End of year and recounting of Olympic Peninsula Trip and
more...
Recounting of the 280-mile roundtrip we made to
the Olympic Peninsula, including short takes on Sequim and Dungeness Spit and
Port Angeles. Other odds-and-ends including new projects of mine (art, music
conversion) and an admonishment for more exercise - me included - but you - dear
reader - most of all. It's good for you and you know it and I give some real
reasons why. Pictures of the Olympic Peninsula trip are the previous post -
below this, in other words - but, a map showing the trek is here. Still up and
coming a long essay on blogging and what I think it means or can
mean.
Happy New Year. We had a pretty nice Christmas
and New Years. The tree is still up, it'll come down sometime next week
probably. Weather here has been relatively mild and on several occasions we've
had outstanding blue sky-sunny days. Today, for instance, it's piercingly blue
with the Olympic Range standing tall and snow covered, both Mt. Baker and Mt.
Rainier are jutting their nearly-three-mile-high selves high into the blue sky
and the Cascades are providing a snow-capped ridge line between them.
Leif is back in Washington, DC, and Adam's got a few more days before classes start up again at South Seattle Community College. His work schedule at the West Seattle YMCA (where he lifeguards) has been cut back a bit so he'll have somewhat more free time this winter. Katherine's schedule and mine are relatively un-encumbered - as usual.
Before Leif headed back to DC, he, Adam, and I took an excursion to the Olympic Peninsula to do a little wilderness and small-town sightseeing. On Tuesday, December 28, we headed out early in our car to catch the Bainbridge Island ferry from downtown Seattle. We got to the Colman Dock ferry terminal, paid our $20 fee ($10 for driver and car and $5 each for the passengers) and waited with a few others for the 30-minute ride across the Sound to Bainbridge. The city was shrouded in fog and the sun wasn't up yet. As the ferry headed west, the sun broke out above the fog and gave us some really spectacular views of the city with the sun behind the fog-covered skyscrapers. The fog cleared mid-Sound and we had great views of the Olympic Range with low-lying clouds being lit pink by the rising sun.
Our Olympic Adventure with the red lines showing the un-repeated sections heading west and then back east,
the green sections showing where we retraced our westward path and the blue portion showing where we
corrected our homeward path and got back on the right roads. The origin and ending points on the map are
the approximate position of our house in West Seattle. Furthest point west was 140 miles not counting the
20 mile ferry ride.
Upon landing at Winslow, we set out for Poulsbo, a Norwegian-settled fishing village-turned-arts-and-crafts town. We stopped at one of the milestone shops in town, a German bakery established some 40 years ago and visited by King Harold of Norway a few decades back. We had a breakfast of freshly-baked goodies, several each, and some coffee and read some of the newspaper clippings on the wall. Many of them were from one of the Norwegian national papers commenting on King Harold's visit. Poulsbo has a Leif Ericson park, a really nice walkway along the inlet which connects the town's harbor with the rest of the Sound, and a Sons of Norway Hall, and several streets re-named in honor of Norwegian kings. It even has a commemorative parking lot - the main town parking lot for tourists is the King Olav Parking Lot. How many towns can claim to have a parking lot named after a Viking king - old or new?
The drive from Poulsbo up towards the Olympic Peninsula takes one across the western elements of the Sound - the Hood Canal. This is a strange oddity of nature. The whole Sound region was carved by glaciers after being created by uplifts and volcanic activity in preceding eons. The main Puget Sound area - the water to the east of the Olympic Peninsula - has relatively familiar fjord-like structures, the landforms with hills and mountains with deep escarpments filled with water. It looks like it should if one imagines a glacier scraping away the land between the hills and mountains and leaving deep pockets which would then fill with water. The Sound gets more than 400 feet deep only a few thousand feet offshore of any of the landforms. The Hood Canal, though, is a really straight, dozens-of-miles-long, narrow stretch of deep escarpment which then hooks very abrutly from its generally southwesterly direction back towards the east. It's about ten miles or so across along most of its length with some narrows near the north end, where there's a floating bridge to cross the inlet. The southern portions of the canal suffer from oxygen depletion because of a series of circumstances, including human and farm waste being channeled into the canal. We cross the canal on the floating bridge and are at this point within a dozen miles of the Olympic Mountain foothills with the six-thousand-feet high main mountains rising majestically behind the still-green and completely forested outlying foothills.
Our trip will take us along the northern border of the mountainous central region of the peninsula - following the northern slopes along the Strait of Juan de Fuca. We head north once crossing the Hood Canal bridge, towards another peninsula-cape which is the home of Port Townsend. We're not going to Port Townsend but pass the turnoff (it's a one-way road trip, though there's a ferry from Port Townsend to yet another Puget Sound island) and head towards the northern banks of the Olympic Peninsula - the area between the mountains and the Strait. As we near Sequim we decided to divert and drive through the town. It's pronounced "skwim" (or, depending on your use of English, "squim") and is a native word meaning "calm waters." It's also the hometown for a particularly unique farming region. Because of the prevailing winds and the height of the Olympic Mountains, the Olympics harbor the only true rain forest in North America - the Olympic Rain Forest. Because of this and the location in what is called the "rain shadow" of the mountains, the Sequim valley gets annually less than an inch of rain, even though the valley itself is drenched in aquatic richness because of all the snow and rain runoff creeks and rivers which run north from the mountains through the valley. It borders a very long stretch of the Strait of Juan de Fuca at a location which is also protected by the mountains which are along the southwestern coast of Vancouver Island. The Strait along this stretch is indeed "calm" waters. The rain shadow allows the Sequim valley to receive over 340 days of sunshine a year with incredibly moderate temperatures. The valley is noted for the oldest vineyards in the state, some of the oldest wineries, an incredibly good and special crop of strawberries, blueberries (because of all the marshes along the rivers and all the rocky ledges along the foothills), and blackberries. More recently they've become the lavender capital of North America - lavender for sachets, oil for perfumes, and bunches of plants themselves for bouquets. As we approach Sequim it's more than abundantly obvious that this is a farm valley and that Sequim itself is a farm and farm distribution town - too many trips through the heartland of America to not recognize a farm community when we see one.
