botanizing

From dry to wet

On Friday evening, I tucked into a spot at Johnson Bar, where the only drink was river.  I camp regularly at this point bar on the Selway River.  When was I last here in early April, the river showed no sign of snow melt.  It had a wintered thinness; water was held to last summer’s late channel.  The cobble point bar was broad, extending perhaps 25 yards from my campsite to the river channel.  The cobble bar is now gone.  River washes at the trunks of the cedars and ponderosa pines that line the margin of my camp. 

In the past week, I have gone from desert to moist forest.  I have gone from dry sand in the wind to wet sand on my feet. A week ago, I crawled under pinyon pines for shade.  Here, clouds preclude shade, and water drops hang from the needles of the ponderosa pine in my camp.

Dinner at the Wilderness Inn

The café at the Wilderness Inn is my favorite place to eat.  It’s at Lowell, Idaho, just up the Lochsa River from its confluence with the Selway.  Yesterday, after walking along the Selway River, I stopped at the Wilderness Inn for dinner.  I had a pork tenderloin sandwich and onion rings.

It was 20 years ago—10 June 1988—when I first ate at the Wilderness Inn. On that day I drove over Bitterroot Mountains at Lolo Pass on Highway 12 and down the valley of the Lochsa River. I was searching for kittentails for a research project on flower evolution that I was then just beginning.  Synthyris missurica, the mountain kittentail, is common along the side creeks that enter the Lochsa River, and I was making collections of its flowers at various creeks as I drove down Highway 12.  The morning of collecting work was long.  There had been little food in the truck when I had a quick breakfast and fixed tea earlier at my campsite in Montana.  As I collected along the Lochsa my hunger grew intense, and there were no stores or restaurants.  The drive down the Lochsa valley was slow.  Logging trucks loaded with large cedars crept down the mountain highway.  The curves were tight, coming one after another, and I passed, as I could, the logging trucks and tractor-trailer rigs.  I grew ravenous, wondering the distance to food, feeling certain that Highway 12 in the Lochsa valley was the most extensive food-free zone in America.  And then I saw the Wilderness Inn.  It was situated across the highway from the river, sitting behind a small parking area.  That first meal at the Wilderness Inn was several years before I moved to the inland Northwest and began my regular visits to the Lochsa River.

My research allows me to range widely over the American West, and I enjoy eating in local, independent restaurants as I travel.  A week ago, on my return home from the desert, I stopped in Cascade, Idaho, for breakfast.  I had camped the night before in the mountains to the south of Cascade, and I arrived at the restaurant at 6.30, looking for both breakfast and tea.  Two women were sitting at a table by a front window when I arrived.  They stood when I entered—they were the waitress and cook.  The waitress brought a menu, and the cook went the kitchen, where she began to complain loudly about her job, her employers, and why the restaurant was losing money.  It was a sour breakfast.  Not an experience I’ve ever had at the Wilderness Inn.

The waitress at the Wilderness Inn has a good laugh.  We look up as she laughs, and it helps us see who else is having dinner.  A couple of late middle-aged women at a table talk about their favorite hunting spots, and two retired gentlemen at the counter comment on their favorite soap operas.  Current and former forest rangers speak softly.  Shiny motorcycles line-up outside—I admire them as I eat and think about travelling with the wind in my hair (no helmet law in Idaho!).  Tables of young, white-water rafting guides set my reveries to youth and adventure. “Here ya go,” the waitress says as she hands me a menu, although I know what I want. 

A month ago, I met DL for dinner at the Wilderness Inn before we went camping on her birthday.  The week after that CF and I had lunch there on a day when we searched the river beaches for garden stones.  Two weeks after that, I was back in the restaurant with DL, Peter, and Ray when we were cold and wet from walking 15 miles in the rain at the end of a backpack.  The young waitress that evening kept the hot drinks coming to our table.   For each of those meals and all of my other lunches and dinners at the Wilderness Inn, I have a pork tenderloin sandwich.

