For Holly Lucas, the Journey Was the Joy

Holly Lucas, who sang, hiked, biked, snorkeled, canoed, sailed, stargazed, rafted, hang glided, rode horseback and kayaked her way from Alaska to Nova Scotia, from California’s Muir Woods to North Carolina’s Outer Banks, from Texas’ Big Bend to the Appalachian Trail, and from Maine’s Cadillac Mountain to Caribbean coral reefs, died on July 16, 2023. She was 88.

She is survived by her children, Charlotte-Anne Lucas and her husband, Bill Waldrop; Kevin Lucas and his wife, Mary Giovanini; Wendy Lucas and her husband, Jason Weatherbee; Amélie Harris-McGeehan, the daughter Holly added to the family; her sister-in-law Kitty Franklin and her husband Henry; her brother-in-law David Lucas and his wife Kathy; 10 nieces and nephews; 9 grand nieces and nephews and 4 great-grand nieces and nephews.

Born Charlotte Katherine Salter on May 26, 1935 in Staten Island, N.Y., she was the fourth of five children of Dwight William Salter and Lucia Katherine Hopkins Salter. 

She was named after her grandmother, Charlotte Hopkins, a New York City suffragette who regularly marched and demonstrated for women’s voting rights.

When her younger brother, David, then a toddler, mispronounced Charlotte in a way that sounded like “Holly,” she adopted the nickname and stuck with it for life.

Holly’s lineage goes back to the Hopkins family who crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower, and added a child named Oceanus on the voyage. Although her ancestry qualified her for membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution, Holly eschewed that. She preferred to rail against the patriarchy that unfairly funneled family wealth to first born males, including her mother’s brother, who was given the Hopkins estate on Long Island and passed it down to his son.

She was nearly a genius. “My consistent IQ of 147 was enough (for New York City public schools) to send me to a special school which had a special class, challenging me,” she wrote in an email. 

But the inequity of the patriarchy weighed in when Holly set her sights on college. Her father paid tuition for Holly’s brother, Paul, who was a year older, to attend Cornell University.

When her time came, her father, an austere Princeton University graduate with a puritanical outlook, would not contribute a dime and tried to discourage her. “Girls do not need to go to college,” she said he told her. 

Holly enrolled in Hunter College, got a scholarship and paid her expenses by working part-time as a dietician at the posh Stouffer’s Restaurant in New York City.

She was 18 in 1953, and had barely completed two semesters at Hunter when she agreed to marry Joseph Lucas, the man she affectionately called “The Love of My Life.”

The two met at Camp Hope, “an outdoor ministry of the Moravian Church,” with a lake, wetlands, woods and fields on 125-acres in northwestern New Jersey. Besides the exhilarating outdoors, Holly recalled in an email decades later, Camp Hope “was the first time I had consistently wonderful food at every meal.” 

Holly and Joe’s dates could be adventures. In the pre-dawn hours of Jan. 1, 1953, with Joe at the wheel, the two took off into a snowstorm to try and catch sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean on the Jersey shore. They made it as far as Pakim Pond in the Jersey Pine Barrens, and at 7 a.m., Joe took one of his most beloved photos. For decades, Holly used prints of the snow-blanketed Pakim Pond as Christmas cards. 

Right before Christmas, they planned to elope to nearby Elkton, Md.  Joe was in Jersey on leave from Biggs Air Force Base in El Paso, and he didn’t have much time, recalled his sister, Kitty.  But his cousin, Eleanor Lucas, talked the couple into a church wedding to be held just days later, on Sunday, Dec. 20, 1953.

Holly wore the wedding gown that Joe’s cousin, Wanda Hoelz, had had just been married in, and she wore the veil that another cousin, Dom Lucas, wore when she married Eleanor’s son, Emerson. The dress fit perfectly.

The Moravian Church in Joe’s hometown of Riverside, New Jersey was all dressed up for Christmas with Moravian Stars, holly boughs and dozens of red poinsettia plants when Holly and Joe were married there.

Her brother, Paul Salter, was best man, and his sister, Kitty Lucas, was maid of honor. Using a long, threaded shutter release cable on his camera so he could be in front of the lens, Joe took an album full of portraits of the bride and groom and their family. 

One of the reasons she married Joe, Holly often said, was because “he was from a family of huggers, and I was not.” With the Lucas clan as enthusiastic tutors, Holly would practice and hone the fine art of hugging for the rest of her life.

In El Paso, Holly and Joe lived in a yellow and silver, 37-foot-long “Chapparel” house trailer with jalousie windows. They repurposed a bureau drawer as an infant bed to accommodate the arrival of their first child, Charlotte-Anne, in November, 1955. In an email 50 years later, Holly would recall how much she enjoyed living in El Paso. “The dryness … was part of what I loved, and the constant sun made me feel really great,” she wrote. The Texas sunshine was an antidote for SAD, or Seasonal Affective Disorder, which would afflict her for the rest of her life.

