What do you write about when everything has changed so quickly?

I don’t need to detail anything going on in the world, updates stream in hourly across phone screens and down news feeds. I don’t want to harp on social distancing, self quarantining and washing your hands. I do want to try and live my daily life as normal as I can, with the caveat that nothing is normal these days.

Last night, instead of heading out to meet friends, I stayed in and started another episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” While traveling through space, the final frontier, I set daily goals to accomplish during this universal pandemic, a different kind of frontier.

Seward was announcing their first positive case of COVID-19 and I was promising to watch less, read more, drink more water, exercise daily and do more pushups. And stay positive, it’s important to be positive.

These goals, though, are nothing new. They are eerily similar to my New Year’s resolutions — even in the face of massive upheaval, we still want the same things, to be healthy and happy.

This morning, I practiced my personal social distancing and accomplished one of the more important daily tasks — remember, you can still go outside — with an hourlong ski in the fresh air. I had second thoughts as I went to blow a snot rocket, but besides that I enjoyed a mindless ski on a regular Thursday.

In the winter months, snowflakes trickle or dump down and transform the Kenai Peninsula.

At Russian River Falls Campground, the beautiful road leading into the campground magically becomes an aggressively long uphill climb with the bountiful reward of scenic vistas overlooking the Kenai River.

The Lost Lake trail up to the Dales Clemens Cabin takes a different route in the winter months, with a wall of snow blocking the path between you and the cabin. It takes a lot of huffing and puffing to crest the top, and a good pair of microspikes on icier days, but be sure to look back and see the town of Seward below you and how far you have climbed.

Winter brings immense change, but we adapt, we find new routes and new ways to travel, new ways to connect.

So, what do I write about when things have changed so quickly and drastically across the world? I write about the ways they’ve stayed the same, about how I still ski in the springtime solitude, only hearing the occasional chirps from birds as they, once again, return.

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By KAT SORENSEN

For the Clarion

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