Summer's Lease

I understand most of the country has been sweltering through a miserable heat wave, but we have been having an unbroken streak of perfect weather (except for one day that dipped its toe in the 90's): morning after morning of cool air and clouds blowing in off the ocean, to burn off to sunshine and 70s by mid-afternoon. 

With only the twins around (Deux is helping out Bookworm until the addition is finished), and them having achieved the all-but-adult age of 17, summer looks very different from years past. Dash is working at a couple of different things and drives himself everywhere he needs to go, and a few places we need him to. Dame is plowing through 18-book series and occasionally emerging to pontificate on centaur spines and whether harpies would lay eggs. The only thing that carries over from years ago is the usefulness of stocking the freezer with ice cream sandwiches.

It's a mercy the summer is mild, because at the current state of the addition not only do we not have air conditioning, which we have never had, we also have minimal air circulation with one whole side of the house blocked off. However, after a stall of a few months work is supposedly going to resume soon. 

Having set the goal of climbing a mountain, and finding myself with the forgotten luxury of a little more time and energy than is strictly necessary for survival, I've been adding to my daily routine a mile and a half loop around as many neighborhood hills as I can manage with a loaded pack on my back. It's been rather exciting to actually be growing detectably stronger--a month ago, I needed to pause a few times on this loop. Now, even at the end of a long day, I can do it easily with increased speed on the uphills. Two weeks ago Dash and I hiked up a smaller, closer mountain and I struggled to go more than a dozen steps uphill at a stretch and never made it quite to the summit. Yesterday we did the same trail again and I paused less than a third of the times, made it to the summit, and still cut 45 minutes off my time. Right now the main concern about our goal hike is that the trails are closed due to a threatening wildfire, and while the weather has not been hot, neither have we had any rain to speak of nor are likely to before September. 

Thanks to this gorgeous arrangement getting stuck in my head, I've been memorizing Shakespeare's Sonnet 18. It's always struck me as odd. Beautiful, expertly crafted, but weird. It's not really about the beloved--in which, to be fair, it is not unlike most love poetry, which tends to be about the sensation of love rather than the parties involved. But it's not really about being in love, either. It's about the poet's expectation of the immortality of his own poetry. (About which, to be fair, he was not wrong.) But perhaps that is because a large part of what love, or at least the feeling of being "in love" is about--the sensation of touching immortality, even though, paradoxically, only for a moment. 

It seems, at least to me, that a large part of the transition from falling in love to mature love is letting go of the vision of the idealized and immortal beloved and accepting the messy human that they are now. It is like in the movie Inception where Cobb rejects his dream-wife to return to the reality where his real wife is dead: "But I can't imagine you with all your complexity, all you perfection, all your imperfection. Look at you. You are just a shade of my real wife. You're the best I can do; but I'm sorry, you are just not good enough." In time it is the annoying, imperfect, mortal being we come to love. 

Perhaps parenting is a bit like that, too. Babies are, for the most part, very easy to fall in love with because they are wide open for the imagination, because they give us a brush with immortality. And to a baby or toddler, a parent is all wise and all powerful. It would be heady stuff if one weren't so sleep-deprived. But adolescence comes and not only does the child realize his parents are human, the parents have to come to term with the child being human, of growing up into an ordinary person with an ordinary skill set and ordinary range of foibles. It's a difficult process for the parent, not just the child, but both of the alternatives--the parent who sees the grown child with all the rosy intoxication of infancy, and the parent who has never gotten over the disappointment of humanity--turn into something hideous in time. 

Mountain Mama

Which is a lyric that has never made sense to me, but I'm not from West Virginia. 

Over the past few years DOB has been working out how to do some off-roading in the Olympics. It started as just a diversion en route to the annual beach pilgrimage, involving a lot of dead ends and occasionally bees. Over the years he has acquired more off-roading capable vehicles and figured out where to print off maps of the logging roads. 

This year we spent Memorial Day chasing down roads along with a few other people. He wanted to do that again on the 5th, but it didn't work out for anyone else, so just Dash and I went along. I suggested a relatively tame loop, but Dash and DOB wanted something more interesting. We went as far as the trailhead for Mount Ellinor, which my father used to climb regularly in his youth and which I ascended with him when I was about 10. My only memory of this trip is clinging to the summit in terror. Still, it was cool to be up there and Dash and I are discussing doing a summit. It's a challenging trail but there were plenty of people coming down with grade school children in tow, so it can't be that difficult, right?  On the other hand, while I walk a good deal on relatively level ground I was getting winded just descending a bit from the parking lot, so I probably should try some lesser elevation hikes first. 

After that we tried various roads. The first one had apparently been wiped out by a landslide several years back (judging from the scrubby trees growing out of it). Fortunately the wipe out was clearly visible from where it turned off the main(ish) road and there was a parking lot, so DOB stayed there while Dash and I hiked a short way down and discovered it would indeed have had incredible views if it had been traversible. But that one would have been a dead end at best anyway, so we were not too disappointed.  

The next one we had passed on the way up and the maps indicated would lead us on a large and windy loop that would eventually get us back to Highway 101. However, as should be indicated by my statement above, the maps are not in any way updated to show that roads have become impassable or closed. It is entirely a use at your own risk system, and often we would see roads clearly marked on the map of which there was no sign that a road had ever existed. 

The entrance to this one was rocky and narrow but clear, so we headed out and DOB was rather disappointed when the rocks dissipated to gravel and a clear but narrow road lined heavily by trees that looked more like an overgrown driveway than a mountain adventure. We continued for quite awhile with nothing more terrifying that a good bit of paint damage when the road began to be more along the edge and we came across a rockslide where a boulder blocked half the road and there was no shoulder on the other side. Dash got out and determined it was *just* wide enough for the truck and he spotted DOB through it while I tried valiantly but not always successfully not to scream. 

There were a few other narrow spots between fallen trees and boulders, and one with loose scree high on one side and a narrow edge on the other. There were also some lovely views and absolutely no other vehicles on the road, which was both a relief and a concern. 

I decided after the first time, that it would be for the good of all if I got out and walked around the next bend and examined the very lovely wildflowers while these locations were being traversed. So we continued on for a couple of hours (at about 5 mph) thinking that at least we would not need to past *those* obstacles again when we came to a place where the road was entirely covered a couple feet thick in loose scree that tapered off into more landslide on the other side. There were tire tracks on it, and the road did continue on the other side, but DOB concluded that it was beyond even his considerable skill except in a Jeep with a winch. (I did not previously realize that having equipment to tie your car to a tree and drag it over such obstacles was even a thing.)

Well. That meant all those obstacles we were relieved to get past were still waiting behind us, and that only after DOB backed the truck the quarter mile back to the closest turnout. I did even more walking ahead on the way back, along with some fervent prayers and, at that hour, some bug slapping. However, we did eventually make it all out alive. (DOB swore that death was not really a potential outcome, although getting the truck stuck in a stand of trees was one, in which case I felt like I would still be in a much better position to render aid if I waited down the road.) We got back to the main forest road and took the more mundane loop back to the highway, although we did pass where the road would, theoretically, have come out. 

Anyway, having discovered that while I do still have some fear of edges, edges with my feet on solid ground are much less scary than edges in the passenger seat of a 3-ton truck with an inch clearance for its tires, so I am looking forward to tackling Mt. Ellinor again.