I'm leaving, on a jet plane ...

Chiang Mai street scene

It's a quiet Sunday afternoon at the Northwest Corner blog offices.  The staff has been given three-week leaves, the "Closed, but Still Awesome" sign has been hung on the front door.  The mighty printing presses have been shut down and will be maintained during down time.

Only your editor and publisher remains on the premises, brooding over the Decline and Fall of Virtually Everything, and wondering how to make a clever story out of the Apocalypse.  His luggage has been dragged out, piles of clothes strewn about his desk, a not-uncommon look of confusion flickering across his face.

The blog cats suspect and fear the worse, and follow their befuddled editor as he darts from room to room, howling with outrage. The cats howling, that is; not the editor.

So, yes.  As his earlier posts have suggested, "Confused Thoughts from the Northwest Corner" will be shut down -- in fact, with this post, is henceforth shut down -- until his return from Southeast Asia on November 8.  God willing, fire and eruptions permitting, and connecting flights through Seoul still being possible.

Have a Happy Halloween!

Happy blazing birthday!

Denny, teaching his sixth grade
class in Chiang Mai 

Fireworks!  That's the kind of celebration my sister Kathy has always loved.  So naturally, when a major birthday comes along, she isn't going to mark it with a mega-candled cake at your local Applebee's.

And so, as mentioned in earlier posts, our plan has been that as many as can do it will go first to Chiang Mai, Thailand, where Kathy's son Denny is teaching sixth grade at an international school, and then -- for the actual celebration -- we (including Denny and his young daughter) will fly to Bali where others, with less free time, will join us for a week long family frolic in the sun, ocean, and jungle.  Returning from Bali to Chiang Mai, some of us will also stop en route for a couple of days in Cambodia, to explore the ruins at Angkor Wat.

That was the general plan.  Pretty exciting, but apparently a little tame for Kathy.  So she managed to dial up the seismic activity on Bali, causing a large area around the volcano Agung to be evacuated in expectation of an imminent eruption.  And then she waved her wand, causing northern California to burst into flame -- a wave of the wand that was a bit too exuberant, as her own house burned to the ground.

But losing your hearth and home is no reason to change plans.  She flew off to Chiang Mai on Tuesday.  I -- my head reeling -- will be departing Seattle in three days, on  Monday, to join her, Denny, and other celebrants.  As the schedule of coming events now stands, everyone will all show up on Bali on October 22, where we will remain for a week, barring some eruptive disaster, in a rented beachside home.

Although Kathy lost her home in Sonoma, I'm happy to relate that her Sonoma area friends mostly seem to have fared better, and that the fire danger -- although still worrisome -- has improved.  And Agung on Bali, still muttering to itself, has so far refrained from erupting, or even from showing increased signs of eruption.

Always the optimist, I'm eagerly awaiting the trip.  It will be fun to talk to Denny and find out how he likes teaching at a Thai school (indications are that he loves it), and it will be fun to toast Kathy's birthday as the ground quakes beneath us, smoke rises on the horizon, and lava threatens to burst forth at any moment. 

As they say, no one on his death bed ever wished that he had spent more birthdays eating cake at Applebee's.

I left my heart

Bay and latte, from
the Ferry Building

I was in San Francisco for a few hours yesterday -- no, my visit had been planned long before the recent fires.  My reason for my brief visit is too embarrassing to explain in detail  -- let's just say that the care and feeding of my Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan was involved.

So what did I do in my few hours?  It's not as though I never visit San Francisco, but usually when I'm there I'm meeting people, visiting homes, eating meals, re-visiting "sights" -- even occasionally going sailing.  All with other people, mainly relatives.  But, being alone yesterday with no one expecting my arrival, I did what I do best -- I wandered alone and indulged in nostalgia.

When I was 29, with a brand-new M.S. degree in hand and with some thoughts of teaching in a junior college (I thank God now that I was unsuccessful in my job search), I lived for about four months in "The City" during that period in limbo.  Yesterday, I decided to hoof it around town and re-visit places I recalled from that odd period of my life.

After several days apartment-searching, while living in a YMCA located in the Tenderloin, I finally ended up renting a small studio apartment in a large apartment complex.  At that time -- and now -- it was called "The Imperial," located on Sutter Street between Gough and Octavia.  It had been built during World War II as officers' housing for -- I believe -- the Navy.  The rent was about $200 per month -- which seemed quite steep at the time -- but then, as now, after all, I was living in San Francisco! 

Every morning I caught a trolley bus heading east on Sutter -- carefully depositing my 15 cent fare -- and rode to the end of the line at Market, where I transferred to a bus that took me down to somewhere in the general area of today's AT&T Park.  It was an industrial area, and I worked at a short-term job running chemical analyses for a testing laboratory.  The job was tedious, but life in San Francisco was interesting.

