The City of Light, Part I

On the balcony, Paris, day of arrival. Our room is excellent – fifth floor overlooking a Latin quarter street lined with cafes. A steeple rises to the east, and on all sides French rooftops, windows, balconies with iron railings and pots of trailing plants and flowers, clay chimneys, the bustling street coursing with pedestrians, shoppers, buskers, tourists, shopkeepers, waiters, delivery men, and the people who live here – men in suits, women in dresses, immigrants from within Europe and from without (the Turkish candy shop at the corner!), the rich and the poor, the average and the unique. Notre Dame and the Ile de la Cité two blocks away, the Louvre just downstream on the opposite bank. The sun shining through thin clouds. Gardens and statues and bells. Music and leaves and restaurant awnings flutter in the breeze.

How is it that Paris carries with it so much romance, loveliness, loneliness, and sorrow? It’s not a cliché, it’s truth. Our hotel – St. Severin – sever – I feel severed. Severed from home, from my friends, even from my family. I don’t really know my brother. I’m years away from my parents, though they’re just down the hall, and I’m learning to understand them more. I wonder how they’re beginning to understand me.

I wonder how I’m beginning to understand me.

The hours are falling into darkness and the sun will set on the city of lights in a few short hours. Now the wind is warm, but it will blow cold across the Seine tonight. A late rain is expected. I need more tobacco. I need more wonder.

As I write this an old man across the street and two floors below me is on his balcony, watering his plants. Above the building’s entrance is carved the date 1860. Just around the corner, in a small park, is a tree planted over 400 years ago, and tended all that time.

People grow complacent and comfortable at home and it’s important to shake them from their complacency and comfort once in a while. It’s vital to self and to one’s own values to confront the “other” in order to compare, contrast, understand. Sometimes I feel an intense desire for the familiar – not just while traveling, but at home, too – and sometimes I feel a great boredom and sense of anomie. Traveling has a way of making me want to adjust my life to fit my needs and wants better – not in major ways, through there are some – but particularly in minor ways, in the day-to-day. I want to reduce routine and discover more. My material needs are simple and largely met. Now to work on self – as always.

One more cigarette and if no one stirs I’m hitting the walk-about for half an hour. The bells are ringing a quarter past. Paris beckons.

Copenhagen and Amsterdam were rainy and it felt like fall. I want to buy a sweater here. And I want to see this city, this city especially, under snow. What happens in winter is as true and as revealing as what happens under the skies of summer – but frost and snow make for a deeper hue wherever color is splashed.

I think of two paintings in the Rijksmuseum – van Everdingen’s “Woman Warming Hands over a Brazier” (the woman represents winter), and Lepère’s “Montmartre in the Snow” (actually, in the Van Gogh Museum). Then there’s that Monet and the Caillebotte in the Orsay, no more than a fifteen-minute walk away…

I made a comment to Dad earlier today about the democracy of trains – especially true here in Europe, where trains are such a central aspect of life, a bridge between cities as well as a common denominator between cultures. Time to walk that culture.

Hiking Paradise Park

At the end of August, just before I left for a month in Europe, Mike and I hiked to Paradise Park, on the southwest flank of Mt. Hood. We started late and hit the trail at Timberline Lodge at about 1 pm. Right off the bat, we miscommunicated and followed what we thought was the correct path to the Timberline Trail. We missed the intersection and climbed instead to the Silcox Hut high above the ski slopes. The frustration at climbing 1000 extra feet over an extra mile and a half was more than compensated by the views - from the hut, at 7000' elevation, we could see all the way to the Three Sisters, and the Mt. Hood summit appeared so close it felt like we could reach up and touch it. A cold front was slowly moving in from the west, so we bounded down to the Timberline and headed west towards the Paradise meadows.

The trail gradually descended through sparse stands of time-worn trees and little meadows filled with flowers, and crossed a number of creeks. Many of the creek beds were still filled with snow, and the streams started flowing below us, further down the mountain. The fact that such large canyons are formed from what, in summer at least, appears to be a small amount of water is humbling, and kind of puts me in my place. I'm not so big, not so old, not so powerful and important - nature has been carving these canyons for centuries, water has been coursing through these channels for hundreds of winters, and the ancient hemlocks and firs have been sending out roots and breaking up stones into soil that supports plants and wildlife that, like me, flowers and breathes for only a brief time.

The mountain was truly majestic.

