Pride

Our day again started a little late since we had been up late for the fireworks. John surprised me by wanting to go the the service at Christ Church Cathedral. They have a fine choir here, but they were off for the summer and this week’s musicians were a country-folk group. So the introit was a blues-tinted version of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” not the usual fare for the spiritual offspring of the Church of England.

Today is Pride Day in Vancouver. The first lesbian and gay pride celebrations were not about pride or celebration. These commemorations of the Stonewall Riots were called “Liberation Day” or “Freedom Day” and were strongly political protests against legal discrimination. The first Freedom Day I remember in San Francisco came just after Governor George Deukmejian had vetoed AB 1, a measure which only sought to end legal discrimination in employment. The pink triangle, the emblem that the Nazis made gay prisoners wear in the death camps, was the most common symbol to be seen. Today the political environment is different – though not quite as different as most of us in places like California or the northeast think it is. The strident political rhetoric has faded somewhat, and the pink triangle has been replaced by the rainbow flag.

Here in Vancouver, the date has no connection with the Stonewall Riots. Instead, it comes right before the BC Day celebration, a provincial holiday which also lacks connection to any historical event. The themes of struggling for rights and solidarity with other struggling for freedom which dominated the first parades in New York and San Francisco are almost completely absent. Instead, Pride here is a community celebration of tolerance and inclusion. Now I am completely in favor of tolerance and inclusion. I am glad that the movement has made so much progress in places like Vancouver. But there is a smugness, a sense of superiority and self-congratulation which is also a little annoying. It is the most irritating characteristic of Canadians.

Pride Day gives many community groups who have no particular connection with the LGBT community a chance to march. These colorfully-clad marchers are Filipinos who celebrate the Ati-Atihan festival. In the Philippines, this is held in January. I am not sure if they march around in this regalia in the cold wet weather of January here. But I somehow doubt it.

The parade also gives banks and other companies an opportunity for some inexpensive advertising. There was nothing worth photographing about people in yellow tee-shirts holding signs declaring that “Bank of Montreal supports diversity.” On the other hand, the Trojan people – and not the ones from USC – did made for some good photographs.

The closest to political rhetoric came from a few anti-circumcision and animal rights groups. I am sure that Ellen’s chickens would have supported this group.

The provincial government had the most elaborate float, one I suspect that they recycle for many events. I suppose I am harping on this theme of a nanny state, but I found the exhortation to “Work Safe” a little irritating. Most industrial accidents are the result of bad management practices, not workers deciding that it would be amusing to risk life-long disability. Still, had it been made of flowers, I suppose thing one might have won a lesser prize at the Tournament of Roses.

Amid all this high-mindedness, it was refreshing to see something vaguely suggestive.

The parade ended at Sunset Beach on English Bay. Here there were lots of booths from various companies and community groups. There was also a stage where different musical acts performed. Unlike Los Angeles, where tickets are required to enter the festival area, this was free. Consumption of alcohol, however, was strictly controlled in a separate beer garden area.

Although the morning had been overcast, the afternoon was sunny and warm. So warm that John decided that it was time for the dogs to get cool.

The dogs found lots of fans as they walked through the festival grounds. Edie, in particular, had lots of guys willing to pose with her.

Even the Trojans could not resist her charms.

In the evening, we left the dogs at the apartment while we went to see a movie. John had never seen the Jean Cocteau Orpheus in a theater. He had tried to watch it on television, but it never made much sense to him. So when we discovered it was playing at the new home of the Vancouver International Film Festival, we decided to go see it.

It didn’t make anymore sense on a big screen with a good sound system. Bosley Crowther, the crotchety film critic for the New York Times in the post-war years, observed that the movie was more “Morpheus than Orpheus.” John and I both nodded off at points during the film so I guess we would have to agree.

Fireworks

We all slept in late this morning, including the dogs. I am usually up by five in the morning, but this morning when I turned over and looked at the clock it read 8:45. I tossed some clothes on and took the animals out to do what they needed to do. John slept for about 45 minutes more.

We had read about a community pancake breakfast, a fundraiser for Vancouver Pride. It sounded like fun, so we went down to Davie Street to have something to eat. The pancakes and sausage were great, and since the recommended donation was only 2 dollars, it was just as easy on the budget as it was delicious to the taste. We sat at long tables, and we chatted with some of the people seated with us as well as a couple of women from from Calgary who stopped by to ask us about the dogs.

