18 Months and Counting

April 10, 2017 JG 2 Comments

It’s April. Spring showers, wildflowers, coming out of dormancy, beginning again. It’s also the 18-month anniversary of my return to corporate America, and the date by which my younger sister told me I’d better be out of it again.

I have always been better at doing what I was told, than determining what I would do. I have dreams, but I view them as the things I can’t wait to do when they pop up right in front of my face, not things I go out and make happen. It’s an approach that explains why my decision to travel around the world petrified me: I had made a statement of intent, and now I must follow through. It was exactly the opposite of what I was used to.

During the first week of this trip, I was terrified. I tried to be patient, but any forgiveness I happily show another person isn’t a generosity I bestow on myself. In calls home to family, an ‘auntie’ said to me, “you know you can always come home.”

This struck me as possibly the most ridiculous thing anyone had ever said to me. Of course I would not go home. Face-saving aside, who takes three steps forward into a dream and then turns around? Not THIS chick. And saving face isn’t an aside. I was not going to give up – not on the trip, and definitely not on myself. I had come this far. It was only the beginning, but it was still pretty far.

This wasn’t the first time someone had said such a thing to me. In grad school, out of my element, in a new town decidedly more conservative than any I’d been used to, in a program that forced me so far out of my comfort zone I began to drink regularly for the first time in my life (at the age of 30), I sought counsel from a mentor back in Seattle. She said a very similar thing, “if you are this miserable, why don’t you quit?”

When my auntie told me I could just go home, the first thing I heard was, “if you’re miserable, why don’t you quit?” It was ridiculous, and a revelation, and true: I could quit. I could go home, and no one would be bothered by it. Except for me. As much as I was out of my element in trying to catch the Transmilenio in Bogota, as much a failure as I felt for not having conquered the world three days into seeing it, I just needed to know there was an out, in order to find the ability to continue.

And so, last July, when I showed up for a family vacation 10 months into my new job and six months into literally dreading every single day of it, into waking in the night riddled with the buckshot of anxiety that tore up my confidence, into driving to the office and sitting in the parking lot willing myself to open the door and go into the building, I was slightly more prepared for someone to ask exactly what one sister did.

“You know you can quit, right? It sounds miserable.”

This time, I knew. And because I knew, I had started working through what the plan should be. How to turn the three steps forward into ten, into 20, into, potentially, a path to the door.

The project that was making me miserable was more out of my comfort zone than foreign transportation. It was amorphous, relied on resources who were poorly managed and had no people skills, and required the involvement of literally every area of the operation. I couldn’t articulate it, let alone lead it. I had no guidance, no mentorship. I was bogged down.

But here is what I knew: I don’t like to give up. I hated what I was doing, but I didn’t want to let it get the better of me. I had, by July, outlined the most significant milestones, the release dates and deliverables, and put regular routines in place to track them. I had found a mentor who could help keep me out of the weeds. I had taken three steps forward, and was continuing to put one foot in front of the other.

No one wants to see a resume with a job that lasts under a year, so I wouldn’t leave before October. I had a significant deliverable by Sept 30^th, and I was requesting permission to work remotely for a month. I would wrap up the first and if I got the second, I would stick around a little longer. I had my out, so I could continue to work.

I delivered the first, they delivered the second. And during October, from my remote work escape to the Pacific Northwest, I had my mid-year review, during which I was told something that caught me by surprise: I was knocking it out of the park.

How could I be this miserable, and successful? Because the metrics by which these things are measured are vastly separate. Delivery despite the cost it takes on my self is workplace success, but not a personal success. Unlike delivering myself successfully around the world, which was almost pure joy, where each fear conquered was a gift to the person I had once been and was becoming again, each milestone conquered at work was another little weight on the scale tipping in a direction way from who I am. I will pull the scale back into balance, but only by hanging off the edge of it and pulling it back down.

So here we are: April. Month 19. A time for growth, for rebirth, for new buds and sweet smells in the sun coming out. A time, perhaps for coming out of the cocoon as a butterfly and flying away. Only time will tell.

