Category Archives: travel

New Friends on the Way

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Heteromeles arbutifolia – toyon

On my way to visit Pippin, The Professor, and Scout last week I stopped to see some of my tree friends. The lovely bay tree was blooming, all tangled up with the madrone, whose berries were almost gone.

toyon with manzanita behind

Also in the jumble was the toyon, with slightly fresher berries. I read in Pippin’s tree book that toyon is the only species in its genus, and it grows only in California and Baja California. Though I’d been introduced to Mr. Toyon many times in the last 40 years, I didn’t seem to pay much attention to him. I think we’ll be friends now. On this occasion I had the time and Google to help me focus and learn more, and I also have a blog where I can find him again if my memory fails.

another view of toyon

I did see quite a few of my most beloved manzanitas as well. Manzanita means “little apple.” The botanical name arctostaphylos means “bear berry,” though of course other animals also feed on these fruits. The common name of some varieties is also bearberry.

Right now the bushes are in bloom (so is the one in my yard); I saw pink- and white-flowered variations. There are about 60 species total, and most of those are native to California, so it’s a hard one to pin down as to which species you are seeing.

manzanita

Many of the trees I saw on this outing are growing on the slopes of that volcanic mountain I told about before, Mt. Saint Helena, in Napa County. On the weekend scores of cars were parked at the trailhead for hikes up to the top. The spot is in Robert Louis Stevenson State Park, so named because the author and his wife honeymooned on this mountain in 1880. He went on to use it as the model for Spyglass Peak in Treasure Island. One New Year’s Day a decade ago our whole family made the trek up and got amazing views.

I left the forest and after driving a while longer I caught a glimpse of something off the highway that made me flip a U across three lanes to go back and take a second look. I was lucky there was a turnout right opposite the meadow where 20 elk were grazing!

Later The Professor told me that he had seen this herd of tule elk many times over the years, in this their winter home; it is the largest migratory elk herd in California. Tule elk are a subspecies of elk only half the size of Roosevelt elk, whose habitat is even more narrow than the toyon: they only live in California. I stumbled through the star thistles and got my socks full of prickles, trying to get as close as possible and watch them for a few minutes before they escaped.

On the way home I looked and looked for the spot where I’d pulled over three days before, but I couldn’t even find the turnout across from the meadow, much less see any animals. If I can get a view of the elk another time or two, I might put them in the category of friends, though they didn’t show any signs of wanting to get to know me. So far I’m content to thank God for this happy meeting.

Advent Retreat in San Francisco

Advent, buildings, church, Nativity, people, San Francisco, travel

The skies were gray above, the asphalt and sidewalks dark and wet below, but colors jumped out at me as we were leaving Holy Trinity Cathedral in San Francisco this afternoon.

 Two of us had traveled to attend lectures by Father Alexander Golitzin on “The Advent of the Christ.” Father Alexander is Professor of Patristics at Marquette University, and the lectures were rich with references to ancient Judaic texts, little-known Persian Christians in the 4th Century, the Dead Sea Scrolls, New Testament scriptures and the beloved liturgical hymns that tie our salvation history together into a whole.

My heart and mind didn’t want Fr. Alexander to stop, even though I had the feeling as of a voice saying, “Whoa — that is a bit much to feed me all at once.” I left the cathedral worn out and happy, holding my notebook full of scrawls that I hope to meditate on further.

The flowers, though….they must be part of the large family of metaphors that tell about God taking on human flesh, entering our world as an infant at a particular point in history. Something about beauty and color and brightness breaking into the winter.

Washington – The Rain Forest

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The rain forest surprised me. It wasn’t chilly, even though it was cool; perhaps the humidity served as a blanket. The towering complexity wasn’t too overwhelming, because my camera helped me to isolate and literally focus on various particulars.

My favorite plants were the exotic fungi, because they stood out from the multitude of mostly green colors.

They say there are several thousand plant species in there, and I imagined it would be a trial to take a day hike through all that jumble and jungle of green sameness. Instead, it was strangely invigorating. Is there more oxygen than average in a rain forest, what with all those plants exhaling? It was as exciting as the beach.