After breakfast, John surprised me when he said that he wanted to do the walk around Stanley Park that the dogs and I had made yesterday. So we walked back to the hotel to pick up our doggie canteen and to pick up a couple other things, and then we strolled down Barclay Street and Denman Street to the entrance of the park. Unlike the cloudy morning we had yesterday, today was warm and brilliantly sunny.

Unlike yesterday, when my goal was to complete my circuit around the park as fast as possible, we took the walk at a leisurely pace and stopped to look at everything interesting. We also stopped while Miss Edie smelled everything interesting! Of little interest to the dogs were of couple of cricket matches being played. My first thought was, “Oh, so British!” but when we looked closer we discovered that almost all the players were Indian or Pakistani.

So were most of the fans who were watching from the shade of nearby trees.

Near the Indians playing cricket, were the Totem Poles, reminders that the other Indians, the people Canadians now call “First Nations” once made this place their home. Most of the native peoples were driven from their villages when various lumber companies cut down the trees in the area and when the Royal Navy decided to make this area its headquarters. A few Squamish people remained here after the establishment of the park, but they were finally convinced to sell their homes. The government burned the last authentic remains of native culture, and then erected these totem poles to honor the people whose lives they had destroyed.

On the seawall there is also a replica of the masthead of the RMS Empress of Japan. Despite the name and the dragon motif, there is nothing authentically Asian about this. The Empress of Japan was a ship built in England in 1890 for the Canadian Pacific Railroad designed to carry passengers and mail between western Canada and Hong Kong. Since this way the era in which the English had just given Victoria the title of “Empress of India,” I wonder if the British in their imperial lunacy had decided it was only time before they made Japan part of their empire, too? The dogs did not seem to find the fiberglass replica either historic or interesting.

A little further down the path is a statue called simply Girl in a Wetsuit. It’s a completely unremarkable piece of public art from the 1970’s. The best part of it was that it seemed to make tourists who passed by pose for pictures.

Around this time, the dogs were getting pretty hot and John decided to cool them off. There were signs everywhere warning that dogs were not allowed on the beach subject to a 2.000 dollar fine. But we have both noticed that while there are lots of laws and regulations in Vancouver, there seems to be little effort to enforce them. So we found a rocky spot where nobody was around and he doused them with some cool sea water. They seemed to like that.

We soon came upon Siwash Rock, another Stanley Park landmark. There is a plaque here commemorating some young man who dove from the top of the rock to his death below because he did not notice it was low tide. I suspect the problem was more likely inebriation than a failure to consult the tide tables.

After the rock, we came to Third Beach. This is the largest and sandiest of the the three beaches in the park and it was packed with people on this warm day. The beach was also loaded with signs telling you what you should and should not do. You should wear a hat. You should wear sunscreen with a high SPF. You may not drink alcohol. You may not have inflatables. You may not smoke. Looking at the crowd assembled, the most whites I had ever seen in any spot in Vancouver, I observed few hats. I smelled a lot of sunscreen, though I could not tell if it was high SPF or not. I saw a number of people drinking beer. I saw several inflatables. And there were, pretty typical for Vancouver, lots of people smoking. I am not exactly sure of what value there is in passing regulations that you have no intention of enforcing.

After Third Beach, which directly faces the Strait of George, the path veers east and now you face English Bay.  After a short walk, we came to Second Beach. There is a huge pool here, and it seems to be the most popular spot for families. It was also much more multicultural than Third Beach, and I observed lots of Asians and Eastern Europeans here. The Poles and Russians have an interesting beach look as you can see in the picture below.

On our way back, we found a young man who was selling lemonade to help raise money for tsunami relief.

Back at the apartment, John made a nice supper of us from our Granville Public Market purchases. The salami was particularly delicious.

Every year since 1990 there has been an international fireworks competition in Vancouver.  Now called the Celebration of Light, three countries stage elaborate fireworks shows set to music which is broadcast by a local radio station. John and I had seen one of the first of these the first time we came to Vancouver for a brief visit in the early 1990’s. One of the reasons for picking this week to come to British Columbia was so we could see this again.

