I was glad to be back in an English-speaking country. In Salerno I’d seen the headlines “E MORTO IL PAPA!” It was August of 1978 and Pope Paul VI had just died. People would be rushing to the Vatican; it was time to hightail it home. I’d picked up Alec on the way.

Alec stroked his tea cup.
“Did you have some trouble at passport control?” I said.
“Yes, I had a lot of bloody trouble. The buggers strip-searched me.”
“What are you talking about?” I’d never heard of strip-searching.
“They’re British, and I’m from Belfast, so they thought I must be carrying a bomb. I had to take off all my clothes, and they fingered me all over. That’s what I’m talking about.”

He snapped a biscuit in half. The tea shop was quiet. The street down the hill to the ocean was dappled with sunlight. People lay on the beach on huge striped towels. A phone rang in the back of the shop.

I was heading for England when I’d met Alec in the hot Gare du Nord waiting room in Paris. It was midnight, and a knot of sullen Algerian laborers slouched in the other chairs. They never spoke or closed their eyes, and the next train to Calais wouldn’t leave till seven the next morning. Alec brought me rolls and coffee without asking, me falling all over myself like he’d made Christmas dinner.

Alec put another sugar in his tea.
“They asked me if I’d gotten a leg over you,” he said.
“Who did? Whose leg?” Couldn’t he just speak in normal English?
“The bloody policemen. They asked if we’d had sex.”

I gripped my cup and looked away. The cops must have watched us as we left the boat and separated at passport control. I’d been so relieved to leave Paris, get onto the train, and get back to England. I’d finally felt safe. I’d counted on Alec to keep me away from the Algerians and other questionables. Now it turned out he was the one who needed protecting. When are you finally safe out on the road? Right then I didn’t want to travel anymore: no more politics, popes dying, former colonials raging, differentness.

“My next trip out I will be carrying a bomb,” Alec said, looking up at me, his eyes red, humiliated, furious.

We stood and murmured goodbyes. He shouldered his rucksack and took a bus to Brighton where he knew somebody. I cinched the straps of my backpack and headed for another train. I just wanted to get back to where I knew—and could really trust—somebody.

The sharp pork, corn, and chili aromas from tamales filled the air as the tour group stood in front of Los Angeles’ Union Station looking over at Olvera Street. “Let’s meet back at El Paseo at 11:30 for lunch,” said Janice, our guide. “El Paseo,” a woman on the tour said, deep in reverie. “I used to dance there in the ‘50s.” Maria Morca was in her 70s, but she kept the elegant posture of a flamenco artist. “Olvera Street was a prestigious place to dance 50 years ago, “she added.

We were all aware of Olvera Street’s reputation as a tourist trap in the “old town” of Los Angeles, but the area is now in the middle of an energetic renovation. It was worth a second look. Olvera (“ole-VERR-ah”) Street is a two-block-long Mexican marketplace and—fairly unique in this City of Automobiles—for pedestrians only. Gene Kelly danced around its small fountain in the 1945 movie Anchors Aweigh.

The street is still lined with the original wooden puestos (merchandise stalls), and many have been converted into restaurants, cafés, and art studios. The ruffled embroidered blouses, paper flowers, skulls made out of sugar for Día de los Muertos (“Day of the Dead”), and the T-shirts of Pancho and Ché have all been made in Mexico. There’s not an hecho en China to be seen.

Built on the site of an Indian village and an early Chinatown, the marketplace was originally called Calle Vino (“Wine Street,” after nearby vineyards and a winery). Don Agustín Olvera arrived in California from Mexico in 1841 and bought an adobe home on the north side of the plaza. As the first judge of L.A. County, he often held court proceedings there. The street was officially renamed Olvera Street after the judge died in 1876.

Olvera Street was now a mix of USC football fans, families and couples, college students, and tour groups. In front of the church, a nervous wedding party posed for the photographer. Nearby, little girls twirled in their bodas (christening dresses), and squirmy little boys in white tuxedos held tightly to their fathers’ hands. Visitors chatted at outdoor tables over great plates of enchiladas, rice, and beans.

