For the friends and family of Bonnie Jo Campbell
September 2007

When the power first went out at our house, it was fun. There was a thunderstorm early Wednesday morning that knocked some branches onto power lines. Uncle Terry called me at 7 a.m., hours before we are usually up and around. Terry was not in Chicago but here in Kalamazoo, and so I told him to come on over. We had lost power, and trees were blocking our road from the north, but there was enough juice left in my computer's UPS battery back-up to grind beans for several pots of coffee—we usually use a drip pot, but luckily we also have an old French press. Uncle Terry had fourteen-year-old Cousin Andrew in tow, so I cooked bacon and eggs on our gas grill, cut up red haven peaches and French bread, and we took turns winding our emergency radio. The power came back on twelve hours later, before nightfall. Note to self: See about hand operated coffee grinders.

Thursday afternoon a battalion of black clouds charged across the sky from Chicago then fell upon us with 70 mph winds, wrestling traffic lights from their wires, slashing trees, cutting down antennas, and even shooting off little tornadoes with winds to 130 mph. And rain! Whoa there was rain! Drenching, punishing rain that battered birds' nests to the earth. By the time I got home (I was driving in this mad splash and fury), my UPS battery was used up and my computer was in the process of crashing. Perhaps I wasted the next few hours, still darkened by the storm, assuming naively that the power would be back on soon. I drove through downtown (without the hindrance of stop lights) and home again, then found some candles, cooked my dinner on the grill, and sat on the screen porch reading and relighting candles, as the wind continually blew them out. Note to self: buy hurricane lamps.

The following day, I called the camping supply store to ask for hurricane lamps and they laughed and said, "sold out." In the future, I swear, I will prepare in advance for every imaginable contingency by getting emergency first aid kit, propane heater, hurricane lamps, shotgun shells, boxes of red wine, etc.

Over the last twenty years, I've become accustomed to writing on the computer, and now I have a hard time getting anything down with pen and paper. After not writing anything much for a few days, I felt lousy. All year I have been writing more than ever before, and I have been sending out work for publication on a daily basis (which also requires the computer), basically doing everything I can to make this writing gig pan out. It has been years since my last book was published Note to self: learn to write with paper and pen. Additional note to self: write beautiful, engaging stories that someone with power wants to publish.

As a writer trying to get published, this business of feeling powerless is nothing new. When one first realizes one is powerless, one can sit in the dark and pout or one can take stock, gather up one's candles and flashlights and batteries; at first one must envision the contents of the refrigerator and freezer without opening the doors to let warm air in, figure out without visual confirmation just what sustenance is available and hope the power returns. When one still doesn't have a book published after several years, one must accept that the power is not coming back on immediately, and it is time to go out and buy ice in ten-pound blocks and locate the last remaining pair of hurricane lamps at the local discount store. (Who would have imagined they even had them, there behind the Valu-Tyme dog food?) Several years without a book published means it is time to eat whatever food is thawing, quickly before it spoils. (Turkey from last thanksgiving, anyone?) Note to self: stop writing notes to self—it's only the illusion of control.

Friday morning, before work, darling Christopher went out to start the old gasoline generator that the neighbor Ken gave us. He disconnected the carburetor and poured the rusty varnish water out of it and put it back together. The thing choked and stalled. I was on the front porch meanwhile trying to smash coffee beans with a hammer. After a half hour, Christopher returned to the kitchen stinking of gasoline, his morning's achievement clutched in his hand: a pint jar of ground coffee.

Ah coffee. There's something. But then I was taking the food out of the refrigerator and putting it on ice in coolers, and there was something in my refrigerator that I could not justify saving any longer. A little jar of blackcap jelly, made by my granny Betty. The date on the jar is 6/15/83. I kept it in my cupboard for more than two decades and opened it up a year ago. It tasted okay, but once opened, it sugared and became strangely textured, the way Dorian Gray changed once the mirror was broken. As long as I didn't clean the refrigerator, I didn't have to make a decision about tossing this last jar of Granny's jelly, but now the refrigerator was awful with warming and melting and spoiling, and so I took that jar out of the bottom shelf, along with a number of other suspect containers (a bit of hardened mole sauce, a jar containing an inch of mincemeat pie filling), and I put them in the utility sink for future rinsing and recycling. Note to self: consider my whole life a work of art, take joy in living this life of my own design; make elderberry wine or black cap jelly as rich as liqueur; love husband to excess.

Susanna's power went out briefly but came back on. Her water, however, was not so forthcoming, despite the pump's running and running. The previous time this happened my brother George and I primed the hell out of the pump and got it going again. We knew full well there was a deeper problem, starting with a failed check valve, but we opted for the temporary fix. This time my mom got my brother Tom the pipe fitter over. He wanted to fix it the right way, replace the broken parts, and when he pulled up the first length of pipe, the ancient well point crumbled, and chunks of rusted metal and dirt came gushing into the system. So Susanna had power but was without water for five days, until the guts of her well were replaced and repaired. For five days she flushed her toilet with buckets of water dipped from the creek.

We visited friends on Saturday, and they were the only ones in their subdivision who had a generator. What a pleasure to look upon the dark houses out there and drink frosty Margueritas, to open and close the refrigerator and freezer door on a whim, without fear of losing the cold. And I learned something about generators. I thought that a person used extension cords and plugged his or her appliances to the generator pumping away in the garage. Perhaps you smart readers already know this, but electricity will flow both ways, in and out of a normal outlet (making it sometimes an inlet), so to power a circuit in your house with a generator, you need only plug that generator into the wall on that circuit. Unless of course you're trying to use an outdoor plug or one in the bathroom or near the kitchen sink, because the GFCI (ground fault circuit interrupter) plug will not into allow energy to enter your house. Note to self: buy tequila and lime juice.

People are friendly during a power outage so long as they have faith it won't last too long and there are no suggestions that cannibalism will be an inevitable end to the thing. Maybe for my emergency kit, I should print out and file instructions for skinning and gutting and grilling squirrel, woodchuck and raccoon; resist, even as an ironic commentary on human nature looking up instructions for preparing humans as meat. Do not even google the phrase "long pig."

