Jedi Dentistry

[Disclaimer:  This essay contains allusions that will be obtuse and irritating to members of the reading public who have not seen the original Star Wars, including Mom, Dad, and several residents of Tuvalu and Djibouti.]

“Have you been flossing their teeth?”

Dr. Pendegrast’s face was furrowed with kindly concern as she looked at the diminutive x-rays.

“Umm…” I felt parental guilt crashing around me like a tsunami. I help them brush, I mentally protested. Molly and Lizzy don’t eat Cocoa Puffs with Coke for breakfast and Gummy Bear sandwiches for lunch.  Ok, so there’s often blueberry cobbler or Heavenly Hash after dinner, but such items are an important part of the Sinful Food Group.  We brush right afterward.  But flossing?  I’m pretty sure I never flossed my own teeth until I was twenty. 

 “Well… um… no.”

I never got cavities in my baby teeth.  My kids, it seemed, were not so lucky. Dr. Pendergrast told me that not one, but BOTH twins need not one, but MORE than one filling.  My stomach knotted with worry.  Would the kids behave themselves?  Would they dread each visit?  Would they have nightmares about those huge robotic dental chairs? 

It all depended on whether my Jedi mind tricks were good enough to earn me a light saber. 

Even while I was wallowing in self-recrimination, I knew what I had to do.  I made the appointments, and I limbered up my acting muscles.  If I wanted to save my kids’ teeth from the Dark Side while maintaining sanity, harmony, and tranquility in our corner of the galaxy, I had one week to create a self-fulfilling prophesy of happy dentistry. 

As a novice parent, it took me a while to realize that small children resemble Imperial Storm Troopers – not just because they run around a lot, have extremely poor aim, and like silly costumes, but also because they may actually believe you when you tell them, “These are not the droids you’re looking for.”   It took me even longer to appreciate the full possibilities of approaching tricky situations with a combination of utter conviction and feigned disinterest. 

I don’t have the advantage of resembling Obi-Wan Kenobi – at least, not last time I checked.  (Mom and Dad, even my spell checker recognizes Obi-Wan).  Still, the utter conviction part is not too difficult when I actually am convinced.  This in known is non-parenting circles as “being truthful.”  I’m pretty sure this helped with a few useful traits the kids have picked up.  Like their parents, Molly and Lizzy enjoy hiking, running, biking, libraries, cool bugs, scruffy dogs, and weird scientific questions.  They are avid consumers of cucumbers, spinach, tofu, oat bran, and beets.

I’ve tried not to even imagine that my kids won’t love these things, because truthfulness alone is not enough.  Avoiding over-eagerness is important too.  Even toddlers are remarkably savvy to when they are being given a hard sell.  The “yummy, yummy, yummy” peas are likely to come flying back in Daddy or Mommy’s face, and the “awesome fabulous big-kid potty” may be shunned.  Thus, this can be tricky. Not thinking negative thoughts is like not looking at the elephant in the corner.  It’s like pretending you don’t notice that the AT-AT bearing down on you is four hundred times larger than you are.  I try to avoid saying things like “Come on, try this, it’s so fun/delicious/educational.”  Even if it is.

It’s even tougher when acting skills are required.  When it comes to the “cleaning up messes is fun” mind-trick, Jay and I have not made Yoda proud.  In fact, a few days ago I knew I’d failed dismally when a simple request to pick up a few toys caused Lizzy to start sobbing.  It was then that I noted that a) I hate cleaning up; b) I’m completely inconsistent about it and c) I present it to the kids as if it were a punishment akin to being locked out at night on the ice-planet Hoth.  Clearly I’m a moron, because at preschool, Lizzy happily dances around picking up toys and singing the cleanup song with all the other little people.

And now I was facing a new test.  This particular case seemed like a tall order for a novice Jedi knight.  Unfortunately, I do not associate dentistry with rainbows, sunsets, ocean breezes, and the wafting notes of dulcimers. But I didn’t have any choice about it.  The key to pulling off the mind trick, I reasoned, isn’t to hope for success, but to ASSUME it. “Do.  Or do not. There is no try.”  Ok, fine.  I don’t know if Yoda ever had a root canal, but if he did, I’m sure he approached it with muppetty stoicism. 

With one week to obsess over the subject, I realized that I needed to work on my conviction.  In order to do so, it would help to draw from the truth.  What’s comforting, fun, and charming about fillings?  Luckily, I had a lot to work with.  The dental office that our family visits is elegant, graceful, and welcoming, with lots of sunlight streaming through arched windows, state-of-the-art equipment, and such comfortable chairs that napping during a cleaning seems like a realistic possibility.  Dr. Pendergrast is about as gentle, competent, and grandmotherly as anyone could possibly wish.  Her hygienists are all cheerful, friendly, and solicitous. The receptionist treats me like a friend. And to top it off, there’s a box of toys at the end of the hall for pint-sized patients. But… it’s still a dentist’s office. 

Gathering the Force around me, I set out to convince Molly and Lizzy that dental hygienists are as charming as Elmo and Dora, that Novocain is an exciting adventure in numbness, and that Dr. Pendergrast’s box of plastic trinket-prizes is as exciting as Fort Knox – all without seeming to care too much. 

I stayed attuned for every sneaky opportunity. “You’re right, I think those are baby twins in that stroller!”  Molly and Lizzy are always on the lookout for other litters of siblings.  “Hey, you know who else has twins?  One of Dr. Pendergrast’s hygienists!  Her twins are big kids, almost seven.” To five-year-olds, kids aged six through eight are the gold standard of coolness.

“Alex told you the dentist gives shots?”  Uh-oh.  Beware of the peer group.  “He probably didn’t understand about Novocain.  I bet you’ll understand.”  The kids like the idea that they are scientists with Nobel Laureate potential. “See, feelings in your body are communicated by cells called nerves. Novocain blocks the nerves, so you can’t feel anything, kind of like when your foot falls asleep.  Can you imagine your tongue falling asleep?  It’s pretty funny.  It thort of makth you talk like thith for a while.” This last part was deemed so hilarious that I had to elaborate on it for five minutes, like an inebriated cartoon duck.

And speaking of ducks…“Hmmm…. I don’t think we have any more toys to float in the rain barrel, but did you see all those rubber duckies in the dentist’s prize box?  We could collect a whole family of them!”

“I think we’re all out of chapstick.  Darn.” Luckily, Molly and Lizzy don’t yet have any idea about the relative costs of items such as duckies, chapstick, and diamond tiaras.  Either that, or they are resigned to the fact that Mommy is too cheap to buy them anything. “Oh, but remember that little tube of special chapstick Daddy got last time he visited Dr. Pendergrast?”  Daddy’s chapstick is so flabbergastingly awesome it almost caused a riot a month or so ago.  “If we’re really lucky, she might have some for you, too.”

On the fateful day, thirty minutes before the Hour of Reckoning, Lizzy bounded up to me at the preschool gate. “We get to go to the dentist today!” she chirped.

The kids’ preschool teacher gave me a bemused look as I hustled Molly and Lizzy out the gate, each trailing the inevitable fragile-yet-sticky art projects behind her.  “I wish I were that enthusiastic about the dentist,” she murmured.

Given my kids’ excitement, I had obviously already passed the first hurdle.  Now I would find out whether the mind trick held, when tested. 

