Cluck, cluck.

I say goodbye to the two of them at the roundabout.  They pedal away from me, pigtails poking from beneath helmets, little twenty-inch tires churning.  They don’t look back.

As I run up the hill to West Ridge, the road’s shoulder looks narrower than I remember, and the slope seems steeper and longer.  Will they have to walk their bikes, when it’s time for them to find me?  What about the two busy roads they need to cross, both coming and going? Will they correctly calculate what lunches they can purchase with the money I have provided? Do they remember the combination to the bike lock?  How about the location of my new office? What if…

No. Stop. I open the glass doors of the International Arctic Research Center.  I jog up two flights of stairs and around the corner to an office decorated with a medley of artwork from grades K-3.  I fire up my computer.  The kids will buy their sandwiches at the café in Gulliver’s Books, I tell myself.  They will peruse a few used paperbacks.  They might count up their change and buy a caramel or two from the alluring box by the cash register.  And then, in two hours’ time, they’ll bike up the hill.  My little free-rangers will be just fine.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve read a lot of articles about “free range kids”.  The term -- and the movement -- was initiated by Lenore Skenazy, the dastardly mother who triggered an uproar when she allowed her nine-year-old to ride the New York City subway alone, and then admitted to it, in print!  In truth, Skenazy is a self-proclaimed “safety geek” who nonetheless espouses the notion that kids are  capable young individuals who should be allowed and expected, when ready, to do stuff on their own.

Now, my own kids are nine.  There are no subways here in Fairbanks, Alaska, but there are other ways for young poultry to spread their wings.  Simply going to the outhouse alone when the thermometer reads forty degrees below zero is a small-scale adventure in self-reliance.  The school bus stop is half a mile from our cabin in the woods. At a campground in Denali National Park last week, I put the twins and a young friend in charge of lighting and tending the fire, then wandered off; when I came back 45 minutes later, they’d not only refrained from setting themselves alight, they’d also baked me a perfect potato.

But Fairbanks isn’t just a place for Last Frontier Style independence; we can also conjure opportunities for retro nineteen-fifties free-ranging, both figuratively and literally.  A couple of weeks ago, a friend and I were interrupted in the middle of a carpentry project by a cheerful voice. “Hello! Can you let me know if you see a chicken?”

As a conversational opener, this had promise.  We paused in our industrious hammering of nails into a nascent shed. The speaker, casually friendly on the edge of the lawn, quickly introduced herself as my friend’s new neighbor.  She didn’t seem unduly worried about her missing bird.  “They go wherever they want.  They’re completely free-range.”

The phrase made me involuntarily glance over to where four girls, aged 8¹/₂, 9, 9, and almost 12, were busy constructing mysterious items out of scrap lumber.  One of my twins was really going to town with the cordless drill.  The eldest of the quartet was sweating away with a hand saw. 

The fact that the kids were all in view was unusual.  The pre-teen has been uncaged for some time.  The three younger ones, best buddies, are new to the mean streets – but over the course of the previous two weeks, they had been rampaging around the miniscule metropolis of downtown Fairbanks, undertaking such nefarious pursuits as riding their bikes to a local playground, touring historical buildings, and (horrifying as it may seem) checking out library books.

That’s right: my kids, left to their own devices, went and signed themselves up for the Summer Reading Program.   According to the Noel Wien Public Library Patron Conduct Policy: “…Conduct in the library building or on its premises which may lead to denial of library privileges includes… leaving a child under the age of 9 unattended in the library…" The twins were precisely nine years and five days old, and thus totally kosher, but their scofflaw friend was a mere eight years and seven months.  However, as the more diminutive of my kids noted with undisguised jealousy, “Everyone would totally think she’s nine.  Maybe even TEN!”  Right.  She’s practically ready for a fake I.D.  Or, like, a fake “Raven About Reading” children’s library card.  Don’t tell the authorities.

But, in truth, free-range parenting is not about making your kids into public nuisances, and it’s not about breaking rules; it’s about resisting the urge to make too many of them.  It’s the antithesis of helicopter parenting.   As such, it represents kick-back against what has become the new norm.  Skenazy was called, “The World’s Worst Mother” for letting a nine-year-old loose in New York for an hour – but there was no uproar whatsoever when my dad rode the NYC subway to school alone every day when he was just six.  There was no uproar when I myself was nine, and my mom hung a house key around my neck on a piece of yarn.

