1883
Time zones invented, in part because of the railroad, to avoid crashes in the US. The train time becomes the time that the train leaves its stop. Eventually, a standardized time is chosen, just 4 minutes later than NY time, announced Sunday November 18th, from the naval outpost, 4 minutes after the church bells rang.
Current proposal- universal time, based on Greenwich time, as is used in the air when crossing time zones
My eighty year old neighbour lent me this book to read, and I have taken on a last minute, overdue trip to celebrate a belated 50 year birthday with high school classmates who all reached this milestone in the midst of the only pandemic we have ever lived through.
It’s a fun premise, albeit fraught with the expected tropes of masculinity and racist ideas that were pervasive in a man of comfortable financial means in the 1960s. I know that John Steinbeck is renowned writer, but I honestly didn’t expect him to be such a vagabond American as he is in this non-fiction telling of a three month trip he took through thirty-four states over ten thousand miles, with his sole companion a blue poodle named Charley that was raised in France, so he responds much better to French commands. He has memories of WWII that he carries out with him across the river as he travels by ferry to his first landfall.
In truth, I hear a little of Bill Bryson, if he was more tone deaf to his privilege, and less motivated to achieve “all of something”, like the Appalachian trail or Australia. He is often very funny. About his dog, he writes, “ It is my experience that in some areas Charley is more intelligent than I am but in other he is abysmally ignorant. He can’t read. He can’t drive a car, and has no grasp of mathematics.”
I also identified with his literary habits, having compiled and piled and reduced a stack of books myself for this trip, leaving three “must-reads” for upcoming book clubs that I will likely be incompletely prepared for, and choosing instead two books that were unplanned and carry no social value, but for the pure pleasure of reading them. He says, “ I suppose our capacity for self-delusion is boundless…I laid in a hundred and fifty pounds of those books one hasn’t got around to reading— and of course those are the books one isn’t ever going to get to reading.” (In this I hear my dear uncle echoing my dear grandmother’s dry humour).
RE: Florida “I’ve lived in good climate. It bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate…How can one know colour in perpetual green, and what good is warmth without cold to give it sweetness??
I initially thought that this would be the first book I would read by Steinbeck, but the list in front, with Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, and East of Eden all books I wish I had read, reminded me that I had read the Pearl in high school, although I think I conflated it with the Old Man and the Sea, which I hated with a passion that remain hot coals today. Is it possible that it was about a deep sea free diver before that was a sport, but a necessary high risk life choice as occupation?
While the intro is strong, appealing to the “virus of restlessness” (Wanderluster in the colloquial) in me, in my 50s, there is much of his story that is of a privilege and exclusion that I cannot identify with. While apparently handy, he orders a camper van made-to-order instead of kitting it out himself, and starts off from his home in Sag Harbour, Long Island, leaving behind his wife and boat that he foolishly rescues in a hurricane for reasons that I can only describe as foolish and egotistical. He also contradicts himself in many circumstances, describing cities encircled by garbage, and then blithely describing aluminum dishes being “disposable” and throwing them into the water after cooking one dinner. To be fair, he also covers his hot dish with an asbestos cover when cooking, so it’s easy to judge things in hindsight that most people were blind to at the time.
I enjoyed the way he didn’t make me need to google something, kindly teaching me something I didn’t know without making me feeling like I should have known. Describing his “roulotte”, “…I named it Rocinante, which you will remember was the name of Don Quixote’s horse.” Since then, however, I have been struggling to remember the exact definition of many words, and since I am not connected to internet, I have to rely on the context and my distant memory of exactly what the descriptions mean: taciturn (written in the margin helpfully: temperamentally disinclined to talk), tawdry(efforts), laconic(speech), spangle (the autumn), yeomanry,
Some words evoked immediate images with certainty, but I suspect my daughter would have no idea what a gunny sack or a doodad even is, and would not even imaging what a whaling from a parent would be!)
Some of his truths are universal: “I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention, help, and conversation is to be lost.”
