Muscle Memory

"I think I already know your answer, but I had to ask," said Molly, the new production manager at Tram Bar World, when she called me yesterday morning.

Apparently the factory was in crisis mode and needed bars made stat. I really, really didn't want to do it, but once someone puts an idea in my head, I have trouble saying no without a good reason. I had a bar-sized window of time between sending the paper to print and going to kid's practice. I was planning to veg out, clean up my piles, go mountain biking with girlfriends. Instead I donned a sleeveless tee and skate shoes and went to the factory.

I walked in with my trademark churlish swagger, accepting happy greetings but trying to broadcast a half-amused, half-resentful attitude. Then Molly told me what the crisis pay scale was, and I saw that my ingredients had already been measured out. Well, that's better.

Since I left, the factory has seen almost twenty people cycle through, attempt to make bars, and quit with little ado, so my princess treatment was warranted. It's not often one gets acknowledged as the Greatest of All Time, but my bar-making record backs that up.

That said, I was pretty nervous that I wouldn't remember how to do it. My brain had already deleted the file, confident that it was obsolete information. I couldn't mentally walk through the steps beforehand. But once I was in front of a tub of ingredients, dressed in my whites, muscle memory took over and it was like the last nine months had never happened.

Back in my native habitat

I flowed through the steps, performing my weird little granola dance, barely thinking, luxuriating in nostalgia. This was the thing I was better at than anything else I've ever done. But to be excellent isn't enough when there is no personal growth, when my brain melted into custard even as my arms gained definition, when I did the exact same thing day after day.

I left the factory many dollars richer and reeking of peanut butter and honey. I was dehydrated but not as achey as I expected. Deeply-ingrained skills don't go away that quickly.

The Fire

Once you open the door to housesitting in a new place, you get tons of requests. I watched my coworker’s big dumb Goldens for a couple weeks and then her wealthy friend enlisted me to watch an independent Bernese, some chicks (she described their care with bemusement—her kids were in charge of the poultry), and a semi-feral cat.

The house was nice-not nice, a model I’ve seen so many times when housesitting. Shockingly expensive touches (immaculate gas range, flagstone flooring) compete with chintzy touches (all of the doorknobs barely functioned). I have stayed in modest, thoughtful houses and I have stayed in garish houses where the thoughtful touches happen to exist because they were the premium option.

I am hopelessly nosey. When I stay at a house, I poke around, observe, judge. My biggest takeaway is often a suffocating claustrophobia—how can these people own so much STUFF? I have moved almost twenty times in my adult life and the thought of filling every drawer, closet, rafter, and bureau in your four thousand square foot house makes me choke on anxiety. I was in the midst of moving the last time I stayed at this particular house, and I stashed all my earthly possessions in a single bay of their three-car garage.

Four days after they returned from their most recent trip, I was lazily checking Facebook in bed and started seeing posts about a fire.

The house had burned to the ground. Every matched pair of toy firetrucks (twin boys), every elaborate wall hanging, the countless drawers of stainless steel specialized-use kitchen implements (pizza scissors?), the three sets of flatware ordered by occasion, the pantry full of organic kid’s energy bars, the four-post king-sized bed with decorative throws, the shower with multiple heads and a sauna setting, the four bikes, three stand-up paddleboards, and two lawnmowers…all gone.

By some divine grace, a neighbor saw flames coming from the house at 2 a.m. and was able to wake the family. It sickens me to consider the alternative. The gregarious Bernese also survived.

I went to the property, shifting roles from family acquaintance to journalist. I took photos of the blackened shell, smelled the aftermath of the burn, registered the empty space where the big wooden chicken coop had been.

The outpouring of support online was immediate, because people are good. Well-wishers were offering food and clothing donations. The family’s friend took me aside and asked how the newspaper could help head off this generosity—she didn’t go quite so far as to say, “They don’t want other people’s used clothing,” but it was implied.

Their cell phones and three (four?) cars burned. Their friends quickly provided them with new phones and a new car. Someone in their network set up a GoFundMe page and it’s currently sitting at an incredible $24,000.

Looking at that number, more than I make in a year, and thinking about the size of the insurance check that I know they’ll get, makes me sick and confused. The tragedy of losing everything, birth certificates and wedding photos and special art, is a terrible blow, but these people are positioned to weather it with minimal suffering. I couldn’t help thinking what $24,000 could mean to nonprofits, other families, people less blessed with opportunity, affluence, or a support system.

It made me squeamish to question this family’s right to benefit from the generosity of others, but I also kept imagining the McMansion they’ll be able to build with their insurance pay-out--bigger, better laid out, more storage space for newly-acquired possessions.  

Then I ran into her at the grocery store. It was the first time I'd ever seen her without make-up. I was scared to engage but she didn’t mind talking to me about the fire. She said they were looking for a long-term rental while they rebuilt. “Housing here is hard,” she said with tired amusement. I choked out an agreement. Housing here is hard, and it’s harder if you have a limited budget and if insurance isn’t footing the bill.

I used my mournful tone (I’m so awkward with condolences) and tried to express how glad I was that she and her husband and their two boys had made it out alive.

There is no right answer.

Thirty-Six Hour Vacation

In Gilmore, Idaho, there is a piece of cardboard nailed to the side of a shack with a handwritten for sale message: “Lot and house $10,000.” There is nothing available in Teton Village for under a million.

But six miles up the road is a campground more beautiful than any car-accessed one in Grand Teton National Park, a small cerulean lake abutted by a towering chunk of rock in a cirque of crumbling spires. On a Saturday afternoon in July, there are two sites free out of fifteen. We claim one and immediately try to figure out how accessible that chunk of rock, Gilmore Peak, is.

Next to the lake there is a broad mellow trail through woods carpeted with rich greenery.  We branch off it and follow a faint trail churned into the talus on the shoulder of the cirque. We are on top barely twenty minutes later, looking across the basic at Gilmore, but a storm is scudding toward us so we bail. Tomorrow!

Waking up is so easy in summer. Oatmeal, coffee, ablutions, and back up to the ridge. We scramble over dalmatian-spotted feldspar, waiting for the difficulty of the route to match the drama of the scenery, but it never does. We summit by nine. Long couloirs and precipitous drops and warm-colored peaks of red and ochre surround us.

Descend fast, feet in the lake, drinking Coors at ten. We get restless and pack up camp to pursue another adventure—a twenty-mile backcountry ride. The road is studded with tombstones that scrape and jolt the little car. A cow-wallow stops us several miles before the trailhead so we start pedaling.

The hot, unpleasant doubletrack turns into a long mellow singletrack climb from the mouth of the gulch to an alpine pass. We contour around the base of Yellow Peak, spot elk cows and calves below us in a clearing, and push up a darkened shale path unlike anything I’ve ever traveled by bike. I throw myself into the snow patch up top and stuff my hydration bladder with snow. I’m out of water, it’s hot, we already climbed a mountain this morning.

The descent is appropriately backcountry’esque, rock-cluttered erosion channels, downed trees, mud bogs, but also huge views of adjacent peaks. We slog through the last five miles thirsty and hot.

The closest open gas station is a hundred miles away but we still have cherries and Oreos and snow to melt and beer to drink. I am shelled, burned, my eyes red and my lips chapped, but I am content. 

Most of my Saturday mornings are consumed by bike practice but I’ve gotten much better about GTFO of the valley the second practice ends and taking advantage of my full thirty-six hours of weekend. There are incredible places within a five-hour drive of here and I’ve only scratched the surface.