Monday, January 29th, 2024
Monday, January 1st, 2024: Hikes, Southern Indiana.
The Eastern Deciduous Forest is where I grew up. I formed a whole mythology out of it in early childhood. The radical swing of its seasons seemed to amplify the emotional rollercoaster of my adolescence, from the tantalizing fertility of summer to the Calvinist repression of winter.
On every visit to Indiana I hike this forest. Coming from a land of towering mountains with forever views in a roadless wilderness as big as some states, this tiny patch of second-and-third-growth habitat covering modest ridges and hollows only frustrates me and makes me long for the West. And that’s even worse in the monotony of winter, when the entire ecosystem is resting or decomposing to the base nutrients that will fuel spring’s renewal.
It was a dark day, the temperature hovering just above freezing. I was the first on this popular trail in the morning, but after a couple hours I was passed by a male trail runner. We’d had several rains in the past week, so the carpet of leaves covering the trail was especially slippery and hid the roots that crisscross the ground. It was hard enough for me to keep from slipping or tripping – I couldn’t imagine running in these conditions.
I passed a handfull of other hikers throughout the day, and on the highest ridge – only 300 vertical feet above the deepest hollow – I passed a young guy setting up camp under a lean-to, only a few yards off the trail, then noticed another farther off in the forest. It had started to snow lightly. The guy under the lean-to conjured romantic images of mountain men on the frontier, but he’d only walked a mile from his vehicle and climbed less than 300 vertical feet, you could still hear cars passing occasionally on the road he’d driven, and there were farms and more paved roads within the next mile.
Working Out – A Lifelong Journey
Friday, January 19th, 2024: Places, Special Places.
1976-1977: Rebounding in the Gym
I was an undersize child – the smallest or second-smallest boy in my class – and weaker than the other boys and many of the girls. They called me Tiny Tim and taunted, chased, bullied and beat me. In junior high our physical education teacher was an ex-Marine drill sergeant who marched us around the neighborhood in tight formation and encouraged the strong kids to pick on the weak ones like me.
I grew about six inches in high school, and found the companionship of other unpopular outsiders. But when I fell in love at the end of my senior year, my girlfriend’s father, a respected math professor and former basketball star, forbade her to see me, calling me a “spineless jellyfish” who wasn’t fit to date his daughter since I hadn’t excelled in sports.
So we hid our relationship from him all through college, until she dumped me six years later for her much older boss. My best friend in grad school encouraged me to start working out, so I headed over to Stanford’s tiny, antiquated weight room, where one of the first people I saw was my ex’s new fiance. Still, I managed to put on over 15 pounds of muscle mass before finishing my master’s and rejecting the career I’d prepared for.
My most vivid memory from that gym is of the tall, slender man from India, a rock climber, who did fingertip pullups on the door frame. I, on the other hand, was building muscle to compensate for the loss of self-esteem in being suddenly abandoned by someone my life had revolved around for six years. But it’s never that simple. I was challenging and learning about my body in many other ways then, after growing up repressed and inhibited – building muscle was just one of those learning opportunities.
1988-1993: Growing Into the Role
Bohemians don’t work out. I was no longer weak, but I was comfortable enough in my body after grad school that I went for more than a decade without trying to make it any stronger. It was the drummer in my band, my close friend Mike, who finally said I didn’t have enough presence to be a bandleader, and should hit the gym to bulk up.
He became my fitness coach, getting me started at his gym, Gold’s on Oakland’s Grand Avenue, near beautiful Lake Merritt. Gold’s was a bodybuilder’s gym, and from the beginning I enjoyed their intensity and sometimes flamboyant personalities. Ordinary fitness buffs are often afraid they won’t be welcome at bodybuilder gyms, but it’s just the opposite. Everyone who puts in the effort is respected.
The impetus for this effort was my friend’s belief that bigger muscles would inspire my bandmates and appeal to our audience, but again, it’s never that simple. Building muscle feels good, and in moderation, looks good – and looks are important to visual artists. I quickly came to love my new body, and wanted to see how much better I could make it.
