Buzz!

“How come it’s okay to kill mosquitoes, Mommy?”

 

“Because I enjoy it.” 

That was not the answer I actually gave to my five-year-old interrogator; I pleaded self-defense.  But it was, I hate to admit, the first reply that sprang to mind.  I like to think I am reasonably compassionate.  At the very least, I’ve always assumed that I’m not a degenerate reprobate who gets a thrill from slaughter.  But when it comes to members of the Aedes genus, my self-image is on shaky ground.  Sure, I may be able to justify all my swatting with the popular “I don’t like being eaten alive” plea – especially given my immense personal magnetism to small creatures who think of me as dinner.  What I can’t justify is the gratification that accompanies each crushed corpse.  

But they’re just insects you protest. Where’s the dilemma?  Granted, my little “hobby” doesn’t place me in the league of The Silence of the Lambs.  But as my kids like to remind me -- with the kind of moral authority that only the Christopher Robin age group can muster -- it’s not ok to mistreat any creature, regardless of its humble phylum, class, or order.  Molly and Lizzy’s preschool has a terrarium full of stick-insects carefully fed on lettuce leaves. A child caught tearing the wings off butterflies or crushing ladybugs is likely to be given a stern lecture, or even professional counseling.  

“Mosquitoes are important because they pollinate the blueberries,” Lizzy tells me, “and they’re food for dragonflies and spiders.”  

Maybe I shouldn’t have read them Charlotte’s Web.  Nonetheless, I abet the educational experience, and tell the kids that only the girl mosquitoes bite.  (The boys sip nectar, presumably while singing kumbaya). A quick Google search reveals that those hungry Aedes ladies can find us by following our CO₂ upstream from 100 feet away.  Once they get close, they are also attracted to body heat and body scent.  My scent in particular, apparently. Since I doubt that I am a particularly heavy breather, I have to assume that I excel in the other two categories. I am indeed a very warm person.  This is handy in Alaska in January, but not so handy in June.  All that hot blood rushing around in my surface capillaries, coupled with my apparently irremovable Nancy-human-stink, makes me irresistible.  While they are the insect world’s forsaken, I am their goddess.  The biting-insect handbook has my scent-print on the cover. While others are idly chatting at barbecues, I am swatting.

Still, shouldn’t I be able to employ a mode of defense other than killing? 

I’ve tried.  I really have.  Raw cloves of garlic didn’t help me much, but gave me a fascinating coating on my tongue.  What about limiting how much carbon dioxide I release?  For brief stops such as shoe-tying or peeing, waiting to exhale really does seem to help – or maybe it’s just that the lack of oxygen makes me delusional. Have you ever tried to change a bike tire while holding your breath and trying not to sweat?  Desperate people do desperate things.  I’ve used every possible type of repellant, including DEET, even though it’s a neurotoxin that eats holes in clothes.  The relatively new Picaridin earned a somewhat better toxicity rating from the EPA.  It doesn’t smell, and seems to work pretty well, so I squirt it with a liberal hand, but I’m still not exactly thrilled. How does “Toxicity Category III for acute oral, acute dermal and primary eye irritation” translate to my own personal equation: two kids who like to be outside as much as possible, and who have a 110% likelihood of touching their treated skin and then picking up a sandwich?  But the only other option seems to be kids covered in red welts.  My children, alas, seem to have inherited my tastiness.  This afternoon, at the dentist, Lizzy cheerfully told two hygienists, “You know, I have really a lot of mosquito bites on my buttocks.” 

One of my preferred ways of avoiding mosquitoes and black flies is movement.  In mid-summer in the Arctic, tiny, whining, swarming creatures can drive whole herds of caribou to galloping, thundering, near-insanity. The caribou are right: run!  Run like hell! 

“How fast can mosquitoes, fly, exactly?” I mused to a friend a few days ago.  We were idling at a playground, leaning on the primary-colored tubes and bars. 

“One and a half miles per hour.”  The answer came, instantaneously and unexpectedly, not from my fellow-adult, but from a snub-nosed child who had just popped his head out of a plastic tunnel.  He looked about eight.  He didn’t wait for confirmation or thanks before disappearing down the slide, his face earnest, his hair sticking up from static electricity.  I liked his answer.  It set the bar easily within reach.  Even preschoolers ought to be able to move that fast.

Not that I was able to keep up the pace when I was the age the twins are now.  One of my first memories of back-woods hiking was climbing a mountain called Ampersand, a nice rocky little peak whose only drawback was a rather boggy stretch near the trailhead.  Given that it was 1977, I believe I was wearing plaid bell-bottoms, meaning that my legs, thankfully, were covered.  However, my hair was pulled up into two crooked pigtails.  By that evening, the welts were so thick on my neck that I looked as if I had a combination of mumps and goiter.  I couldn’t move my head in any direction.  My mother, consumed by parental guilt that I only now understand, insisted that on subsequent hikes that summer I wear a peculiar headdress made from an old t-shirt soaked in citronella.  In retrospect, I think it was then -- perhaps befuddled by the intense, pseudo-lemony fumes, perhaps slightly derailed by the unfairness of seeing the rest of the family breeze along with only a few nibbles – that my mosquito-squashing began to take on a darker edge. 

Weirdly, though, I decided that I liked hiking.  I was thrilled by hiking.  It was just the biting insects I despised.  Over the next dozen years, I begged to hike more peaks, in Maine, Vermont, upstate New York, and other vermin-infested locales.  By the time I reached college, I was well seasoned in the woods.  I was also already a bit too avid in my “self-defense.”  On a hike with my friend Steve, an idealistic 18-year-old vegetarian and pacifist like myself, the inevitable whining buzz surrounded me within minutes.  “Gotcha!” I crowed, grabbing the air one-handed and opening my palm to reveal the millimeter-wide carnage.  Steve stared at me in consternation.  

“What do you mean, you don’t kill mosquitoes?”  My rant was defensive and slightly hysterical. “Everybody does it,” I argued.  Mosquitoes whine in your ears, swarm your exposed flesh, and sink their greedy proboscises deep into your skin in order to drink your blood.  

Steve shrugged.  “They don’t really bite me,” he said.

I watched him, eagle-eyed and incredulous.  It was true.  While there was a dense swarm of hungry blood-suckers around me at all times, the only ones around him seemed to be strays from my clan.  They didn’t bother to land on him. Such people exist.  They really do.  And they make me somewhat wild-eyed and twitchy, even if they happen to me among my bestest friends.

For reasons that seem to defy logic, that summer I eagerly signed up to earn minimum wage hauling rocks and logs around in the swamps of the Adirondacks. These splendid old Eastern mountains boast bumper crops of not just one genus of biting insects, but several. The Simulium -- also known as black flies or white socks – have the charming habit of amassing by the thousands and going for eyes, ears, and nostrils.  Horse flies, the Tabanidae, sound like little jets around your ears and bite like actual horses.  Ceratopogonidae, a.k.a. no-see-ums… well, the name says it all.  Every single species in each genus loves me. 

By definition, trail crew involved spending long hours in some of the muddiest sections of swamp.  We wore head nets, long sleeves, and long pants.  Black flies crept in around the neck-cinches.  They swarmed as at lunch time, to the point where we’d duck back under our nets between bites.  We were all roughly 17-22 years old, and prone to bravado and basic idiocy.  It was with this crowd that insect-killing crept beyond the realm of satisfying necessity and became a cross between an episode of Survivor and a team sport.  Can’t make a peanut butter sandwich without accidentally including flies?  Why not embrace it by waving the sticky bread in the air a few times, to garner a more generous layer of little black dots?  Is a horsefly driving you over the brink?  Try lassoing it to keep as a pet.  This latter task was done by a guy called Jim, using strands of my very long hair, carefully tied into a tiny slipknot at the end.  I want to say I wasn’t amused by the results -- but I’d be lying.

