Matt’s Cameras: Kodak Brownie Hawkeye covers the camera we juct picked up at Goodwill’s Labor Day sale for, um, two bucks?

The deciding factor was the roll of shot color film still inside. Ah, er, uh… – film at 11.

Writing a ton of comics reviews yesterday and today – soppin’ up my blog energy.

Ergo, limited bloggage ahead. Thank you for your time.

Mount Rainier National Park

Saturday, after having gotten situated at Ohanapecosh, we began to realize how much stuff we’d left at home. We then took a stroll through the “Grove of the Patriachs”, a small stand of old-growth that was somehow overlooked earlier in the century, and has been conveniently provided with a raised, level planked walkway.

Then we experienced the joy of woodfire chicken cookery in the dark.

One thing went right, finally – Spencer and I played together around the fire and it was a good, organic thing. I hope Spence wants to pick up where we left off last year.

Sunday dawned with the plop-plop sound of water dripping from the trees on to our tent. We were in the louds, and the clouds stayed with us all day, even on the drive home. We’d royally fucked up by not stopping at Paradise on the way in – when we arrived there on Sunday, after breaking camp, it was solid white everywhere you looked – a visibility distance of up to a hundred feet from time to time.

We still went for a long walk up Paradise’s broad and paved paths – looking at maps of the trail network, I think we made it to within a half-mile of Icicle Creek, where I heard scuttlebutt that the cloud-layer ended.

Mount Rainier National Park (NPS) – Camping

We drove to Ohanapecosh, in the lower right corner of the park. We arrived there at about 4, if I recall.

Vivian and I were most unprepared for the trip, as it turned out. We had spent serious time on developing a checklist and pre-pack procedure, but for some reason, on this trip we did such things as lose the checklist, forget food items purchased less than 24 hours prior to the trip, and so forth.

This confusion delayed our departure from Seattle and cost us free time on Saturday, which could have been spent at Paradise.

It was a perfectly clear day all day on Saturday, the mountain looming over us in surprisingly snow-free glory. But we had to push on to our camping area to be sure we had daylight.

…“To talk of many things:
Of clams, and ships, and sealing-wax,
Of cabbages, and kings;
And why the pho is boiling hot,
And whether pigs have wings.”

Too much to do interfering with writing here. In fact, I’m going to be a day late on a story pitch to Eric at Cinescape, darn it. And I still have to wrangle gear for camping. Shoot.

It’s cool and a bit grey, which is a bit odd for August.

So. Thursday, I did walk down to see the tail end of the ship parade on Lake Union. There’s a steep street called Belmont in my neighborhood that is arched by old trees. They frame a view down an arboreal tunnel to part of south Lake Union, compressing the view of the surface of the lake and the boats on it in a remarkable forced perspective. As I walked down this street, the Lady Washington and the Hawaiian Cheiftain were visible, apparently stacked one atop the other, with full sails flying. It was quite a sight.

Naturally, I did not have my camera handy.

Friday evening, I made a nice picnic – a good bottle of wine, a nice baguette, cheese, and salami – and walked down to meet Viv at the foot of the hill, and then we walked to Northwest Seaport where the ships were. By the time we arrived and ate, the ships were closed to visitation, which made me cranky. The event felt pretty disorganized; but it was significantly less crowded than, for example, Folklife or any of the other Seattle Center festivals, and I like it when most of you are over on the other side of town.

I took a few pix but nothin’ special (Note: all images in this entry link to larger images, and also to a gallery of shots).

We returned on Saturday, but were expecting guests and had some errands to do so we were only there for about an hour. Then we whipped over to Uwajimaya to grab some clams, and beat our guests in the door.

Clams were a hit, and we had a very pleasant dinner, I’m happy to report.

Next day, we went to the Green Cat fo’ brekkus before heading off to our respective destinations – the waterfront for Chris and Sabrina, and more ships for me and Viv. However, we were delayed getting down to the festival by one thing or another and I was getting cranky, as I knew the ships closed to visitors at six, and this would be the last day for visits.

