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July 15, 2009 | 0 Comments

Newbies on the Kootenay

Having been a fan, in my youth, of many a water flume ride, I often wondered if white water rafting was merely a few degrees higher on the dial of the same animal, or an entirely different adventure, not the least because it was off a metal track and in the open outdoors.

I now have my answer.

We dragged ourselves groggily to the meeting location, most of us wearing layers like we’d been instructed. The Kootenay river runs very near the much larger, longer, Columbia, but the Kootenay is home to more sacred Native lands and is said to be the source for some ancient medicines. One by one we lumbered in, and I watched the cousins, some of whom Susanne hadn’t seen since the wedding, greet each other and start to wake up. We read over the liability releases, made sure we had everyone we were waiting for, and piled into the yellow school bus for our 1/2 day trip to the river.

“Cousins on the river,” they shouted like a pre-game warmup cheer, and we rumbled to the rafting site.

We listened to the guides give us our safety instructions, but we were ready on our own accord, coming armed with 5 epi pens in case an evil peanut or honey bee should come at us in one of the rapids. I chatted up the guide at the back of the raft, our conversation repeatedly redirected so that we could “paddle forward,” “left back, right front,” and so on. The Kootenay has dug through a lot of earth over the millennia, and we found our selves in some deep river canyons, limestone cliffs on our right, deep dark soil thick with evergreens off the port. The cousins at the front of the boat were soaked head to toe. Wet cousins do indeeed look like drowned rats.

We hurtled over class 3 rapids like young bucking bronco riders. Twisting alongside the Canadian rockies, we declared the experience thrilling and vowed to take on a more challenging river next summer. Hooray for the river!

July 9, 2009 | 0 Comments

Stumbles with bears

Recent flashback in the woods:

It was our second day of hiking in Glacier National Park. In the morning we’d tooled around the west side, what I like to call the “smooth stone side” of the tectonic plate collision. Much of this was on a raised, wooden platform that curled through enormous cedar trees. We had a wonderful time taking pictures of tree roots, the top of the canopy, the still waters and rushing slivers of waterfalls. My knee held up pretty well, and I thought if this was hiking, I could go for miles.

St. Mary Lake, Montana

St. Mary Lake, Montana

The east side of the park, which I named “jagged slice-y stone side,” was much less forgiving, but held jaw-dropping vistas for one’s trouble. After clambering up a rocky hillside, we could look over the top of the cliff and see crystalline water—St. Mary Lake. There we spent several minutes taking in the view and examining how different the eastern plate was from the geology just a few miles west. We scrambled back down the hill and started walking down a thin trail along the water.

My knee started complaining from the uneven terrain. Where were the nice wooden platforms? Couldn’t we outfit every national park in the country with raised wooden hiking platforms for the cost of half of one missile? Perhaps hikers actually liked hiking, I guessed. But still, my leg wasn’t holding up after a couple miles of walking. That was frustrating.

Susanne took a look at the park map to see the easiest way back to the car, other than going back to where we’d started.

“Hey, if you just continue on this way,” she said, pointing at the print out, “it’s really short to the road. Then Kurt and I can go back over here, get the car, and pick you up.”

That sounded like a plan. She reminded me to make some noise so I would keep any nearby bears away. Fortunately, the three of us walking together made quite a bit of ruckus, so we hadn’t been too concerned. But with me by myself, I needed to remember to talk, or sing. I gave her a peck of a kiss, noted the direction I was to travel, and heading off, sang that I was King Henry the VIII.

No sooner were they out of earshot of me than I turned a corner and stopped. The trail traced up the side of a very steep, very long hill. I considered my options, now on fourth verse, same as the first. Going all the way back was too long, and the car would be gone by the time I got there. I probably wasn’t fast enough to catch up to Kurt and Susanne, so following  where they went probably wouldn’t work, either. I didn’t have the map. So I had to traverse this . . . this mini-mountain. I took a deep breath, and plunged forward.

Up, up, up I climbed. King Henry fell by the way side, as simple breathing became priority. I sucked in liters of air, holding on to a tree for support, no longer worrying about making enough noise.

HEAVE, exhale, HEAVE, exhale, HEAVE!!!! Who the hell climbs mountains for fun? Masochists who want to suffer outside, that’s who. I put one foot in front of the other, thankful I’d been working out my quads in the gym as part of rehab. Every ligament south of my waist made its voice known. I grabbed at small tree trunks on the side of the pebbles in front of me, hoping my feet would stay put.

