Sleepy Snowshoeing

My snowshoeing experiences have mirrored my mood lately: lots of (literal and figurative) ups and downs, but I keep pushing on, knowing I’m learning each time I go out, getting better at this life business each trip around sun. Whatever. No matter how I try to write that I sound like a Hallmark card in the sympathy section! I guess the snowshoeing part is my own signature. The Shelly section of the greeting card display. 

Sleep Update

Seriously, my sleep has been the victim of what I now know is called DAWS, dopamine-agonist withdrawal syndrome. I’ve tapered off the drug I’d been taking for restless legs way too quickly, but—seeing as how I can’t get in to a neurologist here and am following my young PCP’s advice that’s secondhand though e-consults and practitioners’ message boards and AI—there is no taper schedule gradual enough to soften the blow for someone on that medication for as long as I was.  I’m hoping my sleep hasn’t forever been compromised; its quality was disrupted by the drug for a decade, and my brain rebounding from that will take months, but it will recover. I broke free of the fully sleepless nights I had right after Thanksgiving, my God, and am now not exactly enjoying but definitely appreciating three to four hours of sleep a night.

It’s like my nervous system’s gear box has been reduced to two gears only: crazy-ass forward in jerks and leaps and heartbeat spikes, and the most sumptuous feeling of drowsy relaxation I’ve ever had. Once I get those few hours of sleep in, it’s like I’m an android with its power button switched to off. I keep falling asleep: while in the truck, waiting for Tracy to cook lunch, sitting on the sofa, texting with a friend. I’m out, man. Sayonara.  Until suddenly the gear box grinds back into hyper-awake, and I stay stuck jerking forward against my will for the next 20 hours or so.

Except, here’s the hope-filled Hallmark part, that “or so” period keeps getting shorter.  Mostly every few days I have less crazy-ass tears and more Android-off-mode slowing to a stop. Maybe my nervous system will find another gear to add in the options, and I’ll wake and sleep and function like most people roughly on a 24-hour cycle, shifting among five favorite modes. That’s so far in my future though; right now I’m grateful for my android-off gear, whenever I drop into it.  

Back to the snowshoeing though, which was the point of this post. 

Snow Update 

No matter my sleep sitch, I’ve been gearing up and walking out behind the apartment every single day to tromp over the snow. I’m slowly improving my clothes, my gear, my route. And we certainly have enough snow. A foot to start us off, with an inch or so adding to that every few days. 

One day I looked over the bike path that bulldozers are making through a field between apartment complexes here and saw a large coyote crossing the snow far in the distance.  Then three coyotes following him. I know they’re a pest in urban environments, but for me, now that I’m off the road, it was like seeing an old friend. 

I was looking down at my feet and saw a vole poke its head up through its snowy tunnel, see me, and go back down and run a few more feet, then appear up ahead. Like a wack-a-mole, just no wacking.  

I keep seeing the prints of turkeys, and finally I saw just one, far ahead in the woods. I never saw it or any other again. Weird there weren’t more. But the one was welcome. 

The red tailed hawk we kept seeing in the distance flew right over my head one day, so I saw, straight above me, a fluffy white-feathered body, with two curled talons, right there above my head. Beautiful.  

Later, as I was walking across the coyote field looking for their prints, I saw instead evidence that the hawk had come down to get a vole, but missed, then come down 15 feet farther away and grabbed it successfully. 

I love feeling the different types of snow under my snowshoes.  Rough and crunchy where people have walked. Fluffy in the woods. Hard-packed by the wind over the open field that I can walk entirely on top of. 

I don’t have far I can go in this apartment complex theater, but I can get out there for an hour a day and look. Look for tracks, look for animals, listen for the quiet.  Use my body for a purpose I want instead of fighting in the two gears I’m stuck with right now.