The Million Dollar Bridge

We went to Cordova. I would have gone to Cordova long ago but you can't drive there and if you're going to cough up enough money to fly locally in Alaska you may as well cough up a little more and go somewhere warm. So we took the ferry.

We happened to go at the end of a long stretch of fantastic weather. The forecast suggested that our travel day was the last day of good sun for several days, so when we got off the ferry at 7:30pm i decided the best thing to do was to grab something to eat, check into our lodging, and drive out of town to the end of the road.

 The Child's Glacier is three miles wide and several hundred feet high.

That road is  called the Cordova Highway. It's mostly gravel and it goes east out of Cordova for 50 miles before it becomes impassable to cars. It was built originally as a railroad by the familiar names J.P Morgan and the Guggenheim's. The rail line connected Cordova to the 200 mile distant Kennecott Mine in the Wrangells to the Northeast. From the mine the rail originally traveled west until it met the Copper River, at which point it turned south and followed the river as it cut it's way through the Chugach Mountains. The rail then crossed the huge flat delta and terminated in Cordova, where the copper was loaded onto ships. It was built in the early 1900's and abandoned in 1938. About a decade later it was converted into the Copper River Highway and linked Cordova to the rest of the state along Alaska Route 10.

After driving through dense mountains surrounding Cordova the land suddenly opens up into vast wetlands as the highway travels through the extensive Copper River Delta.

 When the highway reaches the center of the delta and crosses the main channel of the river the landscape changes from lush wetlands to what has the look of desert wastelands.

Eventually the highway comes back to the mountains, which erupt up out of the flat delta.

 In this view of the bridge you can see how the section in the foreground (the formerly collapsed section) is more than two feet off of alignment with the rest of the bridge.

Today the road ends on the Cordova side at the Million Dollar Bridge. One section of the bridge collapsed in the 1964 earthquake and the highway has been abandoned ever since. It's truly a bridge to nowhere, but it's a fantastic destination.

The bridge was built in between two enormous glaciers. To the west the Child's Glacier terminates in huge cliffs at the Copper River. Chunks of it break off into the river as you watch from the opposite shore. To the east the Miles Glacier marks the westernmost edge of the 3rd largest icefield on earth. From the Miles Glacier you can travel across ice for over 200 miles, well into Canada. It's a true barrier, and after the Copper River no other inland river makes it to the coast until the Alsek, a distant 250 miles down the coast. The distance in between is what is known as The Lost Coast.

 A fisherman is dwarfed by the Child's Glacier. The river between the glacier and the man in these pictures is a quarter mile wide.

From here, at the bridge, the Miles Glacier looms 5 miles away. The edge of the largest icefield on earth outside of Greenland and Antarctica, continues from here for over 200 miles. It's size distorts perspective. The reason the alpenglow seems to dip closer to the horizon on the right side of the photo is because those mountains are 30 miles more distant than the ones on the left. This is the end of the road.

It's a very interesting location. The Miles and Child's Glaciers follow the same path from opposite directions. The Copper River smashes into the Miles Glacier, turns 90 degrees, goes under the bridge, smashes into the Child's Glacier, turns 90 degrees and then behaves like a normal river. The bridge was damaged along this same line, one section of it is now nearly two feet to the left of the rest of the bridge. It's all part of the barrier between two crustal plates known as part of the Bagley Fault. The Bering Glacier in the neighboring Bagley Icefield also follows the same line for 100 miles. The Copper River, though, had been following it's southward path for many years before the existence of the surrounding Chugach Mountains.

Blessed...

I feel extremely blessed when 'art' in any form comes home. Whether it is a a small woven basket picked up from a craft fair or a huge Tanjore painting brought home from one of our various travels.

This week began with me experiencing that feeling not once but twice!

All of you must be familiar with the super-talented blogger of the famous Artnlight ~ Vineeta Nair. I have been a longtime follower of her blog, from the time of it's inception to the time it started showcasing Vineeta's new venture of decoupaged line of products, each piece so unique in it's design.

I had been eyeing this box for a while and finally placed an order for it and here it is!

The attention to detail is amazing...

A piece of art from Artnlight that I am going to treasure for a long time to come. Thanks Vineeta.

