Cold Snap, Full Moon and a Lack of Free Will
We’ve been having a proper cold snap, Anchorage style- days are just above zero F and nights are down to -14 F. I walk my dogs in this cold but we only make it a mile along the snowy trail before they’re doing the cold-foot dance (and they detest dog booties, I’ve tried) so mostly they sleep, and wait for the cold snap to pass, and it feels like the rest of the world is sleeping too.
Skate skiing is no fun at these temps, even with wax that’s rated for it- the snow becomes sticky and there’s not much glide and I work super hard and don’t get anywhere. The ice, though- the ice! Even the biggest lakes are frozen now, and since the coldest days are also the clearest ones there’s no snow yet on the new ice and everyone who can is driving an hour or two outside of town to these massive, wild, epic lakes to experience one of the most unique things on this planet- skating across them.
Portage lake is an hour from town, and a few friends and I went the other day, arriving just at sunset, and skated three miles across to the glacier at the other end. It was -5 F but the movement made us warm and then the full moon rose and I felt like my heart and brain were in a microwave, the way the full moon makes me feel.
We bellered at the moon and pretended we knew how to do ice skating tricks, falling and sliding on the ice. I get so caught up in the hustle of existing and making a life in this human world as if there’s anything to “make” or we actually ever “arrive” and then one day I’m chasing my moonshadow across a frozen lake, frost sticking my eyelashes together, warm in spite of the cold and I remember that this is the entire point, that vibing with the natural world is the whole reason we’re on this earth and everything else we do is just a support system for these moments, and one day we’ll die and that’s fine, necessary actually, that there will always be life in spite of our individual deaths, life in so many magical forms, that we’re neither as terrible or important as we think we are, that we couldn’t end life on this planet if we tried (and we are trying).
I just finished an eight day Wilderness First Responder course. I signed up because a WFA certification is required for one of my commercial guiding permits and I thought, why not do WFR and learn more? And the class ended up being one of the most fun things I’ve experienced in a long time. There were seventeen people in the class, everyone with the most bonkers amount of hardcore experience in the Alaskan backcountry/on the land, and I felt awed every day with how much people knew/how close they were with their natural environments. And it turns out that learning to fashion a tourniquet from a stick and items from your pack and building a litter from a climbing rope and trekking poles just really scratches an itch in my brain. I am always thinking about collapse/survival after the supply chains are gone/troubleshooting crisis with whatever junk you have lying around and to learn to do that for a handful of medical emergencies was really, really satisfying. On our last day we had two big mock rescues outside in -6 F weather- a snowmachine/bowhunting accident in (make believe) overflow where there was a lower leg arterial bleed, flail chest and hypothermia, among other things, and a (simulated) avalanche that carried five people (two ppl were buried) and the victims had spine injuries, frostbite, internal bleeding and a femur fracture. As a surprise, our instructor had our incident commander go into anaphylactic shock partway through the avalanche rescue and in the snowmachine accident the uninjured person suddenly doubled over with appendicitis. We managed it all though, and nobody pretend died!
Of course a WFR is just the tiniest bit of beginner emergency medical training and I don’t exactly feel confident should any of the above situations happen for real- but now I want to feel more confident? I understand now why some of my friends are such medical nerds. It’s nice to feel useful, like you could be helpful in an emergency. Mostly what I do is walking, it’s unlikely that someone would have an open book pelvic fracture on one of my backpacking trips, and most of the other students in the class engaged in riskier activities- they were ski mountaineers, hunting guides and ppl who work with chainsaws, among other things- but if I learned more there are orgs I could volunteer with, and that would be fun. I’d like to take a wilderness EMT course next, I just have to figure out… how that makes sense with everything else I’ve got going on. Lol.
The WFR course I took was from Dorothy Adler- she was an incredible teacher and her experience in the backcountry (including with medical emergencies) is honestly insane. I highly recommend her courses, you can see them here!
Speaking of having a good time starting to learn about backcountry medical emergencies, I’ve been thinking a lot about all the different paths we can take in life, and how overwhelming that can feel sometimes- like we all have all these interests and want to be useful/needed/contribute somehow and also just vibe and also survive within crabitalism and also have security for the future somehow?! So what choices do we make, year after year, to balance all of these things, and now we’re getting older oh my god it’s starting to feel more urgent? My friends and I were talking about this on Portage lake under the full moon and there weren’t any answers but then I woke up this morning and remembered that we have no free will, and that helped some. Like, do you ever pay attention to identical twins? As far as DNA goes they’re clones, yet they develop into different people, just because of their different positionality in space-time- this individuation starts in the womb, just from being arranged differently in there- so they are like if there were two of you, capable of making separate choices at each branching moment in life, when the road splits and one could either, say, become an EMT or get really into dog mushing. And the twins do make different choices! And yet, as they go through life, they often course correct and by middle age end up in eerily similar, almost parallel life situations. For example, I know one set up identical twins my age where one is a queer femme DJ and fashion designer in New York, and the other is a queer femme fashion designer and DJ in San Francisco. (They both have curly hair but one of them straightens her hair.) I know another set of identical twins my age who are heavily tattooed trans welders (in different cities, but sometimes the same city). My point is that sometimes we’re like “omg I suddenly want to become an EMT but I don’t know if this is the right choice WTF am I doing with my life?” and we don’t know what the right thing to do is but it literally doesn’t matter what we choose. We’re all special treasures on a journey to the place we’re meant to end up. As we bump painfully along we’ll automatically course correct and one day we’ll wake up, and we’ll be there, and it’ll be the exact right place. (And then we die, ha ha ha.)
