Kit Bakke's Blog, page 2

The Beginning of the End, or?

Or is it the end of the beginning?

Spawning salmon in Alaska creek. 

Maybe it’s just the end of the first phase of our Covid-19 pandemic: the scramble to identify the virus’ strong and weak points, to develop vaccines, to realize it’s a global problem, to stumble as we learn a thing or two about delivery and care, to disentangle politics from the health of the human community. Maybe we’ll crush Covid-19 to an annoyance, one more annual vaccine to get. Or maybe not. Viruses are wily.

Even if Covid-19 becomes background noise, there’s the next one waiting in the wings. Will we (the global we) be foresighted enough, and will we care enough about our future generations, to prepare for it as we so clearly did not for this one?

Well, that’s my scary question for now.

On the other hand, my white and fully vaccinated Seattle life motors along just fine. Our county’s case numbers are dropping, hospital beds are emptying, vaccination rates are doing well, our big employers understand the public health issues and are not screaming for an end to social distancing and mask-wearing.

As a result of all this good behavior, we now have the tentative return to dinners between vaccinated couples inside their houses! Our social skills are rusty, so we’re hesitant, but to even talk about such a thing is a huge change from the past year. Next week, if the numbers continue to move in the right direction, our restaurants are scheduled to open to 50% capacity. Incredible!

It feels as if space is expanding, as if we can take a deep breath and move on.

I’ve recently signed up the local recycling pick-up company Ridwell. They have found partners and recyclers who will take the things that our city/county recycling system will not. Specifically, Styrofoam and all scrunchy plastic like grocery store produce bags, plastic wrap and cling film. The cling film is what got me going. I’ve been haunted by all those photos of the stuff wrapped around fish and clinging to the floating trash islands in the oceans. If we destroy our oceans, we destroy the planet.

And guess what the cling film and flexible plastic food and mailer envelopes (think those blue and white Amazon prime wrappers) are being recycled to become: Trex. You know, that decking material that looks like wood, is cheaper than wood, lasts longer than wood and doesn’t need to be refinished like wood. So it’s a double, maybe a triple win. Saves the forests, saves the oceans and is convenient and affordable for people. Ridwell. Maybe you have something similar in your area.

I’ve been taking a Zoom painting class from a local art school that’s focused on painting water. Here’s my results from two of our exercises: both from photos I’ve taken on trips. One is a spawning salmon in Alaska and the other is a rushing stream in Yosemite.

Rushing stream and bent tree, Yosemite, 2019.

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New Year, Turn the Page

People have lot to say about 2020. Some miraculously spot on; others wildly off target. The best will require barrel time to mellow into vintage nonfiction and fiction. After a year of reading more novels than usual, I’ve gained a lot more respect for fiction as a means of telling the truth. Good novelists are translators—they hear our telegraphic off-the-cuff shouts and murmurs and convert them into the more nuanced pain and joy of characters caught in a story that loops us back and forth from their world to ours. No matter how alien the landscape, the best fictional worlds are a cleverly distorted mirror. We see ourselves in their words—our own fears, furies, worries, kindnesses and courage.

I just finished Penelope Lively’s How it all Began (published in 2011). I’ve read a couple of her books before. She’s very good at playing with coincidence, with the roads not taken, with alternate lives, what might have been, all within a story of basically normal middle class, contemporary people. She buries tiny, jewel-like asides about the human condition in the middle of a paragraph detailing a suburban husband’s Saturday DIY chores or an immigrant’s struggle to become literate in English. Her characters take walks in city parks, go to the grocery store, wait in the doctor’s office, have affairs, worry about money, and tell jokes. They do all those recognizable nonthreatening things, but underneath, as we all know about ourselves, there’s another world, another life that they, and we, are living. Her characters swing back and forth between wishing they were living different lives and loving the ones they have.

There’s a solidity, a forgivingness, a deep humanity to Lively’s novels. Her characters are unpretentious, moving in quieter times than ours today, but requiring kindness and courage nonetheless.

