Dickens and the waterfall

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It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,

it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,

it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,

it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,

it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,

we had everything before us, we had nothing before us …

- Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

Here it is, amazingly, the end of another year. It’s been a remarkable one in so many ways. Dickens pretty much nailed it. It’s all so disorienting, I thought a bit of reflection on what the year actually held might help make sense of it. It’ll also serve as a catch-up of sorts, since I was incommunicado here for most of the year.

And, as so often happens, I figured out what I wanted to say as I wrote. Hence the odd allusion to the waterfall in the title.

So,  for starters, I promised to comment on my bloggish silence from January to November. The short explanation is that I had “blogger’s block.” But that’s a cop-out, a description that explains nothing. So let me try again. At some point, I noticed that instead of enjoying writing, I was feeling obligated to do it, and then I got anxious when I didn’t. The best defense against anxiety is avoidance (think elevator phobia), so that’s what I did. But why the lack of enjoyment, when I’ve always loved writing? And why the sense of obligation to do a totally voluntary activity? The second is easier: I know it’s good for me to have an outlet for my ponderings, and some folks appreciate it, so of course I should do it. The first is harder: why the resistance? Complicated. Partly just too busy. Partly, some experiences that left me feeling tentative about writing. Partly a growing discomfort with the “selfie /facebook culture” and the assumption that everyone (anyone) would want to hear about what I was doing or thinking. Seemed pretty self-centered to me … heck, writing about myself and my life is self-centered, by definition.

So, although people encouraged me to return to this space, I stayed away. Until November 8. At that point, I so needed an outlet for my feelings and thoughts—and connections to a wider community—that all the rest seemed unimportant. That elevator stuff is still there, in the background. But it just doesn’t matter in the same way. I need to be here, and if others appreciate it, that’s a bonus.

So, a few glimpses of what I would have written about in 2016, if I’d been writing.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times

You may recall that 2015 was the year of my return to fitness program, culminating in a hike in Southern Utah (specifically, Capitol Reef) that had been my aspirational aim through my self-rehab process. I had a wonderful hike, although I didn’t find the arch I was aiming for. I loved the day … and in the back of my mind, I wanted to go back and try again.

It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness

This past spring, feeling my oats after a full year of orthopedic health, I decided to visit Utah again, this time to hike a favorite trail in the Needles District of Canyonlands. En route, I stopped to take a shortish hike in a small canyon I remember from my desert rat days. It was a very hot day, but I’ve always loved the dessert heat, so I figured I’d “warm up” for the next 

day’s planned long hike by doing this short one. Right at lunchtime. Perfect for a picnic beneath the arch at the canyon’s end.  

Unfortunately, I hadn’t reckoned with what about 15 years’ added age would do to my tolerance for mid-day 103° direct sunshine. I struggled out of the canyon with a mild case of heat exhaustion, sadly certain that I couldn’t recover enough for the next day’s long (equally hot) walk in Canyonlands.  So I postponed that hike until next year … and congratulated myself on my wisdom.

And I was back to the best of times …

I had a glorious summer, resurrecting my long-dormant passion for hiking in the mountains. I hooked up with a couple of friends who are also avid hikers, and together we visited old favorites and explored new (to me, at least) hikes along streams, to glacial lakes, among early summer flowers and fall colors, with moose families posing for pictures just before tiny snowflakes spotted our jackets. This return to the woods was wonderful for me. I’d forgotten how much I love it.

          

     

                

                                                             

The year held lots of indoor adventures, too. Plays, concerts, educational events—talks, panels, documentaries, a CU on the Weekend course—any of which would have been blog-worthy. And my mega-cultural undertaking: working with Resonance Women’s Chorus through the spring  concert and the early summer (the national conference of LGBTQ choruses, GALA, was here) and then again through the fall. Stories, stories, all untold. And then there’s OutSources, the weekly LGBTQ-themed radio show that a group of us produce. Over the year, I did a dozen or so shows, most with my partner—we pretty much work as a DJ duo these days—on topics ranging from religious freedom restoration acts through trans misogyny and Orlando to non-binary identities and AIDS work in South Africa—lots of these also warranted blogs.

