House and garden:
Errands
Lisaism
Reading:
Exercise
When I began this book, I thought it was going to read like a self-published book: too personal, with an axe to grind (somehow bitterness against the publishing business always leeches out), riddled with errors. In the first chapters especially are noticeable typos--lie for lay, e.g.--and it was overtly and perhaps excessively personal, intimately personal, early on. But this, I realized, was because Mark Bittner needed to set up why he was able to arrange his life around the parrots--no steady job, few commitments, a high tolerance for filth.
Lou saw that I was reading it and asked whether I liked it--she'd also seen the trailer--and I said I liked it a lot, but then I'm a parrot person (which she is not, definitively). Even as a parrot person, if I had not seen some of the flock moments before buying the book in City Lights, I might not have liked it as much.
Reading it alongside Blink was interesting: Bittner practices the intuition Gladwell promotes. Bittner ties his ability to connect with the parrots (and his responsibility, if any, to them to return, like the Little Prince's fox) to Taoism but also to intuition and the oneness of the world, a concept I cannot describe justly or aptly but which rang true to me.
All books continued to be one book because in Blink, Gladwell mentions the ecotone, the area in which two distinct ecologies overlap; (and it was the title of that Sunday's episode of "Six Feet Under";) also Bittner just by paying attention found how much more overlap there is between "the natural world" and San Francisco, and how to move between them.
I will always be grateful to Barbara Wallace for Claudia, which is why I recently picked this up at Park Hill Books (a co-operative used book store). This, eh, it was okay. Well, good. Well, I shouldn't expect everything she wrote to be Claudia. But I think expecting things not to be just a rehash is fair too. Also, was the Scholastic imprint the '70s book equivalent of today's straight-to-video toddlers' movies?
Fun fun fun. I was glad of the first half of the day, steady current but no rapids to speak of, to practice for and appreciate the difference in the second half. The Arkansas is three hours away and the cost per person is more than a lift ticket, but fun! and no ski boots.
A perfect day, clear hot sky and clear cool water.
I had earlier shied at RDC's suggestion of rafting through Royal Gorge, but now I think I could do it (as a crew member under a guide, that is).
When RDC spoke with his mother the next day, she said she could not remember which day we planned to raft but thought it was Sunday because she had a strong sense of our being in danger. Shyeah.
What's the last river I swam in, the Mt. Hope? Lots of times in that, and before that, if not in the Fenton, then in the Roxbury, all in Connecticut. The Arkansas is a leetle different. From rafting yesteray, I thought the current strong but manageable. Of course, I was not trying to keep to one spot, did not have a destination other than back in the raft, and did in fact have a craft to cling to (by requirement).
Today, by contrast, I made a series of what could very easily have been fatal mistakes. I 1) approached an appealingly slanty rock from upstream a) because I had allowed for the current to bring me down to it as I crossed from right to left bank toward it. I b) paused on a shoal to gauge the current, but 2) thereby got a feel of the current over the shoal, strong but doable, not of that as it met the rock. I saw riffles upstream of the rock and failed to appreciate that they indicated an undertow (I cannot call this one an undertoad). I 3) failed to appreciate that a river bottom is likely to--and in this case did--drop suddenly because undertow suction will have pulled rock and dirt out. I aimed for the left bank upstream corner of the rock and expected it to be a lot slopier than it was, and yesterday I could juuuuust not return myself to the raft with a grip on a handle and the perimeter line. Today I could not pull myself up on a rock with only occasional faults and cracks for handholds, especially when it did not slope as much as I expected. I learned nothing from the sea lions on pier 39, apparently.
I could tell, too late, that I did not want my feet under the rock, because there was no rock within their reach to brace myself against, to push against, but instead possibly plenty of space for my body, lungs and all, to follow braceless feet. I had aimed for it facing downstream and feet first, as rafting instruction had indicated the day before, to see obstacles and encounter them with the more expendable body parts. The rock remained obdurate, and I, noodle-armed, could not pull myself up. Less of me was now above the water: when the current first thrust me against the rock, I was shoulders and head over, arms above head, as I planned, but as I was pulled from left to right along the upstream edge, I was also pulled under, inch by inch. I was pushing now against the rock, instead of trying to pull myself up, pushing against the force driving me under it, underwater. Finally, only my face, turned up, rose above the hardly tranquil surface, and then my face, too, went under.
Up and a breath, and I would not stop shoving against the rock until the water jostled me around the corner to the side parallel to the current. Puny of might but stony of will, I got past the corner without having inhaled any water, and now I could thrust with my legs. Free of rock and undertow, with only current to contend with, I swam for the right bank. I turned broadside against the current, to offer it more resistance; I swam sidestroke, despite its not being efficient, because my breathing was not at all steady and I would not readily submerge my face again. Swimming hard against a current I can do. I landed only a tad downstream from where RDC stood watching helpless, and there panted and shook--one reason I wrote all this was to calm my nerves.
RDC at first said "nearly drowning." I don't, because I never inhaled water. (I remember from seventh grade science that the human lung can extract oxygen from among water molecules; it merely cannot expel the water as it can air.) I don't deny I was in peril of my own making, and I won't soon forget the feel of the merciless water closing over my face, but I didn't nearly drown. I told CoolBoss on Friday that the weekend's plans were to camp and raft together and then for RDC to fish while I lolled about on the riverbank in a decorative manner. I got as close as ever I wish to be to "The River's Edge"-style decoration.
Two 3.6-mile city rides.
No swim because I had already worked late in a pre-Big Top kind of way. Yes, that's a bad excuse.
Catching up from my commonplace book. Really, I don't get to call it that. I'm channeling Quigley Quagmire is all.
Etymology:
flim-flam?
Somewhere in San Francisco, probably in SF MOMA, we saw a photograph of an early 20th century law practice: Flam & Flam.
Eh, probably just nonsense syllables.
From our 2002 trip to Steamboat Springs: looking around at the local businesses, RDC asked if Jane Austen had written a book called Taxi and Taxidermy.
