What is lost, what is gained

Garter snakes eat many garden pests, such as slugs!

Jumping off my recent post regarding the way life has changed since the ubiquity of the internet (thanks to smartphones and wifi), I found myself meditating the other day on what is gained versus lost with all sorts of technologies. The one close at hand is the lawn mower.

Mowing the lawn always seemed a rather thankless task growing up, and in my adult life too. Run a machine to manicure your perfect yard and cough for an hour afterwards thanks to the exhaust fumes and hayfever. And to what end? Just to have a short, even lawn. Perhaps someone who knows more about the specifics of grass growing (or who cares more about it) could explain to me that this is actually important for anything beyond vanity. But it seems a bit vain to me.

In our current (temporary) home we've made a decision. Not because of my dislike of lawn mowing, but more due to spatial constraints and the fact that we don't want to purchase a machine that could be different from what we'd need in our future home. The lawn here is relatively small, so we bought a hand tool known as a "weed whip". Not to be confused with the weed whacker, the weed whip consists of a medium-length wooden handle with a serrated, two-edged blade at the bottom. It's a tool that Jack uses at work sometimes for brushing the trail corridor. It's remarkably effective at cutting things down to size. It just requires a bit more manual labor.

So as you can imagine, our yard looks a lot scruffier than those of our neighbors. And frankly, we like it that way. A scruffy lawn seems more inviting, more lush and semi-wild. More like a meadow. As P. Allen Smith said one time (I think it was him?) "Children love meadows." And I am a child at heart.

For a motorized walking or riding lawn mower, what is lost is the direct connection to the land, the manual labor (though some walk-behinds do require a bit more effort, but it's often more of just a leg workout, which is just like any other workout I tend to do), and the peace and quiet (and clean air, if it's a gas mower) for yourself and those around you. What is gained is time, especially if the lawn is large.

Time is what is lost with a weed whip. Although I have gotten good enough to get through the front lawn in 30 minutes now (I did it on my lunch break yesterday), that's compared to the 47+/- minutes it took me to do about 5x (or more?) that space with a walking mower at our Crescent City house. (I used to listen to the entirety of Pearl Jam's "Lightning Bolt" album while I mowed.) What's gained is pretty significant, though: peace and quiet for yourself and your neighbors (just a gentle swish-swish-thwack-thwack sound), cleaner air, a solid upper body workout, and a greater connection to the land that you're working. What do I mean by that last part? I mean that I know exactly what plants are growing and where in my little lawn because I recognize and trim them with my "eye on the ball" and so much more focus on the plants themselves than when I run a mower over them. Also, since I tend to strike higher than a mower and with less frequency/speed, I'm less likely to injure wildlife going about its business in our lawn. Wildlife like the beautiful garter snake in the photograph above. I've seen that beauty while "whacking" (as I like to call it, because "whipping" sounds weird) the lawn twice now!

For anyone who's wondering: what about a non-motorized, old-fashioned, walk-behind mower? The modern ones are full of plastic parts and we had one in Crescent City - it ceased to function effectively within a year. If I found a proper vintage one for a good price, I'd buy it and try it again, but I'm not impressed with the ones on the modern market. Not for these thick, lush, PNW lawns, anyway. On that same note, I'm certainly not opposed to the non-gas motorized options that are out there as well, and I may well look into them before the summer is over, perhaps an electric weedwhacker as a nice midway option.

If it's not obvious, I hope you recognize that I view this as a "right tool for the job" situation. And it's more along the lines of consciously deciding what technology we utilize in our lives and accepting the gains and losses that the type of technology we use affords. For this house at this time, something small with more of an upper body workout works well for me. This is akin to that question I've been trying to ask myself more lately: is this trip better suited to walking, cycling, or driving?

Until next time!

Shifting Gears

 For the last two months I have been training for a metric century ride as part of the Columbia Century Challenge, a supported bike tour on the other side of the Columbia River from where we live. The price was right, the photos were lovely, the course was challenging but not crazy, and I was hoping to be able to have a lovely day in communion with my fellow cyclists. But when I signed up, I agreed to a clause that said I would not participate in the ride if I exhibited symptoms of a cough, sore throat, etc, on the day of the ride. Today is the day of the ride, and I have a baritone chest cough and a recovering sore throat.

