Tag Archives: adventure

Unexpected Favorite Things

Posted on by under Iconic Place

“…but don’t you think the gazebo looks a little bit small?” The voice of our Austrian tour guide settled comfortably at the top of the treble clef. Saccharine as Salzburg’s famous Mozartkugel, this woman might as well have been a recording playing from an MP3 player hanging from a lanyard around our necks.IMG_5017

“How could they do the sixteen-going-on-seventeen dance here?” She jutted her head forward, the rest of her body remarkably stiff.

At this point in the tour, I could see where her query was going. Similar rhetorical questions had lead to the revelations that the front of the Von Trapp family home was a different property than the back of the house, that we couldn’t get to the exact spot where the opening had been filmed, and that the free place to stay in the downtown was in fact the city’s prison.

While the Alps were, well, the Alps, just about everything else from the movie was a jumbled amalgamation of buildings, Hollywood soundstages, and private properties that we whizzed past on the tour bus.

When Josh and John Mark had invited me on their European adventure, the Sound of Music Tour had been my one stipulation, my “must-see.” I promised to trek with them to stare at the outside of houses Dietrich Bonhoeffer had lived in and to check out the East Berlin Wall Gallery despite frigid winds, but this was my stipulation—to finally embark on my musical theatre pilgrimage.

I don’t know what I thought would happen on the Sound of Music Tour. That someone would hand me an outfit made out of draperies and teach me how to sing? That I’d share in an oddly steamy Austrian folk dance with Christopher Plummer? Or perhaps that I might stomp around downtown Salzburg with a guitar case wearing a dress that “the poor didn’t want” whilst asserting my self confidence in song. If you don’t know the moments in the movie to which I am referencing, you’re missing out.

Instead, at every turn, I was discovering that my childhood favorite movie was cobbled together from scraps of Austria and the Twentieth Century Fox Studio in Los Angeles. IMG_5026

I laughed nervously with my travel companions hoping for the transformative experience to start at any moment, so that the boys would think the tour was “worth it.”

Worth it.

It was the rubric I applied all along our trip to Europe, a notion I’d picked up in a frugal home where each dollar spent on vacation was squeezed like a wet rag till every last drop had been extricated. It was in the way my mom read every placard at the museum and it accompanied the anxious hum in the back of our minds; we may never get to come back to this place. So we’d hover a little longer, trying to stare hard enough at our surroundings to render them meaningful and worth it…

It wasn’t just Salzburg and the tour bus piping Julie Andrews and the Von Trapp Family Singers through its speakers, it was the Holocaust museum in Berlin, and Prague, with its corridors of gift shops filled with sundry items branded with their city’s name. At each stop, I longed to feel different and romantic, and at each stop I found myself tired, or introverted, or hungry, or craving a Diet Coke.

I found myself to be the same self I was in Chicago, except disillusioned that inhaling the European air hadn’t transformed me. In Europe, as in Chicago, real life was much more embodied and much less ethereal than it was in my daydreams. The hard things about being me, about being an adult, my depression and anxiety, and even the prickly hairs that sprouted from my chin, remained.

The Sound of Music tour guide continued with her characteristic refrain, dismantling the magical world created in the film. “How could they do the sixteen-going-on-seventeen dance in such a small gazebo? Hmmmmm? That’s because they didn’t. They built a larger one in Hollywood…”

We couldn’t even go inside the gazebo, because an elderly guest had recently broken her leg trying to dance on the benches as Liesel and Ralph do in the movie. Our passion for the film was a liability to the touring company at each step, as we were reminded to keep everything at an arm’s reach.

The tour ended in the town with the church where Maria and the Captain got married. The interior of the church had been painted pink. Pink. I took an obligatory picture in the aisle of the cathedral, wanting to stomp out of the building like a grumpy toddler. I had been promised magic and instead found altered buildings and relics beyond reach.

As she was wrapping up the tour, the guide suggested we try some “crisp apple strudel,” which was sold at several shops in town for the consumption of parents who had dragged their kids on the tour and retired couples who had watched the movie premiere in theatres. At the peak of my frustration and need for air, we took our strudel “to-go,” a phrase hardly ever uttered in Europe, and went out to explore the town.

