2000 - Linda Completes Acupuncture Training; Tall Ships and Taller Tales - The East Indies; Y2K & Sand-Strand Bonfires. Preparing Renunciation; Mom Moves Back North; Noah Graduates

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Getting away, specifically getting away without Jared for any brief span to reorient and re-bond never came easy, never came without projection or other relationship issues. The primary obstacle remained a sense that the children would suffer or have hurt feelings if Linda was not there all the time for everything.

Given the heroic efforts Linda expended on their behalf, there was legitimacy in that perception. But everyone told her how erosive and eventually destructive to their relationship that could be. So, after much dialog and angst, as their 25th Wedding Anniversary approached, they decided to do something special that included Alia.  

Before Linda finished her acupuncture training, before the strains and rescue efforts for their relationship sent them across the world trying to save it, they took their anniversary on Barefoot Cruises in the Caribbean with an outfit that does not exist anymore. It went bankrupt when one of their two vessels tried to outrun a hurricane and got caught. Losing all hands and the ship, they were sued into insolvency. When still operating, though, they featured relatively small “tall ships,” sailing with a passenger manifest of only 20 people, the crew playing “Amazing Grace” on the PA as anyone who wanted to helped hoist the sails on their circuit to the small cays around the Caribbean.

It was an idyllic excursion, the time they had together, its soothing and love-reinforcing effect, and it encouraged them they might just maybe entertain their fantasy of going around the world together.

That planning began in earnest.

Besides several minute Caribbean islands, they put in in Venezuela with an air flight up to Angel Falls, which at a mile-high is the tallest waterfall in the world. Coursing off the Pangaea plateau above the Amazon floor, with rock formations of a type that match up only with those from Tibet, the plateau and gorge host species of plants and animals so unique and diverse that they do not seem to belong to South America, or even this planet… Snakes and birds with outrageous plumage, a yellow poisonous tree frog less than the size of a thumbnail… My, oh my.

Everyone thought it would be the real thing: Y2K codes would crash all computers, and civilization would collapse.

As the dreaded evening approached, they became giddy. Souring the beach for driftwood, they made a huge bonfire, friends and a few relatives assembling, dancing and beating drums, dashing into the nighttime surf as the moment approached, the clock ticked down, and the lights stayed on!

It was a good party.

Y2K and world collapse – it played into some of their long-held primal beliefs about the tenuousness of civilization, anyway. They read in their twenties Edgar Cayce who predicted California would collapse into the ocean and Atlantis would rise again. Packing their essential tools to flee Three Mile Island had a negatively reinforcing effect: nothing like feeling everything’s lost to a techno-disaster and starting over somewhere else with minimal to nothing.

Living in Alaska where the Great Earthquake of 1964 pulverized communities and left families with little food or fuel-stocks, every family they encountered there had months to a year’s supply of food stashed. Heck, their own commitment early-on to homestead, to live off the grid, all likely had connection to their subliminal distrust of the moral and logistic viability of their planet-consuming culture.

They played with it while taking it quite seriously. Noah, in school in Providence RI, checked out University kayaks and tentatively planned how he could snatch one as the chaos hit, grab enough food to make a 30-day paddle down the presumably in-flames east coast to rendezvous with them on their island strand. They took a few canoe trips into the lagoon, tried seine fishing, and felt they could subsistence fish if need be. Water distillation would be a huge survival issue if power went out, and they began investigating household desalinization units.

Likely they would have gone down anyway, like most folks if the world collapsed. But the mental and psychic exercise proved useful, if for nothing else, to relieve angst with thoughts they might be able to do anything about it if it really occurred.

At one point Noah wanted to take his own discovery trip across the U.S. The old Tumbleweed Express (VW bus) was decrepit by then, but they paid for an engine rebuild and gave it to Noah for his birthday. Noah sold it to purchase a cross-country Greyhound bus ticket and went west.

That spring, Noah graduated from Brown. Paul’s sister, Mary moved back from Europe, and Mom moved back to Virginia, essentially clearing the boards to dig into finishing school and making plans to bug out. To go to Pacific Islands, then China, and on to India and Nepal.

They got started, but per an Emmy Lou Harris song, “He promised her the world, but they never got that far“: a saga of its own…