The Mouse King; 11 March 2014

Pussy cat pussy cat, where have you been?

I’ve been to London to visit the queen.

Pussy cat pussy cat, what did you there?

I frightened a little mouse under the chair.

This is has been a long hiatus—I have been traveling, to Provence to visit Bill’s niece and her daughters and then to Amsterdam, for a house trade. Traveling is one of the things baby boomers do in retirement; it is wonderful to see the world another way around.

However, I don’t know about you, but I get tired of reading straight travelogues. They hold my attention for awhile, but then I wander off, musing,

“Why didn’t I go there? When is my next trip? I remember when I visited. . . “

on and on. There is really no point in recounting one’s activities blow by blow, but sometimes it works to recount just one event that might give the flavor of a place. In my case, this incident was a chance encounter with the King of the Netherlands, King Wilhelm-Alexander.

During one of our nine days in Amsterdam, we took one of Holland’s incredibly efficient trains to the small town of Alkmaar, where there is a museum dedicated to the history of regional cheese making. We also wanted to buy some cheese, of course, to smuggle back to the States in our luggage. We arrived with minimal difficulty and wandered around the town for an hour or two—a visual treat as these small towns have beautiful seventeenth century brick houses that cast soft reflections in the many canals. We found a lunch place and dined on the most wonderful soup I ever had, a wild mushroom bisque. Amazing. I mused out loud,

“Why does the richest country in the world have the worst food?”

It seemed a good time to visit said cheese museum, so after our coffee we wandered across the town square to the spectacular building, replete with ornate carvings and gilded trim. We had noticed earlier that there were long velvet ropes around the outside of the museum—to organize the lines? We weren’t sure, as on a Thursday afternoon there were very few people walking (or biking, the preferred mode of transportation) in the town center. We walked up to the entrance and a man in a dark blue suit stopped us.

“The museum is not open.”

“Why not? We thought your hours were from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily.”

“The King is coming.”

And with no further explanation he turned on his heel to speak to the woman behind him.

Well, now I was curious. What king? And why on earth would he visit the cheese museum? If this were the King of the Netherlands, surely he knew all about cheese. We decided to wait around a bit to see what would happen.

Sure enough, within ten minutes a small crowded started to gather at the edge of the red ropes, which now stretched from the museum door to the very end of the stone paved square. I must have looked like a quizzical tourist (I did look a tourist, with map in hand and small camera around my neck), because a woman about my age standing near me announced that the King of the Netherlands was coming to preside over the official opening of the newly renovated cheese museum.

Good grief. The chance to be next to a member of the monarchy—this is something on a par with having Robert Redford as co-honoree when I received my honorary doctorate at Westminster last May! (I tell everyone that I was invited because that insured there would be lots of media attention for the ceremony.) Why not stay? I asked the woman if she knew when Sir King would arrive—she asked the people around her. The consensus was 2:30 PM. Since that meant we only had a little over half an hour to go, we decided to keep our place in the front row and watch this event.

Things grew livelier. Cheese maidens strolled about with trays of individually wrapped Gouda samples. They were dressed in white blouses, black slacks, long red aprons, and wore black high heels—hardly the thing for walking on those old cobblestones, but they seemed to manage well. All of them but one had long blonde hair and all wore very bright red lipstick.

Now groups of police swooped in on bicycles, wearing neon green vests and dark uniforms. Most of them dismounted near the entrance and stood chatting with one another, though two of them did ride their bikes around the square and on adjacent streets.  I looked around me and at the surrounding area. No one had been screened. There was no weapons detector. Worse, the four story buildings around the square had many large windows. Fleetingly I thought of Lee Harvey Oswald and the book depository in Dallas. Not a worry here, evidently. Obviously there are advantages to having a constitutional monarchy—first, the royal person does not have to face elections, and second, there is no immediate advantage to bumping off the wearer of the crown, as typically today royalty has little say in the actual running of the country. It must be a relief to have such a stable institution at times—think of our political scene now, for instance. There seems to be almost no one with any gravitas in Washington to steer a sane path to the future.

Members of the press started to flock in, some carrying huge cameras. They also stood in a group near the museum’s front and chatted, a few smoking. One woman, who must have been a news anchor, found a woman in the crowd to interview and film.

And of course he was late—the King, that is. It was chilly and windy that day, and I was beginning to think we should walk back to the train, when suddenly we heard a helicopter. A bright yellow copter came into view, making smaller and smaller circles. (Later I read that this king is an avid pilot, so he may have been flying the aircraft himself.) And a few minutes later, people started talking loudly and the press rushed forward clicking wildly. It was the King.

At first I thought the town mayor was the King, a man wearing a bright ceremonial necklace. (Well, I can be forgiven—it was my first time with royalty, after all.) There was a pleasant looking forty-something man next to him, smiling broadly and waving enthusiastically to all in the crowd. The king, at last. Within two minutes he was inside the factory, and my brush with greatness was over. . . .

Back on the train, I suddenly started laughing. I thought out loud of how much President Obama might give right now to have Wilhelm-Alexander’s daily schedule. I imagined our president waking in the morning and his assistant handing him the agenda.

“Here is your agenda for March 6, sir. First you will breakfast. Then you have an hour to exercise before going to your correspondence. After a light lunch, you will pilot Air Force Helicopter One to Alkmaar to open the cheese museum.”

Enough said. I have thought many times how wonderful it must be to live in a small, neutral country. I bet Obama has thought this, too.

I won’t write next week as we are off to northern California for our granddaughter Abby’s fourth birthday, but I hope to resume more regular postings after that!

The title of this Sunday morning’s posting comes from a Richard Wilbur poem, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World.” I read this poem decades ago as an undergraduate and it has remained with me; it concerns paying attention to our daily activities—like laundry. Today I read it as a call to put behind the bad things that happened and focus on the life at hand, even trying to make something of the bad events that occur to every one of us. It’s worth a read if you have time.

For me the worst thing happened thirty-two years ago today, when my beloved mother took her own life in a hospital in Kittaning, Pennsylvania. She had been a polio victim as a child, and in her early sixties she succumbed to the things that we now know plague those who have suffered this terrible disease: physical pain, mental pain, even in her case substance abuse.  I knew of the disease’s physical effects (one of her legs was considerably shorter than the other and she had a pronounced limp), but as a young person I never considered the mental ravages that follow an attack of polio.

When I got the call from the hospital’s social worker, though, while I knew things had been very wrong with my mother for years, I nearly ripped the red phone from the wall in my anger. How could this have happened?

I was living in rural Colorado at the time with my husband and two very young sons, and I had just returned from visiting her for what became the last time. She had been hospitalized with severe depression and was under a suicide watch, but she managed to elude her keepers to find the peace she sought. She was a very bright woman who had had limited opportunities. In the thirties money was tight, and although her beloved younger brother went to Penn State, she did not go. (I don’t know now how much of that was her choice and how much financial exigencies.) She married, had three girls, lived in the same house where she was born with her mother still living there, and worked. Her job was at our local steel mill, Cyclops, and she did accounting, but she was paid as an assistant secretary. That was the fifties—since she was not the main breadwinner, she was not paid as much as men doing equivalent tasks. She loved music and she loved to learn. When I was in high school I remember that she took a night stenography course—she studied hard and took pleasure in each assignment. She was the secretary of our local United Methodist Church, a member of the Women’s Club, she sang in the church choir, and she loved to play show tunes on our old upright piano.