HEAVE, HEAVE, exhale. . . Susanne’s map sucks! The trail rounded a corner, and it was another mountain. I was climbing Machu Pichu. Sweat rolled in sheets down my temples, making my shirt wet. I cursed the sweatshirt I was wearing.

All around me, wildlife fled. Including the bears. I think they thought, “whoa, that is some big bear coming this way! Quck, get up a tree!”

I saw an archway. A bridge. It signalled that I had reached the road. I felt like I had been alone for hours. I clambered up one last incline, then sat down, still panting heavily, on the side of the bridge. A few cars had parked in the pullout, and looked at me with fear. Who was this single very large man who came out of the woods? I’d probably left a few bodies behind me.

Susanne and Kurt pulled up in the car ten minutes later, by which time I’d resolved most of my sweatballness.

“There’s another trail up to a waterfall over there, honey,” Susanne said innocently. “Wanna go?”

“No,” I said, and rather quickly, so that she took notice. “I’ll just wait in the car,” I added, trying to sound laissez faire about it. It was too late to cover, however.

“Are you okay?” She looked concerned.

“I’m fine,” I said. I gave a tight smile. “That path went up a big hill.”

“Oh honey, I’m sorry,” Susanne said, touching my knee, which was on its way to inflating like the hot air balloons I saw in May. Maybe I would start floating in another 15 minutes.

I reassured her, and they went up what turned out to be a 50-foot incline to a trickling waterfall. I knew the hiking was worth it, but I was done for the day. I’ll go back to Glacier in a few years when I have a more solid set of legs and a screaming toddler. Surely that will be easier!

July 6, 2009 | 0 Comments

Cherries jubilee

It sounded like a fun little outing, going to our friend’s aunt’s house, an hour away, to pick cherries. I think of things like picking strawberries, down at one’s feet, where I can walk away whenever I think I have enough, or picking blueberries, right at torso height and brambleless.

Cherry picking is not those things. And one cherry tree has something like a gazillion pieces of fruit on it. Such was it that a couple who showed up—in response to the aunt’s mass email announcement—walked away with 150 pounds of cherries, and I couldn’t tell which part of the tree had been hit. Getting the fruit out of the tree entailed extremely high, rickety metal ladders, which, given the knee issues of mine, Susanne forbade me to climb, and plastic buckets we were supposed to string around our necks so we could pick with two hands.

The aunt and her sister chuckled quietly as we walked toward the tree, thinking that these city folk would be poor farmers. Susanne, however, proved them wrong, getting her little body in between large branches heavy with cherries, double fisting clumps of berries and quickly accumulating several full buckets. We joked that she was a migrant farmer in a past life, and if the political science professing career dried up, we’d be just fine with her picking prowress.

I, meanwhile, thought the tree was quite the pugilist, and I came away with several scrapes on my arms and torso as if I’d gone five rounds with the thing. For my part I hauled in something on the order of 8 quarts, certainly laughable by the aunts’ standards. They sat on their porch  smoking cigarettes and drinking Mexican beer as dusk overtook us. Aunt Maureen—affectionately called Mo—is quite the antiques collector, and her home is filled with old things, especially kitch from the 1930s and 40s. Our friend warned us before we walked in that she has a lot of “Aunt Jemima stuff,” which amounted to dolls in black face, framed sheet music about “how funny the Negroes are,” and old Amos ‘n Andy stills.

“Aunt Mo has a funny sense of humor,” our friend said, in summary.

We therefore ignored the offensive portion of the antiques in Mo’s house, and considered them an unfortunate piece of American history, artifacts of a time when people were more openly, though not necessarily more, racist.

Mo was not afraid of new technology, her love of things archaic notwithstanding. Perhaps it was just that gadgets needed to have proper motivation. For example, her cat, Sharon, had both a locator microchip implanted in her neck, and a “finder collar” that was wirelessly connected to a button Mo could push to show her where the cat was in space. This would have been only a small point of interest except for the fact that the feline did go missing later that evening. And then we identified the flaw in the cat radar screen: walking up to where the cat should have been, there was no Sharon. It was like the scene in Aliens when Riley is looking at the green blip, knowing she should be right on top of the thing, but there’s no alien.

Or is there?

Sure enough, Sharon had taken solace directly above where we had gathered. Turns out she had a bad tooth and wanted nothing more than to alleviate her pain, and barring that, figured hiding under her caregiver’s bed was her next best bet. So kudos to the cat finder company: they’ve gone and taken very useful technology and morphd it into something only a crazy pet owner would desire.

