Wonderstruck (2025)

because the universe wants us to be surprised, to be in awe of what comes next… eschewing the snarky, the witty, and the partisan to celebrate all the wonders I encounter.

12/02/2025

I should already have been in Peru.

During a recent ill-fated trip abroad, our little party of three sat stranded in Tom Bradley Terminal at LAX. The trip itself certainly felt terminal at that point. “What is the point of all this?” Misuk asked. “Should we just cancel the trip and go home?”

The previous day had certainly started out well enough. We had risen on schedule at 5 AM and made our final arrangements for departure. Shortly after 6 AM, we left Twin Lakes a little ahead of schedule to pick up Youngme Lehman on our way out of Methow Valley. She was ready and waiting for us outside her garage off East County Road.

The trip from Twisp to SeaTac was smooth and uneventful. We checked in early for our appointed time at the WallyPark garage, found what appeared to be the last open spot in the building, and caught the next shuttle bus to the terminal. We arrived for our pre-booked TSA appointment almost exactly on schedule — and, as the load was light at Checkpoint 2, we were through security by noon for our 1:30 PM flight to LAX.

We had deliberately scheduled a long layover at LAX prior to departure on our connecting flight for Lima. It was a good plan. The route from our AlaskaAir arrival gate to Tom Bradley — the international departures terminal — was long. Very long. Four or five connecting tunnels under the vast LAX complex.

And then, as it turned out, our departure gate was literally at the very farthest possible point at TB. By the time we scouted it out, we were all too ready to backtrack to the food court for a dinner and rest before returning to the departure gate for our 8:45 PM flight.

Right up until boarding time, the day had gone like clockwork… and then the wheels fell off.

Shortly after the schedule boarding time, the podium announced a flight delay due to mechanical issues. The new departure time would be 11 PM.

When Misuk started texting our hosts in Lima to let them know we would be late, I advised holding off on the text for a while. Intuition told that this would not be the final announcement from the podium.

Sadly, I was correct. Over the next five hours, a non-comedy of errors ensued at TB’s gate 136. Twice the gate crew attempted to quell the restless natives of our flight with bribes of meal vouchers… as if anyone but Hobbits can use bonus dinners after midnight, and as if the food court establishments were staying open just for our little disaster.

Once the actual flight crew showed up to board the plane, even the lone competent LATAM Air staffer — apparently the LAX manager for LATAM — disappeared, thinking that most of the damage had been done. But that was just wishful thinking. Over and over again Misuk and I would slowly filter to the front of the line at the podium to seek some kind of insight into the status of the flight.

At one point I pointedly asked, “Is this flight headed for cancellation?”

“Oh, no,” the gate agent replied. “We’re definitely flying tonight.” She checked her watch. “Today.”

I did not get warm fuzzies.

Finally my patience wore thin. Only minutes after I had left the podium I returned once more during a lull in activity — many passengers having gone a second time in search of a bonus meal — and decided to press the point about a serious lack of information throughout the ordeal. For the last four hours, most of the information we had all gleaned about the status of the flight had come from other passengers rather than from official announcements from the podium, broadcast in full in Spanish and in much-abbreviated form in English.

Many of the passengers had started to get to know each other quite well — like the two teenaged girls flying unaccompanied to Lima, and who, though never having met previously, were now fast friends; like the two young gentlemen from the Yukon, one of whose laptops had been hacked with a virus while connected to the LAX free WiFi, and who now swore he’d never travel again once he got back to the Yukon; like Betty from Chilliwack, who was making her first solo trip of her life to join a Macchu Picchu tour group, but was now feeling like the trip was just another episode in a life on meltdown; or like the numerous other Senior couples who were attempting to navigate the whole episode with something like good humor while gleaning bits of information, wishful thinking, and outright falsehood from fellow underinformed passengers like us.

“You last made an announcement 45 minutes ago,” I pointed out to the trio of gate agents in front of me, “telling us that you expected to start boarding in 10 minutes.

“You haven’t announced anything since. Passengers have lost their confidence in you. I’d like to speak to your boss, whom we haven’t seen since the flight crew arrived.”