Vancouver is still recovering from the riots that followed the Stanley Cup game earlier this year. Now by Los Angeles standards, this was hardly a riot. One person died, a few cars were burned, and a bunch of shop windows were smashed. Seems like a pretty ordinary day in South LA. But the locals here were horrified by what they saw as a descent into Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, so the police presence was pretty strong even if they did not seem to be really doing anything. John snapped this artsy shot as we watched people stroll down Davie Street.

Tonight’s show was presented by China, and with such a large Chinese population here, it seemed like they had almost a hometown advantage in the competition. The music was pretty uninteresting – it sounded for the most part like a bad film score – but the pyrotechnics are amazing.

As we came home, it began to rain. How perfect that they rain waited until the fireworks were over.

Slowing Down

After three days when we had to get up, had to get packed, had to get out, and had to get some place by some time we found the freedom of our first day in Canada a little bewildering. John and I found it hard to focus on what we wanted to do first. The dogs and I seemed a little restless, so I suggested doing to complete circuit around Stanley Park on the seawall. John liked the idea, but was not sure his knee – he is still recovering from knee surgery – would like it. So I left him to explore West End and the dogs and I walked around the park.

For those who have not yet been to Vancouver, Stanley Park is the jewel of this beautiful city. Central Vancouver is a peninsula, and Stanley Park is the tip of that peninsula as it juts into the Straight of Georgia. Imagine Central Park moved from the middle of Manhattan to occupy the area from the Battery all the way to Midtown. A road goes around the edge of the park, and a low seawall protects the road. I think the road may once have been meant for cars, but today it is separated into two sections, one for pedestrians and another for cyclists. There are no cars in sight, only rocky beaches on one side and granite cliffs covered with cedar trees on the other. Talking pictures with two dogs is not easy, so I left the camera at home. Here are some stock photos I found on Google Images which give some idea of where the dogs and I were.

The seawall walk is a bit over 6 miles long, and our apartment is probably about a mile from the park. So altogether the dogs and I put in about 8 miles on this trip. I was a cool, overcast morning, so Edie did not complain about the heat like she sometimes does. We kept up a pretty brisk pace, and John was surprised when we were back in a little over two hours. I was still feeling pretty strong, but the animals, who are younger than me even in their dog years, seemed exhausted when we came back to the apartment.

In the afternoon, John and I went to Granville Island to go to the market there. This is a pricy place to get food, but the stuff they have there is just terrific and it’s a fun place to shop.

By this time it was after three o’clock, and unbelievably enough, we hadn’t had a thing to eat all day. So we found an outside restaurant there. I had fish and chip (the fish was great, the chips mediocre) and John had something which looked like a can of cat food mixed with weeds, but he assured me it was quite good.

Returning to the West End, we took a walk with the dogs to let them stretch their aching legs and answer Nature’s call. This neighborhood is a mixture of high-rise apartment buildings, smaller, older apartments, and a few single family houses. Once there had only been houses here, and a small park near us has some of these preserved to show what Vancouver was like around 1900.

I though this shot John did nicely juxtaposed the old and the new. I vote for the old!

The dogs were thoroughly and quite sensibly exhausted by this time, but the human were eager for more. One of the amenities offered by our landlord is free access to a  local gym. John went there last year, but I did not. This time he checked out their group classes and discovered that they were offering mat Pilates. So I figured I’d go.

The facilities were pretty tired. It looked like it had been built around 1985 right at the height of the racquetball craze. There were several courts there, and not a soul playing on any of them. In fact, it didn’t look like anybody had played on them for some time. The weights equipment looked similarly clunky and dated. It’s funny. I don’t normally think of styles in exercise equipment, but I guess they exist. The Pilates class itself was great. Our instructor was named Hector. Coming from LA I just assumed that he was Hispanic, but he proved to be a small Chinese man. His accent made him occasionally hard to follow, but he was a superb instructor who really pushed all of us to do some of the hardest positions correctly. I really felt every muscle in my core when I left.

Before we left home, John had done some reading about the theater offering this summer in Vancouver. One of the plays that had received good reviews was A Closer Walk with Patsy Cline. John bought us tickets. It was the only disappointment of the day.

