until a very large, extremely nonplussed elk came charging out of the woods right in front of me. and before you ridicule me for freaking out in the presence of a furry herbivore let me point out that i was first of all six miles from the nearest person and not in posession of any kind of weapon. and it may be (in retrospect, it probably was) that i was imagining it, but this thing looked pissed. bob. its funny how your brain prioritizes things in an emergency – the first thing i could think of was that i would call him bob. the second thing i did was ski off into the woods as fast as i could. this was probably less than brilliant, but like i said i was not 100% prepared to take on a five-hundred pound animal with antlers armed only with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. and i’m sure it could have caught me if it actually wanted to, but instead he just followed me for like twenty minutes, deeper and deeper into the woods with me freaking out a little more with every step. gradually i began to be afraid that he would chase me of a cliff or gnaw me to death. so i stopped near what looked like a pond and took off my skis, holding them up in an ‘x’ between me and him. then i stuck my skis down into the snow, and ran into the pond. this cannot possibly be the most intelligent thing i have ever done but i figured there was no way it would be able to keep track of my scent. and i was right, i think.

but it could still see me. and once i’d gotten myself halfway across this pond – really no more than an overgrown bog, and freezing cold at that – i saw that the other side was so heavily wooded that the chances of my ever getting out that way were close to zero. so i stood there, locked in a staring contest with bob the elk. big, stupid animal. at one pm i crouched down behind a log, soaking myself to the waist, so i wouldn’t be so easily visible. and he just stood there, staring at me.

for. freaking. ever.

gradually i began to get pretty cold, but since i was still, at that point, afraid of being gored to death by an elk, i stayed in the pond. i did pee in the pond at one forty-five but it didn’t make me any warmer. they say you should pee whenever you can, in the winter. holding it makes you feel colder. anyway, i stayed crouched down in the bog. at three-fifteen, i ate my sandwich. from three-twenty to six pm i cursed, in succession, the elk, the nordic center, the outdoors, myself, my skis, the manufacturer of my skis, weather, animals in general and the elk in particular, whoever perpetrated the myth that wool stays warm when it is wet, noah, the world as a whole, and the elk several more times just to be sure. and at six pm, after six and a half hours of staring at each other (two of those in the relative darkness of moonlit snow), bob the elk turned and walked away. just like that. big stupid animal.

i stayed in the bog for ten more minutes just to be sure and then hightailed it back to the nordic center. it turned out to be pretty easy, thankfully: i just followedmy own tracks back to the trail, and it turned out to be slightly downhill back to the lodge. when i got back i was frozen, of course, but they had a fire that i used to thaw myself out. after three big cups of hot chocolate by the fire i burped with gusto and headed for the door. as i was leaving i saw a hand-carved sign above the door:

And this? Thisis God’s country.

God’s country? He can keep it.

last winter, when i was still working at chili’s, i came home late one night reeking of Awesome Blossom to find my roomate carissa wiping a fine yellow dust off of everything in the kitchen. our apartment smelled overpoweringly of charred lemon-scented cleanser and the formerly white toaster oven sat in an open garbage bag in the kitchen, charred, forlorn, and covered with yellow dust. it was obviously going to be necessary to tread lightly in this situation, but you can’t just avoid mentioning what was clearly a fire. so i eventually inquired after the events of the evening. it turned out to have all started with a taco shell in the toaster oven, which had caught fire much more dramatically than is usual. once the flames were past the top of the toaster oven and were licking against teh cabinet above, carissa wisely decided to haul out the heavy rtillery in the form of our hand-held fire extinguisher. the fire extinguisher turned out to have been filled with yellow chalk (who knew the main weapon of the elementary school teacher was such a potent firefighting tool). subsequently, the fire was out, the only other change being the contents of the fire extinguisher and the kitchen changing places. the fire extinguisher, which had been filled with yellow chalk, was empty, and the kitchen, which had been empty, was filled with yellow chalk. later, we got a new toaster oven.

