While searching, typically, for something else I came upon this heartening piece of Kodachrome from the winter of 1943.  The original 35mm slide has a caption written the flip side from the “Kodachrome”  stamp.  It reads, in toto,  “Jan. 43  Our favorite spot to rest in summer under trees on shore E. Green Lake Way. Beautiful in Winter as well!!!”

For the moment I do not know where this slide came from, although I think it was mostly likely picked (by me) from one of two large collections of slides.  One I purchased in a basement sale from a home near the east shore of Green Lake.  The other I got from Lawton Gowey, a since deceased friend, who shared with me many images, stories and enthusiasm for regional history.  Earlier he was given the collected slides of Horace Sykes, a long-time member of the Seattle Camera Club,  and Lawton passed the collection on to me.

Sykes’ work is often wonderful and we should show more of it in this blog and will.  But for the moment the image reminded me of Jean’s frequent early morning visits with his camera to this shore of Green Lake, which is also near his home, and the results that he has published here.  So this is my first “Jean Challenge.”

Can he – or rather, you Jean – repeat this shot with a “now.”  A warning through.  It may be more difficult than we think.  There have been some changes on the east shore since 1943.

JEAN GRABS THE GAUNTLET:

Here’s my best effort, slightly wider than the orginal, but pretty close I think.

I emailed the Sykes original to Kathy Whitman, Aquatics Manager for Seattle Parks and Recreation and she replied:

I can’t be certain but I think it is the northern shore of Green Lake looking across the west. West Green Lake Beach would be located just outside the area of vision to the left side the distant shore… the wading pool located to right side outside the area of vision.  It is on the shore about 2/3’s of the way toward the wading pool when leaving Evans Pool.

That had been my best guess as well, as this spot has always been a favorite of Green Lake strollers. As I recall, the trees in the ’43 photo were cut down and replaced by smaller trees, to general opprobrium, but I can’t recall why.  As can be seen, they’ve grown up a bit.

Back a few insertions or entries in this blog we put up seven, if memory serves, panoramas of Meridian Park from the same prospect as the one attached  here, and recorded this afternoon, 12/14/8.  In the now 28 months I have been walking through the Good Shepherd campus, sticking snow has been rare indeed.  This is the third time.  Another of the three is included in the mentioned group below.

(Please click to enlarge)

Paul writes:

In March of 2005, my oldest brother Ted celebrated his 80th birthday with a banquet for kith and kin at Ivar’s Acres of Clams.  It was a family custom that whenever the Dorpat boys returned home for a reunion or whatever, they would join with their father, a robust bass, in another singing of the song “What Will the Poor Birdies Do Then.”

We never knew the actual title for the song, but that may well be it for the line appears in all four verses, which follow and may be named for the four seasons. Ordinarily we began with the Winter stanza.

There are two important tips for the performance of this pathetic song.  First, whenever possible, Norwegian pronunciations are substituted for English – e.g. “Vinter” for “Winter”.  Second, with the singing of the same last line in all four verses, “…and put their heads under their wings”, the singers are obliged to do just that: bend or dip their head and crook their arm over it, as if protecting themselves from something falling from the sky.

So here, left to right, are Ted, David, Norm and Paul, the four sons of Rev. Theo Dorpat and Eda Gerina Christiansen Dorpat, singing in a kind of unison “What Will the Poor Birdies Do Then.”  It was the last time, for before they could meet and sing and raise their arms again Ted and Norm passed.  Actually, Ted never confessed to singing, and if you listen closely, at the beginning of this clip you will hear him announce, “I can’t sing.”

(For those planning to attend ‘Up the Down Chimney’ with Paul and Jean at the Good Shepherd Center on Monday the 22nd, please use the preceding video as a rehearsal tape.)

First, the last of these five recordings of the fall of fall looks up into some of the trees that border the Meridian Playfield in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood.  The park was once an orchard for the Roman Catholic Good Shepherd Home for Girls, and a favored few of the old fruit trees survive.   The panorama merges four images photographed on Saturday the 6th of December, 2008, around 3:30 in the afternoon  The center of the scene is to the northwest.  (Click the image to enlarge it.)

One month and four days earlier (Nov. 2, 2008) I recorded the several parts for this about 260 degree panorama that includes part of the P-Patch (far left)  and most of the Tilth garden.  At the center this pan looks northeast from a Tilth prospect that is near the southern border of the Good Shepherd Campus.  The home seen in part on the right is off-campus and faces Corliss Avenue at its campus dead end north of 46th Street.  The pan is a stitching of eight photos.

The trees that break the horizon above Tilth’s A-Frame greenhouse, left-of-center in the above panorama, appear again in the next recording which looks east towards the Good Shepherd Center and on the same second day of November, 2008.  My back is to the Meridian playfield.  The popular Pergola on the left supports and shelters several concerts during the warmer months, and below the tapping feet of the musicians several families of Rabbits have used the pergola as a hutch.   It is thought that these opportunists made their way to the campus from Woodland Park.

Wet leaves and the bouquets they make can be found throughout the campus resting in and beside the bushes.  This arrangement, however, was discovered a block off campus near the intersection of 46th and Corliss on November 11, 2008.

The last signs of fall included here are the reflections of an autumnal sunset off the west facades of the glass-curtain University District Building at the southeast corner of 11th Avenue and 45th Street – for many years the District’s unofficial mayor, Cal McCune, had his office there – and behind and above it the old corporate Safeco Building recently purchased by the University of Washington. It is the school’s first true high-rise and a symbol of sorts for many developments in the culture of higher education including grade inflation in the school’s undergraduate classes.  B’s continue to rise to A’s at a pace more relentless than global warming.  They are compassionately engineered by human forces in the interests of both comforting and complimenting the often anxious students and also avoiding their sometimes impetuous wrath.   The school recently replaced the insurance company’s banner sign with its own across the top of their new skyscraper.  The photograph was snapped while leaving Trader Joe’s with some pre-cooked brown rice and 73% dark chocolate in the purple wrapper on Dec. 6, 2008.

