Seattle: Travel Day

I'm in a mood to flee as I board my flight for Seattle. The previous few months have been a grind and seem to be disjointed and themeless in my mind. I have had no sense of real focus despite my routine schedule. I have been a hamster on a wheel, stuck on fast forward without gaining any sense of accomplishment. I need a break, even if it's only four days. I'm bound for the northwest, a new corner of the country for me. A lifetime ago, my family lived in a small town near Portland, but I hardly remember it now, having left when I was only three. I'm going, I say to myself. Going to get on that plane and go. Go to breathe, live a little differently, let a new town open itself up to me.

Travel is so much more than moving from one point to another. Every journey has its unique limitations, discoveries and uncertainties, but at some point it all begins when the need to seek new ideas and horizons outweighs complacency. Off I must go every so often. With a healthy sense of irony, I am dusting off mental cobwebs at Halloween. Perfect.

The flight from San Jose is smooth as glass, the jet arcing north as the sun sets in a streak of gold and ochre beyond the western Pacific. I'm sitting on the inland side of the cabin and spot each of the snow-clad Cascade peaks one by one until the craggy and grand Mt. Rainier emerges and then quickly disappears in the twilight mists and clouds.

SeaTac Airport is very quiet this Saturday evening. We snag our luggage and hike the five-minute walk to the Link Light Rail train station. For $2.75 we get a 30-minute ride to downtown Seattle, a no-brainer alternative to taxis and rental cars.** Our hotel is about a four-block walk downhill and then three south along Pike Street. Check-in at the Alexis Hotel is just as easy, and we're here. Just like that.

Three deep breaths and then we are out the door again for dinner across the street at Boka. Halloween is here, drifting past our restaurant window in groups of three and four. A party of eight arrives, including Fred Flintstone, John MacEnroe, a cruise ship captain, a floozie, and a few others. Uncle Sam rides by outside on a tall bicycle, wearing a very tall hat. A young vampire is eating a burger with his three pretty wenches next to us.  My dinner of quail stuffed with sausage over cannellini beans is a savory treat that hits the spot, and I'm satisfied. It's too dark to tell what Seattle looks like at this hour.

Cloaked now in darkness, the street and city have not yet emerged in my consciousness. I caught a few glimpses of waterways and stadiums when the jet roared northward earlier, but when we circled down to the airport, I lost my bearings.  I have no sense of place yet. This savory meal has only served as a hint of what may come. We'll be on foot and taking public transit on this trip; details are more easily grasped that way, and I prefer it. Time to rest and let go of Monterey so that Seattle may emerge in the morning.

Small Bird, Big Problem

A small bird crashes headlong into a pane of glass, nearly killing himself. He flutters to a perch up off the ground and then sits quietly in a daze, his senses gradually clearing. That's when I see him. I am with two others, and we are all alarmed at his appearance. He is panting slowly with his beak agape, and his eyes are closed. He looks like a little wreck, feathers askew and call silenced.

A house finch is a very small bird, almost ordinary as birds go, except for their courting songs in springtime. Then, very few birds are as lyrical and sweet to hear. They call and sing as if doing so sets their very souls a-flight. I've listened for finches ever since I first noticed them as a child. While dour and stern scientists hesitate to apply terms such as "merry" and "happy" to mere birds, these are the exact words that always come to mind when I hear their warbling trills. They sing with wild abandon, as if throwing themselves into the effort like feathered rock-star flutists. It's just beautiful.

The bird's head, shoulders and chest have a blush of red, as if an artist has just dusted him with red ochre. He has a short stout beak and bright black eyes. The rest of his feathers are barred, medium brown and pale duff, easily providing camouflage when he's hunting for seeds in the dry grasses in this area.

