At the same time that dear colleagues are headed back to school for in-service in 90 degree weather, Allen and I are hiking in Glacier National Park. Yesterday snow dusted the mountains, and today the high was in the 70s. Yesterday also brought excitement not found in LBCC hallways. We were taking pictures of a mountain goat along side the road when we spotted a grizzley bear ambling along the hillside. Just for a few moments we could see this magnificant wild creature, surrounded by high mountains.

I also conquered my fear of heights by hiking along the Highline Trail, not difficult in terms of length, only 1.5 miles, but the trail wound along a sheer cliff. One side was rock, the other straight down. Only perseverance and those little iron rings that "real" climbers use kept us going. But the views were magnificent. Altogether the hiking has been spectacular -- as I hope the picture shows.

So do I miss teaching yet? I'm still getting used to the reality of retirement, where each day is entirely open. Tomorrow we'll hike in the upper portion of Glacier National Park and then go on to Canada. I can report that very quickly when we're camping I have renewed appreciation for the small things in life -- like hot water, showers, and access to the internet! For now, I wish you all a very good school year, one filled with the very best of students, good colleagues, and short meetings! And I hope to see you on the road! Beth

August 27, 2007. Monday morning, 4 days before the U-haul arrives.

Some of my friends are having a hard time understanding why we are leaving such a beautiful and peaceful community to go on the road for some ambiguous time -- three to five years without a fixed plan, just with tent, car, and box of books -- and a laptop.

In ancient and medieval India, men who reached a certain age, sometime after 50, would, with the blessings of their family, assume a wanderer’s robes and begging bowl to seek enlightenment. Here in the United States, "Go West young man," was a compelling call to adventure for many young men and families too. Perhaps the California gold rush of the 1850s contributed, but many families packed up, eager to become landowners. And before a United States existed, religious persecution drove some out of Europe to the west, to the new land before it was the United States.

But this doesn’t exactly get at why I want to go. When I grew up, we moved often. I remember attending 6 different high schools and moving too many times as a younger child to count the grade schools I attended. We were not itinerant farmworkers, but divorce in the 1940s and 1950s, when divorce was unthinkable, led my Hollywood starlet mother to pack her two daughters up and move. Somehow she always made such moves an adventure. She showed us something beautiful, a window in a different place, a new toy, the adventure of crossing railroad tracks at dawn, our very own room. I felt comfortable in the world most of the time. So I grew up rather footloose and bookish. After all, books were portable.

When I met my husband 32 years ago, he dazzled me with tales of world travels. I was ready to go. India. South America. Nepal. China. All beckoned. We began with Mexico. Then our daughter Rachel came into our lives. And we did travel – Hawaii, the land of Jack Lord; California, from Los Angeles to San Francisco, urban Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, several times to Mexico, and then from the affluent suburbs of New Jersey to Ecuador where Rachel attended kindergarten with Quechuan and Spanish children and the only people from North America living in Otavalo, Ecuador, who were not missionaries, was our little family. Both of us felt once Rachel was old enough to go to school, she should have the experience of growing up in one place.

So we returned to life in the United States, I pursued my degree to teach, and we have lived a quiet, very happy life in Corvallis -- close to friends and family, and teaching first at Oregon State and then my teaching home for the last twenty three years -- Linn-Benton Community College. We still traveled in the summers, mostly camping and studying trips -- Alaska, Mexico, northern Canada above the Artic Circle, and I took a two-term sabbatical to seven countries in eight months (Egypt, Israel, Turkey, Greece, Italy, France and England). Rachel went on to become a musician, attending the University of Oregon, meeting and marrying a wonderful man, Nick. Our family expanded. And then I retired.

Teaching is, for me, an immersion experience. For the first time, with retirement, writing becomes a real possibility. Unstructured time without a schedule and so many places in this world to see and try to understand. So this first year we begin our travels, a new laptop, a crate of books, our tent and the United States.