 

We traveled to a few conferences, and added in playful travels, like a trip to DC with my partner’s 14-year-old grandson. Predictably, his favorite parts were the Air and Space Museum and crabbing with his great uncle. Some pictures, but no blog. Then there were the un-travels: a couple of “staycations” at a hotel, featuring sleep-ins, coffee and newspaper while lounging in the room, and lots of movies. Blog material galore.

To finish off the summer, my partner joined me on a trip back to the site of last year’s delightful, but incomplete, adventure. The walk in Capitol Reef was wonderful, again, and this time, I found the fork in the trail that led to Cassidy Arch. And here it is (in slightly washed out light).

Then came the campaign and the election, the staple of my schedule through the fall (with a side of weekly hikes). Starting in September, I spent several hours a couple of times each week working on the election—first doing voter registration, then shifting to door-to-door get-out-the-vote canvassing. I hated it. Every time I got out of my car, I had to talk to myself: "Just go do it, Janis. One door-knock at a time." I knew I had to do whatever I could, because if she lost / if he won, I didn't want to wonder if I should have done more.

The campaign and its outcome well warrant the remainder of Dickens’ words:

it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,

it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,

it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair

You know what the campaign was like. Belief in the ultimate power of the process to select someone qualified, at least somewhat, for this most important job … and incredulity as we watched his ignorance and boorishness be rewarded over and over. The season of Light emerged occasionally in the words of someone sane, brilliant, speaking from the depths—like Michelle Obama—but that Darkness was close behind, as even brilliance and poignancy were disregarded. The perpetual spring of hope, as the polls continued to show 90%+ probability that the nation would soon have its first woman president. And the winter of despair that settled in early in the evening of November 8, when even the (very partisan) commentators couldn’t tweak the results enough to make her victory look likely.

 we had everything before us, we had nothing before us …

And you know what happened on November 8. It’s what brought me back here. That was, without a doubt, among the worst of times. We had everything before us: the expectation for positive change ahead, the certainty that at least the outrageousness of the campaign would end on a sane note. And then nothing. Hopes dashed, confusion, anger, fear setting in. Nothing to feed the dreams we might have dared dream if she’d won.

On the other hand, that “nothing” did actually give us something: one of the biggest challenges of our lives (at least mine). I think about that arch I didn’t find last year, but reached this year. And the trail that I decided not to hike in a moment of clarity, but that I plan to walk next year. There’s a lesson here.

And that brings to mind a now decades-old story about a waterfall:

I was on a canoe trip with friends in the Boundary Waters between Minnesota and Canada, six of us, each pair paddling a two-woman-and-a-dog craft crossing lake after lake, portaging in between. We were pulling away from the shore onto one of the string of lakes we were traversing. Just around a bend in the shore from where we were putting in was a falls that flowed from this lake into the one below. As we pulled away from the shore, the current drawn by the falls took our canoe, and we knew we were headed for trouble. I was thinking to myself: This is it. I can just give up and go with this rushing water and see what happens … or I can put all my energy into it, and maybe we can get out of the flow. Without saying a thing, both of us started paddling harder than we ever imagined we could. Slowly, we started making headway, dragging the canoe out of the current and into the calm water of the lake, where we set out in just the direction we had planned.

Landfall that day and camp that night felt especially good. We picked wild blueberries the next morning right outside the tent.

I don’t think of that story too often, but it seems fitting now.

© Janis Bohan, 2010-2015. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post. 

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Approaching sanity

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Evening light on the Colorado River above Moab

All summer, I’ve been expecting to write a blog about the trip I just took—a hiking adventure in Capitol Reef, a lesser-known national park in Southern Utah. I’ve written before about how much I love this corner of the world—I even referred to it as “the center of the cosmos.” Capitol Reef is a distinctive place relative to, say, Arches and Canyonlands—more lush, with the Fremont River at its center, higher in elevation, making for cooler temperatures overall, and more remote. The closest “city,” Green River (pop ~1000), is about 100 miles away. I hadn’t been to Capitol Reef for years, and my wish to hike the Frying Pan Canyon trail, a favorite walk there, was one incentive for the “return to fitness” program that framed much of my summer. If you missed that part of the story, I spent an uncharacteristically sedentary winter recovering, gently, from some late summer knee and hip crises. The lack of activity was bad for me, body and mind. So my summer project was to regain the physical well-being that has been a central part of my life—and I wasn't certain that I'd be able to do that, aging being what it is. So, not too surprisingly, the blog I expected to be a rousing celebration of my big hike became something else as well—a reflection on the slow arrival of acceptance, the (sorely belated) ability to, as the Beatles urged, let it be.