Mike taught me to warm up, to stretch, and to spend hours per session. He inspired me to eat healthier – he blended and guzzled fresh carrot-beet juice daily and got me started eating brown rice. He was also taking a choline supplement, a stimulant a lot of athletes were using at the time, and had settled into a routine of 3-4 hour workouts twice a week, plus running on the beach at Alameda.
Gyms can feel like home in some ways. I walked into the Oakland Gold’s one day just as news helicopters were following the police chase of O. J. Simpson on the 405 freeway in Los Angeles, and all our eyes were riveted to the public drama on the big TV screens above the exercise bikes along the south wall. I discovered right away that there are always people who seem to live in the gym – bodybuilders included. They work hard on their reps, but between sets they socialize as if they have all the time in the world. I occasionally talk to strangers, but mostly I’m the quiet, intense guy who just wants to do the work.
I took the choline, but I had no interest in cardio. I just wanted to see how big I could make my muscles, and I started wearing skimpy tank tops and tight shorts from boutiques in San Francisco’s Castro District. When we played the I-Beam, a famous club in the city, the bartender sneered and called me a fag.
This was when I met the love of my life, an aspiring musician and aerobics instructor. I attended one of her classes, and the students congratulated her on how buff her boyfriend was.
1993-1997: Working Out Homeless
But at the same time, my obsession with the desert was consuming me. I ended up leaving the girl in Oakland and moving to my desert land, where I did pullups on the beams of the old miner’s shelter I was living in, deep in the wilderness, with one long workout per week at the new Gold’s Gym in Victorville during my 80-mile trips to town for supplies.
Then I ran out of money, the long-distance girlfriend dumped me, and I became homeless and increasingly in debt for most of the next four years. Shortly before breaking up, she’d remarked on how flat her new man’s chest was compared to mine, and I realized that a muscular lover is not that important to most women. But I never stopped working out, and I got used to random sessions in whatever gym I happened to be near at the time.
I moved to Los Angeles in 1995 and joined Gold’s Hollywood, the home gym for Fabio, Hulk Hogan, and my favorite TV personality, Huell Howser. Jodie Foster was sweating on a stationary bike when I entered one day.
Gold’s Hollywood was probably where I reached my peak muscle mass, more than 20 pounds over my base weight. I’ve always enjoyed the hardest exercises the most, and at that time I was saving wide grip pullups for last because they were so damn hard. I’ll never forget how good I felt when I touched the floor at the end of the last set.
1997-2001: Climbing the Dotcom Boom
I returned to the Bay Area at the start of the Dotcom Boom, inventing a new career and paying off my debt. I was living in Pacifica, but Gold’s had opened a fancy new gym South of Market near where I was working in San Francisco, so I joined that for a while. Then I started my own business, working from home at first, and joined the Pacifica Athletic Center, in a former supermarket near the beach. This was another bodybuilding gym – they had a power-lifting contest, the perennial winner of which was Bill Armstrong. I loved living in Pacifica and that really felt like my first “home” gym.
Fitness addicts know that as long as you’re working out, you’re in pain somewhere. Until late 1999 I’d just had muscle strains. But suddenly my back felt like I was being sliced in half at the waist – my lumbar disks were starting to collapse. From then on, my focus would no longer be on building my body, but rather on avoiding injury while remaining able to do the things that make my life worth living.
After opening an office in North Beach, I ended up with a new hippie girlfriend, who shunned gyms and fitness as yuppie affectations. Since I refused to stop working out, she suggested we join a climbing gym together, and since she lived and worked in Berkeley, we joined the Berkeley Ironworks, in an old factory near the Bay. And since climbing gyms also typically have weights and machines, I could also keep pumping iron.
My close friend Carson had started working out and mountain biking with me years earlier, and now he started climbing too. We sometimes climbed together at his gym, Mission Cliffs in the city. I’d mostly worked out alone since the early days with Mike, but a partner was always welcome, especially since you could get a beer and burrito together afterwards.
