Trains and planes

A thousand miles seems pretty far
But they've got planes and trains and cars.

--Plain White T's, "Hey There Delilah"

I leave a week from Thursday for Rome.  It will be a short, one-week trip.  Why not longer?  A question I now ask myself.

But although I'll actually have only 3½ days in Rome itself, plus a two-day side trip to Levanto and Florence, as I discussed in an earlier post -- and will be back in Seattle before I have a chance to become fully acclimated to "Central Europe Summer Time"-- I couldn't feel more excited. 

Why?  Partly because 5½ days in Italy is better than two weeks in most parts of the world, even including Tulsa, Oklahoma.  But also because -- as I realize as I ponder the question -- I simply like the mechanics of travel.

I like airports.  Not so much TSA lines, although Pre-Check removes most of their sting.  But I like the atmosphere, the excited travelers, the constant departures to places to which I've never yet been, and to other places that I've visited and loved. 

I like airplanes.  Although the airlines seem determined to do everything possible to make plane travel unpleasant, I remain enthused.  I'm too short and skinny to be bothered (yet) by decreasing knee space.  I miss the meals on domestic flights, but the food on international flights remains decent or better -- and part of the fun of meals is to interrupt the monotony of sitting in one place.  But I also love, to some extent, that very same monotony.  A book to read; an old classic movie to watch or a new movie I'm too lazy to see in a theater.  Music on my iPhone -- when else but on long flights do I listen repeatedly to the "Goldberg Variations"?!

Once I arrive, I love train travel.  I've written on this blog repeatedly about the joys of Amtrak's long haul trains.  Train travel is much faster in Europe, so one rarely lingers for hours these days in an overnight "Wagons Lits" accommodation.  But their fast trains are very comfortable, and the scenery zooming past your window is great.  I'll be taking a 4½ hour high speed train from Rome to Levanto (on the Ligurian coast between Pisa and Genoa), and a 1½ hour high speed train from Florence to Rome. 

"Planes and trains and cars."  Cars aren't my favorite way to travel, but a rental car picked up at the airport or at the end of a railway journey and used for visiting small towns in the region affords access to certain areas that would be unattainable otherwise.  Especially when many countries have cut back their rail service to many small towns off the main lines.  No car rental this time, but I'll be renting a car a couple of weeks later to reach my sister's house, some three hours from Sun Valley airport.

City buses and subways?  Absolutely.  Figuring out their routes is one of the great joys of visiting a large city.  Note all my posts about maneuvering through subway systems, including my 2009 review of Lowboy, a novel about a schizophrenic teenager who lived in the New York subway!¹

Even long-distance buses can be fun.  When I was a college student, I frequently rode the Greyhound between school in California and home in Washington state.  Bus rides were associated in my mind with "finals are over!"  Since those days, I've read an essay that  David Sedaris wrote a couple of decades ago about a bus ride from hell that he endured in Middle America.²  Sedaris's vivid powers of description, although funny, do make me a little nervous about venturing again to "leave the driving to us," but I've also heard people claim that the buses have become much more enjoyable in recent years.

What I'm saying is that yes, even were I going to Tulsa for a week, I'd probably be looking forward to the trip, just because -- hey! -- travel is travel.  Out of the house and into the world!  Maybe for an introvert, travel is a substitute for long, convivial conversations, night after night, at the neighborhood tavern.  Who knows?  The heart has its reasons of which one's reason knows not, and even if reason knows it isn't talking.  To me, at least. 

So, as I say, I'm off to Rome.  A week in Rome would be something I'd anticipate even if I were being "teleported" there electronically in a nanosecond, using some quirk of quantum physics.  But combined with the blessed "mechanics" of travel? 

Yes!  Only 205 hours until take-off, bro!
-----------------------------
¹ John Wray, Lowboy (2009)
²David Sedaris, Naked, "c.o.g." (1997)

Families

Sedaris siblings as kids
Clockwise from top left:
Gretchen, Lisa, David, Tiffany,
Paul, and Amy  

How could anyone purposefully leave us -- us, of all people?  This is how I thought of it, for though I've often lost faith in myself, I've never lost faith in my family, in my certainty that we are fundamentally better than everyone else.  It's an archaic belief, and one I haven't seriously reconsidered since my late teens, but still I hold it.  Ours is the only club I'd ever wanted to be a member of, so I couldn't imagine quitting.  Backing off for a year or two was understandable, but to want out so badly that you'd take your own life?

