Change In Plans

This post is about Zola, our joyful, boisterous, and loving 8-year-old son.

India took this picture, and used it for the bio on Zola’s travel blog (http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/zolab/1/1217357520/tpod.html). I am embarrassed to say that his blog is definitely more interesting and better written than my own.

Zola was born in Cape Town, and lived there for the first year of his life. In Xhosa, his first name means “peaceful, calm, or tranquil,” which reflected wishful thinking on the part of his parents.

We moved back to New York City, and Zola lived on the Upper West Side, right across from Riverside Park. India was still working then, so Zola spent a lot of time with his nanny, Marilyn Torres, and her children. We all lived in the same building. I don’t know what Zola’s first memories are, but I will ask him. We have travelled back to South Africa every year since he was born, and usually stay for at least a couple of weeks. He seems to feel a connection to the country of his birth.

When Zola was three, he started attending the Weekday School at Riverside Church. Weekday was a wonderful environment: high ceilings and big windows looking out over the Hudson. The teachers and the other familes were diverse, and interesting, and very caring. He was wildly happy there for two years of nursery school. His favorite part of the day was riding up Riverside Drive to school with his Mom on the MTA bus. At every stop, more kids from Weekday School would get on, and it was a raucous, rolling kidfest each morning. We all loved Weekday.

For reasons that we thought made sense at the time, we moved out to rural New Jersey when Zola was four. India worked hard to get him into the best school we could find, which was a Montessori School in Mendham. Zola loved it, but as a family we never quite clicked with the Montessori School. (It did not help that his teacher had two giant posters in her classroom: one of President Bush and one of the New York Yankees). Many people swear by the Montessori method, but I never figured it out.

In New Jersey, Zola loved having a big yard, and his own room. He liked learning to ride a bike on the deserted dirt roads around our house, and having his own sand box and swing set. City kid that he is, though, he frequently asked, “Where are all the people?”

One of the constants in Zola’s life has been the camp up in the Beaverkill. He has been at camp with the same kids every summer since he was three. Even if they haven’t seen each other for months, as soon as the camp kids are together they always fall into a comfortable, physiaclly active play group. Usually, this means wrestling and whomping each other with pillows, which is perfect for eight year olds.

This was just a short chronology. In the next post, I will write about the last three years, and try to capture some of the essence of the kid. If I can, I will also try to find another photo.

This post is about shooting the river in a canoe, at the crack of dawn this morning. I will create a second post later this evening, which starts the “who we are” portion of our more structured content entertainment. In the meantime, the canoe trip was too cool to not share.

Over dinner on Saturday night, our friend, Jon Friedland, held up a thumb and forefinger about an inch apart, and said, “I came this close to calling you last night and asking whether you wanted to canoe down the river.” Even three days after the rain stopped, the river is still up, and it might be possible to shoot down it safely. Under normal circumstances, it would be too shallow and too slow-moving to be navigable.

Responding to Jon’s teaser, we agreed to try it early on Sunday morning. I got up a little after six, fetched the canoe from the pond, and strapped it onto the pickup truck. I left the canoe by the side of the road, where Alder Creek junctions with the Beaverkill River. Jon and I met five miles downstream, and drove back up to the canoe in his Jeep.

We had a brief debate about what we should wear (eg, helmets or no helmets, shirts or no shirts), which mostly revealed that we were buffoons and amateurs. Undeterred, we put in, and started down the river.

Overall, the trip was amazingly fun. We capsized twice, and swamped twice more, but mostly we stayed vertical and relatively dry. Each time we were out of the boat, we were standing in two feet of water, so it felt pretty controllable. We laughed our way through some rapids, and scraped the bottom of the canoe a lot, but we had no disasters. In the end, I was glad I had the helmet on, when my head bumped a tree that was jutting out of the riverbank.

It took us just under an hour to cover the five miles, which seemed pretty fast to me, but what do I know? A little flock of ducklings fled in front of us for most of the trip, and we disturbed a lone fly fisherman in front of the Inn. Aside from that, it was just us and the river. Jon is great company, and this was a terrific idea.

The summer of fun continues.

