e.alia.salim

Durango to Moab 2020, the prelude

April 25, 2021May 15, 2021 Alia S.2 Comments

I am crying in a Tahoe motel room, a meltdown precipitated by the sound of someone coughing in the hallway and the buzz of a group chat update: with days to go before our scheduled departure from Durango, only half of us have COVID test results.

The delay presents a problem somewhere between moral calculus and an LSAT question. Are the negatives willing to travel with unknowns, if a positive result delivered en route would disqualify the whole car? What if someone’s still waiting on results by the time we’re supposed to head into the backcountry? Would a result even mean anything if it was—at that point—a week old?

This is my first attempt at going anywhere since These Challenging Times began. I’d pictured long weekends training at altitude all spring; instead I’ve hardly been more than riding distance from my one-room apartment in four months. I’m overwhelmed by the sidewalks crowded with tourists, bristle at the man who stands too close to me at check-in.

“If we go and someone gets sick it’ll be my fault because it was my idea,” I protest.

“You’re giving yourself way too much credit,” Ryan says. “Everyone’s an adult. Everyone’s here because they chose to be here.”

“I know,” I croak, “but still.”

COVID conditions were still excruciatingly uncertain at the point we’d had to decide whether to keep our reservation—muddled questions about transmission, ongoing shortages of PPE. In the Bay Area it was all grim headlines and hand sanitizer recipes, NextDoor pile-ons and neighbors berating each other for mask lapses on the street. But when I called the tour company in Colorado they had answered breezily that they were operating more or less as as normal. The dissonance rattled my skull.

The group met to discuss it it—over Zoom. We are all Good Citizens, or at least very much want to be, and so it was and remains difficult to separate actual fear of getting or spreading the virus from fear of appearing not to care. Two of the party are married to nurses. The rest know enough.

Was the situation so unclear that clearly we shouldn’t go, or clearly so unclear that we should? On the one hand the news cycle seemed to birth some fresh hell daily. On the other hand, next year things might be even worse. “Personally I am oscillating between fuck-no and YOLO roughly every three hours,” I write to the boys. “This is friggin’ crazy,” one replies.

*My question but very much not my answer sheet*

Now we pass through one-street towns in Nevada, shambling storefronts with angry Sharpie bans on entry to anyone with a mask on. I still don’t have a COVID result. Online, commentators wonder why we don’t batch test like the Rwandans. From the back seat I try to work out how you’d determine the optimal number of samples per batch, given a certain infection rate. The engineer in the car is initially amused by this, less amused when my remedial math questions make us miss the turn to Provo.

When we finally arrive there we stop for lunch at a city park. The other tables are occupied by big families of unmasked Mormons. I’m not sure if they believe in COVID, but I know they believe in heaven and so I stay as far away as I can. Hours later it’s orderly, distanced queues for groceries in Grand Junction, then onward to signed threats on the “fashist” governor’s life just a few miles down the road.

One nation, individuals.

In Silverton at last we’re sorting gear in the motel room when there’s a loud crash and a panicked wail from the parking lot below. I turn to the window and see a big touring motorcycle down, the rider convulsing on the pavement. At first it seems he’s been hit, but his passenger, frantic, screams to onlookers that he’s having a seizure. A flurry of activity. Her hands to her face.

He is alright now, it seems, but my heart is pounding. I don’t want to make a habit of crying in front of my friends in motel rooms, but for a moment I think I might again. Empathy for the stranger condenses quickly into judgement as I gather myself. I think of the winding, shoulder-less mountain road up from Ouray, the sheer rock and long fall to the river below. It’s one thing to choose yourself to ride yourself, with such a dangerous condition, but to take someone else with you? How irresponsi—and the word comes screeching to a halt on my tongue.

The countdown to departure is all tradeoffs and squabbles. Garmin has been hacked, hilariously, and I can’t determine if my SOS device will still work. The weather is deteriorating and we’ve bought up all the gardening gloves from the hardware store. I’m shedding pack weight in ridiculous, desperate ways (do I need both spare socks?) at the same time that Ryan’s trying to convince me to bring canned oxygen and Jacob is distributing hand-carved spoons. Meanwhile Sean’s in the parking lot offloading mangos and yogurt to a party of four-wheelers in an attempt to clean out his car. “Hey, thanks, man,” they say.

I bark and nag and fret until we have all six of us assembled on time (!) at the shuttle pickup spot. The driver steps out of the van with temperature gun drawn. Six moments of truth.

When we unload the bikes at the trailhead the actual clouds are gathering into grim gray fists—but the metaphorical ones have parted into sunshine. I know the week ahead is likely to be one of the hardest things I’ve ever tried to do. We have 200 miles to cover—today’s opener all above 11,000 feet, with weather incoming, on a bike I’ve never even ridden fully loaded. But I feel, for a moment, weightless. “Here we go!” someone says, but “We made it!” is all I can think.

2020: Before times

March 6, 2021April 13, 2021 Alia S.Leave a comment

January

I’ve outgrown my old New Year’s Yosemite trip—or rather, it outgrew me—but I still like to watch the sun rise on a clean slate.

Even having left home at 4 a.m. and climbed without stopping, I’m only just turning the key in my bike lock when the first other people show up at the summit of Mt. Tam. They are an older couple, possibly with a head start from the West Point Inn. As we all cross the dark lot toward the start of the trail that leads to fire lookout, I think I hear the woman suggest that they let me go ahead.