Patsy Cline is not somebody I grew up listening to, though I did know a couple of her hit songs. John was a lot more familiar with her than I was. All I can say is that she had to be a more interesting person than this revue – I really can’t call it a play – depicted her. Closer Walk is more hagiography than biography. In fact, after her death in the plane crash Patsy walks back on stage where she rises up on a hydraulic lift as the voice of a radio announcer says “God needed another star” or some similarly stupid line. Despite the wretched writing, the woman who played Patsy had a great contralto voice and the band was also quite good.

We finished the evening by going down to Davie Street where there was a street party, one of the events in the Pride weekend. I had no great expectations for this, and I was not disappointed. It had the usual number of marginally talented people singing covers of disco hits from the seventies and pop hits from the eighties and nineties. If you ever doubt the talent of Donna Summer all you have to do is listen to somebody pretending to be Donna Summer and she seems positively brilliant. After about a half hour of this, we stopped in a cheap Vietnamese restaurant and had some Pho. Unlike the faux disco on the street behind us, the noodle soup was truly “fabulous!”

Vancouver at Last!

This was the worst day of traveling, but we are grateful that it will be our last day in the car for a week.

The day began pleasantly enough at Ellen’s house.

Ellen is not only a wonderful organic gardener, but she has her own chickens in the back yard.

So breakfast on Sherman Street always includes the freshest and most delicious eggs you can imagine. Today,  I decided that poached eggs on top of fresh avocado on top of toast made from Dave’s Killer Bread would be perfect. And it was!

Ellen is teaching summer session this year, so she took off before we did. I gave her dog a walk along with the two of mine. I’m sure somebody supposed that somebody riding a bike past me would have assumed that I was just a professional dog walker with three dogs and a couple bags of poop. Of course, the way things are going, pretty soon dog walking may pay better than the Board of Education does.

We locked up the house, put our two dogs in the car, and started out of town. As we crossed the Columbia River into Washington, John joked, “I just felt the sales tax go up and the IQs go down.” I was going to protest that Washington is the home of Microsoft, but then remembering Windows Vista I decided that he was probably right.

Daniel, our trusty GPS, was not at his most helpful today. He had us leave the freeway about 60 miles before Tacoma and drive down state route this and county route that. It was probably slightly shorter for total miles, but it had to have added at least 30 minutes to the trip. And Danny is usually so dependable.

We thought we were free and clear when we passed Seattle, but our traffic woes were only beginning. You know the old joke that in Chicago there are two seasons, winter and road repair? Evidently the same is true in Washington. They decided that highway 5 near Bellingham needed to be repaved and we crawled along as the dogs whimpered and whined. I suppose listening to them complain was karmic revenge for all the times I whined “Are we there yet?” when I was traveling with my parents.

Once at the border, we again thought we were lucky because there was virtually no wait. We called our landlord in Vancouver – while we still had an AT&T signal – to say we’d be there soon. We were so wrong.

The Fraser River is the largest river in British Columbia. Its estuary forms a good natural harbor, so it is an important port. As such, somebody thought in the 1950’s that a tunnel would be better than a bridge to allow river traffic. Well, the tunnel they build in 1959 may have been sufficient for the traffic of that era, but today it is woefully inadequate – to put it mildly. John and I spent close to an hour stuck there as 5 lanes to traffic had to merge into 1 lane crossing northbound under the river. We were there for so long that people left their cars and walked around. John did too, snapping this photo.

We did finally make it into town, though our landlord had give up on us and put the key under a flower pot. We are staying at the same apartment in West End where we stayed last time.

And why not? The apartment is reasonably priced, has a kitchen and a separate bedroom, takes dogs, and it in just about the most interesting neighborhood in Vancouver.

We unpacked the car and went for a walk. After a long day in the moving crate, we figured that the dogs needed to run free a bit. There’s an off-leash park nearby, and we took them there for some canine socializing. For the humans, it made for some fascinating people watching, too.

From there, we continued down toward Davies Street where we found a place where we could have dinner with the dogs on the sidewalk.

And from there we walked down to English Bay. All these references to England and the British names seem so ironic because almost everybody you see in Vancouver seems to hail from China or south Asia. The people you see who look European are almost invariably speaking some kind of Slavic language.

