Surviving Winter's Worst

I grew up in a subdivision outside a small town in east central Illinois.  It was far enough outside of civilization to feel fairly isolated when winter’s nasty weather reared its ugly head.  It seemed to snow a lot more in the 70s and 80s than it does now, and I remember my mom taking photographs of 10 and 15-foot drifts lining the country road leading to the smaller road I lived on.  The wind from the west was unstoppable, and it seemed strange that snow fences lined the north-south road to break the drifting force and create mountains of the white stuff right on the road.  (It would not have been my strategy for preserving the precious topsoil, but I had little say in the matter.)  Schools closed often in winter during these years, and if the plow didn’t come through, or only came through on the main road, there was no way for us at our little dead-end to get out.  Often we were stranded there for two or three days at a time.

My parents were children of the Great Depression, and had always kept a garden; even when they both had full-time jobs, they canned and froze vast quantities of food during the growing season.  My mother planned a sizable pantry when we built our house, and it was always full of home-canned and store-bought dry goods.  We also had a large refrigerator with freezer, and a separate chest freezer sitting next to it.  We had a gas stove that could still be lit if the power went out, and a fireplace with a large supply of cut wood ready at all times.  We always had thermoses of fresh water filled and at the ready.  My mother could have prepared a feast for 20 with her four-burner stove and her garden preserves.  We were survivalists.

According to State of Illinois records: “The Midwest, including Illinois, experienced in 1977-1978 its most severe winter since weather records began in the early Nineteenth Century. Illinois had a record-breaking number of 18 severe winter storms; 4 such storms is normal. The record winter began with 3 snowstorms in late November and ended with an extremely damaging ice storm in late March. Unusual snow patterns occurred with several storms and they lasted much longer than usual.”  Yep. Easter Sunday 1978, there was an ice storm to beat all.  During the night we listened to the orchestra of the crash and bang of tree branches freezing, breaking and toppling with the weight of the ice.  Sunday morning we awoke to a world encased in ice—incredibly beautiful, but crippling.  Our driveway, the road, everything was covered in a two-inch-thick layer of perfectly clear ice, at times brilliantly reflecting and magnifying the timid spring sun.  The power had gone out in the middle of the night, and would not come back on for a week.  We had a well, so when the power was out, the pump didn’t work.  That meant hauling water up from the river at the edge of our property to flush the toilets.  

But we had food!  My mother and father rolled the chest freezer out onto the porch to keep the food cold, and we did our best to cook and consume the fresh food in the refrigerator before delving into the canned goods.  Fortunately, my mother had prepared a good deal of Easter dinner beforehand, so she heated things on the stove, and we ate like kings.  We closed off the living room by hanging tarps, and hauled in pillows, blankets, and all our favorite books, some board games, and a couple of decks of cards.  We played music on the piano.  We sang, we listened to the transistor radio.  To my 11-year-old self it was magical—camping in your own house!  Having a gas stove meant that we could still pop popcorn, make toast with a piece of bread stuck onto a fork, make chili, make spaghetti; even better, we could drink orange soda at every meal, since we were reserving water, and we ran out of milk!  After seven days of no electricity, my dad decided it was time to hook up his old and questionable gas-powered generator.  It took him several tries to get the thing started, and some time to figure out the weird configurations for which circuits could be powered, but finally the refrigerator roared to life and the clock in the kitchen started ticking again.  As luck would have it, thirty minutes later all the lights in the hallway went on too; electricity had been restored to our neighborhood.

Although it was incredibly fun, something from that experience must have stuck in the back of my mind and unsettled me to this day.  Every time there’s a winter storm in the forecast, the first thing I think about is having enough food in the pantry.  Year-round, I have become a bit of a food hoarder.  In our current house, we live about a 15-minute walk to a grocery store.  I can count the number of times on one hand our power has been cut off in the nine years we’ve lived here, and never for more than a couple of hours. And yet, I can’t help but picture what we would do if we were stranded here without power for a week.  I’m happy that we heat our house with a wood stove, with at least a year’s worth of reserve of cut wood ready; it makes me more comfortable to know that we’ll be warm. 

