post-nicaragua postings: July 2008

a thirty-minute drive to see...

...a bug.

It's a Tucson tradition to drive out to the western edge of the city to watch the sun set from Gates Pass. You climb into the red rocks, past the neo-adobe palaces, curving between saguaro-studded crags, to end up looking west over pristine desert:

But while waiting for the sun to set behind the mountains, my eye caught this guy, about two inches long from antler-like antennae to bottom tip--some kind of beetle, I guess:

He (why not "she?") seemed to be admiring the evening light as well:

So, yes--a thirty minute drive, to end up seeing a bug.

It was a highlight.

And speaking of highlights...Go see Wall-E! (Click here for reviews.)Yes, the animated film about a boxy robot in the dystopian future. Poetic (yes, I wrote 'poetic') animation, allusions to classic science-fiction-films, the myth of Sisyphus, and the animated marvel of making a rusty box and even a roach (!) cute, an allegory of the dangers of too much ease and overconsumption--the film has it all. My wife and I were surprised at how much we enjoyed the film...it was even (whoa) thought-provoking.

...

And here's a thought-provoking expression: "nuke the fridge." Who out there has already heard it? It seems it's becoming a catch-phrase. Today's International Herald Tribune has an article: Indiana Jones and the temple of absurdly implausible excess.

And that's it for this Sunday night.

three weeks later...

It's been three weeks since I last wrote, during which time S. & I were in Maine, Québec City and Montréal...

...then we returned last week to a rainy desert and yesterday I burned my arms while going for a sunny-morning-bike-ride along the currently-flowing Rillito river. Local minutiae. That's what a blog is for, eh? (By the way, Paquito is on my shoulder and the patio temperature is 101 degrees as I type this.)

The east-coast jet-lag took surprisingly long to shake off; we felt sluggish for several days...

...after a truly relaxing stay with my aunt and uncle in Maine after having driven all over the heartland of French-speaking Canada.

Ahh, a summer afternoon in "Vacationland" (as Maine license plates officially proclaim): canoe, lake, and bugs...

My aunt and uncle live on the shore of Lake Wassookeag in a 19th-century farmhouse that they've restored:

Just a few miles away is the old farmhouse (no longer in the family) where my father finished his growing up:

"Roots" of a sort, I guess...wistful to think what life was like back then...and how my father was the only one among his siblings who left New England...

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Two weeks prior to that, we flew into Portland late at night. We spent the next morning on the coast before driving inland up to Québec. The smell of the sea, evergreens, and wild roses was a heady change for our desert-acclimated nostrils...This lighthouse is perhaps the most-photographed lighthouse in the country, a visual cliché, even...How many of you have seen it without knowing where it is? Now you know where it is, the Portland Head Light, built in the 1790's.

Driving on up towards Canda, then...up the Kennebec River valley through Jackman to the Québec border...

When this road was opened up in the mid-19th-century, it became the main route for thousands of French-Canadians who were seeking work in the mills of New England. About a million people left, fleeing the rural poverty and unemployment of the time...In fact, their Franco-American descendents in the U.S. today total about 10 million, which is more than the current population of Québec (7.6 million)...kind of like how there are more "Irish" who live outside of Ireland than there are on the island itself...Anyway...Voilà--two demographic factoids for you...

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...The town of Baie-St-Paul, a couple of hours northeast of Québec City, on the north shore of the St.-Lawrence; artsy-but-not-too-fartsy, if you will..

...and nearby, further up the Charlevoix coast, is the island of l'Île-aux-coudres, which was linked to the mainland by year-round ferry only a few decades ago. It still feels like a different world...The notion of being cut off from the rest of civilization by ice for months at a time...no wonder the islanders were known for being self-sufficient...in the days before B-&-B's became weekend refuges for stressed-out city-dwellers...

...and Québec City...I fall easily into tourist-brochur-ese when talking about this place, so I will cease and desist...

Outside the old city's walls, the rue St.-Jean is an 'everyday' neighborhood that also happens to have the oldest grocery in North America (J.A. Moisan), right next to the quintessentially Québecois institution of the "dépanneur", the local equivalent of a 7-11 or Circle-K.

A chocolate-shop on the same street was really getting into the 400th-anniversary spirit with its window-display of one of the explorateur's ships...all for sail (oh, no, I didn't really just say that?) in chocolate, évidemment.

Perhaps I'm glorifying a vandal by posting this, but I thought this informal-stencil-art ("This is not graffiti") was clever:

...and onto Montréal, where we spent one morning in the Marché Jean-Talon, one of the largest urban farmer's markets left in North-America. The vendors are proud that there are no souvenir-shirts for sale among the scores of stands displaying fruits, vegetables, flowers, pastries, local cheeses, etc. etc...All smack-dab in the middle of the city's La Petite Italie neighborhood...

Yep, those are carrots up above. I overheard several passers-by asking, "what are those?" We're all so used to seeing the orange kind (peeled and in plastic) that most of us don't know that carrots naturally occur in a variety of shades and that the orange-roots became 'standard' only within the last century or so...Vive la différence, eh?

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We went up the Olympic Tower in the east end of the city for this view of some of the bridges over the St.-Lawrence:

...and just below the tower is the Chinese section of the Montréal Botanical Gardens...

The Tower was built for the 1976 Olympics; it's the tallest (almost 60-stories high) leaning structure in the world.

...Okay...I'm beginning to run out of captioning-steam...so let's try a cliché: "Montréal's streetscape is a beguiling mix of the old and the new, old world elegance and new world modernity." Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's lifted from some mediocre tourist-brochure...but, come on, the city is photogenic:

...driving back to Maine, through the region of the northern Appalachians called "The Eastern Townships," originally settled by English colonists who did not want to be part of a newly indepent United States of America. These Loyalists arrived in the 1790's, settling in places they named Sherbrooke, North Hatley, Cookshire, Mount Orford...But through the decades, the Catholic birthrate was so much higher than the Protestant that the region today is mostly French-speaking. (Historians call this "the revenge of the cradle," seriously...) So, New England scenery with a French accent--makes for a nice Sunday drive...
...and the last stop before crossing the border, at a casse-croûte, a road-side family-run alternative to corporate fast-food chains, French-Canadian artery-clogging charm.
The de rigueur highway snack is la poutine--crispy french fries topped with fresh cheddar cheese curds, with hot brown sauce (le gravy) poured over it all...the closest thing in the U.S., I guess, would be chili-cheese-fries...