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When I got back from Arizona, almost two weeks ago, I took stock of what work I can possibly accomplish before my final day on the job, July 31st. I wrote up a list and sent it off to my boss, who said it looked about right.

This means that, for the first time in my tenure with this company, I have a to-do list that actually diminishes as each day passes, with nothing new tacked on to the end. (Well, there are some incidental things that have and will come up, but no new projects.) By the end of the day Friday, I was done with half of this list. I have precisely two more large tasks to accomplish before I leave, in both cases reading through and marking up reports. Along the way, I’ll have to contribute various small items to the massive reference binder my company must prepare each summer, ahead of a fiscal planning conference we put on for a certain mayoral blue-ribbon panel.

So the end is in sight.

After work I walked to Dizzy’s, the first time I’ve been there in over a month. (All other things being equal, I’d be there every Friday, or such has been the tradition, lo this year and a half.) Of the regulars, Greg and I were the only attendees, though Erin joined us briefly on a break from nannying. (What? Is a bar not a normal place for a nanny to kill some time before tucking in the kids?)

And at home I watched a little television and read a David Sedaris article in the latest New Yorker.

By now, it is well understood that “they” hate us (why?!!), leading scientists are finally uniting in suggesting that it might not be a good idea to tell the aliens we’re here, and our visionary president has done his best to warn us of the dangers we face from human-animal hybrids.

But what I want to know is, are we ready for this?

This diary isn’t the only routine I’m off of. No packing and no exercise the last couple of days, just work, thinking about work, thinking about packing, trying not to think about exercising, trying not to think about this diary. The craziness and pressures of what’s going on were starting to weigh on me, and I guess I just needed a break. Plus there’s this freelance project I’ve got to try to squeeze in sometime before noon on Sunday, when I’ll need to present my findings to the client, in person. All of my obligations start to feel overwhelming at points like this, but I just keep telling myself that the picture will look very different after this weekend, when I’ll be free of non-move-related obligations and can refocus for the final stretch.

The house will look very different after this weekend, too, as that’s when the plumbers are coming to work on this bathroom hot-water situation and will likely damage at least the dining room ceiling and possibly the dining room wall in the process. I’ve finally nailed down the bathroom contractor who will be replacing the tub surround: he says he’ll do the work next Wednesday. It will be a relief to have that work done, as that will be the last performed by outsiders. Then I can just work on the few small jobs on my list and do the touch-up painting necessary to pass the lead inspection.

Speaking of working too much, and I believe we were, I spent part of Independence Day at work, trying to catch up on the second of those two projects I’ve mentioned that involve so much work in Filemaker databases. In the late afternoon, I walked to a friend’s house in Remington, where a holiday BBQ was scheduled. This is a somewhat distant acquaintance I’ve known since Living Classroom days, when he was the facilities manager on the organization’s waterfront campus. (He says he was the “groundskeeper Willie” of the campus.) He’s since left and now works as a contractor; his soon-to-be wife is in public health at Johns Hopkins. It always takes me a second to realize that I, too, am essentially in public health myself, but once I did, we all had plenty to talk about. Plus another two guests at the party were biologists and one of them had done field work similar to what A. is doing, so the conversation just rolled right along.

With work the next day, I wanted to get to bed early and left the party around eight thirty. It didn’t start raining until I was almost home; before that, there was a cool, damp breeze as I walked through the empty streets, the sound of amateur fireworks rolling in from near and far across the city, Baltimore, a city that bears up well under gray skies and gets a positive twinkle in her eye when the sea winds come in off of the bay. I sat up for a little while watching television once I was home. In between downbursts, the neighborhood guys were setting off some pretty major-sounding fireworks of their own, including bottle rockets (or whatever you call the kind of fireworks that actually shoots up into the air). I was glad for the rain, because who knows where some of these burning fragments were landing. I’ve heard of some Baltimore homeowners needing to stay up on their roofs all night with a garden hose, although thankfully the neighborhood efforts didn’t seem that high powered.

At work on Thursday I plugged along with my Filemaker adventures. We also recently switched to OS X at work (yes, you read that right: we switched this week to the operating system that Apple first introduced in 2001 – up until which point all I can say is It’s Been An Adventure), and I’m literally the only person in the building with any experience using it, so I’ve been the stand-in tech support guy as everyone tries to figure out how to check their mail and what that bouncing thing is down at the bottom of the screen. Official company policy is to hate OS X (insert grumpy Scottish voice muttering about how OS 9 “was God’s own operating system” and ranting against the “frou-frou gewgaws” of the OS X display), but everyone seems to be enjoying using computers that actually work, features of the operating system aside. We could all agree that we don’t care for the “genie effect” when you minimize programs (which effect you can just turn off, by the way), for the sake of argument, but the real point is that these computers actually show you web pages the way they are supposed to look and, when you try to download a PDF, it simply happens, immediately. Before, you had to stare at your blank screen for five minutes wondering if it was working or frozen up. So initial reviews are good.

As I worked, more fireworks were going off in the ruined blocks south of Calvert.

