Beloved Birkenstocks Bite the Dust

My elderly Birkenstocks, age 36+, were recently put to rest after a remembrance ceremony. Yes, friends, I threw them into the trash and the garbage truck hauled them to the landfill.

My other Birks got together for a send-off. I forgot to add the ones I was wearing, a black three-strap pair with brand new soles. Only about 12 years old, as are all the others except for the tan fat-strapped units on the right.  They look mature, but are less than a year in my possession.
One year down, 36 to go. 

I wore my first Birkenstocks for nearly 37 years. I can't recall how many times I had them resoled, and the shoe bed was replaced once, or maybe twice. When PK and I traveled to Italy for a bicycling trip, they were my only shoes, in addition to cycling shoes. Several days of that adventure were spent hot-footing along Italian streets, 10 miles a day, at least. These Birks also carried me down the Rogue River trail for 20-some miles after my official hiking shoes produced a huge blister and rubbed a toenail off. I have worn Birkenstocks to death and have never suffered a blister, corn, bunion, ingrown toenail, plantar wart, toenail fungus or feet-that-failed-me on their account.

My original Birkenstocks finally faded beyond repair. 

I remember the day in 1977 that I purchased them for around $30 - a lot of money then, in Medford, Oregon. I was pregnant with my first-born, Quinn, who turned 36 in August. I wore the Birks a lot during the next 20 years, but not exclusively.

Those were the days when I could wear other types of shoes. It wasn't like NOW when Birkenstocks, or other high-quality sandals, are my only choice since developing, several years ago, a hostile bone spur, which defied bone spur-removal surgery and grew back with attitude. It is my enemy,

Left foot—perfect. Right foot—big painful gobby-looking bone spur, the reason I rarely
wear shoes with closed toes, unless I"m in a self-flagellating mood.

I must say I've taken a lot of, ummm, derision, for being a constant Birk wearer, especially regarding the recent cast-offs. Hey, I should get credit for loyalty and the wisdom to ignore current fashion. To Birk aficionados, shoe-horning feet into pointy high-heeled shoes seems ludicrous.

Through the decades of being the only person I knew wearing Birks, I believed they must be in style someplace. I am now thrilled to learn that Birkenstocks are officially back! The Fashion Beast (of online Newsweek's Daily Beast fame) even said it. 

Summer 2013: the Season We All Started Wearing Birkenstocks Again 

This article confirmed my suspicion, and gratified my hope, that my decades-long devotion to Birks has not gone unnoticed, and now luminaries such as Miley Cyrus and other famous beautiful young people, whose every fashion move creates headlines, have perked up their toes with the world's best shoes! Like moi!

I have a few decades on them, and I live in the Oregon boonies, so I'm wondering how the fashionistas knew? Who knew first? How did the word spread that a fashion leader had emerged in Southern Oregon? Well, that was about a week ago and the Birk revival is likely fading already, despite my continuing devotion. Sigh.

I'll be going to a fancy wedding next weekend, where the fantastically gorgeous bride will be wearing shoes worthy of her sleek bridal gown and beautiful self, and where her multitudinous lovely friends will be fashionably attired and shod. Me?  I'll be wearing my "dress Birks", the black ones with the back strap that served me well during a mud fest at the rainy New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Fest in 2008, and also as my official bike shoes on numerous rides over the past several years.

The "bandages" are duct tape blister prevention.

These Birks provide a clue to how the word "shoddy" may have originated? But seriously. Since this photo was taken a mere five years ago, they've been cleaned up and resoled and are ready to rock and roll! They're likely to be useful far longer than me.  I'm taking them to South Africa and Uganda in a couple weeks. Aside from gorilla tracking (the subject, no doubt, of a future blog post) I know the black-strapped Birks will be up to the challenge. I hope I will be too!

North Cascades National Park with guilt, bone spurs, and a bad hip

Email subscribers, please click on the post's headline to get to the website. Everything looks better there and text is easier to read. 
When I think about our three camping trips to Washington's North Cascades over four decades, spectacular peaks come to mind. And also rushing turquoise rivers, glaciers hanging on for dear life, old growth forests, profuse wildflowers in mountain meadows, and campgrounds draped in the lush foliage of the mountainous Pacific Northwest. I also remember guilt. And pain.

