Under One Roof

[Throughout the book there are chapters dedicated to Worth's identical twin brother, Had (short for "Hadrian), who is on the last leg of a solo circumnavigation of the world on his sailboat, Orbital Matchbox. Although I'm not sure about the exact percentage of the book that will be dedicated to Had -- at this point in time, this is primarily Worth's story -- there are frequent interruptions in the narrative as he seems to vie for supremacy of the story.]

Seven days after the storm, I saw a boy sitting on the bow of my sailboat.

He sat slumped into the bow pulpit, his back to me, his bare feet stretching down to the water. He had small pebbles in his hand, which he dropped one-by-one into the water, each glistening stone meeting the surface with a tiny splash. From where I stood, I could see the stones sinking in the water, disappearing into the murkiness of the Pacific brine a few feet below the surface. I watched my visitor for a while, hypnotized by the steady rhythm of the dropping stones.

All about him was evidence of the damage the sea had inflicted on my boat five days ago in a punishing storm that almost pulled me under. My mast was gone. In its place was a jury-rigged spinnaker pole, standing just twelve feet proud of the deck – twenty-five feet shorter than my fugitive mast – and a handkerchief-sized storm jib, which propelled me slowly towards the weeping horizon. Gouges crisscrossed my fiberglass deck, one jagged scar leading to a hole that penetrated right through into the compartment below where the unseated mast had struck before flopping overboard.

I wasn’t alarmed by my visitor, just curious. I looked around to see if there was anything nearby – a ship, a raft, an uncharted island – that might explain his provenance, but there was nothing but water in every direction, as far as I could see. I spun completely around, confirming what I suspected: except for my visitor here, I was alone, as far from another human being as was possible on this planet.

His appearance wasn’t a complete anomaly. Others have visited me over the preceding eighteen months of my journey, especially at times when I’m severely sleep-deprived. It’s a fairly well documented occurrence, these sorts of spectral visions, particularly among solo-sailors. After weeks alone at sea, the rules that we all abide by in society begin to seem restrictive, even quaint, as our dreams and fantasies begin to slosh out into our daylight hours. Typically, the visitors hail from my past; family members with unfinished business, people I’ve wronged or, often, those who simply want to contribute to or be a part of this great adventure of mine. There were days in the Indian Ocean – earlier in my trip (over a year ago!) – when my voice grew hoarse from conversing with these visitors, each with a lesson to impart, a question to ask, a bone to pick, or just weary and looking for a reprieve from the vast emptiness of the desert sea. I realize that the hoarseness could also have come from the intense heat and scalding sun of the equator, combined with three weeks of ever-diminishing water rations, as I made my way slowly towards South Africa and the Cape of Good Hope. It hasn’t escaped my notice that I’m usually visited at times when I’m in distress – physically, mentally or both – such as now when I’m operating on near-starvation rations and haven’t seen another human for over a month-and-a-half.

This afternoon was overcast and drizzling off and on, no surprise here deep down in the frigid and storm-tossed Southern Ocean, but the wind had abated a few hours before, which was unusual, leaving my boat, Orbital Matchbox, bobbing and clanking in the residual chop, as noisy as a packhorse hauling pots and pans down a rutted mountain trail, as Aeolus drew in a deep breath in preparation for the next torturous blow.

I watched my visitor for a while, curious if he would make the first move: a glance, a nod, a subtle wave of the hand or some other summoning gesture. But he attempted no connection, his body slumped over, staring down into the water, as fixed as my former mast (now on the ocean floor), except for his feet, which dangled loosely over the edge of the hull and the seemingly endless store of pebbles he plunked into the water. He wore a rain slicker, as I did, his hood pulled up over his head, his face obscured deep in its shadowy recess. It was late afternoon and, although in the twilight I couldn’t make out who he was, I guessed by his size that he was a child.

I decided to make the first move.

Victoria, B.C.

Two of Victoria's iconic buildings - The Empress Hotel and the Parliament Building

For those of you who have never been to this gem of a city on Vancouver Island, you've been missing one of North America's prettiest and most liveable cities. It feels more British than (North) American, both in its gardens and stately aesthetic and its mellower pace. Jenny, our Aussie friend and erstwhile renter, says that it makes her feel like she's back home. We're staying with Jenny as she house-sits for a friend of hers from Australia. When we got in on Thursday night, Jenny had just got in the day before (late) from Beijing -- yes China. She was participating in a conference that touched several Asian countries, assessing the state of the different country's animal forensics labs. Fascinating.

