Omnibus

“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars, it’s where the rich ride public transportation.” – Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogotá

“When is your flight home?” my coworker asked, watching my feeble attempts to stuff a half-dozen brochures, a pair of shoes, and a dirty gas-station coffee mug into a too-small backpack – all while maintaining some semblance of decorum behind our conference-booth table at the Alaska Forum on the Environment.  I saw her mentally calculating whether anyone could be spared to drive me to the airport, so I quickly explained that there was no problem; I was planning to take the bus.

“There’s a bus to the airport?”  She looked astonished -- and I, as usual, felt slightly deflated by that astonishment.  My depression had nothing to do with my coworker, who is charming – and, moreover, tolerates me with a remarkable degree of equanimity.  It’s just that… well… anyone who has known me for more than four minutes already knows I have a bit of an obsession with bikes -- but now I have to admit that I also have a chip on my shoulder about buses.

More generally, I’ve always been perplexed and frustrated by the gap between what we think we believe and what we actually DO with regard to public transportation in this country.  Those of us who are liberal, progressive, environmental types all say we want it.  Oh, boy!  Buses!  Light rail!  Subway systems!  How efficient! How green!  But when push comes to shove, we hardly ever seem to USE public transportation – especially not buses.   America’s relationship with buses is like Roxanne’s relationship with Cyrano: somewhere between disparaging, patronizing, and oblivious.

Ok, maybe it was reasonable that my coworkers didn’t know anything about Anchorage buses; after all, we live in Fairbanks.  But it’s no better here at home.  Most people in Fairbanks seem unaware that we even have a bus system, and if they know it exists, they don’t know where it goes, or when.   We have a grim problem with air pollution around here, and cars are big contributors.  Moreover, getting a car started – and keeping it running – in temperatures that plummet as low as -50F is neither fun nor cheap.  And yet I know exactly one person who uses the Fairbanks public bus as his primary means of commuting.  One. 

Part of the problem, of course, is a chicken-and-egg thing.  Despite efforts to expand the system, Fairbanks buses have limited schedules and routes.  Trying to take a bus is pretty darn frustrating if it doesn’t go where you want, or arrives only once an hour, or both.  And the bus isn’t too likely to go where you want it to, because we Fairbanksans are horrendously guilty of sprawl.  We spread ourselves across the landscape like syrup oozing across a pancake.  The bus doesn’t reach people’s homes because we’re building our homes way the heck out on Gold Hill, Cripple Creek, Two Rivers, Moose Mountain, and other fancifully named locales.

In other towns and cities – cities with denser populations and less ridiculous climates – the story is of course a bit better.  My sister’s family, in Cambridge/Boston MA, uses the bus and subway system (the T) regularly.  My good friends in Seattle are well acquainted with both light rail and bus routes. But even in those locations, where routes are regular and frequent, most people seem to still be driving most places.  Why?  Well, I’ve heard a lot of reasons.  Convenience (see chicken-and-egg, above).  Speed (Maybe -- but put enough cars on the road, and no one is moving).  Autonomy (I’m biased here, because I kind of hate driving, but on a bus you can relax and read a book!).  And… niceness.

Niceness?  Yeah.  Apparently it’s a biggie.

My coworkers and I had all arrived in Anchorage by plane, and the Downtown Transit Center was diagonally across the street from the conference center where we’d spent the past three days.  It might as well have been in another world.  A poorer world.  A world in which the smell of extraordinarily bad pizza and extraordinarily cheap alcohol hung heavy on the air.  A world in which a terribly young-looking mom with twins in a stroller could not get them to stop crying; a teenage guy was trying to buy a cigarette from a group of strangers; a whole lot of young men were amicably and loudly swearing at each other;  and someone in the corner was talking to himself, quietly. 

Yelp and Foursquare offer online info on the Downtown Transit Center in particular, and the Anchorage People Mover bus system in general.  The comments don’t pull any punches.  “There are a ridiculous amount of drunk and disgusting people here,” says someone named Shauna.  Crystal P. adds, “Try and get a car if at all possible. Buses stink and are slow. Plus there are tons of creepy people down here.”

Creepy people?  Maybe.  Are you a creepy person, Crystal P.? 

Poor people?  Yeah.  Of course.  The bus station is heated, and Anchorage is not tropical.  Plus, there are seats in the station, and friends to hang out with, if you happen to have creepy friends, or drunken friends, or not-at-all-creepy not-at-all-drunken friends, who may or may not be planning to actually ride a bus any time soon.  Our nation is woefully short of places where one can comfortably and freely sit with friends and strangers and enjoy a sense of community, and our nation also has woefully inadequate resources to alleviate poverty.  But that is a subject for another blog post… or ten. 

The idea that people who ride buses are creepy, dangerous, and just plain nasty is not a new one.  When I was in college in the Boston area, I needed to visit my parents on Long Island a few times a year.  I took the bus.  This always surprised people, especially all-the-way-grown-up white-collar people.  But, honey, why don’t you fly?  Or take the train?  While these other options were slightly faster, there weren’t markedly so; the New York area cannot be traversed quickly by any means short of teleportation. But, honey, the train is so much more… comfortable.  So much… nicer. 

