Birthday Cake: Abroad

I plan trips carefully, choosing my companions with as much thought as I can. Still, despite my best efforts, things sometimes go awry.

This was how I found myself in Europe over my birthday, right in the middle of a two week trip which was meant to be an adventure. Communication hadn’t functioned, and I opened my eyes each morning to greet my worst nightmare: lonely in a foreign country. Isolated in someone else’s house. Out of place in someone else’s life.

I was staying in the heart of the small country of Luxembourg, which is situated between Germany, Belgium, and France. The entire country is smaller than the state of Rhode Island.

On my birthday, my hostess decided that I should have a birthday cake. For a moment, my spirits rose. She asked me what kind I would like and I answered honestly. “Chocolate, with coconut icing.”

She searched through her cookbooks until she found a recipe she thought would do. Then she got out the ingredients and turned the book over to me, sitting at a barstool to watch.

My experiences with baking have been rather fraught. Once, I replaced baking powder with baking soda in a batch of biscuits, ending up with hard, pungent rocks. On another occasion, I attempted to make peanut butter cookies for a beau’s father. When my mother saw them, she buried them in the kitchen trash can, covering them with other trash to hide them from view.

Cara, bakingMy hands shook as I began to follow the recipe. I didn’t talk much, I knew my voice would shake, too.

I had never used a kitchen scale, and it took me a moment to figure it out, reading the recipe and matching it to the new units of measurement.

But, like my childhood hero Amelia Bedelia, I took a little of this and a pinch of that and made cake batter.

We made several small cakes instead of one large one, and while they baked, I stirred up the frosting, following another recipe. It was a little stiff and a little sweet for me, but by then I was spent. I frosted half of the small cakes and allowed them to sit on the counter.

When I tasted one that night, I was overwhelmed by the feeling that it was dry. No amount of water seemed to help.

In spite of my disappointment about the way the trip had gone, I was keenlybirthday cake: abroad aware that I might not be in Europe again for a long time, if ever. It was heartbreaking to feel that the trip was a waste. I promised myself that I was not a waste of a trip.

We traveled to Orval, to learn how the Trappist beer was made and to sip hot chocolate in the chill of the early afternoon. We darted through rain in France, consuming pastries and coffee, the only one I was confident pronouncing: cafe au lait. I endured the stomach aches I got after these cups of coffee, my stomach rebelling at all the dairy.

I inspected leggings at a shop in Germany, only to be hard-sold by a salesgirl who searched a long time for the right English word: those will make your ass look hot, she said.

mint teaOne sunny day, we took the train to the Netherlands to meet a friend who lived in Amsterdam. We spent the day walking around Maastricht, and I reveled in the overheard English words, and the tea I had learned to order, made with fresh mint in a clear glass.

My friend was at ease in the city, in the country, and I couldn’t help but be at ease with her as she smoked a sultry cigarette every hour or so, like clockwork.

I have never experienced friendlier sunshine than I did in Maastricht that day.

For the rest of the trip, I ate birthday cake for breakfast.

I rose earlier than the other occupants of the house, partly because of jet-lag, and I presume, because of anxiety.

I ate the cake until the small round mounds became too hard and my hostess threw them away.

True love travels

My take on “true love” is this: You can’t be sure it’s true until you’ve traveled together.

When Jason and I were planning our honeymoon, months before we even got on the plane, I knew the two of us made a great match.

For instance, there was no argument about what should be our top priority in deciding which country to go to. Of course it would be cuisine.

After running a variety of potential honeymoon locations through the cuisine filter, we began discussing what we might want to do with our time besides cook and eat (and, um, sleep). Our second priority, we agreed, was being in a place where we could simultaneously relax and absorb culture. We wouldn’t have to leave a resort or cruise ship to go off in search of whatever it was that might make the place “ethnic” and unique. There wouldn’t be a checklist of “must-sees” to work through—no posing for pictures by each iconic sight to prove we had indeed been there. We wanted to simply be—to do everyday things we love to do at home, like read, sit outside at cafes and talk, cook together, take walks at sunset—but in a completely different place.

