My sister-in-law suggested to me today that I might be going through the Kubler-Ross stages of grief when it comes to Pants' deployment. I thought this was a pretty canny assessment, given that I'd just popped out with the entirely too dramatic statement, "Deployment is like getting dumped only I still have to pay all the bills and take care of our stuff."
So if we're looking at the traditionally accepted five stages here, I'm on Anger, which, sadly is only number two after Denial, which in my case was ridiculously short. I have to say, though, I recommend Anger. It's action-oriented. Today I've knocked out a giant stack of work and homework, done physical therapy on my Frankenstein stress-neck, balanced the checkbook, and called people I've been meaning forever to call. Like my poor sister-in-law, who totally didn't see it coming.
I'm also slashing my way through an overgrown field of weedy running-the-household questions with a giant gleaming scythe. Why am I doing [X] this way? Because there's no one else here. Because this way is better and I say so. Furthermore, it will be done this way henceforth. I'm issuing edicts and declarations and iron-clad laws about how things are gonna Change around here, damn it. It feels good. I like being a dictator, even if I'm a lonely one. Months from now I will be Kim Jon Il, sitting in the living room in a gray silk suit and forcing my pets to re-enact Tarantino films with me. I'll tell them how the sun rises each morning because of the giant chain I pull, and I'll rename days of the week in my own honor.
If a sixth step were added to the process of grieving change, I would vote for Batshit Crazy, and it wouldn't be a separate step so much as a recurrent blip on the sine wave of my mood swings.
Poor Pants, bobbing out there on the sea. He has no idea what he'll come home to. Neither do I, in fact. I'm recognizing that I can't control that change, though, just like I can't control him leaving. I'm the only one around right now, so all I can do is focus on making me tolerable to myself. If that involves slashing and burning a few acres, so be it. Hopefully he'll recognize what's left when he gets home.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
If you have good news
If you've got good news today, please leave a comment and tell me what it is.
I hesitate to even write anything on here today because I'm stuck on the old adage, "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all." But I've never been one for adages, and I'm afraid that if I indulge to urge to clam up and wait this out, I'll grow a spiny, calcified shell and sink way down into the mud and only reappear when I cut someone's unsuspecting foot.
We're at the point in the deployment separation where all sorts of things start to feel dangerous unmoored. Mostly my sense of perspective. I have this bad habit of telescoping my current bad moods out into philosophical questions of good and evil and the essential, unsolvable loneliness of the human condition. Blanket statements appeal to me right now. I'd like to wrap myself in them and ignore the scrambly little details of small, specific, and potentially solvable problems.
If I were a plant today, I'd be one of those horrifying ones that grows a big, dry puffball of poisonous spores and then waits for someone to brush up against it to explode.
Friday, January 23, 2009
How not to do it
This is how to fail miserably at your first seven days after the beginning of a deployment. (Disclaimer for my dad: Everything's OK now. I am losing my God damned mind, but I am also handling this.)
1.) Attempt to drop off an old, heavy box TV at your town's charity donation place.
2.) When said box TV is rejected for charity because it must be slapped to work (makes sense-- I didn't want it either), haul it to a half empty shipping container marked "Electronics Recycling."
3.) Despite this TV's prodigious and awkwardly balanced weight, and the rain, and your dainty little ballet slipper shoes, attempt to carry it into the shipping container.
4.) Drop the TV on the bridge of your foot. Howl.
5.) Fall on the dirty floor of the shipping container and run through your repertoir of curses. Wonder if your foot is broken, wiggle a toe, decide it's probably not broken, and then refuse to look at it again because you're starting to feel sick.
6.) Hop out to your pick-up and attempt to wrench the world's workings back into the acceptable range of "normal" by promising yourself that the morning will continue as planned. Therefore, you will get coffee at Starbucks and think about this whole foot thing later. Ignore the foot's protests as you jam in the clutch.
7.) Starbucks. You feel like you might puke, but Starbucks. In line at the counter, notice that two paramedics are ahead of you in line. How convenient! Ask the friendly one with the mustache his professional opinion about foot breaks. Wiggling toes a good sign or no? Nod politely as he begins to describe green stick fractures and bone fragments. Chuckle apologetically as you interrupt him. "I'm sorry. I just need to sit down." Aim for a chair six feet away. Fail to reach it.
8.) As you gray out, pull your classic maneuver, that wonderful thing you've been doing all your life when your body and brain hit the "panic" button and fail to agree on what to do with you: have a mild, non-epileptic seizure, lose the ability to speak, and scare the shit out of everyone around you. Notice that the coffee smells burnt, and that the mugs on the bottom row of the display have dust on their rims.
9.) Now the gurney is here, way to go. Shake and jerk and spazz out as they try to wheel it in between the displays. Everyone is looking at you. Slur drunkenly that you really appreciate all this, and you're very sorry, but it's not possible for you to go to the hospital. Apologize as the paramedics fail to find your pulse. This too is a neat little trick of yours, and has happened before. Think briefly of all the lab techs and nurses you've terrified in your lifetime and wonder if this whole fainting thing is really a revenge mechanism for their having dared to poke you with a needle.
10.) Slowly come to and kick the apologies into high gear. Explain yourself-- you are afraid of your own injuries. You just dropped a TV on your foot and you were afraid it was broken but you didn't want to look and your husband's deployed so they can stop asking where your cell phone is because there's no need to call anyone. The older guy who works at the Starbucks, the one with the homemade heart tattoo on the web of his hand, comes over and brings you ice water. Ta da! Your pulse returns.
11.) A woman comes over and hands you her phone number on a piece of paper. She explains that she's a Navy wife too, and she can stay with you or giver you a ride or whatever you need. The paramedics are eventually persuaded to leave you sitting with this woman, who is very kind, who is rocking a passed out baby and having coffee with her two sisters-in-law, who are also very kind, and they start sharing stories. They are all on their third deployments. Their husbands are enlisted and are on combat tours. They've all had children. In other words, they have hurt a lot worse than your foot, which has stopped hurting completely, and their husbands are not safely cruising around the Pacific. For less than seven days. Feel like a putz.
