"Solo" Backpacking

I did my first "solo" backpacking trip this week. I put "solo" in quotations because I was a solo human, but I did have a partner: Lexi's 8-month-old golden doodle puppy, Juneau.

Juneau and me at the trailhead

The trailhead

I was planning to be gone for two nights but only ended up staying for one. I was hiking in a location I'd never been to before and I wasn't sure what the landscape would be like, although I did know that the weather would be warmer and sunnier than where I live. I guess I should have done more research.

Getting some sun felt amazing. As you can see, the trail is pretty wide-open and there wasn't a lot of shade. A jumble of trails near the trailhead made navigating difficult for me at first (as I am not great with directions and when backpacking with other people I am usually not the one in charge of the map). When I couldn't find one of the main trails I was looking for, I had to find an alternative route.

Happy hiker

From there, the trail steepened and narrowed and I started to feel my body's inadequacy. I had to pause to catch my breath a few times on some of the uphills and Juneau would always turn back and look at me like, Why are we stopping?

However, I was rewarded multiple times with stunning views.

Looking back on the hill I had just hiked up

I am smitten by the snow-capped rockies in the distance.

Glad I'm only at 7-8,000 feet in elevation! No 14ers for me (yet).

The snow glows in the sunshine.

Just thought this was a neat-looking hill

Because our location was, as it turns out, pretty desert-like in climate, there were lots of cacti hanging around, one dead piece of which Juneau stepped on. He paused to pull it out of his foot with his teeth and then started walking again, limping. I sat down and tried to get him to sit next to me or on my lap so that I could pull out the remaining spikes. After pulling one out, he would have no more. A few minutes later, we started walking again and he stopped limping so I figured, oh well. That was, thankfully, the only injury either of us suffered.

The trail widened and leveled out again and the sun was getting low. However, none of the creeks promised on my map had made themselves known; in fact, everything I saw that looked like a creek bed was dry as a bone. For being so early in the summer, I was surprised that there would be so little water. I didn't have enough to last me two nights or really even one, as I had been counting on being able to find some in the alleged creeks in the area.

The low sun made me nervous about having enough time to set up camp, so when I got to a fork in the trail, I climbed a hill in between the "tongs" of the fork, hoping to look down and spot some water. The trees blocked my view, but there was a wonderful camping spot up on that hill so I decided to just park it for the night and then figure out what to do the next day.

My body was ill-prepared for the hiking and weight-bearing required for backpacking, but I have all the skills and knowledge necessary, so I was pretty pleased with myself that I was able to set up camp and cook dinner over a fire with no issues. Juneau was wonderfully well-behaved and occupied himself with a jawbone he found.

It was pretty brittle and made a nasty crunching sound when he chewed it.

The sun was down and I had run out of things to do to keep busy. I lamented being "alone" and having no one to talk to. Contemplating this, I decided that I didn't really care for solo backpacking. It gives me a nice sense of autonomy and self-accomplishment, but I am too much of an extravert and need someone to talk to (who talks back). I settled down next to the fire with my bum in the dirt and started reading "Jacob have I loved."

When it was about 9 or 9:30 it was too dark for me to continue reading even with the light from the fire so I went to bed. I saved a little bit of water for both of us to drink in the morning, but I was almost out. I brought my ENO hammock instead of a tent and tried out the new 15-grade sleeping bag Evan got me for Christmas.

Meanwhile, Juneau was attached with a long cord and harness to one of the trees my ENO was strapped to. Lexi had prophesied that he probably wouldn't sleep much nor even want to lie down on the ground because of his aversion to being dirty. She was right about him not sleeping. I had trouble sleeping simply because I was in a hammock and unable to sleep on my belly, but Juneau was busy playing watchdog all through the night.

I frequently heard him growling and even barking, sometimes from right under my hammock, at things I could or couldn't hear. I was terrified of a mountain lion smelling our food and coming into camp. With mountain lions, you're supposed to make yourself look big and talk to it in a low, firm voice. If Juneau saw one, I was sure he'd foil my attempts to ward it off by barking and possibly attacking, which would result in both of our deaths, so I was a little freaked out. I never saw or heard any humans or animals larger than a bird the entire time, though.

I had heated some rocks around the fire so when it came time to go to bed, I put them under my hammock to keep me warm. It worked pretty well for a couple hours. Here's a video on using hot rocks if you're interested.