I’d tried to maintain my gym schedule while traveling before, but during the Dotcom Boom, when I had lengthy engagements in Chicago and Portland, I began to take advantage of hotel fitness centers.
2002-2005: Working Out Busted
As the Boom collapsed, my last relationship fizzled out. I moved to the desert and stayed in an old ranch house where I invented strength-training exercises using rocks and parts of the building. I was still into indoor climbing and found a gym in Vegas where I could boulder on occasional shopping trips.
I visited a close friend in Los Angeles who took me to the Hollywood YMCA, where I started doing a new exercise I’d seen someone else doing, the halo. I was doing it with 45 pound plates then – now I can only do 25! On another visit, I climbed at a gym in Culver City where the desk clerk broke into my locker, stole my credit card, and used it to buy gas and groceries before I could get it canceled.
The tech industry work eventually started coming back to me, and I got a series of contracts in the Seattle area. First, I lived on Capitol Hill and worked out at the old Downtown YMCA, a maze-like, multi-story brick building. Then I stayed at an extended-stay place in Bellevue – a really interesting time when I harvested wild blackberries for breakfast among the tents of the homeless in an urban pocket forest, and went on runs in the foggy dawn through the affluent suburb to a distant park that combined a farm and wetland. There, my gym was a generic urban fitness center I can barely remember.
And whenever I returned home, I bouldered alone or climbed with Carson at the Bay Area climbing gyms.
2006-2015: Moving and Losing
I’d been trying to escape the city for years, and when I could tell the work was going to keep coming, and clients would pay me to travel, I made one more scouting trip, and found my place in New Mexico. There was a fitness center only a few blocks away, and it would become the longest gym membership I’ve ever had – but unfortunately I have no pictures to share. Suffice to say it’s very low-key, and the regulars were people I interacted with regularly in the community – one of many advantages to this small town.
But shortly after moving I began my longest-lasting contract, in San Diego, and started commuting regularly by air, at first via Tucson, a three-hour drive. At first I would drive to Tucson, fly to San Diego, work a day, fly back, and drive home during the night, to save money. After the money accumulated and the travel got old, I began staying over at Tucson and working out at my favorite hotel there, which has a bigger-than-usual fitness center.
Eventually, I was established enough that I could arrange longer stays and connecting flights from our local airport. I found a favorite hotel in San Diego – they had a minimal fitness center but I only needed it for one session at intervals of two weeks to two months, between which I worked out at home.
That contract sent me all over the continent, from the south to the east to Canada and the northwest, and on every trip I found a gym or fitness center. The one I remember best was a neighborhood gym on the near west side of Grand Rapids, apparently closed now.
And at least once a year I flew back to Indianapolis to visit family, where I’d join my mom at the YMCA. Originally we worked out at the Athenaeum, the ornate old “German House” where my mom was a donor and I had special privileges. But then they opened the ultra-modern CityWay facility south of downtown, and we just had to go there, despite the hardship of getting me in as a guest. I could make both work – CityWay was new and shiny, but had the downside of a more bourgeois clientele.
The San Diego work was completed, and I had a short hiatus, running out of money again before resuming in Palo Alto in 2012. There, the client wanted me onsite, and AirBnB was a new thing, so I found myself living first in Pacifica, where I rejoined the Pacifica Athletic Center almost a decade later, in its new digs in a strip mall. Later I settled near Stanford, working out on my alumni pass at the new Arrillaga Athletic Center. I always worked out early before hitting the office, and I was the old guy surrounded by students, so my workouts were always efficient, helped by the clean, well-maintained equipment.
2015-Present: Fighting Back
My right hip had lost all its cartilage by 2007, and by 2014 I was unable to hike, so I had it resurfaced in 2015, and that began a long ordeal of serial joint conditions and arduous rehab, during which I still tried to work out as much as possible. I’d terminated my tech industry career so I was working out and getting rehab at the same facility – my home gym. And then COVID hit, and my house caught fire.
