Signs I saw on a recent road trip

A week ago, I got back from a road trip, 2400 miles. Down I15, over to Boise, west to Vale, on to Burns, Bend, where I visited the kinfolk, up on Century Drive, on to Hiway 58, past Odell lake, over to the coast, down to the Rogue, up the Rogue to Grants Pass, Medford, east to K-Falls, Lakeview, Hart Mtn, Frenchglen, and north clear up to WA, ID, and back home. Anyway, here are three signs I saw.
The first, in Southern Oregon, on the large sign outside a small gas/convenience store:
Cold Ass Beer
The next, on a actual state highway sign
Winding Road Next 99 Miles
The last was in Idaho, a very small billboard, with a badly-done drawing of a snarling wolf

This deserves some comment, I believe. Poaching is broadly defined as the illegal taking of an animal, in violation of state, national or local laws. This brings up some interesting issues....are wolves bound by law? Do they have hunting seasons? Are they going to have to work at Burger King to get the money for license and tags??
Well, you kids settle this among yourselves. Meanwhile, I'm confident the Idaho Fish and Game will be out there getting search warrants, and reading wolves their Miranda Rights.

Sunday

Some time has passed since I last put anything on this 'blog', I've moved my daughter back to Seattle, and gotten used to a quiet house. I've taken a few road trips, and seen a bit of Montana that had escaped me in the past. Summer arrived near the end of a very wet June, and Montana is as green as I've ever seen.

This is the peak of tourist season, the freeways (all two of them) seem crowded by comparison, but once off them onto the state highways it is remarkable how little traffic and people you encounter. And once off paved roads, it's possible to drive 20 or more miles without seeing another vehicle. This is the part of Montana I love.

I got back yesterday from the latest trip, just in time for Evel Knievel Days......Butte's annual 'celebration' of a famous son. It's one of Butte's less-attractive features; a weekend devoted to a man who those that knew him say was a liar, cheat, and drunken bum. I've yet to meet anyone who knew him who liked him. He seems to have had no redeeming qualities, yet a weekend is devoted to him. But I digress.

I have been fishing on these trips, mostly small streams; tributaries of the rivers still much higher flow than usual. Some have been quite good; rainbows and brookies mostly.

In a normal summer, these small streams get quite small, and the fish go downstream to larger water. This year, there are a lot of reasons to fish them: few or no other anglers and good-sized trout.

I plan on leaving early next week on another trip, north to the area of the Bob Marshall Wilderness. I've heard of a creek that is "fulla cutthroat", a statement I've heard before, and learned to distrust. We'll see. But signs like this add spice to fishing:

Connections to the past

I don't think I have anything unique in this regard, but.......one thing that drew me into history, and the grad program at UC, was the connection I've always felt to the past. I was a late child, born in 1946, to a father that was in very late middle age, at best. He was born in 1889. Yep, you read right. My father was born before the Spanish-American war. His dad was born in 1856, nine years before the Civil War. My grandfather was of an age to remember well the civil war, except he was in Oregon, where it was not a part of day to day life.

I grew up hearing stories of life in Oregon before electricity, cars, and most things we think of as everyday life. Going fishing on the McKenzie River in a wagon pulled by a horse with his brothers, camping where now there are suburbs and malls. The Willamette Valley before there were paved roads, let alone freeways. His stories of the depression, when he and his brothers took to the rails, wandering the US looking for work. He had a game-to-game contract with the St. Louis Browns, and according to his brothers was a hell of a pitcher.

I"ve always felt that through my dad and grandfather, I have memories of life long past. It's given me a life view that hasn't always been helpful to everyday life. I saw the war in Viet Nam as an extension of the policies of containment laid out by George Kennan in 1948, this while on the ground there as a corpsman with the Marines. I had a lot of Marines listen to me and shake their heads in either wonderment or boredom.

I see the drug laws and public attitude with a view of how laudanum was popular in the late 19th century.  I drive over the Willamette Pass past Odell Lake in Oregon, where the old state highway crew barracks were, and hear my dad on the radio talking to the drivers plowing snow, the only way they could communicate. I remember the kids from Brooklyn who came out to Silver Lake, to work for the USFS in the summer of 1963, as part of LBJ's Great Society program, having taken a bus cross-country. First black kids we'd ever seen, and at the time I thought of FDR's CCC program. Neither my buddies or these Brooklyn kids had ever heard of him.

I'm not saying that I have any special knowledge, or any special aptitude, heaven knows. It's just that being seeped in the past, I tend to live there, and see things through that lens.