At some point, shivering in my sleeping bag, I peeked out and realized it was morning. I sat up and saw this:

Juneau had gotten tangled around a cactus bush and, lacking the logic to get himself untangled, he nevertheless used problem-solving skills and Houdini-ed his way out of his harness. Turning to look for him, I saw him in the near distance looking at me stock-still with his head cocked. I called him and he ran over as fast as he could and proceeded jumping on my hammock and biting me.

When I was able to keep Juneau off of me long enough to get out of my sleeping bag and put on my shoes, I gave him breakfast and we finished the little bit of water we had left. I had decided that without any water and no guarantee that there would be water further up the trail, the safest and smartest thing to do would simply be to head home. We packed up and were on the trail by about 6:45 a.m., going a different way than how we had come in.

The view from my campsite at sunrise. 

Camera batteries died so this was taken with my phone.

On our way out, we passed a tiny flowing creek and I was able to get some water for the rest of the hike. It was so tiny that I could see both where it started and ended from one spot. My mind had been made up about going home so I didn't consider getting water from it and then turning around and camping somewhere, nor did I consider camping by the creek as it was so tiny and only about 8:00 in the morning when we found it. I don't know what I would have done all day just sitting there. Napped, I guess. Juneau was too thirsty to wait for me to filter water for him and he drank heartily directly from the stream. He seems to be suffering no ill effects.

I reached my car at about 9:20 and was home by around 11. I'm disappointed by the pseudo-failure of my trip, but I learned from the experience. My body was pretty sore the next day (yesterday), so I'm also glad I didn't push my body to do more than I was really prepared to do. Still, I hope I can go out again soon, next time with a (human) friend.

God bless.

Ten-years-ago Me

I had what might be considered an out-of-body experience today in which I saw myself from my 13-year-old self's perspective.

I was driving, with the warm sun shining in on my arms and face and the mountains in full view on my right, a cool song I'd never heard before playing on the radio. From my current perspective, it was a slightly above-average experience, however the fact that I was driving to the shop to pay $130 on a car repair for a problem that had no drivability symptoms neutralized the moment significantly.

Suddenly, I wondered what ten-years-ago me would think if she could see me in that moment, and realized I was the epitome of coolness. I looked cool: I was wearing cute shoes, dark skinny jeans, aviators, and my favorite teal tank top. My red hair was braided down the back and my double-pierced ears were decorated. I was in my very own car, driving parallel to snow-capped mountains, jamming out. And I was doing cool things: being an adult getting car repairs, spending adult-sized money, working, going to grad school. My 13-year-old self was dazzled. She was thrilled that over the next ten years she would become so awesome. She couldn't wait for that one moment in the car to come.

I think people tend to get really down because they compare themselves so unrealistically to others' "ideal" lives. We look at all the cool people and we're jealous of their coolness. We look at our future and despair with the fear that it won't all turn out like we hope. We daydream about the things we want to do but don't have the time or money or even motivation for and conclude that our life is useless and stupid.

But I think looking at yourself from an outside perspective can help. What would ten-years-ago you think of you? What have you accomplished that you never thought you would? What are you doing right now, in this moment in your life, that would impress someone younger and less experienced? Something as simple as working a full-time job is noteworthy. Something as normal as renting your own apartment and furnishing it yourself can seem incredibly grown-up and cool to someone who hasn't left mom and dad's yet.

Your life isn't perfect, obviously, but neither is the person's next to you. Be optimistic: if ten-years ago you is impressed by present you, think how cool present you would find ten-years-from-now you. I like where I am now, a lot, but I'm excited to meet 33-year-old Maryann. She is probably super awesome.


God bless.

Rain in the Cabin

When I was a counselor at church camp, we had code words for letting other staff know that there was an issue we don't want the kids to know about. For example, if we saw a stranger/intruder at camp, we would tell another counselor that we saw "a penguin" over by cabin 5. Or, if a camper wet the bed, it "rained in the cabin."

But we didn't always sleep in the cabin. Once a week, we would gather up all our sleeping bags and a tarp, make foil dinners, and hike out to a campsite in the woods for a night under the stars. I looked forward to "out-posting" ...on nights it wasn't rainy.

While the campers played games and gathered kindling, we counselors would labor over the fire (some of us being more experienced than others), and lay the foil dinners on the coals. We called them "hobo meals" before that term became "offensive" and we had to start calling them something nice and sweet and P.C. I think they tried to implement "dragon dinners" since that is obviously way cooler than "foil dinners," but it never got off the ground while I worked there.

