Archive for July, 2010

July 29, 2010
Wicked good day

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At the end of a whirlwind trip that still hadn’t quite sunk in, I wanted a long, solo walk to clear my head before my flight home. So I got on the 8:57 Downeaster from Dovah …

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(wishing there was time to stop in beloved Haverhill on the way)

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… to Beantown. With only four hours to spend in town, and a muggy heat index of 100, I stuck to a small radius of old haunts.

After first gaping in stunned shock at the neatly-landscaped evidence that the Big Dig was finally finished,

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I took a stroll through my favorite neighborhood, the North End.

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Listen, my children, and you shul heeya
Uh the midnight ride of Pawl Reveeya,
Awn the eighteenth of Aprul, in Seventy-Five;
Hahdly a may’n is now alive
Who remembas that famous day un’ yeeya

I tipped my imaginary hat to my Yankee heritage,

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and went in search of lunch at a place I knew of nearby that makes a mean lobsta roll.

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Connecticut-style, with clarified butta (even if it is a bit of a faux pas this close to Maine), natch.

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Then I headed downtown to take up my well-trodden loop.

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First I stopped in to visit some old friends,

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including Mista Reveeya himself.

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Then I trudged past the Statehouse …

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… to Beacon Hill, where it was entirely too hot to draw.

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(Though you can see where the inspiration for doodles past comes from.)

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Next on my circuit was the Public Gahden, where the willows wept,

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and both swans and non-swans took to the water to cool off.

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By then there was just enough time to walk through the Common to the T,

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and then it was back on the train again, off to catch my flight. I love the Blue Line because it doesn’t stop at “AIRPORT,” and because it’s my favorite metaphor for Boston. I don’t mind the traffic, or the grime, or the expense, or the often-lousy weather—because at the end of all of that is Wonderland.

Posted by Chandler at 2:30 PM in Travel  |  Permalink  |   Comments (2)
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July 25, 2010
And then, sometimes, vacations take you.

All this talk of stolen vacations, and all I had to do was wait another week. Well, maybe not for a vacation, per se, but certainly a change of scenery. My mother called to let me know that my grandfather was entering hospice care, and before I knew it, I was on a plane back East.

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For the first time in my life, it felt like going away rather than going home, but my roots are here nonetheless. This is Exeter, New Hampshire, formerly my grandparents’ place of residence and, for most of her life, anyway, Mum’s hometown.

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Exeter, founded in 1638 (ye olde now-defunct colonial movie theatre founded a little later, har har), is a place where change comes so gradually that much of its past—and the memory of my childhood—is still intact. It’s a classic, the quintessential New England town. So much of what I identify with New England is either here or nearby, and between visits with Bampa, I soaked up all my Yankee favorites.

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The mills. Remnants of the Industrial Revolution are all over New England, and still alive in one form or another—my parents even live in one.

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The churches. From simple Quaker meetinghouses to grand dames like the Exeter “Congo Church,” one can observe an entire colonial history just by exploring a handful of churches.

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The houses. I picked up my fascination with residential architecture from Mum, and she and I have a tradition of taking house-viewing jaunts along the coast. My favorites are the colonials:

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McIntire Garrison House, built either in 1645 or 1707, depending on whom you ask

Postmedieval Englishes,

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Well, Jefferd’s Tavern, on the right, is almost a saltbox…

Saltboxes,

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Original or “true” Capes don’t have dormers upstairs

classic Cape Cods,

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Emerson-Wilcox House, built 1745, York, ME

Georgians,

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and Federals/Adams.

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Tuttle’s Red Barn, founded 1632, the oldest American family farm still in operation

The farms. Nothing says New England to me like the barns dotting the countryside—

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especially the steepled ones. They’re everywhere, but I’ve never seen two barn cupolas that are exactly alike.

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The landscape. I love the pockets of meadows and marshes that pop up suddenly between the trees,

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momentary visions right out of Anne of Green Gables,

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and that line the winding country roads, casting a dappled green glow onto every surface.

