Asakiyume mita

When I came home from Readercon, there was a tornado watch, and so rather than be on the awful interstate between Quincy, MA, and B'town, likely trapped in a traffic jam (they are pretty much a guarantee for this time of the year, traveling between western and eastern Massachusetts) awaiting a funnel of doom, I decided to go home no-highways (which really just means no interstates), aided by my phone. It took me the route I was expecting it would take me: along state highway rt. 9, which runs east-west through the middle of the state. For much of the journey it's scenic towns, and there are plenty of places to stop if you need to shelter from a tornado. And a constant reassuring progression of Dunkin Donuts (it doesn't go through Stow, MA).

So yesterday, having dropped Wakanomori at the airport, I decided to do similar as soon as I escaped the traffic jam surrounding the airport. But this time, maybe because it was rush hour and so rt 9 was also quite thick with traffic, the app directed me north and further north, always managing to inch west too. Are you sure you know where I want to go? --It claimed it did.

( mildly entertaining journey )

Anyway, I made it home! And this morning a bobcat walked through my yard, and the two of us exchanged a long and meaningful look.

Also my Tikuna teacher texted me "Guungua choru maune wa cu ñemata," and I understood (almost) the whole thing without her translating,** so life is good. 😁

**siempre estás presente en mi corazón/you're always present in my heart

By this time on Friday--assuming no flight cancellations and no sudden-onset covid--Wakanomori and I will be on a plane to Colombia. We'll spend a day in Bogotá, staying at the same place we stayed in 2018, and then we'll hop on a plane to Leticia.

I blocked off this week from work so that I could be free to prepare for the trip, and the result is that I think I'm well prepared (sovay--I have in fact purchased antiseptic ointment and band-aids, and I can feel the ~ scorn ~ of Markiyan Kamysh), but I have plenty of free time for my body to mount a huge pre-travel anxiety onslaught. It's beyond the ken of reason, just wave after wave of cortisol flooding my bloodstream, leaving me practically fainting. I've been through this before, so I know what to do, but even though I can defuse it or grapple it back into its box (choose your metaphor), it's always waiting to surge back.

Right now it's receded, so I can write this! Most recent thing I've done, taskwise, is load a couple of books onto my kindle for downtime when we're not watching macaws or river dolphins. Thanks to a recommendation from skygiants, I'm taking Julie Czerneda's Survival, and thanks to a recommendation from Marshallese poet Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, I'm taking Gina Cole's Na Viro, a work of Pacifikafuturism.

Fun fact that Wakanomori just shared: Bogotá is 4 degrees north of the equator, and Leticia is 4 degrees south. So we'll cross the equator! We'll maybe see Southern Hemisphere stars! (... I should have looked for them when I was in Timor-Leste, which is 8 degrees south of the equator, but I didn't.)

... The forest presses in all around. There's roads and houses, and then forest, and forest, and forest, and forest, on and on. Here's a screen shot from Tabatinga, the part of Leticia that's in Brazil (or you could call Leticia the part of Tabatinga that's in Colombia--you cross the street and you're in another country).



Even now, with my brain in cortisol overproduction, when I think about being in this green embrace, held so tightly, I feel as if I'm about to sprout wings.

Last weekend mallorys_camera invited me to pick sour cherries and blueberries at Samascott Orchard in Kinderhook, NY.

What an experience! I've never been to such a huge orchard. You pay to enter and then can *drive* to the place where you want to pick. mallorys_camera and I scoffed at this, but soon we realized that people who come here to pick are not playing, and with the amounts they're picking (pounds and pounds--enough for all their home canning; enough for their roadside stall or their home pie business), yes, you would want your car nearby.

And wow, what an international bunch of people it attracts. Did you think you needed to go to a big metropolitan center to hear a panoply of languages? Why no! Come to this orchard! The first family we ran into were exclaiming over the unripe fruit of a particular tree.

"I've never seen this fruit in America!" said a man.

"What is it?" I asked.

"I don't know what it's called in English, but in Turkish we call it [word I don't remember] which is something like 'sour apricot'"

He turned and started talking to another man in Turkish.

Like us, this family was trying to get to cherry trees that hadn't been picked over. Eventually we hit the jackpot. "Dad!" a kid in their family called. "This tree has two thousand cherries!!"

