Biking & Solitude

I don't know why Stephanie thought I was joking, except that she said I kept talking about it and not actually doing it. Taking a little trip by myself, though, made me more careful than perhaps I needed to be -- hinting, declaring, asserting, planning, all so slowly and deliberately that it probably came out funny. Better that way, though. Household ecologies are delicate, and extrications are more than a matter of logistics.

Adventure with the family can be had in three or four hour blocks. After that, every day this summer is scheduled with the girls' lessons (music, kayaking) and various rounds of camp. Then those hours often overlap with some playdate or another, and that's the day. There is a way around all this. If we really had an idea in mind and we planned in advance, those three or four hour blocks could turn into legitimate outings; but somehow, we fail to make such little plans in advance. We're not good at inviting people over, or for planning outings, and for the same reasons. We join well but also lump at home -- all too well.

So, for maybe two weeks, every few days, I'd tell Stephanie I was going to go on a camping trip. And I was so subtle about it, that the day before, when I was finally definitely going, when Stephanie was arranging some kid logistics with another parent I heard her say, "He just spontaneously decided to go camping tomorrow." 

The route wasn't going to range far. I hadn't logged enough time in the saddle to stand the kind of trip that appealed to my greatest sense of romance, one in which I crossed entirely out of the familiar biome into mountains or desert or ocean, all on whatever power I generated myself. But with the help of a ferry or two, I could at least skirt around the far side of Puget Sound.

The plan below was organized around state parks. And because I'd hit three different spots in Kitsap County with ferries back to Seattle (Southworth, Bremerton, Bainbridge), I gave myself plenty of room to bail if my body cramped or crumbled. If it didn't, I'd make a small tour of state parks in central Kitsap.

I started by biking to West Seattle. Loaded touring is a little slower and more unwieldy, but I have a terrific, solid bike, and I didn't bring the really heavy stuff, like stoves or groceries. By the time I got to Manchester, I had biked maybe 20 miles, the sun was out, and I was out in the beauty. I'd biked here before on a group ride around the Sound, but had forgotten the miles of fencing and razor wire, though I'd remember soon enough the solid presence of the U.S. Navy throughout the county.

Manchester State Park

At the park (C in the map above), the rangers tried to persuade me that their park was more beautiful than my destination for the night in Seabeck (D). One of the rangers also wondered how I'd get there from here. I just pointed to the list of Google Map directions I'd strapped to my handlebar stem, and maybe she figured I knew what I was doing, because she didn't say anymore.

I didn't stay long, maybe forty minutes. I walked a wooded trail, examined some of the old military remnants, checked out the campsites, just in case, exchanged words with a couple families, then took off.

On my way out I saw something that looked like a camel in a yard. 

Sometimes people keep camels.

The ride from Manchester to Port Orchard includes a slow road immediately off the water with a clear view to Bremerton and its dramatic bridge and naval hulks on the other side. I blew a tire in Port Orchard and tried to stuff inside it the long, skinny tube I'd been carrying around  as a spare for years. Fortunately, a bicycle store was only a mile away, maybe not a coincidence, given that the builders' staple I pulled from my tired came from the grit of town.

The bicycle store or the camel. One of these heightened my sense of adventure more than the other, but which? The camel was exotic and peculiar, but the bicycle suggested a story, a protagonist out of Dickens. The owner danced through the detritus on the floor of his shop to reach me, then sold me a tube. I asked if I could install it there and borrow a pump and wash up afterwards, and he said fine, but I'd have to do the work right outside. My bicycle had been blocking the only ingress and egress available. When I reached what felt to be good pressure (his weak pump had a broken gauge), I too picked my way across the floor for the filthy bathroom in the back. He cursed the governor for her rapacious taxes as I paid.

Who was I going to curse for tiling the waterfront with highways? My bicycle map told me to stay on the highway and then exit to another, but the ramp was in a left lane. I headed into Bremerton and pointed the nose of my bike in the general direction I wanted to go, and eventually, with the help of a young clerk who had never heard of Seabeck but had access to the Internet, I got back to Highway 3 and the exit advised.

