Today I drove to a produce market and bought fruit. Not amazing, except it is the first time in two months that I have driven my car. (My husband has used it on alternate weeks to keep the battery charged.)
At the market, I wore my face mask. The market allowed only 10 customers at a time. Within the market, duct-taped arrows on the floor directed me around the fruit and vegetable stands – if I missed something, no turning back. I avoided putting my choices in bags as much as possible – everything went into one bag at the check-out station, which was shielded by plastic curtains except where I could insert my credit card for the check-out.
For a decade we have been asked to bring our own reusable bags to shop. Now reusable bags are possible vectors of infection, and the plastic bag makers are staging a comeback. All I can do is to pile my fruit and vegetables all together in one cart, let the checkout clerk sort, and put my purchases into one paper bag.
Public transportation, re-usable bags, cluster housing – all those ecologically correct ideas are now hazardous – how can we save the planet now?
When forced to spend entirely too much time in airports, you have time to notice how things have changed. I don’t believe I had ever seen this convenience offered in a airport before:
If the print is too small for you, it reads “Privacy for pumping and breast-feeding.” Wow! There are times when that could have been really welcome to me and mine!
But it’s not only nursing mothers who might crave privacy, or at least a respite from the constant murmur of the airport crowd and announcements of their arrivals and departures. So here’s another accomodation which struck me as novel:
This pair of cubicles was nestled in an out-of the way corridor. One of them was already in use, and the other about to be.
If you think that the world of whimsy is far removed from the hard-edged world of airline travel, be assured that Austin, at least, has allowed its weirdness to seep into its Airport. Here’s Arrivals at Gate ∞ (see above for the entire installation):
You can even print a boarding pass to Narnia or Neverland or any of 118 other fantastical destinations.
But good luck looking for a post card at DFW, SFO, or PHX. The old-fashioned “Hello from [your state here]” way of letting folks know you are on the road is almost dead. You can still find them at AUS, though, another friendly form of Austin weirdness.
I spent quite a number of hours in four different airports last week.
San Francisco International (SFO) was my first and final. I have made many trips through this airport, but each one reveals a new aspect, as the airport is constantly re-inventing itself with new construction, new retail outlets and restaurants, and new airlines coming and old ones disappearing. I used to fly TWA and PanAm; now my flights are more likely to be United and Southwest. On departure day I am flying Southwest, and my departure is from one of the gates in one of the newer sections of Terminal One. SFO does its best to invoke the quirky sophistication of its namesake city, even though it is actually located thirty miles south of San Francisco, in San Mateo County. The shops offer authentic sourdough bread, See’s candy, and little packets of goodies wrapped in cable-car-shaped boxes, as well as t-shirts adorned with representation of the Golden Gate Bridge and Coit Tower. Restaurants invoke the Asian/European diversity of the City, with Vietnamese, Mexican, Filipino, Japanese, Vegan and Italian supplementing the standard Starbuck’s.
You can also pick up the usual sports-themed offerings from the Golden State Warriors and the 49ers (who actually play home games fifty miles south in Santa Clara, but hey, who’s picky!) Unfortunately, the airport has none of the Victorian charm of historic San Francisco, but I guess a Victorian airport would be oxymoronic.
Dallas-Love Field (DAL) was my next stop. I had expected to be picked up right away, and had my carryon with me, but my friend was unexpectedly two hours delayed, so I had plenty of time to explore DAL.
Love Field is the former major airport into Dallas, but has been supplanted by the much larger Dallas/Fort Worth Intenational positioned exactly on the county line between the two rival cities. Dallas, I am afraid, lacks a civic personality, and this shows in its secondary airport. The shops offer vanilla t-shirts that say, basically, “I was in Dallas and I bought this t-shirt.” The restaurants include Dunkin Donuts, Maggiano’s, Baskin-Robbins, Chick-fil-A, and Chili’s. One Texas staple, Whataburger, is also available, and there is a Dallas Cowboys store, but in general one could as well be in St. Louis. I hunted in vain throughout the terminal for either a Dallas post card or a local newspaper.
I was aiming next to fly out of Austin-Bergstrom International on an American flight to DFW. The flight I had intended to exit on was cancelled, so I had plenty of time to check AUS out while waiting around on standby and then for an airport pickup from a friend.
