Mick, Kanye and Stampede Shania

My son saw the Rolling Stones. For free. And doesn’t entirely realize how cool that is. He came home from school and said, “Kevin’s got seven extra tickets (no, I don’t know how) to the Rolling Stones tomorrow night. Can I go? We’re just gonna stay for the opening act, Kanye West.”

The “tomorrow night” in question was a school night, but this was the Stones. They’d brought their Bigger Bang concert to Gillette Stadium outside Boston. Were I to say no, I’d be haunted for the rest of my life every time the radio played “Brown Sugar.” After giving both permission and the mandatory no-drinking-and-driving-if-there’s-a-problem-call-and-I’ll-come-get-you speech, I secretly hoped Adam and his friends would, after communing with Kanye, stick around for at least a little jumpin’ jack flash.

Concert night came, and at 9:45 my phone rang. “Mom!” yelled Adam into his cellphone above the musical tidal wave in the background. “We’re gonna stay for a few more sets!” I was delighted. I wasn’t hearing the Stones live, but my 17-year-old son was, and I went back to bed humming some vicariously-enjoyed “Angie” as a lullaby.

Adam got home just before midnight (this is a great kid). I bolted into the dark hallway and said, “So? Was it awesome?” Adam held up his cellphone and played video of Mick and the men pumping out “Tumblin’ Dice.” The kids had been so close to the stage that, had there been no volume to the video playing on this lilliputian screen, you could’ve identified the song by reading Mick’s pouty lips.

“Yeah! Awesome. We were acknowledged by Kanye West!”

“What? That’s great... but... Just look at this!” I pointed to the tiny cellphone concert. “You saw the Rolling Stones! One of the greatest bands in rock 'n roll history!"

“Yeah. I know. We saw the Rolling Stones. But we were acknowledged by Kanye West.”

Fair enough. Then I learned the kids had used only five of Kevin’s seven tickets. What did Kevin do with the other two? “Sold them to a guy in the parking lot for twenty bucks.”

Oh, the pain. “Tell Kevin if I’d have known there were extras I’d have given him a hundred bucks apiece. And I wouldn’t have driven with you guys nor sat anywhere near you...”

I thought about how close I’d been to maybe seeing the Stones, then realized how long it’d been since I’d been to any concert. Let’s see... When was the last time? Oh, right...

We were at the Calgary Stampede, the great rodeo cum carnival which, for one week each July, turns Alberta’s capital into a non-stop street party and 99.9 per cent of its good citizens into boots and bolo-wearing cowboys. Everybody, young and old, becomes a Stampeder. Calgarians and visitors start the day by parking themselves on hay bales stacked in strip mall parking lots all over the city to enjoy pancake breakfasts with big dollops of Stampede spirit on the side. Stampede is in the air. It's everywhere, inescapable. Musicians in Stetsons and big silver belt buckles tap their toes on the concrete in street corners and pedestrian areas all over the city. Even run of the mill salutations like "Have a nice day" or "See you later" are temporarily replaced by "Have a good Stampede!" Everyone has a Stampede ticket in his pocket, and all roads and rail lines lead to the fairgrounds, where people come and go all day and all night, all week long. If you’re planning to visit Calgary, Stampede Week is the time to go.

There’s a lot to do at Stampede, from morning to midnight, so we studied the program detailing the week’s events, and everyone in the family circled his or her must-sees. Mine included Shania Twain’s performance at the giant white-topped musical tent.

On concert day, I entered the tent and scouted a spot from where I could get some good telephoto shots of Shania. As she twanged and sashayed her way around the stage in a leopard leotard, gold lame jumpsuit, and other comely costumes, I shot an entire 36-exposure roll of slides. I noticed folks in the audience eying me with amused looks, and I thought, What? What are you looking at? She’s famous. I want pictures.

When the family reconvened in our hotel room later that afternoon, I said, “Well, I saw Shania Twain.”

Dana, swallowing a smile, said, “No, mom, actually you didn’t,” and handed me the marked-up program.

Had I looked at it more closely before trotting off to the music tent I would have known I’d just burned a roll of expensive Fujichrome on a you-won’t be-able-to-tell-the-difference Shania impersonator, the lovely and talented Shania Twin.


www.LoriHein.com

Fall in Keene, NH: Clarence DeMar and lots of pumpkins

Keene, New Hampshire is a great little city. It’s got college kids and all the fun and funk they bring to a place; the pristine clapboard crispness of elegant, old Victorians; wooded parks and rippling rivers; a double-wide Main Street with a mall down its middle and a gazebo at its end; just the right mix of eclectic, priced-right shops and box stores where you can get stuff like mops and toilet paper. A pretty, peaceful place sprinkled under stone-tipped Mt. Monadnock, reputedly the world’s most-climbed mountain after Japan’s Fuji.