The hotel room's guide to San Francisco writes that the neighborhood of Noe Valley is pronounced "Noh-ee." This works better orally. But Noe Valley is spelled with an e.
We saw a sea lion tattooed with number 382x--we couldn't make out the fourth digit. Perhaps it was in a swim race.
A public announcement: next summer, I plan to participate in the Danskin triathlon. It's not much of a triathlon: swim .5 mile (or .75K, a difference of 50 meters), bike 12 miles, and run 6 miles. I say "it's not much" but let's see if I actually do it. I don't, after all, run, at all, or swim particularly fast, or bike racingly. But I think I can do it. I deleted a photograph of me jumping into the San Francisco Bay because my ass was an affront to the eye. I cannot pull myself into a raft. I had a nightmare last night that I must be pregnant, because look at this belly! but it was just fat.
Jorge Luis Borges. Alexandria. One Hundred Years of Solitude again. I am not equal to describing this book's effect on me. I want more Umberto Eco.
I could not haul myself onto a raft, despite handles. The sexy back of lore (I had a fabulously sexy back once) has lost definition. Today I did weights for the first time since the pool opened.
Bike 8.3 miles in three legs; squats, 3x12 @ 80; lats, 3x12 @60; chest press, 3x12 @30; shoulders, 3x12 @25. Swim 1000 meters.
I usually pause every five laps for water. At 10, I noticed a man leaning against a planter, and he was still there at 11. I asked him if he needed to share a lane, and he said he would wait until a whole lane was available. I was about to turn back to the water when he asked, "May I suggest something?" It had to be about swimming, unless he was wantonly cruel, and he looked like a swimmer--in his 60s or maybe 70s, but a swimmer. "Of course."
He told me something I knew but didn't enforce: each hand slices the water index finger-first instead of chopping it pinky-first. I did two laps thus and did feel a difference: my shoulders were more engaged. Now he was standing by the pool edge where I would see him and stop. I stopped. He said his index-finger gesture was an exaggeration and modified it for me. And two more things? I nodded. One, I should look not beneath me but to the bottom at the other end. By raising the head, the shoulders follow. Two, with the body parallel to the water surface, the hand enters at an angle, toward 8 o'clock, rather than at 9, and in front of the eyes not the shoulders, and keep the elbows up.
I know I have seen him before: I remembered him because he looks like McCarthy's father. Now I know his name and am hugely grateful to him. He said that just in those laps he watched, I had improved greatly. I liked that. And unlike with the ski instructor, who also said I improved in March of 2004--the last time I skied--this is made sense to me and that I'll therefore remember and apply it.
Even after his first comment I was thinking of him as Gram in Dicey's Song, descending upon Sammy's grade as the Lone Marble Ranger (so he was the Lone Swimming Ranger) and, as she said to Mina's family, to put a face on the boogeyman of my bad technique.
Plus it didn't rain until I got home.
My littlest boy with the big feet is ten today. We tossed around the idea of having a party, but he can't have ice cream and cake and is afraid of balloons so maybe not. Instead he had his head pet lots and lots, got to take a nap with his daddy, had a shower, helped daddy shave (serenading prevents scrapes), had pasta and basil stems with his dinner, and is now making small tired squeaks in a one-footed, beak-chewing way from my lap.
He's ten! I don't want him to be old.
That foot! That foot raised in mid-step! That is just too adorable. By the bye, when he raises a foot asking to be picked up (to be stepped up) is different--he raises the leg higher and holds the foot horizontal, and manages to change his expression to pathetic instead of curious.
Well, I wanted to read it. Silly me for thinking I would learn something new about the book from it. Glossing the same words--mind, connections, relation--at each use seems unnecessary to me, but maybe that's the nature of the annotated beast and not something I might hold against David Shapard. What I may* hold against him are the apostrophes in his decades ("1790's"), his plurals ("the Philips's party"), the size of the print, and, much worse, one unfounded assumption about Darcy's motivation and, less harmful but stupider, at least one utter blindness to the given text.
Just after Col. Fitzwilliam tells Elizabeth about Darcy's interference in Bingley's suit of Jane, Elizabeth decides that Darcy "had been partly governed by this worst kind of pride, and partly by the wish of retaining Mr. Bingley for his sister." Shapard asserts that "Elizabeth's final point is correct, though Darcy himself will never admit it, even after he reforms" (p. 343). And later, on p. 471, contemplating reasons for Darcy not to have brought Georgiana with him to Netherfield, Shapard says maybe Darcy didn't because such a visit would have interrupted her education, but "one could argue that this is one of the rare occasions when Jane Austen sacrifices...plausibility of behavior to the needs of the plot": Darcy had more reason to bring her with him, Shapard asserts, because he would want after Ramsgate to keep her with him and to promote a Bingley-Georgiana marriage.
Up on my hind feet now, I say no way. Wickham at 15 through elopement would have been a terrible situation, but anyone else at age 16 through procurement would not be much better. I am sure Darcy still considers her too young to form a permanent attachment. Furthermore, I believe he told the full truth in his letter to Elizabeth, that he discouraged Bingley because of the Bennets' situation and because Jane's heart was, he believed, not easily touched. The only textual evidence is Caroline Bingley writing to Jane of her and Louisa's hope that Georgiana might one day be their sister, and I don't call that evidence of Darcy's similar hope but of the Bingley females trying to separate their brother from Jane.
The utter blindness to the text occurs with Mr. Collins's last letter to Mr. Bennet, warning Elizabeth away from Darcy. After relating the chief ("the greater part," as Shapard believes his readers need be told repeatedly) of it, Mr. Bennet continues, "The rest of his letter is only about his dear Charlotte's situation, and his expectation of a young olive-branch." Shapard notes the biblical source "olive-branch" to mean offspring (Psalm 128:3) and that "such an allusion, one both pedantic and biblical, is appropriate for Mr. Collins."
