Written Processing- Vini

 I don't exactly know how to start writing this post or what the purpose is. Verbal processing on the phone and in person has been my go-to, but I have a desire to be more reflective in writing as well. To have something that documents my thoughts right now, so I can look back later when my memory is fuzzy. Do I want to describe what these last three weeks have been like? That feels easier than attempting to describe Vini and what she means to me. I think I'm avoiding that reflection, because it feels insurmountable to describe how much of an impact she has had on me, and in which ways.

 I'll start with just the narrative of what happened with me. Day 14 of a 30 day Outward Bound course that was going really well. It was the second afternoon of Solo in the Solitario- a very remote spot in the state park at the end of our backpacking portion. All our students were spread out by their tarps, I was in our instructor base camp 3/4 of the way through individual check-ins with my students. I looked up and saw a man backpacking on a hill nearby one of our students. I made eye contact with my co-instructor Hannah and we were on alert-- it's pretty rare to see other people in the Solitario, and our students would be freaked out to see a random hiker. The random hiker got closer, and we said to each other that the man looked a lot like our supervisor, Will. Seeing your supervisor wandering through the desert towards you when you aren't supposed to see them only means something bad has happened. Sure enough, Will appeared and took me aside and delivered the news that Vini was dying from cancer with weeks to live. I've always thought of Vini as invincible, so to say this news was bizarre to process is an understatement. Vini, sick, in Virginia. Me, in the middle of the West Texas desert, completely out of touch. Will told me about the decision process Outward Bound went through to decide to come tell me. My camp friends had all found out on Sunday/Monday, and worked through many venues to figure out how to contact my supervisors and explain the situation, and that I had to find out as soon as humanly possible. So then on Wednesday, I was packing up my backpack, driving out of the spectacular desert with a vice-grip clutch on my cell phone, waiting to get into service and get in the loop.

That car ride was a looong two hours. And that evening and night was a flurry of phone calls, getting in touch with my dear people and hearing how their process had been, and feeling so strange about being a couple days behind in finding out, not sleeping more than an hour that first night. The next morning I texted Vini to figure out when to call. I was terrified to speak with her. What the hell was I supposed to talk about, was this supposed to be when I said goodbye to her? Would I be going back into the field with my group? Should I attempt to fly East? What about my students? What about the pandemic? How would I feel if I didn't try to see her? How would I feel about going into the field again and being completely unable to contact my support system?

After a ton of indecision and inner turmoil about it, on Friday afternoon I decided to leave Texas. It took me putting myself in the shoes of future me, paddling on the glorious Rio Grande in a few days, out of service and having no idea of what was happening back east for an eight day stretch in the field. Once I envisioned that possibility, it was glaringly obvious to me that I couldn't be fully on course for my students and my co-instructors while this huge thing was happening. And most importantly, I couldn't let a chance to see Vini  go by me without trying. So I said goodbye to my students on Saturday morning as they embarked on their river portion of expedition, and I made plans to leave base until January. Outward Bound was hugely supportive of me, and said they would make it work with whatever I decided.

And even though I still have found myself feeling unsure about it, it was totally the right decision. Being able to see Vini for a few minutes was really difficult, and also I'm so glad I was able to laugh with her one more time. And being able to see my camp friends in person,  to call and text them at all hours of the day and share our thoughts, on the spectrum of happy to heavy, has been exactly what I needed. I needed to be in touch, to process this period of extended shock and grief, to hear about my friends' experiences and share mine. I needed to be with the people who shared this collective knowledge of camp and Vini, because it's just incredibly hard to describe to people who didn't grow up in this community. That whole first week of being home I was totally engrossed in thinking about "it", unable to have trivial conversations with anyone aside from my camp friends. They were all I wanted to look at, be with, talk to. And I still feel semi like that, but at the point I"m writing this point I feel totally able to have normal interactions with other friends too.

My shock and sadness hit me most while I was still in Texas in those first couple of days of finding out and trying to get in touch, and trying to contact Vini. At this point of writing this post it's been almost two weeks since Vini died, and I haven't felt many emotions about it. I've felt conflicted about that-- why am I not feeling very sad, and when will it happen?  Maybe I'm still just numb, or maybe it won't truly hit me until I show up at the Cove this summer and realize that she's not there. I've been doing things like going through all my snail mail correspondence and emails with her, photos, facebook comments, everything I can find with her handwriting on it, trying to see if dredging up these things will make me feel anything. Mostly, these things have made me really happy and sentimental and glad that I'm such a packrat. And there have been countless moments of looking through memorabilia where I think: Oh I need to share this with Vini! And then realize that the only reason I'm home and looking through all this shit is because she's gone. 

