Southern Cross

I woke up at three in the morning, hurting and headachy and HUNGRY. The sand was
uncomfortably hot, but my body and my mind were so tired, I must have fallen asleep anyway…at least for a few hours. Now, my stomach was moaning and my muscles were demanding repayment for the energy I had wrung from them all day long. I remembered that I had some heavy Turkish soldiers’ bread (kudam) in the hood of my backpack. Kudam is, by far, the densest bread I have ever eaten. It is said to have nourished the Ottoman Turkish army in their massive conquests hundreds of years ago, and I can see why.


In the starlight of a Red Sea beach somewhere south of al Hudaydah I reached into my bag and let my hand root around like a famished rodent. My fingers quickly found the brick of bread they were feeling for and ripped off a chunk to direct mouthward.

In the dark, I crammed the wad of bread in and started chewing. As I did, it felt like shards of glass were stabbing my tongue and the inside of my lips. I had no idea what was going on, but my self-preservation instinct took over and I spit the bread out faster than I had shoved it in.

My mouth felt like it was on fire and I could not make the feeling go away. I reached around in my backpack and found a small flashlight, which I turned on and aimed at the bolus of bread on the ground. When I looked closely I could see ants in the wet wad of bread. I am not a myrmecologist, so I do not know specifically what kind of ants were chewing on the insides of my mouth, but I can tell you they packed one heckuva bite. My mouth REALLY hurt.

I took the bread out of my backpack and saw that it was indeed crawling with red ants. I threw the bread into the dark of the dunes and cursed.

My friends Nick and Tim and I had decided to take a three-day hike along the Red Sea from near a town called Bayt-al-Faqi north to my “hometown” al Hudaydah. This stretch of Yemen is in what is called the Tihama—the flat coastal plain that often hits 115 degrees in the summer. We had not carried enough water that first day and I had come close to suffering from heat stroke. We were dreadfully unprepared for how tough it was and that first night when I bit into the bread and then the ants bit into me, I wanted to just cry and be back home in my bed. (Not my “home” in al Hudaydah, but my real home back in Delaware with the Wonder Bread down in the bread drawer and the air conditioner set at a comfortable 72.)

Delaware was not an option there on the beach at three a.m. and crying wasn’t making anything better, so eventually I decided to lie back down and try to get back to sleep. The inside of my mouth had swelled up painfully wherever the ants had bitten, but my fears of anaphylaxis proved unfounded. Once I got used to the pain, it actually felt kind of cool in the same way your tongue exploring the soft pulpy gap where a tooth has just fallen out can feel kind of cool.

As I lay flat on my back in the still-too-hot sand, feeling the pain in my mouth slowly subside to an acceptable ache and listening to the small waves on the windless night as they made half-hearted attempts to reach us far up the incline of the beach, I noticed the stars for the first time. We were far from any source of light pollution and the stars were thicker and brighter than any I had ever seen. As I scanned the skies I noticed what could only be the Southern Cross.

And in an odd way, I place my coming of age as an adult at that exact moment. Twenty-two years old, eight thousand miles from home, on a beach in Yemen at three in the morning with some fresh ant bites in my mouth. The full ridiculousness of the situation dawned in me there in the starlight and I had to laugh out loud. My friend Tim asked with a groggy voice what I was laughing at and I just said, “Nothing…go back to sleep.” And that is just what both of us did.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

I have been running on the Farmington Canal trail through Hamden a lot recently. Isabel has gymnastics class several times a week and the trail is a short drive from her gym. This gives me two or three excellent opportunities in the midst of an often-busy workweek to get out and run four or five miles without feeling like I should be somewhere else, doing something else.

Since the New Year, I have seen the same hawk, perched in the same tree, each time I have run the trail. The time of day is always the same, the tree is always the same, and the bird is always the same. I am not really sure how I even saw it the first time. It sits so still and its mottled feathers match the bark of the trunk it tucks up against so perfectly that it is sometimes hard to spot, even though I now know exactly where to look.

