After ten straight hours of bingeing on chocolate eggs, what eventually hatched was a scheme. Lacking a phaeton-and-four, it was a simple plan. (The author has just finished a Jane Austen book, and is thinking of seasides, horse-drawn carriages, and misadventures that result in stays of se’ennight, ending in marriage.)
It began as a casual suggestion on the part of the eldest: “This grass is so soft,” he said, staring up at the sky in the warm light of day. “We should sleep out here.” His younger siblings were immediately on board, catching him in a whim, a bluff, a passing fancy. They started drawing up plans, fancying themselves medieval travellers, caught out-of-doors on a much longer journey. It was a scheme as dreamed up by three children, aged 11, 7, and 4, lacking finesse, but making up for it with gusto. If there were older (or of a more literary bent), I believe they might have phrased it, “What need have we of a tent, mother? We shall survive by our wits alone!” As it was, it came out, “Oh, no. We don’t need anything. We’ve got our snowsuits.”
As the evening progressed, they acknowledged (as in the tradition of great role-playing games) that it might be a good idea to have a tarp in case of rain. And perhaps a bottle of water. And maybe a lantern. But that was it. At dusk, they set off for the back of the lot with their snowsuits in hand, still wearing only pajamas. “No, no!” I cried. “You have to put the snow suits on!“ Grudgingly, they put on their appropriate clothing for the chilly (getting colder) evening. 10 minutes later, they arrived back at the door, wearing only pajamas. “No,” I said. “If you get too cold, you won’t be able to get warm again. If you are going winter camping, you have to keep warm. You can’t warm up again. Please put the snowsuits back on.” (You can see that I play the part of the mother in this drama.)
The adults set off to light a fire in the pit at the other end of the yard, near where the children have discovered a pine-cone mine.
Several minutes later, the children, drawn to the fire, arrived with pine cones in hand, wishing to see what happened when they roasted them. The fire smoked and failed to catch in the long-unused and wet pit, the children danced around the smoke, trying to add things to the smoldering pile. The father became irritated. So I took a different role in the scheme, going back to the tarp with them. “May I join you on your tarp?” I asked. I was invited into the travelling band. We took up our places, and the middle child volunteered for first watch. We lay on our backs for some time, counting satellites and shooting stars.
The encampment
***
It is genuinely dark by this point, the clouds are parting, and the stars are plentiful above our heads. “You’re allowed to stay, if you want,” they say. “Do you want me to go?” I ask. “Um. A little bit yes, a little bit no,” says the middle child, my intrepid daughter. “No,” says the youngest. “You stay, Mummy.”
The girl has thought to bring a sleeping bag, and the youngest child becomes jealous. The oldest goes back to the house for blankets, and returns with a single light-weight polar fleece sleeping bag, into which the youngest is dutifully zipped. Laying on the ground (also in my snowsuit) I discover that a snowsuit and tarp alone will not keep the cold out of your legs. A 4-year old in a sleeping bag, however, makes a marvelous blanket. I recommend it. Eventually, though, my blanket loses his youthful enthusiasm, and starts conjuring canines hiding in the dark. “It’s too dark, Mummy. When the lights go out, you should be in the house.” It is decided. I will take him in, and bring back more blankets for the rest of the troupe. “Do you want me to come back?” The loons are making a racket on the river, the frogs are hollering at the tops of their lungs, and the mysterious howls of the neighbourhood dogs have started up. In short, the dark in our yard is starting to remind them that we live at the edge of the forest.
“I think I do,” says the oldest. “Yes,” says my intrepid daughter. “You can come back.”
I arrive back to find that they have (once again) removed their snowsuits and are wrapped up in the thin blankets over their pajamas. “Mom” comes out. “Put the snowsuit on. Do you remember the other day when you refused to wear a jacket and then you got so cold it made you cry and then you had to stand in the shower for 20 minutes to warm back up??? You can’t warm yourself back up if you get that cold! It’s dangerous!” (Why? Why is this an argument? Do kids LIKE getting hypothermia? I don’t understand, at all!) And, I fear, completely contrary to the spirit of the thing, I lay down the law. “You are not allowed to sleep outside unless you put your snowsuit back on and don’t take it off again.”
This is exactly why we don’t take our mothers along when hatching a scheme.
