Fluid Logic

Summers in Lotus are such a study in contrast: the heat of the day and the infalliable coolness of the night, the baking dry heat of each clear blue day, and the stunning icy cold of the river to bring you back to joy. 

Ok, I'm pregnant, so the heat/cold thing seems to be taking an awful lot of my consciousness despite the fact that this is easily the mildest summer I've ever felt here. But there is plenty of other contrast in the summer as well - the rush and hurry of getting to swim team, doing a shuttle, leading the children to sleep before the dragon scales show all the way through their skin. And the ultimate contrast, life and death.

A death occurred on the river this summer and it amazes me how it brings back into stark focus what exactly it is we do, what a great leap of faith it is. The death on the river was a tragic accident, no one to be blamed, no one to be punished, plenty to be learned by all. A passenger fell out of a boat in a place where daily tens of people fall out of their boats. I have swum this particular rapid a couple of times, and know people who have done it in rafts, duckies, tubes, riverboards, kayaks and pool toys. We took our children on it early this summer for their first time. They loved it. The man who died was rafting with a good organization who were running the river with excellent safety procedures in place. No one to blame.

And yet he died. And every day we offer people the opportunity to raft this same rapid, to trust us, our equipment, our guides, their judgement. And we can never promise them safety because, as we tell our children, you alone are responsible for your body. We can control only so much, and then we give it up to faith. And hope. 

When the accident happened, Tom went and studied the pictures to find out exactly what happened. He went to the rapid at low water to see what the rocks looked like. He brought our crew to the rapid to show them where and why and how and to remind them that it is a matter of life and death, this guiding job. And he mourned. 

I was reminded why this occupation is a perfect one for him: because he cares about it so much, believes in it so much, and takes on the responsibility of it completely. And because he loves the magic it creates for people who choose to raft it, and he loves the people who choose that magic. He's never been bored on the South Fork and I'd trust him to guide me on any river he deemed runnable. He finds the fun, the joy, the beauty, the adventure in it every single day. I know there is not another company owner or manager who chooses to guide the river every possible chance just to be a part of that joy. He gives it that respect, and he also gives it it's due as a place where tragedy can happen. Every summer he falls in love with the river and every summer I fall in love with that part of him again as well. 

Sometimes I forget that I used to be a guide, that I spent four solid summers constantly on the water taking boat after boat of passengers down. This unwieldy pregnant body seems in contrast to the one people entrusted their lives and their children's lives to. I forget until a passenger comes back, telling a story about the last time they were on the river and I realize I was their guide and we laugh that there's been a picture of me and them in the middle of a rapid on their mantle for the last seven years. I have to remind myself to own that part of my past, to let it be a part of the mom I am now.  We don't have many pictures of us on the river: it's something so normal, so common an occurrence. We don't take pictures of ourselves going to work or to school, doing the everyday things.

On days off that used to be rare but are all to plentiful in this summer of recession, we choose the river: blowing up a raft (loosening the life vest straps another inch each week) and going through the motions to travel three miles on water with our children and friends on Class II riffles. We are always different at the end than we were at the beginning, always glad we made the effort, took the time.

Because there is an inexplicable magic to a river. And it takes my breath away each and every day I spend in it, next to it, on it. The kids and I do shuttles three or four times a week and it's inevitable that we wind up in the river each time. Usually we plan for it, wearing swimsuits to take-out and following the winding down of summer through the waning depth of the reservoir, each day a steeper and longer climb down to the water. Sometimes it's a surprise on a morning shuttle: its still cool when we leave the house and by the time the boats are blown up and the safety talk is happening, we're at least partially immersed. 

Camp Lotus is our favorite, of course, our second home. The kids have learned to swim on the shallow banks there, moving gradually into the current whose power they know to respect. At the end of a day I show up on it's banks tired and hot and all too often grouchy and am rebirthed instantly each time I jump in as it washes away the heat, the exhaustion, the stress and leaves me cooled down and blissed out and back in the moment. The joy floods back into my consciousness and I am grateful and awestruck at what an amazing place I live in, how lucky my children are to have these summers of  raw bliss, of endless fun with friends making sand castles, imagining and playing out great characters and stories, and swimming in water that is theirs only for a moment before rushing on. 