One of the most memorable nights of my life – because my perverse brain clings more tightly to the abhorrent than to the merely pleasant – was spent with six or eight trail crew friends.  We were young, we were stupidish, and we thought it would be a fine idea to go camping on a hot clear night without a tent.  It wasn’t just a bad idea – it was a Very Bad Idea.  In this case, although I might have been the most popular target, I was certainly not the only one to suffer.  We were besieged. We were mobbed.  We were reduced to swollen, pestilent, sniveling insomnia in the unforgiving dark of 3 a.m.  It was much too warm to zip our sleeping bags over our heads, and it was much too buggy to do anything else.  We sweated, we scratched, we swore, and some point in the predawn hours, rising above the constant buzzing whine in my ears, I heard a 19-year-old man, completely without irony or sarcasm, sobbing for his mother.

It occurs to me that all these memories may explain a lot.  Mosquitoes drive caribou mad… and they drive humans to infantile blubbering… and they have been waging a personal vendetta against me in a variety of scenic, damp locales for the better part of four decades.  When an insect-magnet such as myself lives in a cabin nestled in an idyllic 80 acres of festering bog in the heart of Alaska, is it so surprising that something might end up a little off-kilter, psychologically?  Something like taking visceral pleasure from crushing the tiny defenseless bodies of mosquitoes?

“How come it’s okay to kill mosquitoes, Mommy?”

Sure, I can fall back on self-defense as my plea before the jury.  This excuse seems to pass muster with most people.  But just in case, maybe I should also give an insanity plea a try. I’ll plea-bargain, too:  If I can retain my less-than-savory proclivities toward joyful mosquito carnage, I promise I will never fry ants with a magnifying glass.  I won’t revive the horsefly lassoing tradition. I’ll be willing and even eager to let caterpillars crawl up my arms while my offspring admire their fuzziness.  And I will never, ever eat any more peanut-butter-and-black-fly sandwiches.  Not even one.

It's not a Water Closet

                “At our school,” announced Lizzy, soon after starting preschool at the age of three, “we have flush potties.”

As opposed, she meant, to normal bathroom accommodations, such as the plywood privy that we have at home.

My amusement was mixed with foreboding.  Is this yet another way in which Jay and I are warping our kids? 

I questioned a lot of things as a small child, but indoor plumbing was not one of them.  In suburban New York, there was only one sanctioned type of receptacle for bodily functions, and it was made of porcelain and full of water.  Flush a handle, and whoosh, there it went, into the mysterious world of hidden pipes.  Walls were full of pipes.  The ground was full of pipes.  On the rare occasions when a wall was stripped open or a cesspool unearthed, the resulting view was a fascinating, illicit anomaly.  For the most part, all that water, paper, and poop just… disappeared.

I imagine my daughter, full-grown --but still a trace acned or gangly-- horrifying her brand-new college roommates with her lack of bathroom etiquette.  “You grew up using an outhouse?” they squeal, backing away slightly. 

What if we really aren’t being fair to our twins?  As Lizzy and Molly get older and more demanding, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to turn a cold shoulder to pleas that “all the other kids” have a Playstation/cell phone/Posche/etc.  But “all the other kids have toilets!” sounds a bit more sympathy-evoking – even if, at least in our neighborhood, it isn’t true. 

I tell myself that my children are certainly not deprived.  They have so many toys that I spend half the day tripping over them.  We have electricity.  We have a nice cozy wood-pellet stove.  We have a car and a truck.  We have a microwave, a popcorn popper, a bread machine, and more computers than seems reasonable in our cabin.  We have wireless internet, for heaven’s sake.  Still, my friends and family outside Alaska always get hung up on the outhouse.

It’s just not normal, in twenty-first century America, to dig a hole in the icy ground, put a plywood shack on top, and use it as a toilet.  “Don’t you get… um… cold?”  The combination of forty below zero and incomplete pants-coverage throws people off.   In fact, it’s not too chilly -- the seat is Styrofoam, we wear parkas in the winter, and it’s not as if we hang out there for hours.   But I get the feeling that this is just a superficial concern, anyhow.  The real unspoken consensus seems to be that the whole concept is just… icky. 

But why?  We don’t leap down into the pit and wallow around.  The bygone Shakespearian era of dumping chamber pots out of windows to mix with the horse turds in the gutter didn’t work out too well for all those cholera and dysentery victims, but we don’t live in a densely populated area, and we have a self-contained pit.  Its contents are not as toxic as depleted uranium, or airplane glue, or Windex.  It isn’t even particularly smelly, since the permanently frozen ground keeps everything nicely chilled.  Sure, you can look down and see a lot of old poop, but it’s unlikely to leap out and bite you. 

The major difference, as far as I can tell, is not really convenience or sanitation, but awareness.  A lot of American houses have cesspools.  I grew up in a house with one.  A cesspool is bigger than an outhouse, and involves mixing waste with a lot of clean drinking water, but it does effectively the same thing, namely stick the poop underground a couple of dozen feet from your front door.  But if everything goes into a cesspool, you can pretend it is gone, gone gone.  You can pretend it never really existed.  On the other hand, if it’s in an outhouse, it’s still down there.  Anyone with a flashlight a too much spare time can take a good look at it. 

“Does it have an automatic flush?”  Now five years old, Lizzy is shrinking back from the toilet at the Pagoda restaurant, preemptively holding her hands over her ears.  The tiny motion sensor light on the wall is blinking at her like Hal the homicidal robot.

“It won’t flush until you’re done,” Molly declares bravely, but she has her hands over her ears, too, and she does not appear to be volunteering to go first. 

Motion sensors are remarkably poor at detecting the presence or absence of 40-pound bathroom users, meaning that such toilets often flush with unexpected vehemence while a startled child is precariously balanced above the vortex, legs dangling, mid-pee.  I don’t enjoy having to cram myself into a bathroom stall with my kids in order to hold one hand over the watchful red light, but sometimes it’s a necessary parental duty, like assisting with flossing.  Are other people’s offspring scared of restaurant bathrooms?  Again I worry that my kids aren’t normal.

And yet, another part of me protests: why do we need robotic toilets, anyhow?  Sure, the flush handle might not be terribly sanitary, but our next action is going to be hand washing anyhow.  It seems to me that it’s less about cleanliness than denial. We Americans like to pretend we don’t poop.  We like to pretend we don’t even think about pooping.  Auto-flushers help fulfill this cultural ideal.  Not only does everything disappear in a loud whoosh, but it does so without us even having to participate!

The kids are already being taught at preschool (the one with the flush toilets) that “potty talk” is not acceptable.  Ok, I’ll admit that this is necessary.   I don’t want my kids to go around calling people “doo-doo head.”  But it never occurred to them to do so until the subject was made taboo.  Molly and Lizzy haven’t yet become squeamish and phobic about excrement.  They still like to admire and comment upon their own output, especially if they’ve eaten a large amount of spinach, or carrots, or – best of all – beets.  The results can be shockingly --- dare I say gorgeously – purple. 

I suppose they’ll soon learn that this sort of thing doesn’t make for acceptable chit-chat at a potluck.  I guess I’ll have to help teach them this taboo, as a normal cultural progression, and as a way of lessening the impact of their integration in to the “real” world.

Molly is already more savvy to social cues than her sister is.  By age eighteen, she’ll probably have the good sense to adopt a new standard to fit a new situation.  Perhaps she’ll manage to make growing up in a cabin in Fairbanks Alaska seem fascinating rather than repugnant.  Maybe she’ll roll her eyes – she’s already got the preschool version of this perfected – and tell everyone that she couldn’t wait to get away from home. 

Maybe it will be the truth.  For now, though, the kids still think that the presence of a flush potty merits a news announcement.  And I don’t mind.

Spinning Our Wheels

The leaves have finally appeared, the sun is shining, Hot Licks Ice Cream is scooping the Nanook Nosh into waffle cones, and I suddenly have a whole lot of two-wheeled company on the paths, sidewalks, and road-shoulders of Fairbanks.  It’s Bike to Work week again.  

