Road trips and taxes, with a detour to Finland
April is more than just the cruelest month
Check in
Resilience
As we go about our day, all of us, we encounter challenges. We solve problems. Sometimes there is stress, but we usually overcome that, too.
The quality that allows us to do these things is resilience.
Like the weed that struggles to survive on a scrim of dirt, just a few pieces of grit, we can bring meaning forth from just a few grains of consciousness.
This week, let’s celebrate our ability to overcome. We are strong. We are competent. We are resilient.
Finland
This small Nordic country joined NATO on April 4, but it’s famous for other things.
Like this Monty Python song:
Finland, Finland , Finland The country where I want to be, Pony trekking or camping Or just watching TV.
Or paying taxes
In The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life, Anu Partanen describes the ease of filing her taxes in her native Finland.
Every year that I have to fill out my absurdly complex U.S. tax forms, I feel profoundly nostalgic about paying my Finnish taxes.
[In Finland] My tax form had been one page long, and came prefilled with my earnings and taxes paid, including the calculations for amount owed or refunded. My job was simply to check that everything was correct and amend it if needed. During my years as a salaried employee, I mostly just looked it over and did nothing. As a freelancer, I had to add my expenses and send the form back, but even then the process was incredibly simple. All individuals were taxed separately, regardless of marital status, and shared deductions were split between spouses.
File now. File later. It’s still not the ides.
Income tax deadline is Monday, April 17, this year. Usually it’s the 15th, which I thought was the ides of April. (We know all about the ill-omened ides of March from Julius Caesar.) But I’m indebted to our friend Wikipedia for pointing out that except for March, May, July, and October, when it is indeed the 15th, the ides of the month fall on the 13th. It was the date of the full moon in the Julian calendar.
Road trips
Eight months ago, I happened to be seated at a meeting next to an acquaintance who asked casual questions about my writing. He may have been making polite conversation, but it caused me to start looking at what I was working on and how I was working on it—and to discover Substack.
Ivan also told me about what he was reading: a new translation of The Odyssey by Emily Wilson, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. I bought this splendid book, which reads like a novel. Maybe even a graphic novel.
Wilson has made a series of sprightly 2-minute synopses of her translation.
In the first one, she does quick changes with props as she shifts (with her delightful, lilting English accent) from the Narrator to Athena, with her golden sandals, mighty spear (actually, an umbrella), and, as a disguise, sunglasses. Odysseus’s son Telemachus appears wearing a backwards Phillies hat.
The synchronicity
Not two days later, I find the first line of that translation,
Tell me about a complicated man, Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost. . . . on the frontispiece of Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path, a book about walking the Cornish coast in Britain. That and Wild, Cheryl Strayed’s account of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, are the walking version of road trips.
As I started to think about my road trips, and the walking road trips, other things fell into place.
“Where does the road end, Mom?” my children asked. What did they imagine? That the edges converge like train tracks in the distance and the road peters out?
On the road in April
Geoffrey Chaucer chose April to put his characters on the road to Canterbury. He wrote in Middle English, strange-sounding to us, but translations are widely available, including at Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.
How to read Middle English
The Canterbury Tales is written in iambic pentameter, like Shakespeare plays and sonnets, with five da-DUM beats per line. To make the rhythm work in Chaucer, you have to pronounce many of the final “e”s.
Like this: WHAN that APrille WITH his SHOR-es SOO-te [When April with its sweet-smelling showers] Go here to hear someone read the first 18 lines.
The original begins:
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licóur Of which vertú engendred is the flour; Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth Inspired hath in every holt and heeth The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne Hath in the Ram [the sign of Aires] his halfe cours y-ronne, And smale foweles maken melodye, That slepen al the nyght with open ye, So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages [hearts], Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages . . . [this is the road trip part] And specially, from every shires ende Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende, The hooly blisful martir for to seke, [SEE-ke, “seek”] That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke. [“sick,” just one syllable.]
Other books about journeys
Blue Highways: A Journey into America, by William Least Heat-Moon, aka William Trogdon, who was, when the book was published in 1982, a professor of English at his alma mater, the University of Missouri.
But not Steinbeck’s Travels With Charlie, because the evidence is that he made up most of his encounters, and the book reads that way.
