On being alone

UPDATE: Being alone is all well and good, but sometimes it would be nice to have another person in the car when I'm going skiing and have to put chains on the tires to get there...

At the age of about 8, I was lucky enough to have a horse-crazy mother who was finally able to fulfill her lifelong dream by getting me a pony - Paleface - and then later, a horse - Najmah (she also got herself a horse for a while). By the time I was a young teen, I was doing things like riding Najmah through the Dairy Queen drive-thru and sharing a hamburger with her. I ate the burger, she ate the bun. This was Texas in the '70s, so the only really unusual thing about that was that I was riding English style instead of Western. Although I often rode with friends, we lived in a rural area where I was also able to just saddle up and ride off by myself pretty much whenever I wanted. It was very liberating.

It would be just me and Najmah. Usually Whiskey, our border collie, would come — ostensibly for protection, but in reality she mostly just chased squirrels (she did attack and drive off a much larger Keeshond who was trying to bite Najmah's heels once). I had a feeling of exhilaration and well-being and thought I never felt alone or lonely because I was enjoying the company of other beings. I had these same feelings years later with my horse, Sandpiper.

The weird thing is, I get the exact same feelings when I'm skiing, and I'm almost always alone when I ski. I even prefer to ride the lift alone if the resort isn't too busy. Making conversation with a complete stranger on a long lift ride can be interesting, but is sometimes just too stressful. My mother actually recently asked me if I get lonely skiing. No, never. It doesn't bother me to have lunch at the resort restaurants alone, either.* I have more recently started riding my bike regularly, and yes, I get those same feelings. I often ride with friends, but far more often alone.

I actually kind of find it sad that the "company" was all in my head. This, of course, doesn't mean that I didn't love the horses. When we left Texas for California, we had to leave them there, and I missed them terribly and cried for weeks (that was back in 1979, and I'll still get choked up thinking about it). Or perhaps I should say that I WAS enjoying their company, but that wasn't why I wasn't lonely.

I like company, but I guess I'm also just comfortable being by myself.

* My mother told me once that she had never eaten in a restaurant alone. I was flabbergasted. I've even been to movies by myself.

On misanthropy

I've always enjoyed being by myself. I love just sitting alone and reading a book, messing about on the computer, or even taking a nap. I like going into the office really early, because there's nobody else around.

I've never minded going to restaurants alone. I just take a book. Once, while I was getting my degree in Indiana, my parents were in England, and my son was with his dad in California, I was alone for several weeks. I was working on my thesis, but I decided to take a break one night and go to Grindstone Charley's, a fairly nice restaurant. When I mentioned it later, my mother was shocked that I had gone to a restaurant alone. I, in turn, was shocked that she had never been to one by herself in her life.

I've also gone to movies alone several times. I went to a late-night showing of Jurassic Park when it was still in one of the huge domes of a Century Complex theater. I think they've since subdivided all those into smaller screens. There were three other people in a ~500 seat theater and they all sat down in the front. I had pretty much the entire theater to myself, so I sat back and put my feet up on the chair in front. When the velociraptor lunged for Laura Dern's feet as she was yanked up through the ceiling, I actually jerked my feet back. Embarrassed, I looked around but there was nobody to see....whew!

I used to ride horses a lot, and I loved going out with only the horse for company. My 3/4 Arab 1/4 quarter horse, Thalj Najmah and I would go out for hours just enjoying ourselves. I could talk to her, and I could justify it as not just talking to myself. She was always willing to do whatever I wanted, from suddenly taking off at a mad gallop to herding a neighbors wayward calf back through a hole in the fence (which probably looked odd with my English saddle and jodphurs, but hey)(did I mention I lived in Texas at the time?). I did have a few human friends, but if you ask me who my best friend was when I was a young teenager, I would have to say Najmah.

Now, most of the time I go skiing and ride my bicycle, I spend literally hours alone, and surprisingly to me, find it just as enjoyable as riding a horse. I always thought I had the horse for company, but maybe it's always been just me. Don't get me wrong; I like going with friends, too, but if I waited around for someone to go with, I'd never go.This is the only picture I could find of Najmah. I'm sure my mother has others. The white pony was our much loved Pony of the Americas, Paleface. And there's the Mirror dinghy that my father built one winter when we lived in upstate New York.

Mountain biking fun

This is a photo of me with my new mountain bike taken by my friend M (I have three friends M) right after an hour-long ride in 90+ F (32+ C) degree heat. Note the red face. I think I got mild heat stroke because I had a horrible headache for the rest of the day. There is also a red letter somewhere in the photo...

We were riding along, and I had to slam on my brakes to avoid running over a fat two foot plus snake stretched out all the way across the trail. My initial reaction whenever I see a snake is to yell “Cool!” and grab it before it can get away (ask Kia - she’s seen me in action). I love snakes.

This is what went through my mind in the couple of seconds it took for the snake to move off the trail:
“Wow! That’s one fat gopher snake”
“Shoot! These stupid mountain bikes don’t have kickstands” (making it more difficult to just jump off and leave it)
“Darn! It’s moving too fast for me to catch it.”

Then my brain began to engage…
“That gopher snake has odd markings…”
”and a very triangular head......”
“And rattles” just as M slid to a stop behind me and said, “Is that a rattler?”
“Yep.”

Photos from CaliforniaHerps.com
Crotalus oreganus oreganus - Northern Pacific Rattlesnake

Pituophis catenifer catenifer - Pacific Gopher Snake

Me, mountain bike?

Well, since I hadn't hurt myself enough last week when I went skiing, I let myself get talked into going on a death ride mountain biking with a friend yesterday. I rented a bike where the guy helpfully and cheerfully told me that I would probably fall down a couple of times, and that the $900 bike was fairly fragile, and of course, I would have to pay for any damage done. Isn't fragile mountain bike an oxymoron?

He didn't know that my friend is a seasoned mountain biker who gave me a very thorough tutorial on such things as changing gears - if you've never mountain biked, the number of gears the thing has and how to change them is a little bewildering. She told me to just use middle and bottom. She then took me to what she called "the easiest trail around." I would hate can't wait to see what a harder one looks like. She yelled back at me when I was supposed to change gears, and she made me get off and walk through rocky areas. Well...tried to make me, anyway. At one point I asked her how many gears there actually were. "Just two. Middle and bottom. Now GET OFF AND WALK IT!!" I stressed her out because I was having a little trouble following orders...

There's me and the fragile bike. It had better disc brakes than my car:There may still be snow in the Sierras, but down in the Sacramento Valley the very short flowering season is almost over. I took some photos while gasping for air pausing to take in the view along the scenic trail. Here are some purple flowers. I don't know what they are, but they were pretty. (Dammit Jim, I'm a fisheries biologist, not a botanist...)
And here are some purplish-blue ones with what my friend thought were owl's clover (she's a fisheries biologist, too)
Here are some of the purple flowers next to a rock. My attempt at artsy-fartsy. You can see why I am a fisheries biologist.
Oooh, oooh, I know this one! Lupine. Darn flowers kept moving, so they came out blurry......
Any west coast field biologist can identify THIS one. Poison oak. Lots and lots of it.
And the State Flower, California poppy.
Ok, I cheated on that one. We didn't actually see those while riding. These flowers are growing in the front yard of the house about two doors down from ours.

Here is a picture of what most of the trail looked like. It is a fairly typical live oak/valley oak woodland with lots and lots of poison oak.
I didn't fall down. I didn't break the fragile bike. I did have a great time! When can we go again?