For the first day of summer 2013: A taste of winter

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I like to commemorate special days, and the first day of summer – today, by the calendar – is a special day.

I’ve lived in Rhode Island for almost thirty-five years, but I – a child of the cool foggy Pacific Northwest – still haven’t accustomed myself to the steamy uncomfortable summers here. I suffer (mostly in silence) for about two months, from late June to late August, while we fluctuate between hot / warm / humid / stormy / insufferable.

So here are some photos from last winter’s snow.

I hope you find them refreshing.

See you next January, when the world is cool and quiet again.

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British English and American English

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A friend in England just sent me a nice little book: “British Language and Culture,” published by Lonely Planet.

I thought my knowledge of British English was moderately okay. I can read the Financial Times without a crib sheet, and even do the crossword puzzle. (The puzzle, sadly enough, often resorts to cricket terminology, which kills me, but I now know all about googlies and centuries and maiden overs, not to mention former Archbishops of Canterbury and Prime Ministers and managers of Manchester United.)

But this new book is a gold mine.

I opened the book randomly to Cockney rhyming slang. “Apples and pears” I knew from an Austin Powers movie (it means “stairs,” which rhymes with “pears”; you can say just “apples” if you’re feeling obscure). How about “Use your loaf” for “Use your head”? I assumed “loaf” was just a silly euphemism for “head,” because people’s heads were big and lumpy, like loaves of bread. But it’s rhyming slang too: “head” rhymes with “bread,” which leads us to “loaf of bread” . . . .

The book also includes Estuary English, and Zummerzet English, and Geordie English. It has a Cornish lexicon, and a Welsh lexicon, and a Scots Gaelic lexicon, not to mention a Lallans supplement.

It makes my head spin, that there are so many ways of saying the same thing.

Here’s a story from my own past:

Where I grew up – in the Pacific Northwest in the 1960s/1970s – “I have an idea” was a synonym for “I think so” or “I agree.” Example: if someone said “I think it’s going to rain today,” you could agree by saying “I have an idea.”

Then I came to New England in 1978, still using all my Northwestern idioms. I quickly stopped saying “pop,” and substituted “soda” (which seemed strange for a year or two, but which wasn’t such a big deal). I quickly stopped making fun of people who didn’t pronounce “ant” and “aunt” in exactly the same way. Ditto “ferry” and “fairy.” Ditto “Mary” and “marry” and “merry.”

And slowly I learned to speak New England English, or more specifically, Rhode Island English.

But it took me a long time to get rid of “I have an idea,” even though people reacted strangely to it. One person long ago said, wonderingly: “What? What idea do you have?”

Okay. I finally got it. No one understands “I have an idea.”

But I still think it’s a cute expression.

And isn’t it lovely that we have so many ways of expressing ourselves?

‘Bye now. I have to run up the apples and pears.

Such a s

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Goldendale, Washington

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 Goldendale is a town in Washington state, in Klickitat County not far north of the Columbia River. The sign at the city limits used to read like this (maybe it still does):

 

 

 

WELCOME TO GOLDENDALE

THE GOLDEN GATE

TO THE EVERGREEN STATE

 

 

When we made our yearly visits to my my paternal grandmother, back in the 1960s and 1970s, Goldendale was the last real town we passed through before we arrived at her house. We usually stopped for a burger. I wish I could remember the name of the burger place, because it was excellent.

 

 

Partner and I have passed through Goldendale a few times over the past fifteen years. It’s bigger than I remember, but I see from Wikipedia that it has less than four thousand residents, so it’s still pretty small.

 

 

In June 1918, astronomers William Campbell and Heber Curtis came to Goldendale to view a solar eclipse. This was an especially important eclipse, because Einstein’s theories predicted that the light of stars close to the sun would be deflected slightly, and everyone wanted to see whether or not it was true.

 

 

The Goldendale data (which wasn’t terrific) did not confirm Einstein’s theories. Luckily, other viewings over the next few years confirmed that Einstein was correct.

 

 

But Goldendale turns out to be a great place to have an observatory. The air is clear, and the weather is mostly cloudless. There’s a permanent observatory there now, in its own state park.

 

 

And here’s the thing: my father (who was six years old at the time) was only a few miles away from Campbell and Curtis, on his parents’ ranch, as Campbell and Curtis performed their observations.

 

 

The world is a very small place after all.

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Dowsing

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Dowsing is looking for underground water – springs, wells, etc. – by magical means.