"Night and day the river flows. If time is the mind of space, the River is the soul of the desert. Brave boatmen come, they go, they die, the voyage flows on forever. We are all canyoneers. We are all passengers on this little mossy ship, this delicate dory sailing round the sun that humans call the earth. Joy, shipmates, joy." Edward Abbey, The Hidden Canyon - A River Journey

The Heart Outside Your Body

We live in this fabulous oasis of a community: the river is the heart of it, flowing straight through the middle: we have friends on both sides and with all it's twists and turns and bridges, it's only from the river you really get an idea of the lay of the land. Parcels are generally five acre minimums, close enough to feel neighborly but not crowded and so it feels wild - especially with campgrounds and nature reserves and amazing walking, biking and hiking trails on Conservancy dedicated land patchworked through. There are tangles of wildflowers and trees, wild animals and wild locals and it's a place so special thousands of tourists visit each year. It's an amazing place to raise a child.

And a terrible place to lose one.

Even prefacing this with the fact that there is a happy ending can't eliminate the knife-in-stomach fear for the parents I tell it to - maybe it's the fact that they can so easily transpose their own child into the story, that because of how tight knit (despite the five acre parcels) we are, they know me or my daughter well enough to feel what we felt.

There is a beautiful campground across the river and down a few miles from where we have our river company. One of our groups was camping there and so we were there for two nights and two mornings cooking dinner and breakfast. A simple path skirts the campground from upper parking lot to the campsites to the river access to the outdoor kitchen and dining area. Probably an eighth of a mile in total. The property bordering it upstream is a lovely local hiking area with a simple 1.1 mile trail that meanders along the river for a few hundred yards. The whole area is easily identifiable as former mining territory with rock tailings piled into meandering raised beds easily construed as paths. Animals or humans have carved more definable paths into the piles and the possible diversions for exploration are endless. Especially for a curious six year-old. On the first night, Jordan and Sawyer meandered down a path together and were just identifying that they were indeed lost when Tom found them. We had a good talk about being lost and what to do and not do, and there seemed to have been just enough of and edge to the experience to keep them wary of future wanderings. But Hansel and Gretel left out the part about what happens when there's the roiling emotions of a six year old in transition involved.

Two mornings later we were back and having refereed a fight about a dandelion that came out to Sawyer's benefit, my daughter was sulking and gave only a pouty nod to my "breakfast in five minutes" guideline. Eight minutes later I wandered the trail while nibbling a piece of cantaloupe, fully expecting her to appear and join me in a quick resolution of her emotions on the walk back to breakfast. On round two I made a wider loop, beginning to foray onto the potential trailheads, and increasing quite noticeably the volume of my calls despite the early hour. Round three I picked up Sawyer, now long done with his breakfast and asked him to show me the "secret hiding place" they'd discovered in case she was silently ignoring my calls. (I'm thinking of surgically attaching a GPS unit to the poor child. It wasn't a helpful endeavor and we both have poison oak in spots.) We made it all the way to the adjacent hiking trail and knowing he wasn't going to manage the one mile loop with any speed I was bringing him back and intending to go back for round four, the now worried guides joining in the search. Suddenly some one called "Here she is, Heather."

Running up the road, I found my crying daughter attached to the hand of a lovely twenty-something woman, blond and athletic and looking quite eerily the picture of who my daughter could be in another fifteen years. She had indeed found her on the adjacent trail. "She was sobbing," said the angelic young woman in running shoes and shorts, "she was so sad It made me tear up. But at least she knew where she was supposed to be so I walked her back here." There were tears in the poor woman's eyes and after hugging Jordan I shook her hand and then enveloped her in a hug. She had rescued my daughter, and even in her strong and able and youthful invincibility she connected so clearly to that feeling of loss and of being lost that I felt a ping of sadness for her, thinking already she could see through to this side of parenthood: the possibility of loss. Or maybe it was her empathy for Jordan that caused her tears, a connectedness still to childhood - she was a perfect figure to bridge mother and daughter, whatever her experience.


Never have my feelings been so conflicted about my daughter and what to show her. But her fear was palpable enough. I don't have to write what I said: its the same script any parent would have for a found child, the same one for when my mother found my sister who had lost herself purposefully at about the same age in our living room curtains, more terrified to give herself up to the crime of which I'd promised to tattle on her for than to answer the calls of my mother. When the police cars with their flashing lights showed up, her eyes grew wider and her confusion greater: were they there to punish her for her crime or to help to find her? I can see the confusion now in my mother's eyes, the flood of relief and the anger: I love you so much I could kill you for scaring me so with the potential of your loss.

