A Whole New Category of Getting Away

Yesterday we picked up our new boat. Yes, it’s a ski boat. Yes, it runs on blood sucked from the veins of small Middle Eastern children. Yes, I do feel some ambivalence about that. What I don’t feel any ambivalence about is how fucking awesome it is to be out on the water, wind and waves buffeting me, cruising around Lake Union, racing around Lake Washington—whenever I feel like it. I have wanted a boat since moving to our house eight years ago, a mere six blocks up the street from Gasworks Park. I can’t go outside without seeing some of the water that makes Seattle such a superbly beautiful place to live—and now I can go on it, whenever I want. And I can go fast, which fills my soul with joy.

Don’t get me wrong—I love kayaking, with the hybrid human/duck feeling of it, the intense physical effort of paddling, the ability to explore the multitude of rock shores and teeny coves that are too small for any sort of power boat. There’s a unique satisfaction in being your own impulsion.

But I also love getting from one place to another in less than a day and a half. We’re looking forward to a summer in the San Juans, where most of the 450 islands aren’t accessible by ferry, and where we can now, finally, visit some of my favorite childhood state parks. Sucia, for instance, or James, or even tiny Clark.

I had another interesting insight into my psyche last night, as we took our new boat trailer from Seattle out to Maple Valley where M&M are kindly storing it for us at their place (the boat’s in a dry-stack storage facility on Lake Union, blocks from home, but they didn’t have room for the trailer). I was driving along I-5 through downtown Seattle, in traffic (of course, even though it was 7:30 pm), glancing at my mirrors periodically to make sure the trailer was centered in the lane behind me, and I suddenly, out of the blue, got all choked up. And I realized that, for some reason, I have equated owning your own trailer with adulthood. I’m sure we have more trailers in our future—at least a horse trailer, and perhaps some sort of flatbed or utility trailer as well. But this, our boat trailer, is our first trailer, and as such it represents this new phase of life into which we’ve entered. New skills, new opportunities, new challenges, new responsibilities. And, of course, new fun.

Hey—anyone wanna go skiing?

New Addition

For a while now Ian and I have talked about getting another puppy, in part so that Spackle would have a friend, but mostly because puppies are really cute and we’ve always known that we eventually wanted two dogs and we definitely wanted Spackle to help the puppy understand what we expect from a dog.

So: meet Hoover! He’s a lab mix (we’re trying to avoid the huge potential costs—actual in our case—associated with the dodgy hips of the purebred Lab) whom we adopted last week from the Humane Society in Longview, Washington (puppies in our home city of Seattle seem to be primarily pit bulls, and we just didn’t want to go there, regardless of the fact that it’s the training that makes the dog, blah blah blah.) I suppose it’s fortunate that a “friend for Spackle” wasn’t, in fact, our primary motivation in getting Hoover, because we would be sad failures.

Spackle hates Hoover. All Hoover needs to do is look at him and an almost subsonic, Mack-truck-downshifting-on-a-distant-I-5 growl issues from deep in his throat, his lips curl back, and his whole body tenses. This does not, in fact, deter Hoover one bit, so he races over, in his galumphing puppy way, right on to Spackle’s bed. This drives Spackle mad, and he lets out an infuriated, giant-dog bark, and lunges. Hoover dances out of the way, and approaches, maybe the slightest bit more cautiously, again.

We’ve ended up spending a lot of time with Spackle shut out of the kitchen simply so he can have a break from the endless prickly fawning adoration. Also, if Hoover is shut into the kitchen, we can monitor his chewing and piddling activities moderately well. His bed looks like a toddler’s favorite place to play—five or six different chew toys that he’s collected all over it, him (frequently, blessedly) conked out in the middle.

He’s been okay at nights—if one of us takes him out once (usually me, usually around 3am) he’ll piddle and poop and then sleep for several more hours until about 7:30 when one of us (so far exclusively Ian, bless his heart) gets up and feeds him and Spackle. Ian then lets Spackle back into the bedroom where he and I sleep for another two hours.

We’re starting puppy manners classes next week, which I’m hoping will appease my mother, who was a bit peeved that we decided to get a puppy knowing that she’s going to be stuck taking care of him when Spackle comes for his 2 ½ week summer vacation while we’re in Cabo Verde. But Hoover’ll be about six months old by then, and his bladder will have grown to grapefruit-size instead of lentil-size, and the needle teeth will be replaced, and he’ll be a perfect, farm-dog angel.

Not Technically Travel

Ian and I went skiing today at Crystal Mountain, a couple hours south of Seattle. With surgery and our intended—I mean actual although not to our intended destination—move last year, we didn’t make it to the snow at all. So today was our first trip to any mountains in 2 years.

It was spectacular. Perfectly clear, lots of snow, hardly any people, and a whole new steep bowl area opened up with a new lift since last we were there. I told multiple strangers that it was our first time up in two years . . . not that they cared. Our only notable conversation with a stranger on the lift was about this video, so that’s at least about travel.

We were smugly impressed with ourselves for looking at the map of the new section, seeing a sea of black diamonds and double black diamonds, and agreeing yes, we should totally check that out. Two years off? Nothin’.

On a Clear Day

One of our blessings in the Pacific Northwest, in addition to all the natural beauty of water and evergreen hill and snow-capped, rocky mountaintop, is a small fleet of seaplanes to jump us from one exquisite vista to the next. The Kenmore Air seaplanes fly out of either south Lake Union or north Lake Washington, to all the destinations you really want to go up Puget Sound and into the Strait of Georgia in Canada (with the notable, and peculiar, exception of Port Townsend, which would be the perfect 40-minute jaunt).