As it happened, we ran into our neighbor Peter and his nephews; they were in fact headed to the same place, so we teamed up. Once we arrived, we stood in line for a good hour to board the vintage 1911 steel-hulled Europa, a visit which in the end was worth the wait; we went on to board nearly all of the vessels that were at the slips, with, sadly, the exceptions of the Niña (a British Virgin Islands based replica of one of Columbus’ ships – tiny!), the Bellingham-based Zodiac, a huge pre-WW2 racing yacht, and the weekend’s stars, the Washington-based Lady Washington and the California-operating Hawaiian Cheiftain.

la Nina	the Europa	Lady Washington and the Hawaiian Chieftain

These last two were mostly sailing in Lake Union, engaged in running cannon battles. Seats on these ships for the battles were a paltry fifty bones, and I must say I regret cheaping out and settling for the ten-dollar boarding passes.

The greatest mystery of the festival was the appearance of the Ukrainian Bat’Kvyshnia, which appeared to be a standard fifty-year-old small freighter which had been spontaneously converted into a sailing ship. Where the rest of the ships looked like time travelers from a glamorous past, the Bat’Kvyshnia looked like a time traveler from a scabrous future. When Mad Max has to leave Australia, it’s this boat he’ll sail aboard. The scrappiness, perhaps the foolhardiness, of sailing this vessel, quite literally, around the world, impressed me. Mutliple, visible rusting holes at the waterline of the badly-in-need-of-paint ship led the lubber in me to wonder if these holes were wear and tear or design features.

(Given my track record of attracting site visitors here whom I’ve made critical comments about, let me hasten to add that despite the battered appearance of the ship, I was glad to see it at the show. One would never encounter such a vessel at, oh, Disneyland, for example.)

At last, after many lines and quite a few sea shanties from the performers at the festival, we made our way up the hill to hook up with Chris and Sabrina again for Pho, a social tradition that held sway among Sabrina’s friends when she was here for a while. I was happy to be there, had good food, and took three pictures, one of which is repro’ed here; after, we adjourned to Deluxe for a couple drinks. While there I espied a gent in a “Jackie Hell has a posse” tee, seen here. I gave the gent a KG posse sticker, natch.

Tall Ships gallery

Chris and Sabrina visit

Moments ago, I returned from running an errand in the neighborhood. I was musing to myself about the proliferating dog poop scene in my apartment building’s yard spaces, trying to not get all bent out of shape about it (one of our neighbors is temporarily fostering a pair of sweet little granny lap dogs; since they already have one dog, the three together are a challenge for them to manage when they head out to do some business).

As I was carrying a load of laundry downstairs, thinking of dog turds, I got a whiff of something really awful, much like raw sewage or a rotting carcass. I actually spoke aloud: “What is that smell?”

I got down to the entry to the laundry room, and heard a noise near to where I smelled the stench. I saw a person, standing near a starcase that leads to the upper deck on our building. At first, I shrugged and went to open the laundry room. Then I put two and two together. I looked a bit more closely, and had the traumatizing experience of seeing some homeless person wiping their ass after having just taking a huge, steaming dump in my yard, fifteen feet from my dining room window.

My inner Republican erupted: I immediately started yelling, “GET THE FUCK OUTTA MY YARD! GET THE FUCK OUT NOW! STAY OUT! DON’T COME BACK!” and walked right up to the wretched asshole, pointing, waving my arms, and shouting. The prick (no, make that the PRICK WHO SHIT IN MY FUCKING YARD) was so rattled by my angry rantings that he repeatedly failed to pull his pants up, while mumbling pathetically about “when he gets paid” and other sad things.

He finally made his shambling way down the street, a sad specimen indeed; meanwhile I had the exquisite pleasure of picking his smeary, steaming, still-warm dump up between sheets of newspaper and conveying it to the dumpster. Naturally, while engaged in this deeply fulfilling act of service to humanity, I noticed a secret dog-poop cache: at least one pooch has found the same spot as inviting a latrine as the-fuckwad-who-took-a-dump-in-my-yard, and yet, unaccountably, failed to inform their peeps of the event!

It should be noted that last summer I repeatedly chased junkies and teenagers looking for a spot to blow some spliff off the property as well.

No, really.

He was standing out front of Twice-Sold Tales at the intersection of Broadway and John tonight at 10pm, looking at books on the cheap racks, when Viv and I walked past on our way home from the silent movie tonight.

He was wearing a red Red Top Taxi work shirt with a name patch that clearly read “Elvis”.

