Happy New Year

Is it just me?  Or is that traditional New Year baby showing signs of apprehension and exhaustion, even before he's born?

It's hard to get ourselves excited about 2013.  The Democrats and Republicans have converted governing into a private grudge match, ignoring the real problems facing the country.  Analysts warn us that political wrangling will be only worse in the year to come, even if a temporary patch to the financial "cliff" is somehow patched together this week.  The re-election of Obama didn't persuade the Republicans that they had drifted out of touch with the nation's majority.  It just made them madder.  "Mad" in all its definitions.

Politics aside, everything just seems to be getting worse.   Hurricanes and other storms, attributable to global climate change.  Crazy mass killers in Connecticut and Colorado, as well as nonsensical killings on a lesser scale all around the country.  A nation arming itself to the teeth.  Mass unemployment.  Rampant drug use, especially in rural areas and small towns. 

The dying year, 2012, did have its good moments, the November election being one of them.  On a more personal level, my two great nieces had their second and third birthdays, showing already those tendencies toward rich talent and amazing genius that so typify my family.  I had two highly enjoyable trips overseas: to England with a 14-year-old relative, and to Morocco with my adult nephew.   I plunged into the Grand Canyon, hiking down to the river and back, all in one day -- something I'd been wanting to do for years.  

In times of stress, such personal enjoyments can tide one over until things get better.  Families during the Great Depression often found happiness in private lives that were loving, if austere.  We may be learning to follow their footsteps during our own Great Recession.  But I worry about the temptation to focus solely on private pleasures and ignore the infighting of doctrinaire politicians who seem increasingly beyond our control.

The greatest political events passed over the heads of the people like black or golden clouds.  Later it was to watch even the ruin of the Empire and the coming of the barbarians with indifference.   It was a worn-out body whose fibres no longer reacted to any stimulus.

--Ferdinand Lot, The End of the Ancient World and the Beginnings of the Middle Ages.

I once included that quotation in a commentary on the Watergate crisis, concluding that, as bad as things seemed at the time, "the fibers of our civilization remain healthy."

Today, I'm not so sure. 

But, tonight, whatever our optimism or pessimism, 2012 comes to an end, and 2013 finds himself born -- willy-nilly.  Let's all hold our breaths, vow that we'll attempt to make our civilization better and stronger, and welcome the poor, naked little tyke into the scary world that awaits him.

Happy New Year!

Traditions

Noted pianist Hayden Grey plays her original
composition, Christmas Boogie, for a
dog and a naked baby.



During their days of colonial hegemony, the British were famous for their attempts to convert every far-flung colony into a small piece of home. 

I recall a movie scene set in 1930s India.  It was a New Year's Eve party.  The men and women were dressed in formal wear, as though at a party in London.  At the stroke of midnight, the band struck up Auld Lang Syne, and the guests concluded by singing a rousing chorus of God Save the King.

In America, we're less rigid in our observances.  Even so, at least for those of us not strongly attached to alternative religious traditions, our common observance of Christmas -- including Santa, reindeer, and shopping overload -- plays a similarly homogenizing function -- not throughout any external colonial possessions, but within our own, otherwise heterogeneous and far-flung home territory.

Which is to say, I spent three days in far distant, exotic Los Angeles county, and gosh -- it was just like celebrating Christmas up here in God's own country, the Northwest Corner.

I was visiting my niece and her partner in Glendale, joined by my brother and his wife.  But the star of the Christmas celebration, of course, was the newest member of the family -- my great niece, Hayden, so recently born but already a highly personable two-year-old.  Just as when my brother and I were children, just as when my niece herself and her cousins were young, almost everything revolved around Hayden.

It all felt comfortingly familiar.  The tree.  The stockings hung by the chimney with care.  The mounds of beautifully wrapped presents, which revealed themselves when opened to be offerings to Hayden of virtually every age-appropriate gift to be found in any toy catalogue.  The rest of us unconsciously played, in our small bumbling way, the part of Magi offering our gifts to a Child.

Also familiar were the Christmas morning breakfast traditions invented by my own mother.  The turkey dinner.  The televised football games.  The mandatory viewing of A Christmas Story.  (We somehow missed, this year, both Dickens' Christmas Carol and the more modern but still usually obligatory tale of Seuss's Grinch.)

Best yet, the weather was the kind of weather that to me spells "Christmas":  Not snowy rides in one-horse open sleighs, and certainly not balmy, beside-the-pool, Los Angeles sunshine.  No, the skies were cloudy and the rain was intermittent.  Just like home!  Just like the Christmases of my childhood!

And best of all -- the jokes, the games, Hayden's wide-eyed excitement.  The sense of being surrounded by family members, of being part of a family that maintains its continuity, generation after generation.   A family whose members come and, unfortunately, eventually go -- but a family whose warmth and traditions continue year after year.  It was a great visit and a great Christmas.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Mayan endings

If you've been paying attention, you realize that at approximately 6 p.m. tonight, Pacific Daylight Time, those chosen by God will disappear from the face of the earth, having been assumed body and soul into heaven. I hope this warning reaches you in time.
--Northwest Corner blog (May 21,2011)

If you've been paying attention, you realize that at 3:12 a.m. tomorrow morning, Pacific Standard Time, the entire Earth (together, perhaps, with the Universe that surrounds it) will vanish.  A new world will replace it, but we won't be part of it.  I hope this warning reaches you in time.

Yes, these apocalypses seem to be coming around more and more frequently.

Excitement about the end of the current, 5,125-year Mayan calendar cycle has been growing now for some time.  Some experts have tried to tell us that the end of the cycle meant no more to the Mayans than the flipping of the calendar from 1999 to 2000 did for us.  But we will have none of it.  The world must end.  It'll turn itself off, as when a light switch is flipped.  Or end in a crunch when we collide with the mythical (and oddly-reclusive) planet Nibiru. 

