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Stories from 2002

January 2001

Here was my New Years letter-

In late December of last year, Richard drove a Ryder truck, towing a trailer with his '84 Volvo, out to his new job at Columbia Gorge Community College teaching electronics. The rest of us stayed in Bryan for a number of reasons. My big reasons were a still unfinished but now unpaid Post Doctorate project on the multivariate analysis of worldwide spore and pollen floras from the Mississipian-Pennsylvanian boundary, a big unsold house, and my real love for doing radio at KEOS. Ian hated to leave his friend Ben Jacob. Emma was graduating from Bryan High in March and did not intend to go out to Oregon at all. Erin went with the flow. I had the house painted and the attic sheetrocked.

In February Emma and I went up to Cleveland for Folk Alliance. During spring break Ian, Erin and I visited Oregon and Emma I think went skiing. In June, Richard flew back and picked up another huge Uhaul and Erin, while I drove out in my red Windstar with Ian and 2 cats. We unloaded the Uhaul into a The Dalles storage building, Ian went to canoe camp in Maine, and I flew to a meeting in Jena, Germany called CIMBIO. The people there were mostly Europeans who had done research in Mediterranean palynology; I was invited because of the Greek palynomorph diagrams I'd done in Duluth around 1980. That was great fun. Then I took a grey Ford Focus to the Rudolstadt folk festival in Germany thence down into Austria and Switzerland and a few days later picked up Ian at the Frankfurt airport. We drove up across the new bridge from Denmark to Sweden, up across from near Stockholm to Aland and into mainland Finland. I picked up a couple of great Neoclassical Power Metal CDs, my new esoteric musical love at a huge Euromart in Pori and drove up to the folk festival at Kaustinen, where we stayed at one of my favorite spots, Evijarvi, and could drive home in daylight at 11:30pm.. As it was cool and wet, we had mostly stayed in motels or in those funny little camping cottages.. Then we crossed over at Vaasa to Umea in Sweden and over into Norway at Mo I Rana near the Arctic Circle, Ian's favorite part of the trip...and where he discovered Romance Novels. We hiked up to a glacier there and went in a cave. Then we went south, over the highest mountain pass in northern Europe; the weather was nice so we camped a lot. We crossed over on the ferry to Newcastle and stayed a couple days in Yorkshire, and then went over to see my friend Gordon, who used to play guitar with Silly Wizard, in Cumbria. He has a 12 year old son with great video games. Then we went down to the Fairport Convention festival in Oxfordshire, and across the channel through Belgium and back to Frankfurt. All this took about a month.

We flew back to Portland, and then I flew back to Bryan, where I had a great time clearing out the garage of the house, which we had now sold to some new folks in Range Science, in 106 degree weather. I also got to do a little more radio and live an unfettered wild life. Then I drove yet another small Uhaul up to The Dalles, where we had finally found another house. It has a creek on the property and is near Albertsons, Fred Meyer, and Safeway where are sold an amazing array of beers.. Emma did stay in Texas, moving in with Will Pepper in Pasadena. They are both going to the exclusive San Jacinto Community College; Emma is now majoring in Aviation Management and Will is finishing up his AA in Ford Mechanics. They both work at Pizza Hut.

We've been here at the Ponderosa Pine-steppe ecotone in the Cascade rain shadow ever since. I "joined" Mountain View Friends Worship Group so I do know a few people, and volunteered to host house concerts for the Mid Columbia Folklore Society, though I suspect they will not put up with neoclassical metal. I've been driving around the Cenozoic volcanic terrane trying to get the local geology and botany down...it certainly is interesting here. I put up a bunch of genealogy on the web with as many photos as I could manage.

On November 30, Richard was biking to work when a blood vessel in his brain stem burst...a ruptured aneurysm. This is not an experience you would wish to have. They life flighted him to Portland and he finally came home Christmas Eve, very tired and with a clip in his brain and a couple new plastic tubes in his body. The aneurysm was in his swallowing area, so it left him with about 1 ½ cm of his throat paralyzed at least temporarily. He is practicing choking down food and reading Star Wars novels, but as we say, he's a lot better than he was a couple weeks ago.

Ian, who was in the Singing Boys of Bryan last spring, is in the 6^th grade chorus at the Dalles Middle School.. He continues to irritate people by reading at Post High School level and making Ds in work habits. After school he goes to the library and reads. Recently he required 4 stitches in his knee from stepping wrong off a handicapped ramp. Erin is practicing being assertive and has made great grades in 2^nd grade at Col. Wright Elementary. She is enjoying being in camp fire girls and playing with Jordan, the grandaughter of the woman next door, and with the Quaker Twins, Ariel and Liana, from Mt Hood, as well as Trace and Grace at school. The cats, Freddie and Katie, mostly hide.

Ian and Richard are watching Cast Away at the Columbia Theatre. I am going to pick them up at 6:05. Erin refused to go, so she is trying to do magic tricks with lethal matches.

I've posted a bunch of stuff I wrote about what I've done, this year and in the past, at my web page, http://w3.gorge.net/judith. The genealogy is up there too. There are some photos there as well if you feel like hunting around, for instance on my ahnentafel in the genealogy section.

Judith Gennett

1100 W 9^th St

The Dalles, OR 97058

judith@gorge.net

541-296-6055

========

The day after Christmas I went to pick up a prescription. I dozed in a chair waiting. The man beside me, perhaps in his late 50s and with a brimmed straw hat, said:

"How ya doing today."

"I'm fine," I lied, groggily. I was too sleepy. "They sure take a while."

"Yeh, I got a long trip to make, too," he said.

"Where to?"

"Well, first I go up to Yakima, but ultimately Arizona."

"Yakima is the wrong direction for Arizona."

"I drive a truck all around."

"What kind?" I asked. There are many trucks going by on I-84.

"I drive a Kenworth."

"A Kenworth?" A semi-driver picking up a prescription in Fred Meyer.

"Its a semi," he clarified.

"Do you haul something in particular?"

"Fruits and vegetables."

"Ah, a hauler of fruit crates," I noted. "Yakimas a good place for fruit. I used to live in Tempe."

"I live in Mesa."

Then his cell phone rang.

Today as my brother in law David, who has not cut his hair since he stopped smoking in 1992, is here, so I drove again into the East, east on Washington 14 farther than I have ever gone before along the Washington Columbia, into a wasteland of Artemisia steppe. In the ethical order of ecological associations, this steppe rated a -10. The landscape looked as if someone had dumped a vacuum cleaner bag on top of it. A sign just passed Biggs said "No gas for 84 miles."

Finally there appeared a few orchards, and Roosevelt, Washington. There was a post office, a convenience store with neon beer signs but no gas pumps, and two closed restaurants. I followed Roosevelt Grade, thinking it a great trafficway to Yakima with so many trucks. I delighted at white volcanic ash beds along the road cut. At the top, the entrance of The Roosevelt Regional Landfill loomed like some huge cemetary. Unlike the semi preceeding me, I could not get in without permission. I drove back down to the city. By the Great Columbia, containerized cargo was being transferred from flatcars onto trucks, and the trucks drove up the Roosevelt Grade.

Uncle David asked me if Roosevelt glowed.

I asked Uncle David about being a bartender. Because it is a night job, I thought it would be great for me. He told me that many bartenders in Seattle are there not because they need the work, but because they write, or because they are actors. If a bartender stays in one place too long, however, they will hear the bar regulars tell the same story many times during the same night, and then night after night. They wonder whether the storyteller has done anything else with his life.

==========

In July of 1998, I went to the big contra dance at the Swannanoa Gathering in Asheville. Long, beautiful lines of dancers that filled the building. I was recording the band and the dancers when Joe Root's brother Eric asked me to dance, and I recorded that too, setting down the recorder.. Then I went outside to have a beer. I talked with a man in conventional dress who had grown up in the area, in a small mountain town. He had gone to the dances in the 60s.

"We'd drive over across the mountain with a bunch of girls in the car. They needed a ride over, but they could always get back on their own.

"I always make it a point to dance with the person I came with, with someone I didnt know, and with someone I really wanted to dance with. Those were my rules. Another rule is to always fall in love with the woman you're dancing with. After you finish, walk away, but while you're dancing with her, you are in love with her.

-----------------------

Her husband did not feel well enough to dance, and she had thought she would sit with her family and just listen, but the passion of two dance sets swept her into the vortex. The dances were unusual, one was French Canadian and the other just unusual. It was on the third dance that she could not contain herself, the caller asked for another couple and she looked to her son who rolled his eyes and then she stood up and looked out to the dance floor, at the other side of the room, and saw him, a large man in a faded blue sweatshirt. He looked around and he saw her as well, his view dodging established couples. At first she believed that he was looking at someone else, but she walked out and he walked towards her and grinned so she took his hand. June Harper asked her "How are you Judith?" and she said laughing "Fine, except for these shoes," kicking her clogs off across to the benches that lined the walls of the grange hall, narrowly missing a small child.

He was tall and sturdy and his hair brown with grey, a weathered mustached face, his eyes too far above hers to look into as contra dancers are advised, but she knew they were faded blue like the sweatshirt. The dance was too fast and complex to look at him, this was the first time she'd galloped wildly forward in a waltz position and then back in place, looking back as not to trip in rapid chaotic motion, hoping not to trip or collide with another laughing couple. She knew more the feel of the faded sweatshirt on her left hand and the roughness of his hand in hers, and the way he always clapped as the number one couples took their turn.

At the end, she bowed her head and thanked him, and then left, not feeling bad because they'd been told to change partners again. She walked back and sat with her husband and son, her younger daughter engaged in illicit floor sliding with her friends come all the way from Mount Hood and Trout Lake.. She watched for her partner on the floor but he never appeared as a dancer again; she thought perhaps he were some sort of supernatural creature. Then she looked at the stage, at the local contra band, and on the end she saw a large man in a faded blue sweatshirt and a brown guitar. He was not a supernatural creature, but it was indeed magic that he had chosen to take that break and dance.

=======

I was playing The Fourth Legacy at dinner tonite, which was a mistake. My husband said

"I think I've had about enough of that heavy metal."

"I'm sorry. I was playing it mostly now because I find it tremendously upbeat and exciting."

"I dont. I think its depressing. That beat is really monotonous. It's the same thing all the time. I cant imagine intentionally listening to it."

"I think its the beat that is really peppy. This stuff is only a hop skip from Celtic rock.

"Yeh, well...that proves my point."

"You dont really like the Celtic dance stuff or the Eastern European brass bands either, they have a really set rhythm. Whereas I think John Prine has a really bad voice and doesnt even attempt to sing."

"It doesnt bother me. I just listen to the words."

"Well, that's why I listen to English traditional singers, they can usually sing and the words are interesting. The guys on these metal CDs sing really well I think."

"You must be kidding. They sound awful to me."

"Ian Day-Gennett, I hear he's in hot water," I said at the window. Yes, he knifed the principle, the police are with him now.

"Yes he is!" smiled the clerk. An administrator in a grey pants suit immediately beckoned me into her office.

"You can shut the door," she told me.

"For months," she explained, "Mr Eddy has been trying to get him to do what the rest of the class is doing."

"I know he's always reading during class,." I said

"Yes, and he is such a voracious reader, " she agreed smiling.

"He probably reads 30 books a week." She likely knew that. I wondered if she were the same person who took him to Taco Bell for lunch when he mistepped from a handicap ramp and slashed his knee, requiring an ambulance and four stitches. No one could see all the blood under his jeans until he stood up and his knee kept buckling and then he rolled up his pants leg.

"Mr. Eddy brought him in this morning and he was just finally exasperated. And oddly, he wasnt reading. It was AR reading time and he was doing math." She smiled.

"He was suspended for doing math when he was suspposed to be reading?"

"Mr Eddy just hit the roof. And since this was his first real disciplinary problem, the counselor looked in his file and found he was a STAR student. She wondered if he might be bored."

"Probably not." Life is not boring for Ian, because he lives all the lives of the books he reads."Is there actually something you could do for him if he were?"

"Well, we used to take them out of class, but then they cut the budget. We do what we can." And there wasn't much more they could do, I knew from talking to Mr. Eddy.

Smiling, she led me down through the shabby halls of The Dalles Middle School Annex. Most of the Middle School is in portables and this old elementary school. Last year, all the classrooms were condemned because the school is in the Slide Zone. Drainage of irrigation water from the cherry orchards has caused major slippage along a fault in the Plateau Basalts that lie beneath The Dalles Middle School.

There were five kids in the ISS room. The teacher, a large brown haired woman, smiled at me. Two boys and a red haired girl sat working cheerfully. The administrator motioned at a third boy unconscious on the floor.

"He sure is conked out, isnt he!" laughed the teacher.

Ian was reading. I smiled.

"You're grounded from going to the library after school," I said.

"Oh mom, you're kidding," he whined.

The administrator smiled.

The next morning, on 9^th Street, it is the same monotonous grey drizzle, only a slight dusting of snow on one part of the green lawn. We drive down 9^th, tire studs clicking on wet black pavement, and climb upwards on Trevitt, turning left on 12^th, a definite light cover on the lawns and then on across town, past Pulpit Rock, to the Middle School, the cover becoming more definite. I drive up on Kelley, towards the community college and the sky, the sullen white of this computer screen, spits snow, not rain and out on Dry Hollow, into the orchards, snow covering the cherry trees and the big oblong tan fruit crates labeled Diana at Pulehn Orchards and the tiny seasonal cabins of the migrant workers. Beyond the town limits the road turns to slush, on either side row after row, acre after acre of spidery white and black cherry trees lined up in perfect ranks as diffused analogs of the freon tanks, soldiers of the ozone, that my father used to warehouse. Beyond the next curve, nothing but white, lombardies appearing suddenly as sentinel guardians of the orchards, black on white flocks of birds rolling into view from the roadsides in perfect formation, as the design on the back of playing cards. On the right, a functional windmill beside a modern home, on the left, a round satellite dish in an old farmyard, juxtaposed on the barn colorful Try Farioli Feeds and Bush Cheney signs, otherwise a strident vertical army in black and brown and grey against the sullen white sky, lombardies, fence posts, telephone poles, reflector posts, frost fans now rendered useless, row after row of cherry trees waiting for spring. I turn left on Pleasant Ridge and climb, the yellow of the centerline disappearing underneath the snow but nothing to the left to challenge. Below me the cherries turn to scrub oak and riparian walnut, at my level a small field of restless brown horses, above the barren yellow green of the steppe hills, and then one more orchard. I turn around in a chaos of dogtracks when the road sign says Road Narrows and go back to town the long way.