Up in my office, I wade through the slurry of emails swamping my inbox.  I battle a spreadsheet into submission.  I quickly rummage for my lunch in the break-room fridge, which is adorned with a discomfiting laminated note reminding everyone to refrain from storing scientific experiments therein.  What are the kids eating down at Gulliver’s? They love taking command of little wipe-off cards that allow them to micro-manage what kind of bread and fillings they prefer.  Toasted or not toasted?  Provolone or Cheddar?  With the shredded carrot?  The spinach?  Oh, the thrill of it!  They can take ten minutes to carefully plan a sandwich. 

Being in control turns the humdrum into an adventure. This piece of kid-psychology isn’t new-fangled.  Classic novels that I’ve passed on to my children over the past couple of years – books by Elizabeth Enright and Arthur Ransome – feature buccaneers as young as six joining older siblings in adult-free urban exploration, rural camping, and sailing.  It warms my heart to see my third-grader burying her nose in a 400-page moldy-looking volume that once belonged to my mother.  That the story in those pages involves bold and unapologetic free-range girls pretending to be Amazon pirates – well, that’s pure perfection.

But those were different times, the protest goes.  The world is so much more dangerous nowadays. Except that, in fact, it’s not.  I had to explain to my kids what “mumps” were, when that disease cropped up in one of the above stories.  I had to define “quarantine”, “coal gas”, “rationing”, and “illegal still”, and explain why the cars had no seat belts and why so many people seemed to be smoking. We’ve made the world a better, safer, kinder, and more equitable place in a lot of ways that matter.  Moreover, crime rates have actually decreased since I was the age my kids are now, when a buddy and I rampaged around our suburban neighborhood on bikes.  The odds have improved.  But, barraged with Bad News TV, Americans tend not to believe this.

Thinking about life choices as some kind of statistical gambling game might seem Machiavellian, especially when it comes to our sweet, darling children.  But if playing the probabilities like a savvy gambler is cold-hearted, it still beats the other option – playing the odds like a clueless sucker. Math matters.

Math.  Spreadsheets.  I glance at the clock.  What if someone sees the twins out there, and doesn’t share my views on parenting?  It doesn’t help that my nine-year-olds look younger than their years.  One of them is barely the size of the average first grader. What if someone thinks… No.  I glance resolutely at my emails again: Climate change scenarios planning…

Scenarios.  My job title and my research group both include the word, so it looms large in my life.  The concept doesn’t apply only to all the ways in which the ice caps might melt or the forests might burn.  The future – anyone’s future, everyone’s future – is a patchwork of possibilities.  Some are far more likely than others.  Some are desirable, some are benign, and some are so horrific that we want to believe that we can dial their risk down to absolute zero. 

Sometimes, we can come pretty darned close.  Don’t want your kid to end up polio-stricken in an iron lung?  Huzzah, there’s a handy-dandy vaccine for that!  But other choices carry heavier trade-offs.  For example, one of the most dangerous things that we Americans allow our kids to do is ride in cars.  We can greatly improve the odds by insisting on seat belts and those five-point harnesses that toddlers love so much.  But if we wanted to eradicate the risk, we’d have to keep the kids out of vehicles entirely, which… yeah.  Welcome to reality.

Oddly, what keeps a lot of kids under the whipping blades of helicopter parenting is not the non-negligible hazard of traffic, but the bogey-man of Stranger Danger. I’ve blogged before about kids talking to strangers. [http://latitude.nancyfresco.com/2012/09/stranger-than-fiction.html]  I’m in favor of it.   I know, I know: the over-hyped news of children-abducted-by-unknown-creeps-or-psychos is scary as hell.  It’s also, with an annual rate of approximately 1.25 per million in the US, mathematically insignificant. 

One thirty.  They’ll be leaving the book store now – if they remember what we agreed, and if they remember to look at their watches.  Two traffic lights.  One roundabout.  And those two awkward three-way intersections protected only by stop signs.  But they know enough to make the right choices.

The vast majority of the time, we are not helpless in the face of a cruel world, and neither are our kids.  It makes sense to talk to children about which potential adult behaviors (even among friends and family… no, given the statistics, ESPECIALLY among friends and family) are iffy, untrustworthy, or downright horrendous.  Wearing helmets and brightly colored clothing and assiduously following traffic rules reduces the risk associated with riding bikes.  It’s also important to teach kids to remain alert to the jack-holes* who are too busy texting to know how to drive. 

The tradeoffs for doing all of the above are… Being dorky?  Having helmet-hair?  I’m cool with that.  But some risk still exists.  The only way to reduce kids-on-bikes injuries to zero is to never let kids bike at all.  This is not a trade-off I’m willing to consider or negotiate. Nor am I willing to tell children to never speak to anyone they haven’t met before. 

