Bibliophilic blind dates

 

When I was visiting Crash and his partner in London I paid a visit to House of Books in Crouch End which has a delightful assortment of books to "blind date". Wrapped in brown paper and twine they remind you not to judge a book by its cover. Clues to the content are printed on the wrapping, but no titles or authors. I bought two - both tagged Noir. I was intrigued by the biopunk set in Thailand and what was Tartan Noir going to be? 

I unwrapped the surprises last week while at the beach on vacation. I am halfway through the biopunk novel, which turned out to be The Windup Girl which won both Hugo and Nebula awards in 2010. It's set in a world where global temperatures and sea levels have both risen. Reading it on a steamy summer day at the beach adds to the atmosphere which Paolo Bacigalupi evokes. A world with no ice, no AC, and where generippers try to stay ahead of the plagues.

Tartan noir? It is a mystery by Ambrose Perry!

Sensible of conditions

I looked out at the beach yesterday, the water dotted with white caps, sand shimmying itself into tiny dunes and turned to Crash, "Did they teach you the Beaufort scale?" (He is taking a sailing course in London this summer.) He checks the waves and says, "Beaufort 6?" "It's been too long since I thought about it," I admitted.

The Beaufort scale describes the intensity of the wind in terms of observable conditions. Beaufort 0 is so calm that smoke rises vertically.  At Beaufort 2 the leaves can be heard to rustle and you can feel the breeze on your face. Beaufort 6 is a "strong breeze" in which it is hard to raise an umbrella, and white caps are widespread on the waves.

If I wanted to know the current wind speed at the nearby weather station I could check my phone, but there is something about being sensible of the conditions where I am standing that I find appealing. It calls me to be present, to listen and to look and to feel what is around me.

For the record, the conditions were Beaufort 5, a fresh breeze, windspeed 20 mph. Crash and Math Man demonstrate!

Resistance

Should I spend some time this morning working on my syllabus? It's a cool day at the beach and perhaps that is why I am feeling the tug of the school year. Or perhaps it's because I read an opinion piece in The Atlantic that claims the syllabus is dead. (Because you can make an update-able electronic version? Because now it's customary to put a lot of policies on it, which somehow dilutes the scholarly value of the reading list and schedule?)  

I am trying to resist. I have been seriously unbusy for the last 10 days, leaning into the joy of being away where I can't clear off my desk or tidy the living room. Savoring the time with family. Burrowing into books old and new. Writing purely for pleasure. 

The pull of the new academic year is a bit like the tide, swelling and ebbing on an immutable schedule. Today at 1:09 pm the tide will peak. On Wednesday, September 6th at 1:10 pm, I will stand up and welcome a physical chemistry class bursting at the seams. Resistance is futile.

Re-created

I am recreating. I am down at the New Jersey shore, ocean breezes blowing through the door, the susurration of the surf punctuated by the shrill shrieks of sea gulls excited by the potential snacks being toted onto the beach to keep toddlers (and teens and twenty-something offspring and their parents) from getting peckish. 

I have read six books, walked miles each day unplugged from books or podcasts or the news, floated in the sea, eaten ice cream, laughed with my kids until the tears ran down my face, lingered over dinner at an outdoor cafe. Soaked in grace until the creakiness of the summer’s push to finish the book (and several other projects) eases. Reminded that at my core I am a human being, and not a human do-er.  I feel re-created.

Classes begin in just over two weeks, the start of my 39th year as a college professor, my 61st “first day of school”. I always imagine the entry to the new school year will be gentle, the air faintly crisp at the end of the day. And always somehow surprised when it is comes in hot, afterburners roaring. All the more reason to dump as much heat as I can this week.

O Canada

Before I headed off to the Specola for a couple of weeks of science, cappuccino and gelato, Math Man and I went off to Canada on holiday, Cape Breton Island. We were there for Canada Day (the 150th), where Math Man was bemused by all the people wearing red in the little town park, waving tiny Canadian flags.  It seemed so...unCanadian to be so flamboyantly Canadian.  There were fireworks.

I saw a bald eagle, my first ever in the wild, 30 feet over my head on the 5th hole at the Highland Links golf course in Ingonish.

Parks Canada has put red Adirondack chairs out in national parks all over Canada to encourage people to sit and admire the view.  There is a nice view behind Math Man, but he is also facing a gorgeous view.  We are on a small peninsula poking out into the Atlantic.  Some of the red chairs are pretty remote, a couple even helicoptered in according the Park Ranger I met atop Mt. Franey, 1400 hard won feet above sea level.

