It was a great trip

I'm a little overdue on passing along some observations about our trip to the Pacific Northwest, which remains one of my favorite regions. Now that the Johanna episode has largely passed, here they are.

First and foremost, many thanks to John and Mary and Janet's brother John and Roseanna and especially Sean for looking after Johanna while we debated whether to end the trip early.

Our cousin Hope Dean. If you don't get yourself out to Anacortes and the San Juan Islands with Hope as your elaborately prepared guide and teacher, you are definitely missing out on one of life's great experiences. She booked a ferry, drove to the ferry, drove all over San Juan Island and showed us the place, packed a great lunch of local berries, which we ate overlooking a harbor, and took us to two great dinner places. While I wish we all lived closer, this was certainly an unmatched experience. Did you know? British and American garrisons stationed on different parts of San Juan Island once got into a war in which the only casualty was a pig.

Our Canadian friends Bob and Merrilyn Mason, who live on a farm about an hour east of Vancouver. We stayed there for three days, our first visit since they hosted us at the 2010 Olympics. One night we had turkey and the next steaks, all raised on the premises.

Janet's cousin Christine Robbins and her husband Ed, with whom we had dinner near her house in Olympia one evening.

As you can tell, I like traveling where you get to see cousins and friends you don't get to see all that often. We did the same in Texas last spring.

Ferries. I could go out to this region for two weeks and spend the whole time riding ferries around all the bays and islands. It's as beautiful as any region can get. We had spectacular weather, almost all sunny and pleasantly warm.

Food. One problem when you travel is the frequent difficulty of finding healthy food. Not in the Pacific Northwest with its ample supplies of salmon and halibut. Janet gets the prize for the quip of the trip, one evening at a seafood dinner: "You don't see much tilapia around here."

On our last two visits to the Seattle-Tacoma Airport, we had delightful seafood dinners at a restaurant named Anthony's, which is a small chain of sorts. We had dinner at three of the restaurants in the area – Anacortes, with Hope, Olympia, with Christine, and the airport again.

Dickson family lore features another seafood restaurant named Ivar's Fish House. It's now a chain called Ivar's House Of Salmon. It gets pretty awful reviews. The only time we had anything at an Ivar's was waiting for a ferry: we got ice cream cones at an outdoor snack bar attached to the restaurant.

One reason for the plentiful supply of salmon is an extensive system of fish hatcheries. We visited one and it was fascinating; the salmon live for eighteen months to two years in tanks fed by water from the nearby stream before being released to go down to the ocean. Their sense of something like smell of the water brings them back to the same hatchery to spawn. While less than ten percent of naturally hatched salmon survive, ninety percent of those from the hatcheries survive.

Serendipity. Twice we decided to just drive out of our way into the mountains and got rewarded both times with stunning alpine panoramas. One drive to a high meadow (with plenty of snow still around) featured hair-raising hairpin turns with no guard rails. Janet just put her head in her lap.

Seattle. Great town, pretty compact to get around in. But homeless people abounded. And we had one miserable day trying to drive from Canada down to Olympia, through Seattle, which meant taking the only decent route, I-5, which was a parking lot. Six hours for a trip that was supposed to take three.

It was fun to reprise some of our old trip to the World's Fair. We rode the monorail out to the Space Needle. We went to the top. We saw perhaps the very finest movie I have ever seen, an IMAX production called The Flight Of The Butterflies, about the discovery that monarchs over the course of three generations every year, migrate to a remote part of Mexico and back, in what was the US Pavilion at that fair.

Despite Seattle's obvious prosperity, the region as a whole seems a bit down. In nearly every town of any size there are at least one and usually more than one (1) pawnshop, (2) payday loan shop and check cashing shop and (3) Goodwill store. For one memorable town, called Concrete for some reason not known to us, the most impressive thing was the elaborate and fancy sign at the town entrance, which belied the very downtrodden look of the place.

Driving around the Olympia Peninsula, we had decided to drive down to the Pacific coast and spend one night in a coastal town. At Cape Flattery, we saw a seal catch a fish and head for a cave to eat it. Farther down the coast, the area became fogged in. Over the course of five minutes driving from sun into fog, the thermometer on our rental car registered a drop of ten degrees; and then a rise of twelve degrees going back. Ocean Shores, the coastal town where we stayed, was a foggy, depressing town without a single decent restaurant.

Sometimes if seems as if airlines and car rental companies have a secret plan to make travel as supremely miserable and senseless as possible. It's too long to recount here why this trip reinforces this suspicion, but if it's true, they are doing a very fine job indeed.

Who Knows Where the Time Goes?

Isn't that a Judy Collins song?  Isn't that appropriate for August 2013?

Johanna knows where it went, but the good news is she is out of the hospital and on the mend.  Phew.  It was a rough week before the doctors decided surgery was required.  Peter and Janet had come back from the west coast early and help nudge the doctors in that direction.  I think doctors need a nudge. Anyway, we're hopeful and glad for Johanna.

Claire may know as well since she is off to college this coming weekend.  I bet there's been a fair amount of time getting ready, and I wondered if she got her new pencil case for college.  Daniel already started school, and he's a sophomore.  Can you believe it?  One day, before we know it, we'll be saying Miles is a sophomore.   

And the trees up here are beginning to wonder the same things about the lost summer.  They are giving off a faint touch of yellow, while a handful are positively turned.  Must be football season.

