Orcas Pt. II: Hippy Musing or Musing About Hippies...whatever

I don't know when the hippies came to Orcas; probably they were born out of fern-spores, kind of like the Smurfs. They would probably like that if I suggested it, depending on what herbs they were actually taking as 'supplements.' You see, I often wonder how Orcas changed from being an American Native land and edgy pirate's hiding ground into a place where Green Rules (who is Green?) and the Solstice Parade is the highlight of the summer. The people who seem to be the heads for the Solstice stuff live, oh yes, close to Enchanted Forest Road...well, not quite. That'd be perfect. They down a ways into town on Beach Road, which is one the main downtown streets with the co-op and yoga center, the Island Market, and the wonderful Island Skillet.

The Solstice house has big stone turtles all over the front lawn, and it looks perpetually ready for a party, with lots of picnic tables, flowing silk flags with incomprehensible symbols, and cartoon-level-perfect lovely flowers planted everywhere. I often wonder how tolerant they'd be if I decided to sit on one of the turtles and drink my fresh  co-op kombucha. Wouldn't they take me in as one of their own?

In fact, they might. I am a kind of hippie, and as I get my grey hair and am just too lazy to color it, I look more and more authentic. When we moved to Santa Cruz from "You Must Wear Black at All Times" New York in 2005, I looked around and said, "Here are my people." I love herbs and organic food and long flowing East Indian skirts and hair, guitars and folk music, Bob Dylan, being shoeless on the sidewalk with sand still sticking to you. But I'm also not a hippie. But I guess that depends on what you mean by hippie.

I like that the original hippies said 'no' to the Vietnam War; I like that they decided to wear clothing that was natural and something Eastern, and stopped trying to look successful. I like our friends from Santa Cruz who were part of the Civil Rights movement in the sixties. But like so many ideologies and movements, when one essential element is missing, the whole thing goes wrong. Many hippies became a symbol of the very excess they hated, which probably one is fated to do if not pursuing Truth.

But here on Orcas, many years after the Vietnam War, I wonder what hippies are now. I sense hippy. But what kind? Perhaps, really, the neo-hippy organic farmers here are not fake but a kind of continuation, perhaps, of the pirate survivalists and also the Native Americans. Or maybe they are Smurfs living in a kind of fantasy-land.

And all this makes me think of Ed Lavender.  Ed's cabin was the last house on our beach before PS (Purple Starfish) Point. In the 90s, I remember feeling from Ed's cabin a sense of silent peace, some loneliness, and the sense of an ending life holed up in the homemade structure. The cabin looked as though it was leaning up for dear life against the huge pine tree and the river-rock chimney; the only sign I ever saw of Ed was a thin wisp of smoke going straight up into the sky. I would look for that and smile at the faceless windows, just in case he could see out. His driveway, up on the end of Blanchard Road (it was a place used by early settlers to load supplies off to take into Eastsound), had an ancient sign with simple letters carved in it: "Ed Lavender." The letter-groves were entirely filled with a beautiful blue-green moss, and this to me in some weird way, was the face of Ed.

Ed was an Old-Timer here; he was a self-sufficient man who lived almost a hermit's life; he owned a lot of land on Orcas, and there is a place downtown, a housing unit area, called "Lavender Hollow." His property near the beach included a virgin forest area of about five acres. As he got older, people stopped believing he was there and slowly began to encroach: dumping garbage (cars, even--and a fridge) in the forest, partying on the point.

One year, I saw no smoke and I was told that Ed had been taken to a nursing home to die. Apparently, he did have a daughter, but we saw no sign of her, and as the years passed, the house began to fall into ruin in earnest. But as long as that house stood, we felt Ed was alive and a part of Orcas.

Ed, to me, was the kind of person Old Orcas was made of, and he became an amorphous symbol, a giant presence, simply because I'd never seen him. He seemed to live the life close to nature off the edge of the continent, a full-day travel of car and ferry ride away from full civilization. His permanence, his ancient connection to sailed ships and no medical care made us feel like temporary flotsam brought up recently by the tide. In his lifetime, he probably knew the last of the Native tribes who summered here. He was probably a boy when Helene Glidden and her family left Patos in the teens.

