Lattes, Lazers, and Little Girls

 Having spent all my money on 7 weeks of travel with my beloved, I am for now reduced to settling for whatever odd job I can squeeze a few bucks out of. The other day, it was babysitting. I found the family on craigslist. The lady of the house said her mother was in town to help with the kids while she recovered from surgery, but she needed back-up for the day. So I went.

She answered the door with stiff, shiny arms and a lavender velcro towel fastened around her chest. Moving around the house in quick, jerky motions, like a robot, she introduced me to her kids and her mother, a large woman who wore black stretch pants and reeked of cigarette smoke. The surgery, it turns out, was "voluntary." Soon her arms would be free of sun damage and the freckles she's always hated. That day, though, her arms were freshly lazered, and looked like uncooked sausages, red greasy speckled bloated sausages. She smelled like chemicals.

Scattered around the floor amongst toys and giant, life-sized stuffed animals, were two sweet little girls and a rolly baby boy, the girls made even sweeter by the entire ginger bread house they were allowed to eat for lunch. "You sure you don't want a sandwich, girls? I have cheese and salami here..." grandma said, trailing off. "I swear ya haven't eaten any real food today! Oh well..."

I was just grandma's helper while mom oozed medicinal ointment all over her bed upstairs, so I stayed out of it. At one point, grandma got us Starbucks. She said "latte" so many times I'm convinced she doesn't know any other kind of coffee beverage. "All Starbucks is, anyway," she said, "is just reeeally strong coffee." She laughed, then added, "with steamed milk!" She kept laughing to herself, seemed to think she'd made either some kind of joke or a very shrewd observation. It wasn't long before I could no longer figure out how to respond to the things she said.

Grandma brought her latte from her solitaire game on the computer to the bench on the front porch. She went out there pretty frequently with cigarettes and a romance novel. "The kids don't need to know I smoke," she said. "But when they get older, hell if I'm gonna run outside all the time to do it!"

Mom appeared downstairs every so often, usually to pick at cold orange chicken in a plastic takeout container or tell me more about the benefits of plastic surgery. I was relieved when she suggested I take the kids to the park. We spent a blissful hour, free of mindless (and I mean mindless) adult chatter, playing on the swings and doing gymnastics in the sun.

On our way home, the 5-year-old picked up big fallen leaves off the ground and collected them in a little bouquet, saying it was a bird. "No," she said, "it's two birds. They're flying... when two birds fly together, it's called a celebration."

She said this like it was total, unequivocal fact. And for some reason, this little sentence made the whole day worthwhile to me. It reminded me that so often, it's the kids we should be listening to. All day I'd been hearing chemicals, lazers, tobacco, caffeine. And here she was, the little one. All sugar and leaves and sun and cartwheels. Still young enough to speak in poetry.

Santa: Naughty or Nice?

Yikes.

Well, the blinking lights and blackout sales have made it impossible to ignore; the holiday season is upon us! Get out the ginger snaps to be inhaled whole and the candy canes to be looked at but never eaten because it's time to celebrate! We're getting into the holiday spirit by turning the TV to the Sounds of the Seasons music channel while we arrange assorted creepy Santa heads around the house. (Don't get me wrong, my mom's Christmas decorating is lovely and relatively reserved, but it does include Santa heads. Can't get around that.)

Sounds of the Season plays various holiday songs and flips through Christmas trivia and weird images of snow and presents and stuff. The other day, this little fact popped up:

"Poinsettias are the most popular Christmas plant and the No. 1 potted flowering plant in the U.S."

Like, hold on, are they saying more popular than Christmas trees? Or does that not count as a plant? Do they mean more popular than mistletoe? Either way, I am so happy to have this information. Now I'll be the life of all the ugly Christmas sweater parties in the land, both mock hipster version and authentic old lady version.

