Girl Blew West Diary: Ashford and Mount Rainier National Park

There's something about the open road, and what you find along the way. Things that just tug at the soul, are so simple and feel so satisfying. Like...

Farm stands, selling nature's seasonal bounty.

I'm not sure if it was partly psychological, but when I purchased Rainier cherries back in New Jersey, they didn't taste nearly as good as these ones in Washington state in June.

Post offices, like this one in La Grande, Washington. I hope these stand proudly and strongly in the age of internet communication.

Little independent roadside restaurants. Defying a world of chain restaurants, these establishments offer in their own little corners of the world what corporate ones lack: individuality and character. At a wine tasting on Bainbridge Island, we were told about Scaleburgers in Elbe on the way to Ashford.

Unfortunately, they didn't have any veggie burgers, so I ordered a burger with the works - hold the burger, and a blackberry shake.

Places of worship. The Elbe Church, constructed in 1906.

Little cabin in the woods. This we booked in advance: the Almost Paradise Lodging in Ashford. This is for couples only. We stayed in the Rainier Cabin, our splurge place at $150 a night but our favorite of the stay.

 

 

We picked the smallest cabin but had plenty of room. I like a more snug feel, anyway. This had a private hot tub, thankfully covered as it rained much of our time here.

Breakfast baskets are ready in the room. The apple cider mix and hot cocoa came in handy for the campfire. There were pastries in the fridge which we packed with a thermos of coffee for a coffee klatch in the woods for our hikes.

 

Guests leave trinkets behind. One of my favorites was a saying from a fortune cookie, "Forget the lottery. You are lucky in love."

 

 

There was an old wagon behind our cabin and when I asked the owner about it, she said she picked it up from someone and didn't know its history. Everything has a story. So many stories are lost.

 

 

There are gas fireplaces in the room. I understand safety issues why establishments have them, but I don't care for them at all. There's nothing like a real wood fire like the one built behind our cabin. 

 

 

We lost an old oak tree during Superstorm Sandy at our home in New Jersey. My husband Steve bought a log splitter on Craig's List and it's one of our most favorite activities to have a fire outside in a fire pit he got at an estate sale.       

 

"I must say this now about that first fire. It was magic. Out of dead tinder and grass and sticks came a live warm light. It cracked and snapped and smoked and filled the woods with brightness. It lighted the trees and made them warm and friendly. It stood tall and bright and held back the night." - Jean Craighead George, My Side of the Mountain.

 

Small happiness as a child, and as an adult: toasting marshmallows over a fire.

 

 

Our reason for being in Ashford: visiting Mount Rainier National Park. Sipping on mint tea, I took a photo of this portrait of campfire stories, and made me long for a story. Could you tell a story about the old wagon? I don't have the calling of original storytelling, and think it's a true gift for those who do.

 

 

In her diary of her trip from South Dakota to Mansfield, Missouri in1894 that was published in "On the Way Home," Laura Ingalls Wilder, one of my favorite storytellers, said observing the beauty of the surroundings she was leaving behind, "We all stopped and looked back at the scene and I wished for an artist's hand or a poet's brain or even to be able to tell in good plain prose how beautiful it was." I feel at a loss for words too describing the landscapes on my journeys. Photographs help, but don't fully capture it. We didn't have views of Rainier itself, but were satiated with others.

  

 

Laura wrote, "What is it about water that always affects a person? I never see a great river or lake but I think how I would like to see a world made and watch it through all its changes." Of another landscape she wrote, "It is a drowsy country that makes you feel wide awake and alive but somehow contended."

 

Like Laura, I would love to see a world made, and feel wide awake and alive seeing these images. I capture them here to share with others but for my own memory too. These travel diaries I do, and this blog, keeps my story alive for me so it doesn't get lost like the forgotten wagon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eddie Vedder's haunting Into the Wild soundtrack was a storyteller on the journey, from the wonderful film that was made of the John Krakauer book about Chris McCandless' journey into the wilds of Alaska.  There's much I can't relate to in his tragic story, but I can understand his need to follow a different path instead of the one of material gain - keeping up with the Joneses so to speak - and his connection with the natural world. I love the quote by Lord Byron the film starts with,

 

"There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more."

In the film, his sister Carine says, "He risked what could have been a relentlessly lonely path but found company in the characters of the books he loved from writers like Tolstoy, Jack London and Thoreau. He could summon their words to suit any occasion." I too love to carry my storytellers with me. Their words give me comfort.

 

Reminders to not just look around, but look up. Life is everywhere, thriving. 

 

 

The giving tree. 

 

 

 

 Wild Berry. A Nepalese restaurant feels so fitting for this area.

 

 

Sherpa tea (like a chai) with a vegetarian feast. Chickpeas are a hearty, inexpensive protein substitute for meat. So many can't picture a life without meat. I can't picture a life for me with it.

 

One of their specialties, the comforting huckleberry pie a la mode.

Copper Creek restaurant provided a cozy environment on another rain soaked night.

 

 

Love the wood burning stove and the zen artwork in the background with the woman holding the tree in the forest. Life has been very chaotic and unexpected this year in a number of ways (more about this later, and why these travel diaries are so far behind), but plans are to still get a wood burning stove for our home like this one.

