December 2010 - First Winter

Winter started coyly, as if it was trying to charm us into embracing the cold. The first snow of the year fell on Halloween. This melted quickly and we didn’t see snow again until Thanksgiving day, at my parents’ place in Ithaca. I started to think God was teasing us by playing to the American holiday schedule, and it reminded me of a childhood mystery – the only time I ever saw snow flakes fall on my home town in San Diego was on a Valentine’s day.

The kids’ first reaction to the snow was to eat as much of it as possible. One big white snow cone!! It took them a few times to realize that despite looking pure white, snow from the car’s bumper or the ground near the chicken coop were not the tasty-est freeze.

There we were, waltzing our way through the season and wondering how Maine got its reputation for harsh winters when a storm came and dumped several feet. Jonah rejoiced at his first cancelled school day, and the kids spent the day home watching movies (what else to do when you still need to work?). Apparently Nora the noravirus doesn’t care about school cancellations or lost days of work, since she decided to visit us the very next day. Zach was out on his weekly expedition to Massachusetts, after a night of holding two childrens’ heads over bowls I was groggily shoveling snow off our car and out of the chickens’ run. The path I shoveled from the back door of our trailer to the henhouse looked like a tunnel. Once some ground had been cleared in their run, the chickens decided to venture out. At least they’re smart enough not to step into snow that is taller than they are. One of them was so grateful that she laid an egg right there on the snowy ground. Either they’re not very bright or not very maternal. But why is it that the golf ball we put in their nest boxes to encourage them to lay their eggs there keeps winding up on the opposite corner of the five-foot hen house? It’s heavy, and to get it out of the nest box they have to launch it over a 2” ledge. It’s not as though they have hands to pick the thing up and throw it. There’s only one possible explanation: our chickens know how to golf.

One sign that you’re in a small town is that your kids show up in the newspaper even if they haven’t done anything wrong. We’ve only been here 5 months, and between the two of them our kids’ photos have already been in print 3 times. One is a photo of Zora sitting in a fire engine, quoted as asking the firefighter to “go fast.” The most recent one is a shot of Jonah with his kindergarden teacher, brandishing an award for “courage.” In the photo he has a huge scab over one of his eyes from having slipped on my parents’ stairs and cut his brow. In any case, it goes nicely with the courage award, which he actually received for having moved across the country. Folks here think it’s pretty courageous for a Californian to venture so far North. I think they are wondering if we’re going to “stick,” like these first snows.

I bottled and labeled our first ever batch of hard cider. It’s mellowed a bit now, and tastes a bit like a dry white wine with the scent of apples. I wasn’t sure at first but now quite like it. It may finally be good enough to take over to the folks who sold us the apples. Their last name is French, like so many people here, and I sometimes wish more of the French culture had stuck around. Just a bit north of here in Quebec is an amazing band, Le Vent du Nord, which plays some of the best folk music I’ve ever heard. We saw them at the Bangor folk festival and since then I’ve been hooked on the fiery, melancholy reels of Quebequois music. The French Canadian fiddlers tap with their feet (mat-a-pat, mat-a-pat) as they play, and the round tones of the fiddle carved up with “les pieds” creates such an infectious rhythm that it’s almost impossible to take sitting down. Hence the saying that the way to kill a Quebequois is to tie his feet to the chair and play fiddle music at him.

Zach is working furiously at his new job, in the midst of the end-of-the year crunch for spend-it-or-lose-it grant funding. I have been keeping busy working on a database, and just finished driving down to Boston to present the first draft. In November we surprised my parents at their retirement from Cornell Biology, sneaking up the night before and staying at aunt Wendy’s place. The little powerpoint presentation I did on my parents as a species went over so well that I was invited to do it again the next night at the Lab of Ornithology’s board meeting, where my mother was also being congratulated on her retirement. The board is fortunate to have many luminaries, including Hank Paulson (the former treasury secretary), the former chair of BP, and heads of major foundations. So now to add to the list of odd things I have done recently I can add: conducting a presentation attended by a (former) US treasury secretary. He even laughed at my sex jokes.

We’re digging in now and will be home for the holidays. Zach’s mother Patty has baked about six different kinds of cookies and more are on the way, as well as my parents’ own Christmas bread. Between that, Winter Lager, and our homemade toffee, I hope we’ll put on enough padding to help us through the next several months of relentless cold and deep snow, which I hear will not start melting until April. What started as flirtation is about to turn into a committed relationship – the winter is going to stick, for a long time. At least the days will start getting longer soon! Look for the eclipse of the moon that is supposed to take place the evening of the solstice.

At Home in Lincoln

We’ve settled into Lincoln happily – so much that it will be hard to leave, when the time comes. Every morning now we walk Jonah down the driveway to wait for the school bus. The grass is still green, and looks like powdered mint in the morning frost. The trees are blazing red, orange, and yellow, scuttling their leaves across Sweet Road on the way to drop off Zora. Both kids have great teachers and are happy in school. I drive home to work as the sun starts filling the valley.

The weather changed suddenly. In early September we had to run the fans, and just two weeks later we were turning on the heater. The first week of Jonah’s new life as a kindergardener, he came home and jumped in the lake. Now the lake is too cold for swimming, but it’s still warm enough to fish from the canoe. The only kind of fish out there that seems to want Jonah’s worms are large toothy pickerill – the last one was 16”. They’re probably full of mercury, but what they hey, we fry them up in flour with curry powder and just try not to take Jonah fishing too often.