“I love my mommy because she rides us to school in a Chariot.”  This Mother’s Day proclamation was laminated for posterity by the ever-patient and good-humored teachers at Bunnell House Preschool.  It not only advertises the fact that I haul the kids about in a nifty convertible trailer with a lofty Greco-Roman-sounding name, but also features a drawing of me doing some sort of peculiar-looking calisthenics. I’m stretching all four limbs -- each adorned with precisely five digits.  Whatever I’m doing must be fun, because I have an enormous blue smile on my egg-shaped head.  Egg-head or not, though, the message seems unambiguous: Mommy is all about brawn, not brains.

I tacked up this card in my office, because I’m just as delusional as other parents about my children’s talents, and because I have a deep-seated appreciation for Crayola as an artistic medium. The work was created with the greatest goodwill on the part of the young artist, Molly.  Still, the card slightly discomfits me.  As I sit at my computer, peering at an array of downscaled Global Circulation Model data or enjoying literary treats such as “Development of scale-free climate data for western Canada” and “A high resolution bioclimate map of the world,” I wonder whether my kids have the right idea about who Mommy is, exactly.  Then I wonder whether I do, either.

It seems ironic to me – and disingenuous – that I am labeled as the mom who bikes or jogs everywhere.  With embarrassing regularity, I meet strangers who say, “Oh, I see you every single morning!” or “You’re the one who runs with your kids at thirty below!”  Some remember the 2010 NewsMiner feature on Bike to Work Week.  On the front of the Local section there was an enormous photo of Molly and Lizzy, taken from their own perspective at sub-bicycle height.  I am busy cramming helmets onto their heads.  A few people even recall another NewsMiner article from more than four years ago, featuring me and Jay and our then-infant twins on an overnight cross-country ski trip.  On the other hand, no one remembers the much more recent article in which I’m quoted saying “We’re at the cutting edge of climate change,” or the one in which I wax lyrical about permafrost. Some people seem to find my antics on bikes and skis commendable, while others clearly think I’m only a few blue tarps away from the lunatic fringe, but either way, they have typecast me as a dedicated athlete.  This is laughable.  “I’m not a jock!” I want to tell them.  “I’m a nerd.”  

I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense.  I’ve always been a nerd.  I’m used to it, and it fits me comfortably.  I was the toddler who sat at a green plastic desk, playing the role of earnest pupil, while my big sister Sarah taught me everything she’d learned at school.  This gave me a three-year preview on academic life, and meant that when I finally reached school-age myself, I spent a lot of time alone in the hallway reading terrific stories with protagonists who were, irritatingly, as elderly as nine or ten. I was the kid who looked forward to Mathletes meets, entered every contest in the Summer Reading Program, and as a kindergartener sent a letter to Kellogg’s, complaining about their misspelling of “Krispy.”

Sports, on the other hand, were not my strong point.  I swung a bat without any apparent regard for the location of the ball.  At early-eighties roller-skating birthday parties, I clung to the walls. The only time I made contact with the ball in flag football was when it slammed me directly in the nose.  During soccer games, I stood rooted in the fullback position, hoping the ball would never come my way, and letting my mind wander.  It was kind of interesting how those black pentagons and white hexagons tessellated.

I suppose my lack of athletic prowess wasn’t really surprising, given the influences of my family.  My dad loves watching baseball, but he freely admits that the statistics are what drew him to the game, not any innate ability to actually bat, throw, or run.  My mom dutifully took me to swimming lessons, but she is most definitely not a soccer mom.  And my sister, who was such a talented and voluble pupil that I found myself consistently tagged at “Sarah’s sister” by teachers and school staff, ended up doing a stint in remedial gym. 

As for biking, we Frescos weren’t stellar in that realm either.  Dad tooled around on an old Schwinn, but mom never learned to ride at all.   Sarah didn’t learn until she was about ten, when the peer pressure became so great that it overshadowed her fear of scraped knees.  I was not much better, getting my balance some time around my eighth birthday. 

I suppose in the back of my mind, I assumed my kids would take the same trajectory I did.  Thus, I felt a peculiar mix of surprise, pride, and alarm when Molly and Lizzy both ditched their training wheels last summer, when they were barely four.  They are avid fans of not only the Chariot, but also our double and single tag-along bikes and their own miniature two-wheelers.  They can now weave among innocent bystanders on UAF’s footpaths fast enough to cause their daddy to panic.   They are also immensely proud of their ability to handle a mushing sled, and are eager to join the Junior Nordic ski club. 

On the other hand, the twins can barely struggle – with help -- through “pre-readers” with scintillating plotlines such as “See Otto Swing.”  They only recently mastered counting to 100.  They’ll be fine little kindergarteners in the fall, but they certainly won’t be prodigies.  Nerd that I am, I find myself wondering if perhaps the kids aren’t gaining skills in the optimal order.  I wonder whether, through all my hiking, biking, ski racing, and running, I’m serving as a role model for brawn over brains.

Luckily, all that biking and running also gives me plenty of time for corralling my straying thoughts into some semblance of logic.  Does it really matter in what order they learn, so long as they are having fun, and just being happy kids?  I was an early reader and a late biker, I remind myself, but now I’m quite adept at both.  Jay was a later reader, but now he often has trouble unearthing himself from a good book.  And Sarah, my talented, gym-challenged big sister, grew up to be an avid reader, a great community leader – and a professional bicycling advocate, coordinator for the Massachusetts Green Streets Initiative.  On whatever timeline suits them, Molly and Lizzy will eventually be able to read AND ride bikes – although not, I would hope, at the same time. 

Besides, although I’ve generally been happy with my nerd persona, there were times – mostly when I was between the ages of thirteen and eighteen – when I desperately wished that more people would notice that I had non-academic personality traits, too.  I wasn’t JUST a kid with good test scores – I was also a kid who liked firing up the power tools in shop class, getting muddy in the woods, watching The Princess Bride altogether too many times, making crabapple jelly, and riding my bike to the beach. 

Maybe now, finally, I’ve got what I wanted all along. I can be a scientist AND a poster child for non-motorized transportation.  Maybe one day my kids will be able to look back and appreciate me for an eclectic range of attributes and activities. Of course, before that will come the teen years, when they will probably appreciate me for nothing at all.

For now, I’m happy to see bicycles stacked up against the fence outside Fun Time playground.  I’m pleased to hear people talking about burning calories, not gas, and I appreciate the fact that Fairbanks has embraced Bike to Work Week.  I’m also glad that Molly is proud of me, even if she’s only proud of me for my pedal power.  Besides, if I want diversity of opinion, I can always check with Lizzy.  Her Mother’s Day card is displayed on my wall, too. 

“I love that Mommy can still pick us up,” it says.

Maybe I should take up weight lifting.

Photo by Eric Engman, Fairbanks Daily NewsMiner, May 12 2010

Tofurky Trot

            “What kind of animal was this?” Molly asked.   I glanced at her, perched next to me at the table in her blue plastic booster seat.  Her mouth was decoratively adorned with barbecue sauce.  In her small hands, the meaty bone looked like the rib of a mammoth, or at the very least a muskox. 

            “A pig,” I told her, trying hard not to put any particular weight on my words.  Please pass the pepper.  Would you like some more peas?  You’re eating the flesh of a pig. 

How, exactly, did I want her to react?  Did I harbor a secret desire that she would hurl down the bone in horror and never touch meat again?  Or did I want her to continue her dinner in peace and contentment, thus avoiding a lifetime of suspiciously poking at potluck casseroles in order to determine whether they are animal, vegetable, or mineral?  The truth was, I wasn’t sure. 

I’ve been a vegetarian for twenty years.  The twins know that.  They like to roll the word off their tongues, savoring the extravagance of five syllables.  They like to tell me what I can and cannot eat:  “Oh, Mommy, you can’t have any soup.  It has meat in it.  You’re a veg-e-tar-i-an.”

I’ve always maintained that I want the kids to choose for themselves whether or not they will eat meat.  But I still don’t entirely trust my own motives.  Am I biased as to which choice I want them to make?  Am I subtly stacking the deck?  After all, kids are contrary.  If I withheld meat, at some point it would probably become as wildly desirable as Snickers bars and Pringles.  Maybe by allowing them to eat it, I am actually hoping to influence them not to eat it.  Am I, at heart, a sneaky, manipulative mommy?