 



 

Blackberry wine and linguine with pesto sauce, and garlic bread. Even the butter is blackberry!

 

 

Blackberry pie a la mode.

 

 

I picked up some cards by local artists at Ashford Creek Pottery.

 

 

I often looked abroad for adventure in my twenties, but in my thirties realized I'd overlooked the United States. I can't wait for more adventures in this life, both domestic and international. There may be more armchair traveling at certain points, or we may have to be more frugal camping instead of cabins, but I'm so grateful for my memory banks of roads traveled. 

 

 

"The core of man's spirit comes from new experiences." - Chris McCandless, Into the Wild, the film.

 

I've loved many places I've traveled. For some reason I always think of the Southwest journey to those haunting New Mexico desert landscapes, the mountain overpasses in Colorado, and the stunning parks of Utah. But I'm grateful to keep finding new landscapes to carve out places in my heart, like those along the Carbon River.

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

The cycle of life in the rainforest.

 

 

 

 

A favorite road trip storyteller is always Scarlet's Walk from Tori Amos. Here in "Carbon" she seems to be figuring out a mystery, consulting real life writer friend Neil Gaiman asking him to read his short story Snow Glass Apples where nothing is what it seems. Stories help me figure out my journey too, as do friends, family, and travel. I love this quote from the actress Lillian Rodriguez from her travels to Carmel, California, "The more people you meet, things you touch and places you go, the more ideas you have for what you want your life to be and the larger it becomes." 

 

Respect: People, Animals, and the Earth, Our True Mother

Wisdom learned, wisdom to pass on from Celia Rees' Sorceress, her sequel to Witch Child. The former, what happens to Mary after fleeing the colonists. I'm so grateful the prior reader bought the book as a physical copy and not an eBook, or this story would never have entered my life.


"We cannot win this war. I see a land with no place for us in it. I have looked for an end to the white men coming, but see none. They will make this land their own, and there will be no room for us," White Eagle tells Mary. I often reflect how people fleeing persecution persecuted an entire population that was living here. When I hear the song, "This land is your land, this land is my land" I think of it differently. I don't think this land was "made" for you and me.

"Both groups believed in dreams and portents," Mary says. "The scalplock moon shone down on all alike, and they would have looked back with equal disquiet. A time of trial approached, and both would look to great spirit for guidance and blessing. Be it God or Manitou, what did the naming of him matter?"

Agnes had an aunt, "Aunt M." who was the passer on of knowledge. Isn't it so that often there is the wise older or elderly person who passes the torch of wisdom on to the next generation? Singer Tori Amos recalled memories of her grandfather, who was Eastern Cherokee. "He would tell me stories about his ancestors escaping the Trail of Tears and their walk and their spiritual beliefs. And they felt that they were caretakers for our true mother and it was instilled in me but I guess I didn't think about it in this way until I became a mother myself and I always hear him saying in my ear 'I've put a chip underneath your skin and you will remember.'" In Ben Gadd's Raven End told from the perspective of a raven, the young raven Colin becomes the apprentice of wise old Greta to be the keeper and passer on of the old ways.

In Sorceress, it is Agnes's Aunt M. who "was not averse to adopting and adapting the practices of the older people. The ways to wisdom are many. She did not see one religion, one nation, or one people as having the monopoly on the truth. Her own path had led her to different teachers from different traditions." Looking at those who embrace a hate-filled, one path-only world, I remember these words. I want more than one teacher in life, and to be exposed to different cultures, don't you?

A door in Tangier, Morocco.

Agnes observes the custom of the native people leaving gifts by the stream (white pebbles, quartz crystals, a bead or two), "Offerings to the Mother, for water springs from her and flows free and pure to give us life. People had thought that from the beginning of time."

I think of what we leave now. Remnants of our disposable society: plastic water bottles, bags, and cups and more I've picked up during the Hackensack Riverkeeper cleanups I volunteered at. Waste which could have been avoided if people made different choices. I reflect on how we are so reckless with the water that bears the names of Indian peoples and languages, like the Hackensack River.

To the great hunter Jaybird, "all life was sacred. He would stand in solemn prayer before the creature whose life he had taken, saying "We are sorry to kill you, little brother, but our need is great. We do honor to your courage and speed to your strength."

I don't challenge people's right or desire to consume meat and animal products. I don't eat meat but do have some animal by products in my diet. My issue is with the great exploitation that comes with a population that wants to consume them in such excess and at the cheapest prices available and an entitlement attitude that we can treat animals in any manner we please and show no respect for their lives. Things are "cheap" for a reason: because of factory like conditions where animals are treated like machines.

Why can't animals live a natural life? Why can't we consume a little less? There's is a life too. I stand with Jaybird: All life is sacred.

There are prayers said before meals thanking God for the blessings about to be received, but what about the acknowledgment for those here in Earth who made the meal possible? For each meal...

For the farmers who so nurtured and toiled
For the animals who sacrificed life
For the land whose soil bore its bounty
For the water, giver of life
For the spirit above
I give thanks and gratitude.