With healthy doses of self-control, that type of travel experience can be had just about anywhere, but we wanted to go someplace where we wouldn’t even feel lured into a trap of tourist rushing and doing, checking train schedules, packing our bags and moving from one hotel to another in an attempt to “see it all.” Our choice would completely eliminate the possibility of people later saying, “You went to [fill in the country] and you didn’t go see [fill in the artwork, cathedral, city, castle, etc.]???”

OiaviewClearly, that narrowed our list down to a very easy choice: to honeymoon on a small Greek island.

And on that small island, we chose a town high up on the cliffs—one without a port large enough to handle passing cruise ships, or roads wide enough for tourist buses.

And in that small town, we chose to stay in a small, kitchen-equipped apartment carved right into those cliffs (locally known as “cave houses”).

And there, in and around our small cave, overlooking the Caldera and the sea, we went about our everyday lives in a completely new way.

donkeysOia (pronounced ee-ah) on the island Santorini has the perfect mix of everything and nothing: winding, narrow lanes and walks with room only for pedestrians and the donkeys that transport loads too heavy for people; local craftspeople and shops, complete with the town’s collection of sweet stray dogs napping in the sun; markets selling local yogurt, figs, wine, honey, eggs, cheese, and olives; and views of the sea and sunsets that take your breath away.

What Oia doesn’t have was just as important to our experience there. It doesn’t have room for motor vehicles of any kind beyond the town perimeter—certainly not for any loud construction vehicles (which means there are no large hotels or multi-storied buildings). It didn’t (in 2007, at least) have wireless Internet (and the cell phones we had at the time were useless there). And it doesn’t have a list of must-see sights (unless you count the sun setting over the Caldera).

It was quiet. It was gorgeous. We could be at home there, yet it was very different from home.

kitchenetteIn the mornings we drank coffee and ate farm eggs, or yogurt and figs on our porch, still in our pajamas, idly talking about what we might want to do that day, if anything.

Later, we strolled through town, trying a local restaurant for lunch when our stomachs began to grumble, followed by, perhaps, a longer walk into the countryside, or time with books, coffee and sweets on the terrace. Often we napped in the cool, dimness of our honeymoon cave.

cookingdinnerThe only rule that seemed to guide us was more like an anti-rule: an unspoken agreement that we would make things up as we went along. Sometimes a trip to the market would inspire a dinner made in our kitchenette. Other times a restaurant we had discovered on a walk earlier that day would be tempting us by evening. Dinners were long and leisurely, and each day ended the same way: with the setting of the sun and the rising of the moon.

We have since taken other trips together—including some less leisurely and more scripted than our trip to Santorini. But the ease by which we plan and embark on travels together has continued to be a hallmark of the compatibility in our marriage—one that not only allows us to bond and feel refreshed by our travel experiences, but also spills over into how we travel together through life.

 

kiss

Mi Tierra

After nearly 24 hours, we finally landed in Havana. It was May of 1998, the summer after I’d completed my sophomore year in college, when I accompanied my mother back to her homeland, an island she hadn’t seen since 1971 when she boarded a plane as part of the Freedom Flight program. Our multi-stop journey — Los Angeles to Houston to Cancun to Havana — was made with each of us wearing several layers of clothing, all of which we would leave behind. That’s what you did when you visited family in Cuba.

Exhausted, we stood before an inspector who began to pick apart our luggage, item by item, all of which Mom had carefully selected and weighed, because the rule was if you were over the weight allotment, they would require some kind of remittance. Knowing this, Mom slipped our inspector a twenty dollar bill, and just like that, we were allowed to move forward.

Just on the other side of the makeshift cordoned off area for those waiting, was our family—the real people whose names and faces I’d only known through photographs and stories that occasionally worked themselves from my mother’s memory. After a round of hearty hugs, Mom and I were ushered into a relic of a car and off to her cousin’s apartment. With the windows down (the AC had long since stopped working), we drove through the damp Caribbean air under a silken evening sky. I found it hard to believe we were actually here; we were in Cuba, finally. It wasn’t a mythical land about which was sung to me through lyrics from my mother’s albums. This place was in fact real. I let my head lean against the doorframe and listened to the salty waves crashing against the stone walls along the famous stretch of Malecon that held up this crumbling city.