That's one of the funniest things Mr. Bennet says but Shapard doesn't even notice. I aver that Mr. Collins didn't write "olive branch" at all, but instead that Mr. Bennet summarizes the letter thus because it mocks both Mr. Collins in his first letter (his "offered olive branch" of accord and peace between himself and the Bennets) and Mary's tedious observation ("the idea of the olive branch perhaps is not wholly new, yet I think it is well expressed").
* "permit myself to," not "possibly," speaking of glossing.
I didn't swim today either. Poop.
Aerobic:
Elliptical, 15' @ level 12, incline 100%, 212 calories, 1962 strides
Stairs: 5' @ 68 spm.
Treadmill, 5' @ 15% incline, 2 mph, until my heartrate was below 130 bpm.
Weights:
Lats, 3x8 @50
Squats, 3x12 @80
Quads, 3x12 @17.5
Hamstrings, 3x12 @15
Row, 3x12 @60
Pulldown, 3x12 @60. This must be the same thing as lats.
High row, 3x12 @60
Incline press, 3x12 @40
Decline press, 3x12 @30
If I lost 15 pounds of fat without adding any muscle, I would bring my fat percentage down to reasonable and my weight under my IQ, which was a, you should pardon the term, brainlessly easy goal to set at age 17. How many times have I declared this goal, starting now--no, now, after this last handful of M&Ms.
In the other garden, there is an eggplant about the size of a baby's foot, not yet eaten by a squirrel, and miles of squash vines with exactly one zucchini. We can't eat the lettuce fast enough, we can keep up with the cucumbers, and the honeydew melon that is growing is ovoid, not spherical. Edited 30 August to explain that I planted spaghetti squash, not honeydew melon, and I can somewhat but not entirely excuse my failure to distinguish between squash and melon leaves because it's a jungle back there with zucchini zucchini über alles.
I awoke before the low moan of dawn to attempt an earlier flight to Seattle. Miraculously, I got on the first of the four I was trying for, in a seat with footroom even because a mechanic just brought the seat back into service. So I was the last person seated, one of the first off, and, okay, I had to gate-check my bag, but I entered the hotel lobby before 11:30 PDT and a good thing because Ernie was stalking me.
I was walking in, sunglasses, nonbinding travel skirt, wheelie, and Dot Org "briefcase" (Lands' End, and canvas, but everyone else calls it a briefcase and it has our logo on it so I follow the crowd), and saw Ernie at the registration desk. He was about to ask the desk if I had checked in yet, but at least now he was spared tracking me down. There was a problem with the report. He said it didn't need to be fixed until tomorrow afternoon, but I said it needed to be fixed now because tomorrow I would belong not to my department but to the registration staff.
I called Denver, and Minnie was still in the office and would not only fix the error but oversee a fresh batch of photocopies and the shipping. Photocopying would be more expensive at this end than shipping at that.
I made the required visit to Pike Place Market, where I bought flowers for my evening's hosts, took them to my room and ventured toward Seattle Center. Here the line for the Needle was 30 minutes, after waiting in however long the ticket line was, and I had changed from traveling clothes to city clothes and stupidly had not brought either printed or audio book with me. So I bagged that. I will dine alone, attend movies solo, travel by myself, but I will not wait in line by myself without a book. Frankly if I'm waiting in line with someone I'd still rather have a book. I have seldom had tolerable conversation in a queue.
On the bus up to Jackson Park, I listened to The Killer Angels. War novels are not my usual fare so it's a good audio choice, but I need paper backup for maps.
I arrived at PSA's right on time. I had not seen him, my first boyfriend, since 1998, and he and his were the reason I wanted an earlier flight--a Tuesday departure for Japan meant Monday was the only available evening. I met his wife and their two sons, one three and terribly excited about all his visitors especially his cousins, and the other just a month or so and much quieter. I spent more time talking to PSA's 11-year-old niece than to him, but she was great and we were immediately pals. The 3-year-old's best cousin was not this girl but a younger boy, probably because closer proximity in age but perhaps because of his splendid Elvis impersonation. PSA's brother I met one Thanksgiving a thousand years ago, and his wife and I made female chat.
We talked about family resemblances and toy sushi sets, ate cookout foot and lychee nuts, and all of a sudden it was time for me to leave. Next time I'll make sure to talk to PSA more than his niece and to have more than an abbreviated evening to get to know his wife.
PSA announced to all that I kept a blog, and besides that I otherwise affect an "Internet? What's that?" persona, I had to protest "blog." This site has existed long before weblogs, and it has seldom had much to do with the rest of the internet. Lucy and I will be the last blog refuse-niks.
Seven o'clock in the morning to six in the evening is no joke, especially since my regular workday is this Fantasyland seven-hour thing that is reason the nth for me to cling to Dot Org with my dying breath. Registration released me at 4 when Yet More needed to be done to the report.
Since I am a research analyst I may now have remote access to the file servers, but that process is not automatic and required my running the right person to earth and asking that he set me up, which took him about 30 seconds but is not what he attends the Big Top to do. I tweaked this and made that pretty and so forth and finally it was Perfect and loosed upon the world and I was free.
Officially I was supposed to go to the social event but realistically there was not a chance in hell, given that it required shuttle busses, crossing the threshold of a professional sports venue, and mingling among people I do not know. I missed that chance to meet CoolBoss's squeeze, but hieing myself to Elliot Bay Books was much more important and gratifying.
Unofficially I had tentative plans to meet my high school classmate MEWN but realistically there was not much chance of that either, since my dearest wish was not her company but solitude. She understood this fully ("especially after a conference, ick!") which is why her company is so worth seeking out and off I went to Pioneer Square.
First I stopped in Magic Mouse. I might not have browsed in the store so long if I had not almost upon entry spotted and seized a nearly-life-sized emperor penguin. I clutched him to myself and laid my cheek on his head and if it wasn't a real bird or a real dog I know it did its best anyway.
