We've Moved!

It's a New Year, 2014, and true to it's very title and nature, Where In The World are the Kittels?! is moving! After five years, my blog has grown up into a full-fledged website! Please come and visit us at our new address:  www.kellykittel.com. There you'll find us swimming around with new posts, new books and all kinds of fun, new critters. Thank you for following us and please, click on the link and join us on this brave, new adventure! Hasta!

"It's Not That I Can't Help...

I just don't want to..."

This morning I'm reminded of this, my favorite quotation from the movie, Volunteers, about the Peace Corps. The film came out when I was an idealistic young volunteer-in-training a few decades ago and we all went as a group to see it in Miami before heading off to the jungles of, well, Jamaica. I was a tiny bit offended by it (as was the Peace Corps itself, according to Wikipedia) and I may have even left the theater early but I did laugh when Tom Hanks delivered that line. (Daily Trivia: this is the film where Tom met Rita, still his wife; also when I met Andy, still my husband!) Gene Siskel stated that the film had "two lame performances by its leading actors, the vastly overrated Tom Hanks...and the consistently disappointing John Candy.” Just saw that "overrated" guy at the Golden Globes and I wonder if Gene ever regretted saying that.

And so this was brought to mind when my fellow She Writes Spring author and Goodreads pal, Rossandra White, wrote on her blog, “So here I am now trying to negotiate the rocky shoals of publicizing the book, like interviews, public readings, etc. My brain keels over every time I think about it, and I break out into a cold sweat.” Yes Rossandra, I, too, am feeling nervous about my impending public speaking engagements (which are literally months away) for my debut book, Breathe, and find it all a tiny bit ironic.

For some time now I’ve been trying to wrap my own brain around my impending public speaking as well, wishing I’d joined Toastmasters so many years ago as I’d planned. (Be brave; do hard things!) Instead, I switched colleges to avoid taking public speaking, which was probably misguided. And I’ve been trying to think of a good analogy, like, hey, you're a WRITER and you're publishing your book. That's great! NOW, even though you've worked for seven years in total seclusion, could you get your chair-shaped ass out of that chair, yes, stand right up, and TALK to people about it? Is that like so, you host a great TALK show or you’re a fabulous STAND-UP COMEDIAN, now could you go home and sit by yourself for a few years (or more) and WRITE about it? Or, you PAINTED a masterpiece, now get right on out there and DANCE about it? Anyone have another?

Where’s Dale Carnegie when I need him? I don’t even like to talk on the telephone. If I did, I wouldn’t be sitting by myself in my Grinch pajamas typing away, I’d be living in Mumbai as a "Customer Service" Rep for Spirit Airlines (don’t even get me started on that topic) or I’d be a Saleswoman, or maybe even Speaker of the House!

It’s not that I can’t speak in public, I just don’t want to.

K3

The History of Breathe, Part Two!

When last we left off, our unsung heroine, um, that would be me, was in Guatemala kneeling at the feet of famous authors while they filled her head with their infinite wisdom (“avoid taking the reader to the bathroom!”) on the banks of Lake Atitlan—the bellybutton of the planet—but she was also a tiny bit lighter, as she’d just lost one of her diamond earrings in the lake . . .

Okay, back up, back to first person, still in Guatemala where mornings found Eve and I donning our caps and goggles at the end of our dock, then swimming along the shore, around a punta and into the cove to Joyce’s dock where we hauled out and joined her in the sauna. One morning, I climbed onto her dock, yanked off my tight red cap, and one of my earrings plopped right in the lake. I just stood there, watching helplessly, as it sank into the clear, green abyss. The news spread via grapevine, like it does in the tropics, and by afternoon a bevy of brown-skinned boys were diving off said dock in search of gold, like some kind of historical role reversal of the conquistadors. I offered a reward, I think $100 (it still stands and I can’t wait to go and deliver it) as the slippery boys came up time and time again, naked and smiling, but empty handed. Since that time, the lake has risen some 15 feet and Joyce’s dock and her lovely recycled glass bottle-dotted sauna walls have been reclaimed by the caldera-filling waters. Since that time, I’ve been carrying the many lessons learned, never forgetting the feeling I had when Joyce’s eyeballs drilled me to my chair, never quite losing the echo of her voice in my brain, “I want to know, how have you changed?”

I returned home to RI from Guatemala to finish packing up our house, sell a bunch of things I still miss at our garage sale, load up the black panther, and wave adios to Andy, Micah, and Dunkin on their isthmus driving adventure, following soon thereafter by plane. We settled into our new lives in Costa Rica for the school year, 2008-9, where we walked the beach and swam daily. I started this blog as my New Years resolution and began working on my publishing platform, with one of my essays called “Noah’s Name” soon thereafter published in We Need Not Walk Alone, a bereavement magazine. Without friends, my YMCA/Starbucks routine, or TJMaxx to distract me, I sat my ass in a leather-strapped chair and I wrote. And I wrote. Some days I’d look up from my keyboard and half expect to see Noah come toddling across the tile floor to me, arms outstretched. Some days I’d see my kids off to school, sit down with a hot cup of coffee at our dining room table, and greet them seven hours later when they walked back in and said, “Mom, have you been sitting there in your pajamas all day?” And, mostly, I had.

I’d stretch and change into a bathing suit, then walk the beach with Christiana, puzzling out the story structure and plot while throwing coconuts into the warm, salty sea of Conchal for Dunkin, gone and missed now these past two years, to retrieve. We’d hike back home through the orange sunset-infused air and jump in our pool while flocks of parrots screamed their way to bed and bats emerged for the night, swooping the pool’s surface but always just missing us. After dinner, we’d take our quads to a nearby deserted beach where we’d stroll along the water’s edge, kicking bioluminescent sprays of warm sea water and watching sea turtles laying their eggs. I finished the manuscript again, this time calling it The Light of the Son, but it was still very, very long. Start over.

 We moved to the coast of Oregon where we built two yurts on a lovely piece of ground hugged by a creek and surrounded by national forest, just two miles from where Noah was run over. This was the last place on earth I wanted to live, but it’s also the place that holds my husband’s heart, his home, and it was time to make peace with it. We moved in without heat or running water for Christmas of 2009. I attended my second writing conference near Seattle and Wordstock in Portland and became the Willamette Writers Coastal Chapter Co-Chair, learning something about the craft of writing every month. By then I realized that my unspoken motto seemed to be, “Why write less when you can write more?” so I bit the economic bullet and hired an editor to help me “trim” my manuscript to a manageable size. I wore my colorful alpaca glittens and drank cups of coffee that winter in my yurt, writing all morning while Bella was at Kindergarten with the elk bugling outside and the salmon spawning in our creek. Then I’d pick her up and head for the pool, swimming lap after lap while puzzling out some story problem or amusing myself with potential names for my characters. And when school was over for the other kids in the afternoon, Christiana and I took long walks along the creek, brainstorming book titles.

