By Thursday, I was doing that thing at work where I was opening four different windows on the computer at once, each with a different process to go through, and then just looking at them for a minute to decide which to do.
I was tired enough to be doing everything in such an erratic manner, and even my conversation felt flushed and hectic. It was time for a break. Luckily, since I’ve gone down to only teaching one class in addition to my advisor job, every weekend, my break is all-consuming. Instead of a tepid and watery two days off, with at least half of one spent grading. I now enjoy three full days of being at home, drinking coffee with the light of dawn washing over the still sleeping house, and hanging out at the park all afternoon making up monster voices and new games with my kids. Sometimes, I even get to watch a movie in the evening, if my wife can stay awake.
But, at work, I was feeling burnt out enough even to want to leave all of that behind.
My wife and I first met when I came back from the Peace Corps and, thus, was in a very peregrinatory, rootless mode of life. I think we’d been together about two or three months when I told her I was applying to a job in Mexico. When I didn’t get it, I told her I was planning on moving to Argentina. Luckily, she agreed to come with me.
After Argentina, we went all over for several years, living in a far-flung place and making it our base to explore the area and the larger region. In periods between work, we took trips that sometimes lasted for months, stopping through places like Bolivia, Kosovo, and Myanmar.
I know this sounds insufferable. I’m not bragging. We lived very, very frugally most of the time. Instead of internet at home, instead of owning a car, instead of new clothes, we travelled. To us, it was the best use of our time and money. Without kids, pets, or ailing relatives, this sort of life is really just a matter of acclimation: not wealth, as many think.
And, once acclimated, it’s a hard lifestyle to leave. Just as those living in the suburbs can find living in an apartment with no kitchen and mattresses on the floor in Thailand incredible, so those living abroad with all their possessions in a backpack find the move to the suburbs equally difficult to attain. But, after about five years, we have kids and a house, and a car, etc. Opportunities to travel don’t come up as much as they once did when we lived in Paraguay. And yet, the impulse to travel remains, even though it looks very different than the kind of all-night-bus-ride variety it once was. Now, I have no interest in getting on a plane, or sleeping in a dirty motel, or trying to rush anything. We’ve tried these things with kids. They don’t work the same way. They aren’t fun in the same way.
Fortunately, the kids have met us halfway and enjoy our adapted mode of travel. They often show more outward excitement about trips than we do. I’m not sure what travel means to them other than looking out the window, eating more junk than usual, and getting to swim in a pool, but whatever it is, they seem to like it quite a bit. Maybe they just pick up on our interest, but at the same time, I’ve learned to not show your kids you want something, not to seem over-eager, which usually has the opposite effect of turning them against your proposal, so maybe I try not to care about travel as much these days.
I’m not going to spend time questioning it how it’s happened. I love that my kids are happy to pile into the car for five hours, and hardly make a peep while my wife and I are in the front drinking coffee and philosophizing like in the old days—well, when she’s awake.
So, feeling burnt out at work, I was happy to have a trip planned for the weekend. A small one, but still enough to give structure and purpose to the weekend. Sometimes I feel a sense of urgency on Saturday to not let the weekend pass me by just doing the same old things, to go out and create some kind of spectacular memory, but these generally aren’t the kind of things one can plan. They just have to happen. But they tend to happen much easier when one is in a different place.
…
It was a cloudy day on the coast when we left, and there was rain scheduled for the weekend, but I took solace in the fact that we were heading inland where we’d be near the mountains, and the slightly clearer air, and drier climate. Plus, the town we were heading to has a great café with great coffee that I looked forward to stumbling toward in the cold and colorful mountain dawn and then collecting myself with. And, of course, the hotel had the requisite pool.
After checking in, swimming, and going out for a beer and an $18 pretzel, we brought some snacks back to the room and promptly passed out. One of the most beautiful things about vacationing with little kids is that everyone just falls asleep together, like practically in an heap. It can still be a bit of a struggle to get everyone ready for bed, but the bedtime routine is not so protracted when everyone is going to sleep at the same time.
I always wake up a little earlier than everyone else, and usually this is when I slip out for a coffee and an hour or so of vacation reading. But we weren’t in the Bay, so I didn’t have the luxury of going to a café at 5:30am. I had to wait until 7, and so, when I woke up, I checked the time on my phone, knowing that I’d have a while to lie there.
I had a text message from my father-in-law. There’d been a landslide on the narrow, precarious coastal highway that we’d taken to get to our destination. There were videos showing tree after tree toppling over like a river of forest pouring down over the road. The videos were taken in the dark and punctuated with the red lights of heavy equipment running in the night and the whole thing had kind of a sinister air, especially considering we’d only driven through there a few hours before and the other side of the road is a cliff dropping into the ocean.
