Wrapping up

​Friday, June 16th​​

The evening at Saraa and Bagi’s horse camp was pleasant. We sorted out our stinking clothes, relaxed, and had a bit of a dance party as we brainstormed over theme songs for our adventure. Amerika’s “I been been through the desert on a horse with no name, if feels good to be outta the rain” was a hit, as was Old Town Road (“I’m gonna ride like I can’t no more”). The Mongolians don’t name their horses, and every day we felt like we couldn’t ride no more for those last ten or 15 km.

​Dinner was a feast with the herders – gigantic platters of mutton. This is clearly a big hit with the Mongolians, and also clearly less of one with most of the Westerners who would die for a vegetable or some rice at these meals. I loved seeing how much the crew enjoyed it though, and the little kids really tucked in. There was some ceremony too, as Bagi carved the shoulder meat off of the shoulder blades and distributed a piece to everyone. It was important that everyone partake in this particular meat, a tradition.

After dinner we had a bonfire on the bank of the Tuul River. The Tuul is so beautiful there, very wide with a thick cottonwood forest on the other side. The Mongolians sang traditional songs, which were beautiful. They asked us to sing, too, and we performed a pitiful version of Let It Be. It really was horrendous, but they didn’t seem to care; they cheered the performance. Much vodka and beer was consumed as night fell. The fire burned low and everyone drifted off to bed.

The masseuse spent the night and this morning I was treated to a terrific massage. Then breakfast, then packing, then goodbyes to Saraa. We loaded into the yellow bus and headed back to UlanBatar. I did not love the feeling of coming back into the city traffic and smelling the smoggy pollution, but the hotel is absolutely fabulous and I quickly forgot all that.

We were a funny bunch in the lobby, sunburnt and dirty, as we stood next to our expedition boxes while elegant ladies and men in business suits came and went. We dropped our boxes in our rooms and headed straight for the hotel restaurant. We had cocktails and an excellent lunch. The soup was so excellent that Cele licked the bowl out. It might take a few days to adjust…

After lunch, Cele, who is on her fifth trip to Mongolia, acted as tour guide for us and took us via taxi to the Narantul black market. We spent hours shopping for horse tack and gifts. Then, back to the hotel for a long soak in the deep bathtub. The water was the color of tea by the time I rinsed off. (Later the other riders confirmed that their bathwater, too, was well-steeped). Tonight we’ll have dinner in the hotel again and tomorrow night is the big Veloo foundation gala. My gown magically appeared in my hotel room while I was at the market, along with my suitcases and the city clothing I left behind. The blue silk gown is gorgeous!

Sunday, June 18th

I was so wrong about Mongolians on my first impression. Siagna enlightened me on one of our last days of the ride. We Mongolians are shy! he said. Rather than aloof, as was my initial thought after I tried to buy a pillow in the state department store and couldn’t get a clerk to help me, Mongolians are kind and warm and generous.

Today I had a wonderful adventure by myself. I have been on a mission for three days to find Tomas an official team jersey for a Mongolian team. I failed at the black market on Friday, and yesterday’s attempts would have been comical were they not so tiring. After another market adventure, Cele and Christina agreed to extend our shopping a bit longer to taxi over to what I thought was a store that sells soccer shirts. Our cab driver wasn’t keen on following our Google map and got us way off course in UB traffic, and then the shop ended up not being a shop but rather a production center; they could/would not sell me a shirt. So, today, correct address in hand, I didn’t drag anyone else along but set out on my own to find the place. I hailed a cab, which really more or less means hitchhiking. The cabs, if they are cabs at all, are unmarked, and often they are just friendly people who are willing to drive you. There are no meters, and, when you overpay, the driver hands you back change without being asked. (Yesterday we came back from our misadventure with a nice family – mom, dad, and fat-cheeked baby, who were all in the front seat. they spoke not a word of English, but we chatted via a translation app.) I managed to communicate my desired destination with my phone map, and then was able to signal to the guy to drive around the area until I could find what I was looking for. In a fancy mall, I found the sports shop, more or less by accident. The shopkeeper was a young girl who spoke English, loves soccer (Tottenham Hotspur), and was able to fill me in on the Mongolian national team and the best club teams. She was disappointed to find that I’m a social media phobe, as she wanted to keep in touch. I hitchhiked back to the hotel again for a tiny fee and without incident. The point is, now I’m finding that people are kind and helpful. I just had to figure it out.

I’ve also completely come around on UB. It might bear the Soviet legacy of ugly concrete block buildings, but it is a healthy, thriving city in many aspects. Over the weekend I spent a lot of time walking around the neighborhood of the hotel, which is near the parliament building and the enormous plaza in front of it. There was a festival going on, with live performances – singing and music from all over Asia – and a handicrafts fair. From early morning until late at night, the square was filled with music and people. Parents could rent tiny electric cars for kids to race around in or rickshaws for the whole family to use. There were tots on tricycles, lots of people playing a Mongolian game that looks a lot like volleyball but doesn’t involve a net, and older Mongolian men in fancy city deels. It was such a healthy city scene – I loved it.

Last night’s gala (or “garla”, as it’s come to be known among the riders in gentle teasing of Ashley the South African videographer’s accent) was incredible. We were collected in a bus at 4:30 pm in our party deel’s and other fancy attire, and taken over the the UG Palace, an events venue a few miles away. We were photographed in the lobby and handed a glass of champagne, which most of us topped off by dumping in a second glass from the server’s platter. (I wondered in that moment iif Julie worries about bringing us back into “the world”, as she calls it, after the ride. I asked her later. Yes, I do, was her response.) We made our way to a room with elegantly dressed people and blue and red cocktails on a table and a big poster showing the riders. Beautiful items to be auctioned for the Veloo Foundation’s kindergarten were displayed around the room. The place was quickly packed with guests. We were thrilled when the herders arrived, dressed in their finest deels and several with their gorgeous wives. There were happy greetings and hugs all around. I was interviewed about the ride and my impressions of the Veloo Foundation’s work by someone with a microphone.

Eventually we made our way into a gigantic dining hall. The riders and herdsman (and the biker guys) got to sit front and center at the table of honor. We ate and drank together, course after course of excellent food (although Soyolbold said he felt like a goat eating salad, so the Mongolians may have disagreed about some of the courses; I’m pretty sure they loved the pork ribs). Throughout the meal, there were videos and acts and awards. Ashley (accidental coiner of “garla”) made an incredible video of the ride that was shown; I’ll post a link when it becomes available). On stage, each of the riders received a tiny silver “passport” on a chain. Various items were auctioned — a beautiful necklace made from iridium and gold and diamonds and sculpted by Julie’s jeweler brother was sold for $12,000 to a stunning woman, and a jeweled ring in the shape of a dragon that was donated by Steven Seagal via his Mongolian wife, who was present, sold for $6,000 to another beauty. I sat with my phone and converted the dollars to tugrik for the herders who sat next to me. They were flabbergasted and also thrilled at how much money was flowing in for the kindergarten. Each year a beautiful Mongolian saddle is built for the Gobi Gallop, ridden in for the 700km, and then sold at the auction. This year’s one was really gorgeous, a pumpkin orange color with pretty silver decorations. Bagi had said on the ride how much he loved it and what a good saddle it was. Betsy, one of the riders, whose finances have turned completely around since she grew up on a tobacco farm in Maryland, is incredibly generous and kind; she knew Bagi wanted the saddle and she bid on it over and over, with Christina, the rider from New Hampshire, throwing in a bid now and then to raise the price. Betsy bought the saddle for Bagi for $2,300 and gave it to him right then and there. He was thrilled. On the ride he was always very serious and slightly intimidating, but he was all smiles for the rest of the night and, once the dancing started, he couldn’t be gotten off the dance floor. It was so much fun to see.

There were many acts, including traditional dancers, a jazz band, a fabulous cover singer, Mongolian throat singers, and the Mongolian contemporary ballet who created an incredible piece in the theme of “evolve”, which was the context of the whole event. For the last two hours, already late in the night, there was a fabulous techno DJ. We danced like crazy with both the herdsman and the elite of Ulaanbataar; it was an absolute blast.

It was hard to say goodbye to Soyolbold and the herdsman and Khlauga’s and Bagi’s wives, Tooja and Saraa, at the end of the night.

Today we had a final farewell lunch with Julie and her brother Darrel (maker of the iridium necklace), who is visiting from Canada. We were already down a couple of riders, as Sara Beck has headed off on another adventure and Christina is on her way to see Przewalski’s horses in a park. Tanya, too, was not there; she was busy getting a CT scan of her back, as an x-ray at the SOS clinic yesterday revealed that she has a compression fracture of a thoracic vertebra – she broke her back in that fall on Day 2 and then rode another 600 plus km. Her severe bilateral muscle spasm was holding her spine in place. Holy shit. The rest of us had delicious Indian food, talked about the comedies of last night, and said our goodbyes.

Monday, June 19th again, later, somewhere over the Pacific

Now you know why champagne and self-serve bars have been a part of my flight home. Sadly, although I encouraged Tanya to grimace and moan to elicit pity from the United check-in staff, I was not upgraded to First Class to sit with her. Princess Sausage Thighs, as I came to be known by the other riders after my unfortunate time in the f-ed up saddle, is squished in an Economy Class seat. But Tanya just sent me a cup of red wine from up front, so things could be worse.

What an adventure. I’m so glad I did this. I’m going to go home and try all 600 ways to sit in a saddle on my own horses. And I’m going to know that I have incredible strength to do whatever comes next with life, kids, nursing – I just had 12 metaphorical babies in 12 days, after all. My ass is calloused. My trotting muscles are made of steel. I own land in Mongolia. I have hitchhiked across UIanbatar. I have a bunch of herdsman friends on the Mongolian steppes. I have danced to techno for hours in the middle of the night with both the nomads and the elite of Mongolia. I’ve raced like the wind on a Mongolian pony and bathed in the freezing Kherlin River. And I’ll be back. Muiren da!

The second half of the ride

Saturday, June 10th: Late morning on Day 7, about Day 6 and today so far 

It’s 11am on our rest and recovery day. We are again on the Kherlin River, now in dry steppe, almost desert. Still in Henty Province. Yesterday we continued across broad flat plains dotted with burrows, then crossed a mountain range into this dry area. We have now come somewhat south and are nearing the Gobi. 

I slept much of the way in the bus yesterday, sprawled out across the tops of the expedition boxes with my head resting on somebody’s stuffed sleeping bag. It hurt to sit, and I was totally depleted. We met the riders for lunch. They said the morning ride had been unbelievably hot; they drenched their heads with water to cool off. The crew presented each with an ice cream cone they had picked up at a town along the way. Julia decided to sit the afternoon out in one of the vehicles, thanks to the UTI.

The buses and snoozing me arrived at the camp spot mid-afternoon. Saraa kindly set up my tent right away, just feet from the Kherlin. A herd of camels grazed in the brush across the river. It was hot. I hiked upstream a bit, plunged into the cold river, and soaked my aching body. It was delightful. I spent the afternoon reorganizing my expedition boxes, choosing the bits of dirty laundry to wash that will get me through the rest of the ride, and napping in a sarong, mentally encouraging my bum to heal.

The herd of loose horses arrived first, driven by Khlauga. The riders and guides arrived around 7:30pm. Tanya said progress had been awfully slow, much of the ride at a walk thanks to burrows and the heat. I was sad to have missed it but also glad to have been spared the grind of a slow walk. I sat with Cele on an expedition box next to the river and drank wine while Tanya had a dip; she treated us to a view of the bruise on her hip, which is as big as a cantaloupe. Her back is hurting. Dinner was spaghetti with meat sauce and was fabulous, boxed wine, beer made cold in the river, and vodka on the side. There was no wind and it was a beautiful evening; we sat outside until after nightfall.

I slept well and none of us were up before 7:30. I had a freezing morning dip in the Kherlin. Breakfast was omelettes with glorious bacon bits Julie had brought from Canada, penne noodles, and sliced cucumbers and tomatoes. (By now you are expecting these interesting combinations, right?) Then, some more laundry, a bit of writing, another dip in the river, more writing.

We have come over about 400 kilometers. This is an incredible adventure with a group of amazing and very tough women. I’m not sure I’m quite as tough as they are, but I’m enjoying their company and, I hope, channeling their fabulousness.

Sunday, June 11th: End of Day 8

Yesterday’s rest day was terrific. I wrote in this journal and dipped in the river a gazillion times. Many of us slept on and off all day. I devoted much of the day to my buttocks. All of the other riders had suggestions about how to best cure my chafe. Julie said to soak in the river as often as possible. Cele said to slather zinc oxide on it. Tanya promoted treatment with an herbal moisturizer. Sara Beck had a different opinion: I grew up on a cattle station with no doctor. I tell you, doll, wipe it with alcohol swabs. That’ll do the trick. It’s certain to work, though it’ll make you scream. Then wear nylons to ride under your riding tights. (She gave me a new pair of nylons.) Doctor Suke said to slather it with antibiotic cream. Someone else urged copious lube use for all future riding.

I ended up employing every single one of these techniques. I also spent the day snoozing and studying from a ridiculous 10 pound study guide for the nursing licensing exam that I hauled along on this trip. Things improved moderately.

This morning we left early to avoid the heat. Before we took off, I slathered with all of the recommended ointments at the same time, hoping for the best. We left at 6:30 am and had ridden 15 km by 7:45. By 9 am with had done 30 km. We had a break near a gigantic flock of sheep. We happened to have signal, and I sat with a tablet in the middle of nowhere Mongolia and registered to take my nursing licensing exam. Hard to remember I ever went to nursing school. Our odd days and even days are now thrown off by the rest day. I was not on Irgh, or Odd Day Horse, whom I really like, but rather was on one on my previous even day horses. He’s a good guy, but I don’t like him as much as Irgh. His gears aren’t adjusted the same as the leader’s horse, so I either have to push him or hold him back, usually the former. But we chugged along and did ok, with me mostly standing in the stirrups to protect my bum.

At some point we stopped at tall stone pillar that had been stood in the ground by Ghengis Khan a thousand years ago. It’s a tie pole, which he used to tether foals while their dams were being milked. Apparently there are many of these across the landscape. The huge stone must have been brought from far away in the mountains somewhere – there was nothing like it anywhere around.

At another point Sara’s horse’s front hooves went through the ground, probably into a burrow. He came down on his nose. Sara calmly pulled him up out of the ground, barely missing a stride. All the riders complimented her for staying on and handling it so well. She’s a fabulous rider. Four minutes later my horse did a slightly less dramatic version of the same. I stayed on as well and felt good.

We had lunch at 40 km. Most of the riders snoozed after eating. It got really hot. We doused our shirts and scarves in cold water before taking off again. We passed through the transitional steppe zone into the northern Gobi Desert, trotting over sand and through increasingly sparse vegetation. When we thought we had about 10 km to go, I was exhausted. I wasn’t the only one. 17 km later, at a total of 77 km for the day (or 48 miles), we finally reached the yellow buses and our yellow tents, already set up. 

We have agreed that these days are like having babies. They are both exhilarating and excruciating. In the last stretches of the ride / delivery, you want to kill everybody around you and you swear you will never have a baby / ride again. Then, you reach camp, swim in the river, put on fresh(ish) clothes, squeeze out a glass of wine from the box, and feel ready to push out another baby / 70 km tomorrow.

We are camped in a beautiful spot. Sand, sparse vegetation, dessert hills. Again on the fast-moving Kherlin River, in which I bathed after we arrived in camp. We could see storms in the sky to both the east and west, but they did not reach us. We were treated to a rainbow. We ate dinner and drank wine outside while the horses fed from grain bags and rolled in the sand. The herdsmen engaged in an intense card game; Julie says their games are impossibly complicated.

A highlight of today: translated via Julie, Khlauga said today that when I come to be his assistant, I should first lose about 10 kilos before coming so the horse can carry me more easily. Then he will take me for a 150 km training ride during which there will be zero stops. I’m not sure I’m up to all of this. Haven’t signed a contract yet.

Monday, June 12th: End of Day 9

Exhausted. Absolutely exhausted. It was hot today, again. We started early after a strange breakfast that included something Julie described as “lecho sushi” (I stuck with bread and a pastry) and had done 17 km by our first break a little after 8am, 30 km by the next break before 10 am, and 45 km by lunch. We traveled through gently rolling hills, mile after mile, with only spare short grass on the ground and the occasional clump of longer grass whose blades looked like porcupine quills. We saw a yellow fox (the Corsac fox) dart across the landscape in a zigzag fashion that gave us a good view for a minute or so. A herd of Mongolian gazelle crossed our paths. We wet our clothing at breaks against the heat; it dried in 20 minutes. We galloped for miles and miles. I was on a new horse, one whom Saigna says would be his race horse of choice. He did like to go and clearly enjoyed the long gallops. Dolma, the nine-year old sister of the little boy who rode a bit with us at the beginning of the trip, joined us today for the second time. She hasn’t ridden much before. Bagi has her on a lead line for a short while at the start, and then he releases her and gallops off into the distance. Trial by fire. Of course, she’s perfectly fine. She jiggles along in the saddle like she’s been doing this for thousands of years, which, really, she has. Her pony tails bounce away and she’s happy as a clam. She put away the first 40 km with us with a smile on her face and a knuckle bump for anyone riding by her side.

At lunch we all slept in the shade of the buses, some of us actually under the buses, a deep, snoring sleep. Lunch was more or less mutton goulash. It was very, very hot at lunch. We expected that Bagi would lead us at a slower pace when we went on. That was not really so. We rode through more dessert and saw hamsters and little birds (Wheatears) that live in rodent burrows. At one point we rode through miles of prairie that had strange granite rocks poking up from the sparse grass. Things were much, much less painful today, but the last 10 km was still torture. We reached the camp, where it is hot and sunny, around 5. 