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The stone walls. Criss-crossing the woods and fields like seams, the walls are some of the oldest remnants of Colonial culture—demarcating property boundaries and connecting living New England with its past. And every time I go back, New Hampshire’s own Robert Frost recites in my head:

Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors’.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

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Posted by Chandler at 4:05 PM in Life, Travel  |  Permalink  |   Comments (6)
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July 17, 2010
Stolen vacation, part two: lava and craters and volcanoes, oh my!

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The second part of my little holiday was a little more ambitious: a four-night camping trip with the Tailor in southern Oregon. It was just what the doctor ordered—the perfect prescription for recharging the soul.

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We camped in the Rogue River National Forest, in a grove of hemlocks and blooming dogwoods—

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just downstream from this.

The Rogue River is so beautiful that we could have spent the whole trip exploring its banks. Well, if we hadn’t had another destination in mind, that is:

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Crater Lake National Park. One of the deepest, clearest lakes in the world, Crater Lake was formed 7,700 years ago by the collapse of Mt. Mazama, after an explosion more than forty times the size of the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens.

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When a group of prospectors stumbled upon it in 1853, and thus became the first white folks to lay eyes on it, they named it Deep Blue Lake. Heh. Imaginative. Well, at least it’s descriptive.

And accurate. The lake is so impossibly blue because of its depth; when the sun’s rays refract upon hitting the water, red and green light are absorbed in the depths, while only the blue light (which has a shorter wavelength) reflects back to the surface. So the lake is blue even on a cloudy day—as you can see.

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We were a week too early for the boat tours to open for the season, but we hiked down to the water anyway. The rangers like to say that the trail is “one mile down, ten miles back  up” (it’s funny because it’s true. Oy.), but the experience is well worth the huffing and puffing. Next time I’ll bring bug spray, though. Note to self.

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Did I mention that it’s blue? And deep? Maybe those prospectors were onto something.

The photo above doesn’t come close to doing it justice (none of my photos do), but the sheer depth and clarity of Crater Lake was mind-boggling. It’s impossible to tell how deep the rocks in the upper left corner of the photo are, but according to the topo map in front of me, it’s quite a ways down. Because there are no streams in or out of Crater Lake, there’s nothing to muddy or disturb the water—objects are visible nearly 150 feet down. Deep Blue indeed.

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The thing that really got to me was the fact that the lake was both a bottomless pit and a perfectly-flat mirror, depending on which way you looked at it. That’s probably why this is my favorite photo of the trip—somehow the camera managed to look at things both ways.

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I think I must have been trying for the same kind of perspective with this drawing—and with far less success, I’m afraid. My brain broke when I tried to analyze the thing graphically. Ah, well. (The ground squirrels were fun, though.)

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This one worked out a lot better—and it didn’t hurt that the figure and desert drawings were already there to help things along.

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Speaking of deserts, we also saw a whole lot of barren landscapes to balance out all this snow and water. For one thing, we drove down and back on the eastern (the arid leeward) side of the Cascades. For another, there are places where all this ancient volcanic destruction still looks like it happened last year. This is the Pumice Desert, on the north side of the National Park.

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And this is something else again. Now, I loved everything we’d seen at the Park, but my absolute favorite part of the trip was this place, which made for a side trip on the way home. This is just south of the Newberry Caldera, another collapsed volcano formed in precisely the same way as Crater Lake, but on a much smaller scale. A trail winds up and through the rock-pile hills—a landscape that seems plucked from the surface of the Moon.

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If you step closer, however, you’ll see the light glinting off of each rock and pooling in every crevice. In full sunlight the entire hillside sparkles like a gigantic, blinding treasure hoard.

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The rocks shine because they’re not rocks—they’re glass. This is obsidian, a natural glass formed when lava cools rapidly without crystallizing. Besides being gorgeous and just about the coolest thing ever, obsidian is extremely useful as a surgical tool. Obsidian scalpels can be sharpened to a near-microscopic edge (because of the not-forming-crystals thing), and the incisions they make produce narrower scars than steel scalpels do. Neat, huh? Anyway, obsidian flows of this size are quite rare, so if you get the chance to walk through one—take it.