Busy doesn't even begin to describe our last few weeks.  Crazy is more like it.  But fun.  We gave Mary two beach chairs for her birthday, so we had to go to the beach.  And our old haunts in Rhode Island became our destination.  We stayed with Lew and Marj and spent the day at East Beach with Mary Fort and with Maura and Elsie.  This was our favorite beach because of the nice surf.  Unfortunately, the surf also had a few monster jelly fish, and we discovered that sometimes their tentacles get separated from their bodies, but still sting.  Anyway, it was fun catching up with Mary and Maura.  

From there we went up to New Bedford to continue my obsession with all things Melville this summer.  The whaling museum there is really spectacular, especially with a guide.  What a brutal, dangerous business it was to collect oil this way.  I'll take fracking any day.  (My timecapsulepilot blogpost has more, under the Summer with Herman tab.)

When we got home, our Charlie and his family were here, as well as Marj and her mother.  Then, after they left, friends from Peru came by for a couple of days.  In between I gave a talk on my Civil War exhibit at Arrowhead, attended by 4 people, all rounded up by Mary.  What a great fan.  In between, Mary hosted her swim team for a Sunday morning  swim around the lake and a pancake breakfast.  I slept.

While away, we got photos of Margaret and Andrew's camping trip with the wild and fairly aggressive/cheeky ponies in Chincoteague.  We also saw some photos from Jeffrey and Melodie on their camping trip, in Virginia, I think.

Joe wrote from Manila saying the torrential rainstorms are flooding and shutting down the city.  He even had the tropical version of a "snow day."  We also heard from Annie who likes her new job in the city.  

John and Marilyn have headed south and west on an extended vacation, with their family in Myrtle Beach and then head west.  Eventually, they will land back in their new house in Florida, for much of the fall, coming back up here for the holidays.  We went out with them before they left, and Johnny took us to the western mouth of the Hoosac Tunnel in North Adams, once the longest tunnel in the U.S.

It's harvest season, and the fence we put up in the garden has kept the critters safely away, and allowed us to have a good crop of lettuce, continuous since mid-July and beans and zucchini and a few cucumbers and peas.  The cool weather in August has meant only now are we seeing orange on the tomatoes.  Our fence was modeled after the Pomfret Meadow Rock Farm, split rail fence.  

Speaking of Pomfret we stopped at the old homestead on our way to Rhode Island.  They had put up a new fence for their horses, and made some nice changes to the kitchen,  I was fixated, though on one of the shutters, with slats falling and paint peeling.  Sorry Pop.  

On that wistful note, we hope all is well with you and will sign off.  Love from up here.

 

 

New York, New York

Sunday we took Annie down to New York.  We thought it was going to be an uneventful trip to drop her off, but, shortly before we left, we heard from Peter and Sean that Johanna was in the hospital.  She had called 911 with symptoms much like she had when she had the intestinal blockage 5-6 years ago.  The doctors have been stumped and as of this writing were ordering more tests.  Peter and Janet were in Seattle, and we kept them apprised as they were figuring out how and if to get back.  Sean has been a real trooper, staying at the hospital, and Annie's now with him. 

Annie's starting today at a campus work-study job, even though her classes don't begin for a few more weeks.  So, before school starts, she will be staying at Johanna's, on her couch. (Thanks Johanna!)  Then she'll move up town when her grad school housing opens up.  Oh to be young again.  

Johanna has started a new job at an architectural firm not too far from her apartment.  Sean's been busy himself this summer doing a legal internship in New Jersey.

It ends a nice, long visit here at the old homestead.  She had a few friends here in the last few weeks.  Joe came up for a week, by train.  Margaret and Andrew drove up for a long weekend, and we celebrated Mary's birthday in grand style.  We met Andrew's parents, and his mother's birthday was the day before Mary's so it was a double celebration.  Triple, counting the big engagement.  Lots of champagne.  

Lots of activities - Andrew and his father played golf with Johnny, Andrew's mother joined the Dickson girls for a tour of Stockbridge and the Rockwell Museum - they're having an exhibition of the drawings of the Disney movie, Snow White.  We took a pontoon boat out on the lake; there was swimming, and canoeing.  And shopping.  We went to a wonderful play called The Chosen, based on the novel by Chaim Potok.  A very nice week.

Joe didn't waste much time back in DC before taking off again, to a place I don't think any Dickson has ever been to yet.  He is in Manila for three weeks, having left on Sunday.  

You may have seen the pictures of Hillary and Barack a week ago, when the two met for lunch at the White House.  The story didn't mention that she also met Margaret, at a Fulbright event later that same day!  

We've been continuing our Melville summer here (and you get read my blog - http://timecapsulepilot.wordpress.com/summer-with-herman-melville/.  I have to watch that it doesn't become an obsession.)  Anyway, Sunday, Mary and I joined a group of hikers to climb Monument Mountain, repeating the walk that Melville took in 1850, where he met Nathaniel Hawthorne.  We didn't meet Hawthorne, but we met some interesting, unique folks and had great exchanges up and down the mountain.  At the top we had a champagne toast.  It was a clear day and we could see for miles all around.

A couple of recommendations to put on your movie list:  20 Feet from Stardom (about back-up singers for pop and rock groups) and Searching for Sugarman (about an American folk singer enormously popular, but only in South Africa and he never knew it.)

So that's pretty much it from up here.  Hope everyone is enjoying the summer.

Love, and a prayer for Johanna.