Whether I imagine this or not, it’s the excuse I need to speed-walk ahead and, once I make the first turn out of sight, start a breathless, clumsy sprint to the top. I’m stumbling over the stone staircase in my cleats and the weak glow of a bad headlamp, sweating into the chill, but I make it: I see the sun edge over the horizon, watch it wash light into the water for eight crystalline minutes in perfect solitude.

In my head I thank the sun. I thank the mountain. I thank my bike and my wobbly knee. I thank the woman from the parking lot, several times.

The crowds arrive and thicken behind me with the morning until the sky is bright and the base of the lookout hums with happy chatter. Having already gotten what I came for I’m unbothered, clasping a thermos on top of a boulder, when a man appears below and directly in front of me.

He’s wearing $500 Arc’teryx and a poorly knit cap with bears’ ears, the sort of thing you’d put on a baby. Like any quirky sartorial choice by a conventionally attractive person, I hate this hat and by extension this man, who is now beaming up at me with eyes sparkling out of a weathered face. “Lovely morning! Happy new year! Are you having a good day?”

“Uh huh.” I stare straight ahead and past him. I want to kick his teeth in, and from this unnecessarily small distance probably could.

“Can you guess what all this white stuff is?” He’s gesturing at the rocks where he stands beneath me, but I’m not looking, only wondering: What the fuck? What compels them? What animates a man to step off the trail, pick his way slowly across the slope through a mat of chaparral, and stand right here rather than anywhere else for a hundred yards? What about me—sitting alone and apart from a crowd drinking tea in a duct-tape-patched parka—suggests that I want to talk to him?

Nothing, John Cheever reminds me; it’s not about me. I must forgive them—these tall, old, white, wealthy, handsome men—it’s simply that no one has ever suggested anything else.

He had never before felt unwanted. It had never been said. He had been wanted as a baby, wanted as a young man, wanted as a lover, a husband and father, wanted as a scriptwriter, a raconteur and companion. He had, if anything, been wanted excessively, and his only worry had been to spare himself, to spread his sought-after charms with prudence and discretion, so that they would do the most good. He had been wanted for golf, for tennis, for bridge, for charades, for cocktails, for boards of management—and yet this ancient wall addressed him as if he were a pariah, a nameless beggar, an outcast. He was deeply wounded.

“Ashes,” the man announces, knowingly. “People come here to spread ashes. It’s not allowed but they do it anyway. Now you know!”

In this moment I see the crux very clearly. This is what it will be about now, this year and every year until I am dust myself—an arms race against my own waning energy to get up earlier, drive farther, search longer, try harder to find space. The world closes in and I will need to do more and more ridiculous things to get away.

Little do I know!

February

I do not look forward to anything. I consider it dangerous. Nobody taught me this, nothing happened, but it’s the way I’m wired—to believe anticipation tempts the gods. Even absent force majeure, our earthly bodies fail in the face of even the surest thing.

But when six of my friends agree to take a week-long mountain bike trip with me in the summer, I can’t help it: I’m excited. I put it on my calendar with only a fingers-crossed emoji to mitigate the exclamation point. This, I dare think for a moment, is going to be good.

March

We’re driving to the South Bay, three of us in one car—the idea of it now—debating the new plague. Jacob is worried, but Jacob is always worried. I say, I distinctly remember: “I don’t see how it’s any different than flu.”

Later I will forgive myself this declaration and further argue that although my friend was right, he was right for no good reason, whereas I was wrong correctly, given all the information I or any average citizen had at the time. I see your eyes roll, and I stand by myself, but also I remember the morning of 9/11—

—sophomore year chemistry, lesson plan abandoned. Kids are hugging with their sweatshirt hoods tied closed, boys grandiosely consoling girls. “Why are they crying?” I hiss. “This stuff happens all the time.”

“Not here,” someone wails back at me, and of course she’s completely and profoundly correct without either of us knowing it. It will be decades before I fully grasp that the difference between what may go on here and there is what makes the whole world.

Four days later the big companies have already shuttered, but Sean and I are still due in at work. Our offices in Oakland will be among the last to close. We ride in together, take a long detour through the park, and have a sense it may be the last time for a long while.

Along 108, 11/9–11/10

May 9, 2020July 2, 2020 Alia S.Leave a comment

We’re not even past Manteca when I wander carelessly into an argument about climate change and the primaries. It ends poorly, with one friend red-faced and seething in the driver’s seat and me in tears, confused—but not really—at how easily I make people angry when I’m only playing a game.

A neutral third party, child of schoolteachers, tries to mediate from the back. It is gently suggested I tend to belabor semantics. (Moi?)

“Listen, have you ever seen Star Trek?”

“I’m not Spock,” I protest, wiping my nose on my sleeve. I’ve heard this one before. “I have feelings.”

Chief among them: I’m tired. In trying to make up for a summer lost to my new job, I set a rat-a-tat cadence of shoulder-season trips I didn’t really have the energy to take. The weekend-warrior maneuvers have always been hard: fractious Friday-night logistics, restless sleep, pre-dawn alarm. Sixteen or so waking hours of the good stuff before the reluctant slog back to reality, straight into the glare of the sun bleeding out in Central Valley smog. Those drives are so much longer than they used be, the dread of the Monday so much heavier in my chest. This late in the year the days are short and cold along the edges.

So what I want to do, if I’m honest, is crib from notes on another day I didn’t feel like trying very hard and have brunch on the deck of the Jamestown Hotel. My friends will not say no to me, now that I’ve scared them by behaving like a girl—so I order French toast and inform them we will be here for a while.

I know, but there’s a miniature town in the stem of the glass.

