Eclipse

 

At a small graveyard in Sherman our family perched along a ridgeline, gazing at the mountain where the sun first touches our country each morning. Dirigo, says our state motto, “We lead.” But the eclipse was traveling in reverse from the sun, rising over the Pacific in Mexico and reaching us in Maine at the tail of its arc.  Mount Katahdin stood like a stately white-haired elder bearing witness before us, with the staggered gravestones at our back serving as its solemn court. The long line of the mountain’s backbone and its “knife edge” were sacred to me for my own reasons; two young lovers who would later become my husband and me had clambered across that stony dragon-back, returning two decades later to repeat the adventure with our children. Both times my father-in-law was with us. He had hiked it every year for so many years, usually on his own. He gazed across the glacier-chiseled marshland in his leather hat, with hair as white as the mountain’s snowy peak, remembering the paths his feet had followed like a slowly repeated prayer.

The curling husk-tips of last year’s wild grass, dry and long empty of seed heads, prickled our undersides as we found our own places along the ridge and brought out our glasses. The lenses looked too dark to see through, but when we held them up to our eyes, they blocked out all light except for the sun itself. The sun was a dully glowing orb surrounded by blackness, and the moon was part of this darkness as it swallowed a larger and larger bite of the yellow sun-pie. The sky’s blue slowly deepened as the moon advanced. Without glasses, the sun still looked bright and whole, but when we put them back on we could see that only a fingernail sliver was left.

Then the sliver was gone, and our glasses went dark. We removed them from our faces as the earth suddenly chilled and a cold wind crept across the ridgeline. We looked up into an eerie black hole where the sun had been, a wispy white corona flaring around it. I lifted my camera to take pictures, but the camera diminished and simplified the image. Now the sky filled with shadow and a star-bright planet appeared beneath the sun. The mountains, which had been bright white before in a field of light blue, sunk into a dark silhouette with a golden sunset lighting up behind them. “The sun looks like an eye,” people on the ridge exclaimed. But it felt like a heart: the great big burning heart of our existence. A hush of awe fell over the ridge. It was so quiet the earth seemed to hum. The moment felt more sacred than I had expected as the great heart pulsed overhead. The sun was making its power known. If we had not known it from the daily rhythm of day and night we would know it now, in the way even its passing absence darkened our world. I could not see the faces of my family members at a distance. The darkness felt eerie and smoky, not an ordinary nighttime dark. The edges of the earth were still light – not just where the sun would normally set, but in every direction around the horizon.

“It’s coming back, put your glasses back on!” someone warned. We did as they suggested, even though the sun still looked like a wide-open portal. When we did, we could see the tiniest sliver of light appearing where the moon had first started nibbling at the orb. The sky lightened more and more. People began moving and talking again, but much more quietly than they had before.  We had been shaken, and no one knew what to say. A little longer and the sky was back to light blue. The mountains reappeared like white molars across the horizon’s broad grin. Sun shone again on the gravestones. Cars choked to life and eased out onto the rural highway, heading home.

We joined our family for dinner before our long drive back home. Mémé made an army-sized quantity of paella to feed her flock of visitors, and the bright color and taste of saffron paid homage to the sun. Children and dogs scampered underfoot. Having just returned from my grandfather's memorial the day before, life was feeling transient and I wondered how many turns around the sun we still had to enjoy the cooking and conversations that took place in this great kitchen. If the world can turn so dark and cold from a passing shadow, blotting out so much of what we can see even with light all around, what other, longer shadows might pass over us? I have known some of them, and each time the sunshine returned I chided myself for having lost a measure of faith that it would. But I will not forget the way the sun felt on this day, hanging before us in the sky, a great presence that continued pulsing with energy even when we could only see the glow of its edges. It still gathered us to it and centered us. That is what I will do then, I thought to myself. When I am next in shadow, I will stop trying to look for a sun I can’t see. I will close my eyes and just feel that it’s there, holding us all as we spin through the dark together.

Fleeting

My last grandparent passed a few weeks ago, just shy of his 97th birthday. He was the last member of our family from the “great” generation – those who endured the depression and WWII, then helped rebuild our country. My grandfather’s contribution to that effort, his “brick in the wall,”  floated high above the earth in the form of the many satellites he helped design. In his hours off work he traversed the Earth’s surface, hiking, biking and sailing. This made both his body and his mind so strong that even when he was ready to tap out of life, his body wouldn’t oblige. The night before he died he marveled to my mother, “I can still walk!” He passed away the next morning at his desk while reading the Economist. It is unknown which of the three articles open on the table was the exact cause of his demise.

After the end of his early marriage to my grandmother, my grandfather built a condo near the beach in LA and lived for decades as a quiet bachelor. He didn’t just commission his condo but did most of the actual building, along with nearly all the furniture inside it. He was modest and hard-working.  Romantic love mostly eluded him. But he was steady as the sun in showing up for his family. When our family was living in the middle of Amboseli National Park in Kenya, he came to visit. On a regular basis, deep into his 80s, he drove the 10 hours from LA to Portland Oregon to visit his son’s family. He called his mother faithfully every week of her life. My cousins and I loved visiting Grandpa and staying with him, not only because he was conveniently located right near the Los Angeles airport, but because he was a sweet, steady presence who liked exploring and always had something interesting to say. He was conservative by nature, but enjoyed reading books that informed and expanded his thinking. The Desiderata hung over his dining room table and he seemed to have absorbed its every word, living out his life in a way that was grace-ful; full of grace. 

It was my grandfather who introduced me to hike-in camping with a trip up into the hills near Julian. I remember walking with him for miles on a dusty trail through hills rippling with long golden grass, clusters of sage roasting in the sun, and dark green scrub oak and peeling Manzanitas dotting the hills.  We spoke, but most of our time together was peaceful and quiet, simply enjoying our presence together among the rustle of grasses and birds and the fall of our steady footsteps. 