In the evening, an evening in which I consciously Accomplished Nothing, I turned on the TV for a little while but couldn’t settle on anything. The choices were Big Brother 8, where contestants were sitting on some sort of spinning mushroom-shaped structures, apparently trying not to vomit, although they were coated in some unpleasant-looking substance, so maybe they already had; Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?, where the children seem to be at pains not to make the adults feel bad about themselves, and sort of cavort and dance with a well-trained expression of delight on their faces whether they get a question right or not (they certainly don’t seem allowed to think of themselves as Smarter Than a Grownup, although clearly some of them are); and… Actually, I forget what else was on.

I went to bed and drifted off to the sound of explosions.

I’m probably the last person on earth to clue into this, but I was reading coverage of the commutation (just keep polishing that legacy, George) and was struck by a bizarre fact from the It’s A Small World Department.

In the furor over Bush’s decision, one of the things various parties are at pains to accomplish is to prove that Bush’s commutation is more/less evil than Clinton’s last-minute pardons, most notably the pardon of “fugitive financier” Marc Rich.

The article referred back to hearings held in the first minutes of the Bush administration, looking into Rich’s and others’ pardons.

At those hearings, way back in 2001, a man who had worked as Rich’s lawyer defended the pardon, saying prosecutors had “misconstrued the facts and the law.”

That lawyer’s name?

Scooter Libby.

On my third morning in Flagstaff, a Friday, we eat breakfast across the tracks at Biff’s Bagels (named for somebody’s dead dog and now a repository of memorial photos of everyone else’s dead dog) then split up: I head back to the hotel to pack while A. drives one of the camp Suburbans to a tire place to get a tire patched, a frequent necessity for camp vehicles given the rough roads on which they are operated. I finish packing and take her laptop down to the coffee shop on the ground floor to take care of some work emails and otherwise embrace the grid one last time before heading into the woods. While I wait, a man in a bushy beard and a cowboy hat and a shirt with mother-of-pearl snaps walks up to the counter and, in response to the counter girl’s question as to whether he’d like a menu, says he’d like a double shot of Jack with a glass of water on the side. It is 8 a.m.

“This is what you look like the day after your anniversary,” he says, adjusting his sunglasses.

When A. finally arrives, the man, who is “down from the rez” for a visit to town, is buying breakfasts for the fourth set of customers who have walked in since he did.

“I bought everything last night,” he says. At least he is only sipping the whisky. “I might as well keep going.”

I wish him a happy anniversary and we hit the road.

Bird Camp takes a three-night break every week and a half or so, with campers needing to be back and ready for work bright and early (in the field by 5 a.m., remember) the morning after the third night. In effect, this means that the last night of break can really only be spent in camp; most of the campers come back to camp in time for dinner, but some might have a reason to trail in very late that night. We are headed back early, trying to get to camp by early afternoon, because A. needs to make rounds on some nests that are due for monitoring visits that day. Riding with us is a Taiwanese UM grad student and a friend of hers from back home, also a biologist, who will be visiting the camp for a week or so. (She is a Virginia Tech student.)

Before leaving town we stop at a grocery store. (Each camper is responsible for his or her own food and other supplies, plus A. needs supplies for the BBQ she is throwing because her predecessor will be visiting the camp with her husband that evening.) The Taiwanese students are keenly aware that a container of ice cream they had purchased in town will not last the drive, much less survive at camp, so they eat it with a set of metal chopsticks as they shop.

As the Suburban makes its lumbering way out of town, the trappings of civilization fall away very quickly. Soon we are on a curving, two-lane blacktop through tree-covered hills. We pass a geographical feature known as Mormon Lake that currently has no actual water in it; it’s been a very dry season so far, though the area around Bird Camp got a lot of snow last winter.

After about an hour we reach Happy Jack: a gravel parking lot serving a gas station, general store and cafe. I fill up the Suburban while A. gets the camp’s mail. The two Taiwanese duck into the general store, surprised that I am not joining them.

“Are you sure?” asks one. “Last chance for ice cream.”

At this point, we are only halfway there, in terms of time on the road: we leave the highway at the ranger station (we stop and A. picks up the two eBay video cameras she’d ordered, which had to be sent to a street address instead of the P.O. boxes in Happy Jack) and commence the final leg, about an hour on narrow gravel roads up and down steep grades through the Coconino National Forest. The roads vary greatly in quality along the route. Often they are in good shape, but occasionally they have developed those latitudinal ridges that gravel roads sometimes get; when we encounter these on a downgrade, the Suburban has the disquieting tendency to swim back and forth across the road unless driven at barely noticeable speeds. In fact, other than its general sturdiness (I’m assuming) and high passenger/equipment capacity, there seems little to recommend this particular model of SUV for this purpose. (It’s not even four-wheel drive, although to be fair it’s not like they really need to drive off-road or deal with snow or much mud.)

Finally we pull into the camp. The first view is of the few personal vehicles that some of the campers keep at camp, parked next to the four chemical toilets that the visiting Taiwanese student refers to as “porta-pities,” which seems apt. Under a tree in this parking area lie a pile of ladders, poles, traps and other equipment. From the parking area, the tiny gravel track continues toward the center of the camp, still fifty yards distant. Off in the trees I can see some of the campers’ personal tents, which are scattered in all directions on the outskirts of camp, according to the idiosyncratic privacy desires and other considerations of each camper.