If not the literal end of the physical world, at least our old corrupt world must end, to be replaced by a new world order of spiritual enlightenment, telepathic communication, and perhaps levitation and teleportation.  Crystals, certainly.  Vortexes.  Bright shiny beads.  Magic mushrooms.  Pyramid power.  Maybe even bell bottoms and giant afro hairstyles?  Without a doubt..

I know.  It all seems déjà vu-esque.

Even as I write, the Yucatan is packed with spiritual pilgrims -- looking forward to joining the vanguard of this renewed universe, hanging around Mayaland in the off chance that tomorrow morning doesn't bring literal obliteration.  China and Russia are reporting panic buying of candles and "essentials."  (I'm not sure what's essential if the world is to vanish.)  Famous scientist and intellectual Ron Hubbard is going underground, not to emerge until the 23rd -- just as a precaution.

A college-aged friend writes -- with controlled but perceptible rolling of his eyes -- that he is going out into the desert with his mother to bang drums, dance around a campfire, and otherwise signal to aliens that they seek sanctuary in their spaceships before the world terminates.

There was a terrible ghastly silence.
There was a terrible ghastly noise.
There was a terrible ghastly silence.
--Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Yeah, terminating kind of like that, I guess.

Saturday morning the sun will come up.  The Yucatan tourists will put away their scented oils and joss sticks.  The Chinese and Russians will put their candles and essentials to some other good use.  Ron Hubbard will emerge from his hobbit hole, grinning (?) sheepishly and reminding us that he never said he really believed anything was going to happen.

And someone will discover that a numerological interpretation of a certain phrase in the Talmud reveals that the world will end on April 1, 2013.  As Huck so wisely expressed my own feelings, "I can't stand it.  I been there before."

But then, they laughed at Noah, too, didn't they? As he was sawing and pounding away on his ark? And look where it got them.

Jumping in with both feet

When I was a kid, on one of those fairly rare, warm, Northwest summer days when my family decided on a picnic, I could play for hours in a creek or lake without getting cold.  But if I emerged from the water for a while, dried off in the sun, let myself get warm and drowsy, and then waded back into the water ....

Yikes!

Well, we've all had that experience.  The water seemed to have dropped twenty degrees.  It was literally¹ freezing.  You'd stick in your toe, wade in up to your ankles, then your knees, your hips ... it was excruciating.  Finally, you'd hurl yourself into the Arctic sea -- or be thrown in by disgusted fellow swimmers.  Within a minute or two the water again felt fine.

Rather than pursue this metaphor -- for such it is, rather than simply a tedious recollection -- any further, let me get to the point.

This is my first post in 32 days.  The longest gap between posts, in the almost six years I've been putting out the Northwest Corner.  The longest, I think, even including periods when I've been away from my computer, engaged in foreign travel.  I can't tell you why I haven't been writing.  Nothing much has happened in the past 32 days, it's true, but -- as regular readers are well aware -- lack of viable real world referents has never stopped me from writing before.

No, what puzzles me has been my failure to respond with either delight or outrage to even those insignificant events -- both nationally and in my own small life -- that usually make up my subject matter.  The problem is circular.  When I fail to react viscerally to events, I lack incentive to write.  And when I stop writing, I also stop seeking out and perceiving events worthy of my reaction.

And as the circle continues, I become more and more hesitant to take even that first step, that dabbling of my metaphorical child's toe in the literary waters of quasi-literature.  I find myself awaiting some topic worthy of a Russian novel, not simply one worthy of a short feature on the back page of a shoppers' gazette.

So, today I decided to force the issue.  To jump right into the lake -- to commit self-immersion in one fell swoop.²   Get myself wet and re-acclimated.  And so ... here I am, sputtering, coughing, and shaking the water out of my metaphorically boyish crewcut.

Will our hero thus have overcome his unseemly writer's block, and find himself reinvigorated with the juices of literary production?  As that time-honored closing formula of hack journalism reminds us: "Only time will tell!"

-------------------------------------------------
¹  By "literally," I mean, of course, "figuratively."

²  "Fell swoop"?  Why do we say that?  The expression, like so many others, is from the Bard:

All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop?

--Macbeth

The "kite" -- we still use the word -- which did the (in Macbeth, metaphorical) swooping is a species of hunting bird.  "Fell" is an ancient adjective, dating back to the 13th century, which the OED defines as: "fierce, savage; cruel, ruthless; dreadful, terrible."  "Felon" is derived from "fell" in this sense.

Garfield county: the place no one knows

Most of us -- those of us who love to travel, at least -- have in the back of our minds an idea of a place that is totally remote. 

A place we've never been, a place no one we know has ever been, a place we hardly even hear about except as shorthand for legendary inaccessiblity.  A place not only remote physically, but also living in a time warp, still primitive or medieval culturally and socially.   There aren't that many left.  Timbuctu, maybe.  Yellow Knife.   Upper Congo Basin.  Tannu Tuva.

But while perusing last week's election results, I found such a spot closer to home.  Garfield county.

Garfield jumped to my attention as I reviewed, county by county, the voting results for each candidate and measure on the Washington state ballot.  Garfield's results were as far from the over-all state results as seemingly possible.

Democrat Inslee became governor, although losing most of the counties outside King (Seattle).  But he lost those counties by generally moderate percentages;  he lost Garfield, winning only 26.48 percent of the vote.  Democrat Cantwell was re-elected U.S. Senator with 60.19 percent of the state's votes.  She lost Garfield, winning only 36.47 percent.

Gay marriage won state-wide by 53.35 percent.  It lost in Garfield with only 28.59 percent.  Marijuana legalization won state-wide with 55.53 percent, carrying a number of generally conservative counties from east of the mountains.  Garfield, just 37.91 percent.  Charter schools squeaked by with 50.72 percent of the vote, cutting across usual liberal/conservative voting lines, and losing slightly in King county.  It attracted only 41.6 percent of the votes in Garfield county. 

