Okay, I feel better now. I'm quite sure things will work out with this whole home-loan thing. I was pretty out of sorts this weekend, perhaps it was a combination of the full moon being in Pisces, which is my own moon sign, (and a moody one at that); and as my astrologically minded friend Debbie pointed out Mercury is in retrograde until Thursday, which means snafus in things like contracts and communications. I recall now reading about that Mercury in retrograde thing awhile back, interesting if it has actually manifested in the way they say it does. Luckily Mercury goes direct again on Thursday.
Mind you I know this house stuff will work out for the best no matter what. Astrology is just a fun set of coorespondences to take note of.
Very different apparently. So different that i'm suddenly in limbo about whether or not i'll actually get a loan. Assumptions were made that the PPC condos were Fannie Mae approved, and my Umpqua Bank loan is contingent upon that. But in fact there is (as yet) no fannie mae approval, only freddie mac. Listen. I'm a civilian. I don't know what the fuck any of this means. Other than that if i do not, after all this, qualify for a loan, despite spoken assurances from more than one mortgage lender that I do (and moreover that they will have me signing papers before the end of August), I am going to pile all my possesions (currently in boxes on the floor of "my" home) in a heap, douse them with gasoline, light a big bonfire, and then hit the road and be a hobo.
At least that's the mood I'm in.
The City. When I was a little kid that meant one thing: the Fun Forest amusement midway at the Seattle Center. The Seattle Center was where they had the World's Fair in 2002. Elvis Presley came and made a movie. Perry Como sang about the blue skies. Best of all they built a monorail and a roller coaster called the Screaming Sasquatch.
We actually lived closer to Portland but Seattle always drew us. Now it isn't called Seattle anymore. Chief Seattle was an appeaser. Became a Catholic and sold his people down the river. So they say. The big speech was made up by a Victorian hack and a 1970's TV scriptwriter. That much may be true; but I still like the old guy. And his daughter Princess Angeline lived in a shack on the beach until she was 128 years old. I remember her from when I was little. She could have lived in a mansion from what she made off her "get your picture taken with Princess Angeline" booth. She just liked the beach. Mussels and clams, seagulls, seaweed. I don't blame her.
But now Seattle is Leschi. Leschi was the chief who fought back. Leschi, the Lord of the City, who languished in the shadows, now he rules his rightful place. So they say. All I know is that bells ring every day at 1500 and we turn toward the Great Mountain and dance. I'd call it a hippie dance but that word is apparently taboo now, at least for the general populace.
I ran as fast as I could back down the mountain to retrieve the tools I'd need for the grisly task at hand. I was scared but excited. But it never crossed my mind that I might never see my home again after that day.
Ah, nothing like berry season. Picked several containers full of blackberries today in the brambles near Kathy and Sue's house in Eugene. (I'm here for the night picking up stuff I've had stored. ) I'm gonna make pies and sell them at last Thursday this week. I'm thinking of doing little pocket-pies, 2 bucks a pop or something. It'll take some experimentation though.
Slooowly settling into Peninsula Park Commons. Need some odds and ends of furniture like another table and some more shelves and a dresser.
Received my first housewarming gift today, some nice printed cards from Carye the Bee, thanks! Who's next then? People? Actually my next door neighbor Nicole gave gave me not only a bottle of wine but her old (but still good condition) mattress and box spring and some other items. It worked out well on both sides because she is replacing things and I need things.
Next big household project (probably over a week away though) is tiling all around the tub. I have a couple buckets of colored tiles from SCRAP, when i have enough I am going to do it in a combo of intact tile and decorative mosaic (with broken tile pieces.) My friend Debbie is doing a big shower enclosure like that floor to ceiling (including ceiling) and it is inspiring me.
All this time in Portland and this week was my first time swimming in the Sandy River. After work on Wednesday Babs borrowed my car to go out there (Troutdale) to wash away the cares of a hot and tiring day. Luckily she all but insisted I come along, since I was tired and grimy too. I was in a crabby mood and almost didn't but boy am I glad I did. Swimming in rivers is one of the great joys of life. I've known that ever since I was a kid splashing around in the Loisach river, and all the mountain streams since, but sometimes in the heat and bother of the city you temporarily lose sight of these things.
