Adventure Unpacked

Marriage hadn’t been one of my life ambitions. I was a headstrong kid raised in a high-demand religion where leaders and extended family members made it clear that this was the only path available to me — to trade my autonomy for a tedious existence of domestic servitude. I wanted a life of adventure.

Beat takes in the view from Aiguillette des Houches In my memory, it was the only cold day in Boulder all winter, a frosty Monday morning on the cusp of spring. My sister, driving my Subaru, crept down the icy switchbacks of Flagstaff Road as I sat in the passenger seat, watching diffused sunlight ripple across the eastern plains. “If this is the last sunrise I ever see, at least it’s a good one,” I thought, because I am particularly overwrought when I am stressed. Surgery is scary.

Remembering the days of dreaming big Any American who was old enough to remember much of anything has a core memory of that bright September morning. It was my third week on the job at my first full-time newspaper gig, the Tooele Transcript-Bulletin in Tooele, Utah. We published Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the publisher made it clear that I was expected to arrive on time on deadline day, 7 a.m. sharp. I made sure to be five minutes early.

I’ve started to have a recurring dream about running. It’s strange; even as I venture back into my old race enthusiasm while scrolling through UTMB coverage, my subconscious doesn’t conjure mountain-running talent — a dream I let go a long time ago. No, it takes me back to a time and place I never wanted to be the first time around. The time and place where I sort of, reluctantly, “became” a runner — although running didn’t stick and wouldn’t return to my life for another six years.

Living it up in midlife with friends in France. Christine, on the left, is around 70, which is still solidly midlife in my opinion. Have you heard of the “Happiness Curve?” The U-shaped graph was popularized in 2008 by two British economists who researched patterns in life satisfaction. Their math consistently revealed that even when controlling for income, marriage status, and employment, happiness levels were naturally high in youth, dipped in midlife, and then began to climb again.

The evening sky over Mont Blanc on Aug. 17 I’ve been putting together a mountain bike route for my birthday this week. Something to celebrate the incredible gift that is the ability to move under my own power, with a splash of the ridiculousness I enjoyed in my youth. But just a splash. Age has given me enough wisdom to at least try to keep my risk-to-reward ratio closer to 1:1.

Awaiting the 94% solar eclipse on Wednesday evening. Phones aren’t great for taking eclipse photos, but the lens flare captured a fairly accurate reflection of the crescent sun. It was one of the farthest points I’d been from home in three weeks since arriving in the French Alps — 11.25 miles by e-bike to a grassy bench beneath Mont Joly.

“But you’re still learning to walk again,” I said aloud to myself as I gaped at the limestone cliffs blocking any hint of a viable route to the summit. The rock walls loomed over a steep, grassy bench as I emerged from the forest, forming a gray fortress of impossibility. What was the date I hiked to Cecret Lake in Utah with my sister and niece and nephew? It was July 17, not even three weeks ago.

They say you always bring a little bit of home with you. On July 22, I left a summer of heat and fire in the American West and boarded a plane to our Shangri-La, the bit of paradise we’ve carved out in the French Alps. That same day, a fire broke out in the Gironde region of Southwest France that has grown into one of the most destructive megafires in European history.

In the past week, I helped my mom move out of her home of 43 years and packed to spend nearly three months in France, so my thoughts have been preoccupied with “stuff.” Traveling out to Salt Lake City in mid-July wasn’t originally part of the plan. I went out to visit my mom in early June — the earliest I could travel based on my surgeon’s recommendations — to say goodbye to the home I grew up in.