Our Anniversary Trip, Day 1 (of 2)

Our Happy Couple

The Drive

Omaha and I had arranged to go mountain biking for our anniversary. We love camping and mountain biking, and the weather had finally decided to be kind and give us a sunny weekend. That whole "we lied about how bad the weather is in Seattle?" We lied again: the weather here has been awful. Only last weekend did it warm up enough, and provide enough sun, to be called "Spring." Otherwise, it's Junuary.

Our trip was supposed to be over two days, but Omaha caught Kouryou-chan's cold from the week before and it was only Saturday morning that she was over it enough to go. We had packed most of our stuff Friday evening in the hopes her cold would fade, and Saturday we went for it.

The ferry ride over was fun, although the bomb-sniffing dog that circled my car wasn't too reassuring.

We drove through Bainbridge, and the drive was fine except for the Hood Canal bridge being open, which delayed us about half an hour. As we got closer and closer to our destination-- a little wild resort area halfway between Port Angeles and Forks, the setting for Stephanie Meyer's execrable Twilight series, the tourism got more annoying: "Welcome Twilight Fans!" read one motel sign. A diner promised "Bella Eats Here! We have Bloodshakes and Werewolf Fries!"

We passed by some unlikely sights. A prefab hut, little more than a ship's container with a door and an external HVAC, in the middle of an unpaved plot of scragland, advertised "XXX Movies! Magazines! Novelties! Firewood!" Sure enough, in front of it were dozens of small piles of firewood, ready for camping. Another was "Maria's Mexican Restaurant" with a small billboard outside reading "Check out our German dishes!"

We passed by another set of small signs, "Foresters plant trees / for future generations / to have wood products / and fine recreation!" But there was no "Burma Shave" at the end. I felt so disappointed.

Mountain

The Ride

We reached the trailhead about 1:00pm, and headed out. At first, we weren't convinced it was the trail. It didn't look like a railbed, it looked like a technical-2 single-track with some mud. Easy stuff. It got harder, with rocks, and then it got to Crescent Lake, where the trail was at times narrow and edging up to the lakeside, sometimes high, sometimes low, and often with a steep fall to the water.

At one point, we stopped to get water and all these pretty blue moths swirled around us. They really loved our gloves, for some reason, lighting on both my blue and Omaha's grey; I'm not sure what in the gloves was so damn attractive, but it was very strange. (Bonus photo: Blue-white moths on Omaha's glove.)

We rode about four miles when we reached the actual railbed, which had been paved with bicycle-friendly rubber-recycle pave. We were advised not to take the dirt road that paralleled it, as the bridge was out. We later saw that bridge, and sure enough it was unfinished.

We stopped twice to talk with hikers along the way. One couple was from the area, told us about which road to take after the bridge-out, and generally were very kind with their information. I asked if he was embarrassed about the Twilight stuff. He shrugged. "I have a vampire slide in presentations I give," he said, telling me he sold nutritional supplements. "We joke about it. Hey, they're tourists, they bring money."

After four more miles, we decided to head back. That was the easy part, as we'd been going uphill almost the entire way. I just coasted back to the place where the railbed ended and the rough trail began. Omaha and I plunged back into the woods, and soon we found ourselves lakeside again.

Over the Edge

As we rode along a particularly tricky part, the trail narrowed at a place about 6 meters above the lake, with a 60° slope of sharp, broken shale going down to the water. A large rock from the slope above had fallen into the trail, and I decided I had more room to the right, closer to the water.

Maybe, but not enough. I hesitated going around the rock, the front tire lost traction. I knew already the bike was going to go so I tried to leap off, but already the back tire had caught up and was also slipping down the hill. I went over.

I fell maybe two meters and landed on my shins, screaming the whole way down. I tumbled once, hitting my right shoulder, then slid down on my backside, feet-first, stopping only when one shoe hit the water. Then the bicycle hit me in the back of the head, went over me, and sailed into the lake.

I lay there, surprised to be fully conscious, and did an assessment. Arms worked. Thumbs and fingers moved without noticeable pain. The legs, too.

I stood up.

