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joshbales · 1 year ago
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Shangrilogs is one of my favorite newsletters and definitely worth the substack subscription.
dog days of summer
This is edition 101 of Shangrilogs.
God September is a romance, huh? Will they, won’t they, the crisp breeze swinging into the party, only there long enough to lock eyes and leave. Just another night of humidity without reprieve. You’re in the unrelenting sun when it creeps up your spine like cool breath. “Fall is coming,” everyone says, blessed with the premonition of a cold morning. “I can feel it.” 
It’s such a relief when summer caves in on itself, when the expectations lower and the season of routine sets in. The season of When Harry Met Sally and Practical Magic, of notebooks and soup. Maybe it’s the old memories of it, of losing summer to the coming chill. No longer did you have to judge whether or not you were adequately tan or adequately fun. All the lives you weaseled in and out of burrowed back into the ground, another season’s ghosts. And in their absence, this uncanny version of yourself, same as ever but with so much potential — so much potential in fact it made me throw up every first morning of the new school year. Absolutely gagged with options.
Now, fall means I can sleep. The sun angle changes, slinking away from my bedroom to peer into someone else’s window. The air cools and the logs shrink, letting the tendrils of night reach into the gaps of my bedspread, searching for bare ankles to twist around and beckon to the floor. 
But not yet. 
September is merely the promise of fall. You can put on your sharpest sweater, play only Bon Iver and Joni Mitchell, and summer will still rule the party in a slip dress and an aperol spritz. Save your Meg Ryan and Manhattans for October. How can one even stomach pumpkin on a seventy degree day? If only to be dragged by the senses one month forward and countless years back to color-coded folders and the clank of lockers and corn stalks tied with twine to the porch. 
The sun is setting at dinner time, though, shutting the blinds on a full stomach. At least she gets it. No more 9pms on the asphalt, still warm under foot. She’s as eager for fall as we are — she’s got to bring spring somewhere else. Her absence makes space for brooding. The longer nights lead to longer longings. Summer loses her grip when the stars come out. She might have the blistering of the high sun, but the green of the leaves has lost its luster and fall sneaks in at night. You can stand in the creeping wind of the evening and wrap your arms a little tighter, shove your pockets a little deeper, and breathe. Summer’s not watching at night. You can embrace fall like a lover. 
The embrace is brief, though. Too risky to let it linger. You would find a way to leave summer behind, but she always leaves first. She packs her bags while you’re eyeing a farmstand of peaches and tomatoes. She gives it her all, sweat shimmering on her collarbone, but the party always turns on her — she’s never the It Girl for long. Every conversation diverts from backyard BBQs to back to school, sunscreen to sweatshirts, and she’s left standing there with an emptying glass while the menu changes behind her back. She’s meaner now, hot headed and cruel. Too many years of people buying too many things in an effort to drown her out. They love her, they adore her, they forget her. Fall never overstays their welcome, they don't know how. They take their cues from the leaves, gone before you had a chance to say how you felt.
But not yet. 
For now, fall’s lovers simply practice their speeches in the mirror, shoulders still bare, summer just out of ear shot. “I’ve been thinking about you,” they would say. Something where the heft is in the hands of the receiver, where they can always back down with, “as a friend, of course.” But fall knows. 
The hot drink on a hot day, sweater tied around the waist, a sudden interest in the occult. A crush on fall is obvious if you’re looking. And who hasn’t dreamed of what they can’t have. Summer has an ever dripping affair so long as you’ll land between her latitudes. And those who find themselves cunning enough to play winter’s games can spend all year in her bed. But fall never stays, you would merely chase them around the world, just another leaf on the wind. 
Their cool hands will graze your skin, wrapping you in blankets, lighting candles of sandalwood and musk, and they’ll curl up next to you to watch as the leaves begin to blush, embarrassed they were ever so green, and they’ll press a hand to your cheek as they do every year, if only to remind you that however brief, the romance was real. 
But not yet.
“There are some things though I know for certain: always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder, keep rosemary by your garden gate, plant lavender for luck, and fall in love whenever you can.” - Practical Magic
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mmwm · 11 months ago
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LINK FEST: 6 FEBRUARY 2024
Links that may or may not be related to gardens, food, travel, nature, or heterotopias and liminal spaces but probably are. Sources in parentheses. photo essay: Wood Work (Dig Delve). What it says on the label. Including coppicing! And eco-piles, habitat for animals, fungi, beetles, etc. essay: Be careful – #119: Worry, warning, and when things go wrong (Kelton Wright/Shangrilogs). “When [the…
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mmwm · 2 years ago
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LINK FEST: 7 FEBRUARY 2023
Links that may or may not be related to gardens, food, travel, nature, or heterotopias and liminal spaces but probably are. Sources in parentheses. essay: Hilarity in grief – #74 (Kelton Wright/Shangrilogs). On the loss of a cat, grief, chaos and cat-astrophe, and living in a haunted house. photo essay: The Flower That Sprouted From a Book (Boaz Frankel/Rootbound). “[H]ydrangeas and roses and…
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keltonwrites · 3 years ago
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When's your off-season?