This post is about swimming in the Beaverkill River.

Normally, the river is a part of our daily lives here in the summer. We look at it continuously, listen to a tributary of it (Alder Creek) when we sleep, and swim in it a few times every week. There are a couple of world-class swimming holes about three miles from the house.

Because of the rain and flooding, we have been looking at the river differently this week. The clear water turned cafe au lait brown, the volume and speed increased hugely (fivefold?), and the placid meandering became a raging torrent. Standing near the river on Wednesday evening, amazed by the power and intensity, with lots of small children ambling about, seemed like a tremendously dangerous environment. We assumed that anyone who fell in would be swept downriver to a watery and certain death.

After two days of sunshine, the water has subsided a lot. If the volume had peaked at a fivefold increase, now it is back down to merely a double, and the murky brown is starting to clarify again. By Sunday, maybe it will be back to normal.

This post is about swimming in the river. Tonight we went to a dinner party at a friend’s house. The property has hundreds of feet of river frontage, set off from the house by about 200 yards. In dire need of a bath (after a long, hot bike ride and two hours of kids’ baseball), I decided to wash in the river.

After splashing around for a few minutes, I worked up my courage enough to lie down in the rushing water, and let the current take me. It was an amazing ride. Floating in two feet of water, I shot down the river on my back. Occasionally, I bumped on some rocks, but mostly I just rode in comfort and silence (I guess my ears were under water). I climbed out a thousand feet or so downstream, and walked back along the river bank in my shorts.

I happened to have my swim goggles with me, so on my second ride, I lay on my stomach (feet first), and watched the bottom of the river rush past me. It was quite otherworldly, to watch myself moving so rapidly over the round stones, with my hands flailing and grasping in the murky water.

It is difficult to describe what I saw and felt, and I am not doing it justice. This may be something that I see again in a dream. It may also be some kind of metaphor for life - the rushing sensation, the murk, the very fleeting purchase on anything solid.

Regardless, it was definitely different and special. Aside from being cold for the rest of the evening, no harm done. Probably not a recreation I will recommend to the kids.

This post is about making changes to the “change in plans” blog. The intention is to make it less like a series of notes to myself (and to my Mom, who may be the only person reading it), and more like something that would be of interest to a broader audience.

Up until now, the main purpose of the blog has been to get in the habit of writing every day. That, at least, has been a success. It has also been fun, and has involved everyone in the family (particularly Zola).

Over the enxt weeks and months, I am trying to add structure and broader resonance to the content. To be honest, I have no idea whether I will be good at this at all.

Prior to departing on our trip, the broad topics that I think we will cover will include:

• Who we are
• What we are planning to do
• How we came to have this great opportunity to travel for a year
• What we are doing to prepare for our trip

Once we leave (August 17th), we will mostly write about where we are, and what we are learning as we go. That actually sounds easier.

We will also really try to incorporate some maps and pictures, to supplement (or distract from) my self-conscious prose.

So, this is the end of the beginning. From here, the “change in plans” blog gets serious.

The whole valley got woken up at about 5am by lightning and thunder, and then by a tremendous downpour. The electricity must have gone out at about 6am.

The storm lasted until about 9am, when Zola and I rode to camp. En route, we saw a 25-foot pine bough break off and crach to the ground, about 30 yards from the road. Not scary, but impressive.

India pulled me along on a 12-mile run through the mountains, with the downpour starting again about 9 miles into it. By the time we got back to the Inn (which had electricity and running water), I was completely soaked - as wet as if I had jumped into a pond.

It rained either hard or very hard for the rest of the afternoon, with water filling the stremas and rivers, and running off the mountains and across the roads. I got the opportunity to saw up a fallen tree which was blocking one of the small roads down the valley, which was fun, and was more chainsawing than I have done all summer.

After camp, Zola had two boys over for a play date, and one of our nanny friends and her charges came to figure out how to get back to her house, as her road had washed out entirely. This was a lot of people in our tiny cabin, particularly in the pouring rain. Fortunately, the electricity had come back on.

