Travels, Adventures, Friends, Big Days, and Tiny Moments with Pat Arnow
We moved into our sweet little shotgun cottage not far from the Mississippi and Audobon Park and Magazine St.
Right away we visited the Tree of Life–the live oak planted in 1740 and now covered in Spanish moss and resurrection ferns. We found it bike riding around last year in Audobon Park.
We’ve had an oyster po’ boy, a cup of gumbo, a root beer snowball from Sno-LA.
I’m going backwards–before we headed west to Alabama, we stopped outside of Savannah, Georgia, at Tybee Island. It looked like an appealing off-season spot to get an inexpensive room with an ocean view to watch a couple of rainy days go by.
It was. Under cloudy skies, we watched the MLK parade.
Tybee has an endearing and proud shabbiness, though there are many neat little cottages and modestly sized hotels and apartments.
We had a full moon while we were there, and the clouds parted long enough for us to see it and have our moon kiss. (Sorry, it’s the sappy thing we do.)
I ate crab legs at the Stingray with lessons from the waitress who really put some body English into the instructions. It was inspirational, and I cleaned the hell out of the shells. Crack, wiggle, pick.
They are replenishing their beach with dredging. Opinions on beach dredging?
The gulls liked it, flocking all around the fountain of sandy water being dredged from the distant sea.
Here is one of the life-size sculptures by Dana King of three women, a tribute to those who sustained the momentous Montgomery bus boycott.
We stopped in Montgomery specifically to see the memorial. We found a small, Southern city with a fabulous civil rights history proudly on display but also chilling–for instance, a historical marker for the place where slaves were warehoused, literally, between slave auctions.
Here’s a link to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice website.
Yes, it is worth a trip to Montgomery. Bonus for a visit: fried catfish with cheese grits at Central Restaurant downtown. Steve’s bonus: the local AA baseball team is called the Biscuits, and he got a hat.
The long way to New Orleans from New York. First night, Chincoteague Island in Virginia, just over five hours from New York.
Refuge Inn, great place to stay, right by causeway to the island. Bill’s Prime on Main Street, great place to eat.
I drew a comic memoir called “A Death in Chicago” about my father’s final year. It’s a personal story but also shows a time of momentous change in the way we think about death. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who started that change with her book, On Death and Dying, appears in the story, as she did in our lives.
This fall, “The Intima,” an online journal of narrative medicine, published the comic.
Here is the link to the memoir: “A Death in Chicago”
“The Intima” also published a lovely essay by Jonathan Garfinkel about “A Death in Chicago.”
He wrote, “Pat Arnow’s touching account of the death of her father illustrates the power of graphic memoir, showcasing both her talent as illustrator and writer. There is something simple and intimate in the story she tells, as Arnow lets us into the private moment between father and daughter, father and family, and we witness his journey toward death from cancer. The effect is incredibly moving.”
Here’s the link to Jonathan Garfinkel’s review: On Compassionate Storytelling in Graphic Memoir: Pat Arnow’s “A Death in Chicago, 1972: Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and My Family” By Jonathan Garfinkel
And here’s a link to Jonathan Garfinkel’s own excellent piece in “The Intima,” “Diabetes Diary.”
The blog from “The Intima” included an essay I wrote about another “Intima” story by Karen Dukess. It’s about her father’s dying and how different attitudes are now–and how some things never change in the process of death and dying.
“Karen Dukess writes…as if those choices were an everyday thing,” I said. “Well they are—now.”
“In this lovely memoir of a beloved father, it is striking to me how things have changed from when my dad faced terminal cancer in the early 1970s. Then the rule was maximum intervention no matter what the prognosis. No one would quibble with doctors. People died in hospitals.”
Here is the link to my essay: “Dads, Daughters, Death“
“The Intima” is devoted to the use of storytelling to bring compassion and better communications between caregivers and patients. People involved in the field include those who provide health care, who need it, and families and friends. It’s a growing field–you can get a master’s degree in narrative medicine! You can also study my favorite subspecialty, Graphic Medicine–or comics that have to do with health and illness. The field feels especially suited to my comics, because I tend to draw and write about death.
Here’s a link to this interesting journal: The Intima
A couple of wonderful presidents were on our route as we traveled through Georgia dodging the frozen north in January.
We stopped at Jimmy Carter’s tiny hometown, Plains, Georgia, with its museum, home place, and current home.
Near the state park we visited Warm Springs where Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a modest home built. When he became president, it was called the Little White House and is now a state historic site. We stood by the chair where the president suffered a stroke and by his single bed in his small bedroom where he died a few hours later, April 11, 1945.
We spent four days at FD Roosevelt State Park in a cabin built by the CCC–the Civilian Conservation Corps–in the 1930s. It was a National Recovery Act program invented by Roosevelt after he was elected during the nation’s worst economic depression. The program employed an army of out-of-work young men to build wonderful stone structures on public lands throughout our nation. Many of the buildings, picnic shelters, stone-lined paths, and roads are still striking features across the country today.
We have seen the CCC’s handiwork from the Blue Ridge Parkway to Saguaro National Park to Watoga State Park in West Virginia. The program was a model of public works projects.
My friend and camping companion Jennie captured my happiness on the loveliest hike on our trip to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. In Battery Provincial Park on Cape Breton Island, the trail was a grassy path through wildflowers that grew above our heads with the dark elegant fir trees and the blue sea beyond. I hiked barefoot!
The photo below with the cliffside highway and rocky beach cove captures the essence to me of the Cabot Trail that skirts Cape Breton Island.