--David Sedaris, Calypso, "Now We Are Five"

Sedaris is stunned that his youngest sister, Tiffany, has committed suicide.  When you're privileged to be a Sedaris, he thinks, why would you give it all up by voluntarily dying?

So, I think to myself,  I'm not unique.  I'm not the only person who's always felt that being a member of my family somehow lifted me above the common herd.  Not that we're the best family on the face of the earth, but certainly way above those we've encountered in our own lives.  It's clear that our Christmas traditions, our family jokes, our style of vacations, not only differ from others, but are easily better than those of our would-be peers by any objective standard.

From an objective point of view, admittedly, one might question Sedaris's faith in his family.  He himself -- and I speak of his persona in his essays, not knowing how exaggerated that picture might be -- is an entire constellation of neuroses.  As a child, he suffered severely from obsessive-compulsive disorder, forcing him to face an exhausting list of items that he was required to touch each day on his way home from school.  He has put his OCD to a slightly less irrational use as an adult: Starting out with the common goal of walking 10,000 steps, or four miles, per day, he quickly demanded more and more of himself, ultimately spending most of each day walking 25 to 30 miles, and picking up highway litter as he walked.  He claims, probably truthfully, that his region of West Sussex, where he now lives as an adult, is stunningly litter-free compared with surrounding areas.

He was a mediocre student in school, and an ambitious but untalented art student in college.  He spent years doing menial labor, his brain addled by an amazing assortment of drugs.  His life for years was one series of humiliations after another.  I haven't yet read an essay explaining how he transitioned from this unpromising beginning into a world-famous comic speaker and writer, but it's probably out there somewhere to be read.

His four sisters were each different, and all more or less weird.  There was Tiffany, who lived in squalor for years, ignoring her family.  The personalities of the other three girls are less precisely defined, but together they were the type who, once the first joys of childhood were past, spent their time at the beach avoiding the water and stretched out on a blanket working on their tans.  David's brother Paul, the youngest child and the only one born in North Carolina, where they all grew up, rather than upstate New York, where the others were born, was the kind of guy who could not speak a simple declaratory sentence without including at least three obscenities.

The mother was a character, who could charm everyone, including her family, assisted by the glass of wine in her hands.  The father? David was convinced that his father had never felt any affection whatsoever for him, only contempt -- from David's earliest memories until his father finally thawed a bit as he approached his 90s.

Not only was each member of the family dysfunctional in one or more ways, but so, consequently, was the family as a unit.

And yet, David feels they were and are better people than anyone else -- the only club he ever wanted to be a member of.

Every member of my family, none more so than myself, is weird in varying degrees.  And so must the entire ensemble appear to those who know us well.  And yet, I can truthfully say that none of us is as weird as the least weird of the Sedaris family, at least as portrayed by their famous son.  So my professed belief in the perfection of my own family passes what we lawyers call "the straight face test" -- i.e., I could profess it in court, looking the judge in they eye as I spoke.

I do not contend that every family evidences this same chauvinism; I've spoken with too many sad folks who hate their families and avoid them at all costs.  Even David's sister Tiffany refused to communicate with her parents and siblings in her final years, leaving behind -- as a shock for her heirs -- boxes full of family photos which she had torn into small pieces.

But, even admitting such exceptions, it does seem to be human nature to feel pride in one's family, however odd that family may seem to others, and to be convinced of its superiority -- not so much for its achievements as the world sees them but for the private secrets and traditions known perhaps only to themselves .  Thus the House of Lancaster was pitted against the House of York.  Thus the Tudors and Stuarts.  And the Roosevelts and Clintons.  Families whose members sincerely believe they belong to the Finest Club Ever. 

Even when, or especially when, they suspect that no other club would have them. 

Shmoo

I recently reviewed a novel (Rabbit and Robot), set about 50 years from now, when, for the great bulk of society, automation had eliminated all job choices except those of coders (for programing robots) and soldiers (for fighting wars that had become essentially a form of fatal recreation).  It was a dysfunctional version of an ideal world that I've often enjoyed discussing with willing and unwilling listeners.

In my version, however, life becomes a paradise.  The most creative members of society still have opportunities to advance civilization, and are rewarded for their accomplishments.  For the great majority of citizens, however, the folks who used to man assembly lines, employment would no longer exist.  Automation would produce with little human input all the goods and services that were needed, and all members of society would share in those goods and services.  A minimum standard of living would be guaranteed everyone.