We spent two weeks in Cuba, visiting with family and taking in as much as we could. I got to see the elementary school Mom attended, and the apartment where she had lived with her own mother. Everywhere we went we were treated like royalty—brought to tables bowing under the weight of feasts prepared. Someone had gotten wind that I loved mangoes, so at every stop there was always plenty of fresh mango, the flesh of the bright orange fruit so sweet that it could have only ripened under an island sun. We walked through abandoned sugar factories, gnawing on the raw cane. There were trips to swimming pools, and dinner dances at rooftop bars. Music and laughter was never far from our ears and lips, and someone was always telling me a story of when my mother was a little girl. This woman I had only ever known as my mother, a figure I often worked hard to steer against as a teenager, took on a new light. She had a history that was all her own, one apart from mine. For the first time I saw her as an individual.

My favorite memory rests with the particular leg of the trip that took us to Camaguey, the town from which Mom came. We were sitting in the backyard of someone’s house, most of the women busying themselves with putting the meal together, while the men were planted in a circle, passing around the two bottles of rum we had purchased with our American dollars at the local store. There was the sound of glass clinking as someone poured himself another swig, callused farm-worked hands rubbing scruffy cheeks, and laughter. There was so much laughter. At some point someone arrived with an accordion, and the group broke into a spontaneous rendition of Guantanamera. I know the lyrics because I grew up with them, Mom singing the song at parties, or turning up the stereo if the track came through the speakers. I knew Guantanamera, and I felt part of these people, this island, this place. I sang with them, our arms interlocking with one another, feet tapping in rhythm, the accordion scissoring its soulful notes through the heavy afternoon air.

The toothy smiles, the plumes of dust kicked up by our dancing heels in the backyard of our cousin’s house, the smell of stewing goat meat on the open fire in a makeshift shack of a kitchen. That scene has been stitched into my history and I often wonder what will happen to our connection with Cuba when my mother is gone. She is the last true link to the island, and all the history that lies with those people, the ones with whom we danced and sang.

DSC01229My own daughter, Lucille, was born in October of 2013. Weeks into her new life, my rawness into Motherhood, I discovered that if I wore her strapped to my chest and played music, her screams would calm as she became lulled by the rhythm of my dancing body. Often, the music I played  was Cuban. I recently posted a picture of my daughter wearing a woven fedora. The caption read, Ella no nacio en Cuba, pero la isla vive en su corazon. Translation: She wasn’t born in Cuba, but the island lives in her heart. It’s in her smile — the one I gave her —the food I make, the music we listen to, and the intangible way my mother has taught me to live life. And now this breathes in Lucy, stitched in the fabric of her flesh, in all the ways that can be seen and unseen.

We are always there.

*    *    *    *    *

3_9_14 (25 of 27)“Mi Tierra” was written by Ilene Marshall. Ilene resides in Pittsburgh, PA, with her husband and daughter. When she’s not documenting her life through photography, she attempts to capture some of it in writing. She has been a teacher for 11 years, but finds that often times, the biggest lessons aren’t found in books. Ilene blogs atThese Marmalade Skies,” and her photography can be seen at Ilene Marshall Photography.

Alone in the City Again

In one of the final moments my Chicago community gathered together, I knelt on a swiveling armchair and squeezed my shoulders in next to Caitlyn and Ben’s.  We peered out the window in the boys’ Logan Square apartment; its angle pointed to the intersection of Kedzie and Schubert Ave where rain fell on the aftermath of a car crash.

Alone in the City AgainThe crash had thrown a cooler from the back of a truck, and now, the contents of a summer picnic spilled on the pavement. The doors of the truck remained open, the driver long since run away.

As sirens bent around buildings toward the scene, the sky opened to sheets of water and timpani thunder. Spectators hurried inside, looking back over their shoulders, hoping to catch a last glimpse of the action. Maybe like me, they found it easier to look on the wreckage of someone else’s life than to face their own.

Lord, I don’t want to be alone in the city again.