Some of the trees were so loaded with cherries that branches were weighed down to the ground.

Here are some of those two thousand cherries:





On our way to the blueberries, we could hear families speaking in some Southeast Asian language, and when I was crouched down picking, I could hear a guy from Israel (probably? from some of the things he referenced) talking to a woman about the history of the YMCA. "I want to write about the transition from empire to [unintelligible] through the YMCA."

Here are some blueberries and milkweed.



I heard a girl exclaim, "This one is as big as my thumb!"

While we were picking blueberries a handsome young guy with a Jamaican accent tried to interest us in a cruise on a yacht. Since mallorys_camera and I are, shall we say, of an age that makes us unlikely partners for handsome young guys with Jamaican accents ("Speak for yourself!" says MC from off stage), I suspect he was looking for generous patronesses, which is hilarious, but that accent is beautiful, and I enjoyed the flirtation all the same.

As we headed back to our cars we passed some Polish speakers, and also a South Asian mom using an umbrella to shelter her child, who was sleeping in a stroller, from the sun (there was actually sun that day--but then it did rain, of course: practically every day this month it's rained at least a little and more often than not spectacularly).

Before paying for our haul, we decided to have some lavender ice cream (marvelous!). The wall carries lists of plates of cars caught stealing as a warning not to try similar:



They, too, are not playing: they search your car when you go to pay. They opened my overnight bag that had my previous-day's clothes in it.

paying, and car search


While we were eating ice cream, I saw these two. The woman's skirt was full and flouncy, and then she popped that hat on her head and looked straight out of a brochure for Bolivia or Peru.



It was a wonderful experience--super company, beautiful outdoor activity, and great people watching/listening.

Wakanomori and I went on a five-day holiday. We thought our phones would work in our destination--our phone plan said they would ... but they didn't! His at least worked for non-calling/texting purposes (e.g., taking photos, looking at internet) if we were in wifi range, but mine had decided to try to do an update and so it was a brick.

That's all right though, our destination was fascinating and fun anyway. It did, however, suffer bunches of earthquakes while we were there, including one that woke us up and kept our room shaking, although we were some 40 miles away, as the crow flies, from the epicenter. That quake was the worst in a century and cut all power everywhere.**

. . . Can you guess our destination?


**Fortunately for us, many people and establishments, having lived through a very, very extended power outage in the recent past, have generators--including the place we were staying and a number of nearby eateries. Many people don't, though, so there's this, or, for something completely based in the locale, there's this. I was grateful that even before the generator came on, the water was still running--near the epicenter, many people are without water.

Eventually I hope to have photos in some form to share, but in the meantime, here's a sketch of our street. I really stink at drawing cars, clearly (click through to see it bigger):

In the supermarket the other day, a mom scolded her baby, who was sitting in the little seat at the front of the shopping cart, when the baby leaned down and started chewing on the cart handle. "Don't do that! You don't know where that's been!" the mom exclaimed.

AND HOW RIGHT SHE IS! Just **think** of the adventures shopping carts get up to!

The cart you are sitting in right now, baby, may recently have been sunning itself on the beach...


(source)

Or it may have been tangling with rival gangs in shadowed alleys... (though your shopping cart seemed more hale and hearty than this one)



(source)

It may have been for a refreshing swim...



(source, an old LJ friend's journal)

Or perhaps spent time communing with the mountains...



(click through for source, Flickr user "Malcolm").

Baby, if we were to give you a blessing, it might be to travel as widely as a shopping cart.

We didn't set out with any plan do anything like a boat tour, and when we saw a brochure in a visitors' center somewhere, featuring a puffin wearing a captain's hat and a promise of seeing puffins, we thought it would be fun, but still it wasn't something we were actually planning on doing.



( conversation, legends, and bird information under the cut )

My attempts at photographing puffins, razorsbills, bald eagles, black guillmonts ("white wing patches, and sexy red legs" was how Ian taught us to recognize them), and cormorants hanging their wings to drain and dry were hopeless, so I'll post a couple of the Van Schaiks' own photos:

puffins!


razorbills




... and share my sketch of some seals instead. The scribbled note says "Mark said, when I said that they have dog faces, that his dad said the males have dog faces and the females have horse faces."