The heart of the camp consists of a row of three military campaign-style utility tents, floorless, house-shaped, in white canvas. The largest is the cook tent and the other two are used to store cameras, records and other necessities. There is a late model, smallish camper trailer to one side, where the Bird Camp Professor stays when he visits and which is otherwise available as a spot for sheltered computer use and for its refrigerator. (These people eat a lot of cheese.) The wisdom of using the computers inside the camper – in addition to comfort – is clear after only a few minutes in camp. With the dry weather, a fine red dust rises from the soil and covers everything. The white canvas tents are dingy with it.

A. confers with Kara, who is also back at camp, about which nests need a visit, flipping through the pink cards on which each nest’s location is recorded and where visits are logged. Then they get their equipment together: various small instrument cases, backpacks, notebooks, a narrow ten-foot ladder.

I am already sneezing. I seem to be allergic to every place A. does field work.

On the even rougher gravel roads around Bird Camp, the Suburban is deafening to ride in. The windows are open for what little comfort the hot breeze brings, so we hear the tires crunching and popping over every rock. The vehicle jounces up and down over hard ridges and through washed-out gullies, suspension and seat springs squeaking, the dashboard rattling. The aluminum ladder, lying across the seat backs, is its own symphony of clatters.

We need to visit three nests: one to install an egg probe, one to change out the data logger at an already probed nest, and one to measure some nestlings that have recently hatched.

The first nest is accessible from a road, so we park and A. and Kara pile their instrument cases on the ground. This nest is in a snag, or the trunk of a snapped-off tree about eight feet tall. A. walks to the nest; the mother waits until the last second, then takes off, flying low to the ground, hoping we’ll follow her, whoever we are, whatever it is we want. A. stands on tiptoe to lift a tiny, rust-specked egg out of the nest, which is built into the exposed hollow at the center of the tree. The egg is about the size of an almond M&M; the number “3” is written on the side in blue ink.

This egg is doomed; the process it’s about to undergo will kill it, but the plan is to hook up a probe to it that will allow the Bird Campers to monitor the temperature of the nest as the mother continues to incubate her other eggs. This is a difficult thing to pull off, since – while mother birds don’t mind their eggs being handled, it seems – they will reject eggs if they detect the probe, and they often do. But the often frustrating effort is worth it for the fascinating temperature data that are collected. For example, eggs must be kept above a certain temperature to develop; below that temperature, they just don’t grow and will eventually die. This temperature is easily maintained when the mother is sitting on the eggs, of course, but what about when she leaves for food? The probe data, which – when downloaded from the logging devices – is visible on a computer screen as a jagged line graph of steep peaks and valleys, show that the birds are somehow able – and somehow “know” – to increase the temperature of the eggs just before leaving, just to give themselves a little more time before they must return.

The first step is to collect a yolk sample; this isn’t necessary to the probing but might as well happen since the egg will die anyway. A. inserts a tiny, needle-shaped nozzle into the egg. The nozzle is connected to a tiny pieces of tubing on the end which is in turn attached to a syringe, where the syringe’s needle would usually be. Drawing up the syringe’s plunger, A. is pleased by the result.

“I got yolk on the first try!”

I can tell from Kara’s reaction that this is not usually so easy.

Now it’s time for the probe. A. takes out about three feet of skinny wire with black insulation. The wire terminates in two bare metal wires that come together in a little tear-drop tip, about the size of a glob of ink from a dying ballpoint. The two bare leads remind me of the filament in a light bulb. She inserts the little tear drop into the hole she made for the yolk sample, and then she and Kara work on sealing the hole as smoothly as possible with super glue and a spray accelerant that speeds the glue’s drying. A little clumpy, one of them says, but it will do. A. writes a code on the data logger, a small black plastic object the approximate size and shape of a pack of cigarettes cut in half. Holding the egg, the probe wire trailing, a roll of camouflaged duct tape around her bicep, A. walks over the nest, followed by Kara with the logger and a large ziploc bag. Now the other two eggs come out of the nest as well so that this one can be placed in the middle and the wire hidden as well as possible. After arranging the eggs and leading the wire out of the back of the nest, A. tapes the wire to the tree trunk and plugs it into the data logger, which she places in the ziploc and wedges into the space behind some peeling bark. More tape. She studies her handiwork. Nothing obvious, no strange human-related objects immediately in view. This should do the trick.

For the next nest we drive again and then pile out of the vehicle for a quarter-mile walk through the woods. If A. and Kara haven’t been to a particular nest before, they must get out an orienteering compass and follow someone else’s written directions on the pink card for that nest: start at station A, walk 30 yards at 070 degrees to a jagged stump, walk 90 yards at 180 degrees to two aspens growing in a V, etc. It’s like looking for pirate’s treasure. At this nest, which is built in a low tree at about thigh height, A. only needs to change out the logger hooked up to an already probed egg. After doing so, A. walks to two or three other low trees in the immediate area and makes the same motions, pretending to examine non-existent nests. This is to confuse any of the smarter nest predators – namely jays – who might be watching; incredibly, they are known to use human scientists to lead them to their lunches.

As we walk back up to the car, from the wetter region at the bottom of the little valley or drainage to the drier ridge, we pass from deciduous forest back into pines, the air dappled with late afternoon sunlight and shimmering with dust and pollen. As we drive, the wind kicks up little dust devils from the red dirt in front of us. I’m blowing my nose about every minute or so, and my lips are already severely chapped from the dry air.

