Forty Below and Feeling Aglow

To the giant-looking man who operates the kettle corn machine at the Tanana Valley Farmer’s Market and last Wednesday paid a kid in popcorn to assassinate at least thirty-three of the seemingly unaware wood-boring beetles as they attempted to fly into his large hot black kettle: I was wrong. They do bite, just not very often nor very fast.

How often do you hear of someone catching a frostbite in Fairbanks in June? I am here to tell you that, while rare, this situation is not uncommon. As a matter of fact, I happen to know someone who just this past Sunday encountered a heavy frost in downtown Fairbanks. Though it was about 70 degrees outside, it was oh so chilly on the inside.

By all accounts, this person was recovering from the Two-way Torture Test. Thanks to miles of uphill on pavement then downhill on pavement the previous weekend, they were icing their knee at a rapid pace. And the fancy blue gel ice pack, fresh from the freezer, plopped skin to plastic (NOTE: when icing a knee with a plastic blue ice pack, put a towel between flesh and plastic) helped the knee to numb right up. In fact, it was so numb and this person was so busy on Facebook, blogging, talking on the phone, reading, or just dreaming off in space contemplating their belly button, that they left the 40 below ice pack on their knee for, well, about one hour. According to this runner, there were some burning sensations emanating from the knee area at various moments, but that only made them readjust the pack to a slightly different angle on the knee. And when the burning returned, more readjusting.

Maybe it was the endorphins from all that running. Maybe reduced brain cells due to lack of oxygen on the uphill. Whatever the reason, it just didn’t sink in for them that the burning sensation was the freezing of their flesh. It wasn’t until Monday at work when they were sitting on their ball, minding their own business, they happened to look down and couldn’t help notice the half dollar-sized purple blotch on their kneecap, surrounded by smaller blueberry-looking patches. At first their mind raced to possible leprosy or a strange flesh-eating fungus. Then it all came together. The burning sensation that felt like a tongue sticking to a frozen chain link fence pole in the middle of January was actually the bite of cold.

Luckily this person survived that heavy June frost and lived to blog about it.

One of my coworkers is expecting and this week we hosted a baby shower for her. I was in charge of the cake, so I decided to order one last week from a local bakery. Yesterday I walked up to the bakery counter and asked for the carrot cake that said ‘Congratulations Amy & Adam’. A woman looked up at me from her piping bag and said, with some hesitation, “It only says ‘Amy & Adam’.” She then brought me the cake box and opened it up. Blaring out at me was a somewhat psychedelic-looking airbrushed purple, white and brown cake, with plastic toy blocks and miniature balloons placed upon the top half of the cake, and only the words ‘Amy & Adam’ piped in purple on the lower half.

I looked at her with a quizzical eye and asked, “What happened to ‘Congratulations Amy & Adam’?”
“Well, there was a problem,” she said.
“A problem?” I said.
“Yes,” she said.

She put the cake down and came out to the front of the cake display case with a piece of paper in her hand. It was my written order. She pointed to the section on the order form for the instructions of what to write on the cake.

Upon first glance, it was difficult for me to decipher the first word in that section. Then I realized that was because the first word was written in Japanese, followed by the English words ‘Amy & Adam’. Apparently, the person who had taken my order over the phone had written the word ‘Congratulations’ in Japanese. And since my cake decorator didn’t read Japanese she didn’t know what to write on that part of the cake, so just moved on. Along with four plastic pastel colored toy blocks that spelled out B-A-B-Y, all together the cake said simply, ‘BABY Amy & Adam’.

In a minimalist sort of way this worked, but this was not a minimalist baby shower. This little number was competing against an orange three-tiered diaper cake with silk gerber daisies and matching lollipop baby spoons, so it needed to have pizazz, elicit an emotional response from the audience, or at least just offer some congratulations.

I then said to her casually, “It seems like this might be a problem for you and your customers when they call in and their orders are written in Japanese.” She shrugged her shoulders, rolled her eyes to the side and mumbled. For some reason, I was beginning to like her style. A cake decorator coppin’ a ‘tude.

“Do you think you could add something to this?”

And then, with my cake in hand, she silently walked back to her decorating station. Carefully, below the B-A-B-Y blocks and above ‘Amy & Adam’, with more purple frosting, in her best cursive wrote in another word so that it read ‘Congrats! Amy & Adam’. Perfect.

Tonight, after the lawn was mowed and the dahlias transplanted, those little chianti sunflowers that I planted as seeds back on Tax Day finally landed in the ground. They’re in good company with a few strawberry blondes, two valentines, several mammoths and one moulin rouge. Sounds like a fun group. Makes me wish for a millisecond that I was a sunflower. But I bet that if they do actually know the significance of their names they’re probably too busy growing roots and photosynthesizing to go on a hot date or have any parties. Soon their bright faces will be shielding my living room window from the rest of the world and gracing me every morning with sunshiny petals of happiness. Grow speed racers! Grow!

Photo by
Eric Engman, Fairbanks Daily News Miner

Of course, the fact that at mile two, prior to peeing in the woods, I accidentally jumped into a spruce bog and immediately soaked both of my feet didn’t help to contribute positively in any way to my Two-Way Torture experience. And the continuous hill from mile three to mile six didn’t really help either. Nor did the fact that there were only two water stations during the entire 13.1 mile run. Or that the direction I was going around the Chena Ridge meant running on the sunny and hot side of the road most of the the time.

But what did help is the hill work I’d done prior to the race. It made the three-mile hill very feasible and I motored up with focus and a steady pace. I also brought my own water with me so I stayed hydrated. And I started slow, like a tortoise, so that by mile eleven I was basically on fire. And at the end, since he finished 15 minutes before me, my partner joined me for the last 1/2 mile of my race. That really helped. Of course, the best part was when it was done!

