Not-quite sleepless in Seattle

My preference would have been to discover Seattle on foot, staying in a cozy B&B in Frasier’s old neighbourhood and soaking up a rare urban experience on this mostly rural and small-town trip.  Pragmatism prevailed, and the hour of our arrival in Port Angeles plus the late-night drive to a second ferry which would take us across to the city meant that booking a hotel on Bainbridge Island was the more sensible option. 

With sincere apologies to my American friends ,I admit to a certain wariness about being the States, as Canadians call the country that our only charismatic Prime Minister, Pierre Eliot Trudeau, once likened to ‘sleeping with an elephant’.  The slightest move made south of the border has its repercussions for Canada and despite our proclamations of apart-ness, we are inextricably linked to American economics, politics and culture.  That is not to say there isn’t a difference, but to the uninformed point of view, North Americans (minus Mexico) could be considered a single unit.

Sure enough, in Port Angeles a sign announces that ‘Guns and Ammo’ are for sale at a pawn shop cum hardware store.  The right to bear arms is, rather simplistically, the single biggest criticism  we have of American culture.  (I don’t make the mistake of assuming that all Americans are comfortable with this, either).  But the relative ease of gun ownership puts visions of pistol-packing Starbucks patrons into my head and I intend to be excessively polite here in my dealings with strangers.  

Next morning it’s cool and overcast.  The Olympic Mountains are sheathed in low cloud and I’m relieved we didn’t pay a fortune to stay in any of the Seattle B&Bs I had initially earmarked for their fabulous views.  We hop the ferry from Bainbridge Island over to the big city and by the time we walk two blocks from the docks, it is raining.  The Pike Place Market is on our list of places to see, and it doesn’t disappoint.  Colourful and filled to the brim with fish, flowers and fruit, it is also jam-packed with browsers.  A big cruise ship is in port and it’s also Father’s Day, but maybe every Sunday is this busy.    (I find out later in the day that another blogger who regularly comments on my other (collaborative) blog Fridge Soup, is at the market at the same time!!)

 

 

I never met a busker I didn’t like. Somebody tell what the name of the third instrument is…?

I love browsing and am always alert for handicrafts with some originality.  My FB, on the other hand, does not do shopping.  He does not think about Christmas presents in June nor consider it necessary to have souvenirs to remember things by.  His philosophy of shopping excludes the possibility of buying anything he hasn’t already decided he needs, whereas I am open to the delights of happenstance.  This clash of personal habits is one of our few, map-reading at the wheel being another. 

We walk to the Space Needle but decide that a ride up on such a grey day would be a waste of time and money.  Instead, we head for the Experience Music Project, a hands-on museum of rock and roll history and paraphenalia that features an interactive area of recording studios, where I briefly contemplate cutting a CD of the Belgian and I jamming on guitar and drums.  Only trouble is, neither of us is sufficiently unself-conscious to brave the public display of our ineptitude – a TV screen placed outside the studio gives everybody a chance to watch the session and snicker.  I care too much about making a fool of myself and walk away with mild regret that we weren’t just able to be silly and have a permanent record of it. 

The Guitar Sculpture at the Experimental Music Project  (about 40 feet tall!)

I wish Youngest Son was there to see the extensive display of electric guitars.  His basement room holds an expanding collection of them, with accompanying massive amplifiers that do double duty as sled substitutes for his Malamute-in-training. 

We walk and walk and walk and I’m grateful that I have broken my Golden Rule of Sneakers, which is to say that they are never my default footwear of choice. Especially in cities, where running shoes should only be worn if training for a marathon on your lunch hour. 

Although I generally shun Starbucks coffee for reasons of taste and corporate bigness, in its birthplace of Seattle, I will put my principles aside.  The staff are extraordinarily friendly and nobody seems to have any hardware stuffed into their belt.  The coffee, a blend exclusive to this location (if the board is to be believed) is very decent and we retire to a window table to decide what to do for dinner.  I’m skeptical that Bainbridge Island will have a restaurant with anything other than standard American fare, but neither of us feel like finding a way to occupy ourselves in the city on a Sunday in the rain between 5 and 7:30 PM  before we’re ready to eat.  We opt for the ferry, and on the other side discover that my dim view of Bainbridge Island gastronomy was completely incorrect.  Dinner is very good, without a French fry in sight. 

