Kevin's Blog Site

2011-08-15T15:48:00.001-07:00

So, Sunday, August 14, 2011, I head out for my Sunday bike ride on my road bike. Its my first ride (other than my daily one mile ride to work) since the Pierre’s Hole 50 (PH50) miler at Targhee the weekend before. As I ride I realize that my rubbery legs are just not waking up. By mile 10, where I am almost always fully awake and almost always ready to go, my legs still just did not have the get-up-and-go I usually have. I guess the PH50 took a bit more out of me than I thought and I was still not fully recovered, (“but it been a full 7 days of doing nothing” - my mind screamed) but I rode on.

My thoughts wandered a strange and meandering path during the ride. With my Nano on shuffle running through my favorites playlist, I tried not to think about the Leadville race I had missed the day before. I hadn’t made the lottery cut to get in and I didn’t qualify at the 100 km Tahoe Qualifier three weeks ago that I somehow, foolishly, thought I might have a shot at. Adding to this depressing thought I reflected on (obsessed about) my terrible performance at the PH50. As I posted on the PH50 website: “the good news: I finished 6^th in my age group. The bad news: there were only 6 in my age group”. And to add insult to an already severely damaged ego, the 5^th place guy in my age group beat me by well over an hour. 1 hr 16 min to be exact. So as all the guys in my group came in between 4 hrs 33 minutes to 6 hrs 6 mins, I struggle in in a ridiculous 7:22. Sheeesh!

And it was the same story at Tahoe three weeks ago. I actually thought I might be able to qualify for Leadville there, i.e. finish in the top five of my age group. In the end, I think I might have beat just 5 people. Not in my age group – Overall! That race, 100 km between at 6100 and 7200 feet elevation, was FAR less technical than PH50 and mostly on roads, just like Leadville. Out of 195 finishers, I finished 179^th. (ok, so I actually beat 16 and several more who did not finish) Ouch! I finished in 7:14. Out of 33 in my age group, I finished 28^th. The winner of the mens 50-59 group finished more than two hours ahead of me in 5:03.

“So what is going on with me” I continued to ask myself as I rode along on legs that just could not get in the groove. “Am I finally getting too old?” Is it junior high all over again, when I realized that I just wasn’t that great of an athlete? And then thinking about Leadville next year, if I could somehow get in, I’d be 57! And even slower!?

This sent me into a deeper funk. And I pedaled on through the pain. Both physical and emotional. And my fear grew and fed upon itself. My fear of old age. Of crumbling and deteriorating physical capabilities. Of future decrepitude. Of senility. Of….becoming my father - wasted away to a mere shell of his former self, waiting to die.

OK, this is a bit overly dramatic and just a tad morbidly self-indulgent, but I always have these thoughts, albeit usually to a lesser degree, after I visit my parents at their assisted living facility and observe all the octogenarians. Add the depressing parental visitations to the compounding thoughts of failure and athletic ineptitude and you have the making for a depressing day. And all this is compounded by knowing that no matter how hard I train, no matter how much I ride, how much weight I loose, how serious I get, I will be only be another year older, approaching 60, and its just not going to get any easier.

Boz Scaggs at the Waikiki Shell - March 11, 2010

2010-03-12T11:28:00.000-08:00

Boz Scaggs concert report - Boz was FANTASTIC! What a show – only WAY too short. Michael McDonald played first (and was surprisingly good, much better than I thought he’d be – or that is, I enjoyed him more than I thought I would) and played for an hour or so. He even brought out local boy Henry Kapono (of Cecilio & Kapono fame).

After a 20 minute set change Boz came on and sounded soooooooooooooooo good. And he had this super hot lady back up singer (Ms. Monet) who he turned loose for one song (she sang that Mo Town song “till you come back to me” . You know it… “..I’m gonna knock on your door, tap on your window pane……etc. etc…… She was SMOKIN HOT (musically) and almost…almost I say…stole the show. Boz, in acknowledging her after her performance said: “Ms. Monet….. a tactical nuclear device with me on stage”.

Boz….MAN!!! He played all the favorites. Break down Dead Ahead, Lido Shuffle, We’re all Alone, Harbor Lights, Slow Dancer ….WOW! Soooooo cool. And the sound….the musicianship….P-E-R-F-E-C-T. My only complaint is it was way too short. Boz only played for about an hour and fifteen minutes (the Waikiki Shell is bound by a city ordinance that says all shows have to end by 10:00 due to cranky neighbors in nearby condos that don’t appreciate late night concerts).