Jean’s Nissan parks almost alone on Raymond, Washington’s quiet First Street in 2005.  Once this was the main street of a smoking mill town that often went swimming when the Willapa River flooded the street to its knees.  Here on a rare hot day for the coast the pavement is dry as cured fire wood and hot too.  Jean recorded this scene looking south on First as I was either stepping into or out of my side of his gallant carrier.   We were chasing contemporary “repeats” for historical photographs that were then candidates for our book “Washington Then and Now.”  While Raymond’s First Street made it through the final cut and into the book, the repeat we used looks down the center of the street.  It misses the helpful signpost on the left but it is a more accurate “now” for the historical photos used – three of them.  (For Raymond see page 83 – in the book, not this blog.)

Traveling with Jean – the Sherrard of this blog – would be like riding with an ironic* Captain America except that he really has impressive upper body strength from frequent exercise.  He rows while watching the East Enders, the nearly 30 year old BBC1 soap.  And yet Jean is still more pumped-up for ideas of all sorts and for questions of taste and temperament too.   And he can drive like no body’s business, including his own for in truth he hardly makes anything from all his driving zest, including 10 thousand miles across this state pursuing historical sites in order to repeat them for our book Washington Then and Now.   (Visitors to this blog will know how often he flies to that curvaceous canyon on the veriform Yakima River.)

Jean also travels the world, loving the arroyos and scablands of eastern Washington and Ethiopia, equally.  I have seen him travel great distances.  For two weeks in the summer of 2005 I was his dependent as we flew first to London and then rolled by chunnel to Paris.  And there at the train station Jean first met Berangere AKA BB, the Lomont of this blog and I first saw her again since 1977.   I met Berangere that summer now more than thirty years ago!   The adventurous Parisian teenager was visiting my friend Bill Burden, whom she had met the summer before while picking grapes in southern France.  And here, right to left, are Jean, Bill and I posing for Berangere with a familiar landmark behind.

Next, another Parisian scene by Berangere – this one of Jean and I preparing  – with BB – to “repeat” with a contemporary recording the print I hold in my hand.  It is of Concorde Square, and I took it in the summer of 1955 when I spent two weeks in Paris.  I was sixteen and also still more sweet than sour.  Below it is Berangere’s repeat from 2005.  I was hovering over her shoulder.

Back in Washington while touring the state for our book and jobbing about for the book’s promotion, Jean has done all the driving.  I sit beside him in the passenger seat (As I do in the Good Shepherd’s stone grotto portraits also recently posted here.) of his all white Nissan, ready to yield whatever travel advice I have and, more important, listen to his stories.    My Captain is an insistent rapper about this wonder and that injustice and such a good storyteller that unless there is an emergency one will not mind hearing some of them twice because they are his classics.   And one should expect and accept cell phone interruptions from one or another of his many dependents.  Jean is admirably “up-front,” except for those instances when he will suddenly stop, jump from the car and exit around a corner for no announced reason.  Rarely gone for long, he still always takes the keys and a heavy Nikon (digital) about the size of a large chocolate croissant.

Here follow a few recent snapshots of travels with Jean – most of them my own through the Jeanmobile’s heroic windshield.   Jean is just to the left of these recordings, except when he is in them.

First, for the above picture choose one.  We catch Jean (1) looking for a phone booth (2) running around the corner and up the stairs of the Washington State Museum of History in Tacoma looking for proofs of our Washington Then and Now show that opens there in January next.  I take the moment to also leave the car and record this snapshot of the “leaning tower of Tacoma” – another Tacoma museum, for glass not history.

Rather than glass it is Tacoma’s old bricks that both Jean and I find most stimulating. Here is a splendid example on Pacific Avenue, long ago Tacoma’s “boulevard of dreams.”  The pentimento of the pink cream and green sign exhibited on the east façade of this brick block is one of the West Coast’s finest examples of worn mural art.  (While I have never visited a large sample of West Coast revealed murals nor know of any book about them, I still am confident that this is true or may be.   I’ll say that this is another Tacoma museum, one of one work and one wall.   A “drive-in or drive-by” museum you can enjoy, as Jean and I did, through the windshield.

A day after our appointment in Tacoma we were traveling again to responsibilities in Kirkland and Issaquah.  When we reached the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge Jean was feeling good – having a fine time.  Once on the bridge he pointed to “The Mountain That Was God” aka Mt. Tacoma, but officially named Mt. Rainier.  Two years earlier he had sat for most of an afternoon near Paradise Lodge, waiting for The Mountain to reveal itself for the repeat of a historical photograph of it he carried with him.  Now those two views – his and the historical  – appear side-by-side in our book.  Here from the bridge and in the late morning light The Mountain was stroked by dry-brushed clouds.  [Can some reader more familiar with the sky and its tricks explain first that slender but not lenticular, it seems to me, cloud that either points to The Mountain or springs from it, and still more mysteriously the shadow that in part repeats the banner-cloud to the left?]

