We're feelin' good!

With any true adventure, there are as many different ways to tell the story as there are participants. Here you see George and me setting out on our Mt. Rainier climb. Let's start with George's take (or Mom's take on George's take, since I'm trying to quote things he's said to me about the experience.)

People don't realize just how difficult it really is to climb Mt. Rainier. The guides have an incredibly tough job. Our lead guide was telling me he takes a summit team up Mt. Rainier (a three day stint--to train, go up, and come back down), then he gets a day off, then he takes up another one, all summer long. And it's so strenuous: He led us up at the pace of about 1,000 vertical feet per hour! 

Leaving Muir at 1 am

From Camp Muir, we hiked 4.5 miles to the summit, and we did it all in the dark, before the sun even came up. It didn't matter that I couldn't see anything--I was spending every last ounce of focus on pressure-breathing and rest-stepping and scrambling up snow with crampons on my feet. Some parts were rocky, and with crampons on, it was like scraping nails on a blackboard.

The rim

Since Rainier is a volcano, the top of the mountain is this big crater, and anywhere on the rim is considered the summit. But the true summit, from where we arrived at the rim, was another quarter mile away.

Still feelin' good

It was clouded in when we got there, with a 40 mph wind and 60 mph gusts, so you couldn't see much and you could hardly stand. Then there was the windchill. Some people in my group chose not to do the extra 45-minute hike to the summit registry and back, but I went over there.

In the crater

Once the sun came up and we headed back down, it cleared up, and I was amazed by how dangerous it actually was--all the sheer drop-offs and rock and icefall. There were incredible views.

The view on the way back down

Claire's version of events:

At least one of us made it!!! 

Practicing self-arrests

Whittaker Bunkhouse

I have to say, this experience is not for everyone. I did my best to be prepared, to get in shape, to keep an open mind. But let's face it--Mt. Rainier is a big, steep, glaciated mountain. Still, I was prepared to have a blast. George and I stayed in the Whittaker Bunkhouse in Ashford. There were four single beds in this one little attic room with a sloped ceiling. One of our bunkmates the first night came in after we'd gone to bed. He had a full-blown head cold and coughed and hacked all night, then abruptly packed up and left at 5 am. I still don't even know what he looked like. The next day we went out to Paradise for a day-long training for how to hike on a rope team, how to self-arrest with an ice ax, how to operate an avalanche transceiver.

Setting out for Camp Muir

Still, I was having a blast. We set out at 8 a.m. on a shuttle bus to Paradise. We hiked up with 45-lb. packs from 6,600 feet to Camp Muir at 10,000 feet. Once we got up there at 3:30 in the afternoon, we ate dinner, got briefed about the summit climb, repacked our gear, and went to bed, which meant lying in this bunkhouse stacked in three tiers in rows 4-5 across. We went to bed at 6 p.m., the sun still blaring in the window. The guy next to me got altitude sickness in the middle of the "night" and barfed into a plastic bag.

Camp Muir

Still, I was having a blast. At midnight, our guides woke us up. We gulped down oatmeal and hot chocolate, roped together like lamplit beads on a string and struck out for the summit by one in the morning. There were lots of enthusiastic weather reports from the guides--very little wind, perfect night, gorgeous weather, all systems go, this-is-going-to-be-awesome, etc., etc. An hour and fifteen minutes later, I was sitting on my pack in a two-inch down parka, choking down a Reese's peanut butter cup with gatorade. The wind was strong and biting:  When I took off my gloves, my hands were so instantly cold I couldn't get the wrapper off the chocolate. We were at 11,000 feet, on something called "the flats."

Still, I was having a blast. After a  ten minute break and a hasty change into warmer clothes, we set out again for what the guides had warned us would be the toughest part of the climb: Disappointment Cleaver.  With every step, I had to breathe harder, and every step was practically vertical. It was dark out. Sometimes the slope at my feet was snow, sometimes it was crumbling rock. It was very very steep. I was roped tightly to the guide in front of me, with two more climbers behind me. The pace was relentless, we were moving fast, faster than I could go. As I had more and more trouble breathing, when I picked up a foot to take a step, I couldn't control where it landed. I began to stagger. I begged the guide:  "Wait, wait, I can't breathe," but he just kept going, and the rope yanked me forward, sometimes bringing me to my hands and knees against the vertical wall of mountain. Still, I was desperate to pull it together, to rest-step, to pressure-breathe, to stand upright, but my body dictated otherwise. I kept apologizing to Walter, my guide, for having to rope-tow me up the mountain. "Sorry. Sorry. I can't breathe. I'm sorry." Above me the slope rose like a huge white cape to the skyline, the lamps of the climbers ahead dotting the darkness. It always went up, and up, like it would never end.

