Tag Archives: travel

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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Meredith-bio-YAH-1024x327

The More Interesting Route

Posted on by under Iconic Place

One of our travel books called it “the less-straightforward but more interesting route,” which was all we needed to know. Of course we would go that way. There was no need to confer, even as extra-considerate newlyweds. We were, after all, celebrating what could certainly be described as a “less-straightforward but more interesting route” to marital happiness. Why opt for the utilitarian route now?

It was Day 2 of our honeymoon, and the route we chose was true to its description. Winding dirt and smooth clay paths led us uphill through a neighborhood of plaster-covered homes, crowded together all hodgepodge, like blocks set in place by a toddler. In some places, the walkway was close enough to the homes for me to touch the lace curtains fluttering in screenless kitchen windows, not that I dared to—just walking by made me feel apologetic for encroaching on what most Americans would label “personal space.”

narrowpathBut we were not in the U.S. There were no wide lawns or privacy fences buffering personal space from public. Instead, we could smell garlic and lemon wafting from windows, and hear the bang of a wooden spoon on the side of a pot, the voice of a woman calling to a child, and the mysterious foreign chatter of a television show.

We walked by dogs lying lazily on shaded stoops, never tied up but also not interested in us; only their eyes moved in the heat of the day, keeping watch as we passed. Brightly-colored laundry was hung out on lines in narrow alleys between the homes, coordinating with bright pink and red flowers planted in pots and window boxes.

As the path continued to switch-back and fork every-which-way, it became clear the travel book Jason carried was no help. “Do you think we’re still on the right path?” I whispered, hoping to avoid being an “annoying tourist.”

“We’re still going up, so that’s a good sign,” Jason whispered in response, with a grin. I smiled inwardly at how automatically my writer’s mind turned everyday comments and experiences into metaphor. Are we on the right path? We’re still going up! Anything is better than being stagnant and stuck. Life is a journey. What happens along the way can be more important than the final destination!

It was all so cliche, but how could I resist? I was on my honeymoon, celebrating the hope rooted in a second wedding after years of feeling stuck and deciding that marriage—the whole idea of it—wasn’t for me. Now I was exploring new lands with someone who made every step one of companionship and possibility. I was able to be in the moment, both to feel seen and to look around and enjoy what I saw—to consider who I was in that place and time, rather than living in desperate impatience for the faint idea of what I thought my life would be.

*   *   *   *   *

Just when I felt certain we were lost in the maze of quaint domesticity (which certainly isn’t the worst place to be lost, metaphorically or actually), we spotted a sign propped in someone’s garden, hand-lettered with the word “Acropolis” and an arrow.

signingardenSomething about its complete lack of official pomp and grandeur made us laugh out loud (and take photos). I imagined a man making the sign, perhaps at the request of his wife who had long grown weary of confused, insensitive tourists calling out to her while she hung laundry or watered her flowers: “Excuse me, is this the way to the Acropolis?” The sign communicated that wry note of impatience, but also one of pride, as if to say the people who lived their everyday lives along the way to this magnificent site fully understood the value of this treasure they had to offer the world. If tourists walked daily by their windows to get there, so be it.

Soon after passing the sign, we emerged from the jumble of garlic-sauteing and television-watching and dog-napping. We could see the Acropolis ahead. Having taken the “more interesting route,” we arrived at the back entrance of the fifth-century BC site, passing through the Theatre of Dionysus, where people were setting up a very modern sound system for a performance that evening.

We climbed further, up and out, toward the Parthenon looming above. Its ancient structure was partially engulfed by scaffolding, perhaps marring the view as seen through the eyes of a romantic, but also pointing to the reality of the architecture’s age and value; it had weathered much, and was worth meticulous preservation and care.

Jason and I stood silently side by side, taking it in, struggling to grasp the weight of history, the span of time lying between us in that moment and all that had come before—in our small lifetimes and for centuries and generations back. Then we walked on, ready to see what was next.

parthenon

***

Kristin bio YAH

To Paris and Back

Posted on by under Iconic Place

We drive the long, dark distance from the countryside, deep into the heart of the city. It is 4:00am, and the roads are empty. Even the London streets are deserted, the shadow of our car revolving around us as we approach and pass the street lights, circling the roundabouts. We park our car, find our train, and fall asleep even before it pulls away from the platform.

