Bring on the Snakes

Always with the words.

I've written a fake Ramones song about my life. It's the most boring of all fake Ramones songs ever:

Read and write!

Read and write!

All day and all night! 

All day and all night!

Read and write!

Read and write!

All day and all night! 

All day and all night!

OK, maybe it's more of a fake Wesley Willis song: Rock over Bookbug! Rock on Kalamazoo! Michigan News Agency: Bringing the World to You!

In my "reggler" life, I process words all the time. Always. NPR while making breakfast, read book or magazine while walking to work, read and write and edit and proof and turn words into fonts and pictures all day, read book or magazine while walking home from work. Then there is the evening time, discussing with Man what I've read and written and edited and proofed and heard in the radio stories. So there is the intake of words, then the processing and repetition, and then later the regurgitation and reiteration. Then there were those days, for a couple of decades, of memorizing and then learning scripts and then rehearsing them and then getting notes from a director and processing those notes, incorporating them into the next day's reading of the script. My days and nights with words.

I took five books and three magazines with me on the road trip. Also a journal. I spent the first three days thinking, "I should write. I have so much time to write. I'm sitting here and seeing this stuff and having these conversations and it's all just flying by me and out the window into the clouds above the fields southwest of Grand Forks where it will collect and be distributed somewhere other than in my journal. I should be recording; getting it down." (See all those Shoulds in there?)

Or what? Or it will simply be an awesome vacation during which I rested and engaged fully with the people and the land around me? Somewhere in Montana I discovered that reading and writing on the road would have kept me in that place in which I exist every day. That place in which I take in media, churn it for a while, adopt or disregard it, and lay it back down in some other arrangement.

Don't get me wrong, I dig living in that place. It (mostly) works for me. But this was travel. This was intentionally abandoning my element. I sometimes think that writing allows me to keep the world at arm’s length, scrutinizing and categorizing, rather than feeling. But even if I’m not able to describe what I’m feeling, I’m still feeling it, right? Perhaps more so for not being able to describe it.

I just don’t want to stagnate, see? Stagnation is when that fulgent force begins to flag and I stumble around questioning my worth and the mold and the must begin to collect in all the corners of my life. That’s why we took a road trip. That’s why I camped IN THE PRESENCE OF SNAKES. (OK, snake, singular, but still.) That’s why I ate beet salad and let Man drive me over that stunning, stupefying Beartooth Pass. That’s why I didn’t write on the trip. I had to stay out of my element to kick off the dust. If a tree fell in Yellowstone and I didn’t write about it, it still fell, and I think I can be comfortable with that.

This is not to say I won’t be writing about the trip. I have pages of notes, inscrutable jottings to jog loose an image or conversation, all in early anaphase about to bust out into more and more words amassing into little blog-update colonies. They’re just now starting to bubble up from the soup as I find myself longing to hold on to the trip as it fades into the blur of school schedules and grocery shopping. Because we are home now, and life resumes apace. While the flora and fauna is now more familiar, the flicker of elemental resistance to stagnation remains. Let’s hope I can keep it smoldering.

We Live in the Sky

Before we left, my friend said, "Don't forget to look around."


Thinking in pictures and captions. The UP, west of Marquette, Agate Falls, a little Dagoba, a little Deliverance. The rocks dark and craggy and ancient. So many grasshoppers it feels like the Lower Peninsula of the 1970s. The ease of who we are out of home context. The girls talk about plural marriage, negative space and Hitler.


A certain dip in majesty once we cross out of the UP, leaving behind that coastal terrain: conifers, dune grass, ferns. A rainstorm and a big bridge in Duluth, a near miss and someone threatens to sing "Take it Easy". These people. These people. There is so much good and love in them.


Then Highway 2 bends just west of Floodwood, MN, and we are suddenly in The West, barren tree spines floodplain-bound, a foot below high water.


Warba, population 183, is remarkably developed. Start to see "No Services" signs at exits. Jumping jacks and squat thrusts at Scenic Overlooks. We laugh until we cry listening to Mitch Hedberg, hurtling past mile after mile of sunflower fields: central North Dakota. We reach consensus on our preference for the band The Bismarck over the city of Bismarck.


Somewhere beneath all of this, or within it even, stews something about infrastructure and the possible impacts of population density and diversity on empathy and how entirely unimaginable it is that this immense expanse has managed to remain one singular polity for more than two centuries.


Billings, MT, tonight. The Beartooth tomorrow.