Thankfully there was cold (lukewarm) beer waiting for us. The motorcycle guys had picked it up, along with another bottle of vodka. The motorcycle guys? This year Julie is vetting another kind of fundraising ride – the Steel Horse Gallop. An Irish medic and two Mongolian guys are riding our route plus some. They started after us; we met up on Day 4 and have lunch together and camp in the same site. Julie devised the idea after having many female riders whose husbands don’t ride horses but do ride motorcycles. There are no couples on this trip, but perhaps in the future. It’s been entertaining to meet the three bikers. One of the Mongolian guys (Soyolbold) speaks excellent English and is a wildlife photographer. The other (Zola) is another son of Bagi, Saigna’s brother. The beer was welcomed. There is no river here, just a well. I bathed by dumping water over my head from a big jug. It was critical.

Dinner was spaghetti with a vegetable sauce that included pickles. Hard to believe, I know, but it was phenomenal. It is possible that my inability to make up the calories I’m burning every day is contributing to my taste for these meals, but I’m not complaining.

We have 158 km left to ride, two big days, which we now call “babies to be delivered”, plus just a smidge on the final day. To bed…

Wednesday, June 14th: Start of Day 11, about Day 10

It’s 7:05 am and I’m still in my sleeping bag. Yesterday we earned a late start this morning – really, REALLY earned it.

We had ridden 30 km by 10 am, mostly through dessert – sandy soils and short, sparse grass. It was hot and windy. I was on a horse we had named Fabio, as he was ridiculously handsome with a thick foot and a half long mane when we first picked him up from Khlauga’s herd a few days ago. (The herders promptly shaved it off – too hot for that kind of mane). Fabio has clearly been around the block before and might be sort on the lazy side. He was a lot of work and took a lot of pushing to keep him on pace. Also, he wasn’t much interested in cantering, and it’s exhausting not to get a break from trotting now and then…unless you’re a Mongolian herder. At our second morning rest break (after 30 km), We decided to finish 50 before the long lunch break. We were looking forward to that, as it would make the afternoon part of the ride, when it is hotter and everyone is already tired, even shorter. We hammered out another 10 km.  At one point we stopped so the men could untangle the leg of a horse that was tethered to a yearling. (Saigna explained that sometimes herders will tether a horse that is new to a herd to one that is a part of the herd until the new horse has become assimilated.) We passed back into Tov Province.

After the 40 km break we were all set to finish another 10 before lunch…but there were the lunch buses up ahead after only a couple of km. It turns out there was a police blockade up ahead. The region was having an outbreak of some kind of livestock disease. We would have to lunch quickly and move on. We ended up having to take a huge detour to avoid the affected area; we would have been required to quarantine there for 31 days had we not! The landscape got greener for a while, and then we approached a salt lake. The wind blew small cyclones of white salt high into the air. At 62 km we took a break in a huge salt pan that spread out beyond the lake. I was amazed to see those same small purple irises, fields of them, growing in the salty soil. We were very tired already and weren’t totally sure how much we had left; we were entering an area where there were some agricultural projects and large fences had been erected that we’d have to skirt. Two of the riders moved into the support truck with the doctor.

We rode another 20 km, along long fences, then through fields dotted thickly with wild rhubarb. We could see the buses and the camp site for miles, but had to weave between fence lines. 

We arrived in camp. We had ridden 82 km, over 51 miles. It was not a day of long gallops, but rather one of lots and lots of trotting. Trotting is clearly the preferred gait, and a steady rig is the most efficient of all; you can cover 10 km an hour at that gait, and you can just sit in the saddle and space out while you do it, so it’s efficient for the rider as well.

I bathed from a jug of water. Dinner was rice and beet salad and meatballs of mutton with a sauce. The motorcycle guys had kindly picked up several extra jugs of beer. We drank lots of water and rehydration salts, and lots of beer. Everyone was in a good mood, especially after Julie said that the herdman had decided we’d have a shorter ride today (40-45 km), and finish tomorrow (the final day of the ride) with the 20-something we’ll need to reach 700 km.

As dusk fell, two small children rode past bareback, herding a big flock of sheep to a nearby well. They were chatting and giggling as the passed. I waved and they waved back. It was a good moment. I’m not so silly as to think that nomadic life is easy, but it is something to be preserved by reducing overgrazing for cashmere and by rich city people who have large herds for status, and by providing medicine and education to rural areas. However you slice it, I’d rather be one of those giggling kids than one of the trashpicker kids in the Ger District.

I had a long conversation with Soyolbold at the dinner table. He’s an interesting guy, very smart and very interested in both wildlife conversation and the preservation of traditional Mongolian nomadic life. (And in motorcycles.) I could see him becoming an important and effective figure in fighting for these things.

A quick story that I left out in my last entry: as we rode into camp the day before yesterday, we passed a woman with a big flock of several hundred sheep at well. It was very hot and she was trying to make sure all of her sheep were watered. We arrived in camp with Bagi in the lead. While the riders dismounted, Bagi turned to one of the men. Translated later by Julie, he said, “Didn’t you see that woman all by herself at the well, struggling to give water to all of her sheep in this heat? You guys all went right past her! Go back there and help her.” And the man did. Julie has told other stories of stopping to help people set up their ger as they ride by. 

End of Day 11

Have I mentioned that the Prius is an amazing car? They are all over the Mongolian steppes, in all sorts of places you can’t imagine them going. They traverse rivers, climb rocky slopes, and are good for herding sheep. If you are looking for a rugged car for off road trekking, buy a Prius.

Thursday, June 15: Start of Day 12, about Day 11

I had planned on writing last night, but then there was a big surprise celebration for more or less having finished our ride. We were up late for the party, and there was no writing.

The day was pretty amazing. As I said, we had earned a late start. We slept late, breakfasted on toasted bread and omelette with Canadian bacon bits (nothing overly creative to report there!), and started the ride at 10 am. We planned to do about 48 km.

I was again riding the race horse, whom we call Floppy Ears. He is big and dark brown and just fabulous. We did 12 km, then breaked, then another 10, after we which rested in an incredibly beautiful, wide, long valley. This valley is very important in Mongolian history, as it was for centuries (millenia?) the meeting place of clans where the khans were named. Small white composite flowers with purple centers dotted the valley floor. We lay on our backs at the break and watched the clouds moving over us.

We rode onward. At one point Bagi, who was leading, called his son Saigna to the front. I’m pretty sure he said “Take them for a big gallop.” Tanya and I were both riding horses who were really wanting to go, and we’d been holding them back next to Bagi. Saigna zoomed off and Tanya and I followed, then rode to each of his sides…and then off we went! It was the most incredible (and fairly scary) ride I have ever had. It started at a gallop, and then it switched into a higher gear, and then Saigna sped up, and it turned out there was another gear I didn’t know existed. We were flying, absolutely flying, and I was hold the horse back. He had more gears. He wanted to go faster! I admit it, I was afraid of coming off at that speed, and I could see some gravel up ahead. We slowed. It was amazing.

We arrived at a tourist site (the first such thing I’ve seen) that has a life-size model of a Ghengis Khan fortress and an old style of ger. The crew had planned a whole performance for us that was so sweet. Apparently Mongolia is the birthplace of the passport; travelers carried a small metal tablet that had their name stamped on it in the ancient Mongolian script. Saraa had translated each of our first names into the script and Tolman, one of the herdsman, had carved our names into small pieces of wood shaped like the old passports. We rode through a gate at which Brya (who is the crew comedian and one the drivers, but who also is reputably one of the greatest horseman ever) stood dressed in the costume of one of Ghengis Khan’s soldiers and shouted out some kind of greeting or warning to us. We had to show our passports to ride through. On the other side of the gate, Dolma greeted us, also dressed in an ancient traditional costume. It was all very sweet. We rode through the fortress and had a look, then headed to the buses for lunch (a hearty chicken soup).

Although the day’s ride was short, the afternoon portion was still long. We entered beautiful rolling hills that looked like swaths of green velvet. We rode over hill after hill. Floppy Ears chugged along uncomplainingly, ready to run again if asked. We arrived in camp in late afternoon. Another 52 km (32 miles), with 24 km left to do today to complete our 700. 

I sponged off, attended to my chafe, and put on warm clothes. It had grown cold again. We drank beer and wine. Sweet Dolma had planned a dance performance; we adjusted our camp chairs while Saigna set up her music. She has been taking traditional dance classes. She performed dances to two “popified” traditional songs and then a third to music performed on a horsehead fiddle. She was excellent. Then Saraa appeared with a bottle of vodka and a shot glass. It was time for the circle of toasts again. Zola poured and translated. There were heartfelt thanks from both the Mongolians and the visitors. Khlauga sang a beautiful song. It was a wonderful party. I was a little emotional when I gave my toast, in which I said that they – Bagi, Saigna, Saraa, Khlauga, Tolman, and the others – gave me hope for the world. Dolma hugged me and one of the kitchen ladies held my hand. These are all truly kind people. I’m so glad for this creative and amazing collaboration between Julie’s foundation and these herdsman, and I think it is clear that it is helping keep herders in the countryside and out of the Ger District and the dump. It’s the kind of small success that gives you hope.

It was funny – neither Saigna nor Zola toasted and drank vodka. Although they are both in their 20’s, they were with their parents, so they are children. Children do not drink with their parents.

It’s time to prep for the final day of riding, in which we’ll arrive at Saraa and Bagi’s home and horse camp. As incredibly hard as this has been, I don’t think any of us want it to end. I’m going to miss these folks.

8:23 am

There’s still time to write a bit. It looks like it will be a late departure.The herdsmen are concerned about some of the new vegetation the horses are eating in this valley and determined, through their millenium-old calculus, that several of the horses should be bled. We watched from the breakfast table. I think I might have found this upsetting a few weeks go. I did not today. I absolutely trust that these guys know what they are doing and that they would not harm their horses.

At the table, there was discussion over who would be given the very last antiinflammatory injection in the medical bag. Dr Suke went back to the city for work a couple of days ago (he is the doctor for a mining company), leaving Tom the Irish biker in charge of medical care. Tom was a medic in Afghanistan. Be careful if you ask Tom for a bandaid for your finger, we joke, he’ll decide to amputate your arm right here in the field. Maybe that’s only funny after you’ve been hanging out with the guy. (He’s quite a character. I can only understand 50% of what he says in his Irish brogue. He is sunburnt and has wild hair. He’s married to a South African art teacher. They’ve been in Mongolia for many years and he loves it. She is soon starting a job in Singapore and they will move in a few weeks. He is clearly heartbroken to leave.) It was determined that Tanya, who has been riding for a week with very painful spasms in her back, will be the beneficiary of the shot.

We departed after a breakfast of french toast and pickles, and a photo shoot of each of us on horseback sans helmet. You can’t identify any of us with our helmets and scarves on, and we requested photos with our faces showing so we can prove we’ve really been here. We left the velvety green hills and rode through a carpet of sweet-smelling purple flowers. We had a break next to a larch forest. (It was so nice to start seeing trees again yesterday after five or so days with not a one, but for the few cottonwoods planted in one town we passed). The view in all directions was fabulous at this rest spot, and the wildflowers growing under the larches were gorgeous. As we rode on after the rest, we passed through the larch forest, and the number of different wildflowers grew more and more – tall pretty white ones, orange ones that looked a little like poppies but with more petals, little yellow ones. The forest was beautiful. Bagi was in the lead, Khlauga mixed in among us. He broke out in a beautiful song and Bagi chimed in from way up ahead. They were laughing and enjoying themselves. 

We emerged from the forest and passed an ugly coal mine and a small settlement. We again entered rolling hills and had a gallop (our last one) straight up the steep side of one. I was on handsome Fabio, who flagged a bit and the end, but that was okay because nothing will ever beat yesterday’s gallop on Floppy Ears. At the very top of that hill we hit 700 km, our goal. 

And two plus km later, we were at Saraa and Bagi’s home and horse camp. A feast awaited us, with plates of cheeses and preserved meats, nuts and dried fruits, meat dumplings, heaping platters of cabbage and carrot salad. We ate and drank beer and wine. We were shown to our gers – I am sharing a spacious one with Tanya and Cele, the Australian rider. We took hot showers, one by one, in a bathhouse. I pried the dirt out from under my fingernails and bandaged my bum. The riders with the worst back pain (Charlotte and Tanya) are getting massages to work out the spasms. I am wrapping up my journal about the riding part of our trip.

I feel a bit sad that it’s over, though of course I’m relieved that my body will not undergo the physical strain it’s been under for 12 days. I was happy to see our horses grazing just outside the gers. I’ll miss them, and I’ll miss Khlauga and Dolma, Bagi and Saigna, Zola and Soyolbold, the kitchen ladies. These are good people who have taken good care of me for almost two weeks. Sigh.

Tomorrow we will be driven back to UlanBataar, with our expedition boxes filled with heaps of very dirty laundry. My deel has chicken soup and red wine on it, and has been laid down on the ground on top of dried manure for a lunchtime nap every day of the ride. It tells a whole story!

We will be taken to the five star UB Best Western for spas and massages and pampering. I think we’ll have a group dinner tomorrow night, and then on Saturday night is the fancy gala. Looking forward to seeing what kind of gown the seamstresses in the Ger District have concocted for me.

The first half of the ride

Sunday, June 4th: Before Day 1

It’s Sunday, June 4th, the official first day of the ride. I will ride 40 miles today on a Mongolian pony. I am so excited; this has been a long time in the making.

It’s early morning. I am sitting up in my tent to type. Last night’s camp was set up in a beautiful valley. We are in a flat grassy plain near a fairly big river called the Tuul. There are cottonwood trees near the river which were the sou​​rce of wood for last night’s celebratory bonfire. I can hear what sounds like ravens discussing our yellow tents, which might be temporarily polluting their hunting ground. I love how ravens seem to speak a different language in different areas; even the San Francisco ravens sound different from the Kneeland ravens. These Mongolian ravens are different, yet again.

Yesterday morning we left our hotels and hostels in Ulaanbataar. It happened to be the day of the UB marathon and much of the city was shut down to cars. Our luggage and expedition boxes had been picked up earlier, and we walked with our daypacks to meet the bus that would take us to the start of the ride and, it turns out, be one of two yellow buses to accompany us on our trek. We loaded onto a yellow bus decorated on the inside with purple tassels and fringes and curtains. Some seats had been removed and our expedition boxes were piled inside. Off we went!

We drove out of town. The stretches of green hills grew larger as the city faded away. Houses and gers grew further in between. We began to see horses and large flocks of sheep. We made a stop at a big grocery store for boxed wine and last minute snack supplies, and then a second stop at a ger factory. This is another fabulous project of Julie’s to raise money for the kindergarten (and to empower Mongolian women). Julie co-owns the business with Saara, the woman who manages the horses and support crew that are a part of the Gobi Gallop and other rides that Julie runs. The two women have assembled a team of craftsmen and painters (men and women) to build beautiful, high quality gers for export. Julie donates all of her 50% share of the profits to the kindergarten. We watched the pieces of wood that form the frame of a ger being cut and sanded, and we watched women painting the pieces with bright colors and beautiful designs, both of animals and of traditional Mongolian symbols. The work is stunningly beautiful. I should not fail to mention that Julie has also initiated reforestation work in the southeast of the country, from where the wood for the ger frames is harvested.

We arrived at the camp in Tov Province in the afternoon. The crew had already set up our yellow tents and had the horses tethered under the cottonwood trees. The Tuul River snaked through the cottonwoods. There was no undergrowth – the woods looked like parkland, but for the bleached skulls and long bones of horses and cows that dotted the grass. (I LOVE bones, and Mongolia is littered with them – they don’t disintegrate here, but rather just bleach to a snow white in the sun.) We were fed lunch (borscht), put on our riding gear, and were each presented with a deel – a long traditional coat worn by Mongolian herders. The herders literally dressed us in our deels to make sure we buttoned them correctly and tied the belt on just right – there are thousands of years worth of tradition and practice and perfecting behind the deel and the belt and it’s important to get it right. (And I later learned from Julie that it’s slutty to wear your deel with the side buttons unbuttoned. Don’t want to be slutty!) With each of us in our deel, we were paired with a horse and led off on a short ride, the purpose of which was to make sure our saddles and stirrups felt good and were adjusted properly. It was a moment I’d been waiting for a long time! I’m pleased to say that I did not fall off and that it was loads of fun – I was disappointed that it was so short.

After the ride it got fairly cold. We drank wine in our deels sitting in folding camp chairs, at first outside with a view of the horses, which had been put out to graze in somebody’s unused paddock, enclosed by a wooden fence. (This is something I’m seeing over and over – there is a lot of space in Mongolia and sometimes there are people there and sometimes there are not. If you need to get somewhere, you can just drive off over the hills. Random roads crisscross the landscape. Unused paddocks that might be somebody’s winter home are here and there.) When it got too cold, we moved our camp chairs into a ger, where we had a dinner of beef dumplings and egg salad. Then, the wonderful hot bonfire. Before going off to bed, we opened our deels to soak up the heat, wrapped them back up quickly, and headed off to our tents. I spread my deel over my sleeping back for extra warmth and slept very well. The deel was my second blanket  every night of the trip.

Now I’m off to find a cup of coffee before our first big day!

Monday, June 5th: After Day 1, before start of Day 2

It’s 5:16 am on Day 2. I am sitting in a tent in a valley nestled between two hills that look like places archeologists would have fun exploring, with layers of rock that I imagine are full of dinosaur bones. As I lay in my sleeping back last night, before I put in my earplugs to block out the sounds of my fellow snoring riders, I could hear our ponies grazing just feet from the tent. They are hobbled but free to move around the camp. They are lovely, mostly browns ranging from light sandy color to almost black in our herd. They are unshod, with tough little feet that carry them just as well over rock-strewn meadows as up grassy slopes. The herdsmen don’t trim their hooves, which wear to perfection on the steppes. When you watch the hind feet of the horse in front of you trotting, you marvel at how quickly and steadily they step, like some kind of wind-up toy buzzing along.

