Read Me: Tales of a Female Nomad, Rita Golden Gelman

An antsy bookstore gift card led me to the travel section one day, where Rita Goldman Gelman’s Tales of a Female Nomad (Three Rivers Press, 2001) caught my eye. It turns out to be a diary of Gelman’s life since her divorce at age 48, when she abandoned a glitzy life among the elite of LA in order to get to know the rest of the world. By smiling often, sampling every food she was offered, and asking everyone she met about their children in a genuinely interested tone, she inserted herself into communities in Mexico, Nicaragua, Israel, New Zealand, and Indonesia. Serendipity is her guide. She typically picks an intriguing country almost at random and flies there on the meager profits of her children’s books (which include such colorful titles as More Spaghetti, I Say! and Stop Those Painters!). She then places herself in the remotest backwater village she can reach and chats with locals until someone invites her to stay in their home. She absorbs the local culture and language from her hosts while helping out with chores (preferably in the kitchen) and giving English lessons. When her visa expires, she moves on.

Most of the people she called friends in her old life believe that her divorce severely traumatized her. They accuse her of running away from the situation, making up for her husband’s withdrawal by insisting on being accepted by everyone else she meets. Or of purposefully removing herself from any possibility of long-term relationships by refusing to settle in one place. Gelman responds that she is not running away from anything, and instead she is running toward something. (Funny, that’s the same response I once gave when someone asked me why in the world, as it were, I was going to spend a year in New Zealand. And I thought I was being so smart, turning around his accusation like that.) Is it so crazy to want to be liked and accepted by strangers? Or to be curious and crave challenges? There are worse ways to deal with curves in the road of life. Gelman chose to go off-roading. Her book’s purpose is to explain how positive a nontraditional lifestyle can be. She hopes to be an inspiration, especially to older, divorced women. They still have a lot of living to do, and they might as well spend it on adventures, new friends, and a renewed sense of helpfulness.

At times, though, Gelman makes her life sound impossibly idyllic. She marches into remote corners of the world, making devoted friends out of whole villages on nothing but a smile. Her determined optimism finds ways to tack happy endings onto even the most revolting bad luck. (She succeeds in turning an ugly bout with a whole-body skin infection into a beautiful snake-shedding-skin allegory.) Plus, to make her modest ends meet, she gets to be a writer. She conducts research simply by living. She rarely admits to a wistful thought. But there must be something undesirable about her life. How does she handle so many long-distance relationships, particularly with her parents and children? Does her bank account ever run threateningly low? Does she ever spend five minutes passionately hating children’s books before settling down to finish a story about an exuberantly grinning monkey dressed in a floppy red hat and a gold necklace? How does she plan on living when she’s 90? Does she ever get antsy at the keyboard like I do, itching to go out and collect more neat experiences instead of sequestering herself away to write about the past? Does she ever wish that her life was even a teeny bit different? Her book is an advertisement describing the absence of regret in her nomadic life, a kind of so-there letter to her baffled former friends. But it sometimes sounds as exaggerated as the second half of a drug commercial, after the actress has gulped down her pills and now is running for president. It’s a premeditated strategy for encouraging potential nomads, but if I were seriously considering selling my silverware for a ticket to Borneo, I might want to prepare for the tough parts as well as look forward to the wonderful ones. (Then again, mystery is part of the adventure... Still, the book remains unbalanced.)

