Always Forward

Location: Heber City, UT

It started on an earlier day in mid September. After living in Vermont off and on for the past six years, it was difficult to say good-bye to the place and friends I’d come to know. But my life has moved west gradually over the past several years, attracted by real mountains, awesome weather, and a more urban lifestyle, compared to rural Vermont. Leaving Jericho at 4:30 AM, I drove to the airport as the first hints of light appeared for the day. Leaves had just started to change color and it was a crisp fall morning. The quintessentially perfect day in New England.

My ’98 Ford Explorer had been giving me problems since the spring. Actually, it had given me problems since I started driving it. Why did we ever come up with vehicles that only get 15 miles per gallon? Other than that economic and environmental weakness, that truck took me to a lot of places, both in the years I have driven it, and when it was our family car before that. But I would be getting a new car, so it didn’t make sense to keep the Explorer around. Seeing that I didn’t have much time or energy to sell it, considering the fact that there were some necessary, expensive repairs to be made, and that the demand for SUVs isn’t all that high these days for good reason, my options were to bring it to a salvage yard so it could be turned into scrap metal or donate it to the Firing Range to be used as target practice for artillery fire. A third, less destructive option emerged that I ultimately chose.

At the airport, I was met by my friend Vy and her father. They offered to take it off my hands. So I sold it to them for $1. Since then, they’ve replaced the brakes and windshield and Vy’s father is now using it for his business.

I flew to Minnesota from Vermont and took a taxi to my parent’s old neighborhood in St. Paul. I grew up in Bloomington, but my parents abandoned suburban living in favor of a small urban house closer to work and sanity in St. Paul. They sold this house last spring in preparation for their grand adventure, which I’ll describe in a bit, and moved into a newly wed studio apartment. They proceeded to get rid of most of their possessions and move the remainder to a new condominium they bought in downtown Denver.

At the beginning of September, they both retired and moved onto what I refer to as a tugboat, but which is actually even slower, a trawler. It’s a beautiful boat and they’ve reminded me from where I get the genetics to keep moving around. We’ve always had a boat. For most of the years, my sister and I essentially grew up in the summer time in the Apostle Islands off the tip of northern Wisconsin in Lake Superior. A few years ago, my parents traded in the main and jib sails for a handkerchief sail and a larger, albeit still sluggish engine. Now they are on the Great Circle Route for the next several months. Having started in the Apostles, they said good-bye, and cruised out of Lake Superior along the South Shore and down across Lake Michigan to the Illinois River. Then, they spent a few dozen miles on the Mississippi and are now on the Ohio River (I think) in Kentucky. They’ll continue down several rivers to the Gulf of Mexico and cruise around Florida and the Bahamas, eventually returning to the Great Lakes via the East Coast and Hudson River.

Anyways, that’s how I inherited my new Subaru Outback, which was the impetus for this road trip.

I spent two nights in Minnesota. The first, I spent just south of Duluth with my friend Hansi, whom I lived with in Richmond my first year in Vermont. He and his wife Margaret have found an amazing home in an awesome small town that reminded me how cool Minnesota can be if you remove six-lane highways and acre after acre of subdivision housing. The rest of the time I spent checking out the Cities again – and renewing my fear of the suburbs. I did some training, too, though I forgot my LEKI grip straps, so it was just no poling.

I drove by my childhood house and realized how so completely removed my life, my values, my friends, and my place in the world is from Bloomington. After a quick drive-by, I filled up with gas at the Super America I would go to for Gatorade with friends in the summer, saw the bank I first had an account at, and looked on with horror at the McDonalds whose food I used to crave. As much as my life is moving on right now, it is nowhere near the abrupt transplantation I embarked upon when I lifted off and moved to Norway at age 16.

A few minutes later, I was stuck in traffic on US-169 for an hour. It seems Minnesota didn’t want to get rid of me without a fight.

I arrived in Sioux City, Iowa, following many, many miles of fields and many, many hours of NPR later. My friend Marci is a native Iowan whom I met during the second half of Army training this past spring at Fort Jackson. She has a great sense of humor mixed with good shots of intelligence and wit. I’d throw it all on ice, too. I met her fiancé and some of her friends. She would hate me if I didn’t mention that she is getting married in a Vera Wang dress. I guess that’s a big deal.

The next morning, I walked to the car and saw a flat tire. Thirty minutes, a few phone calls to dad, and lots of misunderstanding with the Subaru user manual, I changed my first flat tire with the spare. As it was a Sunday in conservative America, most of the tire centers were closed. The one I did find open didn’t have the speed-rated tires I needed as the flat was caused by a nail that went through the sidewall, necessitating replacement of all tires. But they had one tire that would work. As I was leaving, he mentioned that next time I might want to put the spare tire on the other direction. Oops, so much for feeling all blue-collar and manly.

As I drove, between many, many more fields of Iowa and Nebraska, I wondered if replacing just one tire on the axel would cause problems for the differential. BlackBerry internet came to the rescue yet again, telling me that indeed I was putting my vehicle’s all-wheel drive system and the rear differential at risk by replacing only one tire. Sometimes ignorance is bliss. I kept sweating, worrying… listening for anything out of the ordinary. Then Nebraska made me unconscious and all was better, err… ignored.

I finally arrived in Denver Sunday night to my parents’ condominium, which is a few blocks from downtown. My sister is taking care of it while they are on their tugboat adventure. It’s fantastic. The interior is really well done and it has great views of downtown and the Front Range of the Rockies. It’s next to a decent-sized park and not far from a good-sized park. I went running the next day in the latter park and only had to do three laps! My impressions of urban life are gradually moving towards receptive. We went out to eat a few times and were constantly reminded why we are each other’s sibling and our parents’ children.

One day, I spent in Boulder. I checked out downtown and the new Nordic store that Nathan Schultz has. Then, I met with one of the professors in the Environmental Studies graduate program at CU Boulder. The program is outstanding. However, even better is that Boulder is the best city-sized place I would actually consider living. The mountains are 5 minutes away. The city is bikeable. The weather is perfect. The public transportation even ascends all the way to the nearest ski area, Eldora, 45 minutes away, along whose route you can jump off and on if you want to hike or cruise the backcountry. The city is progressive-minded, but seemingly pragmatic. Everyone looked under 25 years old.

I met up with an old friend from the good old days of Minnesota Valley Ski Club. At the ripe age of 12, I began training formally for skiing with Reid Lutter and his gang of coaches at Hyland Park Reserve. One of the first kids I met was Blake Pound. He moved out to Boulder to attend CU and has stayed there since graduating a while ago. We went for a run near the Flatirons. One of the things about Boulder I’ll just have to get used to is that I’m no longer going to be the best, strongest, or fastest while training. We were passed by a guy in his 60s while running up a pretty good-sized hill. I think Boulder has the highest concentration of Olympians in the country. Oh, and I almost stepped on a coral snake.

My time in Colorado had come to a close. On my way to Utah, I stopped in Laramie, Wyoming to go for a run with 2006 Olympic teammate Sarah Konrad. Both of us were running for the position of athlete representative to the U.S. Biathlon Association Board of Directors and U.S. Olympic Committee’s Athlete Advisory Committee. So we got a chance to talk about directions we’d like to see those organizations exploring and going forth in. We ran at a place called Happy Jack, which is high above Laramie. The trails are wonderful and the views of the surrounding high desert are spectacular. We had lunch at a great Mexican restaurant where I stuck to my mainstay, fish tacos. A few hours later, I was in Utah, just in time to listen to our dear President on the radio tell me how great the financial bailout would be.

A few hundred miles and seven days later, I had arrived in Utah.

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