After yesterday’s rain there was bright sun, crisp air, and a stiff breeze on the water at 7:45 a.m. I pointed my boat up river into the wind—choosing to have the “uphill battle” while I’m fresh and then glide easily home afterwards. This choice might just be a life strategy, too. I can see it more clearly on the river than anywhere else.
Today I paddled farther than ever before, stretching to go a little bit farther, just to see what’s there. I went far enough to see three blue chairs poised between the white birch shade and the water shadows. Those three blue chairs could become a destination in themselves, but today I went beyond the chairs to see the dock with the fairy lights.
Note to family with “MELENEY” painted in block letters on a float north of Edgewater beach, just off the beach in your own neighborhood: “Your sailboat—RI0334S—is restless. What do you think it is doing when you are not looking? Do you think it is resting peacefully just off shore waiting blankly for you to return? It is not. Your boat is restless. It pivots gracefully around the tether like a young horse, golden in the early morning light. The other sailboats are resting; your boat is not.”
Watching the little ripples on the water gives no clue whatsoever to the random movements of this boat. The breeze holds steadily from one direction and yet the filly swings her head to a different drummer. She is restless and yet, she is also thoughtful and deliberate. And unpredictable, so I keep my distance. Perhaps I seem the same to her or to any other observer—a blank entity, resting on a paddle, floating in the current? But I am most active and alive, filled with intentions and processes. If asked, “What are you doing just sitting there?” I would say, “I am writing a book.”
I balance the paddle across my boat and let go to see what happens next. If home is at 12 o’clock and the direction I’m heading now is toward 6 o’clock, the head of my boat swings counterclockwise slowly to 11 o’clock, silently unwinding me.
No ducks today.
A few days ago I took my own storm to the water and paddled uphill in both directions. There was a stiff wind, but my internal turbulence trumped its force. “What puzzle did I bring to the water, hoping for a solution by throwing my being into propulsion?”
Learning to share is a lesson we repeat over and over for toddlers and children, but as adults we need to keep learning it over and over as well. As the oldest of five children, forced by circumstances to share everything, I may be more sensitive than others. Sharing is more complex than we think, and out on the water in my own initiative, I can contemplate sharing at a safe distance. It calls for mountain climbing effort to reach the peak where a gift is set entirely free from expectations, and all inconveniences are forgiven. I find myself caught in a misty humid morning at sea level. I brought no joy; I found no meaning.
Monday, April 29, 2013
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Driving in Italy
The seaside community of Fano was described as a “sleepy little town” in our guide book, but we found it to be fairly large with energetic crowds of vacationers and vigorous street life. In fact, from our room at Hotel Roma, Viale Dante Alighieri, we were immersed in street life for about twenty hours a day! Just as we thought things were calming down around 3 a.m. on our first night, there was a horrendous metallic crash just outside our window. We were surprised not to hear shouting from the drivers involved (a crash sound is always followed by shouting in our experience). In the morning, litter from the event and a crumpled guard rail remained as evidence of the nocturnal collision. On our second day we were sitting at an outdoor café less than a block away when we witnessed another accident on the same corner. Needless to say, our departure from the hotel in a rented car was rather stressful given the record of one accident per day on that corner!!
After a long morning walk north along the waterfront of Fano, we departed with vague directions for reaching Urbino. Driving in Italy requires quick decisions based on sketchy information. Everyone else knows where they are going, and there are far too many traffic circles! We are used to 4-way stop signs or traffic lights. Even though I know that traffic circles are demonstrably safer than, say left turns against oncoming traffic, I still prefer the full stop to the ambiguous glide. It seems to me that traffic circles bring on a collective, and very literal, agoraphobia.
Highways in Italy are kind to the landscape. They are built with many bridges and tunnels in order to accommodate the hills and valleys. These roads seem soft, unlike those where a bulldozer rearranges the earth to make a straight new thoroughfare.
