Creative Nonfiction Mad Libs: An essay-writing experiment

One of my favorite online journals, Brevity, posted a Mad Libs exercise, created by writer and teacher Lee Martin, on their blog.  I decided to try it--here's my result:

Craggy.Root.Love

by Rachael Button

1.

The first time I visited the Cascades I worked in a community called Holden Village as a gardener. I spent most of my time weeding. I weeded herb beds and flower beds, brick pathways and dirt roads. I pulled grass and dandelions, letting the tendrils of their roots rest in my palms. I flicked soil from the structure that had delivered nutrients to the plant--tying them to the earth. The strands looked like lace, a web of fragile fibers. I watched the roots wilt between my fingers before I bagged them to be burned.

2.

I’ve moved six times in seven years.  When I moved to the Cascades more permanently, to teach in the Holden Village school (a year after my first visit to the mountains), I made stops: at a friend’s apartment in Chicago, a professor’s bungalow in Grinnell, a monastery in Wyoming, and a house in Spokane.  My longest stop was in Ames, Iowa—where I had lived for three years as a graduate student.  I stayed for four days.  I went out to lunch and lingered over breakfast coffee.  I hiked on land owned by the English department and watched Northern Exposure at a friend’s newly purchased house.  The night before I left I went walking with a friend I love, a friend I used to date.  We walked shoulder-to-shoulder through downtown Ames on sidewalks shadowed by streetlights.  He drove me home.  After he turned off his engine, I lay my head on his narrow shoulders and asked him if I could keep it there.  I knew that the next day I would drive sixteen hours by myself to the Big Horn Mountains.  But in that moment I needed to be tied to him.  I needed to let my body go limp.  We didn’t kiss.  We didn’t melt into each other.  We just sat close.  He stayed still enough for me to cry, silent enough for me to tell him I felt scared, rootless. 

3.

When I worked in the garden at Holden webs of roots crumpled and furrowed in my fingers.  They were fitful, piece-y, like the Cascades Mountains encircling the garden where I weeded.  The stony faces of the Cascades are rugged: young and becoming.  A rocky spine jutting through Washington with summits and spires cut by geographic violence:  the scrape of glaciers and the swell of volcanoes.  

4.

I like to think I’m more like the mountains than those plants I held between my fingers: capable of becoming more vivid as I break and change.  I picture snowfields and false summits that a person can stand on, reaching solo for a cloud-shielded sky. 

5.

Last Friday night, a friend and I sat in the Holden Village hot tub and talked about home.  He said he wondered what made a person feel rooted in a place.  He’d felt attached to people in the past but he wanted a place he could gravitate around: a home.  I told him that I’d been writing about home and love: about how both become more difficult to find as I age.  Freezing rain fell around us.  Steam rose from the water. Clouds covered the stars and mountain summits. 

When I woke the next morning, snow sheltered our mountain valley, softening the cliffs and scree.  I thought about seasons: about the blankets that cover us and the way they melt: transplanting us in new places, rooting us to our craggy homes.

Here's the process:  

(Again I'm completely stealing this from Lee Martin but it's fun so I wanted to share)

1.  Make a list of three adjectives. Any three. Don’t think too hard. Just do it.
(Frozen, Craggy, Brittle)

2.  Make a list of three objects that have recently become “unforgettable” to you in some way. Three objects from the current time or the recent past that you can’t get out of your head.
(Roots, Scree, Snow)

3.  Make a list of three abstractions, but try to avoid nouns that could also be transitive verbs. Nothing that could be turned into a statement such as “I love x,” or “I hate y.” Stick with things like “limbo” or “harmony.”

(Love, Home, Awe)

4. Choose an adjective from your list, an object, and an abstraction. Do it in that order. Add a preposition or an article as necessary. Write the title of your essay (e.g. “Pretty Dog Leash in Limbo”). Note: now that you know you’re creating a title, feel free to switch out any of the words for others on your lists.
(Craggy.Root.Love.)

