Becoming Frozen

by Jill Homer

  “I can’t believe tomorrow is April Fool’s Day,” I whined as Geoff and I trudged through thigh-deep snow to gather twigs for a fire.

  “April Fools,” Geoff laughed as he broke branches from a downed tree and piled them in my outstretched arms. With the ground still buried in several feet of snow, I didn’t think we’d find any wood for a fire, but eventually we had enough ruler-sized twigs to stoke a few hours of small flames. Geoff fished the camp stove from his sled and we made dinner out of soupy rehydrated vegetables spooned up with tortillas, because both of us had neglected to bring bowls or silverware. We devoured our sloppy meal over the campfire, dripping vegetable mash everywhere.

  “The bears are still asleep, right?” I joked.

  “Hope so,” Geoff said with a shrug.

  We hovered over our tiny campfire for the next two hours. It kept us warm, but only because we had to repeatedly get up, trudge through the snow, and hack away at a dead tree until we collected another armload of wet spruce branches to feed the tiny flames. Finally it was dark enough to feign sleep, so we crawled into our tent only to discover that moisture from the wet snow had already soaked through the floor. My base layers were drenched in sweat from walking and wood-hauling, and my outer layers were soaked from wallowing in waist-deep drifts in search of wood. My sleeping bag was now damp as well, from condensation dripping overhead. This mountaineering tent — built for the extreme climates of high altitudes — apparently wasn’t waterproof. An overnight camping trip on a date that technically qualified as spring suddenly didn’t seem so benign.

  “What do you think about hiking out tonight?” I asked Geoff as we slithered into wet sleeping bags.

  “We’ll be fine,” Geoff said. “If we get cold we can always build another fire.”

  “Great,” I mumbled. Heavy flakes of snow continued to pummel the tent as I shivered and tossed in my bag. I wasn’t hypothermic, but I certainly wasn’t comfortable, and no amount of meditative counting could take my mind off the fact that my skin felt like it was wrapped in a cold pack.

  Somehow I fell asleep, and woke to gray morning light and six inches of dense snow. Geoff heated up similarly thick oatmeal. We shoveled it into our mouths with spruce twigs, only able to sit still for only a few seconds before we started shivering.

  We left our packs and most of our remaining food behind, and set out for a six-mile walk to the shoreline of Caribou Lake and back — the day hike we’d planned before we trekked out later that afternoon. A dark, low-lying cloud ceiling washed out the spring daylight, giving the landscape the appearance of a pencil sketch that had been doused in dishwater. Temperatures hovered just below freezing. The new layer of snow was soft to the touch, but it would freeze to a concrete-like crust around my shins after my snowshoes punched through the surface —a veritable trap. Geoff fared better on skis, but our strained progress ensured this stroll was going to consume more than four monotonous hours.

  By the time we returned to our campsite to pack up, heavy snow was falling again, and my body was weary. I’d lapsed into shivering, and yet I felt too weak to generate my own heat. Since there were only three miles left in the journey, I felt incredulous about my fatigue, rather than concerned for my own safety. We’d slept outside in moderate cold and then hiked six miles. How could this be so difficult?

  “Turns out camping is tougher than racing,” I said to Geoff as we followed the faint remnants of our own tracks toward the car. The wind drove snow daggers directly into our face. We had to scream over the machine-gun-like clamor, and discussed potential plans for the upcoming summer as a weak distraction. Geoff wanted to complete the Alaska Mountain Running series and canoe the Yukon River. I wanted to enter a twenty-four-hour mountain bike race at Kincaid Park in Anchorage. Without a regular job commitment, I just figured Geoff would spend the entire summer linking ambitious adventures that didn’t include me. At least this would be a good opportunity for time-intensive endurance training.

  “I’m feeling much better now than I was this morning,” I observed. “It is actually easier to just keep moving.”

  “We should do this more often,” Geoff said without sarcasm. “I miss camping. It’s more work here than it is in the desert, but it’s still fun.

  “I suppose,” I said. My thoughts drifted to all of the luxuries I was going to enjoy when we returned to our cabin. Eating Fruit Loops out of the box. Curling up in a blanket on the couch and watching DVDs. More blankets. All of the blankets.

