up, down

me and three of my dudes climbed st. helens this weekend.







2 miles of the hike is just a steep hike; everything above treeline is a scramble. you can't walk more than a few steps before you have to climb a rock.



(there is no space for a trail so the poles are your only markers. this one had lost the will to live)




micah, who led the way most of the time, found this treasure about 3/4 of the way through the hike:



it was an actual barbell. you know, the kind that weigh, like, 40 pounds. how anybody got it up there is a real mystery. we were amused.








(apparently I had my camera on the "dark and shitty" setting)


the way the cloud cover formed made it seem like we were very, very high.


I climbed that mountain once too.



we found wall-e along the way.


also, it was really effing windy. I didn't do my hair like that on purpose.

we got to the top. it looks like this inside the cauldron.





Nub got there too. it was too windy to put him down.
(also, teeny tiny mt hood!)




I'm still not sure mountain climbing is really my bag. but I'm glad I went.

---

otherwise, things are pretty hard, internet. it's a herculean effort just to get out of bed in the mornings. and that's all there is to say about the rest of my life.

homestead

maryland, summer, nighttime: silent but for the sound of the crickets -- endless crickets. the windows open, the house warm and sticky and still.

the yard is populated primarily by weeds, which must always have been the case. there's an enormous amount of wild strawberry. the backyard is overgrown, or rather, overgrowing, but in a sweet, homey, unkempt way. the front yard, flat and easy to mow, is tame. business in the front, party in the back.

the smells are all different. I can't put my finger on how, exactly. when I was a kid growing up in that house, I used to think of the smell of the front yard (as I spent hours mowing it) as "buttery." now, better accustomed to it, I can recognize it as a kind of hay smell, though buttery still comes to mind: warm, yellow. as a teen on the mower in late summer, grasshoppers would shoot in all directions from the dried stalks of grass as I passed up and down the yard. six acres. it took a long time.

my brother is taller than me -- taller than me!! this was a great novelty to both of us -- but still the kid I know, just surrounded by a new, slightly surlier teenage exterior. we play frisbee in the yard. we're both pretty bad at it but we have a good time. one night while my mom and sister are at 4-H camp, we watch a bunch of episodes of "deadliest warrior" on spike TV. we eat pizza, which he heats in the oven and brings out for us. he's finally hooked on doctor who (I've been telling him for years) and we watch something like 15 episodes while I'm home.

the cornfields are everywhere. the houses are old, with older barns, the silos crumbling into the earth. in general, everything feels older on the east coast. I might just be imagining it.

I eat snowballs. I actually declared to my mom when I landed at BWI that I wanted a snowball at least every other day, since it's such a regional food that there's no chance in hell of ever having one here. I didn't get my first one for four days, which continues to feel like a great travesty. then, instead of getting a bunch of kiddie cups of every flavor I like (fireball, spearmint, chocolate, egg custard, birthday cake, sour cherry), I got chocolate every time. I did get crazy and ask for a chocolate/fireball combo for my last one, the day before I left. it was delicious.

actually, I ordered chocolate cherry a few times. with marshmallow. so probably you shouldn't pay attention to my complaining.

my sister showed two lambs at the 4-H county fair. do you know how you trim a lamb's hooves? it's hilarious.



they flip the lambs over (an athletic maneuver in itself) and plop them on their butts. for whatever reason the lambs go totally docile the minute they're put like that. I don't know whether there's something akin to twitching a horse in it (where maybe the position releases some sort of calming endorphin?) but more likely the lamb is like, "fuck it. I'm stuck." I took like a hundred pictures of this because I could not get over how hilarious it was. also my sister clipped those hooves like a boss. I'm glad I don't have to do this to Cookie.