 

 

Many dowsers use a split twig, which looks like a slingshot. They hold the two split ends like handles, and walk. When there’s water below their feet, the twig will tell them so. It will tug at their hands, and draw the twig to earth.

 

 

When I was growing up in southwest Washington state in the 1960s, dowsing was a fact of life. A family friend named Ruth was a water witch; she made good money dowsing wells for people.

 

 

My father did it himself, but he had his own method: he filled a ketchup bottle with water, and suspended it from a thick piece of twine, and carried it around the field, looking for water.

 

 

(Here’s the thing: in those days, in southwest Washington, the water table was nearly level with the ground. There was water everywhere. After a heavy rainfall, you could put a stick in the ground, and water would gush out.)

 

 

(So how hard was it to be a water witch? Not very.  And how often did they succeed? A lot.)

 

 

This doesn’t mean that I disbelieve in it. A lot of animals can smell water; why shouldn’t people be able to do that?

 

 

But finding water below ground, in southwest Washington, in those days, was just too easy.

 

 

I believe in all kinds of crazy crap, but in this case, I’d like to see a bit more proof.

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From paradise to parking lot

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You know I have a great affection for weeds. I grew up on the edge of a National Forest, and we had more land than we could use (my parents started with twenty acres of woods and pasture, sold half, and still couldn’t figure out what to do with the remaining ten acres). There was one small patch of weeds, probably twenty feet square, just off to one side of our house, on a little hill. My mother insisted that it be mowed from time to time, but I resisted. I rejoiced in it. It had everything: dandelion, chess, quack, vetch, three kinds of clover, plaintain. I literally used to roll in that weed patch on sunny days. It was a miniature jungle, just right for a little boy.

 

 

I visit my old home on Google Earth from time to time. The house is still there (though greatly changed). But I see that my old patch of weeds is all plowed up now, made into useful ground.

 

 

What a pity.

 

 

Even here in Providence, where people have been building and ripping up and building again for over three hundred years, there are still little patches of chaos. One of my favorites was on Angell Street, a few blocks from where I’m writing this. In summer it was practically tropical; it featured a couple of gigantic trees-of-Heaven (Ailanthus altissima), that fabulous fast-growing weed tree, bigger than any I’d ever seen in southern New England, and at least two dozen smaller species.

 

 

Then, about ten years ago, the bulldozers moved in, and they plowed it under, and they built a Starbucks.

 

 

Another piece of paradise gone.

 

 

There’s another little patch close to our apartment, a hill with trees and flowers. Huge mullein thrive there, and weedy maples, and Queen Anne’s lace in summertime.

 

 

The backhoe was there this morning, ripping it all up.

 

 

Sing it, Joni Mitchell!

 

 

 

 

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The Rhode Island accent and the Pacific Northwest accent

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I came to Rhode Island thirty-four years ago, and the accent baffled me for a long time. Then I understood it. Then I tried to imitate it.

 

 

Now, decades later, I can almost manage it.

 

 

It took me years to master the pronunciation of “Worcester.” It’s WUH-stah, with a funny breathy sound in the middle.  I said WOO-stah for a long time, and everyone laughed at me.

 

 

“Sure” is easy: SHOO-wah. I say it all the time; it’s my best Rhode Island word. It baffles the Brown students who work for me; they've never heard anything like it, and they’re sure I’m a local.

 

 

“Cheryl” is, of course, CHEV-vil. I kid you not.

 

 

It goes without saying that I came here from the Pacific Northwest with no accent at all.

 

 

Who am I kidding? I sounded like Huckleberry Finn when I first got here. When I go back to the Northwest, I listen to my relatives talk, and I think: Are we serious? Do we really sound like that? Did I ever really sound like that?

 

 

When my brother Leopold says my name – “Loren” – it comes out sounding something like “Lawwrn.”

 

 

I speak quickly and nervously. I probably always did. But quick and nervous is appropriate for the Rhode Island accent; a lot of people here speak too quickly for their own good. It’s okay if you only get a few words here and there; most of the time, it’s enough.  I have an acquaintance here who speaks so quickly, the words seem to overlap one another.

 

 

But, even after all this time, when I go back to the Northwest, or when I talk to someone from the Northwest, the local dialect starts coming back to me.

 

 

We have “groshry stores” instead of “grocery stores.” “Washington” is “Worshington.” It’s curtains for you if you say “O-ray-gone” instead of “Orrygun.”   “Idaho” is “EYE-dee-hoe.”