¹ I can't find any corroboration for this legend elsewhere, and I may have mangled it--but anyway, it makes a good story. (The closest thing I find is the remarks of John MacGregor, published in 1828, remarking about fishermen on the other side of Cape Breton, that they

are Acadian French, who live by pursuing cod, herring, and seal fisheries, together with wrecking; at which last occupation, in consequence of the frequent shipwrecks about the entrance of the Gulf during the spring and fall, for several years, they are as expert as the Bermudians, or the people of the Bahamas.

While we waited on the Bay of Fundy for a ferry to take us to Nova Scotia, we walked around on a little patch of shore. There were lots of sea-smoothened pieces of shale there, perfect for skipping on the waves, or for decorating a piece of driftwood.



You see the slightly sparkly stone, four from the right end? I have another piece like that. That's not shale. We thought it might be coal, but couldn't be sure.**

Later, we were staying in an old house in the coastal town of Port Hood. The house looked, from the exterior, like it ought to be haunted. We found out it had been built by someone who had made money in coal mining. Among the setbacks (disasters, more like) were that the mines sometimes flooded. Gradually, we realized that the mines had been . . . under the sea. As Wakanomori said: they would have found coal seams in the cliffs and then... worked their way down to under-the-water.

I mean, coal mining is always scary work, but PUTTING IT UNDER THE OCEAN makes it considerably more scary. As the housekeeper at the (potentially) haunted house put it, "I don't know how hungry I'd have to be to go down into that."

A cliff (not at the same place... but representative)



Then at one of the northernmost inhabited points on Cape Breton, we went on a little boat out to see puffins (and did see them! I hope I can do a whole post about that trip) and other pelagic birds, and the young captain (third-generation of tour-boat operators) was telling us more about erstwhile undersea mines, and meanwhile there were seals out on the rocks, watching us.... and swimming in the water and regarding us with just their heads peeking out...



... and now I think, there is a story out there about the dangers of the mines, and flooded mines, and selkies, and when I have it worked out, I'll share it with you.

**The day after the puffin tour, we found ourselves a town called Sydney Mines, a much-boarded-up town that no longer has any mines, but that does have a fossil museum and a room given over to artifacts from the mining days. There was some coal on display, and I was able to confirm that yes, the item I'd picked up on Nova Scotia's southern coast was indeed coal. Maybe if I sleep with it under my pillow, that selkie mining story will come to me faster.

Behold the powerful falls at the Holyoke dam. Holyoke Gas and Electric generates power here.



This dam is a barrier to fish that need to get upstream to spawn. There have been various means of solving this problem, but at present it's a literal elevator, a huge mechanism powered by giant turbines and with great chains that lift boxes of water, packed with fish, up above the falls. Yesterday Wakanomori and I went to see it--a marvelous experience!

It has very cute signposts:


In the informational room, there's a diagram that shows how the elevator works. You can see the giant turbines:



And a tally of how many fish have been lifted: yesterday was a record for American shad. (In the colonial days, they used to say that when the shad were running, you could walk across the Connecticut river on their backs.)



( photos and videos of fish, people watching fish, people fishing, and massive machinery )

EVEN UNTO THE BOWELS OF THE EARTH!

Are we not golden? Are we not heroes? Then pry loose this foolish grill and let us see what awaits us in the depths!

The Arkell Museum in Canajoharie, New York (a town celebrated by They Might Be Giants in a song--can your town say as much? Mine cannot--but more about Canajoharie later) has been assiduously advertising its exhibit of art from James Gurney's Dinotopia since October. Yesterday the ninja girl, the healing angel, and I went to see it.

Do you know Dinotopia? James Gurney imagined an island populated by sentient dinosaurs and humans, living together. Gurney's worldbuilding is fabulous, and his art is amazing--very much like N.C. Wyeth or Howard Pyle. Here are some examples from the Dinotopia website that we actually got to see:

flying on a skybax



Waterfall City in the Mist





One very intriguing artifact was an early sketch of the island that would become Dinotopia. In pencil, he has it labeled Panmundia, and then under that, a series of other possible titles, including Sauropolis, Saurotopia, and Dinotolia, and at the bottom, Dinotopia, with three underlines and a star beside it. Yep, that's the one!

( Read more... )