Three weeks from today, I’ll be flying to Ethiopia. I’ve been training for trip. I’ve been aqua jogging.

   Actually, I just had to stop aqua jogging. I was over-training with the 12”-wide water-flotation device. In my defense, I was just trying to keep up with Astrid, the 65-year old woman with a hip and knee replacement. At 33 with two back surgeries, I was eating her aquatic dust. It’s a good thing I’ve finally been cleared to go back to climbing. It’s about time—East Africa is looming close.

   Not everyone sees it like this. My father does not understand why I am a) going on a trip in Ethiopia so close to two back surgeries and b) flying to Ethiopia so close to two back surgeries. “Do you know how long the plane ride is?” he asks me each time we talk.

   “18 hours,” I usually say, wondering if he thinks it will get shorter or longer if he keeps checking.

   “Are you sure this is a good idea?” he asks.

   It’s hard to reassure anyone who took care of you during the height of your drug hazed post operative days that going to the grocery store by yourself is a good idea, let alone going to Ethiopia. So to reassure my father, I have had to resort to going to his sweet spot.

   “Think of the poodle,” I say. “Don’t you think he’d be proud of me?”

The poodle, at last count, has cancer, one torn knee we fixed, and another we didn’t. I have prepared myself to put him down on four separate occasions in four different states all in the past ten months. He got cancer in Jackson, Wyoming, ate a ½ pound of chocolate and went feral for twenty hours in Minnesota, tore knee  number one in New Hampshire, and knee number two in Montana. His second knee injury and my second surgery were in near-perfect synch. We both spent June in various stiff positions to manage our pain with rumpled curly hair and bad breath from all of our medications.

They say pets have perfect timing in your life, even if you don’t know it at the time of their timing. This winter and spring, Osito and I were like the chicken and the egg. I skipped a February trip to Norway and took care of him—but my back would not really have let me go. I had a reason to stay stateside other than myself, and thus I was home in NH when the reflexes in my right foot started waning. In Montana in May, the stairs in our house were too scary for a poodle in recovery, and soon the hospital’s medical regulations were too scary for my insurance. Thus, together, we tried out a half-dozen places to live and recover, and together, we came home to Boulder.

Three months and an aqua jogging career have now come and gone. Osito and I went on a hike this morning. Afterwards, I dropped him off at home and went climbing outside for my second time since February. I came back and we lay on the floor together and did our PT.

People seem surprised when they learn I have a dog. How can you do what you do with a dog they ask? I usually explain to them first that I have a poodle, which is different than a dog. And then, if I have not already lost them, I tell them the truth. I do what I do because of the poodle. We have a deal. We have always had deals, though sometimes I am not as savvy to their terms. This past winter our deal was about time together. This fall, our deal is recovery. So I am going to Africa, and the poodle will be here when I get home.

   In the meantime, they’ve closed my aqua-jogging pool early this summer. They’ve opened it for the dogs. It is Boulder. So this weekend, the poodle will be the aqua jogger, and I’ll be the climber, and together we’ll get ready for what’s next.

Read more about Ethiopia at Imagine Ethiopia 2010.



Let’s get this out of the way. I was 8. I made bad choices like singing Don’t Fence Me In at my father’s second wedding and lying down on the carpet in the school loft; I had bad choices foisted upon me, like a two-inch buzz cut—billed as a smart fashion move with the added benefit of being easier to treat lice (the loft). No wonder I felt sorry for the people in Ethiopia.

   My older sister terrorized me, I had a boy hair cut, and glasses. They were starving, being relocated 400 miles away from their families and heritage, and in the middle of one of the most militaristic regimes in modern Africa called The Red Terror. I did what any person feeling a great sense of connected persecution would do. I wrote a ballad.

   Listen along with me (click play on the photo above) Or if you can’t bear it, here is the chorus: “People in Ethiopia, want to have some food and love.” Although what I am really singing is peee-pole in Eeethiooopia, want to have some foooooood and lo-uv-uv. Remember, think ballad. Either way you write it, it went on, passionately. 

The half completed Laelay Weste Community School   I sang about helping the children, holding the children, as if I was not a child myself while singing. There are three minutes and thirty-five seconds of my most heartfelt worries about a place and people I only knew from grainy BBC imagery of utter desolation and haunted skeletal women, men, and children, always too many children.

Over a million people died in the 1984 famine. In Minnesota, our school lives revolved around it with full student body renditions of "We Are the World" at every assembly. It is that song I remember. I forgot my own.