I visited Victoria with my cousin last weekend, and had two clear-day opportunities to fly on one of the ten-passenger Turbine Single Otters for my round trip.

It was spectacular.

Some of you may remember from long, long ago that I was afraid of flying on big commercial planes. Fortunately, I mostly got over that, particularly considering all the flying we did last summer. But even at the height of my fears, the small planes didn’t really bother me. It probably has something to do with scale, I’m sure.

For one thing, although I know this isn’t true, it looks like I could probably figure out the controls in a pinch and land the thing if I had to. After all, there’s a lot of water around, so finding a flat runway won’t be a problem. (I conveniently forget the front page photo in the paper several years ago of a Kenmore Air plane floating upside down just off-shore from Gasworks Park . . . turns out it was a training flight and no one was injured, but still. The pontoons are meant to be under the plane.)

For another thing, we only fly at about 1,000 feet, and although again I know I’m wrong, it feels like I could pretty easily live through plummeting such a slight distance. So anyway, I accept that I’m deluding myself, and I enjoy the ride.

A nice feature of the Otter is that the windows are convex, so you can get an excellent view of the countryside trailing away under you. I spent both my one-hour flights with my pate glued to the deepest part of my window, staring straight down at the ground. Did you know trees are star-shaped from the top? Well, they are. And tide flats look like elephant skin. And much of Puget Sound is surprisingly clear. And much of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, right outside Victoria Harbour, really isn’t (although we’ve heard that, with the Olympics coming to Whistler in a couple years, Victoria is finally going to have to do something with municipal sewage other than pump it straight into the drink. Although the local fishing is good.)

My cousin S and I enjoyed our stay in a foreign country, even though with the dollars at virtual parity it wasn’t like being able to spend play money anymore, and we look forward to other getaways in the future.

And I cannot recommend the seaplane adventure highly enough.

It’s Fun to Plan Ahead

We’re still enjoying being back in our house, but there’s so much of the world to see, you know. Fortunately, we’ve had some friends recently give us the excuses we needed to make some more overseas plans. They’re all kind of crammed together, but one of the things we learned last summer was that we can jump from one thing to another fairly quickly.

So first we have a wedding to attend in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, in June, and we’ve started planning when to go and where to stay (and who to stay with, since we know several people attending this ceremony), and how long to stay. We probably would’ve given Mexico more of our time—we’ve never been (since I’m not counting Tijuana with my parents when I was in seventh grade) and it looks lovely—except for reason number 2 to travel.

Our second reason to travel is another June wedding, this one in London (you may remember from last summer that our friends, J&C, got engaged between two of our visits? Yep, it’s them!). Now, getting to London, even on British Airways’s comfortable and convenient 9-hour non-stop flight, is more of a haul then getting to Puerto Vallarta on Alaska Air’s direct flight. The time zone change is also more significant, of course, so we decided that, given the choice, we’d rather spend more time on the other side of the Atlantic than just down the coast from home.

Of course, we traveled around Europe all last summer . . . so this summer we’re finally going to take a trip we’ve been dreaming about for years: Cabo Verde!

Cabo Verde, or Cape Verde, is a small island country off the coast of Senegal in West Africa. It’s a former Portuguese colony and the official language is Portuguese, although most people speak a Portuguese/West African criole called Crioulu, which appeared late in the 15^th century because of the slave trade. Culturally, Cabo Verde is considered to be more Latin American than African; geographically it’s unique. There is one island that’s still an active volcano—Fogo—some barren islands, some “greener” islands. And it’s in the middle of the Atlantic. It was uninhabited when the Portuguese discovered it (as were the Açores), and the people now are a beautiful blend of Portuguese and African.

Cabo Verde is known (if it’s known for anything) for its music; Cesária Évora is probably their most widely known musician. Ian’s excited about funaná, a style of music that originated on Santiago, one of the islands in the archipelago, and is accordion-based.

The accordion is everywhere.

Home at Last

Ian and I moved back into our house 14 days ago, and boy are we glad to be here. Our house, making sure that the renters wouldn’t feel bad at all to be moving to their new place (they bought a condo—they seem quite happy about it), let a little river flow through the basement six days before they left. Those of you who know us and our house know that rivers have run through it periodically over the last almost eight years, and we thought we’d taken care of them all with French drains and the judicious use of sump pumps and exterior water-seepage-blocking spray stuff on the outside of the basement walls (exposed, of course, due to a great deal of hired sweat). But, it turns out not putting a drain by the crawl space meant that the water had one last way in.

As floodings go, this one was minor (it happened the same day that I-5 closed in Chehalis and some relatives had to be rescued from the attic of their house by boat). It didn’t get anyone’s belongings wet, and only soaked a little bit of the carpet on the bottom stair. But it was enough to convince G&E, the former tenants, that their new 2^nd floor condo was a step up (and not just literally).

Anyway, they were willing to let us not do anything, as any work in the yard would only seriously inconvenience everyone involved and not, in fact, solve anything before they left. As of yet, we still haven’t done anything, but rains have been more moderately usual, and the basement has stayed dry through our moving process.

I really think the house missed us. We’d lived here for seven years straight, and had, aside from the river, no problems with anything. We feel warmed and well-protected by our house, and we feel that our friends and family are also comfortable here. When we moved out, though, I don’t think I let the house know how much we really appreciate it. We talked a lot about going away for a couple years, having strangers live within its walls, then building a new house and moving away when we returned to the US. And I think our house here was sad.

