Shanah tovah

The new year has arrived, and once again, I am not quite ready.  There are things I meant to get done, that I have not yet accomplished; tasks associated with processing and memorializing our year like no other that I did not quite finish by my self-imposed deadline.

Oh well.

Ready or not, time rolls on.  Our year like no other was wondrous, and challenging, and transformative.  I loved keeping a blog through it all.  Taking pictures and writing about what we were experiencing helped me, immensely, to understand the experiences.

So I will continue to blog… just not here.  I have set up a new one, fragmentstofugues.com, where I will continue to process the next phase of my life.

I have some half-formed ideas of some of what I want to work through, there.  But it will take a while for any of it to take shape (or, for that matter, for me to learn how to work an entirely new set of programs), so please be patient.

And thanks for fellow traveling!

And the skylark sings with me…

Next week, the kids head back to brick-and-mortar school: another demarcation of the end of the Gap Year.

I’ll miss homeschooling.  Well, aspects of it.  Most fundamentally, of course, the portability of homeschooling enabled us to do the trip at all, and I will sorely miss that freedom of time and place.  I’ll also miss the reading. For me, the opportunity to delve into books with my kids, the time to talk them over in detail, the ability to link what they were reading with what we were experiencing as a family… was magical.  As well, we laughed a lot.  (When we weren’t on the verge of murdering each other, I mean.)

School is different.

The Schoolboy (William Blake)

I love to rise in a summer morn,
When the birds sing on every tree;
The distant huntsman winds his horn,
And the skylark sings with me:
O what sweet company!

But to go to school in a summer morn, —
O it drives all joy away!
Under a cruel eye outworn,
The little ones spend the day
In sighing and dismay.

Ah then at times I drooping sit,
And spend many an anxious hour;
Nor in my book can I take delight,
Nor sit in learning’s bower,
Worn through with the dreary shower.

How can the bird that is born for joy
Sit in a cage and sing?
How can a child, when fears annoy,
But droop his tender wing,
And forget his youthful spring!

O father and mother if buds are nipped,
And blossoms blown away;
And if the tender plants are stripped
Of their joy in the springing day,
By sorrow and care’s dismay, —

How shall the summer arise in joy,
Or the summer fruits appear?
Or how shall we gather what griefs destroy,
Or bless the mellowing year,
When the blasts of winter appear?

The line that comprises the title of this post is also the title of a book by David Albert, chronicling his experiences homeschooling his daughters.  For both practical and pedagogical reasons, our learning on the road looked quite different from his daughters’ experiences.  There’s as much variation between homeschoolers as there is between large brick-and-mortar schools and small ones, public and private, parochial and secular, general and specialized.  No shockers there.

The poem, however, is not concerned with pedagogy; its focus is joy.   Outside, unfettered, children have it; whereas caged in school, they don’t.

Many homeschooling families concur.

Between the three of them, my kids have over the years attended small schools and large ones, private and public, traditional and progresssive.   They each would say that there are moments of laughter and joy in brick-and-mortar schools of all kinds.  I have taught in public school, and I agree.

I think it is fair, though, to say joy is not part of the mandate, official or implicit, of most brick-and-mortar schools.  Kids are funny, and curious, and active, and mischievous; and wherever kids are convened, joy will bubble up spontaneously.  That is precisely why many teachers are drawn to the profession in the first place.

However, in large groups, that very energy, and attendant noise and disruption and distraction, quickly devolves into a management issue.  Which in turn evolves, all too often, into lists of rules that in the context of kids are simultaneously understandable and ridiculous: No running.  No talking.  No playing.  No touching the hallway walls.  There’s nothing wrong with joy in school, so long as it contained and silent; but its frequent corollary, exuberance, is a problem.

Map of Africa near our Blantyre guesthouse

Geography lesson: “Okay, backstroke to Liberia! Good job! Crawl to Morocco! Breast stroke to Kenya!

Sigh.  How shall we, back in our regular lives…
…bless the mellowing year,
When the blasts of winter appear?

