Careful What You Wish For

Today In Alaska

Be Careful What You Wish For

My younger sister and I used to talk a lot about going together on a whale watching tour in Alaska. It seemed the ultimate in adventure and really awesome because of the whales. After all, I’d read Moby Dick and (horrified by the harpooning) fallen for the Cetacea with all of a Free Willy type of love, wanting to see with my own eyes the giant ocean creatures who could sing heartrending notes like underwater operatic tenors. 

As we dreamed big with no money in our pockets and the future somewhere ahead of us just out of reach, Michaela’s and my phones calls faded into years.

Then I went off to Peru and then ever-ever onward and she moved away to Mexico.

We didn’t exactly forget about our dream, but we backburnered it. Also, we began to live our lives as a day to day adventure as best we could. She found whales and dolphins in Mexico and I found moose and other wild things out in the wilderness.

But, occasionally, I still had Alaska on my mind.

This past winter, my mom and I were talking about my travels and where I’d yet like to go. Alaska came up in my list.

A few days later, as if spoken into existence because of my conversation with my mother, I found an ad in the Caretaker’s Gazette for a summer work exchange in, of all places, Alaska. With nothing to lose, I shot off an email. And then soon after that found myself locked in to a summer gig.

Oh lord, work. Now what have I done?

I’d wished for Alaska and gotten it. And while that was a magic of its own, the work (somewhat unspecific in scope and with a number of hours to work in exchange for a place to stay before I get paid) daunted me.

“Are you excited about Alaska?” my grandmother asked as the days sped me forward toward my travel day.

“Yes,” I’d said, but I hadn’t been sure if I was. Whale watching was one thing, work was another.

There’s a quote by Russell Baker in which he says, “The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn’t require any.”

While my suspicion about what writing requires has been doused by the reality of trying to make my writing good (and then better)(can suspicion be doused?), I had latched on to the part of the quote about not being fit for real work—mostly because I was tired of unfulfilling hours of work for other people. It wasn’t that I was lazy, not exactly, I simply realized my own limitations and desires. Also, I wanted to do my own thing. I liked my freedom.

Unfortunately, as of yet, I cannot live on dreams (or writing) alone.

But I can choose where I go and what I do. In this life that’s a lot.

For now, I’m lucky enough to be able to write half the year in the relative solitude of the wilderness and work out in the world in an attempt to gain money the other half.

Which has brought me to Alaska.

And though my sister isn’t here with me and though I’ve yet to see whales, I have the summer ahead of me to discover what this territory is all about. I’ve made it and here I am.

Hello, Alaska.

That Girl and Her Sister in Paris

That Girl and Her Sister

Blogs from Across the Pond

Paris

Paris. 

 
In our last European city together, Jesse and I spend a week, a lifetime, and not nearly long enough in Paris. It’s fall in France. Golden leaves flitter over the walkways and across the streets, tumble down from branches to sit on the grass of the gardens.

Moody clouds press against the sky. On our first morning there, fog hides the top of the Eiffel Tower from our view giving the monument and the city a misty, magical feel.

As we make our way through the Metro tunnels from one line to the other heading to the little apartment we’ve rented for the week, a woman sings into a tinny microphone to an accompanying tune.

“She’s singing Jean Jacques Goldman,” I say, stopping in my tracks as I recognize the French rock n’ roll star’s song Comme Toi. When we were young, our family and our friends’ family hosted French exchange students who then introduced us to the popular J.J. Goldman. Loving French ‘80s rock ‘n roll as a child and then a teenager, I’d never imagined that one day I’d be here listening to the words I’ve known for so many years fill the subway tunnel and carry on with me even after the sounds fade from our hearing as we move on and away.

Jean Jacques Goldman! We really are in Paris.

Over the week, Jesse and I visit many of the main Parisian sites. We stand in line for three hours to get into the Louvre where we see the Mona Lisa and (to my great surprise and joy) the Nike of Samothrace among other wonders by da Vinci, Fra Angelico, Bellini, Luini, Raphael. Many of the paintings and painters I’d learned about in art history I’m seeing with my own eyes. And it’s crowded and busy and overwhelming and wonderful.

The next day, we stand in line again and eventually get to the Eiffel Tower’s summit from where we gaze down upon all of Paris. We drink espressos from the second level immersed in our own lofty thoughts.

Another day, we climb up all the stairs of Notre Dame’s North Tower where we make friends with gargoyles and meet Quasimodo’s bell.

Later on, with the song in our heads, we venture down the busy Champs-Élysées without shopping and then go stare at the Arche de Triomphe.