Trimmed and Burning

We picked Zu up from Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp yesterday. (I totally love arts camps. I love the uniforms. I love the sweating pine cabins. I love to walk down the dusty paths between tree stands and hear discordant waves snaking through the forest from the cinderblock practice rooms. I love the dance and the talent show and the having to wake up too early. I love the last day of arts camp, when kids are flying from all directions into each others' arms, crying their stupid eyes out.)

I was relieved to have her back, to make her laugh, to smell her head, to shore up the three-piece. It had been a laborious ten days without her. The internal and physical universes seemed to be in cahoots to keep Man and me constantly challenged. Mucky interpersonal conflict, car and house issues, prospects of big changes. None of it is worth rehashing here and most is not my story to tell, but it was complex, to be sure.

Earlier this week, we went to The Lake with some friends and their family, visiting from North Dakota. The children had never experienced The Lake before and were ecstatic to spend the week at the beach. We'd heard there was a rip tide warning that day, so all the kids had lifejackets. We were sure that would cut it. We had no idea. That Lake was roiling. I think the only time I've seen anything similar was in the middle of winter. I stood in knee-deep water and it quickly became chest deep. The suction from the rip tide preceded every wave, wrenching us under and outward.

We were fortunate to have a one-to-one ratio of adults to children. We hadn't anticipated the work it would require to stay together and near the shore. I hadn't anticipated how anxious it would make me. Eventually I stopped trying to swim and played look-out. I found a level place and watched. Staying upright took a special combination of of strength and flexibility. Even that was not foolproof, as the lakebed drew me downward if I was still too long. Fighting the competing tides could quickly leave me entrenched.

"One of these kids might die today." I flinched when I thought it, as though I'd doomed someone in the recognition. "One of these kids might die today." I thought it again as I looked around me to other kids in the water, many without lifejackets or grown-ups within reach. "One of these kids might die today." Because kids die at The Lake sometimes. Despite our best intentions, The Lake takes them, and often on days far less treacherous than that one.

Once I acknowledged that we could, in fact, lose a child in those waters, my anxiety inexplicably lessened. I stopped worrying about losing a child and started observing. I came out of my head, where the fear was, and into the physical surroundings. Crests, feet, spray, mouths spitting, hair splayed, bobbing, a scream followed by a laugh (drowning children don't scream and they certainly don't laugh), gulls, gasps. Undaunted, fixating, always forward. The rip tide their siren call.

Later I heard that the Coast Guard had to pluck dozens of folks out of The Lake that day, folks drawn too far who were then too tired to make it ashore. The beach we chose just happened to be one of the few not closed. Had we known that, we wouldn't have been in at all. Mmmmmaybe.

In 72 hours we'll be on the road. I'm trying to get out of my head and stay in that "one of these kids might die today" space. However morbid that sounds, I find it comforting to accept that everything could go wrong, rather than to vacillate between worrying, staying positive and trying to make this The Very Best Trip That Anyone's Taken in All of History. Fighting the competing tides could quickly leave me entrenched.

"To the West, we will run."

Yesterday we listened to the Minutes rough mixes on the way out to The Lake. I think it was John Fogerty who said you need to listen to a record on a car stereo before you determine if it's ready. Even without mastering, these Minutes songs are fantastic: Varied, rich, heartbreaking.

We thought we were headed to a new beach. I've heard people reference this beach and how great it is for years, but never knew where it was and couldn't find directions on the interwebs. Someone finally gave me directions, so we grabbed our respective Krakauer books (Banner of Heaven for me, Where Men Win Glory for my special man) and a couple of pounds of blueberries and flew lakeward across west Michigan. It wasn't until we pulled into the parking lot that we realized that we'd been to this beach dozens of times, we'd just come from another direction and called it something different. It's the beach I where I spent many late nights and early mornings after closing the coffee shop, and one we've been taking Zu to since we had to lug her diapered ass up the dune. It's actually in our top 5 of Places to Pay Respect to The Lake. I was glad we got the opportunity to check out a different route, though. At one point, during a somewhat Galaxy-500-y guitar break, while passing a field of nothing but Queen Anne's Lace, I said, "I love driving on roads I've never seen before."

Man said, "You're about to do nothing but that." That was the first time I got excited about the trip. I think I've been so distracted by details that I forgot to be stoked.

This got me thinking about the specific alchemy of music and driving. Until recently, my vehicular listening options were radio and whichever tape I could score at Goodwill. We now have cd and ipod available to us. If you haven't been in subsistence listening mode for the last decade, you may not understand just how decadent this new arrangement is for me.