In this New York Times article, A Northwest Journey by Canoe to Reconnect With the Old Ways, it spoke of "a deliberate effort to recapture cultural, linguistic and intertribal connections they said they had nearly lost as Indian ways of life were overwhelmed, first by European settlers and more recently by substance abuse and suicide."

I think many of us long to recapture and maintain a way of life that has been threatened. I want to connect with what matters most, and I want to be a caretaker, not a taker, of the land, its animals and its people.

Lessons from the Native Americans: Go Lightly on this World

In "Wampum Prayer" off of Tori Amos' Scarlet's Walk album, a sonic road trip around America, Amos (who has Cherokee blood on her mother's side) calls upon the voice of an old Apache woman. She describes it as bestowing a curse or a blessing on the settlers who have come to America and taken and taken and taken.

"In our hand an old, old, old thread.
Trail of blood and amens.
Greed is the gift for the sons of the sons.
Hear this prayer of the wampum. This is the tie that will bind us."

Native Americans tribes inhabited the area I live in (the northern tip of New Jersey) for 10,000 years. It only took a few hundred years to wipe most out through disease, alcohol, bloodshed and relocation, as was recalled at the Bergen County Historical Society's Lenape New Year.

From their site:

"The first Dark Moon after the Long Moon marks the arrival of Chwame gischuch, the Shad Moon, and the New Year of the ancient Sanhicans and Minisinks, locally known as the Hackensacks and Tappans. Native peoples returned from their winter villages, gathering at the narrows of the great streams, in places such as Acquackanonck (Garfield) and Aschatking (New Bridge), to set their fykes and weirs and catch smelt and later shad as these fish ran up the rivers in great numbers."

Reflect on the idea of living in harmony with nature, and how very far removed we are from that in modern times. Like the settlers hundreds of years before, we take, and take, and take.

Tobacco leaves, which were left on the animal after it was killed and the animal was asked for its forgiveness for its life. Consider the respect given to animals in the Native American culture, versus the exploitation that exists in factory farming today.

Wayne Pacelle, the CEO and President of The Humane Society of the United States, observed, "We have so much power in this relationship [with animals], and for so many years we've treated that power as license. That we could do whatever we wanted with it." Mr Pacelle has a new book out, The Bond: Our Kinship with Animals, Our Call to Defend Them.

Lower than the animals is how one Presbyterian minster described the Indians. Savages. Who are the true savages?

Nothing was wasted - animal, plant, material. Squash shells for bowls.

A red blanket from the Hudson Bay Company. The two stripes represented the numbers of furs the blanket would be traded for. How upsetting today to see people mindlessly wearing fur trims and coats with no care for the animals who suffered for senseless fashion vanity. No one needs fur today to survive. But the life of animals, disregarded in our culture. Most feel entitled to exploit them for their wants (not needs) of the day.


A snapping turtle rattle used by the medicine men. How often healing is mind over matter.
I recalled my friend Jennifer's tale of her father shooting a snapping turtle, and the often disharmonious relationship between animals and people. You can read "Why I Don't Like Pink" here.

Speaker Bob Wills from Sunrise Trading Post, holding up a deer hide (note George Washington watching over his shoulder). Deer are now slaughtered in New Jersey for being a nuisance. Again, who is the nuisance to Mother Nature - man or animal? I wonder this observing the litter lined roads on my bus in and out of New York City everyday, and on garbage night with the abundance of perfectly good items heading to the overflowing landfills. Even in economic lean times, we are the land of excess.

Mr. Wills recalled telling some Native Americans he thinks they have been wronged and would give the land back to them if he could. They replied they wouldn't want it - we've screwed it up too much.

"They live in the forest in nakedness, in sin and degradation. They make nothing of the land. They live worse than beggars," says Goodwife Anne, in Celia Rees' Witch Child, a novel based on the premise a collection called "the Mary papers" was found hidden in a quilt from the colonial period guessed to be from 1659. Mary says, "I want to shout, cry out about how little she understands. The Indians go lightly on the world, that is all. They make their homes from living trees, only take what they need before moving on to let the land replenish itself." Replenish, go lightly? Why can we not do the same?

When the old Indian man is dismayed to hear of colonists killing wolves, "He says everything has its own place in the world, wolves and men."

I love this photo of Mary (of Indian descent) who does the cooking in the Dutch out kitchen.

Gathering at the tavern after over hoecakes (corn cakes) with blueberry jam and hot cider. Maybe I'm romanticizing it, but I love the idea of the tavern as a meeting house for sharing ideas, lively talk of the politics of the day, local activism. Meeting of the minds often occurs online now, but wouldn't it be nice in person sometimes. How I wish, readers, we could all gather in a room to discuss our nation, which seems a bit troubled on its path.


As I admired on the daffodils popping up, one of Mother Nature's gifts for the eyes, I vowed to continue to go lightly on my path as much as I can, with respect for other species who have their own place.


"What do you plan to do with all your freedom? The new sheriff said, quite proud of his badge.
You must admit the land is now in good hands. Yes time will tell.

I used to think that her destiny should have been mine.
Big brave nation, but instead, her medicine now forgotten. Leaving terra." - Tori Amos, Scarlet's Walk.