Our waitress is a grandmotherly type in sensible shoes and a black butterfly-sleeved blouse. I can see her pausing over it at the sale rack, a scene so vivid I realize I may cry again when she arrives to take our orders. She moved to Jamestown after a divorce, she says, doesn’t miss him or the city or a single damn thing. She works when they’ll have her. She likes seeing people find a moment to breathe.

The boys make steady progress on biscuits and gravy. When the server returns to distribute the remains of the mimosa pitcher, she just grazes their glasses before chugging the lion’s share into mine with a wink.

“Ready to roll?” one friend asks me tentatively as I finish my drink. We’ve got another hour or so in the car and they want to ride. “No,” I announce gravely. “I want to go antiquing.”

We get to Pinecrest eventually. I bail on a long cross-country route in favor of dozing by the lake like a civilian, guzzling sun in the brief afternoon hours that still look like summer. The crowds are manageable now, and if you keep out of the shadows it’s warm enough.

I do ride a little: just the short stuff, more a vague gesture at the French toast than anything else. There is a moment after dropping in from a road crossing when my friends and the trail turn directly into the setting sun. As they pull away from me they are cast suddenly into silhouettes against their own rising dust, lit deep orange and red through the trees. I hit the brakes, taste the dirt settling on my tongue as I watch them disappear into plumes of light.

Georgetown, 10/26–10/27

May 2, 2020February 20, 2021 Alia S.Leave a comment

I try to attend women’s-only mountain bike events once every few years to avoid becoming completely incompetent. We all improve by observing others, but my usual riding partners are men so much faster than me that they’re rarely in sight. Even when I can watch them, their clearing an obstacle is meaningless—whereas I consider a woman doing the same thing to be admissible evidence I should at least try it. If this approach is completely sexist, it has also thus far kept me alive.

Having said that, all-women events stress me out. There’s often a lot of dancing and “WOOO”-ing, and while men can choose to stand apart from these rituals without drawing much notice, opting out as a woman tends to cause other women to assume you’re a stuck-up bitch. It doesn’t help that in my case it’s arguably true.

Point being, I am already swimming against a current of dread when I arrive late to the meeting point and find the parking lot full of women kitted up in armor—a lot of armor. I watch them loading big bikes onto the shuttle rigs and observe an alarming number of full-face helmets.

Oooooooh shit, I think. I am at the wrong party.

By Donna Ellsworth, ripper.

As it turns out, I needn’t have worried. Georgetown trails are somehow everything I like and nothing I don’t: all wide, chunky, fast stuff, no acrobatics, no exposure, no water. Even without a functional rear brake (….), by far the most intimidating part of the day is dinner with 20 women I don’t know—and even that is easy to sneak out of once it gets dark.

I go to bed resolving to Fully Participate on day two, but when I wake up the weather has taken a turn. A bone-dry wind is howling down through the woods to the foothills. The thoughtful decorative touches are blown about the lawn and the oaks are groaning and cracking overhead. No fool, the organizer pulls the plug.

The first two roads I follow out of camp are blocked by downed trees. When I finally reach the highway a few 15-point turns later, it’s strewn with branches and pine needles that crunch under my toy car as it wobbles in the gusts. In the small Gold Country towns where PG&E cut the power days ago, the blank-faced stoplights are swinging drunkenly in the wind. Construction debris rattling down the sidewalk sounds strangely like shouting: get out, get out, get out.

… on the other hand, I hate to waste a day out of my own zip code and I’ve always wanted a closer look at the Foresthill Bridge:

One ill-advised “short jog” later, a dozen or so grassfires are now burning between me and the bay. Driving in hapless circles through Sacramento trying to route my way around one of them, I at one point find myself in bumper-to-bumper traffic across an overpass spanning visible flames. Crossing the Carquinez Bridge at last—hills smoldering on both sides of the water—I’ve been in the car for almost six hours: easily more time than I spent on my bike.

There are more days like this ahead, more and more grind for the right side of the ratio. We all know it and we pray for rain.

Fall forward, 2019

April 18, 2020May 11, 2020 Alia S.Leave a comment

Genoa

This climb is pretty civilized, but it’s also 20 miles long. By the time we’re over it, I’m over it: I dump my bike unceremoniously on the rocks and stumble off to stuff my face and drink the view—Lake Tahoe in dreamy blue haze far below.

Sean’s moving my bike out of the way when he notices the headset is loose. After many years of watching my eyes glaze over at the first mention of mechanics, most of these guys would rather fix something for me than watch me make it worse, which suits my version of feminism just fine. Sean tightens the headset and, being both generous and thorough, starts checking the rest of the bike, too.

“Uh, you might to look at this, actually,” he says.

“Don’t care, do whatever,” I reply around the last of my sandwich.

“No, seriously. Do you have a 10?”

One of the pivot bolts has loosened to the point you can see daylight between pieces of the frame. To fix it takes a tool nobody’s carrying, so I face the prospect of a long, baby-head-strewn descent on a bike coming apart at the seams—or on foot.

I’m cry-laughing at my options when a pair of riders appears over the hill behind us—the only other people we’ve seen on the trail all day. After a suspenseful few moments of rummaging through his pack, one of them presents Sean with a 10 millimeter Allen wrench.

I will end the season with my trail karma deep in the red.

*At Mormon Station State Park, an unrelated ailment and an unrelated cure.*

Usal Hopper

I thought sea level might help, but—apart from dropping things out of my pockets—I’m having all the same problems I did at Lost and Found. It’s a beautiful day and the course is a treat, but with a number on I just want to get it over with.

Being not especially athletic, my best strategy for doing this involves spinning slowly up climbs, then riding the descents at a speed at which I can’t actually see anything and a wreck would end in the hospital. Every time I careen past someone fitter than me I hear echos of my former self watching the podiums for my first race, circa 2008.