Our source of heat

My chest freezers are full of bread, vegetables, fruits, and meat.  Our basement is cool enough to become an emergency refrigerator, as long as the outside temperature stays cold.  We have city water, so we can still flush our toilets.

I’m ready for that huge snowfall, sky.  Bring it.

Knitting 101

Getting through this fall has been a challenge.  I’m not sure why, but I’ve been busy and beleaguered and burdened with bureaucratic blather at every turn.  I made it 1/10^th of the way through my NaNoWriMo goal and decided to take a break.  This is of course justified by my saying that writing my mother’s memoir/biography was not my only goal this fall; I also wanted desperately to learn to knit, something I’ve been yearning to do for many years.  I envy those women in airports and doctors’ waiting rooms who seem perfectly content to click their needles whiling away the hours, and I watch intently to try to figure out what they’re making.  Is it a scarf?  A cap?  A baby blanket?  A tea cozy?  Are they ambitious enough to make a sweater? Why did they choose that yarn?  What will it look like when it’s finished?  But all of these knitters seem less concerned with the final product than with the knitting itself.  They all look like they’re enjoying themselves immensely; I want to know why.  I want to be in the secret brother-/sisterhood of knitters.

So I turned to my friend Sarah.  She of anyone would know the best place in town to get knitting lessons.  I consider her a “professional” knitter, occasionally showing off some clothes she has made for herself; less so now that she has a toddler, of course.  When I sent her a message asking for advice, she volunteered to teach me herself!  For free!  We settled on a Friday evening in a new coffee shop/pizza place to meet.  I ordered a glass of Chianti and she ordered a hazelnut steamer, and we settled ourselves side by side in the window looking out onto the dark street.

Sarah patiently explained how the lesson(s) would progress, how she would start my first project so I didn’t need to worry yet about that part, how to hold the needles and create tension on the yarn with my left hand.  She told me how we would start with a small square, which could be expanded if I wanted to make a scarf, or left as a coaster or a doily.  She showed me how to count the loops; there should always be 30.  We talked about where to get the best yarn, the different methods of knitting, and exercises for stretching after knitting.  Soon it was my turn to actually try to knit, and I slowly pushed through from the left side of the loop, under the left needle, wrapped around the yarn, pulled the loop I’d made back through, then cast the original loop off to the right needle.  Over and over.  My hands started to ache.  I couldn’t figure out the best way to hold tension in the yarn.  My back ached.  I realized I couldn’t see the yarn or needles very well, so I gingerly put down the needles and dug in my purse for my reading glasses.  I tried to carry on a conversation, but couldn’t completely concentrate; I’ve never been one of those people who could simultaneously walk and chew gum, or rub my belly while patting my head.  I kept forgetting to move the loops on the left needle closer to the end, the top inch and a half of each needle where Sarah told me “all of the work is done.”  At one point, I even thought of laughingly giving it up and saying how enjoyable it was to just sit back and have a drink together.  The next minute I felt myself actually almost close to tears with frustration.  Left side of the loop, not right.  Hold the tension on the yarn.  Make sure your left pinkie anchors the yarn.  Wrap the yarn clockwise, not counterclockwise.  Move the stitches up the needle.  Soft words of encouragement from Sarah; I kept going.

I can’t remember the last time I learned a new motor activity.  Maybe they’re all, after all, just like learning to ride a bike.  Hours and days and weeks and months of training wheels and wobbly parent-assisted jaunts down the driveway resulting in skinned knees and bruises and tears.  And then, one day, for some unknown reason, it works.  The wobblies cease, the momentum pulls you along faster than Mom or Dad or Grandpa can push you, the front tire straightens out, and you are light.  You are made of air.  You are moving forward effortlessly, perfectly attuned to the rhythm of your turning pedals.  And then….you realize you’re going fast, faster than you’ve ever gone.  And you panic, and start feeling the component parts of the bicycle:  the seat, the pedals, your feet, your legs, the handlebars; your logical brain cannot accept how they would work together in such perfect synchronicity.  So you stop, or maybe the ground stops you.  And maybe you’re afraid to start again.  But once you’ve tasted a drop of that essence of perfect balance of pedaling and breathing and holding the handlebars, you have mastered the thing.  You may stumble or wobble, but it will be short-lived and just enough to keep you wary and humble.