At the end of the counter sat a man, a much older version of Kepa Junkera, in a black suede jacket.

"Are those your children?" he asked in a thick accent.

"Yes," I answered. He seemed puzzled. "I have grey hair though," I added.

"My wife is 40 and she dont want no kids. She's already got two kids, she's been married twice before and she dont want no more she says. She says shes too old. I got a kid but its by this other woman. This one dont want no more."

"Really," I said.

"But you're a nice lady to have kids that old. God I got financial problems, I got those kids, I got child support. I'm late on my child support. God I got so many problems. But its a genetic thing I think, I want to hold this baby, I want my own kids, these two dont count. "

I dipped a freeze-fried mushroom into the tartar sauce provided and took a sip of shake, clogging my straw with marischino cherry.

"Is that your truck out there?" I asked, nodding at a yellow Penske semi cab with a generic "Refrigerated Foods" trailer. At the Westwind, semis park out on the street.

"Yeh, I'm gone three weeks and home two days. That's the way she likes it. She says she dont want me around more than that. They're so nice until you sign the paper and then they treat you like dirt.

"Where do you live?" I asked.

"Alpany."

"What?"

"Alpany. She's Russian."

"Albany." Just down the Valley. "Russian?"

"Yeh, I went over there to get her. I went to Khazakstan, thats where she's from. That's an Autonomous Republic of the Former Soviet Union, but when you get the passports and stuff you gotta go to Moscow, they do it through Moscow. You marry them and then they get over here and treat you like dirt. I been divorced twice. This is the sixth job I had in the last 2 years. It wears on me at work and I get depressed and then my employer can tell and fires me.

"Where are you from originally?"

"Mexico." Couldnt I tell that? No, I spent 17 years in Texas. Perhaps he was a fellow Bush refugee.

"I've never been divorced," I said.

"You're such a nice lady. Look, I'm about done for the day. Where you going? I could meet you somewhere and we could have a good time."

"No, I gotta go," I said, bolting for the car and kids. I pulled out, making a beeline for the freeway and Multnomah Falls, grateful for the10mph truck speed differential for cars and semis on I-84.

February 2001

I was in a hotel room showcase with Rachel Bissex, DeNice Franke, and Ruthie Foster and Cyd Cassone from my old town of Bryan-College Station. Ruthie, who is a black woman with a huge blues voice, got a standing ovation at Kerrville etc, had just finished a song. A guy ambled in with a Tshirt that said something to the effect of Dar Williams-Richard Shindell Tour and said,

"More Texas s--t, huh?"

I believe it was Eric Taylor who turned around and drawled:

"You better watch what you say, she's gonna whup you."

The guy with the shirt left pretty shortly.

++++

It took me about an hour to get through the I-5 customs queue. I told the customs man that I had 2 presents for my kids worth $20 and 17 non-US promotional CDs. When pressed, I said I did house concerts and yes, I would listen to them in connection with booking house concerts. He gave me a pink slip and instructed me to park and go inside. Several customs agents were clustered around a husky gentleman, about 6'2 with ash blond hair, so it took a few minutes for anyone to pay attention to me.

"These are commercial goods," they said. "You need to buy a permit to bring them over the border. It costs $5," said a stout blonde woman.

"They are WHAT?"

"It is a law enacted during the Reagan Administration." Why didnt I knowthat? Because I am an ignorant third time offender, caught once with fresh German salami and once with shoes that had walked a organic hog operation in Yorkshire and needed to be fumigated.

"But we're non-profit," I said. Who cared? The German double hip-hop folk album was alone worth $5. Unlike the sausage, it didnt need to be refrigerated.

"I suppose *they* get paid," I said, searching for the correct currency.

"Cant remember what country I'm in," I said, intentionally spacy.

"You're in the United States," she answered in all seriousness.

I gave her a ten and watched the drama unfold next to me.

"Your mothers stuff is outside in that U-Haul, yeh?" asked a customs agent.

"Yeh," said the tall man with ash blond hair and pale blue eyes. You could just imagine him on ice with skates and a long stick. "What's the problem?"

"The status of your mother in the United States is uncertain," began the agent.

The arch right out behind customs reads something like "Two sisters from the same mother/May these gates never be closed." Up on the northern border, customs had filled their quota by intercepting undocumented CDs and dinette sets.

March 2001

We strive; we save;

You ebb and flow,

In long terraced waves,

Like millions of gravestones;

You ebb and flow. -L.B.

Her younger daughter had asked her for a slide show. She took out the old single slide projector that her parents had used to show muted kodachromes of women in hose with seams and '56 Buicks, and rummaging through the big carton, she took "Thanksgiving 1979" from the top of the stack of small boxes. The old brick farm house house in New Ulm, a victim in the 80s of careless tenants, had been resurrected from ashes in a field where young apple trees now grow.. The owners, Uncle Louie and Aunt Ruby Mueller, were risen from the grave. "I know I cooked the wild rice casserole too long," said Aunt Ruby. Uncle Roger had recovered from a divorce and his job as an educator to pose as a college student. A pretty, thin girl in bell bottoms and wispy brown hair smiled blankly at the end of the table, bearing the pain of a searing inlaw induced headache. Other slides were from her house in Duluth: chairs sold in a garge sale because they were too rickety, new rugs donated to the Salvation Army 20 years later, her beloved Starr apartment piano too bulky it was said to move to Arizona, four cats and a dog euthanized in one batch in Texas, mostly due to end stage feline leukemia. The next box showed New York City, Aids to Navigation School, 1978, the dark haired man in the blue uniform...

The third box contained slides from Arizona, where she went in '81 to get a graduate degree in botany. One slide showed her smiling, wearing a Mexican peasant shirt, white with orange embroidery, a green straw hat, and a rare appearance of plastic glasses. On her lap sat a small wrinkled gnome, now majoring in Aviation Management. The cinder block house on East Williams, they'd rented for $300 a month from an elderly couple next door, originally from North Dakota, named "The Lauts." The washer was connected on a concrete slab, against the back of the house. Every month, the city of Tempe flooded the lot in a process called "irrigation."

"Hey, I'm pretty thin, there," she said to her younger daughter. 123 pounds from throwing up constantly for 6 months before that.. "Hey," she joked to her husband, "I don't look too bad in this one do I?" Her younger daughter agreed. "You don't have all those wrinkles and that ugly wart on your chin." Her husband agreed. "That was when your mother had been to the dentist recently and her teeth werent so yellow." She hated dentists. "You aren't so fat there," agreed her daughter. Suddenly the joke stopped and, starting to cry, she ran from the room. She was trapped there in that body, no different than when she was 14, she'd never grown up. Women her age cut their hair for their administrative jobs, talked about retirement, complained about their adult children wearing black and piercing their nose, droned on in that Oregonian nasal whine about their adult children coming "home" for the weekend. She said: bring me back, bring me back to that house in Duluth, to the harbour and the sound of the lakers approaching the lift bridge, the endless Larix and Alnus and Picea for miles north of town all the way to Ontario.

She turned the light on in her room, thousands of volumes of natural history and music put on and off shelves during her years in Texas, ambivalent spectres of 18 years in Texas. These books, these albums carried in them ghosts of men she'd fallen in loved with, gotten that far and turned abruptly and walked away out of guilt, grinding a razor sharp heel into the unlucky ones as she pivoted, each one never leaving her, each one figuratively ripping flesh off, irrevocably each one a raw hole in her body, until now she could no longer stand the idea of it, afraid one more jagged hole would kill her...now she contemplated the bitter ghosts in this room with an almost detatched melancholy, the years an unreal dream.

She said, "Erin, are you crying or sniffing?"

Erin said, "I'm sniffing."

She said, "I'm sorry I cried but you hurt my feelings."

Erin's sniffs became a loud, startling wail. She could do nothing but hold her, shaking and sobbing. "You're not ugly mom, you're nice. I didnt mean to do it."

"Do you know what," she asked, "If I had a choice between being pretty and having my children, which would, I take?"

"Your children," answered her younger daughter, whom she would never make fun of for wearing black.

"Of course," she said. "You know how much I love you."

She knew she would get a headache over her right eye from crying. But she did not. It was a thing of the past.

Though it was 6pm, we were the only customers. It was obviously a lunch place. The lone waitress brought us menus and took orders for drinks. She returned for food orders. I ordered a cheese omelet. Erin ordered 2 scrambled eggs.

"Is that all you want...no toast?" prompted the waitress, a well built woman with a pageboy.

"Yes, I'd like toast, on WHITE bread," beamed Erin.

The waitress went back to the kitchen and started taking eggs out of the refrigerator.

A stout, older black man wearing overalls came into the restaurant and sat in the booth next to us. He was the fifth black man I had seen in The Dalles.

"Hi Joe," said the waitress.

"Kid told me to bring back a patty melt."

"I'll make it to go, " said the waitress. "What do you want tonite?"

"I dont know. What kind of soup you got?"

"Navy bean."

"No, what else you got?"

"Corn beef and cabbage casserole, special for lunch."

"No dont want that," he said, "I never heard of this patty melt before, what is it?"

"It's hamburger with cheese melted on it. How about a salad, you want some kinda salad?"

"No."

"Well, Joe what do you want?"

"I dont know, you tell me."

"I'm trying to, but you dont want anything I suggest. How about a grilled ham and cheese?"

Joe said, "I do believe I would like that. With Kool Aid."

"We dont have any lemonade today. You want ice tea?"

"I guess so," said Joe.

"I'll have it out in a minute."

"I'm ready," said Joe.

The waitress brought our meals. Instead of the usually soothing velveeta my omelete was filled and covered with tart, half melted cheddar.

Joe said to the waitress, "You know that guy that came in here with me sometimes, he went down to California."

"No kidding," said the waitress.

"He been living with this woman two or three years, went down with a load of stuff to California, then they gonna go to Reno and get married."

"No kidding," said the waitress.

She went back and in due time brought back his sandwich and a paper bag.

Joe said, "Sixty years old and never been married, now hes gonna marry this one."

"He must have found the right one, you find the right one and that's it," said the waitress.

======

"They had her wash his feet and hands in a tub. Then they done told her they'd give her they'd give her $300 if she'd drink the water but she wouldnt. Turned my stomach."

"I musta been in my 80s when I made that hole in one, and I'd been golfing since I was in my teens."

"You ever shoot at one of those things up on a clothesline with a .22?"

Nothing cohesive.

Yesterday, I spent some time in Don's Wash n Dry while black and hispanic families passed in and out of a portal which proclaimed "NO OILFIELD CLOTHES WASHED OR DRIED IN THESE MACHINES." One of three stocky hispanic youths asked me how I was doing, but I couldnt get anything cohesive there either.

========

Through the lake of wilderness

Travel by a lonely tramp

See flock of swans on the lake

Crying their freedom

Longing the past

On the air yelling by eagles

From safe lake of wilderness

Way to other side of mountains

----Translation from the Finnish by Henri Halminen

It was the first time I had been to the Senior Citizens Center, across Mill Creek from our house. The reason we'd gone was that there was a sign up that said, "Irish Potato Feast" and it looked like a good, down to earth way to avoid cooking dinner. It was a sure bet for a vegetarian.

Despite the invitation, almost all the attendees were Senior Citizens. Although usually in The Dalles I see no one I know anywhere, I saw three separate groups here that I'd met, none of whom I believed would ask us outfor a Full Sail afterwards. My husband saw a colleague from work and her husband, so we sat with them.

"I hear that you've done public radio," she said. "You must be interested in our new low power station."

I sighed, not wanting to discuss the flimsiness of Columbia Radio Oz . "I did community radio. LPFM would be more like community radio."

"I really love Public Radio," she said. "They have such good shows on. I just love Prairie Home Companion."

"A lot of people really like Prairie Home Companion," I said, not wanting to get into it. "Community radio is more community oriented," I pushed.

Her husband then spoke. "I called my daughter the other day. When I heard what she had in the background, I knew I'd raised her right. You know what she had on?"

"No," I said.

"Car Talk. I could hear car talk in the background." He looked right past my frown and wince. When I visualize Car Talk, hear those slimy chuckles, I imagine every jerk of a smart ass uninvited man who ever tried to pull some verbal wool over my earnest, trusting eyes.

I first heard Prairie Home Companion when we lived in Duluth in the late seventies. Garrison Keillor also had a morning folk show which was piped to us on Minnesota Public Radio. I knew PHC and Garrison Keillor were cool, because the music played on the shows had an aura of Agrarian Utopian Communities...Claudia Schmidt, Charlie Maguire, old time, bluegrass, stuff like that. A fellow who was on the Cutter Woodrush asked us to go down to the World Theatre in St Paul with them. They had tickets. We went down to the Homestead Pickin Parlor so he could buy some bluegrass albums. I knew bluegrass was cool because it was botanical and a member of the Poaceae.

Please oh please let him look cool, let him be a hippie, I thought, looking down from the balcony. And he was indeed cool in his white suit and huge brown beard. You can see him like this on the famous Brown Album with the Gatefold Cover. I was later to see Garrison at the Railroad Retirees Concert at the Duluth Auditorium and he looked cool there too. I also saw Arlo Guthrie and Shenandoah there and Harry Chapin as well. Harry sung "Mail Order Annie" a capella without a mike, and we could hear him way to the back of the auditorium.

