Beneath desert skies

Immediately when you arrive in the Sahara, for the first or the tenth time, you notice the stillness. An incredible, absolute silence prevails outside the towns; and within, even in busy places like the markets, there is a hushed quality in the air...  A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintegration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it takes its course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for a while is quite the same as when he came.
--Paul Bowles 

As an antidote, perhaps, to the rains of England through which I've just finished hiking, my nephew Doug and I will visit Morocco in October.  It's a country that's always fascinated me, probably ever since I first watched Casablanca -- a film shot entirely in the Warner Bros. studios, with the exception of one scene shot at the Van Nuys airport!  The magic of the silver screen.

The trip is sponsored by the same "adventure company" that guided Pascal and me to 18,000 feet in Nepal last October, but this "adventure" will be somewhat less strenuous.  We will fly into Marrakesh about three days before the tour begins and drive to the coastal city of Essaouira, originally a seventeenth century Portuguese fortress.  So exotic and unknown a destination that (to me) it seems odd that Jimi Hendrix hung out there in his early days!

The tour proper begins back in Marrakesh, an eleventh century Moorish city. We then drive into and over the High Atlas mountains and down into the Sahara. We will stay overnight at various villages along the way, as we plunge deeper and deeper into the sea of sand and rock.  The central feature of the trip will be four days traversing a bit of the Sahara atop spiteful camels, staring up at the swirling stars at night.  Remember Lawrence of Arabia?  Remember that scene where he dressed up as an Arab for the first time, strutting back and forth in front of a mirror, swirling his robes about him?  You know that floor-length mirror in my guest bedroom?   Well, never mind.  You get the idea.  So, yeah. I daydream.  And I'll be riding camelback for four days.  Or, as the itinerary tactfully puts it, we can alternately walk and ride, depending on our feelings about the experience. And, as the itinerary also tactfully puts it:

[The camels'] saddles are cushioned with traditional blankets to make our safari a comfortable experience over the magical seas of orange dunes and contrasting spaces of shiny black volcanic rock.

Okaaaaaay!  It sounds very cool in theory.  I'll let you know how it works out on the ground, as it were. 

The trip ends up in Fez (or Fès), a medieval city with a large, ancient native quarter, or medina. Its medina is the sort of place in which I like to imagine (romanticist that I am) that I could end up losing my way, unable to find my way out, forced to spend my remaining days living hand to mouth in a native hovel, cadging dirhams (or euros) from tourists to pay for my couscous, and attempting each day to write the great novel that will earn me enough in a cash advance to pay my airfare back to America.

That American writer, Paul Bowles, after all, ended up spending most of his years in Tangier, and actually finished up his great existential novel, The Sheltering Sky (which I read a couple of weeks ago while hiking in England!) in Fez.

The sky hides the night behind it and shelters the people beneath from the horror that lies above.

Maybe so.  Maybe not.  But the trackless dunes beneath the desert sky should be an excellent place to test Bowles's scary epigram. 

And Morocco has plenty of desert.

Iolanthe

When in that House M.P.'s divide,
If they’ve a brain and cerebellum, too,
They’ve got to leave that brain outside,
And vote just as their leaders tell 'em to.
But then the prospect of a lot
Of dull M. P.’s in close proximity,
All thinking for themselves, is what
No man can face with equanimity.

In an election year -- especially in this election year -- what could be more enjoyable than a musical about a young man, half-human and half-fairy, being sent to Parliament where he becomes head of both opposing parties and passes a bill requiring that members of the  House of Lords be selected by competitive examination, rather than by noble birth?  Especially since this musical comedy dates back to 1882, and, as we know, things have only grown worse in the interval?

Yes, it's July and time once again for the annual production of the Seattle Gilbert & Sullivan Society.  This year, the production is Iolanthe, an operetta dear to my own heart since it was the first G&S show I ever saw live, back when I was a college freshman.

As I've said in past years, if you've seen one G&S show, in a sense you've seen them all.  But Iolanthe does have some interesting twists of plot, what with the fairies and all. 

Iolanthe, a luscious young female fairy (they all are luscious -- they never grow old, don't you know) married a human.  Although a capital offense, the Queen of the Fairies commuted the sentence to a permanent ban from fairydom.  In the fullness of time, Iolanthe brought forth a halfling son, Strephon, a radiant and unbearably cheerful young twit who, as the story commences, is 25 years old.  He, a shepherd by profession,  has fallen in love with a Bo Peep of a wife who, as an orphan, is a ward of Chancery. 

