Nature and Art

Our day was devoted roughly equally to nature, all of it great, and art, not all of it so good….

We had a lovely breakfast at Ellen and Mike’s. Ellen and I also took all the dogs out for a stroll through the neighborhood. John and I packed up, and we headed over the bridge towards Washington. Our first stop there was the Mount Saint Helens Visitor Center. The National Park Service runs the actual eruption site, and the Parks people are notoriously hostile to dogs, so we knew we could not actually get close to the mountain itself. But we still had a nice view of the peak from there.

There was also a nice half mile or so hike around Silver Lake near the Visitor Center.  This is a nice marsh and the interpretive materials were interesting. Not that the dogs were all that fascinated, I am sorry to say.

We continue on from there to the Monarch Contemporary Art Center and Sculpture Garden near Olympia. This is a pretty bizarre place, definitely off the beaten track. It consists of several acres of gardens, much of it weedy and overgrown, with lots of various bits of modern art scattered throughout it. Some of this seems like it is done by serious artists, and other things seem like they were done as therapy in a divorced women’s support group. We did find some things we liked there like this car door with a half of a guy waiting there.

Other things were a bit whimsical such as this installation below. It’s a “flower bed” – get it?

 

We thought that this was actually just an old recliner which had been dumped in the back until were came close and realized it was actually made of cement. Edie was a good girl and for once did not sit on the furniture.

From there we went on to Tacoma where we went to the Museum of Glass. John had been there about 10 years ago when it first opened and he was interested in coming back. When he was there before the place was packed. We arrived fairly late in the afternoon and it was pretty deserted. The building itself is interesting. It has broad public plazas on its roof which look down toward the water. There are a couple shallow pools as well, and one of them is always the site of an installation by a visiting artist.

There is not a whole lot of art in the galleries, nor is that the main attraction. Most people come to see the “hot box” where the staff of the museum and visiting artists produce works of art. Even I had to admit this was pretty fun.

The Museum of Glass is separated from the rest of downtown Tacoma by railroad tracks and roadway. Part of the Museum is the “Bridge of Glass” which links the two areas. In the picture below you can see the old Union Station on the far side by the railroad tracks. It is now a U. S. District Courthouse. Near it is the Museum of Washington History and the Tacoma campus of U-W.

The Bridge of Glass features the colorful work of Dale Chihuly. 

We cruised around Tacoma a little after this looking in a park and finding an very attractive older nieghborhood. But from there it was time to press on to our stop for the night in Gig Harbor.

When I lived in Long Beach, Gertie, the older lady who lived across the street, moved to Gig Harbor to be with her daughter. Before she left, she showed me a pretty post card of the town with sailboats in the harbor and snowcapped Mt. Rainier in the background. I must say the postcard was absolutely accurate:  this is exactly what you see when you come to Gig Harbor.

We had an adequate meal at a small cafe. When you have dogs with you, it’s not always easy to get a seat at a restaurant, even if they have an outdoor area, so you take what you can.

On the Trail in Oregon

We had a decent evening in Mount Shasta. John went to the nearby Round Table Pizza – Siskiyou County is not exactly foodie heaven – and we had our supper outside the hotel room while the dogs chomped on pigs ears. They possibly may have had the better meal….

In the morning we packed the car and headed north. Our first stop was Weed. John and I stayed near hear about 25 years ago when it was still a lumber town and a pretty wild place. Only a few traces of this era remain. In fact, the town is pretty much either dead or dying as far as we could see. But we did have a pleasant chat with the lady at the chamber of commerce office.

We had thought of heading up Mt Shasta into the snow, but we learned that they did not allow dogs. So we decided to just continue on into Oregon.

After driving a couple hours, it seemed like the dogs deserved a little break. So we went to our favorite dog park in southern Oregon, the one just off Helman Street on the north side of Ashland. The dogs stood alert as we started to come close to it, and we could tell that they remembered this place well.

In fact, they remember that they favorite part of this park is Bear Creek which runs behind the far portion of the park. They ran towards the the gate there and waited for us to let them out to play in the water.

We let them dry off a bit and headed north on Interstate 5. It always surprises me how long it takes to get from one end of Oregon to another. We thought about stopping along the way at the Oregon Garden, but decided that they really was not enough time. We did stop briefly in Eugene to go to Starbucks and we let the dogs play in a dog park near the university stadium there.