It was the monologues that did me in. He spoke in a sly manner of the Minnesota I knew. My husband was born in St. Cloud. He had seven aunts, six of whom were married and one not. One lived in St Paul, one in Bloomington, one on an orchard outside New Ulm, one on a dairy farm south of Park Rapids, one in Superior, where her husband worked for the ice cream factory; they had a constant supply of large plastic buckets. The aunts had the state covered. Two of them had moved to California, but like the cat, they came back periodically. The monologs were my revenge on the aunts. We'd drive out across the muskeg on 2 past spindly spruce in the green'67 SAAB wagon (the blue one was really for parts), old PHC tapes running the whole time. We'd stop at the park at Jacobson on 200 where they had an outhouse, then drove past the ski resort at Hill City, past the casino at Ah-gwa-ching, and finally we would be on 71, north of Park Rapids, at the pink cabin home of my husband's parents. You could see in the faint sunset the fish houses on Little Mantrap. I longed to eat in the corner cafes of Park Rapids, to sit in the brown paneled glow of the Budweiser and Miller signs on the torn red vinyl chrome chairs at the tavern and store on the highway in front of Ilo's resort, where people came up from The Cities and Iowa. Men in red plaid jackets and battered caps, their snowmobiles outside in cold hard whiteness, sat drinking beers, staring purposefully. We had our own northern, so we never went there; we never went much of anywhere but the Senior Citizen Dinner in Park Rapids, as guests. We never had our own beer until much later, when I hauled a 6 pack of Shiner up from Texas in an Aerostar and drank it defiantly, the power of the old aunts waning in the fading sunset light and the silence of the north.

The Prairie Home Companion followed me to Texas. My officemate Dave, formerly a band teacher in Illinois and now headed for the oil patch, told me Jean Redpath had horrible voice and then he said, "But the monologues are wonderful with the poignant stories about the people in small town Minnesota."

"Poignant? I thought he was making fun of 'em," I said. It was a cold shock.

Then Garrison shaved off his beard and, resembling more an assistant manager at McDonald's in Fergus Falls, moved to New York.

I was walking into school an hour late, aware that the Earth Day celebration and demonstrations were afoot. There were areas set up all over for the events. I walked past the raised and hedged patio of the library and saw someone with long flowing hair and a long striped Bibical robe. "I bet that's Gary," I said to myself.

"It's 9am and I'm late," I said, "but I've already been through high school before."

"I'm very excited about this." You pointed to my 50s vintage walnut veneer kitchen cabinets, which had started to rumble and sway. There was an aluminum placque with a floral design which described the event.

I moved back. Colin Allen came up next to me. I was intensely aware that he was much more interested in the event than in talking to me.

"Gary's got those cabinets full of disodium hydroxide reaction. In a few minutes, they should expode and the whole area should be covered with filthy synthetic pollution," he said.

Thick black smoke was escaping from the cracks between the doors

He was reclining sumptuously in the hot tub when I went in, water swirling wildly, almost scalding. He said to me in that Oregon whine, "Everyone should have one of these at home!" His four front upper teeth we missing, the mystery of the blackest night showing in the cavern of his mouth, you could get lost in that night. "You better believe it," I answered him.

The pretty waitress stared at me in confusion as I asked, "Can I sit anywhere?" Slowly, speak slowly. I ordered sauteed eggplant. "Seventy seven," I said slowly.

"No soup, uh?" She pointed at egg flower soup on the menu.

"No soup," I said.

On the other side of the room, by a long window, a hispanic man with long frizzy hair pulled back ate and read. Near the door a man with a grey beard sat and read. Two men, one Orienntal and the other Oregonian and wearing a flourescant green and yellow tie die Widmer Brothers Brew shirt and with a small girl next to him, stared at each other at the next table. A small oriental child sat at the counter, out side the door, a boy and two beautiful girls immaculately dressed in velvet played. The Portland paper, The Oregonian, had just doomed them as Asian and Pacific Islanders to receive the highest grades on standardized tests this year, outwitting white kids.

The waitress brought my eggplant, oddly hot, sweet, and tart. The two girls walked inside and entered a door immediately to my left , leaving it open long enough for me to view a chromed couch and a living room floor of blue industrial carpet over ancient brown sheet vinyl. The hispanic man payed his bill and rode out the door on his motorized cart. A man walked in the door and with concern queried the waitress, "Anyone in here know anything about the little girl out on the curb here?" The waitress went out the front door and retrieved her toddler, then waited a moment and nonchalantly watched as the toddler left again to the street with the two pretty girls in velvet.

The man in the Widmers T Shirt answered his cell phone. I tried to look through the man with white hair and a sky blue windbreaker at the table in front of me, third table from the front window. His hand shook as he ate.

"Isnt this a pretty card?" he asked. He held up a slick greeting card with yellow and white flowers.

"What?" I said.

"You know that card shop down between...."[ My memory fails as to the location, despite his laborious attempts to describe it to me, and my ruse of not admitting I was from the styx]. They got American Greeting cards. Safeway up here they just have Hallmark garbage. Two dollars and thirty five cents."

"It would have cost 35c 30 years ago," I said, attempting to relate.

"You know I used to send out a lot of cards. I had friends from high school..."

"When did you go to high school?" I asked.

"In the mid 50s." I cringed, now realizing he was only ten years older than me, and I was a sweet lady of the sorrows. "I kept in touch with a lot of people. I had a list of three hundred and fifty people. You know those boxes of cards you could get?"

"Boxes of cards?" I said distracted by an effort to put half my spicy sauteed eggplant in a box.

"You used to be able to buy those boxes of Christmas cards." I remembered the boxes; my mother would order them imprinted from sample books that one of her friends brought by as a home industry. Then I would address them because the nerves that operated her hand had been intentionally damaged by surgery to stop her hand from shaking so much from Parkinson's, my child's hand prematurely imprinted on envelopes intended for the elegant hand of adults women.

"But," he said, "I had to cut the list down. Now they don't write for two years they're off the list"

"Yeh, it gets expensive," I said.

"No, its not so much that. The tremors are getting so bad I cant write."

"Let me see that card," I said. He opened the kaolinized easter lilies and daffodils. "That's to my brother," he said.

"You write pretty well," I said.

"That's about it, though, that's all I can write at one time."

I paused. "Well, I need to get home."

He said, "Happy Easter, whether you believe in it or not." He said this bitterly; I speculated as to whether he cared if I left, but if I stayed he would talk to me all night.

My fortune read, "You have compassion for others." No, I said, I am truly incompetent at compassion. If I were good at it, I would bring you all into my arms.

At the edge of town, in the Best Western parking lot, three pick ups and a minivan displayed signs that said "FISH." I drove to the drive-in, and then back, thinking of fish, thinking of salmon. "Salmon would be bound to die in just a little while anyway, Judith." I always said this when I bought salmon. Each vehicle had a huge cooler, one or more stout dark men, and maybe a small child running free. I walked the farthest, to the first FISH sign I'd seen and a red chevy pick up.

"Whatcha got there?" I asked, dropping my Oregon whine, picking up Texan.

"Fresh Chinook salmon, caught this morning," said the man on the truck bed, in the accent of a native American. The three men with the red chevy were thickset and dark, rough faced, heavily clothed in tired dirty sweatshirt jackets and jeans and scuffed boots, thick black braids down their backs.

"Come up and take a look."

I climbed up. As for me, I had on a tasteless black T shirt with Mel Gibson in pict make up and "Scotland Land Of Heroes" on the front, worn, baggy jeans, and my new black clogs. Thank God I didnt look like a professional from Portland. The cooler was full of huge, dead fish. Fascinated, I shoved aside fish after fish.

"Wheredjyuh catch these?" I asked.

"Just up the river there, fresh this morning," he answered.

Two women came up and jostled fish with me. One told me, in the accent of the vendors, "I'm looking for one with a fin right here. That means they're wild."

"Is there a small one? These are pretty big." I asked the man.

"I'll ask Che-Goosh, he's the one who knows about it. This is Che-Goosh," he introduced me to a man with a scraggly beard and a thick black braid down his back. "That's an Indian name."

Che-Goosh found one and said "Eight pounds."

The other man weighed it on a hook. "Nine pounds," he said. Che-Goosh shook his head.

"How do you clean this?" I asked. In Minnesota, my father-in-law would clean and filet the fish we caught and I would skin them, hundreds of little perch and sunfish, bullheads, crappies, and the rare northern. I would take a special wooden handled knife with the hand burned design and insert it just in in front of where the tail fin had been and slide it through, lifting the white flesh from the silver skin. I hated skinning bullheads. Lyle Day never showed me how to clean, never showed me the dirty work.

"You see this fin here?" instructed the first man. "You put the knife in right in front of it and just slit it to here. Then you slit it right here behind the gills. Then it'll all pull out."

I wiped most of the blood and mucus off my hands with a paper towel while the man put the dead fish in a black garbage bag.

"Where else do you get a free garbage bag and paper towels?" He asked.

"Safeway?" I laughed.

"Hey, tell all you're friends we're here!" he answered.

I paid him, put the fish corpse on the floor of my red Windstar and drove east of the mountains, wondering where it had been caught. Before the dam was built at The Dalles, Indians had caught salmon at Celilo Falls. There are huge wooden platforms now that you can see crossing our own big bridge, but

like the rest of the fishing areas, they are behind chain link fences and locked gates.

Around five, I started to clean the fish. The third knife I found was sharp enough, and I easily sawed through the red flesh where I had been told. I cut off the head, and pulled out the guts and put both in the black garbage bag. There was blood all over the newspaper I'd put on the counter and on my hands. With difficulty I took out the backbone and cut the thick red flesh into chunks, and then I put the pieces into gallon freezer bags in salted water and put the bags in the freezer, except for one big chunk.

Erin came in and screamed and then told me, "I'm glad you're not like other mothers. They're all afraid of bugs." She rinsed the blood off each slice in the sink. It didnt bother me, it was like slicing apples. I had taught biology labs, watching pre-med students slice apart fetal pigs and then throwing them in the dumpster myself so as not to violate the university's contract with the janitors.

I cooked the unfrozen chunk for dinner. My hand hestitated at each bite, feeling the body of the salmon prince in my hands, watching him silver and black swim up the river, jumping the falls.

The Camus Prairie is a flat land stolen by the Oregon Topographical Atlas from the State Of Washington. At the top, just after the State Of Washington ends, is Glenwood, Washington, and the Shade Tree Gas, Deli, Restaurant, and Motel....In the restaurant, hanging over the window to the kitchen is 4 foot antique 2 man saw, covered over in acrylic paint with a forest scene with, deer and in the middle a lake . On one window sill are three rocks: a coquina, a volcanic scoria, and a chunk of pertified wood. People sit at two of the other tables.

Thirty minutes later, my garden burger arrived. Almost simultaneously, a man maybe in his early 50s and wearing a feed cap, walked in the door...

"Hey Jason, " said one of the two men in feedcaps and long beards at the far table. "Wet enough for you?"

"Yep," said Jason.

"Get any turkeys?"

"No," said Jason, "Too fast for me."

The woman at the other table, a woman around sixty with what approached a buzz cut said,"I was down to Camus, there were turkey hunters all over the place. Got up to the summit, had to shoo turkeys off the road; they were all over the place."

"Turkey season's over now, huh?" one of the men in long beards asked.

"No, it keeps on till the end of the month," answered Jason.

The woman's husband was white-haired and wore a vest and stetson. She was reading out of a paperback book. "Quarter horse gelding, started with barrels and poles. Have to sell it because their daughter's going off to college." She paused. "Lots of geldings in here."

"Not too many brood mares," said her husband.

"That's a shame," she said.

The waitress came in. "Want coffee Jason?" she asked.

"Sure." he said.

"Wish it would stop raining," said the waitress.

"Good to get some rain," debated one of the men at the next table.

"We need the rain, but my kids got a baseball game over in Goldendale at 4:30 and they're not cancelling it."

"Don't want to stand out in the rain!" He taunted.

"I don't care if I get wet I just don't want my kids to, " she defended.

Using Sound

1) Rain. A dark bar can deaden the mind. Imagine yourself in the days of pinball, contortions jolting the whole pinball structure, the dull thus of beer glasses against tables, and the prescient clatter of rain outside, like the persistent clicking of poolballs.

"Looks like we better run," I said.

"Aw no, who cares if we get wet," he answered.

I stepped outside the door of Joe's, into the black Iowa night, J-O-E-S splashed shimmering on the wavy blackness of the street, at left an Oldsmobile swished until the Doppler Effect caught up with it, making its way through those tiny myriad poolballs from the sky. We strolled almost blind from those tapping little drops hitting our glasses, our feet like great tugs slugging the gutters, Ker-whoosh! Ker-sloosh!

"I think its actually sleeting," I observed.

"Looks more like styrofoam, "he answered.

I looked up into the dark void. One bright silver pitchfork streaked the sky. I turned to look at him, and that is when he grabbed me and kissed me, drenched.

Thunder boomed like a pool table hitting the ground.

2) A Hike. Last summer my son Ian and I climbed up to the Svartsvarted Glacier in Norway. We left the boat, walked past the first cairns, up an asphalt trail. The asphalt trail stopped before us. Yards away appeared a cairn but no trail. My legs ached. My toes hurt. Straight up, another cairn. Toes dug into vertical mica schist. Cairn after cairn. More schist, just the same. The sun blazed. Ian scrambled fast. "Wait! Slow down!" At last we saw the glacier, sparkling white and cold, matching the absent clouds in the sky. I sat down, wanting to take off my shoes. jostling them in the cool blue of the glacial lake, but felt I would never make my way down again.

Masters Of the Shrub-Steppe: The Rowena Plateau

"I hate this barren place," my son said.

"You have to be tough to live here," I answered. "This is a place for the rough and tough."

I always look for water, look through these tough landscapes of columnar basalt and rubble and dust, for a familiar haven of moisture. I saw no water here, but in the swales were the green flat leaves of iris, and in the spring I guessed there would be lovely shallow pools and wild purple blooms. In the early spring also there would be another member of the iris family, with smaller, symmetrical blooms, that would take over this brown land. But I would find this out later.

The whole landscape tips every moment you walk here, and the vegetation changes accordingly, high to low, where a little more water collects. I would have told my boy, :"See there is excitement here," but he was long gone, kicking a chunk of weathered basalt.