Link to my dad:
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=65493319

Montefioralle

While living in Germany, we took several trips around Europe. Our favorite, at least my favorite, was Italy. We went to Venice for the first Thanksgiving, and in March went to Tuscany for a week. A friend from the states came over for the trip, and through contacts of hers we were able to rent a house in Montefioralle, a hilltop 'castle village', overlooking Greve in Chianti.

Montefioralle was first noted in documents around 1050, and was a military and administrative center for the local governing family. It had, and has, a wall around the town, with houses built into the wall.

It has a 'street', generally too small for cars of any size, going around inside the town. I would guess the population is around 500, and when we were there no tourist housing was present. We were fortunate to have our friend, L., along, who had a friend that had family that owned a house. Also, she speaks Italian, a big plus, it wouldn't have been the same trip without her.

Our place was the first door on the left side, two stories, a worn stone staircase going up to the second floor, where we lived. My understanding is the second floor had been constructed in the mid 1700's, and electricity brought in perhaps in the '60's....wires coming through the windows and walls. The bathroom was about 5x4', sink and toilet, and the 'shower' was a faucet head in the middle, near the window. One had to take everything out of the bathroom to shower, and the hot water would last maybe 3 minutes. There were two 'water heaters', one in the bathroom and one in the kitchen. You had to be careful about using too many electrical things or a fuse would go. A couple doors down the street was the birthplace of Amerigo Vespucci, marked only by a wasp engraving over the door.

The view from the kitchen

The hills of Chianti from the terrace outside the kitchen, opposite side from the previous picture

The same street on the other side of the village

The land around the village was agricultural, with lots of olive trees. Down the hill in Greve, you could get olive oil in a couple shops from a big vat, you bring your own container. If you've never had good olive oil, it's delicious. One can actually sip it like wine, it's that good.

Olive orchard just outside the village

In the week we were there we took day trips, to Sienna, where the famed exercise in treachery, bribes and anarchy, the Palio, occurs every Summer. It's a horserace between districts of the city.

We also went to San Gimignano, the city of towers

We also too trips to Rome, Pisa and Florence, I'll post pictures of that another time.

My Sojourn in Europe 2007-08

Late summer of 2007 my company asked if I would go to Europe to work with our German branch to integrate their product into our corporate fold.....be the borg, so to speak. I agreed, feigning reluctance, and stated my conditions: a company apartment and car, and some autonomy regarding actions while there. The German branch had been acquired a few years before, and had not successfully been integrated into our way of doing things; of business and the company mind-set. We'll set aside the notion that I was the wrong person to send: I don't like Germans (as a group), and have little patience with those who don't agree with me professionally. So...an experiment doomed to failure: sending an intractable geezer to work with German engineers to convince them to modify a product they deemed perfect.

What it did do, was give me 9 months in Europe. My youngest daughter, Emily, upon hearing that I was going, said "Hey, me too!" So I had a companion, a 21 year old who had not been to Europe. "Cool", I thought, "What could possibly go wrong with this!?"

Nothing went wrong, to fend off misconceptions, it was a throughly wonderful experience for her and me. To see  Europe through new eyes was a great thing. I had been several times, but never for more than 2 weeks at a time. I found the experience of actually living there, day to day, shopping, getting laundry done, cooking, etc, quite different than living in a hotel.

In early October, 2007 we flew to Frankfurt, a driver picked us up, and drove us 140km to Bad Kissingen, the town near our German branch. They had a 2 bedroom apartment ready for us, quite spacious by European standards, and we started our stay.

Directly behind the yellow vehicle is the Weiss Haus, a great restaurant where we ate at least twice a week. our building is the next one behind it.....built in 1793, remodeled several times.

A block away, the river Saale, taken on a Sunday morning early. Once I was standing looking, and saw some rise-forms on the river, and found later there were trout in the river.

Me 'working' from home.

Ah, the food available there:  the kitchen was the smallest I'd ever had......the stove had two burners and a small oven...the fridge was 3' high, the sink water heater was above the sink on the wall, and would heat about 2 gallons of water at a time. But the food we could get at the local markets. The wurst, brotchen, brot, rabbit, fish....man. There were 5 bakeries within walking distance, all with different breads available each day...geez. And of course the local beer.

I'll do posts about the trips we took while there: Venice, Florence, Rome, Tuscany, Austria, Munich, Erfurt and the UK.

The news about Bin Laden is just breaking, I hope that we don't see too many repercussions from it. My son came back last summer from his second tour over there, and I'm happy they got him. I just hope our troops don't pay too heavily for it.