The large plaza on Olvera Street’s south end is surrounded by museums (including the newly opened Chinese-American Museum), historical homes, and churches. Tourists strolled in lazy circles, holding cinnamon-sprinkled churros and multi-flavored Jarritos sodas. Children begged for marionettes and skeleton piñatas that were hanging in the shops. Parents hoisted toddlers onto Jorge, the stuffed donkey, for photographs, as an assistant added serapes and sombreros—pink for the girls, black for the boys. A piper was playing “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic. Olvera Street may remain a Southern California tourist icon, but it is clean, colorful, energetic, and family-friendly.

“My parents sent me to secretarial college,” Maria said, “but it didn’t take. I always wanted to be a dancer. We wore lots of ruffles and polka dots back then, doing the farruca and sevillanas dances. Yes, this was a prestigious place to dance, and it always had a festive spirit.” The spirit of Olvera Street is festive again.

WHY GO? Olvera Street is the old town center of the original El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles, founded in 1781. It’s clean, safe, and easy to get to by car, light rail, and train.

HOW TO GET THERE: From Salt Lake City, the drive via I-15 takes about 12 hours. Olvera Street is just across Alameda Street from Union Station where Amtrak passengers arrive from all over the country.

WHAT IT WILL COST: To avoid parking hassles, three dollars will get you a Metro light-rail roundtrip. L.A. Metro station maps and timetables are available at www.mta.net

NOT TO MISS: Shopping! Mexican dresses and shawls, Day of the Dead items, piñatas, tooled leather, marionettes, and musical instruments are featured.

WHERE TO EAT: La Golondrina Café was the first Mexican restaurant in Los Angeles. Also good are La Luz del Día, El Paseo, Juanita’s, Las Anitas, and Cielito Lindo.

WEATHER: Olvera Street is an outdoor experience, and Southern California is mild year-round. However, summers can be hot away from the ocean, autumn brings Santa Ana winds off the desert, and L.A. winters feature fog and rain.

MORE INFORMATION: www.olvera-street.com and www.cityofla.org

“You can fall in love at first sight with a place as with a person.” Alex Waugh

This isn’t the Greece of my 2006 calendar. The Greece of island beaches, Melina Mercouri swimming in her underwear, little white houses with blue roofs, Zorba dancing with his arms up. Where I’m now standing is a forest of rock, gray-and-yellow stone pinnacles that are streaked with rain, age, and bird excrement. And many of the pinnacles are topped by monasteries.

This is Meteora (meh-TAY-oh-ruh), a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Located 326 kilometers (202 miles) north of Athens above the Pineios River Valley on the northwestern edge of the Thessalian plain, Meteora’s spectacular sandstone spires rise 400 meters (1300 feet) above the foothills of the Pindos Mountains. “Meteora” comes from the adjective meteroso, meaning “suspended in air.” And its monasteries seem to be just that. UNESCO describes Meteora as “a unique example of monastic life since the 14th century” with frescoes that “are a fundamental stage in the development of post-Byzantine painting.” There are many monasteries throughout Greece, but the “unique example” part refers to the placement and setting of these buildings. Of the 24 monasteries built in Meteora, six are now active as museums and convents.

It is April, and we have just caught up with our son Ed. He has finished four months of classes at the Phillipe Nakas Conservatory, part of the new Semester in Athens program through Boston’s Berklee College of Music. He has been studying Greek language, history, and culture, and has received private instruction in the bouzouki, oudi, guitar, and Mediterranean percussion. He meets us at the airport with everything he’s brought to Greece. A guitar case with duct tape holding in the fraying edges. The red roller bag he got for high school graduation. An REI day pack with carabiners hanging off the webbing loops. His hair is now long ringlets, and his blue eyes are bloodshot. “Don’t get the car right away,” he says after hugging us. “Let’s just sit down for a while at the cafeino. I like the Nescafe frappés they have. C’mon, guys, we have plenty of time. Don’t be so . . . American.”