I may have the order of events wrong, but here are some of the problems G&E encountered, most of them within the first two months:

The drain for the clawfoot tub disconnected.
After it had been reconnected, one clawfoot fell off the tub while G was showering, pitching him to the floor. And the drain disconnected again.
The bathroom fan went out.
The sewer went out, or rather stopped going out, which turned out to be because the line from the house to the street was completely clogged up with debris and a huge root system.

I believe that’s it—at least, that’s all G&E let us (read: Deane) know about. We found a couple days ago, however, that the oven doesn’t work very well. I turned it up as high as it would go and still, after about 3 hours, it had only reached 377 degrees, where it seemed to have stalled out. Clearly not acceptable. I hope G&E were simply not bakers rather than they just didn’t want to complain about another issue.

We received our keys on the evening of December 9, and immediately, throughout the house, burned some sage that we’d harvested from our front stoop and banged two grills from the stove together to produce a purifying clanging sound. We weren’t so much getting rid of energy—as I’ve said, G&E were great tenants, and all-around good people—but rather letting the house know that we were back.

I had two rooms that I wanted to repaint before we moved in our belongings, so we went into those rooms (our bedroom and our former guest room which is now my study) with pencils and wrote prayers on the walls that were about to be covered up. A friend gave me this idea, and I love it. Basically, you write things that you are grateful for (past, present or future, but as if they have already happened), and infuse your room with good energy.

It seems to have worked—I’ve been sleeping well in our bedroom, and I’m looking forward to creating in my office (by the way, the bedroom had been light blue with a green wall and it’s now a warm, caramely brown; and the study-as-guest-room was peach, and it’s now a rich pumpkin.)

We’ve replaced a lot of things. We decided when we moved out that the futons had to go—they’re convenient, yes, but I’d bought them ten years before in graduate school and we thought it was time to join the adult world with adult furniture. So we now own a sleeper-sofa in the TV room and we have on order a classic cigars-at-the-men’s-club sofa from North Carolina. We also replaced both our mattresses with organic latex, wool and cotton mattresses that. we. love. I’ve been having a nap every day just to appreciate the guest bed as well as our own.

We’ve entered the world of grown-up entertainment systems . . . sort of . . . with a flat screen plasma TV that had to be installed by the Geek Squad. I say sort of because we did get an HD DVD player, but we did not get cable TV, regardless of the fact that our internet and phone are now from Comcast. We really just don’t watch TV, and if we do decide we need to continue with the Gossip Girl habit we started while staying at L&S’s place, we can probably find some rabbit ears in a dumpster or in a piece of retro art somewhere.

Spackle has inserted himself seamlessly back into our lives, resurrected, as it were, from the “doggy heaven” that Ian kept claiming he was staying at. His first bath in 8 months yielded a lot of hair. Like, enough for another dog. He still snores at night if we let him sleep in the bed with the sides, because he rests his chin and cuts off his air, evidently. And keeps us awake.

Today we’ve been finishing up collating the last few belongings into their appropriate order and hanging the last few bits of art on the walls, then I think we’re both ready to take a breather and see about getting back into the semblance of a routine after almost nine months.

For several weeks I had been ready for the adventures to end, so that I could have a place to call my own again, a place to get back into my schedule, and use the things that I have collected to live my life the way I want to live it. So that I could be settled again. And when we were given our keys, back in mid-December, the first thing I felt wasn’t joy, it wasn’t freedom, it wasn’t relief. The first thing I felt was . . . settled. And a twinge of regret that we hadn’t managed to make it to New Zealand. And that we weren’t free to go traipsing around the world again at the moment, maybe South America this time. And that we were, as we’d been wishing, the only ones in charge of all the issues and responsibilities of home ownership. I quickly recovered, and I have loved being back in my space again, where Ian is the only other person I have to worry about.

It’s been a crazy year, certainly. One year ago, Ian was offered the job in Wellington. In January, I had a mastectomy. In April we moved out of our house, expecting to alight again in Southern climes. In May we left for Europe, and after four months of nomadism, arrived back in Seattle at the end of August. We stayed with friends for 3 months, then suddenly here we are, back in our house, one year later, as if nothing had happened. But everything is different.

So . . . where to next?

A Confession

I went to New York City over the first weekend in December, to attend a baby shower for the first baby of one of my college friends. A. was actually one of the first people I met in college—she was my RA, and signed me in when Dad dropped me off. It was a growing experience for both of us—me and Dad, that is—because I found myself installed on a co-ed floor (shared bathroom!) and Dad found himself needing to be polite to someone who, well within her rights, was chewing gum in his presence. Dad had some idiosyncrasies, and expecting the world to not make small repetitive noises just because they irritated him was one of them. I remember being impressed that he didn’t even glare at her, leaving her to wonder why this complete stranger was judging her for some mysterious reason. No, he tucked away his irritation in a way that some might even have interpreted as a lack of concern.

Anyway, A. and her husband J. are expecting a little girl at the end of January, and I was thrilled, in the midst of our busy fall of sitting around waiting to move back into our house, to have the time to visit and attend the shower. I was only able to stay two nights, however, and so (and here is the confession) I didn’t contact any other of my NYC friends.

This was a difficult choice to make, and I felt bad about it for awhile, but it was ultimately the only thing I could’ve done. I had not gone to NYC alone—two other college friends, L. and C., also came, and between the four of us (five if you count baby Ribbet, her in-utero name; six if you count J.) we had plenty to do to keep us busy.

