Tag: preparation

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Schrödinger’s October

By the time this column appears in print, we’ll either be tired of shoveling or cynical about weather forecasters.

No surprise. That’s how October in Colorado works.

My friends from warmer climes often do a double take when they hear that a Front Range “snow season” runs from October to May. But even those words don’t really capture the true experience. The symbol of those eight months isn’t a snow shovel, but a pair of dice. You listen to the forecasts, buy out the bread and milk at the grocery stores (and somehow it’s always the bread and milk) and then roll ‘em.

Sometimes we laugh. Sometimes the big Snowmageddon forecasts produce nothing but a dusting of flakes and an ironic “I survived” post on social media.

Other times, it’s no laughing matter.

I grew up here. I remember a lot of Halloweens spent with a winter coat pulled over a truly awesome costume. (Hercules just doesn’t look the same when he’s bundled up against the cold.) But the year that really drove it home for me was 1997, when we got slammed by a late-October blizzard right before the Broncos were due to leave town for a game in Buffalo.

In those John Elway days, every bit of Bronco news was Serious Business. And so, in the midst of relentlessly raging snow and cars stacking up on Peña Boulevard, broadcasters would break in with the latest escapades. Kicker Jason Elam caught a ride to team headquarters with a group of fans. Safety Steve Atwater joined the rest of the team by snowmobile. Somehow, incredibly, everyone got out of town, stumbled into their hotel at 1 a.m. in the morning, and then  staggered their way through an overtime win that afternoon.

So yeah. We know. Feast or famine. Snow or “Snow big deal.”

And the thing is, we have to be ready for both. Like Schrödinger’s cat, the fabled “Chance of Snow” isn’t really alive or dead until we open the box and find out.

But then, isn’t that how we live our lives anyway?

We like to think we’ve minimized uncertainty. We make plans, we check forecasts, we schedule out our day. Everything’s in control.

Until it’s not.

The reminders, inevitably, come in. Sometimes as small as the storm that cancels a birthday picnic in the park. Sometimes as big as the injury or illness that transforms a lifetime.

We may have planned a route. But we’re not the ones driving the car.

So what do we do?

First, be aware. Always. Both in the moment-by-moment “situational awareness” sense and the bigger-picture sense of seeing what’s out there, not just what you want to see. Not only will that keep you ready – well, readier – for the unexpected, but it also reminds you of how much great stuff there is to see around you and how many situations your gifts and talents might be able to improve.

Second, stick together. I stress this a lot, maybe more than anything else I’ve ever written in this column. But it’s that important. Whether it’s shoveling our neighbor’s walks or standing up for our neighbors’ needs, we depend on each other. It’s how we weather a crisis or enhance a celebration.

We’re not going to see everything. But with eyes open and hands clasped, just maybe we can see enough.

Even in a stormy October.

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Standing Ready

Predicting Colorado weather has to be the most thankless job around.

If you’ve lived here for any length of time, you know what I mean. Whether it comes from the mountains meeting the plains, or some weird cosmic vibrations out of Boulder, or just the cumulative atmospheric effects of too many disappointing Rockies baseball seasons, Colorado weather is weird.

This is where the Four Seasons isn’t a hotel, it’s a 24-hour period. Where the morning’s T-shirt may turn into the afternoon’s parka. Where a school-closing storm can be followed by a perfect day to walk the dog.

Given that, is it any wonder that we get a little cynical at proclamations of snowy doom?

By the time this appears in print, we’ll know for sure whether the latest Snow My Goodness really was the storm of ages or just the usual shoveling and muttering of Colorado’s annual welcome to spring. This region has had some epic snows and everyone has their favorite to talk about:  the Christmas Blizzard of ’82; the roof-busters of 2003; the 2006 storms that piled on like a network TV show, claiming a regular Thursday slot. But we’ve also seen enough doom-and-disaster prophecies go bust to reflexively roll our eyes anytime a TV personality uses the words “Snowmageddon” or “Snowpocalypse.”

