Exercising at the Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference

Everyone laughs at the film clip of Allen Iverson the basketball superstar who was too good for practice.  “Practice?” he famously whined, “Practice?  We talkin’ about practice?”  He could not believe that he, the league leading scorer at the time, was in trouble for skipping practice.  Whereas for most of us there’s a kind of cause and effect relation between practice and the real thing.  If you’re zen enough you know that there isn’t any difference at all between practice and the real thing.

I was explaining the value of exercises to some students at an impromptu class the Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference in Homer, Alaska.  I was trying to convince them that you are actually freed up by prescription and teacherly coercion.  You don’t “own” the exercises, you’re just following instructions.  You’re sort of liberated by low expectations, you have nothing to lose.  Whereas in our real writing we feel we have everything to lose.  And yet semester after semester I would see students’ best work done in exercises.  Left to one’s own devices to fill up the blank screen (page) with no prompting gives a writer an infinite number of ways to fail.  As a writer you can sit, apparently idle, in front of a blank screen for a long time, but give a student writer an exercise and time limit and sure enough every pen in the class will begin to move.

I no longer get many chances to submit myself to the exercises, the prompts, a teacher demands.  And, I confess, I can be a real do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do kind of guy.  But I did get the chance at the Conference this year under the prompting of two first rate teachers of writing, Debra Gwartney and Elizabeth Dodd, in two separate sessions.

Gwartney, whose memoir about parenting, Live Through This: A Mother’s Memoir, is about as harrowing as such stories get, was trying to teach us how trauma (the hot) is best rendered coolly.  The great strength of her demonstration was its carefully chosen examples, Harry Crews and Darin Strauss particularly, to illustrate something that is really hard to articulate.

I’m pasting in my exercises here, because for me practice writing is like blogging; it lives in some ethereal limbo between the grocery list and real writing. 

What I wrote in Debra’s session:

Within five minutes of meeting my surgeon for the first time he told me I had a large cancerous tumor on my kidney. He pointed it out on the x-ray with the eraser end of long pencil. And nearly simultaneously he explained that he would simply remove the tumor, and that I would be fine.

            This was surprising news, as I was asymptomatic—without symptoms––but I believed him: that I would be fine.

            I was 51 years old and just a few weeks earlier I had made a long difficult ascent of a lesser known peak in the Teton Range.  At the time I would have denied this, but I know now it was my unstated assumption that I was invincible.

            The moment this illusion began to crack was when I told the news of my impending surgery to my mother over the telephone. My manner was casual, and matter-of-fact, but she burst into tears and put the phone down.  After a long pause my father picked up the phone and I realized that my manner with my mother had been all wrong, insensitive.  I realized that age 51 was a late moment in life to understand that I was not 17.

Elizabeth Dodd (she’s the author most recently of In the Mind’s Eye: Essays Across the Inanimate World) was trying to talk about showing and telling in a fresh way and she too used terrific examples: Dinah Lenney, Atul Gawande, Lia Pupura.  I think every example the two of them provided made me want to read the whole piece they were excerpted from.  That’s a gift, too. 

I already have my misgivings about showing and telling, although like most of my colleagues I too dispense such advice (that showing is better) to students as if it had been received in a divine revelation etched on stone tablets.  (My take, in short: there’s nothing at all wrong with telling and anyway, showing is only telling that is successful at pretending to show; in other words, it’s all telling.  The end.)

Here’s what I wrote in Elizabeth’s session, in which a chore was supposed to show an underlying darkness:

The numbers on the fertilizer bag describe the nitrogen levels, you think, but all you care about is the weedkiller.  The lawn is infested with dandelions.  What’s wrong with that? you secretly wonder.

You fertilize the lawn with a hand-cranked spreader.  You hold the spreader open with your left hand, which begins to strain and cramp before the fertilizer is all dispersed.  To make the fertilizer actually spread you spin the cranking apparatus with your right hand, similar to a fishing reel but more precisely like the winding of toy jack-in-the-box.