Hairy Adventures, Part VII

Jonah’s well-wishers will be happy to hear: he cleaned up, just in time for Papa’s 80th birthday tomorrow.  Praise be.

So in review, here, at a glance… The Gap Year, In Hair:

Zambia

Malawi

South Africa

Miami

Ecuador

Peru

Chile

New Zealand

Australia

Singapore

Ireland

Canada

Alaska

Off to camp

At camp

Post camp

And now, I think it is finally safe to say…

The End

On the road again

Deja vu all over again…

Just a little road this time, a short trip to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, to visit friends.

We’ve been to the Yoop before.  Several years ago, we came up with my parents and brother, rented a couple of RVs and drove around clockwise, from one stunning lakeside campground to the next.

It’s quite different, here, from the lower 47 1/2.

 

Akaya running

Boys wading

Seedheads waving

Lounging in the pocket of warm water

Maybe we don’t have to go quite so far, to get away.

 

 

 

Hairy Adventures, Part VI

He’s back from camp…

It’s rare, that I’m speechless.

 

Connecting the Dots: Seeing Signs

I’m spending a lot of time going through pictures these days.  It’s fun to see how the dots connect across continents.

Capetown, South Africa: Honestly, I’m afraid it’s too late.

Karoo, South Africa

Rotorua, New Zealand

Queenstown, New Zealand: for the Extreme Adventure sport of… mini golf

Fraser Island, Australia

Cedarville, Upper Peninsula

And my personal favorite…

Abita, Louisiana

Top 5 Lessons Learned About Extended Travel

Carrying on with the Top 5 Lists:

Over the last few days, Tom and I have had several conversations with people interested in our trip in which we have attempted to distill the highlights.  It’s hard.  “Of all the places we visited, my ‘favorite’ was…” doesn’t really do the trick.

We are lucky people.  Even before the gap year, we’d been able to travel a fair bit with the kids.

One of our major reasons for wanting to an extended trip was to experience travel a different way: slower, with more intentionality and greater processing en route.  After years of trying to squeeze as much as we could into each whirlwind week we could snatch from school and work schedules, we aimed this time for about a month in each new country.  We sought out books related to the places we were experiencing.  We set aside time each school day for Jonah and Stella to write about what they were seeing and reading.  Emma wrote every day as well.  I kept a blog.  We tried, much more consciously than on any prior trip, to process what we were doing as we did it.

So now that we’ve been back for a month and a half… here is some of the wisdom we gleaned along our way:

Top 5 Lessons Learned About Extended Travel

1. Whoever you are… that’s who’s going.  We didn’t magically metamorphize into some idyllic family with perfectly aligned interests and values just because we were on this trip.  Marital dynamics, sibling bickering, individual idiosyncrasies, imbalanced divisions of labor: whatever baggage you happen to have, that’s what you’ll carry.  That isn’t something to be afraid of — presumably, anybody you’re seriously considering as an extended travel partner, you do like — but it is important, I think, to be realistic.  It’s a trip, not a fantasy.
2. That said, the more different the environment, the more transformative the experience.  Although we did bring with us all our goofy and imperfect habits, we were most jolted out of them when we were living in radically different circumstances, such as service projects and homestays in remote locations in developing countries, that were extremely different from our usual lives.  Although those weeks were in many respects the most scary to envision and exhausting to experience, all five of us agree that they were also  the most rewarding.  Road tripping around New Zealand and Australia, while excellent, felt much more like trips we’d taken in the past.
3. It is really, really, really great if friends and family can meet up with you for portions of the trip.  We had friends meet up with us for a week in Ecuador, and another set for a week in Peru; Tom’s dad and his wife met up with us in New Zealand; and my parents in Australia.  It took some upfront organizational work to pull the scheduling for this off (sadly, the rest of the world did still have to operate around school and work schedules); but it was soooooo worth it.  (For us, at least.  I hope it was equally great for them.)
4. It’s good to strike a balance between planning and spontaneity.  Tom’s preference would have been to have every night planned out in advance for the duration of the entire journey; mine would have been to have our initial night or two in each place organized and to wing it from there.  We actually did something in between — in each country we had one or two “stakes” that we’d sorted out in advance (service projects, or language schools, or the weeks we’d fully booked along with the vacation-constrained friends meeting up with us), and also some unplanned slots.  Peace of mind is nice, and Tripadvisor is great.  But there’s no substitute for local insight; it’s much cheaper to work out logistics locally, and there still are a lot of terrific places out there that haven’t built an accessible web site.
5. Whenever possible, look for accommodations with some sort of kitchen facility.  This can range from full apartments, through “family bungalows” and guest houses, to motel suites with kitchenettes, to hostels.  We found it made a huge difference to our mental health to be able to cook what we wanted and sit down with just us.  Cooking also thrust us into the local markets, which often was an experience unto itself.  (It took me several rounds in my lousy Spanish to convince the market lady in Urubamba, Peru that I wasn’t looking for additional discounts; I really preferred my chicken without the head and legs.)