It was the Vegas Elvis, but not fat: big ol’ burns, aviator shades.

Alas, no camera. Just down the street was his Red Top shuttlevan, park lights blinkin’.

It seems clear to me that he was takin’ care of business. Uh-hunh.

Paul Frankenstein’s brother has some thoughts on what people mean when they ask “where ya from”.

He’s of visually apparent mixed ethnicity, and in his experience, people want to know about his mixed ethnicity when he’s asked this question, and he doesn’t care for the implication that answering “America” fails to cut it. Which I can understand.

Yet, in another way, I think he’s fortunate to know what his ethnic background is, and grew up knowing about it.

I grew up with not a clue about my ethnicity, in two different ways. One, I’m adopted, under sixties-style rules, which means I have no idea at all about my genetic identity, and will never know when I meet someone of similar genetic background, what the rest of you out there would think of as family, cousin, mother, or brother.

Second, my real family, by which I mean my adoptive family, had no idea what their ethnic background was. ‘American’, they’d say, with a shrug. This reflected what appears to have been a family tradition of actively suppressing knowledge of family history. My grandfather, for example, flat-out refused to discuss anything about his father, for whom I surmise both he and I were named.

As a yoot, this drove me nuts. Where did our wacky last name, ‘Whybark’, come from? What about the apparent compulsion to not discuss family history? What about my gramps, my dad’s and my own bullheaded sense of personal independence from, even outright disdain for, standard socialization, community mores, and grim, thin-lipped resistance to simply keeping our heads down and fitting in?

I still don’t have answers to many of these questions. I surmised, for example that our last name is an anglicization of a German placename, probably ‘Weiberg’; our family’s traditions of cuckoo clocks, dachsunds, and analytic approaches to work and relationships made me suspect that this was a valid guess.

As it turns out, I was correct. But the name change did not happen at Ellis Island – my earliest American ancestor was a German emigrant to Philadelphia who arrived in the 1760s or thereabouts. I learned this from a comprehensive geneaological history published by the patriarch of a different branch of the family. Included in the book is what I take to be an explanaton of the muteness of my family’s own memory.

Two key generations of my ancestors experienced a catastrophic event that destoyed their lives; and nearly all of my male ancestors in direct descent from the 1700s to the present day have picked up and moved away from where they grew up. The key events? In the 1780’s Philadelphia suffered a massive yellow fever epidemic, and everyone in the first North American born generation died in it, except for one man, who immediately left and took up a frontier life. He eventually settled in Missouri, while it was Spanish territory, and had a family; his sons also reproduced in Missouri.

Then the Civil War happened; it appears that reflecting the unsettled nature of Missouri, the family was partly split bewteen grey and blue. In any event, only three Whybark males survived the war. There’s no evidence that these deaths were in combat, which wuld fit the stats: the majority of the war’s casualties were from disease. The survivors were a Missouri born father and his two sons. The father died shortly after the war and his eldest surviving son (my great-great-grandfather) went west.

The other, still a teenager, stayed, was presumably raised by aunts, and eventually became a lawyer, shopkeeper, and member of the Missouri House of Representatives. I have photocopies of his store’s account books.

So my surmise is between up-and-moving, yellow fever, and the Civil War, a few generations of my ancestors established new traditions of how to be a family:

• Move on, physically if possible
• Forget the past, refuse to talk about it
• Be ready to move
• Expect tragedy

Observing my life, my father’s, and my grandfather’s, I would say that each of us has constructed their own lives in dialog with this set of ideas about the world and how to live in it.

Anne Zender proffers a short piece on house at Sixth and Grant in Bloomington, Indiana, my homwtown and where Anne went to college.

This house is about two doors from the Runcible Spoon, a former employer of, um, really, everyone I knew in Bloomington, at one point or another.

Perhaps you worked there as well.

And on Saturday we’ll greet Chris Dent and Sabrina here in Seattle, direct from the muggy hills of my homeland.

Right now, I think I might walk down to the edge of the Hill to watch the ships come in.

In the summer sun, they’re riding their webs like tars in the yardarms of the trees. Their webs bellying and snapping in the breeze, these fine ladies will shortly double in size – late August often shares a brood of wind-riding gems, each an inch or two across.