So, if you live in NYC and you missed me December 1^st, I do apologize, and I’ll plan many more days for my next trip.

Here We Stay

Ian and I came to the decision about 10 days ago that we would rather stay in Seattle than continue to jump through the hoops set out for us by New Zealand Immigration. They were getting ridiculous. One requirement was that Ian submit a certified copy of his undergraduate diploma even though they already had an official transcript. Finding the diploma, which Ian had never considered to be that important, involved him digging through my brother’s basement, where many of our belongings are stored, for most of an afternoon (I happened to be out of town, and was thus, unfortunately, unable to assist).

They were sticklers on relationship evidence as well. Our marriage certificate wasn’t enough, and photos we sent (digital print-outs) illustrating several years of relationship were deemed to be “photocopies, not originals,” as were the digital print-outs of some bank statements. It’s not as if Ian were a New Zealand citizen trying to sneak in a “wife”; he would’ve been there last April if it weren’t for me. We joked all summer that this was his chance to get rid of me. But no, he insisted on keeping me on, as the “anchor weighing him down.” (his words or mine? we can’t remember.).

My health history eventually reared its head too, with a request from the medical consultants for “more specific information from her surgeon, including her prognosis (figures if possible), and future surgical and/or medical needs.” I’m sorry—my surgeon isn’t any more of a clairvoyant than you are, Dr. New Zealand Medical Consultant. I’m afraid she, also, has no idea what my expiration date is.

We spent thousands of dollars on the process too, including the application fees, the medical exam fees, the certification fees, and the shipping fees.

All of those things were irritations, yes, but strangely, the benefit of them was that they took so much time. We started thinking about New Zealand ten months ago, last year, Christmas 2006. I’m sure we would’ve loved Wellington if we’d gotten there in April as we’d originally expected . . . but the longer we spent not there the more we thought about Seattle and how much we already love it here. We really do. We have dear friends here, we have family here, we have a dog here. We have a house that we love, and that appeals to us in location and character. We can ski here, we can ride here, we can kayak here. We can eat exclusively organic food here, even if we go out. Ian can even get a job here, and one that he’ll probably love. If Wellington was expected to offer a significantly different, and significantly better (at least as far as we are concerned) environment, we maybe would’ve stuck it out to the bitter end. But aside from the traffic (which doesn’t directly affect us, fortunately), pretty much everything is at least slightly better here.

And so, thank you New Zealand Immigration, for doing such a brilliant job of petty bureaucracy. If you’d actually seen the value of us as potential Kiwis, we would’ve made the mistake of leaving this land that we love, and giving our considerable skills and strengths to you.

Phew.

Southern California Fires—Not Our Fault

Ian and I were in La Jolla a few weeks ago, for him to attend a dork conference and for me to, as it turned out, sleep a lot in the lovely and unpeopled apartment of his friend and former UW office-mate, A (for those of you who followed along this summer, A’s parents were the generous ones with the Alentejan beach house in Portugal). Five days in Southern California were enough to make us very, very happy that Ian decided not to look into jobs there. The surface streets are six lanes wide, for crying out loud. Ian did skip out on the last day of his conference and we drove to the Salton Sea. If you know nothing (or even if you do) about the Salton Sea, then you should totally watch this documentary. It’s a bizarre, fascinating place. And it smells.

Probably much of the reason I slept so much was the Valium I was taking for my jaw—turns out I had three cavities that needed filling when I got home from the Summer of Self-Indulgence, so I spent a couple hours with my mouth wide open and as a result it was very sore. I was supposed to take the Valium right before I went to bed, so that I’d sleep well and not be dopey the next day, but it kind of had a time-release effect with me. No matter what time I took it, I finally woke up the next day about 12 hours after I’d gone to sleep (i.e. take Valium and 9:00pm. Go to bed at 11:30pm. Wake up next day at noon.).

We also ate some good Mexican food (I was careful with the chips) in Old Town and the Gas Lamp District, and I finished one night on the town with a chocolate shake from Ghirardelli (yum!).

On our way from the Salton Sea we drove through the town of Ramona, from which 30,000 people were evacuated less than a week later. But we were long gone by then.

Pictures from Jerome Creek

I've put more pictures up on a google web album. I think a lot of them are better than my usual pictures, courtesy of my friend E's SLR camera. It didn't go on any rides with me, since it doesn't fit in my pocket, so all of these pics are from walks I took. With dogs and horses. Enjoy!

http://picasaweb.google.com/nilact/JeromeCreekOctober2007

Not in Any Particular Order

When one is on the road for months on end, it’s hard to keep track of what one has and hasn’t written about. At least, when I’m on the road for months on end, it’s hard for me to keep track. I know there’s tons of stuff I left off, tons of stuff we really enjoyed, or found beautiful, or eye-opening, or whatever. So I’m going to wrack my brains, and try to give Europe more of its due (in doing so, I may repeat things. Ah well.). And so, following are things I loved.

Riga, Latvia: Double Coffee. No, it’s true, I wasn’t drinking coffee by the time we got to Latvia, but Double Coffee is oh, so much more than a coffeehouse chain. It also has an extensive, full-color menu of snacks with photos so you know what you’re getting even if you haven’t managed to learn more than one word of Latvian and it’s not a food word. Pancakes of various sorts (like crepes, or hashbrowns) are popular snacks in Riga and Double Coffee serves them up right (i.e. either sweet or savory has lots of sour cream). They also do smoothies and shakes, and lots of kinds of coffee. Ian had Turkish, made the traditional way in a brazier full of hot sand, with the little brass coffee maker sitting right in the sand.