 

 

After I’d been in Rhode Island for a year, I called one of my banks in Worshington State to transfer some money. After a moment on the line, the bank lady said, sounding just like Ado Annie in “Oklahoma”: “YOO SHORE SOUND FAAR AWAAY. WHERE AARE YOOU?”

 

 

And, without thinking, I bellowed back: “AH’M IN RHUDE AAHLAND!”

 

 

Seriously.

 

 

Or, as we say here: Foh shooah!

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August

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(Note: this is a silly sentimental blog, about the passage of time, daily life, getting older, etc. If you don’t like that kind of thing, stop reading now.)

 

 

Okay. Here goes:

 

 

I have always loved the month of August. In the Pacific Northwest where I grew up, it was usually the month in which we got some warm dry weather. As a kid, I knew it meant we were going back to school soon, but it didn’t seem to matter. Time seemed to stop in mid-August. It was (as my mother said) “beach weather”: sunny and warm and pleasant.

 

 

It’s no different here in Rhode Island. August can be brutally hot and humid here, but there are also days when it’s just – pleasant. The girls and I were sunning ourselves outdoors at lunchtime recently, and Cathleen said: “It’s a beach day.” And she was exactly right.

 

 

Sometimes there are storms, or long angry heatwaves. No matter. We know that September's right around the corner, and – whatever else happens – the weather changes in September. (Last year there was a hurricane working its way up the coast at the end of August. We lived through it.)

 

 

Sometimes – even in mid-August – there’s an occasional cool breeze. It seems to come out of nowhere. It’s a foretaste of autumn, get it? It’s a message that summer is not going to last forever.

 

 

And there are the Perseids. This is a meteor shower that happens around mid-August (this year’s peak comes next weekend, around the 11^th and 12^th of August). It is supposed to be one of the year’s most spectacular displays. (I wouldn’t know. I’ve never seen a single bloody meteor. I’ve tried: I’ve waited up, and gone out in a lawn chair, and faced north. Not a single shooting star have I ever seen.)

 

 

Time stands still in mid-August. We know that summer is almost over: but it’s not over yet. The office is quiet, because so many people are away. The streets are quiet, because so many people are on vacation. Labor Day’s right around the corner, and the return to work will happen soon.

 

 

But we don’t need to think of that, do we?

 

 

Not yet, anyway.

 

 

Bring on the Perseids.

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I am the son of a rodeo rider

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A cousin of mine contacted me recently, and sent me some family pictures, and talked for a while about my father and my uncles and aunts.

 

 

How remote I have become from my father’s family.

 

 

Here I am: a business manager in a big East Coast university.  And my father was a farmer, and a bronco buster in rodeos in the Pacific Northwest.

 

 

WTF?

 

 

Origins are mysterious and obscure, as a character in the Mahabharata says.  Who can say? Who knows where I really came from?  Or where my father came from?

 

 

I keep discovering new stories about my father.  I knew him as a quiet glowering figure, very silent.  I have discovered, from others, that he was kindly, and a lover of animals (his boyhood / teenage nickname was “Doc,” because he served as informal veterinarian to the family’s animals), and very generous to his younger siblings, who thought very highly of him.   (One of my aunts told me that, one very lean giftless Christmas in the 1930s, he made her a doll. Sixty years later, she still remembered it with a smile.)

 

 

And he won blue ribbons for rodeo riding. Specifically, for bronco busting.

 

 

(I bet your father never did that.)

 

 

Dad was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1975. His last year was painful. Cancer treatment was unsophisticated in those days; the doctors gave him radiation therapy, which burned him horribly. He had to stop eating everything he loved. He had to stop smoking. His quality of life plummeted to near-zero.

 

 

Then, around Easter 1976, he began to eat whatever he liked.

 

 

We knew what that meant: he was tired of living in perpetual misery. He’d chosen to eat some ham, and maybe smoke a cigarette once in a while.

 

 

He died about a month later. He was sixty-two years old, only seven years older than I am right now.

 

 

Origins are mysterious, and so are endings.

 

 

Rest in peace, Dad.

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Summer heat

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It has been very hot in Providence this summer.  This week was pretty awful: mid-90s, high humidity. The air was like the water in a dirty aquarium: warm, and thick, and most likely toxic. Yesterday morning, walking to work, I was sweating like a Teamster. I was carrying a blue-covered library book, and when I got to work I found that it had left blue dye all over my lovely rose-pink shirt. At one point downtown I realized that the temperature inside my body was almost the same as the temperature outside my body; I had the creepy feeling that I didn’t know where my body left off and the outside world began.