Urbino’s signature is “Emozioni in forma di città,” and we learned it the hard way. The drive from Fano to Urbino seemed quick compared with the time it took us to locate the conference site once we arrived! We quickly found the location of the “Seven Deadly Sins” meeting we had attended eleven years before at the Università degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo, but that entire campus is now under construction. That didn’t hinder people from sending us to three or four buildings based entirely on rumors. An hour later, when two recommendations converged on the fact that we needed to go to another campus 5 km out of town, we were not surprised, but were disappointed that we would not be within walking distance of Urbino.
The Sogesta campus is isolated from any village by 5 km of very steep, curvy, narrow roads. Even after we found the main building, it was difficult to find the registration desk for the conference. On the other hand we were able to register for our room right away and discovered that it was air conditioned!! We both remembered a torrid room facing the afternoon sun at the other campus.
I had a wonderful pranzo in the cafeteria (chicken, vegetables, salad, fruit, wine) and then took a nap. I hope to do the same every day! Being isolated on this campus all day was frustrating, so we decided to take an excursion to Fermignano, reportedly closer than Urbino. As we approached a stop sign just outside the town, I shouted to Vincent to stop, and so he did, causing the car behind to hit us.
The driver got out and began shouting at us in Italian. When Vincent got out of our car, looking a little dazed and confused, the other driver got progressively more and more angry at my husband’s silence. Finally, after two long minutes of this shouting and pointing, I regained the presence of mind to say, “No capisce Italiano.” The formerly aggressive driver shifted his tone and began to apologize (I think). Vincent and I were both shaken by this episode although neither car was damaged at all. We tried to go to a grocery store in Fermignano, which, of course, was closed, so we cautiously drove right back to the campus parking lot and went to our room to compose ourselves before dinner. I felt a little like a character in the short story, “The Appointment in Samarra” by Somerset Maugham. After all of our efforts to avoid the “crash-a-day” we witnessed in Fano, “fate” followed us all the way to Urbino, and came close enough to give us a fright!
We had a very nice dinner on campus with our friends, and found a ride into Urbino for a nightcap afterwards. Vincent offered to drive, but fortunately someone else won that joust. We sat outside a café in the Piazza de la Republica, drinking Campari while water sparkled from the fountain like a curtain of jewels.
After a long morning walk north along the waterfront of Fano, we departed with vague directions for reaching Urbino. Driving in Italy requires quick decisions based on sketchy information. Everyone else knows where they are going, and there are far too many traffic circles! We are used to 4-way stop signs or traffic lights. Even though I know that traffic circles are demonstrably safer than, say left turns against oncoming traffic, I still prefer the full stop to the ambiguous glide. It seems to me that traffic circles bring on a collective, and very literal, agoraphobia.
Highways in Italy are kind to the landscape. They are built with many bridges and tunnels in order to accommodate the hills and valleys. These roads seem soft, unlike those where a bulldozer rearranges the earth to make a straight new thoroughfare.
Urbino’s signature is “Emozioni in forma di città,” and we learned it the hard way. The drive from Fano to Urbino seemed quick compared with the time it took us to locate the conference site once we arrived! We quickly found the location of the “Seven Deadly Sins” meeting we had attended eleven years before at the Università degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo, but that entire campus is now under construction. That didn’t hinder people from sending us to three or four buildings based entirely on rumors. An hour later, when two recommendations converged on the fact that we needed to go to another campus 5 km out of town, we were not surprised, but were disappointed that we would not be within walking distance of Urbino.
The Sogesta campus is isolated from any village by 5 km of very steep, curvy, narrow roads. Even after we found the main building, it was difficult to find the registration desk for the conference. On the other hand we were able to register for our room right away and discovered that it was air conditioned!! We both remembered a torrid room facing the afternoon sun at the other campus.
I had a wonderful pranzo in the cafeteria (chicken, vegetables, salad, fruit, wine) and then took a nap. I hope to do the same every day! Being isolated on this campus all day was frustrating, so we decided to take an excursion to Fermignano, reportedly closer than Urbino. As we approached a stop sign just outside the town, I shouted to Vincent to stop, and so he did, causing the car behind to hit us.
