works of wanderlust

Category: cast iron guy

  • It’s All About the Trail Shoes

    Sunday Runday and with less than two weeks until my first in-person race in over a year and a half I found myself facing a morning run dilemma.

    New shoes.

    Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining about new shoes.

    Quite the opposite.

    While on vacation in the mountains a few weeks ago I finally found a pair of trail shoes in my size and splurged. The next morning I broke them in with an (a previously blogged about) eight kilometer trail run up some steep incline and early morning terrain in the wilderness beauty of our National Park system, and then …

    … well … that dilemma I mentioned a couple paragraphs back compounded itself: I haven’t run any trail since, and the shoes had been sitting by my front door looking more forlorn than the dog when she needs her morning walk, and that other thing I mentioned in my opening sentence about an upcoming trail race kept nagging in the back of my mind.

    In two weeks I’m headed back out to the trails we visited last month for our little adventure with the wasps. Apparently the wasp situation has cooled alongside the weather, but neither of those things cooling off negates the fact that I’m signed up to run a roller-coaster single track trail half marathon quasi-ultra later this month.

    And as of this morning I’d run a mere eight kilometers in that brand new pair and brand new style (to me) of shoes.

    I tossed them into my backseat this morning on my way to meet my running crew and humbly suggested that we maybe, possibly, if anyone was interested run some trails as our Sunday route.

    There were some hefty dark clouds lurking to the west and the forecast (though cloudy and dry as we left) was for some light drizzle after a good soaking overnight.

    We decended into the river valley and into the rain-soaked single track weaving through the forests. The leaves are starting to yellow as the days shorten and fall creeps ever closer.

    By the time we exited that first stretch, my new shoes were clumped with mud and each weighed about a kilogram heavier than when I had entered.

    I was also dragging a small branch clinging to my heel, and I pulled off to the side of the path to clear the worst of it into the wet grass.

    A bit further down along we turned upwards towards a short ascent and into a utility corridor between the highway and the neighbourhood where the ankle-deep grass was still sopping with last night’s rain.

    Onward looped us into more single track and by the time we found our exit back into the asphalt of the nearby suburban streets not only were all our feet soaking wet and muddy, but the rains had truly arrived and would not let up again until we were well done the other half of our morning run.

    Soaked. Dirty. Tired. Epic.

    All for a pair of trail shoes…

    …and, oh, of course, the mental confidence that goes along with logging another medium-length trial run using those shoes, breaking them in, trialing them out, and generally assuring myself of their fit and function leading into that upcoming race.

  • Potluck Impossible

    As the sun sets this evening I’ll be partaking in a strange and magical event that has become rare elusive these past eighteen months: a small housewarming party.

    A dozen or so (fully vaccinated) friends and I are converging on the newest abode of one of them to sit and chat and eat and chat some more.

    And as per usual, the most daunting part of the occasion is spending my Saturday afternoon trying to figure out what kind of dish I should bring along for shares with everyone.

    The time honoured tradition of a potluck-style party has stumped many who have planned attendance at gatherings of any size. Bringing a sharable dish to someone else’s event is seemingly simple, but cooking for a crowd can open up a whole host of contemplations and considerations.

    I mean, lately I’d bake up a big loaf of sourdough to accompany some other contribution. But not only did I put this off and run short on time, I had put it aside as an option this time because the hostess has lately taken up her own sourdough habit after I re-invorgated her access to a starter.

    So, what to bring?

    Inevitably, some folks will show up with something tasty and simple, like a deli plate or a vegetable platter, and maybe a bottle of wine tucked under their arm. These are staples and great additions, but one always risks being the second or third one to show up with an “oh… another cheese ball!”

    At least one person is bound to have stopped on their way over for a takeaway solution, like a bucket of fried chicken from the drive-thru or a tray of spring rolls from the local dim sum. This is always a hit, and I would never complain while always eating my share of these offerings, but deep down I feel like it would be a bit too much of a shortcut to match my desire to cook or prepare something personal.

    The option that I do envy is the person with their special dish.

    THE dish.

    That thing they always bring to parties. The plate or bowl that never fails to appear in their potluck parade. Their speciality. You know the one.