When Joe’s hitch was up in 1956, he pulled the house trailer home to Southern New Jersey behind a 1946 Dodge coupe packed with his mother, his 10-year-old brother, David, Holly and the baby. 

The expedition was a prelude of Holly and Joe’s lives to come. As David recalls, the trip included stops at the Painted Desert in Arizona, the Grand Canyon, Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, New Orleans City Park, Bellingrath Gardens near Mobile, Alabama  and Salem, North Carolina for the Moravian Church’s legendary Easter Sunrise service. They got back to New Jersey in the nick of time for Joe to give his sister, Kitty, away at her wedding to Henry Franklin on April 14, 1956.

Roots Down in Jersey

The house trailer, with Holly, Joe and Charlotte-Anne, rolled into a “Mobile Home Park” near the Garden State Racetrack in Delaware Township, which later changed its name to Cherry Hill.

As soon as she turned 21 in 1956, the granddaughter of a suffragette went to register to vote. But Holly was turned away. She never forgot the registrar’s words as he pointed to her address in a “trailer park:” “We don’t let transients vote here.”

Holly and Joe and their toddler became regulars at Pakim Pond and Lake Oswego, places in the New Jersey Pine Barrens with picnic areas built by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).

They joined a host of family members for annual picnic traditions to enjoy the autumn leaves in Childs State Park near the Delaware Water Gap and Washington’s Crossing Park. 

On Aug. 11, 1959, Holly and Joe traded in the trailer for a mortgage on a Cape Cod-style house in the Evergreen Park, an all-White subdivision in Woodbury N.J.  The young mother scandalized her suburban neighbors by wearing her hair in a ponytail, wearing pedal pushers and sneakers, riding a bicycle and declining to participate in coffee klatches with the stay-at-home moms. 

In Woodbury, Holly registered to vote and quickly became a card-carrying member of the local chapter of the League of Women Voters. She brought her young daughter to every League meeting and into the voting booth whenever she cast a ballot.

Through the childcare leader at the Camden YWCA where she swam laps, Holly learned of the nascent fellowship of Unitarians in nearby Merchantville. Soon, she and Joe became members of what is now the Unitarian Universalist Church of Cherry Hill.

Holly recalled that the Rev. Edwin Lane’s sermons were a lot like the best college lectures. His preaching from 1958 to 1967 was an exhortation to activism for civil rights and against the Vietnam War.

Asked on the 50th anniversary if she recalled the 1960 Woolworth lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, N.C. that lasted five months,  Holly said, “Oh yes, I remember! Ed Lane went down to join in the sit-in protests and I was pissed because I couldn’t go. I had to stay home because of the kids.” Charlotte-Anne was almost five and Holly was pregnant with her second child.

Camping With Children

For nearly two years, Holly worked full time in the corporate library of RCA, the same company where Joe worked as a technician. She later said she loved “doing her own thing” and being respected and compensated as a professional. Joe wanted more children, so they had two more in quick succession.

Wendy was born Feb. 17, 1961 at Underwood Hospital in Woodbury. Kevin was born 14 months later, on April 14, 1962. At a time when many women demurred to doctors, Holly was an outspoken advocate for herself. She said she chose to deliver Kevin at Cooper Hospital in Camden because it was the only place that would allow her to stay awake and experience his birth. “They even had mirrors so I could watch,” she recalled with a smile.

Holly and Joe’s love affair with nature was undaunted by having two toddlers in cloth diapers.

With Charlotte-Anne, they had already explored Acadia National Park in Maine, Sunrise Mountain on the Appalachian Trail and lived through a black bear scare camping  in the Great Smoky Mountains. They gamely managed to take the whole flock on tent-camping vacations for a few weeks each summer in parks from New York’s Lake George and Watkins Glen to Elk Neck State Park in Maryland and as far south as Bahia Honda State Park in the Florida keys.

In between, Holly and the family would go “down the Pines” nearly every weekend. Often they stayed after dark, waiting until they heard the evening song of the Eastern whip-poor-wills in the trees.

“We, the whole family, were members of the Outdoor Club of South Jersey way back when… for something like eons, at least from about 1958 thru 1970,” Holly wrote in a 2015 email. “Canoed, hiked, lots of good memories.”

Long before she got her degree in Library Science, Holly was her own reference desk. She collected, then dog-eared and annotated books to identify everything from birds and wildflowers to amphibians and rocks. No trip to a national or state park was complete until the entire brood had attended at least one educational ranger talk, preferably three. 

When Eull Gibbons’ book, Stalking the Wild Asparagus was published, Holly took it to heart. Camping trips became even more interesting as she sought edible plants next to woodland trails and behind sand dunes. Dishes like Sea Oat Salad soon graced the picnic table.

Recipes for Life

Holly was a disciplined scholar of cooking who used a typewriter to document and source recipes on 3×5 index cards. She filed the recipes with alphabetical dividers, just like a library card catalog. To protect the recipes from spatters, she stapled each one with glassine covers recycled from the library.