One of the last times I visited my grandfather in LA, he was in his early 90s and still driving and shopping for himself. He had only in recent years made the concession to stop biking, after recovering from being hit by a car. We went out to a BBQ joint and shared a drink, laughing and talking like two young folks out on the town. The next visit, though, was a bit more sober. He’d had a couple of falls in his home and was forced to start considering his next move. Together, we measured his furniture and picked up boxes at the UHaul. He moved across the country into my parents’ home just one month before Covid struck. 

Grandpa’s decline was gradual. He fell more often and was more forgetful, but up until his last day he still looked out from the windows of his bright eyes and asked brilliant questions. Sometimes, we would answer his question, only to have him ask it again a few minutes later with the same degree of curiosity. When we bought a Tesla he was thrilled to be taken for a ride. “I’ve never gotten to ride in an electric car!” He exclaimed. By the next visit, it was all new again, and he had another first-time experience of riding in an electric car.  On one ride, we drove up the East side of Cayuga lake. Late September sun sparkled on the water as trucks cleared the stubble of dry corn stalks from fields. Grandpa was aware that he could not remember things. “I remember the earliest things, and the most recent ones, but not the things in between,” he explained. He was relishing a maple donut we had picked up in a drive-through, the sort of treat he lived for but did not have access to in his new nursing care ward. “I guess you probably won’t remember this drive,” I suggested. “No,” he agreed. Then his face suddenly brightened, and for a moment he looked like he was about 5. “But I’ll remember this donut!” Later, on the way home, I placed my hand over his and held it. The car felt suspended in the hazy, golden light of the sun hanging low over the southern horizon as we drove towards it. “I guess all we have is this moment,” I said. “But, that’s all we really ever have.” He nodded in acceptance, and then echoed my words: “That’s all we have.” That day with my grandfather imprinted in my heart what it felt to be fully present in a moment without being able to – or needing to - attach anything else to it.  Later, he forgot both the drive and the donut, passing the memory along for me to hold on my own until the dry stalks of my memories are also cleared from the field. But it’s ok, because for that one moment we were both completely there, with our hearts beating and our minds understanding, together.

As for man, his days are as grass; As a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; And the place thereof shall know it no more.

I will miss you, Grandpa. May your soul rest peaceful in golden fields.

Tour of the Rockies

Our country is divided – however figuratively, also literally - along a rocky seam where two tectonic plates smash up against each other, shoving layers of prehistoric ocean sediment up into gnashing white-capped teeth with sulfurous breath. That’s where we decided to go for our family vacation this last year with two kids at home. With one of those kids headed to college, we had to do it on a budget. We used the generous flight vouchers we earned on our last trip through collective willingness to give up our seats to another family. I sketched out an ambitious 10-day, 1800+ mile loop with lots of camping and cooking our own meals and prayed we’d all survive the pressure.

Thermopolis

After landing in Denver close to midnight the night before, we had to pick up the camping gear we were renting and book it to Thermopolis. We rode through that first long day listening to “The Modern West”, which casts an unflinching eye on the native-white struggle for the Great Plains. By the time we were snaking through the Wind River reservation’s stunning canyon we knew how the Shoshone Tribe had been forced to make a devil’s bargain, sending off their children to white-run boarding schools in order to be granted that piece of their own ancestral land. In the flats of Wyoming we drove through forgotten places like Jeffrey City, a short-lived uranium boom town now filled with rust-stained boarded windows. Silvery cottonwood trees lined the banks of every river. At a rest stop marking a branching-off spot for the Oregon and California trails, a fat, fiendish prairie dog challenged Zora for one of her fries, then dove down a hole with its prize. We arrived at Thermopolis in time to see its huge, icing-like formations of travertine, built up through a constant flow of mineral-rich geothermal water. Tired from travel, we still managed to climb a hill where we could watch the sun set over a herd of shaggy bison. The hills were stippled with Nuthall’s Larkspur, nearly a perfect match to the enigmatic blue-purple of our kids’ school district colors. A scaly dried raptor foot lay in the dust where we stood in a cryptic representation of the district mascot (a hawk).

Chief Washakie of the Shoshone tribe is said to have sold the hot springs at Thermopolis to the US under the condition that all people be allowed to access it for free, in perpetuity. The deal was made under the pressure of near-starvation conditions for the Shoshone, but the clean, well-maintained hot spring facility at least honors his wish.  We arrived soon after it opened in the morning and sunk gratefully into the warm, sulfur-rich water, which glowed a soft frost-blue in the morning sun. Behind us, hot water trickled across the travertine ledge into which the bathhouse had been built.

 

Yellowstone and Grand Tetons

We rinsed off and drove on to Cody. Hotel Irma, which had been built by Buffalo Bill, was an interesting place for lunch with its famous carved redwood bar and roses in its stained glass windows. We stocked up on food and camping provisions in Cody before pressing on to set up camp for the night in Yellowstone. The lady checking us into our Yellowstone campsite leveled me with a look, cautioning us, “You guys are brave. It might hail or snow tonight.” “Well, we’re from Maine,” I grinned, “And my husband used to lead snow camping expeditions. He’s been trying to get us all to camp in the snow for years.” That first night -was- cold. Since J’s sleeping bag was summer weight and his camping pad failed at its one job (to stay inflated), Zach swapped gear with him, sleeping in a hat and sweater and creating an ersatz bivy sack for his feet & legs out of the large nylon sail bag we had planned to use as a hamper. After a restless night we woke stiff and cold, but roused with coffee and fire as an elk nosed its way through the campsite, chewing on everything salty.