As if like magic, the very LATAM manager of whom I spoke appeared from down the concourse, and a bustle arrived with him. The gate crew abruptly abandoned me for a quick confab with the manager. While they were gone, I looked at the paperwork left in plain sight on the counter. At the bottom of the sheet: “MAINTENANCE: Bird Strike.”

Almost immediately, the gate trio returned and started flipping frantically through a binder of boilerplate announcements, all in red print and ALL CAPS. This was not a good sign.

Shortly, they settled on a Spanish-language script, pulling it and its sheet protector from the blue three-ring binder — how appropriate for this little circus — but seemimg unable to locate the companion English-language script. Once the lead agent started reading from the Spanish script over the PA, I understood enough to guess what was happening.

The gentleman next to me held a Brazilian passport. I turned to speak to him.

“I imagine that you speak English and Spanish as well as Portuguese.”

He nodded, and confirmed that the announcement made formal what I had suspected would happen all along. Our flight was cancelled, and we would all have to await seat assignments on an alternate flight later in the day.

In the mean time, the bustle accompanying the LATAM manager onto the concourse turned out to be the distribution of paperwork, a task which would have to be accomplished for the varying classes of passengers: hotel vouchers and instruction sheets, to be distributed by this already organizationally-challenged gate crew, in order to funnel 360 or so passengers out of Tom Bradley and into neighboring hotels for the next dozen hours or so.

That I happened to be standing at the counter when all of this came down, and as a result was first in line for the pitiful dole saved us a couple of wee hours for a mid-morning nap, was exceedingly fortuitous.

But here was the thing: Being at the counter at just the right time was not entirely random. If Misuk hadn’t prodded me to be more proactive in seeking out up-to-date info, I wouldn’t have been up there six times, much less right when it counted.

If you aren’t engaged with the process, you won’t be at the counter at all, and certainly never at the most propitious time.

The retreat from Gate 136 through a shuttered Tom Bradley, traversing customs backward toward baggage claim carousel 31, and then onto hotel shuttles at 3 AM was disastrous. LATAM had no agents on hand to guide us through all this. At one point we ended up in an outdoor maintenace-worker smoking lounge because the normal route to baggage claim had been barricaded for after-hours restrictions. Some very kind literally blue-collared worked guided our small pioneering party to customs. Along the way, it was up to us to inform various security personnel that a very slow procession of 300 others would be following us.

We finally settled into our hotel around 3:30 AM. The hotel staff courteously extended checkout time to noon, which afforded us a little sleep before we returned to LAX to begin the departure ordeal anew.

After we cleared security yet again, we settled into comfy furniture near the terminals high-end retailers while we waited for boarding. As our fellow LATAM flight alumni filtered past, we caught up with one another. The two teenaged girls sat near us, chatting happily.

When we rose and headed to the gate, we passed a little knot of fellow information hawks at the food court. “Did you get the email?” one called out. “Departure is delayed!”

“No…” I faltered. I checked email. Yup. There it was. The announcement had just come in.

Rather than return to the roost we had just left, Youngme, Misuk, and I wandered on to the lounge benches we had occupied for hours the night previously.

After a brief silence, Misuk spoke out in frustration. “What is the point of all this?” Misuk asked. “What are we supposed to learn? Should we just cancel the trip and go home?”

I knew Misuk was asking a Big Question — trying to figure where God was moving in all of this, not just trying to decipher an alternate itinerary.

She had been hinting at this question throughout the previous 12 hours. And so I had already been pondering that very issue. But I was silent when she explicitly voiced the question. I didn’t have an answer. Go big or go home? I had no clue.

But the theologically-correct answer came readily to hand. In Kingdom values, answers are very often found in the still, small voice, rather than in the whirlwhine or the earthquack.

“Well,” I slowly began, “I can say this much.

“There are around 350 of us whose very busy lives have been interrupted. None of us, right now, are where we expected to be at this time on this day. Instead, we have all been cast in with one another with a whole lot of extra time on our hands. And we have been kind with one another. We have helped one another. We have entered into the lives of strangers. And, I expect, one or more of us have spoken words to a fellow traveler that have made some kind of impact — an impact we probably have no idea of, perhaps even an impact that will only be manifest months or years down the line.”

Youngme and Misuk immediately turned to one another and said, “Betty.”

