Steve’s Newsletter 1(5)

Steve’s Newsletter 1(5)

A Day in the Olympic Peninsula

This is an excerpt from an upcoming nonfiction book titled Hermit Crabs that chronicled a year-long trip in a travel trailer with my family of five people. Lauren is my wife, and my three boys are named Wolf, Bear, and Lynx. This excerpt was about a day spent on the Olympic Peninsula, both on the Makah Tribe Reservation and in the Olympic National Park.

The history of the US interaction with Native Americans is filled with the tale of tribes shipped far from their native country to live out life on a reservation in a place like Oklahoma. However, for many tribes along the Pacific Coast, they were able to stay on their traditional tribal areas, albeit in a diminished scale. This is the case for the Makah Tribe whose traditional range occupied the northern third of the Olympic Peninsula. Now they have been pushed to its northwestern corner, continuing their seafaring ways up to and including an annual whale hunt.

Tourism is a major part of their economy. Their reservation boasts Cape Flattery, the northwest extremity of the continental United States. Geography enthusiasts who wish to hike to the tip must pay a $20 annual pass for entry.

Those entering the reservation are subject to tribal laws, and in the case of the Makah, fairly draconian prohibitions on alcohol possession that can result in up to three months jail time. Because the reservations are treated as sovereign nations, there is a gray area as to whether the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution should apply to a warrantless search and seizure. Congress has attempted to legislate such protections, but the courts have been mostly silent about enforcing it. You should heed the warnings about alcohol on the large billboard coming into the Makah Reservation if you don’t want to risk jail time or a very expensive court battle.

It’s curious that the Makah have zero linguistic similarities with the Quileute Tribe back down around Forks, Washington where we are camping. For anyone with even a passing interest in anthropology and migration theory, it begs the question of multiple migrations from various places on the Asian continent to account for such extreme variety in language. Given how extremely adept this tribe is at seafaring, one wonders if they are descendants of some great ocean-faring people.

The Cape Flattery trail was our destination for the morning. The trail was immensely popular with a large group of Indian Americans on a group vacation from Seattle’s tech industry for Memorial Day weekend. (I am referring to people with ancestry from the Indian subcontinent.) Parking was tight and with some concern about ticketing and towing, we parked in a turnaround area for RVs. As it turns out this was common practice. By the time we left, the entire circle was taken up with cars with barely enough room left for the alleged RV turnaround.

They were a fairly noisy bunch stopping every five feet for the perfect selfie and slowing progress on the trail. One man called out a woman’s name and shouted “pam pam pam!” She jumped a good foot in the air sideways, looking beneath her feet. The joke was universal, despite them speaking Telegu. Pamu with a silent u is the word for snake. While there are no venomous snakes on the Olympic Peninsula, if you happen to be stomping around Andhra Pradesh where Telegu is spoken, someone shouting “pam” might save you from the saw-scaled viper which kills 5,000 people annually. Insert “the more you know rainbow” here.

To prevent erosion from the constant press of humanity, much of the trail was covered in a boardwalk barely wide enough for two people. Often people were stepping off the boardwalk to let people by, defeating its purpose. There were numerous lookouts with solid railings that would have appeased even Lauren who decided to stay back in the truck with a sleeping Lynx. However, there were lots of side trails into the woods that ended at cliff faces with no railings, so perhaps it is best that I was alone with Wolf and Bear given past terrors of them in high places.

We made it to the far end of the trail and went past the final overlook to stand on the very tip of the point, nothing but a small pine tree between us and the ocean. Several groups of people had taken pictures there, so it seemed stable enough, despite being off the boardwalk. Someone took a picture of all three of us and I returned the favor for their group before catching up with Wolf and Bear. Meanwhile, Lynx woke up and Lauren was headed my way. We did a handoff of Lynx in the pack and she made her way out to same point.

From the left, the author, Bear, and Wolf on the tip of Cape Flattery

After stopping by the trailer briefly, we made our way to Ruby Beach which we had visited two days prior. We were better prepared this time with Wolf, Bear, and me wearing swimsuits in anticipation of plunging into the frigid water. Lynx and Lauren were in street clothes. Our goal was to make more rafts out of driftwood with Wolf and Bear, having learned a few things in our previous attempts.