There were eight of us, expatriates of our college suburb in some stopgap Alone in the City Again 2time between college and the rest of life: six boys who lived together in Logan Square, their around the block neighbor Caitlyn, and myself.

My first year in Chicago, I fell into the trap of urban loneliness; it is easy to remain anonymous in a city—wake up, go to work, return to your little compartment, and shut the door behind you, waiting for an invitation to join the bustle. I was a first year teacher, falling asleep to episodes of “Mad Men” at 7:30 p.m., clinging to perceptions that I could not “fit in” with the cool kids.

By my second year in the city, my unhappiness persuaded me to try something different; I resolved to fashion Chicago into a home. I began to invite people over, rationalizing that perhaps others wanted someone to organize togetherness as much as I did.

With fluttering heart beats and shallow breath, I pushed all the chairs in my apartment into the living room and rigged up a digital antenna to broadcast the 2012 summer Olympics. Amidst my good intentions were less noble feelings of desperation: “like me,” “love me,” “stay with me.”

Talking myself into courage, I clung to a Field Of Dreams like promise that if I built the parties, meals, and traditions, the community would gather. And it did.

In summer, friends propped themselves on pillows that leaned against the rails of the back porch. We watched movies on a wobbly projector screen, and I served bowls filled with stove-popped popcorn drizzled with browned butter and rosemary. The boys came over to my apartment with ravenous appetites and cases of PBR. They recited compliments and “mmmms” around the table, sons of polite mothers.

We lived a sitcom city life, but I soon realized I had built a foundation of cement for a shantytown. The others talked about leaving, about futures beyond the walls of the city. I began to panic. What was wrong with Chicago? What was wrong with me?

On one afternoon, we draped a picnic blanket over the boys’ front steps. I sliced Brie and apples, arranging them on a plate to eat with a baguette and glasses of red wine. The conversation drifted towards careers and futures. Tim mentioned moving to Denver and my heart lurched.

Caitlyn suggested an exodus to her home state of California. Ben proposed working in his cousin’s bookstore in Portland. I tried not to scream, “Why not here?” Instead, I cried on the car ride home.

I felt like a little girl begging her parents not to leave her with a babysitter; if I could have clung to their legs as they tried to drag their feet out of the city, I would have.

At one of our three 1920s parties, I hung my head back, warm with gin, and listened to the lullaby of our conversation. Marty argued with another friend about the Meyers Briggs of Jesus, and Caitlyn and Andrew made the floor moan and creak with their dancing. I knew that we had become something together. With such bounty, maybe no one would ever leave.

Please God, let no one ever leave.

But tonight with the news that Tim had an interview in Washington D.C., I finally gave myself permission to take inventory of our dwindling social circle. Tonight we were together for Caitlyn’s farewell. Andrew left in May for another continent, and Ben would leave by the end of the month for Grand Rapids. Others cast their lines towards new horizons, waiting for any tug towards something different. Already there had been garage sales and exchanges of items that couldn’t fit in moving trucks.

I strung my problems together, making them into one giant demon that tormented me with questions and fears. Suddenly the boys leaving meant I shouldn’t take risks, that all my prospects for marriage would be over, that I could not discern the whispers of God’s will, that I had proved unworthy of love and ended up a failure. I grafted each of these things to the paths my friends took away from the city, away from me.

Daniel played Beethoven’s seventh symphony as two tow trucks pulled the wreckage of the crash away in different directions. The thunderstorm, the car crash, and then a silent ride home with Tim—signs and wonders denoting the end. I wanted the city to swallow me into its dark belly.

I forgot how lonely the city could feel at night.

*****

Meredith Bazzoli“Alone in the City Again” was written by Meredith Bazzoli. Meredith has spent her whole life orbiting around Chicago and its suburbs. She currently resides just west of the city with her husband Drew, who grew up a hoosier. She never thought she could marry one of those. Meredith writes, performs improv comedy, and teaches in West Garfield Park (all stories for another day). She seeks to start conversations about the life we stuff under the bed and keep off our Instagram feeds.