This post was originally published on Shangrilogs Substack. Subscribe here.
Do you have a personal off-season? Can you?
My life here is supported by a resort town. There’s not a single amenity in our “town”, so we head into the actual town 25 minutes away for restaurants, stores, salons, etc. Those businesses all operate on a resort schedule, which is the closest American Industry gets to European. Beginning in late October through early December, hours are reduced and many places close up for a well-earned off-season. And I love every moment of minor inconvenience. Good for you, Siam Thai. Get out of here! No problem, ski shop. You go climb those mountains.
Unfortunately my own sanctioned off-season this time of year probably looks like yours: here are two days off — we know you’re likely spending them negotiating familial relationships, walking on Covid eggshells, trying to recover from years of getting hammered by 40-hr-work-weeks that are actually boundary-less tethers to tiny dinny nightmare sounds coming from your tracking device, all while cooking an actual feast you haven’t practiced in a year — but we hope you come back refreshed on Monday because Carl scheduled that 8am. (Carl thinks we should be back in the office because he’s a sycophant who believes the American Dream is real. Carl doesn’t give a shit what timezone you’re in.)
Corporate jobs don’t have off-seasons. And no, vacation days don’t count, because the point of shutting down the whole business is that there’s not 738 emails waiting to destroy your newly replenished zen when you get back. Which is why I believe in manufacturing your own off-seasons: breaks from fitness, upping the frequency of takeout meals, a pre-determined month of caring less when the house is a mess, a couple weeks’ work of “phoning it in” which I love and have loved since college when I realized it was possible to give a C performance and still get A- life results. And to be clear, despite years of professional work promoting it, I’m not talking about self-care. I am instead talking about self-reallocation-of-care. For me, the perfect off-season isn’t punctuated by massages and elaborate tea routines, it’s just doing a whole lot less of the bullshit and a whole lot more of the best shit.
But what is the best shit?
I have to give my brain a long enough break from the day-to-day to even figure out what a fulfilling day even is. A natural place to start here is to just think about what you’re grateful for. But when I’ve attempted gratitude journals in the past, it gets a little old writing “my legs, Finn, Ben, parents, the outdoors” over and over again. So instead, I like to think about what I regret. After all, when we sit around talking about what we’re grateful for, we’re just dancing around what we regret, or more often, what we’re attempting to not regret, e.g., ignoring your children, spending your life at a desk, never seeing Paris or whatever. Gratitude is a nostalgia-laced reverence, a practice of really nesting in the good things brought into our lives, where regret is that same nostalgia-driven awe, just this time with a big ole complicated layer of “whoops.”
I only have one serious regret — the rest all fall under the categories of “learning experiences” and “well what are ya gonna do.” (I guess the third category is “yes, I absolutely wouldn’t have gone to that restaurant that night” but that’s rewriting history — not choosing a better decision.) My biggest regret is when I had something really good and I let another person convince me it wasn’t. Or, in more explicit terms, I had a popular Tumblr from 2010-2013 that was optioned into a book and instead of converting that audience to a newsletter or different platform and continuing to write for myself, I just let it die because my Worst Boyfriend™ convinced me it (and I) were trash.
I used to resent him for that, but it was my choice. There will always be people who want to influence your decisions — usually not with any malice. But an off-season, a time when I let my brain get a full dose of introspection, allows me to pay closer attention to what’s bringing me real joy and flow immersion. When I can pay attention like this, and burrow into that feeling, I’m not so easily led astray in the woods.
Sort of like moving to this town in the first place.
“Isn’t that kind of far from a hospital?” “Aren’t you worried about avalanches?” “Do you even have snow tires?”
I had conviction around this decision. (To be fair, I also didn’t have any manipulative sacs of bitterness in my circle anymore.) Which brings me to the present, an off-season if I ever had one. Living somewhere without endless city entertainments, my job in transition with our budget slashed, friends to see in person at a near all-time low, and only six hours of actual sunshine — there’s not a lot to do but dedicate myself to figuring out what I want to do with myself.