I have noticed that my son goes through a period of being extremely moody and difficult right before a cognitive growth spurt. So it was with knitting.  After my overblown frustration, I took a deep breath, and tried again.  And suddenly I was on that bike, zooming down the block, putting my needle through loops and winding yarn around and pulling it back through and casting it off to the other needle in one fluid movement.  Of course, I got going too fast, and became overconfident; that’s probably why I ended up with 31 loops instead of 30.  That’s probably why when I got home and tried to show my husband what I had learned, the thing suddenly looked all wonky and foreign.  But I had a small taste of mastery.  And I’ll stumble and wobble and drop stitches, but just enough to keep me wary and humble.

I have a few rows done now.  I can’t stop, of course, unless I only want a wristband or a scarf for a mouse.

The Journey of Writing

Writing has been on my mind a lot lately.  I’ve been thinking about writing more than actually writing, so my blog sites are pitifully and woefully ignored as of late.  But sometimes you have to reflect on stories, events, daydreams and night dreams to get the well primed, so to speak.  I also have spent a lot of time reading what others have written in my Prose Workshop and in my personal reading time, and sometimes trying on a new style to see how it fits.  The Cinderella slipper is out there for each new piece of work I produce.  And while I’m not traveling literally, I’ve been traveling in two important ways recently: 

1) Thinking about moving gracefully through mid-life.  Dear God, if you exist, and whoever or wherever you may be, don’t let me become a cliché.  Don’t let me get too comfortable.  Don’t let me get bored.  Don’t let me get lazy; rest is OK, lazy is not.  Don’t let me stop learning.  Don’t let me stop trying.  Don’t let me get too far off-track--I have a few goals this fall, such as learning to knit and finishing a rough draft of my mother’s biography.  Don’t let my health fail, my eyesight fade, my sanity depart.  Don’t let my family get away with not appreciating what I do for them.  Don’t let me complain too much without taking action.  Don’t let me forget who I once was, who I am, and who I want to be.  Don’t let me wallow for grey days on end without making that light appear at the end of the tunnel.

2) Traveling with my mother through the past to try to recreate her life on the page.  She went to a lot of places, that woman.  And lived some pretty exciting stuff.  Actually, what’s most exciting is not the stuff, but the enthusiasm she showed for the things she experienced, some of which many think are mundane.  I’m hoping she’ll be alive for the readers.  Through her photographs, her letters (written and received), interviews with my aunt, and my memories of lectures she gave when I was in grade school, I’ve been jumping from southern Illinois to Japan, to Panama, to Europe, to Egypt, and back again.  I’m exhausted.  My mental passport is in tatters.

My next stop is NaNoWriMo, a website set up for writers to network and enter raw word counts during November, National Novel Writing Month.  The idea is that if you can average 1667 words per day for 3o days, you’ll have 50,000 words—the average length of a full-length novel—by the end of November.  In theory, December is for revision, and in January of the new year you can start looking for a way to publish.  I tried halfheartedly to do this last year, but only got a few days in.  The election happened, and 4^th grade homework, Christmas shopping, Thanksgiving meal planning, and situations at work conspired to shut my efforts down after only 10 days.  Oh, and I wasn’t getting much sleep either.  Sleep is vastly underrated.  Sleep is necessary to fuel imagination.  So this year, I’m shelving last year’s unfinished project, and bravely starting the new project I’ve been talking about for years.  It’s time.  Even if I have to ditch it after a couple of weeks, that’s OK.  I will have tried.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being in my Prose Writing Workshop, it’s that the writer’s archenemy is a blank page; so my first goal is to fill it up.  How can you do 1667 words a day, you ask?  Well, right now this blog entry has 612 words.  That’s over a third of the way.  And I’m a chatty person most of the time, so if I write as much as I would chat, the other 1000 words will come spilling out in no time.  It doesn’t have to be beautiful, poetic, descriptive, unified, or witty.  That will come out later, hopefully.  It just has to be volume.  Then the magic happens; once you have lots of volume, you realize that you’ve been sort of…well….beautiful, poetic, descriptive, unified, witty.  In a few places, at least.  And the rest is just work.