The fertilizer covers your feet and you wonder how much of it you have inhaled.  You wonder if your sons will really keep the dog out of the yard, as they have promised.  And then you think of the three incidences of cancer that you have now survived.  And how not once did the surgeons speculate as to their causes.

Observe that I can’t resist “telling” at the end.  Thus, I get an F.  But you can’t fail practice (actually, you can).

What was odd to me, when I stepped back from them, is that in both cases I wrote about cancer, which I have vowed to myself that I would not address in my real writing.  Despite this it has slipped onto my blogposts a couple times.   And that seems right: the blog is a kind of practice.  And the exercises did what they are supposed to do: drew, as if from the unconscious, something I was not aware of having been there.

So thanks to Debra and Elizabeth, and also to the maestro Carol Swartz who puts together a great conference year after year.

So far this post has been too unified, not enough of my trademark randomness, so I’ll add:

•  On the drive back to Anchorage as I was crossing the Kenai River in Soldotna I heard Tim Buckley’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.  The river of course brought to mind Buckley’s disappearance in the Mississippi and how, somehow, for me, that fact makes his version of the song the most soulful.  Though, even Brandi Carlisle couldn’t ruin that song; so far as I know there’s not a bad cover of it, a mark of its greatness.

•  Then I filled a liter growler at the St Elias Brewing Company with Big Timber Double IPA.  This, you have to take my word, is sublime brew.

•  It rained the rest of the drive north and further up the Sterling Highway traffic was held up by troopers who were cleaning up an accident scene, where today I learned a man had died when someone swerved a rented car over the yellow line.  If I hadn’t stopped at the brewery . . .

Here’s to us all keeping on the right side of the yellow line.  And you: you’re never too old for some practice.

Random Gravelly Thoughts

1.  On Memorial Day, sitting on a gravel bar off Troublesome Creek a tributary to the Chulitna River fed by the melting snows of the Alaska Range, reading a book set in London and written by a fellow native Midwesterner, pausing to look up at the sky and think about my father.

2.  Comic Books reviewed in the NYTBR, science fiction in the NYer. A good essay on genre fiction, also in the New Yorker by Arthur Krystal and an even better commentary on both by Lev Grossman here:

http://entertainment.time.com/2012/05/23/genre-fiction-is-disruptive-technology/

Regarding genre: does knowing a work's genre affect our judgment of how good it is?  Uh, yeah, but not necessarily in a good way.

When Phaedrus asked Socrates “Do we need anyone to tell us what is good?” (Muchly paraphrased here by me), I think it was a rhetorical question, that the good should be obvious.  But, clearly, what is good is not obvious.

When I taught an undergrad creative writing course last spring, the students—hard-working and highly-motivated—would have rather written fantasy, which is what they have read.

“Serious literary fiction” sounds pretentious, but that’s where my heart is.

3. On our bike commute, if we do it as a circuit, we cover about thirty miles and stay mostly in an urban wilderness that passes four lakes and the Cook Inlet.  It’s a remarkable ride, yet part of our daily bread.  On a single day: a large trout breaks the surface of Taku Lake, and we fly by three moose and a porcupine.  I promise to not ever take this for granted.

4.   I am reading three books at once.  No, that can’t be right: I am reading one book at a time and simultaneously there are two others that I stopped reading for whatever reasons but have not abandoned.  The threesome is:  Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry, Lance Armstrong (with Sally Jenkins) It’s Not About the Bike, and Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84.

I make no apologies for the Armstrong—it’s an amazing story.  And, I didn’t start riding so much because of Lance or my own surviving of cancer (knock on wood, throw some salt over shoulder) but because my hips no longer tolerate running.

Niffenegger says, in an interview: “I don’t believe in electronic books.”  It’s nice to acquire the stature to be able to draw that line in the sand.  Most of us won’t be afforded this luxury.  I never read The Time Traveller’s Wife, but I like this book.

I have never read a Murakami book I didn’t love.