25 years later, I went to Ethiopia for a story about coffee. I entered a country of extreme duality--both the poverty I expected, and bounty--agricultural, spiritual, and human--unlike I have ever known. It was supposed to be a three-week trip. Instead I followed a trajectory from coffee to a climbing trip for first ascents on sandstone towers and cracks, to a book that asked how adventure offers a lens for a deeper understanding of culture. I then got up in front of groups of six people to six hundred and tried out answers. I learned, and re-learned, how to ask the questions. And then, my mother found the ballad.

   I had one lecture left for the Vertical Ethiopia tour when she sent me an email. “Did you know you wrote a song about Ethiopia? I have it.”

A young student showing off his artistic side with the rest of his class at one of imagine1day's schoolsMaybe we all know who we will become as adults when we are eight years old. Maybe I am just lucky. Maybe I had to forget to remember. I cringe at my warbling 8-year old voice. At one point I surmise, in song: “They don’t even have a turkey.” To be fair, twenty five-years and five months of time in Ethiopia later, I was pretty dead on about the lack of turkeys. I was also pretty dead on about how much a person can care.           

   Six weeks from today, Imagine Ethiopia 2010 kicks off.  We’re heading to Tigray, the Ethiopian region at the heart of the 1984 famine.  That is where I climbed, where imagine1day is building their schools, where together we will create a new school. I will, undoubtedly see a lot of eight year olds. I might even see myself.

See the new children of Tigray in imagine1day's video trailer: This is Our Story.

Photo By Gabe Rogel

I have no idea who the people are who will change my life in the next two years. I had no idea, two years ago, that a woman making a spontaneous stop in a Patagonia store in California would change mine now. Susanne Conrad caught a glimpse of a tall hardbound book called Vertical Ethiopia. I’d written it, but that didn’t matter to her, then. Ethiopia mattered.

A few months later, a random email appeared in my inbox. Sapna Dayal introduced herself and suggested that we might have much in common. She was the executive director of imagine1day, a non-profit dedicated to changing the world’s future via building schools in Ethiopia. We spent following winter months talking. I’d come home from ice climbing in New Hampshire and watch it get dark and cold in New England as Sapna would pause her afternoon in a rainy Vancouver for us to brainstorm about how to work together in the high desert in the Horn of Africa.

This September 23^rd marks the start of our answer. Sapna, Susanne and I, along with Shannon Wilson, are leading a group on a three-week journey of adventure, global stewardship, and scared connection.  Together, we’re raising enough money to build a new school—imagine1day’s 7^th primary school in Ethiopia. We’re going rock climbing, visiting ancient churches, hiking to schools imagine1day built where the wells that broke ground were often the first ever in a three-mile radius, and more. 

Photo by Gabe RogelRemember when you were a kid and you’d connect the dots on cheap piece of paper to make the Little Engine that Could or Strawberry Shortcake? Remember when you were young enough to not know what you were connecting until it was done? I have no idea what we are all drawing together. I am just one of the dots. I’m a leader dot-- the Ethiopia and adventure expert on the trip, but I still have no idea what our picture will look like.

Today I’m kicking off a pre-trip series of etchings via blogs. Come back. Every other week I’ll tell you more about what we’re doing. I’ll post up an audio clip of 1984 ballad about Ethiopia—that I wrote, when I was eight. It’s bad. It’s a ballad. (It was the 80’s).

Learn more, get involved, become a dot:

Imagine Ethiopia 2010 the Trip

Who’s Coming With Us

How Ethiopia Started

*Additive Adventure, the New Sub Blog on The Liminal Line (or, what happened to the poodles?)

• I launched the new Additive Adventure Blog today on OutsideTV.com. We're teaming up with Ospreypacks.com to co-host/house the blogs.

• What is additive adventure? Majka Burhardt made it up. But she's betting you might live your life in a quest for the same--when adventure goes beyond exploration and toward cultural and environmental connection. "Additive Adventure" tracks Majka's forays into the greater world while she asks for the linkages between...everything. Read Majka's stories of the far afield and track how she brings them close to home every other Friday.

• Don't worry. I'll still be talking about poodles and life and how to navigate choice. How could I not?



Self Portrait, attempt 13

A month ago, while driving through the dark streets of Bozeman, I called Sara in Bend. We’d both lived together in Boulder a few years back. “I’m going to see an intuitive,” I announced.