The computer version of a blank page

So…off I go.  Into uncharted territory, murky waters, snowy peaks and rocky valleys…use whichever metaphor you like.  Wish me luck.  I’ll try to send you a postcard once I arrive.

Birthday

As we travel through mid-life, at some point we have to reckon with our own aging.  Not only the reckoning with aches and pains, the slowing down of metabolism, the burden of responsibility in every decision we make, but also the reckoning with the actual number.  Do we stare it down?  Hit it head on with jokes and sarcasm?  Don a Hawaiian shirt and dance on the bar?  Or do we ignore it, as if passing from 9 to 10, or 22 to 23, or as if changing from a black pair of pants to a blue one?

My husband has a birthday tomorrow.  A big one.  One of those decade markers.  The one that is important enough to have its own roman numeral.  And while I would be taking my own personal holiday for a week on such an occasion--perhaps a month, soaking my toes in an ocean or climbing to the pinnacle of Kilimanjaro--my husband is completely ignoring it.  He has denied me the opportunity to give him gifts, to shower him alternately with love and jokes about aging, to bake him a cake and sing and dance with others that life has triumphed for one more year.  He maintains that for him, it’s just another day.  Which, of course, it is, but I can’t help but wonder what he’s missing by not celebrating his survival at top volume to the masses, or at least to his trusted friends and family.

But my husband is a simple man, with simple tastes.  And above all, on his birthday, I will respect his wishes.  So I pour my love for him into cutting the apples for his apple cake, which I will serve here at home after his special meal of rib roast and roasted vegetables and cheeses from here and yon.  And I will pour him a glass of champagne and raise a toast to celebrating life, simply.

And we’ll make travel plans….for an exotic location.  Before he has to face another number.  Happy Birthday, my love.

Desserts, St. Louis, Chicago, and Further

Well, the weather has changed again, the leaves are falling and changing in earnest, the ‘flu season has begun, and the time has come for me to truly put the summer to rest.

After returning from our grand camping adventure, when Patrice went back to work, and Gaël had to soon start school, it was a flurry of activity of cleaning sleeping bags and tents, airing out camping containers, reorganizing the camping equipment in the box, and putting everything away until the next season. Our wonderful friends, Gretchen and Mikeljon, brought their lovely daughters Elise and Audrey, as well as Charlotte, the family dog, out from Washington, D.C. to visit, and were here to send off Gaël for his first day of 5th grade.

Gaël and Charlotte, first day of school

 Also during this down time, we explored the local sights with Aude, rode the bus, took her shopping, showed her the University of Illinois campus. 

  

And she made desserts.  She took my favorite cookbook, America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, and made an amazing fruit tart.  And because she had eggs left over from the pastry cream of the fruit tart, she decided to make chocolate mousse, from a traditional French recipe.  Both were incredible, and I encouraged Aude to follow her talents; we talked about food as art, and what it means to be a pastry chef in France.

Gaël returned to school, and Aude and I took a day to drive to St. Louis.  I don’t know St. Louis all that well, but it’s a lovely city, with plenty to do, and the tourist places are extremely accessible.  No trip to St. Louis is complete without a trip to the top of the Gateway Arch, and Aude was enchanted with the view from the top; I managed to overcome my claustrophobia and take the little connected pods, which creak their way to the top.  I silently wondered how many people per year freaked out in those little cars.  Aude took tons of photos of the street views and the architecture.  I told her about coming to St. Louis in the summer of 1993, when the water came up to the steps of the Arch, and Laclede’s Landing was completely inaccessible.  The Mighty Mississippi has an incredible power.

