Category: Family

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Road Blog: New York at Night

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Assertion: New York is a city meant to be seen after dark. Well, you could say that about a lot of other vertical, well-lit cities. Tokyo comes to mind among those I have eyeballed. Chicago maybe. Paris? No–there’s so much texture there that’s lost at night. In New York’s case, the city’s night-time allure is partly about lighting and partly about the fact you encounter other walkers everywhere you go at all times of night.

The thought about New York occurred while my brother John and I went out for a stroll that turned into a three-hour hike: from his place near the Brooklyn Bridge to the Manhattan Bridge, over that span to Manhattan, past the government center and the World Trade Center site to the Hudson (I never knew before tonight that there is a memorial over there commemorating the Irish Famine), then back across downtown to the Brooklyn Bridge to John’s place. Something was up on the bridge as we started up the walkway from the west side. Traffic was halted and didn’t start moving at all until we had nearly finished our crossing. It turned out the police had shut down the bridge because of an abandoned SUV and a body that had been found in the roadway. Or at least that’s what we heard from walkway kibitzers viewing the scene.

We got back the apartment about 2 in the morning, and now it’s insanely late. More later today. Or tomorrow. Or whenever it is.

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Road Blog: Sandy Hook

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After spending a shocking portion of a beautiful summer day inside, we went out to Sandy Hook. That’s the hook-shaped peninsula that juts north toward Long Island from the top of the Jersey Shore. It wasn’t a long, complicated visit. We walked a little way up a paved trail that was clearly meant for bikes, not pedestrians, then crossed over a park road to a beach area that faced out to Sandy Hook Bay. Along the way we encountered a memorial to a dozen British sailors and a couple of their officers who died at the conclusion of the Revolutonary War trying to bring back deserting crewmates who had decided they would rather stay in the United States than continue service in His Majesty’s Navy. But for the most part, we just noodled along the beach until we found a nice square timber to park ourelves on. I was not above posing the above broken shell for a brief spate of New Jersey landscape photography.

Later, we picked up Eamon and Sakura at the train in Hazlet–they came down from New York–then drove back out to the shore for a (mostly fried) fish dinner. We sat out on a deck adjacent to the Highway 36 bridge over the Navesink River, and were out there when my brother John called to alert us that the International Space Station would pass over in just a few minutes. We got a nice long look at it, finished dinner, then drove back to the city.

Conclusion of the foregoing.

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Road Blog: Home to Brooklyn

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We flew out to New York from the Bay Area on Sunday. It may be the last 6 a.m. flight I ever take, because I have so poorly mastered the logistics of an early morning departure that I wind up getting almost no sleep the night before I leave. In the current instance, I wasted much of the eve of the trip screwing around with entirely gratuitous family history stuff; task avoidance if I’ve ever seen it, and believe me I have. The net effect was I was up until after two in the morning doing all manner of stuff I had planned on doing earlier and which I was convinced had to be done. I got about an hour of real sleep (Kate got a bit less), then got up for our cab ride to the airport. We did manage to sleep some on the plane.

Then we landed at Newark. Eamon and Sakura drove bravely through the rain from Brooklyn to pick us up and take us back to their place in Brooklyn (Cobble Hill, just down Court Street from the Borough Hall). We walked out into the storm to eat at a place on Atlantic Avenue, splashed back to the apartment, where I napped for an hour. Then, since the rain was still pounding down, we all took the subway to my brother John’s new place next to the Brooklyn Bridge. He and his wife, Dawn, had lived in the same apartment in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood for 20 years but just this past year landed a spot in a big co-op-type apartment building. We all hung out for a couple hours and checked out the new digs. Outside it had finally stopped raining. the Cobble Hill contingent walked home.

Next morning: No rain. We met John and his kids (Sean and Leah) for coffee and a post-breakfast bagel, then walked to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade and up to the new park at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. Kate and I later cleared out and came down to visit her family in friends in what I describe as the northern Jersey shore area–Holmdel and Hazlet townships in Monmouth County. But let’s stay in New York for a minute: The strangest thing for me about our arrival wasn’t the sleepless haze that enveloped parts of the first day but the feeling that I’m visiting a place where my family, through John and Eamon, has put down roots. It feels like home territory, though my zip code still begins with a 9.

(Photo: east tower of the Brooklyn Bridge, shot from Evert Street outside the headquarters of the Watchtower Society (a.k.a. Jehovah’s Witnesses.) You think of the Witnesses as quaint fringe Bible thumpers? You probably won’t after reading about their immense and hugely valuable Brooklyn real-estate holdings and the part they’re playing in local property wheeling and dealing (involving that same new park I mentioned above.))