Remember this post on Aarohi Singh's exhibition? That was way back in November last year. I had bought a gorgeous 'Goddess Saraswati ' Thali from her and decided to pick it up from her after the exhibition.

Days led to weeks, weeks into months. The busy individuals after planning and re-planning finally met in the middle of the day over hot khullads of chai for some stimulating creative conversation:-)

I welcomed the Goddess to our home...

...offered her some frangipanis from our garden.

Thanks Aarohi.

You ladies completely made my day!

(images by Arch)

Recommendation 3: On the road with Mavis and Marge

Front cover 

Niamh Sharkey  is an Irish author illustrator, and her award winning picturebook, On the road with Mavis and Marge,  has been recommended by Ana Rasteiro, a primary English teacher who works with me here in Portugal. 

I am familiar with one or two of Niamh Sharkey's picturebooks - I've got  I'm a happy Hugglewug, and The Gigantic Turnip.  The latter has been recommended by another colleague in Spain, so I'll write about it another day!  Her illustrations are fun and colourful, but change quite a bit between picturebooks, the three titles I've mentioned here are all different.   On the road ... mixes occasional collage with an illustrative style you might associate with cool sets of coffee mugs - I think the illustrations were originally painted with oil, at least in an interview Sharkey says that's her favourite medium. She's also an admirer of Tove Jansson's The Moomins . 

Thelma & Louise 1991

But let's get back to On the road ... Mavis is a cow and Marge is a chicken, and together they go where no animal has gone before!  They have great adventures, but eventually decide that home is the place to be.  On the front cover Marge the chicken reminds me of Louise, in the film Thelma and Louise  with Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis - those sun glasses and her polka dot head scarf are almost the same! 

As usual I've got the paperback edition, and there are no endpapers as such, though the inside of the front and back cover is red with little white dots, just like Marge's headscarf on the front cover.  

Copyright and title page

On the copyright and title pages the mass of writing drew my attention to the font, called Kingthings Trypwriter. As we go through the picturebook its quirky hand typed letters mix nicely with some hand-written font.  You'll notice that the lower case f, i, and n have little shadows. Fun illustrations on the copyright page too... And once again we see Mavis and Marge, no ordinary cow and chicken for they have handbags and books under their arms. 

Opening 1

The first opening introduces our characters:  Mavis is shown in the verso illustration, looking eagerly out at the world, Marge is busy reading a book.  The words on the recto tell us that Mavis is "different to other cows" and that Marge is "smarter than your average chicken", if you go back to the verso illustration, you'll see the other cows and the average chicken in the back ground!  Great image of Mavis and Marge on the collage mountain top. 

Opening 2

The second spread uses multiple cartoon-like frames, giving us a sequence of events to see and read about.  "They knew there was a world out there waiting to be explored" say the words, and the picture shows us that Marge has discovered this in her book.  So they take the bike from the barn and off they go! The next spread is a wonderful double page illustration, of the two friends on their adventure.  Marge is giving directions!

Opening 3

Can you guess what happens? In comic strip fashion we are taken through the sequence of events that leads them to their encounter with Clarence, a friendly rabbit, "out for a spin in his car."

Opening 4

Off they go with Clarence, and we see another double spread of the three of them tootling along happily. Then another spread with separate shots of the different places they visit, going "uphill ... downhill... through puddles ... over bridges ... through the forest ... all the way to the ocean."  My favourite is this little cameo, using a map of somewhere in Ireland (yep, I checked the name, it's from County Antrim, N. Ireland) 

Close up from opening 6

And so they arrive at the ocean and crash, they hit a bollard, but "What luck!  They landed in Benny's boat!"   "Welcome aboard!" say's Benny!  And off they go … in a tiny yellow boat.  Mavis is green, but Marge has great sea legs! Where are they going can you see? 

Opening 8

The South Pole of course! Home of penguins and in particular Albert, who's an adventurous penguin about to fly to the moon!  "Ready? Stead?  Blast off!" Mavis and Marge, Clarence, Benny and Albert arrive on the moon, where they bounce around with green faced aliens, and all's well, until ... 

Opening 12

They look to into space and see planet Earth, blue and green in all its glory.  "I want to go …" "HOME!" say Mavis and Marge. "Hmmmm?" says the alien, what is this thing called home? And so they all went home, from the moon  back to earth and Mavis and Marge say "Goodbye" to their new friends and cycle back to the farm. 

