Cabin

Spring Break II

Two days after the Libya intervention, and Japan imploding, and it being hard to keep abreast with the world, we run for cover to a cabin in the woods. She never knows anything much about news stuffs, but I try my best for both of us to stay well informed. It is my conscience, then, that takes the brunt of tragedy and terror and overwhelming injustice, while she smiles and collapses into headphoned bliss. Or perhaps I am the conscience, deliberately severed off so she can siphon information into my person whenever she wants. It’s difficult to tell whether I have said enough yet to have my own conscience, or whether we’re still attached. I hope we’re not still attached. She is an embarrassment to general knowledge.

Still, for 3 days in Spring Break, I too abandon my social callings and succumb to an indulgent, tree-bound rest. The cabin is in Washington’s Gifford Pinchot National Forest, and it takes just over an hour to get there by car, during which time we listen to Monty Python on the radio, share strips of dried mango (heaven?), and gawp out of the window at the roadside waterfalls. While host dad Kevin tells us about the Native American salmon docks all along the Columbia River, we cross into Washington without even realising it. The countryside seems suddenly like the Scottish Borders – uniform sitka spruce and long, unwavering roads through the trees. The similarity, then, bit by bit unpicks itself, and the trees turn yellow, bending old-man sinewy arms under drifts of moss. Kevin stops the car when we reach the end of the road, as it condenses into a mud/snow track and lowers itself down into the forest. We pack up the sled, and Kevin sets off at a pace, dragging on foot the full load of our food supplies, water, and battery packs, amongst other survival essentials. The idiot falls over 4 times over the course of a 1 mile ski into the cabin, and claims ‘cross country is much more difficult than downhill!’ I of course have prior experience in both forms of skiing, and overtake her, and host mom Karen, and host sister Amelia within a bare minute of setting off (all this ‘host’ business begins to sound rather sinister). Later, I transcribe a section from the idiot’s diary which details, in her accustomed style, first impressions of the forest. I would provide a section here, for your general amusement, if it wasn’t for threat of violence and food sanctions. She can be quite protective about her writing. And I guess it’s understandable: if that was my writing, I would keep it firmly under wraps – far too sparse and simple, kind of grotesquely bare, and with none of my linguistic jouissance (I learnt this word today). It gets worse as we go further into Washington. She thinks she’s Raymond Carver, and everything is all he says/she says, and with sentences like matchsticks.

The entrance to the cabin is marked by two halves of a fallen tree, forming a noble gateway into the garden. I arrive just after Kevin and help make up the fire in the wood burner, so that by the time the others get there the heat is already up by 10 degrees˚F. S’alright for some eh. We open all the windows to let out the damp, and Karen lights the paraffin lamps with a lighter like a toy gun. Kevin intermittently barks the progress of the temperature dial as it flickers towards the intended goal of 70. Amelia teaches the idiot how to play cribbage, then we make popcorn in an old-fashioned popcorn maker with a turning wheel, then we drink sweet tea with double whipping cream and then we discover the beauty of the kumquat. The idiot takes an almighty nap before supper, the heat in the cabin having by this time reached the doze-inducing mark. As far as I can gather, she and Piper the Airedale nap for most of the visit, except the latter remains curled up in front of the wood burner and reminds me of an oversized Norfolk Terrier, while the former is less hairy and more annoying.

That first evening is spent tying two blankets together to make a hybrid blanket of warmth and happiness, eating enchiladas, dancing to Michael Jackson and toasting marshmallows for s’mores (see entry on January 30^th). I refrain from reading Kevin’s New York Times – even the supplements – and sink further into a slack temporal slow lane. The next morning, Tuesday perhaps, Karen leads us on a ‘tromp’ through the forest, over tree roots as soft and thin as slow worms. We make a snowman that looks like Caesar, and stand next to the steaming creek, and consider that this is what it is like to be an outdoorsy type of person. The idiot tries to catch things on camera. I wish she would give that up; she knows it’s just a tick, and only of use to facebook. Karen says that there are certain environments to which each human being is most suited, and that snow and trees make her breathe in deeper. Feel more engaged. In the afternoon, Kevin lends the idiot his old wooden and leather snow shoes, and we tromp in the other direction towards the summer campsite. During the prohibition era, the hollow used to be the site of a hotel ‘retreat’ for the benefit of ‘cleansing waters’.