I took the boys out in the pick up truck, to look at the streams and waterfalls, to check on one of our neighbors, and to add the sawn wood to our burn pile. The collective 8-year-old boy decision to sit in the back of the truck soaked all three of them. Directly next door, a big tree crashed to the ground (missing the wires).

We drove our nanny friend home later, skirting the washed-out bridge, around some downed trees, and through a lot of water rushing over the remains of a bridge. On the other side of the bridge, an old and beaten-up sub-compact car was wheezing and steaming, and unable to move. When I went up to the window, the young man driving said, “It’s running rough, homes.” Couldn’t disagree with that.

The pub was closed, so we imposed on a friend in her new house for dinner. A group gathered, and we built a big fire, drank wine, and speculated about the rain. A nice end to a wet day.

The rain is still falling now, and the creek across the road is at its banks (probably three feet higher than normal). Drought is over, I guess. We will see what the damage is tomorrow.

Love it or hate it, Wal*Mart is America.

We had to make a trip out of our suspended-reality Beaverkill bubble yesterday to get passport photos made. The nearest place was the Wal*Mart in Monticello, New York, about 40 minutes from our cabin.

Monticello itself is a totally beaten old town in a depressed part of upstate New York. More than half of the buildings on the Main Street are empty, and there are few signs of economic vitality or hope.

The Wal*Mart at the edge of town was packed with people. The demographic was interesting: roughly 40% Hasidic families, 30% Latino families, 30% all others. The portrait studio was overrun with (no exaggeration) about 25 small children from three Hasidic families, two of which were waiting to take baby pictures. While we waited, I took Zola for a great haircut (at Wal*Mart), and we took both kids to McDonald’s (at Wal*Mart). After we got the passport photos done, we bought an inexpensive digital camera, some toothbrushes, a bunch of magazines, kids’ books, safety glasses for chainsawing, and other things we didn’t know we needed. I think if you stand still, consumer goods just fly off the shelves at you.

We were glad to get out of there, but it was amazing to see how much stuff was getting bought, and how much other activity there was: at the bank, at the manicurist, at the optometrist, at the florist, etc. It is impossible for most Main Streets to compete effectively with that.

Having started to read a few other blogs, I feel a need to improve this one. I will work on making it more informative, more incisive, and more personal. The discipline of writing frequently has been good, but now I need to develop a message and a voice. I am still not sure what the right balance is between travelogue, observation, professional development, spiritual journey, fact, commentary, etc.

As expected, India has gotten deeply into planning the trip. We have a spreadsheet which provides day-by-day details from August 3rd until at least early January. She is making hotel reservations and flight arrangements all over the place (getting excellent help from Geographic Expeditions and from Wings Travel, our old friends from South Africa). We are expediting additional pages in passports, scheduling vaccinations, and applying for visas. In the midst of our reality-suspended Catskills idyll, the trip is taking shape.

Today was supposed to be a recovery day on the bicycle, after riding about 120 miles in the previous three days. India and our hyperfit friend Holly allowed me to tag along on a hike, which I assumed (naively) would be leisurely and short. In the roughly two and a half hours we marched through the mountains, I estimate we covered 11-12 miles, and swatted 300 deer flies. The highlight for me, as we ran up yet another hill was Holly shouting back at me over her shoulder: “This is boot camp. That’s why you are wearing boots, buddy.”

One more funny kid experience to describe. We spent the early evening up at our pond, enjoying a camp fire and looking at the small, nearly completed stone hut. Eventually, Tallulah and I took out the canoe, and Zola stood on shore with his net, catching and releasing frogs. After a while, the three of us went swimming in the warm, still water. A beautiful evening.

As we prepared to go back down to the house, Tallulah (naked) started dancing around the canoe, and punching at it with her tiny open hands. She did this for a few minutes -bobbing and weaving away, and then moving in with a smack smack smack. We laughed, and India asked what she was doing.

“I’m chopping, Mommy.”
“Why are you chopping, Lula?”

“I have to chop, Mommy. I’m a Choppinese fighter. Chop, chop, chop.”

Three is a sweet age. She is learning a lot at camp.

India encouraged me to write more about funny things that our kids do. I guess my wry observations on the human condition just aren’t bringing in the ad dollars.