I'm going to stop with the numbering, and with the self-berating, though honestly, I think that part of the story's pretty funny. What's less funny is that in addition to the fainting episode, Abby's been limping for more than a month and I finally made her an appointment at the vet, where they asked if I wanted to do X-rays. It would be expensive, they said, but she might have hip dyplasia, or arthritis, or a tumor on her spine. She's getting older, after all, and she's been a highly active dog with a few pretty major injuries, like jumping out of a moving pick-up and off of a second story balcony. So I say OK, X-ray. Twenty-four hours and six hundred dollars later, I am broke. I can pay for the visit, but just barely. My credit card is maxed out. I burst into tears in the vet's office and the woman behind the counter taking my payment just says, "Sign here. The doctor will see you in just a minute." She even sounds a little disgusted.
Thankfully, Abby's fine. She has a chip fracture in her mid-back, most likely from the balcony leap two years ago (incidentally, this was during a different crisis in Pensacola and Pants and I were at the naval hospital and she got worried waiting for us and decided to come looking), but it's unlikely that this is causing her to limp. I'm given non-steroidal anti-inflammatory pills to feed her and told to keep her indoors. "I only paid a hundred bucks for the dog," is the famous Pants saying whenever Abby's had health crises before-- gotten bitten on the nose by a scorpion and had her face swell up like a bull dog, for instance-- but the last time she went missing (same Pensacola debacle), he laid face down on the living room floor and cried himself hoarse. I didn't know what to do, but I had to make it better so I went out and somehow, by magic, by the grace of God, I found her-- which is pretty handy since I'd just yelled at him and told him to get it together, that he could stay here and cry but I was going to go get her back.
It's not even been a week since he left, and I've managed to wipe out our bank account to find out that our dog's limp is still a mystery, nearly break my own foot, and pass out in a Starbucks. I've moved money around from our savings and brought the card back under its limit, and I'm sure I'll be able to make it to the end of the month money-wise, but I have to say I'm pretty freaked out. And not a little of that is pure fucking rage. This? All of this has to happen? And so much of it has been humiliating.
I'm not ungrateful enough to miss the significance of the other Navy wives helping me out in Starbucks. If there's one thing everyone's told me from the beginning it's that life in the military is hard, but everyone sticks together and supports each other. That was awesome. That was really huge. And I'm grateful that our dog doesn't have any obvious damage or disease going on. But right now I'm so mad at myself and at Pants for not being here, and for most likely being disappointed in me because I've had to write him an email saying "Everything's OK, but I'm having a rough week and I need you not to make any withdrawals from the bank account right now-- please don't worry, I'm taking care of it."
Really, I'm yelling at him and kicking the wall with my good foot.
1.) Attempt to drop off an old, heavy box TV at your town's charity donation place.
2.) When said box TV is rejected for charity because it must be slapped to work (makes sense-- I didn't want it either), haul it to a half empty shipping container marked "Electronics Recycling."
3.) Despite this TV's prodigious and awkwardly balanced weight, and the rain, and your dainty little ballet slipper shoes, attempt to carry it into the shipping container.
4.) Drop the TV on the bridge of your foot. Howl.
5.) Fall on the dirty floor of the shipping container and run through your repertoir of curses. Wonder if your foot is broken, wiggle a toe, decide it's probably not broken, and then refuse to look at it again because you're starting to feel sick.
6.) Hop out to your pick-up and attempt to wrench the world's workings back into the acceptable range of "normal" by promising yourself that the morning will continue as planned. Therefore, you will get coffee at Starbucks and think about this whole foot thing later. Ignore the foot's protests as you jam in the clutch.
7.) Starbucks. You feel like you might puke, but Starbucks. In line at the counter, notice that two paramedics are ahead of you in line. How convenient! Ask the friendly one with the mustache his professional opinion about foot breaks. Wiggling toes a good sign or no? Nod politely as he begins to describe green stick fractures and bone fragments. Chuckle apologetically as you interrupt him. "I'm sorry. I just need to sit down." Aim for a chair six feet away. Fail to reach it.
8.) As you gray out, pull your classic maneuver, that wonderful thing you've been doing all your life when your body and brain hit the "panic" button and fail to agree on what to do with you: have a mild, non-epileptic seizure, lose the ability to speak, and scare the shit out of everyone around you. Notice that the coffee smells burnt, and that the mugs on the bottom row of the display have dust on their rims.
9.) Now the gurney is here, way to go. Shake and jerk and spazz out as they try to wheel it in between the displays. Everyone is looking at you. Slur drunkenly that you really appreciate all this, and you're very sorry, but it's not possible for you to go to the hospital. Apologize as the paramedics fail to find your pulse. This too is a neat little trick of yours, and has happened before. Think briefly of all the lab techs and nurses you've terrified in your lifetime and wonder if this whole fainting thing is really a revenge mechanism for their having dared to poke you with a needle.
10.) Slowly come to and kick the apologies into high gear. Explain yourself-- you are afraid of your own injuries. You just dropped a TV on your foot and you were afraid it was broken but you didn't want to look and your husband's deployed so they can stop asking where your cell phone is because there's no need to call anyone. The older guy who works at the Starbucks, the one with the homemade heart tattoo on the web of his hand, comes over and brings you ice water. Ta da! Your pulse returns.
11.) A woman comes over and hands you her phone number on a piece of paper. She explains that she's a Navy wife too, and she can stay with you or giver you a ride or whatever you need. The paramedics are eventually persuaded to leave you sitting with this woman, who is very kind, who is rocking a passed out baby and having coffee with her two sisters-in-law, who are also very kind, and they start sharing stories. They are all on their third deployments. Their husbands are enlisted and are on combat tours. They've all had children. In other words, they have hurt a lot worse than your foot, which has stopped hurting completely, and their husbands are not safely cruising around the Pacific. For less than seven days. Feel like a putz.