Interestingly enough, almost everyone is furious at this idea. Capitalists hate seeing anyone get something for nothing, of course. But it's also resisted by the intended beneficiaries.  Maybe because they can't figure out how they would spend their lives if not required to work 9 to 5.  Or maybe because of the biblical injunction that fallen man must live by the sweat of  his brow.  (Not many American brows sweat much anymore, actually.)

The hostile reaction by capitalists was anticipated back in 1948 by the cartoonist Al Capp in his popular satirical comic strip Li'l Abner.  In that year, he drew a sequence of strips dealing with a new topic, a topic to which he frequently returned in subsequent years -- the shmoo.   Everyone talked about shmoos. In my family, when one of us kids worried about the poor little piggy or lamb whose meat we were eating for dinner, my dad assured us that it had been a "shmoo piglet" or a "shmoo lamb."  We read the comics, and we understood the allusion.

Wikipedia reminds me that Abner discovered the shmoos in the Valley of the Shmoon.  They were a strange and versatile animal.

They reproduce asexually and are incredibly prolific, multiplying exponentially faster than rabbits. They require no sustenance other than air.

Shmoos are delicious to eat, and are eager to be eaten. If a human looks at one hungrily, it will happily immolate itself—either by jumping into a frying pan, after which they taste like chicken, or into a broiling pan, after which they taste like steak. When roasted they taste like pork, and when baked they taste like catfish. (Raw, they taste like oysters on the half-shell.)

They also produce eggs (neatly packaged), milk (bottled, grade-A), and butter—no churning required. Their pelts make perfect bootleather or house timbers, depending on how thick one slices them.

They have no bones, so there's absolutely no waste. Their eyes make the best suspender buttons, and their whiskers make perfect toothpicks. In short, they are simply the perfect ideal of a subsistence agricultural herd animal.

Naturally gentle, they require minimal care, and are ideal playmates for young children. The frolicking of shmoon is so entertaining (such as their staged "shmoosical comedies") that people no longer feel the need to watch television or go to the movies.

The use of "shmoon" for the plural is a bit pedantic.  Everyone I knew called them "shmoos."

Their most interesting quality, and the one to which my dad referred, was their joy at being eaten.  Without this craving for self-immolation, their tasty qualities would be heart-breaking, because of their lovable personalities.  Eating Bambi would have been easy by comparison.

The critics -- political, economic, philosophical, moral -- were enraged by the way in which the plot developed.  Once the world learned of the excellent quality of the shmoos, the world is turned upside down.  Li'l Abner is quick to understand the consequences: ("Wif these around, nobody won't nevah havta work no more!!")  The traditional economy collapses.  Everyone has everything he needs.  No one buys anything.  Folks just embrace the lovable shmoos, and eat them.  The Malefactors of Great Wealth were no different in 1948 from today -- relentless.  The capitalists hired "Shmoo Squads" to exterminate the shmoos and eliminate this threat to "The American Way." 

As automation turns the economy upside down, I doubt if we'll see corporate-created "Robot Squads," because automation, unlike shmoos, is the creation, the tool of the capitalists.  Robots enhance corporate profits, rather than undermine them. 

But for the average working stiff, the question remains:  Would automation/shmoos bring a worker's paradise, where every citizen can become a painter, a novelist, a singer, a hobbyist?  Or would we all be bored out of our minds and, like the citizens in Rabbit and Robot enlist in the military and go to war, out of a sheer sense of ennui?  

Or choose a third alternative, perhaps the most likely, one that's becoming increasingly prevalent wherever jobs become scarce -- live life on drugs. 

I hope not.  I don't think our little shmoo friends would like it.

Tasty little devils.

Princess Ida

Pat and I made our annual pilgrimage to the Bagley Wright Theater last night, for the 64th (I think?) season's production of the Seattle Gilbert and Sullivan Society -- this year, Princess Ida.

Arthur Sullivan always considered himself a serious musician, a notch above the comic operas he orchestrated in partnership with W. S. Gilbert.  After the successful production of Iolanthe, still playing in 1883, Sullivan wanted to jump ship and go off on his own.  But, as is so often the case, financial constraints forced him to sign a five-year contract, together with Gilbert, with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, and Princess Ida opened at the Savoy Theatre in January 1884.

Gilbert had written a libretto for Princess Ida in 1870, based on an 1847 poem by Tennyson, but he rewrote it for his collaboration with Sullivan.  Attendance was poor, for a number of reasons, and its season was short.  It was not performed again until 1919.  Nevertheless, it is considered one of their better comic operas.