Helene and her family were also Old Orcas, or rather, San Juan hippies. Helene moved with her something like twelve siblings to Patos Island so that her father could man the lighthouse sitting on the edges of the US and Canada; they moved out of Bellingham to escape the dirt, disease, and poor-quality food of the port in the early 20th century. Helene's mother forced the move so that they could have chickens, a cow, and some fresh air. Green Rules and Organics are Life. Helene records her father as saying, "Please don't make me move out to that G-damn island." Their life was, perhaps, unpalatable to him because it was a hippie one...a return to nature, a certain stepping out of the stream for certain values. Helene's autobiography, The Light on the Island, is hilarious, sad, loving, and full of delight in life. She herself, with her independent spirit and wild ways, was a San Juan hippie (the special brand I am trying to define); she did not follow rules for the sake of worldly success, it seems to me, but valued for real things, like love and adventure and so she was, like many true hippies, a careful and passionate observer, standing a little on the edges of life.

So it seems to me that the San Juans are where the physical reality perhaps does create a genuine organic culture: the islands of great beauty and magical sunsets, and dangerous currents, off the edge of Washington help create people of observation and adventure, people a little off the edge. So perhaps the new age hippie veneer here (turtles and silk flags and solstice) is that: a veneer. Orcas really does have the hippies that just--are--hippies by the very fact that they'd choose to live on an island. I'm getting good at spotting them. They are in a spectrum from the guy at Island Market who wears marbles around his neck with his jeans pulled way up (looks kind of excruciating) almost to his chest and big boots, or the lady who has worked at the spot where, now, I've seen three-or four? natural food stores come and go. The stores change, but she doesn't. Her hair just gets longer and whiter, like a Rip Van Winkle sign of time passing. Don't know how she's managed to stay in one spot, but every year she acknowledges me with an ironic smirk. I don't know why. I keep the tradition going and smile back submissively, which seems to placate her. I wouldn't change it. I am beginning to wonder if she is an Evil Genius Hippie who has been secretly in control of the Natural Food Market Concept and somehow undermines each incarnation so that she maintains a kind of control through chaos. It is that ironic smirk that does it. Okay, I think I drank too much kombucha.

Now, being a kind of hippie myself ( I do stop and observe plants carefully and have been known to pat them affectionately and to me there's not much better than a truly eclectic, challenging, open conversation), my idea of a mini-vacation is to go to the natural foods store. I find them wherever I go. Here, the health food store is now a co-op, which I think is great although I do miss the first one...it was so, so--herb-y and more like a barn than a store, and even had old wooden plank floors. Or maybe I imagined that. This one, though, is member-owned, which means it is supposed to reach, therefore, deep roots into the the community and encourage local produce, a more distributivist life. An island is, in some ways, by its position as an island, necessarily local. But is it all fakey, or the good part of hippie?

Perhaps, really, now, it has moved from 90s and 00s more neo-hippy stuff to just regular people really just living here, or committed to learning local farming, like Maple Rock Farm (the mrf van is a fixture here and there are even T-shirts that just have 'mrf' on them) and Black Dog Farm, just up the road from us. Is being a local, though, under fifty on Orcas, tantamount to having a kind of hippy identity? I just look around downtown.

There's the Village Market, where all the young Orcas Specials go. They wear crocheted snow hats all year, maybe at all times (maybe the crocheted stuff is really their hair in a complicated dread-lock), and they look like they shave themselves with shells off the beach. They drive cars that they may live in, and look a little daunting, but they ignore you with great friendliness. The ice cream is cheap in there and these types suddenly lose any danger-hippie-mystique when they start licking soft-serve.

There's also the wonderful second-hand store world of Orcas. An intensely loving Orcas native, a young woman, runs one. She spends lots of time with each customer, hoping their karma will be good in future. She is genuinely kind, though.

There's the interesting housing co-ops here, Opal land grants set aside for locals to have pretty nice little homes: brightly painted, with nice gardens, they look like little Scandinavian homes, somehow. They can buy the homes, but are only allowed a certain margin of profit upon sale--to keep the prices affordable. Interesting idea. Hippie idea.