When we were called in from the waiting room, I perched on a stool between two partitioned-off cubes, while the twins were each dwarfed by a massive examining chair. I feigned cheery calm.  I feigned fascination as the shiny little dental tools were introduced.

The staff knew what they were doing.  They kept the giant needles out of the kids’ line of sight like conjurers. They maintained cheerful patter, and slathered on the praise.  They were, in short, as charming to small children as Elmo and Dora – and infinitely less irritating to adults.  Novocain was kind of cool – as all new sensations are, when you’re five.  The drill was never actually called a drill.  The chapstick materialized, in appealingly miniature tubes and exotic flavors.  And the prizes?  Well, who WOULDN’T be thrilled by a rubber duckie wearing a bowler hat? 

Slowly, very slowly, I released my pent-up breath.

The receptionist heaped congratulatory words on all three of us on our way out the door.  The kids, still slurring their words through numb lips, were excitedly discussing which prizes they’d choose on our next visit, the following week.  And although I was still harboring guilt about the inadequacy of my previous cavity-prevention techniques, I felt like I’d blown up an enemy battle station. 

I’d succeeded.  On the other hand, success in one venue makes me question everything else, and bemoan lost opportunities.  Why can’t I – using my newfound powers and my imaginary light-saber -- convince my kids to put away their stuffed animals, pipe cleaners, and special rocks?  Why can’t I cure myself of my addiction to chocolate?  Why doesn’t everyone rush to save the planet when I blather on about renewable energy, organic produce, and waste reduction?

And what about my future as a parent?  Sure, I can pull of a Jedi mind trick on a couple of five-year-olds, but I suspect the twins’ credulity will have diminished sharply a decade from now. Obviously I need a lot of work honing my skills – because the Empire always strikes back.

In the Spirit

Lizzy and Molly on the Granite Tors trail, 2009

 

Adventure:

1. an exciting or very unusual experience.

2. a bold, usually risky undertaking; hazardous action of uncertain outcome.

“This week, instead of writing down the titles of the books you’ve read, we want you to tell us about adventures you’ve had.”

The librarian in the Berry Room is smiling beatifically at Molly and Lizzy.  I look at them expectantly, too.  Adventure!  The connotations are irresistible.  I know I love adventure.  I know I seek it out.  And yet, dictionary definition notwithstanding, I’m not sure I know precisely what the word means.  What counts?  What qualifies?  I can’t help but wonder about the quantity of fractured, ungrammatical sagas this friendly lady is likely to hear between Monday and Friday from eager young participants in the “One World -- Many Stories” summer reading program. I also can’t help but wonder how many of these thousand recitations will truly fulfill the promise of “adventure”. 

Molly is half-clinging to my leg, but she’s enticed by both the appeal of the question and the charisma of the questioner.   She ventures an answer: “There was a big big storm and we had to hide under the picnic table roof thing.”

Heavy rain?  I mentally scoff that the thunderstorm last weekend at the Manley Hot Springs campground was not in any way a real adventure.  I have to work to restrain myself from editorializing.  However, the librarian gives every indication of genuine interest. Thankfully, given the nature of her job, she seems to like little kids – not just in a cute-at-a-safe-distance way, but in the sense of enjoying long circuitous conversations with people who start in the middle of a story and leave out 83% of the salient details.  Her enthusiasm encourages my shy children to wax loquacious, in a non-linear manner.

“We ran a real race,” Lizzy offers.  “The big kids winned.  They were almost teenagers.”

If the nice book lady wants to listen, Molly and Lizzy have lots more to relate.  While they do so, I ruminate.

“We went to Seattle.  Steve and Manish have a dog called Billy.”

Adventure.  A few years ago, pre-kids, I debated the nuances of this single word with Jay and my friends Tom and Justin for the entire course of a hike around the Granite Tors trail.  The route is a 15-mile loop with steep ascents, dramatic vistas, impressive rock formations, and sucking bogs, so we had plenty of time to talk.  Besides, for me it felt like the perfect locale to discuss the subject. 

“Daddy’s bike had two flat tires, but we didn’t mind because we played with the tickle grass.”

The trail and I already had a bit of history.  Jay lured me to the Tors as our first real date, telling me he knew a “nice afternoon hike”.  On that occasion, the loop took us from noon to six p.m., so he maintains that his description was precisely accurate.  I didn’t argue the point at the time.  I like long hikes, and I didn’t want to look like a wimp in front of this sweet blue-eyed boy I’d recently met.  As I sweated and squelched my way over rocks, tussocks, and logs, trying not to suck air as I chatted with my date, I savored the feeling of adventure.

“The long-ago miners were litterbugs!  They left cans.  And a stove, right up at the top!”

Several years later, strolling along with Jay, Tom, and Justin, with a well-practiced knowledge of the trail and nothing to prove, the hike didn’t feel particularly adventuresome.  But when I said this, Justin disagreed.  For one thing, he’d never been to the Tors before, and didn’t hike nearly as frequently as I did.  For another, he’d been brainwashed by his own propaganda.  That summer, he was earning extra cash by working for the Northern Alaska Tour Company.  Justin’s job entailed driving a bus full of vacationers up to the Arctic Circle, stopping at the few available snack stops and gift shops along the long gravel road that wends its way toward the oil fields of the North Slope.  He was expected to narrate local lore to keep his customers engaged and amused.  He was also expected to persuade his passengers that the trip was thrilling, and even a bit risky.  Every one of the pre-packaged trips offered by NATC was billed as an “adventure.” 

“On the way down the mountain, we were a mushing team, but only walking, because Anna didn’t want to run.”

Jay and Tom pooh-poohed Justin’s perspective.  Retired bankers from Cleveland, little old ladies from Wichita, and sock-and-sandal-wearing empty-nesters from Jersey City, each toting a camera and plunking down a credit card for a Coldfoot T-shirt, cannot claim to be having an adventure.  True adventure, they argued, requires novelty.  It implies a visceral thrill, a flutter of excitement, and a sense of risk.

“I liked Ireland.  There were snails.”

In the debate between Jay and Tom and Justin, I wavered.  I had to admit that being hauled up the Haul Road didn’t sound terribly stimulating or jeopardy-filled, but maybe for people who had never seen the Alaska pipeline, Arctic tundra, or the Yukon River, the trip qualified.  My friend the bus driver had a point about context mattering.  I knew the Tors could be an adventure.  I felt peeved when Tom and Jay mocked meager exploits, but I wasn’t sure what was making me so defensive, and I never entirely took Justin’s side in the argument, either. 

“We have our own sled.  Togiak and Polar are old, but Remus is bouncy.” 

If the Tors were novel and thrilling on my first visit because I’d found a date who shared my proclivity for muddy hiking boots, they were novel and thrilling on my second trip there for slightly different reasons.  In October of 1999, several months into our relationship, Jay and I hiked the trail again.  We were hit by an unexpected white-out, with snow heavy enough to obscure our tracks within minutes of our making them.  We tried to short-cut off the ridge by hugging the side of the hill slope.  We failed.  In the darkness of an early-winter afternoon, we peered at our compass and soggy map and realized we had dropped into a valley – the wrong valley.  We were a daunting distance from the car.  We weren’t lost, precisely, but the slog out through the rapidly piling white stuff was long.  Very long.  By the time we staggered back to the parking lot, dug out the vehicle, and inched our way back to town on snow-clogged roads, it was 5 a.m.  We scarfed down spaghetti for breakfast.  Despite my exhaustion and my shame at having made such a silly wrong turn, I was buoyed by the feeling of adventure.

