Almost there—Napa to Anchorage today
June 29, 2008
Filed in: Alaska, The Way We Live Now
First can I say that C pulled up the seven-day forecast for Homer, Alaska on his iPhone yesterday afternoon as we were being driven to the most awesomest wedding ever in the history of nuptials and that we’re in for one entire week of straight rain?
Seriously, seven little crying cloud icons down the entire screen, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday… every single day is rain. And cold. 50s, low 60s and rain.
I just want to cry. T just wants to stay in Napa, his emotional home on planet earth, and listen to the grapes quietly ripen in their skins. Who would know if we actually went or not? Download a few pics of, say, bears or moose or glacial whatever, something that looks sufficiently Alaska-like, and we’re home free.
I did truly think of canceling our trip for an hour or so, then got distracted from my worries by my 10th glass of chardonnay, so we’re going whether we like it or not. It rains on all our vacations, how should this be different?
Other random bits: it’s a pretty big coincidence we’re going to Homer just a few days after the Supreme Court knocked down the punitive damages related to the Exxon-Valdez spill. Hard to believe that was so long ago, and I hadn’t really ever thought about how much it must have—and obviously still does, if this piece from the Times is any indication—impacted the very area we’re traveling to. We are going to be one big chunk of land over from Price William Sound, but yeah, of course, it’s water (and oil) and it’s all the same big soup; it doesn’t make a distinction which side of the peninsula it’s on.
In all that I’ve read about the Kenai, I haven’t seen so much as a single syllable that mentioned the Exxon-Valdez, but duh, I’ve been reading travel stuff and even the good, supposedly unbiased guidebooks or whatever have no need or desire to get into either the politics or the potentially-tourist-offputting physical aftermath of the spill.
More randoms: I stumbled across the fishing forecast for the Homer area. I have a fondness for language related to things I know nothing about. I have absolutely no idea what this report is saying, I just love the words:
Homer Spit (15)
King salmon
Bobber with eggs, herring and No. 5 blue Vibrax spinners best on the incoming tide. King salmon fishing at the Nick Dudiak Fishing Lagoon should be fair this weekend. Remember, anglers may no longer fish with weights or bobbers beyond the hook or hooks.
Got that everyone? NO BOBBERS beyond the hooks! Don’t make me have to come down there …
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Fear Factor
June 25, 2008
Filed in: Alaska, The Home Front, The Middle Ages
I’m not really thinking of what’s happening tomorrow morning as a vacation. Adventure, yes. Trip-of-a-lifetime, yes. But vacation?
To our little family, vacation means plunking down a hunk of money for a house somewhere nice, then parking our butts in front of whatever nicest body of water is close by.
If you’re one of the parents of this group, you read till you start to get a slight headache, at which point you take a little swim, after which you think you might be hungry so you wander back up to the house and eat a bit of this and that from the fridge, during which time you realize you’re feeling a little woozy from all your time in the sun and it really would be best if you snuck off for a quick nap, after which you look up at the sky and wonder if the sun hasn’t crossed the yardarm and if it isn’t in fact time for happy hour.
That’s vacation. What we’re doing starting tomorrow is thrilling, exciting, complicated, and expensive, but no, not vacation.
It is odd to be taking a trip with a little pile of fears also waiting to be packed, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit there are a few anxieties floating freely through the sparkly air of Swellville this morning:
Some of us are worried we’ll be attacked by bears on our flightseeing trip next Friday.
Some of us are afraid of the 5-seater plane that takes us to the bears, the one that lands on the hard-packed sands during low tide (yeah, that’s right, there’s no asphalt at all).
Some of us are worried we’re not up to kayaking around the glacial ponds or lakes or whatever they are. We know what it feels like to be paddling and paddling but not really getting anywhere, how suddenly far away the rest of the group can appear, how alone we can feel in our boat, our arms tired. Some of us are thinking about that.
Some of us are wondering just how much experience our guides have and how good they are at fetching medical assistance from the mainland if we need it. We’re out of 911 territory for at least three of the days; if that bear gets you, it’s 45 minutes minimum for some kind of airborne triage to get to you.
Some of us are worried about money.
Some of us—okay, the one who has already pretty much given up sleeping—is wondering if, spending 10 nights in a row with her entire family in the same room—she is going to sleep at all, a single wink, and if not, how will she be able to run from bears, save her children from kayak mishaps, and earn enough money to keep us from debtor’s prison.
Some of us are worried that one child, the one with the great big personality, will react to becoming untethered from his peer group for so long by idly attacking, berating, picking on, criticizing and generally bullying the other one, the one with the Buddha personality.