Other family members wanted to replicate the legendary pumpkin pie made by Joe’s Aunt Dot Thaidigsmann. But the pie’s ingredients were unfettered by the confines of a recipe. So Holly went to work. She stood at Dot’s elbow and measured and documented everything as it went in – starting with a Hubbard Squash – then immortalized the process on an index card. 

Holly’s Gingerbread House recipe, which originated in the New York Times, is a three-index card masterpiece that includes diagrams with measurements for cutting the walls, windows, front door, roof and chimney, along with this helpful handwritten note: “*May need to prop up house, inside & out with toy blocks overnight ‘till frosting dries.”

Holly seemed to ace the parenthood test. 

She sang. She was always on key. She sang acapella lullabies when the children were little, and instigated a small, but enthusiastic version of the von Trapp family , encouraging her children to sing along with LP records to learn every word and every note of musicals from Brigadoon and the Sound of Music to Camelot, Porgy and Bess and West Side Story.

She ferried the children to piano, ballet and swimming lessons and made sure they practiced. She organized field trips to the local candy factory and to the Woodbury Daily Times newspaper. She and Joe made sure the children knew how to properly care for their guinea pigs, bunnies, turtles, guppies and dogs, and she taught them the difference between Sassafras (edible) and Skunk Cabbage (inedible & smelly).

She made remarkable confections, including a cake shaped like a castle for a birthday party for Wendy and her cousin, Linda.

The annual Perseid Meteor Shower might well have been the Fourth of July for all of Holly’s cheerful determination and planning to get everyone awake and outside to look up and watch the predawn sky show. When it was hot in the summer, she drove the children into nearby Philly so they could frolic in the fountains in front of the Philadelphia Art Museum.

She could be a highbrow. She made sure her children knew the difference between van Gogh, Miro and Monet, in the Philadelphia Art Museum’s permanent collection. She also impressed upon them that the real museums and culture were to be found in The City, spelled with a capital T and capital C.

She was also genuinely down to earth. Although Woodbury was a stop on the Underground Railroad, the schools remained segregated until the fall of 1964, when the Black students who had attended the Carpenter Street school were assigned to go to the schools that formerly had only White students. Holly befriended Charlene Green, the mother of Jeffrey and Johnny, two of the Carpenter Street students who bicycled to Evergreen Avenue Elementary School and became Charlotte-Anne’s classmates. 

Looking back on that time 60 years later, Jeffrey Green said Charlene’s and Holly’s open and honest friendship and sincere delight in each other’s company became a positive model of “normal” for their children, an attitude that rubbed off on the children’s elementary school classmates and their teachers.

“Those women were crusaders,” he said. “We just followed along.” 

Career

But Holly burned to get back to school and launch her career. It wasn’t so much about the money.  They were comfortably in the middle class, with Joe earning $13,000 a year at RCA (equivalent to $126,100 in 2023), an amount that was the same as the mortgage on their house. She had just turned 30 and her ambitions were on hold, bursting to get out. As she matter-of-factly told her firstborn much later, “Having kids really got in the way of my career.” 

From 1965 to 1968, over the course of five semesters, she took seven evening courses at Rutgers University in Camden, according to her transcripts. Charlotte-Anne, then 10, was enlisted to get dinner on the table for the family when Holly was in school. 

In the summers of 1967 and 1968, Holly earned money for tuition and fees by working full time as a lifeguard at a South Jersey playground and children’s resort known as Soupy Island while her oldest babysat the younger two on the grounds of the park. 

In the fall of 1968, just as Kevin entered first grade, Holly enrolled full-time at Rutgers University in Camden. Most days she left the house before breakfast and stayed at school studying until the university library closed at 10 p.m. On June 4, 1969, at a ceremony that began at 6 p.m., Holly graduated from Rutgers University, cum laude.

Holly and Joe celebrated her graduation and her return to the family by going on a second honeymoon for a couple weeks that summer, vacationing without the kids for a change. To the surprise of no one, they chose to go backpacking on the Appalachian Trail.

Holly immediately returned to school, attending Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia with the same rigor she had applied to Rutgers, staying at school 10 or more hours a day. Charlotte-Anne became a better meal planner and cook with help from her Aunt Kitty and Betty Crocker. In June of 1971, Holly earned a master’s degree in Library Science from Drexel, again graduating cum laude.

Holly was quickly hired by University of Pennsylvania as a librarian with faculty status, first as head of the library of the Moore School of Electrical Engineering. With her tacit approval, a sign went up on the wall in one area that said, “No Silence.”

Before the Internet and Google, Holly and other academic librarians were an essential resource and partner for journalists researching issues including public health and diseases. For years afterward, Holly would reflect on the call she got in 1981 from a reporter from the Miami Herald when she was on the Reference Desk at the University of Pennsylvania Biomedical Library. “What is acquired immunodeficiency syndrome?” the reporter asked. It was new to her, and Holly learned even as she helped the reporter with information about the disease – AIDS – that would become a tragic global epidemic.