I tried to check-in with the boys to see if they resented the fifty dollars spent on the tickets, trying to distract them with impressions of the tour guide and her underwhelming introductions at every stop. Josh and John Mark felt the disappointment of the tour, but it seemed they were able to brush it off, laugh it off… 

As we walked with our noisy plastic to-go boxes chasing the strudel around the base of the containers with plastic forks, we came upon the shore of a lake tucked in the mountains. It looked like something out of Middle-Earth. Long docks stretched their arms into the water and fog rested and pooled around rooftops painted with snow drifts. IMG_5089

It was a view similar to one in the movie, but begging to be examined on its own merits for its mountains, spiky pine trees, water smoothed as if with a frosting knife, and dissolving horizon, where the water seemed to fall off the edge of the earth in an interstellar waterfall as it disappeared from our eyesight.  

Maria Von Trapp, The Grand Canyon, or the Eiffel Tower may draw us to a certain place, but the experience we have there must transcend what could be reduced to a postcard. My experience of the “Sound of Music Tour,” once let loose of my expectations, expanded to more than I could have anticipated.

The tour was posing on the steps where Do-Re-Me had been filmed, but also the hostel we trekked to in the dark along steep gravel paths that seemed more like landscaping than legitimate passageways. It was feeling pretty in my vintage dress cinched in at the waist as we snapped hundreds of pictures at the mystical docks. It was the strudel in crinkling plastic containers, and even the monotone tour guide who disappointed my expectations at every turn.

The tour was a means to an unexpected end, as each stop begged to speak for itself and show us why it is special, the hills not so much alive with the sound of music, but asleep under blankets of snow.

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Queen of the Woods

Posted on by under Guest, Reclaiming Place

A small creek ran through our neighborhood of manicured lawns and look-alike condominiums. Thick walls of gray rock under wire-mesh netting sat on either side of the water’s edge, containing it, keeping all things wet and wild within its borders. When I was a child, I loved to explore there. I loved to escape the stale air-conditioned spaces of our two-bedroom unit and feel the submerged rocks, slick with algae, slip under my feet.

We creek-walked in the shallow places, but the water grew deep near the neck of the small woods bordering the development. There, the neighborhood kids and I spent hours sitting on thick rocks jutting out of the water watching sunfish and crayfish and water striders scuttle by. “The Woods” became the backdrop for every summer day adventure and autumn walk. In the safety and sameness of our suburbia, we were brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, friends and neighbors. In The Woods, we became adventurers and curiosity seekers. We were kings and queens, intrepid explorers, the heroes and heroines of our own stories. We became hosts to the wild inside and out.

As a child, The Woods and the creek gave me worlds to explore. My stomach turned somersaults every time I stepped into the dappled depths of the wooded paths, because I sensed it belonged to a world I could never fully understand. The water and the whispering trees sang a song of freedom to us in an ancient, unknown language. At home I worried about getting things right, in The Woods I just listened to the murmurs, no translation necessary.

As I entered my teens, The Woods no longer lured me in as they did before. I chose time with friends or the swimming pool or, more and more often, I chose books. I began to read about adventures rather than live them. The Woods lost their sense of magic, instead becoming the route I took to arrive, just as the bell rang, at my local high school. Then my mother, after hearing rumors of abandoned beer cans and makeshift shelters hidden among the trees, insisted I stop walking the well-worn path to school. I had to walk the long way around, on the main road, where cars rushed by and kids yelled obscenities out of open windows from big yellow buses.

When I defied my mother due to bad weather, and walked through The Woods on my way home, my stomach clenched in fear. I wondered who might be lurking in the shadows. It was no longer a place of freedom, but a place I must pass through to reach the other side of safety.

The Woods became the passage through which I left behind the simple wonder of my childhood and entered into the complexities of adulthood and maturity.