Molly didn’t recoil, but she didn’t let the subject drop, either.  She licked her fingers and paused in her munching.  “Who deaded it?”

“Who – oh, you mean who killed it?”  One day, I’ll miss how four-year-olds wreak havoc with verbs.  “The pig?”

She nodded.  Grownups were sometimes so slow on the uptake.

“I don’t know who killed it.”

“Why not?  Why don’t you know who hunted it?”

“Well… pigs aren’t hunted, like moose and caribou.” 

We live in Alaska.  People hunt here.  That includes my husband, although Jay’s infrequent hunting trips seem to involve avoiding shooting game, in favor of taking a nice hike over some remote terrain. He once explained: “If you actually get an animal, you have to spend the rest of the time gutting it and hauling it out.  It’s a lot of work,”

I don’t have a problem with hunting.  For the most part, it seems a lot more appealing than the way most of America’s meat is obtained.  I don’t really want to go hunting myself, though.  I’m not squeamish – I was kind of annoyed not to be allowed to watch my own c-section -- but I don’t enjoy killing things.  This was part of why I decided not to eat meat in the first place.  It seemed hypocritical to pay someone to do your behind-the-scenes dirty work for you, and then pretend it never happened. 

An aversion to death was part of the original rationale for my dietary choices, but it wasn’t the whole reason.  Decimating a rainforest seemed like a steep price to pay for a flaccid, greasy, McBurger.  The idea that cow farts are altering earth’s climate was darkly humorous, but kind of wrecked the flavor of rib-eye.  I wasn’t a big fan of deli-cut-hormones and antibiotics-on-rye, ether.  If I were a self-sacrificing idealist rather than a slightly hypocritical one, I would have become vegan, and given up fresh Parmesan, aged cheddar, spinach-and-feta pie, and Cadbury’s milk chocolate – but I don’t have that sort of fortitude.  I never craved meat the way I crave pizza.  The truth was, I couldn’t find many reasons why I should eat meat, other than social convenience.

“Pigs are raised on farms,” I told my daughter now.  I thought of the farms in the Molly’s and Lizzy’s picture books: idyllic, sunny places with cows grazing in wide-open pastures.  I thought of Charlotte’s Web, the very first big-kid book I’d read aloud to my four-year-olds, a few months back.  Molly was the twin who sniffled when the spider died – even though Wilbur the pig was saved. 

I explained that farm animals are raised for food, then killed and packaged up and sent to supermarkets.  I tried to be honest about the process, although I left out descriptions of feed lots, slaughter houses, and runoff from sewage lagoons.

“They bring it to Fred Meyers in a truck?” asked Lizzy.  Lizzy is fond of trucks.

I became a vegetarian when I left home, as a teenager.  I remained a vegetarian for four years of college, and two years of grad school.  During my two years in the Peace Corps in Jamaica, I ate rice and beans, papayas, breadfruit, mangoes, pineapples, callaloo, cho-cho, star fruit and bammy.  I was gloriously well-fed, and happy to have a polite reason for avoiding goat-testicle soup and roasted chicken feet.

I stuck with my plant-eating ways when I moved to Alaska, even though the irony of living up here and not consuming salmon was glaring.  I was just so used to eschewing anything with a face that I found I didn’t want to change my diet.

I didn’t eat any meat while pregnant with twins.  I had the full approval of my cheerful and down-to-earth family practitioner, who also allowed me to commute by bike until the day before the kids were born.  Her go-ahead made it easier to ignore the politely constrained horror of the more traditionally-minded folks in my life, who think that vegetables, if they are served at all, should be limited to iceberg lettuce and limp green beans smothered in Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup and Bacos.  When the kids were born full-term and robust, I felt like I’d scored a couple of points for Team Tofu.

I remained a vegetarian while I was nursing, although I don’t know whether I would have been able to sustain veganism, had that been my normal diet.  Two ravenous six-month-olds could, between them, consume half a gallon of my milk – or more – each day.  “You’re producing as much as a good dairy goat!” one agriculturally-minded friend told me.  I was pretty sure she was impressed, so I took it as a compliment.  I also gained new respect for the animals who provide me with my yogurt and my smoked Gouda.

But when the kids started slurping strained peas and gumming Cheerios, Jay and I had to make a decision. Would they be vegetarians?  It didn’t seem fair to make that choice for them, I said.  Jay, never one to sweat this sort of detail, shrugged and agreed, but said that it would have been ok with him either way.

Three years later, we had kids who ate some – but not a lot – of meat.  We didn’t limit it, but we just didn’t have it around all that often.  This allowed me to feel like I’d taken the high ground, and yet gave me the freedom to not think about the issue very much. 

But now, thanks to the fine cooking of a friend, Molly was wallowing in a plate of ribs and giving me the third degree.  And I was toying with self-doubt.  What, exactly, did I want?

I snuck another glance at my kids.  On Molly, I saw an expression of thoughtful concentration worthy of a great philosopher – albeit a philosopher with round cheeks, bangs crookedly trimmed by her mother, and a patina of barbecue sauce.  Next to her, in a second booster seat, Lizzy was capturing a strand of pork with a kid-sized fork, her brow furrowed.  I was pretty sure she was conjuring up a new line of questioning that might or might not include pigs, farms, or trucks.

As I waited for the next brain-spinning non-sequitur, I found myself grinning. The world is rich in subjects worth pondering, and a lot of them don’t have answers that can be tucked neatly into a folder or filed in a box.  One of the best things about being a parent is the opportunity to revisit all those big, sprawling, gray-area questions, the ones that most of us adults have long ago selected a stock answer for.  Hanging out with a couple of four-year-olds is a festival of “whys,” all approached with curiosity and gusto. It can drive you nuts, if you happen to be trying to edit a scientific paper, bake a lasagna, and get everyone into their snow gear all at the same time.  On the other hand, if you have time to respond to ‘What makes a rainbow?” or “How is the fire in the wood stove different from the fire in the sun?” it can give your brain a refreshing bout of aerobics.

I realized that I wasn’t worried about whether my kids ultimately decided to eat meat or not – I really wasn’t.  I could let myself off the hook of my own self-suspicions. It didn’t matter exactly what their questions were—or whether they had anything to do with grilled pork -- it just mattered that they were asking them. What I wanted, what I’d always really wanted, was neither compliance nor rebellion, but thought and awareness.  I wanted my kids to dig their hands into the soil, the mud, and the truth of the world.  What I wanted was exactly what I was now getting -- with a little added barbecue sauce.

Settling

“It’s so warm here, we don’t even have to wear puffy mittens!”  Lizzy is so astounded by the balminess of a New England January that she feels the need to remark upon it to the stranger seated across from her, a friend of my sister’s.  Never mind that this woman actually lives here in Cambridge, and doesn’t seem favorably impressed either by the 12-degree breeze or the latest blizzard. Fairbanks, Alaska is the center of Lizzy’s universe, so her perspective is a little skewed – and I feel guilty for producing kids who think it’s a treat not to have to wear three hats.

I cut up Lizzy’s samosa, scoop some dahl onto her rice, and try to field my new acquaintance’s bemused queries about our life up north.  Do I really pee outside at forty below zero?  How do I manage to ride a bike in January?  Are the mosquitoes as large as Black Hawk helicopters?  Is the average IQ higher than the average annual temperature?

“So, are you guys settled up there for good, then?”

It’s a yes-or-no question, and yet I find myself waffling and hedging like a senatorial candidate. “Um… well, we’re both pretty happy with our jobs and our community… and the schools are good… the outdoor opportunities…” I meander to a stop, uncomfortably aware of how unconvincing I sound – not just to my questioner, but to myself.

It’s that word, settled.  It still gives me indigestion.

