Grand Ronde Run

The week after school let out, Sam (top right) took us rafting down the Grande Ronde.

We'd also gone the year before and had a terrific time, five days of floating and camping, launching water canons and eating and drinking absurdly well. I was mildly wondering who would kill the rattlesnakes, because in 2013, Jim had come: he was competent with a machete and had killed three of them (we skinned and ate the first). Though Jim couldn't come this year, the weather was much cooler and we saw no snakes at all.

Replacing Jim and his daughter was our friend Jono (center, yellow) and his son, Lionel (right front), flying in from Brooklyn. Stephanie and I had just seen Sam and Jen (center, blue), and Jono at the Oberlin College reunion, during which, Sam and Jon revived the Plum Loco Circus, originally an extravaganza of clowning and acrobats that brought together town and gown in an unprecedented community gathering; later, Plum Loco was Sam and Jono on the road, two clowns on their way to becoming a doctor and a child-life specialist.

Here's a chunk of their show from the reunion.

This year our rafting trip featured equally excellent provisions and ended with the same promise by Sam: next year, more austerity, less prep and less weight. And once again, the area is stunning. The Wallowas in Oregon are dry and craggy, and from the river, we cut through basalt and steep hills. From Minam to Troy, we floated 45 relaxed miles and 4 nights on two rafts and an inflatable kayak.

 

The trip did have one sleepless night, following an incident early on the second day. 

Toby and I were in the inflatable kayak. Everything he did with his paddle, I did the opposite, trying to prevent him water-terrorizing the rafts with his water gun. He was avid to drench someone, but it was just too cloudy, too cool, too early. I steered him towards action.

And then our boat overturned. And I couldn't flip it. We were still in rapids. In the end, Toby was rescued first, though he was holding a paddle in one hand and wouldn't relinquish the water gun from the other, and I floated for what turned out to be a mile and a half before the churning water calmed enough and Sam pulled me out of the river.

First, though, I bobbed along in my life preserver, leaning on the underbelly of the ducky, which kept me a little warm, and grasping my paddle with the other hand, watching the rafts in front of me get further and further away, and getting colder and scareder, looking wildly for a place to self-rescue but mostly keeping my legs up and pointed down-river, just like Sam told us, not to get the feet trapped in rocks and the rest dragged under in the current, and also whimpering a little, saying hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey

Sam told me to let go of the ducky and the other raft retrieved it. For a while I was totally exposed to the river before Sam hauled me onto his raft. I lay prone over a pile of fat wetbags, aware of Maisie on the other pile with Sam's younger son, Robin, aware of the image of me beached and face down.

"Are you hypothermic?" Sam asked me. I asked what that looked like. He said I'd be numb and foggy and wouldn't be able to move. I wiggled my toes and head and figured I wasn't.

But when Sam and the other raft found a place to eddy out, there was no other priority but to warm me up. This began one of the most beautiful episodes of my adult life.

Stephanie and the girls closed in all sides around me. Sam took my wet shirt and gave me his warm red jacket. Someone gave me water which I kept tossing in my face because I was shaking too hard to get it to my mouth. Sam took my swimming trunks, and now I was only wearing his jacket. Someone gave me warm tea, which I jerked into my mouth. At some point, Jono was with me; at some point, Sam's father got behind me and rubbed my kidneys. The girls were all around me.

Then Sam told me to get naked with Stephanie, and he covered us with sleeping bags, and Stephanie shed her clothes so readily, just chucked them and held me, didn't look around or hesitate, and there was nothing else like it, I'd felt so loved, I felt so full of love, and I said so: the embrace from my daughters and friends, being naked with Stephanie under the sleeping bags and everyone around us. 

Sam said I was probably feeling weak and a little groggy headed. "Or as I like to call it," I said, "relaxed."