The Waikiki Shell is such a great venue (though they charge $13 for margarita and $5 for a slice of pizza). Its a small amphitheater at the base of Diamond Head so when you are sitting in your seat (I was in the 17th row), or on the grassy slope with your picnic dinner, facing the stage, Diamond Head looms out of the darkness to your right and the whole place is surrounded by huge swaying palm trees - all beneath a star-filled sky. Super nice. It was a bit breeze and even had a couple of minor sprinkles, but everyone was bundled up (it looked like a mainland concert. Everyone even wore long pants. And SOCKS too!!! (though I didn’t go that far).

All in all a GREAT show. These things are important!!! Life is SO short and oh so sweet!

2009-04-03T14:31:00.001-07:00

I have been riding my bike a lot lately (well, not as much as I'd like due to the very wet and windy winter we've been having as of late), and many of my friends and acquaintances have been asking me why I ride so much and how can I possibly enjoy it. I have lots of reasons and even more answers and could go into a long esoteric discussion, but I think Lance Armstrong summed it up pretty succinctly in his article Back in the Saddle, printed in the December 3, 2001 issue of Forbes.

Now I am, of course, nowhere near the rider that Lance is (Is anyone?) and I certainly don't ride anywhere near as much or as hard as he does and I have not even come close to going through anything like he did with his cancer and subsequent surgeries and chemotherapy; however, I still relate intimately to the "pain" he writes about while on the bike and I get the same satisfaction and fulfilment, maybe for different reasons, but with similar results.

Lance wrote:

People ask me why I ride my bike for six hour a day; what is the pleasure? The answer is that I don’t do it for the pleasure. I do it for the pain. In my most painful moments on the bike, I am at my most self-aware and self-defining. There is a point in every race when a rider encounters the real opponent and realizes that it’s…himself. You might say pain is my chosen way of exploring the human heart.

That pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it subsides. And when it does, something else takes its place, and that thing might be called a greater space for happiness. We have unrealized capacities that only emerge in crisis – capacities for enduring, for living, for hoping, for caring, for enjoying. Each time we overcome pain, I believe that we grow.

Cancer was the making of me: Through it I became a more compassionate, complete, and intelligent man, and therefore a more alive one. So that’s why I ride, and why I ride hard. Because it makes me hurt, and so it makes me happy.

Now me - I was not made by cancer. I was made, am still being made, by my life without any real suffering. I guess you could say - no, you can definitely say - I have been blessed. I have suffered nothing even close to anything like cancer and the horrors of chemotherapy, though I have lost a friend or two to it. But I do notice that when I ride, especially while climbing a long steep hill, sweat dripping off my face, my legs burning with lactic acid, my lungs aching for more oxygen, I am, utterly, alive. I smell the air, I hear the birds, I feel the wind. I feel my heart pound and the blood flow. My mind and senses are hyper-alert, and just as Lance, at my most self-aware. And though I cause and feel the pain, I rejoice in it. Because it means I am alive, that I am living. When it is my turn to go, I will die living - I refuse to live dying.

2009-03-31T13:25:00.000-07:00

The Lookout

I believe that the most defining event in my life, without question, was getting the job of manning a fire lookout tower in the Clearwater National Forest in my youth. For three consecutive summers, at the ripe old ages of 20, 21 & 22, I spent 9 to 12 weeks living in a 14-foot by 14-foot glass house on top of 50-foot stilts, in the middle of the Idaho Primitive Area. My job was to stay awake and watch for forest fires, yet as far as I could tell I had died and gone to heaven.

It all came about quite serendipitously. I had landed a job for the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college with the Clearwater. I was hired as a member of the summer fire crew, whose job it was to fight forest fires. As the summer days passed by without a single fire (not even a lightening strike) I learned that the Kelly Creek Ranger District of the Clearwater Forest, the one where I was working, had three fire lookout towers, Osier, Junction Mountain, and Horseshoe Lake.

On one of our days off, a couple of fellow firefighters and I hiked up to Junction Mountain Lookout, the one closest to the ranger station, to visit Junction John, as we called him. It was a short three or four mile hike and as we climbed up the stairs to the top of the tower I was amazed at the view. As we popped up through the hatch on the catwalk surrounding the house on top of the tower, I could see for miles. I could see ridge after ridge of the beautiful northern Idaho forest land. I knew then and there that I wanted this “job”.

