Ironing

The use of an iron to smooth and flatten clothes is fast disappearing.  I feel like an old lady as I spend ten minutes most mornings, ironing my clothes before work.  However, I was surprised to find that a slightly older friend  uses an even more archaic implement, a mangle, to dewrinkle her larger home fabrics.  Her household revelation caused great interest on Facebook, though I doubt a rush of mangler companies started sending ads to her sidebar.

My use of the iron started early, when Mom assigned me pillowcases and napkins for my beginning attempts.  I remember her equipment included a soda bottle filled with starch water, topped with a piece of nylon  stocking secured with rubber bands.  I think this was to sprinkle on the clothes to impart some stiffness to the cotton fabrics that constituted the majority of our clothes.  Later, the invention of starch in a spray can replaced this homemade tool..

Mom must have done mountains of ironing, but early on, Dad decided to take his work shirts to the cleaners.  Whether this was because of his dissatisfaction with her results or her complaint over the labor I don’t know.  It always seemed a touch of fastidiousness on his part but led to a ready supply of smooth shirt cardboard for art projects.

Ironing has its pleasures, including the smell of hot cloth, the exciting steam expulsions and the heady risk of scorch.  It also has its artistry; the rhythm of collar, cuffs, back and sides, the careful placement of crease and pleats and the expert adjustments of temperature for different kinds of cloth.

The younger generation rarely irons, which grows less and less necessary with all the various artificial fibers and no-iron finishes.  There is also a lot of wrinkling that you can avoid with careful attention to the drying process.  But ironing may just be another type of housework which has succumbed to the reality of the working woman, with little deleterious results.  Unlike the demise of homecooking, I do not see a revival in well-ironed tea towels coming any time soon.

The Smell of Time

We spent each summer of my childhood in Vermont, renting out our house near the beach on Long Island to finance the school vacation of my teacher father.   The scramble to clean out the home for renters and at the same time pack clothes, cat and five children into one car for the seven hour trip north, was an operation we all suffered through.  With last minute cleaning, and timing to miss the traffic that could ensnare us as we skirted the City, we often left in the evening and drove through the night. 

When we got up to the Vermont house, we always set up the big tent in the backyard as an extra bedroom.  With foam pads, inflatable mattresses and half a dozen flannel lined sleeping bags, there was room for as many of us who would choose the tent at night to sleep, even if it meant cold dew soaked feet when we ran back to the house for breakfast. 

The tent was also a favorite place to nap after our midday swim at Fern Lake.  Given that we lived in a place called Leicester Swamp on old maps, refuge from mosquitoes was required, at least until August.  The smell of canvas in the sun, mixed with the tang of well-used bedding, together with the sap of white pine, and in some years the aroma of the summer horse we corralled right next to the tent, was a perfume  I have never found again but can still remember.  It was the smell of all the time in the world.

Up On the Mountain

At 6:30 PM the sun slipped behind the shoulder of Mount Hood, and immediately the air cooled. A reminder that we depend on that star for everything. I put on a second layer of clothes and turn to making dinner, which here on Gnarl Ridge, a rib of volcanic gravel above treeline, means heating water to soak precooked food from town. The next two hours we watch the layers of hills between us and Mount Jefferson to the south, turn from green to orange to gray and finally disappear into twilight haze. A crescent moon emerges briefly and then sets behind the steep canyon carved by the Newton glacier snowmelt.

In the city, I notice the pieces of nature close at hand: whether the garden needs watering, and the crows flapping quietly to the mysterious place they all go in the last light. But here there is the collection of Clark’s nutcrackers saying their last throaty goodnights and then, almost immediately, the whole Milky Way appears. The sky seems both vast and too close over my head. For added punctuation, there are the exclamations of the Perseid meteor shower.

