Author: John Bassett

Today was generally a pretty quiet day, but it started off with a bang. Ellen and Mike live in Southeast Portland, a young, hipper neighborhood like Echo Park or Sunset Junction. They are a couple blocks north of Division Street. When I first came to Portland, Division Street was a fairly dreary commercial stretch with little to recommend it except for the presence of Pok Pok, Portland’s best-known Thai restaurant. In recent years, however, it has become a hotbed of what David Brooks called the “bohemian bourgeoisie” and there are now dozens of interesting restaurants and stores up and down the street. About a half dozen mixed use projects are planned for the street, and a couple of them are already under construction.

Each year the merchants and neighborhood associations put on a street fair. It starts out with a parade.

A drum band lead the way and these pales lasses, who looked like the customers of the vampire bar in True Blood, twirled flags and batons.

Not all the participants were so unwholesome. This charming little fairy tossed fruit candies to the bystanders.

The usual assortment of politicians were there, and in Portland style there were more bikes than you might normally see. There was also some contention on display as members of the neighborhood association protested the city’s decision to allow developers to build apartments on the street with no parking. This is based on the assumption that everybody will bike or take public transit. That seems a little far-fetched to me, too.

Ellen and Mike spent the day hard at work on their house. Ellen has done a great deal in recent years with the gardening as you can see below.

Mike continued his work building the new rental unit in back.

In the afternoon, Ellen took a break and she and I rode bikes along the Sweetwater trail to the charming neighborhood of Sellwood. I didn’t bring the camera along, but I found this photo of the bike path right as you come to the Sellwood bridge.

We walked up and down 13th Avenue, the main commercial thoroughfare, and we had ice teas, after an interminable wait, at Jade.

In the evening, Mike and Ellen took John and I to dinner at Avignon, a local wine bar. The food was delicious. Other than John accidentally setting his napkin on fire, it was a perfect evening!

If you asked the dogs about today, they would just have yawned. It was a mostly a travel day, and travel days are not that exciting for canines or humans.

We spent the early morning cleaning up after ourselves. Vacation rentals have taken to charging security deposits, and I was determined to leave the place in just as good condition as we found it. I was also determined we would not forget the camera, either! Ellen helped me thoroughly clean the Abrams Cottage. John packed the car while she and I took the dogs for one last visit to the dog park.

We drove for a couple hours and stopped in Roseburg for lunch. John and I had done this on a previous trip, and when we mentioned to Ellen that we had found – courtesy or Urban Spoon – a decent Greek place there, she was all in favor of a repeat visit. It turned out that Ellen had actually never been to Roseburg, so I explained about how most of the downtown had been destroyed by a blast from a truck loaded with nitro in 1959. Unfortunately, there is little charm in the rebuilt downtown and the area seems like one of the most economically depressed in Oregon.

From Roseburg, John turned the driving duties over to me and I continued on into Portland. We were stuck for about 45 minutes in horrendous traffic near Eugene. Apparently several cars, including one carrying a boat trailer, had been in a serious accident.

We arrive in Portland around five o’clock. Mike, Ellen husband, has been busy building a rental unit in the back of their property. When they move to Virginia, they will rent out both the house and this “ADU” (planning talk for “additional dwelling unit”). They hope to come back to Portland and stay in the ADU in the summers if Ellen in not teaching. Mike has made a lot of progress on this. The walls and the roof are all up, and windows and doors will be in soon.

Jill, a long-time friend of Mike and Ellen’s, came over for a visit. She is the second person on the left. Jill is a really smart and interesting person. John and I spent an afternoon at her house a couple years ago. Ellen ordered pizza and we had a pleasant supper on the back patio.

After two plays yesterday, we all had a slow start to the morning. But we had a full day of Ashland adventures planned, as usual.

We started off with a walking tour of the city. John had found this one a brochure somewhere, and we have sometimes had good experiences with free local walking tours. This really was not one of those.

Our guide, shown in the picture below on the right, was certainly sincere. But her presentation of the history of the town was a little bit scattered at times and it was not always easy to follow her narrative. 

We started off at the lower end of Lithia Park, and for the most part we simply walked up the street next to the park and walked down through the park. This does contain not only some of Ashland’s most historic homes, but some of its most beautifully restored as well. Ellen found landscaping ideas along the way.

Probably the most interesting thing we learned on the trip was about lithia water. I knew that people had come to Ashland to drink the spring water for their health. Until this trip, however, I never understood that it was for their mental health. Lithia water is simply water containing lithium, the drug still widely used today for the treatment of manic depressive patients, and people drank the water for its mood-altering powers.

