Idaho rafting

Ever since I was a kid, I've dreamed of a float trip down the Colorado river, through the Grand Canyon.  I've never done it, and the probability of my doing it in the future is growing smaller and smaller.  Hasn't vanished yet, but diminishing.

But in four weeks, I will be rafting down the Middle Fork of the Salmon river in Idaho -- also one of the great river rafting experiences in America.  I'll be with a private group, consisting of two or four family friends, as well as my sister and myself.  

We'll be on the river for six days, camping out each night in the heart of the River of No Return Wilderness Area -- the largest contiguous, designated wilderness area outside Alaska (2,366,827 acres).  At its deepest point, 6,300 feet, the canyon is deeper than the Grand Canyon.

I'll fly to Sun Valley a couple of days before the beginning of the trip, and drive to my sister's house near Challis.  The next evening, we'll meet up with our guides and others in our group in Stanley, about an hour's south of Challis.

My only prior river rafting experience has been a couple of floats with a group from my law firm over thirty years ago -- day floats down the Skagit river, north of Seattle.  The Skagit was pretty swift, and I managed to bounce out of the raft and into the river on each occasion.  Our Idaho guides provide both luxury rides on guide-directed rafts, and kayaks for the more adventurous.  I'll probably start out being conservative, but long before six days have elapsed, I suspect I'll want to try my hand at kayaking.  We will see.

I've been provided an impressively long list of items to bring with me -- most but not all of which I already own.  A trip to REI obviously will be required before departure.

I've spent my life hiking and climbing in wilderness areas.  This summer, I'll be able to enjoy the wilderness while letting water and gravity do all the work.  

Maintaining my hedge fun

In mid-June, I lamented on this blog the results of the biennial visit from my gardener/landscaper.  He and his crew had once again cut down the jungle that had threatened to engulf my house.  They had left my property cleaner, tidier, and less of a neighborhood eyesore.  They had also destroyed its character, I feared, that unique character that only my personal touch, or lack of touch, can create.

But I neglected to mention Phase Two of their visit.  

The backyard of my neighbor to the south is about four feet higher than my own, separated by a faux stone retaining wall.  It's been that way for all the decades that I've owned this property.  For years, I hardly gave it a second thought.  In fact, the south property was originally the only property not separated from mine by a dense mass of blackberry brambles.  A condition afflicting many other lots as well.

But as property values rose, and the neighborhood became increasingly packed with young, well-paid tech workers, and decreasingly with older, shabby-genteel, university-oriented academics, the brambles were rooted out and fences and other barriers were built.  But not between me and my southern neighbor.

The property to my south is a rental property, and every year a new crop of young kids -- college, or more frequently just out of college -- takes over.  In our fairly sedate neighborhood, they are a noisy exception.  And the last group -- who just moved out -- were the most obtrusive.  Nice kids, but noisy.  And they were the first to use all the possible recreational opportunities of their rented back yard.

As I sat on my back deck, reading Great Literature, the kids to my south were throwing party after party.  Our lots are only forty feet in width, so their parties took place virtually under my nose.  Or, more precisely, about four feet above my nose.

So I had the gardener plant a hedge.  I wanted bamboo, but he assured me it was "too expensive."  I then wanted something not dense and opaque -- as is my laurel hedge to my north -- but something that would provide just enough of a screen to keep the Wild Ones next door from staring at me while they played their games, and vice versa.

No problem, he said.  And installed a laurel  hedge.  Oh well.

He installed it just before the temperature was predicted to rise to about 108 degrees (which it, in fact, did).  He gave me strict instructions to water it every day.  EVERY DAY, he emphasized.  He didn't want to come back in two years and find it dead.  I appreciated his concern.

And for the first couple of weeks, I watered it EVERY DAY.  Then the temperatures dropped to something more Seattle-esque, and I noted that the soil was still quite damp after 24 hours.  I now water every other day.  The gardener planted fifteen laurel plants, and I water each one for sixty seconds.  Yes, I'm methodical, and I keep an eye on my watch.