But here’s the thing. For all the sarcasm – we still prepare. We may not believe, but we prepare.

Why? Because the potential cost of not doing it is just too darned high.

We’ve learned that from tornado warnings: head to the basement, because even if the last 12 ended harmlessly, there’s no guarantee on the 13th.  

We’ve learned that from wildfires and floods: get out quick when the warning comes, because the longer you linger, the harder it becomes to leave.

And over this last year, a lot of us have learned that again and again from the pandemic.

By now, most of us can recite it like a mantra. Wear a mask. Wash your hands. Keep at least six feet away. And when something slips, like a party on the Hill or a burst of Memorial Day impatience,  we see the curves rise and get a fresh reminder of why it’s important.

It’s been tedious, even for the dedicated introverts among us. Constant vigilance is tiring and there’s always the temptation to say “Forget it, I’ll be OK just this once.”

But we know better. As the old adage goes, it’s better to prepare without need than to need and not prepare.

So we do what we need to do. For ourselves. For our neighbors. For our community.

Sometimes the predicted danger melts away like a seventh-inning chance at Coors Field, and we share a laugh at the hype (and maybe a quiet sigh of relief). But when the preparation and endurance pay off – that’s when we come out the other end with gratitude and another story to tell.

So whether today’s landscape looks like a typical Longmont March or a remake of “Nanook of the North,”  thank you for being ready. For yesterday’s warning. For tomorrow’s. And especially for the ongoing one that we’re finally starting to push back as hope rises and the shots roll out.

That’s how we make it through. Not panicking, but not foolhardy either. Eventually, that caution and care will bring us out the other side and we can return to a slightly less stressful existence.

Well … everyone except the weather forecasters, anyway.

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The Next Chapter

These days, Labor Day weekend feels a little novel. If the novel were written by George R.R. Martin, anyway.

Maybe I should explain.

This is the time of year when I usually spend a lot of time looking forward and looking back. The looking forward is one that I share with millions of Americans as I try to stare into a crystal ball and put together two viable fantasy football teams. It’s an exercise in trying to predict greatness, injury, and whether you can scramble to the fridge for another Dr Pepper before the next Draft Day round pops up on your computer screen.

The looking back? That involves Missy. As I’ve sometimes mentioned here, September is when my wife Heather and I have to put together our annual guardian’s report on Missy, combing through receipts, bank statements and memories by the score. It’s time-consuming but oddly rewarding as well as we reaffirm another wonderful year together.

It’s a well-worn routine. In any other year, it’d be utter reflex.

Any other year isn’t 2020.

This is the year when football prognostication means guessing whether there’ll be a full season at all – not exactly a guarantee when the team stats may include points against, yards allowed and positivity rate.

It’s the year when most of Missy’s usual activities and expectations were turned upside down. No bowling. No softball. No hugs with her favorite band (Face) after a great show – kind of hard when you’re crowding the monitor for a livestream performance.

In many ways, life has become month-to-month, if not week-to-week. Grand plans for the future? These days, if we can figure out what’s available at the grocery store, we’re probably doing well.

It’s a little like living in a Paul Simon song: “I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.”

Even more, it’s like living in a novel.

Not reading one. Writing one.

Readers, after all, have the benefit of knowing how much of the book is left before major plot points have to be resolved. (Assuming the absence of a sequel, anyway.) They can cheat, skip ahead, look up a review on Amazon.

Writers don’t necessarily have that luxury. Oh, some laboriously outline everything – and still get surprised. Others go in with a starting point, a destination, and a loose idea of how to get there, discovering the path as they go. The reader is almost guaranteed to be surprised by the next chapter because … well, so was the writer.

As E.L. Doctorow put it (and many others have quoted), it’s like driving at night. All you can see is what’s in front of your headlights. But you can make the entire trip that way.

That’s our life at the best of times. 2020 just made it obvious.

The good news is, some truly epic journeys have been made that way.

