Little things

Yesterday, the girls went to Minnetonka Cave where their Uncle Devin works. I wasn't there. Their grandmas have been taking turns with the girls for the last couple of weeks. I miss them, so I called them this morning. Here are their observations from the trip:

Eva: "I found a big butterfly, and it was alive. And Isobel found a little butterfly, and it wasn't alive. And we picked them up."
"You picked up a live butterfly?"
"Yeah, and Isobel did, too."

Isobel: "We went into three rooms in the cave and then we came out. And then we got some Snickers bars. And I got to drink banana milk. And Eva got orange creme."

Neither of them mentioned this:












It was the same at the Redwoods. On the trails lined with 350-foot, 500-year-old trees, Isobel's favorite things there were the shamrocks. Eva preferred the slugs and the centipedes.

Distance makes the heart grow fonder

I was about 8 years old when I first saw a tide pool. I was 33 when I found out what it was called.

My mom and dad might challenge this a bit, but as I remember it, my first tide pool was a blind and random stop along the coast of northern Oregon during one of our visits to Kennewick, Wash., where we lived for the first four years of my life.

We stopped randomly to stretch our legs and look at the ocean, climbed down a steep slope to the seashore, walked over to some rocks towering out of the ocean. And there were starfish! And these plants that grab on and collapse around if you poke them with a stick! And all this other stuff that I thought you only saw if you were scuba diving, if I'd ever thought about them at all.

A couple of weeks ago, Shonda and her friends took Eva, Isobel and I from Concord, Calif., Shonda's (old) home to the Redwoods. Her friend knew where some tide pools were and when low tide would expose them.

Low tide! I'd driven along the Oregon and Washington coasts a thousand times since that first day, wishing I could see starfish and those collapsing things -- I had no idea that they were called sea anemones, these didn't look much like Nemo's home -- again, but I'd never once thought that maybe they would only be visible at low tide.

So we camped in one of the Redwood state parks that border Redwoods National Park and headed north to the tide pools the next morning. After breakfast and an hour drive, we didn't get to the tide pools until about 10 a.m., 1.5 hours after low tide. So the water was coming in, but we found the spot.

Eva and Isobel needed a hand to leap from the sand, over the water, to the rocks. But there they were: Tons of starfish (I hear it's more correct to call them sea stars, since they aren't fish) and sea anemones that tried to swallow the sticks we pressed against them. Isobel was very excited. Eva looked mostly at the waves crashing on the rocks around our feet.

We poked around out there for a few minutes while the waves crashed around us, then decided we better get back on shore before the gap got too wide and stranded us there.

On the way back, Eva clenched her fist tightly around my finger, and kept saying, "Dad, let's go up there."

So we went up away from the ocean. "Let's go up there." Then up onto the next sandy shelf. "Let's go higher." Then the shelf of gravel.

At one point, I saw a big crab shell that I wanted to look at, so I broke free and dropped down a bit toward it. Eva said, "Dad. Dad, come back."

When I did and she had fastened herself back onto my hand, she said, "I didn't want the ocean to take you away." I was never closer than 20 yards to the nearest wave.

Soon she said, "Let's go back to the trail." At that point, I was kind of disappointed. That little tide pool experience 25 years before was one of my fondest vacation memories from childhood, and Eva just couldn't wait to leave.

But as soon as we got on solid ground, with brush and trees on either side of us and no sand or waves in sight, Eva woke up.

"We saw the SEA! Me and Isobel saw the sea! We never seen the sea before. That was super cool! And we saw starfish, too!"

Then she talked about it, just like that, for most of the 20 minute hike back to the car.

(Note: To see a tide pool, go at low tide, and look for exposed rocks near the waterline -- unlike sand, the rocks hold water so these sedentary sea creatures can stay there through all tide levels.)

(Note II: I left my camera at camp that day.)