  The reprieve didn’t last long, because the following morning brought the Homer Sea to Ski, an annual triathlon that involved a five-kilometer run along the Sterling Highway, a seven-kilometer mountain bike ride up West End Road, and then a five-kilometer ski on groomed trails. This would be my first triathlon, and second race ever.

  The weather made a dramatic turn toward spring since the blizzard just sixteen hours earlier. Clear skies and temperatures above forty degrees made it almost feel like it really was April 2. I wasn’t a skier, but I was arguably even less of a runner, so I felt disproportionately nervous as I joined sixty other participants in a gravel parking lot at Mariner Park, at the base of the Homer Spit.

  After an unseen race volunteer called out “go,” I slithered toward the back of the pack with the middle-school-aged girls and even younger boys. My heart rate shot skyward and I was breathing fire, but only managing about a ten-minute-mile pace. The rest of my energy was consumed by nerves and adrenaline. Soon I fell behind the children and joined a few stragglers at the very back of the pack — other non-runners and hobby joggers coerced into taking the undesirable running leg for their relay teams.

  Mine was one of six or seven bikes remaining at the school parking lot where we picked up the cycling leg, and I dashed to vindicate my poor performance with a show of cycling prowess. West End Road was my usual commuter route, and I had memorized every point where the grade steepened and where it eased, and every section where I could ride hard and then recover. I sprinted toward the other back-of-packers and was soon passing the little boys, the teenage girls, and even other racers who I’d been nowhere near during the run. I felt a surge of power in passing people with such ease, and I could understand why people like triathlons — after all, most people have only one sport they’re actually good at, and it’s gratifying to show up others struggling through a sport that for them is a weakness. If all of us stuck with only our good sport, our competition would be more directly matched, and the mediocre would never have an opportunity to shine.

  I surged up the hill, passing one cyclist after the next, and basking in the illusion that I was the strongest cyclist on the road. The route turned onto a slush-coated gravel road. Here I also excelled, thanks to efficient handling skills learned from a season of riding through marginal trail conditions. I elevated my position to something legitimately mid-pack when the mountain bike leg ended all too quickly, and it was time to strap on my secondhand skis.

  A handful of ski outings since the Susitna 100 still hadn’t transformed me into a skier. If anything, I was getting worse at the sport. When it came to simply propelling myself forward in the snow, attaching planks to my feet made about as much sense as strapping on a lead-weighted vest or hopping in a potato sack. On this groomed trail, I’d be much faster using either my running shoes or my bike. Instead, I had to drag the sticks for five kilometers. This was the point of a triathlon — to build us up as athletes before tearing down our poorly-constructed delusions.

  The trail cut into the woods, remaining mercifully flat for all of two hundred meters. My inefficient scooting technique at least allowed me to move at walking speeds on flat terrain, but the course rolled through the drainages just below the crest of Diamond Ridge. Beyond the initial run-out, the entire trail either climbed or descended steeply. The course trended downhill, which was not an advantage.

  The first upward pitch prompted frantic chopping. When the skis began to slide bac
kward, I resorted to squatting down and hopping, like a frog, using the plastic-edged skis to dig a shallow anchor into the icy snow. As the trail plunged into the next drainage, I flailed halfway down the hill, lost my balance altogether, and rolled shoulder over shoulder until finally slowing to a stop near the bottom. After I rose, I had to climb in the wrong direction to retrieve both skis and poles. I considered just chucking them into the woods and leaving them there, but I didn’t want to forfeit the race on account of finishing the ski leg with no skis.

  In the meantime, the cyclists I’d passed on the mountain bike leg passed me once again. A few asked if I was okay. “Yeah, not much of a skier,” I’d reply with a weak laugh. By then they had already glided out of sight. I continued to strap the skis back on my feet and make choppy, frog-hopping attempts at every climb, but started taking them off at the top of hills because I was afraid of breaking a bone. I’d step off the trail to avoid collisions with skiers as they zipped past me. Soon I just stayed off the trail. I wasn’t just walking downhill; I was wallowing in thigh-deep powder.