As you may have gathered from my past confessions, I've have no interest in gardening.  I have decent landscaping, but it was all planted before I bought the house in 1987.  Perennial flowers that are supposed to last about ten years -- like tulips -- are still flowering every spring. I let my lawn dry up every summer -- as at least half of my neighbors do as well, out of concern for water usage -- and in fact my outdoor water taps are non-functional.  I have to run a long hose from my basement laundry tubs to the outdoors.

But -- and here is the point I want to make:  Forcing myself to water the hedge on a rigid schedule has given me a a certain interest -- very slight, but significant -- in growing plant life.  Like a father who never liked kids until he had his own and began caring for it.

I actually look forward to my every-other-day watering regimen.  I even sprinkle some water on other bushes in my back yard, bushes that I've usually allowed to suffer from aggravated thirst every summer.  I worry about my 15 laurel bushes.  Two or three of them are becoming a lighter shade of green than the others.  My god, is this normal?  A couple have shed an occasional yellowed leaf.  Falling leaves!  I worry about them.  "Are you feeling ok?" I ask.  "Am I giving you enough water?  Am I giving you too much water, drowning your young, developing roots?  Do you need food -- fertilizer?

All my other shrubs -- 35 years old or more -- have settled down, living boring, conservative life styles.  They have proved they are survivors, surviving even my grossly negligent care.  But my new hedge plants are so young and sensitive, barely tall enough to peek over the edge of the retaining wall.  They are so dependent on me for care, so thirsty (I imagine) not only for water but for affection.

Let's face it.  I'm in love.

My entire back yard suddenly seems suffused with a golden aura.  I feel a new affection for my rhododendrons, for my blue spruce, for my well established north boundary laurel hedge.  Even for my gangling butterfly bush, a plant that always seems on the verge of death, its limbs repeatedly dying and breaking off -- but which still continues to produce beautiful violet flowers year after year.

A final sign of my madness -- I've downloaded the "Picture This" app onto my phone, a handy app that allows me to identify any plant whose photo I snap with the app.  My old, pre-hedge self is dismayed.  Who cares what plants are called?  Who cares about their Latin names? 

Madness!  What next?  Greenhouses in my back yard? 

Drink your milk

• 

My ma, she tells me to drink milk,
My pa, he says so, too.
My teacher says a quart a day
Is not too much for you. 

Such were the memorable lyrics of a song we sang in third grade, part of a "Good Health" class extravaganza that we presented for the benefit of lowly first and second graders.  The verse was sung to the tune of Auld Lang Syne.  

A quart a day of milk.  The recognized amount needed for good health.  No one would ever have questioned it.  And a quart a day would amount to 91¼ gallons of milk per capita per annum.  Although our budding third grade math skills weren't yet quite up to that calculation.

A quart a day was the amount required by kids.  I suppose most adults drank less, although my mother, at least, drank the same amount as her children -- in addition to her coffee.  But times have changed.   In 2018, Americans consumed just 17 gallons per capita.  That had fallen from 24 gallons in 1996, and from about 28 gallons in 1975.

Why?  A spokesman for the milk industry says that -- for children at least -- the responsibility falls on the lack of concern by "gatekeeper moms."

Now there's so much choice in the marketplace. You have all kinds of different waters and sports beverages and energy drinks, so there's just a lot of choice out there. It's a culture of choice."

I still do my part.  Milk on my breakfast cereal.  Milk at lunch.  Milk at dinner.  Often, milk with snacks.  I'm part of a rapidly dying breed, however.

Some dairymen are going with the flow.  The Seattle Times carried an A.P. story this morning about two brothers who operate a dairy farm in Vermont, a farm that has been in the family for 150 years.  They're switching from cows to goats -- as are a growing number of other dairy farms.  So what does this mean?  Have kids and their parents, after turning up their noses at cows' milk -- in favor of Cokes, juice, and Red Bull -- not to mention coffee --  suddenly developed a taste for goat's milk?