5. Write a few lines about the object you’re chosen. Why have you been thinking about it lately? Give us a context for why this object is important to you.
(The first time I visited the Cascades I worked in a community called Holden Village as a gardener. I spent most of my time weeding. I weeded herb beds and flower beds, brick pathways and dirt roads. I pulled grass and dandelions, letting the tendrils of their roots rest in my palms. I flicked soil from the structure that had delivered nutrients to the plant--tying them to the earth. The strands looked like lace, a web of fragile fibers. I watched the roots wilt between my fingers before I bagged them to be burned..)

6.  Write a few lines that evoke the abstraction you’ve chosen without naming it. How does the abstraction convey your emotional response to the object? In what way does thinking about the object leave you unsettled, uncertain, or whatever your emotional response turns out to be?
(I’ve moved six times in seven years. When I moved to the Cascades more permanently, to teach in the Holden Village school (a year after my first visit to the mountains) I made stops--at a friend’s apartment in Chicago, a professor’s bungalow in Grinnell, a monastery in Wyoming, and a house in Spokane. My longest stop was in Ames, Iowa—where I had lived for three years as a graduate student. I stayed for four days. I went out to lunch and lingered over breakfast coffee. I hiked on land owned by the English department and watched Northern Exposure at a friend’s newly purchased house. The night before I left I went walking with a friend I love, a friend I used to date. We walked shoulder-to-shoulder through downtown Ames on sidewalks shadowed by streetlights. He drove me home. After he turned off his engine, I lay my head on his narrow shoulders and asked him if I could keep it there. I knew that the next day I would drive sixteen hours by myself to the Big Horn Mountains. But in that moment I needed to be tied to him. I needed to let my body go limp. We didn’t kiss. We didn’t melt into each other. We just sat close. He stayed still enough for me to cry, silent enough for me to tell him I felt scared, rootless.) 

7.  Write a few lines that evoke the adjective you’ve chosen without naming it. Give us a sense of its relationship to the object. Is it ironic, for example, or genuine?

 (When I worked in the garden at Holden, webs of roots crumpled and furrowed in my fingers. They were fitful, piece-y—like the Cascades Mountains encircling the garden where I weeded. The stony faces of the Cascades are rugged—young and becoming. A rocky spine jutting through Washington with summits and spires cut by geographic violence: the scrape of glaciers and the swelling of volcanoes.)

8.  Write a few lines about another object, story,  or memory that comes to you right now. We’re working with free association here. Look for words or phrases or images that subtly connect to what you’ve already written. If you need a prompt, here’s one: “When I think of that dog leash, I remember (fill in the blank with another object, a story, a memory).”

(I like to think I’m more like the mountains than those plants I held between my fingers: capable of becoming more vivid as I break and change. I picture snowfields and false summits that a person can stand on, reaching solo for the cloud-covered sky.

Last Friday night, a friend and I sat in the Holden Village hot tub and talked about home. He said he wondered what made a person feel rooted in a place. He’d felt attached to people in the past but he wanted a place he could gravitate around: a home. I told him that I’d been writing about home and love: about how both become more difficult to find as I age. Freezing rain fell around us. Steam rose from the water. Clouds covered the stars and mountain summits.)

9.  Make a direct statement about where the second object, story, or memory takes you in your thinking. Here’s a prompt: “I begin (or began) to think about (fill in the blank however you’d like).” The emphasis with this last step is to let the texture of the writing invite an abstract thought, conclusion, question, speculation, etc., thereby allowing the central line of inquiry of the essay to grow organically from what precedes it.
(When I woke the next morning, snow sheltered our mountain valley, softening the cliffs and scree. I thought about seasons: about the blankets that cover us and the way they melt: transplanting us in new places, rooting us in to craggy homes)

