I dreamt, quite vividly, that I was at the beach with a group of people, I think I was part of a class. We were wading in the water for something, and we noticed bubbles coming up through the sand, moving along a line. The person in charge directed us out of the water, and we watched as a part of the shallow shelf sank. The person in charge explained there were underwater tunnels that were filling in because this was unstable sediment. There were tremors and more of the beach sank. I was worried that the next thing would be a tsunami, but although huge waves came in and rearranged a bunch of gravel in front of us, it did not reach us. The water level actually went down with the beach, twenty or thirty feet. I assume the underwater tunnels were collapsed.

It appeared there was a small peninsula in front of us which had sunk, the change now looking more like 100 yards, because we were looking down at half-submerged spruce and speculating whether this was high tide and the upper ones would survive, or whether all of these trees would die from the salt. Some of the trees were already red-needled and dying because of spruce bark beetles. We decided it wasn’t yet safe to investigate, because there might be further tremors, and went back inside.

I looked out the window, and noticed that all the water was draining away, and quite quickly. ‘Fuck!’ I said, fully aware that this was not the sort of language expected of me in front of the person in charge. ‘There’s a fucking whirlpool!’

We went back outside, which was now more of a lakeside than a seaside location, and watched as the water swirled down, in an honest to goodness whirlpool, and disappeared into a manhole-cover-sized hole, right next to a manhole cover drain for the sewer.

At this point I recieved a phone call from Alex, except it was Emily on the line. They’d discovered they had some class together, or next door, or something at UW, were having lunch together at Alki, and wanted me to come over, except I seemed to be somewhere on the East Side on Lake Washington. So I started heading towards town, marvelling at the empty lake bottom, and there were already people driving across it in heavy machinery. I reached a plac where I would catch a bus, and there was still water there! So I started running back, trying to figure out how/which section of the lake had managed to be isolated enough to drain, and then I ran into a little boy who was selling spaniel puppies, and I thought ‘wow, I want a dog! ..but I don’t want a spaniel,’ and this is the point when my alarm started going off.

I can see so much latent information in this dream, but the whole ‘get ready for work’ thing prevents me from detailing it.

I had the most amazing day yesterday.

Alex picked me up early in the morning and we caught a ferry to the Olympic Peninsula, drove past a Civil War re-enactment, across a floating bridge, and along a Forest Service road, over a river and through the woods until we reached a trailhead for Mt. Townsend. Beneath some old growth (maybe) canopy, and blue skies, we started at 3000 feet and hiked another 3000 feet up to a ridgeline. Around four thousand there were strawberry plants with flowers, and red Indian paintbrush, and tunnels (marmots?) under parts of the trail. At five thousand feet there were snow patches. Then it opened up and we could see Mt. Rainier. Then we got higher, and there was Mt. Baker.

At the beginning of the ridgeline we had lunch, and then followed the ridge to its highest point (6200 or so) and its furtherst point, from which we could see Canada. We saw two chipmunks, which was exciting because I had never seen a chipmunk before.
The most exciting, though, was when we passed a man hiking up with four alpine goats, big as great danes, carrying most of his gear and wearing bells.

We made the 10 mile round trip in 4.5 hours, half an hour of which was lunch and headed back towards civilization. We bought a two lb bag of cherries on the side of the road and ate them all, then got stuck in traffic for a while. More traffic (everyone else heading home after their Saturday outings, no doubt), and more waiting in the car before the ferry came. We got ice cream, though, and verified that Alex doesn’t like peppermint. (I firmly believe this is a Russian thing; my friend Anna’s mother is a piano teacher, and visiting them at Christmas was great because all the students give her chocolate for the holidays and they’d give me any mint flavored ones.) Took a little nap on the ferry… We took off our shoes and socks; I stuck my feet out the window and some lady walking by tickled my foot! I can imagine so many instances in which this would have been incredibly creepy, but she was a sort of grandmotherly lady, and it was just very funny instead.

Back in Seattle, it was 7 o’clock, and time to shower and change and head to the second event of the day: Baaba Maal. The ticketed time for the show was 8 pm, and I was really worried about being late. I’ve been to, say, three shows in my life. We couldn’t find parking, couldn’t find parking, had to pay for parking, and had a Subway sandwhich for dinner. Then I learned that shows don’t ever start when they are advertised to. There was nowhere to sit down and I wasn’t really feeling like standing up forever. Finally we went for a little walk, and when we came back, at 9:30ish, Baaba Maal had started to sing, and it was all worth it.

That guy has a voice. No microphone really neccessary. The backbone of the music is an amazing set of different drums, a little guitar, and the voice, which is not neccessarily providing a melody, but providing some bass line, some rhythm, tying the pieces together. I have always thought of voices as ribbons. Some are lacey with vibrato. Bob Dylan sings like a hemp cord. Opera is generally two inches wide, blue satin like the sash on my Easter dress when I was eight.