“Settling” has connotations of resignation, of agreeing to something that is less than it ought to be due to some sort of miserable compromise.  Back in college, my friend Colleen described “settling down” as a process by which people pair off, go into their houses, and close the doors.  The implication was that they then become too dull to do anything even remotely fun ever again.  Parties are exchanged for potluck fundraisers, outdoor adventures disappear in favor of pee-wee soccer practice, and international travel is subsumed by staying at a Holiday Inn near Disneyland. 

I argued that this didn’t have to be the case.  I insisted that it ought to be possible to say “forever” to a person (an idea that my well-hidden romantic side rather liked) without having to say “forever” to middle-management, business-casual, and lawn flamingos.  Surely, I said, one didn’t have to stay in one place forever.  I wanted passport stamps from around the world, bus rides shared with baskets of chickens and sacks of mangos, a jar full of fascinatingly indecipherable coins, and a working knowledge of a dozen different subway systems.  I wanted remoteness, bucolic bliss, and mountain vistas, but I also wanted second-hand bookstores, museums crammed with artifacts, and an occasional night at the symphony.  How could I ever settle? 

As a kid, there were many things I loved about my hometown – the ability to bike to the beach being near the top of the list – but I took it for granted that I would one day leave. I would go off to college, and I would move on from there into a half-realized future full of job satisfaction, adventure, and hypothetical children. . . somewhere.  I was clearly either dim-witted or a poor planner or both, because I was halfway through college before it occurred to me that “somewhere” really had to be somewhere.  I balked at the mere idea.

When I graduated, I did what all over-educated, idealistic, indecisive, adventuresome 22-year-olds do.  I joined the Peace Corps.  There I got plenty of bus rides with chickens.  I learned a lot, but probably not nearly as much as I ought to have.  When I completed my service, I came back to the US and earned a Master’s degree, all the while limiting my possessions to what could fit in the trunk of a compact car.

When I completed that degree, I was lucky enough to have not just one, but two job offers to choose from.  One was based in the northeast, at a respected college.  It paid reasonably well and seemed like a stepping-stone into a professional career in environmental ecology.  The other was with a small non-profit.  It paid badly, offered no particular upward mobility, and required moving to Fairbanks Alaska.

My dad said he never had any doubt about which job I’d choose.

I moved to Fairbanks in the last year of the previous millennium, back before muffin-top and plumber’s crack became mandatory features of feminine attire, before tweeting became a means of communication for species other than songbirds, and before anyone had misunderestimated the American people.  I intended to stay a year or two -- maybe three, if I was having a lot of fun mushing or whatever the heck it was people did in Fairbanks.

Fast-forward twelve years.  A husband, a house, a PhD and two kids later, I am sitting at a restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, trying to weasel my way around the word “settled.”  My sister’s friend is affable to her core, but she can’t quite hide her incredulity at the idea that a well-educated woman would really think of Fairbanks as home.  Forever.

Lizzy wants more rice and dahl, and some of “the thing with the peas in it.”

“Mutter paneer,” I tell her, although I’m sure I’m mangling the pronunciation.  We don’t have an Indian restaurant in Fairbanks.  I sorely miss this cuisine.

“What’s that?” Molly asks, pointing to another dish. 

“Eggplant,” I tell her.  “It’s a little spicy…”

“I want some,” she says. I do my signature eyebrow raise. “Please,” she adds, resigned to the inexplicable inevitability of good manners.

“We do have several good Thai restaurants in Fairbanks,” I remark.  My mouth is full.  I swallow, and try again.  “There’s a good Korean place, and some ok Chinese.”  I sound like an apologist for the sub-arctic.  We can practically see Asia from our igloos!

The conversation shifts to what the kids and I have been up to during our whirlwind four-day visit.  I rattle off the list of destinations: the Science Museum, the Children’s Museum, the Harvard Museum of Natural History, the MIT Museum.  “That’s a lot of museums,” says the husband of my original questioner, smiling at me over his naan bread to show that he’s not criticizing.  He probably thinks I’m starved for culture. 

“Well, they’re all so different, and besides, we spend a lot of time walking from one place to another, just kind of seeing the city.”  I feel embarrassed by how much fun this gawking is for the kids.  In Boston they can see a congested cacophony of garbage trucks, fire trucks, construction equipment, ambulances, and people.  Hundreds of people, thousands of people, people of all colors and sizes and habits.  This is a city as it exists in their picture books, not the 40,000-inhabitant strip-mall version up north.

The adults ask the kids what they’ve enjoyed most, and are treated to a disorganized litany of high points that includes meteorites, a live snake, chocolate milk, and a disturbingly wonderful display of deformed human hands that I had trouble wresting them away from at the Science Museum.

And what about at home?  What do they like to do there?

“We have our own mushing sled,” says Molly, proud as the title-holder of a new Corvette.  She soon realizes that these silly grownups know almost nothing about mushing.  She is happy to fill them in.  Molly likes to educate people.  When she is done talking about the sled and the dogs, there is plenty more to describe.  Her skis.  Preschool.  The two big kids in our community who go to big kid school and therefore know almost everything, but who are nonetheless friends of hers. 

As I listen to the twins talk, I imagine what I would have described when I was the same age.  Preschool at the YMCA.  My big sister.  The three children up the street.  The park with the playground and the ducks who struggled along on a constant diet of moldy crusts.  A “fancy” dinner out at which I was allowed to order breaded shrimp.

Kids, I realized, are the little hubs of their own little universes.  As such, they are always “settled.”  They like new experiences, but they judge them by the yardstick of their own reality.  For Molly and Lizzy, that reality includes riding to school in a bike trailer with four hot water bottles when the mercury is below -30.  It includes counting the new reindeer calves at the farm in the spring.  It includes wilderness hikes on which we can go hours or even days without seeing any other traces of human beings.  Molly and Lizzy are quite likely to leave Fairbanks when they grow up.  I know that, and I think they already know it too.  But for now, they are quite happy to be settled.

But what about me? 

Some of Colleen’s predictions have come true.  I’m married with kids, and I hang out with a lot of other married-with-kids friends.  My idea of a party these days is something that involves several different people’s salads and ends at 9 p.m.  On the other hand, Fairbanks is GOOD at doing potlucks, and let’s face it, I wasn’t the life of the party even when I was 19.  I can see now that some of my fears were hyperbolic. 

I relax in my seat, and grab another helping of the eggplant dish.  I tell the couple across from me – who are themselves married, and settled, and yet still very interesting people – that living in Fairbanks means I can combine my love of wilderness and open spaces with my desire for libraries and ridiculously intellectual friends.  I mention that we have theatrical performances, poetry readings, film festivals, visiting scientists, and a symphony orchestra.  I get to be a university professor.  I allow myself a small smile at the realization that I don’t have to worry about business casual (patched jeans and a thermal hoodie will do) or lawn flamingos (no lawn around my outhouse). 

Of course, staying in Fairbanks also means having only one real museum, very few bustling urban scenes, obnoxiously cold and dark Januaries, and no decent Indian food.  But that is what travel is for.  My passport hasn’t acquired as many new stamps as I’d like in the past few years, but I’m looking into correcting that.  I’m settled – I can admit that now – but there are still some things I refuse to settle for.

Pink

            “Do you have any slippers that would fit a four-year-old?

“Uh-huh.  D’you wanna see the boys’ ones, or the girls’?”

“Um… It doesn’t matter. Both, I guess.”

The Payless Shoe clerk looked at me as if I’d just told her I had a child with three feet.  Clearly she thought I was a drooling imbecile, but she directed me to my choices: pink shiny Cinderella slippers, or clunky rectangular Cars slippers.  They were at opposite ends of the store.

 I sighed – but I wasn’t really surprised.  Almost five years ago, I felt the leading edge of this storm, and tried to fend it off.  A friend watched with a mixture of amusement and concern as I plunged a sack of miniscule onesies into a bucket of dye.  Maybe she thought I was suffering from some sort of postpartum hormonal imbalance.  “You won’t be able to escape it in a few years, you know,” she said. The laundry sink was spattered with dark green.  “You will let them choose their own clothes when they’re older, won’t you?”

