THEN & NOW: Road Trips

Ray and I are about to leave on a road trip to Oklahoma, where I get to read poems at the Scissortail Writers Conference. I was sorting my first-aid accoutrements alphabetically and by container size, and it occurred to me that I don’t pack like I used to “back in the day,” as the Whippersnappers are fond of saying. Here’s a little comparison…

Preparation THEN - Turn off the lights.

Preparation NOW - Start planning and list-making at least 2 months in advance. As departure nears, set thermostat schedule, leave list of directions for feeding dogs, frog, parrots, peacocks and barn cats, stock fridge and pantry for pet-sitter and maybe bake a nice cheesecake to leave, make list of phone numbers (two cell phones, hotel, vet, neighbor, conference coordinator, conference hall), water plants, clean aquarium and parrot cages, do laundry, clean house, wash sheets and change beds. If there’s still a little time, re-paint living room. Day of departure, check all water and gas lines, check stove, lock all doors and windows, turn off the lights.

Packing THEN - Sundress, halter top, one pair of jeans, crocheted shawl, broom skirt, all in a backpack. Underwear is just a symbol of The Man’s attempt to keep us down.

Packing NOW - Enough clothes in every conceivable combination to survive several months without wearing the same thing twice, including enough clean socks and underwear to supply a Girl Scout jamboree. Three suitcases: one for basic clothing, one for 15 pairs of shoes, sandals, and boots, and one for various weights of jackets and sweaters.

First-Aid Kit THEN - You’re kidding, right? The Universe is watching over us. Besides, if you plan for accidents, that’s just what you’ll get, Star Child.

First-Aid Kit NOW - Assorted creams (antibiotic, antifungal, antiitch), Advil and any stronger pain meds on hand, 17 shapes/sizes of bandaids, gauze pads, tape (paper, surgical, duct), finger & nose splints, Betadine, iodine, alchohol, witch hazel, Imodium, Tums and 22 homeopathic remedies, essential oils, and flower essences.

Toiletries THEN - Leather cords for wrapping braids, toothbrush & toothpaste (maybe), patchouli.

Toiletries NOW - Comb, brush, 6 kinds of hair accessories, foundation makeup, eye liner, mascara, 2 kinds of lip gloss, 2 kinds of antiperspirants, talc, nail clippers, tweezers, shampoo, conditioner, 3 colors of nail polish and polish remover, toothbrush & toothpaste, mouthwash, soap, day cream, night cream, cucumber peel, eye serum, neck serum, patchouli.

Extras THEN - Guitar, maracas, sleeping bags.

Extras NOW - Cell phones, travel mug, thermos of Ethiopian coffee, 2 gallons of filtered water from home, camera, laptop, iPods, chargers, travel Chemex coffee pot, coffee filters, corkscrew, beach towels (good for wrapping Chemex), pillows, blankets, travel neck pillow, parkas/gloves/stocking hats, guitar, maracas.

Cooler THEN - Boones Farm Strawberry Hill wine, peanut butter, Wonder bread, brownies.

Cooler NOW – Gaucho Club Malbec wine, yogurt, hummus, oranges, grapes, blueberries, goat feta, flatbread, spelt crackers, V-8, freshly-ground Ethiopian coffee, prunes, figs, organic half & half, homemade deer jerky, protein shakes, frozen water bottles, Chubby Chipmunk crème brule truffles.

Navigation THEN - Love & luck.

Navigation NOW - MapQuest directions, road atlas, AAA phone numbers, fear & trepidation.

Lodging THEN – Kansas cornfield, Oklahoma city park, sleeping bags, stars.

Lodging NOW – Advanced reservation confirmation printouts for Holiday and Comfort Inns, showers, 2 queen beds, breakfast buffet, whirlpool tub, sauna, fitness center, wireless, cable TV.

The drive THEN - Long conversations, frequent stops to play & sing & eat peanut butter sandwiches at roadside rest areas, reorganizing the gigantic box of cassette tapes, listening to one album at a time all the way through, brief playful romantic interludes in the car, at the rest stops, in the bathroom of a Kansas IHOP.

The drive NOW - Alternating driving and napping due to exhaustion from preparation. Occasional minor arguments over whose iPod rules. Frequent stops to go to the bathroom and double-check maps. Frequent texting to make sure kids, pets, and pet sitter are okay. Silent admiration of the diversity of the American landscape. Silent wishes that you were back home already.

The Ides of March - a poem

THE IDES OF MARCH

The seer was right to warn us,
beware the ides of March.

It’s a dangerous time, peering

through iced windows at the jeweled

tease of crocus and daffodil.