 The US is second only to the UK for its profusion of churches,according to me.  The Scientologists seem to have NW WA all wrapped up.   

The next morning we set off for a mall near the airport, specifically for the Abercrombie & Fitch kids’ store, at the request of my FB’s daughter, whose young sons are taken by the brand.  It astonishes me that anyone is willing to pay money to put someone else’s advertising on their back. On principle I will not buy anything that visibly proclaims its corporate origins, with the exception of automobiles, and there I am a snob.  Did I mention that I bought an Audi recently? Did I also mention that I’m a cheapskate and made sure somebody else took a serious depreciation hit on it first?  

The freeway to the mall is a scene of high anxiety.  FB is driving and I am navigating, a reversal of our usual roles when in a strange place that requires intensive map-reading.  I nearly come undone when he decides spontaneously to take an earlier exit than planned and crosses five lanes of traffic in an exceedingly short time.  He is, I add in all fairness, an excellent driver in whom I am normally very confident, but we’re in my new-to-me Audi and I’m not in control.  

Half an hour later.  Purchases made, harmony restored.  We leave the city behind and head north-east, past the well-kept farms and tidy towns of Washington state, towards the distant mountains, still obscured by clouds.  Even the imposing and stunningly beautiful Mt. Baker, normally visible from a hundred miles away, remains discreetly under cover.  It’s a disappointment, but there will be, we hope, other compensations along the way.   

 

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The Longest Undefended Border in the World

Leaving Tofino, the sun is out in full force,typical for a day we have to spend in the car.  We stop at Combers Beach for a quick snap or two and wish we could stay longer – this is the southern part of Long Beach, 12 km from end to end.  Watching the waves roll in, I imagine the Pacific Ocean as a gigantic bowl of water, the earth’s rotation sloshing the sea from one continental coastline to the other. 

 

We visit my aunt and uncle – she my mother’s siter, he my father’s brother, both in their 80s and determined to stay in their neat-as-a-pin house for as long as they can.  I catch them up on the latest from the relatives we’ve visited so far – my FB still having me believe that he isn’t yet fed up with the endless re-broadcasting of family news.

Down the Island highway to Victoria and nearly out of gas.  My gut tells me I’ve been in this situation before – running on empty in a German car.  Oh right, it’s that Boxing Day fiasco on the road to Banff.  Read about it here,.

Maggie of Stepping Out With Red Shoes On picked up on the label on the previous post and wanted to know what ‘learning to be a better passenger’ was all about.    That’s a whole other post in itself, but it refers to my anxiety when not behind the wheel, especially in my own car and in my own country,  More on that later. 

These are not boats.  These are high-end housing projects that happen to float.   

Pulling into the ferry line-up at Victoria Harbour, the US Border Patrol requests the presence of MFB at the customs office.  He’s gone for a long time and I imagine him being overly helpful and giving them way more information than they need.  As in, how many bottle of wine we/;ve got stashed in the back of the car and the provenance of all that jewellery that used to be my mother’s.  Going into the States makes me slightly queasy, and I won’t be completely sorry if MFB is refused entry. 

But he’s not.  He’s passed the preliminary inspection and will go through a more rigorous one once we make land on Bainbridge Island.  I’ve heard lots of stories about cars torn apart by zealous agents, and owners left to deal with the aftermath.  Do I have any illegal downloads on my hard drive?  And why am I writing about this on the ferry – incriminating words right here for official eyes to find?

Tiny floating houses with tiny floating taxi.  Victoria inner harbour. 

We board the ferry and get some cafeteria food.  MFB, surprisingly, orders nachos, and I, even less characteristically opt for clam chowder with chilli on the side.  Here are his nachos a l’orange plastique. 

I can’t believe he’s going to eat them, and force him to take some of my chilli/chowder.  With as many varieties of cheese in the world as there are, it astounds me that my neighbours to the south had to invent their own to melt over corn chips.  American  cheese is as much a misnomer as Canadian Cheddar.

