The Liminal Line

liminal: of, or relating to, the state in-between
Saturday
06Mar2010

Post Op

DateSaturday, March 6, 2010 at 11:47AM

Osito with Golden Retriver's (his favorite non-poodle breed) pictured above as inspiration for healingLast year, during my first winter in New Hampshire, I made the mistake of asking what one does for culture in North Conway. Not that wanting culture in North Conway is a mistake--you can want it--you’re just not supposed to admit you want it. Especially not to someone like Freddie.

         When I slipped last winter and inquired about culture, Freddie and I were in a car driving back from climbing. I don’t remember what spurred me to ask him, but I do remember his answer: “That’s what we come here to get away from,” he said.

         I used the same line to my father last week. This time, I was the one defending New Hampshire. No one in my family has ever spent time in New England. They don’t get New England. I can’t say I do yet either, but I’m trying.         

         I have a mechanic here, I have a good coffee shop, and I have friends. I have a vet that drives me home from his office when my car won’t start the night after my poodle’s knee surgery. The night my poodle was supposed to spend in the hospital, the night my vet called and told me that the poodle was in no uncertain terms willing to spend the night away from his mother.

         Said poodle had just received the single most expensive operation he will have in his lifetime. He has a bionic knee now, of sorts. It was not the most practical decision of my life; knee surgery on an elderly dog with cancer is seldom referred to as practical.  But it wasn’t my life I was making the decision for. It was partially the poodles, and partially something greater.

 

         In the weeks it took me to decide to do the surgery, I watched Osito and processed the sinking feeling that loosing him will be the final bracket to a period of intense loss in my life. I resigned myself to this. I saw it. And then I saw it differently.

         This was something I could do something about. I could not go back and save any of my friends from getting killed, I could not change the course of their actions, say good bye to my grandmother, learn more French to tell her how much I admired her, stop the storm from coming or Charley from going. But I could fix the poodle.

         Rehab: Yes, that is a Zeebra in the crateSo I did. Ostio went into surgery and came out with a 15-pill regime for antibiotics, chemo, painkillers, and the one extra pill he has to take to make sure he doesn’t upchuck the other pills. The night he was supposed to spend at the hospital there was a party in town for Freddie’s engagement to Janet. All of my friends would be there. It was the NH culture event of the winter. The vet called as we were heading out the door.

         Poodle parents are not supposed to see their dogs when they are sedated and 4 hours post knee surgery. But Osito was determined. He was tearing his paws on the kennel door.  I brought him home with a leaky backside, glazed eyes, new lampshade cone, and a sling to hold up his rear end. I changed from my party clothes into my loungewear. I lay down next to the poodle and iced his knee. Together we shared a box of Annie’s Mac and Cheese, the organic kind because that is his favorite. We went to bed at 9.

 

An over-examined life threatens the chances of being content. I write this as if I understand and live this belief. I’m far from it. But every now and again, I get a part of it. I get that culture might not be what surrounds you weather you access it or not, but that instead, it might be what engulfs you when you need it. It might be the half-dozen friends who sign up to carry the poodle up and down the stairs, medicate him, and tell him, as suggested, that he really is the most handsome poodle in the world while you’re gone at work in Montana. It might be your mechanic suggesting that washing your van would be the first step in protecting it from the northeastern salt-erosion. It might be finding a support network away from home in your boyfriend’s family—for yourself, the poodle, and for him as he single-parents the poodle for a week by himself. And it might be learning that my kind of culture, this year, is somehow tied to a 60-pound poodle who’s two weeks post-op, and kicking ass.



AuthorMajka Burhardt | Comment4 Comments |
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Monday
25Jan2010

Terminal Effervescence

DateMonday, January 25, 2010 at 03:08PM

Returning Home to the Portland, Maine AirportI started skipping winter without knowing it, a few years back. Today, 1.5-inches of rain into the New Hampshire afternoon, I’m making up for what I missed. The poodle has to go outside to go to the bathroom, and I promised him I’d take him once the rain let up. That was three hours ago. I’d let him out to go by himself, but all he’d do is wait for me at the top of the stairs, his back right leg permanently kipped up in protest against the pain.

This dog is teaching me lessons. They likely all do. Three weeks ago, I held all 60-pounds of him on my lap in the vet office in North Conway. The last time we were there was ten months prior, for what turned out to be a floating bone in his neck. When Dr Alfred asked this time how we are, I tried to let the information out gently. In between talking about Osito’s sudden limp and the skiing that day, I let it slip that he was diagnosed with cancer.