    I don’t have one of those.

    I want one of those.

    I want that go-to. I want to have a potluck platter with which I always show up at parties.

    I want a plate that I unveil to knowing nods, a tray that is cleared before the night is over or a bowl that is scraped clean as people argue politely over the last morsel. I want to bring the kind of thing for which people ask me the recipe and to which I smirk and say, “I’ll send it to you” but never do because it’s THE thing I bring and don’t want to spoil it for myself.

    It can’t be too spicy. Many people like heat, but it frightens just as many others away.

    And the serving-size commitment level needs to be low, allowing guests to try a bite and then go back for a second or third helping. Forcing a full slice or a portion that takes over a quarter of one’s plate turns potential samplers into skeptics.

    This hypothetical dish of mine also needs to be some kind of side that can hold its own across different food themes. We’ve all encountered that one dish that is inexplicably out of place among everything else, the one that tastes great but somehow just doesn’t quite belong.

    I want to have one of those recipes to which I always turn when the invite comes through, something that I know I can pull together in a couple hours and do my part for any party.

    It might not be an impossible potluck search, but I haven’t found that dish yet. My dish.

    Not yet.

    So tonight, yet again, I’ll probably just bring a…

  • Friday Finds: Pressed Flowers

    Fatherhood is funny.

    Finding honest and interesting things to do with a young child can lead one down all sorts of previously unfollowed paths of creative exploration and into all kinds of time-filling follies.

    For (nearly) fourteen years I’ve been nudging my daughter to try new things, to explore her creative self, and find fanciful ways to fill her mind with fabulous experiences.

    For whatever reason for which I can’t quite recall, I was recently exploring something far less fanciful: the closet in my office… which is in itself an archeological site dating back to my having moved into the space well over a decade ago.

    Finding my old university textbooks was not surprising, but finding those same textbooks stuffed full of dried wild flowers was something that I had obviously done long ago but almost forgotten about.

    Foggy though my memory was on the exact timeline, I recall spending the day with my toddler-aged daughter in the local natural areas of the river valley, filling our days with simple delights and effortless fun.

    Frolicking through the tall grasses and between the poplar trees, I remember that we picked flowers and I’d promised her that we would dry them and “make a present for mommy.”

    Fascination is an emotion so easily overwhelmed by impatience, especially for someone only three or four years old, and I assume the flowers were stuffed into some conveniently fulsome tomes, my old microbiology textbook for one, to begin the drying and pressing process, then…

    Forgotten.

    Fast forward to this week and the aforementioned archeological dig through the back corners of my closet revealed a small stack of flagrantly outdated text books filled with the feathered edges of wax paper pressings, and a dozen or so samples of decade-old dried flowers.

    Finding something meaningful to do with these fragments of my shared history with a daughter who is growing up and out so quickly may be a fruitless effort, or…

    Forcing some kind of nostalgia into something so fleeting, a single day from a forgotten timeframe shared by a father and daughter my prove old-fashioned to her teenage eyes.

    Faithless as that may seem, I almost stuck those textbooks back into the dark corners of my closet to wait out another decade.

    Flowers, dried and brittle, imbued with some kind of narrative for a long lost day would likely age further and form an even more fortified link to that flipbook past given a few more fleeting years of passing time, or…

    Forgotten again.

    Frail and lost to time.

    Famous to no one but my fleeting recollection of a fragile moment.

    Fatherhood is funny, and fumbling my forties with emotions and curiously fading memories in unforeseen forms on an otherwise quiet Friday morning.

  • Book: Handbook of the Canadian Rockies

    I don’t buy many paper books these days, so I caught even myself off guard when I dropped fifty bucks on this doorstop-grade loaf while on vacation over the summer, and in a souvenir store no less.

    We had spent the day in the wilderness and flipping through the pages it caught the dangling threads of my vacationing soul and pried open my wallet.