Planes, trains and automobiles

PLANES

The girls and I flew to San Francisco to visit my sister Shonda last week. The plane from Albuquerque to Salt Lake City was a small one, three seats across with an aisle in the middle. So Isobel and Eva both got a window seat, and Eva even got the aisle as a buffer between her and me. Both of them wanted that buffer, but Isobel is in a very unselfish phase.

Before we took off, Eva noticed something.

"Dad. We're in a jet! This is a jet!"

"How can you tell?"

"Because the wings stick up. See?"

It was a jet, an ExpressJet.

Eva kept looking out the window, then looking over at me with wide eyes, a little shiver of excitement and a small smile.

While we were on the plane, Isobel drew an airplane and wrote me this note:

"Dad. Thanks for taking us on this trip. The airplane is so fun!"

TRAINS

We were eating in Chinatown the night we arrived and Isobel asked Shonda, "What did I say that was cute when I was little?"

Shonda remembered sitting downstairs in her mom's house in Hyrum, during a summer between BYU accounting classes, trying to work on the Scenic Canyons books, and hearing Isobel chant from the top of the stairs, "shon...DA, shon...DA, shon...DA."

"And then you would come down and say, 'Shonda, you don't really need to work today, do you?' And I would say, 'No, I guess not; I can take a break.' "

At 7:45 a.m. the next day, we were all on the BART, Shonda's commuter train. She was headed to work. The two small girls and I were off for a fun-filled day on the buses, trains and light rail of San Francisco.

As we neared Shonda's stop, Isobel said, "I wish I was little so I could say, 'Shonda, you don't really need to work today, do you?' "

AUTOMOBILES

4 p.m.

We had seen Golden Gate Park, with plants from all over the world, and turtles in a pond, and millions of roses;


(these are called Betty Boop roses)








and the Golden Gate Bridge, walking halfway across while a guy surfed the bay below and a sea lion popped up every now and again;













and the Exploratorium, with endless exhibits featuring big magnets and little tornados and floating beach balls and meditation chambers;

















and were now headed to the sea lions at Pier 39. I got a bit turned around and we did a little extra walking before finding the bus stop we needed. In the meantime, we'd gone through all of our snacks and lunch was long gone.

We were tired. Luckily, we passed a grocery store with fresh strawberries out front. I paid a buck-fifty, found the bus stop and the girls chowed down. I gave them a bit of distance, until I noticed a funky looking little woman eyeing them, then walked back toward them.

"Are those your little girls?"

Oh boy.
"It is really dangerous to let them eat those strawberries without washing them. And you should know that. I know it's hard to say 'no' - and maybe it's not my place -but that is really dangerous."

Then she said, "Uh oh. It looks like I made your daddy mad."

And Eva, who has seen me do a lot more than glare silently, said, "No. He's fine."

So I snatched the strawberries away (to protests) and we walked back to the grocery store to have them fill our empty water bottle. Then I walked back to the bus stop, sprinkled a little water over the strawberries and handed them back to the girls.

The woman said, "Oh good, now you can have a feast," and Eva promptly dropped the basket and spilled the strawberries all over the dirty, oily sidewalk. So I sprinkled the strawberries one more time and handed them back to the girls. The woman walked away and never looked at us again.

EPILOGUE

(This is Eva, just before I got scolded again, this time for letting her climb the fence.)

Public transportation was free that day, the one day of the year, on the one day in our lives we had to visit downtown San Francisco. I'm pretty cheap, so I was excited about it at first. But so was everybody else. The line was this long for the light rail, I swear - one train had already filled up and left us there, and another had zoomed right by without even stopping, and we had been waiting for almost an hour - by the time this guy started prancing up and down in front of everyone shouting, "LIMO. BART stations, downtown hotels, MARKET STREET. $5 per person. LIMO RIDE. BART stations ... "

Unfortunately, I'd burned through the last of our cash at dinner, and on horsie rides and other gizmos at the Musee Mechanique, and I'm sure this guy didn't take credit cards. So I watched 15 other people pile in -- including three on the front seat with the driver -- and drive away. It was 9:45 p.m. (that's 10:45 p.m. in Santa Fe), Isobel was sagging on a bench, and even Eva was starting to slow down.