St. Benedict's

So after leaving BART at Powell yesterday, I walked up Sutter to find my old home.  It was still there, still looking the same -- although as I looked in the front window I'd guess that it now looks more elegant than I had recalled.  The parking lot next door is now another apartment house.  I walked two blocks up Octavia, and found, although one block away from where I expected it, St. Benedict's Church, the church I attended each Sunday, at an age and in a time and place when church attendance was somewhat unusual. 

Several more blocks uphill led me to Lafayette Park, where I'd sometimes come on a weekend to lie in the sun and read.  The park seems more developed than I recall it -- tennis courts, a large off-leash dog area -- but the same great views of the Golden Gate, and the same grassy patch where I once stretched out on the lawn.

Golden Gate from
Lafayette Park

I then walked eastward on Bush, trying to locate the fictional Nob Hill mansion "Thunderbolt House" that I had read about as a child (and discussed here in a post in September 2016).  I knew it was on Bush, but didn't remember the cross street (according to the book, it was at Bush and Mason).  At any rate, the entire stretch of Bush along the southern slope of Nob Hill -- including Thunderbolt House -- was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire, and Bush itself today is pleasant and low-key, but not particularly interesting architecturally.

I ended up at the Ferry Building, which looks better every time I see it.  The elevated Embarcadero Freeway, which shut off the Ferry Building and the waterfront from the rest of the city, was heavily damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and was torn down in 1991.  It's an ill wind that blows no good, I guess, which may be news to folks today in Sonoma and Napa..  Seattle will be doing something similar -- but more voluntarily -- with the Alaska Way Viaduct along its own waterfront -- as soon as the tunnel replacing it is completed.

Embarcadero

When the Embarcadero was first torn down, the area seemed a bit vacant, but has since been planted in palm trees, and the area is alive with streetcar lines.  And tourists. 

If I had had time to visit all the highlights of my short residency in San Francisco, I would have walked up Market -- torn to pieces at the time, while BART was being constructed -- from the Ferry Building to the Civic Center.  And there I would have re-visited the public library -- one of my former favorite haunts.  But my time already was drawing to a close.  I walked up Market as far as Powell, jumped aboard BART, and returned to the Oakland airport.

San Francisco was an edgier place when I lived there, although probably less edgy than in the noir-ish, pre-war years described in the detective novels of author Dashiell Hammett.  When a city has gentrified to the point where property is virtually impossible for the average guy to rent, let alone buy, it's bound to change. 

Gentrification has both its good and bad aspects, both socially and from the point of urban planning.  It's a subject beyond the scope of my brief visit and this brief essay.  I'll just say that it's a very attractive city today, and a place well worth an extended visit.  For a tourist, at least, today's San Francisco combines the best aspects of New York and Boston, and avoids some of the weaknesses of both.  Which, from me, is a high compliment.

Sonoma tragedy

My sister's home, consumed by flames

Even as we eyed Bali nervously (see prior post), disaster struck last night, closer to home.

My sister, whose birthday we will be celebrating in Bali, lives just outside Sonoma, California.  She has a close friend who owns a ranch and bed and breakfast, with plenty of acreage for both their horses.  My sister arranged with her friend -- somewhat unorthodoxly (and perhaps extra-legally) -- to construct an inconspicuous home for herself on the property by joining two shipping containers.

Actually, there are websites about how to build your house from a shipping container.

The idea may sound unpromising, but the containers were brought into place, our brother did a lot of the construction and electrical work, my sister did the interior design -- and the result was both beautiful and comfortable.  And -- from the side where outsiders could view it -- it appeared to be nothing more than a large tool shed.

Yesterday, brush fires fanned by freakish high winds, hit all over northern California.  News reports indicate that at least 1,500 homes have been destroyed to date.  Much of Sonoma county, outside the towns, has been evacuated.

I received an email from my sister last night at 2 a.m., telling me that her home had been totally destroyed, together with all its contents:  a large library of books, family mementos and photographs, furniture, oddities that she has collected over the decades.  Fortunately, the friend's bed and breakfast -- closer to the road -- was not damaged, and the horses were not injured.

Her heartbreaking story is being repeated over and over throughout California today.  Added to hurricanes and floods, the year 2017 is becoming a year to remember.  Not with affection. 

Tempting the gods

There was a roar and a great confusion of noise.  Fires leaped up and licked the roof.  The throbbing grew to a great tumult, and the Mountain shook. ... And there upon the dark threshold of the Sammath Naur, high above the plains of Mordor, such wonder and terror came on him that he stood still forgetting all else, and gazed as one turned to stone.

--J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

Mount Agung, a volcano in eastern Bali, killed between 1,100 and 1,700 people in 1963, when it exploded in two major eruptions.  It then remained quiescent until last month, when alarming sesismic activity -- 844 earthquakes on September 26 alone -- seemed to presage another major eruption.  Over a hundred thousand residents of Bali have been evacuated from a twelve-mile exclusionary zone around the mountain.