If her own life is idyllic, the lives of the people she visits are less satisfying. She prefers the company of indigenous communities whose lives are entwined with tradition. Her hosts are often relatively poor and live in developing countries. Gelman struggles to balance two noble goals: on one hand, wanting to help improve her friends’ lives, and on the other, respecting traditions which are often wonderful but sometimes troublesome. She strives to accept new cultural frames and to see life through the eyes of the locals. When she sees one host family throw their food wrappers to the wind during a roadside picnic, she resists her urge to find a garbage can for her own litter, forcing herself not to judge their actions by the standards of the culture she grew up in. But what would you do if you watched your drunken host beat his wife, knowing that it was “culturally acceptable?” (Acceptable by whom, I wonder?) What would you do if you recognized a great artistic talent in a kid whose destiny it is to wash windows in the family woodcarving gallery? Gelman gave this kid a carving kit, with which he created inspired sculptures, but she stopped short of asking the family to give him time off to develop his talent, fearing that her request would be seen as meddlesome. “Interference” is a slippery concept whose definition slides into that of “helping” without obvious borders, made even more difficult to discern when surrounded by an unfamiliar code of manners and lurking local politics. Fearing that she wouldn’t be able to stop herself from “interfering,” she decided it was time to pack up and continue her journeys. She interprets her urge to interfere as a sign that she has been somewhere long enough, that she has settled into her surroundings enough to feel comfortable passing judgments and suggesting changes. (Then again, maybe she just needs an excuse to keep moving, to feed her addiction to newness.)

After a bit of internet research, I see that there is a small but growing community of older, typically divorced, women travelers. How exciting, and reassuring, to discover a new kind of freedom at an age that we whippersnappers associate with dentures and canes. I almost wish I were 60 right now, so that I could join that crowd, confident with the wisdom of years—and the bank account of years. Or at least a promising work-from-“home” business idea. Sigh, I just hope that a long and boring career from which to launch such a business isn’t a prerequisite for world travel. I wonder how Gelman would advise younger women who are making, instead of remaking, their lives?

Gelman does reach her goal of inspiring potential travelers and showing us how easy and rewarding it is to connect with people who seem, at first, so fundamentally different. Granted, near the middle, her narrative turns into a straight-from-the-diary list that could be entitled “Neat things that happened to me this month:” this is what I cooked on that day, then I flew there, here’s how I found a house, these are the people I went to that ceremony with. Passages that emphasize important events and tie them to Gelman’s life-philosophy become shorter and rarer. But despite my few critiques, I’m ready to hop on a one-way flight to the deepest jungle where no one’s ever heard of English. (Don’t worry, friends and parents, I wouldn’t thrive in Gelman’s shoes. First of all, she can have the tropics, give me a good snowfall. Besides, she repeats that her passion is people, whereas mine is landscapes. Her expertise in chit-chatting opens her doors, literally. I, on the other hand, would head for Nowheresville in order to leave it and go hiking nearby, so I guess I’m still searching for a role model. Still, writing books while hiking around Vatnajökull Glacier sounds sorely tempting.) There is, apparently, more than one way to live a successful and rewarding life.

More Info:
www.ritagoldengelman.com

Other Eye-Catching Titles:
Not So Funny When It Happened (ed. Tim Cahill, Travelers’ Tales 2006)
Madam, Have You Ever Really Been Happy? (Meg Noble Peterson, iUniverse 2005)

Currently on my coffee table:
Tales from Nowhere (ed. Don George, Lonely Planet 2006)

Two Thumbs Up:
Into the Wild (Jon Krakauer, Anchor Books 1996)
Southern Exposure (Chris Duff, Falcon 2003)
Rowing to Latitude: Journeys Along the Arctic’s Edge (Jill Fredston, North Point Press 2001)
A Walk in the Woods (Bill Bryson, Broadway Books 1998)

The Adventures of Home Depot GirlEpisode XXXVYZ: Open Sesame

HDG may not have many outstanding superpowers, but yesterday she did encounter a young man who discovered supernatural abilities of his own. HDG was minding her own business (and not the business’s business, oops) while organizing a file cabinet drawer of owner’s manuals for display models. (It’s a kind of manual graveyard, complete with literally moldering booklets and amputated spare parts, although no one leaves flowers. Not on purpose, anyway. Sometimes, though, a few blooms break off from the potted mums and get trampled to the concrete nearby.)

HDG looked up when she heard the command, in the confident voice of a five-year-old boy, “Open sesame!” There he was, standing directly before the automatic door behind HDG, arms half-raised in a stance of power, but not quite close enough to trigger the door’s sensor. He tried his command again, arms a little higher, channeling the sorcerer’s apprentice. HDG couldn’t help herself. She stepped casually backward into the sensor’s range, triggering the door to open. The kid was delighted. He seemed to genuinely believe that he had developed the power to open doors using speech alone. He skipped back to his mom to report his success, grinning and giggling. To HDG’s disappointment (but with no apparent decrease in the kid’s enthusiasm), Mom was oblivious to her son’s recent magical achievement. (In her defense, I wonder just how many other doors Little Merlin had verbally opened since breakfast.)