I'm going to stop with the numbering, and with the self-berating, though honestly, I think that part of the story's pretty funny. What's less funny is that in addition to the fainting episode, Abby's been limping for more than a month and I finally made her an appointment at the vet, where they asked if I wanted to do X-rays. It would be expensive, they said, but she might have hip dyplasia, or arthritis, or a tumor on her spine. She's getting older, after all, and she's been a highly active dog with a few pretty major injuries, like jumping out of a moving pick-up and off of a second story balcony. So I say OK, X-ray. Twenty-four hours and six hundred dollars later, I am broke. I can pay for the visit, but just barely. My credit card is maxed out. I burst into tears in the vet's office and the woman behind the counter taking my payment just says, "Sign here. The doctor will see you in just a minute." She even sounds a little disgusted.
Thankfully, Abby's fine. She has a chip fracture in her mid-back, most likely from the balcony leap two years ago (incidentally, this was during a different crisis in Pensacola and Pants and I were at the naval hospital and she got worried waiting for us and decided to come looking), but it's unlikely that this is causing her to limp. I'm given non-steroidal anti-inflammatory pills to feed her and told to keep her indoors. "I only paid a hundred bucks for the dog," is the famous Pants saying whenever Abby's had health crises before-- gotten bitten on the nose by a scorpion and had her face swell up like a bull dog, for instance-- but the last time she went missing (same Pensacola debacle), he laid face down on the living room floor and cried himself hoarse. I didn't know what to do, but I had to make it better so I went out and somehow, by magic, by the grace of God, I found her-- which is pretty handy since I'd just yelled at him and told him to get it together, that he could stay here and cry but I was going to go get her back.
It's not even been a week since he left, and I've managed to wipe out our bank account to find out that our dog's limp is still a mystery, nearly break my own foot, and pass out in a Starbucks. I've moved money around from our savings and brought the card back under its limit, and I'm sure I'll be able to make it to the end of the month money-wise, but I have to say I'm pretty freaked out. And not a little of that is pure fucking rage. This? All of this has to happen? And so much of it has been humiliating.
I'm not ungrateful enough to miss the significance of the other Navy wives helping me out in Starbucks. If there's one thing everyone's told me from the beginning it's that life in the military is hard, but everyone sticks together and supports each other. That was awesome. That was really huge. And I'm grateful that our dog doesn't have any obvious damage or disease going on. But right now I'm so mad at myself and at Pants for not being here, and for most likely being disappointed in me because I've had to write him an email saying "Everything's OK, but I'm having a rough week and I need you not to make any withdrawals from the bank account right now-- please don't worry, I'm taking care of it."
Really, I'm yelling at him and kicking the wall with my good foot.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Green Slope Girl
If you were to look at my legs today, you might assume that I spent my weekend at a croquet game gone horribly awry, or perhaps running a hurdles race without bothering to jump. My knees are swollen and covered in lovely burgundy bruises and my shins no longer taper smoothly to the tops of my feet-- they are lumpy and greenish with several diagonal scrapes. Three times last night I hissed angrily at Pants for daring to touch my legs as he got up off of the couch.
We went snowboarding again, but in all fairness, I think there should be another name for the sport when all the snow melts into packed ice and people take it in their heads to go shirtless down the slopes. "High-velocity ice-surfing," perhaps. Or "rednecks riding very wide swords." Twice yesterday I was inches away from being slammed into by teenage boys with absolutely no control over their crashes. One screamed an apology as he tagged the edge of my board and sent me flying; the other just yelled, and I'm hoping it was because he was in pain. Wreck all you like, I say-- it's one of my favorite things to do on a snowboard, especially getting off the lift-- but wreck discreetly, clean yourself up, and don't factor in other people to be part of your crumple zone. It tends to increase the panic factor of those of us trying to learn.
And it's panic I'd like to talk about today, boys and girls. Good old-fashioned, why-can't-I-breathe-right-now panic. I quite nearly lost my shit on Sunday and sustained not a few injuries on which I'm kind of fixated right now, but as usual I'm talking in several layers. Pants deploys this Saturday, as in five days from now. A mountain of Important Administrative Details looms over us-- writing wills, notarizing my Power of Attorney, getting a safe deposit box for our important papers instead of shoving them all into an old box for plug-in curlers, and doing something about the ominous "Check Engine" light on the Honda-- but we decided instead to indulge our sentimental escapist fantasies and head out to Sierra Summit with a buddy from Pants' squadron to get in one last snowboarding trip.
Take note: even if you try to leave the Panic in another zip code, it will find a way to hitch a ride. Instead of fretting and wringing my hands over important adult things, I concentrated and distilled my pre-deployment panic into a much more potent elixir. Instead of getting our paperwork in order, I hyperventilated on a ski lift and thought seriously about jumping off of it, even though it meant a 40-ft. free fall, because I could then avoid the inevitable scene caused when I fell at the tiny getting-off slope. Six out of seven rides, I ate shit coming off the lift. This, after two previous snowboarding trips where I had no trouble with it. The worst of the six scenes was the first, wherein I hugged the chair's railing, despite frantic shouts from Pants and the lift operator to let go, and was dragged crotch-first over a wooden sign. If there's a more desperate and pathetically painful example of emotional transference, I don't know what it is. I'm afraid to let go because I think it'll hurt; I make it hurt far more. Ibuprofen doesn't work on shame.
The ironic thing is that each trip down the mountain I was getting better and better at my turns, speed, and control. And without knowing it, I was tackling harder and harder runs. This was not my plan. My plan was to find a green slope, fall in love with it, and then ride it all day until I knew every bump and could feel like I had improved, but Pants and his friend kept switching it up on me. Several times I got this: "See? You can do a run like that, right?" not knowing that this meant, "Great. Now we're heading up to the craggy top of the mountain where there are only blue and black runs." I should mention that it was a balmy 50 degrees, and as we climbed higher and ridiculously higher up the mountain, the sun caught each of the hundreds of ski and board slices in the snow and they all glinted and sparked in the light: ice, I tell you. Not snow. Melting ice, with terrifying patches of brown rock peaking through.