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I could have stayed all day with the obsidian (which, by the way, is called the Big Obsidian Flow, a name that gives Deep Blue Lake a run for its money), but we were still several hours from home (we figured we’d have to spend the first hour stepping carefully around all the ground squirrels that had appeared at our feet), and we still had one more stop to make:

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Lava Butte, from which it was possible to see pretty much every darn volcano in Oregon, and even Mt. Adams in Washington. I won’t bore you with the 200 other photos I shot from up there, but let’s just say I was in suitable awe.

Oh, and for the record? All of these volcanoes are still active. How freaky is that? Or maybe it isn’t, and I just have volcanoes on the brain, but I think it’s freaky.

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I lost count of all the volcanoes we spied, but the rest of the numbers were easy to tally:

Five glorious days.

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Five breathtaking sunsets.

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Five thousand smiles.

Posted by Chandler at 2:29 AM in Adventure, Drawing, Pacific Northwest, Travel  |  Permalink  |   Comments (5)
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July 11, 2010
Stolen vacation, part one: mollusks, vampires and the rainless rain forest

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Since I’ll be a hermit for most of the rest of the year while I finish my Rainier book, I tried to sneak a little summer vacation time into June. If I was going to lock myself indoors during our sunniest season, I wanted as many mountains, oceans, flowers and skies as I could cram into a week first.

For the first few days we had a couple of friends staying with us. Since one of them was visiting from Colorado, and wanted a change from the hot, dusty summer back home, we took a day trip to the Olympic Peninsula for a good dose of lush greenery.

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The West Coast highway, U.S. Route 101, ends with a 300-mile, two-lane meandering loop around the Peninsula. It’s the only thoroughfare on the entire Peninsula, and a treacherous road, full of hairpin curves, patches of fog, logging trucks and landslide-prone slopes—but the scenic beauty makes the drive a spectacular adventure.

We took the northernmost leg of the road that day. Just west of Port Angeles it winds through a tunnel of trees as it hugs the shore of Lake Crescent, where we stopped for a picnic lunch beside the impossibly blue water.

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We were tempted to spend the whole day at the lake, but a bigger surprise lay down the road: the Hoh Rain Forest, one of the largest of America’s rare temperate rain forests. I’d also bet it’s the most beautiful—if it weren’t a four-hour drive away, I’d go every day.

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I had only ever seen the place in a downpour (big surprise—they get up to fourteen feet of rain and over 300 cloudy days a year), but as soon as we arrived that day … the sun came out.

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I almost didn’t recognize the place.

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The last time I was there, droplets hung from every surface and everything shimmered with a gossamer silver glow.

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This time, the glow turned to spun gold and bottle green.

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As always, though, every branch was festooned with cat-tail moss, and sword ferns carpeted the forest floor.

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And the clovers were the biggest I’ve ever seen.

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So were the trees.

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The best part about our road trip was the fact that it was nearly Midsummer; we still had hours of sunshine left to us. Next on the itinerary: Ruby Beach.

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It was a short hike down to the water, past Queen Anne’s lace and just-ripening salmonberries, with the roar of the Pacific ringing in our ears.

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That second stamp is still the only banana slug I’ve ever seen, alas. The search continues!

I sat down to do a watercolor,

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while Ethan moved along the shore to explore the sea stacks,

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and Nicole stopped to take in the view.

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We made a quick contribution to the collection of obos on a nearby driftwood log, and set off for home.

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If this is Twilight Firewood, then can I assume that’s the Twilight Dumpster back there?

On the way back we stopped for a little absurdity. Route 101 passes through Forks, home of a certain infamous vampire series; we couldn’t resist stopping to take photos of the hilarious roadside tie-ins that had popped up since the last time I passed through.  I’d never read the books, but when Nicole told me that these vampires only eschew sunlight because it makes them sparkle … well. My morbid curiosity got the better of me, and before I could stop myself, I read the whole blasted page-turning accident scene of a series the following week. Ugh.

And, uh, yeah. They sparkle. And whine and brood and mope. Curiosity satisfied.

I digress. Sorry.