After the strange inclusion of the hurricane, he sets off and quite quickly gets himself into frost. He travels east through Maine and makes his way to Deer Isle, which he describes poorly, but, reading between the lines, it is likely another enclave of exclusivity, to visit a friend, parking outside and sleeping in the caravan for a brief visit. Nonetheless, there is perhaps an old time respect for the “reputation” of Miss Brace to have a male visitor (or maybe it was really just not to interfere with her cat George)
Despite being unable to describe the place, his comment “One doesn’t have to be sensitive to feel the strangeness of Deer Isle” is enough to make me want to go there myself! Note: the chief town is Stonington, which he compares to Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast, and the open country like Dartmoor, with Maine speech like that in West County England, with double vowels pronounced as in Anglo-Saxon, and,like the coastal people below the Bristol Channel, they are “secret people, perhaps magic people…This Isle is like Avalon.” This is where coon cats live wild, larger than their tailless cousins of Manx origin. Also, he missed Baxter State Park, but maybe I shouldn’t. I have a little glimmer of recollection that in these places in Maine, Martha Stewart may live.
I don’t know why he can’t say the word Canadian unless he is talking about French Canadians, but he always calls us Canucks, which I never knew was a pejorative from the American lips that refer to other migrants as Hindus, Filipinos, Mexican “wetbacks”, “Okies”, and “negroes”
Vacilando no counterword in English (Spanish) ? Meander - In his search of potatoes in Aroostook county (three great potato growing areas: Idaho, Suffolk County on Long Island and Aroostook county, Maine)
Here is Aurora Borealis in his words: “I’ve seen it only a few times in my life. It hung and moved with majesty in folds like an infinite traveller upstage in an infinite theater. In colors of rose and lavender and purple it moved and pulsed against the night, and the frost-sharpened stars shone through it.
After a period low mood mimicking the grey weather “under the weeping night”, his mood changes with the weather. “The sun was up when I awakened and the world was remade and shining. There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I. The night fears and loneliness were so far gone that I could hardly remember them.”
Misogyny and misanthropy (not tipping the waitress because she complained that she didn’t get tipped), « lumberman doing their logging in the whorehouse and their sex in the woods », « Illinois » « Rather it was like a beautiful woman who requires the support and help of many faceless ones just to keep her going.But this fact does not make her less lovely-if you can afford her.
“I have further established, at least to my own satisfaction, that those states with the shortest history and the least world-shaking events have the most historical markers.”
Nostalgia:
« Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit or human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.
I who love words and the endless possibility of words am saddened by this inevitability. For with local accent will disappear local temp. The idioms, the figures of speech that make language rich and full of poetry of time and place must go. And in their place will be a national speech, wrapped and packaged, standard and tasteless. »
“ Can I then say that the America I saw has put cleanliness first, at the expense of taste? “
“Driving the big highway near Toledo I had a conversation with Charley on the subject of roots. He listened but he didn't reply. In the pattern-thinking about roots I and most other people have left two things out of consideration. Could it be that Americans are a restless people, a mobile people, never satisfied with where they are as a matter of selection? The pioneers, the immigrants who peopled the continent, were the restless ones in Europe. The steady rooted ones stayed home and are still there. But every one of us, except the Negroes forced here as slaves, are descended from the restless ones, the wayward ones who were not content to stay at home. Wouldn't it be unusual if we had not inherited this tendency? And the fact is that we have. But that's the short view. What are roots and how long have we had them? If our species has existed for a couple of million years, what is its history? Our remote ancestors followed the game, moved with the food supply, and fled from evil weather, from ice and the changing seasons. Then after millennia beyond thinking they domesticated some animals so that they lived with their food supply. Then of necessity they followed the grass that fed their flocks in endless wanderings. Only when agriculture came into practice--and that's not very long ago in terms of the whole history--did a place achieve meaning and value and permanence. But land is a tangible, and tangibles have a way of getting into few hands. Thus it was that one man wanted ownership of land and at the same time wanted servitude because someone had to work it. Roots were in ownership of land, in tangible and immovable possessions. In this view we are a restless species with a very short history of roots, and those not widely distributed. Perhaps we have overrated roots as a psychic need. Maybe the greater the urge, the deeper and more ancient is the need, the will, the hunger to be somewhere else.”
I started to enjoy impressions of individual states. In North Dakota, he describes the badlands turning to goodlands at dusk. He is in love with Montana.
He describes how both these states are “memory marked” as “Injun” country, and tells the story from his neighbour who participated in the massacre of Chief Joseph and the Nez Percé tribe, who were retreating with their families and possessions to Canada, with cringeworthy rationalizations and token praises of their fighting qualités of “real men”.