Was it?  Well, the aisles were wider, and the bathroom was larger, although not necessarily cleaner.  The train was often, but not always, less crowded.  On the bus, I sometimes ended up sitting next to strangers.  Some of them were marginally annoying.  Some fell asleep.  Some fell asleep on me.  Some were interesting.  I learned about Pakistani culture and the five tenets of Islam from an international gem merchant, and he learned a lot about American culture and feminism from me. 

In any case, the bus was cheaper – way cheaper – than the train, and I was nineteen, and a student.  I was scraping together what income I had by delivering newspapers before class.  In the summer, my employment was wallowing in mud and black flies while moving rocks using only a crowbar and pick.  Seriously.  In any case, as far as I could tell, the biggest difference between the bus and the train was that on the train, the other passengers were almost all white, and middle-class.  On the bus, it was a mixed crowd, with every possible ethnicity and a lot of different flavors of poor.  I took the bus.

Even before college, I’d been on Greyhounds, of course.  In junior high, the special enrichment program that I was lucky enough to be part of involved a lot of extended field trips.  Twenty-five twelve-year-olds drove our teachers batshit crazy all the way from Long Island to Washington D.C., and I’m pretty sure we loved every minute of it.  And in high school, some of my most treasured memories are from the three times in which I managed to qualify for the New York Metropolitan All Stars Mathletes team.  Twenty-nine boys.  Two male teachers.  And me.  On a coach bus headed to Penn State.  It’s a long, long drive.  What did we do?  We played bridge, of course.  The year that the bus’s exhaust system caught fire on the way home and we all had to be evacuated to a rural fire station -- to the confused amusement of the volunteer firefighters -- was just added excitement in an already perfect sojourn.   We were a joke so good that it didn’t even require a punchline: thirty pimply little math geeks escape from a burning bus...

Of course, city buses and Greyhounds were not the first buses I knew.  That honor was reserved for a big, impressive yellow bus with flashing lights.  I can recall LONGING to climb onto that bus -- just as soon as I reached the exalted age of five – so that I could join my big sister in all her glory.   But my remembered excitement runs counter to what seems to be the common middle-class wisdom these days.  Recently, I’ve heard an unsettling number of half-spoken implications to the (vague) effect that schoolbuses are just “not nice”.

The yellow behemoths, circa 1980, were sometimes a trace Lord of the Flies, there’s no denying it.  Drivers who are concentrating on the road are hard pressed to deal with ten-year-olds who have come up with new engineering marvels relating to increasing the velocity of spitballs.  Nonetheless, I have a lot of great schoolbus memories.  Not long after I attained the lofty goal of riding to kindergarten, I achieved the additional self-perceived honor of sitting in the front seat, my legs dangling, giving directions to a substitute bus driver.  I think he was relieved to find that I not only knew the way to Huntington Elementary School but also reliably knew left from right. 

I recall the little boy who had a crush on my sister, and who thought that he might impress her by giving me rocks to add to my rock collection.  Practically every bus ride, I got another rock. I really liked rocks. 

A few years later, when we moved to a new house and I was thus on an unfamiliar bus, being joined in my seat by another fourth-grader who confided that she had just switched into public school from Catholic school, and was thus new, too.  We became fast friends almost immediately.  She patiently taught me to shoot baskets and ride my bike with no hands, and I tutored her in math.  Thirty years later, and she and her wife have twins – just as Jay and I do.

These days, my own twins and I walk up to the school bus stop every morning.  It’s a half-mile jaunt, because we live way the heck down a dirt road in the bottom of a swamp.  We’re not helping Fairbanks’ above-mentioned problem with low-density development by living here.  However, in our defense, we chose this piece of land in part because it’s close enough to town and to our jobs at the university to allow us to be car-free much of the time. 

I don’t mind the fifteen-minute morning hike.  It serves as the start to my morning run-or-bike-commute, and it guarantees that the kids get at least a bit of exercise, even on days when the mercury is below -20F, and recess is cancelled.  It also doubles as time to eat a portable breakfast (usually toast, but sometimes a more ambitious foray into pancakes, fruit, muffins, oatmeal, or yogurt).  We chat about what’s coming up in the day ahead, note the phase of the moon or the configuration of the constellations,  kick snowballs along the icy road,  or say hi to the neighbors’ neurotically excitable dogs.  Sometimes we catch a little aurora, startle a few grouse, or even pause to make way for a moose.  We have our timing down to the minute; when we reach the stop sign on Gold Hill, we can almost always see red safety lights blinking in the dark, a quarter mile down the road, at the next bus stop.  The driver pulls up for my two little people, I kiss the tops of their puffy jacket hoods, and they carefully wait to cross the road.

In the afternoons, we complete the same journey in reverse, but usually with higher energy and more chatter.  Afternoon snacks are clutched in mittened hands – the kids are really stellar at eating with mittens on – and there is more hopping, skipping, slipping, and sliding than mere walking.  Did Coach Davis set up the Indiana Jones obstacle course in gym class?  Do you actually know the meanings of all the words in the Star Spangled Banner?   Did you spell ‘maniac’ correctly? 

