Gram: My Pen Pal

They say the written letter is dead. Tell that to my Gram.

Gram does not have a cell phone. She doesn’t get online. So since I moved to Montana it has become challenging to stay in touch. Gram and I have always been close. Before moving west I never lived more than an hour away from her. When I got my first job at a newspaper in my hometown our office was on the same street as her house. I would drop in, admittedly not as often as I should have for being so nearby, but often enough to know when she would be watching Judge Judy and did not want to be interrupted.

When I moved here almost three years ago we started writing letters. And unlike my childhood pen pal our flow of letters did not decrease over time. In fact it has increased. And like when I was a child and I would see the unfamiliar envelope from overseas handed to me from our pile of mail, I get excited every time I open our mailbox here and see one of Gram’s letters peeking out from the stack of bills, magazines and junk mail. Her neat cursive handwriting grabs me right away.

Sometimes I fall behind. I mailed her a letter a few days ago and the next day was surprised to find a card from her in the mailbox. She wrote to tell me that she had read a book set near Bozeman, Montana. I’m still holding out hope that she’ll come visit me here one day – see the mountains, the big sky, the bighorn sheep, the elk. See my new home. But I realize she may not come. So when she told me about the book she was reading it made me feel closer to her and I think the book probably made her feel closer to me too.

One of my goals is to one day write a book and sometimes I get frustrated with myself for not putting as much time into writing as I should. But recently it occurred to me that my time spent writing to Gram is time very well spent and I can’t think of a better way to spend it. And if the only writing I ever do ends up being letters to my Gram,  well, I can’t think of a better literary accomplishment than that. Anyway, she’s read books about Bozeman already, she doesn’t need me to write those for her.

The Best Little Steelers Haunt in Montana

Steelers fans are never surprised to find a bar or restaurant sporting the Black and Gold.

They’re everywhere. In every nook and cranny of the country with Terrible Towels fluttering from the walls, old pictures from the 1970s and today and dusty Iron City beer bottles lined up above the bar.

Growing up in Western Pennsylvania I’m used to the familiar scene. That’s why a couple of summers ago while driving through Cooke City, Montana, a tiny town where there are probably more snowmobiles in the winter than there are cars, a modest Steelers tent surprisingly caught my eye.

Cooke City is no ordinary place. When I looked it up on Wikipedia it said as of the 2000 census 140 people and 27 families lived there. And as the old saying goes – if you blink when you’re driving through you may miss it. We arrived in Cooke City after driving through Yellowstone National Park en route to the Beartooth Pass (10,947 feet high, according to Wikipedia) where in mid-August snowflakes clung to our windshield and we had to wait for a herd of sheep to cross the craggy road in front of us.

A little Steelers tent propped beside one of the low-slung buildings that crowded against the town’s main drag seemed to jump out at us, kind of like a Where’s Waldo game. Either my husband or I gave the order to stop the car and we got out and took a picture, marveling at the oddity of a familiar friend in the middle of nowhere. Had we not been in such a hurry to get on our way on the Beartooth Highway (reportedly dubbed “the most beautiful drive in America by Charles Kuralt) we would have stopped in for a beer and checked out the digs.

A little searching online told me that Buns “N” Beds was indeed a Steelers fan friendly place. A picture of the smiling staff on the restaurant’s website confirmed it with Steelers swag hanging in the background, complete with a sign that read “Pittsburgh Steelers Car Parking Only” posted above one woman’s shoulder.

I thought of this little friendly looking place when the Steelers made it to the Super Bowl this year. Wouldn’t it be fun to watch the game there, I thought. Stop in, have a beer and a sandwich, enjoy the game with some other fans.

There’s something surreal about being 2,000 miles away from home and seeing an eatery, one of the only buildings in town, sporting your team’s colors. It makes you feel like the world isn’t as big as it sometimes seems. It makes you feel like you have a friend you didn’t know about. Now, if they do win, I will definitely have to make it a point to get back to Buns “N” Beds in Cooke City for a celebratory beer! Go Steelers!

Sweating it out

I am a puddle.

The tops of my feet. My forearms. My face. My fingertips. They are all sweating.

I grew up working in a dry cleaners where we threw open the doors in winter to cool the place down, where big industrial fans were used to circulate air, make it cooler. And I have never sweated like this. I don’t realize exactly just how much I’ve sweated until I stumble into the changing room on floating, delirious feet and realize there is not an inch of my clothing that’s not dripping. Even my towel is soaked through. And I guzzle water.

I opted for the first time in my life to take yoga. I have run hundreds of miles over the years but always been intimidated by the stretchy well-balanced students of yoga. Their flexibility. Their calm inner well-being as opposed to my high-energy-Irish-punk-music therapy of a good run. So when presented with the idea of Bikram’s Yoga (aka – “hot yoga”  at 105 degrees and 40 percent humidity), I realized this was the yoga for me. I consider something that doesn’t intensify my heart rate and burn calories or teach me something a waste of time. So it took a lot to convince myself that I should spend 90 minutes touching my toes and focusing on the wall. But this kind of yoga fulfills both of those requirements.