Those two were incredible that day, though, I'll tell you what. They were pretty pleasant all day, even at the end. And a train eventually did come. I sharpened my elbows and got us all on. We started the 45 minute BART ride to Concord between 10:30 and 11 p.m. If you're counting, that's 16 hours of public transport; the girls snuggled in and spent the last 44 minutes just like this:

Pics

A weird, natural log flume we found.
















Isobel: A flying caterpillar?
















But dad, my legs are so tired. I'm so tired of walking.















Not me!

















Eva loves bridges. She loves driving on overpasses, walking on these. And tomorrow, she'll see the Golden Gate Bridge. Oh man.











Me: What's that?
Eva: It's a beaver's house.
Me: Where does the beaver live?
Eva: In the top part, above the water.
Me: Where does it go in?
Eva: It swims under the water.
Me: What's that?
Eva: It's a beaver!
Me: Where did it go?
Eva: It swam under and went into its home.















Here's a picture of Isobel not catching a fish.

Fishing was good, catching wasn't

    Isobel's collected a few fishing stories over the last two summers. Here are a couple of samples:
    "We went fishing and Grandpa caught a tiger trout and killed it. We ate it and it was so yummy."
    "We went fishing on the ice, and Uncle Devin pulled me on the sled. It was fun."

    The common threads with all of the stories are a) that the trip was a success and b) that neither she nor I has landed a fish. She's a very sweet, positive girl, so she rarely mentions the latter, at least not when I can hear.

    Last week, for instance, we got schooled by the Thompsons. Gordon called me up for a bare-minimum shopping list for participation in free-fishing day; he checked off the list and, with the help of the Sportsman's Warehouse salesperson, improved it; then he, Katie and Lily fished right next to Isobel, Eva and I, and (while we were getting skunked) all caught their first fish in 20 or so years (well Lily's seven, so it'd been way longer than 20 years for her).
    Isobel and Eva got sunburned, threw rocks, tangled a few lines. The next day, Isobel told everyone at church that she got to go fishing and that it was so cool that Lily (a 7-year-old!) caught a fish and Isobel got to eat it, because fish is so yummy.

    Friday, I asked her and Eva if they wanted to go camping and fishing with me, or stay home and play and go swimming with their Mom. I admit there was a part of me hoping to leave the girls and the Powerbait at home, take my fly rod (not very kid compatible) and go after some big browns in the Cimarron River. That part of me vanished without a whisper of protest when both girls immediately chose to go fishing with their Dad. They didn't even have to think about it.

    We left at about 3:00 and took almost five hours to make the three-hour drive northeast into the mountains east of Taos. The extra time was mostly spent on a "short-cut" on a dirt road, over an 11,000-foot peak to see a mountain bluebird, a shocked cow elk and learn what a cattleguard is and why it makes that alarming sound under the tires (we actually stopped, got out and looked at the third one).
    At about 7:30, almost at our campsite, we passed a small fishing pond and I asked them if we should stop and fish or find the camp.
    We stopped.

    We had to cross a small creek to get to the pond and while the girls were distracted on one side, I hopped across and tossed a spinner into the pond. On the second cast, believe me or don't, I reeled in a 13-inch rainbow. The girls were not only too far away to hand the pole to, they were too far away to even witness the feat.
    After I let it go, I helped them across the creek and told them about it.

    "Where is it?"
    "I tossed it back."
    "Aww. I wanted to eat it."

    So we fished for a while with no luck. The spinners never worked again and nothing went for the bait. When we couldn't see the clear bubble out on the water anymore, we decided to call it. So Isobel reeled in. Three-quarters of the way in, she said, "Why is my bubble moving like that?"
    Fish on!
    She horsed it to within about 3 feet of the shore before the line broke.

