A hundred is better

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep”

– Robert Frost

There’s an old abandoned railroad grade called the Iron Horse Trail, the old railbed of the Milwaukee Road, that winds up to Snoqualmie Pass from North Bend along the northern flanks of Mount Washington, Change Peak, McClellan Butte and Silver Peak before running into what was in its day the longest tunnel on the Milwaukee Road system, then to emerge at the west end of Lake Keechelus at the top of the pass. This blog post is not really about that trail.

“A Taste of Old Monroe”.

Pictures of the Iron Horse Trail online now show repaired trestles that have no rails across them but instead smooth, walkable, bikeable, joggable paths, but when my friend Rich and I hiked along the railway there long ago, it was still physically a railroad, with rails and ties, and there was one trestle that we walked out on whose middle had collapsed many years before. We always saw it from the highway going up into the pass. It looked like a disaster waiting to happen, but it was the crumbling infrastructure of a world long gone.

The day we hiked along the rails we heard gunshots, someone shooting a rifle, but didn’t worry about it until we emerged from a wooded section of the railbed and saw a man standing next to a pickup that was parked next to the rails and looking sheepish. When he realized we were not authorities of any kind he told us he’d been target practicing along the tracks, hadn’t expected anyone to be walking up here, and was surprised when he saw my tee-shirt in the cross-hairs of his scope. My tee-shirt was blue and had a big rooster on it. Both the marksman and I were lucky that day, to say nothing of the rooster.

Trillium.

I had hoped my hiking buddy Scott and I might hike part of the Iron Horse Trail this past Saturday. But a sick man allegedly shot his wife and his daughter in their North Bend home the previous Sunday, then burned down the house by setting a can of gasoline in a skillet on a lit stove and headed for his bunker in the woods, where he had stockpiled food and ammunition for a last stand. Scott, who lives in North Bend, didn’t want to hike anywhere in the Snoqualmie Valley while the manhunt was going on. I agreed. The night before our hike, news reports were quoting forest experts who said that the man, a well-equipped survivalist, might be able to remain hidden in the mountains for months or years, which left us with the future prospect of hiking where we ran the risk of running into this desperado, or forsaking the Snoqualmie Valley completely and using up precious hike time on the highway to places further away.

As it turned out we needn’t have worried; the police work on this case was executed very swiftly. Images on the man’s computer, which survived the fire, practically put an X on the map for those in pursuit, and by the time I was driving to meet Scott the next morning I heard that special police teams were watching the man’s bunker, and before our day of hiking was done they would find him dead inside it, leaving us all to realize over and over again that even if they’d taken him alive there would have been no use asking what he was thinking.

Salmonberry. The lower woods were spangled with them.

Bridal Veil Falls.

Our wives had only given us shore leave until one o’clock, but we started early and drove up to Highway 2 to hike the Lake Serene trail, figuring if we didn’t have time to get all the way to the lake we could go as far as the Bridal Veil Falls Lookout.

We stopped for breakfast at the Hitching Post Cafe in Monroe, old Monroe, Main Street Monroe, which most people driving through Monroe don’t even know exists because it’s across the tracks from the main highway. I love Monroe’s Main Street because you can drive down the street and when you see a cafe you want to eat at advertising “A Taste of Old Monroe” you can just tug the steering wheel a little to the right and angle into a wide space, which is what we did.

I’m not sure if this is “stream violet” or “evergreen violet”, but it’s a violet okay.

“A few good years left in us.”

A day like this would not be complete, would not start well, without a good hungry man breakfast. I had the French Toast combo — I always do — and Scott got a similar arrangement with griddle cakes. The old men of the town were already there, having finished breakfast and now chatting over coffee. We sat in a booth painted with a little mural of a steam engine, “Pat McCoy’s 4-4-0″. There were other, larger murals covering all the surrounding walls, one depicting the street in the 1950s. Wood models of Conestoga wagons lined the shelves, and there were several old pistols, a guitar and a long logger’s crosscut saw hanging on the walls. The food was delicious and plentiful.