Mt. Adams and Mt. St. Helens

I wasn't having a blast anymore. I couldn't get enough oxygen to lift my legs. I couldn't keep my balance and wavered precariously along the sheer, inky-black drop-offs. Somehow, I kept going forward. Finally, we made it to the breakpoint and I slumped on my pack, my entire body shaking violently. Walter and I talked. The lead guide Brent and I talked. I wouldn't be going on. Walter would remain behind and take me back down to Camp Muir. They roped up George and Michael to different leaders. A few minutes later, in the gradually softening light, the others marched away toward the summit, still 2,000 vertical feet away. It was 3:30 a.m. Walter and I sat a few moments longer. The edge of the sky to the left grew lighter. I stood shakily when Walter told me to and started back down that hellish dragon-spine of a ridge, me leading the way this time at my own pace. A couple of hundred feet down, Walter pointed out a spot where I could rest out of the wind. While he repaired the trail, I gazed out over the vast, cloud-coated world, the sun rising, lighting up first Mt. Hood, then Mt. St. Helens, then Mt. Adams. Around me, the snowfields turned from rose to pale gray to white.

And I was perfectly happy. 12,300 feet up Mt. Rainier, I had my own personal summit, and it was enough.

Thanks, everyone, for your good thoughts, for lifting us up the mountain. It was awesome!

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Mt. Rainier trail to Camp Muir

"Day One!" My 18-year-old son George said to me last Monday as we hopped back in the car.

For him, it actually was Day One. We'd just climbed Wilderness Peak, elevation 1,595, with 35 lb. packs on our backs, training for our summit attempt on Mt. Rainier on June 26th. George just graduated from high school, and is headed for UW. It's been a crazy, hectic ride at the end of his senior year. Now, finally, with all that behind him, he's ready to focus on the next big hurdle--Mt. Rainier.

To state the obvious, I'm not 18, I'm 50. His Day One was my Day One Hundred. I'd been working up to this moment over long, arduous months, ever since we signed up with RMI Guides. I'd thought I had gotten into decent shape, what with the jogging, the bicycling, the yoga, the hiking. This morning, I'd felt ready when we'd reached the trailhead to Wilderness Peak, like I'd come a long way, like my son and I would chat happily together as we cruised down the trail. Within minutes, he'd left me in the dust. I didn't see him again till I got back to the car.

So we're climbing Mt. Rainier this week, a young colt of a kid and an old mare of a woman. Earlier, I'd imagined I would blog my training, my thoughts, my aspirations. But there just wasn't time. I thought at least I'd blog this week starting June 15 (Day One). But I've learned there's a reason hikers don't write all that much -- they're out there in the woods, hiking!

Instead, here's our last training week, an atypical one, to say the least. I felt like we were on a backpacking trip while living out of our house. Monday we climbed Wilderness Peak, Tuesday we climbed West Tiger, then George was sick of being held up by his mom, so Wednesday I hiked Coal Creek Trail alone (he went jogging). Thursday, we climbed Mt. Si and that's all the more we could do--we haven't been out hiking since, because they tell you to rest up, to store your energy for the big ascent. Today (Sunday), I take Vivian to Cle Elum for horse camp. Tomorrow, George and I head out to Rainier. Think of us Thursday morning, early! Hopefully, we'll be above it all, at 14,410 feet, gazing out over the planet. 

Just to let you know, there's about a 50-percent chance we won't even get to go, based on capricious mountain weather. So keep your fingers crossed for sunny skies, and we'll let you know how it went when we return.

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I read an article in the Sunday New York Times, (May, 2007), about a publishing house that plans to pare down the literary classics into succinct, easy-to-chew morsels, editing out all the 'boring' parts. To celebrate the occasion, well-known authors were invited to suggest how they'd pare down certain classics. One of the many authors who delighted in the exercise was Stephen King, who reduced the 800+ pages of Gone with the Wind to a bit of dialogue and a two sentence paragraph.

At the very least, it's discouraging. What does that say to potential authors like me? That all my storytelling, all the word pictures I've labored to craft, the sensual imagery, the stern, courageous self-editing, has the potential to be dismissed as not worth the effort? Still, I take the risk.  

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Hey, guess what!? I got published!