Growing up: “I realize now that there were some thing else about the coop set set them apart from other Negros I have seen and met sense because they were not hurt or insulted they were not defensive or combative, because they’re dignity was intact, they had no need to be over bearing and because the Cooper boys had never heard that they were inferior their minds could grow to their true limits…. Beyond my feelings as a racist, I knew I was not wanted in the south when people are engaged in some thing they are not proud of. They do not welcome witnesses. In fact, they come to believe the witnesses causes the trouble.”
“My own journey started long before I left and was over before I returned. I know exactly where and when it was over. “
John Steinbeck
Sometimes he’s a real idiot. In the eye of a hurricane, he frees his boat from entanglement with other improperly moored boats. He leaves his wife and kids as though he was a bachelor.
He uses toxic chemicals in his truck to kill insects and is surprised that his dog Charly has a reaction.
He’s entitled. He decides to go on a cross country trip and orders a custom built truck.
Most of the time he is in Long Island as a 1 %er or interrupting his trip in Chicago to reconnect with his wife, hiring a taxi to follow to the hotel when he gets lost, inventing a character after insisting on a room for a shower before his room is ready, and leaving his poodle at the groomers for the duration of his stay
My friend has a fitness pass that allows her to bring a friend. I get to work out for free, and she gets the motivation to go when I join her. It’s working for the both of us.
We left the gym, and were standing between the two parking lots, deciding our next workout. She had parked where I always do, and she was hating it. I parked where she usually does, and laughed that she didn’t do it too!
The sky was painted with a vivid pink and muted purple. The sun had set, and its last reflections backlit the scattered clouds in grey.
I heard the honking, and looked up just in time to see a gaggle of Canada geese flying across the sunset, crossing our vision like a live version gif.
As they moved across from East to West, I followed their action and noted above them a dark expanse with a tiny crescent moon in its typical waxing association that marks flags across middle eastern countries.
It was a splendid live moment, and being shared, however briefly, made it that much more precious.
WARNING: GRAPHIC VIOLENCE
It is hard to describe the performance I watched tonight, but in a phrase, it was unbelievably moving. I was honestly concerned that I would be disappointed, because the original recording is incredible, and I was looking forward to the show for a long time.
I didn’t need to be worried. It was incredible! The songs came to life with some voices that I had confused, now concretely performed by distinct characters. The voices of Jesus and Judas took me back to my early adult years of the characteristic falsettos of the heavy metal genre I still love. Mary Magdalen had such beautiful dynamic control of her emotional vocals. The entire score is a rock opera triumph!
It’s getting late, but here are a few highlights:
The theatre marquis was BRIGHT, but all LED!
The Stanley Theatre is amazing. Built in the 1930s, it was renovated in the 1970s and is in spectacular condition today.
Opening scene is the stage with a base guitarist stage left standing in alcoves with two other instrumentalists (unseen thanks to my partially obstructed seat E22, so I may be wrong) that played throughout
Lots of dry ice, glitter and confetti, with glitter as water, and blood, silver glitter smeared on a number of performers in a quick costume change that I would love to have seen back stage. It was efficient!
The ramp that descended center stage was cross shaped
The Pharisee pair of tenor and bass were unreal! The costumes and props were simple and effective. I found myself grinning with the beauty of it, when they were actually condemning him to death! I had trouble not enjoying myself more than caught up in the story until Jesus finishes sitting in the garden, exhausted and reconciled to his fate.
Jesus in Gethsemane. I noticed that the singer/actor was adding the extra complexity of playing the guitar during the buildup, and I was starting to think he was just not going to do the high notes that take my breath away when Steve Balsano sings, but then he did it! I was among the many to hoot and cheer when he finished. It was too amazing not to be recognized, even though it was a weird place to break out of the story.
Judas’ narrator role might have inspired Aaron Burr’s a little. His anguish was portrayed with his hands dipped in silver for his betrayal, and his suicide a combination of his climbing the platform and the “mob leader” falling forward on her head below as a metaphor.
Herod as drag queen in a gold Liberace style cape of feathers and extended eyelashes, with a brutal row of headless, tongue less victims, playing it psychotic and effeminate with a southern twang, was the most radical of changes.
The “mob leader” was an unexpected weirdness, frenetically thrashing in random places. Got to credit her for physical effort. Giving Jesus 39 lashes with glitter was quite an intense scene.