5.  Yesterday I passed four moose on my morning bike ride on Kincaid Coastal Trail.  Also, driving down to Homer I passed four more moose.  The difference between passing a moose on your bike and seeing one from your car is roughly equivalent to the difference between seeing a moose from your car and seeing one on television.  My pal Sweeney, who is camped out for the summer in some undisclosed location down here near Homer, encountered two bears yesterday on his bike commute.

6.  Driving down to Homer I heard this amazing NPR radio program about the attraction Europeans have for the city of my birth (59 years ago, exactly), Detroit:

http://www.theworld.org/2012/06/foreigners-attracted-to-detroit/

This line stuck in my head: “Some other people say that it’s exactly what the future looks like everywhere.”  

Toqueville called Detroit “the utmost end of European civilization.”  There’s not much Euro left but for the tourists.

When I got to Homer, also an end of the road locale, I heard a talk by Barry Lopez, in which he asserted that very soon, all people will be sharing the same fate.  He wasn’t talking about death, the obvious shared fate (which we expertly deny). He was talking, though, about a near apocalypse, our degraded environment, the unlikelihood of the ability of our species to sustain ourselves, and the coming, related economic collapse.  At least that is what I assume he was talking about.  He never used the words apocalypse, environment, nor even sustainablity.  I thank the heavens for that, as those words are practically meaningless from overuse.  What he was really talking about was the role of art in warding off the coming storm.  In this way, he was very much echoing Faulkner’s 1953 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, when the holocaust was assumed to be nuclear and Faulkner staked out art’s role as an almost literal pillar of society. 

Faulkner believed we will prevail, but, I think Lopez believes we will be lucky to merely endure.

Lopez is worried, but so am I.  I worry that this stance amounts to the same thing as a diversion, the band plays on while the Titanic lists and begins its watery slide.

7.  Last week I wrote three sentences.  I mean real writing.  At least (I don’t mind saying this) they are very good sentences.  However, this also will work to explain the trajectory of my writing career, such as it is.

8.  Finally, Ray Bradbury left us this week.  In life he well knew that he was immortal.  I hope he believed it with his last thought.  Bradbury was brilliant, energetic, and generous.  We will miss him.

Among the Giants with Emerson and Kiko

If you’ve been reading all along you might remember that a central preoccupation is my books and the lamentable fact that I moved from a huge house to a small house, thus much of my literary treasure house is hidden away in boxes in the garage. There remain titles that have yet to be recovered, but I believe they are out there.  Imagine, then, my distress when the hot water heater in the garage imploded, flooding the place.  Six large boxes of books had to be rescued, and I found, happily, none were damaged.  I also found all my Bruce Chatwin and all my Charles Baxter, curiously, in the same box.  And, I found my Emerson, the Riverside edition, also curiously, in a box of mountaineering books, among Bonington, Cassin, and Shipton.  I suspect it was in that particular box for a reason, but I can’t remember what it might have been.  More worrisome: this means that for four years, the years these were cloistered in the garage, I have not consulted Emerson.  Shameful, and soon to be remedied.

I was just thinking of Emerson because my friend, the poet John Mann, has used a line from Emerson as an epigraph in his book of poetry Able, Baker, Charlie (winner of the 2011 national Poetry review Book Prize, forthcoming in August 2012): 

“Now many are thought not only unexplained but inexplicable; as language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex.”

I have to ask John where he found those lines; looking for it in Emerson’s essays could take days, weeks, though there are far worse places to be lost.

Inside my Emerson book was a folded piece of paper and I recognized it immediately as a student’s work from my high school teaching days, circa about 1985.

The short essay was written by Francisco Arteseros, who signed his name Fco and liked to be called Kiko.  I remember him well because, well, because of this essay, but also because he was dropped into our school as if out of the sky with not a word of English. His father was a physicist on assignment to the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, and both he and Kiko’s mother were elegant and worldly.  She, too, knew no English and was teaching herself by watching soap operas.  I liked the parents immensely and admired the panache with which Kiko and his brother entered into high school life in America.