Mercer Island Reporter article, May 7, 2008

Mercer Island Reporter article, May 21, 2008

Mercer Island Reporter article, July 23, 2008

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I went on the MLK Day march this January. I loved the mix of skin colors--all shades of brown, red, yellow, white. I wondered what Dr. King himself would have thought about the cacophony of signs:

******

Buddhists for Peace        Let Freedom Ring, End Racism, Poverty & War  

Stop HIV: Get Involved      West Seattle Neighbors for Peace and Justice

Veterans for Peace      Immigrants Workers Taxpayers--we are human, too.

Impeach Bush      Kucinich for President      Jobs for Justice     

Put MLK on this $20 bill      Stop Racism Now!      Obama for President

Palestinians have a dream, too: End Apartheid!      I Miss America

Alternative Schools      Iranian Americans for Equality, Peace, Justice

Stop the ICE Raids, no more deportation      Freedom Socialist Party

Stop demolition of Palestinian houses      John Edwards for President

Class struggle against the imperial war machine:  stop the illegal and unjust war

Jobs, housing and healthcare are human rights      No More War!

We are all born free and equal      Seattle Longshoremen march for Justice

Seattle University Black Student Union      Street Pavers/Tunnel Workers

Public Health Workers say troops out now!      Patricia Troncoso Pobles/Political Prisoner

No Iraq War      Nuclear Deterrence is Terrorism      Jobs with Justice

Kadima: a Progressive Jewish Community      Human Needs Not War

Justice works: restore dignity, restore democracy, restore the right to vote

*****

That's just how we looked, moving down Rainier Avenue, one big, random chunk of marchers carrying a jumble of messages and signs. We all seemed to have our agendas: one non-marcher even displayed a personal vendetta from a pedestrian overpass:  Boycott Money Tree.

It's at the core of everything now, so many voices, so diluted, so peripheral. We assembled, and with our signs and calls and cheers, we carried forward our individual, determined ideals with congenial dignity. Would Dr. King be proud? Is it what he intended? I like to believe he would have hoped his message was not consigned to a peripheral, once-a-year celebration. I like to believe he hoped for real, systemic, permanent change. Clearly, his vision is not yet realized.

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Her house was a zoo--the birds started it. Two little birds in a cage--parakeets, they were--and they sang such pretty songs. There was a bit of mess about the birds--some seed spilling from the cage, the vague smell of molting feathers and droppings when the water dish was bumped. But the music was pleasant enough, and they kept each other company.

One day, it occurred to Miss Claudine that her parakeets were getting awfully tired of the indoor, stale air, so she tripped outside with the chirping cage and set it on the deck in the sunshine.

"A happy outing for you," she said smugly, beaming in at their frail little bodies, peering closely since she was quite near-sighted.

Miss Claudine then stepped inside to brew a cup of tea, returning to the deck to share it with her songbirds, sitting out with them in the faint sun of springtime, leaves just budding on the maples and hickories, a promise of floral scents on the breeze. Then she thought to air her bedding and bustled back inside. Half an hour later, humming busily to herself, she returned with an armload of pillows and the duvet, piling the great bundle of material on the deck chair.

As she untangled the duvet to shake it out, Miss Claudine noticed how quiet it was. No bird song, no warbles or cheeps. She squinted at the cage to reassure herself, but found it empty. She set the duvet back down and moved in closer, examining the door, still latched. Snowy green feathers were sprinkled about the table and the deck, for some swift, winged predator--an owl? a falcon? she never would know--had made a tasty teatime treat of her little parakeets.

It was then that Miss Claudine bought the fish. The tank burbled and hummed happily on the counter, the black-and-white and coral-colored fish waving their fins in liquid suspense. Miss Claudine never had a husband, or children, but the fish seemed to do quite nicely. The second batch, that is. The first fish she put in the tank languished in ever murkier water ...

[A writing group exercise just after reading Alexander McCall Smith's 44 Scotland Street ...]

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It's fall, and the birds are flying north outside my bedroom window. Lying in bed, I can see the sky, a sliver of it beneath the Venetian blind. As I open and close my eyes, the birds keep coming. It is a large assembly, a flock gathered for migration, traveling with purpose and speed. But they're going the wrong way. Groggily, just to be sure, I orient my inner compass. No doubt about it, the birds are flying north for the winter.

I want to climb to the rooftop and flap my arms. "Go back!" I want to call. "Turn around!" The dark, feathery bullets continue to zip past, punctuated now and again by moments of blank sky. Every time I think I've seen the last of them, more birds appear. Flying north, the wrong way. It is nature turned upside down, and I am powerless against it, their destiny, and, so it would seem, my own.