“Daddy and I raced the butterflies.  One of them beated us.”

After that hike with Tom and Justin, Jay and I didn’t hike the Tors for four years.  During that time, our universe shifted.  When we hit the trail again in 2009, it took us not one afternoon, but two days to complete the 15 miles.  For about five of those miles, two three-year-olds hopped and meandered around our feet.  For the other ten miles, our packs were heavy.  It was our first attempt at real backpacking with the kids.  We were trying out our ultra-light gear, which under the circumstances didn’t feel all that light.  We had to be prepared to protect our precious progeny against voracious mosquitoes, hot sun, and wind-driven 40-degree rain.  We had to bring bedtime stories, stuffed animals, sippy cups, and footie pajamas.  We were trusting the kids not to whine, not to rebel, and not to wet their pants.  We were seeing the trail through their eyes, as they exclaimed over tree fungus and stopped to worship puddles, ladybugs, and cloudberries.  For them, life is still full of challenge, risk, and excitement. 

“The boat loop is six miles!”

Now, standing in the Berry Room, listening with embarrassed amusement to a breathless recitation of mundane events, I finally realize why I am so ungenerous in my willingness to grant the title of “adventure” to the kids’ latest bike ride, or a bus trip taken by tourists, or Justin’s ascent of the Tors.  It’s not that I can’t accept that these experiences should be judged subjectively.  It’s simply that I’m worried, and perversely jealous.  I’ve already seen lots of thunderstorms.  I didn’t wait until the age of sixty-seven to first glimpse a black bear, a caribou, or a photogenic “Arctic Circle” sign.  I love adventure – I thrive on adventure -- and I’m secretly afraid that a lot of my adventures have already been trumped by experience, and therefore “used up.” 

“We’re digging a big hole, for treasure, or maybe dinosaur bones.”

But of course, that’s completely ridiculous.  Merely identifying my own hang-up is a relief, because as soon as the thought forms, I can logically – laughingly, self-mockingly -- quash it.  Who do I think I am, anyhow?  Sacagawea? Sir Francis Drake?  I haven’t even used up all the easy-to-reach adventures, let alone the ones that require a bit more planning, expensive plane tickets, and new outfits.  I haven’t bicycled to the Arctic Ocean and taken a bracing dip amidst the sea ice.  I haven’t gone sea kayaking in Prince William Sound.  I haven’t ridden in a hot air balloon.  I haven’t even seen the Grand Canyon, for heaven’s sake. The world is a large and fabulously complex place, with billions of inhabitants, thousands of ecosystems, and entire continents I have yet to visit.  I can no more use up all the possible adventures than I can speak Yoruba.  Haven’t I been paying attention to the theme of the summer reading program?  One World – Many Stories.  Or many adventures, as the case may be. 

“We biked all the way to Pioneer Park.”

Mollified and cheered, I try to rescue the Berry Room librarian.  I smile at her apologetically as I redirect Molly and Lizzy toward the picture books.  “We go biking and hiking kind of a lot,” I say, in an attempt to excuse all the unnecessary detail still being over-shared.

“Mommy and Daddy don’t have to carry us any more.  Not like when we were little.”

The librarian still seems interested.  She tells me she’s been doing a bit of hiking recently, too.  Where are we planning on going this summer?

“We get to have juice when we go hiking.  And pudding every day!”

“Well, we want to see how far the kids can manage completely under their own steam this year,” I say. “We were thinking of doing Pinnell, and maybe Kesugi, but we’ll probably start with the Tors.”

The librarian looks surprised, but she’s all smiles.  “Wow…well, good luck!  I hiked the Granite Tors last weekend.  It’s a beautiful trail, but I’m still sore.”  She laughs.  “It was a real adventure.”

She’s right, of course.  I know that now.  Every story she hears this week – even if involves mini-golf or feeding ducks – will be a genuine adventure.  So was her two-day version of that “nice afternoon hike”.  And this time, I don’t begrudge her.  I’m pretty sure hiking the Tors with two five-year-olds will offer up some novelty, and some excitement.  But even if it doesn’t, it will still be fun – and we will still have plenty to look forward to.  There are, after all, an almost infinite number and flavor of adventures still beckoning.

Buzz!

“How come it’s okay to kill mosquitoes, Mommy?”

 

“Because I enjoy it.” 

That was not the answer I actually gave to my five-year-old interrogator; I pleaded self-defense.  But it was, I hate to admit, the first reply that sprang to mind.  I like to think I am reasonably compassionate.  At the very least, I’ve always assumed that I’m not a degenerate reprobate who gets a thrill from slaughter.  But when it comes to members of the Aedes genus, my self-image is on shaky ground.  Sure, I may be able to justify all my swatting with the popular “I don’t like being eaten alive” plea – especially given my immense personal magnetism to small creatures who think of me as dinner.  What I can’t justify is the gratification that accompanies each crushed corpse.  

But they’re just insects you protest. Where’s the dilemma?  Granted, my little “hobby” doesn’t place me in the league of The Silence of the Lambs.  But as my kids like to remind me -- with the kind of moral authority that only the Christopher Robin age group can muster -- it’s not ok to mistreat any creature, regardless of its humble phylum, class, or order.  Molly and Lizzy’s preschool has a terrarium full of stick-insects carefully fed on lettuce leaves. A child caught tearing the wings off butterflies or crushing ladybugs is likely to be given a stern lecture, or even professional counseling.  

“Mosquitoes are important because they pollinate the blueberries,” Lizzy tells me, “and they’re food for dragonflies and spiders.”  

Maybe I shouldn’t have read them Charlotte’s Web.  Nonetheless, I abet the educational experience, and tell the kids that only the girl mosquitoes bite.  (The boys sip nectar, presumably while singing kumbaya). A quick Google search reveals that those hungry Aedes ladies can find us by following our CO₂ upstream from 100 feet away.  Once they get close, they are also attracted to body heat and body scent.  My scent in particular, apparently. Since I doubt that I am a particularly heavy breather, I have to assume that I excel in the other two categories. I am indeed a very warm person.  This is handy in Alaska in January, but not so handy in June.  All that hot blood rushing around in my surface capillaries, coupled with my apparently irremovable Nancy-human-stink, makes me irresistible.  While they are the insect world’s forsaken, I am their goddess.  The biting-insect handbook has my scent-print on the cover. While others are idly chatting at barbecues, I am swatting.

Still, shouldn’t I be able to employ a mode of defense other than killing? 