The driver got out and began shouting at us in Italian. When Vincent got out of our car, looking a little dazed and confused, the other driver got progressively more and more angry at my husband’s silence. Finally, after two long minutes of this shouting and pointing, I regained the presence of mind to say, “No capisce Italiano.” The formerly aggressive driver shifted his tone and began to apologize (I think). Vincent and I were both shaken by this episode although neither car was damaged at all. We tried to go to a grocery store in Fermignano, which, of course, was closed, so we cautiously drove right back to the campus parking lot and went to our room to compose ourselves before dinner. I felt a little like a character in the short story, “The Appointment in Samarra” by Somerset Maugham. After all of our efforts to avoid the “crash-a-day” we witnessed in Fano, “fate” followed us all the way to Urbino, and came close enough to give us a fright!
We had a very nice dinner on campus with our friends, and found a ride into Urbino for a nightcap afterwards. Vincent offered to drive, but fortunately someone else won that joust. We sat outside a café in the Piazza de la Republica, drinking Campari while water sparkled from the fountain like a curtain of jewels.
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
I Love Maps!
I love maps. Maps are affordable gateways to movement and transformation; the intrinsic pleasure of stretching out an arm and reaching deep into the universe to grasp a star or a starfish. They are finite in shape, size, and data, but infinite as sinkholes into a jungle, desert, city, pyramid, marketplace, river, cave, museum, tundra, or fireside. Love of maps is similar to love of travel, and Pico Iyer describes that joy as “the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle.” (www.salon.com, March 18, 2000).
I love maps. When I taught seventh grade in my twenties, I petitioned AAA to donate a classroom set of USA road maps. I created individual student assignments to write directions from, say, Ypisilanti, Michigan to Portola, California. Each student would slowly read his or her directions while everyone else traced the route at their own desks. The goal was to skillfully guide everyone in the class from the starting point to the destination. It was a lot of fun, everyone participated, and I hope they learned something about giving (and following) directions! When my own two children were about middle school age, we bought a white van, customized it with a plywood seat/convertible bed, and set out across the country. Each day, one of the kids would be in charge of maps and directions, letting us know where we were, how far to the next destination, what crossroads or major intersections we should encounter, etc. That was a long car trip for young adolescents and I devised quite a few activities in addition to maps to occupy them through long stretches between territorial targets. There were no seatbelts in the van, the air conditioning stopped functioning before we hit Texas, and we had more than a few battles over who sleeps in the tent vs. the van!
I love maps. Several years after being lost on a highway near the wrong Las Vegas, I was clutching a subway map and learning the byways of Manhattan. One of my first assignments upon joining a small publishing house at the very bottom of the pecking order was to go to the map room of the New York Public Library and identify maps for a book called Christianity Comes to the Americas. It was a plum of a mission; I was the proverbial “kid in a candy store.” With the authority of being “on assignment,” I looked at many more maps than necessary, completely fascinated by early perspectives of territory and experience. I recently came across this quote attributed to Christopher Columbus, “For the execution of the voyage to the Indies, I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps.” (www.brainyquote.com) Columbus does not, however, disavow using stories which long-preceded maps as inspiration for exploration. Philosopher Michel de Certeau comments on the evolution of present day maps from narratives. “Maps of medieval times, which were really illustrated stories telling of journeys made and of memorable encounters along the way, were gradually supplanted during the early history of modernity by spatial representations of the earth’s surface.”*
I love maps. While I am out in the world spinning my own narrative thread, I often integrate a variety of maps. I superimpose maps one on another: for example, a simple grid marked only with numbers keyed to an index of site names is superimposed in my mind with a full color map that has little pictures of churches, monuments, tramcars, fountains, ships, etc. On a trip to Helsinki, Finland, I collected and carried around four maps: a guidebook map cut with a razor out of the big fat travel book, a color grid of streets, a tram map superimposed over light grey streets, and a sketch of the city with destinations of interest highlighted. I studied my maps frequently, seeking the layered knowledge of the city they offered. I was a visitor to Helsinki, but when a city dweller knows her or his city, it becomes a series of layered internalized maps, many more than my four maps of Helsinki. For example, one layer would be a map of daily routines; another might be be a map of significant sites in this person’s life as lived in this city.