 

Selfie at the top of the Arch

After visiting the Arch, and watching the ancient movie about its construction (can’t we update this, people?!), we walked to lunch in Laclede’s Landing.After lunch, we went to Union Station.  Once a train station, this gorgeous building had been turned into a shopping mall in the mid-1980s.  I had shopped there in the 1990s, but hadn’t returned since then, and was shocked to find a sort of “ghost mall.”  Most shops were closed, there were very few people about, and only the hotel still seemed to be going in full swing; we found a store for cheap St. Louis souvenirs, and bought some things for Aude to take back to France.  The Hard Rock Café was blaring music to no one as we left, and I was depressed at the lack of vitality of this once-beautiful edifice.  I didn’t want to go to another mall (I’m not a big shopping person and I generally avoid malls at all costs), so we had to choose between the botanical gardens or the Central West End for boutique shopping; we didn’t have enough time to do both and get home at a reasonable hour.  I knew which one would win, but Aude did entertain briefly the idea of seeing the botanical gardens.  The sun was hot, though, and the Central West End was a good place to duck into shops and cool off; most of the shops were a little pricey for what she wanted to buy, but it’s certainly fun to look, and to walk through the stunning neighborhoods near St. Louis’s famous Barnes Hospital.  We finished off the day with a quick drive through the beautiful Forest Park, then we got onto the highway home.  Three hours each way was enough time for Aude and me to get to know each other just a little better, and I heard family stories, boyfriend stories, and school stories; we also checked out St. Louis radio stations to make the time pass more quickly.

The time was coming quickly for Aude to leave, and we had not yet explored the last frontier, Chicago.  Aude had never really been in a big city before, and her dream has always been to go to New York.  We had the challenge of showing her that this city on the shores of Lake Michigan had so much life and culture and things to see, she would enjoy it as much as a trip to New York.  Tall order!  But the wide-eyed 17-year-old packed her bags for the last time, and we left early Saturday morning for the big city.  Before leaving, however, we had to do the last, very important things to show she had been in Champaign-Urbana:  we had to go to the sweetcorn festival, we had to have dinner at the Esquire, and we had to write on the wall.  The sweetcorn festival was brief, but fun, and we got to listen to some music which Aude really liked; Gaël also got to climb, which is always a favorite.  

Not afraid of heights

When I told Aude how her uncle and I had met by banging heads at the Esquire Lounge many years ago—and the involvement of the peanut in the whole affair—she wanted desperately to go there.  We sat outside at the metal table with the umbrella and the Friday night happy-hour goers and ordered big burgers and munched on peanuts from their shells.  Aude was fascinated with American bar life, and we people-watched for an hour in the setting sun.  

We totally forgot to write on the wall.  We would have to save it until the morning on our way out of town.

A former colleague, Nancy, and a close acquaintance, Joanna, came up with the idea for a chalkboard wall in downtown Champaign where everyone could contribute to complete the sentence, “Before I Die…”  I wanted Aude to be able to put her desires in writing in front of everyone; she wrote, “I want to travel in the world.”   Not exactly perfectly grammatical English, but the sentiment was there.   

Patrice’s desire was similar, “going around the world,” (before I pointed out that his sentence also was ungrammatical, but that he had no excuse.)

Mine was simply “I want to raise my son to be a happy adult.”  

And my son’s sentence?

“I like pie.”  Of course.

The drive to Chicago was uneventful, thankfully.  We drove straight to the Millenium Park parking garage to save time and show Aude the brilliant morning splendor of the Chicago skyline.  We would spend the next few hours walking, doing the tourist thing. 

Millenium Park, the bean, walking up the coast to Navy Pier, sun beating on our heads, eating lunch at the Billy Goat, taking the Chicago River architecture tour, walking up Michigan Avenue to Watertower Place, seeing the hotels, the stores, the street performers.  

We wandered back to our car, then headed north and west to our friends Kim and Cliff’s house.  They and their adorable sons, Sammy and Nico, live in a three-flat they’ve been remodeling in Wicker Park. 

We ate appetizers and drank wine, then went out for a neighborhood walk and a dinner at a semi-fancy Italian place, where we just kept ordering more food.  We admired the Wicker Park architecture through the windows as you can do best at night on our way back.  The kids went to bed and the adults stayed up a bit longer to chat in the back garden.

