The Death of Imagination

I'm back from my peregrinations. Quite a bit to unpack. It was gorgeous, of course, but I was confronted with the impact of mass tourism in a way few other places I've visited have. On the way home, I stopped off for a few days in the Bay Area and a friend drove me to the coast just north of Santa Cruz. Recalling that on the flight later that day, I imagined seeing that stretch as overdeveloped as as the west coast of Maui and the very thought made me angry.

So I want to travel, but I have to give more thought on how to do so ethically. Now I have people on Maui I could stay with, which makes a return visit more of a possibility. But should I be burning that much fossil fuel to go someplace where nearly everything I consume has to be shipped in from elsewhere? Why not visit someplace closer, someplace I reach by train?

Things went well enough with Ginger Farmboy. We didn't deal with our issues head on, but we did work out a modus vivendi which got us through a week with only one real crisis, and I handled that by simply going for a stroll and drinking a cocktail. It helped that the last day was an intense bonding experience: a seat-of-the-pants tear around the east side of the island, which would not have been possible without him at the wheel.

I got a great deal of satisfaction out of my California coda, and it convinced me I need to return sooner rather than later. I reconnected with folks I haven't seen in too long and finally met someone I've known only virtually for what seems like half a lifetime. More of that, please!

As we were packing to leave Chicago, I Googled "florida poutine" on a whim and discovered a gourmet poutinerie just about a half hour south of where we were staying. I knew I couldn't convince anyone to go there (the Old Man hates the stuff), but it tickled me to find it all the same. At the local grocery store (a fancy new Publix on the mainland) I found a single aislecap devoted to "English foods" and seize a tiny jar of Marmite to wave in monshu's face. Unfortunately I didn't have the presence of mind to pick up any clotted cream for the scones my sister made.

The food was as we expected: not great and not terrible. I was a little appalled the day of our arrival when I went down to the grill to keep my BIL company while he cooked and find that he had chicken breasts in the package straight from the refrigerator and was about to plunk them on the grill the same time as the steak. To my surprise, even the thickest of them cooked through without the outside turning completely to char and even remained juicy. The next evening, my older brother made us all reubens and was doing quite well until he was undone by hard butter because he managed to overlook the margarine.

In both cases, I was annoyed to find they'd both been entrusted with feeding seven people and then been abandoned to their own devices. Especially Crazy Brother, who was so disoriented from everything that he didn't even notice he hadn't turned the [shitty electric] burner on until I pointed it out. You don't mess around with my mealtime like that. For similar reasons, we also insisted on coming along on the food-shopping expeditions.

I also did more research on local restaurants this time since part of our agenda was meals out with Sis and BIL and with my parents. We found a nice French-style café just up the road for brunch with the former. The quiche was so good the Old Man bought a whole one for his upcoming day of abstinence, but the loaf of bread we got there was disappointing. (Floridians appear not to understand the meaning of the word "crusty" when applied to baked goods rather than old men.)

For dinner that night, we went to a fish place nearby called "Cod & Capers". It started as a fishmonger's and that's still half the store, and that seemed like a guarantee of quality to me. I liked almost everyone else's dish more than mine. monshu's grouper was first-rate, Stepmom's risotto was overcooked but loaded with lobster, the pieces of calamari were the biggest I've seen and tender as anything, but my conch steak was tough and chewy. Now I understand why it's usually made into fritters.

Friday evening, monshu took things in hand and made a massive batch of pork and chicken en mojo--both orthodox and "allium-free" for the sake of my garlic- and onion-intolerant sister. My family being my family, the pork was snarfed up like cream puffs, but there was more than enough chicken left for a massive salad the next day. That was also when we made our one other foray to the grills--in the rain--with a stack of hotdogs, bratwursts, and Argentinian-style chorizos frescos.

Had I been 100% sure that would come off, I might not have had a wild boar burger at the gourmet fast-casual joint Dad spotted on the Dixie Highway coming back from West Palm City Center, where the dining choices were disappointingly generic. The neighbourhood is called "Northwood Village", and it's exactly what we'd been looking for: a walkable street where the shops are locally-owned one-offs and not the same damn chains found everywhere. (Poor monshu ended up having coffee with Stepmom at Panera.) It was a well-cooked patty (by which I mean it was truly medium rare), but the shrimp cobb salad the GWO had was amazing, the bacon so thick Stepmom didn't recoginse it for what it was, pillowy boiled egg, and beets even I could eat.

I would've liked to have steered us toward a Cuban restaurant for a change of pace, but maybe that will come next time when Stepmom and I finally figure out where the local barrio is located. (There's an area just east of the airport called "Vedado", presumably after the neighbourhood in Havana, and I found hits for Cuban restaurants on the stretch of Dixie Highway which runs south of there.) The important thing is that we didn't kill ourselves trying to herd everyone to someplace unfindable or sit for forever waiting for overpriced mediocre plates.

