Change In Plans

This post is an introduction to our three-year-old daughter, Tallulah.

As a Dad, this seems easy: she is beautiful and perfect in every possible way. Imagine perfection in a small human being, and that is the right description. Leaving aside my (are they obvious?) paternal biases, I will try to gin up a little more nuance and backstory.

Having Tallulah required a great deal of medical assistance, exceptional determination on India’s part, and some unknown amount of luck. In February 2002, India and I lost a baby girl in the 27th week of pregnancy. We named her Graca Riverside Baird, and we scattered her ashes on the side of Lion’s Head mountain in Cape Town. I don’t know if that is considered a miscarriage or a still birth, but it was a shocking, horrible, and painful experience. Holding that tiny, still baby in a room at St. Luke’s - Roosevelt Hospital may have been the saddest moment of my life.

In the year after losing Graca, we had four miscarriages. We delved deeper and deeper into the strange world of medically assisted reproduction, once losing twins in Weeks 11 and 12 after our first cycle of IVF. After our second round of IVF (with genetic viability testing of the blastocycsts before implantation), and with India giving herself twice-daily heparin injections (in case undiagnosed blood clotting had been the problem), we finally had a baby who made it through the first trimester. My incredibly determined wife (maybe the most compliant heparin self-injecting patient in history) and I sweated through months of checkups and ultrasounds, trying hard not to raise our hopes too much.

Finally, in November 2004, we had a Tallulah. We should give a big shout out to Dr. Amos Grunebaum (superstar high-risk OB/GYN), Dr. Orly Ettingen (superstar women’s health specialist), and Dr. Owen Davis (superstar IVF doctor) and for all of their colleagues at New York Presbyterian/Cornell Reproductive Medicine Institute. They were individually and collectively amazing.

Within hours of Tallulah’s birth, the memories of sadness and tribulation were largely replaced by the joy of our new baby. The three plus years with Tallulah, who we call Lula or Lu, have been almost a pure pleasure. She is very funny and sweet. She is hugely opinionated and bossy. She is ridiculously good at puzzles, and she loves to organize her toys and clothes. Even at age three, she seems to have a lot of common sense. At this stage, every day with her feels like a blessing. My understanding is that things may get a little rockier in the ages between about 12 and 24, but in the meantime, we feel so very fortunate to have her in our lives.

Lu started nursery school this year. As an example of her being “hugely opinionated”, she fired her first nursery school after going for five days. She just declared, “I am finished with the Cottage School,” and made clear that she would not go. Neither India nor I was crazy about the place either, so we withdrew her. She loved her second school (Pottersville Nursery), and she really loved what we called “Suzy School,” where a wonderful Peruvian teacher would come to our house and teach Lu and her friends for a few hours each week.

We are a little concerned about not having Lu in school this coming year: she is really ready for the structure and for the socializing. I am also a little concerned about the health risks (or “losing her somewhere” risks) oif taking such a small child on this big a trip. Although we probably won’t get a leash, we are finishing a course of travel vaccinations, and we will hold her closely and make sure she is easily identifiable (e.g., India got us all Medical Alert bracelets already).

We also don’t have any sense for how much of this time, and this trip, Tallulah will remember with specificity. My understanding is that episodic memory develops around age three, but who knows? At the very least, we hope it all blends into a warm “I had a very happy childhood” feeling that she carries with her for her whole life.

This post is about celebrating the completion of 1,000 miles on my bicycle in the last 35 days. This is a small victory, over an arbitrary and self-imposed challenge, but it still feels great to be finished. More importantly, the summer of riding itself was really spectacular.

In the combined ten years prior to this summer, I would be surprised if I had ridden even 500 miles cumulatively on a bicycle. I got a new mountain bike a few years ago, and enjoyed riding on a few summer weekends, but it did not add up to much.

When I left my job, in late May, I wanted to set some quantifiable goals, knowing that this would reduce the risk of dissipating and/or slipping into a funk. Knowing nothing about cycling, I decided to buy a nice road bike, and I set the 1,000 mile goal (publicly, vocally and repeatedly). To be honest, the original goal I talked about was 1,500 miles, but an experienced Beaverkill cyclist persuaded quickly me that this was just not feasible.

Initially just on the mountain bike, and then much more so on the new road bike, I have been out riding hard nearly every day. I picked up a couple of hundred miles just going back and forth to camp with Zola (Thanks for the company, kid. I really enjoyed the time with you, and learned more about Pokemon than any adult has the right to know).

I picked up another couple of hundred miles riding to places where I normally would have driven: to dinner at the Inn or the pub, to friends’ houses, to swimming, to baseball.

The rest of the mileage came from going out on long rides into the Catskills, generally by myself. The longest days were about 60 miles, but mostly I would go 30-40 miles - over mountains, along rivers, through woods. I have never really liked, nor felt entirely comfortable, being alone. This summer, riding by myself, I think I got a lot more comfortable with my own company: thinking, singing, swearing, sweating.

I rode about 95 miles in the last 48 hours, somewhat desperate to finish before we leave tomorrow. This afternoon, I got back to the house after a 35-mile ride, and found myself at 998 total miles. Zola rode the last two miles with me, telling funny stories about a sleepout he had this summer at camp.

There were many sublime moments in the 1,000 miles: enjoying the childish freedom of racing along the flats, feeling the laser focus of terror while bombing down big hills at 40+ mph, immersing myself in the beauty of the countryside. I greatly enjoyed the company of my son, my wife and daughter, and the friends I rode with. I also really enjoyed the time alone.

This is a small accomplishment, even in the not-so-grand scheme of things. That said, I feel tired and happy, and that is pretty good.

This post is about the anxieties that I am feeling as our departure becomes imminent.