At the tail-end of my last off-season, I and three other women set out to read Designing Your Life together. I was swimming with big ideas and bigger dreams, and I needed to shape the clay of them into something I could use, which is exactly what that book advertised it could help with. For the most part, I really enjoyed that book, but one exercise struck me as particularly futile. It asked for you to write down a thing you love, e.g., “the outdoors” or “making to-do lists”, and then make a word web in all directions under a time limit, and at the end, circle the words you wanted to be a bigger part of your life. I remember thinking this was so dumb. Then earlier this week, I came across all these old papers while unpacking. Here are the words I circled:
Home decor
Sharing
Community
Inspiration
Tropical
Rustic
Connection
Stories
Newsletter
*Gestures around at exactly what I’m doing right now, in a house I themed #tropicabin, sharing my stories and building a little community of people who care via a newsletter.*
Which brings me back to my big regret: abandoning the blog I worked tremendously hard to build. I knew when I was working on that blog that I was fulfilled. Is it ironic to do years of on-and-off soul-searching to come to the same conclusion that you did years ago? This is the plot of countless successful movies, after all. It took me a few years, and a couple very good off-seasons, but here I am, spinning my regret back in the gratitude direction.
So I want to say thank you for supporting this writing endeavor. I don’t wake up each day excited to log in to work, but I do wake up excited to work on this. And I still get questions that make me doubt myself.
“Are you doing it to just practice your writing?” “Do people actually read it?” “It seems a little aimless?”
But thanks to the right kind of rest, my conviction is happy to answer: no, yes, so?
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We have to give ourselves off-seasons. It wasn’t that long ago that humans knew a couple hundred people and read the paper and a few books. We have got to give ourselves a break because no one else is going to give it to us. Shut your kitchen down. Shut your social down. Put an out-of-office on your personal email. We need our own permission slips to care less about some things so we can care more about finding and funding and defending the things that light us up.
Here’s my recommendation for a little Sunday journaling in the afternoon sun: Use the past week of stirring up the pot of gratitude to see which regrets are adding that depth of flavor to the stew. Write down all the joy-giving things in your life, from things you do frequently to things you rarely get to do. Then, write down your regrets and what you would do differently. The reality is, we can always start “differently” right now. Be more honest, commit more deeply, love bigger, draw stronger boundaries, and so on. Finally, give yourself a time-constrained off-season. Put it on the calendar. “Do not spend time picking up the house.” Because it doesn’t matter how good your list of loves’n’loathes is if you don’t give your brain the space to figure out how to apply that to your life.
So when I’m re-shaping that ball of clay called life, I try to remember this:
Gratitude tells us what we’re getting right
Regret tells us what we could get right
And rest tells us how
It’s been almost a decade since I was this excited about my own ball of clay. It took one off-season to realize what I had, one to realize what I wanted, and this one to finally pursue it. Thank you being the ones to help me shape it.
If you liked this, consider subscribing to Shangrilogs on Substack for the free weekly newsletter, or support a writer and go paid to get gear reviews, renovation recaps, and more.
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keltonwrites · 3 years ago
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my friends, the dead
The graves have a way of finding you here.
I took Cooper for a walk the other day, and I try to take a new trail every time. Trails branch off at random, sometimes old mining roads, sometimes game trails well-traveled enough to dupe a novice and tempt a regular. But this one branched past an old dilapidated cabin, windows smashed and guts covered in dust and leaves. Just past the rotten home, maybe 20 feet into the woods, there was a wooden post sticking some three feet up from the ground. It had the usual marks of man — straight, smooth, standing erect. I stepped through the deadfall to get a closer look. Every other piece of planed wood was either collapsing into the cabin or already ground-bound, rotting back to its mother. At the base of the stud were rocks piled in a pyramid of sorts, holding it in place, and beside the rocks, two moss covered statues the size of small rabbits. Beneath their soft, green blankets were two angels, kneeling by the post, one with their stone hands clasped looking up, the other with their hands on the ground, staring into it.
A marker read, “You were so much STRONGER and BRAVER and SWEETER than I will ever Be. I’ll miss you. Love Peter”
In lettering lost in time, you can just make out the name: Henrietta.
Just up the dirt road from our house is the cemetery, unfenced and unkept. There’s a swing strung between two old aspens, and you can kick your feet high above the handful of graves below. One gravestone shares two names — both children, laid to rest more than 100 years ago. In the center of their grave bed, a massive pine has splintered the stone with her roots made of bones and breath. Even with a cemetery in town, there are graves everywhere. Marked or forgotten, along the town’s edges, on the mountain, and in the mountain where men and burros were held hostage and held forever in the mines. There are two memorials right now in a town with fewer people than my graduating class in rural Ohio. One waves with prayer flags on a grassy knoll overlooking the old part of town. Beneath the flags, a photo of a girl my age, riding horseback through town. The other is in the cemetery, a mound dug and buried the day we moved in. As we unpacked our moving truck on a warm July day, cars with license plates from up and down the Rockies parked along our street to pay tribute. On the gravestone hangs the collar and tags of the man’s dog. He was 42.