Deadline on sacred time

I think I’ll give myself a deadline.  I find deadlines to be helpful.

Although obviously there was dreaming and planning and prelude, the true Gap part of our Year began somewhere between Labor Day and October 1 of last fall.  That was when our rhythms shifted, and the way we spent our hours transformed.  Labor Day is when the kids would have, had we been operating on standard time, headed back to brick-and-mortar school.  September 29 was Tom’s last day at the office (screeeeech! right up to 7 pm on Friday), and we flew off to Zambia the morning of October 1.

Also in that month fell the High Holidays, including Rosh Hashanah, the day on which Jews mark the new year; and Yom Kippur, the day of atonement.  The interval between is supposed to be a time of reflection and redemption… although if I am honest I have to concede that last fall, it was more about logistics and last minute doctors’ appointments.

Emma made a Rosh Hashanah resolution to keep a daily journal, and by God, she actually has done it, developing and sustaining a habit of writing a bit — as little as a couple of sentences, or as much as she’s moved — between brushing her teeth and falling to sleep.

And I find myself envious, not just that she’s maintained the discipline, about which I’ve written before, but also that she framed this significant change in her habits in sacred time.

The tagline of this blog, why is this year different from all other years? is easily recognizable to Jews as a reference to a specific place in the Passover seder, in which we pause in the washing of hands and dipping of fingers and reciting of blessings, and ask: why is this night different from all other nights?

The question is not meant to be rhetorical.  It is meant to jolt us into actually focusing on why we are eating particular symbolic foods, why we are focusing specifically on a difficult chapter in our tribal story, why we are recalling the desolation of our ancestors, and why in the midst of re-telling that story of bitterness are we relaxing, celebrating, drinking four full cups of wine.

Similarly, the blog tagline is also not meant to be rhetorical.  What is different about cutting free from our ordinary obligations and wandering the world as a family for a year?  Well, there are many possible answers, but the real question is: which of those differences matter? And out of those differences — this is the crucial part, the part with the power to generate concrete action out of potentially limitless navel-gazing — what can we do differently within the frame of our regular lives, to keep hold on those lessons, and continue to learn from them?

So Rosh Hashanah begins, this year, at sunset on September 4th.  That is my deadline. By then, I will finish various little tasks associated with this blog (I have meant, for instance, to organize all the kids’ portfolio writing that we got out of the habit of posting during those long weeks of too-rare internet access; and there are still pictures I want to get up, and a couple of contemplative mode posts I never got around to finalizing).  After that, I will not make any new entries, although I guess it will stay up as long as WordPress so chooses (?).  This blog was meant to chronicle one particular, unusual year.

When the new year begins, I may start another blog.  I am, after all, in the habit now.  But I haven’t yet worked out what Questions will serve as my focus.

I’m open to ideas.