“It’s not fair,” I’m hissing at my boyfriend, who’s (quite correctly) ignoring me. “She was behind me the whole time and then she just passed me going downhill! Does that even count? It’s just gravity!”

Twelve years, twenty pounds, a ponytail, and a literal awkward turtle ago …

I’m glad, truly, to be better now both at losing and descending. But I still miss those days—back when riding bikes wasn’t cool. From my sample size of two, it appears that organized gravel events are my petty, contrarian hell: something I want to do that the Popular Kids want to do, too.

In the evening the beach is awash in craft beer, peppered with Ibis and Thesis bikes (Ibises? Theses?) posed against driftwood and the sunset for Instagram. In the gentle surf, a pair of yoga-bodied blonde chicks splash naked arm in arm, while various indistinguishable bearded men mill around their string-lit Sprinter vans pretending not to watch. I’ve been trying to study pelicans through my binoculars and now I have to put them down so I don’t look like a creep. I do recall graduating middle school, but I’m so irritated with the whole scene I could spit.

They’re out here, too, though, my Freds, my people. They were the retirees trundling the 60+ miles on un-ironic hybrids; the red-faced couple on a tandem. We don’t speak apart from brief congratulations at the finish, but I decide they’ve dated since high school and met in marching band. I love them as fiercely and unjustifiably as I resent everybody else.

Big Chief

The much-hyped, new-to-us trail is too technical for me: I’m walking more than I’m riding. It’s also bitterly cold, occasionally raining, and, by the time we get back to the car after getting lost and riding in circles for an extra 45 minutes, almost dark.

And I am so, so happy.

Summer reruns, 2019

March 14, 2020March 15, 2020 Alia S.Leave a comment

Pinecrest

Between the first time out and familiarity a lot of Forest Service fire roads look the same. In this case, I’ve confused the ascent of Pinecrest Peak with the long slog up Mt. Hough, which is at least five highways north and much, much harder. When I realize this—after dragging my feet and dreading the climb all morning— I’m so pleased I don’t mind when the trail peters out, that I can’t remember how to mountain bike, or even when the boys lose me in the woods.

There’s still snow up high and it’s too early for the flowers . But from where I sit in the hammock in the campground—inhaling queso fresco, talking shit, breathing woodsmoke—summer is on.

Oakridge

My still-new job and the misguided decision to take allergy drugs mean I arrive in Oakridge—one of my all-time favorite places to ride—in a state of irritable lethargy bordering a medical concern. At the fish hatchery I’ve been hyping for weeks I make it through just three holes of salmon-lifecycle-themed mini-golf (you see why I was excited) before staggering off to sleep on a bench. Later I watch Fourth of July fireworks reflected in the inky river, in part because it’s beautiful and in part because it takes less energy than lifting my head.

Apart from some outstanding trails, Oakridge has a few through-streets, four or five trailer parks, and an often-shuttered Chinese restaurant we’ve always regarded as a kind of joke. This time around, we stop in. Sean has heard the proprietor is in fact the onetime personal chef of Jackie Chan, and that he can be plied with tequila into provisioning off-script dishes and entertainment.

As the DD (for all of four blocks between dinner and motel) I suspect that Mr. Lee is not even remotely as drunk as he’s pretending to be—or serious when he insists we come to stay with him on a dumpling tour of Taiwan. But the food is excellent and his advice is worth considering. The secret to matrimonial bliss, he says, is to transfer your assets to your spouse outright and then encourage her to spend however she likes. “I tell my wife: You like it? Buy it! Just buy it! But if the money’s gone, it’s gone. That’s all you.”

He has arrived at this understanding over the course of several marriages, each of which cleaned him out. He met his current wife when she cut his hair at a salon. He came back daily, nothing left on his head to cut, asking her out until she capitulated. Wrong word?

His father-in-law tells him he’s an idiot. “Maybe I am,” he tell us, “but I’m happy.”

We’ve been here four or five times now, sniffed all the plants—and still can’t figure out what makes this forest smell so good.

Even if if you don’t count the long stop at the logging museum—where I buy a bird-shaped water whistle and a train t-shirt declaring me “ALL STEAMED UP”—it takes us 12 hours to get home. The combination of holiday and construction traffic has turned the highway rest stops into stations of the apocalypse: idling trucks and fractious dogs and children, bickering in a dozen languages, overflowing toilets and trash. I spend the week that follows wistfully browsing real estate.

Emigrant Wilderness

The season’s nearly over and we haven’t been backpacking once. We get it together just enough for 18 or so hours in Emigrant, a tease. I’m dizzy and wheezing from the altitude, but the light in the morning‘s a balm and the water, once I inch my way in, a cool caress.

Bad cell-phone pic, con: Not as cool as drone footage. Bad cell-phone pic, pro: Doesn’t intrude on every living thing for miles in any direction.

This trip has two offenders. One is Maddie the dog, who limps and lags and pants until she cons me into lobbying for the removal of her backpack—and then bolts off into the woods like a track sprinter. The second is the garbage human flying a drone over the lake.

“NO DRONES IN THE WILDERNESS,” Ryan yells down to their Instagram-able hammocks on the shore. This of course is all anyone can do. But vivid fantasies of a sharp shot from a BB gun—also, obviously, not allowed in the wilderness—down to the bite of granite on my elbows, the pop and the whine and clatter of the wounded machine—carry me all the way down to the car.

Hayduke lives.