The solo traveler from Chilliwack had, at one point, settled in next to Youngme for a long chat while I was engaged at the podium.

“She said like she felt like her life was falling apart,” Youngme explained. “We need to find her.”

And off we went to the gate in search of Betty. And found her. And spent the remainder of the time at Gate 135, Tom Bradley Terminal, keeping her company and learning a little bit more about her life.

This, friends, is what we are here for. Always. The still, small voice that God speaks to us, through one another in times of trial.

We need to be engaged. We need to be checking in at the podium while we wait for “what’s next.”

And while we wait, look out for one another.

“To the extent that you did it for one of the least of these, my children, you have done it for me.”

Previously published at Medium. Reprinted with permission.

23/10/2024

"The wind puffed out. The leaves hung silently again on stiff branches. There was another burst of song, and then suddenly, hopping and dancing along the path, there appeared above the reeds an old battered hat with a tall crown and a long blue feather stuck in the band. With another hop and a bound there came into view a man, or so it seemed. At any rate he was too large and heavy for a Hobbit, if not quite tall enough for one of the Big People, though he made noise enough for one, slumping along with great yellow boots on his thick legs, and charging through grass and rushes like a cow going down to drink. He had a blue coat and a long brown beard; his eyes were blue and bright, and his face was red as a ripe apple but creased into a hundred wrinkles of laughter."

No, I did not write that. The words are Tolkien’s description of Frodo and Sam’s first encounter with Tom Bombadil in The Lord of the Rings.

Who (or what) is Tom Bombadil? That’s not the subject of this essay, but in short he’s an otherwordly creature who is neither overly concerned with or controlled by the events and conditions of the physical world. He simply occupies it. Once you encounter Tom Bombadil, you know you’ve been in the presence of something extraordinary — something the likes of which you shall not likely encounter again.

On Friday, September 13, I met Kate and Cary Therriault at the Lone Fir Campground for a guided tour of the historic Early Winters Trail. Earlier in the summer, Kate had placed the winning bid for the tour at the Public School Funding Alliance silent auction fundraiser hosted by Arrowleaf Bistro. After several false starts, Kate and I finally managed to coordinate our schedules so I could make good on the winning bid. Kate and Cary brought Jane Gilbertsen along for the hike.

At one time, the Early Winters Trail followed Early Winters Creek from what is now Freestone Inn up and over Washington Pass and down to Rainy Pass. The trail was essentially built and maintained by Jack Wilson for his personal use as a trapper, to ferry backcountry clients via pack train, and to serve as access for his contracts to construct trail for the Cascade Crest and Pacific Crest trails.

Once Wilson’s campaign to use that essential route for construction of the North Cascades Highway came to fruition, the trail fell into disuse. Miles of the trail disappeared under SR 20’s asphalt, and the trail’s original purpose simply ceased to be. By the 1990s, only a couple of trail sections were still maintained by the USFS — one piece accessed from Klipchuck Campground, and the other at Lone Fir.

The Lone Fir section was turned into a loop trail, with the access link between the campground and the bottom of the loop paved and lined with interpretive signage designed by Laura Bitzes Thomas during her time with the USFS. Two log bridges were put across Early Winters, and numerous smaller bridges and boardwalks were constructed to span flooding spring tributaries and troublesome marshes.

A years-long closure of Lone Fir, however, due to a pine bark beetle infestation, led to neglect of the loop trail. Many of the boardwalks and bridges fell into disrepair. At the present time, two of the major bridges have been entirely dismantled and removed by the USFS, and while the trail is not officially closed it is certainly not accessible in the way that it was designed. 200 yards from the trailhead, the paved path tumbles into a 50-foot spring-runoff chasm.

So the trail is less-frequented now than it usually is. Already a well-kept secret featuring an old-growth forest full of multi-season wildflowers and fungi, it’s the last place you would expect to simply bump into an acquaintance.

Though you wouldn’t be surprised to bump into Tom Bombadil. It’s that kind of place.

During the outward leg of our trail tour, in conversation with Kate, Jane mentioned having bumped into local legend and naturalist Dana Visalli on a trail up at Harts Pass. I wasn’t part of that conversation, so I waited until we were straddling Early Winters Creek on the loop trail’s upper bridge to follow up on Jane’s mention of Dana.