Earlier this summer, Jack and Pat sailed up to Canada in Alisande and we met them at Eastport, the easternmost town in the U.S. It was a beautiful old town, preserved through neglect and now full of artists. The mackerel were running in the harbor and kids just a little older than Jonah were pulling out lines with five or more fish hooked on at a time. Jonah befriended a boy who was more than happy to share his catch, so I cleaned the fish and we cooked and ate them on board. In town, I found a store that sold handmade things. I bought a box of “Needhams” candy and two dolls (one for Zora and one for her cousin Easnadh) that had been rescued from goodwill and outfitted with custom-knitted dresses. The cost of the dolls could never have covered the work that went into the knitting, so I imagine the artist as a saintly rescuer of abandoned lovies, someone who still gets misty-eyed when she hears “Puff the Magic Dragon.”

Time is valued differently here. Goods all cost the same – or more – as they did in the Bay Area, but anything that requires human time is much less. The best haircutter in town (who is actually quite good) charges $16 and is amazed if you pay her $20. Zora’s Montessori, also the most expensive in town and the sort of nurturing and politically correct place that would cost at least $1500 per month in the Bay, only charges $450. For now we are quite lucky to have been able to hang on to employment from outside the state, but I am sure that if we had to find jobs in Maine we would struggle. Many people work multiple jobs. It’s not uncommon to see a sign that reads something like: “Small Engine Repair and Fresh Baked Pies.”

People who find out we’re from California like to tease me that I’ll never make it through the winter. I’ve learned that the best retort is to tease them back that I know how they do it – it’s that Allen Coffee Brandy. Every drugstore and grocery store in Maine seems to have about a fifth of the liquor aisle dedicated to variously sized bottles of Allen Coffee Brandy (also known as “Fat Ass in a Glass”). I figure since we’re already living in a trailer, I might as well start working on a double-wide. But I haven’t bought any Allen’s yet. I can’t sleep at night if I drink caffeine after noon, so until I’m cold enough to start drinking at 10am, it’s no use to me. Instead, we are working on fermenting three gallons of apple cider that we squeezed with a borrowed cider press. The apples came from a local orchard that agreed to discount the “drops” we harvested from the ground. The kids enjoyed using the press and collecting fresh cider from its spout, but after grinding and pressing 8 bushels I felt like I never wanted to see another apple. Zach and Jonah had the slightly less arduous task of slicing apples for the dehydrator, with which they made yummy apple chips. And Zach’s mother made wonderful applesauce, enough to last until the next apple harvest.

We ate out of the garden all summer. It was neat to be here when everything came out of the ground and had to be processed. Zach’s mother made pickled “dilly” beans, pickled beets, relish, spiced grape jam from the concord grapes near the driveway, and we had several apple cakes and crisps from the crabby little apples in the front. On a trip to Machias we obtained a 10-pound box of blueberries for the freezer. Now we are just waiting for our cider to ferment and our 5 new Australorp pullets to start laying eggs. They are lovely black chickens, green and blue iridescent in the sun. I love to sit on the lawn with my coffee in the morning listening to them cluck.

Zach built the chicken house and run while he was waiting to hear about his job with Fat Spaniel. It was a good outlet for the anxiety, something concrete and productive to focus on. He had been working with Fat Spaniel for seven years, was one of the first employees, and we were heavily invested there – but as often happens with start-ups, it was bought by another company and our stocks never came to anything. It would have been devastating news to receive in the Bay, but here, in this timeless place, it’s just a failed harvest. The bad news was followed up by a great offer from another company down in Massachusetts. Zach is now the new Director of Measurement and Monitoring for American Capital Energy, a high-end company that carries out about 20% of the country’s major solar installations. They are willing to let him work in the office just 2 days a week for now (and 3 from home), which will let us keep the kids in school and gives us time to look for a place of our own in southern Maine.

I have just finished drafting two evaluation reports for the organization I contracted with in April. It was a great experience and they were happy enough with my work to ask me to evaluate the same two projects next year, this time on a prospective basis. I may also have a chance to help them re-design the database they use to gather data about their various initiatives. Exciting, fun, and challenging work with great people, and it will continue to give me the flexibility to work from some so I can be here when Jonah bursts into the house and wants to tell us about his day.

Jonah turned five this month. I planned a “Rock Party” for him and gave him an invitation to offer to a friend he’d met on the bus. She refused the invitation, so I thought the party idea was dead in the water and started planning a trip to Western Maine to tour a mine (something Jonah had been asking to do all year). The next week Jonah took out the invitation and offered it to someone in his class – everyone crowded around, saying they wanted to come too. At that point we were committed to invite the whole class. Zach and his family were apprehensive (the last party they threw, in Taos, ended up in tears) but it went off beautifully, particularly the mine shaft in the basement that led to a bucket of dirt filled with treasures. We had a good mix of cousins and classmates (not too many), and a tasty lemon cake with candy “rocks.” Jonah had a blast and parents wrote me afterwards to let me know what a nice time they’d had. Whew – one down. We were still committed to the mine tour I had reserved, so we did that last weekend. Jack and Pat came along and helped entertain Zora while Zach, Jonah and I went into the mines. Everyone got to dig in the tailings, where we found feldspar, mica, quartz, and even some rough-grade aquamarine and garnet. We had a beautiful drive home along route 2, which is sort of a Northern Route 66, running West to the Pacific coast and East right past Sweet Road where we currently abide.

