It's your word against mine

Me: We should do Scrabble lunches every once in a while, now that we're in the same neck of the woods, and all.

P1: Scrabble lunches are an excellent idea, as soon as I remember I'll bring my board into my office. I also need to get a copy of the new dictionary next time I do an Amazon order, so I can drop "chillax" and "vlog" on your ass. :)

Okay.  It’s time I came clean with all of you.  I have a secret addiction.  It tends to manifest late at night, but it can sneak into other parts of my day, as well.  Sometimes it steals my focus.  Often, I try to resist, but I still succumb -- if only a little -- practically every day.  Terrible as it sounds, I’ve been addicted since the age of seven or eight… and it was my own father who led me down this path.

I’m talking, of course, about my Scrabble habit.

That’s right, Scrabble® -- that Hasbro board game with the little tiles that have letters and numbers on them.  More specifically, that game with one hundred tiles, including twelve E’s, nine A’s, nine I’s, eight O’s, four U’s, and (thankfully) only one Q.  Yes, I could tell you the frequencies of the other twenty letters (plus two blanks).  I could also tell you all their point values, and in which valid two-letter words each letter appears (fore or aft), as sanctioned by the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary.  I could offer up the words that include the Q without requiring the presence of a pesky U.  I could even tell you what “QAID” actually means, although that, of course, is irrelevant¹.

I realize that being addicted to Scrabble probably isn’t as damaging as being addicted to methamphetamines.  Nor is it as heart-rending as being addicted to love or as irritating as being addicted to Farmville.  Nonetheless, I do find myself wondering whether there’s any way I can honestly justify the time and mental energy I waste on shuffling around my letters looking for a way to get the K onto the triple letter score, or (having found the obvious bingo) checking to make sure there isn’t a better bingo.  Should I really have felt such a heady surge of glee last week when I decorated a triple-word-score with the word SHITLESS?

I started my obsession so early in life that I’m not entirely sure how I slipped into it.  My family had an old-school version of the game, with folding cardboard board and plastic tiles, and I suppose my parents played occasionally.  At some point, maybe on a rainy Saturday when my sister was old enough to reasonably participate in the game -- and I blatantly wasn’t -- we sat down to play as a foursome.  Someone must have told me the rules. Make words.  They have to be connected to one another. They have to be correctly spelled.  You can’t accidentally create additional combinations such as “GJ” or “ZULUQBASKETRY”.  Mommy and Daddy know way more words than you do.  So does Sarah.  You will lose.  Badly.

Looking back, I’m not sure why an activity that demanded skills I (like most seven-year-olds) patently lacked (a vast vocabulary, strong strategic powers, the ability to spell one’s way out of a paper bag, and a penchant for sitting still for more than fifteen seconds) held such immediate appeal to me.  My big sister soon lost interest in the game.  My mother, who was always busy doing more than her share of the chores and childcare, seemed happy to back out.  So I played with Daddy.  And played.  And played.

My father took the game seriously.  Dad takes ALL games seriously, including bridge, backyard croquet, and Fictionary.  Thus, even though he was taking on a fifty-pound scabby-kneed opponent, he played to win.  Without a doubt, the scores in our first head-to-head game – and in the next, and the next, and the one after that – were something like 295 to 112, or 347 to 86.  Peculiarly, I was unfazed. 

Although playing Scrabble with Dad was largely a silent experience, it could be an intensely emotional one.  Dad brooked very little of the kind of table-talk that gave any hint as to what letters we held.  However, he didn’t have even the vaguest approximation of a poker face – or a Scrabble face – and he knew it.  A bad draw from the bag left him tearing his Einstein-esque hair and muttering the sort of imprecations that greatly improved my stock of short, efficient, valid Scrabble plays.  A rack with bingo-potential set him madly shuffling.  When he plonked down something really superb, his joy was so palpable it practically skipped around the board singing show tunes. Dad was often so amused by weird or salacious combinations of tiles that he sat there giggling at his letters – and scribbled them down to show me later.

My father did (somewhat grudgingly) allow me free access to the dictionary, so that I could check my spelling – but only until I was old enough to occasionally (but increasingly) beat him.  From the start, I was sternly told that I was not permitted to go fishing through the dictionary, searching for likely possibilities.  Nor was I allowed to read the dictionary and memorize useful words in my free time.  That’s right -- my own parent forbade me to increase my vocabulary, because he didn’t want me to best him at a board game.  The fact that he needed to forbid such behavior at all highlights the fact that I was not only a hopelessly odd child, but also already an addict.

That was more than thirty years ago.  These days, no one can stop me from reading the dictionary, should I choose to do so. I don’t… mostly.  But the fifth edition came out last month.  I hear it includes DA. GI. PO. and TE². 

Me: If you manage to play "chillax" I'll give you an automatic win.  I guess I could remember to bring my board.  And my pathetic old dictionary

P1: Naw, your board gets plenty of use at your house, mine not so much. It'll be more useful here at work. And your pathetic old dictionary was a gift from me, as I recall, so a little more treasuring is perhaps in order!