All four of us on this upcoming trip are obsessive about music. It is as much a life force as breath and blood. Fortunately, we share a lot of musical tastes. Led Zeppelin is a go all around, as are White Stripes, Beatles, Minor Threat, The Evens, PJ Harvey, The Pixies, Prince (duh), just to name a few. There are some areas in which we go cattywampus, such as in any discussion of reggae and a great deal of new folk. With 80-some hours in the car together, it is imperative that we find some perfect foundation on which to balance this issue. I've devised a system of selection which I'm hoping is failproof. We begin with the driver and, working in clockwise fashion, each traveler selects a record. Volume is negotiable relative to circumstance, selection is not, unless chooser forfeits their turn. Complaints (esp. in the form of whining) will lose one's subsequent turn. This will be fervently recognized in the case of complaints about Bob Marley or Bob Dylan. Both Bobs are beyond reproach for the duration of our excursion.

I'm mulling my options. I want to make my selections count. I want stuff that's expansive but not domineering. I don't want the musics to dominate the possibility of either fresh conversation or peaceful reflection. Perfect From Now On. To Bring You My Love. What's Going On? Get Evens. On the Mouth. Artificial Horizon. OK Computer. Instrument Soundtrack. Abbey Road? Revolver? The White Album?

Help a girl out …

The Particular Particulars

Soon we will touch Lake Superior. Soon we will see North Dakota and the desert and geysers. Soon we will see people we love dearly who've lived far too far away for far too long.

In the second week of August we will leave our dogs and our home to the loving hands of our friend Flo. In case you don't know Flo, I will describe her to you: Flo is made of blue skies and bing cherries. Flo is sweetness and light. We trust her without reservation. We hope her stay in our home is to her liking. We've never had anyone house-sit in this capacity before and it's tripping me out. Do you know all those little ways in which you live that are completely normal to you but are probably outside of the realm of someone else's experience, simply by virtue of living elsewhere? The way the latch on the storm door works (or doesn't, really). Which toilet runs, which toilet seat breaks too easily. How to stack the food in the refrigerator so that if the dogs do manage to circumvent the childproof latch, they won't get a brick of parmesan, a dozen eggs and four sticks of butter. The constant awareness that any food left unattended will be swallowed whole within seconds. You think I'm exaggerating, I know.

In any case, along with preparing for the trip (Planning! Saving! Researching! Mapping!), I'm investigating my house for these particular persnickety specifics. This is challenging, in that these are aspects of our home that I'm totally accustomed to, and have been for more than a decade. It's kind of like trying to describe to someone how to drive to my grandmother's farm in central Indiana. I can't tell you the names of county roads, I prolly can't even give you landmarks, I just feel my way through.

The other particulars for the trip are as follows:

• From Kalamazoo we will drive to Marquette, where Man's band will play a show.
• From Marquette we head to Grand Forks, ND, with a layover likely in Duluth. Man will play another show in Grand Forks, the homeland of our dear friend and bandmate.
• From Grand Forks as far as we want to tolerate in one day, either Billings or Bozeman, MT, where we'll camp.
• Arise early from camping to continue to West Yellowstone, MT, home of dear friends with gorgeous baby. Also home of YELLOWSTONE, perhaps you've heard of it?
• A mere day in the park and then on to (if all goes well) Unionville, NV, and a 150-year-old inn near Mark Twain's home and Thunder Mountain Monument. It should be noted here that upon seeing pictures of said inn, Man declared that we would all be murdered.
• After a morning at local nerdy desert sites, we head to Grass Valley, CA, to deposit our friend Lila, who's hitching a ride both ways in order to visit her dad. We will pass her off, hug her, take a pee and get ourselves right quick to San Francisco, where we will spend a week with beautiful friends and beautiful San Francisco.

That's the trip out. The return is less set in stone, but will hopefully take us through Salt Lake City, as I just bought Under the Banner of Heaven. Another probable leg of the return is the Nebraska Sandhills. Do you know about this? 20,000 square miles of grasslands, dunes, meadows, lakes and wetlands. Apparently it's quite lovely, green, the anti-interstate and everybody who passes you on the road waves to you. Which is cool, I guess, if you're, like, into that sort of thing.

Anyway, there's a rough outline, still in development. We'll wind our way home somehow. Do you know what we won't be seeing? Our house, our jobs, our regular grocery store and farmers' market, the same things we drive past every day.

That Which We Own, Owns Us

I have a complicated relationship with my stuff. By "stuff" I don't mean "issues". I have a complicated relationship with my issues, too, but that's why they're my issues, so it hardly merits a mention. No, I mean material goods. My relationship with them (to them? since they're inanimate, right?) is complicated which, I guess, makes "stuff" one of my "issues".

