It still snows in Summit County. It snowed while we were gone, it snowed when we got home. To say we hated to come back to snow is a serious understatement.
We left on a rainy day, driving through misty, emerald valleys at lower elevations, marveling at the presence of spring, the Colorado River already straining at it's banks, rapids boiling furiously over the rocks they play between the rest of the year.
Fruita was cold. It didn't feel like vacation yet, because we were shivering. We left the tent-ends of the camper closed to conserve heat, B and Andy sleeping on the table-bed, Andy and me sleeping on the sofa-bed, neither bed wide enough to accommodate a person plus a dog who somehow managed to evenly divide his nighttime between the two beds. When he is really happy, he lays on his side and braces against things with his paws, things usually being the fleshiest parts of his humans, who's dreams resent the intrusion and who, in their sleep, move away from the four sharp points of contact until they are either smashed against the wall, the chill from it seeping through covers into dreams, or are hanging precariously off the edge of the bed. When they finally come awake enough to care, he gets flipped onto his back by his human burrowing under covers, and under him, and he lays there with his feet in the air until...ahhh...ahh-ahh...CHOOOO! He has never been able to sustain an upside down position for long before a sneezing fit starts. Which rocks the camper, brings the humans fully awake, and he finds himself back on the floor in his own bed, waiting until the humans fall back asleep, at which time he can start the process over with the other human. Of course, there are also the nights he curls up with his back to my back, or on my feet, or spoons with me, my arm draped over his gently rising and falling chest, the other arm tucked behind him and his 102degree body heat radiates and the twitching of his feet and smacking of his lips and small whimpers and yips of his doggy dreams are a small price to pay for such glorious heat. Perhaps if we lived in a warmer climate we would have followed through more thoroughly on our iron-fisted rule of his first six months- six months he absolutely, positively would not get on the furniture of beds, except for his designated leather chair in the living room. Now we have discovered that if two bodies in a bed is warm, three bodies is even better.
We stayed at the James M Robb State Park in Fruita, right in town, just off the interstate, and we had water and electric hookups, and Bobby had borrowed a TV screen and DVD player for the trip, so while he bounced between camper and coffee shop, I watched movies, and in the evening we watched more movies, and we waited for the rain to stop.
When it finally did, I took Andy for a five mile run from the campsite, along the road, and around Dinosaur Hill, the sight of a significant find and excavation of- you guessed it- a dinosaur skeleton. When I returned, we seized the window of opportunity to go for a bike ride, letting the sun warm and dry the trails for as long as we dared before the next bank of clouds rolled in. We did a lovely little loop, only eight miles, and returned to the camper as the rain started again.
The next morning, B checked his phone's weather radar, and we debated our options. We had planned on spending some time in Moab, but it was windy there, 50 degrees with a chance of rain, only a slight improvement over Fruita where the rain was already falling. After much debating, we decided to spend the day, which promised cool, wet conditions all over Colorado, driving to Zion National Park, where the weather promised to be nicer the next day than anywhere else in Colorado. So we packed up the camper and drove. Six hours later, we pulled into Hurricane, looking for a campground. Sunset was approaching, and we kept driving, and found ourselves deciding to check rates at a campground in Virgin that we had noticed the last trip through as being quite green and shaded and oasis-like, in spite of all the too-tan snowbirds with mega-motorhomes who also think so. We gulped at their price, not much less than a cheap motel, but there was a pool, and a hot tub, and pillowey green grass, and it all looked so much more inviting that a flat piece of dry desert with no hookups that was our other option. Just tonight, we told ourselves. Then we added, and tomorrow night, so we don't have to spend tomorrow moving. Then we payed the lady and parked the camper under a nice shade tree,
on a litte concrete pad surrounded by deep, thick, soft grass. We sat in the hot tub and shivering in Fruita seemed a distant memory. After a walk along a canyon in the sunset,
just enough to wear the edge off of Andy, we fell asleep to the sounds of frogs and crickets and and river...and cars whizzing by.
The next day, we biked Hurricane Rim. Not the whole thing, just to the high point and back, about a 15 mile ride.
