WANDERINGS

Seattle Aquarium

UTILITY ACCESS COVERS

A doorway to another world, another place, another time.

Rectangular. Rusted welded writing on silver. Metal. Electrical. Inset.

This is ELECTRiC High-VoLTAgE and don’t you forget it.


This is how we do things here on Mount Rainier.

This is rough and tumble. This is tough and ready for a fight.

This is The West. This is Frontier. This is The Land of the Dead.

The land of tomorrow. The land of no tomorrow.

Now it's "make or break" time.

Say your prayers.

Do not touch.

MOUNTAIN TIME

No hiking today. We pack up camp after breakfast. We walk to the river to retire our walking sticks gathered two days prior. We ceremoniously throw them into the rapids from the footbridge.

The plan is to drive from White River to Ohanapecosh, to see what that campground has to offer, and to return home. The plan changes when we encounter road construction near Panther Creek. We decide, after twenty-five minutes of combined waiting at three separate sites of construction within two miles, to travel home by going around The Mountain. The map shows that it is the same distance and then we don't have to encounter the same road construction. Our day turns into an auto tour of The Mountain. We make brief stops at Ohanapecosh, Paradise, Longmire. We stop at Cougar Rock for lunch. The child vomits her lunch all over herself as we pass through the Nisqually Entrance gate, so we stop to change her clothes. We pull over in Elbe so that the child can see some of the locomotives near the Mount Rainier Scenic Railroad depot. She is currently facinated by the book Freight Train by Donald Crews. We read it every night before she goes to bed. Now she gets to see the real thing.

We were glad to be able to camp and hike and enjoy the company of one another. Now, we are glad to be home and take hot showers and sleep in our own beds.

MOUNTAIN TIME

The wife, the child, and I hike from White River campground to Glacier Basin. The view of The Mountain from this basin is spectacular: forest, meadow, river, rock, basalt cliffs, sun, puffs of clouds that assemble and spin and quickly dissipate. We thank God for being here to see this because we almost didn't make it.

First, we are not hikers by nature. The wife would most likely rather not, and I engage in the activity far too infrequently. Second, the wife was battling a cold. Third, I am horribly out of shape and was carrying the child in a backpack. Fourth, sleep was fitful for all of us last night.

Last night, after gathering walking sticks from the riverbed, and then going through bedtime rituals, we all went to bed at the same time. The child was not going to sleep in a strange place—the tent—by herself. The wife and the child were sleeping in their individual sleeping bags on an air mattress, while I was sleeping in my sleeping bag in the "trench" next to it. The child is an "active" sleeper. This was compounded by any movement by the wife, which would propel the child about due to the weight difference. Therefore, the child was often propelled into the trench and onto me. At one point, the child even crawled down to curl up at my feet, whereupon I placed her back into her sleeping bag. The decision was made that the air mattress would only serve one night of duty.

Today, our slow pace, fatigue, and various aches and pains meant that our seven mile round-trip hike, with an overall ascent of 1640 feet in elevation, took much longer than a fit, less encumbered hiker could do the same. We did make it, however. Then we enjoyed our lunch and hiked back—most of it downhill—with much less effort. Overall, it was a great experience and the first hike of the child, some of which she did actually walk.

It made our dinner of steak, corn on the cob, and roasted vegetables that much better. The only thing missing was a good beer!

Tonight, the child is more comfortable with the idea of sleeping in the tent. This allows the wife and I to stay up slightly later than her to enjoy the fire and the company of one another, under the canopies of hemlocks and summer stars. We also know there is no air mattress this evening to hinder sleep.

MOUNTAIN TIME

Tonight, the child, the wife, and I are retiring to our sleeping bags in our three-man tent in our campsite of White River Campground of Mount Rainier National Park. The fire has just been extinguished and the sky is filled with thousands of visible stars, most of which cannot be seen from our home due to the lights of suburban and urban living that washout the night sky. Our bellies are full of hotdogs and baked beans. This meal was chosen by the child, who in her toddler mind, thought this would be good food for the evening. It was.

This is the child's first camping trip. She is excited about her sleeping bag. She is excited about marshmallows toasted over hot coals. She is excited by hotdogs and baked beans. She is excited by the river whose rapids we stood inches above upon a footbridge. She is excited by all of the rocks. It is wonderful to see her interaction with nature and the world around her. Everything is new. Everything is full of potential. Nothing, or very little, has yet to be soured by those around her, or events, or her own shortcomings. This is paradise.

GENTLEMEN, START YOUR ENGINES

"I saw in [the] eyes [of neighbors who came to visit] something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation—a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here."
—John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

One of my favorite memories is the night I had to keep watch over the Puyallup Jaycee firework stand. I was not allowed to sleep. Therefore, my plan was to sit in a lawnchair, outside the stand, and read John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley. I did that despite the cold, damp night and the constant parade of cars that pulled up before the nearby Goodwill trailer either to dump off items or surreptitiously steal them again. I had the good fortune of observing the best and worst of America with my own eyes and through the eyes of John Steinbeck and his poodle Charley.

I recently read three articles that reminded me of Steinbeck's tribute to America and its roads. They are

1. "Flâneur at 55 MPH" by Joan Ockman in the Summer 2006 issue of Arcade.
2. "Capitalist Roaders" by Ted Conover, with photographs by Nick Waplington, in the July 02, 2006 issue of The New York Times Magazine.
3. "Perpetual Motion: Volume One" by Robert Sullivan, with photographs by Matthew Monteith, in the September 2006 issue of Dwell. This is part one of four.

