Hikers' march to the sea

Angry voters take Britain out of the European union.  Scotland threatens to secede.  The Economist urges Parliament to eliminate the park-like Green Belt surrounding the Greater London area, in order to permit construction of new housing.  The London skyline itself is littered with skyscrapers, designed in appalling taste, revealing no attempt to conform them with their surroundings ( St. Paul's, the Tower of London) in either size or architectural style.

Britain seems like a mess.

But behind the headlines and outside the large cities lies a country little changed over the centuries.  I returned from this magical country last Tuesday (and have since been nursing my jet lag before attempting to share my impressions).

Kathy, Clinton and I defied predictions of daily rain (didn't happen), lack of physical preparation (by some of us), and the depredations of advanced old age (well, I exaggerate) -- and walked 109 miles from Kirkby Stephen in eastern Cumbria to Robin Hood's Bay on the North Sea.  We also took a bus from Robin Hood's Bay six miles north to Whitby to see the abbey ruins, and walked back along the coast line.  We did great, we enjoyed it greatly, we'd do it again gladly, and we recommend that viewers give it a whirl as well.

But aside from the statistics and the bragging, walking in rural northern England is an experience with time travel.  Although we occasionally had to walk along a paved back road, for the most part we walked on paths and gravel tracks that have been in place for centuries.  We stayed in small villages and in isolated inns.   When we entered Richmond (population 8,413), where we laid over for a day, we felt -- as Yorkshiremen no doubt felt in centuries past -- that we had entered a major city.  A city dominated by the ruins of Richmond Castle -- parts of which date back to the twelfth century.

The hike encompassed three main phases -- the crossing of the Pennine range, the descent of the Swale river valley ("Swaledale") in Yorkshire Dales National Park, and the march to the sea across the high moors of North Yorkshire Moors National Park. 

Although diverse in topography, the hike throughout all regions gave a sense of how well the English have preserved the rural countryside, even while permitting its use for grazing and some cultivation.  We stayed at picturesque bed and breakfasts, and dined in centuries-old pubs.  We were greeted cautiously by thousands of sheep, and sleepily by almost as many cows.  We ended each day tired and hungry, and began each morning with enthusiasm.

We felt it our duty to sample the varying ales of Yorkshire, and we did our duty.

We were surprised at the conclusion of the trip by the charms (and pubs) of Robin Hood's Bay, a village built on steep and winding roads that work their way down to the sea, a village where we mingled with fellow hikers and with less ambitious folks who arrived by more modern means for their holiday, walking their children with pails and shovels down to the seashore.

Not one person mentioned "Brexit" to us.  We were circumspect, and avoided the topic ourselves.

It's hard to believe that a week ago, I was still living in an Anglophile's paradise.  I'll be back.

Coast to coast

At 5 p.m. PDT tomorrow afternoon, the lights in the editorial offices of Confused Ideas will blink off, the staff will be sent home, the banks of servers will whirr to a stop, a key will be turned in the lock, and ... your Chief Correspondent and Editor in Chief will head out the door.

As I'm sure I've mentioned before, I'll be returning to the small, picturesque town of Kirkby Stephen, in the shadow of the Pennines of northern England -- the point where I ended my hike eastward across England from the Irish Sea at its half-way point a year ago.  I will resume the hike, completing the eastern half of the Coast to Coast path, crossing Yorkshire, and ending up at the North Sea ten days later.

I can then brag that I've crossed England twice on foot -- from east to west following Hadrian's Wall near the Scottish border in 2010, and from west to east farther south -- where England is much "fatter," some 190 miles by trail -- in 2015-16.

I will return home on July 26, my legs sturdier, my breath surer, my vowels more clipped, and licking a last few drops of English ale off my lips.  Confused Ideas from the Northwest Corner will resume publication shortly thereafter.

Chamber music

Jeewon Park, pianist
last night playing the
Mozart sonata, K.305 

Last night was the opening night of the Seattle Chamber Music Society's 35th Summer Festival.

Nine years ago, almost to the day, I wrote an ecstatic post about attending the festival, which was then held on the bucolic campus of the Lakeside School, near Seattle's northern city limits.  I frankly admitted that I was as enchanted by the campus as by the music itself.  A large number of non-paying attendees sat on the grass outside St. Nicholas Hall, eating picnics and listening to the concert from within on speakers that the festival thoughtfully provided.