So I have earned the right to tell everyone that I passed the Two-Way Torture Test. And now that it’s over I can say that I would definitely do that again, minus the spruce bog. And while I accomplished my goal of finishing in under two hours, I can still walk today. That’s always a plus.

The Two-Way Torture Test. Why would anyone want to put themselves through the pain of running a total of 13.1 miles, beginning with a huge uphill climb followed by a bumpy ridge line trek with more hills, then culminating in a lengthy downhill section on pavement? I’m about to find out.

These days when I’m working in my yard or sometimes just sitting in the living room letting the breeze float in, overhead I can often hear the sound of cooing pigeons. Occasionally they take flight or land, but most of the time this Garden Island (scroll to bottom) flock of eighty spends its days waiting on an electric wire that is located just outside my yard. And every afternoon my neighbor from across the street walks outside, scoops feed from a synthetic burlap bag into a bowl, and sprinkles its contents under the large spruce tree located in his front yard. Last month I documented this ritual in a Soundslides project called Pigeon Place.

Here is a quick story about two surprises—one bad, one good.

Despite the fact that Mother’s Day 2007 my mom had flown in from Tucson and we spent the weekend together, overall the day was pretty grim. In the middle of the night we received a call saying that my dad had unexpectedly passed away. This was a very bad surprise, indeed.

So one year later, we decided to stay put in our respective towns, each doing our best to pass through the memory of that unfortunate day. This year anniversary dates, such as Dad’s February 14th birthday, have been rough. Memories are all around. Sadness emerges. Grief runs its course sometimes like an earthquake and other times it just lingers in the background like afternoon storm clouds. It’s a strange sensation to experience for the first time an entire year without him.

This Mother’s Day my mom planned to go to brunch with a friend. Little did she know that I planned to come, too. After a quick work trip to Kodiak, on Saturday night I secretly flew down on the red-eye to Tucson, and there began the Great Mother’s Day Surprise of 2008.

It went something like this:

Her best friend Londa picked me up at the airport and while she parked and walked into Mom’s house, ready to pick her up for brunch, I was standing on the sidewalk around the corner, calling Mom from my cell.

“Hi Mom. Happy Mother’s Day!”
“Hi sweetie.”
“Sorry I didn’t call you sooner today. I was out on a long run.”
“Oh, I should have known.”

As we talked, I started walking towards her house and up her walkway. I could see her standing in her living room, talking to me on the phone. She had absolutely no idea that I was standing outside. She thought that I was in Fairbanks.

“Did my package make it in time?”
“No, it didn’t make it.” I could hear the disappointment in her voice that the Mother’s Day package I had told her about earlier in the week, had not arrived.
“It didn’t make it? Really? Hmmmm. Well—I DID!!”

And then I pranced right into her living room and with a giggle said, “SURPRISE!!!!”

She immediately burst into tears, shaking her head in complete disbelief that I could possibly be standing in front of her. After all, a few seconds earlier I had been in Fairbanks, talking with her on the phone. We gave each other a very long hug, both awash with feelings of such deep gratitude that we could share the day together. This was definitely one of those unforgettable moments, a new memory that will always be part of our mother daughter story.

If you’re contemplating some sort of crazy caper like this in the future, I would highly recommend it. Ideally, life gives us more good surprises than bad, and it’s the good ones that fuel us through the rest.

Have you ever tried to scare a herd of wild pigeons? Technically, I realize that a group of pigeons is not a herd, but the word herd associated with this bird, helps me to toss to the wind the stereotype of pigeon as dumb, boring and just plain odd. Saying, “a herd of wild pigeons” carries a toughness that they probably don’t deserve, since the herd I recently tried this with are fed by a human everyday. Though while I was in the middle of the interview, a goshawk did swoop down in the middle of the street and fly away with one of the poor birds, so they do face their fair share of wild predators.

If you’ve never tried to make a pigeon fly, be forewarned that when these birds are nervous they tend to relieve themselves from their hind ends. And if you are standing below them, doing your best Freddy Kruger imitation, this tends to make them nervous, so be prepared to dodge a few stray pigeon bullets.

Last week I interviewed a man named Dick about a place in Fairbanks where a flock of nearly 80 pigeons spend their days. The birds sit atop several electric wires, everyday, waiting, waiting, waiting, for food, courtesy of Dick. To complete the story, I wanted to include a few sound bites of flying and cooing. So I asked my friend Brad, a former college roommate turned professional improvisation specialist (see the On Your Feet website) who was in town leading a workshop, to help me make these pigeons fly on command. While he was doing his best to motivate them to move on up, the plan was that I would record the sound of them flying away, while also photographing the spectacle. Above is what they looked like after the take-off and here is what the whole thing sounded like: default.aspx?fldr=2008052509&fl=ScaringPigeons.mp3&vfl=ScaringPigeons.mp3&disposition=inline Stay tuned for the Soundslides interview with Dick, the pigeon feeder. It should post in the next few days.

Self, please let my inner leopard of literary liquidity run over this page with flamboyant flair and expressive, descriptive might. With brave honesty and some sort of wit and humor, help me get what’s inside, out. But just not before jumping through this huge flaming hoop called “final project”. I’m wearing my three piece suit of business retardant, and there’s a hefty pack of pemican in my make-believe briefcase, so I’m bound to survive. But if I find myself stuck, tied figuratively to a chair, writing a must-be-professional consulting report and feeling like I could scream, help me to just keep writing! Soon it will be summer…