LeeAnn Prescott - Escape From Nowhere

B is for Birthday

For kids, birthdays are all about presents. Presents and cake. Presents, cake, and a party. A party where all your friends come and give you presents, and sing "Happy Birthday" to you.

Being born on December 23 does not facilitate having a big party, which means your opportunities to get presents are limited.

All through my childhood, I was envious of kids who had birthdays in the summer. They got to have outdoor parties, and maybe go swimming at a lake. Their relatives and friends gave them presents for Christmas AND their birthday. I sometimes got cards from relatives that said "Happy Birthday and Merry Christmas," and contained perhaps a $10 bill. Were my non-Christmas-born cousins getting $10 twice a year? I could never know, but I somehow felt this was unfair.

We always had some sort of little party - usually just me and my mother and Papa, and perhaps a friend or two. My mother made it festive by making my favorite food - one year it was lasagna, another year tofu patties - and a cake of some kind with candles. They would do their best to divide up the gifts evenly between my birthday and Christmas. But I could never remember afterward which gift I got for Christmas or my birthday - except when I wrote it my journal, as I did in 1982 and 1983.

1982 (Benton, New Hampshire)

On my birthday I turned 11. I had Shanni, Angela, and Erika over. We went sliding. Alicia came over. I had a birthday cake with whipped cream and flowers on top. I got a blouse that Cheryl made, a hairless Garfield, and Italian porcelain doll, a Jordache pocketbook, some markers, crayons, a zodiac stained glass window coloring book, the 2nd Big Book of Amazing Facts, some Osh Kosh overalls, and my favorite was a stuffed horse from Marian, Pat and Alicia. We played pin the nose on the clown. Shanni won. Erika spent the night. We played barbie dolls the next day until Darci's hand broke off. Then we got bored. We made a snowgirl because it rained.

Here's a photo of me and Alicia on Christmas day that year. I'm showing her my new stuffed horse horse and my doll Erica (Darci's sister). I'm wearing the blouse and the overalls I got on my birthday. The feather barrette was a Christmas gift.

On my birthday the following year we were living in a little trailer RV in a KOA Kampground in Tombstone, Arizona. Marian, Pat and Alicia ("the Boudreaults") had traveled west with us and were living in the nearby town of Bisbee.

1983 (Tombstone, Arizona)

On my birthday I turned 12. The Boudreaults came over. For supper we had tofu patties, peas, baked potatoes, salad, and bread. I had a cherry pie with rainbow candles and a tofu-orange dessert. It was delicious.

For presents, I got an Indian crafts book, an Indian beaded ponytail holder, a big stuffed Garfield and a loaf of sweet bread (from Cheryl and Papa). From the Boudreaults I got a baseball shirt with pink sleeves and a Pegasus with a rainbow and stars in the background, in pastel colors. From our landlord I got a knitted snowman - the hat fits Sasha. Some people in the campground gave me a copper road runner pin.

That pegasus shirt became my favorite shirt, and I wore it until the iron-on design crumbled off. Note that my mother knew my dissatisfaction with the hairless Garfield I got the year before, and got me a nice furry one that year.

Now having birthday parties is difficult because most people are with their families for the holidays. But I'm far past the age of being present-hungry, and if two people show up and I get to eat some cake, I'm happy.

Alphabet: A History - A is for Apple

I stumbled across a group of blogging writers - Fog City Writer, The Contact Zone, Jade Park, Everything In Between, and Charlotte's Web - who are writing entries based on letters of the alphabet. Here's my first installment. I already know what I'm going to write for "Z," so I can't wait to get there!

A is for Apple

In New England, fall is apple time. People come from all over the country to view the fall foliage - mountains colored in a swaths of oranges, reds and yellow. Roadside stands selling bags of fresh apples, apple butter, apple sauce and apple cider dot the roadways. Tourists and locals alike enjoy steaming cups of hot spiced cider, filling their insides with a sweet warmth on the cool crisp days. 

There were several apple trees on our property, which had been pasture before it had grown into the young forest that my parents cleared to build our home. These sprawling trees stood out among the younger pines, alder, and cherry trees that had grown straight up toward the light through the brush, reminding us that once animals had grazed there, and had sat under the trees for shade from the sun or shelter from the rains, and eaten the apples that fell from the trees.

The apples were abundant on two of our trees - the tree by the roadside had small, hard apples that turned red, and the larger tree by the house and green apples that were also bitter and hard. There was a third tree in the woods, surrounded by tall pines that had grown around it. The pines had blocked so much light from the tree that it no longer produced apples, but was alive enough for Papa to build a tree house for me in it.