I will now transcribe Kiko’s essay, exactly as it appears on the page, which is the original and covered (much to my embarrassment) in teacherly red ink.

THE JUMP

It was spring, the moust beautiful estation of the year, birds flying, everything was just wonderfull.  THE sun was bright and illuminating the scenary of my experience. That night, I had a dream my new bicycle a shiny wonderfull machine made for run as fast as the win.  When I went to buy the bicycle, in the bicycle store, I sow a lot of god bicycles of all kinds, chrome, small bigs, smalls, all kinds of excellent bicycles, I was about to buy one really good but, then in the last moment I sow one bicycle, the bicycle of my dream the special bicycle, the best and mist beautiful machine I ever seen.  So I bought it and took it home, I cleaned it and fix it. The next morning I weak up early, it was not me, I was a different person, I felt stronger than ever before, I was ready for something I did not know. I went right to the garage, and I did not know and I went straight to the bicycle, it was there, it was the most wonderful machine I ever seen.  Something made me take the bicycle and started riding, the bicycle tuck me to the park, nobody was there, it seemed like I was the only one in the world.  The park was full of roses and all kinds of flowers,  could feel the wonderful powere of nature in the air in the flowers in the trees in the birds, suddenly I saw this big jump so I ride my bicycle straight to it, I was gaining speed by the seconds, I felt how my all body was getting ready for the jump, suddently I felt my self flying in the air I was floating in the space, I could feel myself becoming part of the nature I was nature too I could smell the aroma of the roses and the fresh air in my face.  In that moment I felt that God, nature, and my soul were the same thing.

At the bottom of the page are two notes from me, yes, in the red ink:
This is very good, and Please see me about the grammar. At least I underlined the This is very good.  In the end, I know that, well, I still have the original, meaning that he never did come to see me about the grammar, and also, I hope, that I realized my corrections were absurd.

I remember when Kiko got in a motorcycle accident my wife and I visited him in the hospital, where, when his mother left the room, he lit up a cigarette. I suppose this memory, this writing, is the best illustration I can offer as proof of the ephemeral rewards of teaching.

 

And, just this: the reason Kiko’s essay is tucked in among Emerson’s pages must be the same reason that Emerson was tucked in among the mountaineers, giants among giants.

Slender Currents

Good luck comes in slender currents, misfortune in a rolling tide—according to the Irish

It’s been a surreal winter for lots of reasons and I’m not going to go into the over-arching big picture here. All that feels beyond me.  But the slender currents I’ll tell you about here are local and manageable.  And the reasons for them aren’t at issue.  Good dumb luck, outside the karmic chain, so far as I can tell.

Night skiing at Alyeska with my sons.  Although we all skied a lot last season (this, if you haven’t yet given up—the snow is still out there) the three of us didn’t get out together until February.  And it was great night, with a layer of powder that kept blowing over the runs so that every run was untracked until we got on it.  Dream skiing.  And after, we got a quick meal at the Sitzmark, the classic ski resort bar at the base of the mountain.

When we got home my skis weren’t in the box on top of the car.  We racked our brains: could it be that we simply left them in the parking lot? Possible, but I almost always lean them against the car and we couldn’t have driven away without a clatter. And we had skied right to the car and I was sure I hadn’t driven over them.

Furthermore, Macklin had met us at the Sitz after taking a couple extra runs with his pals; he said he saw them in the box when he loaded his board in.  But when pressed, he couldn’t swear to it.  We never lock the box, because, with this single exception, we are always either driving the car or skiing.  I wanted to call them stolen—it felt better than saying I spaced them out.

I reversed the heinous 37 mile icey drive back down the Seward Highway to scour the parking lot: nada.  Made a call to lost and found—not hopeful.

I was heartsick, more or less.  These were new skis.  Skied on six times.  I hadn’t even mastered them yet.