(practice-showing her southdown)

I showed my sheep earlier in the week.

that's ethel. lucy was in the other room. in the background you can see my brother racing out the door. this is because my sister was about to recite, apparently for the 900th time, the FFA creed. I was holding the lamb as a tribute.

we drove to the beach. I already told you about that. on the drive, I told my sister wicked stories about my troublemaking as a kid. I didn't think I was a particularly bad kid but in comparison to her, I was. she was pretty horrified. I hope I didn't give her any ideas, or blackmail fodder.

my mom and I visited my brother at his internship at the national aquarium. they still have the bubble columns from when I was a kid. I was pretty nervous about them because they used to be right at the entrance and they weren't there when we walked in, but it turns out that's because they built a whole other wing that you have to walk through to get to the old entrance. I was so happy about the columns that I hugged them.


yeah, I don't know either. that's a shark fin on my head, in case you're wondering. my brother was, sadly, not embarrassed. he's pretty used to these shenanigans by now.

also at the aquarium there is the best sign ever. EVER.

I really wanted to.

this fucker is beautiful but he starts crowing at, I don't know, 4 AM? party foul, buddy.

his name is jimbob. that's not a joke.

we go to an O's game. not-quite-nosebleed seats that turn out to be pretty good, and in the foul zone, but no luck on catching any. we do get there in time for FREE JERSEY NIGHT which I am irrationally stoked about.





fuck yeah, natty boh.


yeah, nobody can ever see the family resemblance.

one day travis and I run one of my favorite old trails, whose turnaround point is a spot on the gunpowder where my track buddies used to sometimes jump from a bridge into the river. the water was too shallow to make the leap but I did wade in from the shore. it was utterly frigid. of course we skipped stones, because anybody who's ever been with me near a body of water knows I can't not skip stones. the trail was just as I had remembered it. but harder.

I unearthed some treasures from the basement, in the midst of searching for my yearbooks. all my old track ribbons, two pairs of track spikes, my powderpuff jersey, my kindergarten gym uniform (private school). my uniforms from the years I spent as a competitive jumproper. they still fit. sort of.


jacket model, jumprope model

a great deal of nostalgia, in general, but when it was time to go, there was none of the homesickness of last year. in truth, part of me was glad to be coming back here. the country doesn't get any smaller, and it doesn't get any easier to be so far from them, but in oregon, there's more to look forward to these days. which I am grateful for.

my secret vacation (#12)

took a mini-vacation to the desert this week, for two and a half days.









just me and the desert and the sun. and the pool. I read books and slept the wrong way in the king bed and paid a guide to let me gallop a horse (mouse) through the sand. I hardly told anyone I was going, and the only talking I did during the trip was while ordering drinks and riding horses. traveling alone provides such unspeakable freedom. nobody's needs to fill but your own. only when I got home and walked into my dark apartment did I feel lonely. it's always better when somebody's happy you're home.

tomorrow: candide rehearsal. just one more opera, then we can breathe until the fall. thank the heavens. we might love what we do, but several months without last minute crises sounds pretty divine, thanks.

my one-time stint as a professional nike runner

this morning, I arrived at portland meadows at 6:50 for the 7 AM nike video shoot call. as I mentioned the other day, I answered an ad, posted by one of the local running stores, calling for women who could pass as elite high school cross country runners. the video is a promo for the nike cross nationals; it will air on the internet only (because the nationals are also only viewable online). thirty women were picked from last week's photo shoot/audition.

this whole thing was so totally surreal. I have no aspirations to be a model or actor, but I am a sucker for anything that seems like an adventure or that will make a good story. it was a kick in the pants to tell people, "oh, I won't be in the office tomorrow, I'll be doing a nike video shoot all day." how fun to get to be the talent.



the girls all arrived, checked in, filled out tax paperwork, and got our clothes for the shoot: a high school cross country uniform (from three local high schools), a pair of socks, and a new pair of nike xc victory race spikes.




we hung out for awhile inside the clubhouse, everyone in sweats and jackets. the agency that cast us had stressed again and again the importance of bringing tons of warm clothes, so everyone was bundled up and many girls had blankets. (I brought a zebra print snuggie).




