That Moment When ...

China Camp 2008

You all of a sudden realize that the kids have grown up! It’s pretty sudden. You’ve planned your life around them, and then all of a sudden, they turn 18 and have their own lives in front of them.

In our case, we had one son, Jesse. He lived with his mother two states away during the school year, so Don programmed the holidays and vacation periods when he was with us solidly. Don wanted to give Jesse a sense of what Don was already calling IRL, or what it was like “in real life.” In February, for Jesse’s birthday, we usually went skiing and snowshoeing up in Idaho. One spring break we went to Europe. In the summer, we camped on Angel Island. We went to Minnesota to stay on the lake or out to Merced, where Don grew up. We planned Thanksgiving cookouts and Christmas hunts, one of which ended up in Hawaii! Planning began at the beginning of the year, so as to get reservations and include others.

Then, all of a sudden, just before he graduated from high school, Jesse turned 18. From then on, Don thought he should make his own plans. We did at least one more epic camping trip to the top of Angel Island that summer, but Jesse began to be involved with friends and in college anticipation. Don turned back to his own career, which he felt needed stoking. And I turned my attention to writing and publishing.

I am an inveterate writer. There’s really no help for me. While I was still working full time, I wrote blog pieces about our family life and other things for Living in the Flatlands. The Flatlands project seemed to be over when Jesse turned 18 and everything changed. When I was able, I collected the pieces into a book with the same title. I also self-published two novels I had written years ago. And then I “retired,” and was able to start the work I had been hoping for many years, So Are You to My Thoughts.

We were still going to northern Minnesota each summer, to the cabin owned, in the end, by a partnership of my siblings. In my journal I write: “8.27.07. I sit in family, and it is never stronger than when I come here in August. Amidst all the stresses, the strengths Florence and John set up so long ago, the strong pull toward Minnesota and the place they managed, against all odds, to make, remains in place. There is a painting of them on Ann’s studio wall, done during Dad’s last days. Mom’s loom is against the wall. She is reading to Dad in the picture. He holds a cup of tea, an afghan around his weak shoulders.”

“8. 28.07. On the plane I make up the characters for So Are You to My Thoughts, at least the first book. Thinking about the sisters, brother, cousins and others I know. I can see all the tensions about how much one relates to the world. The tensions of whom you marry. I imagine my three main characters, Line, Margie and Paul, and how they hide the situation, keep it from the ‘little kids,’ and why. How the parents’ desires are thwarted, but also how they are fulfilled. That intense time between 1968 and 1972, which lingered long in everyone’s memory.”

By the next year, I had developed an outline for seven books. The first six have been finished. You can find them here. The last one is more than half finished. I thought at first I might vary the structure for each of the books, moving in on the points of view of other characters. But in the end, I have stuck with Line, Marty and Paul.

Line has her four kids early and they are grown by the end of my seven books, some of them with kids of their own. Marty, oddly, has no kids, but her second husband has four. She is thrilled that Doug’s family needs her and steps up into the role, though she is older than most women would be with such a family. Paul has no kids either, but his wife has a daughter who has five. They live close to the lake on which Paul finally settles, so he gets to be involved with them. All three of the Mikkelsons have the good health to enjoy their later lives, though Line has begun to wonder about her own. The arcs of each of their lives is different, though each of them has a chance to experience that moment when the kids don’t need them so much anymore. The family story goes on, however, rich in meaning.

Alkalize Your Body

I first understood the need to balance one's diet between acid and alkaline in about 2005. In researching it, I came upon The Wolfe Clinic, a Canadian website which promoted the ideas of Dr. Darrell Wolfe. By this time, Dr. Wolfe is no longer associated with it, but they still have on-line the three articles he wrote about the importance of our digestive systems to our over-all health. His premise was a revelation to me, a way of preventing the diseases which came up as one grew older, or at least holding them somewhat at bay.

