Joys and Fears

Ollie meets Annabelle for the first time.

On May 13, 2020, wrinkled little Oliver Franklin Travis became the latest in a line of Travis descendants in New England that stretches back to 1634. Together we’ve produced fourteen generations of wrinkled little babies now—and weary parents too. Our son, Ben, and his wife, Liz, gifted Ollie with a middle name chosen in memory of my dad, Ben’s Papa, Lewis Franklin Travis—much as my middle name, Lewis, honors both my dad and his father too. Nods to our family’s past, acknowledgements of those we love. I was delighted by their decision, just as I was thrilled to cradle Ollie’s warm, wiggling weight in my arms. Of course, I was wearing a mask over my mouth and nose at the time—so who knows what our tiny new family member made of me. 

Ollie arrived two months after Covid-19 paralyzed the world. Schools closed overnight. Businesses shut their doors. Maybe it was dangerous to breathe in the presence of others; maybe it was dangerous to touch a doorknob. At first we didn’t know. Many of us did everything we could to protect ourselves and each other, and the rest carried on as if nothing were wrong. It took a long, frightening year for the first vaccines to emerge. By then millions had died around the world, while wearing a mask or getting a shot in this country had become a political statement.

My wife, Brenda, and I stayed connected with friends and family as best we could. For a time our daughter, Leanna, came home from medical school in Rhode Island—but then she returned to the front lines. Every few weeks my wife, Brenda, and I picked a Sunday morning and drove the two hours down from New Hampshire. After parking on the empty street outside Leanna’s apartment, we deposited a box of Brenda’s homemade goodies on her doorstep, retreated to the sidewalk, and texted her. Leanna emerged for her box and we talked, always keeping our distance. It felt reassuring; it felt painful. After we said our hug-free goodbyes, Brenda and I drove home, stopping at Ben and Liz’s on the way. I hope it helped Leanna’s state of mind. Ben and Liz sure helped ours, exempting us from Covid restrictions so long as we stayed well and wore masks. As a result, we enjoyed hands-on time with Ollie beginning with his first days home.

In many ways his presence felt even more precious because of the circumstances. I held him in my lap and made silly noises—blub, blub, blub—until I got a smile, which made me blub even more. When he tightened a tiny, dimpled finger around one of mine, it squeezed my heart. Every visit, a gift. At the same time, I wondered if he could see the worry behind my eyes, and it wasn’t only because of Covid. I couldn’t help asking myself what sort of world this beautiful baby of ours would grow into.

Human emissions have warmed the planet so much so fast that life won’t be the same when Oliver reaches my age, or even Ben’s. Already climate change has caused devastating storms, droughts, wildfires, and rising sea levels. We are sheltered from these extremes where we live, but our climate is changing too, in ways big and small. Here’s one example: old-time winters here were cold enough to keep the tick population and the diseases they carry in check, but no more. Snow doesn’t fall as it once did, and temperatures don’t drop as they once did either. Today Brenda doesn’t dare weed the garden without bundling in clothes sprayed with repellent. Every so often I still find a tiny tick in her lovely white hair, lost on its way to her skin.

Climate change would be enough, but there are some who fear that our latest breakthrough—artificial intelligence—may someday yield computers so smart that they turn against us. Who could blame them? Our many spectacular achievements have made life so much easier, but at the same time we’ve lost confidence in a better future. Though social media connects us as never before, too many feel alone and unrecognized. Fear and the anger it fosters have led millions to arm themselves with military assault rifles, the weapon of choice in acts of violence inflicted on the innocent by the troubled. Common sense and shared purpose have been swallowed by ideology and mistrust. The worst among us make the most of it. Perhaps we hit bottom on January 6, 2021, when a mob fueled by President Trump’s lies of a stolen election invaded the U.S. Capitol. We’ll see. 

As I write these words we’re in 2023. Oliver is three years old, and Covid, climate change, and Donald Trump are all still with us. But life goes on. In Canterbury, the small town where we live, people are once again looking for reasons to come together rather than stay apart, and community spirit is rising. It feels great to be part of that—to belong again, in the company of friends and neighbors. 

Covid’s grip has loosened, too. Annabelle Lynn Travis, Ollie’s sister and our second grandchild, arrived on December 7, 2022. (1) When Ollie was born, Covid restrictions were so tight that the doula Ben and Liz hired to coach them through delivery wasn’t allowed in the hospital. But on the evening after Annabelle’s birth, there we were, inside Ben and Liz’s room—and there was Annabelle. Ollie climbed onto the couch between his mom and dad. They put a pillow on his lap, then laid Annabelle atop it. Liz put an arm around Ollie’s shoulders. “A little tiny baby!” he said, hands at his ears, hesitant to touch her. “Do you want to give her a kiss?” Ben asked. “Yeah!” he said, leaning forward to smooch her swaddled belly. Among the many more gifts Ben and Liz have given Ollie is the capacity to name emotions. “Oh no!” he said when she began to cry, hungry again. “She’s sad!” When I cradle Annabelle’s warm, wiggling weight in my arms, she sees my smile, my bald head, and my graying beard in all their glory—and in her smile back I see a second miracle.

It’s glorious, an experience beyond words. Still, I can’t wish away my anxiety. I don’t know where our family’s story, our country’s story, or the world’s story will carry us from here. So much has already gone wrong; so much more could. The stakes in this moment are so very high. I cannot see the future, never mind control it. 

So what am I to do?

For now, at least, two things that come naturally to me. First, to look to the past. Our family’s past. I’ve always loved history. In the stories of those who came before us, I find perspective.