Here are two attempts:

1- Zola and the other 8-9 year old boys at his camp have adopted some G-rated (no pun intended) gangsta slang as part of their little-boy patois.

It is sort of funny on its own to see a predominantly blonde and pale group of little guys shouting ” ‘Sup?” and flashing what I guess they think are some kind of gang hand signs at each other. The photo after the first intra-camp baseball game of the summer, Bearcats vs. Slammers, looked more like Cuckolds vs. Klingons.

Yesterday morning, one of our our next-door neighbors came over to visit. Zola greeted him with a cheerful, “Yo! ‘Sup dawg?” Our visitor, Honey, was, in fact, a dog. I thought this was pretty hilarious.

2- Tallulah and the 3-4 year olds are the most enthusiastic singers amongst all of the campers. She treats us to endless rounds of call-and-response classics, including “Princess Pat” (which she performed in the talent show), “Bringing Home a Baby Bumble Bee,” and “Boom Chicka Boom.”

On her own, Tallulah has been singing her favorite Christmas carol a lot this afternoon. In July, she is as convinced as she was in December that the climactic verse of Jingle Bells is “… in a hoppen, sloppen sleigh.” A little Christmas, right here in our Catskills summer.

“Today was good day.” - Zola’s comment at bedtime.

His reasons:

1- his friend Chuckles slept over last night, and they had a long game of “swamp the canoe” after breakfast

2- before the sleepover, we had a big cookout and bonfire (about 40 people) at a cabin way up in the mountains

3- he saw the last Avatar movie ever, watching with a posse of 8-10 year old boys in the basement of the Inn, while parents had dinner

4- he had a 2-hour tennis clinic with a bunch of other kids

5- he and his Dad went for a swim in the Quill pond together, and he and a group of other kids caught frogs

It was a good day for me too. My reasons:

1- India went on a long run in the morning, while I had a chance to cook breakfast for Zola, Tallulah, and Chuckles

2- I went on long mountain-bike ride, with five others, up to the cabin where we had the cookout last night. From there we took a “hidden path”, which became a two-mile bike carry through the woods, when the path became too hidden to follow. Lots of scratches on the legs and hands. Great ride down the mountain, once we emerged from the dense forest. I am at 487 miles in my 1,000 mile bike challenge.

3- we had the first annual Pimms Cup tennis mixed-doubles tennis tournament in the afternoon. The scramble gave each of the men and each of the women a chance to play together, with victories from each partnership being tallied for the individuals. I finished DFL, which is last, out of 16 participants, but it was fun, and the company was excellent. Pimms tastes pretty good.

4- we had a great outdor dinner at the Inn, with meat and vegetables from local farmers, and a full pig roast. My enthusiast friend and business-school classmate, Laurent, came down from Cooperstown to host a tasting of his Belgian-style beers. He did a similar even with me at McKinsey three years ago. It was wonderful to see him, to meet his wife, and to drink his beer.

Everyone has passed out at 10pm. Lulu was actually asleep before I pulled out of my parking space at the Inn.

A good day.

On Zola’s behalf, I interviewed a 10-year-old boy in Datca, Turkey. His dad, Hussein, owned the gulet that we sailed on, and seems to own about half of Datca. Egehan spoke very little English, so his father and one of my colleagues translated.

Name?
Egehan Gunes
Gunesegehan@hotmail.com

Age?
10 (well, close to 10. I’m 10 on 20 September)

Where do you live?
Datca, Turkey

Why do you live there?
Because my father lives there

Who do you live with?
Mom and Dad, younger brother (Evren), no pets yet, but I’m asking for a puppy

Go to school?
Yes. I’m in Grade 3

What’s it like?
500 kids, it goes up to 8th grade

What is your favorite subject?

Maths

What are you most afraid of?
There is a Turkish scary movie, Dabbe, about the end of the world. I see the movie in my dreams. In the earthquake last night, I thought Dabbe

was happening.

What do you do for fun?
Windsurfing and sailing

What do you want to be when you grow up?
A scientist, or technologist

What would you tell every kid in the whole world?
They should not smoke.