My parents no longer live in the condominium by the creek, so I can no longer visit. I can’t remember the last time I sat on the jutting rock beside the creek in the sunshine and watched the secret life of water float by. I don’t recall the last walk through The Woods or what I saw there. But, I remember the feeling it gave me as a child. It was the feeling of endless possibility, and I have chased it from state to ocean to country to continent. I may never reclaim The Woods, but I have discovered I can reclaim the feeling it gave me.pasted image 0 (1)

The closest I have come to possibility, to remembering this sense of serendipity and freedom, was in a small forest tucked into the mountains of Horgenberg in Switzerland. I moved to Switzerland in my thirties, no longer a child, but with three children of my own in tow. I began to walk and run in the forest. I discovered its central lake, its tree lined paths covered in leaves and dropped fir needles. I walked in snow, I ran in blazing heat, I prayed and cried and laughed and adventured. It healed me in ways I didn’t know I needed healing. It brought back a sense of childlike wonder I believed was lost forever.

I no longer live in Switzerland, and once again I’ve lost the woods and the water. I live in the suburbs of New Jersey, where concrete and mini-malls surround look-alike housing developments. I haven’t given up hope though. I walk through parks with curated paths of poured cement, and in gardens with glacial rock formations surrounded by manicured lawns. Again, I’m a wild queen contained in a tower, an explorer trapped in a maze of concrete, but I haven’t stopped looking for the door. I believe with enough searching, I will discover a place that I will claim and call mine, where I will once again know freedom. I’ll know it by the way my stomach twists with excitement when I discover it. I’ll know it in the way it makes me believe in endless possibilities.

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pasted image 0Kimberly Coyle is a writer, mother, and gypsy at heart. She tells stories of everyday life and the search for belonging while raising a family and her faith at kimberlyanncoyle.com. She writes from the suburbs of New Jersey, where she is learning how to put down roots that stretch further than the nearest airport. Connect with her on Twitter @KimberlyACoyle or her FB page Kimberly Coyle

The Creek Less Traveled

Posted on by under Memory & Place

There were many bodies of water to enjoy and explore at my grandparents’ cabin—it was Northern Michigan, after all, where bodies of water are as common as fields of corn where I live now, in Central Illinois.

The small, inland lakes had their appealing features: sandy shores for digging, floating rafts to dive from, and glass-like surfaces that perfectly mirrored the evening sky until the canoe you paddled broke through the stillness.

But of the many tempting bodies of water, it was the creek that enticed me most. The creek had something the lakes didn’t: It had mystery, a destination.

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We called it simply The Creek, but on a detailed-enough map it has a proper name: Canada Creek. It probably winds for miles, but our encounters with the creek took place in the far upper-east corner of Michigan’s lower peninsula—right where the cuticle of your index finger would settle in the mitten-shaped map.

As elementary-aged kids, my older brother and I were allowed to walk together down a curving sand road until it became a one-lane bridge at the creek. The road was rarely traveled, like all the roads in the area—we were somewhere in the midst of 20 square miles of woods and water known as Canada Creek Ranch (only a fourth of which was dotted with a few hundred cabins).

At the creek, my brother and I stood on the bridge for a while, tossing stones into the water to hear them plink and plunk their varying notes. Then we slid and scrambled down the gravely bank to the creek’s shore, where we inevitably ditched our canvas sneakers and sweaty socks to wade in the cold, clear spring water. It was sandy and shallow by the bridge; I liked to stand very still, hoping a dragonfly might land on me, while the tadpoles investigated my toes.

But how long could a kid stand still in a creek? After all, the creek had places to go and things to show us.

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PICT0023I’m guessing that we schemed and planned our first creek walk when I was about seven, sitting around Grandma’s breakfast table, pancakes piled high and studded with wild blueberries we had picked the day before. I’m sure my brother and I were persuasive in our desire to follow the creek. Not only did it beg to be further explored, but the creek held potential for so many stories. The grownups were apparently just as intrigued, because a new summer tradition was born (one that continued into our teen years, as seen in the photo): The Creek Walk.

On Creek Walk day my brother and I set out as adventurers, eager to play the characters in our favorite books—to live out their stories, or more likely a compilation of their stories. Laura Ingalls, Davey Crockett, Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea each took a turn being embodied by us as we forged the stream.