After an hour of sipping our frothy drinks and trying hard not to be too American, we start driving the rental van north. Lilacs and forsythias are in full bloom. Fields are plowed but bare, and grape leaves are only just starting to sprout from vines. Scarlet poppies decorate fields, vermillion geraniums are bursting out of tavernas’ clay pots, and lavender flowers seep from the cracks of ruined walls. Strewn across the landscape are sweet violets, dwarf yellow and velvety brown iris, daisies, anemones, periwinkle, and vetch. Greece is in bloom.

Ed had heard of Meteora from Petros, his percussion teacher, who said the area was a climbing mecca. Ed didn’t see Meteora until the conservatory’s nine-hour bus trip north to Grevena to see the carnival. In the rain and fog, the bus had stopped at a plaza in Kalambaka to drop and pick up passengers. “It was like something out of a fantasy novel, like out of Lord of the Rings,” Ed says of his view from the bus window. “I couldn’t believe it was a real town with real people and schools.” Asked for more details, Ed is quiet for a moment. “It’s not just that I liked it,” he said. “It’s that I realized it was a place where I wanted to live.” In addition to being a musician, Ed is a rock climber. Meteora had been love at first sight.
Greeks think Athens is still the center of the world, Ed tells us. Meteora feels like another planet. A local guidebook says, “The scenery suggests a vision of the world in the first days of the Creation and puts one in mind of the lost state of human innocence and perfection, of the decay of the human condition.” The spires themselves are conglomerates of limestone, marble, serpentine, and metamorphic rock interspersed with layers of sand and shale. Meteora is a rock community with 60-million-year-old stony fists thrusting up to the sky.

But it is the climbers—and perhaps Meteora’s many bird species—who can best understand the magnificence of this area. Eagles, swifts, martins, kites, storks, sparrow hawks, vultures, and falcons slice back and forth between the spires, alighting onto rocky ledges and cave verandas. Climbers are astonished at the difficulty of getting up to the monasteries and hermit caves. And that’s with just a standard climbing rack, not carrying building materials, baskets of food, or blankets for the winter. “There are these monasteries at the top of these serious and difficult routes that hardly anybody climbs today,” Ed says. “No chipped footholds or anything that would make it easy to get up.” The spectacular achievement of building shelters and spiritual retreats up so high is hidden to those tied to gravity.

For nonclimbers, the Meteora experience is a bit like driving through Zion National Park. You drive, stop, hike, look way up, and hike back to the car. Rock climbers have a deeper appreciation. “The walls are sheer, clean, even faces with only tiny little knobs,” Ed says. “There are bolts, but they’re often rusted or missing, and it’s easy to get off route. You have to have your bag of tricks [with chocks and other climbing ‘friends’ for traditional protection].” Ed does some top-roping with his brothers and pronounces the experience unique, like no other climbing he’s ever done.

During Turkish-Greco bloodshed in the eleventh century, hermit monks sought refuge in the region’s caves using retractable ladders. Later, windlasses were cranked by hand to haul supplies and monks in large nets. The Orthodox community grew grapes, corn, potatoes, sheep, and cattle in the valleys below. Some monks stayed in such isolation in their rocky aeries that they starved to death. Townspeople periodically had to climb up to retrieve the bodies.
Meteora is featured in For Your Eyes Only, the 1981 James Bond film. Before adding it to your Netflix queue, you can watch an actual clip by clicking on “Exotic Locations” at www.jamesbond.com/mmpr/index.php?cat=missions&id=fyeo
Actor Topol’s Milos Columbo character points to Meteora’s St. Stephen’s Monastery and tells Roger Moore’s Bond, “St Cyril’s—where we used to hide from the Germans. Only Kristatos [the movie’s villainous Russian operative] would make an abandoned monastery his personal retreat.” Actually, Topol isn’t that far off. During World War II, German occupying armies looted and destroyed monasteries in Meteora during raids on the Greek countryside, responding to increasing pressure by Greece’s anti-Nazi ELAS resistance fighters. Bill Conti’s musical score in For Your Eyes Only is awful, but Alan Hume’s cinematography is magnificent.