Lithium was also, I learned, an ingredient in the original formula for 7-Up. The name now makes sense:  it was supposed to make you feel “up” because you were imbibing psychiatric medication with each swallow. All all of this without having to worry about an insurance co-pay.

Today was another marathon theater day. Neither of the plays, unfortunately, was as good as All the Way.

In the afternoon we saw Party People. This play is about two young men, one black and one Hispanic, who are the children of former revolutionaries from the 60’s. One is the child of a Black Panther leader, now in jail, and in the other is the nephew of one of the Young Lords. Right away my mind started to do some simple subtraction and I wondered how these boys could have been born in the late 1960’s or early 1970’s and be in their mid-twenties today. But that was just the beginning of the problems with the play. The idea is that these boys are putting together some kind of gallery opening with pictures and video of the revolutionaries. They plan to invite all of these people to the opening – apparently nobody else has been notified about this art show – where they will confront their elders … about something. Jimmy, the character shown in the publicity still below is a nebbish with a MacBook, but, when the guests show up he dressed like a clown and suddenly has an aggressive personality. His jibes reverberate courtesy only of a microphone and audio special effects:  the words themselves have no real bite to them.

About a dozen characters wander through the play and deliver monologues. A couple seem to connect with each other, but others seem to have no purpose at all. For example, right after intermission, a young black woman sings a song in Spanish. We never find out who she is or how she is related to anybody else. As best as I could follow it, the song was about slaves being transported from Africa to the Americas, though what “caracoles” – conch – had to do with it was unclear to me. A character appears who discussed his suicide. Huh? The white woman shown in the picture castigates one of the revolutionaries for killing her husband, a police officer, forty years earlier. How exactly had she heard about this opening when nobody from the Village Voice had? Never explained.

Nor is the play willing to take any stand about the former leaders. At one point, a story is told about how a couple of the Panthers had tortured another one for supposedly being a police informant. Yet a gruesome as the details of this are, they not really condemned for it. The older Black Panther maintains that he did not kill the police officer, but was framed for it by the police. And that seems to be the closest the play can come to assigning some kind of blame for the chaos of those years. It is all the fault of a nameless establishment. But then the two young characters suggest that the revolutionaries needed to use media to convey their message. They confidently assert that YouTube and Twitter will help them help the people. This is historical nonsense. The Black Panthers were masters of media manipulation.

There were two older women sitting next to me in the theater. At the interval, one said to the other, “Is there anything I can get you?” The other woman immediately shot back, “Yes. A cup of hemlock!” My feelings exactly.

The evening play featured a much different kind of party. This was Ashland’s revival of Animal Crackers, the 1928 musical that George Kaufman wrote for the Marx Brothers. The play all revolves around the antics at a Long Island mansion where a famous painting is stolen and a couple forgeries put in its place. The story line really makes no sense at all; the play simply provided a structure for a series of classic Marx Brothers jokes and routines.

I wanted to like this play, and I found little fault with the actors. They had lots of energy and they appropriately improvised some jokes and shtick in classic Marx Brothers style. But I ultimately found that seeing the play added nothing to watching the movie, and I failed to really figure out why it should rise again as a stage play. Since the play was really written for the Marx Brothers, it seems best to watch them do it, not watch other actors imitate them doing it.

Today we saw two plays, one good, one almost great. That didn’t leave us much time for anything else!

In the afternoon we saw Romeo and Juliet. Photography is not allowed in the theater, so the only visual I could find for this was this graphic from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival website. It gives an idea of the basic twist of this production: the “star-crossed lovers” are Californios living just after the American conquest. Now the more California history you know, the less sense this makes, but it does allow the director to stick in a few words of Spanish like “venga aqui, mi hija” and to draw attention to the Hispanic actors. This kind of thing is easy to deride for political correctness, but I doubt that is the point of it. All arts organizations are looking at demographic trends and unless you can make Hispanics, blacks, and Asians feel comfortable in your auditorium, your future is limited.

Generally, while the change of setting added little to the production (other than allowing them to use some lovely mid-nineteenth century costumes) it did not detract from it, either. Daniel José Molina, the young actor who played Romeo, was absolutely terrific. Jason Rojas was an utterly amazing Mercutio. I was less enchanted with Alejandra Escalante who seemed at times a little wooden as Juliet. But it was overall a solid and completely enjoyable performance.

We returned to the Green Show in the evening. Dance Kaleidoscope was again the featured company. This time they did a program of dance inspired by Motown hits. John had put down our blanket after Romeo and Juliet, so we had front-row seats. Somehow we did not bring the camera for this.

