Everything to Scale

“… and we’re here at this dot, in Machynlleth…” 

Oh.  So that’s how you pronounce it. 

The affable young man smiled down at my daughters, who were stomping across his gigantic floor-map of the United Kingdom in their small red and yellow rubber boots.  Sorry, their “Wellingtons”.

“This is where we started biking,” I told Molly and Lizzy, pointing.  “In Chepstow.”  After several days of being lulled by Welsh accents, my own sharp American vowels sounded grating. “And this,” I pointed again, “is where we’ll finish this bike route, in Holyhead.” 

Molly, brow furrowed, examined the dots on the map.  Chepstow.  Machynlleth.  Holyhead.  Then, looking delighted, she grinned up at the helpful employee of the Centre for Alternative Technology.  “Wales really isn’t very big!” she told him. 

Awkward, kid.  Awkward.  Really, there’s nothing a man likes more than having a nine-year-old guilelessly insult the size of his eensy-weensy little… nation.

“We’re from Alaska,” I mumbled, by way of explanation.  “It’s, um, large...”  Right.  And Americans are known for their tact and cultural astuteness.

The young man, however, did not appear to be offended – merely completely nonplussed.  “You’re from… Alaska?  And you’re… bicycling?  Across  Wales?”  The fact that two tiny little people with blonde plaits had arrived in Machynlleth (population 2,147) by bicycle was clearly unfathomable.  That all four of us were residents of Fairbanks was, quite literally, not on his map.  “Um… What brought you here?”

He was not the first Welshman to show a distinct lack of ego about his Bonsai-sized homeland. As one cheerful rural farmer put it, why would a family from Alaska want to visit “little old Wales”? 

All along our route, we were met with a similarly humble, perplexed, startled-but-welcoming attitude.  And I, in return, was humbled, startled, and perplexed.  Because… castles!  Expansive views across stolen-from-time picturesque farmland!  Ancient ruins! Unspoiled stone-built villages! An amazingly cool display on Alternative Technology! Tea and scones with heaps of jam and fresh clotted cream! Why WOULDN’T American tourists – including that peculiar breed, the Alaskan -- want to come to such an idyllic place?

When I say that the Welsh seemed modest about their nation, I don’t mean that they didn’t appear to be socially distinctive and culturally proud.  Red dragons fluttered from flagstaffs.  Jay crammed startling numbers of Welsh cakes into his handlebar bag.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that in many cozy cafés and pubs, the four of us were the only English-speakers amidst a boisterous barrage of words that my ears did not seem to be able to parse at all.   Indeed, the difficulty that English-speakers experience with the Welsh language seems to be, in itself, a source of pride.  Way back in the 1860s, residents of one small town decided to rename their home, “Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch”*. Why?  Well, the official answer is “for promotional purposes”, but quite possibly the real reason may be that the national sport of Wales involves gentle torment of those who cannot wrap their tonsils around Welsh consonants. 

This was brought home to me in the tiny Rhayader Information Centre. “Llanidloes”, said the grinning clerk. 

I stood there, bike helmet still fastened beneath my chin, trying to weasel my way out of attempting that “Ll” (let alone the “dl” that followed) while asking about camping options in the next town.  I pointed at its name on a map. 

The clerk’s eyes twinkled.  “Llanidloes,” he repeated. 

I tried.  I failed.  I tried again, laughing.  One of my small side-kicks, with the effortless linguistic flexibility of childhood, smiled back conspiratorially at the clerk.  “Llanidloes”, she said.  And then they both laughed at me -- but in the nicest possible way.

This mischievous whimsy, I discovered, wasn’t limited to place names.  At the Centre for Alternative Technology we didn’t just get to examine that excellent floor-map and ride a way-cool water-powered tram; we also learned, from the neatly bilingual signs labeling various electrical appliances, that the Welsh neologism for a microwave oven is a “popty ping”. 

Popty ping!  Could any small nation be more delightfully lacking in a Napoleon complex?  A country that is willing to show the whole world its popty ping obviously feels it has nothing to prove. 

And yet, strangely, the whole world didn’t seem to be there to appreciate all that Machynlleth had to offer.  When planning our bike trip, I imagined that we’d cross paths with lots of like-minded foreigners on similar ventures -- but we didn’t. True, we found English tourists somewhat ironically cluttering up the castles that were once sacked and besieged in bold defiance of unwanted dominion from the east.  Atop the delightfully precipitous turrets of Caernarfan, the small children ignoring warnings to “be careful” were chided in accents of London, Birmingham, Liverpool, or Leeds. The Welsh were invariably kind to these interlopers, yet seemed to have no expectation that the allure of their green hills might extend past the edge of the English Channel or the coast of the North Sea.