I’ve tried.  I really have.  Raw cloves of garlic didn’t help me much, but gave me a fascinating coating on my tongue.  What about limiting how much carbon dioxide I release?  For brief stops such as shoe-tying or peeing, waiting to exhale really does seem to help – or maybe it’s just that the lack of oxygen makes me delusional. Have you ever tried to change a bike tire while holding your breath and trying not to sweat?  Desperate people do desperate things.  I’ve used every possible type of repellant, including DEET, even though it’s a neurotoxin that eats holes in clothes.  The relatively new Picaridin earned a somewhat better toxicity rating from the EPA.  It doesn’t smell, and seems to work pretty well, so I squirt it with a liberal hand, but I’m still not exactly thrilled. How does “Toxicity Category III for acute oral, acute dermal and primary eye irritation” translate to my own personal equation: two kids who like to be outside as much as possible, and who have a 110% likelihood of touching their treated skin and then picking up a sandwich?  But the only other option seems to be kids covered in red welts.  My children, alas, seem to have inherited my tastiness.  This afternoon, at the dentist, Lizzy cheerfully told two hygienists, “You know, I have really a lot of mosquito bites on my buttocks.” 

One of my preferred ways of avoiding mosquitoes and black flies is movement.  In mid-summer in the Arctic, tiny, whining, swarming creatures can drive whole herds of caribou to galloping, thundering, near-insanity. The caribou are right: run!  Run like hell! 

“How fast can mosquitoes, fly, exactly?” I mused to a friend a few days ago.  We were idling at a playground, leaning on the primary-colored tubes and bars. 

“One and a half miles per hour.”  The answer came, instantaneously and unexpectedly, not from my fellow-adult, but from a snub-nosed child who had just popped his head out of a plastic tunnel.  He looked about eight.  He didn’t wait for confirmation or thanks before disappearing down the slide, his face earnest, his hair sticking up from static electricity.  I liked his answer.  It set the bar easily within reach.  Even preschoolers ought to be able to move that fast.

Not that I was able to keep up the pace when I was the age the twins are now.  One of my first memories of back-woods hiking was climbing a mountain called Ampersand, a nice rocky little peak whose only drawback was a rather boggy stretch near the trailhead.  Given that it was 1977, I believe I was wearing plaid bell-bottoms, meaning that my legs, thankfully, were covered.  However, my hair was pulled up into two crooked pigtails.  By that evening, the welts were so thick on my neck that I looked as if I had a combination of mumps and goiter.  I couldn’t move my head in any direction.  My mother, consumed by parental guilt that I only now understand, insisted that on subsequent hikes that summer I wear a peculiar headdress made from an old t-shirt soaked in citronella.  In retrospect, I think it was then -- perhaps befuddled by the intense, pseudo-lemony fumes, perhaps slightly derailed by the unfairness of seeing the rest of the family breeze along with only a few nibbles – that my mosquito-squashing began to take on a darker edge. 

Weirdly, though, I decided that I liked hiking.  I was thrilled by hiking.  It was just the biting insects I despised.  Over the next dozen years, I begged to hike more peaks, in Maine, Vermont, upstate New York, and other vermin-infested locales.  By the time I reached college, I was well seasoned in the woods.  I was also already a bit too avid in my “self-defense.”  On a hike with my friend Steve, an idealistic 18-year-old vegetarian and pacifist like myself, the inevitable whining buzz surrounded me within minutes.  “Gotcha!” I crowed, grabbing the air one-handed and opening my palm to reveal the millimeter-wide carnage.  Steve stared at me in consternation.  

“What do you mean, you don’t kill mosquitoes?”  My rant was defensive and slightly hysterical. “Everybody does it,” I argued.  Mosquitoes whine in your ears, swarm your exposed flesh, and sink their greedy proboscises deep into your skin in order to drink your blood.  

Steve shrugged.  “They don’t really bite me,” he said.

I watched him, eagle-eyed and incredulous.  It was true.  While there was a dense swarm of hungry blood-suckers around me at all times, the only ones around him seemed to be strays from my clan.  They didn’t bother to land on him. Such people exist.  They really do.  And they make me somewhat wild-eyed and twitchy, even if they happen to me among my bestest friends.

For reasons that seem to defy logic, that summer I eagerly signed up to earn minimum wage hauling rocks and logs around in the swamps of the Adirondacks. These splendid old Eastern mountains boast bumper crops of not just one genus of biting insects, but several. The Simulium -- also known as black flies or white socks – have the charming habit of amassing by the thousands and going for eyes, ears, and nostrils.  Horse flies, the Tabanidae, sound like little jets around your ears and bite like actual horses.  Ceratopogonidae, a.k.a. no-see-ums… well, the name says it all.  Every single species in each genus loves me. 

By definition, trail crew involved spending long hours in some of the muddiest sections of swamp.  We wore head nets, long sleeves, and long pants.  Black flies crept in around the neck-cinches.  They swarmed as at lunch time, to the point where we’d duck back under our nets between bites.  We were all roughly 17-22 years old, and prone to bravado and basic idiocy.  It was with this crowd that insect-killing crept beyond the realm of satisfying necessity and became a cross between an episode of Survivor and a team sport.  Can’t make a peanut butter sandwich without accidentally including flies?  Why not embrace it by waving the sticky bread in the air a few times, to garner a more generous layer of little black dots?  Is a horsefly driving you over the brink?  Try lassoing it to keep as a pet.  This latter task was done by a guy called Jim, using strands of my very long hair, carefully tied into a tiny slipknot at the end.  I want to say I wasn’t amused by the results -- but I’d be lying.

One of the most memorable nights of my life – because my perverse brain clings more tightly to the abhorrent than to the merely pleasant – was spent with six or eight trail crew friends.  We were young, we were stupidish, and we thought it would be a fine idea to go camping on a hot clear night without a tent.  It wasn’t just a bad idea – it was a Very Bad Idea.  In this case, although I might have been the most popular target, I was certainly not the only one to suffer.  We were besieged. We were mobbed.  We were reduced to swollen, pestilent, sniveling insomnia in the unforgiving dark of 3 a.m.  It was much too warm to zip our sleeping bags over our heads, and it was much too buggy to do anything else.  We sweated, we scratched, we swore, and some point in the predawn hours, rising above the constant buzzing whine in my ears, I heard a 19-year-old man, completely without irony or sarcasm, sobbing for his mother.

It occurs to me that all these memories may explain a lot.  Mosquitoes drive caribou mad… and they drive humans to infantile blubbering… and they have been waging a personal vendetta against me in a variety of scenic, damp locales for the better part of four decades.  When an insect-magnet such as myself lives in a cabin nestled in an idyllic 80 acres of festering bog in the heart of Alaska, is it so surprising that something might end up a little off-kilter, psychologically?  Something like taking visceral pleasure from crushing the tiny defenseless bodies of mosquitoes?

“How come it’s okay to kill mosquitoes, Mommy?”

Sure, I can fall back on self-defense as my plea before the jury.  This excuse seems to pass muster with most people.  But just in case, maybe I should also give an insanity plea a try. I’ll plea-bargain, too:  If I can retain my less-than-savory proclivities toward joyful mosquito carnage, I promise I will never fry ants with a magnifying glass.  I won’t revive the horsefly lassoing tradition. I’ll be willing and even eager to let caterpillars crawl up my arms while my offspring admire their fuzziness.  And I will never, ever eat any more peanut-butter-and-black-fly sandwiches.  Not even one.

It's not a Water Closet

                “At our school,” announced Lizzy, soon after starting preschool at the age of three, “we have flush potties.”

As opposed, she meant, to normal bathroom accommodations, such as the plywood privy that we have at home.

My amusement was mixed with foreboding.  Is this yet another way in which Jay and I are warping our kids? 