Hardly the profile of a desperate suicide. So that is what I had to come to terms with. I loved my mother deeply, though I think that even as a child I knew something was wrong with her. While I have many warm memories of my grandmother Ruby, I remember almost nothing of my mother before my teen years. I struck out at her once physically, something I remain ashamed of, but I was trying to reach her—she always eluded my grasp, somewhere out of reach around a corner.  

I think only having small children saved me from going under after her death; I could not abandon boys of two and five years. One night in Colorado, after they were asleep, I ran out into the snow in my bare feet screaming.

“This could not have happened to my mother!”

Some days I ran down the mountain roads near us as fast as I could go, reliving each event over and over in my mind as if that could change them.

The other thing that saved me was going back to graduate school six months after her death.  A month or so after her death, Bill was transferred to South Carolina. Though I had not considered more graduate school, I realized I would be living close to a major university. I had been out of school for over a decade, but I took the graduate record exam and did well enough to be admitted, even though the only writing samples I could produce were reviews I had written for the Salida newspaper on the Aspen Music Festival.

So, that August, I began with Chaucer and Shakespeare’s histories, giving me the long view that I badly needed. I loved being in class, and I loved sitting up at night reading these magical stories. The following year I found something that helped me even more: I enrolled in James Dickey’s poetry writing class. (For those of you who don’t know his work, he wrote a novel called Deliverance, and he played the sheriff in the movie version.) Although he was rumored to be an alcoholic and a womanizer (and he probably was both those things), he was a transformative teacher. He strolled into class wearing cowboy boots and a big white cowboy hat, and he slung a large worn brown leather satchel onto the desk. We students were so in awe of him that we sat in perfect silence while he pulled out one book after another and read to us aloud in a deep, rhythmic voice. I was nearly hypnotized—and utterly inspired. I wrote, and wrote, and wrote, many of my poems about my mother. Some of them I eventually published, though many of them were less than good. I had found the place to put my feelings, my despair. I made something.

Today I am in a poetry workshop again, with visiting poet Andrea Hollander, and I am rediscovering how wonderful it is to put things into material forms. I am also painting, learning watercolor, and recently I have begun a series of doors—I have ten of them, from photos I have taken in various places abroad. Briefly I asked myself why I was intrigued with doors, but I didn’t probe because I thoroughly enjoy painting them. But when I combined my efforts at watercolor with writing a poem for this week’s assignment, at least one reason emerged.

The last time that I ever saw my mother, she walked with me down a long blank hall to a heavy metal door. I hugged her goodbye and walked through it; she stayed behind. The door swung shut with a heavy clang and locked; I listened to her limp back down the hall, dragging her left foot after her right. I never saw her again.

I am attaching the poem, as it illustrates how art and writing can help bring us back to the world. I think any kind of creative or mental activity that produces something (tangible or intangible) can do the same thing. I lost a dear friend this week, and another dear friend’s mother died, so this poem is for them and for my mother.

         Composition: Mixed Media

I paint to learn what my eyes barely register,

things hidden to me: cast shadows, a latch,

a spectre whose form floats behind the drapes.

I study the image I shot, its hues and patterns:

copper door, stained windows, the stone of walls

and sun faded stone, the blur of a doorway’s curve.

I sketch the door. I mask it. I pour

Holbein’s opera rose over phthalo blue.

My scumbling suggests the shapes.

I’m not done. The three hundred pound

cold press needs to dry. I eye it in my mirror

to see whether I like it better backwards.

Like Dodgson’s Alice, I’ve found a world.

Once I was young; I lost someone. I glaze

a green on top of my pain: I paint a door.

Happiness; 26 January 2014

Today our Sundance film festival is officially over; the town will be quieter, the pace will slow. We drive in Park City as little as possible while the festival is on, but when we did go into town this year the traffic was not as intense. I think this is because, unlike many other years, we had no winter snowstorms to slow everything down. And although the nights were quite cold (down around 15 degrees) during the day the sun came out and temperatures climbed to 40 and above. This meant that the sidewalks were clear and there were fewer PIBS (people in black) wandering the streets. I spotted no celebrities—I probably wouldn’t know them if I saw them—but as usual there were rampant reports of celebrity sightings. There were parties all over Park City, the grapevine said, but since I wasn’t invited to any of them I only heard about them through hearsay—and reading the New York Times, which ran a story about the party houses in Deer Valley.

Both of us volunteered at our local library, selling concessions.  With some difficulty I learned to run a credit card through an I-pad, and I did a reasonably good job with the cash register, though I made a number of mistakes. Thank heavens no one checked me when my shifts were over—it was harder than I thought it would be. I even got a few tips, the biggest one $1.50. I can see that this career is not in my future. It made me think of all the “menial” jobs people do in our culture. We take their work for granted and typically don’t pay them well, yet they can be demanding and stressful. After just four hours on my feet, I was tired. 

Again I am meandering, but doing that kind of work brings me to my week’s topic, the Sundance documentary Happiness.  It was the most visually beautiful film I have ever seen, and while the story line was simple, I am still thinking about what I learned from it.

Happiness was filmed by Western filmmakers in Bhutan, where the average national income is $6,100 per capita. In the early 1970s, the country’s Fourth Dragon King (don’t you love that tile??) stated his commitment to modernizing his country. He coined the term “Gross National Happiness,” which he defined as building Bhutan’s economy on the basis of Buddhist spiritual values. Here are the four necessary elements for a happy country:

1.         sustainable development;

2.         preservation and promotion of cultural values;

3.         conserving the natural environment;

4.         establishing good governance.

A GNH index should replace the GDP as a way of measuring countries’ progress, he thought. Bhutan is rated as the happiest country in Asia, the eighth happiest country in the world.

The film poses the question of how entering the twenty-first century might change this allegedly happy land. It opens with the present king of Bhutan declaring that he will allow the Internet and television into his country. People cheer; flags wave; bright colored balloons rise to the sky.  Then we are in a high mountain field, where women and an eight-year-old boy harvest barley. The boy sings a beautiful song about their work and about life.  They seem to accept the fact that they must work hard, as winter is coming and they will need food; this is simple. The mountains around are breathtaking, the highest of them soaring to 24,000 feet. But the boy’s mother, a widow with six children, decides to send him to a nearby monastery, as she cannot afford to send him to school and can barely feed him. He resists this.

However, once at the monastery he makes the best of things. He studies during the day and he makes a friend, an older monk-in-training. Some of the best shots show the two of them in their bright crimson robes running and tumbling against a magnificent, overpowering landscape, emblems of human happiness juxtaposed against an inscrutable, implacable nature.  

These scenes are interspersed with shots of work crews building the electrical system that will bring power to this remote village, a reminder that progress will come here, too.

Even the monks are leaving, though, going south toward Bhutan’s capital, Thimphu. There seems little hope that this way of life can survive.

Although his life at the monastery is not difficult, the boy is homesick. He gets permission to go home to his mother for a few days, and it is at this point that his uncle decides to travel to Thimphu to buy a television; the work crews are close and soon they will have electricity. (Uncle had already bought one, but he broke it when he transported it up the mountain.) Each time he buys one, he has to sell a yak. One yak = one television. The boy accompanies his uncle this time, the first time he has left his village. While in Thimphu, he wants to see his sister, who has an office job there and uses computers—his mother is extremely proud of her daughter.

The film has amazing shots in Thimphu of the boy’s reaction to what he sees: the traffic, the police, the shops, the candy he can buy, the brightly colored lights at night. He finds his sister, but she does not work in an office: she is a dancing girl in a club, and, it is implied, a prostitute. (I know from my two stints working in the Balkans that one of the tried-and-true ways of luring young women into prostitution is to promise them that they will be “administrative assistants” in this city or that if they come with the procurers.)