Stopping for a light on East Lake Sammamish Parkway I used all 10X of the optical zoom advertised even on the body of my little Lumix.  (I purchased it on Ken Levine’s advice.) Jean pointed to the houses hugging the edge of the hill.  He explained that they are the front line of oversized and yet crowded residences built on the plateau east and above the lake.  Some of them he indication would qualify as McMansions.   Depending upon the film you remember, they resemble either a line of U.S. Cavalry or a line of bareback mounted Sioux, waiting to descend into the valley and stick it to a few persons without horses.  I have a different analogy for them born of my study of Classical Greek long ago.  For me they appear to be a phalanx of barbarian invaders.  These homes – Jean tells me for I have never given much time to real estate except the historical sort – continue for miles to the east from that edge of the bluff.  Jean explains that some of this work-in-progress is now stuck.

Ambitious plans on the Issaquah Plateau were popped along with the housing bubble. But then many of them were created together like raindrops on a windshield, or cookie crumbs on a counter, or McMuffins on a grill.  What, I wonder, difference will their mass production matter in a century – if they survive and gain some charm from time and the weather.  Depending upon one’s class sensitivities they now seem to either inspire resentment, remorse, weltschmerz, petty glee or indifference.  Not certain about how I feel, I can at least identify with that comely crow perched on the light standard upper right.  I may be smart about some things, but not about most, including this at once awesome, ominous and curious row on the ridge.  The crow soon flew away from its meditations to search for more scraps in the valley, and once the light had changed Jean continued to the Issaquah Costco where we were scheduled to sign books, which we were fond of telling those who purchased them increased the book’s value by twenty cents, or ten cents a signature.

Late in the afternoon we returned to Wallingford and Green Lake, where the next day I crossed paths with Seattle City Councilman Nick Licata.  I asked Nick if he had seen the young trio singing Bach’s a capella motet Jesu Meine Freude at the front door to the Wallingford QFC.  He had not.  I explained, “With three-parts of a four part Baroque motet they were promoting the social engineer Lyndon LaRouche’s political literature and asking for donations.”  I gave them a dollar for the 3/4ths of Bach.  I might have given 75 cents.   The photograph included here of an unidentified arm shows part of the Wallingford QFC sign beyond.

I told Nick about our trip the day before to the Issaquah and Kirkland Costcos and together we lamented how in the last quarter-century much of “book culture” – both the making and marketing – had been captured by a few heavy weight publishers and retailers – or in Costco’s prosperous formula, semi-retailers.  The Issaquah plateau also entered our little conversation about books and Bach, and the other Lyndon.   Nick confirmed what I had only incidentally heard about Chip Marshall.  The once famous 60’s activist at the U.W., Marshall later became one of the principal developers on the plateau east of Issaquah. Something like Ken Kesey and Abbie Hoffman, Marshall had made his own theatrical run several times from the law, which he offended with some brash objections to the war in Vietnam. What was so entertaining is that he would sometimes appear unannounced to speak in public, but then ditch away again before he could be nabbed.  It was the behavior of legends, and it helped that he was Errol Flynn dashing.  But now his story is a mixed report.  Unlike Kesey and Hoffman, and more like Jerry Rubin, Chip later joined “the man.”  And now, Nick revealed – and this from Chip himself – his old friend longs to open a night club in Seattle.

Returning to the windshield snapshot, Jean told me that the forested horizon behind the crow is Tiger Mountain.  I believe him, for he has been intimate with these “Issaquah Alps” almost since he was a child returning from Germany with his parents to live in Bellevue and eventually, in the early 1980s, to open Hillside School on Cougar Mountain, the little “alp” closest to Lake Washington.  Jean teaches drama, writing and video at Hillside.  His wife, Karen, teaches French and history.  Their oldest son, Ethan, teaches mathematics.   Just above is a photo showing Jean preparing his students for that night’s performance of Brecht’s play “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” staged last year at Hillside.

While on our way from Kirkland to Issaquah we stopped along the east shore of Lake Sammamish where, again from the comfort of the passenger seat, I photographed Jean preparing to take a photograph along the old Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad right-of-way (1889), which is now a recreation path – a controversial one, although not for those who use it.  Rather some of those who live to the sides of the trail imagine it as a conduit for urban thugs and liberal ideologists (for some, one and the same) who are carried to the east shore on light weight ten-gear bicycles from Seattle thereby interrupting the formerly fretless piety of the lake shore community and more recently the highlands behind it.   Jean is here visiting the now lost mill town of Monohon.  And that is spelled correctly with three O’s.  (Look it up on historylink for a thumbnail narrative of its substantial history.)

And here still at the abandoned depot site of Monohon, Jean shows the power in those shoulders and long arms as he lifts his heavy camera far above the path and over the heads of a cycling family perhaps returning to smoke-filled rooms in Seattle.  Jean has attached his heavy Nikon to his big ten footer and thereby brings its prospect to about knee-level on the third story of a typical office block.

Continuing on to Issaquah and moments before we stop for the crow on the lamppost (discussed above) I snapped this screen of trees along the east shore of the lake.   I figure that this may be an example of the kind of landscape that we are wired in our genes to enjoy and even long for.  On this possibility I included this scene’s easy pleasures for you to study in reverie.  This tentative insight of evolutionary psychology also adds to my hope that some of the garage sale art that I have purchased over the years is resalable.  Let this also be a fair caveat lector to this blog’s visitors for there are plans for using examples from my “Forsaken Art” collection on this site.

Issaquah is also the corporate headquarters of Costco whose employees seem to express universal gratitude for how well they are treated.  Here we take our place before a special black backdrop raised behind our signing table like an altar and pose with Angela who is our Costco hostess.   We ask her how she likes her employer and get that same response.  While I am happy for Angela and Costco I still feel ambivalent and think of Jean’s and my good friend Clay Eals, the author/historian who is such a champion of small stores and neighborhood culture.  We sympathize with Clay’s ideals but can we also afford them.   In Paris it is still possible, if one wishes, to visit a dozen different stores for a day’s needs and all within walking distance – like Wallingford.

