Over thousands of miles and hundreds of flights my air travel has blurred to a single amalgam. I no longer recall individual airports or trips though occasionally a single airplane ride etches itself indelibly in my memory – sometimes for the drama, sometimes for just an epiphany.
This morning I departed for San Antonio. The air was crystal clear as only a February morning can give. The flight path took us west, and I was amazed how clearly I could make out my very own house below. We then turned gently south, and just as clearly I could see the Potomac River meander from Harpers Ferry through Point of Rocks and past Leesburg – all in a single view. Further on lay Thoroughfare Gap, The Plains, Warrenton, and then Culpeper. My heart warmed to see Old Rag Mountain and then our Novum farm. I had the urge to knock on the cockpit door and say, “You can drop me off here, please.” We continued to traverse the Route 29 corridor until I saw Roanoke and finally the New River leading to Blacksburg.
In a mere thirty minutes I had traced the arc of my existence for the past 47 years, and somewhere there on the frosty Virginia Tech campus my son was walking between classes as I had done so many years before. In some strange kismet I realized my arc of so many years was now becoming a circle.
As taken from Showtime's Henry VIII drama The Tudors:
In a quiet moment Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk, finds Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, writing:
Suffolk: “What’s that my lord?”
Surrey: “Oh nothing, a trifle.”
Suffolk: “I dare say the other Surrey’s trifles will someday be regarded as some of our greatest poesy.”
Surrey: “Then I dare say your grace can read it. It’s a translation in sonnet form – one of Marcus’ epigrams. That is of course the Roman poet, but that doesn’t matter. It’s about the ‘happy life’, the ‘golden mean’.”
Suffolk carefully reads from the sonnet:
The happy life be these, I find:
The riches left, not got with pain;
The fruitful ground, the quiet mind;
The equal friend; no grudge nor strife;
No charge of rule nor governance;
Without disease, the healthful life;
Wisdom joined with simplicity;
The night discharged of all care.
Suffolk repeats quietly to himself gazing to the middle distance, “A quiet mind? A night discharged of all care. Wisdom joined with simplicity. My God, how I wish these things were true.”
Surrey: ”Which of these, your grace, do you not have?”
Suffolk: “All of them.”
Surrey: “Then you are like me, and like all the Romans, and all the barbarians, and all the generations before, and all those yet to come. For who does not wish, your grace, with all their heart, for the quiet mind? Tell me a single soul who has ever found it?”
There is no quiet like the dawn. When darkness clings to its last hour all sounds cease as if God has pressed his finger to his lips, and a solemn hush surrounds me. The clock reads 4:45am as I gaze across the Wye River. A full moon casts a pale glow, and I can perceive only the dark and light shadows of crab boats rummaging in the coves. It is my favorite time.
It is boat moving day. We have kept Kiwi here on the Wye during summer, but
hurricane season has arrived and it is time to seek the protection of our slip up the Eastern Bay. As I savor my last drops of coffee an orange luminance grows on the horizon. Still working in darkness I prepare the boat coiling spring lines, removing hatch covers, and checking engine fluids. Soon Jeanne emerges from the house and ambles to the dock rubbing sleep from her eyes.
When we cast off the dock lines the heavens are ablaze in anticipation of sunrise. We ghost down the river above the low rumble of our diesel deep in the hull. I spy the moon still hung in the western sky as full light breaks to the East.
As we round the lighthouse two rays swim past the transom. Gulls cry from the buoys. Morning has broken. By 8:00am we have tied up and our day can begin.
As parents we want our children to share our interests and our passions. These provide pathways to pass down traditions, and they allow our children to develop an understanding of who we are beyond just mom and dad. We take comfort in seeing memories of our young selves played out before us affirming that our values live on. Sometimes though we focus so much on giving to our children that we miss what they give back, and it can come in surprising and profound ways.
My grandfather was an avid amateur radio enthusiast. His cellar was affectionately known as the “HAM shack,” and it overflowed with transmitters, microphones, morse-code keys, antennas, and oscilloscopes. Vacuum tubes and circuit boards spilled from drawers and ‘QSL’ greeting cards adorned the walls. For me this was Thomas Edison’s laboratory. I would spend hours by his side in the dull green light of tuner displays as high-pitched whirls and hissing static emanated from the radios. He would slowly turn dials in search of Morse code or human voices drifting through the ether.