More than once in the past four years I've been reminded of a trip Pants and I took to climb the Flatirons in Boulder, Colorado back when we were still dating. I suspected then that he was a kinetic kind of guy, more at home in the world when he's hanging off one edge of it or screaming towards it at mach one, but I hadn't yet figured out that he would try to involve me in this physics-taunting, this vestigial cry of the cave people, and that he would mask it with words like "fun" and "relaxing." I was also still trying to come off as impulsive, brave, and confident, when as we all know, my bowels shut down at the slightest hint of upheaval. Anyway. We took the trip, and we climbed the Flatirons-- an 800+ foot rock face-- in about 8 hours, finally rapelling off the back of it in total darkness. This means we averaged 100 feet of climbing per panic attack for me, which I then spun into a more encouraging statistic: I can climb a ten-story building without crying. Line up 8 of them, a mid-sized city's financial district, say, and we're only talking 8 crises of faith before I've stood on top of each one!
I think I ran through my entire repertoire of emotions that day, every last one, every single shade of feeling. At one particularly bad moment, I was clinging with two fingers and a toe to a wall with no other visible holds, and Pants was so far above me and the wind was so strong, that he never heard me yelling for him to let some slack into the rope so I could re-maneuver. I couldn't see what was above or below me, but I knew there was a very real chance I would finally find out if our knots were well-tied. Basically I just cried a little, waited to see if I would lose bladder control, didn't, and somehow found another toehold. He had the rope if I fell, but I didn't fall. Maybe I was too afraid to fall. I trusted him then, and I trust him even more now, but what if my fear of falling is stronger?
And then there was the dizzy, stupid-happy, chest-thumping pride of being able to stand there on top of the rock face and stare down at the night lights of Boulder on one side, and the empty blackness of the rock's hollowed out back on the other, knowing that I was about to just sit back into a rope and slide my way down. There's a sharpness to that feeling, an aloneness that's exhilarating. Not everyone can do this thing I'm doing, is what it says, conveniently editing out the previous crying and bladder-doubting. Better than that, though-- being out on a high, sharp rock edge in the dark with someone who loves you, and who says, "I knew you could do this."
I don't doubt that Pants and the other couple who endured that climb were thoroughly exhausted by the experience of teaching me to climb, but it taught me a lot-- mostly that I tend to shoot way low in what I think I'm capable of. If I had known then how important that climb was going to be for preparing me for marrying Pants, I don't know how I would have reacted. It's possible I would have reconsidered.
Green slopes for repeated practice have been hard to come by in the past four years, and I keep getting tricked into blue ones. I know there's bound to be another high at the end of finally mastering snowboarding, just like I know the end of deployment will feel like a huge accomplishment, but right now I'm all bruised up and the last thing I want to do is let go of the lift.
Monday, January 05, 2009
After a while, you get used to it.
"After a while, you get used to it."
This is a handy little lie that's been told to me about any number of horribly unpleasant things (short list: braces, moving, the suffocating smell of someone suffering indigestion with you on a long car trip, being assigned a truly belittling nickname, and the yearly recurrence of sinus headaches, and being too tall to be a matched dance partner for many men), but in the past two weeks, I've found that it's true about one thing I truly hate. My latest revelation: after repeated exposure to thigh-deep snow and face-peeling wind, one becomes accustomed to being cold such that being cold is no longer a compelling reason for rage, bitterness, and physical pain.
I owe this discovery to the state of Utah. And also to Pants, who schooled me in the art of layering for winter sports, though I at first doubted his "no cotton" edict and thus felt the paradoxical icy bite of first sweating and then freezing from my own sweat.
In the past two weeks, we've hit four states, rattling along in our 1992 Ford F-150, a.k.a Babe the Blue Ox, and covered roughly 2700 miles of snow, sleet, wind, ice, dust, and frozen dog turds (ah, ye designer-clothed resort dogs, little more than breathing accessories for Ugg-wearing, skinny-jeaned second wives-- dare I begrudge you a well-placed parking lot dog bomb? Nay, wretched one. Take ye pleasures where ye may). We hit the road on December 20 with the bed of the truck weighed down with a curious water bladder thing meant to keep the back end of our two-wheel drive truck from sliding on Lake Tahoe's icy mountain pass, and were successful in making it through both chain application and chain removal, which occur on either side of Donner Pass, where I like to eat beef jerky very solemnly and will the truck onward with my mind. That night we made it to Fallon, Nevada where there's a Naval Air Station with a lodge we could spend the night in for super cheap.
Poor Fallon. All lonely and abandoned in a part of the state willingly given over to fake bombing runs and permanent jet roar, and so homely that not even a lacy layer of snow can do much to class it up. Every town needs an ace in the hole, though, and Fallon's is the Taqueria Azteca, where God's own breakfast burritos are assembled with divine inspiration and priced criminally cheap. The next day was for traversing Nevada and gaining a new appreciation for the majesty of a big sky, which necessarily requires open, flat land and nothing to block the wandering of the eye from horizon to horizon. We stopped in Elko for a traditional Basque lunch at the Star Hotel, and here I have to stop and confess a deeply embarrassing travel condition I get because it's essential to the story.
I can't poop when I'm traveling. This is a problem, and I suspect it comes from some deep internal fear that unfamiliar environments mean we're moving again, and my body locks down, refusing to process food normally until "home court advantage" is reestablished. In the early days of our relationship, I was polite and elliptical with Pants about the source of my discomfort, but now I just say it plainly and we buy lots of coffee. If that doesn't work, then I get to seek out a local grocery establishment and look eye to eye with some stranger as I slap down a box of Ex-Lax and try to pretend I'm not dying a little inside as we exchange pleasantries.
So this is what I did in Elko, Nevada, at the local Albertsons (which happens to be yet another completely inappropriate place for slot machines, and yet there they are, right next to the pharmacy, and occupied by all kinds of people only days before Christmas in a recession-- seriously, Nevada?). It was here in the Albertsons that I wrestled with my competing senses of embarassment and misery in front of some raccoon-eyed teenage girl who just couldn't seem to wipe the huge, knowing grin off her face while I tried to be casual in asking where the Basque restaurant was. Teen Cashier of Elko, know that you made my pain just a little bit worse, but know too that you are in ELKO, NEVADA. The Basque food was delicious.
