Becoming Frozen

by Jill Homer

  Geoff’s cavalier attitude stretched to all aspects of life; he didn’t care about the ash cloud warnings, either. The moose, wolves and rabbits could breathe this air. So could he.

  I envied Geoff’s disregard for danger and resolved to set out myself. I was already suited up for outdoor adventure, so I mounted my bike and followed his tracks in the snow. Each footprint was a white imprint in the dull gray surface, revealing at least a half inch of ash on top of the snow. I wrapped my fleece scarf around my face and pedaled toward the Homestead Trails, where I expected to find Geoff. But his footprints faded on the icy access road, and I lost track of his route.

  “Oh well,” I thought. “It’s not like I can run with him while I’m riding a bike.” This was just another area of our lives where Geoff’s and my paths paralleled but didn’t quite connect. We were two planets orbiting the same star, but sometimes it felt like we were still an unbridgeable distance apart. Geoff seemed forever resistant to gravitational forces; he could bounce into the next galaxy as easily as he could go for a run during a volcano eruption.

  The sun was setting, and a billowing fog had moved back in over Kachemak Bay. Above the cloud cover, I could still see the smoking silhouette of Augustine, but soon the fog obscured that as well. I pedaled up a hillside, chased by the rising cloud. I descended into a steep gully shrouded in gray fog, then climbed onto a ridge where I saw my last gasps of clear sky. The clouds beneath me were drenched in golden sunlight. I raised my fleece-covered chin and imagined I was flying over them, utterly free.

  I returned home forty minutes sooner than Geoff, whose eight-mile run had morphed into fifteen miles, all the way down the next valley along Bridge Creek and back.

  “Do your lungs hurt?” I asked. I felt okay after my ride, but paranoia had resulted in a dry cough as I repeatedly cleared my throat, then consumed so much water that I could feel it sloshing around in my gut.

  “No, it’s fine out there,” Geoff said. “There’s like a centimeter of ash on the ground, and it just sticks to the snow.”

  “I ended up going for a ride,” I said. “It was short, just a Homestead loop, but I got above the fog before the sun set.”

  “It was a nice afternoon,” Geoff agreed. “Even better when no one’s out on the roads.”

  I nodded. The rest of Homer was patiently waiting for a disaster that wouldn’t come. Augustine would continue to belch out ash and even lava for a few more weeks, but never in the quantities feared. Geoff and I didn’t lose a step of training to the ongoing ash forecast (I still tuned in every afternoon and chose to start heeding the warnings, but favorable winds kept alerts on low.)

  Every time I glanced over at the steaming silhouette of the cone-shaped island, something still seemed off. It was strange that a volcano erupted, and nothing happened.

  _____

  Long Ride

  January 21, 2006

  I have a little of that serene, drugged-out drowsiness going on right now ... long ride, big dinner, warm house, storm raging outside.

  Today I set out just before sunrise with the intention of putting in an eight- to ten-hour ride that would mimic my attack of the Susitna 100. To do that, I had to ride on a lot of soft, rutted trails that are punchy and slow and there’s no way around it (winter riders call this stuff “mashed potatoes” ... in my case, very lumpy mashed potatoes). I rode the ice roads, open snow (about 5 inches of powder) and on Caribou Lake itself. I also did a fair amount of pushing. Any food I ate, I ate while pushing. I kept my full stops to an absolute minimum, to keep my core temperature higher, and also because it’s the way I deal with the muscle strain of long rides ... just keep moving, moving, moving, and there’s less time for hurt.

  *****

  In marketing materials, the city of Homer often advertises itself as “The End of the Road” — but it’s not. A narrow strip of pavement continues east for forty miles beyond the edge of town. This road eventually tapers into a boggy dirt track that leads to the reclusive Russian immigrant community of Voznesenka, which then tapers to ATV-trammeled mud flats at the lip of Kachemak Bay. If one were to keep walking across the tidal plain, they could access the glaciated valleys of the Kenai Mountains, then climb the towering granite peaks that appeared unobtainable from Homer’s side of the bay.