Not to be deflated, the kid returned to the door, this time demanding, “Close sesame!” Sadly, even HDG couldn’t help him with this one. He was on his own. All HDG could do was stand still. But his incantation served him well, and the door obediently slid shut. He continued to practice until his mom wandered off in search of some mums that were still connected to their roots.

It all goes to show that there really is magic out there in the everyday world, even in the mundane environment of a big box store, if only you are willing to notice it. That kid will never know how much HDG, an unknown bystander waging constant battle against the forces of boredom, appreciated his magic that day.

Adolescents with Swords

Evidence suggests that I’ve survived another summer fencing camp. The ten straight days of two or three practices per day were well balanced by the three hot, all-you-can-eat meals per day in the best college cafeteria in the nation. Let’s take a moment to imagine, if you will, two tables piled with desserts: fruit pies, several flavors of cookie, slice upon slice of sweet breads, double troughs of pudding, a freezer stocked with ice cream treats, and of course, cakes: carrot, oreo, white, and chocolate, all doused with sugary frosting. The frosting looked as smooth and fancy as on store-bought cakes, and I ignored the vision in my mind of some basement classroom where unfortunate hotel school students attended their nutrition science lab, icing cake after cake long into the night, until at last the professor deemed them capable of producing an acceptably uniform flower on demand. Oh, and the entrees were good, too.

A typical day had three sessions. In the mornings and afternoons, we had warm-ups and conditioning in an room with spongy artificial turf that’s great for running but less great for certain varieties of push-ups in which elbows remain on the ground. A friend noticed that his skin was having a minor allergic reaction to the artificial turf. He shrugged it off as an artificial reaction and kept jogging. After we were warmed and conditioned, we switched to a basketball gym for footwork and blade drills. If there was time, we would free fence or play bouting games while the coaches gave individual lessons. Coach Iryna imported four impressive-level coaches, and a few other Cornell fencers dropped by sporadically. Evening sessions were short, only an hour compared to 2 ½, and low-key. We watched videos of Olympic fencing, played dodgeball-like games with soccer balls (somehow without major injuries), went for a nature walk, or just watched a movie. Kids and coaches alike were pooped by then.

The kids were mostly high schoolers, although we had some younger ones, too. I made early friends with a particular 11-year-old who was quick to work into the conversation that he was from Oklahoma. I suspect that his motivation for attending fencing camp was so that he could return home and beat up on his brothers and friends with tree branches. The fighting style he had already built while practicing with branches in his backyard didn’t help him much on the strip. He seemed to have fun, though, mostly, until his attention span finally sputtered out during the last few days, when he complained variously of blisters, “pulled” muscles (read: sore, because he didn’t understand the purpose of stretching), electric shocks to the heart by the scoring machine, and circulation-stopping socks, all of which miraculously evaporated when it came time to fence someone he thought he could beat. Then he became a chivalrous young man. Pointing to one of the beginner girls, he shouted across the room to me, “Can I fence her? I can cream her, but I’ll let her win after I get the first four points!”

I was secretly terrified of the kid, and only partially because of his full-arm parries. Harry Potter 7 came out during the first few days of camp, and it wasn’t long before the campers, including my Oklahoman friend, started carrying around the distinctively orange tomes. I was convinced that I would overhear someone reading aloud the very last page. Whenever the radio so much as said the word “Harry,” my hand darted toward the off switch in a panic. I had visions of some lunatic galloping down the street, yelling out a synopsis of the plot through a bullhorn in order to make a point about the dictatorial powers of mass marketing. I had come so far, six Hogwarts years, without hearing a leak that it would be cruel for someone to reveal anything to me now. Logically, the bullhorn guy was unlikely, but this 11-year-old kid could too easily spill the beans accidentally. It’s like when my parents tape football games. They avoid the very presence of certain friends before they watch the tape due to the disappointing eloquence of those friends’ facial expressions: a grimace means we lost, for example, and a smiling nod means that it was close, but we pulled through with a field goal in the final seconds.