When I transferred wallet-y stuff to my purse I took my booklists with me. And so, in Elliot Bay Books, I cut a swath. Hot damn, it beats the Tattered Cover--both stores combined--all hollow, and probably the third one, whose existence I ignore since it is in The Land of Beige All the Same (Highlands Ranch), even hollower. In the LoDo TC recently, there was no William Styron, no Erskine Caldwell, and only A.S. Byatt's most recent title and not even her Booker winner, not even with a movie cover. The new fiction titles in Elliot Bay, and oh, its YA section, were several and varied and, best of all, at least a third unknown to me.
I restrained myself in the new section except for Thomas Pakenham's The World's Most Remarkable Trees because I could think of nothing more comforting (than a dog, a buddy, or a plush penguin) than a book about trees. In the used section, I found Regeneration, All the Pretty Horses, A Pale View of the Hills, and Breakfast at Tiffany's, without any of which no library is complete, and Upon the Head of a Goat for my other life goal (besides always having skinned knees) of reading all the Newberys. Then a present for my sister, and then I stopped. I had packed pretty minimally so I could fly stand-by, leaving RDC to haul some of my vacation gear, and as yet I had no idea how to get any of this home.
What the hell kind of great city has interesting parking garages? No I didn't note the address, but somewhere near Pioneer Square is a parking garage built into a descending triangular intersection. It looks almost like sculpture.
I read the Newbery Honor book with my dinner (a mushroomy pasta dish on the patio of a little Italian place better in service, setting, and food than I expected anywhere in the touristy area I was in to have), stopped in a nightclub briefly when I heard live jazz and saw people dancing, and taxied back.
Could I have walked? It wasn't quite dark yet--an indication of how much farther north Seattle is than Denver--and that area of the city is laid out in a grid, but it was dusk and would be dark before I got home, and it was an unfamiliar city, and, this being the primary reason, the Dansko Alexa sandals in black that I bought specifically because I've lived in the brown ones all summer and needed a comfortable shoe for the Big Top with illusions of looking slightly more professional, were murder. Each pair is individually made and despite being the same pattern and size, these black ones are vicious. I wonder if I complained to Dansko whether the company would care.
And they I stayed up until I finished Goat. Not on purpose, and I lay awake even after I finished, because, clearly, my body hates me.
I remember in Maus Vladek Spiegelmann's describing the hundreds of thousands of Hungarians Jews being brought to Auschwitz and murdered immediately. This is one family's story. I knew nothing about Hungary before and during WWII or its preceding war with Ukraine. Yes, Aranka Siegal's book is for (older) children and is fiction, but it's also her own experience and shows the Holocaust from a perspective I didn't have before.
More registration, gah. Certain comments about certain people I encountered, some not for the first time, deleted because I'm tactful like that.
Loose at last, I ate in Wild Ginger: lamb satay, a Vietnamese green papaya salad, and ginger ice cream. For this meal I was accompanied by Katharine Graham. In Personal History I came across what something I've been wanting for a while: an example showing the encroaching usage of the (subjunctive?) for the pluperfect. One problem with giving such an example is that natural-sounding constructions are elusive, sounding like the aseptic examples they are. Another is that I don't know the names of tenses in grammatically technical terms. I do, however, have an ear for my own languague, and could match subjects and verbs correctly in number long before I understood the concept of plurals. Such vocabulary is not necessary to understanding but is useful in explaining.
Graham quotes someone's impression of her husband: "My feeling always was that he was terribly troubled by a self-doubt [--] whether or not he would have hit the heights that he did professionally if he hadn't been Kay Graham's husband, Eugene Meyer's son-in-law, and hadn't had the Post stock given to him."
In common speech now, someone might say, instead of "if he hadn't been," "if he wouldn't have been," the same tense or time or mood as in the earlier "whether" clause, and therefore renders meaningless the conditional nature of the musing. It is the past-tense equivalent of Paul Simon wishing he not were but was homeward bound, but worse, because the if-then aspect. You can achieve much with context and additional words--I understand that Chinese has no tenses--but I want to English to remain short and snappy.
I am getting into a Mood that might have been diverted with some MEWN, or maybe is caused by three days of buddydustlessness, or by getting to the point in Personal History when Graham talks about her husband's mental illness. Or perhaps I am decompressing after two days of On-ness. Being in a crowd does not necessarily help, though being alone is almost certainly bad. I can maintain my boundaries best among people I know slightly: enough to owe courtesy but not enough reasonably to expect anything from. I was thinking about that in the context of someone who wanted to attend the Big Top today. Him I can talk about because he does not belong to Dot Org. Apparently a Social Security office told him about the meeting, probably more from a wholly understandable desire to be rid of him than from any misguided idea that we could help him with advocacy or information. He wanted as a private citizen to attend, but not to pay any registration fees, and wanted our attendees to help him directly. More irrational than his expectations of us was his inability to hold his boundaries: to know what information was too much, to know when he was repeating himself, to process what he was told and react to it. All of that is, 14 years out, distressingly familiar to me. Nigel Hawthorne as George III still put it best: "I have remembered how to seem."
On my last morning of registration someone came up to the counter on a Segway. I told him I would give him one million dollars for a short ride, and he said I could ride it for free, which was a good thing because I was lying about the million dollars. Kal passed through, laughed at me, and took out her camera, thereby reminding me of my camera. Wheee!
Seattle has hemlocks! They all died in the early '90s in Connecticut (in New England? in the whole northeast?) and of course they're too wet a tree for Colorado. They're mournful things, but they made me smile in recognition.
The mountain came out a little bit, its top third peeking over clouds. Hello, mountain.
Another smiley thing was meeting RDC at Boeing Field and leaving the city for the uncity. We flew to Campbell River, British Columbia, about two-thirds of the way up Vancouver Island's east side, and ferried across to Quadra Island, one of the Discoveries. Vancouver Island is big! and has high mountains right in the middle of it! and glaciers! (or year-long snow).