Breaded pork tenderloin sandwiches are practically the state food of Iowa, where I grew-up.  The pork tenderloin sandwiches at the Wilderness Inn are fixed Iowa style, which is uncommon.  Iowa style is basically a wiener schnitzel with thinly pounded meat—about the thickness of corrugated cardboard (and sometimes it has the taste of cardboard as well)—served on a hamburger bun.  The piece of meat should be twice the diameter of the hamburger bun so that the sandwich with the overhanging rim of breaded pork looks more like a flying saucer than a hamburger.  One puts ketchup on this sandwich, probably also mustard or mayo, and tomato, onion, lettuce, as well as pickles.

I’ve eaten breaded pork tenderloin sandwiches this way since childhood.  It was my mother’s favorite food.  After I moved away from home, she would always fix them for me when I returned to visit.  In her mid-80s, when she no longer cooked for herself, she would ask, “Do you want a tenderloin sandwich this evening?”  She would then call a minimart near the senior citizens’ apartments where she lived in old age to place an order for the sandwiches.  “Will you walk over to pick them up?” she would ask after the order was placed.  It takes only a few minutes to cook the meat, and by the time I walked to the grill at the nearby minimart our sandwiches would be ready.

Each time I order a pork tenderloin sandwich at the Wilderness Inn, I think about having dinner with my mother.  I think about her love of breaded pork tenderloin sandwiches.

Worshippers and lunatics

They gather before the standing stones.  Priapic stones draw their urges.  The balanced rock, knobbed columns, and parapets of hoodoos are dark silhouettes against the sunset smear of orange and flare of yellow.

A woman dances.  One leg out and down and then the other—her slow twirl takes her from toes of one foot to those of the other.  Her extended arms catch the last orange light.  Her long, dark hair becomes the last shadow.  There are perhaps 20 others who have gathered for the ceremony.  They stand in the sand.  They face west.  Men and women and children.  Every family has a camera.  These are worshippers of sunset.

I sit at the edge of the Garden of Eden, which is just uphill from the worshippers, in Arches National Park.  I’ve put my canvas chair below a line of sandstone fins to watch the ceremony and have a late dinner.  I eat a bagel with ham and Swiss cheese and sip very cold orange juice.

The dancing woman dissipates in the heat and dusk.  The dark gap between sunset and the rising moon makes the crowd disappear—they become disembodied voices, cacophonous among the junipers.  They talk not about the sunset but about the moon.  We talk about heat but not about the sun.  We swoon silently before sunsets.  The moon makes us talk.  This is the night of the full moon.

“We checked the Internet,” I hear a woman say, “sunset was at 8.37 and the moon rises at 8.47.”

“Where will it rise,” a voice asks.

“Behind the mountains,” another woman says.  “I came to watch it rise over the mountains.”

We follow the moon.  I, too, have come to watch the moon rise over the La Sal Mountains.  I am among the lunatics. 

A yellow glow broadens behind the mountains in the east.

*   *   *

This was the 19th of May.

Gray's Canyon

Cottonwoods clatter.  A steady wind has risen with the evening.  The multitude of fresh leaves on plump, flexing petioles slide and shuffle against one another.  They make the noise of a crowd. 

Sometime before my arrival there was a crowd in my campsite on the Green River.  There is a large fire mound of old, gray coals and circling it is a broad ring of beer bottles.  My predecessors, as they sat around the fire, must have tossed bottle after bottle over their shoulders.  Many bottles per shoulder, I guess, and possibly several shoulders.  The many bottles shout loudly an awful egotism, although bottle litter is a squalid sign of one's power and persistent presence.   The bottle mouths had gathered sand before I arrived.  I gather the bottles into a pile, and as I gather I find more and more among the bushes.

There is a crowd in the campground down the river about a quarter of a mile. River runners were lined-up for dinner when I drove past.  Rafts were parked in the campground sites.  I have used that campground in the past but now tend to drive past.  My site up the river, despite the bottle litter, offers only the crowd of cottonwood leaves, a thicket of skunkbush, sand sage, and greasewood.  It offers this:  "kwip, kwip, kwip, kwip."  The periodic song of a lonely bird, calling from a cottonwood for a mate. 