There were three ponds I found here, oak trees playing dad in these February winds, beached cattails and waterlilies in half frozen mud above a large puddle of half frozen water. I tried to imagine what the spring rains would be, to expand this token puddle to the size of a real lake, drowning the dog and deer tracks on the perimeter. I wondered if, in better times, these oaks would have lived as a solid body with the oaks and ponderosa pines not far to the west.

It's 4:30, we've basically spent too long buying junk food in Maupin, and we take only a short tour of the museum. There is mentioned in the displays only the graphic inspiration of the rich cultural heritage, well-managed lumbering and hydropower, the luxury resort, and the casino. The kids wander down to the river and I wonder to the sound of drums. Between State Highway 26 and some trees by the parking lot are gathered two rows of mostly middle aged Indians, facing each other with a large gap on wooden benches; a couple of the women have aluminum lawn chairs. I guess that this is part exhibit, part jam session. Four of them are pounding on various frame drums, in perfect time. 1-1-1-1-1....sometimes I imagine 12341234, 121212 but its only a hint. Someone has wooden sticks wrapped in blue stripes, more of a rattler. One woman seated in a lawn chair has a game boy.

The singer is a man with one raven black waistlength braid, wrapped halfway up from the bottom. He is wearing tennis shoes, running shorts, a dark teal Tshirt with some sort of black crinkles and some sort of vivid design on the front, and a baseball cap. It is more a wail than a song. He makes motions with his arms, but never stands.

He motions me to come over and sit on the bench.

"No," I say, probably unheard. "But I'll come in closer."

He takes two long white rectangular things and shakes them and then casts them on the ground, crooning. He does this several times. The drummers continue. Sometimes the people in the group exchange instruments. I long for a frame drum.

He motions me to come over again. The rest of the group eyes me without expression. The Man Who Casts is again teasing women in Scottish T shirts, perhaps they say.

I shake my head and watch and then turn and leave, and the music fades, in reality fades. It's 5:30.

A large Indian in a lavender Tshirt asks me on the sidewalk, "They done yet?"

"Dunno," I say.

======

"Look," I say to Ian, "if you get really hungry, call room service. IAN!!"

He looks up from the TV screen. "Call room service. DON'T GO ANYWHERE unless there is a fire," I say.

They sit and stare at the TV. We have no TV at home. Erin has had nothing since breakfast but a strawberry kiwi smoothie, and has nonchalantly made her stage debut as an exhibition shape note singer.

I am free, seven blocks to the monorail, maybe ten or twelve to the Seattle Center, no loving glimpses to the space needle, twilight, my camera ready. I pass Scando dancers in the Center who've knocked over figurative cement barriers to dance to Buttons and Bows tuning up, but I am a wild rover in a black Symphony X shirt, no one in this universe knows SyX and that makes me invisible, and this is the open Puget dusk. Passing into a hill fortress, hip-hop, Spinnavaders, black kids, white kids, tattoos, dreads, spikes, nose rings, the audience more exciting than the three drab boys playing vinyl on turntables on stage. Up the hill and into the food area, a woman hulahoops while playing fiddle, a man plays assorted metal trash tied on his chest percussion, another with wings movable by a string unpacks like objects. On down the hill, the bluegrassers jam, no show here, just mandos and banjos and red necks. Farther, tropical percussion groups, truly world fusion jam, catching crowds, and then break dancing, head spinning, you fall you're out, up the hill, hardly light anymore, I snap a lone mando players whose CD I might buy if I could see it and then turning, a guy maybe in his 20s sees my shirt and gives me a salute. I nod. I walk up the hill, past a blues singer with a National, but now darkness has shadowed the light.

I find a seat by the dance floor inside and wait only a few minutes for the Northwest Pelimannit. Seated with standing comrades is a hefty woman older than me (I hope) with light orange-pink hair and a huge piano accordion and she is one hot mama. They are all dressed as ethnic Finns and they start with polskas and then decide to make the next item a humppa mixer. A man from the new Silicon Valley goes down the line trying to find a partner; with a mixer he's safe.

"Well," I answer, "I would but I have no idea how to humppa. I'm a contra dancer."

"Aw, its easy." I can tell he's a desperate man.

The formal instruction lasts 5 seconds, then we are on the road. Luckily it is much like a contra dance, confusing. I am a chaos dancer, with no grace, so this is good. Frontwards, backwards, across, side, twirl and crash. You crash into your next fella. Too many people, too fast, too little space. I love it, can't stop laughing.

The lady sitting next to me, in her 70s, tells me, "They needed two circles."

"Are you from Seattle?" I ask.

"I've lived here 30 years. I love it. I come here to dance twice a week."

"Scandinavian dancing?"

"Yes. What do they mean yanka? It looks like a schottische to me. I never heard of any yanka. This is a Finnish band. They must call a schottische a yanka."

"I don't know, I just came up here to sing Sacred Harp."

"They didn't pay your way, either, did they? I think it's wonderful how you people come here for nothing."

"I should pay THEM to let me sing," I say.

Her husband asks me to waltz but I decline. I have no grace. He goes on to the next gal.

"That waltz is too slow. This next band [Speldosan] says 'Hot Tunes From the Cold North.' I hope they step it up," the wife comments.

JUNE 2001

North-Ellensburg. North towards Seattle on Saturday, the velvet hills already brown in May, Uzbekistan gypsy caravans camp here, and then that one hill, looking downwards, the evening sun to the left a tangerine slice, streaking its juice across the forward vision of bright aqua, looking down, the level green fields along the Yakima, and Ellensburg, and above that, the far opal sawteeth, Himalayas over lush Irish plains.

Through 20 miles of dry dirt-colored grasses, we visited the cement copy of Stonehenge, devised by a fellow Quaker as a memorial to the 18 men from Klickitat County, Washington who died in Worldwar One, when he visited Stonehenge in England they told him it had been built for human sacrifices to pagan gods, and then down by the river, flat acres of green trees in military rows, we stopped at a stand today, stripped bare except for 2 baskets, and we bought our first blood red cherries of the season.

JULY 2001

July 2000-After I left Rudolstadt in Saxony, and Jena I drove south on the freeway, alone for two days in a silver german focus, through Bavaria and into a great slowdown of trucks and cars from all points in Europe, from Turkey and the Ukraine and Russia to Eire and Espana, some invisible EU force blocking cars and trucks from Persia and Algeria and Mali from joining this German word for "dam"...inching along the highway, and then free at last I see jagged bluegrey triangles ahead and they are the BIGGEST mountains I have ever seen in my life and I follow huge Italian trucks up the grade into the narrow Tyrolean slice of tunnels and terraced meadows they call The Eastern Empire.

Almost a year later, I am in the same dam, inching my way from the human soup of the Bay Area towards the short straw hills and slivers of windmills to the east and I say to myself, "Are these my Alps for the year?" Towards Stockton, the dam breaks and I turn northward and drive on 5, the irrigated rice fields around me the green of a spray dyed neon buzzcut, the white bellies of egrets wading lead sinker grey shallow ponds, the sky ahead of me cobalt and flamingo pink. Up the road the land turns to straw-color again and then I stop for night at Cottonwood, the gas prices lowered, picking up Sierra Nevada Porter in the Shell Station, across the road Bob Wiley's Fences and Corrals and Shasta Livestock. In the morning ahead of me, the first of our volcanos, Mt Shasta, the chain that goes to Jefferson and Hood and Adams and then St Helens and Ranier, at its peak the white of the egrets.

I stopped at MacDonald's in Redding. Four men about my age in shorts chatted: "So I told Animal Control, you come with me I'll show you why my cows are loose. So I showed them how they'd clipped the wires in 2 places and I said 'Cows don't cut the fences themselves.' So then I went back to bed and they came over again and said, "They're loose again, we gotta fine you." So I showed 'em where they'd been cut again. See there's that stockyard next door and they cut 'em to give the cows their freedom, they thought we were part of the stockyard. So then I went back to bed again, I was fed up with getting up in the middle of the night like that."

I picked up my bagel with great patience and took it to the counter. "This has ham in it," I said, "I ordered an egg an cheese bagel because I'm a vegetarian."

"Egg and cheese?" asked the clerk.

"Buckets of Betrayal" reads a hand painted sign as I drive into the Klamath Valley of Oregon.

=====

Fifteen minutes south of town and I-84 in the Hood River Valley, through the orchards with hispanic men in workclothes and yellow pears hanging almost ripe, you can turn west on Kingsley Road and climb, past the last steep orchard and into mixed woods along Ditch Creek. Finally peaking higher is a landscape, a moonscape, not unlike the one around the Sudbury stack before they cleaned things up, only greenness and barren stumps evidencing the only toxic chemical here, the petroleum of clear-cutting. One wide-eyed of horror, but then up ahead, Schwartzwald am Ditch, almost all firs here at 3000 feet.

Here on the east flank of Mt. Defiance, on the east flank of the Cascades, they have dammed the Ditch to make the Green Point Reses. A gold minivan, a small red SUV, a pickup hauling a boat pass me on the one lane paved road. The land around the trees is stripped to bare yellow-orange dust by vehicle use; the one door of the restroom is propped up against the cinderblock wall. Obviously maintenance is not a Forest Service priority. I turn south and drive maybe a hundred yards on grey gravel the size of bricks, then towards the lake on orange dust, and park by the lake. There is almost no one here, none of the windsurfers who dot the Columbia, none of the tourists who clog the freeway restaurants. A couple stands in swimsuits by the dock. A family rows around on the lake, a net standing straight up. Behind me a lone lodgepole thrives, I suspect some of the trees are Tsuga, but I don't know Tsuga. These lakes form a nation: Evijarvi, the lake by Bangor where the float planes take off, Little Mantrap and Itasca, Green Point, these northern lakes where there is no human voice but by fishermen with boats, the sound of waves against the shore as they pass. This is where my soul lives, with the northern lakes and the spruces and the firs. It is only by faulty bargain that I leave and I have spent most of my lifein faulty bargain.

Down the hill I stop at the moonscape, where new firs struggle waist high to surpass the shrubs in the articial steppe, noisy bees as thick as peasoup in the legumes and composites. Back near Hood River, I buy 49c tomatoes and then stop at a Shell Mart, buying a diet coke in line behind four dusty men each with two 16 oz. cans of cold beer. The T-shirt of the man in front of me, hair curling over the logo, reads, "It takes a stud to build a house." These are not tourists either.

The gates opened separately for Shane and a confused tan and white calf, both backdropped by signs for Copenhagen and Dodge trucks and Budweiser. They shot out together, Shane dismounted, grabbed the calf, tipped it over, whipped the rope around its legs, with no slack in the timing.

"5.2 folks! That'll do it!" Shane had topped Chad Erickson from Redmond at 5.4. "But it's not official till he rides up on his horse for 3 seconds."

Shane, slim and dressed in blue, mounted confidently and his brown horse walked forward. That's when the rope around the calf's flailing legs came untied.

=====

August 2001

Sweeping my vision from the Falun red siding onto the flat green shoreline of Big Mantrap, past birch and alders, I initially visualized, "I am camping in Sweden." But by afternoon, this dream was no longer effective. I'd set my watch back to Pacific time the first time someone pointed out that I'd slept till ten. At one (3pm CST) I pulled the keys off the top of the refrigerator, and opened the door of the Cool-Whip white Ford Taurus that Budget in Minneapolis gave us at a lowered rate instead of the non-existant minivan. I drove south on 4, insearch of that more effective vision for people with square faces and tiny noses, Finland.

"I'm going to look for photo opportunities at the sampo in Menagha," I said, and left.

Twice now I have walked the center line of Hubbard 4 at midnite, walked for half an hour daring to be hit, but all I did was scare raccoons on the side of the road when I wavered. Up here, nine miles of Dorset, there is not even much traffic even in the day, and in fact a few miles north it turns to gravel and goes for miles like that till it hits US 71 near Lake George. Lake George is known, or used to be, for its annual blueberry pancake feeds at the fire hall. But in the evening, down towards Dorset, Chateau Paulette is hopping, offering live music. "FISHERMEN WELCOME" says the new plastic banner. Dorset itself hops in the daytime, with tourists from exotic places like the Cities and Iowa, because it has a bunch of restaurants.

I turned the corner at the huge new "Dorset Liquor" and started to go west, but stopped at the blue pickup that bore the sign "Sweet corn.3.00 per Dozen."

"How you doing to day?" asked the seller.

"I'm hot." I said.

"You're telling me!" I love Minnesotans, they always seem to communicate well."You want a dozen?"

"Sure I said." As things were going, with a chef/wine merchant in the other cabin, I would be cooking myself a dozen ears of corn on that gas stove. What the heck.

"Here, I'm giving you fourteen."

"More than a bakers dozen."

"Well, you always get one or two that're funny." said the vendor.

I drove on west, through Park Rapids, and thrilling at the stupendous number of mega gas stations, stopped at NORTHERN CONVENIENCE for a liter of Diet Mountain Dew. Then I turned south on 71, passed the huge potato processing plant and the airport, and was on my way to Menagha. Menagha is Ojibway for "blueberries." Menagha's slogan is "Gateway To the Pines."

In the central portion of Menagha is a statue of St Urho. I had first heard of St Urho from Dick "O.J." Ojakangas, who was one of my professors at Wasatch-Uinta field camp. I now realize that O.J.'s name means something like "ditch cloth," but at the time it seemed very exotic. The stuatue has Urho holding a huge grasshopper and slaying it. As the plaque explains, he is the patron saint of Finnish winegrowers and rid the nation of grasshoppers. Menagha is known for its great St Urho day rituals, and for its monster truck mud races on the 4^th as well.

I pulled up by the new decorative concrete block museum and went in. Three ladies were at the cash register and got excited at the fact I was from Oregon. I saw the photo of what I remembered as the 50s version Nu-design Sampo on the photo wall. "Now the parking lot..." Parking lot of what? A cloud emerged over my head. The admission ladies had followed me back and meanwhile began to discuss the photos.

"They called it 'Happy Hour Road'...they had that bar at the end of it, at least it got the men out of the house."