We drive through Sequim and decide to take a further diversion and head towards the Dungeness Spit - a natural, five-mile-long, sand and gravel spit which sticks out into the Strait from the region where the Sequim river empties into the oceanway. It's a natural wildlife preserve and national recreation area and completely protected. We park, read most of the signs along the path, pay our user fee and chat with a docent from the local National Recreation Area-National Wildlife Area office, and head down the steep hill from the headlands to the waterfront and the spit. There are hundreds of species of waterfowl which use this area - it's along one of North America's major flyways - and there's several unique fish and mammals which claim this area as home. We hike out along the spit, an area maybe fifty to a hundred feet wide depending on tides, toward the lighthouse at the end, which is five miles away. When we first saw this along the view road through Sequim we thought it was a breakwater. The rocks and driftwood which have been directed by tides and river runoff to create the spit looked all the world like a man-made breakwater consisting of huge boulders. Up close it's a completely different scene with sandy and pebble-strewn beaches on both sides. The Strait is on one side and two protected bays are on the inside sections, the spit actually has a branch which creates the two bays on the protected side. Portions of the area are off-limits to humans and accessible only by kayak in the summer months. The whole area is a wonderful, pristine, natural beach with the Olympic Mountains behind us, the Strait of Juan de Fuca at our feet and across the Strait the snow-capped mountains along the southern coast of Vancouver Island. We can see condominiums and apartment and office buildings glistening in the sun at the eastern end of Vancouver Island - the city of Victoria - is a mere 19 miles away, across smooth-as-glass blue saltwater. We spend about two hours crawling along the spit and then head back to the car to continue on westward.
From Sequim we head along the coast highway - US 101 - towards Port Angeles. Port Angeles is an old whaling town which has retained its nautical roots and is a grain and oil tanker harbor with a Coast Guard station and one of the Park Entrance stations for the Olympic National Park. It's also the local services town for this stretch of the northern Olympic Peninsula, so it has the hospital, college branches and developed infrastructure of an "important" city. It's not that big but does have a nicely appointed turn-of-the-century downtown area which parallels the harbor and a harbor drive and walkway which runs the several miles along the harbor area. It is also the location of one of two ferry terminals which directly serve Vancouver Island (British Columbia) and Victoria, the other being Seattle. We stop and have a fancy lunch of seafood at a crab house along the harbor-front and watch as the clouds roll in and the fog develops again. This is mid-afternoon, after the whole morning being basically a blue-sky, clear and sunny day. Now we begin to appreciate the "rain shadow" effect of the Olympics as we're now more westerly and getting out of the rain shadow. We finish our lunch and head along the Strait highway, Washington State Route 112, to see if we can make it all the way or at least part of the way to the bluffs at Neah Bay, the most westerly point in the state of Washington and the end of the peninsula. If we can't make it, there's a turnoff from 112 back to Highway 101 and we can just retrace our steps. As we're riding along Highway 112, we can see the promontory which is the headlands at Neah Bay - it seems so much closer than it really is. By this time it's about 3:30 pm and the sun will be setting at 4:15 pm so we decided to take the turnoff back to Highway 101. It's not that the drive wasn't incredibly gorgeous, it was, winding and twisting mountain roads about 100 to 200 feet directly above a steep cliffside which fell directly down to the beach along the Strait. The road was a good two-lane state highway with virtually no traffic, but it also had no guard rails and speeds which went down to 10 mph and no faster than 40 mph on whatever passed for a straight-away. In short, it was a long-time drive for not that many miles and we were not going to get to Neah Bay in time to watch the sun set. I'll do that later in the year when there are more hours of sunlight. It's a shame that Leif couldn't experience that on this trip - it was his first venture in the Northwest this far west - but there'll be other times he's in town and we can try and recapture this.
We got to the cutoff and headed south back to Highway 101 and took that back east towards Port Angeles. Highway 101 dips inside the Olympic National Forest, which borders on all sides the National Park, and took us alongside Crescent Lake. Crescent Lake is another glaciated remnant of 10,000 years ago and is a deep, crescent-shaped, mountain lake very much like the alpine lakes in Switzerland or higher here in the Cascades of Washington and Oregon. There was a very moody fog bank which was hugging the water with periodic breaks to let the sun shine down on the waters - giving it a very spooky and Stephen King-like feel. There were a few really fanciful lodges and really large single-family chalets along the northern edge of the lake, the southern edge being in the protected confines of the national forest. This would be a really sweet getaway spot for those with the money. Basically like having a private lake a mere three hours from downtown Seattle. We drove along the eight-mile lake marveling at the bends and twists of the lake, all the little coves, and the wonderful tricks the fog and sunlight were playing with the water and the sky. Once past Crescent Lake we were back on the straighter sections of Highway 101 and breezed through Port Angeles and Sequim and headed back towards the Hood Canal to get back to Poulsbo and thence Winslow and the ferry back home to Seattle. By now it was well past sunset and very dark, being surrounded on all sides by mountains or foothills and the fog was beginning to roll back in.
We cross the Hood Canal bridge with no effort and find our way to the right highway but our path toward Poulsbo was made a bit difficult by the lack of proper signage and the thickness of the fog. Twenty minutes past where we should have turned off we realize we're on a one-way trip to Bremerton and find a turnoff and turn around. Getting through Poulsbo this time correctly, we headed for Winslow and began to see the trail of commuter cars coming from the ferry landing still more than a dozen miles in the distance. I had begun to get worried that we'd have to await maybe another ferry, but by the time we get to the Winslow ferry terminal there's only a few dozen cars ahead of us so we'll catch the next ferry with no problem. It's only a $10 cost back across the Sound and our wait is a mere ten minutes and once more we're on a Washington State Ferry boat. Rolling across the Sound on the way back we encounter no fog and clear skies but as we approach Elliott Bay and the Seattle harbor, the city is enshrouded in a really thick bank of fog and it's not until we are practically docked that we can actually see the buildings and lights of downtown.