Not really.  The milk is used primarily for making goat's cheese, which is acquiring a growing following among America's consumers.  Cheese is also a good source of calcium and other nutrients, of course, but I'm not sure that the kids who skip their daily milk are now nibbling on goat cheese.  It's more likely to be consumed by their parents, accompanying their evening glass of wine -- another milk competitor.

Goat dairymen seem pleased enough with the change, judging by the reaction of one such farmer:

The goats have a lot more personality than cows do, that's for sure.  Very curious," Brian Jones said, adding that they always wanted to nibble on something.

I have no problems with the production of goat cheese, but I lament the decline of Elsie the Cow and her friends.  Drinking milk just seems more, well, American, than eating goat cheese.  Even more American than owning an assault rifle.

I think I'll mull over the situation with a glass of milk and a couple of Oreos.  

Buon giorno, signore! Come va?

As mentioned last week, in just over seven weeks, I'll be heading for Italy.  This will be my ninth visit to that country, beginning with a six-month period of living and studying in Italy as a college student.

I must speak Italian pretty well by now, right?

Ha!

I am the worst person I know at learning spoken languages.  I took two years of Spanish in high school, and another five terms in college.  I became reasonably adept -- temporarily -- at reading simple Spanish.  But my speaking and listening ability, despite college language labs in college, designed to give us an "ear" for the language, remained rudimentary.  "Buenos dias.  ¿Como está usted?"  That pretty much sums up my conversational Spanish.

As part of my student days in Italy, I also took three terms of "Intensive Italian," focusing on the spoken, rather than written, language,  One of my female classmates was kind enough to tell me that my spoken Italian was "laughable."   Laughable or not, I am a bit more fluent in Italian than in Spanish, because I've visited the country so frequently.

Spanish and Italian are similar languages -- more similar when spoken than in writing.  This similarity helped me at first to master an elementary Italian vocabulary, but it also meant that I now forget whether the word that comes to mind when I'm trying to make myself understood is the Italian or the Spanish word.  "¡Que lastima!  Or, should I say, "Che peccato!"  

Even at my best, back when I was a student and had command of a very basic vocabulary, my grammar was even less than basic.  Italian has at least eight verb tenses, for example -- present, future, imperfect, perfect, past historic, imperative, conditional, and subjunctive.  In speaking, I confine myself to the present tense; where absolutely necessary, I'll use the perfect tense to indicate a past action, for the simple reason that it's an easy tense to remember. 

"Tomorrow I go to Milan if my sister arrives in time; yesterday I am in Rome," is how I sound."     

Fortunately, the Italians are a very genial people, and very forgiving of mistakes made by struggling foreigners.  The people I'm apt to deal with as a tourist very often speak excellent English -- better than some native English speakers I know back home.  And everyone seems delighted if you know any Italian at all, and that you make any effort at all to speak it.  

And those facts -- together with use of explanatory hand signs -- get me through the day as a tourist.  But "getting through the day" doesn't equate with an ability to engage in good conversation with those Italians who speak no English.  It's hard to discuss anything of complexity when one of the speakers is, as David Sedaris put it somewhere, "speaking baby talk." 

For months, I've been planning to brush up on my Italian before the trip, and now it seems a bit too late.  I'm not proud of myself, but it will all work out.  The human brain has surprising resources, and I've been surprised at the Italian words that have popped into my mouth from the depths of my memory when I desperately needed to convey or obtain information.  

Like, "Per favore!  Dov'è la toilette?"    

Language fails us

The "Eucharist" is the Christian ceremony celebrating the Last Supper, and also refers to the bread and wine consecrated during the ceremony and received by the priest and the congregation.  During the past few months, the press has reported calls by various Catholic bishops to deny the Eucharist to President Biden, as a punishment for his failure to support a national ban on abortion, or, more accurately, because his political beliefs and actions render him "unworthy" of receiving communion.  

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has decided to draft and issue a "teaching document" reminding the faithful of the meaning of the Eucharist.  The press had been rife with rumors that the document would specifically authorize a bishop to refuse the Eucharist to politicians under certain conditions.  Representatives of the USCCB have denied that this will be the intent or the effect of the document.

