A few weeks ago, Brian and I drove to John Day, Oregon, which is where a good part of my family lived. I grew up visiting my grandmother there, and John Day’s roads are steeped in memory for me. I was properly horrified when I did the math and realized that I hadn’t been here in 11 years! It had been bothering me that we hadn’t been to John Day since finally moving back to Oregon. Luckily, Brian likes John Day equally as much as I do, so he was up for it.

We got a late start on Friday, probably about 2 in the afternoon, and we were worried about being able to get dinner before all of the restaurants closed. None of the restaurants have websites, and from yelp, it sounded like most of them closed at 9 p.m. Yikes!

We left Portland, and it was 77 degrees. We decided to take the route along the Gorge rather than over Mt Hood. When we turned off at The Dalles, it was 100 degrees! It’s crazy how much it varies dependent on where you are in Oregon.

Hwy 97 looks like this:

Hwy 97, Central Oregon

There are some ghost towns we visit not too far from here and I had to stop myself from pulling over a bunch to take pictures. Here’s a church without windows and doors, it looked ooooold.

Old church on Hwy 97, Oregon

Even though we were worried about getting to John Day in time, we had to pull over at the Sheep Rock unit of the John Day Fossil beds. It was funny – I said we’d save the Fossil Beds for a trip when we had time to properly explore them, but we got a taste of most of the major areas of the fossil beds. Brian and I definitely love being flexible on road trips – we allow ourselves to get distracted and pull off the road at the drop of a hat.

Here’s what it looked like in one direction:

Brian At the Sheep Rock Unit of the John Day Fossil Beds, Oregon.

And in the other:

Heather At the Sheep Rock Unit of the John Day Fossil Beds, Oregon.

The visitors’ center was closed when we go there, which was a good thing or it really would have been granola bars for dinner for us. It was hot and windy here, and you need to watch and listen for rattlesnakes.

We made it to John Day with enough time to eat dinner. We found a “new” restaurant (well, it wasn’t there 11 years ago) called The Outpost and it was perfect. They were super nice, had some good microbrews on tap, had good food, and introduced us to fried pickles (yeah, I know it sounds weird. I was against it too. They were really, really good and I’d get ‘em again in heartbeat).

The sun was setting as we left town. We were staying about 10 miles away in Prairie City. We were racing the clock again as the hotel clerk only worked until 9! The drive there felt like something out of a movie, with the sun setting over the Strawberry Mountain range to our right. It was hot, dusty and completely wonderful. We must go back for much longer next time! Here’s a bad iPhone photo I took of it at 65 mph (I wasn’t driving):

Sunset in Eastern Oregon.

We made it to Prairie City in time. I had a nice chat with a woman who liked my “Oregon Girls Rock” shirt and we checked into Hotel Prairie.

I’m not sure I can say enough good things about Hotel Prairie. An old 1904 hotel which was renovated in 2005, it was a piece of history. The owners did it right – they used local materials for the renovation, with lots of beautiful photography of local history on the walls. The lobby had a fireplace you could sit next to and read or knit. Brian didn’t tell me, but when he made the reservation, he reserved the best room in the hotel for us. It was huge and marvelous and not a single picture I took turned out. It was very clean and modern inside, and had framed quilts on the walls that must have taken forever to make as they were handstitched and extremely complicated. We settled in to read for the night.

Here’s a bad iPhone photo of the Hotel sign from our living room at Hotel Prairie:

Hotel Prairie, Prairie City, Oregon.

Alright, more later, I better get to work for the day.

I don’t owe a dollar and I still have four bits in my pocket. I have never sued a man in my life nor have been sued. I have never been arrested – but that ain’t saying I came pretty near it once. A man called me a damn liar, so I knocked him down and when he got up I took after him with a pitchfork; but he outran me. For 50 yards I kept almost near enough to stick the tines into him, but when he looked around and saw how close I was he let out another link and got away. He complained to Judge Boise. I asked for a jury. They cleared me, but one of the jurymen thought I ought to have speeded up a little and stuck him with my hay fork.

— Joseph Yates

My family is awesome.

Brian and I got to Lone Fir (on SE Stark, between 20th and 26th) almost perfectly in time to watch Buddhist masters from Hui Lin Temple perform a cleaning ceremony for Block 14. It was very beautiful to watch on a summer evening, and I wish I had pictures, but I inevitably lean towards being respectful rather than getting the picture I want.