Magic was still on my mind the day we introduced some particularly complicated coordination drills. The goal was to fling your fencing glove into the air in various awkward ways, then catch it in a lunge. Keep in mind that an interest in fencing does not necessarily coincide with outstanding coordination. Adolescence doesn’t help, either. The kids’ clumsy, unnatural movements and expressions of confused concentration struck me as the same ones I had imagined showing up in Apparition lessons at Hogwarts. Our high-ceilinged basketball gym became the airy Great Hall, the kids’ gloves became wands. Coach Iryna was the official Ministry instructor, demonstrating the simple-looking task, and I was a minor teacher, keeping an eye on my students to be sure they didn’t splinch themselves as they lunged.

As it happened, I overheard mostly nothing about the book from either him or anyone else, bought my own copy within hours of the end of camp, and read the last word three days later. That, and a slice of chocolate cake, were my rewards for surviving another year of fencing camp.

My Shelf

Today I made a Shelf.

That was my task when I showed up to the museum this morning: “This high table needs a shelf underneath it halfway to the floor to store all these fancy display lamps. Feeling handy?” Sure... I assured her that I could cobble something together, assuming beauty was not paramount. Thankfully, the table stands in a corner of the already disorganized tool shop, so the shelf’s potential aesthetic merits would likely remain unnoticed in any case.

So, building a shelf. No problem. I have spatial reasoning skills. I get along with drills for the most part. I’ve watched Mom create a picnic table and a swing set from a pile of wood, neither of which are in danger of collapsing any time soon. (In fact, their monumental sturdiness is sure to grant them heirloom status someday.) Growing up, I always assumed I inherited woodworking genes, and now was their chance to express themselves. Why, just the other day I took apart a mini-golf hole with a sledgehammer and a crowbar and felt satisfyingly Tool Time. On the other hand, that was destruction, not construction.

I stood in front of the inferior table for a while in what I hoped was a “thinking” pose. I stood in front of the shelves of wood for a little longer, then took inventory of the tools at hand: a cordless drill, baggies bristling with used screws that looked only vaguely similar, a battery-powered chop saw mounted on a Rubbermaid-style plastic base, and a portable table saw too small, and with too short a cord, to be useful for its intended purpose. Finally, I decided that my plan of action would likely include some sketching and measuring. While investigating the shelfless table's dimensions, I concluded that its original creator had been no more a master carpenter than I was. It was a solid piece of furniture that served its purpose, but its legs were haphazardly spaced and lacked any supports to ensure their verticality. Well, my Shelf would give it support! No longer concerned about defiling the already-cobbled table, I began to cut my wood.

And I did it: It took all day, but I did create a Shelf! It fits snugly between the diverse legs with clearance below for plastic storage bins and above for fancy track lights. The surface is what appears to be part of a repurposed chalkboard, which is supported below by rows of sturdy beams. Those fancy lights won’t fall off any time soon.

And now, I feel unusually successful. There now exists a newborn Shelf in this world because of me. Hopefully, years from now, people I will not have met will take that Shelf for granted, putting things on it and taking things off, because of me. Tomorrow, when I drive down the hill to work, I can gaze across the lake, through the trees, to the museum, and know that it is a better, more efficient place because of my labors.

I think I’ve finally graduated from Legos.

Weeding the ScienCenter

I am a natural disaster. I am the sudden, unpredictable obliteration of an entire habitat. There was a healthy patch of clover between the ScienCenter mini-golf course and the brick wall of the building. Now there's not. Now, instead of lush greenery and bulging purple flowers, there's a strip of dirt, ugly and bare and hot and dry. Not only do the clovers vanish with a few waves of my callous hands, but also the spiders, centipedes, aphids, bees, wasps, ants, and all the other bugs that fly and crawl and dig become immediately and inexplicably homeless. Some are scattered into unfamiliar lands by clinging desperately to the doomed vegetation. Spiders skitter several inches up the newly exposed wall, then halt in disbelieving bewilderment to survey their unrecognizable homeland. Worms and centipedes writhe fiercely in silent panic until they find shelter under ragged clods of the freshly scarred earth. I've never seen insects run so fast.