            I didn’t want to be Evil Controlling Parent, so I assured her that of course I would.  I nodded and smiled with exaggerated bonhomie. I told my friend that if my kids went through a Tinsel Princess phase and insisted on carrying sequin-covered purses to kindergarten, I’d honor their freedom of expression. 

But I wasn’t looking forward to it.

I hate pink. Ok, I said it.  I detest frills, and ruffles, and flounces.  Makeup and high heels and nylons are not my cup of tea -- to the point where I feel awkwardly cross-dressed on the increasingly rare occasions when I put them on.  Girly stuff just… grates on me. 

I’d like to think that my aversion to the stereotypical hallmarks of femininity has a reasonable basis – but I’m not sure this is true.  I can rationalize at least some of my arguments: stilettos are murder on the feet, dyes and bleaches are toxic, and waxing sounds – um – kinda painful.   Barbie might give a little girl a complex if her waist is larger than a dragonfly’s.  But Hello Kitty and Strawberry Shortcake are relatively benign, aren’t they?  Why do they make me bare my teeth?

Even as I dyed that batch of bubble-gum onesies, I felt a twinge of worry.  Maybe rejection of pink is a sign of some sort of deep-rooted hatred of myself.  Maybe it means I’ve absorbed the males-are-better assumptions of the patriarchy.  Maybe I’m a traitor to my gender – and therefore a traitor to my daughters.

Where do my biases come from?  As a kid, I was a tomboy, but not a die-hard one.  I loved climbing trees, constructing Tinkertoy and Erector Set masterpieces, and wrestling other kids to the playground sand.  On the other hand, I also liked skipping rope and playing hopscotch, and I adored a baby-faced cuddly doll whom I named, with the inimitable logic of toddlers, “Bedtime.” I took apart the vacuum cleaner and regularly shimmied up the swingset poles, but I also sewed myself a quilt and baked countless cookies.  Sometimes I wished I were a boy, but I couldn’t throw a snowball the width of a residential street, and I was so nurturing that I insisted on rescuing the ants my mother was trying to exterminate from the kitchen.  I was only really concerned with gender when it imposed limits on something I wanted to do.  I didn’t want to be told that only boys could help the teacher get the heavy textbooks from the supply closet. I didn’t want to be told that only girls could come to my birthday party.  When I grew up, I was going to be an inventor, an astronaut, a novelist, AND a mommy.

As an east-coast college student, I sometimes felt like a fish out of water in my baggy overalls.  I didn’t like Wonderbras or lipstick, but I did like boys, and for a while that seemed like it might be a problem.  But when I moved to Alaska, I found my ideal man.  Not only was he smart, funny, and kind (you’re welcome, Jay), but he also gave me skis instead of flowers, and said, with some consternation, on the morning of our wedding, “You’re not going to wear makeup, are you?” I slipped comfortably into a social and professional circle in which Carhardtts can pass as eveningwear.  Jay and I built our own cabin and dug our own outhouse.  I taught college classes and met with the mayor in my jeans and t-shirts, and felt pretty comfortable in my own skin. 

Then I had twin daughters.

Newborns are not aware of their own gender, and they are not concerned with fashion. Nevertheless, the fashion industry for the under-three-months set is booming.  To the credit of my friends and family – who know me, and who know Jay – our twins were given lots of green blankets, yellow pajamas, and snuggly teddy bears.  But pinkness is so ubiquitous that it can actually be hard to find clothes, toys, crib mattresses, ANYTHING that isn’t gender-specific.  Girl stuff has to be not only pink, but also lacy, frilly, and emblazoned with cute animals: bunnies, kittens, My Little Rainbow Sparkle Pony with Humongous Eyes.  Girl clothes say things like “Daddy’s princess.” Boy stuff comes with modes of transportation, or bigger, fiercer animals -- dinosaurs, dogs, rabid saber-tooth tigers -- and says things like “Li’l Trooper.”  Needless to say, baby boy clothes are hung on different racks from the girls’, sometimes many aisles apart, to avoid infectious cross-contamination.

What I discovered, while lugging two infant cars seats in and out of Fred Meyers, is that everyone I talked to – which was fairly close to everyone in the store, given the apparently magnetic qualities of infant twins – expected me to follow the unwritten laws of gender assignment.  Talon-fingernailed cashiers and pumpkin-shaped grandpas were embarrassed, awkward, and sometimes even openly pissed-off that I had not dressed my six-month-olds in a manner that made it obvious which sort of genitalia they had under their diapers. 

Did these people not realize that pale pink looks particularly hideous with strained carrot stains?  Frills and ruffles collect little chunks of curdled spit-up or other substances that ooze out of babies.  Some of the girls outfits on the rack defy all logic, all reason, and all laundry realities.  And if you think I am going to glue a ribbon to my kid’s bald head, I wanted to tell those well-meaning strangers, please return to aisle six: Tacky Plastic Seasonal Ornaments.  But at heart, I knew that my logic was masking a deeper annoyance.  I just… didn’t like pink.

Four years have passed by – sometimes as quickly as a full bowl of rice cereal catapulting off a highchair tray, sometimes as slowly as a toddler dressing herself.  My two wiggly squalling bundles have grown into waist-high humans with large vocabularies and even larger opinions.  Preschool gives them peers, and peers mean peer pressure. Daily, I watch, fascinated, waiting to be appalled. Let them make their own choices, my good-parent super-ego tells me, even as I try to stack those choices.

Their drawers overflow with clothes, mostly hand-me-downs, in shades and styles ranging from rose-petal-kitten to khaki-dinosaur.  Their room spills toys across the whole house: herds of stuffed animals, toe-stabbing beads, a fire helicopter that makes hideously annoying noises, and a thousand art projects made from old yogurt containers, toilet tubes, and duct tape.

Molly is my social child.  At the playground, the pool, the library, her eyes are always on the other kids – especially the bigger kids.  She can tell me who is already five, and who is still four-and-a-half.  “Alex can put on his outdoor gear the fastest,” she tells me.  “Anna skis in Junior Nordics.”  She knows who can ride a bike, who can read, and who can tie shoes. Molly has also taken note of which toys and clothes are preferred by which gender.

Lizzy, meanwhile, is in her own happy little orbit.  On Planet Lizzy, making a cardboard mushing sled for her stuffed dogs can reign supreme over human interaction for hours at a time.  She’s happy to play with her peers and their toys, but she’s blissfully unconcerned with pecking order, competition, and petty social conventions.  Lizzy has strong opinions about her wardrobe – sometimes so strong that I have to wrestle clothes off her body in order to wash them – but her three favorite pairs of pants are too-short corduroys with Dora on one leg and patches on both knees; olive drab overalls with multiple pockets and hammer loops; and navy stretch pants decorated with a skull and crossbones motif that she insists is “stylin’.”

Of course, both kids have a clear grasp on the existence of gender. A few months ago, the whole family was in the car together.  Lizzy, as usual, was clinging to a stuffed animal that apparently needed extensive care.  “She’s too jumpy.  I have to tell her to behave. Now she’s tired.  Now she’s hungry.”

Jay, perhaps feeling outnumbered, inquired how Lizzy knew that the creature in question was a girl.

In her chipper slightly lisping voice, Lizzy supplied an immediate answer.  “She doesn’t have a penis, Daddy.”

I had no sympathy for Jay’s discomfort with this response.  “Well, you did ask.  And their Mommy’s a biologist,” I reminded him, grinning.

Molly, strapped into the car seat next to her sister’s, was cogitating and extrapolating.  “All our animals are girls!” she announced, with obvious glee.  “None of them have penises!”

Maybe someone should tell the toy manufacturers that for all their efforts to maximally exaggerate the gender segregation of Toys R Us and Walmart, they’ve been missing something obvious.  Your son’s Tyrannosaurus Rex might be fierce, sure – but she’s an egg-layer.

We don’t make a lot of off-the-shelf toy or apparel purchases, but this spring it became clear that the kids’ head size had outstripped their bike helmets.  Great excitement was engendered by a foray into a remote aisle of Fred Meyers, back past the guns and motor oil.  Not surprisingly, the selection was distinctly dichotomous. 