The trail was adorned with trilliums, yellow violets and salmonberry (I took pictures, naturally) and as far as the fork between the falls lookout and the lake it was fairly easy going, which fooled us into thinking we could make the lake in another hour. If this were an official report, I would note that there was a fair amount of downed material lying athwart the trail and that the trail was pretty much a streambed after the turn-off to the falls. Had the trail not been chiefly composed of crumbled granite rocks it would have been muddy going. And it was very steep. In many places there were wooden stairs that might as well have been submarine ladders.

The trail would have been muddy if it weren’t so rocky.

This is what the back of Mt. Index looks like.

During a water break near the top I called Angela on my cell phone. I don’t normally do this. I like to leave technology behind me when I’m in the woods. She had walked with the girls to a restaurant near the house and they were eating brunch, which made me glad. I knew that at a certain place on their walk home they’d be able to see Mt. Index, and I asked her to point and tell the girls that that’s where I was, and have them wave, which she did. She told them that even though I would not be able to see them waving I would feel it in my heart.

A snowfield lay over the last quarter mile of the trail, and Lake Serene was covered in snow and ice. We were way behind schedule now so we only stayed at the lake’s edge long enough to snap some photos, watch a few avalanches high up on the rock walls that rose from the lake’s far shore — the northern face of Index — and eat our lunches. Then we bolted back down the trail. The only wildlife I saw was a single chipmunk because the trail was so difficult, each step so full of potential for a twisted ankle, that I could never lift my eyes from the trail ahead of me.

A hazy stripe of sun lies across frozen Lake Serene.

Scott and I are attempting to plan and execute a hike — a no-kids, just-us-fellas hike — every other month this year, the even months minus December, so just five hikes. After we met a man on the trail who seemed in his seventies at least, Scott said to me cheerfully that we still had a few good hiking years in us. I got to thinking. That’s just twenty years for me now — Scott is a little younger. If we hadn’t committed to these five or six hikes every year (and we missed February because of bad colds and scheduling mishaps) then realistically I might only do one hike every year, if that. Twenty more hikes only? In the whole rest of my life? It reminded me of the lines by Paul Bowles in his novel The Sheltering Sky:

Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

Twenty hikes. The thought made me very sad and I said so.

Scott’s happy retort, “but a hundred is better!”, went ahead of us like the call of a trumpet, seemed to be picked up and amplified by the forest.

Scott and parties unrelated picking their way across the snowfield. By the time we headed down the footholds were getting slushy.

Faithful Scott. Yes. I’ll take a hundred, please. A hundred more hikes in these rolling fir hills that hatched me. And I’ll be grateful for them. I don’t like it that we get old. That death comes for us all. I hope someday to find a grace and a rhythm and a dignity in it, but right now it just bums me out, as it bums me out that a man can go round the twist without his neighbors knowing it, without them knowing that he’s spent six years building and stocking an underground munitions bunker in the woods, and that he will be willing to kill his family when he has decided the end of the world is at hand.

We have so far to go and it feels to me like there’s so little time.

Lettuce pause

Than growing food I can imagine no worthier enterprise. It’s what I should have done with my life, what I would be doing if I didn’t have to work. I know, I just said that out loud to fully imbibe the insanity. Those of you who have followed this blog since early days may recall that we grew peas a few years in a row, and lettuce once before, and pole beans and pumpkins and cucumbers and tomatoes, but then the wave seemed to break on our heads and we’ve been awash in too much to do since then.

A good season for green and purple lettuce.

For several years now our yard has of all things most closely resembled a weed preserve. I can hear the voice-over for the conservation video:

Here in this suburban enclave nestled in the unlikely environs of North Seattle, vegetate supercompetitors such as ivy, clover, morning glory, blackberry and dandelion are free to flourish and reproduce without the threat of physical and verbal abuse (harm to both root and reputation) that they would otherwise face. Ivy clambers exuberantly up every vertical surface, morning glory and blackberry raise their periscopes to the sunlit world from below every square foot of garden, clover and moss sashay unchecked across every corner of the lawn, dandelions sink their carroty anchors deep among the grass roots, and the grass in turn moseys into every patch of cultivated earth…”

I can barely keep the lawn mown.

So it was something of a victory over entropy when Mara and I went out one day in February, pulled all the three-foot weeds out of the farm box I built years ago on the planting strip by the street, mixed in fertilizer and compost, and planted some peas and lettuce — two kinds of romaine, Valmaine (green) and Petite Rouge (purple) — from Territorial Seed Company seed packets we had purchased at City People’s the week before. I was careful to let Mara do the actual dropping of the seeds so she could feel she really had a hand in it, because I had no intention of making her weed the box later, inflicting the lessons of toiling at cultivation on her at her age — just the thing to kill her very real enthusiasm for playing in soil.