A few days ago, during one such session of afternoon conversation, one of the kids remarked (with her mouth full of honey-roasted peanuts) that, “Not very many kids take the bus.” 

I probed.  More than half, I asked?  No, both twins agreed.  Less than half.  Maybe a third, if that. More like a quarter.  Yay, fractions!  Molly and Lizzy weren’t objecting to riding the bus, merely stating a fact: most kids are driven to school.  Which of your friends ride the bus?  Reading between the lines, I began to guess that the economic breakdown among pint-sized bus-riders might not be so different from that among full-sized bus riders.  Buses are not “nice”.

Granted, the twins’ estimates may be off, and granted, some kids walk to school.  But still, there are clearly hundreds of kids being driven to University Park Elementary, every day.  This means a huge, tangled lineup of cars trailing exhaust in the parking lot, which – despite excellent efforts on the part of school administrators – was clearly was not designed for so much traffic. 

So, adults are not riding buses… and neither are kids.  And… I think that’s a shame. 

It’s a shame for the obvious reasons, of course: environmentalism, efficiency, fuel use, road crowding, economy, air quality, and so on.  But (as I’ve bored you all with my circuitous bus-reminiscing) I’ve come to realize that it’s a shame for a host of other reasons, too.  Buses are good places for people-watching, for social mixing, for letting go of road rage, and for doing all the things that people like to do while driving (texting, putting on makeup, eating a four-course-meal) without creating a deadly hazard.  Buses can be slow, but slow isn’t always bad.  Slowness offers the opportunity to read a good book, to learn to spell ‘maniac’, to experience a little parent-free teacher-free subversive conversation, to finish your homework in bumpy-hurried handwriting, to explain everything you know about women’s rights to someone you’ve never met before, to take a nap, or to play bridge with the most heart-stoppingly nerdy boys you have ever met.

I don’t know how to make buses more popular.  I don’t know how to get rich people to ride them.  I don’t know how to argue with the logic of fellow-parents who tell me, quite reasonably, that it’s quicker and simpler and easier to drop off their kids on the way to and from work than to stand at a school bus stop when the mercury is at -40.  I don’t know how to address the fears of parents who think that the schoolbus is somehow dangerous or “not nice”; people tend to dance around the subject rather than face it head-on.  But I do have my suspicions that if kids aren’t riding the school bus when they are seven, they will be less likely – and less willing – to hop on a Greyhound or a city bus when they are twenty-seven, thirty-seven, or forty-seven. 

The bus from downtown Anchorage to the airport cost exactly two dollars.  My bills were a bit rumpled, but the driver helped me get them into the slot.  The ride was relaxing: perhaps ten percent slower than a taxi would have been, because of the stops, but at least 90% cheaper, and no less comfortable.  I enjoyed it.  And I’d do it again, every time – unless, of course, the option of riding a bike were available.

The Farmer's Husband

A father and his son are hurt in a car crash.  While the father’s injuries are being dealt with in the emergency room, the boy is rushed in for surgery. But on entering the operating room, the surgeon says, "I can't operate on this boy. He's my son."  How can this be?

I first heard this riddle when I was about the age my kids are now (riddles are epidemic among second-graders).  I’m pretty sure it took me a minute or two to figure out the answer.

The surgeon was the boy’s mother.

This merited a laugh of surprise.  How tricky! 

I don’t think it occurred to me at the time that this question shouldn’t have been difficult – or even worthy of being a riddle.  “Surgeon,” after all, is not a word that has a gender, in the English language – not, that is, unless we mentally assign it one.

At the age of seven, my brain was already chock-full of preconceptions.  Not only were default-doctors male, but I’d accepted that “the farmer’s wife” was a character who showed up in songs and stories, while “the farmer’s husband” never, ever did.  I was already sexist – and, most likely, ageist, sizeist, and racist, too.  Not explicitly, that is.  Not consciously.  Unconsciously, though, I was a bouncy little bundle of biases. 

But then, we all are.

Yeah, that’s a controversial piss-off-your-friends kind of statement.  What?  Me?  No way!  But, based on my not-terribly-scientific personal observation of our society (The World as Nancy Knows It), it’s nonetheless a true statement.  Yes, we’ve made some splendid progress between my generation and my kids’.  We’ve gotten past much of the most egregious and overt “but can she type?” discrimination that my mother had to suffer, and we’re capable, as a nation, of electing people with appreciable melanin.  But even in the radically modern world of 2013, I’m both fascinated and horrified by the degree of differential treatment – “profiling,” if you will – dished out to both children and adults by people who are NOT nasty racist creeps or slimy sexist pigs. Many of our skewed assumptions are hidden even from ourselves.

If my anecdotal ramblings don’t pass muster, I can offer data to back them up. (Data!  Full of numbers!)  Researchers at Harvard (Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz, 1998) have come up with a whole battery of tests that use paired words, reaction times, and error rates to tease apart that subtlest and trickiest of mental knots: separating what people think they think from what they actually think.   (Those Harvard types are tricksy).  The “Implicit Association Tests” (IATs) measure everything from consumer preferences to self-esteem.  I’ve taken a few of these tests over the years – mostly when my procrastination reaches epic proportions (which is common), and when I remember they exist (less common).