Molly honed in on a hot-pink helmet with an air of inevitability, as if this were a multiple-choice test on which she was concerned with filling in the correct oval.  The helmet was adorned with Pet-Shop caricatures that take the big-eye thing to monstrous extremes.  It came with a mini bike bottle, which, needless to say, was also pink. 

Molly seemed pleased enough with her selection, but her zeal was nothing compared to Lizzy’s.  Lizzy chose a black helmet with silver streaks.  It came with a Hot Wheels race car.  This car didn’t leave her sight for the next three days.  “It’s zoomy,” she told anyone who would listen.  She demonstrated the zoominess on the couch, the kitchen floor, and the dining table.  She took it to preschool to show to Bodin, Callum, and James.  “They really like Hot Wheels,” she said, with great enthusiasm.  She did not seem to have noticed what other category those friends fall into – a category to which she does not belong.

The twins’ birthday is fast approaching, and since I was being given an obvious hint, I looked up Hot Wheels online.  Not surprisingly, several gazillion cars and accessories are available.  Not surprisingly, every photo depicts little boys.  No girls.  No pink.  But the thing that really captured my attention was the way the vehicles and plastic tracks are described in the hyperbolic marketing prose. Every toy seems to involve death, crashing, slamming, destroying, or exploding.

I don’t like pink, but I’m not a fan of wholesale holocaust, either.  I don’t give my daughters guns. I wouldn’t give my sons guns, either.  If I had boys, I wouldn’t tell them that “boys don’t cry”, or require that they “toughen up,” or frown upon them if they enjoyed skipping, giggling, snuggling with dolls or decorating doilies. 

As I shook my head over the Hot Wheels, I realized something that should have been obvious to me from the start: I hate stereotypical boy toys just as much as I hate the girly stuff.   Moreover, I don’t like the grown-up versions -- monster trucks, pro wrestling, Budweiser -- any better than I like Cosmo or eye shadow.  I could have saved myself some of the time and mental energy I’ve spend navel-gazing, because ultimately, it dawned on me that I don’t hate my gender.  If I’m betraying my daughters, it’s not because I’m sexist. My problem is not with the color pink, per se.   My real phobia is about being cornered. 

I really, really hate being put in a box.  When someone thrusts assumptions at me, some devious part of my soul is compelled to circumvent them.  My politics aren’t libertarian, but my toy selection is.  I don’t want the girly stuff because I want MORE than that.  Inside, I still want to be an inventor, an astronaut, a novelist, AND a Mommy.  And I want the same degree of freedom for my kids.

I found a set of Hot Wheels that come with regular tracks that can be set up creatively, with no explosions required.  I’m looking for a present for Molly that’s equally creative.  I’m ok with it being pink – or not. 

As for the slippers, I walked out of Payless without buying any.  I know the kids would love some fleecy new footwear, but I can make it at home.  I’m a decent seamstress – and I’d like my daughters to learn how to sew, too.  While we’re at it, we can sew some slippers for Bedtime.  She’s a little worn-looking these days, and could do with some new wardrobe items.  She doesn’t sleep in my bed any more, of course.  She sleeps in Lizzy’s – with the Hot Wheels race car.

Epic

Last winter, Jay competed in the inaugural White Mountains 100 -- back-country skiing a hundred miles through wild Alaskan forests and mountains, slogging up long ascents, struggling over a windy 4000-foot mountain pass, and barreling down what the official website describes as “bowel-clenching descents.” Temperatures dropped to twenty below zero. Ice, slush, bumps, tussocks, and ruts abounded. It took him over thirty sleepless hours.

While Jay skied, I stayed home playing mom.  The kids and I made congratulatory welcome-home signs, did some baking, and organized the post-race party, at which the racers all said overly kind things about the cheap Sam’s Club spaghetti, the veggies and dip, and the cake decorated by preschool artisans.  I felt tubby and torpid in a roomful of people with less body fat than Olympic gymnasts.  I saw the frostbite-blistered fingers, toes, and noses, and I heard the stories.  They were epic.

Certain members of my social circle like to use the word “epic” in its adjectival form to describe adventures that incorporate all the best components of, say, Homer’s Odysseus.  Are there seemingly impossible quests involved?  Pain and suffering?  Blood-thirsty many-headed sea creatures?  Epic.  On the other hand, outdoor adventures that include designated campgrounds, bedtime stories, or marshmallow roasts may be fun, but they aren’t epic.

Several of my friends had completed the race, and they were happy to share the details of their odysseys. Tom admitted that near the finish, snow-bent boreal spruce trees started to look like people.  He began peering over his shoulder in sleep-deprived paranoia.  His knees were swollen from repeatedly crashing on sheer sloping ice.  Amy, who received the perseverance award after 38 grueling hours, told me about high-velocity impacts between her face and the snow.  She said she spent hours longing to glimpse the next little white sign promising “one mile to checkpoint.”  She was terribly dehydrated, yet unable to eat or drink.  Meanwhile Jay, in characteristically self-effacing fashion, said that his biggest concern was the poor job he did cleaning up the trail after he sullied it with partially digested ramen and coffee. 

Jay then went on to protest that the race was “fun.”  Lots of fun, he insisted.  Boy, was he excited to do it again, he told me.  When the registration opening for the 2011 race rolled around, he stayed up until midnight to make sure he garnered a slot.

So did I.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a masochist.  At least, I don’t think I’m a masochist.  I signed up for the race because I love backcountry skiing and because I wanted to challenge myself -- not because I actively desired pain, misery, suppurating blisters, or delirium.  Still, there were issues of pride at stake.  In recent years, Jay has done a lot of trips that make for really excellent stories.  I – in part because of two fabulous little fans of campgrounds, bedtime stories, and marshmallows -- have fewer tales to tell.  As much as I wanted to finish the race, and as much wanted to avoid frostbite, hypothermia, and regurgitation, at some level I wanted my Odysseus story, in all its drama-queen glory. I wanted to be epic. 

Thanks to a truly magnificent set of friends who were willing to babysit twin preschoolers, Jay and I were both able to register for the 2011 event. But by the time late March rolled around, I was more than a little worried.  Who did I think I was, anyhow?  Not an ultra-racer, certainly.  Besides, I knew I hadn’t trained enough.  No, that was too generous.  I hadn’t really trained at all.  My total skiing for the winter added up to about 300 miles, which is mind-bogglingly little for someone who plans to cover 1/3 that distance pretty much nonstop.  The remainder of my physical exertion consisted of commuting four miles to my job at UAF, by bike or on foot, towing or pushing the kids in their nifty convertible Chariot trailer.  Granted, jogging 8 miles round trip with two four-year-olds can work up a sweat, but it doesn’t exactly qualify one to cover the length of four marathons in a row.

At the pre-race meeting, I was reminded of the fact that most of the people I’d met at last year’s party had visible sinews, complex competitive strategies, and dozens of ultra-races under their belts.  A BLM ranger sat mute at the back of the room for a full hour before offering, as a parting one-liner, the information that an early-waking bear had been sighted near Borealis.  “Early bears are hungry,” he noted, as if a roomful of Alaskans might think it was a good idea to smear themselves with peanut butter and honey.  I won a coveted door prize at the meeting, but worried that if I didn’t make it through the race, I’d feel guilty about keeping it.

When I dug in my ski poles at the start, I was sure that at some point in the next two days I was going to begin hating snow. . . and hating trees. . . and hating my skis, my backpack, all the free audio books I’d downloaded from the library, and every Ziploc of Cadbury’s Dark, Nutter Butters, Combos, and peanut-butter-and-jelly-on-pilot-bread.  In fact, I was pretty sure that somewhere along the hundred-mile course I was going to assume a personality that blended the least likeable attributes of Eeyore, Marvin the depressed robot, and a partially decayed zombie.  I wasn’t sure that I should be out there at all – but at the very least, I was expecting the race to be epic.