Walking in Athens can feel like entering someone’s parlor or living room. You’re an expected guest, and Greeks jump to get you things to eat and drink. Exploring Kastraki—the village closest to Meteora’s spires—is more like walking into a bedroom. Shopkeepers seem surprised to see outsiders buying groceries. Kids play soccer in the square near the tiny “Super” Market where we select apples, cheeses, bread, and Ion milk chocolate bars for the next day. After the crowded confusion of Athens, this picturesque village has a welcome intimacy.

The monasteries have a strict dress code, and the nuns at Saint Varvaras Rousanou direct unprepared women to choose from baskets piled with cotton apron-like skirts. The Greek Orthodox Church owns all the monasteries and charges two Euros to view the small, immaculately kept hallways, frescoes, paintings, and chapel. Pots of small shrubs line the patio. Wood buffed in lemon oil, vases of white lilies, and manicured geometric flower beds add to the reverent ambience. In the gift shop, two somber nuns swathed in black sell books, beeswax candles, rosary beads, crucifixes, bookmarks, painted religious icons, and Meteora shot glasses.

We rent two rooms in Kastraki and then walk across the road for dinner at the taverna, where we’re the first people seated when the restaurant opens the gates at 7:30. Sometimes you have to just give up and be American. We order platters of lamb, pork, and chicken, and savor the thick slices of feta, the fresh tomatoes, and red wine “from the barrel.” Patient cats curl around the chairs waiting for dropped morsels. Breakfasts are included at our hotel, but its spread of ham, cheese, bread, and cookies seems more like picnic fare, so we gorge at dinner. “The Greeks,” Ed says, “just have coffee and a cigarette in the morning.”

As a sensitive musician sandwiched between two analytical brothers, Ed is seldom the one in charge. On this trip, however, he blooms between the rocks of temperment and birth order. He translates, navigates, suggests food and wine, explains history and customs, and teaches us kalimera (good morning), kalispera (good afternoon—after the siesta), and kalinikta (good night). “He’s gone Greek!” my husband says.

We see a country—and a young man—come into full flower.

I had our 25th wedding anniversary all planned out. Tom and I, our three sons plus a girlfriend, would head off to Ireland for two weeks, rent a van, shop, research our family tree, visit megalithic dolmens and the Cliffs of Moher, eat big Irish breakfasts . . . “. . . and go caving,” said Tom.

I didn’t want to do a watery cave. I had almost drowned in one 24 years ago. So I made two demands: “Put me in a dry cave, and don’t leave me.” But there I was, hundreds of feet beneath Ireland, in stiff overalls, sloshing through two feet of cold water with Adrian, our slightly askew Irish guide. And Tom and our sons had disappeared with Adrian’s map.
We had found Adrian through our hosts at the Doolin Activity Lodge, where the six of us were staying on the last leg of our trip. Doolin is a village of 200 people on the western coast of County Clare, the Republic of Ireland’s least-developed county. Irish writer Sean O’Faolain calls Clare “a shaggy-dressed, hairy-faced, dark-eyed, rough faced man of the road.” Known for its wild berry jams and traditional music, Doolin also runs summer ferries to the Aran Islands. Shopping for Aran sweaters and sipping hot tea back at the lodge was starting to look like a better option as I watched Adrian drive up to meet us in the steady drizzle.

Shaking hands with all of us, he looked like a character out of Lord of the Rings. Not an orc or a Hobbit, Adrian was more of a wizard with wild gray hair, bad teeth, and a certain glint. I’ve been around a lot of cavers, and they’re not entirely normal. Eggs and beer for breakfast, cast-off Army-Navy gear, minimal personal hygiene, and a psychopathic love of mud suggest why spelunkers hover only at the edges of civilization. I doubted Irish cavers were any different. Now, as we followed Adrian’s truck, civilization seemed to be slipping even farther away.

