Olympic National Park

With the unusually warm and dry spring weather last weekend, we took a hike on the North Fork Skokomish Trail in the Olympic National Park.  The full trail is about 12 miles beginning at the Staircase Ranger Station and ending around the base of Mt. Steel.  We did a little less than half the trail.    This area being all ancient forest made the hike like being in a Transcendental painting.

The trail began winding along the staircase rapids of the Skokomish river.

After about an hour of hiking, we began to climb above the river.  Slowly, the unmelted snow of winter began to appear.  First, there were just small piles of snow on the edges of the trail and in the shade.  Soon after, we were walking through snow pretty consistently, but it was low enough to hardly get boots wet.  Eventually, we were in consistent snow of about one foot.  Luckily, the more prepared of us (not me) had remembered to bring our gators.  More prepared for snow, we set off for about 2 or 3 more miles trudging through the snow and dealing with large trees blocking the narrow trail.

We passed over many streams leading down to the river.  Most of them were small enough to wade through on rocks.  One in particular was running quite deeply in a small gorge.  The trail continued over across on a log bridge, which was essentially just a fallen tree that had been flattened on the top and a handrail added.  This was by far the scariest part of the hike.

By midday, we reached Donohue Creek where we stopped for lunch.  Unlike hiking in the east, where it is easy to get to a summit - or multiple summits - in one day - hiking in the Olympic National Park is a more remote and lengthy experience.  To truly reach any kind of height, multi-day trips are necessary.  However, even a day hike where the farthest destination is just a creek can be an amazing experience.  Sitting next to Donohue Creek with such a mix of ancient trees above me was like being in one of those Transcendental paintings where two small people are sitting at the edge of a cliff in a vast and lush green landscape.  It made me feel small and at peace.  

Book Review: The Giver Quartet

A few weeks ago a jump for joy surprise came in the mail:  an autographed copy of the final installment in Lois Lowry's Giver series.  My mom is awesome!  The present inspired me to reread all of the books that form The Giver Quartet.

I first read The Giver in elementary school and have since taught it to middle schoolers several times.  I remember as a child wondering if a place like Jonas' community - everything in perfect order, everyone perfectly taken care of - really did exist.  Parts of this social idealism really appealed to my desire for an ordered life even as a child.  While the supreme order of the community is appealing - no conflict, no hunger, no sadness - the sterility and mundanity is the downside of that order.  The good things in life - freewill, beauty, love, friendship - are only good in relation to the downs of life.  In Jonas' community, there are no downs, just mundanity.   Of course, almost no one in the community notices, and as the Giver points out, freewill and feelings can lead to catastrophes and have in the past.   Jonas is a twelve-year old who through his assignment working with the Giver learns some disturbing truths about his community.  He must courageously attempt to change the community.

In the second book, Gathering Blue, Lowry introduces a very different community where people have freewill, yet poverty, selfishness, danger, and hunger prevail.  The main character is again a twelve-ish child.  Kira is in a very bad situation when she is selected to help the community in a very special way.  There is no direct connection to The Giver in this second installment, but there are many parallels between the stories.  By the third book, The Messenger, Lowry is beginning to tie the stories together with the return of Matty, a character from Gathering Blue, who is now the protagonist.  This story also gives hints as to what happened to Jonas after The Giver ended.  While the hints are indirect, they are exhilarating to a fan of The Giver.  Matty, again a twelve-ish child, lives in a community that takes the good from the other two communities - people have freewill but are also kind and generous.  As evil begins to take-hold of the village, Matty is sent to save it.