The Raw and the Cooked (apologies to Jim Harrison)

Last night after dinner I decided to do a food/cooking post. I made salmon patty and salad, and it was good. I'm not a gourmet cook by any stretch, but I like to cook, and enjoy good food. I can't account for this; growing up I was neither exposed to good food/cooking or adventurous eating. My mother was an indifferent cook at best, the standard meal I remember was hamburger or liver fried, boiled potatoes and canned vegetables. Her method of cooking any meat was to fry it until it was reduced in size by half. My first year at university I ate dorm food, and thought it great.

It wasn't until my late 20's that I started cooking passable food, and for some time followed my mother's example of overcooking what would have been good food. My time in the military and living in Japan helped, I was exposed to Vietnamese and Japanese food, and first had sushi.  Living in Alaska in the 70's helped, having access to freshly-caught King and Red salmon and halibut. And, oddly, this is where I first had good wine.

In a previous post I mentioned 'happy hour' in the ICU at Anchorage Community Hospital. Every Friday we would get wine and cheese from Madeline's Wine Shop, and Madeline would pick the wine. Prior to this, my wine exposure was limited to Mad Dog 20/20 for camping trips (high alcohol content for volume), and Tavola Red or Boone's Farm.

I 'cut my teeth' on Madeline's wines: 1970-71 French Burgundy...Grand Cru Pommard, Bonne Mares, Echeczeaux, Rhone wines like Hermitage, etc. The downside to this is when I had developed a taste for these delightful wines, I later had to pay for them. A few years later in grad school, I lived in Sonoma County and sampled the big reds of that bucolic area. This was also when I started sampling the food of the area: Italian and Chinese, San Francisco had it all. Abalone was readily available and cheap, and the Sand Dabs at the fabled North Beach Restaurant were fantastic. My friend David and I had a house in Sebastopol, he tended our large garden, and we cooked.

Neither of us were of a disposition to follow recipes, and my ad-hoc style of cooking developed. So if I were to write a recipe for last night's salmon pattys, it might look like this:

A nice large Salmon Fillet, cut up into smallish pieces
A bunch of green onions, also chopped fairly fine
A couple garlic cloves, crushed up
A bit of mayo and good mustard
Some bread crumbs, panko if available
A sprinkle of salt and pepper, fresh parsley is ok too

Combine ingredients in a bowl, shape into pattys

Saute (ok, fry) in a big pan with olive oil till nicely brown on both sides, roughly 4 or 5 mins on each side on medium to high heat.

Serve on a nice salad.

I'm now limited somewhat in what I cook, due to where I live. Butte has no good seafood markets; the closest is Bozeman, some 75 miles away. We're luckier with meat, there is a good butcher only a couple miles away. In the summer we have the Farmer's Market every Saturday for 4 months, and for that short period some great, fresh vegetables and fruit are available. Other than that, it's pretty standard supermarket fare. One of them has a fish counter, and occasionally has a decent selection. In the Spring, Summer and Fall of course there is fresh trout from the streams and lakes, but frankly I find trout a bit bland. Nice once in a while, but I want Grouper, Monkfish, Smelt and Flounder. And rabbit. Rabbit is fantastic.....a saddle of rabbit, slow cooked in a burgundy, mushroom and garlic stock. Sigh. When I lived in Germany a few years ago, rabbit was available in the markets, as was a hundred different kinds of wurst. And don't get me started on bread. Good, fresh, crusty bread. The one good bakery in Butte is long gone, and in Germany there were 6 bakeries within walking distance, each with different 'brot' every day.

I almost forgot duck. Another post perhaps.

Road Trip 1973, pt. 3

We got back to Dawson, re-supplied and headed onwards, crossing the Yukon River on a ferry, then climbing up the hills towards the border crossing near Chicken, Alaska.

Nearing the border, the road went over the tops of rounded hills, there was little traffic. We had been on the road for over a week, the Land Cruiser was caked with mud, and we probably looked like the Snopes, just getting to California.

The US custom's agent at the border either thought we looked suspicious, or perhaps was bored from inactivity. He had us out of the vehicle, and we watched as he crawled in and leaned over the front seat, rummaging through the chaos in the back. We heard him yelp, then swear. He got out, holding a jacket of Tim's, his hand still in one pocket. Tim had done what I often did at his age; when fishing and changing lures it was easier to put a lure in your pocket than find the tackle box. The poor guy had a treble hook firmly embedded in his finger. I'm sure he thought we'd set a trap for him, and he was not happy. Despite assurances this was not the case, after getting the hook out he proceeded to empty the back, putting our stuff on the ground. An hour or so later, finding nothing, he reluctantly let us pass back onto US soil.

