Glassels

As I've done readings and interviews for Uphill Both Ways over the last few months, one question has come up again and again: what's your next big adventure? And I've been chagrined to not have an answer. Since our big hike in 2016, the boys and I went on a road trip to Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and points in between. I went on a solo road trip to Colorado last fall. We traveled as a family to Washington, DC, the summer before the pandemic. And I went to Mexico with friends last winter. We've also gone on our sort-of-annual camping trip, with a couple of missed years due to work and pandemic. But none of those have been adventure adventures like hiking 500 miles through Colorado. And since the book came out in March, I haven't had even a little adventure, other than a weekend of car camping, on my agenda.

I needed to do something to remedy that situation, stat, so I began thinking about a hiking trip along the coast in Downeast Maine, a trip we'd planned to take the fall after we returned from the Colorado Trail, until both the weather and the children threatened mutiny. I thought it might be my opportunity to give solo hiking a try, for the first time in 25 years. But as I thought about our gear--tents and stoves designed for groups, not singles--and the fact that I'd have to carry all my water, I decided to invite C along, even though I swore I'd never backpack with him again after our Colorado Trail hike (if you've read the book, you'll know why).

He agreed, and we gathered gear and food for two days and hit the road very early in the morning on the last Friday in July. C loaded his pack with most of the essentials, and with the weight I saved by not carrying anything vital, I brought along two books, a journal kit, a camera, binoculars, and an extra sleep pad for lounging on the beach. After a very long drive, we made the hot, sweaty hike in. On the five miles of up-and-down, rooty, rocky, brushy trail, with six liters of water on my back, I was very, very grateful to not also be carrying our 6-pound, five(ish)-person tent or our not-so-light Whisper-Lite stove.

Once we arrived at our campsite, the apltly named Fairy Head, we spent the afternoon and all the next day moving from rock to rock as we lounged on the beach, cooking, snacking, reading, birdwatching, and swimming, I was again very, very grateful to have company. I'm very good at entertaining myself, but it was nice to have someone to chat with and share camp chores with. Although we wished we'd brought a mini deck of cards, we caught up on about 20 years' worth of conversation. C, for his part, redeemed himself, and he only got a little bit antsy. As a remedy, I proposed a walk to the headland (and ended up slipping on seaweed and acquiring a collection of big, purple bruises). 

Our beach was made up of pebbles ranging in size from marble to potato. Most of them were a slaty gray, but several had blue, red, pink, or green in them, and they glistened like gems when wet from the outgoing tide. I was reminded of the book Landmarks by Robert MacFarlane, where he quotes The Meaning of Liffby Douglas Adams and John Lloyd, which MacFarlane describes as "a genius catalogue of nonce words. . . in which British place names are used as nouns for the 'hundreds of common experiences, feelings, situations and even objects which we all recognize, but for which no word exists.'" One example he quotes is " 'Glassel (n.): A seaside pebble which was shiny and interesting when wet, and which now is a lump of rock, but which children nevertheless insist on filling their suitcases with after a holiday.' "

C filled his pockets with glassels, several of which now sit on our coffee table. They've been polished enough by eons of being washed and tumbled by the sea that they are a bit more interesting than lumps of rock, and even the least shiny ones are silent reminders of a our adventure.

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Leaning into the Lull

July is lull season here in Maine. May and June's headlong rush of flowering and leafing and mating and pollinating and singing has settled into a comfortable summer's pace of more hidden fledging and seeding.

I've had the pleasure of catching some new birds shorty post-fledge: house wrens, white-breasted nuthatches, yellow-bellied sapsuckers, chipping sparrows, common yellowthroats. Our neighbor left most of his field un-mown, and in addition to giving me a front-row seat in watching the progression of grass to hay, this meant the bobolinks got a chance to raise their babies. I missed the swallows' maiden flight, though I watched the biggest baby in each nest box hog the opening (and the bugs) for two days. Bluebirds moved into one of the boxes as soon as the swallows moved out, but they're more shy, not making a spectacle of flight and feather collecting like the swallows.

As the birds wrap up their parenting duties and the flowers turn to seeds, I'm trying not to panic ("winter is coming"). After all, until this week the temperatures barely topped 80 degrees (and the nights dropped down into the 50s or low 60s, even down to 53 one night last weekend), and my trips to the beach so far have involved sweatshirts and very cold, quick dashes into the water. Which has got to mean there's a whole lot of summer left, right? 