Like wind

On a triangle of sand, extending up the Selway River from the mouth of Three Links Creek, we settle one-by-one near the fire.  It is late afternoon.  Smoke rises from the one log left through the afternoon in the stone fire ring.  Ray saws a drift log into thirds.  He grabs a branch of pine and saws-off a few finger-like branches.  He puts the pine fingers along the length of the smoking log.  He adds the drift log thirds.  New smoke rises and twists.  “You’re getting smoked-out in that nice perfect spot,” Ray says to me.  I arrived first at the beach and settled into a spot with a stone backrest where I could extend my legs to the fire.  The smoke tucks back into wind from upstream, allowing me to open my eyes.  New wind gusts upstream, blowing back smoke that fills Ray’s face.  I go to the woodpile, break sticks, and pile them on the new flame.  The flame rises, the smoke goes.  The sun, too, begins to go.  The hill opposite us is half lit by sun.  Aspen leaves hold yellow light against the infiltration of darkness.  With the darkness, we share whiskey, chocolate, and words.  We share the wind. It blows upriver on the edge of a new front. “In weather reports, news of the wind always gets my attention,” Ray says. “I like wind,” he says.

Finding My Medieval

The medieval is shuttered.  Through the shutter louvers little is visible, although I try to look.  The medieval is shadowy and obscure.  Some years ago, I read Norman Cantor’s Inventing the Middle Ages, in which he cautions that contemporary quests for the Middle Ages are “perilous and never-ending.” 

I’m not on a quest and don’t feel imperiled, although I am disoriented when I step from the bus in San Gimignano. I do not have a map.  I do not know where our B & B is or how to get to it.  When we step from the bus, we face a high wall built in the Middle Ages to protect the city.  A gentle rain begins, which adds to my disorientation.  We walk on the sidewalk around a Medieval tower at a corner of the wall and go up hill to look for an entrance.

San Gimignano is advertised as a ‘medieval dream.’  It is a hill town in Italy located not far from Florence.  It has a myth for its origin and Etruscan artifacts in its museum, but mostly it retains the architectural structure of its medieval boom.

The High Middle Ages, Norman Cantor suggested, date from the First Crusade of 1095-1099, but the flourishing of that era, extending from the 12th to the early 14th centuries, was surely tied to expansions of wealth and food resources.  The churches and many other buildings of San Gimignano were built in the High Middle Ages.  Its city wall reflects the power struggles and violence of that time.  Beyond the High Middle Ages, as in much of the rest of Tuscany, devastating plagues, especially in 1464 and 1631, reduced the population of San Gimignano and the people’s wealth diminished. Part of the story of this ‘medieval dream’ is that plague and insufficient wealth in a small population left little opportunity for the development of San Gimignano over the 500 years since the end of those High Middle Ages.

I walk the streets of San Gimignano, half expecting and mostly hoping that I will meet the medieval on someone’s stoop.  Is it ridiculous that I want to find a concept like the medieval on these streets? Indeed, how could I expect to find an era 500 years past in my contemporary travels?

I like to touch the stones of old places.  Each place has it own stoniness, and I grasp at the roughness. The various textures open my senses to the possibilities of a place and its times.

In San Gimignano, I feel closest to the medieval in the narrow lanes. The stone facades that enclose the lanes are close.  I wonder about the medieval sense of ‘closeness.’ How did these narrow lanes with their high stone facades contribute to senses of safety as well as confinement in that time?  There is comfort now in the tightness of the place and its proportions favor the pedestrian.  Of course, the ‘closeness’ and density of San Gimignano’s population may 500 years ago have promoted susceptibility to plague. 

Stoops in the lanes are washed in the mornings.  The medieval lanes must have run with gutters for sewage.  The smells of that age are gone.  Today San Gimignano smells of sausage and pizza and cotton candy on market day.

My medieval in San Gimignano is as thin and sweet as cotton candy.  It is as cool and rough as stone.  It has the elegance of simple angles and the beauty of an old place.