I can’t walk by or even near Henrietta’s grave without talking to her, the peculiarity of which is heightened by the fact that it’s hard to tell if Henri was a girl or a dog. Either way, the conversations are the same:
“How’re the woods today? Any good visitors? Anything you’d like me to see?”
In the chance there’s some connective tissue between now and every then, I’m following the golden rule. I personally would like people to talk to me, to be curious, to be revenant. How fast do you think I could trip someone with a well-placed root if they were one of those people who carried speakers into the woods? How deeply could I infect their psyche if they defaced my resting place or hurt an animal?
Thus far, if Henrietta seems anything, it’s suspicious. Which is fine. I would be too. But she’s not the only one I’m talking to. In a deeper canyon, six miles by foot from the house, you can feel the enormity of time. A box canyon closing in on you with a swampy bottom, talus fields, waterfalls, and a scree climb to the ridge. Something that feels pulled from Land Before Time or referenced for some untouched world space saga. Alone on a misty trail run, I felt safe enough from the eyes of judgment that I knelt on the ground, my bare hands on the soil, and shared my intentions with the Earth: her kingdom is my gift to hold tenderly and her right to take quickly. I stayed on my knees until I forgot how it might look to someone coming, and I stayed a little longer after that until the connection loosened and I felt the dirt in my fingernails.
I dusted off my knees and my hands and carried on running. Around the next bush, I came to a quick halt — there in the middle of the path was a porcupine, as startled to see me as I was her. Nature, providing an offering and a test. Are you a good steward? Can you see this moment for what it is? I stepped back and spoke softly until the porcupine waddled deep into the brush. I carried on with that feeling of earned reverence in my heart, talking mostly to myself.
As we approach Halloween, the town has yet to unveil any inherent spookiness beyond the reality of death. Hard work and hard loss are etched in, but there’s no unease. And maybe there never will be if I keep talking to all the dead people and animals, the dying trees, the creatures long absorbed into the ground.
Several people asked me if I feel safe here, especially out in the wilderness on my own. Some people don’t know any better. They never learned the animals are mostly harmless. They never read the research that you’re much more likely to die at the hands of your partner than at those of a stranger. They never knew I already escaped those hands anyway. They never learned to read the sky and the mountain. Never learned to read me.
But whatever I am safe from here, I think more about what I am safe to be here: odd. Solitary. The kind of woman who kneels, palms in the soil, to feel time and purpose crawl up her spine vertebrae by vertebrae like a wooden roller coaster, hoping to stay in the moment long enough to feel the freefall of getting lost in time.
Whatever strange, backwoods habits this town enables, it also draws you in from the deathly calls of the winter wind with emails like this:
On Sunday, meet in the town square at 5pm in COSTUME for the parade, pizza, and the photo. Trick or treating starts at 6pm on the old side of town. Ryan will transport the kids to the other side of town and back at night. Add Town Hall to your trick or treating to meet the new Town Manager, John.
You want me to… wear a costume? To take a town photo? And meet the new town manager? Guys there are 150 people here. If you stand outside your house for longer than 5 minutes, you’ll meet the new town manager.
But that’s small town life. And I bought Halloween candy weeks ago to prepare for our first-ever trick’or’treaters. Hopefully after a few years of talking to ghosts in the pines, I won’t need a costume. The local kids will be scared enough as is.
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This is issue #10 of Shangrilogs, a story of high altitude relocation and renovation. Subscribe here. See the journey on Instagram here.
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keltonwrites · 3 years ago
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unearthing the compass
This is Edition #23 of Shangrilogs.
Every day, I wake up on the Western side of the house, tucked safely from the crawl of dawn. The valley to the west rolls down in elevation beneath me, still trapped in shadow. All I can hear is the heavy breathing of the dog and the thump of a kitten suddenly aware of the consequences of being caught on the counter. There is no house hum here, only the occasional dripping of the baseboard, set at a cool 65. My side of the bed has extra blankets. Worn linen sheets, a wool Pendleton just for me, the duvet, and then the tabby’s favorite blanket — an impossibly soft knit of burnt orange and white. Pre-dawn calls to me every day, a child too eager for presents to wait. Every day, during the last vestiges of the dark, I pad my feet down onto an animal skin older than I am, and I make my way to the kitchen. The dog doesn’t rustle, the floor boards don’t creak. When the wind isn’t calling to it, the house doesn’t make a noise.