You can connect with her at www.veryrevealing.com

Black and white photos from the night in the essay by Daniel Saunders.

Choose Your Own Isolation

It was January in London. The damp hung in the air, seeping into my lungs and up the legs of my flared jeans, as I walked the streets each day for hours, along with the rest of my contingent, students on a month-long study abroad.

I’d always loved the idea of studying abroad, and I’d always wanted to return to England after living there for a few short months as a four-year-old. My memories were hazy, but they were present. I wanted to return to a place I’d been happy, feeding cows in the afternoons at a nearby dairy, watching them slowly envelop my small handfuls of grass, looking at me with large, soulful eyes.

Our professor was very tall, and I found my five-foot-two self falling further and further behind as he gestured to the objects and sites of interest as we passed. I couldn’t hear a word. Frequently, I would break into a run, so that I didn’t start to panic about losing sight of the last member of the group and truly being as alone as I felt.

At the end of each long day, we would return to our hotel, a few blocks from Queen’s Way. My roommate was often ready to go out to a show on the West End, but I was usually spent, my feet aching from all of the walking, feeling so far away from everyone I loved. I had signed up for the trip without knowing anyone well, and I found it difficult to break into the groups which had formed long before the trip had started.

Choose Your Own IsolationAlthough I didn’t venture out on my own at first, soon I grew a bit more brave (or perhaps just desperate). Although I worried about getting lost, I walked the blocks to Queen’s Way, slipping into a Spar I’d visited earlier in the trip with fellow students. I purchased a samosa, some decaf PG Tips (the tea my mother drank at home on special occasions) and a single piece of baklava.

I walked back to the hotel with my simple meal, and waited until the kettle had come to a boil. Slowly, I poured the hot water over the tea bag in my cup, watching the deep brown fingers curl into the water. I added some powdered soy milk, brought from home, and a swizzle of honey, before taking my first sip. To this day, when I drink PG tips in the evening, I am back in that spare hotel room, and I start to crave baklava.

This ritual became my sanity. My feet learned the way to the Spar, and I slowly stopped shaking on the way. Sometimes I even ventured away from my usual samosa, and tried one of the other interesting Indian delicacies in the hot case.

But I always got baklava. It was soggy, and left my fingers sticky, but it comforted me still, a sweet spot in a winter evening, the perfect companion to a cup of tea. It was the last thing I ate, and I waited as long as I could before consuming it, not wanting the experience to end, to be left alone in the hotel.

I’ve always been frugal, and this trip was no exception. I tried to avoid eating out, buying cress sandwiches at Tesco as I passed by, and storing packaged pasta salad on my hotel windowsill to keep it cool, hoping that housekeeping wouldn’t see it and throw it away.

I’m sure that this was a large part of the isolation I felt. Instead of bonding with my traveling companions over hot bowls of soup, I snuck into tiny grocery stores and ate on the run. During one such transaction, I must have betrayed something of my loneliness. “Are you happy?” the cashier asked me. She looked concerned, and genuine. I was surprised by the directness of the question, and by being seen in that anonymous place, so far from home. I can’t remember what I said, but I couldn’t forget it.

I started looking over my finances, gradually loosening my grip on my money. One day I found an Indian buffet with two other girls. I ate hot chicken soup at Stonehenge. I purchased greasy fish and chips in Canterbury and mushroom risotto at the Eagle and Child, while toasting C.S. Lewis and all that his words had meant to me.

The knot in my chest finally started to untangle. My phone calls home became less desperate. I started to reach out, just a little. I stood closer to the group, and chatted with some of them. I joined them for shopping trips to H&M (which seemed so exotic in those days). I’d written off these people in the early days of the trip, but as I made slow steps in their direction, they responded. I didn’t meet a lifelong best friend on that trip, but I did learn that I wasn’t as alone as I felt. I was the instigator of my own isolation. I had the power to connect all along.

My Life as a Failed Fifties Housewife

From the beginning, there were no illusions of my culinary domesticity. We met, he cooked, and I fell in love.