Nowadays, I’d say it’s not a bad idea to dip into her world from time to time. May it be ours too, sometime.

Hope springs eternal; time to turn the page.

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Stuck in the mud?

All together now–onward through mud on land and storm at sea

Time flies when you’re having fun, but not, it turns out, during a terrible global pandemic. But it’s not so much that time has been stuck in the mud for the last eleven months; it’s me who’s lost momentum. My wellies got sucked down, my umbrella blew away, and my jacket’s soaked through. I’m the one stuck in the mud. I seem to have lost my mojo, my oomph, my get-up-and-go.

Pull yourself together, I say. DO things. Make Christmas cookies! Send money to food banks! Go through those extra blankets again and give most of them to the downtown shelters. Spend more time exercising, go back to yoga…why aren’t you writing that book, for goodness sake? And what about those friends you haven’t checked up on lately?

Does that little pep talk help me? Not really. Makes me feel guilty, though. I’ve no right to be like this.

I do have things to do, and when I actually tear myself away from various horrendous newsfeeds, and make myself attend to some household chore or to someone else’s problems (far bigger than mine) I end up feeling OK.

Briefly.

A couple hours, maybe, of feeling useful. But then all the disasters of our world come bubbling back, catching my heels and chilling my hands.

One thing I have done these last few months, that’s fun (!) for me but of no value to anyone else is take a drawing class. I’ve always wanted to learn to draw—to take a three dimensional world and turn it into two dimensions. Peter and I spend a lot of time in art museums (back in the distant past when we traveled) and I so admire painters’ work—not just the technical skill, although that’s totally amazing, but their imagination and creativity—how they decide what to paint, what goes where, inserting a joke here, a coded message there. All very wonderful.

It was a once a week zoom class for a couple months: drawing the still life—paper and graphite pencils. I was very bad, but it was so interesting—I got into a kind of meditative mode when I was drawing for 30 minutes or so. There’s a kind of magic to it. In a way, the results don’t matter, which is a very alien place for me. Black and white still lives are all about shading and light and shadow. But I miss color.

Even though it’s still very muddy, I’ve signed up for a painting class.

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Literary Chitchat

Through a spider’s web

 

A strange picture of my backyard through a spider’s web. I couldn’t get the camera to focus properly, so special kudos to anyone who can actually see the spider. But the raindrops on the beautiful web are a treat to see.

I’ve been thinking about spiders recently. Thinking about Charlotte, of course, the most famous spider of them all. There she was, in Fern’s family barn, watching everything, caring for everything, teaching her friend Wilbur,  protecting everyone.

Bottom line, I don’t kill spiders. I used to (in spite of my childhood enjoyment of Charlotte’s Web) but this year, I’ve stopped.

But this isn’t about any of that. Mainly, I wanted to pass along an audio chat I did with a wonderfully enthusiastic supporter of authors and their books. Vikki Carter found me, and I was so glad she did. She has a background as a research librarian and as an author, I love the research part of the job. It’s so fun–the anxiety and stress of the blank page is completely absent! It’s always hard for me to stop the research and start writing. You never know when that perfect piece of information might be just on the next page, or hiding in the bibliography or tucked into the next person you interview.

Vikki has a newsletter and a website. Take the time to visit her; you’ll enjoy it.

Here’s the link to the podcast conversation she and I had.  Hope you like it as much as we did.

 

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The Joys of Electoral Politics

I’m back on track with current events, after taking a few days off to mourn Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the end of the American democracy as we know it. But…perhaps there is a light at the end of the tunnel after all…I’ve been text banking for 2020Victory. A very organized process, supported by easy to sue software (Slack and a server called ThruText), detailed training sessions, and encouraging mentors and supporters. I get a batch of 300 names/text addresses, in this case from Ohio. I send them out, one by one. The message is specific to the recipient group. It identifies me (the sender) by first name only, as a volunteer for the democratic campaign, and does not include my personal text address. When (if) they respond, I have a series of canned messages I can send them, depending on their response. For me, these Ohio voters were Terrific! Many had already voted blue. One responded “Blue all the way through.”