We eat teriyaki chicken and chocolate brownies for dinner, before a dram of cinnamon whiskey, more of Kevin’s beer, and a round of backgammon. I look at the idiot’s face once in a while, bloated by food coma, but also smiling with talk and good company and escape from school. She had left all her work behind, purposefully limiting her reading to the Spring Break gift from Gianmarco – The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares. And I read through some of Amelia’s Roald Dahls. The Twits is still the best.

We leave on Wednesday morning, after Karen’s novel interpretation of Toad in the Hole for breakfast – puncture hole in slice of bread, place in hot pan, crack egg over holey bread, ensure yolk falls in hole, distribute egg white evenly over surface, cook, flip over, serve, and munch. Packing up takes a good hour of sweeping, washing, and shutting everything down. I am loath to depart, and therefore procrastinate in desperation over my designated tasks. But all at once we’re skiing out and nothing can be done. The idiot is silent. Kevin and Piper pound on ahead, and you can hear Kevin shouting ‘get!’ through the trees, pronouncing it like ‘git!’ It is our favourite Americanism. On the journey home we stop off at some of the waterfalls; Multnomah looks like it’s been extracted straight from Rivendell. We try stare at the same spot of falling water for 25 seconds, and hallucinate breathing rocks.

Once back at Reed, the idiot enrolls for her final year of university at UEA, and I take my first shower in 3 days. Reality bites.

Consette x

Gout

Spring Break I

This is the first installment of a tripartite mini-series about Spring Break: events from almost a month ago now, coming to light by virtue of my mastermistressidiot and some sore remarks on the discipline of writing. Discipline I evidently lack. Her pronunciation of evidently like evi-dent-ly, sounding curled and gnarly in the American way.

So it starts in Northeast Portland, where we spend the weekend walking. On the day before break, the Friday, she wears the wrong shoes and bubbles up a liquid blister on her foot. On Saturday she wears her Converse instead of those monkish clip-clops, and the muscle all along the outer side of her right foot, just below the shin, begins to inflame. She and Holly had been to see Warpaint at the Wonder Ballroom the evening before, and the resultant cocktail hangover manages to seep from her head, down her back, and into the thighs and lower legs, culminating in the feet with a triumphant throb. On Saturday night she consults symptomchecker and decides, with certainty, that she has developed gout. On Sunday she wears the Converse again. If I have gout, she thinks, it can't be helped and the shoes I wear will barely make a difference and bugger this, the sun is shining. By Sunday at 5pm she is limping around Lloyd Center shopping mall on her tiptoes and making all sorts of gallant men relinquish their seats on the bus. Sunday is also the day she gets her tattoo, so the bandage on her right forearm lends texture to what is fast becoming a martyrdom complex, complete with sigh and slanted eyebrows.

She had proposed Northeast Portland as a walking destination with all the smiley innocence I have since begun to suspect. I later discover that this is where Atlas Tattoos is located, on Albina above Mississippi, but for over 24 hours she devils a weave, and I am summarily hoodwinked. Whilst I eat a sloppy meatball sandwich from Garden State, she announces she needs the portaloo. She returns after an improbable 20 minutes; I am polite, refrain from asking questions. In fact, she tells me in the safety of retrospect, she had used that 20 minutes to talk to a tattooist about walk-in appointments for the following day.

But we're not going to talk about the tattoo anymore. At 22, already making up for the sobriety of her youth, she says. No, instead we're going to talk about the ignorant bliss which suffused the whole of Saturday, before she slunk away on Sunday and confounded my sense of propriety. BT = BeforeTat. We bus-it up to Burnside on the 75, and walk all 39 blocks down to MLK Boulevard in a sunlight that, bless it, tries really hard to burn away the wet on the pavements and the roads, and the heavy air. She listens to Leonard Cohen, and I listen to The Beatles. Last year I persuaded her to buy me a separate ipod, and things have since been more agreeable. I suggest that we could be compared to a married couple who at last decide to have separate duvets or separate beds, just for space and leg room, and she says, 'No Consette, we are not like that, not like that at all.' Consette can't do similes, she says.