Opening 14

And what a welcome they get!  Mavis and Marge both agree that "Home!" "It is the best place to be!"  If you look at Opening 1 again you'll see that the farm is called "Home Farm"! But that's not the end, turn the page and you'll see they have a visitor!  He's come to find out what "Home" is!

Back verso

Ana discovered this picturebook at a book fair in Lisbon.  She was playing with transport words with a group of pre-school children and it was the theme that caught her attention, as well as the fun illustrations and the fantasy storyline.  She didn't do anything special with the picturebook, she just read it to the children several times.  But that is special, and very often overlooked!  Children need to be read to for the sake of being read to, forget the linguistic focus or pre- during- and after- storytelling activities! Just enjoy the sharing of a picturebook together. She described the children's responses as they saw the different types of transport and they were able to call out the names in English.  They loved the bizarre occurrences and the trip to the moon, and of course they all empathized with Mavis and Marge when they realised that home was the best place to be. And as I've mentioned in previous posts, the children recognized the speech bubbles as visual representations of the spoken word and wanted them to be read.  And they all enjoyed saying "Hello" with the alien at the end!  

Thanks to Ana for recommending such a fun book, loved it! And don't think it's just for pre-school, primary aged children learning English as a foreign language, up till about 8 years old, would enjoy this picturebook I think, and if you go to this link, you can download some fun activities: cut out and colour Mavis and Marge, write a postcard, complete an alien, colour a space rocket. 

Blending in

Halibut Jackson is a book I came across by chance and I’m much taken by the illustrations, done by David Lucas, who is both author and illustrator of this lovely book.  It was his first picturebook and won instant acclaim. 

Close up of illustration

There’s something unfinished about the illustrations, though to be honest I can’t work out why, as each page is packed full of pattern and design - it’s like walking into an Aladin’s cave, all bright and sparkly with loads to look at.  It also reminds me of a page of tattoos, again not sure why, maybe it’s the inky outlines? Look at this close up of one of David Lucas’ sketches, found on the back verso page of my paperback edition.  It’s got a lovely scratchy feeling to it, I suppose from the quality of paper he uses.  It absorbs the ink - I love it. 

The front cover presents our protagonist, though we’d not see him if it wasn’t for those scratchy lines, his yellow suit blends in with that jewel-like sun.  A nice contrast to the patterned foreground, covered in wild flowers.  Goodness, even the birds wear decorated hats! 

Open the book and you are greeted by a flowery set of endpapers ...

Front endpapers

... flowers from another world, leading our eyes towards a yellow archway, and there’s Halibut Jackson again, can you see him?  He’s the colour of the sky.

Copyright, dedication and title pages

On the title page, he's blending in with the bricks in the wall.  I love the decorated frame, like cut gold.  We already know quite a bit about Mr Jackson don't we?  He likes blending in and seems to have a lot of different suits.  I wonder if he makes them himself? Let’s see shall we?

Opening 1

Can you see Halibut Jackson?  He’s leaning against the wall in his red brick suit, and what a lot of movement all around. It’s such a dramatic illustration, all that red, and Mr Jackson is in the middle of it all.  Great composition. And from the words we learn that …

“Halibut Jackson was shy.

Halibut Jackson didn’t like to be noticed.

Halibut Jackson liked to blend into the background.”

We'd picked up on that hadn't we?  Poor chap, can't be easy.  He has a suit for all the different places he visits. Before we turn the page I'd like to talk about the way many of the double spreads in this picturebook work visually.  In almost all the illustrations there is a frame, which contains some of the objects, but not all.  From the left verso objects either rush out of or rush into the frame.  In Opening 1 there are objects rushing out. It’s an interesting technique and gives the illustrations a surreal feel to them - there’s an impossibility to Halibut’s world, we are neither in it nor out of it. 

Back to the story, but look out for those frames! Turn the page and we can see some of his different suits.  He has  a suit for the park, a flowery suit. Can you see him?  

Opening 2

Keep turning.  He has a suit for the supermarket which blends with the red apples; a suit for the library, that blends with the books.  Each spread is full of things to look at and each spread contains that in and out framed composition.