It’s how J.R.R. Tolkien picked his way across the landscape of the Lord of the Rings, discovering each new bend as he came to it.

It’s how Stephen King walked every step of “The Green Mile,” staying just barely ahead of his readers as he wrote each new installment.

And it’s how we’ve survived crisis after crisis, both as individuals and as a nation.

That’s not saying foresight and planning are useless. When you hit a crisis, your preparation shows, as anyone knows who’s ever plunged the depths of a blizzard-bound grocery store in search of milk and bread. But however well we’ve trained our reflexes, we’re still living life at one second per second. We can only see so far ahead. And we may be wrong about that.

But as long as we’re staying aware – of ourselves, of the moment, of each other – we have a chance of building a story worth remembering.

Maybe we’ll even get a decent quarterback out of it.

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A Space Apart

Methodically, one by one, I went through the motions.

Roll the neck. Flex the shoulders. Windmill the arms. Eyes closed the whole time as I carefully stretched each muscle and joint, down to the ankles.

The routine was familiar. The setting was not. Usually, I would be doing this on a stage in an empty theatre, a silent preparation for the organized chaos of a show. This time, the space was home, a familiar place pushed to one side of awareness for just a while.

This time, the quiet moment would descend for a different purpose.

Different actors may call it different things, but I suspect that most would recognize what I call the “quiet moment.” It’s the moment before a performance when you still your thoughts and clear your head, preparing to put on a new life and story. The moment that stands between your true self and your stage self, when all is quiet and in readiness. Soon, something will be. For now, it simply is.

Everyone has a different way of entering it. For me, it’s a routine of stretches so familiar, it no longer impinges on conscious thought. For others in a cast, it might mean lying in a darkened hallway for a few minutes, or whispering an exchange of lines like a mantra. However you do it, you’re entering border country.

It’s a calm place. Peaceful. Everything given over to complete focus.

In other words, a complete rarity in today’s world.

You know what I mean. We travel through a world of constant chatter, and not just in actual conversation. Televisions blare. Radios and music fill our travels. From our desks to our pockets, computers constantly connect us, filling each space with the latest thought, the latest news, the latest clever joke or point of interest.

I don’t want to sound like a curmudgeon, mind you.  I’ve met some close friends through the Internet that I never would have met any other way. I’ve found inspiration from something heard by chance on a morning drive. But while it’s not necessarily a bad thing, it is a busy thing, keeping thoughts buzzing, awareness ever-vigilant.

In a stressful time, that can mean less chance for respite and recharge. Maybe none at all.

And which of us hasn’t had a stressful time lately?

National politics. Local traumas. Personal matters of a hundred kinds. It can all seem relentless. Combine it with the constant mental buzz, and it becomes darned near inescapable.

Breaking that requires perspective.

And perspective – whether literal or figurative – requires a little distance.

That’s not always achievable at every instant, I know. If you’re wracked with excruciating pain right now, or distraught over an immediate crisis, that moment may simply not be reachable yet.

But it’s a moment we need, in order to survive all the other ones.

Again, everyone’s key to the door is shaped a little differently. Some of us have a whole ringful: prayer and meditation, a burst of exercise, a quiet walk under the night sky. Not so much taking yourself out of the moment, but plunging more deeply into it, taking a moment as a moment and not just a bridge to the next task.

The task will come. It always does. But for just a little while, it’s good to let the moment be.

Outside the theater walls, I often forget that. But, with apologies to the Bard of Avon, maybe it’s time to let all the world be a stage. If peace and focus is valuable for creating an imaginary life, how much more so for a real one?

The show must go on. But the orchestra doesn’t always have to be playing.

If that’s not too much of a stretch.

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Reading and Revolutions

Heather and I have a lot of reading ahead of us.

OK, that’s not unusual. After all, between us, we have enough books to be the northern annex of the Longmont Library. (“Yeah, that’s history and classic literature in the living room, sci-fi and fantasy in the basement … I’m sorry, crafting and gardening? Upstairs and hang a left.”) But these next few months are going to be different.