The controversy aroused by this issue reminds me of a weekly email sent to parishioners by our then-pastor back in February 2020.  The email did not address directly the subject of the Eucharist, but rather eloquently examined the nature of the Church itself, and noted the impossibility that any formal statement of doctrine could adequately sum up the nature of reality or set forth the fullness of the Christian message.

I'm copying a lengthy excerpt from that email, whose eloquence of expression I admire, and which I find myself reading over again from time to time.

---------------------

We can forget, sometimes, that our Catholic identity is rooted not in some clear and distinct theological and dogmatic ideas, but in the story of Jesus Christ and the unfolding story of the Church, i.e., the People of God. Ideas, dogmas, theological schemas: all may arise from our reading of the story of Jesus, but they are always just approximations—attempts to synthesize and reduce to a “yes” or “no” framework something which is, by its very nature, as complex, as open to various and varied interpretations as is the human experience itself. Jesus doesn’t come into the world with a white-board to explain everything to us, once and for all; but comes with a story, and leaves his story behind, to be told until the end of days. And while the teachings and the precepts may be important, what connects us to Christ is his story, as it is told by those who loved him and received by us; a story into which we are called to enter and make our own. In the end, the message of Christianity—including Catholicism—is that the complex revelation present in a human being and in a human community cannot be reduced to any idea or summarizing principle. The narrative character of Catholicism means that truth emerges only in the dynamic interplay of everything human—thought and feeling, intuition and rationality, science and poetry, action and reflection, gender and transcendence, individuality and community—which only our story can bear. Or, as St. Irenaeus says more succinctly: “The glory of God is the human person fully alive.”

In these days of competing ideologies and systems, there is a temptation to equate certainty of facts with the fullness of truth, and so to reduce the value of story to something less important and less true. We want definite answers—a “yes” or a “no”—which ideology too easily supplies. But what if the deepest truth of this world, and our deepest truth, cannot be reduced to bumper sticker aphorisms or 280 character tweets? What if truth requires engagement and encounter, like a book that needs to be opened and read, like a story that needs to be heard and told, over and over again—and whose meaning changes us, and changes in us, in ways we may not ever fully fathom? Then, if we want truth, we should read great stories—by Dostoyevski and Camus, L’Engle and Austen, Baldwin and Borges, and anyone else who opens our heart. And if we want true religion, we should read the gospels—not to sift out the rules or look for the loopholes, but to encounter the humanity of our God, whose Word longs to become part of our story.

Biking in southern China

Another "blast from the past."  In 1998, my nephew and I joined an REI Adventures biking tour (eleven of us, altogether) of southern China.  The trip began with a couple of nights in Hong Kong, exploring the city, partly with the group and partly on our own.    

We then took a catamaran ferry from Hong Kong, up the Pearl River, and passed through Chinese customs at Zhaoqing.  We spent the night in Zhaoqing, where we were introduced to our very good road bikes, which were adjusted to fit each of our bodies.  I will begin quoting from my journal after the first day of biking:

October 13 [1998] -- Tuesday -- 9:05 p.m.
Qing Yuan

First full day of biking, and Den and I went the entire 50 miles, together with five others from our group.  We rode in the bus for a number of miles out of town, then unloaded the bikes and set out into the Chinese landscape.  Fantastic day of sights, topped off with some exhaustion and a splitting headache the last two or three miles.  The headaches evaporated as soon as we stopped biking and sat down nursing a beer!

The route was flat, much of it on the top of a river levee.  We stopped a number of times for breaks, and were approached each time by curious locals.

October 14 -- Wednesday -- 6:25 a.m.
Qing Yuan

I conked out after writing one paragraph last night.  Fifty miles caught up with me, along with ending the day playing several games of gin rummy -- which Denny is finally learning to like!