Some of us are worried that the tween in our group, who can sometimes be exquisitely sensitive and murderously intolerant of, say, teen brothers singing emo songs along to their iPods really loudly, will in fact be exquisitely sensitive and murderously intolerant the entire trip.
Some of us are wondering if the weird fear that’s been creeping up on us for a couple of years now, the thing that started out being about bridges, but is now about bridges and on-ramps and highways in general. That thing. Some of us are wondering how bad that thing will be and how much of the crazy mountainous 2-lane driving we’ll be able to handle.
Some of us are wondering if the body parts that have been bothering us—necks, backs, knees, that stuff—will act up while we’re trying to hike or kayak or beachcomb or run away from bears.
Some of us are wondering if this whole 50th State business isn’t just spoiled middle-aged indulgence that’s never going to amount to anything other than a pile of debt and a bunch of memories. (Heh, that’s a pretty good description of middle-class American life, pile of debt, bunch of memories.)
There is one more fear, but it’s private so I’m not going to write down here. (This may seem to be one of those blogs where I let it all hang out, but in reality I’m an uptight New Englander, and even uptight New Englanders with blogs keep things pretty buttoned-up.)
Also there’s the worry about the dog and the kennel and the constipation, but nobody needs to read about that either. Ew.
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Yeah, we got baggage
June 22, 2008
Filed in: Alaska, The Home Front
Way back in February, when I was just beginning to contemplate the idea of tagging an Alaska trip onto the family wedding in Napa that’s now upcoming this very week, I mentioned the idea to my friend M.
M is perfect. Literally. She is a size zero, an understated-yet-stylish dresser, a mad shopper, a person who has decorated her large home in an important community (yeah, she actually fled Swellville for Evenswellerville) so beautifully and so thoroughly that she is now starting a business to help other slobs along the path to domestic enlightenment.
Her daughters are beautiful and accomplished; her husband is charming and funny and brings home a large paycheck. I have never one single time in my entire life seen so much as a speck of dirt in, on or anywhere near her house, person or offspring.
You would think I could stand to take some advice from someone like that. But nooooooo. M told me flat out I was nuts to think about combining trips. “There is no way you could pack for those together!” she exclaimed in true horror. “A wedding? And Alaska? You’re crazy. I would never do that, not in a million years.”
Poor M, I thought, nice gal, but you know, some people are so constrained by these petty practical concerns. M needs to lighten up. Sheesh.
Flash forward five months, and I am nearing apoplexy at the thought of all the packing that’s got to go on in the next 72 hours. Seriously, the left side of my face started twitching yesterday morning and hasn’t yet stopped. Something tells me it won’t till they seal the door on the plane, at which time it’s too late to do anything more.
Napa wedding means 2 dressy-yet-casual outfits (Californians are so annoying. I mean, is it dressy or isn’t it? Casual dressy is just…impossible) times 4 people, two of whom are growing so fast their dress clothes should really be rented rather than bought.
There are things to be picked up from the tailor and the dry cleaners. There are loafers to be dragged from the backs of closets and polished. Belts? Uh…yeah, belts. I’m sure I’ll get to that between now and Thursday morning at 2 a.m.
Then on the other hand, there’s Alaska. Hiking boots, I need to find 8 hiking boots that still fit and are properly waterproofed. Rain pants. Don’t get me started on rain pants. Who owns enough rain pants for everyone in the entire family? Everyone, it seems, except us.
Polypropylene, the wonder fabric that costs as much as spun gold? We all supposedly need entire outfits made of polypro. Then the little things, emergency whistles that tie onto our zipper pulls and compasses and binoculars and bug spray and bottles of contact lens solution small enough to avoid confiscation by security. Gum for the plane, batteries for our various electronic amusements, the list goes on and on.
In the face of this onslaught, all I can say is, M, you were so right! I apologize for being smug! Will you come help? M….? Are you there?
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Ignoreland
June 15, 2008
Filed in: The Home Front, The Middle Ages
There is a growing list of mainstream media story types I simply cannot read anymore, no matter who they’re written by or how important a publication they appear in.
Witness one: today’s uber-boring cover article in the NYT Mag. Wow, people in the 21st century who have children sometimes decide to split the duties involved in caring for these beings and their abode? Sometimes they fight? Sometimes it works out great? Eventually, the kids grow up and leave, and the parents look back on it all with fondness or bitterness or [insert other emotion here]? Talk about breaking news.