I know, however, that we have it easy compared to other parts of the country. We haven’t had any really horrible storms (although lightning did strike our building a while back). We are not spontaneously combusting, like Colorado. We are not getting flash floods, like Arizona.


Still, it’s pretty icky and nasty here.


I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, green and mild, where 80 degrees was considered steamy. (On my first trip to the Northwest with Partner in 2001, we were in Seattle during a (mild) heatwave – mid-80s! – and everyone was apologizing to us for the heat.) Then I came here, to Southern New England, where the winters are bitter and the summers are ferocious, and I suffer every day. (Except during the long beautiful autumn and the brief gorgeous spring.)


I take it easy on these hot days. I drink lots of water and move slowly. (Last summer, I nearly dehydrated myself on a hot summer day, and came close to collapsing. I will not do that again.) On Monday, one of my student employees, an athlete in training, overdid it during an afternoon workout; he spent the evening retching and the next day recuperating. (I told him to hydrate and not overexert himself. These kids don’t listen to me. I lectured him on this yesterday, and he heard me out very meekly, but I doubt that he’s learned his lesson.)


Global warming? Oh, wait, we call it “climate change” now. Nah. Couldn’t be.


As I said to Apollonia the other day: this is good practice for Hell, when we finally get there.


From the Book of Jonah, Chapter Four (King James Version, naturally):

⁵ So Jonah went out of the city, and sat on the east side of the city, and there made him a booth, and sat under it in the shadow, till he might see what would become of the city. 

⁶ And the Lord God prepared a gourd, and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head, to deliver him from his grief. So Jonah was exceeding glad of the gourd. 
⁷ But God prepared a worm when the morning rose the next day, and it smote the gourd that it withered. 
⁸ And it came to pass, when the sun did arise, that God prepared a vehement east wind; and the sun beat upon the head of Jonah, that he fainted, and wished in himself to die, and said, It is better for me to die than to live. 


Speaking for myself: I would be exceeding glad of a gourd right about now.

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My mother, the killer

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We were a gun-totin’ family.  My father had at least half a dozen hunting rifles, of which he was very proud.  After his death, my mother kept one (loaded) in her bedroom, for emergencies.

 

 

Yes, I know. Mammy Yokum. Ma Kettle. But she knew how to use it.

 

 

She continually fought moles in her beloved garden; she set traps for them, mean little miniature bear-traps, stuffed down into their burrows.  (If you’ve ever seen a mole, you know how small and delicate they are.  But, to my mother, they were Lucifer incarnate, because they ruined her garden.) Sometimes, however, they triggered the traps and then ran away unharmed, and this infuriated her.  So she came up with the idea of chaining the trap to a metal post.

 

 

One morning she looked out the window to see the post rocking back and forth frantically.  Moles (as I said) are pretty small.  She’d obviously caught something much bigger.

 

 

It turned out to be a big mean angry badger.  It was caught fast, and it growled at her and ran back and forth, and tried to get free

.

 

And she shot it dead.

 

 

Story number two:

 

 

On one of my visits to her in the earlyt 1990s, I woke in the middle of the night to hear an odd scraping sound outside. Mom’s house was miles from anywhere, out in the woods, so there was normally complete silence outside, apart from wind and rain and the howling of coyotes. I mentioned this at breakfast. She looked grim. “I heard it too,” she said. “Goddamned porcupine.  Chewing on the back steps. I’ll get it one of these days.”

 

 

(Editorial note: porcupines like to chew on wood that’s been handled by human beings. The wood gets impregnated with salt – generally from our sweat.  And porcupines are infatuated with salty wood.  They will eat the handles of axes and mallets and hammers, just to imbibe all the delicious salt that’s in there.)

 

 

Within a few weeks after my return to Providence, Mom told me the following story:

 

 

She started waiting for the porcupine, and finally one evening, she surprised it, and came out of the house toting her rifle.  Being a smart little porcupine, he flattened himself against the house, reasoning that Mom wouldn’t be so stupid as to shoot into her own house. 

 

 

He didn’t realize how resourceful she was.  She put down her rifle, picked up a broom, and started spanking him.

 

 

Squalling, he ran from her, out into the yard.

