Sweet Potato Run

Sweet Potato Run

As the nights get cooler, I find myself reminiscing about fall in Kyoto. I remember trying to settle my children at bedtime. More than once after reading a story and tucking everybody in, my son’s head popped out of his futon when the familiar sound of the sweet potato man came within reach.

“Yaki Imo, Ishi yaki imo (sweet potatoes, stone-roasted sweet potatoes),” the sweet potato man sang, his voice echoing through the old Kyoto neighborhood where my husband and children once lived. His song slowly traveled from one place to another as he pushed his hot oven cart through the streets of our neighborhood with the aroma of plump red-skinned sweet potatoes roasting on hot stones.

“Okaasan, onaka ga suita. Yakiimo ga hoshii.  Otoosan to kai ni itte ii desu ka?–I want a sweet potato. Can I go with Dad to buy one?”

In earlier days, the sweet potato man created his own jingle to sell potatoes. Today he uses a recorded song, which though aesthetically less appealing still holds the romance of days gone by.

More than once we would relent, letting Philip crawl out of bed to head out with Dad. They set out into the dark night on his front-lighted bicycle with Philip on the back bundled in his winter coat. Together they would criss-cross neighborhood streets in search of the elusive vendor before arriving home with a plump potato wrapped in newspaper and a great look of triumph.  Philip would sit down at our dining room table, unwrap the potato and enjoy a few bites of the succulent roasted potato before crawling back into his futon to sleep.

Riptide

At first I paddled as usual putting power into each stroke, but got frustrated when I slid into the high grass missing each turn.  It was my first time to navigate a meandering current through a salt marsh in Plum Island Sound.

“Paddle gently,” Dan said. Slow down and put less effort into it.” Soon tiny, newly hatched green bugs covered my arms and legs down into the cockpit.

It was Labor Day weekend and we had chosen to paddle rather that venture up to the Whites where Tropical Storm Irene had torn up the Kankamagus and other roads.

Later Dan showed me a feathering draw stroke to use when trying to move sideways.  I didn’t have much success with that on first try, but with a gentle paddle and an occasional backstroke to slow me down, soon found myself navigating the hairpin turns that led us toward a gathering of white cranes and egrets, their graceful silouettes visible in the distance through the tall grass.

On our way out of the marsh, Dan pointed out a cluster of vertical wooden posts in a clearing of the marsh.

“So what do you think this is?” he asked.

“Hmmm…”

“It’s for drying marsh grass for cattle. It gives them salt.”

“Oh, really?  Kinda like a salt lick for horses.”

After a long paddle back toward Pavillion Beach, where we had begun our adventure, we heard the sounds of a live rock band from the southern end of Plum Island when we were nearly ready to dock and call it a day.

“It looks like a party out on the sandbar,” Dan shouted. “Wanna check it out?” “Sure,” I said wondering if I could hold off on finding a toilet or jumping out of my boat much longer. I knew I should’ve relieved myself in the marsh like Dan did earlier.

We swiftly paddled over to the sandbar that had emerged near the lower tip of Plum Island where Plum Island Sound merges with the Ipswich River. Soon we were swaying to the gentle sounds of the local band. More than a hundred bare-foot people were enjoying the lazy afternoon in bright bathing suits and sun dresses while kids were splashing in the shallow water.

As we got ready to leave, Dan noticed the churning water beyond our boats where the Ipswich River meets Plum Island Sound. Little white caps were forming.

“We’ve got an aggressive rip tide so once you’re in the water, paddle quickly and just keep going.”

My boat was 50 ft down the beach from Dan’s, so he gave me a push, then ran up to launch his kayak. Soon I found myself paddling between the shore I had just departed and a large white yacht.  I felt the backward pull of the violent current so dug in and paddled with all my might to get in front of it. I knew we were heading back toward Pavillion Beach and didn’t want to drop behind the yacht. By the time I got around the yacht, Dan appeared ahead of me paddling vigorously.

“Point your boat to the shore,” he shouted.  “You’re getting pulled backwards.”

After a few aggressive strokes, I glanced back at a double diamond sign indicating rocks and strong currents.  Suddenly I realized I was getting sucked backward in the direction of the powerful riptide. My heart raced. I knew I needed to paddle with all my might and turn my kayak’s nose 90 degrees westward toward Pavillion Beach. Even a moment of complacency could put me in those dangerous waters and pull me out to the Atlantic Ocean.