The sun was shouting down for all the world. My exit, Newberry Hill, baked in it. A large concrete retaining wall loomed on the right and the hill, as it seemed at the time, went straight up. After struggling to find my way and fighting the highways in the sun, hitting that wall drove me right off my bike, which I walked until I crested and stopped off a driveway to nowhere strewn with road waste and litter. I crossed the street to find some shade and found my jaws too tired for the energy bar I was chewing. But before turning off Newberry Hill I filled my water bottles with cold carbonated water and downed an ice cream sandwich, and the turn onto Seabeck Highway also brought with it trees and shade. 

In another 10 miles, I was in Scenic Beach State Park. It was a beautiful spot opposite the Olympic mountains across Hood Canal. The campsites and trails are forested and laced with mossy curtains. On a bike, I took the best campsite in the whole park and paid less than half the cost for the privilege.

And though I was counting on a grocery or something more than a pizza place to lure me over the hills for dinner, I was content with a handful of jerky and nuts and dried fruit.

So here's the wondrous part. I walked through the trails. I walked on the beach. I waded in the water. At one point I read a fifth of Wiesel's Night in preparation for teaching it to ninth graders. But otherwise, nothing. I didn't read, didn't write, didn't listen to music. I was available, not busy, not full.

And at eight o'clock, I sat down on the beach and waited for sunset. Nearby, another couple waited, silently. We sat and watched the water reaching to the shore and shielded our eyes from the progress of the sun towards the mountains.

What was I thinking about in all that time? I wasn't fretting. I wasn't planning. I wasn't reflecting, or counting blessings or wondering. Time passed. Oyster shells scraped across rounded pebbles. My chest and face were warm, not unpleasantly. And then I walked back through the woods before it was dark.

Nothing in this trip was better than the presence I experienced here, the quiet of my mind. The next morning when I had breakfast in Poulsbo restaurant, I was unembarrassed to eat without reading, because then, still, I un-Americaned and didn't mutli-task; I ate, I looked around or didn't, and comfortably enjoyed my eggs and lightly buttered rye and the man at the other table reading a paper and the server preparing for the day.

Fay Bainbridge State Park wouldn't be the same. Its campsites all had RV hook-ups and a small bush beside that. They lined up next to each other rather like a row of toilets without stalls. I finally selected a site next to a friendly looking older lady sitting in a canvas chair outside her big RV. We chatted. She told me she didn't have Internet on her phone, so she couldn't tell me the weather, but that her husband could do it. When I returned from paying for my space, the husband was cursing at the friendly older lady. He was very loud. I was ashamed, and confused about my role. I jumped on my bike and went to Winslow six miles away. I toyed with catching a ferry to Seattle for the day, and then coming back at night to sleep. I could see a movie. But I turned around and went back. I wasn't going to let this schmuck turn my adventure. I returned with a sandwich, a beer, a yogurt, cherries and grapes, and there was not a trace left of the couple when I got back.

Unloading in my new site.

A ranger told me there were cheaper campsites for bikes on the bluff above, and he'd refund me if I'd give up my space. I was only too glad.

I wandered the beach, talked to a family stranded without gas in their boat, finished preparing Night, started another Holocaust book by a different Hungarian Jew who also, as a young teenager, went to Auschwitz then Buchenwald -- Fatelessness, by Imre Kertész -- failed to finish my beer, then returned to my campsite, where firewood scavenged from pits around the bluff made a fire to warm my body and ward off the mosquitoes buzzing round.

View of Seattle from the ferry home

I biked 120 loaded miles. I can still feel the adventure in my back, in my bottom. It's nothing that I'm most proud of.

Taming of the Shrew

I teach Shakespeare. That means I should enjoy attending and evaluating interpretations of Shakespeare's plays, and that my appreciation should be heightened by what I know. Good news! These things are true.

Last Friday, we brought the girls to a couple plays at Woodland Park, about a mile from our house. First we saw Henry VIII and then, a couple hours later, Taming of the Shrew. Any Shakespeare production is interesting for me, if not fun, because this stuff has been out there so long and so long valued and yet with enough play within the plays (no stage directions; no playwright's Forward!) that people really throw their creativity and brains and compassion into the projects, and different stagings and sensibilities emerge though they richly resonate with what we already know. Plus, every year I learn a little bit more about the plays and their contexts, and so I notice ever-finer details and understand better the deliberateness of decisions. Shakespeare in the Park is another layer of cool because, a) it's free, an inclusiveness and civic mission I always appreciate, and b) stagings have to be loud and energetic and stylized to compete with open space, babies and airplanes, which makes comedies over-the-top fun and tragedies and histories more accessible and energetic.

