Summer Bliss Interrupted

We deserve kindness

Greetings from the lush green mountains of New Hampshire.

It’s Bike Week up here. The roar of packs of motorcycles is a regular refrain. Thankfully, they don’t impact us all that much. Most of the crowd vacillates between the Lakes Region and North Conway. But now that the rain has ceased, and the temperatures will warm this week, we’ll see more of them coming by the house on the way to the Mount Washington Auto Road.

This is one of the set points of summer. Bike week is a point where summer is announced.

Another is that farmstands will open in full, and our veggies will get fresher and more delicious. Our beloved, heart-essential greens will be plentiful. Huzzah! Huzzah! And we’ll have fewer reasons to go to the grocery stores.

One of the things I miss about traveling through much of the South, Southern Arizona, and along the California Coast and Central Valley is how sweet, ripe, and bursting the fruits are, even in winter and early spring. Northern New England is not the most fruit-friendly spot. Strawberries are finally here. Eventually, peaches will be, too. By midsummer, the good watermelons arrive, but their season is far too brief. Then comes the apples. Depending on the year, blueberries can be plentiful.

By traveling each winter and spring, we have no desire to travel anywhere. We’ve only now reclaimed our quietude. Besides, it is stunning here, so it’s not like we are missing out on anything. We’re smack dab in the middle of vacationland.

With rain every weekend for the past three-plus months, the rivers are flowing nicely. Eventually, the summer will winnow them, and we’ll have to seek out deeper spots for swimming. However, right now, Emily is in heaven two or three times a day.

We’ve made it to our skinny-dipping hole once already. It was bracingly refreshing. I could not help but invoke the words of Seinfeld’s George Costanza, “I was swimming! I was swimming!” (Fans of the show will get this.) I’ve not watched it since the last episode, but it’s an evergreen line all men can relate to.

Our lives become simple each summer. We get up, walk early, return for breakfast, and I’ll write. By late morning, we drop in on Keith and Mike at the post office. They are two of our favorite people and are crucial for an author who prefers staying to himself. In the early afternoon, I read, then return to write and edit. That brings us to our dinner and our last walk of the day.

Last night, I had a moment of gratitude for how basic but fulfilling our lives are and how I am in love with our late evenings. We settle into bed, Sam and Emily with a chew treat, and I with a book and a cup of tea. These rituals are uncomplicated sacraments in the life of a solitary. They are as peaceful as prayer.

Life on the road is constant churning and tumult. It’s thrilling and engrossing, but the complete opposite of who we are.

But this is one of the blessings of travel. We’re forced outside of practiced norms, away from the ordinary, and separated from sweet comfort. Long trips to distant lands lend a particular vulnerability. They force us to learn, adapt, and grow. And when we return home, at any given moment, I can be doing laundry, shaving, cooking, mowing the lawn, washing dishes, and a thought of our trips enters my imagination. And just like that, we are suddenly back on the lip of the Grand Canyon under an infinitude of stars, gliding across the high, firm gypsum dunes of White Sands National Park, among the red rock trails of southern Utah at dawn, or standing among Redwoods, Sequoias, Cottonwoods, and Ponderosa Pines. If we are lucky here in Jackson, we will see a black bear, as we did yesterday on the trail. Yet, the wonders of the wilder beasts of the West are always near when I remember times spent with ravens, javelinas, seals, sea otters, bison, elk, rattlesnakes, and mountain lions.

Fantasy is fertile ground to escape a world getting darker, meaner, and crueler. Due to our travels, the fantastical lands I’ve read about for decades are more than just imaginings; they are memories as real as the breeze that just entered through the window next to my desk.