The morning didn't turn magically into one of seamless redemption - clearly I'm no Ma Ingalls. My frayed nerves and the over-tiredness of both my children translated into an escalation of emotion. After a fight between the two of them over a cookie in the Camp Lotus store brought us to a pinnacle, I called my own mother to confess my sore throat from yelling at my children. And got to feel her fear and pain mirroring my own: after all, she loves my daughter, and she knows me now as both a mother and a daughter. I'm so filled with gratitude she's there for me to talk to. At these moments I so clearly still need a mama of my own.

These are the times when you connect with the comment "I aged five years in that moment," and yet you swear to yourself that you will never die of old age (no matter how quickly they cause it) or anything else: after all, you have to stick around for the rest of their lives to protect them. Raising children seems such a delicate balance: loving them so much you never want them out of your sight (much less your house), and at the same time allowing them the independence and strength to become their own person. Likely one who will be driven crazy by you just as much as they drive you crazy and so you will want them to fly on their independent wings as wonderfully high as they possibly can.

After just a few weeks of being a mother, I was walking bleary-eyed and in shock around my small cabin and picked up a tiny book on motherhood someone had attached to a gift. This small quote brought me to my knees in its profundity even at that stage: "Making the decision to have a child - it's momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body." - Elizabeth Stone

Growing From Seed

My true nature as an annoying optimist is never more apparent than when I am in the garden. Given the potential for frustration, it is amazing (my husband might have another name for it) that I continue to try. But there is no better balm for my soul than gardening. Plus, it's one heck of a great place to spend time with the kids. In the glorious rain we actually had this May, the children spent hours getting soggy and absolutely covered in mud, rejoicing in each and every worm they found, diligently pulling up weed after weed, dropping seed after hopeful seed into the finger holes I made, or scattering handfuls like wishes, lined up in careful rows.

Last year was the year of the mole and gopher (no Chinese calendar here, this was a hostile takeover). Tom, either in defeat or what I'd rather see as undaunted support built me eight gorgeous raised beds this winter and spring. We have a lovely harvest of onions in our pantry now, and seedlings popping up in every one, unthreatened by burrowing rodents. In all that garden space still left, however, are three rows of corn, an archway of peas, many rows of cutting flowers, and the cabbage, broccoli and chard left over from the winter plantings. (One less corn plant as of yesterday, actually, and one new gopher hole. I'm thinking of not feeding the cats for a few weeks to make them a little more inspired.)

This year we've had the most unbelievable harvests of strawberries - at least a pint a day, and those are what make it into the baskets. My children are pink-lipped and finger tipped and thriving on extra vitamin C. But two days ago while picking, we noticed an infestation of black beetles on a plant. And a new war was waged. Sawyer joined me in the garden yesterday while Jordan was at school, dressed in his latest uniform of shorts and cowboy boots, and armed with a squirt bottle of soapy water. For thirty minutes he diligently and thoroughly sprayed every strawberry plant. And then last night the skies opened and washed clean each and every leaf. So we'll see who comes back. But, to my great joy, my children love being in the garden with me, and I love not having my iPod on, hearing instead the tinkling noises of their words and laughter, the exclamations of excitement, the sounds of their little hoes pinging off the rock hard dirt.

On the way back into the house yesterday, Sawyer called out from ten feet back, "Is this the same snake from before?" and I turned to see him holding a small, curved unmistakably snake body, definitely not the 3 foot long roadkill garter snake brought onto the property and enjoyed by the kids by the previous week. "Sawyer, put down the snake and step away while mama sees what kind it is, okay?" Running, keeping the fear out of my voice. It's a half of a snake, a garter again, it's head devoured either by a cat or the mower. As we walk towards the house together, Sawyer says "The snake is a little bit sad because it doesn't have a head anymore. But it's okay because we still love it." My children often take my breath away with examples of their kind and nurturing hearts. True gardeners from their souls on up.