At the time, I was working in campus ministry, which meant: one, I was not wealthy, but two, I had a generous expense account. With it, I took students out for dinner and ate lovely balanced meals. I always ordered meat, because restaurant meat was the only animal protein I was getting at the time. I always ordered fresh vegetables, because vegetables are expensive when they don’t come in a can.

At home, I ate things from cans. And Zatarain’s. Lots of Zatarain’s.

zatarain's

There is no shame in eating red beans and rice from a box. And my to-be husband was happy to cook. He loves to cook, and most people love to eat what he cooks. I was content to do the shopping and dishes, and to set the table with candles and cloth napkins.

I’m not completely undomesticated.

Our system worked well until children came into the picture. For a variety of reasons, and against both of our good judgments, I became a mostly stay-at-home mom, though I tried to be not-at-home as much as possible.

I spent a lot of time pushing strollers around museums, frequented the library, and mapped the location of every bathroom at the zoo. I leaned up against piles of laundry and read theology during naptime. I planned playdates with people I liked, and refused to give up coffeeshops.

This was my survival strategy, and everything (apart from diapers, inexplicable crying and constant fatigue) was fine and dandy. Until about five-thirty.

“Honey, I’m home!”

dad

And almost every day, when my husband walked through the front door, I experienced two emotions simultaneously. One was relief, “Oh-thank-you-Jesus-it’s-another-grown-up,” and the other, a daily dose of magnified guilt about dinner. It felt like June Cleaver was slapping me across the face with her perfectly manicured hand. Dinner. He had just worked all day long, and I was at the museum, and now I expected him to make dinner.

Housewife fail.

Now, nevermind that my husband likes to cook and that it helps him unwind from the day (I do not understand this, but he swears that it is true). Nevermind that it gives him a free pass from kid responsibility for another hour. Nevermind that he whips up amazing meals from random things he finds in the fridge, and I can cook spaghetti into the shape of a ball. “Excuses, excuses,” scolds the well-pressed superwoman in my head, “what kind of wife and mother are you?”

In my better moments, I am astounded that I give this scolding superwoman the time of day. It’s 2015 for goodness sake, and set gender roles have shifted, at least in part. My husband likes to cook, and he’s good at it. This is his role in our family, and he accepts it. So why do I experience this nagging pressure? What’s next? Am I going to start questioning my right to vote?

But all of this is more complicated than a caricature.

I have these female friends, and they are not caricatures. They are accomplished, dynamic women, and I have a lot of respect for them. A few years ago they started doing things like family meal planning, and as far as I can tell, family meal planning involves not only planning (which is bad enough) but also cooking(!) from scratch(!!). They bookmark food blogs, research chef knives, and collect healthy recipes on Pintrest. They make brownies with hidden spinach. They buy Brussels sprouts at the Farmer’s Market and prepare them in a way that their kids will eat.

Imagine.

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And they don’t do all of this as superwomen, or because they are trying to squeeze themselves into some predetermined role. They care about nutrition, and they care about their families. And so they are working on new habits, in fits and starts, according to their schedules and situations.

And because I know my friends, I can’t dismiss them as I would a caricature of a “fifties housewife,” just as I can’t hide behind my caricature of a “liberated woman” or even “hopeless cook.” My husband is our family’s 9-5 worker in this season of our lives, and we need to eat, and eat well.

Maybe there is a part I can play.

I’m not saying anything revolutionary here, just that I’d like to take meal preparation a bit more seriously. I’d like to explore a role that I have largely rejected-not because I have to, but because it would be beneficial for the people I love. I won’t do all the cooking (oh perish the thought), but I could do more, and I’m sure that it won’t be a complete disaster.

Maybe I’ll begin with a big pot of homemade beans and rice. I don’t want my daughters to think that only men can cook.

 

Photo by Peter Grevstad

Wilderness and the Costcolypse

What do we talk about when we talk about food? It’s my feeling that discussions about food always reveal at some level the most intimate, spiritual, and dearly held values with which we compose a life. I think, for instance, of the struggle that some families I encounter go through to make ends meet, and how many times we frame this basic challenge in terms like “putting food on the table,” or “keeping the kids fed.”