Though he was a great storyteller and passionate about his politics, “Poppa” was a quiet man. He never pressed his interests on me, and he was sparing in his advice during my many adolescent years. If asked, he was a willing teacher. He would transcribe pages of Morse code for me and take gentle pride in replying to his radio contacts that his grandson was seated beside him. My curiosity with his radios delighted him, but despite my wonder I always remained just the spectator. My interests focused instead on Tonka toys, motocross bikes then girls. What else is there when you’re a kid?
Henry Eugene Church died on April 15th, 1996. My beloved grandmother, Bomma, followed him two years later in April of 1998. By then I was married and had two young boys of my own. With both my grandparents passed, my sisters, mother and I sorted through their belongings packing boxes of family photos and keepsakes that we divided between us. The boxes found a quiet resting place in the corner of my basement with no time for me to plumb their riches. My days were filled with chasing my boys and naively attempting to form them in my own image.
Within a year or two I did find time to blow dust off the boxes and begin to explore my grandparents’ lives beyond the narrow glimpses I was allowed as a child. I was overwhelmed. Their marriage was a love story that spanned almost sixty years. They traveled across the United States and Europe by camper and motorcar. Poppa was not only a radio enthusiast, but a photographer, a craftsman, and a writer. How I yearned to sit with them and hear all the stories left untold. Only as a father and husband did I realize the lessons they offered me that meant so little then and so much now. Had I been Poppa’s contemporary we would have been best of friends. I longed to sit back in the cellar and take genuine interest in every hiss and crackle, but his radios were gone.
The years rolled on and my own sons are older but not quite left home. I’ve learned they do not have to be like me, but I still enjoy when they take an interest in my hobbies and I often think back to my grandfather and opportunities lost. A curious thing happened though a few years ago. I bought a marine radio book in an attempt to self-install a shortwave radio on our sailboat. I lost track of it, but my son found it, read it cover-to-cover, and then announced he wanted to take the amateur radio license exam. He did and passed with flying colors. Within a year he went on to pass the intermediate exam and then the expert ‘extra’ level exam - all before the age of fourteen. For Christmas that year he asked Santa for his own amateur radio set to put in our basement, and we spent Thanksgiving rigging a sixty-five foot antenna high above our backyard in anticipation of its arrival. It was as if he were channeling his great-grandfather he never knew.
This past Father’s Day my son asked whether he might set his radio up on our sailboat for amateur radio “field day.” I happily obliged, and within a few hours of our arrival he was ensconced in the cabin below tuning radio dials amidst whirls and hisses plucking “contacts” from the air. I sat quietly with him mesmerized by the scene. For the first time I truly realized that Poppa’s passions were not lost, his gifts had simply bridged generations. But it was not only a gift from the past to the present. My son was giving back to me my fond memories from that cellar so long ago. The joy of reunion replaced my deep feeling of loss. Poppa was looking back down on us both – a warm smile on his face.
Sometimes, if you are real lucky, you can be twelve again. I was fortunate as a child to grow up in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains surrounded by never ending forests and meadows. I would spend countless days exploring trails beneath oak tree canopies and sloshing through meandering creeks. I would build tree-houses and lean-tos. It was my ‘Hundred Acre Wood.’
Decades have passed and now iPods and Xboxes saturate our senses, but I try to instill the same sense of wonder in my son, Jeremy, when I can. We go hiking together, and we have traversed many miles of nearby train tracks replete with a long stone tunnel and cascading river.
On a recent late autumn Sunday we decided we might head to the tracks again, but I wanted to try something different. Why not go geocaching? It is a sort of modern day treasure hunt where you use a handheld GPS to seek hidden treasure boxes (caches), trade trinkets, and log your finds on the Internet. We once did this avidly as a family foursome, but our GPS was now gathering dust on a closet shelf. A check of our Internet logs revealed a lapse of three years! Today, we would begin anew.