Holly, who first used an IBM mainframe computer at Drexel in 1969, was an information technology pioneer. She put Penn’s Biomedical Library on the World Wide Web in 1993, not long after Tim Berners-Lee created the first website.

“The Biomedical Library was the first library to be on the Web,” recalled Carlos Rodriguez, one of Holly’s coworkers. “We got the first Web page up.”

Pleased with her scoop, Holly called Charlotte-Anne, who at the time was confined to a “dumb” computer terminal in the San Francisco Examiner newsroom. “When are you coming to the Internet?” she asked.

She was proud of her ability to solve tech problems, and open about where it came from. “I figured it out, that is, I dug up the manual* and looked it up,” she wrote in an email explaining how she changed the date on the home computer. She added the footnote: “*Neither Dad nor (his best friend) Scot have even opened the manual. Different strokes for different folks.”

The Journey

While her career was rewarding, it was also a means to two ends: her children got discounted tuition at Penn and elsewhere, and camping vacations got more amazing.

In June, 1975, with two canoes tied to the top of their 1973 Dodge van and a tent-top Apache Camper hitched to the back of the van, Holly, Joe, all three kids and a boyfriend drove across the country, stopping at the Badlands National Park, the Wisconsin Dells, Yellowstone National Park and Grand Tetons National Park on the way West.

They only camped in a commercial space once: in Daly City while Holly attended a convention of Special Librarians in San Francisco.

On the way back to New Jersey, the adventures included  Yosemite National Park, the Giant Sequoias at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park, the Great Salt Lake and the Grand Canyon.

From coast to coast, Joe took extraordinary photos and Holly went on hikes with breathtaking views.

On Sept. 1, 1976, Holly sent a postcard from Nova Scotia, Canada: “The vacation’s been wonderful – sort of like Maine, but less filled up – lots of desolate and rugged and magnificent shores, people with extraordinarily varied accents, speaking Gaelic, Acadian French, Old English like we heard on the Outer Banks, Scotch, New England, some Canadian, US, and European. Not too many people any place. Not too many restrictions, no “Private Keep Off” signs, very little commercialization. All in all it’s perfect for us.”

 

In 1978, for their 25th wedding anniversary, the kids sent Holly and Joe to the Caribbean for a Windjammer Cruise on the Schooner Harvey Gamage.

Holly and Joe learned to sail, watched delicious meals being made at sea, and they soaked in the scenery. (see the Harvey Gamage’s recent mission here).

Afterwards, they went camping for a week on the Island of St. John and explored the Virgin Islands Coral Reef National Monument.

Joe (of course) brought underwater photography gear and Holly (of course) brought an underwater fish identification book.

On New Year’s Day, 1981, Holly sent a postcard from Tampa, Florida. They were in search of a Giant Banyan Tree. All three children were off on their own by then. “It’s neat now, with just 2 of us in the van,” she wrote. “Leave for Everglades & Keys tomorrow.”

In May 1981, Holly, Joe and Kevin went hang gliding in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, an achievement Holly would later add to her resumé.

The adventure was not without its challenges, she recalled 40 years later.

“We decided I should not do it again because I don’t know my right from my left,” she said with a sheepish grin.

 

Waystations

The further her children moved from Jersey, the better Holly liked it. The kids and other relatives became destinations and whistle-stops on her incredible journey.

In October 1982, just a year after Charlotte-Anne moved to Dallas, Holly and Joe stopped in to see her on their way to Big Bend. She brought “A Field Guide to the Birds of Texas,” inscribing it, “To Char, With love, Mom.” For herself, Holly had bought “Wildflowers of the Big Bend Country Texas,” she soon annotated it with dates and the names of plants she’d seen: Purple Ceniza, White Apache Plume, Texas Virgin’s Bower, Bush Anisacanth, Golden Crownboard, Louisiana Broom Rope and Mountain Mahogany.

For the next couple of years, Holly and Joe plunged into a professional partnership. They went to the Oshkosh Air Show in Wisconsin, and regional balloon festivals and fly-ins where he took aviation portraits – some air-to-air – and she wrote magazine articles under the nom de plume Holly Hopkins. Holly explored getting another master’s degree in business, and they framed and sold prints of his work. 

In 1984, Holly helped Joe get what would become his most sought-after photograph: Boathouse Row in Philadelphia. 

Nearly 40 later, she still remembered the exact spot where she helped him get his tripod and camera on the roof of the van late one night: it was a no-parking pullover on Martin Luther King Drive near the Fairmont Fish ladder.

When the right kind of snow fell in Jersey, the kind of snow that sticks to trees then sparkles in the morning sun, Holly and Joe headed straight for the pines to capture the moment before it melted.

They were more properly outfitted than they had been at Pakim Pond 36 years earlier, but no less in love with where they were and who they were with. 

Wherever she went, Holly was the Johnny Appleseed of walking. She believed, and occasionally proved, that walking could cure almost anything.

In 1985, when doctors told Joe’s mother, Anna, that she would never walk again after a stroke, Holly set out to prove them wrong. She went to the rehab facility in Cinnaminson, N.J. almost daily and worked with the children’s “Gram” to help her walk on her own again.