There's Portofino Restaurant, where there always seems to come some dish of conflict with every order. Once, the owner got in a drag-out fight with a customer; another time a waitress was weeping...there's really rude jokes hung up on the kitchen wall in the back. We now go there partly for the pizza, and partly to watch for the soap-opera. Don't know if that is hippy, or just eccentric.

The locals, the natives, the Real Hippies: I don't know what they think of us Summer People, those of us who yearly swell the population from about 5,000 to 15,000. They are the people who live through the dark and stormy winter, the bar owners and farmers and restaurant owners who have to make it through winter with almost no income.

There's the young people who come here to learn organic farming, and I love their ambiance. They exude grass and herbal scents, mixed with clay and something like manure. They are the ones that I think are born from fern-spores. Where did they come from?

Where do hippies come from? It could that their measure of success, their identity, is somehow rooted in being different. That means that they don't wear deodorant or shave their legs or face and eat raw foods because they are trying to be different--why? Because it makes them feel special. Those are Insecure Hippies. It could be that their identity is about being authentic. This means that they want to express themselves as an individual, to be themselves. This can end up as a grouping with other Smurfs and looking exactly the same, eating the same stuff, smoking the same stuff. In a place as small as Orcas, the draw to authenticity can also be communal...to have, in other words, a community that one can function in--not as a Back in Black object in the sea of people on Fifth Avenue, but as the guy who is trying to make the Co-op work and is limited in acquaintances by the shores of an island. It can be that the natural beauty that is here makes a person want to think about things, to steward nature, and to try and make Small and Local and Green and Organic values that help, really, sustain a healthy community.

I don't know, though. I bet some of that is true. I bet a bunch of it is not. Can it simply be isolation from the real problems in the world? An escape? Or a meditation? Navel-gazing? Or just being yourself in a small town (which you can't really escape being in small towns)? Maybe the Orcas hippie is all of those things at once.

But the hippies and the edgy people are just one layer of Orcas. This has been also a getaway place for rich people, too--probably starting with Mr. Moran, one of the more interesting people to have made his mark here.

TBC.

Stories from Orcas: Part One

While we are waiting to see if we have a home in Lander, or when to start trekking back, we have been able to have our traditional summer on Orcas, the most consistent home our kids know. Orcas has been a part of my life for many years now, and my kids don't remember life without it. So, some stories of the strange, out-of-the-way, magical place that is Orcas seems like a good idea.

In 1992, Grandpa John called my dad in Moscow and said, "I've found you a piece of property to buy" and my dad trusted the word of his step-father so much that he bought the Nina Lane beach-front property without seeing it.

Grandpa John was a Texan who ran away from his home at sixteen in some prehistoric time, when there were still territory sheriffs. He left his father, Sheriff Ames, who lay on his bed after a couple of whiskeys in the hot afternoons and shot flies off the screen, and who probably wore his boots to bed and at all times and maybe even had a wooden leg or a metal plate in his head. I can imagine all kinds of things. After running away, Grandpa John made money gathering bounty money on donkey heads and by joining the army. He was on the last ride of the American calvary across the Golden Gate Bridge, and was well-traveled, and smarter than a whip. He told me, "If I were a young man, I'd immigrate to New Zealand." That was the wisdom that made my dad trust him with buying a property he'd never seen, and I thought of Grandpa John's wisdom a lot when in New Zealand. I could see his new-world, adventure wisdom.

I asked my grandmother once if she'd met Grandpa John's mother. I'd imagine Mama Ames to have been, of course, in contrast to the brutal Texas sheriff shooting innocent flies, a sweet Texas rose who wept on the porch in front of the destroyed screen door, both to wave young Grandpa John goodbye and also to shield him from any stray bullets. However, my poetic vision was destroyed when Grandma said, "She was one mean woman."

Oh. No wonder he left home--and that says something about the man I grew up with as Grandpa, my Grandpa Ken having died of a heart attack when I was only one. Grandpa John, I remember, knew how to keep my brave but sometimes relentlessly, powerfully anxious Grandma in line, and he was a huge barrel of a man (the donkeys didn't stand a chance). "Marthy," he'd say, "putta led on't." And Grandma would huff, purse her lips and attend to the chicken and peas, feeling better.

