Paul reluctantly leaves his sisters, heading north to Alaska. He sees stone sheep on the way, stops at a hot spring and drives the old Country Sedan carefully over the Alcan highway. Fairbanks seems a bare and austere town after a recent flood. Paul doesn’t know where to turn. He camps, but then is given the name of Arvi Kukkonen, a Finnish Quaker homesteader. Arvi welcomes Paul and rents him a cabin.
Marty gives up waiting for Erik and goes to Yosemite Valley with friends she has met at work. She enjoys the monumental landscape, camping out, the cooking fire and visiting the Ahwahnee Hotel, but feels a little lonely. She also enjoys a lavish retirement lunch laid out at the Palace Hotel for a woman who regaled Marty’s typing pool with stories of being a “holy terror” in her early years. Marty picks up Christopher.
Line finds that Marty and Erik want to move in together and have found an apartment out by Golden Gate park for all of them. Line is reluctant, but it has a small garden and is close to the arboretum. Spiritual teachers and seekers abound and Line enjoys the Sufis, but Christopher keeps her grounded. Line is wary of Erik, but she and Marty both enjoy their film-loving friends Jack and Nathan.
Paul wakes up in Fairbanks on a spring morning, making breakfast for himself and a resident fox. He hitches rides to school, talking politics. It is Friday, and after school he goes to the house of his friends. They decide to go to a small club parents have set up. Folk singers from Anchorage are playing. Paul is asked if he wants to do carpenter work for the summer at a resort hotel friends are building in the bush.
Friends, musicians and drug dealers collect around Erik and Marty. Line finds it is no place for a little kid. She calls Paul and asks if she can come to stay with him in Fairbanks. Paul picks her up at the airport, buys supplies and they go out into the bush where Paul is working as a carpenter. As they listen to the bush radio one night, a message comes for Line. Her husband Stephen has come to Fairbanks to find her.
Early in December, Marty goes Christmas shopping. She is missing Line, who has moved to Santa Cruz. With Erik, she goes on an impromptu drive into the snowy mountains, to Lake Tahoe. The atmosphere in Reno feels to her what hell would actually be like. She suspects Erik of dealing drugs, has done acid trips with him. After Christmas, they visit Line and Stephen and share intellectual passions.
Paul takes advantage of the offer of a trip to the Athabascan village of New Minto to see his friend Marcia. As a passenger on a snowmobile, they take an old sled road through the bush. A dogsled sprint race, and Easter vacation, are the occasion for a potlatch. Once home, Paul goes to the Sunday night sauna where people are discussing the environmental impact of the proposed oil pipeline through the state.
At the beach together, Line and Stephen find that Christy is still angry around his father. Line hopes it will change. She takes Christy with her to the Birth Center where women share their pregnancy experiences. Line is hugely pregnant. When she goes into labor she sends Christy away, but has the baby at home with a midwife and Stephen to help. When Christy comes home he is thrilled to hold the new baby.
Marty comes home from work one day to find that some of Erik’s things are gone. She calls him and he tells her to pack her things. He has rented them a new apartment. Marty is frightened, but within two hours she is packed and ready to leave. The new apartment is in North Beach. Everything is new. Marty, out beyond her boundaries, goes to her photography class, wondering what is right.
On a Saturday in October, Paul goes out early to a little lake he has made into an observation point. He spends his afternoon reading Bonhoeffer, a book of his letters from prison, given him by Arvi. Bonhoeffer’s thoughts reflect what Paul is working on. And in the evening, he goes out with Brian to play “the holy game of poker,” with men they admire. Bearded young carpenters and surveyors.
In Santa Cruz, Line stresses over her domestic worries, lack of money mostly. She counsels a young woman student who has just had a miscarriage. Stephen, while talking to his father in New York, reveals that the provost of his college is stepping down. The university is changing. But Christy is more folded into the family and the baby, Heather, is doing well. Line is optimistic about their family life.
Erik surprises Marty by suggesting they get married. Marty is happy, but she knows what she is getting into. They drive out to Iowa in May and enjoy a family wedding. Even Paul is there for the summer. On the way back they stop in Santa Fe to see the desert architecture, and in Palm Desert where Marty meets Erik’s sophisticated father and acid-tongued mother. She hopes someday to overcome their artificiality.
At the end of a summer in which Paul has helped Dad with a construction project at the lake, he finds himself rushing to finish shingling a roof. Ellie and her two girls are visiting, will head back to Italy soon. Mother leaves with Kristen and Hanna. Dad and Paul enclose the new building, stow equipment and drain the pipes before leaving. When Dad asks whether Paul still plans to go to the seminary, Paul says no.
Line becomes pregnant again and their apartment at the dorm begins to feel too small. Stephen’s father helps with a down payment and Line goes house hunting. In the spring, a month before the baby is to come, they move into a big house with a garden near an elementary school. Marty comes down to help. Though midwives are being arrested, Line manages to have this baby, Fern, born at home also.