After a summer meal of salmon, corn on the cob, fruit salad, and rhubarb crisp, we took the cherries to the car, realizing we’d picked about 50 pounds worth. Aunt Mo was grateful to have people harvest the tree so that she didn’t have a rotting mess on her lawn come next week. Getting home, we made every kind of cherry everything: dried cherries, preserved cherries in syrup, cherry preserves, liquor-infused cherries, cherry ice cream, and cherry pie and for the love of Pete, we still have a boatload in our kitchen.

So chalk one up for Walla Walla, having lots of summer produce for us to pluck out of trees, and teaching us about 19th Century food preservation. Next up, skinning a wild boar and using the hide to make moccasins.

July 1, 2009 | 0 Comments

Your car is your cage

Driving from the east coast to Walla Walla, we stayed in all manner of hotel accommodations. The overdone casino hotel on the reservation in Niagara Falls to the bare but tidy room in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, we had pretty much seen it all, or so we thought. Spending one night in the lodge on McDonald Lake in Glacier National Park, we drove down and under the park, coming out on the other side in East Glacier, Montana.

The innkeeper was decidedly pessimistic about the likeliehood we would keep our reservation.

“We’re just opening up for the season, so we don’t have the cable TV working yet,” she said. “It’s okay if you want to stay somewhere else.”

That would have sounded self-sacrificing if it weren’t for the fact that there were no other hotels open that weekend in East Glacier, and that she had left out one little issue that was actually much more important than the lack of television.

The entire town was under a boiling water ordinance because there was too much particulate matter in the water. Apparently it was safe to shower in and brush our teeth. But who wanted to chance that? I lied under the top sheet later that night, trying not to think about the water the linens had been washed in, and how many microbes were immune to the heat of the dryer, and now staking land claims on my skin. Helpfully, exhaustion from hiking set in, and I slept soundly on the listing mattress, and then we were off to Canada, the next morning. O, Canada!

We had time to look around a little while we traveled. Our favorite (?) parts of Montana, other than the truly majestic beauty of the park, were the town of Hungry Horse and the “Bear Safari” west of the park. It is one thing to name one’s town after emaciated livestock, but quite another to use the town name in logos for local businesses. It just didn’t have quite the same cache as say, fat pandas do for Chinese restaurants. Nobody in our party wanted to eat at any grill featuring horses with exaggerated rib cages.

The Bear Safari was a wild idea, the Wild West’s version of an alligator park, I presume. The idea was you drive through an enclosed area where someone has purposefully placed some number and variety of bears. Real bears. The tagline, “Your Car Is Your Cage,” did not instill us with a sense of comfort. Perhaps if we had been driving a Hummer. And even then, I still wouldn’t drive into that. I should see how long this place has been around, or stake out the opposite side of the street to observe which crazy people actually pay admission to this thing.

June 4, 2009 | 1 Comment

Driving up

Posting on this blog wasn’t possible while we were on vacation because we had no Internet access. I’d forgotten there were places in the US that still had big gaps, but after trekking through the wilderness, the real, bonafide wilderness, I’m glad the gaps are there.

Last Monday we climbed in the car and headed out past Spokane, through the prettiness that is Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, and into Montana, to Glacier National Park. The park is the site where the Pacific and Atlantic tectonic plates collided, hundreds of millions of years ago, forming the Rocky Mountain range and the Continental Divide. We paid the guard at the gate and drove through an evergreen forest, suddenly taken aback when the long McDonald Lake appeared on our left, sparkling like a blue sapphire in all of the greenery.

Mountains behind Lake McDonald

Mountains behind Lake McDonald

We found our lodge and checked in to our cabin. This was a more slow and cumbersome process than one would realize, because the lodge had just opened up for the season, it being Memorial Day Weekend, and the staff still trying to figure out the computer system. I hoped these weren’t actual Park Service employees.

We signed up for the last boat ride of the night on an 81-year-old wooden vessel, and cruised around the lake, listening to the guide tell us about the Robert fire of 2003 and how the mountains came by their monikers. The sun set slowly in the enormous sky, and we had dinner in the lodge’s restaurant, then settled in for some board games by the very large, 20-foot long fireplace, a popular spot, clearly, for the lodge guests.

Tour boat

Tour boat

The next morning, we drove back out of the park’s west entrance because the road through was shut down in the middle with an avanlanche and about 35 feet of snow and ice. In May. Two hours later we’d driven south around the bottom edge of the park and were on the other side of the Divide, at the East Glacier entrance. We hiked up an embankment to look at St. Mary’s Lake.