Yesterday was wonderful, and hard. It turns out that I had missed a piece of planning at some point – Julie wisely planned a “short” ride for the first day; we rode 26 miles, not 40-45, as we will from here out. Almost all of it was ridden at a trot. My horse was willing and forward. We didn’t have a single argument. He was very smart, brilliantly avoiding marmot holes and vole mounds, navigating rock fields, staying the right distance from his herdmates (which is much closer than we would normally ride in the West, sometimes thigh to thigh). His trot was incredible. All I need to do is say a quiet “cho”, which means go faster, and he quickens his little steps. As most Americans and Europeans would, I started out in a posting trot. By the end of the day, I was copying the Mongolian herdsmen who were leading us and herding the lose horses (who we will ride today while yesterday’s horses are herded along riderless). The Mongolians often sit the trot, which is perfectly do-able on these horses. Their stride is so short it’s tough to post when the trot is fast, and the gait is smooth enough to sit comfortably without jarring your spine from sacrum to neck (on many but not all of the horses, I learned later). The Mongolians also ride with very short stirrups, their knees bent at about 100 degrees – I stuck with my long stirrups. Our youngest rider, the grandson of our head herdsman, is six. His grandfather leads his pony and they ride side by side, both with short stirrups and a sitting trot.

We rode from about 9:30 am to about 5:30 pm, with several breaks along the way including a long stop for a hot lunch, cooked by the crew carried ahead in our cute yellow buses. We rode over plains, up and down hills, through larch forests, and past Bronze Age ceremonial monuments, where clans met for formal gatherings when Ghengis Khan ruled the country. At one point we saw a pair of golden eagles mating mid-flight.

I loved it. I was blown away by the tough little ponies and by how comfortable it is to ride them. I loved riding along with our loose horses, something I’d never do in the US. Loose horses are usually a pain in the ass, but these were very well-behaved, except at the start of the ride when three naughty musketeers took off and had to be chased by the herders. The problem was resolved by tying the ringleader’s head side-by-side to the head of a well-behaved horse, who then oversaw his behavior for the rest of the day. Two herders ponied a few other horses, one with three horses alongside his mount, the other with four –  it was impressive. I struggled to pony just Dolly when Phoebe was learning to ride her.

It’s time for me to put on my riding gear, re-pack my expedition boxes, and head for breakfast. Hoping I can get my sore body to hang on for today’s 40 miles!

Tuesday, June 6th: After Day 2, start of Day 3

I am sitting in my tent on the very edge of a beautiful river, called the Kherlin (in which I had a freezing cold and very refreshing bath after we arrived in camp last night). I’ll be honest, most of my body hurts. Yesterday was very tough. Fun, but tough. It began with me getting tossed off my horse as we were saddling up. The herdsmen were helping us saddle up, check girths, adjust stirrups. While these horses are used to being ridden and know their job when they are under saddle, they are half wild. The Mongolians are very careful around them. They move slowly when they approach the horses and they don’t make sudden movements or load noises or flap things around. Something set the horse off as his girth was being adjusted, and he tossed me off. I hit the ground and rolled aside. The men were visibly appalled; I think they hadn’t anticipated this at all and felt really bad. They promptly unsaddled him and ran him up a hillside for a tete a tete. When I ended up back on him, he was a gentleman.

The good news is, I’m now a landowner in Mongolia: the herdsmen say that when you fall off, the piece of land where you fall becomes yours. Later in the day, Tanya’s horse stepped in a deep hole; the horse fell and Tanya came off. Last night the herdsmen shared their whiskey with the riders. Tanya and I learned the phrase about owning land and the men laughed very hard when we toasted over it.

Some highlights of yesterday’s 40+ mile ride…

At one point we crossed a busy highway. When the lead herdsman saw an opening, he urged us all on and drove the loose horses into the road. It was terrifying, but it turns out that traffic in Mongolia, even highway traffic, stops for horses. The other riders laughed when I said, “That’s not how I tell my kids to do it.” Later, over the course of the trip, I often saw huge flocks of sheep and goats crossing big roads.

At another point we crossed a livestock bridge that had a fair number of holes in it. It was all fine, just not the kind of riding I do back in Kansas. They horses adeptly picked their way around the cracks.

We rode past gorgeous herds of horses watering in a river. Our herdsmen have no trouble driving our loose horses past other herds, and our ponies know to stick with their herd.

At one point we passed many dead cows. Apparently last winter (which is really just ending) was very hard and many herders lost livestock.

For those of you who want landmarks (Papa), in the afternoon we passed the outskirts of a mining city called Baniguur.  

We rode through a meadow of tiny purple irises, past lone gers in the middle of vast plains, and by small settlements with many gers and even permanent houses. I’m told that the wildflowers we see are the unaltered unselected stock of all the flowers we see in the grocery store at home.

At lunchtime the good doctor who accompanies us in one of the gear vehicles tended to our aches and pains. Several of us partook in an antiinflammatory injection. I don’t think I would have finished the day without it – I have some chafe, a previously sprained ankle that is terribly sore, and swollen bruises on my thighs where some parts of the Russian military saddle do not agree with my anatomy. I plan to partake again today. Everyone says that Day 3 is the worst, and that things look up from here. Let’s hope!

Wednesday, June 7th: Start of Day 4, about Day 3

It’s 5:13 am. The wind is making a lot of noise in the tent flaps. I can hear the cooks getting up to start making breakfast and hot water for coffee. The other riders are still asleep – there is a cacaphony of snores, different pitches and rythms, arising from the tents. I think every single one of us snores. We’re so tired it doesn’t matter.

This morning I am very, very sore and sore in some new places. Yesterday I rode 70 km, about 44 miles, in a Mongolian saddle. Julie asks each rider to do 20 km in it as a part of appreciating the culture of the Mongolian herdsmen. I did it not for cultural appreciation, but rather out of desperation. The saddle I used on the first two days was pounding on the inside of my thighs, which had become bruised and swollen. I had tried various extra pads and sheepskins, to no avail. I figured that, however different or uncomfortable it might be, at least the Mongolian traditional saddle would hurt in different places and I could give my bruises a break.

It was an interesting experience with some enormously high points and some very low lows. I rode the whole day in it. I rode my Day 1 horse again, whom I’m now calling Odd Day Horse with the hope that I’ll continue to ride him on those days. (Day 2 Horse ended up having a very choppy trot that he was happy to do at breakneck speeds, avoiding the canter whenever he could. I could not sit his trot at all.) Odd (for short) has both lovely trots and canters.

We set off after breakfast. At first I could not sit in the Mongolian saddle at all; I spent the first few miles standing in the stirrups, which seemed terribly unsustainable. I gradually tried the various things the Mongolians do when they are riding, and which are so different from how we in the West are taught to ride. We are instructed to be symmetrical and quiet in the seat. Sit straight, distribute your weight equally, keep your hands and legs as quiet as you can. In contrast, the Mongolians believe that symmetry is bad for the horse, as it sitting unmoving in the saddle. They always set their stirrups at different lengths. They sit on one butt cheek or the other, leaning back a bit and with the weight as far back and up as your jeans pocket. They shift now and then from side to side. They stand the canter. They jiggle their legs and rest the majority of their weight on one stirrup or the other, depending on what butt cheek is in use. They move their hands around. The horses neck rein, so the reins are in one hand or the other, the other arm dangling loosely down like our cowboys.

Over the morning, I tried these things and, between the saddle and the technique, gradually alleviated some of my major pains and sufferings. By resting my weight on one cheek and in one stirrup, I reduced the chafe on my butt and could give my right ankle a break. (I also taped up that ankle, which helped, too.) I figured out that I could sit in a perfectly acceptable lopsided Mongolian pose during the slower trots. When the trot sped up, I could stand. Same with canter. At first I needed to hold the front of the saddle for faster trots and canters – the balance in the saddle is totally different from an English or dressage or Western saddle and it took me a while to figure it out. But I eventually did, and for a while it was glorious. At one point – my zenith – we overtook two horsemen driving a massive flock of sheep and goats. In that moment, I was very happily cantering in a Mongolian saddle. The men did a visible double take. We’ve got to be a fairly strange sight.

At some point we passed into Henty Province, indicated by the first road signs I’ve seen since we left UB. Not that I could read them; they were in cyrylic.

Eventually the good doctor’s antiinflammatory shots and my learning curve were overtaken by soreness and exhaustion. It also happens that I’m allergic to Mongolia, the land of grasses, and I had a massive mounted allergy attack. The last ten kilometers were torture – my nadir. I was desperate to see the yellow crew buses up ahead and diasppointed when, hill after hill, no busses were over the crest. I seriously considered dismounting to lead my horse to camp. Most of us had slowed to a walk, decidedly not keeping up with our lead herder. We arrived at camp, where one of the cooks came up to me and threw her arms around me in a massive hug. I must have looked like I was half dead. They fed us an enormous dinner that was both delicious and the most bizzare combination of foods I have every seen side by side on a table: pizza; kim chee; kidney beans; a pork dish; a beef and broccoli dish; and a green salad. No complaints. We all ate a ton while we drank boxed wine and vodka. It got very cold and we retreated to the ger, where the men had made a fire in a camp stove that was brought along. I had taken a benadryl to combat the allergies. Forty plus miles and benadryl and vodka don’t make for consciousness; I couldn’t keep my head up and hit my tent, where I slept very well despite the snores of the riders and the partying of the herdsmen and cook staff, who like to drink vodka and chat late into the night. They are not sore.

On another note: The landscape is huge and wide and open. There are lots of hills, but the valleys between can be miles and miles across. Some of the hills are rocky and bare (those are the ones where I imagine dinosaur bones). Others are covered by larch forests, the trees spread thinly and with no underbrush. For miles and miles at a stretch it can seem like a desolate place that nobody else has ever visited. But then you look down at the ground – there isn’t a piece of the earth bigger than 3 x 3 feet that doesn’t have on it some combination of horse, cow, sheep, and goat poop. There’s also a fascinating distribution of vodka bottles and shoe soles. And every inch of grass has been grazed. People have definitely been there. This is what it looks like to be in a country of nomadic herders. It is not an untouched landscape, despite what we tend to think when we look ahead at a vast and empty landscape.

Off for breakfast and to decide if I might need some car time today to heal my poor body…

8:35 am. I’ve decided, with Julie’s recommendation and the doctor’s agreement, to take the morning off and see if I can get the swelling in my thighs to go down. Charlotte, the Irish woman, is also going to ride in the crew team bus with me. She is a fabulous rider, beautiful on the horse, but her Even Day Horse, like mine, didn’t agree with her and her back is very sore. Right now the crew is taking the camp down. Charlotte and I saw the riders off – they all groaned as they mounted up – and we are now taking refuge in ger, which hasn’t yet been disarticulated.

I plan to ride again in the afternoon and may be replaced in the bus by another rider. There are several possible contenders. Yesterday around mid-day one of the horses fell and his rider – Julia the linguist – came off, bashing her face and the knuckles of one hand, which are swollen and sore today. When her horse fell, the one next to it spooked and unseated Tanya, who landed hard on one hip; she is hurting today. (More landowners.) Also, Cele’s saddle broke mid-morning and was replaced by the thigh-pounding saddle I used for the first two days (as I was in the Mongolian saddle and it was available). It turns out it wasn’t just my anatomy that didn’t work with the saddle, and a few hours later Cele was in similar pain. At a water break, the herdsmen untacked Cele’s horse and sat on the ground to examine the saddle. Alas, it had a serious design flaw, with parts of the wooden tree unplaned that should have been planed. The sharp edges of the wood had been digging into our legs. I feel somewhat better about my injuries now that this has come to light, but am fighting injured pride about sitting the morning ride out.

We are in the bus and soon to take off. We’ll go ahead to the lunch spot, where the cooks will prep a hot meal and we’ll regroup with the riders. The last thing to be disassembled is the outhouse*. When I used it just now for a last minute pee, I was treated to a view of an golden eagle hunting, gliding a foot above the ground while he looked for a furry snack.

*The outhouse is a funny thing, really not particularly necessary. When you live in a ger with 15 others in a flat valley with no big trees or rocks, you simply look away when someone is changing clothes or going potty. In addition, the riders on this trip are the most easy going and toughest women I’ve ever met. On our water and lunch breaks, standard protocol is to walk 50 feet away and have a squat. Nobody cares. Also the deel is a perfect privacy tent if draped in the right fashion. Just one of its many uses – jacket, blanket, picnic blanket, shade, privacy screen.

Thursday, June 8th: Start of Day 5, about Day 4

Yesterday was a breakthrough day. As I wrote, I had decided to take the morning off and ride in the bus with Charlotte, who appears to have really hurt her back. The riders departed. I jokingly held Saigna’s horse as he mounted and pretended to help him up, as he has now done many times for me. (Saigna is one of the herders. He is the son of Bagi, the lead herder. He is in his 20s, ridiculously handsome, and speaks excellent English after having spent a good chunk of time in Canada with Canadian Julie and her family. We’ve decided he will be January in our calendar-to-be of Men of Mongolia.) We sat in camp as it was broken down and I typed away at this journal after the riders had departed. Charlotte wrote in her notebook. We saw five beautiful kites circling and hunting above the camp. After camp was disassembled, we loaded up into the bus carrying the expedition boxes and extra saddles and we took off across the plains, mostly following ruts left by other cars, no real roads. Charlotte and I chatted and she showed me some photos of the beautiful Irish draught horses that she and her husband breed. Eventually we passed the riders and drove on to what would be the lunch site. Charlotte was suffering terribly by then – I think it’s a serious muscle spasm – and I massaged the area and tried to help ease it.

The riders appeared and dismounted. Two were suffering badly – Tanya’s hip was hurting after yesterday’s fall and Sara was weak from the virus she’d been fighting and having trouble pushing her horse, who is not very forward, onward. I want to tell you about Sara. Sara is an Australian cattle rancher who identifies as Aboriginal. She is white, but she grew up on a cattle station in the Northern Territory where her father was initiated into an Aboriginal clan when she was a young child. He advocated for and protected the local native group, the Gerrwa, helping them to hide their half caste children in the hills when the government came to take them away to be assimilated in boarding schools in the city. Sara says that all the children she grew up near who were taken away are dead by now, but not so the children who her father protected. The local tribe was so dedicated to Sara’s father that when he and his family moved to Queensland the tribe went along and reestablished there. In addition to ranching cattle, Sara currently works to advocate for Aboriginal rights and is clearly as dedicated as her father was. She is heartbroken to see that clan life in the Aboriginal groups has largely disappeared and says that she has looked for similar things elsewhere and has finally found it in Mongolia. Sara is a very tough and straightforward woman; there was nothing syruppy about what she told us. Several of us were in tears last night in the ger as she told us these stories and showed us photos from her childhood. She is a kind lady with the downest under accent I have ever heard. She always likes to ride on the left side of the group and keep count of us to make sure nobody gets lost. Sara, too, has ridden part of the Mongol Derby. We all adore this woman and are concerned for her – she’s got a cough, has been running a fever, and has had an upset stomach for several days.

During the lunch break we sorted out that Charlotte would be driven the several hours back to Ulanbatar to have her back examined. The doctor tried to convince Tanya to come as well, but she was able to will th​e​ muscles in her back to stop spasming during a post-lunch nap and she declined. I felt great after my morning of rest and was ready to hop back onto a horse for the second half of the day and in a different saddle, neither the Mongolian one nor the thigh pounding one. Saigna and Julie had me climb onto a horse mounted with what has been dubbed “the princess saddle” for its shape and the thick fluffy white sheepskin covering it. Two riders had already rejected it. I loved it! The horse under it was new for me, too – thankfully not my Day 2 horse, with whom I wasn’t thrilled. This saddle was designed by a guy who rode from Mongolia to Germany a few years ago. It’s somewhere between a Mongolian saddle and a Western saddle, and, after my introduction the day before to Mongolian riding, I could do some combination of that and what I’m used to doing that really worked for me. Most importantly, there was nothing on this saddle that pounded on my thighs.

We rode over rocky slopes, through huge grassy plains, and past a small town. We rode past a lone ger with a satellite dish and a solar panel mounted outside. We rode past enormous mixed flocks of sheep and goats. We rode past a herd of horses guarded by a vigilant and gorgeous grey stallion. We were accompanied for a short while by a young chestnut male clearly looking for a herd of his own. The herdsman shooed him off and sent him home. All of these horses belong to someone; they are not for the taking. (I clarified with the men that horse theft bears a prison sentence of three years, but that if you are identified as a horse thief, the police are likely to pin ALL of the local horse thefts on you and you will be sent to the worse prison – the one for murderers – for a longer time.) We crossed another highway, again ordered by one of the men to plunge across it. There was not much traffic on this one so it was a bit less stressful than our last crossing.

In the evening we arrived in our camp, which had been laid out next to a small river in a grassy plain. I washed my hair and did a splash bath in the river. Dinner was something between a beef stir fry and porkolt; I can’t get over the hybrid Euro-Asian meals; they are bizarre and delicious. We sat in the ger because the wind was cold, and we drank wine and vodka. That’s when Sara told us her stories. My pain during all this was so much less than it had been, I felt almost normal for the first time in days. It was a fun evening and the moon was huge and beautiful over the small river.

I can hear the other riders starting to wake up. Now I’ll pack up my sleeping back and expedition boxes, get dressed in my riding gear, and head to the ger for breakfast.