We found an empty beach and watched people walk by and the sun set.

One of our real reasons for coming this week to Vancouver is to see the “Festival of Light,” an international fireworks competition.  The barge in the bay is already in place for it.

Tomorrow, only pedestrian adventures!

Journey On

The first day of traveling seems like an adventure. The second day begins to seem like work. Neither the children of Israel nor Odysseus’s crew complained on the first day, much less rebelled. After a few days on the road, however, things started to change…. Fortunately, though our second day of traveling was just about as long as the first, we had no grumbling from humans or canines. In fact, the dogs had a much better time on the second day.

Our day began at the Mount Shasta Ranch Bed and Breakfast with a hearty ranch breakfast. By about nine thirty, we were on the road. Highway 5, heading north from Mt Shasta towards the Siskiyou Pass, cuts through a classic western landscape where cattle roam through grasslands separated into enormous pastures by split rail fences. But the pastoral scene barely disguises the violent volcanic past. Black, basalt lava flows cut through the plains like enormous scars and cows wander past the jagged remnants of ancient volcanoes.

Nearly at the top of the pass, around 4300 feet, you see the sign that says “Welcome to Oregon.” From this point, the highway drops rapidly towards the Rogue River Valley, and all the signs telling truckers about what to do if their brakes fail makes this a particularly nervous stretch of road. But before long the small city of Ashland appears, home of one of the Northwest's best dog parks. We have done this drive enough times that the moment we pull off the highway onto Siskiyou Boulevard the dogs know where they are going and the tails start wagging wildly.

In most respects, the Ashland Dog Park is not particularly exceptional. There are a couple acres or so of well-worn grass surrounded by the usual cyclone fencing. There are nice views of the city and Mount Ashland, still frosted at the top with a bit of snow, but similar vistas can be had from any lot in the town. No, what makes the Ashland Dog Park so wonderful is Bear Creek.  The dogs rushed right away to the gate on the far side of the park which leads to this rivulet. Bear Creek is no more than about 18 inches deep, and for dogs, that’s just about perfect. The water is cool, but not too cold, and it is crystal clear. Canine paradise!

Like any dog park, there other bowls filled with water for drinking and a few old tubs for dogs to wash off the dirt. John snapped this picture, one of my favorites of the trip so far.

The dogs would have stayed here for the rest of the day. But we knew we still had about five hours of driving before we made it to Portland, so once they were reasonably dry, we piled them back into the car and found our way back to the highway.

Southern Oregon is monotonously beautiful. Leaving the dry savannah of the Rogue Valley, the road climbs again into the Cascades. The granite mountains are covered with Douglas Fir and other conifers. Almost any scene of this montane forest is lovely, but as the road winds among the peaks you find yourself thinking, “Aren’t we almost to Eugene?” And then you see a sign which reminds you that there are at least a couple more hours before you arrive in the Willamette Valley.

We stopped in Roseburg for lunch. Roseburg is an old settlement and was for a while a prosperous timber city. Its downtown was famously destroyed in 1959 when a truck loaded with dynamite caught fire. The center of the city was rebuilt, but it lacks much charm and the recession has taken a toll. Many of storefronts were empty, though the Republican Party had taken charge of vacant shop, a reminder that places like Douglas County are bastions of right-wing politics in a distinctly liberal state.

We didn’t stop after that until we came to Portland. Traffic was pretty terrible on the 5 as we approached Washington County. Not everybody in Portland takes the Trimet or rides a bike. Ellen called to ask where we were, and when she discovered we were just about to come into the city, she suggested we stop by her office and pick her up. We cheerfully agreed.

We had a lovely evening with Ellen. Mike is in California working with irrigation districts to help control zebra mussels. We walked the dogs, cooked dinner, drank wine and talked. Rafiki, Ellen’s dog, seemed quite happy to see her California cousins again.

Tomorrow will be our last big driving day for a while as we leave for Vancouver.

