Family visits

    Nothing warms my heart more than being with family.  I am so proud of who each of them is.

    I went to Vashon Island, Washington, last week for my son, Ela's, talk at the Vashon Center for the Arts, describing the process of building the sculpture-skeleton of Singer, the gray whale who had beached on Vashon two years ago. (See posts on June 17 and 19 for more details.) A large audience sat under the sculpture as its tail waved over their heads with the same motion it would have used to propel the body through the sea.

It's not the only articulated whale skeleton in the world, but it is the only one with a sculptural outline and a tail (half the skeleton) that moves. The audience was enthralled with Ela's explanations of his work.

    And I am proud of my grandchild, Kairos, who graduated from high school last June and who will be working as photographer for a dance company in Atlanta in December. We had a brief but thoroughly satisfying visit.

     After a few days on Vashon, I flew to Georgia for a siblings reunion with my sisters, Laura and Sharon, and our brother, Lee. Five years ago last spring Lee sustained traumatic spinal injury in a bicycle accident (see post on June 25, 2021). Now, thanks to a new high-tech device he wore around his waist that kept his feet pointed forward and his legs walking straight, Lee joined us for a hike through the woods in the north Georgia mountains—not only joined us but hiked right along with us.

l-r: Laura, Sharon, me, Lee, at Amicalola Falls
                                                            photo by a passerby

              

It did my heart good to see his continued enthusiasm for athletics (he was a rugby player up to his accident and, of course, a bicyclist, as well as a skier, hiker, etc.) by embracing his new identity as a disabled athlete, hiking with us and entering bicycle races. What an inspiring example of perseverance.

    As for my sisters—one of the reasons for going to Georgia was to see their combined art exhibit at the Blue Ridge Mountains Art Center—

From the poster for the exhibit

Sharon's calligraphy pieces based on nature subjects and Laura's botanical drawings of endangered plants of the Southeast. It was a stunningly beautiful exhibit. What fine artists my sisters are!

   Another reason was to attend Laura's lecture at the arts center on those endangered plants, based on her book, published by the University of Georgia, due out next April. Laura is an excellent public speaker and storyteller; her informative and entertaining lecture received enthusiastic applause. 

    Their talents aside, I enjoy being with my family just because we like each other's company so much. We shared good meals from restaurants, pubs, and Sharon's kitchen. We worked a jigsaw puzzle together, and one evening we watched the digitized versions of family movies Lee had brought to show us. And, of course, we shared stories of our current lives.

    Then it was over, and I flew home, my heart full of gratitude and admiration for the wonderful people of my family.

Visiting a Friend in the Memory Care Unit of an Assisted Living Facility

     The other day I visited a close friend who lives in a facility for people with dementia and other problems. He is in a wheelchair and can't operate it himself, so he goes where people take him. When I got there, he was on the patio, alone, asleep in the sun.

    He does recognize people, though sometimes it takes a minute—me, his family, the many friends who come to visit. He can't follow a conversation, but you can somewhat engage him by sharing a photo book, for instance, or reading short pieces of poetry that maybe trigger good feelings, if not memories. If you put a musical instrument or a ping-pong paddle in his hand, his body will remember—the fingers pluck the strings, the hand makes the paddle hit the ball—moments of engagement. But on his own he doesn't make art or write poems or read—things he used to enjoy—and he never watched television, anyway, so that isn't much of a distraction, either. 

    I wondered how he fills his time, the tedious hours of day after day. 

    But that, I see now, misses the mark.

    He can't articulate his thoughts very well, but he said something extraordinary that day. Looking directly at me, with neither despair nor self-pity, he said, "I don't know what my role is." 

    He had expressed a deep truth. We want to be meaningful in our lives, to have purpose in relation to other people. This man had been a high-school teacher, many years ago; that was a role. He had started a commune and shared in the experiments of life style so important in that era. He was a mentor to young men. He made art and played music with other people. He has sustained many important friendships. He is still a father and a husband, but those roles are meaningless in his day-to-day life situation now, as neither sons nor wife need anything from him. His family and friends come to visit, and they come often, but that doesn't help him understand his role in life. What, now, does he have to offer? 

    Later during my visit he got caught in a loop of statements, as often happens. None of it was clear and direct, but what he said was, "I'm just a guest here." The elaboration was a little garbled, but the gist was, "When you are a guest in someone's house or when you go to church, you respect the way they do things. You go along with their ways." Things like that. 