We wake and sleep and wake and sleep while the train leaves the station and clatters over and under the London streets, into the English countryside. It ducks under the channel, sweeping faster and faster, emerging into France like a bullet. Telephone poles flash by in a blur. Condensation forms outside the windows, the drops swept away as quickly as they form.

The rails curve towards Paris, first the suburbs, and then the ancient city itself. Domes and spires rise to greet us. When we get off the train, we are overcome by the smells of the city: coffee and urine and baking bread and another train leaving. And another. Black smoke churns and follows us out into the early morning streets.

There is no quiet place and not a word of English. Following the trail laid before us by the magazine you read, we go from place to place, from patisserie to patisserie. Flaky croissants and bichon au citron line up inside bright displays alongside macarons and Mille-feuille. We cannot take a bite without moaning and rolling our eyes. We walk the cobblestones down vacant alleys, the sugar coursing through our veins. The sun is barely up.

We stroll into the square and along the river and disappear down into the Louvre. The Mona Lisa stares quietly, at us of all people, her gaze skimming the top of the crowd. This place is like another culture, an ancient civilization, and when we come back up from that land of oils and sculpture I’m surprised to see we still have cars. We still have airplanes. I had expected the world to revert back a thousand years.

downloadIn the heat of the afternoon we sit on a bench drinking bottled water, pulling apart a fresh baguette, watching people from all over the world. It is like Babel: the languages, the laughing, the confusion. People talk with their hands, pointing here and there, asking questions that go unanswered. It is a beautiful chaos.

The afternoon crawls onto our backs, slows us, weighs us down. We meander. We lie down in the grass across from Notre Dame and you fall asleep. I watch, your eyes closed, eyelids fluttering. The sky is blue. People wait in a line to enter the cathedral. Then, suddenly, it’s time, and we’re back on the sidewalk hailing a cab to La Gare du Nord with its sweeping face, it’s glaring glass. We’re back on the train, the countryside vanishing into night. We are under the channel once again, rising up into the London skyline, then under the streets.

We drive the long drive home, the highways emptying, the sky a splash of stars. Trees bend down to touch our car as we pull in the long lane. The high hedges whisper, “They are back. They are back. They are back.”

shawn bio YAH

Safe and Sound

Posted on by under Sound & Place

Packing tape rips, the sound raging through the telephone wire, threatening to undo my best attempts not to yell in order to be heard.

“Will you please stop for a minute?” I whisper in a saccharine tone. (I read somewhere if one lowers her voice during a conflict, the other person will listen better.) Tom keeps on clinking and ripping. I imagine his shoulders hunched over a desk, counting hundreds of buffalo nickels. My heart softens. “Call me tomorrow!” I yell. “I love you!”

I’ve been married to a traveling man for thirty years. Like a peddler whose wares hang on hooks from a wagon, Tom’s road-1208298_1280wares are coins which he buys and sells from his briefcase, filling it during the day. When he is racking up miles on asphalt, his office is a hotel room. Every evening he organizes and boxes the day’s purchases for shipping to customers. When he checks in in the evening, I try not to be annoyed by clinks of silver dollar on silver dollar as they drop into plastic holders. After all, he’s settled in, safe and sound.

 *   *   *   *

When he was away working, in the early years of our marriage, before we had internet, cell phones, or caller ID, but we had two small children, I listened for the phone to ring, carrying his voice to me. Call times varied according to where he was: I’m at the Red Roof Inn in Fargo. Our back and forth:

How was your day?

And how was your day?

What did the kids do today?

Taekwondo, homework, and oh, I put a drop of soap on Kendall’s tongue because he called Barbara a penis. Of course, she probably taunted him.

When Tom heard my laughter on the other end, he relaxed. Alexander Graham Bell’s invention helped keep our marriage together in our early child-rearing days, creating moments of intimacy in the ordinary when we were miles apart.

*   *   *   *

It’s 12;30 a.m. on a Saturday night. Tom is out-of-town. I am wide awake in bed, fanning the bodice of my cotton nightgown, trying to recover from a hot, humid day. Add a layer of anxiety from mothering two teenagers; I begin a conversation with myself.

Did I tell Barbara to call me when she leaves her friend’s house…

Cautious and compliant, Barbara will drive home, glancing through her rear-view window to be sure no stranger is following her, but I still want to hear “I’m on my way home.” Sometimes she positions herself in a taekwondo pose and pops a high kick reminding me that she almost earned a black belt.