I am as abrupt as an earthquake, as destructive as a hurricane. I am environmental annihilation personalized. I am one unit of humanity playing out humanity's instinctual duty to raze nature. My strip of former clover could be a miniature subdivision in its infancy, all ready to pour concrete roads and driveways and basements.

When that deed was done, I went to the other side of the building to plant geraniums. That reversed my conscience.

Mostly.

Amazonian at Work

The other day I was called “some kind of Amazon woman” at work, while hefting 40 pound bags of dirt (and manure--just because it’s composted doesn’t make it less messy--first one to develop a tear-proof manure bag gets an A+ and a lollipop), apparently making the bags look like the world’s filthiest (and least comfy) pillows. I took it as a compliment. Later, when I was called over to help another lady, she squeezed my upper arm before allowing me to load her dirt. An elderly couple even tipped me $2 for transporting a single bag from the shelf to their cart a foot away to their car idling on the sidewalk (the cash was in two $1 gold-colored coins featuring George Washington, the first in a presidential series, so it’s one tip I won’t be spending). There have been plenty of other puzzled looks and comments upon my approach, from “But you’re only as big as I am!” to “But I thought they’d get one of those big strong men to help me...” Thanks to the wealth of muscularly underdeveloped female gardeners out there, at least I can skip going to the gym.

Summer on the Green

Ah, these warm and sunny summer days... The time of open windows, sprouting gardens, overflowing shopping carts at Home Depot, increasingly frequent laundering of fencing apparel (or at least increasingly frequent olfactory reminders of this need), and golf.

Now, I tend to use golf courses mostly in winter, because my skis don’t slide nearly so smoothly over the sand traps in the heat of August. Also, I’d rather not disturb the nice people with bagfuls of clubs. My spindly ski poles, I suspect, would not put up much resistance against an enthusiastically wielded 9-iron.

This summer, though, I’m spending two days a week out on the links. No, Spaceballs fans, I’m not working on my putz. I’m working on my putt-putts. You see, my course of choice is of the miniature variety. Specifically, it is Galaxy Golf, the science-themed mini-golf course in the side yard of the local children’s science museum, the ScienCenter. I work for its greenskeeper.

Keeping the grass green is rather easier here than on traditional courses. Cut the sod into rectangles, add a few staples in strategic locations, reattach the edging, and you're good to go for years, no mowing or watering required. There's no driving range to worry about, unless you count the parking lot.

Wily groundhogs are less of a pest than spray-paint-wielding teenagers in the night. They're the only ones who make divots. (They can smash our bright blue loop-de-loop on Hole Seventeen and plug up the Black Hole with stones, but they haven't yet managed to break into our ball reservoir on the last hole!)

The biggest concern is making sure balls don’t get stuck. They occasionally disappear down the PVC pipes that lead from a higher green to a lower one. I wonder whether the balls do the same things in those pipes as I used to hear what happened in The Tube on the playground of Rose Glen Elementary... Balls also sometimes pause on their spiraling descent down the DNA model, and once in a while the black hole hole lives up to its name. Although balls don’t get stuck on Hole Two, its blatant ignorance of several basic theories of geometry nevertheless causes the greenskeeper no small amount of vexation.

Mostly the work involves renovating the holes after the winter, the sun, and the children and teenagers have taken their respective tolls. One of my first tasks involved replacing the mesh netting barrier between the holes and the parking lot. This gave me no end of glee when I went to practice that night because I got to tell people that I did fencing in the mornings and then I did fencing in the evenings. I didn’t tell many people that, come to think. It got a disappointingly cool reaction. But it made me happy all the same.

If you’ve never been Galaxy Golfing, I’ll take you on a verbal tour.

