Northwest winter

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You are sick of listening to me moan and groan about the unseasonal weather, and climate change, and all such hippie tree-hugger liberal talk, I know.  So I will zip my lip and say no more.

 

 

(Rhode Island has hardly had any snow this winter so far, by the way.  Our winter has been positively balmy.  I walked downtown with no coat - just a sweater - the other day.  The grass is still pretty springy and fresh in most places around Providence, and I’ve seen things blooming.  In January.)

 

 

(Oops.  Zip the lip.  Sorry.)

 

 

This winter reminds me of the typical Northwest winter: cool, cloudy, dark, often foggy and rainy.  It’s the kind of winter that engenders “cabin fever”: you stay inside with your loved ones, waiting for spring, until you just can’t stand them any longer, and then you get out the shotgun.

 

 

Dark foggy weather doesn’t frighten me.  I grew up in the Northwest.  It’s nothin’.  By April, we’ll be tearing off our winter underwear and dancing among the daffodils.  For now –

 

 

Well, but still.  You have to make it through the darkness.

 

 

A few years ago, Partner and I were driving through rural Oregon.  It was midsummer, and the hills were covered with beautiful firs and pines, and the sky was wonderfully blue.  “I could live here,” Partner said.

 

 

“Yeah,” I said.  “I’m picturing this in mid-December.  You wouldn’t even be able to see those hills, the fog would be so thick.  It’d get light around ten in the morning, and dark again by four in the afternoon.  From November through mid-February.”

 

 

Partner regarded me mildly.  He has only ever seen the Northwest in summertime, and I think he has only ever seen it rain there once, one day in Portland.  He doesn’t really believe me.

 

 

But oh yes it’s true.

 

 

(Oh, did I mention that it’s snowing in Egypt this winter?  Yeah.  Oh, and they’re having a huge and extremely unseasonal windstorm – with hundred-mile-an-hour winds – on the central Oregon coast.)

 

 

(Huh!)

 

 

(Enjoy the future, kids.  It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.)

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Maryhill Museum

 

If you drive eastward along the Washington side of the Columbia River from Portland, you will encounter dramatic shifts of scenery.  The forested hills of Clark and Skamania county turn craggy as you pass through the Cascades, and the cliffs grow higher on either side of the river; then you see an odd shimmer in front of you – it never fails – and suddenly you pass from the damp greenery of Western Washington into the deserty hills of Eastern Washington. 

 

 

The cliffs in the gorge are spectacular.  One of the most spectacular places is Wishram Heights, which overlooks (more or less) a stretch on the Columbia which used to be a tumbling rapids called Celilo Falls.  The damming of the Columbia filled the waterfall, and it's a lake now.  (Don't be sad.  Someday the dams will fall, and Celilo Falls will still be there.)

 

 

A wealthy railroad man named Sam Hill loved this stretch of the riverside.  He built two things here: a replica of Stonehenge, and a huge rambling house, which he named after his wife Mary.  It is a windy lonely place now, and it must have been twenty times as lonely when Sam and Mary lived here.

 

 

The Stonehenge replica is no mere reproduction; it is a depiction of the original Stonehenge, with all of the stones in place.  Klickitat County, Washington (Partner calls it “Clicketyclack,” just to peeve me) made it their World War I memorial; my great-uncle Dewey Bromley is commemorated on one of the upright stones.  (Dewey died on a ship, either en route to the war or returning from it.)

 

 

The big house is now a museum, with a huge beautiful garden, and a state park attached.  Sam Hill knew Queen Marie of Romania quite well, and ended up (not quite sure how all this worked) with a whole bunch of Marie's stuff – her memorabilia, her traveling throne, her portrait collection, gifts from her grandmother, Queen Victoria. 

 

 

Oh, and Sam knew Loie Fuller too.  And ended up with quite a few of her things. 

 

 

Have I mentioned that all of this Byzantine treasure is on display in a drafty old house in a remote corner of Washington state, visited by few? 

 

 

I think a lot of people drive along that highway, above those really amazing Columbia Gorge bluffs, and suddenly catch sight of that big house and that bizarre circle of standing stones, and think: Did I really just see that?

 

 

But once you’ve caught sight of it and had time to wonder about it , it's gone.  You're in the wilderness again.

 

 

This must be a metaphor for something.  Let me think.

 

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Mushrooms

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The Pacific Northwest breeds life like you wouldn't believe. I've already mentioned slugs. Also coniferous trees (when I took “Washington History” at Battle Ground High in 1971 – a required course, mind you! - it was 10% history and 90% tree recognition).

