Vacation imagination

This is where I watch the sun come up. 

So much of the pleasure of a vacation happens weeks in advance.

My upcoming three-day hiking trip to my favorite wilderness retreat — Pittsburg, New Hampshire — begins next Tuesday. But in my heart and my imagination, my nature getaway begins the minute I open Evernote and begin itemizing packing and to do lists.

• S’mores ingredients. Check.
• Hat and gloves. Check.
• Running shoes. Check.
• Walking stick. Check.
• Travel mug. Check.

Each item on the list comes with a treasured repository of memory. There’s the hilly, chilly morning run past First Lake and on to Happy Corners restaurant for celebration pancakes. Hat and gloves a must. There’s the late-night, fire-pit roasting of marshmallows under a jewel box of radiant stars. And that steep and miserable climb up to Magalloway’s summit, where my walking stick’s a necessary appendage? Up there, breathtaking — oooh, aaaah — tempts hyperventilation it is all so beautiful.

And what about the travel mug? My daughter Ardis and I sip coffee on our before-dawn photo safaris up and down remote logging roads, where fox, bull moose and deer bound in front of us, flushed from their meanderings, as surprised as we are. Ardis, the daring one, takes our off-road vehicle places I would never go alone.

Full moon over First Connecticut Lake.

For years I have opted for Pittsburg adventures in lieu of travel to Italy or France or Greece or Spain — all places I have no personal knowledge of despite how right they seem for me. I choose nature. And it calls to me so persistently that I never fail to reserve a cabin and let myself be drawn, mile by forested mile, till I am breathing pine and peat and wood smoke. My hiking buddy Lynn called it “the Pittsburg effect.” Once I pull away from it and head home, and that is a wrenching moment, it haunts when I blink, turn my head, bring a fork to my mouth, mount a lectern to greet an audience. I know the siren call personally. And so did Lynn.

And yet, you cannot know what is to come.

I often open my iPhoto library and scroll through Pittsburg photos taken year after year, season after season. How many photos do I have of Murphy Dam? Of the moose feeding in the wallows? Of Lynn? Of Cliff? Two of my favorite hiking companions, Lynn Harnett and Cliff Post, died within a week of each other just a couple of years ago. They both look so happy in Pittsburg, with the panorama of Maine, Canada, Vermont at their backs and the solid granite summit stone at their feet. I miss them most right there and in the memory of there.

Cliff Post, left, feeling content,
at the end of the scramble
to Table Rock. Lynn Harnett, right
thrilled to have found a new trail
in nearby Vermont. 

I have packing-for-Pittsburg rituals that keep up my end of the bargain so that Pittsburg won’t disappoint. I wedge a sharp chopping knife into the middle of a roll of paper towels because my knife is a good one. I bring two-ply toilet paper because we do appreciate our creature comforts more than the lodge owners do. I have a gin-and-tonic on the deck after a long day of hiking and exploring so that, despite the chill this time of year, I suck in enough of her essence to carry me through the winter and bring me back to her next year.

As the sun sets, there's time to commune.

In the top tier of New Hampshire, where Pittsburg spreads its ever-changing woodlands and waterways like a Secret Garden, there is always something new to see and do in nature. Or, put another way, there’s always another way to bully fate.

Pittsburg doesn’t get old. It is the lover with always the new trick up her sleeve. Or the soft shale on the precipice’s tempting edge.   

All this pre-travel fantasy may psyche me for my next rendezvous with Pittsburg, but it will never prepare me. Imagination gets me only so far. I have to be there to truly know.

  

Passion as art

Israel Galván interacts
with a guitarist and singer
in his intense and stylized
flamenco dance.

Flamenco dance is a glorious departure from normal.

Hence, this must be an American speaking. Someone with the romantic languages in her blood and popular culture fatigue in her bones. Car chases. Faces pummeled. Guns exploding. Women raped. Enough. Give me Andalusian soul music. Show me your beating heart.

Today I had the great fortune to see flamenco dancer Israel Galván in one of his last performances in NYC this fall. It’s a 10-minute walk from when I’m staying and despite this week’s rave review in the NY Times, I managed to get the best seat in the house.

Here’s what today’s flamenco performance was like. And though the performance, titled “La Edad de Oro,” is avant-garde by traditional standards, what I describe here is pure flamenco:

Three men on a stage — one dancer (Israel Galván), one singer (David Lagos) and one guitarist (David’s brother Alfredo). They’re all dressed in black, though at one point Galván changes to white shoes. The stage is bare except for their chairs and a speaker for the guitarist. The backdrop is black. Lighting is often from above and it’s minimal. Everything that happens happens between the men and the music and the audience.

It’s intimate. Us and them.

The performance feels like a long story that Galván starts off by stepping into the solitary beam of light and beginning a percussive dance with, at first, no accompaniment. Sometimes the only sounds are his vocalizations. Sometimes he is completely still and there is only silence. David begins to sing and Alfredo plays his guitar. They trade off, Galván sitting while David or Alfredo continues. It’s a conversation, told in music and dance, that lasts for an hour and a half. Exuberant, plaintive, funny in parts, the dance and music portray us, in conflict, in love, in loss. And when Galvan stomps his feet and arcs his entire body with arms straining toward the ends of the universe, it is unbearably intense.

