Friday, March 13, 2020

A terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day that ended all right

The outhouse roof was clear when I left 2 weeks ago.
Early in the last century a woman named Annie Edson Taylor went over Niagara Falls in a barrel.That used to be a thing. Despite the destruction of a couple of test barrels, Annie decided she'd give it a try anyway. When they freed her from the barrel battered, bruised and bloody, but alive, Annie had these words of wisdom for the ages: "Nobody ought ever do that again." That's how I felt yesterday.
Returning to the East Pole after a couple of weeks taking care of business, I'd been warned by a couple of people there'd been a heavy snowfall in my absence. I've dealt with that before, even told a friend on facebook "I can only go and deal with what is." It's never been a problem before. It only meant going in I would have to leave my snowmachine and cargo sled out near the main trail and snowshoe in with what I could pull in a small sled. That happens all the time until I can get a trail up to the cabin put in.
What I encountered almost did me in. To begin with I had to snowshoe over a berm to get my outfit off the main trail which was only wide enough for one machine at a time. After beating down the berm on snowshoes I fired up the snowmachine and tried to blast my way as far as I could go. That turned out to be less than 100 yards. Then I had to hike back and pull the sled off the trail. With the machine stuck and the sled off the trail, I strapped on the snowshoes again and headed up the trail with my computer bag and a small backpack I carry everywhere I go. I didn't even get another hundred yards before discouragement. With every step when I lifted a snowshoe with a couple of feet of snow on it. I slogged along that way but didn't get far before I got the definite feeling I wouldn't make it. So, back to the snowmachine. At that point I was ready to give up. The first time I have ever considered on it doing this. My thought was I don't have to do this. Turn the machine around and go back. Come back in a week when everything is packed down better. There was only one problem. I couldn't get the machine turned around.
Breaking trail I had built up my own personal berms that required a lot of shoveling to make room to turn it. After several attempts with gains measured in inches I tried something else. I started it and put it in reverse thinking maybe I could back out. I got about 3 feet and stuck again. I did that two more times, in all gaining about 10 feet in the wrong direction. It began to dawn on me that I might be in trouble and every thing I had done so far was draining energy. I am an old guy, remember, be 78 this year with mild COPD. So I did something I learned from Iditarod musher Donna Massay years ago.
She had told me about losing her way on the Seward Peninsula. Realizing she needed to gather her thoughts, as she told me, she down and wrote it out in the snow, with a little help from a dog named Pup Pup. I have carried that phrase with me: "write it out in the snow." And that's what I did there, sitting on my stuck snowmachine looking at my useless snowshoes and a quarter mile uphill to the cabin. As I was "writing it out in the snow" another phrase came to mind that I had used in the past: "I am close enough I can crawl from here." And none of the choices were great, but the cabin despite the snow and climb was the closest haven.  If this was going to turn out all right, I had to make it to the cabin..
I set out on the missing trail  with only a bottle of Vita-Water in my pocket, slogging along in snow always over my knees and if I stepped off the old hard-packed trail from my previous time here, up to my hips. One step at a time, pushing snow with my knees I slogged up that trail. I never felt reduced to crawling but it went painfully slowly with lots of stops and at least two hits on my rescue inhaler. How long did it take? I have no idea. I had left the trailhead with the snowmachine a little after 1 p.m. When I finally made it into the cabin it was almost 6 p.m. I know the trip in takes about 40 minutes to an hour. That leaves about four hours spent on the trail from the main one to the cabin.
I always lay a fire in the woodstove before I leave the cabin. One match and I had a fire going. I sat here for a while, waiting to feel the heat. The indoor thermometer at the time read 14. At least it was on the plus side of zero. But slowly the temperature rose and by 8 it had reached 65. At that point I thawed a can of Dinty Moore beef stew, gradually started living here and went to sleep at my usual time around midnight.
First of all I slept soundly almost 8 hours which is a record for me these days. Over the morning as I watched the temperature rise outside, I had an Ensure and then a bowl of chicken noodle soup. Around noon it went to the mid double digits and I prepared to go back down and try to free the snowmachine and bring some vitals up. Among them a charger for my cell phone. (A separate one to leave at the cabin is on the next shopping list.) I strapped on another pair of snowshoes and headed down the hill pulling a sled holding a bigger shovel and a come-along. Much easier walking and I was able to stomp snow down and widen the trail as well. But the rope I'd brought wasn't long enough to reach the nearest usable tree, so I decided  to work on freeing the the machine the next day and focused on loading what I needed into the sled with a critical eye to keeping the load as light as possible. Then I headed back up the hill. I won't go into detail like the day before, but I had left the cabin around 12:30 and by the time I got back with my treasures the clock showed a few minutes after 4. It was easier, but not that much easier and after I fell pulling that sled up the last steep part of the trail, I crawled to the porch on my hands and knees. So there was some of that after all.
But tonight I can have one of those little round filet steaks with mashed potatoes and gravy, and best of all, I can now begin watching the fourth season of Game of Thrones. It's all about priorities. And there's this: Nobody ought ever do that again.
A note from a friend's experience: If you are looking for an experience that will temper your vanity, this is it. There's no one to impress when you're alone on the trap line. – Michael Carey quoting his father's journal

A NOTE FROM  DONNA MASSAY AFTER READING THIS: We’re never too old to add to the “survived adventure” list! But smaller challenges make very big adventures as we mature. Thanks for letting me know that “writing it in the snow” helped
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Memorable quotations

The best way to know you are having an adventure is when you wish you were home talking about it." — a mechanic on the Alaska State Ferry System. Or as in my own case planning how I will be writing it on this blog.