Our final play of the day was All the Way by Robert Schenkkan. This production is the world premiere of a play which deserves to be widely produced. The play depicts the first eleven months of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, focusing on his struggle to both pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and his desire to be elected in his own right to the Presidency. This is that real historic moment in the oval office, though the scene from the play looked remarkably similar.

Schenkkan is best know for his Pulitzer Prize winning Kentucky Cycle. In his liner notes for this play, he reflected on why he wrote the All the Way.

This play, like so many of the History Plays of Shakespeare is a meditation on Power. It begins in November 1963 with LBJ’s sudden ascension to the Presidency following Kennedy’s assassination and ends 12 months later with LBJ’s historic landslide victory over Barry Goldwater. I see this period as a hinge point in American politics. Everything changes. And the modern political landscape is wrenchingly born.

The play fundamentally deals with change and compromise as a political realities. Some characters resist change altogether. Others embrace change, but are unwilling to compromise. Johnson and King understand that both are inevitable. This sense of the impurity and messiness of political life and the moral ambiguities of political aspirations are what make the play more than a docudrama about civil rights.

Jack Willis was absolutely astonishing as President Lyndon Baines Johnson as was  Jonathan Haugen as Gov. George Wallace. Kenajuan Bentley quite credibly played  Martin Luther King Jr., a fairly thankless role when you character has been elevated to modern sainthood. Villains and morally ambiguous characters are much more fun to watch and must be much more fun to play. Peter Frechetteas was decent as Senator Hubert Humphrey, though you got little sense of why he was referred to as a “happy warrior” at the time.

John is sure that this play will be an HBO special sometime soon, and I think he may be right.

We took our time leaving Mt Shasta today. It is not far from Shasta to Ashland, and our cottage was not available until late afternoon. So we had a leisurely breakfast, walked the dogs around a bit, and packed up carefully. We are determined not to leave the camera behind again!

There is a nice park just on the outskirts of Mt Shasta simply called Mt Shasta City Park. From 1920 to 1940, it was the summer campus of Chico State Teachers College. The old dining hall and some of the dormitories, handsome redwood buildings constructed in the rustic style, still stand in the park. Teachers apparently spent the summer in this Arcadian paradise improving their professional skills.  Now the best we can only hope for is a conference room in a Marriot with some stale Danish pastry.

The springs which form the headwaters of the Sacramento River are the centerpiece of the park. People come from all over to fill up bottles with the fresh, cold water from the melting glaciers on the mountain. Ellen had to try a sample of the water for herself.

Heading north from Mt Shasta, the road rises sharply and then levels out into a broad, somewhat arid plain. The landscape is covered with the remnants of ancient volcanic eruptions and cattle grave on the brown grass in between the black lava flows which still scar the land.

Yreka is the main settlement in this area. Yreka, which supposedly means “White Mountain” in the local native language, enjoyed a short boom in the early 1850’s when gold was discovered nearby. Not all that much seems to have happened there in the next century, and there is a small main street of historic nineteenth century buildings. None of the structures are particularly significant, and they are filled with the usual kinds of shops one finds in small, struggling towns. John went into the sporting good store, and the owner was quite happy to chat with him for a bit.

Yreka also regards itself as the capital of the State of Jefferson. In an episode of American history not widely known outside of this area, several southern Oregon counties and several northern California counties, all feeling neglected by their respective state governments, proposed seceding and creating a new state in 1941. Even without the outbreak of the Second World War, this proposal would have never been successful, but it lives on here in the way that only small communities can recall their grievances. Ellen decided however that a “State of Jefferson” license plate frame would be perfect for her when she moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, and she found one in a local store.

From Yreka we climbed rapidly through the Siskiyou Pass and then descended into Ashland. We will be here in Ashland for three night while we see five plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

We are staying at the Abrams Cottage. We’ve stayed here a couple times before. It used to be owned by a guy named Nils Hansen and not only did he charge less than everybody else in Ashland for a small rental house, but he seemed pretty casual about even getting paid for it. One time I recall he just said to leave a check on the kitchen table when we left. It has since been purchased by a couple from Napa and they have cleaned up the place a bit but are also more traditional in billing and the like.

We unpacked and then went down to the the Green Show. The performance today was by Dance Kaleidoscope, a modern dance troupe from Indianapolis. They are doing a couple programs here in Ashland. The once today was an interpretation of Romeo and Juliet set to the Tchaikovsky music. It was pretty good. 