All three books parallel each other in the depiction of young heroes courageously fighting for better societies, but each book ends abruptly.  In Lowry's new novel, Son, the stories are brought to a nice conclusion.  She opens back in Jonas' community around the same time that The Giver began.  The plot of Son moves through and beyond the time of the other three novels and encompasses most of the settings of the other three; in this way, Son literally encompasses the other three stories. The main character, Claire, is a birthmother in the original community.  After giving birth to a boy, she is kept from the baby, as is the custom, and assigned to different work.  Due to an unusual protocol, she is not reminded to take the medication required for all adults, leaving her to feel real emotions, something foreign to the members of the community.   While she begins at roughly the same age as the other three protagonists, her story is of a much more mature nature.  It touches on a type of loss and loneliness that is deeper and more adult than the previous books.  Perhaps in the same way that the characters of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series grew up at the same rate the texts became more mature, Lowry has saved this intriguing viewpoint for a more mature audience.  Of course, this could just be my bias as an adult reader.  There are themes in the other three books that are perhaps nearly as mature and not viewed in the same way by children.  Perhaps, like when I read The Giver as a child, there are aspects of Son that are understood differently by children than by adults.  For this reason, I often like to go back to novels I loved as a child.

For someone who has not read The Giver since childhood, or someone that has never read it at all, The Giver Quartet is a worthy revisit or first visit.

Puget Sound's Rougher Museums

Museums don't always have to be frilly buildings with girly tchotchkes in the gift shop.  Recently, I had the opportunity to visit two of Puget Sound's rougher museums.  Both the brand new Lemay - America's Car Museum and the recently relocated Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI) are industrial looking buildings filled with the kind of stuff that interests small boys.  Yes, neither were my choice; however, both were entertaining.

Lemay - America's Car Museum is also sometimes referred to as the giant metal slug.  The museum sits between downtown Tacoma and the Tacoma Dome.  When we first visited Tacoma in 2010, the building was under construction.  We had a lot of wild guesses as to what this long flat metal building next to the interstate was going to be.  It looks a little like an upside-down sardine can on a pedestal.  In reality, it is just a huge garage.  The museum, which opened in the summer of 2012, houses more than 300 cars, trucks, and motorcycles most of which are from the first half of the twentieth century.  Much to my delight, it was a romp through some of my favorite eras.  There was a wide array of the earliest automobiles, sleek and stylish cars from the roaring twenties, behemoths of the fifties, and in good taste, very few cars from the sixties, seventies, and eighties.  Stylish and cars just didn't go together in those decades.   From a 1906 Cadillac to the 1994 Flintmobile, built for the Flintstone's movie, it was a feast of our country's gluttony for rolling autonomy.

The Museum of History and Industry was exactly how it sounds - a little boring.  While they had many interactive exhibits, the topics - business, innovation, city planning - are not necessarily my interests.  The new location, they just moved to a former Naval Armory on South Lake Union at the end of 2012, is rather nice.  The entrance opens into a four story atrium.  Right away there is a giant wall of dioramas about Washington that can be lit up one at a time by the patrons.  They also have business building boards that look like air hockey tables and allow patrons to assemble tools for a business and see if that business would succeed.  From a room about Boeing to a periscope to earthquakes to film in Seattle to the World's Fair to Microsoft, the museum is a hodgepodge, which is perhaps why I didn't love it.  There seemed to be no topical organization or central focus for us to connect with as we roamed through the artifacts.  The absolute BEST thing was the musical medley about the Seattle fire complete with light up artifacts.  I haven't seen anything so amazingly hokey since the Salem Witch museum's rendition of the Salem Witch trials complete with lit up wax figurines in dioramas.  All kidding aside, this was their best exhibit because it logically moved from the fire to how Seattle rebuilt.  I also really liked the 3D map of the Puget Sound area that was set up to change from the natural area to the man-altered area.  Probably, I set myself up for disappointment because somewhere I got the idea that the museum would have a real train, which it didn't.  Although, for a museum full of topics I am not interested in, I was entertained for the better part of a day.