Speaking of Mt. Franey, I climbed it while Math Man played 18 holes of golf on the course below.  There is a red chair on top of it, which I was determined to sit in. The trail is steep, and after the first half kilometer, quite rough.  I made it to the top, enjoyed the view, sat in the red chair and chatted up the ranger. How did the red chair get up there, I wondered. In pieces?  No, no, we drove it up the road.  Yep, that's how she got up there.  She drove.  (I couldn't have driven up the road, but I could have walked down it.)

Math Man and I hiked on the other side of Cape Breton Island, on the Mabou mine trail.  It follows a track that was used by carts (hard to imagine as it clung to the edge of the steep cliffs) to go from house to house. Not much sign of the houses left, except the occasional rose bush gone feral along the way.

And there was Tim Horton's. A red sprinkle donut.  O Canada!

Photo: Still Life

Column: God in the rough

For the record, do not use water to wash off banana slug slime. Really. It makes things much worse. And according to Nicholas Kristof, interesting things happen if you lick one - though we did not try this. And if the scene below looks familar, it may be because Return of the Jedi (the scene with the Ewoks on Endor) was filmed here.

[This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times on 6 August 2009.]

God made the two great lights, the greater one to govern the day, and the lesser one to govern the night; and he made the stars. God set them in the dome of the sky, to shed light upon the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. — Gen. 1:16-18a

Anxiously I patted around the edge of the tent, looking for my flashlight to take a midnight walk. Finally finding it stuck under the foot of the sleeping bag, I crawled carefully over my husband, trying not to wake him. Once out of the tent I realized with a start that I had no need of a light, there was just enough moonlight to let me safely thread my way through the tents and gently glowing fire pits dotting the campsite.

I just spent eight days camping in the redwood groves of Northern California with some of the more adventuresome members of my family — 17 of us ranging in age from 7 months to 77 years old. We slept on the ground, hauled water from the pump and cooked all our meals over an open fire.

With no cell phone service, no Internet and no electricity many of the things we take for granted, from a quick Google search to find out what might take the banana slug slime off my 5-year-old nephew to hot water to lights were not as easy to manage. But, no one seemed to mind; there was enough to do what we needed.

In the summer of 1998, Pope John Paul II, himself an enthusiastic camper, reflected, “In the era of technology our life risks becoming always more anonymous and merely a function of the production process. In this way, man becomes incapable of enjoying the beauties of the Creator and to see in them the reflection of the face of God.”

Stripped of technology, our lives ran on very different clocks while camping. We woke when the sun peeked over the cliffs and towering redwoods. The kids’ bedtimes were determined not so much by their parents but by the lights that “governed the day and the night” (and how far they’d hiked that day). I re-discovered long forgotten aspects of God’s “lesser light.” The moon ceased to be merely a bauble — albeit a beautiful one — hung in the sky, and as it lit my midnight excursion, I could see again in its gentle light God’s care for me.

As the days passed, I grew more aware of how much of modern life creates a buffer between God’s created world and me — and as a result, blurs nature’s reflection of God’s face.

Cooking at home offers me the illusion of ease and control. Four minutes after I hit the switch on my teakettle, it is merrily bubbling away. Camping, I put a heavy pot of icy water drawn from the pump on the fire. Twenty minutes — or more — later I might have boiling water that tastes ever so faintly of the smoke from the wood over which it was heated.

In Sollicitudo rei socialis Pope John Paul II reminded us “we must never lose sight of that dimension which is in the specific nature of man, who has been created by God in His image and likeness. It is a bodily and a spiritual nature, symbolized … by the two elements: the earth, from which God forms man’s body, and the breath of life which He breathes into man’s nostrils.” Cooking over that unpredictable open fire, drinking my morning cup of tea tasting of the wood and the earth, was to recall how and what I am created to be.

Roughing it with God these last days has sharpened my vision of His face in creation. As heavenly as a hot shower felt at the end of the trip, I already miss this unmediated time with God. I come back wondering what modern layers I can on occasion do without, that I may better know that I am dust, given life by His breath alone.

---

"Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees takes off his shoes."
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Aurora Leigh

Stop, Thief!

We had a long drive up from Oregon's Gold Coast where Math Man had an amazing time golfing, and Barnacle Boy, Crash and I explored the environs. We clambered over dunes, took a horse ride across the beach, saw a whale cavorting with her calf off the rocks, and tried windsurfing.  (So far I am on the only person I know who can get sea sick on a windsurfer - but it was fun up until then!)

