Weekending

Much is afoot these days. Let's go back a week and take a peek at where it all started, shall we?

K. is one of my best friends from college. Actually, scratch that. She's the only person I met during my college days with whom I regularly keep up, and whose doings continue to fascinate me to no end. Like few other people in my life, K. has mastered that confident sense of adventure that leads me to imagine her sitting down at a dinner table surrounded by talking animals and aliens and calmly interjecting something insightful into the conversation. As for me, I'd be under that same table, gripping my head and rocking. When all else in my life has seemed off-kilter and barely under control, K. is a breath of fresh air, and a reminder that it's all going to work out and that I can go ahead and remove my head from ass.

So into our tiny, cow-smelling town came K. in her car packed with all-purpose surprises and armed with fresh bread longer than my arm, and the reassuring promise that she was down for "whatev." Pants and I bundled her off to Sequoia National Park where we all sank our feet into deep banks of fresh snow and took pictures with foreigners and big Latino families lacing the borders. I bitched about French people having interfered with my awkward first attempts at snowboarding, and in one of those rare instances of instant karma, the log I was posing on in front of the giant General Sherman sequoia gave way and dumped me into the hard packed snow, right in front of more French people, who, being more cultured than me, understood my English griping perfectly and then laughed at my misfortune with their nasally, "honh, honh, honh!"

The next day K. and I went to an art museum to see a big exhibit on "Peace Calligraphy," which was really incredible. Being only semi-aware of the prohibition against photography, I snapped a few shots, and if I had my camera handy right now, I would totally post them in defiance of the artist, the museum, and karma once again, but words will have to suffice. It was a whole room of long sheets of paper suspended vertically from fishing line screwed into the ceiling tiles, and each sheet had a different decorative quote or message about peace. There were also origami cranes of different colors and sizes interspersed among the sheets, and the whole thing was lit from various angles so as to create a wonderful variety of shadows and silent fluttery movement. It inspired another weird goal of mine: I will learn to make paper cranes, and will undertake the folding of 1,000 of them as a meditative act when Pants deploys. [side note: when I told Pants of this goal, he said that when he was a little boy, he learned to make cranes and sent some off to a museum in Hiroshima as part of a project to memorialize the victims of the bomb.]

K. and I then spent a quiet afternoon at a tea shop in Fresno's most earnest attempt at a hipster neighborhood. She sketched her hand for an art class and I read about Frank Sinatra having a cold for my journalism class, and for a while it was calm and easy and the afternoon seemed to stretch out forever, like when we were roommates years ago and had nothing to do but eat fried chicken and watch HBO on a Sunday. I was sad to see her go the next day. When we have guests, our dog goes through cycles of amnesia where she periodically forgets that someone has stayed the night, and then goes into spasms of floor-scraping delight when a surprise someone emerges, sleepy-eyed in the morning, and unsuspecting of her crotch-sniffing agenda. Abby's fall into abject depression when guests leave is equally extreme, and when K. left I almost couldn't bear being in the same room with Abby, so accurately did her sudden sadness mirror my own.

The work week in between then and this past weekend was unremarkable. The constancy of minor emergencies wore me down to a quiet nub, and Pants, P. the Roomie, and I always seemed to miss each other, with the odd result of living alone in a crowded house.

We planned to go snowboarding for the weekend, and early Friday morning I went to the base to rent the scraped up snowboard that would end up ferrying me smoothly and reliably through ridiculously deep drifts of light, powdery snow. But I didn't know that morning how nice the board would end up riding-- all I saw were its chipped edges and the deep scars where prior users had scraped over rocks or tree limbs or something.

As I was getting ready to leave the base, Pants called and asked if I would like to go hang out in the LSO shack right next to the runway and watch bounces, which is a rare opportunity and one that I missed out on at our previous posting, so I immediately jumped on it. The experience deserves a whole post on its own, but for now I'll simply explain that it means sitting in a tiny greenhouse-like building, really no bigger than a plexi-glass-walled outhouse a scant ten feet from the runway, where a box is painted to approximate the size of an aircraft carrier's deck. The LSO, Landing Signals Officer, sits inside the shack with a radio, some phones, and a "pickle stick," which is a control stick he uses to alter the configuration of lights guiding the pilots in. Over and over again, the pilots do touch and goes, kissing their tires down as close as possible to a place on the runway right outside the shack's door that represents where the wires would be to catch the tailhook on the boat. The entire experience was amazing and intimidating, but also comforting in that I can see a little better what it is Pants is trying to do and how hard the Navy is trying to prepare him for it a second time. Plus it's undeniable proof for the skeptic in me that Pants is actually a pilot, and not just playing dress up to go hang out at the library all day. Believe it or not, this is only the second time I've seen him actually flying a plane.

On to the weekend. We hit the road in my 11 year old Honda Accord mid-afternoon on Friday loaded down with gear, boards, boots, and a dizzying array of electronic toys for four people-- Pants and myself plus two other Navy guys I didn't know very well. One of them was the source of the fountain of gadgets, and over the next six hours he kept up a constant engagement with one or the other of them. At one point, he actually called a cell phone company representative to discuss at length the merits of one service over the other. I was under the mistaken impression that most people would rather punch themselves repeatedly in the crotch than voluntarily call a cell phone rep, but apparently I'm wrong. The trip was long.

All the way up to Tahoe, now in darkness, we heard weather warnings about a winter storm approaching, but since none of us was from a mountain state, we were confused-- isn't a snowstorm the perfect time for snowboarding? Don't winter sports depend for their very existence on winter storms? The answer is yes and no, apparently. Yes, storms provide great soft powder to slide around on, and yes that powder makes falling a much more attractive prospect than when the weather is lovely and sunny and the snow turns to ass-bruising hard-packed ice. But everything tends to get stuck, including you, face down with a board strapping both feet into useless immobility. Actually getting to and from the mountain, or even out of a parking lot where your car's been stationary for two hours, is an epic struggle against wind, ice, sleet, slushy spray from plows and other cars, and the muffling white blanket of snow that never let up the whole time we were there. Two feet of the stuff fell Saturday night alone, and that was when the world was already covered over in what looked like an extravagant coat of shaving cream and sugar. Out the window of our (crowded) hotel room Sunday morning, I saw where the empty pool was supposed to be instead a high, lumpy mountain of white at least four feet over and above the level of the pool's edge. I got caught up in a fantasy of jumping into it that quickly turned into a claustrophobic nightmare.

On Sunday, I chose to read about World War II nuclear physicists inside a wet-floored Starbucks rather than brave the slopes again. We showed up at a different resort, and as lift tickets were free for the guys but expensive for me, I figured it was a safer bet to do homework rather than get out there only to discover that my boots had still not broken in, and that the previous day's numbness and bruising included swelling as a bonus, thus making the second day twice as uncomfortable. So bombs and depleted uranium over Nevada instead. I recommend the book if you accept that a certain amount of heavy-handed activism comes with it.

The trip home on Sunday started out with a creepy two hours atop Donner Pass in near white-out conditions with pick-ups and SUVs sliding and spinning all around us in slow motion. There is no creepier sign to see half buried in snow and ice than one that calls to mind cannibalism and desolation. The Honda's buzzing heater and new set of snow chains seemed paltry little tokens against disaster, and I was acutely aware that all we had in the way of provisions was a box of Jujubees and some stale onion bagels. But the fact that we made it, chugging along as far pricier and heftier vehicles struggled and whined, further proves my theory that there is no better car than mine, no finer or more loyal vehicle, and I will lovingly polish its scraped up hub caps and its scarred rear bumper until it falls completely apart.

Kiss, kiss, Honda.