I do not sleep straight through the night as a certain amount of tossing and turning is expected on the ground. It is noisy as gusts of cold air rush down the mountain into the hotter valleys below. But at about five in the morning it starts getting light and I begin to enjoy sleeping in, drowsing from one hour to the next. At six the mountain turns pink. At seven the nutcrackers collect again for morning chatter. At eight o’clock it is starting to get warm and finally at nine Robert coaxes me out of the tent with coffee. I am never so lazy at home.

Because we are camped right off the Timberline trail, which circumnavigates the entire girth of the mountain, I expect to see fellow hikers on this weekend day. But I am surprised to hear quick footsteps outside the tent at 8:00AM. These are the first of several groups of folks running the entire trail. I am in awe of such prowess, but I am not so sure it is the best way to see the mountain.

Mount Hood is a young volcano and its upper reaches maintain snow year round. It is good to live close to a place that is still geologically new. It gives proof that the planet will wax and wane regardless of us and what we might do. There are plenty of people using the trails of Mount Hood, even on this far side from Portland, and I don’t think that can be a bad thing. But can we hold the awe of this geography as we go back to town in our carbon spitting machines? Just being here will not stop the glacier from melting. We will have to do more than keep a good thought.

Childish Pursuits

There has been much ado around here about a little girl selling lemonade at a street fair who got shut down by the board of health. It’s one of those things that the news loves to highlight in order to test the polarity of the community. The anti-government folks can rail against the reach of petty bureaucracy. The pro-child faction can bemoan the loss of entrepreneurial opportunity for eight year olds, and the health conscious can shudder at the possibility for contagion. But it started me thinking about the things I did to make money as a child. Although there was formal employment that adults controlled, such as babysitting and paper routes, most of our enterprises were designed to extract money and goods from each other.

Back in the baby boom years of the sixties, we were old-fashioned enough to engage in games that rewarded success with the amassing of certain tangible, non-currency assets. So, there were the titans of jacks, marbles, and for the boys, baseball cards. These pursuits were usually specific to certain years and grades, but when the fever hit, like tulip fortunes in Holland, it was all we did, all the time.

Occasionally, a group of friends would band together to design an entertainment we called a carnival. We would set up games of chance, gather prizes, advertise, and open our doors in a backyard decorated with sheets and Christmas garlands and strings of lights, to help customers part with their money. I have no idea where the model for this came from, but it was effective in drawing participants, because who wouldn’t want to try for a chance to win a rubberband ball, or some really cool toy soldiers? Sometimes the carnival would offer lemonade or cookies, but adults were far away from these enterprises, Mom only noticing several days later that the packets of Kool-Aid she bought to last the week were nowhere to be found.

For many adults, we try our hardest to superimpose our recalled childhood on today’s children, with results such as the lemonade stand described above. It’s hard to know how to innoculate children with the freedom and curiosity we remember, and at the same time keep them absolutely safe.

Confusing Art With Words

The Abstract Landscape (Workshop)

First a photo. A moment in a particular day when you exclaimed
and clicked your mnemonic device.
The image now resides pixillated and printed,
history devolving to this shot of life already lived.

Now, new instructions. Take the picture and see even less than you remember.
Instead of what journey led you to this view, see only a triangle of hill and rectangle of sky. Tetris them together on a sheet of paper with a line.

Then mix paint in colors you feel like today.
Notice everyone is choosing different hues.
Notice how we cannot bear to copy even the teacher.

Now there are the layers to put down, starting with a light wash,
working into dark writhing shapes of shade,
remembering the goal is to follow a semblance of geometry we stole
from the picture of a place at which we pressed pause. Or is it?

Then, this long afternoon of staring into pigment, trying to make splotches of color meaningful.
Yes, by all means draw a horizon for the eyes to travel toward.
Yes, remember the near is bright and far away is dim, and how amazing
when imagination highlights a place that should be hidden from view.

It was the line of trees when sun broke the fog.
It was a moment when the rising wave thinned and caught the sky.
It was the way a rock in the ocean turns every color before night claims it.
It was the purple space between the green trees.

