Knitting Iris

Misunderstanding.

In yesterday's post, I wasn't intending to appear to be Kansas bashing.  I'm sorry that I didn't come across as I meant to. 

Yes, I've been through there on I-70, at least 12 times, as well as both North and South Dakota each once, and Eastern Montana several times.  I'm aware of how others dread it, but I can't tell you how much I've actually enjoyed all my drives through Eastern Washington as well as Kansas (except maybe not quite so much the time I rode the Greyhound 22 hours on Christmas Eve, or the time it was a sheet of ice most of the way, or the time I was still fevering a bit from a 24 hour flu which had delayed our trip and I started to panic mildly, feeling whatever the opposite of claustrophobia is, about midway through our trip when we stopped in Hays). 

Having lived all but only a few months of my near 37 years in places within eyesight of mountains, I could go on and on about my fascination with wide open spaces like these.  As someone who has always had mountains around me in my peripheral vision, getting my bearings from them constantly, I'm intrigued and drawn toward the prairies.  It's a matter of what I know and have experienced from the life I've lead and the places I've lived it.  There are states in our country I've wanted to visit since I was a young child: Kansas was one of them (so different from what I know), Maine (far at the other end of the country from Seattle), Alaska (also far away).

Whenever I'm driving through these places, it's all I can do to not take a sharp right or left turn on some unknown road and just drive some dusty dirt road far from any easy interstate, immersing myself and fully experiencing the beauty of all that space, attempting to overcome any apprehensions I may have.  I would expext there to be more freedom to think and feel and breathe. 

My heading at the top of the page may state that I'm "knitting and breathing under the big sky" but I know full well that Kansas has got Montana beat on it's claim to the "big sky". 

The beauty in mountains is a lazy, easy one, rarely disputed.  Fewer people make the effort to see, feel, and appreciate the beauty of the wide open prairie-type lands.  When I lived at the edge between the two, literally a couple of blocks from the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Boulder, CO, I would beg friends to take a day or a weekend, find a lesser travelled road heading east, just driving and seeing where it would take us.  No one ever accepted my offer.  Boulder-ites tend to look only towards the west for their recreation, heading straight for the hills if anywhere.  Sometimes, I would take our dog to a park east of town to walk her and as I'd come up over a small rise in the land, seeing the front range of the mountains before me, try to imagine what it would have felt like to come across the country on foot or wagon and to see those mountains for the very first time after so many miles.  Beautiful?  Intimidating?  Both?

I can't imagine that there is a place on this earth, big, small, wide, or narrow, that wouldn't hold some degree of intense beauty or at least interest for me in some way. 

Someday in my travels I hope to step out of my comfort zone and take that sharp turn in the road.

The Long Road Home

Driving through the mini-Kansas of Eastern Washington, the road sign that forewarns "NO SERVICES NEXT 40 MILES" between Moses Lake and Ritzville has always left me feeling slightly apprehensive even though I know perfectly well that I'll be driving on a major 4- lane interstate highway with plenty of help at hand.  (I don't have a cell phone, by the way.) 

Yesterday, we took our time leaving Seattle, stopping several times along the way to pick blackberries, for coffee, potty breaks, to pick wild flowers, for snacks, to dip our feet in the Columbia River, to shop at Old Gravy in Spokane.  We were going to spend the night in Sandpoint, Idaho but when we rolled in around 8:30 p.m. there wasn't a single room to be had.  By the time we checked several motels and had a makeshift dinner out of the cooler on the side of the road it was dark and now 9:30 pm.   Our only choice was to keep driving another 3 and a half hours home or else only another 2 hours to a hotel in Libby, MT (one of the last places on earth I'd want to wake up in the morning.  No offense.  The area around Libby is beautiful and the people are great.  The town itself just leaves a bit to be desired.)