Other types on the list:
* Any story in which baseball or golf is the catalyst for a moment of emotion or revelation between any two men—father/son, boss/underling, celebrity profilee/profile writer, Justin Timberlake/Tiger Woods.
* Any article that attempts to codify the ways in which Marilyn Monroe was, is or will continue to be meaningful to the American zeitgeist. (It’s terrible to say, but now that Norman Mailer has passed, this bit of journalism ought to decrease markedly.)
* Any piece in which a woman of a certain age contemplates Botox/a facelift/Restylane, polls her friends, pesters her man-companion, decides in either the affirmative or negative, and learns to live, if just a tiny bit ruefully (if she didn’t do it) and/or defensively (if she did), with her decision. Over the past few months, I have had to spend a lot of time reading lady magazines in various doctors’ waiting rooms, and I’m here to say you could wallpaper the Kremlin with these articles. Stop already.
* Any story in which the writer hires a cleaning woman and experiences any kind of emotion/revelation related to that act—guilt, enlightenment, guilt followed by enlightenment, etc.
* Any essay in which a middle-aged parent (usually a dad) takes his teenaged child (usually his son) to his first concert—rock, ska, rap, punk, alternative, really anything except pure pop.
Dad has memories, dad has emotions, dad wishes he could get high or jacked or drunk or whatever mind-altering thing he used to do at concerts but no longer does, dad looks at the sexy teenaged girls and reminisces about his own sexy days past (requisite paragraph required for publication in Esquire, GQ, Details, etc.), dad looks at his fat aging self and feels insecure.
But mostly, writer dad bends over backwards to remind readers in a very low-key (and therefore cool) way how very cool he used to be.
Because the world does not need another one of these articles, not never, I’m not going to say anything about the R.E.M. concert C and I went to this weekend, his first. Way back in another century, I had the good sense to befriend Beulah, who had previously had the good sense to attend college in Athens, Ga., and hang with what would later turn out to be R.E.M.
Flash forward 25 years, and Auntie B is able to set us up with free V.I.P. tix, 15 rows back, center, in a lovely outdoor venue, plus access to the V.I.P. beer-garden-like lounge, plus (most important at this crummy car-centric stadium), V.I.P. parking that allowed us to get out of the lot in something other than the 2.5 hours it takes regular plebes.
As I rolled down the window of our pollen-encrusted Honda (the white pine is dropping its stuff this week in New England) and said to the parking girl, “Uh, I think we’re on the list for the band? We’re with Beulah?” C said, “How do you know Beulah anyhow?” You can figure out his thought process for yourselves. Fat-butt suburban mom + hipster cool Beulah = wha?????
And it’s true, B and I haven’t anything in common, except a love of words and writing and a certain bemused, mostly-but-not-always-sarcastic way of watching the world. But since those things take up 90% of my consciousness (the other 10% being divided equally between food and drink—and, oh yeah, my kids), that’s a pretty big connection.
B was happy Friday night. The evening was fine, she was looking hot, and the band played, in her honor, “Don’t Go Back to Rockville,” which was written for her way back when. They also played two hours of out-of-the-park faves of mine, including, astonishingly, an acoustic country version of “Let Me In,” a song I semi-obsessed on during a particular 18-month chunk of time when it felt like all I could do with any measure of success was miscarry over and over.
So yeah, did mom have emotions, standing next to her now-6-foot-tall offspring on a gorgeous summer night sneaking little sideways peeks as he rocked out to her favorite band in the world? I ain’t saying. You will not read a word about it here.
I am not going to be a loser and tell you that after the show in the beer garden we stood not 10 feet away from a certain polite, soft-spoken hipster icon, and could have met him for ourselves if only we were willing to wait for all the other mom/teen fan combos ahead of us to get their salutations out of the way. Not talking.
I will, however, bow to convention by posting the requisite cell-phone photo. How did people ever go to stadium concerts before mobile phones were invented? Did you just, like, stand there and listen to the music? So last century.
The trio in question are in the teeny, tiny middle of the pic. I don’t care what anyone says, cell phone photos suck.
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You better listen to the radio
June 12, 2008
Filed in: The Home Front, The Way We Live Now
I’m not being bossy, I’m quoting Elvis Costello.
Reading my various frantic bits, you’d never guess, but I do have a day job. And today—well, actually a couple of weeks ago, but airing today—I was on the radio.
Fun, in a slightly disembodied kind of way.
On my list of small anomalies of human life that will be corrected after death: in Heaven, your voice will sound the same to everyone else as it does to you.