Two days later we got to Anchorage. I decided to splurge, and we got a room at the Cook hotel with a view of the end of Cook Inlet, looking north towards Denali (Mt. McKinley).

I remember being surprised at how warm it was, mid-eighties and sunny. The trip thus far had been cool, frequent rain, and even some sleet while were on the Dempster. I thought that Alaska had great summers, not knowing that we were there the week when they had record high temps. We moved up to Anchorage the next April from Grants Pass with our infant daughter, and I waited for the summer to start....I think it might have gotten up to 70 that next summer, and it was then I found out what summers were really like up there.

We spent a day doing laundry and seeing the sights. I liked Anchorage a lot, and was determined to move there.

We decided to drive down the Kenai Peninsula as far as we could go, to Homer. The road goes along Turnagain Arm of Cook Inlet, so named because when Cook explored the area he thought he'd found passage back to the Pacific, but alas, had to 'turnagain'. Up over Moose Pass, past lower and upper Summit Lake.

After half a day or so we got to the Kenai River, where I'd planned to fish. I saw the masses of fishermen lining the banks of every access and drove on to the Russian River, where I saw my first scene of 'combat fishing'. It was what I later came to call a 'welcome to Alaska' moment.

For the next two days the hard reality of fishing near roads in Alaska was driven home. Few roads, lots of people. After moving there the following spring I learned that there were places that had few people within hiking distance, or unmarked roads that led to 'secret' salmon spots, but for now this was the reality.

We continued down to Homer, the 'end of the road'. Homer was and is, I suppose, one of the most picturesque places on earth that includes a town.

The end of the road is at the end of this long 'spit' of land that sticks out into Katchemak Bay, with Cook Inlet off to the north. At the time, Homer was around 3 or 4 thousand people. In the next few years I spent a lot of time in Homer, and grew to love it. The inhabitants seemed to be either back-to-the-earth hippies-with-guns, living on their gardens, fishing and hunting, or right-wing religious conservatives. My next visit there would be in late April, after moving to Anchorage. I drove down, arriving in early evening. I stopped at a large, barn-like structure that proclaimed it's self to be "The Palace". A tavern, filled with hippies that looked like me. The bartender at the crowded bar walked by, handed me a joint, saying he'd be back in a minute to get me a beer. I was quickly elbowed by the gent next to me, wondering if I was going to just hold on to that thing. But I digress....

Somehow, I decided we were going to experience 'real Alaska fishing', and after asking around, went to a float plane outfit on the small lake just visible in the lower part of the above picture. For a hundred bucks, he loaded the three of us in his Beaver, and we took off on floats. Across Katchemak Bay there was a small lake he knew, Leisure Lake. A short flight took us over the first mountains, we spiraled in and landed on this lake and stayed for three days.

I have no pictures of the lake, having either lost them over the years or one of the boys have them. I remember the fishing was good, rainbows up to 20", and the weather was wonderful. In later years I learned the lake was accessible by trail from the shore, but had infrequent visitors. In the months it was ice-free, there was just too much good fishing more easily accessed.

After two nights, the plane came back and flew us out. We drove back to Anchorage, camped in a city park, and started the marathon drive back. I remember little about that drive, except that for some reason I was in a hurry to get back. I do remember that roof rack had disintegrated, and Tim was really crowded in the back. Russ had long since stopped trading seats with the poor lad. Also, somewhere in the Yukon, I was pulled over by a RCMP. I had apparently gone through a small village going 50, and not even seen it. He gave me a ticket for 15 Canadian bucks, shook his head, and let us go.

We got back to Bend some days later in the early evening, I dropped the kids off at my sister's place, and drove back to Grants Pass. Going past Diamond Lake, in the dark, I hit a deer. It had come out of the trees onto the road, and the sturdy fender of the Land Cruiser whacked it's head. I got out, saw it was undamaged but for the head, quickly gutted it, loaded it into the back with the trips detritus, and drove home. Somehow a fitting end to the trip.

During that fall and winter I wrote hospitals in Anchorage and Fairbanks, seeking work. Getting offers from both we decided Anchorage was the best place, and moved up in late March. In the next years I experienced some of the finest hunting and fishing in the world. I caught large salmon and steelhead from streams I'd driven by the previous summer without a glance, and grew to love the place.

It wasn't all roses; it was the pipeline years in Anchorage, I was working long hours and various other 1970-ish things took their toll on my marriage. But that's another story, and perhaps not for this forum.