Case Study on Balance

Charles Novotny is in a bit of a pickle. He is sitting at a cubicle desk, a few feet back from his computer. His tie is loosened and Rorschach-esque dabs of perspiration are growing under his arms and at the back of his collar. A photograph of two young children rests on a shelf above his monitor and is obscured by smoke from the two-stroke engines flying around his head.

He is wearing a freshly pressed pair of Dockers khakis (with a little bit of spandex in them) and a few drops of bar oil have fallen and left stains. He does not notice. He is focused intently on juggling four running chainsaws and three live kittens. They appear to be tabbys.

A teenage boy of about sixteen pushes a mail cart through the office. One of the wheels squeaks, but Charles does not notice. He is wearing earmuffs; the motors are very loud. The boy behind the mail cart stops at Charles’ desk and pauses for a moment. He furls his brow before reaching into the cart to produce another chainsaw. He flicks the choke and pulls it to start. He and Charles make eye contact, and the boy tosses the saw with one and a half backward flips so that it blends seamlessly into the seated man’s rotation. Charles Novotny is now juggling five running chainsaws and three small tabbys.

The boy moves on with the mail cart. The wheel still squeaks.

The ease with which Charles Novotny keeps the saws and kittens in flight is hypnotizing. His eyes are cast upward and  do not blink. He does not move his head. Muscle memory and his periphery track the saws and cats that fly through the air.

And these are not small, top handled arborist’s saws. We’re talking, like, full on Stihl 661s. Each time he catches one and tosses it aloft again, the 20″ bar swings toward him, and he extends his arm fully to ensure that the blade does not land on his shoulder and sever his arm. Vibrations from the engines have numbed his hands, and his arms ache. It is not yet eleven in the morning.

He catches and throws one or two running chainsaws for every kitten. To use the same strength and force he needs to keep the saws in the air when it comes time to catch a small cat would certainly crush the animal. Yet each tabby looks calm. One is sleeping.

There is no display of stress aside from the sweat.

His underarms are wetted through and his shirt is stuck to his back. Each vertibra is visible through the cheap microfiber cloth. A droplet has formed on his nose and is hanging from between his nostrils. He twitches his face and the droplet falls to the tile floor below his chair. His eyes do not move.

The phone rings. He does not answer it because doing so would mean dropping a saw or a tabby. There is a pause before the phone in the next cubicle rings. The woman there answers it. She steps into Charles Novotny’s small office with another saw. She chokes it, rips the cord, and it putters to life. She opens the choke and gives it some throttle and it roars. She throws it to him and he catches it. A pool of sweat is forming around his chair.

It is three in the afternoon. One of the saws sputters and when it comes through its next rotation the engine has run out of gas. He throws it again and the next time it comes through he sets it next to his chair without breaking the stride. By four pm two more saws run through their fuel and are sitting askew in a pile. He is now juggling two running saws and three kittens.

The lights in the office begin to go out. The first one darkens at 4:57. Precisely at 5 most of the lights darken. Charles Novotny is still juggling three cats and a saw.

It is nearly 7pm when the last saw goes quiet. He lays it in the pile of the others and gently catches the kittens. He tucks one into each pocket of his coat, shuts off the light, and locks the door as he leaves.

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The End of the Story

Things Left Behind originally ran in Camas Magazine. You can find the beginning right here.

They stood on the porch and waited for the van that the boy in the yellow shirt had said would come. She had no car and so they waited on the porch. The boy asked, Momma can I feed the horses if we’re leaving? The horses were still in the pen and had not been moved even though up the canyon orangeblack embers rolled down the steep grassy slope and caught fire anew. Not now she said, there’s time for that when we come back.

She liked the horses, too. A boy she knew as a child had a palomino that they sometimes rode. He would bring it to the pole fence behind the school so that she could climb onto the timbers and reach over its back with her leg. It wore no saddle and she sat behind the boy, arms wrapped tightly around his bony waist. He held them on the horse with his bare heels tucked tightly around the cream and butterscotch ribs of the beast and her voice made a funny thumping sound with every canter step. Her hair sometimes would blow into her face and stick in her eyes and mouth, but she was afraid to let go of the boy to brush it away.