If there is any message in this method it is that we have been so lazy
naming the color of things. Likewise, we rely on labels to tell us who we are.
Stripped away from context, in a random lovely place,
trying to mutate beauty into beauty,
we are all Van Gogh.

But back to the painting, paper heavy with experiments and disguises.
We labor on the dark pigments, we paddle in watery dazes.
We defiantly define flowers, trees and stones.

But as the day goes on we yearn for that dark horizon of rest,
seemingly reachable across a mirage of land or sea,
color always changing under an uncertain sky.

7/29/08

The Uses of Enchantment

I just visited a place called the Enchanted Valley, in the Olympic National Park. Although I was skeptical of the enthusiastic name, the place was worthy. The long route to the valley was through a forest with gigantic old growth hemlock, Doug fir and cedar and spruce trees. Familiar with the history of rapacious logging in the Northwest, I am reverent of any and all trees wider than my outstretched arms and this forest was full of big ones. An old growth forest has just as many downed trees as standing ones and it was beautiful to see how a carpet of moss, oxalis and fern blanketed the fallen old ones like they had been gently put to bed.

We had three perfect days of sun and the vegetation was exhaling oxygen and moisture in clouds that made sweat run down our faces as we hiked. With an average of twelve feet of rain per year, the forest had plenty of water to transpire and we had to join in the water cycle. The park requires permits for backpacking and we declared that we would hike nine miles the first day and camp at Pyrites Creek. Because black bears are common, we felt we had to make it that far because the camping area had a bear wire to hang our food above the reach of the animals. Even though the elevation gain was not severe, we were very tired when we stumbled into camp at six in the evening. We were surprised and happy to see no one else was there.

We set up our tent on the gravel bar above the Quinault river. This river keeps a furious pace for sixty-five miles from the top of the snowfields, to Lake Quinault, where it empties and then on to the ocean. It is green and full of grey rocks and silt and whole trees that have toppled from the banks and propelled down the valley. The sounds of rushing water filled our ears and made it easy to sleep, even though the sky was light from the almost full moon.

The next day we had our coffee and granola and discovered that while hanging our food kept the bears away, it was an open invitation for mice. I can imagine their delight to scamper up the tree, across the wire and shimmy down to our bag full of goodies. Luckily they appeared to be satisfied with the granola and did not sample each and every ziplock bag.

After a lazy breakfast we hiked four more miles to the Enchanted Valley itself, eating lunch at the two story chalet, originally built as a lodge for hikers, now refurbished for use by summer rangers. Two men were winching a log slowly across the meadow in order to square it off for use as a beam for reconstruction. It looked like a fun job.

The valley has steep sides in a classic U-shape of retreating glaciers. There were many waterfalls, cascading hundreds of feet, fed by the snowfields on top. The floor of the valley was an open grassland, which made it easy to sit and and stare at the views. Although we went a mile or two beyond the lodge, we didn’t get close to the pass at the end of the valley, which would have given us vistas of the mountains all around.

Coming back to our campsite, we found other people camping close by. But we were tucked away enough that we only saw them down at the river, where we were all trying to dip into the cold water and wash away the sweat, without actually submersing. Although I generally like to talk to strangers when I travel, somehow the long hike to get here made me want to safeguard the distance I had put between me and the rest of humanity. Robert said the pleasantries as he hung our food, but I stayed with the tent.

The next day was a trek back the way we came, but our packs were lighter and we made it to the car by four in the afternoon. Although others told us about their sightings, we didn’t see any bears. And although elk trails intersected the hiking trail at numerous points, we didn’t see them either. But we did discover that the Olympics are very different from Oregon mountains, and a study of the map shows that the trail system could send us up and over many passes and into many valleys if we allowed the time.

I am always impressed by how different the day is, as soon as you leave the pavement and vehicles behind. Each lurch of elevation must be absorbed in the knees, but every turn reveals a view that is a reward. Contrast the almost effortless driving we do around the city, that only seems to produce boredom and frustration. Could it be that we need to work at getting there, to really appreciate the places we go to?