The quick chirp of Barbara’s car alarm pierces the night. She closes the side door with a gentle nudge. Floorboards creak. The kitchen water faucet turns on, then off. I know she will open the refrigerator door looking for a snack to satisfy her tummy before a good night’s sleep. Her feet tread quiet and quick up the stairs to her room.

My inner monologue turns to Kendall.

Did I remember to pray: God watch over my boy—as if God would not keep Kendall safe if I forgot? Did I tell him to follow the speed limit?

A train whistles in the distance, and I worry that Kendall will pull too close to the tracks, and the train will derail.

Boom ba Boom ba Boom ba. I hear and almost feel Kendall approaching our driveway, heavy bass blaring—beautiful music to a mother’s ears. I inhale and exhale like an expectant mother in a Lamaze class. He needs to turn that thing down when he enters our neighborhood.

Our side door opens. Hinges squeak. Slam.

My man-child lumbers down the hallway with his size 14 sneakers slapping the floor. A looming presence stops at my bedroom door: “Mama, I’m home. Are you awake?”

“Yes, I’m awake.”

*   *   *   *

“I am 56 years old. I am not an old woman,” I say to Tom. “You bought me a safe car, and I can wield this cane like an old woman fighting off a purse snatcher.”

He worries about me. I have physical challenges, and he likes to be my knight in shining armor, but I insist that I have to do as much as I am able.

“Please text me or call me when you get home,” he says with concern, “and I’ll text you when I get settled at my hotel.”

I meet my sister for dinner, something we rarely do. Our menus remain untouched on the table while we begin chatting, catching up, talking over one another, finally stopping to give the server our orders. Diners at the table next to us smile when I choke on laughter as my sister and I reminisce about old boyfriends: the good, the bald, and the portly. Struggling to recover my manners, I avoid eye contact with my sister lest high-pitched giggles conquer me again.

We are the last to leave the restaurant, carrying our conversation out the door.

“We closed the place down,” I say with a merry grin. “Let’s promise one another to do this more often.”

The evening has flown by. I pull out my phone and text Tom.

Home soon. Love L

Back home, I settle under a quilt, with a full belly and heavy eyes. Grown and gone, my children are never far from my mind, but I don’t worry as much when I’m not expecting them to come home.

Instead of listening for a key in the lock or booming bass paving our driveway, my ears and heart are more open to God’s voice. He and I have a history together, and those nights I waited up, wondering, worrying, God heard, God answered.

My phone on the nightstand vibrates and scoots, awakening me from the edge of sleep. I knock my glasses off the nightstand, grope blindly for the phone, and bring it close to my eyes.

I’m in for the night

Safe and sound  Love T keys-233368_1280

 

 

Lisa bio YAH

 

The Rice Between Us

Posted on by under Food & Place

My mom’s dad was stationed in Okinawa during the Korean War in the 1950s. Although he never saw combat, he did see rice. When he returned from Japan after the war, he swore it off completely, exercising his power of choice as a civilian. As far as I know, he went to his death without eating another grain.

My mom’s mom honored his aversion. Recently she told me that she’d made him dinner when they were first dating: a dish that included rice. He hemmed and hawed and ultimately didn’t eat it. Only later, he told her the backstory. During their marriage, she never served rice when he was home. Sometimes, however, she would prepare it when he wasn’t. My mom doesn’t remember eating rice as a special occasion or a treat, but she remembers liking it.

My earliest memories are of eating white rice, my favorite–a foreshadowing of a palate that leans hard toward taste over health. It was only later that my mom switched to brown rice, for the higher fiber content (although she sometimes added Benefiber to white rice, which never bothered me). I knew the brown rice was supposed to be healthier, but to me it wasn’t really rice. I can’t help thinking that if my Poppa hadn’t been completely against rice, he would have agreed with me. He was never one to choose a healthy option over a more delicious one. That may have been part of what killed him at 56, before any of us were ready to say goodbye.

***

At nineteen, I signed up to take a trip to South Korea with my Tae Kwon Do school. I was months away from testing for my black belt, and I was eager to see the birthplace of my beloved martial art.

Almost immediately, I fell in love with the country. Although with my blonde hair and fair skin I looked like exactly no one who lived there, I felt completely at home. Every new experience filled me with delight. One of the first things we did when we arrived was eat. We really never stopped for long.

3161831426_780182ca28_zI had grown up eating three distinct meals every day, with breakfast containing different foods than lunch or dinner. This wasn’t always true in Korea.