Jean is taking French lessons at the Alliance Française.  He is justly proud of his pronunciation, although, as he describes it, learning the ways of French verbs requires the discipline, flexibility, sobriety and elegance of a ballet dancer in the Ecole Française.   A point that is perhaps mean to make, an instance of protecting my own interests, is this.  After studying his French for however much time he can give it, will he ever be able to tell a story as well in the language of Balzac as he can in the language of Dickens?  (In the accompanying photo directly below, two French-looking visitors admire some of the garden bedding on the Good Shepherd campus.  The Alliance Francaise is in the brick building to the rear.)

Come hear Jean read in English Jean Shepherd’s “Red Ryder and the Cleveland Street Kid” and “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” this coming Dec 22 in the fourth floor Chapel of the Good Shepherd Center in Wallingford.  I will be backing him up as the amateur part of the program reading O’Henry’s “Gift of the Magi”, along with a poem that has profoundly shaped the culture of Christmas, yes “The Night before Christmas.” We rented this fine performance hall  – which you can study below in this blog in the many pictures included with Sally Anderson’s Ashes to Ashes review – so there will be a requested or suggested gate of $10.00.   Elsewhere in this blog is an announcement for this reading – and another at the Haller Lake Community Club –  accompanied by a photograph of Jean and I sitting in the Good Shepherd Center’s Grotto.  I am, again, on Jean’s right – left to you.  Here we also include at the bottom another example of a grotto – this one in the pavement near 42nd Street and 1st Ave. N.E. – and just below an abandoned Christmas nativity scene, or part of one, discovered half buried by untended ground cover and neighbor to other incongruous artifacts in a hidden Wallingford side lawn.

* As yet, we can’t quite expect a sincerely ecstatic post-ironic America with the new administration, although satire will now have to search harder for targets.   What we need is rather a post-iconic America, which is a nation dedicated to patrolling for dead metaphors in public speech and hysterically driven clichés like “iconic.”   This “iconic” is used much too often now as a substitute for thinking.   So stop it!

Chris and Mary Troth’s “plantation manse” in Wallingford (at the southeast corner of 44th and Meridian) has a pompon or citrouille or potiron coloring (all French terms that have something to do with Pumpkins and used in celebration of this blog’s recent turn to bi-linguil – or more often bi-focul – with the contributions of Parisian Berangere Lomont) and has been recently and wonderfully appointed with the attached row of pumpkins for Obama.  As far as I can determine there are only Democrat signs in Walllingford, and if America follows this neighborhood in the upcoming election it will surly be an Obama Landslide followed by an Obama landfill of signs and such, but not of these pumpkins.  The Troths are also avid gardners and almost surely have their own compost for this endearing political marker.  Mary explains that the colors of their Wallingford landmark are a golden-orange named “jubilation” (and may we so hope) by its manufacturer, white, and a dark read, which she explains acts like the home’s “eye-liner.”

(In celebration of the season I’ll add other pumpkins to this contribution – perhaps later in the day.  A suggestion: why not keep your Obama sign – not the pumpkins – as both a reminder and a part of Sustainable Wallingford?)

Four snaps from today, Friday the tenth of October.   The fly and the monkeys are from a porch on Bagley Avenue.  The flower from the Good Shepherd campus P-Patch.   And The Mountain from the corner of 42nd Street and 1st Avenue N.E. – all in Wallingford.  (All – or nearly all – may be “moused” for enlargement.)

Like most of the other subjects posted here since we changed our blog-programmer, these four panoramas of Good Shepherd can be enlarged with a tap of the mouse.  They were all recorded this Tuesday afternoon of October 7, 2008.  And they are presented in the order that I visited them as part of my regular walk through the Good Shepherd grounds or campus.  I was cheerfully told by two pedestrians that today was supposed to have been overcast and wet.  One used the word “dismal” and the other “nasty”.  Instead we were spared the rain and got instead performing clouds with sunshine between them.  I entered the campus at the Bagley Avenue entrance at about four in the afternoon and left it about thirty minutes later.

The top pan is of the Meridian Play Field, the most westerly part of the campus.  It is managed by the park department more directly than the rest of the campus.

The next pan is of Tilth’s workhouse/greenhouse, which has also a green or planted roof.

The third pan looks northwest from Tilth’s teaching garden to the same structure and part of the P-Patch attended to by Wallingford neighbors.  On the far side of the screen of trees is the Meridian Play Field.

The last pan shows the Good Shepherd Center against today’s playful sky.  Once a Catholic school for girls – many of them from troubled homes – the structure and campus celebrated its centennial last year.  The restored chapel on the top floor has become a popular concert venue with admired acoustics.

At the Wallingford corner of Eastern Avenue and 42nd Street stand two of the tallest American Elms in Seattle.  There are no witnesses to their age and neighbors hope that the rings may never be counted.  The trees can be seen prominently from the Ship Canal Bridge on I-5.  Together these twins are the largest green mass around.  A few years ago the twin to the east began to crack between its two high branches.  The owners then of the corner house had a cable run between them.  The sudden molesting wind that blew through the north end (at least) on the afternoon of Saturday Oct. 4, did not break the cable, but it did snap a limb from the east landmark and dropped it to the front lawn.  About one hundred feet away and heading for the trees to take my several daily photographs of them, I heard the snap and saw the limb fall.   If it had held on for a minute more I’d have been standing beneath as I do with the three photographs attached here in a row, looking up the north side of the west elm watching the limb approach me — and just miss me.  Find the hole or identify the missing limb when it was still in place in two of the three views.   The limb is missing, far right, on the afternoon of Oct. 4 2008.  It is in tact, at the center, in the afternoon of Feburary 28, 2007, and also intact, far left, on the afternoon of Oct. 1, 2008.  In a fourth photograph at the top the limb is lying on the front lawn of the  home at the northeast corner of 42nd Street and Eastern Avenue.

