Yesterday was slow going, winding up and down from Lac Le Hac to Whistler.

The road is as steep and lovely as I’ve ever seen with lush mountain passes, little wooden bridges and lakes nestled in gorges that remind me of Across the Bay.

We were positively carsick between schoolwork and loopy roads by the time we pulled over at Nairn Falls, just outside Whistler. An hour’s hike to a green river freshed us—spraying and boiling through potholes, beneath logjams and rocky ledges.  It’s a drag that all the BC parks are closed, so we’re spring for spendy private campgrounds lately. But it’s worth buying another day in Whistler. 11:46; we’ve plowed through school. Not surprisingly, language arts followed by world history is his how he prefers to start his day. Then science, spelling and math. Jake sent this poem to his favorite teacher, Kiki, this morning:

Although he has just informed Michael and I tearfully that he wants to get back to the USA and he’s sick of us, I still feel lucky to hang out with him. I’m pretty sure he’ll chip up once he’s on his bike, exploring Whistler.

Indeed,  Whistler provided a much-needed break in the routine of driving and schooling in swerves. A rare pleasure to pedal into to “The Village” on a two-lane bike trail (I admit, it’s the first I’ve seen, I mean with yellow dividing lines). Although Jake asked me to please change my natty tie-died “hippie shirt” (and I refused) I still felt quite posh biking to Whistler on a Wednesday afternoon.  Michael may not be feeling quite so smart.

“Why do you have the lamest gear, ever, Mike?!” Jake cries. “I mean, look at that helmet. Its SO lame. What did you pay for it anyway? And that bike! WHY Do you have to have a girlie basket like that?!”

Michael does not respond. About 1.5 km passed several large hairstyles and daddies pushing strollers we approached Whistler Village. I have seen this place before with Robin, heaped with snow and polypro bunnies. It was delightful to feel it wrapped in autumn splendor, clearance sales and quietude. Jake plead for pizza, and since it was cheap and filling we agreed. $12.99 and 3 toppings later, we sat dazed amidst the most groovy childhood park I can imagine aside from the very best which I’ve already experienced. In fact, it’s a toss up between the very large spruce that dangled into McNeil Canyon from the eastern corner of my childhood home (which provided a most excellent obstacle course) and Alexandra Giacometti’s (yes, the daughter of The Giacometti) macramé junglegym in Bolinas in 1974.  Interesting to see how hippie ingenuity defines style in the end. Here we have several Cedar and Pine gnome homes constructed purely of shakes and stumps and the most cosmic joinery you can imagine, animated with roots and quirky eaves, spitting distance from Olympic rings. So we climbed in there too and considered the unique privilege of visiting an actual Olympic village. We dutifully read the Canadian Olympic award winners and debated the Alaskan ones. I should say, Mike and Jake did. This is where I become fly-on-wall and drift off amidst their athletic gymnastifications which range from Peekaboo Street to Jermichael Findlay. I am in left field... No, I’m in the Body Shop sniffing variations of self-seasoning. Then we all head into IGA for some very expensive groceries.

“See this basket, Jake?” says Mike with a grin. “See this beer and this tasty apple juice it carries? That’s why MY bike is the coolest. Its golden, Little Big Man. So just chill out.”

We returned to “camp” about 4:30. Da Boyz, still in Mike and Jake mode, sniffed out a baseball field and left me to my first hour of absolute independence this epoch. I daresay, my yoga mat interposed on any other possibilities.

The game of Risk sits half-finished in the dark. Yoga mats melt into the grass. Bikes are blissfully unlocked. As I relish the joys of unlimited hot water for dishes, Mike and Jake circle the camper in the blue halo of a head lamp. Jake is wielding a kitchen knife or  baseball bat, acting out Mike’s script for a family road trip gone bad. Jake is overjoyed.

“Its so great Mom. But why? I prefer not to say. Next question?”

Time to tuck into the buggy, to travel to Corfu with young Gerry Durrell et all.

My Family and Other Animals beckons.

 Jake doesn’t want to take a shower at the campground. Its been four days.

“Can’t we wait till we back in the United States? Its just that in these strange showers there’s no way to protect your virginity!”

We are a few hours north of Vancouver. In this small space we are each in our own orbits. Michael is pounding one booted foot as he drives, plugged into The Fall on itunes, grinning.  I’m not in the mood for Manchester’s punk scene yet. I’m hovering between realms, playing teacher, pbj-maker, map reader, fly on the wall.  Jake sighs over science. He’s grappling with the building blocks of life: cells, sexual vs. asexual reproduction. As much as he deplores the subject, it chases him down. Before bed at night he shouts his usual warning, “No monkey business!”