2014 Guilt Trip. With turquoise river. Thunder Creek Trail.

Unwelcome "peaks" in my foot are bone spurs, which I recently had removed. They'd plagued me

for years and finally got bad enough that I chose surgery over letting them take charge of my mobility. They're the reason that I wore Birkenstocks almost exclusively as described in an earlier post, Beloved Birkenstocks Bite the Dust. I've worn sandals year round for dancing, biking, and, yes, hiking mountain trails. Plus ordinary everyday life. It has not been ideal. I'm hobbling around now in an orthopedic post-surgery "shoe" hoping and praying the surgery works for the long haul. Bone spurs have been known to grow back. Mine recurred with a vengeance after an earlier surgery.

The mountains are little changed since we first visited in 1978. The Cascades is a youngish range, only 200 million years old. Eons and ages will likely pass before it starts going downhill, so to speak. The peaks won't be so pointy in a zillion years after wind and water, quakes, shakes  and glaciers have their relentless way. This is a stretch, but in 1978 we were sorta like the North Cascades—we'd been around for awhile but were still youngish, vigorous, pointy, and, well, pretty. We fit right in.

Diablo Lake is a reservoir and a major feature in the North Cascade's alpine landscape.

Family history as measured by North Cascades National Park visits

August 1978 - Poor Young Family Trip

PK and I fired up our orange and white Volkswagen pop-top van and, with our one-year-old baby boy, Quinn, headed to the North Cascades to camp and hike before veering west to visit my Grandmother Dorothea, now long gone, but who then lived in Everett, Washington.

Those were the days.  So young! I was 32 and PK, like now, was 4.5 years younger. I know. Thirty-two does not seem young. I didn't think 32 was young until I was that age and glorying in every new day. Now any time between 30 and 45 seems a wonderful age. Not that I don't like being 70, and that I don't relish life, but there is a lot less to look forward to. And there are bone spurs. And other things.

It rained. No problem! We erected the portable playpen we'd squeezed into the van, and set the kid out there in the drizzle to gurgle and coo. We have some old-fashioned photos in which little Quinn is delighted in his enclosure and kept warm by a hand-knitted blue and white cap. In another photo PK poses on a steep trail with Quinn in a funky baby backpack that would  certainly not meet the standards of finicky modern-day parents. Remember. This was 1978, long before child safety restraints were required in vehicles and child backpacks became wonders of safety and convenience. Not that we could have afforded one if they existed.

In those days we lived paycheck to paycheck, made do in a tin-can trailer where, for a time,  you could see the ground  between the metal siding and flooring. I discovered Diet for a Small Planet, which offered a sane and frugal way to eat. We  consumed countless meals based on combining beans and rice into complete proteins. I sometimes had to return cans and bottles to buy food or gas. We had trouble keeping the lights on, but we somehow smiled a lot. We had love and a beautiful baby, if not a lot of groceries.

The North Cascades are part of a young mountain range whose peaks are still pointy and whose glaciers, while diminished , continue to gouge and scour.

Then, all of a sudden, it was 1989. Hooray! We'd survived the leanest years. PK ascended the ladder at his job, and continued to do so until his retirement in 2007.
I progressed from unemployment to teaching English to newspaper journalism. I still reported and made photos for the Grant Pass Daily Courier in 1986, when, shockingly, we had another baby! I was 41. This was appalling, even to me.

 But at the same time, I felt a stirring about this child, prompted in part by a vivid dream. In the dream, before I knew I was pregnant, a magnificent but fearsome tiger was stalking around the house, trying to get in. I was curious but afraid. I awoke with a start and couldn't get back to sleep, thinking about the tiger dream.

Quinn and Chris Korbulic, June 1986

A week or so later, I bought the drugstore pregnancy test, and there it was— a little red circle closing around my future. When baby Christopher turned three, I quit the newspaper and substitute taught while developing  a writing and editing business. This turned out to be a great decision, and I enjoyed more mothering time and greater income  while serving numerous wonderful clients until I retired fully in 2013.
During our lean child-rearing years, our family recreation centered not too far from home, the Rogue River and the many beautiful outdoor opportunities afforded by Southern Oregon.
It took us a few decades to return to the North Cascades, one of the West's most beautiful and dramatic parks.

Flash! What was that!? Life blazing past like a freaking comet

August 2014 - The Guilt Trip

Fast forward. A lot forward, to August 2014. PK and I, empty-nesters for years, retired, and solidly in the elder demographic, traveled to the North Cascades for the second time. Quinn was, and is, a grown man with a quirky little family and a doctorate degree. Son Chris travels the world as a professional kayaker with various accolades including being recognized as one of the World's Most Adventurous Men. (A tiger!) My mother, LaVone, was then 98.5 and lived a mile away. I was her touchstone and only family member close by. I was the light in her increasingly dim world. Thus guilt cast a pallor on my emotional landscape.