We had the slightest drizzle as we entered, but not enough to warrant covering my head. Even that amount of moisture waned and my hair didn’t get wet — only pleasantly fluffy, a welcome relief from the usual flat.

Autumn was beginning to give some color accents, especially in the form of the big leaf maples that arch throughout the canopy and drop their leaves over everything.

Hoh….the very name of this forest is like a mother’s calming hush, or a version of the meditative Ohm. I got to thinking of the shape of the letters themselves as the circumference of a Sitka Spruce trunk with branches on the sides.

It seems that the word Hoh by itself has endless possibilities, but in any case it seems to be the only name possible for this place, so quiet and deep. The Hoh River runs through it.

Wherever a stump stands, several plants will use it for a seedbed, so that a conifer, a fern and a deciduous tree will often make a bouquet on the stump. But a log lying horizontal becomes a pasture of low and thick lichens and moss.

Below: Gray leaf lichens were in abundance, lying around everywhere, and also growing on trees. If there were a contest for the brightest fungi, the yellow one would get my vote.

This area of the world boasts the tallest (Sitka) spruce tree and the tallest (Red) cedar tree in the world. I couldn’t guess what most of the evergreens were, their lowest branches were so high up, and everything blanketed with spongy green lace. But I think this one is a Douglas-fir (it’s written like that because it’s not a true fir.)

 Leafy lichens abound. I guess this is one?

I was surprised when Mr. Glad said we should turn around and go back out. We’d been hiking two hours and it didn’t seem to have been more than about 40 minutes. By that time I wasn’t living in the moment, though. Time was flying because I had caught a whiff of the moist rain forest scents. Funny I didn’t notice right away. But when I did, I couldn’t just enjoy the mystery and deliciousness of these smells, but I had to start thinking about how I would describe them, if only to myself, so I could remember them.

I will probably never come back here! was my thought, and I will never smell this again. So why did I waste time thinking about it, I now wonder. Why not just drink of the thrilling sensory Now? And why were the disciples not content to just be in Christ’s presence at His transfiguration?

They were trying to make provision for the future, and prolong the experience, as I was hoping to provide myself with some words to take with me. I couldn’t hope to make the moment last, as we were walking fairly briskly by then, getting closer and closer to the outside where the opportunity would be gone.  I was lagging behind and noticing that the mix of wild aromas changed with the changing terrain, but they were always bewitching. Do people get addicted to smells? It could happen here.

Time was running out, and it did run out, ten days ago now. I kept thinking about the words for several days, but as expected, there was no way to improve on whatever poor metaphors I came up with while my senses were being bombarded.

The smell of the rain forest was something like eating a cookie fresh from the oven, a cookie made of fermented wild mushrooms and hazelnuts, with one’s head in a bucket of vanilla ice cream.

This was a new smell for me, with no links to my grandmother or anything in my past. There was no way to focus on it the way a camera helps one to focus visually — and no way to deliberately preserve it, though my mind has no doubt filed this input in a purer form than the silly image I worked so hard to invent. Perhaps elements of that exotic forest atmosphere exist elsewhere, and if so, they might someday come to me on a moist breeze and I’ll be taken back to the Hoh.

 

Washington – Homesickness Cured

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In an essay titled “The Inside of Life,” G.K. Chesterton said that he envied Robinson Crusoe being shipwrecked on an island. He talks about “the poetry of limits,” which I am learning is the category where my own favorite life-poems are found. I found another one just last week.

At the beginning of our trip to Washington I was homesick — the first time I recall being plagued by that feeling when actually away from home, though I probably did complain over it right here at the peak of our remodeling project.

There’s never been a year when I took so many trips as 2010. It’s one of those things that is really different about my life nowadays and that I’m learning to adjust to. I’m just a homebody threatening to turn agoraphobic if I get pushed too far. The good old days were the ones when our family’s only car was not available to me and I didn’t have the option of driving to town. I “had to” stay home.

Time wasn’t enough for me to do a proper job preparing for our trip. As G.K.C. also says in that essay, “Life is too large for us as it is: we have all too many things to attend to.” I didn’t seem to have the right clothes, but when I noticed that, it was too late to buy or sew the right ones. I was self-conscious about looking odd until the day I could put on my hiking boots and paint-spattered fleece for the trail.