Dr. Darrell Wolfe

In researching Dr. Wolfe now, I find he is in British Columbia and has his own website. He is, if anything, more adamant than ever that one can take responsibility for one’s own health: Joy is the most important component of radical health. People who focus on being sick are usually sick. Cancer is a frequency, a fungus. Acidosis in the body starts it. Alkalize your body to get rid of mold. Society will try to get you to buy anything they can. The “functional medicine” side of things is as bad as our medical systems, insisting that you buy all kinds of supplements. But Vitamin D from the sun is better than any supplement. Your food should be your medicine. Even more than his website, I find this interaction with the father of a young child with cancer, useful.

My Dad was an iconoclast. Upholding the traditions of the Lutheran church and small town America, he was only slightly facetious when he used to say of Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, “This is God’s country!” But he looked askance at power and its designs on him. He made up his mind about things himself, well aware that corporations, society may take you down a primrose path, insisting that you buy whatever will increase the GNP. He was a child of first-generation Norwegians in farming country, as well as of the Depression, a time when your own resources made all the difference. He believed in taking responsibility for himself and taught his kids to do the same. Though all about him were smoking, Dad believed that if he didn’t smoke, he could put himself through college. Not smoking helped do that, and seminary as well.

My father’s parents lived in southern Minnesota at the margins of the economy in a house they had built themselves. I knew them when they were quite a bit older, but still working a large garden, using it to feed themselves throughout the year. I especially remember my Grandmother’s pickles, the crabapple pickles seasoned with cloves which I adored. Though my Dad was felled by cancer at 63, his parents lived to be 89 and 86. I find that my Dad’s cousin, Ruth Mickelson (for whom I named the Mikkelsons of my series) was born in 1899 and died in 2001, at 101 years of age. She had taught kindergarten in Thief River Falls (the town of my birth) for almost fifty years.

As represented in my characters, many health ideas have come and gone during the years of my series. The Mikkelsons were victims of a Northern diet which relied on meat and potatoes, frozen vegetables except during the summer, lots of dairy and baked goods. But all of them make changes in this diet as they grow older. They resist processed foods and, in particular, the large quantities of sugar they were used to had to be reduced! During the first decade of the new millennium, it seemed to me doctors were finally going to admit the importance of an alkaline, anti-oxidant diet.

Line is the one most involved in health care her whole life, working as a nurse in community hospitals and finally as a hospice nurse. She sees bodies as a whole, and gives particular attention to a hands-on practice which allows the resonance of one person’s energy to be transferred to another. Marty knows that natural health welling up in the body is what all of nature sees as beauty. She is lucky enough to find tai chi, a movement-based meditation, which wakes up her sedentary life. Despite a healthy diet, Paul’s wife fades from an aggressive cancer. He learns that only if he takes care of himself can he take care of anyone else.

As we have all learned about journalism, in navigating health caveats and research, one must triangulate between the available knowledge. The evidence of one’s experience and one’s senses is essential. Information becomes wisdom only with a few grains of salt, one’s own common sense.

On Beyond Letters

Christmas, 2015

Our family members are good at living their lives, but not at keeping in touch! Letters are few and far between. We are also spread across the continental US and in Yorkshire, England. In the past, we were also not apt to call each other just to shoot the breeze, as we didn’t want to pay for long distance phone calls.

During the first ten years of the 21^st century, the World Wide Web bloomed with many ways to communicate simply and economically. Because I lived with Don Starnes, who is particularly tech savvy, I was often on the “cutting edge” of these new ways of communicating. (We joked that Don himself was on the “bleeding edge,” suffering because he often tried to do things with computers that were theoretically possible, but not quite available.)

In 2001 I put up an MSN community for the Kronlokken family. It was intended to replace a newsletter I had been editing called The Intercoastal Hobbit. The children of my siblings were the first to sign up. I wondered why others didn’t, but my brother reminded me that I was surrounded by high-speed DSL lines. Others weren’t! It did limp along for a few years, however.