On their next road trip, Holly and Joe took Kevin and Gram along.

Gram danced and celebrated at Charlotte-Anne and Bill Waldrop’s wedding in Dallas on New Year’s Eve, 1986.

Then the Lucas van headed south to Big Bend National Park.

There, Joe took a spectacular portrait of his mother, mountains in the background, Joe’s tall walking stick in her right hand, her left hand flipping the third finger to the doctors who’d said she would never walk again.

The trip was breathtaking in other ways, as Holly recalled in an email to Kevin 25 years later: “And then there was that fantastic mountain in Big Bend we climbed with the full moon giving us plenty of light…  I recall hearing so many sounds I’d never heard…  Let’s see, ‘The moon doth shine as bright as day...’ “

In 1987, Holly and Joe headed for the Northwest. “Had a neat (52nd) birthday on this beach,” Holly wrote on a May 26 postcard from Shi Shi Beach in Olympic National Park. They saw the Hoh Rainforest for the first time. “300-foot tall Sitka Spruce Trees, Amazing!” Joe wrote on the same postcard. They headed to Wyoming, where Holly wrote that “Grand Teton National Park was WONDERFUL & weather great.”

Charlotte-Anne and Bill heard a knock on the door of their Phoenix home a few nights later. It was Holly and Joe.  “Can we do some laundry here and take a shower?” Holly asked. “We’re on our way to the Grand Canyon.”

In 1992, when Charlotte-Anne and Bill lived near San Francisco, Holly and Joe showed up to stay a few days. They were armed with a Golden Eagle Pass good for all national parks and monuments.

The four spent a glorious day at the Muir Woods National Monument  and another day at the Point Reyes National Seashore before Holly and Joe headed south for a reunion with Yosemite National Park: “Wonderful 3 days – AWESOME … We climbed Vernal Falls then up Yosemite Falls. Wow… I didn’t hike anywhere near what I’d like to have,” Holly wrote on June 20.

Then on a card postmarked June 26 in Boulder Utah, she wrote: “Awe-inspiring scenery, Many places where you can see forever and see & hear no sign of humans. Starry skies that I’ve only seen out here in the middle of nowhere, far, far away from city (or town) lights. If I could figure it out financially, could/should we move?”

And on June 27: “We’re in a section of Canyonlands National Park called Island in the Sky. A high mesa with overwhelming vistas of almost incomprehensible dimensions.”

On July 2, 1992 they arrived in Coaldale, Colorado, on the Arkansas River a few miles upstream from Royal Gorge.

There they got the ride of a lifetime with their son, Kevin, at the helm: “Kevin took us white white water rafting – it was great fun! We swam a rapid, too – wow! We plan to leave for home Thursday a.m.”  

In 1971, Joe and Kevin helped build a cabin in Maine for his cousin Wanda and her husband, Richard.

Maine had always been a favorite destination for Holly and Joe, but it beckoned even more with the cabin as a stopover.  “The cabin’s neat. You all did a good job,” Holly wrote in a postcard to Kevin in  1984. “Shall we all take our fall trip to see the leaves, to Maine? End of September?” 

“Had a great week (at the cabin).  We’re on our way to the coast & then home tomorrow,” she wrote in another postcard.  In 1994, Holly sent a postcard from Thunder Hole in Acadia National Park, one of their all-time favorite places: “Hi! Great weather, hikes, biking, birds, scenery, etc. Biked down Cadillac Mt. – loved it. Biked around Eagle Lake on one of Rockefella’s Carriage Roads. Hiked across (& back) the Bar to Bar Island at low tide. Did more trails than I’d expected and enough mountains to satisfy me! Dad saw whales; we both saw seals & porpoises, eagles, loons, etc., etc” 

When they went to Kitty’s home in South Carolina for Thanksgiving dinner in 1994, there was no rest for the carbohydrates. Her postcard was full of motion: “Joe, Dick and I canoed down the Waccamaw to Lees’ Landing Saturday. 2 1/2 hour trip even though we stopped to watch a big ole Pileated Woodpecker show off for me. I had heard one call early Sat. when I’d biked the logging roads back beyond Kitty’s. Were you there when we heard the Barred Owl call?”

Holly and Joe’s trip to Charlotte-Anne and Bill’s home in San Antonio for Christmas in 1995  was the last one they had to rush home from, after, of course, stopping at the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge to see the wintering Whooping Cranes.

Holly retired from Penn in 1996.  She said she had a single goal: Alaska.

Conveniently, she and Joe had a son there. Kevin, the only child with his mother’s clear blue eyes, was a genuine expert in the outdoors she loved so much. A graduate of National Outdoor Leadership School, who studied Environmental Studies and Outdoor Leadership at Prescott College, Kevin went to Alaska in 1989 to help out after the oil tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground and decided to stay awhile.

He was in Haines, Alaska, a 3,700-mile drive from Woodbury, N.J. 