 

 

And then she shot him.

 

 

I come from tough stock, people. 

 

 

Beware.

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The other side of the hill

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When I was growing up in Washington state, I was always surrounded with heavily-wooded hills and mountains.  I have a distinct childhood memory of sitting in a supermarket parking lot and looking into the corner of a small but impenetrable-looking forest that seemed to roll forever up the side of a hill.  I knew this was impossible, because we weren't really far from Portland/Vancouver.  But it seemed that way.

 

 

My fantasy was (and is) always this: to walk into those trees, up that hill, and come to the summit, and see what's on the other side.  I bet it's lovely.  I bet there's a river in the valley below, under a perpetual ruddy sunset.  I bet there's a town, or maybe just a general store, where you can buy supplies for the journey onward.

 

 

I treasure this fantasy. I will never let go of it.

 

 

Rhode Island is very flat. Jerimoth Hill, the highest spot in the state, is barely over eight hundred feet high.  There are hills – Providence used to brag of its seven hills (College, Constitition, Federal, Smith, Tockwotten, Weybosset, and Christian) – but they’re anthills really; some have been dismantled completely.  You can look out from Prospect Terrace over downtown and see all the way to – what? – Johnston, maybe. 

 

 

It’s lovely, but not very inspiring.

 

 

So I still dream of those lovely Northwest horizons, with mountains and mysterious treelines and hills disappearing into the blue distance, into -

 

 

Into something.  I don't know.

 

 

But it’s something wonderful.

 

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The Idaho Spud

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There is a nice website called Hometown Favorites, which markets grocery items from around the country: items that are generally only available locally.  In Rhode Island, for example, we’re talking about Eclipse Coffee Syrup, and Kenyon’s Clam Cake Mix, and New England Frozen Lemonade (sorry, kids, I don’t like Del’s). 

 

 

And sometimes I long for the candy bars of my Pacific Northwest childhood, and Hometown Favorites has them.

 

 

They have Mountain Bars.  They have Rocky Road bars (my favorites: chocolate-covered marshmallow bars, with bits of cashew in the chocolate).  They have Zero bars (white chocolate).  They have bags of Brach’s Chocolate Stars, which, inexplicably, you can’t buy in the Northeast.

 

 

And they have the Idaho Spud.

 

 

What?  You've never heard of it?  It’s only “the candy bar that made Idaho famous.”  It’s made in Boise (I checked the wrapper), by the Idaho Candy Company.  It’s an ovoid-shaped bar, rather like a used bar of soap, and it has a nubbly chocolate-coconut coating.  The inside is marshmallow mixed with something else I've never quite figured out. I gave an Idaho Spud to a coworker not long ago, and she described it this way: “The outside was delicious. The inside was – just flavorless.  Like a husk.”

 

 

And yet: I still buy them, five or ten at a time, and I eat them, or I give them away. I tell people: “Even if you don’t like the candy bar, the wrapper is a novelty.”

 

 

But, sincerely, I like them.  They remind me of my childhood, for one thing.  And there’s something profoundly simple about that brown wrapper.  And I like giving them to people who’ve never seen them before, who invariably say: “What is this thing?”

 

 

Why, it’s an Idaho Spud, you silly goose.

 

 

Just close your eyes and surrender to the experience.

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Why I should learn to swim

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I don’t think anyone in my family really knows how to swim.  I think my brother Leonard can swim a little, but that’s it.

 

 

We didn’t have a pool when I was a kid.  Nor did we live near placid clean bodies of water.  The local swimmin’ holes – the Lewis River, the Columbia River, Battle Ground Lake – were either too brisk or rocky for swimming, or big bowls of tepid water and bacteria. 

 

 

During Peace Corps training in Puerto Rico, I tried to learn.  There were fifteen of us in the training group: twelve other guys going to Morocco, and two women going to the Turks and Caicos Islands.  One of the women was a very nice happy lesbian and didn’t care about the guys at all, except as friends; the other was straight and moderately attractive and was being peppered on all sides by offers of sexual congress from fellow trainees.  She and I liked each other, and I think she found my company peaceful, as I wasn’t trying to get her into bed.  Anyway, she tried to teach me to swim in the Caribbean, with the barracudas darting around our feet, and the straight guys in our group were very envious of me as I was being held in the water by my ladyfriend.

 

 

But I can’t really swim, to this day.  (They tried to teach me to float.  Depending on what I happen to be wearing on any particular day, I may be able to float.)