Driving home from the ferry terminal is equally exciting as the fog is definitely covering the entire city and West Seattle even more so. Heading up from the West Seattle bridge along 35th Avenue towards home we could barely see half-a-block in front of us and when we turn on Monroe to drive the four blocks to our house we can't see even that far. When we get to the top of the hill our house is barely visible through the fog - and we're only thirty feet away from it. Exciting day. We'd spent 12 hours on the road, from the morning ferry run across the Sound to the evening ferry run back and seen fog, blue sky and sunshine, rain, fog, clear night skies, and more fog. I suppose you might say that is typical for the Puget Sound area in the Winter but it was a treat for me, Adam, and especially Leif - who hasn't had the pleasure of staying here for more than a few days at a time.
It was also a great experience because it truly demonstrated how diverse this area of the country is and how magnificent the scenery is and how close the wilderness is to the big-city downtown. We'd gone 140 miles west (and another 140 back east again) and seen several different ecologies and experienced a number of unique and totally different environments and seen something I hadn't known existed - a natural and huge spit sticking out into the Strait. We'd also experienced a bit of Northwest history and culture and explored several local towns of note. We'd also seen and been impressed by the depth and breadth of the Olympic Range - it's much larger the closer one gets. My view across the Sound encompasses the entire range, from northern to southern extents, and yet I had no idea how convoluted and inter-meshed these ranges really were, nor how many different rivers and creeks came tumbling out of them towards either the Sound or the Strait. We'd also sampled more local cuisine in both Poulsbo and Port Angeles and decided that this place has really good food - practically anywhere.
What else has been happening around here. Well, it's Winter, which means the usual (learned this last Winter) three to four days of rain, mist, fog, or a combination of all three with or without winds and temperatures in the mid-forties followed by one or two days of piercingly-blue-sky weather with the temperatures either plunging another five degrees or not. It also doesn't seem to matter whether or not the barometer shows high or low pressure. That's the weather around here whether or not one actually likes it. I've been getting outside, usually in the morning, for a five mile hike for the singular purpose of getting exercise and whatever sunlight there is to be had. I'm not sure that I really suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder - isn't it pathetic the way we seem to always come up with the acronym before we fill in the blanks as to what the letters mean. I think SAD is such a pathetic nomer - it's like the psychologists and psychiatrists and their conniving kind deliberately wanted to name a disease after the way it made most folks feel. I don't get "sad" in the winter time - I just get restless. I'm really an outdoor person, which is to say I'd rather be outdoors than indoors. This explains why our addition, and my studio especially, are nearly all glass - glass which opens. It also explains why I'm on the go all the time, I want to get "out" - whether it's only from one indoor place to another. I also can't sit still for very long periods without feeling like my bones are turning to stone and muscles are atrophying in front of my very eyes.
The truth is that for those who do suffer from SAD, getting real sunlight is the trick and without that getting real exercise is the next best trick. Alas, most folks who do suffer SAD are neither compelled to get outdoors in the Winter nor are they motivated to exercise. Which, of course, for those who are the real sufferers is a double-whammy on their malady. Katherine's brother's soulmate works in the health services industry as either a physical therapist or exercise manager, depending on the location and clientele. According to her knowledgeable mind in these matters, walking 10,000 steps a day is the minimum which we should all be doing. For folks who have floor jobs, such as working in a store or maybe a real estate agent, some of those steps come as a natural consequence of the job. For most, though, it's a few dozen steps here to the door and a few more dozen to the car and then maybe a hundred from the parking lot to wherever they're going. Which means most folks get maybe a half-a-thousand steps a day. I asked her what 10,000 steps equated to in miles. Her answer was both a surprise and not a surprise.
I don't feel good if I've not had at least one five-mile walk (and around here in West Seattle, they're hikes because of all the hills) a day. Ten-thousand steps is roughly equivalent to a five-mile walk depending on one's stride and leg length. Which means I've been naturally-driven towards what is the minimum exercise we should all be getting - in my case because I don't feel right if I don't get that exercise. In the summer, it's a whole lot easier because I take these 15 and 20 mile bike rides and then go for a walk later. The exercise, especially the walking, is really good for you because it gets the heart and circulatory system working to full capacity; the legs are an auxiliary heart muscle, pumping the blood back up to the level of the heart and relieving the heart of some of the burden of the diastolic portion of the beat. Walking and swimming are also good because they assist the lymph system. Though a circulatory system of its own, the lymph system doesn't have a pump like the heart's circulatory system. Which means your lymph system relies entirely on the contractions of adjacent muscles along the line of a lymph node to move the contents of that node along. The really important element of this is that without exercise some of the body's waste products mosey along slowly towards being concentrated and eliminated. In the Winter there is a higher risk of getting infected with something - a flu or a cold. This is the time we should be avidly flushing our lymph systems, not letting them sit there and stew away.
For all these reasons I've been getting out even more this winter than in previous winters and I must admit, it's doing good things for me. With as little light as we have in the days during winter, it's important to have a feeling that one is not wasting the time away and simply hibernating in one's cave. Admittedly, pretty much everyone who reads this will agree and then turn around in their chair to continue to watch that DVD they've gotten from NetFlix. Since we've evolved so far away from actually having to "work" for a living, keeping up a rigorous exercise regime is even more important and - at least in my case - it also seems to be one of the keys to continued good health. So, for the rest of you, please get some exercise, any will do and it's all better for you than simply staying indoors and pining away the long winter days.