I loved him--but then again, I didn't have to live with him. Mercifully over the phone, he always guessed how many boyfriends I had, and to my consternation, he was usually right. He seemed to have laser aim at exactly what would embarrass you the most, like, "How many pounds are ya now, girl?" and so at about twelve, I started dishing it back: "Less than you." After that, I was his favorite.

So, in 1992 or so, thanks to Grandpa John, we all came up to Orcas for the first time, and he showed us, matter-of-factly, the ocean front property that has a view all the way to Vancouver, BC, with Patos and Sucia Islands in view, and the Canadian San Juans off to the left horizon. We sat there with our mouths open, and then Grandpa John told us to 'shut yer traps' and started us clearing brush.

It would be ten years before my dad started building on the land, and Grandpa John did not live to see the house. But some part of our joy here is always due to his foresight. He knew a good thing when he saw it. Like my Grandma.

Orcas is an island off the coast of Washington, in Puget Sound. We can see the great cargo ships heading down the Haro Strait to the open Pacific, and the islands are mostly covered in fern and moss pine forests, rolling farmland, and hedges of salmonberry, blackberry, and wild rose.

Our Beach has a life of its own, a little Totleigh Toweresque society that has developed over many years. Before we came, and our property was a kind of meadow and forest, the Gerards on the right and the Caleys on the left had been neighbors for almost forty years. Like goats in a pen getting used to the new one over time, they have become part of our life, as we have theirs; both sides have the same generational turnover, so all of us forty-somethings are slowly realizing that someday, God willing we all last that long, we will be working out fence lines and beach problems together, and I think we're beginning to wonder about each other. Most of them are super people, down-to-earth fellow lovers of Orcas, and like us, grateful every time our respective parents let us hang out.

But the current generation is still, thankfully, around. I can't imagine Orcas without Ben Caley, or Don and Marian Gerard. Don Gerard is an Orcas native, and that means something special. He's almost a legend here; everyone on the island seems to know him and he seems to have a finger in many places all around the island. He lived here long before it was a boutique-posh getaway and was still a pirate-woodsman-survivalist place. Don is a typical Washingtonian: there's good-naturedness that has a hint of some hard-working farmer way back in the roots, an equanimity with eating spam as well as steak; a kind of crafted, comfortable way of life that enables one to be out in the rain without an umbrella. My grandmother, a third-generation Washingtonian used to say, "What do you need an umbrella for?"

I, a snooty Californian, would just smirk and watch more MTV if it was raining. I'm sure she wondered what on earth would become of me if we didn't get up here to realistic Washington. Now I am here, and I get it, Grandma.

Don's wife, Marian, has fought a thirty-year war for her flowers with the in-bred, brazen and psychotic deer that live in droves on Orcas. Don kept building her more and more complicated deer fences with lights and buzzers and who knows what else, but of course he couldn't build down into the beach water--and the nutcase deer swim in the 40 F water. It was fated to end badly for the flowers.

(Once Lucy chased a deer about a half mile out to sea, for example. The deer won and we had to fish her out with the Zodiac. The whole Beach came out to see that one.)

On the left are the Caleys. Ben's second wife, Fay, whom everyone loved, died about five years ago of MS. I remember her only briefly, a still figure in a wheelchair, lit up by the sunset light, out on their porch. Ben now is with Diane, a lovely person, who will row the boys, Dallas (her grandson) and TJ all the way down past the Ditch (the marina) and back. She's stronger than me, both physically and mentally. She tells a story of playing the harp for the Bishop, when she had a bad cut on one of her fingers. As she played, the blood pressure built up and suddenly burst out of her finger, all over the harp--and the Bishop.

One of the neighbors hates Momo, one of our dogs, and Momo hates him. I am not sure where the hate started. I think it was Momo being Screw-Loose Momo. So that will be that for the dogs out here. Lucy did once almost destroy someone's screen door in an attempt to eat their cat, so I can see why the Beach hates the dogs. I used to hear a compressed-lip silence emanating from the houses as I walked them on the beach. We Kozinskis can't even get hold of our kids, much less an ADD drama queen dog and one with a serious, dark-horse screw loose.