  It was my dream to someday cross this point of inaccessibility. Still, the end of the road — the point where East End Road curls into Basargin Road, bringing thousands of miles of the North American highway system to a splintered end — held its own mysterious allure. An overcast sky threatened snow as I drove along the icy pavement, past the fancy restaurant at the edge of town, then past the outlying estates occupied by Homer’s wealthier residents. Beyond the city residential zones were the outliers — ramshackle cabins with Tyvek siding, hand-built dwellings that seemed to not only defy building codes but also a few laws of physics, and the driveways of the longtime homesteaders. Eventually there was only the occasional street intersection leading into the woods. As the road climbed several hundred feet above sheer bluffs, views opened to the far end of the bay. At that elevation, roiling whitecaps appeared as diamonds glittering in a charcoal sea.

  “It’s windy today,” I thought.

  I turned off the road just before the outskirts of Voznesenka, and parked in a small clearing alongside a half dozen trucks with empty snowmobile trailers. As soon as I stepped outside, I had to battle a surging panic. The air was a humid ten degrees — moderate cold that becomes bitter when infused with moisture and driven by a steady breeze. The sensation of transitioning from a heated interior to that kind of cold must be the number one reason why people hate winter — it sucker-punches you in the gut, saps the feeling from your extremities, and burns your lungs with ice. Most people react to this by grumbling loudly and rushing to the nearest heated interior. Here, out the End of the Road, there was no indoor escape. I took a deep breath and rushed to complete the outdoor transition before my fingers froze: removing the mountain bike from a rack on top of the car, re-attaching the front wheel and rim brake, attaching the handlebar bag full of peanut butter sandwiches and Power Bars, and changing from my tennis shoes to hiking boots and knee-high overboots. My intention was to spend the whole day in this dreadful hinterland.

  A biting wind forced me to turn my face away from it at all times. This wasn’t my ideal day for a long ride — if I could switch this weather for clear, subzero cold, I would. But it was exactly three weeks before the Susitna 100, and my self-generated training plan called for a peak effort on this day. Although I’d never traveled this far east from Homer, a co-worker told me about dozens of miles of trails that were maintained by the local snowmobile club, the Snomads. Traveling forty-five miles out a dead-end road was a risky trip for my Geo Prism. If it snowed more than a few inches, the city’s snowplows wouldn’t make it out here until Monday and I’d be stranded. Still, I wanted to prepare for the Susitna 100, and I understood that would happen only if I mimicked the conditions of the race — remote and wild.

  The crackling sound of my studded tires on pavement was comforting in its familiarity, but the noise abruptly ceased as soon as I passed the Snomads’ trailhead sign and crossed the backcountry threshold. Here snowmobiles traveled freely over hills and swamps, blazing their own paths across an otherwise unbroken canvas of snow. This basin was a rare geographic hiccup here on the southern coast of Alaska, at least in comparison to the volcano-dominated ranges that rise like fortresses straight out of the sea. The coastal mountains are guarded by glaciers and cliffs, inaccessible to machines and all but the most daring humans. The thumb of the Kenai Peninsula is comparatively flat, yet still nearly empty of human presence. Beside East End Road, the boreal forest stretches across the basin with very few interruptions all the way to the Sterling Highway, some fifty or sixty miles northwest. These small, rolling hills a few dozen miles from Homer were still very much a wild part of Alaska.

 
Cold wind licked my cheeks I mashed the pedals along the soft trail. Its surface resembled a soufflé, and turning the bike’s crank was like stirring batter, with similar results. Forward motion was precipitated only by applying enough force to plow the rear tire through the trench created by the front tire. Three snowmobiles raced by in a cloud of powder, obliterating my trail-breaking trench and all other evidence of my labors.

  After twenty minutes of maximum effort while watching the bike’s speedometer dip below two and a half miles per hour — where it automatically zeroed out — I resigned myself to walking for a while. Pushing my bike was something I didn’t practice nearly often enough, given the volatile weather and trail conditions I was likely to face in the Susitna 100. It goes without saying that once a bike can no longer be ridden, it becomes worse than useless. My feet, clad in floppy overboots, punched shin-deep holes in the snow as I dragged the anchor of a bike beside me. It was slower than wallowing without a bike, and definitely stupider than using a pair of skis. Still, the motion itself was meditative and strangely therapeutic — a Sisyphean grind whose rhythm echoed the impermanence of all efforts in life. The bike was a symbol of hope — of the pursuit of happiness amid an absurd and ultimately futile labor. Many people drag dead weight around for years in anticipation of a just few minutes of flight.

