by Jill Homer
I straddled my bike at a street corner, shielding my digital camera with one neoprene glove while taking snapshots with the other. Jane wouldn’t permit use of the newspaper’s camera in this weather, and I didn’t expect any of my waterlogged images to turn out anyway. As I remounted my bike, I noticed water sloshing inside my overboots. My feet were so numb that I failed to notice rainwater leaking in from the top and flooding the interior. Waves of shivering soon followed. My core felt even colder on this rainy, thirty-five-degree afternoon than it did at twenty below.
“Wet cold is so much worse than deep cold,” I thought. “No one ever warns you about that in the tropics.”
Homer is sometimes jokingly referred to as “Alaska’s Banana Belt,” thanks to its location in a rain shadow formed by the Kenai Mountains (Homer’s dryness is relative — on the other side of the mountains, hundreds of inches of precipitation fall over the Prince William Sound every year.) The region also has relatively mild temperatures thanks to its proximity to the Pacific Ocean. This “Banana Belt” moniker has probably fooled more than a few Alaskans into believing the weather was always warm and dry in Homer. In reality, the weather was just a lighter shade of crappy.
Still, after only five months in Homer, I was already Alaskan enough to think nothing of returning from a five-hour bike ride, then dumping a half gallon of slush water out of my boots and wringing out my winter coat before walking in the door. My skin was chilled and my limbs were numb. The subsequent hot showers after these wet rides hurt so good, like a massaging mist of battery acid.
The following day brought another work assignment, the Nordic Ski Club’s annual wine and cheese event. It sounded pleasant enough, but the caveat was that participants were skiing fifteen kilometers from a trailhead to the home where wine and cheese would be served. Saturday’s rainstorm had fallen as more than a foot of dense snow in the hills, and my Geo Prism balked at the road conditions. I pumped the gas repeatedly as the car crawled through narrow tracks laid by stronger trucks and SUVs. Progress was glacial, even slower than biking. I felt like the car was barely moving, so it surprised me when I lost control and managed to skid all the way off Ohlson Mountain Road during an icy descent. The car plunged windshield-deep into a snow bank. I couldn’t even see the hood.
It was laughable to believe I could dig my car out of several feet of chunky snow by hand, but I popped the trunk and pulled out the shovel I carried for this purpose. Just as I took my second stab at the cement-like snow, a man in a full-sized Ford pickup pulled up beside me. He was the first driver to pass, and I was surprised that he stopped.
“Need help?” he asked.
“I do, but it’s going to take forever to dig out of here.”
“No worries,” he said, and got back into his vehicle. After maneuvering an impressive U-turn, he emerged again and pulled a wire cable out from beneath his truck, then attached the hook beneath the rear bumper of my car. I was confused for a few seconds before I realized that he planned to use his truck to pull Geo out by its ass.
As the wheels of his truck spun on the ice, locked in a vehicle tug-o-war, three other drivers stopped to help. I was flabbergasted. In Idaho I could potentially walk along I-15 with a gas can and my thumb out for an hour before anybody pulled over to offer a ride. In Homer, the default setting was to stop and help someone in need. Carey’s explanation about weather extremes and inhabitants in Alaska rang true — the harsher the weather, the nicer the folks.
Also, by helping me, the Alaskan in the pickup truck had an opportunity to exhibit the power of his vehicle, of which he was clearly proud. The snowbank put up strong resistance, and the truck emitted a chorus of guttural roars and squeals. Even though I told others who stopped that we had it all covered, they got out of their vehicles anyway and retrieved their own shovels. Now there were four different people shoveling snow away from my car’s front end as the truck bucked and growled. Finally, in a burst of powder, Geo broke free. Everyone cheered.