We came into Portland about five o’clock. We had been here only a couple weeks ago for our Six Traits of Writing workshop, so it felt sort of like coming home. Mike, my brother-in-law, was a gracious host as he always is.

My sister Ellen had just returned from East Africa where she had been leading a group of American students in a study abroad class. She was watering her fabulous vegetable garden when Eli had to play in the spray. He loves to bite at the water as it come out of the hose. It is even more fun than a tennis ball!

Tomorrow we will be on to Washington. 

Away We Go

We covered a lot of territory today. We packed the car last night, and we pulled out of the house at about 6:30. Traffic was not bad in the direction that we were going, but we did pass a bad accident on the other side of the highway in the Newhall Pass where to big rigs had collided into each other. They were still spraying foam on the fire as we passed.

Shortly after this, we stopped at Fort Tejon State Historic Park. This was the place where the U. S. Cavalry Dragoons were stationed from 1854 to 1864 to protect white settlers from attacks from the Paiute and the Mojaves. Most famously, the army experimented with the use of camels at this and nearby forts during that period.

We saw no camels there or even a ranger. It was still early enough in the morning that we wandered around freely and let the dogs do the same. The buildings here are reconstructions.

We went back in the car and headed towards Sacramento. In Dear Mr. Henshaw, Lee Botts, the narrator, described highway 5 as a stretch of road so boring that the cows forget to moo. It certainly is not an interesting or attractive route, but it is relatively quick. We made good time and arrived in Sacramento a little after noon.

We had lunch with our friend Dan Story at a charming outdoor cafe a few blocks from the state capitol.

Dan is in the middle of renovating his downtown townhouse/loft, and he is doing really great things with it. So of course we spent a lot of time talking about renovations and real estate. Dan is a bartender at one of the restaurants most frequented by assemblymen and lobbyists, and he always has some great off-the-record stuff about what is happening in state government, too.

After Sacramento, we continued on towards the northern part of the state. We had already decided that Mt. Shasta was about as far as we wanted to go this first day and I had made reservations at a dog-friendly motel some days ago. So, instead of rushing directly to our room, we explored some of the parks near Mt. Shasta.

The first was Lake Siskiyou. It was awfully pretty, but there really was not much for the dogs to do there.

So we continued on to Mt. Shasta city park. This is famous as the headwaters of the Sacramento River. The people in the picture below are getting the water as it comes rushing out of the spring which feeds the river. This is snow melt straight off the mountain. The water is pure, sweet, and extremely cold.

Here there were lots more places for the dogs to play around. They went in and out of the water and frolicked through the fields.

I was wearing tennis shoes instead of sandals, so I let John get wet this the pups.

We were also impressed with some of the native flora that we saw growing along the banks of the river.

Tomorrow, on to Portland. 

Too Soon!

Too soon indeed our Louisiana adventure had to come to an end. On our final day in Shreveport, Sherry took us to a nearby park. It is not a city park; a local family has their art museum there and maintains the grounds around it as a public space. It is hard to imagine that happening in California. The azaleas were not blooming as wildly yet as Sherry hoped – they probably needed about another week of sunshine and warmth for that – but the park was still stunningly beautiful.

There are bronze statues throughout the park like this tableau about the American West.

 

And there are Sherry and I and, in her arms, Taboo.

Sherry wanted us to stay for the afternoon because she was hosting the Easter Bonnet party, a fundraiser for a local LGBT group. I am sure it would have been fun, but American Airlines wanted to charge us about the price of the original ticket for changing flight times. So we reluctantly had to leave for Dallas a little before noon. Sherry’s friend James who was setting up for the event gave us a little taste of some of the imaginative haberdashery that would have been on display later in the day.

And Sherry’s mom Shirley was going to be one of the judges for the contest along with Tom Giles’ mother. I adore Shirley.

 

The drive to Dallas went uneventfully and our flight left and arrived on time. So, gentle readers, I am signing off until the next time John and John are on the road – again!

Briarwood and Natchitoches

I woke up early as usual, and did some work on pictures and things for school. About eight, there was a whir of activity and everybody else jumped out of bed and drank some coffee. We were supposed to leave right around that time for Briarwood, a nature preserve near Natchitoches where we had reservations for a ten o’clock tour.

It took us a while to get there, and I must say the GSP was pretty helpful. We went through a number of small towns as we went over two lane rural highways. We finally turned down a dirt road, and, after a few hundred feet, we were there.