Also, there missed opportunity for one scene of mob asking questions of Jesus. I would have loved see them as paparazzi shoving mikes in his face. ( I have since watched the original film, and they do it brilliantly. It was excellent too, but the live performance cannot be beat!)
The Crucifixion was necessarily brutal and gruesome, with a crown of thorns.
They end with Jesus off the cross, sitting across from Judas, on either side of the transverse cross.
Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Weber truly made a masterpiece. It is my favourite version of the last days of Jesus, with complex emotions and historical and political maneuvering that I have never seen or heard paralleled.
Although there was a mix of melanin in the cast, I did not so anyone leaving the theatre that looked anything but white.
When I relistened to the original tracks on the way home, I realized that the organ, tambourine, and saxophone had been removed. Is it possible there was only guitar, and that the piano was removed too? I suspect there was a keyboard, but can’t confirm.
If you can see this extended 50th anniversary tour version of JCS, you need to go! You will not regret it!
I drove 8 hours today to see a 2 hour musical that is bound to be, on some level, a disappointment. It’s spitting rain, and I am badly parked in front of a Dominican restaurant where the single server was engrossed in a difficult Doordash order when I arrived. When I got her attention, somewhere halfway through explaining every item on the menu on the phone, I gestured questioningly to a table, hoping to seat myself at the window if I could. She nodded, and here I sit at a table with a table covered with a red checkered cloth, and a vase of snow white flowers. The air is filled with a warm aroma of garlic and oil, and I am drinking a unsweetened ice tea in a glass of ice waiting for plantain and yucca dishes that I will wolf down with pleasure. My only emotion is happiness. I have loved this day, and I haven’t even seen the main event.
When I travel, I don’t feel lonely when I am alone. I can stop at a restaurant, ignore others, read a book, eavesdrop on conversations, and no one bats an eye. I can stop where I want (although time is always at a premium), and I found on this trip that I no longer even need a navigator, having downloaded the complicated route to my phone, that happily indicated each turn with a morse code buzzing on my wrist and a broadcast through my car stereo when and where and in which direction.
I sat outside with my neighbours last night, and excitedly explained to them about my upcoming, last minute, whirlwind trip to see the musical Jesus Christ Superstar. I have been enjoying the score for years. Telling them turned out to be a mistake, because they had no ability to enthuse vicariously. They were honestly worried for me, with one of them bewildered by my plan to go alone. She shook her head, saying,” I wouldn’t do it”. I showed them the incredible vocal range of my favourite song “Gethsemane” ,they were not only unconvinced; they didn’t like it!
I feel sorry for them. I am grateful that I am able to go to something truly special even when no one else appreciates it. I am grateful that it’s still exciting to navigate myself to somewhere new. I am grateful that I can pack in a few minutes, grab my car keys, passport, and proof of insurance, and be on my way! I am grateful that I can sit at a table alone in a restaurant and find myself in the most pleasant company. I am grateful that I can travel alone, and that I love it!
My neighbour told me to bring Kleenex. I told myself that I would be grateful that she showed up everyday and was nice to people. I didn’t expect my tears to come after a silent ride home from the venue where 300 kids received their graduation diplomas today.
I was up late last night, participating in the last session of a wellness course. I didn’t have a lot of time to sleep, but I had six hours. Unfortunately my cat has gotten the taste of being outdoors, and the birds start being interesting around 4 am, so even that was interrupted.
I wore a dress to work, but didn’t get a chance to shower because I started the dishwasher that I had forgotten to run last night, only to discover that a speed wash takes a solid 30 minutes, and I wasn’t going to have time. I rushed to work, forgetting my wallet the first time I left for the train, but with my Princess Pirate’s lunch and my cat’s litter and food supply replenished.
I rushed from work, getting the comment that I was leaving already at 5:01, because that wouldn’t be okay, unless it was my daughter’s convocation.
I made it just in the nick of time to catch the right train, but still no time to shower. I chatted with two sets of neighbours who were out. I can’t talk long. I’m excited! It’s my daughter’s convocation today!
I hydrate and find a half an avocado to eat. My neighbour sent over flowers and a gift card for her, and then I realized that she had given her dad and Nan tickets, but she had forgotten to give me mine.
I found it in her belongings, thankfully, and I was on my way. Parking was full, so I parked further away and walked in. There was no one collecting tickets anymore, and apparently no seats due to a mistake in counting chairs. I looked for one spare seat, which I find, gratefully, since I knew her dad and Nan won’t bother saving me one. I saw her two closest friends who waved at me. I waved back, happy. I would figure out where she was sitting when her name was called.
