Road Trip! North Dakota and Minnesota

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The storm last night blew eastward at a rate of about 35 mph, hitting the Twin Cities before dawn, and moving into western Wisconsin in the morning.  Another (others) blew up in their places, however. Yesterday I was escaping the weather, my 75 mph easily beating the storm; today, I was chasing into it -- this time, catching up.  I still managed to duck just south of the storms (which hit Mille Lacs hard -- the large lake next to the "a" in Minnesota in the map above).

Still, I arrived at Prosapia Dommus ("family home") just in time to unload the car and participate in this week's Popcorn Dialogues. (More about that some other day.)  I have driven 1,849 miles since Tuesday (technically, since HomoDommi drove many of the miles the first day, I've driven 1,427 miles since Wednesday afternoon).

Here are some more photos:

A close up of flowers in the Gallatin National Forest. Looking, IIRC, north.  I took several photos of the immense, glacier-covered mountains in the distance, but none of them show up.

Park City, Montana, is in the chasm between the line of the tops of dark trees and the buttes in the distance.  This is maybe 30 miles west of Billings, Montana, looking southwest. 

A rainbow north of the highway, over eastern Montana, round about Glendive.

The National Grasslands of the North Dakota Prairie.  The wind here was blowing so hard, I lost my footing trying to walk back to my car. I love this territory, and every time I drive through it hurriedly, wonder why I don't stop for a proper hike. It is always windy (based on three different trips through).

The last photo of last night's storm, taken around Williston, ND.

At a rest stop in North Dakota.  This felt like Caledonia (southern Minnesota) to me, although about 500 miles northwest of it.

Driving into another storm, this time in Minnesota, today.

The rain it raineth every day

The rest of the USA is experiencing record heat and sun, from what I read in the papers. Not here. In Portland, we've had "measurable rain" every day for the last 2 weeks. We are almost double our usual rainfall for the month of May, and -- after a couple of years of being about 30% below our average annual rainfall, we've made up to within an inch this spring.

And this is not your typical Portland rain, which is light showers and general drizzle -- annoying, but not even umbrella-worthy.  No, this is torrential downpours, with thunder and lightning (still nothing like a good prairie thunderstorm).  The ground is completely soaked, with muddy puddles on every paved intersection. Tree limbs block the way as you walk down the sidewalk, marinated leaves heavy with all the extra water.

The azaleas are taking it badly. Ours bloomed last weekend, and normally we have a few weeks of bright, sunny pink fluffiness. The buckets of rain have saturated and collapsed the blossoms, so instead, we have the remnants of a giant child's ice cream in the front garden, the mint-chocolate-chip mostly scraped away and the raspberry sherbet left for later.

They say the rain is supposed to taper off, but not for a few more days yet. We shall sea.  (hee hee)

When that I was and a little tiny boy,

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

A foolish thing was but a toy,

For the rain it raineth every day.

- Twelfth Night

Continued Cold

I still am sniffling and sneezing, although meds work so well to suppress all symptoms that -- aside from spaciness -- I can almost forget at times that I have a cold.

But I cannot forget that it is cold.  It is refreshing to come to Minnesota for a week every winter and be reminded about true frigidity. The worst of it is its unending-ness.  Even though the temps go up 10°F or so from dawn to mid-afternoon, it is so deeply cold that the "warmth" isn't noticeable. It's just more of the same.

Or maybe it's the layers that are the worst. Today I've been wearing a silk camisole, a cashmere turtleneck and two wool cardigans, with a down vest over that, and a down parka over all the above much of the time. This is what cream must feel when it's whipped -- huge, fluffy, and full of fat.

Or maybe it's the ice, that is the worst.  The Cities were socked by a blizzard on Christmas, but then it warmed to above freezing and everything melted to slush. And then it got deeply cold, and snowed some more on the way down, and so now every outside surface is rutted with the worst kind of ice, slippery and thick. The roads are like driving on irregularly corrugated cardboard.

Or maybe it's the dryness, that is the worst.  I feel the moisture flowing out of my body. My skin is drawn and tight. My eyes are sandy (although some of that is due to virus). My fingertips are rough and flaking, and my lips are chapped red.