Life Skills, United States

Cultivating A Herd

September 21, 2015 JG 1 Comment

Cultivating a Herd

In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m single. I would love to find the man of my dreams, but I don’t spend that much time dreaming about him – I’m too busy out here being me. Oprah would probably tell me to ideate a version of who/where/how that guy is so that I can make love manifest when he is in the vicinity, but I’d rather go to LACMA. I feel a vision board coming on.

Unlike a number of single women I know, I do no reading or research about dating. That comes to me unsolicited and for free (minus the psychological cost) from friends who take a much more organized approach to these things. From what they’ve told me, I understand I’m to be “cultivating a herd,” of options, from which one will be right. It’s a fancy way of saying the whole thing is a numbers game over which I have about as much control as I do a roulette wheel.

I was thinking about this yesterday while walking down the street in Washington DC, where I’ve come to visit a friend recovering from a significant and unforeseen health event. It occurred to me that, though I’ve failed to cultivate a dating herd, I managed to cultivate a fantastic herd of friends in the less than 12 months I lived in DC. And they have more than risen to the occasion during this most recent event.

When I mentioned I may be coming to town, I was immediately offered a couch to stay on. I flew overnight and went straight from the airport to spend a day at the hospital. That evening, I was welcomed by friends with delicious dinner and a glass of wine, given clean sheets and towels and pillows and snacks, house keys and a ‘guest’ metro card, a laundry card so I could wash the patient’s laundry, and a cocktail when I returned home at night. One friend made big dutch baby for breakfast, gave me tea and helped me find games to bring to the hospital for entertainment and cerebral stimulation. I was lent a car. An impromptu drinks gathering was arranged during my stay. A not-yet-three year-old delivered home-made banana bread to the door. Friends took breaks from work to meet up with me at odd times to accommodate my being at the hospital for visiting hours. My hosts made me laugh at least once each morning and twice before bed.

A Three Year Old Delivering Banana Bread

This is only one city, one group of friends, with whom I’ve been lucky enough to spend time. And certainly, this is a remarkable event. While pondering how fantastic this herd is, I realized that, while fumbling dating for decades, I’ve successfully cultivated a variety of herds, flocks, gaggles and prides across time and geography. Rather than one partner, my efforts have yielded a community of strength and laughter and insightful conversation and delicious unsolicited opinions and adventurous travel partners. I do hope that someday, one of these groupings will yield the man of my dreams. Until then, I’m going to be vastly fulfilled, entertained, challenged and supported by these amazing people I’m grateful to call my friends. Mr. Right would be lucky to join us.

The Silver Lining: a portion of the herd together again in DC

On the Road, United States

Going for Gold

June 19, 2015 JG 2 Comments

They came for the gold. They were a little late, and they weren’t quite in the right place, and the competition did a little better, but they found enough, close enough, to keep something going until someone hit it big. And then it ran out, and so did they.

Bodie’s story is typical in the Sierras: boomtown gone bust. Here, it’s even more typical than its successful counterpart, boomtown gone boom. For every Reno, there are ten Bodies, most of them long disintegrated into scraps of wood and metal strewn around the mountains, in places no one ever goes. Why one survives better than another is anyone’s guess. In the beginning, it’s about ore, but in the end, chance makes the decision.

I first came to Bodie when I was about 13, on a vacation with my family that based us near Lake Tahoe and took us on day trips like this one, through the smaller towns on the east side of the mountains and then out six miles of dirt road in the heat and dust. In my memory, we rode here in the back of my uncle’s blue Toyota panel van, named Squirt, after the soft drink. It is a magnificent sight, coming up out of nowhere, the buildings nestled between hills, rising above scrubby manzanita and the sandy ground with just enough consistency of shape and variation of color so that you can tell there is a town, even at a distance.

The last time I was in Bodie was 25 years ago. It was the summer after my high school graduation and somehow I lucked into a trip to the mountains with my mom, uncle, and grandfather. No sisters. It was right before my grandfather unraveled into the abyss of dementia. I knew it was starting though, because he kept telling the television to slow down, and asking why the picture had to change so fast. (A sentiment, to be honest, I now share with him.) Between outings, I pulled a blanket onto the windy lawn behind the condo and read Bukowski’s Women, in what had become a burgeoning love affair with his debauched misogyny that even now, I betray my feminist instincts to devour.