Garfield county appears not only to be very conservative, but to be essentially opposed to anything that comes up for a vote.  Where is this place?  I actually had to dig out a state map to find out.

And there it was.  In the southeast corner of the state, bordering Oregon to its south, and just one small county away from Idaho to its east.  Garfield isn't the smallest county geographically -- there are six smaller.  But, with 2,266 residents, it is by far the smallest in population.  It has only one incorporated city, its county seat -- Pomeroy.  Pomeroy boasts 1,425 of the county's total population. 

But, you know ... unlike the Upper Congo, or even perhaps Tannu Tuva, Garfield doesn't sound like that bad a place.  Especially if you're respectably conservative.  As an unofficial website describing the city boasts: "The Republican party stood out in its ability to raise compaign money in Pomeroy."  I'm sure that's true. But I don't think that means that well-behaved liberals wouldn't be welcomed.  The website of the Pomeroy Chamber of Commerce (yes, there is one) states:

Here in Pomeroy you'll always be greeted with a smile! We have the appeal of a small farm town with possibilities that are endless.

The Chamber's website lists upcoming attractions:  "Holiday Bazaar," "Old Fashioned Christmas," "Chocolate Extravaganza," and "Twinkle Light Sale."  That's all within the next three weeks, and, before you urbanites say anything snarky and supercilious, ask yourselves whether any small town of about 1,500 that you know of has such an active Chamber of Commerce.

Pomeroy has a junior-senior high school with 184 students, and an elementary school with 156.  Test results well exceed the state averages, with 96.3 percent of tenth graders passing both the reading and the writing tests.

I'd never live in a place where I'd be considered the "County Liberal," but Garfield county might well be worth a visit, especially if I'm ever headed into Oregon to see the nearby Hell's Canyon area.  Local lodging, listed on the website, tends a bit toward the trailer court and RV park variety, and restaurant listings are heavy on coffee houses and drive-ins, but that may be part of the charm.

My investigation into the world of Garfield county reminds me that it isn't only red-staters who at times live in ideological and cultural bubbles.  It's also easy for us who rejoice at living in liberal bastions to forget that life in more conservative areas -- e.g., all the "fly-over" states -- can be just as happy and satisfying for those who choose to live there as (and often lived with greater community spirit than) anything with which we're familiar.  Not as culturally or intellectually challenging, as a city like Seattle, perhaps, but all choices of lifestyle have their trade-offs.

Twinky farewell

Just a quiet moment of silence, please, for the death of the Twinkies.  And the Ding Dongs.  And Sno Balls.  And, notably, Wonder Bread.

But -- to me, most tragically -- Hostess CupCakes.

Hostess Brands, Inc., the maker of all the above, and more, announced today that it's shutting down operations.  The company has been in bankruptcy since January, and a strike this week delivered the final blow.

American's changing food preferences have been cited as the underlying cause of the company's financial woes.  In other words, there is junk food and there is junk food.  And Hostess's products were really junk food. 

I could never fathom how anyone could eat Twinkies.  Ding Dongs were ok -- it's hard to dislike chocolate.  Sno Balls -- remember them?  one pink and one white per package? -- always looked good, and sounded good in concept, but never quite passed the eating test with me. Just a little too marshmallowy, maybe. 

Wonder Bread was the bread of my childhood.  White bread only, of course, although the brown bread seemed to differ from white only by the addition of food coloring.  You knew a brand of bread had to be good when it was so wonderfully soft and plushy that you could wad a slice into a tiny ball, a pellet of carbs so small that you could fit it into your bean shooter.  (No, I'm not sure that's true, but I'd be surprised if someone didn't do it.)

But the chocolate "CupCakes" -- the package of two chocolate cupcakes with chocolate frosting and a white squiggle across the top -- were a childhood favorite.  Happy (and rare) the day that I'd find them in my school lunch sack.  I loved them in high school.  And in college.  I'd pack them for energy and solace when I started off on a long day hike.  They were a pleasure that became guiltier and guiltier as the years passed, and as I became increasingly conscious of health concerns.

The Hostess cupcakes had one nutritional value: sugar.  Or as the British nutritional labels more coyly express it: "energy."  But they had a taste and a consistency that was well nigh irresistable once you had a package in your possession.

So today we lament not just the demise of an iconic American company, not just the passing of another set of familiar products from our childhood, but the passing of an era.  A time when depression-starved bodies craved "energy"-packed food, when processed food was a novelty that quickly replaced home baking, when our tastes were uncomplicated and unevolved.  When we ate whatever tasted good.

The government saved Chevrolets and Chryslers -- even greater icons of our youth -- but the maker of Twinkies and CupCakes apparently is not "too big to fail."  Our tastes in transportation remain pretty much the same as they were fifty years ago, but our tastes in food have moved along.  So rest in peace, Hostess Brands.

If I could have just one last Hostess cupcake with a glass of milk, I'd feel that I'd properly and happily celebrated the wake of a memorable American company.

Clouds from hell

Hurricanes like Sandy and Katrina aren't the only weather-related disasters our country has faced within the lifetimes of people still alive.  It's easy to forget the Dust Bowl of the 1930's, a multi-year catastrophe that ruined farmers' lives and drove them and their families from their homes.

Like Sandy, the drought-related dust bowl was caused in part by mankind.  Throughout the 1920's, farm land in the affected area -- the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas, parts of Colorado, Kansas and New Mexico -- had been offered for sale at low prices by land speculators.  Land that had existed as grass prairies for centures was ruthlessly plowed under, primarily to grow wheat at subsidized prices.  Favorable rainfall had created good crops, and had encouraged ambitious young families from other parts of the country to move to the Southwest.