We've weathered another season

of deep-freeze, locked up tight

in muscle and mind. We're tired

of winter’s grey and gritty leftovers.

But this is no time to get careless,

toss a floorboard heater through

the beveled glass and go out,

where Spring flashes her flannel petticoat

embroidered in pinks and greens,

leaves us gaping, breathless,

in air still cold as a knife blade,

stripping off the down.

Flatlander Confession

I realized midway through our recent road trip to the Black Hills that I am a flatlander. My oldest son and his family moved to Rapid City, SD a month ago, so we headed out to see them. The drive out was pleasant and uneventful. We made the perfunctory stop at Wall Drug for nickel coffee and deerskin gloves. It’s off-season west river, so traffic at Wall and across the state on I-90 was sparse, just the way we like it. We cruised along with Patti Griffin, Los Lobos, the Pretenders, Loggins & Messina, Aretha, Leon Russell and Randy Newman. We ate car food. We took turns putting our feet up on the dusty dash. We were on Spring Break. Ah…


We arrived at dusk. The Black Hills aren’t really hills; they’re mountains. They’re smallish mountains, foothills of the Rockies really, but compared to 0 feet above sea level at home, Lead/Deadwood’s 4500-5200 feet is certifiably mountainous, dangit. So as we drove through Rapid and started climbing that night it hit us—the unsettling transition that happens when flatlanders meet elevation. The curves and ascents/descents sent us into Acclimation Mode—a period usually lasting a day or two and marked by slight nausea, faint dizziness, shaky legs, and a sudden propensity for swearing. And if it’s winter, and if Jack Blizzard has been particularly puckish that winter, multiply the severity of symptoms by a bazillion.


The undulations of Rapid City itself are okay, because “civilization” can dim one’s awareness of elevation, but my son lives west and north, up and over, up and over, 10 miles from the city limits in a little hilly hamlet. And it isn’t the elevation itself, or even the constant swaying motion of side-to-side driving that does it; it’s the fact that we can’t see what’s ahead. Back home on the plains, we can See.For.Ever. We KNOW what’s coming. If a crazy driver suddenly veers into our lane, say, we can simply choose to ease off the road and let the foolish probably-texting-teen driver whoosh by. And if we slip off the road on ice or snow, we’ll glide gently, almost in slow motion, to rest in a snow-filled shallow ditch, where we can sit in our car, hold hands, and admire the expansive horizon until a kindly neighbor comes along to pull us out.


West river, every fifty feet of driving is a spine-tingling unknown. The “Falling Rock” and “Watch for Bighorn Sheep” signs don’t help, because now we have to navigate turns, avoid the plummet-to-your-death guardrails, pop our ears, pry our hands off the overhead hand-holds, dodge plummeting boulders, and veer around rutting rams (and possibly peacock-pilfering mountain lions)—all in the same split second: rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. If we slip off the road in the snow or ice in the Hills, they will need the Jaws of Life to pull our mangled, unidentifiable bodies from our compacted car, and that’s only if they can see down far enough to find us, and only if we haven’t landed in a lake or creek. You know those “Why die?” cross signs along the Interstate? They line Black Hills roads like a picket fence.


Okay, slight exaggerations because I’m a total wuss. So Ray and I perfected our Annoying Old People Driving skills on this trip. By white-knuckle driving at a staggering 25 mph, and by calling out sweetly “slow the *&%# down!” whenever Ray was driving, we survived the daily drives to my son’s house, the obligatory Chubby Chipmunk chocolatier run (she now has a truffle vending machine out front—brilliant!) and a quick trip to the slot machines (won then lost $4) in Deadwood, dinner with friends in Spearfish, and the breathtaking drive through Spearfish Canyon, where we continued our family tradition by “baptizing” our new grandson Clyde in Spearfish Creek water.


The real flatland kicker, and a delicious irony, was that as we left the Hills behind and headed home, we found ourselves driving in near-blizzard conditions on I-90. This put the kibosh on our planned drive through the Badlands, and kept us swearing, sweating, and swerving for 7 or 8 hours. We counted a couple dozen cars, trucks, SUVs and semis in the ditches, flipped over, jackknifed, or hitched up to tow trucks between Rapid and Sioux Falls, and there were times when we weren’t sure we were still on the road. Still, I knew that if I could avoid other cars and they would avoid me, sliding would mean a fairly soft landing, and I would SEE it coming. From Sioux Falls to home, the dreary rain, the grey melting snow, and the withered brown corn stubble as far as the eye could see was the most beautiful vista I could imagine.