 

 

Years ago, when I was a kid, my family went to Copalis, Washington, to dig clams and play on the beach.  I was left alone to play.  Apparently the tide came in very rapidly.  I remember (vividly) playing in the sand.  I remember the water coming in rapidly, but I wasn’t worried about it.  Then I heard screaming, and my family ran through the rapidly-deepening water and scooped me up – and then I was concerned. 

 

 

My memory is in black-and-white, but very sharp.  I wasn’t scared until I heard the screams and the people running toward me.

 

 

Ah well. Here I am today.

 

 

Let the chips fall where they may, kids. 

 

 

Here’s to another hundred years of foolish heedless living.

 

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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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Final arrangements

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Partner and I are both getting on in age, and have begun to talk about our final arrangements.  Naturally we want to be together, even after we’re both defunct.  (This is irrational, but we’re human, so naturally we’re irrational.)

 

 

We have, unfortunately, discovered that we have a little discrepancy in our final wishes.

 

 

Partner wants to be cremated (after he’s dead, I mean, not today) and have his ashes thrown into the water off the Pacific island of Maui.

 

 

I want to be buried in a proper wooden casket and put in the ground in Venersborg, Washington, close to where I grew up, in a grave facing Spotted Deer Mountain, in northern Clark County.

 

 

So, you see, we have some negotiating to do.

 

 

I think we will do a catch-as-catch-can scenario.  If I go first (which I think is very possible), I want him to take me with him wherever he goes.  It would be nice if some little part of me – even a keepsake – were put in the ground near my parents, but really, it doesn’t matter that much.  It matters much more to me that I be with Partner.  He can take me to Maui if he likes.  There’s enough of me in Venersborg already, I suppose, after having grown up there. 

 

 

And, if he takes me with him to Maui, Partner and I will be together.

 

 

And if (God forbid) Partner goes first, I will carry out his wishes, and he will swim with the fishes off Maui.  But a little pinch of him is going to stay with me, and I will be buried in Venersborg with an envelope in my pocket, and that envelope will have some of Partner in it.

 

 

And, if I bring a little piece of him to Venersborg with me, Partner and I will be together.

 

 

And that’s really all that matters, isn’t it?

 

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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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Imaginary hometowns

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In Italo Calvino's novel “Invisible Cities,” Marco Polo describes imaginary places to the Emperor of China. They are wonderful, and impossible.

 

 

This is at least partly because they do not exist.

 

 

Okay, Italo Calvino. How about this?

 

 

The town my mother was born in no longer exists. The town my father was born in never existed. And the town I grew up in doesn't quite exist.

 

 

I will elaborate.

 

 

Bayne, Washington, where my mother was born, was a “railroad town,” with “houses” built for the railroad workers. When we took our yearly trip up to visit Grandma, Mom would point over into a field of yellowed grass and say: “I was born over there!” And all I could see were some burnt-out shacks lost in the trees and weeds. It still shows up on a few maps, but there's really nothing there.

 

 

Glade, Washington, where my father was born, was a fiction: just a name that my grandparents chose to call their farm in rural Klickitat County, Washington in the early decades of the Twentieth Century. Dad was born in the Glade in January 1914. The weather was very cold. Grandma felt her water break (it was at least her third birth) and told Grandpa to hitch up the buckboard to take her into town to have her child. He took a long time about doing it, so Grandma (I'm quoting her, by the way) “mixed herself up a hot toddy to keep the cold away.”

 

 

By the time Grandpa got back in the house, Grandma was drunk on the kitchen floor, giving birth to Dad. She didn't quite know what to do with the umbilical cord; she knew it was supposed to be tied off, so she tried to loop Dad around and through it, as if tying a shoe.

 

 

They never quite made it into town. But Dad got born anyway, right there in the house, in “Glade, Washington,” which you will never find on any map. There's a Glade Cemetery, with a few markers. I dare you to find it.

 

 

As for me, I grew up in Venersborg, Washington. It's on the side of Spotted Deer Mountain, in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. It's not a real city or town; Wikipedia calls it a “census-designated place,” which sounds about right. Mom and Dad are buried in Venersborg Cemetery over by Finn Hill, and it's always the first place Partner and I go when we visit the Northwest. Sometimes, when I'm very nostalgic, we drive all the way up the hill to look (from a distance) at the house I grew up in. It's been remodeled, and it's different now.