In the Fall of 2010, I moved back to Costa Rica after attending my first Willamette Writers conference where I pitched to five agents face-to-face for the first time. I unpacked in our treehouse (recently featured on Househunters International), got the kids off to school, set my laptop up on yet another table, finished my revisions from my editor, then sent my ms off to the agents with a prayer. A few months later, we moved from the treehouse into the beach house in front of it, Casa Azul, where the surf sang us to sleep each night and I began homeschooling Bella. Life on the playa means walking twice a day, sunrise and sunset, and I left a lot of footprints in that sand. I met a greeting card writer at school and another writer during one sunset walk and we started a writing group called Tuesdays with Amy. We lounged, poolside, at the Langosta Beach Club, eating salmon paninis and drinking real sugar Cokes, trading literary agent contacts and trying to figure out how to get our manuscripts published. They also became two of my first five readers. I queried over 150 agents from my casa on the playa in between beach walks, swims, and teaching Bella much more about bide-riding and marine biology than math and also submitted my chapters to WeBook with good reviews. I also continued working on my platform, writing the Costa Rica section of Getting Out:  Your Guide to Leaving America, which was published the following year.

In the summer of 2011, I moved back to the yurts, went back to the WW conference and pitched 8 more agents, went to Wordstock again, and my co-chair gave me a full ms critique. I revised again. My WeBook advanced to Round 2, I queried another 20 agents, and I paid for another partial ms critique, revising with ratchets and levers and other scene and sequel techniques and changing the name to East Meets West. I also joined SheWrites and an essay I wrote in Guatemala called “Yoga Matt” was accepted for a travel humor anthology—Moose on the Loose. I continued swimming laps and walking the beach watching seals while thinking of character development and agonizing over theme.

In the summer of 2012, I went back to the WW conference for the third time, pitched to 7 agents, then moved back to RI, where I read about the new SheWrites Press, sent in my $25 and chapters, and was accepted as a Track 2 Writer in September. But with two more kids now in college (not selected for the free SW Passion Project) and still hoping to hear something positive from the agents I pitched, I hemmed and hawed. 

I joined the Providence Writers Group (now Guild!) and spent another nine months submitting and revising my book in its entirety with their excellent advice and fiction-writing feedback. Then I submitted to the WW agents again, still hoping. I guest blogged a piece called “Sea Turtles and Moon Baths” in Polliwog on Safari, published an essay called “Summer Fun Made by Mr. Richardson” on the Wayne in Focus website, wrote the new website content and several success stories for the Coastal Resources Center, and authored articles on scallops and quahogs and a book review on narwhals for 41N magazine. And remember those six pages about salmon? Well, they became an essay called “Dam It” which was just published in a literary journal called Gold Man Review.

All in all, I’ve sent over 200 queries and pitched 20 agents, fielded over 120 rejections, attended 2 workshops, 3 conferences, and have worked with 5 editors (3 partial, 2 full). I’ve been in three writing groups and have had 15 readers of my full ms including 3 agents. I’ve spent a lot of time and even more money getting to this point. I spent the past winter and spring working and trying to save some money for publishing, which didn’t go so well, but in July we received an unexpected payment on an outstanding debt owed to us. The opportunity to publish with SWP was at hand. I received my edited ms at the end of tail end of July but was still working and enjoying summer so I tabled it until the kids were back in school. The day after Labor Day I was laid off, which wasn’t exactly in the spirit of the holiday, and I spent the rest of September revising my ms full-time. Again. In the middle of August, Andy’s cousin was preparing to head out on the highway for the Sturgis Rally Harley trip of a lifetime with her husband, sister and brother-in-law when she felt ill. She was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer and instead of seeing Mt. Rushmore, she was confined to her death bed where she exhaled her final breath only two months later. She wasn’t much older than me. And if that’s not incentive enough for any one of us to get up off our chair-shaped asses and start moving in our intended directions, I don’t know what is.

I signed with SheWrites press on September 28 to publish my memoir, Breathe, and a week or so later I received my draft tip sheet from my publisher, Brooke Warner, with my publication date—May 14, 2014. May 14 is the day that Jonah died and was born. In addition to that, an excerpt from Breathe recounting that same day was one of 80 pieces recently selected out of 600 submissions for an anthology called “Three Minus One” which is also forthcoming in the spring to accompany a movie, “Return To Zero.” I am sincerely hopeful that at last I will be given another chance to successfully birth something on that date. And that many people will love it.

The History of Breathe, Part One

Well, I've done it again. I've been recalcitrant in my blogging duties and have finally written a new blog post but I'm afraid it will greatly exceed your patience to read. So, I'll post it in two parts. Here, at long last, is The History of Breathe, Part One.

Next Spring will mark seven years since I began writing my memoir, now called Breathe. For two or three decades now, even before this story began, people have asked me when I was going to write a book. This was often in response to them receiving, of all things, my annual holiday letter which arrived anytime between Christmas and Easter. And interspersed among these votes of confidence was the voice of my mother, sighing and saying, “You’re such a gifted writer, it’s a shame you never did anything with it.” 

“Hey,” I’d counter, scribbling yet another note to one of my kids teachers, I write every day!” 

After the events in this story had transpired in real time, I started answering, “well, first I have to figure out how many of my family members I want to alienate.” And then I lost them all anyway. By then I’d given birth to Bella, at age 42, and this book, which I referred to as Naptime, began.

Bella Grace is born!

While the other four kids were at school and Bella slept in the afternoons, on most days I resisted the temptation to crawl in beside her, forcing my ass into my office chair instead to finally start writing this book. I figured I needed the old college deadline so I set myself the goal of having it done to mark the tenth anniversary of Noah’s, death on August 10, 1997. Yes, one year plus a few months to wrap things up sounded completely attainable as I sat down to begin. (If you haven’t written a book, this may seem perfectly attainable; if you have, you’re probably smirking about now.) By then it had been about ten years since the story timeline started—the opening scene being Noah’s birth on May 18, 1996—and it was Easter 2006, which seemed like a good time for resurrections.  

Noah Patrick

The first thing I realized was that I had to start at the end. The final scenes of the story recount our medical malpractice trial so my first task was to transcribe the trial because, lucky me, our courtroom had the technological innovation of videotape vs. stenographer. For many months, during naptime, I sat in front of our VCR with my notebooks and pens and wrote, word for word, every testimony from seven full days in court. My kids would come home from school to find me seated in front of the TV, stopping, rewinding, and starting the seven VCR tapes over and over again, until I was finished. By then, it had been four years since the trial, so this exercise served as a good refresher. And when I’d pressed the stop button for the last, blessed time, I still had to transfer them from my notebooks to my computer. 

That done, I searched through cupboards, closets, and storage bins in the basement until I’d found all the baby books, photo albums, calendars, journals, sympathy cards, newspaper clippings, church bulletins, bills, receipts, and birth, death and medical records from the five-year span of story time, researching and reliving those events over and over until they, too, were fresh in my head and in my heart. And I learned the absolute truth of the saying:  the heart remembers what the mind forgets. One of the many things I unearthed in the process were notes I’d taken from a Compassionate Friends conference for bereaved parents that Andy and I had attended in 1999 where I’d asked a well-known grief writer, “how long should you wait to write your story?” And because I can’t remember even my own phone number, for five years by then I’d felt like I was running behind because I remembered her answering, “five.” But when I found my notes, I discovered she’d really answered me by saying, “You should wait five years to tell it, but ten years to write it!” So, I was right on track.