Stuff like that. There were Norwegian names, Finnish names I recognized like Koski, Maki, Karjala...and more that were too hard. Maybe half, because there were a lot of English and German names as well...maybe like Joyce Thomson from Wasatch-Uinta field camp, some names had just become English because they were too hard, though I wouldn't imagine someone changing their name from Viukhola to MacPherson. On the wall, in 1887, Ole Granlund renounced allegiance to the Czar of Russia. On the wall, they all just looked like regular Minnesotans, except for one old woman in a black headscarf. This reminded me of one of my own in-laws, Wilhelmina Steffens, destined to spend 30 years as a widow in Faribault speaking German.

One of the grey haired ladies was speaking. "My mother had Lilly, then the next year she had me, then the next year she had George, then the next year Raymond...I don't remember Lilly doing anything other than asa a babysitter." I walked back out into the foyer, hoping to see something fun to buy and read about history and society, but there was nothing. "Nice glass," I said to Lilly's sister, about some cut glass in a cabinet. Someone, the card read, had brought it over from Finland; it was painted with gold on the borders and with red on the flowers.

"That stuff is heavy as lead. I got some glasses my husband's mother had, that's all cut in there, you see, see how thick it is. I don't use it for anything, some people do, I just bring out the Tupperware when I have company.

"So you don't use this stuff any more?" I said politely.

"You don't use that do you Laura?" Laura was a chunky blonde about my age. Though naturally blonde, her dye was a deep brassy yellow. I thought in horror of my own hair I'd just dyed red-brown.

"No," said Laura, "I never did use it. I remember it being in my grandmother's china cabinet. She used to use it all the time. Then my mother got it, but I don't use it, it's as heavy as lead." Plus it was behind bars here in the museum.

Afterwards I looked all over for the Sampo. I thought I would like to live here, in the pines where no one threw out a board or piece of furniture they may have a use for in the future, just keep it in the yard with the four old boats and the 1968 pick-up. Finally, in the middle of town, I found a white aspenite building with giant red letters that COOP SAMPO OFFICE, Cenex, huge ware house and elevator behind, and 2 flammable liquid tankers and one small agricultural chemical spray truck that said "Menagha Coop Sampo" even after Y2K. I took some photos. Then I went over to Spirit Lake and sat on the dock with my feet in the water and watched other peoples kids play on the beach. I wished my kids were there too.

I drove back north and stopped and bought some frozen northerns at Don's Supermarket for $2.98 a pound. As soon as I got up the next day...at 8:30AM PST...I lit the gas stove and put on the northerns to fry. The blue flame danced under my control.

"Maybe you should coordinate that with the people in the other cabin," said my husband.

"I don't have enough to go around. I don't even have a pound." I said.

"Well, you should cook the corn in the microwave." To my horror there was a microwave on the counter. "Why did you get garlic butter? They have some butter in the refrigerator."

"Do you want this fish or not?" I asked.

At Port McNeill on Vancouver Island, we took the 25 minute ferry ride east to Malcolm Island. I read of this place on the Northern Island ferry schedule, which notes briefly that Sointula, the major town, was founded at the turn of the century as a Finnish utopian community. The schedule goes on to describe in three paragraphs the wonders of bird and whale watching at the second stop, Alert Bay.

Disembarking, we drove past bed and breakfast signs, but the only sign of Utopia we saw was the Co-op/ Liquor Agency. My older daughter, in control of the Windstar, veered to the right and drove south along the coastal road. Sointula proper disappeared in 30 seconds, and we drove past small farms, or perhaps just houses with huge yards. Some were modern and upscale, some were old, some were what you could call unusual. On the ocean side were small pullouts every so often between the trees where you could stand on the huge eggs of ocean cobbles and watch the grey blue mist and drizzle of ocean.

"Mother," said Emma, "This place is weird. This is not American."

"That's because we're in Canada," I explained.

"No, it is not from this continent. Don't you think?" she commented patiently.

We stopped to take pictures at an alpaca farm at the end of the road. Then we drove back into town.

Ian spotted the library in an old white building, which doubles as museum and Pre-School. The museum is much like any makeshift county historical society museum. There is an old switchboard, and it was here that I could at last demonstrate my old job in Outward Toll.

"In Des Moines there were maybe a hundred of these," I said, reenacting a collect call from Boone to Dubuque. There are fishing nets, school desks, and old photos and you can touch them all.

Before leaving, I stopped to talk with the hostess, a young woman with yellow hair and an eyebrow ring. "People come here all the way from Finland to see this," she said. And then she told me the fascinating story of the Finnish idealists who came to Sointula (which means "place of harmony"), of how they had only craft skills and had to learn logging and fishing, of the devastating fire, and of the split between factions and final demise of the utopian colony.

My daughters and I went looking for a late lunch. The restaurant/bar/hotel was closed.

"Turn up that way," I said. The only other eating place in town is a taco stand called Parta Myarta. Despite the trendy sign, it is a brown one roomed shack with a sun cover for a dining room. Sun didn't seem like the major threat from above, I mused, mistaking the polyurethane on the table for water. We ate weird tacos and quesadillas while the owner chatted with First Nation kids on bikes and threw things at stray dogs. Then we returned to pick up Ian at what I now knew to be the former school.

"We open again at six, he can come back then!" the librarian encouraged.

Waiting for the ferry, I stopped to look for a meaningful souvenir at a small store. I found to my delight a book written about Sointula, and bought it.

"Where's Johnson's Crossing?" asked the clerk, targeting my souvenir hat.

"North of Carcross," I answered.

"I used to live in the Yukon. I lived at Faro.

"That's way up there."

"There was a lead mine there. That's where I learned to hate snow."

"No snow here?"

"It melts fast. It's usually about like this in winter too." Then she launched into a discussion of types of rain. I eyed the Uhaul in the Ferry Queue. "I'm scared they'll go without me." I said. She assured me from looking out the other window that I had five minutes.

We settled into the front row of three lanes. The ferryman, middle aged and handsome, with short ash blond hair and a yellow rain slicker, came over and talked to us.

"What part of Oregon are you from?"

"The Dalles."

He shook his head. "I'm from the Salem area. Came up here in '78." He grinned, showing the rims of gold around his front teeth.

Then we moved into another world. I read the book along the way, fascinated by the story. Isolated by language and socialism, the residents had kept up their own sort of utopia for decades, with a sense of community and respect for work, long after the "commune" failed. For decades they lived without police or churches. Finally, as TV began to dissolve the social structure, hippies moved in, resetting the clock in their own way. The author of the book wonders if the northward movement of population density on Vancouver Island will finally do Sointula in.

............

Back in 1990 when I first visited Scotland, on a romantic bent I rode the Hebridean ferry out to North Uist with two young children. We drove to the desolate grey rainy end of barren Skye, leaving the silver rented Vauxhall 5 speed hatchback in a parking lot and waiting on the ferry at Uig Bay. We talked to a kid from Italy with a backpack...the salt marsh campground at Portree was full of European kids with worn tents, as well as livestock and lethal midges. Like the British Columbia roads, it is likely now full of affluent Germans and Austrians and Italians with big white motorhomes..

"Do you know when the bus comes?" he asked.
"It looks like from the schedule it doesn't run on Sunday, " I answered.

But finally we rode the leaden grey waves to Lochmaddy and the brown hills of North Uist. The landscape was not much different than the barren brown Oregon hills which surround me now. Eight year old Emma and I pushed Ian in his stoller along an asphalt road, the houses we passed huddled in an ancient world. In August, the air smelled heavy. "Wow, peat smoke!" I thought with delight. A sole figure, a tweed man with a cane who reeked of a black and white movie, slowly passed us and said hello.

You live here?
Yes, he said, smiling.
You like it here?
Yes I do!

I couldn't imagine living there and liking it; I had felt betrayed by the songs that pictured Scotland, particularly the Islands, as a beautiful paradise, green land of silver knotwork. They were instead as barren and grim as Nebraska. Now I know that these Oregon Hills and the smell of grassfires grow on you. But I have not been back to the Hebrides.
Returning to Uig, we met a woman at the soup machine in the Lochmaddy terminal, and I exerpt a past story:
"Her hair was the color of whiskey, maybe she was around 30. She said, "I was here to visit my family...I got married, I got out of here and moved to Inverness and I hate coming here." She sipped progressively on a pint flask in a bag in her purse. 'I hate it here because nothing ever happens.' She bought my kids Mars bars from the machine. Later on the boat, she lay snoring on
one of the couches by the bar, the remains of a tray of burger, chips, and catsup on a tray in front of her, like the carcass of Burns."
=====

One of the oddest ferry trips I have seen is one arriving from the Isle of Lismor. We were waiting on the ferry to the Isle of Mull and the Lismore Ferry came in. There were almost no people on the boat, just a few boy shepherds. The rest of the passengers were sheep, like angry fluffy clouds or cheese curds against the red welded metal of the flat boat. The boys drove the sheep off into a truck, and when the truck seemed full, its floor became a sheep shelf, and then more sheep were herded into the truck. It was indeed something to mull over.

Yesterday, we decided to look for the source of Mill Creek, which forms a southwest boundary to our property. Following the admittedly faulty topo atlas of Oregon, we drove up Skyline drive, pass the steep cherry orchards and then onto washboard gravel, kicking up dust, with only steep Quercus garryi (scrub oak)-grass savanna for miles, one sneeze and the red windstar would plunge hundreds of feet down. There was no traffic, nothing in the wide linear western view of fir forest and Hood to suggest humans had ever been here, just the road. It was a reminder that The Dalles is just an eye in the face of Heaven.

The road leveled at a place called Dutch Flats. Opening before us was a bounty of clipped wheat fields and pasture, the same dry yellow straw as the grass in the savanna. As we drove, cows grazed beneath oaks in the pasture on the left. On the right a boy in faded camouflage clothing walked through cut golden wheat. In front of us, a massive white pick up slowly followed a herd of cows. We followed the white truck for several minutes along one lane gravel, driving parallel with the walking cowherd on the right. Then the white truck pulled over and we waved thanks at a second smiling boy with chiseled features. We followed the cows for another five minutes. Other cows joined from the left, twelve in all, huge and heavy at this distance with bulbous rolling bellies, black as the basalts in Mill Creek, white as the clouds, tan as the sheared wheat, walked in slow motion. Sometimes they trotted in slow motion.

"If you inch over to the right," stated my husband,"they'll move over."

"Could you shut your window please?" I answered. My glasses were caked in dust.

Finally, the cows compressed to the left around a curve. A black cow stared me in the face as I passed. We drove on past a ruptured wire fence and a lone house, and the roadside turned to Ponderosa Pine. We skated onto asphalt at the National Forest Border and into fir. We saw no more humans till we reached a dark campground with a water trough for horses and an outhouse. We never found the reservoir.

If you lived on Dutch Flats, you would be living in an eye on the face of heaven. Driving your livestock and growing your winter wheat, you might look down and see that insecticides ride in the wind from the orchards, that Iraq has been systematically poisoned and bombed, and that airplanes fly into huge buildings.

====

BC37 is a crazy highway to drive. Connecting with the Yellowhead Highway on the south near the Hazeltons and with the Alaska Highway near Watson Lake on the north, it cuts for hundreds of miles through boreal forest. Part of it is paved and part is gravel and a good portion is under repair. You can count the number of gas stations along 37 on your fingers, and you can put all the phone numbers in the Yukon and northern BC into the book that holds those of our small communities along the Columbia Gorge.

But the gas stations are there, and so is lodging. On the way up we stayed at a motel in Dease Lake, following in the same motorboat and pickup with Yukon plates we'd been stalled behind by a flagger south of Bell II hours earlier.

"You took my picture," accused the driver smiling. I had memorized the order of vehicles as I walked the dusty queue: Alaska, BC, Yukon, Oregon, Montana, California.

On the way down, we passed Dease Lake in a drizzle, but a half hour on, Emma said,

"Mother do you plan to drive all night?"

I was looking for camping with a lake and hot tub, but this had not shown up. As I often do, I turned off abruptly as if inspired by determination. I drove under a log portal that said BEAR PAW RANCH.

The car behind me pulled in as well and followed me down the gravel road, past the log fences. It was a 1986 faded gold Olds sedan. We both parked at the lodge. A white haired couple leaped out.

"Where in Oregon are you from?" the man asked.

"The Dalles." I said.

"THE DALLES!!!" he accused suspiciously. "We're from Bentley."

"Where's Bentley?"

"WHERE'S PENDLETON? HOW CAN YOU LIVE IN OREGON AND NOT KNOW PENDLETON?" Why can't people talk right? Why do they make me seem like an idiot.

We all walked in the door. So many people confused the college girl acting as clerk. They had a room for us, but just with 2 single beds...as it turned out they had a lot of these. They served dinner here, but it was served by the plate and they would have to make some more. We all took our bags up.

"Why do I have to sleep on the floor again?" whined Ian, dragging his sleeping bag and Star Wars novel.

"Because you just got back from backwoods canoe camp in Maine and you were almost struck by lightning so you are tough," I said.

Then we stood by the dining hall. A member of the staff came by and told us there was a herd of moose headed this way and it should be here in 15 minutes.

"We've been up to Alaska," the old man told me. "We've been up quite a few times. My wife says go, and we get in the car and go!" He turned to a middle aged man who had arrived in a bland '99 white sedan with Utah! Plates. "This guy's from Oregon too. Just met him in the lobby"

"I'm from the Corvallis area," the man from Utah! explained.

My little family had its own table in the middle. The other people from Oregon were by the window, and at a third table a family of German speakers sat chain-smoking. Later, the staff appeared at another table. On the wall above them hung a moose skull with large crucifix and some lichens coming out the top.

The 3 course dinner was excellent. I swallowed my pride along with chicken in wine and mushroom sauce. Then someone asked what had ever happened to the moose herd.

"It's at times like these I pick up my accordion," answered the host in a German accent, laying down his cigarette. It was a short piano accordion with an uncountable number of basses. Another member of the staff picked up his guitar, and they began to sing and play the great old songs of the Tyrol. I looked above the fireplace on the tall log wall, to see a flag with the great bird of the Eastern Kingdom.

The white haired man from Pendleton asked "Do you have a song for an old man who will be 82 in September?"

"Not specifically, but I have one about the way they used to milk the cows by hand."

