Stars' Landing

Marci: I think the Venn diagram of people who snowmobile at night and people who watch the Super Bowl is basically a circle.

I accidentally joined a weekend 5k challenge on the Garmin app. (I mean, I joined it on purpose, but I thought it was walking 5k over the course of the weekend, and it turned out to be running 5k all at once. Or, as Aaron says, "I did a marathon once: one mile every day for a month.")

Also when I posted something about goals last weekend I definitely mentioned kicksledding, although I can't remember if it was a goal or just a random comment, but let me tell you about kicksledding in New England, about which I know almost nothing. I know it's harder than I expected to actually get a kicksled here, because apparently the US isn't snowy enough to readily distribute kicksleds to every corner of the country.

(In the movie "The Day After Tomorrow," what was the line above which they wrote off the population? I thought it was an actual latitude line, but the internet tells me it was just "everything north of Washington DC." Seems like that's enough of the country to have kicksleds, to me.)

Anyway, Canada makes them, but because of tariffs won't ship them to the US. Alaska will ship them but you have to meet the plane at the airport. Minnesota will ship a kit to your door, which is how I ended up building my own kicksled from a kit in our living room.

The point is, I'd only taken the sled out once, and I was in this challenge anyway, and it seemed like kicksledding was enough like running to count, so I put on a lighted vest, turned on the GPS for "trail run," and went out on the river in the dark. (I mean, with a phone, and only after telling my sister where I was going.) It was fun.

I took a selfie as I started, and thought about the picture of the woman in front of a snow leopard with the headline "Chilling Selfie Taken Moments Before Woman Mauled By Snow Leopard." She shouldn't have turned her back, right? One year at Arisia I walked to the New England Aquarium and watched an IMAX movie about free diving with sharks. Literally the only thing I remember from it was someone saying "You never turn your back on a shark. We always dive in threes so someone's always watching behind you."

The first time I took the sled out I said it pulled to the right (probably because I tightened one of the crossbars too much, or not enough) but this time I started to get the hang of turning and realized I probably just lean left and therefore push the sled right. Especially when you're brand-new to an activity, it's hard to know what's you and what's the equipment.

I remembered when I was in high school my mom brought home a pair of "Zetrablades" from the library, some non-Rollerblade brand inline skates that the librarian had bought and then not used, so she was giving them away or selling them in the sports swap or something, I don't remember. In fact my whole memory of this is vague and may be completely wrong, but I think my mom thought inline skating was something I would like.

If that's true, it turns out she was right, because I loved it. (I still love it, just less actively than I once did.) I wore those Zetrablades for years and wrote my college admission essay about skating. (At night, which I now realize is appropriate to this story.) In college I bought myself some K2s, which were a tremendously better quality pair of skates, and I loved them even more. I skated everywhere on campus: to class, to work, through the student building, through all the science buildings, downtown. There was an 18+ skate night at a rink in the next town where they told me, "You can only go as fast as you can stop if someone falls down in front of you," which was honestly great life advice.

But the point is, having good skates improved my experience, but it wasn't required for me to know I loved skating. Multiple times in my life I have said, or supported other people saying, "even if you don't like an activity, you might like it if you had different equipment." (Driving, this comes up a lot with driving. "You just haven't driven the right car yet." And dating, weirdly. Maybe those are different.) I no longer think that's true, although now that I've introduced dating to the conversation I'm just gonna drop it and move on.

While I was out with the sled I thought about the lights people leave on to find their way home (we do this on the docks in the summertime, and I saw a few lights left out by tracks on the river tonight). I thought about what the path I took looks like with less snow and more ice, and what it looks like when it's just water. And I thought about the books I remember reading in middle school, though I can't remember why.

Oh, because I was cataloguing the things I'd done right and wrong when it comes to being safe in the wilderness at night. I wore some of the right clothes and some of the wrong ones, I packed an emergency backpack but I didn't bring it, I had a light on my back but not on my front (genuinely don't know what I was thinking to not bring a headlamp; I ended up taking my light harness off and draping it over the sled so I could see where I was going). I told my sister where I was going and when I would check in, but the path I followed wasn't marked except that it was in the middle of the river, which I can tell you from past experience is much easier to mess up than you'd think.

(I went way off course on a winter night run much like this one a few years back - I was relaying what I thought my location was to my sister as I went, and when I got back she was like, "I have no idea where you were; you shouldn't have been able to go that far without seeing the railroad bridge." I think we checked my GPS and realized I'd gone right instead of left around an island I missed in the dark, and because of that I almost ended up going in circles on my way back, except a house had left Christmas lights on their porch and I recognized it when I passed it the second time.)

Anyway, I try to remember it's easier to die than we sometimes think, since most of us haven't done it before, and that made me wonder if reading Denise Lopes Heald's Mistwalker (amazon link) as a teenager impressed on me principles of survival in the wilderness. I mean, not practical ones, I'm sure that comes from doing stupid things in the wilderness myself and then hearing about other people who died from them, but conceptually, what I remember about that book is that there are a lot of things you can get used to that can still kill you.

Like I was in Colorado for work a few times, and I wanted to go hiking, but the internet was very alarmist about scorpions and rattlesnakes (good thing the internet wasn't such a thing when I went out there with sekitou back in the dark ages, I'm sure I climbed at least one of those mountains barefoot), so I asked some of my coworkers if I should be worried. One of them was like, oh please, if we worried about rattlesnakes around here we'd never do anything.

This did not clarify for me whether I was supposed to step ON or OVER fallen logs in order to avoid disturbing rattlesnakes, but it did reassure me that Rabbit Mountain (previously named, I kid you not, Rattlesnake Mountain) was not at the top of the list of things that might kill me on that trip.

After I remembered Mistwalker, I tried to figure out which other childhood books would come immediately to mind: Janet Kagan's ST: TOS Uhura's Song, Diane Duane's ST: TOS The Wounded Sky, and Diane Carey's ST: TNG Ghost Ship were the next three I thought of.

Anyway, spoiler, I didn't die, and also it was really fun. I should make a goals post so I can note the 100% increase in kicksledding this year.