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Powell's Bookstore, Portland OR

Portland, Oregon

AAfter visiting Alaska, every sunset nudged us closer to home. In Brooklyn, my cats Ruben and Little One Eye were waiting for me, growing fat, and Kate’s friends held their nightly Casper vigil. It seemed that we’d only just touched our feet to the muskeg before boarding the MV Columbia again. Good-bye, Tom and Kira, good-bye bar boys with headgear, it was very nice, we had a lovely time, good-bye. We wanted to ferry over to Sitka and visit Miyike (met on ferry #1) but there was no efficient way to do this.

Stumbling onto land at 7am, Bellingham looked exactly as we had left it seven days before, but with the scent of a story read to us from an old book, damp-smelling. We were ready for the next book. We drove south from Bellingham, quick stop for tea, another at an exit advertising “farm fresh corn!” (which we couldn’t find), another visit with Jamie in Redmond –Shall we see Seattle? No Seattle! –Hwy 5 to Portland for lunch, quick stop for gas –oughtn’t we have seen Seattle? Google-searching for vegetarian cafes in Portland,  inadequacy of google forcing us to ASK FOR DIRECTIONS, circling in the car like mad to find parking, we settled finally at the corner of NW tenth and W Burnside Street.

This is also the address of Powell’s, the largest bookstore in the world. It takes up a city block and stocks a million new and used books. “Sure,” I snorted, “in the world, no less.” (Why are New Yorkers this way? Is it something in the water?) In my defense, I just couldn’t imagine a bookstore with more character, or more books, than our beloved Strand. That’s right –EIGHT MILES of BOOKS organized so haphazardly and rising a mile above your head, dumped there with such little love that you balk at any price tag over a dollar –that’s the Strand. And lest you forget where you are, notice the commode so tiny and bespattered with GOO that you’ll fairly gasp the words: New York City.

But I was not in New York, at least not yet, and I’d been roughing it for three weeks. Where’s the café in this bookstore? Happy camper Chunsoon Li wants a chai spiced latte with soy milk and Splenda. Oh, and a cookie…yes, that one…in the back under those others? Thank you. Kate left me to find a book about the Appalachian Trail, something she’s taken a keen interest in. I settled down at a table with my cookie, my tea, and my ‘top.

Powell’s bookstore is wonderful. They organise the books by title, so if you’re looking for a decent, tattered copy of Lolita circa 1955 or its current lascivious incarnation you will find them side-by-side on the shelf –okay, well, you won‘t find the rare green classic but you take my meaning: Powell‘s encourages people to buy used books. I saw a sign that proclaims: “Every day, we receive four to six thousand used books”, which somehow makes me smile and cringe at the same time. All those books, such little time, so many bookworms dying? According to their website, about three thousand people per day walk in and buy a book (Kate), and another three just browse and drink caffeine (me). People once feared that television would herald an end to reading. Powell’s garners about eighty thousand visitors, online and in-store, per day.

Just thinking about that makes me giddy.

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Dinner at Kira and Tom's place

Dinner at Kira and Tom’s place

head scarf like mom's

knit, purl, knit, purl

Quilt: Kate

It's remembered this way

Doug's ebb and flow

good people of the Ferry

Seer

Chunsoon Li, that's me

McSmileypants! you!

The Journalist v. Kate

smiling exhaustion

the world's most affable

Bellingham "bed head"

What's so funny?

oh those Turks

like a wistful madonna

kate and the boys

writing her life

Kate

Kate as Ms. Woolf

dinner party

she says, "I want so much"

in big letters, US!

Kira

CS and Tom at Northern Lights

Dave of the Midnight Rider

morning sonata

CS on deck

in the kitchen

I love this!

Tom's night In

tourista

as tough as he looks

tree-hugger

the most amazing bartender

power to the people

Miyike v. chunsoon

Tour Guide: detail

a very old tree

The pensive Journalist

miyike, we hardly knew ya

cs tickles the ivory

creatures of the night

on the MV Columbia

Kira and Kate

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water like a silk sheet

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Petersburg, Alaska

Petersburg, Alaska

AAlaska, that wild state of affairs up north, has occupied a place in my mind like the corner that gathers cobwebs in an attic. To its inside passage my love fled ten years ago, and to its mossy, creosote-soaked pillars I have been tied since. In a manner of speaking. He worked at the fishery, slept in the woods like an animal, and sent me postcards to let me know he was alive. He read Notes from the Underground as I waited, but he stayed too long in this place where my voice, my hands, couldn’t reach him.

This story occurred so long ago that its telling is positively maudlin; we were children then, we’re good friends now. However, when I picture Alaska it always takes on this tint, this bruised color beneath the snow. I am sure that my visit to Petersburg was a bit bluer, a bit truer for the memory. In the strange way people can be, I felt better having seen the patch of trees where he slept, the coffee shop where he sat. I felt as though these places were telling me a story. The story of–I don’t know–the story of a young man running away from love? A youth gone wet-faced into the wild? or just a story of boredom?