Friday, June 9th: Start of Day 6, about Day 5

Arrrrggg. Yesterday was both the most amazing day and the worst day. There is definately a repeated theme of very high highs and very low lows. Many of us are suffering. Sara Beck rode the whole day in the truck, weak from the virus she can’t shake. Charlotte still hasn’t returned from UB, where she was taken to have her back examined and is having physiotherapy. Tanya’s back muscles are spasming, but she seems to be made of steel and rode through it. Julie has a UTI, which is no fun to ride with. Betsy is dehydrated. The doctor has been busy dispensing IVs, antibiotics, and antiinflammatories.

I had the most incredible first part of the day. While my princess saddle was sadly revoked as it had caused my Day 4 horse a sore back, I was put in a Russian military one with the fluffy white sheepskin from the princess saddle and that worked for me. I was again on Odd Day horse and learned the word for odd: irgh. Now I’m calling him Irgh. He was, again, fabulous. All morning we traveled across an enormous flat plain dotted with burrows. We proceeded at a slow jig and I discovered that Irgh has an autopilot setting. He likes to travel right behind the lead horse, following his every step around the dangerous borrows. We did that for hours. I had relatively little pain, a good tape job on my ankle eliminating that soreness and the saddle well fit for my thighs, and I almost fell asleep. I was told by Saigna that was very Mongolian of me. I felt superb. I also realized during this time that there are 600 ways to sit in a saddle, and that when you ride dozens of miles each day, you’ll need to use them all. I am so looking forward to riding my own horses again and trying out all my new techniques and positions – what an epiphany that there isn’t just one right way to ride.

We had a few rest stops and then gradually entered some green hills, absolutely lovely. Then, another zenith: we rode the last few miles to the lunch stop at a tremendous gallop in a strong wind. Irgh was amazing. He is kind and sensitive and willing and he always has one more speed. It was an incredible run. We then stopped for lunch near a ger that is the summer home of Khlauga, the herder who had led us all day. His wife greeted us with a ceremonial bowl of milk that she brought to each of us for a sip. We ate, and then every single rider laid down on her ger and went to sleep on the ground. We are exhausted.

The ride after lunch was phenomenal. We rode up up up over a large mountain. The view was stunning. The landscape is less grazed down than anything we’ve seen so far. No car tracks cut across the terrain. There were no vodka bottles or shoe soles. The rocky mountains surrounded us. Khlauga continued to lead us and I had a sense that he was proud of his home. He pointed out his winter place with its solid wooden and packed manure sheep pen to buffer the bitter wind and snow. A herd of horses we passed belongs to his brother. He rode us into a little dead end valley, green and dotted with some kind of wild cherry flowering with white blossoms. Wild rhubarb and scallions poked out from the grass. We had a long break there and Julie translated while I told Khlauga that I would like to move my family there and have my daughter help him with his goats and sheep. I showed him pictures of Phoebe’s dwarf goats and he wanted to know how much milk they make. I think I might have overestimated because he was very impressed.

This first part of the afternoon ride was truly incredible, and it was the most spectacular thing we’ve seen so far. Unfortunately the chafe on my backside was getting worse during all of this. Then, because so many of the riders are so sore and cramped right now, the second part of the afternoon consisted entirely of walking – this was the absolute worst for me, as it meant constant grinding on my sore spots (as opposed to trotting or cantering, which can be stood more easily). It was excruciating.

We ended up circling the tall mountains we had crossed and heading back in the direction we had come in a valley on the other side of them. We learned that the plan was to camp back at the beautiful lunch site after visiting a special spot nearby. During the Soviet invasion, sometime around the 20s or 30s, the Russians killed lots of Mongolian monks. One took refuge in a cave in this valley. He lived there for many years, over a decade, at one point surviving on one bowl of rice for 180 days, story tells. The spot is now a shrine, which we rode to. We got off the horses and entered the cave. Julie and Saigna translated while Khlauga told us the meaning of the colored pieces of cloth on the shrine: blue for sky, red for fire, yellow for monks, green for grass, white for teaching. Again, he was clearly proud of this place and it was special to see it. I was happy for the afternoon excursion to the beautiful spot with the cherry trees, and happy to see the shrine, but my ass was in so much pain that I asked Saigna to lead my horse back to camp and I walked the ten minutes there from the cave.

Honestly, the evening was sort of miserable. We arrived late – it must have been close to 8pm – and dinner was very late, and it was more or less a gigantic platter of mutton. It hurt me to sit. No surprise that the hashtag for this ride is Chafe for Charity. I was about to head to bed, but some of the men called us into Khlauga’s family ger for what turned out to be a party. Things then got fun for a while. One of the men filled a small ceremonial bowl with vodka over and over and passed it to one of us, around the circle. It had to go back to him each time in between drinkers, some kind of traditional ceremony. (Nevermind my blistered sunburnt lips, Tanya’s cough, and Sara’ virus.) We made toasts and Julie translated in both directions. My toast had Julie in tears with laughter and the men chuckling – I thanked Khlauga for sharing his beautiful home and land with us and told him that I would be back with my family to move into his ger with his family. His wife said that was wonderful and that I could help milk her 11 cows. I again offered Phoebe’s help with milking goats. At this, Julie ran into a bit of a translation disaster, as goat and monk are very similar words in Mongolian. After a brief moment of surprise, the misunderstanding was resolved and it was no longer understood that I was offering my adolescent daughter to milk the monks. Khlauga pointed to a traditional Buddhist painting on a cabinet behind him. The translation wasn’t totally clear,  but he was using the elephant and bluebird and monkey sitting on top of each other to illustrate how our families would serve each other. Although I didn’t totally understand it, it was kind and sweet. I seriously would love for Tristan and Phoebe to come spend time with these folks, and I would happily host their children or grandchildren for an immersive American experience. The riders have agreed that Khlauga, too, should occupy a high status place in the Men of Mongolia calendar.

The vodka and laughter alleviated my pain for a while, but I had a miserable night. In pain, exhausted, and stressed about deciding what to do today, I slept terribly. There might have been too much vodka in the mix, too.
​
This morning I resolved to take today as a recovery day. Tomorrow will be a rest day anyway and I am hoping that two days out of the saddle will give my bum time to heal. Sara Beck is riding again today and there is room for me to ride along with the crew. I’m not happy about it, but Julie and the veteran riders have reassured me that it’s very common to need to pull out for a day or two to recover. Plus I’m eating a package of Twizzlers my friend Kelly gave me for just this kind of moment, so I’m pretty happy. After a breakfast of french toast and salad (they are strange sometimes, these meals), the riders departed and, after camp was disassembled, I took off in the bus. Onward we bounce across the Mongolian plains!

Before the ride

Monday, June 19th

I am sitting in the Seoul Incheon Airport right now in a fancy lounge, eating good food and helping myself to a self serve bar. None of this luxury would be possible if I weren’t traveling with my friend Tanya, who has a broken back. I’ve been joking with her that she’s a friend with benefits and that all of this was certainly worth the suffering and financial cost she endured to acquire these amenities. Before this, there was the premier Miat Airlines lounge in Ulanbataar and free champagne in bu​​siness class. The joy! Fortunately Tanya thinks I’m funny, rather than insensitive. I think.

If you want to learn how all this came to be, read on below. ​(​​I’ll post the journal in four parts.) ​Tanya and I have just completed a 12-day horse trek over 700 km of Mongolian steppes and Gobi Desert. On our longest day, we rode 52 miles. It was an incredible adventure that we have been planning for years, since before Covid. The ride is called the Gobi Gallop. It is a charity ride, a fundraiser for kindergartens that serve the trashpickers of UlanBataar. That’s about all I knew before going, other than that it would be physically challenging and an exciting way to explore a new place. So, you get to start the story in the same place I was in terms of knowledge about the ride and Mongolia in general when I departed California at the very end of May.

Oh, and I finished nursing school and graduated in mid-May. I should mention that, though for the last three weeks it hasn’t been on my radar. That seems so long ago now…

Friday, June 2

It’s Friday morning in Ulaanbataar (which has so many spellings that I’ve given up on trying to find the right one; I’m committed to using as many as possible from here on out). Today Tanya and I will meet the rest of the Gobi Gallop group and be taken for a tour of the Veloo Foundation’s two kindergartens. We will also visit the garbage dump where the kindergarteners’ families earn their living. One day in UB was enough for me. Tanya was unwell, fighting a migraine and a cold; she was in bed for the day. I spent the day walking up and down Peace Avenue, one of the main big streets in the city, to buy some last minute supplies, bring Tanya food she could tolerate, and buy a pillow for the ride. My adventures gave me lots of opportunities to assess the language, the city, the Mongolians.

It’s funny — most of my life has been spent in three places: the US, Hungary, Indonesia. From Hungary I know what is looks and feels like to be in something that was behind the Iron Curtain. From Indonesia I have a sense for Asia and Asians. In Ulan Batar (different spelling this time) I’m struck by the mix of both influences. It’s ugly — like East Berlin ugly. People stand right at your shoulder when you’re at an ATM, just like in Bogor. Mongolians definitely act more like Hungarians. They are not super friendly or outgoing, at least not in the city*. (Sorry Hungarians.) I interacted with a dozen or so clerks and shop attendants. Nobody spoke English or smiled. Several pretended not to notice that I needed help. Versus Indonesians, who’d be all over any customer service opportunity with a foreigner. The language is bizarre, very staccato, does not sound like any Asian language I’ve ever heard. I’m told it’s structurally similar to Korean but the words are not shared. There are some guttural throat-clearing sounds that almost sound German and some lilting up and downs that sound like Swedish now and then. And there are all sorts of sounds I can’t make, no matter how hard I try.

*Ok, but don’t be offended. Read on. I changed my mind later, both about the city and about Mongolians! These were first impressions.

Yesterday was a national holiday — National Children’s Day. The streets were jam packed with people, there was music and events in the street, and absolutely everyone seemed to be eating an ice cream cone. I guess Mongolians are not lactose intolerant. Or I hope they are not lactose intolerant.

Yesterday we met two of the others in our riding group. We’re sharing an apartment with them in our hostel. This was sort of unexpected – the nice guy who runs the hostel has put up Gobi Gallopers before and thought it would be nice to stick us together in an apartment; instant immersion – but it’s been absolutely fine. Julia is a PhD cognitive linguist in her early 70s. She has ridden over 3000 kilometers in Mongolia, including in part of a 1000 mile race called the Mongolian Derby. It’s some crazy British thing that half of its riders don’t finish. Each rider can only carry 5kg and gets a new horse every 25 km. Julia and I had lunch and did some errands together yesterday, during which I learned about her work, her riding adventures, and her previous trips to Mongolia. In the afternoon a second woman arrived. Cele (“Seal”, short for Cecelia) is in her 50s, an Australian. Julia and Cele know each other already from a previous ride they did together here in Mongolia called the Blue Wolf Totem, a three-month trek across the country that covered 3000 km; this ride was organized by the same woman who runs the Gobi Gallop. Cele, too, rode part of the Mongol Derby in a different year.

Tomorrow we will be taken to the start point of our ride an hour or two out of UB and we’ll do our first ride together, a short loop, presumably to make sure that everyone can stay on a horse. Very much hoping I don’t fall off. Then, the day after tomorrow, our first long riding day!

Saturday June 3

Yesterday was incredible and long and exhausting. I was totally engaged and attentive the whole day, and by the end I was pooped. I think I’ve still got some jet lag, too. We had breakfast again in the hostel (bread, butter, jam, hard boiled eggs) and for the second morning again ran into the members of an archeology team from University of Texas. They are here on a three-month expedition; the lead is an expert in ancient cultivation — she identifies fossil components of certain grains. It sounds fascinating and the group is fun, a typical academic field expedition of nerds who like to party while they do research. Being one of those myself, I liked them instantly.

After breakfast, volunteers and employees of the Veloo Foundation (Julie Veloo’s organization that runs the Gobi Gallop and other races and events to fundraise for the kindergartens) arrived at the hostel to collect our expedition boxes and the luggage we will leave behind in UB. Then they loaded us into a minivan and swept us off to collect other riders at other hotels. We then drove to the outskirts of the city, toward the dump and into the Ger District. As these things often go, things became shabbier and broken as we left the inner city and headed outward. While we drove, Julie told us about the city, Mongolia, the Ger District. There are three million Mongolians and half live in UB. This was not always so and is only recently so. A combination of climate change and overgrazing (fueled by the government’s reward program for making lots of babies, the cashmere industry, and rich city people who have large herds as nothing more than status symbols) is making it impossible for the herders to feed their animals, especially during winters that follow summers with poor grass growth. There has been drought. When the herders can’t make it herding, they pick up their ger and move it to the outskirts of UB. (Gers are the dome-shaped homes of most Mongolians. They can be assembled in less than an hour.) It is law that one can stake out a territory of a certain size (small, like a quarter of an acre) by finding an empty spot and building a fence to mark the boundary (just like in our old Wild West). Fences are marked to begin with by old tires, then replaced by wood or oil drums banged flat. (Sometimes the fences are really creative – we saw one later that was made entirely from car hoods.) Thus, the Ger District. There is no running water in the Ger District, or plumbing; the lots have an outhouse and water is carted from community wells a km or two away. I saw later in the market aisles and aisles of water containers; these are an essential part of many (most?) households in the city and much of the countryside. Mongolia has very little agriculture. I’m not sure about industry other than coal. Herders who move to UB drive taxis or buses or pick trash in the garbage dump, which they use or sell or eat. Some is medical waste, which is sorted, dusted off, and sold back to clinics.

Julie Veloo moved to Mongolia ten plus years ago with her Malaysian husband, who is in oil. She fell in love with the horses and the herders and she learned of the Ger District and the children who pick trash with their parents in the dump. She resolved to get all children under six out of the dump and into schools by building a kindergarten in the Ger District. Eventually she also supported the government in setting up another school that is literally on the very edge of the dump. Yesterday we visited both, which are beautiful and well-planned. We also visited a community library that Julie built next to her school, as well as a sewing shop that she established to give work to some of the local women. I was measured for a gown to wear at the gala fundraiser at the end of the ride; I chose a traditional dress. Both schools have kitchens, and the children are fed good meals each day. They also sleep, and sometimes they sleep for three or four hours because sleeping is not always so good in a ger with a big family and garbage trucks bumping past at all hours. Both schools also have a doctor. School is just being let out for the year, but the kids were still there for their last day at Julie’s school. We were treated to an awesome singing and dancing performance and then we sat and played with the kids. I fell in love with a very smart little girl; I picked up some books (in Mongolian) and asked her to tell me the names of things in them. She figured out quickly what I wanted, and she was delighted, and in a few minutes she was practically in my lap and laughing at my efforts to pronounce the names of cat, dog, ball, flower. The pronunciation is hard! The rolling RRRRs I can do, but there are other complicated sounds that come from somewhere in the throat that I don’t quite get. This little one was very cute.

After seeing the schools, we were treated to a tour of the dump. We stood on a hill just outside of it and watched the garbage trucks roll in. As each enters, men leap onto it and begin sorting the crap in the moving truck; there is competition — you want to get there first. It is dangerous and there are frequent deaths. Outside of the official dump there is illegal dumping to avoid the fees associated with the official dump. I saw two or three dead dogs, big shaggy things.

I was impressed with the project and struck by how integrative the work is and how similar in many ways it is to the work I did with Kinari and Health In Harmony. Julie talked about how empowering getting a start in school is for the children (almost all are able to go on in school after they finish her kindergarten) and the library is for the adults who bring their children there. At first the mothers were afraid to come in, ashamed of being dirty. Now they come. She told how the community began to organize trash pick up around the school and library, which is incredible really when you think about how they spend their days in trash and it’s not really the kind of thing they might notice — but they began to notice and to take pride and to be invested. Julie explained that the trauma of being a trashpicker kid is not really generational yet — at most it was their parents who came from the countryside. She hopes that by educating these kids and helping new arrivals to avoid ending up in the dump, the cycle will be broken.

After the Ger District tour we headed back to our hotels and hostels. I headed right back out again with Cele (the Australian) and Charlotte (a lovely Irish lady) to see the big market. We didn’t have much time as we were expected to meet Julie and the whole group again for dinner and drinks, but, in the time I had, I found seventeen thousand things I’d like to go back and buy. There is a whole horse gear section, with beautiful soft reins and traditional saddles and stirrups and bits and tall soft leather boots. The textiles are to die for, silks in vibrant colors with incredible patterns. And dresses…and baby clothes…

Dinner was fun, in a hip modern restaurant with things like Caesar salad and french fries and steak. We talked about the day and Julie told us more about the upcoming ride. The group is fun and smaller than expected, with only eight versus the 14 initially expected (not including Julie, the Mongolian doctor who comes along, and the herdsmen and crew who will support us). I don’t yet know why some of the expected riders did not come, but I don’t mind the smaller group size. Others in the group include Sara, from down under, Betsy from Nevada and Annapolis (she splits her time), Charlotte from Northern Ireland, and Christina, who teaches horseback riding and also writes articles about travel for magazines. By chance, we are all women.

That was yesterday, minus the details of what might have been slightly too much vodka with Julia (the linguist, not Julie) and Cele before bedtime. They are quite fun! Today we will drive to a horse camp that is the start site of the ride via a grocery store (to get wine and sugary snacks to sustain us on long riding days) and a national park with a Genghis Khan statue. We’ll do a short ride in the afternoon and then start the real stuff tomorrow. Woohoo!

