Angelus rampant

Woke up, got dressed, drove to Missoula. That was my day, mostly. It takes about seven hours to get to this mid-sized university town in Montana from Seattle. I was eager to get off to a strong start on my way back to the east coast, and seven hours in the driver's seat -- taking me through all of Washington, the Idaho "panhandle," and western Montana -- qualifies. On the drive I listened to "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" (my second to last audiobook -- must practice conservation!) and watched the forests transform into high plains in hilly and occasionally dramatic fashion. One hillside had lots of trees but no brush whatsoever, creating a ghost town effect. While I gained some altitude today, I've hardly begun to re-penetrate the Rockies. Those mountains are not something you drive across in a day, though you can get across the wicked part in a day. Today was canoeing down the Hudson River; the wicked part is canoeing down Niagara Falls.

Since I have so little else to say today, I thought I'd post an imaginary dialogue that I think does a pretty good job illustrating what most days are like for me out here. This is how I got dinner tonight. I hung up with my parents saying I was going to Perkins to get some comfort food after some subpar Ethiopian last night. But the angel of adventure, who was sitting beside me, said, "Nay! We shall at least check Google Maps first to see what unique local eateries might be in the area!" I let him do it, and he discovered that in downtown Missoula there is a place called MacKenzie River Pizza Co that Google Maps rates five stars. "Let us then abscond to the pizza place," he said. "But Perkins is right down the road and I know it'll be good," I protested. He chided me: "Lo, you have been bugging Us for good pizza for weeks now, and now that pizza appears on Our doorstep you wish to eat at Perkins?" "Fine," I said, and we got in the car.

We drove downtown, a short and pleasant drive, and there was a wait. While we waited for a table, we looked at the menu. "I can't wait to have some of this classic mozzarella," I said. "Hold!" replied the angel of adventure. "It says on this menu that this is a gourmet pizzeria, and therefore we shall have gourmet pizza!" "Mozzarella can be gourmet," I pointed out. "Mozzarella is less likely to be gourmet," said the angel of adventure, "than a Thai Pie, which is a pizza in which tomato sauce has been replaced with peanut sauce, and which is topped with basil chicken, mandarin oranges, scallions, red peppers, peanuts, and cilantro!" "Is that even a pizza?" I asked. "I do not know!" answered the angel excitedly. "Therefore, let us order it and find out!" "I was promised pizza," I grumbled. "And verily, you are getting a Thai Pie," said the angel.

The Thai Pie, to my surprise and frankly I think to the angel's too, was indeed a pizza, and it was delicious. It was more delicious than mozzarella would have been.

Now to the pictures!


Speaking of angels, here's the statuary trumpeter atop the central cathedral in Salt Lake City, Utah, at sunset. No post-production effects have been applied to this picture. This is how it really looked.


The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, through the fence on the south end. This is not the classic view of the bridge, which is taken from Marin County on the north end on a clear day, but this picture is closer to the reality of the bridge as I experienced it in the fog.

Jono Xia (nee DiCarlo) denounces the evils of socialism in full wedding regalia.


Sushu and Jono, all dressed up in their self-designed wedding couture. Aren't they radiant?


Brian Auriti, Action Wildlife Photographer! That is a wild deer who lives on a steep and exhausting three-mile trail in Muir Woods in Marin County. The hike was beautiful but did not photograph well.


Run, it's a tsunami! Oh wait, no it's not, that's just the fog rolling in on Pacifica, the Bay Area town where the Raskin clan lives. I stayed one night in their place. Never having seen a tsunami, I actually was momentarily worried when I glanced out of my car window and saw this panorama.


And in less threatening landscape capture, the sun sets here on quite a different bay, eight hours' drive away in Waldport, Oregon.


Run, it's the Fremont Troll! This guy lives under a bridge in Seattle and is a piece of public art. The things I learned in Seattle were generally less photographable than the things I learned elsewhere, so this is the only picture from Seattle in this batch.


One of a thousand views of the Dr. Sun Yat-sen Classical Chinese Garden in Vancouver. Photos are not very good at capturing motion or depth, two elements very important to understanding how beautiful this garden is, but I couldn't very well not include any photos of this tranquil place.


And a few blocks away, here's Vancouver pot culture. It's a little blurry because I was holding an umbrella in the other hand. Does rain bring out the potheads, or is downtown Vancouver always this smoky?


I touched the moon! This was at the otherwise not very interesting astronomy museum in Vancouver by the southern bay. The rock was very smooth, worn down by God knows how many thousand or million fingers.


Vancouver as seen from Queen Elizabeth Park, the highest point in Vancouver. Funny how in many ways this view is better than any view of the city I took from atop the tourist tower (visible at right; it's the one with the needle) or the skyride at Grouse Mountain (the one on the right).