The last nest of the day is also a quarter mile or so from the road. Unlike the other two, this one is built high in a tree, about fifteen feet off the ground. Also unlike the other two nests, this one is guarded by a kind of a bird – a Steller’s Jay – that is known to be a little less passive when humans come knocking. Kara warns that it might fly at our faces, which has me wishing for ski goggles, but A. isn’t concerned. Kara and I prop the forestry ladder against the tree and hold it while A. worms up through the branches to lift out two of the three nestlings (never leave an empty nest, in case the mother returns and decides to abandon the nest because, she “thinks,” all of the eggs/nestlings have been eaten) before climbing down again. We retreat to the instrument cases piled about twenty yards away from the tree. Against prediction, the Steller’s Jay never once attacks.

Eggs are easy: you just weigh them. With nestlings, you must measure various parts of their wings, which means holding them firmly and grabbing the wings and unfolding them. The little creatures are startlingly ugly and pathetic; no feathers yet, although you can see where ridges of something featherlike are growing in; their skin so thin it is almost transparent. They seem too vulnerable to be exposed to the outside air, like little gallbladders with wings. After the measurements are taken, they are stuffed head first into a film canister for weighing; the film canister holds them still and keeps them on the scale. Periodically, some reflex triggers their feeding instinct and their massive mouths pop open.

A. returns the first two, retrieves the third, and completes the round of measurements. We return to camp, where more campers are trickling back from break. There is paperwork to complete, the next day’s routes and procedures to plan, and then it is time for the BBQ.

The next morning, I do not join A. when the alarm goes off at 3:45. She dresses with her headlamp on and brushes her teeth at the tent door before kissing me goodbye. I drift in and out of sleep while the camp wakes up around me. Pots and pans clank in the cook tent, vehicle doors slam, equipment clanks. When campers walk past the tent, their headlamps project the grasses and trees against the side of the tent like a shadow-puppet show. The birds’ dawn symphony is warming up, not exactly loud, but dozens of different patterns melding together from all sides. Something howls: is it a coyote or just the dog visiting camp with A.’s predecessor?

I pass the morning wandering the meadow next to the camp, my only company the flies and whatever left the large piles of poop I must keep half an eye out for. But it’s beautiful: grassland along a meandering creek, bordered by pines. Other than Bird Camp, the closest permanent human structures are seventeen miles away, at the ranger station. Back at the camp, I read and chat with two of the grad students who are working in camp today. One is transferring notes from one notebook to another; the other is making “dummy eggs” for some purpose from plaster of paris. Eventually they head out and at 10 a.m. the camp is empty, the only sounds occasional bird chirps and the wind, starting as a light whistling in the treetops before gusting louder and louder, kicking up the red dust as it whooshes through. The dust coats the haphazardly arranged plastic patio chairs, the picnic table, the six red gas cans in the shade of a tree, the seven trash cans clustered around another tree. The dishwashing station, well off from the cook tent, six blue jerry cans for water, bottles of soap, buckets. The utility tents’ doors flap with a sound like sails in the wind. And far off in the tall grass, a soccer ball sits forgotten.

*****

Saturday evening we will return to a motel in Flagstaff for the last night of my visit, since my shuttle to Phoenix leaves at 7:30 Sunday morning. But first I accompany A. out on afternoon rounds, similar to those we made on Friday. We visit the first nest again, the one she probed, to change out the data logger. But the probed egg is gone, its innards smeared across the other two eggs. At first, A. can’t even find the logger but eventually locates it in the tall grass about six feet from the tree snag. It has been ripped from the tree and the black probe wire chewed neatly through, as if clipped by wire cutters. Back at camp, on the computer, the logger is shown to have been collecting normal nestlike temperatures until six a.m., which is when the probe seems to have been detected and destroyed. The mother might have been trying to rotate and rearrange the eggs, one of the grad students says. I ask if he’s ever seen a wire chewed straight through like that.

“They get pretty upset sometimes,” he says.

1.
The Monte Vista Hotel opened in 1927 and trades on its retro image. There is an old-fashioned front desk with mail cubbyholes in the wall behind it. The decor is dark wood; the bar has a black and red color scheme. On the front desk, a brass plaque advertises “Ear plugs available upon request.” (Perhaps because, as I’ll later hear a local claim, 83 trains pass through Flagstaff on an average day.) In the elevator, a brass plaque asks “Please be kind to our ancient elevator.” The brochure A. sent me mentions that “several dozen rooms are named after our celebrated guests: Carol Lombard, Humphrey Bogart, Bob Hope, Clark Gable, Spencer Tracey, Zane Grey, Jane Russell, Bing Crosby and more.” Indeed, as we walk down the hall toward our third-floor room, we pass the Jane Russell room and the Alan Ladd room. So my head just isn’t in the right era when we come to our room, read the name beneath the black and white framed photo on the door, and try to place the name “Robert Englund.” It comes to me before we open the door, but, if it hadn’t, the framed picture of Freddy Krueger next to the mirror would have tipped us off. It’s autographed by “Freddy” and is annotated: “Suite Dreams — Ha, Ha!”

