west, vol. 8

-i woke up next to the bald & bearded andreas butler. considering how many times i've lived with the dude, this may have been the first time waking up next to the man. though the bed was the most comfortable thing i'd slept in or on since leaving indiana, i knew i had to get up. the pound of bacon in the fridge (or was it two?) wasn't going to cook itself. i wandered down to the kitchen, started some coffee, and grated several pounds of potatoes, diced a few onions, tossing them together in the biggest plastic bowl i could find. had to get the starch started first, essential in an 8-person breakfast.

-unfortunately, only two of the burners on the stove functioned, and they were the smaller ones. i turned them both to high, began sauteeing the taters-n-onions, warming the oven to keep everything evenly done. midway through the bacon fry, bodies began to rise, lurching out of sleep towards the downright magical combination of onion, oil, bacon, and coffee. i don't know what the first explorers ate while winding out of the mountain passes towards the pacific ocean, but i like to imagine it was the same combination of pork fat, rough-ground coffee, and starch. i am nothing if not a descendent of lewis & clark.




The scene of the crime. Modelo-addled as I was, I managed to finishing everything simultaneously, a heroic breakfast achievement.

-after finishing the potatoes & bacon, slipped them in the oven and whisked two dozen eggs with some milk & a block of american-orange cheddar. scrambling these over a small burner took longer than expected; tyler stepped in to keep stirring (and sipping the day's first brew) while i washed the hot tub & cigar off of me.

-post-breakfast & coffee, we headed out in two car-loads in search of the Nooksack Falls, a winding drive towards the end of the highway. along the way we passed strung-out lines of bikers, whose ability to ride that far uphill disturbed me almost as much as the motorcycle-death-wish-brigade who flew around tight corners, passing a dude (me) driving another dude's (chris) car dangerously close to said bikers. still, it was over 70-degrees, sunny, and the day soon mellowed when we reached the turn-off to the falls.




The top-third of the roughly 90-foot falls. Signs indicated at least 8 people had gone over to meet their fate at the ageless rocks and broken trees below. Despite the warnings, edging up to a precipice was needfully done---not often can you experience the simultaneous feeling of being so close to oblivion & so close to the constancy of nature.

-even when the falls began to busy with a few hikers & tourists, i still felt drawn to the strange age of the place, carved with the sweat of the even-nearer glacier over thousands of years. having recently watched werner herzog's cave of forgotten dreams, another examination of the tiny glint of humanity in the timeless eye of the universe, the falls gave me that sense of being incredibly young, unimportant, and vague, merely sucking up as much sunshine and intense pine aroma as possible in a space more old & venerable than all the cathedrals of the world laid end-to-end.

-enough philosophizing already. after wandering in the woods a bit, getting close enough to the stream for a brave few to take a freezing, fear-no-bacteria gulp, and ben climbing into a tall, hollow tree-trunk; we decamped in search of a trail that might take us up the mountainside a bit. unfortunately, upon finding it, we realized it would involve a 15-mile drive on a gravel path till we even got to the beginning of the trail. we had laid in no supplies, so settled for the horseshoe bend trail, which ran along the Nooksack a few miles further downstream from the falls.




Contemplating the odd notion that I should swim in water meant for mammals with a coat of body fat that weighs more than my car. I would soon give in to this temptation; glacier-flow-swimming as performance-art.

-noting that "bear season" was in effect, the crew made sure to permeate the early-afternoon river's edge with various bird calls, alien mating sounds, caribou grunts, and what was soon to be determined to be the true & actual call of a bear, "huuyh-ahhh!" after weaving up and down the riverbank for a time, the trail eventually came to rest a a spot looking up into the mountains, logs laying across large stones created swirling pools of ice blue water, and small stacks of disc-like stones adorned the sun-bleached dusty rock bed. after building some stacks of our own, the sun had me sweating and shirtless, and i realized that...yes, i needed to swim in the nooksack.

-part of the river had been almost sealed off by a fallen tree, and the fast-running current present everywhere else merely swirled to a crawl in a six-foot circle of two-foot deep, amazingly ice-clouded water. i put my hand in, and it felt cold, but do-able. after cajoling some dudes to join me, and none obliged, the crowd was getting restless; it was swim-or-go-home. next to a sun-soaked boulder, i checked the trail for square-looking hikers, then shucked shoes & clothes down to underwear, and took a deep breath. oh shit!




Pre-dip phase of Operation Tea-Bag the Nooksack. At this point, I'm thinking, "This is very probably not the best idea I've ever had." Soon, I would be in extreme pain and unable to form a cogent defense of what I'd done...

-i stepped into the water. "hey, this isn't bad," i said out-loud. a couple seconds later, as i began descending to get my waist underwater, i realized i couldn't feel my feet. at all. by the time the water hit my torso, both my legs were shrieking in pain. i probably began howling, and jumped up & out of the water. compelled by my near-religious experience, maxson doffed his footwear to wade in. the second voyage was worse than the first---too cold to make the five-foot run back to shore, we opted for the tree trunk suspended over the water, letting the air put feeling back in my toes. courage summoned (or stupidity swallowed); the gap was bridged and seventy degree sand stomped upon in an attempt to regain feeling. the serious pain subsided, and the warm walk back to the vehicles was welcome, fake wildlife calls and all.

part nine & rest of day to follow

west, vol. 6 (interlude: maps)

During my travels, I developed a slight obsession for mapping. I've been using Google Earth (and maps) for a couple years at work, mostly unsuccessfully, but have finally found an outlet plotting points of interest, bike & hiking routes, and running loops. Running routes actually provided my entry-point; while running my neighborhood route at home, I plotted it via Google Maps so I could calculate the distance I was running.