The ones that made it. We like the Sugar Sprint variety.

It almost didn’t happen, but we did it at the right time. Of course, with the maddening late freezes and pelting rains we get here ONLY right after you’ve carefully planted seeds, the peas were much disturbed. They’re hardy little buggers, but heavy rain turns them up out of the soil, and…well, I don’t know if the late cold really hurts them, but at all events half of them didn’t come up. I was so excited to have lots of snap peas this year, they’re so tasty right off the bush. We will still have peas, but not the lush bounty I’d planned.

The lettuce has so far fared better. We didn’t do any successive plantings, so it’ll just be one short crop, and you have to thin the rows to give the best individuals maximum room to grow, so you lose a lot there, too. I’ve purposely let Mara’s lettuce rows grow as much as I could before thinning them — you’re supposed to do it as soon as they come up — so that we could eat what we thinned. This past week the lettuce really put on weight, both varieties, and so Mara and I thinned the rows and took the thinnings inside and washed it. I let Mara use a very sharp knife for the first time in her life to cut the earth-ends off each clump, and tonight we enjoyed tasty, wholesome greens fresh from the garden in a little salad that we ate with our cheese pizza.

Ham over salad. Mara shows off the first greens of the year.

It was a delicious harvest. I’ll get to the weeding later. Or not.

A momentary grammar

Our youngest daughter has been very vocal for the past couple of months and I’ve been meaning to write about it because she’s doing something that is, if not downright unusual, at least very interesting to me. She has developed her own method of saying two-syllable words.

I started noticing this with the words and names that she was very familiar with, like “cracker” and “apple” and “Togy” (our male cat), the words she was hearing all the time. But now she is doing it with any old word that reaches her ears on the wind, the very first time she hears it.

What’s fascinating to me is not simply the fact that Emilia is speaking words in a unique way — I guess every kid does at first — but that the simple grammatical rule she applies to the pronunciation of each word is so consistent. It’s such a reliable grammar that we can, when she says something we don’t understand, pause and reverse-engineer the word in our minds by applying her rule backwards.

Here’s the rule: say the first syllable twice and end with the most interesting consonant. In this grammar, “apple” becomes “ah-ahp”, “cracker” becomes “cah-cahk”, “Grandma” becomes “ga-gam”, “carrot” becomes “cah-cad”, “Togy” becomes “toh-toge”, “waffle” becomes “wah-waff” and my friend Jeremy is called “Je-jem”. “Mah-mok” is Millie’s word for “marker”, “teh-teb” is her word for “table”, and “be-beth” is how she refers to Jeremy’s wife Bethany.

A sunny morning brings new opportunities for saying exactly what she means.

Emilian grammar has a fine point or two. Her first syllable is always very simple even if the input is not. She does not pronounce the first ‘r’ in cracker or Grandma, and Jeremy and Bethany’s daughter Gwyneth is referred to as “gi-geth”, not “gwi-geth”. Angela notes that if she says “horse”, Millie will say “horse” too, but if she says “horsie” Millie says “hoh-horse”. The letter ‘l’ is altered; she does not pronounce our other cat Tillie’s name “ti-til” as you might expect, but simply “ti-di”. Also, the rule applies to the occasional three-syllable word, such as “ah-aff” for “elephant”.

Tonight we were watching a movie as a family and at one point I commented on the action, “here comes trouble”. Millie wasn’t even watching, she was playing on the floor and looking the other way but she absentmindedly and automatically applied her grammar to the last thing she heard. “Tuh-tub”.

The first word I noticed Millie’s grammar on was “coffee”, which of course came over as “cah-caff”. I heard it every morning when I sipped my joe and then started realizing that she used similar repetition with other words.

bunny = “buh-bun”
sippy = “si-sip”
diaper = “dah-dap”
pencil = “peh-pes”
tower = “tah-tow”

We have used this grammar to decode dozens of Emilia’s words, and it follows that you can even anticipate how she will say words of a certain kind. She would say “hah-ham” for “hammer”, I’m sure. The grammar also applies in the new two-word and three-word sentences she’s practicing. Yesterday we took the girls to Ravenna Park to play in the playground, and afterwards we set off up the trail that borders the restored creek running through the ravine. Angela cheerily announced “here we go on our nature walk!” and as Millie trotted after her I heard her say “neh-netch…wahk”.