One of numerous glaciers in the North Cascades, this one viewed from The Cascade Pass trail in 2014.  Our hike was only 3.7 miles one way, but 3 miles with 31 switchbacks was a bit daunting for one just shy of 70 whose foot harbored peaks that look something like the mountains.  Along the way we saw marmots, butterflies, wildflowers, glaciers, and a handful of hikers. The air was hazy from the 2014 wildfires in Washington. The fires are even worse this year, and a few days ago, the North Cascades Park was closed due to fires and smoke..

It gets worse. When we left for the North Cascades and to visit relatives in Bellingham, my mom was in hospice. I didn't understand exactly why. She was 98, but I somehow believed she would live to 100 because there was nothing wrong with her. She did not have cancer, heart disease, kidney failure, Alzheimer's, COPD, pneumonia or any of the other afflictions that kill so many elderly. Her innards were just fine. Her doctor shook his head in disbelief at her great labs.

The Cascade Pass trail with sandals, bone spurs, and guilt 2014.

However. She did have disabilities. She could barely see or hear and was unable to walk without assistance. She needed help with every physical task. Her muscles had turned to mush. Hospice provided an extra level of attention and care, for which I was grateful. But I secretly doubted she was near death.

What does my mother have to do with a vacation to the North Cascades?

Everything. This is complicated, as are all situations that force people to decide between what they want to do and what think they should do. I struggled whether to stay close to mom or go with my mate, PK, to revisit the North Cascades. I wanted desperately to go.

Seven years earlier, PK had retired the very month that we traveled to Minnesota to relocate my then lively 93-year-old mom to Oregon. Since then, many a trip had been deferred or shortened because I felt I needed to be nearby. To his credit, he went to Spain without me. Also to his credit, he never failed me.

And so, despite the fact that my mother was in what turned out to be her final decline, PK and headed to the North Cascades. This was just over a year ago. We spent a few glorious days that included a seriously steep and beautiful hike. I only thought about my mother every other minute.

PK hiking the Cascade Pass trail in 2014, before his hip went straight to hell.

Awesome views in every direction along the Cascades Pass Trail.

So fun to see butterflies near tree line.

Columbine along the trail.

June 2015 - Bad Hip and Bone Spurs Trip

My mother passed away September 7, 2014, about two weeks after our return from the Guilt Trip. I was able to spend time with her and assuage my misgivings about having been absent for a time before her end arrived.

In late May this year, we headed out for a month-long road trip that included a family reunion in Minnesota and a return trip via Canada to the North Cascades. We were fortunate to be there in June, long before fires closed roads, obscured views, and recently, closed the park. Our journey across the USA to Minnesota and back West via Canada and the Canadian Rockies was great. Only a couple little things....PK's hip was giving him major grief and my bone spur was testing my endurance. It's not that we can't handle a little discomfort. But.....the things we're accustomed to doing, like hiking five or six miles on mountain trails, well, that wasn't going to happen. And it didn't.

View from our bad hip and bone spurs hike in the North Cascades.

We managed several short walks, and even a couple hikes that included a four-mile round trip in the North Cascades on a clear, cool and beautiful morning, a gift from the universe.

Now I am gimping around with an awkward orthopedic shoe hoping that this procedure will leave me without  peaks in my foot and pain in my step
 PK? He's  awaiting a surgery date for a hip replacement. People are always saying,  Do what you can while you're still able. Yes, do it.

There's no more identifying with the North Cascades for us. They're as young and beautiful and thrilling  as ever. We're not. Plus we're going downhill fast. No more guilt, as my mom was released from her decaying physical body a year ago. (Not that guilt can't be called into play for a number of other reasons, and I wasn't even brought up Catholic.)
Resignation has now entered the aging vocabulary. Maybe reality is a better word? If I live as long as my mom did, and I'm not sure I want to, I hope to get  another crack at the North Cascades' hundreds of miles of hiking trails.
And  also trails into other parts of a full life that are without physical landscapes.

Gotta get to it because, as we know, no matter now long you live, life is short.

Earlier posts about 2015 road trips

After Banff and Jasper, Canada has More

Banff and Jasper


Road Notes, first couple days across the Great Plains of Canada

Theodore Roosevelt National Park and Changing Times in North Dakota

Getting Along on the road, and Yellowstone Park

Riding the Trail of the Couer d' Alenes

Road tripping in the Four-Wheel Camper

Travel moment on the Plains of Abraham

Sometimes on a rainy foggy day, we can see certain things more clearly.
The St. Lawrence River from an overlook near the Plains of Abraham, Quebec City.