It’s not a suite, though, just a small room with a bed, dresser and sink, and the shower and toilet in a little closet-like space. Adequate to our purposes. There is no bedside table, which will be significant a few nights into our stay. By then, I’ll be in the habit of hanging my metal-framed glasses from the floor lamp next to the bed, by hooking one temple over the lampshade. This works just fine when turning in for the night, but on one occasion I do this while resting my eyes during the an “Office” marathon we’re watching on TV. (Probably I did this during the many previews of the apparently execrable movie “Evan Almighty,” also starring Steve Carrell, that they are playing at the commercial breaks.) The light is on. Fifteen minutes later, I scoop the glasses up and pop them onto my face too quickly to notice that the metal temple has been superheated by its proximity to the light bulb. All at the same time, I hear the sound of my sizzling flesh, feel the pain and find that I am yelling with pain and surprise.

Our room could have a cooler namesake, but it could also have a worse one. On our way out for dinner at Karma Sushi Tapas, on Route 66, I notice a Bon Jovi room next to the elevator.

2.
The next morning we walk across the tracks to the laundromat and start a load of A.’s clothes before ordering breakfast next door in Macy’s, one of these places where you order food at the counter and some hairy young person eventually walks out into the middle of the dining room with your meal and yells your name. Mismatched, scarred wood furniture, a general atmosphere of virtuous reducing, reusing and making do. Ahead of us in line, a Frenchman apologizes for his English. “Don’t apologize,” the clerk instructs him. All of the Bird Campers are in town and we run into various of them everywhere we go; at breakfast, A.’s colleague Kara joins us. They eat granola, I eat a “steamed egg” sandwich (which is much better than it sounds). While A. and Kara talk birds and camp, I flip through a copy of Us magazine I’ve stolen from the laundromat. I had thought I wanted to see the “scandalous pictures” of Lindsay Lohan holding a knife to Vanessa Williams’s neck, pictures which the headline claims are “testing [Williams’s husband’s] love”], but I find myself transfixed by an ad for the Canon Powershot digital camera featuring Maria Sharapova, and not for the reasons you might expect: the camera ad features about a dozen photographs, but they are all pictures of Sharapova taking pictures, with no suggestion that the photos are supposed to represent what the camera is actually capable of. You should want this camera, in other words, so that you will look like Maria Sharapova when you are using it?

While we eat, a heavyset woman stirs coffee beans in the massive roaster that dominates the dining room. Her iPod and the coffee roaster are the same shade of red. On the way back to our side of the tracks, we are stopped by a train, an immensely long row of doubledecker cargo containers full of all the stuff China makes for us.

3.
Flagstaff is such a small town that, when I visited last year, I drove through it thinking it was its own suburbs. There is a tiny downtown “grid” before the town peters out into suburban sprawl and strip malls. But the downtown has an appealing, defiant feel to it, remnants of the old west, no building taller than four or five stories. There are interesting restaurants and small boutiques where one can pay a lot of money for clothes to go for a hike in, and other stores with signs advertising “Crystal Sale” and “Sustainable Fashions.” The side streets feel sleepy and of another time, the local motels advertised by billboards on steel Eiffel Tower-like structures towering fifty feet above the sidewalk, a clear sign of the absence of zoning laws, like they were thrown up during a plutonium rush in the 1960s. One block over from the tracks is a street of old-fashioned motor-court-style motels, overgrown with unplanned foliage and obviously offering weekly and monthly rates.

July 1st. Officially my last full month in Baltimore has begun, and, since A. now arrives back here on August 1st, my last full month alone. It’s a good feeling and a daunting one at the same time, since – to repeat it for the thousandth time – there is so much to get done before then. The little household tasks aren’t such a big deal; they’ll take time, but I know I can get them done, and it looks like I’ll have some help. The biggest load off of my mind would be if I knew we had a house in Missoula lined up, but I just keep telling myself there are 30 days left in which to find one; it’ll get done. It does look like we’ll have to lie about Zuzu, though, as it seems that pretty much no Missoula landlords allow pets. Well, this is what they get, and let that be a lesson to you, if you’re in a similar position: if your ad says “pets on approval,” then your tenant will tell you he or she has a pet, and you can make a determination based on what kind it is, etc. But if you just say “no pets,” well, you need to realize that lots of people have pets, and they’re not going to just drown them so that they can rent a house from you. So then they lie, and now look what a fine start you’re off to. . .

My brother and I departed West Virginia around noon, after brunch (and after setting my father up on Skype, a VOIP phone service that supports video as well as voice, so that he could see the video phone effect he’s dreamed of – he claims – since before it appeared in Dick Tracy comics, i.e., before the dawn of the modern age). It’s a beautiful drive, although more beautiful on the way to West Virginia, the direction in which the ugliness dissolves layer by layer like peeling an onion. Being a weekend close to Independence Day, there were an inordinate number of classic cars on the road, not to mention motorcycles. One thing that struck me was the relatively high number of three-wheeled motorcycles (or motorized tricycles, as I look forward to referring to one some day in the presence of its owner); my impression is that these were once a relative novelty, but perhaps they have gone into higher production. Maybe they’re the “safe” motorcycle that more and more novices are starting out on or that are being purchased by Milquetoasts who want to ride along with their friends.

We were home by five. My brother went swimming with friends at Pretty Boy Reservoir (he’s obsessed with swimming in “natural” bodies of water) and I went grocery shopping before planning some freelance work, packing three boxes (that’s my new, doable daily goal), and otherwise puttering around. Busy busy busy keeps the black dog at bay.

P.S. I learned over the weekend that the tenants have finally signed the lease. Now I is a landlord, I guess.