The next day would be Aude’s last day in the U.S.  We ate a lovely late breakfast, then headed to the Bucktown Arts Festival on foot; I do love that about bigger cities, where you can do so much without ever getting into your car.  The day became quite a scorcher as we explored the tents and expos.  The kids could play at the park playground next to the art fair, and there was music and food. 

Aude bought the last of her gifts for the family.  We headed back to retrieve our things and take Aude to the airport early in the afternoon with plenty of time to spare, as you never know how traffic will be to O’Hare.  For some reason, I once again had trouble translating/explaining the whole transporting liquids and luggage requirements thing to Aude, but we managed to re-pack her things and get her checked in in plenty of time.  We verified that the flight was on time, explained again about security in the U.S., security in France, passport control in France, and clearing customs.  We checked to make sure she had her passport, her letter from her parents, her wallet, her phone.  We gave her extra money for dinner, and watched her go through security.  After that, it would be silly to wait, so we checked the boards again and proceeded slowly to the parking lot to head back to C-U.  

Unfortunately, about the time we were having dinner at Lincoln Highway about a third of the way home, Aude was finding out her flight would be delayed about four hours.  She got a dinner voucher and was able to get Wi-Fi to contact her parents by email, and she handled the situation beautifully as far as we know.  I felt really bad for her, knowing we couldn’t have done anything, and knowing also that her parents had planned a little outing for her on the other end in Paris, not wanting to waste the opportunity of being there.  I wasn’t sure I would want to spend my day after a nine-hour overnight flight wandering the streets and by-ways and tourist sites of Paris, but Aude was such a good sport, and said she would enjoy the contrast of seeing two cities—Chicago and Paris—back-to-back, both for the very first time.  Ah, the energy of youth.

We returned home to a house that felt more than slightly empty.  We would miss our travel companion for the past month.  Gaël would miss the “big sister” he’d temporarily experienced.  And I would miss the desserts.

What’s next, you might ask?  Isn’t this a blog about travel adventures?

Well, stay tuned, because there are plans galore afoot!  Not to mention the fact that, mid-life crisis travel adventures are not always about traveling to a different city, area, region, or country.  Sometimes the adventure is just simply traveling through mid-life, having a family, learning to change.  There is often a no more rocky, exciting adventure than that.

August Camping Adventures, Part 5: Art, Rain, and Realizations

I vaguely remember making a silly promise somewhere that I would wrap up the August camping trip by the end of September….and here I am the afternoon of September 30, wishing I had not procrastinated.  So much to say about such a little trip…but a promise is a promise, and I’ll do my best.

Chicago traffic is sometimes just the reminder you need that living in a small-ish town has its advantages.  Taking I-94 through the heart of Chicago at 5:00 p.m. on a Friday tests even the most patient of souls, and our little car was not filled with patient souls; bickering alternated with silence alternated with cussing.  The back-seaters bore the boredom with as much grace as they could summon, and eventually we were out of the worst of it and could stop for dinner as the sun was setting.  Patrice kept gamely trying to find campsites, but I put my foot down; tonight would be a hotel room, pure and simple.  We made it as far as Janesville, Wisconsin, finding a reasonable room at a run-down Ramada.  There’s something incredibly sad about these has-been hotels.  Despite a grand atrium in the center with a swimming pool, the carpet was shabby and the lobby smelled like onion rings.  But the room was clean and the rate was appealing, and it was downright luxury compared to the outdoors.  We enjoyed the shower, the pool, and finally the pillows to their fullest extent.

Refreshed and full of Perkins breakfast, we drove the small distance to Madison.  The plan was to explore the capitol and city center, and buy some provisions at the farmer’s market on the square.  We bought some cheese curds of course, and a block of aged local cheddar.  We wandered inside the capitol building, and climbed to the top for a tiny museum visit and a lookout over the city.  Madison has always held a fond place in my heart:  Midwesterners who love beer and cheese, who built their capital city between two pretty lakes, who effortlessly combine university town with bustling city of politicians—what’s not to love?