At Zig Zag overlook, I was again reminded of my relative size when I gazed down the massive chasm to the tiny creek flowing below. The trail dropped almost 1000' to a log crossing of the creek, then climbed back up another 1000'. Up top, the weather was cool and breezy, but as we descended through layers of changing forest it grew muggy from warm air rising up the moist valley. Parts of the trail reminded me of lush Gorge trails, quite different from what we'd been hiking through.

The ascent was a chore, but once out of the valley, we hiked around ridges, steadily climbing until we reached a beautiful creek with a clear shot of the mountain above the little valley. The water cut a cliff near the trail and there is a cool campsite right on the edge, with spectacular views and the sound of rushing water. No fires allowed, though!

Just above that, we reached the foundations of an old stone shelter, another couple of campsites, and then we crossed into Paradise Park. As we rounded the last few ridges the meadows grew more vibrant with color: paintbrush and lupine in abundance, but also myriad bunches of white, pink, and yellow flowers, some beargrass, and one of the coolest looking plants ever, the western pasqueflower. It looks like a little Dr. Seuss plant, and it feels very soft, almost like moss.

The meadows opened up, the treeline fell away, and the views extended all the way from the summit to hundreds of miles south. I love hiking this high up over all the ridges and Cascades, but the mountain drew all of our attention with a massive storm front backed up behind it. Jagged spires of greenish tan and rust-colored volcanic rock thrust skyward between white glaciers and snowfields dusted with brown and ochre rockfall. Dark purple-gray clouds formed a backdrop against a massive lenticular cloud that swirled clockwise around the peak. The sun broke through the low clouds pushing in from the coast, and the evening light was magnificent as we approached a massive black and gray boulder, perhaps 20' high, that sat isolated in the meadows. It was cracked like an egg into three jagged sections, and a lone tree (a la Caspar David Friedrich) stood in its lee. The meadows rolled on, broken with small outcrops of stone, and the absolute remoteness, the time of day, and our fatigue made me wish more than ever that we'd brought tents and overnight gear. We lingered for a while and finished our last IPAs until it grew so late we worried about getting back. Eventually the western storm front made the decision for us - the valley bottoms were slowly filling up with dark clouds. We hiked back down to the Zig Zag canyon, fought biting flies climbing out, and then hiked the last few miles in growing darkness before we reached the truck just minutes before we'd need to get out our headlamps. The microwave station popping out of the gloom looked like an Imperial base on Endor, the motionless ski-lifts were strange rips across the sky, and ethereal and ghostly lights and soft noises issued from Timberline Lodge.

All in all, a great hiking trip. Paradise Park had been free of other people, and most of the people we say on the trail were heading opposite our direction - except for the long-gray-haired old man with leopard-print gaiters and an old external frame pack. We drove back in the rain and went straight to the Horsebrass and knocked back pints of Ninkasi Tricerahops Double IPA before retreating to the house to watch the Olympics’ closing ceremony. Which resembled Willie Wonka on a sheet of acid, but maybe that was the beer, and certainly it’s a story for another time.

Hamilton Mountain

Last Monday I woke up with a little craft-beer headache and decided the only way to beat the blues was to climb a mountain. I grabbed my pack, a stack of Dead discs, and drove out to Hamilton Mountain in the Gorge.

Hamilton Mountain is in Washington, just west of Bonneville Dam. The four-mile trail leading to the summit is stocked with waterfalls, wildflower meadows, and towering cliffs with killer views of the Gorge. Mt. Hood, Mt. Adams, and Mt. St. Helens all make appearances, nearly overwhelming nearby Table Mountain and Beacon Rock. Read More