Our destinations this first year spread from the great Southwest to the wilds of Maine, with month-long stops in Florida and New Orleans. I’m hoping for opportunities to visit far-flung family, for some volunteer work, and for every day a good place for reflecting, writing, hiking, and experiencing the wider world, looking at the connections between people, places, culture and history. This promises to be a grand adventure. Some friends will join us for parts of the way. Others will stay home. So it has always been. Make it a good day! Beth

This week I'm focused on taking my library down. I think there are about 3,000 books here, with concentrations in Latin American lit, African lit, the humanities, art, and history. Plus a giant pile of books I haven't read yet, everything from The Secret Life of Bees to The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. Right now I'm reading Sheri Tepper's Singer from the Sea, whose intrepid heroine somehow seems much more accessible than that in David Guterson's Our Lady of the Forest, but I haven't given up, being 2/3rd's of the way through.
Some books go into storage, some on the road, some to Rachel and Nick (and friends), some to the library for their book sale, and some reserved for the garage sale. All the process of letting go. I started with books first as I thought that would be harder than dishes.

Anyway, some have requested I post a schedule for our first trips . . . so here are the "fall" trips:

SEPTEMBER 2007. We start about Sept 3 in Spokane, going to Waterton (Canada) and Glacier National Park (Montana), then down to Yellowstone and the Tetons (Wyoming), Craters of the Moon National Monument (Idaho), Hell's Canyon (Oregon) all in a grand loop of camping back to Spokane by Sept 30, Rachel's birthday. This gives us a dry run on all the camping gear.

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2007 begins the Southwest tour, starting about October 2-3, Great Basin National Park (Nevada), then to Utah for the rest of the month of October. We'll explore five national parks -- Bryce, Zion, Capitol Reef, Arches and Canyonlands. We cross the border into Colorado to visit Mesa Verde National Park and then head south to New Mexico where we visit Aztec Ruins National Monument and possibly Chaco Culture National Park. Then we hit Four Corners and jump into Arizona for the month of November. Highlights will include visiting the Navajo National Monument and Park, the Grand Canyon, Walnut Canyon, and Wupatki (the petrified forest). We'll continue on to the Petrified Forest National Park, the Hubbel Trading Post, Boyce Thompson Arboretum in Phoenix, then to Casa Grande Ruins and finally Tucson for Thanksgiving with my sister, Wynn, Alfred and family. Visiting the Amerind Museum in Tucson will be a highlight as will Tombstone and Kartchner Caverns. Whew!

In December, we head north and east to Philadelphia by Dec. 15th with a few stops in Mexico and Texas, including, hopefully, a stop in our favorite restaurant in San Antonio, the fabled Biga on the Banks, my first five-start dining experience.

Somehow writing will fit in all this traveling and hiking and taking photos. At this point I'm excited about continuing the mermaid stories (5 stories more or less finished and 4 on the research/notes level). Every culture seems to have a mermaid story, and every time I find another link, another image, I'm intrigued by the connections, but wonder if I will find mermaids in the desert. Hi from Beth

Mermaid bridges or gates are found in seaports all over the world, marking a half way point between this world and the next, the world of the sea and myth. I found this mermaid "gate" at Paris, Paris in Las Vegas at a friend's wedding; it made me think of the old neighborhoods in Paris, with small, crooked, winding streets where a turn opens up to a small square with a fountain or a bakery or a mermaid gate.

Efforts to track down the inspiration for these two mermen led me to a bridge built in 1846, now torn down in St. Petersburg, and then to Karen Valentine's blog and her just published novel, The Old Mermaid's Inn, which looks like a fascinating read well grounded in Gloucester's seafaring history, Breton myth, and solid writing -- and self-published through her own press.

One comment that keeps surfacing over and over again in my readings about writers is how we must persevere. The workday begins with some sort of writing, some sort of commitment to time and focus, even if the writer has no real direction. The casting about, the writing itself is its own reward. And most writers confront doubt. Maybe not every day, but real doubt entertwined with a sense of accomplishment.