Detroit, Holden, Home

A sense of home is, it seems, worth more than any other comfort. And one of the questions I want to answer now, for myself, is what makes a place feel like home.-Eula Biss, “Back to Buxton”

In graduate school study becomes specific.  Instead of majoring in English, graduate students study “depictions of domestic women in late eighteenth century novels of social criticism” instead of studying biology, graduate students study, “the PH of soil and its role in urban farming.”  The graduate students I know are people able to pour themselves into fields so specialized that they may know more about the subject of their dissertation than anyone in their department, their university, or even their state or country—which is why, when I try to explain what I studied in graduate school, I struggle to articulate the subject of my thesis or the aims of my research. 

During my three years at Iowa State I completed a book-length project titled, When I Get Home.  I checked out dozens of books on Detroit, Michigan, the Midwest, and the rust belt.  I studied my home.  I read about the concept of home.  I learned that there is no word in the French language for “home.”  In Mandarin (“Jia”) and Cantonese (“Gaa”)—“home” and “family” are synonyms.  In Spanish, the word for home, “hogar,” translates closely to our English word for “hearth.”  The Spanish phrase for being far from home: “hallarse ausente” literally translates to “seeking and finding distance.”  I ended my graduate thesis, my book, with my own image of hope and home: a description of standing on top of the Guardian building in Detroit looking out on the city, “a garden of towers scraping the sky.”

But I didn’t move back to Detroit after graduating.  I applied for jobs at Cranbrook and Wayne State University.  I searched Metro-Detroit job-finding websites weekly.  After sending out dozens of cover letters and applications, I ended up on the west coast teaching outdoor education, helping students near Tacoma, Washington learn about their environment and claim their landscape.  I stored the furniture from my graduate school apartment and moved cross country with a glove box full of maps, a cardboard box of books, and two suitcases bags full of my most weather-durable clothing.  I moved into a room with white walls and a twin bed and woke every morning to the sound of pop music playing on the dining hall stereo and the clank of students setting breakfast tables.

~

I moved cross-country for the second time last August, to Holden Village, a place so isolated that it’s only accessible by ferry or on foot.  I arrived August 31^th, six days before I began working as a para-educator in Holden’s “remote and necessary” public school.  I’ve been in Holden Village for just over a month and a half.  I live with three girls in a chalet with a wood-burning stove and a front porch swing.  We host knitting circle every week and bi-weekly tea parties in our living room.  I have book shelves lining my wall and prayer flags hanging above my bedroom window.  There are pots of basil in our dining room and checkered curtains hanging on the window above our kitchen table. 

My mom visited Holden in the beginning of October.  I watched her ferry chug up to Lucerne landing.  I greeted her wearing a sweater she’d bought almost thirty years ago in Scotland on her honey-moon.  We rode the school bus up the ten miles of switchbacks and ate soup and salad together in Holden’s dining hall. 

What makes a place feel like home?  The night my mom came to Holden I invited people from the village to my chalet after vespers for snacks and conversation.  I served wine my mom brought from the Safeway in Chelan, trail mix, pumpkin cookies, Wheat Thins and goat cheese.  Friends filtered in and out.  We sat in a circle in my living room, drinking wine and tea and laughing.  The crowd that congregated in my living room ranged from people in their twenties to people in their sixties—professors and pastors, social workers and students, musicians, artists, writers, and cooks.  We belly-laughed about totaled cars and cross country road trips.  We talked about hiking and mountains and the sacredness of sharing food. 

My mom and I walked thirty miles during her weekend in Holden.  We hiked to Holden Lake and Cloudy Pass, places I’d walked to by myself in the days between arriving in the village and starting my work at the school.  We sat at the top of the Lyman switchbacks, stretching and drinking water while we looked out at Dumbbell mountain’s glacial snowfields.  We picnicked on homemade granola, plums, green peppers, and cheese and hummus sandwiches at Cloudy Pass.  We crouched on boulders beside Lyman Lake and photographed its turquoise water.  We dined with villagers of all ages and talked at our dinner table about big families, counseling at camps, applying to college, and crashing weddings.  At night we sat in the Holden Village hot tub where we let our muscles soak in the hot water and looked up at the smattering of stars which spanned the sky from one horizon to the other.