Beyond getting out and about, I've also been converting my LP collection into MP3's - actually I've been converting them into MP4s because I've been using the new AAC (or MP4, both the same, one's Apple's name the other is the generic name) converter in iTunes. It takes a little more space than an MP3 but in a one-to-one comparison, the new MP4 codecs are much better at preserving the minute distinctions which make music that much better. And, since I've got the originals, if I really want to get that last ounce of music out of it, i'll put the LP on my turntable and play it through my Krell preamp and Adcom poweramps and Infinity speakers. The MP4s are for putting all this music on the iPod which means I can take it with me - in the car or on my person - or I can play it from my computer through iTunes. Yes, even you Windows people should be using iTunes. It's just that much better a musical experience than anything Microsoft or Real can even conceive of let alone produce.
I'm only through the "C's" in my LP collection so there's an amazing amount of music which I have but haven't listened to in a long time which I'll be able to hear. For the technically-inclined, I use a Mac so the software is Mac-specific, but I'm sure there's Windows or Linux equivalents. First I capture the audio - using a line out from my preamp - with Audio Hijack Pro. This is a $39 tool which is a great capture device and very affordable. It has a built-in digital editor if you need that as well. I personally use BIAS' Peak digital audio editor because I own it (that's a $400 program). Mostly, though, all I do is trim the front and back and maybe fade it out a little quicker and if necessary, equalize the tracks so I use more of the digital bits I have. Then I save and dump it into iTunes which converts it to MP4. From putting a record on the turntable to having it in my iTunes collection takes maybe ten minutes longer than the length of time the record runs for. Because I've become so proficient, I'd actually be willing to offer my services to anyone within driving range of my house if they couldn't otherwise do this. LPs also have a different "sound" than CDs and even converted into digital MP3's or MP4's they sound a wee bit better. Warmer, better oomph on the base (with a good turntable and cartridge, 'natch) and the highs are a little more open and airy. How do I know this? Because I've spent such a fortune on music so far that I've actually got the same album in LP, cassette and CD format. And, there's no one who thinks the RIAA is more evil than me. Furthermore, I've even paid for all this stuff. They're just barking up the wrong tree and like Detroit in the '60's are heading for a huge fall if they don't get a better act together than suing people. Like, how about pricing the music at what it actually costs to make and giving the artists some of the money? When I see CDs in stores for $12.99 and they're considered "bargain" prices and I know that BMG music service will sell me the same album for $7.99 and iTunes will sell it for $9.99, I know someone is ripping a whole bunch of us off. (Okay, end of anti-RIAA rant!)
I've also been planning my next set of art walks. There's the Pioneer Square first Thursday and the Ballard second Saturday. Now that I've done two of the Pioneer Square walks and one of the Ballard, I'll head back with the intention of talking to the gallery owners and artists and capturing these conversations. Call it another avocation. I want to get inside the heads of these folks, see why they do what they do and where they get their ideas and inspiration from. Yeah, sure, there's lots of art magazines out there which try to do the same thing but they don't ask the questions I ask and their articles don't have the same affect as a direct interaction with the artist. Not much of what I've read about some of the artists I've talked to was actually about their personal lives, and, it's the personal life element from which an artist paints or sculpts or writes or even acts. This new gig will occupy a few days a month for the foreseeable hereafter.
I've also begun to paint again myself. I've got two canvases now about half-way finished. I don't have the materials I want to finish them but will begin to erode away at that issue soon enough. There's an artist's paint and materials manufacturing firm right here in Seattle, in fact right near us in SoDo. I'll visit them - Daniel Smith Art Supplies and find what I'm looking for and probably be inspired even further. It's a shame, really, because a few months ago we had all this new, empty, wall space upstairs. But, because I had a lifetime of already-finished art and photography, I've begun to fill the walls already. At some point, and who knows when that point will be reached, it might make sense to consider art as something I do but others actually hang in their space. In college, I painted with oils and did a huge number of canvases and gave them away to whoever expressed a liking for a particular piece. Most of what I gave away could have been sold. I had no one who wanted a piece of my art who didn't offer some dollar amount in trade. Heaven knows I was poor enough that I should have taken their money and felt good about it. But, at that time I was actually offended at the idea of "selling" my art. It was "art" and I think I come by the "information/art wants to be free" notion naturally. I wanted to give it away because that was the more pure of the possible motives which the artist and patron could have between them. To be honest, I still feel that way. I know there's this notion about something not being worth it's equivalent value if it's "free," so I'll have to have some inner-self discussions about the art and artist and patron and see where I wind up. On the other hand, if someone sees something in my house which they like and would hang in their house, I'd probably be okay with making them a gift of it.
On even other matters, I've been spending a lot of time at Apple's online store of late, dickering between one of three models of new computer to see which would be both affordable and last the longest. I'm torn between a $2500 iMac 20" LCD model (decked out, of course, base price is $1900) and one of two G5 dual processors, the more elaborate of which is $3000 (equally decked out). No, I haven't fallen out of love with my iBook. Nor has it failed me in any way. It's just incapable of doing what I now want it to do. For instance, I couldn't download the 30-day free trial copy of Motion, Apple's After Effects-like product for Final Cut Pro, because the specs for Motion required a G4 minimum and a faster drive than my iBook has. Nor could I get myself the new Myst IV game which I really wanted for Christmas because it, too, requires a minimum of G4 but with even stiffer requirements for the video card (and my iBook only has 12meg of VRAM!!). I already couldn't use GarageBand from the internal drive on the iBook but managed to get around that by booting from a faster, external, drive. Yuck! It's always such an eye-opening kick in the rear (to mix metaphors) when one realizes that one's tool of the moment is incapable of being used in the manner one would like. So, time to upgrade. I'll wait to see what happens at the MacWorld thingy in January (Apple usually introduces new models, lowering either the price of admission for the older ones or improving the whole system for the same price) and then make up my mind. I was spending so much time on the Apple site that I even got email and a phone call from an Apple "personal" sales representative who said she could offer some discounts or up the ante for whatever I was interested in. That was curious because it never dawned on me that - A) Apple monitored their store's online activities; or, B) Apple might notice that I've spent a lot of money with them over the years. All of this is a good thing and I'll find a way to make the money appear.