My wife was already awake in the next bed, and I told her that our way home was blocked by a landslide. She reached for her phone and we lie there reading the same thing while the kids woke up and started squirreling around in the beds. It was still too early to begin a conversation about alternatives, but I couldn’t help myself. The shortest way around would be the mountain highway (only an extra hour), but the traffic camera showed a fair amount of snow, plus temperatures (on the passes) were to be in the mid-30s with like 90% precipitation expected. No way was I going to drive our Toyota through that. So, the only other option would be to drive about four hours south. Stop and sleep and then wake up and drive another five and a half hours way the hell around the mountains, and despite my zeal for adventure and travel, I wasn’t looking forward to that at all. It would turn our trip into little more than a few stopovers over the course of a marathon drive.
We left it up in the air, and I went out to get my coffee, but I was distracted. Now the drive ahead of us seemed like a task, and I wanted to get it over with. I wanted to see if we could cancel our next night and leave later that day. I knew my wife, more sensibly, wanted to give ourselves a day and just hang out as we had planned.But there seemed little point in this when we were going to have to drive 11 hours anyway. “Might as well get it over with and still have a full day to recuperate,” I reasoned in typical forty-year-old male fashion. “Might as well get this started,” seems to be my mantra these days.
However, as always ends up happening in these situations, I convinced my wife and she convinced me. When I got back from the café, she was convinced we should just get going, and I was thinking maybe a day to take it easy wouldn’t be so bad. After all, what was the rush? The weather was holding, the kids and I were having fun in the pool. But after swimming for two hours, I think we all felt like we’d gotten what we’d needed from the experience and decided to leave, especially as the hotel was good enough to cancel our reservation for the second night
After the morning in the pool, I started to feel a little optimistic. It would be a long drive, but at least I’d go through a section of northern California I hadn’t seen in a very long time. For a few months, I’d be wanting to visit Mt. Shasta, and now we’d get to go right past it. The weather would be a bit overcast, but mountains make their own weather as the saying goes. And maybe the mountain would break through the clouds for us.
We got out of the hotel right before checkout and we stopped for brunch at the Coop. While in the bathroom with my son, I decided to do some more road condition/weather doom scrolling and discovered that the landslide had been partially cleared and was now open to one-way traffic. However, the forecast showed steady rain on the coast and, considering that, I couldn’t help but to wonder how long it could hold. Should we risk it and head back through the hazardous area which would shave about six hours off our drive? Could we get out of yet another hotel reservation (we’d already made a reservation for a place four hours south)? While we pondered these things, our kids ran around the Coop parking lot like it was a playground, and we looked like the kind of negligent parents who are totally absorbed in their phones, rather than their children. Something to keep in mind the next time you see people zombie to their phones—you never know what their using their phones to try and resolve.
My wife called the place she’d booked down south to see if she could cancel and apparently got someone willing to make the cancellation although she was reminded it was “against the rules”. Whatever, we cancelled and then delved profoundly into our personal anxieties while trying to enjoy a few more hours in town. In Lithia Park, where they have the Shakespeare Festival, there is a great playground, a little river for throwing rocks, and the whole place is admirably landscaped with the long-needled conifers that like the dry, clear air of the mountains. The kids had fun climbing, sliding, leaping, and doing the things kids like to do to better acquaint themselves with a new landscape, but all I could think about was whether we would get through the area of the slide before the rain wiped it out again. After the fires, and the wet winter, the whole area seemed a bit unstable before, but now I felt acute anxiety about driving back under all the dripping cliffs we’d gone under on the way up. How many others were on the verge of collapse. I pushed my son on the swing and shuddered thinking about the red-lit video of the trees collapsing in a sylvian tide. Was there one of those likewise shuddering and loosening now?
And even if we made it past the cliffs of burnt trees and dripping mud, what if the slide broke through whatever they had restrained it with? The area had been closed to two-way traffic for nine years and shortly after it opened again, this happened. Would it hold out?
My wife and I discussed whether it was better to leave and race for the affected area to get through before further closures, or if we should just let fate take its course and enjoy the day. Soon the decision was made for us. The kids got ice cream and then passed out in the back of the car, and as we drove west into the rain, we had no desire to stop. Back in the pacific northwestern winter, the trip already felt over. This was all just prologue.
We talked about fate, and our lives, and our decisions, while the ice cream and pool-satiated kids snoozed in their car seats, doing that disconcerting thing where their heads slump forward and they look like they’re going to choke or something, but if you push their heads back, they just sort of topple forward again and it seems like a valuable parenting lesson to just leave them alone and let them sleep, regardless of appearances.
We drove through the wet wreckage of southern Oregon and into the river valleys that allow winter passage through the coastal range. Small waterfalls were raging all around us, reminding me of the indominable strength of nature and our cosmic unimportance as we drove along. But, other than a few small stones, nothing fell. And for as precarious as it all looked under the sheets of running white water, the valley walls held, even as the road we drove over was pitted with the divots of falling rocks and heavy equipment tread from fire season.
Last Chance Grade, where the slide had been, was awash in rain and coastal fog, but the river of trees from the video has been cleared away and we only had to wait about five minutes for oncoming traffic to wend its way by so we could continue down the cliff, right down to the beach where the ocean was snarling with 20-foot swells and gray winter spray, and before long, we were home all wrapped up again in the coastal drizzle, waiting for another week of work and spring to return.