St. Mary Lake overlook

St. Mary Lake overlook

Wow. There were so many interesting stones, tree roots, animals, and waterfalls, we started to lose track in all of the beauty. It’s a spot I’ll have to see again, and I am now officially a fan of national parks. You can find more photos on my Flickr account, linked on the main page.

June 2, 2009 | 1 Comment

Tom’s house

In my quest for all things interesting in the Walla Walla valley, a friend (former physical therapist of mine, actually) and I went out to Dixie, Washington, a town a little to the east of town. Unlike towns on the east coast, many miles of farmland separate Dixie from Walla Walla. We curved around the rolling foothills of the Blue Mountains, passing the occassional pickup truck, but otherwise we had the road to ourselves. About 10 minutes later, my friend pulled into what seemed to be a random house behind some strategically grown pine trees, put there, presumably, to break the desert wind and keep the house from a near-constant pounding. A large German shephard came out to greet and inspect us, not necessarily in that order. He clearly knew my friend but not me, so he gave me a good growl as a warning that I not do anything  stupid nor make any sudden moves.

As we walked around the free-standing garage, I saw that there were other people assembled here, a kind of makeshift Zen meditation and country sermon, as it were. They sat on a variety of plastic lawn chairs and wooden benches, and all among them, floating with the sound of tiny racing cars, were hummingbirds. Tom, the 84-year-old who has lived in this house all his life, shook my hand and welcomed me into the inner circle, and I moved slowly (for the hummingbirds skirt away if they see jerky motion) to a bench to watch the nature show. My friend stood just next to a bird feeder and put her fingers out in case a hummingbird decided to sit on her for a few moments. They aren’t still long, not while they’re tanking up on sugar water just before they go to sleep.

Hummingbird’s hearts beat at a frenetic 500 to 800 times a minute, until they sleep at night, and then they take a mini-hibernation before resuming their pollination activities for the next day. Their metabolisms are astronomically huge — weighing in at something like 1.3 ounces, they are the smallest birds in the world, yet they take in great quantities of fuel. On this night we saw something like 100 birds, totaling 3 species, my personal favorite being the orange Rufous. They have neck feathers that if they catch the sun at just the right angle, seem to glow from inside each feather. It was mesmerzing.

I was clearly the newbie to the group, as I had not brought a camera. I’ll make sure that I take one along next time. Tom’s house, festooned with hummingbird feeders of all kinds, draws something like 600 to 700 hummingbirds at the height of their season. It’s one of only a few places in the world with such a concentration of them. Perhaps only pictures can describe the joy of sitting and watching a group of hummingbirds jockey for position at a feeder — the male birds let the female birds in, but show no chivarly to other male birds, which they yell at to find another watering hole. Scratch that — perhaps only seeing them in person and experiencing it oneself is satisfactory.

May 10, 2009 | 3 Comments

Up, up, and away

The 2009 Walla Walla Balloon Stampede is this weekend, and events kicked off yesterday at the snappy hour of 6 AM. Stampede is kind of a strange word to associate with rudderless airborne vehicles that drift on the wind, but it is the wild west out here, so I presumed the name was really more about the other, more rodeo-esque events that take place in this region. But after going to take pictures of the hot air balloons, I now also realize it does refer—a bit, at least—to this event itself.

IMG_1871

Balloons launch from several locations in town, and I plus a few friends picked a junior high school football field as our location to watch the events unfold. About 30 or 40 pickup trucks were parked within a few feet of each other, and just as dawn was breaking, they started unfurling their tarps and balloons and testing their heaters. This gave the audio effect, for someone who had gotten up at 5 and not had a cup of coffee, of little dragons learning to cast fire.

I was surprised that the balloons were set up so close to each other, thinking that they’d need lots of space for each one, but everything went off without a hitch, despite the fact that 5,000 people had gathered to see the event (which is about one-sixth of the WW population, for those who care about such things). Each balloon had vents at the top that the handlers made sure were properly velcroed in place, and the top of every balloon had a long rope that the presumably strongest handler would hold on to, in order, I think, the manage the rate at which the balloon went from horizontal to vertical. So picture the early breaking dawn, temperatures in the low to mid 60s, colorful fabrics strewn all about the grass, and thousands of children running around, dodging taut ropes and sleepy grownups who are looking at the sky taking pictures. And nobody got hurt.