I bought a really cheap weight bench and adjustable dumbbells at Walmart at the start of COVID, and after the fire I cleaned those and set them up in my temporary place at the edge of town. I bought resistance bands I could attach to door hinges for back and shoulder work. Six months later I was kicked out of that place, and I set up the bench and weights at the side of the weird front room in the inconveniently subdivided old house I moved into next.
Finally my house was repaired enough for me to camp there, and I moved my meager fitness gear into the small dining room, which had been my music studio before the fire. For a year and a half I’d had to stash the fitness gear in a corner, moving it out to use and back when I was done. Now I could leave it set up in its own dedicated area.
I missed going to the gym, but it just didn’t feel safe yet, and I’d found that when working out at home, I could multi-task. So I began accumulating the gear I’d been missing the most. Floor mats so I could handle the dumbbells without damaging the refinished wood floors. A cable pulldown machine because the door-mounted resistance bands had turned out to be useless. Dipping bars, fixed-weight dumbbells, and a storage rack. And finally, a near-gym-quality adjustable bench. It seems to be all I’ll ever need, and it was accumulated gradually, after research to find mid-price options of sufficient quality, so the cost impact was low.
My workout has continually evolved, while sometimes returning full circle to old favorites. During recovery from injuries or joint conditions, workouts become rehab sessions, and after I recover, some rehab exercises become part of my weekly routine. With a lower back condition, I prioritize the core, starting with a core warmup before a lengthy stretching series, then into upper body strengthening. Some of my long-time favorites are wide grip pullups/pulldowns, dips, dumbbell pullovers, and the halo. Besides my lower back, the biggest recurring problem is rotator cuff tears in both shoulders. Since I live alone, the lengthy incapacitation of surgery wasn’t an option, and physical therapy made the problem worse, but on my own, I’ve cobbled together exercises that mostly enable the surrounding muscles to compensate for both injuries.
During 36 continuous years of working out, I’ve trained at between 50 and 100 different gyms and fitness centers all over North America. But on my last trip to Indianapolis, I used a gym for the first time since COVID, a huge new bouldering gym in a former factory. Since my foot condition prevents climbing, I only used the weight room, but it felt like coming home.
For the traveler, every gym is a space station, like Denny’s used to be on my routine drives between San Francisco and Los Angeles during the punk years. The same familiar, useful stuff – timeless, unchanging, comforting, a refuge along the way where you can do what you need to do to stay strong. You’re an outsider – anonymous, a secret agent – but there’s always people-watching and the opportunity to interact with strangers, and those interactions are eased by the universal language of gyms. Man buns seem to be the thing now in Indiana – Hoosiers are always at least a decade behind the coasts. And I was surprised to see patrons going barefoot throughout – traditional gyms consider that both dangerous and unsanitary.
I’d eventually come to see this legacy, this continent-wide continuum of gyms, as one of my natural habitats. Temples of the body – to invert the euphemism – magical forests of complex structures, like childhood erector sets, standing ready to maintain and repair the precious bodies gifted us by evolution and genetics. Communal spaces where we can be inspired and validated by a stimulating variety of brothers and sisters devoted to the same noble aim.
Monday, January 22nd, 2024: 2024 Trips, Mogollon Rim, Regions, Road Trips.
I could tell from the clouds on Saturday that we were going to get rain Sunday. But I hike in the rain all the time and it’s never been a problem around here.
My problem was, as usual, deciding on a hike. I’d gone three weeks without hiking, in darkest Indiana under heavy cloud cover, and most of our local hikes involve a canyon – I wanted something exposed, with a view to remind me I was back in the West.
I was tempted to make a long drive into Arizona, spending the night over there. But the options there weren’t much better and would involve more complications. In the end, I used up an hour and a half trying to decide, then leaving late, headed north to a new area I’ve been studying on the map.