These apples were not good for eating - not nearly as good as the apples we could get at the roadside stands, or at Windy Ridge Orchard a few miles away. Yet my resourceful parents could not let this free source of food go to waste - my mother would cook up huge batches of apple sauce and can it in mason jars. The apple sauce tasted distinctly different depending on which tree the apples came from, and needed extra sugar to make it more palatable. Because we did not apply any pesticides to the trees, many of the apples were wormy, and I admired my mother's patience in preparing them.

McIntosh are the quintessential New England apple variety. They are soft, crisp, sweet, juicy and slightly tangy all at once. The sensation of biting into a fresh McIntosh is distinct from all other apples, but can only be experienced for several months a year. Sadly, their softness makes them bruise easily and thus not travel or store very well.

In high school, fall for me was also defined by cross-country running, and the coach would often bring a white paper bag of apples to practice. After the run, we would rush to the apple bag and stand around eating our apples as we went through the motions of stretching, far more interested in absorbing the juicy crispness that hydrated us and replaced our blood sugar. In this age of electrolyte replacement drinks and packaged energy gels, I still think that the apple is the best post-workout recovery food. And a fantastic snack when cut up and covered with peanut butter.

The Maker Family's Outdoor Solar Shower

A few weekends ago, I went to the Maker Faire in San Mateo. As I stared in wonder at things like a life size mousetrap or a puppy mover monorail, I thought about ingenuity and what drives people to envision something, and decide to make it themselves.

My parents are makers, but of the practical kind. They see something they want, and decide to build it themselves in order to save money. Papa built our house in New Hampshire almost entirely by himself, with only help from my mother and occasionally some friends. He drew up the plans for the house based on plans in a book. He did the wiring and plumbing. If there was something he didn't know how to do, he would ask someone or get a book from the library.

The outdoor solar shower is a great example of Papa's inner maker. In the second summer we spent in New Hampshire, in 1982, the basement was not yet done, which means the house had no bathroom or shower. There was a water pump that sat in the dirt beneath the house to pump water from the well. We had a gas hot water heater for the kitchen sink and a shower stall that stood outside next to the house. This shower worked perfectly well, but Papa wanted to save money on propane by harnessing the power of the sun to heat our water.

There were many trees that needed to be cleared from the property, so when Papa cut down trees to build a bigger parking area at the top of the driveway, he kept some of the straight ones intact instead of cutting them up for firewood. He placed four logs upright in the ground in a shower sized square, and built a platform on the bottom. He then built a platform on the top, upon which he placed a 50-gallon drum that was painted black. A hose from the house filled the barrel with water. There was a spout that came out of the drum and it had holes in it to resemble a shower head. The log posts were wrapped in black plastic for warmth and privacy. The idea was that the sun would heat the water in the drum, and gravity would provide the necessary pressure to make it a shower. This was to be a luxurious outdoor shower experience.

But summertime in New Hampshire is fickle. It rarely gets above 80 degrees. Our property sloped to the North, so even in the southern corner, the forest made a full day of sun non-existent. When I used the shower, I tried very hard to like it. The lukewarm water dripped on my head, and the lack of pressure made rinsing shampoo from my hair difficult. I looked up and could see the trees, but I could also see the dirt of the driveway through the cracks in the platform. The wood was not treated, so slivers felt imminent. But this was grand, this was living off the land!

I longed for a ceramic tub with a high pressure shower. In a room with a toilet.

I used the solar shower a couple of times. I tried to stay at my friend Erika's house often so I could bathe there. Soon my parents switched back to the outdoor metal shower stall with its water pressure and hot water from the propane tank. Some things in life are worth paying for, and I believe water pressure, hot water, a shower stall and a septic system are well worth the money.

Why I Love Suburbia

On a recent evening walk with my dog, I turned onto a street I had never been down before, and was struck by the sensation of being in a tunnel of trees. A warm breeze blew branches and leaves in a gentle whisper, revealing stars and a moonlight sky.

I quickly noticed that the trees were all the same type and size. Most likely they had been planted about 60 years ago when mid-town Palo Alto was developed from orchards to middle-class housing. Many of the original houses still stand, although some have had major remodels or additions.

As I stood watching this scene, I thought of all the lives that had been lived on that little street - children learning to ride their bikes, teenagers going out for reckless nights, adults growing old and dying, marriages beginning, marriages crumbling. The trees were silent witnesses to this flow of life, growing imperceptibly from young saplings to the sentinels of today. Here nature is controlled, safe, and even in wild winter storms and oppressive summer heat, the trees impart a sense of solidness, of stability. Could the developers have imagined such a pristine, yet perfectly uneventful scene 60 years later?

