Like Usual.

The other day, I was hanging out with three of my favorite kids. We were playing kickball with a smaller-than-a-kickball-type rubber ball. After striking out, I poutingly sat on the sidelines with the four-year-old, who couldn't figure out that after kicking the ball (further than I could have), she was supposed to run to first base. "I can't do it, Lizzy!" she screamed. "I don't know where to run!"

I excitedly pointed toward first base and said, "Right there! You're almost there! Keep going!"

But "right there" was too obscure for her four-year-old brain, which saw so many possibilities. She didn't realize that there were four bases connected by straight lines--she saw a million directions in which she could run. That way? That way? That way?

I watched her little eyes dart in all directions, earnestly trying to figure out where "right there" was supposed to be.

And then she collapsed on the dusty ground and began to sob.

So I scooped her up and we had a short rest on the sidelines while her brothers attempted to play baseball with the larger-than-a-baseball-type rubber ball.

While we sat in the shady grass, both of us recuperating and nursing our egos, we took off our shoes and wiggled our toes in the late summer breeze. "Ooh!" I said, "My toes are a little stinky!"

And Theo, being four, picked up her shoe and put it to her nose. Then she pulled her foot to just below her nostrils and announced, "Mine are not stinky. My feet smell....like usual."

I laughed, thinking that was such a strange thing to say. "And does 'like usual' smell like?" I asked her.

"Plain," she said. "My feet smell plain."

"Plain, just like usual?" I said, smiling.

"Yep. Just like usual," she said.

Then she put back on her shoes, stood up, and announced she wanted to finish running to first base.

Extravagant

In the past week, I have been at altitudes of 2,400 feet and over 12,000 feet. My legs have carried me up and down Arizona's highest and lowest places. Well, second highest place, to be exact. I attempted to climb to Humphrey's Peak, which really is the highest point in Arizona, but an unfortunate mistaken deviation from the trail led me to Agassiz Peak instead. Second highest. But close. And only two days later, without fully recovering from the climb, I hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and then back up the following day.

I have lots to say about both of these experiences, including other mishaps and potentially dangerous situations from which I gratefully escaped with only a few sore muscles (situations which may or may not have to do with unpreparedly climbing the San Francisco Peaks in monsoon season without adequate attire and then actually being caught in a monsoon, descending steep drop-offs of loose boulders and falling rock while watching the lightning pierce nearer and nearer, scaling a "no hiking allowed" fence out of dire necessity, and things of this nature).

But, alas, I am not here to write about my hiking adventures. Not yet. That will come later, along with a top ten list of the most exciting non-life-threatening things that happened during my trip (you know, freestyling in broken French while suffering mild heat exhaustion, biking in the dark while pretty much unable to see at night, Charlie the bike-rental kid who was either hitting on me or hating on me, depending on the day, etc.)

I am here tonight, instead, to gush about my extravagant compensation for volunteering to give my airline ticket to a standby passenger. Well, maybe it's not really extravagant, considering that I am stuck here in Phoenix overnight, but to a month-by-month fiscally irresponsible young lady like myself, getting a free hotel room, a free breakfast, a free shuttle to and from the airport AND a free round trip ticket to anywhere in the contiguous U.S. is pretty luxurious.

So here I am, using free internet after my free swim in the underwater-lit, outdoor pool, under the open night sky, after a free shower with free lemon-verbena shampoo and lotion soap, just winding down from my adventurous trip with a free stay in a fancy-shmancy hotel room with two double beds (which one should I choose? How does one choose between two beds?). There is free coffee, free towels to use, free toothpaste, free air conditioning (it was 106 degrees in Phoenix today), free TV (which I won't use--even free, I still hate that animated box), free wake-up calls, and even free food for me, compliments of the airline.

Apparently there are people who seek out this sort of situation--who immediately ask at the ticket counter if they need volunteers to give up their seats. I didn't seek it out--I wanted to be in St. Paul tonight, snuggly in my bed (er, well, the borrowed bed I am sleeping in for the next few months). Instead, I got bumped from my flight, which was delayed anyway, and here I am, soaking up the luxury that only an unsuspecting, strapped-for-cash wide-eyed, lovestruck traveler can really appreciate.

This free stuff doesn't come without some amount of guilt for me--do I really deserve this? I mean, really, two beds? Three towels in the bathroom? Air conditioning?

But...for now I am just going to enjoy it. Luxury awaits me and my stinky backpack.