View Neighborhood Running Route in a larger map
And here-in lies another obsession; when I began running almost 18 months ago, I began to keep strict track of the distance and time of each session, perhaps a way of tracking my improvement, but more likely an outgrowth of my somewhat obsessive-compulsive personality.

The small 4-bedroom house in the West-side 'burbs of Kokomo necessitated that my younger brother, Wes, share a room with me, in which we had homemade bunk beds, a Nerf basketball drawer, more Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles paraphernalia than would seem financially possible, and most notably, a 1960s-era map of the United States, measuring at least 6-feet across, that my Dad had salvaged from a defunct classroom set-up. I remember plotting points and routes on the map, far before travelling by plane. Most years, our vacation consisted of driving south to Nashville, Tennesee, to visit relatives, or further south to Gulf Shores, Alabama, where we camped in pine-covered swamps at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico.



View Canal Route 1 in a larger map
Despite its flaws, the canal in downtown Indianapolis is a great running route. Though I hadn't ran on it till this weekend, it is free of street-crossings & most exhaust smell. Despite the Labor Day weekend ignorant pedestrians, long, reclined bikes piloted by poor-steering 12-year-olds, and fat, Segway-riding, jean-wearing tourists; running the smooth stones alongside the slow-moving, blue-green canal was a welcome relief from the neighborhood route full of potholes, buckled pavement, loose dogs, and throttling mufflers.

I remember running my finger along routes in-between cities, wondering how so many cities could be clustered in the tiny states of New England, and reading strange place names in my head; Nogales, Butte, Amarillo, Baja California. I had never been west of Missouri at the time, and so the West held a magical sort of realism, a place so full of names that it wasn't quite real at the time, more akin to the maps I pored over at the beginning of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, which had equally strange names; Lothlorien, Mordor, the Shire.



Detail of LOTR map. I really like the contour lines denoting where the waters of Middle Earth begin. Just as when I was a kid, I always wonder what lay to the East of these mystically named lands...was it just vast nothingness? An evil worse than Mordor? I wondered the same thing about the edge of space, once I realized the universe was constantly expanding, which meant there was a constantly moving edge. Would you bump into it with your nose, like a sliding door made of glass?

At the age of 22, driving out West was a revelation in distance. Armed with only a free road atlas, highlighter, and a folder full of printed directions, we traversed the Deep South, Southwest, West Coast, Pacific Northwest, and Great Plains. All of the greens, pale yellows, and oranges of the 1960s canvas-backed map came to life in New Orleans, Albuquerque, Sacramento, and Spokane. The craggy-ridged mountain ranges were no longer bold textures drawn over blood-orange hued terrain; they were omnipresent in the horizon, looming over Seattle, obscuring San Francisco, bisected by a road lashed out of Salt Lake City that threw us out on to the plateau.



View Cabin in a larger map
Detail of the cabin weekend. Left point is the cabin, right point is Nooksack Falls. The green line is a trail running along the Nooksack River. More details on my encounter with the glacial-fed stream in my next post, West, Vol. 6.

Returning to the cool greens and yellows of Indiana was relief, though not temperature-wise, long-hair and patchy beard only exacerbating the 90-degee, humid weather. But on the eyes, after escaping through the harsh blues and yellow-browns of Colorado and Nebraska, the lush greens of Indiana, pole-straight cornfields occasionally interrupted by lush stands of elm, maple, and oak, the low-lying scruff of soybean leaves that seem a single solid mass until perpendicular to the exacting rows; the map wasn't lying with its colors, though accepting that I had traversed such a visual spectrum was still hard to swallow.



View Chuckanut Ridge Hike in a larger map
Hike taken on the last day of the 2011 Western Swing. Though the rise in elevation was only around 1300 feet over a couple miles, it was more taxing than I originally thought. Near the top of the ridge, I finally sprinted uphill as long as I could, bored by the interminable climb that had not yet produced a view. Ah, the patience of the Internet age. Less than 5 minutes later, we were rewarded with a sudden clearing on a sheer rock cliff, looking over Lake Padden to Mt. Baker.

Returning home from the West last October, after flying out over Mt. Rainier, the only identifiable Indiana object was Conner Prairie, identified by its stationary hot air balloon hanging stagnant over a quilt-work of crop fields and encroaching suburbia. There was no relief in this return, and there was none in my most recent return either, the night landscape of Indianapolis disorienting and unfamiliar, with not even a Lucas Oil Stadium sighting to grant me directional bearing. Again I had flown out in the height of a sunny day, passing Mt. Rainier while my seatmate took pictures out of the window. She noticed me staring, and paused so I could get a good look. I glanced, and realized that the view wasn't one that I could get tired of, wasn't one that I wished to leave.



View Bellingham Overlook in a larger map
A bike-ride-turned-hike to a spectacular ridge overlooking the city of Bellingham and the bay. An army of 30+ mountain bikers passed us near the top of the ridge, though I was glad we left our bikes at the trailhead a mile back. The trail opened to a dusty, street-wide path atop the ridge, and we plopped on rocks and tree stumps, eating blueberries and basil-wheat bread with goat cheese, warmed by the sun.