After much transition we have found a new path forward. It’s nice to finally have some time to write. I am looking out the bedroom of our trailer at a broad green lawn, trees with gold and russet leaves, and a garden that is turning back into the earth. Standing in the corner of our room are four birch branches, the huppah poles from our wedding. They came off this property in ‘02, travelled all the way to Boonville, sat in the dark 5 years at our storage unit in Berkeley and now are just a few meters from where they grew.

Orienting North East

I’ve spent the past two weeks spinning a bit. Who are we now? What are our new priorities, and how do we fit them in to a pattern of living? At least that pattern – a daily and weekly routine - is now starting to take shape. Zach used to always leave before dawn; now he helps the kids get ready in the morning and even sometimes has a chance to read to or play with them before they head to school, while I am making their lunch and cleaning up from breakfast. Right now I am doing both the pick-up and drop-off since my schedule is more flexible. The kids get out at 4, and Zach has to work till 5, so I can spend the extra hour taking the kids to the lake or doing errands in town. On Thursdays I have the whole day with the kids. Jack is retired, so yesterday (our most recent Thursday) he took us on a hike up to the top of a hill that was covered in wild low-bush blueberries. The berries are small but intensely flavored, and when you tickle the leaves they fall right into your hand. The road to the blueberry stand is lined with raspberries and blackberries. We gathered as many as we could of all three, hoping for pie, but only amassed enough for generous toppings on ice cream.

We asked Jonah the other day whether he liked living on a boat or living in a house. He thought for a moment, then like a good politician framed his answer in terms of the question he thought we should have asked. “I like this place,” he told us. Then, “It’s different here.” He couldn’t specify what was different, exactly. Probably more things than he could list. I wondered if he is aware of the cultural differences; the relaxed, straightforward, old-fashioned sensibility of the townsfolk here. But both kids seem to be happy and responding well. Upon meeting his Montessori teacher for the first time, Jonah spontaneously and enthusiastically hugged her. This wasn’t even after they had spent time together – it was an immediate connection, and such an unusual response for him that I was completely surprised.

Zora has grown up quite a bit over the last 1 ½ months. She’s now running at full speed, talking up a storm, and asking questions that start with “why?” A recent exchange:

“Time to get dressed, Zora.”

“No!” She wails and bolts, then pauses, pointing at a picture of a monkey on the floor. “Monkey no clothes.” She looks up earnestly, trying to make sure I understand her point. “Why monkey no clothes?”

In Bangor, after shopping for a sofa, we ate at a restaurant that has a robotic talking moose over the bar. The kids loved it, but Zora was stumped. “Why moose talking?” she asked while the moose was telling us about the “avalanche of flavor” we were about to experience. Then, when the moose went into his 10-minute shut-down mode, she tugged on me again. “Why moose no talking?”

Zora seems to love the Montessori, where she has lots of new “babies” to play with (both plastic and real). Every time I pick her up she looks tired, happy, and her shoes are drenched from water play. For both kids, four full days a week, this costs less than half what we paid in the Bay. Jonah will get to enjoy the worm-digging, teepee-building and butterfly-hatching for one more month before he starts kindergarden. I went to enroll him at the town superintendent’s office yesterday, which is located on the ground floor of the Masonic Temple. I thought I was late signing him up (shopping around for kindergardens in Berkeley starts in January, and the lottery is in the spring), but they told me I was too early. I need to go directly to the school, just two weeks before school starts, and they’ll take care of it then. The receptionist at the office (Lisa) who explained this to me is the daughter-in-law of the hospital’s ultrasound technician, Karen. Karen is also the person who cleans the local hospital and Jack and Pat’s house – and who is scheduled to clean our trailer’s carpet *sometime* so we can start moving in. Lisa lives across the street from her mother-in-law, so I asked her to ask Karen when she plans to clean the carpet. It would be nice to know when she is coming, so we can either set aside the weekend to move in or take off and go sailing. I realize now this was pushy of me to ask, and in combination with the school sign-up, it became clear that I need to slow down to the pace of Maine. Karen will come when she can, and we should just plan to go sailing.

Arrival in Maine

We left Boston, last northern edifice of civilization and of jobs, heading towards our future home in a state that has been called both “Vacationland” and “a god-forsaken, fly-infested country” (Annie Proulx). The kids were asleep but we couldn’t help but let out a cheer as we crossed the border and saw the welcome sign, which reads: “Maine - The Way Life Should Be.” I felt an ache in my chest and suppressed an urge to cry, it had taken us so much to get here. Years of dreaming and planning and postponing, coming to visit and hating to leave, working on the boat so that it would sell, holding on with our teeth through the process of selling, then packing, cutting ties, driving so far. We had made it all this way, one step and one mile at a time. We wondered if this place would be kind to us. And we wondered if the luck that had brought us to this point was self-made, pure luck, or fate. You never can look far enough down the road to know for sure whether something can be called good or bad, but it does feel good, if even for a moment, to believe you can control your destiny by choosing your place on the map and getting there.

Arriving in the countryside of Northern Maine in summer is like being heralded with a blast of angel trumpets. Golden sun and swaying leafy green trees. Warm country roads lined with cicadas and singing birds. As we rolled up to the home of Zach’s parents, I opened the double doors in their wooden fence and we drove into the front yard. Jack and Pat walked out to meet us, quietly grinning, followed by Rachel, Aaron, Gryphon, and Nikita (the dog). We stood with the Nobels’ welcome party in the yard for a long time, hugging and talking. Then we went inside and gave everyone a taste of California - Madera figs and Humboldt Fog cheese – we had transported from Ithaca.