I’ve been living in this mountain village for over a month and a half.  It’ll be two months on Halloween.  Last week, after my mom’s departure, I left the Cascades for the first time since August to travel to my housemate Kari’s cabin in Coeur d’Alene with my friends Cecilia and Jericho.  When we left the village, we referred to our chalet in Holden as “home.”  It’s a word that’s been slipping back in my mouth for the first time since I left my graduate school apartment in Iowa and it feels good to have it back on my tongue:  Home.

~

Tuesday night, at a party, a friend asked me what I missed most about the world outside Holden.  I paused and told him that I missed the diversity of places like Detroit: the assortment of economic, religious, and racial backgrounds the city offers.  He said he missed movie theaters and going out to eat and access to the support network he’d built in the city where he lived.  I told him that I missed my family and friends from Michigan and Indiana and Iowa but that I’d struggled to build the same kind of close cluster of friends during my first year in Washington.  I thought about the things I didn’t miss: driving, malls, traffic, texting, spending money. 

But later that night, without the buzz of people talking and drinking all around me, I thought again about what I miss.  I miss being able to talk with my parents on the phone.  I miss the colorful heaps of vegetables at the co-op.  I miss going to Grand Ledge with my brother, working climbing routes, playing fetch with Dave’s dog, and picnicking on humus and homemade bread beneath Grand Ledge’s limestone cliffs.  I miss cooking breakfast on Fridays with Brenna and Liz and Annie in Iowa, lingering over French toast casserole and breakfast salad.  I miss drinking coffee with my mom on my parents’ back porch and listening to my dad play guitar.  I miss cooking dinner with John, making fish tacos or squash soup or pesto, while drinking cheap wine and listening to podcasts.  I miss internet fast enough to stream songs and going with my brother to see Michigan bluegrass and folk bands play at college auditoriums and art galleries, dive bars and libraries. 

Claiming a home, like falling in love, becomes harder as you get older.  Or maybe it becomes more difficult if you haven’t done it by a certain age.  I could have stayed in any of the places I’ve lived in the same way I could have ended up with any of the people I’ve been lucky enough to be close to over the years.  But as a twenty-six year-old, single and living in the Cascade Mountains, my sense of home feels fragmented and there’s not a person or place I can return to that fills all the gaps.  Instead there are memories of moments when I felt at home and a smattering of people who make those moments happen more often—family and friends who are scattered across Michigan, Iowa Indiana, Oregon, California, Pennsylvania, and Washington.  And there’s Holden Village, a community of people clustered together in the mountains, trying to make a home for vagabonds like me. 

Wednesday afternoon I received a book I’d ordered in the mail, a hard-covered copy of Rick Bass’s collection, The Lives of Rocks.  I read it in graduate school for a class on “Re-inventing the West” and I bought it because I wanted to own a copy of the first story in the collection, a short story about two boys, best friends, who both loved the same girl, and, in a less common variation of the ancient story she chose neither of them but went on to meet and choose a third, and lived happily ever after.  It’s not a story about regret or mistakes, but a narrative about change and the ways we become the people we are.  The story ends, Even now, Richard thinks they missed each other by a hair’s breadth…he thinks it may have been one of the closest misses in history of the world…he marvels at how wise they were and all the paths they did not take.  I re-read the story in my chalet Wednesday evening, before heading to the dining hall for dinner, and thought about the people I’ve loved and the places I’ve lived, “husks” of my former lives: fragments of the homes I’ve had and the homes I could have had.