The twins’ ninth birthday party occurred on a gloriously sunny day at a sprawling public park (which is named “Alaskaland” if you’ve been in Fairbanks since the previous millennium and “Pioneer Park” if you haven’t).  I interrupted the young revelers in their primary activity (spraying one another with muddy water from the drainage ditch that masquerades as a stream) to send them off on a somewhat quirky scavenger hunt.  Not only did this provide the lingering adults with the opportunity to covertly spike our lemonade, it also gave the kids a chance to accost totally unknown park-goers with odd requests.  “Can you please tell me who was President when you were nine?”  Go learn some history, children.  Also, please talk to strangers.

It’s only a mile or so from the book store to my office, but it’s all uphill.  It will take them a while on those six-geared bikes.  They will press the buttons and wait for the Walking Person.  They will look both ways for the drivers who think that “right turn on red” is one of the Ten Commandments.  Spreadsheets.  Back to my spreadsheets.  They will come back.

Ultimately, the woman with the missing poultry reported that all her free-rangers were accounted for.  Then she invited the human free-rangers to come and visit.  Apparently her birds like hugs.  “And at night, they just kind of pick a tree, and roost there.”  I couldn’t stop myself from picturing four young girls cozily roosting in some kind of homemade treehouse. How much would they love that?

Ping!  A message.  Quickly, I click.

“As I finished crossing the street on today's expedition to Pad Thai, I was accosted by… “

Yeah.  By my children.  

But, connotations of the word “accosted” notwithstanding, this is not a message from Social Services. Nor is it a message from the State Troopers, Fairbanks Memorial Hospital, or the FBI.  No, via the sweet serendipity of small-town life, the writer is not only my good friend, but also the husband of my shed-building-partner and father of the twins’ free-ranging, tool-using, library-rule-flouting co-conspirators. 

 “… What a pleasure it was to see those strong, independent, skillfully biking young women.”

Young women!  Ha.  On one hand, it seems like a stretch to describe my freckled, scabby-kneed pipsqueaks in such a manner.  On the other hand… growing up is incremental.  That’s the whole damned point, isn’t it? A grin spreads across my face. 

And then, impeccably timed, I hear an ebullient chirrup at my elbow. 

“Hi Mom! We’re here!”

Cluck.  Cluck.  Good little chicks.

 

*This term was coined by the eldest of the four children featured in this essay.  Her logic is that she cannot get in trouble for saying it, but it’s obvious that it’s a swearword.  I feel that it deserves to be popularized, particularly with connotations linked to use of technology, as in, “If that jack-hole doesn’t put down his phone, this is the last Panang curry I’m ever gonna buy him.”

Let's get dirty

“Mommy?  Is it ok if I get my pants muddy?”

I looked down at Molly.  She and her sister were splashing at the silty edge of the Chena River. There was mud oozing through the mint-green holes in her Crocs, mud caked in a ring around the bottom of her pants, and mud on her arms up to the elbow.  By normal standards, her question is a wee bit late in coming.  But I knew what she meant.  “Go for it,” I told her.

“Yes!” Molly let out a happy-kid noise, and just in case her twin didn’t hear the good news, passed it on:  “We can get dirty!” And both children immediately plunged waist-deep into the dense brown muck.

Part of me sighed inwardly.  Letting kids get dirty – really dirty, as dirty as they want to be -- is not without consequences.  Those consequences are not only logistical, but also social.  Filthy children earn odd looks from strangers – or, even worse, non-looks.  You know what I mean: that brief and scuttling glance that is followed by a fixed inability to see all things that are simply too vile and offensive to exist in polite society. 

This is no minor taboo.  Americans are clean folks.  A New York Times article from 2010 starts with the lead, “A daily shower is a deeply ingrained American habit. Most people would no sooner disclose they had not showered in days than admit infidelity.”

Well… gosh. 

Of course, my ruminations here are focused on my filthy children, and my propensity for allowing them to become even filthier, rather than on my own habits with regard to… um… showering. Thus, I don’t really need to confess as to the frequency with which I fully immerse myself in water (not every day – and my hair only once-a-weekish).  Nor do I need to divulge how often I wash my jeans (occasionally), my sheets (when I remember), my windows (only in extreme cases), or my computer keyboard (once per U. S. President).   And yet, I now realize that our culture is so squeamish about being “dirty” that we don’t necessarily clarify whether that means the same thing as being “covered with dirt”-- which my children, at that moment, indubitably were.

