Güd wrtr

All across Canada, the last weekend in July is a bank holiday–that is, the banks and governmental services shut down for a three-day weekend. But in Victoria, it’s more than a three-day weekend. It’s Symphony Splash weekend, this year nicely timed for the day after my birthday, which made me feel even more celebrated.

OK, really, they’re celebrating B.C. day, honouring their province, and this year the 100th anniversary of B.C. parks. But I felt honoured, too. (When in Canada, we spell in Canadian.)

The crowd on the causeway waiting for the annual Victoria Symphony Splash.

Imagine 40,000 people gathering outdoors around Victoria’s Inner Harbour to watch the diminutive Victoria Symphony play their hearts out (all 54 of them–I counted) under the direction of a small woman on a barge, for heaven’s sake. They’ve done this for 21 years in what has to be one of the biggest outdoor concerts on the West Coast of this continent. Rock concerts don’t generally attract that many people.

Did I mention that they play the Splash on a barge?

The Canadian Scottish Regiment Pipe and Drum Band with Victoria Symphony conductor Tania Miller in pedicab.

And the musicians parade across the grounds of the Parliament building in Victoria, led by the Canadian Scottish Regiment Pipe and Drum Band, through the crowd, down the causeway and climb up stairs (some of them with upright basses) to the stage. On a barge.

The Vic Symph on a barge with 11-year-old violin soloist Alice Haeyko Lee.

It looked rather like the hovering barge in the second “Star Wars” movie that Luke and Han used to spring Princess Leia from the clutches of Jabba the Hut. Only it was tethered in a seemingly too small space in a very tight harbour that made Dick and me say to each other, “How did they get that in there?” (Dick, by the way, who covered the Splash as if he was still working for a paper, while I sat in the bleachers. Whadda guy.)

This is even more impressive to someone who mourned the loss of the symphony in her town when it disbanded in 1997. We live in the capital city of California, and we can’t field a symphonic organization like this. And though a newer orchestra has regrouped in Sacramento, the Philharmonic is indeed smaller and plays perhaps four concerts a year.

The Victoria Symphony, in a much smaller city, just performed ten concerts over twelve days, culminating in The Splash. This year they will perform 200 times, an astonishing number for any musical organization.

And all this in a city of about 330,000 people. (Sacramento has three times the population.) Plus the Victoria Symphony (known as VS, for short) sponsors concerts for kids, a new composers workshop for young people, youth volunteers as well as adult ones, young performers, a speakers bureau and (this is my favourite) an instrument petting zoo. You can go pet a clarinet, if you like. In public.

So they put on this big pops concert, and Dick sprung for the expensive seats in the bleachers set up on Belleville Street in front of the Parliament building. It was very festive–lots of Victorians out and about waving free little B.C. flags, wearing temporary B.C. flag tattoos, and sporting moose ears in honor of the parks’ 100th anniversary.

An honorary Canadian celebrating B.C. Day at the Splash.

People everywhere. Ev-ree-where. And, this being Canada, one of the most polite huge crowds you’ve ever seen. Apparently, on Canada Day (July 1), the crowds have gotten rowdy and in some cases violent, breaking store windows even. But on Splash Day, all was genteel. People even shut up so we could all hear the orchestra play a nice program of mostly pops music. Really. Very little crowd noise.

The Splash crowd on the lawn of the Ledge, the Parliament building.

The star of the evening was an 11-year-old violinist named Alice Hayeko Lee, who wowed 40,000 people with the first movement of the Bruch Violin Concerto No. 1. She looked pretty cute onstage in her little white dress with pink sweater (and orange tennies, which maestra Tania Miller pointed out to the crowd). From the first notes of that concerto, Alice had our attention, and we all forgot how cute she was and listened instead to a young master coax stunning music out of her instrument.

The orchestra also debuted a new piece by an 18-year-old composer, Jared Richardson, called “Winds of Kananaskis,” a county outside Banff National park in Alberta. Seventeen years old. He composed it when he was 15, just one of 70 pieces he’s written.

Sheesh.

The concert ended with a very show-offy finale that never fails to please even the most clueless or the most jaded about classical music: the 1812 Overture, complete with cannon and fireworks.

The finale of the Splash: the 1812 Overture and fireworks!

It’s hard not to get jazzed when the sky is shot through with color and the orchestra swings into the final part of that number–the chimes chiming and the trumpets blaring. People were on their feet cheering and stomping their feet, whistling. It was a happy group of people, lemme tell you, their problems forgotten for an evening of great music with their community.

This is what music does, if you let it. It can grab you by the ears and say, “Listen. Feel this.” People who have never experienced a fabulous symphony orchestra miss this. The people of Victoria get it.

And, not incidentally, by 8 a.m. the next day, the barge had disappeared from the Inner Harbour, as had all the signs and bleachers. Dick went on walk-about and took photos to prove it. There was not a speck of garbage anywhere on the lawn of the Ledge in front of the Parliament building. Some 400 volunteers did that. This is Canada. They clean up well and fast here.

Bravo!