So, I'm trying to be OK with however my emotions are. I feel fine right now, less like I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.  I had an amazing dream about Vini last night, and it felt good. We hugged for a while, and she told me things I needed to hear, something in the vein of her being proud of me and that I was a talented educator, aka the highest praise from the educator I look up to most of all. It felt like more of a goodbye than my in person "goodbye." Because how the hell do you say goodbye to a person who means the world to you? 

Photo of the day: Quarantine Edition

Greetings from Snowmass, CO! I am here just... waiting until 1. I am done with my 14 days of quarantine required of anyone coming in to the state and 2. for some other option to come up of where to go during this weird time. My coworker Bennett kindly let me stay for this undetermined amount of time at his parent's place. We drove here in a single (read: long ass) day from Texas, and I'm going to try and tell you what we've been up to in photo form, because we have a strictly enforced photo-of-the-day requirement, and a rule that no two photos can be taken in the same spot. It's been a pretty ideal quarantine situation and I have not been bored yet! 

Day 1: Driving Day! We wore these masks made by Nina and drove for 18 hours, including this shopping trip to stock up for the next two weeks. 

Day 2: Virtual Passover! We hosted a quick seder over Zoom with some Outward Bound friends. I made matzah ball soup and Bennett hid both a virtual and real afikomen. Twas a nice way to connect.

Day 3: Guitar Lessons! Bennett has been teaching me guitar almost every day. I have worked up from Ode To Joy and am now picking along to Worried Man Blues. Our running joke is that Bennett is a really mean teacher and makes fun of my "skills." It is true that I have absolutely no rhythm. 

Day 4: Snow Day! Porch pic from the beginning of the day-- a lot more snow came throughout the day and I tramped around in it and ate some of course. It was pretty bizarre to come from 80 degree Texas to a foot of snow here in Colorado.

Day 5: This Huge Puzzle. We worked on it for 8 days-- a typical morning involved a couple solid hours of puzzling while sipping coffee and listening to BingeMode Harry Potter (highly recommend). 2,000 pieces, so we're feeling pretty dang accomplished now that it is done.

Day 6: Hallway! We aren't really supposed to leave the apartment according to the county rules but I have been carefully going outside for a lil exercise every day. I kick all the doors open to leave and use hand sani on the way in.

Day 7: Avatar. We have been watching Avatar: The Last Airbender every night in quarantine. This began down in Redford where we all watched the first season together, and now that we are separated, Kevin and Carly have been watching and so have we. So one night (day 7!) we video chatted with them to discuss our feelings about the second season.

Day 8: Best Fiends. This is my current quarantine vice. A phone game where you try to destroy evil slugs... we are both obsessed and have definitely wasted hours and hours on it. Here we are, fiending away. 

Day 9: High Tea! Spurred because I found some cooking lavender, so I made an eggless lavender cake loaf and we had tea with fancy jam jars and it was quite nice! Inspiring of course by High Tea at Cove work weekends.

Day 10: Virtual Gaming! We have so far played virtual Catan with Rachael and Thomas on a website and then on this day we tried virual Pandemic using two video chats, a real board on our end, and good communication with Maxx and Jaimie on the other end! Sadly we did not win, but it was a successful endeavor. So many screens!

Day 11: Abs squad! We do 15-min abs every other day with the Redford homies-- a tradition that began during our Redford Quarantine (see previous blog post) and is still going strong over fb messenger video. We mostly just hang out and chat but also do our workout. This day had a strong turnout and many giggles as we were introduced to the wild world of filters by Jaime and Maxx.

Day 12: The Kitchen! We take turns cooking every day. Lunch and breakfast are half fend for yourself, half one of us sometimes makes more of a thing. Dinners have been fun in that one of us is totally responsible each day, so you just wait and see what the other person whips up from our funny assortment of freshies and random dried trail food. I've made Challah for Shabbat both Fridays, and Bennett's specialty has been eggless cupcakes. We made our two dozen eggs last 12 days, wooohoo! Shoutout to chia seeds and applesauce. 

Day 13: Garage Trip. We try to limit trips to the car where the majority of our stuff still is because it's technically a public space, but on this day we went on a mission to grab yeast and Ticket to Ride. Just essentials, ya know.

Day 14: Bath pic! Finally took this one-- it was our plan since Day 1. We each have a bathtub in our rooms and pretty much every night we watch Avatar until 8:30 or 9 and then go take a luxurious bath. Bennet's mom has a lot of bath salts that we've been testing out, and I've brought in an array of candles and I read Terry Tempest Williams by candlelight and it's quite dreamy.