*  *  *

Notes

Middle Ages are “perilous and never-ending” from p. 39 in Norman Cantor, 1991, Inventing the Middle Ages.  Quill, New York.

I have used Gianna Coppini’s San Gimignano:  A Medieval Dream published in 2000 by Edizione Il Furetto for information on San Gimignano.

I was in San Gimignano on 11 to 14 March.

San Gimignano

Blackbirds sing before the first bells of St. Agostino.  They sing again after the bells, too.  The Blackbird’s vigorous song is like that of the American Robin and, in drowsy reverie, I braid the peels of Blackbirds, Robins, and bells. 

A slant of light comes through the lace curtains to make a lace of shadow on the wall. I have forgotten to set my alarm.  This doesn’t matter.

I walk later in the sun. Veronicas and violets bloom among the grasses below the town wall.  Hairs of fresh, dark nettle leaves catch the sun.  I am drawn to them but don’t touch.  Stalks of nettle flowers bend like purple tongues from the tops of plants.  Green stigmas of the females are recurved against the purple.

Sibyls and a Blue Madonna

I am dizzy.  My head was down and my eyes closed as we came into Siena.  Our bus was hot and tight, and the road on the many hills curved back and forth and around and down and back and forth.  My stomach, ready to empty upward at any moment, flipped kilometers ago and lies pressed against my diaphragm.  My steps on the cobble street are unsteady. 

Tea and salty chips help to reorient my stomach.  Opposite the café and above our heads in a small lane, there is a painting of the Madonna and child in a slight niche of a building’s façade.  Both Madonna and child have moulded crowns. Her hands in prayer come between her and the child. The folds of her drapery form shadowy arcs, extending from her head and around her lap to point to the child. Despite that compositional device and her simple rendering, it is the Madonna, more than the child, that captures our attention.  Partly, this comes from the reverence of her face, with downcast eyes and dusty cheek, yet also with red lips.  It is, however, the blue of her robe that fixes our eyes. 

The Duomo, a Cathedral built over the late 12th to the 14th centuries, has both Gothic stridency and a marble façade with the pinkness of overheated flesh.  The interior is surreal.  The columns of the nave are striped in black and white.  The cool darkness is a walk in a night’s odd dream.  Yellow light flowing through the high round windows glances on the gold of the altar.  The light smears sheens on the dark floor, where sibyls have been etched in black marble. I wonder at the prophecies of the stone-bound sibyls and how they could have echoed the sermons given by priests.  In this church, built supposedly on the site of a classical temple devoted to Minerva, I feel the closeness of classical and Christian myths.  Much the way that Native Americans grafted Catholicism on indigenous beliefs, one senses in Siena’s Duomo the grafting of Christianity on classical myth.  Here the annunciation of the Virgin by an angel succeeds simply the host of classical gods begetting upon humans their hybrid offspring.

I think also of hybrids when I see Donatello’s statue of St. John in the Duomo.  It is much like his statue of Mary Magdalene in the Duomo museum in Florence.  Donatello’s St. John could be the sibling of his Mary Magdalene. Both of the Donatello figures look half animal and half human as if hybrid beasts from myths that have walked from dark woods to dark cathedral.  These statues remind me also of photographs by Edward Steichen—they are similarly shadowy and imprecise.  In photographs by Steichen, light and shadow have the same shagginess as these statues by Donatello.

We go from the Duomo to the Pinacotheca Nazionale, where Sienese art reigns.  One has the sense that all of the regional churches were raided for their Medieval and Renaissance art. The Pinacotheca’s art veers hardly from Christian iconography.  A handful of themes are repeated.  The many Virgins, pink-cheeked and smooth-faced, look universally sad, whether apprehensive at annunciation or forlorn with child.  The men that surround the many Madonnas have hard looks.  They are serious.  They will be the enforcers of doctrine.

*  *  *
Notes

The photographs from Siena are the small painting of a Madonna and child from a niche in a building
described above, a tip bit of the Duomo facade, and a Sibyl from the floor of the Duomo.

I was in Siena on 12 March.