  Here, beyond the End of the Road, I didn’t need to wait so long. After forty-five minutes of wading through fluff, I reached a trail intersection where all of the neighborhood access trails converged on the main route to Caribou Lake. Crossing frozen swamps and forested hills, the higher-traffic trail was polished to a glistening sheen of ice. I mounted my bike again. With the breeze at my back, the sensation was like launching a kite. In a single breath I transitioned from wallowing in the snow to coasting effortlessly. Flying.

  I accelerated to the precise speed of the wind, and its dull hum lapsed into silence. With gusts ushering the bike forward, I could no longer feel any wind or surface resistance. Moving at the speed of the wind had a similar effect to floating in space, in a vacuum devoid of sound or sensation. My body felt motionless as I continued to spin pedals and gaze at the landscape sweeping beside me — a blur of spruce, snow, and sky. Only the muffled crackle of tire studs and vibrating jolts on the front shock betrayed the illusion that I was no longer anchored to the Earth. In this virtual space warp, a seeming instant carried me seven miles from the ice road intersection to the shoreline of Caribou Lake.

  Snowmobile tracks fanned in all directions across the frozen surface of the lake, accessing cabins and camp sites along the shore. Caribou Lake was Homer’s backcountry getaway, and the vacation properties were the reason this ice road was so well-traveled. In summer, the land is mired in swamps and bumpy muskeg. The only way to access lakeside properties then is to fly in a float plane, or hike seven miles on a boardwalk trail. Like most of Alaska, winter conditions make Homer’s backcountry more accessible. It seems counterintuitive that deep cold and long nights would create the best season for travel in this part of the world, but it’s true. During the summer months, cross-country travel frequently involves mosquito-infested swamps, knee-deep sludge, turbulent rivers that can be crossed only by boat, raging creeks that can be crossed only at a hikers’ peril, and alder-choked woods that could stymie an army with machetes. In the winter, when the land is blanketed by snow and waterways are frozen, travel can be as uncomplicated as drawing a line on a blank sheet of paper.

  Well, perhaps not that simple. The ice road ended at Caribou Lake, and the public trail splintered in several directions. I wanted to head west, so I picked what appeared to be the smoothest individual snowmobile track. It was an illusion — a thin crust atop bottomless fluff. Although I could ride, the wheels dug in and I was once again churning through thick batter. My chosen trail veered at an acute angle from the ice road. A full half hour after I rode away from the lake, I could still see the occasional snowmobile zipping up the ice road across the swamp. I longed to just return to the easy seven miles of my route, ride laps out and back, regain that feeling of flying with every outbound trip, and then return home with a hundred miles on my odometer.

  Those potentially quick and easy miles would bring a superficial buzz of accomplishment, but I knew they wouldn’t provide meaningful training for the Susitna 100. The race course wouldn’t offer effortless miles on a manicured road. Those trails were sure to be soft and unwieldy, veering away from the edge of civilization into true wilderness. This was the point of the race. It wasn’t supposed to be fun — at least, not in the traditional sense of the word. It was supposed to be hard. It was supposed to invite pain and frustration. It was supposed to hinge on the likelihood of failure rather than success.

  It was this promise of difficulty that kept me riding away from the ice road rather than rushing back toward the comforts of home. I craved this ache in my leg muscles, the tightness in my back, the burn of cold air in my lungs and frustration as I battled the wind and snow for forward progress. From a stranger’s perspective, I must have looked ridiculous — cranking a mountain bike through deep snow, moving slower than a person walking. But if I could find a way to push through all of the obstructions, I was confident I’d discover something more enduring, and more meaningful than fun. Something like enlightenment.