“You know that’s a psychic, right?” Sara asked.

“No it’s not,” I said. “I’m not all oovy groovy like that.”

Sara laughed. “You’re the worst kind of oovy groovy. You’re closet oovy groovy.”

“I’m not repressed,” I countered, “I say things like universe, truth…and…”

“Let it out Majka,” Sara said. “Nothing’s ever good in the closet.”

Two weeks after our conversation, I was at MountainFilm Telluride sitting in an audience of 300 plus listening to Rick Hodes, a doctor who’s devoted the greater part of his life to giving others a better life in Ethiopia, Ghana, and beyond. He showed photos of his past patients who’ve become current friends. I don’t know how many of us in that group had seen an intuitive that week. I don’t know how many were set on out path, mid-change, mid-execution of as change, or mid-evening nap. What I do know is that the oovy groovy was out of the closet.

After Rick, we all sat together and watched I Am, a Tom Shadyac (of Ace Ventura, Bruce Almighty, and now the vision behind an about-face documentary film about the point of life) film. We followed flocks of birds make communal decisions, saw people controlling their energetic output through their spirit, watched animals love and fight. Granted, we were in the oovy grrovy vortex of Telluride. But it was amplified. Maybe because we all wanted it to be.

There is beauty in allowing ourselves to be impacted by others. I want to delete that as I write it. Sara would say it’s the closet oovy-groovy in me wants to erase it. But it’s still there. I fight it, all of it, but I’m doing so lying down. Today I’m six days post my second back surgery in eight weeks, I’ve stopped trying so hard to fight anything. I could say I have accepted it all, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

Communal LivingIn the past two months, I have slept in guest rooms of nine houses, borrowed five cars, had dozens of friends drive me to the doctor, and had countless more dozens of strangers hold doors, pick up the pens I drop, or make room for me to pass them, slowly, en route to the next moment of my life. My dog has been tended to by strangers, four vets, and my extended family. Last week, he settled into sharing his bed- his perfectly clean non-shedding poodle bed with an Entlebucher Sennehunde, an exceptionally hairy dog who eats elk carcasses and expels them near whole as a pastime. They slept butt to butt. Neither of them seemed to mind. 

They slept that way before the poodle tore his second ACL in 4 months, and after. They’d still sleep that way now if Peter hadn’t brought the poodle back home to be in Boulder.

This was not the plan. I was supposed to be kicking butt in Bozeman this summer. Instead, today, I took a two-hour nap with the poodle and tried to take self-portrait of us in bed. He didn’t cooperate. We’re on the mend. Like it or not.

The day I drove home from Telluride, three Ethiopian runners crossed a finish line in a Boulder Colorado running race holding hands. That was the night after Rick Hodes’ talk about Ethiopia, less than 24-hours after I’d realized he’d worked with my good friend Andrew Swanson, a friend who was killed last June on Denali. Rick was the man, I suddenly understood, whom Andrew had wanted me to meet the next time I was in Addis. We’d hoped to all be there one day together.

Lelisa Desisa, Tilahun Regassa and Tadese Tola clasped their fingers and palms at the end of a 10K race. Maybe it’s not a big deal. Maybe it’s exactly what I’m talking about.

*And yes, I am still on meds.  Stay tuned for tips on using the shoe donner and the tush cush.            



“Get in shape girl, you know the feeling.”

“Get in shape girl, it’s so appealing.”

I was seven. It was right around the age when I cornered Reed in the coatroom and pinched him for saying mankind instead of humankind. I have no idea where this behavior came from. Nor do I understand why it was ok in my mind to watch the Miss Universe pageant and keep my own score (I was convinced the judges had it out for us Midwesterners), but the actions of Hasbro Toy Company were offensive. Fitness in a package? In the same aisle as Barbie? (In the same aisle as the Barbie I wanted?)

Today, over 25 years later, I bought my first set of 2 pound weights. Pink ones. It was all they had. They are all I am allowed to use, for now. Currently, I lie on the floor and wave them around above my head, hips, I make snow angels on every imaginary plane intersecting my body. If I move them for long enough, I am convinced, I will feel something.

I have carried Get in Shape Girl all over the world. Having a hard time hiking in Nepal? Get in Shape Girl. Huffing on Chimborazo? Get in Shape Girl.  Trying to keep up on the approach to Come and Get it in Hyalite? Get in Shape Girl. For me, the song always comes into my head when I am on my way to do something and sucking wind. No wonder the vertical world makes more sense to me—it’s jingleless. If I ever start singing Get in Shape Girl while climbing, I want an intervention.