For those of you suffering with unbearable heat in places like, say, Sacramento or Texas or anyplace on the East coast, I’m going to suggest that you might want to pass on reading this post. It might make you a little jealous or hostile. On the other hand, if you want to look at the following image and imagine yourself in this lovely spot in the middle of a Pacific Northwest rainforest, it might reduce your blood pressure a bit and make you feel just a bit cooler. Go ahead. Look:

Lake Crescent on a July morning

This is Lake Crescent, Washington. If I am very good and work my butt off over the course of a school year, I get to have about two months off each summer. In 1999, way back in the previous century, Dick and I “discovered” this place in the way that people think they’re the first ones to find some idyllic spot. We had decamped to Victoria, B.C. (my first time in that lovely city) not long after Dick’s mom had died, seeking refuge and solace, as well as cooler weather. While there, we read in a tourist mag about Lake Crescent. On a whim, Dick called and secured lodging in a historic cabin for a couple of nights, thinking that “it looked kinda pretty in the pictures.” Whoa, baby, was that an understatement. Take another look here:

Lake Crescent Lodge, dusk

This is the lodge built in 1916 by a guy named Al Singer who decided, I suppose, that this was the perfect lakeshore spot for one. He was right. It’s still there, along with some outlying buildings that total only 52 guest rooms in this sweet spot. So getting a place to stay there can be tricky. Especially if you dilly-dally about making vacation plans till, say, June, and you want to be there in late July. Which is what happened this year. But I hang with the master vacation planner (no one can pack as much stuff into the trunk of an Accord as Dick Schmidt, baby), who has the best travel karma of anyone I know.

Dick Schmidt on the Lake Crescent Lodge pier

With many persistent phone calls and calendar juggling, he made it happen: three nights at Lake Crescent. For which I am deeply grateful. Especially in light of recent water pipe breakages at my house in Sacramento, if you’ve been reading previous posts. (God bless you, Sonya, for handling all that. Can we send you here as a thank you?) Here’s another Dickie photo (have I said that he is the best photographer I know, up close and personal? or how lucky I am that he likes to travel with me?):

Watercraft on Lake Crescent

Here’s another reason I love to return here. If you look at the photo atop my blog, that’s me, writing–working on a novel, actually–in the sunporch of the Lake Crescent Lodge at dusk, which, in summer, can easily run till 9:30 p.m. I wrote big chunks of the novel set in British Columbia on that sunporch. I am tweaking it still on this trip late at night, alone on that sunporch. It is a heavenly place for me to get my work done. Also, the Lake Crescent gaggle of Canada geese inspired a scene in that novel. No geese this year. Don’t know where the flock’s got to. Just these guys:

It’s a place that works for me as a writer, and I can never have too many of those getaway spots. My friend Pat Schneider, founder of the Amherst Writers and Artists method, is fond of saying that writers need to get away at least once a year to a place where they can relax, recharge and then write. “Spend the first three days sleeping,” she advises. “Then, and only then, can you start your work.” I didn’t sleep for all of the first three days at Lake Crescent, but I sure did take a long nap every afternoon. Woke up from one nap with the beginnings of a poem buzzing around in my head–always a sign that my mind has finally gone on vacation, too, and that it can finally hear the creative parts that want to be put on the page.

This, for someone who spends way too much time dealing with the minutae of life rolling around the brain cells (and I know I’m not alone in that), is what vacation is to me. People tease me about taking my laptop with me on vacation.

Yep, this is what I do...

It’s not that I need to check the email as much as I needneedneed to be able to capture stuff that hasn’t been able to be written for the rest of the year. I am grateful for the company of my Saturday writing group, for the space and encouragement those writers offer me to put words on the page. Without them, I think I would be a much unhappier creative person with far fewer spaces in my life to do writing. But this–this is the time when I know, as Tess Slesinger, a terrific author put it in her good short story, “A Life in the Day of a Writer”:

I am a writer if I never write another line. I am alive if I never step out of this room again. Christ, oh, Christ, the problem is not to expand a feeling, but to condense a feeling–all thought, all ecstasy–tangled and tumbled in the empty crowded head of a writer, to one clear thought, one clear form, and still preserve the enormity, the hugeness, the unbearable all-at-onceness of being alive and knowing it, too.

Amen.

This may look like I’m fishing for presents, or at least birthday greetings, but it’s not. It’s just that not only does July 30 happen to be my birthday (the 53rd this year, if you’re keeping track), but it also happens to be my niece Lauren’s (24–happy birthday, sweetie!) and that of my across-the-street neighbor, Sonya (70), who looks fabulous. I’m not nearly as gorgeous now, let alone when I’m 70. Yet I love Sonya, who is also a great friend.

Sonya might tell you that it’s also the birthday of the daughter of her former next-door neighbor, and I would add that I know at least two other people born July 30 (but I can’t for the life of me remember who they are now). It’s a good day for a birthday.

Actually, it’s a perfect birth day, I’ve always thought. (Thanks, Mom!) I showed up weeks early, apparently, because even in utero I coveted a mid-summer birthday, almost perfectly positioned for swim or water skiing parties at the lake next door. It falls in that time between the end of one school year and the beginning of another, and it is no accident that now, as a middle-aged person (I guess I am living to be 100 then), I try to be out of town on vacation on our birthday.