Dirt and dirtiness are related, of course – and yet also peculiarly unrelated.  As far as I can tell, there are several fundamentally different reasons why we wash things.  These include health (influenza is bad; cholera is really really bad); odor (Americans have declared a war on armpits); comfort (wow, these sheets feel nice without all the crumbs); visual aesthetics (no, Lizzy, you can’t save that ice cream on your chin for later); and a combination of social pressure and cultural habit (I can’t go out, I haven’t taken even taken a shower!)

Okay: health.  That’s easy.  I’m… wait for it… in favor of it! Yes!  Yay, health!  I get annual flu shots and the recommended number of physicals, and I vaccinate my kids. I try to keep everyone’s immune system in tip-top shape via consumption of blueberries, brown rice, and chard; plenty of sleep; and vigorous bike-riding, wrestling, and duck-duck-goose.   I encourage lots of hand-washing.  I avoid contact with bubonic plague-bearing fleas, and I generally eschew exchanging bodily fluids with strangers. 

Moreover, I’m an avid washer-off of the type of dirt correctly termed “super-nasty-chemicals-that-we-insist-on-spraying-on-stuff”.  These, like Yersinia pestis, aren’t usually visible.  Nonetheless, they come conveniently ready-applied to our fruit and pre-injected into our farm animals.  How handy!  Ironically, toxins (which to me seem like the ultimate in “dirtiness”) seem to show up in a lot of our cleaners, probably because anything designed to obliterate germs tends to be iffy for your own body, too.  I’m careful (but not always consistent, and certainly not obsessive, because who has the energy to be either consistent or obsessive?) about avoiding that kind of dirt – the kind that no one thinks of as “dirt”.  Heck, I don’t even use mosquito repellant with DEET in it.  Yes, that’s right.  I don’t use DEET.  And I live in Alaska.

Speaking of mosquitoes, let’s move on to the “comfort” argument.  Well, I’m in favor of comfort, too – but my views on what is delightfully cushy don’t always seem to mesh very well with other people’s opinions.  In my world, grimy sandals held together with duct tape are extraordinarily comfortable, as is this marginally stained t-shirt and this pair of shorts that are on their third or fourth or maybe seventh wearing since they last rolled around in the washing machine.  The smear of bike grease on my leg and the trace of ketchup on my elbow are probably comfortable, too given that I’ve forgotten about them.  Stiff new shoes and buttoned-up cleanliness?  Not so much.

Most adults seems to take it as a given that being wet or messy is intrinsically uncomfortable.  But I suspect that this is a learned discomfort, rather than an intrinsic one.  Small children make great bell-weathers, in that they are hyper-sensitive (read: scream like banshees) in response to the smallest boo-boo.  They will do their very best to reach their 117-decibel potential¹ if they are too cold, are stung by a bee, or are forced to wear an itchy sweater.  However, they don’t much care about being a little sweaty, or even dripping with sweat.  So long as they are not chilly, they also don’t mind being rain-damp, or full-on head-to-toe sloshing-with-every-movement rain-soaked.  Mud? Grime?  An upended jar of honey?   The more the better!  They will happily wiggle their hands into the Play-Doh, plunge their arms into the wet sand, and hurl their whole exhilarated bodies into a swamp. 

Which is, of course, exactly what my kids were doing on the banks of the flooded Chena.  We were, at that moment, eight miles from home, with only our trusty tandem Trail-a-Bike as transportation.  Whatever degree of filth and moisture the kids accumulated, they would be wearing, publicly, all across town.   I, of course, would be branded as The Mom Who Let Her Kids Go Out Like That.

Which bring us to the “social norms” argument for cleanliness.  I worry about this one, at least occasionally.  Given that “odor” is in some ways a sub-category of “respectability”, I do augment my sporadic shower regimen with frequent spot-washing of any stinky areas.  I do this mostly for the sensibilities of others, rather than for my own.   Katherine Ashenburg, author of a book entitled “The Dirt on Clean,” notes that the idea that human sweat is unutterably repugnant is both relatively new and relatively geographically localized.  Still, I wear deodorant.  I draw the line at anti-perspirant, though -- because what IS that stuff?  Does it fill your pores with Crazy Glue, or what?

I also worry, with regard to Not Being A Social Freak, that word is already out that if you drop off your innocent child for a playdate under my care, she will be returned with mud stains, grass stains, blueberry stains, and weird stains of unknown origin.  You might find, for example, that when she gets into your tidy family car, her shorts are soaking wet.  There may be twigs in her hair.  On one notable occasion, over the course of about five hours, I managed to transform two perfectly respectable and fully clothed girls, then aged six and ten, into feral shirtless creatures streaked with dirt, fermented wild-cranberry war-paint, and dried blood.

Yes, this can occur in the space of time that it takes you to enjoy a nice movie-date and shop for some new patio furniture – because, okay, I really am The Mom Who Lets Kids Do That. 