This time the television reaches the village of Laya safely, and the film ends with the villagers sitting in front of it in the evening. They are watching “World Wide Wrestling Federation,” the program reflected in the pupils of the small children who stare in disbelief at the screen.

“This cannot be real,” one murmurs. “They would murder each other if this were really happening.”

So the film leaves many unanswered questions: how will exposure to the media, to other ways of life, change these people? will these villages endure? will Bhutan’s happiness index diminish as the country is modernized?

Not necessarily. Things will change for these people, some things for the better: they may be better fed, they made work less, their daily lives may be easier.

I know little about Buddhism, but I wonder whether its value of acceptance of life as it is can endure in a postmodern era, where the media encourages us to desire things that we don’t or can’t have. The little boy’s mother counsels him to accept what he must do, and even when she sends him away despite his wishes, when he comes home he finds happiness in lying in her lap in front of the fire.

I find that I am happy in my retirement, though I have enough to satisfy my needs with enough left over for travel, recreation, entertainment, hobbies, etc. I have a partner who loves me, loved family members I see often. I can hardly say what happiness is, but I think accepting what I have should suffice. There are no guarantees in life, no innate justice or fairness. The metaphysical English poets’ theme of carpe diem (seize the day) might be, like Buddhism, a path to enlightenment. 

It’s funny what takes us into the past. It happens to me on a regular basis these days; I might be cleaning up the kitchen, working on a painting, reading or writing a poem, listening idly to the radio—and I am gone, back to a place that seems at least as real as where I am now.

Yesterday it was listening to a program on NPR about the sixties. Maybe it was “This American Life” or ‘The Takeaway,” but the host was interviewing men who had been conscientious objectors and draft dodgers during the Vietnam War. One of them had been at Cornell with Daniel Berrigan; he recounted his tale of objecting to the war on ethical, not religious, grounds and going back to Oklahoma to confront the draft board there rather than staying in New York. Oklahoma at that point had given no one, not even Quakers, deferments for any reason, so returning home meant a prison term. He decided that to make the point that the war was immoral he had to be willing to make sacrifices.

Earlier that day I had been reading over my journal from 1966, the winter term of my freshman year at Allegheny College. Bill and I have been rearranging our respective studies, so that I can have his drafting table in my office for my painting, and in the process I have been moving books and papers. You know—we get this impulse to put our lives in order; it makes us very happy for a time, until the inevitable chaos resumes and we spend a good bit of our time looking for things.

Anyway, I decided to put my dozens of journals in order. I have kept them for decades, starting with 1966. There are lots of gaps from then until around the late 1970s, so I was glad to see I have an early record.

What a pivotal year that was for me. Since I was the first person in my immediate family to go to college, I had been overwhelmed the first weeks. But when I started recording my days that second term, I was happy and in love with Allegheny. Everything there was magical and meaningful. I had forgotten how many important friends I made that year—such a varied lot, male and female. Most of my entries are full of my encounters, conversations, and mini-dramas involving casual dates, would be dates (should I ask Bob Metting to the Sadie Hawkins dance or not? etc.), and imaginary lovers—but also the classes I was taking and the ways my mind was being stretched and re-shaped. I was terrified in speech class, worried I would make a fool of myself in front of whatever male I found desirable at the time.  And sure enough, after my first speech I record, “I looked up and saw John Boughton laughing.” I was still determined, though. After that I worked very hard on my next speech. My journal records that trial:

I have rehearsed my speech five times aloud. I spent considerable time researching it (3 ½ hours), considerable time taking notes (2 1/3 hours), considerable time writing it (2 hours), and a fair amount of time practicing it (1 hour). I believe that adds up to approximately 9 hours. That sounds about right. Let’s see.  9 x 60 +540. 540/7 = 77.0, or 77 ½ minutes preparation for every minute I speak. How can I flub it up?

I was self-conscious, but I also had a growing political awareness that I don’t think I would have ever developed in Titusville. I still believed in my religion at that time, and I spend Sunday evenings at meetings hosted by our college chaplain, Dick Devor. We had discussions, did role-playing, and had speakers. We learned about Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “pecca fortiter” (sin boldly), and we took ourselves very seriously: we really believed that we could change the world. Remember that this was just after the terrible summer of 1964, when the three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi and after the assassination of John Kennedy. America was changing, and we wanted to be part of this revolution. I read Nat Hentoff’s The New Equality, Eric Fromm’s The Art of Loving, Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story, Le Petit Prince, watched Last Year at Marienbad, and did scandalous things—I went alone to David Frost’s apartment to listen to jazz while he smoked dope. . . . And I even learned to swim well that winter. You see, you could not graduate from Allegheny without passing a swimming test, using four strokes. I hated coming from the basement gym on cold winter days with wet hair, but I loved my teacher, Pam Westerman, who had long blonde hair and the brightest blue eyes. I thought she was one of the coolest women I had ever met. And despite my initial trepidation, I grew to enjoy my swim sessions with her.

So, for a while yesterday I was there, fully immersed in those transcendent moments. I saw the person that I was and I liked her. Although she was naïve, she cared about her family, the people around her, and the entire world. And she made me laugh. By January 1966 the Vietnam protests had begun in earnest, and Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania, was not to be left behind. We also  protested other things: hunger among the Ibo in Biafra, racism, poverty. I joined in these protests, but I kept my head and did not let them submerge my own sensibilities. I will end with my entry for 6 February 1966. Now my lists makes me laugh, but when I compiled them I was deadly serious. That was my job: to learn how I fit in the world.

Why I am skipping dinner to take part in the Vietnam protest fast:

1          I believe that

            a.         the war should not be escalated;

            b.         the Viet Cong Liberation Front should be considered a bargaining

                        unit;

            c,          the government should thoroughly and conscientiously re-examine its

                        policy on the war in Vietnam.

2.         I believe that individuals have the right, and duty, to say “no” to the

government if:

a.         they are acting in accordance with their principles;

b.         they have thought carefully about what they are doing.

3.         I believe that I should take a stand on the fact that no one is “asinine”

            for acting on what they sincerely believe in.

4.         No human being has the right to judge the acts of another human.

[And here is the kicker! Evidently the local committee has decreed that we skip meals for a day and a half, but I couldn’t go that far, even though I knew it was the right thing to do.]

           

Why I am not fasting for 36 hours:

1.         As far as I cam concerned, it would accomplish nothing.

2.         I want to protest as an individual.

3.         It would interfere with my learning.

4.         I can’t swim twice in one day on an empty stomach. . . . . 

I See Russia from My Rear View Mirror; 12 January 2014



The above line is adapted from the title of a poem by Agha Shahid Ali, “I See Chile from My Rear View Mirror.” I heard him read the poem years ago at a Westminster Poetry Series reading; while he was hopelessly drunk by the time he got to this poem, he read it with feeling. The poem involves, among other things, the overthrow of Salvador Allende and the subsequent nearly twenty-year rule of the military dictator Pinochet: the imprisonments, the torture, the unjustified arrests.

                                        The siren

empties Santiago; he watches

--from a hush of windows--blindfolded men

blurred in gleaming vans.

The poem ends with the line,

The waters darken. The continent vanishes.

So what does this have to do with Russia? Everything. Last week I thought I had it figured out: relations between Russia and the West had thawed, life is better there now, things are easier.

Not.

In an odd way, the fear I had of Russia as a child has re-emerged: the country in many ways is as repressive as it was during the Stalinist era, even during the feudal ages. Most Russians struggle to make any kind of living, to have the basic necessities of life, while the Gazprom executives  (the oil magnate billionaires) and the ruling politicians live in unimaginable luxury. Sort of like the 1% here and the rest of us, only much worse—“the rest of us” in Russia have very little.