It’s hard for me to contemplate my relationship to food in Alaska nowadays without my thoughts swiftly veering to Don Rearden’s wonderfully eerie, post-apocalyptic novel, The Raven’s Gift. The book, which came out in 2011, takes place in an Alaska that could easily and believably prove five minutes or five or fifty years into the future. Set around the far-flung region of Bethel – a city (population approx. 6000) accessible only by air or river in Western Alaska – we encounter John Morgan, a man who with a large heart and pure intentions moved to the remote location with his wife, Anna. Both aspired, in overly relatable, starry-eyed ways, to experience first hand one of the lone, final wilderness frontiers on Earth. John and Anna find their way North and court adventure not by aiding to plunder the state’s wealth of natural resources, but by following opportunities to live and teach in the schools of a community comprised primarily of Native Americans.

The Raven's Gift, Don Rearden

But then things go horribly awry, descend – as the book’s jacket reads – “into total chaos.”

Rearden never goes far out of his way to specifically detail what happens that sends John’s life careening into the most unintended, terrifying and primitive form of survival imaginable. It’s not the “how” we got here that matters. It’s purely, “You’re here. Now what?” We hear rumor of a deadly epidemic. Did it spread through all of Alaska? Did it reach beyond Alaska and infect America? Or was it restricted only to Bethel? Was it an intentional epidemic? But does it even matter? When an unexpected stranger offers Morgan a cup of broth – after wandering how long without food in his belly – you don’t care about the origins of this tragedy. You’re sipping broth with him. When he risks a daydream about a cup of coffee, you’re shivering in your bones, too, and you want to offer him a simple cup of joe. The novel puts a man with minimal skills in the absolute barest of imaginable circumstances, strips him of everything he possesses and loves, and tells him only, “Survive this.”

The story offers a unique perspective – with a touch of Stephen King, and periodic nods towards The Road – regarding the curious dilemma that comes with trying to live out one’s dreams up here. Intentionally or no, it indirectly asks readers how they would survive in one of the rumored remaining “wild places” in the 21st century as it strives to become as domesticated and predictable as every strip-malled and fast-fooded location that many of us came here to escape. On one hand, in Alaska, we can hunt wild game and catch and wrestle with so many salmon in the summer that they will swim through your dreams. We can pick our weight in wild blueberries for free, and not pay the exorbitant prices for farmed blues that our friends and family pay Outside. (“Outside” is ow we refer to everywhere in the Lower 48.) And yet, despite this, it often strikes me that a low-level anxiety persists.

It’s noticeable when you hit Costco or Sam’s Club on the weekends. It’s in the way the crowds, myself included, flock in droves to the warehouse stores to purchase mountains of foods and goods that come shipped to us from Anywhere out of state. You can ask me about terrifying bear encounters all you want, but in Anchorage I’m more often worried about escaping the Costco parking lot in one piece than I am concerned with encountering wild animals on a hike in the woods.

Costco

The idea that “Alaska” largely proves synonymous with “survival(ist)” probably isn’t news to anyone. And, to the credit of more than a handful of true-to-life rugged individualists past and present, the state definitely boasts a fascinating library of stories revealing that many Alaskans live life a little closer to the bone than the majority of their fellow Americans. And while there’s not time or space to explore the topic here, we’ve also seen a rapidly growing demand for locally grown produce and goods, and are watching farmers markets gain traction at the local level in ways they wouldn’t have a decade ago.

But Don Rearden’s novel turns a blind eye to our romance with “Alaska” and challenges every naïve notion we carry about “wilderness.” And he does it in such a way that I consider his post-Apocalyptic Alaska tundra every time I walk into Costco and see crowds manically surviving, depending on mountainous flats of pre-packaged foodstuff and goods that rely on barges, flights, and massive amounts of fuel in order for us to consume it. I see John Morgan staggering across the naked tundra when I hear my coworkers or students giddily rave about the new Olive Garden or Chile’s coming to town as if we were a remote African village miraculously acquiring a fresh water resource. What is this nimble, unsustainable set design we’re blissfully constructing in Anchorage, and what does it say that while we’re welcoming it here, many communities Outside are beginning to reconsider and address the glaring errors and dangers that exist in this format?