balloon raising

balloon raising

One of these balloons launches first—it’s called the “hare” balloon—and is chased by the other launching balloons. Hence part of the stampede moniker. We knew this because we had, I should have guessed there would be one, an announcer to tell us this, and to call out the names of people flying each balloon like it was a very colorful, in-the-air quinceanera. This guy was a Garrison Keillor wannabe if ever there was one, which I know is a big statement to make. I really did a double take to make sure I wasn’t suddenly in an episode of Prairie Home Companion. Put this guy in a hockey rink and one would get a very entertaining play by play. Really all he lacked was the quality of tone that Garrison has, that kind of half a piece of toast in his mouth sound. If he would just talk with food in his mouth, he’d be a dead ringer.

balloons away

balloons away

One by one balloons floated into the sky, they drifted east, chasing the rabbit. At this point the pickup trucks for each would leave the field (“Please give the trucks egress, folks,” said the announcer. Egress? Wow.) and then would chase their balloons around and out of town. I suppose this is another aspect of the stampede. I stayed put and snapped 200 photos instead.

balloon

balloon

After all of them had launched we headed over to Clarette’s restaurant for breakfast, and I have to really think hard about when the last time was that I ate breakfast before 8 in the morning. A long, long time. Perfectly serviceable eggs over easy, served old school with the toast already buttered. The coffee was delightful, and I’ve decided I miss coffee that hasn’t been overroasted into bitterness. It was a little thrilling to see the balloons making their way overhead while we were in the middle of the city. Probably the neatest thing I’ve seen since I’ve been out here, majestic snow-capped mountains aside. Now if I could just get Susanne to go up in a balloon with me, that would be the real stuff of fun.

May 5, 2009 | 5 Comments

The Liar House strikes again

We have been thinking of renaming our house. Without knowing it was the tradition around these college parts, we nicknamed the house shortly after we moved into it, decreeing it was “the Liar House,” namely because it looks cute from the outside (and in the picture we’d seen before we moved here), but hosting a series of minor to moderate problems once you get inside.

One of the issues has been that the tub from the full bathroom leaks through the ceiling and into our kitchen. As my 14-year-old niece put it, “your dirty tub water rains into your kitchen? Eww!”

We’ve asked the building manager to come out to fix this several times, and although he didn’t understand the severity of the leak at first, he has been here repeatedly to try different things, even opening up the ceiling at one point and having a bona fide plumber replace some of the pipes. We still had water coming down after that, but the ceiling was closed back up anyway.

While we were away on our tour of western Canada, the building manager had the kitchen painted in Susanne’s favorite shade of blue (the shade of which he had researched with me) in order to win her heart and soften her email messages, which by this point had become understandably more and more irate. Who wants to deal with putting four pots around the kitchen to catch brown water, after all? Not either of us.

We were assured the matter had been resolved. Until one of us took a bath. And then:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/evmaroon/3484892097/

We are considering changing the name of our abode to, “The Crying House.” There are a multitude of connotations, see, that we can address with this moniker, and so that may be the direction we take. Thoughts? Comments? Questions?

May 4, 2009 | 3 Comments

Don’t go chasing waterfalls

In my search for earnings on the Karma Credit Plan, I agreed to babysit one of Susanne’s colleagues babies—a 6-week old boy who is still growing into his cheeks, which are bountiful. Now, I’ve babysat little ones before, including my sister’s girls, babies of friends, that kind of thing. So I think of myself as a capable caretaker, if nothing else.

In the morning my charge was alert and curious. He is working the phonemes currently, so when I say “oo?” to him, he will reply with the identical sound. It’s pretty groovy of babies when they’re in that phase.

This particular morning we played around with sounds, and compared hand size, which was pretty funny to him. And then in a flash, the good times were over, something had struck him as all kinds of terrible awful horrendously bad, and he was off to the races with a good cry.

I knew it wasn’t feeding time, so I figured it was diaper time. This presents an immediate conundrum when it happens. Does one rush to change the diaper, knowing there may soon be more to come, or does one wait another oh, minute or so? Certainly most people don’t like the thought that a sweet innocent child is sitting in his or her own swill. But for the sake of the planet, not to mention the baby’s bottom, rushing to change a diaper only to change it again in a few minutes, seems inadvisable.

So I looked at him and I asked him if he was done with his business. Having misplaced my Baby Screams Decoder Ring that I got in my last box of Life cereal, he replied with a hearty, “waaaaaaaahahahaha!” I took this as yes.