Don’t get me wrong—I love love love the Black Hills dressed in any color except white. I’ve been all over the country, and still, I once thought my dream life would be teaching English at Black Hills State in Spearfish and maybe living in a cabin on a creek up in the Hills. But I think I’m finally ready to admit that I’m a flatlander. I want that endless horizon. I want to squint and believe I’m looking at Wyoming. Like the song says, don’t fence me in…not even with the breathtaking beauty of the Black Hills.

Treatise on Beauty

In my younger years, I kowtowed to all the fashion do’s and don’t’s. But I no longer shrink in shame when someone says, “you look your age.” I’m celebrating midlife by cutting my ties to Maybelline, by letting loose my folds & frills, by cultivating the wisdom that comes with age if we invite it in, and by shifting my thinking about “beauty” toward a higher ideal of healthy radiance and sound character. What am I giving up in my unwillingness to drag myself, panting, after youth?

Skin Care & Makeup. Some women (and probably men too) will plop down $50 for anti-aging anything-in-a-jar, though these “miracles” are most likely common kitchen ingredients like olive oil and parsley. Foundation makeup is really just highly refined spackling or drywall compound, isn’t it girls? If properly applied, preferably with a trowel, one can no longer detect holes, pockmarks, dents and seams. Makeup in general is really just carnival face-painting for Big Girls. And some Big Boys, although most men have the good sense to see through the ruse. If I had the nerve, my preferred method of applying makeup would be a la Pris in Blade Runner—one pass with a can of black spray paint.

High Heels. They were invented (by a man) to keep medieval riders’ (men) boots from slipping out of their stirrups. But why they’re now tilting the pelvic bones, throwing out the spinal alignment, blistering, bunioning & binding the feet of women worldwide, is beyond me. Perhaps with the invention of OB/GYN stirrups (I’ll bet it was a man), someone (probably a man) thought, “Hey! I know what would help these little ladies…” The only other explanation I can come up with is that men secretly want to date upright-walking [insert hoofed animal here]. Seriously, there must be a video of a goat, walking upright and possibly dressed in sequins, on YouTube. Compare this to any video of a runway model in 4” stilettos, and you’ll see exactly what I mean. Flicka—stamp once for YES, twice for MAYBE.

Diets. I understand the health issues associated with obesity and want to avoid these pitfalls. I don’t want to develop the shuffling walk that signals painful joints buckling under too much weight. But if I’m in good health and reasonably active, don’t even think about bringing up BMI. I’ve been a human laboratory for Atkins, Pritikin, Weight Watchers, South Beach, cabbage, Fit for Life, and countless other experiments in depravity, starvation, obsessive selection, and restriction. I’ve worked constantly against my body’s own desire to maintain a certain voluptuous, healthy weight, albeit contrary to the medical charts. But I’m tired of thinking constantly about what goes into my mouth, when we should all be thinking more about what comes out. I’m not falling for the “protruding pointy-boned waif” model of beauty any more. I’m in the fluff-is-fundamental camp. The curves-are-commendable camp. The camp that has Moon Pies and 1% milk ‘round the campfire.

Spanx. This may be the one legitimately lifesaving fashion accessory. It’s not that we want an impossible, unhealthy hourglass figure; we just want our Spanx to contain and steady us, so we aren’t yanked hither & yon by the momentum of unbound curvaceousness. And so we can slide into that blue beaded sheath dress.

Bad Hair Days. Let’s heat an iron rod in the fire, then get it as close to our eyes as possible without actually burning flesh, so we can make these dead protein cells curl. Cool. Better yet, let’s soak our entire heads (and possibly our brains) in toxic chemicals that alter the color and kink the dead cells, THEN let’s torch them with the iron rod. I currently have long red hair. I’ve buckled under peer pressure to cover the few newly emerging white hairs with henna, but that’s as far as I’ll go. I alternate between a messy ponytail, braided pigtails (yes, even at my age), and the occasional crew cut I get in moments of extreme hair exasperation. I understand and occasionally adopt the military haircut, the nun’s concealing wimple, voluntary baldness.

Shaving. Come ON. Really? I don’t know first-hand, but I hear that even men are shaving now. Apparently, hairless is in. It creeps me out a little when they say it’s “sexy”—doesn’t that suggest an attraction to prepubescent children? I think it would be smarter, if we really want to lose the fur (and I’m not sure that’s such a good idea for South Dakota prairie folk), if only people who are naturally hairless through genetic mutation were allowed to breed for the next few generations, until we’re all born smooth as silk. Like the Sphynx cat, or the Chinese Crested dog with just a little floof on top. Then we can get to work on regrowing our vestigial tails.