We were entering the burren (“place of rock”), western Ireland’s fantastical limestone karst. The burren is a treeless, rocky moor that paves most of County Clare. Irish essayist Susan Cahill called it “a sci-fi Metallica wasteland.” You walk the rolling landscape among ridges that protrude like the vertebrae of buried creatures. The sharp rock will slice your hands if you stumble. Neolithic drystone walls delineate old sheep pastures.
Leaning into his truck, the wizard dragged out some lumpy duffels and dumped out overalls, boots, gloves, battery packs, and helmets. “You’re all adults, “Adrian said. You can pick out your own gear.” He then gave us a lecture on hydrology. Fluctuating water makes burren caves dangerous, especially during the rainy season, but the recent dry spell and today’s weather forecast guaranteed us predictable levels. We then trudged off to the mouth of “PollnaGollum,” the longest cave in Ireland. “Gollum?” I said. “Like in Lord of the Rings?” The wizard shrugged.
PollnaGollum’s serpentine passageways are my favorite kind of caving. You can walk standing up, brace yourself against walls, only occasionally stoop or crawl, and confidently follow the river seams. Once the water in my boots warmed up, I comfortably sloshed behind Adrian. All was going well until I heard what sounded like somebody dumping out buckets of rocks.
The waterfall was deafening. We’d reached a “skylight,” where a section of cave had collapsed and water was pouring in. The wizard looked up at the cascade. “It’s more water than I thought,” he said simply. “I thought you said this was a dry cave,” I said. “This is a dry cave,” he said. “If it were a wet cave, we’d need diving gear.”
We stopped to sit on some rocks, waiting for Tom and the boys who were now fifteen minutes late for our rendezvous. The water in my boots was cooling, and I was starting to shiver. The wizard dug out some Mars Bars from his pack. We turned off our headlamps and ate our candy, the wrappers crackling in the inky silence. We then heard voices somewhere behind us. “We made a wrong turn,” Tom told Adrian. “So I decided to go back to the entrance. Then we just followed your route.”

We all tromped back through the dark watery stew to the drizzly twilight of the entrance and climbed up the cable ladder to the top. As we peeled off sodden gear back at the vehicles, I asked the wizard what his next spelunking adventure would be. “Oh, I’m getting out of this muck!” Adrian said, gesturing at the leaden sky. “In ten days the missus and I are going to Crete for a week.” A wise wizard indeed.

If you go:

Doolin Activity Lodge Bed & Breakfast
County Clare, Ireland
One hour from Shannon Airport
Four hours from Dublin Airport

Hosts: Niall and Deirdre

Tel: +353 65 707 4888
Fax: +353 65 707 4877
Email: info@doolinlodge.com

http://www.doolinlodge.com./

Open all year, Niall can connect you with guided walking and cycling tours plus on-site caving and diving facilities. En-suite rooms with under-floor heating are excellent for drying wet caving clothes. Several pubs and restaurants are within walking distance.

I always thought it would be ideal to live six months of the year in one place and the other six months of the year in another place. I’d have a trailer down in Tucson for the winter and I’d have a summer cabin in a lovely northern, wooded place. You know, something like in the movie “On Golden Pond.”

I would arrive my summer home like Katherine Hepburn and pull the sheets off the furniture, chattering on about hearing the loons, nagging Henry Fonda about going out in the motorboat on the lake, and wandering out into the woods to pick strawberries. I’d be so happy to be back in that familiar house, looking out on that familiar water, and getting back into the familiar routines I’d been missing the last six months somewhere else.

So, here we are again in Nome but I have no sheets to pull off the furniture. Other renters were sitting on this furniture just before we arrived. Instead of a few boxes lugged in from the car, we had 26 large, hernia-popping duffle bags, trunks, and boxes in various states arrival by air freight. The ravens and gulls around here are not exactly melodious, the blueberries won’t be ripe for another two months, our boats are locked up in some warehouse in Texas, and we don’t know where we’ll spend the winter. “On Golden Pond,” it ain’t.

I didn’t want to pack up and live six months somewhere else. I wanted to stay here and finish more of the books on Arctic exploration and sing in the Handel chorus. We still had tundra to explore and snow to ski. And it was a crime to leave when we still had salmon in the freezer.