Lone Fir is a pretty old cemetery in the middle of Portland. Some of our more notable citizens are buried there: Couch, MacLeay, Dr. Hawthorne, poets, city-builders. Some of our more notorious citizens have also been buried there – a madam whose “suitors” gathered money after her death to bury her and build a monument to her, a beloved bar-owner who decided that the annual Tom-And-Jerry bowl should be placed on his grave after he died (and apparently his friends would come and borrow it during the holidays, carefully replacing it on his grave afterwards), robbers, ax-murderers.

But Block 14 is where people who immigrated from China were buried. The tradition was that you would be buried there, but eventually, you would be dug up and sent back to your homeland, where your town or village would find a spot for you and re-bury you there.

Portland at one point had the second-largest Chinatown in the United States; it also had a shameful history of racism. When you look at the county records for Lone Fir, there are many details about the other parts of the cemetery but for Block 14, nearly each person buried in a plot was listed as “Chinaman” or a ditto mark. In the 1940s, the city decided to build a county building there and told the Portland Chinese-American community that the buried folks had to be moved. And supposedly they all were and the city built a municipal building on their former graves.

Except it turns out they weren’t all moved. So really what the city did (not intentionally) was literally build a building on their graves.

And then there’s the other part – Dr. Hawthorne, a well-renown early mental-health doctor, paid for many of his patients (who often were too poor or had no family who would recognize them) to be buried in Lone Fir. A good number of them are buried around Dr. Hawthorne’s grave, but it turns out that probably a number of them are still under the driveway that the city built in Block 14.

So last night, in addition to the cleansing ceremony for Block 14, there was some fundraising for the memorial being built on Block 14 (the city building has been torn down). Friends of Lone Fir sell a CD called Dearly Departed (which Brian and I have owned for a while) and some of the musicians were there and played. The songs on here are about people buried in the graveyard. You can read their stories here (a zip file of a PDF, hosted by Friends of Lone Fir).

The commissioner of Parks in Portland also dedicated three Heritage Trees (specifically the Lone Fir for which the cemetary is named).

At 9, they showed a movie I’ve been trying to catch for a while. It was made by a woman named Ivy Lin, and it is about the Chinese immigrants who were buried in Block 14. In 1949, Communist China closed its doors. The people whose bones had been shipped back to Hong Kong (where they’d stay until a spot in their town or village was found) were no longer allowed to be shipped back to their villages. The movie, called Come Together Home, follows her as she tries to find out what happened to them.

A fair amount of the movie is about the history of Lone Fir, so what a perfect place to finally get to see it. It was a fun night – there was a beautiful breeze blowing among the hundreds-of-years-old trees, and we were facing Block 14. Really, really cool.

So that’s how I spent my night in a cemetery, perfectly happy.

An interview with Bill Murray!

In unrelated news, I like cataloging things. I don’t know why, but I do. So when Metafilter was back-tagging all of their posts, I spent a few hours working on it. It’s interesting because you get to learn about random things about which you knew nothing.

And so, when Ravelry (a knitting website) needed help tagging their patterns, I did the same thing. Got to browse some patterns and look at things I would have never noticed otherwise. But! They decided to give out prizes to ten people, out of the crazy amount of people who worked on this project (160,000 patterns, and Ravelry has 800,000 users). So when I saw they were announcing the prizes every ten minutes, I was just enjoying seeing what the prizes were. And then someone named Heather (no, not me) won something and I thought, well, there, they aren’t going to let two Heathers out of the crazy amount of people win. Of course, then, the very next person who won was me! Yay! I’m so excited to see the yarn and purse and supplies, how completely cool to win something when I already just wanted to help out and have fun browsing patterns!

Yesterday I set a goal for us of walking across town to get dinner. We decided to check out Savoy Tavern in the Clinton neighborhood and set off. It’s about 3.5 miles from our house. It was too hot on the way there and I overheated (something I need to be better about not doing, I’ve had heat exhaustion a few times). The restaurant was great – we were there just in time for happy hour, and Tom Waits was playing when we walked into the bar.

Had to laugh though, of all the places in Portland I could have picked, I picked one with a Wisconsin theme. Needless to say, we ordered the fried cheese curds (as far as I know, the only ones in Portland). They were good, but not as good as the ones you get in a good dive bar setting in Madison. We’d get them again though for the novelty. Apparently Savoy Tavern’s Old Fashioned is pretty fantastic, and they serve Wisconsin cheddar instead of Tillamook (blasphemy!). Really liked the vibe there and definitely will head back to try a cocktail next time (and maybe sit outside if I haven’t walked there). Fun stuff.