Downieville

I’m sick and sitting out the first day’s ride as a sort of sacrificial offering, as if a cold can be negotiated with. Walking alone in the woods instead I encounter a snake, an encampment, a creepy pile of rotting clothing, and a stretch of trail that smells suddenly and powerfully like a railroad track. There’s no reason for this that I can see. Just Gold Country shadows and ghosts.

Back in town I watch two kids—maybe nine or ten—as they record a third cannonballing off the bridge into the river. They take turns working the cell phone and shuttling the performer’s Crocs back and forth. They debrief. (“So-o sketch, bro. That one was so sketch.”)

It’s a nontrivial jump with signage strenuously forbidding it. I wouldn’t have tried it at their age, and though I think I’m braver now I know I’m not brave enough. Over the course of what I’ll call my career as an editor I have by coincidence worked on three separate pieces featuring an interviewee who paralyzed themselves jumping into rivers or lakes, and the act of dissecting each scene down to the comma has given cliff-diving and the like a special place in my anti-repertoire, the things I will not do. I’m glad when the kid quits for pizza.

When I ride, even somewhere familiar, I take very few bridge-grade risks. The consequences are too high, and the payoff—given that my bravest moments on a bike are routine for everyone else—almost nonexistent. So when I crash these days it’s usually somewhere unexpected: in this case, on a flat, fast corner 30 seconds from the car. I’ve been trying to hold Ryan’s wheel. I insist it had been going, up until that point, pretty well.

“Bigger tires,” he shrugs.

I’ve been up to the Sierra Buttes lookout tower before, in my first week out of the boot after breaking my foot. I wasn’t taking any risks when I did that, either. I was walking down the stairs in my own damn house.

Now, dragging my bike up boulders everyone else seems able to ride, I can’t understand how I ever managed the hike.

Slowly, doggedly, eventually, I suppose, if not bravely or well. Then as now; now, I hope, as ever.

Escalante, May 18–26

February 15, 2020March 15, 2020 Alia S.1 Comment

I’m skeptical that I have any business being on the water for a week, having only and rarely ever served as ballast. Sean, however, has more than a decade of experience both in guiding trips and in baiting me out of safe harbors. I’m not really listening to his detailed explanation of dam releases and flow rates because I get the gist: this is a rare opportunity, a river you can’t usually run. My catnip, my kryptonite, my achilles: the Chance That Will Not Come Again™.

Taking the bait, 2019 (above) and 2010 (below). “The Frog” is our (French-Canadian) former housemate. More on that later.

When I commit to going I envision that I’ll be unemployed, or at least seriously underemployed—not two weeks into/already underwater at my first new-new job-job in a decade. I haven’t had time to think about it, and the sight of all three of my travel companions in our Google Sheets packing list at 12:45 a.m. the morning of our flight suggests that none of them have, either.

The immediacy of the need to get ourselves and our gear to the airport overshadows the larger issue of the rapidly deteriorating forecast, which we dismiss as an incidental detail we can do nothing about. This age-old illogic may one day end the world in fire. (“But sir, are you sure you want to—” / “DO IT. I ALREADY BOUGHT THE TICKET.”)

1 a.m. and really starting to make progress.

Once confined to suitcases, this Gear Explosion is less enormous than you’d think—considering that it includes a literal boat—but still too enormous for the Lyft driver, who takes one look at me standing on the curb with my duffles and speeds away shaking his head. Plan B involves three bodies and six body-bags in a Gig car and looks like this:

There’s an app for that. Photo by Sean, driving this thing.

We make it to Salt Lake City, play another round of rental-car Tetris, and beeline south. Anticipating lean times ahead, we eat an extravagant last supper in an inexplicable, Alice Waters-esque outpost of “fanciful cuisine” called Hell’s Backbone Grill. It’s an ashram or art collective or organic goat farm or something and all the staff are beautiful in exactly the same way, as if generated by artificial intelligence trained on a dataset of Madewell catalogs. Our doll-waisted waitress coos and floats about like an exotic bird reciting unnecessary but mellifluous information about herbs. A few outstanding margaritas later I am calling her Jessica and cannot recall if this is actually her name.

The next morning there is a long and fractious procedure of packing, re-packing, and shuttling vehicles before we finally get our feet wet, at a nondescript put-in under a low bridge in a thicket of mesquite trees. Neither Ryan or I have seen our packraft outside of a living room before, but as it belongs to a bona fide National Geographic Explorer one hopes it’s imbued with some sort of residual competence. I am swimming (soon literally) in said Explorer’s trousers and splash jacket, while Ryan has borrowed his wetsuit from an ex-girlfriend, a stick-thin triathlete. We look insane.

It’s immediately apparent that the Forager is not for amateurs. Ten feet long and fully loaded with food and gear, it spins and ping-pongs off the banks on a capricious course of its own. This becomes less and less amusing as the weather deteriorates, from cheery spring sunshine when we set out to a steel-gray sky and spitting rain.

The temperature drops and the wind rises. The rain becomes a deluge, then hail, pellets of ice ricocheting off the nose of the boat like buckshot. Behind us there’s a deafening crash, something like a building collapse or a car wreck. When I turn to look, there’s a jet of water exploding over the cliff edge, a roaring cascade where seconds ago the red rock face was bare. It’s one of the most astonishing things I’ve ever seen. Nothing happens until it happens, I think, inanely, then, everything happens out of sight.

In the morning the river is running very high and very fast. It looks like a latte and sounds like an animal. Sean surveys the situation from the banks in silence. “Seems … different,” I offer. “Yeeeeeah,” he says. “We’ll talk about that.”

