Kate

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early morning tea, Mount St. Helens

early morning tea, Mount St. Helens

birds taking flight

broccoli on a stick

it's delicious!

open space very high up

Kate hates styrofoam.

curried peas. Thanks JME!

Morgan Lake

Oregon clear

angel eyes

Is IT in you?

don't mess widdus

laughter and forgetting

Moab checkout girl

American Idyll

hovering in a friendly way

Mount St. Helens

early morning tea

lunch-time

red rocks of UT

fashion is muy importante!

ah, that's better.

Utah take me home

on the road of life....

silly dance

Sinclair4

lazy telluride day

tell-u-ride

man about town

happy telluride dogs

tired, as in DEAD

wheels

from Rome to the midwest

headache called "today"

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At the Bagby Hot Springs

TThe Bagby Hot Springs are located in the Mount Hood National Forest, approximately sixty-seven miles southeast of Portland. Long used by native americans, they were named after Bob Bagby, a hunter and prospector who stumbled upon them in 1880. A bathhouse was built in 1920, but it was destroyed by an unattended candle in ‘79. Today, The US Forest Service maintains three bathhouses with the help of volunteers who live on-site.

Despite what the internet says about the Springs being “easy to locate,” we found ourselves winding up and down about twenty forest roads, some with paper plate signs (one of them saying, simply, “Mother”), until stumbling –like Bagby himself –onto the trailhead. It’s a 1.5 mile hike to the Springs. With our tent, food and clothes on our backs, we searched for the fabled Bagby campsite, about a quarter-mile past the baths. The topo map we had was useless, and after an hour of hiking we decided to make camp in a level clearing by a stream. Kate made an excellent fire, I roasted broccoli on a stick. Have you seen this movie? It captures the Babgy Springs perfectly:

When I was a kid, one my my earliest heroes was Grizzly Adams, from the TV show. He had left civilisation for the wilderness (something about being wanted for a murder he didn’t commit) and enjoyed a nigh-telepathic bond with animals.  His demeanor was always gentle, thoughtful, and he looked vaguely like Kenny Rogers, another icon of my childhood. I had fantasies of running away into the woods, subsisting on plants and fungi, and, like ‘ol Grizzly himself, communing with the creatures. The television series lasted two seasons, just enough time for the transformation to take place: on the outside, I still looked like a little girl, but on the inside…I was…JUNIOR GRIZZLY! Of course, the real James “Grizzly” Adams was a deadbeat dad who trapped wild animals and sold them to PT Barnum’s Traveling Show. In the seventies, that would have made an unpopular show.

Kate and I woke early the next morning to break camp and make it to the baths before anyone else. It was a chilly monday morning; the likelihood of people visiting the Springs at this hour was low, and we hadn’t seen any other campers. Of course, being women, we constantly have to make concessions to our sex and consider the risks in any given situation. We know where our codiac mace is at all times. But Junior Grizzly does not like having to make concessions. She would rather take a few (calculated and juicy) risks and lose from time to time, than live a caged life. Whose world is this, anyhow?

Laying in a hollowed-out cedar log, steam rising into the cold morning air, I tilted my head to hear the chirp-chirp of Oregon birds. “This forest is a cathedral,” I thought. I looked at Kate, who had fallen back into her log so that only her bent knees showed. Even her knees are beautiful. Kate says that she is an ugly woman, but I know in my heart that’s not true. Her words, her thoughts, her smile, her shoulders in the sun. It is simply not true.

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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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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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what is this thing, called “blog”?

KKate is downstairs taking a bath. I had thought, in the health food store where we bought charcoal pills and Primal Strips, to get her some oatmeal bath stuff. I didn’t–it was pricey–but I wish now that I did.

Today we rode rickety touring bikes down Ash Street to another health clinic. They were doing low-cost blood screenings for the underinsured folks of Casper. It always amazes me when people get together to do a good thing. Volunteers at an elephant sanctuary, borderless doctors, men who fight human trafficking rings–these people are tenacious and kind, and I think it’s the combination of the two that really warms my cockles. With so much strife in the world, it’s easy to forget the good people who beat it back.

As for the blood tests, I had the Chem profile, hemogram, hemoglobin A1C, and ferritin tests ordered. These are but gauzy, meaningless terms to me, promising a glimpse of something beautiful. If I am patient. If I am calm. Being adopted burdens one with problems of alienation and loss, some say its own syndrome; I can’t remember a time when I was not sad. Perhaps now, I’ll gain some insight into my bloodline, through–fittingly–my own blood.

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