I film her group making their way to the stage, and the proud moment that she walks across the stage. No one is taking pictures with the principal and I am too far away for a good photo. No matter. She toughed it out in IB, and it’s a triumph. I am so tired. If I lay down here, I would fall asleep in a heartbeat. My head aches and I wish I had more to eat. The ceremony started late and it’s a three hour program.
In the end, there is chaos! I see her friends together, but can’t find her. It’s full, and families are reconnecting everywhere. I can’t see her, but I start weaving around the aisles looking for her. Then I see her, and wave but she doesn’t see me. I chase after her, but I lose her again. There she is! Rebecca!
She sees me, and she scowls. I open my arms to hug her and she punches them away, gritting her teeth. I don’t want a hug, she says. I step back and start scanning for her friends. I know she wants photos with them before they have to give back their gowns. I ask to take a picture with the stage in the back ground. Already my mom, and my neighbour, and a classmate’s mom want a picture. She is severe and beautiful, not smiling, as a take the only photo I might have to remember this momentous night by. She asks for my phone, taking it before waiting for permission. Don’t follow me, she says, marching away.
I find her friend but I have no idea where she is. I am the patsy, waiting for her to return, not even sure if I am the one she will accept to take home. I have work to do. One more night on the wellness platform before it expires. If she isn’t coming home with me, I would leave now. I find her nan, and she has found her dad. We go to where they are standing. She’s giving him a hug, and smiling now. They ham it up, pretending to replicate a photo when he graduated when she was younger. Her nan offers to take a picture of me with her. I am grateful. I return the favour.
She finds her friend, and takes off. I chat with her parents, and try and enjoy the event. She keeps coming back, and taking off. They had been kind enough to bring her. Now they want to go, but she and her friend keep moving away. They wait with me uncomfortably, since it’s clear that they are just messing with us now. We head towards them, but they move further away. Finally, I clarify that she is coming home with me.
We move out of the building, and she is changing her shoes. The family that brought her are waiting, and she doesn’t say anything gracious, like thank you or good night, or attempt to be brief. She keeps dumping things in my bag like I am at her bidding, and after a half dozen condescending uses, I give her a look, and she gives a slightly sarcastic please.
We leave and I say goodbye to her friend and family, but she is off, pretending that I am not part of this. Forgetting to say thanks to the kind people who took her early to the campus and waited until it started because I couldn’t and so that her dad didn’t have to. She walks to the left, leaving me far behind, but my car is nowhere near where she is going. I slow down and look to see if she sees me. She is coming my way again, but distainfully walks ahead, again blindly.
I ask her to stop. What is this game she is playing? You are my only daughter and this is your only high school convocation, and you treat me like this? I thought I would cry for pride, but I find myself crying in shame.
On this night, my daughter graduated from high school, and she wouldn’t have even noticed if I wasn’t there.
I am back from a week in Victoria, and enumerating the things I didn’t get a chance to do. It’s always easy to find reasons for a return trip!
My friend Anna and I spent each morning at 7 PDT (my jet lag and her usual schedule made this possible as it was a comfortable 10 am EST for me) editing our respective books, and I am continuing the early morning habit as often as I can. She was editing 4000 words an hour, and I was hitting 400, with a lot of rewriting expected after that!
One major deficit in my short stay was not hitting the West Coast Trail. This trail has become so popular that you need a pass to hike on it in the high season or on shoulder season weekends, or to stay overnight at any time.. The 75 kilometre WCT runs on the Northwest edge of Victoria’s peninsula, from Port Renfrew to Bamfield. The direction may not just be a personal preference (the North part is the easier part), but what you can get permission to hike. Since your pack gets lighter as you go, North to South is reasonable, but if you like to get the hard part done early, South to North is recommended, with an estimated 6-8 days. You can also just split the trail and just do one section or the other.
The North section starts from Pachena Bay and ends at Walbran Creek. The South section starts from Walbran Creek and ends at Port Renfrew. While it is not a hike to be attempted by a novice, it has been predictably “unwilded” over time, and the challenge that it was previously has been replaced. This spoilage requires a wilderness etiquette to be taught to the new hikers of the “leave no trace” camping. This means that you pack it in and pack it out, and avoid constructing fires.
