Showing posts with label Rain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rain. Show all posts
Friday, December 30, 2016
Racing the Rain
I wake up to rain and, when I crawl out of bed, it is still raining. It is raining while I make my coffee, and it is raining when I load the canoe on the car. I skip breakfast because it is raining. I am racing the rain and if I don't hurry, it might stop. It is still raining when I finally push off from Pilgrim Landing.
I planned on heading upriver into Lord Cove, but the wind is stronger than I expected and it seems that I might be in for a beating as I return to the put-in. I turn around after a couple hundred yards and head downstream onto a mile of river that I've not seen before. After that I can finish exploring the Lieutenant River.
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| fog making sculpture at the Florence Griswold Museum |
I am ditching the funhog*. In the west, at least a third of my days in the canoe were in the rain, and one quickly learns the advantages. I almost always had the water to myself. Rain cancels funhog plans, and it also cancels the sounds of civilization and softens the intrusion of distant structures. Being a funhog isn't the worst thing in the world - I was once one myself. At least they are out in nature, and sometimes funhogs develop into something more layered. A friend of mine looked at me one day and told me that I was a deep ecologist**. I had to look that up, but the description fit pretty close. I had come some distance while not paying attention.
I leave the big river where the Lieutenant River comes in. It doesn't take long for it to narrow into something comprehensible, and this is where the egrets also begin to show up. Only a few shoreline fishermen share the day with me and the birds. Numerous osprey whistle and perch in riverside trees while an egret steps slowly, slowly, slowly, making no waves and no ripples... as it moves in on prey. A great blue heron flies off before I am anything that I would call near. Where the river widens into a marsh edged pond, I paddle off to the east until it shallows, a few inches deep with large widely spaced boulders...a typical waterscape for many of the tidal rivers that I explore. I turn back and try the west channel, which turns out to go a distance....it is a place that the satellite photos do not show, and the river goes further than I had thought, until it shrinks to a canoe width in the round terminal marsh that is bounded by forested hills.
*Definition: Funhog
1. One who uses nature as a playground without seeing the deeper meaning and purpose of nature. Identifiable by hooting and hollering and a garage full of mostly unused outdoor equipment. Rarely knows where they are or what they are looking at.
2. Bear food
**Definition: Deep ecologist
One who believes that everything in nature has worth and is to be respected, whether or not you understand its purpose and whether or not it has some utilitarian value to man. Or, as I like to say - there is value in knowing that if you hike in bear country, you might get eaten by a bear, and if you hike off trail in wilderness, there is value in knowing that you may be lost and never found...and this is the way things should be.
Monday, December 12, 2016
Trouble in Mind revisiting Rain City
Yesterday Seattle came close to reaching a 1951 record by stretching out a dry spell to about 49 consecutive days. It finally sprinkled last night (9/10 September) to leave the foliage gleaming with droplets by morning. The 1951 record was 51 days. That for a town often referred to as “Rain City”.
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| Rain City |
But why Rain City? Perhaps because the dry sunny summer period typically only lasts from May to late September, with plenty of days with rain through the rest of the year? Seattle does have several other nicknames, including The Gateway to Alaska, Queen City, Jet City, and Emerald City.
Rain City is the fictional city in which the 1985 film noir “Trouble in Mind” was set. Did Seattle appropriate the nickname “Rain City” from that film? Or was the name in the film taken from Seattle’s nickname? The movie was filmed in Seattle.
Director Alan Rudolph chose some of the meaner areas of Seattle on the edge of downtown, beneath overpasses and under the monorail for much of his filming. He took over a derelict corner property in a downtown building to create a café as a center point. In the opening scene in which Kris Kristofferson leaves prison having served a sentence for murder, Marianne Faithful sets the mood with the opening song, an appropriately raspy rendition of the slow 8-bar blues song, Trouble in Mind written by jazz pianist Richard M Jones (first recorded with Thelma La Vizzo accompanied by Jones on piano in 1941). Actors include Kris Kristofferson, (as Hawk) Genevieve Bujold, Joe Morton, Lori Singer (as Georgia) and Keith Carradine (as Coop).
The action of this retro futuristic melodramatic gangster romance culminates in a shoot-out at the luxury residence of the smooth gangster character Divine. For suitable opulence the film uses the Seattle Asian Art Museum in Volunteer Park. Cleared of its usual displays, the museum is transformed into an art-moderne mansion with armed guards at the gates, and decorated throughout with wonderful paintings and sculptures on loan for the film by northwest artists. During the course of the action late in the film one large painting is destroyed spectacularly over someone’s head, while a bullet smashes a large glass installation by Dale Chihuly, something some of Kristin’s artists friends delight in replaying.
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| Hawk,Georgia and Coop. |
Watching the film this week, Kristin Nelson pointed out one of her ceramic sculptures she loaned for the mansion scene. The scene was full of work from the local art scene. “But it was a budget production” she explained. “You can tell by the length of the credits; we all had our names in the credits instead of being paid, so the credits are very long!” Sadly the credits weren’t quite accurate… they misspelled her name!
Trouble in Mind is a thought-provoking film. The characters come together each in their own style, as if from different times, or as caricatures from an old comic book. The film is ambiguously set in the future or past, so after than 25 years later I think it still looks fresh.
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| Seattle Asian Art Museum |
Yesterday the Seattle Asian Art museum with its pair of sitting camels guarding the main entrance looked serene in its summer setting. Currently showing inside is the Ramayana exhibition of 44 works of Indian art from 16th century onward. There is no sign of smashed glass or blood stains. Nearby and also within Volunteer Park is the park conservatory: a mini crystal palace full of wonderful plant specimens from around the world. The conservatory this weekend celebrated its 100th anniversary. Happy anniversary!
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