This past Friday night we were invited to a dinner hosted by three Russians, our friend Tamara of last week’s blog; her student O., a mathematical climate genius; and O.’s wife I., who was a doctoral candidate in climate research in St. Petersburg. Tamara wanted to thank us for the Moab tour, but, more importantly, she wanted us to meet O. and I. They prepared a meal of traditional Russian foods: a thin soup of potatoes and vegetables, a very spicy carrot salad, a tomato and red paper salad, potatoes with head cheese, caviar on black bread, and blini (thin pancakes rolled up around sour cream and jam—very delicious). We ate and talked; O. had good English, I. some English, and Tamara very limited English. Again, I only have 20 words of Russian.  Toward the end of the evening, the conversation turned to a discussion of life in Russia today.

Ivan explained that after the end of the Cold War, most Russians believed that daily life would improve in their country: they would begin to acquire the material things that most middle-class Westerners take for granted. But when after a generation this did not happen, Russians became cynical and disillusioned. Today a mafia that came primarily from the KGB controls most of the country while the average Russian struggles to scrape by. His own mother is a doctor and works endless hours for very little pay. The educational system is, according to our 3 hosts, a disaster.

“Russian professors and researches cheat,” O. announced, his thick black glasses slightly lowered below his brows.

We understood the sentence but not its meaning. He went on to explain that there are no external controls on research within Russian institutions. It is not necessary to verify one’s data before releasing the results. For example, a director of a Russian research institute publishes her/his own journal. He selects who will publish in a journal, usually among his colleagues and students. In the international community, when someone wants to publish research, that someone submits the article to what is called a peer-reviewed journal (with no name attached). The anonymous article goes to two or three experts in that particular field, who review it. They either accept it, accept it pending revisions, or reject it. I have been through this process numerous times myself with my articles and books on Henry James, with all three of those possible outcomes happening. I do know that while the process takes months or even longer, the laborious method guarantees that the author’s data and conclusions have a high degree of validity. Authorities, with no personal ties to the author, make sure that the research is legitimate.

This does not happen in Russia. In the vast majority of cases, scientific and other articles are published without any validation. While they may be revised for style and grammar, no one checks the facts. Thus, as O. announced, Russian researchers cheat.

Then the conversation took a turn neither Bill nor I would have ever expected. The following information I am reporting is true in its outlines. Some of the details as to the timing of the events may be off, though, as we both had trouble understanding some of what I. told us. She spoke with emotion and not a little fear. She is tall and slender, with a pretty face and long dark hair tied behind her head in a ponytail.



I. looks at deep layers of sediment in the Arctic oceans, trying to track what climate change might be doing to sea life of all kinds. She conducts her field research from various ships. Recently she accompanied an American expedition to the Chukchi Sea, which lies within the Arctic sea between Russia and Alaska. It must have been an amazing trip: she recounted seeing a mother polar bear with her baby along the way.

When she presented a paper detailing some of her findings at a conference in St. Petersburg afterwards, though, colleagues from her own department accused her of “sharing secrets” with Americans. What possibly could be political about doing research involving climate change? Bill later explained that there can be valuable mineral deposits in the deep sediments, for example manganese nodes, that Russia would want to keep for itself.

Obviously I. is a very talented woman, as in the meantime she had been invited to Maryland to work on her projects in the fall of 2013.

Back in St. Petersburg, though, her fellow professors had another surprise in store for her. She had finished her dissertation and was ready to defend it, but abruptly her committee cancelled her defense. No explanations, no defense.

But worse, accusations came: she was a spy and she could go to prison for an indeterminate length of time. At one point as she talked I heard, “CIA.” She had been accused of collaborating with Americans to steal Russian secrets. She would have no recourse in the current Russian system. If there were a trial, it would be heavily weighted toward the university. We are not even sure if there would even be a trial, let alone a lawyer.

She has not been back to Russia since these accusations surfaced, and she married O. in Las Vegas before Christmas. (They could not marry in Utah because they are not citizens—go figure. Let’s not even get started on who can get married in Utah and who can’t!).  But they are legally married and now can begin their application for a green card, O. applying as he is employed in the country with very good prospects of further work at universities. Evidently he is considered to be brilliant in his field, with fellowships in Cambridge, Germany, etc.  They need ten letters of recommendation for the green card, and we will each write one for them.

So, not only do Russian researchers and professors cheat, they can send one another to prison at will. While my English department had serious feuds over my twenty-five plus years as an academic, no one ever tried to send an enemy to prison. Bill and I both suspect that her Russian colleagues were jealous of I., who also seems to have quite an international reputation for someone so young (27?). She had received international grants and attention, and her work was going well. Since it is probably impossible for some of her colleagues to achieve her success, particularly if they have come through a system where there is little oversight of their work, it would be easier to get rid of her. No, not refuse her tenure or fail her at her dissertation defense, imprison her.

She is afraid to go home.

So, that is what I have earned about Russia this month. I don’t want to go there, either. I hope that things work out for this young couple; they will be assets here, as we try to deal with the burgeoning effects of global warming. What insanity, for a country with as much natural wealth as Russia to lock up the very people who might bring about such positive things for Russia—and the entire planet.

Door to Another World; 5 January 2014



Once upon a time I was afraid of Russia: that was during the Cold War era, when my fourth-grade teacher Miss Doris Newbold told our class that Titusville, Pennsylvania (pop.8,000+) was tenth on the list of cities to be bombed by the Soviet Union. I did not question the logic of her pronouncement. I knew that my town had a steel mill; my mother Esther and my uncle Paul both worked there. She claimed that our production of this product made us vulnerable. Who was I to question her higher authority? So after class I ran the two blocks to my home on Second Street and scrambled down the wooden steps to our basement. The basement had an outer room with windows and a cement floor, but in the very back, near the furnace, was a small narrow oblong space, all of dirt. I ducked in and crouched on the floor. If the bomb hit, I just might be saved.

Unfortunately, there was enough light coming into the room that once my eyes adjusted, I could see spider webs festooning the low ceiling—lots of them. I didn’t wait long to see what kind of spiders might have made them. I pulled myself up and headed back through the cellar’s main room, with its electric wringer washer and its wooden shelves sagging with hundreds of jars of colorful canned goods. My grandmother Ruby was in the kitchen, as usual, and when she saw me emerging from the basement, eyes tear-stained and school dress grimy, she exclaimed,

“Why Susan, whatever is wrong?”

Usually I came home from school in a happy mood, as I had good grades and liked nearly all of my classmates. But today I was disheveled and in tears.

“Miss Newbold said we are going to be bombed by Russia!”

Ruby quickly grabbed the bottom of her blue calico apron and pulled it up over her face. At the time I thought she was wiping the sweat from her face, as she had been stirring a pot of something on a hot stove, but I realize now that she must have been laughing. She was always very careful about not hurting any of her five granddaughters’ feelings.

“No, dear. I think that is hardly possible. Why don’t you sit down and have a piece of cake and we can talk.”

While I am no longer afraid of Russia, somewhere, subliminally, I still view it as “other”: other to my life, other to my way of thinking. And although I am curious about that country and though I love to travel, I have no desire to go there. That must be the result of an atavistic fear stemming back to my Elm Street School Days.

This holiday, after our two older sons, one daughter-in-law, and three granddaughters left, I had planned a trip to southern Utah with a visiting Fulbright scholar from Russia, Tamara Sukacheva. While I would have preferred to be in Moab with warmer weather (it was 15 degrees there in the morning), I had a chance to learn more about the country and people that I once feared.