As a Shakespeare teacher and father of three kids, one would hope that my children also know something about Shakespeare's plays, and maybe even enjoy them. More good news! Somehow, through no fault of my own, they do! When the girls were younger, with groups of amenable people we played a couple theater-in-a-box style productions of King Lear and Merchant of Venice, which come with collapsable daggers and, in the case of King Lear, a plastic eyeball. Maybe that helped. The kids also really got into A Midsummer Night's Dream, I don't remember why. We owned the movie with Stanly Tucci, Michelle Pfeiffer and Kevin Kline, and for a while, they watched it over and over. Also at some point, while we were visiting our great friends in Vancouver, Rachel and Isabelle and their three kids (probably just two at the time), the adults decided it was time the kids watched one of our plays for a change, and we put on "Pyramus and Thisbe," the wedding play put on by the truckdrivers of Midsummer, and, I have to here assert, we blew their world.

This doesn't mean our kids are happy to watch anything. Sophie brought things to draw, Maisie regretted she didn't, and Amelia's always ready for a live performance but can be disappointed though not glum. Sophie rarely looked up through Henry VIII, though she said she heard everything (and people back in Shakespeare's day didn't go see a play -- they went to go hear one), and afterwards, Sophie had some good historical questions that got into the holes of Shakespeare's Tudor propaganda. But nothing special happened here.

As for me, I liked the Catherine of Aragon character a lot; I liked the message repeated throughout the play, Don't hit someone when he's down; I liked the speeches given by characters at their lowest points; I liked musing about the crafting of this play in Elizabeth's court with Shakespeare's possible Catholic leanings; the acting was excellent; but it isn't a play to introduce people to Shakespeare (sorry, Nathan; glad you could make it).

Stretching out on blankets in the park to see some dusty History gave us mission, though.

Using a blanket to stake a claim for a performance was something we had recently rehearsed, and I do want to say something tangentially about this.

Tangent, go: We visited Rachel and Isabelle again the week before and went to Vancouver's Folk Life Festival. The sun beat down at day and the beats spun up at night, and it was a fine tiem. Among other groups at the many stages was Besh o droM, a group we knew from Hungary (thank you for the albums, Barna).

A highlight of the visit was the final meal. Rachel had put the kids to the task of planning and preparing a meal for the adults, something her kids had done before. They spent a day and a half planning. Ben's a giant detail guy, and ended up assigning himself to drinks within which he had multiple giant fruits and hammer-crushed coconut. Maisie and Gabby put themselves in charge of desserts, ice cream sundaes with raspberry sauce, perhaps the most triumphant dish of the night. Sophie's soup, though, was a small broth; and perhaps we should have worried when Ben asked if he really needed to put in 58 cups of water for the amount of pasta Amelia was going to prepare. In the end, the pasta was an astonishing thing. No one knows just how the effect was achieved. But it put the paste back in pasta. And I don't know when I'd seen people laugh so hard.

To work my way back from the tangent, at the Vancouver Folk Life Festival, we used blankets to stake our territory, and now we were doing it again.

By the time Taming of the Shrew opened, shade was mercifully spreading across the field. The actors had been practicing cracking a bullwhip and rolling around on each other and slapping faces. A little man in a green hat was distributing candy coins. The crowd had grown substantially.

I love productions of Taming of the Shrew, because it's so sexist it's a riddle but so quick and funny it's irresistible. People put it on, and then we get to see how they deal with a play that tames its free-thinking woman by depriving her of food, drink and company until she gives a speech at the very end saying, "Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, thy head, thy sovereign" and "our lances are but straws, Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare."

A few years ago, Seattle Shakespeare Company handled this problem by casting everyone as a man at a bachelor party, staging the play in a final sexist bacchanal -- until the groom delivers Kate's speech with such irony we see he rejects it. Two years ago, Wooden O set Padua in a trailer park, and we could laugh freely because they were rednecks and Kate was genuinely fiercesome. I actually thought I'd never see a better live production. Franco Zeffirelli, meanwhile, handles the issue so brilliantly in his film with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. We see Taylor's Kate, jealous and hurt, we see her making deliberate quiet choices to build a home for herself in her war with her new husband, and in the final scene, we see her watching children, with longing, before she delivers the speech, and we see that this too is a strategy but also partly sincere.