(Mouse the triptych to enlarge it.)

With the last posting (directly below this one) I promised a return with evidence that like this year’s spring, so this fall is late by a few days.  The comparison below of the blossomed cherry trees at the southeast corner of 46th and Corliss were taken one year apart.  The top of the two on March 27, 2008 and the bottom of the two one year earlier, where the budding is further along and the petals are dropping.   This flowering comparison is followed by another from Sept 27, 2008 (on the top of the bottom two) and at the bottom, one year earlier.   The difference here is subtler than with the blossoms, but real enough in the reds of the turning leaves.  I will not name the types of several trees that appear there at the northeast corner of 46th  and Burke in hopes that a reader will respond with their names.  Another reason is that I don’t myself known the names.  So, if you can, please help both nature and me.

(Tapping these pairs with a mouse will make them bigger.)

One day more and I returned to the northeast corner of 44th Street and Wallingford Avenue to repeat a tree I first notice many years ago for its brilliant fall color.  I tagged it the “Flame Tree.”  However, today, Monday Sept. 29, 2008, it was still in the summer greens seen here direclty below.  Below it and two years ago, on Sept. 27, 2006, the Flame Tree was far into its fire.

I found this tender sign of fall at my feet late this afternoon while shuffling from my car seat to the slabs of granite that pave our front walkway off the street.   Folks, this year’s fall is late.  And I can prove it – but not tonight.  Tomorrow perhaps.  Since I have been walking that same Walllingford Walk for more than two years I can bring in last years pixs from this day – or tomorrow – and show examples of a landscape that has knitted for itself an autumn dress about a week more developed in 2007 than now.   This was true of Spring as well.  Our cherry trees were a about a week late with their blossoms this year, when compared with 2007.  I may have proved that one earlier with this blog.  For now I do not remember if I did, but will check it out soon for you casual readers.  If I did not put the blossoms of spring – 2007 and 2008 – in earlier I will include them as well – with the “fall” preview – probably tomorrow.

(To enlarge the photo tap it with your mouse.)

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A good number of Walt Crowley’s friends formed a circle around his memorial headstone – a flat and yet risible plaque lying on the grass –  this afternoon (9/21/8) to share memories of Walt and scatter a few of his ashes in the vicinity of the plaque.  Some of Walt probably drifted near the Thomas Prosch plaque, which rests so close to Walt’s that they are bedfellows now for eternity.   This was meant to be, and it was historylink historian Paula Becker who first envisioned it so last year and then suggested to Marie McCaffrey, Walt’s widow and now his successor as head of Historylink, that it would be most appropraite to put the two of them near one another.  Since Prosch could not be readily moved this meant putting Walt – his plaque – near to Thomas. And so it was done.  Thomas Prosch was another historian/journalist whose typed 1901 manuscript “A Chronological History of Seattle” was a most important source for the construction of historylink – its many earliest essays on subjects of Seattle history.  Jean (of this blog) took photographs of all those who said something and he has included some of these directly above.

After the memorial while returning to the car, I noticed Jean’s shadow on a headstone and so recorded it, and then also turned the camera left for a few more shots that fit into this panorama.  It includes a few degrees more than one-fourth of Lakeview Cemetery.  The center of the pan looks to the northeast.  The cedar tree, in the shadows on the far left, is at the cemetery’s summit.  Pioneer Doc. Maynard is buried at its base.  I might have investigated the name on the far side of the big stone on which Jean’s working shadow was caste, but I did not think to do it.  By late afternoon this Sunday, Lakeview was showing the beauty that lured Victorians to cemeteries for their weekend leisure and reflections on mortality.  The site of Walt’s and Prosch’s plaques is about fifty or sixty yards directly behind me.

Walt and Marie’s plaque reads brilliantly, “Walt Crowley 1947 – 2007 Husband of Marie McCaffrey  Co-Founder of Historylink Citizen of Seattle To learn More Visit, http://www.historylink.org ECV  Marie McCaffrey 1951”  A close-up of the plaque is included with Jean’s photographs printed above.

(Note to reader:  What follows is a response to Berangere Lomont’s photos of the Pope’s visit to Paris, especially the one (reduced above) that shows the Pope looking towards her through the green glass of the Popemobile. You can now find this view and her other photographs of the Pope’s visit full sized below, or later in this site’s archive. )

Dear Berangere,
Like Celeste of the Women’s Century Club, here in Seattle, I also love your Pope and your Paris.  While the German Pope is relentlessly strict in his orthodoxy, it is claimed that he writes a good dogma. And this Pope is a little less forbidding under the City of Lights, although his walking guards throw some shadow on that. They seem to be worrying like stooges working their way through purgatory. But that can’t be helped, for the world is not so perfect as the Popemobile.   And the Pope certainly looks fit in his Popemobile.  With the fold-out curbside video screen in your photograph one can see the Pope coming and going — omnipresent.  How many of these devices did they use in the 5th Arrondissement alone? It may help us wonder what compensating attractions they used in medieval processions, not having these curbside Deus Ex Machines? And it occurs to me that anytime the Pope does a mass in an outdoor stadium they may be useful – fourteen of them – as Stations of the Cross.  Whether ex cathedra or inside the cathedra, I think what distinguishes any Pope from the rest of us is something more clinging.  They dress the best.  How long do you suppose the Vatican has been filling its pope closets with the nonesuch of outfits made from surpassing fabrics by the ruling class of seamstresses and tailors?  For centuries.  Take off any Pope’s clothes and there is probably not much to prefer. But without the evidence of a Pope with no clothes who can know? Writing now about myself only, as humble as my wardrobe is, every part of it is clean, machine washable and stamped with a free pass to paradise, which I’ll use only if I cannot make it back to Paris.
Paul

Yesterday in broad sunlight I came upon this long-legged beauty sunning on a big leaf. Something, perhaps the sound of my simulated shutter, sent it – yes – flying.

