The English Geek

I've {finally} Been Here:

Due to my seventh-grade science teacher, I've been to a lot of the geological wonders of the (American Western) world: the petrified forest, the Grand Canyon, Four Corners (not so much a geological wonder but a cartological wonder that proved fairly anti-climactic; your life really doesn't change in meaningful ways just because you've had four parts of your body in four different states at the same time), Shiprock, and of course Bryce Canyon. I've also toured a salt mine, examined faults along the Wasatch front, and participated in a dig for trilobyte fossils. (I still have the one I found, stored in a box under the stairs.)

But I, dear friends, have never been here, even though I've wanted to go:

 
(Yes! those are the fumes of Old Faithful behind me!)

Until Monday, when I got the tiniest taste of Yellowstone. Now I want to go back for a much longer visit. Because, you know: we didn't see any bears, so that part left me a bit disappointed. But the geological wonders were rich and amazing and gorgeous, even with the sounds of my sweet children's complaints (observing geological wonders helps even me ignore "this is boring" and "how many more geysers do we have to see?" type comments).

I'd like to write more right now but unfortunately my house is a disaster of stuff waiting to be unpacked and washed. Writing will have to wait. I'll be envisioning Yellowstone while I sort, though.

Have you ever been there? What was your favorite part?

San Clemente, California

Since no one guessed the town we stayed in (San Clemente), the winner of my beach-related scrapping-supply give away is Karen

who DID guess the beach we hung out at the most: Laguna. (Karen, will you email me your regular address?)

We didn't go to Disneyland, although this trip was inspired by our February trip; when we went to Newport Beach for a few hours, we all decided that we needed to return to California for some beach time. Like everyone else, I was excited to go to the beach for three days...but I left not certain if I really, really love it. I was anxious every beachy, sandy, wave-filled second, terrified that someone would get swept away by a wave and drown. No one did drown, though, so maybe I just need to figure out how to get over my anxiety. (And I'm talking serious, heart-pounding, adrenaline-filled anxiety...for three entire days at the beach.)

At any rate, a handful of California highlights:

Despite the pebbly beach,

San Clemente is a lovely town. Our hotel was a little bit disappointing—the information said it was "right across the street" from the beach...apparently "right across the street" translates into "three-quarters of a mile," but the walking did everyone good. We got to our hotel early enough that we still had three hours before the sun set. Our day ended when Kaleb accidentally beaned Jake with a big rock, right on the scalp; no stitches were required, but he did get to get his bloody wound cleaned by the life guard.

Every morning we were there, I went down to the beach to go running. Beach running is perhaps the only thing that I was entirely anxiety-free for. There is a lovely little 2 1/2 mile-long trail along the north beach, so I ran on that every morning. It includes a wooden bridge, and gorgeous ocean views

and brought me great happiness. We also discovered a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant called La Tiendita. Fabulous Mexican food for a great price!

The first day, we went to Bolsa Chica state beach, which was OK. It was freezing that day, and I just sat in the beach towel talking to our friend Jean and shivering. The kids still had fun. Kaleb, especially, is entranced by the water. He kept going in to catch the waves, even though he was shivering. Then he'd come and get buried until he was warm again:

Haley mostly read her book—she was reading Nation, by Terry Pratchett, about an island in the Pacific that was devastated by the tsunami caused by Krakatoa—but we also practiced taking arm's length self-portraits:

(isn't she gorgeous?)

Since we were close, we swung by here:

My California guide book highly recommended it, but it was just sort of ehhhh. I mean, I would love to go for a run along the trail, but we didn't get to see any birds. The most interesting thing was the contrast between the "ecologically sensitive area" and the oil drills in the distance. (I would have taken a photo but I was still freezing and shivering.)

Nathan was my compatriot in cold. I think we both shivered the entire day. Still, doesn't he look like a classic surfer dude?

