There is a nice park just on the outskirts of Mt Shasta simply called Mt Shasta City Park. From 1920 to 1940, it was the summer campus of Chico State Teachers College. The old dining hall and some of the dormitories, handsome redwood buildings constructed in the rustic style, still stand in the park. Teachers apparently spent the summer in this Arcadian paradise improving their professional skills. Now the best we can only hope for is a conference room in a Marriot with some stale Danish pastry.
The springs which form the headwaters of the Sacramento River are the centerpiece of the park. People come from all over to fill up bottles with the fresh, cold water from the melting glaciers on the mountain. Ellen had to try a sample of the water for herself.
Heading north from Mt Shasta, the road rises sharply and then levels out into a broad, somewhat arid plain. The landscape is covered with the remnants of ancient volcanic eruptions and cattle grave on the brown grass in between the black lava flows which still scar the land.
Yreka is the main settlement in this area. Yreka, which supposedly means “White Mountain” in the local native language, enjoyed a short boom in the early 1850’s when gold was discovered nearby. Not all that much seems to have happened there in the next century, and there is a small main street of historic nineteenth century buildings. None of the structures are particularly significant, and they are filled with the usual kinds of shops one finds in small, struggling towns. John went into the sporting good store, and the owner was quite happy to chat with him for a bit.
Yreka also regards itself as the capital of the State of Jefferson. In an episode of American history not widely known outside of this area, several southern Oregon counties and several northern California counties, all feeling neglected by their respective state governments, proposed seceding and creating a new state in 1941. Even without the outbreak of the Second World War, this proposal would have never been successful, but it lives on here in the way that only small communities can recall their grievances. Ellen decided however that a “State of Jefferson” license plate frame would be perfect for her when she moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, and she found one in a local store.
From Yreka we climbed rapidly through the Siskiyou Pass and then descended into Ashland. We will be here in Ashland for three night while we see five plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
We are staying at the Abrams Cottage. We’ve stayed here a couple times before. It used to be owned by a guy named Nils Hansen and not only did he charge less than everybody else in Ashland for a small rental house, but he seemed pretty casual about even getting paid for it. One time I recall he just said to leave a check on the kitchen table when we left. It has since been purchased by a couple from Napa and they have cleaned up the place a bit but are also more traditional in billing and the like.
One of the best things about the cottage is the fenced-in front yard, perfect for dogs.
We unpacked and then went down to the the Green Show. The performance today was by Dance Kaleidoscope, a modern dance troupe from Indianapolis. They are doing a couple programs here in Ashland. The once today was an interpretation of Romeo and Juliet set to the Tchaikovsky music. It was pretty good.
Our play this evening was Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella. This was, well, interesting. Basically, somewhat abbreviated versions of Euripides’ Medea, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and Rogers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella were performed on the same stage more or less at the same time. At times, the characters from one play began to move into another play. There were a few times this was effective. The Cinderella sisters, for example, at one point also doubled as the Macbeth witches. But I failed to notice how they all stemmed from any kind of overarching metanarrative or how this exercise in intertextuality really provided any illumination into any one of the stories. The best way I found to accept the production was to imagine that I had taken a couple slugs of codeine-laden cough syrup and I was sitting in bed switching channels on the television.
Tomorrow, we have more traditional fare with Romeo and Juliet and a new play about Lyndon Johnson.
