Remembering Parents at Christmas

With my parents in Virginia in 2014.

When I was a kid in the 1960s, Christmas was a big deal at our house in the Washington D.C. suburbs. We set up the tree in our 1950s-style basement with its linoleum floor, brick fireplace, knotty pine paneling, and, down the hall, a cinder block fallout shelter in case we had to weather a nuclear attack while waiting for Santa. By the time Christmas Eve arrived, there was an enormous pile of presents under the tree—my parents always went overboard, and their generosity was augmented by grandparents so that we were beside ourselves with excitement by Christmas morning, waking at an ungodly hour to rouse our parents and start the long-awaited opening of gifts. My parents loved surprises, so we never knew what great thing we might get. It seemed magical. We were a fortunate bunch.

Last summer, I met my three siblings, Kim, Clark, and Emily, all of us now in our 50s and 60s, at our family cottage north of Traverse City, Michigan to scatter our parents’ ashes, saving a few for other places that were important to them. My father died in September 2019 just before covid shut everything down, and we never had a formal memorial. My mother died in the spring of 2024, and it took us a year to find a time when we could all get together. It was a week of laughter, cocktails on the patio overlooking Grand Traverse Bay, and good meals, but it was also melancholy as we read love letters that my parents exchanged before they had us. We visited Bellaire, where my grandmother was born and is buried beside my grandfather, and we revisited places that were expansive to us as kids but now seem smaller. We told stories about our teenage years, marveling that we never ended up dead or in jail, and we went through a huge wooden trunk of my grandmother’s, full of photographs and letters from when she was a teenager herself in the early 1900s.

Cocktail hour at the cottage last summer. Emily is reading love letters that my parents exchanged before we were born.

My father was born in Dearborn, a suburb of Detroit. His family built the cottage “up north,” as they say in Michigan, around 1950 and spent summers there for years afterwards. His father worked for the Pierre Marquette Railroad but died of cancer at age 52, before I was born. His mother, Nelle, was an English teacher, earning undergraduate and master’s degrees in Michigan. Going back even farther, Nelle’s father, Clark Densmore, was an attorney in Bellaire and a passionate advocate for women’s education and suffrage, though he and his wife, Hattie, had nine children, which probably caused some suffer-age on Hattie’s part if not for them both.

My father, Ed, with his parents, Ken Driese and Nelle Driese (nee Densmore).

My mother, on the other hand, was born in Enterprise, Alabama: the deep South. Her father, “Mac,” worked on the Pan American highway and eventually owned a furniture store in downtown Enterprise, a small town known for its Boll Weevil Monument, lauding the pest for forcing a switch from cotton to peanuts, which turned out to be an economic boon. When we were kids, men sold soggy bags of boiled peanuts on the streets of Enterprise (delicious), and the air smelled of peanut butter thanks to a processing plant on the outskirts of town. My grandmother always had cats around the house, and for her whole life, my mother was seldom without pets (mostly cats). We’d visit Enterprise in the summer, driving south in hot, un-air-conditioned Buicks, fussing at each other unbuckled in the back seat, eating at Howard Johnson’s, and sleeping at Holiday Inns that my parents found in a big newsprint publication that listed all of them in the U.S. They’d find a payphone and call ahead for a reservation once they knew how far we’d get or how much longer they could stand to be in the car with us. 

My mother, Barbara McCall in Alabama with pets.

In Enterprise, we walked into town in the hot Alabama sun from my grandparent’s house on Crawford Street to dust furniture at my grandfather’s store in exchange for soda money and to watch the monkey that hung around (literally) in the rafters of an adjacent feed store. My grandfather had a big, cluttered office in the back of the store that smelled of cigars. He’d take me to lunch at The Enterpriser, where I ordered shrimp cocktail and chocolate milk, both of which I like to this day.

My Mom's father, Oscar "Mac" McCall with me and my sister, Kim, at the furniture store in Enterprise.

My parents met in Northern Virginia where my siblings and I were eventually born, my father there for his first engineering job after graduating from the University of Michigan and my mother to teach high school English with a degree from William and Mary. When I was born, they lived in an apartment in Falls Church, near where my dad worked. My mom quit teaching to raise the four of us over the next thirty years, and she must have done a good job, because we all thrived. Of course, my dad had an important hand in that too, but he worked hard as an engineer, so my mother dealt with day-to-day parenting. There was a lot of it with four kids. We adored our dad, and I’ll always remember lining up on the living room couch with my siblings to watch out the window for his arrival home from work every evening, excited to see his sportscar pull into the driveway, usually in time to join us at the dining room table for a meal somehow cooked by my mother while she juggled everything else.