We watched Little Big Man last night. Jake was rapt. I’d forgotten that we three had watched that together when Jake was only seven and Michael has been calling him that ever since. I don’t think we could all squeeze into this buggy next year.

For now, we run back in time. Birch bannered in gold again. Rocky hillsides dotted with pine and yellow grasses. In the lowlands, emerald green valleys, hulks of old tractors and wood-fired cookstoves sit out in the fields. One hung open, oven door agape and a hand painted sign, “Open Range.” If we passed a fruit tree of any kind, even if the fruit had fallen, I would have to pull over and eat it like the Joads. The landscape makes me hungry. Grapes of wrath lay thick about these parts. Wreakage of industry, beaten-down dreams. Towns called Horsefly and Likely. Was that rusty dark green car a vw karmann ghia? Sitting atop the sloping end of a trailer home, flooded with sun, it’s a south-facing deck, a cocktail hour crow’s nest.

BC Parks closed be damned, its still summer to us Alaskans!

We pass a perfectly circular lake encrusted and swirled with white.

“How can that be frozen?!” Jake wonders from the sunny loft.

“Salt,” says Michael, “There were other signs of a salt mine.”

So much history here, more log barns, old wooden waterwheels, picket-fenced farms. “Groovy town,” says Michael. Then, his benediction: “It looks like Northern California.”

And it feels like the West Coast’s Appalachia. A big rough footprint of White Man’s struggle to survive in an Indian stronghold. The ‘settlers’ took all but the names: Puntchesakut, Nazko, Lillooet, Xax’lip, Squamish. Typically these are left to the parks.

Sun shining for the first day since Tok. We are peeling off layers, standing dazed under trees still in full leaf.

We’re starting to find a rhythm. Waking with the sun is truly a gift. The cab-over bed is incredibly comfortable. Like a tent, but with windows, sheets, warmth. I’m glad I brought a subzero comforter. Jake burrows deeper into his cloud of blue and purple. We slowly extricate ourselves from our cocoons to see where we’ve landed. Last night it was a barren parking lot behind a convenience store. Once again, we’d driven for hours expecting to find a park (as indicated on the map) but none had appeared by 7:30. So, grudgingly, we paid $30 for full hookup under sodium lights. We ate udon and watched a movie--Dr. No, the first of the James Bond 007 series. I slept like a bag of buckshot.

With all due respect for Michael’s disdain for Mr. Manly Man, I am grateful for his willingness to drive and run around checking systems at our various stops.  Yesterday we ran out of gas about 50 km from Sasquatch. Thanks be, we had 5 gals. in a canister on back. It took both of us to figure out the no-leak container. I held the twist-and-wouldn’t-lock valve open as Michael held the weight of it up to the tank. By the time we finished the chore, our hands were soaked in gas. “Mama’s  hero!” he told Jake. Michael is too, especially because he prefers to share in the weight and the glory of the tasks. This morning he showed Jake how to unhook all the systems before we departed.

Jake ran around gloriously in dirty orange gloves draining the pee pipe and later washed his hands with relish for the first time in days.

While I want to dive into the river of life with this trip, on any given morning this trip I’m more likely to feel I’ve stepped out of it, escaped. For over a year I’ve been reading from The Book of Awakenings by Mark Nepo, a gift from Eva. She discovered it or perhaps was given it during a year of cancer treatment. Nepo survives cancer as well, and this book was borne of that experience. I often read it aloud before yoga. And reach for it often during this trip, for structure, solace and instructions.

            October 5, Waking Close to the Bone

            Seeking life everywhere, I found it in the burn of my lungs

            “… simply by waking, waves of feeling pulse close to the bone, and this continual pulse is so deep it aches. It is the ache of being alive. I used to think the ache was sadness, but now know it is deeper than not getting what I want or losing want I need. This waking close to the bone is the pulse from which both joy and sadness rise, where pain and wonder meet. Now I wake on stubborn fall days that resist the cold, I wake before the sun, the world wet with anticipation, and I feel this ache, the way the Earth feels its core grind about that central fire that no one sees. It is the slight burn of being here.”

          

I may read this book for years, like a cow slowly digesting fibrous grass through several stomachs. I’m still drawing nutrients from days ago. As Michael said, that’s the heaviest I’ve heard from that book and I like it. Because I feel it; it confirms the heaviness I feel. Call it gravity. It’s the weight that holds me to earth, next to naked birches and knotted spruce.