Another couple, hikers, had seen the accident and come running to help. "Your bike! It's going down."

I turned and grabbed it. By this time I was so pleased at being relatively uninjured that I just picked it up, put it onto dry land, grabbed the water bottle and took a swig.

Omaha was not amused. She yelled at me that I was being an idiot for rescuing my bike, for not paying attention to the profuse bleeding on my left knee, and in general for going around the wrong side of the rock, all the while she was picking her way down the cliff-side to join me.

With much bickering, I convinced her to hand the bike up to the couple at the top of the ridge, then we both climbed up, using a tree a few meters south of where I'd fallen as support. She wanted to leave the bike lakeside until she was sure I was fine.

I wasn't that fine. A follow-up assessment was that I had lacerations and abrasions on both shins, on my ass (can Elf legitimately write, "Damn, my ass hurts so much this week" without the audience getting the wrong impression?) right where buttocks meet thighs, and my right arm. And contusions just about everywhere. The worst was the left knee, where I had a deep cut bleeding quite a bit.

Even scarier, when we looked at my helmet: a seven-centimeter gash right at the back of the skull, about a half-cm deep. That could have been my head. Always ride with a helmet, kids.

We cleaned the wounds and bandaged me up with the first-aid kit, applying butterflies and "fingertip" bandages for ad-hock butterflies to the knee, and gauze-and-tape to the abrasions. Then we kept riding.

Cave Mouth

We saw this awesome cave mouth on the way back. A closer inspection revealed that it wasn't a natural formation, but a raw tunnel built back during World War I in order to connect a rail line that brought timber down from the northern edge of the Olympic Peninsula. It was never finished.

Although I was aching and sore, we pushed on, completing the last two miles of the trip, and made it back to the trailhead where we had parked the car.

And so, to eat and sleep

We packed up and headed down to the Elwha campground, where we set up our new two-person tent. We put down the footprint-- a layer of plastic meant to protect the tent proper from sharp rocks-- and then set up the framework before adding the tent body. After struggling to match the instructions with the actual work, Omaha looked inside to see if maybe we'd assembled it upside down. "Elf? Where's the floor?"

I looked. There was no floor. We looked twice before realizing we'd assembled the rainfly, not the tent. A quick disassembly and we were back in business, this time with a proper tent, an assembled rainfly. The tent was nice, an REI half-dome that I paid extra for, but it had been worth it: this tent has two egresses, one for each occupant.

Wild Raspberry

The campsite was lined with wild raspberries, all of which were too unripe to eat.

I fetched firewood and Omaha set up the fire, and then we assembled our dinner: Chicken Foil, or Hobo Chicken, which is basically raw boneless chicken, a handful of vegetables, a handful of sliced potatoes, and some milk or cream soup, packed into a watertight foil packet, shaken, and cooked in a fire. Delicious.

We cleaned up. There were signs everywhere that this was bear country. I replaced straining bandages, especially the ones on my high-traffic knee that kept pulling at my leg hairs (ouch!), sponged-bathed off all the blood, and then we went to bed. By then, everything had scabbed over. It looked like I would live.

I must have fallen asleep almost instantly.

(no subject)

We woke up the next morning feeling refreshed. I was stiff in odd places, sore in other odd places, but still miraculously in one piece.

There was some kind of crow battle going on overhead, with lots of screaming and cawing. Whatever it was, it sounded territorial. That morning there were also bumblebees everywhere on the raspberry bushes.

The first thing to take care of was breakfast. I made a primitive fire and made breakfast tea for me and Omaha, then we set about the process of actually making breakfast. Rashers of bacon, and then I poured the grease into the firepit, watched it flame up impressively (if you've never seen the Bacon Torch, I recommend it), and scrambled some eggs.

Omaha lounged about the campsite in her pajamas. If you've ever wanted to see Omaha in hot Victoria's Secret Lingere, ( Here's your chance )

Fully fed, we cleaned up, broke down the campsite, and decided we would not be riding that day. Instead, we'd go hiking. We picked a trail up in the Elwha river basin and headed out.