We stopped at a little market for dinner. The pizza place (The Lovin' Oven, whose sign was decorated with frogs. Run by Quebécois or serving frogs on their pizzas? We were never to know) had closed at 7:30. Fig Newtons, the most vital of outdoor foods, were not on offer. Other regular Usan products were labeled in two languages! It was almost as if we were in a whole 'nother country.
From e-mail to Egg:
We went on a whale watch on a Zodiac, a kind of inflatable boat with a motor. You're not much above the water! My east coast whale watches have been for humpbacks and happened on ferry-type vessels, and the one off Orcas Island in 1999 was a generous-size motor boat. Not this! Four benches for four passengers each, and a pulpit for the captain. Inside the pulpit was the world's smallest washroom, as he put it; I would call it a head, since it was on a boat, and there was no washing happening. Also we got to wear these astronaut suits. I had worn a heavy long skirt for a windy day but had a short hiking skirt in my dry bag, which I quickly nipped on--another benefit to skirts instead of trousers, easily changed--and put on the suit, which protects you from wind (high), spray (cold), and also floats you if you fall off.
We saw orcas! The first pod we came across was part of A pod (we also saw I Pod, and RDC wondered if Apple paid a royalty for the name). They were asleep! The resident orcas eat salmon and vocalize a lot when they're awake, whereas the transients, who have a larger range, tend not to talk so much amongst themselves because their prey are mammals so can hear.
These were residents and the captain said "Let's call them up on the Orcaphone" and dropped a microphone into the water. First we just saw a bunch of dorsal fins--a dozen or so--rhythmically rising and sinking--and they were swimming in such tight formation and so silently that the captain said they were sleeping! Swimming and sleeping! They can turn off a part of their brain so only the keep-with-others and swim functions are on, and one whale will stay awake to be a sentry. Two pairs were cow and calf.
They woke up a bit when they cruised through a herd of salmon. Humans were fishing for the salmon as well, from boats, and the arrival of orcas, sleeping or not, scattered the salmon. Poor fisherfolk. The whales woke up and talked a little and maybe had a snack and fell asleep again. Kind of like that Wiggle. We left them to sleep and went farther north in Johnstone Strait through whirlpools you would not believe. Whirlpools in the currents between the islands, fifty feet across some of them with vortexes five or more feet deep. It was wild.
We found another clan of A pod and what the boat does is stop behind them, watch for a bit, and zoom out and around them and pause again in hopes the whales will pass nearby when they've caught up. This other clan was more awake and we heard them echo-locating the boat and discussing amongst themselves what they should have for lunch ("Let's have salmon again!" "Okay!") and where they should go for said lunch. Later we saw a part of I Pod and even I, who had never heard them before, could hear how different their dialects were. The resident pods have the same language though different dialects, but the transients have a different, lesser-used language as well as a different diet and habitats. In general their dorsal fins are pointier triangles rather than the residents' more curved ones--/\ versus /)--but despite those differences, they have not yet evolved different teeth.
I saw a few black-and-white dogs including a Landseer Newfie, who of course with the being so big and being black and white is the perfect dog for me, and a smooth-coated border collie, and though I don't think Orca is a very good name, I might make an exception if the black and white were better distributed. Better for a cat. Also a 12-week-old regular black Newfie named Posey. Such big paws! And a 4-month-old black lab named Beau.
Quadra Island was gorgeous, much more beautiful than Orcas Island and its waters were warmer. But everything about our lodging and activities was colored by our "hosts," Coastal Spirits, and not colored in a nice friendly way but in a dim, bilious orange. The third photograph on the right, being at the top of a page titled "Lodge-Based Tours," implies that the lodging is in that "lodge." It is not a lodge but the owners' house and it is quite clear guests are not welcomed in or near it. I am not sure I was even welcome to walk through the grounds near the gardens. Only on this photo gallery page, in the fourth row, is the guest lodging featured, as a "cabin," again suggesting something cabin-like and maybe that the pictured building is a single cabin. It is, in fact, a single building, but contains three units smaller than an average Usan living room with a corner walled off for shower stall and toilet. The fourth photograph on this page is of our room, with the adjoining door to the middle unit open deceptively to suggest more spacious accommodation than is offered. Two of the three units have ventilation only through the unscreened sliding glass doors and the bathroom window. We had the far right room with a window on the front, unscreened doors on the side, and bathroom in the rear, (and an unwindow, a fixed sheet of glass, over the single sink) but even marginally more ventilation did not spare us from the smell of mildew.
Dampness I expected in British Columbia; mildew in a professional lodge I did not. One of the things about lodge-based adventures I thought worth paying for was outdoor adventures ending in a dry bed, hot shower, and clean toilet, in a lodge. I might have lived in Denver for a decade and developed a horror of mold, but mildew is not just dampness but smacks of inadequate cleaning.
Nor was the cleaning the only inadequate thing. I have not slept in sheets with such a low thread count and high polyester count since a freshling year romp with a fellow in the next dorm. Freshling year is also probably the last time I had to resort to a single, puny towel (smelling of mildew) after a shower (there was no tub).
Coastal Spirits calls itself a bed & breakfast, but it is not, any more than a Holiday Inn offering an, ahem, continental breakfast is a B&B. At a B&B, you eat with the family, who enjoy having guests. At a B&B, your coffee and your breakfast are made for you. At a B&B, your breakfast is more substantial than a small cup of yogurt and a mini-muffin. There might even be orange juice.
Which brings us to the included lunch. When you're kayaking or hiking, you want a substantial lunch, something resembling the meal pictured in the third photograph of this page. But no. A single cheese and vegetable sandwich apiece, good but not ample or especially delicious, small nearly bitter apples, granola bars. The hot mint tea was yummy and refreshing, at least, and usually there were orange slices.
The "hosts" had not a single damn thing to do with the lodging or the tours. Our guides, who--the primary ones, anyway--were fine, told us that the owner might take one tour out per season. None of them appeared to enjoy either people or "adventures."