Arctic Circle: Reindeer are really, really cute with their huge fuzzy feet (good as snowshoes) and their velvety antlers. And they’re charmingly daft about cars sharing the highways with them.

Lisbon: Visiting our friends A&F who, we just found out, have a third family member on the way! The timing of our visit to them seems to have been auspicious . . .

London: Our friends J&C who got engaged between visits to them. The timing of our visits to them seem to have been auspicious as well. Way to go J! Best wishes, C.

Scotland: Tumbling, tea-colored becks washing down steep, barren hillsides. Tie-dyed sheep. Porridge.

Sweden: White-trimmed red fishing villages. I’d love to see all the red against the snow in the winter. For those three hours of daylight. Staying with dear friends, again (read more about Sweden, from the inside, here.)

Kihnu, Estonia: Wireless internet in our inn, on the island where women—young women—still wear their traditional woolen skirts for everyday use.

Šiauliai, Lithuania: several girls’ football teams staying in our Soviet hotel with us, in town for some tournament. Using Skype in the hotel lobby to call their boyfriends back in Liverpool.

Ravello, Italy: The lemon tree outside our room, where I hung my dress to dry in the warm breeze. Chocolate gelato. Chocolate gelato.

Amorgos, Greece: Dmitri, our landlord, running outside onto his verandah with an ancient shotgun and pretending to shoot the Greek military planes doing maneuvers overhead.

Pärnu, Estonia: The beautiful people in the notary’s office.

Porto, Portugal: Indian food, then ice cream at an outside bar in the new part of Gaia, as the sun set and the stars came out over the Douro. Playing on the new playground with 7-year-old C. Marveling anew, neck craned and mouth agape, at the crumbling tiled grandeur of the Ribeiro district, then eating a succulent choriço assado.

Arlanda Airport, Sweden, the second time: Seeing my brother and sister-in-law waiting for us outside customs. First family members to hug in almost four months.

Trás-os-Montes, Portugal: Finding extra pork in our doggie bag, so we’d be sure to have enough for sandwiches the next day.

Hampstead, London: Attending my first Quaker Meeting with a relative of a family friend.

Folegandros, Greece: The perfect place to stay for a week. Flying views of the sea. Heart-tugging pastoral beauty. Donkeys.

Heathrow Airport: Business Class Lounge. Oh yeah.

Porto Côvo, Portugal: The beach through the tunnel, particularly the time we went at night, with a full moon and no flashlights. WiFi in the main square.

Westray, Orkney, Scotland: The Pierowall Hotel, with its “snug”, for adults only. Puffins.

Mainland, Orkney, Scotland: Viking graffiti near the ceiling at Mae’s Howe, the Neolithic burial site: “Thor writes this very high up.”

Europe, in general: Sharing four months with Ian.

A Good Day

Had an awesome ride on Sikem today, where I got to use a narrow trail I’d found a few years ago that’s clearly meant to be a secondary choice, but had to be the primary choice today because the usual primary choice had a big spiky tree across it. Sikem was pretty convinced that he’d rather just go home than across a baby Doug fir (which would undoubtedly tickle his sensitive belly) and into the narrow, dark, wooded passageway that was patently not pointing toward home. He tried backing up, and turning, and backing and turning, and simply not going, for several long minutes. I eventually stopped playing around, though, and he went. We wandered off into a wilderness I hadn’t visited in the last several years, Sadie the inexhaustible puppy bounding along behind us, until we finally came to a big crossroads and Sikem very decidedly turned left when I thought we should go straight. I was ready to head for home, and I asked him if he was sure; yes, he was. No question. It turns out he was right, and a good thing, too. I think we were out about three hours. Added to my two hours on Shadow yesterday, that’s a lot of hard labor for my ass. And it shows. Or rather, it would, but it doesn’t.

I hadn’t seen the cows for a couple days, and even though they hadn’t gotten out all summer, I had started to worry, so the dogs and I went for a walk to find them this morning. Evidently, they’d forgotten about people, because once we did find them, somewhere in the back part of their 60 acre grazing ground, they came back to civilization. About 30 minutes after we got back, they were down eating their two days’ worth of grain. Right, PEOPLE! They feed us tasty things! A’s right—they’re very beautiful, with their kohl-rimmed eyes and silvery-white coats, and they look like they're muscling up nicely.

My thumbs are healed (well, the garlic-prick never really amounted to much. Nor, to be honest, did the ax-cident, considering the potential), the repaired tire hasn’t gone flat again, and I’ve had a couple days of communing with horses in chilly gold, dark green, and crimson nature.

My friend E loaned me his SLR camera, so I'll post some pics after I get back to Seattle and high speed internet. Although my Potlatch dial-up has been working swimmingly.

Sometimes It’s Good to Have a Fifth Wheel

I’m in Jerome Creek right now, and it’s a bit weird. It rained today, and so I didn’t go riding. What? Hello? If it’s raining tomorrow I’ll suck it up and ride anyway, but it was really raining pretty hard today. I can’t be that sad about it, though, because it’s been a dry summer and rain is definitely welcome. At least by the people who live here all the time.

I’m driving a rented Chevy Trailblazer right now (they discontinued the shorter name Blazer, which maybe implied “inferno” a bit too much, a couple years back. But that’s what this is.) It’s fine, you know. It’s not the 4-Runner, but it can’t be expected to be. It’s brand new, so I was hopeful that the stereo would have an iPod jack in it, but it doesn’t. It also doesn’t have a cassette player, of course—it’s one of those inconvenient middle designs—so I can’t use my old cassette adaptor. Ian picked me out some CDs from L&S’s collection before I hit the road, though, so I wasn’t bereft of entertainment.