So in this subdivision where we were drinking, everyone was outside their houses. Children were messing about on lawns without the guidance of television or Playstation. A few doors away, a twenty-something Asian woman was pacing the perimeter of her house, peering in her own windows. She told us she hadn't been inside her house since the power went out. In addition to the regular locks, this security-conscious gal has always engaged the security sliders on her door (like chains only rigid). Thursday morning, she exited her house as usual into the garage, then got in her car and continued out though her electronically activated garage door. Her garage door has no manual lock or handle, and her garage has no utility door. Unless she was willing to break into her own house, she was sealed out until the power came back on, which was scheduled to be several more days. I didn't tell the gal that for all her locks, she couldn't have kept out a thief with a brick.

Mike, my older brother, is a great sport about this sort of thing, says power failure is a lot like camping. When the power went out in his trailer he already had three flashlights and two hundred tea candles, several portable radios, bags of ice, spare batteries, a portable television that plugged into his truck lighter, a camping stove with spare propane. Perhaps he would have been disappointed if he had not lost power. The thirty gallons in his hot water heater lasted him, but the refrigerator was at 60 degrees when the power finally came back on, and so, upon regaining power, he did a great deal of cooking. Myself, I had lugged my boxes of frozen goods to Susanna's.

My VW truck's rear right tire needs air in it every day. I haven't changed it because I plan to get four new tires soon. I had planned to get the tires at Discount Tire but my wise VW mechanic Kirk says, wait, let's see what we can find for you. But Kirk is busy and a few weeks ago he cut off the end of his finger, so the tire thing keeps getting put off. It's no problem if I can fill up my tire with Christopher's compressor, but without electricity to power the compressor, I have to pay seventy-five cents at the gas station, and I only have three minutes before it cuts out. Note to self: stop complaining, for crying out loud!

I rode my bike through downtown Friday night, which was a little eerie. I thought, oh I'm going to get hassled in the druggy part of town; I'll get shouted at, maybe even have rocks thrown at me by bored kids. The reality was disappointing. Nobody was there. The moonlit porches of the downtown houses were empty. Where were the people? Did they pack up and go stay with their cousins in the country? How could they abandon their lives this way? Okay, power or no power, I have things to do. In the ditches along the road, elderberry stalks are bent beneath the weight of their tiny purple fruits. I need to pick elderberries, invite friends over to keep me company while I de-stem the berries on the screen porch with hurricane lamps on hand. Where's my carboy? I need to locate my carboy, write beautiful and funny stories, rinse and smash my berries, love everyone to excess, make elderberry wine.

News from the trenches: fifty thousand homes were without power in Kalamazoo County alone. Some of our friends have checked in with us

Elizabeth Kerlikowske writes: After solving the immediate and pressing issue of how to keep 65 pounds of Alaskan salmon frozen (solution: husband carries freezer with salmon inside to truck, moves it to Engineering college, plugs in), he and I spent an enjoyable 50+ hours burning through my supply of candles and cooking on the grill. We played more cards than my husband ever dreamt he could play. We watched the cat play with her toys, and when I splashed him with spilled water at the table and we both laughed, we knew we had lowered our standards for amusement as low as they could possibly go. I read by candlelight out loud while my husband sat in front of the darkened TV pretending I was some last resort PBS offering. When the miracle occurred at 5:30 a.m., I didn't mind all the lights, fans, and TVs blaring. Once the salmon freezer was back in place, life returned to normal.

Matt Schwartz, husband of my sister Sheila, writes: We were out of power from Thursday night till Sunday evening. We were worried about our fridge and fish and most of all our freezer. On Friday, our neighbor Andy came over and hooked up our fridge and freezer and our fish tanks just for a few minutes to get them up to cold again and give the fish a little oxygen. We ended up losing five fish: two big silver dollar fish, one shark, a tiger loach and a molly. Our friend Butch called us Saturday morning and told us they got their power back and that we could use their generator. He brought it over about noon and hooked it up to our electrical box and it ran everything in our house! It was a 4000 watt generator. We had already made plans and reservations to go to South Haven to a B&B for the weekend for our 10th anniversary so Andy said he would make sure the generator stays filled with gas and keeps running while we're gone. That gave us a great relief. We had a great time in South Haven and Andy called Sunday evening and said that we have power once again. We now have replaced the fish that we lost. They are little now but they will get big like our other ones were. That was our power outage adventure. You'd think with me growing up Amish that I would be well suited for such an occasion but I've been away from it too long.

Gina Betcher writes that the power outage inspired a bold and first purchase from Ebay: a manual typewriter! And otherwise I felt as though, while walking Bea Bea those couple of powerless evenings, I was reassuring neighbors that our ancestors survived greater life trials. On the other hand, I was grateful my mother was not affected...living up on the sixth floor within a senior housing complex. Most of all, it's no secret that I have always been powerless, just without the glow of candles and peace. I loved the peace. I did, just as I would wonder about the babies being made. Is a power outage like a snow storm? Hmm.

Mike Campbell writes: There is one problem I haven't solved yet. How do I keep air circulating without power to my fan? Without it my walls get damp and pick up mildew.

Melissa Blood Green writes: I work as a social worker and a tree fell on the power lines close to the adult foster care home some of my clients live in. They are developmentally disabled and all had to be evacuated to a hotel in Ionia. That created quite the stir.

And there were who never relinquished their power. Andy Mozina writes: We over here feel blessed to have been spared this outage. Because we had power, I am storyless about it, which might suggest the relationship between stories and power.