As all of us British Constitutional Law nerds know, the Lord Chancellor -- in whose hands Phyllis's matrimonial future lies -- sits (or did until 2005) on the wool sack,  presiding over the House of Lords.  Unfortunately, all of the Lords, including the Chancellor himself, have their own connubial designs on Bo Peep (I mean Phyllis).

The Law is the true embodiment
Of everything that's excellent.
It has no kind of fault or flaw,
And I, my Lords, embody the Law.
The constitutional guardian I
Of pretty young Wards in Chancery,
All very agreeable girls — and none
Are over the age of twenty-one.
A pleasant occupation for
A rather susceptible Chancellor!

Complications ensue, as they are wont to do in these little plays, complications that include Iolanthe's return to fairydom and the Lords' incurring the wrath of the Fairy Queen.  Her Fairy Majesty, fortunately controlling a rotten borough or two, sends Strephon to Parliament armed with a spell requiring all other M.P.s to obey his commands.  To the horror of the Lords, his bill to require members of the Upper House to possess intelligence is rushed through its second reading.

Strephon’s a Member of Parliament!
Carries ev'ry Bill he chooses.
To his measures all assent –
Showing that fairies have their uses.
Whigs and Tories
Dim their glories,
Giving an ear to all his stories –
Lords and Commons are both in the blues!
Strephon makes them shake in their shoes!

More complications.  The Lord Chancellor (played by local talk radio host Dave Ross, who always scoops up these most juicy roles) grants a request from himself to marry Phyllis himself.

Lord Chancellor. Victory! Victory! Success has crowned my efforts, and I may consider myself engaged to Phyllis! At first I wouldn’t hear of it – it was out of the question. But I took heart. I pointed out to myself that I was no stranger to myself; that, in point of fact, I had been personally acquainted with myself for some years. This had its effect. I admitted that I had watched my professional advancement with considerable interest, and I handsomely added that I yielded to no one in admiration for my private and professional virtues. This was a great point gained. I then endeavoured to work upon my feelings. Conceive my joy when I distinctly perceived a tear glistening in my own eye! Eventually, after a severe struggle with myself, I reluctantly – most reluctantly – consented.

In the face of such a disastrous potential marriage by her daughter, Iolanthe abandons her inclinations toward secrecy and confesses to her daughter -- and to the astonished Lord Chancellor -- that the Chancellor himself was the man whom she had married yea these many years ago.  The Lord Chancellor could hardly marry his own daughter.

Nor did he wish to, now that he had his fair Iolanthe back again, aged not a whit over a quarter century.  Immediately, all the fairies and all the Lords wish to be married off together.  The fact that such a marriage is a capital offense under fairy law is overcome by the sort of adroit legal maneuvering one would expect from a Lord Chancellor, and everyone lives happily ever after.

Damn!  Who would want to waste an evening watching The Dark Knight Rises when he has meaty fare like Iolanthe at his disposal.  Guess there's just no accounting for tastes.

Tonight's is the final night's performance at the Bagley Wright -- see it if you have a chance. And watch for next July's Gilbert & Sullivan production.

Chiroptophobia

Now I have no objection in principle to taking a simple story of adventure, hyping it up with pop psychological analysis and dark metaphorical portent, and creating a complex artistic endeavor worthy of being subjected to the full battery of tools available to critical analysis.  Richard Wagner proved that such an elevation could work quite nicely, transforming simple heroic tales told by Germanic warriors as they sat around a campfire into the heavy-breathing Sturm und Drang of an opera like Götterdämmerung.

But Batman?  I have just finished reading the New Yorker's review of The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan's third part of his ponderous Batman trilogy.  The review cleverly (and rather snarkily) mocks the seriousness of the entire enterprise, notes the uncoolness of both Bruce Wayne and his Batman alias, laments Batman's frustrating (to the reviewer) asexuality, and remarks on the absence of any real political relevance of the movie to today's political world.  What we have left, according to the review, is cool gadgets: the Bat-Pod and "the Bat" (a sort of airplane).  The review observes of the director:

We go to his films to gasp, not to yearn or pity or weep, except over the paucity of our own automobiles.

