Yellowstone - Wild Earth

Warning: I shall revisit this topic numerous times, hopefully in a more focused fashion. First, Montana is full of some of the friendliest, outgoing people I've met anywhere. And why wouldn't they be?!? They have YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK to play in! 2.2 million acres of biodiversity that includes rare, large mammals like bison, elk, and bears roaming free to cause traffic jams in immense valleys crossed by hundreds of streams and rivers. 2.2 million acres of geothermal "features" that include hot springs, fumaroles, geysers, mud volcanoes, and steaming pots of bubbling stuff that smell sulphurous and look menacing. Mountains of sublime beauty with pine that smells like mint. Hosted star parties (next week, drat :() and early morning gatherings of people from around the globe lined up below herds grazing distant hills to catch glimpses of wolves hunting early in the morning.

How funny that I planned to "drive through" Yellowstone on the way to somewhere else. I could reach some conclusions about life, I s'pose, if I wanted to...but I'm in too good a mood to bother with that!

Beartooth Highway

Drinking a latte in Red Lodge, MT. I find the interwebs are pervasive these days. Even in the remotest of spots and with no laptop, it's quite easy to blog. Yellowstone (arrived yesterday afternoon) is so immense, so expansive, so interesting, so overwhelming, that I believe I will return to the area for a week after I drop A. off in Missoula Friday. I've fallen in love with Montana.
This morning, A. and I got up early and drove Beartooth Highway, a sixty mile drive from Cooke City (where we are staying just outside Yellowstone) to Red Lodge, Montana. I have a driving guide written by photographers for Life Magazine who agreed with Charles Kurault that this short road that winds between Montana and Wyoming and spans the Continental Divide is among the best, if not the best, drives in North America. After having driven it myself, I say it's in my top two. It rivals in expansiveness and drama Big Sur and Highway 1. The views are forever, and I could feel my spirit lift just being here.

Blue

Randomly, I once typed my favorite color, blue, into Google image search. As I recall my experiment, I was testing a theory about adjectives, that they are merely commonly-held generalizations that "pretty up" writing and make it suspicious. Adjectives and adverbs are not to be trusted, I believe. Nouns are stronger.

Google's results for "blue" included a lake in southern Oregon, Crater Lake. Now I'd some vague notion of what this lake was--wrong--that somewhere in California a large meteor had hit the earth creating a big hole and a big lake. Throw in a cooked-up perception of mystery, possibly coupled with Martians landing there or some such, and that was my idea of Crater Lake. I always find it amusing that apparently what I don't know I will make up--wrong. Crater Lake was not caused by a meteor, I read. However, the image of this lake, like sapphire under a gloamy sky brooding deep in a volcanic caldera, not only defined for me why I love blue, but intrigued me. The link for "Crater Lake" I cut and pasted into my "Things to do someday" folder that I keep on my desktop computer.

So someday arrived. (I love it when that happens!) Crater Lake is blue. (Adjective) It is beautiful. (Adjective) It is friggin big (6 miles across). It is deep (Approximately 2000 feet at its deepest.) It is surrounded by 2000 foot drop, glaciated cliffs (even in July), and around 2 million damned mosquitoes, many of whom are fattened with my DNA now. The landscape going up to it is decimated, pumice dessert caused by an eruption approximately 8000 years ago. Another baby volcano (Wizard Island) has pushed up from the depths of the lake. I photographed Crater Lake at sunrise, at noon, at dusk, and I never remotely captured anything about it that shows how it makes you feel--like the Grand Canyon--it's pretty much indescribable. My photographs are pitiful.

