Vacation Lessons

When I fly, I like to pull tarot cards for myself. Usually this results in cards that are about travel. This time around the tarot suggested that I be more mindful in setting up habits around how I use my time.  The three-card-pull was a capstone of little observations I stumbled upon while away from home, work, and the Internet.

My friends, who are only a year or three older than I am, are not exactly elderly, but they are in the early stages of being old.  This is better than being old like my parents, but still, as the saying goes, “We’re not exactly spring chickens any more.”  I have also fallen out of good fitness habits, and was in better shape this time last year than I am now.  If I want to be spry in thirty years, I need to be actively spry and limber now (glares the the joints of his toes).

The systems of air travel in the US are brutal to the under-privileged, the foreign, and the elderly.  To navigate in the world one needs a good credit card, a modern cell phone, mental acuity, and good English language skills.  And guess what, air travel is simply a simple manifestation of a much larger system of privilege.  I imagine that I’ll need to stay on top of how the world works as I age.

I spend far too much time on social media, and far too little time playing the harp, reading tarot cards, exercising, learning Middle Kingdom hieroglyphs, or writing, and various “adulting” jobs like meal preparation, laundry, and general maintenance.  I suppose this means actively scheduling time.  Given my inclination to relax and recharge after work, I should probably limit my social media to a half-hour or so in the afternoon.

I can survive on just one sixteen ounce cup of tea per morning.  This feeds into the decision to aim for seven-and-half hours of sleep.  This means both going to bed a little bit earlier and getting up a little bit earlier.  It also means I should more aggressively reclaim lost bed geography from the dog.

If I had to select which Tarot card symbolizes reclaiming lost bed geography from the dog, I’m pretty sure it would be the Nine of Wands, with the Seven of Wands reversed for those nights when she sprawls her body athwart the bed and crushes my knees and feet into each other.

First Snow and Ice of 2024

The January winter storms have hit and covered much of the Willamette Valley with snow and a crust of ice.  Power lines are down, and it seems like half of my friends up and down the valley are without power, or their wells have stopped, or trees have come crashing down near or onto their houses.  The city has closed public parks and bike paths.

We’re lucky to be in a part of Eugene that seems to have robust power transmission.  I believe the last time we were without power was due to someone speeding down Willamette Street at something like fifty miles per hour and smacking into a power pole (Willamette Street is straight, so they would have had to work a little bit to hit a pole at the side of the road).  

The time before that was a strange occurrence: lightning overhead caused a mechanical switch (maybe a line arrester) at the top of a pole near our house to trip.  I’m guessing that the lightning caused an induction surge in the transmission line.  Only houses on our side of the block were without power, but some linemen came and used a very long (and insulated) cherry-picker type tool to flip the switch closed.  

Luckily, the temperature has only gotten into the mid twenties, so the animals can go outside when they need to.  Aoife doesn’t appreciate the snow on her paws—although one of her plush toys, a fox, has turned into an icicle that she likes to chew. The cats only want to be outside for a short period of time, mostly so they can stalk songbirds attracted by the suet we’ve put out .  The snow is covered with a crust of ice; walking is not too bad as the ice is bumpy and dry.  

Today it’s supposed to be sunny—it’s currently sunny in Corvallis—but at the moment it is still overcast with diffuse light bouncing between the white ground and the grey clouds.   But there’s a Winter Storm Warning issued for today through tomorrow morning, so maybe all we’ll get is deeper grey.  

I think an expedition for chocolate may be in order.

Full Moon Conjunct Mars in Opposition

Happy Full Moon Before Yule in Conjunction with Opposition Mars.

We thought the sky would be too overcast and cloudy to see anything, but around 8 PM, there was a large enough hole in the clouds to take a few pictures.  

Of course I was fiddling around with the tripod and the camera focus to get too many photos before new clouds swarmed overhead, but I did manage to get some shots that weren't too artsy.

The moon was already a little to the east of Mars when we saw it, so I think we missed the actual occultation of Mars.  Still the two were about a fingers-width apart, and while the clouds may have blurred Mars a little, they also cut down on the Moon's glare.

Visiting Butchart Gardens

It seems like a lifetime ago but it was only about two weeks since we visited the Butchart Gardens outside of Victoria, BC.  The Gardens were started over a hundred years ago by Jennie Butchart, who was the wife of a cement manufacturer and limestone quarry owner.  The Butchart's house overlooked the quarry, and Jennie got tired of looking at a strip mine, so she planted flowers.  The story goes she even planted ivy along rocky cliff sides from a bosun's chair.  The gardens have been a tourist attraction ever since.