We’d had ChatGPT recommend an itinerary for seeing Yellowstone in a day, but the AI was too wise for us in its recommendations for a normal human pace and some downtime. We chose to largely ignore it as we spend a day driving the whole loop Nobel-style, hiking out as quick as we could to see the bubbling Mud Pots, Tower Falls necklaced with a rainbow, Mammoth Hot Springs, the Geyser Basin Trail with its steaming fumaroles and bright blue and green hot pools, Artist Paint Pots, and ending with a terrific long spout by Old Faithful. We had ice cream at the Old Faithful Inn, marveling at the log construction that made the inside look like a giant treehouse, with a crow’s nest built high in the rafters.

Time really is relative when you’ve stretched it with distance and compressed experience. After another night, we were only on Day 3 but already felt we’d been traveling forever. We visited the Grand Prismatic Spring, which was shrouded in fog but would furtively lift its skirts for a dazzling moment’s view of bright blue, green, and orange swirling layers. Then we left Yellowtone, descending through the Grand Tetons to Jackson. Our campsite in Jackson had hot showers (glory!) and was close to an REI where we found functioning sleeping pads for both kids. We ate at a noodle house in town and returned to our campsite for our now-nightly tradition of s’mores. In one of those rare hallmark moments that one hopes for in a vacation, our kids snuggled me from both sides as we sat watching the fire dwindle. We slept deeply that night, finally, like a bunch of swaddled babies lined up in our sleeping bags. The rushing stream beside us swept away all stress and sound.  

The next day we were swept away, ourselves, into a larger body of the same water. We shimmied into wetsuits and joined other campers on a whitewater trip down the Snake River. Zach and J sat at the front of our raft, digging into the foaming water with paddling muscle. The rest of us sat behind, trying to match their strokes like galley slaves on a viking ship. We bounced through the “Big Kahuna”, dropped down the “Lunch Counter,” and floated across the delicately bubbling surface of an underwater waterfall called “Champagne.” A bald eagle surveyed us from a tall dead tree while a pair of huddling river otters peered at us from under a canyon ledge. One of our fellow rafters – a father of 7 - was flung from the boat in the rapids, but we and the kids held on to the boat by wedging in our toes. The father was hauled back in gratefully. As we coasted to the boat launch at the end of our journey, our teens’ faces were elated with adrenaline and I hoped we had fulfilled their need for risk-taking - at least for awhile.

 

Rock Springs and Dinosaur National Monument

We left the pine forests of Jackson and pressed on to Rock Springs, where the land turned dusty and arid. Our hotel was a faded flower of its better days, with a grand staircase descending into the lobby and a pool surrounded by a 2^nd floor balcony walkway. Zach and I felt we’d stepped back into the 70s – it even smelled like that era – to a time when people would emerge from their rooms to watch and socialize with swimmers down below. Meanwhile, our children stared at their phones like wide-eyed starved things, making up for all the time they’d lost without reception. It was late when we finally trawled out to dinner, passing strip malls and streets of despairing homes. Rock Springs had been gutted twice, first by the end of the 70s oil boom and then by the end of the natural gas boom. We passed the Astro Lounge, where in the 2000s a single woman could reliably expect to be surrounded by 20 men. During and after that era, the town had turned to meth and oxy. It felt hollow now, like a place you wouldn’t want to linger long or you might never get out. 

We jumped back in the car and followed the Green River – which starts near Rock Springs – down through Flaming Gorge Canyon. Bright clusters of Indian Paintbrush lived up to their name, splashed over the hills like flicks from a brush dipped in a pot of red-coral. At one point the road appeared to be moving, until we realized that what we were seeing was a swarm of large black insects scuttling down the road like an oily black flood from hell. Were they cockroaches? I insisted on stopping to look and film them while Zora wailed. We couldn’t help but crush hundreds under our tires as we drove on. A couple miles down the road we finally figured out on Google what they were: so-called Mormon crickets, which are related to Katydids. They have long been a plague of Mormon farmers and, more recently, speedway racers. Since the bugs are cannibalistic, they feast on the remains of crushed members of their kind, so the tracks from one passing car result in even messier tracks from the next. This was definitely the weirdest and grossest thing we saw on our trip.

Before long this image was replaced by a gorgeous view of the red cliffs of Flaming Gorge and the Green River that carved it. We watched the eagles and tried to imagine how it would feel to spend one’s days flying back and forth across the deep canyon. As the Green River cuts through layers of sediment it travels back through time, and as we descended south towards Dinosaur National Park we did the same. Signs along the roadway told us when we were driving through the ancient coastal sand dunes of the Permian, the red Chinle layer that formed around the time dinosaurs and mammals first appeared, and the alabaster-rich Carmel formation from tidal flats in the Jurassic. This land had been everything at one point or another: ocean floor, coastline, swamp, forest, and dry desert. At Dinosaur National Monument we trollied up to the Quarry Exhibit. Enormous dinosaurs dying in or near a river had piled up in that spot and turned into fossils. Instead of digging all the bones out, quarry workers had dug out the rock so that the bones protruded in situ from a long, high wall. We could follow the curving neck bones of a Diplodocus down to its scattered ribs as it lay horizontally jumbled with other species from the late Jurassic.

Our campsite in Dinosaur was in a tiny tree-lined oasis near a river. Rocky layered hills rose up around us on all sides, rosy with the falling sun. We pitched our tent in the dust, and the oppressive heat made the kids unwilling partners in this effort. Before the sun was gone we drove around to see the petroglyphs left by ancestors of the Uinta tribe. They had made use of the layered rocks in that area by carving into the face of dark red rock and exposing the carmel-colored layer beneath it. There were animals along with an assortment of triangle and other oddly-shaped humanoid figures. Given how precious these were, I was surprised not to see them guarded or behind glass. It seemed odd that something so old and delicate could survive so long exposed to the elements and the whims of modern humans.

That night a hot, dry wind was blowing. We left the rainfly off so the tent was open under the starry sky, and the walls billowed around us as we anchored the tent with our bodies. I couldn’t sleep, so for hours I lay watching the sky, listening to the wind, and feeling the movement of the tent alongside the rise and fall of three sleepers I fiercely love. 