Cliffs and cottonwood along the
Fremont River entering Capitol Reef

The rounded sandstone formations that give
"Capitol Reef" its name

Not that the trip wasn’t blog-worthy in its own right. The soft evening light on the Colorado River above Moab, the deep morning shade contrasting with the sunlight glancing off the red rock formations along Wall Street trail in Arches, the early-fall light on the cliffs entering Capitol Reef, the cottonwoods slowly turning golden, and the vast expanses of the San Rafael Swell and the Water Pocket Fold, grand geology on display. It felt perfect for this hike, which had been in my plans for months. And the walk itself was, as I'd recalled, wonderfully varied and welcoming and gorgeous.

Chimney Rock. A day-before-the-big-hike
walk took me to the plateau above this spire

In concrete terms, my aim on this trip was to hike from the campground at Capitol Reef up into and then through Cohab Canyon (so named, legend has it, because early Mormons who “cohatited”—i.e., lived in polygamous families—retreated to this high, hidden canyon when the feds came calling), climb out of Cohab and drop into Frying Pan Canyon (so named, according to local stories, because the very exposed trail gets so hot), and finally out of Frying Pan and across the slickrock plateau to Cassidy Arch (named for Butch Cassidy, who hung out in these parts with his pal, the Sundance Kid).

Overlooking the Water Pocket Fold,
a vast monocline that gave white settlers fits

At a more profound (and less visible) level, my aim was to be capable of taking a long hike in the desert I love, on a trail I that remembered as gorgeous but that I hadn’t hiked for years—and, most importantly, to do that feeling strong and relaxed enough to genuinely enjoy the walk. I had prepared for that all summer, following a remarkably (for me) sane and flexible exercise plan. And now I'd see how well it paid off, what limits remain even after all that.

The weathered Navajo sandstone walls of Cohab Canyon

Looking back down into Cohab

The summer produced many small pleasures on my way back to hikability. Interestingly (to me), none of them had to do with pushing through exhaustion or enduring painful exercise, as would have been my tendency earlier in life. Instead, they came from backing off when pain suggested a problem, turning back from a long walk when a bee sting threatened an allergic reaction or thunder signaled lightening nearby, accepting with equanimity the unavoidable schedule changes that spoiled my workout plans. I told myself, many times, “Don’t be stupid, Janis”—and I stopped the painful exercise on the spot, let go of the anxiety about the abandoned workout, and traded a planned walk for access to my epipen or to shelter from the lightening. And, remarkably (to me, at least) I felt fine about these moments, totally content. Maybe even wise. 

This sense of peace was entirely a matter of perspective. For reasons I don’t fully understand, I found myself not obsessing over these things but calmly aware that what I wanted was to be fit enough to enjoy a hike like the one I had planned. I wasn’t trying to show off, to be best at anything. Achieving this specific weight room success, making it to that aerobics class, or completing a particular walk didn’t really matter. What I cared about was the slow, gradual progress toward being well again.

A local goblin on the plateau beyond Frying Pan Canyon

The final experience that confirmed my tectonic shift in attitude came on the day of my long-planned hyper-hike, when I faced a moment that would have seemed intolerable in years past: I actually couldn’t find the trail junction that would take me to the end-point of the hike I had planned, Cassidy Arch. I hunted for the junction for a long time, walking hither and yon, up and down, until I realized I was getting dangerously tired for someone with a serious return hike yet to come. I said to myself, “Don’t be stupid, Janis.” And I started the long trek back to the trailhead where I started. I had done what I set out to do—had a wonderful, long hike in the desert I love. I’d walked far enough to have reached the end-goal arch (and then some)—just not entirely in the right direction. And I got back to my car feeling happy and strong, satisfyingly tired. Exactly what I had hoped for to close the summer. Sure, I was a bit disappointed (I really wanted a picture of Cassidy Arch), but it was really fine. My summer is happily complete.