The thought has crossed my mind to worry that this very durable grammar might be a kind of dyslexia, but I don’t really have any reason to believe that and I know how hyperactive my imagination can be when running in the shadows.

In any case, I find it not only adorable but also very helpful. If we hadn’t noticed this rule I’m sure we’d be missing a lot of what she’s saying. I don’t remember Mara using any such consistent rules, though she certainly had her own interesting turns of phrase and she used a wider vocabulary of signs before she had verbal language than did Millie, who still uses a few signs but never took to signing with the same enthusiasm.

Millie about to set out on a neh-netch walk.

This usage will vanish soon, which is why I wanted to write it down. Someday it will seem impossible, we will remember only the fact of it, not the actual sound of it in our ears, even though we will tell Millie years from now that she used to speak this way. Mara does not remember saying “paahtu” for “pasta”. She didn’t believe it until we showed her a movie clip of her as a toddler in which we asked her what her favorite food was.

To me there’s a sadness in this. There are so many things now that we ask Mara whether she remembers, things she used to do every day or things we used to do with her, how we used to play a chasing game we called Hunting Dog and how, when she was only three, she would study Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever in bed at night and fall asleep with the huge book over her head like a tent. When the answer is no, she doesn’t remember, we feel a little sting of melancholy, as though we had thought she were there with us and she wasn’t.

She has only our word that things really were that way, and that word is what is passed on, that’s what she’ll remember. For our daughters these things that we cherish from their earliest days become legends rather than memories. They become the family stories we tell, like a collection of shells on the mantel — no longer inhabited by the things that made them and gave them their original shapes, but imbued with a later, oral, assigned and handed-down magic and charged with the task of constituting and holding together our history as a family.

GSGH #12 solution

I thought that Gargoyle #12 might keep even Issy occupied for a while since its location is a little bit off the beaten path of my usual wanderings, but she pegged it as the Eagles Auditorium on the northeast corner of Seventh Avenue and Union Street. Here’s a wider shot of the eagle that posed for our original hunt post:

The west entrance to what is now called Kreielsheimer Place, just one of its many names.

This is another building I have zilcho history with, and in fact I only noticed the decorative eagle on it for the first time when I was out one day shooting city fountains for our Aqua Urbana tour. That doesn’t mean the building doesn’t have any history, and in fact it has been “as busy as Issy” since its completion in 1926, if you’ll allow the minting of a new phrase.

The old Eagles Auditorium has housed A Contemporary Theater since 1995.

The building now is called Kreielsheimer Place and houses ACT Theater (sic), which, because people have always insisted on appending the word “theater” to its acronym, has given in to common usage and must now pretend that its acronym does not mean anything, or at least that it does not already include the word ‘theater’ — an untenable turn of events for the dwindling race of strict grammarians, equivalent to a normal person’s zombie apocalypse.

The hall in earlier days, around 1926. This is the southwest corner of the building, or the northeast corner of Seventh and Union. Image property of Museum of History and Industry.

But where were we? Oh yes, we were about to go back in time. But I’ll let the National Park Service repeat what’s on their “Seattle: A National Register of Historic Places Travel Itinerary” web page, since it’s so evocatively told:

On February 6, 1898, a group of theater managers met to discuss some business matters. The men decided to take a walk along the tide flats, and upon reaching the shipyards, settled upon some pilings, where the conversation took a philosophical turn. Combining their ideas on democracy and brotherhood, it was decided that an organization should be formed to reflect this spirit, an organization called the “Seattle Order of Good Things.” Later renamed the “Fraternal Order of Eagles,” the society’s constitution asked its members to “make human life more desirable by lessening its ills and promoting peace, prosperity, gladness, and hope.”

I don’t know anything about the Eagles, except that I met and danced with my wife at a folk dance in a hall that they built in Ballard, so for that reason alone they’re okay in my book. I find the above vignette actually very moving and while I know that some of these fraternal organizations surround themselves in great secrecy and wear funny hats and develop secret handshakes and assume austere titles for themselves, I think if they’re also achieving in any measure the goals they set for themselves in their original constitution then they’ve done well.

