Wildflowers

On June 10, the forests will be closed.  I'm not sure how that works:  cops at the trailheads?  chains across roads?  roving park rangers writing tickets?  But what it means for me is that my Sandia hikes will contract to strolls through the open spaces.  This makes me sad;  I've come to depend on my weekly hikes with G.  Since I moved here I've considered the Sandias "my" mountains.  They hover to the east, watching over me, appearance varying with light, cloud patterns, and vegetation change.  Since I met G, I've explored front, back, side, arroyos and heights.  I'm vested.

Last Sunday we went to the back half to hike the 10K trail.  G's work and games buddy K joined us.  When I arrived at G's, they were huddled around the table, looking over the expansion for King of Tokyo, the new game of choice.  K is a tall medium build 30-ish man with a chin strap beard, quizzical eyes, and baseball cap.  Laconic but not off-putting.  He continued to focus on the game while I changed into walking shoes.  I was so proud that I had remembered hat and water bottles, but G brought out his spare camelback, complete with iced water.

He takes such good care of me.

En route, we were listening to Beck, a new experience for me.  I am so unhip.  About halfway up the Sandia Peak road, I said, "This is dangerously close to rap."  And that's all I'll say about Beck.  G was driving, so I was not about to kvetch about the music that kept him focused and happy.

The 10K trail doubles as a cross-country ski trail in winter, so the trees were marked with blue diamonds, 12 feet up.  It's a deceptively simple trail, paralleling the road for a bit and then circling the mountain to the east, going up and down, so the net elevation gain was minimal.  G picked it because we would be in trees for most of the hike, and thus cooler.  The promised reward was a nice overlook.

Within 5 minutes I discovered a bonus reward:  wildflowers!

 

I didn't just use the flowers as an excuse to get my breath back and reduce my cardio rate, but they sure helped.  I recognized violets and columbine and G identified the clematis, but the rest need to be researched.  Maybe.

Meanwhile, the trail went up, the trail went down.  I absorbed the dusty smell of the trail, the spicy smell of the pines, the clicking, trilling, melodic calls of birds.  K was forging ahead, not fast, but faster than I.  G kept waiting for me, and I kept saying, I'll catch you up.  At every stop I sucked on the camelback nozzle, hyperventilating while my heart pounded in my throat.  Note to self:  wait until you get your breath back before drinking.  I was a slow learner.

We entered into a tree graveyard, fallen grey logs covering the ground between trees:  they took up so much space there was no room for much undergrowth.  I was reminded of the tree graveyard above V's house on Cascade Head:  different vegetation, but the same sense of age and destruction.  Whenever I hiked the trail behind her house, I always looked for the huge silvery snag standing out in the woods, about 2 miles up the trail.  I never hiked to it, it was off the trail. It was a landmark. It had another tree growing in the thick moss of an out-flung branch, which was big enough to be its own trunk.  The nursing tree was at least 12 feet tall, it's host probably 50.  One day, I realized the snag was gone.  We clambered through the forest, to find it sprawled on the ground, stretching out endlessly amidst a silver-grey landscape of fallen trees.  Windstorm.

This Sandia tree graveyard was the result of bark beetle and some other parasite, the name of which escapes me.

Shortly past that, I said, "That would appear to be a woodpecker."  G and I stopped to listen and watch.  Rat-a-tat-a-tat, the rapid drilling sound echoed through the trees, the light filtered down, but we never saw the bird.  It was there when we came back, but again, hidden in the treetops.  

There were the obligatory dog sightings, my favorite being the stag hound.  I've heard of them, but never seen one.  It was like a greyhound in shape and size, but the fur was rough and reddish.  It looked like a stag.  I would love to see it run.

A half mile from the peak, we entered upon a relentless uphill.   I clambered over rocks, I paused at each little leveling out, each little turn (you couldn't call them switchbacks).  At one point there was a meadow with scattered aspen, blue irises at their feet.  That was good for a 2-minute photo op.  Then I saw some more clematis, this time seemingly growing out of a fern.  I commented on it, and G said, "You know, it's a vine."  I said, "duh, for a smart woman I say stupid things." He declined the gambit.

