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Baja California

Top photo credit: Karen Maynard Map and text: Darcy Higgins Time to be honest: as an environmental educator, there are many things that I passionately teach others to do, but do not do myself. Most of these fall in the category of “align yourself to the rhythms of nature.” For example, chose a sit spot to visit regularly (I don’t have one). Keep a nature journal (sometimes I mention the weather when I’m diary spewing about my love life?). Be aware of the shifting phases of the moon.

One of the deepest impacts from my trip to Baja California for my Earth Expeditions class was not a centerpiece of the schedule; it was not the intimate encounters with the charismatic whale shark or the ecology classes that taught me which cactuses to eat (though don’t take those parts away, please!). It was sleeping outside, exposed, each night.

Simply making my bedroll, with no walls, windows, or space-age tent fabric between me and the sky (or the mountains, or the earth).

Each night I saw the moon rise and set. When we arrived, it was a few days from full. We turned our beds and eyes away from its brightness so we could sleep. By the third night, I knew not to bother; the full moon would be behind the mountain tops by the time we stopped chatting from our pillows.

The dew gathered on us like on the cactus flowers and we shivered.

Or we slept like we were nestled in warm arms.

Or the wind blew in from the sea, and I feared one by one all would be ripped away from me: blankets, pillows, sweater, hair, eyelashes, and then what would I be?

But always, without making any special excursion, I was aware of the natural world. I didn’t wake up in the morning, and have someone ask me at the coffee pot, “Hear that storm last night?” and shrug. I was right alongside it all.

When we left, the moon was a few days into waning. My family picked me up at the airport. I stayed with them for a few days and ran around taking care of errands; it rained, became cloudy. A few days later I finally found myself under the night sky, driving. I looked up, and jolted. I hadn’t seen the moon in a few days, and the phase looked wrong to me, like it had skipped ahead. I realized I had, without realizing it, ceased to observe. Ceased awareness.

It is easy, in our society, to decouple from real rhythms to artificial calendars, with months added to honor Roman emperors and little reflection of any underlying phenomena. It is worth fighting.

I went to a weekend Lughnasadh festival after I returned to Missouri; our tent had grown moldy, and I didn’t have time to clean it, and began to grow frustrated. How could I attend with nowhere to sleep? Then I shook my head at myself, grabbed my sleeping bag and mat, and drove to the festival. I found a little spot away from the campgrounds, in a clearing in the woods, laid down my blankets, and slept under the sky. Don’t tell my sixth graders, who I encourage to spend a night ‘alone’ at  campouts, but I grew scared at rustlings, until I stopped. I woke up, with blankets not much wetter than in a poorly ventilated tent. “Underequipped” sounded like such a threat. It turns out it’s really very simple to sleep in the woods without a tent.

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We went on a trip to the northern Caucasus! Here’s the teaser reel! Y’all, if you go to Russia, you have got to get further than Moscow and go to one of these areas. So much diversity! And mountains.

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April 28-29th: Who loves 29 hr train rides in plaskart? I do! Seriously, I do. Me, Carrie Ann, and Andrea have a week and a half in the Russian northern Caucasus ahead of us, covering Kabardino-Balkaria (real mountains) and Mineralniy Vodiy (popular spa area in soviet times, before the unrest in neighboring republics made northern Russians more paranoid about visiting, though it’s still popular now).

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April 30th: We arrive at our couch-surfing hosts in Pyatigorsk and are invited to “climb Beshtau and picnic all day with their friends.” We end up climbing up and down two of this mountain’s five peaks with 50 other people, led by a crazy and likeable former  military man who breaks out the cognac when we finally picnic at the bottom. Our legs hate us. We love the south.

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May 2nd: Catching a breather in the southern-Russo-European resort town of Kislovodsk—we spend most of the day laying in the grass because our legs still hurt from the mountain climbing. In the evening we make our couch-surfing hosts fajitas and watch a Russian bromance comedy with their neighbors.

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May 3rd: Couch-surfing is great, but having your own apartment in Nalchik that you found cheap through a fast-talking taxi-driver is better.

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May 4th: 1, every exhibit in the National Museum of Kabardino-Balkaria is still supported by quotes from Lenin and Engels. 2, the chairlift up the hill in the the big park in Nalchik goes to a restaurant where Andrea orders a double entree because the chef doesn’t want to make just one.

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May 5th: Making friends with a Kabardian taxi driver named Zamil, who happily repeated his new “american” words all day (“Very good!”), we finally drove into the mountains to see the Chegem waterfalls. The morning is spent at the market in Nalchik, where I buy a long skirt and scarf. When I put them on and go to buy chocolate for our tea that evening, the salesperson greets me in Kabardinian.

