Category: Travel

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Wildwood

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I know I said today I’d post David’s poem from our morning of poetry play, but I’m going to do that the next tomorrow.  Today we went to Wildwood, the next town south from Stone Harbor, and outside of being another beach town, about as different as it could be.  Wildwood has an enormous boardwalk, three piers of amusement park rides, water parks, motels that looked completely unchanged since the 50’s, scads of people, monster truck rides, and a complete lack of the kind of intellectual preoccupations David and I often spend our days slipping around in.

For example, this morning on our walk along the beach, David did his book report style recounting of the concepts about human evolution and the development of the cooperative brain through trade and specialization of skill from Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist.  Earlier, I’d shown him the latest draft of one of the three poems I’m working on right now, and he helped me edit out a few more words, generally a good move in any poem.

But this afternoon we went to Wildwood and lost ourselves in the sights and sounds and sun.  This slide show doesn’t do the experience justice, because you can’t hear all the amplified voices telling you “We have barbecued chicken, we have fried flounder, come eat here,” and “Two for the price of one, two for the price of one, come in and buy.”  We walked and looked and listened until we were thirsty and hungry and tired, went to have dinner at a Mexican restaurant run by a family David’s second cousin in St. John knows (it’s such a small world), came back to the house and watched a royally brilliant sunset.  There’s a tiny bit of pink left in the quickly darkening sky, and the first star is out.  Time for a wish.

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Haiku XCII

Wisconsin farmland
Rolls and swirls across the hills
Heading east plane-bound.

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Coffee Shop

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I’m in a coffee shop in Madison with cappuccino, wi-fi and time.  This is a place I often imagine myself and hardly ever really experience.  In my imagined life I have boundless time to sit in a cafe and be creative, or read, or just watch the life of whatever city I’m visiting move through.

Coming to Madison this weekend for a visit with David’s family, I thought maybe I could make it happen, I could actually get to a coffee shop with some open time and sit and read and write and just be.  And here I am.

But the path here is not what I expected, though this particular cafe is playing the role well. It’s an independent coffee shop (Starbucks just doesn’t work for this particularly fantasy) with interesting cards, a bucket of slogan buttons by the cash register, coffee accessories, and a fairly spectacular railing for the upstairs seating area — circles of metals and looping silver chains, the kind of repeating and swirling patterns I draw myself when I doodle.

Sam called yesterday with unexpected news.  Marianna has been offered a job in Tennessee, so their planned move to Boston for Sam to go to BC graduate school may be taking a 180 degree reverse turn.  We talked twice yesterday, as they’re trying to sort out what their best move is, how real is this offer, what does this do to Sam’s plans, just simply, what should they do?

Early this morning I heard my phone buzzing.  I got up to check to see who had called. Natalie, Eric’s mother, was in the hospital last week and is now in a rehab facility, and I wanted to be sure it wasn’t someone from Connecticut calling.  It was Sam and Marianna.  I tried going back to sleep but couldn’t.  David was still sleeping, so I left the room to call them back.

“Guess what?” Sam said.  “I won a 37 foot, two bedroom camper trailer in a raffle!”  He and Marianna are camping with her father at a music festival, and Sam bought two tickets for a charity raffle.  And then won.

“Do you and David want it?”  David and I do talk a lot about our plans to take off and travel the country, teardrop trailer in tow.  Sam wanted to be sure we didn’t want to amend our vision of what will be following our VW Passat wagon.  “I really don’t know what to do with it.”

And isn’t that just what life is?  Right turn swerves, then left turn swerves, tumbling chances and changes.  We’re in Madison because we’d planned to come to a family wedding here and then that fell apart, but a good number of the wedding guests came anyway and there was a wonderful gathering of lively and interesting people last night.  Sam and Marianna were moving to NH in two weeks, to spend the summer with David and me before moving to Boston.  Now they may be staying in Tennessee.  I was planning to spend the rest of my life with Eric and then he died.  Now I’m in the big, interesting life of another man and in places I never expected to be.

Like Madison.  Except for a long time I’ve expected to be in this coffee shop.

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Haiku XXIX and Thoughts on Doubling Back

Waiting at the gate
Another late departure
Change flights to leave home.

So here I am at the airport, hours earlier than needed because my flight through Philadelphia is late enough there’s a good chance I’d miss my connection to Minneapolis.  So I took a seat on another flight through Chicago, which leaves two hours later than my original flight and gets me to Minneapolis over an hour later than planned.  Which is an hour later than my body time, since I’ll be flying through that invisible line where the clocks jump back an hour.

I keep walking back and forth between my new gate and my original gate to see if the delayed Philadelphia plane is here yet.  Maybe I should stay with my planned itinerary, I’ll get to Minneapolis earlier, I won’t have to wait around here so long?  The plane still isn’t there.  I walk back to my new gate — empty, no one at the gate counter yet to give me new boarding passes.  So back to the original gate, nothing new, turn and walk back down the long tiled corridor of the airport to a cafe and check out the menu, decide to go eat at the grill down past the other gate, walk back, eat, come back to the new gate, walk back to the old, back and forth, leave or stay?  No choice really, there isn’t a plane at either gate.

Yesterday morning David and I spent about an hour working on a poem for a holiday card that explores the idea of doubling back, of duality, of two things happening at once, two poets simultaneously writing the same poem.  Then we packed up and left to meet up with Ruth and Rick for a hike of Mt. Hedgehog.  The afternoon turned sunny and the hike was glorious, a trail dusted with snow rising through hemlocks and hardwoods to ledges that ring the mountain, opening up grand views of Passaconaway and Chocorua rising to the south. 

We’d planned the hike for the narrow band of afternoon light, so we’d finish in time for an early dinner.  But we planned it too tight and ended up still on the trail when it got dark.  I pulled out my headlamp and David got out his flashlight, neither shedding much light due to low batteries.  The trail at first was easy enough to follow, but then the wide open strip lit with snow dust crossed a brook and we couldn’t tell if the trail turned with the brook or crossed it.  I started hunting for blazes, walking up and down the different possible directions, finally finding a blaze.  We continued on a wet, sunken trail bed but then had doubts.  Were we following a brook, or on a badly eroded trail?  Again, I went back and found a blaze on a tree and a culvert sticking through the gravel.  We continued on.  I stepped in a deep puddle and water poured into my boot.  I plowed through water and wet ground, then came to a narrow swatch and couldn’t find any footprints.  I turned around and looked for the last blaze, found one and turned again, lost confidence and went back.  Doubling back, going forward, doubling back, going forward, David and Rick and Ruth letting me lead.  I pushed through the blackness of low shrubs at the narrow swatch and swung my head down.  Footprints in the gravel in front of me.  “This is it,” I said and kept going.  Soon I came to a foot bridge and signs.  We got out of the woods, laughing and relieved, all agreeing that was enough dark hiking to make an adventure we didn’t need to repeat. 

Last night we got to our cars and a dinner in front of a roaring fire in a pub.  Tonight I hope I get to Minneapolis.