 Nighttime. The camp fire has almost burnt out. We made burgers here, atop Jake’s fire. Jake took a slug of our Canadian pilsner, gave it a good review, then jumped over the fire. Loon calls, and then Jake, “Mom! you should take a look at this sunset. There’s some good lines—“ he points to the water.

“And you should write about the Milky Way, Cutie,” added Michael, “It spreads from one side of the horizon to the other, as big as the St. Louis Arch. ”

After driving out of last night’s lousy parking lot and discovering we were 10 minutes shy of two lovely (and free) provincial parks, today was by far the prettiest we’ve seen since I said goodbye to the birches of Mary Allen lane. We finally felt the warmth of the sun about Queznel, a sleeply little town that time seems to have forgotten since the 50’s, 700 km north of Vancouver. We pulled over and rode our bikes for an hour, through town and along the Queznel river. Affirming that it’s a river worth respecting, Michael pointed out that salmon must swim it, and it feeds into the ocean. We did some yoga and Jake fried up a quesadilla. Then Michael went for a run. Didn’t it feel good? “No, it feels terrible,” he cried. “Its been too long!”

Sixty degrees. Its all I ask. So amazing to feel the warmth of the sun as I salute it. And to see sweet little settlements, log barns, whole fences made of old wagon wheels. Kids playing frisbee in hayfields. Its Canadian Thanksgiving Day, and families stroll the riverfront. As her father walks the dog, a small girl carries her gerbil in its plastic cage.  Big golden leaves swirl down the sidewalks. After days, months, of cold and the shoddy, barren settlements of Glenallen and Tok of Whitehorse and Sasquatch--double-wide trailer homes by dusty parking lots and Atco hotels, I feel like I’m waking up from a dream. We have come here by way of a road through the Peace Valley (simply called “Peace” on the radio) as the sunset and by a mist-covered lake called MacLeod, and down to the fertile lowlands full of grazing cows. “It smells like Northern California already,” says Michael. “Can you believe it? We’re back in the land of the sun.”

We finally hit the incredibly long and boring part of the road last night. It creeped up on us after a long distranctingly gorgeous sunset. Michael had been driving for six hours when I took the wheel, embracing the expanse of sky, bands of clouds, bold pink ribbons reaching farther than I’ve seen. We were about an hour south of Fort Nelson and Michael and Jake were playing gin rummy in the cabin whooping it up and snacking. “We should look for  campground,” said Michael. I had to go pee, and gradually realized there had been no place to stop for miles. Around 6:30 I was getting hungry, looking for a rest stop in earnest. But the road kept on straight and long, a tyranny of a small spruce like young conscripts dumbly marching on and on. Bumpy asphalt with barely a shoulder. No signs for campgrounds. Not even a pullout for miles. Nothing. I don’t see that well in the dark and I really have to go pee now. Finally I pull out at a trash station. We have a discussion. Jake feels we could stay here. He wants to play Risk tonite. But I don’t like this spot. One against two. Michael takes the wheel. We drive on for another 5 km when we see a road drawing up a hill on the right.  Lets try it I say. We could at least make dinner.” The greasy track is marked by a cacophony of signs announcing various towing companies. The little toyota crawls to the top. I feel badly for it. With the big camper it feels wrong at the end of the day, like you’ve taken your poodle ski-joring. It wants to go at first, eating up the track. But the big hills are killer. “I don’t like this,” says Michael surveying our rutted track at the top. You can’t tell where the road ends, its so wide and exposed at the top, with a ragged black rim of trees. “Looks like Creepsville to me,” he says. We rattle back down the hill and press on. We passed a couple abandoned gas stations. Then a sign for a campground. Closed.  And bigger sign “Dog at large. Beware.” My favorite.

“Well,” says Jake, “we can at least stay at one of the trash pullouts. Can we have some tortellinis? I really want to play Risk” I can’t take the three thoughts at once. “Okay, a pullout,” I say. “But not a trash pullout. The next one.” Two against one.

 Michael drives on. On the way down a long hill we see a giant semi hauled up with lights blaring and engine running. Probably for a nap? We roll in, trying to park so the lights don’t shine in. Directly facing  a gravel heap. “Gravel anyone?” says Michael. “Do you think we could sleep here?” No. The next pullout, without a semi I say. Michael concedes. “But you guys! Its getting late. Are we going to play Risk?!” I feel bad for the little guy. I want him to have good memories. “Okay, next pullout. No trash bins or semis, k?”