  Hours trickled away beneath the crush of heavy labor. My body began to break down in the way human bodies do — in that they’re still physically intact, but the brain is besieged with signals of sharp pain, dull aches, and a distracting loop of negative forces that all echo the same protest: We’re tired, we’re tired, we’re tired. Glycogen stores evaporated and my muscles turned to the slow-burning fuel source of body fat. I nibbled on peanut butter sandwiches in an effort to keep the inner furnace burning, but this was akin to throwing twigs of kindling on a nearly-extinguished log. The sandwiches were frozen, rendering the bread tasteless, the jam crystallized, and the all-natural peanut butter to a consistency of wet cement. Not exactly the most appetizing snack, and my stomach was churning from all the demands of my depleted body. This is the largest puzzle of endurance efforts — everything boils down to available energy, but when the body needs energy most is often when it’s the most resistant to processing fuel. I had a handlebar bag full of sandwiches, but a diminished appetite and nausea prompted me to stop eating. Eventually my higher brain kicked in with a reminder: “Food is fuel. You need to eat!” After a few bites I’d start gagging, and the nausea would signal that I’d had enough. But it wasn’t nearly enough.

  My legs were wobbly by the time I reached the base of a large bluff. I would need to climb and then descend this steep ridge in order to complete my counter-clockwise loop and return to East End Road. I’d been traveling for six and a half hours, and although my odometer screen blacked out in the cold hours earlier, I guessed I’d ridden about forty miles. The effort lumped in my legs like hot lead. I could scarcely fathom the reality of surmounting this hill and pedaling ten miles back to the parking lot, let alone traveling the entirety of the Susitna 100. Sometimes it pays not to dwell on the big picture. Forward progress often depends on willful ignorance.

  Climbing the bluff was more difficult than I feared. Powered by massive engines, snowmobiles laid a trail that cut directly up the steep face. There weren’t even hints of switchbacks, and the grade was just a few degrees shy of a vertical wall. I had to kick steps into the packed snow for traction as I wrestled with my bike, pushing the wheels into the snow to leverage another step. My pace deteriorated from painfully slow to something otherworldly, like walking on a planet with fifty times the gravitational force of Earth. My legs felt like they weighed hundreds of pounds. Adding insult to insult, the frigid wind picked up strength as I gained elevation. Subzero wind chills sapped the remainder of my meager strength. I didn’t have enough kindling left in the energy furnace to heat my core, and began to shiver.

  Now I was not only tired, but increasingly cold and frightened. I wondered i
f I should flag down a snowmobile driver and ask for help. Of course, I hadn’t seen anyone since the ice road, many hours earlier. I wasn’t sure if any snowmobiles had ventured beyond the lake on this day. I was probably on my own, and my cell phone didn’t work out here. Geoff likely wouldn’t deduce something was wrong until a few hours after dark; in that amount of time, I’d freeze to death if I didn’t keep moving. Panic gurgled in my gut, but I couldn’t lose it now. I’d gotten myself into this spot, and I’d have to get myself out. There were no other choices.

  After stopping to cram another sandwich half down my throat, I resolved to attack the remainder of the climb as though I wasn’t running out of steam. I needed heat to stop shivering, and only hard-working muscles could make heat. Fear focused my efforts. I drove one foot into the trail as I picked up the other, fighting against gravity to move as quickly as possible. I gasped for air, and the cold fumes in my lungs were replaced with oxygen-starved flames. I didn’t know what would kill me faster — hypothermia or hypoxia — but the hard marching did reignite my internal furnace. By the time I arrived at the crest of the bluff, feeling had returned to my fingers and trickles of sweat flowed down my face beneath my helmet.

  I stopped briefly at the top to catch my breath, and crammed down another frozen sandwich. The calories helped stoke the furnace, causing the onslaught of shivery cold to retreat, for now. The wind continued to stir up swirls of snow, which swept across the plateau in a mesmerizing dance. This high plain was a nutrient-starved muskeg, and the few scattered spruce trees were no taller than me. The sun hovered low on the horizon, and long shadows cast the snow in dark blue hues. Twilight would arrive soon. I had a headlight but no desire to linger in this place after nightfall. Dark clouds and increasing winds signaled the approach of a storm, and the sun’s retreat would strengthen the piercing cold. After several minutes on the plateau, snow flurries began to fall.