For the first time in a while, I’ll be reading out loud to my wife.

We used to do this quite a bit. And, granted, sometimes she still listens in when I’m doing our bedtime reading with our disabled ward Missy. But this time, we’re doing this for exercise as much as recreation. Maybe a few laps with Heather’s beloved Jane Austen, or the calisthenics of Charles Dickens putting us through our paces. Heck, Dave Barry may be warming us up.

At this point, we’re reaching for anything and everything that will cut through the fog.

Regular devotees of this column may remember that Heather was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis a little more than 14 months ago. As we stumble towards (please!) a new, more effective medicine, there have been a lot of small battles to fight. The moments of weakness. The occasional vertigo and loss of balance. But the most persistent and insidious has been what Heather and others with MS often call the “brain fog.”

MS lives in your brain. And it’s not especially careful with the furniture. It can make someone forgetful, make it hard to focus or concentrate. Heather noticed it creeping in when some of her puzzle games became more difficult and when anything longer than a news article became too much to handle. The woman who had read and loved “War and Peace” couldn’t pick up a novel.

It can be fought – by using patience, by establishing patterns and workarounds, and maybe most of all by keeping the brain active and stimulated. Hence the out-loud reading, which lets us work through at our pace, stop and explain or repeat if necessary, and use multiple senses at once (including my own sense of the theatrical) to hold and keep her attention.

It won’t be easy. We know it’ll take a lot of time and work. The progress may seem minuscule or even invisible more often than not.

But that’s how revolutions work. Whether you’re revolting against Great Britain or your own brain.

This July marks 240 years since we first held “these truths to be self-evident.” But the American Revolution didn’t spring fully formed from the brain of Thomas Jefferson or John Adams. Its success was from more than just an eight-year war or even a summer-long Constitutional Convention. Plenty of movements have declared revolutions, from 18th-century France to modern-day politicians. Most of them fail.

What made ours different – or at least one vital factor in it – is how well-prepared it was.

In a way, the Revolution merely confirmed what the American colonists had spent seven or eight generations learning: that they could govern themselves independently of any outside power. They had been practicing that art for nearly 160 years before Lexington and Concord, learning how to build a society and keep it together, in a land where the mother country was months distant and much indifferent.

They survived. They thrived. And by the time the King and Parliament decided it might be time to tighten the rein, the colonists discovered they didn’t need Britain any more – and hadn’t for some time.

“The Revolution was effected before the war commenced,” Adams once observed. “The Revolution was in the hearts and minds of the people.”

Now it’s time for revolution to come to a mind again.

We don’t have 160 years to spend. But Heather spent most of her life forging the necessary tools. We’re willing to work as patiently and persistently as we have to, to knock the rust off and make them fit for use again.

I’ll take any excuse to read a good book. And this may be the best of them all.

Nothing could be more self-evident than that.

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Making Magic

Heather’s youngest sister hurried up to me as the rehearsal dinner wound to an end.

“Mom’s outside with Heather,” she said. “She’s sick.”

My turn to hustle. Sure enough, my wife Heather was doubled over on a bench outside the restaurant. It had been a warm night and heat is no friend to an MS patient; as she’d stepped outside the crowded dining room to get some air, she’d suddenly had to sit down before she fainted, threw up or both.

“I need the car,” she whispered as her stepmom watched over her. Of course. I hurried off and pulled around, slamming the air-conditioning from Spring Day to Christmas in the Arctic. Her family helped bundle her into the back seat, some asking if they needed to follow us home.

No need. After a few brief minutes in the frigid air, Heather was upright and coherent, talking easily and reassuring everyone. It was like magic.

Appropriate enough. After all, dealing with any chronic condition is something akin to stage magic.

We’ve dealt with a lot of things for a lot of years. Crohn’s disease. Ankylosing spondylitis. Now multiple sclerosis. Each time, we’ve had to meet it with the dedication and training of a David Copperfield, not to vanish the Statue of Liberty, but to make something close to a real life reappear.