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She wondered what happened to that boy and if he’d become a man or stayed a boy like the mottled, sad-eyed drinkers that stared too long when she went to town. The smoke was thicker now. It burned her eyes and she couldn’t see much past the green painted cattle guard just up the road. A warm wind blew across the porch and the low roar of the fire up the valley was woven in the breeze with the idling diesels of fire trucks and trembling aspen.

They waited forty minutes and the van still had not come. They played Eye Spy and Twenty Questions to pass the time so that the boy would not be scared. It seemed to the boy strange that he was told to hurry, but now they waited playing games. They were a child’s games and he was tired of them soon, but agreed to another to distract his mother so that she was not afraid. The wind came down the canyon like an open oven door. Wait here she said and moved the cast iron sprinkler to the other side of the roof.

Woodsmoke choked the canyon now and the sun, still high but late in the day, burned through and took a bloodred hue. Red sky at night, she said quietly so the boy would not hear. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. She found no joy in a bloodred nighttime sky and she had winced at her father yelling poetry at the cows through a barbed wire fenceline while her mother cut onions for a stew and didn’t notice the color of the evening at all. It had been her mother’s home and after she passed was just a house.

The bus came. It was short, with only room for twelve passengers and a bag or two apiece. Another boy in a yellow shirt sat behind the wheel, soft blond bristles poking through a smudge of black soot above his lip where perhaps he had wiped his running nose. Come along, he said, in a bureaucratic calm that fell to pieces when the screams began.

What’s that Momma, the boy asked, and she pushed him gently onto the bus. I don’t know, she said, and thought that she had never lied to him before and never would again. She helped him to a seat and through the screaming fought to keep her hands still on his shoulder. Wait here, she said to the boy behind the wheel. I’ll only be a minute. We need to go he said but she walked to the house with terse steps and didn’t look back at him or slow.

The horses that the boy liked to feed stayed fenced in a five acre parcel with only a few trees by the far edge back by the hill and young alder along the fence. One of those partitioned hobby spreads that pop up when the old die and the young come home again to settle their affairs. Embers from the fire rolled down the hill and touched off the tall grass. The fire spread in an arrowhead shape through the pasture and pushed the horses to the corner until they pranced to stay above the flames around their feet.

The chestnut color of the horse’s breast was not so different from the wood stock of the rifle in the basement. She felt its worn, smooth butt against her cheek and looked through the kitchen window and along the faded blue barrel with both eyes open, like her grandmother had shown her. You can see everything that way, the old woman had said, guiding the girl through the motions of shooting the skinny coyotes that slinked just beyond the March lamplight during calving. You lose sight when you close an eye. .

Two shots rang out and the writhing in the burning grass came to rest. A pause. A third and a fourth shot came to quell the screaming, the second shimmering chestnut mare knelt and fell. The woman stood for a moment in the woody pinesmoke and listened to the fire speak out from up the valley. Low clouds of brown smoke and glowing ash wafted through the open window. She laid the rifle on a leather ottoman next to the worn leather-bound album and walked slowly back to the waiting boy.

Tough Decisions

Al Allen, from what I recall, is not a tall man. By my junior year in high school his thinning black widow’s peak stopped just above my shoulder. He had the paunch of a man in his 50s that crept past his belt and had a way of picking up ink from the white board on the wall as he moved back and forth across the room.

He addressed us by barking last names, or nicknames, or grossly phonetic caricatures of Christian names, but almost never what our parents had in mind. In my class was Peanut, Giraffe, Steed, and Pa-owl-la, among others. I remember him being a kind of excitable little man who routinely yelled at us to “shut up.”

He also had the uncanny ability to appeal to a roomful of comatose, bleary eyed sixteen year-olds and make trigonometry absolutely fascinating.

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Here’s Matt working out one of life’s tough decisions: one more lap or the hot tub?

Al’s (we called him Al) uncouth approach to instruction was disarming. After a lifetime of tutelage-through-obedience, this class offered an early glimpse of how fun and important learning through collaboration and mutual respect can be. In less than a semester I went from never actually quite learning my multiplication tables to deciding to study math in college.