Greenstage's production, though, didn't try to do anything tricky for its modern audience. They trusted to Shakespeare's own devices. I think it worked, and it was a revelation. At the very beginning of Shakespeare's script, there's a drunk dude named Christopher Sly, and people think it'd be hilarious to put in a fancy bed in a fancy house and tell him he's always been rich and here's a play for you, a I'm in-charge-of-fortunes-and-women fantasy. Greenstage played this up, and it was ferocious, and so funny. Then, in the larger play, Petruchio is given free rein to have full reign, and we reveled in his sly control; meanwhile we sympathized with Katherine's unfair portions in life and felt a rising delight as we saw she would emerge into more happiness than she ever achieved in sour competition with her sister. The production even made the versifying funny, emphasizing the rhyming and laying bare its ridiculousness. The show was thoughtful, boisterous, creative, and Sophie was up and watching the entire time.

Arizona

Our friend Emily M. got married. It was a Fulbright marriage, and we were so happy to follow the whole courtship that started in Budapest and found legal consummation in a strip mall in Phoenix. The wedding was set for the day after the kids' last day of school, and so my last hours in the classroom involved two finals, a set of essays to grade, sweeping up final assignments and my room, and marking final grades. I checked out, zipped home, gathered kids, and then we took a bus to light rail to the airport to a plane to a rented car and closed the doors of our hotel room in Phoenix just after midnight.

During the wedding, I was so busy dancing, I didn't have the conversations Stephanie had, and I ended up feeling a little empty for it. Several from our Hungarian year were there -- Kent, Georgi, Katherine -- and I should have talked to them more. But Amelia and Maisie kept me on the dance floor, which was more or less unpopulated except for Emily's one-year-old nephew, who bounced to rap and funk and disco, his arms waving before him like a G.

A Phoenix-Hungarian officiant presided over the wedding, pronouncing rites in both English and Hungarian, a unifying of these geographies that will attach them forever. István's family was largely absent, but his brother and niece were there, and a good friend named Tibor who surprised us with a very-not-Hungarian accent and easy English: it turns out he was Dutch and just learning his family Hungarian himself. Emily, meanwhile, besides drawing people like us from all over the country, was flanked by her good friend from Germany. Theirs is an international marriage, and it is good to see the worldwide love.

We spent most of our trip, though, with the best man from my own wedding -- Tyler. Oh, Tyler. Tyler who I followed home from my first day of high school because I liked how he spoke in complete sentences. He moved to Arizona a dozen years ago, became a doctor, grew a family, married and divorced, and I never went to visit him once. 

His visits to Seattle were likewise infrequent. So it was funny how this last month worked: He brought Ava and Danny to Seattle, and his new partner, Angela, and her two year old, Joulliette, for a week's stay, and only another week would pass before we joined them again on their home turf.

The Seattle reunion included a whirlwind visit from our dear friends Rachel and Isabelle and their kids, and even, as luck would have it, Paisley, another mutual friend, who'd ended up teaching creative writing in Utah. This was a terrific weekend, now a bit of a blur, that included a walk in Discovery Park, whose two favorite features on this day were the beach and a big field by the parking lot.

Before we saw Tyler again, our girls thrilled in swimming and exploring the five identical halls in our hotel. I went out into the over 110 degree heat to get close to the Mariners' Spring training complex, an attraction Stephanie found hilarious in me. But what else was there? After getting to know the neighborhood and dining at the fine available restaurants like Red Robin and admiring the stone horses in front of P.F. Chiang's, I spent the morning wondering where Ichiro would go for dinner. Would he go to Red Robin? Would he eat at P.F. Chiang's? Does he spend the month eating suburban mall food? I was making Stephanie laugh, but I really wanted to know. Where would Ichiro go? We travelled around the outlying areas of Phoenix, and everything seemed to be a P.F. Chiang's or a Red Robin, a Target or a Walmart; the colors of buildings and houses were identical, which provided an aesthetic purity that appealed and toned down the commercialism of the chains around us, but still, the whole place seemed like Lynnwood in a frying pan.

