Just to see a rainbow
Humans are such odd creatures with our ephemeral things that make life worth living
Sleep deprivation was killing me. I didn’t realize this until antidepressants helped replace my long nights of ruminating on all of the agonies of life with wacky dreams. When I shifted from imagining various ways to leave this world to dreaming about fixing up a car with random people I’ve known throughout my life … all of my waking hours began to soften. I may be a fortunate person, but insomnia is the hardest trial I have endured. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone — even the bad actors of the world, because I’m sure it would only make their machinations worse.
My sleep has been a little more disrupted this week, and it’s been tough to sit down and write. Again, I am haunted by ruminations — perhaps not because of slipping mental health, but because the times seem particularly bad right now. Escalating war in the Middle East. The specter of genocide. Another mass shooting. Another step toward Christian Nationalism. Devastating hurricanes erupting out of nowhere. Intense grief splattered throughout the photographs I scroll through for work.
I read the news for a paycheck. It’s an old-fashioned job that I love. But sometimes I wonder … do I love this job? Or is this just something I thought I would love when I was young and inexperienced and still believed I could help change the world? My job is to edit and design the Nation/World section for the Anchorage Daily News. The print newspaper. Yes, the one in Alaska. It’s a shadow of the career I pursued when I was a wide-eyed 20-something seeking Alaska adventure on a trajectory I thought would continue for life. Now this “career” is a convenient side hustle I can do from home during the post-Covid era, cheaply and efficiently, for a struggling industry that has been on life support for most (okay, all) of my adult years.
As I toss and turn with photographs of grief lodged in my mind, I have been thinking back to the week Beat was running the Tor des Geants and I was staying up all night reading the news. Anchorage deadlines fall hard in Italy, which is 10 hours ahead of Alaska. Toward the end of the week, the sleep deprivation had reached its zenith and my waking life was more of a wacky dream than an intense rumination. But on the third day of the race, I was still in that grumpy phase of sleeplessness.
Beat was set to arrive at the 150-kilometer life base sometime in the late morning on Tuesday. Tuesdays bring daylong deadlines thanks to a few rural Alaska weeklies that I still work on. On this Tuesday, I was able to get quite a bit done early — very early — thanks to staying up after my Monday shift ended at 4 a.m. and pretty much forgoing sleep altogether. Then I packed up Beat’s potential supplies, purchased his daily sandwich, and merged onto the endless tunnels of the A1 for the hour-long commute to the bottom of the Aosta Valley at the old Roman city of Donnas.
That day in the Tor des Geants was still scorching — upwards of 92 degrees in the lower valley — and the racers were struggling. Beat understandably needed to rest and rehydrate and wanted to wait out the hottest part of the day. Shortly after I arrived, he disappeared into the sports center to take a nap. I still needed to work, so I took my laptop to a corner of the parking lot where I could find a wisp of wifi and languished in a sliver of shade, sweating profusely. The sports center wasn’t close to any public bathrooms and racers’ crews were not allowed inside, so after drinking several bottles of sparkling water to stave off heat exhaustion, I had to find a cluster of bushes to discretely relieve myself. Then my laptop began to overheat and shut down. By this point, I was feeling pretty sorry for myself.
A half-hour later, Beat was ready to slog upward in the hot, hot heat, and I was able to move my operations to a local coffee shop. Italian coffee shops aren’t like American ones. People walk up to counters, down a cup of espresso, and leave. A few will order pastries and linger with friends for a social hour at one of the tables. But no one has laptops out, no one is working, no one is nursing their fourth cup of delicious €1 espresso that they really shouldn’t be drinking because their therapist had them wean off caffeine, and to suddenly jump back into it like this is only exacerbating their anxiety.
As I finished up work on the weeklies, I moved on to the day’s world news. You likely don’t remember the headlines of Sept. 12. Who would? But they provided the usual serving of disheartenment. People were digging out and still awaiting help four days after a massive quake on Morroco. Severe flooding following a dam burst in Libya killed hundreds, likely thousands of people. The Speaker of the House, facing both an ouster and a government shutdown, decided to open up an impeachment inquiry against the president. 9/11 ceremonies commemorated a day of intense grief that now feels like a lifetime ago.
As I was scrolling, the sky outside the window suddenly lit up with a massive lightning strike. I had vaguely noticed my sun-scorched corner of the coffee shop becoming shady and cool, but I had been so focused on my screen that I didn’t realize the sky had filled with clouds. Within minutes, thunderheads opened up to an intense deluge. I gazed out the window, mesmerized. Rain fell at a rate that would physically hurt if I were outside like Beat was at that moment. I wondered where he’d be. High on a col? Hunched under a shepherd’s hut? Or was the thunderstorm only hitting this exact spot?
When the deluge calmed down, I realized I had been letting my emotions similarly build toward an explosion, which wasn’t healthy or necessary. I needed to step away for a while. What I needed was to sleep, but at 5 p.m. and more than an hour from my bed, it didn’t seem possible. Instead, I packed up my laptop, left the coffee shop, and set out on a hike.
My choice of route was an odd one. Rather than choosing the race route through its maze of vineyards, I pivoted to the village next door, Bard. The single trail out of town climbed sheer cliffs on a series of stone staircases to pass through an early 19th-century fortress that is now a tourist attraction. The castle was closed for the day; its emptiness had an ominous air. A brief spout of sunlight closed in and the rain returned.
My thoughts continued to waver between ill-defined dread and unfocused everything else as I climbed onto a trail that followed an old Roman road lined with ruins. This place had an eerie, ghostly feel that was not helped by the pattering rain. The droplets became less intense but more steady and surprisingly cold. Just like that, the summer switch flipped and it was suddenly autumn in the Aosta Valley.