The funny thing is, the day I found bigfoot was the last straw. That's how it started out. Dad was harping again about how I should apply for the internship at the mill. You got to count logs as they came in and board-feet as they went out and if you were lucky maybe drive the sawdust plow. They hyped it up at the high school like it was this great vocational work-study opportunity of a lifetime. And I guess it worked because most of the guys who did it ended up working there after graduation. They started you on the night shift. I knew for a fact that most of them were meth-heads. The trail to my hideout went past the main meth-lab house. I used to be friends with their son but he turned into a tweeker who played video games for literally days in a row. Who says drugs are bad for your attention span?
So Dad was haranguing me and Mom... was in the kitchen mixing up the medicine. For real though. She used to collect Devil's Club and boil the spiny stalks into a sort of magic cure-all tea that she plied us with whenever things got too noisy. She grew pot behind the garden shed too and baked brownies pretty much every week. She was generous though. She had a sort of housewives afternoon potluck once a month and believe me, half the ladies from church were usually there. But this day, I don't know, it must have been a bad cup of the tea or something. Dad was swilling it along with his sixth Rainier Beer and both of them were in full color display.
So I grabbed my pack and stomped out, past the shed, onto the deer trail, down through alders and maples grown up since the first big cut 80 years ago, across the county road, past the meth lab and then up and up along the creek that led to... a stench of rotten eggs. I remember reading how bigfoots (bigfeet?), sasquatches, often had a powerful musky odor like rotten eggs. There was a book at the county library by a nutcase zoology professor from the university who believed in bigfoot. I used to read it over and over.
But when I ran into this stench I didn't know what to think. I was pretty much dumbfounded until I saw what I couldn't believe. I won't even bother with a close description because everyone knows what they're supposed to look like. That's what they look like. Big and hairy. Dark brown to black. This one was male.
I knew instantly that my secret peace and quiet was gone for good. I guess I could have just not told anyone. But it was obviously too important. The only question was, tell who? The county deputies were all tweekers, the sheriff was a regular Boss Hogg. They'd try to steal the whole show for 20 minutes on Jerry Springer. Big city TV news station maybe? But who'd even believe me?
So I knew in that moment what I'd have to do: cut off bigfoot's head, pack it into an ice-chest, and take it to the city.
I'm finally moving into my new place at Peninsula Park Commons. The address is:
6325 N. Albina, #5
Portland, OR 97217
On Albina between Ainsworth and Portland Boulevard. Pumpkin yellow.
Peninsula Park Commons is a co-housing project being developed by Jim Labbe and Eli Spivak. Great guys, and my other neighbors will include Amy Stork and the Folz family (Alan, Carrie, and Cody.)
Phone is still my cell, 503-816-6491.
Stop by! More tomatoes than we know what to do with.
Growing up I always thought it would be really neat to be psychic. In recent years I've had a number of experiences that have led me to understand that in fact I *am* "psychic" to a moderate or perhaps even strong degree. I'm talking in particular about precognitive dreams and certain moments of knowing things that I "couldn't" have known. Like recently when i envisioned half an hour before it happened, getting stung on the head by a bee while riding my bike. Or that Mount Rainier/Adams dream (see comment on previous entry.) Many other such dreams and incidents over the last few years. But by and large they have nothing to do with anything of any real import to my life, at least as far as I can tell. Don't get me wrong, I find it fascinating and enjoyable to have a vivid dream that comes literally true in waking life. But in the matters of the affairs of my life and heart, in particular close relationships or "romance", my intuition seems to fail completely. If there's an earthquake here soon, well, i'm telling you right now. But as to whether and what the reality of things is between X and I, or what the best vocational path is for me, I have no idea. In truth I think I do, we all do, but for whatever stupid reason the things that are closest and most important are the hardest to see clearly. I know that intuition can be developed, it is really a matter of believing your own most basic feelings and acting upon them without over-reflecting or intellectualizing. But that's a toughie. I may very well have a pre-cognitive dream tonight but probably about something like seeing a big green double-decker bus. As far as what to say and how to say it in the situations that matter most to me, well, I'm flying blind like the rest of us.