Now we're talking about remote with no services, and curvy dark roads often choked with deer and sometimes elk, moose, and bighorn sheep, not to mention the lame headlights on my car and my increasingly worsening night vision so 55 mph was the absolute maximum I could do.  There's a time and a place for everything and times like these call for desperate measures:  truck stop coffee and country music blasting on the radio, and eventually counting the oncoming cars for something to do:  35 cars in one hour, 21 of which were inside the Libby city limits.  3 cars in the following hour.  3 cars and 3 insane motorcyclists in the last 25 minutes.  With the time change to Mountain Time, we rolled in at almost 2 o'clock in the morning.

We had planned on lollygagging our way home today, stopping to walk the Ross Creek Cedars trail and to see the Kootenai Falls, things we never have time to do when we're tied to C's work schedule.  I must say, though, that it sure was nice to wake up in our own beds this morning.            

Sailing Away

By the time this posts, the boys and I will either be in Seattle or meeting my parents north of there in Bellingham to climb aboard and spend several days sailing in the San Juan Islands with them.  That is how my parents spent their honeymoon 45 years ago.  This back of this picture reads 1963, two years after their wedding. 

Growing up, each year my dad would take about 4 weeks off in the summer go sailing with us up the coast of British Columbia.  It's one of those things that you so take for granted as a child.  We had no idea how lucky we were.  I remember bringing nothing much more than our clothes and a pack of markers and paper, a coffee can of legos, and a few books for the rainy days, as well as a few rolls of duct tape to make boats out of Olympia beer cans and driftwood for towing behind the boat.  We would get to pick out an ice cream bar a new comic book each time we stopped for food and gas.  Sometimes we got lucky and found Asterix and Obelix or Tin Tin ones. 

Now, I'd like our boys to have some of those same experiences, if only for a few days, and I know it means so much to my parents to have them there.  They still go every year, my mom usually for about 3 weeks but my dad stays out for up to 6 weeks now, returning sometime in early to mid September.

Be back in early August!

And thank you for all the great comments.  I know I rarely get a chance to respond to them, but I do read and think about each one.  There's also the matter of over a thousand unread posts in my bloglines feeds.  I wish I could just sit down with all of you and talk, unbroken.  It would be a long time before we ran out of things to say.

Here's what we're bringing along for rainy days(that's my new Trek Along sock, rpm from the new Knitty. Great pattern, although I've adapted it.  It's going to fit perfectly):

Alaska wrap up.

Top to bottom, left to right:  Flying into the near dusk of Anchorage at midnight.  Walking to the wedding reception in Hope where we feasted on king crab legs and salmon and boogied all night to a good band out of Seattle (can't remember their name). Only a small part of the "library" of books at the house we stayed at in Hope.  While driving back to Anchorage.  Glacial creek south of Chickaloon.  Birch bark covered woodshed in Chickaloon.  Birch firewood at the house in Hope.  The wedding site at Windy Point (coiincidentally, my parents spent that same evening, their 45th wedding anniverary, only a 2 hours' drive away in Anchorage).  Fungus covered birch log at cabin in Chickaloon.  Returning to the darkness of Kalispell at midnight.

"We come from the mountain, we come from the mountain. Go back to the mountain, turn the world around." -Bill Harley

This is the pair of socks that I knit during the trip to Alaska from the extra skeins of my Dye-o-rama sock yarn.  They were meant to be for a friend's birthday in August except I may have made them too big.  I think the pattern is the Blueberry Waffle Socks since, without having the pattern along with me, I winged it.  Yes, now reading that pattern over, I see that it is.  I spent much of the flight time knitting and since the pattern was simple, I was able to knit in the car and still see the scenery.  They would not have been finished so quickly if we hadn't come across the sign above when we reached the trailhead from where we were planning to hike one day.  It read:

caution: recent bear sightings in area.  7/8 Black Bear.  7/9 AGAIN VERY AGRESSIVE BLACK BEAR - STALKING GROUP OF SIX - MULTIPLE CHARGES!  DON'T GO!!  NOT KIDDING

We were there reading this on 7/10.  After already a few hours of driving to see the cabin that C's friend is building in Chickaloon, we were looking forward to getting out and stretching our legs, so it was disappointing to find this sign.