The plot is a spoof on feminism and education for women, which were hot topics in Victorian England. 

Prince Hilarion was betrothed at birth to Princess Ida, of a neighboring kingdom.  But now that the hour for marriage is at hand, Hilarion's father, King Hildebrand, discovers that Ida has decided to have nothing to do with men, and has founded a women's university.  Hildebrand threatens his counterpart, King Gama, with war if Gama's daughter doesn't come to her senses.

The two kings send Hilarion off to decided the matter by force.  But Hilarion, a typically dreamy-eyed G&S hero, hopes to somehow woo his reluctant fiancée, charming her into marriage.  With two buddies, he sneaks into the university -- nicely staged by the Seattle company -- and is appalled by what he sees:  The female students are taught that men are stupid apes, and that women are superior.

The three men don women's student robes to disguise themselves, allowing them to mingle with the students, but one of the boys gets drunk during dinner and gives away their secret.  They are seized and held prisoner, with death looming as their punishment.  However, it becomes increasingly clear that many of the students, as well as some of the faculty, consider the handsome "manliness" of Hilarion, his friends, and his soldiers a true and startling revelation.

King Hildebrand arrives on the scene with his soldiers, and the women who were intended to defend the university fade away at the thought of actual, rather than theoretical, fighting.   Ida is left only with the three sons of King Gama to defend her.  A brief struggle ensues, Ida's forces are defeated, and Ida agrees to the marriage, accepting it only after it is pointed out to her that if women avoid all men, they will have no posterity.  "I never thought of that," she exclaims with wide eyes. 

As in so many G&S operas, the final scene is one of joy on behalf of the entire company, with ensemble singing, as all of the men pair up with all of the women, and everyone plans to live happily ever after.

The plot may sound a bit, um, "dated," as well as farcical, to our modern, enlightened ears, but it is farce, after all and not to be taken seriously.  Our local production was very well sung and acted.  More so, perhaps, than in Victorian times, there was an almost Shakespearean premium placed on cross-dressing and gender confusion.  It is surprising that King Gama has sired three sons and a daughter, as he flounces around the stage, emanating elegance, and flirting with both young men and young women. 

Gama's three sons turn out to be -- in this production, but not traditionally -- three daughters, revealed when they remove their helmets and let their long hair blow free.  They fight with more hilarious gusto and defiance than the soldiers who defeat them, leaving their gender with at least a moral victory.  In fact, to me it appeared they had defeated their opponents, but that's not how the plot reads.

Not really one of my favorite G&S operas -- Pirates of Penzance is next year, yippee! -- but funny, quite musical, and only superficially topical.  Excellent acting.  See it if you're in town between now and July 28.

Venice Observed

As I've mentioned in some past post, I first became acquainted with Mary McCarthy during my sophomore year at college in a course on Renaissance history, when we were given a series of articles she had written in the New Yorker about Florentine life, history, and art.  The articles were consolidated into a book, The Stones of Florence, published in 1959.

"How can you stand it?"  According to Ms. McCarthy, this was the first question every visitor to Florence asked.  The town was dry, unattractive, business-oriented.  When the traffic momentarily stops, she wrote, one heard two characteristic sounds:  "the clack-clack of a sewing machine and the tinkle of a young girl practicing on an old piano."  The closest American analogy she could think of was Boston.

A year after taking my Renaissance history class, I attended school for six months in Florence.  I loved it.  "How can you stand it?" was certainly a question I never asked. Visit today and you'll discover that Florence has become virtually loved to death.  Read Mary McCarthy's book, and you realize that she loved it as well.

All this is prelude to my thoughts about an earlier book by Mary McCarthy, written in 1956, Venice Observed, a volume some regard as a warm-up for her better known study of Florence.  In both books, she combines reportage on the present day city with a much more extensive study of each city's history, commercial development, politics,  artistic achievements, and collective personality.

If Florence appears, at least at first glance, dry and withdrawn, business-oriented, old money aristocratic, somewhat off-putting for the casual tourist -- building after building being plain and brown on its exterior, hiding from prying eyes an often beautiful and lavish interior -- Venice, on the other hand, is all exterior, all beauty and ornamentation displayed openly as proof of the importance and commercial success of its owners. 

McCarthy describes how the cantankerous, nineteenth century British art critic John Ruskin loved to prowl around the city, finding statues and buildings that had been finished only on the side facing the public. The implication being that Venetians, unlike Florentines, cared little for artistic integrity as opposed to the impression they made on their neighbors. American readers may squirm a bit.