Long post for a period of time when most folks think nothing happens. Now you know. In the middle of Winter, in the middle of short days and indoor-stay-at-home activities, some things do happen to some people. Or, those people make them happen.
And like that....
Chas
Leif is back in Washington, DC, and Adam's got a few more days before classes start up again at South Seattle Community College. His work schedule at the West Seattle YMCA (where he lifeguards) has been cut back a bit so he'll have somewhat more free time this winter. Katherine's schedule and mine are relatively un-encumbered - as usual.
Before Leif headed back to DC, he, Adam, and I took an excursion to the Olympic Peninsula to do a little wilderness and small-town sightseeing. On Tuesday, December 28, we headed out early in our car to catch the Bainbridge Island ferry from downtown Seattle. We got to the Colman Dock ferry terminal, paid our $20 fee ($10 for driver and car and $5 each for the passengers) and waited with a few others for the 30-minute ride across the Sound to Bainbridge. The city was shrouded in fog and the sun wasn't up yet. As the ferry headed west, the sun broke out above the fog and gave us some really spectacular views of the city with the sun behind the fog-covered skyscrapers. The fog cleared mid-Sound and we had great views of the Olympic Range with low-lying clouds being lit pink by the rising sun.
Our Olympic Adventure with the red lines showing the un-repeated sections heading west and then back east,
the green sections showing where we retraced our westward path and the blue portion showing where we
corrected our homeward path and got back on the right roads. The origin and ending points on the map are
the approximate position of our house in West Seattle. Furthest point west was 140 miles not counting the
20 mile ferry ride.
Upon landing at Winslow, we set out for Poulsbo, a Norwegian-settled fishing village-turned-arts-and-crafts town. We stopped at one of the milestone shops in town, a German bakery established some 40 years ago and visited by King Harold of Norway a few decades back. We had a breakfast of freshly-baked goodies, several each, and some coffee and read some of the newspaper clippings on the wall. Many of them were from one of the Norwegian national papers commenting on King Harold's visit. Poulsbo has a Leif Ericson park, a really nice walkway along the inlet which connects the town's harbor with the rest of the Sound, and a Sons of Norway Hall, and several streets re-named in honor of Norwegian kings. It even has a commemorative parking lot - the main town parking lot for tourists is the King Olav Parking Lot. How many towns can claim to have a parking lot named after a Viking king - old or new?
The drive from Poulsbo up towards the Olympic Peninsula takes one across the western elements of the Sound - the Hood Canal. This is a strange oddity of nature. The whole Sound region was carved by glaciers after being created by uplifts and volcanic activity in preceding eons. The main Puget Sound area - the water to the east of the Olympic Peninsula - has relatively familiar fjord-like structures, the landforms with hills and mountains with deep escarpments filled with water. It looks like it should if one imagines a glacier scraping away the land between the hills and mountains and leaving deep pockets which would then fill with water. The Sound gets more than 400 feet deep only a few thousand feet offshore of any of the landforms. The Hood Canal, though, is a really straight, dozens-of-miles-long, narrow stretch of deep escarpment which then hooks very abrutly from its generally southwesterly direction back towards the east. It's about ten miles or so across along most of its length with some narrows near the north end, where there's a floating bridge to cross the inlet. The southern portions of the canal suffer from oxygen depletion because of a series of circumstances, including human and farm waste being channeled into the canal. We cross the canal on the floating bridge and are at this point within a dozen miles of the Olympic Mountain foothills with the six-thousand-feet high main mountains rising majestically behind the still-green and completely forested outlying foothills.
Our trip will take us along the northern border of the mountainous central region of the peninsula - following the northern slopes along the Strait of Juan de Fuca. We head north once crossing the Hood Canal bridge, towards another peninsula-cape which is the home of Port Townsend. We're not going to Port Townsend but pass the turnoff (it's a one-way road trip, though there's a ferry from Port Townsend to yet another Puget Sound island) and head towards the northern banks of the Olympic Peninsula - the area between the mountains and the Strait. As we near Sequim we decided to divert and drive through the town. It's pronounced "skwim" (or, depending on your use of English, "squim") and is a native word meaning "calm waters." It's also the hometown for a particularly unique farming region. Because of the prevailing winds and the height of the Olympic Mountains, the Olympics harbor the only true rain forest in North America - the Olympic Rain Forest. Because of this and the location in what is called the "rain shadow" of the mountains, the Sequim valley gets annually less than an inch of rain, even though the valley itself is drenched in aquatic richness because of all the snow and rain runoff creeks and rivers which run north from the mountains through the valley. It borders a very long stretch of the Strait of Juan de Fuca at a location which is also protected by the mountains which are along the southwestern coast of Vancouver Island. The Strait along this stretch is indeed "calm" waters. The rain shadow allows the Sequim valley to receive over 340 days of sunshine a year with incredibly moderate temperatures. The valley is noted for the oldest vineyards in the state, some of the oldest wineries, an incredibly good and special crop of strawberries, blueberries (because of all the marshes along the rivers and all the rocky ledges along the foothills), and blackberries. More recently they've become the lavender capital of North America - lavender for sachets, oil for perfumes, and bunches of plants themselves for bouquets. As we approach Sequim it's more than abundantly obvious that this is a farm valley and that Sequim itself is a farm and farm distribution town - too many trips through the heartland of America to not recognize a farm community when we see one.
