sounds familiar

One of the habits I’ve been fueling, as opposed to those I’ve been attempting to starve-out, on this roadtrip is reading for pleasure.  I love reading, but I do it in a very bursty way.  I’ll read every day, devouring books, for months on end, and then I’ll simply put a book down and not read at all for, again, months on end.  I’ve been trying to smooth-out that ebb and flow a bit.  

I began the trip choosing to read East of Eden, something I’ve always wanted to read.  Bolstered by the fact that my mom had also just read it (not planned, but a nice happenstance) and we could thus have it as a topic of shared discussion, I dove in. 

I thoroughly enjoyed the book, but that’s not what this post is about.  This post is about one particular passage from the book that really stuck with me.  I won’t spoil anything, but I’ll set the scene just a little.  Turn of the century America, a man has just left the post office having picked up a letter from his out-of-state brother.  Here’s what Steinbeck actually wrote:

A man who gets few letters does not open one lightly.  He hefts it for weight, reads the name of the sender on the envelope and the address, looks at the handwriting, and studies the postmark and the date.  

… He looked at the envelope … He turned the envelope over and looked at the back … Once having decided to open the letter he took out his pocketknife, opened the big blade, and inspected the envelope for a point of ingress, found none, held the letter up to the sun to make sure not to cut the message, tapped the letter to one end of the envelope, and cut off the other end.  He blew in the end and extracted the letter with two fingers.  He read the letter very slowly.  

First off, can we just pause for a moment and appreciate the laboriously detailed documentation of such a simple action?  It’s glorious!  Not only that, but taking such luxury in capturing such a small thing seems to brilliantly underscore the actual slow savoring being described.  It’s like in the Simon and Garfunkel song Overs, where Simon holds the word “long” for a long time.  You want to let the reader know just how serious the business of this letter is, how meaningfully slow the character is considering & consuming it?  Got it.  

But that’s not what I’m writing about either.  

The point of me sharing the Steinbeck passage, the thing that struck and has stayed with me, is just how luxurious certain things can be if we just slow down and take the time to enjoy them for every detail.   

In my life, I savor very little.  I rarely slow down.  Every moment is a multitasked context-switching fastlane.  On this trip, forcing myself to see and feel and reflect, I have been amazed to find that a single waking day can, when properly savored, feel like two or even three times what I’m normally used to.  You probably know the days, they are likely poolside on vacation when you’ve not checked the time in a while and think to yourself, “It must be getting near dinnertime,” and are then shocked to find it’s barely past 2pm.   It’s that kind of purposed-slowness.  And, when you can achieve it, it’s simply beautiful.  

I won’t say I’ve achieved this state in some permanent way, but this trip is helping me hone my skills in slowing down, in savoring life.  Further, I can say with certainty that cellphones are the worst enemy here.  At least for me, with my cellphone at arms reach, I can always be working on something between everything else – and that means cheating anyone or anything I’m doing of the proper consideration and involvement.   I find myself addicted to the little device in my pocket, and realizing it’s stealing my ability to be undivided in my attention.  

So that languid exploration of getting and opening a letter stays prominent in my mind.  Reading it, noticing the contrast to the haste & partial attention which characterizes most actions I take, makes me realize… we are doing this wrong; so very wrong.  I am going too fast, I am doing too much at once, I am just not living in the moment and enjoying things.  

I am seriously working on fixing that.  

Until later, peace all.

I was doing OK… then we changed routine. I’m still trying – please keep checking.

My brain, being broken in all the ways I’ve come to know, has been thinking of this trip as a string of four segments. That I do this is actually a bit disappointing to me… like I’m somehow unable to let the trip be organic – I have to dissect it and give it a taxonomy and think of it as a series of beginnings and ends. While I worry about that, I guess it’s just how I do. So, to the point, I’ve been thinking of this trip as a string of four segments: (1) Pre-Hawaii, (2) Post-Hawaii, (3) Cruise-to-Christmas, and (4) the great unknown. We’re in the second segment now, having finished both our Pacific Northwest tour & our Hawaii vacation-from-vacation. Sharaun goes on her New Kids cruise this coming week and after that we have about two months to meander from California to Florida (our third segment, in my diseased thinking).