If we had gone on the hike, however, we would not have driven further up the road to this beautiful mountain valley where you can still find remnants of the Archangel Mine (click to see the tiny shack dwarfed by this expansive valley).  I can barely imagine the hardiness of the people who lived here and worked that mine.  This was the place I wrote about the other day as being almost too much to experience without aching just for being there, one where I had to grit my jaw just to keep the tears from coming, even when I think of it now.  The flowers and the lichen covered boulders and sharp mountain ridges were like nothing I can remember seeing before, and yet this kind of landscape is one that speaks to me like no other.  This was similar to the kinds of rugged places my parents brought us to as children, including Princess Louisa Inlet in Canada, Glacier National Park, only about 20 miles as the bird flies from where I live now, and the glacial valley of Jostedalen where my grandmother was born and raised, the landscape of my Nordic anscestors.  When I left Seattle the first time, I headed straight for a 9,000 foot valley up in the mountains of Colorado.  These places live thick in my blood, my experiences, my memories.

I could have stayed there all day and all night just watching the shadows and the light change as the clouds blew by and the sun dipped out of the sky for just the short time that it did there at night this time of year.  I regret not getting to hike deeper into those mountians but, like I said, I wouldn't have gotten as much knitting time in if we had gone on that hike and besides, we wanted to return alive to those two little boys back home.

And thank goodness I finished up those socks because I found the motherlode of sock yarn waiting for me when we returned back home!  I had actually forgotten this was coming until I saw it in the mailbox and read the label on the package.  It was ordered from Shelley at Fun Knits on Quadra Island in British Columbia, not really all that far from Princess Louisa Inlet, by the way.  The shipping cost are quite low and the prices are good, especially if you shop her ebay auctions.  The Lorna's Laces at the top is in the Fun Knits colorway, the other three are Opal Prisma #1197 and Regia Canadian Collection #4732 Toronto and #4733 Ottawa.   She threw in one of these little 10 gram balls of Opal yarn with my order (see the July 5th post of her blog). After the second Trekking pair I'm working on right now for the Trek Along, the orange Opal will be knit up next, a pair of socks requested by my mother for the friend she went skiing and hiking with in Yellowstone this winter and spring.

Rural/Urban

Please bear with me as I'm not quite done with Alaska yet.  Only a few more posts, including this one on Anchorage, or Los Anchorage as it is apparently not so affectionately known.  Urban and rural seems to overlap into a strange mix in this place.  While the newspapers were full of reports on gang shootings, the only "crime" I saw in my limited time there was just a new take on carved tree graffiti, only here they opted for the more effortless spray paint can rather than the time consuming knife, marking numerous birch trees along the bike path that winds its way through the city. 

While the number of people living in Anchorage is around 260,000, the moose population tops 4,000, so they say that you are more likely to see a moose there than any other part of the state.  This one in the picture is one of two that we saw browsing and munching away along path just minutes from where we were staying at our friends' house.  The fireweed, probably the most notorious wildflower in Alaska, in the vacant lot behind a chain-link fence, also along that path, was one of the earliest blooming patches that we saw during our trip. 

These days, I tend to equate remoteness with distance from a Starbucks store.  I've watched warily as they creep closer and closer to us over the past 10 years that we've lived in Montana.  Now, there's a store 3.5 hours west, 3.5 hours south, 5 hours east, and (holey $#%@!) I just did a search here and found one only a little over an hour north of us in British Columbia, Canada.  Yikes, that's close!  Don't get me wrong.  I can't really knock corporate coffee too hard as I worked as a barista for Starbucks for 5 years, starting when there were only a little over 80 stores and Howard Schultz used to personally call a handful of stores each evening to see how their sales were for the day.  I was there when the company went public and after a few years, used the profits from the sale of my stock options as a down payment on our land, cutting our mortgage in half.  Still, I was surprised to wake up on our first morning in Alaska to find C had already walked a few minutes along the bike path and returned with a paper cup of Starbucks coffee.  I didn't succumb to going to get my own cup, though, since I can get a far superior cup of coffee in my own backyard, not to mention our own share of terrible shooting tragedies, moose, and fireweed.