Whereas our two weeks Ithaca passed by in a flash, our first week in Maine was so long that by the end we felt like we had been here for at least a month. Sorting through the pile of bills forwarded from Berkeley, trying to figure out how to make the trailer liveable, trying to memorize the names of our new townsfolk, starting the kids in Montessori our 3^rd day after arrival. But we also began enjoying ourselves right away, running around in the huge green yard, eating out of the garden, swimming in the lake, pushing the kids in a swing in the barn, and enjoying Meme’s endless supply and variety of cookies. In the evenings, we share meals with Zach’s parents, and with Laura and Rachel’s families each weekend. The kids are off and running with their rediscovered cousins and the family is restructuring itself into one large, layered unit. This big house has expands to fit however many children come to play or sleep under its eaves. The barn has expanded to fit the uhaul truck full of boxes Zach ferried up from Portland on Friday. And Jack and Pat have made room for us in their lives, inviting us to stay as long as we need. Like their house, generous and expansive.

Up the road is a farm and horse ranch. I inquired there about lessons and began my first yesterday. It had been at least 17 years but the muscle memory was still there, if a little rusty. Jonah got a chance to do a short ride; if he expresses interest, I may give him a few more, though it will be a long time before he’ll be able to control the horse on his own. After work, Zach and Jonah went out in the canoe and returned with a 13” fish for dinner. This morning, with the kids in school, Zach and I went running. All in all, it’s every bit the healthier and more active country life we had imagined. When we breathe in, there’s no trace of smog. The water is plentiful and tastes wonderful. There’s no commute to work (for now). And with the grandparents around nightly and even more family on weekends, Rachel can slip away for a swim, I can slip out into the yard to fiddle under the trees, or Aaron can take some time for himself on the computer. Someone is always around to keep an eye on the kids.

Ithaca

My sister Katrina was born on the 4^th of July. I remember being 4 years old, watching our neighbors’ fireworks from the safety of my grandma’s lap, and thinking it perfectly natural that the whole country was celebrating her arrival. This year, Katrina arrived on the 6^th, so we saved most of the stockpile of explosives we had purchased from “Uncle Zack’s Fireworks” in West Virginia to blow up in her presence. First we lit glow worms, which spouted black snakes of ash. We escalated to snapping poppers on the ground, waved around sparklers, then went up to the driveway to light a succession of rockets and fountains. We had never bought fireworks before, so when the thing that was described as a spinning fountain took off into the air screaming and exploded, shooting arrows of sparks, we were all a little surprised. Finally we worked up our courage to set off a big ball over the pond. It was shockingly large and we all held our breath as its sparks cleared the trees. So there you go Katrina. A great big birthday candle.

The rest of the TNT crackers were used to shoot homemade tin can rockets up into the air. After several experiments the boys (my father, Zach, and Jonah, who all behaved about the same age with regards to this activity) got the can 20 feet above the top of the three-story house.

We stayed on the basement floor, which gave the kids a place to make messy projects and to nap. During the day Zach and I headed up to the top floor to work while my parents and Katrina generously entertained the kids. They walked in the forest, swam in the pond, searched for bullfrogs, and read books. Throughout the day, various animals made their appearances – songbirds, woodpeckers, chipmunks, deer, rabbits, and Mabel the turkey. At 5, when Zach and I were done working, we all went swimming in the pond together. Then my parents would pass out margaritas and serve something wonderful from the barbeque. Uncle Joel and Aunt Diane came to stay for a little while and we took the opportunity to have a little hootenanny, with Joel on the banjo and Jeff on dobro. When night came fireflies filled the ground and the sky, sometimes streaking like shooting starts. The stars were so clear, and the fireflies so many, it was sometimes hard to tell which was which.

On our last weekend we went wine-tasting. We hit our favorite spot and also some new ones, including a distillery that made the most aromatic gin and where we bought a small bottle of sour cherry liqueur. Since the kids couldn’t taste the wine they went “cracker tasting.” Jonah had a little scorecard where he described and rated the crackers at each winery. Lamoreaux, where we bought the most wine, scored lowest on crackers. But the place where they passed out popsicles was off the charts.

Two weeks in Ithaca flew by. On our last morning we met the three sweet sons of my sister’s boyfriend Pablo. They were staying the night, so we had to clear out of the basement, and in any case it was time for us to be moving on. We packed everything up quickly like expert gypsies, leaving only our footsteps, and sailed off in the red land yacht for Boston. Phyllis and Ken were doing real sailing in Maine, but they had left us the key to their gracious old brownstone. After a nice evening on the porch talking with Carmen and her boyfriend Greg, we joined the kids for sleep on the haunted 3^rd floor.

South to North - and car life

We woke to 14-foot-high ceilings in our four-poster at the Lafitte. The outside of the windows, which looked down on Bourbon Street, were drenched with condensation. I tried to take a photo of the street below from our balcony, but the moment I brought out the camera its lens frosted over. We ate biscuits and coffee on the balcony, listening to the sounds of the French Quarter struggling to rise from its nightly hangover. Finally, we noticed the floorboards of the balcony were rotting and falling apart below us, so we took the kids for a run in the penitent streets. We kept just barely ahead of the street-cleaning team’s pressure-wash hoses. Back at the river, we jumped on a trolley, which broke down after about 500 feet in a fenced corridor. The driver left us and went for help. After we and the other 2 moms + 5 kids aboard had had enough of sitting in the glass-walled steam bath, we made a break for it, ushering our little troupe of evacuees as quickly as we could over multiple tracks to the gravel shoulder. We emerged near the ferry building, deciding to ride the broad, flat ferry across the river & back. Suddenly Justin appeared. He had the wild, luminescent look of a writer who is entirely unslept and over-caffeinated. He was also unfed. “I find I can’t eat while I’m writing,” he told us, “it slows me down.” So while Zach and I ordered catfish Po’Boys, Justin nursed the remnants of a stained white mug and laughed with us. The rain was coming down in draperies over the streets, bouncing off lacy awnings and shooting out of gutter pipes. We took this as a sign it was time to head out, and since Justin was still under deadline, we had to set him free.