We spent the next two days at Laguna beach. They were much, much warmer. Warm enough for me to get in the water, all the way out beyond the breakers, and then body surf in. That was fun until I nearly lost my swimsuit bottom and mooned everyone. Then I just sat by the beach towels. The beach towels and the swim bag full of cameras and MP3 players and cell phones. All the stuff that nearly got ruined when the biggest wave swept up the beach and completely doused our spot. (No one else's spot, mind you. Just ours.) (Kendell's sand wall had nothing against the ferocity of that wave.) I saw it coming and started scrambling—grabbing bags and books and everything I could. The library books took the brunt of the water and were completely ruined. I'm talking: so wet that the spines cracked backwards. I tried to overlook the irony of a book about a rogue wave being ruined by a rogue wave, but there you have it. At least I managed to save the electronics-filled bag, right?

Later that day, we took a whale-watching cruise. This was the highlight of the trip for me. Yep, even better than running: seeing a blue whale swimming through the ocean. We were freezing (everyone's clothes got soaked by that crazy wave) but it was still magical. Here's the short bit of video I took just before my camera battery died:

 

(That's Kaleb's voice you can hear!)
 

There were sunburns, of course. Most notably the tops of my feet and Jake's skull. For most of one day he walked around in my bandana

until a wave washed it away, and then he wore my floppy hat (with strict instructions to NOT lose the hat).

There were the usual arguments  you get when you spend perhaps too much time together.

There was that pesky and persistent anxiety of mine.

But all in all, rogue wave aside, it was a great beach vacation!

Where in the World?

There's a pile of sandy beach towels on the back porch, waiting to be washed. They'll have to wait though, because there're also piles of darks and lights to be washed, too; they all smell vaguely of hotel. Plus our enormous suitcase is sitting in the middle of the front room, waiting to be put away, and all of my lotions and soaps are still in Ziploc bags on the bathroom floor.

All signs that we've recently returned from a vacation!

Despite all your excellent advice, we didn't get to go to San Francisco. We started planning this spur-of-the-moment vacation too close to when we were leaving, and the tours to Alactraz were already completely booked. So we just went to the beach instead. We'll save San Fran for another vacation.

While I'm doing laundry and putting stuff away and obsessing over the smell in the suitcase, I thought I'd do a little blog give away. If you DON'T know which California beach city we stayed at, leave me a comment with your guess. (Here's a tiny hint: we stayed south of Los Angeles.) Whoever guesses correctly first will be the happy winner of a package of beach-related scrapping supplies.

Happy guessing!

San Francisco, in Theory

Say that you were kicking around the idea of maybe going to San Francisco in three weeks or so. What would you do there? Where would you stay? What would you take your kids to do?

We're tossing around end-of-summer vacation ideas. We've never been to San Fran (well, I have, the summer after sixth grade, but all we did was drive around trying to find the Gunne Sax factory outlet, and failing, and then we shopped a little bit and maybe we ate in Chinatown, but Becky might remember better) and someone suggested it...

Tell me, o wise Internet, of your personal San Francisco adventures?

Exhausted: A Trek Teaser

Home from Trek. Wanting to sit down and write all about the incredible experience I had, but am way too tired this evening, plus I still have to go to the grocery store. I'm just trying to talk myself down from going to bed at 7:06 pm. Luckily Kaleb peed in my bed last night (wheeeeeee!) and I'm still washing the bedding. Otherwise I might just be asleep by now. At any rate, a Trek Teaser:

• 60+ mph winds and Amy (seriously claustrophobic Amy) in a blown-down tent do not get along. Serious and total and complete mental breakdown on my part, as well as a sudden rush of enlightenment.
• Wyoming is cold. And windy. In fact, the weather is so awful we should have named it Whinoming. (You know...because the weather makes even grown men whine.)
• Walking paths my ancestors also walked was a deeply spiritual and moving experience. I might not be able to frame it in words that are blog-worthy for awhile. (Read: there might be more than one blog entry about the Trek.)
• When driving six hours with women you sort-of know, don't plan on reading massive books. You'll more than sort-of know them by the end of the experience; you might not finish (or even crack open) the books but you will have new friends.
• Speaking of friends. At some of the most intense moments, I thought of several different people (my friend Jamie, and my sister Becky, and my other friend Chris, to name just a couple) and I felt as if just by thinking of them I had brought them along.
• Life is strange. I discovered I have a cousin—a man who is also the great-great grandchild of Levi Openshaw—who lives less than half a mile away from me.
• There are some experiences a camera cannot do justice to.
• Zyrtek is no match for Wyoming pollen.
• Kleenex during spring allergy season is an absolute necessity on camping trips.
• Bring next time: extra blanket, sack for dirty clothes, slippers for tent. SPRINGBAR TENT. (I will never camp again unless I have one. Ever.)
• I really, really hope there is a next time.
• The hardest things are also the best ones.

That's it until I catch up on some sleep. And go to the grocery store.

Writing Challenge: Textuality #2

It's grey and dark here today—that temperature of light that makes you turn lights on, even during the day. Sleet, snow, rain, hail, and wind. Driving the carpool this morning in this weather, I found myself daydreaming about our February trip to California. It wasn't hot weather then, but it was definitely warmer than the end of winter in Utah. The air there already smelled like spring.

 

A fragment of Elizabeth Bishop's poem "Questions of Travel" came to mind: "and then a sudden golden silence in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes." Right there, in the car at the stoplight by the McDonald's where eight or ten school buses visit every morning, I decided to change today's writing challenge. First, a recap of the rules:

 

The writing exercise rules:

 

1.Write for at least ten minutes.

2.Let the topic be a starting point and see where it takes you—if you veer off in an entirely different direction, that's fabulous!

3.Keep writing. Don't let your fingers stop. If you run out of ideas, simply transcribe the thoughts in your head.

4.NO EDITING! Don't backspace or cross out or stop to look up how to spell a word. You can do that after your writing time is up.

5.If you want to publish what you wrote—on your blog, or on the Textuality website, you can edit. But only AFTER the writing, not during!

 

Today's writing prompt

Write a vacation memory. It can be from a trip you took last week or one you took seventeen years ago; the time of the experience doesn't matter. Rather than writing a list of what you did on the trip, try to focus on exploring one small moment, some small experience (it can be good or bad) that has stuck in your memory. Write with the goal of getting your reader to feel what you felt.

 

Here's mine:

 

As if some great wave had picked us all up and then randomly spread us out on the beach, we are scattered like seashells ourselves as we look for seashells. Kendell is near the pier, with its glimmering shadows and the teal underbelly of waves wrapped around the poles, ostensibly watching the pelicans, which stay always one step ahead of you, but only one, and seem to be tripled: their shadow, their reflection in the thin sheet of water they stand in, and their very bodies—a heavy machinework that seems too bulky for flight.

 

Really he is talking on his cell phone.

 

Jacob is racing the waves, trying not to get wet but not caring if he does. Nathan, halfway between his older brother and his dad, probes the sand with his toes. That blonde hair seems to make him the epitome of a California surfer but really, he's probably shivering, even with his sweatshirt. Haley, far down the sand, flips to a different song on her MP3, caught in her individual beach experience, blissed out from being at her favorite place in the world but still annoyed and prickly. Kaleb, who was toppled by a wave when we came to the beach three days ago, has been my shadow, glued to my side, but while I have been looking for everyone else he's gotten braver, wandered ahead of me, and is now almost caught up with Haley.

 

So I run.

My feet are bare. I'm wearing a swimsuit and a sweatshirt and goosebumps; the wind catches my hair up into Medusa swirls and maybe the light—which is so beautiful, glinting off the waves, bronzing the sand, tripling everything—catches it, too. I run for three minutes, and then for five, past Kaleb, past Haley. Not breathless, my heart barely seeming to pound even though I am sprinting. I'm running as hard and as fast as I can, not for the exercise or the conditioning but just for the sheer joy of running, of freedom, of being alive right at this very second. It is painless, effortless, joyful running, the way I run when I am dreaming, the way I wish running could always be—movement as a translation of joy. I sprint down the sand, everything (children and husband and obligations and sorrow and aches, those awkwardly beautiful pelicans) behind me, everything in front of me (time, distance, water, wind).