One of the hundreds of outdoor cafes throughout Victoria

"Splendour  Without Diminishment" -- British Columbia's fitting provincial motto

Erin befriends a local sailor down on the waterfront

A favorite mural downtown

Port Townsend 

A few random images from around town:

The late 19th century Victorian architecture in Port Townsend is stunning

Our favorite coffee house right on the water

Some day

There are many beautiful women in this town who pose at will for the camera

View of Puget Sound

Yet another marina

Onward to Washington

Astoria-Megler bridge

We're in Washington now. We took the mile-long bridge from Astoria, Oregon and continued up Route 101. In short, we'd both recommend skipping this length of the 101. As absolutely stunning as parts of the 101 are in California and Oregon, up here it leaves much to be desired. It's a monotonous carousel of forest clear-cuts and depressed (and depressing) towns, all with infrequent views of the coastline. I don't understand how there can be so many signs of the evisceration of the forests and still evidence the collapse of the timber industry, which translates into these rusted and rundown hamlets. One town, which shall remain nameless, was about as forlorn and tumble-down as a place can get and still have inhabitants. I observed that I counted more tattoos than teeth on one intersection in particular and Erin said that you know a town is in the slump when the Walmart is in the nice part of town. Shouldn't the decimation of these woodlands translate as a vibrant economy, as it means the timber industry is thriving? From all appearances, the lumber money isn't trickling down here along Washington's 101.

The good news: we camped overnight in Old Fort Townsend just outside of Port Townsend, Washington last night. What an incredible little town this is. Erin and I passed through here on our road trip 14 years ago and it made quite an impression and it still doesn't disappoint. Artsy, bustling and funky, it's a nice combination of fancy and seaside shabby -- it's one of our favorite coastal towns (and apparently, we're not alone in our love of this place). I'll post some pictures later.

Campsite in Old Fort Townsend, just outside of Port Townsend, Washington

Astoria, Oregon

Our last photo op with Lorenzo in Eugene

Erin and I are in Astoria. We visited Fort Clatsop nearby, which is where Lewis & Clark and company overwintered in 1805/06. I remember reading their description, in which they described the area as almost a hell on earth, because of the voluminous amount of rain that poured down on them. We camped a little way down the road from here (our first night camping on our trip) and experienced . . .

The AGONY . . .

. . . and the ECSTASY.

[An interesting side note: because the native American woman Sacagawea and Clark's slave York were both allowed to participate in the vote as to whether they would stay in Clatsop or not, it was the first time in American history where a woman and a slave were allowed to vote.)

Our campsite (before the rain)

Meeting the campers next door

Astoria Column

The view of the Columbia River from the top and a video below

Update of Claire at the Statue of Liberty

Another brief installation from "Under One Roof." His mother has passed away and Worth has returned to the family home (arriving in the middle of the night). He is just coming downstairs in the morning to see his siblings for the first time in a while, surreptitiously observing them from the next room:

I lurk there in the dining room and regard my siblings with the remove of a museum curator mulling over a diorama of a threatened tribe of Amazonian Indians. I enjoy watching them from here in the shadows, picture framed, as they are, by the pass-through casing, a motley suburban tableau. I love these bewildering creatures – more than I can possibly say – and this is why I hesitate. Their existence in this familiar, and comforting, habitat appears ridiculously fragile and I fear my arrival will only serve to stir up the pot, churning the harsh sediment of grief back up to the surface.

So I study them instead. 

I have a keen eye, honed by many years of scrutinizing trivial architectural details, so I’ve noticed certain things about them, things that they probably don’t even know about themselves. I know that Mason, whenever he’s bewildered, sticks both his hands deep into his front pants pockets as if searching for the answer inside, squinting his eyes and jingling coins and other pocket debris. I know that whenever Jules steps outside into the open air, she always looks straight up into the sky for a few seconds, as if anticipating the return of the Mother Ship. Bridge, who was struck by a car as a teenager and has endured a lifetime of agonizing surgeries, never crosses a street (or a driveway, for that matter) without checking three times in each direction in rapid, alternating succession. And I know that Had, before he puts his shoes on, reflexively taps them together and shakes them out up-side-down, because when he was eight a bee wandered into his sneaker and stung him on the sole of his foot. Such are my lifelong gleanings of the idiosyncratic nature of my tribe. What good this monitoring does me in my own critical self-evaluation I can’t say, for I believe I know much more about them than I do about myself. I’m chock-full of trivial snap shots and arcane observations, but I fear I’m bereft of any genuine insight. My camera only faces in one direction – outward.

