The thing that helps when nothing helps

mold, prepping, and trying to remember to zoom out

First! Do you want to learn to make a seven day route in the Alaskan arctic in Caltopo, and then hike it? Applications are open for my July Brooks Range trips! These are seriously the trip of a lifetime. Extremely epic! And this year I have permits for two other mountain ranges in Alaska as well, in case of bad weather. Details and the application are here.

People like Bets! They like the characters and the plot twist and find the story realistic, which is cool. I worked hard to try and imagine what it would be like to ride one’s bike across the abandoned desert southwest. I love to write a good escapist travel narrative! Also, I guess I was a bit ahead of my time with the evil techbro subplot? Ha.

Dear reader,

We had a strangely warm week here, where it got just above freezing and the skies were heavy and grey, and the top layer of snow melted and then refroze as a sheet of ice, and now you can ice skate in the streets- this morning it’s properly cold again, and maybe it’ll stay this way maybe not, who knows. I keep wanting to write but then not writing because I feel, not for the first time in the last few months, that I have nothing useful to say. I’ve been cycling, and then re-cycling? Through what feels like the stages of grief, as my brain turns itself inside out looking for answers, some sort of answers. If only there were answers! To literally anything! Ever! Amirite? And then that is where I always land in the end- there aren’t any answers. If I’ve found anything to be helpful, if only for a moment, it’s to keep zooming myself out- grabbing myself by the metaphorical suspenders and yanking myself up off the ground, where I’ve been laying on my stomach in the moss, staring at the tiny minutia of one single, perfect, (dying) flower and crying- pulling myself up and then up, and up, into the sky, until I’m out in space looking down at the planet and saying to myself- in all of human history, there has never been a time that could be described as “chill and restful”. Ever. That’s just what it means to be people, and you signed up to be people so, here you are. Suck it up.

This helps for a moment and then I’m in the moss again, crying about the flower. So it goes.

The other thing I’ve found to be (momentarily) helpful is to remind myself that one of Trump’s tactics is to wear everyone out by causing constant chaos and alarm- and so by managing to stay mentally well in these times, I’m actually winning. And the healthier we can stay, the more useful we can be! And there are going to be many opportunities to be useful. Many.

this person says it well

The third thing that helps me is remembering that the sweet release of death comes for us all in the end, and since linear time is a construct I’m actually already dead, so what am I fretting about? And also the chances of someone nuking the US and putting us all out of our misery simultaneously and without further suffering is low, but never zero!!

Anyway. I got really stressed before the inauguration and ended up with a brutal respiratory infection- partly from the stress and partly because there was mold in my cabin! I’m super allergic to mold and have spent the last decade, since leaving Portland, carefully avoiding it- never would I have suspected that in Fairbanks, Alaska, where it’s drier than venus in the wintertime, I would have issues with mold, but some of these dry cabins (like mine, it turns out) are poorly ventilated and the temperature difference between inside and outside causes problems with condensation and moisture buildup. My neighbors, who all live in the same cabin as me, have constant problems with mold, and then one day I woke up with a chest full of broken glass and a fever and it hurt so bad to cough it made me cry and I knew that my cabin had mold too, because that is what happens when I’m around mold and I haven’t been sick like that in over a decade, since I started avoiding it. I had an idea of where the mold was and my boyfriend, who is an angel and who also has every tool and machine imaginable, immediately came over with his tools and helped me look for it- we found the mold- it was in fact where I thought it would be- and cleaned it, and took steps to keep the area dry so it won’t mold again. My boyfriend let me stay at his cabin for a few nights while mine was ventilating, and he got me flowers and fed me and made me tea, and every morning my chest felt a little better and now I’m back in my cabin again and much improved. The inauguration happened while I was sick and I fell into a pretty dark place- I couldn’t do much so I did a lot of doom scrolling, and worrying about the future- thinking should I leave the country? But things aren’t that bad yet? But what if they get worse? At what point in the project 2025 playbook would I actually leave? And what if we’re not allowed to leave at that point? And where would I even go? We live in a global system, the whole thing is destabilizing…

I decided to prep a bit because it’s one of the only things I have control over? Even though prepping always feels a bit insane to me. I went to Costco and got a big plastic tub and six months worth of non-perishables (dry beans, canned salmon, olive oil, bars etc- everything with an expiration date of at least a year from now) and shoved that into my storage area. I ordered chemical abortion pills online here in anticipation of losing that access- even if my eggs are too old and dusty to get pregnant, someone else might need them. I talked to my boyfriend about what we would do if we had to flee on foot- which again, feels insane, but was soothing as a thought exercise- he’s from a remote village in the Alaskan bush west of the Alaska range and we mapped out our overland journey- we could do it pulling sleds, we decided, with skis and snowshoes. The dogs could ride in the sled. His village is near a spot with a lot of whitefish, so it would be a good place to hunker down.

“Do you want to go gun shopping?” Asked my boyfriend, even though he already has many guns. I’d been thinking about this, and I decided that yes, I do want to get guns, a small one for self defense and a big one for moose, if only because at some point women might no longer be able to own them. I worry about guns getting confiscated, but they can only confiscate them if they know you have them- “The way to get guns that aren’t registered,” said my boyfriend, “is to post a vehicle for sale on craigslist and say you’re open to trades…” I’d also been thinking about how many guns people in the US own but at the end of the day, you’re only as armed as the ammunition you have, and what if there’s no more ammunition? So I couldn’t help but wonder (Carrie Bradshaw voice), should I be hoarding ammunition too? I also started watching tiktoks about ham radio, thinking about our tech overlords having total unchecked power and communication systems going down. Maybe I should get into ham radio…

I couldn’t help but wonder… should I be hoarding ammunition too?

Of course none of these things solve any actual immediate problems, but they sure gave me a lot to think about, helped wear out my brain as I lay in bed, sick, cycling through the stages of grief, until I was eventually able to pull myself up off the moss and out into space where I could stare down at the earth and feel calm again. The sweet release of death comes for us all…

I also think, at this late stage in the subarctic winter, that I very badly need some bright light. Luckily, on Saturday I fly to Arizona ahead of my guided trips there, and for the whole month of February I’ll get to cook like a rotisserie chicken in the sweet, sweet low elevation Sonoran desert. That should help!

What are you finding to be helpful, as you cycle through the stages of grief? How are you channeling your rage? Sound off in the comments if that feels fun for you.

That’s all for now,

Carrot