Burnside is really great - nouveau riche by Laurelhurst, deep in vintage stores, restaurants, yummy mummys etc, and then bit by bit extracting itself from village quiet and turning into the dusty precursor to downtown we had hoped it would become. We follow signs saying COMICS COMICS COMICS!, into a warehouse and down a rusty stairway, hoping for goodness sake this isn't some sinister childcatcher trapping. It's not. It is wonderful. Emerging into the light again, we turn right at MLK and walk another 20 blocks or so northwards to Viking Soul Food, a sheen aluminium (not aluminum) cart that sells smoked salmon lefses for under $5. A lady from the neighboring cart comes and sits next to us on the bench, and I feel guilty for not choosing her BBQ ribs. The idiot seems very interested in the life of a foodcarter, which concerns me for obvious, practical, Consette-thinking, reasons. I project forward a decade or so, and envisage the lowliness of our future life. 'I wanna write books and I wanna make biscuits', she insists. Not so lucrative, I say. And what she says in response I can't put on the internet, or it might upset the grandmother. Speaking of which, the grandmother sent the idiot another email last week. I don't come out of it very well, it must be said. I think she thinks me rather verbose, rather stuffy. Quote (sic):

Incidentally will tell that ghastly Consett creature that I never gave her permission to call Margaret ...what a liberty! And if she can,t think of anything nice to say about my eldest granddaughter she can jolly well shut up.

This is a shame, but whatcanyoudo. From Viking Soul Foods we amble off west in the direction of Mississippi, and I buy my second lunch (the meatball sandwich). The foodcart site lies on the crest of the Mississippi hill, with downtown just there to the left, and Portland's spaghetti junction of flyovers to the south. The sun is less insipid; I bask for a while. She goes to the infamous 'portaloo'. Later we sit in Fresh Pot coffee and spy on a man who is either Simon Neil from Biffy Clyro, or Simon Neil from Biffy Clyro's just-as-hairy-and-attractive doppelganger. The idiot sends a message to England (Rebecca MacDonald) and tells her the news. SUPREME BEARD SEDUCES AMERICA. We like a beard, especially when there might be a Scottish accent beneath it.

The day ends, somehow, with friends in an English pub on Belmont. I know from the idiot's expression as she walks inside that this is the sort of sneering opportunity she can't resist, that this English pub will be nothing like an English pub, and that no 'pub' in America could ever really be a pub. But as it turns out, the smell in the Horse and Brass does in fact approximate the smell of England. The post-smoking ban admixture of stained carpet, fried food and Toilet Duck. A Wetherspoons pub, but an English pub nonetheless. And dare I say it, with better beer.

Consette x

Ides

A lazy photo blog for the bit of March before Spring Break.

MARCH 8TH, Elephant 6 Holiday Surprise:
I hide in the toilet (too noisy), but the idiot informs me afterwards that a man plays a saw, that members of the audience throw balls at a paper 'moon' on a stick to hail the coming of Spring (for which we're still waiting), and that 90s American indie is actually kind of fantastic. She adopts a side parting for a few days later in the week, just to see whether it makes a difference. Difference to what, I'm not entirely sure. Punk credential? Consummate hair failure, whatever the intention.

MARCH 11TH (4PM), Lark Ascending:
Friend Charlie Hankin plays pristine and crystal Vaughan Williams concerto on the violin, reminding her that some music can do things, and that this should not be neglected (as principle of life orientation).






MARCH 11TH (7PM), Portland Cello Project:
Inga D - kindest friend of a friend we have ever encountered - picks us up at 6.45pm for the PCP show scheduled for 7.30. By the time we arrive (barely 7ish), the Community Music Center is already packed and swarming with children. Standing room only, Friday atmosphere (resist reference to Rebecca Black), and 7 cellos playing Mario Kart, Pantera, Kanye West etc. Idiot heaven.