    Again, I understood. He has no relationship with the other "guests" in the facility, who have the same cognitive difficulties he has. The staff are good. The care is excellent. But his role with them is passive. He gives them purpose, but he doesn't feel his own purpose. 

    "I don't know what my role is”—a simple recognition of his life now and a tremendous effort to come to terms with it.

    I didn't know what to tell him.

    

The House on Merrits Avenue

On Merritts Avenue, in downtown Atlanta, not far from the Varsity drive-in restaurant and Georgia Tech University, squatted a old white-wood house. It wasn’t dilapidated, but it never received a fresh coat of paint, either. This was the home of Eveready Plastics, a laboratory for making ear molds for hearing aids, my father’s mail-order business.
In my teen years, and again, later, I worked in that old house, as my father's employee. After the long drive from our rural home, always leaving early enough to start work at 8:00 am, he would park the old Oldsmobile in the back of the house. We entered through the basement, where a mean-looking German shepherd growled and barked and leapt against the wire of his large cage. This was no pet, but a thoroughly frightening guard dog. I kept my distance.
At first, in my early teens, I worked with Bobby, the secretary, in the small room to the right of the front door. She taught me how to file business papers and correspondence and advised me to learn shorthand as well as typing. Later, when Bobby was gone and I was secretary, I worked in the larger, brighter room to the left of the front door. By now it was my office. I opened and sorted the mail and took the day’s orders for ear molds into the lab, laying the little boxes with impressions of each customer’s ear in a row on the workbench and the order form under each one.

The cardboard mailing box and the plastic box the ear mold went in

I learned how to write a business letter and how to patiently uncoil tangled rubber tubing, and I cleaned out and organized the files. The reward for that otherwise undesirable task was the many letters I found to my father from business associates, praising his integrity.
The large center room of the house was the lab itself, with its noisy electric tools and acrid smell of hot plastic. Everyone in the lab worked on equal footing—my father, the boss; Henry, a black man (at a time in Georgia when such a thing was not done); Woody, an alcoholic until my father urged him into AA; the Georgia Tech students, working part-time—six or seven employees at the height of the business. They were a jovial bunch, laughing and easy with each other. There were no women in the lab, but sometimes, if time was tight for getting all the orders out by the end of the workday, my father would call me in for the final step: buffing the ear molds to a glowing shine. The machine I used shined my fingernails at the same time.
Behind the lab was the kitchen, with a tiny screened-in porch at its back side, one story above the Oldsmobile parked below. The refrigerator was fully stocked with Coca-Colas, in glass bottles, for anyone to have at any time. We ate our lunches at the wooden kitchen table, all of us together. Sometimes my father sent me next door to pick up a lunch for us from what he called the Greasy Spoon. Sometimes we all had steak, which Henry cooked, smothered with onions and gravy.
At one point in my growing-up years, my father bought the Atlanta Stationery and Printing Company and moved the printing presses into the basement of Eveready Plastics. One of those presses was a machine for printing numbers onto hard plastic disks. When an order for these came in, the job fell to me. As I pressed the handle of the machine, repetitively, to burn a series of white numbers onto a black disk, I forestalled boredom and practiced my French by saying the numerals in French.
The house of Eveready Plastics was musty and old. It smelled of hot plastic, smoke from fried foods, old wooden walls, decades of papers. The basement smelled of dampness and dog and printer’s ink. I liked the old house and my work there. I knew I would never be a career secretary, Bobby’s mentorship notwithstanding, and maybe I was given a break with the work because I was the boss’s daughter, but I was learning skills that would stay with me the rest of my life—typing, filing, business relationships (but not shorthand, which I quickly forgot). My boss didn't mind if I read a book when work was slow. The employees were polite and mildly deferential to me. 

    Most of all, those were years of getting to know my father, aspects of him outside the family, his relationships with other kinds of people. I saw the traits he deliberately tried to instill in his children—respect, equality, generosity, honesty—manifested in the ways he behaved in the real world. Whatever has happened by now to that old white house on Merritts Avenue, it is in my memory a house of merit.

Backpacking in the Trinity Alps of Northern California

     My friend Sarah and I didn't get started on the Long Canyon Trail in the Trinity Alps Wilderness Area until 2:30 in the afternoon, but we were only hiking 5 1/2 miles and figured that even with full packs for this seven-day backpacking trip, we would have plenty of time to get to our proposed campsite at Deer Lake.