We head into Keene whenever the quiet of the woods surrounding our nearby cottage starts crushing in on us. "To Keene for chicken tacos!"

Fall in Keene brings a few traditions, like the return of Keene State College students, the Clarence DeMar Marathon, and the Keene Pumpkin Festival.

This Sunday, God and hamstring willing, I'm running the DeMar. It’s a tiny marathon – only about 250 runners – and the route is open to traffic, which should be interesting. When my brain is fried at mile 21, I hope divine intervention will pluck me from the path of the oncoming car I’m about to run into. I guess nobody’s been seriously hurt yet, because this race, named for seven-time Boston Marathon winner and sometime Keene resident and teacher Clarence DeMar, has been run since 1978. (For a fun read, try to find a copy of DeMar’s autobiography, Marathon. The dude could run, and his pavement-pounding exploits are fascinating, but his personality quirks are a story unto themselves. The book, out of print, is hard to find, even on Amazon, and what I saw there recently makes me think my two copies are worth much more than the $7.50 each I paid for them at my favorite used bookstore outside Keene: somebody was selling a copy on Amazon for $49.95. )

I drove the DeMar course a few weeks ago and videotaped it so I can practice running it in my head before the real deal. It’s a gorgeous course, which should help ease my suffering.

The race starts in Gilsum, where gems like quartz and tourmaline pepper the ground, and mineral and crystal seekers gather every June for the annual Rock Swap. We take off in front of the General Store, near Mine Street. The course winds through Surry, following the curves of the swift-moving Ashuelot River, and then spends miles wending through parts of Keene I never knew existed. (And up hills I never knew existed.)

After the race I'll repair to Margarita's for red wine and fake Mexican food. Margarita's sits on Main Street and looks onto the site of another Keene fall tradition, the Pumpkin Festival.

It's something to see: over 20,000 jack-o-lanterns lighting the city center in a festival that holds the record for most jack-o-lanterns assembled in one place (over 28,000). The carved pumpkins, lit at night in a spectacular display, sit in tiers on scaffolds, piled in pyramids, and lined up and down every inch of curbing in downtown Keene.

Keene's well worth a trip any time of year, but fall brings its own brand of fun.


www.LoriHein.com

Bermuda can wait

Mike and I went to our favorite Indian restaurant tonight, a 20-table place in a mint-green stucco strip mall next to a golf course and a municipal airstrip.

As we ate our onion naan, lamb curry and chicken tikka, we eavesdropped on the conversation going on in an adjacent booth. A man about 50 was trying to persuade what I assumed to be his thritysomething wife and five or six-year-old daughter to let him plan a family trip.

After they ordered – saag and tandoori for the adults, a basket of naan for the little girl – the man took a sip of his shiraz, put his glass down and said, “I’d like to go back to Bermuda.” His wife said that sounded nice. Then he upped the ante: “Or Italy.”

Oh, I recognized this tactic. I chuckled, waiting to see where this would end. I knew what the guy was doing because I’ve done it 50 times myself. You casually flip a four or five-day jaunt to an innocuous, relatively nearby resort destination like Aruba onto the family table, then, when everyone agrees it’d be a nice idea to “go somewhere,” you turn Aruba into a week in Caracas, which you then gently parlay into two weeks in Patagonia.

I resisted the urge to get up, offer this guy my hand, and tell him we’d never met but were kindred spirits. I knew Italy wouldn’t be enough for him and waited to hear his final gambit.

His wife bought into the Italy idea, so he ran with it. “What pops into my head for a trip to Italy is a week in Rome and a week in Venice.” Mike and I looked at each other and smiled. Nice. Rome and Venice came flooding back, and we were ready to get the check and head for the airport. We were sold, and so was his wife, who, in the course of five forkfuls of chicken saag, had been moved from a few days in Bermuda to two weeks in Italy. I waited for the finale.

“We could go next July. We have a couple of weeks then.” To this point, the daughter hadn’t paid the least attention to her parents’ conversation. She’d been glued to the window, chewing on bread, watching golfers approach the ninth green and red-tailed Cherokees take off from the airport beyond the trees.