I have gotten to the point that I now stop and say hi to the bird. (My daughter thinks this is slightly crazy.)

Each time I have run the trail these past three weeks, it has been cold and often it has been snowy. There have been very few other humans out there in that oddly beautiful little valley running through some fairly developed neighborhoods near some heavily trafficked roads. I have had a lot of time and space and quiet to let my mind wander the way it will during a good run.

Where my mind has wandered lately is to the idea of “change.” New Year’s resolutions are all about making changes. Barack Obama ran hard on the notion of making necessary changes. My wife and I have been contemplating what sorts of changes to make in our lives.

Yet, the status quo has such power and things can feel so frozen.

As I run through that valley and hear the stream gurgling through the snow-covered rocks, it feels like winter will not end. Actually, that doesn’t quite explain the feeling. Rather than winter not ever ending, it feels as if the changes the Earth and Sun need to go through to make winter turn to spring will never happen. It is not a feeling of hopelessness, but rather one of powerlessness. Spring absolutely WILL happen. There is just nothing I can do to make it happen any sooner. And as a result, winter feels like the permanent state of affairs.

A few days ago I thought about getting the hawk’s opinion on this idea but when I stopped to try, one look at him told me he would not understand. One look at him told me that he is patience personified, (or should I say “avified?) That hawk would not want to make spring come any sooner. That hawk is waiting. It is what he does. He waits. Spring comes.

High Plains Running

I went for the craziest ten-mile run of my life this morning. Six inches of cold, powdery snow fell two days ago and then a steady 25 to 30 miles-per-hour wind started blowing from the West. Sometimes after a storm, the wind comes down the East slope of the Rockies and out into the Plains, sweeping everything not tied down out ahead of it. 

The snow streaks across the roads and freezes into a super-slick layer of black ice or gathers into drifts many-inches deep halfway across the lanes of traffic. On a short drive from Billings to Laurel yesterday we passed at least five cars that had spun off the highway and into the ditches on either side of the road. 

I am signed-up to run a half marathon in New Hampshire on February 15, so I am on a training schedule that had me doing a ten-mile run today. It seemed like a good idea for me to get out into the cold and the wind—(mid-February on the coast of New Hampshire might just be the same)—so I put on my new Secret Santa running shorts from my cousin Nicole and an undershirt beneath my running shirt and out the door I went. I got on First Avenue and headed uphill, slowly running my way out of the valley. 

It was very windy and as the road turned slightly east of north, it struck me that the wind that was whipping me along from behind would soon enough be pummeling me from the front when I turned back for the return five miles. The snow from two days ago was still very light and powdery and the wind was such that the blowing snow never got any higher than six inches off of the ground. It whipped across the fields and across the road in a serpentine motion—looking more like smoke or steam than snow. The look of the blowing snow combined with the way it stung my ankles and lower calves to make me think of malicious spirits. 

I was reminded of Tolkein’s description of Ring Wraiths or the movie depiction of Voldemort in the first Harry Potter film—before He Who Shall Not Be Named has found a body to inhabit. There was one advantage to the relentless wind that I could not have predicted in advance of my run. Wildlife on the sides of the road couldn’t hear me coming until I was right next to them. In this way I managed to get within 20 feet of a bald eagle as it stood in the snow and picked at the frozen carcass of a mule deer. When the bird finally saw me it didn’t lurch or panic at all. It fixed me in its sharp yellow eye, held steady for a long moment, and then simply opened its wings into the strong headwind and with a slight change in the angle of its feathers it rose up and drifted away in a graceful arc to the east, out over a stumpy cornfield.

I watched the bird for a long moment and then continued my run. By the time I had gone another quarter mile up the road the eagle had circled back around and was once again tearing chunks off of the roadkill deer. Once I had gone five miles up the road, out of the valley and into the high plains, I had gotten into a rhythm and felt the impulse to just keep running and running and running. 