I haven't seen the latest Dark Knight, nor do I intend to.  (I did see Batman Begins, the first of the series.)  I can't analyze the movie, therefore, but I have some thoughts about the entire endeavor.

Batman was my favorite comic hero as a kid.  He didn't leap tall buildings in a single bound, he didn't achieve super powers by exclaiming, "Shazam!", he didn't fly like a hawk, or have magic bullet-repellent bracelets and lariat, or possess a power ring and power lantern.  He was just an ordinary guy -- an ordinary hyper-rich guy, admittedly -- who was fed up with lawlessness in Gotham City and had the money and determination to do something about it.   Luckily, his mansion rested astride a large cave (the Bat Cave, of course), whence he and his sidekick Robin jumped into the Batcar and shot out into the night in response to Commissioner Gordon's Bat Signal.  That was pretty much it.

(And no -- no decent all-American kid ever questioned Bruce Wayne's relationship with young Dick Grayson.  That was left to decadent literary critics of the day.  What could seem more normal to us than that a hero should be accompanied by a young sidekick?  A Tonto to his Lone Ranger, a Lucky to his Hopalong Cassidy?)

We knew the general lines of the back story -- that Bruce had witnessed the murder of his parents, and had vowed a revenge on criminals -- albeit a revenge taken within the law and tempered with justice.  That was all we needed to know.  We didn't worry about Bruce Wayne's psychological profile, his presentation of symptoms codified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, his complicated relationship with his butler Alfred, his obsession with bats.  Batman was not acting out some obsessive-compulsive disorder resulting from childhood trauma.  As American kids, we had a simple trust in free will, untainted by Calvinist intellectualism.  Good people chose to be good; bad guys chose to be bad.  Batman was good.  Commissioner Gordon, although at times obtuse, was good.  The Joker, the Penguin -- they were evil -- although fascinating, like Milton's Satan -- and fully deserved whatever blows to the jaw (and their egos) came their way in the course of each episode.

The stories of Batman and Robin were no folk tales arising out of a nation's childhood. They were simple commercial kid's stories arising out of the need to make a buck (or a dime) during America's 1930's. Batman should have been left to those murky drawings of DC Comics, not transformed into a cinematic blockbuster superhero, encased in a rubber batsuit worthy of some S&M cult.  If the age-old struggle between the noble Caped Crusader and DC Comics's peculiar agents of Evil seems too old-fashioned and naïve for today's audiences, then let's leave Batman (and the now-neglected Robin) to those piles of old comic books still stored in the attic.  The original Batman premise was too simple and straightforward a base on which to build a trilogy of multi-million dollar epics (the estimated cost of the current movie being $250 million).

Next it will be "Goldilocks: Porridge Too Hot! -- A Modern Tale of Blonde Aryan Lust and Familial Ursine Rivalry, Deep in the Dense Forests of Northern Europe." Bah! I'm going up to the attic to dig out my old comics.

Astray in the Langdales

Near Stake Pass
(in decent weather!)

The UK public has already endured the wettest April for over a century and the wettest June since records began and more bad weather is forecast. However, it seems this has merely spurred people to invest in waterproof jackets and trousers, determined to get outdoors to enjoy the British "summer" no matter what it takes.

--PR Newswire (7-16-12)

As Maya and I neared the end of our second day of hiking, we felt pleased.  Despite the dire forecasts of daily rain, we had encountered at most an occasional sprinkle.  Twenty-nine miles of hiking already lay behind us -- through farm lands, along the forested lakeshore of five-mile Coniston Water, circling the park-like Tarn Hows, crossing over the picturesque stone arch of Skelway Bridge, and following generally flat trails through ever-narrowing valleys into the mountainous realm of the Langdales.  We were tempted to laugh at the weatherman.

As we approached the ancient inn of Old Dungeon Ghyll, however, the skies darkened, the first drops fell, and before we could reach the shelter of the inn -- our stop for the night -- we were soaked to the skin. 