Jeremy and I scouted the website for nearby caches and found two in Morgan Run, a state park about 10 miles away. Morgan Run has fourteen hundred forested acres with hiking trails and a pristine stream running the length of its center.
In short order we arrived at a small parking area with GPS in hand. The first cache to find was called “The Iron Man,” and a few cryptic log entries mentioned blow torches and WD-40 – kind of odd. The second cache was named Bobalexcows – caches have these funny names. Jeremy and I began by walking a few large circles in the parking lot attempting to get our bearings. Starting on the correct side of the stream was important, as the water was high, and if we guessed wrong crossing the stream would be difficult. Jeremy soon convinced me that we should first pass over the highway bridge and then into the woods, so we did. Before us loomed a steep rise to a ridge top.
As we ascended I caught a reflection of glass from the top of the slope, and I suspected it must be a house – so much for endless wilderness. But there was no house; instead we found the hulks of several 1950’s cars nestled in the forest like slumbering Rip Van Winkles. How cool was this? A breath-taking view opened before them and I mused this must be a long-lost lovers’ lane.
“Hey Daddy,” Jeremy shouted, “Start looking through the cars.”
It seemed reasonable that a geocache named the “Iron Man” might be hidden in one of the cars, but the coordinates were wrong. While Jeremy dug in glove boxes and looked under rusting hoods, I crept steadily to the West and slightly down the slope which dropped precipitously towards the stream below.
“Jeremy. I am standing directly on the coordinates,” I shout up the hill. I was perched atop rock ledge with rock faces above and below me providing numerous crevices to hide a cache. I hear leaves crunch underfoot as Jeremy comes to inspect. I begin to descend the moss covered rock, and in an instant I see my feet against the powder blue sky and I am falling weightless through the air. Humph! I crash against the ground knocking the air out of my lungs.
“Daddy! I found it. I found the Iron Man!” Jeremy exclaims, not seeing my fall.
I slowly rise, gasping for breath. There before us is the cache. The Iron Man. Should you ever go on this quest I do not want to ruin in for you, but as we looked at the vessel the clues about blow torches and WD-40 all made sense. Jeremy and I carefully removed him and found his log book secured neatly in his cranium. We take a moment to marvel at the creativity of the entire cache then gently set him back in his perch. Now it was time to seek out cache number two.
We slowly descended the steep ravine with GPS in hand carefully picking our way over fallen trees and through entangled vines. Soon we found ourselves standing along the bank of the rushing stream. I compare the bearings from my handheld compass with the coordinates of Jeremy’s GPS. Wouldn’t you know it – the Bobalexcow is somewhere on the other side.
Jeremy walks up the stream while I walk down looking for anywhere we might be able to leap from rock to rock but to no avail. It is about 34 degrees out and ice glazes the edge of the stream which looks to be one to three feet deep between us and the far side. We begin to double back in defeat when Jeremy spots a fallen tree not too far into the woods. Hmmm, it measures about 25 feet long and is about eight inches wide at its base.
“Let’s put it across,” Jeremy declares.
I am dubious, but I bend down and attempt to lift it just in front of its broken roots.
“Good Lord, Jeremy! I don’t think so,” I grunt as I set it back down. Jeremy displays a hint of disappointment. I reflect for a moment and realize it is time to “man up.” If we are going to have an adventure, let’s have an adventure. By keeping my back straight and directing Jeremy at the other end we are able to just heave the long trunk and drag it toward the water. The direct route takes us through thick thorns which rip at my legs and forearms, but I am determined we are going to get this done. We pull the tree down the embankment and onto a sand spit, but now I am not sure just how we’re going to heft this thing all the way across Morgan Run. Then it dawns on me…
“Jeremy, take the skinny end that is pointing upstream and push it out into the water. Push it hard,” I tell him.
With that, the narrow end of the trunk gets caught by the current and steadily floats in an arc across the water catching against another fallen tree on the far side. Awesome! I look at our triumph, but now I am not feeling so clever. The tree is a solid eight inches wide on our end, but narrows to less than three on the other. How am I supposed to keep my balance on that? Before I can ponder too long, Jeremy effortlessly skips across as if he has just arrived from Cirque du Soleil.