The man picked up his wine glass and said, “You know, with a couple of weeks, we could go somewhere really interesting and different,” (Ohhh! I know this script! That’s one of my best lines. What's he hoping for? Drumroll...) “...like China.”

The girl turned from the window and looked at her dad. “China?”

"Yeah. China.”

“You mean Chinatown?”

“No. China. The country China.”

“You mean the real China?”

“Yeah. The real China.”

The girl left the window and the golfers and the little planes and sat down in the booth. Her dad – and China – had gotten her attention.

He leaned in over the table and said, “If I was a kid, I’d want to know about the world.” His daughter, and her mom, were listening. “I’d want to know everything I could about all the people in the world.”

If only more parents talked to their kids like this.

Look for this family at the airport next July, boarding a plane to Beijing.

www.LoriHein.com

New York City, 2001: A run to remember

I wrote this essay in 2001. It ran nationwide and was e-mailed around the world.

(The essay, 2001; the photograph, 1998, from the Staten Island Ferry)

United we ran
by Lori Hein

I know where hope lives. I know where strength, endurance, passion and pride live. They live in New York City. On November 4th I ran through 26 miles of these affirmations of our humanity.

This New York City Marathon was not about athletes turning in impressive times. It was about going the distance -- the distance from profound sadness and loss to a point where collective human goodness and hope carry us toward a finish line we still can't see. In a city pierced through its core by hate and pain, hope is alive and well. There is no doubt it will triumph.

Thirty thousand runners came to New York to fuel that hope. We came from all over the globe to tell New York it doesn't stand alone. Runners from Kansas and Denmark and Japan and Algeria and California and Scotland and Venezuela came to show the people of Brooklyn and the Bronx and Long Island and New Jersey and Staten Island and Manhattan and Queens and Yonkers and White Plains and southern Connecticut that their pain is shared. When pain is shared, it is eased.

In turn, the two million spectators who lined the 26.2 mile five-borough route fueled the runners with something far more nourishing to a spent body and mind than any energy drink or quick-acting carbohydrate. They carried us through the neighborhoods, up the hills, over the bridges, past the buildings, down the avenues, around the corners and into Central Park with their humanity. To say we connected is to understate the pure human goodness that permeated every inch of every borough. When we slapped palms with kids in Brooklyn and exchanged high-fives with teenagers in the Bronx and looked into the eyes of young mothers in Queens and smiled at old men on kitchen chairs waving flags and raised defiantly clenched fists to the firefighters watching from their engines and station houses, we said, together and loudly with no words, "We cannot be beaten. We will overcome. We are united."

Go to New York if you can. You will hear occasional sirens and see a few haz-mat trucks roaring down the street. You will likely make the unspeakably painful pilgrimage to Ground Zero to try and take in the enormity of the loss and grief. You won't be able to, and you will walk away numb. You will see billboards and walls with the faces of young people gone forever. You will see the tired eyes of cops operating on adrenaline and resolve. You will see fire stations wreathed in purple bunting and covered with drawings from schoolkids in Lubbock, Texas and Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

But keep walking and looking, and you will find hope. You will check into your hotel and be given both a key and a smile that thanks you for coming. You will ask an elevator attendant how he's doing, and he'll thank you for asking. You will eat dinner in a Turkish restaurant with an American flag painted on its window. You will see the Christmas lights strung across Mulberry Street in Little Italy, lighting the hopeful faces of waiters beckoning you to try their pasta tonight. You will see the pulsing neon of Times Square and the lacy spires of St. Patrick's and the holiday window dressers already at work on Fifth Avenue. You will look from the Chrysler Building's gleaming art deco cap to the Empire State Building, doing justice to its role as New York's tallest building by beaming its red, white and blue floodlit top like a beacon to the city and the world.

I know where hope lives. It lives in New York City. And it lives in all of us.


www.LoriHein.com

Stuck in Norway

It was our last day in Norway. Over the course of a week, my mother, sister, Linda, and I had covered 1,700 miles of the country’s back roads, negotiating scores of twisting, high altitude, hairpin-filled routes that brought us through some of the world’s most pristine landscape.


I drove, Linda rode shotgun, and my mother camped out in the back seat, crouching on the floor with her eyes closed whenever we found ourselves clinging to some piece of precariously pitched gravel or asphalt with a 500-foot drop just outside the window.