MARCH 11TH (11PM), Carnaval:
Spanish House party in Winch. Guess who attaches a full box of Cap'n Crunch to her person and announces that she is dressed as a cereal killer? I formally disown her for the night.




MARCH 12TH (2PM), PDX Underground Tour:
20 minutes or so spent in a basement, followed by a 2 hour, decidedly overground, tour of Portland's Old Town. This woman, wearing this hat, spends most of the time talking into a microphone about the 'chemically dependent' and 'demographically undesirable' character of the quarter. A few seconds after this photograph, the voodoo doll doughnut is passed around for shared and equal sampling. Shared and equal, that is, until one member of the party chunks off at least a quarter of its body mass, and pockets the rest in his pac-a-mac.
We learn important stuff about Portland too.




MARCH 12TH (1OPM), Drag Ball: Does this picture really require blurb?
Oh, but I must say, they've installed a gigantic see-saw in the S.U. with a sofa on either end. Useful for looking up skirts when you're not sure what's what (at Drag Ball only, mind).









THROUGHOUT MARCH:
Idiot becomes more confident in class. Professors nod in encouragement, make coaxing noises ...would clap, if appropriate, like exhausted parents who wonder why their baby is still too top-heavy to toddle at 18 months.
Idiotic confidence not necessarily beneficial to class discussion - proclivity for using the non-phrase 'lalalalalala' to denote something a) obvious b) inexpressible c) that has slipped her mind.

MARCH 17TH (3PM), Mills End Park:
After Film Theory finishes at 2.30pm, the idiot decides to start Spring Break early - on a Thursday - and work through a few bullet points on that 'America To Do List 2011'. Here, then, is the smallest park in the world - so says Guinness Book of Records - located on the division between two sides of a dual carriageway, and in full regalia for St. Patrick's. It was put in place by an Irish Portlander in 1948.
St Patrick's Day is something of a fetish in America, and the city is suddenly awash with Irish 'pubs' and their $10 beer gardens.

MARCH 17TH (4PM), Rare Book Room:
From Mills End to the rare book room on the top floor of Powell's. Ulysses, much Burroughs, FIRST EDITION OF MICE AND MEN (idiot's emphasis), Julia Child, and, prized, Lewis and Clark's EXPEDITION worth $350'000.








MARCH 17TH (8PM), Tanuki:
Gianmarco joins us. We wander in the rain and flaunt top hats on 23rd avenue, before dinner at Tanuki on 21st. The idiot once again declares, 'this is the best thing I have eaten so far in Portland' about her thick noodles and pork cheek. The moon outside is almost full.







MARCH 18TH:
Spring Break begins in earnest and we go for a sodden walk to celebrate - from Reed to Sellwood's Antique Avenue (SE 13th), and all the way down Milwaukie to the Powell intersection. En route we pass the creepy sweet house (see photo) and, for once, tiptoe inside.
I don't want to talk about it.



Consette x

Fools

She had wanted to spend this Sunday afternoon acquainting herself with the idiom of William Faulkner, but the post-lunchtime food slump precipitated an hour of heavy sleep at 3pm and the marked inability to do anything useful ever since. Even registering for Netflix proved a task of insurmountable obstacles, bound as we are to the UK billing address. April, and the second half of the semester, began last week. Sometimes the smell of mowing and warm wind makes it seem like the year (abroad) is coming full circle, slouching towards a second coming (cf. Yeats), or an end. And then it rains and the illusion blurs.