I started with a recording of Godspell, then went on to Paul Simon, and then had a go at some Black Eyed Peas. And then I went with silence for the rest of the journey.

Right now I’m listening to my iPod’s “Alternative and Punk” genre, which is perfect for solitary introspection and cooking. I don’t know why I never listened to them before, since Ian’s owned the CDs for who knows how long, but I’ve really come to love the Decemberists in the last month or so. They’re just really awesome.

K was here last night but left this morning to join A in Seattle visiting relatives. We were strolling around this morning, me gathering the current information on feeding and whatnot for the animals, and we stopped by the Trailblazer.

“That looks like a pretty flat tire,” observed King.

“Wow. It sure does,” I replied.

“Did you notice anything on the way here?”

“Nope, I really didn’t.”

The right rear tire was completely flat. We discussed how to get it fixed and decided on just throwing it in the back of the farm pick-up (King was going to be driving the lighter weight, long-distance pick-up west) and I would take it in to Moscow to get it repaired. I would then bring it back and put it on and, before heading back to Seattle, drive the Trailblazer to Moscow to make sure I’d got the tire on well (assuming I’d gotten it on well enough to make it the 40 or so miles without being flung into a ditch). Then I remembered that the thing was rented, and that perhaps Enterprise would rather just deal with it themselves, in their own way, a way that didn’t involve farm trucks and city slickers replacing tires. I have changed tires before—Dad was a mechanic, and he felt that, if we were going to drive, we needed to be able to change our tires and our oil ourselves. But the last time I did that was probably almost 20 years ago.

Anyway, a charming elderly man came out and put on the spare (his wife came along and was also charming); I drove into Moscow with an exclamation point blinking at me from the control panel (it didn’t seem to be listed under “warning lights” in the owner’s manual but I assumed it had something to do with the spare—either being gone from its home, or a weird size compared to the other tires) and dropped off the car at the tire place. It was repaired and put back together within 15 minutes—culprit was a Philips head screwdriver. I hadn’t driven far enough on it to ruin the tire, which was good. The exclamation point also disappeared.

The only other time I’ve ever had a flat tire, it was coming out to visit K&A. This was about 15 years ago, and I was driving an old Ford Bronco (one of the big ones) back to Garfield that someone had borrowed from some friends of K&A’s. At the rest area at the intersection between Highway 26 and Highway 395, 60 miles from Ritzville (the nearest town), someone pointed out to me that one of my tires was low. He offered to put on the spare for me, but when we found the spare, it was flat too. So I called AAA and they sent out a tow truck from Ritzville. The guy brought an air compressor and pumped up the spare, which then showed a weird knot in the sidewall. He said “Well, I’m not sure it’ll get you all the way to Pullman. You’d better come up to Ritzville and get it checked out at the garage.” So I did.

I kid you not—when I pulled into Ritzville an hour later, there was no one around, and a tumbleweed tumbled slowly across the street in front of me. I laughed a trifle hysterically, then found the garage. They told me it’d probably last me another three hours, but probably not much beyond that. With that comforting thought, I continued on my way. I made it, and it only took me five hours longer than usual.

With the rain came the cold today, as I found when I woke up from my nap on the couch, stiff and a little groggy. I thought “split wood and warm yourself twice,” so out I went to the woodpile to make some kindling, so that I could then make a fire. Hard physical labor is perhaps not the first thing one should attempt upon first waking, particularly if one is cold and stiff, and I had some trouble getting the ax to work right. I just wasn’t getting any force into my swings, and the wood wasn’t splitting. I finally got one piece to crack, and then, knowing I shouldn’t, I held it in place with my left hand and raised the ax in my right hand.

When the ax came down, it didn’t, in fact, cut off my thumb. But it did cut it. Just a little. And it woke me up, so that after I had put on a bandaid and headed back outside, I was able to split the rest of the kindling just fine, thank you. And now the fire is lovely and warm. When I was cleaning garlic for dinner the pointy end of the skin of one clove punched a teeny hole in the pad of my right thumb. I thought “By the pricking of my thumbs; Something wicked this way comes,” as I watched the bead of blood well up. But I don’t think anything wicked is really coming. My accidents have rendered me for the time being the opposite of “all thumbs”, which is, I’ve discovered, for all practical purposes the same thing.

Our Summer by the Numbers

30 April: Date we left
around 50kg: weight of our baggage leaving the US
11: Countries visited
22: New stamps in my passport
6: Number of those stamps acquired in London (“Leave to enter for six months. Employment and recourse to public funds prohibited.”)
2: Countries which didn’t stamp me at all (Spain and Finland)
36° 35’: Southernmost latitude reached (Folegandros, Greece)
66° 39’: Northernmost latitude reached (Sinettä, Finland)
66° 32’: Arctic Circle
3: Number of reindeer we passed wandering down the middle of the road
3: Time zones visited
12: Modes of transport utilized
15: Ferries taken
4: Cars rented
2: Cars enjoyed, of those rented (the Ford Focus in Scotland, and the Saab in Sweden)
12: Flights taken
5: Flights in business class (i.e. not quite enough of them)
7: Flights using airline miles (including all of those in business class)
8: Hours flights were delayed
12: Pizzas eaten
0: Pizzas eaten in Naples
11: Pizzas eaten north of Latitude 51° 30’ (Naples is at 40° 51’)
around 70: Total number of pork-centered dinners eaten
15: Friends visited
37: Nights spent with friends, or in friends’ houses (i.e. FREE)
2: Relatives who visited us
11: Most nights slept in one place (Porto Côvo, Portugal)
5: Total number of days spent apart (I went to Phoenix)
118: Total days spent together
2800: Total hours spent together (taking into account my horseback rides)
0: Total number of serious fights
around 100kg: Weight of our baggage returning to the US
31 August: Date we returned