Eight hundred members of the WPA (Works Progress Administration) raise their hands in a yea vote to continue a strike in 1937. For the naysayer behind his hat in the front row, his vote is something he'd rather not have his neighbors find out about in the morning paper, a reminder that extraordinary courage used to be required of ordinary people at regular intervals. Image property of Museum of History and Industry.

The building was, I think, a hotel at some point called the Senator, although I have no more information than that and don’t know when that might have been. In the 1950s it passed into the hands of the Unity Church of Truth, which did its thing there until 1960, and from the mid-’60s until 1970 it hosted many musical acts, including Leon Russell, the Grateful Dead, John Mayall and Jethro Tull.

Here’s a shot of the avian decoration above the south-facing entrance on Union. Thanks again for playing, Issy. Every time you (or anyone else) win one of these hunts, I learn something about my town I didn’t know before.

This Eagle is slightly smaller and its wings are stretched out to its sides rather than upward.

GSGH #13 winner limerick

I’ve been really busy lately (in a good kind of way) and I haven’t even done the solution post for Gargoyle #12 yet, but I promised Issy another limerick for #13 so I thought I’d best get to it. Our resident slayer has put up two more crisp wins. Gargoyle #13 turns out, as Issy rightly declared, to be on the Caroline Kline Galland Building on the southwest corner of Second Avenue and University Street.

Gargoyle #13. I included some of the building's name because I had thought this hunt would be harder.

Although I have taken a few photos of it both intentionally and incidentally I know almost goose-egg about this structure. The only history I have with it is that I fell in love with a painting called “Oakley Doakley” by Idaho artist Jerri Lisk, which hung until it was sold in the Patricia Rovzar Gallery, which occupies the corner space at the street level. (The gallery rotates its artists and it just happens that Lisk is the featured artist again as I write this, so if you’re curious you can stroll by and have a look at her style.)

One of Seattle's early steel-frame buildings. Not having to rely on brick or stone for load bearing enabled exterior walls with larger windows. Hey, perfect for art galleries!

What’s in the name? The Bavarian-born Caroline Roseberg wed two men, first the successful Seattle clothier Louis Kline and then the retired successful San Francisco merchant and Seattle philanthropist Bonham Galland, outliving both of them. She had Max Umbrecht design this little investment for her, supposedly in 1906, though I can’t figure out why, if that’s really the date of design, the lions’ medallions clearly announce “1905″, unless building supply companies sold year-old lions back then the way shops sell day-old loaves of bread.

The Caroline Kline Galland Building shortly after it was completed, with the kind of massive overhanging cornice that invariably seemed like a bad idea after an earthquake. The construction date is listed on records as 1906, but the lions and I have our doubts. Image courtesy of University of Washington Libraries.

Ms. Galland died childless only a year or two after the building was completed, and all of her many real estate holdings — except this building — were sold to fulfill her wish that her wealth “may bring to the lives of the aged men and women … the greatest degree of contentment and happiness in their declining years.” Annual income from the Galland building was used to build the Caroline Kline Galland Home for the Aged and Feeble Poor, which, according to a Samis Land Company document I dug up from 2007, was at that time still operating in Seward Park and still equipped to care for 205 residents. The document is here and it includes a lot of interesting old photos which are unfortunately very low resolution, but it’s still worth a look.

This angle from a parking tower up the street shows the top floor with its outdoor patio. I can't tell from earlier photos if this was original or added later. If anyone knows, say.

It’s no surprise to me that this building turns out to be a Samis building. Sam Israel bought the building in 1969 from the trustees of Galland’s estate, the Seattle Title and Trust Company. I wonder if it was because like Galland, Israel was a philanthropist who had a passion for helping fellow Jews. I once heard this about Sam Israel, though I don’t know how true it is or isn’t: he bought up a lot of old properties in Seattle and sat on them. He didn’t improve or update the properties but he wouldn’t sell them either, which made developers crazy in the 1960s when they were tearing down the old brick and stone city to build a new one in sleek concrete. I heard that he’d keep the roofs in good repair to protect the investment, but he was deaf to tenant complaints and appeals for other improvements. He channeled the rent money from his properties into charities that benefited Jews and the nation of Israel.