I had been given my very own Olympus OM-1 as a graduation present, and this was the first of many trips on which it would accompany me. Even then, they were hard to find. I loved the feel of its weight in my hand, the click of the lens as I switched between f-stops, the ratchet of the film being clicked into place. I lugged it up into Lundy canyon with me, photographing columbine. And then, I took it to Bodie.

Bodie was founded in 1859 after gold was discovered in the hills. The cache wasn’t great, and compared poorly to the mass of silver found in nearby Aurora. Twenty years later, gold-bearing ore was discovered and the town boomed to around 6,000 people at its height. It was big enough for a bank, a red light district, and gymnasium called the Bodie Club, which sported both workout rings, and cold beer.

Bank Fare

Gas Station

It bustled with business, a train track was built, families laid claim. Miner’s organized into a union, and Chinese workers built a Chinatown on one end of town. But by late 1880, mining booms in Montana, Utah, and Arizona began to pull people away. Despite a resurgence in the early 1890’s, when cyanide processing allowed a second-pass at discarded mill tailings, the population continued to diminish, until the 1910 census recorded just 698 people, mostly families, still living in the town. By 1932, when a fire demolished much of ‘downtown,’ Bodie, it was down to 120 people.

The Remaining Safe

My memory of Bodie is mostly of the wood, and the wind. On that visit 25 years ago, the story of the town was different. It was of a place people had left in a hurry, due to a fire in the mine. Food plates were on the table, clothes still hung on hooks, pottery and goods still lined the shelves of the store. I may have made that story up to match the pictures I took, looking in through six-pained windows at a yellow pitcher, a table setting. The wood warmed a reddish brown in the sun, grooves worn deep in the pattern of its grain by the wind, heat, and cold of the century it stood there. Curtains, edged in lace and slightly tattered, frame the scenes.

Now, Bodie has a proper parking lot and a restroom, and the day I was there, a google-camera car was in the lot. The driver got out and put on a photographic contraption to walk the main streets of town, so soon you can experience it from your desktop.

The Google Car

But the wood is the same. Even when the sacred photographic light of morning has passed and the amateur professionals are packing up their tripods, the wood still glows weathered and warm. The picket fences that remain have grown skinny and rickety over time, their moorings less secure.

I assume this was a barber shop?

The buildings stand proud against the few defined streets. The hotel is there (no guests), and the Bodie Club. The mercantile is now a museum/foundation shop. The piles of debris, or of trash – wood, cans, bits of tin and leftover shoes – have grown a little larger as time wears down structure. Trash as artifact and memory. Reminders.

Reminders.

The wind is still predominate. Bodie is nestled in a crook of hills and as you walk upwards past the mine, toward the hilltop, the wind falls down against you, whispering secrets as it goes. When you walk the main street out of town, to the north – to where a bank and a brothel once stood – you hear little but your footsteps, the breathing of the dog that follows behind you, panting against the heating sun. The wind blows across the top of the metal stanchions that mark property lines and Do Not Enter areas like the sound of a drunken cowboy blowing across the top of his beer bottle in mockery of your wander. It slips quickly through the spaces left between shrinking wooden slats, pulling splinters of them with it, beckoning you in, just a little closer, just come here for one minute, it has something to tell you. Don’t leave yet; your time will come soon enough and it will be here, whispering, long after you have gone.

Main Street

Life Skills, United States

The Importance of Feeling Small

April 5, 2015 JG 3 Comments

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the importance of feeling small. We tend to think of it as a bad thing: feeling “less than” others. Feeling unimportant. Feeling hidden. But there is another aspect of feeling small. The one that allows you to feel the mighty wonder of something else. To feel small against it, and in relation, to feel its power, and relocate our own.

I suppose this may sound like a religious sentiment, and ironically, I’m writing this on Easter. But I’m not a religious person. I get my feeling small from being out in nature, and I love it.

I started contemplating feeling small in October, when I was traveling through Utah. Newly reunited with the dog after a year of separation, I was generally gleeful, and grateful, but I was also venturing to a new territory and a major life change: living in LA, looking for a job, staying in one place.

