The End endeth here.

Hi, welcome to the end of this blog.

If you find yourself here by chance then go to the introduction to see what it is all about.

Me i'm back on www.bitsnbobsshowntell.blogspot.com

All's well that ends well"

And suddenly it’s too late; all things will have to wait or remain missed.

It’s too late to get a burger on Queen Anne Hill, to sit outside the coffee shop again in their recycled milk carton, Poly-Wood loungers. No time to have breakfast, lunch, dinner or cocktails at the black and white tiled 5 Spot Regional American Diner. No longer enough time to stroll down to Highland drive and stand on the terrace that looks out over the central city night-lights and West Seattle sea clouds, nor time to stand ankle deep in the chilling pacific and look west to the islands and dream.

I’m sitting on the plane, Lufthansa flight number 491 en route to Frankfurt, Germany and an eventual connection to home. Evening meal has been served, digested and I’ve watched one movie with my daughter – Horton Hears a Who, an animated version of the Dr Seuss story, surprisingly well done.

On the cabin screen now there is a map of our approximate position, just slightly east of the southern tip of Greenland. The map is pleasingly graphic, textbook greens and blues and of course, for Greenland - white. It seems almost to be in 3-D. In front of the symbolised airplane that trails a red line across the surface of the map is the empty blue of the Atlantic Ocean; somewhere in the distance I can see the outline of Britain.

Later we will pass over the Lockerbie memorial where my friend Bill Mack remains, but now we are approaching an area known as the strait of Denmark. Soon we will pass Iceland where my father-in-law died whilst on his own travels aboard a cruise ship tracing its own red line across his un-chartered blue.

We are flying at a height of 35000 feet the distance to destination is 1772 miles and our ground speed is 532 mph. Most of the passengers are asleep; the hostesses are resting my children dreaming. Just now I went to the rear of the plane and opened the shade to look out at the ice passing below but it is night time over the pole; we arrive tomorrow morning.

Everything, the map (which reminds me of school days, explorers and Tin-Tin cartoons of the sixties), the statistics, Frankfurt marked within a diamond, equidistant between Nice and Oslo and the red trace, the stark colours, the names all combine to incite within me a desire to travel.

And yet this is an end, a going home and a parting from friends, family and a place that has been home for two months.
It is also the end of this blog; the challenge laid down by a distant friend has been met, albeit with some degree of interpretation.

Unlike last year’s blog from San Francisco when the alphabet was the substructure there is no X to give me problems.

Yes, Shakespeare and his Titles seemed an impossible thing when it was first proposed but the relief of not having to answer to X outweighed the worry about Anthony and Cleopatra. Although I do not love Seattle in the way I do San Francisco, and find it harder to write inspirationally about, there is a at least a cinema here called The Egyptian.

It was there that a summer of multiple film attendance came to a fitting climax. Juno was the film of the moment, discovered at the first visit to the open-air screenings, seen again at the last and twice on video in-between, a sort of token of our time here. The Dark Knight, the latest Batman was the most impressive, firstly for the actor Heath Ledger’s promiscuously talented portrayal of the Joker and secondly for its resonance in the psyche of the American audience that surrounded me and cheered the end.

The Egyptian would not have been the climax to this celluloid feast if the final film I chose had not been a thriller depicting grisly murder in a French forest; the setting was too close to home and I didn’t want that atmosphere to be something I carried away from a summer in the northwest. As it was the cinema left us with the tale of Philippe Petite’s audacious tight ropewalk across the top of the former Twin Towers of the world trade centre. The film included the same animated “plane across atlas’ graphic that I am enjoying on the cabin screen as I write.

So summer, August, holidays and trip all come to an end. September starts as I land, maybe already has as I write. Krissie remains the other side of the ocean that now separates me and the continent that is her home for another six weeks.

Goodbyes are so hard, so much harder each time.

When I walk through the door at home, I will phone her, she will be about to wake up on a day that will not have almost finished for me and tell her we are home, safe and sound.