But… why not?  Not only were the nearby attractions appealing (did I mention castles?), but I was heartily impressed by the availability of numerous well-planned and well-marked bicycle routes.  These routes kept riders almost entirely on superbly bikeable byways, using not only mile upon mile of dedicated bike paths and greenways, but also Britain’s incredible tangle of miniscule B-roads.

From my memories of childhood vacations to visit family in the United Kingdom, I recall B-roads with a mixture of fondness and horror.  They are utterly perfect for biking precisely because they are almost impossible to drive.  My adventuresome and inquisitive mother, always eager to find the most interesting corners of everywhere, would sit in the passenger’s seat eagerly reading directions from a guidebook, while my father struggled to shift gears with the wrong hand, to “keep left” in a space too narrow to even have a “left”, and to restrict his swearing to a minimum. We were looking for stone circles left by ancient Celts, or six-thousand-year-old burial mounds in sheep paddocks.  Occasionally, we eventually found these things.  Always, we eventually found a creaking farm vehicle attempting to navigate the same B-road in the opposite direction.  The laws of physics have trouble with the B-roads of Britain. 

B-roads don’t really go anywhere – and therein lies their perfection.  On our over-laden bikes, with the kids gamely sweating behind us on tagalongs, we pedaled up hills -- only to immediately plunge down the other sides.  We meandered past field after field of placid neatly-shorn sheep and outsized late-summer lambs still optimistically attempting to nurse on mothers barely larger than themselves.  Ripe raspberries and maddeningly not-quite-ripe blackberries dangled within reach along the hedgerows.  In small pubs jostling with hungry farmers, an enormous baked potato – a “jacket potato” -- with baked beans and cheese and a fresh salad cost £2.75.  The kids told us that the local milk tasted happy, and I knew what they meant.  

One farmer shifted a dozen sheep to the next field to make room for our tent, and the beasts spent the evening spurning the perfectly good grass in their new spot in order to stare at us accusingly.  At another “campsite” – again, at which we were the only campers – our host noticed the twins admiring two squealing litters of little porkers.  He asked the kids if they’d like to help dole out the daily ration of stale bread, after he picked it up from his friend at the local bakery.  Yes, yes!  They would!

He was gone for a while, and the kids were wracked with fear that bedtime would arrive before pig-feeding time.  When the truck finally pulled back into the driveway, both girls went tearing across the grass in their nightwear. 

“Sorry I took so long,” the farmer said, before I could apologize for the over-familiarity of my offspring.  He told me about the lumber deal he’d been trying to work out with his brother, about the difficulties of local ordinances, and about his hopes for rebuilding some outbuildings.  The kids hurled crusts.  The piglets gobbled.  The sun set.  The world was small.

Alaska – and, indeed, much of America – is impressive on a grand scale.  Denali, recently reaffirmed in its proper and rightful Native name, is so imposing that it often commands our horizon from a hundred miles away.  The majesty of our vast landscape inspires me - but I am not always looking for majesty.

I thought I understood where Molly was coming from, when she told the nice young man with the map that his country was diminutive.  She wasn’t merely proud and pleased to see how far we’d come, in the four and a half days of our journey thus far, and how relatively small a distance we still had left to cover, in the remaining two-and-a-half days in this Welsh leg of it.  Her joy was also intrinsic to the smallness of Wales.  It was akin to her pleasure (and her sister’s) in building intricate little dioramas, racing Hot Wheels along miniature tracks, and sewing realistic snowpants for dolls.  There is something deeply pleasing about being able to experience the adventure and excitement of a whole new world on a scale that feels Lilliputian.

Yeah, it sounds appallingly patronizing to imply that an entire nation, language, and culture is “twee”.  I wouldn’t blame every single incredibly kindly Welsh person who offered help, advice, directions, or a cheerful wave to the family of stupidly lost and confused Americans for wanting to whack me with a partially dried cow-pat for sounding like such an arrogant bastard.  But “twee” is not really what I mean.  What I realized – and what the kids discovered too, I think – is that Wales was a complex, personal, immersive adventure perfectly proportioned for bicycles.  It was letting a calf suck on your fingers, admiring the enormous slugs, noticing that every single sheep says “baaa” in a distinctly different voice, and wondering why someone had carefully built an old microwave into a stone wall.  Popty ping! 