The gorgeous interior of the Wisconsin Capitol

Downtown Madison

Back into the car, we set off for our final destination, Devil’s Lake State Park.  For several years we have been camping with the same group of people at Devil’s Lake.  We met these folks when our kids were together at the same daycare, and we’ve been friends ever since.  We are five couples, averaging two kids each (one couple has three for our one), and life has been such that we rarely see these folks outside of our annual camping trip, but we dutifully reserve every February, work out the meal schedule in June, and pull through the entrance at the south end of Devil’s Lake every late July or early August.  This year, we decided to drop off the tents first; while Patrice got everything set up and Gaël went in search of his buddies, Aude and I would go into the nearest town to get food for dinner.  We were first up on the dinner schedule, since we were leaving a couple of days sooner than the others.  I had decided to keep it simple with brats and buns, sauerkraut, potato salad and chips.  I forgot dessert, but another couple came to the rescue with some sweets for the kids.  The weather was lovely, but rain was brewing on the horizon, and would plague us the entire weekend.

We always enjoy catching up with these people, even if we’re huddled under a tarp against the elements.  Sleeping in the tent was damp to say the least, and we woke up to a mildly frightening network of daddy-long-legs seeking shelter under our rain flap.  Making breakfast, chatting with others, going to take a shower--everything was twice as difficult while dodging raindrops.  The consensus after breakfast was to skip the beach for obvious reasons, wait for the weather to clear a bit for an afternoon hike, and spend the morning at a local curiosity, Dr. Evermor’s Forevertron, the largest scrap metal sculpture in the world.  Surreal is not sufficient enough an adjective….

Baraboo, Wisconsin is home to the Circus World Museum, the International Crane Foundation, and Dr. Evermor’s Forevertron.  For a small town in the middle of nowhere, it’s got a lot going on.  The Forevertron is a park of sorts which is located behind a surplus store.  There’s not much parking.  There is a lot of scrap metal.  A LOT of scrap metal.  Made into one of the most gorgeous artistic arrangements I’ve ever seen.  The late morning mist added to the mood as we wandered from strange object to strange object—a lifetime of collecting, visualizing, and welding spread before us.  Words are insufficient to describe, and my photos don’t do it justice.  Take the time to visit if you ever have a chance, you won’t be disappointed.  More information can be found at: http://worldofdrevermor.com/.

They move!

I don't think he could even make sense of it upside-down

That afternoon we ventured to Parfrey’s Glen trail.  The park guide describes it as, “Gently ascending moderate walking trail enters the sublimely spectacular hushed narrow gorge with moss and ferns and a small stream in the bottom of the glen.”  I describe it as “Joy realizes she doesn’t like slippery rocks”, or, alternately, the “is that my child that just climbed 50 feet up and is now precariously hanging from a small tree limb?!” trail.  Pretty sure that harmless little hike took years off my life.

Dinner was fajitas expertly made by our friends while more rain fell and finding the exact perfect angle to pull a tarp so as to not get pools of water that suddenly shower unwitting folks underneath.  By this time, the four of us had had enough of camping.

The next morning, while I was in the bathhouse debating whether or not it was worth it to take a shower, a mother and four tiny, adorable girls walked in speaking Spanish.  They were not dressed like the kids we were with; they were not wearing expensive little Keen’s shoes or Columbia jackets; I don’t know where they were from, and perhaps they were on vacation from Chicago or Madison or Milwaukee, but hearing their language transported me to places I’ve visited in the world where camping isn’t a past-time, it’s a way of life.  In many many places in the world, children and adults sleep every night together in one room, or in hammocks strung from trees, or in makeshift shelters more rudimentary than a tent.

I felt a sudden sense of shame.

Here I was, schlepping my fancy tent and expensive camping equipment around in a very nice car, choosing to sleep outdoors for “fun”.  Among our group of friends, there were easily thousands of dollars worth of tents, sleeping bags, lanterns, air mattresses, mini-grills, camp stoves, thermoses, tiny espresso makers, coolers, tarps; not to mention the minivans and station wagons we’d bought to fit them all into (and this group are fairly modest campers by comparison).  And, worse yet, I’d complained about having to sleep outdoors on hard surfaces, in rain, getting dirty and bug-bitten; at any minute I had the option of going back home to my four walls with clean, hot, running water and a soft mattress.  Where I could close the door, lock it, and be safe. Camping suddenly felt like a farce, a purely first-world activity where people “rough it” for “fun”, then go back to their normal lives again, having achieved a moment of serenity in the Great Outdoors; or at least enjoyed a beer beside a campfire.  Granted, sometimes you have to sleep outdoors in order to remember what silence sounds like, or what the stars look like in a purely inky-black sky; but the exercise of going camping felt empty to me suddenly.  Some people are always “camping” and do not have a choice.  Am I not mocking them by attempting to live temporarily the way they’re forced to live every day?

