Cheese and Crackers at the End of Time

My husband and I didn’t take a vacation this year. It seems like a million years ago that I was planning to go to London in April to see our daughter. Later there was a plan to visit our son and his girlfriend in San Francisco. Maybe we’d drive along the coast and visit wineries. I wanted to see the redwood forest. 

But all of that got scrapped and we've been stuck at home, my husband basically living/working in our dining room for five months, sometimes twelve-hour days, where I tiptoe around him and into the kitchen because he’s always on work calls. 

We needed to get out of town for a few days. Even if only for a change of scenery. 

Only an hour away from Columbus is a hiking area called Hocking Hills and we found a cabin nearby, overlooking a pond. The best part: no internet access. No cell phone service. Just four days of quiet. My husband wanted to fish. I wanted to read books. One day we took a five-mile hike that almost killed us. The next day he fished and I read a book.  

Also, I’d packed cheese and crackers. The book I was reading was about the end of time and it felt like the end of time. Feels like the end of time. The man who wrote the book lives in the desert and watches the same news I do and is quietly freaked out about it. Climate change. Political corruption. Violence. (and he didn’t even get to part about the Virus yet.) This cannot end well, is the general feeling he has, that I have. So anyway, the two of us on are on the same page. 

But what are we supposed to do about it, is the question. 

What’s interesting about the essays in the book is how many times throughout history humans have been faced with the same catastrophe. Pretty much all of the time, apparently. Civilization collapse is the norm, not the exception. Going all the way back to the beginning. Whole entire cultures wiped out. And barely any record left of them. Worse, the “winners” rewrite the conquered people out of the picture, so if there is any record left of them, it’s a skewed version. 

Something else interesting: people try to leave their mark anyway. Pictographs on canyon walls in the desert. Manuscripts smuggled out of war-torn cities. 

This is a book about myths and languages and history and "western civilization" and religion. Also, it's about writing. Why writers bother when we may not have anyone to read what we write. If nothing else, it seems, we like to tell ourselves stories. 

My husband caught one fish and when I tried to take a picture of it, it slipped off his hook. It was five inches long. He says it was more like eight. Maybe we are both right. We ate our fancy crackers and cheese on the porch overlooking the pond and the woods. He went back down to try to catch more fish. I finished my book about the end of time. 

Later we spread a blanket out on the dock so we could watch the stars. At first we couldn't see any. The sky was pink. And then it was gray. And then suddenly, like it a switch, it went black. The stars came out one by one and somehow all together, until the whole sky, it seemed was filled with them. 

The River Wild

I didn't sign up for this

but my more adventurous friend, who is acting as the cruise director for our vacation, found the Level Three Whitewater Rafting Trip through an Urban Setting online, and cut to:

I am sweating it out on the shore of the James River in Richmond Virginia on a 100 degree day, listening to the river guide explain rowing directions as if my life depends on it. My life does, apparently, depend on it, because there's so much How-to-stay-in-the-boat and What-to-do-if-you-fly-out-of-the-boat directions, coupled with "Let's sign a waiver in case of Permanent Paralysis and/or Death" that even my adventurous friend is starting to get nervous.

But we all climb into the raft-- my husband (who has been whitewater rafting before and has fallen out of the boat and survived) my friend and her husband-- and our guide, twenty year old Kate, who I am skeptical about at first, but by the time this ride is over I will be singing her praises.

Kate is all business, shouting out when we should row forward and back, pointing out points of interest along the way. An old bridge that collapsed in a hurricane, the Hollywood cemetery on the hill where 18,000 confederate soldiers are buried, the Richmond skyline, the various rapids that we'll be rafting through.

The river is low and we immediately get stuck on a rock. Bounce up and down, Kate tells us, and we do, but it doesn't help in the slightest. Kate hops into the water, heaves us off the rock and then hops back in. She does that several times while the four of us bounce middle-aged-ly.

Do you ever feel like you're a sherpa? I ask her. You know, like one of those guides on Mount Everest who's paid to get people who should not be climbing Mount Everest up to the peak?

Kate just laughs, but I notice that she does not answer the question.

We slide and turn and bounce through rapids. We stop and eat trail mix on an island and talk about our bucket lists. Side note: whitewater rafting was not on my bucket list.