The winter I first read The Raven’s Gift happened to be the snowiest winter on record in southern Alaska in nearly 60 years. This, compounded with the fact that I had become a single father only a couple months prior to that cold, record-breaking season caused the book to leave an indelible mark on my trembling, unnerved heart.

Sprawled along my couch those dark, lonesome and silent evenings, I would set the novel down and look past the frosted windows of my apartment, stare out at the four-foot high mounds of snow in the front yard and find in John Morgan’s plight a frightening metaphor for the stark terrain of my new life in Alaska. It was impossible not to feel stranded and terrified in those months, living as far away as I do from my entire extended family and closest friends, all while striving to make ends meet each week, to survive on a very middling-, single-income from my work at a non-profit social service agency. Never mind wanting to be “a good father” (or husband). What did/do those terms even mean? All I knew to want then was whatever would keep the boys healthy and fed.

Snow-moose

What do we talk about when we talk about food? I believe discussions about food are at heart holding and asking the most valuable questions about our collective survival, on one hand, and that discussions about survival explore and reveal our most deeply cherished values and intimate connections to the places we find ourselves and to all the people we encounter there.

John Morgan encounters these truths in the most primitive way imaginable. I’ve been fortunate enough not to learn these lessons as brutally as he does, although his journey strikes me as eerily familiar, and never very far away from my own.

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On mornings, intention, and getting still enough

I’m no purist. As soon as the temperature dips below 90—usually mid-October in this part of Texas—I start pouring eggnog into my coffee. This may be one of few truly habitual morning routines I have. By design, I resist routine in the mornings. I have never been the sort of person that wakes the same time, has the same breakfast, has the same commute. I don’t find this to be noble. I have tried with limited success to become that sort of disciplined person, anchored in morning ritual and liturgy of coffee cup and toast point and made bed. I manage for a few days, at most, and then the resolve slips away from me and I’m back to a disordered sense of morning duty, careening from grocer to writing to recycle bin to conference call.

But eggnog in the coffee cup, that point in October when it becomes justified, slows me down just enough. I catch myself getting still, hearing my breath, the way the brick of the apartment whistles when wind cuts across it, the feel of the cement beneath bare feet. I sit across from the windows that keep watch with the sunrise and pull out the notebook, forgotten too often during the late season of summer, where pen is set to craft recipe, reason out flavor, and I plan a menu for the week. I get still enough to be mindful, yet again, of Alexander Schmemann’s speculation that no matter how utilitarian we have managed to make everything else, food remains something sacred to us, something that cannot be pure utility. There is reverence in the wielded knife and the butchered lamb, a kind of sacrament of patience in the warm of the midday loaf set on the windowsill to rise.

unnamedEggnog in the coffee cup returns me to this practice of noticing, attending to the detailed work of craft. I am no hater of technology, no scorner of social media, but in the brevity of the early morning pause, the breviary of an ordinary life, I disconnect just long enough to be mindful. Mindfulness is an underrated virtue. It doesn’t boast a great deal of acclaim. But mindfulness keeps us observant of ourselves and of the spaces we inhabit, keeps us intentional and keeps us kind. When I pause long enough to be careful, I am reminded of the miracle that it is to live, to taste, to smell, to make. We are alchemists of invitation and acceptance in our kitchens. We present common sacrament upon our tables. We offer chairs as signs of worth. We prepare tables as icons of welcome.

All this from eggnog in the coffee cup. Just enough of a pause in the waking hour, when the sun first colors the skyline, to remember the good work of being present, being focused, being exactly where I am. This is a ritual I can return to, when all else about routine fails. Clasped coffee cup tinged with sweetness, this takes me back to the center, to the contentment of the very moment.

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Yancey.Headshot-5“On mornings, intention, and getting still enough” was written by Preston Yancey. Preston is an Anglican priest-in-training, an author, sometimes-painter, sometimes-baker, sometimes-scholar interested in Christian theology and the arts. He wrote Tables in the Wilderness, a book about God and silence, and lives with his wife, Hilary, in Waco, Texas.