Ben, and his son Calvin, who is my age, have lots of great stories of old Orcas lore. The San Juans, including Orcas, were, at one time, smuggler's havens. At one time it was pirate ships with Spanish gold and rum, and now it has deteriorated to Zodiacs with smugglers in Addidas tracksuits and meth. But I think, over the last fifteen years, even they are gone and the only smugglers are retired people in yachts taking corn chips and champagne across the Canadian border, which is two miles off Orcas.

Ben told us about how the airport, which lies only about five hundred yards past the Gerard's, was built. Apparently, a ship captain made a bet with someone in Australia that he could land a plane on a dock. So he came back home to Orcas and built the airport, bought a plane, and practiced. When he returned to Australia, he landed the plane on the dock and came home with his prize: a kangaroo. The kangaroo had been trained to dance to music, and the sea captain let the kangaroo roam around the island, and when he wanted it to come home, he'd play music. The end of the kangaroo was a poetic one: One night, at the Music Hall in Eastsound, there was a concert, and the kangaroo happened to be in the neighborhood. Hearing the music, he rushed into town, went across a road without looking and well, that was it. I now can imagine the kangaroo as our Australian experience getting run over, and somehow, the pieces fit and I feel a certain satisfied revenge. That's not nice and I'm hopeful that I'll get past it. The captain's old home is now The Kangaroo House, and functions as a high-end B and B. That is the way of things.

One fixture at the airport is Magic the freaking bi-plane. At first you think it is cute and then over time, you get annoyed because the pilot charges so much money for a ride. He did let the kids, when they were toddlers, ride in his toy planes, though, so I can't be too annoyed with the cutesy-deceptive expensive rides. A better deal is to simply fly down to Seattle on San Juan air, for less money, or better yet, take the sea plane from Rosario's and land on Lake Union in Seattle...unless you didn't want to go that far.

So our Beach has the airport, the Ditch, the Gerards, the Caleys, and further down, next to the Purple Starfish Point, was where Ed Lavender lived. Next time, I'll tell you about Ed...and magical Patos, and The Light on the Island, ageing hippies and neo-ones, the candy-level joyful St. Francis Church, majestic Rosario's, the weird merry-go-round of checkers at Island Market, and pathetic but kind of cute Orcas parades.

Apprehension

A loving, wise aunt, my aunt who says little but sees much, sent a short email to me today: All she said in her quiet, simple, Danish way was, "Welcome home...see Phil 3:12-14."

So I went and saw it. 

"12 Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect: but I follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus.

13 Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before,

14 I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus."

That second part of verse 12 is a kicker. I've always just read it like this: "Not as thought I had already attained, either were already perfect: but I follow after, blah blah blah rumble huh?"

I think I get the first part...St. Paul meant a following that is more like a chase, which fits with the idea of race (and almost conveniently rhymes). So I got that. And I got that I'm not perfect. And I've often thought of myself as a little kid on the Pinewood all-school race in Greece. I was the fastest in my class and I spent more time running, in those days, than breathing. I ran for the pure joy of it, pre-puberty at least...I'm one of those who hopes I have a child's freedom to run again someday. I loved the wind on my hot cheeks, the joy of following my speeding heart.

On that Pinewood School race day, I was the Fast Girl. Flash. And I remember lining up with the high school students, thinking seriously that I would win this race and bring glory home for the 4th grade. 

And the St. Paul's race also reminds me of the mile and a half race at Oakdale Jr. High, mid-puberty, when we back-o-the-bus rebels walked it, blowing it all off. How I had changed, but this was simply the other side of the see-saw that, if level, would be fortitude. 

True to this form in the spiritual life, I have flung back and forth between rashness, almost a manic love of God and a desire to die a thousand deaths, and fear and sloth disguised as rebellion. Once again, Aristotle is right about that balance stuff. Running a race, a long-term one, is about balance. 

Okay. Got it. But what on earth is " if that I may apprehend that for which also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus"? 