East along Hwy 10, we crossed swamps, rivers, and bayous and drove on a several-mile bridge over what felt like an ocean. Mississippi and Alabama looked every bit as tropical as Louisiana. It wasn’t until we turned north and headed up towards Georgia that foliage started to change, feeling itself on surer ground. Jonah felt a sudden urge to pee, and when we dove towards the nearest rest station we discovered it held a 15-foot-tall model of a lunar landing module. By chance, we had pulled over at a NASA rocket testing facility that gave tours. We would have loved to stay, but as was we were due to arrive in Atlanta long after dinner, we pressed on. All along our route, hurricaine Alex whipped us with his outer edge of lightening and rain. At times the rain was so thick we could not see where we were going. The raindrops smashing our windshield appeared to be as large as a hampsters. Somewhere along our route in Alabama, Zach felt a powerful desire for a soy mocha. We joked about putting in a request for such a thing at one of the facilities we were passing, such as the local Alabama Woodsmen’s Club. He had to settle for a Yoohoo at the gas station.

A little bit about car life: The Odyssey provided plenty of space for us all to stretch out, but of course the kids’ footwells were still crowded with all the items we had to have at hand – a bag of dry foods, a cooler of cold items, Jonah’s suitcase of toys, an additional bag of books & art supplies, pillows for naps, and a bag of DVDs. In the front was an assortment of cables and the things they plugged into: ipod, three phones, camera, DVD player, and an inverter. The kids did as well as could be hoped keeping busy on the marathon car rides. We stopped giving Zora pens after she decided that decorating her skin and car seat were more fun than using the paper she was provided. Both kids had small bags of rocks they had bought in Zion, and for some time they were entertained trading rocks (this mainly consisted of Jonah convincing Zora to give him all her nicely colored ones, while he passed back the brown ones). At times they consumed books (both figuratively & literally). Every time we entered a new state, we brought out the map on the book our friend Risa had given us and showed the kids where we were. The adult in the front passenger seat worked the hardest, because s/he had to tend almost constantly to the whimsical needs of the driver and the other passengers We learned that Jonah would go almost all afternoon without a nap if left to himself, but if we bribed him, he would fall asleep almost immediately and sleep for 3+ hours. Zora often had to wail a bit before she could settle into sleep, and she never slept quite as long. When awake, she would sometimes beg to unbuckled, then surrender to a pissed-off baby pout. When we had energy, we provided lots of tickling. The kids often played with each other because there was no one else, and it was fun to see the two of them inventing new games they could play together. Tug-of-war with a pillow was popular, and when I finally brought out the animal memory card game that Uncle Joel & Aunt Diane had given us months ago, Jonah passed the cards to Zora one at a time naming the animals to her. Zach and I both got fairly good at changing Zora’s poopy diaper on our laps while in motion. Sometimes it seemed to us that Zora pooped just so she could get out of her seat for awhile.

Atlanta had a lovely skyline, skyscrapers with minarets and features as interesting as any in downtown San Francisco. We reached the stunning home Kimmy and Ched had built in the suburbs (Suwanee) late at night. They were gracious hosts and stayed up to entertain us long after we arrived. The next day the kids re-met their cousins. Jonah and Dalton became fast buddies over descriptions of the various lethal features of Dalton’s toys. Zora and Calvin, who were born only a week apart, had a little more difficulty sharing the “baby” title. Calvin toddled after Zora, perplexed, while Zora grabbed his toys with a “No! Meeeee!” and tried to push him off his own slide. Outside, the kids enjoyed the trampoline and playground set, but the most fun they had was building a dam across the red dirt arroyo, filling it with water and mucking around inside. We hosed them down for lunch and a long nap. In the evening Kimmy made us a several-course meal and the grown-ups had several courses of beer as well. As the kids tossed in the heat of the 2^nd floor we sipped wine on the porch, talking and enjoying the presence of well-behaved insects – the pulse of cicadas and the sparkle of lightning bugs – without a single biting one.

Eight hours from Atlanta to Virginia, and we spent the night in the Holiday Inn Express (for the cinnamon rolls, why else?) in Harrisonburg. We were eager to get to Ithaca in time for a party at my parents’ house. We didn’t have time for much sight-seeing, but we did go out for dinner in the downtown and stumbled across a band with a fiddle playing in the town square. The next morning we drove through the Shenandoah valley and everything became much drier until we reached northern Pennsylvania’s mountainous region. We passed at least one mountain whose top had been removed and left as open soil. Otherwise the hills were green all the way from there to Ithaca, and we danced through them with Selena and Manu Chao. When we started seeing quite a number of beautiful old barns, we knew we were close. Zora woke just before we arrived ("Gamma house?") and became very excited, pointing and exclaiming in Spanish "Aka!Aka!".