Later, I called three different vet offices to all fax their records over. I pictured a giant spool of information finally coalescing in New England. Surgery in Jackson, check ups in Boulder, drugs in Bozeman. I didn’t even tell the vet, himself, about Bozeman, I just tacked it on to the list for the receptionist, hoping no one would notice what suddenly seemed to be not, as I had envisioned it, the perfect life of a poodle who got to join his mom in the world, but the clear trail of evidence of a poodle trying to keep up.

 

NH Recovery ModeA week of leash walks, no deep snow, and opium (for the poodle) later, I left North Conway at 3:30 am and headed east to go west. I distrust anyone else who is driving at that hour. I always want to know where they are going and what business they have. But that morning, I am the one with faded license plates from 2200 miles away affixed to a large white van.

I listened to a rocky mountain serenade compiled by my Montana mother who wanted me to move to Bozeman as I passed towns I still cannot pronounce like Ossipee and Moultonborough. The aussie man on my GPS had a better new England accent than I did and I muted him in retaliation.

 

When I was seven, my father married my stepmother. I sang Don’t Fence Me In at their wedding. In someone’s defense (mine? theirs? the piano players?) it was one of my best numbers at the time. I repeated it that morning on my mother’s mix. I repeated it again for the rest of the ninety-minute drive.

 

12 days, three speaking events, one Waypoint Namibia film premier later, I came home to New England. I knew I was home because I have a toaster oven. I would never buy one, but the beauty of renting your 6th home in a year is that you’ll eventually have one anyway. The poodle, with his limp and his chemo greeted me at the door. His regimen of eight pills at three different daily intervals was chronicled in the spreadsheet I’d printed out as a checklist when I left. According to the vet, the poodle should have been putting weight on his back leg by now. Instead, he had perfected the hop-along canine routine. Within days we were back at the vet clinic so that I could understand just how to be a mother to a cancer-fighting poodle with a bum knee.

 

Waiting in the office, I looked at Osito and asked him what he wanted. Would you be a happier poodle out west? East? Here? There? With each place I offered, his head tilted a bit more. Sri Lanka? Could he even see me through the tunnel of hair surrounding his eyes? By the time Dr. Alfred came in I had embraced the life stability that would come from the poodle’s terminal cancer. I pictured one home with one bed in which he would be surrounded by endless stuffed jungle animals to accompany him during his last months.

 

An hour later, the poodle was knocked out with a metal bar spanning his mouth. Dr. Alfred pulled out his tongue and Osito’s eyes rolled back. There was no more tumor. Not to the eye. Terminal cancer was suddenly conditional.

 

On the drive home I started up the CD player and Bing sang us home. It’s been twenty-five years and I still had no idea what a Cayuse is. I sang it anyways, and when I got home, I carried the poodle up the stairs and cut the hair around his eyes, going too close so that he now looks constantly surprised.

 

That was three days ago.

 

It’s still raining outside, today. It’s time to heft him down the stairs. One day, soon, I have to decide what to do about his leg. I have to decide what to do about our home. But for now, I’m carrying him into the rain and won’t stop him when he heads straight for the deep snow.



AuthorMajka Burhardt | Comment3 Comments |
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Sunday
20Dec2009

Transitions in Paradox

DateSunday, December 20, 2009 at 12:36PM

Where I started: Jima Airport, SW EthiopiaThree weeks ago I flew from southwestern Ethiopia to central Montana, in six flights. When I arrived at the Bozeman airport, at 11:45 pm. I’d been traveling for thirty-eight hours. It was -5 degrees outside, a 75-degree drop from where I’d started. My van, choked full of a winter’s assortment of climbing gear, files, and poodle food, was waiting in the parking lot. Peter and I tossed in our bags and, when the sliding door would not stay shut because of the cold, I held it closed on the drive to what would become our home for the next twenty-two days.

The next morning, mid-unpack, jetlagged, and missing my gloves, I met Gretchen, a friend of a friend for coffee.  I warned her of my state in my greeting. “This might be a bad idea,” I said. “I’m probably about as least like myself, or most like myself, as I could be.”

Gretchen smiled compassionately. “Transitions are always hard.”

This was the right thing to say, and true. I felt better from the validation. But then I thought about the coming months of homestead auditions in Bozeman and North Conway, and the previous months in Jackson, Boulder, aMidway: Spa in Addis Ababa, Ethiopiand Africa.  I’m not sure what that right ratio of excuse to action is, but it stands to reason that the 50% threshold is one not to exceed for the former.