My body plunged headfirst into culture shock, as I sunk my teeth into bulgogi (the most delicious Korean barbecue). At bulgogi restaurants, we would sit in groups at long tables with small domed metal grills in their centers, spaced every few feet from each other. Our server would bring us containers of marinated meats and vegetables, and we would cook them ourselves on the nearest grills. When we got close to meal times, my ears would prick up, hoping that someone would say that we were going for bulgogi again.

Another favorite for me was the classic meal-in-a-bowl, bibimbap. At one of the restaurants, our host told us that the concept is credited to members of the Mongolian army, who would put all of their leftover food into their helmets to eat like liquidless soup. Later, I discovered that this is only one of the many legends that surround this chameleon of a food. It looks different depending on where you are in the country, the time of year, the whim of the chef. If you’re making it at home, it’s a kitchen sink meal, lending itself easily to using up whatever you might have on hand. In a restaurant, it’s a little more uniform: a bowl of rice topped with veggies and (sometimes) cooked meat, with a variety of ingredients which were deliciously mysterious to me. It’s served very hot, sometimes in a heated stone bowl called a dolsot, which continues to cook the contents throughout the meal. At the last moment before serving, an egg is usually cracked over the top, the heat of the other ingredients quickly cooking it. I would mix the egg into my bowl with delight and then squeeze large dollops of spicy red pepper paste in, swirling my chopsticks to get a consistent flavor.

And at every meal, without fail, we ate rice. I loved it.

I wonder, now, if I was trying to memorize the taste of Korea. I knew I couldn’t stay, that I would need to return to a land where rice was a side dish, not the undergirding of everything I ate. I could make rice at home. I could use my tongue to transport me back to Korea.

***

It no longer surprises me when I discover that my Poppa and I share similar tastes. It’s hard to know if it is because my mother missed him and cooked his favorites for me as a child. The ways of food and family are mysterious. I’m sure that there are other ways that we differ, but I know this one well, and I think about it every time I turn on my rice maker, or order a risotto, or take a virtual journey back to Korea, where I was overwhelmed with a sense of belonging.

For my Poppa, rice was also a portal to another place, but it was one that he wanted to remain closed forever. For me, the idea of Mongolian soldiers eating out of their helmets adds color and context to a delicious dish. But I have never been a soldier. I have never worn a helmet for long hours in the heat, knowing that I would have no control over how I broke my fast at each meal, far away from home. For a long while, I wondered if my love for rice was disloyal to him. Even though he never held others to his standard, now I think he might like the fact that I think of him as I reach for a piece of sushi or add coconut to my rice. Our connection continues to be strong, our opposite tastes providing an ironic but significant bond.

cara YAH bio

(photo credit)

Dublin Lamb Stew

Posted on by under Food & Place, Guest

Nine months after my college graduation, I find myself living with my parents, looking for work, trying to write more frequently, de-cluttering my room, and generally freaking out about life. It is a time of uncertainty, a time that requires more patience than I have.

The lamb stew I am cooking for St. Patrick’s Day takes patience, too. Lamb—trimmed of excess fat and cut into 2-inch cubes—simmers with beer, some spices, and broth for at least an hour before I can add the cubed potatoes and sliced carrots. I start early in the afternoon so that the stew will be ready for my family’s 6 o’clock dinner hour. As it cooks, the stew fills the kitchen with a meaty smell. Its taste, when we finally sit down to dinner, is rich, with a hint of thyme and a ghost of wheat from the beer. My family’s silence indicates their approval.

Deciding to make lamb stew was not so much a whim as a nostalgic gesture to the weekend I spent in Ireland three years ago. It was the end of my semester studying abroad. Four girlfriends and I had arranged our flights to stay over in Ireland for the weekend. After a jaunt to Galway, the Cliffs of Moher, and the shrine at Knock, we returned to Dublin for a farewell dinner to Europe. We chose what the hostel employee told us was the oldest pub in Ireland—The Brazen Head—partly for its history and partly because it was only a short walk away. A waitress seated us at a battered wood table in the pub’s squashed and dimly lit interior.

IMG_2325Four months abroad had felt like a lifetime; we were ready to return to American soil and our families. Yet, at the same time, we were overflowing with the exhilaration of seeing the world, of being young, of having friends, and of being more or less carefree. We ordered Guinness and raised a glass: to friendship, to Ireland, to life.