Well, I have lost you

                On Thursday, about twenty minutes before I learned the reason one of my 4^th period students was switched into my 3^rd (due to a no contact order resulting from a classmate mugging him outside school the day before), I also learned that another kid in the class was expelled for a third offense of possession in as many months.
                I had in fact spent part of the night before and that morning preparing to talk to this guy about marijuana use: the last class we had together, while the rest of us were discussing Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Well, I Have Lost You,” he was overheard spending the hour trying to score pot for the evening. He was failing the class with a 12%, but he was smart, but he was a pot-head, but he was winning and courteous, but he distracted everyone in class (but his mother had shot herself in the head a year and a half ago after calling her two boys repeatedly from a hotel room and saying goodbye).
                The school’s social worker helped prep me to talk to him, after which I created eight bullet points of things I would say when I saw him next—that he wasn’t in trouble; how worried it made me that he so casually and publicly spent class time pursuing something illegal and harmful; that it raised red flags, and that I needed to share what I’d overheard with his father—did he want to be there when I did it; that it might not feel like it but this was done out of care and concern; how was he doing; and the hardest part, about his mother, and how he was coping, recognizing how hard; I’d ask him if he had people he talked to, and if he thought he’d been self-medicating; and if he wanted to talk to someone confidentially about any of it—about school, family, grief, marijuana.
                But he came to school reeking and security got to him first.
                I’ve been thinking a lot about marijuana this year. I’d already lost a different kid to a drug expulsion, and another to a plains-state wilderness detox camp. And I’d tortured two others over the course of first term, meeting with them after school to help stretch their thin summaries into analytical essays, day after day, watching them breathe in extra oxygen for any small burst of smarts that would help them explain to me how one sentence connected to another, the grass growing straight out of their heads in a patched meadow of broken logs and candy wrappers. They are 14 years old, 15, in ninth grade; my 14 year old daughter is writing stories about heroines retaking whole countries while her class mates laugh off the civic and familial and corporeal lines that make them human beings in the care of and charge of other human beings, like it’s funny that anyone cares.
                Two weeks, ago, our principal sent home a letter about the spike in marijuana use in our ninth graders. When I distributed the letter to my ninth graders, I spent a good 20 minutes talking about it. I told them how I regretted our state vote on marijuana legalization, because Colorado and Washington have sent unintended messages to kids that marijuana is safe. But I’ve seen things in this ninth grade class I’ve never seen before, including the number of kids blithely failing and bullying each other, and kids I’ve overseen struggling for thoughts that wouldn’t come. I talked about the neuroscience of the adolescent brain, and showed them a story from NPR detailing how the teenage brain rewires itself for maximum efficiency, and marijuana fundamentally messes with the wiring. This is no time to be mucking around in there, I told them.
                I’ve got more than the usual number of kids who could care less what I think these days. It’s an imbalance of regard that leads to the problem Millay identifies in her poem—that sometimes it’s our very desire to invest that keeps us from being able to connect: “If I had loved you less,” she writes, “or played you slyly / I might have held you for a summer more.” But Millay doesn’t end there—quailing at loss; she counters it with the passions she wouldn’t trade:

                If I had loved you less or played you slyly

                I might have held you for a summer more,
                But at the cost of words I value highly,
                And no such summer as the one before.

                I too want to assert the worth of untempered, unsmoked emotion.
                Here are the words I value highly: devotion, solidarity, duty, love.

Amsterdam Layover

                I am currently in hour seven of a layover in Amsterdam. It’s two in the morning and I have eight more hours to go. The airport is quiet. I can use the bathroom and there are no cleaning ladies hovering about the mirrors and urinals. The airport here also has the best accommodations of any I’ve visited, so I might avail myself soon of one of the lounging chairs and take a nap. But I’ve also had a couple cappuccinos and a coke today, trying to use this layover to begin my shift to Seattle time, nine hours back.