On the Bay of Fundy with the highest tides in the world, we stayed at Five Islands Provincial Park in Nova Scotia and Fundy National Park in New Brunswick. In both places we spent hours climbing around rocks and admiring the fast approaching and receding waters, how quickly the landscape changed, how we could walk out onto mudflats that had been covered with water that would have been over our heads a little while ago. Here are photos of the low and high tides at Five Islands:
Here are my fellow explorers, Jennie and Lilac. At the picnic table, Jennie is breaking down one of the lobsters we ate along the Cabot Trail. We were at the Hideaway campground at the top of Cape Breton Island.
I took many more photos and posted them as an album on flickr. Click on the link below to take a look:
What’s a desperate woman to do when there’s no place to pee for miles? Pull off onto a remote country road and turn onto a grassy gravel path looking for a deserted spot.
And there it was, the reward for too much coffee: A rumpled sign for a pet cemetery. 
Just like a pet dog, I took care of my business in the grass by a tree. Then I followed the trail over a grassy field past overgrown trees laden with green apples to a large shady corral freshly mowed. 
There were touching and funny little headstones: Sheri, “Our Little Care Bear,” Molly, “Daddy’s Precious Little Teddy Bear,” Eleanor, “a Purrfect Companion,” Tinker, “Sassy Cat.”
Then there was Butchy, Valley Bulldog, 1997-2008 “Like Losing the Perfect Son.” Ouch for their human children.
The little graves were marked with familiar pet names: Duke, Sheba, Patches, Brandy, Rascal, Mittens (Bless Me Kitty), Tattoo, Puddy, Wiley, and two Busters.
Queenie had a big headstone decorated with with carved dog bones, sea-themed sculptures and plushy toys, well chewed. 
I took a close up of her bear (at right) with legs torn off and stuffing spilling out, but it’s too gruesome to publish.
Here’s one of my favorites: 
Floppy lived one year but Melissa loved that hare, and her parents (I’m guessing) helped her through her grief with this memorial.
Well, I know that doesn’t tell you much about this trip to Nova Scotia except for that one little charming and eerie place outside of Lunenberg.
I have been having a fine time meandering from Yarmouth to Halifax along green-lined roads, admiring the cute towns with both pretty and working waterfronts.
The food has been excellent: a seafood chowder, Montreal meat sandwich (corned beef, really), poutine—a combination of fries, gravy and cheese curds that sounds like a mess but tastes divine. I want to eat it every day while I’m here.
I could be telling a lot of anecdotes—about the lacy B&Bs I stayed in, the helpful bus driver in Halifax who answered my inquiry by telling me to hop on so he could take me to a better transfer point, the bike rider who insisted on giving me a ferry ticket in Dartmouth (across from Halifax–the Brooklyn of Nova Scotia) because it was my first day.
This trip is delightful and there is a lot to share.
But I really wanted to show you the pet headstones.
In anticipation of a road trip with lots of camping in Nova Scotia, I’ve been reading The Tent Dwellers, a droll 1906 travelogue about a fishing trip to Nova Scotia. It rains most of the time on his trip, which inspires me to pack two raincoats, waterproof pants, and two tarps.
Here’s a good passage about when the author gets poison Ivy on his face:
Many times a day I bathed my face in the pure waters of the lake and then with the spirits—rye or Scotch, as happened to be handy…And I wish to add here in all seriousness that whatever may be your scruples against the use of liquors, don’t go into the woods without whisky…
Alcohol, of course, is good for poison ivy, but whisky is better. Maybe it is because of the drugs that wicked men are said to put into it. Besides, whisky has other uses. The guides told us of one perfectly rigid person who, when he had discovered that whisky was being included in his camp supplies, had become properly incensed, and commanded that it be left at home. The guides had pleaded that he need not drink any of it, that they would attend to that part of what seemed to them a necessary camp duty, but he was petrified in his morals, and the whisky remained behind.
Well, they struck a chilly snap, and it rained. It was none of your little summer landscape rains, either. It was a deadly cold, driving, drenching saturation. Men who had built their houses on the sand, and had no whisky, were in a bad fix. The waves rose and the tents blew down, and the rigid, fossilized person had to be carried across an overflowed place on the back of a guide, lifting up his voice meanwhile in an effort to convince the Almighty that it was a mistake to let it rain at this particular time, and calling for whisky at every step.
It is well to carry one’s morals into the woods, but if I had to leave either behind, I should take the whisky. — Albert Bigelow Paine
Yes, I am bringing whiskey. I’ll tell you later if any morals survive.
I hope to post pictures and stories from the trip. Next week, I’ll be taking the ferry from Portland, Maine, to Yarmouth, exploring the Southwestern coast, and staying in Dartmouth, which I read is the Brooklyn of Halifax.
Then I’ll meet with my camping friend Jennie and her miniature Schnauzer Lilac, and their little truck. We’ll camp all around Cape Breton Island.
In New Brunswick, we will stay in Fundy National Park where we’ll see the 50-foot tides.
If you know of places I should see, please do tell.
Along a beautiful, disheveled beach are the remains of a bankrupted hotel. This is on Santa Martha’s Bay, about halfway up the island, far from the cruise terminals of Willemstad. Abandoned about nine years ago, all the windows, doors, and fixtures have been removed, and the place is crumbling. These ruins below our rental house added a spooky magic to a charming trip with friends Ken and Clarence.
Besides the glorious ruins, the beautiful beaches and views called.
And fabulous friends
Close Up and Far away 