In November of 2006, the same year I began writing, Andy and I went on a sailing trip with friends to Martinique. On November 13, I sat on the deck after my 45^th birthday dinner under a starlit night with the Caribbean caressing our catamaran. My friend told me I could make a birthday wish. I was still nervous about saying I was writing a memoir, hadn’t told anyone yet, what if I didn’t finish it?, but the night cradled me its warm, magical spell so I said, “My wish for my birthday is to publish the book I’m writing.” They were silent at first, so I figured I’d better have a back-up plan, adding, “and to see a sea turtle.” Then we all toasted my birthday wishes those seven years ago and the next day while we were snorkeling, I swam ahead of the group and there, just in front of me, I saw a beautiful hawksbill turtle breaststroking along. As I screamed through my snorkel, the turtle turned its head and looked at me with a round, soulful eye and I felt my birthday blessing, happy that I’d added a wish that could be so quickly granted. My other wish, as you know, took much longer. But I was happy to have the encouragement of this ancient reptile whose ancestors had been swimming in the sea for over 250 million years and whenever I grew frustrated, I’d imagine my birthday turtle patting my hand with its flipper and saying “all in good time, my dear, all in good time.” 

One year later, I had still only just begun to fathom the mountain I’d set out to climb as we celebrated the tenth anniversary of Noah’s death in August of 2007 by hiking in the White Mountains, climbing Mt. Carter and staying overnight in a hut with Hannah, Christiana, and Micah instead.  We brought a sprinkling of his ashes and buried them at the peak, making it just a teeny bit higher.

In the past seven years, I’ve solidified our familial reputation for being late for everything, telling my kids, “Just a minute, I need to finish this sentence,” my fingers flying across the keyboard before hitting “save” and speeding them off to one soccer game or another wondering what on earth we were having for dinner. In the time that I’ve been writing this memoir, we’ve moved from Rhode Island to Costa Rica and from Costa Rica to the Oregon coast, then back to Costa Rica for another year, back to Oregon for yet another, and last year we returned to Rhode Island.  When I started writing, my oldest daughter, Hannah, was a junior in high school looking at colleges and I was still nursing Bella, who was two. Hannah graduated from Georgetown two years ago with degrees in Physics and Portuguese and Bella, now nine, has never known a time in her life when I haven’t been working on this book. In this time, she’s been weaned and potty trained, lost her first baby tooth and grown X number of her permanent ones, learned to walk, skip, swing, swim, dance and ride a bike, and she’s learned to speak in both English and Spanish.  .

After completing my crash course in stenography and historical research, when I finally sat down to begin writing the story off the top of my head, what came swimming out of my fingertips were six pages about salmon. And when I got to “the end” for the first time, the manuscript was over 500 pages long, raw and uncut, was entitled Shoveling Sand, and contained not one scene or sentence of dialogue, except what I’d transcribed from the trial. I was beginning to understand that I needed help learning to craft a story. I wrote to Ann Hood and in July 2008 I went to my first writing conference in Guatemala, at her recommendation, where she told me, “This story needs to be told and you need to tell it,” and Joyce Maynard said, “You sound angry; start over.”  

Joyce and Ann

  ***
K3

Summer Fun: Made by Mr. Richardson

Mr. Richardson, proprietor of Richardson’s Cottages in Wayne, Maine where we vacationed every summer, lives in my childhood lake memories as a fixture more constant than sunscreen (which I don’t remember.) I never knew George as a fall, winter, or spring guy. For all I knew, he returned each summer to Pocasset when the ice went out. Like the loons. Like we did.

As soon as we arrived at Pocasset Lake, we burst out of our packed station wagon and raced down the ramp to the dock. Waiting there was the wooden boat that came with the cottage, both of which George had built along with the wooden oars painted a matching gray and tucked beneath the seats. And usually, as we scanned the lake for our summer friends, we’d spot the signature white, flat-top crew-cut that was George (Mr. Richardson to us) motoring towards us in his own boat which was also wooden in my younger days but transformed to aluminum and fiberglass as the years went by. We waited impatiently for him to get to us, always excited to see which boat motor he’d chosen for us to rent and how many horsepower would propel us around the lake in the weeks ahead, always hoping for a 12.

Once that was checked off the list, we ran inside to change into bathing suits and sped to the beach. The beach was dotted with colorful Adirondack chairs and presided over by a red boathouse with white trim, all made by George. And by the time the man who’d built our summer vacations with his own two hands arrived from his lunch break each day, at least 20 kids of all ages were lined up and ready to ski. George had one of the few ski boats on the lake for many years and few, if any, of us renters owned one. So he spent his afternoons sticking to the red vinyl seat of his shiny silver boat, circling the lake for hours and teaching us all to ski by proffering his characteristic favorite advice—silence. And it worked. We all eventually learned to sit like we were in a chair, skis parallel, rope in between, and to let the boat pull us under George’s quiet, patient tutelage.

But the most fun we had with Mr. Richardson came towards the end of dinnertime every few nights when we heard the sound of his truck coming through the woods towards our cottage. We guzzled our milk, washing down the final bites of our dinner, and jumped up from the table with a quick, “Can I be excused?” The screen door slammed behind us as George lifted our garbage can off the nail in the tree where it hung out of the reach of raccoons. We greeted our friends already in the back of the red pick-up and clambered in beside them, ready for the dump run. 

While we picked the last bits of corn from our teeth and fooled around, George worked, cruising the shoreline and unhooking trash cans from their respective nails outside each cottage, cottages his wife, Janet, had christened with Indian names—Sitting Bull, Hiawatha, Pocahontas. I recited these ancient words to myself, committing them to memory in a sacred soliloquy for these people who’d walked the woods before us. One by one, kids from these other tribal homes let their own screen doors slam behind them and jumped in the truck to join us, leaving their own families still seated around their meatloaf dinners.

George tucked paper bags of trash in the bed around us, gradually filling in the rectangular space until we reached Willowash, the end of the line. The setting sun perched on the tree tops across the lake, coloring our adventure in shades of orange and pink, as George turned the truck away from the lake and into the cool, darkening woods. By then we lined the side rails like T-shirted decorations or sat across the open tailgate, bare feet hanging down.

We all knew the road by heart, anticipating the bumpy places where we’d exaggerate the bounce with a “Whoa!” while the tailgate sitters stretched their legs and brushed bare toes along the hard-packed dirt tracks or dragged them through the softer pine needles nestled in between. The braver souls, usually boys, “accidentally” fell off the tailgate, running and laughing to catch up and jump back on. We grabbed at the leaves which overhung the road and, like kids do, turned a simple trip to the dump into a thrilling game of daring adventure.

Not to worry. Like everything else he did, George drove slowly and purposefully while we, of course, pretended otherwise. The forest shadows cooled our eternally sunburned faces and the evening air ruffled through our still-damp hair from the day’s waterskiing. We layered our childhood memories with the spicy scent of pine trees, selectively forgetting the too-sweet smell of rotting fruit.