It can be done. But like a Copperfield or a Houdini, it takes hours of advance preparation to make things seem natural, even effortless to an audience. The wedding of Heather’s sister Jaimee the next day was typical, where a full morning’s rest, a constantly-present water bottle and periodic micro-breaks outside the reception helped Heather survive a ceremony on the hottest day of the year.

Magic indeed. But you never really get to let the curtain go down.

Chronic illness ebbs and flows, but the need to manage it never really goes away, much like the need to exercise. It’s a constant. For someone who hates losing control of their life, it can even be something of an irony – now you have to take control of your life whether you want to or not, even those things that would normally be automatic for most people.

You measure how much you can do before the fatigue catches up. You inventory what you need for even a short excursion. You balance, compromise, postpone so that the essentials can keep going. Maybe you even learn for the first time what the essentials truly are.

Somehow, you keep things going. Sometimes surprisingly well. Well enough that friends or relatives can be astonished when a breakdown occurs, because they’ve never seen you that sick.

It’s a triumph. But it’s a tiring one. After all, the show must go on … and on, and on, and on.

I’m not saying any of this to fish for pity. If anything, what I feel is closer to wonder. I am married to a strong person in a compromised body, and even on the days when she’s feeling weakest, the power of what she’s already done shouts to me in a voice I can’t ignore.

This is more than magical. This is miraculous. Maybe not the kind of miracle where a lame man is suddenly pole-vaulting down the street, but miraculous nonetheless.

There will be better days. There always are, eventually. But until that intermission hits, the Magically Medical Rochat Family will continue the conjuration. We can’t let the audience down, after all.

And if it means some long highway trips in sub-frigid air, then so be it.

After all, I already knew she was the coolest lady around.

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A Memory of Water

The surging water quickly filled the gutter, cascading down the nearby grating in ripples and bubbles.

I watched in the dark, hypnotized for a few seconds.

Part of it, in all honesty, was probably fatigue. Normal people sleep at 1 o’clock in the morning. Even crazy ones will sleep at 1 a.m. when it’s snowing outside. But as a reporter, I’m a special breed of crazy, so I was out in the snow showers, trying to get a halfway-decent picture that could run on our website come morning.

But lack of sleep only goes so far, especially for a night owl. The larger part of my mind, the part that couldn’t look away, was hearing an echo. One that was six months old.

A memory of a river that would not stop rising.

***

I doubt I’m alone here, either in my reflex or in my embarrassment at it.

I mean, water is the treasure of the West. It’s what starts small towns and big fights. It’s the heart of everything we do in Colorado, from farms to breweries to ski lodges.

What’s more, I love water from the sky. I glory in rainstorms (especially since their arrival means my early-warning pressure headaches can go away). And snow has been a special treat for me since childhood, a chance to see the world transformed and the California drivers at a loss.

It’s beautiful. Marvelous. Powerful.

And last September, we all got a reminder of the other side of that power.

I was one of the lucky ones. The flood didn’t reach my home, didn’t harm my family, didn’t turn my life upside down. Even so, I still have memories from the first day, reporting from the south side of Longmont and not sure how I was going to get back to the north.

I remember the “Missouri river” created when Left Hand Creek emptied into the nearby street. And the sea that had been Boston Avenue, stranding those who lingered even a moment. I can still see water slowly filling neighborhoods or quickly roaring under bridges or ripping away railway beds. And I doubt I’ll ever forget the sight of people walking across a flooded-out Hover Street, desperate for any way to get back home.

That’s from someone for whom the flood was a job. How much stronger still for those whose lives passed through the current?

And no one emerges from a trauma unmarked.

It’s like having a death in the family: the smallest things will trigger the most powerful memories. And so we sometimes wince to see gray clouds in the sky, or to hear rain on the roof, or to even think of what spring’s runoff may bring down the St. Vrain’s channel.