Venetian art, she argues, is beautiful but derivative.  All the important artistic advances had been made in Florence and other Italian and Northern European cities; Venice used those advances to entertain its own people and attract what had begun very early -- tourism.  When the sailing routes around Cape Horn opened up, Venice lost its commercial advantage as the provider of ships and transport across and about the Mediterranean.  Tourism quickly took its place.

And there is no use pretending that the tourist Venice is not the real Venice, which is possible with other cities -- Rome or Florence or Naples.  The tourist Venice is Venice: the gondolas, the sunsets, the changing light, Florian's Quadri's, Torcello, Harry's Bar, Muriano, Burano, the pigeons, the glass beads, the vaporetto.  Venice is a folding picture-post-card of itself.

But before then, Venice, more than other cities, had long looked to the east for its income and its cultural influences.  Its ships carried the products of the Spice and Silk Roads from the Levant to Western Europe.  Its ships had carried the Crusaders from Western Europe to the Holy Land, and raided the Christian cities of the East to ensure a profit.  (McCarthy describes the disgraceful sack of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade.) 

Venice's art, as a result, was heavily influenced by Byzantine art, with the improved techniques of the Italian Renaissance a subsequent development.  But while Byzantine art and architecture were heavily spiritual in their development, Venice's adaptations were the adaptations by a society of businessmen who were celebrating their own status and success.

A wholly materialistic city is nothing but a dream incarnate.  Venice is the world's unconscious: a miser's glittering hoard, guarded by a Beast whose eyes are made of white agate, and by a saint who is really a prince who has just slain a dragon. … The Venetian mind, interested only in the immediate and the solid, leaves behind it for our minds, clear, dawn-fresh images out of fairy tales.

Mary McCarthy, in addition to her other talents, is a student of art.  In Venice Observed, she often overcomes the casual reader with her discussions, analyses, and conclusions regarding Venice's artistic origins and lasting heritage.  The book certainly will most interest readers with some background in the history of the region and the basics of Italian art.  But those passages that seem overly detailed can be skimmed, without losing much of the value of her commentary.

McCarthy does not claim to be original, though many of her conclusions struck me as new.  She modestly suggests:

One accepts the fact that what one is about to feel or say has not only been said before by Goethe or Musset but is on the tip of the tongue of the tourist from Iowa who is alighting in the Piazzetta with his wife in her fur piece and jeweled pin.

Don't let her kid you.  This book has much to offer.  And it demands that some day soon, I must return once more to the City of the Doges.

Roman holiday

I liked nothing better than to lose my way in a labyrinth of tiny, shady, furtive, ocher-hued vicoli, which I hoped would one day, by dint of being strayed in, finally debouch into an enchanted little square where I'd encounter some still higher order of beauty.  What I wished above all things was to amble freely about the streets of the Campo Marzio and to find whatever I wished to find there freely, whether it was the true image of this city, or something in me, or a likeness of myself in the things and people I saw.

--André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere, "Roman Hours"

Italy was the first country, outside North America, in which I ever set foot.  I was an impressionable 21-year-old, bowled over by Florence. First impressions stick with you. 

It's now been ten years since my last visit to Rome -- or to Italy in general -- and I've been growing impatient.  Impatient even though -- or perhaps because -- I'm joining a large contingent of family and friends getting together next May in the beach town of Levanto.  A gathering for which I bear some major responsibility.

And so, in three weeks I fly off to Rome.  It will be a fast visit of just one week.  And of that one week, two days will be devoted to a detour to Levanto, an inspection and orientation visit just to assure myself that I haven't made some terrible mistake in luring my trusting relatives to that town.

After three days in Rome, I'll take the high-speed train to La Spezia, just south of the Cinque Terre, connecting with a local train for an additional half-hour ride to Levanto.  After about five hours checking out the Levanto scene -- will that be enough?  I don't know! -- I'll take an evening not-so-high-speed train to Florence, where I'll spend the night.  The following day, I'll wander about Florence, lamenting my lost youth, and then take another high-speed train in the evening back to Rome.

One more day of enjoying Rome, and I'll return to Seattle, looking eagerly forward to our two-week Levanto stay ten months from now.

This will be my eighth visit to Rome over my lifetime, which suggests that I've seen the major Roman "sights."  That's true to an extent -- the Forum, the Colosseum, the Vatican, the major basilicas, the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps.  But Rome is the only city that's called "eternal," and over the millennia it has accumulated a lot of other less major sights.  Remnants of the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Baroque era, and odds and ends in more recent times including architectural insults by the Italian Trump -- Benito Mussolini.