It took only nine minutes for my situation to change from seemingly hopeless to solved. The pickup driver unhooked his tow cable and tipped the brim of his hunter’s hat like a real cowboy. The turnover was impressively fast, but combined with my late start and slow driving, I arrived at the trailhead thirty-seven minutes after all the scheduled start of the ski outing. Homer’s skiers, always a punctual bunch, had long since departed. Since I didn’t know exactly where they planned to meet for wine and cheese, I had no choice but to race after them. Anyway, people skiing would make for more interesting photographs than people standing around and drinking wine. The fact that they’d be doing so in their ski clothing was the only uniquely Alaskan thing about it.
The skiers’ course was marked with pink ribbons tied to trees, and started at the base of a tiny, tow-rope supported ski hill on Ohlson Mountain. I strapped on my secondhand skis, warped with age, and scooted along the groomed trail. Although I had continued to join Geoff for ski outings at least once a week, I seemed to only get worse at it with every attempt. I’d shuffle along slowly like a prisoner with chains strapped to my feet, only to start careening out of control on any remotely downward-angled slope. If I were to rate my skill level in winter activities, hopping uphill on a snowboard and shoveling my car out of a snowbank would rank above my skiing abilities.
To top it all off, the morning’s snow flurries had transitioned to a full blizzard. Gusts of wind swirled from all directions, disrupting my already precarious sense of balance. I scooted down a small hill into the disorienting whiteout. Since I couldn’t discern the trail from the hills from the sky, I continued to search for pink ribbons that were now tied to lathe stabbed into the snow along an open meadow. Often I’d have to stand in place for several seconds before I could locate the next one. At this rate, I would never catch the other skiers before the wine drinking began. It seemed a lot of trouble to go to for a photo that Carey was probably going to bury on page fifteen next to the classified ads for Toyo stoves and outboard motors.
At the end of the meadow, I crossed into a stand of spruce trees. My relief about shelter from the blizzard was short-lived. A hundred meters into the forest was a paper plate stapled to a trunk, scrawled with the words “Caution” and an arrow pointing straight down a long, steep hill. Peering over the edge, I couldn’t see the landing zone beneath a swirl of blowing snow. It could have been fifty feet down, or it could have been five hundred. There was no way of knowing.
“They have to be kidding me,” I said out loud. Even if I took off my skis and walked down, it was steep enough that I was likely to slip and careen down the slope on my back. Injury appeared inevitable. Even a small thing like a twisted ankle would sabotage my participation in the Susitna 100 one week later. The thought of dropping out of the race with a work-related injury made me feel queasy.
Where self-doubt was the wiser inner voice, ego spoke louder. I was trying to be an extreme winter athlete, damn it, so surely I should be able to handle a fifteen-kilometer ski. I pointed my skis in the classic “A” formation and scooted toward the ledge until gravity took hold. Unsurprisingly, my skis crossed about twenty feet into the descent, pushing my right knee in one direction and my left foot in another until my body toppled in a swirl of powder and limbs and skis. During the rumble, I managed to stab myself in the back with one of my poles and wrench my left knee before I finally skidded to a stop halfway down the hill. By that point I could see the meadow below. It was still a long way down. I didn’t bother to fasten the death planks to my feet again. As it was, those skis were lucky that I bothered to collect them on my way up the hill rather than toss them into the woods.
“Carey should know better than to send a non-skier to the ski n’cheese,” I grumbled to myself as I started my car. I rolled away from the trailhead without taking a single photo. My boss would likely be annoyed if I used the excuse of my car going off the road for not attending the event — as it was, she continued to remind m
e that I needed to upgrade to something with four-wheel drive. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to admit the truth — that my ski skills were simply too poor to manage a casual Sunday outing involving wine and cheese. Some extreme winter athlete I was.
Of course, beneath these layers of ego I had so carefully bolstered with training rides and praise from the Internet, a deeper part of me feared my less desirable, hidden identity — I was not an extreme winter athlete. I was not even an athlete. I was Just Jill, scared little Mormon girl from Utah, who once had an anxiety attack while sitting on a couch indoors, and who followed a boy all the way to Alaska not because she was fearlessly adventurous, but because she was afraid of being alone.
