back down alone. I folded my fleece sweatshirt into a pad for my seat on a nearby rock, took custody of the backpack, and settled in to wait for my son to make it to the summit and bring back some good pictures. It took him two hours to get back, factoring in the half-hour phone call to his girlfriend from the top of the mountain, a lot of picture taking, and some time spent just glorying in the achievement.
As I sat, I basked in the sun and marveled at the grandeur surrounding me, and the total serendipity that had brought us here. Who knew, when we set out on this trip, that we'd be setting out to climb a mountain to its very top? Or photographing a yellow bellied marmot peeking out of his den near a set of volcanic vents? It was certainly an altitude on the side of a mountain that I never thought I'd experience.
A very long time ago, when a friend of mine was getting ready to leave college without graduating and faced a very uncertain future, I sent him on his way with an inspirational poster that read something to the effect that if you set your sights among the heavens, even if you fail you will fall among the stars.
I hadn't thought about that in quite a long time, but thought about it again recently. At the tail end of our vacation, we drove the well-maintained highway to the visitor center of Mount St. Helens in Washington state and realized that even though it looked rugged and awesome and hgh and imposing...we'd both made it farther above sea level than this national landmark.
But for me, an even bigger victory was just in getting as far as I had. I may not have made it to the top as I would have liked ... but I ended up sitting high enough that I could nearly touch the stars.
Not the most encouraging advice ever given to a hiker thinking about setting off on a trek up the side of a dormant volcano where the trail began at more than 8,000 feet above sea level and the difficulty rating for the 2.4 mile hike in the national park brochure was "strenous."
Gulp.
But then, I really hadn't been looking for encouragement. I'd been looking for validation ... or any other form of an excuse to not climb the mountain.
My son and I were on a week-long traditional mom-and-me vacation on the West Coast, a trip of particular poignance because he's the last of the brood and his departure for college means my nest will be empty for the first time in twenty-eight years. We'd stopped at Lassen Volcanic National Park in northern California at the suggestion of a middle-aged couple we'd met at Yosemite when I volunteered to take their picture a couple of days earlier. I'd only planned for the first three days of the trip, figuring we'd make it up as we went along, and so we let ourselves be carried to higher altitudes on the descriptive phrases of our newfound acquaintances. This was my most wing-and-a-prayer vacation since I'd gone to Ireland for a month at the age of twenty-two with a backpack stocked with Carnation Instant Breakfast packets and a bicycle that I had to reassemble once I landed and the phone numbers of a few of my Irish relatives.
This time I was (much) older, and (much more) out of shape, and without the resiliancy of youth to cushion my missteps. And my left foot had been hurting like heck for the previous four months, making a reusable ice pack and a microwavable heat pack and a bottle of Advil part of my packing essentials.
My son and I had scoped out the park the evening before, after checking into our remote little motel that had been recommended on the fly two hundred miles before by the young man who had carved the bear I bought at a gift shop. Are we finding a theme here? One of the most memorable things my son said to me during the entire vacation was, stepping back into the motel room after phoning his girlfriend at twilight to chat, "Mom, I think I just heard a cow get attacked by a bear. Do you want to come outside?" What's a mother to say? Of course I stepped outside for a listen. And when the porch lights went out behind us, you wouldn't believe how fast we beat it back into the room!
But while he was outside on the phone, I'd been poring over the pamphlets and maps we'd picked up by the visitor center the night before. And by the time I went to sleep, I was convinced that between my lifelong acrophobia, and the troublesome foot, and the vivid description of altitude sickness that usually sets in at lower altitudes than we were even going to start hiking at I was going to chicken out in favor of a more leisurely walk half the distance to see a pretty waterfall.
All I was looking for when we pulled up to the park entrance the next morning was an excuse. I pled age, I pled infirmity, I pled forty extra pounds, I pled an appalling lack of stamina ... and then I threw in the vertigo and fear of heights for good measure. The heights thing is no laughing matter for me, in fact. I get dizzy if I climb higher than the first step on a ladder, and it's been like that for most of my life.