I’ve started meeting with applicants for my Brooks Range summer 2024 trips on zoom- these are trips for people who already have a good deal of backpacking/long-distance hiking experience, who want the added challenge of learning to make a route in caltopo, which we’ll then hike together in the arctic! I like to talk with applicants quite a bit before they register for this trip, to make sure they can conceptualize the vibe of this particular landscape- due to its remote nature, the only way to bail on this trip is to charter a bush plane pickup with your inreach, and that costs like $2,000. And although the vistas are incredible, the walking is pretty unsexy- it’s mostly bog. The ground in the arctic is frozen at a certain depth, so it doesn’t drain well. Hence, a hundred varieties of bog, all of which we’ll encounter. But also! One of the most beautiful places on earth, and also one of the most intact ecosystems, including the human element of that ecosystem- the Inupiaq people live where we’ll be going, have autonomy and still practice their subsistence lifestyles. Making one’s way through the squishy river drainages and along the crispy tundra ridges of the Brooks range, eating salmonberries/aqpit and sleeping under the midnight sun is honestly one of the most special things I have experienced. If you’re interested in applying for one of these trips, more deets and the link to the application is here!
In other news, Emma Copley Eisenberg was kind enough to include The Sunset Route in this list of Eight Books To Take With You On A Roadtrip in the Atlantic- Emma has a book coming out in May, Housemates, that looks amazing. Also, did you know that my friend Nicole Antoinette has a new book out, about thru-hiking the Colorado Trail?!
If you love trail-journal style long-distance hiking memoirs (I sure do!) then you’ll love Nicole’s writing- she’s one of the best! I stayed up late last night reading it- there’s something so pleasurable about lying in a comfortable bed, being reminded of the bonkers-level physical discomfort of long distance hiking- like, your sleeping bag isn’t warm enough so you can’t fall asleep and it’s raining sideways into your shelter and you were too nauseous to eat dinner because of the altitude, and so you just lay there curled into a miserable little ball until it’s morning and then you have to get up and put your wet clothes back on and hike uphill at altitude all day, even though you’re so exhausted your blood feels like sand. Like what?! (Nicole also has a book on her hike of the AZT.)
The genocide in Palestine continues to happen. Israeli propaganda continues to propaganda, to wilder and wilder levels- it’s shocking, like how can anyone actually believe the things Israel is saying? When there’s eleventy billion current and historic evidence to the contrary? It seems unsustainable to keep doing what they’re doing, lying and scapegoating and distracting, but the thing is, it doesn’t have to be sustainable. Genocide and ethnic cleansing is a project that happens withing a specific window of time. Israel doesn’t have to manipulate the masses into turning a blind eye to their behavior forever- just until they finish the job. Which, at this rate- Palestinians ill and injured and starving to death- probably won’t take much longer. This issue is actually really, really urgent. It’s time sensitive. I know we all got burnt out on speaking up online in the last few years, when we all shouted about horrible systemic issues and it changed exactly nothing, but this situation is different than that. There’s a reason that some people are being punished for speaking up about this. It’s because speaking up about this actually helps. I promise you, this country does not allow any sort of activism that actually challenges its interests- it never has. Representation, sure! Because representation changes nothing. This genocide, and its resulting expansion of Israel’s power in the middle east, is absolutely in this country’s interest, and nobody with any skin in that game wants you speaking up against the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. So take a risk, dammit. Be a shitposter online, sharing reporting from the people in Gaza, go to a protest, talk to the people in your life, argue with your family on facebook.
Here's a great example about how the state only allows symbolic bullshit that changes nothing, and squashes any sort of real activism- recently Mary Peltola, US representative for the state of Alaska, had a meet-and-greet in Juneau. At the beginning of the meet-and-greet was a land acknowledgement. The indigenous person doing the land acknowledgement talked about the connection between the genocide against Native Americans during colonization and the current genocide against Palestinians, at which point Shannon Mason, Mary Peltola’s staffer, physically pushed the person doing the land acknowledgement away from the mic and said, I fucking shit you not, “I asked you to do a land acknowledgement, this is not what I asked for.”
I’ll leave you with this poem by Nikita Gill, for some posi amongst the horrors:
That’s all for now,
Carrot
I am so delighted that you enjoyed my book, friend! Having to put on the wet clothes in the morning though – WHY ARE WE LIKE THIS lol
I too have been in the middle-aged woman wilderness of what-ifs recently. (I’m a bit older than you, Carrot, but we are of a generation). What if I made different choices in my twenties? What if I didn’t have kids rn? Where would I be? How would my regrets be different? My 20 yo daughter and I are beginning to plan our first thru hike together (TRT ‘25, baby!) and I find myself wanting to grab her and shout, “have all the experiences! Do what you’re scared to do! You have so much time, but also no time at all!!” I don’t know that 20 year olds can hear those words when shouted by their mothers, no matter how much we get along. But maybe I’m shouting them to myself. I realize, maybe I’m coming back around to my plan all along.