Ok, that's all for now so I can post this today and check that off the to-do list! Despite what our photo count says, we still have tomorrow to be in quarantine and then on Tuesday we are technically free! Well, free to go to public spaces like a grocery store and free to drive to a trailhead. The only parts of our quarantine not included in this photo series is our art table where we watercolor. Hope you enjoyed a peek into our quarantine life! Next up: who the heck knows. I sure don't!

West Texas Quarantine Log

Greetings from Redford, TX! I have been living here since September and have neglected to blog for lack of time and a plethora of other things to keep me entertained, so now here I am ~ a week in to our Quarantine of sorts. It's Saturday and there is not a whole lot going on because for once in our outdoor educator lives we are observing proper weekends.
I thought I'd give my dear readers (aka my mom) a glimpse into the life of our Redford Quarantine. Not gonna lie, it's been pretty swell, especially when I compare our situation to friends who are stuck in their apartments in big cities. Hopefully this post doesn't come off as me bragging about how great we have it. We do have it great, and we are very lucky to have been able to stay here for some extra weeks. We're trying to enjoy this community time while we have it because we know from watching the rest of the world in isolation how special our situation is. In ten days we, The Quarantine Ten, will be going our separate directions into this changed world because the Texas base has to close down to save money.

But until that time comes, we've been keeping quite busy with service projects and events and have set up a system for living here. I'll give you a run down:
We had a long meeting once it was established that ten of us would be staying on base for as long as we possibly could. To stay here we would have to contribute 20 hours of service to base each week to earn our room and board and we would also have to abide by the Outward Bound community living guidelines as directed by the CDC. No physical touch, bleach down every surface two times per day, use your own bathroom only (luckily we each have our own bathroom), don't go into other people's rooms, one person is the designated errands runner.
We had to move things out of the Melon (where we keep tools and supplies) so that we limit people going in and out of certain spaces.

Then we decided on jobs and crafted a Quarantine Living Agreement.
Kevin had all the projects in mind so he was elected to be Bob the Builder.
I was obviously the Post Master, responsible for checking the mail.
Arty was dubbed 'The Explorer' and is responsible for trips to town every three days for groceries.
Maxx is 'Senor Limpiador' or 'Profesor Maximilian' because he is the best at Spanish and is responsible for a weekly Spanish lesson and for making the daily bleach solution
Nina is the Laundry Lady- since we can't go to town for laundry anymore she does it at her house
Jaimie is the Town Scribe- she made all our informational posters
Dan doesn't seem to have an assigned job but he's in charge of the burn barrel
Bennett is the Party Planner, keeping up with our schedule of social events
Brian is still doing his normal job of Program Director
Yoshie and I are tag teaming the food room- we are the Ration Rats and operate the "store" on base where we give out dried food if people need more

Every Sunday we have community dinner. We have to be served food by the cooks, but otherwise it's a pretty normal affair. Tomorrow is Indian food, last week Arty made this beautiful array of dishes.

We have a projector in our community space so many evenings we watch a movie. So far we're watched O Brother, Where Art Thou, Gladiator, 1917, How to Train Your Dragon, and Moulin Rouge. We're been board gaming a ton, armed with hand sanitizer in case we accidentally touch our face while gaming, and a rule that we have to wash our hands before and after. We've collectively played 8 games of Pandemic, 1/2 a game of Twighlight Imperium, and talk of Catan has been in the works for days. We had a hilarious cooking competition a couple nights ago. Each team was given 5 ingredients from the food room and had 1 hour to craft an appetizer, main, and dessert using those ingredients plus whatever else from their personal food that they wanted.

Tonight we're having open mic night, and already today we had trivia hosted by Willie over Zoom. A couple days ago our Spanish lesson was a mock courtroom where we had to split into two teams and argue about the ownership of a dog. As you can see, we're pretty dang busy, and I haven't even gotten into our projects during the day.

As I said, we're expected to do 20 hours a week and Kevin is our task maker. A big project has been filling the ground of the gear-clean station out back with small rocks to promote better drainage. We devised a system of digging for rock 50 yards away from the site and loading it into a wheelbarrow using a giant hand-made sieve to get rid of the dirt.
Another project is painting: we are still working on painting the inside of the Melon, and we unearthed two bathrooms on base that were covered in dirt and random stuff and have painted them and turned them into what will soon be the most popular bathrooms on base, once Nina figures out the plumbing. And it'll bring our grand total of bathrooms on base to 12!

It really is an ideal situation. Very limited contact with the outside world, a very fun community to be in, freedom to socialize and be outside... I love it. Every day I go on a bike ride, typically at sunset because the days have been pretty toasty. We have our neighborhood pups that come visit every couple of days. Someone is always baking something delicious. We do 15-minute ab workouts every other day. I think reality is going to hit pretty hard when our time here is up, but for now, everything is peachy. And boy do we have a lot of canned peaches in case we get really desperate.