I'm trying to accomplish, or gain, a purpose, a relationship, a creative act. And it is that thing for which I was made. I am trying to be what the Logos spoke when He translated the thought of the Father, a tiny thought that became, in my mother's womb, me. I am both that thought, but in God's wanting me to be a co-creator, this great sharing of Himself with us, I am also a becoming of that thought. He wants me to co-create it, to race for it, to sweat for it, to die for it, like the seed falling into the ground. And I am not just a thought isolated; no. A thought is communication, by its very nature it is a reaching, a spilling out towards the Other, towards Unity. I am meant to be a flame flaring up that lights other flames: we 'sign' this reality at Easter Vigil Mass.

And it is in the particulars of this life, the messy stuff, the matter, the small actions and hard choices and fails and successes and words and songs, the things we choose to see and not to see--these are where the unity will come, that unity that God wants to recognize as His thought of me, and when He will kiss me, finally, with the kiss of a bridegroom. 

So, even on days when the waves crash in (and I had a dream that the waves, giant ones, were coming horizontal with the beach at Curl Curl or somewhere, and I then did not see them coming), on days of darkness, or days filled with glorious light, the particulars are there to create opportunity for me to become more myself--or less. As CS Lewis said, nothing is static. We are either getting better or getting worse. And I guess I might change that a little and say that we are either becoming more unified, more a cohesive, faithful rendering of God's thought of us, or less of one. 

Violence is a kind of force of disharmony, Thaddeus told me today. Sometimes he teaches me; I am sometimes, in precious moments alone, a class of one, because he is just always and everywhere, a learner-teacher. He is my Socrates. Who could be so blessed to be married to a philosopher--not the academic kind, but a real one? Okay, yeah, sometimes I want to give him hemlock. But most times, I see how marriage is supposed to be, where one grows the other.

So I thought about that as I thought of myself as trying, running to apprehend what God made me to do, to be, in a situation where I feel somewhat more than usual that foreignness I carry with me always. I thought that as we run, we act, we live, if we run so that we become more ourselves, what God saw us to be in His mind and then spoke us, we are a force towards harmony. If rather, we run without that hunting, but just amble along or 'walk it' or rashly think it is possible for us to do it ourselves, we become a force of disharmony. We then become a thought of disharmony, a violence. 

After talking to Socrates, I felt suddenly as if my heart rested when we got off the Bellair shuttle at the Anacortes terminal. Dad and Mom were there, and I smelled again the blue and green, the water and the pines, and it seems to me that the sunlight in the islands even has a certain smell, a smell like bread baking. Oh, right. We're sitting outside the Cheesecake Cafe. Dumbest name ever, but please, don't change it.

And how I love the ferries. I know their names by now, and where things are in them, and I love especially the padded linoleum benches sidled up to rows of rounded-square windows; I love the clear, sparkling water, and each island with its over-dress of dark green and petticoat of white rock (I take this from H. Glidden about Patos); we all know that when the ferry pulls away from Shaw Island, it is time to "return to the cars for de-embarkment" and we take the winding drive through Orcas forest and farmland; we always stop at Curtis Lane, just before the turn onto Nina Lane, to do the ineffable Curtis reverence; then the satisfying centripetal turn onto the gravel Nina which takes you through a canopy of Scotch brush and pine and finally, the sign in the reeds on the right "Wrye 299" that my uncle made, and the turn past the blackberry bushes, the rope swing, and first sight of the beautiful art that is the home my uncle built for my parents. It stands, understated and modest but beautiful, the cedar shingle siding still honey-color, with the wide stairway, and the hint of the ocean behind it. The walk up the stairs, the swoosh of the heavy front door, and the soft pine, high-ceilinged great room with the panorama of old friends waiting outside the large picture windows: the little path we made that is still springy from the wood pulp of the building nearly ten years ago now; the rainbow rocks, the quiet gardener snakes surprised, the rock beach, and Patos, lovely magical Patos and Sucia and Matia Islands sunbathing in the blue water. 

The anxiety sort of put up a white flag and I walked out of the battle inside me, looking forward over the water. 

I don't know what's ahead for us, but we asked God to bless our next chapter so that we can help each other "apprehend that for which also [we are] apprehended of Christ Jesus." Instead of fighting over what Jeeves and Wooster episode to watch.