Tamara Sukacheva is a mathematical logician, a professor at a university in Novgorod, Russia’s oldest city. Now she is in Salt Lake City, developing a mathematical model for predicting climate change in sea ice. She is fifty-eight years old, has been widowed for ten years, and lives with her daughter’s family, sharing a room with a three-year-old grandson. She does not drive a car, and in the summers she takes the bus to her dacha in the country twice daily to care for her garden.  Her dacha, by the way, is a very small shack with no plumbing, set on a treeless plain with a small plot of land behind it. Her mother lives near her as does her thirty-four year old son Daniela. (I have a thirty-four year old son, Daniel.)

Since I am determined to stay as active as I can during my retirement, I have returned to Utah’s Fulbright Board. We plan activities for Fulbrighters coming here from other countries. In November I had a brunch for people and then we visited the Native Elder Show at the Deer Valley ski area, where our guests could learn about Navajo weaving and crafts. They loved meeting the native elders and some were able to try weaving with these beautiful women. Tamara came and a few weeks later fed me lunch at her apartment: borscht and blini. Both were delicious. When I learned that she had seen nothing of Utah outside of downtown Salt Lake and the University of Utah, I invited her to come with us to Moab after Christmas.

“Great!” she proclaimed.

I picked her up on New Year’s Eve and brought her to our house. We went to a neighborhood party that night. She brought gifts for us and for our neighbors: small baskets made of birch bark filled with candy. Novgorod, it seems, is the birch bark craft center of the world. She showed me many pictures of the beautiful things made there, including shoes. At one time the nobility wore shoes made of animal skins, while the serfs had birch bark shoes—they lasted about one week. I also learned that the New Year is the most important holiday in Russia. It lasts a week and ends on 7 January, with the celebration of Russian Orthodox Christmas. So I was glad that we could take her to a celebration. She had never had guacamole, salsa, nor ricotta and spinach stuffed chicken thighs. She took several pictures of the buffet table.

I did find it something of a struggle to communicate with her. Tamara speaks very little English, and I have about twenty words of Russia—I only know those because I used to teach Slavic literature in translation. We did well, though, using gestures and expressions and repeating things often.

We have had multiple visitors from other countries over the years, most of them professors associated with Fulbright. It remains an embarrassment when our guests see our house. Though it is small by Park City standards (about 2700 square feet), it would be huge almost anywhere else on the planet. I tried to explain to Tamara that this is a small not a large (velike) house, but to no avail. What I said made no sense to her. Even our small guest bedroom (12 by 14 or so) was, to her, a large space.

On New Year’s Day I packed up a box and a cooler of food and we headed to Moab, where we stayed at the Gonzo Inn. The suite had a pull-out bed in the living room and a small kitchenette. I knew that while when I have lived overseas on Fulbright grants I was wealthy, Fulbrighters coming here have sticker shock. They have enough to get by but little left for extras, like restaurants. We had breakfasts in our room and took lunches with us.

Tamara found Arches and Canyonlands both “very interesting.” She had learned about our national parks on the Internet, and while Russia has a few of them, her country has nothing like our vast network of public spaces. We were able to see quite a bit in our few days there, but I always forget how far apart things are in this state. Tamara loves to walk, but hiking was limited because some of the trails were icy. We walked to the Windows Arches and partway to Delicate Arch, and we walked to the meteor crater in Canyonlands, because Bll is fascinated by the rock formations there. We took other walks along the park roads; there is little traffic now and the roads were ice free. During our time we saw few other visitors, a plus I think; most of those that we encountered were from Asia.



We visited the Green River overlook and Dead Horse Point, where the state of Utah has built a very nice museum.  I don’t think I had ever seen the parks dusted with snow before; they are magnificent. The snow outlines the myriad rock contours, highlighting their strange shapes, and the shadows are bluer, deeper.

Our inn had a Jacuzzi, which I also called a “hot tub.” Tamara had heard Jacuzzi before but not “hot tub,” which she continually pronounced “hot butt.” When I proposed trying it our first night, she promptly took all her clothes off and wrapped a towel around her body. She grabbed the soap and shampoo from the bathroom.

“I am ready!”

 “Where is your bathing suit?”

Before we left on our excursion I had told her to bring a bathing suit.

“I need bathing suit? We go swimming?”

I finally made her understand that in America, we wear bathing suits to the “hot butt.” And when I realized that she planned to take a shower at the Jacuzzi when we were finished, I also explained (laboriously) that there was no shower there.

“Nyet.”

Not so in Russia, I learned. Novgorod has many “banias,” or public baths, where people bathe naked and then shower after. Aha, I thought, a small light dawning: that is why at my health club in Park City I recently saw a sign reading,

“VISITORS MUST WEAR BATHING SUITS IN THE SAUNA.”

Some poor unsuspecting Russian (Eastern European, etc.) must have walked in wearing only a birthday suit.

She loved soaking in the tub. Afterwards she got out and stamped her feet in the snow.

“This bring good health.”

Conversing together became slightly easier toward the end of our trip. I learned that while Tamara and her family lack some of our material goods, they are rich in love and food. Families remain close there, supporting one another always. When the old wooden fence around her dacha fell down, her son and his friends spent a weekend there putting up a new metal one. Her living arrangements with her daughter seem to work quite well, despite their small space, and her daughter’s family is building a home where Tamara will have her own bedroom. It is different there, though: she showed me pictures of the house in its present state. The family works on it as their money and time allow; they are not taking out a mortgage from the bank so that they can have the house NOW.  Her twelve-year-old grandson’s greatest joy comes from his music. He is in a band where players play traditional Russian instruments. She showed me a picture of this large group: it looked like something from the Fifties here. All the members were wearing folk costumes. They are raising money to go to a band competition in Estonia. Somehow this seems like a better choice than being immersed in social media here as many (though not all) teens are here. I think in general Russians are more innocent than we are.

But it is easy to make these worn comparisons. The truth is much more complex.

Tamara would not say anything negative against Putin when we asked her.

“He is a very clever men, but the people around him are not clever.”

Maybe that’s a holdover from the Soviet period, not criticizing leaders. She did tell us that she can’t understand why so many Russian people are still so poor, as the country is very wealthy in agricultural and mineral resources. I suspect it is because Russia went from feudal to modern times, skipping the Renaissance and Enlightenment ages that did so much to grow the middle class in the West. My attempts to ask her about that, though, were futile, so we went back to talking about our respective grandchildren. That’s universal.

I envy her her geographically close family and her personal strength, surviving as a widow for over a decade. She has been remarkably successful in what is, in Russia as here, a male-dominated profession. She laughs about this. When she went to a conference in Poland, she was the only professor who did not have to share a room with someone else.  That was because she was the only woman there. I know from my semester teaching in Bulgaria that professors in the Eastern bloc have very low salaries and heavy workloads, so this Fulbright grant has provided a wonderful opportunity for her to do nothing but her research. I discovered that her sponsoring American professor has not even met with her yet, but as I had the same experience in Montenegro I was not surprised. With her ever positive spirit, she has seized this chance and works constantly on her project.  While I could not always read her face, I found her to be very warm. She always stood very close to me, smiling.

I was exhausted by the end of our trip, probably because of the effort it took to explain things, but I found learning about her world fascinating. I did not have to come home and hide in the crawl space under our house; Russia is no longer “other.”

A very happy New Year to all.

It is hard to say anymore which is more real: today or yesterday. I would probably vote for yesterday, as in the theme song of my 1965 freshman year at Allegheny: “All our troubles seemed so far away. . . . I believe in yesterday.”