In Santa Croce with no Baedeker

On the piazza where Dante as a statue stands with head and shoulders against the heavenly blue sky, we face the Victorian façade of Florence’s Santa Croce, and I think about E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View.  Forster’s Lucy had no Baedeker and neither do I.  I had attempted to order from Amazon a Blue Guide for Florence, which would have detailed the architecture and art and provided a map of the interior of the Church, but they couldn’t procure a copy for me.  I fear that we will be lost in Santa Croce.  Lucy and I go forward, without guides, around Dante to the side entrance, make our way to the ticket kiosk, and finally into the church.

“[H]ow like a barn!  And how very cold!” exclaims Forster’s narrator.  The chill in these old churches is like sitting on cold, wet stone in spring woods, except that the church is also dark.  It is not like a barn; there is no smell of hay or manure or the oil of machinery.  Cold, old stone lacks the lively smells of barns.

“Of course, it contained frescoes by Giotto, in the presence of whose tactile values she was capable of feeling what was proper.”  Forster tweaks us.  The iconography of Medieval church art is narrow, reifying the Church’s power through the repetition of images—annuciation, Madonna with child, crucifixion, assumption.  Frescoes are pedagogical—almost comic book versions of history.

In Giotto’s frescoes of the life of St. Francis in Santa Croce, I see emotion and the painter’s sensitivity to the human. I am intrigued by Giotto as a step away from the Medieval.  Giotto steps toward the Renaissance, at least we are told to look back on him from that perspective.  He has willed emotionality and glints of individual feeling, not just glints of the ever pervasive late Medieval gold leaf, in the figures of his paintings.  He has allowed drapery a hint of sensuous shadow and depth.  Yet, when faced with Giotto, I feel his primitive simplicity—his work has the sensibility of a very different time.  I want to understand this art—the work of Giotto and other artists at the beginning of the Renaissance—but I don’t understand the church and its role in the artists’ lives, and that, I think, is a severe limitation.

I am a disconnected tourist walking in dim Santa Croce.  Lucy watched the tourists—noses as red as their Baedekers, Forster tells us.  She watched the tourists at the Machiavelli memorial:  “Advancing towards it very slowly and from immense distances, they touched the stone with their fingers, with the handkerchiefs, with their heads, and then retreated.  What could this mean?  They did it again and again.  Then Lucy realized that they had mistaken Machiavelli for some saint . . .”  Among the tourists, I, too, stood before St. Machiavelli, but now a perimeter around the memorials has been cordoned.  We can touch neither the stone of Machiavelli’s grave, nor that of Galileo or Michelangelo’s graves.  These three graves delight me.  Curmudgeonly, gay Michelangelo, logical, insightful Galileo, and Machiavelli of ruthless politics all buried in a cathedral—as if everyone were welcome to burial here (at least if his talents approached genius).  Michelangelo’s ornate tomb has a crowd. My companion tourists light candles for him.

We walk out to the Pazzi Chapel.  It’s a stately place, a rectangle with columns in relief and between them are moulded arches.  Between the arches and the architrave reside apostles in high, blue roundels.  The apostles speak with the voices of sparrows. Then I realize my deception--birds flutter.  Perhaps, after all, it is a barn.

We return to the Piazza Santa Croce.  Back to space and light and the early spring air of Italy.  Here, Forster offers refuge: “Over such trivialities as these many a valuable hour may slip away, and the traveller who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, many return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it.”

*  *  *
Notes:

I have taken my title from that of chapter 2 in E. M Forster’s A Room with a View.

Baedekers:  “Verlag Karl Baedeker is a Germany-based publisher and pioneer in the business of worldwide travel guides. The guides, often referred as simply "Baedekers" (sometimes the term is used about similar works from other publishers), contain important introductions, descriptions of buildings, of museum collections, etc., written by the best specialists, and are frequently revised in order to be up to date. For the convenience of travellers, they are in a handy format and in small print.”  From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baedeker)

The quotes from E. M. Forster’s (1908) A Room with View are taken from a Bantam Classic published in 1988 (which I purchased in 1992 in Lihue on the island of Kauai and read on my return flight from Honolulu to San Francisco), including:
“[H]ow like a barn!  And how very cold!” p. 19.
“Of course, it contained frescoes by Giotto . . .” p. 19.
“Advancing towards it very slowly . . .” p. 20.
“Over such trivialities . . .”  p. 15.