I questioned a lot of things as a small child, but indoor plumbing was not one of them.  In suburban New York, there was only one sanctioned type of receptacle for bodily functions, and it was made of porcelain and full of water.  Flush a handle, and whoosh, there it went, into the mysterious world of hidden pipes.  Walls were full of pipes.  The ground was full of pipes.  On the rare occasions when a wall was stripped open or a cesspool unearthed, the resulting view was a fascinating, illicit anomaly.  For the most part, all that water, paper, and poop just… disappeared.

I imagine my daughter, full-grown --but still a trace acned or gangly-- horrifying her brand-new college roommates with her lack of bathroom etiquette.  “You grew up using an outhouse?” they squeal, backing away slightly. 

What if we really aren’t being fair to our twins?  As Lizzy and Molly get older and more demanding, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to turn a cold shoulder to pleas that “all the other kids” have a Playstation/cell phone/Posche/etc.  But “all the other kids have toilets!” sounds a bit more sympathy-evoking – even if, at least in our neighborhood, it isn’t true. 

I tell myself that my children are certainly not deprived.  They have so many toys that I spend half the day tripping over them.  We have electricity.  We have a nice cozy wood-pellet stove.  We have a car and a truck.  We have a microwave, a popcorn popper, a bread machine, and more computers than seems reasonable in our cabin.  We have wireless internet, for heaven’s sake.  Still, my friends and family outside Alaska always get hung up on the outhouse.

It’s just not normal, in twenty-first century America, to dig a hole in the icy ground, put a plywood shack on top, and use it as a toilet.  “Don’t you get… um… cold?”  The combination of forty below zero and incomplete pants-coverage throws people off.   In fact, it’s not too chilly -- the seat is Styrofoam, we wear parkas in the winter, and it’s not as if we hang out there for hours.   But I get the feeling that this is just a superficial concern, anyhow.  The real unspoken consensus seems to be that the whole concept is just… icky. 

But why?  We don’t leap down into the pit and wallow around.  The bygone Shakespearian era of dumping chamber pots out of windows to mix with the horse turds in the gutter didn’t work out too well for all those cholera and dysentery victims, but we don’t live in a densely populated area, and we have a self-contained pit.  Its contents are not as toxic as depleted uranium, or airplane glue, or Windex.  It isn’t even particularly smelly, since the permanently frozen ground keeps everything nicely chilled.  Sure, you can look down and see a lot of old poop, but it’s unlikely to leap out and bite you. 

The major difference, as far as I can tell, is not really convenience or sanitation, but awareness.  A lot of American houses have cesspools.  I grew up in a house with one.  A cesspool is bigger than an outhouse, and involves mixing waste with a lot of clean drinking water, but it does effectively the same thing, namely stick the poop underground a couple of dozen feet from your front door.  But if everything goes into a cesspool, you can pretend it is gone, gone gone.  You can pretend it never really existed.  On the other hand, if it’s in an outhouse, it’s still down there.  Anyone with a flashlight a too much spare time can take a good look at it. 

“Does it have an automatic flush?”  Now five years old, Lizzy is shrinking back from the toilet at the Pagoda restaurant, preemptively holding her hands over her ears.  The tiny motion sensor light on the wall is blinking at her like Hal the homicidal robot.

“It won’t flush until you’re done,” Molly declares bravely, but she has her hands over her ears, too, and she does not appear to be volunteering to go first. 

Motion sensors are remarkably poor at detecting the presence or absence of 40-pound bathroom users, meaning that such toilets often flush with unexpected vehemence while a startled child is precariously balanced above the vortex, legs dangling, mid-pee.  I don’t enjoy having to cram myself into a bathroom stall with my kids in order to hold one hand over the watchful red light, but sometimes it’s a necessary parental duty, like assisting with flossing.  Are other people’s offspring scared of restaurant bathrooms?  Again I worry that my kids aren’t normal.

And yet, another part of me protests: why do we need robotic toilets, anyhow?  Sure, the flush handle might not be terribly sanitary, but our next action is going to be hand washing anyhow.  It seems to me that it’s less about cleanliness than denial. We Americans like to pretend we don’t poop.  We like to pretend we don’t even think about pooping.  Auto-flushers help fulfill this cultural ideal.  Not only does everything disappear in a loud whoosh, but it does so without us even having to participate!

The kids are already being taught at preschool (the one with the flush toilets) that “potty talk” is not acceptable.  Ok, I’ll admit that this is necessary.   I don’t want my kids to go around calling people “doo-doo head.”  But it never occurred to them to do so until the subject was made taboo.  Molly and Lizzy haven’t yet become squeamish and phobic about excrement.  They still like to admire and comment upon their own output, especially if they’ve eaten a large amount of spinach, or carrots, or – best of all – beets.  The results can be shockingly --- dare I say gorgeously – purple. 

I suppose they’ll soon learn that this sort of thing doesn’t make for acceptable chit-chat at a potluck.  I guess I’ll have to help teach them this taboo, as a normal cultural progression, and as a way of lessening the impact of their integration in to the “real” world.

Molly is already more savvy to social cues than her sister is.  By age eighteen, she’ll probably have the good sense to adopt a new standard to fit a new situation.  Perhaps she’ll manage to make growing up in a cabin in Fairbanks Alaska seem fascinating rather than repugnant.  Maybe she’ll roll her eyes – she’s already got the preschool version of this perfected – and tell everyone that she couldn’t wait to get away from home. 

Maybe it will be the truth.  For now, though, the kids still think that the presence of a flush potty merits a news announcement.  And I don’t mind.

Spinning Our Wheels

The leaves have finally appeared, the sun is shining, Hot Licks Ice Cream is scooping the Nanook Nosh into waffle cones, and I suddenly have a whole lot of two-wheeled company on the paths, sidewalks, and road-shoulders of Fairbanks.  It’s Bike to Work week again.  

“I love my mommy because she rides us to school in a Chariot.”  This Mother’s Day proclamation was laminated for posterity by the ever-patient and good-humored teachers at Bunnell House Preschool.  It not only advertises the fact that I haul the kids about in a nifty convertible trailer with a lofty Greco-Roman-sounding name, but also features a drawing of me doing some sort of peculiar-looking calisthenics. I’m stretching all four limbs -- each adorned with precisely five digits.  Whatever I’m doing must be fun, because I have an enormous blue smile on my egg-shaped head.  Egg-head or not, though, the message seems unambiguous: Mommy is all about brawn, not brains.

I tacked up this card in my office, because I’m just as delusional as other parents about my children’s talents, and because I have a deep-seated appreciation for Crayola as an artistic medium. The work was created with the greatest goodwill on the part of the young artist, Molly.  Still, the card slightly discomfits me.  As I sit at my computer, peering at an array of downscaled Global Circulation Model data or enjoying literary treats such as “Development of scale-free climate data for western Canada” and “A high resolution bioclimate map of the world,” I wonder whether my kids have the right idea about who Mommy is, exactly.  Then I wonder whether I do, either.