Under the Volcano

The great travel narratives do not discuss traffic. We will never know if the road out of Ur was congested when Abraham left his hometown, not did Chaucer’s pilgrims seem to complain about too many people or donkeys on the road to Canterbury. But we live in Los Angeles, and the apprehension of being stuck pointlessly on a highway is as deeply ingrained in us as ancient sailors feared falling off the edge of a flat world. So, we packed our bags yesterday, packed the car last night, and we were traveling west on the Santa Monica Freeway not long after the sun had risen.

Our strategy worked, and we sailed north on the San Diego Freeway passing the remnants of the Mulholland Bridge, scene of last week’s not-so-apocalyptic “Carmageddon.”  Both dogs were attentive but calm. Edie is always that way in the car, but I had the foresight to give Eli one of his “doggie downers” before we left this morning. Without canine sedation, Eli becomes so excited when we start a big trip that he pants, whimpers, and tries to get in the driver’s seat. With the help of the medication, he was pretty docile. But, after driving for 90 minutes or so up through the Grapevine, we figured that even sedated dogs might like a break. So we stopped at Fort Tejon State Historic Park.

Fort Tejon was established shortly after the Gold Rush, ostensibly to protect the native peoples of the San Joaquin valley from land-hungry whites. The Fort was famous for a couple things. First, the great earthquake of 1857 was named for the fort, although the epicenter was probably much farther north. Secondly, in the 1850’s, Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of War in the Pierce administration, decided that camels might work well in the arid territories newly acquired from Mexico. A number of those camels were sent to Fort Tejon, though the poor beasts were in fact ill-suited to the terrain. Today, two other beasts found the grassy field around the reconstructed buildings a delightful place to get a little exercise, and to do what dogs usually do after they’ve been stuck in a car for a while.

From Fort Tejon the highways descends rapidly into the San Joaquin Valley. This is surely one of the least interesting stretches of highway in the United States. John and I took turns driving. To relieve the tedium, we plugged the iPhone into the car’s sound system and started listening to The Help. It’s a good car book so far. It’s interesting enough, but does not require really intense concentration to follow the story. So, listening to the story of black maids and a white journalist in Jackson, Mississippi in 1963 the hours on Highway 5 passed pleasantly enough.

We arrived Sacramento a little after noon. We made plans with our friend Dan to meet for lunch. Dan has a sweet little townhouse on Q Street. He has done an amazing job creating a lovely garden on the patio. I wish this picture did it justice. Sometimes it’s just impossible to get the lighting right.

On the way to lunch, we passed by Sacramento’s most famous sight. The dogs were interested more in finding possible messes on the lawn than in contemplating that mess that is our state’s budget process.

We had  a pleasant meal with Dan on the patio of the Esquire Grill. Dan works as a bartender in Sacramento, and he has lots of a great stories about the governors, assemblymen, and lobbyists.

From Sacramento, we headed north on Highway 5 towards Mt Shasta. The Sacramento Valley is smaller and somewhat more attractive than the San Joaquin. Still, it would be a stretch to call this an interesting drive either, so we settled down to listening again to The Help. Around six in the evening, we pulled into the town of Mt Shasta, named for California’s largest volcano.

This is an odd part of the state. Not that long ago, it was the center of an active lumber industry, and many of those lumbermen are still around trying to make ends meet the best they can. There is also no shortage of young environmentalists, freshly minted from Davis or Berkeley, clad in Columbia sportswear with kayaks strapped to the roof of their hybrid cars. You see signs around here still demanding the Obama “Produce the Birth Certificate!” Meanwhile, another group here earnestly believes that Mount Shasta is the home of the Lemurian people who fled here to create the subterranean city of Telos.

We’ve stayed in Mt Shasta before at one of the chain motels near the center of town. This time we decided to try something different and we chose the Mount Shasta Ranch Bed and Breakfast. I had my doubts when John made this choice, but it is a really sweet place. It’s located a couple miles out of town in an old farm house with a very large lawn.

It has a wonderful front porch we looks out at the great snow-covered volcanic peak.

After we settled into our new accommodations and had a little snack, we decided to take the dogs to nearby Lake Siskiyou. They ran through the woods and fields and splashed happily in the water.

The Sacramento River flows out of the lake, and we stopped by the edge of the river on a whim. We found that on the rocky shores of the river people had arranged the stones into the most astonishing rock piles. Who knows? Maybe it was the Lemurians who did it.

Tomorrow, on to Portland.