After a big flurry of book launch events in late June, I too have hit a bit of a lull with few events scheduled for July. Which is a relief, since I lost a whole week to a tooth abscess. Though I powered through two book readings, two book signings, and four days of alumni weekend activities, most of those events bookended the worst of it, not counting one reading that took place the day of my root canal. In between, I spent a week lying on the couch watching TV all day and night (I was in too much pain to read or sleep or do anything else).

I won't say it was more painful than childbirth, but it lasted a lot longer. I've always thought the washing machine and the window screen were the most valuable of modern inventions, but now I'll throw in antibiotics and anesthesia. When I wasn't numbing my pain and brain with television shows, I thought a lot about people who lived prior to modern dentistry, especially the Ancient Puebloan people of the American Southwest, who apparently died at a relatively young age because the sand grains ground into their corn wore down their teeth. Now I know they didn't fade away from malnutrition but suffered in agony from exposed roots.

Once the pain and swelling subsided, I made it my mission to get out hiking and kayaking as much as possible. I also resumed on my morning pajama bird walks--which have grown a lot quieter of late--and daily search for butterflies. This month is, too, supposed to be a lull for butterflies. Much of the variety of last month is down, but I've seen more monarchs drifting around our property than ever before, and the pollinator garden, which I put in two summers ago, is seeing a lot of action, with six fritillaries, two skippers, and a monarch on one plant during one pass-by alone this morning. It won't win any garden club awards, the plants too close together and of crazily varying heights and colors, but the butterflies and other pollinators don't seem to care.

For what's left of this month, I'm leaning into the lull, in the vain hope that reveling in the slow pace of mid-summer can slow down time and the butterflies fluttering a little longer before it's time to face another season.

A version of this post went out recently to subscribers of my newsletter, along with some bonus material. Subscribe here and receive a free PDF of my illustrated short essay "Eleven Ways to Raise a Wild Child."

Five Hundred Miles in Deep Wild

 I'm pleased to share that my essay "Five Hundred Miles" appears in the 2022 issue of Deep Wild: Writing from the Backcountry.

My 15-year-old son Milo and I are hiking along the backbone of a ridge. The land drops away on both sides to deep, green valleys. Beyond the valleys, jagged peaks rise up, red and gray dusted with green. Farther in the distance, more mountains stretch hazy and blue to the edge of the sky. 

We climb up sharply, heading toward a rocky knob—the high point mentioned in the guidebook, I hope. I lift one foot after the other, repeating a mantra I found in a book on walking meditation: I have arrived. I have arrived. Looking down, I notice the track of a mountain bike between rocks. 

“What a stupid place to ride a bike,” I say.

“What a stupid place to do anything,” Milo replies.

It tells a little bit of our Colorado Trail story, although it's not a direct excerpt from Uphill Both Ways (though you might recognize a phrase here or there. . . I'm a strong believer in recycling). 

I'm notoriously bad about keeping up with reading the literary journals and anthologies that come my way, even when my own writing is included. But I've read the two previous issues of Deep Wild and have started in on this one, and the writing is really good. If you love reading about nature and wild places, you'll love this journal. You can order your copy here.

And if you enjoy my essay, you'll definitely love my book, which you can order from one of the links listed here.

Leveling Up

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to give a presentation and lead a workshop at the low-residency MFA program I graduated from eight (!!) years ago. It was so good to be in a milieu of writers for the day, and both my sessions went incredibly well---I felt good while they were happening and I got good immediate feedback from a few students who stuck around (I think I might even have acquired a fan). It made me think I want to do more of it. Not teaching every day, and not in a traditional classroom setting. Certainly not to children or (horrors) teenagers. But adults eager and excited to learn, in a beautiful location, where I don't have to do any of the work to promote the event or recruit the participants, yes please.

So that's on my to-do list, what I'm thinking of as my leveling-up plan. Although it's not so much a plan yet as an aspiration, a desire to raise myself up to the next rung in the writerly career. Some steps along the way include illustrating my second book and writing my third book. Both of these seem, from where I stand now, really, really hard. Beyond my current abilities. But I remind myself that when I was in the early stages of writing Uphill Both Ways that I didn't feel smart enough for what I wanted to do with the book---incorporate natural, cultural, and environmental history in the travel narrative in a way that felt natural and seamless to the reader. All that research, all that managing of different narrative threads seemed like it was going to be too difficult and unwieldy. But just as when you face an impenetrable mountain range you can find a path through, I found my way into the heart of the story I wanted to tell, and I succeeded in writing it the way I envisioned.