Di Seuss writes: I didn't lose power. For the first time in my goddamned life I was one of the select few, the free, the proud, the privileged. Yes, the bats still crazy-eighted through my living room, the dog still humped the couch, the dog's wienie still hung there like an hors d'oeuvre or a Shetland pony or a woman's nose in a fairy tale that turns into a sausage, the thing that looked like a Doric column in my dining room was still a stack of bills, but we were air conditioned! We were so cool our nipples sprouted banana Popsicles! And I opened the fridge and the yogurt stamped with last Tuesday's date was still cold! And the weird lima beans, shriveled leftovers I never intended to eat, still nested, green and sad, in their bowl. (By the way, do turtles have testicles?) I turned on all the lights and ran around the house on my bad leg just to prove it. The bathroom wall was still caving in, the old dog was still incontinent, still peeing and snickering behind my back and laying turds across the floor in a formation more complicated than something Hannibal would have come up with, that Senator from Idaho was still playing footsie under the bathroom stall with an undercover cop, my son still got his head shaved at football camp and looked naked and vulnerable, but the coils of the stove burned orange and when I turned on the oven the cherry pie that spilled over last Thanksgiving still smoked. I never blow dry my hair but I turned on the blow dryer. I poofed my hair up, high as Mt. Olympus. Yes Bonnie Jo, while everyone else suffered, while the war raged on, I lived like a goddamned queen!! Suddenly I have an itch to vote Republican.

(Please continue sending power outage stories from this storm or any other. Or letters on any subject, to bonniejo@iserv.net, bonniecamp@gmail.com or to PO Box 52, Comstock MI 49041.)

Other News around here: Krystal Gayle Campbell, my niece, George's daughter, grew great then burst forth with large-sized child, one Julianna Marie Rose, May 31, 2007. Daddy is Paul Rose. All mentioned are currently living with George at The Yard house. And why not? Krystal was surprised three weeks after giving birth that the pain was not gone; the poor girl was subsequently forced to deliver up her gall bladder.

On May 5, yours truly held a successful garlic mustard pulling party, and in attendance were Susan Ramsey, Norma and Verlin VanRheenen, Gina Betcher, darling Christopher, and many Campbells (including Susanna, Rick, George, Matthew, Kellee, Mike). The day was a little dreary but we kept warm by vigorously pulling the noxious weed, and by eating and drinking not insignificant amounts during rest periods.

Alicia Conroy and Chris Schmid became wife and husband at a twin cities wedding, Sunday August 5, 2007 (just four days after the bridge collapse!)

New vehicle has been acquired by yours truly, a Honda station wagon ‘93, in good shape, bought from a Baptist minister in Lawrence. Christopher just spent twenty hours lying beneath it replacing a variety of front end parts, and the shuddering at high speeds is gone, as is wheel bearing whine, warped brake rotors. Now I can start filling it full of stuff.

News from Travelers:

Alicia Conroy writes from France, sends a card featuring the local donkey, the Baudet du Poitou (Wild Ass of Poitou): The area I'm spending time in, [The Poitevin Marshes Interregional Park], is small town and lower-case T tourist activity. It's a "swamp," a salt marsh estuary, tamed by centuries of canal building off the rivers, with a very distinctive culture. Tons of birds, fabulous gardens. Saw a Poitou donkey in someone's dinky farmyard. In this area there were almost no bridges besides footbridges till the 60s and they got around by boat (poling flat-bottomed skiffs.)

[We spent a good two hours or so touring the breeding program for the wild ass of Poitou. They were down to 44 or so in the early 70s and they started by breeding them to the Portuguese donkey, which was genetically the optimal variety, I guess, and they have been breeding those offspring and their offspring back to the Poitou since, with the goal of being back to essentially 100 percent Poitou in another few years or so. Historically they bred Poitou jacks to a variety of small, shaggy fetlocked draft mares from the Poitou marshes to produce mules that were popular as far away as Spain (and you'd think they'd have plenty of their own mule-stock there, right?). Funniest thing was that less commonly they'd breed a Poitou jenny to a draft horse male, but the mules were considered inferior, and they were called "bardots" (so Brigitte Bardot was named for a second string donkey!]

Here's my trivia: Every day it rains around one and 5:30 for two to ten minutes. You can get your eel grilled, fried in butter with garlic, or stewed with red wine and potatoes. Ash trees are best on the banks of canals because of their root structure (the poplars stay inland; they tip over). If you are polite and try to use your French, people will actually be pretty chatty. In smaller towns everything closes from noon to two. Bring TP. Public toilets can be pretty minimal. You can get a ton of food in a 3-course lunch special of the day for 10-14 bucks. Snails taste kinda like mussels, only more earthy. After a couple days of lunch specials, you skip lunch (or get a salad). Phone booths are hexagonal. Slang for the nation of France is "The Hexagon" Imported Louisiana crayfish are an invasive species in the canals. I've never seen such huge, brilliant hydrangeas.

Wayne Beebe writes in August: Jan and I are returning from Cooling off in Alaska. It was pretty cool in Juneau and Sitka, now we'll warm up in Oklahoma. We're on a Holland American cruise. We had a good time on the trip sightseeing every day, dancing every night. From a post card sent in January: Jan & I are on a cruise, and are en route to Curacao from Grenada. The weather has been perfect and I've swum at a different Island every day for five days. St. Martin is a favorite—half French half Dutch. The French side has topless beaches but we didn't go there.

Sam Lipson writes: Great Britain was a great deal of fun. Jane Herlihy put us up in her still-empty row-house just purchased. Man, London is expensive to visit and to live in. This place, maybe 1100 s.f. on two floors with a concrete plot of backyard, runs 250,000 pounds ($500k) and the prices were rising. The neighborhood was quite colorful and maybe a little rough. Lots of Turks, Jamaicans, Arabs, and of course Yobs and Yobettes. I am SO glad I read a couple of Martin Amis novels about the ever-spiraling gluttony of those blotch-faced wankers on the block. We also got up the Outer Hebrides (check a map) and reached the 58th parallel, aligned with Stockholm. It was rough and barren and looked a lot like Iceland. These Gaelic-speaking islands were under the Norse crown until the late 1500s. Along with Orkney and Shetland Island groups they are less British than Gaels and Norse by tongue and traditions. Also got to Jane and Mike's cottage (divided under an agreement that grants her usage rights and him ownership). There was a feast of delicate Portuguese fish and stew dishes. Lots of Jane's friends and her brother David and his wife Amy and kids Neil, Anna and Christina (?). They are our 4th cousins, as Pat Herlihy concluded to everyone's satisfaction after an animated discussion.