I'll be honest, I cried last night when I made the decision to request that my registration be rolled over to next year (something that they are very kind to offer for folks who can't make it). It's hard to shift gears sometimes, to let go of things that we had planned and poured ourselves into before they come to fruition. But letting go can also be a huge relief. I slept in this morning and felt good about my decision last night when I woke up to a heavy cough and runny nose that would have sucked even more while riding than they do in my comfy bed. No more stress of making a ride when my body is out of it, now I can focus on healing this weekend so that I can put this spring cold behind me before my mother-in-law comes up for the weekend in 6 days.

And already, my mind is going on to the next thing. Training for the ride was only a preamble to training for the backpacking trips I'll be doing this year - two trips to hike the 24 miles +/- to Jack's backcountry camp, and back! It will be the most I've done in less than 48 hours since 2014 when I was working at Sequoia and hiking mad miles every day. Back then, it was normal amongst my peers to get off work and hike 6 miles round-trip to visit a waterfall, and then to still do all your fun evening hangout activities. I hope in the coming weeks to capture some of that spirit. I will be able to slide cycling to the role of cross-training, alongside using the new roller skates that I recently acquired, and workouts at the calisthenics stations in the park. I intend to make a habit of walking down to the post office of an evening to mail a postcard or letter, perhaps wandering up and down the hillier parts of town, perhaps carrying a backpack with evermore weight inside to build up my load-bearing muscles once again. On particularly nice days, while the sun is up so late, I hope to drive to places with proper hiking trails at least once a week to put in some good miles. I intend to start wearing my hiking boots more often than my sneakers so that I can get used to them again, their weight, their stiffness, their strike.

Given the high gas prices, this next stage of my summer training will require more planning to make sure I'm not driving too much unnecessarily. Acquainting myself with the local bus may finally be in order. Planning days where I put in two training activities so that I can make the most of the drive - perhaps doing the SUP fitness class on Wednesday night and then riding my bike around the flats of Woodland dike afterwards. Perhaps pedaling to Longview and then walking around Lake Sacajawea before pedaling back home. At work they've restricted our use of "wellness hours" (3 hours each week that we can use to exercise) until the end of the month, so that will cut into my options a bit as well. But when the sun doesn't go down until 9 o'clock, the only thing standing in my way, truly, is myself.

So while I sit here, sick in bed, I am going to put myself to work, planning my outings and trainings for the next couple weeks so that the decision and guesswork is taken out of the equation. Because the best way to talk yourself out of a workout is to give yourself an option to do nothing. And if I can have a bunch of options pre-established that I just pick one from each day, that will go a long way to keep me on the right track for an enjoyable backpacking trip in July.

That's all for today, not a particularly beautiful piece of writing, but more just a check-in on where I am and what my goals are for the coming summer. Solstice is coming up, and I scored an invite to "Summer Rollstice" - a group outdoor roller skate event along the Columbia River in Portland - but I was also contemplating doing a big hike that afternoon. Perhaps something else will come up - or perhaps I'll do both activities! I'm looking forward to this, one of my favorite holidays, as an opportunity to check in and orient myself going into summer. To shift gears from the spring, where I've been getting started and dabbling in lots of different things and familiarizing myself with the flow of this new home, to a summer where I lock into more of a focus and fill my after-work hours with time outdoors and spending time with new friends and at new favorite places.

Until next time!

Back Before...

 I listened to an episode of NPR's LifeKit about what we've "lost" to the internet. I think it was billed as "how to get it back" but I didn't find a whole lot of actually tangible advice in that regard. Or perhaps I got distracted by my meal prep and the fact that my lunch break was almost over and I still had to pee... But I downloaded that episode (yes, I'm still downloading, not streaming, podcasts - old habits die hard) because the title resonated with a thought I've been having a lot lately. What did we give up in favor of the internet? in favor of smart phones? in favor of evermore cell and data coverage? Many of my friends these days are about 7 years or more younger than I am and I've come to realize that their childhood experiences were often vastly different from my own. They often cannot remember a time before the internet.