On our last night, at about 10 o'clock, I stood in the middle of the lawn looking starward through binoculars. Someone had left the lodge in a truck just as I went outside, which I noticed because I had turned away from the headlights not to ruin my eyes for stargazing. He returned just a short time later and again I turned away from the headlights in a clearly suspicious manner, and once out of the truck he called, "Who is that?" I didn't answer, because I didn't know he was speaking to me, because he couldn't have been speaking to his own guest in such a way, and because he should have known by this time who I was anyway--if he hadn't interacted with me directly he had seen me enough over the past few days to recognize a woman of my height and build and hair as a guest. Also I didn't answer because he had no reason to use such a rude tone.
When he called again, I deigned to reply, "Are you speaking to me?"
"Yes--who are you?"
"I'm Lisa, I'm your guest in number 3."
"What are you doing?"
"Stargazing." What the fuck business of his what it was I was doing? Stealing kayaks? Puncturing life vests? Stargazing? It was all equally criminal in his eyes. We were happily televisionless but there was just one reading lamp, on one side of the bed, aside from the glaring overhead, and the island is fairly without nightlife and the hosts weren't exactly inviting us into the house for cribbage or backgammon or Pictionary; so stargazing, even at sea level in a humid environment, struck me as a fine activity.
The one pleasant surprise was the optional cat. Gizmo, a guide, not a host, told me, was that very dark brown that looks black, and was the worst beggar of a cat I have ever met. He made himself known the first day, begging for In and content to cozy up on a lap and read for a while. Subsequently he appeared for breakfast so he could lick the foil tops of the yogurt tubs or possibly be given some in a bowl.
That was the lodging and board. The tours are the other half. We paid for Tour 6: Glaciers, Waterfalls and Lagoons. The first day we kayaked through the Breton Islands and the second day on the chained lakes. The third day we hiked. By the fourth day, we and the other guests asked when the glaciers, lagoons, and waterfalls would happen. There are no waterfalls on Quadra Island, come to find out, and though Coastal Spirits' site promises a trip to Elk Falls Provincial Park on Vancouver Island (where a 200' waterfall stops the salmon in their tracks), the guides said that not only was that not on our itinerary but that they had never brought any tour thither. Glaciers we could see atop the mountains on Vancouver Island and the mainland, and that's as close as we came to one. The left picture in the fifth row is of "Emerald Lagoon, Discovery Islands." Again, not only were we not ferried to Elk Falls Provincial Park, we did not kayak to any other island in the Discovery archipelago or any lagoon on one.
Paying for several days at a time, several weeks in advance, should have got us a better rate than parties joining us at the last minute for single-day tours. Ahaha, no. Planning so far ahead should have given Coastal Spirits time to arrange everything they promised, except that reportedly they never deliver everything they promise and it's not deliverable from Quadra Island anyway.
Quadra Island is gorgeous, and I had a great time when I wasn't dealing with mildew or our hosts. We want to return, but there is not a chance in hell of our booking through Coastal Spite or giving it any but the worst marks in honesty and hospitality.
The first day we kayaked from the tip of Rebecca Spit around the Breton Islands. In our party were three Canadians, mother, daughter and son; two Scots, boy and girl; one Japanese man; and us. Minus the Scots, these six would be together for the next five days.
That morning, some hoodlums had poached dozens of pink salmon. Their corpses, filleted and bloody, lay strewn on the beach. I asked if salmon eyes were a delicacy, like seals' eyes: these fish were blind. But no, corvi and gulls had taken the easiest pickings. Also I asked why the poachers hadn't taken the fish whole rather than spend time on the beach butchering them. They wouldn't want to be caught with the fish, the guide said, though being caught with oodles of fish steaks couldn't be much less incriminating. In the afternoon, upon our return, baby crows begged their parents for salmon guts even though the guts lay right there for easy picking.
At the start, I was screamingly incompetent. A kayak with a rudder? Getting the pedals properly adjusted was a bitch, and for a while I pulled the rudder up entirely rather than let it steer me in circles. At that point, the kayak was dead in the water, impossible to keep on any course at all, so I let it down again, but I still wanted to steer with the paddle.
We saw a bald eagle, harbor seals, and seastars. The eagle perched nonchalantly on a rock only a few feet above the tide line, perhaps napping off a large meal. Seals by the score napped and rested just feet away from us. Harbor seals vary in color and spottiness, but no matter how pale or dark or mottled they are, they all blend perfectly into rocks from a distance. Closer, they separate into tails and flippers, noses and eyes, cow and calf.
Lunchtime meant time to look at seastars and tie bull kelp into knots. Bull kelp, thick and strong as it is, is an annual. It is barely rooted to the seabed, and the stem that grows from bed to surface is solid but resilient and tough, like cork. Kayaking through a forest of it, plastic hull against hollow kelp, sounded like--yes, I am of the television generation--armless Hawkeye drifting among the cast-off limbs in "Dreams," one of my favorite MASH episodes.
Julie, a 17-year-old Ontario transplant to British Columbia, tied the kelp in knots as Bill, the guide, told us how Indians used kelp to straighten wood (for spears or arrows) and treated it to make it last, for storage, for syringes. He showed us several types of seastars, all of whose names I forget.
A little more paddling between the Bretons and Quadra and then another stop for a walk or a swim. Julie or Leann first tried to wade in, but that water was 58 degrees. I asked Bill if there was a jumping rock, and there was. All three of us jumped in, and I am glad to say I was not the only one shrieking off the worst of the shock. The shrieking did scare the nearby seals farther off. Sorry, seals.
I surprised and pleased myself staying in as long as I did. When I waded into the sea off Orcas Island, it was to say I had done it, and that was plenty cold for a 31-year-old. I expected this water to be much colder, that much farther north and six years on. I went in expecting only to come out again, just to say I had done it, but we all three stayed in for--well, not long, maybe 15'. Longer than just a plunge, anyway. The other two complained about the cold in their nipple piercings. Oy.