When the time came to order our food, I knew I had to try a truly Irish dish. I chose the lamb stew. Ladled into a wide-rimmed, white bowl, it came with a scoop of mashed potatoes floating on top. Crusty brown bread was served on the side, slathered in butter, which of course I dipped in the stew, soaking up all of its delicious gravy. My friend, Allison, also ordered the lamb stew and together we reveled in its heartiness, while the other girls enjoyed beef and Guinness stew, another Irish favorite.

Stew, in all its forms, although hearty and flavorful, is a rather unremarkable dish. What was it about the Dublin lamb stew that captured my attention so that it stands forth in my mind as a dish worth recreating?

I felt whole during that weekend in Ireland. Now that I had seen places that before I had only read about, the world seemed smaller. Anything was possible. I could go anywhere. I could meet anyone. I could do anything.

Perhaps, subconsciously, it is that feeling of potentiality I am seeking to recapture as I cook lamb stew for my family this St. Patrick’s Day. A bubble of hope rises in my heart like those that rise to the top of my stew as it breaks into a gentle, rolling boil. Anything is possible.

*   *   *   *   *

IMG_6527 vig“Dublin Lamb Stew” is by Stasia Phillips, a writer and amateur cook who loves a delicious bowl of stew once in a while. Studying abroad in Austria for a semester opened her eyes to a whole world of flavors that she is slowly incorporating into her cooking repertoire. Stasia draws inspiration for her writing from nature, good books, her faith, and hazelnut coffee. You can find her blogging at “Cold Hands, Warm Heart.”

Outer Banks

Posted on by under Reclaiming Place

Tears streamed down my face as I huddled in my corner of the backseat of our wood-paneled station wagon. I was crying as quietly as I could, not wanting to attract concerned attention from my parents, or ridicule from my two younger brothers. As the car sped north and west—across the causeway to the mainland, away from the Atlantic Ocean and toward my western Pennsylvania home—I was convinced that my 12-year-old heart would break.

The Best Week of the Year had come to an end.

***

I was nine years old the first time my family vacationed on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. That first year, it was me, my parents, my two younger brothers, and the family of a man my dad worked with. Three years later, my dad’s three brothers and their families had joined us on what would become an annual pilgrimage and a de facto family reunion.

Every year, we journeyed to Kill Devil Hills, to The Cavalier by the Sea motel at milepost 8.5 of Beach Road. It was a week I looked forward to all year, when I would reconnect with cousins who were so cool, they probably would never notice me in the school hallways if (a) we lived near each other and (b) were not related.

***

A typical day in my life during the Best Week of the Year went something like this:

The aromas of brewing coffee and frying bacon would greet me when I awoke, mixing with the scents of saltwater and Coppertone suntan lotion.

I would emerge from my bedroom, hair hastily combed, swimsuit on, to find Mom and Dad sitting in bamboo chairs at the Formica table of the main room, finishing breakfast and watching morning TV. My bare feet would shuffle across the grainy, sandy texture of air-conditioned linoleum. After slurping up a bowl of cereal, I would be out the door, a brightly colored beach towel slung around my neck.

A quick stop at the pool in the courtyard to see who was already swimming, and I’d continue on, under the archway and onto the beach. Stumbling across the already hot sand toward the crashing waves of the Atlantic, I would drop my towel next to the cluster of beach umbrellas where my tribe had already set up camp for the week.

nags-head-family-picUncle Mike and Aunt Mary would be sipping their morning coffee. Uncle Paul and Aunt Barb would be slathering suntan lotion on my littlest cousins. Cousins closer to my age would be stretched out on towels—exposed skin glistening with baby oil, as was the naive custom of the 1970s—or jumping the waves.

After lunch, my cousin Mike would start his latest sand sculpture masterpiece, and my brothers would help our younger cousins fill plastic buckets with plastic shovels-full of sand, building castles and digging moats.

As shadows grew longer, we would wander back to our rooms to shower and change clothes before dinner—hot dogs and watermelon by the pool, or fresh seafood at a nearby restaurant, or spaghetti and meatballs prepared in one of the kitchens.

Later, we would return to the pool, or pile into cars for a trip to ride go-carts or bowl or see a movie. We would play cards until bedtime.

Then the aromas coffee and bacon and Coppertone would signal the beginning of the next day.

***

Around the time I graduated from high school, our family stopped going down every year—but the uncles and aunts and cousins did not.

While I loved these beach vacations, and so did most of my family, my mother was never a fan of the sand, and she wasn’t a swimmer. She didn’t like the beach, but she knew what this week meant to the rest of us.