There are moments in the village where I feel a sense of home, “hogar,” hearth and “Jia,” family: roasting marshmallows at Hart Lake with Sally, watching My So-Called-Life reruns with Cecilia, talking on the porch of Agape after Vespers with Scott, reading out-loud to Micah and Micaela in the Holden School library loft, running four-hundred meter repeats with our school’s three cross country runners, and hanging my jeans and sweaters back in my closet after a trip out of the village.  My chalet--with its porch swing, paneled walls, flower boxes, lamp-lit living room and wood burning stove--looks and feels like the kind of home I’d design for myself: homey and old-worldly, spacious and quirky. 

~

Thursday, I left the village for the second time in two weeks.  I went with our three high schoolers to a cross country meet in Chelan.  The school district chartered a private boat to drive Joe, Kasey, Corey, our assistant coach Thomas, and me.  We zipped along the rocky cliffs of Lake Chelan, watching the boat's depth finder.  We photographed the finder at the lake's deepest point: 1,535 feet.  At points the boat sailed through water so smooth that only the boat's wake rippled the lake's surface, at points white-capped waves broke our rhythm, sending the boat sputtering and swerving, bouncing us from our padded seats.  We watched the mountains get smaller and smoother.  We watched the groves of Ponderosa Pines and Douglas Firs thin to the scrappy dessert.  We pulled into the dock at Chelan in just over an hour, where our driver, a grizzled man with gray stubble, told us to stay seated until he'd tied the boat to the dock. 

Before we left Holden, we attended a pep-rally put on by the primary schoolers. The school's seven elementary students wore forest green and computer cut outs of clip art goats. They wore green ribbons in their hair and painted their faces. They held painted letters which, when they stood side-by-side spelled "Go Goats!" (the school's mascot) and led the entire village in pep assembly cheers.

The students ran on the golf course in Chelan, on rolling grass back-dropped by distant Cascade Mountains.  Thomas and I ran from spot to spot, sprinting our legs sore and shouting our voices raw.  All three Holden runners ran personal best times.  Two qualified to go onto districts.  

After the meet, we huddled into a pizza place in called Local Myth and ordered pizzas with Kalmata olives, tomatoes, and basil.  When I went to the bathroom, I could hear the cooks talking about how long our order of three large pizzas would take to complete.  They'll be okay waiting, one said, They're Holden people and I felt like a representative of our mountain community where high schoolers run mountain trails for cross country practice and where people show enough grace to wait patiently for pizza while sipping on water, lingering, talking, and laughing.

~

It snowed Monday.  The mountains look like someone powder-sugared the peaks.  The day it snowed I watched Holden Village students race around the playground, trying to catch falling leaves.  They moved in a clump, extending their arms skyward, elbowing each other in their efforts to hook yellow foliage in their fingers.  When the wind stopped, they caught snow on their tongues. 

As the day went on, I watched the snowline creep down the mountains till white powder covered not only the peaks of Buckskin and Copper but Martin Ridge and the top of the Ten Mile Falls switchbacks.  Yellow leaves skittered across the dirt road that runs through the village and frost sparkled the grass and ferns.

By November the village should be buried in snow.  When I picture winter here I imagine the smell of the wood-burning stove and books piled on the coffee table of my chalet.  I imagine learning to weave and knit and looking up at the stars on snow-lit nights.  I picture sledding down chalet hill and snowshoeing up to Copper Basin.  It'll be a different time to be in the Holden, blanketed by stillness and snow.  Maybe in Holden I'm seeking and finding my distance--or maybe making a home doesn't mean buying property or staying forever anymore than loving somebody means building your entire life around them, maybe creating home just means being in a place long enough to see the seasons change, feeling the first snaps of cold in the air and staying to watch the leaves frost.