Always too soon, we arrived at the dump—something else George had made.  It was nothing fancy, no recycling station, no attendant, simply a quiet clearing in the woods where George eliminated the unwanted parts of our summer vacations. Yet somehow this place held an aura of mystery that engendered a thrill in our tight bellies and we always hoped to see something exciting, like a rat. We stood and helped, handing the bags of refuse down to George. I secretly dreamed of being Jacques Cousteau but at the dump I switched channels, surveying the landscape like Marlon Perkins on Wild Kingdom from the safety of my pickup perch while George, unaware of his role as my Jim, heroically braved the dangers of the dump from the dirt level.

His task complete, no wild animals in sight, George climbed back into his truck and we rode back towards the darkening lake, laughing with the happiness and relief of having lived out our adventure. George slowed down near our respective cottages and we jumped off at Kinoka where the lamps had just begun to glow, backlighting my mother washing dishes in the kitchen window. We had no televisions in our summer cottages. At night we came together as a family or with friends. We ate dessert and played cards or board games. We went to bed early with the songs of loons in our heads. And we dreamed of water and earth and the promise of more summer adventures to come.

KK

*Note: This piece is a revision of an earlier post I wrote when George Richardson died and appears on the website Wayne in Focus at http://www.wayneinfocus.org/summer-fun-made-by-mr-richardson/

Moon Baths and Sea Turtles

Today I am the guest blogger on the blog:  Polliwog on Safari!  It's a piece about watching sea turtles lay their eggs in Costa Rica in the moonlight and you can read it at:  http://michellecusolito.blogspot.com/  Enjoy!

Dear Kelly

Right.  So it has been a couple of months since I last posted a blog.  Grab a cup of coffee and a comfy chair because this will be long.  Been busy moving back onto Mohawk Drive where, after four years of renters, everything I touched needed either cleaning or repairing or both.  Fortunately for me, the military moved all of our tenants stuff except their cleaning products.  So, I have a random sample of the cleaning products preferred by three American military families, which is almost interesting.  And even though it seems questionable whether or not they ever actually used any of them while they lived here, I now have a nice selection of scents with which to clean the toilet.

As the dust has settled anew, the other thing I’ve been preoccupied with is my writing.  I have, as you may or may not know, been trying to realize my dream of being a writer, a published, paid author that is for I have, indeed, always written something, whether it be emails or blogs or notes to teachers. (Or to myself.)  I have had some considerable ass-in-chair time over the past five years and, yes, my ass is distinctively more chair-shaped than it used to be as proof.  I’ve written and revised my manuscript countless times, queried 200 agents, pitched 20 agents in person, attended writing workshops and conferences, worked with five editors, started one writing group, joined another, and have had a couple handfuls of people read various iterations of my manuscript.  Because that is what it is called—a manuscript.  A manuscript dreams of being a book when it grows up.

And in my spare time?  I have been working on “The Platform.”  No writer these days can simply write.  Or drink and write. Or eat opium and write. Or move to Paris and be bisexual and smoke Gauloises and commiserate with starving painters who will be famous once they’re dead and live a bohemian rhapsody lifestyle.  And write. Not, that is, if you want to reach the hallowed halls of publishing before you, too, are dead.  This busy little platform is so important that many writers are actually out there, right now, studying engineering and constructing little toothpick projects even before they have written one single word of their book.  The modern day writer can not simply sit in front of a keyboard and create.  We must also be both businessman and architect, ever mindful of building our venerable platforms or risk writing ourselves straight into obscurity. 

We cannot simply stand, or sit, on the hallowed ground which we inhabit.  We must constantly grow our social networks, tweeting and blogging ourselves above the crowd.  We must become experts in our field or our genre or otherwise.  We must build our mailing lists.  We must win the Miss Congeniality award of the writing pageant to which we all aspire.  Our names must be known.  We must be, as Glinda so aptly sang to Elpheba in Wicked, “Popular.”  (Or Poppa-LEE-ur, as Bella used to say.)  And we must be verbal yoginis.  We must not only write our book as a book, we must flex our fingers and twist our prose into pretzel-like positions, telling our story in one perfect word.  Or one sentence.  Or three.  Or in a paragraph.  Or in a one page synopsis.  Or a three-page synopsis.  Or a five-page synopsis.  Or in a chapter outline.  A scene summary.  A proposal.  A song.  A poem.  An essay.  An excerpt.  A Modern Love column.  I am not kidding.  Except for maybe the song and poem part, but I’m sure some agent out there right now is thinking, “A song? Hmmm…” 

And so, in addition to “just” writing a book, I have also been bending my book into all these shapes in my quest to be not only popular, but published.  Because, just as everyone—including my soon-to-be-98-years-old-mother-in-law—who has ever said, “Someday I’m going to write a book,” will learn, writing the damned thing is actually the “easy” part.  And what you probably don’t know until you’ve fulfilled your threats and finally written that book is that behind every manuscript lurks a literal Mt. Everest.  When you’ve scribbled “The End” and looked up from your laptop screen for the first time in years, you’ll suddenly notice that a) your kids are gone and b) you are sitting on a literal false peak.  For there, looming before you, lies the real challenge—the snow-capped mountain of publishing.  Strapping on your sunglasses and tightening your boot laces, you must rise from your chair and set out anew, clutching your precious manuscript with hope in one hand and determination in the other. 

You will find the path ahead littered with the corpses of writers who’ve come before you, those who succumbed to the obstacles of rejection and the elements of dejection, those who had thin skin or got cold feet.  Some will have left their footprints as they slogged back to their day jobs, burning the pages of their dreams alongside the trail for warmth and choking on the ashes.  But if you can persevere on this path, paving the way for those who follow with the scattered breadcrumbs of your own essays and rejection letters, you might actually, eventually arrive at the tippy top of that snowy peak. 

And there, just beyond Hillary’s Step, you will find a tiny, little, teeny-weeny sign post.  And if you can manage to crawl through the final 3,000 feet of elevation affectionately known as “the death zone” and up, up, up to the 29,029^th foot peak, heaving yourself up with your last bit of energy as your brain begins to eat itself, you will see that the sign says, “Unless!” No, that’s a different story.  Instead, what you will find nailed to that piece of weather-beaten wood is a clipboard.  And attached to that clipboard will be a flimsy piece of paper flapping in the jet stream whose infernal triple-digit winds will threaten to blow it, and you, clear off the mountain any minute now. 

But. IF you can manage to cling to that rickety sign and clutch that piece of paper, squinting through your snow blindness to decipher the words inscribed in some ancient Himalayan language known only to the Dalai Lama and a few others that looks something like this, सगरमाथा, every other word of which sounds suspiciously like the F-bomb, THEN you will see that it is a contract!  From a major publishing house!  And it has YOUR name on it followed by a bunch of legal stuff you wouldn’t understand even without the fog of altitude sickness.  And there, at the bottom, is a blank line that says, “Sign here.”  In English.  Now, you are way above the tree-line and there is no stick or pencil to be found.  Will that stop you?  I certainly hope not.  Because after all you’ve been through, this, you see, is the final test. 