The last time my whole family made that trip together was in the mid-’90s. My brothers and I were now young adults. It was a hotter-than-usual summer, and biting sand flies and stinging sea lice and the lack of a discernible ocean breeze served as the proverbial heavy last straw. Mom made it clear that we were welcome to go back again—but she was done with beach vacations.

***

In July 2007, it had been more than a decade since I had spent that summer week with my cousins. As we approached the first anniversary of losing Mom to cancer, my family returned.

Everything felt so much the same. And completely different.

The swimming pool and the beach were mostly unchanged, as were the Cavalier’s cottages—even with cosmetic upgrades of indoor-outdoor carpeting and fancy new pleather furniture. Traffic on the Beach Road was heavier, and there were more restaurants and hotels and houses between the causeway and milepost 8.5. Cousins I had played with as children were now husbands and wives and parents, and their children looked forward to this week as eagerly as we had at their age. Our tribe still set up camp under the rented umbrellas near the ocean, and we now spanned three generations and seven decades.

But even as we made new memories, introducing my new sister-in-law to the Atlantic Ocean and teaching my 12-year-old niece to play euchre, I missed my mom. I was aware that memories had been made in my absence that would never be mine. I was 40 years old and way past the age of wanting to live in my bathing suit.

At the end of the week, driving my own car across the causeway, away from the Outer Banks and toward western Pennsylvania, I let the tears flow.

This was still The Best Week of the Year for my cousins. It just wasn’t mine anymore.

***

Amy bio YAH

Distance

Posted on by under Travel & Place

A damp chill in the early morning air, unusual for April this far south, makes me shiver. My azaleas and dogwoods are laden with buds yearning to give a color show of pinks and whites.

“Maybe my wisteria will be in bloom when we get back,” I say to myself.

“Come here and tell me what you think,” Tom calls.

Milk crates and boxes filled with antique glass bottles are packed in the rear cargo hold of our SUV. Like a chess player contemplating his next move, Tom, my husband, is surveying the situation—rotating the multi-sized containers until he makes a space for “just one more.” We are preparing to leave for a collectibles show and sale in a small Virginia town nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

“Where in the world are we going to put our luggage, our clothes on hangers, and my tote bag?  I  ask.”Something’s  got to give.”

***

The April tax crunch and an impending audit of our family business have pressure-cooked the creative juices and energy out of me. Tom rarely smiles. Our tempers flare—often. Silence follows. We’ve settled into a rhythm: Work. Sleep. Eat. Work. Sleep. Eat.

Five hundred miles of interstate stretch from Memphis to the Virginia state line. West to east we follow a route we have traveled many times. Tom drives, with a slight hunch of his shoulders, leaving a space between the seat and his back. I absentmindedly reach over and rub his back, circling my fingers over flannel and the nape of his neck.

I see cows graze in a pasture, dots of black scattered across a pasture of brown and patchy green.

“There are your cows,” says Tom with a knowing smile.

As I begin to tell a childhood story about my pet cow, I stop myself and apologize for re-hashing a tale he has heard many times during our 30 years together.

“It’s okay,” he says. Tom smiles, reaches over, and squeezes my hand.

Nearing Nashville, the road begins a gentle climb, bordered by an irregular wall of layered rock. Small trees struggle to maintain their footing as they grow through crevices in the stone. A few reddish brown leaves have hung on to their spindly branches since autumn.

***

A sign greets us: Welcome to Virginia. Virginia is for Lovers. The interstate winds slowly, flanked by deep ditches and streams of water littered with broken Styrofoam, food wrappers, and beer cans. Tidy white clapboard houses, with painted shutters and porches for sitting, live in the shadow of houses with unhinged shutters and collapsing porches.

JESUS IS LORD. WE SELL GUNS. proclaim the signs nailed side by side on the back of a weathered shed with a rusty red metal roof.

“Oh my goodness!” I exclaim. “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

Our route leads us off the interstate to a two-lane highway with the occasional pothole. I hear the tinkle of shifting glass in the back of the vehicle and gasp. Tom assures me his careful packing will protect the fragile bottles from breakage.

Spring is coming slow here, also. The forsythia is starting to splash her cheerful yellow against the canvas of winter’s lingering gray. Slips of green are pushing through the pea-gravel at the side of the road. The mountains rise above this plateau, inviting us to travel to higher ground.

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photo by Lisa Phillips

What We Talk About When We Talk About Traveling

Posted on by under Uncategorized
JT2

Sunrise through a tent door in Joshua Tree

“Pop,” Matt called out from the back seat, the wind from his open window whipping through his hair, “where’s the most beautiful place you’ve ever been?”