Off the Edge...and into the Shire

We went off the edge of Australia 27 May. Or now, I will say, May 27. Back home, dammit. I will say "renting" not "hiring" and finally, I will go directly to the proper side of the car. I don't miss the Panadol capsule Corolla, though I did get weepy when I took the Redfield Rugby and Campion College stickers off the back as we handed the car over to Wayne and his wife Angela, who were our answers to prayers.

We hadn't sold the Panadol thing, and so I decided to do what Achilles did and go to Our Lady and put my arms around her knees in ancient supplication for her prayers....I asked for someone to buy the car who needed it, who would really like it--and pay what we needed, not necessarily what we wanted. The next day, Wayne showed up. Wayne and his wife have never driven before; they have lived in Vietnam, and in Australia now, they saved up enough money to buy our car. When Angela saw it, she jumped up and down, squeaking, and she hugged me. "I love it," she said, "it is so cute. Cute." Angela told me, looking sideways at Wayne, "Now that we have this car, we can have our baby. You need a car to have a baby here in Sydney."

We decided to call Sydney "Pusstown." "Puss" as in liquid, not as in kitten. I decided that I just cannot live in Commonwealth countries. Just never works. Comedy is setting in now; I guess it has been 30 minutes since tragedy.

But we were waved off with love: thank you, friends, friends who came by in groups the last day and filled us with love; friends who took us to the airport even in morning traffic; friends who behaved more like family. They are the real Australia for me, and have made it all worth it. That is the Australia I love, not the beaches or the tea shops, though those were nice things.

Three hours after leaving Sydney, we landed in Auckland for a short stop in New Zealand. You know, thinking in more shallow ways, New Zealand is awesome. They have trolleys with back-locked wheels. I immediately liked New Zealand for that, even felt fuzzy about the nation. Oh, "carts" not "trolleys."

I did decide though that I am going to stay with "biscuits" for "cookies" and "muffins" or "scones" for "biscuits." Just because the Commonwealth nomers for these things make more sense. "Biscuits and tea" I loved and will refuse to forget them.

We landed in Auckland in the evening, and suddenly, the stress level went down. Even the airport was quiet, and green, like the countryside. The first thing we saw was one of the huge stone dwarves from the Lonely Mountain.

We got our Jucy campa van--a Hiace, which I absolutely love driving. Yes, it was green and purple with a stupid sexy lady on the side. It just screamed "tourist" but maybe that is still good, since we're still American drivers at heart. We took the thing out, like a boat out to sea, the Sea of Adventure in the land that really, really, is Middle Earth. It is so green, and blue, and lovely...it has all the seasons at once, it seems, and we hit it in late fall, when the trees were golden and orange.

We got to Hobbiton in the late afternoon, on a day when that sea light slants sideways and makes everything a more intense color. It was a magical afternoon, and we got to the Green Dragon for pub food and ale as the lanterns were being lit. It was like being in the story.

We felt as if the healing was starting, I think; the kids' joy at being at such a wonderful place was a balm for all the ruptures.

The next day was rainy, and misty, and we spent time in the mysterious Rotorua mountain area, where little valleys everywhere put off steam clouds from hot springs, fissures in the green overgrowth. In a secret valley surrounded by small farms and high hills, we heard Mass at the Tyburn Monastery with the nuns, in what must be one of the most remote-feeling places in the world. Edmund Campion died at Tyburn, and we felt a connection with him there. It was dark, but not empty; it was poor, in a sense, and silent, but the silence and the darkness that is so full that one cannot but recoil in one's nature from it at first. It is challenging and daunting that the nuns live this life, this hidden life in this beautiful but unbearably quiet place. Once again, just like at the Clark monastery in Wyoming, I felt like an intruder into the heart of the Church...their work is so hidden, so deep in some way, that it feels almost meaningless--but that is because my sight is so used to clutter. I cannot see in the dark.

In the Waikate Valley, we soaked in hot pools and looked up at the stars which are intense like light shining through holes in black velvet, coming in and out of crystal view as the steam clouds pass overhead in a prehistoric rhythm. We drove down through mist to Taupo and met Jamil Scarberry from Seattle at an Austrian-themed pub; we spent the night at the Top 10 Holiday Park, which we decided was an alternate universe, with the giant pillow play thing and the light pattern game and the giant chess board. They were playing Star Wars for the Queen's birthday celebrations. What?