when we finally headed over to the track, it was about 7:45. it was still super cold, but thankfully sunny. THANK YOU PORTLAND, SERIOUSLY. the jog across the long expanse of infield was our first of SO MUCH RUNNING SWEET JESUS



of course, we'd all been prepped that there would be a lot of running. one of the fields on the audition form even asked what our weekly mileage was. for good reason, it turned out.

we filmed in four race "locations," each a different spot along the "course." (the real nike cross nationals are weeks away, so the course hasn't actually been set up yet). the gag in the video is this: a commentator is at a desk in the middle of the course, trying to talk about the race but continuously being interrupted by the pack of girls racing. so for about 60% of the time, our runs were focused on swerving around him at his desk (or variations on that theme). our first location was a curve on the course, maybe about 50 yards long. we began running at 8:15 or so and didn't move from that spot until about 10 AM; we probably did 25 takes just running the curve. and all the running, all day, was fast. after all -- this is nationals. five minute miles. essentially: sprinting.

since it wasn't rainy, the course wasn't nearly as muddy as it would ordinarily be, so in between takes members of the crew would go over to a corner of the infield with a shovel and some buckets, dig up a bunch of mud, wheel it over in a wheelbarrow, and ask us to slather it all over our shoes and legs. this proved surprisingly difficult, because the shoes essentially REFUSED to stay dirty, and our legs dried quickly, turning the mud to powder.

also, these were the shoes we were going to take home, so everybody was a little reluctant to get them dirty!

our second take was in the series of hills built into the infield, which I happened to encounter earlier this season in the first of the red lizard cross country races, held on the nike pre-nationals course. the hills are essentially a series of four or five moguls. quick up, quick down. funny the first time I encountered them in the course, but way harder the second time.

we spent almost three hours on them.

then: lunch.

then YOU GUYS. the shot we worked on after lunch was on a straightaway in the middle of the infield, and we were joined by andrew wheating, an olympic 800m runner who's currently a nike athlete. I did not know that "run with an olympian" was on my bucket list, but: CHECK. (I was trying to also check off "pass an Olympian in a run" but that dude is fast, y'all). here is my stealth shot of him (the very tall person in the red coat).



he was a hoot. he was an "interviewer" running along with us, and he kept accidentally inserting lines like, "oh, cool," into his script. meanwhile, our pack of girls had been cut in half, since only a few runners would even show up in the shot. those of us who were running probably did 10 takes with andrew, running up and down a stretch of about 100 meters. we kept joking about alternative things we could do (he could talk in an accent, he could throw in a catch phrase like ron burgundy, etc) and so the crew let us do an 'outtake' clip, where andrew pushed a bunch of us out of the way and chased one runner the length of the course, eventually shoving her (not hard) into the course markers. we made it about 3/4 of the way through the take before we all burst out laughing.


(the ladies in a moment of down time prior to the shoot at location #3)

our last location of the day was "the mud pit." the crew had spent the morning running a hose in one corner of the infield, so that by the time we got there, the ensuing puddle was ankle deep. it was 3:15; the sun was going down and we were all getting cold again. we smeared ourselves again with mud, which turned out to be hilariously pointless, since the moment we ran our first take through the puddle, we were all saturated. meanwhile, the crew set up propane heaters so that we didn't freeze to death. everyone's feet were killing them from 8 hours spent running in spikes; most of us were stiff and cold and tired. we did another 15 or 20 takes in the mudpit before we finally called it a day. I took a shower when I got home and I STILL have mud in my hair. (which is super classy because I'm at the opera now).


the girls, all in matching shoes

overall, it was a super fun day, but we were all SO GLAD when it ended. a few hours later, I am walking with some difficulty; mainly my feet hurt, but I'm also just generally tweaky and incredibly, unbelievably tired. like, I was standing backstage waiting for my ratchet cues for figaro and I really thought, my legs might give out. eight hours is a long time to do sprints. I cannot wait to go to bed.