Re-entry

For the last four months, every time I heard any voice speaking American English, it was a friend of mine. This is not entirely without exception, but pretty darn close. And so, I’ve evidently developed the association American accent=someone I know. Which means that any time I’m in public—restaurants, stores, whatever—and I hear someone talking with an American accent (which, face it, is virtually everyone here), I think I must know them. I keep being distracted from the people I’m with to glance around the place and see who else I know. It was all the weirder the other day when I was out to lunch with my grandma, and the person sitting at the table behind her had just come back—like, maybe the day after us—from Sweden and England. She was talking about accidentally speaking Swedish to little kids when she got back to England, and then about seeing Harry and Wills at the memorial service they organized for their mom, which took place the day we left. But no, I really didn’t know her.

Pictures!

It always takes some time to get photos uploaded into Blogger, so I decided to use a different Google product instead--Picasa Web Albums. So please click here to see the rest of our trip.

Back in the USA

Just a quick post to say that we arrived safely at SeaTac this evening around 7:30, only 3 hours later than scheduled (some issue at Heathrow totally unrelated to safety or health or the state of repair of our plane, which was quite fine). Ian's sound asleep, and I'm almost there. Spackle remembered us, and seemed to be thrilled to again be around people who actually like his kisses. He kissed us a lot, which we both thought was very sweet. Mom and Marsh and Loper are also in good health, although less licky.

Look for more pictures and more stories for at least a little while yet!

Something That Keeps Sweden From Being Dull in Its Wholesomeness:

The Raggare (pronounced ROG-are-ay). These folks are evidently dedicated to life in the 50’s. Not the 50’s in Sweden, however; the 50’s in the good ol’ US of A. The main display of this lifestyle is a vintage 50’s American car (or, if you can't find one of those, any vintage American car). In the summer, groups of Raggare occasionally get together and cruise for several hours through a predetermined small town. We happened to be privy to one of these cruises, on our anniversary in Härnösand, when by some fortuitous trick of fate we found ourselves seated by a window in a restaurant on one of the main corners of the cruising route.

I tell you, it was surreal. Classic American car after classic American car, all apparently in mint condition and polished to the nines, full of people (some in 50’s period dress), blasting music (mostly strange Swedish music, although some people did have sock-hop tunes blaring). Some cars were driven by men who would’ve been youths in the 50’s; others by folks younger than me. Some had whole families in them, some convertibles had screeching girls sitting on the back of the back seat. The cruising went on for several hours. We discussed whether or not the prudent Swedes had replaced the engines with modern, fuel efficient models . . . but probably not.

Expensive hobby, but certainly fun to watch.

About Sweden

Sweden is very . . . wholesome. There’s nothing wrong with that; for the most part it’s really very sweet. People ride bikes everywhere. Their favorite thing to do in the late summer is pick berries or mushrooms and you see them heading off into the woods with large buckets as you drive down the road. They eat a lot of fiber for breakfast, and are evidently in bed at a reasonable hour—at least, all the restaurants, even the posh ones, close by 9:00pm*. The beds are invariably super comfortable, though, so I don’t really blame them for wanting to spend more time there. The beds are comfortable because of something they call the “bed mattress”—a sort of pillowtop that sits on top your mattress. When it stops being pillowy, you can toss it out and get a new one. Ian has some trouble with the whole bed mattress concept because the sheet is a flat sheet that’s just folded around the bed mattress rather than a fitted sheet that’s tucked in, and Ian is a bit of a squirmer in bed, so his sheet comes untucked most nights and he finds himself sleeping directly on the bed mattress, which isn’t quite as comfortable. On top are duvets, usually individual ones even if the mattress is double-wide (which it usually isn’t, but when it is and you have those two duvets? Heaven! Particularly if one of you is a covers stealer, Ian.). In the last hotel we stayed at, in Luleå, the bed mattresses were a full seven centimeters thick, and the duvets were down. Bliss.

We did a lot of driving over the last ten days, and the Swedes’ wholesomeness seems to extend to road etiquette as well. Usually, I tend to consider the speed limit a lower limit when I’m driving. I don’t drive much faster than I’m supposed to (maybe 5 or 7 mph over), but I do drive consistently faster. The Swedes, on the other hand, apparently don’t even aspire to reach the speed limit, let alone surpass it. That would be lawbreaking and therefore unwholesome. There aren’t very many people here in this huge country, so there aren’t a lot of multilane roads, so passing people who are going slower than you isn’t totally easy, although there are a couple tools in place. There are frequent second lanes along major roads like the E-4, so for a lot of your drive, if you’re stuck behind someone who’s hovering around 90 when the limit is 110, you can pass easily in a minute or two. For areas of the E-4 where there aren’t passing lanes for long stretches of road, there’s a different system. The lanes are quite wide, and the line along the shoulder is dotted. When the line in the middle is also dotted (which is most of the time), if you come up behind someone quickly, they move to the side—i.e. driving half in the lane and half on the shoulder, and you move to the middle—i.e. driving half in the lane and half in the oncoming lane—and around them. Oncoming traffic knows the drill, so it moves over to be partially on the shoulder if necessary.