Olé! Sí! Bravo! I found I was amid a Spanish-speaking audience, used to joining in, at times, with expressions of appreciation and exclamations of joy. It felt as if we were at a juerga — a spontaneous gathering, perhaps in Spain at some small pub — drinking wine, reflecting on our lot in life. The dancer or singer begins a lament and soon everyone joins in.

This art comes from the heart and is transformed by skill and training and generations of dancers and singers and guitarists evolving to this, where Galván is on the edge of something old and new.

What I describe is passion and I express tremendous gratitude to know passion and to recognize it in others who take it whole and shape it into beautiful art.

As we left the theater, I heard one man say to his group of friends: “I feel so lucky to have witnessed this.”

Perhaps he's also saying is that he feels fortunate to be understood. That his passions have a place in his life.

Appetites

Jim and I knew that the Meatball Shop at 84 Stanton, between Allen and Orchard in the Lower East Side, was about to open for business. We'd been reading about it everywhere: Daily Candy, the New York Times foods section, Time Out New York. I couldn't help but wonder how my book Free Fall, coming out in April, might garner such notice. PR like that must be pricey.

The idea of a place that features meatballs — chicken, pork, beef, etc. — is too good to ignore. Good ideas get notice all on their own. Jim and I knew the Meatball Shop was going to be a destination for the two of us even if the chef and co-owner, Daniel Holzman, was not an old family friend of Jim's.

I must pause, momentarily, to pay tribute:
Hail, fabulous meat ball. You perfect bundle, pumped up on protein and open to infinite flavor permutations. Saucy. Sassy. Spicy. An ethnic wonder. Swedish, Italian, or mongrel in my kitchen where identity reveals itself in relationship to the larder. Raisins? Cilantro? Nub of Parmesan? No pasta as grounding necessary. No sub roll enfolding my treasures. I take my meat balls unencumbered. Wonder of wonders, so, too, does the Meatball Shop, though there are certainly options for those insistent on muting their pleasures with dull and simple carbs: pastas, hero rolls, slider buns. End of reverie.

On a recent Monday evening, after we'd heard author Jonathan Dee read from his new novel "The Privileges" (here's a link to my book review: http://bulletin.aarp.org/states/de/2010/7/articles/book_notes_family_values_its_privileges_jonathan.html) at Half King in Chelsea, Jim and I planned to head to a pre-opening party at the Meatball Shop.

We ate at Half King, however, a place well known for its creative, tasty comfort food. We split a burger, a sort of meatball without ambition but delicious when you're hungry, especially with a slab of red onion and a few freshly cut fries and a talented writer at the lectern reading to us. Perfection is the confluence of food and literature and wine and people, though there were only a few of us that night despite a starred review in Publishers Weekly and a big, positive piece in the New Yorker that day. After reading, Dee asked if there were questions and Jim queried, "Is that the best part?" to which Dee immediately rebounded with, "It just builds from there." Jim, reliable for his impertinence and hearty laugh, jumped up, bought the book, asked for an inscription, and once home, read it in a day and a half.

Already well fed, our arrival at the Meatball Shop would satisfy another appetite, that of curiosity. I never got past the front entrance area. The place was mobbed, as expected, and among the people seated at the long tables were many from the Gurdjieff Work in Manhattan, where Jim had been a participant for 25 years.

For Jim, there were lots of familiar faces including the chef's brother Eli Holzman, whose new CBS reality show Undercover Boss was already, after just one episode, generating a great deal of buzz. I saw the first show, about a waste management company, and found it commendable in the way it reminds us how important the workers are in any successful organization. In our country, where the middle and working classes are devalued and shrinking, shows like this are important. And there was its canny, young, subversive creator and producer, just a few feet inside the front door. Jim burrowed on in but I stayed put in order to to acquaint myself with the boys' father, John, also a longtime friend of Jim's who now lives in Southern California.

I'd heard a lot about John, and knew that he'd been interested in what Jim was up to. He'd asked about me and followed the progress, if you can call it that, of our relationship. John had come East last year, but I'd been in New England.

John was flying high. And why not? He'd been in a sky box at the Super Bowl 50 yard line the night before and on this night he was witnessing incredibly exciting and promising moments in both of his sons' careers.

I conclude this blog posting, another one that is too long and for that I apologize, with the stunning words John uttered in that hot loud deliciously fragrant full-of-laughing place where we stood, face to face, straining to take each other in, straining to hear, bending, smiling, noting Jim as he reached Daniel, shook his hand, spoke his congratulations.

I could tell John wanted to say something. "I hope you don't take this the wrong way."

"All right," I said warily.

"I've known Jim for a long time. He's a good man. Here's the essential thing about Jim. Jim's a lover. But I think you know that. I think you must be, too."

I hadn't expected anything like this. A good friend protecting another friend? An urgent message before it's too late. Jim a lover. Such an unusual way to describe the essence of a person.

I breathed, finally, and smiled. "Well, then, you'll have to read my book."

The message — "Jim's a lover" — in John's hands, had seemed sacred, important. I must have understood what he was trying to say because I'd written a whole book about that one thing.