I am also The Mom Who Remembered Being That Kid.  There’s a correlation, I’m betting.  My own mother told me stories about her early childhood, which – despite being somewhat lacking in store-bought toys, due to the wallop Great Britain took in WWII – was apparently rich in entertainment.  Did you know that little sweet little English girls back in the 1940’s enjoyed chasing each other around idyllic and bucolic fields, hurling partially dried patties of cow poop?  Well, now you do.  Perhaps not surprisingly, my mother often happily allowed her own daughters to be Those Kids. 

When Heckscher Park redid all the earthworks around the tiny artificial lake (which was always crowded with ducks that had grown neurotically greedy and diarrheic from being fed PBJ crusts and the stale ends of Pop-Tarts) the temporary result was… mud.  We children marveled at the oodles of wonderful mud, replete with rivulets of water just begging to be dammed, redirected, and coaxed into a miniature mud-nirvana of lakes, ponds, streams, and, well… mud.  The moms – it was almost all moms at the playground, back in the Carter era – fell into two distinct camps regarding whether it was okay to enter this heavenly world.  I can’t have been more than about six at the time, but I remember the inner gratitude and relief of knowing that my own mother was in the correct camp.

Living on Long Island, we also spent a lot of summer hours on the beach.  Grownups seemed to use the beach as a place to read a book, and perhaps, if it got really hot, to take a sedate swim.  After swimming, they went through elaborate towel-rituals to avoid getting too sandy.  I, on the other hand, thought of the beach as a place to dig, splash, collect peculiar sea-treasures, and roll around until coated like a sugar-doughnut.   Every time I got home and took off my bathing suit, I discovered that I’d been harboring upwards of seventeen pounds of sand in there – and maybe a few yards of seaweed and a horseshoe crab or two.

As I got older, though, I recall feeling a vague pressure to start being cleaner. Big kids – especially big girls -- were supposed to start living by some of the grownup rules.  What were those rules?  Well, as Ashenburg puts it, “For the modern, middle-class North American, ‘clean’ means that you shower and apply deodorant each and every day without fail.”  Certainly, I knew that Big Girls were supposed to be tidier.  Neater.  Less grubby.  Not only were we supposed to be that way, we were supposed to feel that way.  We were supposed to think that dirt was ewww, gross.  Spiders, caterpillars, and competitive spitting of watermelon seeds² were all right out.

I never quite managed this transformation. (You’re all shocked.)  Oh, some things changed. I stopped wandering around with chocolate ice cream on my chin, and I tried not to pick my scabs or my nose in public. There may have even been a few teenage years during which I did not plunge myself bodily into hip-deep mud.  But I never fully internalized the correct repugnance the stuff our whole planet is made of – namely, dirt.

And then, thank goodness, I found summer employment doing trail repair – first, in high school, with the Student Conservation Association, and then, in college, with the Adirondack Mountain Club.  As a member of a trail crew, being dirty – really REALLY dirty – wasn’t just a matter of course, it was a matter of pride.  We were foul.  We were encrusted.  We were so dirty that we were banned from the Lake Placid Laundromat for fouling their washers, and had to take to presoaking our clothes in the lake.  My summers were, in short, delightful.

I couldn’t remain forever in a time-machine College Summer, but moving to Alaska was the next best thing.  Watching my kids cavort in the Chena, even knowing that we’d be sloshing our way home, I still felt like less of a pariah than I would have if we’d been about to board a Long Island Railway train full of people reading the New York Times and pretending not to be able to see me.

Of people like me, the Times has this to say: “Resist the urge to recoil at this swath of society: They may be on to something. Of late, researchers have discovered that just as the gut contains good bacteria that help it run more efficiently, so does our skin brim with beneficial germs that we might not want to wash down the drain.”

Good to know, New York Times.  My bacteria-friends and I get along pretty well.  Still, I’m feeling a bit sensitive about your use of the word “recoil”. 

Indeed, I’m guessing, based on the NYT take on the matter, that most Americans, as products of a media-driven profit-motivated “culture of clean that has prevailed at least since the 1940s” really might recoil – from me, from my kids, from the muddy bike ride across town that was now inevitable.  Their TVs have told them to scrub, to cleanse, to sanitize, to deodorize -- and the TV knows all.

Likewise, Ashenburg notes the effect of the power of advertising, and the inexorable pushing away of dirt that began around the time of WWII.  Her assessment adds yet another twist: “While ads for men told them they would not advance at the office without soap and deodorant, women fretted that no one would want to have sex with them unless their bodies were impeccably clean. No doubt that's why the second-most-frequent question I heard during the writing of this book — almost always from women — was a rhetorical ‘How could they bear to have sex with each other?’ In fact, there's no evidence that the birthrate ever fell because people were too smelly for copulation.”