I hadn’t thought of IAT’s for a while – and I hadn’t yet tried out the mom-surgeon conundrum on my kids – when I brought them to the first day of 4H camp a couple of weeks ago.  The camp director was all smiles as she wielded her clipboard and greeted the children.  “Are you a wild man?” she teased the little boy in front of us, who shyly shuffled his feet.  She offered the same riposte to his brother.  “How about you, are you a wild man?” And then she moved on to the next kid in line -- my petite, blonde little girl.

“Oh, you’re so cuuuute!” cooed the 4-H leader.

No, she’s a wild woman, I wanted to snap – but I didn’t, of course.  I couldn’t act all frothy-mad and self-righteous – not only because a middle-aged mom who starts taking out leaders of the 4H in the botanical garden is likely to end up as the most amusing item on the daily police blotter, but also because this woman was so plainly a nice person.  A good, kind, well-meaning person. I would have bet ten bucks on a nickel that she was not consciously trying to “profile” the children in her care.  She was not a malevolent biased cretin.  She was merely… just like the rest of us.  But she did remind me of the existence of the IATs.

Viewing “implicit associations” through the lens of parenthood gives me a whole new rationale for self-examination.  Am I passing on my own biases to my offspring?  Are they picking up biases from other well-meaning adults? 

In this regard, I know I’m a second-generation worry-wart. Years ago, my mother told me that she chose an ophthalmologist solely based on her gender, because she wanted her kids to know that women could be doctors.  In other subtle and not so subtle ways, she tweaked my view of the world with examples: the daddy who did the cooking, the family with a black stepfather, and so forth. There weren’t necessarily a lot of examples – it was barely even the 80s yet – but there were some.  And… maybe it was enough to render me Not A Total Jerk.

Or was it?  Thinking back to IATs of the Past, I recalled being ashamed to find out that I was ageist, a bias that I can regret at leisure as I become increasingly ancient.  I couldn’t recall what other results I’d received.  So I went and found the tests again.

The first set I found were randomly assigned, so I ended up taking three.  I discovered that although (whew) I associated Caucasian and Latino surnames indiscriminately with words representing intelligence vs. brawn, I linked the white-person names more closely with “human” words, and Hispanic names with “animal” words.  Um…ouch. 

My results for black/white race bias… well, I’ll admit I was kind of holding my breath.  I spent more than two years living in Jamaica, being the pale-white fleck in a dark ocean of humanity.  That was many years ago, but during that time, I feel like I at least made progress in quelling any latent idiocy.  Plenty of recent news has made it clear that our nation isn’t even remotely close to surmounting this problem.  I’m not even talking about profiling unarmed teenagers in hoodies; there are also the people who can’t even handle a Cheerios commercial.  Luckily, however, my IAT results were reassuringly balanced.

Moving on, I was particularly curious about how I’d do on a gender-related test.  Was I really any better than the 4H leader I’d felt so snotty about?  After years of noticing how often people praise girls for being pretty, sweet, charming, cute, and well-dressed – and then, barely pausing to draw breath, praise their brothers for being strong, fast, brave, smart, and tough – I somewhat dreaded finding out what was embedded, parasite-like, in my own brain. 

As it turned out, the particular test that I unearthed linked gender-specific first names with words related to either “career” or “family”.  Would my fingers be quicker to find matches when “Julia” was on the same side of the screen as “home” and “Ben” was paired with “office”, or when “Rebecca” was over by “professional” and “Daniel” was with “children”?

Conveniently, the website gave me a rundown on what thousands of other participants have demonstrated regarding the dusty inner recesses of their brains.  And they put it in a nice table, like this:

Test Result	% of Test Takers
Strong association between male and career	40%
Moderate association between male and career	15%
Slight association between male and career	12%
Little or no gender association with career or family	17%
Slight association between female and career	6%
Moderate association between female and career	5%
Strong association between female and career	5%

What did this really mean?  I wasn’t entirely sure.  It certainly showed that my kids are going to have to battle a few assumptions – and so are the boys, because “home” and “family” are not dirty words.  The skew is still steep – but then again, most of the people in that top 55% or so would probably not try to kick women out of the boardroom, or even realize that their own instincts were anything but fair.

So, how did I fit in? What did my results tell me about me own peculiar brain?

“Your data suggest a slight association of Female with CAREER and Male with FAMILY compared to Male with CAREER and Female with FAMILY.”

So, I was one of the renegades, although not wildly so.

Although I was a bit smugly pleased, I was also surprised. Yes, I deeply believe that men and women should be equally matched to “career” and “family.”  The tough choices made in balancing the two should be equal choices.  Among my friends, this is mostly the case.  For me, Jay, and the kids, it’s certainly true.  But in the world at large, and in the formative years of my upbringing… not so much.

Why would my results not reflect this?  Why, in fact, would they reflect a slight opposite bias, a kind of Alice-through-the-looking-glass world full of female CEOs?  What made my fingers do the backward tapdance on the computer keys?  This seemed important, given that I want to figure out how to raise non-biased kids.