Language alert. I'll be quoting someone below who used bad language that crosses the line. No way to tell this story without the actual words.

I haven't posted a blog since August 18, a few days before we said goodbye to our tomatoes and peppers in Oregon and hit the road. It isn't that I don't think about writing every single day, but I get overwhelmed with photos and "material" and underwhelmed with reliable wifi and/or strong cell service. Hence images and words pile into a muddled mess in my brain and on my computer, and finding a focus eludes me. Even when I do land on a hook, as we used to say in the newspaper business, driving a few hundred miles several days a week and traveling in close quarters with another person doesn't exactly encourage productivity.

When I do find time and place to write, I try to avoid the "we went there and did this, and then we went there and did that" as blog narrative. So when traveling in wifi territory, I do the easy thing: post photos on Facebook with brief descriptions and move on. (If you're interested in seeing the photos, please be my FB friend.)

But something happened this inclement morning in old Quebec City that gave me an idea about how to handle too much stimulation.

Paul and I decided to hell with the weather, pulled on our Eddie Bauer raincoats, unfurled our travel umbrellas and ventured into the heavy rain. A few minutes later I started to smile and talk to myself.

You're doing the traveling you've wanted to do for decades. You're healthy. You have a good man. A good van. A good plan.  Quebec City is charming, picturesque, historic, beautiful, art-filled and stimulating. What a great day to be alive!

I skipped a bit but stifled myself as my Birkenstocks were soggy and the straps were stretched and my footing wasn't solid. As usual, Birks were the only shoes I had with me.

We were pretty much alone,  PK and me, strolling in a downpour from our little boutique hotel in Old Quebec City to the nearby Plains of Abraham. We reached a shelter with a viewpoint down  the St. Lawrence River and, in the opposite direction,  a look at the Plains. We learned that a pivotal battle occurred here between the French and the British in 1759.  It ended with a British victory over France, contributing to the formation of Canada.

The plains had belonged to a farmer named Abraham. No mention of the original First Nation people whose land it was originally.  Canadians did the same as we Americans - stole the land and all but killed off the people indigenous.

Ok. My happy mood was knocked down a notch. There had been plenty of bloodshed here, deep dark history of human beings settling issues with killing, taking, exploiting.  I had to pee.

I descended the deserted stairs to a public restroom. A scowling muscular forty-something woman with a blur of greying hair on her shaved head emerged from the restroom. It was just the two of us,  and as we passed, I nodded and said Hi. I wasn't inviting, or expecting, anything more than a return greeting, one human being's respectful acknowledgement of another.

She stopped and glared at me.
Do I have to say hi to every fucking person?! She spat the words.
I stood stock still, my mouth agape.
She wasn't finished.

Fuck you! Who do you think you are? And fuck Christ, she continued. I'm so sick of people, and you are disgusting. Fuck you! 

She was still spewing anger and hate as she strode into the rain. I made my way into the restroom talking to myself, again. Wow. What was that about? I can't believe that just happened. And so on.

Where I come from in small-town rural Oregon, and earlier in life, small-town Midwest, greeting strangers is as ordinary as toast with jam. It is sweet and harmless. It is not an affront or attack on privacy but an affirmation of a moment of shared time and place.

A few minutes later, when I told PK what transpired, he said he'd noticed the woman muttering something as she passed him, head down.

I'd taken the verbal attack personally, but he took a different view.

She was bald, he said. Maybe she's a cancer patient. Or maybe she's mentally ill. 

Yes, perhaps mentally ill, I concurred. I don't  believe that being a cancer patient explains bad behavior. The bottom line though, was that she was filled with anger and hate. She would have liked to kill me.  I've never been confronted by such a person. But then I've been spared much of the pain and sorrow that life dishes out, lucky in so many ways.

The encounter was a travel moment - a surprising and unexpected result of being out and about in the world, as opposed to sticking close to home. A travel moment is one that can elevate, elate, thrill or educate. Or all of the above. Like the time we swam with whale sharks in La Paz, or when we visited the sacred cremation site in Kathmandu, or when I made eye contact with wild gorillas in Uganda.

But a travel moment can also take you someplace you don't want to go,  proving that travel isn't just about driving around looking at pretty scenery and eating local foods, but also venturing into foreign cultures and lives, places you may not choose but there you are.

In any case, you learn and grow and are somehow challenged.

What does this have to do with Ordinary Life? More travel moments, past and future, will be shared here. I still want to revisit the sacred cremation site and perhaps the whale sharks, and other consequential moments that have become lost in the blur of passing time. Thanks for hanging with me.

Happy travels, wherever they may take you.