  I finally scooted into the finish, wearing my skis for show, with a final time of one hour and forty-three minutes. Geoff had finished more than thirty minutes earlier, and was already shivering from waiting for me in his sweaty clothing. He came in eighth, having dominated the race until the ski leg, where he employed classic cross-country technique while all the other top competitors skated. I was fifth from last among thirty-five solo competitors. I needed forty-one minutes to finish the five-kilometer ski, which obliterated the next slowest time of thirty-two. The thirty-one-minute run was also pretty dismal, but not quite to the level of total embarrassment. However, I pointed out to Geoff later, my bike time rivaled the fastest women.

  “Maybe you should just stick to racing bikes,” he said playfully.

  “Hey, triathlon is hard,” I retorted. “Everything here is hard. Commuting. Camping. I can’t even do a fun sprint-distance race without risking death by impaling myself with a ski.”

  Geoff shrugged as we loaded my disappointingly not-broken skis into his car.

  “Next winter, I’ll spend more time practicing skiing,” I resolved. “And running.”

  “Doesn’t matter to me,” he said. “Racing is fun; it’s not important.”

  “I’m excited for summer,” I said. “I have some ideas.”

  “Crazy long bike rides?”

  “Of course. And all the other Alaska summer adventures I can squeeze in.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  ____

  Just for the Halibut

  April 20, 2006

  Today I was finally indoctrinated into the tourism side of Homer, which is known far and wide as the “Halibut Fishing Capitol of the World.” (Note the addition of the word “Fishing” to that motto. If you just want to eat halibut around here, you still have to dish out $12 a pound.) I hooked up with the Chamber of Commerce crew to tag some “little guys” for the annual halibut derby. After we tagged the requisite number of fish, they let us catch a couple of our own.

  Compared to the rest of the boat, I had an awful morning. I caught three cod, had four incidents of snagging other peoples’ lines, and then nothing — for hours. I just stood out there in the wind and blowing snow, wielding a fishing pole that weighs as much as my road bike, and practically tap dancing to maintain an on-board (as opposed to overboard) position in the rising swells. I had taken two Dramamines to ward of seasickness but wound up feeling pitched and drugged instead. After a while it was hard not to ask myself, “and this is fun, why?”

  At about noon, I was reeling up what I was certain was another cod, thinking about the Popeye forearm muscles I could build if I did this kind of fishing everyday, when my first flatfish finally surfaced. No sooner had I reeled him in the boat and dropped my line back down when I felt another familiar tap-tap-tap. Second halibut, within seconds. And just like that, I was done. Four hours of nothing. Eight minutes of fishing. Done.

  But there is a certain satisfaction, a feeling of warmth and independence, in pulling up your very own “little guy”— one that will net you a cool 10 pounds of moist, melt-in-your-mouth fillets. It makes the whole morning of mindlessly bouncing a four-pound sinker with frozen fingers seem entertaining, even exhilarating. In this way, fishing can be a lot like bicycling. Or mountaineering. Or hitting yourself repeatedly with a hammer. It doesn’t feel good until you stop.

  *****

  By mid-April, daylight lingered until ten in the evening. Diamond Ridge, however, remained stubbornly defiant of spring. The snow in town had mostly melted, exposing a winter’s worth of trash and amid ankle-deep mud and the occasional sheet of ice. At our cabin a thousand feet above town, the land was still gray and white. There wasn’t a streak of mud to be seen.

  Because the roads in town were nearly clear, Geoff and I discussed the possibility of switching our costly studded car tires with summer tires. But the tires remained where he left them when he switched them over in October — stacked outside the shed and buried under six feet of snow. “It will take at least an hour to dig them out,” Geoff said. “And it might snow again.”

  Precipitation that fell as rain in town still came down as sleet and ice pellets on the ridge, and I still had to bundle up to ride my bike to work. I was no longer training for anything specific, although I had nearly committed to a twenty-four-hour mountain bike race in Anchorage on the summer solstice. That race covered multiple loops of an eleven-mile course with mud, roots and rocks — technical features I had not seen since October and might not see before the June race.

