Ready for driving, I wore glasses not contacts, so the rain irritated me as we walked to Pike Place again for breakfast. Stupid rain. We ate lox and bagels, bought lots of fruit for the drive, admired bouquets of peppers and garlic with flowers, considered but resisted having any salmon shipped to us, and pet Rachel the Pig g'bye.

And so we left, driving away in a car that reeked not a little of mildewed tent-towel.

Eighty miles to Roslyn. I admit it, I'm a "Northern Exposure" freak. I can no longer make fun of my mother's friend who, visiting Boston for the first time (living a whole hundred miles away in Connecticut), had one goal: to see the Bull and Finch Pub. At least I didn't expect Roslyn to look as much like Cicely as she expected the Bull and Finch to look like "Cheers."

A whale watch companion told us the tourism has really fallen off in the five? or so years the show's been off the air. It looked thriving to me: the line for the Brick went round the block. I wanted a KBHR mug like the one I saw of PLT's, and so into the store we went. The only thing I could find that didn't say Northern Exposure at all was a sweatshirt:

KBHR
Voice of the Last Frontier
Minnefield Enterprises

But it was black and half polyester and I don't need a sweatshirt I won't wear. So I bought a mug that I'll use left-handed so I can look at KBHR Chris in the Morning instead of "Northern Exposure" with a moose.

The first sign that you've entered the set is the Brick on the corner to your left on the road from the highway. Everything from the show is on a road perpendicular to that state route. Imagine a one quarter-mile stretch of road with the state route bisecting it near its right end. You see the Brick first, on the left as you come to the intersection. Kitty-corner to the Brick is a gift shop with the radio station and Maurice's office to the right of it. Across the road from the Brick (and therefore also across the state route from the KBHR) is Ruthanne's store. At the far end of the (scenic) part of the road, on Ruthanne's side, is the Roslyn CafŽ, (the 's has been painted out). On the Brick's side, nearer than the CafŽ, is Joel's office.

That was all I needed to see, and I had my mug, and so our homeward journey really began.

On the way up, and especially waiting for the late ferry, and now again, we read Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild to each other. (It is convenient that its protagonist used that phrase and that Into Thin Air could continue the theme so appropriately.) Stuart has taught this book to his students as something that always sparks contentious debate (among a generation of students known for reticence). RDC sympathized, I think, with the protagonist, Chris McCandless, where I lost more and more respect for him the more I learned. The final straw was that he didn't know how to preserve the meat of a moose he shot. He tried to smoke whole muscles instead of drying strips the size and shape of tongues. That's just so stupid. (Hey, if I know it, it must be obvious. Or in Jean Auel, whatever.) He wanted to destroy maps and commune with nature, but he hiked into the Alaskan bush as an urban, thoroughly 20th-century person without basic backwoods knowledge or skills. That's not communing, and if it's not suicide, then it's stupidity. His life and body and thus his right knowingly to make a fatal choice, but I don't sympathize with or respect him for it.

Despite my dislike for its subject as a person, Into the Wild was as much a pleasure to read as Into Thin Air. Krakauer has an excellent sense of pacing, turns an evocative phrase, and has a neat trick of perception. In addition to mechanical skill and precise metaphors, his obvious but well-controlled passion for his subject compels the reader. Both Intos were originally Outside magazine articles, and they also have in common that in each he published a mistake. With his personal involvement in the Everest tragedy, that mistake haunts his conscience much more than the McCandless error; in Into Thin AIr's prologue he mentions the Everest mistake as part of what drove him to write a book. With McCandless, his empathy for the young man inspired him, not the mistake; he was researching and writing the book when he discovered it (reporting hearsay that turned out to be false).

While Air is possibly the better, both are excellent. My favorite section of Into the Wild was the tangent in which he explains the rapport he felt for his subject with his own death-defying solo adventure. He just decided to climb the unclimbed north face of an Alaskan mountain it one midsummer morning on a Boulder barstool "while picking at his existential scabs." I like that. There was only one small thing that annoyed me (about Krakauer's writing) in Into the Wild: he draws a simile between something (that slips my mind, probably mountains) to an essence as unknowable, mysterious, and venerable, as a woman's sex. "Thank you so much," I exclaimed, dropping the book, "for using a metaphor that I just don't get."

I understand it, of course, and it's flattering that he has such an appreciation for the female form (what's Maude's line?) but as much as I'm possessed of female genitalia, my personal experience with the generality and my eye-to-eye, as it were, experience with any specific individual, is entirely lacking.

So anyway that one left me in the dark. I wonder, though, when a (heterosexual) woman wants to allude to the arcane and unknowable, would the same metaphor occur to her? I wouldn't compare anything to male genitalia for the same effect. Also, is a woman's sex (coy phrase!) mysterious because it's mysterious, or is it mysterious because men have dominated the distinction between what's mysterious and what's not?

Well. We ended the day in Boise, ate at a Kopper Kitchen (whose salad consisted of iceberg lettuce and a shred of lettuce and whose vegetable course was corn and beans--no dark leafy greens for us), and had our last Motel 6 stay.