Emily Nuchols, our champion for the Snake River sockeye salmon that, she notes, “travels further and climbs higher than any other salmon in the world,” has sent two glimpses of the conditions at Camp Muir, at 10,000 feet, which is the jumping-off place for most early morning attempts on Mt. Rainier.  Throughout August we posted photographs from Wallingford that looked in the direction, at least, of Mt. Rainier from a corner that was a few houses from Emily’s – at the beginning of the month. We did it in support and anticipation of her climb scheduled for August 25-26.  During the month she moved to Portland, perhaps to be nearer those wild sockeye, for Emily is the communications manager for “Save Our Wild Salmon.”   (You can find and/or review that daily Mt. Rainier watch in the archive of this blog, as well as other pictures of Emily and some of her supporters.)

The two snapshots included here show, above, Emily with her climbing team – she is behind the red section of their banner – and, below, Emily alone with the wind and the Cowlitz Glacier.  Emily explains. “When we left Camp Muir at 2 a.m. and started our first traverse across the Cowlitz Glacier the wind was blowing so hard we had to brace ourselves with our ice axes at each step.”   In the dark the Salmon team made it over that ridge behind them – Cathedral Rocks – and beyond that over Ingraham Glazier as well and then onto the rock cleaver so appropriately named  “Dissapointment” for so many.  There, still in the night with flashlights (on their heads I assume) and 60 mph winds pushing against them, the guides put a stop to it, and turned the team around.  Still their effort raised $20,000 for Save Our Wild Salmon.  Our congratulations to the Salmon for having friends like Emily and her team.  And our apologies to the Salmon, for they are still for eating.

From left to right: Bob Connell, B. Bhartik and partner, Jun Akutsu, Cathy Tuttle, Kathleenn Cromp, Michael Kucher, Treb Connell, Christina O’Leary, Michael Courtney

This coming Saturday, Sept 13, from 10 to noon the “ring of illuminated concern” called Sustainable Wallingford – and I’m a member – will meet almost at the Mosaic Community Coffeehouse at 4401 2nd Ave. NE.  That is the landmark.  The meeting itself will be just around the corner in the First Church of the Nazarene fellowship hall.  You enter on 2nd.

Early last month, August 9th, an afternoon squall ran through Seattle scattering picnics to the nearest shelters.  The picnics that Saturday included one for Sustainable Wallingford at the Good Shepherd campus.  The attached group portrait shows a few members illuminated in the reflected glow of an afternoon sun that followed the storm.  They are perched, of course, in the park’s pergola.

Why investigate this circle of concerned Wallingford citizens?  One reason is that they are also meeting in Wallingford United Kingdom.   Here follows parts of Sustainable Wallingford leader Cathy Tuttle’s latest correspondence to members.  It begins with a request you may wish to take time to examine and respond to.

Please take a survey, What Do You Really Think About Climate Change? We will only be collecting survey data until October 25th, so please try to answer soon! Our friends in Sustainable Wallingford UK contacted us last month at Sustainable Wallingford US, to see if we could ask our townspeople the same questions at the same time. We want to see if we have similar interests, knowledge, and concerns in both countries. Wallingford, UK is a small town of about 10,000 people, located 47 miles (75 km) west of London. Wallingford, USA is a neighborhood of around 20,000 people, located 4 miles (6 km) north of Seattle. Please pass along this survey to your friends! We will publish survey results on our website, and in local newspapers. Thank you!

The remainder of Cathy’s bulleted correspondence includes other clues on why one might want to show up this coming weekend or visit the group’s site.

*   CoolMom Wallingford meets at Mosaic 4401 2nd Ave NE this Tuesday, Sept 9 at 7 pm with Kerri Cechovic from Washington Environmental Council. More info about CoolMom Wallingford from Anne Marie 206-522-5034

*   Active Sustainable Wallingford member Mike Ruby received $15,000 from the Dept of Neighborhoods Matching Fund to help plan a Wallingford Community Center He invites folks interested in the project to the Good Shepherd Center room 122 this Wednesday, Sept 10 at 7 pm.

*   If you haven’t seen the Sustainable Wallingford wheelbarrow drill team, click.

*   The great Sustainable Ballard Festival on Sept 27-28 has a variety of must-see events including two Wallingford-based Spokespeople rides at noon to sustainable sites — so ride your bikes to the festival!

*   Spokespeople will also link houses on the Wallingford home tour on Oct 5.

*   Click for more info about Sustainable Wallingford or call Cathy at 206-547-9569

My one-of-a-kind Sustainable Wallingford button

While walking Wallingford this week I’ve come upon two examples of what will most likely soon become a great commonplace of public giving.  As we approach the grand opening or first day of the new federal requirement for high definiton TV and this new age of entertainment and education becomes the right and responsibility of every citizen in their pursuit of happiness and verrisimilitude, more non-complying televisions will be given up by citizens who ask no thanks.  The single set shown here (below) was found gently resting on its face in a driveway on Meridian Avenue near the Tully’s parking lot off 45th Street – Wallingford’s “Highway to Ballard.”  The two sets (above) were neatly set at the edge of another parking lot, appropriately that behind the Hollywood Video, also on 45th.  Look for much more of this curbside philanthropy in the weeks ahead.  While one may check set labels for expiration dates, there are none.  Sometimes the once warm boxes do include their year of origin.  The attached label from the Meridian Ave. set – a Sharp Model 19np58 – reveals that it is barely twenty years old and so probably eager to turn on for someone these last few weeks.