We made it on to Salt Lake City that night and then further north to Ogden, where the Air Force has a base and pretends to do work. We stayed in their lodge, ceremoniously named the Mountain View Inn, for the next five days while the sky hurled giant, landmark-erasing piles of snow down upon us.
I should explain my feelings about the Air Force: I am jealous. They have a base at the foot of a beautiful mountain range in Utah and there is a postcard view out every window of every building on that base. Including the gym with its indoor track and four-story climbing wall and cathedral-like vaulted ceiling and glassed-in handball courts and legions of expensive exercise equipment. Were I notified that the Air Force has its own special warm-water founts for individual ball washing, I would not blink in hesitation. According to my sources (Navy conjecture), the Air Force gets 60% of government funding and the three remaining branches of service duke it out for the remaining 40%. Also, the Air Force lands on air strips, meaning solid ground, and puts their pilots up in nice hotels far from combat and pays per dium. It all makes "Anchors Aweigh" ring a little sad in my ears now, but I keep relatively quiet about that. There is also an Arts & Crafts building on the Ogden base, and Pants and I consoled our jealous little hearts by cooing about Air Force "craft hour" and wondering if they made paper snowflakes and pipe cleaner wreaths for their moms.
Overall, Ogden was a splendid staging ground for our raids on the Wasatch Mountains and their ski resorts. On Christmas Day we tried to snowboard at Brighton, but they were getting three feet of snow hurled down on them and once we made the heroic trek all the way up there, they turned us back. Avalanche cannons were booming in the background, the sky was invisible-- like static on an off-air station-- and cars kept sliding slowly and determinedly the wrong way, so I was more than a little relieved not to have to bust out my shaky snowboarding skills. The day had disaster written all over it, so we headed back to the base, loaded up on macaroni and cheese and watched all four Rocky movies. Pants made us Peppermint Patties (hot chocolate with peppermint Schnapps and whipped cream), and we contemplated Stalone's juiced up pecs and poor enunciation. A merry Christmas was had.
The next day we went to Snow Basin, and then the day after that to Brighton, and I experimented with the many ways not to connect my turns from toe edge to heel edge, but managed to triumph over the lift, which usually bitch slaps me straight onto my face every time I try to stand and slide out like all the other boarders. Both days I took an extended afternoon hiatus from the mountain for some prime people-watching while Pants explored the blue and black routes with his customary maddening ease and grace. I have discovered this about winter resort culture: no matter who you are, or how much money or plastic surgery you've had, no one looks cool walking in ski boots. Also, people will name their kids anything, and then feel comfortable yelling it in a restaurant. I heard Alsace, Loris, Letice and Hampton. These are spelling approximations. I'm sure there are silent letters and umlauts in play here. If I ever get really rich and then find myself pregnant, I'll have to look to either my spice rack or my collection of ancient mariner maps for name inspiration.
After five days in Ogden, we headed south to Zion National Park, and this is the part where I renounce everything bad I've ever said about Mormons and their bizarre special underwear. I truly think that if I were part of a wagon train of weary pilgrims that woke up one morning to sunrise in the deep palm of massive blazing red canyon, I would feel pretty certain that God had set me aside for some special purpose. How that translates into interplanetary travel and knee-length under drawers, I don't know, but I'm willing to accept "dazzled by nature's stunning beauty" as an excuse.
Here I also got a little glimpse into Pants' usually padlocked inner mind. "This is my favorite place in the world," he said quietly when we drove in and got the warm sun reflection from the white-robed shoulders of Zion's peaks. When we turned off the Babe's engine, the world was quieter than I'd heard it in quite some time. Every color seared the retina-- bluest blue of the sky, pure, electric white of snow, an improbable green from scattered evergreens digging their woody toes into the soaring mountainsides, and that wonderful iron-oxide red, the kind of red that gives off heat when it's lit and makes you believe you'll never be cold again. In Zion, I knew what he meant when he once said it was ridiculous to go to church to try and feel God near you when all you had to do was get outside and hike a little. More than that, though, I felt like being in Zion showed me a part of my husband that I've been trying to put words to for four years and can't. There are parts of him that can't be mined with words, his or mine or anyone else's. Parts of him are necessarily remote, but if you pack your own provisions and are prepared to walk, you'll see something beautiful.
We stayed two nights in the lodge in Zion's heart. We had planned to climb Angels' Landing, but the ranger warned us off it by saying some ominous things about ice and people with a fear of falling long distances. Not a fear of heights. Of falling from them. Quite sufficient for me, and instead we took long drives through the canyons and retired for nights of illicit in-room jambalaya cooking and listening to a histrionic British actor read The Chronicles of Narnia on my iPod. We also enjoyed a very fine 2007 Argentinean malbec from the Septima Bodega, which was purchased-- where else?-- at the 24-hour mini-mart on the Air Force base back in Ogden. Incidentally, one can also buy a full set of radial tires there at any time of night.
We originally planned to stay one night at Zion and one night at the lodge in Bryce Canyon, but a ranger with a very thick Baltic accent told us, "Lodge in Bryce Canyon is closed till April," so we re-upped our Zion reservation and made Bryce a day trip. This is where I finally overcame my sissiness about cold and actually took an hour hike in knee-deep snow in a thin, long-sleeved shirt and jeans. I started out the day in my giant fuzzy hat that makes Pants mistake me for a Japanese tourist when we get separated but soon found I didn't need it, or my scarf, or my jacket. We hiked around a canyon rim and took copious photos of the snow-hooded hoodoos (I love that word) in all their cake-layer colorfulness. I wanted to hike further down and go snaking in between all the rock formations, but Pants was recently informed that his left knee no longer has a single supporting ligament (the result of one major lacrosse injury and a series of increasingly ridiculous follow-up injuries, including one dance-related one at a wedding), and he balked at the winding, icy sandstone paths. Now who's the sissy?, I mock, bouncing on stabilized knees.
