Oct 29
When Sedona’s lengthy summer heat wave finally subsided last month, we made a commitment to return to the red rock trails where we had spent much of the first couple of months of our evacuation. Keeping that promise to ourselves proved more difficult than we had imagined.
After many months of uncertainty, in September we finally received some clarity regarding the end of our evacuation. We made up our minds to return to Manila in early December, when the evacuation officially ends. The alternative — request a curtailment and return to Washington — did not appeal to us in the slightest. We told our parents, who scrambled to make plans to visit us, not knowing when they might be able to see us again. We told our landlord. This nearly turned to be a big mistake.
Just as the temperatures have inched down incrementally the last couple of months, a slight chill has also descended inside our home. Our kids, reluctant playmates at first, had grown considerably closer as the months of relatively rigid self-isolation wore on. However, as the summer drew to a close, we decided to send them both to school. No longer entirely dependent on each other, they have begun to drift apart again. The change is barely perceptible day to day, but taking the long view and comparing August to October, it is undeniable.
Oct 24
One would think that after six and a half years of parenthood we would know better, but expectation management is something we still struggle with. Or maybe it’s more the case that the pandemic has rendered wishful thinking a particularly potent force. Or perhaps it’s just that chronic sleep deprivation has scrambled our neurons. Even before we had kids we knew that in early parenthood everything is a phase — both the good and the bad: we had heard plenty of other parents proclaim this fact as gospel. Knowing that it is so, however, does not make it any easier to wrap one’s mind around just how long some of these phases last.
A sharp-shinned hawk alit on a fence post a few feet from where D and Munchkin were kicking a soccer ball on Saturday morning ahead of Munchkin’s second-ever peewee soccer game. D took it as a propitious omen. Saturday was the October Big Day organized by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the start to the first ever Global Bird Weekend, during which birders around the world recorded more than 7,000 different species. Munchkin wound up scoring his team’s first two goals en route to a 4-1 victory. D spotted five new species over the weekend, including the roseate spoonbill that had eluded him previously.
We had been eyeing a visit to the Walnut Canyon National Monument for quite some time. It was one of several worthwhile points of interest just north of us that were off-limits during the early days of the pandemic. Walnut Canyon is right outside Flagstaff, less than an hour’s drive from Sedona. Further north, adjacent to the lands of the Navajo Nation, lie the contiguous Sunset Crater and Wupatki National Monuments. This trio of historical lands preserves some of the region’s most important pre-Columbian relics: the cliffside dwellings of the Sinagua and the impressive fortresses of the Pueblo people.
A couple of weeks ago D rejoiced at recording his 900th bird. After an overwhelming spring, it was slow going for parts of the summer. The migrant species disappeared from our environs and D came close to tapping the potential of his regular birding grounds. With fall now in full swing, migrating birds are back, and D has even glimpsed a few early arrivals of species that winter in Arizona.
We enjoyed a remarkably active holiday weekend, checking out the Birthing Cave — a red rocks hike that had long been on S’s list, wandering around Willow Lake amid Prescott’s Granite Dells, returning — at our son’s urging — for a brief visit to Jerome, and stringing together a tour through three national monuments near Flagstaff. The Birthing Cave in particular deserves a special mention given its place in Sedona lore.
The news signaling the imminent end of our evacuation has spurred us into action. It’s not that we’re aiming to leave no stone unturned, even if the same cannot be said for our son (in the most literal of senses, as will become clear further on). Rather, we’ve found an extra degree of motivation to explore beyond our usual hiking and birding haunts. In addition to visiting the former mining ghost town of Jerome, we also have driven down to Prescott several times in the last couple of weeks to hike among its spectacular Granite Dells.
Throughout much of the summer we had been wondering how this would all end. For many months, the State Department appeared to be torn between several competing imperatives. On one side of the scale were statutory limitations on how long the Department could keep its personnel in evacuation status. On the other side were the procedures the Department announced for gradual reopening, which appeared to hedge toward employee health and safety. The pandemic, of course, cares not for statutory limitations, and predicting its end is clearly a fool’s errand. Given the additional imperative of sustainably resuming normal operations to the extent possible as quickly as possible, something had to give.
towels packed, will travel 