We didn’t linger over dinner long enough so it was still pretty warm when we started walking back. Despite the big meal at Savoy Tavern, we decided to go for dessert at Pied Cow in hopes of the temperature cooling down. We sat out on the patio where I got an ill-fated gingerbread cake and Brian got the largest banana split I’ve ever seen. It was great to sit in the shade (I didn’t know they had a patio) and feel a nice breeze.

By the time we headed out from there, it had cooled off, but I was beginning a reaction to something in the gingerbread cake. My fingers swelled to the point that they looked like sausages! Thankfully, my breathing wasn’t affected so I was able to finish the walk home. Freaky though and I wish I knew what it was that caused the reaction. I make gingerbread cookies without any problems, but I wonder if they use a spice I don’t normally have and that’s what did it. Disappointing, the cake was really good!

Today is going to be pretty mellow, I’m still catching up on laundry from all the visitors we had so I’m going to work on that and study for the SCJA exam.

We went, as I mentioned, to Coeur d’Alene to visit Wilma and also cheer friends in the IronMan. It was a perfect (though long) day for one. The water was cold as it always is (56 degrees, I heard from Wilma). It stayed sunny and mostly cool until around 3 or so, when it climbed to 85 degrees. Not much humidity at least.

Brian got some good shots of the “age groupers” getting into the water for the swim. We got up at 4:15 in the morning to head downtown to see this. Can I mention that I am 100% certain that I see 4:15 a.m. much more often from the other side of the night (just about to go to sleep rather than get up)? If the swim start were any less cool, not a chance I’d be able to make it to there.

First in the water are all of the Pro IronMan competitors (I don’t have any pictures of this – I was meeting an IronMan to hold his iPhone and end-of-night stuff). About 45 minutes later, the “Age Groupers” go into the water.

(Brian took all of these pictures as I was not entirely awake. Click on the images to make them larger. I have even larger versions of these on my computer, but I figured you didn’t want to wait for them to load.)

They start out all on the shore, waiting for the gun.

Everyone stands when the national anthem is sung, and it’s so brilliantly early in the morning with the sun shining off the lake. And then the gun goes off and the first few people dive into the water. Chokes me up.

The amount of splashing you see increases:

It looks like a solid mass rather than lots and lots (over 2000) swimmers:

While watching this, you just see this solid mass moving through the water rather than individual swimmers. It seems like suddenly there is some mammoth creature swimming through the lake. Michele tells me that there are some people who want to be in the front when they dive in, and some people hang back so they aren’t in the middle. She tells me that it’s not uncommon to be kicked in the face, and people end up with broken jaws and bruises. Yow. They swim 2.4 miles, which takes about an hour and a half. The kayaks are in the water so the swimmers don’t get outside of the race course, which is marked by the buoys.

This year, most of the pictures we took were of the swim. Last year, we had a million and one pictures of the bike riders, but I was too busy cheering them on this year to snap shots. My hands were swollen for two days due to the amount of clapping! I couldn’t even get my ring off that night.

Other things that happened – our friend Dean was hit by a drunk driver on the bike ride portion of the IronMan. The man was on several drugs and had also been drinking. Despite a helmet that had been cracked in half and severe damage to his bike, Dean finished the last 35 miles of the ride and went on to complete the IronMan! I still think he should get an extra medal for that, I mean, who does that? Who gets into a bike-vs-car drunk-driving collision and then finishes an IronMan? (He’s alright, just bruised).

I got to see most of my friends finish (they all finished, it’s just remarkably hard to spot these athletes, man, it turns out they are quick!). We were out cheering people on and helping until almost 12:30 so it was a crazy long day. Very fun though, and worth doing if you are near one.

Here’s the latest.

Here’s the first one.

Driving along the Gorge

I will take a few minutes to write about the Merners visiting and IronMan Coeur d’Alene and how Wilma is, but having only a few minutes, I wanted to type up a few things before I forgot them again. Some probably of interest to you, and some not so much.

First the “not so much for most people” – Wilma remembers hanging out with Corwin and his sister Agnes. Corwin was a well-dressed man, but often quiet as he had a stutter. Neat to hear about him, as one of my very favorite collected pictures is of him.

Moving on.

I grew up going to Coeur d’Alene to visit family. In the summer, when we were kids, Bill would take us to Hayden Lake where we would swim in its icy waters (but soooo clear! And felt good on a hot summer day). Gretchen and I would swim out to the landing, where I’d regale her with stories of the whale shark, largest shark in the whole world, which was fresh water. She’d be out of the water so quickly Bill would swear she ran over the top of it. I was a mean older sister, if Gretchen hasn’t told you that yet.