 

 

But it's still there.

 

 

Children: be proud of your imaginary heritage!

 

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Yakima apples

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Early last week, the incomparable Apollonia gave me a little mesh bag of Pink Lady apples. “You want these?” she said. “Take them.”

 

 

“What's the matter with them?” I asked warily. “Are they poisoned?”

 

 

“There's nothing wrong with them,” she said. “Eh. They're not aesthetically pleasing to me. You know how I am.”

 

“Oh yes I do, God help me” I said, accepting the bag. “Can I huck them at people I hate?”

 

 

“Go wild,” she said.

 

 

I took them to Ethan, a student who works for me. “You like apples?” I said, proffering them to him.

 

 

“Yeah,” he said incredulously, taking them from me. (University students seldom turn down food.) Then he became wary, just as I'd done. “What's the matter with them?”

 

 

“Nothing, so far as I know,” I said. “Except that Apollonia didn't want them. She has very high standards for produce.  Plus, she's a lunatic.”

 

Then, as I handed him the bag, I noticed on the label that the apples were grown in Yakima, Washington.

 

I'm a Washingtonian by birth; my father was born not far from Yakima, as were two of my siblings. There’s a pretty large Native American reservation there, and back in my parents' time, the Yakima used to lease out reservation land to local non-Native American farmers. My mother had a pair of beaded buckskin gloves that she'd gotten in those days; she kept them in a drawer in her vanity desk, wrapped in paper, and would get them out once in a while and show them to me. (I have no idea where those gloves are now. It's only my brother and me now, as both our sisters have passed away; I hope he has them. He was born in Yakima, after all.)

 

 

Ethan saw me looking strangely misty, as all these memories crowded through my head. “What's the matter?” he asked.

 

“Nothing,” I said. “My parents lived not far from where those apples were grown, when they were first married. On the Yakima reservation.”

 

 

“I didn't know you were an Indian,” Ethan said with interest.

 

 

“I'm not.” I sighed. “It's a long story.”

 

 

But that didn't stop me from telling it, to him and to you, did it?

 

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Insects I have known

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Every region has its insect population. Back in Washington state, we had all kinds of crazy critters: lime-green katydids, stinkbugs by the millions, spittlebugs in the weeds (there's nothing like taking a walk in summer though the tall grass and getting slimed all over with gobs of spit).

 

 

Rhode Island has nice dragonflies in summer, as well as meat-eating yellowjackets and teeny-tiny ants that boil by the millions out of cracks in the sidewalk.

 

 

Something bit me in Morocco.  I barely felt it, but within a few days my thigh turned blue, then purple, then red and orange in waves. “That's a spider bite, all right,” the Peace Corps nurse said.  It was eerily beautiful, like a sunset at sea. It took months for the colors to go away.

 

 

In Tunisia: bedbugs! You wake up and find three, four, five little tiny bits on your skin, all in a neat row. Live and let live, right? What's a little delicious blood among friends, am I right?

 

 

Once in Tunisia, I was in the living room with a bunch of friends. They were all seated; I was standing in the doorway. All at once something crawled out from under the sofa.  I was the only person who was looking down, so no one else saw it. It was maybe five inches long, and it was bright red, with a million little feet, and it was undulating across the floor in the most prehistorically evil way you can imagine. I yelped wordlessly (I think everyone thought I was having a stroke), picked up a nearby Arabic dictionary (the heaviest thing I could find) and threw it at the thing. I hit it, and it leapt (I do not kid you) into the air writhing and thrashing. I forget how we disposed of the corpse. Next day at work I described it to my friend Halim. “It was red?” he said. “Good thing you killed it. Those are pretty bad.”

 

 

I never found out if he was kidding or not. I didn't want to know.

 

 

On the lighter side: one lovely autumn day in northern Morocco, I was coming down a staircase on the outside of my apartment building (it was a converted villa, very nice). Everything was littered with falling leaves. As I ran my hand down the railing, I felt a leaf cling to my hand. I looked down at the leaf -

 

 

And the leaf looked back at me.

 

 

(You know those Disney nature films with bugs that camouflage themselves as sticks and fallen leaves? They're not making that stuff up.)

 

 

I shrieked. I jumped into the air, waving my hand and screaming. I was terrified. My friends, waiting for me at the base of the stairs, were in hysterics.

 

 

I probably frightened the poor bug into a heart attack.

 

 

And it serves him right for scaring me.

 

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