Not that I don’t want to celebrate with friends and family, but I love being out in the world at this time of summer. Even at Lake Crescent, where it is often gray and chilly, which it was yesterday. Today, however, the sun is shining, turning the lake a color I can only describe as azure, the breeze is blowing softly, moving high, wispy clouds high over Pyramid Mountain.

But I digress. The point here is that Sonya, my loyal, across-the-street neighbor for the past 24 summers, is woman-ing the home front in my absence. She usually does, God bless her, as I do for her when she’s out of town. Typically that consists of Sonya running across the street a couple of times a day to feed my tribe of cats, or me doing the same for her single boy named Dakota.

Sonya Hunter, best neighbor ever

Unfortunately for Sonya, this summer’s vacation began with discovering a small lake on the north side of my house that was suspected to be a sprinkler leak but turned out to be a major water line break. Since I left town, Sonya has been jockeying between Paul the yard guy and great fix-it man, who has been removing stray privets and other invaders, and Ed the plumber, who called me this morning to give me the bad news.

“I can fix the break,” he said in that way that always makes me think that’s not the best idea, “or I can replace the whole line.” Pause to let that sink in; I imagined the dollars that go with each option. “It’s the original water line.” Pause as I did the math: house built in 1921; it’s now 2011… good heavens, that line is almost 90 years old!

“Replace the whole line,” I said, and I could hear Ed sigh, whether in relief or not I couldn’t tell. More work for him, but it has to be done.

“OK,” Ed said. “It’ll be done by the time you get home.”

So in the meantime, to feed and water my cats, Sonya has to import water from her house, check on the (diminishing) lake on the side, still find a way to water plants on the deck and by the garage, and, and, and…

And she’s turning 70 this week, too. Did I say how wonderful she looks? She looks fahhhh-booo-lous. And she is equally fabulous on the inside, too. Truly!

Sonya, this is a public birthday greeting and thank you. All the flowers and gifts I might send can’t adequately convey my gratitude to you, dear neighbor and friend, for all you do for me and mine. You deserve a fabulous getaway or celebration on our day. And we will celebrate when I return home to a new water pipe and far less foliage on one side of my house. (Thanks, Ed and Paul!)

Mahalo nui loa for making my annual birthday vacation possible, for being the best neighbor/pal a gal could have! I owe you a big one!

I can’t believe how easy it is to make butter.

This is not a metaphor. I’m talking literal butter here, the kind you spread on good, home-baked bread, like the kind my BF makes.

It’s really no big deal.

Georgann and the snazzy Kitchen-Aid makin' butter.

A pint of cream and a serious mixer (the BF’s is a honkin’ red Kitchen-Aid). Turn on mixer. Stand back and watch liquid become butter. Stop the blade from turning like a bad carnival ride. Spatula the sides of the metal bowl. At some point, the butter begins to leak (what else?) buttermilk. That’s how you know it’s done.

This is what I learned from my BF this week at her new home on Bainbridge Island, Washington, known locally as BI: Butter is a breeze. And the sun shines every day on BI.

I believe the first one because I saw it. But as for the second… I know the Pacific Northwest. The sun, most emphatically, does not shine every day. Well, maybe it does behind the clouds. But the BF loves the clouds and the mist; this is her kind of weather. Which comes from spending too much time in Wales, I think. Or San Francisco. Or Pacific Grove. All places she called home for a time.

But the BF, husband Ron and daughter Emma have forsaken Sacramento, her hometown and now mine, for BI. And who can blame them? Sacramento in the summer can fry you. Her new place, dripping with pines and so much green you can taste it, suits her, as she likes to say, down to the ground. She is beyond happy. I have rarely seen her so happy. And she deserves this.

I mean, check out this house.

Ron, Emma and Georgann Turner at their new home on Bainbridge Island, Washington

It’s a cute-as-spit two-story with a front porch at the end of a cul de sac that runs into forest on two sides. Deer emerge from the greenery across the street and disappear into it like the baseball players in “Field of Dreams.” It’s beautifully furnished (Ikea rocks!) and, though they’ve been there a little over a month, the house feels cozy and settled, as if they’ve been islanders for years.

It helps that they rented it from people who have decamped to Norway for a year or two and left them with some furnishings and a nicely tended yard. But still, there are BF touches all over the place–notably the red accent pieces in the black and white kitchen. “It’s a newspaper!” I said.

“Black and white and red all over?” she said, peering into the mixing bowl as butter was being made.

She gets me. “Yeah!” I said.

Georgann, Ron and Emma spent two afternoons touring Dick and me around their new island: to their local public beach, which is about forty feet long (homeowners with beachfront property apparently have possession of the beach, too). To the harbour (Canadian spelling on the sign because they’re so close, I guess) to watch the ferry dock through a sea of masts. To Bay and Hay Feed, which is also a nursery and cafe, clothing store and lunch spot–not to mention an actual feed store. To Eagle Harbor Book Co., where I redeemed my birthday gift certificate for books by local authors. To the local museum, which currently has an exhibit of Ansel Adams’s photos of Manzanar, a WWII internment camp (some 227 Bainbridge Islanders were interned there).