We got out to the far NW Wales (called Snowdonia, after the tallest Welsh peak Mount Snowden) after the cottage weekend. We climbed up this short but impressive 3,000 foot peak rising from the coast a few miles away. It was spectacular weather, as nearly the entire trip was for us. One of my favorite diversions was the visit to the place where The Prisoner was filmed. I don't know if you ever saw any of those shows but they were bizarre, psychedelic, and deeply anarchic allegories. The Village where the entire story took place was itself an inspiration for the Patrick McGoohan scripts. It was designed by an eccentric British architect who eventually created this storyland community in an idyllic spot on the Welsh coast. The show was and is, of course, the subject of a deeply loyal cult following.

While Britain was experiencing historic flooding (worst since the 1940s) and boiling drinking water in the Midlands, we darted around and went straight through (by rail) the worst of it, purely by dumb luck. Scotland was getting unusually dry weather in the meantime, though this still involves momentary showers at any time with rapid clearing skies. This good luck presented a opportunity to respond to the deeply depressive commentary about weather from everyone we met (the British pilot, upon landing in London from Boston, lamented that our visit to Britain would probably be ruined by the inevitably bad weather). When asked how the weather had been I got to crow about the really pleasant climate they have, a welcome relief from the intense heat and humidity in the U.S.

Returning home felt more like coming home to Guatemala, steamy, no AC (Logan Airport had a power surge and the international terminal was a steam bath), cheap prices, big cars, signs in Spanish everywhere.

Laleli Lopez writes: Recently finished the Malibu Triathalon with our Men's Health team. What a wonderful experience. The swim was epic at Zuma beach. The bike and run was along the spectacular Pacific Coast Hwy. MTV's doing an LA event so I hope to hook up with (my brother) Lem, too. Life is good. (Note: this post card September 2006, misplaced. We wonder where Laleli is running and biking and swimming now!)

Mary Szpur and Sonia Lipson both took trips to Eastern Europe, including Ukraine.

Mary Szpur (of Chicago) writes: I didn't think I'd enjoy being back in Ukraine as much as I did. I had worried about traveling with my 89-year-old mother for so long that I didn't think I'd have room for pleasurable feelings on my recent brief sojourn to Ukraine, but I did. I wanted to jot down a few impressions before they faded.

My mother and I spent a day in Warsaw and although I enjoyed it, I did not feel a warmth toward Warsaw. Maybe that city has been through too much, with too much destroyed and then rebuilt, and maybe that makes it harder to find its essence if you're an outsider.

We met up with my cousin Roman, his wife Vera, and their 18-year-old daughter Marianna on the plane from Warsaw to Lviv. Roman had returned to Ukraine last year to help his mother recover from a broken hip, but his wife and daughter had not been back since emigrating to Canada (they live in Edmonton) almost eight years ago.

In Lviv, after passing through customs, two women sitting at a booth asked us if we had purchased health insurance for our stay. I was confused—what did they mean? They said a new law had passed stating that visitors must have either purchased health insurance for their trip to Ukraine, or they must purchase it from these ladies at a certain (low) daily rate. I couldn't tell if this was mandatory, if these ladies were official people, or just scam artists. No signs, no badges—it felt like the old days in eastern Europe when you didn't know what was what and people were always rattling off obscure regulations in order to justify whatever it was they wanted from you. I was irritated but showed them that I'd bought travel insurance, and they immediately smiled warmly and waved us through.

We were greeted at Lviv's quaint, provincial little airport by my brother Walter's (who lives in New York) housekeeper's husband, and a distant aunt, both of whom were bearing beautiful flowers from the garden, chocolates, and champagne.

Roman had hired a man to drive us two hours from Lviv to his hometown of Ivano-Frankivsk, at the gateway to the Carpathian Mountains. Our transport was a big fancy Nissan SUV. The highway was mostly two lanes, and we had our first experience of the constant passing and back-and-forth of driving Ukrainian roads. I gave up wincing every few minutes about missed crashes and realized it would be all right.

In Ivano-Frankivsk, a city of about 300,000, we immediately saw evidence of Ukraine's booming economy. Lots and lots of stores, all over the place, full of all kinds of goods. Nice goods. Stores were not just in the town center, but all over. Older homes were being rehabilitated, and many new homes were under construction. Many of these were quite large and nice looking. I went inside a few rehabbed and new homes, and they were comparable to homes in the U.S. Many if not most people have someone in the family working in another country (lots of women work as nannies in Italy, for example), sending money home, to finance this type of thing. Many of the homes have beautiful, elaborate gates and fences.

Also new, since our last visit twelve years ago: lots of restaurants, and they seem to be good! We had a few meals in restaurants, and the food was excellent and reasonably priced. Restaurants that are decorated in traditional Ukrainian folk/village style are kind of trendy, and we ate in a couple that were quite good, and attractive to boot.

Other changes: lots of nice cars. Good roads. Restaurants, bars, stores, things to do. Women dressed to kill. People seem to have money. I heard the Ukrainian language everywhere, even in Kiev, which has been traditionally more Russian speaking. Seems to be trendy now to speak Ukrainian, especially after the Orange Revolution. Schools are taught in Ukrainian. In any case, most people speak several Slavic languages and I frequently heard people freely moving from Ukrainian, to Russian, to Czech or whatever, depending on whom they were talking to.

I could understand most everyone, and I could feel my language skills rising to the occasion, and that felt good.

Roman's daughter Marianna felt right at home because the women there liked to dress up, just as she does. "Canadians don't like to dress up." She would say at random times in a mournful tone, "I just love it here." Followed by a sigh and, "Isn't it beautiful?" She was worried she'd forgotten too much Ukrainian to speak with her childhood friends.