  Even as days warmed, nighttime temperatures continued to fall below thirty-two degrees. Sunlight thawed the surface crust, saturating and condensing the snowpack into a viscous slush. The crust would freeze again overnight, becoming increasingly more dense and solid. I found the freeze-thaw cycle frustrating, because it was beginning to seem like summer would never be warm enough to melt the glaciers forming on the ground. Still, the hard layer of textured ice had its own intriguing quality. I could walk across it, jump on it, roll wheels across it, probably even drive my car on it without sinking in (I did not try this.) Petrified wind-drifts became ramps; stream beds became half pipes. The surface crust was a ready-made mountain bike pump track.

  Duties at work continued to pile up, and I found myself sitting at my desk later each day. Even with more hours of daylight to work with, I still returned home with only an hour, perhaps two, before the sun sank below the horizon. Often I used the time to ride faint remnants of Geoff’s backyard snowshoe trails, leaning into the corners and pretending I was sprinting for the win at the 24 Hours of Kincaid.

  On Easter Sunday, a particularly low overnight freeze left the snow as hard as concrete. Geoff woke up early to embark on a long run. He’d set a rigid training schedule to prepare for the Alaska Mountain Running series, and for the time being we didn’t have any weekend adventures planned. I wanted to take my road bike down to the Homer Spit and ride sprint intervals along the bike path — my own weak nod to structured training. But after removing both wheels and stuffing the bicycle into the back seat of my Geo, the car refused to budge. It started up just fine, and the engine revved when I pressed the gas, but the car was stationary amid loud squealing and clanking noises.

  I turned off the engine and popped the hood to assess the situation. Everything looked okay. There was no smoke. All the fluids were full. I bent down to examine the undercarriage, and noticed ice built up around all four tires. There had been heavy snowfall a few days earlier, and I hadn’t driven since. Subsequent thaws piled up wet snow around the tires, and now the wheels were frozen in clumped ice. Chipping at them with my hands did nothing, and I didn’t have a pickaxe or better tool that wouldn’t damage my car. I speculated that in order to free the car, I’d have to boil a large amount of water to melt the ice. It seemed like more work than it was worth.

 
“Well, guess I’m mountain biking around here today.”

  The outside temperature was twenty-seven degrees as I suited up in my usual winter uniform of a fleece pullover, Burton shell, and rain pants. When I pulled my mountain bike onto the ice-slicked driveway, I noticed the air had a kind of earthy sweetness to it, almost springlike in quality. In town, spring mostly smelled like wet newspapers and dog feces, so this was a welcome aroma. I veered onto Geoff’s snowshoe trail. It had been hard-packed during previous evenings, but today it was like pavement. The bike swooped down the flowing path, flawlessly gripping the hard turns cut by Geoff’s running strides. I giggled out loud. How could I have even considered riding in the muddy part of town? This was going to be the best day for crust riding yet!

  When the snowshoe trail ended, I pulled a small wheelie over the berm and rolled onto the snow crust. I felt a rush of freedom as I cut across the pristine surface, and began weaving erratically through the trees. I imagined myself as a snow rabbit evading a wolf, darting into gullies and sprinting up knolls. My leg muscles throbbed with the urgency of escape, and my throat burned in the cold air. Every breath was an audible marvel at how easy it was to transition from computer-screen drudgery and boxed breakfasts to this thrillingly primordial state of being.

  Stamina faded as the forest corridor continued snaking upward, and logic reminded me that I wasn’t actually being chased by a wolf. I continued climbing toward the crest of a ridge that I thought paralleled the reservoir. When I arrived at a small clearing, however, I didn’t spot the frozen reservoir. I saw only forested hills, in all directions.

  It occurred to me that I hadn’t necessarily ridden in a straight line. I could have turned any number of directions while weaving through trees, and I had no idea which direction I was facing. The sky was a gray pall that hid the position of the sun, and I couldn’t locate any of the taller mountains that might give an idea of which direction pointed east, south, or north. The snow I’d been riding atop was so hard that even my footprints didn’t make an indentation. Bike tracks were nonexistent. I was, unintentionally, quite lost.