The stunned bird perches with his feet gripping the iron bar beneath him. He seems to be maintaining his balance and I am relieved the air is still; a stiff breeze might send him reeling.  Many birds die by hitting window panes; the rude shock of a full-force slam nearly always breaks necks or crushes bones. We watch the finch for a while and wonder what to do next. I've found juvenile birds grounded by such crashes before and helped them briefly to recover and then let them go. This little male is already up out of harm's way and appears to be marginally functional already; it would stress him further to be captured, so we just watch and wait, we three observers gathered below.

Once again the weird intrusion of man's inventions on the patterns of natural life is shown to harmful effect. A bird in flight has been brought down by something it had no defense or preparation for:  A pane of glass. For all intents and purposes, the very air had become solid and impenetrable and the bird was nearly ruined. Pure luck of positioning on impact was all that allowed him to live on.

If I were to experience a similarly deadly and terrifying event, I would get out of bed in the morning and find no floor to stand on, or find that all the items in my car had turned to water or evaporated in a puff of dust when I touched them.  It would make no sense to my brain just as the glass made no sense to the bird. If he could make sense of things before, I doubt he can now. Such a sudden impact against an immovable object has surely caused some internal damage, most likely his brain and internal organs.

Creatures in the natural world are paying a big price so that we can be comfortable and maintain a luxurious lifestyle. Even our pets create havoc even as they seem benign and cute. An example:  Songbirds are consumed in the millions every year by our fluffy, dear house cats. Who knows how many animals become road kill or drown in leftover nets and fishing line.

What's remarkable is that other living species have been able to live somehow as we have spread and multiplied year after year all over the globe.  The little finch seems to have survived, but just barely. He may be killed in some other way soon enough, his capacity to flee predators perhaps diminished by his concussion.

We leave him to his fate eventually. Wild things are better off most of the time without us intervening and imposing our sense of order on them. I just wish his crash wasn't such a perfect metaphor for our day and age and the natural world.

Pausing For A Moment

It's Fall. We had Winter all Summer and now have Summer in Autumn. Today was one of the most beautiful days of the year, equal to any wonderful summer day of gilded childhood memory, but it's October. Shouldn't it be cool and crisp?

I can hear the ocean waves pounding all around the edges of Pacific Grove, a low rumbling continuous heart beat, a steady hum of energy.  I stop to think for a moment and realize that the waves have been rushing and foaming exactly that way since forever.  Nothing has changed about that. Except that the ocean is continually changing the shore, grain by grain of sand. So, in constancy there is change. It has been a light-on-the-heart day. I loved it.

This is my 555th post, kind of a cool number. It's hard to believe I've written that much. I guess when I reach 1,000 I'll have a party. Thank you for taking time to read my stuff.

A Leaf, A Dawn Swim

Fog dresses the morning, demure behind a soft gray veil. Unusual humidity lingers in the atmosphere. Sounds are amplified and odors linger as if able to become visible.

I am swimming today, as I do nearly every day. My companions and I murmur familiar questions between laps as we rest at the wall, breathing and waiting, eyeing the pace clock at the side of the pool.

"How many more?"

"Three more. We go on the 60."

We gather our strength, coil our legs and push away, moving, stretching, reaching for the far wall. We swim, together and yet alone.

The day is gray on gray, a barely noticed condition of time and space that matters insofar as it is oxygen, the air we take in in a measured rhythm.  Backs, shoulders, hands and arms sense moving water as they flex and turn, grip and pull.

My mind takes in images as my head turns for a breath, my eyes covered with misted goggles. Forms are surreal and distorted, sometimes beautiful in an instant and sometimes a mysteriously confusing blur. My mind plays with all of them as my body goes about its work, its play, my joy. I notice how detached I am sometimes from what I am doing. It's a weird pleasure to be both very tired in this pool and mentally adrift in time and space.

"Go six 200s on a descending interval on the next red top. 3:10, 3:00 and 2:50. Get your legs into it." It's a jot of information that we understand implicitly. We have been programmed and set to work again with these words, know exactly when to begin and how fast to swim, how much to rest. The brevity and simplicity of the instruction is precise, perfectly so. The container of the command allows for release of the mind and spirit, and they fly as if the act of swimming is actually an act of aviation. We are water birds, soaring.