The Voices In My Head

I am a podcast junkie. A truth which is not borne out by the fact that I haven't listened to most of my favorite ones in months. Just listening to NPR in the mornings has become an exercise in futility, much of that due to a certain three year old who has rediscovered the word "why", and the fact that no matter how silent it might be in the car with each child happily engaged in their own activity, the minute I answer the phone (on bluetooth, of course!) or turn on the radio, I am beseiged by a barrage of questions or the sudden need for my immediatel inclusion in whatever game of pretend is the flavor of the day. So I try to connect with a more erudite outside world via podcast when I am folding laundry at 10 pm or weeding the garden at 7am. But all too often lately there's a lot of competition going on even inside my own head for the direct attention of whoever it is who's hand is on the steering wheel.

There's the mama voice that frets over whether that cough is worsening, whether we're doing too many activities or too few, whether there are enough playdates, too much car time, and especially whether or not particular behavioral issues stem directly from my own personal character flaws. 

There's the noise about money and work and employment and health insurance and IRA's and 529's and car repairs and kids shoes. 

Even the latent actress in me occasionally makes her presence known, stamping her foot and asking petulantly when it's going to be HER turn again. 

The blog writer and poet and story author provides a constant background monologue, replete with snarky and hilarious comments but rarely breaking surface at the right time to make contact with me when I'm in front of the keyboard with enough energy to write it all down.

There's the massage therapist, the raft company owner, the daughter, sister, friend - oh, and the wife, each with their issues, concerns, responsibilities and desires that need addressing. And I desperately want to give each my full and undivided attention, but generally I can't find it anywhere. It seems irrevocably fractured. 

Strangest of all for me is that fact that there is actually, really, another person living inside of me. Not just close to me or next to me but INSIDE. And it's the most silent one of all. This person is with me all day every day and I know the least about him than anyone else in my world. It really is an amazing act of faith.  We didn't do any of the testing available to check his chromosomes or terrify us with things that may or may not be wrong with him - we did an ultrasound that we felt would tell us adequately if he had anything drastically wrong enough so as to be visible.

 So there he is - inside of me - kicking the small hands of Jordan as she feels for his movements before falling asleep each night, receiving the kisses Sawyer bestows regularly on my belly. There is the voice inside my head that frets about what he might or might not be like, twinned with the delicious anticipation of his arrival and how lucky he will be to have Jordan and Sawyer as his siblings. Tom makes lists of potential names for him and his smile every time he looks at my belly is all the reassurance I need that whatever joys or challenges this person presents, we'll face them together.

My mind can seem so fractured sometimes as to make that little core of me feel crowded out by all the simultaneous conversations. But those few times on trips that I have had a longer stretch of time to myself, I find that it can be the silence itself that is deafening: it's the chorus of my family (and the voices) that lets me know where - and who - I am.

Into (and Quickly Out of) The Deep

You always hear the stories about how some kid sees a poop lying on the bottom of a pool (the Babe Ruth candybar in Caddyshack scene comes to mind) or finds one floating on the surface and quicker than the beach evac when the first shark is seen in JAWS, the pool is cleared, people screaming in horror as they flee.

But you never think it's going to be your child who does the deed. 

Jordan is starting her third year on the Dry Diggins Dolphins swim team. And in the second week of practice every year, there's a BBQ picnic/family swim welcome party. The city pool is opened to all Dolphins swimmers (4 yrs old to 18 yrs old so we are talking a hell of a lot of people) - and their families. 

Sawyer has fallen in love with swimming lately, and was so excited to swim in the pool Jordan gets to be in three days a week. So excited, in fact, that he didn't want to get out of the pool when he first felt the urge to poop. Tom and I were chatting as he "rested" on the submerged pool steps, and suddenly he was next to Tom, urgently pulling on his arm and saying "I have to poop bad" and nearly crying, and as our eyes met and Tom swooped him up, he emitted a little cry and a cloud of brown swooshed from under the too-big legs of his little shortie wetsuit, clouding the turquoise water. A first time for everything.

It was already a bit of a painful event for me - putting on my bikini (a regular suit sure as heck doesn't fit my 5 months pregnant belly) and walking past a hundred and fifty people and into the pool. Then I got to try and be discreet about heading to the nearest teenage lifeguard (about 6 feet away) and telling her my son had just created a vast toxic wasteland out of what was a moment earlier a major fun zone complete with twisting water slide and relay races and chock full of happy, jubilant children of all ages. Nothing discreet about how she immediately brought her whistle to her pouty teenage lips, blew for all she was worth and yelled something like "Poop in the pool! Everyone out!" Ten teenage lifegaurds effectively evac'd the pool in moments whereupon everyone cast their eyes about for the culprit who was, at that moment, showering in the men's room with his papa and crying about wanting to get back to swimming. 