and it wasnt too long before that that i found two kittens by the side of the road while i was out biking one day with my friend ben. he wasn’t allowed to have pets in his apartment, but i wasn’t allowed to have them in my dormitory. so he kept them for a few days, and then gave them to me. i made them a little bed in my eight by ten foot single-suddenly-turned-triple room, and they were pretty content to explore behind my desk and not make any trouble. i was lucky during this time to not have any college security officers notice that i was keeping illicit cats in my room: the fine was $100 per day per cat.

everything was completely copacetic until late one thursday night. i was sitting in the common room, reading sociology, when suddenly i caught a whiff of what smelled like burning hair. i ran back to my room where i saw tom, the dumber of the two cats, had fallen asleep against the heater and caught fire. two of my suitemates had also smelt the commotion and come running: heated debate ensued. we first thought of putting him out with a blanket, but he was pretty small and delicate and we were afraid of crushing or suffocating him. we needed to put him out with water so i picked him up with a towel and carried him into the bathroom. we couldnt get him to stay still in the sink, and the shower couldnt contain him in that frenzied state. finally, as i was really starting to freak out, i pushed open the door to one of the toilet stalls and just tossed him in. with a splash, our problems were solved.

poor tom never went near the radiator again.

i’m not capable of doing anything useful today: way too nervous. i saw the show last night, it went great and everyone seemed really excited. and i wasn’t really nervous until this morning, when i noted to myself over a bowl of oatmeal that it would be me on stage tonight, and i freaked right out. i convinced chloe to wait until next weekend to come see the show – it was sweet that she wanted to come this weekend but it make me too nervous. she might stop by afterwards to go out for a drink.

meantime it will be a busy weekend, and a full report will be forthcoming.

but we both had running shoes in the car, and, well, what better way to warm up? mind out of the gutter, you’re not privy to that kind of information. we laced them up and headed out, at midnight. counterclockwise, and pretty sedate. we weren’t even the only ones out, which cut down on the creep-out factor for me. i’ve always had a problem with running in the dark, i’m afraid some large-toothed animal is going to leap out of the bushes and tear me limb from limb. not that chloe herself helped assuage the fear, but all the other people around reassured me that running around the res at night wasn’t the act of a total lunatic. so chloe and i talked, about nothing in particular and the need for tighter doping controls at road races. should we take a bike ride sometime, it didn’t snow much this winter, what’s the name of those birds with the long balck and white tails, we ought to go on the celestial seasonings tour, spikes in the 10k, wheat white or rye, whats your favorite color. it took way too little time to get back to the car and both of us had to get home, but it was a grand time. need i say it again? smitten.

today i taught a sunday school class about buddhism. we covered the basic tenets, tangentially, via a group exercise on patience and frustration (“no talking!”) and a guided meditation to hell. i cannot recommend guided meditation highly enough: soft music plays in the background, or beethoven’s 9th if thats all you’ve got, and someone talks you through a relaxation and an actual journey (“you see a coconut lying on the sand in front of you, and you pick it up. inside it is a bird…”). they can be incredibly relaxing and powerful, a really fun exercise for discussion afterward because invariably everyone experiences it in a different way. our mind journey went via the flatirons, a powerful hailstorm, and a ride on the back of a dolphin. good fun, its not every day you get to take seven people to hell and back before lunch (bagel, toasted, with light cream cheese).

and carissa bought a gas grill. not an apartment-sized gas grill, suitable for use on our thirty-one square foot porch. this thing is the real mccoy, a shelf on either side and an automatic ignition. carissa doesn’t do things half-assed, and while i would find an appliance of this magnitude intimidating, she grills like a pro. spatulas quake in their boots when hey hear her approach, swinging a bottle of A1 like a .357 magnum and practically daring the steak not to cook evenly. who could help but be impressed?. plus it cuts an arresting figure out there on the porch.

my housemate carissa tested for, and got, her blue belt last night. she is a member of her karate studio’s demo team, a group of itinerant ninjas that performs at county fairs, supermarket openings, weddings, bar mitzvahs, and birthday parties. if you know carissa it should not come as a surprise to you that she could probably kick your ass.