Change is Strange

Dear Readers,

And I do mean dear. Thank you for sticking with me and my Ordinary Life blog, which I have been posting on Google's free Blogger platform sporadically since my first entry on June 2, 2009.*

 

Lost in techie wilderness!

The freaking tech giant (Google) announced a couple months ago that it would be discontinuing emailing posts to blog subscribers as of July 1, 2021. They suggested bloggers find some other way to get their posts to subscribers. 

What was a techie dunce to do?  The answer arrived in a timely email targeting bloggers left in the lurch. A company called follow.it offered to take on the subscription task and extended technical help to install a new subscription "gadget" on blogs and to import existing email subscribers at no charge. I did end up paying someone to help me, but I appreciated follow.it for their gesture. 

Perhaps you'll notice on this post the new email subscription form on the right, which is larger than before. If you got this post via email, no need to reenter your email address. (If you have a minute, though, I'd appreciate knowing that this post arrived in your mailbox, even if you're reading it on Facebook.)

How and why you subscribed to my blog (thank you again!) is a mystery. Except for family and friends, drawing new readers is a challenge. You might notice in coming posts invitations to "share."  Please consider doing that. 

*That first post in 2009 was titled Another Day, Another Storm.  I accidentally discovered much later that Blogger tracks readership stats for every post. NO ONE READ IT.  Here's a screenshot of my first attempt at blogging 🤪. Probably best it wasn't seen.

Why Blog? Then and Now.

           Writing in my head during a 2009 bike ride.

The following is the second blog post I ever published. It was July 14, 2009, and four people read it! 
My first post a couple weeks earlier drew zero attention, and revisiting it, I see why. DELETE!  But this post is still relevant because every bit of the angst and obsession I described then is still true! My present day thoughts are in italics. I wonder if I've learned anything.

Why Blog? July 2009

I wrestle with this question. I think about it while riding my bike, chopping onions for marina sauce, and doing downward facing dog in yoga class. I think about it while wrestling weeds from the garden, buying wine at Grocery Outlet, and mowing what passes for grass in our so-called lawn. I think about it while doing these things because they are all on my ever-growing subjects-for-writing list. In fact, I think about writing multiple times every single day, so the fact that I rarely DO it weighs upon me. All still true.

Not that I haven't tried. I called my first blog attempt New Ventures, and the next one Part 3. These attempts were nearly three years ago, (now nearly 10 years)  but I was paralyzed with doubt and performance anxiety. Who gives a crap what I think? I'm not the snappy tweeter or the quipping commentator or among the swarming and excited political people. Some things never change

But I've been writing since age seven, and for most of my adult life, I wrote for pay. About 25 years ago, I left journalism and a weekly personal column, to start a writing and editing business, which has been nifty and even renumerative. I wrote business profiles, annual reports, magazine articles, company newsletters, executive speeches, clever ad copy and more. Except for a few columns for the local public radio station, I didn't write anything personal for publication. In the meantime, I've kept a private journal accompanied by photos that's bloating my hard drive. Now I journal only while traveling, mostly as notes for blog posts.

All this begs the question: Does writing require an audience? Obviously not, since most journal-keepers write privately with no desire for readers. But blogging? That's another story.

That's the question about blogging and what's been hanging me up. There are millions of writers and bloggers, all vying for attention and wanting and waiting to be loved! Who cares if there's another one putting herself out there? And what is it with this need to communicate?

But I've decided that it doesn't matter. Blogging isn't just about the reader. It's about the writer. It's about me. I've been writing since childhood and I'm not going to stop. I can't stop. For some unfathomable reason, it's what I have to do. If I connect with somebody, that's great. Hello, out there! I shake your hand and pat you on the hind, man or woman. If no connection occurs, oh well! Compulsive writing, whether in my head or on the page, is my curse or blessing. Anyway, I just freaking have to do it. And so I am.

December 2015
And so I still do, 246 published posts later, PLUS 112 in draft. 
My first year of blogging, readership rarely broke into double digits. Yes, it was discouraging to have four or five "regular readers", mostly family!  Now most posts break three digits, and some have climbed past four.  These are ones that recirculate, finding new readers year after year. Beloved Birkenstocks Bite the Dust, for example, has a life of its own, as do a few others. 

As you can see, I have not gone viral in any sense of the word. Still, I no longer fear, when I post something, that no one will read it.  Over the years, I've learned that I do care about having readers and feeling that a connection has been made. Comments are a bonus, even though the majority occur on Facebook, where I usually create a link to my blog.
If you're a regular reader, thank you from the very bottom of my trembling little heart. It means a lot that you've stuck with me.