​Monday, January 16th

Tomas and I took a brief vacation from the current Pacific coast apocalypse to attend a soccer camp in southern Florida. Now we’re headed back West on a United flight, hoping to time our arrival just right between earthquakes and torrential storms. No, seriously, the three weeks since the start of Christmas break has been a rosary of alternating shakes and wind gusts and rains. The wind howls at night, moving the house with the strongest bursts. We’ve had three power outages, the longest lasting three days, outdoing our solar battery, and resulting in a tower of unwashed laundry and children. It’s been exhausting, and it’s been nice to have a break from it. Now we’re heading home. Just so you can picture my current arrangement, at his insistence Tomas the Prince is seated comfortably by the window, where he’s buffered from the world by his Beats and by his mother (that’s me), who is wedged in the middle seat, carefully keeping her elbows to her sides while Tomas occupies one armrest and the aisle seat lady needlepoints aggressively with her dominant left arm (the one next to me). I’m afraid of being stabbed.

With amazing luck and a break in the weather, we left Humboldt County last Thursday and flew without a hitch to Miami, where we spent a night with Chris and Cara, good friends from grad school in Ann Arbor. (Chris and Gary shared an apartment that lacked a bathroom door during our first year of the PhD program. That’s when Chris wasn’t living in a tent on a farm outside of Ann Arbor, which he did on and off.) Fellow field biologists, they’ve spent lots of time in the jungles of French Guiana (Chris’ field site) and Paraguay (Cara’s). I’ve wondered for a long time how they can manage to live in Dade County, Florida. My entire understanding of the area comes from careful and extensive reading of Carl Hiassen’s novels, and, with this reliable reference material in mind, it didn’t seem possible that these hearty outdoorspeople and conservationists could live in such a place. We spent Thursday night with them in their little cottage in Coconut Grove and toured Chris’ nearby project site, a botanical garden of native plants and tropical collections on the former estate of David Fairchild, a tropical biologist. (Both Chris and Cara are faculty at Florida International University, which owns the property.) Between their white stucco house, set back from the street and shaded by a wild tangle of palm fronds and vines populated by vociferous crickets, and the Fairchild property, which the explorer named “The Kampong” after his years studying botany in Indonesia, our friends have found a piece of jungle for themselves in Miami. Hiassen and my favorite character of his – Skink – would be pleased with the mangroves and blossoms and dirt.

Tomas loved the tropical feel of Miami and couldn’t get over how much our friends’ narrow street, lined with giant fig trees loaded with happy epiphytes, looked like our street in Bogor. Tomas also liked Chris and Cara, especially loving how Chris slips into a Latino accent after running into Argentinian friends and into a French accent after chatting with French colleagues; he was the same in grad school, our student chameleon. I’m pretty sure he once returned to Ann Arbor in a cravat after a trip to France. I was happy to introduce Tomas to more of our old friends, and I was so pleased when, after we left, he said to me, “Mom, you and Dad’s friends are good. I’m excited that in college I get to make friends like that.” By good he didn’t mean close, though that was implicit, too. He meant we have good people. I agree, and I’m glad Tomas sees it. He asked where else we have people, so that we might visit universities in those places and so that he’ll know good people wherever he ends up. It was so sweet.

On Friday, after our tour of Chris’ project, Tomas and I picked up our rental car and drove the Tamiami Trail across southern Florida. Tomas began to see alligators in the canal next to the road as soon as we were out of the city, and we stopped in a park to walk a boardwalk and see more. The beasts snoozed contently in clear, shallow water while gar glided past them and anhingas sliced gracefully through the pools. We continued along the ramrod-straight road through sawgrass prairies for a couple of hours, then through an endless series of strip malls, to our AirBnB in Naples. In search of dinner, Tomas and I were in awe that all the roads are three-lane highways. To go to dinner, you take a highway. To buy groceries, you take a highway. We never did make it out of the strip malls that night, settling for TexMex in one so busy it was hard to find a parking space. Where were all these people from?

Saturday and Sunday Tomas participated in the soccer camp, which was led by coaches from some good universities in which Tomas in interested. On Saturday the wind howled all day and it was very cold. (To think I packed a swim suit!) In exhaustion, that night we settled for take-out Thai. Sunday was, thankfully, warmer. While Tomas was in the morning training sessions, I spent the first part of both days looking for nature. It was hard to find. Hurricane Ian damaged the coast so badly that many parks are still closed. Hotels and private mansions line the coast, and all of them seem to be under construction; a port-o-potty, contractor truck, and heavy-duty fencing are prominent features of each property. After a few misfires, I found a beautiful beach called Clam Pass on day one – the shells, pastel pink, yellow, orange, were lovely and a huge mixed flock of terns and skimmers rested on a spit – and a decent one on Gulfshore Drive on day two. I watched the afternoon scrimmages at the soccer camp on both days, chatting with parents from Minnesota, Georgia, New York and watching Tomas do his thing. Tomas was pleased at the level of play and had a great time. The kid loves soccer.

Over the weekend, Tomas and I cemented our commitment to finding something other than highways and strip malls. Where was the REAL Naples, the old part, the original town? Turns out it’s in the southern part of the city, a 20-minute drive from our place. Sunday night we made our way south to the Naples core along the three-lane Tamiami Trail, found a place in a parking garage, and headed out to explore. Tomas was in charge of navigation and wanted us to aim for a cluster of restaurants on his Google map in an area called Olde Naples, with an E, of course. We found real neighborhoods with real streets – albeit very fancy ones – and eventually arrived at cluster of orange dots indicated on Tomas’ phone screen. OMG. Super high-end designer shops, all pink or orange or yellow stucco, lined the streets. The restaurants were filled with very finely dressed people drinking wine out of nice glasses in perfect lighting. I should have known from the E in olde. I was in sneakers, Tomas in shorts and a sweatshirt. We decided that this part of the original Naples wasn’t where we were meant to have dinner, and we headed back toward the neighborhood where we had parked and which had seemed a bit more lively and loud and, we hoped, casual. As we walked, Tomas said, “Mom, that reminded me of The Good Place.” He was totally right! It was like the fabricated, movie set neighborhoods in a Netflix comedy series about a sort of purgatory or holding place people go to when they die. Such an apt comparison! After an hour’s walk to The Good Place and back, we found the perfect restaurant a block from where we had parked – an Italian pescheria full of families and laughing and outdoor seating and delicious-looking dishes on people’s tables. We were seated immediately. Our table was wobbly and nobody cared about Tomas’ shorts, so I knew we had found our place. When I came back from the restroom, I found a waiter speaking with Tomas about the Italian’s underwater sprint routine, which he had used to train for futbol in his village on the coast of southern Italy. He was animatedly describing, with anatomical references to his own legs, which thigh and calf muscles this regimen had built up. The waiter had identified Tomas as a soccer player in a glance. It was sweet and funny. Tomas loved his pear salad and grilled salmon, and I loved my glass of wine and squid ink gnocci. The dinner was the highlight of the adventure and Tomas and I congratulated each other on finding an actual neighborhood to explore.

Tomorrow I start my fourth and final semester of nursing school. This year has been a dramatic improvement over last. Our teachers are excellent and are handling much better than last years’ the mayhem beget by Covid and the general underfunding and understaffing of nursing programs. Last semester I did a rotation in mental health, which I was surprised to enjoy as much as I did. It was eye-opening to learn about the deep and strong connections between trauma, substance abuse, and mental disorders, and it was frightening to learn just how poorly equipped our country is to help people stuck in this Bermuda Triangle of suffering. Once I graduate, I should probably work in a hospital for a while to build a full skill set in nursing, but I think there is a good chance I’ll eventually end up working on these issues. As it stands, it would be hard to avoid it on some level – both suicide and fentanyl are massive problems in Humboldt. Tomorrow I start a rotation in our Public Health Department; no further info yet!

Everybody’s doing well. Phoebe is in seventh grade at Saint Bernards. She played volleyball and soccer in the Fall, is doing great in school, and talks to me a lot about the challenges of being a middle school girl. It doesn’t sound like it’s changed since I was in middle school, and I feel for her. She’s tall and smart and looks great and is the target of some real bitchiness. I’m glad she seeks my advice (rather than keeping quiet), and she seems to understand that all the meanness is a way that some girls practice wielding power over others and that it’s not personal. Tristan is in fourth grade, loves school, begs to stay at aftercare as long as he can, and refuses to have his hair cut. Somehow he’s able to see through his bangs, like a Puli dog. He played soccer in the Fall and continues to do karate, now back in group classes with a few other brown belts. He had a school play in December and loved being on stage. He says he wishes he had more stage time. Tristan, Phoebe, and I ride the horses together, though not as often as I’d like since winter and crappy weather have set in. Tomas is a junior, between his high school and club soccer seasons, and working hard on a bunch of AP and Honors classes. He continues to obsess (in a fun way) over colleges, and Princeton is still at the top of his list after his soccer camp there last summer. Tomas has made a really nice group of friends, also soccer players, also nice guys who seem to have their heads in the right places. He likes to cook, is creative and talented with a skillet in his hand, and sometimes cooks for his friends. He’s driving now, a 1992 Volvo that I felt incredibly cool cruising in on the occasion that I borrowed it. Gary is planning a short sabbatical from work starting next month and looks forward to working on the farm – poor guy, I have a list for him – and having a break from early morning trans-oceanic Zoom meetings. A couple of months ago he made his first trip back to Indonesia since Covid hit; he was happy to reconnect with colleagues and friends and put into place his plan for the sabbatical.

We have an hour left in this flight. I made it a mission while in Naples to drive along a three-lane highway to a strip mall to buy the very first Carl Hiassen book. I want to revisit this important reference on southern Florida (which I haven’t read in 25 years), compare it to my recent experience, and refresh my understanding of corruption and environmental destruction in the Olde Sunshine State. Settling into my book now…

Photos below: kids, Gary, horses, a new puppy named Little Bear, the fruits of the summer and fall garden…

​Tuesday, August 9th

Tomas and I are in the fancy United Club lounge in the Newark Airport. Tomas is clearly in his element, comfortable and assured that all is as it should be. It’s not his fault, poor kid – not his fault that he is sure he wasn’t meant to live on a goat farm, where the rest of his family borrows his nice Adidas slides sandals to feed the chickens and gets chicken poop stuck to the soles. He spent most of his first five years living like a prince, after all. I used to catch one of our helpers, Ibu Tini, piggybacking him home from school, and our other helper, Ibu Mimin, spoonfed him whenever she could, in the ancient Indonesian tradition of pampering and spoiling children as long as possible. (Indeed, the international school in Bogor had to pass a policy banning nannies from spoonfeeding their charges at lunchtime through the school fence, where the preschoolers would line up with mouths open like baby birds, waiting for fried rice and Indomie – ramen noodles – to be deposited. It was a policy hard to enforce without constant vigilance; those nannies were good at darting in with a well-aimed spoon.) Tomas had friends whose parents owned homes in both Indonesia and a European country or two, large boats, fancy horses. Nevermind that his parents didn’t own anything anywhere and rode the angkots (public minibuses) to get around, it rubbed off on him. So, goat farms and chicken poop are not his thing. Airport club lounges and big cities, now we’re talking.

As part of our quest to restore Tomas his rightful place in this universe, he and I are just completing a trip to the East Coast to check out a few colleges. We started in Princeton, where Tomas participated in a two-day “ID soccer camp” with Princeton University’s coaches. The camp was fabulous – the coaches learned the kids’ names in just a few hours and gave valuable feedback to them, and Tomas scored a beautiful goal that earned him a compliment from the head coach. (I almost managed to film it on my phone, but I got so excited as he approached the goal that the focus of the camera bobbed up into the trees beyond the field. Epic mom fail.) Tomas and I toured the campus and the town (including a drive past my childhood home, high school, and middle school, and lunch from Hoagie Haven, a Princeton institution for at least 50 years), and we bought the requisite baseball cap. Tomas took in the stone mansions set back behind long driveways overhung with ancient oaks and sycamores, the private prep schools that ring the town, and the beautiful arches and masonry of the campus; he loved it all.

We stayed with our good family friends (truly family, really), the VanRaaltes, with whom I shared many Adirondack summers and ice-skating sessions on Carnegie Lake as a child. We had lunch at PJs Pancake House (another Princeton Institution) with my childhood babysitter Donna; it was Donna who took Nikki and me to see Grease at the Garden Theater when it was originally released, a life-changing experience. Donna had an impressive collection of colorful pompom socks that I envied enormously and cute boyfriends who rocked up to our house on Moore Street in jacked-up trucks. Our visit also coincided with one from my high school best friend, Katherine, and we were able to meet up. All of our friends offered Tomas home-cooked meals and whatever he might need, should he show up in Princeton as a student two years from now.

The soccer camp finished up on Sunday evening, and Monday Tomas and I took a morning train to Manhattan. As we emerged on the escalator up from Penn Station, we were blasted by the shear New Yorkness of it all: chatter in five or ten different languages; a jackhammer; horns; sirens; shouting workers; scaffolding; crowds; traffic; and, now, sweltering heat and drenching humidity. Tomas seemed to be taking it all in. “It’s a lot,” I said. He nodded and grinned: “Yes, it’s a lot. It really, really is a lot”. We checked into our hotel just around the block from Penn Station, admired the view from our room on the 25th floor, and headed out for a few hours of tourism. Tomas chose to take us to Times Square, where we enjoyed the company of a gazillion other tourists, found a big soccer store for Tomas to drool over, ate lunch, and took photos with The Naked Cowboy (with whom Tomas, who knows everything that has ever appeared on social media, was already familiar). (He also happened to recognize a famous YouTube cooking celebrity walking on the street.) Tomas seems to have a GPS and a compass implanted in his brain, and he led us around adeptly.

We returned to our hotel in the early afternoon to drink water, dry our sweat, and drop our body temperatures to a range acceptable for proper enzyme function for a couple of hours. Mid afternoon we headed out again to take the subway uptown to Columbia University, where we were scheduled for a 4pm tour.

We began by buying a hat, as is customary for us. If Tomas doesn’t end up going to college, he’ll be able to sell his impressive university hat collection and live off of it for…well, at least a few days. Hat on, we followed our tour guide around the majestic campus from 4 to 5. It was 94 degrees. Tomas claimed to be unaffected by the heat (further testament to his genetic superiority), but I would be lying if I claimed that my focus wasn’t affected. Oh my god it was hot. Tomas liked the campus, but, despite his frequent claims that he belongs in a metropolis, he seemed sort of “meh” about Columbia. Toward the end of the tour he said, “You know, I could really see living in Princeton and hopping on a train now and then with my friends to catch a game in the city.” So, Princeton won, at least this round. He LOVED it! And, while I’m happily committed to my mountaintop on the northwest Pacific coast, I’d be overjoyed to bother Tomas frequently in Princeton, catching some of his games and teaching him to do his laundry on the coin-operated machines in the dorms. Or wait, the machines are probably endowed too, and he probably won’t need any coins. But he will need help, unless something changes soon; so far laundry independence is in the goats-and-chicken-poop category.

Following the tour, Tomas and I met up on campus with my wonderful, funny, handsome friend Luca, who is Chair of the Computer Science Department at Columbia. Luca is Italian, and Tomas wore his Juventus shirt in Luca’s honor. Luca walked us around campus a bit more and told us about this building and that, but he’s a soccer addict and the conversation quickly veered in that direction. He took us to his home on Riverside Drive, where his wife and my good friend Meika was waiting for us. Meika, who is from Brazil, was a graduate student at Berkeley when I was an undergraduate there, and it was with Meika and another Brazilian grad student, Albert, whom I spent a semester in the Mata Atlantica, the rainforest along Brazil’s east coast, in 1993. We made dinner while Tomas indulged Luca in soccer chat, including in a description of his awesome goal at the Princeton camp. (It’s a shame there was no video to support the description.) Luca asked detailed questions about distances and angles and which foot was involved, and Tomas commented later that Luca reminds him of Nagypapa. Anyone who knows my father will understand his commitment to detail and the interrogation techniques necessary to obtain said detail. And it’s funny, Luca, who met my father years ago, commented on how much he enjoyed his long, late-night conversation with him (which surely involved details and interrogation, perhaps symmetrical in nature). It was a wonderful evening, and Meika and Luca, too, offered their support to Tomas should he end up at Columbia. Tomas and I subwayed back downtown to our hotel, showered off the caked salt, and went to bed for a super-airconditioned sleep.

I last wrote in January. The rest of the school year was long and tough. Nursing school was all-consuming. I loved the learning – throughout my undergrad and grad, I was a committed organismal biologist, and now I’m having a love affair with molecular and cellular biology – and I enjoyed the clinical rotations, but I was stretched pretty thin. Gary took on a lot of kid transportation, which is more or less a full time job of its own. Friends who live right behind Tristan’s school let us drop him there every morning 20 minutes before the start of school so that Gary could get the other kids to school on time. It was a very smooth system, so smooth, in fact, that once these friends went on vacation and we didn’t know; Gary continued to drop Tristan there, and Tristan let himself into the backyard like usual, sat on their back porch until he judged it was time to go to school, and walked himself over to Garfield Elementary without incident. Ooops. Nobody has called CPS, at least not yet.

Tomas ran track during the Winter season and continued to practice occasionally (when we can get him there) and play games with his competitive soccer team in Santa Rosa. He busted his hump in school and did great; I’m proud of his ability to balance school and sports. I don’t think I would have had the maturity to do that if I had been playing sports as intensively as he is. Phoebe finished out her sixth grade year and underwent huge transformations while she did. She shot up in height, started caring about clothes and hair, and had a few crushes. Thankfully she still loves goats and reading and being a farm girl. She encountered, full-on, all the things that make Middle School the depths of human existence, and we talked regularly about what it means when someone claims to be your friend one day and rejects you the next. I encouraged her to take on the mantra “F*#k it” – well, not really those words, but the spirit of them and the idea that one can’t take these things too seriously. She gets it, more than I ever did at that age, and I’m proud of her. Phoebe also mastered raising one eyebrow, and she likes to use this form of expression (skeptical, questioning) in religion class. Tristan loved third grade and being back in school. His teachers sent me emails now and then about ​how ​they adore him and how helpful he is in class, and their adoration turned out to be useful when we forgot him at school a couple of times on early dismissal days that we failed to note were early dismissal days. Again, nobody has called CPS. Yet. This summer Tristan decided he likes folk tales, and he read three tomes by himself – Russian, Norse, and Grimms. After he did that, he read aloud to me and I realized he might be a speed reader. Great for him, but it’s hard to listen to someone speed read aloud. I couldn’t keep up.