When I first learned how to be a mountain guide, my mentor repeated one word more than any other: transitions. Transitions were the single difference between climbing and guiding, and the efficiency and ease with which you managed your transitions would be what set you apart as a great guide. Transitions were not something to use as a crutch, but something to master.  Transitions were not a state in which to wallow, or a state in which to call up your friends and tell them, for the sixth time that year, that you just couldn’t seem to switch time zones, climate zones, or terrain zones.

My father says I have always had a plan. As a kid I used to plan out our Saturdays with the most efficient order of errands, schematically maneuvering us between Target, the grocery store, the bookstore and the ice cream shop where I had a crush on the head scooper. Granted, it’s harder to manage all of adulthood so it lines up just so, but I certainly try.

Tomorrow I start packing up from Bozeman to head to North Conway. Last night on TV, Peter and I watched an ad for the Space Bag. For $19.95 we can compress our lives into ¼ the size. We just need a vacuum. They provide the plastic bags. This might be the new solution to cross country travel. I considered buying it just to fit in with the other TV shoppers in the world—some skewed sign of stability. And then I considered buying it as a way to perpetuate my increasing justification for the stuff that I deem necessary to buttress all of this movement. This time around, I have two printers and a giant ball chair. We’re not even going to talk about the climbing and skiing gear. Right now I’m running in a dead heat between everything being in use in a home and packed in the van.  But instead of calling the 1-888 number, I went to bed.

Last Stop: Bozeman Ice Festival, 2009It’s raining this morning in Bozeman. In the time I have been here, I have learned that I could call this town home. I’ve learned that the space between stability and permanence might only be in my head. I’ve learned that each friend I lose in the mountains hurts more than the next. And maybe I’ve learned that the real unspoken challenge is the transition from the transition. It’s the let down after the conquering of logistics. It’s the moment when you’re back in your tent with no other task to manage than the questions in your own head about the choices you are making each time you step outside. It’s the morning you wake up and realize that the only place you have to go that day is toward a more complete understanding of why you are where you are.



AuthorMajka Burhardt | Comment7 Comments |
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Saturday
14Nov2009

Common Denominator

DateSaturday, November 14, 2009 at 01:09AM

The trouble with having a blog is a sudden desire to take basic elements like your decision to go to Africa with shoes that suddenly feel too small, how to fix the squeak of your van with a wooden spatula, the death of your grandmother, the unexpected appearance of antivenin five months after you needed it, and an utter sense of self-imposed displacement equal only to the sleep-deprived elation of a new project, and put it together in a pithy way as some sort of logical explanation of life.

         Instead, I think I might just talk about the rodents. They were the least expected. On Monday I gave my first talk about Namibia at Colorado College. Somewhere between addressing the conservation work and the climbing, I talked about snuggling rodents. It was not planned.

    Up on the screen, there was a shot of Peter excavating what he later coached me to say “a large pothole.” Up on stage, however, I looked at the sunken muddy hole in the ground and all that came to mind was a coffin, for a raccoon.

     I’m relatively good at thinking on my feet. I knew I should not talk about raccoon coffins with this crowd, and I should really not mention the coffin thought as a launch point to explain just why I have a current propensity to think of things from the lens of loss and the mechanics of death.

    So instead I did what any well-trained public speaker would do.

    “And this here,” I said, “is a hole that is just big enough for two little rodents to crawl inside…and snuggle each other.”

    I flipped to the next slide. Beforehand, I may or may not have used my laser pointer to illuminate said snuggle spot. Soon, I was back to the subject at hand—Namibia. I would have fully forgotten about the slip had it not been for Peter.  A few hours later, driving north on I-25, he leaned over and patted my knee the way you do to someone whom you love, but someone who needs to be set straight. “Sweetie,” he said, “what was up with the rodents?”

 

    72 hours later, I’m in Minneapolis, at dinner with my father and stepmother. It is hour six of a twenty-four hour stopover en-route to Ethiopia. My dad and I have been planning on this time, and he, as he put it, wanted to “take my pulse." Since I was a child, I have understood this to be a poorly translated Polish expression for: grill your daughter.

   My father starts by placing his elbows on the table and stretching his fingers.

   “So, you left your house in Boulder,” he says, wiggling his pinky finger to represent, I am to understand, Colorado, “drove to Montana…”

   I nod.