All of us in front of the Northern Virginia house we grew up in when we gathered to help our parents move to the Chesapeake Bay when they retired in 1996.

My dad’s companies designed equipment for the federal government, some of it classified. He rose into management, becoming the president of Scope Electronics, a company that he and friends had started in a garage. When Scope was purchased by another company, he consulted for a while and then worked for E-Systems, a descendant of the company he had first worked for (Melpar) after college, until he retired. It seems remarkable that he earned enough money to support our family comfortably, put four kids through college, and still retire with few financial worries, but those were different times.  

My parents retired in 1996 and bought a big old house (Point Breeze) on the Chesapeake Bay near Gloucester, Virginia, living there until my dad’s death. Despite the humidity and the bugs, they loved the house on the bay, even after Hurricane Isabel flooded their main floor while they waited it out in the attic, waves sloshing around in their living room, their house transformed into an island. The storm washed away the boathouse that came with the property, and they never replaced it or bought a boat, despite living on the water all those years. 

The original boathouse at Pt. Breeze, lost to Hurricane Isabel early in my parents' retirement and never rebuilt, though the dock was repaired.

Their main activities were working on the house and property and visiting with friends and neighbors. My father had a well-equipped woodshop, and he loved building things or using his tools for house projects. He played tennis avidly well into his 70s. They were both collectors, my mother of antiques and decorations, my father of tools and books. Their house was beautifully decorated (a gene I did not inherit), but drawers and closets were crammed with treasures from a thousand outings.

My parents wading in the Chesapeake Bay in front of their house.

My mother stayed on the Chesapeake for a few years after my father died despite declining health and our worries about her in such a big house by herself. She increasingly relied on her kind neighbors to help with appointments and minor emergencies. In 2022, she reluctantly moved to assisted living near my youngest sister, Emily, in Austin, Texas, where she seemed less anxious with Emily and her husband, Joe, nearby to visit and bring her treats and with regular attention from the staff at her apartment. She never really embraced Texas though, and if asked I’m sure would have said that she preferred Virginia. She spent lots of time on the phone, chatting with friends, her social life diminished to long-distance phone calls and dinner conversation in the dining room downstairs from her apartment.

I sat in our Silver City courtyard on a warm New Mexico evening a few days ago grilling chicken and roasting chili peppers that Ellen grew in her garden and felt sad that my dad never knew that I moved from Wyoming to New Mexico after all those years and that my mom was never healthy enough after we moved to visit. My dad would have loved sitting with me while I grilled, and I missed having the chance to make small talk and show them around this new place. I was lucky to make it into my 60s with both parents alive. Losing your parents when you’re my age is expected, but not without grief.

Grilling Anaheim chilis in New Mexico. My dad loved to grill as much as I do.

I get embarrassingly nostalgic when I hear Christmas songs that we grew up with. Maybe the worst (best?) are melancholy tunes from the Charlie Brown Christmas special that we gathered around the TV to watch every year. I sometimes play them on Spotify during the holidays when I’m driving around, and I think about that basement and the tree loaded with gifts, my parents coming down the stairs to see their kids hovering around the tree, thrilled with expectation. It seemed like nothing would ever change and that our parents would live forever.

My parents in Boulder, Colorado in 1997 on a rare visit to the West. 

Chiricahua Storm

Storm over the Chiricahua Mountains viewed from the New Mexico Bootheel.

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Southern New Mexico has been in drought since we moved from Wyoming over two years ago. In normal years, the Arizona monsoon brings summer storms, blocking the sun and cooling temperatures. Even then, this is a sunny place, so it's exciting when rains come as they have over the last few days thanks to two low-pressure systems that swept from the California coast across the Southwest and then into the Plains. After rain, locals check their rain gauges and send texts to each other. It can feel almost competitive.

“How much did you get??” 

“We got 0.7 inches. How about you?” 

The sunshine is nothing to complain about, especially for those of us who love the arid West. For most of us, sunny skies and expansive vistas beat the dreary gray and oppressive undergrowth of more humid places. 

Photographically, startling clear blue skies are less interesting than dramatic storms or even well-spaced summer cumuli, so I was excited last weekend while driving home from visiting friends in Bisbee, Arizona when a storm engulfed the Chiricahua Mountains of Southern Arizona. By then, we were in New Mexico’s bootheel, looking west at the mountains where the sun poked through the clouds just enough to highlight a few places in the landscape. It was spectacular, and I stopped to shoot a few photos over the barbed wire fence beside the highway. 

Roadside view. 

The big picture.

Moody version of the storm

Interior Alaska

A view from the Denali Highway.