Saturday was a little drizzly and Sunday was supposed to be more of the same, except windier. All six of us voted to kayak on the lakes. This time our guide was Shale, if her name is spelled as it sounds. Oh, the lakes. The sea had been beautiful, but frankly cold and drizzle do not make for a nice kind of beautiful. Starkly beautiful, deathly beautiful, coldly beautiful. The lakes were warm and still and clear. I had not expected clear with such warmth and all the trees rotting slowly away beneath us, but clear we had.
Another reason for the clarity was the overcast. On the lakes, there was none of the wind forecast for the sea, and despite its being a Sunday in August we were nearly the only activity on the lakes, even the one surrounded by little cottages.
Oo! And lest I forget, this is the day RDC and I tried the Divorce Boat, i.e., a tandem. And it went fine! RDC has always staunchly refused the idea of a tandem bike or kayak as another thing, like wallpapering, that couples should not attempt (I would say no one at all should wallpaper anything. Bleah). Perhaps it worked so well because I could just paddle like an automaton and let him steer, which policy works in general in our marriage too.
So we paddled through the lakes, from Village Lake (the cottage'd one) to Main Lake. To get from one to the next, we paddled through a creek that looked on its way to becoming portage. The water was less than a foot and, when seven people shut up and barely paddled, quiet as heaven.
Today more people swam--the Canadian boy, Phil; the Japanese man, Tatsuro; and RDC. I could have stayed in forever and ever, so warm and perfect was the water. But I didn't have goggles for a real swim and it was a kayaking, not a swimming tour. Next time, when it's just RDC and me, he can go off fishing in his float tube and I will swim and bask and read.
After lunch, Julie took the front of the tandem with me in the rear and RDC her single. I think I'm just not a good steerer. Also--and this surprised me--RDC and I struck a paddling rhythm sooner and easier than Julie and I did.
In Main Lake, there was an island with a house on it. A house on an island in a lake on an island! I wondered if there was maybe a spring on the little island to make a little tiny pond, which would have been even better. A pond on an island in a lake on an island! When Julie and I come into our money, that's the house we're going to live in. Also I wondered if, say, a Briton would be as excited as we were about that little island-lake-island thing. All I would need to live there is internet access and a dryer.
Speaking of dryers! In the evening we used the laundromat at Heriot Bay Inn, which has a campsite adjacent. Dry clothes! What a pleasure.
Monday we all seemed to be in agreement that a day off from kayaking would be good after two days and before the next two days. We climbed to the south peak Chinese Mountain--hardly a mountain--with tremendous views of the south side of Quadra Island, sunlight on the sea, alder and Douglas fir forests below us, Vancouver Island, the mainland, possibly the most beautiful view I have ever beheld.
RDC was a little offended for Colorado's sake. It's not Colorado's fault it lacks water, and water is what a vista needs to be first class. Water, land, more water than land, well mixed up, and not too much evidence of humanity. Certain boats are okay but points off for almost all houses. I had even said of Main Lake that it is what Uncas dreams of at night, so he could have been offended for Connecticut's sake as well.
After that we hiked through primeval forest, covered with moss and ferns and looking like home except without brambles and other nasty underbrush, me expecting a dinosaur to peer out from behind, if not one of the 70-year-old firs of the second planting, then one of the massive trunks still rotting away from the clear-cutting before that. We found our way to Morte Lake, colder than the chained lakes but still swimmable (and I finally brought my goggles), especially since the sun finally came properly out.
I learned that hemlocks tend to tip at the top. Before that pointer, I could sense them even though I mis-identified them on closer inspection. I was pleased to see, when we shuttled days later between Boeing Field and Sea-Tac, that the trees I called hemlocks the week before were hemlocks. It's a Blink thing, maybe. Malcolm Gladwell posits that you can recognize the last stranger you interacted with--a waiter, a clerk at the post office, whoever--but you'd be flummoxed if you tried to describe that person to a third party and even would confuse your own memory so that after the effort you might have lost your recognition as well.
At this point I was happily losing track of days. Tuesday we kayaked from Hyacinthe Bay past Open Bay towards but not to Village Bay. We saw bald eagles and some seals. RDC and I were in a tandem again and our strength and endurance, greater than those of the rest of the party, now swelled with day-trippers again, were showing. Tatsuro was in better shape than either of us but he was in a single.
A tandem gave RDC and me an advantage, but on this day we six--well, five, it was Tatsuro’s last day--decided that we would put our hind feet down to the hosts. We had all paid for tours that were customizable to our abilities, and RDC had twisted his ankle and didn’t want to hike, where Phil’s back protested against another day of kayaking. We saw no reason Coastal Spirits couldn’t give us two guides for two different parties.
I would like to state for the record that here, on a point of Quadra Island shore between Open Bay and Village Bay, I successfully skipped rocks for the first time ever. My mother has tried to teach me, RDC has tried to tell me, but me, I learned from Julie. RDC can send a rock out for yards before it touches down half a dozen times before sinking, and Phil got tremendous numbers of skips. Me, I got twosies and threesies, but after nearly 40 years of plunks, twosies and threesies were just fine.
So Tuesday afternoon we asserted ourselves, and Wednesday the Canadians hiked (poor Julie wanted to kayak) and RDC and I kayaked in a tandem with Bill in a solo. Bill is not only of course a superior paddler but also had a nifty, light little tight little tippy little craft, so we were well matched. We started in Granite Bay and paddled out to the mouth of Small Inlet. There, we saw seastars more than a foot across. We looked down through 40' of water to see kelp at the roots. The water was staggeringly clear, crystal, gorgeous, the most beautiful color, tremendously cold, and heart-rendingly lovely. We paddled up Small Inlet, seeing salmon jumping and bald eagles drying their feathers and seals spy-hopping (does it count as spy-hopping if it's not by whales?), more seastars, jellyfish Bill called moonjellies that he said had no sting (I didn't test this assertion) and looking at the remnants of old-growth forest on the very least accessible ridges and high points above us. When Bill was using a tree, he found a whole abalone shell in a midden. Another midden had been used for shellfish for thousands of years, he said; when I first saw it, it looked like snow.