The photo above was taken by FrenchKate in answer to my post of yesterday. Captured from a webcam, it is a view of downtown Saint Paul.

Cold

It's cold here, in Minnesota.  Today, actually, was warmer than yesterday (high of 1°F then, low of  -15°F; today it got as officially warm as 7°F above zero.  For perspective, the averages for these dates are 22°F and 5°F).  I woke up this morning with an echoing head and aching sinuses, dried out like a tattered lace handkerchief caught on a dead rose bush, blowing in a stiff wind.  I read once that Minnesota in January gets drier than the Sahara Desert, but I can't figure out the stats to show that's actually true.

CoG refers on his blog to the grey, dark painting of The Hunters in the Snow (Winter) by Pieter Brueghels the Elder (1565).  We have a print of this at the house in Portland, a reminder, in the cement skyed damp greenness of western Oregon, of real winter.  I love the painting, although it's chilly to look at. But the skaters are so clearly having fun in the distance, and the mountains look majestic, and that lovely bird, soaring in the grey winter sky-!

However, Minnesota winter brings a sky blue sky and vivid sun; the cold is colder.  During the day my hollow head has filled like a nasty sponge, and tonight I am sneezing and sniffling and clearly have developed the other meaning of the word cold.

Shall we instead concentrate on another Brueghel painting, the Harvesters?  Golden warmth, work and play, at the opposite season of the year.

There and Back Again

Last Saturday, The Texan and I left Portland in a record-breaking downpour and drove out to the new digs in Idaho. We were transporting to The Family a second car -- their 22-year-old white Toyota Corolla. The Corolla's air conditioning doesn't work any more, nor the radio; the engine runs well, but we were not convinced it would be able to make the 400+ mile summer trip to Boise. So we drove two cars, trading off periodically to relieve boredom. When we stopped in The Dalles for lunch, I reported that "now playing in the Blue Mini" was a CD of the original Broadway cast production of Brigadoon. The Texan replied that the entertainment in the white car was watching the arrow on the fuel gauge swing up and down. The fuel gauge doesn't work, either. (To save you any agonizing suspense, Reader, the Toyota purred without a hiccough the whole way there, using significantly less gas than the Mini Cooper along the way.)

I have been trying to figure out why I wanted to call this entry There and Back Again, the subtitle of The Hobbit. I must be free associating that the road goes ever on. And on. That is one long, long, drive. Seven hours with no stops (but further than one tank of gas, so stops are required), and when you go east, you also lose an hour. Boise is just close enough to attempt in one day, but far enough away to discourage stopping for hikes.

And, particularly on the drive east, what is there to look forward to? We left Portland in a rainstorm (not so good) but at least everything was damp and green. You drive through the Columbia River Gorge, with its magnificent waterfalls, the broad blue river and hillsides thick with conifers.

Image from Flickr.com

Slowly the freeway rises up to an open plateau, the river far below and the trees far behind. This, even, is not unbeautiful (although the view from the freeway isn't the best) -- but at least everything is golden, and gently rolling. And the windmills! The amazing windmills that poke up from every crest like the snout of a dog who has been messing with porcupines.

(I could go on at length about the beauty of manmade sophistication highlighting the elegance of the austere landscape -- I had over six hours to contemplate it -- but I'll save it. Or is it that I'll save you?)

The river and the freeway part ways. You spend over an hour traversing a section a disgruntled friend once called "80 miles of Nevada", high desert plateau, before you enter the Blue Mountains. Dry, also, but genuine mountains of blue spruce, bluer skies, steep cliffs, and snow-fed rivers.

(Taken from the drivers seat of the white car, you can see both the extensive crack in the windshield,

at extreme bottom of the photo, and the Mini out in front, just passing a signpost for La Grande and

places east. Click on any of the photos if you want to see them, larger.)