    I had woken that same morning and gone for an eight kilometer trail run up the side of a small mountain to an overlook of the town where we were staying. I’d met a friend (who had moved out to there a few years back for career reasons) and she’d led me on a 7am (and two degrees Celsius in July!) run along a quiet road and up towards the trailhead of a short day hike path that was still quiet of all human life save us. We ascended a few hundred meters of elevation into the early morning crisp air and stood on a smooth boulder with a vista view spanning what seemed fifty kilometers in multiple directions, and I couldn’t help but feel a pang of envy that she could go up there any time she wanted and I was due to drive back to the city the next day.

    Flipping through the display copy of Handbook of the Canadian Rockies by Ben Gadd that evening evoked some overlapping emotions I’d been feeling from that whole week-long excursion into the National Parks, but in particular tugged at my heart in the same sort of way that standing atop a small mountain did at the dawn of that day.

    A few minutes later I was standing at a cash register, tapping my debit card on the kiosk and watching my own copy being handed back to me with a crisp little receipt bookmark protruding from the edge.

    When I was a lot younger I was fascinated by the kinds of books that were stuffed with bounties of information, the kind of books like encyclopedias or almanacs that could surprise you with any visit. Those kinds of books you pry open to a random page and are greeted with a sub-sub-heading of some curious topic and you just read.

    This is that kind of book.

    I opened the book three times at random as I started to write this paragraph and on those three visits I was greeted with a page filled with information about local lichen species, then a page detailing the dietary habits of the mule deer, and finally a two-page spread timeline of the major geological events of the area dating back a few billions of years.

    If that kind of thing isn’t your style, you’re probably also not the kind of person to feel pangs of wonder at the beauty of a particular rock formation or pause in the middle of a long hike to contemplate a small copse carpeted by lush green moss.

    A month later I’ve consistently kept this book on my nightstand and made something of a habit of opening the book at random (if not every day) a few times per week and reading a few pages here or there about the history, flora, fauna, and geology of my nearby mountain escape…

    …and then pining to be back there.

    If that isn’t an endorsement for a book, I don’t know what is.

  • Hymenoptera

    I sometimes tell people that while in university I unofficially minored in bugs.

    As a biology student I had many options for my options, but my interest veered sidelong into a course of courses in the entomology department. I exited with a bachelors degree in genetics, but the extra educational suitcase I had brought along was stuffed full of souvenirs from my study of insects.

    Packed in that suitcase, I’ve always adored the word Hymenoptera.

    hai - muh - NAAP - ter - uh

    Or, the order of insects that contains wasps, bees, hornets, ants and other similar six legged critters.

    The summer of 2021 was apparently a good year around here for a particular kind of yellowjacket wasp.

    Popular opinion was that there was more than just an uptick in the aggressive insects population over the last few months. Call it a surge. A bumper year for hymenopterans. Nearly everyone had a story of being stung, dealing with a nest, or even the consequence of the crop of pandemic puppies encountering angry bugs for the first time either in their campsites or own backyards.

    A nearby neighbour must have had a nest in their yard and for a couple weeks solid the little drones took over a corner of my backyard and harassed the dog (who never did seem to figure out that they were never going to play nice with her.)

    I reluctantly put a trap on a tree and caught a few hundred, but to be honest it neither made much of a dent in the population nor made me feel good about myself.

    There is a balance to everything, and I noted this most acutely when (after dealing with weeks of wasps and yellowjackets in and near the city) we vacationed in the mountains and hiked for hours without seeing so much as a hint of those black and yellow stripes.

    Our attempts to control and manicure the local suburban ecosystem with the species of plants and critters we think we like, the ones that are pretty or simple or tasty, has a side effect of throwing into chaos the nature tug-of-war we can’t quite see, and which manifests as weeds and coyotes and mosquitos and wasps terrorizing those same spaces as we eliminate natural predators or encourage invaders to take refuge in the vacuum.

    The mountain ecosystem, by contrast, has seemingly still not tottered onto its side and the result is that we were able to hike without much fear of being stung.

    Eaten by a bear, maybe, but stung… less so.

    Yet now, twenty years after graduating from university I don’t do much with or recall many facts from my biology education but I have this vague sense that I can see the loose threads of the ecosystem imbalance, that I can talk and write about it with some confidence, and that one of the hundred dollar words I can always lean on is Hymenoptera.