Our play this evening was Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella. This was, well, interesting. Basically, somewhat abbreviated versions of Euripides’ Medea, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and Rogers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella  were performed on the same stage more or less at the same time. At times, the characters from one play began to move into another play. There were a few times this was effective. The Cinderella sisters, for example, at one point also doubled as the Macbeth witches. But I failed to notice how they all stemmed from any kind of overarching metanarrative or how this exercise in intertextuality really provided any illumination into any one of the stories.  The best way I found to accept the production was to imagine that I had taken a couple slugs of codeine-laden cough syrup and I was sitting in bed switching channels on the television.

Tomorrow, we have more traditional fare with Romeo and Juliet  and a new play about Lyndon Johnson.

We are staying in Mount Shasta at the Dream Inn. It’s a pretty odd place; there is a main house which functions as a more traditional bed and breakfast, and then there is a stucco house next to it with two “suites”. We stayed at the one downstairs last year which has a living room done in knotty pine dominated by a large bar. The suite upstairs, where we stayed this year, looks like grandmother just moved out.

The breakfasts are not particularly memorable, but in warm weather – and we certainly had that during our stay in Shasta – you can have it outside in the gazebo.

John wanted Ellen to come to Shasta so she could have a chance to see Mossbrae Falls. It’s not easy to get to these falls; in fact, it’s really illegal right now. The only access is along the Union Pacific Railroad tracks. We had to walk past lots of “No Trespassing” signs. And I’m supposed to teach children to follow the law….

What makes Mossbrae Falls so amazing is how the falls just emerge from the side of a cliff covered in vegetation. It doesn’t look like any other waterfall I have ever seen anywhere else.

And since you have to walk so far and so illegally to get there, you often have the place to yourself. That made Ellen happy!

Eli chased his ball into the river a few times.

We walked back along the tracks. Another hiker warned us about rattlesnakes, but fortunately we didn’t encounter any of them. We drove around Dunsmuir. A couple years ago it looked like this town was starting to stage a comeback, but it seemed pretty desolate now. We stopped at a Mexican takeout stand and had lunch in the gazebo

In the afternoon Ellen and I went down the main street of Mount Shasta to look at the shops. She was set to buy something, but did not really find much of interest. Mount Shasta has an odd assortment of shops, divided roughly evenly between hunting shops and healing crystal emporiums.

After this, we headed out of town to look at Lake Siskiyou. The lake is not natural; it is a flood control project. But it is remarkably pretty and it offers local people many opportunities for recreation. Jumping off the bridge below seemed to be a local past time. John contemplated doing so for a bit, but then thought better of the idea.

Instead, we went to the shore and gave Eli some more opportunities to chase him ball into the water.

Ellen and John completely confused him by playing keep away. Edie barked a lot.

We had a pretty decent dinner at a local pub. They made enormously large and tasty burgers.

Tomorrow, off to Ashland and the Shakespeare Festival.

I remember little from reading Howard’s End except for the famous ending line, “Only connect.” We will be seeing very little new on this trip; instead, it will be offering us the delight of connecting with people we know and love but do not see often enough. When I was younger I did not quite understand why people went to visit friends and relatives on vacation. I suppose I thought that they were just too timid or cheap to go off and see the sights of Europe or South America. But now that I am older I understand more the importance of keeping connected to people, and I also find that this works best when it happens in person. Without becoming too theological, maybe that is the meaning of “real presence.”

It had been a couple years at least since we had seen Rick and Kathi. When we lived in Long Beach and they lived in Irvine, we used to see them frequently. When we moved up to Los Angeles, the distance was a little too much. They renovated a ranch house on the outskirts of Atascadero a few years ago as a retirement home. Kathi moved there full-time a couple years ago while Rick split his time between work in Orange County and their new house in San Luis County. I am not sure how much land they have – a couple acres at least. Most of the property is beautifully landscaped with native plants and they have a large vegetable garden and fruit trees. There are also a lot of deer in the area, so everything has to be fenced or it will be breakfast for Bambi!

Kathi is an accomplished cook, and now that she lives in the country she spends her time canning (that is, when she isn’t busy with her quilting ladies!) She gave us a dozen strawberry and plum preserves and they are astonishingly good.

The Derevans had had Shelties for years, and their current dogs, Barkley and Brooklyn, love to jump. They’re pretty good at it, too.

Our original plan was to leave early in the morning, but since we had left the camera as the restaurant the night before, we had to wait until close to lunchtime so we could pick it up. There was a very bright side to this, since we were treated to scrambled eggs from Kathi’s chickens and her fabulous biscuits with that fresh jam.