The work intensifies and we are brought to earth. The coach is the designated assassin of our reveries, the remote voice from the dry deck whom we have assigned permission to push us beyond the point we are willing to push ourselves alone. The coach and the clock, with its four colored hands circling silently, demand and expect that we swim, do not paddle and dither about. By complying, we agree. We are keenly involved in effort, movement and flow. The clock is the master, the coach its accomplice. The onset of dawn continues in an almost imperceptible increase of light and visual detail. The clock, lit with a spotlight, is the sun and moon for this hour; we began in darkness and end in light; no one notices the change as it happens.

"Last one. Make it your best."

Why do we obey? Why don't we stop and look at the flock of crows, Escher-esque, above us, silhouetted against the pale sky? We are gradually reduced from autonomous, well-considered mature adults to automatons, slaves of liquid motion, our minds yielding to the simple commands of the coach. It is our desire, each of us, to go beyond what is ordinarily comfortable and gain access to an altered state of being. We are swimmers, horizontal, moving through turbulent water, lost in our experience, enlivened by it.

Then, it all stops. The work has ended. Pounding hearts and heaving breaths gradually calm. Effort has ceased; we are gathered at the wall, blinking at the lightening sky. Now the beauty of the morning is reflected in the stilling waters of the pool. The day has begun. In our minds, the work of swimming has aided the dawn, urged the sun to rise and the stars to recede. But now the coach is simply another person, and we are adults again, minds turning to tasks of the day that lies ahead.

I shower, dress, walk to my car and drive slowly home, noticing how beautiful the drifting mist looks. It's as if a soft hand has blurred white chalk across a painting of Monterey. At home, collected drops of dew bead and shimmer on a variegated leaf, each one like a breath preserved in liquid. Perhaps every breath I took while I swam has been recorded by the formation of dew on this leaf. It is beauty to be savored and understood as fantasy, nourishment for imagination and a salve for my soul.

I swim; I am alive.

Thoughts on History: Columbus Day

It's Columbus Day in the United States. An explorer, Cristoforo Colombo, appropriated land for a Spanish queen, committing foot, flag and European mindset to the shores of Cuba or Florida (depending on who you believe) or some other southeastern land spit, after having bobbed around in a strange ocean for a few months in a tiny boat with a scurvy crew.

I, the much-distant beneficiary of that land claim, drove in my little car on civilized and well-regulated streets this morning. My car was designed in Germany and assembled in Mexico. I had oatmeal from Ireland, almonds from Spain, coffee from Costa Rica, and wore clothes manufactured in China, Malaysia, and Indonesia. What a world this has become. I can barely imagine living the way he had to. No phones, electricity, freedoms for every citizen, health, long life. He was a notable and bold change agent, intent on discovery and enrichment, making a leap of imagination most people of his day found very frightening.

It's funny we celebrate only one explorer when so many others also contributed to the comforts of our modern day. We don't have Alexander Graham Bell Day or Thomas Edison Day even though they were equal in bravery and imagination to Columbus, overturning stodgy and ordinary thinking in order to answer nagging questions they could not ignore.  We also don't have Florence Nightingale Day, although my profession owes almost everything to her.

So I'm going to call this day Explorer and Inventor Day. I invite you to fill in a name for the person whom you believe most deserves recognition for advancing the human species.  Hats off to all those free thinkers in the past, the present and the future. They might have been or will be nuts who made us or will make us uncomfortable and frightened, but they were immune to criticism and hesitancy, plowing forward at all costs.

I sit here at my keyboard and try to imagine times past, when difficulties and problems were so much different, or the future that will be all but unrecognizable to me here and now. As much as I like to think I can think outside the box, I often don't. It takes a special breed to do that.  So, explorers and imaginers out there, celebrate the day; we have set it aside to memorialize you and a little wild-eyed explorer from Italy who changed the world as each of you can if you follow your hearts.