It was certainly food for thought as we packed up the 3D jigsaw puzzle of our gear for the last time and said our goodbyes.  And when I arrived back home, I felt even more grateful for the abundance in my life.

August Camping Adventures, Part 4: Respite

After exploring Mackinac Island, we had a day to visit Colonial Fort Michilimackinac.  I enjoyed the period reenactment, complete with musket-firing demonstration, cooking demonstration, archeological site, and period dance.  Gaël was recruited into the British army, and given a gun and uniform. 

 

It’s a good dose of history lesson with a bit of silliness thrown in, all on the lovely shores of Lake Michigan.

Late afternoon we got back in the overpacked car and headed for Kalkaska, where our friend Regina grew up; she was staying with her mother for their yearly visit back to the U.S.  Jean-Philippe had left just a few days before to attend a music festival in Ireland, so it would just be Regina and her mother.  We were sad not to see Jean-Phi, but so happy to spend some days with Regina; as an extra perk, I would get to sleep on a real bed and do some very necessary laundry.  We cooked dinner together, had great conversations, went on a mini-hike in the woods (cut short by Gaël’s protests), explored the antique shops in the center of town, ate, drank, and relaxed.  Regina’s mom is so welcoming and easygoing, and treated us like family.  And as for Regina…well, let’s say that I really owe her after being hosted twice this summer—once in Poitiers, and once in Michigan--in the loveliest way possible.

I felt completely refreshed and ready for the next challenge when we left two days later.  We crossed over through Traverse City to the Leelanau Peninsula, and one of our favorite places, the Sleeping Bear Dunes.  We arrived in Glen Arbor around lunch time, then had time to buy some cherry wine, soda, preserves (and taste all the samples!) at Cherry Republic, the home of all things cherry.  The sun was shining, and we lunched on the patio there.  The afternoon was devoted to climbing the big mother of all dunes, and then exploring the Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive, with breathtaking views on this gorgeous cool and sunny day.  The sand is white, the Lake Michigan water is blue, and the inland lakes are as clear as swimming pools.  I’m sure it’s a shocking contrast in winter, but in summer, it seems like paradise.

We ambitiously hoped to make it to South Haven the next day, but stopped at a place near Manistee called Orchard Beach State Park campground.  It was crowded and lively, with very small campsites, but we got a place near the bathrooms and next to running water, so it was OK.  Fifty feet behind our campsite was the cliff overlooking the beach and the lake.  The kids went to take the stairs down to swim while Patrice and I watched the sunset from the cliff.  My timing, as ever, is off, and I only remembered to grab my camera as the sun was sitting low on the horizon. By the time I got back to take the picture, it was already gone.  I must have been a little overly emotional that day, because I teared up at having missed the opportunity, our last night in Michigan.  Or maybe I sensed something else; that night before bed I checked my phone and found out that a friend and former co-worker was going into hospice.  The stars were clear and bright, but it seemed cold comfort; I passed a long, tearful, and fretful night.

The next day was a driving day.  We had to make it to Devil’s Lake, Wisconsin—about an hour north of Madison—to meet up with our friends Saturday afternoon.  We broke up the driving with a stop in lovely Saugatuck; we shopped (Aude’s constant quest for the perfect souvenirs), looked at art, ate our last Michigan gigantic ice cream cone, and admired the huge yachts in the harbor.  It was a nice place to say our farewell to Michigan.

And in perfect ill-prepared style, we timed it just right:  we would be arriving around the bend of the bottom of Lake Michigan into the morass of Chicago traffic right at 5:00 p.m. on Friday.