Out of Thin Air

So, last week when my uncle launched his quest to answer the mystery of how the 466th highest peak in New Hampshire came to bear our unusual family name, there was a degree of eye-rolling amongst the Klem Klan.  (One cousin re-forwarded the correspondence back to me with a single line of commentary in the subject line: “Leave no stone unturned…” — and I could hear her snort across state lines.)

But behold!  Out of thin air — or rather, the tangled potential of the World Wide Web — Uncle John managed to extract the story.  And the story is great.

Part 1 of the story is that the origin of the name started out as a prank.

Through the assistance of one of the Gilford town librarians and several New Hampshire history buffs, John located Ron Klemarcyzck, the evident namesake; and thereafter tracked him down.  Ron responded to John’s request:

“Hi John,

Naming the mountain started as a joke.  I worked as the forester for Daniel Webster Council in the late 1970’s and lived at Hidden Valley Scout Reservation, now called Griswold Scout Reservation.  One of my last accomplishments before I left that job to work for the State of New Hampshire was to draft a Forest Type Map which showed the various stands of timber on the Reservation, as well as their age class and stocking level.  They did not own the property on which Mt. Klem is located, though I recommended that they acquire it as it had a right-of-way from Grant Road and had a spectacular view.  My supervisor then asked me to include the property on the map as they were planning to approach that landowner.  In my various reports that I did for them while working there, I always referred to it as the “mountain located north of Mt. Mack that blocked the view of the White Mountains and Lake Winnipesaukee”.  On my last day of work, I did a few practical jokes, one of which was replacing the pull cord on one of the chain saws with a bunji cord, and another was writing “Mt. Klem” (my nick-name) on the mountain located north of Mt. Mack that I had shown it on the Forest Type Map.  Over the years, the various personnel that I worked with left Hidden Valley, though the map stayed and no-one knew who Klem was.  The Council eventually purchased the property and the Reservation developed a new hiking trail map that showed Mt. Klem, though there was no trail to the summit.  I became a Consulting Forester in 1981 and in 1993, Daniel Webster Council hired the company I worked for to manage their forests and I was quite surprised to see “Mt. Klem” on their trail map.  I ended up renovating their trail system on a volunteer basis as it had not been maintained and most of the views from the mountain summits that they owned had grown in.  It seems that the Boy Scouts did not want to climb the mountains without views.  I also relocated some trails due to the timber harvesting program we initiated.  With the help of numerous Boy Scouts, I laid out and cleared a trail from Mt. Mack to the vista on Mt. Klem in the spring of 1993 and in the fall, cleared the trail down to Round Pond.  I have re-cleared the vista several times over the years.  Once I finished renovating the trail system, I hand-drafted a new trail map.  The Ranger at the time told me to keep “Mt. Klem” on the new trail map map and it seems to have caught on.”

Indeed.  When I then contacted Ron to ask if I could include his response herein, he relayed Part II of the story, in which the mountain’s namesake and trailblazer proposes from the (false) summit:

“Hi Pam,

Feel free to include the story in your blog. There was a view from the actual summit in the late 1970’s but it had grown in by the 1990’s. I cleared the view that is shown in your false summit #3 picture. If it was a clear day, you would have seen Mt. Washington in the center of the view amidst the rest of the White Mountains. I proposed to my wife at that spot in 1996. The Klemarczyk family has also had two family outings to the summit, though we came in from the south through the Scout Reservation. A distant relative told me that the “arczyk” in my name translates to “house of”, so it would be “house of Klem”. Did any of your viking ancestors ever make it to Poland and fall in love with a peasant’s daughter and trade in his lutefisk for kielbasa?”

I duly put out the question to the extended family, so stay tuned for Part III.

Into Thin(ish) Air

All right — I don’t know that today’s breaking news has any place at all, on the Family Gap Year blog.  Perhaps I ought to work out a different venue.  Nonetheless, having developed such finely honed reportorial habits over the course of the Year, I’m finding that the instinct is hard to break.

We conquered the mountain!