~

Spider Gap

“The toughness I was learning was not a martyred doggedness, a dumb heroism, but the art of accommodation. I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.” 
-Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces

In his book, The Necessity of Empty Places, Paul Gruchow describes alpine flowers: the way they bloom all at once creating a “blaze of color for six weeks or so of the growing season.” Gruchow writes, “Alpine plants do not have the luxury of blooming in succession…everything hugs the thin Earth for protection from the drying, chilling wind.” In early September, when I ascended to Upper Lyman and Cloudy Pass, lupine, yarrow, gentian, Indian paintbrush, and Western pasque flowers brushed the mountains red, white, pink, blue, and violet. Now, less than two weeks later, bright red leaves replace green ground cover and only a couple gentian and pasque flowers remain scattered in the high altitude meadows.

The names of peaks and the names of plants are still new to me here in the North Cascades and I hesitate to say words like “gentian” and “lupine” because they are terms I know from only guidebooks. I haven’t had anyone help me through the nuances of Railroad Creek Valley the way I walked kids through the temperate rain-forest where I worked last year, explaining each tree and shrub by slowly saying the name, telling stories, and sharing identifying characteristics. A couple days ago, at coffee break, I asked the people at my table if they knew what "the puffy plants that grow high up in the mountain are?" When this question (understandably) confused everyone I added, “They look like something out of a Dr. Seuss book.” After several minutes of bumbling, I described the plant enough for Janice, the village gardener, to identify the “Dr. Seuss plant” as the Western pasque flower, a member of the buttercup family that blooms soon after the snow melt, budding into a tiny white pedaled flower. Janice told me that when the pasque flower seeds in a puff of feather-like hairs. I pictured the downy billows I had seen scattered in mountain meadows, floating on their stems like something out of a cartoon: pasque flowers.

I learned recently the leaves turn red in mountains is a result of the terrain: the scrappy soil, sunny afternoons, and cold nights.  In rich lowland soil, the leaves turn yellow.  Summer light decreases, leaves stop producing chlorophyll, and carotene and xanthophyll (the leaf's other pigments) kick in, painting the foliage yellow or orange.  Unlike carotene and xanthophyll, anthocyanin, the pigment that turns leaves red, has to be produced and requires additional energy.  Trees only produce anthocyanin in landscapes where the stress of mere survival would otherwise cause them to drop their leaves too soon.  Like the burst of wildflowers I witnessed in August and September, the red that has started to cross the mountain is a symbol of survival in an ecosystem that makes nothing easy.

~

Yesterday I went to Spider Gap, a slope above Lyman Lake where you can scramble the scree and snowfields and see into the next valley.  It was a twenty-five mile day that I had to pace, in both time and energy, so that I had enough stamina to scramble up the gap after the ten mile trek to Upper Lyman Lake and enough daylight for the hike back after the descent from Spider Gap.  I hiked fast to Hart Lake and the switchbacks at Lyman, then slowed.  I filled my water bottle at a river near Lyman, where I knew the current moved fast enough to make the water safe for drinking.  I sat in the meadows by the lake, scanning the changing horizon for autumn orange and red.  I lay on my belly to photograph the leaves and tromped off trail for better views of Lyman Lake from the trail that snaked above it.  I lingered near Lyman and Upper Lyman Lake, because (1) to me, nothing is prettier than the Lyman Lakes, turquoise pools pocketed by mountain peaks, and (2) I wanted to let my body rest before I had to scramble up the gap.

Spider Gap is no mountain summit.  I don't possess the technical skills to climb any of the peaks that surround Holden Village.  However, I had to bushwhack between the Lake and the gap.  I looked for cairns, stacked stones left by other hikers marking the safest way.  I pressed my palms against the scree when the climb got steep, I toed the snow to test iciness.  I listened for the sound of ice cracking and scanned the cliffs above me for cougars or rock-slides.  When I heard stones skitter on the other side of the slope, I froze, scanning the horizon before I continued my trek.  

In upper elevations color becomes clearer. The thinner atmosphere refracts less light and the decreased dust and moisture captures less color pigment. The sky looks bluer and the yellow and oranges in the stone seem more intense. As I climbed, my senses prickled with a heightened awareness of touch and sight and sound.