It's kind of an odd duck, really, Chicago at the front with some winking Frank Lloyd off the side of the top. From this angle, the top floor looks integral to the original design. Someone please invite me up.

During Israel’s later years, the old properties around his were all torn down and the lots redeveloped and the streetscape of Seattle changed gaggingly for the worse, but the buildings Israel owned are now civic treasures. Thank you Sam for your miserly refusal to stoke the engines of Progress, and thank you Caroline for your many gifts to humanity, including this belioned building.

And thanks to Issy once more for your unflagging enthusiasm in keeping the game afoot. Here’s another limerick for Seattle’s winnin’est gargoyle hunter.

That Isabelle is quite a gal, and
she found our last cat on the Galland.
A gargoyle she’ll tether
regardless of whether
it’s footed or finnéd or talon’d.

Blues Travelin’: Part III – Kings

When I woke up I was sleeping on the street
I felt the world was dancing, and I was dirt beneath their feet
When I woke up I saw the Devil looking down
But my Lord He played guitar the day love came to town”

– B. B. King

Note: This is the last part of a three-parter. The first part of this story is here and the second part is here.

Tuesday

Tuesday I slipped out of the conference during an hour when all of the sessions seemed neither relevant nor interesting and set out up Union Avenue on my way to its intersection with Marshall and Myrtle streets. Union is a main thoroughfare running to the edge of town from the door of the Peabody Hotel, in the lobby of which, after all, the Mississippi delta is famously said to begin, so I was surprised that it was so empty of businesses.

Only a few blocks from the city center are empty lots where only old Magnolias suggest someone ever kept a business or residence here. This is actually not Union but Beale.

I did see a furniture store that displayed fine wood fireplace mantels in the windows of an old building that I at first thought was derelict, and one eatery called the Sky Grille or something like that, and I’m sure there must have been other concerns along the way, but my strongest impression was that Memphis was pretty bombed out, that it had never recovered from some long ago recession, long enough ago that commercial buildings and maybe even some nice old Victorian homes had disappeared leaving stately old Magnolia trees to stand sentinel over weedy lots in places where, if it were Seattle, shiny new condos would be opening up.

It was a little depressing, but as I’ve said before, I’m kind of attracted to urban decay, maybe because it so readily exposes the layers of time.

It was originally called Memphis Recording Service.

The layers of time have been kept from settling on the narrow building at 706 Union, which is where, in 1953 the teenaged Elvis Aaron Presley walked into Sam Phillips’ Memphis Recording Service to make a record and answered the famous question of who he sounded like with the famous line, “I don’t sound like nobody.”

Sun Studio, as it later became known, has been preserved pretty much as it looked back then, and for $12 you can take a tour that leads you up a steep stairway into a room full of photos, old recording gear and other memorabilia related to the famous people whom Sam Phillips recorded here both before and after the night in July 1954 Elvis cut the version of “That’s All Right” that, when Dewey Phillips played it on his radio program “Red Hot and Blue” three days later, got so many people out of their chairs and on the phone that he was forced to play the record over and over again that night.

Tour guide Jason at Sun Studios.

Jason was the guide for the tour I joined of about two dozen people and he made it fun with enthusiastic storytelling and possibly the most interesting combination of face and head hair I’ve ever seen. He ran us through the key artists who recorded there — Rufus Thomas Jr., Chester Burnett (a.k.a. Howlin’ Wolf), Ike Turner, and the Prisonaires among others — and told us what the significance of each contribution was, waving a remote to cause snippets of the original recordings to envelope us so we could hear what he was talking about.

A museum of Memphis music behind glass. Upstairs at Sun.

A famous story says that an amp fell off the roof rack of the car Ike Turner’s band was driving to the studio in Memphis, and even though they stuffed some paper inside it to mitigate damage to the woofer, it sounded distorted. However, Sam Phillips liked the effect and used it in the finished recording of “Rocket 88″, which became a smash hit and is regarded by some (not many who know anything about the history of music, though) as the first rock ‘n’ roll recording. I missed part of what Jason was saying when he pointed to an old torn speaker behind the glass, but I believe he was saying it was the very speaker used in the recording.

