A book after my own heart

 In the fall last year, with another long pandemic winter looming ahead, I invited the ladies of my nuclear family to join me in a monthly book club. To my surprise and delight, they all said 'yes'. Each month one of us would choose a book, and at the end of the month we'd get together online and chat about it. Four months later, we decided to keep it going, so I chose a book that had sneaked up on my radar recently: Miracle Country by Kendra Atleework.

 

On the one hand, the cover was enticing - I'm a sucker for woodblock-style art, and combining that with a very desert-like tree was a recipe for drawing my attention. But when I read what the book was about, I had to add it to the list (a Trello board of all the books I am interested in reading, currently sitting at 52 non-fiction, 38 fiction), and when we decided to keep up the book club, I felt that this would be an excellent next pick.

 I was not wrong.

Atleework basically does in this book what I have tried to do in my own nature writing-memoir hybrid (unfinished) works. Her details of the landscape and the people are intimate and lovely. The way that she shares her family's pain and promise, it's growth and rootedness, is incredibly personal and relatable. She writes with such love for a life entwined with the Eastern Sierra that I came of age in, in which I feel strings of my own heart have rooted and tangled in the stones and sage, and where she had the fortune of living her entire life (with intermissions) - albeit a little further south than where I roamed. Our ranges (and our ages) are so close, I can't help but wonder if we ever had opportunity to cross paths. 

A big player in the book is the ghost of Mulholland and the water theft of the Owens Valley watershed, and the ghost of the water itself. I marveled at her balanced view on the subject. My senior thesis in undergrad was all about the water theft and the fight for water rights of these little communities against the big bad LA City (which the little communities won, by the way, in a manner of speaking... though the rewards are still uncertain and tenuous). I was pretty one-sided. I was also, looking back, remarkably eurocentric. Not only did Atleework add an incredible depth to the story by teaching me about the experiences of the First Peoples in that watershed, but she also treated Mulholland with a level of humanity that I in my early twenties was unable to imagine. Would I have been able to see him as a whole human if I were writing that paper now? To see him as a man with a dream to improve the city in which he lived (albeit to the utter detriment of the future of an entire region)? In my adult life, I have tried to see the whole person more, whether it's the latest media bad guy or the person annoying me at work. They aren't like this with everyone, I tell myself. This person has friends, family, maybe even pets. I admit that I had always viewed Mulholland as only a bad guy. Being able to see him as another failing human was good.

Perhaps what I love the most about Miracle Country, as alluded to briefly above, is the way she wove in the history of the region with her own story and that of her family and community. She draws heavily on Mary Austin, a writer of the water war years that I think will have to be added to the reading list. Atleework didn't stop at white European history, though. She delved deeper, reading and meeting with Native American elders and making certain that their story of sixty generations was just as present in the landscape that she painted. I learned things I did not know about the people who lived there before whites barrelled in - that they built irrigation canals, that they grew and harvested various grasses for food, that white ranchers brought in cows which grazed all their crops and were totally oblivious (or so they claimed) to the harm they had done. Yet another example of European Americans' blindness to any kind of agriculture that didn't look like Farmer McGregor's Garden. Though this one I find even more appalling because it's irrigation ditches and fields of wild grain - how blind can we be!? I learned that the Inyo National Forest, 'inyo' meaning "dwelling place of the Great Spirit," - a name I've always loved - was actually created as part of the conspiracy to allow LA to take the water by limiting where development could occur, while also further reducing the lands of the people who had lived there for sixty generations. Such a beautiful name, with a not-so beautiful history. I'm not sure why I should've been surprised, though, given the history of public lands in Native American displacement in this country.

The final verdict is this: if you'd like to read a book that feels adjacent to a piece of my own heart, or just want to delve into some fascinating local history and family feels surrounded by beautiful nature writing, this is a great book. For me, it was thrilling and also felt a little bit like I was being egged on. "Write it already, I just published mine," she seems to be saying. And maybe this year will be the year (I say, for another year running) that I really delve seriously back into my own writing again. But maybe this will be the year. After all, I started writing on this blog again, didn't I?

Until next time!

Kitchen Experiments

 

Today I made churros with bitter chocolate dipping sauce - gluten free, vegan, "sugar" free, air-fried. They were dough in the middle, but somehow we both ate them. Jack said it was a good start, which I take to mean that he likes churros as much as I do and wouldn't mind if they appeared on the kitchen counter again (preferably in a less-doughy format).