Time Bends

"Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in time and exist in two places at once."
~from Cat's Eye, by Margaret Atwood

If I could have one super power, one Heroes-esque quality, one tiny spec of God's knowledge, it would be that ability: to know enough and to move faster than light, to bend time and exist in two places at once. Sometimes, though, despite the lack of knowledge and speed, time bends. It almost folds back on itself, you can nearly look through the dimension and see yourself, at the same place but a different time, a beloved time, a time you want to return to.

Almost.

Nearly five years ago, I sat here, at this table.
My three oldest were running around Disneyland with their cousins, and Kaleb was hungry. So I sat here, in this nearly-deserted little spot, to nurse him. The flowers were different—mums, I think—and the season: October. But it was still chilly, a little. It was the same iron scroll chairs, the same cheerful decor and faux Swiss architecture, the same vague tinkling from It's a Small World. Back at that moment, I tossed the blanket over my shoulder (the expertise nursing-in-public movement that comes with four babies) and snuggled up with the warm baby, sipped a hot chocolate and thought about how perfect a moment it was. I savored, hard as I could, the minutes of sitting there, just outside the Pinocchio ride. I never expected to take my four-month-old baby to Disneyland, but we did, and it made the experience even sweeter. (Plus: all those stroller passes!) I nearly asked Kendell to take a picture, but as I hate asking that, I didn't.

I wish I had.

So on Thursday, when I found myself at Disneyland again, I took a picture. Then I sat in the exact same spot and I thought about how much life has changed since that sweet moment, and how it hasn't. I thought about time passing, my children growing up, how I expected that their ages would change but I never imagined how our relationships would, too. I wished with everything I had that I could bend time and sit in a chair behind that younger version of myself; I wish I could step back into her heart and feel the exact way I did at that exact moment, instead of just remembering it. I thought about a future day, too, when maybe I would come to Disneyland again, and visit that same spot. What might that older version tell me to appreciate about this moment, right now?

Time bends. Not really, but I could almost, almost make out my alternate versions. My eyes might have filled up. Then Kaleb ran to me and bumped my leg with his shoulder and told me about the Dumbo ride, which was good but could we please go back to Space Mountain now? And time, like it does, kept moving forward. I took his hand and we strode off together toward Tomorrowland.

In God's Country

Of wilderness, the writer Edward Abbey (whose book Desert Solitaire focuses on Arches National Park) said, "the word itself is music. . . . We scarcely know what we mean by the term, though the sound of it draws all whose nerves and emotions have not yet been irreparably stunned, deadened, numbed by the caterwauling of commerce, the sweating scramble for profit and domination." This idea stays with me, a comfort; it reminds me that I am not irreparably stunned, because the wild places left on the earth still draw me. The places man has left only a small footprint upon, or even, rarely, not even the impression of a toe: those landscapes are where I long to go.

So when I got a coveted spot in the Moab Other Half marathon, I decided I needed to go to Arches National Park again. We went five years ago, the day after I finished my first year of teaching, before Kaleb came along.

That day we managed all of the easiest hikes in the park: broken, landscape, sand dune, turret, double, north and south windows, skyline, tunnel. But we had small ones with us (Nathan was only four then. Four! Not even five!), and my new hiking boots had made hamburger out of my feet (18 blisters!), and Kendell still had his bad hips. So we only saw Delicate Arch from the viewpoint, and left all the other trails, tantalizing though they were, for another day.