On Tuesday, the computer was clearly infected by this sensation of things coming to a close and decided to parade a protest - a histrionic refusal to logon in anything other than Safe Mode. Thank you to the magic computer man in the ETC, who gamely pattered his way through reams of coding and Dell intolerance. By the time everything had been sorted out at 8.30pm, he had worked 4 hours over the end of his shift. On Friday we escaped into the city for a walk around some of the parks. All the good food carts had sold out and closed by 3pm, so we went to her favourite alternative: the Whole Foods buffet. Here we witnessed a woman choking on her muffaletta. Actual windpipe blockage choking, which neither the idiot or I had ever seen before. In the 10 seconds or so before the woman maneuvered a recovery, the idiot ran around in circles and yelled 'Heimlich Heimlich??' at dumb eyed customers and the checkout boys and girls. The couple sitting to our left were so entwined and whispery that they didn't even notice. It made the idiot feel all weird - conscious of food and its mysterious jump into the esophagus, conscious of the woman texting and telling people that she almost died. To make herself feel better, the idiot persuaded me to take the 20 bus down Burnside and come and watch True Grit with her at Laurelhurst for only $3. She drank a cider and let her jaw drop down at the scene with Jeff Bridges in the desert, the scene with the starlight, and I had a box of popcorn from that ginormous machine they have in the foyer, where you can see the fresh kernels going in at the top and frothing out as they pop open. We pretended to get annoyed at the bus-stop as the 75 was 20 minutes late, but in fact it was okay: we listened to Why? and the rain smelt hot. Later we went to the Beer Garden on campus, which was sticky and, for once, kind of wonderful. Someone brought along their decks and played music. Terrible and happy dancing ensued on the rainwater-ed porch.

Yesterday was Saturday, another opportunity for an outing. She is crippled with the idea of leaving, now that it's April and Reed ends in May and the flight home is in June, and so all free days are dedicated to venturing Portland. East Burnside, I've realised, is posh and young-parenty, whereas over the Willamette on its West side foil, it demarcates the opening into Old Town, 'female impersonator' land, and the center for the homeless. While making our connection from the 19 to the Yellowline Max, we saw a middle-aged man shuffling along W Burnside clutching a cushion shaped, and dressed, like a small child. He held it against his shoulder as if burping its back. Wholly unnerving. From here our destination was the Mississippi and Skidmore food cart site which we had discovered in Spring Break. The idiot ate a Portlander sandwich from The Big Egg breakfast cart: two easy eggs, black forest ham, mustard, cheddar, chives, between two toasted slices of brioche. We trailed down sunny Mississippi to catch the Red Max back into downtown, and then the bus over Hawthorne bridge to visit OMSI on the Eastbank Esplanade (Oregon Museum of Science and Industry). Being claustrophobic and, quote idiot, 'pathetic', I waited outside and watched things bobbing in the river while she took a tour inside the USS Blueback submarine. She enthused just as much, if not more, over the thoroughly gawky and, she thought, adorable tour guide as the submarine itself. Take a horse to water etc. Another example: in the evening we went to Fire on the Mountain with some friends to consume large quantities of buffalo wings and grease, and she ordered a salad. Salad. Granted - she ate one of Febee's fried oreos for dessert, but this earned only partial redemption. I, on the other hand, ordered, and was successful in consuming, 12 wings, a large chilli cheese fries, an appetizer of fried pickles with chipotle mayo, and a fried Twinkie to close. The boons of an imaginary stomach.

Upon returning to campus, we looked in on Fetish Ball in the S.U (awkward nudity, a phallus totem) and spurned it in favour of Safeway cider and incoherent rounds of pool. I took great pleasure in watching the idiot 'conduct' a lucid conversation with the parental unit on Skype this morning. They're coming out to visit at the end of May, for the last week of Reed, and plans and plans and plans are forthcoming. The idiot's 'America To Do List 2011' is quite terrifying - the longest list she's ever brought into a being, a monster of lists, a constant imperious presence of LIST. The parental unit had originally wanted to visit in March, but the father got called for Somerset jury service and everything was put on hiatus. Confidentiality laws proscribe me from detailing the delicious subject of said jury service, but needless to say that sometimes I miss the Celtic Sea, non-Pacific, general parochial ridiculousness of the English West country.

Consette x

PS. Yes I know, yet to write about March, yet to write about Spring Break. I spend my life losing and reinstating order. She hates me for it.