You turn south, paralleling the Snake River (although that is out of sight many miles away at the bottom of a distant, inhospitable canyon). The landscape is dotted with old memories of gold rush dredgings, defunct mines. The foothills are brown, but with the sun so low behind you, the sky is piercing azure, and you can still make out some of the ruts left from the Oregon Trail, which petered out 130 years ago.

(Well, no ruts in this photo. None of those turned out.)

And then the land just gets browner, and more withered, the hills sucked dry and showing bones like the fingers on a woman who spent too many hours tanning in her youth. Colors are limited to pale blue and pale tan. Texture is scrub. Signs point out "buttes" and "gulches".

(Taken somewhere east of Ontario, west of Caldwell, Idaho.

I was traveling west, home actually, when I took this photo,

so this is what you leave when you drive east. It does not get better for many, many miles.)

The freeway careens down to the bottom of a ravine, meeting up with the Snake River in the heart of the truly ugly industrial town of Ontario, Oregon (of Ore-Ida Tater Tot fame -- get it? Oregon-Idaho Potatoes). You cross over into Idaho. Within a few miles, the concrete, homogenous, unending waves of defunct shopping mall begins, due to uncontrolled sub-urban sprawl (and a ruthless economy), about 25 miles west of Boise.

But at least, now, for us, Boise offers a tidy, loving home to visit. It's not the Shire, there are no round doors -- but residents are friendly, and there are sure to be some excellent second breakfasts available if you visit, too.

More Basement Storage

The space as it was two months ago. Pretty messy, huh?

After clearing out the junk, this is the original wall he built over.

We have been back in town for just over one week. We arrived midday last Wednesday, in almost-but-not-quite record-breaking heat (106°F/41°C, which broke the record for the day, but the record is 107°F, achieved on three other days in history). We met the record for longest hot wave (something like 4 days over 100°F/38°C, surrounded by another week of over 90°F/32°C, most of which we thankfully missed).

This house, this city, is not prepared for that kind of heat. No air conditioning, and the houses aren't built for cross-breezes. The oak tree that FemmeDommi planted on the west side of the house is finally tall enough to shade the front lawn, but not the big sash windows across the house, which soak in the sunlight like sponges. We all promptly wilted, except for HomoDommi, who moved right back into his project in the basement (a relatively cool 85°F/29°C).

He started the project in June, finishing the first part just before we left. He finished the second part, mostly bookcase, two days ago. The heat broke that same day, too, and now it feels like fall, with the high temperatures about 40°F cooler than a week ago. It's already hard to remember being so hot -- I've been wearing a sweater for two days now.

But at least we have a lovely built-in to fill.

The final unit. The stairs up to the main floor are behind all those books.

The Cold Makes Strange Bedfellows of Us All

Most cold is relative. In September, when the temps drop down to 50F (10C), we huddle into our coats and scarves -- while in May, when the temps jump up to 50F, we strip down to t-shirts, shorts and sandals. The cold in the Midwest these days is pretty well unrelativistically (to coin a word) cold.

But we are in our own Pacific Northwest kind of cold snap, dropping to below freezing at night, and slowly crawling up to a mere 45 F (about 7 C) around 3 in the afternoon, not long before the sun sets and the temperatures drop again. I really can't complain about it -- it's lovely and foggy in the mornings and evenings, and by midday, the skies are high with streaky gray-white cirrus clouds not quite entirely obscuring the blue heavens.

The felines don't like it. Harry, born under a deck in a Minnesota October, who used to gambol in the snow in subzero temperatures, has gone soft. He prefers to spend the cold days in a cave of fleece and feathers, if possible. Tasha, wise since birth to seeking out her own comfort, also prefers a nest of fleece.

Most of the year, the rule is clear: Harry has the queen-sized bed during the day, and Tasha at night. (I am allowed to share, as long as I am providing body warmth and the occasional midnight reassurance that one or the other is loved.) But in the cold, they have reached a detente, across a Berlin wall of pillows.

Happy New Year! 2009

The snow melted about the moment I left Oregon for a visit to Minnesota, where in ten days, at no point was there any chance that snow there could melt -- good Minnesota winter weather. I returned home almost a week ago, but have been catching up, and having those final clean-up Christmases (with The Texan, who was away with her own family for Christmas, and with a dear aunt and uncle with whom we could not meet for Christmas, due to the snow). We cleaned up the Christmas decorations yesterday.