It is not without a certain sense of accomplishment that I held him in one arm whilst opening up the baby changing pad, found a new diaper in the bag his mother left for me, and managed to get out the wipes and creamy paste stuff all at once. Only more impressive, I imagined, would have been me also running around the room spinning plates on wooden dowels, although the scene felt about that chaotic, even without the circus sideshow. Wait a minute. I was the circus sideshow. No worries.

I put him down on the matt and he eased up on the tears-making, realizing I’d figured out what his incredibly urgent need was. Such dumb big people, the baby thought, I’m sure. They’re so slow on the uptake.

I opened up the diaper and sure enough, there was a mess to behold. For some reason unbeknownst to me, he decided to start kicking. This seemed inefficient at best to me. If he wants a clean diaper, why was he making trouble?

I lifted him half-off the matt by his ankles and proceeded to do my babysitter/chosen uncle duty of wiping him clean, attempting at the same moment to steer clear of the mess and hold him firmly enough that he couldn’t kick anything onto either of us. In this effort I was unsuccessful, but I figured I could wash up easily enough afterward. And then the unimaginable happened.

It was like an orange-green waterfall of shit. His butt still up in the air, there emerged a projection of poo such as I had never seen before. In a blink, it seemed it was everywhere. I tried to get him back on the matt quickly, but it was a hopeless task. And now I had not only to start all over, but to also change his clothes and mine.

The baby, at least, was now quite satisfied. And the stupid grown-up realized why he’d been fussing. Stupid grown-up now plans to wait a few minutes and let the baby cry before running to change the diaper. I’ll consider it a good lung work out for him.

April 22, 2009 | 0 Comments

ever the sun shall shine

It was in the nadir of the winter that a long-time Walla Wallan approached me and told me to hang in there, the spring in Walla Walla is beautiful and I will really enjoy it. I trusted her, thinking that she wouldn’t knowingly lie to me, except that the people in this town have also declared the following:

1. It doesn’t snow here all that much (we got 40 inches last winter, the height of your average 9-year-old)

2. Oh, you’ll find a job out here, it just may take a few months (9 and counting, is that still “few”?)

3. Vote McCain!

So I took her very genuine statement as well intentioned but potentially far, far off the mark.

Spring did, in fact, uh spring. The wheat started out green on the rolling hills around town, a lovely contrast with the swimming pool blue skies. Daffodils and then tulips started popping up, and in town, the tree buds have given way to bright green baby leaves.

Spring, however, now appears to be over. It lasted something like 8 days. The past three days have been mid-80s, no humidity and lots of bright sunlight. One wonders how hot this desert town will get in the next month, and when we’ll see our first 3-digit degree day. I’ll start a pool on that, I’m sure.

Small town life continues despite the surge in temperature. I’ve been here long enough that shopkeepers know how I like my coffee and my haircut, and ask what I’m going to make for supper when I am in the grocery store. It’s nice and invasive at the same time, and I’m a little surprised that I think that, given that I sometimes was irritated by the constant anonymity of living in a large city. But I do appreciate the friendliness.

Walla Walla hosted a cycling race last weekend, the Tour of Walla Walla. Imagine what my sentence will be:

It was a short race. They looped through the downtown area several times to complete the race. Why they didn’t go through the prison facility or the plutonium plant, I have no idea. We cheered them on, however, and I was happy that someone had brought a cow bell. You really can’t have a bike race without a cow bell.

 

Tour of Walla Walla bike race

Tour of Walla Walla bike race

 

 

Our other excitement of the week was a fire across the street from our house. We had come in our back door from visiting with a friend, and thought the air smelled funny, like barbeque gone horribly wrong. Then we were inside, playing cards with Kurtis, and a few minutes after that, noticing some blinking lights from the street. A quick look with the blinds pulled aside and we could see that one of the apartments in the senior housing center across the way was on fire. The city had sent three fire trucks and a host of police cars, all working to put out the flames and get the residents out safely. Fortunately no one was seriously injured, but it was more than a bit unnerving to see firefighters in full gear running up the stairs with hoses and axes.

Walla Walla has 48 full-time fire fighters, and I think the majority of them were there at the scene. The next morning the building bore the scars of the event.

 

building after the fire

building after the fire

Given that the rain is pretty much over for the season, I wonder how often fires happen in and around town now. We have no Santa Ana-like winds here, but we do have wind, and it is sometimes intense. I suppose given that the town doesn’t own a snow plow, having about 50 people to put out fires is a sign they’ve had to deal with the dryness before. And hopefully that fire last week is the closest it will ever come to us.

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