We drive through Sequim and decide to take a further diversion and head towards the Dungeness Spit - a natural, five-mile-long, sand and gravel spit which sticks out into the Strait from the region where the Sequim river empties into the oceanway. It's a natural wildlife preserve and national recreation area and completely protected. We park, read most of the signs along the path, pay our user fee and chat with a docent from the local National Recreation Area-National Wildlife Area office, and head down the steep hill from the headlands to the waterfront and the spit. There are hundreds of species of waterfowl which use this area - it's along one of North America's major flyways - and there's several unique fish and mammals which claim this area as home. We hike out along the spit, an area maybe fifty to a hundred feet wide depending on tides, toward the lighthouse at the end, which is five miles away. When we first saw this along the view road through Sequim we thought it was a breakwater. The rocks and driftwood which have been directed by tides and river runoff to create the spit looked all the world like a man-made breakwater consisting of huge boulders. Up close it's a completely different scene with sandy and pebble-strewn beaches on both sides. The Strait is on one side and two protected bays are on the inside sections, the spit actually has a branch which creates the two bays on the protected side. Portions of the area are off-limits to humans and accessible only by kayak in the summer months. The whole area is a wonderful, pristine, natural beach with the Olympic Mountains behind us, the Strait of Juan de Fuca at our feet and across the Strait the snow-capped mountains along the southern coast of Vancouver Island. We can see condominiums and apartment and office buildings glistening in the sun at the eastern end of Vancouver Island - the city of Victoria - is a mere 19 miles away, across smooth-as-glass blue saltwater. We spend about two hours crawling along the spit and then head back to the car to continue on westward.
From Sequim we head along the coast highway - US 101 - towards Port Angeles. Port Angeles is an old whaling town which has retained its nautical roots and is a grain and oil tanker harbor with a Coast Guard station and one of the Park Entrance stations for the Olympic National Park. It's also the local services town for this stretch of the northern Olympic Peninsula, so it has the hospital, college branches and developed infrastructure of an "important" city. It's not that big but does have a nicely appointed turn-of-the-century downtown area which parallels the harbor and a harbor drive and walkway which runs the several miles along the harbor area. It is also the location of one of two ferry terminals which directly serve Vancouver Island (British Columbia) and Victoria, the other being Seattle. We stop and have a fancy lunch of seafood at a crab house along the harbor-front and watch as the clouds roll in and the fog develops again. This is mid-afternoon, after the whole morning being basically a blue-sky, clear and sunny day. Now we begin to appreciate the "rain shadow" effect of the Olympics as we're now more westerly and getting out of the rain shadow. We finish our lunch and head along the Strait highway, Washington State Route 112, to see if we can make it all the way or at least part of the way to the bluffs at Neah Bay, the most westerly point in the state of Washington and the end of the peninsula. If we can't make it, there's a turnoff from 112 back to Highway 101 and we can just retrace our steps. As we're riding along Highway 112, we can see the promontory which is the headlands at Neah Bay - it seems so much closer than it really is. By this time it's about 3:30 pm and the sun will be setting at 4:15 pm so we decided to take the turnoff back to Highway 101. It's not that the drive wasn't incredibly gorgeous, it was, winding and twisting mountain roads about 100 to 200 feet directly above a steep cliffside which fell directly down to the beach along the Strait. The road was a good two-lane state highway with virtually no traffic, but it also had no guard rails and speeds which went down to 10 mph and no faster than 40 mph on whatever passed for a straight-away. In short, it was a long-time drive for not that many miles and we were not going to get to Neah Bay in time to watch the sun set. I'll do that later in the year when there are more hours of sunlight. It's a shame that Leif couldn't experience that on this trip - it was his first venture in the Northwest this far west - but there'll be other times he's in town and we can try and recapture this.
We got to the cutoff and headed south back to Highway 101 and took that back east towards Port Angeles. Highway 101 dips inside the Olympic National Forest, which borders on all sides the National Park, and took us alongside Crescent Lake. Crescent Lake is another glaciated remnant of 10,000 years ago and is a deep, crescent-shaped, mountain lake very much like the alpine lakes in Switzerland or higher here in the Cascades of Washington and Oregon. There was a very moody fog bank which was hugging the water with periodic breaks to let the sun shine down on the waters - giving it a very spooky and Stephen King-like feel. There were a few really fanciful lodges and really large single-family chalets along the northern edge of the lake, the southern edge being in the protected confines of the national forest. This would be a really sweet getaway spot for those with the money. Basically like having a private lake a mere three hours from downtown Seattle. We drove along the eight-mile lake marveling at the bends and twists of the lake, all the little coves, and the wonderful tricks the fog and sunlight were playing with the water and the sky. Once past Crescent Lake we were back on the straighter sections of Highway 101 and breezed through Port Angeles and Sequim and headed back towards the Hood Canal to get back to Poulsbo and thence Winslow and the ferry back home to Seattle. By now it was well past sunset and very dark, being surrounded on all sides by mountains or foothills and the fog was beginning to roll back in.
We cross the Hood Canal bridge with no effort and find our way to the right highway but our path toward Poulsbo was made a bit difficult by the lack of proper signage and the thickness of the fog. Twenty minutes past where we should have turned off we realize we're on a one-way trip to Bremerton and find a turnoff and turn around. Getting through Poulsbo this time correctly, we headed for Winslow and began to see the trail of commuter cars coming from the ferry landing still more than a dozen miles in the distance. I had begun to get worried that we'd have to await maybe another ferry, but by the time we get to the Winslow ferry terminal there's only a few dozen cars ahead of us so we'll catch the next ferry with no problem. It's only a $10 cost back across the Sound and our wait is a mere ten minutes and once more we're on a Washington State Ferry boat. Rolling across the Sound on the way back we encounter no fog and clear skies but as we approach Elliott Bay and the Seattle harbor, the city is enshrouded in a really thick bank of fog and it's not until we are practically docked that we can actually see the buildings and lights of downtown.