She can bake a cherry pie, Billy Boy, Billy Boy.

A friend of ours has an old, overgrown orchard where the pie cherry trees have gone wild, their suckers creating a patch that are naturally pruned by the deer.  Friday we went and picked, this being the first year that R can barely reach some of the lower branches.  It's also the first time that we've managed to pick only about as much as we can stand to pit.  It's easy to pick too many, and since they're too small for a cherry pitter you have to pit each one by hand with a paper clip when we get home.  Usually I end up kicking myself for picking more than I have the patience to pit.  Pitting cherries really cuts into knitting time, by the way.

If we'd waited to pick them later, then most of the cherries would come right off the tree, leaving the pits and stems behind.  If you wait that long, though, since the trees essentially fend for themselves and are not sprayed, then most of the cherries have a worm inside them, eating and rapidly growing.  I'd rather pick them a bit earlier, pit them myself, picking out the few worms as I go when they're still only tiny, knowing full well that I'm eating cherry pies with a bit of extra protein inside them from the ones that I miss or that the boys pitted themselves.  (SHHH!  I didn't tell them about the worms and they didn't find any themselves.)

So, we had Friday Pie-day again this week, bringing it to a barbeque at the lake with friends and family, accompanied by ice cream and soy ice cream kept frozen in Thermoses.  On Saturdaywe had a friend in town from Colorado so we made Chuckleberry (cherry-huckleberry) pie with the last of the cherries that was decorated as a group effort, top to bottom: R, E, Me, and C.

Forest Fair

The day following the wedding, we went to the Girdwood Forest Fair.  I bought this skein of hand-dyed superwash fingering weight yarn for only $10 from a vendor there, my only souvenir from Alaska besides a handful of palm-sized rugosa rose petals from the huge bushes in Hope.

Trekking beyond Hope

These socks may not have Trekked Along much in June, but they had their first real trek on Saturday afternoon in Hope, Alaska.  Only hours before his wedding, the groom took C and I, a couple of his brothers-in-law, and his 8 month old nephew hiking on the Hope Point trail.  We climbed from about 100 feet to somewhere around 2500 feet above sea level, I'd guess.  It was lush and green for the first part, hiking the Hope Point trail along a creek through devil's club taller than ourselves then ascending steeply to above treeline where we were climbing, sometimes on all fours, through thickly covered wildflower meadows.  There were bunchberries, columbines, monkshood, chocolate fritillaria, roses, geraniums, bluebells, chickweed, fireweed, yarrow, false hellebore, ferns, spirea, and the more, including some I couldn't identify and the most incredible yellow-greenish paintbrush that I've never seen before.

We reached the first part of a ridgeline leading to a higher peak, but had to turn around and descend with just enough time to come down, get cleaned up (see how dirty those socks got?!), and get the groom to the wedding site to meet his bride on a bluff at the edge of the water below and then on to the reception in Hope (far down in the valley in the top left picture).

Ah-laska!

Let me just start by saying that Alaska makes Montana feel downright Provincial... Tangible... Intimate... Cozy.  I'm certain that I'm not the first to note that just about everything about Alaska, besides the population, is BIG:  the mountains, rivers, ocean, trees, plants, wildflowers, even the summer days and the motor homes.  Not only that but it's possibly the greenest place I've ever been, and this coming from a Seattle girl.   I think we saw every possible shade of green that exists.  Who needs to go to Ireland for green when you can go to Alaska in the summertime?  There were places so heartbreakingly beautiful it was almost too painful to be there.  No garden could ever hope to emulate their perfection. 

Anyways.  I'm not sure me or my camera has really done it proper justice.  My great uncle Henry visited Alaska many times during his 100 years of life with his wife, Mildred, and took amazing photographs of their travels.  I found myself wondering time and again this past weekend whether I was walking/hiking/driving in their footsteps.  I'll have to go through his photo albums again next time I'm back in Seattle (next week?).

Places pictured, in no particular order: Hope, Chickaloon, Girdwood Forest Fair, Hatcher Pass.