I can think of two other teachers who’ve shaped me this much, but I can only remember a single lesson from his class. Of course what I remember has nothing to do with math.

A2 (sometimes we called him A2 ) also coached the basketball team. If he was a good math teacher, then he was a great basketball coach, apparently, and saw numerous players progress to the NBA over 21 years at the helm of the team. That role blurred with teaching. He brought energy from the court to the classroom, and acted as a mentor for players who might not have guidance elsewhere. His office was usually occupied by a student athlete working on homework or studying between classes.

I overhead a conversation once between Coach Al and a girl who was unsure of whether or not to try out for the varsity team. She’d played as a freshman and a sophomore, but didn’t know whether she wanted the additional commitment of a varsity sport.

“What do you mean you’re not sure?” he asked her. “It’s not up to you right now. You haven’t made the team yet, so don’t worry about it. Try out, and if you make it, then you can worry about all that.”

I understood, at the time, that she was a shoe in for the team, but he was right. She didn’t really have an option yet.

I’m not planning on trying out for a basketball team any time soon, but the advice holds up. It’s easy to stop short of applying for a job because you’re not sure if you’ll like it, or not looking at grad school because you don’t really want to move, or to not strike up a conversation with that girl at the coffee shop on the off chance that she’s boring.

But by walking away from something before you apply yourself, you’re making a decision that isn’t yours to make. No matter how good you are, how smart, or how attractive, if you assume that you’re a good fit, then you’re probably not.

Most of us have something on the horizon that we think we’d like to do, but aren’t really sure. It’s easy to talk ourselves out of taking a crack at it just for that reason: we’re not totally sure. Maybe the timing is wrong, or we don’t have all the information, or we’re still figuring out what it is that we really want.

The fact of the matter is that until you’ve got an offer, it’s really not up to you. All you can do is put your head down and try, an worry about some of the logistics later.

You might just find that having hard decisions to make is a good thing.

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Your Worst Friend

It’s Tuesday. Your alarm goes off at 6:32 and you hit snooze three times. You get out of bed, start the coffee, and let the dog out. Your feet are cold on the kitchen floor.

Between the time the dog comes back in and the coffee is ready, you pull your phone from the charger and scroll through your routine: weather, avy report, Instagram, Facebook, email, in that order.

High of 51, 30% chance of rain. Snowline is 6,500 feet, looks like more of the same all week. Considerable danger, heavy new snow and wind on last week’s melt crust; looks like it needs some time. Next advisory on Thursday. Like a few photos. Leave an emoji comment.

You click the blue square and regret it immediately. You knew you would but you clicked it anyway. Wedding photo, engagement photo, album of baby photos, primary commentary. Scalia is trending. You get past the hot topics to the updates relegated below the fold, the detritus that for some reason you keep coming back to read.

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Isn’t this why Twitter is dying? That people have figured out that they have better things to do than scroll through the streams of consciousness of idiots they’ve never met?

The coffee is ready. You pour a cup.

You flick through your newsfeed with your thumb, skimming the profile pictures and a few words at a time for something that might be interesting. It’s more of a tic now than anything, but one genre of post stands out.

“Help me raise awareness of Lou Gehrig’s disease by funding my half Ironman!”

Your blood boils. At least, if you’re anything like me, it makes your skin crawl.

The issue, of course, has nothing to do with fundraising for ALS research, in exactly the same way that your college roommate’s ex-girlfriend’s half Ironman has nothing to do with ALS. Fundraising for disease research is certainly a noble cause, apologizing for liking to be outside is not.

There’s a trend in sports and adventure to partner with philanthropic causes that doesn’t quite sit right with me. It’s as though we feel guilty for spending time doing something that we enjoy or vying for self improvement, and that dedicating our efforts to a charitable cause somehow veils the selfishness that comes with skiing across Antarctica, or pioneering new routes on Baffin Island, or finishing a first half marathon.

To me, partnering with a charity to justify or fund raise for what looks a lot like vacation is, at best, morally opaque, and at worst fraud.