Dateline: In West Virginia, at my parents’ house.

My mother finally retired about a week ago, which meant the end of the almost year-long situation in which she spent the weeks in Silver Spring and the weekends in Elkins, making an approximately 300-mile drive most Fridays and most Sundays, with some variations. Once the Silver Spring house finally sold, she was staying in the basement of her friends’ house in Silver Spring – a nice basement, no doubt, and a nicer living situation than in a house “staged” by real-estate agents for selling, but a basement and what felt like an imposition, nonetheless. Now she’s finally, totally a West Virginia resident but still hasn’t gotten used to it. In fact, she’s just been recuperating the last week, finding her balance, acclimating first to retirement and second to being in one place and finally getting to just stand still.

My brother and I arrived on Friday in the afternoon. Given my upcoming move to Montana, this is probably the last time I’ll visit Elkins for a while. It was nice to partake in the regular daily rhythms of a functioning household that isn’t in the process of being put into boxes: walking the dogs, eating a leisurely dinner, watching a movie. (Robert Altman’s California Split, which I’m not going to have time to say much about here but which is really worth seeing: 1970s film about two men who let the temptation of the gaming tables loom a little large in their lives, but really it’s about life expectations and hope and the lies we tell ourselves, and I enjoyed the hell out of the meaty, real-feeling portrayal of human characters, not to mention the scene where Charlie is fighting the tall mustached guy in the racetrack men’s room and they crash into a stall that is already in use and the guy sitting on the toilet can’t think of anything to say except “Get the hell out of here!”)

I was up early on Saturday and took Hannah, the German Shepherd, for a run. This was something she used to enjoy back when she first joined the family, but I have to remind myself that that was almost eight years ago, which makes her a senior citizen now. I took it slow and tried to engineer things so that she was running on grass as much as possible, but, by the end, she was dragging behind me and even seemed to be forcing stops more and more often, ostensibly to pee, except nothing really seemed to be coming out, leading me to wonder just who was really in charge in here. I took a zigzagging route through the residential streets near my parents’ house. Mostly these streets were sleepy, just a few early-risers out and about, except down in the city park where dozens of classic cars were being directed into position as part of the Independence Day festivities that the county would be observing this weekend. I had the thought that, in Germany, or maybe just in the novels of Ursula Hegi, there is a superstition that celebrating one’s birthday early is a mistake, a jinx along the lines of counting one’s eggs, etc. Given how many localities in the country have probably been doing this for a while now, maybe this is why the nation seems vaguely cursed these days.

After a breakfast of poached eggs and waffles, we piled into the Element and drove to Blackwater Falls State Park, where we once skied as a family about two decades ago. As I recall, it was a warm spring weekend when some skiers were wearing shorts (and got bloody knees as a result), and the lodge was nearly empty of guests, it being so late in the season. I guess the state parks must have had a policy of hiring the handicapped to maintain its facilities at the time, because nearly staff member was either retarded or in some other way (oh, what polite, careful way is there of saying something like “deficient”?).

This time we just took some short hikes, first to the falls (this “hike” took us down wooden steps the whole way) and then through the woods at the edge of Pendleton Lake, which was really more of a large pond than a lake. At overlooks and other suitably photogenic places, I was struck as always by the amount of photographing going on. At the falls, as we approached on the wooden walkway, a twentysomething man and woman were there ahead of us. She was struggling, making some sort of adjustment to her camera, while he snapped away. After a while he walked back to where she was still fiddling and I heard him say, “never mind, I got it.” Fifty feet below the platform where we stood, a stuffed yellow Pokemon doll lay spreadeagled, face down on the rocks.

We drove home through the town of Thomas and stopped for lunch at the Purple Fiddle, another of these casual, sprawling places that don’t quite have table service and where the vegetarians aren’t disappointed. Massive carved bears hefting mugs of something or other stand watch over the outdoor seating area, while the walls inside are covered by quilts, Bluegrass posters, built-in shelves brimming with board games and coffee-table books, and, yes, a purple-painted fiddle or two or three. As we made the drive back to Elkins, the wind turbines on a far hillside loomed into view, out of scale and alien, like the tripods in War of the Worlds.

Back at the house, there was a point in the afternoon when everyone was sitting around either reading or talking or dozing and I was about to suggest that we walk over to the park for a look at the classic cars, which I’d been assuming all day that we would do. My next thought was wait, why would we want to do that? And so I kept my mouth shut and we just kept reading and talking and dozing.

We ate dinner on the river at a restaurant with a deck and a train car (we on the deck), to a folk/string/”old time” music band’s serenade. Then it was just a matter of killing time until the fireworks display scheduled for the evening, about twenty feet over from my parents’ house, on the campus of Davis and Elkins College. As we whiled away the hours, we could hear the amplified echoes of the talent contest we were trying to avoid, a talent contest consisting entirely of would-be country singers. We thought the fireworks were scheduled for nine p.m., although this turned out to be a mistaken impression. We arrived and spread our blanket (my brother pointed out that we seemed to be some of the only people not sitting on these luxurious folding camp armchairs everyone has now; well, my dad had one, but the rest of just stretched out on the blanket, and it was true that there didn’t seem to be many others doing so) on the fringes of the crowd at about 8:45 and then sat through nearly two more hours of the talent contest before the fireworks started at ten thirty. (Is it really talent if everyone has some?)