But in all seriousness, I did hear a statistic the other day that made me squint a tad more suspiciously yet at the creepy Santa heads that represent the most genius media creation in the history of mass consumerism. Last year, Americans spent a grand total of $450 billion on Christmas. Compare this number to the $10 billion it would take to solve the world's lack of clean water for good. This information comes from the Advent Conspiracy, a Christian group that urges people to spend a little less money on material gifts and a little more to help people in need. Now, I'm not religious, but this is something I can get behind. 

With similar do-goodness in mind, my mom instituted a new rule that all gifts exchanged in our family this year have to be either used, recycled, vintage, or handmade (and not by Indonesian children). In other words, nothing mass produced. With the leftover money, we'll select a charity to contribute to. Just a nice way to mix things up and feel a tad less guilty about all the excess at the same time.

There are also things that can be done to lessen the blow on the environment during all the Christmas cheer. In light of the UN climate conference going on in Copenhagen right now, we ought to do our share as they try to save the world in two short weeks. There are a few tips on how to have a more green Christmas here. As for us, we'll be wrapping our gifts with brown paper grocery bags and perhaps newspaper (with pretty ribbons, of course). We've done it in the past and I can say that it is quite stylin'.

Anyway, I don't want to seem like one of those people who stand outside Target ringing a bell and making you put on your best starting-at-something-really-important-on-the-ground routine. I'm just saying, it wouldn't hurt any of us to be a little less wasteful this year, and a little more in touch with the suffering going on in the world beyond our crackling fires and spiked nog.

Airport Security Romance

Well here I am yet again staring at a month since my last post. A whole lot of things have happened since this time in November when Jordi and I were still cruising down the California coast looking for another place to set up camp. We made it back up to Livermore for Thanksgiving after 5,714.4 miles of driving together. Five thousand, seven hundred and fourteen miles. I wrote it out for a stronger impact. We didn't get any speeding tickets, no flat tires, didn't get lost all that much, and we still like each other. A lot. And he's on his way to Central America for 4 months and I'm here. In Livermore. Trying to earn money for whatever I do next.

Saying goodbye to Jordi at the airport in San Francisco was tough. I got used to his constant presence for 3 months, and the prospect of spending an indeterminate length of time on different continents is a scary one. But this is how it has to be. I need to be here to work, he wants to travel, and it's good for us to spend some time apart to focus on ourselves. But as much as my rational brain understands that, there's a part of me that questions it, resents it, fights it like a teenage girl who's been grounded right before prom.

I stood there by the security line at SFO watching him through the plexiglass partition like an animal in a zoo. It's a shame people don't still travel on huge passenger steamliners like the Titanic. I feel like goodbyes must have been much more poignant and romantic back then. I'd be waving my handkerchief and gathering up my skirts so as not to trip as I fluttered along the dock to get one last look at him, tall and dashing in a three-piece suit, before he disappeared on the horizon. Instead I stood there with a couple other weirdos and watched as he removed his belt and shoes, placed them in the plastic container, and stepped somberly in his old black socks through the gray plastic gateway of airport security.

But maybe in a hundred years people will be in their spaceships daydreaming about how romantic it must have been to bid farewell to their loved ones at those primitive, non-galactic travel hubs where people still had to manually remove items of clothing for a security screening. I guess real life is never as romantic and perfectly scripted as we want it to be, and I'm sure people felt the same way a hundred years ago and that farewells at the departure of the Titanic were not as romantic as James Cameron wants us to believe.

Ultimately, the here and now is as much as we can hope for and we ought to be pretty damn glad to have even that. It's ours and the romantic thing about it is that no one else really knows what's going on in your own personal reality (not even the pierced, tattooed lady with a partially shaved head who stood next to me at the airport watching her beloved trek through the TSA line before removing his Dr. Martens).

I just hope Jordi, who I believe is in a plane somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico, is enjoying his here and now and will have good stories for me when we see each other again.

How's it been? Um...

I know I haven't written very much about the road trip so far, a combined result of laziness, lack of internet time, and just the sheer fact that it hasn't been all that great.

