Adventures in the Great Outdoors

Sometimes, it's good to get out to where the sea-sotted wind can blow thru your head and scrub your brain clean.

It's also a great challenge to go hiking with bad dept perception and asthma as your constant companions. While Steady Eddie bounded thru the woods like a springbok on the veldt, I blindly stumbled behind, wheezing. When I fell and screamed, not knowing if I broke my ankel or not, the shock and force of wind out of my lungs knocked the asthma attack out of me, and got his attention. Mind you, he didn't mean to go so fast ahead of me--he is simply more sure footed in the woods than I. He's not as imparied and I tend to forget to remind him of the problems.

For the most part, I usually forget my impairments--they don't really impact my daily life too much. I work thru my astham attacks on my own, and don't notice the depth perception problem. My terrain is pretty flat and familiar, so there aren't too many hazards.

In the woods, though, there are always roots and stones and odd shadows. Since the differences in light and depth don't register in my brain, it's very easy for me to over- or under-estimate my footing. "Pick your feet up!" my mother would scream at me, not knowing why a perfectly good 5 year old kept falling on her face. Obviously, I couldn't see all that well back then--can't see all that well now either. My general clumsiness comes from my inability to see properly coupled with an uncontrollable urge to rush around. So, when I'm in the woods now, I have to slow down, and observe the terrain. I watch where Steady Eddie is stepping and must rationally judge whether or not I can make the kinds of steps and leaps he can. If I can't, I let him know and ask for help.

I eventually get myself on top of things, although the things are usually half the height that he can handle. He knows and it doesn't really bother him all that much--and he is free to go off and conquer whatever heights he needs to whenever he wants to. Personally, I think it's good that while I can share his love of hiking, it is an area that he alone is superior. My tendancy to enjoy slam-dunking guys on an intellectual level makes it so that a man has to have some sort of physical superiority for me to respect him. Good-looking, to me, isn't superiority--only a result of good grooming that anyone with money and time can achieve. Steady Eddie though knows engineering, and, more importantly, he's a very accomplished hiker. I love the fact that he has that outdoorsy knowledge and skill. I'm always game to try the outdoorsy stuff because it's such a challenge for me to overcome my vision and breathing trouble--but it's not something I care to excel at. The distiction between Steady Eddie and myself creates a comfortable separation of our identities. I can respect his skill and experience, but I don't want to be him. He can respect and admire my intelligence, but the knowledge I have he does not care to posess. There is no annoying we-are-one thing with emeshed identities. (BTW, that hill behind me in the pic is a thing called The Beehive--very difficult to hike but we did it last time we were there. Very odd to observe it at a distance and know I've been on top.)

Bar Harbor has an internet cafe on Cottage Street. We passed it a few times, but each time it felt like there was a force-field around it that I could not penetrate. Not that I really wanted to penetrate it.

After our first day's foray in the fog along the top of Cadillac Mountain (not a hike, just a stroll--too bad we didn't take a pic), I pretty much had no desire to check my email or anything else. Not even to blog. The second day's twisted ankle, 3 mile walk around Eagle Lake (the ankle was only mildly sprained), and conversation till I had nothing else to say blew out alot of frustration and anxiety I'd been feeling for months. The two hikes the next day, one along Great Head (pic on top) and on Day Mtn. (where I'm standing pic above) were good challenges for both my body and mind. We ran into such wonderful people, most quite a bit older than us, on both those hikes and on a return jaunt to the Cadilla Mtn summit. There's something encouraging about encountering couples in their late 60s and early 70s who are still strong enough to hike. I think to myself that there is so much more to life than the 18-34 age group obsessively focused on by media and popular culture. It is, though, hard to get used to not being in the glaring light of p/r and marketing's endeavords. Meeting, talking with, and getting to know people who are older, who have full lives and are still active--not debilitated with illness of some sort or another--gives me hope that there is much, much more to life than that brief 15 minutes of fame embodied in the 18-34 age bracket. It makes me wonder, too, why we so devalue the experiences of other age demographics, why we so desperately want to graft wisdom and life experience on an age cohort that has much to learn about living this thing called life.

I want to know how people got to this same geographic location. One woman I talk at length with shares fun stories with me about hiking various places in Yosemite and how one particular hike almost resulted in a divorce. We laugh after I tell her about my Beehive experience, and the much wailing and gnashing of words that happened on that jaunt. She, too, allows her partner to go off and do his thing while she takes in the sea air at a height far lower than he prefers.

On the day we left, we took another short (638 ft) hike up something called The Triad. It was cloudy and windy, and while we thought we might get rained on, breaks in the clouds indicated the downpours were a few hours off. I fell again, but mostly just a pitch forward, and made a rather funny flailing arms gesticulation as we were standing on one set of rocks because I'd lost my equlibrium. I must've looked something like Inspector Clouseau, as I was standing there, fine, one minute and then falling over the next. I often forget that I also have this little equilibrium problem, as I'm not usually standing in places where I end up flailing and falling over like a drunkard. I know it's something to do with fluid in my ears--a chronic problem that's not about to change any time soon--so, when I'm in civilized company, I try to notice the tilt in my head and catch myself before I fall over. In the woods, though, I don't have to be so mindful of it, and my antics add a little bit of comedy to scene.

When we got back, I realized I'd spent far too many days out of touch and didn't really care. I got my brain around the idea of graduate school, of who, professinally, I think I really am; I sorted out the whole ADHD thing and decided to try some vitamin supplements to see if they will effect it (rather than meds--and they do work); and was very surprised to I receive an email from the head of the Religious Studies dept at B.U. The email indicated that, if I did a Ph.D.there, I might end up working with him. Well, if the career prospects and the cost aren't prohibitive, and our personalities mesh well, I might really enjoy that.

In the meantime, there are projects to finish, some volunteering at the
We Media conference on Wednesday, and two parties this weekend...and writing to do...life goes on...