This is not a revival of the Wild Salmon countdown run earlier through the month of August (see the archive), but an instance of an insistent Mt. Rainier.  The reflected sunset this evening (Sept. 2) around 7 pm gave this command performance above Seattle’s Capitol Hill.   Again this representation, like the others below, was snapped with the support of the street sign at the northwest corner of 42nd Street and 1st Ave. N.E. in Wallingford.  (It is one of the about 400 scenes I have repeated most days for the last two years for art and exercise.)  The expression “The Mountain That Would Be God” got considerable play during the long early-20th Century contest between Seattle and Tacoma promoters over how to name Mt. Rainier/Mt. Tacoma.   For some “The God Mountain” was a glorious compromise, although ordinarily this almighty allusion was expressed differently, using instead the rhetorical banner just noted in sentences like “Dear, do you suppose uncle Knud from Bismark would like a drive up to The Mountain That Would Be God?”  And the answer, “Dear, I believe that the  proper name is ‘The Mountain That Was God.’ not ‘would be God’.  You may have thinking of the The Man Who Would Be King a short story by Rudyard Kipling.  Have you read it?”  “No, but I did get started with his novella, The Man Who Would Be Kind.”

Recently, Seattle resident Sally Anderson’s sister Sharon, also known as Deedo, who lives in the highlands of Utah, was visited by a moose. Sally, who describes Deedo as a “moose lover,” had already worried about her sister’s expressed urge to meet face-to-face with a moose in peace.

The attached moose portrait, which said sister recorded through her bedroom window, while standing on the bed, suggests that her wish has nearly come true.

Sharon’s snapshot alarmed the prudent Sally, and with a few words of caution she admonished her sister that as cute and kindly as any moose may seem, it can also run faster than she.  “Sharon” Sally said, “be careful or you may get what you ask for!”

This moose episode, we know, is not a first for Deedo. Two years past, while she was resting in her bathtub, a (presumably) different Utah moose stuck its nose through the open bathroom window.  While Sharon was non-plussed, not so Sally, who has since worried that the next time the moose may try the front door.

Readers who are familiar with similar episodes in other parts of Utah are asked to contact the Utah Department of Parks and Wildlife and share their experiences through the UDPW’s official webpage, under the category “Moose Meetings.”  (This new category “Moose Meetings” takes the place of “Moose Sightings.”)

From left: Sarah Kuck, Emily Nuchols. Sitting: Natalie Brandon.

Emily Nuchols is a near-by Wallingford neighbor – about a half block leap from the back deck. On a recent weekend while on my daily walk of the neighborhood I was lured by bunting and balloons at her front door to make a donation at the back door. There hovering above the salads and corn on the cob on her own deck were a few of Emily’s friends who are supporting her part in the fifth annual “Summit For Salmon.” It is a group climb of Mt. Rainier scheduled this year for August 25. I gave the suggested donation of $20, and thereby joined in the “fight to save our wild salmon.”

Emily is the Save Our Wild Salmon’s Communications Manager, but she has done considerably more than “mediate.” For instance, she has kayaked through Lower Granite Dam on the Snake River, and been “swimming” about Seafair and other events in a well-tailored costume as Buster the Wild Salmon.Our linked sponsorships behave like a kind of pyramid scheme with a wild salmon on the top. This means having been reached I am now expected to find at least five other sponsors and so on until together we raise $5,000 – her goal – for supporting Save Our Wild Salmon by sponsoring her early morning trek up the 14,410 feet of Rainier, the hardest endurance climb in the lower 48 states.

Emily can be seen jogging around the neighborhood, seemingly with little effort. However, by the testimony of practically everyone who has tried it, climbing Mt. Rainier, even on the most fortunate of summer days, is extremely tough.

For my soft part I will stay below in Wallingford keeping a daily posting of what Mt. Rainier looks like – or does not look like – a few feet from Emily’s front door. I have practice, for it is a subject I have been photographing for more than a year, steadying my camera against a power pole at 42nd Street and First Avenue Northeast.

I’ve included here two examples, which I have dated. As every local knows, in any year there are only a few days “The Mountain” can be seen. But what — from Wallingford — will be revealed in the coming three-weeks plus for Emily? These daily postings of the “Mountain That Was God” begin on the first day of August and continue through the 25th, the day of the climb, and perhaps through the month.

When she returns we will ask for an interview.If you would like to help save the wild salmon by helping sponsor Emily’s climb you can contact her at Emily@wildsalmon.org or visit http://wildsalmon.org/donate/. Click “donate now” and then scroll down to “Summit for Salmon” and pick “Emily Nuchols” from the list of climbers.

August 1, 2008: Blue Angels approximate the line of Emily Nuchols upcoming ascent of Mt. Rainier. Photo taken in the early afternoon from the Wallingford corner of 42nd St. and 1st Ave. N.E.. (The dome on the horizon tops Holy Names Academy on Capitol Hill.)

Included as evidence that The Mountain is there. This Rainier was recorded on January 1, 08 and from the same Wallingford intersection (a few doors from Emily’s front door) as those that will be snapped through this month in a watchful accounting or count down to Emily’s ascent…

Looking at Mt. Rainier as if it were there on August 2.