I’ve also been reading some Walt Whitman.

Leaves of grass as seen on my morning walk yesterday.

Whitman also worried about America, saying “…the lack of a common skeleton, knitting all close, continually haunts me…”

Let’s get that skeleton back together!

 

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Where to Begin

When Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, I went on a news fast. I’ve done it before, from time to time, for two reasons. First, the current news keeps me up at night and poisons the good parts of my waking life. And secondly, it teaches me nothing new. I already know the terrible bits of our national and global situation. The big picture is clear, the accumulation of horrendous details doesn’t add anything.

So I’ve been abstaining from the daily news cycle. I do however read the New York Review of Books, whose essays are disguised as book reviews, but are really long and excellent essays on whatever topic the book is about. The same is true of the London Times Literary Supplement, which gives me a more global picture of humanity’s ups and downs. So economics and politics and the pandemic do sneak in under my anti-news barriers. Plus, friends tell me things.

Being a consumer of news, filtered or not, is such a passive approach. OK, so we’ve done a few active things; we all marched a couple months ago with Black Lives Matter. It felt good. But what should we be doing now to take our anti-racist intentions off the street and into courtrooms, prisons, police training programs, city, county and state budget discussions, family dinner tables? A new sign popped up in my neighborhood a week or so ago that very boldly challenges us to take the sorts of actions that are excellent next steps.

Take your pick, but DO something!

Or maybe your concern of choice is American women’s looming loss of (even more) control over their bodies. Planned Parenthood’s campaign “No Matter What” is worth supporting with as much money and time as you can manage. Or maybe you want to stop America’s deportation machine from breaking up even more families. Call your local ACLU or any group of immigration attorneys and find out what they need, and then give it to them.

Find problems worth working on. Find organizations that are capable of tackling them. Add what value you can to their work. Appreciate your efforts. You’ll feel better for it.

 

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It’s All About Voting

Hi friends!

I don’t like asking people for things, and I definitely don’t like asking people to give up their hard-earned money, but sitting within our comfort zones isn’t going to get us anywhere. And we HAVE TO MOVE right now.

Actions:

We’ve been sending postcards to notify people who were purged from voter rolls in key swing states, and now to let people know about early voting. Five million postcards have gone out already, so soon they’ll be looking for volunteers to send texts and make phone calls, so feel free to contact them directly: Reclaim Our Vote: https://actionnetwork.org/forms/reclaim-our-vote-signup

Donations:

In case postcarding, texting, and calling doesn’t fit into your already 110% full day, and you’re  looking to squeeze as much impact as possible out of your donations, check out this site, Flip the Vote: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ftv501c4

They have identified the most effective Get-Out-The-Vote organizations in the most critical swing states so you don’t have to do any research. If you’d rather give to a 501c3, we’ve also been supporting Voter Participation Center, an ‘umbrella’ voter organization for months and they seem to do good, targeted work: https://www.voterparticipation.org/

We have a few other local organizations in swing states that we researched and have been funding, and can pass those names along to you if you like.

Thanks for taking time to support voting! I know the election may seem a little less urgent than all the things we’re faced with today—add the lack of fresh air on the whole west coast to all the other stuff we’re dealing with—but making sure all Americans can and do vote is critical to our ability to address all these issues long-term.

Stay well!

Kit

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When You’re Ready

Everyone loves the Pike Place Market (illustration by Jourdan Kay, from Wildsam’s field guide to Seattle)

When you are ready (and the world is ready) to travel again, here’s an open invitation to visit my home town. Seattle! I’m an actual native, and that is vanishingly rare these days since my fair city has grown many fold since my humble birth here.

Wildsam, https://wildsam.com/seattle-field-guide, a cool publishing company is putting out field guides to cities like Austin, San Francisco and Denver, and other interesting places around the country. The Seattle edition is just hot off their press.