Yet another day, we descend into the Sewers of Paris with their Jean Valjean fame, excited as children to peer down at the murky water, twisting pipes, and covering grates, remembering Hugo’s Les Miserables and the movies made after his story which we’d seen both as children and adults. As I lean over a railing, I imagine Jean Valjean carrying the wounded body of his enemy through the dirty, cloying sewage to safety, and am glad I don’t have to do the same.

In between the waiting in lines and the seeing of sites, we stop off at cafés for drinks and desserts. We wander along the Seine. Pass by museums and churches and even the apartment where Marie Curie lived for a time. We shop for fruit at our local corner store. We even take a daytrip to Versailles.

Every morning but one (when we have French Toast in France at a little restaurant around the corner from the Eiffel Tower), Jesse and I eat our breakfasts at the café on the street below our apartment where we’re waited on by the Happiest Waiter in the World. Each morning, he greets us with a cheerful “Bonjour!”

“Bonjour!” we reply.

 “Ҫa va?” Jesse asks, her French better than mine (mine is very rudimentary consisting mostly of phrases from the French Albums we listened to as children. “Bonjour, Helen” “Bonjour, Maman.” and then a long exchange about it being late and time to get up which I can still recite even if I can’t spell the French correctly).  

 “Ҫa va bien. How could I not be?” the Happiest Waiter in the World says, a morning person who truly loves morning. “The usual?” he asks going back toward the kitchen. His smile has enough energy to light up a street. His joy at living is nearly better than the caffeine in our cappuccinos for waking us up.

He’s the spirit of Paris, this waiter. The joie de vivre. Élan. The expression of emotion that neither Jesse nor I quite know how to voice for ourselves. And now, why should we when we have the Happiest Waiter in the World to do it for us?

All in all, it’s fiction that brings Paris to life for me. The connections between Victor Hugo’s work and the city, and then to the more recent books I’ve found.

More than anything else I’ve seen or loved here, I fall most in love with the river of Paris.

This is in part by its own merit and partly because I’m taken by a fictional character who also loves the Seine. For a number of years now I’ve been reading the French author Fred Vargas’s Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg series, waiting eagerly for each new book to come across the ocean, translated to English from the French.   

From book to book, Adamsberg, a quirky, flawed, intuitive rather than practical Commissaire of the Serious Crimes Unit in Paris, leads his team to solving the tricky murders that his city suffers under. When he needs to get away from the bustle of the station he goes for long walks along the Seine and it’s there by the changing colors of the water that he often gets his breakthroughs.

In one book, the mystery is solved in part by a packet of sugar and the apple brandy Calvados which the characters drink throughout the story. One night, blending the real Paris to the Paris I’d read about, I order a Calva while Jesse gets a dessert. My drink is served on a small saucer with an accompanying sugar cube and I’m thrilled by this. With the magic of fiction and reality swirling like the waters of the Seine around us, we sit outside of our café (waited on by someone who is not the Happiest Waiter in the World) and enjoy the night air. Jesse reads and I people watch.  

Following in his fictional footsteps with more than liquor, on more than one day we wander a long path along the river, and as we go, I think, “This is where Adamsberg walked. This is what he saw. This is where he was.” And the fiction comes alive, the stories take on a more solid reality. The books and characters and arrondissements come to life. And isn’t that the power of fiction, the power of place?

On our last day in Paris, Jesse and I take the Metro to the far end of the line and then trace our way back through the city along the Seine. Stopping occasionally to eat, to get a latte from a charming café with outdoor seating, to have a glass of wine and a snack, and to sit on the stairs and ledges along the river to watch the water move. Jesse reads. I sit and muse.

Was there ever a more perfect time than now? Was there ever a more perfect place than here? The answer is no. Not when I live in the moment. Not when I’m here feeling so full I could cry, feeling bittersweet that this is my last full day in Paris, trying not to remember that. In only a handful of hours, Jesse and I will part ways. I’ll head off to the airport and back to the states and she’ll stay at the apartment one last night before taking a morning train to Brussels. We’ve been together, working over the summer and here on our trip, for five months and this parting is strange and disconcerting. We’ve grown accustomed to looking over our shoulders to make sure we haven’t lost the other as we take trains, subways, and meander down streets. We’ve come to rely on our separate strengths. Now what will we do? 

I don’t think about that here by the Seine as the clouds move and the water slips on by. I don’t think about that as I add this day, this week, this city to my growing list of perfect days, weeks, and cities. With my feet dangling over the water, thinking about real life and fiction, I sit there in companionable silence with my sister for a little while longer, feeling so lucky to be alive.