But I have to admit that I am enjoying this excursion until we get to the end and Kate asks us if we want to go back to the last section of churning water we'd just successfully made it through and do it again. There's this thing called surfing, which I still don't quite understand, where you row directly into the churning water until the front of your raft gets sucked down and then it's supposed to pop back up. My adventurous friend says no

and climbs out of the raft. Weirdly, I stay in. My husband and my friend's husband, with Kate's direction, row toward the churning water. The front of the boat gets sucked in. The two guys immediately flop out and the raft tilts straight up. It's a strange long moment watching them disappear into the foam, waiting for my turn to tumble out,

but I don't. As soon as the guys hit the water, the raft snaps back up and there's a few tense moments of looking for their heads in the spray and then a few more tense moments as my friend's husband swims to shore, but my husband loses his paddle and has to ride the next bit of rapids on his back. He makes it to the raft and Kate tells him that she's going to pull him in and I think, there's no way in hell this one hundred pound, twenty year old girl is going to be able to pull my husband onto the raft, but Boom,

she hauls him up.

We eat popsicles on the bus on the way back to our car. The next day we hike around the Hollywood cemetery and watch the white water from the shore. Would I do it again?

Nope. Am I glad I did it?

Absolutely.

Guest post from my husband writing as me...

Psst: I haven't been honest about being back to work.

My darling husband took me to North Carolina to visit my friend Deb. She turned 50. (insert funny SNL skit with Danny DeVito and Molly Shannon here)

We had an amazing dinner at SoCo, a farm to table, husband and wife owned restaurant and B&B owned by Jeremy and Kimberly (we love them now). Watermelon was cooked for hours until it had the texture of raw tuna. This is a thing!

We drove by a new whirligig park dedicated to Vollis Simpson. Across from it was a huge antique store. I use the word antique loosely. Hats off to Wilson, North Carolina.

Next destination was Boone, home of App State and Yoseph the mountaineer. We also yumped into a LOT of hiking (see what I did there). Hubby was up to 3 shirts and 2 showers a day.

The view on top of this mountain was supposed to be great.

The last day we did some tasting at two wineries, Grandfather Winery and Banner Elk. We met Jensen, a sustainability major at App State, who was our awesome server. We tried to fix him up with Deb's daughter, because, you know, wine.

The end.

Back to Work

After all of the gallivanting around Prague and Venice, strolling over bridges and listening to music and peeking into ancient churches (the icons and the china Jesus babies and the Black Madonnas and the jawbones of saints and the bearded women statues),

after the cemeteries with the tilted headstones and the fallen over flowers, the gondola rides and the wandering in alleyways, the preoccupation with pavement stones, and the stunning artwork in the museums,

after the meals eaten in outdoor cafes, the slabs of pork and dense bread, the pasta, the daily tasting of gelato, the obsession with Trdlos, the wine, the beer (the first glass ever. And the second. And the third),

after the jet lag and unpacking,

after the out of town guests and the return to daily chores (the weeding of the overgrown garden, the picking of vegetables) and the laundry,

after the much longed for and anticipated visit with the young adult children (and a significant other), and the celebration of the 4th of July in that over-the-top way it is celebrated in our town (the parade route staked out with chairs weeks in advance, the star painted streets, the high school marching band warming up by drumming drumming drumming so that we all wonder if we have fallen into the Jumanji set, and the early morning wake up with the bullhorn, the parade and the all day long cookout leading up to the fireworks),

after the kiddos have taken off again, leaving behind the quiet empty nest (oh! I should be used to this by now but somehow it still pierces me, that stillness as I slip past their dark empty bedrooms),

after the chores are done and the garden's producing and the dog's been walked and walked and walked, and there is no more travel on the horizon, no impending house guests, and so nothing more to do, really,

that is when I know it is time,

at last,

to go back to work.

Books on Vacation

All of my vacations are twined up with books. Plane rides with paperbacks splayed open on the seatback tray. Car trips with audio books.

Years later I can call up memories of the trips-- the sightseeing, the restaurants, the company-- scenes of the novels twirling around the edges. Rebecca at a motel pool. A Sarah Dessen novel on the flight home from Barcelona. A novel about the end of the world on a college search trip.

My honeymoon I picked up a copy of A Prayer for Owen Meany in the airport bookstore. I read the book on the plane and at stray moments at the beach. I remember the crazy heat of the Mayan ruins, the lobster cruise with hokey pirates, the surreal thought over and over that I was married, that this guy strolling along beside me through the outdoor markets haggling over a Mexican blanket was now my husband... and Owen Meany with his strange high voice. A freak accident at a baseball game.