I haven't been baking so much lately. The beginning of the pandemic coincided with a relatively recent receipt of Scandinavian Baking by Trine Hahnemann; I found myself needing snacks and not inclined to go to the store; and it also just so happens that incessant baking is one of my stress responses. Much baking occurred. Much oo-ing and ah-ing was seen in response to a deluge of IG posts (oh IG, I do not miss you at all, remarkably). And then, just as fervently as it began, the baking stopped. Uninspired, uninteresting, more flops than fantasies, and my baking was reduced back to the basics - chocolate coconut buttermilk pound cake, chocolate chip cookies when needed, chocolate cherry mousse, not much, not often, and rarely enough to share.

In the past couple weeks, however, I have started ramping up my baking again. Through some testing that my doctor had me do, as well as a general look at my nutrition habits, my doctor recommended that I do an "elimination diet" for three weeks, not so much to find a potential irritant (she wasn't so concerned about that in my situation) but to allow my gut lining to heal and to (hopefully) improve my poops. An elimination diet is about as strict as you want it to be - there's a dozen different rabbit holes on the subject online. I researched around, reasoned it all through, and decided what my parameters would be. And right away, I realized that I had an excuse to do some experiments in the kitchen. I've baked three different small batches of experimental cookies (the first one was best, so far) and today - churros! (Coincidentally (?) these were the show stopper bake in the episode of Great British Baking Show that I watched the other night.) I've baked my own flake cereal for the week to go with my walnuts and pepitas in the morning. Making sure I have snacks on hand is a bit of a chore, but having to try to experiment within these different parameters has put a little spring back in my step in the kitchen. Anyone who has followed my baking in the past will recall that messing around with unique ingredients is one of my faves. Heck, I even made dinner for us the other night (Indigenous Tacos from The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen, a great recipe book if you're trying to eat more plant-based, non-processed, food). 

And that's all for now. Just a few thoughts on food and messing around in the kitchen, and finding inspiration within limitations. The rest of my non-working life is consumed with knitting projects right now - I've got five active at present, though two of them will hopefully wrap up soon. I am trying to get better at keeping up on the housework, too. Last week was the first time we got all the weekly and biweekly tasks done on our tracker chart since I made it, so I'm trying to keep that rolling.

Oh, and I've officially been flossing every day (with one exception) for over a month now. How did I get myself to do this thing I've been trying to get in the habit of for most of my adult life? I listened to the NPR LifeKit podcast episode about "Tiny Habits" (twice, or maybe even three times), and then I decided that only flossing half of my mouth was tiny enough to do without talking myself out of it. And every day and I do just that. Now I don't even have to think about it anymore, it's just what I do! Powerful...

That had nothing to do with everything else, but it seemed worthy of mention. I'm proud of this accomplishment, and I want to celebrate it. Plus, I'm pretty sure I've told Jack this at least twice now, so I had better start sharing it with someone else (albeit on this blog that most folks will never read...).

Until next time!

Where the seasons change with elevation

 My heart is like a bird fluttering at the door of its cage as it creaks open, time for another visit to the great wide world. This week built on the momentum that I garnered over the month of February. I spent Monday out scouting filming locations for some social media content we're going to start producing for work. I spent Wednesday with my boss in the field, filming and soaking in the sunshine. I may or may not have sprayed sun-activated blond-enhancing spray in my hair before we went out there... Delighted with the new-to-me trail, I asked my dear co-worker, "Is it like that the whole way out, right on the edge of the ridgeside with those beautiful views?" "Yes!" she declaimed. I had asked her the wrong question - or rather the right question with the wrong qualifier, I would later discover. Convinced, I asked Jack, "do you wanna do something different this weekend? Let's go for a bike ride on Friday." And Jack agreed.

So this morning I got out of bed earlier than I have in weeks (months) with the prospect of a sunny bike ride ahead of me. It was in the upper 30s on the mountain, but I was confident that by the time we got down to the foothills it would be balmy riding weather. I pumped up the bike tires and we loaded them up in the back of the truck, breakfasted on burritos (made with yesterday's leftovers), and drove downhill. I don't think I will ever cease to be amazed by this place where the seasons change with elevation. We arrive at the trailhead a little past 8 in the morning - late enough that the early risers would be finishing up on the trail, early enough that we would get back before the late morning/lunch crowd started to come out en masse. It was perfectly comfortable to pedal in my hiking pants and ankle socks, my long sleeve wool jersey (lightweight) and regular cycling gloves, my helmet without the ear warmer that my mother knit for riding when it's cold. Jack wore a hoodie and shorts. It was a perfect, sunshiny, spring day.