After our visit we headed back down the trail to the ranger station. We all thought it would be so cool to be a lookout, but we also all knew how hard it was to get the job. We all understood that hundreds of people tried to get the handful of lookout jobs every summer. Still, that evening as I was sitting on the bunkhouse steps after dinner, my boss, the Fire Control Officer, Clark, came walking by so I stopped him and asked that if ever there was an opening in one of Kelly Creek’s three lookouts, I would like to be considered. He said “sure” and walked on. The very next day, the young woman who was up on Horseshoe Lake Lookout, the most remote lookout in the Kelly Creek District, quit and wanted to come down. Clark tracked me down and asked if I wanted to take over Horseshoe Lake, and “oh, by the way, you have to go up tomorrow”. I jumped at the chance and took the job.

I had one day to prepare and make all the necessary arrangements for a summer of isolation and solitude. Fortunately, perhaps again, serendipitously, I was able to catch a ride with the Forest Service supply truck into town. It took about three hours for the 60 mile trip through the back mountain and logging roads into Orofino, Idaho, the closest town to the Kelly Creek Ranger Station. When we got there I went to the only grocery store in the town and set up an account. All of the Clearwater lookouts had accounts there so the process was quick and simple. I loaded up with a two-week supply of groceries and headed back to the station with the supply truck.

We returned to the ranger station in late afternoon and I had the evening to pack up my few clothes and belongings and say so long to my new-found firefighting buddies. I went to everyone on the fire crew and even bugged all the forest survey crew to try and scrounge up as many books as I could. Fortunately everyone came to the forest with several books which we all shared back and forth and I was able to abscond with several books to add to the dozen or so I already had. I was actually worried about getting bored up there.

The next morning, we headed for the lookout. Normally, the trip up to Horseshoe Lake Lookout is a quick 20 minute flight by the Jet Ranger helicopter, but the day of my scheduled departure it was raining and cloudy and the woman I was to replace at Horseshoe Lake, Jenifer, reported in by radio that the peak was completely socked in, so we were going to have to drive up. So I hoped into the truck with Clark and we headed out for the four hour drive on back mountain roads up to Horseshoe Lake.

After three or four hours of bouncing along rarely-traveled ridge roads and crossing flooded creeks, we were approaching Horseshoe Lake. About a mile or two from the Lookout, Clark pulled over to show me a beautiful little spring, surrounded by pink monkey flowers, bubbling away just off the road. “This is where ya git yer water” Clark drawled in his Idaho redneck accent, while spiting out a wad of his chew. We then walked about 100 yards into the trees to the shore of Horseshoe Lake. The pristine horseshoe-shaped (of course) mountain lake was surrounded by tall Douglas firs, grand firs and lodge pole pine. The water was crystal clear and cool. If straightened out the lake would have measured about 300 yards long and about 100 yards wide. “It’s great fer a swim on a hot afternoon and clean enough to drink” Clark said. We headed back to the truck for the final climb up to the lookout.

We entered the clouds just after we left the lake and were pretty much whited-out for the last half mile climb to the top. Clark parked the truck at the base of the tower and I opened the door and stepped out into another world. The air was very cool and we were shrouded in a dark, damp, gloomy-gray cloak of mist and fog. Vague silhouettes of trees and large granitic rock outcrops were barely visible through the fog. The air was redolent with the smell of pine, mountain heather and rain-damp earth. It was actually kind of spooky. Utterly sublime, but spooky.

In his book The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton dedicated a whole chapter to the sublime. He wrote about setting out to visit the Sinai desert – “I set out for the desert so as to be made to feel small”. He went on: “There are few emotions about places for which adequate single words exist; we are forced instead to make awkward piles of words to convey what we feel as we watch the light fade on an early-autumn evening, or when we encounter a pool of perfectly still water in a clearing. But by the beginning of the eighteenth century, a word came to prominence by means of which it became possible to indicate a specific response towards precipices and glaciers, night skies and boulder-strewn deserts [and lookout mountain tops]. In their presence one was likely to experience, and could count on being understood if one reports that one had felt, a sense of the sublime.”

De Botton discusses the sublime in detail, delving into the origin of the word (first used by the Greek author Longinus circa 200 AD), how other traveler/authors like Joseph Addison, Hildebrand Jacob and the poet Thomas Gray used the word; the use of the word in the bible and how it is used to describe the link between God and landscapes, a theme that would play in my daily during my weeks on the lookout. “Sublime landscapes do not therefore introduce us to our inadequacy; rather, to touch on the crux of their appeal, they allow us to conceive of a familiar inadequacy in a new and more helpful way. Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically introduces viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept limitations on our will; that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves. This is the lesson written into the stones of the desert and the ice fields of the poles. So grandly is it written there that we may come away from such places not crushed but inspired by what lies beyond us, privileged to be subject to such majestic necessities. The sense of awe may even shade into a desire to worship.”