The crux isn’t rocks or rapids but Russian Olive. Yesterday it formed a graceful and pleasant canopy overhead, but on the swollen river today the dense, woody branches are now at eye level and very difficult to avoid. Behind me, Ryan can usually flatten himself into the boat deck, but as the hapless hood ornament in the bow I’m getting clotheslined over and over into the water. There’s very little I can do about this other than cover my face and pray I keep both arms in their sockets.

It sounds funny and certainly must look it, but after a few solid blows to the head I am not laughing. Apart from the fact of repeated bludgeoning by (very) invasive trees, I’m also now wet to the skin in a knife-edge wind: having packed for “just stand up”-deep water I’m not wearing a wetsuit, never mind a drysuit. I’m dealing with this the way I typically react to the cold, which is to make myself as small as possible and pretend I don’t exist. Thus semi-catatonic, I almost miss Sean on the riverbank ahead, shouting at us to eddy out.

Poached from the man with the plan and the camera. I took very few pictures, hence the several thousand words.

I haven’t noticed him in time to stop the Forager from careening past the beach. “Not going to make that,” I announce. “I’ll catch the next one.”

“NO. DO. IT. NOW.”

In many years of following him around the backcountry I have rarely heard Sean take this tone. Startled out of my stupor, I lunge at some branches and stab a paddle into the sand. I am half in and half out of the boat when I notice there are other people on the bank—the first we’ve seen in days. They look very concerned, which, given that they are being invaded by shivering lunatics, is probably justified.

I, however, am delighted to discover the reason for the urgent stop. These fine folks have a campsite in the shelter of a glorious overhang; they have hot water and a fire. (Note for due diligence that the latter is not allowed, endorsed, or undertaken on this river without a good reason, which I feel we had.) The angels of mercy are generously sharing all of these things and are also cool as hell. I am once again glad to exist.

Thawing ham. (I told you we looked insane.) Photo from Marisa, who was smart enough to bring a coat and kind enough to let me wear it.

River conditions improve somewhat over the days following. Sean makes a gracious sacrifice of his own, much more entertaining single-person boat in order to take over as pilot of the Forager, which significantly reduces the amount of time I spend in the water and fretting over trees.

That said, it’s still very cold, and I’m reminded of how a thing can be physically challenging without being physically difficult. Whenever the sun appears and disappears behind a cloud again I could weep. I used to resent the lack of secular language for awe. These days I borrow freely. The juxtaposition, sometimes—of our silly little boats in the water and the colossal arches overhead; of my hopelessly awkward, daunted body and every perfect bright flower blooming in the sand—all that is inarticulable otherwise. In every direction the landscape is indifferent, immeasurably variable, infinitely perfect. What is that but sublime?

I watch my footprints fill as we walk silent washes. I think of flash-floods sculpting the alcoves, picture hidden currents freezing and thawing in a million tiny fissures, the moment their exhalations over eons at last cleave the rock apart. I imagine the sound this would make, stone the size of a high-rise hitting the canyon floor. What runs through my head over and over again all week is,

on your knees before your God.

There is also a duck—logically several different ducks, but for all I can tell, one single, very blasé duck—who seems to bob in front of us most of the way down the river. Even when you’re ad-libbing rosaries and spinning in the infinite, you have to admit there’s something intrinsically casual about a mallard.

The sublime and the sublimely ridiculous

We have one day of blazing sunshine, which coincides with our re-entry into land-access territory on a holiday weekend. After miles of perfect solitude the canyons are suddenly overrun. The banks are denuded and tragic, every alcove strewn with camp chairs and sticky, staring children. It’s time to go.

The way out is up a a low-angle slab that morphs from negligible to oddly fraught as soon as I put my pack on. Same goes for the interminable sand dune that follows. As soon as we’ve hauled our gear and ourselves over the canyon rim it seems impossible that the thing exists.

From Sean—up the creek without a creek. If you’re wondering why I didn’t bring a wetsuit “just in case,” the answer is: I suck at backpacking and was desperately trying to save weight for this hike out.

For several hours the entertainment consists of Sean and Ryan yelling back at me that every oncoming hiker is our onetime housemate Philippe, who we’ve vaguely suggested meet us at the trailhead so we can swap shuttles. They’ve told a dozen versions of this joke already by the time it’s actually true—but when it is, our old friend’s buoyant, ambling stride is unmistakable even in distant silhouette, even after many years. It is the perfect thing to take the sting off the end of the journey, The Chance That Will Not Come Again.

Also infinite: my gratitude for these three.

New ground, winter-spring 2019

January 4, 2020October 21, 2021 Alia S.Leave a comment

Boonville

Compared to my friends I am much less fit and much more concerned about trespassing—which is easy enough to do here, whether you mean to or not. I don’t know which side of the Jefferson state line we’re on, but I do know none of us is quite white enough to make assumptions in the woods.

I win some route-finding squabbles; I lose some. On Fish Rock (legal, but too long for me) I cut out early and wait at the car in the gathering darkness for the boys. When they find me I am muddy from looking at sticks and mushrooms.

Geyserville

I love the ruins, the steam, the bend in the river, love the deflating Mad-Max pavement and the unconcerned cows chewing cud on the centerline. I can have a shining-white view of the Russian River Valley or a screaming, serpentine descent into it; I cannot, alas, have both.

Sean’s uncanny instinct for the most and best food leads us to a Mexican grocery stocked with things I’ve never seen before, less because I am not Mexican than because I am not a cook. There is interesting cheese and Twinkie variants; there are strange cones of brown sugar. I learn these are called piloncillo: literally—too good to be true—”little pylons.”