Oh, heavens.  Nope, I’m not going into detail on that one.  But, seriously, America?  If you really, truly think that sex is a 100% neat, tidy, sanitary, non-sweaty, super-clean activity that looks like a Disney cartoon and smells like Scrubbing Bubbles… um, I hate to criticize, but I think you may be doing it wrong.

It’s not just sex I’m talking about here, America.  Even as I worry about how I may be judged, I know that telling me to stay squeaky clean all time – well, it seems like about as viable a notion as telling a goldfish to stay dry.  Gardening involves dirt.  Chopping firewood is not neat.  Hiking through a forest, canoeing down a river, and biking a trail are not sweat-free and fully sanitized activities.  Earth, soil, worms, dogs, joy, connection, exploration, LIFE – none of these things are anything like a blue Windex sheen on a polished surface.  And yes, America, having kids is not tidy, either.  Not at any stage in the process.

I glanced at my own kids, splashing with delight in the murky water – then looked again.  I was pretty sure I only had twins, but now there were three of them.  A round-faced little boy, slightly smaller than my two, had sprouted from nowhere and sidled in to join the fun.  As I watched, he gazed admiringly at his role models – my filthy, filthy, daughters.  As I watched, he precisely copied Molly’s mud-ball-forming technique.  As I watched, one of his legs sank gleefully knee-deep. 

“Tyler!  Tyler!³  From the park plaza above, I heard the distinct call of a mother duck who has lost her chick.  Her voice was not yet worried, but was thinking about being worried.

“He’s down here,” I called, not without some trepidation.  He’s down here, and I’ve ruined him.

Within seconds, both of Tyler’s parents ambled into view.  They looked at their kid.  I looked at them.  I saw, from the mom-person, a slight grimace.  But the dad was now watching Molly, who was bent over and digging rapidly and assuredly, like a puppy, making a fortification out of a huge heap of mud.  Then he looked at Lizzy, her pigtails flying half loose, her jeans sodden, and some unknown substance caked on one side of her face.  Finally, he glanced at me.  I wasn’t precisely IN the mud, but, then again, my sandals were neither clean nor dry. 

Tyler’s dad grinned enormously.  “He’s found friends,” he said.

¹ Roughly equivalent to a jackhammer or a jet at takeoff.

² What has happened to all the seeds, you zombie-fruit-designing agriculturalists?  I want the watermelon seeds back!

³ Not his real name.  I’m not trying to protect him; I just can’t remember his name.

Just Passing Through

Photo of our community living room, blatantly stolen from Scott Pauker's blog
(http://spokeandwords.com/hitching-prudhoe-bay-part-2/)

When the kids and I found the sheet of fresh cookies and the pan of homemade brownies that Scott Pauker had left on our kitchen counter, I felt a twinge of regret that he would not be there to share them with us. 

Not that our little community of nine adults and four kids would have any trouble gobbling down the treats without outside assistance.  We have a strong track-record in Postprandial Gooey Deliciousness Consumption.  It’s part of the rhythm of the evening, which starts when we hungrily gather to sniff out whatever the chef du jour has concocted, and ends when we drag unwilling children home for necessary slumber. 

Dinner itself is usually gratifyingly replete with dark leafy greens, organic legumes, and whole-graininess.  While dining – and in the comfortable after-supper half-hour of plate-scrubbing and leftover-wrapping – we all decompress from work, gripe about current events, share our very best in off-color humor, or (in the case of the eight-to-ten-year-old crowd) happily absorb the off-color humor while bouncing off the walls.  Finally, we settle down to the pleasures of Dessert Time.

For two evenings during the previous week as well as two evenings this week, Scott had made a nice addition to that tableau.  His sunburned grin radiated his total lack of concern at finding himself in the midst of some kind of weird intellectual hippie mini-commune.  They use an outhouse and make jokes about Oxford commas?  Yeah, I’m cool with that.  He filled us in on enticing tidbits of Seattle news and biking lore.  He shared amusing details of his Adventure Thus Far -- and we were fond of his penchant for washing more than his share of the dishes. 

But, of course, he couldn’t hang around Fairbanks, Alaska forever.  He had places to go…such as Tierra del Fuego.  On his bicycle.

“Will we ever see him again?” asked Molly. She was indirectly responsible for the hoard of baked stickiness that was now brightening our morning with the joys of anticipation; with the honed cunning on an almost-third-grader, she’d been the fastest responder when Scott had kindly asked what sort of foodstuffs he might contribute to the general well-being of Tamarack Knoll. 