The next morning we improvised camp showers in our bathing suits with a solar shower held aloft by a fellow family member, decamped and headed towards Moab. This should have been about a 3 hour drive, but a prairie fire had sprung up around the road we’d planned to take and the way was closed. The alternate route, through Gateway and Naturita, was many hours longer. But it was better than sitting in traffic waiting for the fire, so we headed East and South. There must be some kind of route between Gateway and Moab, I was wondering, when J announced that the more detailed maps he’d pre-downloaded onto his phone showed a small path cutting over that way. We drove along the main road with Escalante on our left, then reached Gateway, where J redirected us to a dirt road that had a helipad and compound of US army vehicles on one side and an unmarked metal door embedded in the side of a rocky cliff face on the other. Zach was overjoyed at his chance to test the limits of our rental Jeep and demonstrate his rugged New Mexico driving skills. But we didn’t even know if this unnamed road would let us through all the way to Moab. We decided to go for it. The dirt road ascended steeply up the side of a mesa, with no guard rails to prevent us from pitching over the edge on switchbacks. Once we reached the top, we were in another world from the desert below. Here everything was lush and green, like a Swiss alpine landscape. Snow-capped mountain peaks rose up to the left, trailing frilly purple skirts of wild iris. To our right, the edge of the mesa dropped off into craggy lowlands and when our road took us near the edge I felt dizzy looking down. Suddenly we came upon a sign for “Dinosaur tracks” and heeled over. Dark rock that looked like compressed mud bore foot-long impressions from the hindquarters of Allosaurus. We followed the steps across the mud flat to see how far each step had carried the creatures. In some places their prints were so distinct that you could feel (in reverse) the edge of their sharp, hooked claws. After this landmark the road became paved and we descended the mesa right into “Castle Valley,” with spires of red rock and one huge, castle-shaped fortress rising up abruptly from the top of a mountain. We followed the Colorado River through its canyon, which forms the southern edge of Arches, and finally arrived in Moab.

Moab and Arches

The Fairfield Inn in Moab has four jacuzzis, two pools, and waterfalls that gush down from red rock towers simulating the nearby sandstone formations. We soaked in gratitude after the long drive, had dinner at a colorful Mexican restaurant with lime green walls and hand-painted folkloric chairs, then tucked into bed in preparation for an early morning. Because parks like Arches have become so crowded in recent years, the only way for us to get in without a timed admission was to arrive before 6:30am. This ended up being a blessing, because it allowed us to do most of our hiking before the full heat of the day set in. We saw the iconic “Delicate Arch” from a hike-in viewpoint, then drove quickly over to “Windows” to take shots of the kids silhouetted in brilliant blue archways with the sun beaming behind them. At Devil’s Garden we hiked several miles, past the impossibly long, thin stretch of “Landscape Arch” and out to “Partition” and “Navajo” arches before returning to our car hot and ready to go back to the hotel for a swim. We lounged poolside through the heat of the day and the kids learned from my example that if you just tell the service desk your room number you can pick up a soda or ice cream for “free.” At 5pm Zach remotely attended the South Berwick Planning Board meeting that was ostensibly the reason we needed to stay in a nice hotel with good internet. I snuck into town on my own to “shop,” but wound up only buying a postcard and filling it out in a courtyard with a trickling fountain. I addressed it to home and furtively slipped it into the town’s post office before catching up with the rest of my family a few blocks North for dinner. Throughout our vacation Zach had been insisting we each write a postcard and send it to a friend. The problem was that the postcards we were supposed to use were bought at Dinosaur National Park, which had little to choose from, and most of our postcards were gross pictures of Mormon crickets. So the three of us had blown off the task. Zach would be pleasantly surprised, I hoped, when we got home and he discovered I had actually bothered to send him a nice postcard from Moab. The postcard was a local painting that looked like a scene from the hidden road we’d taken while dodging the fire, and it lent itself to a bit of back-postcard musing on roads less taken - often the ones we seem to wind up on.

Whenever we go out for Indonesian food my kids beg for Thai tea or Vietnamese Coffee. I usually say no because it’s evening and we are a family of insomniacs. That night I said yes, because we planned to go back into Arches to see the desert stars. As we re-entered the park after sunset, a long line of cars was leaving. We argued for a bit about where to go and finally settled on the double arch at “Windows.” Along the short walk there we were stopped in our tracks by the scent of night-blooming Sand Verbena. We hadn’t noticed the plants at all when we visited that same place earlier in the morning; now they were pouring an intoxicating, jasmine-like perfume into the night air from snowball-shaped clusters of tiny white blossoms. We climbed up into the saddle of the double arches, thrilled to have the formerly crowded place all to ourselves, and gazed up into a nebulous stripe of Milky Way. Stars glittered through the windows created by the archways, blacked out only where the stone reached overhead. Earlier in the day our bodies had been silhouettes in front of the rising sun, but now we were silhouettes to moon and starlight pouring in through the arches. J traced the arcs with his powerful flashlight as I followed with my camera, then we just sat in silence for some time before rejoining Zach and a very sleepy Zora, who had returned to the car before us.