The trail continued skirting around the cliffs. The stony surface was slicked with rain and precipitous at times. I had no idea what purpose I actually had out there, so I kept thinking, “Just get to 3,000 feet (of climbing) and then I can turn around. I still had difficulty shutting down my churning thoughts. I didn’t have the energy to climb any faster … my best hope of shutting off my brain. I focused on my music, which as usual I had been using as white noise while I climbed. I saw hints of sunlight reappearing in the sky. And I heard this song by LP:
“Caught a little light and watched it die, but it’s all right now
I’ll just will it for a while
Keep my world inside, oh why
Does it seem so hard to say, oh why
Am I so afraid?”
The cliffy trail climbed onto a grassy plateau dotted with stone farmhouses. I came upon a herd of goats spread out widely around a single human figure, which triggered a spark of panic — mountain shepherds always have dogs. Sure enough, a hulking white farm dog sprinted toward me, barking aggressively. I am afraid of dogs, especially mean dogs, due to three separate dog bites when I was a child and a young adult. Dogs can sense fear and react, so the interactions only get worse due to this phobia — and yet fear is such a difficult emotion to control.
Gratefully, on this day my only reaction to this overprotective farm dog was righteous anger. I stopped and stood my ground, seething and screaming “Go, go!” as if to say “Go ahead, make my day.” I was braced for hand-to-teeth combat to the death and may even have welcomed it … tough to say in a more rational state of mind … but I was filled with an intense surge of rage and had nowhere else to put it. Perhaps the dog sensed this because it stopped, stood its ground briefly, and then sprinted back to the shepherd who had been screaming at the dog since it rushed me. The shepherd grabbed the big dog’s collar and I hiked swiftly past the herd — careful not to move too fast and re-trigger the dog’s protective instinct.
Despite my efforts to disappear, the goats decided I was their new leader and started to follow me up the trail. This agitated the dog and it started howling and thrashing in the shepherd’s arms. I started walking backward, waving my trekking poles at the goats and screaming “Go back! Go back to your owner!” while the shepherd wrestled with the dog that was going berzerk. I think the shepherd knew and I knew that if he released the dog, it was going to kill me, but he had no other options to reel in his herd. Finally, I turned around and sprinted at top speed, hoping for the best. If the shepherd let the dog go, it was indeed going to be an interesting end to a bad day. Luckily, my running seemed to confuse the goats and they stopped following me. A half mile up the hill, when I could no longer hear the dog, I stopped running.
Phew, that was an adrenaline rush. My head spun as I continued wobbling up the hill. I knew I was going to have to pass the herd again on my return, and the thought filled me with dread. My anger had dissolved, replaced with a fear so intense that I felt faint. I pulled out my GPS and scrolled through the map. The shepherd’s hut was just below a road. Surely that road went somewhere. On review, I saw that the road headed back into Donnas — more than ten miles out of my way to get back to my car. But it was something. And ten miles was nothing. It would be dark … I’d likely be late getting back to Courmayeur for my night work shift. But really, it was nothing. Feeling better — but also wanting to put more distance between me and the dog — I continued upward.
Meanwhile — I had hardly noticed — beams of light continued to find their way through the breaking clouds. I was still listening to LP on repeat, admittedly hoping for the outcome the band sang about:
All the storms we’ve been through
And lived to see the light of day
I search the skies within you
Just to see a rainbow
But there’s no clear horizon
And I know more are on the way
Is it worth surviving
Just to see a rainbow?
I climbed up onto a minor pass above the valley — Col de la Cou. In the scheme of these grand mountains surrounded by Alpine giants, it was a little bump at 4,600 feet elevation. But at this moment, Col de la Cou felt like the soaring heights of a great empire — the ghostly fortress guarded by armies of murderous canines. A deepening golden light spread over the valley. And here I was, standing above it all.
The day had been ringed with too many negative emotions — the grumpiness, the stress, the frustration, the hopelessness, the anger, the fear. As the sunlight spread, I felt something closer to liberation. Freedom. The world is filled with so much injustice, tragedy, and grief. In the 19th century, the people of these hills lived with their fear of a surprise attack from the French Army, with disease and poverty, with inequality, physical hardships, and with their own superstitions. But they also were limited to the familiar. They didn’t have access to the grief of the whole world every single day. I think, in this way, we modern humans have done ourselves a great disservice. But what can we do about it? We can’t stick our heads in the sand any more than we can solve the world’s seemingly infinite problems. So is it worth it? Is any of it really worth it?
Here, at this small height in an unfamiliar place, having hiked only a short distance away from mounting responsibilities, having fended off a killer dog that was in fact restrained by a shepherd and not my bad-ass fighting instinct, and having escaped both the heat and oppressive rain … I felt briefly invincible. Intensely alive. I was a cluster of infinitesimal particles within an infinite universe that was nonetheless connected to everything. The universe is beautiful, and so the world and everything in it is beautiful. And then I turned around.
Is it worth surviving just to see a rainbow? I think so.
Your story filled me with anxiety, tension, and awe. I’m amazed at so many elements in it; one, that you can focus and work while crewing. Also, that you can take an impromptu hike like that with all the uncertainty about route finding, weather etc and then to have that dog confrontation. And also, that you can write this newsletter on top of everything you do. I wish you could separate and compartmentalize your heavy job of digesting and filtering the news and let it go at bedtime, and during trips, for the sake of better sleep and having time off while traveling. You seem like a master multitasker, but I feel for all the stress you carry. I’m in awe of your writing skills and productivity but also read this story as an acknowledgment that you get close to the breaking point. I hope you take some time for simple wellness--not adventure or endurance, but nourishing wellness, especially sleep. Take care!
I love the serendipity of how the songs you listen to so often seem to fit the moment.