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We spent our second night on the Denali Highway camped east of the Tangle Lakes at the edge of a large gravel pull-out. The view north across rolling tundra to the Alaska Range and southeast to the Wrangell Mountains was spectacular, and we enjoyed dinner as the sun set, watching the light change on the peaks. But just after going to bed, we heard human footsteps crunching in the gravel, approaching our unlocked van. Immediately alert, we sat up and peered into the darkness. The footsteps passed close and receded. I locked the van from the inside and moved bear spray from my daypack to a bin beside the bed, more worried about humans than bears. 

Ten minutes later a truck entered the pullout and unloaded several loud guys just far enough away that we couldn’t hear their conversation. They left and then showed up again at the far end of the pullout, piling out of their truck and milling around noisily. There was more loud discussion and more driving around. We contemplated fleeing to another camp spot, but neither of us felt like packing up and driving.

Slowly, it dawned on us that these were moose hunters looking for an overdue buddy, presumably wandering the tundra in the dark trying to find the road. A couple of days earlier, one of the few moose we’d seen in Alaska was splayed beside the highway being converted from an impressive herbivore into someone’s winter meat supply. We knew it was the start of moose season when the ruckus began but, in the unexpected anxiety of darkness and half-sleep, hadn’t put two and two together. Eventually we managed to relax and sleep before continuing to Paxson and Delta Junction the next morning.

It’s presumptuous to title a post “Interior Alaska” after driving tiny corridors through the ten or so percent of the interior that even has roads. North and east of where we traveled is the other ninety percent, a vast landscape, much of it wilderness, that I know little about. To access that deeper interior requires bush pilots, canoes, bushwacking, bear spray, and a lot of time. We had bear spray but otherwise were unprepared, so instead we visited Denali National Park, spent a few days driving the Denali Highway, and returned to the Yukon on the Top-of-the-World Highway that connects Tok to the tiny mining town of Chicken before continuing through a remote U.S.-Canadian border station west of Dawson City. 

We nailed the timing except for camping during moose season. Our route traversed a vast mountainous landscape in full fall color with almost none of the mosquitoes that Alaska is infamous for. It only frosted once or twice, though it rained often, and despite it being berry season, we never encountered grizzly bears, though we looked for them eagerly from the safety of the van and nervously while we hiked. We ate huge cinnamon rolls at Chicken just before the Chicken Creek Cafe closed for the season, and we walked through bright yellow aspens to a river where Klondike miners had toiled to dredge up gold over a hundred years ago when the Alaska outback was utterly different than it is now. The only thing we missed was wildlife, seeing almost none the whole time we were in Alaska. Moose and caribou know better than to stand beside the road in September looking like impressive trophies with their enormous racks glinting in the sun. 

This is as close as we got to a moose while in Alaska--an old skull and rack in Denali National Park.

A local denizen in Talkeetna where we stopped to walk around in the rain. In the background is the office of Talkeetna Air Taxi, the famous flying service that has shuttled climbers in and out of the Alaska Range for more than half a century.

Baked goodies at the Talkeetna Roadhouse.

Ellen hiking in the mist on the Healy Ridge, Denali National Park.

Healy Ridge, Denali National Park.

The foggy crest of Healy Ridge.

A drainage in autumn tundra near the west end of the Denali Highway.

An appealing cabin on the Denali Highway.

The Denali Highway, mostly gravel, was the route used to access Denali National Park before the Parks Highway was built. It traverses a gorgeous tundra landscape and parallels the Alaska Range.

Wood plank bridge over the Susitna River on the Denali Highway.

One of hundreds of small lakes along the Denali Highway. 

Ellen hiking from the MacLaren Summit with our friend Terry. We met Terry and her husband, Bruce, in a laundromat at Denali National Park and ran into them again on the Denali Highway. From there we leapfrogged each other all the way to the ferry at Haines. 

Patterned ground beside a tarn along our hike on the MacLaren Summit.

Lenticular clouds over the Alaska Range. I looked at the forecast for the Denali summit one day while we were in the area: 90-100 mph winds with subzero temperatures and three feet of snow. Not a great time of year for Alaskan mountaineering.

The infamous Alaska Pipeline south of Delta Junction. The pipeline carries oil from the North Slope to Valdez.

Northern lights near Chicken, Alaska. 

The Top-of-the-World Highway crosses rolling mountain ranges from Tok, Alaska to the Yukon border.

Ellen ordering cinnamon rolls at the Chicken Creek Cafe in Chicken, Alaska. Supposedly, miners wanted to name the town "Ptarmigan", but couldn't spell it, so they settled for "Chicken". These cinnamon rolls were huge and delicious.

A floating dredge viewed from a bluff above the Mosquito Fork of the Fortymile River near Chicken. These huge contraptions were used to extract gold from rivers during the gold rush.