Here is the recipe for hobo meals/foil dinners:

Ingredients
foil
potatoes
cooked ground beef
carrots
onions
celery
a "liquid" to keep it from burning (either ketchup or concentrated cream of mushroom soup, depending on your preference)
salt & pepper
some other spices maybe
a permanent marker
fire
tongs (this one is very important but is the one that you will probably forget, in which case, use sticks)

Chop up the veggies.
Make two layers of foil with the shiny side up so that the heat reflects back onto the food. Make a little bowl in the foil with your hands.
Put all the food into your foil bowl, with potatoes being the most prominent because they are cheapest and they fill you up.
Fold up your foil so that nothing spills hopefully. If the foil tears, add a layer. Just like they do at Chipotle.
Write your name or initials on the foil dinner with permanent marker so that you know which one is yours when you have at least a dozen other people making hobo meals. You don't want to mix them up because some people prefer ketchup over cream of mushroom soup for some mysterious reason, or maybe someone put the spiciest spice on theirs, or maybe someone likes onions even though they're gross.
Make a fire and when you have hot coals, put the foil dinners on there until they sizzle when you hold them up to your ear with tongs. Don't forget to flip them at least once.
Put them on the ring of the fire to cool.
Can be eaten with forks (or not). Mop up the gravy stuff left in the dents in the foil with a dinner roll or your tongue.


One particular out-posting night, we were out there with middle-schoolers and the raccoons were particularly bad. Raccoons had the tendency to terrorize us at dusk all over camp, as they like to scavenge the food the kiddos drop (or put in the trash cans), but would apparently rather have that food handed to them on a silver platter. Running at them and making noise usually gets them to run away temporarily, but like I said, this night was particularly bad.

They smelled the food, even though we were relatively deep in the woods, and came pretty close to us, hissing. We warded them off long enough to enjoy the fire and s'mores, but when we went to bed only ten yards away from where we had eaten, we could hear them going to town around the fire ring. Of course, we had gotten rid of our trash, but there were still crumbs. Let it be, we reasoned. They were just interested in the food, not us.

It was just girls this week, which was nice, because when you have boy campers, the counselors have to sleep in between the boys and the girls as a barrier, and boys tend to kick you in the face in their sleep. But in the morning one of my girls found an unpleasant surprise.
"Why is my sleeping bag wet?"
"It didn't rain last night..."
"It smells like PEE!"
"...Did you pee in your sleeping bag?"
"No... my clothes are dry."
We concluded that the pee on her sleeping bag was raccoon pee. It was the only thing that made any sense. Surely none of the girls had peed on her sleeping bag, even in their sleep, and the only other animals roaming the forest large enough to produce that much urine were deer, which were too shy to approach even sleeping humans.

So when we got back to camp, I pulled David aside and said, "Can you help me wash a camper's sleeping bag?"
"What happened?"
"It got pee on it."
"Sure. Do you have her clothes too?"
"No... They're dry."
"How did she pee in her sleeping bag without getting any on her clothes? Didn't you say it rained in the cabin?"
"No, no... it didn't rain in the cabin. It was a raccoon. A raccoon peed on her sleeping bag."
Well that communication, and the situation itself, was hilarious to David, and he went around telling that story for the rest of the summer.

Me? Looks like I'm still telling that story five years later.
I wonder how long the camper will be telling her version. She had a good sense of humor about it.


God bless.

Boy Scout Beach

I've convinced myself that, although some people tell me that in order to get good at writing fiction I need to practice, I really should never write fiction again. I'm not very proud of my last two blog posts; any fiction I seem to produce seems devastatingly hokey to me.

However, I still want to practice story-writing. So I guess I'll try writing stories that actually happened. Wish me luck.


Last summer, I and 19 other women on Juneau Summer Project headed out to Boy Scout Beach to camp. Technically we were backpacking, because we had to hike a mile to the site with our food, tents, etc. loaded onto our backs. This short hike covered a wide range of gorgeous terrains (as many hikes in Juneau do): forest, open field, marsh, beach. The beach was beautiful; the water stretched out almost as far as the eye could see, but was cut off by snow-capped mountains lining the horizon. The beach was soft with sand and stopped abruptly with a field of tall grass.

I occupied myself with building the fire while the other girls set up the tents and galavanted in the rising tide. The fire was of minor importance, as we had already eaten dinner and the weather was relatively warm, but I had a trick I wanted to share with the ladies that Elizabeth had shown us the previous summer: fire breathing.