Here's the street in the daytime, via Google Maps.

This scene exists in stark contrast to my childhood. When we came back to New Hampshire to build our house in 1981, my parents cleared the land themselves. Like much of New Hampshire, the forest had once been farmland. There was a well, a crumbling stone wall, and several apple trees, but at least 50 years of unchecked growth - brush, pine trees, and blackberry bushes. While the the neighbor's house could be seen through the trees, we were far from any town center - six miles of curvy road from the post office and the town of Bath where we had lived at the Colonial Inn. The house was 10 miles from the elementary school and high school, which turned out to be 40 minute bus ride each way. There was a separation from the "town kids" and us kids in Benton, or Pike, or Warren, or any of the other towns that were too small to have their own schools. We heated with wood instead of gas, our pipes sometimes froze in the winter or our wells ran dry in the summer, and wild animals were said to be responsible for the disappearance of our pets. Trees, if they had the room to grow wide, offered little protection from the elements.

Here's an aerial view of the neighborhood:

When my family traveled, we always camped. In small towns, at the most remote site of the most remote campground we could find. "Going into town" was a weekly or bi-weekly event, no matter where we lived. 

Today I live a block away from a Safeway, a Walgreens and a Starbucks. The magnolia tree drops its huge leaves onto the roof of my house, clogging the gutters. Nature makes its presence known, but I always feel safe.

Swimming - from a Vermont pond to Menlo Masters

This week I swam the  longest swim thus far in my whole life. I also got my official membership card from US Masters Swimming, after joining the Menlo Masters swim team a few weeks ago. When I got the card in the mail, I was nearly jumping for joy. I can't remember ever being that excited to receive a membership card in the mail. Why, you ask? Let me tell you about a lifetime of wanting to be a good swimmer.

Swimming in the area of New England where I lived as a child is an outdoor activity that can be enjoyed for about 3 months every year. There are lakes, ponds, and rivers to swim in, all which have varying levels of cleanliness, temperature, bottom surface, and current flow dependent on the setting and time of year. Some families had above-ground outdoor pools, and some motels had in-ground pools, but there were no public indoor or outdoor pools in the near vicinity.

One of my first memories of swimming was taking lessons at pond near Newbury, Vermont during the summer I was six. I remember playing ring around the rosie, and going underwater on "we all fall down!" I must have also learned to do the dog paddle, but not much else.

A few years later, when I was in 3rd grade, we went on the road and lived in Florida for the winter. I was thrilled to arrive at my Aunt Virginia's place, which had an outdoor pool. My parents and I lived in a camper on their property, but had full access to the pool and house. I would spend hours playing around in the pool, trying to teach myself to swim and do flips. We came back there again when I was in 5th grade and again in 7th grade, but my swimming skills never progressed beyond the crawl (with my head out of the water), basic backstroke, and sidestroke. I could do a cannonball off the diving board and I could do one-handed somersaults and handstands, the other hand holding my nose. I would watch my cousin with awe when he came over and would smoothly dive in, do handstands at the bottom of the deep end, and swim easily with his face in the water, breathing from side to side. This skills seemed magical to me, and as hard as I tried, I couldn't figure out how to do it myself. Here's me at age eight in Aunt Virginia's pool.

One summer, the year I turned 12, I tried desperately to learn how to dive. We were back in NH and would go to a swimming hole called Big Eddy, and I would practice diving off the rocks. Usually I ended doing some odd form of belly flop. My 11-year-old neighbor had taken lessons and tried to teach me, but I never got it right. Big Eddy was a wonderful swimming spot below a covered bridge 3 miles from hour house. There was one big pool, a deep pool above a waterfall, and another shallow pool above another waterfall, and plenty of rocks for sunbathing and jumping. The picture below shows Big Eddy when the water is higher than normal - there are usually more rocks exposed.

For my 13 or 14th birthday, I wanted to have a swimming party. Since my birthday is in December, swimming at Big Eddy was not an option. So my mother drove me and two friends 45 minutes away to St. Johnsbury, Vermont, where there was an indoor pool. I enviously watched graceful lap swimmers and divers in the other lanes, but just the novelty of swimming in December was enough to make my day joyful.

In college, I was on the X-C running team, and sometimes we did pool running workouts. When I lived on Cape Cod during the summers, I would sometimes go "running" in local ponds for workout variety. I wanted to try to swim all the way across the ponds, but my stroke was not good enough to swim very far without exhausting myself. Sometimes I would backstroke a ways out for fun and just float in the middle of a pond, enjoying the view of the shore and the sky.