Our first raft of the day used three logs about six feet long and flat cross pieces of about five feet long. It was built so that Wolf could sit toward the back of the raft and hold the front of it together with his ankles. Our first trial run went well, though when I used a long pole to pull Wolf back into shore, the underlying logs rolled out from underneath and the whole raft collapsed. Back to the drawing board. I decided that rather than shoot for the buoyancy of three shorter logs, I would go with two longer logs of about 8 feet. This was better structurally, and I pushed Wolf across the creek with water up to my chest.

I still was not satisfied with the construction though and ripped apart the structure, finding even longer logs that by this point were about 10 feet in length and perhaps 80 pounds in weight. Lauren said that I was quite a sight on the far side of the creek, bounding barefoot over log piles in my flamingo swimsuit with no shirt. (It was about 45 degrees outside.) From here, I changed the shape of the structure with the underlying angled into a delta shape rather than parallel. The distance between the two logs up front was about two feet and toward the back about 8 feet. I used only enough cross pieces to keep the two underlying logs together and with the logs angled, the entire structure seemed quite solid.

I went back and forth across the creek several times ferrying Wolf, then Bear, then Wolf and Bear together. Using the long pole that I had tried at the beginning, I was able to tow the boys quite efficiently with them holding on to the pole. I offered to take Lynx out several times, but he loudly declined. This is likely for the best as he had no life jacket and the water was dark. With the boys bored of the whole raft experience, I gave it a go, my weight promptly sinking the entire thing with the buoyant cross pieces flying out from underneath me, dunking me completely to the accompanying giggles of Lauren and all three boys. Obviously, if I were to use lashings, it would make the venture more successful but also less fun.

Cold and wet, we made our way back to the campground, waiting around until it was time to go get pizza at a small restaurant across the street. The pizza was delicious but wait times were extreme with the Memorial Day weekend crowd. We managed to get our food in less than 30 minutes, but at one point the hostess was telling people the weight could be up to 90 minutes. I asked if this was because of short staffing or holiday rush and she said it was just from the holiday.

We have mostly wrapped up our time at Olympic National Park, but we are going to spend a couple hours on the north side tomorrow on our way to Port Townsend Washington.

Le Barbare

This was written in the months shortly after arriving to France on my efforts to learn French and assimilate.

French is thought of as the most difficult of the romance languages. This is likely because it is barely a romance language at all. The root of the language lies with the Gauls, a Celtic people with a language more closely related to modern day Welsh than anything found in other Romance languages. Given that Gaul was conquered fairly late in the Roman Empire, it is no surprise that the language retains many of its Gaulish roots, albeit with a very Latin conjugation. Take for example the word for brush, which is brosse in French and brwsh in Welsh.

This etymological history is compounded by the fact much of the French language is influenced by the Norman invasion of England which was preceded by the Saxon invasion some 1,500 years prior. So, the Normans, a French-speaking Viking people invaded a land that was formerly Celtic yet controlled by the Germanic Saxons. Of course, the periodic invasions and reinvasions by England and France throughout the Middle Ages continued this cultural exchange. Suffice it to say, when you learn French, you are taking on a 3,000-year history lesson. Granted, all languages have these histories, but if ranking languages on their relative pedigree, French is one of the biggest mongrels of all.

In the linguist community a meme-worthy joke goes as follows: In Spanish, the H is silent; in English, there are many silent letters; in French, all letters are meaningless, every living thing is born without reason. At the end of the day, my lessons in French are supported by the fact that I need not learn a new alphabet and I come armed with the fact that 30-percent of English is rooted in French. Having learned fluent Pashto (Afghanistan) in less than a year, I am not terribly frightened of needing to be fluent in French.

Yet my lessons are slow-going. I console my ego by noting that there was an urgency to become fluent in Pashto when I was getting ready to go to war. Mistranslating something by the Taliban meant lost lives, either dead coalition or dead civilians. The only death now is from embarrassment should I ask permission to pet someone’s cat with the wrong gendered noun. (Chat, pronounced “cha” is the masculine form used to refer to the house pet. Chatte pronounced chat is the same impolite manner of referring to a woman’s genitals as “pussy” in English.)

In the meantime, the cultural exchange is a comical one, exacerbated by the fact that our housing for the first month is in a working-class neighborhood filled with immigrants whose French is often only marginally better than mine. Standing at the bus stop, I am peppered with at least half-a-dozen languages I recognize (Russian for example) and several that I don’t (mostly sub-Saharan African.)

I give it my best, managing to get through most grocery store visits with minimal English. Most people are polite with their corrections. The man at the bakery didn’t bat an eye when I mixed up my noun and adjective when asking for deux tartes aux pommes. (Two apple tarts).