It was pretty simple: crumple up a piece of newspaper, shove it onto the end of a stick, light it on fire, fill your mouth with corn starch, and blow the corn starch into the blazing newspaper. The result can be pretty impressive when done well, as all the little corn starch pieces catch fire and spread out in the air like a blow torch. I was the first to demonstrate, and the problem I found was that if you don't blow out the corn starch almost immediately after putting it in your mouth, your saliva moistens it and it doesn't want to be blown. Nevertheless, we amused ourselves with this trick for a good ten minutes.

The tide was rising quickly and it was getting dark (not because the sun was really going to go very far below the horizon, but because it was cloudy). I went out into the water with one of the ladies and timed it as the water level traveled about ten meters in a minute. We couldn't really see a line in the sand where we anticipated the water level would stop. We were camping high on the sand close to the grass, which was too tall to camp in. Behind the grass a ways was the beginning of a pine forest with a clean floor where theoretically we could have camped, but we wouldn't have felt it fair to say we had camped on the beach in that case.

We went to bed kind of late, about 11:00 p.m., and fell asleep without a plan regarding what would happen if the tide got too high. We reasoned that we had camped on this beach the previous summer, when the tide had risen at about the same time of day, and hadn't had any issues with the water level getting too high, so why should it be a problem this year?

I awoke at about 1:00 a.m. to the sound of Lexi's voice hissing my name from outside my tent. I had been in deep sleep and was pretty groggy when she explained to me that she had set a frisbee on the sand about ten feet in front of the tents, and that she had stayed up watching the water level with the plan that if the water reached the frisbee, she would wake me up for collaboration. I started coming to; it was decision time. Do we wake the girls up and move our tents to the forest area? Do we wake the girls up and leave altogether? Do we do nothing and risk getting everything, including ourselves, pretty soggy?

We decided to leave. It wasn't worth the risk, and if we were going to have to pack up and go, we might as well go all the way home rather than try to set everything back up elsewhere in the middle of the night just to say we had camped through the night.

We woke the ladies up and everyone sprung into action. Impressively, we were all packed up and ready to go within ten minutes. The water had risen almost to where our tents had been, and we determined we had made the right choice. While everyone was folding tents, gathering bear bags, and packing their packs, I was handed the can of bear spray and told that I was in charge of warding off bears during our mile hike back to the cars. After I packed my bag and everyone was still bustling around me, I sat there studying the instructions on the can with the light from my headlamp trying to figure out how to operate it.

I led the group on the hike out. The trail had flooded as it had started drizzling during the night, and of course it was dark. I marched through the tall grass beside the trail, trying to avoid the flooding, with 19 women parading behind me. We sang songs and tried to be cheerful. I saw dozens of frogs as we hiked, who seemed to be delighting in the puddles. I warned people of them so that they wouldn't get stepped on. Meanwhile, I was armed and ready with bear spray, on the lookout for a furry midnight attacker.

What relief when we reached the cars! We arrived back on campus at 2:00 a.m., dropped our gear, and fell into bed.

Was our camping trip an utter failure? Yes. Was it worth it? Definitely. Sometimes failing brings out more of the adventurer in you than succeeding. All 20 of us have a story to tell now.


God bless.

Letter #2: Child to President

You may or may not have noticed that while my blog is more or less a place for me to experiment with writing, I almost never publish any sort of fiction.

I would like to wade into the world of fiction by practicing something that I hope will be easy: fictional letters.

Please allow me to experiment as I try this out. Please feel free to comment below with comments or suggestions. My plan is to create two new people each time; a letter-writer and a letter-receiver, both of which you will hopefully learn a little bit about.

I have no idea how this will go, so again, your comments and suggestions are not only welcome, but I ask them of you.


Dear Mr. President,

I listened to your speech last night and I think you did a good job. Your wife is very good at ironing your shirts. Mom said you were giving a "message of hope," and Daddy said that means you're telling our country that it will all be okay.

I'm not worried, though. I know that bombs and war are bad but things always get better. My brother is a soldier in the army and he says all his friends are very brave.

Guess what. Someday I want to be President of the United States of America too. And I will always give messages of hope to people who are sad or scared.

My friend Katie said if she were president she would make sure all the orphans would have mommies and daddies to adopt them. And Doug said if he were president he would make sure everyone had ice cream every day for free but I told him that was stupid because some people are lactose-intolerant.

Anyway I have to go feed my dog, Rocket now. He's a golden retriever.