The first trail was made to in 1889 to connect a telegraph line from Victoria to Bamfield, where the old cable station now serves as Bamfield’s Marine Sciences Centre. It was named after a “federal Indian agent”, William Banfield, but a gazetteer misspelled it on a federal map, and it stayed Bamfield. In 1906, the SS Valencia ran aground (many similar shipwrecks occurred along this stretch of the coast, giving it the name “Graveyard of the Pacific”), and 136 people died. One of the recommendations was to improve the rough telegraph path, known initially as the Life Saving Trail, or Shipwrecked Mariners Trail.
By 1911, the trail was designated a public highway, with a 20 metre right of way, and government upkeep. In 1926, a national park reserve was created to include Nitinat Lake and the coastal trail. In 1947, the reserve status was lifted, and the forest industry began to encroach, starting as Clayoquot Cutting Circle. After WWI, the government abandoned upkeep in 1954, members of the Sierra Club in the 1960s began to hike and keep up the trail, and lobbied for a national park. Parks Canada eventually got involved, and the trail was repaired, from North to South, completed by 1983. In 1993, the trail was formally reestablished as the West Coast Trail Unit of Pacific Rim National Park Reserve.
I heard a story from a fellow Montrealer I met in Cathedral Grove, who hiked it one day alone. She heard growling both ways, which solidified my plan to find a hiking partner. I am more mentally prepared. I had hoped to hike part of it because one of my characters dies on it. Reading my library’s “Hiking the West Coast Trail”, by Tim Leadem this morning, I think I can find a number of ways it could happen.
Here are the cautions (and possibilities) most likely:
South trail is more difficult.
Tides for each day must be considered (see Canadian Hydrographic Service at www.waterlevels.gc.ca, available for Bamfield and Port Renfrew stations). High tide is also known as flood tide and low tide is known as ebb tide. Two of each tide occur a day, with some days only having three tides with varying heights, referred to as lower low tide (LLW and higher low tide). Previous tables were given in Standard time, but now are in PDT. In summertime, you used to need to add an hour.
Injuries are often caused by hurrying.
If poorly equipped, hypothermia is a real risk, given the dampness and cold even in midsummer.
At several locations, crossing a stream on foot is necessary.
Large animal home to cougars, black bears, and wolves (it’s dangerous being quiet, approaching or feeding bears, leaving food in your tent, wearing sweet smelling perfumes, playing dead with a black bear, approaching bus).
The worst danger are occasional freak Pacific swells or rogue waves, particularly at surge channels, over rocks or sandstone swells. These occur even at low tides and are difficult to predict.
Nitinat narrows is hazardous with very fast currents and ocean breakers, and should be crossed only by boat. Many deaths by drowning occur here with a mix of fast currents and ocean breakers. Tidal currents of 8 knots create treacherous whirlpools. A ferry crosses as needed, May 1 to September 30. I would expect spring conditions associated with high water levels would increase potential danger.
Crossing streams and rivers can be treacherous if there is an incoming tide. The incoming sea acts as a dam to the outflow of water from the stream, resulting in a pooling effect, leading to deeper water levels and countercurrents.
Setting up camp at low tide has surprised more than camper with flooding and a moving tent. Camping is safest below winter high tide but above summer high tide.
Hiking the shore when the tides(they aren’t what you think they are. Listen to Neil Degrasse Tyson explain them here.) turn from low to high may result in cliffs that bar your progress or a surge channel, and even if you return, you may not be able to use the same path.
Rocks, logs, and cliffs can be slippery, and your foot placement can be at the edge of steep drops (no selfies on top of cliffs). Vegetation may deceive you, camouflaging a cliff.
Footwear lacking good traction multiplies the danger of a fall.
Wearing the hip belt attached when crossing a river has drowned hikers by their pack weighing them down when they slipped and fell into rushing water.
Toppled trees may block paths, and trails can be washed out.
Elements such as mud, overgrown sections, high winds and downpours occur.
Other hikers, of malevolent intent or in need of help, may interfere with expected safety.
The entire national park falls within the traditional territory of the Nuu-chah-nulth people, and the trail passes by and through some private land. Quu’as guardians patrol all reserve lands. Camping and and trespassing is not allowed.
Red tide cause shellfish like mussels, clams, and oysters to be poisonous (paralytic shellfish poisoning).
Water may contain giardia lamblia and Esherichia coli.
