From Iraq to Rock

I have completed my second day on the island. They sky is gray and wet, the birds are struggling to live through this cold early spring weather. I am making good friends with my work computer screen and  I am still looking for an apartment under $600, which is proving to be challenging.  In the meantime I'm soaking up the April showers.
Here is another unpublished gem from the archives.

From Iraq to Rock
The driver swears his undying love for Lady Gaga, we break into laughter and that’s when something explodes beneath us. The armored hummer swerves to the right. The truck commander immediately radios the rest of the convoy that we’ve got a flat tire. Suddenly the other vehicles encircle us and the tire is changed instantly as if we were at a NASCAR race, but the mechanics wear armor, their large black M4s strapped over their sweaty backs. The tire change is a relatively small glitch if we were at home, but in a war zone it should feel ominous. I try not to laugh, but here I am a journalist, in the middle of the desert and the biggest news I’ve had in weeks is this, a flat tire and I can’t even get out of the vehicle. I’ve agreed to sit in my seat unless told otherwise. As we pull away from the side of the road, just minutes later, and onto the endless stretch of road, I wonder if I should feel something more?

I spent eleven months in Iraq. My mind labored there in the monotony of concrete walls, barbwire and the endless anxiety of a war zone. I returned home to the organized manicured lawns and children riding bikes under leafy oak trees. I missed the possibility of something happening. Some of us search for lost thrills in drugs, alcohol or fist fights. My self-medication is rock climbing.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m no hardcore free solo climber, all it takes is seventy feet and some slab to freak me out, but I love it.  So when a friend I made in Iraq, invited me on a climbing trip, I said yes.

We start the climbing trip driving in the darkness. It’s February and Darrell’s headlights reveal the Joshua trees standing with hairy arms adorned reaching into the sky. The vegetation offers a needed distraction. Three of us, freshly returned from a year in Iraq are boring Garrett, a recent biology graduate from Montana, about our war stories. Natalie, a MEDEVAC Blackhawk pilot, Darrell, a MEDEVAC Blackhawk crew chief and I have complaints. The list includes soggy vegetables in the chow hall, aircrafts landing outside of the designated lines, creepy men and temper tantrums. We haven’t seen much blood and gore, but we’ve been isolated, cut off from our familiar worlds.

My year as an embedded journalist with a medevac unit came with its thrills of running to the concrete bunker when mortars came in. Breaking news stories were far and few in between. When they did occur the military had plenty of rules. “You can write the story, but you can’t take pictures on the flight line, in the hospital or of the patient,” I heard often.

The horrors of our deployment were subtle, full of walls, not just the concrete barricades or the thin walls of the trailers we called home, but also the walls we built to keep others out. Darrell says it wasn’t that bad, perhaps he is tougher than I, or perhaps his time in Afghanistan helped him appreciate real suffering. Later in the week of our climbing trip, as I watch him scale a difficult 5.12 (climbing grades typically range from 5.5, for beginners, to 5.15, only climbed by the few) gracefully stretching his arms out to maneuver each move, he appears to be the real embodiment of Darrell, while the person I palled around with in Iraq was a mere ghost.

Darrell and everything else in Joshua Tree National Park, California is more alive than anything in Iraq. Green and reddish shrubbery fill up the empty wide spaces. Huge monuments of rock jut out in all sorts of directions as if some great giant boy placed them like building blocks and they could be knocked over at any time. My first climb is not exactly graceful. I’m clumsy, unsure of my steps.

Over the next few days we travel to Red Rocks, Nevada. “I should just do it,” I say, working up the courage to lead a route. (Lead climbing is when the climber is above the rope clipping into anchors along the way, opposed to top rope climbing when the climber is attached to a rope, attached to an anchor overhead.) “I just lived in a war zone for the last year. I can do it, I think,” I say. Up, up, up I go, leg shaking, breath cramped inside my ribcage and my heart like a little bird flutters. Afterward, with my feet back on the earth, I say, “That was fun.”

Four days later I finally feel comfortable again on rock. I ascend an easy 5.8 route. Halfway up, I reach between my legs and pull up the rope into my teeth. I fumble with the quick draw (consisting of two metal carabiners connected to a piece of webbing), which hangs on a bolt almost out of my reach. Just as I push the rope safely inside the carabiner, my foot slips ever so slightly and a gust of wind knocks a contact lens out of my eye. “I don’t think I can do this,” I yell down to Natalie, my belayer. “I can’t see.”