As Bill said, “All is well, that ends well.”

Especially when there is no X to worry about.
The End.

Henry (part 2)

From Seattle international airport you have little choice about the way you travel to the city. The train/monorail link is still under construction and not expected to be operational until next year so you are left with a choice of taxi or other wheeled vehicle which will by default deliver you to the city by travelling down Interstate Highway number 5.

As you approach the city, unless you are very attentive you will not notice the water of Elliott Bay – there are only two glimpses accorded and but your attention is distracted by the cranes of the container terminal, the two sports stadiums and then the skyscrapers of downtown.

I was lucky this morning in taking the taxi for the return journey when the driver chose to start the trip on route 99 and approach the airport from the west. We drove out along side the water, close up to the cruise ship terminal downtown and up over the container waterway.

Elliott Bay is the best part of this city, though it doesn’t dominate perception in the way the bay does in San Francisco, It remains glimpsed unless you go out on one of the ferries or across the bridge to West Seattle and Alki Beach.
Or go down the hill, past the Space Needle through the outdoor sculpture park that lies on the hill overlooking the waters of Elliott Bay to Peer 70.

The sculptures are functional, colourful and large – I did not find them emotional, but the seats and benches of the park are unparalleled for contemplating life, all its meanings and the distant peaks of the Olympic Range.

Down at Pier 70 a gushing fountain and some giant concrete eyeballs mark the start of Elliott Bay Park – a “Public Shoreline Access” A footpath and cycleway lead off alongside the water towards the distant Grain Silo. When the weather is clear, as it has been for most of the last two months the space between sea and sky is uplifting and the fresh ocean smell permeates the noise of the city.

Out on the bay a cargo ship or two wait for access to unload grain, the ferries silently glide across to the islands, someone kite surfs and a sailing boat might pass. One morning swimmers were gathered on one of the small beaches engaged in a competitive venture that entailed entering the icy shallows, submerging enough to fill blue plastic funnel attached to their heads and return to fill white plastic tubs on the sand. A small crowd of dogs and their walkers watched in puzzlement.
Further along, past the pier where the grain is unloaded, you will come to the fishing jetty – a series of shelters on a deck above the Salmon runs. Gulls call, if you are on a bike swallows will dart alongside and at one end the Canadian Geese gather on an open field. But the best thing about the park, apart from the space, solitude and air are the benches.

This is the best place In Seattle to sit.

It has been difficult for me to find someone in Seattle called Henry, something I thought would have been easy. It seems that Henry is a very old fashioned name, people today get names like Precious, or Madison, Loui made a friend called Summer, and one of the children backstage, two years old and learning a mixture of German (parental) English, Russian and Chinese is named August. So Loui started by meeting August and ended up kissing summer.

My dad’s name was Henry, Herbert Henry but as far as I know he never made it to Seattle. He spent some time in Miami or nearby, training with the US air force prior to World War 2 but I can’t find anything that connects him to this city.

But what would a challenge like this be if it weren’t challenging?

I came to Elliott Bay Park often; daily sometimes as its freedom was a literal breath of fresh air. I spent time sitting and meditating, reading and writing. I checked out each of the benches for the best view. I met people here, some completely mad but I always tried to find a Henry.

I cycled past the fishing jetty, The Happy Hooker bait shop, along side the railway tracks and even out as far as the marina at the end of the trail. And I read every sign, dedication and notice; some of the benches have dedications to departed loved ones. I even asked owners their dogs’ names. Was there a Henry among them? No.

Somewhere near the Grain Silo, an immense concrete bastion that dominates the shore view from see in a way that the revolving illuminated retro globe doesn’t (although apparently it is the fluorescent & of the sculpture park that is used by shipping) there is a plaque that commemorates the founding of the park. There are five names on the list and the fourth is Henry L. Kotkins and we should thank him for his sterling achievement.

However, it is the fifth name on the list that should remain immortal.

The Fifth

Macbeth

So, let’s recap.