Jake sighs. We press on. Lights glimmer a few km ahead and a sign, “RV Park.”

We draw up to an older white clapboard two-story structure. Towering carved creatures greet us. “Sasquatch Crossing” announced in Kelly green letters. Hmmm. Michael and Jake climb out to ask about parking. He’s gone for twenty minutes. “Crazy scene in there!” he grins, shaking his head. “That guy spoke five languages. He started speaking to me in Chinese,” he laughed. “But the best part was his accent. It was fantastic. And his conspicuous black comb-over. He said we could stay the night, no problem. Just come in for coffee in the morning. They open at five. He started on this religious thing. I told him I had faith. But he kept asking me if I believe in God. He said, ‘When things are tough you have to pray everyday.’ I told him I pray when things are good. He said, ‘Now that’s wise. Then he dropped the godthing. But I’m going back in, come morning.’

We eat totellinis. We play Risk. I read from My Family And Other Animals. In it, we have just met Spiro the Greek, and we are rolling with laughter. I’m so grateful to Bruce for sending Durrell’s entire collection with us. I confess already skipping to the second book because it called me so loudly from the depths of my childhood, to my father’s fireside readings. Suddenly Spiro and Mother are in the cabin with us again. I read aloud till I can’t keep my eyes open.

M and I  wake to the rumble of a big semi pulling up next to us. (It takes a while to realize its not a generator.) We lay awake for a long time, then, sounds of screeching tires. A door slams. “Yeeeehaaaa!” Man Shouts. Revving engine, flying gravel, the car flies away. My heart thumps.

He’s back in ten minutes. More shouting, a crazy reverie of shouts. ‘I think he’s trying to wake people up,’ says Michael. My heart starts pounding wildly. Don’t go out there. I put in my contacts. More shouting – its close. I peel back the windowshade to see a black four-by, red lights, music blaring, pushing past us onto the road. Sasquatch?

Jake woke and told us he had strange dreams.

“These are the messages from my dreams: I should not go back to Liard Hot Springs. You guys can go. But if I do something bad will happen; I should not climb a Redwood Tree; We are going to come to an amazing garden somewhere down the road. You guys can go in, but I should not; I should not eat Double Fudge Icecream. Something bad will happen like a headache.”  He added, “We have to go to Pike Place Market in Seattle. “Its probably the most amazing thing to happen to a city.”

Then, “So when are we gonna hit the road guys? What do think US Customs will be like? Will have they have a Rottweiler? Will we have to tell them we have like two useless  kitchen knives and a baseball bat?”

Finally, “Geez, Mom’s gonna run out of data writing all these things about me!”

We met bison today grazing along the road. They are so big and quiet. Michael’s totem animal, I think. Quietly doing his own thing in a big way…strong, determined, stubborn.  Transplanted. Endangered (celluloid filmmaker). And that wild fire in his eye.

We take lots of pictures. The best are Michael’s, viewed from the cabin, looking out through the cab at Bison. Stranger Than Paradise.

With the buffalo come the Northern Rockies. Stacked and layered rocky peaks. The size of home – Kenai Mountains, but clearly older, compressed and sandy instead of undulating and rippling rock. Hard to imagine what the trees hold onto. Maybe that’s why they’re meager.

Michael and Jake are in the cockpit. Jake is telling a joke. Michael smiles gently and holds the wheel. “C’mon Mike!” says Jake, “You look like one of those guys who has no self-confidence in the group. You know, at the Old Guys Meeting at Save-U-More on Wednesdays? You’re like one of those guys in the upper left who is afraid to chime in. You just sit there and smile and nod your head.”

Where we’ve stayed so far:
One hour south of Tok
Takhini Hot Springs just outside Whitehorse
Campground one hour south of Whitehorse

Its difficult to be driving hard into fall.  Trees are stripped bare – our headlights strike the darkness --White Birch limbs wave back. I feel guilty leaving these thin bodies to face winter.

Often we pull into campgrounds when it’s too late to appreciate our surroundings. I’m starting to get it: just believe, you’ll see in the morning.  With dawn, rivers of condensation in the cab-over bed draw streaks of darkness and dazzle gradually becoming lakes and trees. And rivers and sandbars and lakes and trees. If it weren’t so beautiful I would have to admit its predictable… Is that how someone else perceives my paintings?  Predictable? Do they see the dark aspect, the way I search for light against the hegemony of trees, of darkness.  I am constantly on the look-out for a compelling reflection, a fringe of light against the hem of trees that could be rendered in ink or oils. The camera bounces from hand to hand. Michael is often announcing, “I got some really good ones for you. Asia paintings all the way!”