By November 2002, Don made a space on his website and wrote the HTML code for us to begin a weblog, or blog. We called it “Living in the Flatlands,” because we wanted to write about our daily lives and some of the ideas we had about them. I did most of the writing, though Don edited each essay, trying to make them more universal. It was an exercise in learning how to write for other people, though I loved the freedom of not caring who read it, or when. When Jesse, Don’s son, graduated from high school and our lives changed, I stopped writing for the blog and published the articles as a book, which you can see here.

My nephew Peter Taylor, who lived with us during the early 2000’s, wrote down his experiences in a weblog he called “The Random Englishman,” thus keeping his family and friends in England posted on his exploits.

Google came up with its Blogger software in about the middle of the decade, which gave anyone the space and ability to post a blog. It came in handy for all of us when my sister Ruth and her husband Don Evans rebuilt the family cabin in Minnesota. They used a Blogspot to keep us posted on what was going on. The original cabin was bulldozed in 2006 and a fine new log home was built in its stead. In my journal for June 27, 2007 I wrote, “The rafters are going up on the cabin at Kabekona today. Every day I look at the new photographs Ruth and Don put up. The progress is dramatic; they are ahead of schedule. ‘We just love to go over and smell the wood!’ Ruth says.”

In May of 2008 I “succumbed” to Facebook. It was the easiest way to communicate with a friend in Hong Kong. I loved it at first, as more and more of my family signed on. It was thrilling when new family photos showed up in living color. Facebook still retains some of its ability to disseminate family news, but you do have to plow through a lot more ads and re-posts than at first.

About the middle of the decade, I began to call my sister Solveig in England using Skype. We set up a schedule for speaking each week correlating our time zones. Solveig hasn’t been able to travel much, and it has helped immeasurably to keep in touch with that part of the family. We even read books to each other on Skype! I used Skype for other phone calls, of course, enjoying the ability to see into someone’s life with a camera.

Don and Jesse got their first iPhones about 2008. In the summers, I often drove Jesse from place to place, so I got a little Korean pre-paid phone on which I learned to text (taught by Jesse) and keep in touch. At least ten years later, I still have this little phone, which has faithfully worked ever since. It can’t connect to the web, but it also doesn’t cost an arm and a leg every month!

Other amazing uses of the web began in those years, including wikipedia.org and youtube.com. It is now hard to imagine the world without these knowledge-bases. By 2008, I had published two of my books with iUniverse, and was outlining the characters for the series of books I called So Are You to My Thoughts. This blog details the background and progress of this series, which, at this writing is within sight of completion. I have just finished a first draft of Chapter 10, with fifteen chapters to go.

I’m grateful for the advances in inexpensive personal communication over the web in recent years. I believe the Kronlokkens are in better touch with each other. And I am very happy to be able to use Createspace to publish my family saga. Don is still out there, ahead of the pack, helping me at every stage. It would be nice if I could help him. But, “I can’t be helped,” he tells me.

Somewhat Sideways

Virginia Madsen and Paul Giametti, Sideways, 2004

From the year 2000 to 2010, I worked at Turrentine Brokerage, which assisted wineries in purchasing grapes from various vineyards and also sold bulk wine between wineries. From my perspective, it was a decade when California wine widened its horizons, becoming the drink of "the people" and not just the elite. Above and beyond the things I learned about wine (knowing very little before I started), the business was full of stories! The stakes were always high, and required larger than life characters, many of whom came from backgrounds of philosophy and literature!

Bill Turrentine, my boss, had inherited the fledgling company from his father. When I started there were only eight of us. By now, there are three times that many. I did database work, entering vineyard and sales data and working with statistics and copy editing our newsletter. But I also answered the phone. The people that created sales were important to us and I quickly learned their names!