From a classmate, Paul learns of a summer job on the Adventuress, sailing out of Port Ludlow, Washington. He applies and joins the crew when school is out. He falls in love with the two-masted schooner and becomes a sailor by the end of the summer. Paul is the backup engineer, gives amateur astronomy talks and plays the guitar for sing-alongs. He is beginning to notice his own loneliness, however.
The whole Cohen family goes out to Iowa for Christmas, Stephen, Line, Christy, Heather and six-month-old Fern. Mother puts on lovely meals and there are mounds of presents. The parsonage is no longer as scruffy as when Line grew up. She enjoys playing in the snow with her kids, and especially a talk with Mother when the others have gone out tobogganing. She sees the family through Stephen’s eyes.
Marty is thrilled when Erik suggests they go to Europe for a few weeks. At first they relax in Italy, where Erik sketches houses and antiquities. They go to Athens by ship. Then Erik suggests Marty stay there, while he goes on to Istanbul. She is shocked, spends the week he is gone sorting through her emotional attachment to her marriage, trying to become Stoic, philosophical. By the time Erik returns, she is cool.
When Paul returns to the Adventuress in the summer, he meets the French-Canadian Marie working in the galley. They quickly become aware of each other. Marie has a great voice, but a sad past. The intense emotion between them feels painful to Paul, until he takes her aside and they talk of it. After that Paul doesn’t care that the rest of the crew knows. He feels that he is no longer alone.
Marty rushes off to work in the morning, enjoying the habitual wakening of North Beach people. At work, she types up notes and inventory into a database programmed by her friend Jill. At lunch she meets Min-Yue at the Art Institute, having a picnic. After work, it is off to the ballet, where she and Lana have season tickets. Lana schools her, especially about a Twyla Tharp ballet to a Beach Boys song.
Paul and Marie, who has joined him in Fairbanks, visit friends who have been taking care of extra children. The pipeline is making everyone behave maniacally. They also ski out to visit the Kukkonens. Carol finds some greens for Marie and Arvi talks to Paul about ecology. Paul is still exploring large questions. Marie comes home from her job at a Greek restaurant and drags Paul out to see the auroras, and dance.
On July 4, 1976, everyone celebrates. At Line’s house there is a new baby, Ivy, one week old. And sister Kirsten, spending the summer to help Line. In the morning the household goes to watch a parade, except for Line. They have a barbecue. At night they climb the hill to see the fireworks, again leaving Line and the baby at home. When Christy disappears, Kristen and Stephen worry, but Line does not.
Line hears Fern screaming from the kitchen and Erik calling for an ambulance. Two-year-old Fern has pulled a cup of hot tea on herself. She is taken to a burn unit at Stanford. Poppa comes from New York to help that week, when Stephen and Line go to the hospital every day. When Fern gets to come home, it is to a noisy celebration of Purim, put on by Poppa. Line is grateful.
Marty cleans her apartment and heads out to a coffee shop, where she meets Ming-Yue. Ming-Yue is quitting her job, planning to work freelance, taking as her professional name, Meredith Chen. Marty loves spending time with her. She then joins Erik on a professional trip to Hawaii. She reads about surrealism while Erik has meetings. Later by themselves, they take acid on a lovely afternoon at the beach.
Marie leaves suddenly for home in Quebec. Paul is bereft. He has not had time to pin down a future with her and all of it is uncertain. That summer he works on the construction of a school near Tetlin. Oil is running through the new pipeline, but Paul wants to leave. Northern Minnesota calls him, but he wants to take Marie. When she finally returns, Paul and Marie seal their partnership with a song.
The drought in California lasted a long time. Line’s children are sandier and dirtier than usual. But in the fall the rains come. Line bakes cupcakes for Christy’s birthday as he lobbies for a BB gun, pressured by well-off friends. At night, when the storm knocks out the power, Line makes a fire and they sing songs and dance. They join a community Thanksgiving service in the woods.
Marty and Erik celebrate his passing of the architectural exams with an evening at Chez Panisse, a European-style restaurant in Berkeley. They talk about architectural history. That week Marty’s department goes out for drinks. Another night she goes to a small theatre a block from her North Beach apartment, where Spanish dancers and guitar players perform flamenco, making Marty’s heart ache with its beauty.
Poppa pays for Stephen and Line and their four kids to come to Brooklyn. The neighborhood is scary and Line feels claustrophobic, but they visit the Statue of Liberty, the library and park. Inside, the four-level townhouse is pleasant and refugees Poppa took in cook Indian food. When they get home, the apricots are ripening and Line bakes pies!
By July, Paul and Marie have moved back to Minnesota and are staying at the lake cabin. The two families from California arrive late one night as Mother waits nervously. Paul organizes a canoe trip out to the Bucket lakes with Hanna captaining one canoe. When a storm comes up, he hightails it home, but Hanna pulls up across the lake and lets the residents drive her and Marty home.
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