The tour ends back downstairs in the original studio, the very room where Elvis recorded his first songs, and where the exact spot where he supposedly stood that night is marked on the linoleum floor with an X of black tape. On the west wall hung a photo of the “Million Dollar Quartet”. The story there was that Carl Perkins was in the studio one day to record some rockabilly, with an as-yet-unknown Jerry Lee Lewis on piano to fatten up the lean rockabilly sound, when celebrities Elvis and Johnny Cash both happened to stop by the studio. Phillips recorded their impromptu session and a photographer from the local paper was rushed over to snap the famous photo., which has already appeared at least thrice in this Memphis set of posts.

There's a busted up amp in the display...maybe the one that started all that damned distorted racket?

At the end of the tour, Jason stood an old microphone in the middle of the room and said it had been discovered in the back room years ago when the building was being restored. He couldn’t say for sure now, but it might have been the very microphone used by any number of celebrities who recorded there. We were welcome to take pictures pretending to sing into it, or really singing into it if we wanted.

The 40-minute-or-so tour had caused me to miss not only the conference session I wanted to skip, but the next one as well, so I had to beat it back to the Peabody, and since everyone hesitated I jumped forward and went first. I asked Jason to take my photo, and he thoughtfully counterposed my (pretend) crooning face against that of the King.

What do you think. Should I keep the day job? Photo by Jason.

I hoofed it back downtown, but since it became clear that I was also going to miss the provided lunch, I went back by Beale Street instead of Union so I could get some chow. I wanted to try some barbecued ribs. It was suddenly nearly 80 degrees and I’d walked a mile or two and was hot. The King’s Palace advertised ribs and air conditioning, and there was a family and several other parties inside, so I went in and ordered. When I asked for the barbecue banquet server Rob asked if I wanted the “dry rub” or the wet barbecue and I asked him what he recommended.

“Dry on the ribs, wet on the pulled pork.”

“Great,” I said. “Let’s do that.”

“Alright. Let’s dance,” he said and disappeared into the back.

By the time my food came out the family and the couple had left and there was just a guy at the bar. I was the lone diner in a big dark room, darker because it was so bright out on the street now. I felt a renewed pang of loneliness, and that’s putting it mildly. I’m one needy little human, I tell ya. This was the nadir of the trip, I sitting at a table alone in a huge dark dining room, like some miserable king. To make it worse, some blues band started kicking it up outside on the sunny patio, where I hadn’t even realized it was an option to sit. I considered asking them to move me to an outside table but I was suddenly weak and helpless against the voice in my head that told me it would be unseemly to trouble the wait staff so frivolously, and I couldn’t do it.

“You know how to eat this?” Rob asked as he set a big plate down in front of me. I said I was ready to be schooled. He said “Well, there’s the right way and then there’s the civilized way.”

“I want to know the right way,” I said, whereupon he told me that if I wanted to be civilized I could flip the ribs upside down and then I’d be able to see where the knife could go to cut them apart, but that the right way was just to…here he lifted his hands to his face and growled and gnashed his teeth to signify someone (a local, presumably) tearing the meat off the ribs. I thanked him for the tip and applied myself to the messy task at hand. I have not eaten a lot of ribs in my time, but I believed then and now that those were the best ribs I’ve ever had. I told Rob so when he swung by.

“Have you tried our gumbo?”

“No, but I had gumbo up the street at Blues City last night.”

His eyebrows did a strange thing, as if I’d responded with a non sequitur, and he said “Uh…did that place have trophies out front for ‘best gumbo’ like we do?” I said I hadn’t noticed. Rob said, “hmmm, I was just checking…” with a sardonic edge and then asked if I wanted to taste some, on the house. He brought me some gumbo in a little paper taster cup. It was, I will admit, better gumbo. I finished my meal and could barely haul myself back to the hotel for the afternoon sessions.

The National Civil Rights Museum. Who knew it was controversial?

After the last session I walked south along the river, the Mississippi River, then turned east to find the Lorraine Motel at 450 Mulberry Street, which is now the National Civil Rights Museum. This is where Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968. (Most people say he was “assassinated” but I don’t see any real use for that word; it mainly sounds like a way of abstracting away the brutality of killing somebody.) The museum was closed by then, but I stood for a few moments acknowledging my senseless white guilt about what happened here.