We had finally arrived in Ithaca!! Rounds of hugs, exclamations from my parents over the large red minivan, Jonah wanting to strip off his clothes and run straight into the pond for a swim. We took a moment to breathe and then headed off to a party for the 50th birthday of the man who filled my father's position at the University of Ornithology when he retired last year. The party was in a beautiful old house with soft wood plank floors and a big lawn. We played croquet and badminton, enjoyed the "help yourself" bar, and Zora made friends feeding a big sandy lab who followed her devotedly the rest of the party. There was even a little music, with my father's former grad student Jeff on dobro, a couple of guitars, and my mother and I taking turns on her fiddle.

Spent the next day skinnydipping in the pond with all the kids' pool toys and sipping whisky (you have to drink plenty of whisky after you swim in the pond, just in case you swallowed any pond water). The stress of the drive is melting away already. Today is the 4th and we'll spend this evening visiting friends who have a summer home on Lake Cayuga, probably paddle around with the kids in kayaks and have some very good food and crisp white Finger Lakes Region wine.

Louisiana

Just past Lafayette, a small town called Breaux Bridge is where Zach’s Poppa Joe (now in his mid-nineties) went to work for a sugar company after he struck out on his own. We rolled in late to a B&B (Maison des Amis) next to the bridge. Crickets and cicadas pulsed in air so still and moist it could bear little oxygen. Jonah tried to enchant the local cat while Zora and I walked to a gazebo overlooking the bayou stream. I felt my soul opening to the climate, flooded by memories of places similarly steamy I had loved in childhood. We spent the night in a room appointed with plantation antiques and paintings of women whose faces took on a ghostlike cast in the light from the bridge.

The next day we walked down the street for breakfast at Chez Jacqueline, a cook who was opening her café just for us and the other couple from our B&B. We ordered a plate of baignets, crawfish etouffee, a spicy Cajun omelette, and pancakes (which were each nearly 1” thick and infused with almond). Jaccqueline cooked everything by herself quickly, entertaining us the whole time – a feat I have only seen French women pull off with such grace. When we showed interest in the swamp tours, Jacqueline called up a friend and made a reservation. Our roommates from the B&B decided to join us, so we all met up at Lake Martin and climbed aboard the flat-bottomed aluminum vessel of Norbert LeBlanc – an old Cajun who has spent his life hunting in the swamp and who has been featured in National Geographic and its French equivalent. Norbert scooted expertly through the cypress swamp under cascades of Spanish moss, only rarely striking his prop on a hidden log. We saw several birds and managed to spot one alligator all the way out of the water. The moment it saw us, it slipped into the swamp and cruised past our boat with only its eyes and nostrils showing . Next to a 600-year-old cypress stump Norbert brought out a bottle of homemade moonshine made from corn and peaches and aged 3 years in oak. With the crew pacified by its daily ration, Norbert puttered us back to shore, filled with knowledge about hunting gators, ducks, crawfish, birds (“if it’s good to eat, it’s illegal to shoot”), and just about anything else one might want to eat from a swamp.

We took the long way to New Orleans, on back roads around hwy 90 that led past old sugar plantations. There seemed to be a great number of new homes – Norbert had told us that people keep trying to build in the swamp, then get surprised when their homes are flooded. We crossed the Mississippi and reached New Orleans in heavy rain, which felt poignant as we drove past the superdome. Cousin Justin’s “drifter pad” is in the Treme district, famous for Jazz and home to the nation’s oldest African-American church. We had hoped to stay at Justin’s overnight, but it was fairly hazardous even for us (sheet metal and pieces of plaster everywhere, an open spiral staircase for the kids to fall down). Just three blocks away was the French Quarter. We walked into the Lafitte Guest House (http://www.lafitteguesthouse.com/), and because it was the off-season in the middle of the week they offered us a discount. Tennessee Williams wrote “A Streetcar Named Desire” in the brought the kid attic of that building.

After a very nice (but very very slow) dinner by the river, we put the kids to bed in our hotel room. Justin brought his computer & coffee and set to work on his new article for the Audubon on birds & the oil spill while the kids fell asleep – then we proceeded to enjoy the nicest date we’ve had in years, sashaying hand-in-hand down Bourbon Street.

Taos through Texas

No wonder Zach's parents moved to Taos. And no wonder they had to leave, eventually, "chewed up and spit out" as Zach put it.

It is an enchanted place. Everything seems to carry meaning. From the ancient adobe walls to the sagebrush burning on the hills, the place is a spiritual powerhouse. For that very reason, it seems to attract spiritually restless people. So many seekers, with not enough answers to go around. At least there is lots of chile. Each meal, you have to decide between red and green. This creates something of an existential crisis. I started out with the green, but by the time we left I was regularly choosing red.

We stayed in the Historic Taos Inn, whose former owner was a doctor ("Doc Martin" - like the shoes) who impressed the community with his willingness to help anyone in need. He accepted chickens and art for payment, and this seems to be what Taosians came to expect of their doctors, because a hundred years later Zach's parents routinely received the same compensation for their surgical and pediatric services. In any case, the Taos Inn is in the center of town and still a center of Taos nightlife. Our room happened to be right above the stage.

We stayed three nights, 2 1/2 days. The first morning we went to see Alyce Frank, a gifted artist who is a best friend of Zach's mother and a famous artist - one of her paintings has appeared on a Norton Anthology of Poetry. She raised her children in a morada next to a graveyard, where penitentes used to flagellate themselves (sometimes fatally, hence the convenient location). They own so many Santos de Cristos that they had to loan 250 of them to a museum. We visited her studio, and on the easels were resting some strikingly beautiful paintings (Alyce thinks they may be her best ever). While I was doing all I could to keep the kids from smearing the paint, I asked Alyce about her inspiration - Van Gogh - and pointed out that the way she always paints her canvas red before she covers it with an image echoes the blood theme evident in her choice of setting (morada, santos, sangre de cristo mountains behind her etc.). It seemed like an obvious comment, but Alyce didn't seem to see it as so.