I thought a bit more about the test, and realized what might have happened.  I’d been asked to repeatedly pair four female names and four male names with words relating to home or office.  But the names, in order to have genders, had to be real names.  And real names (sometimes) already have associations in my head.  I know several Bens, Daniels, Julias, and Rebeccas.  But I can only think of one Emily.  In my head, she is firmly – and I think she’d be pleased to know this – associated with “Professional” – and not with “Children”.  On the other hand, the “Paul” who springs to mind is pretty clearly linked with “Family.”  And that’s not at all a bad thing, either.

So, the test didn’t work for me.  It was unfairly weighted.  Not valid.

Or… was it?  True, single individuals do not constitute average results.  But, on the other hand, we all experience humanity as a series of single individuals, rather than as a statistical phenomenon. Single interactions.  Role models.  Real human beings.  Sure, we might always imagine a male when the word “surgeon” appears, but confronted with a female in her scrubs, holding a scalpel, we adjust pretty quickly. 

It was in conjuring this image, and recalling the riddle that went with it, and reminiscing about my mother’s earnest ophthalmologist selection, that I remembered an incident from way back when the kids were no more than four.  They’d recently had two sets of checkups, first from our excellent family dentist, Phyllis, and then from the doctor who has been caring for them since they were fetuses, our friend Corrine.  A few days later, out of nowhere, Molly asked me, “Mama, can boys be doctors, too?”

The memory made me smile – and it also made me relax.  I can’t protect my kids from all the subtle differences in treatment that they are already facing – and will face throughout their lives, based on the crap-shoot of their skin color, their hair color, and the genitalia they came equipped with.  Nor can I stop them from developing biases, based on the world they experience and the osmosis of other people’s preconceptions.  At some level it drives me nuts to know that I can’t mathematically balance the stereotypes so that the numbers come out even.  But for every stereotype, I can at least make sure that the kids see occasional counterexamples.  Or even, perhaps, too many counterexamples. 

Out of amused curiosity I wondered -- had my kids’ “backward” gender bias regarding medical professionals changed in the past few years?  The opportunity to test this arose today, when the twins were in the bathtub together, doing more arguing than washing. I decided to distract them.  “Can I ask you a riddle?”  Quickly, I related the car-accident/surgeon old chestnut.

The kids looked puzzled for only a second or two.  Then they both started talking. (I’ve gotten pretty good, over the past few years, at decoding two conversations at once).  Molly reasoned, “Well, the dad was in the car, to the surgeon must have been the boy’s mo…”

But Lizzy was way ahead of her.  Before her sister’s sentence was half done, she’d already demanded, “But why couldn’t she do surgery on her own kid?” 

Lizzy, honey, there’s something you should know.  If boys work very, very hard in school, they can grow up to be doctors, too.  So if you meet a boy doctor, I don’t want you to be biased against him, ok?

Maybe next bath night, we’ll discuss the farmer’s husband.

http://www.understandingprejudice.org/iat/index2.htm

Most Improved

At the front of the room, Ed (our fearless leader, multi-tasker extraordinaire, crazy-man of the back-country, and peerless interpretive dancer) advances to the next slide.

Most Improved: Nancy Fresco

What?  Oh.  Yikes.  I grin awkwardly, as if I expect people to boo. 

They don’t, of course. The applause is cheerful.  In fact, the crowd at the White Mountains 100 post-race party is almost impossibly cheerful.  About everything.  Folks are happily nibbling on veggies and hummus while comparing second-degree frostbite.  They are slurping down soup while discussing the hallucinations they experienced after forty-plus sleepless hours on the trail.  Nonetheless, I feel the need to demur in the face of their congratulations. 

“But… I cheated!  I switched from skis to a bike!” 

Given that more than half the 65 participants rode snow bikes on the hundred-miles of backcountry trails that make up the race course, “cheating” is perhaps not exactly the most politic term.  Still, I can’t shake the feeling that it is the right term. 

I take part in a fair number of long-distance races, but I’m definitely not a racer.  In 2011 and 2012, I was a skier in the White Mountains 100.  A classic skier.  A slow classic skier. Ok, fine, I was an outright shuffler.  This year, for a change, I rode my shiny new fat-tired bike – but for all its lovely purpleness and high-tech panache, I didn’t really expect it to make me anything more than modestly speedier.

Theoretically, any competitor – whether on wheels, on skis, or on their own two hoofs – can triumph in the 100. In reality, in the four years that the race has existed, the snow bikers have always won – albeit not by much.  In 2010, bikers took the top six slots, but skiers nabbed ten of the top twenty.  In 2011, a skier took fifth, less than an hour behind the lightning-fast top biker.  In 2012, skiers took fourth, seventh, eighth, and ninth.

This year’s race, however, was indubitably the most one-sided to date.  Due to bitterly cold conditions at the start and considerable snow accumulation later in the event, the advantage fell squarely to those who rolled rather than those who swished or tromped.  For the same reasons, it was a race even richer than usual in grisly tales of fortitude and exhaustion.  It was also, for me, a race full of peculiar surprises that left me feeling – well, feeling as if I really had somehow cheated.