The promised treat at the end of the drive was a late dinner at a restaurant we'd all enjoyed two weeks past after another visit to Powell's Books (the largest independent book store in the country - Barnacle Boy got lost in it, figuratively and literally!  (And we bought so many books, I had to do some quick rearranging of things at the airport this morning to avoid fees for overweight baggage.)

After dinner, Math Man and I headed to the car to dig out the map to the hotel for the night, while the boys took one last look around.  As I'm pulling my camera off the seat and throwing it over my shoulder, a man comes running out of the restaurant, crying, "Sir, excuse me, sir!"  At that moment, Math Man turned around, and the man stopped dead as he saw the inside of the car.  "Oh," he said, "your car looks just like ours!"   Thus began this odd conversation about THEIR rented car (parked two spaces up from ours, and indeed identical) and ours:  "It's a nice rig, yes?" "Uh, yes..."

He thought we had broken into his car.  Maybe I should stop wearing black shirts?

In all seriousness, I'm glad that the gentleman was not (as my brothers would say) "packing", but seemed an over-socialized NPR sort -- "Excuse me, sir.  Please stop rifling my car"??  It could have, as Crash would say, ended badly.

Going down

I've been fascinated with volcanoes since I read a story about a small girl and her lei in my reading book in second (or maybe third) grade. I would love to see lava flow, or find obsidian lying around on the ground. Living in the midwest made this all unlikely. So I was not going to miss the chance to see Newberry Volcanic Park just south of the Columbia Gorge! No flowing lava or obsidian, but cinder cones and pumice fields enough to satisfy. The highlight was my two mile walk today - taken 100 feet underground. We walked more than a mile into an old lava tube, that down until it was about 100 feet below the surface. The oddest moment was to walk under the major highway - 80 feet over our heads - no light, no sound gave it away.

The cave is "unimproved", which means no lights other than what you bring with you, the occasional interpretive sign and a set of metal steps to help you make the initial descent. Man Man carried a rented propane lantern, the boys and I flashlights. It was a wild experience. There were times when we could not hear or see anyone else. I thought of Tom Sawyer and Becky in the cave, I imagine a walk through a post-apocalyptic subway system - the shadowy rocks looked like train wreckage.

Every once in a while I would realize that I was nearly a mile away from any light or the surface. When the boys decided to go through the section where you had to crawl on your hands and knees, I was undone until they returned.

The boys are undecided which adventure was most magical - this hike to the nether world or yesterday's adventure in the falls.

Where the Wild Things Are

If you didn't know the entrance was there you would drive right past it. Along a stretch of old Highway 30 sandwiched between the Columbia River and the sheer cliffs of the Columbia Gorge, just past one of the iconic waterfalls that have drawn visitors here by car for more than a hundred years, a set of battered steps descends to a paltry pool of water and a pile of logs and debris. So why are there so many car parked here? We passed a trailhead - but saw no one going up or down.

All along the roadside people are changing from hiking boots to sandals, and heading down the stairway to wade in the water and clamber around the log jam (despite the US Forest Service Warnings that the jam could shift suddenly). But the number of people and number of cars are mysteriously disparate. Unless you had been tipped off, as we had been by the guy at the bike store in Portland, that clambering over the logs and negotiating the rocky creek bed will lead you to another world.

The two story high log jam was not trivial to get over; some logs were loose, others pretty slippery. At one point I looked down as I stepped over a gap to see a clear shaft to the creek bed 15 feet below. I didn't want to fall! Once over the top, we found ourselves in a narrow gorge, so narrow no sunlight made it down, though the sun was only 30 minutes past its zenith, so narrow that toppled trees at the top of the 100 foot cliffs formed bridges from one side to the other. There was no path to follow, the creek filled the bottom from side to side. At points the water was waist deep (or deeper on those of us who were short!). I kept my camera tucked into a dry bag -- since I was loathe to take this trek without it.

You turn one final corner to find a waterfall that looks like it came out of an Indian Jones movie: mossy cliffs, with a deep pool at the bottom, a shelf behind the falls, places to jump off into the swirling waters. It was one of the most amazing places I've been. Barnacle Boy and Crash were enchanted. In the end we dragged them blue-lipped and shivering from the waters, to return to the real world.

Fireside Tales

Barnacle Boy has a shiner - acquired on a holiday weekend sleepover. He got hit in the face by a piece of wood that fell off the wood pile (life lesson: you should not lounge on the ground under the wood stack).