Glenwood Springs and Home

On the way to Glenwood Springs from Moab we traversed the scorched prairie that had been in flames two days before. The town of Glenwood Springs is squeezed into a narrow valley carved out by – again – the Colorado River. But it was much less dry there than Moab. The sides of the canyon were rugged and rocky, but fleeced with pine. We set up camp and then hiked up “No Name Creek,” a torrent of whitewater roaring down through a narrow mountain channel. The remains of wooden structures from old mining operations jutted out from the canyon walls, reminding me of the “Thunder Mountain” ride at Disneyland. Back at camp, we made a dinner of falafel, cucumber-tomato-pepper salad with tahini dressing, and freshly leavened pita dough rolled out with a cup and cooked in a frying pan on our camp stove. Our camping neighbor came to visit with a bag of lemons, offering us some and letting us know that we would likely be hearing her autistic son while we were camping next to them. We reassured her that would be fine. That night we went to bed early, still tired from the early rise and late night we’d had in Moab. We awoke leisurely for once and made our way down to Glenwood Hot Springs, where we spent the day soaking in the mineral-rich pools and enjoying the slides and diving board. In the evening, the kids and I ventured into the Yampah Steam Caves, which are situated at the source of Glenwood Hot Spring’s water. Descending the stone steps into the caves felt like walking into the primordial belly of the earth. We found a tight winding pathway with tiny caves branching off every ten feet. Slab benches lined the caves and hot water welled up burbling in troughs at their edges. It rose up as steam and dripped down from the natural rock ceilings. The smell of sulfur was overcome only by the even stronger smell of human body odor. People sat sighing and grunting in the heat, splashing themselves with trays of colder water from a central faucet. The kids held on for about five minutes and then decided they had satisfied their curiosity and were ready to join Zach back at the surface. I stayed as long as I could, lying on the stone slab and appreciating the natural thermal steam, but I did not outlast them for long. Instead I emerged, showered, and lay in the solarium, relishing the first alone time I’d had in a week.

It was good we spent our last day of vacation relaxing in hot springs, because our trip home was grueling. We awoke soon after dawn, de-camped, breakfasted, and packed up for traveling home. On our three hour drive to Denver we had to find a post office to mail back the bear spray, so Zach made us all write on those Mormon Cricket postcards and send them off to unsuspecting friends and family. We returned the camping gear, then returned the rental jeep, then dropped off our checked bags. The huge pile of stuff that had crowded the back seat and trunk of our vehicle throughout our trip disappeared in a series of quick transactions, and suddenly it was just us and a couple of carry-ons. Our return – which was two legs, laying over in Charlotte – would have already come in past midnight, but the flight was further delayed. We arrived back at our car in Boston around 2am, only to discover our sturdy Durango wouldn’t start. Jumping it did not work, and it took AAA hours to arrive with gas, only to discover that wasn’t the problem. Finally at 4am I called a Lyft. In 5 minutes Ahmed, who lives in Portland, arrived like a knight in a shining Subaru. He had just been getting ready to return home from his Boston run, assuming that as usual there was no one wanting to go to Maine at that hour. We arrived home as the sun rose brightly over interstate 95, nearly a full 24 sleepless hours since we’d left Colorado.

If there’s anything better than travelling, it’s coming home to a place you love more than the place you left. We slowly unpacked and tried to establish a new summer rhythm. Since we had done almost no shopping on our trip except for food, this is what we have to show for our travels: Tanner skin, brilliant memories, this blog, and a lovely postcard (without any crickets on it) that mysteriously arrived from Moab.

California Girls Trip

The cravings just wouldn’t go away: Talavera, spiced Mexican chocolate, crashing Pacific waves and San Diego sunshine. I needed them like rare elements that need to be topped off every few years for my soul to keep running as designed. There is a branch of my family far out in the desert I hadn’t seen for decades, and long-time friends who are touchstones to former and future lives. So I picked my daughter up early from school on a Friday, sticky and grinning with a root beer float in her hand. We were both giddy with the promise of a week-long girls’ vacation stretched out before us. As soon as we arrived in LA, my exhausted 2am EST brain had to jump into navigating a rental car through the LAX-405 highway pretzel on a Friday night with coke-powered sportscars shooting past us at 90mph. My daughter’s playlist thumped against the limits of our speakers.  We headed straight East, away from city lights and into the relative darkness of the desert, as the traffic slowly thinned out and glided into calm.

We slipped into our friends’ home in Claremont long after midnight, taking such care to tiptoe that even Loki, their chihuahua-pug, didn’t hear us enter. When Loki discovered our presence in the morning, sniffing us through the closed guest bedroom door, her outraged bark sounded almost human: “What?!! What?!!” Clearly, she was offended we had managed to slip past her. Some treats and an early-morning pack walk mostly mollified her, though we still received some canine side-eye. Our walk through Claremont – made hazy and urgent by our need for coffee – was lined with old oak trees and xeriscapes full of desert rocks, wildly blooming succulents. Breezes carried the jasmine-gardenia scent of Tea Olive, a bush with small white clusters of blossoms and dark green waxy leaves I remembered seeing everywhere when I was younger. Citrus trees were weighed down with more limes and lemons than their owners could consume, falling to the ground in a ridiculous abundance that my newly frugal yankee self wanted to scoop up and turn into marmalade. Everything was much greener than I remembered. “We’re in an ‘atmospheric river,’” my friend explained. “Like a river of water in the sky. It was raining so hard last month that we couldn’t see across the street.”

Leaving Claremont, we saw that the mountains after which that town is named wore a heavy dusting of snow as they rose up bold and brilliant from the desert floor.  We headed deeper into the desert, through a pass lined with giant tumbling wind turbines, and then up through the winding Morongo canyon whose tufts of desert brush bloomed with a yellow halo. We passed the exit for Indio, where over a hundred thousand Coachella attendees were partying in the desert. When we stopped at a roadside stand to pick up a pint of fresh-cut watermelon sprinkled in lime juice we saw a few of the partygoers, dressed in fishnet shirts and other wild, rave-y clothes. But we had already passed up our rental car company’s “special offer” for tickets to join that crowd. My daughter had looked at young man behind the rental desk and told him plainly, “If I was going to Coachella, I wouldn’t be going with -her-,” gesturing towards me with her eyes. But, she told me later, she had no interest in attending. “Bad things happen at Coachella,” she cautioned. “It’s the sort of party that leads to regrets.”