The snow outside is illuminated under the soft light of the moon, the stars dutifully attending the party. Both cats circle my ankles. Maybe some milk? Maybe just a splash on a little plate? For us? This time of day, Finn’s purrs are guttural, overlapping like a record skipping, like he’s never  sure if I will wake up and can’t contain his relief when I do. He’s happier here. More playful, more curious, more relaxed. This time of day, I am still in my dreams. I pour the milk, I refill the kibble, I am unaware of mirrors, moving only through shadows. I know the edges in this house now. And in the glow of the night, I never check the time.
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These few minutes, when I am nothing but a creature moving gently in the night, I am at ease, I am free. I open one of the shades and I look out at the ridgeline to the east. Dawn is only just beginning to leak into the sky, but the sun will not show itself until past 9am. I rest my hips against the counter, breathing in the moment. I feel something calling me, stirring in my belly and expanding between my vertebrae, but deep rest calls louder, and I close the shade. I nestle again into the covers as Finn settles back on his blanket between my legs, still licking the milk off his whiskers, locking us into reverie.
When the day really begins, that feeling lingers on my tongue like a dream, and I try to hold the taste as long as I can. It feels like an ethereal gateway to flow, to runner’s high, and to joy. By 8am, it has been diluted by emails from other timezones and drowned out by notifications for meetings about those emails. It is lost to the night, invisible in the bright sun of day, and I am tethered again.
A few years ago, I asked my therapist if she thought I was healed enough to try psychedelics. She laughed. “Your tether to reality is very thin. I wouldn’t recommend it.” One of my family members is on the other side of this reality. He and I, we’re not so different, talking to ourselves in the privacy of our rooms and the great wide opens we find ourselves in. The only difference is someone talks back to him. I am always the other side of my own dialogue.
It was hard to be this person in a city. I felt balled up and folded in. Many years ago now, when my mental health was on the verge of collapse, I fled New York for Colorado. The week before I left, I ran into a guy I had fallen for who had not fallen back on the subway. Maybe he asked how I was, maybe he asked what I was up to, whatever he asked, I practically sang to him that I was leaving. I can still summon the energy I felt in that interaction. It felt like leaning on the kitchen counter before dawn, before emails and meetings and anyone else, with the mountains standing guard around you. It felt warm and fluid and expansive.
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Before we left LA, my mental health was the best it had been in decades. My therapist and I agreed I was ready to “graduate.” It had been years since I’d felt the remnants of depersonalization, the things that used to trigger my PTSD were only mild irritants, and panic attacks were limited to only the most extreme of scenarios. I felt like I was on the other side of the pendulum from that last week in New York. It’s one of those things about being human that at the depths of my pain and at the height of my clarity, I was called to the same place.
It’s often Finn that wakes me up in the quiet of night. He climbs onto my chest and purrs until I stir. After the kibble and the milk, when I’m looking at the sleeping giants outside, Finn asks to be picked up and we look out at the wilderness together, his whiskers pressing into my cheek. I wonder if he can feel that expanse in my body, if it’s like purring.
I am happier here. I miss my friends, but I can’t wait to show them my world here. In this world, there is space for my mind to build a stronger tether — not to reality, but to life.
We’ve had a few people tell us they wish they could live this life. They wish they could live in a cabin and spend their days chopping wood and exploring the terrain. I tell them I wish I could too. I am still beholden to a computer, to Zoom meetings, to accrued time-off and embarrassing corporate “benefits.” But at the very least, I have fully unearthed my compass, and I am following it as best I can.
What I wish for them is the same: that they find their North and have the courage and the support to right their ship. This particular life isn’t for everyone, but it is for me. And I can feel the pull of my compass getting stronger and stronger.
I wrote edition #23 of Shangrilogs while listening to Chinstrap Penguins by Jacob Shea & Jasha Klebe, Finder by Cyrus Reynolds & Folial, and Your Peace Will Make Us One by Audrey Assad & Urban Doxology (despite my lack of religion.)
Earlier this month I talked to Cole Noble of Cole’s Climb on his podcast about moving to a small town, the anxiety relief that comes with inconvenience, and the sense of duty that living in a community like this instills in you. I hope you like it.
📷 Cole's Climb Getting off the Grid with Kelton Wright Listen now (39 min) | Welcome Back to Trail Talk During these interview podcast posts, I share stories from other members of the outdoor community. Range from wild adventures to survival skills, conservation, and current events. Look for episodes in your mailbox Sunday mornings at 9 a.m., MST. The stories you’re used to seeing will still arrive at the usual time, Thursday morn… Read more 14 days ago · 13 likes · 21 comments · Cole Noble
A side note: it appears I have been “shadowbanned'' on Instagram because I went, uh, extremely viral. Like, 125 million views on one Reel viral. So if you liked this, by all means, share it, because I will be waiting this one out. 😬🪵🏔️💛
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keltonwrites · 3 years ago
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Shoveling out cars, paths, and bodies.