Tuesday when he went back to school he was wishing for a better story. Did he beat off a pack of hungry wolves? Defend the honor of his posse on the way to the pool? Any better tales?

Romantic Moonlit Memories

Barnacle Boy noticed that tonight is a full moon. As we came back from skiing this afternoon, he also noticed that the sign was up for the "romantic moonlight dinner". The place where we are staying offers a once a week romantic dinner adventure, with a great perk for parents of young kids - babysitting is included! The parents ride up the ski lift with a bottle of wine, snowshoe across the ridge to see views of Lake Champlain and Stowe, the return for a candlelit feast in a hut on top of the mountain. The finale is a snow shoe down the mountain by moonlight. Meanwhile your kids are entertained at a pizza and ice cream party.

Sound good? A few years back, when Crash and the Boy were smaller, it did to us. Math Man booked it as a surprise for me. The kids were excited about their night out, too. The weather was clear, not too cold and there would be a full moon to illuminate the walk down the mountain.

Off we all went on our respective adventures. The ride up the chairlift was beautiful and the views from the ridge up top unparalleled. Our dinner companions were interesting, the food beautifully presented. Still, I was just picking at it. "Don't you like it?" Math Man murmured. "It's great, I'm just not that hungry." Soon, though I realized it wasn't just lack of an appetite, I was ill. Miserably ill, in fact. So ill, there was no walk down the mountain for me; the ski patrol took me down.

"So, do you want to do the dinner this year?" wonders Math Man. Some memories do not fade with time. I think not!

Lasting treasures

The Boy and Crash are hanging out with their cousins this week at the sea side. Today they all went to the arcade. They collected tons of tickets to exchange for "stuff". She of the Book opted for one small ornament to put on her dresser at home to remember the vacation by. Crash, The Boy and Perpetually Tired Teen? Gentlemen of instant gratification. Things that go "pop" and candy topped their list. The most lasting thing they acquired? The Boy's scary mechanical hand...

Jaws

As we were driving to the beach today, Math Man asks Crash if he's watched any of the "Jaws" films showing on one of the local channels this week. This quickly devolves into a conversation about whether just the iconic fin and occasional snout is scarier than seeing the whole thing. "When the teeth bend," hazards Crash, "you can tell they're rubber, so it's not sooo scary!" I wonder aloud if this is really the conversation we want to be having right before we get into the ocean. Both guys look at me like I'm from Mars and go right back to wondering about simulating shark attacks.

All things counter, original, spare, strange

[This column appeared in the Catholic Standard & Times August 14, 2008]

For though the fig tree blossom not nor fruit be on the vines, though the yield of the olive fail and the terraces produce no nourishment, though the flocks disappear from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet will I rejoice in the Lord and exult in my saving God. God, my Lord, is my strength; he makes my feet swift as those of hinds and enables me to go upon the heights. Hab. 3:17-19

“There’s an amazing view when you get around the corner,” the woman ahead of me on the trail offers by way of encouragement. “Thanks,” I squeak out, “but I think I’ll wait ‘til I get to the top and be surprised.”

This is not a gentle trail through the woods; I’m clinging to an iron rung bolted to the cliff with a 250-foot drop to the ocean below, watching my son Chris hug the rock face and inch carefully around the corner on a ledge a few inches wide.

Chris is not afraid. He moves confidently forward to the hike leader waiting on the other side. He knows someone fell here a few years ago and died, but his step remains firm, his eyes trustingly on the leader.

As I follow him across, the words of the prophet Habakkuk rise unbidden to my lips. He makes my feet swift as a hind’s and sets me safe on the heights.

We safely reached the summit, where the views of Mt. Desert Island’s granite crags and the Atlantic surf were as magnificent as promised. God’s creation spread out before our eyes, sparkling in the sun.

On the bus ride back to camp, Chris is still marveling at the experience. “Were you scared?” asked a younger camper. “No, I knew if I fell the leader would catch me,” he declared authoritatively.

I am struck by his assurance. What makes it so easy for him and hard for me? I know I’m not alone in my struggles; the prophets and psalmists alike struggled with trust and doubt.

My imagination runs rampant. Like Habakkuk, I am full of “what ifs?” What if the fig tree failed to blossom or the flocks vanished from the fold? What if my foot were to slip? What if I couldn’t catch Christopher?

Just like I inched along the cliff face hoping to delight in the incredible view at the end, amidst all the uncertainties of life, Habakkuk moves forward in trust, rejoicing in his saving God.