The drought began in 1930, and reached its peak in 1934-36.  Enormous dust storms blew uprooted virgin soil across the area, forming clouds so dense that they turned day to night, and deposited soil on streets as far away as Chicago and Cleveland.  Families at first thought they could ride out the drought; they gradually, year by year, went bankrupt, losing everything they had, including hope for the futures of themselves and their children.  The ambient dust, breathed into the lungs, caused an epidemic of pneumonia, affecting especially the kids.

Ken Burns has produced a four-hour documentary of the history of the Dust Bowl, including extensive interviews with elderly survivors, folks who were children at the time.  Burns spoke Friday night at a packed Neptune Theater in Seattle, illustrating his talk with about 50 minutes of clips from his documentary, to a silent and stunned audience.  The surviving motion picture clips of approaching dust storms -- looking like distant mountain ranges moving inexorably closer -- are breathtaking.  The survivors' stories are heartbreaking. 

Many of the families migrated to California -- where they were reviled as hated "Okies."  Their treatment by the already depression-impoverished residents of the Central Valley is eye-opening.  "Niggers and Okies seated only in balcony," read signs outside movie theaters.  Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and the songs of Woody Guthrie evolved from those artists' own familiarity with the migrants' hardships in California.

The documentary concludes with mention of a lesser drought in the late 1940's and 1950's.  Since then, more favorable weather, better planting techniques and -- most critically -- irrigation, have created a relative prosperity in the area.  But Mother Nature will have the last laugh.  Irrigation has been dependent on wells drawing water out of the Ogallala Aquifer, a reservoir of subterranean water left over from the melting of the last glaciers.  The aquifer has already lost 50 percent of its depth.  Scientists estimate it will last another twenty years.

One expert pointed out that future generations will curse us for having used the water they needed for drinking to grow water-thirsty wheat on soil suited only for plains of grass.

The documentary will be shown in two parts on PBS, November 18 and 19.

Almost too good to be true

We all recall occasions when we had no lofty expectations -- but when things, nevertheless, turned out much better than expected.  The Christmases when we unexpectedly hit the jackpot with our first bicycle or our much longed-for electric train.  Or the in-class essay we merely felt good about, until we got it back with an A+.

Tuesday evening was something like that.  I had been fearing the worst all year long -- a Republican landslide at every level.  I gradually got my hopes up during the summer, only to have them dashed by Obama's dismal performance in the first debate.  By last week, I still felt pessimistic, but hoped against hope that the amazing Nate Silver -- he of the statistical analyses for the New York Times -- actually knew what he was talking about when he predicted first a 70 percent chance, then an 86 percent chance, and finally a 91 or 92 percent chance of an Obama victory.

What I did not foresee was Obama's ability to carry every state he had carried in 2008 except Indiana (how did he ever carry it in 2008?), and -- barely -- North Carolina.  The evening just got better and better as I flipped channels with one hand, and joined like-minded friends in Facebook exchanges of rumors and mutual exultations with the other.  I was practically delirious by the time of Romney's gracious concession speech and Obama's surprisingly sober and moving address to his followers.

But the presidential race was just the highlight.  The first votes ever supporting same-sex marriage in Washington, Maine, Maryland and Minnesota.  The first votes ever fully legalizing marijuana in Washington and Colorado.  Neither vote will have the slightest impact on my life, I hasten to note, but both show signs of liberality of thought and willingness to experiment that -- based on the deadeningly negative, ignorant, and angry comments I've been used to reading on-line -- I had thought dead. 

Washington figured in both those stories, you'll note.  Also, we apparently have once again elected a Democratic governor, Jay Inslee, after a strongly contested campaign against the Republican attorney general.  The attorney general, Rob McKenna, the only elected state-wide official who was a Republican, had defied the rest of state government to single-handedly join the State of Washington as a party to lawsuits opposing Obamacare.

The new attorney general also will be a Democrat.

And, although the Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives is gerrymandered into place for the present, the Democrats -- supposedly at strong risk to lose control of the Senate -- have actually gained two seats in the upper chamber.

Well, my cup runneth over.  I know that this is to some extent just a lot of game playing.  I'm cheering for the liberals the way I cheer for my college football team.  Enormous problems confront the nation.  The Democrats may handle those problems no better than would the Republicans had they won.  Democrats and Republicans will need to cooperate if we're going to accoplish anything.

But my happiness stems primarily from a renewed confidence in my fellow citizens.  They are not all writers of idiotic comments, posted at the end of Yahoo! news stories.  The tea party does not represent the majority of Americans.  At least fifty percent of the voters -- if not necessarily thoughtful political theorists -- have been at least intelligent enough to sense what was best for the nation.  And for themselves.

In 2012, that itself is cause for celebration. 

So, yeah!  America got that new bike on Tuesday.  America aced the test.  We've been celebrating.  Now, let's tackle the real problems facing the country -- with intelligence and mutual understanding.

Into the Sahara

"Do not lay a hand on the boy; do nothing to him.  I know now that you fear God, since you have not withheld your only son from me."  Abraham looked about and saw a ram caught by its horns in the bush.  He went and took it, and offered it as a holocaust in place of his son.
--Genesis 22: 12-13

This past weekend, Muslims in Morocco celebrated the feast of Aïd el-Kebir.   Each year, every family that can afford it ritually slaughters a sheep and offers it in sacrifice, commemorating the ram killed in sacrifice by Abraham in place of his own son.  (According to the Quran, it was Abraham's eldest son, Ishmael, who was to be sacrificed, not Isaac as stated in Genesis.)  For weeks before the feast's culmination, Moroccans have been purchasing and fattening sheep; on the feast day itself, each family slits the neck of its sheep, and dines on the meat, offering whatever it does not need to the poor.  The king himself offers a sheep on television, on behalf of the entire nation.