Behind us, the Eiffel Tower stands tall against the clouds, a silhouette of wonder. The bridge in front of us charms people into walking across it. And a tour boat passing by carries tourists who take pictures of us sitting there like Parisians, like we belong, like this is home.

That Girl and Her Sister in Nantes

That Girl and Her Sister

Blogs from Across the Pond

Nantes

In the dirty port town of Nantes, France we find two of the most whimsical, magical, and mechanical places I’ve ever been. On a Friday, we arrive by train around two in the afternoon and have several hours to wile away before we can check into our apartment. The Nantes Cathedral is only a mile or more from the train station and that’s where we’re headed when we stumble upon Claude Ponti’s Le Jardin Déjante.

On our entry, we’re greeted by the Cloche Pots which are pot chimes that can be made to sing by the turning of a wheel. Jesse turns the wheel and I take pictures while we listen to the singing, chiming ceramic pots.

Surrounded on all sides by a wrought iron gate, and filled so full of grass and trees we forget there’s another world outside, the garden stretches out for miles, maybe, and has a building with tropical plants, a glass-enclosed cart filled with cacti, a bed full of flowers from all over the world, and trees not native to France. With statues, fountains, small forests, rows of blooming flowers, ponds and streams, and delighted children we find ourselves to be quite delighted too. As we make our way down the lane, underneath the giant park bench with giant books and a giant straw hat set on the bench as if left there while the residence giant went to go make some tea, we find a leafy green alcove with funny, painted mushroom heads, and more strangely, the sound of laughter coming from the leaves. La Polymorphiae exactisante it’s called. While disconcerting, a bit fairy, bordering the hysterical, and completely charming, the laughter is also contagious.

Laughing some ourselves, we carry on and from there see the giant, sleeping shrubbery bear. The giant, grinning shrubbery turtle with its shell of red flowers.

Taking a moment to sit on a convenient bench (not a giant one), we shrug our backpacks off our shoulders to catch a break and watch children feed bread to the birds by the lake.

Here, we can touch nature and creativity, whimsy and childishness. It’s exactly the welcome we would have wished for.

We chose to come to Nantes, birthplace of Jules Verne, because of the Isle of the Machines, a place inspired by Jules Verne’s inventiveness, creativity, writing proliferation, and subsequent fame, and which I’d discovered on the internet while coming up with options for our itinerary. And which once we knew about it, we could hardly pass up the chance to visit ourselves.

The next day, after a leisurely morning (on which we make French Press coffee in France!) we head across the road to Les Machines de L’ile.

We stand in line for our tickets and then venture into the side gallery. We’ve been told to pay attention to the time for our Giant Elephant ride starts at 1:00 and the gallery’s ticket does not allow reentry.

The moment we walk through the doors, we’re enchanted by the strange and wonderful.

Because the signs and the tour we eavesdrop upon are in French, I only catch a little bit here and there. But it’s enough. The gallery presents a world of mechanical and natural elements. It proposes a giant tree for people to live on. Transportation from the ground to the top of the tree and back down again is made by ascensors and descensors. The models in this room work and the tour guides elicit volunteers from the crowd to sit in the chairs and rise and descend.

 

Longer travel would be possible by stork. Branch to branch travel by inchworm. Ground travel by mechanized ant.

The idea is creative and beautifully made. All elements of this dream world have been intricately designed, most likely handcrafted, and delightfully painted.

After somewhat reluctantly leaving the gallery, we make it across the park in time to catch our ride on the Giant Elephant. At a snail’s pace it rolls across the Isle, spraying mist from its trunk, bellowing, shaking its giant head, wagging its giant ears, and carrying us all along to our point of disembarkment.

A boy up with us on the elephant calls down to his father and his still infant brother, “Papa! Augustine!” trying to keep their attention the entire trip. When the elephant lets out a wave of misty water, the boy calls down to his father to see if he’d gotten wet. The father pretends to wipe moisture from his face and the boy is sufficiently thrilled.

At some point in the day, one of says, Jesse or I, “It’s wonderful to think that there are people in the world who make things like this. Who dream up things like this. That see such beauty and possibility.”

For Nantes is the dream of an even more imaginative place. One where the machines decorate the parks, the plazas, and the street corners. Where magical gardens stretch between the tramway lines. Where grownups can remember what it was to be child again.

We stay a short time, only a day and a half, but it’s a time whose enchantment I’ll not forget.

For Nantes is imagination and the spectacular dream of what could be, what might be. What can be.