    I wanted to swear.
    Isobel said, "I CAUGHT A FISH. MY FIRST FISH. A 6-YEAR-OLD CAUGHT A FISH.
    "I wanna tell Mommy and Katie and Lily and Uncle Gordon and Grandpa Bryce. That's SO COOL! I caught a fish."

    "I wish I would've got to see it, though. But that was REALLY cool."

Waiting for the Bus (or, Adventures of the Unprepared MMVIII)

Eva just turned 4 years old. She's not in preschool right now, but don't tell her that. Lately, when Isobel arrives home from school, Eva often tells about her day:

"At my school, I played with my friends on the playground and we built sandcastles, and we did jumping jacks and somersaults in the gym, and we went on a field trip on our bus; it has windows all over it and it's really tall, and it goes really really fast, faster than every car in the whole wide world."

One day, she got me to walk her to the bus stop, to wait for that school bus. She rode her bike down to the corner. She got off her bike and stood next to the curb, waiting, watching for the bus. We waited for about 15 minutes, while she told me more about the bus and her friends and her school. During that time, she rarely took her eyes off the street where her bus was about to arrive. I don't know how long she would have waited there -- maybe until kindergarten 2009 -- but eventually I proposed that perhaps her bus wasn't coming.

She was furious; she wasn't leaving until that bus came. Then I told her we should go home, get some money and ride the city bus downtown. We didn't do it that day, but she had a new story to tell her sister that day after school.

"Isobel! Me and daddy are gonna ride the city bus!"
"The one with all the people on the side?" (Pictures of lots of smiling people adorn the Santa Fe buses.)
"Yeah!"
"Cool!"

On Thursday, I had to buy a fishing license and talk to the guy in the downtown fly shop, so we got on that city bus. We walked to the bus stop at almost 1 p.m. It was a nice, cool spring day; a few clouds drifted by and Eva fidgeted around in a cute red dress, "We never rode on the city bus before, huh Dad." "When is that bus gonna get here?"

It arrived, and we began the simple plan: Ride the bus to within a block of the fly shop, walk there and back, ride the bus home.

The first two segments of that plan worked perfectly. We rode by Isobel's dentist office, paused at the hospital, saw Albertson's and even Isobel's school. We got off on the right stop and found the fly shop. I bought the fishing license and talked with the guy about all the water waiting in the mountains, ready to rush down any day.

While I was talking, my phone rang. I let it.

We walked back to the bus stop and only then did it occur to me that since we had been driving on a one-way street for the last mile or so, there was no bus stop going the way I wanted to go. I hadn't looked at the map close enough to know which direction the bus looped around. So we walked back up the one-way street until it became a two way street and waited for the bus.

The nice spring day was now a little breezy and Eva and I were wishing we had a jacket or a hat or something to go over our short sleeved shirts. That's when I remembered the phone call and listened to this omen from Gordon:

"Hey Petersens, I was just wondering what the weather is like up there. It's pretty crazy here in 'querque."

Uh oh.

Twenty minutes later, Eva was pretty chilly. So I was holding her. A woman walked her dog around where we stood, a nice little tree-lined plaza of sorts, three or four times. It was a pleasant time, holding my little girl, talking about the big labrador in the fly shop and the city bus and our jackets at home.

Then, a blast of wind. The woman with the dog turned around immediately and ran. Five seconds later, pea-sized hail. We hid behind a tree trunk about as wide as my own trunk, Eva sunk her head into my chest, I called for backup -- Bettie was working at home -- and Eva cried.

I talked her out of crying and looked at the buildings behind us for shelter. They were far away and didn't have much, so we hunkered down. A woman in a slicker hustled by and directed us to a huge pine tree (it was in sight the whole time) that, as it turns out, was blocking all of the wind and almost all of the rain and hail.

I held Eva there and we tried to keep warm. It felt very nice under that tree, actually, and Eva, still pretty cold, was fine again, knowing that her mother was on the way.