                I took the train in to Amsterdam and I walked for five hours. From the grief it’s giving me, I suspect my left hip is going to protest for the rest of the week. My original intention was to take advantage of this night without kids in one of the most popular cities in the world, and to walk all night, or participate in the nightlife. And I discovered that if I had to spend the middle of the night in a city, Amsterdam was the right place to do it, because it remained crowded and bustling and inviting the entire time. But I ended up reticent about sitting at a bar by myself—though I did it and enjoyed finally getting off my feet and having a foamy coffee—and dancing appealed less when every bouncer at the door looked like the Barcs Jobbik leader, and I wasn’t ready to entrust my backpack to anyone. And then the night started to change on me.
                The energy was terrific and there were so many joyous and attractive people, walking or flying by on bicycles; and I enjoyed absorbing the vitality of it. But as the night wore on and I passed one woman throwing up at a restaurant and a man punched out on the street and taken off in an ambulance, and as men began getting drunker and stumbling into others and into me, and beggars started following people, and as I walked towards the towering façade of a hundreds year old church and stumbled immediately onto the densely crowded red light district where women in glass cubicles either resignedly texted in their underwear or tapped and beckoned at the glass, in my aloneness the thick tang of marijuana at every corner started to smell less sweet and more menacing.
                In three or four hours the sun will rise. And in Seattle my little ones will climb into bed and maybe think tomorrow is the day their father comes home.

 

Last Night in Barcs

                Last night was a farewell dinner at Csillág Étterem. This was the place we’d celebrated Stephanie’s 40^th birthday, an evening that was one of my fondest of the year; at that time, we’d pre-ordered large plates of meat and bowls of soup, and the place was buzzing with activity; behind us, a stage with some microphones was set for even louder occasions. Last night the place was empty. They’d remodeled: the walls were patterned in brick to resemble a Tuscan taverna, and the stage was now gone. Midway through our meal the chef went home.

                G.Kata told a great story from her childhood, how she and her friends had drawn with dusty sticks that turned out not to be sticks; I made an awkward but heartfelt speech twice, the same one, about how good they had all been to me, about how every moment they made me feel so happy I was also saddened the rest of my family was missing it, how I had hoped to be satisfied by this trip and instead how the opposite was true: I feel even more strongly that I must return, with Stephanie, Sophie, Amelia and Maisie.
                The emptiness of the room sometimes spread over our table; I wanted to be a better host and tell stories and provide observations and even smile more, much more than I did, but there was too much absence in the moment: Stephanie far away, myself soon to go, all in fierce contrast to the presence of beloved friendships in the room, located very specifically in space and time. Kriszta had said that in the morning, every time she looked at me in the faculty room, she was reminded that I was soon to leave, the desk I occupied empty; I felt this too and said nothing. But the evening at the restaurant formalized our goodbye, and I am grateful for that; and I am grateful too for the difficulty of the departure, for a tearful Zoé, the strong hug from Kriszta, the ferocity of my own response to it all.
                Kata and Kornél accompanied me to Budapest again. I’m always nervous about Hungarian trains and maybe it’s ridiculous, but this time our train did indeed arrive and depart 15 minutes ahead of schedule and so we missed it. It’s the exact thing I always expect to happen, why I always want to arrive early, because I always think the train will show up and leave before we can get there, something that never happens. What it meant today was that I missed lunch in Budapest with Annamária, the dorm mom of Fulbright Hungary of whom Stephanie and our cadre of teachers are so very fond; she met us anyway, very briefly, and she treated us three to coffee (or, as I panicked on the bus watching the clock tick down to my departure, what I called in my head spaz-juice); and then Annamária accompanied me to the subway with a ticket for the bus, and I only had time to grieve the abbreviation of our meeting in advance; the departure from Kata and from Annamária was merciful and quick, the sadness only hitting me now that I am safely on the plane, 15 minutes to spare at my gate.
                It seems appropriate, really. The sorrowful wheeze of a goodbye and then the sudden rush of departure. As I told Kata, this two weeks have felt both long and fast. The slowness of it is achieved by the return of a profoundly and unexpectedly familiar world of being, these two weeks telescoping into the full year of our lives in Barcs. Yet this was only two weeks.
                After the 40 hour trip back to Seattle, I will have only half a day before I return to Roosevelt, to 110 short stories demanding careful feedback, 110 independent reading projects, meetings with parents and counselors who have patiently been awaiting my return, meetings with department chairs and meetings with various professional groups, and I don’t want to dwell on what else.
                If I hold tightly enough to my little girl Maisie, and to my wonderfully affectionate Amelia, and my sweet Sophie; if I bury myself deeply enough into Stephanie’s hair, they will all feel the loving farewells from Barcs and the hunger of my hello, and perhaps I can hide for one more night.