I love maps! My most recent map purchase is a world map called, “What’s Up? South!” by ODT, Inc. It is based on the simple premise that our typical representation of north at the top of a map is somewhat arbitrary. How strange and unfamiliar the continents look when the whole scheme is reversed! I should have learned this lesson years ago from my favorite Sesame Street animation and jingle, “That’s about the size of it.” It’s a lesson about relative sizes to be sure, but the refrain of “where you put your eyes” is significant when considering the perspective of a snail versus the whole universe, and those of us wandering in between, both near and far.
*According to Tim Ingold (“Up, Across, and Along” p. 48, accessed online at http://www.spacesyntax.tudelft.nl//media/Long%20papers%20I/tim%20ingold.pdf) who reports on de Certeau The Practice of Everyday Life. 1984: 120-1)
I love maps. When I taught seventh grade in my twenties, I petitioned AAA to donate a classroom set of USA road maps. I created individual student assignments to write directions from, say, Ypisilanti, Michigan to Portola, California. Each student would slowly read his or her directions while everyone else traced the route at their own desks. The goal was to skillfully guide everyone in the class from the starting point to the destination. It was a lot of fun, everyone participated, and I hope they learned something about giving (and following) directions! When my own two children were about middle school age, we bought a white van, customized it with a plywood seat/convertible bed, and set out across the country. Each day, one of the kids would be in charge of maps and directions, letting us know where we were, how far to the next destination, what crossroads or major intersections we should encounter, etc. That was a long car trip for young adolescents and I devised quite a few activities in addition to maps to occupy them through long stretches between territorial targets. There were no seatbelts in the van, the air conditioning stopped functioning before we hit Texas, and we had more than a few battles over who sleeps in the tent vs. the van!
I love maps. Several years after being lost on a highway near the wrong Las Vegas, I was clutching a subway map and learning the byways of Manhattan. One of my first assignments upon joining a small publishing house at the very bottom of the pecking order was to go to the map room of the New York Public Library and identify maps for a book called Christianity Comes to the Americas. It was a plum of a mission; I was the proverbial “kid in a candy store.” With the authority of being “on assignment,” I looked at many more maps than necessary, completely fascinated by early perspectives of territory and experience. I recently came across this quote attributed to Christopher Columbus, “For the execution of the voyage to the Indies, I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps.” (www.brainyquote.com) Columbus does not, however, disavow using stories which long-preceded maps as inspiration for exploration. Philosopher Michel de Certeau comments on the evolution of present day maps from narratives. “Maps of medieval times, which were really illustrated stories telling of journeys made and of memorable encounters along the way, were gradually supplanted during the early history of modernity by spatial representations of the earth’s surface.”*
I love maps. While I am out in the world spinning my own narrative thread, I often integrate a variety of maps. I superimpose maps one on another: for example, a simple grid marked only with numbers keyed to an index of site names is superimposed in my mind with a full color map that has little pictures of churches, monuments, tramcars, fountains, ships, etc. On a trip to Helsinki, Finland, I collected and carried around four maps: a guidebook map cut with a razor out of the big fat travel book, a color grid of streets, a tram map superimposed over light grey streets, and a sketch of the city with destinations of interest highlighted. I studied my maps frequently, seeking the layered knowledge of the city they offered. I was a visitor to Helsinki, but when a city dweller knows her or his city, it becomes a series of layered internalized maps, many more than my four maps of Helsinki. For example, one layer would be a map of daily routines; another might be be a map of significant sites in this person’s life as lived in this city.
I love maps! My most recent map purchase is a world map called, “What’s Up? South!” by ODT, Inc. It is based on the simple premise that our typical representation of north at the top of a map is somewhat arbitrary. How strange and unfamiliar the continents look when the whole scheme is reversed! I should have learned this lesson years ago from my favorite Sesame Street animation and jingle, “That’s about the size of it.” It’s a lesson about relative sizes to be sure, but the refrain of “where you put your eyes” is significant when considering the perspective of a snail versus the whole universe, and those of us wandering in between, both near and far.