But such "sights" -- major or minor -- are not the only reason for enjoying Rome.  The last time I was in Rome on my own, in 2009, I spent more time just exploring areas of the city, getting a feel for buildings, the people, the caffès, the parks, the musical performances.  You can enjoy a couple of hours or so -- especially in the frequently unbearable August heat -- just nursing a beer or a glass of wine at a sidewalk table and studying the hordes, both local and tourist, that pass by.

Certain areas of the city -- especially the ancient twisting streets of the Centro Storico ("historic center") described by Aciman (above) -- seem just made for walking and getting lost in.  I can't count the times that I've concluded that I was hopelessly lost in an endless maze, and then turned a corner and found the Pantheon or the Piazza Navona or the Trevi Fountain staring me in the face.  To those of us who love labyrinths and getting lost, Rome offers many challenging enjoyments.

An unreal spell always descends upon Rome at night, and the large lampadari on these empty, interconnecting streets beam with the light of small altars and icons in dark churches.   You can hear your own footsteps, even though your feet don't seem to touch the ground but almost hover above the gleaming slate pavements, covering distances that make the span of years seem trivial.  Along the way, as the streets grow progressively darker and emptier and spookier, I'll let everyone walk ahead of me, be alone a while.  I like to imagine the ghost of Leopardi, of Henry Beyle (known to the world as Stendhal), of Beatrice Cenci, of Anna Magnani, rising by the deserted corner, each one always willing to stop and greet me.

Aciman, id.

So I'm looking forward to a fast but enjoyable visit.  I leave August 8 and return the 15th.

Paradise Inn

My rustic room
at Paradise Inn

I spent Thursday night at Paradise Inn, a National Park lodge on the lower slopes (5,400 ft.) of Mount Rainier.  Jim, a friend with whom I hiked in Cornwall in May, and his small bicycling group were stopping for a couple of nights at Paradise as they biked their way from Lake Tahoe to Bellingham in northern Washington.  I met up with him there, as did contingents of his family from West Lafayette, Indiana, and Winthrop, Washington. 

It was fun to celebrate the success of Jim's bike tour to date, and to hang out with the rest of his family.  It was also fun to have an excuse to stay in a National Park lodge.

Like many such lodges, Paradise is a large, rustic building, constructed in a characteristic National Park style.  It is built around a structural framework of exposed cedar logs.  It was constructed in 1914 by a private developer.  Since 1952, it has been owned by the National Park Service, and operated by a private concessionaire.  In the 1970s, it was nearly demolished, but was instead renovated in the face of howls of outrage from the public.

Rainier National Park has a smaller, but similarly styled lodge -- Longmire -- a short distance inside the western entrance to the park.

National Park lodges characteristically have small, sparsely equipped rooms, but grandiose public places that can be enjoyed by day visitors as well as overnight guests -- similar to many grand hotels that were built during the same time period.  I consider the trade-off to be completely successful.  No one visits a National Park with the purpose of spending hours lying about a luxurious room watching wide-screen TV.  You are out hiking the trails, climbing the peaks, motoring the roads, and otherwise enjoying nature.  At night and for meals, you gather together in the spectacular lobby and dine on surprisingly good food in the adjoining dining room.

Paradise Inn is reminiscent of other National Park lodges I have stayed in or visited in recent years -- Grand Canyon Lodge on the North Rim of the canyon; El Tovar on the South Rim; Many Glacier Hotel on the east side of Glacier National Park and Lake McDonald Lodge on the west side; Lake Crescent Lodge and  Lake Quinault Lodge in Olympic National Park, and Crater Park Lodge in Oregon.  Of similar construction is Timberline Lodge at Oregon's Mount Hood, which is not inside a National Park, but is in a National Forest.

The most grandiose of lodges, but maybe the least characteristic, is Ahwahnee in Yosemite valley -- a luxury hotel of granite construction.  (It is now called, pathetically, "The Majestic Yosemite Hotel," because the former concessionaire had taken the precaution of copywriting the "Ahwahnee" name, and, in a snit, refused to allow the park to continue using the name when it lost the concession.)

I love all these lodges because, collectively, they remind me of vacations of my childhood.  Most of our visits to National Parks were done as auto-camping trips -- we couldn't afford the lodges.  Nevertheless, like most  park visitors, we hung out in them and bought our souvenirs at their gift shops. 