De Botton concludes his chapter on the sublime: “If the world seems unfair or beyond our understanding, sublime places suggest that it is not surprising that things should be thus. We are the playthings of the forces that laid out the oceans and chiseled the mountains. Sublime places gently move us to acknowledge limitations that we might otherwise encounter with anxiety or anger in the ordinary flow of events. It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming. But is the vast spaces of nature that perhaps provide us with the finest, the most respectful reminder of all that exceeds us. If we spend time in them, they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.”

I was about to spend a great deal of time in this “vast space” atop Horseshoe Lake Lookout, and I wasn’t quite sure I was ready.

We carried my few belongings up the four flights of steps and then carried down the retiring lookout’s gear. The little house on top of the tower was the perfect little efficiency studio. The 14’ by 14’ glass house was oriented with the compass so each wall faced exactly north south east and west. The walls were solid windows all around beginning about three feet off the floor and extending all the way to the ceiling. A small single bed was in the southwest corner, a little propane range with four burner stove and oven and a short little propane refrigerator were along the north wall. A waist-high counter with cupboards containing all my dishes, utensils and pots and pans was located along the east wall and little kitchen table was along the west wall. Right smack in the middle of the floor, in the exact middle of the house, was the fire-finder. The fire-finder consisted of a 2-foot diameter, rotating circular map of the forest with Horseshoe Lake Lookout in the exact middle, on top of a about a four and a half-foot high pedestal. The map covered an area about a 10 mile radius from the lookout. Range finder sights were located on the outer ring of the map that you looked through to spot a fire that allowed you to determine a relative bearing to the fire. If a second lookout could see the same fire, an exact location was easily determined by the ranger station by plotting out the intersection of the crossing compass azimuths. A single lookout, with a little practice and experience could still accurately place a fire by referencing the surrounding ridges and valleys, relative to the fires location.

After all my gear and food was unloaded and Jenifer’s belongings were all loaded into the truck, Clark and Jenifer were ready to return to the Ranger Station. Just before he was ready to leave, Clark pulled me aside for a little chat. “Now I want ya to be careful up here, ya hear? That tower’s way up there and it’s a long way down. Yer all by yerself and help is a long way off. Now ya gonna be alright?” I said, a little nervously, “I’ll be fine Clark”. “Ya radio in at 8:00 a.m. and again at 5:00 p.m. and of course whenever you see a fire, or if you leave the tower for water.” He hopped in the truck and they drove off into the fog and quickly disappeared from site.

And I was all alone. Alone as I had ever been. Alone, on top of a 7,000 foot peak in the middle of the Idaho Primitive Area without a living soul (human anyway) for very many miles of very rough country. Solitude as I had never experienced.

I climbed the stairs back up to the lookout and sat down to survey my surroundings. Unfortunately I was still completely socked in. So much so I couldn’t even see the ground. It started to rain again and the wind was picking up and …. I was alone. “Oh my God what have I gotten myself into?” I thought. “Am I going to be able to handle this?” As these thoughts were going through my head, I tried to keep myself busy by putting away my food, arranging my books and trying to make myself at ….home.

I turned on my little portable battery-powered radio and had a very welcome surprise. I could receive the University of Idaho’s FM radio station, KUOI. The station where just a few weeks earlier I was a DJ during the second semester of my Freshman year, holding down the Sunday night 10:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. broadcast slot. I tuned into KUOI and then figured out how to work the stove. I heated up a bowl of canned chili for dinner and went to bed shortly after it got dark, which in July in northern Idaho was past 9:30 p.m. I turned of the gas lamp and climbed into bed. I stared out the window but because of the cloud cover there were no visible stars and it was pitch black. I fell asleep not at all comfortable with my surroundings and not at all sure I was going to survive the ordeal.

And I began to dream…

In my dream I was standing on a white sandy beach, but I was looking down from on high upon the ocean (these vagaries in perspective that often happen in dreams). And in my dream it was a brilliantly sunny day but completely silent, and while still asleep, still behind the curtain of the dream, I remember wondering, “It’s so quiet. Why can’t I hear the waves?” And at that moment I woke up. I opened my eyes and saw that the lookout was flooded in brilliant soft-white moonlight cast by a gigantic full moon. I struggled for a moment with the stark incongruity between my sunlit, ocean-side dream world and moon glow mountain top reality. I got up out of bed and saw that all the clouds that had earlier blanketed my mountain (already I was thinking of the place as “mine”) had settled and my lookout mountain top was the only peak above the clouds, looking exactly like a solitary island in the middle of a vast billowy white ocean. It was achingly beautiful, deafeningly silent, and unbelievably surreal. Again, sublime. I gasped at the majesty of the sight and all my apprehensions from earlier in the evening were instantly gone and I just started laughing. It was incredible! I was ecstatic, delirious with joy.