La Grange

Exchequer is a small park and I want it to myself. To arrive in time for a chance at this—that is, to ride new dirt without weekending GoPro-bros from the valley on my ass—means provisioning at a tiny shop in La Grange. The door breathes a plume of gold-lit dust at my heels as it shuts behind me; I have Pringles and expired chocolate milk for dinner.

But on the trail I get what I came for. I can laugh like a mad thing at the view—land before time—and there’s no one to hear me.

Arroyo Seco

A new bike materializes at the same time as a new job that will prevent me from riding it. I flee south in a sort of desperation, so keen to try this bucket-list route while I still can that I don’t ever check to see where it actually goes.

I’m in the honeymoon period of a bike upgrade where you’d swear the thing has an engine. Hours of climbing feel effortless and the sun is warm on my skin for the first time in months. The wet winter has brought forth a parade of wildflowers that smile and nod from the road-cuts, from beds of chaparral and yucca and agave. On my knees in a saddle meadow carpeted with lupine, I heave with what I suppose the kids these days or a doctor might call a panic attack and I’d call a perfectly reasonable response—to anything so beautiful it hurts, to anything you might never have again.

We talk about “FOMO,” of course, and trivialize it as millennial conceit. But the frivolous little twigs—the aftertaste of the acai bowl when (!) you might have ordered avocado toast—grow on the same family tree as the most fundamental fear we know. I’m on a middling branch as I consider that I have bills to pay, that I can’t stay in this field forever. But at the base—I’m sorry; this is how I’ll excuse my behavior—is nothing less than the specter of death.

Mt. Uhumuhum

I grew up down here on box lore: haunted (false), haunting (true), guarded by armed survivalists (true again). To see the site open now impresses me: I can guess at the work it took to reconcile the EPA with multiple jurisdictions and the smarting Amah Mutsun. I watch the latter shuffle and hum in the ceremonial circle, their piece of the park pie. The tower behind me of course gives an impression of watching, too.

The other ridgeline scar and urban legend in the South Bay is the quarry—rumored of aliens, corpses, etc. Strangely enough I’ve been there, too: in junior year a friend and I finagled a tour by claiming we wanted to write an article for the school paper. We wore polo shirts, trying to look serious, and ogled trucks with tires the size of a house. We had a hell of a time and never actually wrote a word about it.

I am too often in my head, keep too many notes, to be truly confused by my own past logic very often. So while it seems a small thing, I can say without exaggeration that not writing that quarry story is among the most mystifying decisions of my life.

Portola

Theoretically I no longer ride bikes competitively. I will occasionally pay for a destination event if it’s got something I need: a water stop or good camping or permissions for private land (see: Boonville). “I’m not racing,” I will announce, piously, as if anyone gave a shit. “I’m just riding with a number on.”

In reality? Though I’m not willing or able to ride fast, once I put said number on I’m just as dogged as ever by the idea that I can’t stop: not for photos, not for the water I paid for, and not to drop my tire pressure from the cement-like PSI I left it trying to seat my new tires the night before. Nor do I feel I can stop to pick up the driver’s license that falls out of my pocket, where I’d stuck it after eking through registration three minutes before the start. “You dropped something!” yell a half-dozen riders behind me. “Okay!” I yell back.

Sixty-three painful miles at altitude plus a night’s rest and a journey home later I realize it is in fact a huge pain in the ass to replace a driver’s license. I’m still despairing over appointment windows and my new work schedule a week later when this letter turns up it the mail—miraculous. I send a thank-you card, a prayer, and the postage back. The address is a P.O. Box.

The event, if you’ll allow it: Lost and Found.

Fire season 2018

December 31, 2019December 31, 2019 Alia S.Leave a comment

On the way to Quincy we lunch roadside at the Rock House on Yankee Hill. A wooden cutout of Bigfoot ambles across the gravel lot; there is one valiant, buoyant woman behind the counter.

These are my favorite places. I like some kitsch on the walls, some saran-wrapped muffins in a basket, a menu in Comic Sans—italic. “It’s perfect,” I announce, before the food has even arrived. “We’ll have to come here again.”

Back home two days later I’ll watch the incident map as the Camp Fire crawls inexorably toward this spot, hitting the refresh button every hour until there’s no denying the line has jumped the highway. A year later we’ll drive past the little restaurant’s namesake stone walls, all that’s left.

But today we sit on the back patio, hands and sandwiches striped in the shade of a new trellis roof.

Highway 70 after Yankee Hill has been plucked from a model railroad layout. Pylons perch above the road as it winds through rough-blasted tunnels, past power stations trimmed in fall color. Alongside us, the Feather River is by turns glassy bottle green and churning white, strewn with house-sized boulders as if by petulant gods.

When we arrive in Quincy there’s a small crowd of people standing in the median holding up signs and American flags. In the gathering dusk I can see only white skin and hair under red baseball caps and “TRUMP” scrawled on poster-board. My stomach lurches. They are hit and miss, these old mountain towns, after all. You can only guess how each will manifest its particular nostalgia for timber or mining or dinner on the table at six.

But as we get closer I can make out the small print. The sign says “TRUMP LIES MATTER.” The red caps are embroidered with the seal of the U.S. Marine Corps. The midterms are next week.

The house flips, but Paradise burns. I’m aware my N95 is too big and not sealing properly; I wear it anyway, imprinting it with lip gloss. The tightness in my chest might be from smoke or from first-world guilt—from knowing perfectly well that the apocalyptic yellow curtain hanging over my street would constitute a great day in Delhi.