I don’t have many troubles this Christmas, aside from the usual nagging problems of growing old. This will be a very busy and very joyous one here: all three of our granddaughters, two of our sons, and our daughter-in-law are making the journey to our house. And now it is snowing gently, flakes drifting down outside my parallelogram windows as I write, blanketing the spruces at the edge of the path. Park City looks like the quintessential Christmas town, particularly along Main Street and the (mostly renovated) miners’ shacks that stagger up the hills toward the ski areas. Though it was colder last night, we have not had the bitter temperatures of a couple of weeks ago, the sub-zero deep freezes that made me huddle on the couch at night wrapped in my fuzzy white blanket.

I usually say my postings won’t be long and then they are, but this time I mean it. I just have enough time to go out the door with my cross-country skis and make the loop around the meadow half a block away before it is time to pop the already-stuffed turkey in the oven.

There is just enough time to say what I mean to say: that it is the little things of Christmas that stay with us, eventually eclipsing everything else and coming to be the central part of our conscious grasp of what this winter holiday means.

For me, it is a sugar cube house. I think we had one a single time, though I could be wrong. The house sat on top of our high upright dark piano, resting on an oval linen Christmas cloth that was imprinted with a village scene. I have that cloth on top of my own upright piano, though I have not made (nor have I ever made) a sugar cube house. I can see this house clearly and I can almost taste the glittering sweet cubes. I don’t know what the cement was that held the white blocks together, but it must have been something edible. I thought that it was the most wonderful thing I had ever seen. I loved sugar as a child, so much so that it is a miracle I have any teeth left. I used to pick tender lettuce leaves from our garden and put a teaspoon of sugar in the middle of the leaf, rolling it up and shoving the whole thing into my mouth. Desserts were a staple of our household; my mother had an aluminum cake pan with a top that slid over it and there was nearly always a cake in it, red velvet or yellow.

My other treasured memory of Christmas in Titusville also focuses on the piano: Christmas music. My mother played the piano and sang in our church choir, and my sisters and I took lessons. Often our house resounded with tunes from sixties musicals that my mother plunked out:  “Oklahoma,” “South Pacific,” “Fiddler on the Roof.” I still hear those melodies in my head. Best of all, though, were our Christmas songfests, when my Uncle Gordon boomed out the lyrics in his deep voice. Gordon Cross lived in Manhattan and rural Connecticut; he sang in New York’s synagogues, and, to our family’s eternal pride, he was on the Mitch Miller Show, where he was its official photographer and a choral member. Every Saturday night we gathered in the family  room around the TV set, my Uncle Bill who lived next door often joining us, leaning against the doorway to watch when Gordon appeared.

“There he is!” one of us would shout.

Often he was featured taking shots of Mitch and other actors, in a sort of meta-commentary on artifice that was almost post-modern. We couldn’t believe it: someone in our family was on television!

He and his family usually came to Titusville over the holidays to stay with my great-aunt Edna next door, as the Christmas show was shot ahead of time and his synagogue work was done as soon as Hanukkah was over.

On Christmas morning we awoke to find our stockings pinned to the end of our bedspreads. We were allowed to open those right away, though I think the house rule was that we had to wait until daylight to come downstairs. My sister Catherine was the early riser, sometimes up as early as 2AM anticipating Santa’s arrival. I believed in Santa fervently until the second grade, when my friend Marian Jordan (who just happened to be the only African-American girl in the Elm Street School) who had come to swing with me in my backyard leaned back from her perch and whispered,

“You know, Susan, there isn’t any such thing as Santa Claus—he is your parents.”

I don’t think I answered her; I merely filed this remark away. The seed of doubt had been planted though,  and I started to wonder whether my five foot eight inch thin Irish father could possibly be the fat, jolly Kris Kringle.

Our Christmases passed in a whirl of cookies, candies, sledding, ice-skating, and building snow forts along the street where the plows heaped up snow banks sometimes eight feet high. My granddaughters live in sunny climes—Atlanta and California—so it will be a treat for them just to be in the snow. Three-year-old Abby recently announced,

“I am going to my Papa’s house to build a snowman and stick a carrot in its face for the nose.”

Nothing more need be said, except that I wish everyone a happy, healthy, and peaceful holiday season. I will write again after the first of the year.

22/12/2013

Where was I?  Oh yes . . . . with the women who might have lived in the abandoned log cabins in this remote wilderness.  I suppose they just survived. After all, where could they go, particularly if they had children?

And where could I go, when this exciting summer adventure lost some of its glimmer? Read on, dear reader, and you will find out my destination.

In some ways I think that the summer was a metaphor for my entire life: I want to try things, I want to have adventures, I am perennially curious, I become easily bored with routines. So, off I rush eager to excel at my newest passion (read: skiing, golf, yoga, tai chi, writing, painting, playing the piano—though not necessarily in that order). I put enormous amounts of time and energy into these various passions, only to burn out and decide that I would be much better at doing --- X. This summer was no different. Before we departed for camp in early July (the earliest when the camp site was completely free of snow), I spent many hours looking up recipes and copying them onto white index cards. I found this project very interesting, for a time at least. Remember this was pre-Internet, so I combed through my own limited library of cookbooks, looked at magazines, and even checked out books from the Salida library. (Poncha Springs was too small to have one.) I gave little thought for what kind of ingredients would be available—this is typical of my approach to life: full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes. I also gave no thought to how inventive I would be at 5:30 in the morning, when my day’s work started.

Not only did I amass recipes for things like coq au vin, boeuf en daube, duchesse potatoes, corn fritters, chocolate puffs, etc., I even shopped for cooking equipment. I found two large metal coffee pots at the Salvation Army store in Canyon City (coffee was an essential for cold mountain mornings) as well as a giant soup pot and an old-fashioned waffle iron that went over a gas burner. I happily packed these items, along with (not enough) disposable diapers, warm clothing for all of us, and various books that I would finish that summer. I left out my two-volume Scott Moncrief translation of Proust, though—I was enough of a realist to know that I probably would not finish this project at field camp. I took Jane Austen, instead—talk about women’s lives removed from mine.

Well, as you have probably already guessed, it only took a matter of hours after I arrived at said camp for my balloon (becoming a gourmet chef) to deflate. During our first camp meeting, I decided I would ask campers what kinds of food they wanted me to prepare. The novice geologist liked chicken and vegetarian casseroles, one summer student wanted pate and Perrier water, the field technician would only eat beef, and Tony, another student, handed me his mother’s recipe for snickerdoodles—I am not kidding.

And then there was the shock of my first morning in the cook tent. After my trek down to Beaver Creek, I opened the flap to a dark, cold tent. I lit the stove first, then the Coleman lantern. After sweeping up the cats’ nocturnal kill of mice and chipmunks, I brought in drinking water from the plastic tanks next to the tent. Though I used water from the creek to boil for cooking, we did not dare drink the creek water, as there were many cows ranging in this area. Since the potable water came from a well ten miles away, I soon learned to hoard our supply.  I boiled a large kettle of water and poured it into the top halves of my metal pots. After it percolated I poured it into insulated servers. Breakfast and lunch preparation went by in a blur; then it was time to think about dinner.

