DADWAGON

Dear Dadwagon,

As Theodore rightly noted, last week I committed the apparently unpardonable sin of taking my family not just on vacation but entirely off the grid. Up in mid-coast Maine, we had no phone (neither cell nor land line) nor Internet access, unless we wanted to drive 15 minutes to leech Wifi from the local public library. Oh, there were moments, when we were passing through more civilized zones, when our iPhones would suddenly buzz to life and download 60 or 70 important messages, but for the most part, we had to survive as our forefathers did, with only automobiles, a modern kitchen, indoor plumbing (including a jacuzzi tub), a gas grill on the porch, satellite TV, a plethora of farm stands and seafood markets, and a view of the water. In other words, totally roughing it.

What struck me most out there was how different the experience of nature is in the countryside versus the city. Here in New York, we have a couple of great parks—Prospect and Central, duh—but what they provide is not exactly unmediated access to Nature. Rather, they give New Yorkers what we don’t have at home: space. The Great Lawn is our collective backyard, the Long Meadow an extra living room, the bandshells our home theaters. Sure, there are trees, and even “woods,” but despite Olmsted’s genius you never feel like you’re anywhere but a park. Wilderness, this ain’t, and the occasional appearance of a bird of prey or coyote only underscores the parks’ constructed atmosphere.

Compare this with the relative simplicity of our temporary backyard in Maine. Every morning and evening, Sasha and I would scour the blackberry bushes to pick fresh fruit—me trying to instruct her in the difference between black, red, and white berries, and her failing to understand—and in the afternoons, we’d run around on the lawn, finding and chasing bugs, or plucking tiny wild carrots from the earth. We went for walks on Audubon trails and swam in ponds. Sasha pointed out birds and bumblebees, her eyes infinitely sharper than her parents’. I helped her feel soft lichens in the woods and hold sea snails in tidal pools. The variety and, almost more important, the ubiquity of this environment was stunning.

Almost as surprising was that Sasha was primed for this sort of thing. She may be a city kid by birth, but she can’t tell a brownstone from a tenement, or a hydrant from a sprinkler. Taxis, garbage trucks, fire engines—they’re all “cars” to her. But she knows animals—ducks and elephants, monkeys and ants—and is fascinated by flowers, leaves, and trees. She loves water, whether it’s spurting from a spigot in Carroll Park or stretching off into the distance up in Maine. She signs “wind” when it’s windy, and sings a song called “Sunny Day.”

Some of this, weirdly enough, she’s learned from TV and various iPhone applications—which I guess isn’t really that weird. Here in the city, we are always substituting the virtual for the real (think of the intangible advantages we cite when we defend our decision to live in the most expensive place in America), often with the tacit admission that one isn’t quite as good as the other. But it’s nice to know that this isn’t an either/or proposition, and that real/virtual and rural/urban aren’t oppositions but symbiotic. But we’ll save Sasha’s lesson in symbiosis for next summer.

JP just returned from a week’s vacation, and needless to say, I am inordinately excited to see him. This isn’t as much of a given as it might seem at first. One of the semi-rules (semi in the sense that I feel free to break them) I have established for myself as a divorced father is the notion that I’m just not gonna let the whole thing be a big deal. By that I mean, no jumping up and down when JP comes to see me, and conversely, no moping when he’s not around.

While this does have an emotional benefit for me—it’s never good to get too high or too low, right?—the main reason for this rule is JP. I don’t want to signal to him that he should feel bad or unsatisfied with his current lifestyle. It’s important that he view his life as normal—which it is, in a fashion. Certainly it’s better than when he was living with two arguing, unhappy parents.

That said, because I haven’t seen JP in a week, and because preschool summer camp is over, the little one has, of necessity, accompanied me to work today … when I’m on deadline. So far, he’s done well. He’s happily playing an early reading game on my laptop, and all is well.