Over the last few days, I have become increasingly edgy: short with India and kids, bothered by noise, and generally irritable. Even my clothes feel uncomfortable. As India and I spent a few hours today going over detailed elements of our daily plan, and assigning tactical tasks to each other, I felt anxiety bubbling up in me. To my discredit, I take this out on those I love, and am probably not very nice to be around.

This is a complicated mix of emotions, and is difficult to describe coherently (and without sounding like a neurotic or spoiled brat). I am definitely excited about the trip, and about spending time with India and with the kids. I think that my professional situation (more about that later) worked out for the best, and I have no regrets. For once in my life, I am not even particularly worried about running out of money, and about facing some horrible abyss called “running out of money.”

I have been able to identify some of the drivers of my anxiety:

• Awareness of not fitting in and being like everyone else - a sense of “otherness.” This becomes more acute on Mondays (when “everyone else” goes back to work), and has become more acute as camp has ended, and the very busy social time at the Beaverkill ended with it. I have a latent “what will people think?” worry.
• Fear of the unknown - not places, or situations, or people, but a fear of not having a routine, or a home, or any roots for a long period. As India talks about travelling for a full year from now (and she makes clear that she would travel forever if it were feasible), my anxiety levels go way up. I guess I like routine and consistency and predictability more than I had previously thought
• Abstract fear that, for some reason, I would never be able to re-engage with the world, and I would flounder around in unemployable limbo forever. This fear is less about money and security, and more about stature and having impact in my life. It may not be intellectually realistic, but I am discussing (uncomfortably, I might add) the world of my feelings.

Maybe all of this anxiety is normal and will dissipate once we actually get under way. I hope so, both for my own sake and for India and the kids. Grouchy old Dad. Over the next few posts, I will add some context to these feelings, and try to understand them better. I will also finish the descriptions of the family, and describe how we came to have this opportunity.

Despite the picture, this post is about us shifting gears as a family: winding down our idyll time in the Beaverkill, and really preparing to leave on the first leg of our travels in two weeks.

Camp ended on Friday, and many of the families have gone off for their “rest of summer” activities. We had our last baseball game on Friday afternoon - Beaverkill Bearcats beat the Shin Creek Slammers 20-6 in a real pitchers’ duel. I am at 934 miles on the bicycle, closing in on the 1,000-mile goal in the next couple of days (I hope). Even our little stone hut in the pasture is nearly finished.

India has been working feverishly to book travel, and accommodation, and activities. The Spain- Morocco-Tunisia-Turkey-Italy itinerary is in good shape, with details completely firmed up. We are still wrestling with how best to home school the kids (Zola in particular), but aside from that we pretty much know where we will be and what we will be doing.

We have also been shedding assets. Our lovely friends in NYC, Patty and David, bought our Volvo from us yesterday evening. It felt like a significant step away from our suburban existence to part with the station wagon, but we are glad that the car will be well loved, and that they will think of us (fondly we hope) when they drive it. David made the transaction incredibly easy, by being very organized. It felt vaguely disreputable as we sat on Riverside Drive last night and swapped the license plates, but I guess this is how it is done.

India also had a physical and got most of her vaccinations today, while Zola and Lu and I saw our old neighbors from New Jersey. A good time was had by all (except India, who was getting a lot of needle sticks).

When we got back up to the Catskills this evening, we swam in the pond and sat in the sun. The kids can definitely sense the shift in our attitudes, as we get serious about the trip, and the departure date looms. It is nice fro us to have a few more days here, clinging to some sense of normalcy before we start the perpetual motion machine.

This post is a further attempt to describe our eight-year-old son, Zola.

After years of being an absentee father and husband, it has been wonderful for me to be with my family all day every day. In particular, Zola and I have spent a lot of time together, particularly riding bikes to and from camp (he has ridden nearly 200 miles this summer). During these rides, I have gotten to know my own kid a lot better.

Rounding out the quick chronology that I started in my last post: Zola attended the start-up Willow School in New Jersey (http://www.willowschool.org/) for three years (kindergarten, and Grades 1 and 2). Willow is arguably “the greenest school in America,” and has won a lot of awards for the beauty and environmental sustainability of the buildings. There were a lot of things that we liked about Willow, but I had concerns about the intellectual rigor of the curriculum, and (more importantly) about how the school repressed the boyishness of our little boy. Zola’s talkative exuberance and physicality seemed to get him into trouble, particularly in the elective classes that saw him once or twice a week. By the end of second grade, Zola really started to view himself as a “bad kid.” His self-confidence and his deep-rooted enthusiasm were lower than I had ever seen them. Poor guy seemed really beaten down by the experience. Maybe these are just the rationalizations of any parent.

At any rate, this summer it was great to have Zola back in the Beaverkill camp (which nourishes the boisterous enthusiasm), and to see him reverting to what we think of as “his old self, his real self.” As objectively as I can tell, that real self is:

• Fundamentally a very kind, generous, earnest and loving kid
• A great extrovert, getting deep enjoyment and psychic energy from being around other people
• Intelligent and curious (many of the questions he has asked on our bike rides -about history, and science, and human nature- have been touchingly thoughtful)
• A very good and enthusiastic reader, and an impatient and reluctant writer (somthing we will work on a lot during the coming year)

He inherited most of these characteristics (except the extroversion and reluctant writing) from his mother.

I worry that he inherited my intellectual laziness, which I only outgrew as a graduate student in my 20s. This is another area we will try hard to work on in the coming year.

This feels like a reasonably good description of our son at eight. I should add that Zola loves Pokemon, he really thinks he should be allowed to drive the ATV on his own, he knows an enormous amount about animals, and that he is a wonderful brother to his three-year-old sister.

I am greatly looking forward to spending this special time with Zola, and to seeing our travels through his eyes. In the next post, I will attempt the easier task of introducing his sister.

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.