That's when a car stopped, a window rolled down, and an umbrella poked out.

"Do you want this?"
"No, actually this tree is blocking most of it."
"OK... Are you sure?... Free umbrella... She looks pretty wet."
"Alright. Thank you very much."

We opened the umbrella and Eva stood next to me, beaming. She wasn't cold anymore. Then she said, "When is he gonna come back?"

"Never. He just gave it to us."

That guy will never read this, and we'll never see him again, but he turned a cold, uncomfortable minute into a warm and fuzzy moment for my astounded little daughter. I think she got the message, even if this is how she told the story to her mom a few minutes later:

"It's our umbrella now. He's never gonna come back for it."

Top 10 Utah sites

Some fan of Utah (the state) asked Bettie to ask me to tell her Utah's 10 best spots. So I made one up.

Now, while you're looking at this, keep in mind that I think Snowbird and Lake Powell and the Uintas and Delicate Arch and Dead Horse Point are fabulous. These might not be the most beautiful spots in the whole state. They're just spots that I was stoked! to find. They're listed in the order that they popped into my head.

If you've been to any of these, tell me.

1. Drive the LaSal Mountain Loop Road, from Fisher Towers (11 miles east of Moab along the Colorado River) area up into the LaSal mountains and back down to the highway just south of Moab. Starts in red rock towers, climbs to the shadow of a couple of 12,000-foot peaks and descends to some sweet views of Canyonlands.

2. Cassidy Arch, 1.75-mile hike in Capitol Reef National Park. You can walk right on top of this huge arch, and it's a little spooky.

3. Egypt 3, a short slot canyon (not technical) off the Hole in the Rock Road just east of Escalante (in Grand Staircase). Lots of variety -- narrow section; twisty, plunging section; deep section.

4. Cable Arch, aka Funnel Arch, a fun little hike off the Kane Creek Road near Moab. It's not on any of the regular hiking maps. Take the Kane Creek Road (it starts between McDonald's and Burger King) west from Moab. There's a rock full of petroglyphs on the right (a sign points you to it from the road), then the road bends to the left and there's a pullout on the left. Stop there. Hike up the wash, scramble up to the top and bear right. You'll find it eventually from there. Nice arch, named for a cable attached to a nearby fin. Good luck.

5. Hovenweep, for nice clifftop dwellings that you can walk right up to. When I was a kid, there were no signs saying, "Please keep your distance" or whatever. But now the signs are like 2 feet from the walls, so it's still great.

6. Pine Creek Canyon in Zion, if you're up for a technical slot canyon with several nice, kinda scary rappels.

7. Swazys Leap, San Rafael Swell. Get a good map and take I-70 to Exit 131 west of Green River. This would be a fun little mountain bike (if you're into that sort of thing) to the Little Black Box section of the San Rafael River. I walked it. Cool local legend -- Sid Swasey won a bet by leaping over this very rugged, pretty wide gap over a 100-foot or so drop on a horse. You can actually cross the river near there, so you can wade the river or climb up and look down from the leap.

8. Thistle Slide Overlook. Just a really cool geologic event that happened in my lifetime. HUGE natural mudslide wiped out a little town in 1983. You can almost see it happen from this overlook. On US 6/89 just north of where 6 and 89 join (about 15 miles southeast of Spanish Fork).

9. Burr Trail East of Boulder, west of Capitol Reef. Everything's great in there. And I'm not going to tell you what. OK, I'll give you one spot. It's awesome. Strike Valley Overlook. It's actually after the road crosses into Capitol Reef National Park. Short hike to a gigantic, I don't know, amphitheater, half a conk shell standing on its end.

10. Meadow Hot Springs Just off I-15, central Utah, exit 158 at the town of Meadow, 4 miles south of Fillmore. Drive 2 miles south, turn west drive OVER the freeway on a gravel road (never seen that before) follow that to this very deep hot springs. (It gets pretty hick-wild on Saturday nights, though.)