The following day -- the third of the hike -- was  supposed to be a more relaxed seven miles -- over a pass and down a valley into the hamlet of Stonethwaite.  That morning, the skies remained dark, but the night's rain had ceased and we began hiking optimistically.  The first mile took us from the inn to the closed end of the Mickleden valley.  The trail then became much rougher, and we began a steep climb over switchbacks to Stake Pass.  Stake Pass, according to the guidebook, is only 1,400 feet in elevation.  But its setting is bare and desolate, reminiscent of photographs I've seen of northern Alaska, or of some of the New Zealand terrain used as the setting for Lord of the Rings.  Rain began to fall, and visibility was obscured by mist.

We were experiencing for the first time the High Fells of England. 

The path remained clear and distinct, and so I led us forward without much serious reference to the guidebook.  We continued climbing, often quite steeply, but the guide had mentioned that the pass was not a sharp divide but continued for some distance as a rising plateau.  We overtook and passed well-outfitted groups of teenaged climbers, burdened by heavy packs, chugging wetly up the trail with varying degrees of self-confidence and enthusiasm.  Maya and I, carrying only daypacks, were talking and enjoying the scenery.  Then we encountered an older group, less buoyant in expression, coming down the trail.  It occurred to me that we had been hiking quite a distance from our first contact with Stake Pass -- hiking steadily uphill.

Finally, at a wind shelter on a flat rocky plateau, we stopped and talked to a group of obviously experienced climbers.  They had turned back, they said.  The weather ahead was too threatening.  Too threatening for what, I asked myself? Too threatening for a simple descent to Stonethwaite?  I asked them to show me on a map exactly where we were.  Yikes!  We had been ascending the trail to Scafell Pike, the highest peak in England -- just 3,209 feet in elevation, but in the context of its surroundings, and on a wet  and misty day, certainly a more ambitious climb than we had contemplated.

Further review of guidebook and maps revealed that we should have followed a trail branching off to the north at Stake Pass.  We returned to the pass -- a rather large plateau, as the guidebook described -- and spent perhaps an hour or so in the rain, following various promising trails, none of which ended up going anywhere that made sense.  We never did locate the correct path.  As I sit now -- dry and warm in my study, coffee in hand, perusing contour maps -- I still find it impossible to locate the point where our trail -- clearly a major route -- turned off from the Scafell trail.  And yet -- obviously -- hundreds of hikers every year follow the Cumbria Way trail from Dungeon Ghyll to Stonethwaite, apparently with no difficulty.

I do suggest that a clear Cumbria Way signpost or marker at Stake Pass would be well worth the minor expense.

Considering the lateness of the day and the nature of the weather, I finally made an executive decision to retreat.  We hiked back downhill to Dungeon Ghyll. Our baggage had, of course, been sent ahead to our next night's lodging. I called a taxi, and paid £90 for a 50-minute drive from Dungeon Ghyll to Stonethwaite -- seven miles by trail, but a long, circuitous drive through Keswick by highway.  A defeat of sorts, but the sort of defeat that presents its own amusing and instructive aspects. In retrospect, at least.

Our adventure on Stake Pass gave me a proper respect for both the High Fells and English weather.  The Langdales, through which we were ineptly navigating, are only one portion of the High Fells of the Lake District.  We were to pass through another portion (past Skiddaw House) on Day Five.  And yet -- as that distinguished geographer Bill Bryson points out¹ -- the entire Lake District (fells, dales, becks, gills, tarns, waters, pastures, forests, and all) could be dropped comfortably into the geographical area occupied by Minneapolis-St. Paul. 

It's not the size of your country that matters.  It's what you have within it, and what you do with it.  The English need make no apologies to other, larger countries for the scenic beauty and recreational opportunities it offers in its Lake District.

Their weather this July, on the other hand, has been a disgrace!
--------------------------------------------------
¹Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island (Harper Perennial 2001) at 254.

Walking in the rain

Cries of complaint from many readers have been pouring into the Northwest Corner's editorial offices -- well, one cry from one reader -- regarding the diminishing quantity of posts over the past few weeks.  (We'll skim over any complaints about diminishing quality, complaints perhaps becoming more frenetic following my contemplation of living out my life as a Laird.)   I like to think of this slowdown as quantitative easing, but that term doesn't seem popular either.

And it will only get worse.  I leave within the hour for nearly two weeks in England where -- as mentioned in an earlier post -- I will hike the Cumbria Way with my niece.  This trail runs 70 miles from Ulverston to Carlisle. 