Most people don’t take us seasonal movers too seriously, anyway. Why shouldn’t we suffer the bad weather just like everybody else? At the public library back in Pennsylvania, I had to pay a $30 “transient deposit” just for the privilege of checking out two books every three weeks. And even those cost me a quarter each.

But we’re part of a long drifting tradition. My parents are from Ohio. My husband’s parents are from Idaho. Their parents were the children of transplants from the Netherlands, Germany, Ireland, and England. But I’m happy we recrossed the land bridge between Pittsburgh and Alaska to be back on Bering’s golden pond this year. So I’ll pin up my hair like Katherine Hepburn and start listening for red-throated loons and sandhill cranes, picking baskets of berries, walking the local trails, and nagging my husband now and again. Just like the movies.

Blueberry season is almost over in Nome. It hasn’t been an easy berry-picking season for us Nomeites with weeks and weeks of rain. You could hear it in the murmurs at the post office, you could see it in the listless faces on Front Street. We
were teased with one sunny day and then plunged into dark storm for weeks. Berry buckets hung on nails, berry dreams were dreamt as we tossed and turned. And for me, day after day in a small apartment gets longer and smaller with three small boys.

The first ingredient for a real blueberry pie is to marry someone who appreciates a good pie. My husband appreciates solid, peasant fare like potatoes and beans and tortillas and cornbread. He was also born in Oregon, famous for berries. My mother’s people canned fruit in Michigan, blueberries among them, so I qualified as a berry person.
The second ingredient is a good crust. Back in college I learned an odd crust recipe that you shape into the pan with your hands. No rolling. The person who taught me this recipe lived in a nearby apartment also taught me to crochet and choose jazz records.

Another ingredient is real blueberries. My family went out two times to pick blueberries in the Nome area. Each time was on a Sunday after the paper had been read, the card games played, and the dishes washed. The gun was packed for the bears, the sodas for the car sickness, and the candy bars for the small boy thank-yous of being with their parents and not fighting too much.

The last essential ingredient is the performance art of eating the pie in the presence of the maker. When my husband came home late that night, I left a “do not touch” sign on the cooling pie. I did not want to pack any pie in his lunch the next day, either. I wanted to watch him cut the slice, slide a forkful into his mouth, watch his eyes close, and listen for the “mmmmmm.” That was my payment, and I could wait.

I don’t understand how the makers of homemade pies at diners and truck stops can stand just selling their wares to people who will serve the pies to people they’ll never meet. I want to see the face, hear the animal sounds of appreciation, and taste my creation elbow to elbow with everybody else. Now, that’s a pie.

It’s been a quiet week in Nome. The sun’s coming up closer and closer to lunchtime now and it’s risky business walking downtown. We got a little bit of snow and then it got cold, the powder blew away, and a slick hard film coated the entire town: black ice. Chiropractor weather. Lousy footing for trick-or-treating. I’m probably not the only Nomeite who’s taken a bad fall on the ice, either. I had the right boots. I was taking the proper mincing steps. But I fell hard on my left hip just the same right in the middle of the street where the taxis and ATVs had rubbed the ice down silky smooth. I’ll admit that at that moment I was feeling a bit depressed about living in this little town by the sea. But for under $20 you can get some items in our stores that can push those cold-town blues away. They’re plastic. They come in purple, lime green, neon yellow, and bright pink. They’re sleds!

If Citizen Charles Kane’s dying word was “Rosebud” in Orson Welles’ 1941 epic “Citizen Kane” because he’d lost his childhood symbolized by his boyhood sled, then Mr. Kane would have loved the sledding we did behind Anvil Mountain recently. Okay, okay. There were only about 5 inches of snow on the tundra but that was more than we had in town. Besides, we had brand new sleds to try out! We drove to the top of the road, dragged our winter chariots out of the back of the Bronco, and lined them up on the tire ruts. A few boot kicks to the back of the sleds sent some joyful screaming boys down a long run between willow walls to the flats at the bottom.