The article by Ted Conover, "Capitalist Roaders," captures some of the excitement of a culture that is just beginning to really discover individual ownership of automobiles. There is a new middle class emerging in China that is changing the way that China views itself. Subsequently, freeways and highways are being built across China to ensure the growth of car ownership and ease, for some, of moving about the country. Conover traveled with members of the Beijing Target Auto Club as they drove a circuitous route from Beijing to Hubei Province and back, with stops at the recently completed Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River and Shennongjia, an UNESCO biosphere reserve. Most of their journey, however, is spent in their cars, on the roads, oftentimes for twelve or more hours each day.

Conover captures some of the thrill and excitement of a burgeoning car culture, while pondering what that culture will look like in the near future. China will soon have the most miles of roads for a single nation, second only to the United States, and then will quickly surpass even that number. China's need for petroleum to fuel the cars, as well as for the asphalt, will speed up the depletion of global oil resources, and has already dramatically increased air pollution. There is also the question of how the world's largest communist country will embrace the capitalism that underlies the car culture. McDonald's is already in partnership with China's state-run petroleum giant Sinopec. The plan is to build filling stations that include drive-thru McDonald's restaurants along major highways and freeways. Will China's road system soon resemble that of the United States?

The question of what the United States road system looks like, and how it influences other aspects of our culture and our lives is examined in the article by Robert Sullivan. In the first of four examinations, he looks at the automobile infrastructure of New England. As he states in his opening paragraph: "The roads—and the routes and the paths, the trails and the rights-of-way—take us away and they bring us home. They make us who we are and they make the places where we live."

These two sentences are at the heart of what Ted Conover is expressing about China's new car culture and its auto clubs; are what Robert Sullivan's explorations are based upon; are what John Steinbeck was attempting to discover in his travels with Charley; and are the flavor of Joan Ockman's beautiful prose poem about wandering about in her car.

What intrigues me, in addition to the consistent flavor that runs through all three of the articles and Steinbeck's book, is Sullivan's conversations with people whose professions are to think about driving and its effects upon us. He talks with both Dolores Hayden, a professor of architecture and author of the book A Field Guide to Sprawl, and with Andy Wiley-Schwartz, vice-president for transportation of Project for Public Places. Their conversations with Sullivan help to really solidify his argument that roads "make us who we are and they make the places where we live."

While reading the Sullivan article, the myriad of images already in my mind from Ockman's piece, the Conover article, and Steinbeck's book, as well as the photographs that accompany the Sullivan article, collided with one another to create some huge "accident" or "traffic jam" in my mind. My thoughts kept slowing down like traffic in New York City or Beijing or Seattle, which was not necessarily a bad thing, since it allowed for more intense focus and reflection upon what car culture means for me, and for you. One of Matthew Monteith's photographs is of the side of a McDonald's restaurant with the prevalent image of a Big Mac and the words "Super Size It!" The caption below the photograph reads "McDonald's, I-95, Connecticut." But, it could easily read "McDonald's drive-thru at Sinopec gasoline station, Chinese Freeway, Hubei Province."

What will our cars make us? What will they make the places where we live? Will they help us to rediscover who we are? As Steinbeck laments before he sets off on his journey across the United States: "I had not heard the speech of America, smelled the grass and trees and sewage, seen its hills and water, its color and quality of light. I knew the changes only from books and newspapers." Steinbeck did get out of his car, though, in order to hear and smell and see; I have just been reading books, magazines, and newspapers. Perhaps I need to go for a drive.

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I also find it interesting that Robert Sullivan's article in Dwell is sponsored and underwritten by Saturn. Why is a car company supporting an article on how cars affect our lives? As the Dwell introduction to the article proclaims: "With the generous support of Saturn, who shares our mobile fascination..."

So, I figured that this post should also be sponsored by a car, although without the knowledge of the car's maker. If Dwell undergirds its article with a relationship to a particular brand of automobile, then surely I can express my own bias toward the Smart car, which is coming soon to the United States. See what Europeans have been enjoying for the past few years at www.smartusa.com.

Economical. Environmentally friendly. Safe. SMART.

WANDERINGS

PERSPECTIVES

The child and I wandered around a bookstore this evening. It was fun to watch her as she bounced from book to book, aisle to aisle, giggling and chattering.

She has a great eye. There is no consistency that I can recognize to what catches her attention, but she knows what she likes. One book was liked because of its color, pink or green; another was liked because of an image on the cover, a monkey or a bunch of flowers; another due to its shape, square rather than rectangular; yet another for its size, large relative to all its neighbors. Her choices were many of the same books that caught my attention as well.

So, we wandered about without any aim, unfettered, and free to gaze at whatever peaked our interest, collectively or individually.

APOCALYPTIC DREAMS

"These are not joyful times. These are challenging times. These are difficult times."
—President George W. Bush, speaking about the War in Iraq during this morning's press conference regarding Israel's incursions into sovereign Lebanon

Can I fault someone else for their dreams? My dreams don't involve my finger resting on the nuclear trigger. My dreams don't command the world's most powerful army. My dreams don't believe that God is using me as the mouthpiece for his great plan or that Jesus and I are best friends that chat in the Rose Garden. John of Patmos had a vision of great turmoil and the second coming of Christ. It was a glimmer of hope in the midst of chaos. It was faithful. It stood in opposition to the powers that be. It wasn't the powers that be. Jesus stood in opposition to the powers that be. He was the powers that be and chose not to exercise any of his power. He emptied himself out. He obeyed his Father unto death. He suffered for his dreams.

Where are the prophets who will speak out against our current king, our current empire?

NIGHT WANDERINGS