Georgann and Jan at Fort Ward State Park, Bainbridge Island

To Fort Ward State Park to walk Sam, their sweet golden retriever.

And at the end of the second afternoon, after lunch at Cafe Nola and picking up groceries at Town and Country, we headed home to practice Skype-ing (a new thing for me) and start dinner. The butter-making came first.

After it becomes butter in the mixer, it begins to separate. “Into what?” I said.

“Butter and buttermilk,” said the BF.

“Wait. It starts as cream, then becomes butter, then goes back to liquid?” My mind boggled. Chemistry in action.

“Yep,” said the BF, stopping the mixer to show me. Sure enough, a milky liquid in the bottom of the bowl. “We save this and make biscuits with it.”

Labeling the buttermilk next to the brand new butter.

She scooped the butter out of the bowl and mashed it around like Play-Doh, rinsing it under running water, squeezing it, then rinsing it again. Then she plopped it in a small bowl, poured the buttermilk into a lidded jar and labeled it.

“That’s it? Butter?” I said. “No salt? Nothing else?” I tried to imagine our foremothers with a churn, turning and turning all that cream. It must have taken forever. They must have had forearms and biceps like pitchers.

“That’s it,” she said.

And it was. Simple. Clean. Easy. More things in life should be that way. Perfect on her homemade bread, which Ron offered to Dick as a pre-dinner snack. He smacked his lips in appreciation. And we inhaled the pasta carbonara the BF made later, too–more cream and onions and bacon over linguine. Good salad. The exquisitely simple bread and butter.

So I am happy to see the BF so happy. It made me forget for a while that she has moved two states away to begin a new life. It helped me forget the year and a half she spent so sick, recovering sllllloooooowwwwwly from cancer surgery. It reminded me again of how lucky she is to have this second chance–or maybe fifth or tenth, she says–to start over in a new place that suits her down to the (very wet) ground.

I had feared that an era had ended. But, as she has assured me, our friendship will not end.

The BFFs on BI

It began twenty-three years ago writing letters when she attended college in Wales. Now, instead of aero-grams, we will email and Skype. It will take on a new form, like turning cream into butter.

The sun may not shine every day on BI. But the BF is shining on her path to wellness. She is the sunflower lifting its head to the light, the bird tweeting a song from the depths of its grateful heart. And that makes me very, very happy, too.

I awoke this morning in Vancouver, Washington, in a big, soft bed with a line from a song in my head: “We take so much for granted when so much comes free.”

It’s a great song, “Falling in Love in America,” written by someone I’m proud to call a friend. But then, Antsy McClain calls all his fans “friends.” He’s the lead singer guy of the Trailer Park Troubadours, and he and the Troubs played their first gig in Portland last night at a charming old refurbished theater called the Alberta Rose. They rocked the joint, even if they didn’t pack it (“the Trailer Park what?” said the polyester-clad Antsy onstage, resplendent in a blue plaid sport coat and two-tone shoes). And yes, Portlanders didn’t know the Troubs before 8 p.m. July 22, but some of them did by 11 p.m., lemme tell ya. And they were laughing on their way out the door.

Antsy does this–puts smiles in our hearts every time he takes the stage with songs both goofy and touching–from the opening “One Less Trailer Here in Pine View Heights” to, yes, “Falling in Love in America,” which he calls his “love song to America.” That it is. And you can’t not love a guy who sings about and lives by the Aluminum Rule: Thou shalt enjoy the ride. Amen!

Antsy and Polly Esther McClain

(Every so often, Antsy’ll shout out during the show, “Gimme a big amen!” And the crowd–even the newbies–always responds, “AMEN!”)

And I didn’t know how much I needed that “amen” and those goofy and touching songs until last night. It’s been a year of change and loss, and the grief of so much of that has just hit me… now that I’m finally on vacation, now that I’ve allowed someone I love to drag me out of town for the seventeen days. (Thanks, Dickie!) We’re driving north to two places we love–Lake Crescent, Wash., and Victoria, B.C.–where I wrote and researched much of a novel that is now done and is looking for a home publisher. We will visit friends along the way, like Antsy and his lovely wife Polly Esther and their Troubs buddies last night. And I’m amused to note that this surprises me: I didn’t know how much I needed this break from my regular life.

When I sit and think about all that’s happened in the last six months, I’m a little surprised. Not that I didn’t feel it as it was happening–I did. But the cumulative effect of so much change stuns me.

I was lying in bed this morning as a screamingly lovely sunny day blossoms outside, and I made a list:

• I broke my left foot in February in the little trailer where I teach, moving too quickly (me?) from one room to another. Klutzy me fell off my clogs–stupid clogs–and I spent 12 weeks in a knee-high boot, part of it on a kneelie-wheelie scootin’ around, trying to be patient with healing.

• A dear friend from my second newspaper job, Brian Hamlin, died six months after a diagnosis of stomach cancer. He was the light and heart of The Reporter newsroom in Vacaville, known for leaving funny notes and, for some reason, rubber rats on people’s desks. He mentored more young journalists than anyone I know.

• My BFF picked up and decamped from Sacramento, moving herself and husband and two daughters to Bainbridge Island. After two years of illness that has had her in bed much of the time, this is a great move for the newer, healthier Georgann.