I’m looking forward to finally ranging afar from home – to striking out across country and leaving the west coast behind. We’ve talked about consciously slowing down the pace, spending more time in each stop, reducing diving time even more. We started this week, spending Monday nearly all week camped in the same place. I loved it. I had time to sit in the sun in my cam chair, drinking a beer and practicing tying knots (what is it that’s so fascinating about tying knots?). Had time to pull out the guitar for the first time yet on the trip and practice chord changes (no, I cannot play a dang thing still). Had time to take a nap in the hammock with Cohen & zip-tie a life-sized skeleton to the ladder on the back of the RV to show our Halloween spirit.

I want more days where there is nothing to do at all. Not even a planned hike or anything. Just wake up, go for a walk with coffee, do school, and then have the rest of the day for reading and thinking and whatever the heck else we want.

I think we’ll get better at this. We’re already adapting in what I see as healthy ways – learning from our time thus far and tweaking. Example: Keaton and I had been averaging about 90min of math every day for school. This was encroaching on the time Sharaun had for her other subjects, and, when I pulled-up the class webpage for the 7th math teach she’d have if she were in school back home I was surprised to discover that we were fast outpacing them through the material thus far. The solution: Change math to ~40min/day and slow down, spend more time on mastery. I switched to the new model this week and it already feels a lot better to me (and to Keaton, I think). We’re learning…

Until later, peace.

On our year-long road trip, in addition to being “dad” to Keaton, I am also her math teacher. 

Prior to actually executing in this role, I went through a range of emotions.  I was nervous and overwhelmed.  I was unsure about how we’d define her curriculum, anxious about how she’d accept and work with me as an instructor vs. a parent.  

I settled myself a bit once Sharaun and I made the decision that, for math, we’d stick tightly to the California “common core” curriculum for 7th grade.  Since we don’t intend to continue homeschool after this year of travel, we wanted to be sure that when she’s plugged back into the public school system she had learned the same things in the same ways with the same approaches as her peers.  

We’re now in week two of road-school, and are finishing up our first unit, which is focused on operations with rational numbers.  A good bit is review for her, but based on our work so far it’s welcomed review.  We’ve had more good days than bad, and all my nerves and overwhelmedness and anxiety is gone. 

It’s not that it’s a piece of cake – there’s a lot of preparation and a fair amount of just-me time investment required.  But… I am finding myself really, truly enjoying it all… both the preparation and the actual teaching parts.  I also feel myself developing a feel for it… and being more comfortable tailoring what we’re doing to how Keaton seems to be responding and learning (or not).

Case in point, we had a pretty terrible day on Tuesday this week. The lesson was two hours of tears and frustration and plain just not getting it.  Prior to that day, we had been on-track to review the unit today and test on it tomorrow.  But Keaton didn’t have it… she was still getting tripped-up, and she got more and more down on it all with each successive wrong answer or hang-up.  

So, we changed the plan.  We spent this morning doing a bunch of review drills, hitting the key skills in repetition, working together if needed.  Oh man, did it help.  Just taking the time to do a little more work, to slow down, to get a string of right answers under her belt, to gain a little confidence.  What’s more, I think I’m going to do the same thing with tomorrow’s lesson, too. 

After all, I’m the teacher.

Nothing in an RV is easy to get.

Everything is forever behind everything else.  No matter what it is that you need, it’s guaranteed to be under, behind, or inside three or four other cumbersome-to-move things you don’t.  This is Law #1 of full-time RVing.  

To get the shoes I wanted to wear for church this morning, I had to pull-out the shoe-storage bin and paw to the back, where, of course, the brown ones were.  

Keaton wanted to ride her bike after dinner, but you can’t just get her bike… you must remove all bikes.  Can’t ride without a helmet, but that bin is four-deep in the (thankfully) cavernous rear storage space.  

Ran out of toilet paper?  Not enough room under the bathroom sink so that’s a walk outside to the paper bin.   Same for extra paper plates or napkins.  

Living in this tiny space if full of “excuse mes,” “sorry, I’m in heres,” and “did someone move my X?”  But, you know what… 

I am getting used to it.  We are getting used to it. 

 

Laundry day in Crescent City, CA.  High on the Northern Pacific coast.  

Dude walks in, 6ft tall and then some.  Gray hair, missing on top but still a bundled into a ponytail in back.  Sweatpants, too big.  Two front teeth nowhere to be found.  

Seeing my Grateful Dead shirt, “The Grateful Dead?”  Without giving me time to respond, I watch him pause for a moment to look me over a bit, which I assumed was him getting a mental fix on just how old I might be.  Then, like an old friend, “I have a Grateful Dead story for you.”  I’m intrigued.  I show as much on my face and make the right noises to spur him on.  

