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DC Diary: Picking berries, spotting bears and escaping white supremacism

Gadia Zrihan
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Published: 14 October 2017

Last updated: 4 March 2024

MY SON GRADUATED from his DC Jewish school on the same night that the first fireflies of summer appeared on our lawn. It was a balmy evening and the fireflies lit up the dark with an incandescent momentary glow. In the school gym, the anticipation was palpable. Excited 12-year-olds donning suits and party dresses walked solemnly to the stage to share treasured school moments as if they knew it was the end of an era.

This year has passed like a flash. We’ve been through a lot since arriving in the US eighteen months ago, but as I watched my son on the stage, beaming and completely at home with good friends he was soon to part with, I wanted to hold back time.  Next is middle school, but that night I felt grateful that the American summer stretched out endlessly before us.  I wasn’t rushing any of it.

We plunged headlong into an American summer. We picked wild berries and went tubing down a winding river in the hills of West Virginia singing, “country road, take me home” the whole way. We ate crabs from the Chesapeake and bbq ribs from a roadside truck sold by a woman who we cautiously noted was carrying a pistol on her hip. On the 4th of July, friends set off firecrackers bought at a stand piled high with gaudy Independence Day fireworks. My older kids went on a week-long sleep away camp. They learnt nature survival skills, swam and sat around campfires learning Hebrew camp songs.

But it is with our family holiday to Maine that we experienced the quintessential American getaway. “Vacationland” is inscribed on every licence plate and it’s no wonder. Maine has an almost mythological status as a summer destination for those who want to get away from it all. Abutting Canada and frozen for most of the year, in summer it thaws to reveal unadulterated green woods and glistening waters, not to mention an abundance of lobsters and berries, moose and bears.

We rent a cabin on a lake, nestled among the trees with a small wooden dock jutting out into the water. The lake reflects the sky and the trees like a rippling mirror. It is quiet in a way that DC can never be. We swim and canoe and catch up on a year’s reading on lazy afternoons. When evening falls we make fires and listen closely for the haunting call of the loon bird across the water, a wild, lonesome sound. We go strawberry picking.

We squat among the rows plucking ruby red orbs that are smaller and darker than the pale oversized ones found in the supermarket. They are fragrant with a luscious floral scent that intensifies as you pop them into your mouth. I had forgotten how strawberries smell and taste until I picked them in a green field in Maine in the middle of summer, the bite of sea salt in the air from the Atlantic. Even the strawberries that had passed the height of ripeness had a concentrated jammyness that I couldn’t resist.

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Woods and water predominate the calming landscape.  Pine, maple, beech and oak forests look out at you from every road and turning, and in between you catch glimpses of water from the myriad lakes and waterways, and the ocean, always beckoning. One day, we stop at a small flea market on the way to see bears and moose at a wildlife reserve. As I rifle through the teacups and silver spoons, I strike up a conversation with the owner. “Where are you from” she asks me. We chat a little about Australia and I tell her that DC is our home for the next for few years. “Oh, I could never live in DC,” she tells me, “I could never live that far from the woods.”

I know what she means.

Maine is a buffer to Trump and the darker side of DC.  But not completely. Like a persistent storm cloud hanging over our lives, Trump continues to wreak havoc with his bombastic, tactless narcissism. Summer is overshadowed by the white supremacist violence he untapped and clearly sides with, and the growing tension with a nuclear North Korea. The Russia investigation kept gaining momentum as did the lies to bury it. Almost forgotten now are the throwaway speeches and tweets encouraging police brutality, and denying transgender rights.

Even in Maine, Trump’s speech to 30,000 boy scouts in Virginia deeply unsettled me. Maybe it is because my son joined a Jewish scout group earlier this year, or maybe the image of a leader abusing his power to rile up impressionable teens is just too much of an allusion to youth rallies we’ve seen in the past.

WE ARE BACK IN DC NOW. Back in the grip of Trump’s dark reign. School is around the corner and summer will soon come to an end. I no longer see the flickering flame of the firefly and I won’t for another year. I recall how on our first bright morning on the lake, my son ventured out in a kayak a little hesitantly. He paddled out and looked back at me and then went out a bit further. The lake was broad and open.

“Should I come back in Ima?” He called out.

“Only if you want to,” I replied. “Go out as far as you like.”

He turned back to his paddling with renewed energy and his orange kayak moved swiftly and smoothly towards the horizon. Before I knew it, he was just a speck in the distance. I didn’t stop watching him, as if by effort of my gaze alone, I could keep him within my care and maintain the bond of protection.

He is moving beyond it now. I see him stretching out beyond my reach and I feel glad for him. This is the feeling of summer, the tender unfurling to an unknown horizon. It is wrapped up now in my nostalgia for Maine and the unexpected pang of possibility offered by a summer in America, when you leave the city behind.

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DC Diary 3: Trump and me – Chest pains, anxiety and temporary respite

 

About the author

Gadia Zrihan

Jewish wanderer par excellence. Citizen of Australia, Israel and France and currently sojourning with my family in Washington DC. It’s about the journey not the destination.

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