• I spent time sitting in a chemo suite and going to some of her radiation treatments with another dear friend, a woman who has been a second mother to me, diagnosed early this year with lung cancer. Ruth Rita did not lose her hair until the very end of the ordeal, which, I think, is a testament to her tenacity.

• I finished up a 17-year stretch of advising a literary journal I created at the college where I teach. Next year, a new advisor will help a new group of students create Susurrus, which means “a light whispering or rustling sounds; a murmur.”

• Another friend, Judy Parke, who has battled breast cancer for the past five years, died in early July. It had spread to her liver and bones and brain, and she fought that disease with a ferocity I have not often seen. We sat together during some of her infusions in a hospital chemo suite, me writing in a journal as she talked story to me, both of us drinking her favorite peppermint tea. She used every means she could find in traditional and alternative medicine to keep herself alive, and she did it for five years. Judy will always be, to me, the poster girl for metastasized breast cancer.

In all those difficulties there were blessings, of course: I did not have to have surgery or so much as a cast on my broken foot. It has healed nicely, thank you, and it reminded me how lucky I am to be, as I often tell doctors, chronically healthy. I was fortunate to visit Brian a few times before he made it home to be with his family in his last days. I had one of the best Susurrus classes EVER and fabulous assistance from a volunteer writing coach (thanks, Katie!), a terrific designer (bravo, Laura!) and a fine manuscript wrangler (mahalo, April!). I have spent more time with my BFF in and out of Sacramento since she moved (we’ll see her tomorrow on her new island, in fact). Ruth Rita has finished her treatments and is home resting and recovering.

And I was fortunate to be with my friend Judy in the last two weeks of her life, holding her hand, stroking her forehead and temples, singing to her. One of those songs was “Scrapbook,” an Antsy McClain tune, as a matter of fact, with the memorable line: “I won’t cry because it’s over; I’ll smile because it was.”

That’s where I am today… smiling because it was. Every so often a student will write in a journal or a paper something about “taking things for granite.” It always makes me smile–me, the girl who grew up in a place called Granite Bay. It’s become a metaphor to me for the rock that underpinned my early years, the spine-stiffener that holds me up, even when I forget it’s there.

It is my mantra for this trip–and beyond, I hope. It’s the kind of thing that Antsy McClain might put in a song.

Ansty and Hot Rod Todd

Indeed he did: “We take so much for granted when so much comes free.”

Thanks for the reminder, the music, the lifting of my spirit last night, Antsy. I’m not takin’ stuff for granite. I am beyond grateful for my lucky, lovely life; for people who love me and take good care of me; for the good friends and great experiences that have added up to the me who is typing this now in the big, soft bed.

Gimme a big amen!

(Thanks to R.D. Schmidt for the new photos! He rocks!)

It was the last day of our stay on Kauai. We looked at each other the night before and said, “How do you want to spend the last day?” Every time we get a little sad, hating for vacation to end, wondering when we’ll get back here. We try to make the last day special.

“Well, we’ll start at a garden tour by 8:30 a.m.,” Dick said.

And we did, touring the Allerton Garden, a series of garden “rooms” created by Robert Allerton and his son, John Gregg Allerton, beginning in the 1930s. Not only is Mr. Allerton’s Garden of Eden home to the famous Moreton Bay Fig trees featured in Jurassic Park (the very same trees!), it’s a showplace of sculpture in stone and concrete and, yes, foliage.

Jurassic Park tree (really, a Moreton Bay fig) and me.

Robert Allerton was originally an artist, and the garden reflects his method of sculpting with plants.

It’s a magical place and widely used in films and TV. Parts of “Gilligan’s Island” were filmed here, as well as the fourth “Pirates of the Carribean” movie. And Tattoo in “Fantasy Island” stood on the lanai of an Allerton house in the garden to point and call, “Da plane! Da plane!” The garden, a non-profit part of the National Tropical Botanical Garden system, makes no money from Hollywood. It can’t, our guide David told us, or it would lose its non-profit status.

One of Mr. Allerton's orchids.

But the garden can brag about its fame. And lots of tourists can pose for photos in the huge roots of the Moreton Bay figs.

And while that was fabulous, the highlight of the day was zooming (as our friend Cora likes to say) up to Kokee State Park, past Waimea Canyon (the Grand Canyon of the Pacific, Mark Twain allegedly called it), to the end of the road to see if we could catch a glimpse of what may be my favorite sight in all Hawaii.

The Kalalau Valley is reachable on foot via a wicked trail called the Na Pali trail on the north shore of the island. You can also get to its beach by boat or zoom in for a quick view via helicopter. But I love to drive to the second lookout, plop my butt on the edge of what was once part of a volcano and look out to see the spines of ancient rock cascading to the sea and green cathedral spires reaching for the sky.

The challenge is that Kalalau is often shrouded in clouds, so the best time to see it is in the morning… when we were in Mr. Allerton’s garden. And for the past few days, it’s been rainyrainyrainy. We tried to see Kalalua a couple of days before, and it was socked in… really, it looked like a white sock or a big cotton ball or… pick your similie… had descended upon the majestic sight.