Five days later I get a call from REI. Did I lose a pair of Solomon Suspects?  Some random person returned them to REI ski shop where the bindings had been mounted.  There was pink 3x5 card taped to them that read “Found at Alyeska.”

Six weeks later we are hiking up Peak Three with the plan to ski down.  It’s a perfect day, a good two feet of fresh snow, tracks to boot up, blue skies, no wind.  I’m with my son Dougal and his pals from Illinois, the Larson brothers, partners on many an adventure.

From the top of Peak Three you can see deep into the Chugach Range to the east and below us to the west, the glittering waters of Cook Inlet, to the north: Foraker, Hunter and Denali line the horizon.  Quite a vision for a couple of dudes from Illinois.  Quite view for anyone; I know I never tire of it.

The snow was so fine that I was skiing like a powder master (which I am not) slow-motion s-turns, amazing stuff.  Then suddenly I am airborne.  The good thing about powder skiing is the soft landings.  The bad thing was what I was about to find out.  One of my skis rested right on the surface, upslope, where I had ejected out of it.  The other was . . . where?  I set about searching for it like probing for an avalanche victim.  Probing every six inches with my ski pole in an ever expanding grid.  My son hucked himself up slope a hundred yards and joined me.  We blocked out an area about twenty by forty feet and went over it for a couple hours.  The thing was gone.  And worse, well not worse, but also bad: I was going to have to walk down through the best snow ever.  These skis and me, I think, were a match not made in heaven.

A few days went by and I was committed to the search.  However, even though it hadn’t snowed, the wind had swept the slope clear and cemented the surface in.  It would be spring before they emerged, like a fallen alpinist from the last century spit unexpectedly out of the glacier.  Nonetheless, that day, Macklin and I were halfway up the mountain and wanted to hit the summit.  It was windy and snowy, but we pushed on.  Once on top Macklin hit the fall line and was out of sight in a flash.  I work my way down the west ridge a couple hundred yards before entering the fall line, and have a pretty good run.  I hit the car in 18 minutes from the summit, a 2,400 foot vertical run.  

“Do you know how long it took you?” I asked Macklin. 

“Well,” he said, “the same song that I was listening to on my headphones on the summit was playing when I got to the car.  So, I’m thinking about three minutes.”

So, at the end of the season, I have another very minor surgery, minor, at least compared to the surgery that delayed the beginning of the season, and about the only thing the doctor says is, “Don’t go skiing.”   So I wait, for the stitches to come out.   And when my hiking pals ask, I say I have to sit out a week.

They call from the trailhead, “Was that a Solomon Suspect you lost?

“ Yep.” 

“We have it,” they said.

The one party that had been ahead of them that morning had brought it back and planted it like a flag in the snow next to the parking area.

So, my Suspects are returned to me.  I’m debating whether to take them out again—it’s May 6^th, and I have other skis.  I’m thinking about starting out fresh with them next season.  I am knocking on wood, thankful for the slender currents of good luck, with no expectation of avoiding the rolling tide of the other.

Dougal W. Stevenson 1931--2012

This is a photograph of my parents that I made last summer on my parents' 59th wedding anniversary in August. My dad looks pretty good, I think. In fact, he didn't look so bad the last time I saw him the last week in February. I was able to convince myself that I would see him again. But I was wrong; he passed away this week.

The piece I've pasted in below is part of a longer piece. I didn't write it to tell my dad's life story, or the story of our family, or anything so grand or thorough. I wrote it in the spring of 2011 after visiting him in Dearborn. He was between chemotherapy sessions and he had come out of the first round pretty well.

I expect I'll have a lot more to say about him later, but this is all I have for now:

Big Dougal

I made these travel plans at a time when we had been told to expect the worst. But the worst has not happened. Instead, my father has endured the chemotherapy and radiation with considerable luck and grace, though whether the treatment is actually affecting the cancer remains to be known. In fact, he looks better than he did the last time I saw him. He stopped drinking a few months before the cancer was diagnosed and had lost considerable weight, a good outcome from a bad cause.