Research about the gardens suggested an early arrival, so I booked the first charter bus out of the harbor to the gardens.  The day was clear and started out in the low seventies.  The bus driver gave a non-stop speech about Victoria (the most haunted city along the west coast, among other mosts) and the environs as we traveled for about a half-hour.  If I remember correctly, he was from Saskatchewan, and his accent reminded me of my time in Minnesota.  

When we got to the gardens, Mark took one look at the map, saw its suggested path, and promptly lead us the opposite way.  This was a good thing; the first hour or so of our garden experience was a quiet one.   The gardens were still in full bloom, which a pleasant surprise—I was expecting more autumnal foliage.  We saw the Italian Garden first, then the Star Pond, then the Japanese Gardens, then the Rose Garden.  

I liked the boxwood hedge with arches on either side of a statue of Mercury in the Italian Garden.  The Star Pond was nice, but over-hyped.  

I very much enjoyed the Japanese Garden because it was shady and cool, with many little niches and covered tea ceremony benches.  It also had a little metal dragon fountain springing out from the top of a slope.   

At the other end of the garden, we found the cove and dock for the sea planes.

Because we went through the Japanese garden backward, so to speak, when we found it, the tori gate appeared to open up onto a main lawn; this combined with the southeastern morning sunlight made the gate extra mysterious looking.  

The rose garden was very traditional and fun.  I espeicially enjoyed the gazing globe there. Rose fragrance filled the air, and the trellises and hedges created a small enclosed place for contemplation — no small feat given that the number of folks traipsing around was climbing. 

Where a path from the rose garden met a path from the Japanese garden, there was a medium sized fountain with another dragon sculpture.   By this time in our tour of the garden, we were beginning to run into the folks who had taken the traditional path.  

After some wandering, we decided to have tea (our second in as many days!).  Since we didn't have a reservation, we were seated outside, with the caveat that we would likely be visited by wasps.  Our waiter reminded us of Ned Flanders (it was the mustache).  We ordered tea and two servings of savories.  The first non-tea item was trifle  By the time we finished the trifle, the wasps had indeed discovered our plates, so we put a bit of sausage roll out for them as tribute and they mostly left us alone.  The meal was delightful, but I would have to add that some of the savories were trying too hard to be exotic and were more puzzling than delicious.  

After the very filling meal, we wandered about and revisited the fountain, the carousel, and other features near the sunken garden.  Bt this time we had been visiting for about three or four hours, and the post-lunch crowds had were visiting the gardens with us, resulting in some congestion.  Toddlers in the throes of "The Snackening" were more evident.  

So it was time for shopping!  Nancy and I hit the gift shop while Mark did a final round of the sunken garden and the fountains.  I bought some tea (which I've already brewed most of!)

We found the same bus and bus driver waiting to whisk us back to Victoria.  

The gardens were fun.  I would visit again; I'm not sure if the allure of formal gardens or the chance for a fancy tea with proper scones is the draw.   Mark said he enjoyed the garden, but didn't need to see it again—and there were other gardens in Victoria that we didn't get a chance to visit that he would rather see instead.

The Moon and Old Songs

A week ago tonight we were traveling by ferry back to the states.  The sun set just as we set out, and the crescent moon shone over the orange horizon reflecting in the water.  As twilight deepened, the moon sank lower and became more ruddy.  As we pulled into the harbor, suddenly the moon was no longer a beacon of sky and water, but a lamp over the mountains — a pale red bow aimed below the rim of the world.   I stood on the upper deck gazing at the moon, and it seemed like I stood still on a platform while the red moon moved closer.   

An old memory of a song (by We Three) came to mind and I found myself softly singing:

"The moon sails over the city streets / Sails over stars and the water's edge.  / The wind moves the water like a spider's web, / it can be a trap, it can leave you dead.  / Swallows, moving in and out of it, in and out of it. / It's all in the way you live, in the way you live."  

When I finished, the ferry terminal bracketed the moon within a rectangle of metal.   We grabbed our bags and disembarked.   The Blackball Ferry song did not play, and I was able to maintain a poetic mood for a while.  Man, I need to find my old We Three recordings.  

 

[2022-09-26 Editor's Note:  At the beach the other day, starting with the whirlpool, more of the song came back to me:

The Moon sails over the city streets / sails over stars and the waters edge.// The wind moves the water like your wavy hair / I see a reflection there / in the whirlpool. // Thread like like a spider's web,  / it can be a trap, it can leave you dead.  / Swallows, moving in and out of it, in and out of it. / It's all in the way you live, in the way you live.