I say "we", but I did nothing of the Christmas clean-up, except to rescue one bauble that had been forgotten, from a lower limb of the tree, after it had been shoved onto the porch. I wasn't really ready for Christmas to end yet.

But maybe it's for the best. The Glansa has been taken down (sob), so the front hall looks ... ordinary, and with the tree out of the living room, we have space to stretch out in. It's a good reminder that now we are into 2009 (well into 2009! almost the Ides already). Reality has struck the household and I am looking for work.

I hope things will settle soon into a routine and I will be back to posting a little more regularly. We shall see.

Christmas Eve, 2008, Still Snowed In

Well, it's official. We have now accumulated enough snow (14.5", 36+ cm) to make this the:

• Snowiest December (possibly for the whole Pacific Northwest)
  
• 4th Snowiest Winter Season (and we've only just begun)
• Snowiest Christmas Day* (for Portland)
  

(*The record for Christmas Day is only 1", so even if we get the rain expected this evening, it's unlikely to wash out all the snow. It gives a measure of the severity of our usual weather that 1" is the record.)

It's been a learning experience for me. Yes, bad weather happens. But rather than rounding up all the individuals with snowplows in Western Oregon (many of which must exist, living on ranches in the hills) and paying them to clear the roads, many of the smaller towns around Portland are just waiting for the warmer temperatures to come and melt the snow away. These towns are at a virtual standstill, due to unplowed roads. Even Portland itself hasn't yet cleared any residential streets that I've seen, by this, the 9th day of accumulation. The passivity is at the individual level, too -- most residences haven't shoveled (I suppose a lot of people don't have shovels). The sidewalks are hard to walk, the roads dangerous. Busses with chains are skidding off the streets; the streetcar system is running late, when running at all.

When I was six years old, the winter of 1968-1969, we had snow drifts above the rain gutters of our single-story house in western Minnesota, enough that we could slide off the roof and down to the frozen lake at the bottom of our half-acre lawn. HomoDommi remembers we had only two days of school that January. I remember falling through a snowbank into a large ice-sparkling cavern formed by the dryer vent, twice as tall as I was. But I don't remember the houseboundedness. What must it have felt for my workaholic father, unable to get to campus? My mother, at home with three kids -- and that hyperactive husband -- for six weeks and no respite of school, or even much outdoor play, in sub-zero Minnesota temperatures? You couldn't even see out the floor-to-ceiling windows, covered over by wet, dark gray snowdrifts. Talk about claustrophobia!

Here, we can actually go places (walking or in the one all-wheel-drive car, outfitted with chains), but there is nowhere to go. The City Administration is ostensibly open, but the libraries are shut down, the community centers, the gyms, all "non-essential" services, closed. People can't get to work to open shops; when they do, few customers can get in to buy anything. Delivery trucks can't get through to the city, so the larger grocery stores have empty shelves. We've had one power outage of 2 hours here in NE Portland; poor Vernonia, a town northwest of the city almost destroyed by flooding a year ago, lost power for a couple of days.

For a couple of days, sliding held thrall. But Boy-child took a direct hit against a tree, which bruised his knee and pulled sore muscles (he limps sorely when he remembers, but aside from the Drama, it was a nasty tumble). The same accident shattered his sled; the other, inflatable, has popped. The stores we can reach are long since sold out of sleds, needless to say. Today the snow is evolving into rain as we finally start to warm up, and the snow is finally perfect for snowmen; there has been enough accumulation that forts could be built and major battles engaged, if the rain holds off long enough.

Who needs a sled?

While the big kids go to the big hill, the younger ones go to the smaller slopes in the park. Unfortunately, today the boys had taken both sleds, so after sufficiently snow-angeling the neighborhood, Girl-Child and I just used the ice-coated equipment provided by the city.

Did I say snow?