Wildlife Photographer 2: Electric Cockatoo! At Queen Elizabeth Park there is a greenhouse containing a wide variety of tropical plants and birds -- yes, in Canada. I don't know what species this guy is, but he very much enjoyed strutting his stuff for all the photographers.


And here is an axe thrower at the lumberjack show at Grouse Mountain. The axe is actually in the air here, near the target at about two o'clock from the bullseye; you can see it against the light brown pole if you look carefully. He landed the bullseye a fractional second after the moment frozen here.

There! Now I can procrastinate on posting a whole new set of pictures, once I have some! :D

Repatriating

I spent the morning and early afternoon exploring Grouse Mountain, which, like everywhere else in Vancouver, was under heavy construction that blocked off some of the paths I'd really wanted to walk, but which, also like everywhere else in Vancouver, was a pleasure to walk around. Grouse Mountain is sort of a small mountain Disneyland. You take a skyride -- a hundred-person gondola -- to get up, gazing out the windows at breathtaking vistas of the entire Vancouver metro area, which the mountain overlooks. Or at fog, if it's this morning. There were places where the fog was so thick you could only see two trees at a time in the dense alpine forest outside the carriage. The lack of a view was disappointing, but I was cheered by the prospect that I was going to explore a park located inside a cloud, which would have gone into my wedding story if it had happened earlier in the trip.

The highlight of my time at Grouse Mountain was the chair lift. I got there at a time no one else was there, and took the fifteen-minute lift to the mountain peak without seeing another soul... through the fog... in near-perfect silence. You could be moved without even trying. There was nothing to do at the top for those of us who don't want to spend $70 to ride a zip line, but you could ride the chair lift down again, which was just as fun as riding up. The lift plus the lumberjack show -- watching a couple extremely talented saw operators ham it up for the two-hundred-strong crowd, racing to chop logs and throwing axes at bullseyes thirty feet away with deadly accuracy -- was probably just about worth the price of admission. One of them used a chainsaw to carve a baby chair out of a log in under a minute, and gave it away to a mother in the crowd. Good times in spite of the mist, and when I went back down the skyride some of the fog had burned off and I got some great pictures after all.

And then I drove back to Seattle. Vancouver was a good time! I have to say, though, that it didn't feel very different from a town in America. Apart from the different currency and the unpatriotically starless and nearly stripeless flags, there was nothing quintessentially Canadian about it, nothing that screamed "YOU ARE IN A DIFFERENT COUNTRY." Indeed, I caught myself thinking about Vancouver in terms of Seattle geography twice. I didn't hear the word "aboot" once, nor see the glory of socialized medicine in action (though I did get to hear a rant about what a mess the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has made of crossing the border and the ensuing economic downturn), nor see a lot of French signs once I was out of the federally maintained border area. So Vancouver was basically another typical Pacific Northwest city, only with flashing green lights that don't change for cross traffic but do change for pedestrians. Nice enough, but I don't feel that my soul is forever captive to that skyline or that country. I'd go back, though.

I was hoping to post photos tonight, but the Internet is being slow and reluctant, and Blogger's picture uploading tool is sluggish at the best of times. I've been staring at the "uploading" screen for twenty minutes. Photobucket is likewise uncooperative. For my own reference, though, the pictures I want to post are numbered 193, 255, 267, 277, 322, 334, 340, 346, 362, 367, 380, 391, 416, and 428 -- whew, that's a mouthful! One of them will be subtitled "Wildlife Photographer 2: Electric Cockatoo." (I don't know if the bird in question is actually a cockatoo. Maybe one of you can help me!) Perhaps tomorrow I will post the pictures, if I have time? -- when, God willing, this blog will come to you from Missoula, Montana, en route to Yellowstone!

I'm coming to your country, guy

Today I left Seattle for lands to the north. I was not disappointed.

It was no more than a couple hours from Seattle to the Canadian border. The other traffic was almost exclusively Washingtonian, and I felt special for being a Floridian on the road to Vancouver. The border crossing team thought I was special too; when I told them it was my first time in Canada they had me park and go inside for a security check. I gave them my passport, car keys, and cell phone -- harsh! -- and waited in a folding chair until they cleared me to enter their country and be an expatriate for a couple days. Then I drove to East Vancouver while singing what I can remember of the Canadian national anthem, as well as, for some reason, the "Charge of the Light Brigade" song my brother made up fifteen years ago. It's his birthday today (the 7th). Happy birthday, Alex!

Though the cities are comparable in size, Vancouver driving is different from Seattle's. In Seattle, I-5 and I-90 pierce downtown and are major urban thoroughfares. By contrast, there are no highways that run through Vancouver. BC 99, which took me to the city, stops being a highway when it enters city limits. I'm not sure what drove this decision; the lack of a central artery robs one of a way to orient oneself within a city. On the other hand, interstates are ugly and no one likes them; long-distance travelers like me especially hate them when they run through cities we don't intend to visit.