As they sang and played, the old man demonstrated using a wooden stool how he used to milk cows.

"Isnt it funny how that old man acted like he was drunk but he hadnt had a drop?" asked Emma later,

"I think if you are 81, you can act any way you want, " I explained.

After a number of Tyrolean oom-pah songs, a Canadian man in northwoods dress put down his cigarette and took over the guitar. He had told a story earlier of how he'd been down past Bell II and a gravel truck had knocked a big chip out of his window, so I suspect that he owned a gigantic new black 4X4 Chevrolet pickup with chrome trim. The repertoire changed to country and pop.

Alone now at the table, I leafed through the photo albums and guest book. "Wonderful to have a little bit of the Alps in Canada," wrote a Swiss couple. The photo albums showed the ranch in winter snow, the hot tub in action, and the lives of the owners. I went out and looked at the astonishing shadows of mountains and trees and horses in the vale behind the hotel. I wondered if they did this every night.

=======

For the past 16 years I have attended the culinary paragon of FOP trips, the South Central, which has at times included

lunches packed by Marriott, eaten as we slush through mosquito infested bayous and over cow infested ranches. South Central always includes ethno-dinners, barbecue (for me slaw and beans), enchiladas, gumbo, or, when we went to Kansas, roast beef and green beans (for me beans and potatoes). This year I attended the more spartan Pacific Cell, which included no food or soil pits at all, but more basalts. This Friends Of the Pleistocene trip was centered at Pluvial Lake Chewaucan, a precursor of Summer Lake and Lake Abert, in South Central Oregon. Lake Abert can have three times the salinity of the ocean in dry years. Climatic and other events at Chewaucan are dated using the many volcanic ash layers; the oldest tephra layers predate 210 KYBP.

Silvio Pezzopane from Denver, backed by a flat expanse of sagebrush and greasewood, described the work done on the structural geology of the area. He rattled out a couple of people who had worked just to the east.

"Dave Weide." asserted a woman in the front circle.

"And Dave Weide," said Pezzopane.

We drove on en caravan to section C, by the springfed Ana River. Someone had labeled the ashes in a huge stream cut section in unconsolidated sediments, starting with Mt St Helens C (tephra 12-b) at 46.3 KYPB and going down to KK (Tule Lake and Walker Lake) at 179 KYPB. Remnants of the Mazama (7400YBP) from Crater Lake lay on the surface. Adrei Sarno-Wojciciki (who has dated every ash in the universe) spoke of his regional ash correlations:

"I'm sorry this paper didnt make it to the guidebook," he began with a slight lilt that controversed the pronunciation of "th," "I went to New York because of a family tragedy and was caught in downtown Manhattan when all hell broke lose, and was stuck trying to fly out. My family tragedy turned into a national tragedy." His voice wavered for only a moment; if you are a geologist your voice cannot waiver for long in public. "So I made up this handout for you, which I hope you have gotten." We subsequently learned that ashes from a core in an adjacent shrub-dominated cow pasture had been dated at over a million years BP and could be found at Lake Tahoe Dam Core DH-17..

Sarno showed us a big color map of the extent of famous ashes: Wono, Olema, Orange. "Here is everyone's favorite ash, Mount Mazama." Mazama had spewed over 8 states and 3 provinces in bright red. "Look at it in comparison here...hold this one up will you Rob...to this wimpy little eruption of the Mt. St. Helens a few years ago."

Someone in my family commented, "I'm just trying to figure out why the hell all of this they're talking about matters." Conversely, I wonder why anyone would bother to watch TV when Deep Time and cow pastures are so available, when you can walk so easily where no one has walked before, when time itself is in the palm of your own hand.

We drove home Saturday night. In the Valley of the Tygh, the headlights of farm machinery drilled into the black starry night, farmers preparing their fields for Winter Wheat. At Madras, a greyhound bound for Los Angeles pulled into the station to pick up passengers.

October 2001

One year when we went to Indiana for Christmas, Daddy George took me sledding in Glen Miller Park, where there were a lot of children dark and bright against the snow. He pushed the sled off at the top of the big long hill, and then he threw his dry weight on the sled with me for speed. Half way down I started to get scared. The other children, light as snowflakes, brought their sleds gingerly to a halt on the terrace at the base of the hill, but we kept on going. We finally stopped with the runners hanging over the dark waters and ice of the creek. I remember the sweep of the white landscape, but the moment we stopped stays in my mind like it was yesterday, the cold fear and relief.

Like so many Border Hoosiers, my mother's parents originated in part with the Early Friends. Some had come over with Penn on the Welcome, some even earlier to New Jersey, and some were Dutch colonists who had been converted. My mother grieved when Georgie died, "Why did this have to happen to him? He would never hurt a fly!" It was a puzzling statement, not only because he had died peacefully at 85, but because I could remember him in the orchard with his BB gun muttering, "I'll get those jaybirds!"

Later, I went up to Richmond to school. I came home during Christmas break to find the first obituary of a class die in Viet Nam from my homeroom...was it Doug Hahn? In my sophomore year, the administration chartered busses to demonstrate against the War In Viet Nam. I learned about this from my friends in the humanities, whose minds were not concerned with definitions of strike slip faulting and viscosity. I climbed onto the bus on the eve of my 19^th birthday. The college president went with us. We rode through the night, through Ohio and Pennsylvania and Maryland, exotic unknowns out the blackness of the windows.

I couldn't sleep sitting up, so I was in a daze all the next day. The bus stopped on the fringe of The Mall to let us out. The Mall was a mass of thousands of humans in solidarity against the war. Someone said "That's Peter, Paul and Mary up there. Dr. Spock is going to speak later." Though I have tried, I cannot remember anything after that, until hours later I ran into Carolyn Sorrows on her way to the Smithsonian. Carolyn was what you could call a Quaker jock. These people looked just like sorority girls and football players, but could always be counted on to witness their faith.

We bought hot dogs from a cart on the walk outside the Smithsonian. They had an unusual peppery taste. Carolyn said:

"These taste funny." the it dawned on her, "OOH!! Tear gas! I heard they're using tear gas now out there! That's why they taste like this!"

I scanned the area for a white cloud of tear gas. I didnt see anything. We walked up the steps. Kids with backpacks were asleep all over the place. Then it hit me like a brick, that people had hitched here, they'd come from all over, on their own, on their own conviction. Their schools had not chartered a bus.

In the evening we went to the place that the bus would pick us up. There were logs to sit on, set on damp packed ground, and other people from Earlham started a bonfire. Then someone came and told us the police had ordered us to move back, so we had to meet the bus somewhere else. This hit me like another brick, the US government telling our college president to move back. Having grown up in Alabama, it was always a surprise to me how things worked in the North.

I have always been a pacifist, all my life. It is good that George Fox backs me up.

Dallesport, Saturday: We came up upon horses and riders as we drove east along Washington 14, east between dry grass hills and the Columbia. At first I thought they were the usual slow riders, but then saw they were galloping, hell bent, three horses and three teenaged girls on the other side of the ditch. They were sturdy smiling pretty women, with skin the color of the wild muddy water in Mill Creek after a rainstorm in the Cascades. Their hair was the color of obsidian, the color of Raven who opened the box and brought Light to the World. I thought of a vintage photo of a young Ojibway woman and child. The riders turned into an unpaved driveway, still galloping, hell bent. Three faded mobile homes and seven junk vehicles stood in stately cultural grace among the walnuts and willows and dry grass a distance from the ranch house, marks of affluence.

Portland State University, Monday: She wore a calf-length dress of black polished cotton, her thin white arms like skeleton bones next to it. Her hair, black like obsidian, was pulled into a bun and dusted with bright magenta. Her ears were lit by moons of silver rings. Her eyes, beneath severe bangs, were dull grey and quick to see. She was on her lunch break.

"Ya," I said, pulling out the paper I had got on a whim at Mariehamn.

"Go ahead," he said pointing, and we pulled out and drove onto the boat. It left almost immediately, leaving that first sad camper truck and its pack of vehicles to wait six hours in the rain for the next ferry.

The ferry route was a local highway, between the islands, so the ferry walls were bolted metal painted a drab pastel. Passengers from all over Europe milled like the starving dead, waiting for the cafeteria to open.

[August, 2001]The Queen Of the North runs in summer between Prince Rupert just to the south of the Alaskan peninsula and Port Hardy at the northern tip of Vancouver Island. When it was constructed in Germany to run for the Stena line between Denmark and Sweden, it was considered one of the most beautiful car ferries ever built.

We went standby on the North, leaving the Moby Dick Hotel with its swirlpool and sauna at 5AM in an iron grey drizzle.

"I left my book back in the room!" Erin realized.

"Where did you leave it?" I asked calmly, knowing it had been good to leave early.

"In the cabinet under the bathroom sink." She answered.

We pulled into lane 4 with the other standbys at 5:30, behind pickup campers, vans, and leviathan houses on wheels. I walked over in the metallic rain to the office. We were later to learn that if Prince Rupert's annual rainfall were measured on a meter stick, the stick would be taller than a moose; it would go right through the roof. At 5:45 we received our standby numbers.

We were number 4.

"How long is your vehicle?" the clerk asked, her face reflecting great Tlingit legends.

"16 feet I think." The extra foot was why we did not ride the Alaska Ferry from Bellingham.

"Oh, you're in a car," she answered. I hoped having a Windstar would get us on.

I have a photo collection of ferry queues; I have walked ferry queues from Sandnessjøen to Galveston to Port Angeles, noting the demography of the vehicles and the license plates. One of my most exciting experiences on this trip was watching a watching a white RV with long rectangular "D" plates board the Malaspina at Haines. But I was sleepy and it was too wet to walk this one. Ghostlike lines of cars, trucks, and campers, all with tickets reserved weeks ago, pulled into the other lanes and eventually these lines pulled onto the Queen of the North. We shifted lanes, and then, after all the rest of vehicles were on, we were called one by one. We pulled in behind a camper van. Behind us a behemoth motor home was loaded in, and then the ferryman said into his radio, "Give me the first of the camper trucks." They fitted in sideways a truck with two canoes on top, and then closed the hatch.

They give you 15 minutes every four hours to go down to the auto deck and walk your dog and get things. I used this time to walk the auto deck and read the plates. I was walking up the steps when a ferryman asked,

"Where are you from?"

"Oregon. I live in The Dalles."

"I used to live down around there," said the ferryman.

"In Oregon?"

"No, I'm from the Washington Coast. But I lived in Ellensburg. Drove a truck."

"Hauling apple crates."

"No," he corrected, "mostly I carried hay in from the Coast. Then I came up here. I got a job working on this ferry and never wanted to go back."

"I like boats. I worked on some research boats and I loved it."

I unlocked my car door so Erin could get some books. "What's that?" she asked the ferryman.

He was carrying a strange round device. Mostly I had just been noticing that he had pretty blue eyes.

"I'm a security officer. Sometimes I 'll watch the decks on TV to check to see if someone is where they shouldn't be. And I walk around the decks to check them, and I plug this in at various places and it registers that I have been to places at various times," he answered.

=========

I stood in Every Day Music in Portland, flipping the folk section for old Folkways LPs I knew were no longer as findable as they were back in the 90s, when I used to buy them at CD Warehouse on Westheimer in Houston. Facing me across the bins were two young women wearing black.

"We're supposed to each get her one of these," said the first.

"Mmm." said the second.

"She doesn't even have any Beatles albums."

"Mmm."

"She's really out of the loop. She's the child of hippies. She didn't even know about bad TV."

I looked at the women for a flash. The talker was a heavy set woman wearing black polyester slacks and V neck shirt. Her hair, the somber color of used vinyl, was ratted and flipped the way we used to wear it in high school. I wondered smugly if she had a boyfriend. The other woman was thinner.

I was washing dishes at the Portland Sacred Harp Convention because I was assigned to do lunch cleanup.

I washed out other people's cooking dishes so they could take them home to Eugene or Milwaukee. I soaked and then scrubbed out dishes of tabouli, chili-brownrice hotdish, caked-on custard cake, and my contribution, mustard greens...not much scrubbing on greens. I'd brought that since Albertson's didn't have collards. A woman had commented:

"Those mustard greens sure are mustardy."

"Yeah. Mustard greens and macaroni and cheese, isn't that something?" chuckled her companion as she bit into her eggplant quiche. Apparently she had not seen the deviled eggs.

It took me a while to finish. Wetness progressively rose up the sleeves of the blue shirt my older daughter had no longer wanted. Then I started on the silverware. This was the fun part. I did like I do when I camp, I washed off a batch and then rinsed them and then put them on the drain board. Then still seeing more silverware, I repeated this over and over. A woman with the aura of a hen came up behind me and said:

"Wouldn't it be easier if you just washed them all and then rinsed them together?"

I stopped whatever I was daydreaming about and looked at her, dumbfounded.

"Well,"she said, still very concerned. "You seem to have a method that works for you so go ahead and do it your way." Then she turned and left.

Because I daydream so much, I am an easy target for such things. Usually I acquiesce to what people want. Once I had vacuum a whole room in meticulous, straight sweeps. I always turn "here" when people say "Turn here!" usually very abruptly, even though I know a better way, just to make my rider feel important. I know that when I am alone I can follow my own route. But this woman had not given me a chance.

=======

Ralph, who sits next to me in the back of the class, was born perhaps 60 years ago around Zim, Minnesota, which is southwest of Hibbing. He's auditing the course because he wants to visit his cousin or friend in Helsinki, who is a neurosurgeon.

He says: "In the Halls, you couldn't have alcohol out, you'd take the bottles and put them in paper bags and keep them under the table. You could get set-ups." The teacher is talking about Norwegians. "Not the Norwegians," says Ralph. "They didn't do things like that."

Ken is my daughter's age and his last name is an island. I ask him "So did your grandfather speak English well?"

"Yeh, he spoke 4 languages. He was on a boat that was captured by Japan in World War II. He wasn't a prisoner, but he couldn't leave Japan. Then after the war, he never went back to Finland, he came to Oregon."