Tourists have been assured that they are safe in Bali's famed resort areas, but the threat of eruption has caused cancelation of plans by some.  The threat of eruption remains serious, but the immediate eruption that was feared a couple of weeks ago has not yet occurred.

In the midst of all this concern, two days ago a French citizen posted photos (copy of one appears above) and videos of his ascent to the crater's edge.  Facebook and the internet was filled with expressions of disgust that this guy risked his own life in a dangerous situation in exchange for a little publicity, not to mention showing  callous disregard for Balinese culture or for the sensitivities of the Balinese who had been evacuated from their homes.

Agung is regarded by local Hindus as a replica or fragment of mystical Mt. Meru -- the central axis of the universe -- and is the location of sacred temples.  The government has had problems dealing with Hindu priests returning to the slopes to pray that the mountain not erupt.  The climber entered the exclusionary zone,  not to pray on behalf of the people who lived there, but simply as a publicity stunt.  As one writer posted, angrily, on the climber's Facebook page:

This man is a self serving arrogant jerk. Has he not learned anything about the Balinese culture while living in Bali obviously not because he's only interested in himself. I cannot believe some people are making him out to be some kind of hero. The heroes are those locals and expats helping the evacuees who have had to leave their homes on the slopes of their sacred mountain. He has no credibility because of his lack of respect.

I don't mean to sound flippant when I say that if we do make it to Bali on October 22, as planned, my family and I will certainly give the active volcano all the respect it deserves.

We have been advised by the owner of the villa we are leasing that, at 28 km. from the volcano, and protected by an intervening range of hills, we will be perfectly safe in the event of any eruption.  The only concern would be that the airport at Denpasar might be closed should there be too much ash in the air.  But in that event, flights with Bali as a destination would land on Lompok island, immediately to the east, and we would ferry across the channel to Bali.

So.  That's where our Bali visit stands at present.  Before we fly to Bali, we will be visiting my nephew and his daughter in Thailand.  We will make a final decision on how to proceed once we are in Thailand.

None of us is Hindu, but we all, with great respect, implore Agung to hold off any violent activity, at least until November.  

Cosmopolitan cities

Alexandria!  I can't get that city -- or that idea of a city -- out of my mind.

It all started years ago, when I read Durrell's Alexandria Quartet -- a Proustian story set in a partially fantasized Alexandria.  Then I discovered André Aciman -- that Jewish refugee from Alexandria, whose memoir and essays on memory and nostalgia hearken, over and over, to his Alexandrian boyhood.  E. M. Forster, and his 1922 history and guide of Alexandria.  Bits of the poetry of C. P. Cadafy. 

A city of world importance, from its founding by Alexander the Great in 331 B.C.  But what is it that haunts my own imagination?  I think it's the fascination of a "cosmopolitan" city, a city shared by many ethnic groups, many religions, many languages -- all living together, not always comfortably, but reasonably peaceably.  A city where a child or an old man can see much of the world by simply walking down one of its streets.

I feel the same way about Istanbul -- or rather about Constantinople, when the city was the capital of the Ottoman Empire.  Filled with not only the ruling Turks, but with Greeks, Jews, Armenians, Serbs, Syrians, Arabs, Egyptians.  And I feel the same about -- although I know less about -- Vienna, capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Filled not only with the ruling German-speaking Austrians, but with Bohemians, Slovakians, Jews, Slovenes, Italians, Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Rumanians, and -- of course -- Hungarians.

Constantinople and Vienna were exciting cities in which to live, but their cosmopolitan nature was each based on the incorporation of many nations within a single empire.  Alexandria was somewhat different.  It was a city within the Ottoman Empire, but it was not a capital city.  And it drew nationalities from outside Ottoman territory.  People were attracted to it for many reasons, including the very fact of its cosmopolitanism.  British and French, left over from colonial adventures in Egypt.  Jews, fleeing persecution in other countries.  Armenians fleeing violent oppression by the Ottomans, and later, by Turkey.  Many Greeks, who settled throughout the Eastern Mediterranean.  Syrians.  Albanians.  Italians.  Coptic Christians.  Non-Egyptian Arabs.  And, of course, Muslim Egyptians.

One by one, it seems, the great cosmopolitan cities of the world have collapsed.  Vienna is now the capital of a small German-speaking country, not always welcoming to immigrants.  The post-war Turkish Republic moved its capital to Ankara, and -- to a large extent -- welcomed only Turks as citizens.

Alexandria remained a fading but fascinatingly cosmopolitan city until 1954 and the Suez war.  Aciman, in his writings, recalls how -- as a result of that war -- first the British and French, and then the Jews, were expelled from Egypt.  (The Jewish population dropped from 50,000 to about 50 today.)  He doesn't describe the fate of other nationalities -- Alexandrians whose ancestral countries weren't belligerents in the Suez hostilities -- such as the large Greek minority.  But Wikipedia notes that Nasser's nationalization of private property, which reached its zenith in 1961, led almost all non-Egyptians to flee the city. 