The next morning I woke to a brilliantly clear sweet-smelling morning as the sun began to inch up over the Continental Divide of the Bitterroot Mountains and sunlight flooded into my little house through the east windows. I rose up out of bed, this time bathed in real golden sunlight, and caught my first glimpse of the beauty of my mountainous surroundings, displayed in all its rain-washed glory. Endless blue sky, green mountain ridge after rolling ridge spreading in all four directions for miles, glistening streams in the valleys below, the jagged peaks of the Selway Crags to the south. The rugged back bone of the Bitterroots, a hawk soaring above. I was home!

2009-03-29T20:31:00.000-07:00

I went to the local Blood Bank the other day to donate a pint of blood, something I do every eight weeks or so. As much as I hate getting the same routine questions from the check-in nurse every time I go (“Have you ever had sex, even once, with a male since 1976?; Have you ever used, or had sex with someone who used, internasal cocaine?” etc.) and as much as I hate getting impaled by the HUGE needle, I found myself looking forward to the visit, as, I came to realize, I always do.

So on this particular day I found myself at one of Honolulu's Blood Banks and as I laid there, reclining on the couch with the enormous needle sticking in my arm (and thinking "this can't be good for my veins!"), I was quietly observing the nurses going about their business of drawing blood from the several donors present. Without exception, each and every nurse was smiling and friendly. At least three separate nurses would check on me every couple of minutes to see how I was doing. They smiled, they laughed and they constantly thanked me for coming in. They gently teased me and laughed some more, all the while methodically and efficiently going about their business with the several donors.

When I was finished, I got up (at least two nurses surreptitiously watched me closely to make sure that I didn't faint) and headed to the little kitchen for some juice and cookies. All the nurses smiled and said goodbye and thanked me again and again.

I walked into the kitchen, which was staffed by two sweet little old ladies, volunteers, who greeted me with warm smiles and then they too thanked me for coming in. They offered me a choice of several flavors of juice, asked me if I wanted a manapua or a donut. I smiled, took a couple of those little white-powdered donuts that I love, but only allow myself to eat when I give blood (my reward to myself), and then jokingly complained that there were no chocolate chip cookies. “I only come here for the chocolate chip cookies! Where're the cookies?” I teased. The ladies smiled and told me I came in too early. The cookies wouldn't be delivered until later that morning.

So I took my donuts and guava juice and sat down to enjoy my reward and peruse the paper. As I was looking at the business section, one of the ladies came over with two little packages containing two chocolate chip cookies each and quietly slipped them to me as if we were making a drug deal. “You found some!” I exclaimed in pure joy. “Thank you”. “Shhhhh!” she gently scolded me, “Don’t let anyone know”. I don’t know if the cookies were from her private stash, or perhaps they were yesterday’s cookies, but wherever they came from, she made a special little effort to make me happy.

I left the blood bank feeling just a little light-headed but with a big smile and a warm feeling of …contentment? Was that what I was feeling? I felt like I had just spent a half an hour or so with a few very good friends. I contemplated this feeling as I drove to my office to start my workday and had a mild epiphany -- I realized that I had just spent a wonderful 35 minutes or so with a few genuinely warm, friendly and caring people. I realized that one of the driving forces that takes me to the Blood bank every eight weeks is ….to be paid attention to! I go to spend a few genuine moments with real, compassionate human beings and to connect on a surprisingly intimate level. I go to be with people who make me feel good about myself and about being alive.

The Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote about this in his wonderful book When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough. Rabbi Kushner tells us to “Belong to People”. Although I don’t think he was speaking specifically about being poked with a syringe, he wrote “Accept pain as part of your life. Know that you have made a difference. We need to belong intimately to a few people who are permanent elements in our lives. Having a lot of casual acquaintances to talk sports or recipes with is no substitute…One human being cannot be completely and authentically human without ongoing relationships with a few people. And they have to be people with whom we share our whole lives, not just a function of our time and ourselves.

In today’s world, where everyone is ensconced in his or her little private iPod, cell phone My Space, Second Life and chat room bubble, struggling just to get through the day, we find ourselves having to pay our therapist, our waiter, or our trainer or whoever, just so we can spend a few quality moment with someone who will talk to us as a live human being and take our lives seriously.

For me, what’s a pint of blood for a few precious moments of being coddled and nurtured by pretty nurses and sweet little grandmothers?