Nearing Port Angeles, I finally have a close-up view of the mountains of the Olympic peninsula, after years of peering at them from the Canadian side through the haze of the Juan de Fuca straits.   We have an hour-long drive to a little  town across the water from Seattle, and if we can get through US Customs without a hitch, we’ll be in a king-sized bed before midnight.  After two nights in a bed that was a double by aspiration only, I’m looking forward to some room to stretch out.

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On the Road Again

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Left Calgary last Friday, headed for Vancouver Island, land of my childhood dreams and retirement hopes.   

In Canada, there is one major road from East to West, officially called the Trans-Canada, and more often simply the No. 1.  It might even be the longest highway in the world but it certainly isn’t the smoothest, or widest.  On day one of our trip, after stopping for lunch at Field, BC (above) we ran into a traffic jam (below) about 40km east of Golden, BC.  Such imaginative names, along with Radium, Kicking Horse and the aptly named Bountiful, infamous home of a polygamous breakaway branch of the LDS.  

Obviously an accident of some sort had blocked the two-lane road and we had no idea how long the wait would be.  My favourite Belgian, accustomed to the spiderweb network of European roads, wondered if we couldn’t just turn around and take a detour.  In theory, this was possible, but since there are only three ways to get from Alberta to BC through the Rocky Mountains, getting to the next pass would add at least 800km to our trip.  We elected to wait it out, and it only took an hour for things to get moving again. 

It’s been a sentimental journey, and MFB has risen to the occasion.  First stop was an overnight stay in Kelowna (above) with a cousin who I first met at a family reunion when I was seven, and to whom I promptly proposed.  An aunt was scandalized when she heard of my plan but she obviously had no idea that the Royal Family had already been there, done that.     

Next stop was tea and sticky buns with an uncle at his hilltop home overlooking the Okanagan Valley, and more family news and gossip.  MFB still able to keep up.  Pressing on, we wander through south western BC and MFB comments on the lack of wildlife.  Two minutes later a young black bear runs across the road ahead of us.  I’m tempted to stop but have grown up with stories of stupid tourists who stop to take picture of beers and elk in Banff National Park and end up with concussions or badly scratched cars. 

Two nights with a different cousin, one of my special ones.  Our mothers married brothers, and that should make us look almost like twins, but the only physical trait we share is our height.  His wife is my good friend Kath, of YOU ARE HERE, and it’s all her fault that I started to blog.  Wonderfully generous hospitality, hours of talk, a few games of billiards, and outdoor fish and chips followed by a stroll along the beach at White Rock, just east of Vancouver.  MFB mildly confused by the number of family members and friends named Jim.

Two ferries later, we landed on Saturna Island, one of the southern Gulf Islands between the mainland and Vancouver Island.   Explored by piloto Jose Maria Narvaez of the Santa Saturnina in 1791, it is home to about 400 winter residents and about three times as many summer visitors.  It’s a quiet, wet life much of the time, suitable for seals, slugs and people who really don’t mind being away from everything, including reliable internet service. 

Although, if I had a view like the one my uncle and aunt have from their kitchen window (below), I could learn to live almost anything.    

More family, now on Vancouver Island.  My brother and SIL live in Sidney, just a few minutes from the ferry slip.  One night in their huge guest room with its king size bed and stupendous view, and I’m ready to move in.  My sister-in-law had thoughtfully laid out what was left of my mother’s things after her death last November, and packed up what I wanted to keep.  Her jewellery set off flash floods of memories – the turquoise glass beads that went with a tulle-skirted party dress she had made for herself in the late 50s, the opal ring she bought in Australia, a little silver ring fashioned into a lovers knot that I recognized but couldn’t remember the provenance of…it all made me a bit weepy.   MFB still putting on an attentive face at the umpteenth re-telling of family stories. 

Then on to Tofino, on the wild west coast of Vancouver Island, a Mecca for surfers with dreadlocks.  Our hotel is right on the beach, but nobody’s catching any rays here.  The temperature might have got up to fifteen degrees Celsius and even though every surfer wears a wetsuit, I still don’t understand how they can stay in that water for hours.