last night chloe came over for dinner, which got me stressed right out, because after i invited her on wednesday i remembered that i don’t really know how to cook. i used to cook in high school, just for the pure hell of it, but since then my culinary expertise has narrowed considerably to include oatmeal, hot chocolate, and toast. these are not the things you offer your date though, not if you ever want her to be able to look at you with a straight face again. so i picked up some chicken, spinach, ginger, almonds, and a couple of odd-sounding spices and set to work. fortunately the kitchen in my apartment is pretty small, so that when chloe got here she was still able to spot me through the smoke. she showed me how to turn on the fan above the stove (who knew?) and put the radio on the country station. while we waited for dinner to finish cooking we had cosmopolitans out of the pretty cool martini glasses. this was a point of pride for me, because i remembered the recipe that john young told me on new years eve. we made them with fresh lime juice. yum.

dinner was actually pretty good, which surprised me. chicken with some kind of ginger-almond sauce, we ate out on the porch even though it was freezing cold. i wish i could give the recipe for it, but it caught fire on one of the stove burners and i had to put it out with a tee shirt. such a loss, but as long as we didn’t have to drag out the fire extinguisher again, i guess it counts as a small victory. anyhow, after dinner we drank hot chocolate on the stadium couches and watched animal crackers (“Gentlemen… question mark.”).

it was a grand time you know. i could get used to living like this.

and, btw, give josh cox some time before you get all ornery on him. boston’s going to be a sweet show, a lesser race without him to be sure, but part of the intrigue is that roller coaster of popularity and prestige. anybody remember geoff smith, 1984-85? in 85 he split 14:15 (“Smith blasted out 5k in 14:15 as if he were racing against ghosts” )for the first 5k, 1:02:51 for the first half, and blew up spectacularly with about 8 miles to go. he still won, by nearly five minutes, with a 2:14. the next year, rob decastella set a world record.

the field comes and goes, the prestige is similarly cyclical. boston is a race that endures, though, and it will always be there. i take great personal exception to reports of its decline.

other news: what a fantastic weekend. since i quit chilis, i don’t work on weekends anymore. god, what a great schedule that turns out to be. i had time to run (17 miles this weekend, not too shabby), lie in the grass and take pictures of airplanes, plan a sunday school class (judaism), and gather some data for my AI project. saturday i ran (uphill both ways, honest) around wonderland lake and went for ice cream with chloe. the two of us really wanted a pair of those really cool sneakers with the pop-out roller skates. two hours of searching the pearl street mall didn’t actually net us any shoes, but we did come across the stone cold ice cream store (hey, what do you know, its still there. i wonder if their ice cream is still good!). she is fairly coordinated, so she’d have likely done fine on the skates. for my part though, its probably good that we didn’t manage to get the shoes. i still have visible scars (visible when i am naked) from my first foray onto rollerblades, seven years ago now. its a fore/aft balance thing. i also bit it really hard rollerblading in the front hall of my house during winter break my sophomore year of college anyhow, chloe and i checked out the arty stores on the east end of the mall, and just like when my brother was here, we lamented the cost of the cool martini glasses. they’re hand-blown, with translucent blue or green lightning-bolt shaped stems, and big enough that the olive doesn’t crowd out your drink, but not so big that it gets lost in there.

anyway it was a swell evening, and i was up early sunday morning to run with the group that meets across the street from my apartment. we went a little longer today than the past couple of weeks, plus it was hot outside and even hotter inside my t-shirt. its too early in the season for me to run shirtless with a group – my residual pudge from the winter jiggles. i can stand it when i run alone, but with all these other people around i get all self-conscious. there’s a possibility that i might be getting in shape though, i had exceptionally high praise from someone at church (“You look like you’re getting too skinny”). i have a lot of bad fitness to overcome this year though, so its going to take a lot.