The Front Nine:
1: Ricochet your way around a carbon ring.
2: If you hit the ball straight, in theory, it should bounce off the parabola at the end and land in the hole at the parabola's focus.
3: Starting at a plastic owl, make your way down the food chain, past plastic squirrels, plastic insects, plastic "grass" (that was once an ugly doormat), and a wobbly wooden sun.
4: Putt through a slice of a very large tree.
5: Change your ball's potential energy to kinetic energy by putting from a platform into either a shallow or deep valley.
6: Putt just hard enough to keep your ball on a curved, borderless embankment.
7: Putt left-handed. (No easy outs for you leftys—try it right-handed.)
8: Your ball is now a giant particle of pollen, which you must hit up a ramp and into a giant flower.
9: Starting at Pluto, putt through a scale model of the solar system (complete with gravity wells around the planets [but not, of course, around Pluto]) and into the sun.

The Side Nine (They’re on the side of the building):
10: Choose the slippery plastic ramp or the frictionful turf ramp. This one’s called Science Friction.
11: Putt up a ramp and down the double helix of DNA.
12: Forget your club in favor of a catapult! Fling your ball onto rubber, metal, concrete, or sand to bounce into the hole.
13: If you can manage to putt a nice, narrow parabola, your ball will roll over the top of a barrier on a wide ramp.
14: Escape from the black hole by rolling your ball down a large funnel (like the kind you roll pennies down), aiming for the escape hole in the side instead of the event horizon hole at the bottom.
15: Avoid three pendulums, each with a different length and therefore a different period.
16: Get your ball through a narrow opening before two magnets fall slowly through metal tubes and block the way.
17: Try putting past a bee hive while wearing "bee goggles," kind of like strapping a kaleidoscope to your head. Now you know how bees see the world.
18: Putt onto a checkerboard of positive and negative numbers. You only get to aim at the hole when all the numbers you've landed on add to zero.
19: You made it! As a bonus, you get to send your ball down a sloping grid of bells. If it falls straight down the middle, a free game for you!

Fooled You!

Well, maybe not you specifically, gentle reader, but I sure did pull the wool over the eyes of my agriculture students last semester. You see, I finally got up enough nerve to request my student evaluations. Overall, the statistics were fairly average, not phenomenal but also not embarrassing. The students learned neither “a great deal” nor “nothing” from discussion sections; I neither “stimulated great interest” nor “destroyed interest, was boring.” My lowest score, 2.96 out of 5, regarded the amount of criticism of the term papers—only half of which I read. The rest the professor read, so of course that half of the class is going to receive “too little feedback” from me. My highest score, on the other hand, was 4.38, in response to the question, “Was the TA willing to provide help for students who needed it?” ...Not that I had even a single student show up to office hours over the entire semester. But not for lack of letting them know that the opportunity existed, apparently.

The part that made me laugh out loud for a good long time was that my second-highest score, 4.18, belonged to the question, “Did the discussion leader (TA) seem knowledgeable?”, which mean that I was 0.82 points away from “[knowing] the content very well.” I wonder how I managed to give the impression that I actually knew what I was doing? Silly students. Little did they know that I was learning the material right along with them, and in many cases, they had already known vastly more about agriculture by the time they were five than I ever will. Silly students, they make me laugh.

New Jersey Isn't ALL Smelly

I can't speak for Newark, but my olfactory experiences at Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area and in Madison at Drew University, and even at Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, which are where I spent Spring Break this last week, were altogether positive. In fact, the smelliest thing I encountered was a gymfull of ripe fencers, and that certainly isn't endemic to New Jersey.


Before I got to the fencing, I spent a few days on the Appalachian Trail (AT) in Delaware Water Gap NRA, on the border of New Jersey and Pennsylvania (and nowhere near Delaware). The AT is a hiking trail on which, if you have a few spare months and an insatiable craving for gorp and pasta, you can walk from Georgia to Maine. I've got about ten miles of it under my belt; to complete the entire trail, I've got 2,090 miles to go. Which means I'm 0.005% of the way done. Almost there!