So they went. This time the Winnebago had a canoe on top and and a motorcycle racked on the back.  

“Hi,” said her postcard depicting Glacier National Park on Aug. 5, 1996. “Got to Kevin’s this morning. Card is no exaggeration – glorious. I’ve been on a Rocky Mt. high for weeks. On the road, meandering across or munching by road have been Dahl sheep, mt. goats, deer, elk, Caribou and even a buffalo! And the mountain meadows full of flowers are wondrous…”

Another postcard came from Haines in early September: “The picture (of the Eldred Rock Lighthouse) captures much of what I find so beautiful here – rocks, forests, mountains, snow, glaciers, shores and the fiord (Lynn Canal). There’s just a hint of the mountains behind the mountains ‘…they seem to go on forever …’ Joe and Kevin are installing the hard drive. I’m deep into (the book) Women Who Run With the Wolves… Ah computers…I prefer hiking.”

Holly and Joe hiked mountains and glaciers, soaked in hot mineral water springs and documented the amazing moments.

From Liard Hotsprings, on the Alaskan Highway Holly wrote: “Wish you all…could have been here with us in these wonderful hot springs Friday, Sept. 20…” 

“Wait til you see the picture Joe took for our book/articles – Big Horn Sheep happily grazing inside the fenced-in pool area” of a radium mineral pool in British Columbia.

On a postcard from Jasper National Park – Columbia Icefields, Holly wrote: “woke Thurs. 9/26/96 am to snow covered RV…It was fun, beautiful, satisfying and convenient.”

On Oct. 10, Holly’s sent a postcard of the Aurora Borealis. She had seen the Northern Lights, she later said, out of the back window of the RV while they were in Alaska. The card was postmarked Moose, Wyoming. “We’re in Yellowstone. It’s been great…Apparently, there’s a resident herd of buffalo around Old Faithful and a resident laruim (herd of Elk) around Mammoth Hot Springs. 1988 fire devastation & regrowth is fascinating…Leaving Yellowstone Wed. AM South to Big Tits” (Tetons).

Holly’s postcard on Oct. 12 featured the Athabasca Glacier, Columbia Icefied in Canada’s Jasper National Park in the Canadian Rockies. But Canada was in the rear view mirror. “We’re at a very nice rest area in walking/biking distance from nice small town of Pine Bluffs, Wyoming … Feels like I’ve worn shorts since we got back to the lower 48 – in October – in mountains – it’s been beautiful. Think I’ll go on the nature walk, then mail these (postcards).” 

They headed down to San Antonio and stayed a while before going to Oklahoma to see Aunt Dot, and then to New Jersey.

In 1999, they took off in the RV for another long jaunt, stopping in San Antonio on the way down to Big Bend again. Holly was armed with new books to learn more. “The Big Bend, A History of the Last Texas Frontier,” and “Roadside Geology of Texas,” bear her annotations and notes from the trip. They stopped again in San Antonio for Thanksgiving before heading north.

They stopped on the way home in the Tallgrass Prairie Reserve. “I did hike the trails, and from some places, was able to look out over miles and miles of land that was the way it was ‘before the white man came.’ The bison herd added to my sense of how the early settlers may have felt,” she wrote in a letter to Aunt Dot. But after one rainy week home in Jersey, she wrote, “I miss the sunshine and hot weather.”

In 2000, Holly and Joe came to San Antonio for Christmas and stayed nine months, while discussing the notion of moving in with Charlotte-Anne and Bill permanently.

They settled the big RV into a level spot in the yard, and connected it to water, electricity and the Internet. They opened an account at the local credit union. 

Holly made friends with three delightful Master Gardeners and volunteered at the Children’s Garden at the San Antonio Botanical Garden.

They made side trips to Big Bend and to the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on the Gulf Coast. And Holly and Griz hiked every day.

In 2003, Holly and Joe met up with Kevin and Mary Giovanini at a 60-acre ranch in Trout Creek, Montana owned by Frank Winnberg, a former neighbor from Woodbury.

Kevin and Mary had come down from Alaska to visit her family in Washington State, and drove over from Yakima to join the adventure.

Holly and Joe went kayaking and horseback riding to their hearts’ content. Before going home, they headed down through California, stopping in the Bay Area to see Joe’s cousin Gordon Lucas and his wife, Linda. 

It was the last big road trip for Holly and Joe.

But Holly wasn’t sitting still. “Happy 3 Kings Day,” she wrote in an email on Jan. 5, 2008. “Wednesday 9AM-N is my first Master Gardener class. Down in San Antonio I thought I could never be one (never be like THEM – the 3 I knew).  Here I’ve met 2 who are MG’s and I know damn well I can/will be as good or better than them.  Classes every week ’til May. Then open book exam and 60 hours of phone work at the extension service.  Sounds like working at the Medical Library reference desk. Can you tell I’m taking care of myself?”

She not only aced the Master Gardener class, she also helped the fledgling Woodbury Community Garden grow – and acquired a new daughter in the process.