Driving home from the ferry terminal is equally exciting as the fog is definitely covering the entire city and West Seattle even more so. Heading up from the West Seattle bridge along 35th Avenue towards home we could barely see half-a-block in front of us and when we turn on Monroe to drive the four blocks to our house we can't see even that far. When we get to the top of the hill our house is barely visible through the fog - and we're only thirty feet away from it. Exciting day. We'd spent 12 hours on the road, from the morning ferry run across the Sound to the evening ferry run back and seen fog, blue sky and sunshine, rain, fog, clear night skies, and more fog. I suppose you might say that is typical for the Puget Sound area in the Winter but it was a treat for me, Adam, and especially Leif - who hasn't had the pleasure of staying here for more than a few days at a time.
It was also a great experience because it truly demonstrated how diverse this area of the country is and how magnificent the scenery is and how close the wilderness is to the big-city downtown. We'd gone 140 miles west (and another 140 back east again) and seen several different ecologies and experienced a number of unique and totally different environments and seen something I hadn't known existed - a natural and huge spit sticking out into the Strait. We'd also experienced a bit of Northwest history and culture and explored several local towns of note. We'd also seen and been impressed by the depth and breadth of the Olympic Range - it's much larger the closer one gets. My view across the Sound encompasses the entire range, from northern to southern extents, and yet I had no idea how convoluted and inter-meshed these ranges really were, nor how many different rivers and creeks came tumbling out of them towards either the Sound or the Strait. We'd also sampled more local cuisine in both Poulsbo and Port Angeles and decided that this place has really good food - practically anywhere.
What else has been happening around here. Well, it's Winter, which means the usual (learned this last Winter) three to four days of rain, mist, fog, or a combination of all three with or without winds and temperatures in the mid-forties followed by one or two days of piercingly-blue-sky weather with the temperatures either plunging another five degrees or not. It also doesn't seem to matter whether or not the barometer shows high or low pressure. That's the weather around here whether or not one actually likes it. I've been getting outside, usually in the morning, for a five mile hike for the singular purpose of getting exercise and whatever sunlight there is to be had. I'm not sure that I really suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder - isn't it pathetic the way we seem to always come up with the acronym before we fill in the blanks as to what the letters mean. I think SAD is such a pathetic nomer - it's like the psychologists and psychiatrists and their conniving kind deliberately wanted to name a disease after the way it made most folks feel. I don't get "sad" in the winter time - I just get restless. I'm really an outdoor person, which is to say I'd rather be outdoors than indoors. This explains why our addition, and my studio especially, are nearly all glass - glass which opens. It also explains why I'm on the go all the time, I want to get "out" - whether it's only from one indoor place to another. I also can't sit still for very long periods without feeling like my bones are turning to stone and muscles are atrophying in front of my very eyes.
The truth is that for those who do suffer from SAD, getting real sunlight is the trick and without that getting real exercise is the next best trick. Alas, most folks who do suffer SAD are neither compelled to get outdoors in the Winter nor are they motivated to exercise. Which, of course, for those who are the real sufferers is a double-whammy on their malady. Katherine's brother's soulmate works in the health services industry as either a physical therapist or exercise manager, depending on the location and clientele. According to her knowledgeable mind in these matters, walking 10,000 steps a day is the minimum which we should all be doing. For folks who have floor jobs, such as working in a store or maybe a real estate agent, some of those steps come as a natural consequence of the job. For most, though, it's a few dozen steps here to the door and a few more dozen to the car and then maybe a hundred from the parking lot to wherever they're going. Which means most folks get maybe a half-a-thousand steps a day. I asked her what 10,000 steps equated to in miles. Her answer was both a surprise and not a surprise.
I don't feel good if I've not had at least one five-mile walk (and around here in West Seattle, they're hikes because of all the hills) a day. Ten-thousand steps is roughly equivalent to a five-mile walk depending on one's stride and leg length. Which means I've been naturally-driven towards what is the minimum exercise we should all be getting - in my case because I don't feel right if I don't get that exercise. In the summer, it's a whole lot easier because I take these 15 and 20 mile bike rides and then go for a walk later. The exercise, especially the walking, is really good for you because it gets the heart and circulatory system working to full capacity; the legs are an auxiliary heart muscle, pumping the blood back up to the level of the heart and relieving the heart of some of the burden of the diastolic portion of the beat. Walking and swimming are also good because they assist the lymph system. Though a circulatory system of its own, the lymph system doesn't have a pump like the heart's circulatory system. Which means your lymph system relies entirely on the contractions of adjacent muscles along the line of a lymph node to move the contents of that node along. The really important element of this is that without exercise some of the body's waste products mosey along slowly towards being concentrated and eliminated. In the Winter there is a higher risk of getting infected with something - a flu or a cold. This is the time we should be avidly flushing our lymph systems, not letting them sit there and stew away.
For all these reasons I've been getting out even more this winter than in previous winters and I must admit, it's doing good things for me. With as little light as we have in the days during winter, it's important to have a feeling that one is not wasting the time away and simply hibernating in one's cave. Admittedly, pretty much everyone who reads this will agree and then turn around in their chair to continue to watch that DVD they've gotten from NetFlix. Since we've evolved so far away from actually having to "work" for a living, keeping up a rigorous exercise regime is even more important and - at least in my case - it also seems to be one of the keys to continued good health. So, for the rest of you, please get some exercise, any will do and it's all better for you than simply staying indoors and pining away the long winter days.
Beyond getting out and about, I've also been converting my LP collection into MP3's - actually I've been converting them into MP4s because I've been using the new AAC (or MP4, both the same, one's Apple's name the other is the generic name) converter in iTunes. It takes a little more space than an MP3 but in a one-to-one comparison, the new MP4 codecs are much better at preserving the minute distinctions which make music that much better. And, since I've got the originals, if I really want to get that last ounce of music out of it, i'll put the LP on my turntable and play it through my Krell preamp and Adcom poweramps and Infinity speakers. The MP4s are for putting all this music on the iPod which means I can take it with me - in the car or on my person - or I can play it from my computer through iTunes. Yes, even you Windows people should be using iTunes. It's just that much better a musical experience than anything Microsoft or Real can even conceive of let alone produce.