Sophistication is not a word one associates with Austin, but quirkiness certainly is. Somehow I always seem to arrive or leave Austin around the time of Willie Nelson’ s birthday – or maybe they just celebrate this prominent citizen year round. Plenty of post cards here, celebrating the SWSX music festival, the Congress street bats, the mud-colored State Capitol, and the scenic downtown poised along the Colorado River. There are at least eight venues and stages where live music is presented during the week.
And plenty of local businesses are represented, including Book People (“the largest independently owned book store in Texas” now that Archer City’s Booked Up went belly-up), Earl Campbell’s Taco Truck (intact), East Side Pies, Haymaker and others. Not a sign of a chain restaurant anywhere. Nor any sports-related gear – Austin is blessedly free of major leaguery.
I never made it to DFW but was rescheduled on a flight to the Phoenix Sky Harbor International (PHX), with a two-hour layover. So, I went from the Barbara Jordan terminal, named for a firebrand Democratic governor in a state since turned GOP, to the Barry Goldwater terminal, named for a firebrand Republican governor in a state edging toward Democratic. Such is history.
A strange feeling of deja vu in the Phoenix Airport – it was just like the Dallas airport, only with mountains around. I’d swear the T-shirts were identical, except for the city name – same diamond-shape logo behind the name, same dusky blues, pinks, and lavenders. Phoenix, of course, is even shorter on history than Dallas. Flying out, the inhabited city looks like something blue (swimming pools) and green (golf courses) that spilled accidentally on the sere gray desert.
And finally back to SFO and the Harvey Milk terminal. American flights come into much less convenient gates than Southwest flights, and there is a lamentable lack of moving sidewalks for the weary returning traveler. The route to baggage claim is also poorly signed – a gentleman stationed at the end of the seeming blank corridor directed me around a kink in the hallway to the escalator down. But I was home.
When my previous post “New Year for China” was published in the LATC, I hoped to get a letter or two of appreciation for my positive write-up of the the local celebration of the Chinese Lunar New Year and for my regrets about the deterioration of relations between China and the US over the past 20 years.
Here are the letters that came in.
And here was my published response :
Was my original writing really that muddled? Perhaps some readers had earlier bad experiences of Sinophobia, which made them sensitive to possible slights, implications, and innuendoes.
My granddaughter, as a toddler, was knocked over by an unleashed dog, and has been afraid of dogs ever since. Not unreasonable. But, I hope, overcomeable. No one should have to live on the alert for danger.
Last weekend I happened by the local community center and saw a queue of parents and children waiting outside, many wearing bright red shirts, ribbons, or hats. Other families were walking away, many with children waving brightly colored pinwheels or carrying red and gold balloon creations and bright red swag bags. Of course, it was the community celebration of the Chinese Lunar New Year, the Year of the Dragon.
I was reminded of my trip to Hong Kong at the turn of the 21st century. Hong Kong celebrated the Year of the Golden Dragon with fireworks, lanterns, and no apparent fear of the impending handover of the colony from British to Chinese jurisdiction.
In those years I visited China several times for business and for pleasure. Deng Xiao Ping had opened the Bamboo Curtain in 1979, and twenty years later the Chinese tourist industry was booming, with Americans and other foreigners eager to walk on the Great Wall, stand face to face with the Terra Cotta Warriors in Xian, and shop on Shanghai’s Bund.
Foreign investors also lined up to enter the untapped market of Chinese consumers. Jiang Zemin, General Secretary of the Communist Party as well as President of China during these years, promised that “the Chinese people will firmly and unswervingly follow the path of reform and opening up.” Lia Mingkang, a prominent financier of the time, foretold that “as economic freedoms expand, we are inevitably securing more social freedom and the ability to exchange the information and ideas we need to grow.”
Twenty years later, I have to wonder what went wrong.
Tourism in China was completely shut down during the Covid-19 pandemic. Only in January of 2023, after nearly three years of closed borders, did China cancel all COVID-19 quarantine requirements and reopen the country for international travel. But visitors complain of the high degree of surveillance which prevails not only for tourists, but for ordinary citizens.
The U.S. Department of State currently warns travelers to “reconsider travel” to mainland China “due to the arbitrary enforcement of local laws, including in relation to exit bans, and the risk of wrongful detentions.” The State Department classifies Hong Kong under a lesser warning, telling Americans to “avoid demonstrations”, “exercise caution in the vicinity of large gatherings or protests”, and “keep a low profile.”