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Family Photo Odyssey: Sjur Ingebrigtsen Brekke

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We spent a couple hours scanning in some family pictures from albums that Kate and my mom put together from the big mountain of family snapshots that had accumulated for decades and decades. A lot of what we’re scanning is stuff from our own lives, scenes and experiences that the images recall vividly and instantly.

And then there’s the photo above. That’s my dad’s father, Sjur Ingebrigtsen Brekke. who passed on long before I was born. A note on the reverse in my grandmother’s handwriting says, “Lake Michigan, July 31, 1911.” (Maybe such inscriptions are passe, but if you want your own virtual mountain of digital snaps to be a little more intelligible to your posterity, leave some hint of who, what, when, where, etc.)

This man has always been an enigma. Here he is at age 35, ten years before my dad’s arrival in the world. He died a little more than ten years after that event, at age 55. I haven’t seen a picture in which he actually cracks a smile–at least not in any sense I’d recognize. Here he looks a bit put off by whoever it was talked him into coming out to the dunes in his suit. He was a Lutheran pastor in Muskegon at the time, and maybe that was the official beach uniform of his calling. (By all accounts, which means what my dad has told us, he was a kind and gentle soul and a reserved and quiet one, too.)

The photo’s composition is curious, too. Here we are in a picturesque stretch of the Michigan dunes, and the picture is framed in a way that directs attention to the smoke-emitting building in the background. (Later researches showed that the building in the background was the Muskegon waterworks. That building and the dunes in the distance are no more (the dunes were mined for sand, which removed the natural barrier that had protected the city’s harbor from westerly winds off the lake). 

Below: A picture of Sjur at age 26, a little more relaxed looking, about the time he was completing his studies to become a minister.

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Road Blog: Brady Street, Milwaukee, Wales

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Early in our travel week, we drove from Chicago up to Milwaukee to meet our friends Robin and JIm, once of Berkeley, now of Ripon, Wisconsin (the town that’s the birthplace of the Republican Party, I can never refrain from saying).

Our plan was to meet at a Oaxacan restaurant called Cempazuchi, on Brady Street north of downtown. The neighborhood turns out to be happening, as doddering tourist types such as your current guide might put it. By which he means: it’s lined with restaurants, coffeehouses, clubs ‘n’ bars, and a couple of tattoo shops.

Above is one of those last, the Saints and Sinners Tattoo Company. The green hipster fixie machine caught my eye. And the legend “Sullen Art Collective” on the front door got my attention, too. Given the overall look, I read that and thought “art that is sullen.”

I pointed out the door to Kate, who said, “In my craft or sullen art. …” It was a familiar line, but I didn’t place it. She did: the title of a Dylan Thomas poem.

Later, she tracked down the text, and read it aloud, twice:

In My Craft or Sullen Art

In my craft or sullen art   
Exercised in the still night   
When only the moon rages   
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light   
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms   
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages   
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart   
From the raging moon I write   
On these spindrift pages   
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms   
But for the lovers, their arms   
Round the griefs of the ages,   
Who pay no praise or wages   
Nor heed my craft or art.
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Air-Road Blog: Chicago

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We flew to Chicago yesterday. It was clear and warm as we left Oakland. We landed in Salt Lake City just as a big monsoon-driven cell passed over the area. And in Chicago, we emerged into a steam bath. It was about nearly 1 in the morning and about 80 degrees. My first impression was 80 sopping-wet degrees, but I think you get used to it. I say “I think” because like millions of others in Chicagoland, I’m living Monday morning in air-conditioned comfort as the temperature outside climbs toward the 90s (and there’s a complicating factor today: the National Weather Service has issued an air-quality alert for high pollution levels today).

In other weather talk: A neighbor mentioned she’d heard that Chicago had had more than 6 inches of rain in a day recently, but thought that might have been a typo. Well, no, it wasn’t. As the Chicago Weather Center site reports in detail, July 2011 was one of the driest Chicago Julys on record–until 10 days ago. Then storms began rolling in, including one that dropped 6.86 inches on July 23 (the most on one date in the city going back to 1870), and the month turned into the city’s rainiest July on record). Here’s the rundown from WGN’s Tom Skilling and company:

From one of driest to all-time wettest July in just six days

Wettest July also third-warmest

Chicago’s 24-hour rainfall record …

(And the picture? That’s Lunt Avenue, in front of my sister’s place in West Rogers Park. God’s Battle Axe? Well, it gets your attention. The church describes itself as “a fast growing charismatic prayer ministry … destroying the works of darkness thereby impacting the world.” The ministry’s leader “is referred to by some of his close friends as ‘a Praying Machine: The Anointed Apostle of Prayers.’ “)

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Family History

I think it’s pretty common among families to think and talk about the unseen influences on our lives. I”m talking about the little shreds of detail, or sometimes rich, complex stories, about our parents and maybe their parents that we think might explain something about them and about us.

