Seattle is a city of vistas: heading west to the bay and the sound, islands on the horizon, ferries and tug boats and freighters plying the deep, unfathomable blue.
Or looking east, to the lake and Capitol Hill, the muted colors of sky and clouds, small sailboats on the water and a cathedral on the summit.
One of the things I like about travel is that you move through time as well as space. You recover lost springs and leap ahead to crisp autumns.
On Monday I strolled through the Columbia City neighborhood of south Seattle. It was sunny and cool, and I snapped a photo of a gnarled and mossy tree with crimson leaves.
My head was still spinning from the flight across the country — an unusual tail wind meant we made the trip west in less than five hours — but it was alert enough to register this place, this northern place, as already ahead of us in the march of time.
A spur-of-the-moment trip to Seattle (I can do these things now!) means that I’ll attend class tonight on Zoom rather than in person. While I’ve had plenty of experience with Zoom meetings the past year and a half (haven’t we all?!), I’ve been driving down to Georgetown for the real thing every Tuesday evening.
While this seemed slightly terrifying at the start — where will I park? will rush-hour traffic make the trip twice as long as it would be otherwise? — those concerns have largely faded. And the joy of being in a classroom again (even if only one other classmate is there with me, which has been the case the last few weeks) has more than compensated for them.
But tonight, we’ll all be on Zoom. We’ll be a class, a community, of the ether — as so many communities are these days.
(Sunset from the Car Barn Terrace, where I am not whiling away time before class tonight.)
Yesterday, on my way back from a walk, I caught a whiff of manure from a passing truck. Turns out, the truck was turning into my neighbors’ driveway where for a couple of hours the lawn was aerated and fertilized.
As a result, I spent the day inhaling whiffs of the barnyard, a scent I associate more with the farm than the suburb.
It wasn’t unpleasant, not after I got used to it. In fact, it made me think of afternoons spent interviewing farmers in Cambodia or Malawi or other places around the world, places where roosters crowed and pigs wallowed and shy children peeked at me from behind the leaves of a banana tree.
I miss those trips, the golden sunrises, the purple twilights, but I’m grateful that yesterday, for a few hours, a whiff of the barnyard brought them back to me.
I’m home now, looking out the window of my office, staring at the
trees that aren’t palm, the greenery that’s not tropical.
Yesterday I took a walk along familiar streets, nodding at neighbors, noting the changes even a week can bring, the house that’s up for sale, the fall clematis that’s about to bloom. There was much rain while I was gone. Not enough to rescue the parched ferns but enough to green the grass that now clogs the mower.
It’s lovely, it’s my home. But I miss the big skies above the palms, the limitless white sand, the confab of shore birds that hung out at a tidal flat near where I would go. I see in my mind’s eye the small crescent beach only reachable at low tide and the alternating blues and greens of the Gulf water, lighter above the sand bar.
What a magical place! How grateful I am to have gone there again!
One of the things I like about going to the beach is, strangely enough, the rain. Not the steady, all-day showers but the late-afternoon thunderstorm.
In this subtropical climate you’re pretty much guaranteed to have two or three (or more) summer days a week with skies darkening after 3 or 4 p.m., the uptick of stickiness in already-humid air, the low rumble of thunder and then, with a release that matches the heat of the day, a lovely, brief torrent.
There was a downpour like that yesterday, a fitting way to say (sigh!) … goodbye to the beach.
I’m an amateur photographer, doing the best I can with my iPhone 7 and enjoying every minute of it. I like framing the shot, trying to capture a digital image of what I see and want to preserve.
But sometimes I try to get technical, to shoot the difficult and ephemeral — to photograph the rain, for instance.
I wasn’t sure I could do it, have tried before. But the rain in New York last month was falling so fast and furiously that I was able to snap this shot of it streaming through the skies, down the tenement fronts and into the rooftop pool of the newish hotel across the street.
This shot captures a moment and a downpour I won’t soon forget. Water was streaming into the New York City subway system that evening, flooding major highways and making national news.
What I didn’t know then is that the rain would also delay the bass player from the band my cousin leads and in which my brother plays drums— the band we had come to New York to hear. And in fact, the drummer would end up missing all but three songs in the set.
On the other hand, I did get an interesting rain photo out of it.
The west coast of Florida is not only sun-kissed and sugar-sanded but some of it (my part of it, at least) is laced with a series of narrow canals that make for crazy walking but lovely viewing.
I ran into these canals the other day on the way home from the beach. Thinking I could take a shortcut I found myself going in circles on what was, in effect, a peninsula, bounded on all sides by these watery avenues.
No cut-throughs here. Instead, languorous streams tucked behind walls of palmetto, elephant ear, bougainvillea and birds of paradise. They move slowly; I’m trying to learn from them.
Yesterday, the beach was emptier than I’ve ever seen it. Figuring it was due to the high wind — the retreating edges of Tropical Storm Fred, by then pushing north to the panhandle — I took off walking as I usually do, tennis shoes slung over my shoulder, sinking my toes in the sand, warm water flowing up to my ankles as I skirted the waves.
It was a perfect beach walking day — except it was anything but.
I had heard about Red Tide, an algae bloom that kills fish and other wildlife, but mistakenly thought that if you couldn’t see it, it wasn’t there.
But then the cough I had noticed earlier became more insistent and my eyes watered so much I could scarcely keep them open. Could Red Tide hurt humans, too?
The lifeguard station was farther up the beach, and by the time I reached it there was another coughing, sneezing, watery-eyed person asking the same question.
“It’s really bad today,” said the guard, who was wearing one of those bandana masks that’s not allowed on airplanes but which seemed to be helping him cope with Karenia brevis, the organism that was causing the symptoms.
When I looked closer, I noticed the little red flag flying from the lifeguard stand. Red Tide: I have a healthy respect for it now.
(Photo: Courtesy ocean.si.edu)