One week and four classes in I must say that I haven’t felt better. I feel strong. I feel focused. I feel good. I feel physically and emotionally better. And it feels good.

I still feel like I may pass out during the first few minutes every time, but you always get past that point.

“No one has ever died taking Bikram’s Yoga,” the instructor joked during one of my first classes.

“Nope, and no one ever died growing up in a dry cleaners,” I thought to myself, droplets of sweat diving past my eyes as they stayed, focused against the wall.

Going the distance

So tonight I started a post about skiing, or more accurately about my inability to ski. But before I knew it I was researching marathons.

You see, I’ve been researching marathons for a couple of years now, ever since I got back into running after a long hiatus that extended from when I quit my college track team through my mid-20s. Now I’m back lacing up the shoes and couldn’t be happier.

But there’s one thing that mars my love affair with the open road and the pounding of my feet against the ground: the marathon. It looms in front of my like an undone task on a to-do list. Taunting me. Shaking its disappointed head at me. Making me feel as though there’s something I’m avoiding.

It’s right. I have been avoiding it.

I remember my first race after moving to Bozeman. It was my first race in years. It was 5K at the end of summer at Montana State University. I remember doubting myself, wondering if I could do it. But I did. At the end I thanked a woman who I had paced myself behind. “You kept me going,” I told her as I rested my hands on my thighs and gasped for breath. And in the last couple years since being here I’ve bumped it up to 10Ks and even a half marathon. But not yet the marathon.

One of the benefits to getting older is the ability to realize things about yourself. So in addition to the realization that I have been ignoring the nagging pull of the marathon, I also realize that I am more likely to do things if I tell someone first (like how my coworker Dan and I announced we are doing the PostAWeek challenge on WordPress.) So this is me making myself accountable, telling whoever reads this that I’ll run a marathon this year.

Happy trails! … Now if only I could get better about blogging more often.

Panning for gold

This summer my parents came to visit.

It was their second trip here since I moved here two and a half years ago. The first time they were here I had just gotten here myself, so my tour guide abilities were limited. That’s why when they decided to come again this summer, the third summer I was here, I decided to make up for the first time when I just walked them down Main Street, took them to Yellowstone then called it good.

As their visit approached, I became more and more desperate to decide upon activities they would enjoy and that would “make” their trip. But it was my husband, not me, who arrived at the perfect activity for my dad – panning for gold.

He was right. My dad has talked about panning for gold for years. He’s a history buff, and since I’ve moved here he’s become more and more interested in the past happenings of the West. He’s the guy who returns home from vacation with a camera full of pictures of old graveyards and grassy expanses that signs inform him were once battlefields.

I didn’t even know panning for gold was still an activity that people did. But I was wrong. There’s a store in downtown Bozeman that specializes in gems, rocks and other things that emerge from the earth. It also has the equipment to collect your own things from the earth – like gold.

So when Mom and Dad got here we headed down there. We got a little black pan with ridges that you use for shaking sand and water in the hopes of shaking it around enough to uncover some gold.

After collecting the equipment, we headed out behind my house. When we got to a creek a couple miles back we stopped, took off our shoes and waded in. It was a chilly, overcast summer day. My mom, who was acting as Newfoundland wrangler, started snapping pictures.

We shook the pan around in the shimmery sand and there it was – gold! Tons of gold flakes began to shake free from the sand in our pan. We got excited. We picked them out carefully, flake by flake, and slid them into the little plastic bag that holds my fishing license (by the way, that’s the most action my fishing license got all summer).

We collected gold flakes until we couldn’t feel our feet any longer. The fishing license bag glimmered triumphantly.

Now, we both knew it was probably fool’s gold, or maybe not even that. But afterward my dad was cold and happy. He said something about crossing an item off his “bucket list.”

I walked to that creek many times throughout the summer, but now it has special meaning to me. The pan is sitting ready in my basement stairway waiting for their next trip. Now I just have to think of the perfect activity for my mom. Maybe I’ll ask my husband.

 

Write on Time

Twenty minutes. That’s all I have to write something. That’s the Blogoff.

My coworker, Dan, proposed this idea to me last week. Blog for 20 minutes a day. Every day. For a week. He called it the Blog-a-Day Challenge. I called it a Blogoff.

But what Dan doesn’t know is that I’m a master of deadlines. You see, if I can put something off for hours, days, weeks, years then I will. But if someone tells me I have to have something done at a certain time, I’ll get it done.

I’m a procrastinator to the point that if I have, say, 24 hours to do something, I’ll probably wait until the last possible minute to start it. I’ll take a nap, read something, drink some tea, until eventually I look at the clock and start getting antsy. It’s like I have a special procrastination clock in my head that can calculate the time I need to complete any task. When I enter a task, it tells me how long it will take then I know just how long I can put it off.