The good news, when I crossed the border, was that Zhuge Liang (as I dubbed my GPS, after the Chinese strategist) knows Canadian roads! The bad news is that, as I learned online, downtown parking in Vancouver is very, very expensive and time-consuming. So after establishing myself at the Days Inn, I hopped a bus. It was my first public transit of the trip, and getting on the right bus (the 19) going the right direction (downtown) to the right place (Pender and Carrall) was an adventure. I almost couldn't get on; bus fare is $2.50 and requires exact change, and the smallest thing Bank of America had given me when I visited them in the morning was a ten. But by a stroke of good fortune, the fare machine on the 19 I hopped was out of commission, which meant I got a free ride!

Where was I going? Well, to the obvious place when one visits Vancouver, of course: the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden! Apparently twenty-three years ago a master Chinese architect came to British Columbia and, taken aback by its beauty, offered to design a scholar's garden in the style of the Ming Dynasty in downtown Vancouver. British Columbia obligingly bussed in sixty builders from China who were schooled in traditional fifteenth-century methods of architecture and had them erect a garden using only the materials and techniques that would have been available in Ming China, right down to the then-contemporary understanding of Feng Shui. The result is fucking gorgeous. Though situated on just three-tenths of an acre, the garden feels like it must be ten times as big due to the manifold and canny tricks of perspective employed by the architect. You can look at a stone, take two paces left, and look at the same stone again, and you'd swear it was a different stone in a different setting. And all the perspectives would be breathtaking if they weren't so serene. What's best, perhaps, is that the garden is no replica, not a copy of some Ming garden in China; it is an original, built to take best advantage of the space and scenery of Vancouver. There's even a red maple tree planted alongside bamboo in the eastern (yin) side of the garden to symbolize the union of China and Canada in the accomplishment of this project. This is the sort of thing you only get to see once, so if anyone visits Vancouver, look this garden all the way the fuck up. Take the guided tour.

Oh, and go on a rainy day. It turns out cool, rainy days in early July are the best time to see Vancouver; everything's open but there are no crowds, even downtown. I got lucky, because today was just such a day. Vancouver rain is the finest rain I've seen, transparent and inaudible; you go out without an umbrella because it looks like such a light rain, and a block later your clothes are soaked. Fortunately, I brought an umbrella, and it protected me as I went to a big ol' downtown tower to snap some shots of the city from up high. I walked to the tower from the garden, about eight blocks, along Hastings Street through the center of downtown. The pot-smoker concentration in that area was even bigger than Portland's. What follows is an actual conversation I had on the way to the tower:

"Hey, man, you have the time?"

"Sure! Um, 7:05."

"Cool. Man, you want a toke?"

And it was thus that I learned that if you give someone the time in Vancouver you will be offered a joint. I declined. Marijuana is de facto decriminalized in Vancouver: it's illegal, but no one's likely to cuff you for it as long as you don't call attention to yourself. I will post later a picture I took of a pot-related merchandise outlet situated next door to "The Amsterdam Cafe." As an American I find this highly amusing, along with the bilingual road signs (everything's in French, even though I heard a lot more Mandarin and Spanish today than I did French) and more liberal attitudes about sexuality. (One store near the garden played a song whose refrain was "birthday sex, birthday sex" over the speakers, and one of the buses I took had a free sex-ed ad up top.)

It's funny how long this post got, and how much longer I could make it go on, considering that all I did today in the way of touristy stuff was go to the garden and tower. The lesson is that when you're on the road in a really new place, a lot of small things become adventures. I could talk about the very yummy pho I got near the hotel (it's a Vietnamese vermicelli variant that uses rice noodles, for those who don't know; I discovered it first in SF). I could talk about how Canada has $1 coins and $2 coins, and how weird it feels to carry a $2 coin around in your pocket, and how Canadian coinage makes different clinking sounds from American. I could talk about the beautifully tranquil traditional Chinese-style framed painting I practically stole at $15 from the garden gift store, the cheap price being for no reason other than that it was done by a Caucasian -- who the lady at the counter raved to me about, saying how sincere the girl who painted it was and how much that girl would love to hear from me by email how much I liked the painting. I could talk about how the posted gas prices in Canada don't look like gas prices in America -- no decimal point, strange configuration of digits -- and I still haven't figured out what that's all about. There's so much! But this will have to serve, as I need to lie in a warm bath with a Neil Gaiman book and recover from all the fun I'm having. Today was beautiful.