Something of much more interest to her was waiting for us in Twentynine Palms. We pulled off the highway onto a dirt road that led to a Mustang Rescue Center. Two horse statues covered in silver glitter stood sentry by the gates. Staff ushered us in and told us where to find “Desert Daydream,” our canvas glamping tent. We unpacked and set up as horses snorted and a dusty sun set over the mountains of Joshua Tree National Park. Solar string lights popped on, ringing our campfire area. Tired from travel, we zipped up our tent, snuggled up under blankets and followed the darkness into sleep.

 

In the chill of morning, just as the sun was rising back up over the hills, we awoke to the sound of horses’ hooves. Mustangs were all around our tent: running, bucking, tossing their heads, and rearing up on their back legs to flail their front hooves at the rising sun. They moved like rebel spirits reveling in the joy of their own movement. We sat and watched them silently through the open tent. Later, when the center staff and their cattle dogs had finished rounding the escaped rescue horses back into their fenced area, we ventured out in search of food and coffee. We picked up a mocha and a cortada at an unassuming whitewashed adobe-style bar/café just off the main highway and went off in search of my uncle's family.

About 40 years ago, my uncle’s family had been at a campsite in this place – Joshua Tree National Park – when my cousin Laura disappeared. She had been one of the first “milk carton” kids, an adorable toddler whom witnesses thought might have been kidnapped by someone in a van. Our families and a bevy of volunteers searched the park for her, clambering over boulders and hiking through the brush, but she was never found. Her loss tore my uncle’s family apart in a way that only a family who has lost a child to violence or kidnapping can fully understand. My uncle’s family had since lived in many different places – Portland, Arizona, Grass Valley, Huntington Beach – but they had come back to this place, just miles from where Laura had gone missing. It was because my uncle’s family was so far out in the desert, and unable to travel, that it had been so long since I’d seen them in person. We greeted them with hugs and met their extended family of rescue pets. Then we picked up lunch and caravanned together into the park. We visited the Cholla (cactus) garden, saw valleys of Joshua trees standing like aliens with twisted limbs lifted in supplication, and climbed to the top of giant boulder piles. In the evening we picked up Mexican food and ate at their home, catching up on a long overdue span of family stories and bringing our understanding of each others’ divergent lives into a closer alignment.

 
The next day we left the desert and headed towards the beach town North of San Diego where I had grown up. On the way, we stopped at the San Diego Safari Park. I remembered it as so much larger, and the aviaries where I had remembered getting lost in a wonderland of colorful birds and tropical plants were all closed. But there was an entirely new “Australia” section with a stunning cactus garden, tree kangaroo and a platypus – rare to find outside of Australia. In the gorilla enclosure, a bored female demonstrated self-pleasuring techniques to the amused and embarrassed crowd while the males intermittently charged towards each other, beating their chests with cupped palms. We rode the tram through the safari park and might’ve gotten a bit carried away whispering and giggling after they told us they were using surrogates to reproduce white rhinos, because we couldn’t stop impersonating a hapless Coachella attendee, complete with valley girl accent, who made a wrong turn in the desert and wound up a rhino surrogate (yeah OK, you probably had to be there). Once we felt we had absorbed enough of the park, we drove down the “Del Dios” highway, where I had spent the most challenging hours of my driver’s education, and landed at the home of my childhood friend J.

It was the middle of the week, so my friends were working and their kids were all in school. We tried to tread lightly and be easy, helpful guests. During the day, Zora and I visited my childhood homes and special places. I told her the stories that attached me to those places. One was the Knorr Candle Factory, an enchanted store that is hard to find unless you know where to look. I used to buy colored sheets of rolled beeswax to make into candles, and they still had a small wall with cubbies of the colored sheets and wick for sale. We chose a couple colors to share with J’s kids, and Zora selected a few to make a braided candle at home. A beautiful succulent garden with trickling fountains and clusters of brightly painted Mexican pottery surrounded the store. We continued on to a boutique ice cream store that is part of a chain that runs up the west coast, and for which a Maine friend of ours is the Chief Development Officer. Afterwards we walked up Solano beach, stepping carefully around the thousands of wind sailor jellyfish (Vellela) that had washed up on the shoreline like indigo gummy beach stones. Surfers jockeyed for places at the break point, and I explained to Zora what I had learned in high school from my surfer boyfriend about the politics and protocols at a crowded surf site.  

When you return to a place that was significant in childhood it’s reassuring to find it relatively unchanged, serving as a stable anchor of memory. The sun was as bright and the sea air as fresh as I remembered. There were new stores filling in the streets, but the old ones were still standing with their rounded red clay roof tiles, their walls simply repainted with more modern colors than the 70s beiges I remembered. The tiny street where my first childhood home was located still felt like a country-hippie enclave. But there was one place that transported me straight back, with all the shock and tingle of an electric current running down a tree to ground at its root. It took just one sip of a Mexican hot chocolate mocha at Pannikin and I was young once again in body and soul: full of swirling complex thoughts, enchanted by French poetry and vintage dresses, and sliced deep by the keen blade of first love. It was a place relationships had begun and ended, a place where I had met to talk with people I wanted to know. The coffeehouse had a new dressing of lemon-colored awnings, but it was still an old train station with rough wooden beams and Talavera-tiled tables. Birds still flitted in and out, begging for pastry crumbs. You could still hear the train and smell the sea crashing against the nearby sandstone cliffs. I couldn’t have known, back in my youth, that drinking all those distinctive mochas would create a broad highway of memory allowing me to travel back in time, but it strikes me now as a fortunate investment of the few pennies I had to spend. Zora felt the magic too, making her own memories that blended with my stories as the coffee shop became a place we shared. We went back twice more, unable to stay away.