I read Grapes of Wrath on a beach in Destin. My toddler son played in the sand at my feet and I sipped coke under an umbrella, worried about my son getting a sunburn, worried about the Joads starving to death during the Dust Bowl.

A Cape Cod trip when the kids were in elementary school. A weathered house on a rocky windy beach. Fried clams and bike rides and my daughter getting her ears pierced in Provincetown. The whole time I was sneak-reading The Witching Hour. The breathless prose. The evil lurking around plantations. I was having a hard time putting the damn book down. I started entertaining the kids with the g-rated sections of the story and they begged me to read more, shushing each other to be quiet so I could find out what happened next.

A 20-hour car trip with my husband going back to my hometown for a visit, listening to Flowers in the Attic, claustrophobic in the car, trapped in an attic with incestuous siblings, stopping for pizza in the boonies of Pennsylvania, feeling anxious about poisoned powdered donuts.

Flight Behavior on my California book tour.

Beach Music on a boat ride, water splashing the pages.

A car trip with my mother, cracking up over Will Grayson Will Grayson.  

Fangirl on a trip to Florida, my husband blinking tears, our daughter in the backseat, not listening, and then listening, asking us to play the first chapters again so she could hear what she missed.

Station Eleven two days ago on a flight to San Francisco and back. What might have been our last vacation as a family. Grown son working at Facebook. Daughter three weeks away from going off to college. A twenty-fifth anniversary trip for my husband and me.

We walk up and down the steepest hills I've ever seen. Spy sea lions and Mark Zuckerberg. Eat enormous burritos. A street poet types out a poem for our daughter. We snap pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge and search for elusive public restrooms.

Stuck on East Coast time, I wake earlier than everyone else. Drink my crappy hotel coffee in the dim light. Read my book. Fold over pages and read passages like this one:

"She was thinking about the way she'd always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place."

In Which I Take a Much Needed Vacation and Remember I have a Tattoo

Last week I took a vacation with my family. We drove sixteen hours in one day to get to Port Charlotte, Florida, where my aunt lives in a lovely condo.

I guess I should mention that I have a hard time taking breaks, especially when I am in the middle of a writing project. The story I am writing now is intense and dark and sad and jabbing me in places I don't want to go, but recently I had reached some kind of understanding of It and myself, and I was sort of afraid to be away from it for a week. Through much floundering and angsting and cleaning out closets (both literally and metaphorically) I had stumbled onto a routine that seemed to be working.

Every morning I'd get up, change into my work uniform, suck down the first of many cups of coffee, settle in at my work place, and push my way into my dark story world. If I didn't have the dog freaking out about the secretly psychotic serial killer mailman every day, I might never come out of that world.

[*My work uniform used to be a bathrobe over pajamas, but during the course of writing this book, I have discovered this new kind of pajamas called Yoga Pants. Yoga Pants are awesome because while they are as comfortable as pajamas, they are more socially acceptable -- so when you open the door at 5pm for the UPS guy, with your dog jumping around you having a mini heart attack, you don't feel like a total pajama-wearing sloth.]

It's possible that I am a workaholic.

The schedule for writing this book-- as I have been writing it since the middle of January -- has been: Write all day, with a few brief breaks to eat, walk the dog, pick up my daughter from school, wolf down dinner (that my husband has been graciously preparing), and then go back In until like 9:00 or 9:30 until my brain is fried and my eyes are burning.

I do this on weekends too.

But I decided I might need to take a break. If only to prove to myself and my long-suffering family that I could

1. not write for a week
2. wear something besides yoga pants

Okay. I cheated a little, writing in the mornings while everyone was sleeping, but otherwise, I am happy to say that I enjoyed the vacation.

I've been finishing up The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. One of the hardest exercises for me is what the author calls Artist Dates. What you're supposed to do is take an hour or two each week, just for yourself, to pamper your inner child artist. This sounds ridiculous and new age-y to me even as I write it. It's the one task that I am most eager to skip each week and it is the one thing that I probably need most of all.

It's hard to write a book--at least my crazy way of doing it. At the end of the day I am wrung out. Depleted. Empty.

I have to fill myself back up occasionally. With a trip to a museum. Or a movie. With a walk around the block. Or a walk on the beach.