Rationing meals you may run out of water, and dehydration in hot conditions can occur, as well as heatstroke.
No cell service to call for help.
My eighty year old neighbour lent me this book to read, and I have taken on a last minute, overdue trip to celebrate a belated 50 year birthday with high school classmates who all reached this milestone in the midst of the only pandemic we have ever lived through.
It’s a fun premise, fraught with the expected tropes of masculinity and racist ideas that were pervasive in a man of independent means in the 1960s. I know that John Steinbeck is renowned writer, but I honestly didn’t expect him to be such a vagabond American. Indeed, this is a account of a solo three month trip he took through thirty-four states over ten thousand miles, with his dog as his sole companion. There are a few clues early on, though, that this is not a gritty adventure story.
His dog is a blue poodle named Charley that was raised in France, so he responds much better to French commands.
Still, he recalls memories of WWII that he carries out with him across the river as he travels by ferry to his first landfall. In his favour, I hear a little of Bill Bryson, if I was going backwards in a Time Machine, if he was more tone deaf to his privilege, and less motivated to achieve “all of something”, like the Appalachian trail or Australia.
John Steinbeck is often very funny. About his dog, he writes, “ It is my experience that in some areas Charley is more intelligent than I am but in other he is abysmally ignorant. He can’t read. He can’t drive a car, and has no grasp of mathematics.”
I also identified with his literary habits, having compiled and piled and reduced a stack of books myself for this trip, leaving three “must-reads” for upcoming book clubs that I will likely be incompletely prepared for, and choosing instead two books that were unplanned and carry no social value, but for the pure pleasure of reading them. He says, “ I suppose our capacity for self-delusion is boundless…I laid in a hundred and fifty pounds of those books one hasn’t got around to reading— and of course those are the books one isn’t ever going to get to reading.” (In this I hear my dear uncle echoing my dear grandmother’s dry humour).
RE: Florida “I’ve lived in good climate. It bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate…How can one know colour in perpetual green, and what good is warmth without cold to give it sweetness??
I initially thought that this would be the first book I would read by Steinbeck, but the list in front, with Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, and East of Eden all books I wish I had read, reminded me that I had read the Pearl in high school, although I think I conflated it with the Old Man and the Sea, which I hated with a passion that remain hot coals today. Is it possible that it was about a deep sea free diver before that was a sport, but a necessary high risk life choice as occupation?
While the intro is strong, appealing to the “virus of restlessness” (Wanderluster in the colloquial) in me, in my 50s, there is much of his story that is of a privilege and exclusion that I cannot identify with. While apparently handy, he orders a camper van made-to-order instead of kitting it out himself, and starts off from his home in Sag Harbour, Long Island, leaving behind his wife and boat that he foolishly rescues in a hurricane for reasons that I can only describe as foolish and egotistical. He also contradicts himself in many circumstances, describing cities encircled by garbage, and then blithely describing aluminum dishes being “disposable” and throwing them into the water after cooking one dinner. To be fair, he also covers his hot dish with an asbestos cover when cooking, so it’s easy to judge things in hindsight that most people were blind to at the time.
I enjoyed the way he didn’t make me need to google something, kindly teaching me something I didn’t know without making me feeling like I should have known. Describing his “roulotte”, “…I named it Rocinante, which you will remember was the name of Don Quixote’s horse.” Since then, however, I have been struggling to remember the exact definition of many words, and since I am not connected to internet, I have to rely on the context and my distant memory of exactly what the descriptions mean: taciturn (written in the margin helpfully: temperamentally disinclined to talk), tawdry(efforts), laconic(speech), spangle (the autumn), yeomanry,
Some words evoked immediate images with certainty, but I suspect my daughter would have no idea what a gunny sack or a doodad even is, and would not even imaging what a whaling from a parent would be!)
Some of his truths are universal: “I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention, help, and conversation is to be lost.”
After the strange inclusion of the hurricane, he sets off and quite quickly gets himself into frost. He travels east through Maine and makes his way to Deer Isle, which he describes poorly, but, reading between the lines, it is likely another enclave of exclusivity, to visit a friend, parking outside and sleeping in the caravan for a brief visit. Nonetheless, there is perhaps an old time respect for the “reputation” of Miss Brace to have a male visitor (or maybe it was really just not to interfere with her cat George).