I hung back, watching the speedsters disappear up the first hill in a jostling rush.  The early part of the trail was back-yard-familiar to me, all rolling landscapes and easily-earned views across valleys of dark spruce and sun-reflecting snow.  The early morning sky warmed to a deepening blue.  I shared a few upbeat words with my fellow slowpokes, and at mile seven I smiled for my friend Ned’s camera, but by mile ten I was skiing alone, in a private sunlit world of shushing snow.  I was stripped down to a tank top.

Conditions in late March can range from icy slush that forces you to coat your skis in hideously gummy klister, to the -25 degrees and howling wind that froze Amy’s feet at the top of the pass last year. This year, the sun warmed the snow just enough to make it slick and quick, but not enough to wreck it.  I was slathered in sunscreen, mock-hip in cheap sunglasses, and basking Vitamin D.  After a long sub-arctic winter, spring feels like a revelation.  Constant entertainment streamed in via my headphones – novels carefully selected to include nothing in the emotional range of Steven King or Jack London.  I had forgotten just how starkly beautiful the blackened stems of an old burn can be, or how friendly the broad tree trunks look in the valley bottoms.  I had forgotten how much I like having someone read stories aloud to me. 

At mile seventeen, the first checkpoint was a flurry of goodwill and free cocoa refills.  At mile 26, affable strangers called hellos over the ecstatic barking of their dog team; apparently watching 65 people race past was canine nirvana.  I managed the precipitous drop to Beaver Creek without removing my skis or shattering anything, and made it to the second checkpoint at mile 39 feeling optimistic enough to grin for the race volunteer wielding a camera.  The long ascent to the Cache Mountain Mountain Divide lay ahead, but I had a foil-wrapped cheese-filled baked potato in one hand, and the sun was still shining.

The next eight hours were slow and dreamlike.  The trail wove through mile upon mile of grey-green forest, rolling over hillocks, but tending ever upward.  The sky darkened and snow began to fall.  At last, the trees thinned around me until I was surrounded by sheer white, windblown and austere.  I reached the top of the pass just as the very last glimmer of daylight disappeared.  The tracks of all those who had crossed ahead of me were already being subsumed by fresh snow and wind.  Visibility by headlamp narrows to a half-dozen feet in a swirl of snowflakes, a phenomenon that I partly blame for my snaillike progress – even when gravity again began to work in my favor.  Flying headlong down the slopes seemed ill-advised.  I picked my way across the sloping surface of the notorious ice lakes with my feet slush-protected by plastic bags that had once contained wood pellets, and anti-skidded with Yak Trax.  It was no doubt a stylish getup.  The medics’ wall tent glowed temptingly, but I replied to a cheery greeting by explaining that I was doing just fine, thanks.  I waddled on by.

Any dramatic claims I might have made about mind-altering fatigue or about pulling an all-nighter alone in the dark were negated by the three-hour nap I took at Windy Gap checkpoint, at mile 62. After consuming at least half a box of crackers, I lay down fully clothed on a wooden bench amidst a cacophony of comings and goings.  Three fellow races were exchanging stories around the rough wooden table.  Someone had been frozen into her own snowshoe bindings on a 300-mile trek.   It sounded epic.  I snored.

When I hit the trail again at 5 a.m., it was still dark -- but I felt rejuvenated, even ebullient.  Who wouldn’t, gliding through a winter wonderland of new-falling snow, listening to Bill Bryson’s sweetly mid-Atlantic voice reading aloud the comic escapades of his 1950s childhood, and munching four chocolate chip cookies?

It was soon after this Breakfast of Champions that I experienced a moment that might have qualified as drama, if this had been somebody else’s story. I practically ran over the obstacle before I saw it.  It was a person.  Lying in the snow beside the trail.  Face down.

I had about two seconds for all my first-aid training to run through my head in completely random order before I realized that the guy I was now stooping over was neither hypothermic nor the tragic victim of marauding yetis, but merely asleep.  I had two more seconds of confused indecision before he woke up, sprang to his feet, and showered me with thanks and apology.  He’d told himself he’d lie down for just one song, he explained, pointing sheepishly to his headphones. 

The fresh snow made for particularly slow progress.  The sun rose as I passed the dramatic limestone jags near Caribou Bluff.  They towered over me on both sides, somehow simultaneously protective and intimidating.  The mottled light filtering through dense cloud was as gorgeous as the nighttime snowfall and the clear hot skies of the previous day had been. 

Throughout that slow second morning, the weather was all magic and no skullduggery.  The temperature did not plummet.  The icy sections of trail were at a minimum, and I did not plunge any limbs into liquid slush. No starving bears appeared.  Yesterday’s views were veiled, but not obscured.  Mile upon mile, valley upon valley, in every direction, lay forests, marshlands, rivers, crags.  No roads.  No houses.  No overpasses, no strip malls, no car alarms, no Walmarts. I was soaking in the tranquility, while at the same time, with somewhat guilty pleasure, enjoying The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants -- a novel I’d selected on the grounds that if I’m going to write for teenagers, I should at least do a little research. 

At mile 82, the volunteer at the Borealis checkpoint snapped another photo.  In it, I am holding a bowl of ramen noodles and crushed Fritos, and wearing an expression that implies I am delightedly anticipating the next crunchy-soggy, tepid, salt-infused spoonful.  At mile 91, further photo evidence was recorded: I’m beaming like a kid at her own birthday party – albeit a sweaty and perhaps slightly deranged kid.

By the last ten miles of the race, all familiar territory, I was undeniably stiff and sore.  I’ve had bad Achilles tendons for years, and they were starting to remind me of their displeasure.  Crouching down for potty breaks seemed a lot more challenging than it had the previous day, and I began to regret my hot cocoa consumption.  When I reached the unrelenting mile of hill known as “Wickersham Wall” it seemed expedient not only to remove my skis, but also to walk backward all the way up it.  Three miles later, at the bottom of the last steep downhill, the effort of rigorous snowplowing made me think that my knees and ankles might enjoy a one-minute rest, which is why I was lying ignominiously in the trail when not one but three dog sleds came barreling down at me.  But climbing a small mountain while facing in the wrong direction and flailing stiff-legged in front of thirty confused canines are still not epic – especially not if one is also listening to Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits, and giggling.

I completed the race – without grievous bodily harm, dalliances with bears, or even a single blister -- in exactly 35 hours, placing me 54^th out of 65 entrants.  Since seven people didn’t finish, there were actually only four behind me.  Three of them were walking the course.  I was pathetically pokey -- but not quite slow enough for the perseverance award.  I never got dehydrated or cold. I never needed the medics’ extensive first aid kits, or even my own, which consisted of nothing but pain killers and duct tape. I was pleased to have an excuse to consume enough cheese sandwiches and Reisen chocolates to fuel an army.  In other words, my pace, my health, and my digestion were decidedly non-epic.

At the end of the race, a stalwart volunteer snapped one final photo.  I am holding one of my kids in each arm, and grinning at Jay.  Clearly, if I was still strong enough to lift 75 pounds of preschooler, I can’t have been working hard enough.  The four of us don’t look epic – we look Family Circle.

I hosted the post-race party again.  It felt different from last year – but not exactly in the way I’d expected.  My co-organizer added some fresh bread and heaps of strawberries, melon, and pineapple, to the menu, and everyone was even kinder in their thanks.  I still felt dumpy compared to most of the crowd, but I cared less.  Last year, I was looking forward to this year’s race because I was jealous of all the epic-ness around me.  This year, I realized to my own surprise, I was looking forward to next year’s race for a whole list of reasons.

Wilderness inspires me.  Exercise invigorates me.   I now have an official time to beat, and I do love a challenge.  But most importantly, it dawned on me that in my life as a busy working mom there are only rare respites in which I can experience the bliss of being on a mountaintop at sunset, or having hour upon hour all to myself, or absorbing an entire novel nonstop, or eating a gigantic Cadbury bar without even a twinge of remorse.  To do all these things at once? 

Epic.

At the race finish.  Photo by Taryn Lopez