The Merchant of Venice is all about a merchant, possibly one that sells coffee, Henry V is about a guy called Henry and The Twelfth Night is the one just after the eleventh. Love’s Labour’s Lost is about love and Juno (sort of), The star of The Tempest is Caliban and Hamlet is a bit about ghosts and a lot about castles with drawbridges.

We have also learnt that Romeo and Juliet is all about hanging around in graveyards and getting killed and The Taming of The Shrew features a beggar in the opening act. The Comedy of Errors was simply short and The Midsummer’s Night Dream should be confusing and sometime in the summer.

Shakespeare gave everyone the good advice that you should have your salad dressing As You Like It and that when you compare things like shoes you should do so inch by inch and Measure for Measure, and in King Lear he clearly foresaw the madness in everything that can even lead to the death and destruction of loved ones.

In the Bard’s original version of Much Ado About Nothing people talk a lot, as they often do sometimes about, well…. nothing much, in Two Gentlemen of Verona just two men did a whole lot of stuff that meant quite a big deal and in Othello a lot of people end up disappointed with each other.

And in a good production of The Winter’s Tale there ought to be at least a bit of snow.

Which brings us, neatly I think to Macbeth…………, which is all about trees.

Act 4 scene 1
“Be lion-mettled, proud; and take no care 
Who chafes, who frets, or where conspirers are: Macbeth shall never vanquish'd be until Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill 
Shall come against him.”

It’s the trees see, everything is going well until they end up at the castle door and then it’s curtains for Macbeth.

When the settlers arrived in the area that was to become Seattle all they could see were trees, mighty and majestic trees, the cedars of the Pacific Northwest. Some were big enough to drive through, and so they did. They also started to cut them down, fortunes were made, and hillsides were cleared. And then they were gone.

If you drive north from Seattle for about an hour and a half you can come to the town of Anacortes. Among other things it is the ferry gateway to The San Juan Islands. Washington is nicknamed the Evergreen State, Seattle the Emerald City but these are the Jewels. We traveled out there for three days of camping intent on seeing Killer Whales from the shoreline of Lime Kiln State Park. There is no guarantee of a sighting, in fact when we arrived on Monday morning the notice board by the small light house informed us that the last sighting had been Friday. The visiting scientific observer told us the resident pods had gone out to the ocean in order to feed, could be gone for three or four days and that only the itinerant seal eaters were around and unlikely to come past.

We stayed two days wandering the barnacle encrusted rocks, watching the changing sea, drifting seaweed and enflamed sky, the sunsets were outrageous, the smell of the sea intoxicating and there was even a 300 year old cedar tree.

But this is a mere juvenile. In the Quinault rainforest on the Olympic Peninsula you can even find the oldest tree in the world!! It’s the Quinault Big Cedar that claims (through human channels) to be 2000 years old.

The campus of Washington University also used to be full of trees like that; and empty of university. Today, lying on the shore of Lake Washington and just a books throw from lake Union, it is an area of open parkland, manicured lawns and academic buildings, some old some new. And ornamental fountains where Canadian Geese paddle. The atmosphere is genteel, Sunday afternoon, Oxbridge, or at least it is at the weekend when I went looking for trees.

You see the trees are coming back, gathering at the gates. The sculptor Brian Tolle’s new installation, as yet untitled, can be found near the bioengineering Dept. It is an homage to the massive cedar trees that used to grace the Pacific Northwest, and which played such a big part in native live and then later the settler’s; the sculpture’s diameter is the same as the Quinault Big Cedar. From a distance it looks like a giant stump.

Finding it was not easy, the Edinburgh born academic reading in the Herb Garden had not heard of it, the cyclist I stopped had not seen it, and the Pakistani Professor on his way to the library could only point me vaguely to the bioengineering block.

But Macbeth didn’t notice the trees at first either.



A Winter's Tale

If you were going to choose a symbol for a pacific northwest American city, what would it be and where would you put it? How about a statue of Chief Seattle, the person after whom the city is named?