Clinging to the mountainside, I was acutely aware of my physical frailties. My strength alone might not be enough to hold me up.

Opening my breviary the next morning, the memory of the cliff and the words of Psalm 51 provoked a deeper awareness of my spiritual imperfections: “My offenses truly I know them, and my sin is always before me.” Here, too, the psalmist seeks the remedy of “rejoicing and gladness.”

I suspect Chris' secret is the same as the psalmists and prophets — joy. He is attentive to God’s wondrous creation, to God in all things and experiences.

Like priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, Chris delights in all he discovers along the way — dusty trails, breathtaking views, fruit on the vines or not. He trusts it will all be marvelous.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.

From Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J.

Oil and water

Water is perhaps more precious than oil where my dad lives. The water table is hundreds of feet down, rainfall non-existent in this season. Dry wells are no joke.

We arrived here last week, with a duffel full of dirty clothes from our sojourn in Maine (just like a college student - I come home to do laundry). We had barely made our way out back to find my dad when my sister-in-law (the Reverend Brother's wife) appears at the gate. She has bad news. There is no water in the big tank, and the pumps have shut off. (They share a well with my dad.) No laundry...no flushing. Will they need to drill deeper?

As it turned out it was an interlock that had gone back at the level of their first well and by dinner time, there was enough water to do the dishes and flush. By bedtime, I had a load of laundry in.

The Boy gets Moxie

Travel is often culinarily broadening, and this summer's travels have been no exception. I not only brought home a taste for our new favorite soda from retreat, but a case of it as well. Barnacle Boy adores it, too. When he met a family at camp who came from Cape Ann (Eastern Point is at the tip of Cape Ann) he waxed eloquent over his new found delight. They were surprised to find that it was a regional specialty, and not shipped much beyond New England - a rarity in modern, homogeneous, translation invariant America.

They told Barnacle Boy about Moxie, a soda unique to Maine. He was warned that it was an aquired taste (some peopel suggested it wasn't worth aquiring a taste for!). The Boy was determined that we snag some Moxie while we were in Maine (and pick up a few cases of his other regional favorite). On our way home yesterday, we stopped at a small cafe and the Boy headed to the soda case. "They have Moxie! Can I try it?" How not?

It tasted like unsweetened cough syrup - bracing might be the best word for it.
Whew! We all ceremonially had a try, then dumped the rest of the 20 oz bottle.

The company used to advertise that it gave you "spunk", which I think that the Boy had to have to try it -- either that or moxie!

Raining Potatoes Alert

The weather warmed up to a balmy nearly freezing today, so we ventured forth to ski and otherwise frolic in the snow. Barnacle Boy has been eyeing the tubing hill all week, and tonight seemed like a great time to take advantage of it (or at any rate better than last night when it was twenty below by this time). Alas, after the rollicking downhill runs of today, tubing seemed rather tame to my team. I was glad I trekked over there, though - otherwise I never would have seen the sign:

Watch out for descending tubers!

Fairy Fights

With temps not breaking zero today, skiing was not in the cards for the team. Crash and the Boy took a dip in the tub, they emerged literally steaming in the sunlight - with icicles hanging off the Boy's bangs. Looking at 20 acres of pristine snow out the back windows, Crash was longing to have a huge snowball fight. I dutifully suited up to do battle after lunch. "How's the snow?" I inquired as arrived at the battlefield. "Not so good," he mourned. I picked up a handful, carefully tried to pack it and threw it with all my might at Crash. No satisfying thunk as it hit the target. Instead it looked like I was sprinkling fairy dust over my son.

We ended up taking a 45 minute hike through the field, down to the still flowing creek and around the old summer camp house. Only one set of prints to be seen out there besides ours. Even the animals are hunkered down for the duration.

Crash-ing Temps

It's -13^oF here and it's not even the coldest part of the night yet. After a frigid afternoon of skiing (even Barnacle Boy was cold enough to put on long underwear), Crash thought a dip in the outdoor hot tub was in order. Since he couldn't go alone, I reluctantly volunteered to put on my jacket and oversee his soak. "You'd be warmer in the water," he offered. He was right, better in the water and warm than shivering in a jacket. But it was so cold that when I ran my wet hands through my hair, it froze in about a minute. Crash admired the clarity of the sky and the stars, I alas, had left glasses inside, so could see only a blur. When my eyelashes froze together I declared an end to the time in the tub.

But I'd do it again...