I still managed to not quite get unclipped after not quite cleaning a rock ledge, and did not quite manage to avoid toppling sideways into a scrubby little bush with a broken-off main trunk, which left an immediate swelling bruise on the side-back of my thigh, right where I could not see it, so did not realize until I began hearing exclamations of disgust and fascination when I walked past people ("Dude, it that a bruise? It looks nasty!") that it had darkened into radiant purples and blues and was about the size of a grapefruit. I added a few miles by riding back to the campground from the trailhead. Hurricane rime is a rhythmic trail that runs about nine miles from Virgin to Hurricane, a ride that in the summer, must be fairly hot, dry and dusty, but in the spring was a kaleidoscope of pinks and yellows and greens ranging from almost brown to radioactive. Finally, what we were here to do. It felt good to be hot. Even the drops of sweat rolling down my temples were things of wonder after the Winter of a Million Goosebumps.
More pool, and more reading. I blew a bit of money while sitting in Fruita by going into Grand Junction and investing in a Kindle, which greatly enhances vacation reading time. An entire library of humorous travelogues- my genre of choice lately- in one small, flat, lightweight piece of plastic and technology less bulky that the smallest paperback.
The next day, we scouted bike trails, went into Hurricane and inquired at Over the Edge Sports for favorite trails, local's trails, must-do trails, as well as recommended free BLM camping. The guy recommended Gooseberry mesa for camping, so we drove up to the top to scout it out, but we did not see any way we could take the camper up there. The next day, we took the bikes up to the top to ride several of the trails and found the back route, slightly less bumpy, and we also saw a lot of sites we had missed, but that was after we had already reserved the campsite we were in for two more nights. (Hey, we said, we didn't go on vacation to SAVE money.) We buried our guilt over the expensive campsite by luxuriating in the hot tub, rolling with Andy in the deep grass, lying under the tree reading in it's cool, green shade, and just generally being total bums. I checked my facebook on the campground wifi, fabulously fast and "free", to find a message from our favorite Flagstaff student and bike junkie Jeremy, saying his mind was made up, he was hankering for a little desert himself and would be arriving soon...for hiking, and maybe biking. I may or may not have called him a crazy person for being undecided about bringing his bike, and he may or may not have taken it personally (probably not), but the end result was that when he showed up on our third night there, there was a mountain bike in the trunk of his Acura. We went for a fast sunset ride on Hurricane Rim, the sinking sun illuminating the river a few feet to the side and many feet below us in the canyon, the trail hugging it's rim, air scented with whatever desert flower actually smells like the air freshener that says it is supposed to smell like desert flowers and prompted Bobby to wax descriptive a time or two ("It's like they put potpourri in the air...or something!")
The next day, we went back up to Gooseberry Mesa, this time to do the entire edge loop, North Rim and South Rim, the trails hugging the edge of the mesa out to a point high above the valley floor and towns that dot it, sudden slickrock bubbles, ancient sand dunes, rising from desert shrubs with a trail on moment shady and friendly, one moment precariously flirting with a thousand foot drop, one moment downhill and cruising, the next climbing sharply and twisting tightly.
As we neared the point, cracks deepened, threatening to swallow tires, making one glad for one's new 29inch wheels that are not so easily swallowed.
Several times on the trail I proved to have confidence that outweighed my bike-handling skills, with the result that when I returned to the camper, I set about counting all the new bruises. I counted 19. The worst was a simple dismount on a flat spot, when one foot refused to unclip (okay, I forgot I wasnt in my old multi-angle release cleats, so when I tried to tip my foot out instead of swiveling it out, nothing happened and down I went.) That one actually drew blood inside my bike shorts. More blood when I came around a sandy corner too fast and slid my wheel sideways into a rock, and went over the handlebars, the sharp points on my big ring leaving eight parallel scrapes on my calf. Not much blood- just enough to make me feel really incompetent every time I looked down.
Onto a tangent- I hate having a bike that can handle a much better rider than me, and me not being a rider who can do it justice. No, I don't hate the bike. I love it so much I can't imaging a trail with anything else under me. It's the first bike I have ever experienced that rare feeling of being completely one with the bike. (It was during my first race on it. True, oxygen deprivation may have been a part of it, but there was this one glorious stretch of Boreas Pass Road where I slowly became aware that the feel of the grips in my hands had faded until I couldnt tell the difference between hand and grip, I felt comfortably rooted to the saddle under me, my legs pumping up and down like sledgehammers, as indifferent to pain and as efficient and as steely, my feet an extension of the pedals, and I watched the gap between me and the girl ahead, the only thing between me and 1st place, close and I passed her, and then there were cowbells and cheers and downhill and it was teeth-rattling and I had to hit my brakes or bounce off the trail and Ms. Always 1st Place came flying around me and was lost forever, as was the feeling. But now I know it's not just the rhetoric of uber-riders who are trying to make it seem as though they have mystical bike powers- such things do occur when the conditions are right. It's trippy.) But my point is, if my bike were a person, she would be an in-your-face ninety-five pound blonde with a tattoo on her neck, and I would be well, me. A mousy-haired Jack-Mennonite with inferiority issues and junk in the trunk.