Book Review: How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran

Caitlin Moran's How to Be a Woman is touted as the British version of Tina Fey's Bossypants, but it is far from the comedic masterpiece of Bossypants.  The difference is that while both Fey and Moran use their personal experiences to make a point about modern day feminism, the takeaway from Bossypants is, "That was a funny story, and I can't believe women are treated that way!"  Whereas the dialog after a How to Be a Woman diatribe is more likely, "I wish she had told more of the funny story instead of ranting about feminism for so long."  Not that I am against a feminist message.  What I am against is being hit over the head with a feminist message that the author is just going to rescind or revise a few pages later.

The book is a humorous read though.  Moran's stories show her quite unique upbringing in a poor British family, how she broke into music journalism, and other womanly experience such as having children.  There were many times where I could feel for the gawky young Caitlin as she tried to figure things out with very few resources.  The dialogs between her sister, who she seems to abhor in a violent way, but who she also seems to have a tiny softspot for, was the height of hilarity in the book.  It is certainly worth a read.  All of the stories were great, but the feminist messages between stories were a bit long-winded.

Book Review: Banishing Verona by Margot Livesey

Banishing Verona by Margot Livesey was a lyrical love story.  Zeke is a slightly odd London painter who is tricked into letting the very pregnant Verona spend the night at his clients' house.  They have an almost instant, yet tenuous, connection that is abruptly ended when Verona leaves after just two days.  The rest of the novel jumps back and forth from Zeke's and Verona's perspective.  Most of Verona's sections start prior in time to where the previous Zeke section began, giving the reader a jarring sense of catch-up.  Zeke is a bit strung along by Verona's harried plans and there are many missed connections, but the experience helps Zeke to grow as a person.

The fact that Zeke and Verona became so committed to each other after just one meeting is highly unrealistic, but I suppose romantic.  The characters are a bit quirky, which perhaps adds to the high level of commitment that develops at the drop of a hat.  What Livesey does best is character development.  She so discreetly shows the mind of a man living with Aspergers, although she never directly reveals this detail.  The narratives from his viewpoint are eye-opening as to what an adult in his situation might have to go through on a daily basis.  While it is just a classic romance with a quirky twist,  the prose is effortless and, therefore, a smooth and enjoyable read.  

San Juan (Not Puerto Rico)

In the Strait of Juan De Fuca between Vancouver Island and Washington are the San Juan Islands.  I had the pleasure of spending a long October weekend on the largest island, San Juan.  We arrived in Friday Harbor late and quickly found a decent place to eat.  Our hotel, The Earthbox Inn and Spa, was a 50s era motor lodge converted into a welcoming retreat and the only hotel on the island with an indoor pool.  Instead of the bright dingy colors of the 50s, our room was painted with cool earth tones, had wooden floors, and fresh white linens.  There was even a dog bed and bowls with complimentary dog bone waiting for Clara.

In the morning, we took a walk back to the harbor picking up coffee and breakfast sandwiches on the way.  After lovely massages at The Earthbox Spa, we explored the island by car.  Our first stop was the Lime Kiln Point State Park.  The park commemorates the lime mining done on the island for more than sixty years in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  The park has a lighthouse and a restored lime kiln.  It is also a great place to spot the area's resident orcas who had been seen two days before we got there; unfortunately, we did not see the whales.

After some brief hiking at the state park, we headed to both the American and British camps, both now run by the National Park Service.  The two camps, on either end of the island, where the setting of a land dispute.  After the Treaty of Oregon dictated that the 49th parallel would divide the United States and British controlled Canada, the San Juan Islands were claimed by both governments since the language of the treaty was interpreted differently by both parties.  The dispute was a quiet one for over ten years until it almost erupted into a war when an American shot a British pig he found in his garden. After months of build up, a peaceful resolution was agreed upon, and both countries remained on San Juan Island for another twelve years until another treaty gave the San Juan Islands to the United States. The park still has some original buildings.  The most odd, unrelated to the park at all, thing we saw there was a white goose grazing with a gaggle of Canada geese.