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The Douglas fir in our rockery died. A man knocked on our door to tell us so--but we had known before he called. I'd liked the tree. It stood tall and proud, ramrod straight from bottom to top; I was sorry when it had turned brown, then dropped its needles, wishing there was something we could have done to save it. The man said he was in the tree business, he could take it down for us, had a couple of sons to help him. He could do it next week--they'd be in the neighborhood anyway, had the chipper all rented and everything. We agreed.

A week later, the man and his two sons showed up as promised, trampling the azaleas and sedum in our rockery with logger-style brown boots. One of the sons wore a chainsaw slung over his shoulder. I came out to gape and worry as he scaled the thirty-foot tree, methodically lobbing off branches as he climbed, blue smoke swirling in a haze around him, fresh cut wood resins spicing the air.

I spied the dad who'd sold us the job. He was standing in the driveway, helmeted, his eyes pinned to the treetop, to his son working up there. I went over to him on my mission, almost yelling to be heard above the roar of the chainsaw and the chipper.

"I'd like a three-foot section of the base," I shouted.

"You want what?" He yelled back.

"A three-foot section of the base--there, right at the bottom, the thickest part."

The logger dad glanced at me sideways. I've always dreamed of wood carving, I wanted to explain. Ever since I was a little girl, I've dreamed of carving out three-dimensional shapes that hide in wood's bulk, of uncovering what's been there all along. I even have the tools, second hand, but all the same, they're rolled up in a worn, striped cloth, sitting on the workbench, waiting to be put to use. But I didn't go into that. I could tell he looked at wood differently. Instead, I gazed at him solemnly, hoping he'd realize I was serious.

"Where do you want us to put it?"

"Behind the shed."

He nodded, turning back to his boys. I wrapped my coat more tightly around me and returned to the house, mission accomplished.

It's been a year now, and I'm still waiting to carve it. To properly season a log, it needs to weather at least a couple of years. My wood waits for me behind the shed:  In another year or so, I'll get to look inside.

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I have a brachiopod on my dresser from the last time I visited Ohio. It's not a prime specimen--both its wingtips are broken off--but still, I love to hold it in the palm of my hand and remember "Fossil Hill," an eroding creekbank along the ravine near my childhood home.

Recently, I came across another eroding creekbank at the mouth of Scalzo Creek. I happened along it by hiking the Primrose Trail:  A waterfall cascades down a wall of rock to join Coal Creek there, and along the top of the ridge, majestic trees tower above the landscape. From the obvious soil erosion under the cedars, I could tell that many hikers had visited the place, climbing the sides of the waterfall for the heady view. The ground is literally crumbling away beneath the tree roots, a progression that will eventually make the trees fall over, but for now, offer a tempting playground.

At my childhood Fossil Hill, the roots of the maples and oaks on the top of the ridge were twisted and bare along the eroding slope, too, making perfect handholds and footholds for clambering up and down. I still remember nestling among those roots, combing the soil for hours for brachiopods. I almost never went home empty handed--true to its name, the hillside was a treasure trove. I vaguely knew what brachiopods were:  marine creatures that existed in a different geologic time period on Earth. I didn't really appreciate just how old they were, though--around 450 million years, by most estimates--or how they'd met their demise during a mysterious shift in the earth's climate, something now referred to as an "extinction event."

Standing at the base of the Scalzo Creek waterfall, the childhood memories of Fossil Hill bubbled up in me, and before I knew it, I, too, was contributing to erosion, grasping at the tree roots, climbing to the top of the ridge to stand above the waterfall looking down, hungry for the bird's-eye view. I was an innocent kid again, till I reached the top, that is, where a large black plastic pipe snaked up the hill where the creek should have been. The creek bed itself was stony and dry, a shocking substitute for what should have been a babbling brook. Water was spitting out of the pipe at the lip of the falls so it looked natural, but it really wasn't. 

Whatever for? I wondered. Why was the creek confined to a severe black tube, even its color an affront to the greens, grays and browns of nature? And where had the vital, teeming microcosm of small creekbed creatures gone when deprived of their wet world? Perhaps, I thought, in this one example of human efficacy, I witnessed an example of the progress of our own extinction event, which is, inexorably, upon us.

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"It was really hard for me to wake up this morning."

"Me, too. When the alarm went off, I was so fast asleep. I don't know what I was dreaming, exactly, but I know I was solving the world's ills. That's where I do that kind of thing best--in a reclining position."

"I was dreaming we lived in a place called Boston, California. It was really confusing for people."

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