There are in fact five native North American tribes that consider parts of Seattle to be in their traditional territory, the Duwamish, the Suquamish, the Snoqualmie, Tulalip and Muckleshoot. Personally I think the Muckleshoot win the award for funkiest name but it was the chief of the Suquamish people who is thus “honoured”.

Apparently there were a few problems associated with this as his tribe didn’t really have a “chief” in the accepted sense of the word and their beliefs about someone’s name continuing after they had passed on usually forbade such a thing. In fact rumour has it that there are only three statues to the man in the whole of the city, though I have only seen two, one of which is only a bust. So how about a totem pole?

One of the first things you notice in Pioneer Square, a mere smoke ring away from the bust of Chief Seattle, is a totem pole. Which is weird as none of the five tribes particularly have a culture of totem carving, something that belonged to the native tribes further north and into Canada.

The totem pole was first placed here, accompanied by cheers, in 1899. It was later damaged by fire, deliberately, and replaced with a copy in 1940. With a certain irony the replacement was carved by direct descendents of the Alaskan tribe that had seen the original one stolen from their village.

Some accounts say that the native village was abandoned and thus the pillage of a pole was justified, others say that it was a negotiated removal. Either way the Tinglit Tribe demanded twenty thousand dollars for the stolen pole before finally accepting five hundred, paid by a Seattle Newspaper. All in all probably not the best symbol to represent the city.

The Space Needle, a thoroughly modern pole that towers above the Seattle Centre and one of the first things you see as you approach Seattle from the ocean, is almost an iconic symbol for the city; omnipresent, worshipped by visitors and locals alike and appearing on the sides of buildings, t-shirts and key-rings. It is ingrained in the subconscious mind but as the design was originally inspired by a German radio mast it lacks a certain “indiginality.”

So, if I had to choose an iconic, indigenous, omnipresent and awe inspiring symbol for the city what would it be? Mount Rainier, or better still Mount Tahoma to give it its aboriginal name.

Japan’s Tokyo has its Mount Fiji, a mythical summit etched in our collective minds and Mount Tahoma is just as good. Only about fifty miles south of the city, the first thing you see as the airplane approaches Tacoma International airport (Tacoma is a linguistic corruption of Tahoma), the first thing you notice as you leave the airport, the first thing you see from the top of the space needle, from the ferries as you approach the city on water.

Ok, some days the clouds or haze completely hide it and for a while you forget that it exists, dominated as you are by the urban environment, but then suddenly the air clears and the shock of its presence is breath taking. Two years ago I was wandering Pike Street Market and my attention was all at street level, the football world cup was nearing a fantastic climax and my mind was elsewhere. I fell into conversation with an American journalist who opinioned that the US would be much more interested in the game if F.i.F.A. removed the offside rule and the teams played with no goalkeepers.

I turned my head away in shock and was stunned by the unexpected view of the mountain towering over the cranes of the container port in the distance, its majesty no way diminished by the plastic glass I was viewing it through. I didn’t get to visit closer on that trip and I promised myself I would this time. I haven’t, even though it is possible as a day trip from the city centre as well as a camping or hotel visit. There is still time.

“With 26 major glaciers, Mount Rainier is the most heavily glaciated peak in the lower 48 states with 35 square miles of permanent snowfields and glaciers. The summit is topped by two volcanic craters, each over 1,000 feet in diameter. Geothermal heat from the volcano keeps areas of both craters free of snow and ice, and has formed an extensive network of glacier caves and ice-filled craters”.

Snow-covered the whole year round. It’s winter up there.

Othello

In 1852 the early settlers out on Alki beach realised that they were in the wrong place if they wanted to create modern day Seattle so they pulled up there log cabins and sailed across the bay, told the natives to find somewhere else to live and set about cutting trees down and building a city.