*According to Tim Ingold (“Up, Across, and Along” p. 48, accessed online at http://www.spacesyntax.tudelft.nl//media/Long%20papers%20I/tim%20ingold.pdf) who reports on de Certeau The Practice of Everyday Life. 1984: 120-1)
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Kayak Chronicle (#1)
When my father died at age 91 in April of 2012, I received a small inheritance from the sale of the house that held nearly all of the life wealth of my parents. My brother Andrew, the executor of his will, hosted the five sibling beneficiaries on the anniversary of Dad’s landing on Omaha Beach, and wrote a check for each of us. I knew that my parents—my mother in particular—would have wanted me to appreciate at least part of this inter-generational gift through some adventure, transforming the solid foundations of home into flight, laughter, and new horizons. As I drove for three hours from New York to Rhode Island, toward a little blue cottage on Narrow River, the kayak bloomed into my life.
About a month later, on the very day that the mango-and-flame-colored boat was delivered, a Friday, my husband Vincent helped me attach the little wheeled contraption to one end to roll the boat down to our neighborhood beach to launch it. This was the first water craft that either of us had owned. We each wobbled around on the water for about twenty minutes while the other watched from shore. It was an awkward birth.
The next afternoon, Vincent delivered me to the beach and then went home. I spent about an hour paddling up and down about twenty feet off the shoreline. It was Saturday and there were weekend jet ski people and speedboat people out there making waves that rushed into collisions, multiplied, and collapsed into me. It was a lively scene from “Storm At Sea: The Kayak Disaster Movie.”
Skip Sunday and Monday.
On Tuesday, I intended to get up by 7 a.m. and try a new solution to the kayak transportation issue. I wanted to be completely independent in moving my kayak from the driveway to the beach and back again. If I am dependent, I know I won’t be going to the river as often. I created an auxiliary transportation device out of our son’s skateboard taped with bubble wrap as a cushion to protect both the board and the boat. Bungee cords from Ocean State Job Lots and an old green towel completed the scheme. After testing on the driveway, I abandoned the ragamuffinly, towel-ends-dragging contrivance and arranged another assist from my patient husband. I vowed to give this another try when it was not 90 degrees out. After all this, I forgot my paddle at home and had to walk back to get it.
When I finally got out on the water, it was approaching 9 am and the sun was shining unabashedly. The water was still and green, thick and opaque. My paddles and a black duck created only the slightest turbulence. Once I got into a rhythm of not dipping too deep, I found myself gliding with minimal “point oscillation” (front end of kayak pointing left and right as I dipped the paddle on opposite sides of the boat). Finally, I understood what salespeople were saying about my 9-foot boat being very stable, and that the longer, thinner boats “track” better. Ah-h-h, yes!
No other boats were active that morning, save for a solitary motor boat with a standing driver racing inexplicably up and down a short section of the river for about fifteen minutes. The wake from this boat reached me in sheets of flexible mirrored surfaces. I let my boat face the curves coming at us quietly like “shining from shook foil.” Not long after, the intense sun chased me back to my beach and a call for help to get home.
On Wednesday morning I set my alarm clock for 7 a.m. and, even so, the sun was up way before me. I remembered the paddle, but almost forgot the cellphone and life jacket! I was on the water by 7:30 a.m. and found that I could comfortably trace the shade along the east bank of the river where tall trees would hold slumbering shadows in their arms for another hour or so.
Alone with black ducks (Anas rubripes) and dragonflies (Anisoptera), this fourth expedition was the experience I had been hoping for . . . gliding without knowing effort; floating without sensing weight; and just being a bundle of elements continuous with elements above and below, inside and outside.
I set myself the challenge of sliding between two buoys on which serene black ducks were perched. I focused on not hitting the sides of the boat with the paddle, not splashing, not making any noise at all. Slowly, I drifted between the ducks without making eye contact. If I don’t make eye contact, I don’t exist. For one brief instant while crossing the line between two ducks contemplating morning, I became a black duck looking at the same quiet water, feeling the same light breeze ruffle my feathers.
Shortly after I crossed that line, the duck on my right broke the spell, lifted off the float, and skimmed in a wide arc through liminal space; not quite air, not quite water. I placed my palms flat on the water on both sides of my boat-skin and felt a synesthesia of temperature and texture: air . . . water . . . thick, warm, deep: breathing water; floating on air; which is which, both . . . and . . . I am, I am.