Mother deer and faun

There hadn't been a lot of wildlife spotted until now, but as we drove up to the Whiskey Bend trailhead, we were chased by this wild pheasant who came tearing after us like it was the roadrunner. It was the funniest thing we'd seen yet. (Bonus photo: Wild Pheasant.)

When we got to the campsite, however, and even better wildlife treat awaited us. The cutest little faun and its mother were walking down the forest service road as if it hadn't a care in the world. Its steps were slow but unconcerned, and the little faun trotted in that adorable hopping style we all know from Disney movies.

We geared up and headed up the trail. Our goal was an eight-mile loop, most of which would be easy going, or so we had been told. But the day before had taken much more out of us than we'd thought, and one wrong turn down a well-signaged but unmapped path brought us to Eagle Overlook. From there we could see across the Elwha River to what the map said was "Roosevelt's Meadow," and in it I saw a black shape wandering about. Omaha thought it was a cow, but the camera revealed something much more interesting.

Bear!

It was a black bear, rooting about, walking along a trail stomped through the meadow. We later learned from other hikers that it had been there the day before, as well.

We hiked back up to the main trail, then down another steep switchback to a place called The Goblin Gates. The gates were so named because the swirling water through the gorge reminded some of the first visitors, in the 1920s, of tortured faces. (Bonus Photo: The Goblin Gates). We stopped for lunch, then moved on, walking through a beautiful sylvan wood, passing chipmunks, some of which zipped back and forth behind the tree to keep an eye of us like caffienated micromonkeys, others casually sat in the middle of the path and wondered if we might drop a peanut or two. We didn't.

We decided to ascend back from the riverside trail to the main trail. Little did we know it was an intense climb, and Omaha and I were exhausted by the time we got to the top. We walked a little further along, then reached a landmark called "Michael's Cabin," once the home of a mountain man in the 1890s, then in the 1920s a stayover for a conservationist whose specialty was shooting cougars. (I guess "conservationist" had a different meaning back then).

Michaels Cabin

We walked back without further incident, passing lots of people with multi-day packs, including one couple and their powerwalking fourteen-year-old daughter, who was at least a half mile ahead of her party and seemed to be carrying the bulk of the tent supplies. There were two young men running through the woods, one with a backpack-mounted mini boombox playing music as they made their way through. What's the point of heading out into the peace of the woods when you bring the noise with you?

Americans Love their Fireworks

The drive home was unremarkable, although on the way out we passed by dozens of fireworks shacks getting ready for July 4th, the day Americans freely mix alcohol and explosives. One stand was just huge, a city block-length establishment of nothing but black powder things that go Boom!

We took the ferry home. There was an hour's wait at the ferry stand, so I took the time to read further into the book I'd brought, a contemporary analysis of North Korean propaganda.

We rode home, quickly unpacked the car. It was 8:30pm when we reached the house, so we paused long enough to assure Kouryou-chan and Lisakit that we were well, put Kouryou-chan to bed, and headed out to an anniversary dinner at the local steakhouse.

After a quick shower to get free of the dust of the road, and a round of fresh bandages (I'm not going to have any hair left on my legs after that), we went to bed, and zonked right out.

I was fairly vegetative most of Monday, but I seem to be back to life now.

The aftermath of my fall...

I told a friend of mine this, a woman my age with two boys of her own. She said, "Niiiice." I looked at her puzzled, and she related a tale of how her son got terribly scraped up in a bicycling accident and was all covered in blood afterward, and his friend who'd just witnessed it said exactly that word. At first, she was as confused as I was, but she said, "I've learned with Leo, the right thing to say to guys when they come in all bloody and cut up, but it's obvious they're gonna survive, just to say.... niiiice. It's what they want to hear."

She's right, too. I survived a perilous fall with all my parts recoverable. It's hard to express just how dangerously immortal I felt afterwards.

But two days later, the aches and pains, the continually irritating laceration on my left thigh and the now-fading bruise on my right palm, have taught me to be careful.

Still, despite all the weaknesses, Yamaraashi-chan and I still did our workout last night. 97 push-ups in five circuits, 65 squats, and 146 sit-ups. I was going to add pull-ups into my circuit, but my right hand disabused me of that notion.