I remember a hike years ago with my brother and my Dad.  I must have been in my thirties, Dad recently retired.  He and Mom came for the annual summer visit and my brother took us to a favorite trail in the Gorge.  Mom stayed at the car, but Dad was a trouper and, with the promise of an extravagant waterfall just half a mile up, started out with us.  The switchbacks came with inexorable regularity.  Because of the dense undergrowth, you didn't know what was around the corner until you got there.  Trudging up, you hoped in vain that at this one there would be the end, or at least a leveling off.  Instead, the trail stretched upwards to another switchback.  I still remember Dad gasping at each turn, "Oh my god."  I can't remember if the waterfall was worth the trek.

I was channeling him on this last bit.  Except my gasps were wordless, a long hoarse sigh, starting high, ending low.

G promised me a jaw-dropping vista of aspen in their new green, and that, plus pride kept me going.  And the overlook was totally worth it. We looked to the west:  while we couldn't see the plumes of the forest fire, we could not see much on the horizon but haze.  But the aspen were lovely, and we looked at nautilus style fossils in the rocks and munched on nuts.

 

G turned on his GPS for the return trip:  over 5 miles all told.

We're going out again tomorrow, and that'll be it for the season.  But next year I'll go to the Pecos meadows and really see some wildflowers.

Everything has a price

Yesterday I got back out into the Sandias, this time on the south side.  Lots of pine, lots of juniper, lots of rocks.  Some switchbacks, but not too bad.  I only had to stop to relieve cardio-pulmonary distress a few times!  It was nice to have some trees, but it's still New Mexico.  The dusty-spicy pine smell had no hint of moisture to it, and where in Oregon there would have been streams, here there were dry,  rocky creek beds.

Oh, I lie, there was also this Waterfall!

You don't see the water?  well, it's there.  sorta.

The pace my companions wanted was just about right for me, too.  And all in all, it was a good hike, until we started the downward slope.  I was doing fine with the scree and the occasional boulder, I thought, but then my foot slid and I landed, patella first, on a rock.  You know how sudden pain makes you queasy?  I sat there, holding my knee, breathing in, breathing out, while the others stood around.  I felt moisture on my hand and realized I was bleeding.  B pulled out a bandaid, and G offered water and ibuprofen.  I said thanks to the former, and no to the latter, and pulled up the pant leg to assess the damage:  a straight small, deep cut, starting to well up with dark red blood.  Fortunately, the pants were not ripped, and there was no obvious dirt.  I blotted the blood, applied the bandaid, and got to my feet. We had another 45 minutes to an hour to go.

The hike remained lovely.  We stopped at the cave for me to convert my hiking pants to shorts and apply a new bandaid that would not be rubbed off as I walked.  S took some pix of the "Travertine Waterfall," and as we walked on, we pondered:  just what IS travertine?  I dimly recalled seeing travertine tiles when I was doing my remodel, but couldn't remember much but that it's a stone.  Duh.   (I looked it up later in the car, but suffice it to say, we were all wrong in our guesses.)

We stopped again for a water break, and looked for fossils in the rocks.  Mainly they were unremarkable dots and specks, paleolithic bugs.  Neat though.  Then, towards the end of the hike, we re-passed the spiral and cairn that I had spotted on the way up.  The light was much better for photographs at this point;  late afternoon is always my favorite time for photographing rocks.

l have a new pedometer, from the StepItUp Albuquerque program at work.  So I can say, definitively, that we walked 12,861 steps, or 6.48 miles.

The cut started bleeding on the drive back to G's, and he was unhappy that his pack did not have the requisite first aid supplies.  Spring is the time to get the gear back in order, but you usually try to do that before the accidents.  He also said, "next time I'm making you take the hiking pole," and he's going to loan me a 3-liter water pack in addition to my little water bottle.  So, there will be a next time at least.  And even though I'm a liability as a friend and hiking partner, it seems that these three think I'm worth it.

When I got home, finally, I cleaned off the sweat/salt from the hike and put neosporin on the cut.  It was still oozing blood, and I freaked out and called L (my medical expert sister.)  She was mainly concerned with tetanus, ("You know you should have a current shot, don't you?"), but otherwise was a soothing presence in my ear.  I bandaged it up, cancelled on the potluck I had planned to attend, and got out a good book for the rest of the day.