We began riding down tree-lined lanes, with only occasional trucks and motor scooters contesting us for the road.  Everyone grins and shouts "Hello!" or "Hi!"  Then up onto the top of the levee where we followed a path for some distance.  We came down from the levee into a shady area where we stopped for lunch.  Passers-by carrying loads on their shoulders or in push carts were popular subjects for photographs, and were rewarded by one of our group (Dick Zeiner) with Polaroid shots of themselves -- they were delighted.  Denny and I took turns trying out Tom Richardson's recumbent bicycle -- too good an opportunity to miss.  Denny took to it like a duck to water; I was a bit more wobbly.

By now it was 95 degrees and humid, and stayed that way the rest of the day.  We passed through a number of towns.  Most directional signs are in Chinese only, so it's a good thing we had a guide.  (some of the signs on freeways are in English as well.)

We crossed the river on a small ferry, joining a mob of Chinese on bikes and motorbikes.  The ferry crossing was a high point of the day.  On the other side, we stopped at a small store and shelter - sort of an informal community center -- for cokes, and watched locals playing mah jong at a couple of tables.  Money was changing hands, and our guide says that the Chinese are "very bad gamblers."  About half of our group had got onto the bus by the time we reached the ferry, but most rejoined the active bikers for the final leg of the day's ride as we sailed onto a superhighway, went through a number of exchanges (cloverleafs), crossed a major bridge, and ended up here at this very nice, brand new hotel.  Sitting here in bed, looking around me, I feel we could easily be in a Marriott Hotel in the U.S. -- spacious room and many amenities.  On arrival, we traipsed into the lobby all hot and sweaty, and collapsed into the lobby lounge where we had beers before getting our rooms.  Peking duck for dinner -- it's the skin that you eat, we discovered, wrapped in a kind of crêpe with onions and jam.

October 16 -- Friday --6:35 a.m.
Yangshan

After going 50 miles on Tuesday, Wednesday was an easy day.  We rode some 30 or 40 miles in the van, and then biked almost six miles on back roads to our hotel in Jiu Long.  Lucky, because after yesterday, I had a very sore butt!

Karst formations were now seen all over the place -- this area is called "Little Guilin."  Our hotel was a pretty bleak concrete block -- only three years old and it looked like it had been around since the 1930s.  Our room walls were chipped and stained.  Many bugs and mosquitoes.     

After settling in, we biked another couple of miles to the end of a little road where we had a picnic lunch, watched carefully by area children who materialized out of nowhere.  Then we climbed aboard a couple of boats and were poled through an opening into the interior of a karst.  Cool and silent, like a cathedral.  We crossed the interior, dim and mysterious, under an opening to the sky in the karst high above.  We then got out of the boats, and at this point Denny apparently moved his leg in an awkward manner and was immediately in pain.  He thinks something has come loose inside the joint.  Even so, he followed the rest of us up a path about half way to the top of the karst, where we had a view down through the interior of the karst to the water below.  The karst seems to have been used as a fort by a band of bandits until the Communists came along and cleared them out.

Returned to our room for siestas, Denny returning in the van.  Then about 4:30, we biked the opposite direction from town and took another short boat ride upstream a bit.  We hiked through rice fields and pasture areas.  Saw the friskiest calf I've ever seen -- he ran around like a dog.  Denny's knee was bothering him badly.

Our destination was a karst formation with a cave in it, but the cave was closed when we arrived (there was a gate where admission was charged).  A bunch of flags flying atop the karst marked a campsite set up by some boy scouts.  We also visited a rather primitive collection of dwellings -- a tiny, densely populated village set in the middle of farmland.  One of the men showed us his house, a dark room which we entered and inspected.  Life here is obviously very basic.  Zhi-Wei, our guide, says this "village" is centuries old.  We returned to town, it being dark by the time we pulled onto the main street.

Jiu Long itself is a small, more typical village -- dirt streets, kind of run down buildings with small displays of fruits, drinks, household items -- the first we visited of what is turning out to be many similar small towns.  They all have kind of a Mexican or other third world feel.  Virtually no autos, lots of bikes, and quite a few motorcycles and scooters -- often occupied by a couple of teenaged boys buzzing around looking important.  Kind of a post-war Italian feel.  Lots of people in the streets, especially children playing.  The children are extremely cute, usually smiling and laughing and often quite aggressively curious, joking around with us.