First a bit of backstory: Perhaps eighteen months ago, my cousin Lisa discovered that there exists an actual MOUNTAIN which, for reasons wholly unknown to any of us, bears our not-that-common family name.  She instantly forwarded this important information to her parents and mine, her siblings and mine, and several extended family members.  A flurry of extensively cc’d email correspondence immediately ensued, and a plan was generated for a sizable contingent of us, spanning three generations and heralding from at least four states, to convene on a particular date in July at a particular library in New Hampshire and make our way to the trailhead for Mount Klem.  Sadly, although we did convene and we did head out with great enthusiasm onto the Red Trail, we were not, last year, successful.  We fought the mountain and the mountain won.  A combination of lack of confidence in our map, an un-forecasted storm, and insufficient rain gear caused the adults to hesitate; and when a few flashes of lightning crossed the sky, the younger kids revolted; and we ended up turning around.

(This is where, if I had just a bit more oomph, I would include the photo of the very wet, very defeated contingent that attempted the summit last year.  But it’s on my other computer, and life is short.)

So this year our preparations were more comprehensive.  We still didn’t have an especially good map — turns out, the Appalachian Mountain Club doesn’t bother to print them for the 466th highest peak in the state of New Hampshire (44,252th in the US).  We did, however, have fleeces and raincoats for all kids 12 and under (after that, they’re on their own, gear-wise) and plenty of snacks.

We met up again at the Gilford Library, caravanned over to the trailhead, and set off.

Uncle Scott pointing out that the Klem summit is right here… directly under the legend on the trail map to Belknap

The first mile or so is a bit boring

We first celebrated when we got to what we believed was, more or less, the point at which we turned around last year.

The next celebration was the discovery of blueberries…

Blueberries for Pete

… followed by more-or-less plausible ursine evidence.

Little Bear’s poop

We then had a series of False Summits:

Is this the top?

The evidence supporting False Summit 1 was a very long ascent, followed by a very long descent.  But Uncle Dave, who clutched the not-so-great map close to his chest and sallied on far ahead of anyone else, shouted back that we weren’t even close.

Is this the top?

The evidence supporting False Summit 2 was a clear vista looking out over what at least some of us tentatively identified as Lake Winnesquam.  It was hard to tell, without recourse to the map.  But Uncle Dave exhorted us onward.

Is this the top?

The evidence supporting False Summit 3 was a truly lovely view of what at least some of us tentatively identified as Lake Winnepesauki (shout out to Chris B: you will doubtless perceive that this branch of the family is not nearly as disciplined about falling in with the photographer’s requests to line up for the camera, as Tom’s side):

View from False Summit 3

Then on to…

ARE WE AT THE TOP ALREADY??!!

The evidence for False Summit 4 was, obviously, the cairn.

But Uncle Dave announced that no, this was not the summit.  Furthermore, he declared, the summit was not on the trail (??!), so in order to reach it, we had now to bushwhack.

“Don’t worry, all we have to do is head due north!” he shouted, clutching the map close to his chest and crashing fearlessly into the bear-infested forest.  (His own small sons, needless to say, had been left at home.  He’s a different man, when his sons are with him.)

Crashing through the woods

Stella happened to be wearing one of those watches that also have a compass.  “This isn’t north; this is west,” she muttered, shaking her arm vigorously to see if that might generate a different outcome.

But lo and behold, after just a few minutes…

THE SUMMIT

Oh, can’t see that elevation sign, even when you double-click on the picture?  Here, let me help you:

Pretty impressive, huh?

 

The next day, my uncle (the same one who likes to correct my bird identifications) forwarded to the whole contingent of successful summiteers the note he’d written to the Gilford Town Librarian.  I record herein the text in full:

comments: Yesterday 16 Klem relatives summited Mt. Klem.

Could you tell me the origin of the name “Mt. Klem”?  Or, if you don’t have
the info, is there a historical society or other source I might contact.

Thank you for whatever help you may give me.

Within the hour came this reply:

Hi John,

Congratulations on your climb. I will do some research and get back to you.

xxxxxx, Assistant Librarian

 

So I’ll keep you posted.