We pedaled past wildflowers and green grass, and view after view of the Tuolumne River canyon. We passed 5 people and two dogs on our way out, only two of the people and one dog were going the same direction as us, all of them were on foot. Manzanitas were flush with pinkish blossoms like cherry trees and bees were buzzing the manzanita blooms, eager to get out while the sun was bright. It was altogether a lovely ride. We got to the picnic table about a half-mile in - my furthest point on the trail before today - and paused, checked our bikes, decided all was well and continued riding.

Manzanita in bloom - as the name suggests, the trees produce tiny, malic fruit.

The trail is a rail trail - an old railroad grade that has been converted into a biking and hiking path for the modern era. The sort of thing I grew up riding a lot as a kid. So I was over the moon with delight when suddenly we were paralleling ACTUAL RAILS AND TIES!!! A quick rack of my brain couldn't bring up any other times when there were old tracks on along a rail trail. "How cool!" I called out. The segment ended, we rounded a bend, and that was when I realized that I had asked the wrong question of my dear co-worker - or the right question, with the wrong qualifier. When I had asked "is it like this the whole way out?" I should have said "wide, and flat, and packed dirt?" Then I would've gotten a more accurate answer to draw the picture of expectation in my head. The rails and ties of that segment were lonely, the rails and ties for the rest of the trail were nearly continuous for the remaining 4 miles, with only a couple exceptions where there used to be a trestle but now there was a quick jaunt upstream and down to get across a narrow gully. The trail narrowed significantly when you were sharing it with a railroad, in some spots you actually had to cross the rails and ride over the ties (graciously back-filled with greenery and sediment over the years), and the tread itself seemed to grow rockier as we went on. Occasionally whole boulders blocked the path and could be ridden over or else you had to dismount and lead your bike over or around them.

You can see the old rails, overgrown in this section, to the left of the trail.

Even though the trail was perhaps not as optimal for leisure riding as I had imagined it to be, one could not help but pause periodically and take in the incredibly optimal views afforded by its position on the edge of the mountain and following up the canyon. At one point we paused to look down at the river far below, the morning sun angling just over the top edge of the foothill across the way and alighting upon dozens upon dozens of insects flying high and downstream - ladybugs, and who knows what else, glowing in the light as they blazed their own trails through the open sky. It was breathtaking. It was impossible to capture with my iPhone camera. It may not have been very possible to capture with my real camera, so I won't feel bad about having misplaced it somewhere in the house and not having taken the time to find it yet. Eventually the sun was high and warm enough that I took off my long-sleeve jersey and pedaled the rest of the way in a dark-colored tank top.

Canyon vista - note the old rail and ties at bottom of the photo

5 miles out, 5 miles back. The trail ended rather abruptly, with a little tail that appeared to head downhill - we opted to turn around at the 5 mile marker instead of exploring this. The whole point of riding a rail trail is to avoid hills, after all. The way back went quickly. Lulled into a sense of security from my uneventful ride out, I managed first to catch my wheel on a rail as I tried to cross it - landing with an oof! on both sides of my bike, right leg scraping across the teeth of my front chain ring, chest smacking into the ground, hands (gloved, thank goodness) slapping the rocky earth just shy of the opposite rail - which gleamed neatly right in front of my face. I laughed at myself, dusted off, got going again. Jack hadn't seen. :) A little further I tried to pedal over a boulder, and was unsuccessful. I tried, I failed, I tipped over into a neighboring boulder and got a scrape on my elbow. Jack, meanwhile, on his old Schwinn klunker, made it look easy as pie. When we got back within the first mile of the trail, we saw 4 more people, and then arrived back at the truck. We loaded the bikes and returned up the mountain, the winter sun already slipping behind the hill and plunging us into the realm of indirect lighting once again. Still relatively warm - enough that we leave the sliding glass door open with the screen in front for a little while; enough that we don't light a fire in the stove. 

One happy Bikemonkey!

It feels as if Spring is right around the corner. And tonight it's supposed to snow.

Until next time!