That Time I Almost Mountain Biked Into A Bear . . . Again (RE-POST from 7/29/17)

I am still overly paranoid about running into bears. Let's hope it doesn't happen any time soon. Enjoy this re-post from last summer! 
 

My husband, Dan, and I recently got home from a two-week road trip in Washington. We spent the last few days of our vacation in Leavenworth where we, of course, did some mountain biking, and I, of course, turned around halfway through one of the trails due to my well-documented acrophobia.

This isn't a post about my fear of heights for once. It's about my second almost-run-in with a bear.

You might remember Dan and I almost got eaten by a bear during our mountain biking adventure in Montana last summer. It kind of happened again.

We were riding one of the upper trails at the ski hill in Leavenworth, and I made it to about here . . .

before I decided to turn around. Once you ride the trail past these trees, you are fairly unprotected from the edge, and you faithful readers know how well I do on those types of hills.

Dan went on to finish the trail without me, and I rode (or walked, depending on the heights situation) my bike back to the bottom of the trail.

While I was walking my bike, I came across a male runner who asked if everything was okay.

"Pssh! Oh yeah," I said with too much confidence. Then I giggled nervously, and he gave me a quizzical look before he continued on his way.

Next, I pulled off to the side as a group of female hikers approached.

"You can go ahead if you want," one of them called up to me.

"I'm waiting for husband," I told them.

"You're the champion!"

"Not really. I turned around. I'm scared of heights," I explained.

"In our books, you're still the champion," the hiker said.

"I'm fine in the trees but once it drops off the hill onto that singletrack . . . " I let my voice trail off so they understood how traumatized I was.

(Maybe this post is more about my acrophobia than I thought.)

"Me too. I can't ride this trail," the hiker said.

Ha! I thought, I'm not the only one who can't finish the trail!

With renewed energy after my chat with the like-minded hiker chicks, I rode down to the lower junction and waited for Dan.

I waited for a while until a panicked female runner caught up with me.

"I just scared a bear off up at the Freund Canyon junction!" she exclaimed. "He crossed right in front of me. I think he probably went the other direction into the canyon, but keep an eye out. I'm letting everyone know."

"My husband was riding up to that junction," I told her.

"What did he look like?" she asked.

I described my Kurt Cobain lookalike husband.

"He should have been on 'For the Boys' all the way up and down," I said.

"Nope, I didn't see him, and I just ran that entire trail."

He wasn't on the trail he was supposed to be on, and he had been gone a while. The remainder of the trail after we parted ways was only a little over two miles out and back.

I rode back to the car. The reception was surprisingly good on the mountain, so I texted Dan.

I also called him and left this totally awesome voicemail.



Another woman in the parking lot noticed that I was dialing the same number over and over and asked if everything was alright.

I told her about a) the bear, b) the fact that Dan had been gone for a while, and c) the fact that the runner hadn't seen him on the trail he was supposed to be riding.

"I wouldn’t worry about the bear. They're pretty gentle around here," she said. "I would worry more that he might have gotten lost on the trail."

"Maybe I should ride back up to the lower junction," I said, or call 911, I thought.

Just then, we spotted a biker on the hill above us.

"There's someone!" she said.

"Woo hoo! That’s him!"

He admitted he had, in fact, made a wrong turn. That's why the runner hadn't seen him, and that's why it took him a while to get back down.

"What? A bear?" Dan said when he checked my text and voicemail, which he found hilarious. "And I missed it?"

I responded with a roll of my eyes.

"You want to ride the lower loop again?" he asked.

"Sure."

So we did. And we still didn't see any bears.

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Quesadillas On Fire! (RE-POST from 7/23/17)

Not much has changed in a year. I still set things on fire from time to time. Enjoy this re-post from last summer! 

I have decided I shouldn't be allowed to do domestic things anymore. To illustrate this point, here is a recent post from my Facebook page:

"So . . . the fan in the bathroom quit working, the spin cycle on the washer sounds like a machine gun, and I set the oven on fire yesterday. I am totally killing it at being an adult this week."

(I wrote this while waiting for the windshield guy who was supposed to repair a crack made by a stray rock kicked up by an SUV driver in one of the thousands of road work zones in Boise right now.)  

A friend of mine responded, "If by 'it' you mean the appliances in your house . . ."

I should probably add ovens to the growing list of things I'm not supposed to touch, along with power tools, serrated knives, and open tuna cans.

I had made the stupid dish a lot, but the broiler decided this was the perfect time to set everything on fire. By everything, I mostly mean the quesadillas I was trying to quickly get on the table since I had rehearsal that night. My husband, Dan, thinks I have a tendency to exaggerate.

I noticed a slight burning smell coming from the oven, so I opened the door and unleashed a billowing cloud of smoke into the kitchen that also proceeded to drift into the living room.

Funny thing. The smoke detector didn't go off. Maybe I should get that checked.

Then I realized the quesadillas were on fire, Quesadillas-En-Flambé. I blew on the quesadillas even though I knew it was pointless and, not to mention, ridiculous. It was a reflex. Don't judge me.