    Oh, how wrong we were! Long Canyon kicked our butts! It was a relentless uphill trail for three and a half miles and steep, steep, steep for the last mile and a half. Late as it was getting, I called for a rest two or three times in that last climb. On the last rest stop, I saw my calf muscles twitching with tiny movements, like a sparkler under the skin. 

    Nonetheless, when we rounded the pass and started downslope to Deer Lake, I wasn't too tired for the majestic sunset over the mountains and lake.

Me, on the way to Deer Lake

    I was, however, too tired to eat. As soon as the tent was up, I crawled in and fell asleep,

    The next morning I was as enthusiastic and ready as ever. The pattern had been set—steep!—but my muscles never threatened to quit on me again. We made some awesome ascents and hiked through gorgeous county—peaks as sharp and rugged as they come (the Sawtooth Ridge was especially impressive)

meadows rich with autumn colors

creekside campsites, more glorious sunsets seen from rocks we climbed for the sight (a "tequila rock" as the camper we met at Horseshoe Lake called it), 

and beautiful green lakes tucked under peaks, perfect for swimming.

At Summit Lake, after a swim

    Dragonflies by the score. Tadpoles crowding the water's edge at Luella Lake. Tiny frogs leaping ahead of us at Bear Creek, so many it was hard not to step on them. A long entertaining show of fish jumping for flies at Summit Lake. Hawks. Darlingtonia. A ferocious windstorm at Summit Lake that had us sleeping fitfully, and, otherwise, perfect weather. One hardship was that I had somehow left my hat at home, but, as luck would have it, at the second campsite some previous camper had left a deck of cards and a hat sitting on a stump. I didn't take the cards, but the hat was a godsend.

In my "borrowed" hat

    Of course, all the wonders of the trail and the mountains are only the augmentation of good companionship. Sarah lives in Pennsylvania, where the hiking is steep but nothing like in the Trinity Alps (as for that, I live in the Applegate, where the trails are often steep but nothing like the Trinity Alps). She loved the steep granite landscapes, the beautiful lakes and streams (did I mention that the meadows were mostly still fed by lovely gurgling meadow streams?), the strenuous demands of the trail—the hardest hiking she had ever done, she said—the bright cold water for dips in creeks and lakes, the autumnal meadows, the big trees. 

                                                        photo by Diana Coogle

Half my age and strong and fit for the trail,

she never complained that I was slow on the trail or snored in the tent or cramped her style. In fact, our styles, like our tempers, meshed well. Nor did she seem to mind that I depended on her greatly superior map-reading skills. It was she who kept us on route (and not her fault when we missed a trail turn-off and hiked one and a half extra miles on what was already our longest day with one of our steepest ascents), and it was she who kept the stats. For anyone interested, I've listed them below, along with our route, after I sign off with a selfie of two very happy Trinity Alps hikers.

(All photos by Sarah Bay Nawa unless otherwise noted.)
 

Day 1—Long Canyon TH to Deer Lake (no other campers)

    5.5 miles

Day 2—Deer Lake to camp on the confluence of Bear Creek and Swift Creek (no other campers)

    8 miles

Day 3—Swift Creek to Ward Lake (no other campers)

    5.8 miles

Day 4—Ward Lake to Horseshoe Lake (one other camper)

    1.5 miles

Day 5—Horseshoe Lake to Deer Creek Camp (no other campers)

    Up Mumford Pass (!)

    9.9 miles

Day 6—Deer Creek Camp to Summit Lake (3 other tents of 2 people each)

    4.5 miles

Day 7—Summit Lake to Long Canyon TH (2 sets of 2 hikers at Deer Creek Pass)

    6.3 miles

Total elevation gain: 10,130 feet

Totall milage: 41.7

Passes climbed: 

    Bee Tree Gap—7400 feet

    Deer Creek Pass—7485 feet

    Black Basin Pass—7150 feet

    Mumford Pass—7200 feet
    Siligo Pass—7500 feet

Four lakes, 9 swims

Seven glorious days

Internet Woes

     When I came home from Scotland in early July, I had no internet. When at last the technicians came out, they looked around and fiddled with their computers and finally told me they could no longer bring me service. I live too far up the mountain. 