That last post -- nyah, that wasn't a snow storm. Not like what we have now. It's been snowing since Saturday -- you'd think that would give us more than 10 inches, but this is Portland, after all. And half way down in that 10 inches of powder is half an inch of ice, which really spices up the slickness of the roads and walkways. It makes for wonderful sledding, however, and the neighborhood boys have spent considerable time whizzing down the steep and winding hill just a few blocks away, where they have closed the road (no one would be able to drive up it anyway).

And yeah, I know there are terrible winter storms all across the northern half of North America, but as far as our papers and tv-stations are concerned, the world ends at the Oregon border (Vancouver, Washington, which shares the river with Portland and where they've gotten more snow than us, is an honorary Oregon city). I've heard personal rumors that the Midwest is suffering record sub-zero cold, and parts of New York have gotten four feet of snow, but as far as our local news networks are concerned, that world is beyond the Columbia Gorge -- where they've gotten more than three feet of snow and the winds are still howling at 60 mph (enough to blow a semi-truck to another lane): hence, Interstate 84 has been closed for three days.

The U.S. Mail didn't even deliver today.

Nor storm, nor sleet, nor dead of night
Shall delay these couriers
From their appointed rounds.

Yeah, right.

A layer of ice coats everything.

To be fair, rumor has it that Portland only has five snowplows (and I've seen only one in the last two weeks of snow, so I believe it). And no one has told them to plow and then drop gravel, rather than the other way around. And we've gotten enough snow and ice and freezing cold that even the Twin Cities would be slowed by this storm (but not stopped, as we are). Chains are required on all vehicles within the city limits (but HomoDommi -- who was out, bechained with an all-wheel drive vehicle, three times today -- says that a significant number of people are without chains, and they are dangerous, causing accidents and getting stuck in the unplowed intersections all over).

Maybe, in Portland, the world will end in ice. From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire. But ice is also great, and would suffice.



Correction: According to The Oregonian, 23/12/08, we officially have 13" of snow, making this one of the major storms ever for Portland, but still out of the Top 10 for recorded history (since 1880).

snow, Snow, SNOW!

It snowed, I mean, really snowed, two days ago. As much as 3-5 inches in our yard, with sheets of blowing snow, and minuscule drifts. And it has stayed cold since, so we still have snow. (That is, "cold", relatively speaking, with a nod toward Minnesota, where it is -1 F in St. Paul as I write.) Everything shut down on Sunday, with cars routinely sliding into poles. Retailers touting "10 shopping days until Christmas" in a frigid and sinking economy closed mid-afternoon. Schools had a Snow-Day on Monday; those west of the Willamette River (where there are more steep hills than here on the east) are closed again today. Another storm is due tomorrow, and the schools are expected to close again then. The weather folks are predicting this to be the longest-lasting stretch of below-freezing weather in decades.

Even so, we are likely not to have a white Christmas.

We get frustratingly little winter weather activity here in Portland. Sometimes (well, most of the time) that's a good thing -- I am thrilled not to have to shovel snow, slip on ice, and scrape the windshield daily from November to April, as those who live in the Northern Latitudes usually have to.

When I was a teenager, living in the rural mountains of Eastern Oregon, Portland would get 9-10 inches of snow a year. How we would sneer and joke when each 2-inch snowstorm would shut down the city entirely. Our mountain-embraced valley closed regularly from storms on the passes, locking us in with ourselves for weeks at a time. Two inches of snow was barely enough for our winter pastimes: snow-shoeing to school, spinning wheelies in the parking lots (for those wealthy enough to have a car, or those who worked on a ranch and so needed a pick-up simply to get in from the valley to school), and filling the Persecuted-Classmate-du-Jour's locker with hard-packed snow-balls from the bed of that pick-up. I have no idea what the grown-ups did in the weather -- certainly the school system, retail stores and the college up the hill didn't close.

(Hey, I was just a teenager at a rough rural high school, and frankly, I was not engaging in these activities, being myself just one step above PCdJ myself. In true nerd fashion, I was often at the end of the hall watching the intimidation from a distance, waving my fingers across my body as I recited, This is not the droid you seek -- I mean, geek that I was, I actually did that, didn't just joke about it.)