Wonder/Miracle Bras. Here’s a scoop: we live on a planet with gravity, and gravity pulls everything down toward the earth. Even breasts. There’s something absurd about trying to holster & barricade the girls, keeping them shoved up into our collarbones and tethered to our shoulders against the perpetual force of gravity. And again, isn’t it just a little creepy that our definition of beauty drives us to cut, mold, carve & reduce our own mammary glands to simulate the barely-there bumps of puberty? Let’s go back to “Reubenesque” as a model of beauty. Let’s embrace & reward the inevitable drop—another ounce of respect for each ¼” of descent.

There’s something ultimately liberating about giving up on the popular definition of beauty. I’m not driven (mad) to be the goddess of seduction any more. I want to be the goddess who can turn your pig into a toadstool if you make my children or grandchildren cry. And with the time & money I’ll save, I'll stock my cooler with Belgian beer and Moon Pies, don my comfy flannel shirt and sweatpants, and trek off for some backwoods camping with the coyotes who, unimpressed by taut skin and perky breasts, will sing me to peaceful, unfettered, cronish sleep.

Deep-Freeze Delerium

• Nothing on your shopping or to-do list is worth the white-knuckle, whiteout ice-crawl to town.
• If you’re snowed in long enough, you will uncoil, welcome silence, lose your fear of self-reflection.
• Pearl Bailey was right to call the kitchen “a mystical place, a temple.”
• Knitting is meditation for people still plagued by their grandma’s [insert Christian denomination] warning: “Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop.”
• Blooming oncidium orchids are clear proof of alien colonization on Earth.
• We will rail against the other woman/man until we become her/him.
• Gordon Hempton makes the finest environmental/nature sounds CD’s on the planet. You crank the six house speakers and fill your home with babbling brook, wolf calls, and summer thunderstorm.
• If you complain loud enough, your dear, concerned friends will start emailing you photos of blooming spring flowers, wild flamingos, green summer meadows. You are grateful and make a screensaver slide show of only warm, brightly colored things.
• Spectral Super Bunny makes ghostly appearances here & there, briefly, atop the snow drifts in your yard. He has a head the size of pit bull and taunts you with his mystical ability to vanish.
• Peacocks will eat leftover brown rice, onions, and garlic, cooked in hot salsa. But if you serve it on a metal cookie sheet, it will take them an hour or two of posturing and clucking and dancing around to make sure the cookie sheet won’t eat them first.
• The bleakness of a blizzard is humbling, awe-inspiring, or devastating in direct proportion to the affection you feel for the land and the amount of Doritos and Ethiopian coffee beans you have on hand.
• You find out your CD of the Dalai Lama and his entourage chanting for Vaclav Havel is actually Dutch mantra singer Hein Braat. You’ve been the victim of a viral Internet urban legend. You block out the new information and pretend it’s the Dalai Lama.
• If you practice owl calls on your back porch late at night, the owls will eventually start to answer, and you will shiver every time.
• Winter is a necessary step before spring. Spring. Before long, blue crocus and purple hyacinth will peek through the snow. And that’s why you live in South Dakota. Even in the winter.

Creepy Guy Sets Me Straight

In the summer of 1975, when I was but a teen, my friend Steve and I were on our way to a YES concert in Lincoln, NE. We came upon a motorcycle accident on O Street. The bike was lying in the right-hand driver’s lane, and the driver, a young man in his early 20’s maybe, was lying half in the street and half up the curb. I muscled my way into the crowd, nosy thing that I am and aspiring Florence Nightengale (I was still planning on a nursing career at that point). The kid was unconscious, lying on his back, and his shoulder-length dark hair was matted against the sidewalk in a small pool of blood. He gurgled and rasped, and I could see blood in his mouth rising up and going back in with every breath. I yelled for someone to call the ambulance (pre-911/cell phone days), but no one moved. I yelled again, and finally, someone went in the O Street Motel to call.

Meanwhile, a crowd of 20-30 people had gathered but kept a very cautious distance from the kid. No one would touch him. So (and here’s the part that makes people wince), I did two things: (1) I took off my poncho, balled it up, and put it gently under his feet; somewhere in my Dr. Kildare/General Hospital viewing I had heard about elevating feet to prevent shock. And (2) I gently, slowly, tilted his head slightly to the side so the blood would run out, not back in, and wiped out his mouth out with my sweater.