Along with this, A. and I camped under the stars. Clothes smelling of woodsmoke, skin sweetened with Off, I ran screaming from, I thought, a bear and landed back in the tent on my ass in the middle of the freezing night, we ate bacon and eggs, we smoked out, I listened to the 9th symphony while laying on a picnic table looking at stars so bright I could touch them. I am burned a little from the sun, my hair is frazzled from bug spray, A's feet are covered in bug bites, but....it was beautiful. Adjective and not a lie, my friends. :)

Portland - Japanese Gardens

In Portland, kicked things off for this trip right (or wrong) depending on your perspective. Stayed one night at posh Hotel Lucia because I had got a deal on PriceLine. Lucia has its nose in the right place, so to speak. You know you've found a great hotel when you are well-nigh joyfully tackled by 3 doormen upon arrival and the concierge looks grateful you've smiled at him. My PriceLine bargain ended when I discovered, however, (again) why it's never a good deal to stay in a posh hotel if you're trying to save money. A number of modest tips, valet parking, room service, in-room movies, two candy bars from the "Honor Bar" later, and I might as well have been staying at the Ritz-Carlton. Hotel Lucia is pretty nice though with lots of cool photographs and art to look at and a super soft, comfy bed with high-thread count sheets, just as they ought to be!

A. and I then headed over to more familiar territory, stoner-donut world, Voodoo Donut, the only place I know of where you can get a maple bar with bacon on top of it. This donut is surprisingly good, but is especially pleasant augmented with the right intoxicants and eaten just before a stroll through the Japanese Gardens in Washington park. Lovely morning. I had a picture of the maple donut bar (with bacon on top), but decided a picture of the gardens might be more memorable.

Going-to-the-sun Road: Weeks 1, 2, 3 Roughly

Typically, I almost forgot my passport and would not have thought about it had I not been scrounging for Ipod accoutrements. I'm leaving in ten minutes and finishing up here. Last tasks are to send my Mom a short note/card, assemble my reservations--such as they are. Not many of those. My landlord will water my plants and collect my mail.

Here's the first 3 weeks of this trip, and I will try to post some pictures and notes along the way.

1--Oregon (Portland, Oregon Coast/Highway 1, Rogue-Upqua Scenic Byway and Crater Lake National Park, Hells Canyon)
2--Wyoming/Montana (Shoshone Falls, Yellowstone National Park, Beartooth Highway)
3--Montana/Canadian Rockies (Glacier Lake National Park, Going-to-the-sun Road, and North up to Jasper via Banf)

Eventual objective is to drive to Prince Rupert Sound--goal Seward Highway on the Kenai Peninsula. I don't know yet if I will catch ferry up the inside passage, taking my car, or fly to Anchorage, come back, retrieve it...that might be easier and cheaper, but probably less fun. And we can't have that, can we?

If someone asks, this is where I'll be....

I owned a house once my ex-husband bought to please me without consulting me. The experience was a disaster. I had no clue what to do with a house. I had no desire to decorate or to purchase furniture to put inside it, no desire to vaccum its carpets and scrub its toilets, no pride of ownership in it. Weeds grew around it while I watched in dismay and surprise, as though I never knew weeds grew around houses. Dogs began to inhabit the backyard. Neighbors came over, church people showed up. But I had no desire to own this house, no desire to make a garden, no desire to own two dogs, two rabbits, two kids, two thousand church friends, and no desire to actually be in the house. I had no desire to be married either, although I did love my ex-husband. He's still a friend of mine, as friends go--by that I mean, he could call me and ask me for almost anything, and I'd try to do it. I'm sure--truly--he knows this, though he doesn't call very often. He did show up out of the blue to take me out to dinner the last time I was in Dallas--with his second wife's permission. I know if I were her I would not appreciate this, but she is not me, so I went with alacrity. Dinner is dinner after all, and I do love him. I just did not want to be married to him or own a house. I wonder if this sums up our relationship?

Anyhow, I was asked recently what my car says about me by a person who's known me a long time. I'm not sure it says much of anything about me, although the brand moguls who would have me believe it does would like me to believe it. What it says is that I chose this car. I bought it myself. No one chose it to surprise me, no one will pay for it to make me happy, no one will clean it but me, there won't be dogs in the backseat, or kids throwing up on the carpet. I chose it because I liked its shape, I liked its feel, I liked the idea of owning a convertible for grown-ups instead of children. I like that on I5 last week a guy with a BMW pulled even, we traded looks, and then the race was on through light traffic south towards Mount Rainier, which looked beautiful in the morning sun. To our mutual amusement I'm sure. I like that I won.