“Don’t look back.” “Just keep paddling,” he hollered louder.

“I’m paddling as fast as I can,” I said, my muscles burning.

“Just keep paddling or you’ll be headed to England.”

We paddled long and hard parallel to the huge area of riptide until we finally arrived in gentle water closer to Pavillion Beach’s shore.  My whole upper body felt exhausted, but I was glad to be in calm, protected water.

I had learned about the powerful might of  a riptide.

Paddling to Crane’s Beach

We headed north up the winding Essex river toward Crane’s Beach, a four-mile journey through verdant salt marsh.  It was mid-morning and this was a great alternative to hiking or biking since I’m still healing from foot surgery a week and a half ago.  Unfortunately, the peddle-controlled rudder was killing my left  foot and I found myself working twice as hard as my friend D. zigzagging across the river trying to find that sweet spot that would send me in a straight line.

“I have no skills ,” I hollered to D. “You’re a heck of a lot better than my friend who was spinning in circles the first time he paddled that kayak,” he quipped. Eventually, I gave up the rudder to give my sore foot a break and found I could steer much more easily.

After paddling through Conomo Point on relatively calm water, we passed an island with an old stone foundation, the ruins of a house once owned by John Haven Emerson, an American inventor who helped improve the Iron Lung. Black cormorants soared overhead and I recalled my family’s trip down the Uji River in Japan one Fourth of July  when we watched the ancient sport of cormorant fishing as tethered cormorants glided through glistening water  toward a burning straw basket after sunset.

We arrived on the less visited north side of Crane’s Beach by 2 p.m. The wind had picked up, sand was pelting our skin, and I could feel the grit between my teeth with each bite of my PBJ sandwich. We walked the beach, took a dip in a shallow pool surrounded by sandbars and studied the varied geometric designs formed by the tides in wet sand. On our return, low tide left us with no choice but to drag our kayaks across a large sand bar and a failed attempt to take a short cut along the river added mileage to our trip, but we arrived back at the Essex Marina by sunset ready to call it a day.

Oasis of Beauty

While driving home from visiting my mom in rehab at around 9:30 the other night, I saw a shizare sakura, weeping cherry tree, in full bloom and suddenly found myself careening left into the empty parking lot of the free-range fish market.  I was on South Willow, the business district lined with fast-food restaurants and car dealerships here in Manchester.

After cutting the ignition, I hopped out to admire the illuminated tree. Standing beneath the tree with sprays of blossoms gently swaying all around me, I stopped for a few moments to stare upward, oblivious to the cars buzzing past. Through the rough branches, gnarled in places, yet bending gracefully, I took in the pale pink canopy that seemed to wrap me in its delicate beauty.

Here between the fish market and a McDonald’s Play House, I found my first blossoming cherry tree of the season, a little oasis of beauty in an otherwise indistinquishable strip.

It is surely spring.

Sakura

Last night while chatting with Sawaka, the Japanese wife of a journalism school classmate, I lamented that it was spring, but it didn’t feel like spring since I hadn’t seen any cherry blossoms yet. I was at a class reunion party on New York’s Upper West Side and some of us were still warming up from our 10-block walk down Broadway from our old haunt: the West End Café.

“I had planned to walk over to see the blossoms in Riverside Park near the Grant Memorial, but totally forgot,” I said, knocking myself. “You sound so Japanese,” she said, laughing. While the cherry blossoms have already passed peak in Washington, D.C., her husband assured me that the cherry trees had not even started to bloom in Riverside Park.

While living in Kyoto in the 1990s, we welcomed spring each year with a neighborhood cherry blossom festival at Hirano Shrine. In the shrine’s cherry tree grove, my children learned to ride their bikes and my son frequently hunted for bugs. During cherry blossom season, community members strung lanterns along the path and at night families and friends sat on blankets beneath the pale pink cherry blossom canopy enjoying steaming plates of oden (Japanese fish cake stew), takoyaki (octopus balls) and other delicacies while drinking generous amounts of beer and sake. It was always a festive time. This year Japanese and resident foreigners are enjoying the blossoms as always, but unlike in past years, droves of foreign tourists have cancelled trips to Japan and many of the maiko (dancing geisha) party reservations in the nearby Geisha district have been cancelled due to the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami that hit last month and the ongoing Daiichi nuclear crisis.