But the cheerful young lady in the Smokey the Bear ranger hat kept trying to steer me in the direction of optimism. Hikers of all ages and sizes were known to have made it to the summit, she said. Drink plenty of fluids to stave off altitude sickness. And remember, "you can always turn back." I didn't even have to turn my head to know that my son was grinning at the exchange.
We drove on to the base of the trail leading to the peak of Lassen Peak, topping out at 10,457 feet above sea level. We packed water bottles and granola bars and extra clothes in the backpack he'd be carrying. There were snow fields below where we even started. I felt out of breath at the first switchback, which was still so close to the parking lot it didn't even list how far we'd traveled. I wasn't going for glory here, just endurance, and so I just kept putting one foot in front of the other, watching my son's heels to keep from feeling dizzy just as I had hiking down the side of the Grand Canyon with my daughter a few years earlier. (It was a very character building experience.)
We met a delightful pair of teachers from Florida, Pat and Jackie, who went on hiking adventures during their summers off and decided to tackle Lassen this time. They each had a good dozen years or more on me, and were taking this adventure in stride. I didn't want to wimp out while they were watching, and so we overlapped each other's rest stops along the way up. They called out a lot of encouragement to me on the way up.
The higher we climbed, the more breathtaking the views became. The Sierra Nevadas were distant blue hills under a nearly cloudless sky. Lake Helen gleamed azure in the park below us. Snow fields were striped pink and white, but the air was still warm. The forests below looked as tiny as the shrubbery on a model train display. As we scrambled over loose gravel and larger rocks and tree roots, a doe picked her way across the side of the mountain above us, twin fawns scampering quickly behind her to the cover of some brush.
Continuing in the vein of being practical instead of heroic, I took plenty of rest stops along the way, chugging water and letting the faster hikers pass us by. And sometimes Pat and Jackie! There was usually a tree or two that I could sit under for shade, but inevitably we began to leave the tree line behind. Still, I kept going, watching my son's feet in front of me, occasionally getting a hand up over the rougher patches. And then, with less than a mile to the summit, I came to one more switchback and stopped. Up to my left, I could see the trail cross back and forth upon the bare mountain face. And to my right, I could see nothing but open sky.
Right then and there, my fear of heights suddenly nailed me to the side of the mountain. "Robert, honey," I said, "I'm sorry, but I just can't take one more step!" Of all the things that I thought would have shut me down long before--the extra pounds, the thin air at 9,000 feet, the gimpy foot--it was such an anticlimax to call it quits because of this!
Still, there was no going forward for me, and I sure wasn't going to go back down alone. I folded my fleece sweatshirt into a pad for my seat on a nearby rock, took custody of the backpack, and settled in to wait for my son to make it to the summit and bring back some good pictures. It took him two hours to get back, factoring in the half-hour phone call to his girlfriend from the top of the mountain, a lot of picture taking, and some time spent just glorying in the achievement.
As I sat, I basked in the sun and marveled at the grandeur surrounding me, and the total serendipity that had brought us here. Who knew, when we set out on this trip, that we'd be setting out to climb a mountain to its very top? Or photographing a yellow bellied marmot peeking out of his den near a set of volcanic vents? It was certainly an altitude on the side of a mountain that I never thought I'd experience.
A very long time ago, when a friend of mine was getting ready to leave college without graduating and faced a very uncertain future, I sent him on his way with an inspirational poster that read something to the effect that if you set your sights among the heavens, even if you fail you will fall among the stars.
I hadn't thought about that in quite a long time, but thought about it again recently. At the tail end of our vacation, we drove the well-maintained highway to the visitor center of Mount St. Helens in Washington state and realized that even though it looked rugged and awesome and hgh and imposing...we'd both made it farther above sea level than this national landmark.
But for me, an even bigger victory was just in getting as far as I had. I may not have made it to the top as I would have liked ... but I ended up sitting high enough that I could nearly touch the stars.
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