It took me about an hour to ascend from Upper Lyman Lake to Spider Gap.  I moved slow and safe.  I climbed scree, crossed a flat snowfield then ascended a slope of shallow snow.  As I moved toward the top, Upper Lyman started to look like a river, weaving between rock and glacier.  The snow shadowed the rock below.  I could see the way the mountain peaks contained the valley, walling Railroad Creek in Cascade cliffs, and the way Lyman Glacier fed the lushness: the mountain meadows and turquoise lakes.  From Spider Gap I saw a sign warning of fire danger in the next valley and the way the rock sloped down into snowfields that descended into Spider Meadows.  I saw both Lyman Lakes and Cloudy Peak.  I scurried from overlook to overlook before settling in the middle of the gap and wedging myself against the rock to eat granola and chocolate and drink from my water bottle.

~

According to Paul Gruchow, until the late eighteenth century no one visited mountains on purpose. Travelers who had to cross the Alps wore blindfolds and philosophers believed that before the flood and the fall, the earth had only flat smooth surfaces, filled with soil, rich enough to farm. It’s a luxury to love a landscape where "everything hugs the thin Earth for protection," where existence involves struggle, where even the trees turn different colors in their strain to survive.

This summer in Michigan, my brother tried to teach me to rock climb.  I knew I had a decent strength to weight ratio.  I knew knots.  I’d belayed hundreds of kids and taught rock climbing classes at the YMCA where I worked, but the first time Keith belayed me at the rocks at Grand Ledge, I barely ascended the easiest route.  I bruised my knees and banged my shins and held onto the rock so tight that my arms shook till my muscles pumped out.  One day, a man named Dave stood behind my belaying brother to watch me climb.  Dave watched with crossed arms, nodded, and told me in an even voice, “You have to work with the rock, not against it.”  Then he scrambled up beside me, pulling his body in toward the stone, feeling the creases in the rock with his fingers.  “You’re fighting the stone,” he told me and I imagined what climbing might look and feel like if instead of trying to muscle my way up rock I could move more like the ledge itself: gracefully sloping upward in a series of sharp steps and smooth reaches.

It's a different way of thinking: working with the rock.  As a short girl who spent her childhood in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula trying to keep up with stronger more coordinated boys, I learned to rely on speed and scrappy tenacity. I've had to get stitches half a dozen times and had two concussions. Purple scars shadow my legs, elbows, and hips. I broke my collarbone playing football during seventh grade cross country practice. I fractured my shins running too many miles on a cement track during high school.  I know how to barrel forward but I'm still learning how to live in a place where toughness requires sensitivity and fierceness means accommodation.  I'm learning to listen to the crumble of rocks and to feel my way through snowfields.  I'm learning to move slow enough to see the cairns from other hikers.  Sometimes I wonder how my time in the mountains will help me when I go to Ledges with Keith next summer in Michigan.  Will crawling through scree help my hands feel comfortable lingering on dusty rock long enough to find the good holds at Ledges? Will scrambling on snow aid my feet in trusting the small holds I need to lean into in order to work with the rock?  Will I eventually make my ascents with the smoothness of the lanky climbers I love to watch once I' m out of the harness, barefoot on the banks of Grand River?

After descending from Spider Gap, I rested on a boulder beside Upper Lyman Lake.  I scooped my legs into my chest and wrapped my arms around my knees.  I thought about taking off my shoes, rolling up my pants, and wading into the glacier-cold water.  But instead I sat.  I looked up the the cliffs and down at the pebbled bottom of the lake.  I felt the wind brush my sweaty skin.  I don't know when the trails I've walked each weekend will be buried in snow, no longer navigable.  I tried to memorize the way sun beamed off the lake, making the ripples in the water gleam.  I tried to memorize the shape of Lyman Glacier on the peaks.  I focused on breathing and didn't think about the hike back.

Spider Gap, September 2012