Our last stop was at Brian Head, Utah, which I think is a rather awkward name for junior high reasons. At any rate, it's where I finally learned to stop sucking so bad at snowboarding and was finally able to connect my turns, kick my back foot around to tear up an arcing wall of snow when I stop, and manage to keep my head facing forward while making tighter arcs from one edge to the other. Unfortunately, the price for all this progress was a regression to full retard on getting off the lift. In front of others, I will claim that the lift operator sped the thing up, that skiiers were in my way, or that I got a bad foothold with my unbound boot, but in reality, I simply ate shit every time I was supposed to stand up and get off the chair. On several occasions, I gave myself searing militaristic pep talks on the approach to the disembarkation point only to then catch the cord of my mitten on the arm bar of the lift chair, thus nearly ripping my arm out of socket when the lift and I headed our separate ways. My bruises from these encounters refuse to turn the shocking shades of purple and yellow I need to hold up the drama of my tale, but trust me, it fucking hurt.
Brian Head was wonderful in its refusal to fall victim to the fashion show elitism of most winter resorts. Overheard from a large family unloading a minivan in the parking lot: "Cody. CODY! Is them your mittens?" Our parking attendant was for once not some overly-outfitted winter species of skate punk but instead a jovial, red-faced farm boy who came over and shared his plans of becoming a Navy cook once he lost that last stubborn fifty pounds. "It just stays put, you know?" he lamented, taking another swig of his bucket-sized soda. When it became obvious that Pants and I, being the classy people we are, were going to change into our snowboarding gear in the covered bed of our pick-up and thus needed at least a modicum of privacy, he wandered off and struck up a conversation with another carload of people. This is the kind of guy who will never tell you that the runs are "burly, bra" and also will never come rocketing off the blind hill of a green pass, narrowly missing slicing your hand off and then tossing back a wind-chilled "my bad!"
New Year's Eve at Brian Head was wonderful because all the resort employees fire up red road flares and pile onto the longest ski lift at night. Going up, they looked like one big red caterpillar slowly conquering the mountain. Coming down, they looked like a scattered river of lava, splitting off at various trail heads and weaving wildly across the lanes, circling their arms and leaping over hills. The guy on the moguls looked like a tiny pinball popping his way down a tricky pass of the machine and never dodging the paddles. What made this all even more wonderful was that Pants and I watched it from the window of our own little cabin with big steaming bowls of homemade chili and chilled bottles of Utah's own Polygamy Porter. There were even fireworks afterward, which was great for the simple fact of being fireworks (one of the few things in which I take absolute, unmitigated joy), and for occurring over pristine snow, which magnifies their brilliance like nothing else, even water. I knew right then it had been a good year because that was the second time I'd seen fireworks on a rare vacation with Pants-- the first being at Monterey Bay on July 4th.
Which brings us up to the last day, where we got up early, early, way before the sun and while the stars were still incredibly bright and incredibly many, and wound our way down the mountain and out of Utah. My parting gift from the state was the discovery of snow donuts, which is the only name I can think of for the phenomena of falling clumps of snow along a hillside. A clump falls off, say, a low-hanging tree branch onto a hill, and as soon as it does, it gathers up more snow and starts to roll. As it rolls, it increases in size exponentially, just like in cartoons, but instead of a rabbit or a speech-impaired pig wrapped up in the middle of the ball, there's a hole where the ball formed and then rolled so quickly that a shot of daylight was left in the middle. When it settles in the ditch by a winding roadside, it is a fully formed donut standing proudly on edge with a little trough behind it tracing the way back up the hill. Awesome. The snow donut has replaced the icicle as winter's easy, go-to magic trick for impressing me.
On the last day, we ran through four states-- Utah, the lovely northwest corner of Arizona, flat, guileless, casino-infested Nevada, and then the Joshua tree, wind farm part of California, which leads to the false Scottish highlands of California, and then, tragically, to the foggy flatlands we call home. The reality that Pants leaves on deployment in less than two weeks has hit me like a properly functioning ski lift. I'm doing my typical thing-- having small panic attacks about things like the hall closet's flagrant disarray and our perplexing mountain of garage junk. I'm convinced there's something vitally important, and yet trivial, that we haven't discussed, like how to change out the lawnmower blade or what the hell that third remote that came with the DVD player is for.
I can't put my finger on it, and that only panics me more. He'll be gone soon, is all I can think, he's leaving. It's hard to sort out what's important now and what's just knee-jerk fear of something I know I don't do well, which is say goodbye and spend a long time alone. I keep hearing other wives telling me that same lie about how you get used to it, and I both want it to be true and don't want it to be.
This is a handy little lie that's been told to me about any number of horribly unpleasant things (short list: braces, moving, the suffocating smell of someone suffering indigestion with you on a long car trip, being assigned a truly belittling nickname, and the yearly recurrence of sinus headaches, and being too tall to be a matched dance partner for many men), but in the past two weeks, I've found that it's true about one thing I truly hate. My latest revelation: after repeated exposure to thigh-deep snow and face-peeling wind, one becomes accustomed to being cold such that being cold is no longer a compelling reason for rage, bitterness, and physical pain.
I owe this discovery to the state of Utah. And also to Pants, who schooled me in the art of layering for winter sports, though I at first doubted his "no cotton" edict and thus felt the paradoxical icy bite of first sweating and then freezing from my own sweat.
In the past two weeks, we've hit four states, rattling along in our 1992 Ford F-150, a.k.a Babe the Blue Ox, and covered roughly 2700 miles of snow, sleet, wind, ice, dust, and frozen dog turds (ah, ye designer-clothed resort dogs, little more than breathing accessories for Ugg-wearing, skinny-jeaned second wives-- dare I begrudge you a well-placed parking lot dog bomb? Nay, wretched one. Take ye pleasures where ye may). We hit the road on December 20 with the bed of the truck weighed down with a curious water bladder thing meant to keep the back end of our two-wheel drive truck from sliding on Lake Tahoe's icy mountain pass, and were successful in making it through both chain application and chain removal, which occur on either side of Donner Pass, where I like to eat beef jerky very solemnly and will the truck onward with my mind. That night we made it to Fallon, Nevada where there's a Naval Air Station with a lodge we could spend the night in for super cheap.