Our last two days were spent with my high school friend, A. She is now a doctor who lives in a beautiful home not far from where we both grew up. Her backyard is a wonderland with palm trees waving over fountains that spill down rock waterfalls into a clear blue pool and spa. She served us cardamom-rose tea and a beautiful middle-eastern breakfast with cucumbers, creamy white cheese, and brown lentils delicately spiced with Angelica. On one of our evenings, we met for dinner with our beloved high school French teacher, a truly vibrant person who has had an outsize impact on both our lives. Just as Beethoven struggled with hearing and Monet struggled with losing his sight, our teacher – whose heart was the true instrument of her work – had a heart that almost burst. Our teacher was in the hospital recovering from a long-shot heart surgery when A. discovered her on her patient list. Another former student had assisted during the surgery. All through high school, this teacher had given us pieces of her heart, and when it it almost broke it was her former students who helped piece it back together. Even more coincidentally, it was A’s recollection of something she had read in her high school French class that had secured her place in medical school many years ago. In an interview with the school’s imposing Chief Surgeon, he made a reference to the Myth of Sisyphus. A. asked whether he was referring to the myth itself or to the philosophical essay in French by Camus. In all his years, the Chief Surgeon told her, she was the first interviewee to have known about Camus' essay, and A. is certain that this was a critical factor in her acceptance. The essay's entire point is to accept the absurdity of life and not try to create meaning from it. Absurdly, now that essay itself is part of a story with deep meaning, tied to the improbable survival of our teacher and the lasting meaning she brought to our own lives.

In the end, what did our visit to So Cal accomplish? We strengthened ties with long-lost family and friends, showing up in person to testify to their importance in a way that words can never match. We fortified our own mother-daughter bond; Zora now knows where her mother comes from and how she was formed from the sun, sea and sagebrush. I ingested an adequate supply of the element “Californium” to last me through several more Maine winters.  Zora rediscovered her love of deserts and satisfied her longing for new foods & flavors. I feel more reconnected at the root and less likely to topple when the next ice storm weighs down my branches. That’s a hard benefit to quantify. But here I am, full of a rediscovered energy, and looking forward more than ever to the next half of my life.

Seven Year Stitch (3/24/2023)

The last time I wrote anything about our lives longer than a social media post was over seven years ago, just before my sister’s death. The concussion from that event knocked out my breath along with all music and words. I would try to play my violin and find no song in my heart to propel it. I would try to write but find only a numb silence. In this blog, which I have used to chronicle our adventures since we moved to Maine, the impact created a ripple in space-time so deep that I must now somehow stitch December 2015 to March 2023. This huge gathered fold I am holding in my hand feels heavy - a span of years that includes everything since the 2016 election and covid. But it’s now part of the garment I’m wearing, and to walk forward I have to stitch it up and haul it with me.  

I’ll begin by telling you some ghost stories from deep in that dark fold of time. We buried my sister’s ashes on our property, close to the roots of a newly planted Elm. It seemed the right way to honor someone who had spent so many years drawing pictures of people turning into trees. My mother didn’t want to handle the ashes at the memorial any more than she had wanted to hold the box when we first retrieved it from the crematorium. I couldn’t blame her – I don’t think I could ever bear to see the body of one of my own children reduced to ash in a tiny box. But ashes would have burned the roots of our young elm. Someone had to blend them with an acidifying fertilizer, so I took the ashes into the forest to do this thoughtfully. I wondered if I might feel something, but as I mixed the ashes I knew Katrina was not in them. My sister, who had always been pure spirit and yearned for freedom, was finally free of the struggles of an embodied existence. Her presence felt like it was in the trees and the wind and everything living around us, but not in the dust I was holding.

After Katrina’s memorial, we placed a large stone over the place her ashes were buried and engraved it with a line of her poetry: “Where you find love, you will find me.” This was from a poem in her teenage years where she is thinking about our transitory time on earth and wondering how it could all end in nothing. She winds up concluding that love is what lasts and is most permanent. And it’s true; with the specifics of my memory fading, I am left mostly with an impression of the way she made me and other people around her feel. On one particularly dark afternoon, in the depth of my grief, I was lying on my bed in the afternoon with the blackout curtains drawn and the thought flashed through my mind, “I don’t want to be here anymore.” I wanted to follow her down that dark passage and not return to all the stresses and heartbreak of living. Suddenly a light flickered on. It was one of the little LED battery-powered candles that hangs from a sconce on my bedroom wall. Baffled, I got up and turned it over – still lit, it was in the “off” position. I turned it on and off again and the light went out. Never before, and never since, did I see that light come on accidentally. But that day, for the first time, I realized Katrina was still with us. Maybe our love and grief tethered her to the earth; maybe she knew we still needed her. Love for her family had kept her alive long after she stopped wanting to live, so maybe it also kept her spirit with us. She had always been a strong and stubborn girl.  

A couple years later, my parents noticed an Elm growing by their pond in New York, with no other Elms nearby. Based on its size, it looked to have taken root around the time we planted Katrina’s Elm at our home in Maine. From the windows of their home my parents could look out on the pond and see the new Elm growing larger each year. Other than the fact that there were no other Elms, it was perhaps not surprising to see an Elm growing by a pond since Elms love water. A fitting tree for my sister, a Cancer, who was a water spirit by every measure.