When my father died at age 91 in April of 2012, I received a small inheritance from the sale of the house that held nearly all of the life wealth of my parents. My brother Andrew, the executor of his will, hosted the five sibling beneficiaries on the anniversary of Dad’s landing on Omaha Beach, and wrote a check for each of us. I knew that my parents—my mother in particular—would have wanted me to appreciate at least part of this inter-generational gift through some adventure, transforming the solid foundations of home into flight, laughter, and new horizons. As I drove for three hours from New York to Rhode Island, toward a little blue cottage on Narrow River, the kayak bloomed into my life.
About a month later, on the very day that the mango-and-flame-colored boat was delivered, a Friday, my husband Vincent helped me attach the little wheeled contraption to one end to roll the boat down to our neighborhood beach to launch it. This was the first water craft that either of us had owned. We each wobbled around on the water for about twenty minutes while the other watched from shore. It was an awkward birth.
The next afternoon, Vincent delivered me to the beach and then went home. I spent about an hour paddling up and down about twenty feet off the shoreline. It was Saturday and there were weekend jet ski people and speedboat people out there making waves that rushed into collisions, multiplied, and collapsed into me. It was a lively scene from “Storm At Sea: The Kayak Disaster Movie.”
Skip Sunday and Monday.
On Tuesday, I intended to get up by 7 a.m. and try a new solution to the kayak transportation issue. I wanted to be completely independent in moving my kayak from the driveway to the beach and back again. If I am dependent, I know I won’t be going to the river as often. I created an auxiliary transportation device out of our son’s skateboard taped with bubble wrap as a cushion to protect both the board and the boat. Bungee cords from Ocean State Job Lots and an old green towel completed the scheme. After testing on the driveway, I abandoned the ragamuffinly, towel-ends-dragging contrivance and arranged another assist from my patient husband. I vowed to give this another try when it was not 90 degrees out. After all this, I forgot my paddle at home and had to walk back to get it.
When I finally got out on the water, it was approaching 9 am and the sun was shining unabashedly. The water was still and green, thick and opaque. My paddles and a black duck created only the slightest turbulence. Once I got into a rhythm of not dipping too deep, I found myself gliding with minimal “point oscillation” (front end of kayak pointing left and right as I dipped the paddle on opposite sides of the boat). Finally, I understood what salespeople were saying about my 9-foot boat being very stable, and that the longer, thinner boats “track” better. Ah-h-h, yes!
No other boats were active that morning, save for a solitary motor boat with a standing driver racing inexplicably up and down a short section of the river for about fifteen minutes. The wake from this boat reached me in sheets of flexible mirrored surfaces. I let my boat face the curves coming at us quietly like “shining from shook foil.” Not long after, the intense sun chased me back to my beach and a call for help to get home.
On Wednesday morning I set my alarm clock for 7 a.m. and, even so, the sun was up way before me. I remembered the paddle, but almost forgot the cellphone and life jacket! I was on the water by 7:30 a.m. and found that I could comfortably trace the shade along the east bank of the river where tall trees would hold slumbering shadows in their arms for another hour or so.
Alone with black ducks (Anas rubripes) and dragonflies (Anisoptera), this fourth expedition was the experience I had been hoping for . . . gliding without knowing effort; floating without sensing weight; and just being a bundle of elements continuous with elements above and below, inside and outside.
I set myself the challenge of sliding between two buoys on which serene black ducks were perched. I focused on not hitting the sides of the boat with the paddle, not splashing, not making any noise at all. Slowly, I drifted between the ducks without making eye contact. If I don’t make eye contact, I don’t exist. For one brief instant while crossing the line between two ducks contemplating morning, I became a black duck looking at the same quiet water, feeling the same light breeze ruffle my feathers.
Shortly after I crossed that line, the duck on my right broke the spell, lifted off the float, and skimmed in a wide arc through liminal space; not quite air, not quite water. I placed my palms flat on the water on both sides of my boat-skin and felt a synesthesia of temperature and texture: air . . . water . . . thick, warm, deep: breathing water; floating on air; which is which, both . . . and . . . I am, I am.
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