Really cold towns need to do special things for the citizens to enjoy winter. Quebec City, Canada, puts in a long tobaggon run along the St. Lawrence. Marquette, Michigan, has giant ramp for ski jumping. Minneapolis hosts a carnival. The G.I.s stationed here during World War II even built themselves a rope tow and skied down Newton Peak into Hotel Gulch to drive their winter blues away.

We could use some downhill ski runs and a groomed sledding bowl around here. Maybe we could reactivate the old rope tow. Nome is a place for big ideas. You want to open a ski area? Want to start an annual ice-carving carnival? Go right ahead. We’ll all come out for it. We like homemade fun around here. This is a place where your wackiest dreams can come true. Look at our Labor Day Bathtub Race. Maybe we could try a street dance again (in bunny boots) if Ted and the boys are willing.

Nome’s Volunteer Fire Department filled the basin next to Centennial Park with water to freeze for ice skating again this year and I’m sure for a lot of people that will be their escape from the shroud of winter. But for me it’s sleds and snow and kids in ski masks scooting downhill. With the snow spraying from their green and yellow sleds and their mushers’ hat flaps flying, my boys looked like colorful alien puppies. That’s a memory of winter we will take with us. Little Charlie Kane would have had a blast.

As you read this, I’ll be unpacking in an apartment in Anchorage. And while the family is looking forward to malls and Kentucky Fried Chicken for six months, my heart tells me we’re doing the wrong thing for winter. We should have stayed put in Nome. “But there’s more to do in the winter in Anchorage,” I’m hearing. And, “You get great concerts and shopping and there’s always the zoo!”

Zoo, schmoo. I have three sons who will soon remind me that wintering in a small apartment has universal challenges that even the biggest city can’t dispel. I look over at my sons bouncing on the couch and tipping back in chairs and practicing kung fu forms in front of the television. No wonder the Russians have great ballet!

Somewhere along the line they transformed that energy of young boys in cramped apartments through Russian winters. Can’t you hear Mrs. Barishnikov shouting as she rolls out the kolache, “Misha, OFF THE COUCH! Stop bouncing!” And Mrs. Gudonov is hanging up the wash, yelling, “Alexei, stop with the running around!” And Mrs. Nureyev can be heard repeating, “Rudy, Rudy, Rudy! The bed is not for jumping!” Famous dancers they turned out to be but only because their mothers had had it with the leaping around at home!

How different will an Anchorage winter be for me, then! Will it really matter about the concerts, the zoo, the library, and the biscuits and rotisserie meals from Kentucky Fried Chicken? Not much.

Think of me as the winds howl and the drifts collect and the sun is something I see in books. It’s another winter with three boys. It’s containing those bodies in a small space when they should be leaping and spinning with Misha, Alexei, and Rudy. It’s looking forward to an almost Russian winter without the Tchaikovsky. And I’ll be thinking of you up there, too.

On my mother’s recent visit, she asked me when the mail would arrive at the apartment. “We don’t have home delivery,” I said. “No home delivery?” she said, as if I had said Nome had no food or water. “You mean you have to go down and get it yourself?” Yes, I told her, in Nome we have to go down and get the mail ourselves. Actually, it was a shock to me, too, when we arrived last spring. Until then, I had always been able to sit in my house on any day, rain, sleet, snow or dead of summer heat and wait for some poor soul to drop it into my mailbox whatever someone in the world decided to send. Through the ice storms of Ohio, the gummy heat of Galveston Island, or a really cool American movie classic, all I ever had to do was wait. But now the shoe is on the other foot. Now if I want my mail, I have to go get it.

Now I’m the one who has to trudge through the blizzard’s drifts, slide through First Avenue’s mud, tramp through the rain, and dodge pickup trucks and taxis on Front Street. In my heart I know this is fair and that home delivery is a wasteful luxury. Having residents go to the post office themselves has got to be the most efficient way to run a postal service. Maybe if I worked at the post office, some newcomer would come up to the counter and say to me, “How come you guys don’t deliver this to my house?” I’d say, “Hey! We’ve done most of the work. Come down and get it. It’s your turn.”