Days passed; overall and despite my constant fatigue, I thought I was doing well. But I had not reckoned with my boss, Bill. (Need I mention here that it is almost never a good ideasto work for one’s spouse???) I was not the only cook: two of the other wives filled in, as we went back to Poncha Springs every other week for a few days’ rest.  Occasionally we were all in camp at the same time. Bill summoned the three of us together late one afternoon. I was sure he would compliment us on the wonderful meals. Nope: none of that positive reinforcement! He complained: we were not serving enough protein at breakfast. His crew spent long days hiking and carrying backpacks full of rocks up and down Fourteeners; this group had to be well fueled. He had made it clear from the start that we could spend as we needed for supplies: good food was essential to morale. Being the fair-minded person he was (and is), he did NOT say that I, in fact, always had protein at my breakfasts. Since I was married to him (at that moment, at least), he did not say that I had done a better job than the other two women.

I was furious. All this—and then a scolding? Needless to say I did not speak to him for days, but he probably did not notice. I don’t want to generalize about gender behaviors, but he has never picked up on people’s moods like I do. It is probably acculturated behavior, but women in general seem to have a better grasp of how others feel. He might have noticed the frosty glares I gave him every time I saw him that something was wrong—but on the other hand, probably not. He was tired, too.

So, that plus the wretched working conditions (I haven’t even talked about cleaning up in that cook tent!) pretty much ended my career as chef. I should note here that camp life was challenging for nearly everyone, except the children and dogs who continued to love it: our wine and beer account grew as the days in camp lengthened.

I still remember, though, that I had the best desert I have ever had in this primitive camp. In early August of that summer the other mom, Cinda, and I spent an afternoon picking raspberries by a beautiful and precipitous mountain stream, listening for the bears that also loved the berries. That evening she made a raspberry torte. I can still taste it.

Other things about this perfect summer came up short. I could almost here my mother saying, “I told you so,” but since there was no phone service at our campsite I could not call her. It was just as well. First, she didn’t need to hear about this, as she was grappling with her own issues; second, I was ashamed to admit that I had been wrong. I was not superwoman, after all. Surprise. . . . 

From the start sleep deprivation was a problem for Bill and me. Fifteen-month-old Daniel, who slept very well in his room at home, immediately went on strike. We had comfortable cots for the boys, low to the floor and padded with warm sleeping bags. On the first night we put them to bed, both crashed instantly, exhausted from running around the open field. Bill and I, too, were asleep in minutes. But around midnight Dan started in:

“Wah, Wah: I want my cwib!”

This wail continued on and off until 5:00AM, when it was time for me to get up to start the day’s chores. We tried various measures, including letting him sleep between us, but nothing worked.

Okay, after two weeks it was time for our trek back to Poncha. On the way I convinced Bill that he would have to dismantle said “cwib” and bring it back to the camp. That worked. Aha, sleep at last.

Nope. No sleep. Although Dan dozed peacefully through the night, secure behind those familiar bars, Bill started squirming: kicking, wriggling, moving a lot.

“Stop this!” I finally whispered. “I cannot sleep. Would you puleeze stop moving so much?”

“I am not wiggling,” he growled back in a low tone.

Before bed the next night I warned him, “Please try to hold still tonight!”

Same thing.

By the third night, we were really exhausted—beyond even being tired. Around 2AM Bill started again.

“Stop kicking me!” I yelled. “I am going to the truck to sleep.”

He sat upright and announced he had barely moved. As we stared at one another, we realized that the movement continued. Bill picked up the flashlight next to our cot and shone it on the bed. We saw rippling beneath the sleeping bag.

This nocturnal culprit was a chipmunk, who had managed to wiggle between the bag and our sheet. He must have been seeking the warmth. Marriage destroyer, that one.  The next night we brought one of the cats to sleep in our shelter. That solved it—at least, it solved that problem.

In August, the weather turned. In July, a rainy day had meant a welcome break for almost of us. The crew stayed in camp sorting samples and drinking coffee, happy for a break, and I had people to talk too. The three preschoolers, though, proved difficult to entertain inside these small tents. Uncle Lyle played cards with anyone who had the time to sit with him, but the boys weren’t old enough for anything like that. The dogs just slept near the cook stove, glad to be warm, but the boys bounced and shouted and fought. Later in the summer, such days came all too often.

I clearly recall a four-day stretch of freezing rain and then snow, confined to our twelve by fourteen foot tent some hours, the cook tent full of grumblers the next hours. I can’t remember now what Bill said to me. It probably was nothing; by now we almost never spoke to one another aside from an occasional grumble or growl. We both suffered from every classical symptom of sleep deprivation, irritability and irrationality heading the list. Maybe the word “protein” came up—or perhaps even the remark that I was his paid employee?—I just don’t recall what the trigger was, but suddenly I found myself throwing his favorite pint and a half (just-the-right-size) thermos out of the book tent door, barely missing a summer student, and breaking it on a rock (granite schist??). I vaguely recall that I accompanied this dramatic action with an expletive or too, words related to where he could put said thermos and the entire camp, for that matter. Though Bill was distraught at the loss of the thermos, at least I hadn’t thrown out one of the children. (Certainly I might have thrown him out, but he is bigger than I am.)

“I am cooking the breakfast in the morning, and then I am driving you and the boys back to Poncha Springs.”

That was the last thing he said to me for weeks.

Sure enough, the next morning he got up at 5 a.m. I was relieved: angry, but relieved that my once-anticipated-and-looked-forward-to summer would end. Bill marched to the cook tent. I had laid out ingredients for corn fritters the night before, but Bill poured milk into the bowl and cooked pancakes. Whatever. Then he broke down the “cwib” while I threw our belongings into duffle bags. He loaded the three of us in the Bronco and stepped on the gas. I never looked back as we pulled away from the Mt. Zirkel Wilderness group campsite.

Five hours later, with only one stop for gas and the toilet, we arrived at our log home. Bill unloaded the crib and bags and threw them into the yard, while I quickly took the boys inside our never-looked-better house, complete with hot running water and indoor toilets. Our wonderful neighbor Jack remembered our dramatic re-entry for years: Bill driving in, throwing everything (including his family and dog) onto the lawn, and turning around without even a wave to head back up Poncha Pass for camp, arriving there late that same night.

Well, I guess there is no moral to this story, except that our marriage survived the summer.  Fortunately both of us are exceptionally stubborn: I can’t think of another reason why we are still together—except of course that we love each other. When the camp closed in September, after record early snows, Bill and I left the boys with our sainted neighbor Karen and went to Aspen for the weekend. In search of decadence after a summer of bathing in Beaver Creek, I booked a luxury hotel with a sauna and a swim-up bar.

It was at least a decade before I remembered the good things about that summer: the friendships that we made, the remarkable beauty of the camp, the wildlife and flowers, the solitude, living without any links to the outside world other than the post office in Cowdrey. The grapevine has it that the Jackson County Forest Service dismantled our tent platforms years ago, but we could still go back and camp there. I have such strong memories, and I am hoping that a visit will recreate them all. I suspect it is one of the few places left where I have lived that has not changed. It is one thing that I want to do before I am dismantled.

P.S. To this day Bill buys steel thermoses.

file://localhost/Users/susanegunter/Downloads/Sue_North%20Park%201980-2.jpg

At our age, sometimes some small thing triggers an association and with it a flood of rippling memories that submerge us, blotting out our immediate present. For those of you who have forgotten their Proust (or perhaps have just shelved him for future perusal), that is what happened to the narrator, Marcel, in the “Overture” to Swann’s Way, the first of the seven volumes of Proust’s monumental Recherche du Temps Perdue, translated variously as “Remembrance of Things Past” or “In Search of Lost Time.” I prefer the latter title, as I think it more accurately expresses what Proust tried to do—and what all of us try to do as we grow old: capture what we have lost in a meaningful enough way that others might benefit from (or at least understand) our unique experiences.