“If Amélie Harris-Mcgeehan’s name doesn’t sound familiar to you,  she’s a daughter I have added to our family, since her beloved birth mom died of cancer a few years ago,” Holly wrote in a 2014 Christmas email to the family.  “Amélie also is in charge of the Woodbury city community garden.  I was early at the garden and now it looks like a very thriving entity. I feel sure that besides all the persistent work she’s put into the garden, she’s learned a variety of political skills.  I would never have had the patience and endurance she’s developed.  A very special Happy New Year to Amélie and the garden.”

Although she wasn’t on an adventure herself, she sent her imagination to go with Kevin, who had a job tracking tortoises in the Mojave Desert. 

“As I saw my first wonderful male goldfinch of the year, swaying on top of the big rose bush in back, I tried to imagine what you might be getting quite familiar with – cactus wrens, road runners, lizards,” she wrote in a June 22, 2008 email to her son.

On Sunday, June 22, 2009, a day that was both the Summer Solstice and Fathers Day, Kevin and Mary were married on the lawn adjacent to the Bridge Shelter at Tolt-McDonald Park.

Holly and Joe flew out from New Jersey for the wedding, a nod to the oxygen he needed with him around the clock.

After the wedding, they visited nearby Snoqualmie Falls, where Holly took Joe’s photo, for a change.

Then Holly, Joe, Kevin and Mary went to the Grove of the Patriarchs in Mount Rainier National Park for another breathtaking experience.

Some of the trees – Douglas fir, silver fir, hemlock and Western red cedar – are over 300 feet tall and  1,000 years old.

No matter that the 1.1 mile trail was not considered “wheelchair friendly,” the challenge was smaller than Holly’s and Joe’s will to experience more joy in nature.

The wedding and the trip to the glorious the Grove of the Patriarchs and Snoqualmie Falls would be Holly and Joe’s last big adventure.

 

Open Book

Two months later, Holly wrote that she had been diagnosed with Waldenstrom macroglobulinemia, “a rare, slow-growing cancer of the lymphatic system.”    “My bone marrow test and the skeletal scan (xray of all my bones) indicated that I do NOT have myeloma,” which had been quickly fatal for her brother, Paul, she wrote in an Aug. 18, 2009 email. Her email was filled with information about what her family could expect, from her chemotherapy schedule to whether the planned Christmas trip to the Grand Canyon would still happen.

One of Holly’s hallmarks was being open and matter-of-fact when talking about her health and medical issues, up to and including what she wanted after her death. She said in conversations – and in the will that she made each of the children read – that she wanted to be cremated and wanted no funeral service. She believed the funeral industry, as described in the American Way of Death was unscrupulous and obscenely expensive. 

She always shared medical information with all three children and was adamantly opposed to keeping any of them out of the loop. In 1988, Holly wrote a 4-page, single-spaced letter letting the kids know she was getting a hysterectomy, what prompted it and that the risk was very low. She wrote: “I’m telling you about the operations because, although I expect no problems, I have a vivid memory of how I felt when my mother had a (hysterectomy). It was before Char was born, and Joe and I were in El Paso. I didn’t know my mother was going for the operation, etc. I only found out afterwards. I was miffed and deeply hurt. I felt that she could have died, and I would only have known afterwards…”

She was even open about depression. “I have a long record of depression – and cope with it with drugs. I’ll apparently need them life long. Even with the drugs, depression isn’t erased – I sort of feel it’s generally in the shadows, threatening… At this time I find that making myself walk almost daily with Wendy and the dogs is a good antidepressant and about all I can cope with,” she wrote in an email.

Holly had a crippling stroke the day before Labor Day in 2010. The handwriting that previously could fit 500 clearly written words on the back of a postcard would never be the same. She had to relearn to walk. She had aphasia, which sometimes meant she could only successfully utter four words at a time, particularly when she was stressed. 

A month after the stroke, however, she showed that she could still wrangle the computer keyboard with the best of them, and could clearly convey her own thoughts. “Probably you all know I’ve had a stroke the day before Labor Day. Underwood Hosp sent me on to Jefferson, who then sent me on to Magee. I spent almost a month in Magee Rehab. – where the rehab is concentrated and very good. With that and time everything is constantly improving,” she wrote.

The stroke did not affect Holly’s comprehension of information she received through her eyes and her ears. She continued to listen faithfully to the local NPR station, WHYY, and she continued to devour books, often participating in multiple book clubs at once.

On March 28, 2014, Joe Lucas died. They had been married for more than 60 years, and shared adventures, breathtaking moments and an incredible journey.

The Next Step

Moving forward with her life meant replacing her chronically aching knees so she could get back to walking and hiking. She turned her competitive nature inward with vigor.

She did rehab exercises in advance of the knee surgery and kept the family updated: “Yesterday I was able to get all the way up to the very top of Sunrise Mt., and do all the steps in Child’s. Of course the fall colors, Sunrise Mt. and Child’s all were beautiful in themselves, and brought back lots of memories…For Christmas I’m giving myself a new right knee,” she wrote in an October 2014 email to the family. “My goal is to be in very good shape to have the second knee, and then do the necessary exercises to get back to good shape after it.”