This is edition #19 of the Shangrilogs newsletter.
Shoveling out three bodies in under 12 minutes isn’t bad, but there’s room to improve. After all, shoveling has been the hobby du jour lately. And it’s almost entirely the wind’s fault. We’ll get to the bodies in a minute, but we have to start with the wind.
The wind has shown herself to be a worthy adversary, a trickster if I ever knew one, and she takes everything she can. The only time I remember being in the presence of wind with this kind of command was during Hurricane Ike in 2008. I was living in a shoddy hotel room at the resort I worked at on Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands. The western wall of my room was entirely glass, and the night that Category 4 hurricane made landfall, I crouched on the eastern side of my bed, away from the glass, knees pulled to my chest and head tucked. The glass patio doors shook violently in their metal cradles and the 450-mile-wide jet engine that was Ike bellowed through the night. That was the only time I feared wind until the other night.
I have to give credit where it’s due, and the wind jolted me out of the bed I was holding myself so tightly in as she smashed into the French doors in our bedroom, shoving them in and out of frame as she howled through. They were locked, holding hands like children spinning as fast as they can ‘til their grip gives out and they tumble into the grass. Snow swirled in like a devil searching for a body, phantom fingers curling in the air, and it was only then we noticed it was also snowing above our heads, soaking our headboard. I respect the wind outside. But I don’t appreciate unannounced guests even when I like them. The bedroom temperature dipped into the 40s.
Her battering ram didn’t work, but it’s not her only war strategy. If you cannot get in the castle, you trap and starve the people inside. We’ve had some four feet in the last week or so, with 15 more inches coming tomorrow. It is the medium with which the wind paints, her brush strokes severe and energetic; she has patterns that help you recognize her work, like the six foot snow drift in front of our latest main entry. I say “latest” because the wind is having a real laugh taking them one by one. You want to use the front door? Permanent 5-foot snow drift. Your French doors? Taped shut with Peel and Seal tape, just giant pieces of shiny silver tape gift wrapping every seam in the bedroom doors and window. Your garage door? A massive wall of wind-whipped layered snow, compressing and compacting by the hour so if you wait til the storm is over, it will be back-breaking. Get out there where I can see you so I can slither through every zipper you have and chill you to the bone.
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But she does have a sense of humor. After filling the screened-in patio with two foot snow drifts, she left the path from the patio door down to the cars so perfectly clear you can see the ground. She has quite literally swept the path for us, like some kind of game. After all, she wants to see you desperately shovel out the other doors over and over, like a whole town of Sisyphean fools.
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But the shoveling didn’t stop there. We’ve been shoveling out our driveways, shoveling out the truck bed, shoveling out the internet satellite, shoveling out the compost bin, shoveling out the cars — the cars! My and Ben’s egos remain strangled by a warm taunt offered before the snow came: “if you can’t make it up the hill, you can park at my house.” All generosity was wiped clean by the very idea that there would be something Ben and I couldn’t do. If we can’t make it up the hill? It was like insulting our competency, our capabilities, and our cars all at the same time. But lately, I’ve come to understand what he meant.
There are cars abandoned everywhere. I shouldn’t even say cars: 4-wheel drive trucks, Land Cruisers, Subarus, vehicles capable of wintering and presumably driven by people who should understand at least marginally better than us how snow driving works. Maybe everyone is lazier than us. Maybe snow tires are sitting in the garage waiting to prove their value and earn their space. But everywhere you go there’s just another car left in a snowbank, fallen into the creek, jammed between trees, or just abandoned and left to be plowed in. We’ve seen a minimum of ten cars sitting in piles of snowy shame and frustration. There’s only 180 people in this town! It seems like a town ritual to dig out cars. It would be practical to buy shovels to keep in both our vehicles, but thus far we’re too smugly driving up the icy, snow-whipped road in 2-wheel drive knowing we could switch to 4-wheel, and slipping into the driveway without it. Never mind that each vehicle looks like it had one too many when we pull in, swaying from side to side, because the driveway we shoveled out in the morning is, yet again, covered in snow.
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But all this shoveling pales in comparison to the shoveling that matters.
On Monday, Ben and I went to our first avalanche rescue course. It was an all day course, 15°F with (you guessed it) wind gusts upwards of 40mph, but mostly just strong enough to be persistently annoying. It seems important to reality-set a little here: it’s very unlikely that just living here will ever put you in likely avalanche danger. There are often avalanches along the 2.5 mile road into town, but no one in modern history has ever died in one. You’re usually just driving over avalanche debris (assuming you haven’t lost control of the vehicle, which, we’ve seen how people drive here.) The massive avalanche field that splits the town into two sections threatens to annihilate only two houses, and typically conditions are easy enough to understand that those people can evacuate in advance if risk is high. In the last ten years or so, they’ve only stayed with friends once.