Phoebe’s goats always deserve a paragraph to themselves. In October she bred her three adult does to our handsome bearded bucks. Throughout the winter the girls ate and ate with gusto and we watched their sides expand. Jolene in particular (Jolene, Jolene, Joleeeeeeeene) grew in width to absurd proportions. In February we waited on tenterhooks, often dashing outside in pouring rain in the middle of the night to see if anyone was delivering; as the due dates approached, Phoebe and I set up a schedule of alternating checks at midnight and 3am. Phoebe even stayed home a day or two in case things got moving during the school day. In the end, Sugar dropped beautiful twins, dark brown Black Coffee and black-and-white Half & Half, at a very civilized time of the evening. Cowslip had black-and-white twins, Dixie and Moonflower, on a sunny early afternoon while I was home and Phoebe in school; I got to deliver the second one. Jolene, always above and beyond, had five (FIVE!!!) babies during TV time. She was a week late and so wide we were worried that she might explode. It was a special night, with Gary, Phoebe, Tristan, and I all there to “help”. (Jolene didn’t need help.) Tomas, for whom the goats are a bewildering attraction that he does not share with his weird family, was upstairs doing his homework. Jolene popped those babies out like a popcorn maker drops a shower of popcorn, with only a few minutes between each. Phoebe, Tristan, and I dried the tiny babies off with old towels. Gary dashed back and forth to the house for more towels and molasses water to fuel Jolene’s heroic efforts. Every time he’d come back, we’d say, “Dad, she just had another!” Seriously, the whole thing was pretty unbelievable and Jolene is, in my eyes, a caprine goddess. Phoebe sold kids and goat milk, and I made some chevre and froze lots of milk to make more later. Phoebe reinvested her earnings in another registered doe, and Gary is thrilled that SOMEONE’s efforts on the farm are doing something other than simply absorbing every penny he earns. (I still think we should name our farm Bleed Me Dry Farm, though now Middle Sister Dairy Goats is in the running.)

After the school year, I was desperate for Summer, and it’s been a good one. Phoebe, Tristan, and I rode the horses a lot. We’ve made some trips to the river for swimming. Tristan has been to summer camp for a week, and Phoebe is meant to go next week. We had our annual summer visit, better than ever this year, from my friend Tanya and her niece Saysha; we horseback rode in thick fog every day. Also, Tomas’ friend Alex visited from Madrid. We dedicated ourselves to feeding him hamburgers and enabled him to compare and contrast Spanish bullfighting in Madrid, which he has seen, with American bullfighting, which we could provide for his entertainment at the Fortuna Rodeo. The icing on the cake of his American vacation was the Quadiators competition at the rodeo, in which teams of young boys on quads race around trying to smash and pop balloons taped to their opponents’ heads with plastic bats. In June I had a short vacation when I flew to Colorado to ride an endurance event in the Spanish Peaks with my friend Tanya. I rode her 18 year-old Arabian mare, a rescue horse with an unknown history that Tanya has only had for a few years, in a 25-mile race. Luna loves these races, likes to go fast, and knows what she’s doing. I sat on her back and she took care of things, which is good because I don’t really know what I’m doing, and we placed in the top ten. Then, at the end of July, I rode in my first ride-and-tie, which took place at Cuneo Creek, a gorgeous part of Humboldt Redwoods State Park. In a ride-and-tie, two humans and a horse are a team. The humans take turns riding the horse, and the rider, who is usually faster, ties the horse and leaves it for the runner while jogging off ahead. The runner reaches the tied horse, hops on, and the cycle starts again. The humans can take turns running and riding as often as they want or as often as the terrain warrants. I did the 22-mile event with my friend Lauren on her cowpony Goose. It was brutally hilly but an absolute blast, and we came in second in the small field of four teams. I won my first-ever belt buckle! It’s big enough to serve appetizers on. Twenty teams completed in the 36-mile event, and we shared the course with them for the first 12 miles or so, so for the first chunk of the race it was a good crowd of excited, dancing horses and tough cross country runners. Goose was very level-headed; he didn’t mind being left tied to a tree here and there, and he trotted most of the 22 miles at a steady pace. His job on Planet Earth is usually to round up cows, so I do think he might hav​​e been wondering at which part of the course he’d find the cows, but he didn’t complain.

Now, summer is coming to a close. I’m truly sad to have it end – sad that I’ll have less free time with the kids, sad that there will be less riding, sad that Tomas will soon disappear behind his desk. I’m excited about my second a​nd​ final year of nursing school, but also dreading being consumed by it again. Sigh.

Tomas and I are halfway across the country by now. I’m in the middle seat, engaged in a careful fencing act to avoid shoulder contact with the aisle seat guy, who swabbed down his whole seat and tray table with Chlorox wipes just after boarding. I can tell he REALLY doesn’t want to touch shoulders. Tomas insisted on the window seat, where he would be buffered from contact with strangers by me in the middle seat. The middle seat is miserable, and if Tomas had the life he deserves, we’d be in first class, I would not have to shoulder fence with a stranger, and Tomas would be able to stretch out his muscley soccer player legs while sipping an iced mocktail and watching a movie on a decent sized screen. Poor Tomas. It’s all so unfair. I’m sure some day things will be as they should be for him – a life of airport clubs, first class, and his own slide sandals that nobody else borrows and walks through chicken poop in. I hope he doesn’t read this until he’s old enough to know that I’m mercilessly taking the piss.

Monday, January 3rd

Dear friends & family,

Happy new year! A new year in this new world. I wish with all my heart for it to be a good one – for the coronavirus to become no more of a nuisance than the flu, for us to get our heads out of our asses (to paraphrase Ariana Grande in “Don’t Look Up”), and for hope to grow. It’s hard not to feel a wave of hopelessness wash over now and then, sometimes more often than that. Hoping for some glimmers in 2022!

That said, the five of us have stayed relatively safe, busy, and excited about the things in our lives since I last wrote in April. More than ever, I’m thankful that we live on top of a mountain, with plenty of room to run and scream and breathe, and with opportunities to sometimes forget about the rest of the world. Tristan, Phoebe, and I finished up their year of home schooling last Spring with lots of reading in front of the fireplace, early trips to the river for freezing cold swims, and our own homegrown ag curriculum. With enormous dedication and perseverance, Phoebe mastered the milking of Jolene, the goat whose babies she and Tristan delivered in April. Jolene was not particularly interested in being milked, but, with the help of Phoebe’s brothers, who designed creative distractions like playing guitar and doing umbrella dances in front of the stubborn doe, Phoebe procured many gallons of beautiful, rich milk. We made, and are still making from frozen milk, gobs of chevre. It is, by all accounts, delicious. (Sadly, Tomas-the-foodie refuses it, after having seen where it comes from.)

Spring (not wet enough) melted into Summer, and we planted our garden in new gopher-proof raised garden beds. (The gophers had won too many battles over the last few summers, so it was time for an overhaul.) Gary busted his behind to bring truckloads of horse poop and old hay to the new beds, and the garden was a roaring success, with an astonishing harvest of plump cherry tomatoes, delicata squash, green beans, corn, sugar pumpkins, parsley, and enough kale to feed a nation of vegetarians for a year. Phoebe planted flowers throughout her herb bed, and they exploded in colorful waterfalls that poured over the sides of the box. Our fruit trees also went berserk this year – the apricot tree was loaded with golden fruits, the plum kept on giving, and we had hundreds and hundreds of pounds of apples. The kids and I made jam, Gary brewed gallons of hard cider, I donated apples to the food bank, and our horses were thrilled to eat a slightly bruised apple with each meal for a couple of months.

We had some smoky days that got in the way of outdoor fun, but the smaller kids and I still fit in a lot of horseback riding and all of us had a good number of hot summer days at the river. We bought three goslings in May and spent the summer watching them grow, taking them out to graze in our orchard / garden, and learning their amazing gestures and calls. They greet us at every morning and every afternoon feeding with a complex routine that involves bowing their graceful necks, beating their huge, beautiful wings, and, of course, squawking and shrieking. They live with Phoebe’s bucks; known to be excellent livestock guardians, their job is to keep foxes and mountain lions away. Indeed, I can’t imagine any wild creature wanting to approach them when they are in full chorus. Tristan has come to be our chicken, duck, and goose-minder, and the geese absolutely love him.

During that brief pandemic pause in the summer, when numbers were down and it seemed safe to see friends, we had several sets of visitors, including my good friend from grad school Tanya and her niece Saysha, as well as our friends Peter and Laurel and their grandsons. Saysha rode horses with our kids, and Peter and Laurel’s grandkids enjoyed three nights in a tent with Tristan, giggling and wrestling til late at night. Tristan and his good pal Cassidy had a sleepover on our porch. When plans to camp in Lassen National Park with my friend Jackie and her girls were thwarted by wildfires that closed every route there, Phoebe, Tristan, and I instead enjoyed time at Jackie’s family cottage on the Van Duzen River.

A highlight of the summer was the arrival and set-up of a new tiny house, which we have perched in a quiet spot between the house and the stable where it overlooks the nearby coastal hills and, in the distance, the tippy tops of the Trinity Alps. Now we have room for guests (it’s tiny but has a loft and can sleep four), a place for kids having sleepovers to hang out without annoying siblings, and a quiet study spot for me. My parents visited in the Fall and took it for its maiden voyage; my father reported that it was quite excellent, which I was happy to hear, as he provided the loan to me that paid for it. I’m doubly happy to hear the good report, as getting it to our property and into place was a bit of a fiasco: the truck hauling the tiny house couldn’t clear some trees at the top of our drive (my fault, poor planning) and plugged up our driveway until our forester neighbor saved the day with his chainsaw. This delayed the final placement and leveling of the tiny home until nightfall, which induced great stress in the driver, a six-foot-four ex-Marine who was afraid of the dark, flying insects, and spiders. In the end, rather than driving down the mountain in the dark in his shiny new cherry-red truck, he drank a lot of vodka with us, spent the night on the couch, and left in the morning with a very big tip. So, to make the driver’s stress worth it, I hope you’ll all find a time to visit and stay in the tiny house!

Gary worked hard over the summer on his treehouse, a multi-year project that he has undertaken single-handedly. When you come to stay in the tiny house, you will see and appreciate from the tiny house deck how phenomenal this undertaking has been. Straddling two thick branches of a three hundred year-old pepperwood tree, the tree house is an architectural feat. With floating brackets that allow the house’s platform to move with the wind (which is no joke up here) and a hexagonal design, it’s AMAZING. I anticipate that Gary will soon move into the treehouse, I will move into the tiny home (we’ll wave to each other as we sip our morning coffee), and we’ll leave the house to our three children and the dogs. I should teach the kids how to cook and vacuum in anticipation of their imminent independence.

We lost Lucy the dog over the summer, which was particularly hard for Gary and me. We adopted Lucy, whose mother was a street dog in Jakarta, 16 years ago. We knew Lucy before we knew Tomas, and Lucy knew us when we were still young and relatively carefree. She was with us through all kinds of shit and through massive life changes – our car accident in Jakarta, having kids, moving to the US, having another kid, building our farm – and it was hard to see her go. She was ready though, and we all held her at the end and told her it was okay to leave us. Now we like to say that she is happily dumpster-diving in West Java again, her favorite activity when we lived in Bogor. (Kneeland was always sadly devoid of chicken bones and rotten food for sweet Lucy.) To honor her, Tristan re-wrote the song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” to this new theme – it was something like “Lucy in the sky with dumpsters…”. He typed the whole thing out on his computer.

Tomas’ summer was…insane. He finished his Freshman year at Eureka High School with excellent grades and new friends made over the final few in-person months of school. His summer schedule was packed full of soccer events and camps that he was looking forward to. In July, he and I headed down to San Diego for a tournament he would play with his competitive team in Santa Rosa. We arrived early, with half a day to walk around the UC San Diego campus, which he loved. We bought the requisite hat. The next day the tournament began. Fifteen minutes before the end of the game, Tomas’ ankle connected with a mighty kick, meant for the ball, from an opponent. He played the rest of the game, but, as soon as he was off the field and his adrenaline began to ebb, the ankle started to hurt. Tomas couldn’t make it back to the car, and our carpool friends had to bring the car around for him. He said it was cramping and he needed a hot bath, so we went back to the hotel, but it wasn’t long before we were in the Scripps ER. The x-ray didn’t show anything, so Tomas was given a splint and a prescription for Norco and sent packing. The pain was tremendous and barely, if at all, touched by the Norco for well over a day. It did lessen enough by day 3 that Tomas felt he could go back to the fields to watch his team play their final games…but within half an hour of arriving on the sidelines the swelling began again and the pain was excruciating. Poor Tomas, who wants attention as much as he wants a hole in his head, had to be fireman-carried off the field, golf-carted to a car, and lifted into it. Back to the ER, where x-rays still showed nothing. Tomas was given a shot of Tramadol, a new splint, and sent packing again. I tried desperately to get the attention of the ER doctor and our nurse, to explain that Tomas’ level of pain was very real, not a play for attention, and was at a totally unacceptable level. They didn’t give a crap. “It’s gonna hurt,” the ER doc said as she turned away from me. I was reminded of a study that was published a few years ago about the solid statistical evidence demonstrating that people of color are not given the same amounts of pain meds that white people are given in hospitals. Gggrrrrrrrrr.

Tomas and I spent another three days in the hotel room, Tomas struggling through the pain, until he was well enough to fly home with crutches and airport wheelchairs and the whole deal. Eventually, multiple MRIs showed a break through the growth plate of his tibia, as well as a badly bruised talus. The swelling and the distribution of bleeding looked so weird to our local orthopedist that he sent us to consult the oncologists at UCSF. You can imagine how fun that was for Gary and me. Fortunately, unlike most folks, I have my own personal family pediatric oncologist on speed dial; the absolutely amazing love-him-to-death Dr Sabnis got us right in with all the right doctors, who quickly put us at ease, both about cancer and about the fractured growth plate. Long story short, Tomas was on crutches for over a month, and then slowly and carefully eased back into walking, then jogging, then, finally, hitting the field again. He went to every practice and every game of his Eureka High School soccer team, helping his coaches on the sideline and cheering for his teammates. Mid-season, he began to play again, carefully, slowly working his way back to full speed. His coaches noticed his dedication and his skill, even at half speed; at the end of the season, Tomas was awarded All County, an unusual honor for a Sophomore. Tomas was very surprised and pleased – he deserved it.

Here’s the really crazy part of the story: Tomas was scheduled to fly to Spain a couple of weeks after the injury to spend two weeks in August with his friend Alex and the Brickle family. The Brickles were neighbors of ours in Bogor – Nick and I worked together at the Wildlife Conservation Society and Anna taught at an international school in Jakarta. Alex and Tomas are the same age and have been friends since they were babies. The Brickles now live in Madrid. Somehow, by some miracle, and with a delay of only a few days, Tomas still made the trip. It never occurred to him not to go. All alone, on crutches, off he went. He even weathered a 24-hour delay in the Newark (the NEWARK!) airport, poor guy. Now, a 24-hour layover in the Singapore airport could have been quite fun, as Tomas knows (movie theaters, laksa and satay, swimming pools, and shopping-lah), but Newark sucks! In Spain, the Brickles adjusted their plans, scrapped the hikes, scheduled in more tapas, and gave Tomas the ground-floor room in the beachside villa they rented in the North. Tomas, though wishing he wasn’t on crutches, had a marvelous time. The kid loves to travel, and he feels like he belongs in beachside villas.

Tomas just completed his first semester of Sophomore year, and Phoebe and Tristan both started at new schools this year. Phoebe is in the sixth grade down in town at St Bernard’s, where she is co-Class President with an opponent with whom she tied in the 13-person class vote (complicated, I know), an enthusiastic participant in Drama Club, and about to begin rehearsals for a play in which she got a part. She loves the school, is happy for the things a bigger school is bringing to her, and is making new friends. Tristan is in the third grade at Garfield School, a little red schoolhouse at the foot of the mountain. It’s a small school, but bigger than Kneeland School. He loves his teacher and is outrageously happy to be in a class of 24 second and third graders. Both kids couldn’t wait to get back to school today after the Christmas break. Tomas is working hard, with an AP class and two Honors classes. He just completed his online driver’s education course and will soon get his learner’s permit. The joy and freedom of having a car and driving is a bright star ahead for him.

Today I had my first quiet day alone in two weeks, and my first quiet day alone with NO studying to do in five months. I just finished my first semester of nursing school at our local junior college. It was an enormous amount of work and had its moments of frustration, but I loved it. I’m thrilled by learning the physiology, and I enjoyed the eight weeks of clinicals we had in the hospital during the latter part of the semester. Each of those weeks, we spent two days in the hospital caring for only one patient, a luxury I know I won’t have again. Each patient had a story worth hearing and worth telling; most of the stories weren’t very pretty. Four of the eight were diabetic, three were meth users, some were both. I’m glad I met every one of them. On the rosier side, my clinicals cohort was a group of ten women, including a very pregnant pastry chef who curses like a sailor, two cannabis trimmers, and a doula, and one guy, and they were all fabulous. I made particularly close friends with a woman who has a Masters in psychology and who hopes to be a mental health nurse; each week Kelly eagerly snapped up the patients with dementia or who were in alcohol withdrawal, while the rest of us squabbled for nasty wounds and unexplained bleeding. Kelly’s got kids exactly Phoebe and Tristan’s ages, and we made a habit of meeting to study in a cafe while the kids drank cocoa and played games at another table. I’m looking forward to next semester, and even more to starting work after I finish the program.