Just kidding! But I'd be lying if I said it hasn't been hard. Two months of constant every-breathing-second togetherness with anyone is a great recipe for tension and conflict, and attempting to execute a road trip like this comes with all kinds of built-in challenges.

So yeah, it's been hard. It's been getting lost, it's been camping in the rain, ten thousand smelly bathrooms, a leaky cooler soaking the floor of the car, it's been chasing off raccoons, cramming night after night on a twin-bed sized foam pad, the ever-present stench of campfire smoke, broken flashlights, duct tape and tarps and improvised protection from the rain, it's been paying too much for poorly equipped campgrounds and bad food, going several days without a shower, more peanut butter and jelly sandwiches than a person is meant to eat in a lifetime, running out of propane before our dinner is cooked through, constant wrestling with all the stuff in the car, it's been cold and wet, it's been exhaustion and stress, it's been yelling and it's been fighting and it's been hurt feelings.

I can't deny any of those things. And many of you may wonder why even bother? Why spend time and money putting ourselves through all this crap? Why not just stay home?

I have to wonder the same things myself sometimes, but then I remind myself that it's also been pure bliss, light as air, clear as water. It's been falling asleep to the sound of the ocean or a river falling over rocks, it's been seeing things we've never seen before, it's been hiking through lush forests, cooking meals that are simple but to us they are feasts, playing and running wild like children in the sand. It's been the whole luminous world contained in our little old tent.

It's been a misty Redwood valley, rounding a corner and coming face to face with a herd of elk, it's been reading by the fire, watching the sun go down over the Pacific, counting stars on the beach, it's been the new Avett Brothers album so loud on the car stereo that any level of thought is impossible, only feeling.

It's been coloring in our route on Jordi's big map, sketching a little tent in all the many places we've slept, it's been new surprise and thrill every time we turn another bend on the Pacific Coast Highway and see the great endless ocean in the distance, it's been the windows down, the wind in my hair and the sun on my face. It's been laughing and growing stronger and figuring it out. It's been freedom. It's been ours.

We've let the mileage on the odometer run since we set off for Yosemite on September 29th, and since then it's been 3,534 miles of everything, the good and bad, the awful, the helpless, the tired, the so ready to go home, the last straw.

But hey, that's travel sometimes and that's OK. Because what it's really been is 3,534 miles of love. And we still have a couple more weeks to go.

...Toes? Or, fun with language.

I'm in Santa Cruz sitting at a coffee house trying to write, but an old white-haired local won't let me. He's here "doin' lap top" today with an iBook G4 that looks like it was buried in mud and then tied to the back of a truck and dragged down the road. One of these Berkeley graduates from the '60s who's lost a few screws and now blurs the line between the derelict and the tax-paying.

He just won't stop talking, and I don't even know what about. In the last 10 minutes he's mentioned, among other things, running for president, "mythic government," Bhutan, hitch-hiking, earthquakes, and smoking his pipe by the river. Luckily, he's now talking to another old man/veteran/vagrant named Jimbo and giving me a break.

I bring him up because he reminded me of how easy it is to mix up two languages when you spend all your time with a bilingual. When I sat down next to this old fellow, he smiled and said, "we'll be neighbors" and I very nearly said "wat gezellig!" Roughly translated, this means something like "how nice!" in Dutch. I caught myself, but here are a few mix-ups and mistakes that have slipped through over the last few months.

Going from English to Dutch to English to Dutch isn't always easy, after all, and especially hard for some. Take my mother, for example, who, on her visit to Amsterdam, raised her beer for a toast and accidentally said "Probst!" for cheers instead of the Dutch, "proost!" Probst, incidentally, is the name of her gynocologist. She also tried to say something was gezellig once and instead said, with great exuberance, "gefilte!" which is a Jewish fish cake.