Sometimes we talked through our stories as we walked, staying in character as we navigated over or under a fallen tree. At other moments I broke from character to yelp as I slipped on a rock and nearly went under, or to complain when my brother, leading the way, fooled us with his favorite trick: gradually bending his knees then walking on them until the water was up to his neck, which suggested it would be well over my head. (A few times he wasn’t joking, and it actually was that deep.)

And then there were spells when all of us were quiet, amazed by just how quiet the world could be, save for the swish of our legs displacing the water as we walked, and the song of a Goldfinch from somewhere above. Now that I think of it, I don’t recall ever encountering another person on our many creek walks.

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After three or so hours of pressing on, the heat and deer flies became more bothersome, as did the ache in our legs and the rumble in our stomachs. Grandma began searching for a place to exit the creek—an opening in the tangle of brush where the bank wasn’t too steep and we could make our way from the creek’s winding world into the woods.

How Grandma had any idea where we were, I’ll never know. But she had hiked and skied those acres for years, and could confidently point us in the direction of Little Joe, one of the remote lakes on Canada Creek Ranch. We followed deer paths or forged our own way in the direction she pointed, motivated by what we knew we would find at our destination: Grandpa, firing up the grill for hotdogs. Each year on Creek Walk day he put the cooler Grandma had prepared into the car and drove the two-track roads through the woods to meet us at Little Joe’s lone picnic table.

After our feast, we all packed into Grandpa’s car, soggy and worn, to drive back to the cabin. The hotdogs and the lift home were luxuries Sacajawea never had, but by that point I was ready to be a modern-day little girl again, tucked into bed where more creek adventures could be spun in my dreams.

The Pantry Club

Posted on by under Home & Place

“You aren’t going to blog about this are you?!?!?”

While my brother-in-law was playfully enquiring about my future posts, my mom was carefully pouring alcohol into shot glasses, trying to create a layered effect. shots

As a send-off at the end of my Christmas break, my family did a round of shots.

Lest anyone worry, my mom described them as “wussy shots” –something with an embarrassing name and an alcohol that doesn’t burn.

And my pregnant sister abstained.

We toasted to another semester, to family and “To The Pantry Club!” and swallowed the creamy drink.

In my childhood home, the pantry is a 15 x 8 foot hallway, flanked by floor-to-ceiling shelves. It has some creepy corners where a flashlight would be useful if one was to explore. The spare keys hang on the flat side of an outer shelf and on another, the board is marked with short lines and dates, designating our heights at different ages.

The pantry holds Christmas decorations, a fruit dehydrator, catering apparatus, and a respectable collection of glass jars. There is a supply of water, a deep freezer, the pet food, and a complicated trash system to accommodate recycling.  My cousin once spent 45 sweaty minutes in one of those empty trash cans during an epic game of Hide-and-Seek-in-the-Dark.

It has party supplies, canning supplies, baking supplies, and emergency supplies. A few shelves are dedicated to spices and dry goods and canned food. And in the corner, the stash of alcohol hides.

adventure raceAs a Labor Day tradition, my parents have for many years hosted an annual Adventure Extravaganza Weekend. The weekend might involve all sorts of activities: a bike ride, shooting, a poker tournament, backyard parties, a yard games contest, and outings into town. People camp in the yard or find a couch to claim; everyone takes turns prepping meals. The centerpiece of the weekend is a team event called the “Adventure Race” which is a series of competitive activities that are limited only by my parents creativity and my moms fear of people getting hurt.

As “the regulars” have gotten older, the weekend has included more babies and less beer. But, in its early years, there were no babies. It was in that time that “The Pantry Club” was born. The red curtain separating the pantry from the kitchen would be drawn and toasts and cheers would heard from the small gathering hiding in a certain corner of the pantry.

Thus, for me as well as many of those whom I love, the pantry speaks of the Peterson house.

It speaks of the hospitality of my parents and the adventures that many associate with the house.

It speaks of my mom, her presence palpable in so many of the treasures hidden on the top shelves that she insists on keeping.

It speaks of my childhood, noted in the red and blue lines on the marked board and captured in the memories veiled in the stuff.

It speaks of friends and food and fun.

It speaks of home.

And so, join me in a toast: To The Pantry Club!