I always like to write postcards when traveling, so I packed a list of addresses along with some stamps into a zippered pouch along with my pocket calendar and a little prayer book; then the whole thing got left at home in the flurry of departure. All week I wondered if I had lost it at the airport or somewhere on the way, and I felt a bit lost without those props to my usual routine of being me. I couldn’t remember the addresses of most of the people I wanted to favor with a picture and note.

The first night of the journey we stayed with B.’s cousin and her husband who have a house looking out on Hammersley Inlet. They are warm and loving, and I was glad for the time to get to know them better.  It was rejuvenative to walk along the shore and collect large oyster shells, in the company of someone else who appreciated their beauty. Anne didn’t think it strange that I deliberated so much over each one I picked up, and she actually seemed to like talking about the reasons why one or another would be more worthy of carrying around for the rest of the trip. After washing three of my favorite potential soap dishes in the kitchen sink I forgot to take them with me the next morning. Somehow that was o.k. The collecting had been the important part.

We walked with our Bremerton friends also, in the forest nearby, where my beloved “May” showed me piggy back plants, and filbert nuts hanging on the tree; a hazelnut went into my pocket and made it all the way home.

Just making the acquaintance of these tangible natural artifacts was comforting. If I had to leave their territories so soon and move on like an unwilling gypsy, at least I could snap a picture, or kidnap a small nut, to prolong the connection.

On our way to the Lake Quinault Lodge we got lost and spent a couple of hours getting back in the right direction. Rural Washington doesn’t have as many road signs as one could want, and of course, there are all those waterways that confused me when I was trying to be B.’s navigator. Robinson Crusoe didn’t have all this complexity of terrain, and what he had to deal with, he also had time aplenty for. Again, from G.K.C., “What dullness there is in our life arises mostly from its rapidity: people pass us too quickly to show us their interesting side.” Canals and roadsides, too, I find.

We had a reservation for three nights where B. had stayed with his family long ago, a classic inn built in 1926.  F.D.R. also stayed here in 1938 when he was considering whether to make a national park on the Olympic Peninsula. He decided yes, and the rain forest was preserved.

Olympic National Park is kind of like a wheel with spokes going in, but no hub; we had to drive long distances from the outer rim of the park into the choice areas. On the way along the rim to our first spoke, we spent time on Ruby Beach, where the surf crashed and the air was bracing. Just now I was wondering how it compares with the eastern coast in latitude, and after a bit of hunting and pecking around the Net I can tell you that it’s similar to Prince Edward Island, and still well south of the British Isles.

My attention was quickly drawn downward to the smooth and varied pebbles comprising the beach, and I picked up one after another as I noticed their peculiar colors and patterns. Quoting Chesterton, “This desire to be wrecked on an island partly arises from an idea which is at the root of all the arts–the idea of separation.” I removed some of these stones from their vast and cluttered background so I could consider each individually. And I myself had been separated from all my home responsibilities and from all but one talking human. No multitasking necessary.

In that essay that I had read only recently, Chesterton uses literature as a specific example of the artistic principle he’s considering, but it seems to me it is broadly useful for explaining why some activities are just as bracing to my mind and soul as that ocean air.

According to this idea, one appeal of reading a novel is that the number of people we meet there is limited. “Romance seeks to divide certain people from the lump of humanity, as the statue is divided from the lump of marble. We read a good novel not in order to know more people, but in order to know fewer….instead of this bewildering human swarm which passes us every day, fiction asks us to follow one figure (say the postman) consistently through his ecstasies and agonies. That is what makes one so impatient with that type of pessimistic rebel who is always complaining of the narrowness of his life, and demanding a larger sphere. Life is too large for us as it is….All true romance is an attempt to simplify it, to cut it down to plainer and more pictorial proportions.”

Topographically, logistically, socially, the greater Seattle area is way too large for me. Its vastness and complexity weigh on me like an overcast day. Walking with one or two friends is good — more circumscribed and easier to enjoy. But a small pebble is just right. I stuffed my pockets with pebbles, and breathed as heartily as I could of that oxygen-rich and moist air. I sat on a log and did not want to leave.