At a dessert bar in Portland, Jordi politely asked the waitress for an "ice sandwich." Mmm! In Dutch, ijs (pronounced 'ice') is the word for ice cream (and for ice, and popsicles, and frozen yogurt), so naturally he forgot the 'cream' even though he knows ijs from ice.

Dutch prepositions give me a lot of trouble, and as Jordi and I were conversing in his native tongue one day, I was trying to say something like "I was talking to her" but I couldn't think of the word for "to" in that context. I started listing prepositions until I landed on the right one, "Naar? Met?...Tenen?" He laughed. Tenen, it turns out, means toes.

When my siblings visited Amsterdam, they asked Jordi and I how we met, so over Thai food Jordi explained to them how we were at a party and got to talking about the weather in California (what every Dutch person I met wanted to talk about), but we couldn't get very far because neither of us could convert Celsius and Fahrenheit. Some light chuckles around the table. "So then," Jordi went on, "we were talking about my length..." There were a few seconds of confused silence, everyone hoping he didn't mean what it sounded like. What the tall Dutchman meant, of course, was his height. In Dutch, lang (pronounced 'long') means tall. An honest mistake, really.

Luckily, after 6 weeks of essentially spending every waking (and sleeping) moment together, Jordi and I still haven't run out of things to talk about, so as I continue to practice my Dutch, and as Jordi continues to pick up more and more lazy idiomatic American English, we're sure to confuse ourselves and each other countless more times. Wat gefilte!

World's Largest Sponges: Free! And extra absorbant.

Friday marked our entrance back into California, back into the sun. Not to say we didn’t see blue skies our whole time in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia, but it was scarce and the sun that did shine shone cold. But yesterday morning we woke up in Redwood National Park and looked up to see cracks of blue sky through the trees, walked out of the forest into bright, distinct warmth.

We were especially thankful for this sunny greeting after essentially being rained out of Canada. You see, we’re trying to travel cheaply, and that means no indulgences on the essentials. We may be willing to fork over $12 each to see the world’s largest sea cave, but when it comes to eating and sleeping in a dry place, we don’t budge. OK, I may be exaggerating, but we definitely did our best to withstand the weather (we came here to camp, and we’re gonna camp, god dammit!). Here’s how it went.

The worst of it was on Vancouver Island. This wasn’t actually part of our original itinerary, but we have a bad habit of just throwing stuff in, an few days here or there, an extra $150 for the ferries, no big deal. Our first night on the island, we camped on a densely wooded ridge overlooking the Pacific near a lovely place called Tofino. It was beautiful, and, though damp, we managed to make it out of there with no worse than a soggy box of matches. (Although, we did accidentally oversleep to be woken up by a park ranger outside our tent calling, “Good morning! I must have missed you guys on my first time through, but we’re closing the park for the season in 15 minutes, and you don’t want to be on this side of a locked gate!”)

That day we discovered that we can’t afford whale-watching excursions, but had fun exploring a vast stretch of unspoiled beach. We left after we’d had our fill of contemplating life and playing with dead sea plants, just as the real rain started. After spending a good amount of time sitting in the car watching the water pound the windshield and arguing about what to do, we finally just drove.

It rained and we drove and we drove and it rained and then we saw A BEAR! Yes, ladies and gentleman, all the wet sleeping bags in the world couldn’t put a damper on my excitement.

But it did keep raining. We found a campground near Port Alberni that hadn’t closed for the season and set up our tent as fast as we could. In we went, safe and dry…for a matter of hours anyway. It’s a 30-year-old tent that hasn’t been waterproofed in who knows how long, so you can imagine how well it managed.

When I woke up, Jordi was still unconscious as usual (I swear, if someone would let him, he would sleep into old age, wake up with a gray beard down to his ankles like…what fable is that?) and it was still raining. My hip pressed into the old, faded egg-crate foam pad my dad lent us. It was cold. I closed my eyes and hoped that it was just cold, not wet. Not wet, please please not wet. I shook Jordi awake and realized my knees were sinking slowly into the pad as though into a gigantic soaked sponge. Dirty water was seeping up to us from underneath. And cue panic.