Late light

The sky stays light very late at this latitude. 9:45 and there was still light in the sky here in Seattle, even now, two weeks off the solstice. (Has it been two weeks since the solstice? Is it possible there's only a week left until I'll have been away from home for an entire month?) The length of the daylight is disorienting and strange, and it will only be stranger tomorrow, when I make my drive to Vancouver. I'll arrive in time for a late lunch, I think, and spend the day downtown. Unstructured time, guided a little by my reading at the invaluable wikitravel.org. Since I'm going all the way to Canada I might as well spend some extra time, so July 8 will be entirely in the city, and I have a reservation to see Richard II at Vanier Park that evening. In the process I'll need to figure out how public transit works in Vancouver, since parking downtown is likely to be an expensive hassle and my GPS doesn't have Canadian maps anyway. And I'll be alone for the night for the first time since hitting San Francisco.

I'm nervous about tomorrow. More nervous, actually, than I was on June 12, the eve of this whole great adventure. I think the difference is that on June 12 I knew that, if things went terribly, I could be home again on June 14. But the port I'm setting out from tomorrow is already across the continent from my comfort zone. This, of course, is why I'm going to Vancouver. Seattle is the farthest I knew I would get from Fort Myers if all went well, but if I go that far and no farther, I'll feel like I'm straggling home. Vancouver is a victory lap: a way to say to myself, convincingly, "and there's more where that came from." And there is. But I'm nervous anyway.

My time in Seattle has been important. It's a city they've got here -- decisively bigger than Portland, I found to my surprise; more to see, more right and more wrong turns to make. There was a shooting in front of the community center three blocks from Alexis's flat yesterday while we were fooling around in the farmers' market. On the other hand, there's a lot to love here, too, and I'm not talking about the kitschy (but kind of cute) Space Needle; I'm talking about the blackbird art in the UW library, the used bookstores that give 20% off if you know what book a quote comes from, the fact that this is simultaneously the town of Boeing and Starbucks, Bill Gates and Dan Savage. I like that Seattle's City Center, where we are, supports not one but several Ethiopian restaurants, a kind of cooking I didn't know existed until a few days ago. I don't think I would want to live here. But if I did live here, there would be a lot to love. Seattle is a city that has got a personality, distinct and complicated; it doesn't feel schizophrenic like San Francisco, monomaniacal like Winnemucca, or empty like Hays. I don't think we're compatible, Seattle and I. It is too much like Alexis's cat, adorable and fickle. But I understand this place now in a way that goes beyond "it's a town in Washington."

I'll probably be back in Seattle on Thursday. But from now to then, it's north...

Fuck yeah America

Yesterday, July 3, I arrived in Seattle just as planned and commenced celebration! I've now driven corner to corner through this country of ours, and have completed this phase of the journey in time to celebrate our national birthday. Seattle was built amidst a Byzantine maze of rivers and lakes, and it was Lake Union, in the heart of the city, that Seattle chose as the site of its Fourth of July celebration. The lakeside Gas Works Park, itself built upon the ruins of a defunct power plant, was the center of the celebration, so of course Alexis, Aviva, and I avoided it like the proverbial restaurant no one goes to anymore because it's too crowded. Instead we found a nice public pier on one side of the lake to watch the show from.

The story of how we found the pier is itself worth telling and involves a firecracker, a frying pan, and the Seattle police department. The firecracker was employed by the neighbors in holiday festivities at about 2 PM, when we three were at Safeway, and caused a fire to start on Alexis's lawn. The frying pan was also employed by the neighbors, this time to put out the fire. The Seattle police department was employed by Alexis to file a nuisance complaint to cover her butt in case the landlady wondered why there was a five-by-twelve scorch mark on her lawn, and while they were here ("Ma'am, are you aware you're not supposed to set your lawn on fire?") Alexis asked where we should watch the fireworks from. They suggested the east shore of the lake, so that's where we went. Through the help of a privately employed security officer, we then discovered a pier that most people didn't know about or notice, yet which was perfectly public and centrally located -- best seats in the house if you don't own a boat. Anecdotally, I heard over eight hundred thousand people were there, eyes focused like mine on the water.

While we waited for the big show to begin, we picnicked on salad and sandwiches, chatted, did Tarot readings, had poking contests, and watched the various illegal private fireworks shows light up the sky as the sun dipped below the horizon. But when the real show started and the first glittering flares went up from the barge, the breath was taken away, and it didn't come back until the final explosions twenty minutes later. There were spheres, cubes, smile faces, planets, and stars; the booms had shapes too, but English doesn't have easily accessed words for them. The magnitude of this fireworks show could be measured on the Richter scale. It was a fantastic fucking show. I'll tell you, whatever faults it might have, let no one say America can't paint the sky gold.

The show ended at quarter till eleven, and there was a little traffic, and long story short I'm exhausted from all the cheering and swearing. I'm going to bed. Tomorrow Aviva will say her tearful goodbyes and board a Greyhound bus back to Portland, and sometime soon -- the next day? -- I will say a goodbye of my own, kick patriotism across the curb, and set sail for Vancouver.