For example, take my senior comprehensive project (aka – The Comp). Most people took a year to do their projects. But not me. I crammed a year’s worth of work into two weeks. Two sleepless, candy-filled weeks in the computer lab. And after I emerged, Bam!  I had produced some garbled mess about J.D. Salinger. OK, so it wasn’t my best work, but I got it done and they handed me a diploma a short time later.

My next deadline came soon after when it occurred to me that I was nearing the end of college and I needed a job. Funny, it hadn’t crossed my mind until about April or May of my senior year that I would soon be left outside the gates of Allegheny College with a diploma and a pile of student loans to pay off. By the time I realized I was going to need a job soon, many of my fellow classmates were already pursuing their employment options. It was like they were planning all along to get a job after college. That’s funny, I thought, I just realized it now.

Luckily, I landed myself a job that thrived on deadlines – I accepted a position as a newspaper reporter. Each day I had a certain amount of time to get something done, and I did. No more of these loose, liquid timelines for me, not in the world of news.

Now, at least when I’m at work, I can hang up my special procrastination calculating clock. It’s been replaced with an end-of-day deadline clock that seems to serve me much better.

So bring on your 20-minute deadline blog contest, Dan. I’ve been preparing for this for years! Now if I could just start writing more creative headlines.

 

Fending off bears with show tunes

Something people who don’t live in Montana find interesting is that we carry bear spray.

I discovered this during a recent trip back East. I’m not even kidding when I say that I’ve had to explain to some people where exactly Montana is located on a map. So, I wasn’t that surprised when my tales about hiking in the woods with a giant can of pepper spray strapped to my chest, ready to take on a grizzly bear, were met with interest and surprise.

But what I didn’t tell them is how I REALLY keep bears away. I whistle. More specifically, I whistle “Fugue for Tinhorns” from the musical Guys and Dolls.

I don’t know how this song became my predator repellant. I didn’t even know the name of it until I Googled it. But somewhere along the way it got stuck in my head, and unlike the many people who complain when a song gets stuck there, I’m rather enjoying mine. I mean, it’s only there when I’m trying to ward off bears and other things like, say, mountain lions, anyway.

I vaguely remember seeing Guys and Dolls in a seemingly vast and now mentally fuzzy high school gymnasium. I was probably in grade school at the time. But I can’t imagine that that’s the only time I heard the song. I mean, come on, it was probably 20 years ago.

But here it is, stuck in my head every time I start to get a little nervous alone in the woods. Then I start whistling.

These are the words that run through my head as I run through the national forest behind my house or hike along the trail up to Lava Lake or Storm Castle: “I got the horse right here. The name is Paul Revere. And here’s a guy that says if the weather’s clear. Can do, can do. This guy says the horse can do.”

That’s really all I know. But it’s really enough to keep me going, several times over, for the duration of my trip.

I was whistling this song to myself one Sunday as I was running on the trail behind my house. The trail is a switchback that leads to a mountain ridge. It levels off at the ridge then starts switchbacking down the other side, down to a creek. It’s beautiful. And it’s, at times, secluded. So, surrounded by thick, dense trees, I began whistling “Fugue for Tinhorns” to myself and to the mountain lions I pictured lurking behind the pines. I also had on my bear spray, and, as I ran, it bounced uncomfortably against my chest, to the point that I had to hold it with one hand.

That’s when I came upon a man on a horse.

The man commented on my large can of bear spray. (He apparently hadn’t heard my whistling). He casually but matter-of-factly told me that he’d been attacked by a grizzly bear and pointed to a thick scar slashed across his cheek. He then went on to explain that he was the guy who owns the company that makes my bear spray. He was the guy from the pamphlet. The guy that took a picture of his face right after the attack, then went on to develop the high-octane pepper spray that many of us carry through the woods and feel safer by doing so. He included the picture of himself all bloody with his face torn apart in with the directions on how to use the spray.

According to a story I read about him, he had to use pepper spray on the bear he encountered. Actually, according to the story, it was his friend who pulled out the spray as the man was being attacked. It was apparently the only thing that saved the man (now on a horse in front of me) from being mauled to death by the grizzly.

After a short conversation, he again commented on my large can of bear spray. Maybe the largest one his company made, he said. I told him how my husband bought it for me as a gift, a not very romantic gift, I joked. And the man on the horse disagreed.

What I didn’t tell him is that, in my mind, the bear spray, for me, isn’t enough, so I whistle, convinced that this is a more powerful repellant to giant, hungry predators of the animal variety.

So if you’re out in the woods and hear a signature tune from a 1950s Broadway musical echoing through the trees, don’t worry, it’s just me. You’ll also recognize me by my large can of bear spray.