I was delighted to learn that Kate and Cary were already familiar with the Methow Valley Authors Library at Casia Lodge, and that they had already visited. I shared with Jane that the Library holds a complete collection of Dana’s Methow Naturalist, a quarterly journal which includes the writing of dozens of local outdoors enthusiasts.

We all lamented that Dana intends to sunset the publication in the not-too-distant future.

On our return to our cars, we stopped to chat at the junction of the loop trail with the paved interpretive trail, and I took a couple group photos.

As we were preparing to depart, the wind puffed out. And then suddenly, hopping and dancing along the path, there came into view a man, or so it seemed. At any rate he was too large and heavy for a Hobbit, if not quite tall enough for one of the Big People, though he made noise enough for one, clumping along with great brown boots on his thick, bare legs, and charging down the path like a cow elk going down to drink. He wore a thin, well-worn t-shirt and drab shorts; his eyes were blue and bright, and his grizzled face was red as a ripe apple but creased into a hundred wrinkles of laughter.

It was not Tom Bombadil… but it was Dana Visalli.

“It’s as if we conjured him by speaking his name!” whispered Kate.

Jane and Dana, of course, knew each other — and Jane introduced Cary and Kate. Dana explained that he was conducting his annual survey of valley fungi, and we offered that he would certainly find plenty of samples once he left the asphalt and entered the loop trail.

“Wonderful!” he exclaimed. “I’ve never been on this trail before.”

Astounding. How could it possibly be that Dana Visalli, of all people, had never been on the Lone Fir leg of the Early Winters Trail? A well-kept secret indeed!

And how strange and fitting that the first local person I should encounter on the Early Winters Trail — over five years, dozens of visits, and hundreds of hours — should be Dana Visalli, on his first visit to the trail!

It might as well have been Tom Bombadil.

Wonderstruck.

Originally published at Medium. Reprinted by permission.

17/08/2024

My mother Valerie used to have interests.

They were noticeable, and definite. They occupied her thoughts and hours. She pursued them with vigor, often for years at a time.

She is 87 years old now. After several years of medical complications, a heart attack and three stents, and a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease, she has at last made a move this year into a retirement complex with managed care and memory care wings. Right now, she still lives independently with my father — but if you met her you’d never know that she ever had significant interests outside her marriage of nearly 69 years. Aside from eating meals, the only things she does with any regularity is watch Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, and episodes of SVU.

As a child, I would never have guessed that my mother would settle into a TV recliner for several hours a day at the end of her life. If anything, I would have imagined her falling asleep on a sofa with a book spread over her chest — or face, depending on how suddenly she would have nodded off.

My mother was an even more voracious reader than I have ever been — a good model for a young boy, and eventual writer. She would settle into a hefty historical novel for hours at a time, often kept company by the family cat, Frisky. Authors on her bookshelf which I can remember without trying include Anya Seaton, Norah Lofts, Susan Howatch, and Jean Plaidy. I believe she also read the entire Sharpe series, which Wikipedia tells me was created by Bernard Cornwell.

Once in a while I would pick up something my mom would be reading and give it a go. Some of them were quite good. (I was more interested in my brother’s hand-me-downs: Alistair MacLean, Leon Uris, J.R.R. Tolkien.) I know that I finished several of her books after she had done with them… and they weren’t library books. My mom bought them.

Much of what I know of British and early American history came from discussions that my mother and sister Elane would have about what she was reading — books that would also include the journals of Lewis and Clark and Andersonville. My mom was both a fiction ju**ie and history buff. Much of that rubbed off on me.

Mom also fully supported family forays, led by my father, into neighborhood cinemas. I know I saw (and was terrified by) Bambi when I was five, but my earliest movie memory is a double feature of West Side Story and Duel at Diablo. As I got a little older, the films of David Lean — Doctor Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia, Bridge on the River Kwai — found their way into the rotation, along with films from classic 1970s auteurs like Sidney Lumet (Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, Prince of the City), Alan J. Pakula (The Parallax View, All the President’s Men), Sydney Pollack (Three Days of the Condor, Jeremiah Johnson), and William Friedkin (The French Connection, Sorcerer).