John had no trouble getting the camera from the restaurant, and then we started driving to Sacramento. Drove across interior of San Luis County as we started toward Interstate 5. This took up on CA 46 and 41, two roads I do not think I have ever driven down. The area is still quite undeveloped, probably because it is obviously such a dry area. Highway 5, of course, is famously long and boring and hot. Fortunately, John had The Marriage Plot, one of the newer novels by Jeffrey Eugenides on his phone, so we listened to it while dodging the trucks and the highway patrol.

We made it to Sacramento in mid-afternoon. Sacramento is famously hot in the summer, but it was particularly brutal today with temperatures well over 100. We always stop in Sacrament to see our friend Dan Story. Dan lives downtown in a townhouse only a few blocks from the Capitol. He works in a restaurant much favored by politicians and lobbyists and he knows just about everybody in California politics.

We walked to restaurant to have a late lunch. We crossed Capitol Park, as you can see, and Dan found shady streets all the way to our lunch destination. Along the way, John found an interesting mannequin in front of a shop!

Before we left Sacramento, Dan introduced us to his neighbor Larry. This guy has the biggest and best collection of Mexican ceremonial masks I have ever seen!

It was fascinating to learn about the provenance and function of each of the masks. It made me nostalgic for my younger days when we would take off for a month or two to explore Mexico on a budget of just about nothing.

We arrived late in Mount Shasta. We will be picking Ellen up later tonight – technically tomorrow morning, really – from the Amtrak station in Dunsmuir.

Once again, we’re heading north to Oregon. This is going to be a much shorter trip than the last two years, and there will only be a couple new places to see on this trip. But there is another kind of pleasure from visiting familiar people and places.

Today we drove to Atascadero. We stopped along the way for a couple short stops, one at the beach in Summerland and another at a park in San Luis Obispo.

We were delighted to see our long-time friends Rick and Kathi and the dogs were happy to meet up with their old friends Brooklyn and Barkley. Rick is not only a distinguished appellate attorney but is a very talented photographer. His specialty is photographing birds, but he snapped a couple of pictures of the dogs.

I’d show a couple of the pictures that John took, but he accidentally left the camera at a Mexican restaurant this evening. We’re hoping to heaven that it is there when the kitchen opens tomorrow morning!

In France, the nation breaks for vacation on Bastille Day, July 14, and returns to work after Assumption Day, August 15. Today is not only the last day of national vacation for the French, but it feels like the end of my summer adventures, too. We are not home yet. It will be a few days still before we are in Los Angeles. But we are definitely on the way back.

Ellen and I started the day with a dog walk. She pointed out the local home restorations she likes and the gardens in the neighborhood that she admires. Her neighborhood, just north of Division in Southeast Portland, is a fascinating mix of houses or different eras and in different stages of restoration. There are Craftsmen homes which have been completely renovated right next to post-war bungalows which look exactly like they must have in 1965. The former often have elaborate gardens and mortar-free brick walls. The latter usually have a grass, a couple foundation shrubs, and a few geraniums lined up in a perfect row. Ellen stopped in a local bakery and picked up some breakfast pastries while I stood outside with our three dogs. 

Ellen had to go to her office to meet with a former student. Mike needed to return their rental car, so the three of us went downtown. John planned to meet up with us later. Mike and I went to Powell books. I was tempted to buy a few things there, but mindful that we have far more books at home than bookshelves just dutifully pulled out my phone and added them to my requested list at the library.

Not without some confusion, John finally met up with us near Pioneer Square. We went to a great Cuban restaurant for lunch.

We dropped Mike off at home to get some important work done, and John and I went to the nursery with Ellen.

She bought a couple big bags of some kind of organic soil enrichment. We dropped them off in her garden, and then went off to look at Elk Rock, another garden she had always wanted to see. This garden is also known as the “Bishop’s Close” because it is on the grounds of a historic home which currently houses the offices of the Episcopal Diocese of Oregon. The house and garden are just south of Portland near the town of Lake Oswego. The house and garden have a fantastic view of Mount Hood. The mountain is visible from the opening between the trees.

There is a chapel attached to the house and also an area for outside worship.

We went back to the house and picked up Mike to go to see The Help. John and I had listened to the book in the car, and Ellen had also read the novel. So it was interesting to see how the book would be adapted to the screen. Generally we thought they had done a pretty good job and enjoyed it. Outside the downtown theater is a small park where people can play chess with some pretty big chess pieces.

Keeping up the Dixie theme, we went up to Mississippi Street to Miss Delta, a southern restaurant. The food was over quite good, and I particularly enjoyed my crawfish boil. It was served on a piece of newspaper, traditional down in Cajun country.