Jeremy implores, “Come on, Daddy, come on!”
Okay, about that man-up thing. I realize I am past the point of no return whether it means getting soaked in some icy water or not. I begin my traverse with arms outstretched, wavering from side-to-side. I reach the middle with the tree wobbling hardily, and just when I am reconciled to testing the water temperature I spot a rock beneath the surface and to the right. I thrust out my foot and catch my balance straddling tree and rock in the center of the rushing stream. With two more broad strides I now lunge across and make it with just a soaked shoe from the effort.
Before long Jeremy and I find the second cache midway up the facing slope. As if on queue I slip and fall just before he spots it. Let’s hope this doesn’t become some sort of caching ritual. With both caches bagged, we wander the few miles back down stream. We stop occasionally to break ice and watch it float through the rapids, we skip rocks, and Jeremy even cajoles me into another daring water crossing along some narrow rocks. Our day is complete.
Fast forward two months – Jeanne, the boys, and I have traveled for a Christmas dinner to my sister’s house in Virginia, coincidentally not too far from my own childhood stomping grounds. We are gathered in the family room and I mention to my stepmother that Jeremy and I have enjoyed some hiking this fall with some geocaching thrown in. Jeremy’s ears perk up, and he jumps in, “Let me tell her! I want to tell the story!”
I sit back and listen intently as he begins to narrate our most excellent adventure. In that instant I know that we have shared a day that transcends generations. A moment in my childhood has become his. I see his lips moving and his bright eyes twinkling but I have slipped into my own daydream now. I am looking forward perhaps thirty years, and I see Jeremy seated at a Christmas dinner before his own children. He is telling a story, the words something like this, “Around when I was twelve, I would spend countless days exploring the outdoors and sloshing through streams. I built tree houses and forts. I would go treasure hunting and skip rocks. I had my own Hundred Acre Wood.”
Who says New Yorkers aren’t friendly? I was in Manhattan this week and by chance I had a long subway ride from the financial district up to midtown. For anyone who is familiar with the New York subway it has come a long way in the last thirty years, but the protocol remains the same – keep to yourself, stare straight ahead, no facial expressions – you get the picture.
So anyway, I get on and wedge into a seat and glance over to see a man sketching rapidly on a pad in black ink. I think no more of it and look away – remember the protocol, keep eye contact to a minimum. Within a few minutes to my surprise someone sets a sketch gently on my lap. As I look down I see a profile sketch of ME, and it’s not some cheesy caricature but a nice sketch like you might pay a street vendor forty bucks for in Mallory Square. I look up and the sketch artist gives me a wry smile then he sets quickly to work on another piece.
Within minutes had has penned a beautiful likeness of a girl sitting directly across from us and hands it over to her. She asks, “Do you want money for this?” and he replies, “If you wish, or just accept it as a gift to brighten your day.”
Now you might think this is a cheap con, but he says this gently with sincerity and the sketches are good, really good. Before she can reach in her purse, he is busy at work on another sketch of a large, scowling, linebacker looking fellow a few seats down.
The linebacker reluctantly accepts his sketch, and as he studies it a smile slowly grows across his face. He gently asks the artist, “What is your name?”
“Orin,” says the artist.
“You signed the picture Orin Ink” the Linebacker responds quizzically.
“Just a pen name” replies Orin, “It’s what I do, ink pictures.”
The linebacker hands Orin his business card and introduces himself as William. “If you are looking for work, Orin, please give me a call. My company is looking for copy artists all the time” says William.
Then the previously sketched girl chimes in, “I’m Traci. Do you do parties, Orin? You’d be great to do friends’ likenesses.”
“Sure,” Orin replies, “Where do you live, Traci?”
“Queens,” she says, and then Orin invites me into the conversation and soon everyone wants to know all about Baltimore. And a fifth person joins in, then a sixth.
So here we are – six people of different races, ages, and genders carrying on like old college friends. Twenty short minutes ago we were total strangers, I mean TOTAL strangers, and we were all determined to stay in our bubbles for the duration of our ride.
All too soon my stop comes, and I wish I could invite them all up for a beer. Alas, you just have to enjoy the moment and know there is still a lot of goodness in the world.
