Training runs

ThirdCat asked if we still have snow. Yep, we do. Photos from today.

At the top of the northwest chair looking toward Sparks Lake.

Searching for untracked snow. There's a turn or two here!

I got a little lost when I ducked into the trees, thinking that I was a few turns from the run when in fact I was a lot further. I stopped to take this picture when I knew I'd found the run again. That's it, that bright patch of snow up ahead.

Headin' back up.

A case of nerves

Every day for a week I've woken up feeling nauseous. I'm jittery, shivering and nauseous.

It's nerves.

When I was a girl – about my son's age – and started traveling for gymnastics competitions, I'd wake up nauseous like this. I never could eat any breakfast; and then my nerves acting on an empty stomach would cause dry heaves. Once I nearly puked the whole drive from Hazelton to Philadelphia. My poor father.

I thought I'd outgrown this tendency. I haven't felt morning nausea since I was 14.

Turns out I just haven't been doing things that make me nervous.

We've going backcountry skiing. My husband and me. Next Wednesday we're driving 10 hours to Nelson, BC, where we'll catch a helicopter to a mountain-top resort. For three days, all day, we'll ride the powder in the interior mountains of British Columbia. We travel by snowcat...

I'm really nervous.

It's the claustrophobia. I get panicky in deep snow. Also I broke my arm once crashing into a tree and I really, really do not want to do that again... Luckily for the last few weeks we've had a fair bit of powder at Mt. Bachelor – two Fridays ago was epic – so I've been addressing my fear: taunting it: daring it. I snowboarded in three feet of new snow (the snow that Ullr brought) with my daughter, who got stuck three times; I had to unclip from my board and wade through it to rescue her. I snowboarded in eight surprise inches of new snow with my son, who got himself stuck once in a tree well and once in a wave; I had to unclip from my board and wade through the snow to rescue him. I haven't gotten myself stuck, but I have been riding as much as I can through the trees, searching out untracked bits, meandering, playing. If I feel I may be too close to a tree I throw myself into the snow, poof! and then have to figure out how to get back up and going again.

It hasn't helped. I'm still nervous. Mt. Bachelor just cannot replicate for even ten turns the untracked powder in the interior mountains of BC.

EEEEK!

How to tell a story

Some of the world's best storytellers – the folks at This American Life and Planet Money – discuss how to make a story interesting at transom.org. If you're interested in communication, go read this stuff. (Juliane, I'm talking to you!) Here's another good one.

Claustrophobia

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, I learned to scuba dive in Lake Cayuga: a long, cold, muddy-bottomed lake near Ithaca, New York.

I learned to scuba dive in Lake Cayuga because my dad wanted to take us all vacationing in Belize. If I learned in Ithaca and my sister learned in Rhode Island and my little sister, mother and father learned in Pennsylvania, he said, then when we gathered in Belize would could all dive together, being at the same skill level.

That is so my dad.

Anyway. On our first day at the lake, bare trees waved in a strong wind, small branches tearing off and falling to the ground; the grass was brown, dead; picnic tables sat forlorn. We dozen students stood in the dirt at water's edge, shivering in black wet suits and flippers like so many displaced Antarctic penguins.

The instructor told us what to do, pausing every few minutes to remind us that this was a means to an end, that in Belize or the Bahamas or Florida everything would be different. There it would be hot! The water would be clear! It would be blue and alive! You'll see fish there, he said. It won't be like this.

So we girded our loins¹ and flopped into the lake. We tread water. We practiced breathing through our tanks at the surface. We swam out a little ways. Then twelve scuba newbies attempted to dive down through six feet of murk, struggling and splashing, utterly ridiculous. We could not control our buoyancy. Some people sunk, plunk, onto the bottom and then kicked their legs to come up a bit – and their flippers stirred the mud until I could see nothing.

Nothing.

My hands disappeared. My classmates disappeared. I kicked and kicked in a panic, searching for the surface and finding only brown – I did not know where I was, I did not know where anyone else was – I kicked and kicked and imagined I'd reached the center of the lake, where no one would ever find me except Nessie... Finally in exhaustion I stopped fighting and lo, I did float to the surface.

Yeah. Lost in six feet of water.

*

I took that class 20 years ago, so I don't honestly remember some of the details I included here, like tree branches being blown down in the wind. However I will never forget how I panicked.

I am easily claustrophobic now: in the children's tent; in a cave; or on the mountain in a storm when I've fallen and have to unclip from my board, struggling through waist-deep snow to reach a steeper pitch, and then clip in again and struggle to get upright, my hand sinking in the snow and my board sinking, too. At such moments I want to rip off my helmet and goggles and breathe, breathe, breathe.

*

Now see, I think a lot of blog posts read as if they were about something else. As if they were code.

No?

¹I had to look up that phrase. In totally unrelated wondering: how is it we still use a phrase that originated more than 1000 years ago?