Now, you may not think this sounds like fun, but I’ll tell you that nothing beats drowning in your own tent. What a way to start the day! Splattering ourselves in mud, we loaded the whole sopping mess into the car as quickly as possible and raced off as though trying to escape some kind of horrible monster. Flee! FLEE! We did manage to get away (though we had nowhere to go), from whatever it was, but it took days for all of our stuff to dry, and even longer to get over the emotional scarring. I just kept telling myself we saw a bear, we saw a bear, we saw a bear.

But I write this now from the coastal town of Mendocino, CA, a little place full of art, hippies and sun, and as I enjoy the organic oatmeal cookie Jordi just bought, I can hardly remember the reek of moldy foam pads and the damp slime of an eternally wet tent. After all, as Jordi’s father would say, we aren’t made of sugar. We can handle it.

Double Dutch

Unusual circumstances brought us to the town of Lynden, Washington, a place that we would have otherwise cruised right by. Jordi is applying for a graduate program conducted in English that requires him to take the TOEFL exam to prove his knowledge of the language. The only testing center that roughly coincided with our itinerary was at the Christian high school in this little town situated just south of the Canadian border. So we went.

Arriving at the campground the night before the exam, we checked in with a woman wearing a baggy pastel sweatshirt and matching scrunchy in her stringy hair. As soon as Jordi told her his last name, Scholten, she freaked out and talked us about half to death in her croaky voice. It turns out—get this—that the town of Lynden is filled with Scholtens. Filled! After discussing this fact for at least 10 minutes, she pulled out the local phone book just to make sure we understood the magnitude of the coincidence.

You see, about half the population of Lynden has Dutch heritage. That’s 50 percent. As the story goes, they came here starting in the early 20th century because the climate was similar to that of the Netherlands. It’s true. A similar climate. Wild, huh? And then they just, like, made lots of babies and turned the place into miniature Holland faster than you can count een twee drie!

And here, standing before this woman, like Hans Brinker reincarnate, was a real Scholten. Straight out of Amsterdam. I’ll tell ya, that knocked her silver skates right off. “You wouldn’t believe it!” she said, “You’ll go into town and see signs in English and Dutch!”

We’re thinking, no freaking way. Well, actually, I was thinking that. Jordi was probably thinking, echt waar?

“There are old people here who still speak real Dutch!” she went on. “And it’s not just Scholtens…” She started listing other “Dutch” names, which were either heavily Americanized or just not Dutch at all. The one I remember best, partly because she kept repeating it and partly because it’s obscene, sounded like “Coochie”. Jordi and I couldn’t for the life of us imagine what actual Dutch name she was trying to say, but I was reminded of popular mid-90s slang, and, well, female genitalia.

We couldn’t wait to get into town and see the madness for ourselves. And boy, she wasn’t lyin’. They had a public bulletin board with flyers for piano lessons and lost cats with a sign that said “Dorpsnieuws” (village news). There was the Dutch Mothers restaurant, the Dutch Bakery, the Dutch Village Inn, the Dutch Computer Repair Emporium. (OK, I made that last one up, but you get the idea.) They had a giant windmill and a mural depicting wheels of gouda, tulip fields and people in clogs. The post office said “Postkantoor” over the door with a Dutch flag and, again, tulips and clogs. It was kitschy and artificial, but damn were they proud. The only thing missing was a tribute to van Gogh and stoned tourists crowding the streets.

Jordi felt right at home. But, alas, we had to leave dear Dutch Lynden and head north to British Columbia. It's funny, though, that we were there so Jordi could prove his knowledge of English, but what we found was a little American town trying, with all its might, to prove its knowledge of all things Dutch.

They also, just to freak you out a little bit, apparently had some sort of scarecrow contest under way.

 

Ah! Happy October everyone.