Unfortunately, the last remnants of winter (and of a cold) made camping inadvisable, so I made two day-trips. Both began at the Gap, a narrows in the Delaware River pinched between Mt. Tammany (above) and Mt. Minsy (where the above picture was taken from). The first day took me north from the river, skirting Mt. Tammany and onto a ridge paralleling the river. Most of the way was wooded and quiet, and the slush underfoot was soft enough to cushion my steps so that the bottoms of my feet didn't feel pounded flat by the end of the day. Despite the snow, the sun was warm, so I only needed a light jacket for the cold wind on the ridgetops. Looking up, the sky was remarkably cloudless and populated by hawks, vultures, and a pair of gliders. Looking out, the river and its ridge was surrounded by relatively flat farmland. My turn-around point was Sunfish Pond, one of the "seven wonders of New Jersey," according to a pondside sign. It's a nice little lake, and I got to scramble over (snow-laden) boulders on one side, and I can imagine that it's a great spot to swim (illegally) in warmer weather... but I'm not sure that those features are unique enough to earn it the title of "wonder." It doesn't bode well for the impressiveness level of the other six "wonders" if qualifications may include "pleasant spot to pump drinking water from" or "doesn't smell like Newark." Still, it is a nice spot for lunch.

The second day took me south up to the summit of Mt. Minsi (1,463 feet) and along a ridge of radio towers. In my dislike of retracing my footsteps, I returned via access roads and country backroads. The houses I passed either were the country homes of well-off residents of New York City (about an hour's drive away), or had collected enough old vehicles to start a used car lot. Some of them looked impressively antique.


Then, it was on to Drew University for the NCAA National Fencing Championships. Still, I had a few afternoons with enough daylight to wander around in the nearby Great Swamp NWR (above). Most of it is off-limits to people as a wilderness, but there are a few boadwalk trails with bird blinds and feeders. I saw my first Ringneck Duck. I think. It was far away. And mostly under water. And didn't have a ring around its neck. But that's okay, because neither did the picture in the bird book.

Back at Drew, even the (tiny) campus was pleasant to walk around, which you could complete over a lunch break. The buildings are modestly sized and conservatively designed--lots of rock and stone, no all-glass monstrosities or Star Wars-esque curiosities, and certainly no "reflecting pools." And no major streets between them. The ample green space between buildings is nearly a forest of silvery, mature trees.

Oh, and the fencing was neat, too. I was put to work as a score- and timekeeper, and in return, I got a front row seat (sometimes a few inches too close for comfort) to some of the best fencing in the country. Most of the others were nonfencing Drew athletes whose coaches made them volunteer, and who had never seen this strange sport before, so I got to practice my "what is fencing in three sentences or less" speech. The ones who came for the morning shift got a comprehensive lesson in how to mark up score sheets, what buttons to push at what times on the scoring machine remote controls, and why the referees keep waving their hands in the air while speaking French. The afternoon shift, though, got brief on-the-job training before the morning shifters ran off to lunch (ideally, assuming the morning shifters hadn't already wandered off between rounds). Some refs had more patience than others... But we survived. Since I actually knew what I was doing, I was asked to scorekeep for the women's championship bouts. So, if anyone out there has forgotten what I look like, you can refresh your memory by tuning into CBS when they televise the gold medal bouts. I believe it's May 5, but I haven't managed to track down the time yet.

Happy Spring!

SNOW DAY!

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Note: No cars were hurt in the making of this snowstorm. Or rather, no little blue Acuras with Wisconsin plates who live in this parking lot. There was a bit of backbreaking labor involved in reversing the snowstorm in order to free said car. These pictures were taken on Wednesday evening (Snow Day! School Closed and Everything!). By Thursday, I had to dig out the license plate. With a saucepan. Cause in apartment life, you're generally able to leave the shoveling, and the shovel, to the landlord. A nice random bystander from Minnesota offered his help, and his plastic trash can lid, so it only took 45 minutes to uncover the car and excavate a 5-foot path from its back wheels to the plowed lane.

I knew that if I believed in winter hard enough, it would finally come to visit.

This is a test. This is only a test. Don't panic. Don't go back to your regularly scheduled programs, they're boring. Have a snow day instead.