It seems ironic to me – and disingenuous – that I am labeled as the mom who bikes or jogs everywhere.  With embarrassing regularity, I meet strangers who say, “Oh, I see you every single morning!” or “You’re the one who runs with your kids at thirty below!”  Some remember the 2010 NewsMiner feature on Bike to Work Week.  On the front of the Local section there was an enormous photo of Molly and Lizzy, taken from their own perspective at sub-bicycle height.  I am busy cramming helmets onto their heads.  A few people even recall another NewsMiner article from more than four years ago, featuring me and Jay and our then-infant twins on an overnight cross-country ski trip.  On the other hand, no one remembers the much more recent article in which I’m quoted saying “We’re at the cutting edge of climate change,” or the one in which I wax lyrical about permafrost. Some people seem to find my antics on bikes and skis commendable, while others clearly think I’m only a few blue tarps away from the lunatic fringe, but either way, they have typecast me as a dedicated athlete.  This is laughable.  “I’m not a jock!” I want to tell them.  “I’m a nerd.”  

I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense.  I’ve always been a nerd.  I’m used to it, and it fits me comfortably.  I was the toddler who sat at a green plastic desk, playing the role of earnest pupil, while my big sister Sarah taught me everything she’d learned at school.  This gave me a three-year preview on academic life, and meant that when I finally reached school-age myself, I spent a lot of time alone in the hallway reading terrific stories with protagonists who were, irritatingly, as elderly as nine or ten. I was the kid who looked forward to Mathletes meets, entered every contest in the Summer Reading Program, and as a kindergartener sent a letter to Kellogg’s, complaining about their misspelling of “Krispy.”

Sports, on the other hand, were not my strong point.  I swung a bat without any apparent regard for the location of the ball.  At early-eighties roller-skating birthday parties, I clung to the walls. The only time I made contact with the ball in flag football was when it slammed me directly in the nose.  During soccer games, I stood rooted in the fullback position, hoping the ball would never come my way, and letting my mind wander.  It was kind of interesting how those black pentagons and white hexagons tessellated.

I suppose my lack of athletic prowess wasn’t really surprising, given the influences of my family.  My dad loves watching baseball, but he freely admits that the statistics are what drew him to the game, not any innate ability to actually bat, throw, or run.  My mom dutifully took me to swimming lessons, but she is most definitely not a soccer mom.  And my sister, who was such a talented and voluble pupil that I found myself consistently tagged at “Sarah’s sister” by teachers and school staff, ended up doing a stint in remedial gym. 

As for biking, we Frescos weren’t stellar in that realm either.  Dad tooled around on an old Schwinn, but mom never learned to ride at all.   Sarah didn’t learn until she was about ten, when the peer pressure became so great that it overshadowed her fear of scraped knees.  I was not much better, getting my balance some time around my eighth birthday. 

I suppose in the back of my mind, I assumed my kids would take the same trajectory I did.  Thus, I felt a peculiar mix of surprise, pride, and alarm when Molly and Lizzy both ditched their training wheels last summer, when they were barely four.  They are avid fans of not only the Chariot, but also our double and single tag-along bikes and their own miniature two-wheelers.  They can now weave among innocent bystanders on UAF’s footpaths fast enough to cause their daddy to panic.   They are also immensely proud of their ability to handle a mushing sled, and are eager to join the Junior Nordic ski club. 

On the other hand, the twins can barely struggle – with help -- through “pre-readers” with scintillating plotlines such as “See Otto Swing.”  They only recently mastered counting to 100.  They’ll be fine little kindergarteners in the fall, but they certainly won’t be prodigies.  Nerd that I am, I find myself wondering if perhaps the kids aren’t gaining skills in the optimal order.  I wonder whether, through all my hiking, biking, ski racing, and running, I’m serving as a role model for brawn over brains.

Luckily, all that biking and running also gives me plenty of time for corralling my straying thoughts into some semblance of logic.  Does it really matter in what order they learn, so long as they are having fun, and just being happy kids?  I was an early reader and a late biker, I remind myself, but now I’m quite adept at both.  Jay was a later reader, but now he often has trouble unearthing himself from a good book.  And Sarah, my talented, gym-challenged big sister, grew up to be an avid reader, a great community leader – and a professional bicycling advocate, coordinator for the Massachusetts Green Streets Initiative.  On whatever timeline suits them, Molly and Lizzy will eventually be able to read AND ride bikes – although not, I would hope, at the same time. 

Besides, although I’ve generally been happy with my nerd persona, there were times – mostly when I was between the ages of thirteen and eighteen – when I desperately wished that more people would notice that I had non-academic personality traits, too.  I wasn’t JUST a kid with good test scores – I was also a kid who liked firing up the power tools in shop class, getting muddy in the woods, watching The Princess Bride altogether too many times, making crabapple jelly, and riding my bike to the beach. 

Maybe now, finally, I’ve got what I wanted all along. I can be a scientist AND a poster child for non-motorized transportation.  Maybe one day my kids will be able to look back and appreciate me for an eclectic range of attributes and activities. Of course, before that will come the teen years, when they will probably appreciate me for nothing at all.

For now, I’m happy to see bicycles stacked up against the fence outside Fun Time playground.  I’m pleased to hear people talking about burning calories, not gas, and I appreciate the fact that Fairbanks has embraced Bike to Work Week.  I’m also glad that Molly is proud of me, even if she’s only proud of me for my pedal power.  Besides, if I want diversity of opinion, I can always check with Lizzy.  Her Mother’s Day card is displayed on my wall, too. 

“I love that Mommy can still pick us up,” it says.

Maybe I should take up weight lifting.

Photo by Eric Engman, Fairbanks Daily NewsMiner, May 12 2010

Tofurky Trot

            “What kind of animal was this?” Molly asked.   I glanced at her, perched next to me at the table in her blue plastic booster seat.  Her mouth was decoratively adorned with barbecue sauce.  In her small hands, the meaty bone looked like the rib of a mammoth, or at the very least a muskox. 

            “A pig,” I told her, trying hard not to put any particular weight on my words.  Please pass the pepper.  Would you like some more peas?  You’re eating the flesh of a pig. 

How, exactly, did I want her to react?  Did I harbor a secret desire that she would hurl down the bone in horror and never touch meat again?  Or did I want her to continue her dinner in peace and contentment, thus avoiding a lifetime of suspiciously poking at potluck casseroles in order to determine whether they are animal, vegetable, or mineral?  The truth was, I wasn’t sure. 

I’ve been a vegetarian for twenty years.  The twins know that.  They like to roll the word off their tongues, savoring the extravagance of five syllables.  They like to tell me what I can and cannot eat:  “Oh, Mommy, you can’t have any soup.  It has meat in it.  You’re a veg-e-tar-i-an.”

I’ve always maintained that I want the kids to choose for themselves whether or not they will eat meat.  But I still don’t entirely trust my own motives.  Am I biased as to which choice I want them to make?  Am I subtly stacking the deck?  After all, kids are contrary.  If I withheld meat, at some point it would probably become as wildly desirable as Snickers bars and Pringles.  Maybe by allowing them to eat it, I am actually hoping to influence them not to eat it.  Am I, at heart, a sneaky, manipulative mommy?

Molly didn’t recoil, but she didn’t let the subject drop, either.  She licked her fingers and paused in her munching.  “Who deaded it?”

“Who – oh, you mean who killed it?”  One day, I’ll miss how four-year-olds wreak havoc with verbs.  “The pig?”

She nodded.  Grownups were sometimes so slow on the uptake.

“I don’t know who killed it.”