Me: Right.  I'll go home and fondle the dictionary this evening, lovingly caressing ZA and QI in your honor.  I'm writing a blog post about Scrabble.  Can't believe it's taken me this long.

Like all good addicts, I tell myself that it’s No Big Deal.  I can quit.  I can stop whenever I want.  Right after this next move.  Or, you know, the end of this game…

There have been periods in my life when I’ve been forced by circumstances to go cold-turkey – such as when the U.S. Peace Corps sent me to Jamaica.  Jamaica, of course, is officially an English-speaking nation, but in the rural hills, where I was working with kids on school gardens, only patois was spoken, and even basic literacy was limited.  No one seemed likely to be familiar with common terms such as QWERTY³ and LEZ⁴.  I went through withdrawal.

I’m not sure how or why I saw a notice about a National Jamaican Scrabble Championship – it must have been when I was in Kingston on Peace Corps business – but, perhaps inevitably, I rode three different chicken-crowded buses to get to Spanishtown, the nearest site in which I could compete. I was eliminated in the second round, in a tie-breaker game against an elderly woman whose husband had been knocked out in round one.  They were a charming couple.  They were retired teachers.  They raised goats.  They invited me, the utterly-out-of-place white 22-year-old, to their home for a meal.  I felt mothered, and fathered, and delightfully Scrabbled.  It was wonderful.  But they lived too far away for regular games.

I found only one other Scrabble partner in my two and a half years overseas.  He also lived too far away, but I rode my bike to his village, anyhow, over (I seem to recall) several mountains.  He was Nigerian.  He was twenty-eight years old, dazzlingly brilliant, and spoke five languages better than I spoke one.  The Scrabble was great.

All this was pre-internet (or, for the quibblers among you, it was prior to the era in which I personally had useful access to the internet, in which “useful” is taken to mean “Scrabble”).  The Age of Information changed everything.  Back in the early 80’s, Dad and I thought we were pretty cool to upgrade to a Deluxe Edition, complete with a smooth-spinning plastic turntable.  In the ‘00s, any fool could play on a computer – or, for that matter, against a computer.

I went through a phase (centered around a desperate stage of PhD procrastination) when, yeah, I’ll admit it – I used the internet for the perverse pleasures that it offered. I could play with strangers – although I declined to do so.  I could play with androids!  Oh, what the heck, yes, yes! 

What can I say -- it was free.  It was at my fingertips.  It was also demoralizing.  Not so much because the computer was able to shoot moves at me with a speed that gloated, “Your clunky synapses can never match my microprocessors.”  Not so much because I almost always lost, either. After all, I’d chosen to play at the hardest possible setting; I could have set the darned program to “moron” and enjoyed victory after victory.  I just… well… I found that I kind of prefer the real thing.  You know – doing it with a human. 

What?  Real live interaction? It hardly seems possible that agonizing over whether to risk using up all ones vowels for an extra eight points, or obsessively seeking the elusive double-triple-word-score-bingo can be a stepping-stone toward any sort of functional social behavior.  And yet…sorting back through my life, I start to see a pattern.  I’m beginning to suspect that for decades, I’ve been using Scrabble not only as a delightful math-meets-English-meets-strategy decadent brain-stretcher, but also for exactly this nefarious and unspeakable purpose: human connection.

It started with Dad, of course.  My father has always been an intellectual to the core. Small-talk bores the crap out of him, and he doesn’t suffer fools gladly -- or even gracefully.  He was never one of those “let’s-toss-a-ball-around” dads, or a “let’s-work-on-a-building-project” dad.  He was more of a “let’s-analyze-the-political-situation-in-Iran” dad, which can be tough to connect with, if one happens to be four years old.  Thus, by the time I reached second or third grade, I was desperately eager to find some way to bond with Daddy.  And then I found it.  Brows furrowed and tiles clicking, we bonded. 

Decades later, I’m pretty sure that Scrabble was the excuse whereby I first invited over a guy (I’ll call him Player One) I’d met backstage among the other extras in Julius Caesar.  At least, I think this is the case, but there’s so much friendship under the bridge that – twelve years of hikes, bike rides, ski trips, and international family vacations later -- it’s hard to recall.  Still, our mutual addiction is undeniable.  Case in point: Player One was dubious as to his tolerance for babies, and openly displayed his trepidation when I told him, back in ’05, that I was incubating TWO such creatures.  Nonetheless, on more than one occasion he willingly sat across from me at a card table while I not only held twin babies, but actually nursed both squirming creatures simultaneously, locking them in place with my elbows while I shuffled my tiles.  Because – Scrabble.

I felt a bit better about the relative depths of my depravity when I read a book (borrowed from Player One, of course) entitled “Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players”.  These twitchy, basement-dwelling psychiatric cases were nothing at all like me, right?  Right? 

Meanwhile, my recurring Scrabble itch also made me reach out, six or seven years ago, to a buddy from junior high.  We hadn’t spoken in years – but there he was, shuffling his tiles on Facebook!  Well, technically, we still haven’t spoken in (even more) years, but these days he’s not only my most frequent Scrabble opponent, he’s also my most frequent mountain-time-insomniac online chat friend – and my blog editor. He knows way too much about everything, so I can’t talk smack about him. 