“Probably not,” I admitted.  “But we can follow his adventures online, if you want.”

“Okay.”

Molly sounded interested rather than disappointed.  She’d liked Scott.  Still, at age eight, she already seems well-acquainted with the fact that people come and go.  Travelers don’t always return. 

She strapped her own bike helmet over her raincoat hood for the decidedly less epic ride to this week’s summer camp – Shakespearean acting for the eight-to-twelve set – and the subject shifted to the question of why Lizzy’s bike has a rear mud-guard, while her twin’s does not.  But, as we splashed our way up our dirt road, and as I offered pointers on what gear a bike ought to be in on a steep incline (“Try a lower one, kiddo… no, a LOWER one…”) I found myself mulling over how we relate to the transient people in our lives: The Travelers.

I’ve blogged previously about the importance of community; of friendships; of sense of place; of ties that are permanent (okay, fine, not permanent on an intergalactic scale, but you know what I mean); and of people who are SO AWESOME that one can pawn off one’s kids on them at short notice. These myriad bonds are at once as complex as calculus and as comfortable as couch cushions.  In our clock-watching, parking-lot-infested, glowing-screen-riddled lives, the time-and-connectedness algorithms are often tricky to compute, and the fabric of community needs a bit of darning, to say the least.  But where, in weaving that mathematical tapestry, do we place the person who is new, foreign, strange, unknown, and temporary?  What is the role of The Archetypal Traveler?

The Traveler shows up in plenty of stories, from the Odyssey on out.  He or she is the Gypsy, the Tinker, the Explorer, the Warrior, the Vagabond, and the Stranger all rolled into one.  She is the Fairy Godmother, who appears for just long enough to do her trick with the pumpkin.  He is that Brad Pitt character who runs off with all the money in Thelma and Louise – but that’s not why you remember the character, now is it?  He is Gandalf, who never quite seems able to stick around long enough for the entire adventure, due to mysteriously pressing business elsewhere. 

Scott, of course, is not an archetype; he’s a specific, cheerful, 37-year-old man from Seattle with muddy Spandex and a liberal-arts background.  But, for the purposes of my ruminations, he makes a splendid archetypal proxy. We’d never heard of him until a few weeks ago.  He came our way as the friend-of-friends-of-friends, in a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon kind of way. 

Jay mentioned to me, in a vague sort of way, that “some biker guy” might be passing through, like, sometime, and did I think the community would be okay with letting him crash in the guest room?  As the Communications Specialist of the family (a job that falls to me by default, not based on any useful skillset), I posed this question to whomever happened to be around, received some unperturbed “yes” responses, and promptly forgot all about it until my phone rang, showing an unknown out-of-state number. 

“You’re where?  Old Nenana?  Okey-doke, you should be here in about twenty minutes.” 

I went to find a set of sheets, some sandwich-fixings, and a towel with not too many holes in it.

The Traveler is, by definition, is on the move. He’s not merely someone you’ve never met before; he’s someone who has been places you’ve never been, and is going places you probably can’t even imagine: “You’ve never heard of the Millennium Falcon? … It’s the ship that made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs.”

Han Solo may not have known the difference between units of distance and units of time, but he was definitely going places: "Look, I ain't in this for your revolution, and I'm not in it for you, princess. I expect to be well paid. I'm in it for the money.” The traveler may or may not be one of the Good Guys in White Hats, but he’s interesting – and undeniably, oddly magnetic.

The Traveler doesn’t just crop up in literature (yes, of course Star Wars is literature!); he or she also seems to crop up with some regularity in our community.  Why?  Well, I’m not sure.  It might be because, given that there are five households in our group, we naturally receive five times the standard-issue number of guests.  It might be because Fairbanks is the kind of place where people frequently couch-surf – sometimes in a not-getting-off-this-couch-without-a-crowbar kind of way.  Or it might be because our community has an excellent reputation for not yet having slaughtered a single visitor in our ten-year history. 

Be that as it may, the vast majority of our guests have brightened and enlivened our lives.  Fairbanks is not a place that people “just pass through” unless they are up to something just a bit peculiar – such as a stint at Toolik Lake field station, measuring arctic shrubbery while enjoying the enthralling company of a few billion mosquitoes. We’ve housed researchers, families, relatives, and strangers.  We played host to the now-community-legend Fred, a retired African-American factory worker who came up to Alaska just to take part in the White Mountains 100 wilderness race.  I’d explain all about Fred, but this sign that the kids made says it all.  