“Why not?  Why don’t you know who hunted it?”

“Well… pigs aren’t hunted, like moose and caribou.” 

We live in Alaska.  People hunt here.  That includes my husband, although Jay’s infrequent hunting trips seem to involve avoiding shooting game, in favor of taking a nice hike over some remote terrain. He once explained: “If you actually get an animal, you have to spend the rest of the time gutting it and hauling it out.  It’s a lot of work,”

I don’t have a problem with hunting.  For the most part, it seems a lot more appealing than the way most of America’s meat is obtained.  I don’t really want to go hunting myself, though.  I’m not squeamish – I was kind of annoyed not to be allowed to watch my own c-section -- but I don’t enjoy killing things.  This was part of why I decided not to eat meat in the first place.  It seemed hypocritical to pay someone to do your behind-the-scenes dirty work for you, and then pretend it never happened. 

An aversion to death was part of the original rationale for my dietary choices, but it wasn’t the whole reason.  Decimating a rainforest seemed like a steep price to pay for a flaccid, greasy, McBurger.  The idea that cow farts are altering earth’s climate was darkly humorous, but kind of wrecked the flavor of rib-eye.  I wasn’t a big fan of deli-cut-hormones and antibiotics-on-rye, ether.  If I were a self-sacrificing idealist rather than a slightly hypocritical one, I would have become vegan, and given up fresh Parmesan, aged cheddar, spinach-and-feta pie, and Cadbury’s milk chocolate – but I don’t have that sort of fortitude.  I never craved meat the way I crave pizza.  The truth was, I couldn’t find many reasons why I should eat meat, other than social convenience.

“Pigs are raised on farms,” I told my daughter now.  I thought of the farms in the Molly’s and Lizzy’s picture books: idyllic, sunny places with cows grazing in wide-open pastures.  I thought of Charlotte’s Web, the very first big-kid book I’d read aloud to my four-year-olds, a few months back.  Molly was the twin who sniffled when the spider died – even though Wilbur the pig was saved. 

I explained that farm animals are raised for food, then killed and packaged up and sent to supermarkets.  I tried to be honest about the process, although I left out descriptions of feed lots, slaughter houses, and runoff from sewage lagoons.

“They bring it to Fred Meyers in a truck?” asked Lizzy.  Lizzy is fond of trucks.

I became a vegetarian when I left home, as a teenager.  I remained a vegetarian for four years of college, and two years of grad school.  During my two years in the Peace Corps in Jamaica, I ate rice and beans, papayas, breadfruit, mangoes, pineapples, callaloo, cho-cho, star fruit and bammy.  I was gloriously well-fed, and happy to have a polite reason for avoiding goat-testicle soup and roasted chicken feet.

I stuck with my plant-eating ways when I moved to Alaska, even though the irony of living up here and not consuming salmon was glaring.  I was just so used to eschewing anything with a face that I found I didn’t want to change my diet.

I didn’t eat any meat while pregnant with twins.  I had the full approval of my cheerful and down-to-earth family practitioner, who also allowed me to commute by bike until the day before the kids were born.  Her go-ahead made it easier to ignore the politely constrained horror of the more traditionally-minded folks in my life, who think that vegetables, if they are served at all, should be limited to iceberg lettuce and limp green beans smothered in Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup and Bacos.  When the kids were born full-term and robust, I felt like I’d scored a couple of points for Team Tofu.

I remained a vegetarian while I was nursing, although I don’t know whether I would have been able to sustain veganism, had that been my normal diet.  Two ravenous six-month-olds could, between them, consume half a gallon of my milk – or more – each day.  “You’re producing as much as a good dairy goat!” one agriculturally-minded friend told me.  I was pretty sure she was impressed, so I took it as a compliment.  I also gained new respect for the animals who provide me with my yogurt and my smoked Gouda.

But when the kids started slurping strained peas and gumming Cheerios, Jay and I had to make a decision. Would they be vegetarians?  It didn’t seem fair to make that choice for them, I said.  Jay, never one to sweat this sort of detail, shrugged and agreed, but said that it would have been ok with him either way.

Three years later, we had kids who ate some – but not a lot – of meat.  We didn’t limit it, but we just didn’t have it around all that often.  This allowed me to feel like I’d taken the high ground, and yet gave me the freedom to not think about the issue very much. 

But now, thanks to the fine cooking of a friend, Molly was wallowing in a plate of ribs and giving me the third degree.  And I was toying with self-doubt.  What, exactly, did I want?

I snuck another glance at my kids.  On Molly, I saw an expression of thoughtful concentration worthy of a great philosopher – albeit a philosopher with round cheeks, bangs crookedly trimmed by her mother, and a patina of barbecue sauce.  Next to her, in a second booster seat, Lizzy was capturing a strand of pork with a kid-sized fork, her brow furrowed.  I was pretty sure she was conjuring up a new line of questioning that might or might not include pigs, farms, or trucks.

As I waited for the next brain-spinning non-sequitur, I found myself grinning. The world is rich in subjects worth pondering, and a lot of them don’t have answers that can be tucked neatly into a folder or filed in a box.  One of the best things about being a parent is the opportunity to revisit all those big, sprawling, gray-area questions, the ones that most of us adults have long ago selected a stock answer for.  Hanging out with a couple of four-year-olds is a festival of “whys,” all approached with curiosity and gusto. It can drive you nuts, if you happen to be trying to edit a scientific paper, bake a lasagna, and get everyone into their snow gear all at the same time.  On the other hand, if you have time to respond to ‘What makes a rainbow?” or “How is the fire in the wood stove different from the fire in the sun?” it can give your brain a refreshing bout of aerobics.

I realized that I wasn’t worried about whether my kids ultimately decided to eat meat or not – I really wasn’t.  I could let myself off the hook of my own self-suspicions. It didn’t matter exactly what their questions were—or whether they had anything to do with grilled pork -- it just mattered that they were asking them. What I wanted, what I’d always really wanted, was neither compliance nor rebellion, but thought and awareness.  I wanted my kids to dig their hands into the soil, the mud, and the truth of the world.  What I wanted was exactly what I was now getting -- with a little added barbecue sauce.

Settling

“It’s so warm here, we don’t even have to wear puffy mittens!”  Lizzy is so astounded by the balminess of a New England January that she feels the need to remark upon it to the stranger seated across from her, a friend of my sister’s.  Never mind that this woman actually lives here in Cambridge, and doesn’t seem favorably impressed either by the 12-degree breeze or the latest blizzard. Fairbanks, Alaska is the center of Lizzy’s universe, so her perspective is a little skewed – and I feel guilty for producing kids who think it’s a treat not to have to wear three hats.

I cut up Lizzy’s samosa, scoop some dahl onto her rice, and try to field my new acquaintance’s bemused queries about our life up north.  Do I really pee outside at forty below zero?  How do I manage to ride a bike in January?  Are the mosquitoes as large as Black Hawk helicopters?  Is the average IQ higher than the average annual temperature?

“So, are you guys settled up there for good, then?”

It’s a yes-or-no question, and yet I find myself waffling and hedging like a senatorial candidate. “Um… well, we’re both pretty happy with our jobs and our community… and the schools are good… the outdoor opportunities…” I meander to a stop, uncomfortably aware of how unconvincing I sound – not just to my questioner, but to myself.