The anticipation between the time he was diagnosed and when the treatment began was hard on him and my mother. Over the phone I said, “Well, you’ve had a lot of time to get used to the idea [of chemotherapy]. And he laughed. “That sounds like something I would have said to you.”

One day I was sitting on the dock at my parents’ house on Blue Lake. It was early morning. I was drinking coffee and watching the mist rise off the surface of the water. My dad walks up and sits down next to me.

“What are we going to do today?” I ask.

“We’re doing it,” he says.

My mother, who worked with autistic kids, has said that when I was child I was this close to being autistic. She holds her thumb and forefinger about one inch apart. I’m not saying she‘s wrong, but if she’s even this much (thumb and forefinger an inch apart) right, I’m claiming I got it from my father. The form it takes in him is talking, to no one in particular, in bits of received language that have stuck in his brain: ditties, sayings, punchlines, song lyrics, advertising blips. He’s been doing this all my life and every time I see him there is more. “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride,” he whispers to no one, apropos of nothing.

Although my brother has been (wisely) named financial executor of their estate my father felt compelled to show me his financial paperwork: how much money there is and where it is all located. It was the notebook of man who had put his affairs in order. I wish he hadn’t shown it to me. And it wasn’t necessary, as it’s a well-known fact that my mother is blessed with immortality.

He’s a bit frail and has lost his muscle tone along with the weight. Basically he has been immobile for about six months. He has a feeding tube attached to his stomach, that hasn’t seen use, yet has to be cleaned out everyday. He also has some other needles and tubes attached to his arm. He bathes everyday and avoids all the things the doctors have advised to avoid: people, fresh fruit and vegetables, flowers. Stuff he pretty much avoided by nature anyway.

He was a tough guy, a strong guy, most of his life. His father burned the family furniture in the furnace to get them through the winter in the early 1930s. He played football in college, undersized, in the days before facemasks. He smoked a couple packs of Marlboros a day, back when that was not too uncommon. He drank Cutty Sark and didn’t have much use for golf. When we were in high school he could still hang with us in two-on-two basketball in the driveway. He lived most of his life in Dearborn, a notoriously white community, but was one of the least racist persons I have ever known. He believed in Detroit and the car industry. He owned some cool cars: a clean Falcon with three on the tree, an AMC something or other with a huge oversized engine, and later a Mustang that my brother John opened up to 140 mph on I-94 regularly between Dearborn and Kalamazoo. He started out at Ford and ended up back there, sort of, at J. Walter Thompson who did Ford’s advertising. I believe he voted Republican all his life until recently: unable to morally support Republicans he preferred not to vote at all. Also, I suspect that he no longer subscribes to the concept that what is good for General Motors is good for the country. The only time I remember him crying was trying to say grace at Thanksgiving, shortly after his mother died.

We watched a Red Wings game together and talked about our favorite Wings, mine being Gordie Howe, Federov and Shanahan. It’s pretty hard not to love Nik Lidstrom.

My parents let Eddie through the quarantine. They always liked him. He knew where the line was with them and stayed just slightly on the wrong side of it. Ed would pretty much say anything that came to mind, and somehow get away with it. My parents were thrilled to see him. He did his usual bit, good naturedly insulting everyone in the room, talked to my dad about Ford, and the buy-out he got from them after thirty years, talked about the work he was doing now at Detroit Diesel. Then he told them he’d drop me back home at 4:30 in the morning and to look for me in the snowbank out by the street. As we left, I could hear my dad repeating his name, “Eddie Schechter, Eddie Schechter” like a mantra, and shaking his head in wonder, as if Eddie were utterly unchanged since the day he first walked into our house in 1967.

The day I left town he checked into Henry Ford Hospital for another week of chemotherapy. I took a photograph of him at the hospital and you wouldn’t know he was sick by looking at it. My dad was up for the fight.