Love, 
Teagan 

Letter #1: Woman to ex-lover

You may or may not have noticed that while my blog is more or less a place for me to experiment with writing, I almost never publish any sort of fiction.

I would like to wade into the world of fiction by practicing something that I hope will be easy: fictional letters.

Please allow me to experiment as I try this out. Please feel free to comment below with comments or suggestions. My plan is to create two new people each time; a letter-writer and a letter-receiver, both of which you will hopefully learn a little bit about.

I have no idea how this will go, so again, your comments and suggestions are not only welcome, but I ask them of you.


Nate-
I don't know if I'm going to send this letter yet or not. Part of me just wants to vent, but the other part can't help but be -kind of- grateful. You've ruined my life and given me everything. Can you even begin to understand that?

You led me to believe things about you that simply aren't true: your trustworthiness, your faithfulness. You didn't bail when things got a little difficult, like when I got the flu and couldn't come to your parents', or when we got in that fight when you came home stinking of booze and weed. We always seemed to make it work somehow. We always said sorry and we always did our parts to fix things. But I guess Mallory was too much for you.

You didn't just leave. You disappeared. I came home from a twelve-hour shift to find the apartment half-empty. No note. Nothing. I found out from a mutual friend that you had moved to Chicago. What? I mean, WHAT?!? Do you realize how heart-breaking that was for me? Do you realize how alone and confused I felt? I am estranged from my parents and friends because of you, and now I'm on my own. I blamed myself for awhile, but it's not my fault. I know it's not my fault.

Eventually I realized that you don't deserve Mallory. I'm glad I finally figured that out.

To be honest, I thought about an abortion. Then I thought about adoption. It was terrible making all those decisions on my own. But if you had stuck around, there wouldn't have been a decision: she would have been ours. The thought of raising her on my own absolutely terrified me. I work full-time and don't make much money. I'm paying rent by myself now. I can barely keep my own life together, let alone take care of someone else's. Why would you put my through this? You perceived the "freedom" to take this situation or leave it, but I never had that freedom. I don't have a choice but to deal with this.

I wonder if you miss me. If you ever wish this had never happened so that we could still be together. Are you happy?

I can't say motherhood isn't kicking my butt. I want to scream 98% of the time but I don't because then I will wake up or scare Mallory and that will just make it worse. Financially, I'm barely scraping by. I still don't have friends or my parents. I lost my freedom. But maybe it was lost all along, from the day I met you.

BUT. Listen to me, Nate. I am so happy to have Mallory. She is my world and my heart beats for her in a way that it never did for you. When I feel like completely giving up, her precious toothless smile brings all meaning back to my life. I live for her. And you would, too, if you would just catch one glimpse of her beautiful blue eyes or her tiny, tiny fingers. I'd send a picture, but you don't deserve that. If you really wanted to love her, you could come see her for yourself. You know where we live.

The other day, my coworker, June (remember her? Sweetest person ever.), asked me innocently if motherhood was worth losing you. The question took me aback because I really haven't talked about the situation much at work. It was really a pretty bold question for her to ask, but she's sweet as honey and I know she was being genuine when she asked me that. I asked her what she meant. "Well, maybe that's not what I meant. Maybe I'm asking if being with him was worth it, rather than losing him. I like you, Shelly, but you made some mistakes, I think. It seems like that guy was no good but you dove into the relationship head-first and now you're suffering the consequences. Easy come, easy go. But you were also rewarded for enduring his abandonment: you have a beautiful daughter. Was it worth it?"

Yes, June, it was worth it.

Yes, Nate, it was worth it. Good riddance.

-Shelly

Pursuit

For her you planted fields of blooming silk
And with your palette and brush,
You set that field ablaze.
She drives past.

For her you sculpted a body;
The purest pearl as a home for her soul
With dark wisps for eyelashes.
She beats and neglects it.

For her you took your fingertips
And gently lifted the sun
Into the glory of morning.
She turns on her mattress.

For her you created sound waves
That she might joy to hear and to sing
And perhaps return your affections thus.
She would rather weep.

For her you brought yourself to shame
By being slaughtered like cattle,
Letting your blood and tears intermingle.
She forgets to thank you.

Your tortured longing,
Your screams for her
To notice and accept your love
Go ignored.

But you found a servant,
A Jacob for a Rachel,
Who offered all he could to her
And lifted her chin to the heavens.

She turned to you and asked,
Can my Lord love me more than this?
So she bowed and sang
In fields of fiery silk.



God bless.