In the early part of the decade, we spent a lot of time finding grapes for Dennis Hill, a perfectionist winemaker and the magic behind Blackstone Merlot. Derek and Courtney Benham had spent the previous ten years developing the brand. Derek was a genius at it! Blackstone was so popular it was thought that Millennials might start drinking wine rather than beer. In 2001 the Benhams sold the brand and Derek Benham began another venture, determined to bring the elusive Pinot Noir grape “to the people.” He had another great success with this project. Dennis went on to found his own venture, Cannonball Wines.

Bill Turrentine and Ron McManis of McManis Family Vineyards helped each other in many ways. The vineyards are near Ripon, a bit south of Lodi, with a California appellation. Bill found the great winemaker Jeff Runquist for the rapidly growing company. Jeff now has his own operation in the foothills near Plymouth where he carefully selects the vineyards to go into his mostly red varieties, Jeff Runquist Wines.

When you heard someone answer the phone and then break up in giggles, we all knew that Paul Moser of Greenfield Wine Company, was on the other end. Paul’s wines were deliberately European in style, more refined, and not as “big” as some. His wines got high ratings from Robert Parker, but the company was always under-capitalized and no longer exists. You might still find a Moser-Scharding wine, but don’t count on it. Gale Sysock of Delicato Vineyards was also good for a smile and some good grape deals. He is now Vice President at the large Delicato operation.

We didn’t have much to do with the Gallo organization, but in the early years of the decade, harvests were often huge. Grape growers called us begging us to find someone to purchase their grapes before they had to let them dry on the vines. Fred Franzia, of Bronco Wine Company would come in at the last possible minute and sweep up whatever vineyards were still available at the lowest possible prices. Fred, a nephew of Ernest Gallo, was behind Two Buck Chuck, or Charles Shaw Wines, which came to prominence during the decade, sold mostly at Trader Joe’s.

Later I worked with Chris Smith and Eric Aafedt who make the wonderful Bogle wines. Though I learned to appreciate many wines, most are beyond our price range. Bogle wines are not! We drink them often. Don, my husband, has a favorite brand too: Bonterra. Bonterra wines come out of the Fetzer family’s commitment to organic and sustainable vineyards. The great Paul Dolan began this tradition, before moving on to Mendocino Wine Company.

During the years I was at Turrentine, three movies came out which also boosted the idea of wine drinking “for the people.” In 2004, Sideways depicted an adventurous wine-drinking crawl through the Central Coast. Several of its characters talked eloquently about wine, and memorably put down Merlot in favor of Pinot Noir! (Hmmmm, could Derek Benham have had a hand in that?) The movie was said to have quite an impact on wine consumption.

In 2005 came Mondovino, a documentary which quizzed critics and tastemakers, trying to find out whether wine was losing its typicity to global market demands. And in 2008 came Bottle Shock, a dramatization of the so-called “judgment of Paris” in 1976 when, through a series of misadventures, Chateau Montelena’s Napa Valley wines were judged better than French wines in blind tastings.

The world wide web is full of stories about wine production. Stories move us. They drive the culture. These stories are just the tip of iceberg of those I heard at Turrentine Brokerage, where I was lucky enough to work with great people, taste many California wines and get paid for it.

California Camping

Until I married Don Starnes, I had not done much camping. My parents preferred our family cabin on a northern Minnesota lake. I had done some car camping in California, but nothing on the scale of what Don liked to do. He was intent on not letting his family live a ‘second hand life,’ and programmed the summers during which Jesse, his son, was with us with serious camping adventures. It wasn’t about seeing the country. We returned to the same two or three campsites again and again. It was about setting up an outdoor home and living outside of rectangles, under the sun, the moon and the stars as often as possible.

China Camp

At first we used the walk-in campground at China Camp, not far from our house, as our base. We would set up tents, hammock, bring plenty of food and enjoy the outdoor showers. This camp was in a laurel forest, with its lovely, utterly benign canopies high above. Each of the sites had a picnic table and a food locker (no real security from raccoons, however) with an iron fire ring in which to make fires. Over the years we hosted huge picnics here, particularly at Thanksgiving, fire-cooking, spit-roasting and grilling all manner of foods and often making paella on the ground.