One of the quirks of their field guides is to include three essays by locals. I was asked to write one, and I was delighted to contribute.

Wildsam’s field guide to Seattle is out!

“Wildsam Seattle weaves together the salty, misty past of Gold Rush hustlers and jet-building dreams with a modern metropolis intimately linked to the outdoors. Inside you’ll find stories from deep-sea fishermen, artists, entrepreneurs, kayak builders, grunge record producers and the leader of the Indigenous nation at the heart of Seattle history.”

Check it out!

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Protest: Still on Trial

The struggle is nowhere near over

 

It’s been a bittersweet time for those of us who were active in the civil rights movement (that’s what we called it then–today it’s the anti-racist movement; a much clearer descriptor of the struggle and the goal) and the antiwar movement in the 1960s. On the one hand, it’s terrible that in spite of all we did then, there’s as much or more left to do. On the other hand, it’s so wonderful to see the next generations coming along with their energy and leadership, their creativity and their commitment.

The University of Washington Libraries Special Collections has posted a tour of a slice of the 1960s/70 antiwar movement in Seattle. It highlights and references my 2018 book Protest on Trial. I’d like to return the message and give the UW library a plug for their extensive collections of photos, news clippings, FBI memoranda, interviews and more from those times.

They say the devil’s in the details. Well, so are the seeds of knowledge–what fails, what succeeds–it’s knowing the details of history that create a platform for making that next step forward.

Here’s the link: http://specialcollections.ds.lib.uw.edu/Seattle7/

Right on, fight on.

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Pieces of New

Gentoo penguin parent feeding baby.

Below is a draft of  the beginning of a book I’m working on. What’s it about? That’s part of the problem–it’s about too much: traveling, COVID-19, getting old, seeing too many contradictions between happy travels and refugee travels, between our green living world and the firestorms of the future. 

But here’s the start. Tell me what you think.

Those who like to feel that they are always right and

who attach a high importance to their own opinions

should stay at home. Aldous Huxley, 1926

 

The irony of working on a book about travel when much of humanity is under house arrest is not lost on me. Youngsters may get work release, but it’s pretty much an indeterminate sentence for us over-60s. By now, in the summer of 2020, the experience has lost its newness, its adrenaline, its challenge to personal creativity. Let’s learn Japanese! Let’s perfect sourdough bread! Let’s hand-sew quilts! Let’s read Ulysses! No, none of these. Mostly I feel like turning over and going back to sleep.

We’re clearly in for the long slog. Cleaning out closets and sorting family photographs just isn’t going to fill the time I used to spend running around buying things, chatting with friends in bars and flying to interesting international destinations. Even the energizer bunnies of my acquaintance are losing their zippy personalities. No more streetside greetings. We turn away from each other on narrow sidewalks, hoping to shield our lungs from showers of virus. I no longer mouth an automatic smile under my homemade mask. The elbow bump had the lifespan of a fruit fly. I feel a mild depression coming on.

We wait for the vaccine, which we assume will exist and will work like magic. Not just for me, but for everybody. Until then, we can’t go anywhere. Never have so many canceled so much.

When I write “us over-60s” I don’t mean over 60 years old. I mean over the whole 60s decade. I’m in my early 70s; even without COVID-19, the idea of “journey” is taking on a darker existential meaning. And unlike most journeys, this one is a one-way trip—no returns, no changes to the itinerary. Although assumptions of immortality are common among the young they tend to fade with age, for me it’s been the reverse. I was sure I would die in my 20s; and now, despite everything, I find it hard and sad to imagine the world without me.

I have lived for the past forty years on a pleasant Seattle residential street in the same comfortable house, not too big, not too small—running hot and cold water, indoor plumbing, electricity, central heating and high bandwidth internet. Being cooped up here would be a divine heaven for well over half the human beings on Earth. As a prison, it’s light-years better than any I’ve seen or read about, even the enlightened ones in Denmark or Norway.  Our house wraps me like a shiny high-tech space blanket with pockets. It’s warm, safe, pleasant, handy—so why do I wish to exchange it for a stiff, dusty, moth-eaten, but magically functional flying carpet?