I'm only through the "C's" in my LP collection so there's an amazing amount of music which I have but haven't listened to in a long time which I'll be able to hear. For the technically-inclined, I use a Mac so the software is Mac-specific, but I'm sure there's Windows or Linux equivalents. First I capture the audio - using a line out from my preamp - with Audio Hijack Pro. This is a $39 tool which is a great capture device and very affordable. It has a built-in digital editor if you need that as well. I personally use BIAS' Peak digital audio editor because I own it (that's a $400 program). Mostly, though, all I do is trim the front and back and maybe fade it out a little quicker and if necessary, equalize the tracks so I use more of the digital bits I have. Then I save and dump it into iTunes which converts it to MP4. From putting a record on the turntable to having it in my iTunes collection takes maybe ten minutes longer than the length of time the record runs for. Because I've become so proficient, I'd actually be willing to offer my services to anyone within driving range of my house if they couldn't otherwise do this. LPs also have a different "sound" than CDs and even converted into digital MP3's or MP4's they sound a wee bit better. Warmer, better oomph on the base (with a good turntable and cartridge, 'natch) and the highs are a little more open and airy. How do I know this? Because I've spent such a fortune on music so far that I've actually got the same album in LP, cassette and CD format. And, there's no one who thinks the RIAA is more evil than me. Furthermore, I've even paid for all this stuff. They're just barking up the wrong tree and like Detroit in the '60's are heading for a huge fall if they don't get a better act together than suing people. Like, how about pricing the music at what it actually costs to make and giving the artists some of the money? When I see CDs in stores for $12.99 and they're considered "bargain" prices and I know that BMG music service will sell me the same album for $7.99 and iTunes will sell it for $9.99, I know someone is ripping a whole bunch of us off. (Okay, end of anti-RIAA rant!)
I've also been planning my next set of art walks. There's the Pioneer Square first Thursday and the Ballard second Saturday. Now that I've done two of the Pioneer Square walks and one of the Ballard, I'll head back with the intention of talking to the gallery owners and artists and capturing these conversations. Call it another avocation. I want to get inside the heads of these folks, see why they do what they do and where they get their ideas and inspiration from. Yeah, sure, there's lots of art magazines out there which try to do the same thing but they don't ask the questions I ask and their articles don't have the same affect as a direct interaction with the artist. Not much of what I've read about some of the artists I've talked to was actually about their personal lives, and, it's the personal life element from which an artist paints or sculpts or writes or even acts. This new gig will occupy a few days a month for the foreseeable hereafter.
I've also begun to paint again myself. I've got two canvases now about half-way finished. I don't have the materials I want to finish them but will begin to erode away at that issue soon enough. There's an artist's paint and materials manufacturing firm right here in Seattle, in fact right near us in SoDo. I'll visit them - Daniel Smith Art Supplies and find what I'm looking for and probably be inspired even further. It's a shame, really, because a few months ago we had all this new, empty, wall space upstairs. But, because I had a lifetime of already-finished art and photography, I've begun to fill the walls already. At some point, and who knows when that point will be reached, it might make sense to consider art as something I do but others actually hang in their space. In college, I painted with oils and did a huge number of canvases and gave them away to whoever expressed a liking for a particular piece. Most of what I gave away could have been sold. I had no one who wanted a piece of my art who didn't offer some dollar amount in trade. Heaven knows I was poor enough that I should have taken their money and felt good about it. But, at that time I was actually offended at the idea of "selling" my art. It was "art" and I think I come by the "information/art wants to be free" notion naturally. I wanted to give it away because that was the more pure of the possible motives which the artist and patron could have between them. To be honest, I still feel that way. I know there's this notion about something not being worth it's equivalent value if it's "free," so I'll have to have some inner-self discussions about the art and artist and patron and see where I wind up. On the other hand, if someone sees something in my house which they like and would hang in their house, I'd probably be okay with making them a gift of it.
On even other matters, I've been spending a lot of time at Apple's online store of late, dickering between one of three models of new computer to see which would be both affordable and last the longest. I'm torn between a $2500 iMac 20" LCD model (decked out, of course, base price is $1900) and one of two G5 dual processors, the more elaborate of which is $3000 (equally decked out). No, I haven't fallen out of love with my iBook. Nor has it failed me in any way. It's just incapable of doing what I now want it to do. For instance, I couldn't download the 30-day free trial copy of Motion, Apple's After Effects-like product for Final Cut Pro, because the specs for Motion required a G4 minimum and a faster drive than my iBook has. Nor could I get myself the new Myst IV game which I really wanted for Christmas because it, too, requires a minimum of G4 but with even stiffer requirements for the video card (and my iBook only has 12meg of VRAM!!). I already couldn't use GarageBand from the internal drive on the iBook but managed to get around that by booting from a faster, external, drive. Yuck! It's always such an eye-opening kick in the rear (to mix metaphors) when one realizes that one's tool of the moment is incapable of being used in the manner one would like. So, time to upgrade. I'll wait to see what happens at the MacWorld thingy in January (Apple usually introduces new models, lowering either the price of admission for the older ones or improving the whole system for the same price) and then make up my mind. I was spending so much time on the Apple site that I even got email and a phone call from an Apple "personal" sales representative who said she could offer some discounts or up the ante for whatever I was interested in. That was curious because it never dawned on me that - A) Apple monitored their store's online activities; or, B) Apple might notice that I've spent a lot of money with them over the years. All of this is a good thing and I'll find a way to make the money appear.
Long post for a period of time when most folks think nothing happens. Now you know. In the middle of Winter, in the middle of short days and indoor-stay-at-home activities, some things do happen to some people. Or, those people make them happen.
And like that....
Chas
Posted: Sun - January 2, 2005 at 09:54 PM
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Published On: Jul 04, 2005 05:41 PM
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Published On: Jul 04, 2005 05:41 PM