It’s that word, settled.  It still gives me indigestion.

“Settling” has connotations of resignation, of agreeing to something that is less than it ought to be due to some sort of miserable compromise.  Back in college, my friend Colleen described “settling down” as a process by which people pair off, go into their houses, and close the doors.  The implication was that they then become too dull to do anything even remotely fun ever again.  Parties are exchanged for potluck fundraisers, outdoor adventures disappear in favor of pee-wee soccer practice, and international travel is subsumed by staying at a Holiday Inn near Disneyland. 

I argued that this didn’t have to be the case.  I insisted that it ought to be possible to say “forever” to a person (an idea that my well-hidden romantic side rather liked) without having to say “forever” to middle-management, business-casual, and lawn flamingos.  Surely, I said, one didn’t have to stay in one place forever.  I wanted passport stamps from around the world, bus rides shared with baskets of chickens and sacks of mangos, a jar full of fascinatingly indecipherable coins, and a working knowledge of a dozen different subway systems.  I wanted remoteness, bucolic bliss, and mountain vistas, but I also wanted second-hand bookstores, museums crammed with artifacts, and an occasional night at the symphony.  How could I ever settle? 

As a kid, there were many things I loved about my hometown – the ability to bike to the beach being near the top of the list – but I took it for granted that I would one day leave. I would go off to college, and I would move on from there into a half-realized future full of job satisfaction, adventure, and hypothetical children. . . somewhere.  I was clearly either dim-witted or a poor planner or both, because I was halfway through college before it occurred to me that “somewhere” really had to be somewhere.  I balked at the mere idea.

When I graduated, I did what all over-educated, idealistic, indecisive, adventuresome 22-year-olds do.  I joined the Peace Corps.  There I got plenty of bus rides with chickens.  I learned a lot, but probably not nearly as much as I ought to have.  When I completed my service, I came back to the US and earned a Master’s degree, all the while limiting my possessions to what could fit in the trunk of a compact car.

When I completed that degree, I was lucky enough to have not just one, but two job offers to choose from.  One was based in the northeast, at a respected college.  It paid reasonably well and seemed like a stepping-stone into a professional career in environmental ecology.  The other was with a small non-profit.  It paid badly, offered no particular upward mobility, and required moving to Fairbanks Alaska.

My dad said he never had any doubt about which job I’d choose.

I moved to Fairbanks in the last year of the previous millennium, back before muffin-top and plumber’s crack became mandatory features of feminine attire, before tweeting became a means of communication for species other than songbirds, and before anyone had misunderestimated the American people.  I intended to stay a year or two -- maybe three, if I was having a lot of fun mushing or whatever the heck it was people did in Fairbanks.

Fast-forward twelve years.  A husband, a house, a PhD and two kids later, I am sitting at a restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, trying to weasel my way around the word “settled.”  My sister’s friend is affable to her core, but she can’t quite hide her incredulity at the idea that a well-educated woman would really think of Fairbanks as home.  Forever.

Lizzy wants more rice and dahl, and some of “the thing with the peas in it.”

“Mutter paneer,” I tell her, although I’m sure I’m mangling the pronunciation.  We don’t have an Indian restaurant in Fairbanks.  I sorely miss this cuisine.

“What’s that?” Molly asks, pointing to another dish. 

“Eggplant,” I tell her.  “It’s a little spicy…”

“I want some,” she says. I do my signature eyebrow raise. “Please,” she adds, resigned to the inexplicable inevitability of good manners.

“We do have several good Thai restaurants in Fairbanks,” I remark.  My mouth is full.  I swallow, and try again.  “There’s a good Korean place, and some ok Chinese.”  I sound like an apologist for the sub-arctic.  We can practically see Asia from our igloos!

The conversation shifts to what the kids and I have been up to during our whirlwind four-day visit.  I rattle off the list of destinations: the Science Museum, the Children’s Museum, the Harvard Museum of Natural History, the MIT Museum.  “That’s a lot of museums,” says the husband of my original questioner, smiling at me over his naan bread to show that he’s not criticizing.  He probably thinks I’m starved for culture. 

“Well, they’re all so different, and besides, we spend a lot of time walking from one place to another, just kind of seeing the city.”  I feel embarrassed by how much fun this gawking is for the kids.  In Boston they can see a congested cacophony of garbage trucks, fire trucks, construction equipment, ambulances, and people.  Hundreds of people, thousands of people, people of all colors and sizes and habits.  This is a city as it exists in their picture books, not the 40,000-inhabitant strip-mall version up north.

The adults ask the kids what they’ve enjoyed most, and are treated to a disorganized litany of high points that includes meteorites, a live snake, chocolate milk, and a disturbingly wonderful display of deformed human hands that I had trouble wresting them away from at the Science Museum.

And what about at home?  What do they like to do there?

“We have our own mushing sled,” says Molly, proud as the title-holder of a new Corvette.  She soon realizes that these silly grownups know almost nothing about mushing.  She is happy to fill them in.  Molly likes to educate people.  When she is done talking about the sled and the dogs, there is plenty more to describe.  Her skis.  Preschool.  The two big kids in our community who go to big kid school and therefore know almost everything, but who are nonetheless friends of hers. 

As I listen to the twins talk, I imagine what I would have described when I was the same age.  Preschool at the YMCA.  My big sister.  The three children up the street.  The park with the playground and the ducks who struggled along on a constant diet of moldy crusts.  A “fancy” dinner out at which I was allowed to order breaded shrimp.

Kids, I realized, are the little hubs of their own little universes.  As such, they are always “settled.”  They like new experiences, but they judge them by the yardstick of their own reality.  For Molly and Lizzy, that reality includes riding to school in a bike trailer with four hot water bottles when the mercury is below -30.  It includes counting the new reindeer calves at the farm in the spring.  It includes wilderness hikes on which we can go hours or even days without seeing any other traces of human beings.  Molly and Lizzy are quite likely to leave Fairbanks when they grow up.  I know that, and I think they already know it too.  But for now, they are quite happy to be settled.

But what about me? 

Some of Colleen’s predictions have come true.  I’m married with kids, and I hang out with a lot of other married-with-kids friends.  My idea of a party these days is something that involves several different people’s salads and ends at 9 p.m.  On the other hand, Fairbanks is GOOD at doing potlucks, and let’s face it, I wasn’t the life of the party even when I was 19.  I can see now that some of my fears were hyperbolic. 

I relax in my seat, and grab another helping of the eggplant dish.  I tell the couple across from me – who are themselves married, and settled, and yet still very interesting people – that living in Fairbanks means I can combine my love of wilderness and open spaces with my desire for libraries and ridiculously intellectual friends.  I mention that we have theatrical performances, poetry readings, film festivals, visiting scientists, and a symphony orchestra.  I get to be a university professor.  I allow myself a small smile at the realization that I don’t have to worry about business casual (patched jeans and a thermal hoodie will do) or lawn flamingos (no lawn around my outhouse). 

Of course, staying in Fairbanks also means having only one real museum, very few bustling urban scenes, obnoxiously cold and dark Januaries, and no decent Indian food.  But that is what travel is for.  My passport hasn’t acquired as many new stamps as I’d like in the past few years, but I’m looking into correcting that.  I’m settled – I can admit that now – but there are still some things I refuse to settle for.