We stop for lunch and Jake spins around on his mountain bike. Michael chases after on his ancient Schwinn, football in the bread basket. I discover a new use for picnic tables. In the Canadian provincial parks they are smooth and wide, a solid sheet of plywood. Perfect for yoga.

Michael is doing most of the driving. Which concerns me, because this is the kind of driving I’m happy to do. Whereas I’m a complete weenie in cities. I usually get the wheel with afternoon tea, then singing….and then I start speeding up. “Hey baby, can you lighten up? You’re going 75!” I’m so happy on a long country road.

Jake collected leaf and twig samples in the Yukon – willow, spruce, labrador – same as home. But now we are in Jack Pine country, sweet smelling yellow grass, aspen, deer prints.

Anchorage to Tok
The image of home I hold in my heart is golden birch leaves falling,  red bouquets of Devil’s Club dotting the driveway, and the wine scent of elderberry.  I have been nervous and sad for days, anticipating our departure, riddled with questions. Have I made the right choice to go now in elegant autumn, as Michael settles back into Homer, anticipates winter’s interior warmth? As Jake finds his stride in school, embraces the mini-high school social and academic pressures? As I savor the stability of the gallery and the comfort of home? I often look around my environments thinking about how fortunate I am to have satisfying, soul-stirring work, and to have a lovely home and studio, and to live within my means, not clipping my dreams’ wings.

The freedom to fly, to flex my wings because I can is why I have pushed this peregrination…. Because I have seen the deeply empowering benefits of testing my strength against the unknown, especially in the past couple years as Michael completed his MFA in Milwaukee. I resented his decision to serve his own dreams until one day I saw that it served me, too. It served me to find my capacity to provide for myself and others. One day after work last winter I lay on the couch. A fire sparkled in the stove. Snow was thick on the ground. With my new $958 snow tires, I had climbed the icy hill home. Jake was reading, swinging in his hammock chair. I felt strangely elated, safe.

Now, we are flying forward in a fat tin chick. She is white and striped, 88,000 miles strong and 21 years old. She was born about the year I started working at Bunnell. Definitely dated,  but totally functional with a two-hole sink and four-burner stove plus fridge, potty, bathroom sink and shower, and a newly upholstered dinette that converts to a twin bed. She boasts a new cherry laminate floor and birch-look cabinets. Best of all is her feathery nest—a cab-over full-sized bed with a temper-pedic topper and a down comforter.  She is a land-yacht, a boonedock explorer eating up the road at a noisy 60 mph.

Michael observes the preponderance of blue without complaint. This chick is a rainbow of blues… Dark blue totes and blue upholstery, walls painted powder blue, like the soft lining of a cloud. He even encouraged me to hang a couple small bluish paintings, snow scenes I’ve been obsessed with of late. They are mirror images:  a blue meadow of snow rimmed with trees beneath a pinkish white evening sky;  and a white snowfield running into grey shadows and blue trees beneath a blue evening sky. All this blue is to me a calm backdrop for hours of boisterous home school each day on the road. If it weren’t a serene stage for the constant disarray of sweatshirts and teacups, schoolbooks and sneakers I would feel fascistic in my aesthetic autocracy.

I have rode most of the first 600 miles a bit loose in the saddle, jumping up for cups of tea and peanut butter sandwiches. At present, I am  sitting on one of two pink yoga mats which provide a bit of traction and warmth, leaning into the space between  the only two legitimate seatbelts holding Michael and Jake.  My cold feet resist the rattle of the cabin door. As it promised, motor home living so far is shaky and exciting.

Jake climbs out of the driver’s seat slurking through the narrow channel to the top of the blue-bossy bus. “Mom, you haven’t cuddled with me yet up there!” he shouts over the road rattle, pointing to the cab-over loft. So we climb in beneath the comforter. Want me to read to you what I’m writing? “Yes!”  I’m dragging the computer again, and I read to him my journal thus far. “Did you study writing in college mom?” he asks, grinning.  Yes, but long before that – when I was about your age I started to love writing, just like you. "Well,  if I wrote something I think it would be an adventure story. Not really a journal, but realistic fiction that takes place in Afghanistan. " Would you like Michael’s computer to be right up here next to mine, and you can write too?  “Yes!”  So here we are, side by side in the bunk, shaking down the Al-Can, tapping in time.