I'm not exactly sure why the updates I planned to make from our eyrie in the Riviera Beach skyline never happened. It's not that I haven't had enough downtime; this whole trip has basically been downtime (up until today, that is). It's not that there hasn't been anything to report on; there's been plenty of incident. But here we are, one last day of vacation left and back on the jet plane home (diis volentibis).

Right now I'm tired, a little bummed out, but mostly just amazed by the depths of monshu's love for me. I'm glad he's retired; it will spare him having to take a vacation to recover from his vacation.

Wow, I ran out of steam on this even quicker than I expected. Still, I'd like to get some memories down before they become too hazy.

For me, the heart of the trip was the half-day float on the Buffalo. We hadn't any attention of canoeing when we started, but the combination of summerlike weather and high water made us feel like we'd be fools if we didn't. Also, it was the only realistic way to see Hemmed-In Hollow. From our two short test hikes on Tuesday, I knew that coming down from the top of the bluff and then scrambling back up it was not in the cards.

There were signs advertising a float outfit right across the street from where we were staying, but we decided instead to go with a tip from our innkeeper. Not sure if it was cheaper that way or not. Dad said that it was the most he'd ever paid to float, but it was worth it having his car waiting at the take-out point and not have to wait around to ride a beat-up schoolbus at either end of the trip.

It's a 4-6 float, so they said they wanted us on the river by noon. We wasted some time in a fruitless search for bands to hold our specs on, since neither of us fancied seeing a $500 piece of eyewear end up in the riverbed, but at least I found a good soft pack for our sandwiches and spare water. At least it was an opportunity to see where the locals do their shopping.

At the shop in Ponca, there were rumours of a tree that had fallen across the river the night before. We had those confirmed at the put-in point. The grizzled pocket bear who handed over our canoe also warned us of a big rock just a few yards in, telling us it was an augur of whether you should really be on this river or not. We ended up striking it a glancing blow with the bow, which turned out to be a good predictor of our experience.

When I was in my teens, we went canoeing almost every summer. Never on very challenging streams (Class I or II, in the jargon of the sport) and sometimes even in inner tubes. Our most recent experience together was kayaking out to Munyon Island, which is an easy hour or less across a tidal lagoon. Dad had to remind me how to do a sweep stroke, but otherwise the old skills came back pretty effortlessly.

When we did come to the fallen tree, one look was enough to tell us we'd never make it under at the deepest part of the channel, so instead we steered for the shallow, got out, and walked the boat down. Immediately after we rounded a turn and came across a family which didn't have the sense to do the same. They were pulled up on a gravel bar, still looking for a paddle and a flip-flop, and another hot pocket bear called after us to keep and eye peeled for something with "Newcastle" on it.

I asked Dad what he could mean, since I couldn't think of any brand of outdoors equipment labeled "Newcastle". Then about a hundred yards downstream, we came across something glinting underwater: a mini-keg of Newcastle Brown Ale. I tried to alert the others to its location, but they didn't seem to comprehend. Then Dad noticed that it was tumbling slowly in the current and suggest we try to whack it into the shallows with our paddles. But on the second pass, I realised I could simply reach over and haul it up, so I did.

When we returned to the bar and I held it aloft, well, you'd thunk we'd rescued their baby. They offered us half as a "finders fee", but I wasn't ready for lunch yet. Moreover, I was badly slept the night before and needed my wits about me, so I figured I'd better stay sober. We ended up running into them twice more in the course of the afternoon due to stops we made for lunch and for the sidetrip to the waterfall.

Our timing was really rather good on that. Even though the front wasn't predicted to move in before that evening, I'd been seeing scattered black clouds for an hour already and heard some rumbling. It began spattering drops right about when we pulled up. I told Dad I was glad no longer to be the highest thing around, and he said a grove of small trees in the bottom of a dell was just about the best place you could be during a thunderstorm in the forest.

It didn't storm, however. By the time we got back on the river, the risk seemed to have passed. Nevertheless, we felt it best to put on some speed. Even though I wasn't anywhere as sore as I'd expected to be (I brought plenty of naproxen along and never used it)--at least in my back; unexpectedly it was my inner thighs that suffered--the last stretch became a bit wearying. It seemed like we never had more than a hundred yards of calm water before another rapids, and even though they were all relatively small and by now we were systematic in approaching them, the combined effect made me glad we were coming to the end.

There was one exception, however, a rapids with a very narrow channel that turned abruptly at a large rock. I saw it too late, panicked, and we ended up against it broadside. I called to Dad for instruction and he only said, "This is not good." That's usually the kind of circumstance where you capsize, but we managed to hop out and walk it down to a rock ledge where we could hop back in. (I hope the others we saw--one paddle short and drunk on Newcastle--made it through okay.)

It's such a shame that you only really hit your stride on a vacation just before you're about to leave. There was only one firm entry on our schedule for today, and that was for 8:45. What did we do for the rest of the time? We hung out. monshu and I soaked in the whirlpool tub. We napped. We drank. We chatted. We fooled around. But the most relaxing two hours of my day--the highlight of the entire trip--were spent wide awake in a darkened room with no one to talk to.

