7/13 This second morning all the planning worked out. Got to an almost empty parking lot at 8.30, started with the first tour of the Cave of the Winds and got pummeled by the splashing torrents of the Bridal Veil Fall, the plastic ponchos providing little, and random, protection. Family bonding. Six-hour drive back to Newburgh. I drove all of it. Much of a trance for the last two hours. I felt as if I became one with the adaptive cruise control, and could feel the breathing of the road and the traffic in my body as it accelerated and decelerated, harvesting some electricity from the brakes.

7/12 To the Falls in the morning, although we didn’t manage to leave early enough to buck the crowds, and I didn’t find the proper parking lot at first so I made everybody walk in the intensifying heat far further than intended, and made it much more difficult for J than I had planned, way above what she’s normally capable of.

I do not have any new thought about the falls this time, they are more of a backdrop to our family story which we are trying to piece together and get hold of. As that, they work for us. We manage to walk along all the viewing spots on the American side and that will be it for the day; we hope to make it back tomorrow morning, this time really before the crowds, so we can get our few seconds in the torrents of Bridal Veil Fall. J is correct: We should care about the museums only if there’s anything in them we cannot find in Wikipedia.

It is my first anniversary of becoming a US citizen. It becomes ever more bizarre to have done it at precisely this time.

We go to the hotel pool. My son wants a swimming lesson. The intensity with which he asks, almost begs for it, is matched by the fact that I do indeed know a thing or two about swimming, the things I learned when I was his age and couldn’t be dragged out of the water. Yes, I can give instructions, yes, I can say what part of his attempts went good or bad. How odd that I can do this for swimming and almost nothing else. Swimming, such a small part of a life. Yet the few things my father taught me with even a trace of this intensity left impressions that have lasted through the decades.

7/11 Children suddenly struck by sleeping sickness. Without warning, they stay in bed until noon.

Road trip to Niagara. It is a weird kind of trance. A road trip is the unique situation in which doing nothing for 6 hours feels like an accomplishment. Doing nothing may be a higher form of being. It is only in very few places that we have achieved this higher form of being, but the road trip is one of them.

7/10 Heavy bout of depression. We can handle that, we can handle anything. Some days, all we can do, and all we need to do is remain unmoved, stay where we are. It will be alright.

7/9 What are we doing today? – First question from the kids after waking up. We are going to another one of the lakes in the area, to make sure we check all of them out. The answer seems to satisfy them at first. As we get close to the hour of actually going there, they would rather stay home. That we do, and in the evening we go to the bar where they have Paradise Burgers as we had long planned. – Music with my daughter, the first few bars of Wasting Love, Iron Maiden. A Barotrauma mission for four, which was a lot of unexpected fun. My son crashing to sleep so deeply we check for his pulse.

7/8 Finally published: An Open Letter from Closed Minds: Authors Against AI. Apart from the fact that it may be too compressed to be readable, it doesn’t seem that anybody from my circle of writers and readers particularly likes it, and that is only to be expected.

7/7 Slowly moving from spectacular vacation events into regular family life, as much as we can get of it in these four weeks.

7/6 I could have sat outside on the patio, in the backyard, inside the gazebo for hours, possibly the entire day, and do nothing but stare into the distance. We did manage to eat some left-overs for lunch and then drive to Lake Minnewaska with its tiny pebblestone beach and tiny roped off area for swimming, where we spent maybe an hour in the water and tried to lay flat on our backs so that our toes would stick out. Then back home again, back into the backyard, for s’mores. It is officially our familyversary celebration.

7/5 Bought a guitar for my daughter, and she practices with it for three hours; there is hardly any more comforting sound than hearing someone in your family play music. Evening in the backyard, in a collapsible gazebo that J found on Reddit, supposedly able to withstand winds up to 40 miles an hour, and also keeping the bugs out. It is big enough for all five of us, although we also have a free-standing hammock outside that J had found on Kickstarter. I operate the grill for the sausages, funny how clear it is that this is my task, how readily J lets me do it, even though we otherwise have few standard roles in this family.

7/4 Boscobel, Dvorak’s New World in a clear line of sight with West Point Academy, the audience scattered across the lawn as if caught between the two places, we the people just as randomly unable to live up to our presence as always. In some of the quietest moments of the symphony, cannon salutes are fired at West Point and white smoked moves across the hills, unexpected and without coordination. Later, after what is always a patience-wrecking 15-20 minutes while the last daylight fades, finally the fireworks. The crowd is quite silent, more silent in fact than during the concert. I always wonder, and fear, whether the fireworks might leave the audience underwhelmed, but fireworks always seem to find a childhood entrance into everyone’s minds. It is devastating that they have to end, and they do, after barely a few minutes. In pictures of people watching fireworks, they always seem to last forever, entire evenings at least, when in reality they are more fleeting than even rather short pieces of music.