Poor Fallon. All lonely and abandoned in a part of the state willingly given over to fake bombing runs and permanent jet roar, and so homely that not even a lacy layer of snow can do much to class it up. Every town needs an ace in the hole, though, and Fallon's is the Taqueria Azteca, where God's own breakfast burritos are assembled with divine inspiration and priced criminally cheap. The next day was for traversing Nevada and gaining a new appreciation for the majesty of a big sky, which necessarily requires open, flat land and nothing to block the wandering of the eye from horizon to horizon. We stopped in Elko for a traditional Basque lunch at the Star Hotel, and here I have to stop and confess a deeply embarrassing travel condition I get because it's essential to the story.
I can't poop when I'm traveling. This is a problem, and I suspect it comes from some deep internal fear that unfamiliar environments mean we're moving again, and my body locks down, refusing to process food normally until "home court advantage" is reestablished. In the early days of our relationship, I was polite and elliptical with Pants about the source of my discomfort, but now I just say it plainly and we buy lots of coffee. If that doesn't work, then I get to seek out a local grocery establishment and look eye to eye with some stranger as I slap down a box of Ex-Lax and try to pretend I'm not dying a little inside as we exchange pleasantries.
So this is what I did in Elko, Nevada, at the local Albertsons (which happens to be yet another completely inappropriate place for slot machines, and yet there they are, right next to the pharmacy, and occupied by all kinds of people only days before Christmas in a recession-- seriously, Nevada?). It was here in the Albertsons that I wrestled with my competing senses of embarassment and misery in front of some raccoon-eyed teenage girl who just couldn't seem to wipe the huge, knowing grin off her face while I tried to be casual in asking where the Basque restaurant was. Teen Cashier of Elko, know that you made my pain just a little bit worse, but know too that you are in ELKO, NEVADA. The Basque food was delicious.
We made it on to Salt Lake City that night and then further north to Ogden, where the Air Force has a base and pretends to do work. We stayed in their lodge, ceremoniously named the Mountain View Inn, for the next five days while the sky hurled giant, landmark-erasing piles of snow down upon us.
I should explain my feelings about the Air Force: I am jealous. They have a base at the foot of a beautiful mountain range in Utah and there is a postcard view out every window of every building on that base. Including the gym with its indoor track and four-story climbing wall and cathedral-like vaulted ceiling and glassed-in handball courts and legions of expensive exercise equipment. Were I notified that the Air Force has its own special warm-water founts for individual ball washing, I would not blink in hesitation. According to my sources (Navy conjecture), the Air Force gets 60% of government funding and the three remaining branches of service duke it out for the remaining 40%. Also, the Air Force lands on air strips, meaning solid ground, and puts their pilots up in nice hotels far from combat and pays per dium. It all makes "Anchors Aweigh" ring a little sad in my ears now, but I keep relatively quiet about that. There is also an Arts & Crafts building on the Ogden base, and Pants and I consoled our jealous little hearts by cooing about Air Force "craft hour" and wondering if they made paper snowflakes and pipe cleaner wreaths for their moms.
Overall, Ogden was a splendid staging ground for our raids on the Wasatch Mountains and their ski resorts. On Christmas Day we tried to snowboard at Brighton, but they were getting three feet of snow hurled down on them and once we made the heroic trek all the way up there, they turned us back. Avalanche cannons were booming in the background, the sky was invisible-- like static on an off-air station-- and cars kept sliding slowly and determinedly the wrong way, so I was more than a little relieved not to have to bust out my shaky snowboarding skills. The day had disaster written all over it, so we headed back to the base, loaded up on macaroni and cheese and watched all four Rocky movies. Pants made us Peppermint Patties (hot chocolate with peppermint Schnapps and whipped cream), and we contemplated Stalone's juiced up pecs and poor enunciation. A merry Christmas was had.
The next day we went to Snow Basin, and then the day after that to Brighton, and I experimented with the many ways not to connect my turns from toe edge to heel edge, but managed to triumph over the lift, which usually bitch slaps me straight onto my face every time I try to stand and slide out like all the other boarders. Both days I took an extended afternoon hiatus from the mountain for some prime people-watching while Pants explored the blue and black routes with his customary maddening ease and grace. I have discovered this about winter resort culture: no matter who you are, or how much money or plastic surgery you've had, no one looks cool walking in ski boots. Also, people will name their kids anything, and then feel comfortable yelling it in a restaurant. I heard Alsace, Loris, Letice and Hampton. These are spelling approximations. I'm sure there are silent letters and umlauts in play here. If I ever get really rich and then find myself pregnant, I'll have to look to either my spice rack or my collection of ancient mariner maps for name inspiration.
After five days in Ogden, we headed south to Zion National Park, and this is the part where I renounce everything bad I've ever said about Mormons and their bizarre special underwear. I truly think that if I were part of a wagon train of weary pilgrims that woke up one morning to sunrise in the deep palm of massive blazing red canyon, I would feel pretty certain that God had set me aside for some special purpose. How that translates into interplanetary travel and knee-length under drawers, I don't know, but I'm willing to accept "dazzled by nature's stunning beauty" as an excuse.
Here I also got a little glimpse into Pants' usually padlocked inner mind. "This is my favorite place in the world," he said quietly when we drove in and got the warm sun reflection from the white-robed shoulders of Zion's peaks. When we turned off the Babe's engine, the world was quieter than I'd heard it in quite some time. Every color seared the retina-- bluest blue of the sky, pure, electric white of snow, an improbable green from scattered evergreens digging their woody toes into the soaring mountainsides, and that wonderful iron-oxide red, the kind of red that gives off heat when it's lit and makes you believe you'll never be cold again. In Zion, I knew what he meant when he once said it was ridiculous to go to church to try and feel God near you when all you had to do was get outside and hike a little. More than that, though, I felt like being in Zion showed me a part of my husband that I've been trying to put words to for four years and can't. There are parts of him that can't be mined with words, his or mine or anyone else's. Parts of him are necessarily remote, but if you pack your own provisions and are prepared to walk, you'll see something beautiful.