We drove up Taos mountain to the ski resort, stopped for lunch at a hippie cafe where we had to wait for them to pick our salad from their garden, then headed down to the Rio Grande where we let the kids splash in a tributary from Taos mountain.

The next day we hiked around the back side of Zach's childhood home, which was the highest on the mountain. In addition to several abandoned modern items, we found two plant fossils, a finely chipped arrowhead, a piece of petrified wood and a bullet casing. Zora stumbled over a cactus and got poked superficially in the tummy. That night we visited a wonderful gemstone/rock store that Zach had visited as a child and which dramatically expanded Jonah's rock-hunting horizons. We ate sopapillas at a restaurant filled with locals. On our last day we visited the Taos Pueblo, one of the oldest continuously inhabited pueblos in the country. Native Americans at the Pueblo still grow up speaking Tiwa as their primary language, and it was striking to see modern trucks parked amongst the pueblo walls. Most moving was the church and graveyard, carpeted in crosses. Resisting Spanish colonization, the natives initially destroyed the first church, only to be converted to Christianity later in the century. When they sympathized with the Spanish in the Spanish-American war, the women and children of the village retreated to the church (thinking it a sanctuary) and were slaughtered by American forces. As the tour guide told us this, I wondered what it would be like to live just feet away from such a powerful testament to human violence.

We had one last meal at the "Chow Cart". The rodeo had just arrived in town and I would have loved to see teenagers trying to catch a greased pig, but the road was calling and we had to get moving. Winding down the Rio Grande, we headed south through Espanola, past Santa Fe, through Roswell and down to the oil town of Artesia in southern New Mexico. It felt like we were already in Texas. Oil money had dressed up the two blocks that comprised downtown with statues of town luminaries herding longhorns. A prominent restaurant ("The Wellhead") had a sign that read: "Earth First! We'll drill the rest later." We left in the morning and headed on to Carlsbad Caverns. Somewhere on the way down I realized our family was on a Rock Tour. Mostly all we had done at this point was to look at rocks - big monumental ones in Utah, sparkly ones in New Mexico, and now underground ones.

Carlsbad caverns was truly spectacular. A huge cave with a 3-mile path winding amongst a garden of unusual calcite formations. After descending down the glass elevator through 300 feet of rock, we saw stalactites, stalagmites, columns, popcorn, cave pearls, draperies, bottomless pits and cave pools. Our inner Fraggles rejoiced in the cool, magical underground world. As we left, lightening was striking nearby and the caverns closed everything but the elevator entrance to the caves.

With the kids crashed out from their underground hike, we headed deep into the heart of Texas and straight into the storm. The land was dry, flat, and the eerie kind of empty that comes from the abandonment of an industry (oil) that came and went in a hollow flash of wealth. We made it as far as Sonora, where the kids enjoyed Texas-shaped waffles, then bolted east. We drove through the green hill country of Texas (supposedly one of the state's main draws). Instead of adobe, the old homes in the hill country were built with stone packed in between beams. Somewhere near Fredericksburg a lone man was carrying a heavy wooden cross down the road on his shoulder. We stopped at a stand to buy peaches and skirted south of Austin to Lockhart's Kreuz Market, which is rumored to have the best BBQ in Texas ("no forks, no sauce") and we weren't disappointed. With Texas-sized bellies we blew through Dallas and on to Louisiana, watching the trees grow greener, leafier, and closer together. When we crossed the border, we celebrated with music and cheering. The desert and the plains were finally behind us.

Vegas to Taos

The morning we awoke in Vegas we rose as early as we could manage. We were anxious to get to Zion and hike there with the kids before it became roasting hot. But it was ridiculous to go to such a lovely place without a camera, so we stopped at a town next to St. George to acquire one. One hour later, we were finally on the road again. In Mormon country the soil was redder and the rock formations were much more dramatic. It was already noon, but no matter, we shlepped the exhausted kids into the shuttle that took us into the canyon and hiked in the midday heat up to the first of three emerald pools. There, an arc of rock sprinkled mist and droplets of water onto our foreheads. The water seemed to fall from a hidden source, and some streams were dripping right out of the rock. Zach wanted to finish the 2-mile loop uphill, so I headed back with Zora on my shoulders and motivated Jonah through promises of ice cream and competitive encouragement (to beat daddy back to the visitors center). The hardest part, though, was standing in the ice cream line for a half-hour with two exhausted and overheated kids. Zora started wailing towards the end. People stopped to ask her, “what’s wrong, baby?” “Long line,” I replied, and they sighed, but no one thought to help us buy a cone so we could exit the line and spare their nerves.

The kids revived with ice cream, made it back to the Odyssey and then fell asleep for several hours while we raced to the north rim of the Grand Canyon, arriving just in time for the sunset at Bright Angel point. A stone path led to an outcropping of rock just a few feet in diameter that seemed to hang suspended over the deepest part of the canyon. Even I – who love heights – gasped and had to stand back after looking down. When most of the canyon was filled with shadow, we headed back through the lush national forest through which we had come. Apparently someone with a ranch on that land had once tried to cross a heifer with a buffalo, and the progeny now roam free. We didn’t see any but Jonah and I had fun thinking up names for the unlikely bovines – from “beefalow” to “cow-a-low” – and settled on “buffamoo”. Camping grounds were all filled up, and motels were closed for the night, so we pressed on across the Colorado River.