My nephew Doug and I returned Saturday from 2½ weeks in Morocco.  What we saw was not simply a strip of North African desert, but a country rich in diversity -- diversity in scenery, peoples, languages and cultures.  It was an impressive trip, and left me with the hope of visiting parts of the country again in greater depth.  And as a backdrop, throughout our time in Morocco, herds of sheep were being offered for sale in open markets, sheep were being brought home in wheelbarrows, carts, pick-up trucks, automobiles.  Or sheep were being taken home on foot, led by children who treated the sheep as pets.  In one case, we even saw a sheep riding on the back of a motor scooter. 

Doug and I landed in Marrakech on October 10, and had most of the day free to wander around on our own before meeting up with our group.  The next morning, we met with three other travelers for a pre-trek sidetrip to Essaouira on the coast.  Returning to Marrakech on the twelfth, we met the remaining members of our group.  Our eleven-person group consisted of  two couples, five single women, and Doug and me.  We spent another two nights in Marrakech, seeing the city and giving the newly arrived members a chance to adjust their circadian rhythms.  We then climbed into four-wheel drive vehicles and began driving south into the High Atlas mountain range that looms to the south of Marrakech.

The High Atlas is, in fact, high, with peaks climbing above 13,000 feet.  Portions of the mountain range are barren; others are carpeted with cedar trees and populated by inquisitive Barbary apes (tailless macaque monkeys).  The higher peaks of the High Atlas were covered with snow by the time our trip came to an end.

Once we left Marrakech, we were in Berber country.  Very friendly people with a pre-Arabic native culture, an ancient culture that's been influenced by more recent migrations up the caravan routes from sub-Saharan Africa.  Complexions came in every imaginable shade.  The kids get instruction in school, we were told, in Berber, Moroccan Arabic, classical Arabic, French and English.  They spoke mainly Berber, with varying degrees of fluency in French.   

We then drove down into the Dadès valley -- where we walked through oases studded with date palms, and explored fortified kasbahs -- and up again and over the Anti-Atlas mountains, down to the desert town of Zagora.  This was as far south as we traveled.  In Zagora, we encountered a billboard announcing that we were only 52 days by camel caravan from Timbuctu.  Tempting, eh?

The next day, we left paved roads and headed east on stony tracks into the desert, traveling off-road at one point up a dry river bed.  We made our first camp near the village of Remlia, within shouting distance of the frontier with Algeria. We climbed onto camels the next morning.  Or, I should say, we carefully sat on our kneeling camels, and then hung on for dear life as the camels rose, first on their rear  legs, and then on their front legs, pitching us camel-novices backward and forward.  Once up, however, the riding was easy and we quickly learned to enjoy the gentle swaying rhythm as the camels glided along.

We camped a total of four nights -- the first night, believe it or not, it rained -- with the last day and night at Erg Chebbi being the most surreally beautiful part of the trek.  The dunes, in light and shadow, looked exactly like the images of the Sahara that you no doubt have dancing around in your mind.  I found it impossible to take a bad photo.

After leaving our camels behind, we returned to four-wheel drives and drove to Erfoud.  Our hotel was in the form of a kasbah, a wall enclosing a meandering maze of stucco buildings and passage ways.  After the rigors (?) of our four-day trek, we recovered nicely with evening gin and tonics beside the swimming pool, a Berber band playing in the background.

The next day was one long drive north from Erfoud, back over the High Atlas, to Fez, arriving in the evening at our hotel.  Fez is the city I'm most eager to re-visit.  The medina is probably the world's most massive and most intact medieval city. The entire medina is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We did do something of a shopping tour of the medina, meandering through it from one end to the other.  But, for my taste, we did too much shopping and too little meandering.

Fez's medina comprises shops, small industries and residences. It is not merely a tourist shopping destination, as is, for the most part, that of Marrakech.  It's a maze of tiny streets and alleys -- many barely wide enough to allow human passage -- in which one could easily become lost.  Our local guide joked that one of his clients from years ago is still wandering its streets, trying to find a way out.

Paul Bowles caught my feelings about Fez's medina in his 1954 novel, The Spider's House:

"What's very hard to believe," she said presently, "is that this can be existing at the same moment, let's say, that people are standing in line at the information booth in the Grand Central Station asking about trains to New Haven.  You know what I mean?  It's just unthinkable, somehow."

Indeed.  One day was all too short a time to even begin to comprehend the life that occurs in this amazing complex.

And all about us, in Fez even more than in Marrakech, frantic final preparations were being made for Aïd el-Kebir.  Sheep were everywhere, holiday spirits were high, one of the great annual celebrations of Islam was about to occur.  But not for us.  Although we had to leave on the very eve of Aïd, not everyone in our group minded missing the festivities.  The religious symbolism wasn't compelling to everyone -- and those gentle, woolly sheep looked so awfully cute

The lonely moor

Over the green squares of the fields and the low curve of a wood there arose in the distance a gray, melancholy hill, with a strange jagged summit, dim and vague in the distance, like some fantastic landscape in a dream.
--The Hound of the Baskervilles

The Hound of the Baskervilles may be the most popular -- and best -- of the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle.  I first read it when I was about 15, shivering with pleasure -- and I read it again this week. 

I still enjoy it.  I'm perhaps less overawed by Holmes's powers of deduction than I was as a teenager.  But both then and now, I'm able to lose myself in Conan Doyle's vivid portrayal of the English moors -- their gloom, their loneliness, their desolation.  The gothic atmosphere painted by Conan Doyle is as memorable as his detective's solution of a bizarre crime, a ghastly murder apparently caused by a fire-breathing hound from hell.