The Window

“ . . . the guy locked away on the sun porch who the Young Doctors were taking apart an arm and leg at a time.”

––Mark Richard, “The Birds for Christmas”

I’ve always remembered this line but never, until now, thought of it as referring to me. These cancer surgeries are barbaric—they just cut away chunks of flesh and pray for “clean margins.” I’ve got another one next week.

We’ve got so much snow that even with a late start and probably an early finish (for me) I have skied more than in any other year. This is one advantage of not having skied so much as younger man. I came to skiing pretty late.

I was thinking of all the snow (800+ inches down in Girdwood!) and wondering how the crevasses might be all sealed up, and presumably safe, up in the Alaska Range. I think about that a lot more since reading The Ledge by Jim Davidson and Kevin Vaughn. It’s about these two guys who fall into a hidden crevasse on Mt Rainier. One guy dies and the other barely manages to extricate himself and later, to write the book. The book is chilling because probably hundreds of people had walked over that spot and not broken through the surface. I just count my hours on Mt Rainier and think about all the good luck I’ve had, much of it blind and dumb, as good luck so often is.

From up on Mt Kennedy we could see that down on the glacier below there were dozens of places in the snow where the crevasses were buried. They only were slightly shadowed. They were plentiful and parallel and they looked like shark’s gills. On the way in we had blithely, unawaredly skied right over them. But now we knew they were there. We tried not to think of them as we skied out.

This was the advice that according to Hemingway the Catholic Church gave: “Not to think about it." But, said Jake Barnes, Hemingway’s alter ego, “. . . swell advice, Try and take it sometime.”

Years after our climb, one of those very crevasses below Mt Kennedy swallowed up an airplane, killing the pilot. The climbers, who had successfully done the same route we had, were lucky to have survived.

We were drinking Old Bushmills, neat, on St Patrick’s Day, as is befitting a couple old dudes, and I was telling Charlie Sassara my theory that maybe all this snow would seal up the crevasses and it would be a good year for something in the Alaska Range. He was quiet for a minute and then said. “I kind of liked dry years. That way there was less stuff that can fall down on you.”

Crevasses and avalanches. Fire and ice.

Jim Sweeney’s a cat that has used up all his nine lives and then some. He used up most of them on one trip into the Alaska Range where he got seriously injured and barely extricated from the Ruth Glacier. I don’t think a reader of his new book can be expected to actually count the number of avalanches Sweeney survived on that trip. After eight or nine days they managed to get him off the glacier and into the hospital in Anchorage. The book Sweeney has written about this is called Alaska Expedition: Marine Life Solidarity and will be out any day. It’s about as harrowing a mountaineering book as you will ever read (that’s a long list, too: harrowing mountaineering books). The main thing they could have done differently: not gone climbing at all.

When I first got to know Sweeney a few years ago he said, “I don’t even dream of mountains anymore.” But over the weekend he was telling me of the ski runs he took down Flattop over the weekend (note: Flattop is not lift-assisted). So perhaps, after his hip was replaced and the writing of the book exorcised a few daemons, Sweeney is back to dreaming of mountains again.

Charlie and I are talking about the window. The window within which you are climbing at your best. I forget how this topic came up. Probably we were talking about elitism as it relates to climbers and membership in the American Alpine Club, of which Charlie has recently become president. The fact that today the requirement for getting into the club is having a credit card. Charlie, during his window, was as elite as an alpinist can get.

I tell him that I want to go back to the Alaska Range. The climbs I have in mind are not major. He nods.

“It’s a small window,” he says, “a very small window.”

Do you know the great Grace Paley story “A Conversation with My Father?” It is perhaps the ultimate metafictional story, in which a writer tries to write a story to please her dying 86 year old father. The last words of the story belong to the father, he says: “”Tragedy! You too. When will you look it in the face?”

It’s a rhetorical question, right? And I think about it quite a bit, mostly disassociated from the context of the story. The answer is: “not until I absolutely have to.”

