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.