Underwater Music: Water Home

Connection Piece VI

swim as far as you can in your dream/ away from/ your home/ your mate/ your children/ your pets/ your belongings/ your work place/ your colleagues/ see if you drown or survive

--Yoko Ono

 

1.

My mother wants a one-lane lap pool.

We talk about this often.

She wants for us to dig the hole in her backyard

together—

 

we understand one other when we use our bodies.

 

We would shovel out the earth until our arms

ache, our shoulders paralyzed with the strain

of repetitious movement,

 

line it with stone, labor, then fill it with water.

 

2.

Long after the swallows fly south

and the milkweed’s soft leaves begin to

shrivel into crunchy cocoons,

and the monarchs dwindle to the last few

castaways hiding in the tall silvery grasses

the winds pick up from the north and east.

 

After summer fades into longer shadows

and the apples are harvested from her trees,

she will have to construct a tent-bubble

to encase her dream pool—

 

“If I had a small pool in my yard, I would swim

twice, maybe 3 times a day,” my mother whispers—

We understand the world better when we are moving.

“I would like that.”

 

I nodded, yes.

Water home.

Overnight & Weekend Bikepacking from Bend, Oregon

Notes from Bend, OR: Leaving for an overnight in the Cascades Lakes

Slowing, I squinted past the posted sign at the trail intersection, at Kent’s Trailhead, just outside of Bend. I followed the line drawn in dirt with my finger, out past my foreground. My gaze blurred, and the recently bloomed sage, dusty earth and juniper bark into one subtle palette—one step beyond pastel towards the shades and values of dust. I closed my eyes, inhaled: spicy warm, mordant, piquant, and bracing. Opening my eyes again, I refocused on the yellowing grasses the same color as the dying sage blooms, fading into the overcast sky. It’s raining and snowing in the mountains, I thought and remounted my bicycle. I kicked up dust from the trail with my toe, and its fine powder concealed the skin on my legs and the leather on my shoes. It began to sprinkle, yes, its definitely raining and snowing in the mountains, too.

It is the end of summer’s dryness, late September, and the temperatures have begun cooling. I rolled ahead, and dust puffed up; I coughed the dry air coating my lungs, and pedaled down the trail winding through the rocks and sage. Two weeks earlier, it had been the perfect climate to bikepack overnights or shorter 2-4 day sections right from my front door in Bend. But late September, the weather can turn, drizzle turning into rain, the cloud cover can mean snow in the mountains, and make overnight camping in the Cascades more difficult. The autumn is a perfect season for mountain biking, usually dry, sunny and warm days, and cool to cold nights. Water sources are usually scarce, however, especially before one starts climbing into the mountains. In autumn, one can expect to go 20 or 30 miles on single track, in the routes leaving from Bend, without water, and fill up at every stream available. Summer, water is more abundant in Central Oregon, the snow melts in spider webs of streams, cascading downward towards the open plains of the high desert, east.

 Rolling grassy plains and open sky define the country east of the Cascades. Tapped into the earth are touchstones of gnarled juniper trees, sage, and bunchgrass. We are surrounded by history that unfolds each mile we ride, a history that is wrapped up in our own history, the history of the miners, the settlers, and the ranchers. It feels very familiar, somehow. Fences mark borders between wild grasses, and the sky and land seems to blur into one as clouds cover the mountains to our west in the afternoons.

From Downtown Bend, you can have a cup of coffee then roll out to singletrack at the beginning of your trip. There are several different routes to get you to the Cascade Lakes, (where you can tack on an extra few days of riding if you have food!) or loop back onto singletrack that descends back into Bend the following day. The routes offer beautiful colors, and a wide variety of flora. The trails start off in the high desert sage and juniper of Bend, and transition into pine forests with dark red earth made from decomposed pine needles. The COTA/ IMBA Bend, Oregon Adventure Maps, Inc Trail Map is the perfect companion. Here are a few of my favorite options for overnights:

Bend-Phil's Trailhead: Ben's Trail, Fire Road 310, Skyliner's Trail to Tumalo Creek Trail, which is along Tumalo Creek, and past Tumalo Falls, North Fork Trail to Happy Valley, Metolious/Windego Trail (roughly 30 miles) From there, you are near the lakes, and can choose your own adventure. Note that in the Fall, water is scarce until you get to the lakes. Camp out off the trail, somewhere,  there are plenty of flat, hidden areas in the trees. The next day you can go home from two directions. 1. Back track slightly to the Dutchman Sno-Park and take Flagline to Swede Ridge to Upper Whoops and back towards Phil's Trailhead or 2. Head back to Happy Valley, take the 1.1 mile connector north from the North Fork of Tumalo Creek, where you'll find an intersection with Fire Road 370 (which heads North to Three Creek Lake, and is an incredible camping spot for a second night!) and look right to the Mrazek Trail that swoops and flows through higher elevation pine forests and winds its way to rockier, dry, dusty juniper forests on a 14 mile descent back to Bend. 

Mrazek to Three Creek Lake Overnight Out-and-Back. Mrazek is fun in both directions, and feels very different each time. The trail is a gradual climb out of Bend until you hit the intersection with Fire Road 370. You can ride FR370 to Three Creek Lake, or you can turn north using the Metolius/Windego trail depending on your brain-fatigue on the single-track. The M/W is more flowy than technical, but it does take concentration. It is also a shared Horse trail, and can be very pitted with horse tracks depending on the time of year. You can't beat the simplicity of this out-and-back route.

Panorama: 2016 Emerging Writer!

in ,

In December I received Panorama: Journal of Intelligent Travel's Emerging Writer Fund. An excerpt of my long-form book, Open Range: Mountain Passage, about bikepacking, and how one intentionally moves through her landscape, was published in December. Here's the Link to: Sometimes, The Past Lingers, featured in Panorama's Winter Quarterly -- Treasures. 

book in the works::

excerpt:

we meet Jon and Ron. That makes four camping tonight: Jon, Ron, Alex, and John.

Telling stories of other bike adventures and share the primitive camp ground with a fire trying to keep out the mosquitos. What are the big questions of the day? Asks Ron, a former biologist who is completing the divide in month-long sections.

We ask each other and I talk about art and its relationship to the bike trip. I probably bore them talking about phenomenology and other experiential philosophies of the body. The ride is an embodiment of a body’s experience—a body immersed in the landscape.

Becoming the terrain that sustains us.

 

Our dinner      phenomenal (we save space to carry food)

white sweet potato, French lentil, and sausage soup

rice, parsley, and carrot

Jon and Ron ate freeze dried meals—not only am I probably allergic to everything in them, I also am finding I REALLY enjoy cooking after a long day on the bike.

                                                                        magical                        preparing

                                                                        sharing a home cooked meal with John.