One day last week I was kicked out in my beach chair, digging my toes in the sand and I was looking at the tattoo of a foot on my foot. I'd sort of forgotten that it was there. It's been covered up all winter under my socks and my yoga pants.

It made me smile to see it.

Getting a tattoo is one of the crazier things I've done in my life. Crazy because it was so unexpected and not like me. And yet I did it, and now I have this symbol of spontaneity and fun and weirdness tattooed on my ankle. Forever.

Huh. Turns out I still have a tattoo.

It makes me want to do other unexpected fun things.

Paint my toenails orange because orange is a color I would never paint my toenails.

Dig a hole in the sand even though I am old and don't have a little kid parked next to me.

A beach hole. 

Eat food without gulping it.

Have conversations without my mind drifting over character arcs.

Sit at a pool and flip through a magazine.

Spend an entire afternoon sipping pina coladas with my husband.

Take a break once in a while and remember that I am a person.

Fun Times on a Dead Author Vacation

So last week was our daughter's spring break and while many of her friends were cavorting around the sunny beaches of Florida, she was cavorting around museums or traipsing through cemeteries helping us search for dead author tombstones. Yes, this is what passes as a fun family vacation when your mom is a former high school English teacher. Luckily, her father shares my passion for all things American literature/history. He's also a big go-go touristy guy who thinks that lazing about on a beach is a waste of a week when you could spend it instead hitting three cities (Philadelphia, New York, and Boston) and poking around every suggested site in the accompanying guidebooks.

For the most part our daughter was a good sport, trailing after us, her gooby parents, with only a few minor complaints. Snippets from some of our conversations:

Me: Hey! Look! Emerson's grave!
Her: wow.

Dad: Did you see that? It's the white dress Emily Dickinson wore!
Her: Yeah. Cool.

Me: You wanna walk around this pond and find the site of Thoreau's cabin?
Her: Um, not really.
Dad: Come on! It's only a half mile walk! Let's race!
Her: No. Really. I'm fine.

We wore the poor kid out, walking the heck out of the old section of Philadelphia, tromping through most of lower Manhattan, and following the Freedom Trail in Boston. We also explored Amherst, Mass, (home of my beloved Emily Dickinson), Concord (Thoreau! Emerson! Hawthorne! Alcott!), and Salem (a shout out here to our amazing tour guide, Susan, of the Hocus Pocus Night-time Witch Tour. While I'm at it, I should give another shout out to Seamus, our guide on a horse and carriage ride through Central Park. And his horse Marcello. And to Lucy, the ultra cool docent at the Emily Dickinson House.)

Here are some of the fascinating facts those unfortunate beach-going friends missed:

The Declaration of Independence was NOT actually signed by all those signers on July 4, 1776.

Ben Franklin's privy was located only a FEW FEET away from his water supply.

Emily Dickinson dashed off many of her poems in letters to friends and often scratched off words and wrote in alternate word choices. Meaning, these poems weren't as "dashed off" as some people believe...

She had a brother named Austin, who lived next door and sort of looks like a brooding rock star in pictures.

There is a photograph of her that has recently been discovered and is in the process of being verified.

That's probably her, in her late 20's, on the left

Nathaniel Hawthorne was so ashamed of his family's connection to the Salem Witch Trials (an ancestor, John Hathorne, one of the judges) that he added a "w" to his name.

Thoreau's grave is just a small marker that says simply "Henry." Many visitors to the cemetery where he is buried have placed stones, coins, pencils, and pine cones around the grave marker.

You can visit the site of his cabin and leave a stone (or rock) there too. And after, you can stop by the Thoreau Gift Shop and buy a T-shirt or a coffee mug that says: Simplify, Simplify on it. (For those in the know, the actual quote is Simplify, Simplify, Simplify, but apparently that didn't look as simplified to the T-shirt creators.)

The woman who wrote The Five Little Peppers (Margaret Sidney) and the author of Little Women (Louisa May Alcott) are buried right around the bend from Thoreau. Emerson is across the path. Meville is NOT buried in this cemetery, but some guy named Melvin is--which we discovered after circling around for an hour and getting briefly lost).

If you hike the Freedom Trail in Boston, you'll see the Old North Church, Paul Revere's house, the site of the first public school in America, and a cemetery where the British used tombstones for target practice.

Also, there are several Starbucks.

And an Urban Outfitters.

Beat that, beach-goers.

The teen as a four year old, ticked off in Paul Revere's garden, during a previous, fun, literary-themed vacation.