"Another day" finally came last weekend, when we had a day in Moab before my race. I’ve debated with myself for weeks about what, exactly, to do with that day. Hike in Canyonlands? (I’ve not been there yet.) Visit Dead Horse Point? Hike in Negro Bill canyon, or to Fisher Towers? Change the hotel reservation for just one night? Arches won out because I didn’t want to do any two-day hikes, which are the best ones in Canyonlands, and Dead Horse wouldn’t have taken the entire day, and the race went past Fisher Towers anyway. More, though: I wanted to stand under Delicate Arch. I wanted to feel, like I had five years ago, the definitive and individual spirit each arch has. I wanted to reconnect to my inner wilderness in a place that had given it to me before.

I wanted to revisit transcendence.

Our first hike was the one to Delicate Arch. We started sort of early; there were a few groups on the trail at the beginning, but not too many. Even though Kendell’s usually not one to stop for the scenic spots down short spur trails, we spent a few minutes admiring Wolfe’s Ranch,
thinking about the people who lived right in the middle of the beauty and the heat and the dryness. It made me think, as we started up the long ridge of slick rock at the beginning of the trail, about why it is I love the red desert landscape so much. Part of it comes, I think, from spending nearly every summer of my childhood in Lake Powell. Powell might be, in fact, my favorite place in the world. The red sandstone, the extreme contrast: dry desert heat, then sinking into water. The glassy smoothness, first thing in the morning. That feeling that fills me up when I am in the sandstone desert, a sort of sacredness.

But still: I’m grateful the landscape is not my usual one. The rarity of seeing it makes it more exceptional. Plus, it is hot there. I am grateful I never lived in that hot little cabin, and tried to grow food in the sandy soil, and had to drink out of the brackish creek. It is a hard country, demanding and unforgiving. Beautiful, awe inspiring. It asks everything from you, liquid and energy and skin. It asks for the flesh of your palms, kneecaps, shoulders. And then it rewards you: vista, stone, the fabulous architecture wind makes.

The Delicate Arch hike isn’t too strenuous. But it keeps the arch hidden. You don’t see it until you’ve traversed a narrow path carved along a slope of sandstone,
and then: there it is.

Aptly named, but not, either. Not delicate, exactly. A spirit that whispers about standing anyway.

We arrived too late to enjoy the arch with any sort of solitude there. A family with young children, a handful of photographers, one quiet hippy-esque sort of hiker; a large troupe of boy scouts and scattered couples. It almost felt like Disneyland. So I scooted/hiked/inched my way onto the other side of the arch,
where at least I couldn’t see the other people, and sat for a few minutes. I didn’t feel transcendent. But I did feel that sense of desert-is-home.

Between the Delicate Arch hike and our next destination, Devil’s Garden, U2's song "In God’s Country" started playing. (We had a bunch of random compilation CDs in the stereo.) God’s country: a perfect metaphor for the desert. On the surface, it seems like God’s country would be lush and easy, rolling hills and gentle, windy warmth. Maybe part of it is. But God’s country is, in my experience, demanding. He gives it to you, a mixed bag of beauty and trial, a trail to follow if you can. The destinations you work towards are always different, the heights and arches harder to reach than you thought.

You have to bring your own water.

Kendell wasn’t happy but I insisted on repeating that song until we got to the Devil’s Garden trail head. Got there along with 57% of the nation’s population, it seemed. We had to circle the lot four times before we found a parking spot, which wasn’t an auspicious start for the hike. Parking-lot anxiety meant I forgot to grab a few extra water bottles. And we’d forgotten our hiking hats. Still, we headed down the trail. Tunnel Arch

and Pine Tree Arch

and Landscape Arch,

where last time, five years ago, we turned around. This part of the trail is easy: pebbled, and rolling, and wide. But after Landscape Arch, it changes. You immediately hike along the top of a sandstone fin,
following cairns to find your way. The trail takes you right past the now-broken Wall Arch (wish I had seen it before) (its remains are visible on the right middle edge of that photograph), and then, after scrambling, to a spur trail that takes you, alternately, to Navajo Arch

and Partition Arch, which is on the same fin as Landscape, just further north.