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May 6th: Deeper into the real mountains, heading up towards Elbrus. The woman we stayed with in Nalchik calls someone she knows, and we end up the only people spending the night at “Tyotya Valya’s” little hotel. The neighbor shows us in around back through the kitchen, where Fatima is humming to herself and cutting onions on the windowsill. At night, we drink tea and eat hot, stuffed, butter-fried flatbread, and talk to Auntie Valya and Fatima. Tyotya Valya’s whole family and Balkar community was exiled to Kazhakstan in the 40’s and 50’s, and she tells us how other people starved but her father had a cow. Fatima is absent-minded (“It’s just interesting to me, where it went to,” she muses when we arrive and she can’t find the key to the ‘luxe’ room). She’s working to help her daughter pay off debt from diamonds she bought on credit on the seductive main drag of Nalchik.

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May 7th: Conveniently for my street cred, “climbing” Elbrus and “riding up” Elbrus can be just one word in Russian. We haggled with a tour bus driver to swing a ride back to Pyatigorsk in the back row.

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Пасха

It's Easter and it's the first day that feels like spring, the concrete evidence being the  first tiny muddy sprouts that I glimpsed yesterday while taking off my coat for a minute. I feel strange walking around the city, because I don't recognize anything anymore: the snow has been melting faster and faster the last few days, and buildings and landscapes and the shape of things are re-emerging. It's a little uncomfortable, like the city took off its disguise and it wasn't who I thought it was. The snow acted like a high tide line, and now trash has washed up everywhere, things people threw on the street in November that were lost for 5 months. I guess rebirth isn't any prettier than real birth, but of course no one gives a damn about how pretty birth, they're celebrating.

Svetlana's mother took the eggs to church to be blessed; Svetlana broke Lent fasting at midnight last night and we ate the eggs and mound of sweet cheese and cake, all forbidden until then. On TV they were broadcasting from a cathedral in Moscow, Putin and Medvedev and his family-values wife in a lovely lace headscarf, watching the priests circle around the church according to the calculations of Orthodox mathematics and shout: Christ is Risen! Truly, he is risen. We watched--our nod to observance--and then had cognac with our eggs and cake. If I stop long enough, I can feel the energy, the old compelling narrative of suffering together through death and birth; I forget that holidays like this are still gutteral, even if we aren't ancient pagans waiting for the equinox. But I'm not trying to pull the holiday into any kind of tidy narrative or revelation; that's not there. It's just spring today, even if the city looks like winter swallowed it and then puked it up. I like suffering a little for it, actually. It's a better way to mark the season change than the annual sunbathing-students-on-the-green that marked the start of spring at college. I'm only here for two more weeks, and working the whole time, so it's going to be abrupt. I don't really know how I'm going to relate to this place after I'm gone. It's been a personally productive year, and I'll have fond attachment just because I know the place, and, for me, knowing something always operates as powerful an alternative as loving it. But I'm leaving for a reason; I don't know if a relationship to Russia will last.

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3 weeks, 3 days again.

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Here in 5 weeks, 1 day.

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Here in 3 weeks, 3 days.

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Questions my students have written for me in their journals,

when required to do so in the "get to know each other!" first entry:

Most people: What music do you listen?

Maksim:

 When you studied at college you had studied political science. Which the main moments you marked and remembered?

You love listening to people’s stories, as you wrote. It’s very interesting moment. Having listened to certain quantity of people what with point of view of psychology you understood?

Andrew: Have you a boyfriend?

Andrei: Do you have any friends in America and Russia?

Helen: Do you like to go for a walk?

Olga: Do you have any special certificates or degrees?

Mikhail: How do you think, should I study History and Social Study better or concentrate on more important subjects, for example Math.

Timur:

Are you happy?

What do you want from life?

Special bonus sentence about me from Carrie Ann's quiz: Darcy is like more interesting pizza to sushi.

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Yuriy Norshteyn - Hedgehog in the Fog (1975)

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5 second update

Celebrated Old New Years

On the television: Russian Pop Extravaganza, and a mesmerizing video of animated Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton shaking it as they sing a parody of "My Humps."

Drunk 6 cups of bitter tea to recover from celebrating while a 6-year-old boy named all the colors of his straws for me in English.

It snowed from Monday till this morning, and finally we can walk on something better than ice carpet, slush, and kicked up snow: tamped down snow trails.

Saw a bundled child wobble out of his sled-stroller to very carefully set seeds on the ground for the pigeons.

Eating an enormous bowl of kasha for dinner, derp derp.