It takes thirty minutes to effectively reach chlorine levels sufficient to kill all fecal borne microbes (and blind small children and bleach all swimsuits). And thirty minutes for us to pack up, peel a 6 yr old reluctantly from where she has plastered herself happily against the still-warm pool deck concrete on her belly next to another six year old girl and be more than halfway home on the windy foothill roads with two tired children in tow, tiny swimming pool in my body still occupied by the lone swimmer there. 

On the way out a couple friends jokingly asked us something like "Jeez, haven't you taught your kids the right place to go?" And Tom and I, lacking the ability to lie, sheepishly confessed that it was indeed one of our children who had cleared the pool. Mortified, the woman stuttered that she was trying to be funny. "Oh, sadly it is funny," I said. "Or it will be in a few years." We can only hope that Sawyer's ability to get people to move en masse in years to come will come from his motivating them in some social or political cause. He seems to have the necessary charisma. Just needs a little work on his impetus.

The Newest Addition to the Community

Labor is a tricky thing - unless you've scheduled a c-section, you have no idea how long it's going to take. Jordan took forever and a day, the only thing that kept Sawyer longer than two hours was the tricky positioning he switched to midway through. So I had no idea how long I had to get to Seattle. My heart was already there from the moment she called. Luckily labor wasn't rolling but excitement was keeping her awake and she hit the internet to find me a flight - miracle of miracles the cheapest and fastest was just down the road, leaving from the Eureka Airport in two hours. Only, the Eureka Airport isn't in Eureka, travelers: be warned. Although the ticket and the website say Eureka, the airport you want is the one you passed twenty minutes earlier in Arcata, not down here on this desolate strip of bare earth that sports one dirt landing strip on a desolate military base. And there are no online reservations if it's less than six hours 'til your plane leaves. 

Finally arriving at the airport with pajama clad children and a trailer and smelling of campfire, I leapt from the truck and found disappointment - the flight to Oakland was available, but nothing was available any longer from Oakland to Seattle. Oh, and getting just to Oakland was $600 instead of to Seattle for $170. Luckily, the airport had a good internet connection. This being spring break, you could literally watch seats on flights disappear off internet reservation sites, so I booked a Sac to Seattle flight leaving in seven hours. The Trinity alps and I5 ahead of us, it was going to be tight: a turtle carrying it's shell moves slowly, and carrying our little home away from home slowed us down as well. 

Thanks to a portable DVD player, wonderful children, a fantastic driver of a husband, free coffee at the gas station an hour into the mountains, and pb&j's made on my lap, we made it exactly an hour before departure. I ran the kids up and down the escalators five times each way and they headed for home. It was so hard to say goodbye having already robbed them of their last day of the road trip, but since TOm makes every day a vacation for them, I didn't feel too bad. 

My mother had arrived before me and my brother Matt in Seattle was acting as birthing partner for Allison. Her doula Lindsay was there. Matt's partner Scott picked me up at the airport and we headed straight for the hospital. Allison looked like a million bucks - her contractions began in earnest a few hours after her acupuncture appointment at 12. She was her usual, graceful, calm, smiling self, giving herself totally to the contractions and laughing between them. Things started to pick up and the doctor checked her after a half an hour of particularly strong ones. "Five", she said and although Allison looked somewhat disappointed, five to me sounded right on. Things were happening. She laid on the bed and gave in to the contractions and some rest while one person massaged each of her hands and feet. After a while she got up to go to the bathroom.  And then things really happened. I'm pretty sure it was right around then that the little one decided on a major position shift and all of a sudden Allison had tunnel vision. Ah, back labor. Not recognized by the doctor until she was an hour into pushing, the entire experience had shifted. 

My mother hadn't particularly enjoyed watching me give birth (nor had she planned on it - the long labor lasting through the eighteen hour drive and full night's sleep somewhere on the AZ/CA border), and here she was again. And thirty nine years to the day after giving birth to both of us in the hospital. And this time I understood, having a daughter I didn't like to see in pain and witnessing my sister in so much pain as well. But there we all were. Midnight as the day slipped into our birthday, that amazingly thin veil between life and death that can only ever be felt at a birth. 