In my late 20's, I tried visiting my local public pool in San Francisco for early morning swims. I didn't know the first thing about lane etiquette, and still didn't know how to swim efficiently. I tried a few times but felt out of place and didn't know what to do with myself. The adult swim lesson times didn't fit my schedule.

In my early 30's, I joined a triathlon training program at the Bay Club, which was right next to my office at Levi Strauss & Co. My friends and the coach convinced me that lack of swimming knowledge was not a problem - they would teach me. Finally, I learned how to swim with my head in the water, breathing every three strokes. I won our little club triathlon competition, despite a slow swim. Later that year, I took private swim lessons to work on my stroke, and learned how to do flip turns. I competed in a few sprint triathlons, and a mile swim race, in which I proudly finished 7th to last.

For the next 4 years, I swam intermittently, doing 30-40 minute sessions on my own, at the Bay Club and at then at Equinox. When I moved to Palo Alto in July 2007, I was thrilled to learn that all the pools on the Peninsula were outdoors, and intended to join a Master's program. I had to work myself up to go to the Masters Lite workout at Equinox, and found it wasn't so bad. But real Masters Swimming seemed too intimidating. Some advice from another Masters swimmer ("just time yourself for 100 yards and get in the lane that's going that speed") helped me get up the courage to show up at Burgess Park Pool one sunny day this January. I was absolutely petrified. But Coach Tim Sheeper was nice, and everyone else was friendly and encouraging. Still, every time I planned to go to the pool for the next 5 or so times, I would come up with all kinds of seemingly important excuses not to go. For 30 minutes before leaving the house, I was a nervous wreck. I went anyway.

Every January, USMS has a competition called the "1-Hour Postal." Someone counts your laps while you swim as far as you can in one hour. Our club was doing it on January 31, so I volunteered to count laps for someone, just to see what it was like. As I watched Edie, a 58-year-old teammate, slog out 3,225 yards over the course of an hour, I figured I could do it too. She offered to count for me, and even though my results wouldn't be official because my membership wasn't processed in time, I wanted to have a benchmark for next year.

So on February 1st I found myself nervously floating in the pool waiting for Edie's "GO!" The next ten minutes were pure hell. Why did I decide to do this? What was I thinking? I could barely swim for five minutes straight, how was I going to swim for an hour? I might not be able to keep breathing. Would it look silly if I did backstroke the whole time? What if I was a lot slower than I thought I should be? This is silly! Can't I just quit?

I kept swimming.

After about 20 minutes, my stroke had a nice flow. After 40 minutes, I had a realization: How unbelievably lucky I am to have the choice to do THIS - push my body to a new limit, in sunny pool on February 1, with the sounds of a children's birthday party coming from the domed pool, a new friend I barely know counting my every lap, in a place where there are not one but FOUR pools with Masters programs within a 15 minute drive of my house. The sunlight sparkled on the floor of the pool, the water flowed smoothly around my body, and my breath remained even.

I swam 3,150 yards (about 1.8 miles), beating my goal of 3,000, and only 75 yards behind Edie. Next year I hope to beat her. And when I'm her age, I hope I can still call myself a swimmer, and swim farther and faster than the new team member 20 years my junior. At the very least, right now I can officially call myself a Masters swimmer, and I can work productively up until the moment I leave for the pool.

Vegetarianism - A Personal History

Last night I went to a book reading by Gene Baur, the co-founder of Farm Sanctuary and the book Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds about Animals and Food. What struck me about his talk is that the reasons for choosing food wisely are the same as they were when I became a vegetarian 30 years ago, and even far more imperative. What made sense to me at seven years old still makes sense. Here's a history of how the parental influence can have life-long effects on a child:

When I was four years old, my mother and I lived in a yellow rented house in Pike, NH with her boyfriend and some other people. That year they had decided to raise a pig, a common practice in rural areas. I called him Little Pig, and he was my friend. As he grew, it was clear that he could no longer be called Little Pig, so I called him Little Big Pig. He was part of the family to me. I would to try to ride on his back, perhaps wishing he was a horse. One day he was gone and became Bacon. I remember staring at paper-wrapped packages in the freezer and trying to comprehend that Little Big Pig had turned into food.