As I drive along the wide Columbia in my big red car that night, I say: I am the big white moon in the black sky. The moon is a white dove and she flies above the great river. Her white gown drops in the wind, and the waves of the Columbia spread the feathers in the black waters, against the black rocks. I am always the same white moon, everywhere in the world, and I am the same white dove.

And also I say: Olen suuri valkoinen kuu mustassa taivassa. Kuu on valkoinen lintu. Olen aina sama valkoinen kuu, ja olen sama valkoinen lintu.

"It's great that you could finally come over here and play again."

Evergrey has been to the US once before and are one step ahead of Superior, Spiral Architect and even Ark. It costs a fortune to fly an art metal band and all their heavy gear to Amerikka.

I shake hands with the bass player. Dressed in black, Hakkanson is an impressive man with a large silver stud in his lower lip and a mass of wavy black hair. Since I'm an observer, I say hello and leave it at that. But there is dead silence; Hakkanson expects more.

"How's the weather in Sweden?" I ask lamely.

"What?"

I speak louder. "What's the weather like back home?"

Stunned only for a moment, he laughs and says in perfect English, "It's snowing there, actually."

Oh God. Great to have you here, great job, how brilliantly you play vacuum pump bass. Idiot, you're an idiot, Judith. I travel down the line, nodding, remarking at vocalist Tom Eklund's signature in Gold Paint Pen.

"Wow! That's some signature!" I say. He smiles.

I follow a tall man with very black hair along the lobby during the next break. Suddenly, another tall man says to the black-haired man:

"You guys were fucking great."

Eklund, cutting a mighty figure in black, turns and grabs the man, embracing him in tears.

"I love you man, I love you all!"

I figure that would be a smart thing for me to say, too! But now I have the earthshaking realization that these Swedes have black hair because they dye it.

I walk over to the bar, publicly situated as to shock the Oregon liquor laws. Two hefty good old boys in baseball caps explain to someone in a Rhapsody shirt:

"We're from Austin, TEXAS."

I can imagine them chain driving my old path past rice fields and pine forests, into the New South. I ask the bartender:

"Can I get a Shiner?" Shiner Bok, the honey of beers, is on tap here.

In front of me in the audience, two balding men chat about their cameras. Behind me three men in their early thirties, dressed as Lions Club members, exchange tips on bands:

"A good band is Blind Lemur."

"You know I heard about this stuff at a King Diamond concert in L.A. He told me "Stratovarius, Gamma Ray. Guy could hardly speak English. Blind Leper?"

"Blind Lemur."

They all do it, push in like grey icebreakers to the uncharted polar ice of progressive metal. They may do it in secret, silent battleships, warriors in the struggle against Britney Spears and Ricky Martin. We are all living under the same big defiant moon.

I am grateful to have these six hours of peace tonite, these inescapable ultra-high volumes, these beautiful young men with long hair, this ritualism, these smiles, and no suggestions as to correct behavior. Women, outnumbered three to one, smile at me as if I am their sister. I am glad to be in a world where the struggles between good and evil are virtuoso songs in broken English. This music is to me like opera is to others. For Kamelot, the last band and a magical cross-over, I stand in the pit, ten feet from the stage and the huge speakers which threaten to explode my mortal shell, ten feet from Roy Khan's immense voice, and feel the grand simplicity of good and evil. A woman next to me does a little jig.

Viikkonloppua The Dallesissa on jotakin iso, ehkä se ei ole iloinen, mutta me teemme hyvin paljon! Perjantaina saata, ja se on harmaa, kuu ei ole taivasissa, se on kaunis ilma. Me kävellämme ylös. Tässä on koulu ja "perhe-bingo"!!! Lapset syövat, maito ja kakku ovat hyvä! Isä saa hyvä bingo-korttin, niin hyvin iso popcorn on nyt hänen!

Mutta Launtaina taivas on sinenen ja aurinko on kaunis. Me mennemme autossa.. Kello on yhdeksän aamulla kun olemme koulussa Mosierissa. Erin on Campfire Tyttä, niin tännän on "Iloinen Jousta," mutta nyt he luistelovat kaulussa. Mieheni, poikani, ja tyttöni luistelovat, ja minä seison ja nukkun. Koulu ei ole kaunis, se on hyvin vanha, kylä ei voi maksaa, niin kaulu on vanha ja pieni. The Dallesissa, myös. Kun asumme Teksasissa, koulu on kaunis ja uusi. Ajattelen, tämä on outo. Nyt kello on yksitoista...

Syömme Hood Riverissa, ravintolassa, mutta vain kolmekymmentä minuuttia, koska auto on "Short Term Parking Meter" kanssa. Me mennemme taas kotiin ja minä leikkin tietokonea kanssa, teen linkit. Kello on kuusi, teen ruokaa, ja syomme. Minä ja minun tytär teemme pulaa! Ehkä se on outo pula, vähän musta!

Aamulla me, lapset ja minä, mennemme taas ulos; Sunnuntaina on Kveekarien kokous, he sanovat nyt joka sunnuntai, sota Afghanistanissa on huono. Perhe ei syö, me teemme nähdä "Harry Potter," ajatellemme tämä on hyvä elokuva, se on kaunis. Me syömme nopaesti, mies ja lapset syövat nakkia. Syön vain pullaa koska olen kasvissyöja. Niin nyt kello on kolme, iso punainen auto on nyt Parkdale Grange pysäköimisaluessa. Paljon lapset ovat täällä, ja kuuntelemme kun Lui Collins laulaa. Myös täällä on pieni ruskea karhu, ja karhu puhuu! Grange on vanha myös. Juon teetä ja syön kakkua. Me mennemme kotiin, minä juon ehkä kolme sloe gin fizza

=====

Atlanta, November 2001:At two thirty on Peachtree the crowds still cruised. The cars and the police did too, in the vacant black of night. Three patrol cars, blue lights like pulsars, routed my lane around a black TransAm It was if Darth Vader had collided at the speed of light with a telephone pole, the jet black body like the volcanic glass shards of a black store front around the pole, the window glass like thousands of tiny stars strewn across an asphalt sky, in the free lane the front bumper lay like an abandoned space station across my path. It may have been the most startling wreck I have ever seen.
======

Two retired couples sat in the cafeteria of The Queen Of the North as it glided in the cold summer waters of the Inside Passage.

"That's a fishing boat out there," said the man next to the window.

"What are they fishing for?" asked the other.

"That kind, they fish almost exclusively for halibut. They use lines."

"They must have to use a lot of lines."

"How many lines did you have out, Jim?" asked the wife near the window.

"I used nine lines and 14 hooks on a line."

"Must get pretty busy sometimes," said the other man.

"You go through a school you can get VERY busy."

The other man moved over to the window, exchanging positions with the wife, who went to talk about crochet work.

"See, that one over there, that's a gill netter. They fish exclusively for salmon. They get stuck in the net, messes up their gills."

I moved in against the window, staring out at suburban Bella Bella, but listening.

"Last time I trapped, I got mink and..." Jim was saying. "Talked to a fella from Wisconsin, sells to people in New Jersey. The business is different down in the States."

The one wife held up the yellow baby blanket she was working on for the other to admire.

"I really like this yarn," she said.

"Yeah," continued Jim. "I've been all over. I've been to Japan and Germany and Brazil."

"Huh," said the other man.

"I'm a 7th Day Adventist, we travel all over building churches."

"What's that?" The other man asked, interested.

"We do missionary work all over the world. I build the trusses for the churches. Went to Brazil. Up the Amazon, up the Black. They make the trusses out of mahogany there, beautiful wood. Can't get it out to sell it, though."

The next day, she bought a new player at Kmart, presenting her Wells Fargo Check Card and her Dalles Middle School EZ Community Saver card. Now she must lock her car. She thought of what she'd do with the new blue player. She'd fill it full of powdered sugar, anthrax spores, perhaps a toxin so powerful that it killed instanty all who did not wear the magic badge...and then she could leave the car unlocked....

December 2001

Elokuussa kuu on punainen puninen viitake taivalla.

It was in Belgium on the home stretch to Frankfurt that I got trapped inside a nightmare freeway restroom. I had previously gotten locked in an outhouse in Norja, along Eidfjørden , but had escaped by brutally kicking the door with my right foot. Then I was free again, to buy cherries from 2 kids with black clothing and nose rings in the car park. This time the door was grafittied steel, and the concrete floor twice as filthy. How many hours would it take my son in the car to lift his nose from his book? I pounded on the door, turned the tired knob over and over, and then it caught. No cherries in this lot, just Dutch and Italians and Germans wanting to be somewhere other than in this August heat wave, helle indeed. Benelux was the steamroom the Norjastas paid good money to sit inside.We stayed at a motel south of Brussels, too bored to drive farther today. I walked the path behind in an Iowa-like landscape, where there was a creek, then cornfields, then apple orchards. Friendly cows, soon destined to become dead meat in the wake of hoof and mouth, drank from a recyled bathtub. I ate at the cafeteria, not conspicuous in a world of lingua franca English, less so than a group of Argentinians wanting to speak French. Travellers carried black steamed mussels, which were on special, out to the grey cement patio in small stainless steel pots and ate them, bringing wine and pale beer alongside. I envied the couples who sat on the Belgian patio.

The next day, we drove across invisible borders, much like the border between Missouri and Minnesota, where the amiable fields and sticky mud creeks bend slowly into the order and prosperity of long dead but still influential German and Norwegian immigrants. Our silver Ford was home without a scratch, and by auto proxy so were we. On the A-3 near Limburg, we caught rain with the fury of grey hell, the old VW camper in front crawled like a young baby, while the Audis and Mercedes in the far lane crept at 110, fog lights drilling through an artificial night.

We stopped at Bad Camberg, at a rest area motel, so in the morning we could drive to Frankfurt. There was no more rain. Our room, above the cafeteria and gift shop, had a couch as well as a cement balcony that overlooked the freeway. Trickily the glass window opened as a dooras well. I went down and bought a sprite and a small bottle of white wine, speaking sparse German to the cashier. Then we went out onto the balcony, and Ian read his book. I looked out at the mauve dusk and at the trucks running along the freeway, big trucks with Dutch and Hungarian and Swiss words on them. Imagine backing one up inside a Swiss tunnel.

=========

Randy says

"but let's just

say our audience has grown considerably since we repositioned the show in

image if not sound. A lot more people can relate to it now."

You guys tear me up!

I was in class about a month ago and our teacher Marjo asked "What kind of music do you listen to?" I think she actually said something like

"Millainen musiikiia sina kuuntelet?"

That's why she asked such a silly question, to illustrate the irregular verb "kuunnelle." (Note the "t" in the present tense. Notice you can also string it with "kuu" or "moon" and "kuusi" or "6." Listen. Six moons are singing. Kuuntele. Kuusi kuita laulavat.)

So everyone (all 7 of us) answered stuff like "classical" or "country." I, however, stammered slowly

"Kansanmusiikkii...tai worldmusiikii."

So now Marjo has me pegged as a reggae listener. But I found it interesting that no one else admitted listening to folk, though people knew Varttina when she played their tape.

So someone said if you went to Powell's huge bookstore in downtown Portland they had the 266 page Finnish grammar by Fred Karlsson. -/ Lots of grammar. So I found that and then walked over to the musiikii section and what did I find? I found James Taylor and Bob Dylan in the rock section, and the Beatles as well. Much of what was in the "Folk" section was traditional music. When I was looking at the rock section, I found a book about progressive rock in which was presented evidence that bands like Yes and King Crimson were not the shallow 70s phenomenon that rock critics had made them out to be, but rather were musically sophisticated and great stuff even though they violated the silly rules of rock minimalism. But since I had a $25 grammar book and I was trying to get through Rice's book on Bulgarian kansanmusiikki, I thought I'd pass it up.

Anyway, the Beatles sound like folk music because what you are calling folk music sounds like the Beatles. What you are doing is circumscribing a bunch of music you yourself identify with and calling it "folk" largely because of its "sensibilities" rather than because of its musical attributes or historical positioning. Right here, I suspect people are doing this because they are using rock as an aesthetic and moral antagonist, perhaps identifying rock with mundane regulated manufactured culture and commercialism, with shallowness, on the one hand and volumes that are too high and lack of respect for the "folk" value system on the other.

[NoteYou could say the Beatles are "folk music" because the songs are past around and sung a lot by ordinary people, in much the same way as we sang "Teen Angel" in Girl Scout camp. I know this.]

Personally, I fail to see what "sensibilities" Beth Orton and Dan Bern have in common with Wild Asparagus, which is the last live music I saw. Personally I think the Beatles, Beth Orton and Dan Bern could be classified in pop rock, that your morning show is a AAA show. Many of the people who listened (and still do listen) to Open Air requested stuff like Beth Orton or Wilco. That didnt mean more people were listening to folk music. It meant they liked AAA or Alt Country or whatever. I bet, though, some of these people believed they were listening to folk music. If you want descriptive terms you need to have a more solid definition. If you just want to say "music I like" or "morning show" then you can't convey any meaning.

Well, I don't care. Things are what they are. But if *I* say I listen to folk music, I am saying Sally Rogers or Garmarna or John Kirkpatrick or the Mill Creek String band, not Bruce Cockburn or Ani di Franco. I dont think there's anything shameful about calling rock or pop as it is and listening to it, except that some of the rock that passes as "folk" is a pretty insipid and whiny item. And that's not the "rock" I want to listen to, so basically I'd turn that morning show OFF!!! (well, probably not Bruce Cockburn, I like everything on "Night Train.")

==============

<Minnesota, August 2001>I turned onto London Road, which parallels Lake Superior. Caught in a Global Warming flowchart,

Duluth, "The Air Conditioned City" was now a sauna with a lot of water thrown on the rocks. I stopped at the Chalet Motel, where I'd always wanted to stay because of the alpine motif. It was just down the street from the Best Western.