It was an interesting but eventually not particularly enjoyable spectacle, although I’m always fascinated to see How People Live and all that. The event was hosted by some local country-music-station DJs and sponsored by various local businesses (who definitely got their money’s worth, as the DJs listed their names almost as often as they said any other words in the English language) and Colgate toothpaste, leading to the bizarre spectacle of a toothpaste giveaway to children in the crowd at one point that just went on and on. It was strange to hear the DJ refer to the standard jokes that are made about West Virginian dental hygiene as the giveaway progressed, although I’m not sure if his point (that these allegations were being disproved by the toothpaste enthusiasm in the crowd) was underlined or -mined by the surging river of children who came running down the hill toward the stage to receive their toothpaste: if they had some at home already, would they have been quite so excited? But I guess it’s always exciting to get Something for Nothing, and maybe these children’s enthusiasm spoke more to their awareness that they live in households where dollars must be stretched.

Notes on commerce: there wasn’t much, and that surprised me for some reason, although it was a relatively small event, with a crowd of no more than a thousand. All you could buy were root beer floats, various sodas/lemonades, etc., hot dogs, popcorn, and snowballs. There was no beer truck, but the house was only twenty feet away, so were adequately supplied.

The fireworks themselves were a modest display, nothing to be ashamed of but not quite as overwhelming and coordinated as those I’ve gotten used to in the Inner Harbor. While the rockets glared redly, etc., the DJs played a soundtrack of the pop-country songs that must probably at this point be considered “standards” at events like this one. The first one was the Brooks and Dunn number “Only in America,” a blandly inoffensive paean to this country’s alleged equal opportunity (although studies now show it’s not so equal after all):

Only in America
Where we dream in red, white and blue
Only in America
Where we dream as big as we want to
We all get a chance
Everybody gets to dance
Only in America

(As a side note, I wonder if Brooks and Dunn intended the distinctly Buddhist “let go of desire and ambition” sentiment at which the song gestures at one point: “They just might go back to Oklahoma/And talk about the stars they could have been.” No, I guess probably not.)

And at this point, it wouldn’t be the 4th of July without “God Bless the USA,” which was followed by a sort of electronic/muzak version of “God Bless America,” sung by a singer who didn’t sound like she quite meant it. All well and good, but frankly the evening ended on a sour note with a song that I hadn’t even known existed but which seems to me to Explain A Lot. I’m just going to reprint the lyrics below, without comment, except to wonder (1) just how many people’s worldviews are shaped by this sort of thing and (2) why all copies haven’t been retracted by the artist and burned at this late date in the 21st century. (I mean, I don’t need to actually point out that he gets it all entirely wrong, right?) It’s by Darryl Worley, if you want to run out and buy a copy.

I hear people saying we don’t need this war
I say there’s some things worth fighting for
What about our freedom and this piece of ground?
We didn’t get to keep ’em by backing down
They say we don’t realize the mess we’re getting in
Before you start preaching
Let me ask you this my friend

CHORUS 1
Have you forgotten how it felt that day
To see your homeland under fire
And her people blown away?
Have you forgotten when those towers fell?
We had neighbors still inside
Going through a living hell
And you say we shouldn’t worry ’bout Bin Laden
Have you forgotten?

They took all the footage off my T.V.
Said it’s too disturbing for you and me
It’ll just breed anger that’s what the experts say
If it was up to me I’d show it every day
Some say this country’s just out looking for a fight
After 9/11 man I’d have to say that’s right

[repeat CHORUS 1]

I’ve been there with the soldiers
Who’ve gone away to war
And you can bet that they remember
Just what they’re fighting for

CHORUS 2
Have you forgotten all the people killed?
Yes, some went down like heroes in that Pennsylvania field
Have you forgotten about our Pentagon?
All the loved ones that we lost
And those left to carry on
Don’t you tell me not to worry ’bout Bin Laden
Have you forgotten?

Have you forgotten?
Have you forgotten?

Thankfully, the crescendo of fireworks explosions at the finale drowned out the final stanza or two of this song, but it had done its damage to my mood. Up until that point I had enjoyed the show and feeling of community, but now I felt sad and alone. As the last fireworks faded from our retinas, they played “The Star-spangled Banner” (a bloodless, “country” version, i.e., the singer drawled in a slight southern accent over music that might as well have been created by computer program and a drum machine), and everyone stood up, but mostly just to fold their chairs and blankets and start to leave. I was certainly in no mood to salute, not for some crappy muzakified version of the national anthem included in the same playlist as the song I reprinted above. I was struck by the fact that the crowd didn’t seem impressed either and was pretty much just filing out, not exactly the sort of anthem-related behavior that stereotype might lead one to expect in a small town in West Virginia. But at least no one was going to take our own lack of observance amiss, it appeared.

We folded our own blanket and trudged back to the house, in depressed and thoughtful silence.

But all in all it was good to be with family, not least after my mom broke out the Irish cream.

1.
I arrive at BWI at nine a.m. for a ten a.m. flight. If I’d had any bags to check, this would have been a mistake: there are easily two hundred people waiting in the line for check-in with baggage at the Southwest counter. Bagless, I can duck into a separate “line” (actually, there’s no one in it) and I am checked in and free to head for the gate within minutes.