On our bicycles, we found that B-roads don’t really go anywhere – and in going nowhere, they go everywhere that matters. 

* The name means “Saint Mary’s Church in the Hollow of the White Hazel Near the Rapid Whirlpool of Llantysilio of the Red Cave”.  To hear it pronounced, go here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/Cy-Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch_%28Welsh_pronunciation%2C_recorded_17-05-2012%29.ogg

Pooping unicorns

This morning, a friend (who may or may not have been feeling a trace grouchy about the prevailing meteorological conditions) asked me for advice on how to be happy in the rain.  He didn’t specify, but I have my suspicions that he was referring to a very special subset of precipitational joy: biking in the rain. 

Upon receipt of his missive, I was lucky enough to spend the following hour in intense study of this very subject, during which time I mentally threw together a list of Super Helpful Advice.

Given the source, all items on this list should probably be assiduously and vigorously ignored.

1)      Thermoregulation. 
This is first because it’s the most important thing.  Really.
Being too cold is miserable.  Being a hot sack of homo-sapiens-raingear-sweat is also less than desirable.  Being soaking wet, on the other hand, doesn’t necessarily suck. 
Wait… you do occasionally shower, right?  Right?

2)      Fenders. 
See photographic evidence.  Being wet is okay, so long as the wetness is the dewy sky-sprinkling of pure and joyous rain-prisms.  The gritty road-poop of wheel-spun crud is less splendid, unless you’re an insanely cheerful five-year-old, specially bred for that purpose.

3)      Clothes that are not utterly gross when wet (see #1). 
If it’s too hot to pedal in full raingear, or any raingear at all, you should be wearing something minimalist that approximates swimwear: say, Teva sandals, a nylon tank top and lightweight nylon shorts with a liner.  Nah, you don’t need boxers.  And you definitely do not need panties.  No one of either gender ever needs panties, unless the word is used in an ironic context -- in which case you all need them. Biking across town in a stars and stripes bikini is also an acceptable strategy, and has been successfully road-tested by one of my family members.  I’m not divulging which one, but I trust your powers of imagination.

4)      Change of clothes for when you get there.
I’m making the bold assumption that “there” is somewhere that does not appreciate drippy, gritty, slightly steaming people.  A shower at your destination is a nice bonus, but if not, you too can be the person sponging off your children with paper towels in a public restroom.

5)      Raingear. 
Yeah, this is kind of far down the list.  Most people think of this first, not, like, fifth.  However, the truth is that raingear is hot and awkward and inevitably a bit leaky, in an up-the-sleeves-and –down-the-neck kind of way. It’s what you use when it’s too cold to bike in your swimwear, and too hot to be snowing (which is a different blog post; ask again in September).   It’s worth investing in a rain jacket that is lightweight, at least a bit breathable (see #1), fully waterproof, and long enough to cover your butt in the back (see #2).  As for rain pants, just get the bombproof cheap kind that make you look like some kind of obsessive fisherman.  Then when they get torn or covered in chain oil, you’ll just look like a more authentic obsessive fisherman.  My kids even bike in their colorful little rubber boots, with their home-sewed rainpants pulled down over the tops.  It won’t look cute when you do it.

6)      Umbrellas. 
If you are not biking, not hiking, and in fact not moving or using your hands in any way, and if you are located somewhere with no wind, no trees, and no other people around (or, at least, only people who like being repeatedly poked in the eye), then an umbrella might be extremely handy.  Or so I hear.  I do not own an umbrella.

So there you have it: Rainy Day Happiness! 

Of course, some of you may have noticed that this list is missing a crucial element, which we should probably call “Zero [0]*: Being batshit crazy.”  When biking in the rain, it is crucial to persuade yourself, your companions, your children, and all the people passing you in weatherproof vehicles, that you are having a seriously splendiferous time.  [My spell-checker just accepted “splendiferous”, which makes me think that I may be more sane than I thought I was.]

This morning, I told the kids that there would probably be a rainbow any minute, and they should watch for it.  And then a ginormous rainbow appeared.  Seriously.  I mean, I’d have a photo, if I were at all competent as a blogger.  Anyhow, I told them it had been pooped out by magical unicorns, and they lectured me about the electromagnetic spectrum, and then we all sang “Roy G. Biv”, by They Might Be Giants. 

Because, well, obviously.

* There are many ways in which being a Zero [0] makes me happy.  Results may vary. 

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.”