See? Complicated.

We got knocked up young. By "young" I don't mean "pregnant teen", I mean "hardly employed, living in group house, no savings, no plans except to make music and arts and friends and, apparently, a baby." We were, to put it mildly, fiscally unprepared. It took a great deal of tears and terror and sweat to make us fiscally prepared to parent. We are now fiscally prepared to parent. She's nearly thirteen. For the first half of her life we relied heavily on others for every type of support you can imagine. It took the proverbial village to raise not only our child, but us as well.

There was a time in my life when I was kind of a hardcore consumer. I was a somewhat sedentary suburban kid, so there wasn't much more to do than purchase and consume. If I sit for a moment and quiet my mind, I can still summon that purchase! consume! rush that was all too familiar in my youth. I was ravenous for the things that would shape my life, would define me, would make me interesting. I became a discerning shopper, with a keen eye for the precise external elements I would to employ to tell the rest of the world that I was intriguing! and worthy of their attention!

I was also, incongruently, pretty into Jesus. I was raised in a big, supportive Presbyterian community. Camps and ice cream socials and canoe trips and cantatas and lock-ins and mission trips. The Jesus that appealed to me was more the one who was totally into love and peace and sharing and not judging. I felt like a total weirdo back then, as an adolescent, and this Jesus offered hope that maybe people might accept me anyway. I was way less into the Jesus who said he was the only way into heaven. I was pretty into Gandhi, too, and couldn't reconcile that Jesus thought Gandhi should go to hell. This seemed to not jibe so much with the love and peace and sharing and not-judging Jesus, but try as I might, I couldn't find the Provisional Gandhi Dispensation in any of the church's teachings.

Then came punk, specifically DC punk. The Church of Dischord, I like to call it, because it called to me in much the same way I imagine people feel called to a religious order. I will say unequivocally that I don't condone the violence and misogyny often associated with punk. Like christianity, I think punk is too often characterized by the ideas and behaviors of a rowdy minority. Though it's safe to say that by the time punk reached me I was on the road to apostasy, I felt some resonance between the teachings of Jesus and the ideas of some of my punk heroes. This was particularly true of punk's approach to materialism.

The idea that we are not defined by the things we own was earth shattering for that younger me. Liberating, too, as I felt caught in a cycle of buying the exact things my schoolmates and the television prescribed for acceptance, and still feeling pretty lame. Though I noticed clear "conformist" trends early on in my experience with punk, it was soon clear that a t-shirt-and-jeans (void of any discernible branding) combination was punk's great equalizer. This was of great comfort to me. Before punk, I hadn't noticed Jesus' eschewing of material goods all that much, because there weren't malls and cars and Swatch watches in Nazareth. What was there to eschew, really?

My late teens and twenties became a process of throwing off the materialism of my youth, a process with which I continue to struggle. Our many years of living below the poverty line were a blessing, in that regard. My adoration for thrift stores, for the gleaner lifestyle, is both a help and a hindrance at times. We buy new when we must, but most often we're a salvage, reuse, repurpose kind of family. We're often the last people to own something before it's obsolete. There are all sorts of romantic ideas mixed up in there for me, regarding wabi-sabi and minimalism and my responsibility as an inhabitant of this earth, but I don't really need to go into those here.

How does this relate to our travels? We bought a new(to us) car that is the fanciest thing I've ever owned. It is a very practical purchase. Considering that we live through Michigan winters and want to drive thousands upon thousands of miles and carry camping equipment, this is the best car for us. Great gas mileage, enough room for gear, handles decent in snow. These are the things I need to remind myself in order to gain comfort with what feels to me to be an extravagant purchase. It's not extravagant, by most definitions, unless you've been drinking Punk & Jesus kool-aid with religious fervor for twenty-five years.

It's the good kind of kool-aid, though, the kind that you buy at the Co-op, made with all-natural ingredients, so that's OK, right?

Baby, You're Much Too Fast

This venture is not without anxiety for me.

I spent most of my summers in a car or a tent or a pop-up trailer or on a train. My parents were both educators, my father was a high-school counselor in Detroit for forty years and my mother a music teacher in Livonia. Summer vacations were a melange of historical landmarks and state parks. I look back on it as dreamy. Our family, free of stuff and obligation, whiling away the warmer months in exotic Hershey, PA or Interlochen, MI.  I was always a little bit dirty and covered in bites and scratches. I bought pressed pennies and pencils filled with rocks, lived on jawbreakers and jewel-toned rock candy. I killed so many books of Mad Libs.