Take a look at those film titles. A diet of pretty serious cinema for a 6- to 12-year-old! And Mom wasn’t just along for the ride, either. Sure, we saw the pop titles like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Oliver!, too. But my parents were very steady and serious consumers of cinematic art. Again, it’s no accident that I also turned out to be a film critic and script consultant.

My mom was also instrumental in organizing annual family outings to the Seattle Symphony and productions of the Seattle Gilbert and Sullivan Society — which generally expanded into social occasions with family friends. She was my dad’s partner at monthly Bridge games — for decades. She was quite serious about difficult paint-by-numbers projects; crochet and latch-hook; innovative and economical holiday decorations; cross-stitch embroidery; sewing. As the 1970s progressed she even became a fan of Queen! When my folks started sleeping on the hide-a-bed in an adjoining room while my grandmother convalesced upstairs, she would ask me to play side B of A Night at the Opera at bedtime. Figaro! Magnifico!

Outside the house, she thoroughly enjoyed camping and hunting trips, gardening, suntanning, and beach-combing. When she was 56 she rafted the Grand Canyon. As she and Dad aged, she became an avid cruiser — particularly in search of beaches and sun.

She collected shells, and she collected rocks.

And it is this latter enthusiasm that provoked this recollection of my mother’s interests.

Mom collected rocks from all over the United States and the Caribbean. She traveled extensively, and was always on the lookout for interesting stones.

Most of them were on the small side, and the sort which looked fabulous when wet — eye-catching baubles in the surf or stream. But back at home, they would lose their luster… yet Mom would not desert them. For her, they were memories.

One year for Christmas, Dad gave Mom a rock tumbler to, ahem!, polish up a quart or so of her favorite stones. Into the tumbler they went… and out came sand. Mom was crushed. But it did not deter her from collecting more stones.

Some of Mom’s rocks, though, were on the larger side — as big as your fist. These she would line along the window sills at their beach-front retirement chateau on Maplewild Drive in Burien. When they moved to Huntington Park in Des Moines, these were relocated to the deck railing.

A couple of months ago when I helped clean up the property in preparation for sale, I found one of her favorites — an angular chunk of red and purplish chert, from Arizona, I believe — ignominiously incorporated in a flowerbed border long-ignored and mossy.

There, it seemed to me, was a fitting symbol of my mother’s loss of almost everything that once held her interest. When they moved this most recent time, she asked for almost nothing to be taken with her. Things she has moved countless times — family heirlooms and photo collections, cherished books, her red, blue, and green antique glass collections, her sea shells, her stones — all abandoned like Woody and the gang in Toy Story.

Is this what growing up finally looks like? Or is it growing out? Outstripping all the things that once held your interest?

On one hand, I’d like to attribute the effect to Alzheimer’s. What good are mementos if they remind you of… of… things you no longer remember?

But I really don’t think that’s entirely it. Because I see that loss of interests in my father, too, and in many people as they age.

In Mom’s case, I think the flagging of her interests coincided with Dad’s retirement. For a few years, she held on to her weekly volunteering at Highline Hospital — but as their cruise schedule picked up and the two of them were spending more and more time together, everything else faded away. If the two of them couldn’t enjoy something together, that something no longer happened. And rather than dive into a cross-stitch — as she might have done in years past when my dad was traveling, at work, or tied up with church business — she would turn on the TV as she would wait for my dad to fiddle his way through meeting minutes or emails. So they could be together some more when he was ready. Watching TV or playing cards. And now they don’t even play cards.

All of her interests were, in a way, a means of filling up the time until Dad came home. All she ever really wanted was to spend time with him.

I think of that, now, as I approach the threshold of retirement age — and while I find myself pursuing new interests all the time, the pressures of retail push my wife and I more and more into time together at home. Everything else of a social nature seems so exhausting!

It makes me wonder: What will I be like at 70, or 80 years of age? Will I still be interested in publishing books, in writing poetry, in finding creative ways of managing to be out in the woods? Will Misuk and I still make a point of scheduling time away from each other to make room for literature and pickleball? And other people?

Or will we just settle into a routine of Wheel of Fortune? Or Jeopardy? Who will be hosting then, do you think?

Originally published at Medium.
Reprinted with permission.
https://medium.com/wonderstruck/valerie-8a05ca31cb18

26/07/2024

Have you ever seen the guts of a 120-year-old telephone?

