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.

Pictures of Portland

Here are a few of my photos from the wonderful place that is Portland, OR. It was a brief visit, but it didn't take much time before we were asking ourselves we why don't live there. It just fit.

Patience is a virtue. According to most, anyway.

After our night of horror sleeping 30 feet away from the grunting Larry atop a cold mountain, we treated ourselves to coffee and a giant blueberry muffin at a cozy place called Stage Door (that apparently also does cabaret on the weekends). It was warm and friendly and a little quirky (as most of Mount Shasta City is), and the muffin was fluffy as a cotton ball.

The events of that morning wouldn't really be worth sharing with you if it weren't for a particularly strange message I found in the bathroom. Now, it wasn't the kind of bathroom in which one would normally find scribbling on the walls. It was nice, clean, suitable for an old lady. It even smelled delicious. But there, squeezed in rounded letters onto the carved wood toilet paper holder, were the words,

"Patience gave me genital herpes."

What is this? A cry for help, a protest, a warning?

And, my poor, sweet angsty one, I can't help but wonder, what happens when you're in a hurry?

Meet Larry.

Checking in from Portland here, though I won't be spending time talking about our gracious hosts in this funky Southeast neighborhood, the eclectic Easter egg Victorians, the crisp first days of an Oregon autumn, the vintage stores, coffee, books or dessert bars. It's all delightful and warm and fuzzy, but the night we spent on Mount Shasta makes for a far more interesting story.

The sun was setting as we drove up the 5 on Saturday evening and as we neared our destination I insisted that Jordi take out the guidebook and select a campground. "This one's free," he said, "just exit here and follow this road to the end. It's close." Fine, I thought. Free is free and maybe it's nice. I just wanted a convenient place to camp for a quick night before we continued on to Oregon. But the road kept going, became empty, dark. It was winding slowly up the mountain. The moon, white and full, rose over the trees and glowed through the purple haze of the dim sky. Signs for 4,000 feet elevation, 5,000 feet, 6,000 feet. It got darker, we drove on.

What Jordi hadn't mentioned was that the campground, Panther Meadows, is "high on the mountain"--7,400 feet up, roughly. This mountain is the second highest volcano in the US and still considered active. When we finally found the place, there was just enough light to see the face of the only other person there, getting supplies out of the trunk of his old car. He was in his 40s, a backwoods type with a big gut and long graying curly hair. We asked him a bit about the place, it sounded fine so we unloaded and set up camp in the dark.

As we settled in, we got to talking to our lone neighbor a bit more. He was exceptionally friendly, offered us a helping hand and told us some things he knew about the mountain. He'd been camping up there for about a month so far. Though a nice guy, he was an excessive talker and seemed to disregard a certain level of social protocol. But hey, when we're eating leftover rice out of a pan with plastic spoons, who are we to judge? "Beautiful moon," I said to him as I passed, "Do you think it's full?"

"Full enough for me," he said.

So we joined him, Larry, at his fire. At first the conversation floated around topics like travel and the weather, but we all too quickly learned that Larry, dear old Larry, is a religious fanatic, racist and homophobic. A-ha! I knew there was something less than desirable about this fellow. But we were mooching off his fire atop a cold, dark mountain, and were sort of ensnared in this conversation, so we remained seated on our tree stumps.

Then, it got weird. After Larry finished warning us about gruesome death by quicksand on Oregon beaches, expressing sympathy for white supremacy, and sharing his hopes that God would send him a lonely woman to keep him warm in his tent, he said, "Now here's where I'm gonna sound crazy."

Right, because until this point he was screaming normalcy. "All my life," he went on, "I've been able to see things before they happen. See what's gonna happen to people." I closed my eyes, bracing myself, half-expecting to hear next, "And you two are gonna die tonight on this mountain, and I ain't sayin' how."

He didn't say that. But he did tell us about a telepathic encounter he had with a bear in Tahoe and about hearing the growling breath of a Yeti at the nearby Lake Siskiyou. He said Yeti attacks happen all over Mount Shasta. That they attack groups of grown men. He told us that the ghosts of Indians roam through the land, and that strange men in mysterious vans wander through campsites shining flashlights in random tents and snatching women.

"Yer gonna have bad dreams," he said.

The fire was dying and I'd heard enough. We went to bed and I lay there, stiff, unmoving and scared out of my mind. One of three things will happen tonight, I thought:

1. Larry will remain quietly in his tent and we will pass the night in peace.
2. Larry will remain quietly in his tent but we will be attacked by a Yeti, an Indian ghost, or men in unmarked vehicles scouring the area for innocent campers.
3. Larry will axe us to death in the night.

Fortunately, my imagination proved unreliable yet again, and Larry did remain quietly in his tent. Well, mostly. He was actually making loud, unnatural grunting noises all night. And I don't mean snoring or clearing a sore throat, I mean weird, unnatural, almost shouting grunts. Noises a person can't make while asleep. My fears were outlandish, but Larry was right in predicting that I would have bad dreams.

After spending most of the night in terror, either in waking or asleep, I woke up to the tiny cricks and ticks of chipmunks scrambling through the trees above us. It was morning. The sky was light. We'd survived. We emerged from the warmth of our sleeping bags into the cold, gray day. The jug of water in our tent had frozen while we slept. It was snowing. We explored the empty mountain, the still trees that seemed to greet us calmly and wisely, the frozen creek with fresh running water bubbling just below the ice.

I hated that mountain while I lay terrified in our tent, hated Jordi for having no reservations or worries about Larry, for saying he was just lonely and scared and not actually dangerous. I'm glad he was right. And I'm glad he lured me up to that mountain under false pretenses. Because it was an adventure, and it was pure and simple and beautiful.

But I probably would have rather been on that mountain with a Yeti or a ghost than with Larry.