Sunday, 8 a.m. 

Sixty-five crazy individuals crowd the trailhead at Mile 28 of the Eliot Highway, stomping, chattering, and lining up to enjoy the questionable joys of the port-a-potty.  It’s twenty below zero (Fahrenheit).  I may be just a trace too caffeinated.  Just… a… trace.  A quart of Cheerios are bouncing in my innards.  The snow is packed like white pavement.  I decide not to reduce my tire pressure at all.

Sunday, 10:09 a.m. 

Rolling, rolling… I haven’t taken out my audiobook, or even my snacks, for that matter.  Can I really be at Checkpoint #1 already?  But yes, there are my neighbors, in their new guise as volunteers: Mark, bundled up like a camera-wielding yeti, and Trusten, proffering the cocoa and Fritos.  Second breakfast of champions -- or hobbits.  I’m pretty sure I have more similarities to the latter, but so what?  I’m feeling as happy-go-lucky as Peregrine Took.

Sunday, 1:30 p.m. 

Wait… have I already completed the section of trail that was billed as being badly drifted, soft, a potential slog-fest of push-a-bike?  I did have to let out quite a lot of air in order to float my less-than-ladylike weight on my squishy tires.  I took a few remarkable headers into snowbanks when I hit soft spots in the flat, flat light, as clouds came in.  But I chalked that up to my monocularity and general klutziness.  Clambering out from under the huge purple bike and shaking the snow from my hair, my ears, and my pogies is par for the course when Nancy goes biking.  The key fact was, I was still riding. And now I am just outside Checkpoint #2, and…

…and…“Kevin?!”

I see Kevin plenty when I amble the hundred yards from my workplace to his, in order to buy more inner tubes or blinky lights and gossip about snow conditions and suchlike -- but he is not someone I am supposed to see during the White Mountains 100.  That is, I wasn’t supposed to see him after we all shouted, “three… two… one…go!”  For a turtle such as myself, Kevin is supposed to be nothing but a memory of fast-moving snowdust.  But here he is at mile 39.  And he is biking in the wrong direction.

Quickly, sadly – but with impressively upbeat resolve – he explains his dilemma:  a burst water system, drenched clothes that he’s spent the past two hours drying out at Checkpoint #2, and to top it off, a frostbitten stomach.  For (arguably) the fastest racer in Fairbanks, the race is already over.  There’s nothing I can do but remind him of what a great season he’s had, and wish him well as I head into Cache Mountain Cabin.

Sunday, 1:50 p.m.

One ultra-cheese-laden baked potato later, I have my second shock of the day. 

Joel. 

Forty-five miles of crazy-fast riding with the lead pack, a bad knee, and here he is, another amazing athlete, limping in to scratch from the race.  And here am I, slowpoke Nancy, with nothing to offer but a couple of heartfelt hugs and a handful of cookies.  It’s not fair, I think.  He helped me sort, crate, and transport all those cookies, and everything else, besides…

It’s at this point that I began to feel as if there’s something amiss.  How could I be going strong when these two are not?  I hit the trails again, potato-powered, yet still thrown off by my speedy friends’ misfortune. 

On.  And on. And up. And up.

Sunday, circa 5 p.m. 

This year, I get to actually see the Cache Mountain Divide.  In daylight.

Just as I summit, pushing my bike through the soft, steep snow, I hear a sound behind me: an even whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.  The sound of a skate-skier.  It is, of course, the super-human Mike Kramer.  That Mike should pass me is a given.  That it should take until mile 50 for him to do so is unthinkable.

In previous races, I plodded over the Divide near the back of the pack, and crossed the notorious ice lakes in pitch darkness.  Checkpoint #3 -- Windy Gap Cabin -- was a refuge I reached at about one in the morning. The cabin was always a glowing beacon signaling the first stage of exhaustion.  The forty miles of race that lay beyond it were the miles covered in a semi-somnolent and aching blur.

Sunday, 7:02 p.m.

This time, I arrive at a respectable suppertime, even if the supper I eat is not terribly respectable. 

“Number thirteen, checking out.”  I might have sounded kinda official, were my mouth not stuffed full of chocolate.

“Already?”  Teresa, an ever-smiling volunteer (not to mention a strong skier and darned talented research ecologist) has already given me the second-hand hug that Jay left for me, as well as the message that went with it: “Have fun!”  She’s seen me mixing the Gatorade double strength and chugging Coke (sugar and caffeine, gurgling down with a belch).  Still, she seems surprised that I am ready to take off. 

And so, in truth, am I.

My haste is certainly not attributable to competitiveness.  Although I ask after Jay, I don’t check the sign-in sheet to see how many people are ahead of me. My previous finishes placed me 54^th and 53^rd out of an annual field of 65.  For me, it’s always been about (as Jay wants me to be reminded) having fun.  And finishing.  And maintaining a standard-issue numbers of fingers and toes.  So far, so good.

Sunday, 7:17 p.m. 