The most persistent avalanche risk is actually the one you seek out, and because backcountry skiing is now part of our “move your body” roster, we are seeking out that risk, even with all precautions in place. So we need to know how to protect ourselves and anyone else who might be out there. Death by trauma in an avalanche is possible, but plenty of people live through the slide — it’s how fast you get them out of that slide that determines whether they live past it. A person who is completely buried in an avalanche can live for about 15 minutes before incurring serious brain damage. Snow is porous, but victims are typically breathing their own exhaled air (if their airways aren’t clogged by snow), resulting in carbon dioxide poisoning, as well as their breath melting the snow around their mouth which can refreeze as ice (non-porous). Point being, you gotta dig them out, and you need to do it quick.
In the backcountry, you should be wearing a radio to communicate with your party (e.g., “clear, follow my line” or “dropping down in 3”), but everyone also needs to be wearing a beacon. The beacon is how you find someone trapped in the snow, or multiple someones. In the event of a burial in an avalanche, all parties not buried turn their beacons to Search. Once you get your beacon as close to the person trapped as you can, you use a ~10-foot probe (longer in regions with deeper snow) to try to locate the body beneath you. And once you jab into something that feels like a person or a backpack or a ski, you start digging for your life, or more accurately, theirs.
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At the top of the class, our instructor started with a warning: “this class will simulate high stress scenarios. I know some of you know people who’ve died in avalanches. I can’t know how you will react, so please do what you need to to take care of yourself through the class.”
I don’t personally know any avalanche victims (probably “yet”), but it didn’t make the simulations any less serious. In the screaming winds, at the end of a day of skinning and digging and learning, we were set up with a scenario. They separated us into three groups far enough apart to not hear the instructions the other group were receiving, “you don’t know each other, you’re all out in the backcountry on separate trips, and there’s been an avalanche, you have no idea how many people might be buried — rescue all of them, now, or they’ll die.”
They taught us an acronym for avalanche safety: ALONE.
A: Any additional threat of avalanche? No? Assign a leader.  L: Look for clues. Do you see a pole or ski sticking up? Where was the last place you saw the people before the snow broke? O: Outside help. Use your Spot or Garmin and phone and call for help. Call it in over the radio, too.  N: Number of people you’re looking for, if you know. E: Everyone turns their beacons to search mode and begins the hunt.
We were disorganized. Each group assigned their own leader. We didn’t work together. The beacons don’t lead you in a straight line and we didn’t designate paths for each group to search. The wind reveled in the chaos as my beacon led us within 1.5m of a signal. We unearthed probes and shovels from our packs, ditching our skis and bags, probing into the snow until we made contact with something. And then, the shoveling began. You don’t think of shoveling your driveway or your stoop. You don’t think of shoveling out paths and cars. You only think of who you would be shoveling out. Of how many seconds it’s been since you began searching, of how many seconds that might mean their airways have been packed with snow, of how many seconds they have left.
We recovered the first body in three minutes, but we made a dumb mistake of not turning off the dummy’s beacon once we recovered them. We dug a hole only a meter away looking for the second body, our beacons all still alerting us someone was near. It was the beacon we hadn’t turned off, wasting time, wasting seconds of someone’s chance of survival if that had happened in a real slide. A few meters away, more of the search party located another body, and we stomped through the snow to dig them out, your top speed embarrassingly slow as you collapse through the snowpack. At the final shovel strike, we heard another member of our party, completely alone, call out across the slope some 25 meters away, “I’m 1 meter away from a signal!” A third body. My and my friend’s skis were, at this point, maybe 8 meters uphill, so we army-crawled with our shovels out across the snow as fast as we could, trying not to sink in, digging with fury at the site once we arrived. We found the legs, and like idiots, we started digging out the legs, then the belly, then the chest, instead of just trying to dig out the head first so the dummy could breathe.
But we recovered all three bodies in 12 minutes. A little too close for comfort. A little too comfortable for actual close calls. I kneeled in the snow panting, shovel in hand, finally released enough from the simulated disaster to notice how exhausted I was.