    Now what? My son googled the problem (I had no internet, remember) and discovered that Starlink was the only company that would service my little spot on the planet. So I made an appointment for a Starlink installation.

    By the time the installer got here, I had been without connection to the cybersphere for a month.

    It was an interesting hiatus. 

    I quickly learned that it's not necessary to look online for the weather every day. Sometimes an idle thought would suggest a google search before I remembered I couldn't do that. The thought slipped by, easily enough. And I found out that I could, after all, overcome my daily obsession with New York Times games. 

    But I couldn't access Google Drive to work on documents for a book I'm co-writing. I couldn't check email, so I got behind on important work (book editing, board meetings, Applegater). Consequently, I spent a lot of time at the Applegate library, indoors when it was open, sitting on its front-porch bench to use its internet when it wasn't open or going all the way to the Medford library—if it was open. At the beginning of August, inundated with Applegater articles to edit by deadline, I spent three whole days at the Good Bean cafe, where, for the price of coffee and lunch, I could do my work in a pleasant, quietly bustling atmosphere. 

    What I discovered in that month of disconnectedness is that internet at home is, if not absolutely necessary, pretty close to it. The inconvenience was hefty. I don't like Elon Musk and I hate the satellites that cross the sky one after another after another. Nonetheless, I am grateful for Starlink, and, I have to say, the customer service was excellent.

    And now, not only am I back online, but the internet connection is superior to the old system. No more lag while I'm on Zoom. No more computer black-out while I'm doing an online yoga class. And, the biggest bonus of all, for the first time ever I can watch movies. Starting with Ted Lasso tonight.

The Isle of Skye

     I thought I was going to Scotland just for the hiking, but as it turned out, I enjoyed touristy things on the Isle of Skye, where Margaret and I spent the second week of our trip, almost as much. 

    Legends were fun—the Holy Pool of St. Fillan (where I swam), the monster of Loch Ness (where I also swam).

The captain of our Loch Ness boat ride told of being on a research boat when a submerged camera came up with a photo of the monster, which he showed us. He let us gasp in disbelief a few minutes before telling us the camera had found a submerged life-size model used for a Hollywood film.

    Connections with my academic past made castles and museums fun. Walking across the moors in the dramatic rain and wind was like stepping into Wuthering Heights. Seeing the stone ruins of Urquart Castle on Loch Ness reminded me of the Old English poem "The Ruin" and that the Anglo-Saxons walked among Roman ruins just as Scots walk among Medieval ruins. At the MacDonalds' Armadale Castle

I not only was in the presence of the Gothic architecture I had studied, but in the museum there I recognized the Anglo-Saxon culture of lords, thanes, and hall life in the Scottish clan culture of the same era. The museums told of Viking raids in Scotland as I had read about them in Old English texts. Everywhere I was reminded of Mary Queen of Scots, beheaded by Queen Elizabeth, and the Jacobite Rebellion after Elizabeth's death, the war between Catholics and Protestants, and the Scots trying to put James I of Scotland on the throne—history of importance to much of the literature I have studied. The nineteenth-century novelist Sir Walter Scott; that great man of eighteenth-century letters, Samuel Johnson; Johnson's excellent biographer James Boswell—these men had stayed at Dunvegan Castle

(of the MacLeod clan and still occupied today); we read their letters of thanks, in their handwriting. We peered down the Dunvegan Castle dungeon, deep and narrow and made of clammy stone, where one clan chief had put his wife for fourteen years. It was in such a dungeon that the Red Crosse Knight had been thrown, personifying Despair, in Edmund Spenser's six-book, seventeenth-century poem, The Faerie Queene. We saw many monuments and tributes to the Scottish Brigade of World War I, who fought so fiercely in their kilts that they were called the "ladies from hell." 

    The language was also an unexpected enjoyment. Gaelic, Welsh, and Scots-Gaelic are their own language family, unconnected to either Germanic or Romance languages. Generally, my knowledge of French, Latin, and English is a basis of familiarity in European countries, but in Scotland, where road signs were in both Gaelic and English, I could comprehend nothing of the Gaelic, even though both languages use the same alphabet. 

    A third surprise was our stop for breakfast at Sligachan Hotel at the base of the Black Cuillin ridge. Lining the walls in all the hallways were photos and placards about famous mountain climbers who had been there. I remembered then that the Scots were great mountain climbers as well as great walkers. Many came to the Black Cuillin mountains to train for ascents of Mt. Everest, among them the famous duo John MacKenzie and Norman Collie.