Cape Kiwanda

From the tidepools near the dory landing we clambered up the soft eroding stone until we reached the ridge above the steep sandy slope, and proceeded towards the line of dark trees and the cape's jagged meeting with the sea. Signs warned of risk, and cautioned to travel at our own judgment, so I let Mike's judgment go first, followed by Derek's, and finally my own as expedition recorder. We walked under a uniform gray sky, darker gray only down at the coast’s horizon where clouds collided against the land and piled up against the timbered hills. We followed no continuous trail, loping instead across smooth stone, tracing gullies and pitted windswept grooves towards land's end, crossing through copses of wind-shaped pines and past flowers pink and purple and white against the warm orange sandstone. Our path meandered down saddles and over barren crests and past strange wind-sculpted pillars capped with boulders and we wandered as far as we could until we could go no further towards the sea. Derek arrived there first, a solitary figure at the edge of the world, perched miniscule against the slate gray ocean heaving under an arching sky, enchanted and drawn - as were we all - by that immense and powerful force. Cliffs fell precipitously to the sea and the sea rose up in spray and froth to meet the land and reap its rocky bounty. Pelicans and terns wheeled overhead, cormorants skimmed the waves, and the ocean roared against the cliffs, pouring up deep inlets and splashing through caves and channels against barnacles and slime and wet stone painted abstractedly in green seaweed and purple mussel-shell and white sea-salt. We sat in a line, backs to the coast-town snuggled against the sand and spit and hummocked tree-clad slopes, and drank beers brewed locally in vats and casks and copper drums, the product of constant rain and gale, the storm-scented sea-side decay and the warm loamy pine-soil, the slow pace of life when warm light and warm blankets and warm bodies are all the insulation a person has against the coming day. We sat and drank our beers, we watched ten pelicans launch from a rocky island and pass in formation overhead, we cupped our hands around our cigarettes and we sent our thoughts and our smoke sea-ward with the wind, until our beer and our smoke and our thoughts were equally drained and trained on the trail leading back to the land. A dog then bounded over the stone, stopped and sniffed the air eagerly, scouting the way for a party of four crossing the cape distant. We packed our gear, and stood and turned to go, and if I left anything behind there I don’t know what it was, and I don’t miss it.

David Guterson and the Other

Last week I introduced David Guterson at a booksigning at the store. It was a strange experience, in part because of the reactions of some of my coworkers and industry professionals. One coworker said she’d met him several times when she worked in a Seattle bookstore, and she didn’t like him at all. A media escort (hired to pick up authors from airports, drive them to signings, assist booksellers with signings, and so on) for another visiting author said she now refuses to work with him. And many coworkers, informed of his reputation, asked how the signing went.

Well, I replied. It went well.

I should admit that I’ve greatly enjoyed Guterson’s three previous novels. I wasn’t aware of Mr. Guterson’s reputation, and he struck me as the kind of author who shies away from publicity unless it’s necessary – such as a book tour. He’s a solid public speaker, which probably comes from his early career as a high school teacher. But in person, he’s quiet and not very talkative, even with readers in the signing line. There’s always a risk that authors and booksellers won’t have anything to talk about past basic questions and answers: how is the tour going, etc. But Guterson was even more reticent than usual – if I were to hazard a guess, I’d say he believes in the role of the author to write, the reader to read, and that those roles aren’t supposed to cross much.

But it’s more than that, I think. Guterson’s latest novel, “The Other,” explores the reactions of two characters to the fact that our society of material excess is built on the exploitation and suffering of others. One character, John William, decides to lead a hermetic life isolated from society, while his childhood friend pursues a more conventional career and marriage. The novel hinges on the intersection and conflicts raised by these two lives.

Guterson admits that “The Other” is his most autobiographical novel, and what he calls the “other” is our internal conflict caused by having to participate in a society that is predicated on absurdities. Our awareness raises feelings of guilt and a desire to help bring about change. But Guterson believes there is no inherent resolution to this conflict, and he calls hermeticism, with its denial of social contact and subsequent loss of social desire, just as absurd as the metaphysical questions that drove John William to choose such a path.

A reader asked if Guterson felt John William was a sympathetic character. He replied that reviewer’s opinions were mixed: some asked why they should care, and some said John William was heartbreaking. His goal as a writer, however, was to draw a portrait that more closely resembled Thoreau or Chris McCandless in Krakauer’s “Into the Wild,” a character whose romanticism and belief begs a question only the reader can answer: do you personally find him sympathetic?

This theme has grown stronger throughout Guterson’s work, from Kabuo’s cultural reserve in “Snow Falling on Cedars” to Ben’s final solitary journey in “East of the Mountains,” and it grows even stronger in the characters that populate “Our Lady of the Forest.” These works strike me as an attempt by Guterson to strike closer to the “other” within himself, to understand the dichotomies and questions and contradiction within his own life by exploring how those conflicts play out in meaning in fictional lives.

Does Guterson deserve the personal reputation he’s garnered among booksellers in the Northwest? I say no, and even if some people think so, it hardly matters. He’s an artist asking hard questions of himself and his readers, and his work stands under its own weight. Guterson said he believes the metaphysical conundrum underlying our society can’t be fixed, that it’s irredeemable – but his novels show that it’s still worth trying.