Last day in Barcs

                I’m in my last day here. I’m awkwardly sitting around in the teacher’s lounge because this way I don’t have to say goodbye. I’m just running out the clock. I have vacating the dorm room, but not without breaking the toilet brush, which I replaced after a failed conversation with a woman I’d not met before at the collegium during which I waved around a new brush like a weapon. However, I did say goodbye to the principal, who has always been very shy with me, and I with her; I gave her some chocolate and said something like this:

                Speaking thanking with you. Very, very fishy I am. [Be careful with “grateful,” “fish” and also “death,” hálás, hal, halál—they’re different words.] Loving the school. I am thanking you! Pictures?
                At seven last night a couple students brought me into a dorm room in which lay unpacked some audio equipment for an interview intended for student radio, DVK Sulirádió. After one of the two boys expressed his irritation that I was half an hour late, they fiddled with the equipment and did the interview twice. What do I love about Hungary? What do I love about the school, and the students? What is my favorite thing to eat here? Where is my favorite place in Barcs? How are Hungarians different from Americans? And what is a typical day like in my life in America? How is school different? Big questions; but the interview took maybe five minutes. After every answer I gave, the student, said, Cool, cool, or Great. But the questions gave me a lot to think about.  What I said at the time was that I liked being by the river or in the trees, and that in Seattle I get up at 5 am and go running and then go to work for ten hours and come home to busy children who need to go places and then we sleep; I said I liked pörkölt galuskával, and that Hungarians were very serious until you know them and then they are very welcoming; I said students were smart and enthusiastic. Is it all true? Close enough. It doesn’t matter. But how are they different? How is living in the country different than living in the city.
                Bicycling to the store today I noticed how slowly I was peddling. When did that happen? People here pay attention when I go faster, silently tracking me with unwondering eyes, but no one pays any heed when I go at a pace that would drive traffic crazy in Seattle. At Roosevelt, I charge through the halls  and count every minute, finding ways to multitask through the halls; I rush around more than most, I know; and I suspect that such behavior here would come across as even more brusk and cold than in Seattle (although I have made my peace with seeming this way at Roosevelt—too much to get done in too little time). But being in a town one can cross in a 20 minute walk with people many of whom are known all their lives does allow a different pace. Maybe it demands this too: familiarity, greeting, warmth.
                All this has translated into time for me to be with others and to be with myself, and it also translates into enormous hospitality for guests for me. The bulk of my grant went to the plane ticket and my substitute teacher, but a quarter was designated for food and lodging—and this quarter remains largely untouched. I’ve bought some apples and pastries. But the school has housed me and so have friends; and I can bring people wine and chocolate, but all my meals have been provided, either by the school or with lavish generosity by dear, dear friends.

 

 

Just Pictures

This is the lazy man's post. It's just pictures.

In our old house (Munkácsy M. utca 26), with Kata, Kata, Kata, Gábor, Tibor, Lili and Zoé.

In Középrigóc with Péter, Julia and Zsóka.

In Pécs, with Dóri.

In Vienna, with Barna and Zsófi.

In Magyarlukafa, with artisans and Gábor.