If you are a real writer, one worthy of the quest, you will leap this hurdle by gnawing off the end of your fingertip, just as you have done every single day for all these many, many years as you struggled to recall Mrs. Petersen’s seventh grade grammar rules, eating your nails for lunch and wearing your fingertips thin as you erased all traces of letters on your keyboard, your fingers flying across its smooth plastic surface until they melted together like the grilled cheese sandwich you wish you had time to make.  Yes you, and only you, are equipped to pass this final test.  Bite your brittle skin, sign that contract with your own blood, and receive the holy grail.  For then, and only then, will your manuscript realize its dream, magically transforming before your very eyes into a book.  And, then, and only then, will you, yourself, undergo the final metamorphosis from writer of “Dear Diary” entries to Author! 

Yes, folks, the path from chair to peak is paved with disappointment.  Which you may want to remember the next time you bite the head off your book group selection.  And part of preparing the venerable platform is submitting essays to various magazines and contests so you can say that you have been published somewhere, even if it’s only in an anthology called “Moose on the Loose.”  And so it was that I awoke this morning to read the first email on my Crackberry before the sun had even thought about shining:

Dear Kelly,

Thanks for sending "Dam It" (yes, the real name) to Osprey Magazine (no, not the real name) -- and forgive me for the amount of time that has passed since your submission. (four months) All of us at Osprey Magazine were happy to have the chance to consider the piece, but I must take credit for the delayed reply. (um, okay, and ?!)

Though we admired many things about the piece, (that’s nice) we unfortunately must pass. (that’s not)  As you know, Osprey Magazine only publishes six issues a year, (even though you get an email from us weekly) which means decision-making is always quite difficult.

Thanks again, Kelly (at least he didn’t call me Kitty), for considering Osprey Magazine as a home for your writing. (but sorry, you’re still homeless)  Best wishes for a peaceful and productive fall.

James Audubon (not his real name)
On behalf of Osprey Magazine's editorial staff

Yes, folks, this is the kind of love letter we “writers” receive all too often.  Or at least I do.  And we’re never supposed to complain, especially not in a blog we are using to build our platform and can be read on the World Wide Web.  Which I’m not.  I’m simply sharing, as in show and tell.  This is the kind of thing that we are supposed to celebrate as one more “no” on our way to “yes!”  In lieu of gnashing my teeth or kicking the proverbial dog, I graciously poured myself a cup of coffee and beat someone at Words With Friends instead.  And then, drowning in caffeine-laced disappointment, I decided to give you all a little taste of what it takes to be an aspiring author.  Now I think I'll go clean a toilet.

The End

It it's Sunday, we are Smiling!

Sunday.  The day of rest.  We could smell Maine in the sunrise and it was time to get moving.  Again, we snuck out in the wee hours without waking our hosts.  We hit our first Dunkin Donuts and headed for the ferry.  I wish we could have put our car on a ferry back in Waldport and traveled the whole way on the water.  We were the first ones in line and it wasn’t long before we were wheeling on the water to Vermont.  We took photos and laughed and ate donuts on the too-short ride to the other shore. 

You know you’re in Vermont when folk music is playing on the radio.  “What would Woody do?” was a new song for me, but since the trip began with me humming Woody’s “Roll on Columbia,” somehow it made sense and soon I was singing along.  I recently submitted an essay about Woody and salmon and dams.  “He had songs written on the soles of his shoes,” they said.  Indeed, he did.

Recently in Oregon after months of passionate debate about tolerance and tradition, the Board of Education voted to crack down on racism by banning the use of Native American lingo in high schools, leading the nation by flexing the biggest muscles against school mascots, nicknames and logos.  Critics say Indian mascots are racist, reinforcing stereotypes and promoting the bullying of Native students. Supporters say the mascots are intended as tributes and a way to honor Native American history by evoking values of strength and bravery. Eight high schools and an unknown number of elementary and middle schools have five years to use their dwindling funds change their names and logos, some of which have been used for almost 100 years now.  If they don’t comply, they risk losing their state funding.  But at the rate that is declining, some might want to do a little cost:benefit analysis on that one.  

So, just who are these bully promoters and what are their politically incorrect names?  Banks and Reedsport, “we are the Braves, the mighty, mighty, Braves.”  Mohawk, Molalla, Roseburg, and Scappoose, “we are the Indians.”  The Rogue River Chieftains and the Dalles-Wahtonka High Eagle Indians.  That’s it.  The Braves, the Indians, the Chieftains, and the Eagle Indians.  These eight will just have to find a more peaceful, PC name.  Like the squirrels.  Or the turtles.  Or the Warriors?

Because, believe it or not, the board in its infinite wisdom saw fit to determine that the name “Warriors,” which is used by seven other high schools in the Beaver State, is NOT racist and does NOT reinforce stereotypes or promote bullying.  Amity, Lebanon, North Douglas, Oakridge, Philomath, Siletz, and Warrenton all dodged the bullet and will be allowed to remain “the mighty, mighty Warriors,” except they must change their logos and mascots if they depict Native Americans.  I was personally relieved to see Siletz on this list, since they are our neighbors back home in Waldport.  Waldport, incidentally, is the home of the Fighting Irish until someone named Paddy gets a wild hair about that one.  Siletz High School is actually located on a Native American reservation and my kids and I have attended powwows in their gym where everyone simply danced together.  As a soverign nation, I think they should be allowed to judge for themselves whether or not their mascot incited any bullying of, well, themselves.  

So, we can all rest a bit easier thanks to the Oregon Board of Education.  No longer will Banks High School be singing its own local twist of the national anthem at its school sporting events, signing off with “Land of the free, and home of the Braves!”  Somehow Lake Monsters just doesn’t have the same ring.  And this would be a likely spot for me to sing you the high school cheer that Andy’s Mom, aged 97, used to sing which began, “Niggah, niggah, hoe potato,” and ended, “Golva High School, rah, rah, rah.”  But I won’t.

We continued along back country roads all the way across the Green Mountains into the White Mountains, passing places like the InjunJoe Inn and the Mooselook Restaurant.  Lucky for them, these places are tucked way away in the mountains, beyond the reach of the Oregon Board of Education, which I like to visualize like the Eye of Sauron.  Speaking of which, I’ve been looking for a moose for 50 years now and even though we passed countless signs promising, “Moose Crossing,” they failed to do so.  In East Concord, NH we passed Oregon Road.  Which reminded me of the Cape Cod Cottages back home in Oregon.  It seems we Americans take our places along with us for the ride.

As we neared Gorham, NH, I recognized many of the trailheads and peaks I’d climbed over the years and it began to look like home.  We passed through the Shelburne White Birch forest and from there I was on autopilot.  I knew these roads.  We sped along until the white spire of the Wayne church pointed into the blue sky, the church where we were married and our sons were buried.  Turning down Lord Road, the tree branches bent their welcome.  After 3,000 miles, the familiar faces of family and friends waited to greet us.  We’d arrived.  We were home. 

Here I’ll swim across the lake waters I was born in.  I’ll cook fresh peas and corn.  We’ll take the boat to the General Store for candy or to Tubby’s for ice cream.  And then I’ll fly back to Oregon, load up a moving van with Andy, and in another month I’ll do it all over again.  Because we’re moving back to Rhode Island, to our house on Mohawk Drive.  Or at least that’s what it was when we left it.  Perhaps they’ve changed it to Warrior Way.

KK

If it's Saturday, we're swimming with Champ!