Despite being unable to describe the place, his comment “One doesn’t have to be sensitive to feel the strangeness of Deer Isle” is enough to make me want to go there myself! Note: the chief town is Stonington, which he compares to Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast, and the open country like Dartmoor, with Maine speech like that in West County England, with double vowels pronounced as in Anglo-Saxon, and,like the coastal people below the Bristol Channel, they are “secret people, perhaps magic people…This Isle is like Avalon.” This is where coon cats live wild, larger than their tailless cousins of Manx origin. Also, he missed Baxter State Park, but maybe I shouldn’t. I have a little glimmer of recollection that in these places in Maine, Martha Stewart may live.
I don’t know why he can’t say the word Canadian unless he is talking about French Canadians, but he always calls us Canucks, which I never knew was a pejorative from the American lips that refer to other migrants as Hindus, Filipinos, Mexican “wetbacks”, “Okies”, and “negroes”
« Vacilando », a Spanish word that means to enjoy the act of wandering more than arriving at the final destination. He describes the idea while in his search of great potatoes in Aroostook county (One of three great US potato growing areas: Idaho, Suffolk County on Long Island, and Aroostook county, Maine)
Here is aurora borealis in his words: “I’ve seen it only a few times in my life. It hung and moved with majesty in folds like an infinite traveller upstage in an infinite theater. In colors of rose and lavender and purple it moved and pulsed against the night, and the frost-sharpened stars shone through it.
After a period low mood mimicking the grey weather “under the weeping night”, his mood changes with the weather. “The sun was up when I awakened and the world was remade and shining. There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I. The night fears and loneliness were so far gone that I could hardly remember them.”
Misogyny and misanthropy (not tipping the waitress because she complained that she didn’t get tipped), « lumberman doing their logging in the whorehouse and their sex in the woods », « Illinois » « Rather it was like a beautiful woman who requires the support and help of many faceless ones just to keep her going.But this fact does not make her less lovely-if you can afford her. »
“I have further established, at least to my own satisfaction, that those states with the shortest history and the least world-shaking events have the most historical markers.”
Nostalgia:
« Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit or human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.
I who love words and the endless possibility of words am saddened by this inevitability. For with local accent will disappear local temp. The idioms, the figures of speech that make language rich and full of poetry of time and place must go. And in their place will be a national speech, wrapped and packaged, standard and tasteless. »
« Can I then say that the America I saw has put cleanliness first, at the expense of taste? »
Insightful
« In the pattern thinking of about roots I amend most other people have left two things out of consideration. Could it be that Americans are a restless people, a mobile people, never satisfied with where they are as matter of selection? The pioneers, the immigrants who peopled the continent, were the restless ones in Europe. The steady rooted ones stayed home and are still there. But every one of us, except the Negroes forces here as slaves, are descended fro the restless ones, the wayward ones who were not content to stay at home. Wouldn’t it be unusual if we had not inherited this tendency? And the fact is that we have. But that’s the shift view. What are root and how long have we had them? If our species has existed for a couple of million years, what is its history? Our remotes ancestors followed the game, moved with the food supply, and fled from evil weather, from ice and the changing seasons. Then after millennia beyond thinking they domes. ticated some animals so that they lived with their food supply. Then of necessity they followed the grass that fed their flocks in endless wanderings.
Only when agriculture came into practice and that's not very long ago in terms of the whole history did a place achieve meaning and value and permanence. But land is a tangible, and tangibles have a way of getting into few hands. Thus it was that one man wanted ownership of land and at the same time wanted servitude because someone had to work it. Roots were in ownership of land, in tangible and immovable possessions. In this view we are a restless species with a very short history of roots, and those not widely distributed. Perhaps we have overrated roots as a psychic need. Maybe the greater the urge, the deeper and more ancient is the need, the will, the hunger to be somewhere. »
John Steinbeck
Sometimes he’s a real idiot. In the eye of a hurricane, he frees his boat from entanglement with other improperly moored boats.
He leaves his wife and kids as though he was a bachelor.
He uses toxic chemicals in his truck to kill insects and is surprised that his dog Charly has a reaction, calling it an allergy.
He’s entitled. He decides to go on a cross country trip and orders a custom built truck.
Most of the time he is in Long Island as a one-percentor or interrupting his trip in Chicago to reconnect with his wife, hiring a taxi to follow to the hotel when he gets lost, inventing a character after insisting on a room for a shower before his room is ready, and leaving his poodle at the groomers for the duration of his stay.