   “And now you have a home in Montana?” he asks. His pinky is straight, and still, perhaps to represent northward movement.

     “I will,” I say, “For December.”

    His thumb starts wiggling. “And then, a home in New Hampshire?”

    I want to point out that if, technically, the pinky is Colorado then the thumb as NH makes no sense, and if NH is the thumb, then California should be the pinky, but certainly not Colorado.

   “Not yet,” I say, “But Peter is working on it.”

   His other hand starts to levitate and I know it’s about to be Africa. 

   “I know it’s hard to track me,” I say.

   My father smiles. He loves when I make his point for him. He grows quiet as he reaches across the table to hold my hands in his. “I just want to make sure this is what makes you happy.” And before I can reply, he adds, “It can’t make you happy. It is too much real estate.”

    Though my father has never lived in Boulder, he, like many who live there, think of it as the center of universe. His daughter leaving that center seems unfathomable. We debate this, on 50th and Penn in south Minneapolis, 4,671 miles from, and ten hours past, the death of my grandmother in the my father’s family home in Warsaw, Poland.

        

    Two weeks ago, Peter and I were heading toward our second take on a fall vacation. (You can read about our first at Edge Dweller). We were five hours toward Moab when my neighbor Sally called to say her husband Charley was not likely to make it another day.

   In the last stretches of daylight, Peter and I had ensconced our hands in white athletic tape and blended the seams together to forge some layer of protection from the anticipated stone. Four empty shells looked out on the dashboard the whole way back to Boulder. Charley died the next day. For the following weeks, I packed up my house and touched every item I own as if shifting possession like sand through my hands. With each trip outside, I looked across the street and saw some memory of Charley. If he were there, he would have weighed in on my packing strategy. He knew about my plan, and he would not have been surprised that I had four piles in my bedroom: Montana, Ethiopia, NH, and Boulder.

   Charley will never meet my dad, but if they had, they would have had four hands to track me on, instead of two.

 

   Maybe there is a phone app somewhere that will make sense of this all. It could graph me, predict me, explain to my father why his daughter, the one that was so hell bent on building a home and having all of her things in one place when she was 21, now asks him to please hold onto her childhood dollhouse for just a while longer because she has no where to put it.

   I don’t remember if, when I was little, I played house with singular focus, or if I made that house a home in a dozen different lands and landscapes. Or maybe I was like my niece and nephew who yesterday took my hands and led me into an entire mansion inside the space of my father’s guest bedroom. We had a kitchen, a garage with plenty of bikes, two dog beds, lions, and rocks to climb.

 

   Right now I’m in Amsterdam. There is an automated female voice telling Ashtan Koohleny that he is delaying the flight of a plane to Dubai. If he does not come soon, they will proceed to offload his luggage. They don’t threaten like this in Denver.

   Two flights to Warsaw have departed since I arrived. I am going to Addis Ababa, by way of Khartoum. My grandmother’s funeral is next week. My father will return to the land he left when he was twenty-one and start the process of understanding a new life without a mother, as a man who’s lived his whole adulthood away from his motherland. 

    And in the meantime, I will arrive in a foreign and familiar land. After this trip, I will have spent four and a half months in Ethiopia in the past four years. If you graphed it, it would be just as much of a home as I’ve had in that time.

    My life is about to consist of bright red coffee cherries and hot African sun. I'd be lying if I didn't say I was in it, right now, for the buzz.

AuthorMajka Burhardt | Comment8 Comments |
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Sunday
25Oct2009

Edge Dweller

DateSunday, October 25, 2009 at 10:09AM

Cathedral Ledge, Photo by Peter DoucetteYou might not believe what I’m going to tell you. You might—if you have read things I have written in the past months—think I have some perverse law of attraction with tragedy. But maybe the truth of it is that I am trying to turn the tragedy around. When you find a dead body on your second day of vacation, you might have no other choice.   

    Peter and I were in New Hampshire when it happened. We’d spent the day climbing cracks at Cathedral ledge that started off wet at the bottom, behind the shade of trees, and turned crisp and dry when the sun hit their full depths up higher. By four we’d ditched our packs in the car and walked along the base to survey other routes. The ground was spongy with slick roots and cavernous leaf piles.

    Peter saw him first, and put out his arm the way you do when you careen to a stop in the car, and you’re the driver, stopping, and want to keep the passenger safe, even though you know your arm will never accomplish that on it’s own.