Wilma mentioned this last time but I forgot to write it down so that I remembered it – she said that no one knows how deep Hayden Lake is. Neat!

And also on the interesting end of things – she said the natives in the area, the Schitsu’umsh (also known as the Coeurs d’Alene people for which the area is named) would not go near Hayden Lake. They stayed close to Coeur d’Alene where they fished and hunted, and other areas around there, but they would not go near the lake in Hayden. I can’t find any internet information on this, but I think it’s really fascinating and I will need to look into this more.

Off to accomplish stuff, have a beautiful summer day.

Nate and Beth at the Timberline

Nate and Beth came for a visit! It was so completely great. They stayed downtown at Hotel Monaco. It’s interesting inside and is a “dog hotel” so it was fun to see all the different dogs wandering around its halls. The doormen were really nice, holding the door open on my car for Beth when I’d pick her up for a wander. They really liked it – they said they heard the garbage pick-up each morning but it was otherwise quiet. Interesting – I’ve heard that from a few folks who stayed downtown, but I’ve never noticed it any of the times we’ve stayed downtown. I suspect I’m just lucky with the room they give us.

Let’s see, what did we do? We took them to the Kennedy School, of course. Nate was excited to get some Voodoo Doughnuts so we walked there from their hotel (and on the way I found a food cart that sells pierogis! I’m so heading back there next week). We wandered the Pearl so Nate could see where Wieden + Kennedy was. We ate at Sandwich Works, which was on my list as we had eaten at Kenny & Zuke’s several times and liked it. While we were at Sandwich Works, we decided to head up the Gorge to Mt Hood.

The weather while they were here was pretty cool and rainy, and the day we went to Mt Hood was pretty much the only shot they had of going. Oregon made me smile though by briefly clearing up in Hood River so that they could actually see the mountain. It was 36 degrees at the Timberline, with lots of snow (8 inches the day before!). We had a snack at the bar and played some ping pong before heading back. The Timberline is one of the few places in the world where I feel still and calm. I am hopeful that we will do another overnight there in the next year or two.

Ping-pong at the Timberline

What else did we do? A lot of wandering in the city. Beth and I wandered to The Show of Awesome at Doug Fir on Saturday (a great craft fair). It was in fact pretty awesome, and Jill Bliss was there. Beth loved getting to see Jill’s stuff in person rather than over the internet. There were a good number of artists there that Beth knew from etsy. I bought Jill’s Octopus print, a few barrettes and a neat-o squid skirt. Also did Saturday Market, Hawthorne, Alberta and Tin Shed. Had to take them to Multnomah Falls (isn’t that a law or something?) and they hiked to the top of the falls.

iPhone picture of the Show of Awesome

Saturday night, we all hooked up with Jimm and went for dinner at the Grilled Cheese Grill. Followed that up by Pix (not really very good for once, disappointingly. They’ve been getting really hit-or-miss) and then over to Ampersand to watch 40s and 50s beer commericals on their back patio. They were shown by Tom Robinson, so I had seen them before, which was good because it included my favorite crazy racy one. It was packed there, great to see!

We followed that up by going to the World Naked Bike Ride. I’d been wanting to see it for a few years but it never worked out. Really neat to see – they estimate that 11,000 people took part this year. We stood on Weidler and cheered the riders on, which was sometimes appreciated and sometimes caused a jeering “take yer clothes off!” to be shouted at us. There were a few unicyclists! And tall bikes, and at least two runners (barefoot and entirely naked). It was so quiet at night (around 10:30 or so) and really beautiful to see all the people going by. The first few people caused a OMGNAKED reaction at first but really quickly it became something much cooler than that. Not sure that I’m going to explain it well this morning, but I really like getting to see people use their bodies in a good way. There were so many shapes and sizes and it’s all cool. I’m definitely going to try to go cheer again next year, and if I ever get to the point that I can ride a bike reasonably well (doubtful), I’d definitely join in. It’s one of the few reasons I’d like to get good on a bike.

It was also funny to see random naked people scattered through downtown for hours afterwards (we needed to take Nate and Beth back to their hotel).

Brian & Nate tidepooling

Sunday we wandered to the coast – sea lions in Newport, wandering by the boats. They have a new cage by the sea lions’ pier to isolate the ones that have wired caught around their necks so that they can help them now. O! We got to tidepool and saw a leather star and also a 10 inch chiton! Brief whale views in Depoe Bay, but they were feeding pretty far out so they were hard to see. A little disappointing, but I figure we have to have something to get Beth and Nate to visit again.

Leather star at Devil's Punchbowl