I leave Windy Gap full of junk food and energy.  I leave because there is daylight still to burn; even in a mist of softly falling snow, I have some chance of witnessing the long and mountain-hedged valley that glides on down toward Borealis.  Or, in this case, rolls on down.  Bikes, I discover, are pretty darned swift in this section. 

There’s a skier ahead of me.  But… wait… I cannot possibly be passing Mike Kramer – can I?  My brief hello sounds apologetic.  He disappears behind me in the snowy twilight.  Still skating.

Sunday, 10:20 p.m.

Hello, Borealis Cabin.  I remember when you used to seem like an ambitious destination, a whole twenty miles from the trailhead.  When did twenty miles become the “home stretch”?   There is clearly something wrong with my life choices.  Hey, can I have one of those brownies with my ramen?  Or in my ramen.  Or, really, whatever. 

I’ve been plugged into my epic audiobook for quite some time now, and I’m at a dramatic point.  Actually, all of George R.R. Martin’s points are dramatic, or bloody, or licentious, or all of the above.  I need to find out what happens next, so I’d best be going. 

Wait… you there… relaxing in the upper bunk… you’re not… you can’t possibly be Janice Tower, can you?  Because, even though I don’t know you, I certainly know that I’m several orders of magnitude slower than you are.

Um… feel better, ok? This can’t be right.

Sunday, 10:40 p.m.

The kind and patient Borealis crew herd me upstream to cross Beaver Creek, avoiding the section that, earlier in the day, half-swallowed Ariana’s snowmachine in slushy overflow.  On the ensuing uphill I pass a fellow biker who wants to know how long the hill is.  “At least a mile,” I tell him, with ebullience that he does not seem to share.  I think I drank some more Coke at that last stop.  Did I?  Dunno.  Boy, this fresh snow sure is pretty.  The beam of my headlamp glitters on each flake.

Just after midnight, Monday morning

I need to stop at the trail shelter because Mark and Trusten are there.  Except that Trusten is asleep, and Mark takes a photo of me without actually noticing that it’s me.  What, are my frosty outerwear and androgynous-bundled shape not distinctive enough?  But Jim is there, and he is all good cheer.  When is he not?  He seems perplexed that I don’t want to ingest anything.  How could anyone resist that same Sam’s Club sack of corn nuts that came across from Checkpoint #1? 

“I just wanted to say hi!”  

Wickersham Wall is waiting for me, after all.

Some time after 1 a.m., Monday morning

At the Wall, I find Amy and Cody.  This isn’t right.  Amy, who generally inhabits an office just down the hall from mine, is probably faster than me at all things climate-change-ecology-related – but she and Cody are definitely faster than I am at all things bike-related.  But really, right now, “faster” is not an operative word, and logic is a bit foggy.  I turn off the pseudo-medieval clash of dynasties that has been pouring into my ears, and focus on putting one foot in front of the other.  Push.  Push.  Bicycle.  Snow.  Mountain.  Up.  Push.  We are not conversing.  We are pushing.  But somewhere along the way, I extract a promise of a ride home from the finish line from my overly-kind compatriots.  Asking favors of exhausted people in the wee hours is not exactly Kosher, it occurs to me.  But I ask anyhow.

I assume they will pull away from me after the wall, but somehow, the opposite is true.  In the Land of the Wobbly, the least wobbly takes the lead through the darkness – and that, peculiarly, is me.  I know these last six miles of trail so well that I feel them rather than seeing them.  Slow downhill, short steep up, long down, slow up, and… yes.  The last downhill.  Finally – and yet… already?

2:35 (ish) Monday morning

Ann, Ed’s counterpoint and tireless mastermind of Endurance North, is in the trailer – race headquarters – so I bang on the door to get my hug and my sort-of-official finish time.  We chat and laugh.  Andrew, who skied the course in the Nancy-speed league two years ago, comes to give me another hug, and to usher me into the cocoon of the heated tent.  A few other folks are sipping drinks or snuggled on cots.  I don’t ask how many people finished ahead of me – except for Jay.  Jay kicked butt.  I knew that already, though.

4:00 Monday morning

Just.  Keep Talking.  I have no idea what I’m talking about.  Work?  My kids?  Something inappropriately personal and humiliating?  It doesn’t matter, so long as I am keeping Amy awake on these snow-deep roads. 

Back at the wall tent, after many minutes spent staring blankly at one another, unable to fathom how we’d muster the energy and warmth to load all three bikes onto the car’s roof racks, Amy, Cody, and I became the beneficiaries of Andrew’s goodwill.  He made it look so easy, as I fumbled with my wheel and my hex wrench in the snow. Even in my tiredness, though, I knew I wasn’t exhausted.  Not really exhausted.  I know that further zone of Tired.  I’ve visited it in other years.

And so home.  And so to bed, where Jay wakes up enough to congratulate me, and I him, in blurry solidarity.  And so to sleep.

12:00 noon Monday

Oh, the sheer joy of snoring until noon, and then lolling on my window seat in sweats!  I slowly amble through my work emails.  I answer a few.  I’m a bit on the droopy and aching side, but I sigh deeply and contentedly.  Parents don’t get to sleep until noon.  Ever.  But other than approximately one minute of awake-time at 7:30, when the children were permitted to come kiss their comatose Mommy goodbye, I got my slumber. 