Not everyone is nice, however. A few exasperated store clerks have switched to broken English to harshly remind me that they don’t take Discover Card in Europe. (I should probably just take it out of my wallet.) The rudest exchange was with some irony, when a South-Asian lady broke into an irritable, Hindi-accented English to tell me I had to sign my receipt. That someone newly arrived to the country has been my harshest critic is not surprising. Just as with some first-and-second-generation Americans voting for Trump in the US because of his allegedly strong immigration policies, it is often the cultural neophytes who are the most zealous in their assimilation.

I am yet to be guilty of angry-American status and make no insistence that someone speak English for my sake. Contrary to a chauvinist USian belief, most French aren’t fluent in English. The number of people who can claim English fluency nationwide is less than one-third. Outside of touristy areas, English is virtually nonexistent.

I take my ignorance with humor, especially when my vast knowledge of other languages tries to backfill my lack of French. At a restaurant when ordering the Salade de la Mer (Seafood Salad), I paused to think if I should ask if it has crab because of an allergy. All I can think of is the Pashto word, “tsangash.”

“La salade a du tsangash? “
               “Quoi?”
               “Um…  Oublie ca.”

My stubborn submission to the possibility of anaphylaxis rather than admit defeat was made all the more humorous when I got back home and found out that the French word for crab is crabe and pronounced more or less the same. Doubling down when I get to the grocery store the next day, I realize that my plans to make an oatmeal-based granola were going to be thwarted by the fact that not only do I not know the word for oats in French, I don’t know it in Pashto or Spanish or anything else either, not that it would help.

I’ll try again tomorrow with the solid knowledge that the French word for oats is gruau and the a is silent. Lauren’s granola desire won’t be sated just yet.

Staying in a Twelfth Century Monastery

Three nights in the Tamié Abbey in the Savoie region of France

Settling into life in France has been a mixture of drama, stress, and fun. The French bureaucracy is far more streamlined than we expected, but the kids are recalcitrant in adopting the language and cuisine. Lauren and I are battling through all the things left unsaid during 10 years of a military marriage, a year on the road, and a year of awkward transition before moving to France. Our greatest sense of normalcy is our weekend excursions to interesting places within an hour of us.

So, we found ourselves at the Tamié Abbey, regionally famous for its cheese and, as far as I can tell, nothing else.

Without going to deep into Roman Catholic history, the monastery has about 30 monks of the Trappist variety and was originally founded in 1132. It ceased to exist for a few decades during the terrors of the French Revolution before King Charles gifted the land back to the Roman Catholic Church in 1835. The buildings are newer, built sometime in the late 1800s, so there is a certain dubiousness in my title. Twelfth Century sounds better though.

I had not actually seen the monastery prior to staying there. Upon our earlier arrival, our youngest son, Lynx, claimed he couldn’t walk. Rather than initiate a screeching drama that might very well sour the milk used to make their cheese. I stayed back with him while Lauren explored the abbey with the two older boys. A miracle of sorts, Lynx’s lameness was cured the moment Lauren was out of sight; he and I walked about two miles downhill toward the town from which we had come.

Lauren was talking a mile-a-minute when she picked us up.

“Oh, it was so great, we got to hear them sing, and the boys got to ring the bell and see the animals, and oh and Steve, Steve, Steve.”

“What‽”

“Steve!”

“What‽”

They have a hotel, and you can stay there for free. You should go on a dadcation to get away!”

Well…

My interest was piqued. Looking at the website, it seemed to have no strings attached.

Okay, it was supposed to be a spiritual retreat, but that’s ambiguous enough. I’m barely religious and certainly not Roman Catholic. Are there enough aphorisms to justify a spiritual retreat? Let’s check the internet.

“Absence makes the heart grow fonder” said Sextus Propertius, a Roman poet you never heard of prior to about seven seconds ago.

“I restore myself when I’m alone,” according to Marilyn Monroe.

Hell, Jesus disappeared into the wilderness for 40 days to be tempted by Satan.

So, I made my reservation through a simple email of requested dates and showed up. Nothing on the website showed exactly where to go, and I had a mild panic as I pulled on all the exterior doors of the abbey in search of purchase. Fortunately, I am a graduate of the Midvale School for the Gifted, and after calling the phone number attached to my reservation email, I realized that an oversized wooden door worthy of a siege required that I PUSH rather than pull.