It just takes putting one foot in front of the other, or in this case, pen and pencil to page. So that's my plan for July and August, daily drawing sessions, and writing or reading/research sessions. I'll also be playing along with the Summer Blueprint & Butt in the Chair Challenge with #AmWriting and Author Accelerator. By the end of August, I'll have a plan for Book #3, and although I have a pretty good (I think) mental picture for how this book will go, having it all on paper should make it that much easier to stick to it. 

I also want to try to avoid trying to do ALL THE THINGS this summer, as is my wont. Yes, birding, butterflying, dragonflying, hiking, and kayaking. Beach trips. Yoga when I get around to it. Reading through the books stack (which unaccountably keeps growing). Keep on promoting Book #1. That's a lot already, so I'm going to try to avoid adding additional projects to the list. Wish me luck!

A version of this post went out recently to subscribers of my newsletter, along with some bonus material. Subscribe here and receive a free PDF of my illustrated short essay "Eleven Ways to Raise a Wild Child."

Book Stack ~ May & June 2022

 A monthly post about what I've been reading, with aspirations but no real hope of reading down a very tall stack of books. Previous posts from this year:

January 2022

February 2022

March 2022

April 2022

Don't mind the dust; these books have been stacking up for a long time.

As May turned to June and I kept adding books to the stack, I sort of lost track of which I'd read in which month, so I decided to just mash the two months together.

Poetry

In April I picked up this sweet little anthology: How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, edited by James Crewes. It's a lovely collection from poets both familiar and new to me. And we can all use as much gratitude and hope as we can get these days, no?

Fiction

I've been in the mood for light fiction, and my mom had sent me a stack of mysteries earlier in the year that fit the bill: The Body on the Train by Frances Brody, a historical, traditional mystery with rhubarb and coal mining; Death of an Unsung Hero by Tessa Arlen, also historical and traditional, with World War I PTSD (not what it was called then) patients and false identities, and Read and Buried by Eva Gates, a contemporary cozy with a lighthouse library and a treasure map. All feature amateur sleuths, which I prefer to police procedurals, and I think my favorite of the three was The Body on the Train.

Nonfiction

I've been rereading certain books for a new writing project I'm working on: We Took to the Woods and Happy the Land by Louise Dickinson Rich, about Rich's experiences living in a very remote spot in the Maine woods with her husband and young son (and later daughter) in the 1930s and 40s--a funny, poignant, beautifully drawn, and thoroughly entertaining description of her wild life. On the opposite side of the country, Margaret Murie's Two in the Far North, about traveling in the wilds of Alaska beginning with her journey there at age nine in 1911, followed by her honeymoon with her husband Olaus aboard a variety of boats and then dog sled, a boat trip into the interior with their infant son, and several subsequent trips after their family was grown (I also read Margaret's chapters of Wapiti Wilderness, not pictured, which she wrote in collaboration with Olaus, about their life in Wyoming raising kids in the mountains). Beautiful descriptions of the people and landscape of Alaska and the challenges and joys of making a living in such a remote region before the advent of modern technology.

One of the things that's fun about publishing a book is getting to know other writers in the same genre. Nancy East is one of these. Her book, Chasing the Smokies Moon, tells the story of hiking, with a friend, all of the trails in Great Smoky Mountains National Park (more than 900 miles of them) in under 30 days, for the fastest known time, as a fund raiser for search-and-rescue training. It made me think it would be fun to do something similar in Acadia (although, as you  know if you've read Uphill Both Ways, not for any kind of speed record!). East overcomes a lot of difficulties, including injuries and being separated from her children for a whole month, to reach a goal she set for herself, raising money for search-and-rescue training along the way. She is an inspiration to hikers and mothers alike.

I'm training to be a book coach, and one of the books recommended in the course is Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull, the founder of Pixar. Funny story: there is another book of this same title, which was written not by an animation pioneer but rather The Harvard Business Review, and that's the book I accidentally purchased at first. The case study in the book is a company that designs office furniture. Now, I've worked in a lot of offices, and I can say that without exception office furniture is universally ugly, uncomfortable, and dysfunctional, and if there is one iota of creativity that goes into its design, it is in the service of ensuring that the furniture enhances the misery of its users. I was relieved to figure out that I'd bought the wrong book before I got too far into its dusty pages. Once I got the right book, it was entertaining to read about the early days of Pixar and the evolution of that company, and it made me want to go back and watch some of their movies, most of which I never saw, because our kids were always like, "We already watched that at day care. Waah!" I don't often read books about business management (which is what, mainly, this book is about; there's one small section relevant to the work of a book coach), but whenever I do, all I think about is how badly managed almost every place I've ever worked at is. The same was true in this case as well. Do you think actual managers ever read these kinds of books?