It was cold in New Zealand at night, so cold, and this intensified the alternate universe experience, because it was May 31. By day, the fall colors were out, and the cold wind swept across the sky, dancing with bright white clouds.

The next day was spent at Rotorua. Sophie and I explored the dark forest with a group, high up in the trees, crossing across the rich greens and chocolate browns on 50 m high zip lines. Our group, headed by the relentlessly positive Anna and Jenny, had Kyle and his girlfriend, a few kids and their reluctant-to-zipline mom, and a guy from Yorkshire who joked about being off balance because one of his buttocks must be heavier than the other. He kept us all laughing as he hugged trees and flipped upside down as he zipped. The longest zip was a 220 meter flight in the sun. It was marvelous, and young and old and middle-aged, we all turned into children with the delight of flying and having little NZ birds eating out of our hands. The van ride back was boistrous and chatty. On the way there, we'd been shy strangers.

Ana, TJ, and Thaddeus meanwhile went bungie jumping at Agroadventures. Thaddeus came down, as Ana said, like a huge fat bird with tiny wings flapping. The kids did Zorb balls, a ride inside a giant ball down a green hill.

I noticed the lack of commerciality, the personal touch, the absence of crowds and lines and rules. We ate pub food in The Pig and Whistle watching the Glasgow rugby tourney. I love rugby. Love it. New Zealanders seem like hard working, hard playing people, and there just aren't that many people there in this young, volcanic, emerald green land.

The highlight, though, for me, was the Zealong Tea Estate. Long ago, in the deep winter of Wyoming, I copied an old painting I thought of as a picture of walking out of the dark of death to a home waiting; it is of a cottage flanked by cypress trees, in the setting sun, surrounded by intense colors, with blue mountains in the distance. The Tea Estate made me feel as if I'd walked into that picture. I'd painted New Zealand. We had high tea with smoked salmon sandwiches and petit fours, and tea in an elegant Chinese style (infusion cup with lid and hot water to hand on a flame). The teas ranged from 'pure' to 'black' and 'aromatic' with delicate but obvious tastes of honey and smoke. I looked out over the tea fields, through a pergola with vines (that strange New Zealand green but cold winter), and it was one of those moments that you could understand staying eternally in one spot. The beauty filled the senses and overflowed easily, like smooth brew, into the soul.

That night, we just couldn't take the Jucy campa anymore, so we got a hotel and had a good night's sleep.

The next day we boarded a huge Air New Zealand plane with Hobbit characters all over it. I could not see anything of my last look at a Southern Hemisphere land.

Arriving in the US was strange. For me, I got deep anxiety, some kind of old, and deep anxiety, and I haven't figured that one out. Sometimes our feelings and the reasoning of the heart are more accessed by the body than the mind. It just might take some time.

Or maybe I'm just jetlagged.

My parents and Aunt Maryanne met us at the airport waving American flags. We were all looking around to see what was the first thing we noticed that was familiar. It was family for me. For this Third Culture kid, familiarity is truly relative.

In an odd twist, my dad booked the same hotel and restaurant for us that Thaddeus and I had booked when we went, in excitement and hope, out to Australia for our interview. A strange, and somewhat sad, circle, but somehow comforting, a kind of closure; a gift.

But there was some fun from God in it, too. My cinnamon oil ("Your stuff always smells like a kit for embalming," Sophie says) leaked and all my clothes smelled like cinnamon. That stuff is so strong that all the people in the hotel shuttle were wondering what candy factory they'd walked into, probably feeling sick. Smelling like intense cinnamon, we walked into the restaurant where there were literally buckets of cinnamon fireballs on every table. Never seen that before.

We drew rabid interpretive crayon pictures of our experience in the washing machine that was the last six months, on the paper bag paper table covering as a kind of debrief, and we enjoyed the big American portions for less money.

It was nice just feeling like in most situations I just knew the ropes; I didn't have to endure that timid "Hi. I'm obviously American and so of course do not know exactly how this works and will most likely annoy you at any moment now" feeling. That's nice.

My dad put his arm around me at some point, and said, "Look forward now."