Random Picture Alert: Terri, Jill, Patrick, Erin and Sam from our Going Away Party shortly before moving from Chicago to Oregon (Hi Jill -- great to hear from you!)

Claire, Maggie, Joy and . . . wait for it . . .


. . . wait for it . . .

The Mighty Lorenzo

Our friend Mona came over last night and we all had a ball playing Maggie's game, "You Gotta Be Kidding Me." The game asks a lot of thought-provoking philosophical questions such as:

Would you rather leave a slime trail everywhere you walk like a snail . . . or . . . always leave a trail of smoke like an old car?

Would you rather eat snot on your steak . . . or . . . a worm on your pasta?

Would you rather have an extra hand where one of your feet is . . . or . . . an extra eyeball where one of your hands are?

At one point we were required to create our own question and I came up with: Would you rather be slapped on the cheek by every person on the entire planet . . . or . . . have to paint the entire world off-white? I was politely, but firmly, asked to go to bed at this point.

Surely, these are questions we should all be asking ourselves!

A kinetic sculpture up at Belknap Hot Springs

We're in Eugene now, staying with Joy and Maggie for a few nights. Claire just graduated from high school and is in New York City with her cousin Kate. We're sorry we'll miss her this time around -- we'll catch her on our way back down from Canada.

Joy and Erin on the Ridgeline Trail above Joy's house

Erin and I looking down over Eugene

Maggie playing Clementi's "Sonatina"

Claire in absentia (she's in Manhattan for a week)

Just a quick post. We're on the move today, saying goodbye to the Williams clan and heading back over the Cascades to Eugene (and then on to the coast!). Hear that rain is coming . . . will miss the sunny east Cascades.

Erin and Jill on the Sunriver bike trail

Jill, Erin and Janese

My cutie pie

Part of the Williams group (John was setting up a group shot -- might post later)

I'm going to post occasional passages from the book I'm working on ("Under One Roof"). It's not entirely on the subject of our road trip, but, as I'm determined to finish this thing, it's as important to me as the scenery. This is about Worth's grandfather:

Grandpa used to live in the basement. He moved in shortly after dad left home, saying that it was important to have a man in the house. “A real man,” he had said. Mom’s version of the story was different. She told me (many years later) that she invited grandpa to live with us because he had been in a crippling depression since grandma died of lung cancer the year before. I also gathered that he was only an average father to mom; he wasn’t abusive, physically or otherwise, but distant, mercurial and far too wounded to be a stable figure in her life. As a grandfather, however, he was eminently sufficient, a bit too curt and volatile, but a font of swear words, magic tricks, inappropriate war stories, and off-color jokes, everything that an adolescent boy craves in an old geezer. He was also a drunk, whose pervasive bourbon and nicotine aroma was only partially eclipsed by the Brill Cream in his hair and the Aqua Velva he splashed onto his face throughout the day. He always wore a suit jacket, tie and fedora, even when he didn’t leave his basement bedroom all day long and I don’t recall ever seeing him without a cigarette dangling off his lips. He often lit his next cigarette with the one in his mouth and this left him with a permanent droop in his lower lip so that when he talked, words dribbled out his mouth like water out of the dented rim of a bucket. This created the illusion that, whenever he was talking to me, he was confiding in a fellow conspirator, which made me feel older than my years. 

Went to Paulina Lake (and Paulina Falls below) for a half day trip with Erin and John (Jill was with the rest of the gang at the water park in Sunriver). The lake is actually one of two craters (the other is East Lake) which were formed over half a million years. Lots of evidence of volcanic activity in this region, two of the most famous being Crater Lake which was created about 8,000 years ago when Mount Mazama blew its top and the Mount St. Helens eruption of 1980.

Which is more beautiful?

No contest

The last snow of summer

We're in Sunriver, Oregon now, which is situated along the Deschutes River at the base of the Cascade Mountains. It's a large, resort that started as a training camp for the Army Corps of Engineers (called Camp Abbot) back in 1942 and was repurposed as a family-friendly resort community in 1968. We'll be here until Friday, hiking, biking and checking out the many attractions in the area.