...Moving on.
Gooseberry Mesa took us several hours to navigate the trails, with difficulty ranked the same as ski resorts- green circles, for easy, blue squares for intermediate, black diamonds for advanced, and double-black diamonds for expert-advanced. It was only on the double black portion that I had my most epic fails, but Jeremy seemed to not find it too difficult to maneuver. He tried to smooth our damaged pride by pointing out that we have only been serious about biking for a few years, and he's been serious about it for the last decade and a half, and we took the morsel willingly. The truth is, when one only bikes in Summit County, one does not get good at technical riding. One bikes miles and miles on buttery trail, a few semi-technical sections thrown in, and one starts thinking there is no shame in just walking them, no need to go back and try again if the first attempt to clean it ended messily. Besides, who wants to risk getting hurt when one is miles from home and the day is quiet and warm and the trail is shady and one is feeling so good about life?
We hiked to Emerald Pools in Zion National Park that evening after J treated us to Mexican food in Springdale, the touristy "town" outside the park, and returned to camp and a dog who seemed a little miffed about being left in the camper all day.
The next day, J left to return to Flagstaff to pack for a summer in Phoenix, and B and I moved the camper to the campground inside the park. There was no more biking. I was saddle sore. Not bruise sore, which numbs after a few minutes in the saddle, but actually blistery. I gingerly pulled on a loose pair of boardshorts, we left Andy in the camper and grabbed the Park shuttle to the Angel's Landing trailhead. we had hiked it before, so this time we spent less time taking pictures and more time scrambling over rocks on the narrow, winding trail that sits on top of the ribbon of rock rising hundreds of feet above the Zion Canyon floor. We made good time to the top, sat enjoying the queasy, upside-down feeling one can't help but feel sitting on a landing of rock with nothing but sky and miniature trees, river and buses far below. As I was starting down, we passed a group of twenty-something girls also enjoying the view. After we had passed, I heard a gasp and a "Dude! Is that a bruise? That's disgusting! Why would she wear shorts with that on her leg? Cover yourself up!" Oh, yeah. Forgot about the out of sight, out of mind grapefruit-sized bruise. I hiked down, suddenly self-conscious of the stares of other hikers. Truly, this guy I'm with doesn't beat me up. Truly.
The next day, the clouds rolled in. That was the day- okay, in a world where five minutes in front of a TV or over a magazine exposes one's mind to all manner of previously-private and embarrassing conditions such as STDs and infections and incontinence, maybe we're getting to a place in the world where it's okay to admit in mixed company that the reason you are swallowing ibuprofen by the handfuls and still curled up in a ball and writhing in pain- it's okay to admit that it's not a headache. It's that time of the month. So there, I said it. It was that time and from the wee hours of the morning my dreams were filled with pain. I was kicked in the stomach, I biked into a tree branch (truly!), I crashed my bike and landed with the handlebar in my stomach, my subconscious invented all manner of reasons for the strange fact that my dreams contained pain, and finally I bolted awake and it was still there and I doubled over and staggered out of bed and over to the bottle of ibuprophen. Now I must throw in here that I come from a line of women who can kick the snot out of an 1,100 pound cow, throw hay bales around, duct-tape closed gaping wounds, walk away from car crashes,incuriously pick prickly-pear spines from their faces, dig gravel from their own road rash, dump boiling water on their arms, break bones, you name it. They have a high pain tolerance. But these same women are absolutely out of commission, curled on a couch, afraid to move, actually throwing up if it gets bad enough, those few days out of the month. And these women's husbands know, after only once, that insinuating that they are being drama queens, looking for attention or being big babies, is a bed idea and they should apologize and stay far, far away unless offering lower back massages and bringing painkillers. They know to support their wife's story of food poisoning and migraines to get out of social obligations, since society doesn't deem cramps as an acceptable get-out-of-potluck-free card. I should also mention that these are the same women who report that childbirth really isn't that bad.