It happened like this: I suited up to waste some time poolside, only to find my sister returning with the two youngest. I followed them to the unit and helped her wrest them from their swim togs. Her husband arrived with the older boys and they all began rushing about in order to make a matinee of Toy Story 3. I volunteered to stay with little OGI--who was just going down for his nap--until such time as my father got back from an errand and could mind him. He came out of the bedroom crying, I scooped him up and swung him back onto the bed. And the next thing I knew, his father was waving goodbye to me from the doorway.

He wailed for a good ten minutes as I cuddled him and sang lullabies. Pretty soon, his breathing was regular and he was fast asleep--across my left arm. By habit, I had curled up with him exactly as I do with the cat. And exactly as with the cat, I was incredibly loath to disturb him. Moreso, really, because I'd seen my sister struggle with OGI when he was fussy. (Later I discovered there's a critical window immediately after he drops off in which you can make your escape, but at the time I knew nothing.) So I lay there quietly and tried to relax without actually nodding off.

Eventually, I worked my phone out of breast pocket and turned it upside down so I could text with my right thumbnail. I asked my sister how long he should sleep and she replied, "As long as he wants." So that sealed it. I ignored two knocks on the door and two calls from my stepmom. (My sister hadn't thought to leave them a keycard.) Eventually, the poor woman rang the room, startling her grandson out of his sleep. Still I didn't pick up but let him begin to stir at his own pace. He found my phone and began dialing friends of mine; I let him babble onto their voicemail. Finally, he made a break for the door and I led him on to my father's unit.

After that, drinks on the balcony with monshu, some fun on the couch, a tasty supper of leftovers, a sunset walk on the beach. Then it was off to Juno Beach to watch a sea turtle lay her eggs, but that's another story, and a more manic one. Running past the surf while lightning flashes out to sea can't hold a candle to feeling a two year-old rest his elbow on your cheek while he sucks his thumb and dreams.

I caught up with various members of my family last night and was left the impression that I'd lucked out totally in my return trip. It was basically uneventful, the only real aggravations being (1) having my luggage searched at Friendship (no, it doesn't make me special; they were searching everyone's bags) and (2) a noisy kid in the row behind me. And both of these had upsides. The two men who went through my things were very polite and friendly and the brat behind us built solidarity in my row, which translated into some nice chat as I played tour advisor to two visiting Long Islanders. Compare this to the tribulations of my parents and siblings:

• Because of Internet troubles, bunj and e. left two hours later than they planned on Thursday, got caught in horrible traffic and rough weather near DC (the power went out at a filling station as they were tanking up), and got into NY near midnight. Yesterday, they drove 15 hours straight, arriving home just in time to get caught in the endless traffic jam that is Northern Indiana after a holiday weekend.
• My sister's three year-old caught either a flu bug or food poisoning while they were on the road and was throwing up for hours. (I have the story second hand, so I don't know details.)
• Dad's PVC valve conked out and he started burning oil; he spent the Fourth in Indianapolis while mechanics fixed his truck and just got in four p.m. yesterday.

How about the rest of you? Any tales of holiday travel horror to share?

Twenty-six brand new bright orange expansion tanks! And they all have to be installed RIGHT BELOW where I work. Whee! Seen from the end, they look like gigantic metal pumpkins. If they leave some outside tonight, I'd be sorely tempted to to have at them with semi-gloss black. Pretty!

There's so much I could post about California. I brought along my vacation journal, in which I create a one-page calendar for each trip and fill in telegraphic descriptions of each day's events. For instance, the entries for a week ago today read:

• Café do Brasil
• Asian Art Mus.
• Tu Lan
• BART to Millbrae
• missed connex.
• dinner w/ Kcat, Mort, Seth, Olga, Mark

Any one of these items could be expanded to several paragraphs. Y'all've already seen how much I got out of a few minutes discussion over the dinner table at that meal and I haven't even touched on the awesome conversation with Kcat about the dynamics of being a primary caregiver, the amusement I had building architectural masterpieces for Seth to go Godzilla on, or my smouldering lust for one of the dinner guests.

One approach would be to rearrange the entries thematically and do, for instance, a whole food post. That would have the effect of emphasising the Tu Lan trip, since my intention there was to compare the best Vietnamese food I'd ever even up till then to the food I've had in the last few weeks in my new 'hood. (Verdict: Tu Lan is as good as the best VN places I've eaten at in Chicago, but I don't think it's superior--even granting it points for atmosphere.) The banana pancakes at Café do Brasil and the cornish hens in Mountain View would hardly merit a mention--not because they weren't good, but because they don't stand out against some of the true faboo meals we had.

Or I organise entries by people. Those I wanted to reconnect with (like the crowd at dinner) and those I connected with by serendipity (like our highly entertaining Brazilian waiter and the kvetchy old Australian resident he was also serving). After all, that was the chief focus of the trip: Seeing people. So many possibilities, so little motivation to tackle them properly.