Morning sunlight along the Wall Street trail in Arches,
where I was welcomed by the cascading song of a canyon wren

I don’t quite know how to explain the transformation I’m trying to describe here, from super-jock intensity (out to prove something?) to this delightful acceptance of the limits imposed by reality. I think it was  at least partly this: The very real possibility of not ever being able to take such a hike again seriously heightened my awareness of my age and of the realities of my aging body. That insistent striving for more (even for excess) that seemed so important earlier in my life suddenly looked so pointless when I was faced with losing so much. As I drove through Southern Utah, everyday sights—familiar rock formations, ordinary plants, simple ripples in the stream—were suddenly strikingly beautiful. When I took a short walk early one morning in Arches and heard a canyon wren, a tear sprung to my eye. I threw out my arms and sighed at the sheer, deep pleasure of just being there. “There,” where I hadn’t been sure I'd be able to go again. One night, I lay on my back gazing up at the Milky Way and saw a shooting star course across the desert sky; my heart smiled ear to ear. Those experiences were somehow linked directly to this new level of acceptance, this shift in perspective that I sometimes dare to call “wisdom.” Grandiose, maybe, but closer to “wise” than I’ve been in my past, for sure.

Being sufficiently old and physically compromised to contemplate the loss of things that are so valuable to me—my physicality and my access to wilderness—granted me a new perspective. A canyon wren makes my heart sing, and missing a long-awaited trail junction at the end of a very long hike is of no import. Huge and tiny are so relative as to be meaningless. Now that’s a lesson in perspective.

© Janis Bohan, 2010-2015. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post. 

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Retirement risks and highway metaphors

You’ve probably noticed that summer is sliding toward fall. The kids are back in school, the leaves are starting to turn, the sorrel is head high, and last spring's yucca blooms have been transformed to drying pods. And I’m content. I’ve had a marvelous summer. Several good trips and a bunch of other fun events contributed to that. And as a bonus, I’ve had a most successful “return to fitness” campaign, and I’m feeling healthy and strong—and very happy about that. Reflecting on this process has helped me articulate something about the mixed joys and pitfalls of retirement—and some life lessons about the balance between ease and commitment.

Obviously, one of the real pleasure of being retired, as anyone craving the moment when they’ll retire might imagine, is the luxury of pretty much setting my own schedule. My days are busy, but my schedule is flexible and elastic, remarkably free of coercive scheduling. There are exceptions, of course—doctor’s appointments, trash pick-up, meetings, and other events scheduled by or with someone else. But mostly, I get to shape my days as I'd like them to be.

This sounds lovely—and it is—but it has its costs. One of those, oddly, is trouble finding time to do things I want to do. The problem is that the wide-openness of my schedule allows me to not actively think about setting aside time for things that aren’t obligatory. I have to do my online editing work at some point each day, and I have to do assorted life-maintenance chores at times. So I plan time around getting those things done. But then there are the things that I don’t have to do, but I intend to do. Like getting some exercise every day. This is where the ease of my retirement un-schedule trips me up. The tasks that live in intention get set aside. The day slips away, and somehow, I didn’t have time for those things.

So several things contributed to my getting seriously on track this summer—and I’m hoping it’s for the long haul. First, my fall orthopedic crisis made me inactive through the winter, and I paid the price—in energy level, mood, strength, and general engagement in my life (the scarcity of blog entries being one indication of this disengagement). That was a wake-up call.

Then, a planned spring trip to Southern Utah promised an opportunity to see a part of red rock country I haven’t visited for years. As it turned out, we didn’t make precisely that trip, but thinking about it brought to mind a trail there that I really want to walk again. And with that thought, I had to acknowledge that I was nowhere near fit enough to do it and enjoy the experience.

The final nudge came from a bit of wisdom circulated on a listserve I read regularly. It’s nominally for psychologists and largely about psych topics, but the moderator also interweaves other interesting themes—special needs animals, Buddhism, feminism, racism, and—apropos of my point here—health and fitness. This particular post offered fitness tips. Now, I know that there are zillions of lists and fitness experts offering “10 tips for getting fit,” and these were probably no more or less wise than all the others. But the timing was just right, and two of these ideas really stuck with me. In my mental shorthand, these are “no exit ramps” and “merge with traffic.”