The land is so big and the sky so open and the morning so extreme that part of me wanted to be extreme, too. What would happen if I just kept going? How far could I go? My body felt like a machine and the motion was hypnotizing. What I really wanted was to be that eagle and be carried on the wind for as long as it would blow. I felt myself disappearing into the landscape—a tiny dot in the vast sage and scrub landscape. 

I had no sense of struggle, no awareness of the cold. I was simply moving and wanted to keep moving. Eventually I turned around, into the wind, and the run became work again. A friendly woman driving by stopped and asked if I wanted a ride back to town. She was apparently moved to pity by the crust of ice coating my lower legs and my beard and mustache. I politely declined her offer and made it back to Grandpa Andy’s house, glad I had made myself go out and sure that my half marathon would be better because of it. I am also glad that I have my memory of that eagle and of the feeling of self-erasure that running can sometimes bring.

Montana Christmas Pictures

Isabel, Erica, and I were all awake by 6:30 Christmas morning. This far north, that is still an hour before sunrise.



















The rest of the extended family was not ready to start in on opening presents right away, so Isabel patiently bide her time watching "A Christmas Story" for the ten thousandth time.












Once everyone else was up, dressed, fed, caffeinated, and ready to go, we got down to the serious business of unwrapping. Isabel was thrilled to get the iPod she has been wishing for.












She also got a skateboard, but because outside looked like this...







...she had to be satisfied by trying it out in the garage.

















We had a good Christmas with lots of friends and food and family and snow. Who could ask for anything more?

I Have Identified the Problem...

“I have identified the problem, I just haven’t made the time to fix it.”

My father-in-law said these words last night as we drove through the cold and dark of Montana on the evening before the Winter Solstice. We were headed east from Billings to Miles City for an early Christmas dinner with fifty of Erica’s closest relatives and the plastic panel next to me was rattling in a way that annoyed us all. I stuffed a pillow between my seat and the panel and the rattling stopped. I hadn’t fixed the problem, but I had stopped the noise.

A few hours later, after consuming about 4000 calories—mostly from butter and sugar—we got in the van and started back for Billings. As I rested my head against the inside of the window, looking for Northern Lights in the fifteen-below-zero degree darkness, Mike’s words came back to me: “I have identified the problem, I just haven’t made the time to fix it.” It struck me that in the larger context of my life, this sentence rings truer than I am strictly comfortable with. But before I could devote any of my overtired, overfull attention to this realization, I fell asleep—my exhalations freezing on the inside of the window into a thick layer of ice by the time I woke up in Billings.

The following morning I forced myself out the door for a four-mile run through air that was struggling (unsuccessfully) to reach zero degrees. As I ran the sweat made its way out through the three layers of clothes I had on and froze as hoarfrost on my legs, chest, back, and beard. To keep my mind off the frigid temperatures, I thought about what Mike had said the night before.

I have been reading some of Carl Jung’s writings about the challenges of mid-life, and this idea of identifying problems and working to make things different and better has been on my mind a lot lately.


Carl Jung identified 5 main phases of midlife:

* Accommodation (meeting others' expectations - actually, this takes place in the first part of life, but is the context in which midlife processes take place)
* Separation (rejecting the accommodated self)
* Liminality (a period of uncertainty, where life seems directionless and meanders)
* Reintegration (working out 'who I am' and becoming comfortable with that identity)
* Individuation (facing up to and accepting the undesirable aspects of our own character)


Along with these phases, (which are often non-linear and overlapping), Jung identifies the main choice adult humans have to make as they enter the second half of their lives. Jung says people can direct the bulk of their energies into conserving what they have created in their lives OR they can continue to be a creative force for change in their own lives.

I am at that exact point of having to make this choice. My mind and heart tell me to choose the second path, but I am finding a lifetime of habit to be a sometimes-powerful obstacle to overcome. I feel just like my father-in-law with his van door: I have identified the problems, I just have to decide whether, when, and how to fix them.