Yesterday, we left Jiu Long by bike -- another long day of cycling.  Scenery was fantastic, with lots of interesting stuff to see along the road -- road workers, farmers, fishermen, small craftsmen.  Before lunch, most roads were unpaved with some concrete strips which were being laid in places -- in a few years this will all be paved and much less fun to visit.  We buzzed into one small town around lunch hour, and were mobbed by kids, all wearing inexpensive blazers as a uniform, and book bag backpacks.  They were jumping on the backs of bikes to get rides and having quite a time.  We are obviously like the circus when we come to town.  Then up a hill and down a long incline at a pretty fast speed, all on unpaved rocky road, to our lunch stop down in the valley -- an exhilarating ride.  I am delighted with the way the bike behaves on rough terrain -- the shocks obviously help a lot.  

* * *

Today, we go into Yao country.

We biked for another four days, viewing varied types of countryside and cultures, ending up in Guilin.  From Guilin, we flew to Guangzhou (Canton), where we stayed at the five-star White Swan Hotel, and toured the city.  We returned by train the next day to Hong Kong.

I'm glad we took this trip when we did, as China -- especially rural southern China -- was just making the transition from a poor agricultural country to a modern industrial state.   I noted at several points in my journal my feeling that we were lucky to see this area when we did, because big changes were already under way.  Although I suspect that many backwoods corners of the area still haven't changed much in the intervening 23 years.

Sneaking across the Atlantic

Readers of this blog will recall the Great Levanto Fiasco of 2020-21.  

A large birthday celebration, with thirty or so attendees, scheduled for May 2020 in Levanto, Italy, on the Ligurian coast.  Cancellation at the last moment, when Covid-19, like an evil deus ex machina, descended upon the scene.  Rescheduling of the event for May 2021 -- because surely no pandemic would still be raging about the world by that time.  Final cancellation early this year when that prediction proved all too faulty.  

Besides the big Levanto celebration, my sister and I and two or three others planned a small coda to the main event, a cooling-off period -- we joked -- to recover from all that fun.  We rented a house for one week on the shore of Lake Como, in the foothills of the Italian Alps.

We never canceled that rental, but postponed it even further until this September.  I suspected that by that time, world-wide immunization would have got the pandemic under control.

Lake Como still remains on tap.  The pandemic -- despite variant delta -- is increasingly under control in America and in much of Europe, although not elsewhere.  And more important, I and most others originally scheduled for Levanto have received both vaccination shots.

And so, eight weeks from now, barring some new disaster, I will fly to Rome where I'll stay for two nights, readjusting to Italy and renewing my love affair with its capital.  Then by train to Milan, where I'll meet my sister, our cousin, and maybe another couple.  (They are flying directly to Milan from San Francisco.)  We'll take a one hour train ride north to the town of Como, on the lake, and then a ferry ride to Menaggio, where we'll be just three miles (a taxi cab drive) from our rental.

I know.  One definition of insanity is making the same plans over and over and being confronted repeatedly by the same disaster.  But sanity is overrated.

I do have misgivings.  The delta variant is very contagious, and my Pfizer inoculations aren't one hundred percent effective.  Also, I will have reached the end of a six-month period since I received them, with conflicting reports on how effective they will remain without a booster.  But for  now, Italy is letting American tourists arrive without a Covid-19 test result and without a quarantine requirement -- so long as they come bearing a white CDC proof of vaccination card.  Who knows what the situation will be like next summer?  Grab a trip while you can is my possibly flawed instinct.

My other concern is more logistic.  The U.S. government requires a negative Covid-19 test performed within 72 hours of departure on a return trip to the States.  We'll be staying in a somewhat isolated area, and may have to devote much of one of our precious days locating and traveling to a pharmacy able to administer the test.  And of course if the test is positive ... well, I don't even want to think of the consequences, of how long I might have to stay somewhere in Italy until the disease ran its course.  