When we awoke on Saturday, we discovered we were right on a river with an indoor/outdoor pool and Jacuzzi out our window and wished we had more time to linger.  The routine of getting up and at ‘em for the sixth day in a row was growing old.  It was actually raining!  Tim Horton’s was right across the street and we began our day by causing yet another debacle by procuring our inferior American dollars.  “Sorry, sorry,” I apologized to the hungry Canadians lining up behind us while the cashier learned how to calculate for our crappy currency.  We issued our profuse thanks for our doughnuts and breakfast sandwiches like they’d been donated, beating a hasty retreat.  

Then we headed down the street to the gas station where we nearly caused an international incident.  This time I actually attempted to use my credit card without first informing my Oregon Coast bank that I was leaving the country.  Denied.  American Express?  Denied.  Sigh.  Okay, in with the US dollars once again.  The cashier had to call the store owner who was possibly still in bed and who, in turn, instructed his employee two or three times how to convince the computer to accept the bills once commonly known as “double sawbucks,” but probably not in Detroit.  I had $80 dollars so I pumped $70, figuring I’d need a margin of error.  When all was said and done in that half hour of my life I’ll never get back, it was determined that I owed $78.12.  I accepted my change and left.

Crossing back into America at Ogdensburg proved to be no problem either.  We were the only ones there and both me and my wallet exhaled with relief, feeling a tiny bit fatter.  The toll was something like $20.  “Should I pay in US or Canadian dollars?” I asked the lonely border guy.  “Doesn’t matter,” he said, “they’re both about the same.”  I wanted to say, “not where I came from,” and maybe even have a teeny, tiny argument based on my recent experiences but handed him the $20 US with a smile and drove off into New York instead.  The first thing we passed as we entered America was a prison, the St. Lawrence Correctional Facility, which “uses innovation and technology in many ways, such as offering a credit card bail system to inmates.”  Nice.  I wondered how they dealt with the whole currency thing.

Next point of interest, Louisville, home of the turtles.  I kid you not.  “I wonder how their track team is,” said Bella.  Then came Ellenburg, NY, home of the World’s Best Pizza, in case you’re on a quest.  Somewhere back in Mountain time zone Isaiah had started texting family and interested third parties whenever we crossed into a new state.  When we’d entered Ontario, however, Hannah had texted back that each text cost .50 so we’d refrained for a day.  Now back on the free texting plan, Isaiah struck up a text volley with his cousin, Ava.  Periodically I’d ask him to read what folks were writing and somewhere in NY he said, “Ava just called me a snazzy piece of butterscotch.”  “Really?” I said, thinking we may have another writer on our hands.

The last things I expected to see in the Empire State were horse and buggies and straw hats and bonnets.  But it seems the Amish have been busy in the past few years hitching their wagons and heading north for the “productive and underpriced land, weather, growing season and congenial neighbors and local officials.”  Maybe it’s just me, but when I hear the words New and York, the last thing that comes to mind are cheap land, great weather, and friendly folks.  Which, I guess, is a result of the general extrapolation of Manhattan to the rest of the state.  “If you want to get away from the suburbs and the high-tech world, there are more places to hide in New York,” I read online.  And sure enough, around several bends in the road we found the Amish, hiding right there in New York in plain sight with their plain clothes.  

GPS pulled her usual stunt as we neared our destination in Plattsburgh and we got just a little lost but soon the smiling faces of Brian and Amy were within reach.  And within the hour we were onboard their comfy red and white boat cruising around the craggy islands of Lake Champlain, which is huge, as in 125 miles long and over 400 feet deep.  Amy was raised on the lake and is one of the hundreds of people who have actually seen Champ, the American cousin to the Loch Ness critter.  “But that was in the southern end of the lake,” she assured.  Still, one couldn’t help scanning the surface for the mascot of Vermont's lone Minor League Baseball team (we are the monsters, the mighty, mighty lake monsters…)  In keeping with our theme of domination, it should be noted that both the Iroquois and the Abenaki tribes called this creature who may or may not be a Plesiosaur but is definitely not a Brontosaurus by the perfectly fine name of "Tatoskok."  Which doesn’t exactly roll right off your tongue but you could get used to it.  And also which may or may not mean “log,” “fish,” or “eel,” which is what some folks think the monster actually is.

We pulled the boat up to the town beach and nestled in amongst the other Saturday boaters outside the roped-off swimming area.  The water was shallow and cool and we all got out to play.  I decided I’d take a swim and wrestled my cap and goggles on.  “Just swim along the buoys,” Amy suggested.  So I marked a course just beyond the swimming area and began stroking down the line from white buoy to white buoy.  I was doing my best not to think about Champ and, like Steinbeck’s “most Americans,” was really enjoying moving after sitting for so long.  When I swim I can’t hear well because of my cap and the water which inevitably fills my ears.  And try as I might, my goggles usually fog up too.  So there I was, stroking along in my own little watery world, blind and deaf, when I spotted something red a few feet in front of me.  No Champ sighting had ever mentioned red so I knew it wasn’t him.  I stopped and lifted my goggles to find a very young lifeguard in a red kayak, instead. 

“Wah, wahh, wah, wah,” he said. 

“What?” I said, lifting my cap to clear my ears. 

“I said you can’t swim here.” 

“Oh,” I said, although swimming was exactly what I’d thought I’d been doing. 

“Well, where can I swim?” I asked, looking around. 

“In there,” he said, indicating the swimming area with his paddle.  We both looked over at the throngs of people packed within the ropes, all “swimming” in water not much past their knees.

“That doesn’t look very possible,” I said, “how ‘bout I just swim back to the boat?”

“No, you can’t do that,” he said with his best 14-year-old imitation of authority.  I refrained from asking him how he could possibly work while missing the Disney Channel and resigned myself to swimming a few strokes toward shore, then stood up and hiked out. 

“I got kicked out of Lake Champlain,” I told Amy who was at the snack stand with Bella. 

We had a great time anyway.  Later, we took a glass of wine down to the lakeside beach in front of their townhouse and chatted.  Vermont glowed in the setting sun way across the water on the eastern shore.  The wind died down, the water calmed, and Brian paddled Bella around on his board.  That night we could see fireworks, again, on the lakeshores of both Vermont and New York. 

Christiana called to say she’d had a run-in with a rattlesnake in Caliente!  Seems she’d gone behind a bush and looked back to see if her team could see her and when she turned around, a 4-foot rattler was stretched out in front of her giving her the hairy eyeball.  It rattled, she screamed and ran, and her team heard both.  I asked if they carried antivenin and she said no, they relied on air evacuation.  The next week I picked up a Field and Stream magazine which happened to have an article on snake bite treatment.  It said in Montana, treatment costs $75,000 to $100,000.  Apparently antivenin is expensive, avoidance is free.

KK

If it's Friday, we're heading for Canada!

Friday we awoke early and tip-toed out of the beach house while the ladies slumbered, Mike having left much earlier to get in a day’s work in the city so he could return before sunset.  We had an international travel day ahead of us and another hot one to boot.  I stopped at Bella tires to get my air pressure checked, thinking I might need more air in them, but was surprised when the guy actually let air out.  I dutifully had a check-up at Les Schwab before leaving, but that was back in the 60’s and it was already approaching 100, that whole hot air expands thing.  I’d never seen Detroit outside of the airport and, as it turns out, that might be the best part of the city known for poverty, crime, and fallen businesses, according to Lonely Planet, or maybe I made that up. 