I love the photo below. In it, I have just finished the physically-challenging and sweat-inducing task of applying compression stockings to the legs of Ryan, the sole male in my group, with the aid of talcum powder produced circa 1975. Those things are damned hard to get onto oneself, and almost impossible to apply to someone else. We were in hysterics. Fortunately, it’s not all compression stockings and changing sheets – in a couple of weeks we’ll begin learning some fun stuff like IVs and lectures will include things like the body’s acid-base balance, which is incredibly cool. I recommend the topic for anyone looking for good reading in 2022!

Finally, just a few words on Christmas: it was very, very loud and included wonderful food. We spent three nights in San Francisco. On the first, the grown-ups plus Tomas-the-foodie attended my 50th birthday dinner, which Chris organized at an AMAZING restaurant in Bernal Heights. We all dressed up for it, which meant for me a trip to Ross, where I found a fake-mink-trimmed black cloak that was perfect for the occasion. Tomas was very handsome in a sports coat and batik shirt, Agi was glamourous in pearls, and Nagypapa wore suspenders. The following day Agi took the kids to the Nutcracker with her cousin Michelle and her twins. Chris and Agi also treated us to the Lego sculpture show, which was terrific, a strangely emotional experience with sculptures entitled “Despair” and other very un-Legolike themes. Christmas Eve was a madhouse of kids and wrapping paper and Felix with a blossoming ear infection. I think it wasn’t fabulous for Feli, but the rest of us had a ball.

We came home on Christmas Day, spent the evening with Gary’s mom, and had 15 inches of snow dumped on us over the next two days. Now, with steady rain in the forecast for the next week, we start the new year. None of us has Omicron, all three kids are vaccinated, Gary and I are boosterized. Onward!

And more photos…

Friday, April 30th

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We started a dairy goat herd during the pandemic. I mean, who didn’t? It was the natural thing to do. We call them our COVID bovids. Actually, Phoebe has had a few pet does for about two years, but during this year at home we decided to go full throttle, with a plan to breed a bunch of does, make goat cheese, and sell goat kids.

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In January, Phoebe, Tristan, and I made an epic journey to the Central Valley to buy a couple of fancy baby bucklings who will be our herd sires. Our trip was loads of fun, including a one night stay in a hotel in Vacaville, where we booked a time slot in the hotel’s swimming pool, ate crappy take-out food from the Olive Garden, and watched bad TV in our room. The kids were in heaven. The goat farm we visited was amazing, and Phoebe oooed and ahhhed at their set up. Both kids enjoyed a half hour of sitting in a pen with twenty or so baby goats who climbed on their shoulders, chewed on their hair, and ran around the pen bucking and jumping. Who wouldn’t love being swathed in baby goats, really.

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Then, in late February, I bought a pregnant doe named Jolene. Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Joleeeeeeene. If you haven’t listened to that Dolly Parton song, do it now before you read on. Our Jolene does not have flaming locks of auburn hair, eyes of emerald green, or beauty beyond compare, but she is fabulous. Jolene came home to us a month before her due date, and she ate, and ate, and ate, and ate. Her sides expanded laterally until she appeared to be off balance, a problem made worse by the locomotory constraints posed by her swelling udder, which eventually no longer fit between her hind legs. Jolene began to waddle. As the big day approached…and then passed, home school became an extremely unfocused experience; the kids and I jumped up every ten minutes to check Jolene through the living room window as she grazed in front of the house. We had a few false starts, during which we texted everyone we knew to say that our Jolene was going into labor, but we were wrong and Jolene simply continued to eat and expand. It was torture. Hoping it might induce labor, several times we serenaded Jolene with Dolly Parton’s song, crooning along to the track as loud as we could. Jolene simply looked at us sideways and continued to chew her cud.

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Then, finally, a day came (ten days after we expected it) when Jolene ate less than usual, bellowed more than usual, and crabbily pushed the other does around. We continued our halfhearted attempts at schooling, punctuated by frequent looks out the window and visits to Jolene. Still nothing. At 4:45pm, I made my usual run down to the foot of the mountain to deliver Tomas to Gary, who would take him to soccer practice. On my way back, five minutes from home, Tristan called. Breathless and hyper with excitement, he yelled repeatedly into the phone, “Jolene’s having her babies!! She’s already popped one out!” I put the pedal to the metal, flew home, parked the car behind the house, and sprinted to the goat enclosure in the front yard…to find that the kids had fetched the birthing kit Phoebe had carefully assembled in the previous weeks, slapped on blue medical gloves, delivered a second kid, wiped the twins’ nostrils clear, and placed the babies on a fresh towel for Jolene to lick clean. My kids were over the moon with joy, grinning from ear to ear, with blood on their cuffs and goo on the fronts of their jackets. Jolene, ever steady, was unfussed about sharing her babies with Tristan and Phoebe. She cleaned the newborns from head to toe, let Phoebe help them stand to nurse, and began to eat again. It was the most marvelous experience, and I’m so happy it happened the way it did – with my kids home alone for a full COVID bovid midwifery experience.

In the Fall, we’ll breed our new bucks to three of our does, and next Spring we’ll have a bunch of babies to sell and does to milk. Phoebe is so excited, but I’m not far behind her. When I was a kid, I thought I wanted to be a farmer. Now I get to enjoy raising dairy goats via Phoebe!

Rural living has many perks. For some rare souls, these might include pooping in the woods, doing the dishes with a hose in the yard, and having bucket baths on the porch. For others, those activities might fall into the category of downsides of country life. That’s alongside of things like cooking on a hotplate and going to bed at 8:30 to beat the cold. Wait, let me back up.

A few weeks ago, we broke the expensive ceramic glass in the door of our woodburning stove. For a while, we managed with the cracked glass. Then, the piece fell out and we could no longer close the flu without filling the house with smoke. So, we quickly burned through the rest of our firewood. No flu, fast burning. Once the wood was gone, there was no excuse for not taking the stove door to have the glass replaced, so off it went down to town. Without the woodstove, I cranked the propane-fueled forced air heat while Tristan, Phoebe, and I continued to home school. (While Eureka is in the full swing of Spring, pointelist buds dotting all of the trees, at 2700 feet we’re still having frosts most nights and the house is cold most of the day.) Turns out heating your house all day with propane burns fast through the stores in your tank. Huh, go figure. The burners went out while I was cooking dinner, long before we were set up for a refill. I called our propane company; it would be over a week before they could deliver. Pandemic delays, of course.

But that’s not the end of it. Oh no, there’s more. Then our septic system died. And, boy, there’s nothing like a Yellowstone geyser in your bathroom to, well, make you reconsider the perks of rural living if you happen to be someone who prefers not to poop in the woods or bathe or your porch. A new low point in my life was when the propane truck arrived to deliver gas right when the Roto Rooter guys were busy pumping. Cliff, the propane guy, took in the sight of digging, destruction, and heavy equipment around our yard. Then he looked at the propane gauge. “Wow, looks like you’re empty here,” he said, his voice full of profound sympathy for his sweet yet ridiculous customers who were clearly both pooping in the woods AND cooking on a hotplate. Long story short, after roughly ten days without plumbing and a lot of money down the hole (literally), we have a muddy yard, a new septic system, a thorough understanding of septic system anatomy and various types of leach fields, and a great respect for our new set-up, which we will treat like a queen. Queen Kaka, we hereby pledge to divert all of our grey water to the yard. Anyone who flushes a baby wipe into you will be blood-eagled. (If you don’t know what that is, watch all six seasons of The Vikings. Yikes.)

It’s been a helluva school year. Tomas diligently stuck it out at his desk upstairs for month after month, the monotony thankfully broken by frequent trips to Santa Rosa to practice (masked and socially distanced) with his competitive soccer team. Things got lots better in the Spring, when Eureka High School opened again part-time, and when Tomas tried out and made the high school soccer team. The team played a short, intense season, with practices five days a week and games twice a week. Tomas, a Freshman, started and played most of every game as center mid. He’s so shy, but the Juniors and Seniors on the team took him under their wings, were kind to him, and encouraged him. He had an absolute blast. He also did fabulously in his classes, mostly on his own; he rarely asks for help. He definitely understands the value of keeping all of one’s doors open, and he can’t wait to leave our mountaintop and head for taller skyscrapers.

Phoebe, Tristan, and I continued our home schooling, most of the time in front of the fireplace (until we broke the glass door and then ran out of firewood). Tristan, who’s in second grade, blasted halfway through fourth grade math, with his own bizarre way of calculating things that I can’t follow, and Phoebe read stacks of books, did beautiful artwork, and wrote a fascinating report on what the first European settlers brought with them to eat and how screwed they would have been had indigenous peoples not introduced them to native foods and fed them. (She and I plan to plant a “Three Sisters” garden bed this summer.) I taught the kids a bit of mammalian osteology and some phylogenetics, and they invented beautiful creatures for whom we constructed evolutionary trees. We made a few trips to the beach to survey tide pools, visited our local zoo to walk through its new Redwood Skywalk, and did various small research projects of the kids’ interest; with Tristan I learned how helicopters fly, and with Phoebe I learned more than I could ever hope to know about goats. More recently, the first hour or so of “school” is consumed with trying to milk Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Joleeeeeeeene, who is not wholly committed to being a dairy goat. Despite being comfortably perched on a milking stand that Phoebe built on her own with a drill, Jolene bellows and bucks and knocks over the container and makes it clear that she would much prefer to being chewing her cud with her fellow does. Jolene, I’m beggin’ of you please don’t kick over the milk again…

Outside of school, Phoebe, Tristan, and I completed the 2020 Virtual Tevis Cup – horseback riding 100 miles in 100 days. Phoebe rode her young mare Dolly while Tristan and I rode together on my mare Bella. I think it might have been the highlight of this crazy pandemic year for me, and I have so many treasured memories of our rides. On some I read to the kids on horseback, on others we listened to music on my phone, and on others Phoebe sang to us. It was amazing.

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Thanksgiving and Christmas were quiet affairs, with just the five of us, and they were wonderful. On Thanksgiving, Tomas cooked and carved the turkey. On Christmas, Gary and I were bewildered that suddenly things weren’t rushed or crazy anymore. The kids were happy to take the gift-opening slowly, and they savored and appreciated each thing, one at a time. It was so lovely.

We had one and only one decent snow and enjoyed an incredible day of sledding, during which we put into use the Flexible Flyer sled that had appeared under the Christmas tree. Best sled ever!

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Recently, Tristan got his brown belt in the kids’ kenpo karate program at our local dojo. He is the youngest ever to do so at Lost Coast Kenpo, and he did it so competently and capably. He said such kind things to his instructors at his test, the five-stripe blackbelts almost melted.

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We continued to have outdoor playdates with friends, either on sunny days or around a bonfire. Phoebe’s February birthday, usually gloomy, fell on a sunny day. We had only recently brought home her baby goat bucks, and the party featured goat racing for the kids and bloody marys for the moms. You would be correct if you imagined that it was uproariously funny.

Now, as the weather improves, home schooling (and probably schooling everywhere) is wearing a bit thin. We’re ready for summer, and sunshine, and riding horses again. I also feel ready for the kids to be in school again next Fall; Phoebe will go to Eureka’s St Bernard’s, where she is excited to do all nine hundred of the extra curriculars offered, and Tristan will go to the little red schoolhouse at the foot of the mountain, a good school called Garfield. In addition, I’m gearing up again to go to nursing school in the Fall, assuming that the kids will be back in school. While this was an amazing school year and I’m so thankful for the opportunity to spend so much time so intensely with my kids, we all need something new come September! Over the last month or so, compounded by septic failure and propane burnout, Tristan, Phoebe, and I, who have been together in the living room for a year, have decided we’re done with the pandemic. Go away, COVID.

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​Sunday, October 4th​​

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“Well,” Gary said, “this year hasn’t been what I expected.” Um, yeah. While in the back of his mind he was referring to the general clusterfuck of disasters brought by 2020, he was at the moment speaking directly to the specific disaster-of-the-day: our realization that the solar system we just finished installing over the summer doesn’t power us during PG&E outages that coincide with days when the sky is orange-purple with thick wildfire smoke. Go figure! The outages, we predicted. No sunlight at midday, we did not.

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Indeed, this year is full of big surprises, a Spirograph (remember those?) of intersecting disasters and unexpected life changes. We’ve all listed them by now with awe and concern: the current presidency and the looming election (with Trump’s new Covid infection twist); racial unrest; the crumbling economy; the burning of California, smoke so thick on our mountain that we’re stuck inside for days at a time; and the stinking pandemic, making life so damned WEIRD. No hugs for friends, masks everywhere, six foot spacers and one-way aisles in the grocery store.

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Our family’s newest big surprise is this: I’m now homeschooling Tristan and Phoebe. I don’t mean distance learning with our school. I don’t mean Zooming with their teachers. I mean real, honest-to-god homeschooling. I NEVER imagined I’d be doing this. I grew up having the fairly mean misconception that homeschooled kids wore potato sacks, had long greasy hair, and were pretty weird. These days that image has melted away, and I know plenty of homeschooled kids who are neither badly socialized nor badly dressed, but I still never figured I’d have my own.

We lasted three days this year at our tiny school on the mountain, which is able to be open in person thanks to its small numbers. After that, for a combination of both pandemic-related reasons and others entirely unrelated to Covid, I realized that it was time to leave the school. (It wasn’t the first time I’d had the thought, and suddenly we had reached the tipping point. I’m guessing the global monthly average of tipping points has risen sharply during the pandemic.) Gary and I have been big fans and devoted supporters of our tiny school for almost ten years, and I was really upset about how things went pear-shaped at the end. I called several other moms of families who chose to leave the school over the last few years, including one who had moved on to homeschooling. The women I talked with gave me wonderful support and the consolation I was looking for, as well as advice on how to start homeschooling. I filed the State’s private school affidavit (which enables one to homeschool by opening a “private school”; the kids named our school Happy Raven Homeschool, despite my push for the decidedly less granola-toned Treeline Farm Homeschool), and early the next week, after a weekend visit to Oma and Nagypapa full of beachcombing, we were up and running.

Yes, of course there was heartbreak for the kids. They love the school, and they love their wonderful friends. But staying at the school was impossible. I really struggled with this, but I finally realized that there was nothing I could say or do that would take away the pain the kids would feel, other than to make our Happy Raven fabulous and arrange as many outdoor play dates with the kids’ friends as possible.

To my great surprise and delight…homeschooling is wonderful! I absolutely love it, and the kids are happy. I love the flexibility. All of the State content standards are accessible online, and I know what both Phoebe and Tristan are supposed to cover this year…but WE get to decide how to do it!

Math seems to be the one area where there’s a need to be at a particular, concrete place at the end of the school year. The kids​’​ math workbooks were easy to get, and I figured out how many lessons we need to do a week to finish the grade level by the end of the year. Tristan is a full grade level ahead already in math, which pretty much takes any stress off. He’s one of those lucky kids whose brain is simply wired to do math, and he literally does math in his head that I have to do on paper, sometimes faster than I do it on paper. In addition to the State-endorsed books, I found a whole math workbook online that is entirely focused on food and cooking – Phoebe is delighted with it! Anyone who loves cooking as much as she does is only too willing to multiply fractions to double or triple a recipe. Tristan likes it, too, and was happy the other day to fill out a party-planning worksheet listing the food items he will serve and calculating the total cost of the menu.

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Phoebe’s love of cooking inspired an integrated, multi-subject project for both kids: I pulled out all of my cookbooks, had both kids hunt for a recipe they wanted to try, took them to the grocery store with clipboards, had them find the ingredients and calculate the total cost, and brought them home to cook. Tristan, who loves fruit and is also very efficient at keeping things simple, chose a Finnish fruit smoothie that had only three ingredients. Phoebe made churros. Both dishes were delicious! Over the following week, the kids researched the countries of their recipes – Finland and Mexico – and then created travel brochures, complete with colorful photos and fancy fonts (with some help from me on formatting). Tristan and I were especially thrilled to learn about the 5:2 ratio of Fins to saunas and the Finnish tradition of “wife-carrying”, an annual obstacle course race in which men carry their wives slung from their shoulders and over their backs; we’re planning a post-pandemic trip just to see it. Phoebe’s brochure was bursting with color and featured chihuahuas, quinceañeras, and The Day of the Dead.

Language Arts are easy to cover. Both kids started writing novels about dragons this summer and are happy to work on them whenever given a chance, and they are both doing lots of writing in other subjects; spelling words and handwriting practice just spill out of these. Phoebe is reading the Wings of Fire series and Tristan is working his way through the Calvin Coconut books.

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For Social Studies, inspired by The 1619 Project, I’m reading out loud to the kids An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and we’re jumping around National Geographic’s Atlas of Indian Nations. I’m learning so much and want so badly for the kids to understand much earlier than I did how this country was born and how so much of what we’re seeing right now is related to its historical treatment of Native Americans and Blacks. As I read them the Introduction of Dunbar-Ortiz’s book the other day, the kids were both enthralled and horrified, and they kept drawing parallels between the treatment of Native Americans and the many conflicts among dragon tribes in the Wings of Fire series (which is full of metaphors for human atrocities and their associated psychological traumas). I think we’ll turn that into a writing project for Phoebe. Honestly, it could be a PhD: Genocide of the Leafwings, Enslavement of the Silkwings, and Appropriation of Rainwing Territory by Nightwings in Tui T Sutherland’s Wings of Fire as Metaphors for the Settlement and Development of the United States. Or, Psychological Trauma in Wings of Fire: PTSD in Dragonet Veteran Soldiers of the War of Sandwing Succession With a Focus on the Cases of Sora, Icicle, Carnelian, and Flame.