 

Where I Came From: 5,000 Miles and Back Again

Posted on by under Welcome to You Are Here

When I was a little girl with two brown pigtails and bangs cut straight across my forehead, home was a grey-blue ranch-style house situated in the middle of Michigan’s palm. It was also a musty-smelling blue canvas tent, the sweaty brown vinyl backseat of a station wagon, and the open road, always leading to someplace new.

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If “home” is defined as a specific place, then my answer to “Where are you from?” is clear: I’m from St. Johns, Michigan, a town of about 12,000 people with a two-stoplight Main Street that’s anchored on the south end by a classic Midwestern courthouse. My parents still live in the house they bought when I was just five, and when we visit today, my own daughters sleep in my childhood bedroom.

All the kids who went to my elementary school lived in town like me, but by the time we were in middle school, our classmates were pretty evenly split between “town kids” and the “country kids” who grew up on surrounding farms. (My best friend Rhonda was a country kid with horses we rode on the weekends.)

Besides sleepovers and football games, there weren’t many parent-approved things to do for fun, at least not until we were old enough to drive the half hour to Lansing for date-worthy restaurants, movies, and malls. But St. Johns was a good place to be a kid. Growing up in a sheltered town meant plenty of freedom to bike everywhere—the city pool, friends’ houses, the library, and the bakery for custard-filled long johns. We didn’t wear helmets or lock our bikes—the only requirement was a wristwatch so we wouldn’t be late for dinner.

But even with such deep roots in a single place, I also grew up with an understanding of home that was nomadic: Home was wherever you stopped and pitched the tent when it was time to cook dinner. bluetent

My parents were both teachers, which meant summers offered more time than money. Flying from Michigan to visit relatives on the West Coast wasn’t in the budget, so each summer we packed up our wood-paneled station wagon and hit the road for about six weeks.

I was prone to carsickness, so there were just two ways I rode in the car: sprawled asleep across the backseat or awake and perched dead center, leaning forward until I was almost as much in the front seat with my parents as I was in the back. Luckily, my big brother was never the sort to draw a line down the middle of the seat and enforce it with punches or pinches. Besides, I think he was happy to let me chatter away to my parents, leaving him in relative peace with his books.

The ultimate destinations we drove toward—a visit with our grandparents in L.A. or our favorite cousins in Portland, a week spent hiking in Glacier National Park, or a few days exploring San Francisco—were well-worth the 5,000-or-so miles we covered each summer. But so many days were devoted to just getting there, driving through endless-seeming states like Nebraska or North Dakota, only stopping for gas, bathroom breaks, and to eat the sandwiches Mom had made at the campground that morning.

After a full day of driving, as the sun was lowering in the sky and Mom’s voice was hoarse from reading aloud Little House on the Prairie books, we pulled out a thick campground guide and chose a place to stay—with a pool, if my brother and I were lucky. At the campground, Mom pulled out the camp stove and started dinner while the rest of us got to work setting up the tent and filling it with sleeping bags and pillows. The next morning it all came down again, was packed back into the car, and we drove some more—to the next place we would call “home” for a night.

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Now, when I think about where I come from, I still envision that ever-present grey-blue house, first. I am very much a small-town Michigan girl. But it occurs to me that my rootedness in that place has always been filtered through an understanding of other places—of treeless plains and impressive peaks, of rugged beaches with magical tide pools, and of Chinatowns and subways, operas and contemporary art. I knew where I was back home in Michigan because I also knew where I wasn’t.

And in that sense, I come from places that protected me as well as places that exposed me—from a small Michigan town and big Montana mountains; from the inside of a station wagon, where my entire family was always close enough to touch, to a crowded San Francisco sidewalk where strangers pressed in as I absorbed glimpses of the world.

stationwagonPhotographs by William E. Tennant

 

Where I Am: Twenty Minutes from Alaska

Posted on by under Welcome to You Are Here

“[‘Nature’] always happens in a place, and generally, whatever you see and learn, you do so in a small place…So why not look around and see where you are?”    – Gary Snyder, The Etiquette of Freedom

 

My sons’ mother and I had barely pulled into town in August 2003 when longtime residents informed us, “Alaska is twenty minutes outside Anchorage.” The fact that our newly adopted city wasn’t in league with the Truly Wild and Last Frontier initially struck me as unfortunate and disheartening. I’d held higher hopes for the place in which we’d soon start raising a family.