“You’re doing great,” she yells. I finish the climb and without depth perception, feeling the rock below with my fingers before stepping up. An hour later, back in the warmth of the van, we talk about our favorite climbs. By now all discussions of Iraq have dissolved in lieu of more entertaining topics.

Several days later I am home with a nagging sense of depression. The fear and excitement is gone. I ride my bike in the rain, downhill without the braking. For a short moment I feel alive again. I start to look for my next job, my first location choice, Afghanistan. 

With Hope I Turn West

After returning from my last freelance job as a communications advisor in Bangladesh, I started fishing around the Internet for long-term position that (gasp) actually pay decent wages. The most appealing job offers happened to be located in out of the way destinations, including small towns in Wyoming and Alaska. I applied for a job in a Navy community, as I have prior experience working with the military, but I did land that job and was referred to a job opening on the San Juan Islands.
And now, just two weeks later, I am sitting in a coffee shop in the island writing this blog and googling the definition of a rain shadow, one of the many charming aspects of my new home. The Olympic Rain Shadow, according to KOMO news (http://www.komonews.com/weather/faq/4306627.html), is thanks to the wall created by the Olympic Mountains, which protects the northeastern Olympic Peninsula and the San Juan Islands from the non-stop rain which torments the Pacific Northwest.
Basically, it means that I will have all the perks of a landscape with curvy Pacific Madrone and tall Douglas Firs with more sunny days.
I start this blog with an old article, I wrote during my time in Iraq, about a young man who misses the Pacific Northwest and the fishing it has to offer.


A FISHERMAN IN THE DESERT

Balad, Iraq—Inside the air-conditioned trailer, American soldiers lean against leather couches watching Brad Pitt cast a line in A River Runs Through It. Sgt. Jason Westlund’s brown eyes dreamily-gloss over as the screen flashes images of the wide river running over smooth rocks, the high grass carpets, snow-capped mountains looming in the distance and giant trout swimming through clear waters. 

“The fish were breaking my heart,” says Westlund. “You can’t catch trout like that anymore.”

Westlund, 27, of Corvallis, Ore., a flight medic in C/7-158 MEDEVAC, based out of Salem, Ore., sometimes wishes he could drive out to one of his favorite fishing holes. Westlund fishes in places like the Alsea River, known for salmon and steelhead. The fifty-mile river flowing northwest of Eugene to the ocean is adorned with stone and fern covered riverbanks shaded by dense forests.

“It’s a short ride from home,” says Westlund, who often wakes at 3 am and fishes until 2 pm. Westlund also frequents the calm Odell Lake in Klamath County, Ore., where he grew up camping and fishing with his family. It’s still one of his favorite spots because “Kokanee are easy to catch and they taste good,” he says. These are places fishermen salivate for in their sleep, especially if they are stationed on a base in the middle of the desert.

Unfortunately soldiers in Iraq can’t just take off for a weekend whenever they have an urge to reel in a big one. When I ask him what he misses most about fishing trips in Oregon he says, “Everything.” He can’t quite explain how much beauty he finds there in the solitude of sunrise, of afternoons with sunlit skies over grass that sparkles like strings of emerald with the perfume of fir and pine and the cool, algae-laced lakes to wash away summer sweat. “Even if the fishing sucks, I still have a great time,” says Westlund. “All by myself in a gorgeous part of state.”

Westlund ties a fly in a trailer in Balad, Iraq.

Solitude in Iraq is a joke. With over 100 soldiers in his company, there is rarely an empty room or silent space. Westlund spends most of his days restricted to a half-mile area, so he can hear a mission called in on a black radio strapped to his hip. That leaves him with several trailers usually bustling with other soldiers. The dining trailer is only quiet in between meals. He sits at one of the tables in the corner with his brow furrowed, fingers delicately curled and carefully moving. With a backdrop of a poster of a waterfall and lush greenery, he’s tied over a 100 flies while waiting for missions. Westlund works for hours, silently berating his creations, thinking about how “Ugly and lopsided they are coming out.” Not that there are any fat-bellied trout anywhere nearby to notice.

 Every soldier has to find an escape from the heat, memories of blood-soaked helicopters and dying patients. On one of his first missions, Westlund cared for a teenage Iraqi girl with most of her body ravaged by burns, a difficult picture to erase. For Westlund keeping his hands busy is one way to de-stress. 

“It makes the time go by faster,” he says.

Watching Westlund with his flies and rod in a trailer produces a certain melancholy feeling, like watching a boat stranded on a concrete driveway in winter.