So after the garden tour, we decided to take a big chance and zoom up to the overlook. Though it is not far in miles from the Poipu area where we were staying, it takes a good hour and a half over slow roads (there are no fast roads on Kauai, honestly). And there was no guarantee the valley would be open.

This is where faith comes in. Dick hightailed it to the little town of Waimea in our rental car, which, naturally, tailed two verrrry slooooow tourists for some time. (Funny how we don’t think of ourselves that way, huh?) Stopped briefly in Waimea to get a sandwich to go and then raced up the winding road, bypassing the Grand Canyon of the Pacific, as clouds swirled around and over us.

Waimea Canyon (the Grand Canyon of the Pacific), clouding over.

Every so often, they’d part, revealing a piercing blue sky and huge, friendly, fluffy clouds miles high. I thought, “Be open. Be open.”

We drove to the second overlook at Kalalau, blue skies overhead, parked and ran up the incline to see… yes! the same wispy clouds slowly climbing one wall of the massive green valley… and majestic peaks on the back wall in full sun, cascading into impossibly blue ocean. My breath catches every time I first see this place. Part of me wants to weep—I can’t believe it’s still here, still so perfect.

Kalalau Valley being overtaken by mist.

I plopped my butt on the edge and watched. Dick took photos. Tourists milled about, one young woman saying what everyone thinks about this place: “It’s magic.”

And it is. Not because it’s always visible, but because, like Brigadoon, it isn’t. It emerges from the mist when it’s ready, perhaps when weather and air conditions permit, perhaps when someone asks. Two days earlier, I stood on that same spot and looked into a shroud of cloud. I asked. It did not open up. On our last day, we watched the mists overtake the valley and close off the view within ten minutes of our arrival.

The Kalalau mist

We hung around for another half hour or so, waiting, watching. I asked, “Open up again. Please.” But those clouds were persistent. We’ve seen wispy ones wander into the valley and lift up and over it like white hot air balloons, but not today. As we waited, Dick noticed a tiny ladybug on him… not a traditional red one but a pale green one that landed on his pants of about the same color.

Green ladybug at Kalalau overlook.

We tried to get it to hold still for a photo, but the camera close to it made it nervous, we think. Finally, it flitted to my hand, opened its wings and flew away.

But we got to see the Kalalau valley, however briefly from above, to remind us that there is magic alive and well in the world… even if we can’t always see it. (And other gifts besides the ones you hoped for, like a little green ladybug.) The lovely things are always there—like blue skies and big fluffy clouds, like Kalalau. If you’re lucky and patient, have a little faith, they show themselves, and yes, they can literally take your breath away.

Well, not really. It was used as the model for the fictional Bali Hai in the movie, “South Pacific,” but here on Kauai, the famous triangular peak is known by its Hawaiian name: Mt. Makana. It serves as the backdrop for what may be my favorite beach in all of Hawaii—Makua (more commonly called Tunnels) Beach on the north shore of Kauai.

Check it out:

Dick and I have been lazing around the north shore for a week now, and on sunny days (not as many as we’d like; it’s winter, after all) we rise at a reasonable time (it’s also vacation) and head north on da beach. Walkng on the rain-softened sand is a workout, lemme tell ya, and we need the workout. When we rech the point on the beach where you can first see Mt. Makana, Dick goes into his mouth trumpet imitation, blowing a dead-on version of “Bali Hai.” (Ask him for it if you see him.)

I’ve heard it a hundred times, and it still cracks me up.

And there, looming in the distance, at the end of a water- and wind-worn ridge of mountains, towers Mt. Makana. I feel a sharp intake of breath, feel my chest tighten every time, as it does when I put my face in the ocean, trustin that I can breathe through a snorkel. I put my feet in the water, even if the ocean is raging, as it has been this week, and I stare at that ridgeline. Or I cruise the waterline looking for interesting shell pieces for the hobby I picked up a couple of years ago on this very beach—making amateurish shell pendants. They’re completely out of my typical skill set. That’s why they’re fun to do. Each necklace is unique—I have no idea what I’m doing—and I give them away to friends and family, some of whom actually wear them. But I have the most fun making them.

It doesn’t matter what I do out there. I could sit or stand on that beach, dig my feet into the warm sand or let the incoming waves give me a friendly slap about the knees. Dick moseys around, taking photos of the mountain he’s shot thousands of times before because he can, because it’s there. Could there be a better reason?

Dick workin' on some serious R&R on Tunnels Beach.

When he’s tired of that, he sits in the shade against the exposed, above-sand roots of an ironwood tree, resting, and waits for me. Awwww…

When we made our way to the beach on sunny Sunday, someone had erected a piece of driftwood on Haena Point. Someone had hung two dreamcatchers made of things found on the beach from the long, angled mast. Each wore a shell dangling from the dreamcatcher. How many dreams did they catch? How many people did what we did—walk up to them, reach up to touch them, perhaps make a wish or voice a dream?

Mt. Makana and the dreamcatcher

Yesterday we went back and only one dreamcatcher remained. Where had the other gone? Did its creator reclaim it? Did the ocean take it with a big wave? Did someone need to bring it home to help their dreams?