That's Mount Adams, the big huge volcano that hides away in the southeast Washington Cascade Range. The "forgotten giant." You can see it from parts of Portland, and from the main road through Hood River and from Yakima, but really there never was a bigger disjunct between the size of a mountain and its elusiveness (Glacier Peak is similiar in that respect.) It is enormous, second only to Rainier. But to get to know it you have to drive about 3 hours into the high wild boonies.
I hiked up the Killen Creek trail (not next to the creek at all) into the Mt. Adams Wilderness and spent the night a mile above the PCT on a flat spot on the tundra next to a copse of wind-wracked krummholz. (Krummholz is the word for trees in the high alpine zone that are no higher than shrubs although they are fully grown.) Mt. Adams towering above me in its splendid massiveness, St. Helens and Rainier and Goat Rocks and silhouetted ridges forever to the west and north. Adams Glacier a giant falling vertical mile of broken ice. Barren moraine heaps.
And the rushing mountain stream next to the campsite: wait a sec! It wasn't there when I arrived!! No kidding. When I arrived at 5:30 Pm there was nothing but a damp streambed, which sent me on a long scramble to the next stream over for drinking water (which was fine, as the tundra barrens and general scene were fantastic.) An hour later I was back and eating dinner and suddenly heard flowing water. Much to my amazement there was a full-fledged stream cascading down not 20 yards from my campsite. No trickle either but a full force alpine creek. It really boggled me. For awhile I was simply dumbfounded but concluded that the stream must have gotten temporarily blocked by a collapsing snow-tunnel upstream.
I think that was a correct guess because in hiking upstream the next morning I saw that the stream did in fact flow beneath a small but sufficiently thick snowfield. Its source was a meltwater lake higher up at the base of a lobe of the Adams Glacier. I continued steeply (but not dangerously) up the North Cleaver Climbers' route to as high as I could safely go without climbing equipment, a flat spot at about 8800 feet. Two goats scrambled up even further into the cliffs, I can't figure out what they subsist on. There's nothing but rocks up that high. I also saw the bones of a dead goat that appeared to have curled up and died. The ribs had been scattered but the position of the skull and leg bones led me to that conclusion.
From the high point of the hike I witnessed a stupendous fall of enormous (car sized? house sized?) boulders thundering down from the upper mountain, bouncing in huge sprays of snow and rock-dust down the northwest wall and eventually tumbling and rolling to a rest on the lower glacier. Incredible.
And both this trip and last week at Goat Rocks, bright green hummingbirds whirring past me in the highest rocky reaches, apparently seeking out tiny alpine flowers.
Suppose your name was Eustace. Suppose you lived in a milltown in the ragged green mountains of southern Washington State. Suppose you lived there because your mother was a school-teacher who married a millworker in the days when both of them were young dope-smokers (and he still had 10 fingers) and they named you Eustace after getting stoned and reading the Chronicles of Narnia. So you grew up as Eustace in a town full of Swedes and people who migrated from the hills of Carolina in the 1930's and still sounded like it, or like the strange offspring of Appalachia and Scandinavia, the forgotten accent of rural upper Cascadia.
You'd need to find a refuge somewhere, a hiding place. So I did, a mossy grotto in the deep woods along a creek that dropped in a thousand singing cascades to the Cispus River. It was my sanctuary, my secret home. Until the day I found the body of a freshly dead bigfoot. The day that changed my life, and the world, forever.
I'm finding i have less and less time to maintain this blog, but friends who expect a new entry regularly keep pestering me and after all i do love communicating with all you wonderful people, so i'll do my best to keep it coming.
Just got back from a great little adventure into the far secret reaches of the Goat Rocks Wilderness. The far east side, way way long way to drive to get to the trailhead, and a long appraoch hike thru cow meadows and afflicted fir trees, then up and up into an alpine paradise that made me think i took a wrong turn and ended up in the North Cascades. The "Goat Rocks" is a shabby name for what is really a superb sub-range of the Cascades unto itself. I'll write more later, but right now i gotta run.