It was late. We were driving home from a house concert at a friend’s property in a secluded wooded area on the fringes of Anchorage. Between the trance of the evening’s music and the long sunlit Alaskan summer evening, I’d lost all track of time, and so I now raced along the highway, distracted by the hour and that tomorrow was Monday and that the kids were still awake.

“Well…” I said, jogging my memory, “I remember really loving Italy…”

“…and Spain…” I added, as an afterthought.

“Wait, Pop,” he gasped, “you went to I​taly?​”

In 1999, in my late twenties, my then girlfriend and I left Montana and backpacked around Europe for a few months. While I know the trip made an impression, and that there’s a box of photos in a storage closet somewhere documenting the time, I now struggled to put into words any lasting effect or poignant tales from the journey.

As the boys and I hurtled towards home, my mind only proved a soupy stew of vague, passing images and snapshot scenes: vines wrapping around a trellis of on the back porch of an apartment we rented on the Amalfi coast; standing on the balcony of our room in Barcelona and looking down on the courtyard with its little round tables and wooden folding chairs in the square; our host in the Cinque Terre, Giacomo, lifting a bunch of fresh grapes from a barrel and smiling as he handed them to us; a thumping nightclub in Prague where we winced our way through glasses of Windex­-colored absinthe.

Yet I struggled to grasp these wispy images from a long ago former life, to contain them in the framework of story or to find threads that wove all these together into a single fabric.

Who in the world was that guy in Europe baring my name and face then? What were his dreams? What did he want out of life in those years?

And was this midlife? Do memories just erode like shore lines in a hurricane during your forties? I clamored back to the surface.

“Japan was beautiful, too, though, right Sammy?”

“Yeah…” my eleven year-old dreamily sighed from the passenger’s seat.

We emerged beyond the high trees running along the highway and were coasting past exits and turnoffs leading to Anchorage’s version of the gaudy, predictable chain stores and strip malls featured off of every exit in the United States.

On this night, however, well north of consumer culture’s eyesores in the foreground, the sun blazed and pulsed with a dazzling prism of colors and light. Rounding the curve that revealed as much, it’s a wonder we didn’t drive straight off the highway. Slack jawed, I directed Sam and Matt’s attention to the sun’s show on my left.

“Look at that!”

The kids looked and said nothing.

As a born and bred East coast kid from the working class suburbs of Philadelphia, Alaska’s skies always leave me feeling like I’m getting away with something. From the midnight sunsets of summer, to the aurora of winter, there’s something nearly scandalous about letting a random suburban Philly boy travel so far from home to witness so many jaw-dropping skylines.

I tried keeping my eyes on the road while still absorbing the sky’s show on my left. The last time a sky so brilliantly throttled me and consumed my attention was on my trip to Joshua Tree this past March, where I met up and traveled with one of my oldest and best friends, Mark. Every morning and evening in the park seemed, like and unlike in Alaska, an unpredictable but welcome pass for being daily sucker punched by a sky full of Amazing. The in between times, our days, were framed by stupefying encounters with dramatic stone structures, hikes on paths and ground that recalled Roadrunner cartoons, and wandering amidst ruins and desert flora that seemed props for a Cormac McCarthy novel.

Mark

Mark & boulders, Joshua Tree

I remember passing hazily through the airport, in slow motion on the morning we both flew out of LAX, heading our separate ways back to Alaska and Pennsylvania. I boarded my plane in a trance and sat in my window seat, gaping and eyes wide.

What had we just lived through?

While on one hand I felt like it’d take years to process the silent wonder of the desert and all we’d encountered there ­in its raw, unforgiving simplicity – in its stark landscapes, its sunsets and sunrises and stillness ­- my memories of Europe suggested I might not even remember or be able to note the trip’s impact on my life a decade from now.

As I sat staring out the window of the airplane, looking at nothing, my phone buzzed. Mark was texting from his gate, where he still waited to board his flight. He included a photograph featuring an underlined, marked up page of Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire:​

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Matt watching Sunday evening’s sunset, 6/7/15

“If [the desert] has any significance it lies, I will venture, in the power of the odd and unexpected to startle the senses and surprise the mind out of their ruts of habit, to compel us into a reawakened awareness of the wonderful -­ that which is full of wonder…The shock of the real. For a little while, we are again able to see, as the child sees, a world of marvels.”