 

 

The Northwest also breeds mushrooms, toadstools, and puffballs.

 

 

All of them popped up everywhere, in all shapes and sizes. Puffballs were my favorites: smooth stemless white spheres connected to the ground by a stubby little root. When they're growing, they're full of what looks and feels like damp styrofoam; in death, they wither into little brown dry bladders that emit a smoky cloud of spores when you step on them. Fun! (Some people eat them. I had them served to me once. Meh.)

 

 

My mother grew up eating wild mushrooms. She had only one test for poisonous / safe: if it was a white mushroom, and if you could peel the skin off its head, it was okay to eat. These she called “French mushrooms.” I was mistrustful of this, as it seemed just a little too easy. Then there's the silver-dime test: if you cook your mushrooms with a silver dime in the pot, and if the dime turns black, they're poisonous. Two problems here: a) no more silver dimes; b) all it proves is that there's something in the pot with sulfur in it. Lots of people must have died for nothing over this one.

 

 

You know I love Betty MacDonald. As a real Northwesterner, she wrote about mushrooms a lot. In “The Egg and I,” she writes about collecting wild mushrooms and comparing them to pictures in her field guide to determine if they were poisonous. This line, for me, is the best thing anyone ever wrote about mushrooms: “Maybe it was, and maybe it wasn't, so I tossed it into the pot.”

 

 

In her lovely last book, “Onions in the Stew,” she writes about gathering yet more wild mushrooms, and trying (unsuccessfully) to get her family to eat them, and eating them herself just to show them how foolish they were being, and going (temporarily) blind as a result.

 

 

Mushrooms must be awfully good, if they make us go to such ridiculous lengths. It's understandable that they would want to protect themselves from us.

 

 

But, for true mycological viciousness and perversity, nothing compares to the things I've seen here in Rhode Island. I suppose it stands to reason: this whole area was pretty much swampland for millennia, and a little rain brings all the old inhabitants back.

 

 

Including some of most peculiar fungi I've ever seen.

 

 

One variety looks like a rotten head of iceberg lettuce, with a gooey interior. It lies on the ground and stares at you like a big rotten pink-purple eyeball.

 

 

Some are airy little spotted toadstools that look adorable and just dare you to touch them.

 

 

And then there are the beauties you can see at the head of my blog today, which I spotted outside my office building the other day. They are red, and beastly, and very – well, suggestive. “Nature is perverse,” my colleague Cathleen said while we were pondering them. “It really makes you wonder what God was thinking about when he made them.”

 

 

I could not have said it better myself.

 

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Cascadian Literature 101: Ursula K. Le Guin

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Ursula K. Le Guin is our greatest living Cascadian author.

 

 

She has written “fantasy” and “science fiction” (whatever those terms mean). She has written essays, and “straight fiction” (whatever that means), and poetry.

 

She creates whole new cultures, based on entirely different assumptions than the ones we're used to. She plays games with political systems. (“The Left Hand of Darkness” creates a planet with a feudal hierarchy alongside a drab vaguely-Soviet bureaucracy. “The Dispossessed” features one planet with lots of different Earthlike governments – capitalism, pseudo-communism, etc. – and another with an anarchist government. If you've ever wondered what it might look like if the anarchists take over, read “The Dispossessed.”)

 

She uses a backstory for some of her novels, that goes like this: A million or so years ago, a humanoid culture colonized Earthlike planets all over the galaxy. Then, for some reason, they withdrew. Then, a million years later, they come back sheepishly: Look! We're your relatives! And you have cousins all over the place!

 

 

But we all evolved, hm, differently.

 

Some of us evolved hermaphroditically.

 

 

Some of us have cultures in which sex is completely open.

 

Some of us have religions in which numbers are an expression of the divine.

 

My favorite of her books is “Always Coming Home.” It is, in the author's words, “a story about some people who might be going to have lived a long time from now in Northern California.” It's sweet and strange and very solemn, and it feels very real. They have some technology, lots of folklore, and a deeply soulful lifestyle. Le Guin gives us their recipes and their holiday celebrations and their beliefs. And she ends with this plaintive refrain:

 

From the beginning, from the beginning,

We are your children.

 

 

Go read her, kids.

 

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Cascadian Literature 101: Betty MacDonald

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One of my earliest memories is of lying on the couch and watching the movie version of “The Egg And I” on a black-and-white TV. Even as a kid I loved the dumbfounded look on Claudette Colbert's face when she first sees the dumpy chicken farm that's her new home.