It's completely wrong to have to go through labor, two hours of pushing AND a c-section. Honestly, one or the other should suffice, thank you very much. But no, Allison got the double whammy. And knocked out totally to boot thanks to the one in 20,000 insufficient spinal. But at 2:41 I was an aunt to one of my own siblings' children - finally! The nurses brought him out and there he was, evidence of his failed attempt at a sideways entrance into the world evidenced by the jaunty angle of his typical newborn's conehead.

Being knocked out, my mom took Allison duty while my brother left for a shower and change of clothes, and I got to hold my perfect little nephew for two hours while she woke up. Thank goodness we're identical twins - he looked straight up into a face identical to his mom's, and full of love. Those two hours were incredibly special and I sang to him, told him about his journey, his dad, all the amazing things that had finally brought him here to this place. At a quarter to five they wheeled a groggy Allison into the room and she got to hold and nurse her son. I have no idea how she made it on the hour of sleep we got between 6 and 7, but that was the hour that the first nurse came happily charging into the room to inspect and measure and test and poke and prod. It's a bit vague, what happened over the next 24 hours although I know I got to hold the little one when Allison was sleeping and I left for a shower and a change of clothes, shocked at how powerfully I still smelled of campfire smoke as it rolled off of me in waves of  soap and water. And I know we looked a bit like zombies, my mother and I, as we ate a delicious dinner that night.

A C-section really is just a brutal experience, especially when for the next few weeks you have to sit up every couple of hours to nurse. It was easy for me to get up to help the next two nights in the hospital, to prop pillows and fill water glasses and to sleep with my nephew when I got the chance. So sweet to sleep next to him in the huge bed he shared with his mama and smell his sweet milky breath and lift his small body into his mama's arms. And it felt cruel of me to leave, except that I left them with the lady that had managed to get us to adulthood. I am amazed by the entire journey Allison took in getting Hayes Ryan Brooks into this world. From the years of putting off conception in order to care for her husband and her final leap into doing it instead of waiting, to losing her husband just when the tiniest bit of a bump was beginning to show at ten weeks, to going through all the mourning, the therapy, the months of working and working and working while growing this being inside of her.

And she amazed me with the birth, how perfectly she progressed, how strong she was through all of it, and how she clearly processed and made peace with the c-section and the struggle with it all in the days afterward. She is so truly the embodiment of grace, and her joy in her son is so radiant and apparent. 

Welcome little miracle. Your aunt loves you.

Spring Broke - Part Two

It must be the hugeness of the trees that the waves and beaches of Humboldt County feel they have to meet in size and scope. It's a breathtaking place to be - look out one window of the car and you're staring at the powerful vastness of the Pacific, then turn your head the other direction and it's the redwood forests, rolling green hillsides, endless lagoons that roll past your living video screen. Turn your head a little further and there are the kids in the backseat: Sawyer just about to hurl and Jordan halfway through her eleventh chapter book of the trip.

After breakfast we headed a little ways North into the Redwood National Forest and Humboldt State Forests for a peek around. We came first to a perfect mile long loop at the Ladybird Johnson Memorial Grove. Turns out Nixon actually did some good in his time as president, responding to the new environmental awareness of his constituents and delegating protected areas of wilderness. This lovely grove dedicated to Ladybird Johnson's environmental work was a perfect path for our two sprites with plenty of huge trees to walk into, hiding places, wildflowers, and twists and turns. It was also a morning of sibling rivalry and dueling, but with plenty of distractions to keep the parents sane.

It is a stunning sight, those trees, and confounding to think how they were possibly logged before there were cars - or helicopters or cranes or logging trucks. Human resourcefulness is an amazing thing, and somewhat staggering as well: how quickly we could remove a forest that took centuries to grow. Jordan and now Sawyer are still deeply engrossed in games of "pretend" and here they were little bears we were adopting. Occasionally JOrdan will want to play "family" (which is kind of hilarious - like what are we doing when we're NOT playing family?), the great part of which is that we get to pick not only our own names but also our own ages. TOm's and my profound enthusiasm for this element of the game has caused Jordan to instill a new rule: that we chose a number as the parents that is greater than twenty. Which still gives Tom a bit too great of a twinkle in his eye when he hears me say "My name is Julianna and I am 23." He's got a great knack for coming up with names that crack me up. Magellan and Ferdinand and Butch and the like.  