“I don’t really like the Dead; has nothing to do with their music either, I like the music.  I’ll tell you.  I grew up in the Bay.  Back in… oh… ’69 or ’70 or maybe ’71 I saw the Dead at the Avalon.”  I make some happy/encouraging response, we’re talking classic stuff here… some of those shows are legendary. 

“Anyway, there was this big barrel of water at the show.  I had two, maybe three very small cups, and I was shot.  The Dead put acid in the water; spiked it.  Without my permission.  That’s just not cool, man.”  I agree that dosing someone unbeknownst to them is, definitely, not cool man.  

He told me more.  About being so loopy he sat behind the wheel of his Volkswagen bus and couldn’t will himself to drive.  About living in the Bay.  About seeing Quicksilver, Canned Heat, Airplane.  About selling his parents Silicon Valley home for $1M after they died, the home they bought for $16k and that’s now worth $2M just six year later.  About working for Coors for 20 years in Colorado (“I was a liar and a drunk then, though; was a different time.”)

I have no reason to doubt my new buddy.  So what if he mis-remembered where the Dead’s infamous “acid punch show” really happened, I like to think he really was there and really was too messed-up to get his bus moving afterward.  

Laundromats have consistently been one of the most unpredictably cool and interesting parts of our previous trips, and this one is proving no different.

Goodnight.

We walked down to the sea today.

We did so on the way back from a longer walk around a good portion of the grounds here at the state park. That walk itself came after quite the bustling RV morning, including the momentous first day of home-school for the kids & a father/son bike ride.

Momentous as it all was, and it really was, in the grand scheme, it was being beside the ocean that I’ll ultimately take from today. I told Sharaun, who stayed safely just above the closer-to-the-crash rocks the kids & I clambered down to, that I could sit there and stare at the bubbling foamy chaos for hours.

So rough. The rocks taking beating after beating. The waves, unrelenting, smashing at them over and over again, throwing huge plumes of spray into the air and filling the little nooks and crannies of the rough shore with froth. Occasionally a swell of the tide would see the sea cover entirely over all but the most massive upshots of rock, making them temporarily disappear underneath boiling swirls of white.

It was chilly and there really was no “shore” to speak of. The mountains simply crumble into the sea, quite abruptly. You can look back a hundred yards from where you climbed down and see a redwood forest and ferns. The ocean has literally beaten the cliffs into a tumble of rocks.

It was fantastic for every second of the twenty minutes or so we spent there before heading back to the RV for dinner. Ever-changing, almost hypnotic, kind of like watching a campfire or a snow fall.

Goodnight.

We left home Friday morning.

We were about an hour and a half behind schedule, which, honestly, was pretty darn good. Sharaun, in true Sharaun form, propped her phone up on the roots of the tree in the yard and had the family pose in the RV doorframe for an auto-timed picture. I’m glad she did because it came out fantastic and it’ll be an awesome memory.

In the RV, I cranked the engine and paired my phone with the stereo to get some music going. Radiohead’s Last Flowers was on. It’s a little piano-driven number which, at times, sounds quite sad. Oh man, I cried. I just sat there, askew in the driver’s seat, engine running, and cried. Sharaun cried. We laughed at the luck of getting such a dirge as our shuffled-up departure track. Crying was important, though, so I saw the Lord’s hand in it all once again.

We swung by Mom’s house to say one last goodbye. More quick hugs, a bit more tears. Then Costco for gas and a lunch stop for burgers before we hit the road.

And then we were gone.

A Labor Day weekend trip with friends began our journey and marked the last few days of summer for the kids. Tomorrow, Tuesday, we start school. We’re camped at Patrick’s Point State Park on the Northern California coast. I anticipate we’ll stay here a couple nights at least, long enough to hopefully feel-out how the day’s routine is going to go. Although, I’m likely fooling myself… as I suspect we won’t really lock into that routine for quite a while.

There were moments today, on the road, where I felt waves of wonder. Big sweeping landscapes unfolding below and beside us, tacky roadside tourist traps, a laugh shared with a child. There were also moments where I felt waves of anxiety. Why does the house battery gauge show only a third left when we were plugged in all night? Is this pull-out level enough to boil the water I need for my instant noodle lunch? The bike rack is totally going to bottom-out right now…

Until tomorrow then. Goodnight.