The Poodle, waitingNext week, I take off for Mountainfilm in Telluride. They are showing Waypoint Namibia. Last year, at the exact time we’ll watch the movie on the big screen, the real thing was happening. Last year, right now, I was in shape. This year, I will tuck my pink weights into my luggage and fly to Colorado. I will wave them in the air every morning and night of the festival. I will not walk around town with them. But not because I would be too embarrassed. I’m just not allowed to yet.

I’ve grown up. I don’t pinch people who say mankind anymore. I understand that sometimes, we all need the pink weights. We need them to get back to our lives—to carrying poodles up stairs they are too scared to climb, to carrying ourselves to the places we want to understand, to carrying our lives forward. There's a face in Africa that's caught my eye, after all.

*Miss California, Julie Hayek, won Miss USA in 1983. No midwesterners were in the top 10.

**If you absolutely have to, you can see the original here. But I wouldn't advise it...



In Action, photo by Peter Doucette

A Blog in Conjunction with Osprey Packs. Check out their site and great stuff at ospreypacks.com.

Climbers can, as a rule, break rules. We expand our youth, our shoulder stamina, and, most commonly, our seasons. How many people do you know who go crack climbing in shorts in January? Ice climbing in puff jackets in June? Sport climbing in bikinis February? Hyper-mobility and air travel lends itself to this, but so does the split personality of any excessive outdoorsy person.

I’m one of the worst offenders. To make it more interesting (read: personally challenging), I try to be prepared for any activity at any time. This works. Or it does until you have back surgery.

Two weeks ago, I packed up my rental apartment in North Conway, NH. I lovingly placed my monopoint crampons next to my leashless tools. I stuffed my ice climbing packs with every extra down/synthetic/wool/fleece layer I had.  I took my boots and filled them with screws, and then nestled them into duffles. In the beginning, I held up each piece of gear as if honoring it before mashing it into a temporary resting place. I mourned that I would not use it for more than a half dozen months. And then I got a shooting pain down my right leg, stood up with the help of the wall and a chair, limped to my bed, and laid down.

Thigh-high fashionYou rarely know how much you love something until it’s gone. That can apply to people, places, things, values, anything. There is an entire industry of being in the “present” that is based on re-training the human urge against this. I’ve received an entire lifetime of advice to practice such behavior, often suggested as: have you considered meditation? I pack my gear instead.

  This time, however, it was not just for temporary transit. It was for a season. And just as soon as it felt absurdly nostalgic to put these things away, it started to feel good.

I’m lucky. I get to climb and play outside as much as I want to. I remind myself of that good fortune as much as I can. But I’m no zen-master. Sometimes it takes the thing you love being taken away to tell you just how much you love it. I felt that that afternoon in New Hampshire. Everything I touched I wanted to use, and that want felt damn good once I let it.

  Now it’s a few weeks later. I got to wear white thigh highs and have my back operated on, and get on some serious drugs. I have watched 16 episodes of Six Feet Under and it took me 15 to realize that watching a show about death while on medication whose number one side effect is depression is likely a bad idea. To lighten things up, I bought an enema kit at target (which, fortunately, I only live two blocks away from and thus is in legal walking distance as I am not yet allowed to drive) and found the cutest checkout boy I could to ring it up. I came back later that day to buy some exlax and went to the same boy. That night, even while racked with abdominal pain ricocheting off my newly surgered back and down my nerve path, I was entertained. I thought about what other awkward products I could have Jake ring up. This, I thought, could be my counter-therapy.

My real therapy, though, is sleep. I’m still two weeks away from being allowed to do PT. In the meantime, I take drugs to counteract other drugs, and vitamins and herbs to make them all get along. I am not allowed to type for more than an hour at a time.

“Maybe this is your body’s way of telling you that you need to slow down,” people say to me. Granted, many of these people live in Boulder and are wearing yoga pants and recently cleansed their noses with netti pots, but then again, I have a netti pot, too, and the only pants I can really get on these days are ones that have some stretch. Frankly, I don’t believe my body is telling me something I don’t already know. Athletes--climbers, boaters, bikers, skiers, boarders, motoers, horseback riders—we all push our bodies. At some point, we have to take a break and mend the thing that gave out. Now it’s my turn.

