2006 - Her Own Course but Together Trips; Canyons and Basketball; UK and France; A French Love and Noah’s Wedding; New Smyrna Lost
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Paul kept Jared more and more though never near half-time, and not even every weekend until years later. He did stay at her place with Jared for the weeks whenever she traveled, which became a growing part of her professional and personal life.
Not that she never traveled before! But she sought some solo or adult-friend trips, to places and with rigor Jared could never handle without him as her focus (or preoccupation), which on all levels obviated the need and purpose of her trips in those years.
A bittersweet but financially prudent decision, four hurricanes in four years caused more and more damage, and the real estate taxes exceeded the mortgage payment. Paul sold the Florida house, providing a cushion to work more selectively, and helping pay off Conifer home while also initially fund Linda’s own home purchase in Morrison. It made it possible to consider a few different kinds of excursions together.
They continued sharing journeys. Into the Grand Canyon on rafts once again. And to B-ball tourneys!
A few details about each follow.
In their younger hippie days, passion for sports was not exactly hip, not cool. No matter, Paul at the always-losing then slowly improving-to-contenders UVA over their years in Charlottesville intensely identified with their underdog “got-a-brain” teams, especially basketball. A fair observer might claim Paul was intensely fanatic though he never bought memorabilia, he just attended in person as a student into his 30’s! Linda caught the bug when Virginia went to the NIT Championship in Madison Square Gardens during her midwifery years in Brooklyn. They semi-dreamed but never planned on the tourney, the storied, acclaimed, and almost legendary ACC Tournament, much less the NCAA.
In 2006 they did, Alia and Paul to the ACC, Linda and Paul to the first rounds of the NCAA, then Paul and Noah and 85-yr old Ursula in Salt Lake, Sacramento, and the Meadowlands. When seated in the student sections, it was a raucous ride, especially rooting for the opposing team! But more and more the venues were attended by rich alum scoring scalped tickets, and sullenly berating their own team if they did not win. “Not cool”.
They got it out of their system but had a blast doing it.
In 2006 they embarked on another rafting trip through the Grand Canyon. The entire experience can be justifiably described as a series of “highlights”, but one place was new to them, and one day was never to be forgotten.
The new experience? Elve’s Chasm.
They’d ascended from the river through the gorge on earlier trips into the lower portion of that magnificent place. This time, they climbed from the Inner Gorge on a rope a few miles upstream. Edging over the rimrock then hiking along the Esplande to view Royal Arch from above, the wondrous landscape below astounded them. Hanging gardens and travertine sculptures, aquamarine and turquoise, cream and red colors winding sinuously behind the vegetation: the contrasts amid the desert and cliffs delighted the eye and uplifted their hearts.
Once they made it… But the climb was the gut clencher.
Indeed, the rope and climb proved downright scary, and in fact paralyzed Paul momentarily. A fear of heights he never knew he had persisted for several years until they returned to the spot backpacking from above years later, when he in fact did almost fall. That and a 200-foot rappel descent in 2012 into a New Zealand cave with a subterranean river provided the jolt that shook him out of it, so he could again walk along the exposed heights of his beloved Southwest without nausea and unreasoning fear.
Good thing, as he could never give up those places.
The Canyon is a desert. It does rain there, but not much, not frequently. Signs of erosion have sculpted the landforms into the stepped terraces amid vertical cliffs known almost instantly upon sight worldwide as the Grand Canyon.
The land everywhere appears an endless sequence of landslides, dry falls, side-canyon stream courses with massive boulders, difficult to imagine as ever having been moved, much less a torrent of the magnitude to toss these massive slabs willy-nilly about the canyon bottoms. Yet, with all these clear manifestations of erosion and change, the canyon seems eternal, unchanging, the land-carving done millennia before, geologic epochs ago.
Not so.
One morning brought heavy clouds, then a deluge that obscured the canyon rims with mist and cloud curtains. A hundred waterfalls burst into existence in minutes. Pouring off every cliff edge, down small draws which became raging torrents, the deluge caused a massive landslide across from camp, reshaping the face of the canyon while they watched.
No, the canyon has dynamism despite appearances and emotions, and watching even a part of it reshaped felt like observing creation in motion.
They observed. They abided. They shared and they remembered.
Noah moved to London, did well, and had Paul come for a final right-of-passage to address not wide but deep father-son dynamics. On All Hallows Eve in an abandoned castle in Wales they held an initiation, a simple release into Noah’s own glory and adulthood. Noah and Linda did and experienced much of the same a few years later in the same location, Linda glowing in Noah’s assurance he would be there for, care for her no matter what. After the divorce with Paul, those were life-determining concerns for her.
They met Noah’s to-be wife. Several years later, the couple married in London. Linda’s entire family including Jared traveled to share in the joy of the couple’s friends who gathered for the legal seal of their marriage by the dour barrister, but everyone else rejoicing.
While the couple went on honeymoon in the Pyrenees, Linda, Paul, and Alia utilized the opportunity to travel to Scotland and the UK. Across England to Stonehenge while visitors could still stroll inside the circle of stones, up to Scotland, to castles and moors; Linda’s archaeological and classical civilization love sprouted like a mountain rose. Coming across a grove of Redwoods and the wild ruggedness of the Highlands and the north coast, her primal nature spirit also rejoiced.
It was good.