Eleven days after surgery on the first knee, she was impatient. “This is Holly, writing from Wendy’s house where I am staying for a while after my left knee replacement.  Things don’t seem to be coming along quite as speedily as I had assumed they would,” she wrote in the email. “I figured they’d replace my knee on Monday (Nov. 3) & I’d be out and voting on Tuesday.  Guess it’s coming along all right – but no where near as fast as I’d like.”

Two months later, she wrote: “Knee repair seems to be coming along well.  The left has now been done long enough to feel satisfied.  I’m scheduled to see the doctor and get the right done.  Seems now like it’s unnecessarily long.. I took my first long walk by myself this morning!!!!”  

On March 25, 2015 she declared victory.  “I have finished PT for my knee!!! I am walking on uneven paths through the woods near Wendy’s house with my ski poles (in lieu of a mundane cane) for steep hill ascent.”

For her 80th birthday two months later, Holly and Charlotte-Anne went for a two-hour sail on the Hudson River on Pete Seeger’s Sloop, the Clearwater, where her sea legs worked just fine. 

Pete Seeger’s singing and environmental activism had brought her joy for decades. On the ship she was serenaded by his music, got to see a squirmy eel up close, and basked in the scenery of the Catskill Mountains along the Hudson River. 

The sail on the Clearwater would be Holly’s last new adventure.

She never stopped walking. And she never stopped dreaming of the next glorious hike.

“I go for half hour walks twice each day – to help prepare me for going straight up Buttermilk Falls next trip,” she wrote in a 2018 Christmas email. “But I have no illusions that it’s sufficient – just a start.”

She told Kevin and Charlotte-Anne that she wanted to go with them – and take Joe’s ashes – back to Yosemite, back to the Hoh Rain Forest and back to the Grand Canyon.

She said she wanted to go to back to Big Bend again, bask in the Texas sunshine and recreate the Gram photo using Joe’s walking stick and her own middle finger. They talked of traveling by train, in a room with big windows with wonderful views. 

“Why not?” she smiled.

Epilogue

Holly remained at Wendy’s home and never left the Eastern Time Zone again. 

The walls of Holly’s bedroom had none of Joe’s photos of their family, the mountains, glaciers, waterfalls, sunrises, snowscapes, forests, fish, birds, wildflowers, butterflies, hot air balloons, rivers, sea urchins or sailboats they had seen together.

Wendy ran an in-home dog kennel/daycare business and left Holly alone with the dogs for hours and sometimes weekends at a time. Out of Wendy’s earshot, Holly said her notion of living comfortably for the rest of her life meant “no dogs.” No dogs breaking into her bedroom, no dogs slipping alongside her on the stairs, no dog beds on the floor, no dog hair and smell everywhere, no dogs incessantly barking at who-knows-what, no frightened big dogs jumping into her lap during thunderstorms when no one else was around, and no dog piles that she had to clean up in the yard with the device she called the “shit-picker-upper.”

COVID had isolated her from her book clubs, her church fellowship and family. She was disconnected from the stimulating things and people she loved. “Mom could sure use the contact with others,” Wendy wrote in December, 2020. “She is more hermit-like now than ever!”

On a visit to her Woodbury home in 2021, Holly got what she said was her first look at the Facebook photo albums documenting the outdoor travels of Scott Sherburne, her grand-kid/grand-nephew who, with his wife Stephanie, had honored Holly and Joe by naming his first son Lucas.

She was enchanted, and scrolled through each album on a computer laptop without help. Without prompting, she left a loving, positive message on the page for Scott.

In Wendy’s house, Holly didn’t have access to the computer technology that would have connected her to family and friends, even though she could still easily communicate with a computer keyboard.

Social isolation can be life-threatening, as medical professionals have long known.

To find peace and fight depression, she walked alone in the woods twice a day.

But the caged bird could still sing.

For weeks in 2022, Charlotte-Anne and Bill took Holly for walks and then drove her to her beloved chiropractor where the water massage bed soothed and comforted her.

Holly’s walks at Cooper River Park were just across the railroad tracks, and a lifetime of adventures away from the mobile home park where she’d first landed in New Jersey.

Then they drove, with two dozen of Holly’s favorite songs cued up on the van’s audio system and a sheaf of lyrics in her hand.

Holly sang joyfully. She sang every word to every song clearly and on key.

She sang with Pete Seeger, then kept humming the song as she walked down the hall into Dr. Sherry’s office.

“This land is your land, this land is my land

From California to the New York island

From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters

This land was made for you and me

“As I went walking that ribbon of highway

And I saw above me that endless skyway

I saw below me that golden valley

This land was made for you and me

“I roamed and rambled, and I’ve followed my footsteps

To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts

All around me, a voice was sounding

This land was made for you and me

“This land is your land, this land is my land

From California to the New York island

From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters

This land was made for you and me.”