Re-assembling my fragmented mind, part II.

"All addictions are addictions of present hedonism."

Of all the analyses I've seen from regarding the Internet's strain on our attention spans, one of the many that I've heard often is that the Internet pokes at our fight or flight response. Linda Stone, who coined the term "continuous partial attention" to describe our tendency to only be partially in any moment, to have part of our attention always on the potential for asynchronous, geographically distant events that will demand more of us, has now described and documented "email apnea," the tendency of people to breathe oddly when at the computer.

Stone ascribes this phenomenon to our hairless savanna ape ancestry's readiness to respond to crises by holding our breath, jacking up our nitric acid in preparation for fight-or-flight. Email, with its unpredictable nature, creates a similar preparatory reaction in us. Omaha has long noticed that I do that even when writing for pleasure, since often I don't know what's going to come out of my fingers next, and I'm often just as thrilled or threatened as my characters as I write.

A lot of various reports (including the NPR article I linked to earlier) ascribed this almost completely to the premise of message-as-threat, but I also think that there's another reaction going on: the desperate quest for frission, which Roger Ebert so brilliant described in a recent essay, and defined as "a brief intense reaction, usually a feeling of excitement, recognition, or terror." Like a slot machine, the Internet pays off randomly, so the reward cycle isn't dependable, and so becomes more neurotic, and more effective, in its reinforcement. Gambling halls have known this for years; if you start surfing, the Internet becomes the world's biggest casino, where the price is the tick of the precious minutes remaining in your life, and the reward is a particularly amusing LOLcat.

Stone, during the course of her presentation, asks the audience how many of them are experimenting with meditation and other techniques in order to extend their attention span. A lot of folks raised their hands, and I would have been one of them.

There are, in fact, a host of new programs that are designed to prevent distraction. They're called "Freedom," "Concentration," and more esoteric names (I use the X/Emacs character sequence Control-Enter to foreground-and-lock emacs, making it the only thing I have available to me while I work. Arguably, that's pretty stupid, because emacs is perfectly capable of shelling out or launching processes stacked above itself, but in practice it seems to work for me.) The Economist magazine recently touted this new trend in its article Stay on Target, in which they outlined all of the ways that these program prevent continuous partial attention by reminding us that we have jobs to do.

Despite the popularity of these programs, Steven Pinker admonishes us that "scientists are never far from their e-mail, rarely touch paper and cannot lecture without PowerPoint." I don't know which scientists Pinker is talking to, but many of the ones I know practice a kind of networking hygiene, where they separate themselves from the Internet or use one of the programs I listed above. Most writers I know, too, find cafes without wireless in which to work.

Carr responds with this comment:

Pinker says: "It’s not as if habits of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning ever came naturally to people." Exactly. And that’s another cause for concern. Our most valuable mental habits - the habits of deep and focused thought - must be learned, and the way we learn them is by practicing them, regularly and attentively.

I think this is exactly right. Just as Zimbardo points out, we are trained for "deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning," often with settings that are boring, and often by a consortium of the traditionally minded statics and the forward-looking dynamics. Both groups recognize the need for such training to overcome the tendency to adolescent hedonism or fatalism.

Carr has the better argument. We are not merely losing our memories by having books; we are losing our ability to think clearly and deeply. Those with deep memories are sometimes cherished-- if they can tell great stories-- and sometimes treated as somewhat freaky-- if they memorize pi to 10,000 places. Those who think deeply are already regarded as something of a strange breed, but are often cherished. The Internet, with its addictive distractions, makes it much harder to be that kind of thinker.

Re-assembling my fragmented mind, part 3

What can we do about this? Well, first thing: turn off the Internet if you don't need it. Use one of those programs that limits what you can do during your coding or writing hours. Assemble your materials ahead of time for any project, and then leave only that folder open. Meditate. Find time for solitude, as that seems to be the number one tool creative people need to recharge and let themselves work. The philosopher Alain du Botton suggests information fasts, periods of days where we just go off-line, leave even our books behind, and in our solitude do consciously, and for longer stretches what our mind does every night: sort out the intellectual wheat from the chaff. (I was unplugged for 48 hours when all of the Fragmented series came to mind. The plural of anecdote is not data. But I believe that anecdotes should not be so easily dismissed. See for further discussion of this point.)