To compensate for our budgetary excesses at dinner last night we buy stuff for a picnic lunch today and go to Long Beach.  Sitting on a big driftwood log, we watch crows filch a bag of chips from a picnic basket left on the beach.  After they’re done I fold the empty bag neatly and return it to the basket, hoping to drive somebody crazy trying to figure out what happened to their chips. 

I take a photo of a couple on the wharf at Tofino and ask them to return the favour.  We don’t have a lot of pictures of the two of us, and most of the ones we have are way better of MFB than me.  For once, we’re both looking not bad.  

 

Tomorrow we head to Bainbridge Island, WA, (visiting a dear aunt on the way) and hope there’ll be no explaining to do to US Customs about all that stuff of my mom’s. I can’t believe they’d hassle two senior-looking people but every Canadian has a horror story to tell of trans-border car travel. 

Seattle is for Sunday, and then a leisurely drive back to Calgary through northern Washington, Idaho and Montana.  The high point, in both senses of the word, will be the Logan Pass, also known as Going-To-The-Sun road.  See you sometime next week!

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My Holy Trinity: Procrastination, Intimidation and occasionally, Exhilaration

A random picture of the Provencal countryside, with some potential symbolism related to Jumping off Cliffs or Keeping One’s Eye on the Far Horizon.     

As you may have noticed, I don’t post very often. In the early, heady days of my blog I kept to a weekly schedule, spending my Sundays in isolation in front of my computer (not much different than any other day, in fact) writing and editing and re-editing until I started to feel like a hamster in a wheel.  Round about midnight I’d finally post my latest effort and head to bed in happy anticipation of what I’d find in the morning.  I should be embarrassed to admit how thrilling it was to  see those comments rolling in, but there are others out there who understand this very well. 

I had lots to say in the beginning.  The folder of half-finished, semi-started essays that had languished for years on my hard drive began to expand and even took on a new name - Completed Blog Posts. My motivation was high and my commitment consistent. The phrase I am a writer began to seem like it could be true, and I practiced saying it under my breath and without the self-deprecating grimace that used to go along with I’m a full-time mom. Then somebody at a party asked me what I did, and the words came out all by themselves, as smooth as you please.  It felt fabulous to say them in public and in front of witnesses and my left eyebrow didn’t even move. Writing was, after all, a substantial part of my daily occupation, and people actually read and liked what I had to say.  Thanks to you, I wasn’t even afraid of Have you published anything? After a few months of nice reviews and some more out-loud practice, my new professional status felt pretty natural.  I am a writer rolled off my tongue, although deep in the truth-telling part of my brain a few rebel cells muttered in protest.

Every writer gives up energy to doubts about the authenticity of their calling and the measure of their work. Fortunately, every single writer I read has decided to press ahead regardless of their hesitation, and without them, I know not what I’d do. Let me give you an example. Loving the quirks and complexities of the English language as I do, I was happy to discover The Inky Fool, a collaborative blog staffed, in the main, by the highly entertaining, deeply knowledgeable and dangerously habit-forming Dogberry. Fortunately he is also prolific and reliably supplies his readers with a daily fix – occasionally more. The other day he wrote a wonderful piece called ‘Prepositions The End of Sentences At’, the general theme of which was that all kinds of supposed rules of written English usage are not rules at all, but snobberies. The idea that I could start a sentence with And but not feel bad about it filled me with joy, and momentarily held the tantalizing prospect of morphing into motivation to write. And so it did, although with a considerable delay. (See? I used ‘And’ right at the beginning, as I often do, the difference being that now I don’t feel like I’m a lesser writer because of it.)

But as I read Dogberry’s post, I was also conscious that while good writing pleases and often exhilarates me, it also intimidates. A skilled writer (along with a capable editor) leaves the reader with the impression that there was no hard slog behind the prose – that it flowed from imagination to page as effortlessly and continuously as it does in the other direction for the reader. Perhaps this is actually true for some writers, but we know how disingenuous it is to think that an adequately-equipped toolbox of literary devices is sufficient for success as a writer.  But then I go and read Jocelyn at O Mighty Crisis and am convinced anew that she and Dogberry both know something I don’t about the secret to writing with effortless, fabulous, and often hilarious ease. 