Speaking of Red Robin, the one next to our La Quinta Inn had this sign on the door (picture at right). That was the other thing about Arizona: They're allowed to pack heat anywhere unless a business says don't bring it in. Also, Arizona passed a law to make it criminally punishable for illegal immigrants to have a job. And legal immigrants or anyone accented or swarthy have to carry papers everywhere. And police have to stop and demand the papers to make sure someone's not deportable. Also, Ethnic Study classes and books are banned from school. And while the Supreme Court said no to a little of this while we were there last week, it doesn't change the fact that there was a sign on our Red Robin that says Do not bring your pistol in to this place where little girls are eating milkshakes and grilled cheese.

But we didn't remain in suburban Phoenix. Before long, Tyler and Angela took us to a cabin on a peak outside Prescott, with an accompanying temperature and population drop. Suddenly Arizona was beautiful. Some of that beautiful Arizona tore our tire to shreds on the way up the four mile drive to the cabin.

While I was worried about how Maisie would handle Angela's dog (and it's true, Maisie ran around the cabin slamming doors and slamming Tyler's head in a door and screaming and howling as the dog wagged his tail and chased after), Maisie eventually put cautious hands out to pet Taz and settled in; more importantly, I was excited for Sophie and Ava to spend more time together. This has not been a good year for Sophie, socially speaking: she was inserted into the second year of middle school without the orientations and convergings of the first, and she has never been one to introduce herself or appear in any way available to reindeer games. Serious Sophie, meet serious Ava. 

Back in Seattle, I'd heard that Ava wrote short stories. Writing? A 12 year old who likes to write? I know one of those! When I suggested that they might have a writing group in Arizona, Sophie was excited and immediately started gathering possible things to share. She had apparently been jealous when Stephanie and I went to a coffee shop with my former student, Evan, for our third writing group, and so this was a natural extension of an interest I strangely hadn't much noticed. 

The first thing the girls did up in the cabin was get out their writing and sit down, with Amelia -- I don't know what Amelia was doing -- and gave each other feedback on their stories. I was giddy for it, running from Stephanie to Tyler to Stephanie, announcing that Sophie seemed happy. 

All three girls ended up doing more writing, the four of them actually, writing a paragraph each towards a narrative that flowed surprisingly well, given their mix of ages; and the three older girls did more writing before bed. To Danny's disgust.

Danny was very happy to be the boy around them, farting, throwing watermelon rinds off the balcony, bringing them bugs. Danny was an interesting kid to me, in part because he seemed like such a normal boy with many of Tyler's naturalist impulses -- examining plants, insects, owl vomit, constellations in the sky -- but without Tyler's reserve, and all of the boyish manhandling of the world. He was curious, charming, affectionate, and a little lonely too, I suspect.

But when I said out loud that Maisie and Danny seemed to be getting along well, Maisie heard and objected, because Danny spent a lot of his time being a pest to the girls' quieter activities. Still, take a look at these pictures and judge for yourself:

At night we watched the stars come out for hours, clear and wide. The sky stretched and stretched in the still, cooling air. When Stephanie asked about a constellation to our left, Tyler said he had an app for that and pulled out his iPhone and pointed it at the sky. When a large, bright satellite passed the sky on our right, Stephanie wondered if it were the international space station and Tyler said he had an app for that too, and looked to NASA to discover that it was indeed the space station. We sat in the still and the dark, talking -- or letting Danny talk, because he slept alone in the living room just inside and was possibly a little scared to be by himself.

We also went on one hike to a nearby fire tower. It wasn't the nine mile hike Tyler and Angela originally pursued, but a single mile walk had its advantages. And the fire tower, close as it was, perched over stunning views in all directions.

I was so glad to have such close quarters with Tyler's life again, and Angela and Joulliette are bringing him so much joy.

After leaving the cabin, we drove past the 158 curves in 12 miles around Mingus Mountain to get to Jerome, by which time Maisie was sucking on a plastic puke bag and Amelia was holding her stomach and I was driving myself dizzy. The highlight of the Jerome stop was the bored and friendly fire chief who brought us in to his garage and let the kids run wild.

Outside Sedona, we prepared to swim in the river, gawking at the red rock country and changing our clothes in cars or weeds.

We ended up moving downstream where rangers weren't yelling at people to stay away from bacteria blooms. Our last hour together was lush and green and not dry and red.

But on the road again, it was a beauty like nowhere else.