Don’t worry. I’ll be better. I’ll be better than better. In my visualizations (remember, I am in Boulder), I will have the strongest core muscles of the world and be the new star for Cirque du Soleil  They will create a monstrous ice palace and I will dance and climb through it. And even before that, I’ll be rock climbing this summer. I wont be in Alaska swinging my ice tools. But maybe that’s good for me. Maybe it’s time for me to synch up with the seasons.

*All information above was shared under the influence of a list of pharmaceuticals far too long to list. As such, the author is not directly responsible for any of the content, and definitely not responsible for the potentially bad decision of sharing the photo of the thigh highs with the world.



It takes two people 94 days to use 36 rolls of toilet paper. This is pure science. This is my life. Or it is give-or-take the two half rolls I left behind in North Conway last week.

My friends Jim and Sarah came over on my last night in New Hampshire to load my van for me. They each went up and down the stairs a dozen times with me trotting/limping after them. I’ve been placed on carrying restriction by my friends, let alone my doctor, pre-back surgery this week. So Jim and Sarah carried big bins and boxes, and even scooped up the poodle when he was making a run for the van. I carried, well, nothing.

   “Jim’s having van envy,” Sarah said, on one trip.

   I followed her down the stairs to the parking area. Jim’s been climbing twice as long and twice as hard as I have, or will. “Think this looks good?” I asked him.

   He harrumphed. The van was chock full of bins, boxes, skis, rice cookers and salad bowls.  “This used to look good,” he said. “Can’t say I envy it now.”

Over three months ago, when I first arrived in North Conway for the winter, I had dinner at Jim and Sarah’s house. We sat around bison burgers and talked about death. Peter and I were fresh out of Bozeman and loosing Guy Lacelle next to us in Hayalite Canyon. In some perverse way, I suppose the four of us were catching up on the lives, via a remembering of the recent deaths. I told Jim and Sarah about the statistic another friend had passed along to me- that 10% of serious climbers he knows have died. “1 in 10.” I said.

   Jim nodded.

   “1 in 10,” I repeated.

   “Those are pretty good odds,” Jim said. “I’ll take em.”

It was New Years Eve. The ice was forming in the notches all around New Hampshire as we ate. We talked about the myth of danger in climbing and the ways in which we’ve all fought against it.  In the end, it was Sarah who made the most sense. “Climbing is dangerous,” she said, “proven.”

   We all nodded in agreement.

   “So for god’s sake don’t do it if you don’t love it.”

   That was a 9:30. Peter and I were in bed by ten. We went ice climbing the next day. 

I have a friend who’s sorting through her house post raising three children.  She does not know what to keep and what should leave. But some new formation of holding is surely the goal. I could lie and tell you that I am on the opposite side. That I am streamlined, honed and slimmed from my years in perpetual transit. But I have a toiletry problem.

   It took an entire laundry basket to bring my various lotions, potions, extra q-tips, and unused face scrubs that I might be inspired to use in the east, from the west. Then there are the medications.  Vicodin, diclofenac, and pred fote to name a few, even though I’m allergic to the first, don’t know what to do with the second (and it’s a scrip from 2003), and I am reasonably sure the third is for the poodle.

The Poodle keeping an eye on the packing progress   I don’t even take painkillers. Last week, all of the advice-giving people in my family suggested I might want to opt for a different strategy pre-surgery. I have the arsenal, I explained, but I just like to carry it around the country. They all seemed to suggest that if I were waiting for a time, now would be that time.

   Beyond the toiletries, I do have standards. I think globally while buying locally. It’s partially not wanting to be wasteful. I don’t want to buy saran wrap in North Conway if I have some in Boulder. It’s partially the acknowledgement that if I buy it, it might be left over when I leave. I will have to look at it in the drawer and ask it—are you worth taking with me?

I’m back in Boulder now. I wasn’t supposed to be here. Tomorrow at 7:30 AM I have back surgery. I had been planning to head straight to Bozeman, to one house for the next six months. Instead I will live in three in the next three weeks. I tried to make sense of this lying in bed this morning at 6 am with pain shooting down my leg.

For god’s sake, I told myself, don’t do it if you don’t love it. And then I got up and checked the toilet paper stash, I did the math, and I realized I’d be all right.

*Dedicated to Heidi Kloos, a woman who knew how to move when she needed to, and how to be home along the way.

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.



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 6^th 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.



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.