There’s no way to know. And it doesn’t matter. This is a place where dreams are made and where they begin to come true. Whether you think of it as Bali Hai or Mt. Makana, she calls you, saying, as the song goes, “Come away, come away.” I reached up to touch the little shell and whisper a dream to the catcher on our last day on the north shore.

“Mahalo nui loa,” I said. “Thank you very much for this place, this time, everything.”

I have great faith that she hears me.

The only problem with vacationing in Hawaii is that all your friends hate you for it. It’s impossible to write postcards (those old-fashioned 4×6 things with photos on them of impossibly beautiful, and sometimes faked, images) or emails or, yes, blog posts without making the people you love most wildly jealous.

I know. I get that way when other people vacation in stunning or exciting or out-of-the-way places. We all do. It’s one of those human things: We’re jealous creatures who want all the good things of others for ourselves, too.

So that’s why, upon reading this blog, I encourage you to loosen your lips, stick a relaxed tongue between them and blow me a big raspberry.

Feel better?

Besides, you’d hate Kauai. No matter how lovely the photos you’ve seen of this greengreengreen island, I always tell people that Dick and I go to the soggiest place possible. Two years ago in December, we were on island for ten days, and it rained—no, it poured—for all ten of them.

Hanalei taro (photo by Dick Schmidt)

We drove around the two-thirds of island you can drive here, looking for sun. Hanalei on the north shore seems always to be drippy—it’s what makes it beautiful, when the clouds hang low over the rim of mountains behind the town and gorgeous bay. Lihue, the main town, lay under cloudy gray, damp skies. Poipu, the “sunny” south shore—ditto. Only when we drove up the mountain to the often drenched Waimea Canyon (“Grand Canyon of the Pacific,” Mark Twain allegedly said), did the sun peek out a wee bit amid the passing clouds, parting like white curtains to reveal glimpses of dramatic red rock.

Kalapaki Beach sunset (photo by Dick Schmidt)

“It’s a good thing we’ve been here before,” I said to Dick. “If this was our first trip, we’d be mighty disappointed.” But the truth is, Kauai is stunning in all weather. And, as they say here, if you don’t like the weather, wait ten minutes. It changes that fast. Usually.

This year, though, we apparently brought a bit of Sacramento winter with us. It’s been below 60 degrees pretty much every night here (and there are no heaters in Hawaii—who needs heaters in the semi-tropics?), and the locals are freeeeeeezing, poor things. We, who left behind 40-degree fog, think it’s heaven. Any time I can chuck my long undies, slip into shorts and sandals and put my feet in warm ocean water, I’m happy.

Jan on one of her favorite beaches (photo by Dick Schmidt)

Yesterday we went to an afternoon slack key guitar concert put on by Doug and Sandy McMaster in Hanalei. They perform twice a week here, very informally. Doug is the slack key guitar master, and Sandy talks story and strums a ukulele. If you walked in wound up about anything, within ten minutes of listening, you’re a wet noodle. You leave your shoes or sandals at the door, as people do in Hawaii, wander in to find a folding chair, and settle in for a lovely couple of hours in your bare feet.

But poor Sandy was wearing socks. Socks! Doug had boots and socks on. It was almost as shocking as if they’d been wearing mittens.

But when Doug starts to play, Sandy often puts her uke in her lap and her hands on top of it, closes her eyes and listens. You can’t help but do that, too, and let the music take you where it will. The McMasters promise that slack key will slow your heartbeat and lower your blood pressure, and it’s true. You can feel every soul in the room decompress until they’re all floating on a wave of gentle notes.

The McMasters have a CD with Doug playing and Sandy talking that is so meditative, they warn you not to play it while driving. No joke.

Doug and Sandy McMaster, slack keyin' it and talkin' story.

So Dick and I sat there, floating and listening to a style of music the Hawaiians adapted from Mexican vaqueros who brought their guitars when they arrived in Hawaii to help with wayward cattle in the late 1700s. The Hawaiians didn’t know how to tune the guitars and figured out tunings that worked for them (they have lovely names like “Taro Patch,” “Punahele” and “F Wahine”). And so ki ho alu (which means “loosen the (tuning) key”), or slack key guitar, was born.

Doug played what has become a local favorite for his second-to-last song, his arrangement of “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” He arranged this under pressure years ago by a two-and-a-half-year-old named Emma Rose, who, Sandy told the audience, is now twelve-and-a-half. Emma Rose and her parents came to the beach where Doug and Sandy played more than 2,000 consecutive sunsets and asked Doug if he knew “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” He didn’t, and the next night, Emma Rose was back. “Do you know Puff yet?” she asked.

“You better work on an arrangement,” Sandy said. “She’ll be back.”

So Doug did and performed it for Emma Rose when she returned. Sandy recalled that Emma smiled and danced. “She still asks for her song when she’s here,” Sandy said.

I would, too, but I didn’t have to. Instead, I sat with closed eyes and restful mind and floated in that land called Honalee, which is awfully close to Hanalei, the little town ringed by mountains that resemble a dragon’s back. In Hawaiian, the dragon is a mo’o, a giant lizard, and his head lies atop the water at the north end of the bay. But he is a peaceful mo’o, like Puff, who lives forever in song.