Some of this enlivenment-via-house-guest, granted, involved a sort of after-the-fact “Type 2” fun.  The young woman who left a large, bloody, meaty item in our freezer, for example… well, she might have been lacking a few rudimentary social skills, but she left us with a most excellent story.*

Why are we drawn to The Traveler?  Why, knowing that we have no chance of developing a permanent bond, a reciprocal relationship, or even a real friendship, do we eagerly take in the traveler, make him a sandwich, and tell him to “make himself at home”?  Scott gave us wine, dishwashing, and brownies, but such generosity wasn’t expected or required.  What intangibles make The Traveler worthwhile?

What is The Traveler giving away for free?  Well, in the course of my 42 years, I have not only encountered The Traveler many times; I’ve also been The Traveler.  When I signed up to join the US Peace Corps at the ripe old age of 21, I had only the vaguest notion of what it might mean to go away and live in a less-developed foreign country for two years.  That is, I thought about many of the things I might have to give up: running water, electricity, spaghetti, Cadbury’s.  I didn’t understand quite so clearly what it might mean to give up familiarity, belonging, being at home.  I didn’t understand what it would be like to have to explain – weekly, daily, hourly – everything about myself, my worldview, my race, my nationality, my culture.

But there was no choice.  I was The Traveler.  I needed to describe snow to children who had never experienced temperatures below sixty Fahrenheit.  I needed to describe the American educational system to people who had struggled to get as far as seventh grade.  I, a lone white woman in a sea of resentment, needed to discuss racial tensions, the misunderstood plots of soap operas I’d never seen, the entire history of slavery, what New York City is like, the fact that I was NOT a Mormon missionary, class warfare, hurricanes, the CIA, school gardens, international trade, and English grammar.  My role as story-teller was non-negotiable.

I recall, with peculiar clarity, the day when I was seating at the bottom of a pit – destined to be a new school latrine -- with a shovel and crowbar.  The temperature was well over ninety.  It always was.  I was dripping.  But I was digging with fierce determination, in part because I knew that everyone had one eye on their own work, and one eye on me.  As I worked, a very old man, seated comfortably above-ground, turned to no one in particular and wheezed, with absolute conviction, that white girls sure can dig an outhouse.

If it hadn’t been clear before, it was clear then: the payment for my acceptance was not only my tales from afar, but also my role as a proxy for every American that everyone had never met.  I was The Traveler.   And being The Traveler is fascinating.  It’s exhilarating.  It’s also utterly exhausting – although not usually in the bone-weary sledge-hammer sense.  It’s draining socially, psychically, and emotionally. 

Scott passed through our humble not-a-commune on his way north to the official start of his bike ride at the Arctic Ocean.  He passed through again on his way south.  We saw him for a total of four evenings.  Since then, we’ve followed some of his adventures via Facebook and his blog.  “Oh, look, Scott made it to Whitehorse… Hey, did you read the piece Scott wrote about Skinny Dick’s Half-Way Inn?…” 

We won’t see him again.  The brownies are long gone.  The kids are not pining for the missing guest.  But when another Traveler gets in touch with us (by text or Facebook or pure-white carrier pigeon tossed upward from the slopes of a mythical volcano), we’ll welcome her.  We’ll make her a sandwich, and offer her a shower (replete with caveats about our limited water supply).  And we’ll ply her for stories, for mystery, for vicarious armchair-adventure.  She’ll understand the currency.  It’s one with a long history, and yet – despite the Age of Communication, despite supersonic speeds and instant messaging and a distinct lack of tinkers, magicians, Gypsies, and bundle-carrying train-hopping hobos in  a world grown small -- it still clings to shreds of its former value.

Community spells comfort, familiarity, home.  Without a community of friends and family, it’s easy to feel lost, ungrounded, purposeless.  The Traveler, on the other hand, symbolizes the mysterious, the unknown, the adventure you haven’t yet had, and the places you haven’t yet seen – but might.  Without The Traveler, the world can seem too small, too dull, too unchanging, too lacking in possibility. Thus, Community and Traveler are yin and yang.  We need one because we need the other.  And– at least at some time in our lives – we all need to take at least a brief turn at carrying the tales.  We probably won’t cover as many parsecs as Han Solo.  We probably won’t keep our pedals turning all the way from the Arctic Ocean to the tip of South America.  But we’ll at least gain some appreciation for those who do.

Happy trails, Scott.

* The young woman in question called us up about six months later and told us that she’d be swinging by to pick it up.  When we informed her that’s we’d thrown it away (not without some confusion and disgust), she was incensed.  “You threw away my bear heart?!”