Anyway, if I were really going to be extravagant, of my own accord, I would have turned down the fancy-schmancy hotel room offer and rented a car and driven the three hours back to Flagstaff, from where I just came, even if for just overnight. Free food, multiple towels, and an outdoor pool are nothing compared to the extravagance that a little bit of romance can inspire.

My sensibilities keep me here, in this free hotel. Extravagant or not, even leaving Arizona is an adventure. Let's just hope I can get on my return flight tomorrow...

Prairie Mountain

Today I am at my parents' house in North central Iowa. It is the farm I grew up on, surrounded by miles of cornfields and prairie. As I drove up to their house last night, my car filled to the brim with my cats and their belongings, a kayak strapped to the roof, my anxiety high from a day of trying to pull my shit together and learning how to secure a boat to my little Ford Focus all by myself, I couldn't help but feel awed at the tranquility of their big, old farm house, the familiar, long driveway (that is now paved but was a duration of loose gravel for most of my childhood), the rows of tall, looming evergreens that my dad had planted when we were small, and the nostalgic, comfortable images of grain bins, the barn, the shed, farm machinery, and various animals squawking and braying to announce my arrival.

Their house is West of town, so as I approached the farm around 8:30 pm last night, I could see the sun, huge and orange, lazily lowering itself into the horizon. My sister, who is living at home now and working on the farm, had recently said to me, "Do you know what I notice about Iowa? The sky--there is so much color, and there's always a little pink in it, and you can see forever."

And as I watched the sun slowly, slowly settle herself into the head-high rows of corn, then sink amidst the crop, and then disappear into the endless horizon, I saw what she meant. It was beautiful.

Later, after a jovial dinner with all five members of my family (which included ridiculous banter about the donkey, a thoroughly detailed narrative about the lives and character maps of the roosters, and the inevitable plays on words that describe all the animals--"The cocks are chasing the ass again! Ha, ha, ha, ha"), I stepped outside to unload my car.

There were fireflies blinking everywhere! And I glanced up, and there was Cassiopeia, Orion, and all the late summer constellations, brightly gleaming above my head.

There is a lot of charm to this place.

And then, this morning, I woke up to the sound of roosters crowing, the lone donkey braying, and my mom's cat chatting with my two cats through a closed door. I came downstairs and looked out the window, to the South. To the North, the East, and the West, you can see for miles. You see nothing but rows of corn, soybeans, or prairie. You can see a blanket of unending sky, unfolding in all directions, whatever weather it holds taking it sweet time as it makes its way across the enromous palette of flatland.

To the South, however, you see something different. You see crops, you see miles of land, but in the center of the horizon, you see another, strangely misplaced vision.

You see something that looks like a mountain. A mountain?

Yes, a mountain. And it's a growing.

Each time I come home to visit my parents and marvel in the simplicity and beauty of the nature that surrounds them, I notice the mountain to the South, and how it gets a bit taller, a bit fatter.

That "mountain" is a giant landfill that acquires trash from all over the midwest. Less stringent disposal rules and cheaper taxing on dumping in Iowa keep Minnesota garbage spilling over and onto the mountain that lives just a couple miles South of my parents' house (70-100 truckloads from Minnesota arrive daily, according to my dad. He calls Waste Management Systems the Mafia of Garbage--"Google it, Liz, you won't find anything. They're the Mafia.") There was a big uproar about this practice a few years ago, including a write up in the Star Tribune about the landfill just outside of Lake Mills, IA, but apparently nothing has changed. (When I was a first-year in college, my choir director said, "Oh, you're from Lake Mills? I just read about the landfill there!")

So the ungarnished, natural beauty of rural Iowa is interrupted. Garnished, if you will, by pepperings (er, dumpings) of out of state trash, inevitably seeping into the groundwater and nutrient-rich soil.

My sense of awe in the infinite sky and the miles and miles of prairie is disturbed by a mountain of trash.

My enchantment with the loveliness and fresh air is also disturbed by the sound of a low-flying plane outside, right now, at this very moment, spraying fungicide on the crops. "It's crazy out there right now in the farming world," my Dad said to me this morning, when he told me about the pesticide plane. "Farmers are doing everything they can to make more money. Get rid of the aphids, get rid of the fungus, they increase productivity--and they'll make more money."

That lazy sun setting softly into the horizon last night sees all of this. I wonder if her heart breaks, like mine does, at the sound of fierce streams of pesticide, or the vision of a completely unnatural mountain growing by leaps and bounds in the middle of the cornfields and native wildflowers. (And don't even get me started on GMO corn. On Monsanto. On the ethics of hybridization. On hog farms. Among other things.)

Yes, it is beautiful here. And we are completely destroying it, one truckload of trash at a time.