In security, the pregnant women come and go, discussing pregnancy. A new mother pushing a stroller is an elder statesman among them. Everyone quickly establishes how old the baby is. (8 months.) Apparently, he wasn’t even sitting up at Easter, and now look at him. The usual sounds of adoration are made.

“I don’t know what the hell happened to Trent Lott,” says the mean-faced man behind me in the security line. “He’s making nice with Pelosi and the rest of them.”

At the gate, I am one of the last people to join the “C” line, the third and final boarding group on a Southwest flight. This means I am doomed to a middle seat.

“We’re going to be last?” says an old woman in front of me. “Don’t they make allowances for senior citizens?”

“Yes, get out your AARP card,” says a middle-aged woman, standing with her balding, pink-scalped husband. Their hulking sons crowd the door of the jetway.

“Oh, I’m well past that,” says the old woman, mysteriously. (Is there an upper limit for AARP membership now?) “I’m 72.”

“Oh!” says the second woman. “I’m in my 50s, and I would have guessed you were my age.”

Her husband: “I would have guessed 30s.” He does not in the slightest appear to be joking.

The wife: “You have great skin.”

The husband: “And great teeth.” He looks like a dentist, come to think of it.

The wife: “You must hear that all the time.”

“Well, yes, I do,” answers the old woman. “But it’s all genetic, of course,” she continues, the very soul of modesty. Though I suppose these days it’s worth pointing out that it’s not all plastic.

2.
Partway through the flight, Southwest passes out “snack boxes.” Mine contains a plastic pouch of dried fruit, a foil pouch of “shortcake cookies,” and a package of peanut-butter cheese crackers. I stick with my peanut butter sandwich. The flight attendant, who has repeatedly spoken of herself as “the mom of the plane,” makes an announcement.

“We don’t throw food away, so if there’s anything in your snack box you don’t like, just leave it closed and we’re going to come through and collect those. If there’s something you want more of, you can take it then, just give us the stuff you don’t want. Cause we don’t throw food away. Now just so you don’t think we box it up and give it to you – ” (by “you” she is clearly referring to “people who ride our planes”; like many people in the service industry, she thinks of all of her customers as the same person, which is why they get so upset when you don’t understand some process they’re putting you through: they explained it to “you” just yesterday, after all) ” – we actually collect it and give it old folks’ homes, women’s shelters and food banks.” She pauses for the applause that is expected in this country whenever someone announces how virtuous/patriotic/strict at parenting he or she is. The applause comes, on cue.

“Oh,” says the woman sitting next to me, who has been studying a binder that outlines the rules and procedures through which the U.S. Marshall Service can seize financial assets. (Apparently they are able to do so using some feature of the AFT process the rest of us use to pay bills online.) “They don’t box it up and give it to us, they box it up and give it to other people.”

3.
I have 2.5 hours to kill in the Phoenix airport before my shuttle bus to Flagstaff departs. I wander the terminals. In a vending machine, I read the lead USA Today headline: “Troops’ 1-month breaks reduced.” This reminds of the apocalyptic science fiction I used to read in middle school, in which bloated interplanetary empires were depicted as sliding into ruins. This is the kind of headline that one of those writers would have thrown into the background details of the story, to evoke the giant dying slowly, of a thousand cuts. You’re already losing, of course, when such ideas start to seem like the only way to win.

The Phoenix airport, known as “Sky Harbor” (something else that puts me in mind of science fiction stories), is sprawling and small at the same time. There are four terminals (A,B, C and D), separated by a half mile of walkway apiece (with the requisite moving sidewalks), but, when you actually get to one of the terminals, there is often no unused gate at which it is possible to sit in peace and only a relatively small selection of restaurants. Through the tall windows by the moving sidewalk, it just looks hot outside.

4.
My shuttle “bus” turns out to be a van. I am the last one in and must make do with a sort of fold-down jump seat right next to the side doors. Close enough to the side doors that I take a very personal interest in whether those doors are locked. The seat belt is a strange jury-rigged affair that barely stretches far enough to close around me (and I’m svelte) and then prevents me from sitting up all the way, due to where it’s attached behind my back. I spend the whole trip in a mild crouch, braced for death in a fiery crash, a passenger van not being exactly the best choice for high-speed freeway travel. (Their center of gravity moves up and to the rear, the more you load them – in a bus, you might walk away from a highway accident, but, in a van of this sort, you will almost certainly die.) For this I’m paying more than Greyhound? But at least they pick you up at the airport, otherwise I’d have had to take a cab to the Greyhound station.

We battle our way out of the city, through traffic-choked freeways and past utterly uninteresting subdivisions and strip malls. My seat belt never once locks as our frenetic driver works the brakes.

5.
Near Camp Verde, firmly in the desert, with the old stagecoach road winding through the dusty hills below the highway, we stop at Burger King for bathrooms and sustenance before the final hour’s drive into Flagstaff. (The locals just say “Flag.”) I fall into conversation with a local, who then points out the natural features as we draw closer to town. To get to Flagstaff, the highway climbs up to the Mogollon Rim and onto the Colorado Plateau, where Flag sits 7,000 feet above sea level. The junipers give way to pines; the ground turns from dust to green. On a far hillside sits a rusted-out 1920s-era automobile, perhaps most recently used for target practice.

6.
A. meets me at the shuttle-bus stop at the train station, carrying a six pack.