[You could talk smack about me, if it was funny – ed.]

I also play a game or two (or five, or ten) with three other friends – making (for the math challenged) six of us in total.  We’re a mixed bunch.  Some of us have used actual ulus and worn actual qiviut; some have merely used those words to dump awful racks.  Some see me so frequently that they could easily capture my every feature for a police sketch-artist.  Some would probably stride right past me on a crowded sidewalk, oblivious.  We’re all chronically nerdy, of course – that’s a tragic and unavoidable a side effect of being friends with me -- but our background, gender, education, income level, marital status, and occupations vary widely. (Note: friends are always more fun when their genders vary widely). What, then, do we all have in common? 

In answering that, I now realize, I may be able to shed a few more lumens on my own lifelong obsession.

Can I justify the time and energy I spend on a hobby so patently unproductive that it has resulted in my knowing which words can be prefixed with UN- and which with RE-?  Well… maybe.  Because maybe – just maybe – I’ve learned a few things from Scrabble that have nothing to do with how to spell the names of all the Greek and Hebrew letters.

Somewhere along the way, those frustrating little tiles taught me to play like it matters -- but to know in my heart that it doesn’t.  Some of my opponents beat me more often than others.  Some care more than others.  All of us, however, walk a middle ground between self-torturing-angst and don’t-give-a-damn.  We care enough to play with integrity.  We play to win.  We play wholeheartedly.  And yet, conversely, none of us care so much that we sulk, or mope, or give up, or cease to have fun, or put the game ahead of the friendship. All of us know that there’s a lot of luck involved.  Sometimes – in Scrabble, as in life -- the bag gives you UIOOOOA or VVCCJKB.  It sucks.  It’s not fair.  But you can’t take it personally. 

Dad never quite learned this lesson.  He and I don’t play anymore.  Perhaps it’s because now, for him -- suffering from Parkinson’s Disease -- online play would be just too complex a struggle.  But, in truth, I started beating him too often some years ago.  I memorized too much of the dictionary.  I could say that I ruined things, but… it wasn’t really me.

My Scrabble obsession taught me that other people might not understand all my passions -- and that’s okay.  I happily married a not-at-all Scrabble-inclined human being.  Spelling for pleasure makes as much sense to Jay as bashing his toes with a ballpeen hammer for pleasure.  Some of his interests are obtuse to me, too.  We don’t have to have a hive-mind to be a couple.  Indeed – it’s probably for the best that we don’t.

P1: For extra authenticity, make sure no word in the blog post is more than 7 letters long and contains more than 1 'z.' If you need a visual, I saved the scoresheet from that one game where I scored 541.

Me: Seriously?  Oh, by all means send it along.  I mean, a scan or whatever. Because, dork-tastic.

P1: [The next day] It turns out I actually only scored 540 in that game. And I was going to bring the scoresheet in today to scan but I think I left it on the kitchen table this morning. Also, might be worth noting that I had hoped nursing while playing would put you at a competitive disadvantage, but I don't think that worked out. :)

Over the years, Scrabble also taught me to revel in joint high scores, even though the game is not a collaborative one.  Among my cadre of wordsmith-friends, fabulous plays from an opponent are always greeted with genuine kudos, even if that opponent happens to be kicking ass.  MUFTI⁵.  Nice word!  FISHNET?  Hot damn!  CAZIQUE⁶?  You just won the Internet! Scrabble taught me that skill matters; knowledge matters; strategy matters; luck matters… but other things matter even more.  Sometimes the standard rules of politeness can be tossed aside (because SHITLESS⁷ is totally a valid word), but never the rules of kindness.

And, finally, there’s this: Scrabble taught me that no matter how many games you win or lose, ultimately you’re only really ever playing against yourself.  Ever.

¹QAID (Arabic: قائد‎ qāʾid) also spelled kaid or caïd: Master or leader. A title in the Norman kingdom of Sicily, applied to palatine officials and members of the curia, usually to those who were Muslims or converts from Islam. (Wikipedia)

²DA. GI. PO. and TE are the four new two-letter words added in the fifth edition of the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary.  They are defined, respectively, as “dad”, “a martial arts garment”, “a chamber pot”, and “the musical note ti”.

³QWERTY: The name of your keyboard layout.  Because, obviously. You knew that, right?

⁴LEZ: A female homosexual. This word achieved the dubious honor of being expurgated from the third edition of the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, along with other lovely terms such as BOOBIE, GOY, TURD, and JISM -- to great hue and cry amongst people even more obsessive and nerdy than myself.

⁵MUFTI: A mufti (Arabic: مفتي‎ muftī; Turkish: müftü) is an Islamic scholar who is an interpreter or expounder of Islamic law. (Wikipedia)

⁶CAZIQUE:  A chief or petty king among some tribes of Indians in America. (Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 1913)

⁷If you don’t know what SHITLESS means, I’m afraid I really can’t help you.

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?!”