Mostly, I like that this car moves. It moves. It moves. It moves. And I do clean it and I do pamper it and I do enjoy it and I do want it. Nothing about it surprises me. The car makes no sense to the person who asked me because the whole of my life has been spent mostly not wanting--anything. Spent in giving myself away to others, to causes, to sometimes living in a family I did not actually want to be in, spent "unselfishly" without materialism. So inexplicably despite a long-held anti-materialistic bent I have always had that had me writing checks for this or that cause, serving food to the homeless, volunteering in hospitals, this tendency that makes me reluctant to spend money on clothes, make-up, jewelry, fine furnishings, nice carpets, homes, I wanted this car. People are complicated.

That's about all this car says about me. I wanted it. I got it. This is where I'll be. Because of those things, I enjoy it.

Home is where I want to be
Pick me up and turn me round
I feel numb - born with a weak heart
I guess I must be having fun
The less we say about it the better
Make it up as we go along
Feet on the ground
Head in the sky
It's ok I know nothing's wrong . . nothing

Hi yo I got plenty of time
Hi yo you got light in your eyes
And you're standing here beside me
I love the passing of time
Never for money
Always for love
Cover up and say goodnight . . . say goodnight

Home - is where I want to be
But I guess I'm already there
I come home - she lifted up her wings
Guess that this must be the place
I can't tell one from another
Did I find you, or you find me?
There was a time Before we were born
If someone asks, this is where I'll be . . . where I'll be...

A Quality of Light

I am from big-sky, blinding-sun country where the earth is flat, and nothing obscures the intense blue of the horizon. Texas summers are hot, sticky, and full of wondrous smells and sounds. These are about the only thing that makes them tolerable: sweet mimosa and honeysuckle, the watermelony smell of freshly-cut St. Augustine grass, the whirr of a thousand cicadas as night falls. You might as well be a lizard and enjoy the bright heat. In Texas, in summer your life will be bare-rock sensations where you bake and squint and sweat, and scurry-- from house to pool to car (air conditioned) to keep the naked light sun at bay. Even lounging outside in this unfiltered heat can be exhausting.

I've tried to describe where I live to folks back home who have not visited me. The first thing I talk about is the light--the quality of light in the summer. This land glows when it brightens. The thousand streams and rivers and lakes and the ocean that's wrapped itself into every curve, swell, and inlet create an effect when the sun slips through cloud banks the sensation of living in a golden bowl in summer. It reminds me of that line from Dylan Thomas, when he wrote of his childhood that "the sabbath rang in holy streams." They stare at me uncomprehendingly, my kin who have never been here. Why is she talking about the light? of all things, they may wonder. It's because, I guess, the light is so different from back home where it feels merciless. This quality of immanence, a glow from the land itself has affected the work of artists and photographers, of which I am a naive and pedestrian member. People who have seen my pictures have remarked that they "are proto-typical Northwestern gloom with a hint of light." Well, at least that's what some woman at work who's partner owns an art gallery told me, although the photos I take are not meant to be gloomy. If I see a theme, I suppose I do think they reflect an alien's fascination of where she finds herself, however. I found this quote this morning, and think it's accurate. I love where I live.

Perhaps more than anything else that unites [Pacific Northwestern] artists is the role that the natural environment of the region plays in their work. Portland painter Louis Bunce said of the Pacific Northwest that "nature flows up the streets," and it is true that the lush verdancy of the coastal areas and mountains seems to permeate everything, including its art. The prevalence of earth tones and neutral colors, the quality of light and moist atmospheres one finds in Northwest art, both then and now, is characteristic and expressive of a distinct, regional sensibility. It is for all these reasons that French art critics proclaimed Northwestern artists and photographers an "Ecole du Pacifique."