On my Mind

It turns out I really enjoy hiking. I've hiked Tiger Mountain and Mount Si and a good chunk of the trails in Saint Ed's, and I'm wondering why I didn't start doing this sooner. I lived in Bellingham for six years, for god's sake, and I never went hiking once. What was I doing with that time? Why wasn't I climbing Oyster Dome or exploring Chuckanut? Stupid Ian. I'm considering buying a better hiking backpack when I get some money (read: when student loans drop), and I'll definitely pick up a New Hampshire trail guide when I get back for the summer.

***

I'm dreading going back to New Hampshire; I'm going to miss the Northwest a lot. The landscape, my friends, my family, the ethnic food, the mild weather, all the cool little places in Fremont that I've found in the last two months. There are definitely things I'm looking forward to on the east coast--primarily my new apartment, a corner studio in the heart of downtown Dover that overlooks the old textile mill--but I'm enjoying this weird limbo summer away from school and my work.

***

Speaking of my work, I'm writing again. New thesis project is underway. I don't really want to talk about it, so you'll get to read it when it's done. Heh.

***

I just realized that I've been back for two months and still haven't eaten any sushi. This needs to be remedied.

***

Other tidbits: Smarthinking is over and done with and I'll soon spend a weekend wandering around Bellingham, looking at the water, hiking, drinking Boundary Bay, visiting the farmer's market, etc. I can't wait. Everyone should listen to Veckatimest by Grizzly Bear. The Young Ward is close to walking, and she's loving it. When Josh's novel The Story Thief hits the shelves and is a triumphant New York Times' Bestseller, listen to old Ennio Morricone tracks while you read it--they fit together like puzzle pieces, and it's weird. That's all.

The Weather

I had a conversation with Kelly, a fiction prof at WWU, about the Northwest's weather. She was from Florida, and didn't understand when Washingtonians commented on the weather's changeability--"If you don't like the weather, just wait five minutes." She lived in the midwest for a time, and was used to thunderstorms descending from a blue sky, pouring out, and disappearing just as quickly. "The weather doesn't change here. It's just always gray. All the time," she said.

I laughed and agreed, and it wasn't until I got here that I understood Northwesterners perspective on their weather. It's about unpredictability. In Washington, weather forecasts aren't very useful: they may say that tomorrow will be rainy in the morning with clouds dissipating throughout the afternoon, but the weather invariably pulls a fast one--sunny in the morning, rain squalls in the afternoon, clouds at night. Or something else, who knows. In other parts of the country, and especially in New England--reading the forecast is like reading the movie times. It was humid and in the seventies today--miserable--and I looked online to check the weather tomorrow. The forecast says it will be humid and in the seventies, and I know, without a doubt, that it will be.

We've been having a weird summer hangover: humid, no rain, and the leaves don't know whether to die or hold on for another week. In a couple of weeks, Ashley and I are going to drive the Kancamagus in Northern New Hampshire to see the foliage. Pictures will happen, I promise.

Fleet Foxes

Tropical storm Danny is passing by New Hampshire, and bringing with it quite a bit of rain. It started yesterday evening and it's still going--feels like home. I'm sitting in my newly cleaned apartment, looking at the rain fill up the parking lot and soak the deck, listening to Fleet Foxes.



For those who don't know, Fleet Foxes is from Seattle, and I can think of no better soundtrack to a cold, dark, rainy Northwest day. It almost feels like Bellingham here, but I know the rain will quit and we'll be back to our regular humid hell. Oh well, here's another Fleet Foxes song.



Nerd bonus: The Fleet Foxes sound is partly inspired by Robin Pecknold's memories of old Final Fantasy music. A man after my own heart.

Road Trip Day 2: Fellow Washingtonians

I-90. Love it or leave it.

In Wyoming, we pulled off the freeway to gas up and drove past a couple of hippies, a man and a woman, walking into town. He wore long hair and a guitar thrown over his back, she was in a skirt, dreads, and a Grateful Dead tee shirt. When we saw their nalgenes, we knew they were from Washington.

Nobody carries nalgenes around outside of Western Washington (and maybe parts of California). As we proceeded further and further west, we got weirder and weirder looks for filling our water bottles at soda dispensers and water fountains. In the New Hampshire welcome center, a man actually stared at me as I filled my nalgene from the tap. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

The woman smiled at me as she filled her nalgene at the soda fountain in the gas station convenience store, and I didn't see them again until Ashley and I were ready to pull out. Then the woman, sitting in the shade of the convenience store's awning, called out, “Hey, which way are you guys going? West?”

“No, sorry, we're going east.”

“Oh, I saw the Washington plates and thought you were going home.”

“Sorry, we're headed for New Hampshire.”

We said goodbye and got on the road. “I wish we could just turn around and let those hippies sit on top of our trailer, all the way back to Washington,” Ashley said.

Road Trip Day 1: Your cat has died of dysentery

On the first day of the drive from Seattle to New Hampshire, there was a moment in Eastern Washington where I thought that this must be what hell feels like. Ashley was asleep, the iPod was playing some tired David Bowie song I'd heard a million times before, and the air was so hot it brought up those weird mirages on the concrete. For a solid twenty minutes I felt like a zombie. This is what hell feels like.

I wasn't the only overheated one. We stopped at a gas station Subway and ate sandwiches in the shade of the building (near a sign that read the time and the temp—107 degrees!). Our cat, Clementine, was in her carrier, acting kind of drunk and weird. Her nose had white flecks all over it and she was rolling around over and over again. She had pushed her towel all the way to the back and was lying on the bare plastic. We gave her an ice cube and moved on.

In an hour or so, we noticed her panting. We didn't get a picture of a cat panting, but it looks a lot like this:

Now imagine that but with the cuteness replaced by panic and fatigue, and you have a pretty good idea of what our cat looked like.

I had never seen a cat do this before, and it freaked me out. That can't be normal, right? I assumed she was dehydrated, but we couldn't get her to drink. About this time, the car was overheating from driving up a mountain in the Idaho panhandle so we pulled off into the Mullan Tree national historical site to give the car a rest and help our cat. We didn't know what to do (we weren't even sure she was dehydrated, although we assumed she must be), so we wound up holding her on her back, filling soda caps full of tiny cat-sized drinks of water and pouring them into her mouth. She looked pissed, licked the spilled water off her face, and fell asleep for a good five hours.

Later I looked up the symptoms. Turns out she was dehydrated—seriously dehydrated. If we had waited a few more hours we would have had to take her to a vet to get an IV, and since there's a severe lack of vets in the mountains of Idaho, our cat would probably have died.

Is it weird that this makes me feel somehow badass, like a pioneer crossing the country, enduring hardships, close to death? Like in Oregon Trail: Your cat is sick. Your cat has died of dysentery. Ashley drowned while fording the river. Well, the cat lives, and is currently climbing in and out of a box that I haven't unpacked yet.

If you want to know about dehydrated cats—and don't we all?—go here.