We hired one of Roman's friends to drive us to my mother's village in northwest Ukraine, a region called Volyn. This topography is flat to gently rolling hills, with a few bigger cities, but mostly it's rural. It took about 6-7 hours driving (again, the constant passing, and we had to get an auto part replaced) to get to Turyjsk, where my mother and her brother Leo were born. The Orthodox church where they lived no longer exists, and we visited a different church than the one we saw at our last visit. Big church, recently built with money from Canada and U.S. We met the priest, and my mother surprised me by giving him a carefully rehearsed speech, given breathlessly as we had to climb over a long uneven trail through many fields to get to his house: "My name is Tatiana Krywitska. I was born here, and my father's name was Lonhin and he was the priest here. Here is money for your church. Please pray for my father and my family." He nodded and solemnly agreed.

We then found the cemetery in town where my mother's mother Valentina Krywitska (1894-1922, died of typhus) and grandmother Pavlina Kontsevych are buried. We came prepared, armed with the large arrangements of artificial flowers you can buy everywhere for decorating graves. We found the beautiful granite monuments that my cousin Tina's son Peter, who with his wife Jen, travelled to the same villages a few years ago, and arranged for the ruined graves to be replaced with new monuments. The cemetery had been hit by a tornado one month prior, and gravestones were toppled, huge trees cracked in half, but Peter's monuments stood tall and untouched.

We then drove about 18 kilometers down a rough cobblestoned road (passing farmers who had one hand locked into a cell phone while with the other hand they walk their cow) to the tiny village of Ozerany, to where my grandfather was exiled, to a much smaller church when he would not accede to all the demands of the Polish occupiers in Turyjsk. This time, I really appreciated the beauty of this rural area. We saw cranes, beautiful large birds with markings totally different from the cranes I know in the midwest. We saw lots of turkeys with bright red necks, tail feathers fanned out. The area had several picturesque lakes (ozero=lake in Ukrainian). Ozerany only has a few hundred residents. Housing stock are old wooden homes, painted in different colors.

In town, we immediately met a woman riding a bike; she was probably ten years younger than me and remembered us from our last visit twelve years ago, as well as Peter and Jen from their more recent visit. Her mother had remembered my mother and uncle as kids in the village, and we had eaten at her mother's house last visit. The mother had since died. In any case, she took us to the old town cemetery, which was hidden away on a nearby hill. There we found my grandfather's grave, the grave of the village priest, and much to my mother's joy, she saw that the villagers have continued to place flower arrangements on his grave—that is, the grave was not bare. This made my mother very happy, to think the villagers still remembered her father, their priest.

My grandfather, Lonhin Krywitsky, had been killed by Polish partisans during the winter in early WWII. His church was burned down. The villagers found his body in the spring, and used the cross from the church as his monument--a fitting one, as it is a beautiful metal ornamental cross. On the cross is a deteriorating wooden plaque saying: "Here lies Lonhin Krywitksy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, He was attacked by our Polish occupiers" I asked our friend if she could replace the rotting plaque with a newer one, and left her money to do so. We then found the new church and church priest, a cherubic twenty-something who had just had his second child, and gave him some money for his church. I liked Ozerany.

In Ivano-Frankivsk, we spent much time hanging out with Roman's mother Marika, a hale and hearty 84-year-old with an excellent memory and a perpetual look of sorrow on her face. She recounted to me her side of the family tree and I wrote it all down, and finally understood how Roman and her family are related to mine. She also recounted the harrowing wartime experiences she and her sister Daria had—their mother was gunned down in front of her family by the NKVD (Bolshevik secret police) and the body was left in the street for two weeks. Then the same NKVD people burned down the family house. Marika and her sister Daria had to flee and leave their father and brothers, and hid in different houses in several different villages under assumed names for eleven years, meanwhile helping the underground resistance army.

All of this was told to me in my aunt's strong, mournful voice, in a flowing narrative that she had memorized like a script. In fact she began her story in a monotone, exactly this way: "On January 5, 1945, when I was 21 years old, the NKVD drove up outside our house and lit the straw in the field. Our house began to burn. I was in the house with Daria and my mother, along with four young men, wounded soldiers of the Ukrainina Partisan Army." And so it went from there.

Back to present day Ivano-Frankivsk: everyone in that town has a big garden with lots of vegetables, flowers, several fruit trees, walnut trees, and some chickens. We sat in Aunt Marika's garden for hours, hanging up wet clothes, gazing at her overgrown but very pretty garden, and waiting for neighbors to drop by and chat.

With Roman and family, we took an overnight train (four platform beds to a room) to Kiev. Our train conductress was a brusque blonde who offered us delicious tea from a samovar several times during the trip.

In Kiev, most thankfully we were met at the vokzal by Roman and Vera's friend Volodya in his Volkswagen Toureg, and a private driver in a Mercedes Benz! We were driven to the amazing new residential development where he lives--it looked like the North Shore of Chicago, with big houses and beautiful landscaping. Volodya is a real estate developer and moved to Kiev two years ago as "a business opportunity presented itself." He seems to be doing quite well. He, his wife, and two kids treated us like family and fed us incredibly good food, constantly, and coddled us. We took a driving tour arranged by Volodya of Kiev's famous, old, beautiful churches, monasteries, and touristic areas.

Of note, the tour through the Kievan Pecherska Lavra, a huge complex with many churches, seminary, museums, and catacombs. You walk in the catacombs with one lit candle held carefully between your third and fourth fingers, in a very crowded, low-ceilinged underground maze where saints are buried and well preserved. Brown wizened wrinkled hands poke through the preserved silken robes of mummification. Really, it was beautiful, quite amazing to me.

My mother was completely exhausted by the end of the trip, tottering in her bad shoes, almost hallucinating, saying, "Where are we?" "Now what is the name of my son?" Just exhaustion. But now back in Chicago, I think she is pleased to remember this trip, and she says "That was like a dream, that trip to Ukraine. It was a dream."

Sonia Lipson writes: Just back from a whirlwind tour of former haunts, and a few new ones added (including rural Ukraine and Norway). I dragged Ben through ugly Warszawa Centralna to board our Polish sleeping car on route to Kiev. When we got held for three hours at the Slovak border (remember, there's a new country to deal with!) my thoughts went back to my old road buddies. Drunken workers at the railroad cafe leering at fellow gypsy diners made me feel incredibly nostalgic! And my first fried cheese with brambori in 20 years took away the sting of wandering the now shiny streets of Prague among the spoiled Americans, of which I am one of course; but it wasn't the same without Chris there, considering the menu, wondering whether to order Great Hunter's Thing. By the way, I found Prague's Central Hotel; it looks the same but appears to cost about 20 times what it did. Russian, by the way, can be spoken without shame everywhere; if the listener is under 30 they don't understand and figure you're Polish, and if they're older they just don't bother taking offense and will gladly join in conversation.