Later in the afternoon, we had a lovely snack of mussels and sweet potato fries on the deck at Downriggers before we headed to The Place Bar & Grill for dinner.  Both restaurants were delicious although the speed of the service at Downriggers left something to be desired.  The Place was a very small restaurant that specializes in regional fish and shellfish.  The meal was wonderful.  The ambiance, being such a small restaurant right on the harbor, was perfect for a quiet dinner.

Our last full day on San Juan was by far the best day of the trip.  First, I had a gooey cinnamon bun that was as big as my face from the Doctor's Office Cafe.  Later, we drove to the sculpture park.  The Westcott Bay Sculpture Park, unlike typical sculpture parks such as those outside the National Gallery or Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, contains mostly sculptures that are for sale.  While some are quite lovely, others are overpriced and over thought.  It is bad enough when museums have "art" that anyone could make (sticks forming a ladder on a tree) but seeing the prices of that "art" is obscene.  Not to discount the many artists that have legitimate work in the garden.  I especially liked the easel with mirror that made the viewers the art.  The sculpture park was on the way to Roche Harbor where we would be kayaking.

Roche Harbor is actually a resort and marina but looks like an old-timey town.  It was also a lot like being in Disney World with a chapel, hotel, restaurants and shops.  It also has quite an extensive marina, giving us a view of how the boat set live.  The benefit of going kayaking out of peak season: we had the kayak guide all to ourselves.  Lucky for us our guide from San Juan Island Outfitters, who was also the company's co-owner, was immensely knowledgable on the ecology of the area.  We saw many harbor seals and learned that despite their appearances sunning together on rocks, they do not really like one another.  We also saw several bald eagles.  The most interesting thing was the bull kelp forest.  I didn't even know that there were "forests" in the ocean, but we rested on top of one.  It was a messy tangle of thick (at least 5 inches in diameter) bull kelp.  Each piece was attached to rocks many feet under the water.  Since we were just a party of three, we talked while we kayaked and were able to paddle all the way around Henry Island.  The pain of that much paddling in one afternoon was well worth the serenity of the place.

Finally, after a pizza dinner and live music at The Rumor Mill, we ended our trip.  The next morning we put the car in line at the ferry and wandered around town a bit more.  Since we were on San Juan Island celebrating our fifth wedding anniversary, the wood anniversary, we decided to buy a wooden bowl that was hand-carved by a local artist.  Much like the coastal areas of Maine, artists have flocked to the San Juan island and many shops sell their wares.  The ferry trip home was chilly, but we did see a whale and had a clear view to Mount Baker.

Antietam in a Mini

A while ago, on the eve of the 150th anniversary of the battle, I visited Antietam in a mini.

While the battle may not be as famous as Gettysburg, the battlefield was a little easier to follow.  We went on the battlefield driving tour, in the mini, beginning at Dunker church and winding around the fields to bloody lane and the observation tower then Burnside Bridge and on to the Antietam National Cemetery.  And to the man who yelled that we were ignorant as we drove through his photo, that is what happens when you take a picture across a road.

It is fantastic that we can have momentous places preserved to such a degree.  The National Park Service has literally cleared the land so it would look much like it did in 1862 (Yay taxes!).  And the ranger discussion was phenomenal.  Also interesting is the fact that observation tower was built in the late 1800s; I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that those who lived through the events would want to revisit them but for some reason it was.  Later in the day, we saw mementos of many reunions in the early years after the war including buttons and banners at the Pry House Field Hospital Museum.  At the Pry House we were also questioned by some very eager reenactors who were in town for the anniversary.  We even went on to Harpers Ferry, which played a key role in the happenings at Antietam.  For some reason it had always been a desire of mine to go to Harper's Ferry, and it was worth it.  What a pleasant little town on a hill plus I had some delicious pumpkin ice cream there.  What made this trip most memorable was the mini (and the company of the mini's owner).  Here are more pictures of the mini at Antietam!