But at least I'm convinced that -- even if worst came to worst, and I tested positive -- my vaccination would ensure that I'd experience no serious symptoms.  The possibility of a positive testing does add a little stress to my preparations, but all good trips are stressful in some way or another.  Right?  The stress, once overcome, always makes for good stories once I'm back home.  

Not to mention, here on my blog. 

Pollux's excellent adventure

Better to be the cat gazing coolly down from a high wall, its expression inscrutable.

--Laini Taylor

Yeah, well, Pollux wasn't gazing down all that coolly this morning.

I woke up about 5:30.  Here in the northern latitudes, not long past the solstice, it was already light.  A cat -- Pollux -- was prowling restlessly about my bedroom, thinking deep cat thoughts.  Or maybe no thoughts at all.

He glanced over at the room's front window, a small, Gothic affair better suited for a church than a bedroom.  The window is usually just a decorative item, letting a small amount of additional light in through the stained glass.  In summer, however, when days are hot and nights are cooler, I tend to leave it open.  To my two cats -- with me only since the end of last summer -- its open status apparently served as a novelty in this otherwise predictable househould.

Pollux stared at the window for a few moments, and then tightened his muscles ready to leap.  Other, earlier cats had also often jumped up onto the window sill, surveying the front yard of what they considered their estate.  Still, there was the fear in my mind that he would misjudge his leap and soar off the second floor of the house.

I underestimated his feline instincts.  He jumped.  He teetered a bit, surprised at the void beneath his feet.  And then he settled himself with confidence.

As can be seen in the photo, the window is separated by a short gap from a very steep portion of the shingled roof, a small gable roof that covers the entrance to the house.  One prior cat, the late lamented Loki, dared as a  small kitten to make the leap onto the roof.  After some coaxing, and forcing myself to lean precariously out the window, I coaxed Loki to approach my hand and pulled him back inside to safety.

My memory of the event made me a bit nervous, but Pollux seemed settled on the window sill.  I looked away.  When I looked back, Pollux had vanished.  Outside the window, I heard a meow of surprise.  There he was, slightly below my level, hanging onto the roof.  Cats have claws; he was in far less danger of sliding off the edge than I would have been.

He scampered up to the top of the small gable roof, and sat on its summit.  His meows became more plaintive.  I enticed him down closer to the window.  He didn't get close enough for me to catch him, and I wasn't confident enough of my balance to reach out far enough even if he had.  Also, he isn't a small kitten; he isn't huge, but he weighs ten pounds.

I considered the possibilities.  From the other side of the small gable roof, it is quite possible to climb up onto the main portion of the roof, and then to move from the front of the house to the back.  At the back of the house, there's a hedge near the roof line that he might be able to climb down.  

But Pollux showed no interest in exploring that non-obvious possibility.  He was interested in getting down, not climbing higher.

No doubt waking the neighbors, I dragged a ladder out of the garage and propped it against the side of the house.  Just as I feared.  The ladder wasn't long enough to reach the roof from ground level.  I tried bridging the gap between window and cat with various articles, none of which came close to being successful.  My attempts only persuaded Pollux of what he had long suspected --  that I had no idea what I was doing.  They served only in convincing him, in fact, that I was totally useless as his protector.

I sensed despair in his feline eyes.

I decided to go outside again and survey the situation.  For lack of any other idea, other than wanting to go back to bed at what was now 6 a.m.

I opened the front door, and there on the porch sat Pollux.  Less than a couple of minutes after I last saw him out my window, stranded on the roof.

[I had to interrupt writing this adventure to rescue a bird -- alive and as yet uninjured -- that Pollux had seen fit to bring into the house in his mouth.  Never a dull moment with that cat.]

How did he get down from the roof .  Pollux wasn't talking, and I haven't the slightest idea.  Unless he jumped some twenty feet from the roof to the ground, avoiding the porch, the driveway, and other concrete surfaces.  He seemed unperturbed, and happy to accept my congratulations.

But the cat remained inscrutable.