The one great exception that I recall was Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone National Park -- a lodge built in a very similar style to that of Paradise Inn.  For a glorious one or two nights we actually stayed in the lodge as overnight guests.  As a ten-year-old, I was not too young to revel in the glory.

I suppose staying at any of these lodges now, which I do as often as possible, brings satisfactions that hearken back to my primal memories of Old Faithful Lodge, and to the pre-television, pre-internet world those lodges evoke.  Paradise Inn defiantly warns in its advertising that it provides no internet connections, and that its rooms have no television or private phones (although the Visitor Center a short walk away does have a small area with wi-fi service). 

These lodges offer a flashback to an earlier time, to a time when automobiles were rare, a time when guests were welcomed as they stepped from trains, trains run by the railway companies which also had built and operated the lodges.    Or, as in Paradise's case, which was located far from any railway, as they stepped from motor coaches.  A visit to a National Park, for many in those times, especially for those from the East Coast, was an adventure into a semi-primitive world, an adventure described in long letters and glowing post cards to the folks back home.

That world has passed away, but the lodges endure and flourish.  What's not to like?

On shaky ground

It was lunch hour during third grade, and we were eating our sack lunches in our classroom.  No idea where our teacher was -- probably having a couple of stiff drinks in the teachers' lounge. 

I was entertaining myself by choking one of my female classmates with my bare hands, when she began shaking.  And everything began shaking.  Everyone panicked, and instinctively  made a dash for the door, down the hall, down the stairs (as plaster began falling off the walls), and out of the building.

It was a 6.7 earthquake, centered about 65 miles to the north.  Damage wasn't severe in my town, but the shock was significant.  Especially the mental shock of realizing that the earth was not a firmly located ground zero against which all other altitudes could be measured.  Sometimes it was terra infirma.

It also gave me a healthy respect for the powers of the female gender.

I was in San Diego for the Fourth this week, and glancing at my phone while there, discovered that a 6.4 earthquake had occurred about 150 miles northeast of Los Angeles.  We were surprised, because no one felt a thing in San Diego.  But yesterday, an even larger quake -- variously reported as 7.1 or 6.9 -- occurred, centered at the same location. 

I had departed by plane a few hours before the second quake struck, and friends sent me video clips from a San Diego restaurant where'd they'd been having dinner, showing a massive chandelier swaying from the ceiling, with excited and nervous chatter among restaurant guests in the background.

Headlines kept using the term "The Big One," which is really kind of ridiculous.  The term, both in California and in the Puget Sound region, should be reserved for the quake that hasn't yet occurred but is due to strike at any moment -- a 9.0 or higher quake, which by definition will be at least a hundred times more powerful than a 7.0 shaker.

If such a "Big One" occurs in the Northwest, federal officials say they have written off most of Washington west of I-5.  My house is ten blocks or so east of I-5.  Which doesn't reassure me.  I've had the house bolted to its foundation, which is an excellent way of avoiding serious damage during, say, an 8.0 or less earthquake.  I doubt if my house will survive a Big One.

I question whether I myself would survive.  I've put aside minimal emergency supplies of food and water -- enough for a few days.  But I understand it might be weeks before emergency supplies could be rushed to everyone who needed them, because of the total wipeout of the infrastructure.  And we haven't even talked yet about the inevitable tsunami.

Scientists estimate the chances of a Big One affecting Seattle within the next fifty years to be one out of three.  The prognosis for a quick recovery is not good:

Together, the sloshing, sliding, and shaking will trigger fires, flooding, pipe failures, dam breaches, and hazardous-material spills. Any one of these second-order disasters could swamp the original earthquake in terms of cost, damage, or casualties—and one of them definitely will. Four to six minutes after the dogs start barking, the shaking will subside. For another few minutes, the region, upended, will continue to fall apart on its own. Then the wave will arrive, and the real destruction will begin.

--Kathryn Schulz  "The Really Big One"  (New Yorker, 2015)

Maybe I should move some place safe from earthquakes, like Ohio.

Oh, wait ….

Third grade sounds pretty good in retrospect.

Rabbit and Robot

A robotic giraffe named Maurice is eating the mechanical  innards of a robotic tiger.

Maurice ate and ate as the tiger cried and cried.
Maurice burbled, "Cette viande de tigre est délicieux!"
And the tiger wailed, "Sartre was right -- I cannot escape anguish because I am anguish."
"Mmmmph mmmph mmmh!" went Maurice.