I’d heard that gas prices were higher in Canada so turned down a street just before the international bridge and found a corner station within a few blocks to fill up.  Suddenly, we were immersed in another culture and I was definitely the only white woman in the hood as I stepped out of my minivan with Oregon salmon license plates and a bumper sticker that reads, "Certified American Tree Farmer."  I pumped my gas as coolly as possible, silently cursing my lack of preparation in not dressing like my favorite rap star (possibly because I don’t have one), while trying to avoid the obvious stares I was eliciting.  Drawing on my automatic Peace Corps cross-cultural survival response in a further effort to appear casual, I hummed the only tune that surfaced from my rock library—Detroit Rock City.  Really?  Kiss?  Ghostface Killa might have been more appropriate but I didn’t even know he existed until I just googled Top Rap Artists.  Which is when I also “remembered” that Eminem got his start in the Motor City.  But it’s questionable whether or not a blonde, white lady wearing sunglasses and flip flops humming “Lose Yourself” would have made the right impression.  And even though my bladder was as full as my gas tank, I opted not to step inside to inquire about public facilities.    

The Ambassador Bridge lived up to its name: the Americans took our money ($25 US/$22.50 CA) and the Canadians read our passports and we were international, eh?  First stop, McDonalds, where we began our lesson in shame, producing our crap American dollars as payment with an apologetic shoulder shrug.  And used the facilities.  As I drove towards Toronto, I admired the Canadian road signs.  Somehow they seemed so much more genteel than our own, like they’d issued from the proper lips of a Canadian Grandma with a slight British accent.  “Seatbelts compulsory,” she reminded us with a slight wag of her finger.  Can you even read the word compulsory without a lilt?  “Fatigue kills, take a break,” she reminded, sipping on her afternoon tea and somehow you simply wanted to pull over at the next exit and join her.  “Tailgating kills, leave some space,” she suggested.  They really could use her in Chicago.  

At last, we pulled into our friend’s driveway in Peterborough where we took a picnic to a park on Chamong Lake and the kids swam while Cath and I visited.  If you only have one evening together, you make the most of it.  And we did.  We’d met on the Christmas sands of Costa Rica in 2010 where Bella and Annika became amigas and we all picked right up where we left off on the summer sands of Canada, eh?  When darkness threatened and we realized we were the only ones at the park, we called the kids off the swing set and headed into town, arriving at the downtown Holiday Inn for the night.   

KK

If it's Thursday, this must be Michigan...

The next morning, Thursday, I awoke at 5 and checked my cell phone, no messages, no texts.  Unable to sleep for worrying about Christiana and with high heat warnings ahead of us, we made some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the lobby and hit the road early.  It was, as predicted, hot already.  I found an NPR station from Madison and learned that two fireworks shows had been halted the night before after they’d set the grass on fire.  And the highway pavement had buckled in three places from the heat, but fortunately that was all behind us.  All was well traffic-wise as we travelled past Madison on this day-after-the-confusing-holiday-being-on-a-Wednesday-and-all.  As Pacific Time awoke, Andy called to say he’d finally talked to Christiana and that she was okay.  Seems she’d had a stomach flu, perhaps from the MRE’s they were eating.  I called her a little later and she said she was on fire watch recovering.  They’d contained the “small, 4,000-acre” fire and were moving on to Caliente.  Which sounded hot. 

Lake Michigan was calling, but Chicago loomed large in our shimmering future.  GPS, in her infinite wisdom, decided to take me on a tour of back roads between Wisconsin and Chicago, for which I cursed her soundly.  Then she decided I should drive right through the city ahead.  I called my friend, Mike, and asked for better directions.  Then I proceeded to ignore her for the rest of the morning, making her search endlessly for alternate routes to the city then disregarding her every command to exit like a distracted parent.  “Hmm? Did you say something?”  So there.  You know you’ve been traveling a bit too long when you start talking to your GPS.

Even though Fargo is the halfway point on the map, Chicago marks the place where the nation divides between relaxed road trip and road rage.  Suddenly, the east coast population density was upon us and my shoulders begin to rise with the tension of drivers cutting in and out and the way too many exits.  After three days of cruising the freeway virtually alone at 80 mph with hundreds of miles to think about exiting, the theme from Survivor suddenly popped up on my personal playlist.  We cruised past Chicago at a safe distance, paid our first tolls of the trip, and happily rounded the bottom of Lake Michigan, passing through a tiny bit of Indiana and up into Michigan.  Suddenly, we were on Eastern time!  One more exit and we were dropped by GPS once again, suspending route guidance, so there, but soon we were pulling into Beachwood, our friend’s beach house on the shores of the lake, and shifting to park for the day.  Lovely. 

Suddenly, for us, it was summer.  Oregon hadn’t seen over 64 degrees and we’d just soaked up the second rainiest June on record.  We dug out bathing suits still smelling of last year’s sunscreen, packed a lunch, loaded up Mike’s bike cart, and strolled along a lovely wooded path to the lake.  Did I mention it was hot?  My flip-flopped feet were still soft from a year encased in rain boots and once we descended the stairs to the beach, each flip of mid-day sand burned the bottoms as we ran across the boiling gauntlet to the water’s edge for relief crying “ouch, ouch, ouch, ahhh.”  The beach stretched endlessly in each direction and the blue-green lake as well. 

We set up chairs and an umbrella, slathered sunscreen on our glowing rainforest skin, and hit the water.  It was calm, clear and warm.  We were in Lake Michigan!  I swam down the shore while Mike played with the kids.  Happy when wet, I was in Heaven.  We spent the entire afternoon enjoying every minute.  The kids played for hours in the water while Mike and I relived our Peace Corps days, reminding me of the saying, “Old people like the olden days best because they were younger then.”  We immersed ourselves in Jamaica so thoroughly we were surprised whenever the kids interrupted.  “What?  Where did you come from?” we asked, feeling like we were 24 and sipping a Red Stripe on Doctors Cave Beach.

Towards dinner time, we dragged ourselves away but left our chairs as a promise of later.  Catherine and Ella were on their way back from play practice in the city.  This lovely beach retreat is only an hour or so from their home in Chicago and an essential part of living in a city—the escape.  Oddly enough, Beachwood is on Eastern time while their city house is on Central so I guess that must somehow impact their viewing of Americas Got Talent but I can’t figure out what.  We showered and dressed and met them for burgers and fries and onion rings at Redamaks, a local institution since 1946.  I wondered if Steinbeck had eaten there and, if so, if the sign back then had also said, "Bite into a Legend."  Then we packed up some Red Stripe Lite (who knew, posse?) and headed back to the beach for sunset and fireworks.  The kids swam and the night was warm and summer had begun.

KK

If it's Wednesday, we're heading for Wisconsin...