But is Dartmoor -- where the action takes place -- really as dismal and gothic as the story would suggest? I don't know. I've never been to Devon, where the moor is located. It's a large (for England) tract of land -- 368 square miles of uncultivated peat and granite, bogs and tors, bisected by (reasonably enough) the River Dart. The treachorous swampland, the mire that ultimately claimed the life of Conan Doyle's villain, really exists -- Fox Tor Mires being its actual name, rather than Great Grimpen Mire. And the mysterious neolithic standing stones and stone huts are there to be seen, just as in the story.

But, as I look at the photos of Dartmoor that come up from a Yahoo! search, it's hard to see much that's sinister. In fact, the moorland is quite lovely -- the moors and tors looking much like parts of Wyoming. Come to think of it, my expectations of grimness and desolation while I crossed Rannoch Moor in the West Scottish Highlands were never quite realized. Rannoch Moor was also beautiful, and not at all foreboding.

Admittedly, the day I hiked across Rannoch Moor was exceptionally clear and sunny. And most of the photos I've seen of Dartmoor were taken on equally appealing days, days that would tempt the tourist -- from England or anywhere else in the world -- to come visit. In the fog, perhaps, during a wild and stormy night, I might feel different, especially if I were spending the night in a house overlooking the blackness of the moors, my room lit only by a candle.

Part of Dartmoor's grim reputation -- aside from its being featured in The Hound of the Baskervilles -- probably derives from the presence on the moor of Dartmoor Prison. One of the creepy plot devices encountered in the Conan Doyle story was the desperate and brutish escapee from that prison, at loose upon the moors, whom Holmes and Watson encountered. But I also suspect that the average, untraveled Brit -- after a thousand years of civilization and agricultural cultivation -- simply sees wilderness through eyes different from ours as Americans. (Howls of British protest will be cheerfully heard out.)

I'm thinking of our own English forebears, settling in New England. Recall The Scarlet Letter, in which Hawthorne causes the town to represent Christianity and civilization, and the wilderness outside the town to represent barbarism and the realm of Satan. This very early American attitude reflected European sensibilities, where men and women for centuries had strenuously devoted their lives to clearing the forests, exterminating the wolves, seeking out and burning covens of witches frolicking in the wildlands -- a long, continuous effort to replace the wilderness with safe, cozy towns; fortified castles; well-tended crops.

It wasn't until the nineteenth century that we ourselves, in America, began breaking free from this mindset, adopting in its place a romantic exaltation of wilderness. Any major American art museum will contain examples of the nineteenth century's Hudson River School, and later paintings of the American Mountain West. The Sierra Club and the photography of Ansel Adams arose out of this spirit of nature romanticism.

Which is not to say that the British don't also have a strong romantic attachment to nature. In general, however, British romanticism seems to value landscapes shaped by civilization -- the old mill, the arched bridge, the ruined abbey, the ancient Roman pathway -- more frequently than nature in the raw.

All of which is simply a long-winded way of saying that Americans have until rather recently lived in a country more undeveloped than developed -- as did the Europeans -- but have done so during an era when the forests were easy to clear and the wolf at the door didn't pose an existential threat. As a result, wilderness seems more natural and less threatening than it does, perhaps, in Europe. The photos I see of Dartmoor are beautiful, and I hope to visit it someday. But neither its size nor its wildness seem exceptional from an American's perspective.

Of course, as I mentioned in an earlier post, the entire Lake District would fit within the combined city limits of Minneapolis-St. Paul, and the Langdales within the Lake District never rise above three thousand feet. And yet -- last summer, I did manage to get lost in the fog, didn't I?

Play it, Sam

Time goes by.  It seems hard to believe, but one week from now my nephew Doug and I will be settling in, following dinner, at the Es Saadi Hotel in Marrakech.  A long distance, physically and culturally, from my allegedly "haunted" house here in Seattle.

I'm reviewing the clothing and equipment list sent to me by the "adventure company."  The fact that the list is much less extensive -- and thankfully includes fewer items requiring purchase -- suggests the difference between my Morocco trip and other trips I've enjoyed with this same provider.  No ice axe or sub-zero rated sleeping bag this time.  The oddest suggestion is for bicycle pants, to provide additional padding between a camel's back and my own backside. 

Somewhere I have that item, left over from a bicycle tour a number of years ago, but I can't figure out where the pants are stored away.  It's getting down to crunch time -- either find them soon or buy new ones.

The mental preparation is more difficult than the physical gathering of clothes and equipment.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've always been fascinated by desert lands in general, and Morocco in particular.  Certainly ever since I saw that ersatz Moroccan movie, Casablanca.

I doubt that I ever saw Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in Road to Morocco, and let's just say that I'm not viewing that particular film in preparation for the trip.  I am reading, however, Paul Bowles's novel The Spider's House.  I'm only about one fourth of the way through the 1954 novel, but it gives the reader a highly atmospheric feel for Fez -- where we end our trip -- during the period when popular resistance and violence were intensifying, agitation that would lead to the eventual end of the French Protectorate in 1956.

Over a half century has passed since Bowles wrote about his favorite city, and Bowles was already lamenting Fez's physical and cultural changes in 1954, but I suspect that the book remains a good introduction to certain physical and psychological aspects of that part of the world.  I probabaly will be finishing it during the flight over.

Doug will leave San Francisco next Wednesday, about the same time as I fly out of Seattle.  We meet at JFK, where we'll have a layover of several hours before departing for Madrid.  And thence to Marrakech. 

Rev up the four-wheel drives.  Cue the camels.  I'm on my way!

Exorcizo te ...

Exorcizo te, omnis spiritus immunde, in nomine Dei Patris omnipotentis, et in nomine Jesu Christi Filii ejus, Domini et Judicis nostri, et in virtute Spiritus Sancti, ut descedas ab hoc plasmate Dei (name), quod Dominus noster ad templum sanctum suum vocare dignatus est, ut fiat templum Dei vivi, et Spiritus Sanctus habitet in eo.