 I'm still not sure about that double "in the way you live," at the end and have a vague notion there's something about living on the waters edge or looking from a cliff.]

Parliament Building

I fell in love with the Victoria BC Parliament Building.  

Eugene specifically and Oregon generally does not have cool buildings from the late 1800's in it; many of our cool old buildings were knocked over in the sixties, seventies, and eighties and replaced with brutalist concrete, glass boxes, or steel baskets—all of our other buildings are log cabins or cedar ticky-tacky.  

The Parliament Building looks like it came from Rigel VII, where the original Star Trek pilot was shot.  It has writhing grotesques on its pillar capitals.  Various Old Dead White Guys and Figures of Extreme Allegory stand in its niches or along its ramparts.   

Many Oregon buildings look like, to quote Frederic Edwin Church, they were built by people "whose ideal of architecture is wrapped up in felicitous recollections of a successful brick schoolhouse or meeting house or jail."  

And the Parliament Building has a library built into it in the back (the south side)!

If the Parliament Building were in Eugene, chances are good that it would have a dojo, a bellydance studio, a former womyn's bookstore, a bubble-tea place, or (most likely) a cannabis dispensary built into its back.

I circled around the building, gasping every now and then as new features came into view.  The coat of arms for British Columbia hung over the main, gated entrance: a wapati (elk) stag and a bighorn sheep supported a shield with the Union Jack and a western sun of the province.   The grotesques atop pillars enchanted me with the way the masons had carved the figures so that they wrapped around corners, but were still aesthetically pleasing seen straight on.  

Along the west side of the building there is a simple rose garden, with a sundial in the center of a circular pathway.   I really did loose track of time because there were so many details that I wanted to photograph.  

I am not sure why taking photographs of interesting buildings brings me so much pleasure.  Part of it is recording an interesting array of geometric shapes and artistic designs.  It feels similar to how I feel photographing raptors or art in the Metropolitan Museum; part of which is the pleasure of curation—and in the case of the raptors is the desire to create hieroglyphs and other designs from patterns in nature.  Perhaps love of photographic buildings comes from hanging out with architects in the early 1990's, or maybe I'm stocking my mental store of places to use in story.  

I circled around to the north side of the building, where I had started.  I overheard a tour guide say that it was 11 o'clock, which meant that I might have (okay definitely) missed the Water Taxi Ballet.  

Travel By Water

Sunday morning we arose early and caught the Port Angeles Black Ball Line Ferry, the Coho, to Victoria BC.  I should chime in at this point and say that although we used the controversial ArriveCAN app to tell the Canadian government about our travel plans and COVID status, at no point during our travels did anyone ask to see the QR code the app produced for our clearance credentials.  ArriveCAN apparently has the Canadian media and regional boarder folks in a tizzy; using it a day or two before we actually left was irksome, but not the travel deterring angst-fest it's being made out to be—but then again, we weren't just waking up and deciding to drive across the US-Canadian border for High Tea on a whim.

The Child would have loved the Black Ball Ferry because Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters sing a 1950's style jingle about it, which the Coho played going into and out of port.  We were incredibly lucky with the weather:  the waters were very calm whenever we were afloat and the temperatures during our visit didn't rise much higher than the mid-eighties.  Along the thirty-mile trip through the Straight of Juan de Fuca, we saw orca whales in the distance.  

Pulling into Victoria, the modern apartment buildings along the shoreline surprised me; it looked like Portland.  I was expecting more castles or old-timey barbarian (not barbaric) splendor.  I mean, it's Canada; a foreign country; and Victoria's a place more English than England—where was the charming peasantry and why were there no ancient, crenelated gun towers or at least a trebuchet or two?  The recording of Bing and the Andrews Sisters was nice, but subconsciously I was expecting a production number out of the Wizard of Oz, like the Winkie Guards' Pike Dance outside the castle of the Wicked Witch of the West.  Then a sea plane took off out of the harbor docks and flew overhead and I spent the next five minutes with the opening credits scene from Fantasy Island in my head.  So there was that. 

When we sailed into the inner harbor, the Empress Hotel came into view.  It looks similar to depictions of Hogwarts School, only with far fewer towers.  Bits of the Parliament Building were also visible, so Victoria was redeemed as a Truly Foreign Place.  