I’ve never had a post office box before. I know people who have post office boxes. One lives in Iowa, one has a ranch in Texas, and another lives on a rural route in Oklahoma. Some of my best friends have P.O. boxes. Oh, I occasionally needed to go to a post office to weigh things and process large packages but I never needed to go very often. Until now.

The Nome post office is probably like small post offices throughout the country where everybody has to come retrieve mail and packages. If you stood at our post office every day for long enough, you’d eventually see every resident or someone representing them in the whole town. You’d also see people mailing buckets and coolers swaddled in duct tape full of crab meat and frozen salmon. I just wish Nome would go one step farther to take advantage of this daily mass postal migration like my California hometown did. They put in a bakery and a coffee shop in the same building with the post office. “The Cookie Post” had chocolate chip cookies on a stick and little tables and chairs to sit on that added a lot to my experience of buying a book of stamps. So why couldn’t the Park Service sell hot cocoa and doughnuts or the BIA set out some benches, sticky buns, and a 55-cup percolator in Nome’s Federal Building this winter? The BLM might even want to sell slices of Fat Freddies’ bumbleberry pie. I’d be sure to clear out my box every day! But, aside from the lack of coffee and Danish, you won’t hear me complaining about our postal service. It’s a wonderful thing that my friend in Phippsburg, Maine, can go up to her post office counter, give the employee a birthday card addressed to someone who lives in Nome, Alaska, and slap down two dimes, one nickel, and four pennies to get it here.

I’d like to think that Captain James Cook was the kind of guy who gave some serious thought to the names he gave Alaskan geographical features on his voyage here in 1778. I’d like to picture him considering the ambience, the weather, and the personality of the place, and then carefully matching up those characteristics to his list of English aristocrats. But it probably wasn’t like that at all.

He probably sat around at the officers’ table on his ship HMS Resolution after dinner looking over his maps, assigning names on pure whim. Perhaps sailing master William Bligh drained his cup of spruce beer and said, “You know, Jimmy, I’ve always wanted a reef named after me.” And Cook said, “Yeah, I know how you feel, Bill, I’ve always wanted my name on an inlet. Let’s give Prince William this big sound here, Sir Norton can have the sound there, and Darby, Rodney, Denbigh, Wooley, and the Prince of Wales can bloody well have the capes!” Tossing back another glass of brandy, Lieutenant James King may have chimed in, “Well, I’m holding out for an island. Don’t put my name on anything less than an island.” And so Cook wrote all this down in his log with his goose quill pen.

But who was this Norton? Why did Sir Fletcher Norton get his name on an Alaskan sound? He wasn’t at that floating meeting. He wasn’t even out swabbing the deck. He was back in London, thousands of miles away, holding forth as Speaker of the House of Commons.

The huge sound that bears the name of this British knighted subject teems with marine and avian life. If Sir Fletcher Norton were a birder or a naturalist, he should have been very pleased to see his appellation on so fecund a place. I’d like to think old Fletch was at least a fisherman, regularly catching salmon on holiday in wild Scottish streams. Or, perhaps Norton had always yearned to go to sea. He may have really wanted to smell of the tar and go before the mast like his young, enthusiastic relation, Lieutenant King.

We do know that Norton treated Cook and his officers to a lavish meal at the Gun Inn in Plymouth just before the Great Circumnavigator set sail on his third and last voyage in July of 1777. Later, the officers of the Resolution hosted a dinner serving Westmoreland ham, trout, lobster, shrimp, chicken, pigeon pie, and Cook’s last mouthfuls of English strawberries.

I suppose Norton’s patronage and position earned him a name on something but isn’t there something wrong with naming a large, wild place after a rich English politician in a powdered wig? Didn’t the sound already have a perfectly good Inupiaq name? For whatever reason, when John Douglas edited Cook’s journal, he applied Norton’s name to this large open body of water below the Seward Peninsula. (That name also appears on a bay, our hospital, a period of Inupiat culture, an economic development corporation, a seafood company, and a janitorial service.) Here’s to you anyway, Fletch! Pass the strawberries and another slice of that pigeon pie!