(On a side note, French doors are horrible from a standpoint of fire safety. The vast majority open inward, meaning that in the event of an emergency, there is bound to be a press of human flesh and certain tragedy. I have few criticisms of French culture, but fire safety ranks high on the list.)

I was shown to my room, a single twin mattress and roughly 30 square feet of living space. There was a small desk, a radiator, and a nice view of the valley to the west of us.

A picture of my room and of the valley visible from the window.

I set to writing immediately, filled with angst over two stalled novels and a continued disillusionment of teaching American law when the system no longer makes any sense.

“Sure kids, the president can try to overthrow the government and that’s covered under presidential immunity, why not?”

I wrote furiously, crafting the first iteration of my newsletter and a writing plan that might make a full-time job when I can disentangle myself from other employment obligations.

And then I went to church.

I don’t speak Latin and my French is garbage, so I have no idea of the contents of the service, but the tenor singing was nice. And though I am not very religious, there is always a mediative Zen achieved during the perfect harmony of spiritually castrated monks. It was a delight.

Lunch was provided immediately after the church service. The guests of the abbey gathered around a table and waited for a monk to lead a short prayer, presumably a salute on behalf of those about to dine. I was left adrift at the Roman Catholic salute and found myself relying on a crass mnemonic device of “spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch.” That was of limited utility as I almost never carry a wallet and when I do wear a watch, it is on the wrong side. If anyone noticed my error in the horizontal aspect of me signing the cross, they didn’t say anything.

Dinner was much the same, though a glorious roasted cauliflower dolloped with molten cheese was the entrée. Wine flowed freely and the guests became loquacious as the evening progressed.

The vast majority of guests are older. Age is difficult with the French, especially with the women. There is an agelessness that continually befuddles me. I suppose one might blame this on better healthcare, a shorter work week, and higher quality foods. For everyone aged 20-40, I cannot tell the difference. For those who are past the change, there is a new era of agelessness. Judging by the topless cold plungers who frequent a beach near us, I couldn’t ever hazard an age. Men are a little more aged, especially in the rural areas, though still not as bad as the beer bellies of the deep south where I grew up.

I attended church dutifully three more times, not as a matter of requirement but as a matter of respect. When in Roman Catholicism, do as the Roman Catholics do or some such. I continued to enjoy the singing, despite the language barrier. On my second day, I went for a long hike up into the mountains nearby. This too was arguably spiritual. Just checking those boxes for when I pay on the way out.

Breakfasts were self-served, consisting of the standard petit dejeuner (small meal) of bread, jam, and coffee. Each meal was slightly better, though we never again would have proper meat after that first day. (We had fish, which is meat to anyone who isn’t Roman Catholic, but I am trying to assimilate here.)

During lunch and dinner meals, the monks would play music from a CD player of varying genres. I would have expected something religious in nature or certainly something in French. The eclectic musical tastes if the monks was surprising, first when California Dreaming was played and even more so when Joel Frederiksen’s Brave Lord Willoughby came on. I was unfamiliar with the American ballad singer, but Brave Lord Willoughby pertains to a Protestant war hero who defeated a Spanish-Catholic army in the war of Dutch independence. The monks were not without a sense of humor in playing the song.

After each meal, we all joined to clean up the space, washing dishes and clearing the tables of any organic debris. I rushed to the dish washing stand, in part because I find washing dishes cathartic, but predominantly because I am a clutz who drops dishes on a regular basis. Dishwashing in the scalding water was generally a less preferred job, so it worked out well that I liked it.

I did my best to engage with fellow retreaters. An older woman adopted me, translating whenever I didn’t understand. I put her in an awkward position when asking her to explain a joke about Belgians in front of a Belgian monk. (Apparently Belgian jokes are to France what dumb pollock jokes are to Americans.) The Belgian monk’s French accent was profound and after he led the evening prayer, the table began laughing about “the Belge” and his poor accent. The monk took the awkward situation in stride and laughed it off.

After meals, I fell into a disjointed discussion with the older men and a young woman who was probably in her 20s. They expounded on philosophy and mathematics and religion. She was demure, and I was mute on account of the language barrier. (I understood most of what they said but did not have the capacity to respond.)

The young woman compulsively tabbed her rosaries, moving her lips silently. I was curious why she was so anxious and what she might be saying. Tongues? No, wrong denomination. Heil Maries? No, wrong spelling.

In the end, I guess it was a spiritual retreat. I got away from the kids and divined a profound life change out of it.

And I can sign the cross properly now.