Concrete example: Growing up, I was very aware that both my parents lost their fathers at an early age. My dad’s father died when he was 10; my mom’s dad died when she was 11. I came to assume, through small details I picked up over the years, that these events were traumatic if not shattering events in their families’ lives and that in one way or other they shaped my life and the lives of my siblings and maybe even the lives of our kids.

I was thinking about the biggest incident we heard about growing up, one that I think I heard my mom refer to simply as “the dunes.”

In August 1939, my mom, at age 9, was the lone survivor of a five-member family group swept into Lake Michigan at Miller Beach, in the Indiana dunes. I wrote a little bit about that a few years ago. Her account of what happened was pretty graphic–especially regarding her memories of trying to save a brother who was within arm’s reach and what it was like to have almost drowned (she said that by the time she was rescued she had stopped struggling; she was revived on the beach).

Mom suffered from depression for most of her life. It’s reasonable to think that one of the triggers was this terrible incident in the dunes. But she suffered a couple other major tragedies, too. The early death of her father, as I’ve mentioned, and the loss of a child–a brother of mine, the youngest of the four of us who arrived roughly annually in the mid-1950s, who died just before his second birthday. I saw some of the effects of that last tragedy. I remember that eventually my mom started seeing a psychiatrist–a move that may have saved her life and in some measure changed my life, too.

Something that was tucked away in the back of my head about the psychiatrist: Some years after my mom began seeing him, he suffered his own tragedy in the lake. He was out on his boat with his wife one August evening when a storm came up. The boat capsized, and the doctor and his wife were thrown overboard and separated. He was rescued after seven or eight hours in the water. She drowned. I recall my mom talking about this and overheard her saying that he told her that he simply didn’t want to get out of the lake when he was found.

Thinking about all this just now, I went looking for signs of the doctor online. He’d be in his 80s now, or even older. I checked news archives, and the lake incident came up as the only hit for his name in the Chicago area. And here’s what prompted this post: The date of his accident? It was the anniversary of the 1939 dunes drowning. I wonder if my mom and the doctor ever talked about that coincidence.

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Road Blog: Berkeley

And on the seventh day, I flew home from Chicago. I began and ended the journey at the North Berkeley BART station, and at the extreme ends of the train schedule (last Tuesday, I caught a 4:30 a.m. train to take an early shuttle to the Oakland airport; tonight I arrived back on the very last train of the night and got home about 1 a.m.). Here are some basics:

Tuesday, May 31: Flew from Oakland to Seattle-Tacoma airport; drove with Sakura and Eamon from the airport to Butte, Montana. (Notable stops: Roslyn, Washington; Coeur d’Alene, Idaho; Superior, Montana).

Wednesday, June 1: Drove from Butte to Spearfish, South Dakota. (Notable stop: Little Bighorn Battlefield).

Thursday, June 2: Drove from Spearfish, South Dakota., to Council Bluffs, Iowa. (Notable stops: Deadwood’s Mount Moriah Cemetery, Crazy Horse monument, Mount Rushmore, Yankton, South Dakota (cool bridge there).

Friday, June 3: We split as previously planned. I flew to Chicago from Omaha. Eamon and Sakura drove to Independence, Missouri, by way of Lamoni, Iowa (and if you’re sharp you can tell me the connection between those two towns).

Saturday, June 4: I enjoyed my leisure in Chicago. Eamon and Sakura drove into town from Independence.

Sunday, June 5: Chicago for everyone.

Monday, June 6: Eamon and Sakura drove from Chicago to Youngstown, Ohio. They expect to be in New York today (Tuesday, the 7th). I flew from Chicago to San Francisco.

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Road Blog: Chicago

Today, the road trip included zero time on the road. My sister and I did walk a few blocks up the street and back, though. And Eamon and Sakura arrived after their detour from Council Bluffs to Lamoni, Iowa, and Independence, Missouri. Their drive today brought them from Independence, Harry S Truman's hometown, through 100-degree temperatures in Missouri and severe thunderstorms near Bloomington, Illinois–family home of Adlai Stevenson, who failed to succeed Truman.