The desert, certainly. Alaska, too. Perhaps the passage even served as a way to more memorably travel and carry myself as I pass through the world in the coming years.

Because hadn’t I perhaps traveled blind and numb to wonder in my other, younger, previous lives? Didn’t I, like the strip malls we now passed and all they advertised, once treat Experience and the places I traveled like something to ravenously descend upon, consume, and devour? Could that be partially why the threads, the stories, and memories of other places prove so hard to come by?

I blew past our turn and steered the car north.

“Pop!” Matt shouted, “Where are you going?”

“There,” I said, pointing to the sunset in the distance, now straight ahead of us.

“We’re going there.”

To wonder.

Wherever it rests. Wherever we find it.

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Sunset, Point Woronzof, Anchorage, AK 6/7/15

To see what I could see

Posted on by under Alone in Place

I had travelled more than a thousand miles to be surrounded by people, yet there I was, alone on a hard red-dirt trail in the Santa Fe National Forest.

To be clear, I was “alone on purpose,” as Nicole Morgan so deftly phrased it in her recent guest post. But following through on this intentional aloneness had taken great willpower. By choosing to set off solo on a hike that afternoon I was voluntarily leaving behind the potential of great conversations and new friendships—the very experiences I had in mind when I devoted a week of time and a sum of money to attend a Glen West writing workshop.

Many people at the Glen arrive in search of space and time to think and write, but as a full-time solitary writer who longs throughout the year for “colleagues,” I went to the Glen to fill that space and time with people. I needed a break from being alone with my thoughts and words, and during my first three days there I had accomplished just that. The mornings’ inspiring conversations in my non-fiction writing workshop transitioned into lunch hours sitting with authors I’ve long admired. Afternoons spent around courtyard tables, hearing about writing projects others were working on, gave way to more conversations over dinner, followed by engaging author and artist talks. Each night found me fighting the need for sleep as the extroverts and night owls gathered for more talk and laughter over whisky or wine, late into the night.

By that Thursday afternoon I had reached a state of “satisfyingly full” and knew some solitude (beyond the fast-asleep kind) would be good for me. It was one of those moments of awareness that separates childhood from adulthood: when you know that something—maybe eating those greens or getting up early to exercise—is important for your wellbeing, so you do it even though you don’t really want to.

I didn’t really want to be alone, but I knew it would be good for me, so I set out on the nearby Atalaya Trail to see what gift Aloneness might have for me in the midst of so much togetherness.

photo (9)The hard-packed ground was dry and gravelly, a shade of burnt, orangey-red that might as well be called New Mexico Red. I passed by Juniper and piñon, cacti, yuccas, and sagebrush, breathing in a heavenly-yet-foreign blend of scents that added a new layer to my aloneness: I was alone in an unfamiliar land.

As I continued walking, I began to wonder what range of unfamiliar creatures might call this arid region home (rattlesnakes? scorpions?). Then I recalled the coyotes whose sparring the night before had awoken me in my narrow dorm room bed, the windows open to the cool night air. Suddenly, alone took on multiple layers of meaning: I was not only by myself, far from others, but I was 7,000 feet above sea level in a foreign land, surrounded by potential dangers. The cell phone in my pocket didn’t even have service. I began anxiously singing, for company:

The bear went over the mountain,
the bear went over the mountain,
the bear went over the mountain—
to see what it could see.

I couldn’t remember what the bear saw, so I stopped singing and walking to just breathe—to calm the tinge of fear I felt and focus my mind on the quiet and the beauty that was all around me.

After walking a bit further, I reached a trio of wooden plank steps that carried the trail up and over a gravel road. Turning around, I lowered myself onto one of the steps, opening my water bottle and taking in the view below, the path I had just walked. The college campus, where all of those conversations and friendships had taken root the days before, looked small, but there it was, waiting.

I pulled my journal out of my backpack, turning to a page where I had taken a few notes while the poet Scott Cairns had read to us an evening or two before. A line from his poem “Draw Near” had especially captivated me:

For near is where you’ll meet what you have wandered far to find.

I had traveled all the way to New Mexico to be with other writers and artists—I needed new conversations and different perspectives to help reframe the story within me. Then I had traveled up this mountain for time and space alone, in a land so different from the one I know that I couldn’t help but be aware, notice, and respond—not intellectually but viscerally. And all of those miles, all of that wandering both with others and alone, had helped me meet what is very near, in my heart.

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