Nevertheless I flee because I can, to midweek-rate motel rooms in South Lake. While waiting for the days to warm and my friends to arrive I watch, for some reason, the BBC rendition of Daniel Deronda—a sort of Victorian drawing room drama with a surprise dose of Jewish mysticism. One thing leads to another and there I am, not so much working on job applications as Wikipedia-ing Purim and shaking my fist in the name of Vashti, who also did not care to dance for the king.

Hiking alone above Fallen Leaf Lake I step aside for a couple going the other way. The woman has dropped a bandana from her pack, which I retrieve from the trail and offer back to her. “Hey, is this yours?”

“Oh,” she says. “Yeah.” She snatches it back without meeting my eyes or saying thank you, then turns on her heel and jogs back up the trail to where her partner is sniggering into his elbow. I’m puzzled and offended by the entire interaction until, months later, I read a Backpacker Magazine blurb espousing pee rags.

The best ride of the season begins with several hours of pushing my bike up Van Sickle, proceeds to a miserable interlude of backache and altitude-induced puking, and finishes, inexplicably, with my hands in the fur of three golden retrievers unattended at the end of the trail. The first two acts are as likely as the fires to be repeated; the last will presumably never happen again.

A close reader will notice I’m writing, in this case, more than a year after the fact—beginning on a backlog that forces awkward, ungrammatical contortions of temporality because I don’t like to write (read: live) in anything but the present tense. My clairvoyance is only hindsight, and even from one future, what do I know about the next? What does anyone know, of what will befall us, what wind may change?

So dum spiro, spero, I say, for more surprise dogs—through that red-kissed respirator mask or not.

Assorted eastern Oregon, 10/15–10/21

February 24, 2019February 24, 2019 Alia S.Leave a comment

Bend

In Bend I resolve to do the things no one else ever wants to do, specifically, people-watch from armchairs in the library, gain five pounds in cardamom Ocean Rolls, and attend a presentation on ravens. Did you know they mate for life and live to 20? In the High Desert Museum I also learn the word “buckaroo” might be a corruption of vaquero, or perhaps from the Gullah buckra—white man—itself from mbakara in the language of Nigeria’s Efik.

I was going to say that the raven meanwhile quethe today the same as ever. But we don’t know that, either, do we?

It’s not warm enough (for me) to get on a bike until one or two in the afternoon, but the northern days are short and I keep finishing rides in the dark. It’s sure some kind of trail-building, that even I can just about clean this stuff with my eyes shut, and I relish this even as I telegraph thanks to home turf for keeping me honest. What would I be it weren’t for a blown-out, off-camber, fall-line ego-check every weekend?

For an answer, a herd of girls in unicorn onesies appears at the top of the flow trail. A few have gotten too hot on the climb and unzipped themselves into sweat-glossed, lace-bra’d centaurs, unwanted horns and heads dangling lifelessly behind their saddles. They stop and preen and smother the last rider up in hugs and coos of “yaaaaaas” and “crrrrr-ush-errrrrrr,” a dialect of affirmation I’ve grown to understand but can’t speak. I feel like I’ve ridden into an Instagram ad.

Mitchell

The Painted Hills are that, and scattered slabs of layer cake. In the dusky palette I recognize a few shades, if not all: terra cotta tiles, sun on a rose, palomino horse. No lipstick, charcoal-smudged palm. Old bruise, fresh-scraped knee.

I stay at Spoke’n, a white clapboard church with a reading nook in the alcove—place of honor, where books belong. They are catering to bike campers and meticulous about it: kneeling pads for wrenching, conversation prompts on the kitchen table, pre-filled coffee filters, lemon-scented garbage cans. I arrive to my name in calligraphy on the bedroom door, despite having impulse-booked only a half-hour earlier.

I know the right-sized reaction to careful hospitality begins and ends with “Nice touch,” but I feel I know the rare mind it takes to do this sort of thing well, and that it’s often found in a woman not getting nearly enough cash or credit for it. Admiring the aesthetic choices in the old nave I’m consumed with unholy, acquisitive fantasies of a call with the head of recruitment for Hilton or Four Seasons. “You’ll never guess where I found her,” I’ll tell them from a crackling payphone that doesn’t exist. I might also be chewing tobacco, spit a stained arc into the dust and smudge it with my boot. “Trust me, you’re going to want her on those tower walk-throughs A-S-A-P.”

God forgive me; I live in capitalism and my imagination, if not in sin.

Broken Top

To say I make a series of stupid navigational errors would I imply I’m navigating, at all, rather than cruising along on the assumption that a trail named “Broken Top” will eventually just arrive there.

It’s midday before I realize that it won’t, late afternoon by the time I backtrack and screw up again, picking my way up the wrong couloir on the thin evidence of a few other footprints. Just short of a view over the edge, at least, my courage dies with the light. I fret, sally, waffle, retreat, and reach the dark and empty parking lot convinced I could have made the last few moves after all. Oh well, oh well.

Oakridge

I want to go east and wallow in obsidian on Glass Butte, but it’s hours of off-road driving and at this point I have to admit my car is unwell. I turn for Oakridge, instead, a known quantity, drive through either the night or outer space blinded by moonbeams flashing wildly through the pines.

The next day I buddy up with the next-least braap-y people on the shuttle: I ride better this way than without anyone around to call an ambulance. I’m a bit fitter but they’re a lot better, so our pace is about the same—and in any case they seem pleased to have a new audience for old jokes.

It’s difficult to leave. The forest is a kaleidoscope of low-angle light and fall color, the trails a glorious, torturous high-wire between wanting to look and wanting to fly. But the season’s nearly over. The mornings are getting very, very cold.