We spent the night at Page AZ, a town that rises from the red dust at the point where humans built a dam on the Colorado river and created the 150-foot-deep Lake Powell. The next morning we stopped by the dam (impressive as a work of man, but a wimpy counter to the work of nature we had seen the prior day) and started on the long, dry backroad to Taos. We stopped at a Shonto reservation, then passed through the lands of the Navajo nation. Shiprock rose out of the desert, the hard blackened core of an old cindercone volcano. After seeing several dust devils in the distance, we ran into one up close. The devil hit us upside with a puff of air and a swish of grit, pushing us off course. We passed by a town at the “entrance to Monument valley” that may have been the inspiration for Radiator Springs (“the entrance to Ornament valley”) in the movie Cars. In Farmington we filled our tanks and I was surprised to see fields growing in the rocky desert dust. As we neared Chama, the desert turned into pine-covered hills and clouds gathered overhead. We were in horse country now, with grass and pines in the hills and sagebrush in the flats.

We passed Tres Piedras and plunged down into the foothills below Taos mountain. Immediately, it felt as if we had entered a very different sort of place. Pinnacles of "earthships" rose from the ground - houses built into the earth by dreamers with visions of a funky future. A collection of "affordable homesites" peppered the naturally radioactive ground with old buses and shanties. These families, it seemed, had started with a vehicle of one type or another and then built outwards, adding rooms as needed. In some cases brambles had grown up around the collection to tie it all together. By the time we reached Taos we were seeing mostly "standard" housing, which in Taos means lovely round-edged adobe houses with protruding vigas (round wooden roof support beams). We searched for a hotel in town, and with few choices still available decided to stay a night at the Historic Taos Inn. The kids had slept so long in the car that it was easy to explore the town's old Spanish plaza long after sunset flamed the Sangre de Cristo mountains and the 7000-foot-high desert air surrendered the day's heat without a hint of protest.

Berkeley to LA to Vegas

The drive to Las Angeles was quick and blessedly uneventful. We spent two evenings (and the father’s day between them) with our good friends the Budners. Jonah and Jacob had fun running around with guns they fashioned from the peaceful pieces of a marble run, and spewing age-appropriate invictives from their little potty mouths. We hiked in the San Gabriel mountains and spent the afternoon at a pool, sharing dinner at “La Casa de Salsa.” The next morning we re-packed the stuff we had thrown in the car and shipped off two boxes of clothes and other things we hadn’t really intended to bring. We also discovered that in the rush to load the cubes we had shipped away our only camera. So, no photos from this stretch of road.

Monday morning I had a conference call for my contract work, then we started on the old route 66 that runs down Foothill Blvd and headed towards Las Vegas. We didn’t really intend to stop there…but the more I read about it in the guidebook, the more I wanted to go. We booked a cheap room at the Tropicana, which had coconut-scented hallways with peeling teal-and-coral carpet. Then we dressed up (we all looked hot) and headed out to see the strip. MGM was right across from Tropicana, so what the hey, we went looking for the notorious tigers and wound up at the Rainforest Café. Fake rain was sprinkling from the ceiling and every ten minutes there was a thunderstorm that would cause the robotic animals around us to roar, flap and shake. Jonah kept asking me whether things were real or not, because I had already told him that almost everything in Las Vegas was fake, and he had just encountered Astroturf for the first time on a sidewalk in Las Angeles that morning.

Packing

We had only two days (plus a few stolen hours) to pack up all our belongings from the boat and storage and pack them into 2 cubical shipping containers. They were supposed to haul the containers away at the end of the day, but when we arrived at 2pm with a van-full of boxes, the truck was there with both cubes loaded - ready to drive off to Maine. What would we have done if we had been just a little earlier, or a little later? We flagged the truck and convinced him to unload the cubes, begging him to return as late as possible that evening. Thank goodness Shi – to whom we had promised the blue biodiesel Passat – showed up to help us ferry the remainder. At 4pm Zach was frantically packing the rest of our kitchen and I was frantically packing Zach’s suitcase. At 4:20 a call came in that Jonah was running a fever and had to be picked up. At 4:45, giving up on folding the rest of the clean laundry, I did a quick sort and piled it into our suitcases and ran off to get the kids, hoping that through some miracle things would come together. For the most part, they did, just barely – Shi and Zach managed to get most of our stuff off the boat, then at 5:45 (after I had dropped the kids with a very understanding friend) Shi and I ran back to get the very last load, screaming into the parking lot after the truck had loaded one cube and was just about to take the other. We gave the driver a big tip, threw in the seashell fountain from the tiki bar and then the guitar on top of it , then bolted the cube shut and hoped for the best: See you in Maine, broken or not. Survival of the fittest.

We spent a sleepless night at our friend’s house. Zach left at 3am with Zora (the cause of the sleeplessness) to move the rest of the stuff from the boat into our car. When they returned, I went to clean up. I had hoped to present the boat to the new owners in sparkling condition, but when they showed up an hour into my cleaning spree with buckets and mops and told me with a smile, “You’re done,” it was clear I had to surrender the ship. With triumphal classical music blasting from the speakers, we sailed out of Berkeley, waving goodbye to the encroaching summer fog and each landmark we passed until we were out of range of the familiar and could only look ahead.