This is the clearest memory of the incident for me: A man leaned over my shoulder as I knelt beside the kid, and he said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “Give it up. The guy’s dead, man.” My teen blood boiled. I gave Creepy Guy a pointy elbow-jab, held the kid’s limp hand, got down in his face, and semi-shouted one long run-on sentence until the ambulance showed up: “You’re not dead I’m right here with you I’ll stay here until the ambulance comes stay with me you’ll be okay help is on its way that’s my hand you’re feeling don’t let go…” The ambulance came, I left my poncho behind, and Steve and I went on to the concert.

I never found out if the kid lived or died. I never knew his name. I didn’t wait around to give my contact info to the ambulance guys. I didn’t try checking the papers, calling the hospitals, or digging for police reports until a few years ago, and by then it was too late; any records going back that far are long gone.

Part of me knows that I didn’t follow up because I knew even then, while I was gingerly moving that kid, that I could have been hastening him to his death. Still, I believed then, and I believe today, that it’s ALWAYS better to do something, to care enough to act—even if that action is bungling, inept, inadequate, wrong—than to do NOTHING. I tried; I hooked up my will and human compassion to that unconscious kid like a mountaineer’s rope, and I held on, dammit.

I tell this story now because I had a sudden insight into Creepy Guy’s outburst when the news of the Haiti quake broke: Bystanders feel powerless in the face of disaster. We don’t know what to do, we can’t imagine anything powerful enough to fix the damage, so we do nothing. We’re forced to confront our own weak puniness in the face of problems that seem overwhelming. So I privately thanked Creepy Guy for teaching me this lesson, and I did something. I gave a few bucks to Helping Hands for Haiti. I gave a bit to Doctors Without Borders. I gave some to the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe, left without water & power in this brutal cold after a recent ice storm.

I don't think I’m fixing anything, and I'll bet there are a bazillion other overwhelming problems I haven’t even thought about. But I'm shaking up and embracing my inner Good Samaritan. I’m holding on to my belief that the smallest acts of kindness work together to keep in motion an amazing tidalwave of human energy and compassion. And I'm doing what I can because I know only this for sure: It’s better to do something—anything—than to do nothing.

All Dressed in White

The arctic deepfreeze finally let up here at the Row, and we’ve been getting out & about in the balmy 20- or 30-degree days, inching our way back to normal. There are mountains of snow everywhere, with ribbons carved out of gravel roads and county highways just wide enough for cars to pass. School started last Wednesday, and driving into Little Town in the early morning is like crossing the tundra. The scene is breathtaking in its stark black & white contrast, with vast empty pasture & fields blown into oceanscapes of snow tides frozen mid-wave. Dense overnight fog gives us mornings flocked in fuzzy white hoarfrost, quite a spectacle if you’ve never seen it. A couple of mornings, as if it all wasn’t stunning enough, I drove to town in heavy swirling fog; I’m pretty sure Merlin was thumbing a ride on the Greenfield Road.

The recent deepfreeze forced us to conjure prairie ingenuity and took me back to my 70’s Earth Mother roots. I made oat bread and parmesan-caper bread, thick Greek-style yogurt, and a splendid granola with 5 grains and 5 kinds of dried fruit. When Mom and I were in the Yucatan last summer, the pretty Italian boys who ran Posada Margherita in Tulum served us breakfasts of Greek yogurt topped with homemade granola and fresh fruit. So Ray and I have been living lately on yogurt, granola and blueberries for breakfast, and hearty soups and parmie caper bread for dinner. Wonderful, though quite different from breakfast under a thatched palapa with the Caribbean surf as a backdrop.

Winter tragedy found its way to the Row yesterday. Returning home from a day of shopping in Sioux City, Ray and I were stopped on our road by two hunters in a pickup, letting us know that “someone” had run over three of our peacocks just in front of our house. Maybe these two hunters were the culprits, we’ll never know, but we do know the peas have gotten far too comfortable with traffic. The snow is so deep here that the peas spend a lot of time walking single-file up and down the plowed drive and road—the only open spaces they can navigate right now—and they like to spend sunny afternoons on the narrow plowed road, scratching for gravel and spilled corn. They recognize my van, Mini Pearl, and are often reluctant to budge when I drive in or out of the yard. So it wasn’t surprising that someone barreling down our road might have come suddenly on too-tame, stubborn peacocks, but it was very sad to see the carnage. And now we are 17. This is probably still enough peacocks to qualify me as a Crazy Peacock Woman (one peahen, desperate last week to beat her flockmates to the corn bucket, actually flew up and tried to land on my head), but we’ll have to do some serious horn-honking, shrieking, get-out-of-way-NOW car conditioning lest we lose more of our flock before thaws open up the safer yard and pastures for the peas. It’ll thaw one day, right?