I dream. I dream of journeys, past and future, real and pretend, mine and others. My travel imagination is profligate, selfish, amoral. I know all the environmentally devastating reasons to wave toodle-oo to jet travel, arrivederci to sipping espresso in Venice, sayonara to meditating on the cloud-pruned black pines in Kyoto’s imperial gardens, tashi delek la to hiking through Bhutan’s rhododendron forests, güle güle to eating tomatoes and olives at dawn on Turkey’s Lycian shores, and farewell to gazing at Denali’s magnificent profile unobscured by clouds. I know the bad and the beautiful, but shut my eyes and skitter away from inevitable stasis, existential or otherwise.

Instead I imagine casting my lot with Hermes, the Greek god of travel. And I know I’m not alone. A son of Zeus, Hermes had wings sprouting from his sandals, his hat and his staff. Haven’t we all had flying dreams? Flying dreams are the most commonly reported dream theme. I certainly remember mine from childhood: ecstasies of swooping around telephone poles, loop-the-looping around the wires, and then escaping, skimming faraway past the pointy fringed tops of the Doug fir trees, off to who knows where. Flight for us humans has always been the ultimate motion, the definitive trick. The god Hermes also has a reputation as a trickster, popping up all over the place, deflating our assumptions, exploding our pretenses. This endeared him to Jung. And perhaps to me.

**

Homo sapiens have been traveling for tens of thousands of years. Something might be better just over that hill…where does this river go?…is there gold on the other side of this ocean?…maybe we could start over, do better on Mars. Humans are migrants, explorers, wanderers, tourists. We roam, we stroll, we stride, we drift, we run. Our senses and brains are hardwired to notice motion, change, difference. Our survival has always depended on this focused alertness. We didn’t get to the top of the food chain by sitting still, by staying in our caves.

**

Every individual person’s trip is different, because our blankets (and our carpets) are all different. Even when we travel the same route, our experiences are all over the map. Many travel books are memoir: how the travel writer discovers a physical, spiritual or intellectual new world on a journey that changes her life (bittersweet, but always for the better). But travel literature—ask any bookstore owner—is incredibly capacious, and memoir is only one of a half-dozen of its faces; there are also shelves of travel books disguised as philosophy, advocacy, science, history, adventure, fiction. It’s a genre that, like its subject, has no respect for boundaries. Rick Steves broke out of his down-to-earth travel guide persona to write Travel as a Political Act, advocating travel as the key to a better, more peaceful world. Paul Theroux, likely the most prolific of adventuresome travel writers, published a compendium of other travelers’ mediations on travel called The Tao of Travel. Jenny Diski wrote a wonderful travel book called On Trying to Keep Still. There are dozens of entertaining volumes that describe bad trips, one titled I Should Have Stayed Home.

Years ago, I read Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel. It was a used copy, with an inscription. Someone had received it as a gift and eventually had sold it to Twice Sold Tales, a used bookstore in my neighborhood. The giver’s inscription reads: “Happy travels. Open your eyes and your heart! Wherever you are is exactly where you need to be.” Then there’s this: “P.S. I can’t remember if I enjoyed this or not, but it seemed fitting.”

So will my version seem fitting? Will you enjoy my journal of journeys, this trail of travels, my flight with Hermes? There will be some wandering, and a little wondering too. Not much zipping, however, as I contemplate why we go, how we go, and how we decide what baggage we carry with us. There’s not much about where we go, except, for some excitement, I toy briefly with space travel and time travel in Chapters 7 and 8. Nor is it so much about me, but a little bit, yes.

Travel is a maze of contradictions, plans frustrated, foolish expectations, missteps, conundrums, dead ends, paradoxes—and new life.

Come on along.

P.S. Nor do I ignore all the good reasons to stay home.

 

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