So despite my hard-won smarts about some things, I can still fool myself into thinking that my appreciation for and intense enjoyment of good prose should somehow magically transform the uphill-struggle nature of my writing into something much easier and better.  Before you think that I’m fishing for compliments, I should say that I know I’m not a dud.  When I spend enough time and have enough patience to edit, I’m reasonably satisfied with what comes out, but the point is not what I produce, but how much and how difficult it is.

It occurs to me that the title of my blog is apt in a different way than I originally intended.  Words tempt me, definitely, but often that’s all they do.  They beckon, they tease, they make me want to go out and play, but I don’t or won’t push aside the mundane and non-essential things that fill up my time and clog my attention. In more than one analysis of why writers find it so hard to write, it has been suggested that fear of success is to blame. I can hardly believe that.  If you knew that success was waiting in the wings at the end of the performance, would you just shut it down and walk offstage? Not me. Fear of not being accomplished enough, organized enough, disciplined enough, connected enough, motivated enough – that’s more likely.  How about fear of not having anything worthwhile to say?  Years ago, after reading the loveliness that is Arundhati Roy’s ‘The God of Small Things’ , I decided that the world didn’t need less-talented writers to dilute the excellence that had been her contribution to English literature. Comparing yourself to others isn’t productive unless you’re learning from the analysis, but in that case I felt that Roy’s novel was so sublime that my time would be better spent worshipping at the altar of her accomplishment than producing any work of my own.  Nowhere in my personality is there any hint of perfectionism except when it comes to writing, and the critic in my head stays plenty busy. 

Writing is not for the lazy and undisciplined. In my case it demands a marshalling of all my attention and the pushing away of a need to do something more stimulating, more active and less cerebral – something with greater potential for immediate results. I’m a sucker for immediate gratification and writing rarely gives me that. The pleasant anticipation that surrounds the thought of getting down to writing evaporates when the words don’t come fast enough, or when I have to reach for the synonym finder too often. What kind of a writer has to search for words? Is my changing mid-life brain to blame? Is this an early warning sign of the disease that shredded up my mother’s once-sharp mind? I continue to hope that my wordlessness is a temporary situation, and that the fog will lift eventually. Meanwhile, I’m vigilant about proof-reading my comments and disturbingly often find ‘hear’ instead of ‘here’ or letters in wacky order. Sometimes I suspect that I’m working in the wrong department altogether and would do better in appliance repair.

When the kids were small, I read all the articles and listened to the discussions that exhorted women to shuffle the needs and demands of others off to one side to make their own desires and accomplishments a priority. I wasn’t good at it back then, and haven’t improved much over the years. Selflessness isn’t the problem, but more a willingness to be distracted by anything else that moves. Back in a situation where I am in close contact with my children, the need to be needed takes priority, and I get a lot of satisfaction from being useful and maybe even indispensable. It’s a temporary, two-month situation and would probably drive me nuts if it weren’t. In another month they will fend for themselves as they so capably do and I will be back in my undemanding, quiet French environment looking for other excuses not to write. It feels a lot like I’m letting somebody down, and that somebody is me and the people who believe in what I said I would do, which was to write. I want to do it, and I think about it a lot.

The biggest problem is that I want the act of writing to be easier, and it isn’t. Practice, you say! Well yes, that would help, but so would turning off the thinking part that interferes with the doing. The man I love is a sometime tennis player, and was explaining to me yesterday how frustrated he is by the inconsistency of his game. He finds that putting too much thought into his play overrides his instincts, and the outcome isn’t usually good. Playing tennis is not so different from playing the piano or any other kinaesthetic activity, and too much cerebral input gets in the way. Perhaps the same is true of writing. I don’t put a lot of thought into the writing of un-serious things; my email style gets so many compliments that I’ve considered pretending that everything I write has a ‘To’ field. Meanwhile my novel is heading into its fourth year as an incomplete and very rough draft.

It’s been a few days since I started this, and Obsessive-Compulsive Editing Disorder has stopped me from posting it sooner. Tomorrow my favourite Belgian arrives after a month-long separation and I will have yet another wonderful excuse not to write.  If I don’t post this now, it will sit for another couple of weeks and I’ve already spent too much energy trying to ignore that familiar, niggling feeling that I’m not doing what I’m meant to do. 

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