Alaska's Southeast Coast

The view from Valdez, Alaska, the terminus of the Alaska Pipeline, with oil tankers waiting to be filled.

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When we were in Alaska this fall (2025), we dabbled with the coast, spending a few days in Valdez, Anchorage, and Seward early, and then Haines at the end of our trip before taking the Alaska Ferry south past Juneau, Sitka, Petersburg, Wrangell, and Ketchikan. The ferry stopped just long enough at Sitka and Ketchikan for us to stretch our legs (and wallets) for an hour or so. We barely touched Alaska’s 6,640 miles of coastline, and we didn’t stay anywhere long enough for more than a superficial glimpse of life in the small coastal towns. But from the perspective of someone coming from the arid Southwest, to live on Alaska’s southeast coast, you must be hardy, oblivious to rain, and tolerant of cruise ships disgorging so many passengers that they sometimes equal or outnumber the residents of the towns where they stop.

Maybe thanks to the weather, the southeast coast is gorgeous. Mountains march to the edge of the sea, and massive tidal glaciers flow into the ocean. Deep conifer forests crowd rocky shorelines where sea lions lounge. Braided rivers bring glacial silt to the fiords, and bears pluck salmon from the water, tearing off the choice meat before abandoning one and grabbing another. Fishing boats of all sizes, laden with the complicated tangle of nets and floats and ropes and booms needed to make a living catching salmon, cod, and halibut, are packed along piers in the harbors. In the evenings, fishermen lug twelve-packs of cheap beer to their boats to share with their mates. On shore, restaurants serve fish and chips, souvenir stores offer everything from t-shirts to Russian tchotskies, and groceries stock Dramamine in racks beside the check-out line. 

And it rains and rains. Seward, on the Kenai Peninsula, gets five to six feet of rain and eighty inches of snow in an average year. Farther south, Ketchikan, the “Rain Capital of Alaska,” gets thirteen feet of rain a year, the majority during the long dark winter. And if you live there, you can’t just drive to a sunnier place. Most of these towns are not accessible by road. Instead, residents must float or fly to escape. I don’t think I could manage, even with solace of the scenery. 

The day before we left Haines, I met a woman who had moved there two years before from Wilson, Wyoming, where I lived in the 1980s. In fact, she'd lived for decades just up the road from me there, though I don’t think we’d met. When I asked her why she’d moved to Haines, she lamented that, “It’s getting too hot in Jackson in the summer.” I don’t think of Wyoming as being a hot spot, but slow-motion climate migration is happening, and maybe cool and rainy beats hot and dry in the long run. 

Not surprisingly, it was stormy during our trip through the Inside Passage until we left Alaska and re-entered Canada, where the skies finally cleared. Until then, we mostly stayed inside, reading, eating, and scanning the shore through rain-streaked windows for bald eagles or the ocean for whales and orcas. On arrival in Bellingham, the Pacific Northwest, usually a rainy respite from the desert for us, was dry and sunny.

The Lowe River just before entering the Prince William Sound at Valdez on a typically cloudy day.

A fishing boat in the harbor at Valdez.

Complex (to me) piles of gear on fishing boats in Valdez Harbor.

Fireweed along the shore at Valdez.

The Columbia Glacier in retreat from Columbia Bay. We took a boat tour from Valdez to see the glacier.

Ice in Columbia Bay.

Thompson Lake, where we camped just outside of Valdez on our way to Anchorage.

Robin Moore and Ellen descending from Near Point in the Chugach Front Range back into Anchorage.

Seward, Alaska, on the Kenai Peninsula, where we spent a few rainy days.

The view of Resurrection Bay from the Lost Lake Trail above Seward. We enjoyed a rare clear day while on an overnight backpack to Lost Lake but hiked out as the next storm gathered.

Coastal mountains east of Seward viewed from the Lost Lake Trail on our hike out.

Ellen hiking towards Seward from Lost Lake.

The Bamboo Room in Haines. I imagine that bars are popular places during the long dark coastal winters. We had lunch in the adjoining restaurant, owned by the same family for generations. 

Raingear at the ready on a fishing boat in the Haines harbor.

The harbormaster's house above the Haines Harbor.

We missed the peak grizzly bear feed along the Chilcoot River at Haines, but this mother and her four cubs entertained us while we camped at a state park just upstream from here.

The view from inside the Alaska Ferry. I think the poor guy in the yellow jacket was faced with standing in the rain and wind to watch for floating logs as the boat traversed a relatively narrow passage.

A totem pole in Ketchikan.

Our friends, Terry and Bruce, and Ellen, on our last day on the ferry after it finally emerged from the clouds near Vancouver Island.