I just finished my first real draft of "Rusalka," a short story set in the pale of Russia, drawing from the myth of Rusalka and the pogroms of the late 19th Century. Rachel read it and said, "Mother, why are your stories so sad? Think about audience." So I've been pondering the reality of mermaids -- that they symbolize generally both destructive and seductive forces. For me, though, mermaids suggest sheer freedom, the luxury of "life" in the sea, its storms and its vastness. And I find the connection between mermaids and humans fascinating -- even in story form. Perhaps her request for a "happy" story leads me to confront this wall of starting the next story. I have no easy resolution. But finding a mermaid bridge in an old French quarter may be a beginning. Beth

Today's the first day of retirement, officially that is. We spent much of the morning getting camping gear ready, and then a nice chunk of time at the emergency room as Allen pulled down the Coleman cookstove on his head, earning six stitches around his right eye and a massive black eye. No damage directly to the eye is a good thing. I'm not sure yet we're leaving tomorrow morning as a result, so we'll wait and see.


I don't feel retired, but what a series of celebrations this last week has been, not the least being getting final grades in (a few student crises kept me reading until late Thursday night). Whew! And then we took down my office for the last 23 years, all the prints from Mexico, market scenes, Frida Khalo prints, the bird huipil from Lago Atitlan, Guatemala, a prayer rug from Iran, a set of three African dolls. The papers I gladly gifted to colleagues and most of these books went as well. Now my workspace shifts to a new PC laptop (Vista, ole!) and to my own writing projects.


The retirement party was a blast, highlighted by Peter's revision of a scene from Shakespeare's The Tempest, complete with Pers-pero casting spells over our future journeys. The performance was unforgettable for words and costume, friends and family came from everywhere -- even Pennsylania -- and Rachel and Nick played violin/viola with full orchestral sound. Ah! Am I now officially retired, saying goodbye to friends and colleagues? Many hugs and accolades and gifts, not the least being a wonderful scrapbook of photos taken through the years, created by Jane, or new writing journals that tuck into backpacks, and not the gold watch, but a trekker watch with a compass, so I don't get lost along the way.


The last surprise was being named Distinguished Faculty for Linn-Benton Community College, an annual award officially announced each September, but our LBCC president Rita Cavin came to our English Department holistic reading to honor Tammi's graduation -- and my nomination and selection. In September, we'll be travelling somewhere in the wilds of Canada. Yes, it all seems like a dream, a beautiful dream that to a seventeen year old girl was unattainable, but year by year and class by class, job by job, and with the help of many, somehow attained. Tomorrow -- on the road again, I hope! Beth

I generally read about 2 books a week. When school is very intense, the reading is lighter, true escape. I like international settings, sometimes history, mostly adventure/crime drama, but I'm interested in noticing how the plot pacing goes, whether the characters are fully developed, and is the resolution satisfying or what themes is the author working with. Every once in awhile a book comes along that is unforgettable.

So now it's Saturday morning, just after Finals week, and the book I can't forget is Chimamanda Adichie's Half of a Yellow Moon. This compelling story is set during the Biafran-Nigerian war and essentially tells the story of two Nigerian sisters and their experiences during the war. This book is not a fast read or an easy read. The writing is skillful and doesn't lay out all the ideas on the surface of the story. Relationships are developed through events, betrayals and kindnesses -- recreating our humanity in horrendous circumstance. Our television accustoms us to the images of violence and death, but still in a way we are distanced. This can't happen to us. In Half of a Yellow Moon, we become part of the family, shocked and betrayed and comforted in the unrelenting reality of a brutal war. The parallels to other wars we may be thinking of, or of colonial history lessons, provide another layer to this book.

Chimamanda Adichie is young, born in 1977, from Nigeria's newest generation of writers, and already acclaimed as a successor to Chinue Achibe, author of Things Fall Apart, the widely read book that traces the transition from tribal to colonial Africa. She certainly speaks to me.