There were a number of other tourists at the motel. Jacqueline Smith was there, too, at her table across the street. I had heard just two days earlier about this woman Jacqueline Smith, a black woman who has protested on the streetcorner across from the motel (often camping out) for twenty years. She was the last resident of the motel when it was closed in 1988 and she was evicted and, in the end, forcibly removed (but only, so I’ve heard, after barricading herself in her room). She feels strongly that King would not have approved of nine million dollars being spent on a museum for him nor the replacement of affordable housing for the poor in that neighborhood with the upscale condos and lofts that have been going up for years.

Where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. I'm not sure if the Caddie parked out front was actually the car MLK arrived in or not.

I walked over to her crude table, which had blue tarps draped around it for covering at night. I usually avoid proselytizers and torchbearers of every stripe but what I’d heard of her position seemed worth hearing and I told myself I could give her ten minutes of my time (oooh, such largesse). She was sitting and reading a thick book whose title I couldn’t see. She was thin and severe looking. She did not look up at me. I perused her signage, which included one that said “Gentrification is Abuse”. I asked her if she could tell me her story. Without taking her eyes off her book she said “There’s a website.”

*

After the long, nonplussed moment represented by the above asterisk, I said, “Well I can read, but I thought it might be better to hear what you have to say directly from you.”

“I’m done talking for the day,” said Jacqueline Smith, turning a page.

And that was that. I wanted to take a photo of her but it would have been crass. Or I don’t know, maybe it would have been perfect. The world is beyond me to understand. Her website is a little spacey, but it’s here. The conversation I would have liked to have with her was what did she envision as the alternative to either gentrification or leaving the city to rot, since she advocates a space between — the possibility of cleaning up a neighborhood without pricing the poor out of it, of actually maintaining a poor neighborhood — the existence of which I believe developers and city fathers would surely deny.

Chris and Mike can now say they've played Beale Street.

That evening I called the one person whom I’d made a solid contact of at the mixer the night before, a youngster named Scott. He said, yes, his boss Chris and another guy had taken their guitars down to Beale and were about to play on the sidewalk. He was there with them now. I should come on over. I skibbled over to Beale — without a jacket! — and found them on a corner next to where fairy tale carriages pulled by draft horses were waiting for customers. While waiting for the boys to “warm up” I talked to Jenny and the big black horse who stood waiting to pull the carriage she had for rent.

“What’s his name?” I asked, giving him hearty pats on his thick neck.

“Cash.”

“Ah,” I said, getting the connection. “The ‘horse in black’.”

“Right,” she said. “Only it’s Bobby, not Johnny.”

Chris and Mike, one of the conference speakers, played some bluegrass numbers while folks passed by on their way to the clubs or stopped to inquire about the carriage rides. I suggested somebody put a hat out, and one of us did, and Scott and I greased it with a few dollar bills so passers-by might be prompted to throw. Then we walked over to a restaurant of some local fame called the Rendezvous, just up an alley east of the Peabody, and they all ordered ribs. The dry rub recipe is legendary here, and if you go you’re encouraged to order the brisket. One of the women told me in her sweet but not heavy southern accent that she’d grown up here in Memphis when the only places downtown that weren’t boarded up were Schwab’s Hardware and the Rendezvous.

Blue no more. Finally, this howlin' lone wolf finds a pack to run with. Photo by Matthew Ellison.

I still hadn’t digested all the barbecue I’d eaten on my late lunch, so while everyone else ordered ribs and beer I presided over a pitcher of cola. The evening waxed convivial and the laughter rang out. I was wedged in tight against the wall, my new friends having accepted my presence there as though I had merely been misplaced and had now caught up with them. They were smart and funny and friendly, and I wondered why it had taken until my last night in Memphis to hook up with them.

Great Seattle Gargoyle Hunt #13

The Great Seattle Gargoyle Hunt continues with a thirteenth gargoyle, even though hunt #12 is at the moment of this writing still unsolved. This shot includes a few extra clues, because hey, I don’t want this to be agony, I want it to be fun. For rules of play see the first entry, here.

Where is this 107-year-old lion? Use the comments to submit your answer…or even your silly wild-ass guess. No answer that includes a Seattle location is invalid (it may be wrong but it won’t be invalid). Throw out a guess and see what happens.

Gargoyle #13