I must confess here, on this page, that I have never finished said monumental text. At nineteen I started reading it in French, when I was spending the summer working at Ocean City, New Jersey. I was distracted from this interesting project by, of all things, a boyfriend who showed up. I was crazy about him and wasn’t sure whether he reciprocated my feelings, so I dropped my reading in favor of spending long afternoons with him in his tiny apartment just off the beach.

I didn’t pick up Proust again until my thirties. This time I tried to read it in English, so my reading went faster, but I stopped about 300 pages short of my goal. I even taught Swann’s Way in a seminar on Modernism (along with parts of Ulysses and all of James’s The Wings of the Dove—the students liked Proust best). In graduate school, while studying poetry with James Dickey, I wrote a couplet about Proust:

In Proust most single sentences of brevity are free

to underscore the weighty thought of madeleines and tea.

This brings me once again back to where I started—involuntary memory and how it places us squarely in the past. For Proust’s semi-fictional Marcel, it was the taste of a madeleine and lime flower tea that took him back to his childhood in Combray, with the magic lantern, the walks, his mother. For me it was the pictures above, which are of my two young sons during the summer of 1980, when we lived in field camp in the Mount Zirkel Wilderness area near the Colorado/Wyoming border. I took very few pictures that summer, but an old and dear friend, Craig Horlacher, sent Bill these photos a few days ago. I was instantly transported to what was one of the most interesting and challenging summers of my life. Bear with me—this probably will take weeks to tell, so hang on. . . .

So, field camp. In 1980, when Ben and Dan were small, we lived in the beautiful town of Poncha Springs, Colorado, population 250 plus (the plus being the friendly dogs who wandered its dirt streets). My geologist husband Bill was often away from home, leaving me alone with a three year old and a one year old. I had not even wanted children until I married Bill at age 28; I was surprised when I wanted them and even more surprised at how completely I loved them right away. Despite my continuing love for them, however, it was difficult to parent on my own so much of the time. I had become involved in the town—I was the town secretary and I belonged to a baby-sitting coop, an organic food-buying coop, and La Leche League—but still when Bill was gone for ten days at a time there were moments –hours—days—when I thought I would lose it. I used to take the boys to the high school track and put them in the middle of the field on the grass with their toys, while I ran round and round them as fast as I could. Or, when they were both napping, I would go outside and jump rope for hundreds of times. For some reason I did not go insane, but I did push Bill to a) find another career, b) send someone else from his office out prospecting, or c) move me closer to my extended family. I remember sitting in the corner of our log house rocking a crying child at night, watching for his truck headlights to come down the pass from Buena Vista. (This area was so remote that few cars ever passed through the town at night, in case you were wondering how I could recognize his lights.) And when he arrived, I usually turned over the boys to him and disappeared to spend the night in a motel in the nearest town, returning the next morning rested and happy.

So that was my life at that point. I vaguely recall that we fought fairly often, me because I was angry that we did not have shared parenting, Bill because he probably couldn’t figure out how to do anything about it. I think he loved his work, and frankly there aren’t many urban areas (with graduate schools and libraries) where he could have found employment. We laugh about all this now, but as I write about it I am there again and I can feel my own frustration.

At any rate, in the spring of 1980 he announced that he had a joint venture with a British company and a French company to fund a search in northern Colorado for a massive sulfide deposit. Well, fine—but it meant that he would be gone for several months, living five hours from our house. Great.

Instantly I hatched a couple of plans:

A) go back to Titusville, Pa., for the entire summer.

B) take the boys and go with Bill and all the others to field camp.

I had already made plans to go home for a couple of weeks in late May to visit, but when I got there I could see that my poor mother had deteriorated. She had been a polio victim as a child, and as she grew older she suffered various physical and mental ailments. My father was struggling to take care of her, and I realized that adding two little kids to the mix would not be helpful. My dear sister was there, but she too had young children, and her husband ran a big business out of their house. Unless I rented my own place in the town, plan A would not work.

But as I said in last week’s blog, according to Susann, always be ready to go with Plan B. I talked this over with my parents. My mother, who was a very bright woman and still in command of her mental faculties, said that Plan B was out.

“Susan, you cannot possibly take a three year old and one year old to live in a camp in the wilderness for months!”

Well, that did it. Unfortunately I am still that way: if someone tells me I can’t do something, I immediately figure out how to do it, whether it is good for me or not.  And not only did I end up going, I ended up persuading my husband to hire me as one of the camp cooks for the summer.  What a brilliant idea: I would earn a handsome $3.00 per hour, and my children could be by my side as I worked.

So off we went in early July. We were fifteen in all that epic summer: a middle-aged Aussie geologist escaped from the soulless bush for a six weeks’ sojourn in the green Rockies); four summer geology students (two male, two female—I had nagged Bill to hire women); a senior field technician with his wife, two year old, and eighty-three-year-old uncle Lyle; a young geologist and his pregnant wife; and the four of us, camp director Bill, three year old Benjamin, one year old Daniel, and me, a haggard thirty three year old. Two mixed breed dogs, two predatory cats, a herd of elk, and various uninvited rodents completed our singular entourage.

Together we spent the summer in one of the earth’s most beautiful spots. We were 37 miles from the crossroads of Cowdrey, population 45, and 42 miles from the town of Walden, population 1000. While much of the landscape in Jackson County, Colorado, is arid and open, dotted with cacti, sagebrush, juniper, and pinion, the Mt. Zirkel wilderness area is green and spectacular. Throughout the summer the field in our encampment was carpeted with tiny wild flowers, beautiful alpine orchid species in shades of violet, mauve, ad blue. This large open field was bordered by trees at its north end, where our tents were pitched, and sloped down to Beaver Creek at the south, dropping off over a steep brambly edge to the creek bed below. Parts of Beaver Creek were clear and rocky, though other sections widened into boggy mosquito-infested swamps.

An owl nested in a single tall dead tree in one such swamp a quarter-mile southwest of our camp; he circled our field on moonlit nights in search of tasty midnight snacks. At first these night sounds startled me: the owl’s clear hoot, the coyote’s chilling cries, the noises of large animals crashing through the high country timber. Morning sunrises were stunning. As the sun’s red light reflected on the snowy peaks to the west, it bathed our valley in a rosy glow. I loved the dawn quiet: privacy was at a premium here, with fifteen of us sharing common living areas. The three boys in the camp, of course, loved camp. They could play all day long—no structure, no media, nothing but insects, rocks, plants, and two happy dogs.

The camp was set up to expedite the mapping of significant geologic occurrences. The forest service had allowed us to build platforms on which to erect our large canvas tents. Each family group had a tent for sleeping, plus there was a large cook tent and another large tent that served as an office. Our site was next to an abandoned gravel pit filled with water; at first some of us bathed there, but as its water table lowered week by week it looked less and less inviting.  There were two latrines set back from the camp in the woods. (My older son was potty trained when we went, but for weeks he refused to use these facilities, leaving me with two in diapers at a time when disposal diapers were scarce.)

Not only was there no electricity here, there was no water, so I arose at 5:30AM each day to take my water jugs down to Beaver Creek and haul them back up, next heating the propane stove to boil my water for coffee and for cooking chores. Sometimes when the boys napped in the afternoon, I would sneak back to the creek to wash my hair in the icy water, my head aching.

The hills around us were dotted with abandoned cabins. I used to think about the women who might have lived there. If I struggled for a short summer, what must it have been like for them when winter came, with no doctors, no stores, no neighbors. . . . .  I have never fully been able to tell their stories. Next week I will finish this “camp cook” episode, leaving you to imagine what might happen next--debilitating illness, a psychotic breakdown, divorce—but you probably aren’t thinking  “happily ever after!”