The cherry tree grove was a main thoroughfare through the shrine from east to west so I often rode my bike or walked through the shrine while running errands or traveling between home and Ritsumeikan University where I taught English. I recall the day I saw Nakamura-san, the mother of my son’s friend with her three-year-old daughter Keiko wearing a white dress that billowed out from her little figure. As I rode through the shrine one sunny morning, I saw Keiko standing beneath a cherry tree in full bloom, her tiny hands waving upward and feet dancing about as she tried to catch the velvety petals showering down all around her, the light filtering through the branches making her dress glow like a halo around her. That moment is emblazoned in my memory like an old master’s pointillist painting.

Skiing Through Lincoln Woods

Crashing into Mary

We left close to noon to enjoy the warmest part of the day (it was 10 degrees F at 6:30 a.m. in Manchester) and skied about four miles along the Eastside Trail, much of it uphill, navigating a few tricky brook crossing dips before stopping for lunch. After getting wait-listed for an Appalachian Mountain Club cross-country ski trip, my friend Mary invited me to meet her, her husband, Tom, and her trusty Corgi-German Shepherd mutt (Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth would not approve) at Lincoln Woods.

We had hoped to ski along the Pemigewasset River on the Eastside Trail to the site of a washed out bridge, but decided to turn back when a couple of back-country skiers said we had at least another 45 minutes left to travel. It was already 2:30 p.m. and we knew the temperature would soon drop after the sun fell behind Owl’s Head Mountain to our west. The sky was gray and tiny Camelot snowflakes had started to fall.

During our stop, I took off my skis and put the ball of my foot into the loop of my ski pole to stretch my very tight hamstrings that were causing pain in my left foot and leg. It was a bit of a struggle in the deep snow, but I managed to lie on one ski and lift my leg high enough to get a good stretch just in time for a group of about six skiers to see me on the ground. “Well she’s laughing so she must not be injured,” I heard before a jolly bearded skier struck up a conversation.

“Have you seen any snow snakes?” he inquired.
“Snow snakes, nooo, there aren’t really any snow snakes are there?” I bantered back, my eyes darting from side to side.
“What about snow fleas?”

Cable-Stay Bridge

We had our laughs and were soon gliding back down the hills we had earlier climbed. On the frozen river below, snow covered rocks looked like giant fluffy marshmallows and in one section, a cluster of perfectly rounded mounds of snow made me imagine a community of Hobbits living below.

Near the end of our trek, we skied over the long suspension bridge that crosses the river near the park ranger’s cabin. I pointed out the four-foot deep layers of ice visible along the river with a distinctly thick blue layer in the middle. “You can see the progression of the whole winter in that ice from the thinnest layer at the bottom,” Tom said. “After the first thin layer of ice forms, like what you can see near the river’s surface, snow or rain may fall and the river will rise lifting that layer of ice upward,” he explained, pointing to the multi-layered ice formation over the rushing river. “Then another layer will begin forming below until it builds up many layers.”

On our way back, we stopped at Fully Brewed and Half Baked in Lincoln. I got a cup of homemade chicken noodle soup to warm up and a big piece of freshly baked lemon meringue pie. Tom devoured a piece of Pecan pie and Mary, had a decadent piece of chocolate cream pie—the same kind she ate the last time we visited this Lincoln hot spot.

Starlight Skiing

This afternoon I finished the bulk of a 1,500-word feature for Business New Hampshire Magazine and had to get out for some fresh air. I’ve skied at night on occasion, but only beneath bright lights at a ski resort. Tonight was different. Tonight I cross-country skied beneath a star-studded sky across a wide-open pasture and into the forest down to frozen Lake Massabesic at the Audobon Center in Auburn.

While gliding back from Battery Point, my headlamp light got dimmer as my batteries lost juice (Always pack extra batteries!) so I relied on the pristine snow reflection to guide me. I remembered the tall man I passed on my way out to meet the group. He was was skiing without any light and startled me when he suddenly appeared from the pasture’s darkness. “I’ve skied this path so many times that I don’t need any light,” he said.

While following the glowing headlamp light from Will, our Four Season’s group leader, our skiis hissed as we slid across hard packed snow. Looking up, I noticed the Little Dipper appearing in the opening above the parallel lines of towering trees along the trail path and other bright stars twinkling through the branches. All of us appreciated the quiet, peaceful silence of the forest that you find only in the deep freeze of winter when everything is still.