I dragged my pale self out of bed late morning, after Bobby's suggestion that I take the dog for a walk may have resulted in both him and Andy scrambling to get out of the camper. There may have even been a moment where they were both stuck in the narrow doorway, clawing at each other and the doorframe in their haste to exit. They walked, then made a trip to the coffee shop, and when they got back they had decided to spend the day driving to Bryce National Park since there would be no hiking or biking, where it would be colder than Zion, but this might be the only day we could make it work. We might regret not at least having driven through if we never made it back to the area. I slithered out of bed and into a pair of flip-flops and curled up on the front seat of the truck, where the Ibuprofen finally kicked in enough to allow me to straighten my legs and hang my feet out the window. We stopped outside the tunnel that connects Zion to the rest of the world on the backside of the park to wait until they let us through, and the sun came out and warmed my feet, and I began to feel almost human and sleepy from sun and stress, and closed my eyes...and dreamed...and suddenly there was bone crushing pressure on my foot and I shot upright and came awake cradling it in my hands and hyperventilating. Bobby had used his automatic controls to roll up my window when we drove into the tunnel without checking for stray appendages. He won't be doing that again.
I shuffled to a few of the overlooks in Bryce, shivering, then ran back to the truck while B stayed and took pictures. Bryce really has, in my opinion, the most mind-boggling views of any National Park I have been in. Rows and rows of needle-like hoodoos stand like a silent concert crowd in great stadiums, rimmed by cathedral-like arches carved under canyon rims. It's like a real life Magic-eye picture. You wonder what you might see if you cross your eyes.
On our last stop of the day, Sunrise point, I finally was fed up with the whole feeling sorry for myself thing and walked to the edge, still a bit curled over, where I spotted a trail leading down into a narrow slot of a canyon between hoodoos, and I decided that I would walk down it if it killed me, so while B flirted with chipmonks and took pictures for Japanese tourists, I made my way down the thirty-odd switchbacks to the bottom of the small canyon, taking off my flipflops because they flipped and flopped annoyingly and enjoying the cool clay trail under my feet. Just that tiny hike transformed the day into magic.
It reminded me that we were on vacation, and the desert is beautiful and surprising, and I even grabbed the camera from B in my enthusiasm a time or two. And then we drove back home, me trying to ignore the maniacal knives in my stomach and back, feeling bad for having been so awful earlier, and him afraid to speak, lest I decide to be awful again. B built a campfire that night, we sat beside it staring into it's glow, the Virgin river roaring past a few feet away, and life was just pretty seriously good.
The next day, apparently enough ibuprophen had built up to allow it to take effect, and I awoke feelin almost ready to do some hiking. And then I heard the steady tap-tap of rain on the camper awning and zipped down a window to behold a soggy world. B left for his daily shot of java (there was a coffee shop unfortunately close to our campsite) and after a shower that finished out our water reserves, I leashed Andy, donned a jacket and hat, mounted my bike and followed him, finding him a few minutes later staring dejectedly at his laptop monitor at a table in the coffee shop, an empty coffee cup beside him. I squeezed in next to him to see what the problem was. "I don't think we should go to Page, after all. Check the weather."
Our plan had been go to Page, AZ and hike Antelope Canyon, a narrow slot canyon off of Lake Powell renowned for it's colors when the sunlight streams into it at certain times of the day. We had talked about renting a canoe, kayaks, something cheaper than the powerboat we had priced earlier, and getting out on the water. Maybe finding some bike trails. But the radar was one big green, blue and white patch sitting stubbornly over almost the entire state. There would be no sun in Antelope. There may not even be tours, if rain caused a risk of flash floods. No reason to go to the sunny town of Page in the rain, we'd be doing exactly what we were doing now, huddling our shivering selves around cups of coffee and watching movies in the camper- if we could even find a campground with electric hookups that didn't cost much, since we had blown most of our campground budget on the grassy, hot-tubbed oasis for four nights. We sat and stared dejectedly out the window at hooded Asian tourists boarding shuttles, protectively clutching enormous cameras under jackets to keep them dry, hooded moms and dads dragging crying kids up the steps and adminishing them in various languages, hooded long haired hippies striding past. Finally we looked at each other. "This is idiotic. It's not supposed to be sunny anywhere in the western U.S. for another three days. And we need to start thinking about heading home in three days. And we don't know where we were going to camp tonight, since all the roads are muddy. And we can't bike. And one of us doesn't feel very well. And if we're going to just sit in the camper, we may as well just sit in our house. Let's go home."