I continued grieving for my sister, visiting and planting flowers by her Elm and stone, and keeping her memory alive. Holidays were always the hardest, because those used to be the rare times we had always counted on seeing her in person. Her absence at Christmas was palpable, especially in my parents’ home. She had always decorated the tree with my parents before we arrived, making constant naughty jokes about the ball ornaments. With all those memories, my parents didn’t even want to put up a tree without her.  Then Covid hit, and as our family quarantined and then tested ourselves so we could gather in person for Thanksgiving 2020, we decided for practical purposes that year to combine all the holidays together. We celebrated Thanksgiving the first day, Zora’s birthday the second, and Christmas the third. Although it wasn’t really Christmas on that third day, we declared it so, finding a tree and decorating it so it could stand through the holidays and bring my parents some cheer. Zach spent much of that day chopping and stacking wood for my parents so we could have a real fire. At the end of the day, he handed me a piece of paper he had found on the lawn. It was a hand-drawn note from my sister, no bigger than two inches wide, with a pencil drawing of a candle and a message that read “If you’re going to have a Christmas, you might as well have a ‘Merry’ Christmas..” I presented it to my family at the table over dinner, and my mother and I were in tears. The note looked pristine, with no water stains or signs of wear. How could it just have appeared on the lawn? We guessed it might have blown out from the woodshed, since no new wood had been placed there in some time. My mother recalled Katrina having written such a message about ten years ago. But the oddly specific message - coupled with its appearance on a day that we were celebrating as Christmas (but wasn’t) - amazed even the nonbelievers among us. Katrina had a high bar to clear, with a family full of skeptical researchers and engineers.

I no longer had any doubt that Katrina was with us and that she would be for at least as long as we still remembered, loved, and needed her. I started visiting her stone more often. On All Hallow’s Eve, I poured out a shot of rum into the earth over her ashes and lit a candle, saying that I hoped she would stay with us for as long as she could. Later that month, Zora needed some black pants for a choral performance and we couldn’t find anything in her size. I was rummaging around in the attic, looking for something else, when I came across an entire box of Katrina’s clothing that we had cleaned out of her apartment and which I had forgotten existed.  Most of this trove fit Zora perfectly, including a perfect pair of black pants. I thanked my sister. She was still watching over us.

There is a great deal more that has happened in the past seven years; family vacations and all the beautiful messy life in between them. But this was the weightiest part, the part that needed to be written down first. Now that you know our ghost stories they may haunt you too, but I hope it will be with the reassurance that loved ones only truly leave us when we are ready to let them go. I’ve made peace with grief as a way to keep someone close for as long as we need them. Maybe for always, until our own candles wink out.

September 2015 - Barn Dancing and Black Pirate Honey

Last Saturday night we walked to a barn dance. We left our cabin and headed West through our orchard under a nearly full moon. With rose briars clutching at my skirt, Zach lifted me over the wooden fence that frames our neighbor’s horse pasture and we approached the old homestead from behind. This house was once the home of the family that owned our property, the people who built our stone walls and left their old farm implements to rust in our fields. Now the doors of their huge barn were flung open, the inside laced with strings of lights and the sound of a fiddle and dulcimer pouring out.  It seemed all the ghosts of their family graveyard were there with us, strolling through the backyard under the heavily-laden apple trees. As if hosting a neighborhood barn dance is what this homestead was meant to do; it had been sleeping, and now had a reason to wake.  We ate with our neighbors and danced together across the uneven floorboards. The fiddler played Saint Anne’s Reel and her partner called out the steps. For one of the dances I surrendered Zach to a nice lady who had come alone; the musicians dove into the Tamlin and blended it with an American tune I hadn’t heard before.  Then I requested “La Bastringue” and we did it properly, raising our joined hands for a big whoop each time we met up in the middle. The musicians sent us out with a beautiful waltz. It was still playing in my head as we picked our way back home through the pasture and under the barbed wire to one of our forest paths.  Our log cabin glowed warmly as we approached, a humbler building than the chateau-like house and barn we had left behind, but small and sturdy on its ledge hill.  

The next night, last night, we harvested the tiny bit of honey we felt we could take from our bees after such a strange summer. The honey was dark, almost black, and tasted like caramel. Zach said it was knotweed honey. It it is entirely different from the floral, wine-y honey we harvested at midsummer last year.  The kids helped us spin the black, heavy heart out of the combs, then we put them to bed. After they were asleep I finished reading “Cinnamon and Gunpowder,” a novel about a chef who is captured by a redheaded lady pirate and forced to cook for her. It was a rich, sweet, dark story.  As we slowly filled our bell jars with the viscous liquid we had just harvested, the earth’s shadow slid dark red over the moon in a full lunar eclipse “supermoon” – the first since 1987. When a thin crescent of light reappeared, it shone through the sunroom window onto the new jars of black pirate honey.

I turned 40 this year. I, too, feel richer, darker, and sweeter. I am right where I want to be at this moment. Zach and I celebrate 13 happy years of marriage tonight, and my father turns 74. Many dreams are coming true for the people around us: my friend Andrea and two of my cousins have found true love, the Boghs have found their homestead on a hill in town, and my sister has seen the first client in her new business. I pray for our friends who are still waiting or searching, whether it is for love, or the gift of a child, or a place that feels like home: may this be the year.  And although the world is facing much darkness right now, may we pull together – as we do in a New England winter – to help each other through regardless of our differences. 

January 2015 - A Wooden Heart

In the flush of a Maine summer I often wonder, how did I endure January? Just as I wonder now, with two half-grown children, how I endured the diapers and sleepless nights of their babyhood. Or the raw and loveless years of my early 20s. I promise myself every summer that when midwinter comes, I will finally unlock the secret to surviving it – to surviving difficulty in general. And then bring that lesson into the rest of the year.

 Although the solstice passed nearly a month ago, this is my lowest point. The cheer of the holidays are a thin echo, the thermometer sits at 10 below, and I wade through the huge evaluation reports I must write at the close of each year. Like many other folks, I face a dead pine tree, several extra pounds on my belly, and a gift-swollen credit card bill. It’s time to cut back and pay up.

But even a wooden heart is a buoyant one. Unless we’re broken, we tend to float upward. The secret to surviving January is that the scale shifts, so that the sunny day we would have overlooked in May becomes a source of great joy when it sparkles on snow.  In January a friend’s hug feels warmer, and coffee feels better going down. Our emotions bounce up and down within their usual range, but the highs are triggered by smaller things. Hard times seem terrible in retrospect, using one’s current scale for reference, but in the moment they had their bright spots.

Do your worst, January. You’ve only got 2 weeks left.