We made a lot of mistakes in the simulation. We should have designated a leader, assigned dedicated search paths, assigned probe and first shovel duties, turned off beacons on the dummies as soon as we found them, we should have kept our equipment closer in order to reach bodies faster and have better access to the tools at our disposal, and many, many more. But that’s why you take classes and courses, and you keep taking them because the reality is, these skills aren’t tested that often. And between the classes and the books and the videos and the practice drills, you shovel. You shovel all the drifts, over and over, even when she fills them before your eyes, even when she whips and taunts you, yelling through the night, because only then can you see the wind for what she is: a general, fraying and testing your nerve, preparing you for the day when shoveling isn’t in or out, but life or death.
If you enjoyed this, subscribe to the newsletter at shangrilogs.substack.com for my high-altitude adventures. For information on staying safe in avalanche country, check out: Avalanche.org, Colorado Avalanche Information Center (CIAC), Sierra Avalanche Center, and Know Before You Go (KBYG).
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keltonwrites · 1 year ago
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dog days of summer
This is edition 101 of Shangrilogs.
God September is a romance, huh? Will they, won’t they, the crisp breeze swinging into the party, only there long enough to lock eyes and leave. Just another night of humidity without reprieve. You’re in the unrelenting sun when it creeps up your spine like cool breath. “Fall is coming,” everyone says, blessed with the premonition of a cold morning. “I can feel it.” 
It’s such a relief when summer caves in on itself, when the expectations lower and the season of routine sets in. The season of When Harry Met Sally and Practical Magic, of notebooks and soup. Maybe it’s the old memories of it, of losing summer to the coming chill. No longer did you have to judge whether or not you were adequately tan or adequately fun. All the lives you weaseled in and out of burrowed back into the ground, another season’s ghosts. And in their absence, this uncanny version of yourself, same as ever but with so much potential — so much potential in fact it made me throw up every first morning of the new school year. Absolutely gagged with options.
Now, fall means I can sleep. The sun angle changes, slinking away from my bedroom to peer into someone else’s window. The air cools and the logs shrink, letting the tendrils of night reach into the gaps of my bedspread, searching for bare ankles to twist around and beckon to the floor. 
But not yet. 
September is merely the promise of fall. You can put on your sharpest sweater, play only Bon Iver and Joni Mitchell, and summer will still rule the party in a slip dress and an aperol spritz. Save your Meg Ryan and Manhattans for October. How can one even stomach pumpkin on a seventy degree day? If only to be dragged by the senses one month forward and countless years back to color-coded folders and the clank of lockers and corn stalks tied with twine to the porch. 
The sun is setting at dinner time, though, shutting the blinds on a full stomach. At least she gets it. No more 9pms on the asphalt, still warm under foot. She’s as eager for fall as we are — she’s got to bring spring somewhere else. Her absence makes space for brooding. The longer nights lead to longer longings. Summer loses her grip when the stars come out. She might have the blistering of the high sun, but the green of the leaves has lost its luster and fall sneaks in at night. You can stand in the creeping wind of the evening and wrap your arms a little tighter, shove your pockets a little deeper, and breathe. Summer’s not watching at night. You can embrace fall like a lover. 
The embrace is brief, though. Too risky to let it linger. You would find a way to leave summer behind, but she always leaves first. She packs her bags while you’re eyeing a farmstand of peaches and tomatoes. She gives it her all, sweat shimmering on her collarbone, but the party always turns on her — she’s never the It Girl for long. Every conversation diverts from backyard BBQs to back to school, sunscreen to sweatshirts, and she’s left standing there with an emptying glass while the menu changes behind her back. She’s meaner now, hot headed and cruel. Too many years of people buying too many things in an effort to drown her out. They love her, they adore her, they forget her. Fall never overstays their welcome, they don't know how. They take their cues from the leaves, gone before you had a chance to say how you felt.
But not yet. 
For now, fall’s lovers simply practice their speeches in the mirror, shoulders still bare, summer just out of ear shot. “I’ve been thinking about you,” they would say. Something where the heft is in the hands of the receiver, where they can always back down with, “as a friend, of course.” But fall knows. 
The hot drink on a hot day, sweater tied around the waist, a sudden interest in the occult. A crush on fall is obvious if you’re looking. And who hasn’t dreamed of what they can’t have. Summer has an ever dripping affair so long as you’ll land between her latitudes. And those who find themselves cunning enough to play winter’s games can spend all year in her bed. But fall never stays, you would merely chase them around the world, just another leaf on the wind. 
Their cool hands will graze your skin, wrapping you in blankets, lighting candles of sandalwood and musk, and they’ll curl up next to you to watch as the leaves begin to blush, embarrassed they were ever so green, and they’ll press a hand to your cheek as they do every year, if only to remind you that however brief, the romance was real. 
But not yet.
“There are some things though I know for certain: always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder, keep rosemary by your garden gate, plant lavender for luck, and fall in love whenever you can.” - Practical Magic
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