Something to ponder...

But the before I wanted to look at today was not before internet completely, but rather before internet completely overtook our lives. You might think that this is a bit silly for me to ponder, since for the previous three years I was living without internet in my home. But our weekly forays to the library to tap into that endless stream was still a major point of our lives and what so much of what we did revolved around before and after that download/upload session.

The period of my life that I'm pondering right now is when internet was intermittent, not guaranteed to be on my own personal device, and not something that I spent a whole lot of time every day - or even every week - engaging with. What was my life like when internet was a tool instead of an unending stream of content? And perhaps I'm also contemplating this because Jack's field season has started and I have been displeased with how I've spent my extra alone time so far. Let's just say that I've done a lot of looking for content and very little consumption thereof. An internet version of standing in front of the open refrigerator door combined with old-fashioned television channel surfing.

When I think about those days before the internet reached its inkblots into every blank moment of my life, this is what I can remember doing:

I would spend about an hour on the computer every few days, answering emails (these were almost exclusively from people I know in real life) and perhaps writing a blog post for that week. I think the old-fashioned Fb would have been a part of this, too, but my memories of Fb are too tied up in what it is now to remember what it was like before. I remember that I didn't like it much then, for different reasons, and that somewhere in my first or second year of college I deleted my account.

Every other waking-not-working hour would be spent doing something off of this list:

- walking/hiking/exploring

- yoga: my first exposure to podcasts was actually a yoga instructor in Minnesota whose 1-2 hour long yoga classes I would listen to and enact under the ramada in my backyard in Big Bend.

- letter writing: so many letters! I probably averaged 2-3 a week. And I always used to illustrate the envelopes, something I barely take time to do anymore even when I do write.

- reading

- knitting: usually without anything in the background like tv or audiobooks or podcasts. Just knitting and observing the world around me.

- writing: I was still filling notebooks back then. The number of story starts that populate the dark corners of my laptop storage show just how much I was actively creating worlds with my mind back then. And how seldom I've been doing it in the last ten years of my life.

- playing musical instruments and coming up with new songs or learning old ones - often with other people!

- making breakfast: this is something that I did almost every day when I lived in Big Bend, and quite often when I lived at Montezuma Well, too. The yogurt and trail mix that I have almost everyday now used to be my go-to lunch or afternoon snack.

- admiring the scenery: staring off into the landscape instead of into my computer or phone screen.

- planning: poring over maps and other resources to figure out where I might explore next; gazing at the empty spaces around me and deciding how I might fill them with growing things if I had the time and the resources; planning special get-togethers with my friends; planning what epic thing I was going to do on my birthday (something I really noticed myself missing when it happened this year...)

- chilling with friends: watching a movie (often on VHS), making a meal together, going on a hike or a bike ride, or just chatting it up and asking them about life's questions (they were almost always a decade or more older than I was).

- painting: it was brand new to me then! Also, sketching, which I still did a lot of (especially for envelopes).

Less than 30% of those involved looking at a screen for more than a moment. And all of those involved a finite amount of content to choose from.

On Tuesday I got off work and went for a bike ride for an hour, came home and showered, made and ate dinner, then walked to my first meeting of the local Artist and Makers Association. On the walk back I was struck by an inspiration for a story so strong, and when I got home I immediately sat down at the kitchen table and started writing. Yes, on my laptop, but using my old OmmWriter program that shuts out everything else and makes it seem like I'm using a tool instead of a Distractomatic 5000. In one hour I wrote nearly 9000 words. And it was GOOD writing, too.

Where am I going with all of this? I'm not sure at the moment. Getting off Fb was a big step (and I still haven't deleted the actual account, because of the ability to use the messenger side of things for certain people) but I think that I'm ready now to take the next. I'm just feeling around for what that is.

If you've read all the way to here, go ahead and tell me: what is it that you used to spend your time with before the internet became all-consuming? What did you used to use to fill your blank spaces? How did you use the internet back when it was only a tool and not a torrent?

Until next time!