With the late departure, it would be a shorter hike than usual, but at least I could do some scouting for a later return. On the way, I spotted a blue heron standing in the Gila River – I assumed that was a good omen.
The trail I wanted to try is a long traverse west across the foot of a 9,000 foot mountain, with branches along the way. The turnoff is an hour and a half from town. It’d been raining on and off all the way, and the long forest road to the trailhead turned out to consist of mud, snow, and ice. I’d never really tried this vehicle in serious mud before. The road set out climbing a shallow ridge where, despite being in low-range 4wd, I immediately started sliding around. I only made it about a half mile before approaching a deeply washed out section where I was almost certain to get stuck. When I got out of the vehicle to scout, my boots sank an inch into the muck.
There was another option on my list, a six-mile ascent of a 9,800 foot peak. I knew I wouldn’t have time to reach the top, but again, I could do some scouting. It required driving east through the tiny county seat, a hotbed of the anti-government Sagebrush Rebellion. I had thought about spending the night there, if the town’s one motel actually existed. Google Satellite View showed a vacant lot at the address, but the place had a website and ample online reviews.
The motel was indeed there. And past the town, I found the turnoff to the next trailhead, a long and winding dirt road. It wasn’t too bad at first, but after a few miles it climbed to the rim of the canyon of the Tularosa River – which I knew it had to ford at the bottom – and I could see the descent involved more mud, snow, and ice. I definitely didn’t want to start down and find myself unable to drive back up. This day was turning into a real bust.
But on the way north to the first trail, I’d passed one of those little “hiker” signs that I’d never noticed before, about ten miles south of my destination. I checked the national forest map I carry in my pack, and found there was indeed a numbered trail there, heading west into the Blue Wilderness. This trail is not shown anywhere online – it only appears on the official printed map.
I drove another half hour back south and easily found the turnoff. The map showed a dirt road heading west less than a mile to the trailhead, but what I found was the deepest, softest mud yet. Still, after all that driving I was determined to walk, so I parked just off the highway, and began trudging west, immediately picking up several pounds of mud under my boots.
As bad as it was on this road, the mud was even worse when I tried to walk off the road, where it was uncompacted. The road climbed up a little peak to two transmission towers, part of the powerlines that bring our electricity from the coal-fired plants up north. Past the peak, the road enters the wilderness area, continuing downhill to the trailhead. I was surprised to find an old wooden kiosk, but I wasn’t surprised to find a family of mice living in the box where the visitor logbook is stored.
It’d been drizzling on and off. I’d only gone about 3/4 of a mile, and each boot was carrying a big pad of mud like a brown snowshoe. Past the kiosk, I started up the trail proper, but the mud was even worse than on the road. I made it only a hundred yards before realizing this was pointless. It was forecast to rain all day and this could only get worse. And both road and trail had been heavily trampled by cattle, despite federal wilderness designation.
On the way back I saw headlights approaching and stepped aside for a late-model Toyota pickup. I waved but couldn’t see inside – they’d had all the windows tinted, even in front. Where were they going? The powerline is the wilderness boundary – the road is closed past it. Maybe they wanted to camp under the transmission towers – there’s a great view – but they’d be camping in mud.
So much for hiking. It was close to 1 pm, and I’d had nothing but snacks, so I was hungry. There’s a roadside cafe about ten miles north that’s seldom open, but I’d noticed the parking lot was full earlier, so I headed north again.
I was able to get chorizo and eggs, served by a lady with a European accent and a teenage Black boy, and by the time I was finished it was almost check-in time for the mysterious motel in the right-wing county seat. I now knew that the geology in this area is unlike any of the other areas where I hike – the ground is some sort of fine clay that becomes unwalkable when wet – but I wanted to return in dry weather, and it’s far enough that I would need a place to stay overnight. So I might as well try the motel.