and, taxes. of course mine aren’t done yet, and i had to do them tonight, but i couldn’t let such a beautiful weekend pass me by like this. chloe had tax work to do too, but living right up against the mountains has another interesting feature: if you go real close to the edge of them, the sun sets earlier. so we watched a spectacular sunset at about 5 pm in a little meadow not far from canyon road, and drank fruit smoothies out of martini glasses. we couldn’t have picked a better night to watch the sunset, the sky was ablaze with color and it stayed around 75 degrees. and the martini glasses, in case you were wondering, were from pier one. not as cool as the ones from the boulder art cooperative, but a great deal less expensive and more classically styled. they are very james bond, in fact, but 007 would never deign to put a peach-strawberry smoothie in one

that was all the thinking i did for some time, because i spent the better part of the morning and early afternoon fishing with chloe. we picked up a couple of fishing rods at gart sports, and i dug out the hip waders my brother dan got me for my birthday a few years ago, and we headed up to the big old lake near estes park. it was a beautiful day, the kind that makes you wish you had a chainsaw to take the roof off your car and drive around with the wind whipping your hair, and take naps on the grass in the sunshine. and i would like to say that we did just that but it wouldn’t be true. we did roll down the windows, and we did spend a couple of hours in waist-deep water casting lures with no hooks on them, talking about nothing in particular, and gradually succumbing to the early stages of hypothermia (yeah, of course i gave her the waders). we didn’t catch anything, of course, and we’d had to cut the hooks off the fishing lures to make sure of that – there’s really nothing that kills pleasant conversation so much as a big, angry fish flopping around needing a hook extracted from its mouth. so thanks to our preparations, fishing was a pleasantly unproductive activity, but we were eventually too cold to keep going.

we could have just sat in the car to warm back up, and that probably would have been the fastest way, but i was soaking wet and had no change of clothes, so i had to dry out first. chloe scouted out a patch of grass in the lee of a big rock but right in the sunshine where we could warm up. it was great. the sun warmed us up in nothing flat, and my clothes, even my jeans, were dry inside of forty minutes. faster than the dryer in my apartment. so naturally i was sad when we had to go, but until i can start managing to keep regular hours i wait tables on saturday nights. and you know how it is of course. having spent such a nice day with chloe, nothing could get me down all night at work, not even the Spitting Man (“Yesssss, I’ll have a sssssteak.”).

but all of that combined with what i’d done on my brief trip home got me thinking, all the way back to why i moved out here in the first place. it was not to try to land an office job and not to convince the citizens of longmont that they would like a margarita with their dinner. i wanted to carve out a niche here, make myself a part of the community. i wanted to be a professional triathlete. i do feel like i’ve done pretty well at making a niche, to a certain extent, but i feel like its not quite the right one. i think i’ve done well at trying new things (cf. my forays into tap dancing, boxing, and building a computer from parts), but i haven’t left room for my old training patterns. i have my inhaler and a nice pair of shoes, and the weather is mostly great. i just feel like for a while there, i’d forgotten the dream, something i’ve been clinging to for nearly seven years now. it was a dream i was close to realizing last may, but graduating college and moving into a garden shed proved to be a great deal more challenging than i’d imagined.

anyhow, the fire is lit again. happy easter.

what can i say? i’m smitten, more than before. i think we’re hitting it off really well, and i’m really excited. she killed me at pool, five games to two, and i lost the ten bucks i won on that scratch ticket to her. i tried to convince her that i was a slow-movig pool hustler, and that i would win ten times that amount back from her sometime (this was my roundabout way of asking if she wanted to go out again: any guy reading this is nodding his head right now). without missing a beat, she said “Well I guess that means we’ll have to play again.” no kidding.

smitten, no doubt about it.

she was wearing sauconys and a blue t-shirt that said “ATARI” in white letters. i wished, briefly, that i had gotten around to making the big sign that said “what is your phone number?” lacking that, i scrambled up the bank of the reservoir and introduced myself.

“will. nice to meet you”

“i’m chloe. counterclockwise?”

“sure.” we ran and talked. she had just spent a year in chile and was teaching literature to high-school freshman. but what to do at the end of the school year? it was a huge problem, we agreed. it seems like every choice you make at this age is just trying to answer that question ‘so, what are you going to do with your life?’ even though the only person who ever asks it of you is yourself. what brought me to boulder? how did she like teaching?

after far too little time, our paths diverged. we agreed to meet again though, exchanged phone numbers, and i took the long route home.

needless to say, i am smitten. she is charming, witty, and has a commanding knowledge of english literature as well as excellent taste in running shoes.