Renamed, we left our little grove of fantasy and headed to Redwood Creek at the park entrance that boasted a trail and a lovely picnic spot. While the three of them had lunch I ran the trail that led to the "Creek" - this time of year a gorgeous steel colored river we hear is a perfect two day Class II family trip. The trail continued across the river, but the seasonal bridge had not yet been erected and so I ran up the rocky beach and dreamed of another family trip within a family trip: just me and Butch and Posey and Diamond, a pair of twenty-something parents on an idyllic float trip in spring down a gorgeous river. 

Tom ran the trail after I returned and after accidentally swatting each other in the head with the plastic baseball bats still loaded in the truck bed, we decided to head toward the beaches once again, having promised the kids another look at the Camel Rock caves. We took a detour down another park road and wound through dense wet forest and past signs informing us when we were entering and exiting tsunami safety zones. We wound up at more serene and endless beaches - gorgeous waves patiently waiting to crash to shore, surferless. Going back (and hitting every puddle we could find along the way), we stopped and marveled at the elk - deer aren't quite big enough for Humboldt, it's gotta be elk. The weather on our trip was completely idyllic - the kind of year-round weather I'd choose to live in, if it existed - sunny and warm, but not hot, just enough to keep the plants green instead of brown - throw in a weekly rainstorm and I'd be thrilled. 

It's a long rock and cut earth staircase down to Camel Rock beach, giving you a feeling of entering another world. We spread our blanket (kind of a token move since no one ever sits in this family) twenty feet from the incoming waves and as Tom stared at the surfers, the kids quickly stripped off their clothes and hit the tide pools. We brought sand toys, but I am always amazed at how quickly a game or another reality is created by the kids - they work so hard, so faithfully on whatever it is they are creating or building and take no notice of us or anyone else around. Their abandonment of our world and escape into their own reality is so complete, and clearly so freeing.

I walked up the beach to check a cache of rocks rolled in on a high surf and discovered the rotting carcass of a whale along the way. As we were edging toward five o'clock the kids wanted to check it out and were non-plussed by the discovery. Jordan is definitely creating a clear internal scorecard of things that are gross vs. things that are not. We got back to our blanket just in time for a local woman dashing past to let us know an incoming wave was a doozy and we'd best relocate before it hit - sure enough, we lifted our belongings just in time to be ankle deep in the rising surf.

Up top, Tom decided to bike back up to our campground. The kids and I drove and went straight into one of those delicious campground showers where the quarters may as well be gold pieces for the perfect warmth and cleanliness the shower provides. I think we spent $.75 for a blissful ten minutes of decadent warmth and cleanliness and were amazed when we emerged to find Tom already back and making dinner. 

Since it was late, we decided to put off the dutch oven cake for one more night. Tom put the kiddos to bed without their latest installment of the story and I headed to the beach for a walk with Austin. It was a gorgeous night, such a beautiful place and I was wary of the quick rising surf from earlier in the day, so the single rogue wave that came up and stole the clothes and shoes of the teenagers also at the beach didn't get me - the lack of light did. I couldn't find my shoes when I was ready to walk back to the campground and I had two routes available: the trail by the lagoon which involved a bit of climbing through and over tangled tree roots and branches, or on the road. I chose the road and a third of the way there was wrapping my feet in my t-shirts. The teenagers ahead of me were pretty verbal with their exclamations of pain due to thorns on the side of the road and rough pavement on the road itself. Pretty weak feet for a girl who was known for going shoeless in highschool. We were debating whether to stay at the campground for one more night or to start to head back and spend a night somewhere between where we were and Lotus - such a bewilderingly free feeling to have time and ability and no internal compass - I wanted to go everywhere and not just for a night, but we were also in a pretty heavenly place and so why leave? These are the good dilemmas, the standing in a train station with an open ticket and a board full of available destinations. My version of a candy store. 

The next morning the kids started wiggling early and just when I'd convinced them to try to sleep a bit longer, my phone rang at 6:30 and I knew immediately: Allison's baby was on it's way! Before I'd even finished the conversation, Tom was out the door and packing up camp. Allison's water had broken at 2:30 am and although contractions hadn't really started, we knew her doc would want the baby out within 24 hours. So now, we had a new train station dilemma: which airport? By 7:30, the kiddos (still in their jammies) were in their car seats and we were headed down the highway once again.