No, I didn’t think so.

Until two weeks ago, I hadn’t either. Through several decades of cruising antique stores, I could probably have counted the total number of genuine first-generation wall telephones I’ve seen on two hands. Most of them were just the shells, missing either the guts or various appendages, or both. The few that were intact were well-protected by signage or cordage, or both, warning DO NOT TOUCH. So I didn’t even have any idea how one might go about opening one up to see the guts.

And then…

I saw a notice about a yard sale at Ann Martinson’s place off Lower Beaver Creek. Over the last several years, I’ve purchased a number of interesting antiques from Ann — chaps, branding irons, and so on. She has volunteered at the Twisp Senior Center’s thrift store for a long time, and has consequently amassed quite a collection of unique pieces.

The first thing I spied at Ann’s most recent sale was — what appeared to be — a completely intact turn-of-the-20th-Century wall phone. I immediately walked over and hefted it. By the weight of the item I could tell that its hand-crank power plant was intact. Either that or Ann had stashed her gold ingots inside. Either way, I instantly took it to Ann and gladly forked over the requested $75.

When I got it home, I was delighted to discover that its only defect — aside from about sixty years of accumulated barn dust — was a severed handset cord, rather easily spliced and restored to its original external appearance.

I also learned how to open the 1905 Swedish-American Telephone Company telephone case. In addition to the door lock (which had fortunately been left unlocked, as the key was not included) the case has two hook-and-eye closures, one at the top and one at the bottom.

Upon complete inspection of the contents of the case, I was fascinated that the phone’s wiring — between the receiver, the mouthpiece, the ringer, and the hand-crank magneto power plant — is simply thin strands of wire tacked onto the surface of the various parts of the oaken case. Where the wiring crosses onto the hinged door, flexible metal contacts make connection when the door is closed. The wiring is like primitive printed circuit boards.

I was also delighted to find that the only missing parts were the four bolts that mount the magneto to the middle shelf inside the case.

Then… I was mindboggled — wonderstuck, perhaps? — to discover that oldphoneshop.com carries replacement parts… like my four missing bolts. You can see the four bolts at the left in the photo accompanying this article.

After I picked up the bolts at the post office yesterday, I drove back to Winthrop to have dinner with my wife Misuk at Three Fingered Jack’s. Shortly after our dinner was served, the host came into the dining room to announce what has become pretty normal for Methow Valley residents over the last several years: a serenade from operatic tenor Roberto Salina Elisastegui.

Cuban by birth, Roberto first came to the Methow from Cuba in 2016 while visiting his sister in Brewster — 45 minutes to the southeast, along the Columbia River. He was soon making return visits on work visas, and has since obtained his green card. He hopes his wife and two daughters will also soon be able to join him permanently, after completing the years-long sequence of hurdles that our immigration system places in front of those who aspire to call this great — yes, still great, always great — country home.

In Cuba, Roberto was a working musician. Here, in this country and valley he loves, he’s a prep cook at Jack’s — and periodically sings for tips at Jack’s, The Methow Valley Ciderhouse, and other locations throughout the valley. Not long ago I was delighted to be on the same program with him at the Cascadia Spring Concert and have a front-row seat — twice! — for his astounding duet with Rebecca Gallivan.

The first time you hear Roberto perform in bar or a diner, it simply knocks your socks off. It’s like encountering Enrico Caruso at a hot dog stand. You look around to see if you haven’t entered The Twilight Zone. After the third or fourth time you luck out like this, the real fun comes in watching neophytes and tourists react. Last night at Jack’s two teen girls were literally squealing with glee while a 50-something socialite nearby looked like she was about to either cry or swoon. Her husband didn’t seem to mind, equally delighted.

After dinner I came home and fitted the magneto with its new, but very old, set of screws.

And then I sat down at Facebook to see that Blaine Franz had reposted my four-year-old Wonderstruck column about his cross-country cancer-awareness bikeride, praising my writing.

Yeah. What a day full of unexpected delight!

Originally published at Medium. Reprinted with permission.

Address

Telephone

+12062416149

Website

https://medium.com/wonderstruck

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Wonderstruck posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to Wonderstruck:

Wonderstruck