Alas, since 2010, Lakeside has needed the venue for its own purposes.  The concerts are now held in the small performance auditorium in Benaroya Hall, in the heart of downtown.  Not so bucolic, not so relaxed, but significantly better acoustics.  And light rail conveys me from the UW station directly to the interior of Benaroya, a nice benefit in these days of crowded streets and expensive parking.

By the time I decided to get a ticket -- over a month ago -- there were only about three seats available for this opening performance.  One of them, fortunately, was in the third row from the stage.  The musicians were practically in my lap, their every move and expression available for my study.  (Except for the pianist, who -- because I was on the right side of the auditorium -- was hidden behind the piano.)

The festival started with a bang.  Just as the violinist in the first number (a Mozart sonata for piano and violin) put his bow to the strings, the phone of some forgetful member of the audience began ringing.  The phone's owner took an impressively long time to kill the phone -- which was probably deep in the guilty party's purse -- while the musicians paused with bemused smiles on their faces and the audience tittered nervously.

That was the one and only missed note of the evening.

Besides the opening Mozart sonata, the other numbers were a Schumann quartet for piano and strings, and one of the later Beethoven string quartets (No. 15).  All were beautifully and movingly performed, and I really couldn't have asked for a better seat. 

My only (small) complaint is that the tiny lobby space becomes extremely crowded, both before the performance and at the intermission.  Not like those days of yore, when we poured out into the summer twilight.  But that's a drawback I can live with.

The festival continues with eleven more concerts between now and the end of July.

Happy Fourth!

It's 4 p.m. on the Fourth of July.  Somewhere in the distance, I heard a firecracker explode.  It's the first sound of the Fourth to reach my ears on a gray, chilly Fourth of July in Seattle.

I wonder when I made the transition from a kid who went crazy in his eagerness to get his hands on fireworks, legal or illegal, to a guy with two cats who worries whether an occasional explosion might frighten them into neuroses?

When I was growing up, the battle by adults over fireworks went on year after year, the battle lines moving back and forth erratically.  For us kids, the arguments roiled above our heads, sounding like distant thunder.  We worried only about concrete impacts on our ability to initiate explosions. 

My earliest memories are of seeing fireworks stands everywhere, inside and outside city limits, and drooling at the displays.

My brother and I enjoyed and tolerated the "pretty" fireworks.  They were cool, and added variety to the celebration.  They kept our parents happy.  But what we really wanted was noise and mayhem, as much as possible. 

We lit fuses and threw firecrackers and cherry bombs, delightedly aware that poorly standardized fuses endangered our fingers if we didn't throw them fast enough. We of course threw them at each other. We dropped them into ant hills, becoming ourselves the monsters we secretly feared meeting. We tied fuses together, setting off three or four together. (We occasionally lit a full string, but usually abhorred the waste doing so entailed.)  We even got creative and hid firecrackers under our toy tanks and soldiers, miniature landmines that wrecked havoc on the orderly marching of our troops -- we joyously relived the horrors of World War II and the Korean War in our own back yards, at the beach, on family picnics.

Then there were a couple of years when all fireworks, statewide I suppose, were banned absolutely.  A pall of silence fell over the land. My brother and I went in desperation to the dime store and bought rolls of "caps" -- those paper tapes with small amounts of explosives that you threaded through toy cowboy cap guns --and exploded them all at once by placing the roll on the ground and lowering a baseball bat on it full force.

There were years of county option, when fireworks were illegal in my county but, as you followed the Columbia river downstream, were legal in the adjoining county.  My brother and I, together with other kids in the neighborhood, bicycled en masse the ten or fifteen miles to the county line -- the sales booths began precisely at the line -- and loaded up on contraband to haul back home.

At present, fireworks sales and "discharge" are heavily regulated by the state, with sales and use permitted only on certain dates around the Fourth and again at New Year's.  (RCW 70.77.)  Every jurisdiction in the state may, at its option, enact stricter rules.  My old county -- hurrah! -- has no such additional restrictions.  King County, which includes Seattle, sadly bans both sales and discharge entirely, at all times.