I shut the oven door, turned off the heat, turned on the fan above the stove, and assessed the situation. I have a fire extinguisher under the sink, but I wanted to salvage the quesadillas if possible. Like I said, I had to go to a rehearsal and didn't have time to pick up anything new or fix something else.

I peeked in the oven and noticed the flames were not as large. Hmm . . . could keeping the oven door shut be the best way to put out the fire?

I shut the door again and Googled, "what to do if food on fire in oven." It popped right up. Apparently, I was not the only one . . .

Google said to shut the oven door (check), turn off the broiler (check), and wait for the fire to go out. If it didn't go out, I was supposed to call 911. I felt pretty good about the fact that I had already followed Google's advice without even realizing it, aside from the couple of seconds I spent blowing on the food at the beginning of the ordeal.

Dan came home to find me staring at four quesadillas, smoldering on the stove top.

"I kind of set dinner on fire," I told him. "What should we eat?"

"The filling still looks alright, and so does the bottom of the tortilla."

My engineer husband figured out that we could tear off the charred top and fold the bottom over, leaving each of us two half-quesadillas. (Thank you, recipes, for always making four servings.)

"Google says we should clean out the oven after it catches fire," I said after dinner.

We leaned over and checked out the inside of the oven. Then we glanced at each other.

"Yeah, you're right. Too much work," I said.

We're awesome at being adults.

No harm, no foul. The oven is back to normal.

For the latest blog updates, visit and "like" Rebecca Turner-Duggan.

On the Trail

If you have been a faithful reader of my blog, you may recall I like to run during the summer. You may also recall I like to spend time on the trails even though I am pretty much scared of everything from heights to bears, but I still keep going back for more.

The last few summers, I have taken up trail running in the foothills. In other words, I am a forty-one-year-old who can run a four-mile trail that gains almost seven hundred feet in elevation . . . twice. You can refer to me as Middle-Aged Wonder Woman. (It's not that unusual to see middle-aged women trail running and more in Boise. We're basically Amazons out here if Amazons were five-foot-three and freckled.)

Of course, jogging in the foothills means I have to share the path with some interesting critters.

1. Badgers
The other day, I noticed a ton of large burrows while running in the foothills. It turned out they belonged to badgers.

A fellow jogger stopped me and warned me about the two she had encountered in the direction I was headed.

"I have been running this trail forever, and I have never seen badgers in the area," she told me.

She had been able to sneak past them but was a little unnerved by the experience.

 "I might turn around . . . " I began to say.

"Wait!" she said. "There's a biker. Let's see if he has to stop."

He didn't.

I saw a few runners at the top of the hill who would reach the badger sighting about the same time as I would. It looked like the badgers had either gone back in their burrows or had moved on.

"If I hear you screaming, I'll come back for you," my new runner friend said as we parted ways. 

When I approached the burrow, which was indeed right on the trail, I could still see paw tracks in the dirt but no badgers.

And thank goodness for that. Badgers are mean and nasty. They are nothing like the wise, hermit-like character in Wind in the Willows.

2. Beetles
If you have been in our foothills, you have probably seen the humongous black beetles that love to roam the trails. They don't die easily, although I have come across a few causalities of mountain bike tires. It's possible these beetles were created by a radioactive experiment gone wrong. I've seen enough superhero movies to know this could absolutely be true.

3. Lizards
I try not to step on these little guys them as they scurry across the trail because they are super cute . . .

unlike this next, more nefarious creature . . .

4. Snakes
For someone who is super afraid of everything, including radioactive beetles, I have handled my snake encounters fairly calmly. Just this week, I saw a few tracks across the trail but no snakes in sight.

Once I came across a snake on the trail so tiny and immobile, I jumped over it. It lifted its head and stuck out its tongue ever so slightly as I passed.

Another time, I was running around a switchback and saw a woman frozen on the trail, standing beside her bike with her dog.

"Why is she just stopping there?" I wondered.

I rounded the corner and saw a large snake coiled up, sunning itself on the path, flicking its tongue. The biker and I both backed away slowly and returned the direction we came. I didn't stick around long enough to check out whether or not the snake had a rattle.

I haven't run into a mountain lion . . . yet . . . It could still happen. I am definitely not complacent about these things.

For the latest blog updates, visit and "like" Rebecca Turner-Duggan.

Some Thoughts on the Fourth of July

I have a confession to make. I am not proud to be an American at this moment in our history. (Dear Canada, please tell Justin Trudeau we're not all like you-know-who.)

Recently, I performed in the musical Chicago. On the surface, Chicago is a biting, albeit hilarious, satire of America's preoccupation with celebrity and crime.

Photo credit: Dan Lea

This time around, the production resonated with me in a way it hadn't a decade ago when I originally performed in the show. Talk about America's current obsession with celebrity. A reality TV star is our president! (Insert grimace here.)

The "Cell Block Tango" also took on an almost poetic justice in light of the #metoo era. Calm down, people. I'm not saying women should kill their husbands and boyfriends for popping their gum too loudly. (Hyperbole, anyone?) But, boy oh boy, that number was empowering, considering all of the horrendous abuses of male power that have been exposed in the past year.