But I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I love spending the weekend with my boy. I do. He’s sweet and funny and not especially demanding, as 17-month-olds go. And at the end of it, I feel like I’ve just run the Ironman. My wife and I are, as a couple, not compromisers—we probably are trying to hold ourselves to a standard that’s not maintainable for much longer, what with the no-TV rule and all—and we arrive at the end of Friday’s workday already beat. At the end of chasing him around without a pause for the two subsequent days, we are both ready for the boneyard. Until we get to the Sunday-night edition of the Zone.

What is the Zone, you ask? This is my private term for a little window of time that occurs after he goes to sleep but before my wife and I lose the ability to do anything but slump in our chairs. It’s about an hour long—maybe 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. or so. It’s the only after-work time, or weekend-evening time, when she and I can get anything done, whether that something is writing for work, researching for the book, or writing blog posts. It’s also our easy hour of sociability, and sometimes dessert, and occasionally dealing with some household administrative something-or-other, like bills or tidying up. Sometimes I catch a second wind, and find a second Zone, around 11:30. But that’s a time for solo work—my wife is an early-to-bed person. (A lot of Dadwagon posts, including this one, are written during that second Zone.) But I can’t count on Zone 2, because my eyes slam shut a lot earlier than they used to. The early-evening Zone is the only one that’s reliable time. Once the Zone is past, I may be awake, but I am not functional: Half-awake absorption of the History Channel is about all I can handle. Television, in fact, is the enemy of the Zone. It is far too easy to miss this little slice of productivity if you get caught up in, say, Keith Olbermann.

Anyone else got a better way of getting things done? I’m all ears (as well as half-closed eyes).

Last week–the same one in which Theodore was nearly abandoned on this blog, left to do all the important widget-making without us other writers–I was in Northern California.

I have lived there for eleven years, on and off and on again, from adolescence into my 20’s. If I often feel like I’m in forced exile from the Florida Keys, my first home, the emotions are a little more complicated with California.

First, let me say that it is an astoundingly beautiful state, still and always. We went to a wedding up on the border of Yosemite, hiked to tiered waterfalls, did yoga in a meadow (like good Californians), ate delicious meat-burgers at the Iron Door Saloon in Groveland, sat with my grandparents along the fog-wrapped western shore of San Francisco, worked for several days in the red-brick-and-blue-sky refuge of Stanford University, and ended it all with a day of lolling down the Russian River with the kids and their Japanese cousins, eating karaage and M&Ms during stops on the gravelly banks.

Given these many gifts of the state, it’s hard to accept that California is also a constant calamity. Disasters of God and governance, all the time. It deserves much of what it gets: how much sympathy can there be for a race of man who not only elect a literally plastic action figure to be their leader, but whose legislature may actually be worse than the one in Washington, DC? These good voters also passed Proposition 13, which ensured financial bankruptcy in perpetuity, and more recently supported Proposition 8, which was merely a sign of moral bankruptcy.

It is also tempting to blame these people for their many natural disasters, given that they love to build their homes on the sides of slidey hills and in tinder-dry woodlands. But after a week like we had, I can’t blame anyone for wanting to get closer to the land of California (and perhaps farther from the Prop 8-voting people of California). So I’ll leave you with a poem from the Central Coast poet Robinson Jeffers about the beauty of disaster, which to me gets to the heart of the beauty of California.

Fire on the Hills, by Robinson Jeffers

The deer were bounding like blown leaves
Under the smoke in front the roaring wave of the brush-fire;
I thought of the smaller lives that were caught.
Beauty is not always lovely; the fire was beautiful, the terror
Of the deer was beautiful; and when I returned
Down the back slopes after the fire had gone by, an eagle
Was perched on the jag of a burnt pine,
Insolent and gorged, cloaked in the folded storms of his shoulders
He had come from far off for the good hunting
With fire for his beater to drive the game; the sky was merciless
Blue, and the hills merciless black,
The sombre-feathered great bird sleepily merciless between them.
I thought, painfully, but the whole mind,
The destruction that brings an eagle from heaven is better than men.