So we did. We threw our belongings into the camper. We rolled up sodden tarps, threw Andy's bed into the backseat of the truck, made a quick detour through the dump station, and hit the road, the misty, emerald valleys we had passed through on the way down even more misty, shattered through the rain streaming down our windows. Fog hugged us over vail pass, and when we got home eight hours later, a heavy drizzle soaked us as we unloaded the essentials from the camper. We walked into our house and stopped. "What happened to our house? It got huge! It's so big and empty and bare. I thought when we left it was small and cluttered."
And then we ate dinner, I finished another book on my Kindle, and we slipped into a ten hour coma.
It has been because of the Kindle I have been doing a lot of thinking on this trip about the rest of the world. I know, those who spend time with me think the rest of the world is always on the tip on my tongue, in the perceived annoyance with this American way of life. Two of the books I read in rapid succession were You've Gone Too Far This Time, Sir! by Danny Bent, in which the author chronicles a bike ride from the UK to India, through Europe, Russia, and Pakistan to raise money for Action Aid, money that was used to improve the lives of Indian girls. Post 9-11, I might add. His story chronicles his personal journey as well as the one taken on Shirley, the steel bike that carried him over mountain passes, roads that were more pothole and wire than road, through villages where children burst into tears at the sight of a gingery white man, where drinking local water and eating local fare provided constant gastroinestinal distress that he considered worth it when considering the other option-turning down the kindness of strangers who did not have much to offer, but did so anyway. His journey involved coming to the realization that in spite of gunfire and bribes at border crossings and the Taliban and all of the things we think about when we think of these areas, the kindness to be found there in a small way compensates for the inconvenience and heartbreak found in such an area. Would he like to make his home there? No. But over the course of his journey, his prejudice and fear diminished as his hair and beard grew.
The other book was The Sex Lives of Cannibals- Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific by J. Maarten Troost. Dispite having no cannibals (unless you count dogs) and almost no sex, and very little drifting, since there is very few places one can drift to on a small atoll in the middle of the pacific except for out to sea, which one should really not do much of, it was a book that, again, opens eyes to the way many people live. Apparently, living on a volcanic island in the Pacific is very different than living on an atoll in the sparkling blue pacific. A volcanic island has fertile soil, rain, and clean groundwater. An atoll is made up of the coral sprouting from an underwater volcano, and it is very pourous, which means that while there is groundwater, everything that is put into the soil seeps straight into it. Sewage being a big one. On an atoll like the atoll in question, with a population density that is the highest on earth, when the soil is a mix of crushed coral and garbage, making it almost impossible to grow fruit and vegetables, and it rarely rains, and the sewage in the water surrounding the atoll creates toxic fish, food can be a bit of a problem. Never mind that the only interest the rest of the world has in the area is for nuclear testing, phosphate mining, and hazardous waste dumping. Malnutrition and malodorous air and malicious dogs and a government more tended toward indolent lazing and drinking kava than problem solving aside, the author came away from his two years spend there with his aid-worker girlfriend with appreciation for the small things that make life good and a fatalistic new side to his personality.
Such books I should not read, books that make me feel there is rapturous contentment to be found in relationship and community that is not found in the making of a comfortable living and the constant rub of social classes generated by income and the amount of debt one is willing to acquire. It makes me dreamy for a way of life not defined by what we have and what we do but who we are. We are trying to live that way right where we are after some late night discussions in the last few years (that may or may not have been beer and campfire fueled) about our goals and dreams and the realization that what we both assumed would make the other happy was, an fact, us chasing our tails and going nowhere. Both of us wanted to provide a picket fence sort of life for the other one with neither of us being sold on the picket fence ourselves. I know, you've heard it before from me. I'll spare you my soapbox. Instead, I'll leave you with a question- what makes you feel as though you are living well? I'd love to know the answer to that. Really. Email me. I promise not to judge, I just want to know if we are so far off of normal when we say we want a life defined by experiences taking precidence over personal successes of the social or monetary variety.
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