At each place, people were already there, and I still didn’t get the solitude I was craving. The people at Partition Arch were especially bothersome: talkative and happy and young, with their very young children, the group of friends still had that hopeful thing about them, which left me thoughtful as we hiked away. Plus, they never moved out of the arch, so I didn't get any good photos there.

The next part of the hike takes you along more sandstone and slickrock scrambles. One ridge we walked along had cracks in it, small enough to simply step over but still threatening enough that the altophobic hikers turned around. This was my favorite part of the hike, because of the height and the view.
In front of you is a canyon filled with fins, sandstone and shadow, a place I’d like to wander through. Once you're off the slickrock, the takes you to the Dark Arch overlook

(the arch-shaped shadow way behind and to the right of me is Dark Arch) but I wanted to leap off the trail and find my way down to it. Next, more fins, more scrambling, and then: Double O Arch, which is amazing—two arches, stacked on top of each other.

But also crowded.

We decided we wanted to see everything, so we headed up the trail to Dark Angel. I thought this was an arch, too, but it is a monolith, the remnant of an old fin.
The skeleton of a long-crumbled arch? I don’t know, but no one was on that trail, except for one man at the Dark Angel herself, who was preparing to leave when we arrived. Maybe we disturbed his solitude. I wanted to sit and admire, watch the hawks that were flying through the landscape, but Kendell had had it, plus: we were out of water in the camelback. So we headed back to Double Arch, where the trail splits. You can either go back the way you came, or you can take the Primitive Trail. After discussing our options, we went with the Primitive Trail. The ominous "difficult hiking" warning on the trail head sign might have spurred us on.

At first, the hiking wasn’t difficult. We wandered through sandy washes and along slickrock; there are unnamed arches here and there, and stone switchbacks that seem made by the earth just for convenience. Then the trail turns south, and the scrambling starts. That is why it is difficult hiking. The cairns lead you:
over, down, around; right into the center of that fin-filled landscape we saw before we got to Dark Arch. I tried taking pictures but they don’t capture it, the way you feel down in the crevice between two sandstone domes, skirting the side of a bowl with sandy water at the bottom, using your hands to steady yourself up the curve of a fin. Sandstone and shadow.

Of course, this part of the hike would have been much better with, you know, water. We were parched. And once we got out of the sandstone mazes, there was still a wide, sandy, hot desert meadow to cross. Shade was our most precious commodity, and we hiked, silent, tongues dry. And hiked. The crowds at Landscape Arch (where the Primitive Trail loops you back to) were gorgeous, because they meant we had less than a mile left till we could get water.

Back in the air-conditioned car, when lukewarm water had never tasted so good, I felt a sort of satisfied emptiness. It had been too crowded to really feel that transcendence, but I did feel the spirit of the arches. I did get to exhaust myself in the desert, to push myself, to scrape my knuckles on ancient stone. I bled a little, and left something of myself there, and took something with me, of God’s Country.

just one more thing I want to remember

about this trip, and then I'll try to stop writing about it:

Right now, sitting on the balcony, writing in my journal, listening to the waves crash in the dark. Out on the beach there's a jazz band playing 1920's tunes and laughing. My skin is sticky from the humid air; the trumpet speaks, the waves breathe. Just this one moment.

Wild

Is reading people's vacation posts like looking at their vacation photos? I think the impulse to share "here's what I did on my trip" images (whether words or pictures) comes from the desire to bring everyone you know along with you, to not have anyone miss out. But photos and even words don't get it completely right, because it's not the same as being here. I always bring along a journal when I travel, because I want to write down the things I might forget or can't photograph. Like the music that was playing in the garden restaurant we ate at on Thursday night. A sort of big-band, jazzy sound, the woman's voice rich and strong; it took me more than a few numbers to notice that the lyrics she was singing were old alternative songs. I've never heard a weirder version of "Personal Jesus." Or how, at the place where we're staying, every day on the ash tray near the elevator, there's a red hibiscus flower draped very carefully across the sand---but only on the fourth-floor ash tray. The guy at the beach yesterday who was selling silver jewelery; he would not believe me when I told him that I only had forty pesos with me and so couldn't buy the beautiful little bangle he was trying to sell me. Finally I stood up from my towel and said "Listen. I forgot to bring my money with me. I only have forty pesos. I'm not trying to bargain or to waste your time. You can take my forty pesos or not." Crazy!