But, of course, Washington is riddled by territories controlled by sovereign Indian tribes, each of  which is fully aware of the commercial advantages inhering in seasonal sales.  Some reservations seem little larger than the fireworks stands that stand upon them.  If you can't get it at some reservation somewhere, it probably no longer is manufactured.

Which suggests that the present complex state of the law creates a dream world for young pyrotechnicians -- it's almost as easy to find a place to buy fireworks in Washington today as it was to find a drink during prohibition. 

And yet -- I've heard one small explosion all day long, as dinner approaches.  I suppose we're more a spectator society today.  There will be beautiful formal fireworks displays this evening, including a mammoth show over Lake Union -- even if it rains.  These displays are well attended by well-behaved crowds.

As the fireworks, in dazzling and colorful splendor, break out across the entire sky, and as stirring music pours forth from the sound system, the kids sit quietly beside their parents, rapidly dismembering mythical monsters and other enemies on their iPhones.

Approaching Discworld with trepidation

Back in the primeval days of the internet, a guy with whom I was chatting in a chatroom (chatroom!  do they even still exist?) asked if I was a fan of the Discworld books.  "The what?" I asked.  Consumed with pity, he insisted that I read one that he recommended, which I did although I don't recall its title.

I'm not sure what I was expecting.  Some sort of science fiction or fantasy, obviously, but of what sort?  I was amazed and amused -- but not totally converted into the sort of fan who would insist that strangers read the books.  As I recall, Pratchett's world is not a somber world of great events, such as that conceived and written by Tolkien.   It is more like the hilariously confusing muddle of Douglas Adams's novel, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

After reading the recommended book, I then more or less forgot about Discworld, until a month or so ago.  I've belonged for decades to a British book club that brings out books of every sort -- mainly English classics -- in fine (but not lavish) editions.  Their most recent prospectus included an edition of Mort, one of the Discworld books.  I read the blurb, and decided it was worth a try.  The book arrived yesterday.

Discworld was the creation of recently-deceased author Terry Pratchett.  By Wikipedia's count, there are 41 books in the series.  The books are not sequential, as I understand it; each is a separate story but each is set in the same Discworld of Pratchett's imagination.

Discworld is a flatland fantasy.  Being flat, not spherical, the world has borders.  I think it gives you a flavor of the series if I say that the flat disc is balanced on the back of four elephants, which in turn stand upon a giant turtle.  I suspect -- but do not recall for a fact -- that the elephants and turtle have a sort of metaphysical, quasi-Hindu reality, but are not involved in the lives of Discworld inhabitants, human beings who are confined to the surface of the disc itself.*

Anyway, Mort arrived today, and I read the introduction.  The book is a story about Death, the human personification of death represented as a skeleton with a scythe.  But having been brought into physical existence by the human imagination, Death goes beyond his grisly duties and has hopes, interests, and dreams of his own.

The binding is beautiful, as is the somewhat macabre artwork designed especially for this edition.  But in my present state of awareness, I feel unworthy to tackle its reading.  Instead, I plan to broaden my background by downloading onto Kindle the earliest-written of the Discworld books -- The Colour of Magic.  Having first mastered what presumably were Pratchett's earliest thoughts concerning his newly-crafted world, I may feel competent to leap ahead to Mort (the fourth of the series).

Further reports as events warrant.
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*(7-2-16) Actually, after reading the Prologue to The Colour of Magic, I learn that resourceful investigators in the Discworld kingdom of Krull at one time built "a gantry and pulley arrangement" over the edge of Discworld's rim. (In some ways, I imagine, similar to the platform that entrepreneurs have built out over the rim of the Grand Canyon.) They were able, like scientists who send probes to Jupiter and Saturn, "to bring back much information about the shape and nature of A'Tuin [the turtle] and the elephants."
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(7-4-16) To my embarrassment, I find that not only are the elephants and turtle real and physical -- neither metaphysical nor mythical -- but that the last fourth of The Colour of Magic , the very first book of the saga, leads to the protagonist's plunging off the rim of Discworld, past the aforesaid all-too-real creatures and into the unfathomable void of space/time. The moral -- never pretend to understand a story before you read it.