A few years later, my mother began a relationship with the owner of the yellow house. I soon began calling him Papa, and we moved to the Colonial Inn in Bath, NH.  He had traveled around the country quite a bit and was more knoweledgeable about what the "hippies" were doing to affect their footprint on the planet. He wanted us to be vegetarians. But he also smoked cigarrettes, which Cheryl, my mother, didn't like. So they made a deal: she would become vegetarian if he quit smoking. At the Colonial, Cheryl began putting whole wheat flour in the pizza crust, and he found her a cookbook with a recipe for soyburgers, which started showing up on the menu. People tried them and apparently liked them. Papa and I had a soyburger eating contest, and I won.

Papa, Cheryl, and their friends talked much land it takes to raise a cow (in terms of growing feed) versus how much land it takes to grow plants. Adequate protein, the primary arguement against vegetarianism in those days, could be gotten from soybeans and other plants. Factory farming kept animals in tightly enclosed spaces, and they were fed antibiotics and hormones which made them grow faster. Girls were supposedly developing too fast because of hormones in milk. There would be no hunger in the world if people didn't eat meat. This was the talk in the late 70s and early 80s, and it made sense to me. Dairy farming was one of the primary industries in our area of New Hampshire and Vermont and I had grown up around farm animals. I liked them. I saw that the cows existed happily grazing in fields and going to the barn to be milked. I could not fathom factory farms with thousands of cows standing in their own waste.

But still I snitched pepperoni from the pizza-making line-up in the Colonial's kitchen. One time I begged Cheryl to cook a hot dog for me, even though we were no longer eating meat together as a family. Pepperoni and sausage seemed far removed from animals. At some point I heard about how hot dogs are made, which put an end to those cravings.

When we went on the road after leaving the Colonial, sometimes we would pass trucks full of animals - pigs or calves or chickens in crates, probably on their way to be slaughtered. The suffering emanating from a truckload of calves in crates is palpable to a child. I had the sense of a system of injustice that I could do nothing about.

When we moved to Arkansas in 1980, Cheryl started seriously engaging in vegan cooking. She made gluten roast for Thanksgiving and tofu from scratch, using The Farm Vegetarian Cookbook as her guide. The Farm was a vegan commune in Tennessee that inspired hippies all across the country. From that book, I learned that I was not alone in our alternative lifestyle. Going to home school, sitting on the floor to eat, eating with chopsticks, and making and eating tofu were things that other people did too, even if I didn't know any of them personally. The men had long hair and beards and the women had unshaved armpits, just like my parents.

One Arkansas evening we went to have dinner with Papa's boss and family. We hadn't eaten red meat since the Colonial, but I guess we were still open to eating chicken, if only to be accommodating to hosts. The boss' wife served fried chicken. It was greasy and undercooked. We all had a hard time eating it. On the way home, I said, "Let's stop eating chicken." Cheryl and Papa agreed. I was in 4th grade and haven't eaten intentionally eaten chicken or red meat since.

Every once and while I find myself at a restaurant sitting across the table from someone (usually a man) eating ribs or a steak with a big bone. I am unable to look at it without thinking about an animal, who probably lived and died barely seeing the light of day, or perhaps never breathing fresh air that didn't smell of its own manure, and then being led down a line and slaughtered by an unhappy person wearing a white plastic coat smeared with blood, and then carved up on an assembly line of more unhappy people armed with industrial-strength saws made for cutting through bone. These people are surrounded by death all day. The suffering they experience on the job cannot but pervade their lives at home. As I try to ignore the images of suffering and concentrate on the conversation at the dinner table, I look at my friend from the nose up. I avoid glancing down to his hands or his plate as he oohs and ahhs about the tastiness of the pieces of dead animal he is putting inside his mouth. I have no problem with my friends eating meat, but I have learned to never go to a steakhouse, a barbecue joint, or a place known for its ribs.

The one piece of the argument for being vegetarian that has become more imperative in the past 30 years is the meat industry's dependence on petroleum and its contribution to global warming. Raising a cow is a highly petroleum dependent process - petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides are used to grow the feed, and gasoline is used to run the tractors and transport the animals before and after slaughter. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, livestock production worldwide is responsible for 18 percent of the world’s total greenhouse gases. That's more than cars. If you care about your contribution to global warming, read this article from Audubon Magazine, "The Low-Carbon Diet."

My parents eventually went back to eating meat after I left the house. Cheryl eats chicken but not red meat, and Papa eats red meat regularly now. Sometimes they act surprised that I am still a vegetarian. I don't know how to be any different. Better yet, I don't remember what it tastes like.

Here's a picture of me at a farm, I honestly don't remember where or when, but I look about 7 or 8.

Thank you, Gene, for reminding me of my history, reaffirming my beliefs, and inspiring me to post again. "If you have something to say, say it."