I don’t even want to think about the window, the small window. The surgery––minor, I have been assured––is next Thursday. All want to think about is how many powder days I’ll get in before then.

End of the Racing Season

“And, in short, I was afraid.”–-Eliot’s Prufrock

How many words will it take to describe how horribly I raced in the Town League this season at Alyeska? And I’m not even talking about how I compared to the other skiers, which I can’t care too much about because they’re almost all better than me even had I been skiing my best.

I’m talking about how much crappier I was this season than last season. Reasons abound, he rationalized, after the fact.

I started late due to surgery and the course was in lousy condition many of the nights: rutted like a luge course one night, hard as polished diamond field (a diamond field?) another night, –15 F˚ another night, blizzard another night. I only raced five nights, so maybe one night it was okay. My times were lousy every night, though.

By lousy, I mean an average of five full seconds slower than last season. Last season, on a really good night, I once hit the gates (well, didn’t hit them) for a 22 second run. This season I averaged around 29. When a 24 second run is a whole infinity practically, 5 seconds, well, that’s an infinity, too. Time does something inexplicable between the start and the finish line: slowing down and speeding up simultaneously.

I asked my surgeon why I was afraid to let it all hang out this season, when last year I wasn’t (or far less so, apparently). ("Let it all hang out"–my alma mater Evergreen's motto–Omnia Extares.) He laughed because it was the second question I asked him that was, according to him, out of his league. The first question, which I’m embarrassed to admit, was, “Okay it’s a miracle I’m alive, why aren’t I more ecstatic about it?” Not his field, he said, implying I needed a different sort of professional help. Now I was asking him why I stood at the starting gate, ski tips hanging out over the lip, poles poised for leverage, waiting to hear “Skier ready blue, Skier ready red? Three, two, one, . . .” and was . . . scared.

Last season, I couldn’t wait to race. I took a killer fall too, last season, described by a PBR–drinking local racer as “mega ragdoll yard sale.” But I couldn’t wait for the next run.

My surgeon said, “The Scottish race car driver, Sterling Moss said that when he became afraid, he became cautious and becoming cautious increased his danger, didn’t lessen it. And Moss knew that then it was time to quit.” Obviously, my surgeon is telling me that less risky pursuits would be more, I don’t know, age appropriate?

Anyway, at the end of the racing season, I was just glad to have finished the seasons’ runs unhurt. Then, I had a couple IPAs, at the Sitzmark, Aly’s classic après-ski bar, collected my race t-shirt and hit the road back up to Anchorage where I got on a plane to Detroit where I would visit my dad who is beyond doctor’s help, little cancer fires in too many parts of his body to put out. I easily put skiing out of mind. On a good day my dad gets out of bed and walks to his recliner and back and forth a few times, but he’s clearly winding down. On the day the hospice nurse was there he was in good enough spirits to make faces at me behind her back. But some time during the hospice nurses’ droning I had this epiphany and it was this: next year I’m charging hard in Town League, fuck it.

As previously scheduled I returned from the Midwest a day earlier than my conference lasted to race in the second largest cross country ski race in North America, the Tour of Anchorage. Last year in my first Tour I did not distinguish myself, except by how terrible I felt at the end, which included mild hallucinations (not the good kind), vomiting, and hypothermia. The trifecta. Thus, it’s obvious why I was so eager to repeat the experience. I concluded it was a nutrition problem and I had help figuring out a strategy from our trainer, the great Heidi Beer.

On race day morning I had not slept much, having just flown in from Chicago the day before. But master ski waxer, Dave Ward, and his faithful apprentice waxer, Erich Heinrich, had expertly prepared my bases and, somehow, I felt great and during the 25 K course I never stopped feeling great. I kept an even pace, and even finished strong on the final long uphill. It was a vindication, or something.

We’re having a record snow year and I’ll probably get some runs in well into June. I’m already nearing my season's record for days on skis. No more racing, but lots more skiing ahead. And that’s a good thing, because you never know what run will have been your last.