Foreign direct investment into China shrank for the first time in over a decade in 2023, as Western governments discouraged reliance on Chinese-based supply chains. President Xi Jinping’s increasing focus on national security has also left many foreign companies uncertain about where they might step over the line of the law. Chinese entrepreneurs who have become too successful, particularly in social media, have had their businesses shuttered, their property confiscated, and even been jailed on suspicion of subversion. Foreign companies complain that their trade secrets have been copied by Chinese competitors.
Add to this reports of Chinese industrial pollution, oppression of cultural minorities, economic deflation, collapse of the housing market, population implosion, and the on-going threat to Taiwan. and that golden time at the turn of the century seems like a fantasy. Then I think of the bright colors and smiling faces at the LACC last weekend and I wonder – when our Chinese-born immigrants brought all this joy to us, did they leave enough behind?
The railroad tracks from the Coliseum to Jack London Square – everywhere the trash and debris of homelessness… rusted out cars, plywood shanties, abandoned chairs, strollers, buckets, tires, tarps…. But everywhere also the triumphant gaiety of graffiti – a rainbow of indecipherable words adorning every available concrete surface – amazingly no pornographic or obscene drawings or postings, only an occasional sad face, Raiders logo, anime girl in a sarong, a smiling blue tiger. Some of the artists have mastered techniques that I have failed to grasp in art classes – shading, three-D effects. Odd that these artists don’t express more anger and frustration. Every tag, every angular or curvilinear phrase (some out in the water on pipes, some twenty feet high) expressing “I am here!”
Some businesses have given in to the graffiti and put up their own murals using the curvilinear or anime style – these seem to be respected. It is very bad form to paint over another artist’s work. And now at Jack London Suare the graffiti disappears amid the apartments and banners and “public artwork” of the respectable and established world.
Per Wikipedia,Graffiti (plural; singular graffiti or graffito, the latter rarely used except in archeology) is art that is written, painted or drawn on a wall or other surface, usually without permission and within public view. Graffiti ranges from simple written words to elaborate wall paintings, and has existed since ancient times, with examples dating back to ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, and the Roman Empire.. Modern graffiti, focused on tagging, probably began on New York City subway cars and spread like a living cloak flung across railway cars, freeway overpasses, and abandoned buildings. When I first visited Japan in 1997 I remember my colleague remarking on the lack of graffiti . When I last visited in 2011 graffiti was everywhere. In some eyes, graffiti are acts of vandalism. In others, they are works of art.
We leave the Square, with its up-market businesses including a Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, a BevMo, a Cost Plus World Market… and then abruptly we are into the Port area and the graffiti erupts again. Dingier here, as though the artists lacked the energy to walk this far from warmth and people. A huge recycling center. Stacks of shipping containers, A row of black oil tankers, oddly un-graffitied, unlike the box cars and flat cars on the next track over. Is it hard to make the paint stick on the curved surfaces? The cattle cars and box cars are painted as high as a man can reach. Of course – why paint a lowly concrete barrier when one can send one’s aspirations across the country?
When I was a girl in East Texas, I took swim lessons in the public pool from a Red Cross instructor. I was a good floater and treader of water, due to my persistent baby fat, but flailed desperately to swim across the pool just once in order to earn my Beginner badge. There were plenty of other flailers in the pool, though. Swimming was just something you did to cool off in the summer.
Then we moved to Los Altos, which at that time was a fairly new middle-class suburb. The lots were no larger than what I had known in East Texas, the houses no more spacious, but there was one key difference. Of our six closest neighbors, four had swimming pools.
On my first day at school, I marveled at the tanned students with hair tinged green from chlorine. New friends casually mentioned how they dove into their pool each morning before breakfast and did a few laps just to wake up. The school had a swimming pool. And swimming was a regular part of gym class.
In Texas, football had been the sport which determined who was Campus King. In Los Altos, it was swimming. I had not known that swimming could be a competitive event. I had never heard of water polo. But here was LIFE magazine coming to campus to do a feature about our student body President, Steve Clark, who for a brief time was known as “the world’s fastest swimmer” due to his record-breaking 100-meter freestyle times. The president of the LAHS California Scholarship Federation was also the goalie on the US Olympic water polo team. The LAHS swim team under coach Nort Thornton broke 13 national records out of 20. Thornton went on to coach Cal to two National Championships and is in the International Swimming Hall of Fame.