    I walked right through his arm. I walked closer to the man’s crumpled and twisted body knowing I might never forget the image or the experience, but knowing it was part of my life already. Over the next two hours, we brought rescuers to the man and ran trips up and down the trail with supplies. Each time I returned, the man became real to me as a father or a brother, or a husband with the receipt from the hardware store still in his back jean pocket. He was not a climber, though I automatically envisioned him one with sticky rock shoes and a harness full of unplaced gear.  In the end, he was a man who’d driven to the top of the cliff the day before and made the choice to never return home.

                                                                            ----

    A few nights before I left for New Hampshire, I went to an impromptu anniversary celebration at my neighbors. Sally and Charley were toasting their 37th year surrounded by a group of seven friends—none of whom were married. Charley held court on this fact, shaking his head at the rest of us in our 30’s and 40’s at some point along the decision course.

  “Just get over it, already,” he said. “That’s what we did.”

    Sally told a story about their meeting and Charley piped in about the dress she was wearing. Sally corrected him. Charley turned to the group: “See that?” he asked. “ I have two choices. I can argue about it, or,” he shrugged his shoulders, “just say, I love her. That’s marriage—if you do it right.”

    I met Sally and Charley four years ago in Mexico. They enveloped me into their makeshift family via surf lessons complete with stick figures drawn in the hot sand. It was two months after my marriage had ended. Since then, they have been my stalwart friends through singlehood, dating, and partnering. They know me. And that is why, at the end of the night of talking about choices and partnership, Charley looked right at me when he offered his last bit of advice. 

    “That’s what’s wrong with you people in your thirties,” he said, “you all think too much.”

                                                                        ----

    Cathedral Ledge, New Hampshire, is not a stranger to suicide. The cliff stands sentinel on the flank of town and you can drive to the top and walk a few hundred feet to get to her edge. There’s a guardrail there, but intentions make that irrelevant. Because of the climbing that takes place at Cathedral, and the location, climbers, inevitably, are involved in the rescues when people take their lives.

    A friend told me that over the past five times he’s been called to the scene of a death, he has realized that the people who take their life do so with two different paths—they scootch, or they jump.

    Jumpers take the leap, arcing clear of the corners and trees until the final contact at the ground. Scootchers inch their way on foot, on backside, or on all fours, slowly toward the edge, and even past it as it rolls away. They tumble to their end. Jumpers are easier on the rescuers. They are still intact.

   Am I trying to liken falling in love with suicide? I hope not. It seems wrong. It seems inappropriate. It seems astonishingly insensitive to the people who loved the man we found. But every morning since that Monday afternoon at Cathedral, I’ve woken up thinking of these things together. And no matter how hard I try for them not to, they keep lapping up against one and other in my mind.

   I have not wanted to write about this. I have desperately wanted to write about this. There is little sense in the understanding or comparison. If we take declarative action, is it easier on others? If we should-I-shouldn’t-I, would-I-wouldn’t-I, our way through life, love, and action, what do we miss while we look for every option? Or what do we commit to without knowing the other side?

    I tell my friends constantly that adulthood is not what I expected. My parents and all the adults around me just lived—or so I thought when I was a kid. I did not see the off-screen life of decision making, or weighing choices. I saw the results. Now I have to live on both sides.

 

    I asked my sister why she married her husband. “I loved him. I loved how I felt around him.”

    “That’s it?” I said.

    I had just told her I was thinking about going to therapy with Peter, not because we needed it for some particular issue, but just in case. I’d recently proclaimed that if there was some insurance policy wherein you could guarantee that the choice you are making in love is the right one—instead of guard against the wrong one—I would be it’s first buyer. And as I write that, I am ashamed of myself. What if Charley found out?

    My mom says I used to be a jumper—and thinks I secretly still am. I think I am a jumper who scootches to catch up with herself.

    Maybe we are always faced with these two options. Maybe adulthood is knowing which to do when. Maybe finding that man, twisted and crumpled but intact at the bottom of a 500’ cliff face was supposed to make me examine all of this. Maybe Charley would say I am examining it all too much.  And here’s the kicker: He—Charley—since that moment at the party, has gone from the person at the dinner table goading me into declarative action with love, children, and surfing, to a man in the hospital fighting a battle for life with a cancer that won’t let go. Explain that. Scootch that. Jump it.  Then again, if I said that all to Charley, he would probably tell me I needed a vacation, which, of course, is what I was trying to do in the first place.

AuthorMajka Burhardt | Comment7 Comments | Reference1 Reference |
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