 

 

Betty MacDonald, the zestily brilliant comic author behind “The Egg And I,” grew up in a genteel but highly eccentric Montana family. Her first husband, a jerk, dragged her to Washington's Olympic Peninsula because he wanted to be a chicken farmer. Betty did not want to be a chicken farmer, but she went along with the gag. She cooked and canned and kept house and had kids, and was (as you might imagine) pretty unhappy there. She broke up with Mr. Chicken Farmer at last, lived with her mother and sister for a while, got tuberculosis, got better, remarried, and moved to an island in Puget Sound with her new husband and her two chicken-farm daughters.

 

 

She transformed that peculiar life into amazing hilarity.

 

 

“The Egg And I,” in which she describes her childhood and her first marriage, is her classic. Among other things, it gave the world Ma and Pa Kettle. Far from being the clodhoppers they became in the movies, the Kettles were pretty interesting; they had too many kids and not enough money, but they were also smart and endearing. (I'm partial to the scene in which Ma receives a Christmas gift from her citified sister: an oil painting of herself in a low-cut gown. “Look at us!” Ma sneers. “With our dinners as bare as a whore!” She hangs the painting in the outhouse. That scene didn't make it into the movie.)

 

 

Later, Betty wrote up her stay in a Northwestern tuberculosis sanatorium. It's a chilling book, which recounts the medieval methods being used to treat TB in the 1930s, but Betty manages to make it funny.

 

 

And that was her genius, really. She describes misfortune and illness in great detail, but she makes it funny. She's like a mother making a bee-stung child laugh, to take the pain away.

 

 

Her last book, “Onions In The Stew,” about Marriage #2, is mellow and sweet. (My friend Apollonia, a big MacDonald fan, is especially fond of the handyman in “Onions” who misses work because he has “back door trouble.”)

 

 

Betty died a month before her fiftieth birthday, in 1958.

 

 

She is one of the pillars of Cascadian literature.

 

 

Children: find her books where you can. Ebay, used bookstores, whatever.

 

 

And someday soon I'll tell you all about Peg Bracken.

 

 

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Hail Cascadia

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The Japan earthquake made me wonder if the Pacific Northwest coast is/was okay, so I checked the Daily Astorian and the Oregonian online. I grew up out there, and I still have fond (if cold and foggy) memories of those long sandy beaches in Washington and Oregon.

 

 

There was little or no tsunami damage in the Northwest, as it turns out. But reading those papers made me nostalgic for the dark rainy hillsides of my childhood. I used to pretend that the Northwest was its own country, not part of the United States but a sort of dim anarchic zone, lost in the swirling Cascade fog.

 

 

I'm not alone in this. Ernest Callenbach, back in the lawless 1970s, wrote a novel called “Ecotopia,” in which Washington, Oregon, and northern California break off to form a rebel republic, based on gender equality, ecological awareness, and fierce independence.

 

 

Yes, I know. But still.

 

 

There are actually lots of people who enjoy pretending the same thing. They have given their new nation a name: “Cascadia.” They have a flag, and maps, and bumper stickers, and even stamps! I especially love the geoduck stamp. (Geoducks, as you can see above, are giant alien-looking Northwest clams. The word is pronounced “gooeyduck.” My great-aunt Julia was famous in the family for sitting on the the beach with a rifle, waiting for the geoducks to fly over.)

 

 

Julia was a genuine Cascadian.

 

 

We have our national authors too. Callenbach is one of them, I suppose, though frankly I've never been able to plough my way entirely through “Ecotopia.” There's Ken Kesey, most especially for writing “Sometimes A Great Notion”; Betty MacDonald, who deserves a whole blog entry to herself; Ursula K. Le Guin, novelist / essayist / short-story writer, ditto; and Sherman Alexie, member of the Spokane Tribe (well, Spokane's a bit east of the mountains, but Alexie's a crazy Cascadian all right).

 

 

Some Cascadians have set up a Sasquatch Militia. Others are trying to protect the rare tree octopus.

 

 

From the grizzled loggers of the North Cascades, to the sunburnt huckleberry pickers on the slopes of Mount Adams, to the ultra-cool hipsters of Portland and Seattle (not to mention the expatriates like me), we are a nation of (mostly) amiable lunatics.

 

 

And no matter how far we roam, we can still hear the geoduck quacking in our hearts.

 

 

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