This all came back to me as I read of the abrupt closure in January of the George Haines International Swim Center in Santa Clara. The ISC opened during the golden age of Bay Area swimming. Though Los Altos High School ceased its prominence in the swim world when Thornton left for Foothill College and then Cal, the school continued to produce Olympians who swam at the ISC. Steve Clark trained there under George Haines for the 1964 Oympics, and won a gold medal. I was most recently at the ISC for a benefit for the US Olympic synchronized swimming team, which won a bronze medal in Greece in 2004,captained by LAHS alumna Lauren McFall.
There are still plenty of swimming pools in my neighborhood, but not as many children. I see plenty of students walking or biking to and from the campus with unusually colored hair, but none with that tell-tale chlorine green. A quick scan of Town Crier articles about high school sports turns up dozens of articles on football, soccer, basketball, and volleyball, but nothing about swimming or water polo. Does the demise of the ISC in Santa Clara reflect a general sag in swimming as a path to glory? Or are there are still students at LAHS who dive into a backyard pool every morning to wake up? I hope that tradition lives on, even if the ISC does not.
When our boat docked at the small town of Kalama (population just under 3,000) I had a strange sense of deja vu. That three-story tile-roofed hotel facing the beach, with verandas wrapping around all three stories – hadn’t I seen it before?
It turned out I had – years earlier, on a honeymoon trip to Lahaina, and then again on an anniversary return trip to the same place. Nestled on the beach side of the railroad track which separates the town of Kalama from the marina, beach, and boat dock is a replica of the old Pioneer Inn in Lahaina, built from the same blueprints. This recreation is especially poignant as the original Pioneer Inn had been demolished less than two months earlier by the wildfire which destroyed most of historic Lahaina in August 2023.
The Oregon version has an extra level, and the palm trees are replaced by a trio of historic totem poles, but the exterior and interior are meticulously crafted to evoke the historic Pioneer Inn. Inside, the bar has a tiki theme, the walls are pine-paneled , a bark canoe hangs from the ceiling and the furniture is vintage.
But the Mcmenamins empire includes more than a single nostalgic lodge. At this establishment, instead of mai tais, the customer is offered beer from the Mcmenamins’ brewery and hard cider from the Mcmenamins- orchards. The brewery is conveniently located right across from the gift shop, so you can taste and buy onsite within a few steps.
Mcmenamins also owns a number of entertainment venues across the states of Washington and Oregon, and the pine-paneled walls are decorated with posters of noted concerts.
There is a claim, enshrined in oil paintings though not in photos, that Elvis Presley himself stayed, not at the Lodge, but nearby in Kalama on his way to film a movie in Seattle, and it is quite true that Marlon Brando was a frequent visitor to his son Christian’s home in Kalama. The oil painting of the two icons fishing together, however, is purely imaginary, as their visits were two decades apart.
I gained a few pounds on my recent vacation, so I opened the cabinet underneath our TV monitor, found my VCR tape of “Jane Fonda’s Low Impact Workout” and thrust it into my VCR. (I have a DVD player, but the golden age of video workouts was the VCR age, and I have kept my machine and my video tapes through the era of DVDs and the era of streaming. I know, I might as well say I keep a brontosaurus as a pet.) Thirty-five minutes of constant motion later I finished the last steps of the cooldown, hit STOP on the VCR, and then EJECT.
The tape cartridge came halfway out, then stopped. I pulled. Clearly the tape had not released properly; I could feel it give. I tried to push the tape cartridge back into the machine. No go – there was a barrier. Slowly and carefully I worked the tape cartridge out of the machine. A loop of tape, wrinkled and sagging, but unbroken, dangled from the cartridge. I managed to work the tape back inside where it belonged, crossed fingers, and put the cartridge back into the machine. It worked – a bit blurry, but this time it ejected with no problem. Whew!
Two days later, still angry with my scale, I found “Kathy Smith’s Instant Workout” and plopped that cartridge into the VCR. At first the tape was streaky and jittery, but then it cleared up. Forty minutes of toning and low impact aerobics later I hit STOP, then EJECT.
Again, the tape cartridge came halfway out, then stopped. I pulled. Again the tape had not released properly; I could feel it give. Slowly and carefully I worked the tape cartridge out of the machine. This time, the dangling tape was broken. No more “Instant Workout.”