Briarwood is one of the few strands of old growth forest left in Louisiana. Here you can get a sense of what northern Louisiana looked like before the French arrived in the mid-eighteenth century.

Briarwood was the childhood home of Caroline Dormon. Starting in the mid 1930’s, Dormon collected information about the plants and animals of Louisiana. She took pictures, collected specimens, and wrote volumes about her discoveries. Here is a picture of Miss Dormon – she never married – in her later years.

Briarwood was her home throughout most of her life, and she lived here in a small cabin. For much of the time she lived there, she had no electricity, and she only grudgingly allowed a phone line late in her life when her friends feared for her health living alone in the woods. Her house is still preserved much as it was when she lived there.

 

We had Jessie, a very knowledgeable tour guide to take us through the 350 acre preserve and show us the native plants.  Caroline Dormon not only preserved the forest at Briarwood, but she planted native plants from around Louisiana and the south in a natural woodland environment. Briarwood is remarkable because it is a botanical garden which looks nothing the near rows of carefully label plants that we think of when we hear the words “botanical garden”. Jessie helped us to see plants which we might have otherwise not observed and explained about each. She drove us around in an electric cart.

In the picture below, Jessie is the woman on the right side by the steering wheel. The woman in front is Shirley, Sherry’s mother. Sherry Kerr and Tom Giles are in the back.

Here you can see a native azalea.

  

This is a native flox.

 

And I think this was a native sweet olive, though I should have taken closer notes when Jessie was explaining.

  

We saw examples in the cabin and the small visitors center of Miss Dormon’s plant drawings. They are truly exquisite.

After our tour of Briarwood, we went to Natchitoches, the only large town in this part of Louisiana for lunch. Now pronunciation can be a little challenging anywhere in Louisiana, but this town has possibly the greatest disconnect between letters and sounds. Natchitoches  is pronounced "NACK-uh-tish". Go figure….

But however you say the name, it is a lovely small Southern town. Founded in 1714, it has the distinction of being the oldest permanent settlement in the Louisiana Purchase. It is located on the Cane River, an oxbow of the Red River.

 

Natchitoches is most famous as the setting for the play and movie Steel Magnolias. This is the house where the characters played by Julia Roberts and Sally Fields lived. It is now a bed and breakfast.

 

We took a horse cab for a short and very pleasant tour of the town.

 

We returned back to Shreveport in the late afternoon. Tom’s daughter, her husband, and their child were in town for the holiday. They live in Texas. They stopped by to talk, but could not unfortunately stay for dinner. Sherry cooked us a nice supper, and we watched Steel Magnolias.

Shreveport

After our lovely dinner Wednesday night, we decided that we really loved Breaux Bridge and the Maison des Amis. We had breakfast at Chez Jacqueline, a nearby restaurant, as a part of our lodgings. The couple from Michigan were seated right next to us and we were joined by the gentleman from England. We had a great time talking, and the food was pretty wonderful, too. Afterwards, as I packed up, John took some farewell shots.

We drove down to Lake Martin just south of town. We had heard that this was a great area for birds, and we were not disappointed. There were lots of mysterious cypress trees ringing the lake, creating the wonderful Evangeline forest primeval atmosphere (to mix up a couple different Longfellow poems) that you want to see in the bayous of south Louisiana.

But the amazing thing were the sheer number of birds nesting there. From a distance we thought the pink birds were flamingos, but we later learned they were Roseate Spoonbills. It hardly matters. They were all beautiful.

After this, we just drove straight to Shreveport using Interstate 49. This is a fairly empty and surprisingly attractive stretch of highway. Once past Alexandria, the land starts to roll a little and urban sprawl gives way to mixed pine forests. There are few town along the way, and surprisingly little evidence of agriculture. By late afternoon, we were pulling to Sherry’s house.

Sherry and Tom Giles were excited to see us and we sat around and talked. Of course, this still being Louisiana, she had food ready. This is such an amazing house in the heart of one of Shreveport’s historical districts. They are doing minor renovations like stripping the old wall paper and painting right now. The big renovations, like a new kitchen, will wait for the end of the recession. But even as is, it is a beautiful house.

In the evening, Tom was serving as an usher for the Maundy Thursday service at Saint Mark’s Cathedral. I went to the Eucharist with him while John and Sherry talked and napped back home. We we returned, we had a lovely dinner and watched a documentary about the restoration of the Laura plantation which we had bought after our tour on Monday.