travel journals, part IX

Welcome to Harrison, pop. 267.







































Rip Proof main street.














Library Hours. The new(ish) ibrary is where the old jail house used to be, on one side of the little field by the rip-proof building. On Saturdays in the summer there is a farmers market here. On the day that we were in town during library hours quite a few people seemed to come and go. They offer knitting classes for adults and teens. I harbor a strange little fantasy of quitting my job, fleeing New York, and working at the Harrison Library. I could teach knitting classes, really!

June 15th, 4:54pm. Sitting outside the miraculously open library, stealing their wifi. Yesterday: local fruit wine tasting, early morning walk to the road's end, reading on the deck, homemade calzones. Today: geocaching and rain and tomato soup.














One Shot Charlies got a shiny new sign! One Shot Charlies has existed as long as I can remember, going back at least to the early '80s when the grown-ups (meaning my parents' generation ) would go out for drinks maybe once a summer and leave us kids in the care of either the grandparents or the older cousins. It doesn't seem like the inside has changed much in the last 30 years, if not longer than that.

Health concerns. I don't remember these signs from when I
was a kid, and am pretty sure they're relatively recent.

Marina









Post office. One of the hardest things about an often-enough ideal childhood was being away from my friends for almost two months out of the year. Going to the post office at least once a week was a ritual with me, in the hopes of there being a postcard, a letter, a care package from friends back east. One summer in particular, following 9th grade, was the summer of Cindy & Alice & their beautiful letters and envelopes filled to the brim with scribblings and ramblings and drawings and quotes -- mostly from Pump Up the Volume, our obsession of the moment. "Being weird isn't enough." "Rise up in the cafeteria and stab them with your plastic forks." "Everything decent's been done. All the great themes have been used up and turned into theme parks." "Cease to resist, giving my goodbye / drive my car into the ocean / you'll think i'm dead but i sail away / on a wave of mutilation..." At any rate, it was a sparkling shiny day when there was something (anything) addressed to me c/o General Delivery, Harrison, Idaho, 83833.

*Italicized bits were Facebook status updates.

rainy day walk on east harlow point road

I bought my first camera just three years ago, which is kind of funny because I tend to think of myself as being a pretty visual person. I did have a little Fisher Price type camera as a child, but of course that disappeared eons ago (I have vague recollections of it tumbling in slow motion off the end of a dock, whether in Idaho or Mohegan Lake or somewhere else I have no idea). And then in high school and college I just made various friends give me their doubles. And then I dated a boy for five years who harbored aspirations of photographic artistry, and I left all our picture-taking to him (and still have a box of photographs pilfered from his even larger box of photographs tucked away gathering dust in the black hole that is under-my-bed).

So in 34 years of spending all or part of most summers at the lake cabin in Idaho, I have never had any pictures of my own. It was an odd experience, walking to the end of the road and back with my trusty little Canon SD1000 tucked in a pocket out of the mist, looking at this old road, this road that felt like home, through new eyes, new lenses, with a new man who had never been there before. He seemed to like it, despite the rain, despite the cold, and this made me inexpressibly happy, even in the midst of a certain sadness that sometimes pervades the place.

from the front porch

















heading out


















































water closet
































stargazer lane: the end of the road







































skunk remnants
























Snyders' stairs
































almost home again
(Ernie Sword's old pump-house)











McNeil barn & beach & docks


















the family plot



















home sweet home

on the deck

 

 (Reading on the deck, 6.15.10, Idaho)

evan's calzones

(Lake cabin dinner, 6.15.10)

tuesday afternoon, 6.15.10

(Marina, Harrison, Idaho)

burgundy 'seascape stole'

Knitpicks Gloss Sock Yarn, 70% merino, 30% silk
(pattern from Knitty)

travel journals, part VIII

June 15th, 10:53am. Heading east on 84. Stopped to take a gander at the Multnomah Falls and wonder if the huge school of trout swimming so doggedly upstream know what they're in for... * ("Sex!," said Jessica. Though true in its way, this is not what I had in mind...)






























(What those trout are in for...)






































June 14th, 2:43 pm. Passing through Walla Walla, Washington. Blown away by the austere beauty of the wind-farms lining both the Oregon & Washington banks of the Columbia River. Makes me proud. Listening to the Boss. Evan's patience knows no bounds.** (I'm not the only one who thinks this is one of the most beautiful drives in the world.)

*Italicized bits were Facebook status updates.





































































































(Best-placed rest stop ever, about an hour out of Lewiston





**This drive also entailed me trying to convince Evan to love Frank Black (aka Black Francis), specifically such Black Letter Days songs as California Bound, 21 Reasons, Black Letter Day, Black Rider, & Chip Away Boy. This didn't work out so well. While I still adore dear old Frank, I guess I can kind of get that he might be uniquely appealing to the angsty teenager still lurking in some of us more than in others. Even still, I might have to make Evan give Frank Black a go: Los Angeles, Two Spaces, Czar, Hang On to Your Ego.

'oh no you better not...'

(June 14th, 2010)

change this sign

@ chelsea market