Ben really did have a great time (Though he did say he's NEVER EVER TRAVELING AGAIN), and did get to Berdichev (his grandfather's Ukrainian birthplace). He also, of course, fell in love with the Tatras and wondered why we didn't stay their the whole time; I had to explain to him that one must EARN the Tatras.

Warsaw has changed in such dramatic ways since I was last there in1989. Ben was tired and ended up sleeping in the moat around the Old Town Square while I acted like a tourist. Poor guy. I even saw some tourists taking pictures of him! We found some fascinating Jewish landmarks including a kosher lunch kitchen inside a community center and the very moving Jewish Ghetto exhibit. We walked the streets of the old Ghetto, and saw the one line of buildings still standing from that time, currently empty but with the remnants of old 1970s decor inside and a hint of some very hip modern art projects in development. But a lot of the city seems wrapped up in excessive McDonald-ization, so I attempted to tune out what I didn't like and lingered longingly at small pastry shops, adoring being addressed, "swucham, pani?" (very poor transliteration of "can I help you ma'am?").

We luckily found a grocery store next to the train station that took credit cards (changing money when you're travelling to a different country every two days is a daunting challenge; not too much, not to little is hard to determine). We had a real feast and finally got on a train (yeah!) in a train station I was intimate with. We were surrounded by multiple Slavic languages as the train was headed for Kiev and I was just beside myself with joy.

We slept hard because the next day we ended up in Shepativka just as we woke, and there is where the problems started....We had been under the impression that the above mentioned town S. would be where we had to get off, but really wanted to go to the next major town, apparently on the same train line, i.e. Berdichev. The conductor implied that would be fine, but then about 30 minutes later came to apologize; we were headed non-stop to Kiev at that point, and, when I finally got my bearings, realized that we had taken a northern route AROUND Berdichev. Ben was horrified; I was actually feeling some mixed reactions because I would get to go to Kiev as a little bonus, a town I feel romantic about. Meanwhile we both took in the sad scenes of rusting infrastructure and poor peasant life going on along the train tracks as we headed further East than planned.

When we arrived in Kiev, we had to organize, and quickly. Ben figured out how to get a SIM card for Ukraine and started making calls to get us a place to stay and to make contact with someone in Berdichev (there was a series of Jewish contacts listed in one of our books but the phone number was the same for all.) Meanwhile we were camped out in the most soviet of train stations, a mass of humanity coming and going and NO ENGLISH spoken at all, in contrast to our cozy experience in Northern Europe. This was to be the first of four visits to the main vokzal in 24 hours; our lives centered around getting out of Kiev and back "home" as Ben now began to refer to Berdichev.

We managed to contact an outfit called SoloEast travel on the phone who set us up in an apartment in the center of Kiev for $75. They also promised a car and driver for $200 the next day to go out to B.

The apartment was fancy and we were greeted by the rudest, fattest "chamber maid" I've ever met. She followed me to the Bankomat for the cash, kept changing the price and had a cell phone glued to her head the whole time; later it turned out we were locked out of the apartment because she failed to give us a code we needed to get back in, otherwise it was interesting to stay in a courtyard apartment, felt very echt. Another run back to train station immediately, I got good at figuring out how to get around there, which Kaca was the best (#41) and managed to get the important sleeper out of Kiev the next night to Uzhgorod (on border to Slovakia) so was now more up for whatever came, knowing we could flee the next night. Going back we got a quick visit to the metro system too which has those incredibly deep Art Deco stations and is still dirt cheap.

Kiev turned out to be more Russian than I expected; I could unabashedly speak my infantile Russian and no one seemed to care that I was making no attempt to intersperse Ukrainian in there. To be honest, nobody seemed to care too much about anything; we were definitely back in soviet land where people were rude and indifferent. I would have been elated if I wasn't so anxious to get business done.

The next morning I got up at six am and did two hours of sight seeing before the driver was to come. I got to see all the fabulous, recently reconstructed cathedrals, go on the funicular down to Podil and the Dnieper river. The old boat station was standing but had been more or less abandoned, taken over by fancier private cruise operators. I wondered around with the drunks and found my one apricot tree of the trip; that was heaven! It was still romantic for me to be there, tinged by memories from by last visit in 1979. Still the ugly McDonald's right next to the grand train station was a reminder of so much that had changed.

When the driver arrived, something wasn't right; he would not look me in the eye or answer my questions. His English was rudimentary, and I suggested to Ben that we just bag it. At that same moment, the chamber maid showed up unannounced, dumped the breakfast I'd put out for Ben and started stripping the sheets from the bed while we stood there in turmoil. Luckily Ben and I were on the same page, and walked out after getting four anxious calls from the agency manager, trying to entice us back into "making business."

We went back yet again to train station to find some other more proletariat method of getting to B. and found ourselves settling in for a three hour waiting session at the now familiar vokzal. Ben sat with masses of backpacks and watched the following scene; a drunk dropped and broke a bottle of beer not 10 feet in front of him, eventually bringing over militia men and other important people. Finally a cleaning lady came to mop up the impressive mess. It turns out there is a medic in the station whose job is to bandage up these people and shepherd them out; we later went to make our own visit to this office for medical attention. It was a fascinating scene.

We got on the local to Kozyatin finally; it turns out this is the real hub of train travel into near west Kiev; when we arrived much later, in a bad mood, it turned out that there was an even slower train about to take off for the final 20 kms to our destination. Meanwhile the station was out of this world, more like a movie set, really. There was a wedding reception in the back room of the station just getting started (we got to see the same scene five hours later when we came back for our connection). There were also many statues of Lenin, which Ben could not get enough of. The poor guy; being a red diaper baby and getting absolutely all of his exposure to soviet culture in 2007 post empire Ukraine is a rude introduction, I'd say.