As we debarked from the ferry, we saw the Water Taxies warming up for their semi-regular Water Taxi Ballet.  Not quite a Pike Dance, but still entertaining.  The ballet wasn't set to start for about twenty minutes; Mark suggested I could go take a look at the Parliament Building... and I walked over... and I started taking photographs... completely lost track of time... and missed the ballet in its entirety.  (I was in trouble for that one; it didn't help that our cell phones were confused by being 30 miles away from the US, so no one had been able to reach me while I was snapping pix.) 

Port Townsend

On our way to Victoria, BC, we stopped in Port Townsend.  After visiting the local lighthouse and old World War II fort, we made our way to the old downtown for dinner.   This required navigating around a music festival.  We didn't have to be anywhere, really; the ferry left from Port Angeles early the next day, so all we had to do was eat and then drive to our hotel room in Sequim WA (where they were about a third of the price of the ones in Port Angeles).  

We found a restaurant called "Siren"; I wound up ordering fish and chips, I forget what Mark and Nancy ordered, but the food was good.  The most amusing thing about the restaurant was that all of the tables on the outside balcony were swathed in large, hexagonal umbrellas:  this was to protect them from seagull poop.  

Afterward, we wandered into a jewelry shop.  The shop owner commented that she thought we knew each other from somewhere; I'd have to agree, but we didn't know where.  She was a Eugene Country Faire regular, so maybe that was it.  

That was the funny thing about Port Townsend, I kept seeing people who looked vaguely familiar—perhaps it was a Small, Liberal Town in the Pacific Northwest Filled with Middle Class White People Thing.   Mark purchased a sparkly orange/red vest from Sri Lanka.

The old part of Port Townsend had many buildings from the later part of the 1800's, so there were lots of cool fiddly-bits on the buildings.  I like how buildings from this era have the mark of their craftsmen upon them in the column capitals or in the keystones of arches or the weaving patterns set into brick.  There weren't any gargoyles or grotesques that I could find, which was too bad, but there was still a rich vocabulary of place there.   (Eugene, alas, lost a lot of its distinctive Victorian architecture during a period of urban renewal in the 1980's.)  

What caught my eye architecturally were the sandstone capitals from the old city hall:  they reminded me of some similar capitals in New York City, and I wondered how much of the similarity was because they were carved by the same artisan or if there was a common booklet of carvings that masons in the late 1800's used.  

Looking back at my old photos (see the dragon, below), I see that the carvings are different enough that they probably aren't the same craftsman... but maybe they're from the same workshop?  I don't know; the similarities are there, but they were more prominent in my memory than they are in the photos. 

Fort Worden

Fort Worden provided many opportunities for artsy photographs.  

There were many little nooks and crannies.  I wasn't sure how the doors were supposed to work; there was a gear system connected to them, but most of it had rusted away or been removed.  

The old gun turrets would make good small amphitheaters; I can imagine an Art and Music Festival Happening here, although I'd want to put some barriers up around some of the more alarming three story shafts.  

Many of the concrete rooms were excellent echo chambers.

I'm also surprised someone hasn't filmed an apocalyptic movie here.  Or a horror film — based on some of the graffiti, this is where the youngsters go to have sex, so it would be fairly easy to add in a deranged murderer and a misunderstood oceanic beast into the scene for a classic horror film plot. 

Lighthouses and Forts

To get to Victoria BC, we had to take a ferry from Port Angeles.  This required a lot of driving.  The funniest thing we saw along our way was a fireworks stand on a reservation called, "Ill Eagle Fireworks."  When I first saw the drawing of a sick-looking eagle, I thought it was a little disrespectful; then I sounded out the name of the stand and started laughing.  I wish I had a good photograph of it.

Despite an unexpected music festival in the way, we wound up visiting Port Townsend and the lighthouse at Point Wilson.   It reminded me of the lighthouse at Heceta Head; the lens system was similar, but the Point Wilson light has been replaced by a much smaller modern unit.   Point Wilson Lighthouse had been run by a weight that ran through the tower's central column; I don't remember how Heceta Head's light rotated—it was electrified when we visited last.

After the lighthouse, we went for a stroll along the beach, around the local aquarium, and stumbled across an old fort.  The fort was about a hundred years old and supported at least two long-range guns.  Boxy concrete bunkers extended into an earthen embankment.  Rusting iron doors hung from some openings, massive rusting iron rings had worn rings into the concrete walls they were set into, weeds grew in the decommissioned gun turrets, dark and cold rooms echoed when we spoke, and vaguely Satanic graffiti was around every corner.   I'm fairly certain that the local high school kids had their weekend orgies here—and I hope they were careful because there was practically no railings anywhere on the structure and quite a few unexpected places where nasty falls lurked.