Statues of MacKenzie and Collie above the Sligachan Hotel

When a Nepali sherpa came to Sligachan, he climbed to the top of Cuillin and back in less than an hour—barefoooted. Being doubted for this achievement, he got up the next morning and did it again, faster, a record that wasn't broken till the fifties. Boswell and Johnson also stayed at the inn. Boswell hiked up the mountain, I learned from the placard, but "the portly Johnson did not."

    There is a legend that anyone who put their face in the Sligachan River for seven seconds would receive eternal beauty. I figured that such a benefit was more difficult for someone of my age, so I made sure to leave my face in the cold water for a count of fourteen.

Hiking the West Highland Way in Scotland

     Eight days. Ninety-six miles. By foot, with packs. 

    Over the moors, in the blustery wind and driving rain,

                                                                            photo by Margaret della Santina

beside Loch Lomond for two days (and twice a swim),

                                                                            photo by Margaret della Santina

past crumbling ruins of ancient stone huts and churches,

                                                                                        photo by Diana Coogle

past sheep grazing trail-side and dotting the far hills, up the Devil's Staircase to a grand view of Scottish peaks,

At the top of the Devil's Staircase             photo by a willing hiker

up Conic Hill to a grand view of Loch Lomond, up one hill after another, up and down the old stone military road, on the trail through moors and woods, through the graceful and grand old native oaks,

                                        photo by Margaret della Santina

past waterfalls and waterfalls and waterfalls cascading down rock faces,

                                        photo by Margaret della Santina

past plantations of non-native fir trees waiting to be timbered, past the ugly devastation of clearcuts with their stumps and piles of slash and exposed earth (everywhere else we saw earth only on trails), past purple-blooming heather

                                                                        photo by Margaret della Santina

and yellow fields of buttercups and tall purple foxglove, past green, green, green expanses (grass, heather, ferns), past the highland "coo" (cow) with its shaggy red hair falling over its eyes,

                                                                            photo by Margaret della Santina

past centuries-old rock walls winding across the landscape,

                                                                            photo by Margaret della Santina

under the looming peak of Buachaillie Etive Mór (the Big Shepherd of Etive, "the most iconic and most photographed peak in Scotland"),

                                                                        selfie by Margaret della Santina

 and at last, after the seven or ten or fifteen miles of the day, to whatever lodging we had booked for the night: an 18th-century inn

                                                                        photo by a willing stranger

or a bunkhouse next to a hotel or "the most haunted house in the UK" (Drover's Inn)

The Bar at Drover's Inn                                    photo by Margaret della Santina

or "glamping" in the tube of a "pod,"

                                                                                        photo by Diana Coogle

and, first things first, a beer at the hotel bar

                                                                            photo by Margaret della Santina

or down the street in the oldest consecutively operated pub in Scotland (since 1752)

                                                                                        photo by Diana Coogle

or at the bar of Drover's Inn, where the wait staff wore tee shirts that said, "Voted best pub 1703."

    Margaret della Santina hiked every step with me, even with a bum knee, which she iced every evening when we got to our inn and which didn't keep her from loving every minute of the trail. Because she was walking carefully, when we came to a hill, she would say, "See you at the top," and I would take off at my usual steady pace. At one especially raw-weather moment, as she walked up to me where I waited on a beautiful old stone bridge in the cold wind and driving rain,

                                        photo by Margaret della Santina

she said, gleefully, "This is what we signed up for!" And indeed, yes. It was Scotland, after all.

    On the third day, Margaret studied the map and came up with a plan for changing our itinerary. We could hike as planned to Inversnaid but then taking a ferry across Loch Lomond to Tarbet and a bus from there to our lodging, cutting out seven miles of a planned 15-mile day and adding a lovely ferry ride on the lake.

                                                                            photo by Margaret della Santina

(We made up those miles with extra hiking to our various lodgings to equal the 96 miles of the trail.)

    The end of the West Highland Way is in Fort William, at the Statue of the Man with Sore Feet.

                                                photo by a willing passer-by

(How appropriately depicted!) That night Margaret and I toasted our accomplishment with a glass of Prosecco. Not a small feat, I said as we clinked glasses, for the lame and the old.

                                                                                        selfie by Diana Coogle