On Wednesday morning after coffee and Finneman rolls with Ant Weenie, we hit the holiday roads along with, well, ourselves.  Happy Birthday America!  Everyone else must have been chilling in a lake.  Driving North Dakota is endless but easy, one straight highway, speed limit 75, just you and your fracking dinosaur fuel.  Another day, another time zone.  The radio searched and searched, yielding only news from Saskatoon, which immediately reminded me of one of Micah’s favorite movie lines:  “Hey, you American ladies ever been up to Saskatchatoon, eh?”

The kids were lost in the land of Mordor so I began listening to Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley” in which he set off in 1960 from Maine to rediscover America.  It was interesting to hear his observations from the year just before my birth (yes, Bella, they actually had cars when I was born) while observing this fair land for myself some 50 years later.  And on its birthday.  “Nearly every American hungers to move,” he informed.  No kidding, I said to myself, shifting in my seat.  We met in Fargo which, as I learned from John, is the halfway point of our land, east to west.  Sure enough, we folded Bella’s map and there on the edge sat Far-go.  Steinbeck’s Fargo had a population of 40K but three times as many folks had flocked to the state’s largest city in the interim, along with the four white pelicans I spotted circling in the ND sky.  “The only good writer is a dead writer.  Then he couldn’t surprise anyone any more, couldn’t hurt anyone any more,” Steinbeck reminded me.  Hmmm.

But before I leave the state whose official language is English and official drink is milk, I should mention that while Andy’s Mom, who is 97 years old, hails from the western border, his Dad was from Casselton on the eastern line.  Besides Andy’s Dad and its population of red squirrels (yep, “We are the squirrels, the mighty, mighty squirrels!”), Casselton is known for its can pile.  As we neared the exit, I therefore began scanning the roadside for this landmark which I have seen before in my travels at one speed or another.  I secretly admit I was rather looking forward to seeing the silver cone-shaped structure as I’d driven the unremarkable-save-for-the-badlands-300-or-so miles from Beach.  Made entirely from thousands of oil cans and named by somebody most decidedly not Captain Clark (and not engraved by him neither), it is known simply as “The Casselton Can Pile.”

At 45-feet, the Casselton Can Pile is actually the world's largest pile of, yes, cans.  It was created in 1933 by Max Taubert at what was then a Sinclair gas station.  Max, who I like to think of as a frustrated artist stuck pumping gas in the squirrel capital of North Dakota, began tossing oil cans in a pile around an old windmill tower, perhaps as an act of rebellion, perhaps simply because recycling wasn’t an option.  Until one day when he finished yet one more oil change and had an epiphany.  A glint of sunlight shone straight down from the heavens and Max began to visualize his life’s purpose.  Most of the cans, naturally, were Sinclair oil cans whose logo is the dinosaur-formerly-known-as-Brontosaurus, which is now called Apatosaurus or by the more technical name of “long-necks,” thanks to the Land Before Time series.

Fun fact.  Maybe you already know this, but the Brontosaurus “mix-up” goes back to 1879, when a paleontologist who shall remain nameless (hint: a male who was also clearly terrible at jigsaw puzzles) stuck the wrong head on an Apatosaurus body and called it a Brontosaurus.  Sticking with the less-controversial Land Before Time nomenclature, this “plant eater” was displayed at Yale for almost a century until scientists discovered the mismatch.  Woopsy!  But instead of politely playing along like the Native Americans at Pompey’s Pillar, they struck Brontosaurus from their books.  And when the US Postal Service tried to issue a stamp in 1989 with the Brontosaurus on it?  Well, it’s been all downhill ever since for them.  Even though the incorrect name still lingers in people’s minds, like my own.  But I still struggle to say sea star too.

Anyhoo, in 1932, a lengthy campaign was begun by Sinclair to choose their mascot, the squirrel already being taken.  They discarded the more frightening T-Rex and Dino was born out of a desire to express the fact that Sinclair oil came from Pennsylvania crude oil, which was millions of years old, and had been around since the age of the dinosaurs.  The company believed that the oldest crude oils make the best refined oils, and they felt that a dinosaur would get this point across to the public.  The peaceful plant eater, whatever his name was, appealed to the public and garnered the most interest.  According to the internet, like most of this, people thought that the Brontosaurus represented power, endurance, and stamina, which are the qualities that Sinclair Oil Corporation wanted people to associate with their products.  But in spite of how much brain energy Sinclair credited us with dedicating to oil, be it crude or refined, the truth is I rarely, if ever, think about it.  Although unlike what I dare to say are “most” Americans these days, I did actually know that oil and gas are fossil fuels which means they may or may not include the remains of dinosaurs, a subject of much healthy debate, it seems.

Meanwhile, back at Exit 331, search as I did, I couldn’t spot the leaning tower of cans.  And the kids were still trying to get to Mt. Doom with Frodo.  So I carried on.  I wondered if perhaps a tree had grown up in the way or a tornado had ravaged the silver pile as I headed for Fargo, only to learn today that the Casselton Can Pile faced demolition in 2008 but was rescued and relocated, of all things.  I also learned that a Sinclair Dino Oil Can sells for anywhere from $10 to $250 on E-Bay, which just goes to prove to the happy company who bought the world’s largest can pile that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.  Which may bring unintended encouragement to all the can tossers and other “collectors” on the Oregon coast.

We sped through Minnesota, land of 10,000 lakes although we didn’t even see one, scurrying around Minneapolis with the ones still smelling of sunscreen who had.  Minnesota means “sky-tinted water” in Dakota Sioux, which makes you want to say it again, right?  Perhaps even with a feather in your hair or in a sentence including the stereotypical word, “how.”  Dakota, incidentally, is the Sioux word for either “friend” or “pasty white guys,” depending on which website you believe.  And North, well, you already get that one, right?  But I’d be remiss if I didn’t inform that Minnesota’s state motto is “L’Etoile du Nord” which, if you say it in the official state language of North Dakota means “The Star of the North.”  I don’t think this necessarily means that the official state language of Minnesota is French or the official drink wine, however.  I think they might simply be a bit confused.  I blame Canada. 

I-94 cuts across the twelfth largest state at its waist like a slightly crooked belt, reminding me of the joke Hannah tells: “Q: What did the 0 say to the 8?  A: Nice belt!”  Breathing a sigh of relief to be done with the twin cities and fresh out of Minnesota jokes, we crossed over the border river of St. Croix, a tributary of the Mississippi, and promptly entered Wisconsin where we got as far as Eau Claire before stopping for the night at the AmericInn. 

Too tired to drive down to the park for fireworks, Bella and I headed for the hot tub and pool, then watched them from our window under a rising moon instead.  Andy called to say that Christiana was in the hospital.  Seriously?  Two weeks prior she had started her summer job working for the US Forest Service as a Timber Tech, which is supposed to entail relatively safe tasks such as surveying timber sales with the caveat that they are called into firefighting duty as needed.  She was only out of training for one short day when duty called.  As we embarked for the east, she headed south with her crew to fight wildfires in Ely, Nevada.  Andy had received a call from the Forest Service saying she was sick and they’d taken her in for bloodwork.  I tried calling and texting her.  Nothing.  So while we watched the bombs bursting in air and fell asleep, I worried about my second-born, the fainter, under my cool, white AmericInn sheets.  

KK