Still, as I write this (the morning surf huge off our balcony, and there's someone swimming in the water just behind the waves, which is crazy to me), I'm acutely aware that writing about your vacation is not usually beneficial for anyone but yourself, unless you can find something that has a point beyond describing what you did. That thing that good travel writers manage to do. I'm hoping I can achieve that here, but if not, feel free to click away to a better blog!

On Thursday, my mom and sister, Haley, Jake and I went snorkeling. We went to Cabo Pulmo, which is a national marine park. We went via van right across the desert, through the mountains and the little towns where people really live. The difference between the tourist part of Baja and the residential part is stark. People live in these tiny square homes, coated with brightly-colored adobe, with a big water tank on the top. The water is heated by the sun, and that's their hot water. Those with ranches have their cows in their front yard. It's hot here, and dry (rains about four times a year); no air conditioning, obviously, or any of the comforts of how Americans live.  The landscape is sere, grey and brown and white with occasional flashes of green or yellow, yet beautiful, but I think you have to love the desert to see the beauty in it. 

Our guide, Claire, was from France. She’d lived in the Bahamas with her boyfriend, taking tourists out on scuba and snorkeling tours, until they were asked to run the tours at Cabo Pulmo. She and her boyfriend live in this tiny town—population 80, not counting the twenty-five or so tourists that come each day—snorkeling and scuba-ing and telling people about the environment. Suzette asked me if I could live like Claire, and I decided that yes, if I didn’t have kids, I would love to live like her for a year or two. Suzette asked her if she liked the Bahamas or Cabo Pulmo better, and she said that definitely Pulmo, because it is wilder and less developed. There are no big hotels there, no one trying to sell you trinkets on the beach, no spas or chlorinated pools. Just the barest form of survival, and wind and waves and water.

There was another girl, Jasper, on our boat who was also traveling with her boyfriend. They were going up and down the coastline, camping on beaches and getting up early to find the best surfing waves. They’d been living out of their tent and the occasional bed and breakfast for six weeks, since they’d graduated from college, but they were cutting the trip short because she had a job interview next week.

As the day progressed, and we snorkeled with sea lions (seriously! I snorkeled with sea lions!), gazed at coral reefs, reached out casual hands to tropical fish who were wary enough not  to let us touch them; as I watched Haley’s hair grow wilder and wilder in the wind until she looked like a surfer girl; as I tried to keep Jake, who strikes out fearlessly in nearly any environment, constantly in my eyesight so he wouldn’t drown or be beaten against the rocks the sea lions dove from; as I breathed in my snorkeling mask trying to keep my underwater claustrophobia at bay, a line from a poem by Mary Oliver kept coming into my mind: “What will you do with your one wild and precious life?”

Of course, what I will do with my life is mostly decided, and I didn’t do anything amazing. I took the traditional route: marriage and children. I don’t regret any of that, of course, but I can say that I regret not doing anything wild before settling down. At least, not wild in the sense of Claire and Jasper. I didn’t ever have an adventure. Of course, that’s no one’s fault but mine and the choices I made, but I couldn’t help, watching my two oldest swimming, sleek in their wetsuits and brimming with possibility, that they will have adventures. I hope they get to experience something of the world, live on their own, live in other ways than just our staid existence.

There are so many lives a person could chose to live. I’m grateful I don’t live like the people do in the villages we saw, but I’m pretty sure I’ll never live the opulent opposite we see in the tourist side, either. I’m just right in the middle, boring and predictable. I can’t do much to change that, but I am filled with a renewed desire to encourage my kids to seek out adventure.