Where I Belong

Dear Readers,

You know that John Denver song "Country Road", a folksy ballad dedicated to returning to the mountains of his youth? I've been experiencing a similar sentiment the past couple of days. I haven't felt an urge to go back to the mountains so strongly for a long time. The craving is so vivid, my dreams have been infected with visions of tree-lined mountains, feelings of solitude, and the wonderment of realizing just how small I am in this very big world.

My dad never had a son; I believe I was the closest thing to it. Kate and Andrea never showed much interest in the outdoors. I, on the other hand, enjoyed the adventure. I joined him on trips to the desert and lava flows near Kasota, to the mountains and lakes south of Albion, and spent countless Sunday afternoons exploring the Minidoka Dam area. We did everything on these trips from cutting firewood to mapping trails for his scout troop (which I am still bitter that I wasn't allowed to join just because I'm a girl). White water rafting, skiing, backpacking, my dad taught me all of these things.

Later, when I was in high school, I discovered and fell in love with mountain biking. I helped to form the Minico High School Mountain Biking Club, and spent loads of times in the foothills outside of Oakley putting the shocks on my hard earned Schwinn to the test. My friend Monica and I were the only girls in the club, and the guys were more than welcoming to us. We had a blast racing the trails, and I'm sure I made a great impression on them with my sailor vocabulary when I would wreck. That Schwinn and I enjoyed a lot of miles of trail together; when I lived in Logan I continued racing and riding until I was hit by a car on my way home from work. No matter that my head was bleeding and I needed stiches in my leg, my bike was totalled and I was devestated. I haven't been on a trail since. What a shame!

On one college spring break, my friend Melanie and I went on a road trip from Logan to southern New Mexico to visit her family. On the way, we stopped to camp in Moab, Utah. It was dark when we got to our campsite and clumsely set up our tent as best we could with flashlights. It was colder than I expected, and I struggled to sleep. Finally, at first light, I climbed out of the tent to start a fire and witnessed what is easily the most beautiful sunrise I have ever experienced. I wish I could describe in great detail the warm, gold light as filled the red canyon with contrasting dimensions of shadows and stone. We drove through the red desert, eventually making our way through a vast sage brush filled country to the white sand dunes outside Alamagordo and finally to the snow capped mountains where her parents lived. Melanie is an outdoorsman to her core, and she and I had a great time on that trip, hiking whenever we got the chance and taking time to appreciate the solitude of the desert.

For my 30th birthday, I had the great pleasure of introducing "my boys" to one of my favorite places on the face of the planet: the City of Rocks. I grew up visiting there with my dad, and remember loving it from a very young age. The pioneers wound their way through the rocks on the Oregon Trail, and you can still see where they wrote their names and messages, as well as the seemingly permanent ruts of their wagons. Shay, Chris, Aaron, PL, Loren, and I had a blast climbing and exploring. We all slept in the same tent, and all woke feeling like we had slept on a rock. It is one of my favorite memories.

I can already hear the call of the Sawtooths, even though I won't make it there until late spring at the earliest. Zion's National Park and Bryce Canyon are beckoning me from afar. Even the small trails in Hagerman are singing my name. I've made a resolution to ignore the pains of my joints, pull my backpacking tent out of it's hiding spot, load up my 15 year old pack, strap on my boots and hike up that country road, to where I belong.

Sincerely,
h.

The Misery of Youth

Dear Readers,

I rode into the 1990's holding to the dirty flannel shirt wrapped around my older sister's waist. The very early years were lost in my childhood, but I made up for them quickly during my awkward tweens. Full of angst and hormones and armed with a very small collection of grunge cd's, I traded my bright Cross-Colors Malcolm X shirts (because no one can identify with the trials of civil injustice quite like a 12 year old white girl from Rupert, Idaho), for plaid shirts, thrift store cardigans, and a pair of fake Doc Martins.

I was reminded by all of this a few weekends ago, when late one night with Shay out with the boys and Lucas asleep in bed, I found myself watching the Cameron Crowe documentary "PJ20", about the beginnings and goings on of the band Pearl Jam. Conincidentally, I also dug out all of my old journals that same weekend, and spent a couple of hours being thoroughly entertained by my much younger self.

Like a lot of the music from those days, my journal pages were filled with themes of loathing and longing, a bipolar roller coaster of elation and dispair. I wrote of specific songs during that time, honestly believing that I had problems in common with the likes of Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain. Why not? Why wouldn't a good mormon girl who had never been to a bigger city than Salt Lake have much in common with heroin addicted rock starts? Clearly, it was a time when emotion took presidence over reason.

At the time I was quite sure I was the quintisential misunderstood teenager, and I was eyes deep in a misunderstood generation. Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Soundgarden, they were our voice. I remember clearly memorizing the words to Pearl Jam's song "Jeremy", and standing in front of my 9th grade speech class, reciting it as poetry, and sitting down in my seat thinking to myself, "No one in here understands the meaning of that song but me." Ha! Such confidence for someone with such limited life experience.

Later in my teens, while attending Minico High School, I went through some seemingly traumatic surgeries. I had been diagnosed with an extrememly rare skin disorder, which required a sizeable piece of my scalp to be removed. In preparation for the removal, a tissue expander was implanted on the left side of my head, and every week I had injections of saline put into the expander. It was extraordinalry painful, the stretching of my skin. By the time it was filled to capacity, it was about the size of a softball. My hair was cut short. My peers were cruel. My soccer career was over. Conincidentally, that awful band "The Presidents of the United States" released the song "Lump" during this time; I hate them still. I remember coming out of the second surgery, after everything was removed, and looking in the mirror to a horror scene. A nylon stocking of sorts holding my mess of a head together, my face swollen and my eyes blackened, and all I could do was cry. A mistake from the doctor resulted in more surgeries than originally planned, going through my senior year of high school. The strangest thing about this experienece, is that not a word about it was written in my journals. Not one, single word. In fact, this might be the first time I've written about the experience at length. Instead there is page after page of emotional vomit; entries of length on music; horrible poetry and drawings concerning crush's and my prettier friends of whom I was green with jealousy. The later pages desciribing my questions in faith and the beginnings of an existential crisis.

As The nineties ended I was entering adulthood. A year and a half at Utah State, a stint in Washington D.C., and then finding myself in Boise helped to curb my self-loathing and I found that maybe life wasn't as bad as I had assumed. The music scene made a transition along side me; while Pearl Jam survived, the grunge scene in general was lost. I found what I needed more and more in hip-hop and indy-rock. I stuck to some classics (The Smashing Pumpkins, The Cure, The Smith's...a whole lotta "The's"), and embraced a music culture that was bigger than me and I understood it as such. My journals were not so desperate, but far more introspective.

So after watching that documentary, 20 years of a single band, I was touched and a bit emotional. I would love to be able to go back, and whisper to my younger self that things aren't that bad. Yes, there are people who are mean, who will say awful and horrible things. Yes, there is saddness and dark times. Yes, there are times even when you're surrounded by people who love you that you will feel disengaged and lonely. But overall, the majority of days will be good days, and that yes, you are beautiful, and yes, you are talented, and yes, you will be a catalyst to others. Most importantly, I would ask myself to please throw away that disgusting flannel shirt and dress with some dignity because, let's be honest, nothing says "desperate" more than a pair of fake Doc Martin's.

Sincerely,
h.