“But mostly Hallibut Jackson stayed indoors.”

Opening 5

This is a wonderfully decorated spread, the perspective is all out and the yellow carpet acts as the frame, outlining the room, keeping Halibut safe, and the highly decorated furniture on the verso page is tumbling over the line.   Can you see his photo on the table?  He really is shy!

Then one day Halibut Jackson received an invitation to a "Grand Birthday Party" at the Palace.  How wonderful. But Halibut Jackson is shy and he “Certainly didn’t go to parties.  What a shame.”

As in all good stories it came to him in a dream - He’d make a suit, not just any suit, "a suit of silver and gold, covered in jewels."  People won't notice him for sure, for palaces have lots of gold and silver and jewels! 

Opening 9

But how wrong he was, it was a Palace Garden Party.  Yikes!  Poor Halibut. And of course everyone noticed him.  

Opening 10

He looked so very fine. So fine that they all wanted suits of their own!

And so Halibut made a suit for the Queen and the King, for everyone in fact. He opened a shop, a clothes shop of course, and filled it with suits of all kinds.  Can you see some of them?  And even though he was still very shy, it didn’t matter. He had lots of friends and was always very busy.

Opening 12

And when we turn to the endpapers, we see those extravagant flowers again, and the same yellow arch, but Halibut Jackson isn’t blending in, he looks quite different to his surroundings in a smart blue and white striped suit.  It’s Ok to be noticed after all.

Back endpapers

What a wonderful picturebook.  The illustrations are terribly detailed, so it wouldn't work too well in a large class, but if you leave the book in the class library children will be able to browse and scrutinize, and come to all sorts of understandings about what they see. 

Halibut Jackson's suit is always the same shape, so a nice activity would be to create an outline for the suit and have children draw Halibut blending in pictures, with Halibut in different scenes wearing his special suit.   What would he wear at school? At a football match? To the beach? To a wedding? At the school canteen? 

A Halibut Jackson hat competition would be fun too.  He's got some pretty amazing ones in his shop.  

And of course there's the message about being shy. It's OK to be shy and Halibut shows us how we can overcome our shyness. 

Portland Oregon

Although i've been to Oregon before and lived in Seattle for 4 years, i had never done anything in Portland. I've been down the beautiful Oregon coast, up the Columbia River Gorge, and once spent two days at pristine Crater Lake, but i had never done anything in Portland other than to get gas on the way through.

That finally changed this past fall the week before Thanksgiving. I drove down to Portland from Seattle and spent 4 days wandering around town in the rain. The first day had my hopes running high, it was just past the peak of fall and the town was beautiful. That night though a huge wind storm blew most of the leaves off and the following days were plagued by sometimes torrential rain. I didn't spend as much time outside as i wanted, but what i did see told me it was a pretty city.

  Portland has a lot of very pretty city parks, like this one up on a strange big hill.

Portland has a great Art Museum relative to the size of the city, and many other interesting smaller galleries scattered around town. They have a pretty good zoo,(and if you want to avoid the crowds go there during a major rainstorm). The city has a lot of fantastic restaurants for every meal, and they have very good beer.

I finally upgraded my ancient, generations old iPhone, to an iPhone 4. I was shocked that the iPhone 4 actually has a usable camera. So now you can expect phone pictures on this blog, like these. That's my finger in the first one. It took a long time to learn not to do that.

Maybe it was more apparent than usual after spending 3 weeks in Manhattan, but what struck me most about Portland was the friendly attitude i encountered everywhere that i went.  It helped that i was from Alaska, as that seemed to be a location that was on everyone's mind as a vacation spot of interest. Even so, i found my time being sucked up at times by conversations with perfect strangers. One night a friend of a friend, a person who's existence i had just learned about, met up with me and showed me around his part of town just so i'd have something to do that evening. Thanks, Sterling, for the time and the fine Scotch!

 All the leaves blew off the trees and onto the street 4 hours after i got there.

A Portland residence. Portland must have a lot of recycling laws, because this guy has 6 different kinds of garbage cans in front of his garage.

 I couldn't tell if these were wood or resin. The iPhone is bad in low light.

 Portland is full of neat little shops like this one.