Geography is much more fun than I remember it being. I think we did very little of it outside of US states, really. The fifth grade CA content standards require the kids to memorize the US states on the map and learn their capitals. While I think that memorizing state capitals is a really stupid requirement, we’ve been having fun making a game of it (I’m almost there!), and learning the states has lead to all kinds of fun; I discovered a website (Seterra) that has dozens, maybe hundreds, of map quizzes. Tristan is obsessed – he learned the states in under a week and is on to Asia now. Phoebe is not quite as inspired by maps, but she likes the map games as well. Honestly, I don’t care if she doesn’t learn all the states. I can’t break 86% on the quiz myself because the sea of unidentifiable Midwestern states and all those tiny Eastern states are baffling. Who decided to make Vermont and New Hampshire upside down identicals of each other? But, I love that she’s picking up one or two every time she plays and I know she will develop a general and useful sense of the map from the exercise. Also, we hung a giant world map in the stairwell and are pasting colorful labels on places of interest that come up; of course, Hungary, Italy, Indonesia, Singapore, Finland, and Mexico are already labeled. Just arrived in the mail is a map to Native American language groups that we’ll hang next to it.

The kids requested to learn Bahasa Indonesia, so a few times a week we sit in the living room while I write words like anjing, kambing, suka, mau, lapar, and pergi on a whiteboard and the kids make up silly sentences about how much they love goats or about being hungry for lunch.

Science is enormously fun. I can find gobs of short lessons online, and I love finding things to teach that I know nothing about so I can learn something new; last week we dabbled in Earth Science and plate tectonics. I’m clueless about Astronomy, so that’s in our future plans, as well.

But of all, Biology is the best. We began our first day of homeschool with a drive to the coast to go tidepooling. Both kids were absolutely delighted at the hermit crabs and starfish and anemones and explosion of green and pink seaweeds. We made bar graphs of sea creatures we counted in one tide pool and came home to make tidepool art out of patterned scrapbook paper. On another outing, we hiked in our woods to look for owl pellets, hoping to identify mouse and vole species eaten by the owls. Alas, we didn’t find any pellets that day but were thrilled with the pile of deer and cow bones we collected. Treasures, to Tristan. We went to the zoo with clipboards and worksheets I had made and learned Linnaean taxonomy, performed animal observations, and make sketches of some critters. We dove into the human body with lessons so far on the digestive, circulatory, and respiratory systems. (Next: the immune system.) The digestive system inspired a comparative anatomy art project in which Tristan diagrammed the guts of a chicken in colored pencil, Phoebe cut and pasted out of patterned paper the (amazingly complicated!) digestive system of a goat, and I took on the human digestive system. We’ve started learning about ecosystems – Tristan went to the lowlands to focus on savanna while Phoebe climbed the Andean peaks to learn about cloud forest – and about keystone species found in those ecosystems. Tomorrow we’re heading (literally) to the coastal redwoods to talk about ecosystem roles and to find examples of producers, decomposers, scavengers, and consumers. And on Friday, when the tide chart tells us that low tide will be at the perfect time of 11am, we’ll hit the tidepools again to see if anything has changed in a month. There is simply no end to the excitement and fun of spinning one Science project off into another – I​’m really enjoying it.​

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Each day is intense and fun. Phoebe and Tristan sleep as long as they need to, eat breakfast, and then we start learning. We work hard, and then we’re done and, if it’s not smoky, we go ride the horses. We do not do school for six hours a day. Also, when the kids have had enough of one thing, we do another, or we’re simply done. I love the flexibility in timing, and the flexibility on what we chose to study. I love that I am learning, really for the first time, how my kids learn best, and what doesn’t work for them, how to make this the best possible experience for them. I love that I am figuring out how to help Phoebe rebuild the confidence in math she lost last year. She is a smart kid, but she gets frustrated and flustered when she doesn’t understand something right away, or when math is boring and she doesn’t understand why she needs to learn a particular thing. I was so excited last week when I figured out that if I turned the boring word problems about lengths of wood and the weight of coins into ones about goats or about cooking, she had no trouble doing them. I love Tristan’s eagerness to learn, and I love that I can always give him more when he wants more. And, best of all, Phoebe and Tristan are happy and like how we’re doing things.

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I don’t know what will happen next year. I have Tristan and Phoebe on the waitlists of two out-of-district schools where they may be able to go if school is back in-person. If not, I really don’t want them sitting on Zoom doing remote learning. They don’t want that either. I’m still hoping to start nursing school. We might need to hire someone to help them through homeschooling three days a week while I’m at school myself, if the schools are still doing distance learning.

Tomas. Poor Tomas. To be 14 and stuck at home with your mom and much younger siblings. He’s on Google Classroom five hours a day, five days a week. I feel sorry for him, but he’s doing great. He’s very self-motivated. Every day, he gets himself up, fed, showered (he has to make his hair perfect before class), and onto his computer. He pops downstairs for lunch, then back up to his room again. His grades are great. Best of all, every once in a while he asks me for help on Algebra, which I love. Soccer has been up and down, with local air quality frequently too poor to allow for outdoor sports, and with Santa Rosa fires making travel down there dangerous and often axing those practices. Once or twice ​a​ week he’ll have friends over, either Noah to play soccer or Elisha to strum guitars and make music in the outbuilding where Gary set up drums, a keyboard, and a sound system. Tomas isn’t overjoyed with the current situation, but he’s hanging in there. This weekend he’s rearranging his room (which is truly un-rearrangeable) to stir things up a bit in the place where he now spends most of his time. Ugh, poor kid.

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A sad note: a couple of weeks ago, Camp Okizu, the AMAZING, free, beautiful camp near Oroville for pediatric cancer patients and their siblings, burned to the ground along with the neighboring town of Berry Creek. All three of my kids love Okizu, and I really like the family camps I’ve gone to. All three were meant to go this past summer, but didn’t because Covid prevented the camps from happening. All three were sad to hear that it’s gone, and Tomas was stunned at the post-fire photos we saw in a CNN clip. Camp Okizu and Family House, the non-profit that works alongside UCSF to house families of pediatric patients, have the best fundraisers in the universe, so I’m sure they’ll rebuild. Nevertheless, it’s devastating that it went up in flames.

And finally, a bit of birthday news: last week, Tristan turned eight. He had a birthday cake with an 8-shaped snake on it. One of his best friends, Ora, and her family came over to celebrate, along with Noni, Gary’s sister Tina, the kids’ cousin Olivia, and her partner Abby. We prepared pizzas on a picnic table and passed them indoors to Gary to bake in our pizza oven. Tristan was thrilled with the whole thing, and I was enormously pleased that we managed to pull off a pandemic birthday party. Poor Phoebe and Tomas might not be so lucky, as February and March are positively dreary up here and outdoor birthdays will be tough. Of course, who knows what February and March will look like. “Expect the unexpected” is a particularly scary thought these days, as my range of “unexpected” is now considerably wider than it was seven months ago.

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More photos…

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Tuesday, September 1st

Woah. I’m alone at home, maybe for the first time since early March. It feels pretty good! Good enough that I’m tempted to nap here on our outdoor couch, in the shade under the walnut trees. Nap or write, write or nap…? Maybe write, then nap. There’s much to tell.

I last wrote in the Spring, as the kids and I were immersed in both the Humboldt fog and home-schooling. And now, Summer has ended, the kids are back in school, sort of, and the break was totally full of events and adventures and stories, despite the cancellation of absolutely everything.

The kids finished up school during the lockdown just fine, really. Tristan and Phoebe had lots of fun and creative take-home projects from school, and we organized many outdoor play dates, usually on the tarmac of our local tiny airport, to ensure that they didn’t suffer socially. Phoebe made her fourth grade honor roll for three trimesters of excellent work. Tomas went about his online schooling totally independently. Apparently his parents’ negligence in overseeing his work was no biggie – he was named salutatorian of his eight grade class. We attended a belated, mid-summer graduation at St Bernard’s, where the masked graduates sat far apart and the audience was seated in family clusters separated by lots of lawn. Tomas was presented awards for being one of the top students in four subjects. He, too, continued to see one of his best pals, Elisha, for regular biking and skateboarding dates up at the rarely-used Kneeland Airport. Only once, in all of these airport play dates, did the parents have to grab their lawn chairs, round up the kids, and sprint off the runway to allow a helicopter to land.

Summer was definitely not what we had planned, but…maybe it was even better? By early last Spring, the June-July-August calendar was chockablock with plans involving long drives all over California, different kids in different places for a week or two at a time, and even an international trip for Tomas. None of that happened, of course. Instead, the summer was filled with trips, dozens of them, once four days in a row, to our local swimming hole on the Mad River. It was delightful, and reminded me of all the summer days spent at Princeton’s Community Park Swimming Pool when I was a kid – but better, because it’s a river. We often met friends there, and usually took snacks or a lunch. Tristan and Phoebe became strong swimmers, paddling across the river or diving for toys that I’d toss into the water for them. Phoebe’s sweet little Quarter Horse filly came back from the trainer ready and willing and cooperative, and Phoebe, Tristan, and I did dozens of rides together, often with Tristan behind me on my mare. Phoebe and I signed up to ride a virtual Tevis cup, with the promise of t-shirts and stickers upon completion. The “real” Tevis cup is a 100-mile, one-day endurance race ridden every year in California. It won’t be run this year, thanks to corona, but has been replaced by the virtual one – 100 miles in 100 days. We’ve ridden about 30 so far, nice and slow, and it’s been a great way for both Phoebe and her young horse to gain experience.

Tomas often comes along on his mountain bike when we ride; he is not interested in horses at all, showing instead a growing interest in skateboards and bikes. He sometimes joined us at the river for our summer swims, but, in his new, teenage form, he seems to be suffering from the perception that his family is indescribably humiliating. He often declines to join, choosing instead to bike, or work on his bike trail, or train for soccer, or teach himself guitar and ukulele. He is incredibly self-driven. I definitely wasn’t like that at 14, and I’m sort of in awe of him.

Tomas’ summer also included some soccer in a surprise turn of events that really might have saved the vacation for him. Reflecting, I think, a general confusion about state mandates governing youth sports during the pandemic, while Tomas’ local soccer club was not practicing together all Spring and Summer, an elite competitive team in Santa Rosa got county-level permission to do so. Tomas tried out for the team (all in socially-distanced, no-contact tryouts), and was invited to join after just a couple of practices. Gary and I took turns driving him the four hours to practices; while Gary drove Tomas home late at night afterward, I took whichever kids I’d brought along to visit my parents for the night in San Francisco after each practice. The coach is truly excellent and Tomas loves the team. It’s not clear whether they will ever, any time soon, get permission to really play, but this is way better than nothing. Currently the practices in Santa Rosa are on hold while the air is choked with wildfire smoke, but by some stroke of luck Tomas’ local club is beginning socially-distanced practices in small cohorts today. So, we’ll patch things together and keep Tomas playing in one place or the other.

Summer also included a camping trip with two other families on the 6000-acre ranch of one of them. We slept in tents on the banks of the Van Duzen river, swam, drank delicious/deadly frozen margaritas, barbecued, and watched the gaggle of eight kids splash, look for marine fossils in the river bed, and build forts. On another weekend, I was invited to join the same ranching family in a round-up. They patiently tolerated my total lack of experience in Western riding (“Ya might want to use a longer rein on ‘er,” drawled my friend Lauren’s cowboy brother Jake), showed me how to tie a half hitch (“Let me show you how to do that right,” said Lauren’s mother as I sloppily wrapped the end of my lead rope around the saddle horn; we don’t even HAVE saddle horns in English riding and I don’t have the faintest idea how to tie anything to one of them!), and gave me simple jobs to do while they did the hard work of cutting calves out of the herd (“Toni,” they said, “why don’t you sit here on Princess Patches and make sure those cows don’t try to get back in through that gate to their calves” – the cowherding equivalent of playing right field). Despite my many deficiencies, which I attribute to having been raised on the East Coast, I had an absolute blast on the portly Princess Patches and am hoping I was useful enough to be invited back for another roundup. It was incredibly fun!

We had a series of visits over the summer, all involving tents and efforts to limit contact and shared air as much as possible. Chris and Agi brought the boys up in mid-June, after they were sufficiently nuts in their Ocean Beach apartment. Ori and Chris camped in our orchard while Agi and Felix slept in Tomas’ room. Tomas slept in another tent outside of the kitchen door. We ate, drank, caught up, and enjoyed seeing the kids play together. Felix, who is more or less a pandemic baby, was mildly horrified to learn that more people live on this planet than his parents, brother, American grandparents, and aunt. He seemed to adjust over the three days they were here.

In late July, my parents came, also for three days, also to sleep in a tent in the orchard. We, too, ate, drank, and chatted. We made a trip down to the river to swim together, and we had our first meal in a restaurant since March at Eureka’s Bayfront One, where hearty Humboldt County residents and their visitors can eat sushi (or pasta or burgers) on the waterfront in fog so thick you can slice it with a knife. Nagypapa did some electrical engineering with Tristan, Phoebe demonstrated her riding skills to her grandparents, and Tomas enjoyed their company in his quiet way.

Last week we had unexpected visitors. We had just returned from our camping trip on the Van Duzen when my friend Kinari called. [I’ve known Kinari for almost 20 years, overlapped with her in Indonesia for many years, and worked with her both in Indonesia and the US when I was associated with Health In Harmony. She is the doctor who founded the organization. Kinari now lives in the East Bay with her wife Stephanie and a young woman named Kahayag, who I knew as a child in Bogor. Kahayag’s parents worked with non-profits in Indonesia, and her mother had an office across the street from our house. Kahayag was stranded in the US when the pandemic began and thwarted her attempts to head to the Philippines, where she has family, and to Europe, where her parents now live. Kinari and Stephanie took her in.] Kinari was calling from Ukiah and sounded a bit desperate. She is pregnant, and four days earlier she, Stephanie, and Kahayag had fled the smoky East Bay for cleaner air when Kinari was having trouble breathing. The smoke, however, followed them to Ukiah, and they were looking for fresh air further north. “Come,” I said, and they showed up late that night. They, too, stayed in tents in the orchard. The weather was fabulous and we ate every meal outside. It was a wonderful time of catching up, getting to know Stephanie, and re-connecting with Kahayag. They weeded my garden, which I had all but abandoned to the monstrous pocket gophers that felled most of my vegetables, helped Gary buck hay (which means load it into a truck and bring it in from the field, for you deficient East Coasters out there), played with the kids, and generally gave us an absolutely fantastic close to our summer. Alas, we have our own fires burning nearby, and the smoke eventually settled on our mountain. After a week, our fire refugees moved on to camp on the farm of other friends in Corvallis, Oregon. They might be on the road a while, as the rains won’t really come until October. What incredibly crazy times. Over dinner one night with our evacuees, we began calling these times – times of pandemic, fire, racial unrest, election fears, climate crisis – the pre-apocalypse. Too over-the-top? I dunno.

Our pre-apocalyptic but very fun and full summer was punctuated by a sad, and also happy, and important event. About two weeks ago, Gary’s father passed away. He had become very ill, and there were many difficult weeks toward the end. But, the end itself was the best anyone could hope for, very peaceful and quiet and loving. Gary’s father spent his last few days in a hospice in Eureka, with French doors open to a beautiful, tall, shady redwood grove. He wasn’t in pain, and he was surrounded by family. Gary’s mom held his hand and talked to him about their marriage and their life together, and he smiled as she spoke. Gary, his sisters, and his mother were all with him when he passed. Gary has written a beautiful obituary that was published in our local Times Standard, our online Lost Coast Outpost, and Gary’s Facebook page.

The last month had some ups and downs for me. I both watched our local Covid counts carefully and waited anxiously for news from the kids’ schools. Would Eureka High, where Tomas is starting his Freshman year, open in person or go online? While I can’t imagine the disappointment of starting high school online, did I want Tomas mingling with 1200 other teenagers every day? Would the tiny Kneeland School, which stated from the get-go that they would be in-person, commit to teaching outdoors while the weather is still good? Although Tristan is strong and healthy now, I’ll never be totally at ease about what his immune system can handle. On top of his cancer history, he’s had pneumonia five or six times and always sounds scary-terrible when he has a cold. And nursing school – what would happen if the kids ended up at home mid-semester? After a lot of angst, I decided to defer nursing school for a year, which guarantees me a start in next Fall’s class (versus risking having to drop out mid-year this year, which would mean having to reapply and waiting another two or three years to start). I’ve been pretty sad about the delay, but I think it’s the right thing to do, and the decision to do so will ultimately mean that my stress level will be much lower during the upcoming months of uncertainty than otherwise.

Tomas’ high school ended up opting to start online. It’s unclear if that will change, as Humboldt’s corona numbers keep bopping up and down. Kneeland School is making an enormous effort to be outdoors as much as possible, and I’ve decided that Phoebe and Tristan can be there for all outdoor portions of the day. With nursing school set aside (and no job at Humboldt State, as I didn’t expect to be able to teach while in nursing school and didn’t put in for a lectureship), I’ll ferry the kids back and forth. Yesterday, the first day at Kneeland, was a big success: Phoebe got to stay all day, as her class never went indoors, and Tristan came home only for a short bit of the middle of the day. Both outdoor classrooms have shade canopies. Both dealt with new challenges, like papers blowing away in the wind and sun glare on computer screens…but honestly, these seem like small annoyances compared with the dangers of sharing air indoors. I’m so happy with and proud of our tiny school for making the effort. Who knows what the November rain and fog will mean, but, for now, we’re happy.

Shoot, I’m out of time for that nap!

More photos, of course…