We're Home

Notes from Margo:

We’re home.

Lynn and I played a game the last few days of our Victory Lap, proclaiming awards: “Best celebrity home” (FDR house on the Hudson River). “Most egocentric exhibit” (Sam Walton museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, extolling the founder of Wal-Mart). (Jack Desrocher and Sheilah Downey stand in front of the Walton Museum, at right.) “Most original art” (totem poles made of golf bags in Washington, D.C.). “Most spectacular national park on our trip” (tie: Carlsbad Caverns and Niagara Falls). “Best bird sighting” (tie: peregrine falcon in the Hudson River Valley and sandhill cranes at Dinosaur National Monument in Utah). And so forth. “The greatest pleasure,” however, was arriving safe and sound at our home on Bernal Hill.

What did I miss the most? I missed my bed. I missed my bike. I missed puttering among my own things. I missed my friends. I missed burritos in the Mission and clay pot shrimp at Angkor Borei. But most of all, I missed the cycle of events, major and minor, that make up our family’s calendar. We missed Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur at the synagogue. Those were the days I felt the most adrift. And we missed Thanksgiving with our family. That was the day I felt the most homesick. We missed three months of birthdays and gatherings with family and friends – the get-togethers that tie us to our family and friends, to our community. I missed the monthly meeting with my reading group, and my weekly Torah study and the Or Shalom choir practice every two weeks. Is our community a calendar? Well, sort of. It’s an assurance that at a specific hour in a specific place, other people are making time for us, and we’re making time for them. ( "The best musicale" of the trip: In Oberlin, Ohio, Anabel Hirano, Will Rubenstein and Kenny came over to the Hohns' house. At left: Kenny and Anabel sit in with Lynn. Not in the photo is guitarist Clyde Hohn, the host.)

The great pleasure in being back home is not meant to diminish how much fun we had on our Victory Lap. It was a great trip, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. The gatherings that we missed were replaced with once-in-a-lifetime reunions with far-flung folks. We saw huge chunks of the country that we’ve never seen before. We saw the Olympic rainforest in Washington state, a plethora of museums in Washington, D.C., the Mississippi as a creek in upstate Minnesota and as a mile-wide river in Arkansas and Louisiana. We saw cornfields in Kansas, Colorado, Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, New York and, actually, just about everywhere. (At right: "The best bike path" of the trip, along the Missouri River near Brownville, Nebraska, snakes past a cornfield.) We saw windmills in most states, too, and a huge solar power plant in the Mojave Desert. We saw hundreds of Subways and coffee shops.

We planned our itinerary mainly as a way to see friends and relatives we’ve missed over the years. As we look back on the trip, our mental map of America is dotted with friendly, welcoming homes. We were able to see almost all the people we wanted to. We missed J.P. Uhlrich, Stephanie Salter, Mike Gray and a few dear friends in the middle of the country, because our route hewed toward the nation’s perimeter. But we found Lynn’s long-lost cousins, and mine. We made contact with friends of Lynn’s that he had lost touch with for many decades. And we had great pleasure in visiting friends and relatives who were never lost.

We’ve been home a bit more than a week now, and when we talk about our trip, we talk about luck. Let’s start with the car: We drove more than 12,000 miles, and the closest we came to an accident was running over a runaway tire. It had come off the wheel of the car in front of us. It was scary, but it did almost no damage (except to the Buena Vista Elementary School alumni frame for the license plate). After the folks in the tire-less car borrowed our jack and pulled out their spare, we drove on. We had two minor mechanical problems (the sliding door acted up, and the battery needed to be replaced). Neither slowed us down for more than a day. Big luck with the car! (The photo above, of our hardy little car with a whalefish in Wisconsin, illustrates why we called it The Guppy.)

And weather luck: We had some cold. We had some rain. But we managed to avoid any bad storms and all but the tiniest bit of snow. Some of that was planning. The final leg of our trip was going to be a drive up the eastern side of the Sierra on Highway 395 – Owens Valley, Mono Lake, and then over Donner Pass on Interstate 80 and back home. The weather report showed snow for the whole week on Donner Pass, and we changed course at the last minute. We followed a more southerly route through Bakersfield, the Carrizo Plain and up Highway 101. So we missed a big snowstorm by paying attention. But most of our decent weather was just dumb luck. (At left: It is cold in New Orleans, and we complained. About a week later, we saw news reports of torrential rain and flooding. We retract our complaints.)

Medical luck: The one time we needed medical help, we happened to be in one of the few areas in the country with a big Kaiser presence. Lynn got sick with some sort of lung infection (possibly pneumonia) in Washington, D.C. Our dear friends Alex Neill and Tibby Speer have a guest apartment downstairs in their Georgetown house. It is so luxe that they were able to make us feel like we weren’t underfoot for the week that Lynn was recuperating. That week in a campground, a Days Inn or on someone’s couch would have been more problematic and a lot less comfortable. And if that week had been in one of the many states with no Kaiser presence, well, it would have been a lot more complicated. So let's say we were lucky on the microbe front. (At right, Alex and Tibby, win the Victory Lap award for "Most agreeable hosts when the guest is ailing.")

As for the other meaning of “What did you miss?”: The Everglades is near the top of my wish list. But the southern tip of Florida just seemed too far, so we skipped the Deep South in favor of visiting Jack Desrocher and Sheilah Downey in Rogers, Arkansas. We also put off a visit to Selma, Alabama, where Lynn had covered the 1965 march to Montgomery by Martin Luther King and hundreds of other brave demonstrators for voting rights. So the Everglades and that visit to the South will have to wait. And, similarly on the northern end of our itinerary: We'll have take another trip to see Montreal. But for now, we’re home, and we’re definitely staying right here for a while.