It seems to be a typical summer in Britain, especially in the west.  I've been following the weather in Ulverston, and it seems to have been raining daily for the past month, with the ten-day forecast showing more of the same.  Most of the rain is forecast as "showers," a flexible term that can mean most anything.  But I have to say that in my prior years of British hiking I can recall only one day when it rained all day.  Generally, the rain comes and goes, and actually goes more than it comes.

So I'm off, and the Northwest Corner is in abeyance for a couple of weeks.  I'll come back a damper, but more energetic, writer.

I'd make a rum laird, an odd eigg

Isle of Rùm, taken
last summer from Maillag

I crave a title.  What kind of title, you may ask?  Mayor of Seattle?  King of Siam?  Emperor of China?

No.  No, the title that's captured my fancy is "Laird of Muck."

Last summer, after completing my West Highlands hike in Scotland, I took the train from Fort William to the little coastal port of Maillag, just for a day's visit.  From Maillag, I looked across the water to a number of islands making up a portion of the Inner Hebrides -- to the giant Isle of Skye, but also to the smaller islands of Rùm and Eigg (it occurred to me, as it must have occurred to many others, that these isles were the fixings for a delicious eiggnog).  The islands looked somewhat bleak, but tantalizing.  I only wished I had time to take one of the small ferries across the straits -- an exploration saved for perhaps a later date.

What I didn't see, however -- because it was obscured behind the misty shores of Eigg -- was the Isle of Muck.

I knew nothing of Muck, or of its owner, the Laird of Muck, until I opened this month's issue of National Geographic Traveler.  There I found a nicely illustrated article by an adventuresome  young Kansan, a writer who took the time to explore the Inner Hebrides -- even as I would love to do -- but who also seems to have had the connections (or the chutzpah) to spend a day hanging out with the Laird himself -- a fellow named Lawrence MacEwan, a proprietor who raises sheep on his small island. (His wife manages a group of vacation cottages; his daughter runs the lairdom's only hotel.)  The island is a family venture, as you can see, one handed down from laird to laird, from time immemorial. (Which in this case, means since 1896.)

Muck is just about the largest sized dominion over which I could competently reign.  Two and a half square miles.  Population, 30.  Major (and only) town, Port Mòr.  As laird, I would daily manage my herd of sheep, trying to stay one mental step ahead of them.  Grass for grazing grows well on the Isle of Muck; no shortage of rain, you know.  There'd be lots of squishing around in the muck, ha ha ha!

But my estate -- my lairdom -- would consist of more than sheep and hotels and muck.  I would also rule over a resident seal population, and be on at least speaking terms with porpoises in the surrounding waters.  In short, this island has virtually everything that a laird could ask for. Including privacy and lots of silence.  Except when the occasional writer dropped in to see what it was all about.

As my friends, of course, you my readers would always be welcome to visit.  How to address me?  Well might you ask. According to Wikipedia, a "Laird" occupies a spot between an Esquire and a Baron.  As an American lawyer, I'm supposedly already an Esquire (or at least an Esq.), so becoming a laird would be one step up the social heirarchy.  Many of my countrymen would argue that, as an attorney, my esteem in the public eye is so low to begin with that -- while a lairdom might be just one step upward -- it would be a hell of a long step upward.  But to return to the question of address:  I would become "The Much Honoured Rainier96."    (Don't forget that "u" in "Honoured.")  My eldest son -- the heir apparent (primogeniture, you know -- look it up) -- would add "Yr." ("the younger") to the end of his name. Until that fateful day, of course, when he himself became the laird.  

Sure, it'll be wet.  It's the Hebrides, after all.  But I'm from Seattle, right?  Better a wet laird than a wet esquire.  And as Dean Monro commented so perceptively about the island in 1549:

Be ane haffe myle of sea to this ile, lyes ane ile of twa myle lang, callit in Erische Ellannaneche, that is the Swynes ile, and very fertill and fruitful of cornes and grassing for all store, and verey guid for fishing, inhabit and manurit, a good falcon nest in it. It perteynis to the Bishope of the iles, with ane guid heighland haven in it, the entrey quherof is at the west cheik.

Amen to that, I say.  I now plan to become Laird of Muck in my own right, and in the historically correct manner -- by conquest.  I'm off to the nearest ship's chandler to outfit my vessel.  As soon as I secure a vessel.