It's an old house.  Oddly shaped rooms; old-fashioned, leaded-glass windows; a few interior doorways without doors; twisting halls usable only as wall space for bookcases.  A puzzling doorbell button outside the den (where I'm composing this post) connected to no actual doorbell.  Lots of strange creaks in the night, not to mention squirrels running across the roof, the occasional rats in the walls, the closet door in my bedroom that often makes a slamming noise when I step out of bed in the morning, and -- of  course -- the ever-intrusive raccoons.

Normal stuff.

But ghosts?  No. Not in the twenty-five years I've lived here.  Never.

Until now.

My housecleaning service called this morning.  The manager was apologetic. My latest cleaning woman, with me only since my August 3 blog on the subject, is flying the coop.  The reason?  My house's "paranormal activities."  She put up with it, she says, for one four-hour visit.  The odd noises. Noises without plausible explanation.  Noises that paused only when she yelled at them, demanding that they stop. 

But her last visit was too much.  The angry sound of someone pounding on the keys of my piano.  The "cold room" -- the room frigid beyond any natural explanation.  The "dark mass" she watched move toward the electric outlet and disconnect the cord of the vacuum cleaner she was using.  Who could blame her?  She's outta here.

 The manager was apologetic, as I say, but also somewhat curious -- humorously, but nervously curious. Perhaps, I had encountered phenomena of this kind before? Heard other complaints?  No, you say? In going back through the service's records, it appears that, about two years ago, another cleaning woman had declined to work further in my house for exactly the same reason -- odd, inexplicable occurrences that scared the bejesus out of her.

I, of course, initially suspected this to be merely a pretext. She just didn't like cleaning my house.  But following the first time she cleaned my house, in August, the service routinely interviewed her about any problems she experienced working at my house that she wanted to discuss. The cleaner reported that she loved my house, enjoyed working here, and was happy to continue with me as a client.  Then -- during her next visit or two -- things began to happen. 

The manager has had a long, in-depth face-to-face meeting with the service's employee. My housecleaner knows I've lived here a long time, and have had no problems.  She argues that, perhaps, she's more sensitive to the spiritual world than I am.  Or that the spirits who've lived amicably with me (wholly unbeknownst to me, yea, these 25 years) for unknown reasons hate and despise her.  Whatever.  She's had enough.  She ain't coming back.

And so, the search is on for another housecleaner. 

If this were a movie, of course,  you'd all be yelling at me to move out. Now! While I still have my sanity and my life.  Call upon Ghostbusters!  Consult with a priest!

But I'm a child of the Enlightenment.  Everything has a natural explanation. I certainly wouldn't be suspicious just because my pregnant wife had a sudden craving to wear a tannis root charm. I'd even go down into the dark cellar without a flashlight if I heard weird noises.  I'd even kee ........oh ... oh no !!!!!!!!! it can't be!! ............... aaaaaaghhhh!

" .... qui venturus est judicare vivos et mortuos, et saeculum per ignem."

Vintage Festival

Sonoma is wine (lots of it) and history (the founding of the 25-day-long California Bear Republic). Both are celebrated exuberantly throughout the Valley of the Moon Vintage Festival.  I'll be flying down to the Bay Area on Thursday for Sonoma's 115th celebration of the Festival.

My sister, despite growing up like the rest of us with strong roots in the timber and fish resources of the Northwest Corner, long ago abandoned the Fatherland for the wine-based culture of the Sonoma Valley.  As a result, much of my family, and their friends, now live in and about Sonoma.  My annual presence at the Festival is almost (but not quite) a given.  In any event, this year I'll be there.

The Vintage Festival dates back to 1896, as a celebration by local vintners of science's triumph over the phylloxera louse which had devastated grape crops for several decades.  According to a past issue of the local newspaper (Sonoma Index-Tribune):

To organize the celebration they created what they called The Bacchus Club of Rhinefarm, in honor of the Greek god of wine. Imaginative, witty and fun-loving clans (as their descendants still are), they wrote skits, composed humorous songs, designed costumes and practiced lively dances in preparation for the festival which was scheduled for Oct. 16, 1896.

The festival was Greek and Bacchanalian in many respects, with pageants, singing (drinking songs, naturally), "faux-Greek drama," and a re-enactment of "Sonoma's greatest social event" ever, the double wedding of the two daughters of General Vallejo in 1863.

The Festival remains a small town event, although perhaps less bizarrely unique in 2012, more sophisticated, and attracting far more visitors from San Francisco.  It can also be more expensive for the unwary visitor. 

The spiritual high point of the weekend is the blessing of the grapes in front of Mission San Francisco Solano.  The profit-oriented high point is the Friday night wine tasting.  More energetic events are the Firefighters' Water Fight, the Grape Stomp, and the picturesque 5k run through the vineyards, starting out at the Sebastiani winery.  And, of course, the Festival parade. 

I've attended this event for years, and somehow have never grown tired of it.  It's of course an excuse to get together with relatives, but it's also fun to join in the Festival's seldom varying traditions, watch the locals, observe with bemusement the tourists -- and sample a lot of wine.  It's a big event, supported by a major industry, but still never loses it's small town feel. 

I'm again looking forward to it.

No salsa, please. We're Americans.

I concluded (as did many of my colleagues) that the [Cuban] blockade was completely unnecessary and harms the Cuban people and Cuba's attempt to develop economically through tourism and trade with the U.S.  ... It is also difficult to see the Cuban flag flying over oil derricks outside of Havana indicating that the companies are joint ventures between Cuba, China, Spain, Russia and other countries.

So reads a classnote from a fellow alumnus and fellow member of the Washington State Bar, following his tour of Cuba, a tour sponsored by the bar association. 