On the other hand, at least I provide a logical person to take first watch. After the snowsuits are (once more) grudgingly (once more) donned, we settle back down, with extra blankets. I can now report that a 4-layer tarp, plus double wool blanket, plus polar fleece wrap, plus snowpants will keep the cold out, at least when it is just below freezing. My nose is very, very cold, though. I’m a terrible night watch. I start falling asleep almost immediately, and keee pulling the blanket over my head. My eyes start to droop in a matter of minutes. “I don’t think I can take first watch. How about you,” I ask the oldest, initiator of the whole plan. “I’ll do it!” he says. A few minutes later, the daughter says, “I can’t sleep anyway. I’ll take first watch.”
A couple of minutes later, I ask, “What are we watching for?” “Oh, you know,” she says, breezily. “Coyotes. Foxes.” “What are you going to do if you see one?” “Mummy,” she says, and I can hear her hands on her hips and her rolled eyes. “We have a big stick, and we’re right next to the house. Besides, they’re more scared of us than we are of them.”
I’m not convinced, but I’m not going to let my irrational fears jeopardize a good scheme. Hypothermia from sleeping outside without proper protection? Likely. Coyote attack? Not worth the energy to conjure the thought.
It is only about four more minutes before things start to fall apart. “OK. I’m tired,” she says. “Somebody else take over the watch.” My son says maybe we should huddle for warmth. It is the beginning of the end. A few more minutes pass, me still staring straight up at the sky through the tiny gap in the blanket wrapped around my head. My son says, “I’m going in the house.” “Are you cold?” “Yes.” And he is up and gone. (Although, it turns out, to the still-blazing bonfire, not the house. Warmth and light are what he seeks.)
This leaves my daughter and I at opposite ends of the tarp, staring at the starry sky. “Are you cold?” I ask. “Not really,” she says. She pauses. “Do you want to come and snuggle with me?” I ask. “I guess so.”
So we rearrange the blankets and lie there for a few more minutes. “I think I’m ready to go in, now,” she says. “Only, could you go first?” “You want me to leave you here?” “Yes. But just for a few minutes. I want to come across the yard by myself. It might be a bit scary, but I want to try it.”
So I leave my middle child in the dark in the middle of a field… the one who is the thrill-seeker, the one that we think we’d better channel into extreme sports before she finds other things to fill that need. Right now, walking across the back yard in the dark by herself fills that need. And I go into the house. And a few minutes later, doesn’t she show up at the back door, carrying her snowsuit and sleeping bag, dressed only in pajamas? “That,” she says breathlessly, “was a little bit scary!”
Filed under: Creative Writing, Family | Tagged: adventure, children, PostADay2011, storytelling | 3 Comments »
Analyze This: On Not Giving Stuff Up
This post comes with a caveat: It is an exploration of systems, the limits of agency, and the social constructs that preclude giving up my car… yet. I am not looking for sympathy, nor am I beating myself up over my limitations in the face of the myths of Western civilization. I recognize that I lead a profoundly charmed life, full of privilege and the leisure to consider these things. It doesn’t escape my awareness that I can only think about this because of the same education that leads to the rest of it all… it’s complicated.
The problem with giving stuff up is that we don’t want to. I mean we may want to, sort of, but it’s often more that we think it’s a good idea, or we think that we will be better people if we do it, or we think that we should (in all the various interpretations of that loaded word.) But to truly give something up, to stop doing something we enjoy merely for the greater good, without getting any benefit back for it… we don’t really want to do that. At least I don’t.
For me, my ideals keep running up against the car/house problem. My house is too far from the things we do. Or the things we do are too far from my house. Since “the things we do” include the work that pays for the house, I’m going to go with the first interpretation in this case. On a daily basis, we travel more than is justifiable, given the things that we know about the effects of that travel. But once I get to that conclusion, I am unable to take the next logical step…
The benefits of our house, even the environmental ones, are enormous. We have a huge food garden, soon to be updated with nearly year-round greenhouse production. We have chickens, and bees, and fruit trees, and berries, and asparagus (I’m still waiting for the first harvest, so the asparagus is surprisingly prominent on the list of things keeping me here.) At the end of our driveway, we have swimming, canoeing, kayaking, or skating, depending on the season. We can go fishing (which means standing on the end of the dock talking about fish, since no fish are silly enough to come in that close to shore.) It’s like being on vacation whenever we get home, or like living at the cottage. Actually, it’s exactly like living at the cottage, since our house is a winterized, converted cottage. This leads to a couple of quirks, like the fact that the master bedroom is in the basement, and the second bathroom is tucked behind the chimney and has no ceiling.