"You were a mess," my Mom told me recently, when we were reminiscing on our summers with an eye on our upcoming trip.

"A mess?" Dirt? Bites? Scratches?

"Yeah, you never slept the night before we left. You were always anxiety-ridden about travel."

"Um, what? I LOVED to travel."

"No. No you really didn't."

And then it came back to me. That time on July 4 in Philadelphia. I was over-tired and it was four hunnerd degrees and we'd just finished scaling the Rocky stairs to the Rocky statue and watching fireworks and we were heading back out of town to our campsite and I was SOBBING, positive that I would fall out the car onto the interstate and my parents wouldn't come back for me.

"It was nearly a self-fulfilling prophecy." Mother loves me, this I know, for her dry countenance tells me so.

And then I remembered the time in some big old stately square in Boston when I saw a woman fall off her bike onto a small child. I was eating prime rib. There was a clear association in my leettle mind between the violence of the accident and the violence of the prime rib. I completely lost my shit. I could not eat. I had dreams for years of people in that square losing body parts, limbs and digits just falling off them, and street urchins creeping out of alleys and gutters to eat the flesh. Awesome.

So it's fair to say my mother's right. (Harumph.) I have some degree of anxiety associated with travel. It's gotten significantly better over time, softened into slightly hyper Planning! Saving! Graphing! Preparing! This is somewhat difficult for me to acknowledge considering my two largest goals in life:

1. Avoid stress and anxiety at all costs
2. Travel

This travel anxiety is also at odds with one of my stubbornly held beliefs about myself: It was all that travel as a kid that helped me learn to roll with it. Sleeping in sweltering tents and drawing backseat boundaries with my brother and having to make do for a month with only the possessions I could fit in one beer case. Understanding that sometimes there will be a traffic jam and sometimes it will rain for four days and other times I won't have a choice of what I get to eat for lunch and maybe lunch will come many hours later than expected. These are the experiences to which I attribute my ability to be flexible as sands shift. In so many aspects of this particular life we have chosen, I find that to be a most valuable skill.

Mostly I know how to take everything in stride. Mostly. So why the lingering anxiety surrounding that which I desperately crave? I don't know. It could be that what remains is the ghost of the twitchy control freak I would have become were it not for being forged in the fire of Julys in the backseat of a Plymouth Volare with a much larger brother.

These trips will not be made safer, smarter or more affordable by worrying about them. These trips will not be made safer, smarter or more affordable by worrying about them. These trips will not be made safer, smarter or more affordable by worrying about them. These trips will not be made safer, smarter or more affordable by worrying about them. These trips will not be made safer, smarter or more affordable by worrying about them. These trips will …

Shouldhead

I'm a compulsive Should-er.

Sometimes my Shoulds are pedestrian:

"I should try not to spend any more money this week."
"We should get Watty's tags renewed."
"We should totally drag all that crap from the basement out to the curb this Sunday."

Occasionally, they're insouciant:

"We should go to the beach."
"We should eat Malaysian food tonight."
"I should so totally buy a hula-hoop."

Most often, though, are the pie-in-the-sky Shoulds:

"I should go to culinary school."
"We should buy that house in Paw Paw and I should raise goats and make goat cheese which I should then use as my primary source of nourishment and you should have a go-kart track on some of the land and we should have a recording studio there, too, and also an art studio and a place for retreating which we should make available to our friends who should come out and stay for weeks at a time."
"We should retire in Ireland."

Shouldn't I say "Could" instead? Could is nicer. Friendlier. More hopeful. Could lets in a little more sunshine, I think, rather that dooming us to the dank Michigan basement of a certain future. So these ideas for dreamy scenarios flit through my brain and are out of my mouth in the form of Shoulds before I really even realize they contradict twenty other life plans we've laid out over the last decade-and-a-half.

One such Should is the current focus of our life.

"We should try to get our kid to all of the lower 48 states before she graduates from high school."

This Should danced between us in the car one night, or hovered over the dinner table, or waved and flirted from the bed post in those drowsily batty moments just before sleep. I honestly don't know how or when it started, but here we are, boldly leaving the seventh grade behind us to embark on our second cross-country family trip.

I'm aiming to document the process here, to ruminate on my own frugality, to have a clearinghouse for travel plans and options and ideas and Coulds. OK, and Shoulds. Mostly I want to record the experience of trying to focus our remaining years as a full-time three-piece by grounding us in this quest. The days fly quicker the older she gets, so for a little while, we're going to chart our time in miles.