China Camp was close enough so that Peter, my nephew, and I could come home from work, get on our bikes and ride out to camp. I especially loved riding into town at six in the morning, watching deer and jack rabbits jump ahead of me in the early morning light on my way in to work.

One day in July when we were deeply involved in Alexander Dumas’ Three Musketeer series, I wrote this: “Don and Jesse are playing chess, having drawn a board on the manila envelope which holds the pages from The Man in the Iron Mask. Jesse, playing black, is a French king and Don, playing white, is Elizabeth and Sir Walter Raleigh. This morning, during our reading, the old Duchesse de Chevreuse discussed the fate of M. Fouquet in a carriage with M. Colbert, using chess play terms. It is easy to see that chess was once very much alive. Jesse names his pieces D’Artagnan, Aramis, Porthos and Athos. Don has Buckingham. “If I was Buckingham, I’d have a really cool palace,” he says.

“The important thing is where we are playing chess, outdoors at China Camp. It’s warm, but rather breezy, so I stay in the sun. My hair is wet. I am trying to dry it. The sun has come to the hammock, where I am lazily writing. I face the hillside which climbs above the dry creekbed, away from our camp. A wild turkey meanders down the slope, scratching in the dry laurel leaves. I see someone above on the hillside, transporting his light tent on his shoulders, the yellow silk billowing in the wind. The laurels are green and whispering to each other, their thin trunks tall and graceful, the top branches swaying dangerously on thin stalks. The most delicious light filters down into the campsite at all times of the day.”

When we had gotten our camping chops down, Don took it all up a notch and we began backpacking out to Angel Island, a mountain island in San Francisco Bay. It required getting up early the first day reservations were allowed at the beginning of the year! It also required taking the ferry or hiring a boat to get us and our packs out to the island. We usually took camping spots on the east side of the island, taking the switchback trails cut into the slopes. Our packs held the tents, sleeping bags, dishes and camping stoves we needed (no open fires were allowed), but also lots of food! They were heavy. “No retreat, no surrender,” said Don.

Having made the effort, however, the campsites were amazing. I can’t help quote from notes from that same July: “After breakfast I read Don and Jesse a bit from Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which brought on a spate of haiku. I doubt these will be the last. This is such an incredibly lovely place and I begged that we just stay here today, as we only have one full day to watch the sun rise and set, and then the huge, almost full moon as it rises. The view of the bay is incomparable. The sun is quite hot in the morning at breakfast, but we retreat to the pines and drink our tea and read a bit more of The Man in the Iron Mask.

Angel Island

“By the time we have a late lunch, the shade of the pines covers the picnic table, set on the hillside beside an exquisite dead tree, its twisted branches perfect for hanging our towels and our water. At lunch Jesse crushes mint in the water and Don cuts up basil to eat with cheese and tomato. We soak our bread in olive oil and have a piece of grilled eel, which Jesse picked out. ‘This is what life is really all about,’ says Don.

“In the evening the shadows are long, and the views of the sky and water reflecting each other, turning opalescent, again take our breath away. Later I come down from the road, where there is a water faucet, watching Jesse and Don bathed in moonlight at the table. The string of jeweled lights on the far side of the bay glitters. We read in the moonlight beside Jesse’s tent which is pitched beside the dead tree. We read with the aid of a flashlight, but we can walk about without one. ”

Would anyone believe these ecstatic days if I put them in fiction? I did put quite a lot of our camping adventures in this book: Living in the Flatlands.