Anyway the VERY SLOW train to Berdichev put us in a better mood in that we had interesting travel companions, and were finally moving toward our goal. Ben managed to move a drunk guy's stuff to make room for us to sit down, and the guy looked quite ready to punch Ben, then managed to be sweet-talked into making fun of us instead. The woman across from me was Polish from the Ukraine, looked like she had been dragged around a bit in this world, but was incredibly solicitous and friendly. When we finally got to B. there was an absolute sense of elation and relief as we rushed out to find a taxi to take us to the synagogue. Having snagged one I ran back in to local vokzal to check the timetable one last time out of town, and ran into a 60 year American gentleman studying the schedule who turned out to be a former Peace Corp volunteer back visiting with his locally born wife. He had lived in the town for two years and knew everything about the Jewish community there. He readily agreed to come along with us on our two-hour mad dash visit to the town; we were really lucky.

The synagogue turned out to be locked up tight and the slightly hostile neighbors couldn't help explain what was going on; the next address turned out to be for a Jewish enclave including a school and some other multi-use buildings, also with no one around. At that point I proposed going to the cemetery, which I understood was large. It was also as grown over as you can imagine; there was a weed not too different from Queen Ann's Lace but 8 feet tall grown over most of the large plot, with a small section that had recently been somewhat weeded out; someone seemed to be building on the site as well. As you can imagine, it was incredible to be there, and Ben had some time to himself there, which I think was quite meaningful. He played his clarinet; it was wonderful to hear. Our peace corp friend Tony meanwhile filled me in on life in Berdichev including the widespread tendency towards thievery, which even good people there participated in. He had been working with a nature center and with homeless and orphaned children and continued to keep connections with these programs, but seemed to feel pretty bleak about chances for improvement there. He himself became very ill because of the environmental pollution in the area (not too far from Chernobyl, but also the result of poor sanitation and things like burning plastic bottles).

When we realized we would have to rush to catch our train out of Ukraine, the taxi driver agreed to take us back to the main hub train station where the wedding reception was starting to wind down, and it turned out that the guy was fluent in ... Spanish!... having lived and worked in Spain for several years. We had a wonderful conversation with this guy who had his own complaints about the general ignorance and selfishness of Ukrainian life. He would have loved to leave but his family kept him there. I should have realized he was something special; he had been so patient while we searched around Berdichev for some place to attach ourselves to.

We just made it to our train for Uzhgorod, starving and exhausted and finally got a chance to buy train station food (i.e. ladies coming up to your window to sell varenishkis, sunflower seeds and beer.) Two out of three selections were an excellent value; we dropped off and woke in the Carpathian mountains of Western Ukraine.

Sonia's report from Ukraine, final installment, with comments from Ben:

Back to Uzhgorod, West of the Carpathian mountains, which we arrive in at a decent hour (11am) for a change. We exited our train in what could possibly been an excellent place to pass the day. The town is near the Slovak border and has a major crossing there, with a Eurosuper highway, or whatever they call them there, but I wasn't feeling patient (big surprise!). When I found out that the next bus wasn't leaving for 5 hours for the Slovakian town of Kosice, I could have settled for us spending a restful day visiting the local historical museum and getting intimate with the town. Instead (again, my bad) we got on the local bus and pushed on to another little town that promised more train traffic into the West. I've always wondered about Chop, which is a major train crossing and at the intersection of Hungary, Slovakia and Ukraine but it turns out there's pretty much nothing there, and the next train headed West wasn't leaving for 8 hours.. And there isn't even an ethnographic museum in this town. No patience (again, on my part.) So we got out of the station and start interviewing the only cab driver at the train/bus station. This guy is another decent soul, speaks Russian, Slovak and Hungarian, and is a retired train engineer........For every last Ukrainian currency unit left in our pockets (what is it? not Ruble, not Korun) we decided to take pot luck by walking across the closest border. The meandering drive took us through a couple of small well keep (i.e. ethnic Hungarian) villages and we arrived at the pedestrian border and bade our driver goodbye. But, not so fast, because it turns out only Slovaks, Ukrainians and European Union citizens can cross here, and we have to go to the other border crossing, in.......Uzhgorod. We are now in a little nothing town, and the only cab driver is cut from a different cloth, to say the least. His car is in kind of rough shape and he's reluctant to tell me how much it will cost back to town, acting like he doesn't know how far it is. Of well, not much choice, we get in. This guy is a real laugh riot, yelling out the window at everyone, swerving towards a hay wagon, scaring the hell out of the kids on the back. Yeah, and he doesn't speak Russian, so doesn't seem to understand what I'm saying. In the end I realize he's taking us the long way back to town with his own version of a meter running and he's taken his taxi light off, as what he's doing is apparently illegal, but pretty common. I've been thinking about the fact that we have 0 Ukrainian currency left, which is maybe a good thing. We calculate in our heads what is a reasonable fare from our trip out, and (yes, I admit without consulting Ben ) decide to pay him double in the last of my dollars. This may not end up well.... When we arrive at our beloved Uzhgorod train station 3 hours after departing our enthusiastic, and now kind of scary driver insists on driving us right up to the door despite signs and alot of shouting by the lone security guard. He can't do the math so tells us to wait in the car; he's going to get a calculator, and a friend. When the price appears to have tripled, I take off to get more money for bus tickets, leaving Ben with the $20 bill to give him and instructions not to waver. Arriving back I find Ben frantically writing figures out for the hulking cab driver who has now summoned another 'friend' a soldier, who looks completely confused but is carrying a gun. {THIS IS BEN NOW: In fact I was not frantic at all, I was quite calm. Having grown up in New York I figured the best approach is to act very earnest and sincere, attract public attention and let everyone judge for themselves, while keeping an open knife in my pocket. The soldier, who I think was really a police officer, walked away apparently unimpressed, and the bully left.} Moment of truth, I announce 'dostatchna' which means $20 is quite enough, take it our leave it and grab our packs out of the cab, the driver follows (follwed, sorry about tenses) me shouting, tries to wrestle my luggage from me, and we are briefly gathering some attention from fellow travellers. {BEN He actually tried to take the pack off her back} Retiring to the station cafe/bar seems the only way out; I pretend not to be worried, Ben is not so happy and wonders if this is really worth a showdown. Of course it is! Lucky for us, our unhappy friend finally decides $20 is dostatachna, and takes off, but we huddled in the cafe for a good 40 minutes before making sure the coast was clear. {BEN: Actually, when the guy walked away, I saw him furtively hand off the $20 to someone without a word, and figured there must be more story yet to come.) Ben's nerves were a bit shot but were calming down when a drunk guy stumbled in profusely bleeding from his head. The hard hearted waitress wisely pushed the guy out (this is a job for the vokzal medic clearly). {BEN Actually, this is one of the most significant experiences of the whole trip. Sonia is a nurse practitioner and is used to this kind of stuff, so forgot to mention that the blood was streaming down his neck and the whole left half of his T shirt was soaked in blood. When the waitress kicked him out, he saw me standing aghast with my hand out and he walked toward me. Sonia said "don't get involved, there are enough people to take care of him out there". That's exactly what I was afraid of - at that point I realized the guy had probably been beaten up by our taxi driver... (and a few days later in the Tatras Sonia confirmed that she had shared by suspicion) (By the way I didn't!) (Yes she did! This is precisely why I didn't want to and don't want to ever leave Somerville again!, like it's not bad enough here in the States?} When we had really spent our last whatever-it-was we kicked ourselves out and waited with the hords out at the platform. {BEN again: Also, while we were waiting for the bus I watched a group of really down and out Romani (gypsies) off to the side. They were all drunk and picking on the most helpless of them pushing his wheelchair around, pretending to dump him out. One sick, older, balding man, sang and played on a broken accordian that didn't make a sound, didn't get a cent from the passengers waiting for their buses, crossed himself and walked away}