The first is pretty self-explanatory, familiar to anyone who’s tried to stay focused on any challenging goal: don’t give yourself excuses, or you’ll be off the track for sure. The second was more of a surprise to me. It has to do with living in the real world and avoiding extreme, excessive, impossible rules, “merging” with the flow of realistic demands of the moment—an out-of-town trip, a task that genuinely erases time for anything else, fatigue that seems to require a break, extended time spent with someone important. Gently merging with these moments can save your sanity and honor your relationships.

Now, I recognize that item 2 seems to contradict item 1: isn’t merging sort of like an exit ramp? I’ve found that it’s not, as long as I’m really conscious about it: “OK, this (whatever) isn’t perfect for my plan, but it’s important/delightful right now, so I’m going with it. It’s not an exit ramp. I’m merging, not getting off the road. In the next moment, I’m back on track.”

Probably the key to all of this was managing that pesky scheduling-in-retirement thing. I had to override my automatic cruise setting and actually, intentionally plan to get some serious exercise every day. I had to prioritize my efforts at returning to a state of physical well-being that I’d let slide. And I’ve been happily, remarkably consistent in this: I make time for my activity of the day, and then I schedule other things (the ones under my control, that is) around that. No letting it slide, thinking I’ll get to it “later.” Yup, I’ve missed a few days (see “merge with traffic”), but it was a conscious decision to do so, not a struggle over whether I was sabotaging my goal. I named it as merging with traffic, and I never doubted that when circumstances were appropriate again, I’d still be on the same path, not having taken an exit ramp.

I suspect there are valuable life lessons here—not that being healthy isn’t sufficient in its own right. For me, the message of my successful summer has to do with keeping some perspective on time and structure, on the interplay between responsibility and ease, and on the tricky line (at least for me) between clear commitment and obsessive adherence. Accommodating both sides of those dichotomies/dimensions is no easy task—whether in a fitness plan or an overall life plan.

I wonder, if I worked on that balance in all realms of my life, how truly healthy could I be?

© Janis Bohan, 2010-2015. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post. 

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A place on the table

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This summer, I’ve been on a serious return-to-fitness kick, trying to regroup from the long spell of inactivity brought on by last fall’s assorted orthopedic woes. I’ve been really conscientious about it, too, prioritizing walks and workouts and such rather than letting them take the last, left-over spots (if any) in my schedule. So today, after a nice lunch with a friend in Golden and before I got back to work, I planned to stop on my way home for a walk, thinking I’d probably do a loop on a local trail and call it good. But just north of Golden, I spotted the trail head for the North Mesa Trail. I’d never hiked it before (though I'd heard tales), and the steep initial climb really beckoned. So I traded lunch duds for walking shorts, slathered on sunscreen, and started climbing.

If you live in the Denver area and haven’t yet explored this trail (or rather, this web of trails), check it out. It does start with a serious uphill grade, but the almost immediate reward is great views to the west—that wonderful Colorado sky and the shadows of the clouds on the hills. But maybe the best treat for me was the pleasure of walking up a steep hill, settling into a steady-state pace, and discovering that my “training” has actually worked. If legs and lungs can smile, then mine were smiling. But I suspect my fitness regime is of far less interest than the scenery, so I’ll skip right to the nature tales and pictures.

From the road, North Table Mesa looks dry, rocky, and boring. But in truth, once you get up the hill and on top of the mesa, it’s really lovely. At least this year, with our ample rain, the meadows are soft and beautiful, and even mid-summer, the wildflowers and grasses are really nice. 

        

From the flat mesa top, you can see east to Denver and west to the afternoon clouds rolling in.

Around a bend in the trail, I was surprised to see a large-ish pond (in Colorado, we might call this a lake)—thanks, I suspect, to the abundant rain, since there are definitely no streams up there. 

I heard and saw lots of birds—meadowlarks, swallows, circling hawks, an American kestrel on a wire, a cormorant landing on the pond, and a bumblebee big enough to count as a small bird. 

And at the top of the highest promontory, the increasingly common rusty-legged signal carrier.

This unexpected adventure was such a treat—a trail I hadn’t walked, a beautiful day, and the sweet awareness that walking uphill is actually fun again. What a great day.

© Janis Bohan, 2010-2015. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post. 

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