In anticipation of the worst, I inventoried my VCR collection: Several favorite Jane Fonda workouts (which I used to have to hide from my Viet vet brother), several Kathy Smith workouts (longer and more strenuous than Jane’s), several little-used yoga tapes from my yoga period (I was more flexible then),a couple of old movies, some souvenir video tapes from the Lick Observatory, from the National Park Conservancy, from a cruise that we ended up not taking, the stirring“16 Days of Glory” from the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics,– all forgettable or replaceable.
But then there are the recordings. The tape of coverage of 9-11 as it happened, which we replay every September lest we forget. My son’s extra credit project from high school. My son’s appearance on local TV as a burrito expert. A performance put on by our church of “Amahl and the Night Visitors” in which my husband had a singing role. The funeral of an old family friend. My parents on vacation with friends from their childhood. These could not be replaced or updated via Amazon.
The next day I decided I would say goodbye to each tape by playing it one last time, resigned to its breaking on ejection. I danced through Jane Fonda’s “Lean Routine”, rewound and ejected with no problems! Maybe the dinosaur has a few more ages to live through after all! But an attempt that evening to watch a travel video failed – lots of snags, black screens, interruptions. Not dead yet, but in its death throes, I decided. There are services which, for a ruinous charge, will transfer my irreplaceable memories to DVD. I will have replaced my brontosaurus with a wooly mammoth, but my memories may last until the next Ice Age.
Our boat goes through our first lock – 80 feet or more down from one level of the Snake to the next. We move into the lock; a bridge is before us, an open space behind. Then a wall seems to rise from beneath the river behind us as the water level in the lock is let out and we begin to descend. The walls rise, only two feet from the boat on either side. The bridge before us is now far above, with a large and getting ever higher curving wall ahead. We descend and descend. The black wall behind us is holding back the river, though it appears there are leaks. The black wall ahead is now 80 feet high. On the side are dripping black concrete blocks a yard high piled up and up. Finally we stop descending. We wait. There is a loud shudder, and a crack appears in the wall ahead. Sunlight, and color, a view of hills and sparkling water. The crack opens wider – the feeling is like the scene in “The Wizard of Oz” where Dorothy steps out of the sepia-toned world of Kansas into a technicolor Oz. The engines throb and we move forward into the light and space.
We go through a second lock at night – it is still magical. There is only black and white, the white boat, the black night, the gleaming gate, the sparkling water.
Later we explored off the boat at the Bonneville Dam, whose Visitor Center is a self-congratulatory celebration of the transformation of the wild rolling Columbia river into “a damn fine machine” for generating hydropower, in the words of an industry lobbyist.*
We saw another aspect of the locks and dams at the fish hatchery, where tiny salmon fry are nurtured until they are large enough to release downstream from the dams and make their way to the sea, and at the fish ladder, where returning salmon are given a chance to circumvent the dam in a series of cascades. These makeshift replacements of natural features are an attempt to appease the fishermen and native peoples whose lives depend on the salmon run. In another section of the hatchery, a bit off the self-guided tour, the sight of frustrated salmon leaping in vain against a current backed by a three-foot fence made me sad. In the hatchery these fish are artificially milked for their semen or eggs before dying, so the salmon fry can be created. The salmon would die anyway after spawning, but as they frantically jumped over and over against the impassable barrier, theyseemed to know they are supposed to get further to their spawning grounds than a hatchery.
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*Quoted from Blaine Harden’s A River Lost; the Life and Death of the Columbia
D and I were at the Hilton Garden Inn in Spokane, about to embark the next day on a cruise down the Snake and Columbia Rivers. The Garden Inn is a functional airport hotel, made charming by exceptionally pleasant, smiling staff. But dinner at the hotel looked like a bleak proposition; a bunch of folks were playing cards in the lounge, and the dining area was over-brightly lit and uninviting.
So we walked across the parking lot to the Rusty Moose, which, turned out to be very welcoming, despite being decorated with a lot of staring animal heads and other effigies. Though wild game burgers were the featured attractions, Destiny (our smiling server) served us a delicious dinner of seared halibut (D) and Idaho trout (me) with a yummy rice pilaf and baby asparagus on the side. We splurged on a bottle of the house Sauvignon Blanc from WA state, and a berry cobbler shared for desert (served with ice cream AND whipped cream on top – Washingtonians don’t stint!)
Maybe not a destination restaurant, but certainly a worthy haven en route to wherever!
Allyson Johnson 