Our bus came, it was a pleasure to get on a vehicle that definitely had a destination into Slovakia, even if only on the other side of the border, but not so quick because the border has something like 300 cars and trucks lined up when we arrive...............! Somehow buses get to go to the front which meant we only had to wait two hours there; every other crossing up to now had taken something like 3 minutes on our trip, this definately felt like a step back into the bad old days. However the border crossing guard regaled us with stories in part English, part German, proud to demonstrate his abilities and didn't seem too concerned about processing the masses the trucks and cars going nowhere, the main thing is that to get into the EU Ukraine must have an English or German speaker at their border crossings; he was very proud to be that person!

OK, I was desperate by the time we got to Kosice and may have been a little bossy to Ben [BEN: yeah, like this was the first time this happened!}; we had a short falling out that was mended by salami and chocolate. Finally on a train to Poprad and paid for by credit card! we were finally getting somewhere faster. We shared a car with a lovely young family and passed around a variety of junk food. In no time flat were at the foot of the High Tatras (Vysoki Tatry). There is a little electric train that runs right up into the mountains from there; unfortunately we wondered about for about an hour until we found a place that didn't cost the equivelent of a gazillion dollars; prices have definately risen in the part of the country. Somerthing I'm nostalgic about is concrete slab hotels with cheap postcards and this place was that. Another thing that turned out to be good about place, we were across the street from the wonderfulist hike in the Tatras, which goes up to my most favorite concrete block hotel, the Sliezky Dom. So, yes, Ben and I did hike up there the next day, took in the cozy 1970s, James Bondish scene (foxy barmaids, free standing stove with wrap around couch, manly hikers fully equiped for ice climbing) , and managed to get in a 7 hour excursion with a full view of the snowy peaks above and the soft valleys and purple fireweed along the burned out line below.

The next day when I blew out my knee again, (and I know that I fully deserved it for not being mindful in my walk, another my bad) the health club staff at the hotel catered to me in such a wonderfull way, the attendent/nurse rubbed on a strong and healing ointment and wrapped up my leg very professionally. Ben took more than full advantage of the sauna in meanwhile.{BEN: what do you mean? I had reserved two hours and was in there for 1 hr and 58 minutes. Listen, Lipsons/Herlihys, the truth is I was so upset and angry at Sonia for hurting herself again - (she's rushing, rushing, rushing the whole time...hurry up and hurry, we've got seven countries to do in 16 days and, etc...what's going on that she keeps hurting herself? I mean, I don't really believe that accidents just happen...really, I felt like crying) - so I decided this is enough, I'm not going to take care of her or anyone else if they can't at least take care of themselves...EVER AGAIN!} Well, a happy Ben is a happy Sonia I suppose, but another crisis, the restaurant closed before he got out so I couldn't have my fried cheese. Wow, now I'm understanding why cousin Bon worries about having enough food, I'm hungry and what's more I don't know when I will stop being hungry, well until morning I guess. Saved again by the station cafe, more drunks and gypsy {Romani} stories, we hopped on yet another sleeper for Prague.

But that story will have to wait. Prague is beautiful but unfortunately, not that good a story in my mind at this point. Anyway it's been told before I imagine. Or maybe there will be a part IV where I finally deconstruct the whole experience as a parable of my life, full of self reflection. When I've read over the logs I wonder if I'd made alot of it up. Was it really that 'entertaining' a trip? And then I read my friend Mary's tales of her own returning with her family to Ukraine this summer, a wonderful visit with kind and hard working people trying to better themselves. It made me feel both happy and sort of low. Good news wasn't really what I was looking for on my trip, and I feel guilty about this. I guess it doesn't make for good copy. This also made me think how much my trip experience is a reflection of what I wanted to see; except who wants to be shaken down by a fat chamber maid? I guess I do, strangely. But then, politically I have my own reasons for expecting post cold war Eastern Europe to be an entertaining mess. And somewhat related, my father always said cheap food tastes better; now I realize that adversity and filth are their own rewards in my confusing universe. Then to take it even further, if I didn't tell an entertaining tale, did it actually happen? And if people didn't cheer me on in my story telling, were my travels for nothing?

Anway...The End!

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