In the morning, I walked up the hill to my old house on 2nd Street..highway 51 revisited. Built in 1905 it was a townhouse built of mushroom colored bricks, at the end of the row, with windows on the end. It had cost us $19,000 in 1978. We melted and stripped off the vinyl tiles in the dining room to uncover a maple floor with a foot buzzer in the middle for the maid. The adjoining house with the white aluminum siding next door had been owned and run as a boarding house by Alvira Maki and her ex-husband Larry. The row house on the other side had been owned by Marge and Mike Mahan. I'd stood on the flat roof of the front porch painting the window trim cream and babyblue, and looked over next door. Wee Toby was banging on the front bedroom window with a hammer, I slid down the ladder, rang the bell, and as Marge answered, CRASH!!!! Marge was up the steps like a rocket, face white as the moon. Now the trim was neatly scraped and painted a gloss green. But the gold numeral decals, bought at Banks in The Cities, were still on the transom.

I walked into the alley. The garage was still blue and cream. Some of my husband's electrician friends helped build our back deck, and then we had a party for them. Lance Yotti was an electronics tech1 from the UP, where they put doors on the second floor of houses; once my husband had eaten in his mothers home when they'd fixed a lighthouse around Hancock. Paul Sundquist was an electricians mate2 from the cold plains of North Dakota. There was someone else there as well, a fireman named Tom who had just gotten out of high school. We had 4 cats and they'd got some of our catnip and rolled it and given it to the little fireman to smoke.

"What the f-k is this sh-t?" he asked.

Everyone just laughed their head off.

I went back to the motel, packed my stuff into the white rental Cavalier, and drove north, up through Two Harbours. Superior was the color of a bottle of Bridgeview Blue Moon in the sun.

========

Minun ydin aina on pojois jarvin kanssa

[Minnesota, 2001, continued]Two roads lead northeast from Duluth, I took the right one, along the lake. Near Two Harbors I stopped in the smoked fished store, but service was clogged by tourists from Northfield and The Cities tasting samples of carp and lake trout. At Two Harbors I stopped at a 7-11 perhaps owned by Swedes who foolishly trusted the lake for air conditioning and bought a 64-ounce diet coke. I drove north, past the great lakeside parks. We had a used '72 campmobile which we'd cleaned it out when we first bought it and found someone's forgotten stash of grass. We camped by the lake in two of those parks, and my husband, who sailed Superior, said,

"These parks are all the same. I don't see the point"

And that was that, after that it was just me and the Brittany with the too-long tail.

I drove past Split Rock Lighthouse, and at a pull-out looked at its tiny but fee-free outline in the sun. A huge black SUV with Ontario plates pulled in. A thickset Ojibway woman asked me

"Is there a restroom here?"

"Ha ha, only down there in the woods."

"Pretty day, eh?" she answered.

I ate lunch in the grey Westwind Resort near Castle Danger. I ordered an eggplant sandwich from a waiter whose badge said "My name is Heinz. I am from the Czech Republic." Was he an Exchange Waiter? Then I drove into Silver Bay where I hoped to get more film. I stopped at the marina and walked around, imagining Vinsingso in the afternoon precambrian clarity, then drove past the great taconite shipping plant and the ghosts of Reserve Mining. The town itself is not on Superior, but is perpendicular. I parked in the DQ lot and got out to go to the 7-11.

"Hey" called a man in a blue Toyota 4WD pickup.

"What?" I said.

"You going in there?" he asked. He had unruly shoulder-length blond hair.

"No," I answered. "Why?"

He was an exasperated man. "I was gonna ask you to fetch somebody outa there for me."

"No, I'm going over there," I said to close.

I turned west on the Gunflint Trail, I'd never gone there when I lived in Duluth, but I got to Finland and stopped. I looked at the Finland fire station and the co-op and the two huge taverns strung out along 2 or 3 miles of woods, and thought of the long road to Ely and down into Virginia and the big pits. Once Dick Ojakangas took us to the big pits on a field trip (Joe Sislo from The Range, Barb, Neil Rissmeyer, the couple where the wife's (Julie) mother lived in the BWCA, the blonde who followed "hackey"...) and we stood in the great shovel of one of the draglines, all of us, big chunks of taconite sparkling in the sun.

In Duluth again, I walked Superior Street, and visited the shops that were there now for the tourists. People were playing frisbee in a small park lot and they said to me "Come join us." I shook my head. I drove out to Park Point, past what was once Group Duluth, the Mesquite, the Woodrush, and then out to the park at the tip. I drove back up the hill, stopped at the DQ for a blizzard, past Miller Hill Mall, and then out towards Saginaw, past the great bogs and swamps and spruce trees and larches, legacies of the Wisconsinan glaciation. Dick Ojakangas and his wife lived out here somewhere and likely still do. They had a house they built themselves, built of wood, heated by wood, had their own sauna. They'd have parties for geologists. Invariably someone would ask

"How's come your ceiling has "Weyerhauser" stamped all over it?"

And Bea Ojakangas, famous writer of cookbooks, would say, "We tried sanding but that didn't work. So we just learned to accept it."

Outside in winter they groomed the ski trails. You couldnt go to a party without skiing. Right now, I can see in front of me, snow sparkling like a thousand stars and a huge branch, black as taconite, my legs aching, feet numb, my head cracking as I hit that branch, the green taste in my mouth and kaleidoscopic vision.

=======

I drove west on 2, real estate book on the seat beside me. Just past Floodwood, the deer appeared in front of me, eyes wide and body white as the moon in front of my headlights. I heard the thump and the jolt as it hit the rental car, cherry red on ice cream white, my blizzard all over the front seat. But this was as illusive as the ski trail; the deer bolted and left me at a dead stop.December 2001-Portland, that dark boatman, changes his coat with the seasons and now he draws me inside against the cold of the grey, wild Columbia. I travel to him again and again, like a docile tug.

They unload containers from the barges at Boardman, at the Port of Morrow. The boxes come in all colors and carry exotic names, Nanjin, Hyundai, and Yang Ming. Truck cabs come and take them places, somewhere, across the false spring of the flat steppe were Indian ponies once ran.

======

Kaustinen, Finland, 2000-Kaustinen, home of the big Finnish folk festival, is not far from the town and lake called Evijärvi, meaning Lake of the Evies. Whilst some may camp in their car in Kaustinen, a shrew American can stay at a little cabin, set a chair (the Finns call this a "tuoli") on the porch, and stare out at the lake and the motorboats. At Evijärvi, you are likely to find yourself "oranssistackableplastictuolilla," and thus you can totally believe that you are in Nevis or Dorset.

For an extra few markas at Kaustinen, you can descend time and attend a country wedding. We bought the tickets, and at 4 pm, we waited for the bus driver.

"Missä thymä ajaja on?" said a short plump woman. Maybe she was approaching 60. She had curly hair, a scattered look and a press badge.

"We just speak English," I said.

"Where are you from?" she asked with a dizzy smile.

"Texas." I answered. People all over the world love Texas. "Where are you from?"

She named a town I sure cant remember.

"Where is that?" I asked. I ask these questions like a woman on safari in Africa.

"North of Helsinki. It is Sibelius' town. There is another town that claims him, but he is really from our town. I write for the newspaper there. I come up here every year and write a story in the paper." She went on to tell us in detail about many things, none apparently memorable.

A half hour later the driver showed up, and we all got on the bus. Behind us, someone said "Ich bin sehr hungrig." It was a great group. We drove down the highway, turned off down a road, and then stopped at an old red wooden (The Finns call this "vanha punainen puinen") farmhouse in the country where they have weddings and parties. A small stage and long tables were set up on the lawn. I wandered around. A small red outbuilding contained hay, old tools, and a lot of sound equipment. The interior of the house might have been featured in "Country Home." I wandered out hoping to stay aloof, but the journalist caught me. She had a thin blond woman, also with a press pass, in tow.

"This is my friend Maria. She is from Hungary and speaks wonderful Finnish. Hungarian and Finnish are both Fenno-Ugrian languages, so we are sisters." She laughed. About as similar as English to Persian, I repeated in my mind. Maria, however, spoke no English.

"Let's sit here." she said, so all four of us sat here, she and her three captives.

People served us beverages and flat bread. A long table along the side of the house, which held pitchers of water, hot water, milk, coffee, and kotekalja. I imagined our servers to be the finest musicians in all of Finland.

"Have some of our home beer," the journalist laughed. She motioned her head towards Ian and me, and said something in Finnish to everyone else at our long table. They all laughed. Ian took a drink of the brown liquid and grimaced. I drank 3 glasses.

The served us big stainless steel bowls of soup, made from beef and cheese not unlike the Mexican soft cheese they sell in Texas and in the Columbia Valley. I picked out the beef shards and ate the cheese and broth and then filled my small white bowl again, twice again.

The bride had blond hair and looked like a friend of mine from school in Iowa City. She wore a black dress with a white lace collar and sash, and on top of her head was a jeweled and sequined headdress. I had seen them put it on her in my survey of outbuildings. It was two heads high and shaped like a mushroom cloud.

"She's wearing black," I commented.

"All the wedding dresses were black around the turn of the century," said the journalist.

Not in Indiana, in Indiana my grandmother wore a tiny white silk gown, which now lay in the box she had put it in 80 years ago.

There was a skit, it was a humorous wedding, and then the finest of musicians in all of Finland played, hottest thing out of Sweden. The wedding party danced, and I wish that we had also. Then people began to greet the wedding party in line.

"Come on, go up with us," laughed the journalist.

I went, but did not want to talk. It was like the grocery line in Pori where I tried to "pass" with my round face and blond son. I nodded and stared at the dazzling headdress, but they wanted more.

"Congratulations," I said.

The next day, we sat on the front row of the big tent and watched a Russian dance group.

"Look who's here." said Ian.

The journalist was sitting next to us on the bench. Between acts I told her that last time we were in Finland we had gone to visit the big trenches from the Winter War.

"I remember World War II," she said. "My father was a soldier."

"Really?" I asked. "What do you remember?"

"I remember his uniform," she answered. "I remember him standing in front of me in his uniform."

I thought of my own father's uniforms packed away in the green trunk, now long gone, and of the looted china bowls from Okinawa which I had kept.

======

Näetko edistysa? Ei, mutta elämä jatkaa.

Saturday, Erin and I went to a party, walking 10 blocks in the dark wet multicolored night. At first we thought we would be the only

people at the party, but the other guests had expected a bonfire and finally called on their cell phones because they had not found the fire. Then they arrived

All the other attendees were either adults or dogs. The hostess had 4 dogs, 3 poodles and a border collie. The hostess' mother was also there. One of the men mentioned he taught school in Wishram, Washington, pre-school to 12 , 60 students.

"That sounds like the school I went to," said the hostess' mother. "I went to a one room school, but then went to a 2 room school when my father worked in the logging camps."

"Where?" the teacher asked.

"Up in Washington, on the Olympic Peninsula. Shelton, about a hour north of Olympia."

I went and got a cookie.

"...I remember on Saturdays we'd ride the caboose into town. They'd take the logs in on the train and we'd ride the caboose.

"Anything happen to people on those jobs? It must have been dangerous."

"Sometimes the topper would fall out of the tree. They would have a man who cut the top off before they cut down the tree, and he would fall a *long* way. The trees were very tall back then.

"Old growth?"

"Yes, they would call it old growth now." She smiled at whatever she said. After 80 years, she could only smile.

I turned my head to the man wearing a cherry embossed belt buckle. He owned a large orchard; his father and grandfather had always owned the same orchard on the outskirts of The Dalles. His fiancee, a teacher in Klickitat, Washington, was with him.

There was a gap in the conversation. I plunged in

"What do you grow? Why are you tearing out your apples?" I knew why, but I wanted to hear his view.

"I just have a few apples left, Galas and Gravensteins, tore out the red and yellow delicious. I grow some pears, but now its just the cherries I can afford to grow." His voice darkened and became forceful. "It's the free trade. We cant grow the apples for what it costs other countries to grow apples and ship them in. We pay our workers $8 or $9 an hour and benefits. They pay theirs $8 a day. They don't have the regulations on pesticides. Our government has been so efficient at helping other countries out, helping them to grow crops, that we cant afford the competition. They cant afford to sell them in their own countries, so they sell them here."

"Why cherries then?" I asked.

"Because there are few places in the world you can grow cherries. They have a short season. Turkey they grow a lot of cherries. Bulgaria. Its people in Washington who are really hurting. They just walk away, let the bank have their property, and the bank cant sell it, homes they've owned for generations." I remember the big tractor parade in Hood River, the signs along the Hood River Highway that say "Buy American Fruit."

"You cant stop it though," he said. "It's a global culture. We just have to wait till things adjust. But its killing us in the meantime."

We took slips of paper and wrote something bad we wished to rid ourselves of this year, and then put the slips into a bag. Because it was too wet for a bonfire and illegal as well, we put the bag into an aluminum roasting pan, and went outside onto the dead end black gravel road, avoiding the deep lakelike puddles. Then we stood in a circle and someone lit the bag. As the bag burned, we held hands and sang this song that the teacher from Wishram had composed while driving to work

Come back Come home

Come back Father sun.

Come back Come home

The sun our father.

Who brings us warmth

Who brings us light

Who brings us life

Come back.

We sang until the bag was ash, and then we chain lit candles. We made a wish for the next year.

Erin wished, "I wish people would stop talking about terrorists and be like they used to be." Me too.

And then we went home.

==============

This one is for you and your Greyhound, salmon prince, may it have not hit this fate:

In the dark hard stone grey wind and rain, the trucks ahead pulled one by one into the weigh station at Cascade Locks...the scroll of Covenant Transport, the smiling skunk of Dick Simon Trucking, the yellow strobe-lit oversize load of two pleasure boats. Great elephants were leaving the little four wheeled piglets in peace for a few minutes. Then everything went white. I spun across the lanes, like a dream, flying across the smooth grey streaked whiteness, from the roar of downpour and big trucks into ultimate white silence. In a second, though, I knew I had not slid anywhere, it was an illusion, my mind itself out of control, too much change in one instant. There were now no lane markers, just grey and black streaks on fresh icing-like white pavement, waiting to be licked by the tongue of my tires. It was as if the moon above had burst and spread its skim milk glow evenly across the sky. It was if the sky itself was spitting cottage cheese curds at my little red car.

The cars ahead slowed to 35, and I followed. Miles along, a blue and white Albertson's truck reappeared and passed, and then I did too.