By that point we were starving—but not in the mood for Twi-dogs or whatever punny food might be expected in a place with a name like Forks. So I suggested we hang on a little longer and head to Port Townsend, where I knew of a fantastic seafood restaurant.

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An hour later, we had traded Forks for spoons, and were digging into our bowls of the tastiest, freshest, localest carn-starn Manila clam chowder on the West Coast. And changing my definition of road food in the process.

Oh, who am I kidding? You know that whole trip was for the chowder, right?

Posted by Chandler at 5:04 PM in Drawing, Pacific Northwest, Travel  |  Permalink  |   Comments (5)
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July 09, 2010
Summer finally got the memo

Well, if this isn’t a case of “be careful what you wish for,” I don’t know what is. Though for the record, I’m pretty sure I was the only person in the entire Pacific Northwest who wasn’t doing any wishing. (I like the cold.) Monday it was a sweater-perfect 65 degrees; today it scorched out at 93. As I’ve said before, as we so rarely have hot weather and air conditioning is therefore scarce (and totally unnecessary 99 percent of the time)—well, if you want to cool off, you’ve gotta get creative.

In this, my third summer here, a certain set of cooling-off routines are quickly becoming a tradition. Here, then, are my top-5 favorite heat-beating tips, Northwest style:

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1. Grab a friend and get on a boat. Namely, the Bainbridge Island ferry. Since it’s always at least twenty degrees cooler on the Sound, the passage kicks up a deliciously cold breeze that puts every air conditioner in Phoenix to shame.

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2. Take a cue from the seagulls and head for the prow. The breeze is stronger up there—the birds sure love it.

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3. When you arrive on Bainbridge, stroll down to Mora for a cone. I’m a believer in Dessert First.

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(Use a spoon as necessary to stay ahead of the melting.)

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4. When you get back to the mainland, duck into an air-conditioned restaurant and follow up that dessert with a light, cold dinner and an icy drink. Do this European style, and take your sweet time.

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5. When you finally finish dinner, take a walk in the evening air and watch the sun do spectacular things on its way out. That’s the best part, and the most solemn promise of hot-hot days in this neck of the woods.

Posted by Chandler at 12:33 AM in Adventure, Life, Pacific Northwest  |  Permalink  |   Comments (2)
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July 05, 2010
Independence party

Please ’scuse the absense. The Tailor and I have been in and out of town lately (mostly in the woods, far away from computers and civilization), and I’m still going through the mountain of photographs. Travel details this week, pinky swear. In the meantime, today felt like a whole vacation all by itself—just plain old good for the soul.

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This is Carol, a fiery Sicilian kindred spirit and one of my favorite-est people on the planet. She and her fabulous husband, Jeff, hosted a Fourth of July shindig in their garden today, threats of rain be darned.

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There was a little music,

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a healthy dose of croquet,

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(heaven help you if you hit the ball into the fig/rhododendron tangle, or launch it over the wall and down to 30th Street far below)

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a whole lot of laughter,

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and a walloping smörgåsbord that included plenty beyond your typical Fourth o’ July fare. Hey, hummus goes great with stars-and-stripes cake!

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We contributed our ice cream crank, plenty of mashed strawberries, and our upper body strength.

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I’m glad there were plenty of people to share the job of cranking, because I like to cut to the chase.

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Namely, this. My favorite part is when everybody grabs a spoon and helps clean off the dash,

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though I’m sure the novelty alone was the highlight for some. Sure, it was a little cold for ice cream (we’re not exactly known for hot summers here, but this year we’ve been sporting March temperatures for months), but everyone just threw on another clothing layer before digging in.

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After we had all eaten ourselves silly, everyone gathered on Carol and Jeff’s porch, which faces the Sound and provides a front-row seat—

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first for the warm-up act,

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and then for the main event.

And judging by the snap-crackle-popping still echoing through the neighborhood, I’d say the party ain’t over yet.

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Happy Independence Day!

Posted by Chandler at 2:13 AM in Kindred Spirits, Life, T-Town  |  Permalink  |   Comments (2)
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