You Need a Very Big Ladder

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My eldest children, three and six, are adapting to the big city.

They marvel at the loud and steady noises. They point to the double buses with the accordion-like middles and the ones with no tops that take people on street tours.

“Hey, look at that!”

There are lion faces on the façade of an old building.

“Hey, what was that?” they ask after a sudden whoosh comes roaring out of a building behind us, like it was letting off steam or something funnier than that.

They love to listen to the orchestra that plays in the theater behind us. We heard The Nutcracker the other day.

They listen intently to the stories about where my father lived as a child and how his brother walked out on the ledge of their building, four floors up.

“That’s crazy,” they say.

In our apartment, they’ve learned to play adapted versions of their favorite games from back in the pine tree paradise, racing through rooms and down the hall yelling out, “The dragon is coming!” They have to protect the littlest one, their not-yet-crawling sister. She’s the princess, the eldest is the queen and the boy is the knight. Round and round they go, jumping, running, skidding.

Now they are putting out fires.

I wanted to ask if the dragons caused them. But there’s no time. My office is on fire.

“Dad, you have to move. Quick!” my eldest daughter blurts out.

I move aside and my son deftly puts out the fire.

Then they’re off again. And back again.

“Daddy, daddy, we need your help.”

They pull me out of my chair and pull me to the back of the apartment and point out the window to the top of a building.

“How do we get up there?” my daughter asks. “We need to put out the fire up there. Before it gets too big.”

I look out and imagine the flames and the smoke and the dragon racing away. People screaming for help. “You’ll need a very big ladder,” I tell them.

“Or a helicopter?” my daughter asks.

“Yes, that’ll do,” I tell them.

They turn to each other, like in a huddle to strategize, “You get this, I’ll get that.”

Then they’re off to fight the dragons and the fires and to protect the little princess with a very big ladder and a helicopter in the very big metropolis.

Alaska

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Don’t get me wrong. There are great things about living in the city.

I grew up in a leafy – and smoggy – suburb of Los Angeles. On trips downtown as a kid, I would marvel at the tall buildings and the mess of freeway on- and off-ramps, overpasses and underpasses. I’d soak up the mayhem of beggars, executives and low-riders, the shifts in entire cultures from one block to the next.

New York and Washington blew me away on my first visits there, when I was nine years old.

And Buenos Aires? It’s a great city.

Where we live near downtown, you can walk most anywhere. Cousins and friends are around the corner. Buses and subways take us to see other friends, in greener parts.

The big city is all very different from back in the pine forest on the beach, where winters can get lonely. You can stop in the middle of a sandy street and yell out, loudly. You’re lucky to get a dog to bark back. Residents are holed up in their homes next to the fireplace to keep warm. And hundreds of houses stand empty until summer comes again.

I remember a lonely night last winter when we still lived there. The kids were in bed and we sat down to watch Sean Penn’s “Into The Wild,” the true story of a university graduate who drops out to live in the wilderness in Alaska. Jack London’s “The Call of the Wild” kind of stuff. He hitches across the country to get there and heads off over the tundra and sets up camp. Hunts and survives.

But things go terribly wrong and your feelings of the joy of adventure suddenly sour and you come away thinking solitude isn’t that great. Family and friends are better. Hey, who fancies a trip to the city? To breath in the diesel fumes, see people, walk the bustling streets and wait in 30-minute lines at the bank, with those behind you breathing down your back, pacing and bitching.

Me.

That is, for a bit, at least.

Oh to have the best of both worlds. I guess that is an ambition of many.

Lost

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I woke up in the middle of the night last night, suddenly.

I’d dreamt that my wife and I were in the big city, as we are now after two years of living in a small coastal town, and I said, “We should have never left the beach.”

It was much like what Jack said to Kate in the fourth season of “Lost,” the television series about plane crash survivors on a mysterious island.

“We should never have left the island,” Jack said.

So it transpired in my dream that something terrible had happened in our pine tree paradise and we had to get back.

But how?