Back to the pluses of this property: We heat with wood, and we have a huge bank of south-facing windows. We have available wind in abundance and flowing water, so could probably be energy independent on this property with a smaller-than-average investment in renewables… There is also a second garage with apartment above it, and two sheds, one of which contains chickens, and one of which has my writing studio, at least in the summer. This place is awesome (which is why we bought it two hours after we saw it, the day the sign went up.)
But we keep coming back to the cars. There are currently three of them sitting in my parking space. Three! This is awful! (Now, it happens that we just haven’t managed to sell the van, so it’s not that we intend to continue to have three cars for two drivers. That would be silly.) When we get despondent about the house, and the driving, and the repairs, and entropy, and how all this work we are doing is for naught if we just do the opposite of carbon offsetting by driving back and forth to all our environmental and community events… we come around, eventually, to the cars and how else we could solve the transportation problem.
Can we switch to bikes? Well, for about half the days during the one third of the year it is not below freezing on a regular basis. For short trips not involving the 4-lane highway that is the only route to the aforementioned job, that pays the bills. So, not really.
Additionally, I looked at a couple of pedaled cars, since we usually have to take a couple of kids with us, and I’ve come to a conclusion: I am not willing to give up the enclosed roof. It’s not the time it takes me to get somewhere, or the effort involved that stops me. I would adapt, and change my habits to match up. It is the lack of seclusion from the elements that these vehicles provide. I need my stuff (children, car seats, groceries, towels, clothing) not to get wet, and my body not to get frozen. That’s the main thing that I require from my transportation device. It must protect me from the weather, which we get in abundance.
I think there is something more that underlies that, though. I’m not willing to give up the control over my schedule that would come from having to adapt so much more to the weather. As it is, our lives are much more weather-dependent than typical North American expectations. We change the way we heat and cool our house depending on the cloud cover and wind conditions. We must plant, harvest, and do laundry when the sun shines. It is only warm enough to sit outside of an evening occasionally, and I don’t bother to put away my mittens for July and August, in case I want to go for a walk after dark. I live with all of those things. I don’t even mind them. They add a certain… spontaneity to it all. I’m just not ready to start calling our friends and say, “Sorry, we can’t come over this evening. It’s raining.” So if we’re going to replace our cars with bikes, we’ve got to figure out ways to make our bikes drier and warmer.
It isn’t exactly a transportation problem. It’s a social problem. We don’t say, “Oh, my life would be so complete if only I could go those 30 km in the next half hour!” We say, “Stephanie invited us over for dinner. What should we bring?” It’s an entertainment problem: “Did you see that there’s a drama festival on all this week at the university?” It’s an education problem: “The tutor wants to meet us at the library this evening.” It’s a logistics problem: “We’ve got music lessons at 4 and rehearsal at 6, and they are 14 km apart.” It’s a work problem: “I’ve got to stay 45 minutes late to meet with a student who wasn’t able to make it to the exam and the kids have taekwondo before I’ll be home.” It’s a taking-advantage-of-the-weather problem: “It’s not raining! Who wants to go to the beach?!” At the end of it all, it’s a middle-class problem: “I have to. There are all these things I need to do. And what about the children?”
There’s something there to do with expectations. I don’t feel bad that I can’t provide a private jet or regular skiing trips to Europe; those things are so far out of my purview, they don’t even register. I also don’t feel bad about denying my kids access to the skidoos, jetskis, power boats, and ATV’s that are such common weekend activities for the other kids around here: those things are so obviously outside our value system that they exceed my compromise capacity. Also… expensive! Same reasons we have no lawn to speak of. But these activities on the boundary, when I have the ability to provide them, and the activity itself is something I value… they’re gateway activities. Gateway into the car, into the car culture, into fast food, (which I sometimes resort to when desperate for calories when logistics break down) into consumption. The events, the birthday parties, the obligatory gift giving, are all parts of participation in the broader culture, participation in the culture the children are immersed in by going to school. They already don’t get television, elaborate birthday parties, cell-phones, laptops of their own, or the newest gadget from Future Shop. The least I can do (so I reason) is take them to drama classes, taekwondo, and swimming lessons. And the library. And the theatre. And the farmer’s market. And the wildlife park. And the playground. And their friends houses. And… you see how this goes. It’s a good-mother myth, tied up in the package of a successful life, and topped with a bow of synthesized freedom. For the bargain price of $169 (bi-weekly), plus taxes, maintenance, and gasoline. Phew.
And I can analyze it. And I can realize it, and think it, and know it intellectually. But when it comes right down to finally saying, No? I can’t quite give it up.
Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: discipline, environment, PostADay2011, self, social commentary | 9 Comments »