Yesterday's New York Times contains an article advising that it will be increasingly difficult for the public to travel to Cuba in the future.  After loosening restrictions on travel in 2011, the Obama administration is now tightening up those restrictions and refusing to renew licensing of many groups that sponsor trips to Cuba.  These moves are in response to politicians' complaints that tourists are just "having fun" -- rather than engaging in serious "educational exchanges" -- while in Cuba, and especially to reports of tourists joining in salsa dancing (gasp!) with Cuban nationals. 

Many travelers respond that the opportunity to join in these spontaneous dances was a high point of their visit, their best opportunity to actually meet, mingle, and talk with the common people in Cuba.

The Cuban blockade, and especially its travel restrictions -- now having lasted for sixty years -- is one of the more bizarre chunks of American foreign policy.  It's the foreign policy equivalent of the federal crusade against marijuana -- both policies are ineffectual, neither would be worthwhile even if they were effectual, both are infringements on individuals' personal rights without reasonable justification.  Even if the embargo may have been a reasonable emergency response to crisis in the early 1960s, it's gone on for decades -- just like the marijuana campaign -- out of sheer, unthinking, unquestioning momentum.

Cuba is ninety miles from the U.S. mainland.  We shun it as a pariah.  Can anyone claim that Cuba is uniquely evil and deserving of such treatment?  Anyone with a visa can travel to Iran.  Is Cuba more dangerous to American foreign policy interests than Iran?  I actually can't think of any other country -- not even North Korea -- from which American citizens are barred from travel, by their own government, unless they are part of a licensed travel group.

We all know why.  Florida politics.  And perhaps, at least originally, the fear that Cuba might prosper under communism, and thus make a communist economy attractive to other South American countries.  So we demonstrated our confidence in our own economic system by systematically reducing Cuba to poverty and ensuring -- for sixty years, now -- that it remain impoverished.

This state of affairs won't last forever.  There is already a softening of attitude among ordinary Americans -- except among the old guard of Cuban exiles -- now that Fidel has stepped down as leader.  But our foreign policy toward Cuba is not a shining example of American diplomacy.  Not something our grandchildren will read about with pride in their history books.

Meanwhile -- if you are able to visit Cuba -- don't let anyone photograph you smiling. And no salsa.

Lecturing world-wide

In a digital, twenty-first century world, do we still need universities?  Or, rather, do we still need universities as large collections of buildings occupying physical space?

Universities originally formed around men learned in their fields, who offered to teach any students who cared to hang around and pay for the instruction.  Couldn't scholars provide similar instruction now -- not just to a handful of young people who gather together from distant homes to receive it, but to the entire world via the internet?

Providing university-level instruction over the internet is a "hot issue" in educational circles at present.  Stanford has taken a lead in offering such free courses -- or more precisely, in permitting and encouraging its professors to offer such courses.  Stanford President John Hennessy is particularly enthused about such efforts, at least to the extent of having his school experiment with both the necessary technology and the development of course work amenable to presentation on-line.  Stanford professors are now offering certain lecture courses, complete with interactivity between the professor (or his teaching assistants) and the individual student. 

Stanford's alumni magazine this month contains a lengthy article discussing the issue.

Opinion on campus is mixed. Many professors, understandably, don't care for the idea of providing individual assistance -- or even examinations -- to several hundred thousand students around the world.  The courses so far offered have been ones capable of computer grading -- and have been offered primarily in the computer sciences.  Furthermore, the students tend to work together on-line cooperatively in response to the lectures, largely obviating the need for the faculty to hold, metaphorically, their hands.  Grades and university credit, at present, are not given.  The student who successfully completes the course receives a letter or certificate of completion, but not one written in Stanford's name.

I doubt that these courses will ever replace the experience of "going to college."  Much of the "learning" that I received as a student came from being around fellow students who shared my own interests, or students who had totally different interests and whose enthusiasm was contagious.  It does seem possible, however, that even matriculated students could benefit from viewing large lecture courses on-line, rather than sitting in a huge auditorium.  In experiments of this sort at Stanford, attendance at lectures in some large courses has dropped to thirty percent when the lectures are also available on-line.

The feeling was, "Why should I wake up at 8 in the morning to come to class when I can watch it at 2 a.m. in my dorm room?

The Stanford Magazine article begins with the example of a 16-year-old boy in Greece who joined 100,000 other students worldwide in taking a Stanford professor's on-line course in "applied machine learning" -- defined as the "science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed."  The Greek youth received no Stanford credit for the course, just a letter of completion.  But he wrote:

Andrew Ng is truly one of the best teachers I have ever had, even though I've never met him.  I want to thank him from the depths of my heart for offering these amazing learning opportunities.

He's now taking courses in natural language programming and algorithms.  He plans to apply to Stanford in two years.

A moving testimonial to the impact of excellent teaching -- especially when it's received from a youngster on the other side of the globe.

Other students included "a 13-year-old budding physicist, a recovering addict, an unemployed librarian, a thirtysomething stay-at-home mom, and a 72-year-old retiree who once built a computer from scratch."

Obviously, there are a vast number of problems and concerns to be resolved before such courses are offered routinely.  Will professors receive extra pay from their institutions for preparing lectures specifically for on-line use?  Can universities spare the faculty resources when these courses become routine, not experimental?  Is there any way to make money from these courses, or at least defray their expense? Does a university like Stanford "dilute its brand" by opening its instruction to the entire interested world?  (But is this really different from publishing a professor's textbook?)  Will the availability of such courses, taught by world renowned authorities, hurt the ability of smaller schools with less capable faculty to draw student applications? 

Many of these issues are discussed in the article -- discussed, but not resolved.  But, along with Stanford's provost, we can contemplate the potential effects of such innovative teaching methods.  He compared on-line courses to the development of the printing press in the 15th century, which "led to an explosion in the number of universities by radically increasing the efficiency with which knowledge could be transmitted." 

As the cost of a college education skyrockets, any innovation that reduces costs without damaging the education being received is worth our consideration.