Spanky and I set out on a couple of hikes – two in Goblin Valley State Park – in Little Wild Horse Canyon, where we had to stop after a mile or so because poor Spanky couldn’t scale the narrow sandstone walls, and out the Curtis Bench Trail, where we wandered among hoodoos and I contemplated how similar they were to the fairy chimneys of Cappadoccia, and marveled at the amazing things that Nature creates. The next day found us in Escalante, heading toward Lower Calf Creek Falls on a sandy trail through a valley where fall foliage danced in the sun. Turning a corner the last quarter mile before the falls, the temperature dropped at least fifteen degrees and we were met with a cool wind, and then a misty spray, and then the falls themselves, rising 100 feet up a cliff of reddish rock. We stood small against it, had our picture taken, lapped the cool water, and wandered back toward the car tired, happy, refreshed.

From there, we made our way to Devil’s Playground to watch the sun set. The unpaved Hole In the Rock Road stretched ten washboarded miles into unblemished Utah, depositing us in a playground of rock formations that look almost like sand towers and the waves that break them. Spanky was nursing a bloody foot pad from two excited days of pantering through the sand, so we kept our wandering to a minimum. I sat him in a stay while I climbed around and recalled with joy the sense of adventure I’d had all over the world at similar sights – formations of natural origin so astounding in sight they seem otherworldly, which reminds me, always, how magical the world really is. And the lookout from that place, out on a valley of alien sights, familiar to me because I had seen something similar a world away, and new and strange here in my own country, made me feel so wonderfully small, so thankfully little in comparison to the magical mastery that is Nature.

This week, today, April 5^th, marks one year since I flew back into the United States, after visiting 17 other countries. Lately, in Los Angeles, looking for the place where I fit and the job that I can both master and enjoy, I have on occasion felt small in the bad way. The way that makes one feel inconsequential, unnoticed, not fully worthy of the wonder that surrounds and as a consequence, less capable of seeing it, even right there in front of me. It is a great reminder to put myself in the place where I feel blissfully small, and so it happily coincided with plans to hit the road.

Which is how I found myself in Joshua Tree National Park for the first time. Dogs are not allowed on trails in the National Parks, so Spanky and I wandered on dirt roads around Hidden Valley, again staring up in wonder at stone formations – Intersection Rock, of climbing fame, and Skull Rock, of tourist fame. We drove south to the 10 through the cholla patch, the cactus flowering around us, the sacred datura blooming in treacherous, ostentatious piles by the road side. The ocotillo waved red paintbrushes up at the sky. And the Joshua Trees, of course, scratched up at its surface.

And then here, to what could easily be considered a Phoenix suburb, where an easy morning hike puts you up against a hillside of cordon cactus, one of which is older than my great grandfather would be, were he still alive. . And 30 feet tall. There was a cautionary rattler sunning itself by the creek, whose watertable is now starting to retreat to its summer home beneath the ground.

At night, the same trail by moonlight has a different face. Cool breeze through the wash, red-spotted toads hopping across the footpath, which you take more slowly in the dim brilliance of the full moon. No headlamp. Just Nature’s magnificence to light your way. And still, you can make out the outline of the giants, standing tall, prickly, resilient among their history, making you feel small in the best of ways. You shrink beneath them, and you feel closer to the ground. Grounded. Your problems less insurmountable. Your place potentially still unsure, but certainly less tenuous. Your place, here.

Life Skills, Moving, Traveling, United States

The Unfamiliar Familiar

May 20, 2014 JG Leave a comment

Before returning to the states, I spent a decent amount of time contemplating how to keep my love affair with the world going, even after I returned “home.” I remain loathe to give up the joy of new sights, tastes, and sounds. Mostly, I crave the feeling of openness and curiosity that being surrounded by the unfamiliar breeds in me.

My global love affair, as posted to FaceBook on the day I visited Wadi Rum

A million self help books and the magazine rack at your local grocery will tell you that the key to any good love affair is to make the familiar new and exciting. Since the only thing I loathe more than giving up my travels is a self help book, I’m challenged with viewing this amazing island that covers under 58 square miles, on which I’ve been spending time for 38 years, with new eyes. It’s the equivalent of a being 40 years in to an uneventful marriage with the world’s most peaceful, beautiful spouse, whose calm can lull you into doing. Absolutely. Nothing.