Thunderstorms passed through the Chicago area, too. It's an unusual enough occurrence for me, living in the mostly thunder-free Bay Area, that I went out into Ann and Dan's backyard and recorded some of the storm as it passed. The storm and recording were less than Wagnerian in its dramatic dimension, but was plenty atmospheric. Here's an MP3 snippet:

Chicagostorm060411

Back on the other end of this trip, the endless rainy season of 2010-11 continues in the Bay Area and Northern California. To define "endless rainy season," we refer to the National Weather Service record report from earlier today, which runs down a few locations that saw their rainiest June 4th ever. An earlier forecast discussion raised the possibility that some locations might exceed their monthly records for the entire month of June today (a surprising possibility, but not an amazing one: we don't get a lot of rain on average in June; the June record for San Francisco, recorded in 1884, is about two and a half inches. One earlier report ran down rainfall totals over the region through late Saturday morning. Noteworthy: the 2-inch-plus totals in the Santa Cruz Mountains and the 3-inch plus amounts in the Santa Lucia Range in Monterey County.

It's more than I want to get into in detail at this late hour, but: water. One impression driving across the northern Rockies and Plains is how wet and green everything looks (but no, we didn't see any honest-to-goodness flooding in Montana or South Dakota) In California, you think of water supply when you see all the rain (and in the mountains, snow) we've been getting as the wet season continues. The state's daily report on its largest reservoirs shows storage is more than 110 percent of average for this date and the biggest lakes are close to capacity. In the mountains, the snowpack is still at 97 percent of its April 1 average–April 1 being the date when the snowpack is at its maximum. We're two months past that now, and the snowpack is at 343 percent of normal for the beginning of June (in a regional breakdown, the snowpack for the Northern Sierra and far northern mountains is at 559 percent of normal for this date (see California Department of Water Resources/California Data Exchange Center: Snow Water Equivalents).

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Road Blog: Spearfish to Council Bluffs

Every road trip seems to entail one day that gets out of hand, a day you spend a lot more time on the road than you think is wise. Today–yesterday now–was such a day. We bit off a lot, saw a lot, encountered wonderful sights, had a few friendly chats with folks along the way, and wound up with a long grind of a drive east to put us where we wanted to be tonight.

To start at the end: We got where we were going, and I’m sitting in a comfortable motel room in Council Bluffs, Iowa, better than 600 miles from where we started the day. But something happened along the way.

Jump back about 120 miles from here, to Nebraska Route 12, just west of the little town of Ponca. It was dusk. I had been pushing consistently above the 60 mph speed limit in Eamon and Sakura’s new car, a Prius. Part of my brain was doing destination math, whittling down the distance to where I’m sitting now. Part of my brain was watching the road and monitoring everything on the displays in front of me.

The highway took a righthand bend, and my habit is to look through the turn, and I’ve got to think that’s what I was doing, looking right, when the deer appeared on the left side of the road. Sakura saw it first; she said she had seen a dead deer earlier and was watching out for any that might stray onto the road. She exclaimed something, and so did Eamon, sitting in the passenger seat. I saw a brown shape crossing in front of us. “Too late” is as close as I can translate the impulse that went through my head.

Then the impact: It seemed we made impact with the deer with the right front side of the car. It slammed into the front right side of the car, too, near the sideview mirror, as it was thrown up and to the right. The thought occurred that it hadn’t flown into the windshield. That was good. Then it was gone.

I slowed and pulled onto the shoulder about 150 yards down the road. In the car, we were all shocked but otherwise OK. Eamon and I walked back to see if we could find the deer. A man in a pickup truck stopped and rolled down his window. “We hit a deer,” I said. “You all OK?” he asked. I thanked him for stopping, then he rolled on.

Eamon and I walked back, looking for the deer in the ditch. There was just enough light to see it–her, I’m reasonably certain. She had come to rest on her left side, her head to the east. She wasn’t stirring–I’m reasonably certain, too, she was killed instantly. Marvelously intact and irretrievably broken, her left eye open and bottomless. Eamon looked down at her and said, “I’m sorry.” He was stricken and started walking back to the car.

I bent down over her in the dusk. Words came out. “I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry I took your life so brutally. I’m sorry to have taken your life for no purpose. I’m sorry I sent you back to the earth here in this ditch. If there’s a spirit, I hope it has flown and is free.”

Then I walked back to the car. It has some damage to the front end. I hope it’s all cosmetic, as expensive as that’s going to be. I know Eamon was feeling pretty bad about having his new ride banged up on its first voyage. I’m sorry about that, too–really sorry. And of course for the deer and for us I wish I could make the moment different from what it was. And it occurs to me that the moment could easily have been very different, and much worse: If I had swerved and rolled the car, say, or put the car into an uncontrolled skid.

I’ll always remember that righthand curve outside Ponca.