Wines:

Location (while drinking):

Wine Allergic Girlfriend's folks place in New Hampshire (a home)

Activity (while drinking):

Dinner

Food?

Yes; Stir-fried vegetables with rice and salad.

The Scene:

W.A.G and I drove to New Hampshire to drop Stepson off for a two-week wilderness adventure camp. He'll be canoeing up the coast of Maine soon and we won't hear from him the entire two weeks. We expect that after those two weeks the person we pick up will be different than the one we drop off. Stepson is 15.

W.A.G's folks (Dad and Stepmom) live in New Hampshire, and we drove up from our home in MA a day early so Stepson could spend some time with them before embarking on his trip. We arrived with vegetables and other ingredients for dinner. W.A.G's dad lived off-the-grid in New Hampshire for many years and so it's still a shock for her to see him in a modern kitchen with electric lights and running water. He's also never been much of a cook, she claims, and so watched with a little bemusement as he gingerly chopped vegetables with a paring knife and threw them into his wok.

For Christmas, W.A.G. and I signed her dad and stepmom up for a wine club; for our dinner, they decided to open up one of those wine club bottles -- Esterlina Mario's Gran Rojo.

Over dinner, I asked the table whether any of them had gone on a trip similar to Stepson's. "Not necessarily like out in the wilderness," I clarified, "but a trip when you were totally away from your family and your friends. Away from all the patterns and stuff of your normal life." When I was 17, I left my family for 6 weeks on a backpacking trip. I'm not sure why I thought it was a good idea-- I'd never done any real outdoorsy stuff before --and even though the trip solidified my distaste for pretty much anything to do with camping, it also proved critical in terms of growing up and establishing an idea of myself. It was right around then that I started wondering about who I wanted to be in the world and what I valued and prioritized; getting to do that away from everything that had defined me up until then allowed me to come up with my own definition. I wondered if this trip was going to do that for Stepson.

W.A.G's dad talked about a trip he took with his friends to hike the entire Long Trail at 14 (14!) -- 270 miles. They gave up a couple days in and found their way to a farm where they could use the phone. They called their parents, who told them they could come get them in a couple days. The farmer allowed them to stay in exchange for work. "It was just like our parents," he said. "They couldn't, of course, just come and get us when we called," he said. Unlike Stepson's or my trip, W.A.G.'s dad's trip was completely unsupervised or even organized. The parent's not only gave the kids space to be alone and explore; they actively stayed away when the kids called them in.

Stepson sat through this whole conversation not saying much. It was hard to tell if he listened or if we were just white noise behind his teenage thoughts. The next day W.A.G. and I dropped him off in this incredibly idyllic New Hampshire field and told him we'd see him in two weeks.