Baaba Maal’s voice is red cord. Also silken, I think, but round, wide in multiple dimensions. The guitar and the drums fall into line along his voice in the songs like bright glass beads. The songs with acoustic guitar come through transparent and colorful, but mostly he was singing with the drums. Not just the Western drum set, but two sets of other drums, the only one recognizable to me was a djembe, and a fourth drummer. The fourth drummer had just a small drum, which he held under one arm, hitting with one hand and with a hooked drumstick. His drum changed pitch, and I finally decided it must have somewhat flexible walls, and he could squeeze or release it in his armpit.

The fourth drummer moved across the stage, as did Baaba Maal, moving amongst the other musicians, and the dancers. There were two female dancers who came out in a succession of glittering costumes and made me wish I had taken West African dance while I was still in school. When they first started moving, it was so frenzied as to seem random, but it quickly became clear that it was choreographed. There was a lot of posturing and jumping around, and the dancers kept having stand-offs with the fourth drummer. The would face each other, and he would beat a fast stacatto, and the opposing dancer would twitch and flutter in rhythm, until one or the other of them could no longer sustain the movement. During one of the penultimate songs, a number of dancers were pulled on stage from the audience to go against the drummer. There didn’t seem to be any particular differences in the male and female dancing. I would have jumped up and down too, except that my legs were already rather tired.

I bought a cd, which is fun to listen to, although the music loses a certain something without the dancers.

We headed home around midnight, after seventeen hours of hardcore fun, and we slept hard.

I have a hole in my hand, and it’s not from crew, ’cause I’m not rowing anymore. It’s from my little bike crash yesterday morning. I hit a stop light on the way to work and went down a one-way street I don’t usually go down, then figured I had better get on the sidewalk in case a car came uphill and squished me. Unfortunately there was a lip in the concrete on the driveway I tried to turn into, my angle was too narrow, and I did some sort of somersault. At least I assume it was a somersault, because I have bad-ass road burn on my right thigh, but my left shoulder is bruised too. There was no traffic, and I landed in the driveway anyway, so at least I didn’t get run over next, but that was still only the first adrenalin rush of the day.

I got to work, and the twelve person group we were planning to take out for a six-hour paddle didn’t show up until a quarter after ten. Nine eighteen year old boys and three chaperones. On a mission trip from Florida. (You know Seattle is a heathen wilderness, of course.) One boy and one chaperone opted to stay on shore, and somehow between three guides we got them outfitted and they mostly listened to the safety instruction. This did not prevent them from trying to race most of the way around to the lighthouse beach, wearing themselves out as we were heading into the wind. I really really wanted to knock their heads together and yell at them. We had lunch on the beach; apparently I missed a circle prayer before lunch. They went up to the waterfront coffee shops for a hot drink and to watch a little world cup. One guide, also my boss and owner of the whole deal, took his boat on his car and headed back to the boathouse to open rental operations.

The rain blew itself out, the sky cleared, and the wind picked up. We did a surf launch and started heading back. Now the wind is mostly behind us, but also blowing into shore. We end up in shallower water and fast moving, five foot swells. I’m doing back sweep, and the kids are holding tighter formation since they’re getting tired (but still fucking around, and taking nothing seriously), but my boat doesn’t have a rudder (it does but I’ve never had success in getting it down) and I’m blowing around. I didn’t start getting scared, I think until the second or third time I was sitting sideways on a wave and not sure why I was still right side up. The last boat, which I’m keeping pace with, the two boys yell over ‘Are you okay?’

‘I’m fine!’ I yell back, trying to keep a brave face, but under the spray skirt my legs are shaking.

We head into the wind for maybe ten or fifteen minutes. Maybe longer, I don’t know. I keep paddling because every stroke is a stabilizing stroke, and the wind is pushing me and the current is pulling me and my mouth is dry and I know this is fear. The boys are in doubles, and I keep looking around to make sure they are all paddling. “Red boat!” I holler. “Keep paddling!”

Someone is singing ‘row, row, row you boat,’ and I remember a part in Jill Fredston’s Rowing to Latitude. She and her husband are making some horrible, gut-wrenching crossing and she hears him singing, so she thinks he must be having a grand time, although she is scared. When they reach shore, she asks him how he was so relaxed as to be able to sing. ‘Jill,’ he says with great seriousness, ‘I only sing when I’m scared.’

As we came to the channel marker on the point, I realized that the chaperones’ boat is not making the turn as wide as the rest of us. I yell at them to come out from shore with the group. They want to land right there. On the point were it is shallow, where there are submerged remnants of pilings. I yell some more, we are almost back to the pier, once we’re around the point we’ll be sheltered from the wind. The water doesn’t look any calmer to me, but that’s the belief I am clinging to.