So Are You to My Thoughts As Food to Life

Shakespeare's Sonnet 75

In the late 1990’s, I took a calligraphy class in which the teacher suggested we use Shakespeare’s Sonnet 75 as a final project. In my favorite, quite poor Uncial, I lettered the sonnet onto a thick piece of white paper, posting it on the wall when I was done. And there it was, the title for the series of books I was beginning to think about. I had already met the person who was to my own thoughts as food to life. I wrote that I wanted to “plan some big work, amorphous, capacious, which is full of my particular conundrum. To be finished only in twenty or so years, when I shall no longer worry what the world thinks.”

It is now twenty years later, and I’ve begun to outline the last book in the series, entitled So Are You to My Thoughts. It makes me extremely happy to have gotten this far. The penultimate book, A Moon Every Night, is written, waiting for its last edits, and I’ve gone ahead with planning the last.

The books are full of characters, but they tell the stories of three protagonists, Line, Marty and Paul Mikkelson. I’m interested in how the arcs of these three stories play out as over against each other. It isn’t exactly planned. It is just how things happen. One person may be in a dynamic situation which energizes and grows them, while another is in a quieter part of their life.

Line’s story is intense at the beginning, when she and her husband are impacted by the violent student protests of the late 1960’s while quickly having four kids. She is able to do much good as she gains experience working across many spectrums of health care. Later in life things settle for Line, and keeping track of her kids, who make the most of their excellent educations and resources, occupies her.

The reverse is true for Marty, who doesn’t blossom until later. Though she has good jobs and a lively intellectual life in San Francisco, she has married an emotionally deprived man, who never really recovers. Only in the last books do we see the full flowering of her abilities and her taste for beauty, when she finds a partner who loves being a father to his four kids and needs her to complete his family.

Paul’s journey is steady. He successfully settles in wilderness places he wants to study. His achievements turn to ashes in his hands, however. His beloved wife does not live long and he finds himself back where he perhaps wanted to be in the first place: resident at Lake Michigami, the lakeside home built by Mother and Dad, with the long-term help of family and their hard work. He is left with his own task of getting to the bottom of things, his own search for truth.

In all of them, the Mikkelson values for balance and a sort of human ecology can be seen. Excellence often comes at a cost, skewing everything around it and often requiring many people and resources to shore it up while one person gets the glory. Though each of the Mikkelsons is unique and takes their own path (just off the mainstream!), their aims are often modest. In their family culture, Dad’s insistence on right relationship, to God and to all of his creatures as well as each other, is of the highest importance.

I try to look at these stories, which are of course those of me and my family, though fictional, from the outside. They are a saga, an evolving tale of what was possible in particular cultures in the second half of the 20^th century in the United States. It is a time when technology, particularly communications, accelerated. The Mikkelsons grew up in North Dakota, with 19^th century technology and only each other to entertain themselves, however. They have grown rich and fertile inner lives with which to combat Baudrillard’s “desert of the real,” which makes up life in the 21^st century.

I hope that the books are anthropology, as well as story. E.O. Wilson’s great salvo on socio-biology, On Human Nature posits that “soft core” altruism, as opposed to “hard core,” is the key to human society. “The genius of human society is the ease with which alliances are formed, broken and reconstituted. There is in us a flawed capacity for a social contract, combined with a perpetually renewing, optimistic cynicism with which rational people can accomplish a great deal. Human behavior is the technique by which human genetic material is kept intact. Morality has no other demonstrable ultimate function.” The Mikkelsons, keeping themselves simple and their minds open, are the proverbial “salt of the earth.”

The idea that I would have to give up worrying what the world might think about the project was prophetic. I publish the books myself under the imprint Lightly Held Books. But I have had some wonderful comments. On Amazon.com, a “Concerned Citi-zen” writes: “With her photographer's eye, poet's mind and compassionate disposition, Kronlokken steps into and guides us, book after book, through the intimate intricacies of her character's lives and times. Weaving a tale often more akin to a symphony than a story, her novels are rich with a zen-like sensitivity that leaves one quietly fulfilled, yet wanting more. Highly recommended.”