Alexandria's cosmopolitanism, and the death of that cosmopolitanism, brings contemporary America to mind.  When the president rails against "globalization," and shouts loudly in favor of "America First" and "America for Americans," he is generally perceived as worrying that American jobs are migrating overseas.  When he decries immigration, and expresses dislike of treaties (Iran, Cuba, NATO, NAFTA), he is seen as worrying about immigrants who take jobs that citizens could be handling, and about agreements that help other nations while harming America.

And to some extent, these perceptions of his intentions are correct.  But at a deeper level, he is appealing to nativism, to nationalism, to tribalism.  Insofar as possible at this late date, he wants to limit foreign influence on what he and his followers see as "true" American culture and nationality.  He wants to make America white, or at least white in its culture and values. 

Trump doesn't get along with many foreign leaders.  Who does he get along with?  The leaders of Turkey, of Saudi Arabia, of Israel, of the Philippines, of Poland, of Hungary.  Of Russia, sometimes. Of supporters of Brexit in Britain, and of those wishing to weaken the European Union in Europe.  His every instinct is to prevent and reverse a mixing of races, religions, and cultures.  He would have understood fully Gamal Nasser's drive to make Egypt a nation filled only with Egyptians; he would have supported Nasser's successful efforts to drive the Greeks, Jews, Armenians, and Albanians out of Alexandria.

If you look at voters in "blue" states, and compare then with voters in "red" states, one way to distinguish the two is the extent to which residents in each group of states enjoy living in communities that are "cosmopolitan": the extent to which they see value in rubbing shoulders with people different from themselves.  That distinction has become one of the fault lines in American culture and politics.  It explains a number of other fault lines, and any number of disputes over public policy.

I suspect that anyone who reads about Alexandria before World War II with a sense of nostalgia is the sort of person who feels most comfortable living in a blue state.

Like those states in the Northwest Corner.

John Wayne Pioneer trail

October 5, and weather in the Northwest Corner remains beautiful.  Seattle's official high was 68, but in the bright sun it seemed warmer.

Jim B. was in town, arriving last night for a visit with me and with members of his family scattered about the State of Washington.   Jim grew up on Mercer Island, and attended the University of Washington, where I met him.  But he has spent decades as an engineering professor at Purdue in Indiana.  So he returned not as a tourist, but as a Northwesterner revisiting his roots.

To remind him of how we spend time in these parts, we went on a reasonably long but easy hike on the John Wayne Pioneer Trail.  The John Wayne trail begins from a point near North Bend, Washington, and runs some 300 miles eastward to the Idaho border.  It uses the former right of way of the Milwaukee Road ("Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad"), a legendary transcontinental railroad that ran from Chicago to the Northwest (with 2¼ miles burrowing under the summit of the Cascades)  from 1909 to 1980. In 1980, the portions of track through Washington, Idaho, and Montana were abandoned, following bankruptcy.  

The elite passenger streamliner, the Olympian Hiawatha, which competed on the Chicago to Seattle run with the Great Northern's Empire Builder and the Northern Pacific's North Coast Limited, had already been dropped from service by 1961.

What remains -- with track removed -- is the graded route, complete with trestles and tunnels.  It makes excellent biking and hiking.

Jim and I drove to Interstate 90's exit 47, where we parked at the trailhead for Annette Lake.  We hiked on the narrow, winding, and often steep Annette Lake trail for about 0.7 miles, at which point we intersected the John Wayne.  We headed westward through tunnels of forest, past views of alpine peaks and colorful fall foliage, through a snow shed, and over a steampunk-esque iron trestle, aiming for the McClellan Butte trail that intersected the John Wayne as it came up from I-90's exit 42.

The hike was easy but long, and the shadows were growing longer when we decided to turn back shortly before reaching our destination.  My phone's pedometer showed we still had about a half a mile to go, but we found a sunny spot along the trail, ate candy bars and drank water, and declared victory.  By the time we returned to the Annette Lake trail once more, that heavily-shaded approach trail was dark and gloomy.

We logged a total of 12.2 miles by the time we returned to our car.

We were tired, but hardly gloomy.  The John Wayne is a great trail for walking and catching up with a friend whom one rarely has a chance to see.  It would also be a great place to introduce hiking novices to the pleasures of walking -- but perhaps for a shorter walk as their first-time experience.

I understand the right of way was accepted by the legislature with a provision for reversion, should the route ever be needed again for rail service.  Maybe a new generation of Hiawathas will one day roar out of the Cascade tunnel and down the slope to Puget Sound.  Meanwhile -- a real boon to hikers.