Doug and Sandy finished the concert, as they always do, with “Hawaii Aloha,” which may be my favorite Hawaiian song, even if it does make me cry. Though there are English lyrics for it, I’ve only heard the Hawaiian ones, and they’re beautiful. It’s a song often played at the end of Hawaiian concerts or gatherings or church services, its lyrics written by the Rev. Lorenzo Lyons, a missionary to the Big Island, and sung to the tune of an old church hymn, “I Left It All With Jesus,” by James McGranahan.

The chorus goes:

E hau’oli na ‘opio o Hawai’i nei
‘Oli e! ‘Oli e!
Mai na aheahe makani e pa mai nei
Mau ke aloha, no Hawai’i.

And it means in English:

Happy youth of Hawaii
Rejoice! Rejoice!
Gentle breezes blow
Love always for Hawaii.

Yes, oh, yes… love always for Hawaii.

This is my annual Christmas poem, this year written to honor a new baby born Dec. 8, 2010. She’s the daughter of Christina and Mitch, Dick’s nephew and niece-in-law. (See my earlier post, “Welcome to the world, baby girl,” for more about the baby and her parents.)

Merry Christmas to all!

————-

Hatchling

Not quite winter—
trees still shudder
in their crimson sweaters,
days darken earlier
as they sink toward the solstice,
and nights dip their toes in frost.

The world falls to a hush,
except for the encouraging honks
of homebound geese overhead,
a dark arrow winging toward the river.

Then a baby’s new voice rises,
the high treble fresh and clear
as morning. The elders gather
in protective formation
to welcome and hush,
cuddle and rock the hatchling,
who, although unfeathered,
blinks into strange light,
who already understands
that this, now,
is home.

Jan Haag
December 2010

Yesterday I visited my friend Judy at her home in East Sacramento. She greeted me at the door in a fuzzy winter hat. Her hair stuck out at odd angles from underneath it, and she immediately put her hand to her head.

“I haven’t been able to wash my hair,” she said apologetically, though it didn’t matter to me. I was just happy to see her walking and talking. “Twelve days.”

Twelve days since a team of doctors made a sausage-shaped incision on the right side of her skull to try to remove a cancerous brain tumor. Twelve days and she’s walking and talking—not perfectly normally—but she’s up and moving.

For four-and-a-half years my friend Judy has battled metasasized breast cancer. It’s migrated everywhere—to her liver and bones and now her brain—and yet she’s still in the game, pitching and catching. She may not run the bases at top speed, but she gets around. I tell her she’s the poster girl for metasasized breast cancer.

She told me, right after her diagnosis, when I ran into her at our local post office one breezy summer day, that she was hoping for a miracle. By my count, she’s had at least a dozen.

Judy at her 65th birthday party, May 25, 2007

She lived to see her 65th birthday and had a doozy of a party. She’s pursued a variety of treatment methods—both Western and alternative medicine—and some combination of those two has kept her alive all these years.

That and sheer grit. Faith, too. She has a lot of that.

Cancer has been her full-time job, and she’s gotten good at it. I sit with Judy every three weeks in the Kaiser chemo suite when she gets a dose of a drug to try to halt the progression of her tumors. We talk and laugh and have way more fun than is probably typical in the chemo suite. But I have seen her decline over the past three months. She forgets things much more easily. She’s had weakness on her right side. The tumors are on the move. She’s in a last ditch fight for her life.

This morning, I made tea and carried the teapot to the living room where we drank from heart-shaped cups on heart-shaped saucers. We drink a lot of tea together—mostly peppermint, her favorite. Judy took off her cap so I could see her incision. The stitches had just been removed, and I was mighty impressed. The wound is pink and healing nicely—not puffy, not infected. Her doctor, I teased her, is an amazing seamstress.

She beamed. “I know. She’s so nice. I really like her. I trust her. She said she’d try to retain function on my right side, and she did pretty well.”

Judy’s right side is still weak, but she gripped my hand with the thumb and two fingers of the right hand in a powerful grip. “I can’t feel my last two fingers,” she said, and they are floppy.

But she is not giving up. She and her sweetheart, Walt, have been through so much during this long journey. She is grateful for his love and assistance, as she is for her son Eddie’s help, too. After we drank our tea, Judy needed to lie on the sofa to talk. So I sat in a chair, cradling my teacup in my strong right hand, watching her rest. I have sat with people in the last stages of long illness before. I know what this looks like.

But this woman’s not done fighting. She doesn’t want the radiation doctors are suggesting. “That would cause dementia,” she said, her dander rising. “I’m not gonna let that happen.”

She was concerned that she can no longer dye her hair the bright red it has been, she says, for fifty years. I confided that my new year’s resolution is not to color mine anymore either. It’s an odd combination of brown/mousy gray, as one of my grandmothers used to say. It is not particularly pretty, but it’s mine, and I am grateful for it.

“We’ll be as we are together then,” I said.

Judy smiled, stretched her right hand out to squeeze mine with three powerful digits.. “We’ll be as we are,” she repeated.

Which is all we can be, isn’t it?