Second, to write. To tell stories. In research and reflection and sharing what I learn, I find joy. Over what’s now several years of work, with more ahead, I’ve come to feel much closer to our ancestors. Together, we form the braided cord of life from which these stories take their title, a cord stretching from generations past to our present and, in time, beyond. I've come to believe that none of us walks alone. Our ancestors have a lot to teach us, much of it about the pain, uncertainties, and challenges life brings. 

Our earliest Travis mom, Bridgett, got caught doing something she shouldn’t have with a man who wasn’t her husband in a time when that was everyone’s business. They ended up in court on trial together because of it. Henry, our first Travis dad, sailed back to England two years later for reasons unknown. He never returned. That’s my dad’s side of the family, and there we start with a broken marriage. On my mom’s side of the family, our first Fairbanks dad, Jonathan, wrestled with questions of faith in a Puritan culture defined by a belief that there was only one right way to worship God. Winning full acceptance in that culture required him to bare his soul to neighbors, and for years, he held back. Today, he’s better remembered than any of those who judged him. The Fairbanks Homestead, where Jonathan and his family lived, is now the oldest surviving timber-frame house in North America. Imagine that! It’s a swaybacked, weathered old gingerbread house of a museum, open for tours. Our oldest family heirloom.

Beginning with the second generation, our family endured a century of winner-take-all violence—a struggle for survival, awash in suffering. Our ancestors lived and died in battle with Nipmuc, Wampanoag, and Nashaway families whose lands they occupied and whose ways they threatened. Seven family members perished in these clashes. One may have saved his town. Another enslaved an Indian girl. Still another was taken captive. Violence remained a fact of family life, flaring and fading, touching five generations, until the children of the children of the children of the first conflict—and their children too—grew up to fight in the American Revolution, risking their lives for independence. 

These revolutionaries were farmers, just like those who came before and those who followed for many generations more. In fact, for most of our time in New England, our ancestors worked the land. Their calloused hands were much stronger than mine, and their struggles much greater. Farming is backbreaking work here in rocky New England and the rewards are poor. And yet, as better farmland and greater opportunities drew many family members west, our direct ancestors never left this place. They did whatever else they could to get by: making shoes and wagon wheels, blacksmithing, carpentry, running cider and sawmills, renting spare rooms to tourists. 

As the region industrialized, our ancestors changed with it, migrating from fields to factories to the office, moving as they did from the country to the city to the suburbs, where I grew up. I am a child of the twelfth generation, and the first whose lives were not touched by need. Think about that for a moment. How fortunate we are. But our years of plenty did not free us from suffering. My mother lived a life of inner turmoil, my father a life of inner contentment, yet both ended their lives by suicide. 

Despite all this time and all these trials, our family story here now stretches nearly 400 years. Historically speaking, my immediate family represents all who never left. Even within my generation, I’m the outlier—more closely bound to New England than my siblings. Brenda and I live on the edge of the woods in Canterbury, New Hampshire. My brother Michael, his wife. Ivy, and their family found their home in Kansas, brother Philip and his wife, Susan Hoyt, on an island outside Seattle, and sister Rebecca only recently returned from Florida to Massachusetts. Our children, Ben and Leanna, and Michael and Ivy’s, Katie and Meaghan, are members of the thirteenth generation. Their kids—Oliver and Annabelle, Jude, Luna, and Jonah—form the fourteenth. (So far!) In one way or another, every one of us adds our own chapter to the story. (2)

I’m writing this story for those grandkids and their cousins, who I love, and for the great-grandkids I’ll never know. But I believe it has something to offer us all—perhaps most helpfully the fact we have overcome difficult times in the past. That bolsters my belief that we can do so again. Knowing this helps me write from a spirit of hope, while recognizing that my grandchildren will someday step into a changing and challenging world, and that my hands will no longer be there to hold theirs. There is nothing new in this. It’s the way of all living things.

For any of us, past, present, and future, there is only making the most of the life and the opportunities we are given while doing what we can to shoulder the burdens that come with them, knowing the choices we make will frame the opportunities and determine the burdens of those who follow. To the next generations I can say this: I trust that you will do your best, just as I believe those who came before us did. I know you will make mistakes, as we all have, but I choose to hope that you will help to shape a better world. Along with love, hope is everything. Embodied in the young—in you—hope persists, no matter what. If it didn’t, our braided cord would have come to an end long ago. It’s pretty much as simple as that.

Okay. With that said, I think it’s time to hang out with our family. We’ll start where all great stories do, at the beginning.

(What now? You can jump to the top of this page, go to the full story index—or read the next story!)

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Footnotes

1. That's Lynn as in Linda, for Liz's mom, who died of cancer before she should hold her fifth grandchild—and her first granddaughter—in her arms. [Jump back]

2. The threads of our braided cord are many, and they’re elastic. My mom’s cousin, Hilda Berlinguette, lives outside Seattle with her husband, Roger. One of their sons, David, and his wife, Leilani, live nearby. Another son, Steve, has long lived abroad, and their grandson, Oscar, is in Portugal. My mom’s sister, Lucy Lawlor, lives in New Hampshire—remarkably enough!—and her three children, Sheila, Chris, and Kevin, and their children, Owen, Fiadh, and another Annabelle, are in Maine. They’re persistent New Englanders too. One Travis cousin, Scott, lives in Florida and his sister, Amy, lives on Cape Cod, along with her daughter Amanda. My stepbrothers, John Travis and Mark Uebel, are Floridians too. [Jump back]