It’s a natural reflex. And not an entirely bad one.

When a relative passes, the unexpected memories help preserve a loving tie even beyond death. When a flood passes, the memories can keep us alert and watchful — a useful thing, so long as it doesn’t degrade into a fear and panic that paralyzes instead of primes.

We know what can happen now. We can be ready. Even if we don’t anticipate everything, we can prepare for enough.

And someday, down the road, we’ll be able to hear the rumble of thunder without anxiety.

Maybe not yet. Maybe not now. But someday, when watchfulness has built security, the time will come.

Until then, all we can do is navigate as best we can among a flood of memories.

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A Moment’s Attention

I came down the basement steps into a sea of garbage.

“Oh, Blake …”

When a 70-pound dog shreds two bags of trash, the results can be pretty spectacular. Especially when you’ve just cleaned the kitchen the day before. I sighed and set myself to picking up torn cardboard and old yogurt cups, faded rose heads and used Clorox wipes, aged contai…

Wait a minute. Clorox wipes?

Uh-oh.

“Honey, he eats wipes!” my wife Heather said when I relayed the damage. True; it had been just a couple of years before when he’d gotten into my sister-in-law’s baby wipes, briefly turning himself into the world’s most disgusting Kleenex box when her husband had to eventually pull them from the other end.

Off to the vet.

“Oh, Blake …”

That was the main theme. But the counterpoint in my head was just as energetic.

“Scott, you idiot …”

See, I was the reason those trash bags were down there. Two checks of Heather’s had gone missing during the cleanup; I’d brought the bags down so I could see if they’d been thrown away by mistake. Thankfully, I hadn’t been that clueless … not then, anyway. But I’d forgotten to tell Heather the bags were still there when I scrambled off to another round of flood coverage at the newspaper.

Which meant she had no reason not to put Blake in the basement as usual while taking Missy bowling.

Oh, Scott.

He’s OK, as it turns out. But a moment’s inattention almost proved very costly indeed.

We all know stories like that one. The lumberjack whose dropped cigarette sparked the great Yellowstone fire of the 1980s. The girl paying more attention to her text messages than her walking, who stepped into an open New York manhole. From the famous to the mundane, there’s plenty of examples where distraction had quick consequences.

Thankfully, the opposite is true, too. Attention can pay off big.

A lot of us found that out over the last several days.

Three years ago, the city of Longmont changed its flood map. The methods had gotten better; so had the tools. And on the new map, it was quickly obvious how much more of the city would be inundated in a so-called “100-year flood.”

Hint: a lot. But you knew that already.

It would have been easy to ignore, to say that the disaster was too unlikely, the measures too costly. By definition, that sort of disaster has only a 1 percent chance of happening in any year; other needs could have easily been seen as more pressing.

But someone – probably several someones – saw the consequence of a miscalculation. And began setting up new flood control measures.

It wasn’t perfect. Had “The Flood” come two or three years later, it would have found the city even more ready, with two major bridges over the St. Vrain replaced and maybe another stretch of Left Hand Creek done.

But I visited a lot of flood-stricken neighborhoods after the water hit. And I heard a lot of people sound the same chorus: the work that had already been done  kept a bad disaster from being worse.

“Whoever decided to OK that plan is well deserving of some major congratulations.,” one neighbor told me.

Focus pays off.

We’ve seen that since the flood hit, too. Most days, this city can be … shall we say, argumentative? While not necessarily a bad thing – it does mean people are getting a chance to say their say – it can also put a lot of grit in the gears when it comes time to take action. Any action.

But for at least five days, this area was almost supernaturally focused. A threat had come that didn’t care about sides or factions, and it found all of us ready to step up and meet it. And boy, did we.

Now that’s attention.

Distractions will happen. Mistakes will happen. We’re human. But if we can remember what attention saved and what focus allowed us to battle – well, maybe we haven’t stopped doing the amazing yet.

Sometimes the cheapest thing to pay is attention.

And I have the vet bills to prove it.