The photographs:  Giotto fresco of St. Francis death; Dante statue on Piazza Santa Croce; Donatello relief of annunciation; Machiavelli grave memorial; Pazzi chapel; ceiling of Santa Croce.

I was in Santa Croce on 10 March.

Milan

After we arrive at Malpensa airport, we get tickets for a shuttle bus to the central train station in Milan.  The full size bus at the shuttle stop is half enclosed by a semicircle of travelers—a tail of travelers extends to the baggage claim doors.  The bus is loaded and leaves soon after we arrive at the shuttle stop; the bus departure leaves still the large semicircle of travelers to wait for the next bus.  It pulls-up in ten minutes. 

As the fresh shuttle unloads, the passengers move to retrieve bags from the cargo bays—at the same time ticketed passengers anxious to board shove their bags into the bus.  In this pandemonium, the driver pushes through the crowd; he throws his arms and spews angry Italian.  The driver pulls luggage from the cargo bay and pushes people back.  He reloads luggage piece by piece.  He hollers at people.  His voice is harsh.  His scold is hot.  When I lift my bag to make it easier for him to grab, he scolds me too.

There is an uncomfortable hour in the tight seats of the hot and airless bus that becomes cold and airless as we bounce past a woodland of birches and patches of pines in the airport’s countryside.  The landscape becomes industrial as we find an autostrada then shift to another.  We enter a nondescript city.  Apartments and restaurants.  Farmacias and tabacchis.  It’s a miscellany along the tight streets that have heavy traffic.

*

We return by train, arriving in Milan as we had ten days earlier in the early afternoon.  The Stazione Centrale is a little hell; there are no shadows; every motion bangs and echoes.  Lines are long.  The toilets need correct change.  We can’t make the telephones work, and no one knows how many numbers should be dialed.  We stow our bags at the train station and take the subway to the Duomo. 

After days in Tuscany, where the marble facades of the mildly subdued churches seem mostly odd because of their colors, sometimes green or pink or both, the cathedral in Milan is shocking.  Its ornate Gothic façade recalls French cathedrals.  [Is Milan really a Paris suburb?] The Piazza Duomo is a pigeon place.  The birds are so tame and dense it is difficult not to step on them.  The people are similar.  A hawker badgers us to buy cheap bracelets.  “No,” we say and shake our heads, but still he follows us; his sales song repeats.  He throws a bracelet onto my folded arms as I walk.

The Duomo has a skirt of sales banners. We face the façade, contemplate going in, but indecision sends us outward.   Through the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, through posh, expensive Milan, where the men at café tables wear good suits, we emerge at Piazza Scala with its statue of Leonardo and take a turn up the Via Giuseppe Verdi to look for lunch.  The Café Verdi has its windows hung with familiar posters of Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn among photographs of divas.  The image cacophony draws us in.

We return after lunch and a walk through the artful neighborhoods near the Brera gallery to the Duomo, to the subway, to the Stazione Centrale.  We get tickets for the shuttle bus to the airport.  The driver loads bags.  He is calm and tells us where to depart at the airport to get a shuttle to our hotel.  It’s dark when the bus leaves the train station.  The streets are lit by yellow lights.  The stores and bars are bright.  I wonder what Milan might be.  I have been in the city only briefly—too briefly to judge, yet my quick sense is that this is not a city for me.  The city seems an image of images.  Its core is an advertising banner.  The images grab and flutter, but they don’t engage; we know them too well.  Our bus takes wide turns from one small street to another and passes to the broad, indistinct margin of the city with its lights of sales and blocks of repetition.

[We arrived in Milan on 7 March near the beginning of our travels and returned on 17 March as we prepared to leave Italy.]