“Lots of people moved here to escape the law,” Kira explained to us, kicking a rock with her foot. Our ferry arrived early and quietly, slipping into town and without much fanfare slipping away. Tom and Kira know everyone in Petersburg: waving at passers-by, it seems like they all have a story to tell. This guy lives in a filthy trailer and builds wood furniture so beautiful it’d make you weep, that one drinks his own urine–for the health benefits, he swears! Most everyone here is here only seasonally; they subsist on the fish.

I asked Tom, who has worked at the Petersburg fishery for over a decade, if the Alaskan salmon are being depleted beyond conscionable levels. Of course, the next question is, “whose conscience?” That of the owners of the canneries? Or of the fishermen whose lives depend on each season’s yield? The consumers’? As it turns out, it does seem that the yearly cull of Alaskan salmon is highly regulated and that the fish have a swimming chance. This was not always so. Overfishing in the region prompted President Ike to declare Alaska a “federal disaster area” in 1953, meaning that his government (which was responsible for funding the management and research necessary to prevent a, umm, disaster) had failed. Upon statehood in ‘59, this responsibility transferred to Alaska, and the situation improved, then dipped, then improved again, till the Happy Now: thirty-three state hatcheries releasing 1.2 to 1.4 billion juvenile salmon per decade, and a limited entry permit system controlling the volume of fishing allowed.

Bully for you, Alaska! Oh, state of Midnight Sun, of the Northern Lights. The word “Alaska” comes from the Russian “Alyaska”, which came from the Aleut “alaxsxaq”, meaning literally, “the object toward which the motion of the sea is directed”. As game hunters have argued, an animal’s usefulness to us is what guarantees its survival (sigh…this is the sort of animal we are), a theory so neatly exemplified by the wild salmon who–for goodness’ sake!–have steps built for them in particularly steep upstream areas. If we can save these shimmery and dumb creatures from extinction, where are the government-funded elephant orphanages? The laws that curtail the use of heat-seeking weaponry, fired from aircraft, against fleeing wolves?

Now that Kate and I are back in the “lower 48″, staying with Amanda’s parents in Centennial, CO, I remember Alaska the way I saw it: spare, chilly and through a haze of drunkenness. We had arrived on the last day of fishing season; everyone taking to the streets in a great bellow of exhaustion–the kind of exhaustion you feel when, at 2 am in a bar in a strange town, the prospect of walking home seems more tiring than that of having another drink. It is a happy, smiling exhaustion. When finally we did make it back to Kira and Tom’s place, we’d tipped over into that magic zone where nothing at all was tiring, and stayed up late making pizza, taking pictures and laughing so much my throat hurt for days. Petersburg is a picturesque, quirky and altogether disquieting place. I woke early the next day to shoot pictures of the misty mountains and found myself chatting with one scruffy local after another. Nowhere is loneliness more profound than in a fishing town at six in the morning. It’s touching, really…all these renunciates, misfits and young summer workers mashed together…at once running from and striving toward women.

And what else is there?

I’ll never know why my friend went to Petersburg, Alaska. But now I have seen the town, I have felt its allure. Like a woman, like the “object toward which the motion of the sea is directed”, this wild place which called to (and claimed) Chris McCandless at twenty-three, Alaska has left me with a new sort of hunger. More of an itch, actually. It’s really no big deal. I’m sure there’s a topical cream for it.

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My Own Private Telluride

My Own Private Telluride

WWe’re in Telluride, CO, a strange little town off Hwy 145 that has the air about it of a Swiss ski lodge made of chocolate. I imagine at night the residents (all two thousand of them) issuing forth from their cottage beds deep into the mountains, to stir up more chocolate. We will not be staying long. It is an expensive place to be. Unfortunately, we’ll miss the Blues and Brews music festival this weekend, but somehow we will manage. I never did much cotton to the blues–I like Leadbelly et al. but the songs don’t touch me like they seem to others. Give me a sappy Korean pop song from the 80’s–now that’s mourning to a tune.

We came to Telluride by the invitation of a man we met on the Alaskan ferry. Of course that ferry ride was one big drunken party–I remember playing an old piano in the bar and people giving me money. If it was silly of us to hold him to plans made there, then silly is as silly does. But, you know, a gentleman means what he says and says what he means, right? We arrived and this tree-hugging, lily-livered liberal was alternately “too tired” to come out and “too busy” to accommodate us. “I kinda have to feng-shui out my apartment,” he said. “I gotta get a steam cleaner,” he said. He had promised us a tour of Telluride and fresh-baked pastries. What we got was a $150 room at the Victorian Inn.

The townsfolk here are friendly and very well dressed. Handsome college kids play instruments on the sidewalk, ruddy-cheeked; Telluride women (in their thirties through fifties) are especially beautiful–they have a shine in their eyes that softens the face, and they are always smiling. I wonder why: twice since our arrival, we’ve been told about the unreliable nature of Telluride men–by the men themselves. The streets are teeming with people this week before the festival. Everyone asks us where we are coming from. We tell them about Yellowstone, the Lewis and Clark Caverns, Redmond, and days spent driving against dusk.

But they hardly seem to care.

They want to know about Alaska

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