If this dialogue from the first chapter of Andrew Smith's recent novel, Rabbit and Robot, leaves you cold, stop right here.  This is not the book for you.

Similarly, if my February 2014 discussion of the same Andrew Smith's Grasshopper Jungle -- a novel wherein the narrator is one of a few survivors of an infestation of mutant insects that have devoured all of humanity -- left you wondering what was wrong with Mr. Smith (and what was wrong with me for finding the book both funny and profound), then run for the nearest exit.

Rabbit reminds one of Grasshopper, so maybe Andrew Smith -- one of our best Young Adult novelists -- is moving away from the typical teenager "coming of age" YA genre and slipping ever deeper into the dangerous swamp of fantasy.  I love it.

Which is not to say that Rabbit and Robot is perfectly satisfying. 

Cager and Billy are the 16-year-old sons of the two richest men on earth, some half century in the future.  It's a world that seems strangely plausible. For those who aren't sons of the "one percent" -- to use our own time's term for it -- there are only two vocations left -- "bonk" (pejorative slang "rabbit") (meaning a soldier) or "coder" (meaning what it sounds like).  All education is designed to track all children into one of those two fields of endeavor.

Coding, because all work has been automated to the point that robots -- virtually indistinguishable from human beings -- do all the work which is rapidly drying up in our own time.  The military, because humans have little else with which to amuse themselves other than fighting.  Some thirty wars are going on simultaneously around the globe.

All students are enabled to master their studies by use of the drug Woz, which seems to combine the advantages of Ritalin with a drug that produces a feeling of happiness.  Unfortunately, it's rather addictive, and for those who can afford to purchase their own supplies, overdoses are common and fatal.

Cager's father, among his other accomplishments, has designed an enormous "cruise ship" -- the Tennessee -- that circles the moon in a low lunar orbit.  It is like a luxury planet unto itself -- like one of those huge ugly cruise ships that sail the seas in our own time, but vastly larger and more luxurious.  It hasn't yet opened for business, but it is fully staffed by "cogs" -- the vernacular for the robots who keep the economy going while humans are coding and fighting.

Cager is highly addicted to Woz, and his best friend Billy is not.  Billy essentially arranges an intervention, where Cager and Billy travel to the Tennessee, without Cager's realizing where they're going until it's too late, where Cager will essentially be detoxed.

What Billy doesn't realize is that they will be the first and last humans (aside from a couple of stowaway girls) to ever become guests of the Tennessee.  Earth has had one war too many, and is now a desolate brown ball of smoke, as viewed from space.

Just Cager and Billy (and a couple of not-yet-discovered low class girls) on a giant lunar satellite staffed by thousands of cogs.  And, so far as they (or we) know, they are the last of humanity.

Not to prolong this summary, but it should be noted that cogs, at least the earlier model cogs serving on the Tennessee, come in four basic flavors, reflecting the temperament of the human who wrote each one's code -- outraged, elated, horny, or depressed.  The cogs perform their prescribed functions while at the same time frequently offering extreme displays of their basic attitude:

"Could you please instruct our waiter to make my order to go?"
"I have no reason to live," the busboy, whose name badge identified him as Milo, said.
"Nonsense.  You aren't alive to begin with," I pointed out.  "Suck it up and make the best of it, Milo.  The future is bright, I assure you."
"We come into existence, and we float through space, doomed, until we all die horribly.  No reason to live at all."
Milo the busboy wept uncontrollably.
He probably knew more than I did, but who can say?

Confusions and adventures ensue, as you can imagine.  A coding "worm" infects the cogs, and the cogs turn on each other with hungry vengeance, seeking whomsoever's mechanics they can devour. Infected cogs, we see, are no wiser than their human builders had been on earth, and the Tennessee's luxury lies in shambles.

As the book gradually draws near its inconclusive conclusion, we the readers become increasingly aware that when a robot acts like a human, talks like a human, expresses emotions like a human, contemplates his own existence like a human -- it becomes difficult to determine -- short of slicing him open to see if he contains electronics rather than blood -- whether he is in fact a human.   In fact, Cager (and we) had no idea that his "minder" -- a sort of male nanny -- who had raised him from childhood was a cog at a high level of technological development until nearly the end of the novel.  (Well, we had clues, but Cager didn't!)

The novel has a certain level of scatological and bloodthirsty humor that appeals to adolescents, but then so does Shakespeare.  Don't be so damn stuffy.  Rabbit and Robot isn't War and Peace, but you know you're never going to read War and Peace this summer anyway.

Give it a try.