As nice as Portland is, i wasn't there for fun and games. I had come to receive treatment for chronic Tinnitus and what i didn't know until then had a name: hyperacusis. While tinnitus is a sound caused by your brain trying to fill in areas with sound where it isn't getting a signal, hyperacusis is a problem with hearing everyday sounds at an abnormally loud perceived volume. It often occurs along with tinnitus, and some believe they are related. The hyperacusis i was experiencing had been worse in the four months following my introduction to tinnitus. During that time I found restaurants, construction, and retail stores like Home Depot with backing up forklifts to be deafening to the point that i tried to avoid them altogether. The really weird thing about it was that it was so loud to me that i'd have sworn you'd have to yell to be heard, but i could hear anyone talking in a normal tone of voice without any problems at all.

One night it didn't rain for a few hours so i went walking. Portland has hundreds of tons of bridges and crazy complex highway overpasses. This old double decker, which raises in the middle accommodates trains and pedestrians on the deck, and public trains and cars on the upper deck.

On the bridge. The tracks in this one were occupied by robot trains. There are actual signs warning that the trains had no drivers in them.

I went to the the Oregon Tinnitus & Hyperacusis Treatment Center, run by Dr. Marsha Johnson. Dr. Johnson, who is on the board of the American Tinnitus Association, was more helpful and demonstrated more genuine  concern about my problems than any of the other doctors i spoke to over the phone or in person over a period of three months. And she is about as close to Alaska as you can get on a plane.

Due to the type of tinnitus i was experiencing, i was a good candidate for something called cochlear retraining therapy. Cochlear retraining is a long term treatment that teaches your brain to filter out the bothersome noises of tinnitus by mapping out perceived problem frequencies and embedding them into a white noise "mask." The idea is that the patient listens to this masking noise in the background of specially chosen music every day for two to four hours for up to two years. During that time the patients brain will learn edit out the offending noises. That's the gist of it. It's an FDA approved treatment and has an 80% success rate in improving tinnitus. There are no claims that it will cure it, but some patients do report a complete removal of the sounds in their heads.

It takes four days to get set up. Dr. Johnson ran some tests on me and we mapped out the sounds in my head. Unfortunately, my hearing loss was pretty screwed up and i hear four frequencies of sounds ranging from low to high. The program is only designed to treat one sound, so i had to make the tough choice of choosing which sound i wanted to get rid of the most. The least bothersome noise i hear sounds a lot like the refrigeration sounds in the frozen foods aisle at the grocery. I went with the highest pitch noise.

After the frequencies are matched, the doctor has to order what is basically an extraordinarily expensive mp3 player from the company that developed the program. In the U.S. it's called Neuromonics. If things go well a few days later you can leave with the device in hand, and start treatment immediately.

Thirty minutes outside of Portland is one of the prettiest waterfalls in the country. Multnomah Falls is in the Columbia River Gorge. The two falls together plunge 620 feet over cliffs made from old lava flows. Driving along the gorge and looking at the rainforest growing over strangely carved basalt cliffs i couldn't help but notice the similarity to Hawaii.

You can walk on a paved trail to the top of the waterfall, and from there several more miles through the rainforest.

 Shortly after this bend in the creek it plummets off a sheer cliff for 542 feet (165 m).

It's been 9 months now that i've been on the program and my tinnitus has improved greatly in that time. It's a very slow, subconscious process, with days that can still be challenging, and others that i barely notice at all. I've changed some of my habits. For instance, i used to like a completely quiet room to sleep in. Now i sleep with a fan on just outside to generate white noise, which masks some of the sounds. Only in the last three months have i really been able to enjoy music again. Listening to low quality music or music that has lots of constant high frequency noise can still be irritating so i try and avoid that as well. I've found that the most important factor is simply getting enough sleep. Nothing makes a larger difference in volume of the tinnitus than a lack of sleep. Stress can also be a major contributor. In the meantime i'm supposed to make a couple of more trips down to Portland for checkups on the therapy.

Nothing i've ever dealt with has affected me as much as tinnitus. It is apparently the number one injury for American troops in battlefield. I'm lucky enough to be living in an age where they have only recently begun to develop working treatments for the disorder. It's also a unique affliction in that researches seem to be very close to finding a real cure for the problem in our lifetime.

Back home in Snoqualmie. This is the restaurant from the TV show of the same name, still serving pie!