We stayed two nights in the lodge in Zion's heart. We had planned to climb Angels' Landing, but the ranger warned us off it by saying some ominous things about ice and people with a fear of falling long distances. Not a fear of heights. Of falling from them. Quite sufficient for me, and instead we took long drives through the canyons and retired for nights of illicit in-room jambalaya cooking and listening to a histrionic British actor read The Chronicles of Narnia on my iPod. We also enjoyed a very fine 2007 Argentinean malbec from the Septima Bodega, which was purchased-- where else?-- at the 24-hour mini-mart on the Air Force base back in Ogden. Incidentally, one can also buy a full set of radial tires there at any time of night.
We originally planned to stay one night at Zion and one night at the lodge in Bryce Canyon, but a ranger with a very thick Baltic accent told us, "Lodge in Bryce Canyon is closed till April," so we re-upped our Zion reservation and made Bryce a day trip. This is where I finally overcame my sissiness about cold and actually took an hour hike in knee-deep snow in a thin, long-sleeved shirt and jeans. I started out the day in my giant fuzzy hat that makes Pants mistake me for a Japanese tourist when we get separated but soon found I didn't need it, or my scarf, or my jacket. We hiked around a canyon rim and took copious photos of the snow-hooded hoodoos (I love that word) in all their cake-layer colorfulness. I wanted to hike further down and go snaking in between all the rock formations, but Pants was recently informed that his left knee no longer has a single supporting ligament (the result of one major lacrosse injury and a series of increasingly ridiculous follow-up injuries, including one dance-related one at a wedding), and he balked at the winding, icy sandstone paths. Now who's the sissy?, I mock, bouncing on stabilized knees.
Our last stop was at Brian Head, Utah, which I think is a rather awkward name for junior high reasons. At any rate, it's where I finally learned to stop sucking so bad at snowboarding and was finally able to connect my turns, kick my back foot around to tear up an arcing wall of snow when I stop, and manage to keep my head facing forward while making tighter arcs from one edge to the other. Unfortunately, the price for all this progress was a regression to full retard on getting off the lift. In front of others, I will claim that the lift operator sped the thing up, that skiiers were in my way, or that I got a bad foothold with my unbound boot, but in reality, I simply ate shit every time I was supposed to stand up and get off the chair. On several occasions, I gave myself searing militaristic pep talks on the approach to the disembarkation point only to then catch the cord of my mitten on the arm bar of the lift chair, thus nearly ripping my arm out of socket when the lift and I headed our separate ways. My bruises from these encounters refuse to turn the shocking shades of purple and yellow I need to hold up the drama of my tale, but trust me, it fucking hurt.
Brian Head was wonderful in its refusal to fall victim to the fashion show elitism of most winter resorts. Overheard from a large family unloading a minivan in the parking lot: "Cody. CODY! Is them your mittens?" Our parking attendant was for once not some overly-outfitted winter species of skate punk but instead a jovial, red-faced farm boy who came over and shared his plans of becoming a Navy cook once he lost that last stubborn fifty pounds. "It just stays put, you know?" he lamented, taking another swig of his bucket-sized soda. When it became obvious that Pants and I, being the classy people we are, were going to change into our snowboarding gear in the covered bed of our pick-up and thus needed at least a modicum of privacy, he wandered off and struck up a conversation with another carload of people. This is the kind of guy who will never tell you that the runs are "burly, bra" and also will never come rocketing off the blind hill of a green pass, narrowly missing slicing your hand off and then tossing back a wind-chilled "my bad!"
New Year's Eve at Brian Head was wonderful because all the resort employees fire up red road flares and pile onto the longest ski lift at night. Going up, they looked like one big red caterpillar slowly conquering the mountain. Coming down, they looked like a scattered river of lava, splitting off at various trail heads and weaving wildly across the lanes, circling their arms and leaping over hills. The guy on the moguls looked like a tiny pinball popping his way down a tricky pass of the machine and never dodging the paddles. What made this all even more wonderful was that Pants and I watched it from the window of our own little cabin with big steaming bowls of homemade chili and chilled bottles of Utah's own Polygamy Porter. There were even fireworks afterward, which was great for the simple fact of being fireworks (one of the few things in which I take absolute, unmitigated joy), and for occurring over pristine snow, which magnifies their brilliance like nothing else, even water. I knew right then it had been a good year because that was the second time I'd seen fireworks on a rare vacation with Pants-- the first being at Monterey Bay on July 4th.
Which brings us up to the last day, where we got up early, early, way before the sun and while the stars were still incredibly bright and incredibly many, and wound our way down the mountain and out of Utah. My parting gift from the state was the discovery of snow donuts, which is the only name I can think of for the phenomena of falling clumps of snow along a hillside. A clump falls off, say, a low-hanging tree branch onto a hill, and as soon as it does, it gathers up more snow and starts to roll. As it rolls, it increases in size exponentially, just like in cartoons, but instead of a rabbit or a speech-impaired pig wrapped up in the middle of the ball, there's a hole where the ball formed and then rolled so quickly that a shot of daylight was left in the middle. When it settles in the ditch by a winding roadside, it is a fully formed donut standing proudly on edge with a little trough behind it tracing the way back up the hill. Awesome. The snow donut has replaced the icicle as winter's easy, go-to magic trick for impressing me.
On the last day, we ran through four states-- Utah, the lovely northwest corner of Arizona, flat, guileless, casino-infested Nevada, and then the Joshua tree, wind farm part of California, which leads to the false Scottish highlands of California, and then, tragically, to the foggy flatlands we call home. The reality that Pants leaves on deployment in less than two weeks has hit me like a properly functioning ski lift. I'm doing my typical thing-- having small panic attacks about things like the hall closet's flagrant disarray and our perplexing mountain of garage junk. I'm convinced there's something vitally important, and yet trivial, that we haven't discussed, like how to change out the lawnmower blade or what the hell that third remote that came with the DVD player is for.
I can't put my finger on it, and that only panics me more. He'll be gone soon, is all I can think, he's leaving. It's hard to sort out what's important now and what's just knee-jerk fear of something I know I don't do well, which is say goodbye and spend a long time alone. I keep hearing other wives telling me that same lie about how you get used to it, and I both want it to be true and don't want it to be.
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