 Don't forget you can order a copy of my book, Uphill Both Ways: Hiking toward Happiness on the Colorado Trail from any of the vendors listed here.

Flash Friday ~ Effortful Fun

 

I first read the term "effortful fun" in Laura Vanderkam's email newsletter last Friday morning. Vanderkam's example of effortful fun was reading, which is interesting, because even though I love to read, I don't exactly consider it fun, and I also think of it as more of a lazy default activity rather than something that requires effort. At the time I read the newsletter, I was going through my email as a way of procrastinating getting ready to go camping, which is an extremely effortful, but fun, activity.

We'd planned the trip a few months earlier, then rescheduled it due to a friend's daughter's graduation party that would fall in the middle of our original weekend. We'd be going to our favorite spot, the place we'd gone nearly every year for the last 16 years. But still, I dreaded the prospect. Not the camping. Not the location. Not even the inevitable rain. But the massive amount of work required to find, sort, and pack all our camping gear and shop for and prep all the food. Not to mention the unpacking, cleaning, and putting away when we returned (a process I've dubbed "decampression"). Wouldn't it be easier to stay home?

Perhaps sensing my foot-dragging-ness, C stepped in and carried out some of the tasks I usually do--hauling the gear up from the basement, grocery shopping--on top of his usual jobs of loading about a cord of wood in the truck, getting together hatchet and lanterns, filling the water jug, washing water buckets, and tuning up the old Coleman stove. I eventually rousted myself out of my funk enough to sort through the gear and decide what we should take, wash the dishes that had been sitting in the musty basement all winter, load the coolers and organize the food, lug everything out to the car, and write a list for the children of their packing duties.

C and I headed out in afternoon in the pickup, with the tents, the coolers, the dishes, and the wood. The kids would follow later, after E and Z got home from school, M got off of work, and they had all packed their personal items into the car, with the sleeping bags and mats, duffel bags and pillows. It was cloudy and chilly, and I was tired. I still didn't feel like going camping. I dozed in the not-that-comfortable passenger seat, while C drove and surfed radio stations.

After we crossed the Kennebec River, drove under Route 1 in Bath, turned down the peninsula, and passed the shipyard, I began to perk up. I could sense the sea air. When the mudflats and estuaries came into view I could feel my body relax. Near the tip of the peninsula, I began to feel excited. We were going camping! A whole weekend away from screens and news and housework and real life. We stopped at the farm stand and bought two gorgeous pies---strawberry-rhubarb and raspberry-blueberry---and headed across the causeway and onto the island. We picked a campsite well removed from other campers, but not too long a walk from the beach, set up two tents, started a smoky fire to beat back the mosquitoes, and cut two generous slices pie. This was the life. Effortful fun. A lot of work, but so worth it.

What's even more effortful than car camping? Backpacking! And what's more fun than going backpacking? Reading about someone else doing all that work. If you want a little effortless fun, check out my book, Uphill Both Ways: Hiking toward Happiness on the Colorado Trail. 

New Essay ~ Alligator Pear

 

Last summer I grew an avocado jungle on my deck. 

The previous fall, with school operating on a hybrid schedule and the pandemic unfurling before us toward what seemed like eternity, one of my sons asked if we could start an avocado tree from a pit. Eager for any of my children to show interest in anything that wasn't screen based, I jumped on the idea. I remembered my mom starting avocado trees by piercing pits with toothpicks and suspending them in water in a green depression glass sherbet dish. I didn't have a depression glass sherbet dish, so I used an empty yogurt container, and I didn't have any toothpicks, so I used party picks with paper Pinocchio heads on one end that my mother-in-law had given us for no apparent reason. Otherwise, my sprouting avocado looked exactly like my mom's.

Read the rest of "Alligator Pear" in the Flora issue of Stonecrop Review here.

And if you want to order a copy of my book, Uphill Both Ways: Hiking toward Happiness on the Colorado Trail, you can get it half off from Bison Books through July 15, 2022 with the code 6SUMM22.