On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, who burned not with Walter Pater’s “hard, gem-like flame” but with firecrackers:
. . . because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
Northland: A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border, by Porter Fox. The log of a fascinating combo journey, by car, boat and canoe, with portages, along the border between the United States and Canada.
And a book I haven’t explored, Walking With Sam: A Father, a Son, and Five Hundred Miles Across Spain,” by Andrew McCarty. In an article in The New York Times, he describes the epiphany he felt in walking Spain’s Camino de Santiago, an ancient pilgrim route.
I stumbled upon the Camino by accident and then trudged across Spain with purpose. I’ve been a walker ever since. And I’m not the only one. . .
Until I went to Spain with the sole mission of crossing the country on foot, I often considered walking a waste of my time. The Camino changed that. The monthlong walk revealed me to myself in a way nothing else had—my looping pattern of thinking, my habitual emotion cycles, my fearful nature. The Camino wore down my resistance to seeing myself, and then step after step built me back up. It altered my place in the world.
Instead of viewing walking as simply the slowest way to get somewhere, I grew to see it not only as a means to an end, but as the event itself. And since I walked the Camino for a second time last year with my 19-year-old son, I’ve come to understand walking as among the most valuable things I can do.
More will be coming about road trips. Leave a comment if you have ideas about how I should proceed or what books I missed.
Poem
As part of working with the artist Amy Cowen of Illustrated Life on the new Julia Cameron book Write for Life, I’ve committed to writing a poem a day. Blissfully, I’m not going to share all of them with you, but here is one from the last week.
The Warmth of Other Frogs
Near and far, Rasping frogs It’s mating season. Happy in rain. Quiet in sun— Sun-satisfied Sun-satiated. A cat on a warm rock Feels heat through her belly. Tiny kittens Will remember That gestational warmth. Born blind, Remembering the gentle heat And the raspy calls of the frogs beneath that rock. God’s lips Pressed to their ears. We remember, too, The sounds, the motions, When our mother ate spicy food. Often we lay like frogs, knees spread, The soles of our feet touching Not cold-blooded But warm. Warm from the rocks Warm from the sun On Mother’s bloated belly. Later we draw Warmth from blankets, Or quilts worn and sun-bleached. Bright colors muted with age. The sun is strong. The hands that quilted once Today are bones Cleansed and bleached by the sun, Our friend.
Back to the theme
Remember that the theme for April is “reset and reorganize.” I meant working on not only external clutter, the mess we make of our living spaces, but also internal clutter, the rat’s nest of our disorganized thoughts and intentions.
It’s hard to know just where to start, isn’t it? With either type of cleanup.
I suggest that you start very small. A few years ago, I resolved to clear out a drawer or cupboard every week. Since then, I’ve done maybe two drawers and two cupboards. That’s the effect of disorganized intentions.
But—I think about doing it all the time! Never do I go into my underwear, sock and hankie drawer without remembering that resolution. Soon, I tell myself. Maybe that very day . . . But later. Not just now.
Check out
Remember morning routine? These days, it’s intimately tied to the early morning writing exercise, known to millions of followers of Julia Camron as Morning Pages, but to me as simply “exers”* or “today.”
You can find descriptions and directions everywhere with Mr. Google. But how you write daily isn’t as important as doing it daily.
Despite my intentions, I don’t write an exer every day. When I first started Becoming, I had to, because I needed to reawaken the writing moxie that I remembered from the days when I wrote stories about people for The Oregonian.
But after a while, writing itself of any sort—pages in the morning or work on the Substack posts, or crafting poems—it all moves from the same space, where my soul meets Spirit.
The process matters.
It makes me right with the Universe, with spirit. With God, if you will. My feet are on Lermontov’s lonely road, as I wrote in Synchronicity in poetry and song.
The morning exercise makes my day right. Millions of people have tried this and know it is true.
I know you will, too.
*I called the writing exercises “exers” because in the early days I had to fit everything into the eight-character file names allowed by the early-90s version of Word. Like this: EX950415—the exercise for April 15, 1995. Now, of course, I can put all sorts of information in a file name: I have up to 225 characters to play with.
I no longer keep my writing in Word, anyway. It’s all in a vast database called DevonThink. More about that later.
—30—
'The Fool's Progress' by Edward Abbey is about a fictional road trip by a dying man, published shortly before Abbey's death. It's a little dated now, but a worthy read.
Thanks, Ken!