I check the race stats.  I discover that there are people still out there.  As in, a lot of people.  I note that, out of 65 competitors, 35 of them on bikes, Jay took sixth place.  This seems about right.  I also note that I took 15^th.  This seems all wrong. 

“Podium!” comments Ned.  Ned is one of the true stars of the event, in my books. While Kristen, Jay and I were on the trails, he took care of three six-year-olds with a joint penchant for naked trampolining.  It takes me a moment to figure out what he was talking about.  But yes, it seems I was the third woman across the (somewhat ambiguous) finish line.  I tend to forget about fine points such as gender.  Besides, this is clearly wrong, too.  I can’t be third, or fifteenth, or anything above thirtieth.  I must have cheated.  Somehow.

11:00 p.m., Monday

I’ve gotten a bit of work done today.  I’ve also picked up the kids from the bus stop, helped them with their homework, and read stories with them.  We’ve done dinnertime and baths and more playing and more stories and bedtime for little people. It’s time for me to go to bed, but just for good measure, I check the race stats, again – just one more time.  There are still people out there.  Thirty-nine hours into the race, longer than even I have ever been out there, they are still slogging.  They have seen not one sunset on the course, but two.  Nine of them.  They are still going.  One of them is Michael.  I’m pretty sure I told him the race was “fun,” in years past, as we chatted while dropping off our kids at preschool.  Another is our perky and optimistic neighbor, Sarah.  Jay and I have given her lots of race advice over supper.  At this point, is either of them coherent enough to hate me?  And why isn’t it me out there?  It ought to be me, shouldn’t it?  Those are my people, struggling on through the deepening snow. 

9:09 a.m. Tuesday

I am at work, being semi-productive.  But I’m also waiting, waiting. 

At last, at last, Sarah, the red lantern, crosses the finish line.  Forty-nine hours.  She has not slept.

8:00 p.m. Wednesday

Finally, here I am at the post-race party.  This, more than the race itself, is my event.  I booked the community center.  I hit Sam’s Club.  I made the ten-gallon pot of sausage-and-bean soup.  I baked the eleven loaves of bread and the four double-size batches of brownies.  I enslaved my husband and children – and the ever-patient Trusten – to arrange all the tables and chair, fruits and vegetables, cheeses and dips, cups and spoons.  Everyone seems to be enjoying themselves.  Everyone has tales to tell.

Kevin is here, and so is Joel – both of them good sports to the core.  So is Michael, complete with frostbitten fingers and broad smile.  So is Sarah, although I wonder whether someone should send her home to sleep a bit more.  Tom (classic skier, playwright, Scrabble fanatic, and proud winner of the “Most Grunts and Moans” Award) skied seven hours slower this year than last, and has blisters the size of the Goodyear blimp -- yet cedes the Agony of de-Feet Award to Bob, uncontested.  On that score, no one can ever compete with grinning, imperturbable Bob.  Don’t look at the photos, just trust me on this one.

My own “award” is no more serious than any of the others.  There are no prizes.  In the real world, outside of this steam-and-spices-cozy room, no one -- except for a few stalwart and over-loyal friends and family members -- cares who won, who lost, who was “Racer of the Year” (yes, you, Jay), or who got honors for excessive puking. 

And within this room? 

Ah.  There, I realize, is the beauty of it.  Within this room, we all care.  We shout out stories.  Most of them are funny, in a Type-Two fun-after-the-fact kind of way. All of them have merit.  No one is less deserving of credit, or kudos, or attention, or cheers: not the ultra-fast guy who had to scratch, with red frozen welts on his stomach (yeah, he showed them to me – chicks dig that kinda thing); not the woman who didn’t quite make the 48-hour cutoff; not the winner, Tim, who crossed the line in a breathtaking 10.8 hours; not the indomitable Mike, who skated on until 5 a.m.; not the Carrolls, who finished at the next 5 a.m.; not Laura, who beat everyone else on foot (boys and girls both); not the good-humored medic who flooded her snowmachine; not the “crossing guards” at Beaver Creek. 

The sloggers, the plodders, the zoomers, the blistered and goofy and crazy – it takes all sixty-five, plus a horde of amazing volunteers and two astonishing Race Directors, to make the White Mountains 100 what it is.  It’s not really one race, but sixty-five different races, and then some.

So, yes, I cheated.  I totally, utterly cheated by switching from skis (which would have placed me in the Monday Night of Doom crowd) to a bike (which still placed me almost eight hours behind the winner, because when all is said and done, I’m Just Not Fast).  But, on the other hand, I didn’t cheat at all, because the only person I was racing against was me. (It’s always a tie.)

“Have fun,” Jay told me. 

“Have fun,” Teresa passed on, with a hug. 

“Have fun,” I reminded myself. 

Yes.  Yes, I did have fun.  I wasn’t really “most improved” – but so what?  I wasn’t trying to be “improved” any more than I was trying to cheat.  Snowbike or no snowbike, I had a blast. 

I wonder how I should do the race next year?