Yes, it doesn't look like much

Today the cut has scabbed over, but the patellar area is very sore:  I may have bruised the bone.  The flesh doesn't seem to be the problem, and there isn't much flesh there anyway.  This is frustrating:  now that I have hiking partners, I want to HIKE!  And we have a nice one planned for next Sunday.  Grrrr.

I hate limping around.  I hate being pitiful.  I wish it were possible to just do things without fallout and pain.  Why can't I just enjoy what I have without paying some sort of price?  But, right now, that seems to be my life.  Losing balance, losing friends, once step forward, 2 steps back, and a big ass pain in the patella.

Harrumph.

Endings and Beginnings

A few weeks ago my landlady invited me to an "endings" ritual, to punctuate my divorce, to honor the feelings and the past, and to look to the future.

It was very kind of her to recognize the anti-climax and emptiness I was feeling, and to offer me a way to deal with it.  I accepted, not knowing what she had in mind, but trusting in the intent.  It was a night after work, so we planned for 7 pm.  I got home and decided to bake some chocolate chip cookies as thank you offering.  Or rather, a cooky:  the toaster oven doesn't really accommodate cookies, so I put the whole batch in a pie plate.  It doesn't cook evenly, so the bottom was burned.  But you can't really go wrong with butter, chocolate, pine nuts, and brown sugar, right?

M's house is a lovely adobe, with a fireplace and wood floors.  We sat in the living room, on a two-person couch, facing the western windows into the garden.  She had a tri-fold votive screen, which held 12 votive candles, and it was on a table about 5 feet away from us.  We each had a glass of water, and a box of kleenex nearby.

She started with a short meditation:  close your eyes, think of a joy, focus on that sensation.  I can't remember what joy I thought of:  friendship?  snorkeling?  waking by the ocean?  chocolate chip cooky?  but it was actually hard to choose and focus on it, which was a nice revelation.

Then we opened our eyes and thought of an ending or a loss that we wanted to honor.  We took turns, speaking of the event or the thought or the person, and then going to light a candle.  Speak, rise, strike the match, light the candle, sit back down.  In my case, grab a kleenex.  When the candles were all lit, we blew them out, and those endings were sent upward with the smoke.  We continued to speak more thoughts, light more candles.  We talked about joyful losses:  loss of weight, loss of anger, loss of unreasonable expectations.  We talked about grief:  loss of husband, loss of father, loss of self, loss of home.  We talked about endings:  end of a job, of a lifestyle, of youth, of middle age.  All of which leads to beginnings.

She usually does this ritual during the dark of the moon, to help honor the past time and look forward to the new beginnings.  I was reminded of the solstice celebration at T's, 2 years ago back in Portland.  There, we started in darkness and lit each others candles and spoke a word for winter.  The growing light and the sense of community were equally palpable.  This was a more intimate ritual, with just the two of us, and it went deeper in a way.  It began the process of letting go. I have been talking about losses in this blog, but I haven't been letting them go.  I've been stuck in the grieving process.

Today, I came right up against the perils of being stuck.  I have feared that I didn't have the wherewithal to find myself again, and I have feared losing my friends in the process.  I have feared that I am not worth the time or the stress, that the more I reached out, the more I would drive away the help. And that is coming to pass.

It's probably a good thing to realize, viscerally, that the healing has to come from myself, and that others can do little to help.  You can't replace 30 years of connection in a few months, and while those distant connections are real and deep and strong, they can't be there for you every day, or even every week.  And neither can the new connections.  Their support is of a different nature, and the trust and depth are embryonic, maybe stillborn.  For the daily bread, I have to grow my own yeast, bake my own loaves.  I have to do it alone.

And crying is bad for my sinuses.  

Yesterday I walked in the hills with a new friend.  We talked, we were silent.  I touched the amazing rocks, I sniffed the piny juniper and the spicy woody willows, I watched the white fluffy clouds in the brilliant blue sky, I listened to the wind in the junipers, with the deep silence behind the sound.  As ee cummings said, "how could tasting, touching, seeing, hearing, breathing, any -lifted from the no of all nothing- human merely being, doubt unimaginable You."  I spread my arms to the soft cool breeze, I was full of joy, full of the moment.  And that is as real as my grief and my tears.

I just wish I experienced it more often.

To honor Easter
I resurrected two joys:
Hiking and Thai food.