In 1981 Jess Winfield collaborated with Adam Long and Daniel Singer in the founding of the Reduced Shakespeare Company thus inadvertently joining Bill Mack (see King Lear) in successfully creating entertainment and memorable titles from the acronym RSC. I momentarily crossed paths with Mr Singer and Mr Long during a break from my own show at the Vancouver World’s Fair of 1986, when I was lucky to see their sword fighting version of one Romeo and Juliette, at least I think it was them.

These two dates, more than a hundred years apart are linked, somewhat tenuously, by Jess Winfield, Othello and the city of Seattle.

The area that the settlers chose is now known as Pioneer Square and it was here that the fledging city began to take root. Timber was cut, timber was shipped and the city was wooden. Unfortunately the Great Seattle fire of 1889 reduced most of this to ash but the city was rebuilt in brick and because of drainage problems the new Seattle that rose was one story higher and small, damp and smelly remnants of the first attempt can be visited on the underground Tour that is organised from Pioneer square.

Pioneer Square is downtown of downtown Seattle, if you follow me. It seems that the action, the energy is uptown, not here in what is the original centre. This gives the area a calmer, slightly lost, on the fringe feel. It’s an uncomfortable mix of ‘trend’ and ‘down and out.’ The Utility Kilt Company, that aggressively markets dresses for men is located here, so is Skid Row.

The term Skid Row possibly originated here in Seattle where its original meaning referred to the practice of sliding logs down from the hills to the waiting ships anchored in Elliott Bay. The ships have been replaced by ferries going to the islands in Puget Sound or north to Vancouver Island in Canada, the logs by people down on their luck. There is a feeling of disappointment in the area, mixed with initiative, some of it historical.

Seattle’s first skyscraper is here, the Art Deco-esque Smith Tower opened on Independence Day 1914 and for a while the tallest building west of the Mississippi. Today it marks the southern limit of the modern downtown skyscrapers and although dwarfed by them it outclasses them and because of its position literally stands apart. An operator-serviced elevator takes you up to the observation balcony but not to the private apartment that now occupies the roof space formally occupied by the water system.

Although the Utility Kilt Company is an interesting if all-be-it unnecessarily macho experience, complete with world map that shows the location of each purchaser and a very pleasing “Marilyn Monroe” air jet experience that the salesman insists that you experience, the gem of pioneer square, the treasure worth travelling thousands of miles for is the Elliott Bay Book Company.

Do you remember what it sounded like in the library when you were a kid? How the floor creaked as you moved around the stacks, the only sound in a cathedral of silence? The Elliott Bay Bookstore is like that with its wooden floors that seem to date from the days the first explorers moored their boats a few hundred yard west in the bay itself.

It’s a cavernous shop, three floors, but you will only find them if you explore all the nooks and crannies; or follow your nose to the cafe in the basement. If you find the Travel Loft listen to the sound your feet make on the wooden stairs as you descend; there is an echo of boatyard.

Jess Winfield and I paths there at the end of July as part of the regular author readings that the store organises. They take place in the basement, in yet another hidden part beyond the café, are free and eclectic as the stock they sell. It’s a wonderful place; you can loose hours browsing amongst the mix of both new and used but don’t leave your children unattended in the kid’s section whilst you do this though as the shop threatens to give them a cappuccino AND a puppy if you do!

Jess Winfield was reading from his new book – My Name Is Will, a novel of sex, drugs and Shakespeare and I rushed across town to hear his thoughts on Othello; if he didn’t offer them spontaneously then I would elicit them through persistent questioning.

Unfortunately traffic, and my kid’s hip hop class conspired against me and I was too late to hear his educated opinions and his humoristic stories, as I entered he was signing the last few copies that remained unsold as the stragglers straggled. I decided not to press him on the subject preferring to carry away a sense of disappointment.

A sense of disappointment that could mingle with the disappointment that underlies the jealousy at the heart of Othello itself, and the disappointment with life that shows in the faces of the pan-handlers and drunks of Pioneer Square and the disappointment that the trees the first settlers saw are all gone; but also that the low red bricked buildings that replaced them are not more widespread in the city centre.

http://www.utilikilts.com