I’m pretty good at mountain driving, and had a blast with most of it, but there were patches, like the thin, nailbitingly vertical stretch of Route 13 just outside Dale on the way to Voss that forced me to keep reminding myself that if I lost it, if I panicked for an instant, we’d plunge over the edge. Sobering. (For some reason, my mother didn’t crouch on the floor during this stretch. She took this one sitting up. The pressure! My mother’s petrified face staring at me in the rearview mirror.)

So, our last road trip, a flat little jaunt from Oslo to Frederikstad on the Swedish border seemed, at its outset, to be a motoring piece of cake. We’d been through the tough stuff and had conquered Norway’s peaks and valleys from the North Sea to just shy of the Arctic Circle. What could possibly happen on this happy little traipse to old Frederikstad, a remarkable and remarkably preserved walled city that dates from 1567?

From Frederikstad, we followed mild-mannered Route 110, the Oldtidsveien, or Highway of the Ancients, a road that links a chain of Bronze and Iron Age archaeological sites. We took in Hunn, a massive prehistoric burial site with some dozen stone circles set on a hillside, purple wildflowers growing between the graves. At Solberg, we walked among boulders etched with 2,500-year-old carvings, many of ships.

There was one more site I wanted to see, so I turned off the highway onto a farm road, following the sketchy directions in my guidebook. A bus came roaring down the road in our direction, and I pulled off to the shoulder to let it pass.

But there was no shoulder. The right side of the car sank into a drainage ravine that ran alongside the road. The locals know the drainage ditch is there, so there’s no need to advertise it, nor is there any need to mow the high grass that hides it from view. Only the clueless get stuck.

We heard a crunch, a break. I’d split a plank that was laying down there in the gully. My mother jumped out of the back seat, exiting via the right side. The open door wedged itself into the grass and muck and stuck there, open. The car’s left wheels were off the pavement, and Linda and I gingerly catapulted ourselves from the vehicle, exiting stage left.

A fine kettle of fish. What should have been the trip’s most uneventful excursion had suddenly become drama-filled. How would we get out of this? Would we make it back to Oslo in time to catch our plane home? How ugly – and expensive -- would my encounter with the rental car people be?

Within a minute, a car pulled beside us. In perfect English, the farmer behind the wheel said he couldn’t stop – an agrarian emergency demanded his immediate presence – but he pointed to his farmhouse and said, “Get one of my boys to pull you out with the tractor.” He drove away. A bus stopped to have a look at us, and the driver appraised the situation. He confirmed that “you will not get out without a tractor" and drove away.

My mother and I walked to the farm, and Linda stayed with the car. As we entered the farmyard, the world erupted into a cacophony of mooing. The dozens of cows in the barn burst into wild moos that scared and delighted me. Had we tripped some invisible bovine-warning wire? Had these cows been trained as guard cows? The air was swirling and swelling with raucous, graceless moos. Those girls were loud!

Then the dog went wild. He was tied up to the front of the farmhouse, and he let loose, as if he’d saved all his life’s barking for that single moment. A barn full of bovine wildwomen and a canine wildman at the front door. What would the farmer’s sons be like?

We called, “Hello! Hello!” We saw people inside the farmhouse looking at us from the windows. We waved to them. We pointed to the stuck car, looking silly and sad with its right flank kissing the dirt and its left flank airborne. The people watched us, but didn’t come out.

We couldn’t get closer to more thoroughly explain ourselves because the dog was in the way. He wanted to eat us. The cows wailed in the barn. The dog growled maniacally. We had raised the decibel level at this farm by major degrees. (Linda later told us that as she waited with the car, she heard not only the barnyard riot at our savior farm, but at other farms down the road. “They were all bellowing! All mooing!”)

Finally, after we’d stared at this family for what seemed like an uncomfortable and humiliating hour but was likely five minutes, the door opened and the farmer’s wife came out, smiling, flanked by two unsmiling teenage sons. She looked up the road at our car and laughed. The serious boys readied the tractor, gathered up a huge chain, and sputtered off to the car. We walked.

“Do you do this often for tourists?” I asked the farmwife. “In winter,” she laughed, amused that I’d managed to stage our mishap in the dry, unslippery, hazard-free off-season. Unlike her cows and dog (and sons), she enjoyed visitors and said she was having a group of 4-H kids, some from the U.S., stay at her farm over the upcoming weekend.

When we got to the car, some farmers were discussing the boys’ skill in hitching our vehicle and towing it out of the ditch. The boys had clearly done this before (in winter).

After the car was resurrected and righted, I handed the boys some money. That made them smile, but just barely. We tooted, waved and drove off.

Tricky little road, that flat stretch out of Oslo.


www.LoriHein.com