"You can't promote principled anti-corruption without pissing off corrupt people." — George Kent

"If only the British had held on to the airports, the whole thing might have gone differently for us." — Mick Jagger

"You can do anything as long as you don't scare the horses." — a mother's favorite saying recalled by a friend

A poem is an egg with a horse inside” — anonymous fourth grader

“My children will likely turn my picture to the wall but what the hell, you only get old once." — Joe May

“Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.” — Ernest Hemingway

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.― Kurt Vonnegut

“If you wrote something for which someone sent you a cheque, if you cashed the cheque and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.”―Stephen King

The thing about ignorance is, you don't have to remain ignorant. — me again"

"It was like the aftermath of an orgasm with the wrong partner." – David Lagercrants “The Girl in the Spider’s Web.”

Why worry about dying, you aren't going to live to regret it.

Never debate with someone who gets ink by the barrel" — George Hayes, former Alaska Attorney General who died recently

My dear Mr. Frost: two roads never diverge in a yellow wood. Three roads meet there. — @Shakespeare on Twitter

Normal is how somebody else thinks you should act.

"The mark of a great shiphandler is never getting into situations that require great shiphandling," Adm. Ernest King, USN

Me: Does the restaurant have cute waitresses?

My friend Gail: All waitresses are cute when you're hungry.

I'm not a writer, but sometimes I push around words to see what happens. – Scott Berry

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“The rivers of Alaska are strewn with the bones of men who made but one mistake” - Fred McGarry, a Nushagak Trapper

Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stared at walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing. – Meg Chittenden

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity. – Franz Kafka

We are all immortal until the one day we are not. – me again

If the muse is late, start without her – Peter S. Beagle

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. ~Mark Twain Actually you could do the same thing with the word "really" as in "really cold."

If you are looking for an experience that will temper your vanity, this is it. There's no one to impress when you're alone on the trap line. – Michael Carey quoting his father's journal

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. – Benjamin Franklin

It’s nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of. – Shirley Hazzard

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence -- Bertrand Russell

You know that I always just wanted to have a small ship to take stuff from a place that had a lot of that stuff to a place that did not have a lot of that stuff and so prosper.—Jackie Faber, “The Wake of the Lorelei Lee”

If you attack the arguer instead of the argument, you lose both

If an insurance company won’t pay for damages caused by an “act of God,” shouldn’t it then have to prove the existence of God? – I said that

I used to think getting old was about vanity—but actually it’s about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial. – Eugene O’Neill

German General to Swiss General: “You have only 500,000 men in your army; what would you do if I invaded with 1 million men?”

Swiss General: “Well, I suppose every one of my soldiers would need to fire twice.”

Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.—Gloria Steinem

Exceed your bandwidth—sign on the wall of the maintenance shop at the West Coast/Alaska Tsunami Warning Center

One thing I do know, if you keep at it, you usually wind up getting something done.—Patricia Monaghan

Do you want to know what kind of person makes the best reporter? I’ll tell you. A borderline sociopath. Someone smart, inquisitive, stubborn, disorganized, chaotic, and in a perpetual state of simmering rage at the failings of the world.—Brett Arends

It is a very simple mind that only knows how to spell a word one way.—Andrew Jackson

3:30 is too late or too early to do anything—Rene Descartes

Everything is okay when it’s 50-below as long as everything is okay. – an Alaskan in Tom Walker’s “The Seventymile Kid”

You can have your own opinion but you can’t have your own science.—commenter arguing on a story about polar bears and global warming

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Talkeetna: A friendly little drinking town with a climbing problem.—a handmade bumper sticker

“You’re either into the wall or into the show”—Marco Andretti on giving it all to qualify last at the 2011 Indy 500

Makeup is not for the faint of heart—the makeup guerrilla

“I’m going to relax in a very adult manner.”—Danica Patrick after sweating it out and qualifying half an hour before Andretti

“Asking Congress to come back is like asking a mugger to come back because he forgot your wallet.”—a roundtable participant on Fox of all places

As Republicans go further back in the conception process to define when life actually begins, I am beginning to think the eventual definition will be life begins in the beer I was drinking when I met her.—me again

Hunting is a “critical element for the long-term conservation of wood bison.”—a state department of Fish and Game official explaining why the state would not go along with a federal plan to reintroduce wood bison in Alaska because the agreement did not specifically allow hunting

Each day do something that won’t compute – anon

I can’t belive I still have to protest this shit – a sign carriend by an elderly woman at an Occupy demonstration

Life should be a little nuts or else it’s just a bunch of Thursdays strung together—Kevin Costner as Beau Burroughs in “Rumor has it”

You’re just a wanker whipping up fear —Irish President Michael D. Higgins to a tea party radio announcer

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Sports malaprops

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