Doing. Absolutely. Nothing.

While contemplating this (which, you may have figured out by now if you are following me on Facebook, resulted in buying a plane ticket to Spain for a month), I remembered a time when I created something totally unfamiliar out of my favorite hiking spot on the island, almost by accident. Sort of.

On Thanksgiving weekend 2007, I ran away from Texas to refamiliarize myself with the smell of trees and the feel of air that hasn’t been sucking cement. My second day on Orcas, I headed to Mountain Lake, a four-mile trail I know like the back of my hand, since I’ve been traveling it almost as long as I’ve known how to walk.

Top of the switchback hill on a nice hiking day.

It was 4:30 when I parked my car and headed out on the pine-covered path. Just over one mile later, I realized how quickly I was losing light. I took a moment to think about what I was doing. The brook that runs down from Twin Lakes in the wet seasons, barely trickling by August, poured vigorously beneath the little wooden bridge on which I stood. While contemplating the pros and cons of continuing in the fading light, I inhaled air that froze the hair inside my nostrils. The weather forecasted an early snow.

On the pro side: completing the lake loop. I hate not finishing things. In the last 25 years, I’ve failed to finish only one book. Actually, I didn’t fail; I refused to finish it because it was so unbearably bad it constantly made me think of all the other books I could be reading. The disappointment – by an author whose work I had devoured voraciously for years – was so depressing, I donated the book to the library so I wouldn’t have to look at it on my shelf.

Also on the pro side: No predators (unless the squirrels had gone rabid since summer). Trail I know blindfolded. How cold could it REALLY get near a lake that doesn’t freeze? Potential for adventure.

The cons? Potential for frostbite, but a finger or pinky-toe lost for the sake of adventure seems a small price to pay.

Note to self: creating an adventure of the familiar should take place within bounds of reason. Like any adventure, there is a risk-reward equation at play. When the territory is this familiar and the adventure seems this….risky, the equation may be out of balance. Dark +potential for snow + no headlamp….

Giant trees that whine against each other in the wind at Mountain Lake

Not surprisingly, something went awry. Another mile or two down the path, my pace slowing to a shuffle as I became unable to see my feet, I suddenly found myself off the trail and trapped in place by a fallen tree trunk that appeared out of nowhere. I started to panic, almost peed my pants, and came back to my senses quickly enough to remember how blissfully short my cons list had been. I would be safe enough by daylight, as long as I didn’t get bored to insanity, since it was pitch black, freezing cold, and more than twelve hours until the sun rose again.

In one of the more embarrassing and least adventuresome episodes of my life, I committed to two hard and fast rules of being lost in cold, dark woods: (1) don’t wander (it makes you harder to find) and (2) move constantly to keep your blood flowing. For the visually oriented, picture Jane Fonda aerobic warm up steps in fleece pants, long-sleeved shirt, gortex shell, and running shoes.

To these rules, I added a Hail Mary: I yelled for help. Meekly at first, and then with more force, though I felt ridiculous since I wasn’t injured or near death. I modified my cry by turning it into a request, addressing the recipient as, “Mr Park Ranger,” and adding, “please,” to the plea that he come to my assistance. It sounded completely bizarre – almost as if I were hearing someone else doing it, and I wanted to go to her aid.

Mountain Lake from the south end dam. Not that I could see this in the dark.

Miraculously, the state park service had funded a ranger this particular winter, and when he came back from town, he saw my car and came after me with a flashlight and headlamp. He was none-too-happy about it, and I couldn’t have been more the opposite, which made for a chirpy monologue on the way back to my car, and a one-sided hug once I arrived.

So I can’t advocate adventure in the familiar, but even in the ‘know-em-like-the-back-of-your-hand’ places, there is endless possibility for the unfamiliar. Rather than stick with the same lake loop, last week I hiked on a trail I haven’t touched in ten years. I went to dinner at a brew pub that’s been around for two years, and I’ve yet to set foot in it. It isn’t simple familiarity that ruins us – it’s invariable patterning of our lives that blinds us to things that may be always here, and never noticed. If we just change our trail, we can open our minds and hearts as widely as if we traveled the world.

After a day of fear-conquering adventure

Worth Packing In

the little truth of traveling

whiskey