The events leading up to that anxiety attack also revolved around Geoff to some degree. For much of my youth, I pursued adventure travel. In high school, I joined friends for trips into the desert of western Utah to trip out on LSD (but never partook, largely because I was afraid). I dated boys who were into backpacking and invited me on overnight trips in the Wasatch Mountains. Then, shortly after I met Geoff, I became convinced that quitting my career job as a graphic designer and following this man I barely knew on a three-month road trip across the United States was a fantastic idea. It was. The life experiences I amassed traveling through the Deep South and into the boreal wildernesses of northern Ontario eclipsed three years of college education.
Still, there was always a lingering suspicion that Adventure Jill was a fraud. After our road trip in 2001, I landed my second career job as an editor at a bi-weekly newspaper in Tooele, a bedroom community west of Salt Lake City. Five days a week I commuted seventy miles round-trip from our crowded house in the city to this town at the edge of the West Desert. I interviewed conspiracy-theory-believing commanders at Deseret Chemical Depot and routinely fielded phone calls from readers screaming because a name had been spelled wrong in a wedding announcement. This proved to be a stressful position for a twenty-two-year-old. Meanwhile, Geoff worked part-time as a server at a bistro near the University of Utah, earning just enough to scrape by in our already inexpensive living situation, and continued to embark on adventures.
I’d join him for weekend excursions, but often he’d leave for weeks at a time. Early in the summer of 2002, Geoff left for a two-month rafting trip down the Green and Colorado Rivers. Also during this time period, I developed a mysterious but pervasive fear. It was subtle at first — a gray curtain of dread that followed me through my day-to-day activities. Then, just like subzero cold, fear started to seep into every aspect of my life. I’d drive to work and fret about car accidents. I’d watch television with my roommates and imagine devastating earthquakes. In June, a teenage girl named Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped from her home just a few blocks from my house, and I started obsessing about danger lurking outside my bedroom window. This anxiety wasn’t completely unprecedented. I’d exhibited hints of a potential anxiety disorder when I was a child, but thought I’d shaken it off as I developed into a rational, objective adult. Now, I was sinking back into a disturbing pattern. It did seem crazy for a twenty-two-year-old to fret about being kidnapped from her bed by a stranger, and yet there I was, shivering next to an open window that the rational side of my brain told me needed to stay open because it was too hot inside the room to sleep.
In July 2002, something snapped. I drove home from work with a throbbing headache, then slumped down on the couch in the front room. An afternoon thunderstorm moved in as I tried and failed to read a newspaper, and instead stared out the window at the darkening sky. Thunder rumbled, and without much warning the storm seemed to explode over the slightly run-down houses of our neighborhood. Gale-force winds whipped the branches of the gnarled willow tree in the front yard, and garbage can lids bounced down the street.
“Tornado!” my imagination screamed, and my body became paralyzed with anxiety. I felt helpless and disoriented, clinging to the arm of the couch as the room appeared to gyrate around me. Long seconds passed as I neglected to breathe. When I started again, my breaths were short and panicked, hyperventilating, gripped with terror. My vision went dark and my body went from rigid to limp in a strange sort of melting sensation, and I slumped to the floor. Nausea swept in, followed by chills and shivering. Did the tornado kill me? Was I dying of a disease? My body just laid in a useless heap as my mind raced in impotent hysteria.
The thunderstorm moved on, and the wind calmed. There was never a tornado, and I knew that. Still, several more minutes passed before I found the courage to rise. When I looked out the window again, daggers of sunlight were slicing through the clouds.
“What is wrong with me?” I questioned, aloud, to no one. I didn’t have the answer. But the storm panic did set off an alarm. After several months of shrugging off my unstructured fear, I could finally understand that something was very wrong. I remembered other bouts of heart-racing anxiety I had experienced — while hiking in Moab, while dancing at clubs with my roommates, while stewing about Geoff’s safety on some far-away trip, while attending Memorial Day breakfast with my extended family at a cabin in the mountains. Finally I could connect the dots. These were not isolated incidents. I wasn’t just afraid of scary things. I was afraid of everything.