Finally we’re around the point. The water calms down. I calm down. The last boat, that I’m following in now is the same blue boat I was chasing on the way out. Now one of them is paddling, and one of them is singing Christmas carols. Joy to the World. Christ is King. I would like to get on dry land. I am going home and drinking a bottle of red wine while I nurse my wounds in a hot bath.

First we have to carry up the boats. We have to clean up gear. We have to extract payment from these mission people. Turns out they don’t want to pay the full price agreed upon beforehand. They didn’t go to the island (a crossing that would have been extrememly foolhardy to attempt under the conditions), and it rained. It’s Seattle! You want a discount because it rained? Finally full payment was recieved, and they left. No tip, despite the fact that they were pretty obviously collecting money for a tip before. I should have made a point of taking the wad of cash, but I hate asking for money, and I was waiting for them to offer it. And then they didn’t because we made them pay for the trip. No discounts because you were late! No discounts for weather! No discounts for not dying!

Then we three guides had a long talk about the weather conditions, the difficulties of large groups, the mental oddities of the religious right. I had asked one of the boys if they were on some sort of graduation trip. ‘No,’ he said, ‘we’re on a mission trip.’

‘Oh? What’s your mission?’

‘To tell people about Jesus.’

Fortunately, they didn’t try to tell me about Jesus. Their prayers certainly didn’t do anything for the weather. I’ve had more luck calming winds by pouring vodka for the spirits in Siberia.

It was so windy yesterday, so clear and beautiful in the afternoon, but better suited for sailing than for kayaking. I took the water taxi and then the bus home, drank my wine and took my bath and cried on my roommate’s shoulder for a while. The day was pretty much on par with the day in St. Petersburg when I had the flu, tried to do research in the State Historical Archives and was denied exit from the building because I didn’t have some little slip of paper with a signature on it certifying I had returned whatever materials I had used. I didn’t have the signature, because I hadn’t used any materials…

Today my shoulder hurts, my legs are sore (that’s from four days in a row of bike commuting though) and kayak guiding no longer seems such an idyllic job. Still, it is one day out of three summers. Perhaps the second time I have really not enjoyed a trip. I’ll recover.

The Bike Commuter Report:
I was biking up Eastlake and passed a guy and I heard keys drop. I looked back and saw keys, with a bottle opener like I have, and the guy picking it up, so I stopped to check my keys and of course my keys were fine, the guy had dropped his own keys, but I fell over and scraped my knee.
Then, in the U-District, I saw a girl wearing a pink dress and a Russian fur hat and riding bike. I also saw a monk (asia man with a navy blue, ankle-length cassock) jogging.
When I got to my own neighborhood, I saw an ice cream truck!
Overall, rather more exciting today than the usual smattering of roadkill squirrel. And I didn’t even have any cars try and merge into me!

Someday, possibly under the influence of extra hormones from birth control or just general pressure, I am going to snap. And then I am going to start smacking people around, starting with the ones who are talking on their cell phones in the library. And then I’ll start causing property damage to the cars who stop in the crosswalks or try to turn into parking lots with blatant disregard of the fact that neither I nor my bike are constructed of titanium.

Fridtjof Nansen: My new hero

To begin with, he was a bad-ass xc skiier, winning the Norwegian national championships twelve times in a row. Then he skiied across Greenland in 1888, spent six years doing zoological research on the central nervous system and helped come up with the idea that the neural network consists of individual cells communicating with each other.

Next he designed a bad-ass ship called the Fram, which is Norwegian for ‘forward,’ and sailed along the Siberian coast before heading into the pack ice, to test the idea that idea moved on an east-west current. After a year and a half in the ice, he got bored and headed towards the north pole by dogsled. After five months he and his companion hadn’t made it, so they spent the next nine months living in a hut made out of rocks and eating walrus. After that they headed south, luckily met up with some British scientists, and rejoined the Fram shortly after it broke free of the ice (after 35 months) and went back to Norway. He did research for a while more then became a diplomat, and lent the Fram to Roald Amundsen, who took it to Antarctica, and successfully reached the South Pole.

He was involved in the League of Nations (aka United Nations v1.0) and earned a Nobel Peace Prize for helping 400,000 prisoners of war get home after WWI, trying to relieve the famine in the USSR in 1922, providing indentification and legal status for those who fled the Soviet Union after the Revolution, and for resettling displaced Greeks and Turks after fighting down there. After 1925 he was trying to help the Armenians (who got a super raw deal, being the first victims of 20th century genocide), but was unable to gain the League’s support, and then he died (peacefully) in 1930, in his home outside of Oslo.

So – 1. Athlete, 2. amazing oceanographer (see also: Nansen bottles), 3. helped refugees

Oh, and where did he get his skiing from? His mother. His mother was an avid skiier. In the 1860s!