I turned out to be the only guest. Everything looked new, which explains the vacant lot on Google Satellite View. I needed yogurt for breakfast, which led me to the discovery that the “General Merchandise” at the crossroads is really a supermarket crammed into a small building. Of course – it serves an entire county that’s remote and sparsely populated but huge.
After settling into my motel room, I realized this was just what I needed. At home, I’m surrounded by work to do and problems to solve. Maybe this is why I like motel rooms so much. For a minute there, I imagined myself just living in motel rooms for the rest of my life. The phone rang and messages arrived – needy people, demanding my attention – but I ignored them. And the next day, it was hard to leave.
Monday, January 29th, 2024: Hikes, Little Dry, Mogollon Mountains, Southwest New Mexico.
I assume everyone has experienced setbacks, and starting over. Losing the ability to do something essential, and facing a slow, arduous recovery of that ability. That seems to be the theme of my life now – every few months, I lose the ability to hike, and I have to fight my way back to a slightly lower capacity than I had before – so that in the long run, I’m gradually losing capacity. One step forward, two steps back.
When I say essential, I mean hiking is the way I keep my blood pressure low. When I can’t hike at capacity, my blood pressure quickly goes up 30 points, and if it stays there indefinitely I’ll have to start taking daily meds like most people my age.
Today was supposed to be my latest recovery hike, after more than a month off. I knew I shouldn’t tackle a hard one, and my favorite crest hikes were inaccessible anyway because we had more snow last week. I finally decided on a canyon hike I hadn’t done since last May. It’s a slow climb through a flood-damaged canyon to a mid-elevation saddle, and from there I could descend into a second canyon if I had time and the inclination.
It was a little below freezing when I left town, but it was forecast to reach the mid-50s later. Approaching the mountains on the highway, I saw a lot of snow above 8,000 feet – my saddle would be at 8,200, which shouldn’t be too bad.
This is a trail I’ve hiked many times, but it was washed out a few years ago. Last May I discovered that the first two miles had recently been cleared, and beyond that, it was slow going but I could find my way.
This time around, I expected to be out of shape from the hiatus, and at 6,800 feet, beyond the cleared section, I was surprised to run into some snow, which made it even harder to get through the obstacles. Boulder-choked narrows that had to be climbed around, debris flows of loose rock, big snow-covered logs that had to be crawled under or cleared of snow and climbed over. And that was only in the canyon-bottom section.
A mile beyond the cleared section, I came upon three heavy-duty cardboard boxes with plastic handles, containing square seven-gallon water jugs, sitting right on the trail. These could only have been carried in by pack horses or mules, and had to have been left by the equestrian group that has the permit to do trail work. They had to have been left here since my May visit, but there was no corresponding evidence of additional trail work. This was the second time I’ve come upon gear left by these people – using public trails as long-term storage for their gear. The cardboard will rot – what were they thinking?
Three miles in, the trail leaves the creek and begins traversing in and out of side drainages, climbing, at a steep grade, almost a thousand feet to the saddle through dense oak scrub. Since this trail is seldom used by anyone other than me, the stiff scrub has closed over it, and fire-killed trees continue to fall onto it. Since last May, despite a poor summer growing season, I found it had become almost impassable. As a recovery hike, it was brutal, and I had to put on my gaiters halfway up to keep snow out of my boots.
In May it had taken three hours to go the four miles – today, with the snow and worse trail conditions, it took three-and-a-half. I’d really wanted to continue into the second canyon, but only about 50 yards down the side trail I sank into 16 inches of snow and gave up.
In the little saddle, my boots in the snow, I sat in the sun on the end of the only snow-free log, eating my lunch of nuts and jerky, and noticed the last storm had dropped about four fresh inches here, on top of the earlier snowpack. Despite the effort of getting here and my disappointment at having to turn back, the landscape was beautiful and I’d have a fantastic view going down.
The steep grade and tricky footing quickly took their toll on my knees, making the descent almost as slow as the climb, and painful. Remind me to avoid this one in the future, unless I can somehow rebuild my capacity without another setback!