The second big wake-up call of adult life would happen three years later after a drunken blackout in Idaho Falls, but this was the first. I was not even twenty-three years old and already becoming a stress-riddled, anxiety-driven, otherwise boring adult who couldn’t even handle a thunderstorm without a having a meltdown. Something clearly needed to change. I wasn’t quite ready to quit my job and join Geoff on eight-week-long river trips, but I needed to meet Adventure Jill halfway. The following week after returning from work, instead of plopping down on the couch, I pumped up the tires on Geoff’s mountain bike and took it out for a ride.
Although I’d embarked on big adventures in the past, there was something unique about those first bike rides through Salt Lake City’s avenues. The evening sun would cast the valley in glittering gold as I made my way up a maze of suburban streets toward the forested corridor of City Creek Canyon. Most of my self-powered adventures up to that point had been backpacking trips, hoisting forty or fifty pounds of gear and trudging through most of a day to hike ten miles. I was amazed at the ground I could cover on a bicycle, seemingly without effort. The sensation can only be described as flying. It was their ordinariness that made these rides so incredible — the world continued to hum along as it always had, but I was floating above it, free from my perceived anchors.
Avid cycling didn’t eradicate all of the symptoms of my anxiety, but the effect was profound. Initially cycling was a calming distraction, and then it became an empowering motivator. Pedaling drained away stress while generating strength, well-being, and self-sufficiency. Once I discovered I could travel between two points while relying entirely on my own body and wits, I started testing the limits of this independence. Twenty miles became an achievable distance, and then fifty. Geoff and I formulated a plan for a six-hundred-mile bicycle tour across the remote reaches of Utah’s deserts. The trip necessitated carrying two days worth of water and food at a time, camping on open mesas where coyotes howled through the night, and climbing an icy 11,000-foot pass in Colorado after a September snowstorm. We would embark on this tour less than two months after my anxiety breakdown. Somehow, my bicycle made me immune to abstract fears. I wasn’t even concerned with more rational fears when I was riding my bike — the sheer effort of turning pedals required all of the energy I would have used to fret about traffic collisions, wild animals, and dehydration.
My anxieties weren’t so much a fear of the unknown as a fear of powerlessness in the face of the unknown. With hands on handlebars and feet on pedals, I was in control of my situation — come what may.
*****
My emotional state in the days leading up to the Susitna 100 was the most pronounced anxiety I’d felt in years. It was markedly worse than the unease I managed to overc
ome when I abandoned my job, routine, and most of my possessions to follow Geoff to Alaska. In that case, there was a sense that a chapter of my life had rightfully closed. Accepting the inevitability of change subdued my fear of the unknown. But the Susitna 100 was something I had chosen —something unnecessary, irrational and maybe even certifiably crazy. Adventures were my way of battling existential turmoil. New familiarities necessitated upping the ante at regular intervals. But surely this was taking it too far?
Geoff and I drove up to Anchorage two days before the race to attend a pre-race briefing and purchase last-minute supplies. At the meeting, the race directors warned us that warm weather had caused overflow to flood parts of the trail, and that thawing temperatures and even rain were a possibility. Volunteers parsed out and weighed our gear to make sure it met the requirements — one sleeping bag rated to twenty below zero, one sleeping pad, bivy sack, a stove, fuel and pot for melting snow as drinking water, one headlamp, two-liter insulated water container, a rear flashing light, and 3,000 calories of emergency food that we were instructed to not eat under any circumstances, unless we were dying — and either way we’d be disqualified from the race. Since no one has ever died because they went without food for a few hours, I considered this rule particularly condescending. But every other requirement was welcome. I would need to protect myself from elements I didn’t fully understand, and I appreciated the direction.
The day before the race was particularly gloomy. Streams of gray slush flooded Anchorage streets, and the sky was similarly murky. Sleet pelted our faces as we waded through puddles to buy waterproof matches and ingredients for peanut butter sandwiches at Fred Meyer. I felt hollow, as though anxiety had corroded through my emotions until only the mechanics of my body remained.