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Inherent in the trend of Racing for Charity, or Climbing for a Cure, is the implication that racing or climbing is not a worthwhile way to spend our time. A new ice route in Glacier Park or first descent in Chamonix calls for every ounce of passion and toil as a Grammy winning single. An expedition ski tour is as much an expression of creativity as a book of poems.

The implication is that adventure is somehow an idle pursuit, only as valuable as the attention that it brings to some more noble cause. But travel inspires. Each film, or trip report, or story over beers has the ability to light a spark in someone else and to get them to interact with the world in a new way.

Raising money for cancer research is a great thing to do. Here’s a link for a good place to do it. Events that exist primarily as fundraisers, like RATPOD, do a tremendous service as well. But let’s move away from the idea that we need to apologize for our passion with vapid associations with ineffective charities. The journey should be enough.

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Balancing Reward

“It’s really not as hard as people think,” he said. Two ice cubes floated in amber liquid and clinked against the rim of the glass. He held it between his thumb and middle finger, and punctuated every point with an index finger that he brandished like a foil.

“The secret to happiness,” he said for the third or fourth time since I’d wandered to this archipelago of half a dozen people at the fringe of a crowded party, “is simply to lower your expectations.”

The party was several years ago, I think in Chicago, or California or somewhere, but I found myself thinking about it again as I hiked through boottop powder the other day for another short lap of skiing through excellent snow.

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The day before skiing I’d hoped to make it a big day. My usual morning routine involves hitting snooze until the last possible moment, groping in the dark for clean socks, nearly forgetting boots/skins/poles/skis, and leaving the house with neither food nor water (requiring a gas station or grocery stop on the way to the trailhead).

But this time I laid out my gear after dinner and got to bed early. I had snacks and water already packed, and even found my repair/first aid kit. When the alarm went off at 0530 I think I only hit snooze two or three times.

Eight hours later my skis whispered across the snow on a climb back to the top of our short run. It was already after lunch and we’d skied multiple hundreds of vertical feet. It was clear that we would not be hiking anywhere near the 10,000 vert that I’d prepared for the night before.

No one seemed to mind. The unspoken routine in this group of ski partners is for everyone to meet around 7am with an idea of where we’d each like to go. Over coffee and bacon burritos we’ll discuss the weather of the last few days, the avalanche report if it’s recent, any time constraints, and the disparity of our relative gumption. We’ll hem and haw for a while, and by 8 usually have a pretty good idea of where we’re headed and what kind of day it will be.

By the time we consolidate vehicles we’re all on the same page and have a good feel for the social dynamic before we even slip into boots. The morning after I’d laid out my gear and prepared like you’re supposed to, we decided the conditions ruled out steep terrain and settled on a day of conservative tree skiing.

A morning tradition like this sets the tone for good communication and safety. It does not, however, set the tone for doing anything ambitious. The tree skiing the other day was really quite good. We found soft snow blowing in to lee aspects and that wind slabs were easy to avoid. We had a good time and told a lot of jokes.

What we didn’t do was stand on top of anything noteworthy. We didn’t descend anything exciting. Really, nothing we did was worth writing about at all.

When we decided on a plan over coffee and sausage gravy, we categorically rejected expectations for the day. There was no angst about whether or not we’d succeed, because there was no stated goal. There was no risk, because there was no bet. There were simply a few friends wandering around in the woods cracking jokes and skiing powder.

Balancing reward and risk below the East Couloir on Grey Wolf Peak.
Balancing reward and risk below the East Couloir on Grey Wolf Peak.

There’s nothing wrong with cracking jokes and skiing soft snow in the same way that there’s nothing inherently wrong in whiling away your working years without risk or creative endeavor. But the unstated foundation of the idea that happiness is got with lowered expectations is that happiness itself is mutually exclusive with ambition.

I don’t know if I agree. I do think that it’s worth thinking about. Recall Annie Dillard’s warning that “how we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives.”

A day of low stress fun with friends is a beautiful thing, but a life without creative expression is heartbreaking. The daily balance of reward and risk extends beyond our morning routine. It’s the foundation for how we will have lived our lives.

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