Most importantly, be mindful that you are engaged in a project to recover your attention span, your capacity for introspection and deep thinking. The mark of a truly mature person is their ability to handle solitude, even tedium. Honor your adulthood, your maturity, and your uniqueness from the rest of the animal kingdom, don't dismiss it (as Clay Shirky does) as some kind of aberration. You and me baby are more than just mammals (although sometimes I still like to do it like they do on the Discovery Channel), and we're more than adolescents. Zimbardo's research, and Carr's book, show a culture where youth is not only desired and admired over age and maturity, but one where tools meant to empower us tend insteand to make us more hedonistic, more present tense (without being mindfully present in the Buddhist sense).

I'm a naturalist: everything we are is generated by the organized systems of biochemical electrified meat in our heads. Willpower is one of those things, and like everything in our use, it become stronger with practice. Be mindful that you are in that practice. Keep a journal of how well you do.

Good luck.

Footnote: I have been terrible while writing this. I linked to dozens of articles, shattering your attention on what I was saying with temptations to go read something else that I found compelling. So be it. That's what the Internet is. Putting my "references" in a bibliography-in-the-back would be as ridiculous as asking a blacksmith to replace my automobile's tires. I'm not against the Internet; I'm for making peace with what it means to us as human beings. As Linda Stone said, we've gone from collecting data, to generating information, to collating knowledge, to reaching understanding. The next step, after understanding, is wisdom: not merely anticipating possibility, but choosing with reflection of the consequences. We will not get there if we cannot think deeply. I hope we we all get there, and sooner rather than later.

A thought while writing "Fragmented."

I had this realization while assembling thoughts between Linda Stone's presentation and a recent article that appeared in the Times.

The current iteration of the Internet audience, after fifteen years of being on-line, is now fully connected and knows how to be fully connected. We are not merely informed, we are knowledgable. We are just now emerging into a market where the super-savvy know how to integrate vast amounts of information, how to construct accurate visualizations and abstractions of that information, and can correlate the key elements of than information to make informed decisions. What the audience needs right now is education in understanding what all that knowledge means, in order to anticipate what comes next without fearing they may make an irrevocable mistake.

The previous iterations of our culture have been ones of self-expression ("I am") and then networking ("We are"). We are entering a time where we've learned that over-networking, over-sharing (see: Tell-All Generation Learns to Keep Things Offline), is itself a danger, and just as we had a post-70's hangover, now we're having a post-Facebook hangover. The next challenge is to create the meaningful "we", so that when we network, when we reveal, we know with whom, and why, we are doing so. Winners in this race will be those who most clearly, accurately, and honestly educate (see: Kathy Sierra, You Can Out-Spend, or Out-Teach, the Competition) their users as to what it means to use the offered service.

Does Mark Levin fantasize about watching Dick Morris have fetishistic sex with a hooker?

Omaha sent me on an errand to fetch her some ice cream. In the brief trip, I tuned the radio around the dial and found Mark Levin, listening to the president's address to the nation, MST3K style. President Obama launched into a talk about gulf coast shrimping, and Levin said, "Shrimping. Who could he be talking about? Probably Robert Reich."

No, dear. Our president is talking about an important economic activity. Levin, on the other hand, was probably getting stiff thinking about Dick Morris.

(If you don't want to follow the link: Back in the 90's, Morris was a Democratic campaign advisor to then-President Clinton. Morris was busted during the second campaign for hiring a prostitute, and somewhere in the proceedings it came out that Morris liked to suck on her toes, an activity known as "shrimping.")

As for the subject, hey, I'm just asking.

(Morris is a contributor to Fox news, which has mastered the art of putting out highly antagonistic memes by saying "Hey, I'm just asking." A few hours later, during the "News" segments, a talking head will say "Some people are wondering..." By the end of the 24 hour news cycle other sites with less journalistic integrity and lower risk have started to embellish on the meme.)