In theory.

What actually happens is that people don’t pay attention to anyone behind them, so they don’t move over onto the capacious shoulder, and instead frequently hug the center line (although not with the kind of consistency that would make you feel safe passing on the right, although you do have room to do so), thus mostly obscuring your view to oncoming traffic. Eventually you have to pass anyway because you’re going crazy hovering behind this undoubtedly very sweet person who is steadfastly refusing to get within 12 kph of the limit, so you rush out onto the other side of the road and hope that oncoming traffic, if there is any, sees you barreling down and moves over to the side as expected.

In the event, we made it here to Stockholm safely, and dropped off the car at the airport with no trouble whatsoever.

We all seem to be alive and well still. Shockingly, no ill effects from the surströmming.

*Note: not in Stockholm, which is a vibrant big city like other vibrant big cities.

Happy Sixth Anniversary

Ian and I celebrated our sixth anniversary on August 18th with some good friends. In honor of our six years together, I agreed, under duress, to take part in a ceremony that is not only not going to be repeated exactly as we performed it; it’s not going to be repeated even in spirit. The six of us ate, for lunch, surströmming, the Swedish traditional dish of fermented herring. This was the last time I celebrate my anniversary by eating any culture’s shock cuisine. No Thai Ten Thousand Year Old Egg, no Icelandic Hákarl, not even any durian. And definitely not fermented fish from anywhere.

Wait, you say, fermented fish?

Yes.

To make surströmming, in May you take some herrings and remove their heads and their guts (although you leave the roe and the milt), then you put them in a huge vat with salt and water. You keep them at a particular temperature and you stir them a few times over the next few weeks. Then you seal them in smaller barrels for the following few weeks and shake them around periodically, then you tin them and let them sit for a few more weeks. Ten days before the third Friday in August, and not before, you give the tins to people as gifts.

Because the fish continues to “ferment” (i.e. “rot”) in the tins, the tins can develop a rounded, botulistic appearance. The contents are therefore also pressurized, and can explode upon opening, thus drenching the poor, misguided would-be eater with a sulfurous, sewage-smelling liquid that will ruin their clothing, and several layers of skin, forever.

I felt that it should’ve been a sign to us all (and not just me) that A, who is Swedish and whose mother loves surströmming, had never tasted it and had wondered, in fact, how her mother could eat it all these years. But even A thought it might be a good time to give it a try. After all, it was the season, and we were in the part of Sweden where surströmming is produced.

So here’s how you eat it:

You take a piece of large, pill-shaped soft flatbread and butter it. On it you put chopped onion, cubed cooked potato (a particular kind, but the Swedes are really into their potatoes and I have no idea what they all are, so just any old white potato will do—believe me, it’s not the potato that matters), and as much surströmming as you think you can handle (for us, it was one filet each, which turned out to be wildly optimistic). With the sandwich, you drink snaps, which is Swedish schnapps (traditionally flavored with caraway—we had a sampler of small bottles flavored with everything from caraway and dill to St John’s Wort and something translated as “bog myrtle”) and milk. Everyone agreed, kind of without me, that the idea of drinking milk and snaps sounded disgusting, so we didn’t have any milk. You don’t mix them together, though; they’re drunk in succession. I kept saying, to no avail, “but rotted fish doesn’t sound disgusting?”

The fun part of the day was that we rented kayaks and paddled around in the protected bays near Härnösand, and so we were able to create our garbage sandwiches out in the open air far from where we were sleeping. And we had brought plenty of cheese, brats, mustard, potato salad, biscuits, chocolate, and gorp, so when, as I had predicted all along, the sandwiches weren’t found to be surprisingly tasty, or even edible at all, we had plenty of other things to eat to help us forget our folly.

We did have varying degrees of success with the surströmming sandwiches themselves.

Ian ate his entire sandwich, and even took a moment to cast a barb my way, suggesting that I wouldn’t actually chew bites of this sandwich 54 times. He was right; I spit my first bite out after maybe 4 chews, recognizing that I was moments away from gut-clenching puking. Deane ate his entire sandwich, although it can’t be said that he enjoyed the experience. He was going to bring a can home for a friend (they’re flying SAS; British Airways and Air France among others, don’t allow it onboard) but he’s afraid the friend would expect him to eat some, too, and he can’t face that again. Erika spit out her first bite, then took another with a homeopathic amount of fish and managed to swallow that. A swallowed her first bite, but pulled the rest of the fish out of the sandwich to finish it (the sandwich, that is). She commented that it was a pleasure to discover that the thing she’d been avoiding for so many years actually was a good thing to avoid. G spit out his first bite, too, and marveled at the human anatomy and the gag-reflex which was so clearly designed to keep him from eating things that would poison him, but then decided that, since he knew with his brain that the fish was edible, he’d force himself to eat some anyway. I told him his gag reflex wasn’t likely to work so well for him in the future, since he’d so clearly and immediately scorned its powers.

But what did surströmming taste like? Not fish, actually. It tasted slightly sweet, and a lot like the way raw sewage smells, and even more like the smell of the absolute worst slimy, greasy stinky thing your dog has ever rolled in.

It did not taste like food.

But the kayaking was beautiful, and the company excellent, and the Italian dinner tasty (although the kitchen closed at 9:00pm on a Saturday night, which was so un-Italian as to be comical, almost, except I didn’t get dessert). And now we’re on a ferry heading across the Gulf of Bothnia to Finland.