Photo credit: Glynis Calhoun

Then there was the immigrant story, a story I acted out on stage every night. At the same time I was pleading my innocence (in Hungarian for the most part), families in the real world, seeking amnesty and a better life in America, were being ripped apart at our border.

My character, the Hungarian immigrant (known as the Hunyak, a derogatory term for an immigrant from Hungary and/or Central Europe) is accused of a murder that she most likely, as implied by the English translation of her monologue and other dialogue in the script, did not commit. She is the only so-called murderess in the show hanged for her crimes, a result of the language barrier and the apathy of the U.S. justice system.

"Not guilty, Uncle Sam!" she cries out at the end of her life. The America she believed in is her ultimate downfall.

Several friends told me they teared up during that scene, especially in light of what was happening at our border. But also every night, a few people laughed when the emcee announced "The Hungarian Rope Trick" and my head went through the noose. Hopefully, the chortles in the audience were a knee-jerk nervous reaction and not due to a lack of compassion for our immigrant population.

It was with these things on my mind, that I "celebrated" July 4th this year. I tried to focus more on the fact that I visited my family, you know, the family with the cutest nephews in the world.

 

I wore my bright blue Neil Gaiman American Gods shirt, and my husband, Dan, wore a red and blue Hard Rock Cafe shirt. It was our way of being somewhat, but not very, subversive.

We drove to a July 4th parade in a nearby rural Idaho town with my brother and nephew and saw some rather disheartening displays of "patriotism." Yes, man wearing the "Veterans Before Refugees" T-shirt, I am looking at you. (Why does it have to be one or the other? We should be taking care of both.)

My family fell silent as a life size cutout of our Commander-in-Chief rolled by followed by two Republican Party floats. We were probably the only ones standing on that corner, shaking our heads sadly.

"There is definitely some hero worship going on," Dan said.

Despite those minor discouragements, we had a great time hanging out with my brother, sister-in-law, and nephews.

We had a barbecue and set off fireworks. They happen to live in a neighborhood where several immigrant families have settled. These neighbors, too, were joyfully celebrating with their families as Americans.

The morning after I got back to Boise, I was jogging around my own neighborhood. I came upon the house that sits on the corner of the park. At first, all I saw were the American flags posted across the homeowner's yard, and I started to roll my eyes.

I mean, this is the neighborhood where I run into some old guy wearing a "Make America Great Again" hat on a daily basis. I call the cul-de-sac down the street from us the Tea Party Circle because of the propaganda spewed all over the cars and lawns.

Then I saw the sign.

I was torn between crying and knocking on the door and hugging the people.

Instead, I took a picture and ran away.

#weloveourcountrytoo

For the latest blog updates, visit and "like" Rebecca Turner-Duggan.

The Day My Eyes Got Big (RE-POST FROM 7/5/14)

I am busy being sexy in the production of Chicago this weekend. I had my eyes dilated a couple of weeks ago and thought about this blog post from 2014. Enjoy! 

I, like most severely near-sighted individuals, get my eyes dilated annually so that the doctor can make sure my floaters really are just floaters and not something more sinister. As I approach forty, I'm finding that lots of common physiological nuisances could become more sinister and less manageable. Or that could be my obsession with self-diagnosis via WebMD.

Here is a joke for you: My eyesight is so bad, even the eye doctor says Lasik wouldn't help! (Uproarious laughter, please.)

Actually, the funniest part about getting my eyes dilated is my husband, Dan.

Dan has better than twenty-twenty vision and has never had his eyes dilated in his life (as far as he can remember). Dan drives me to and from the eye doctor because I am useless behind a wheel when dilated, and, trust me, you would not want me driving down Eagle Road.

About ten minutes into my dilation, Dan started staring into my eyes and not in the romantic sense.

The flash on this picture about killed me.

"It's like an alien is taking over your body," he said, way too enthusiastically.

"Or it could be the devil, like in Penny Dreadful," and in my best Eva Green, I whispered, "What game shall we play?"

"That's so cool. I want my eyes dilated!" Dan exclaimed.

About that time, the waiting area started to take on an uncomfortable aura, and a salesperson sat himself beside me on the window side, tempting me with the prospect of new contacts and glasses. I couldn't even look up, the glare from the window was so bad. I stared at his lap the whole time while Dan stared at me like I was some sort of science experiment.

What will happen to the girl with big pupils when confronted with extreme sunlight?

Torture is not the best sales method. I didn't buy any new contacts or glasses.

Finally, when the salesperson finished his spiel, he said, "You're squinting a lot. I'll go shut the blinds."

You mean, you just now realized that I was staring at your crotch during your entire pitch?

After finding out that my floaters were still just my floaters and my bad eyesight was still just my bad eyesight, Dan drove me home. We closed the blinds and watched Game of Thrones.

During the second episode, I was able to read my watch again, which is always a sign to me that my eyes are going back to normal.

"How are my eyes now?" I asked Dan.

"You still look like an alien."

Helpful, Dan, very helpful.

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