Mt. Rainier twice on August 3. The top was taken around mid-afternoon with a few angels performing for Seafair. The above was snapped about 4:45 pm with the mountain revealed, in part.

Sunset – around 8pm – August 4. The Mountain reflects the color of wild salmon.

Around 7:30 pm – August 5.

Around 6:30 pm – August 6, a Wednesday.

7:30 pm – August 7 – Mountain lost behind miles of haze at the end of a clear but hot day.

6-ish and still beyond the purple haze on 8/8/8.

About one in the afternoon of 8/9/8, a Saturday, with The Mountain relaxing in the bleachers at a cloud rally.

Six or seven hours later after an afternoon squall brushed the north end a rainbow formed a complete semi-circle across the western horizon. As seen from Emily’s avenue in Wallingford its southern end did not quite reach the summit of The Mountain, which was, of course, still hidden behind the remainders of Saturday, 8/9/8.

Sunday, 8/10/8 around 4pm.

Monday, 8/11/8 around 7pm. Had Emily climbed this morning and lingered at the top of The Mountain she could have looked down at Wallingford in the late afternoon.

8/12/8 around 6pm on a generally dismal Tuesday that may have tested the good will of every dear reader.

8/13/8 – a Wednesday – around 5:30 and as clear as The Mountain snapped through the Interstate-5 atmosphere can get.

About 7pm on Thursday the fourteenth after the loitering contributions of this hot day.

A hot Friday afternoon, 8/15/8 – with The Mountain barely detectable on a “clear” day.

A hotter Saturday, 8/16/8, around 6:30 pm, with only the speck of a single crow heading east to the arboretum for the night.

Another clear day and yet impenetrable. 8/17/8

Gray Monday, the 18 of August, about 5:30.

Tuesday the 19th with clouds failing to shape themselves like The Mountain. About 5 pm.

Wednesday the 20th – suggestive of entropy about 6:30 pm.

Thursday the 21st – clouds acting like mountains but no The Mountain about 7:30 pm.

The Mountain shows herself on the afternoon – around 3:30 – of Friday the 22nd, 2008.

August 23, 2008 about 11:30 AM and so some part of two days short of Emily’s ascent of The Mountain. Living now in Portland – and so nearer the Wild Salmon of the Columbia – she will be approaching Mt Rainier from the south side, the side from which she will begin her ascent. We will be watching, sort of.

The day before: Sunday August 24, 2008 about 6:30 pm, and the day before Emily’s scheduled climb for Wild Salmon.  Today it rained and tomorrow is looking at least somewhat wet.  What will become of the climb in such stuff may be revealed tomorrow.

A moment after  the above photo was taken around 3:10 on the afternoon of Aug. 25, 2008 – the day that Emily was scheduled to climb and we assume reach the summit of Mt. Rainier – had The Mountain been in Wallingford, the Seattle neighborhood in which Emily lived when this count down began on the first day of August, it would have been pelted by an impressively heavy rain that flooded the gutters and drove cats to waiting beneath parked cars.  Tomorrow we will attempt to recount Emily and the Wild Salmon’s fate on what we hope was a climb that reached above these piling clouds.

The Mountain show her head around 3:30 pm on August 26, 2008,  the day after the Wild Salmon team was scheduled to reach the summit of Mt. Rainier.  However, no news as yet from Emily nor on the http://www.wildsalmon.org website concerning the success or, we may imagine from yesterday’s weather, gray rain away.  Of course, we hope for pictures soon as evidence either way.  For our part we will continue to watch The Mountain from Wallingford.

Looking towards The Mountain hidden from Wallingford on Wednesday, Sept. 27, around 4pm — and we have news from Emily.

“Thanks Paul.  We ended up getting stormed out. 60 mph winds and avalanche danger turned us around about halfway up Disappointment Cleaver (aptly named :). We were all bummed, but our guides were spectacular and we all had a great time . . . I’ll send you some choice pix tomorrow.  Cheers, Emily”

A Google for Disappointment Cleaver will bring up a great variety of slide shows taken by climbers that follow the route that Emily took, until her group was turned back by those winds.  If you compare some of these illustrated narratives you will soon get a confident impression of the route to the top that goes by way of Camp Muir, Cathedral Rocks, three glaciers and Disapointment Cleaver.  After the rock cleaver one reaches the last part of the climb, up the “big snowy top” of the mountain.

Towards The Mountain from 1st ne and ne 42nd around 4 pm August 28, 08.

August 29, 08 around 7pm with the day’s evidently getting shorter.

Saturday, August 30 about 4 pm.  The Mountain is hidden behind sympathetic clouds.

Last day of August 2008, the 31st, a Sunday and around 2pm.  When Emily Nuchols returns to her Wild Salmon office (now in Portland) and sends us a scene or two of her group’s attempt to climb The Mountain by the Paradise, Camp Muir, Cowlitz Glacier, Cathedral Rocks, Ingraham flats, Disappointment Cleaver, more Ingraham Glacier (I think), Emmons Glacier to the top route, only to run into 60 mph winds while on Disappointment Cleaver, and there be turned back by their guides, we will print them.  Otherwise, this concludes the August record of Mt. Rainier as seen – and not seen – from the northwest corner of the Wallingford intersection of 1st Ave. Northeast and E. 42nd Street, with the camera steadied about seven feet up on the street sign post.  And may more wild salmon make it to Idaho.

Sponsors at the back deck benefit – July 12, 2008. From left: Rachel Kuck, Leigh Newman-Bell, Sarah Kuck, Sherry, Emily Nuchols, Mike Cooksey, Rachel Cooksey, Val Heer. Sitting: Natalie Brandon, Dan Ritzman.