These days, thirty years later, Portland gets about 2-3 inches of snow a year, usually in dustings between ice storms. This is the first real snowstorm I've seen in the three years I've lived here. Thank you, global warming climate change.

Marquam Bridge, which is also I-5.

The real issue is ice. The temperatures are, well, temperate, rarely below freezing for much of the city (which is built on hills, so some of the more expensive real estate overlooking the rest of the city gets a few degrees cooler weather than the rest of us. But I'm talking about the rest of us). Usually, the copious precipitation remains near-liquid, and any snow melts into sleet as it falls. Portland has many lovely bridges, arcing high over the rivers; driving over them at 60 mph even in high, dry, summer, I have fretted about the long drop down to the water. I don't drive over them at all when it's slippery (although, to be fair, I haven't read of any tragedies in our current weather).

Fremont Bridge

So, as with so many life lessons, I have come full circle and understand from within, now, how a few inches of snow really can shut down a city unprepared for it. What a grace maturity is, giving us a comb after we've lost all our hair.

(Bridge photos by Mark C. Scherzinger, from http://en.structurae.de. Click on them to see them larger.)

Prepping for winter in the garden

Our winters here in P'land are so mild that I hesitate to call it "winter", after decades of Minnesota cold and storms. On the other hand, it does get cold enough to freeze, and the rains get as depressing as the dry coldness in Minnesota, so, if one associates the term "winter" with "unpleasant weather", then we have winter.

Our fall has been unusually warm and dry. At the end of October, we have had about 1.5 inches of rain, about half of normal. The last two weeks have been unseasonably, unreasonably, beautiful, with intense leaf color, balmy afternoons and sun and clear skies every day (even better, every morning has started with atmospheric mist -- "atmospheric" meant both literally and figuratively -- which burns off about noon). I haven't spent as much time outdoors relishing the weather as I should have done, but about every other afternoon I've tinkered about the garden a bit.

I won't post photos, because it's all boring dirt to look at. The good photos, I hope, will come next spring. I've planted about 100 tulip and daffodil bulbs all over the front yard, and another 100 or more bluebell bulbs, plus another 50 crocuses, snowdrops, and other early small blooming flowers. I've also pulled up about 50 dandelions and other deep-rooted weeds from the weediest part of the lawn (so weedy, almost no grass is there, just clover, moss and weeds).

Yesterday I finished by tossing grass seed over all the bare parts of the lawn, and I moved the hydrangea to a more prominent position, and I planted 24 fava beans and about that many garlic cloves in the old tomato bed in the back (the best thing about the lack of a tough winter is that we can actually grow some stuff still). I'm smug about the work, because this morning opened with a pouring rain that hasn't stopped in 4 hours, and which is predicted to last as far as the forecasts go. November usually gets twice as much rain as October (over 5 inches), and we have an inch and a half to make up for -- it looks like Mother Nature is starting early.

Gardening is hard work

(Oriental Poppies)

I've been gardening, from 3 to 6 hours a day, every day for the last week or so. I ache all over, and have little to show for it. Like the child moving 7 cars down the toy race track, I have been pushing every car a little way forward every day, and some day (soon, I hope) they'll all achieve the finish line about the same time.

In lieu of a long-winded description of what I'm doing (which I'll get back to later -- it involves digging, transplanting, moving mountains of dirt, fencing, pruning, staking, training and even a little weeding and planting here and there), I'll just append some photos of the highlights of the garden this year -- it's been a cold spring, but it's been great for the roses, in particular.

Summer Hiatus

The blog will be on hiatus until early September, when we're back from Minnesota. In the 17 days that we are going to be gone, the length of the days will decrease by 48 minutes. The average temperature will drop only 2 degrees (from 80/57 to 78/55 - high/low).

In Minnesota, the average temperature drops over that period from 80/61 to 76/56, a steeper drop, as it has further to go to get to Fall. Ipswich's temps drop from, 79/59 to 76/56, pacing her Minnesotan sister.