John and Erin on the bike trail

There are endless bike trails here along the Deschutes River

Interesting that I am relinquishing my house as I am trying to finish my book about a character, Worth Browning, who is losing his home. Granted, Worth -- a builder who has got in too deep and is now watching his fledgling development, New Camelot, implode -- doesn't have much of a choice in the matter, whereas Erin and I have left our home willingly, even enthusiastically. Yet feelings get stirred up. "Home" has always been a powerful word for me, so it's not surprising that it happens to be the theme (along with "family") of my first novel. So it is with a tinge of sadness that we bid adieu to our humble mountain home in Ashland for several months.

Our house, hidden amongst the trees

Worth, from "Under One Roof":

Fool that I am, building homes for me has never been primarily a moneymaking proposition. Since I first picked up a hammer, it’s been my one great passion in life. That’s why I arrive well before the excavators on purpose, so I can walk the perimeter of this future home, pausing occasionally to take a sip of coffee or to refer to the blueprints. Tramping from one stake to the next, my ritual is to make physical contact with every one, reaching down to touch them with my hand or gently nudging them with the toe of my boot. Soon, as the sun begins to rise, the excavators appear, their diesel trucks chugging as they unload the big cat and hulking backhoe off the flatbed and, just like that, the property is theirs now. My sacred moment is over. Inevitably, a great sadness washes over me. For the next several months, this lot will be all about industry. There will be much noise and aggravation; there will be mountains of mud and myriad disasters; there will be problems, shouting matches and sometimes tears; there will be hurdles to leap over and hoops to jump through; there will be surprises, mostly bad ones; there will be major headaches and minor victories; and, eventually, as the house creaks and groans skyward – its walls all firmly in place and the roof finally nestled on top – the water and sewer will be connected, the electricity powered up and the heating system switched on. Then, like Frankenstein, my creation will lurch to life and there will be a home for a family to live in. I will turn over the keys to the homeowner, which is the second saddest moment for me, because it means that this lumbering beast that has been an obsession of mine for a year or longer will become a stranger me, will no longer welcome me inside. Now, I will ring the doorbell and patiently stand there on the spiffy doormat with the label still attached, scrutinizing the paint job and miters as I await the usurpers.

In the beginning

"Be careful what you wish for, you might get it."

These are words that I have repeated to myself numerous times over the last several months as I've pondered a scheme that Erin and I cooked up last summer over a few bottles of wine with Paula and Shel, out-of-town friends who mentioned that they were looking to stay in Ashland for five months over this summer. "Why don't you stay in our house!" we both said, the wine sloshing out of our glasses. We'd been thinking about renting out our house and traveling for an extended period of time and this seemed like the perfect union of supply (our house) and demand (Paula and Shel's desire for an Ashland home for several months). The details were hashed out over the course of a few weeks and eventually a working, and mostly sober, plan emerged. They'd rent our house from the first of June to the end of October, and we'd clear out our personal possessions (with the exception of one dangerously cluttered closet), leaving our furniture, artwork, books, TV, etc. The one notable exception: Dallas, our fifteen-year-old mutt -- who does not enjoy a trip across town let alone across the country -- would remain at home, under their loving care.

So . . . eventually the day dawned when we found ourselves minus a home, with a cherry bomb red 2004 Toyota Matrix as our temporary abode (and a minor addition on top, in the form of a Thule cargo box).

And so we hit the road.

Ready to hit the road

This is our (partially tentative) plan:  A week in Sunriver, Oregon, visiting the wonderful Williams family (John, Jill, Jackson and Jenna) who happened to have an extra room in their vacation home east of the Cascades > a brief stop in Eugene to see some friends on the way to the coast  > northwards along the coast up to Victoria on Vancouver Island, to stay with Jenny, our Australian friend, who is house-sitting for friends of hers there > back to the mainland for a few nights in a nice hotel in Vancouver by Stanley Park > eastward to Banff and Lake Louise for some northern Rockies camping adventures > then back down south across the eastern parts of Washington and Oregon until we return to Ashland by July 18th, or thereabouts. Erin has a work commitment, providing massage at a retreat up in the Greensprings for a week and from there . . . who knows where.(Okay, we have a pretty good idea where, but stay tuned anyway.)