At the head of Small Inlet, we found a spring Bill had never found before. When Bill put his hand to the ground, he startled a frog, who leaped to a branch over the surface. We saw water bubbling up through the mica-sifted bottom, and Bill filled his water bottle. I was tempted, but am not a native, and he's been drinking water from all over the islands, sources less pristine than this, for 20 years. And that water was cold. It felt just above freezing.
I didn't know if I would like Katharine Graham's memoir. I thought first it was autobiography, and then the first chapters set up her family background and psychology, which I thought intrusive and overly intimate, even though well-written.
I started really liking it after she got out of her family's hearts and minds and into her own. Obvious talent, ambition, and sociability. She and her broadening circle knew everyone and everything, which was interesting; and she presented her wealthy frankly, and I liked that she didn't apologize any more than she condescended.
The book made an excellent follow-up to All the President's Men, even at a remove of a few months and from a distance.
So that was our last day. Thursday we had a long day of travel, the quick ferry to Campbell River (I said goodbye to the water and an eagle perched on a tree as the ferry left Quathiaski Cove), through Campbell River to the airport, helijet to Boeing, shuttle to Sea-Tac, and two hours in the airport before the flight home. Baker and Rainier were thoroughly out, saying goodbye.
I thought I was coming home in time for Haitch to deliver, but my new nephew increased Haitch and McCarthy's joy five whole days early. Welcome Increase!
I am sitting on my porch swing (Blake in his cage alongside) writing entries from mid-month and watching a squirrel eat the berries off the European ash.
Sunday night neighbors had a progressive dinner of all tapas. I remember a couple of times babysitting for 3SK when they went out for progressive dinners in Old Lyme, which occasions now strike me as a bunch of inebriated people driving around town. This, happening all in walking distance, was safer. I had about a half-glass of well-seltzered sangria and stumbled on the sidewalk when Inga's family walked me home, and they laughed at me for having no tolerance. A silver maple had buckled the sidewalk! Really nice company and conversation and dogs and babies.
I came home with one of Scarf's wineglasses in my cooler and a request to borrow a movie, and in the mailbox today was a key to Inga's house, since I had offered to walk her. So today I did something daring: I walked Blake. Not on my shoulder, as I once brought Percy to do laundry, fetch the mail, or even drive to the video store, because Blake is so much flittier than steady Percy, and not in his travel cage, mostly solid with vertical slits for ventilating cats not optimally placed for a cockatiel to watch from, but in a small cage about the size of the travel cage, but vertical, a bird cage intended for wee things like finches. Percy lived in it, between us on the moving truck's bench seat, on the drive from Connecticut in 1995, except of course he was mostly on my shoulder; his regular cage was in the towed Terrapin along with his playpen and other awkwardly-shaped things.
I don't know why I kept that finch cage. Blake has had the more suitable--horizontal, sturdier, opaque--travel cage since 1999. But he hates that, I hope only because he can't see out of it. He hates his harness to the point I would never trust that he would ever stop struggling to extricate himself, and either do himself an injury in the process or by trying to flutter away from its leash or by successfully fluttering away from it altogether. So into the finch cage he went.
This was interesting! This was new! He leaned forward, steering. I left a note at Inga's about an obvious leash and supply of poop bags, dropped the movie at another house, and brought the glass to Scarf's. We sat on her porch and chatted with Blake between us and her dog, a huge Lab/Newf cross, gently curious about the bird, at our feet, sniffing. Blake chucked at the dog in greeting, but then huffed when she turned her head quickly.
Anyway, it gives me hope that maybe he could get used to a dog. And I love the neighborhood group Scarf has pulled us all into.
At some point in here one of the neighbors lent me the book for the next discussion, The Dogs of Babel. I don't know why I didn't note it at the time and I thought I said something about its making me glad I didn't read Lives of the Monster Dogs.
Oh, I know when it was. The Saturday RDC and I got back, a half dozen of us congregated chez Scarf, where it took us in a brigade all of nine minutes to move 500 bricks from the garage around the corner to a better spot. At the progressive dinner the next night, I hurled myself on someone and demanded to know whether it would be okay, much as I hurled myself at Jessie five years ago demanding to know whether The Amber Spyglass would be okay. You just don't do that to dogs, and please don't be that stupid about your dog.
What reminded me that Dogs of Babel had been missing from SC until today, 9 September, was that over lunch I began William Trevor's Death in Summer, the other bookgroup's August selection, which I didn't read because I wouldn't be back from vacation in time. Kal just lent it to me, and wheee, it starts with someone's wife dying and leaving him with her dog. And Dogs reminded me somewhat of Time-Traveler's Wife. All books are one book.
I love Robertson Davies. By heaven, an engaging, readable story, and though not sacrificing a bit of being a great story, also lovely, witty, erudite writing.
Also contributions for the Invisible Library: Dunstable Ramsay, A Hundred Saints for Travellers, Forgotten Saints of the Tyrol, and Celtic Saints of Britain and Europe.
Fiction has probably proliferated most, but though the nonfiction expanded more slowly, it had less space, just 12 feet of shelving. So along with gifts for Increase I bought a bookcase. It's only four inches wider than the one it displaced but has five shelves instead of three. The three-shelfer went into a corner of my study, behind the closet door, for fiction to swell into (and perhaps by the time that's full, we'll have a breakfast nook and its shelves; after that, I dunno).
I listened to "Jaws" and put together yet another piece of particle board. I had been able to hoist the piece from shelf to cart in the store, and from cart to hatchback, but I opened the box in the street and brought four armloads of pieces downstairs. Emptying the old bookcase and moving it, and emptying another bookcase so I could scoot it four inches to the right (now the rocking chair is out from the corner, at an angle), inserting "cam locks," screwing in brackets, nailing on the back, and reorganzing the books (including the 18" stack that had accumulated elsewhere) took me from "Come on in, the water's great!" to "I always hated the water"--"I can't imagine why."
Then I picked up RDC from the airport.