Still, it was helpful to learn that sage little chestnut. It alleviated some of my bewilderment towards the city we had – albeit, a little impulsively – elected to call home for the next couple years (which has since become ten, though that’s a different story).

Only days earlier, after nearly two weeks spent road tripping from my city of origin, Philadelphia, and through some of the most scenic and jaw-dropping wilderness areas in North America, I pulled into Anchorage feeling just a little duped, appearing to have landed…in South Jersey?

To the new arrival – especially one from a major metropolitan area relocating to Alaska’s largest city – Anchorage looks less like the Metropolis of the North than a complex and intricately woven web of strip-malls, each of which rests couched in the massive, sprawling lots that contain them.

And for the first few years that we lived here, that’s all I could see. It ate at me constantly: Never mind brown bears and wolverines! How have you people survived such garish aesthetics? You’re an architect? Can’t you do something about all this?

So, while we were married, the kids’ mom and I thrilled in every possible opportunity to peel past the city limits, beyond the gaudy shopping centers and stop-and-go traffic, spilling headlong into the jaw dropping landscapes always twenty minutes or more beyond Anchorage. And in that way, yes, we’re very spoiled here. I won’t pretend otherwise: It’s incredible. It is Alaska out there. With camping gear and rations packed, the grand SUV of fat-tired strollers in the trunk, and a Baby Bjorn strapped to one of our chests, we were often wilderness bound, city-free, and soon romping around in a real-life postcard in no time.

However, when I became a single dad to my two boys a couple years ago, those postcard-romps became a little more difficult to achieve. Not impossible, but a whole lot tougher to pull off single-handedly, much less with anything remotely resembling frequency, or urgency, or – more recently – even energy and drive.

Between parenting, domestic duties, juggling a couple jobs, and moonlighting as a musician, nothing seems more adventurous or wild in my mind many nights than a solid, single night’s sleep.

Nowadays, I’m happy to let the John Krakauers reveal their life-altering Into the Wild and Into Thin Air adventures (and misadventures), if only because I’m trying to conquer the Mount McKinley of laundry piles preventing me from freely collapsing to my bed, or couch, or both. By day’s end, a few meals worth of dishes in the sink, and a minefield of the boys’ most sinister, microscopic Legos embedded in the carpet – brilliant for late night, barefoot walks across the living room – the only adventure you stand to sell me features red wine and my guitar.

The Baroness, the apartment complex in which I reside and spend part of each week with my sons, is nothing to look at. In fact, let’s disregard the building. If you visit, I’ll want to turn your attention the other direction. From our second floor balcony, turn your gaze towards the Chugach Mountains strung along the horizon line, the not too distant range resting there, cradling our funky and flawed effort at a ready-made city, oblivious to our mess. We witness the moon’s cycles, sunrises, and sunsets from this same landing, too. In recent years, even despite the nearby city lights, I’ve somehow seen a handful of aurora displays dance across the winter’s night sky from our building’s front yard.

There’s a creek a short walk away from the apartment, running along a trail network that winds the length of the city. These days it strikes me as only regrettable that during all the years we were firing up the Forester and blowing out of town towards postcard-worthy locations, I never acknowledged or considered this minor-miracle trail network for the nearby wonder it today, time and again proves to be for me. Could I have survived my failed marriage without this stretch of winding path, without the creek’s song singing me through any number of the soul’s dark spells all those long nights a couple years ago?

Sure, the creek is frequently littered with empty cigarette cartons, Wal-Mart bags, and spent liquor and beer bottles. But in recent years I’ve come to adore and rely on how the sun’s light hits the water and trees lining its banks a million different ways in every day. The creek, too, runs in every season, even under the ice that will soon cover it. And its song never changes. I’ve only recently begun to hear that song, and it seems a timeless one, moving to some universal heart’s rhythm, a lulling song that – if it used words – might croon,

“Here You Are,

Here You Are…

And Here You Are…”

Chester Creek, AK