“Work Hard, Play Hard” has been my mantra of late. For now, this means putting in 40-plus hours of work in four days and then taking the next three trying to put in just as much time outdoors. Luckily, I have a few good gal pals around who are more into playing than working these days, so I’ve got some willing (climbing, hiking, cycling) partners. Rocky Mountain National Park has proven to be a good stomping ground, with the new-to-me Lumpy Ridge just outside of Estes Park offering infinite climbing opportunities. Conveniently, a friend of a friend is a ranger in the park, so I somehow got invited to an amazing sushi party over the weekend at one of the ranger houses in Wild Basin. At first glance, I thought that the arrangement of homemade rolls was too artful to eat. But then I reconsidered…and dug in. The next day, we climbed at Lumpy’s The Pear with full bellies (Cece, left; Deb, right):

I’m just learning how to place trad climbing gear, and the progress feels tediously slow at times. But the shared moments with friends seem to counteract my frustrations a bit.

Taking in the summit views and giggling down shady rappels makes the effort worthwhile.

The site of recent outdoor adventuring: Golden, Colorado’s Clear Creek Canyon. Golden is a way-cool little town on the west side of Denver. It still has a slight Old West feel in its downtown area, which is also the location of a kayak park and the Coors brewery. Dip into Clear Creek Canyon, just west outside of Golden on Highway 6, and the towering rock walls will quickly put you in your place. The canyon is only thirteen miles long, but there is something to climb at every pullout. And while you’re out there rock climbing, kayakers and rafters will be yahoo-ing through the rapids below. This has been the experience, at least, in the last two weekends, as I’ve been meeting up with friends to climb there. Last weekend, we checked out the Tunnel 2 area for some sport climbing along the River Wall and High Wire areas (pictured right and below).

I always get super-excited to see wildlife in its element, and while we didn’t stumble upon any mountain goats or rattlesnakes, we found some spring (or is it summer now?) flowers instead. This yellow cactus bloom stuck out beautifully against its dusty brown background:

Back in Vail, the creek continues to churn powerfully outside my window, and yellow pollen grains are scattering themselves all over the place. Summer is perhaps just starting in the mountains: cool blue skies in the mornings and threatening black clouds rolling over the peaks in the afternoons.

What—exactly—makes a good beach read? I pondered this question with gal pal Arika (pictured right) on a recent weekend jaunt that included a trip to her local beach near Holland, Michigan. At this time of the year, the “beach reads” lists are cropping up all over the place (i.e. Amazon.com’s This Summer’s Best Beach Reads List!!!!). Some of these lists are more sympathetic to those of us living in landlocked states, substituting the word “summer” for “beach,” such as the LA Times 2008 Summer Reading List. Lists aside, Arika and I decided that the best beach book depends a lot on the person doing the reading. “Theology is pretty much the only thing I don’t bring to the beach,” she says, which is understandable since she works editing theological texts for an academic publisher.

I happened to be equipped with a book that I was reading for an upcoming review, but when I really thought about it, I would have rather been reading an anthology of Victorian poetry. Yep. That’s my pick for this summer’s eager readers. Victorian poetry. A lot of the subject matter in Victorian poetry seems perfectly suited for beach landscapes; the Victorians aren’t as hopeful as the Romantics, and they seem to have a more realistic respect for nature. Victorian poetry is at once beautiful and powerful, like the ocean in many ways.

If I were to pick one, just one, Victorian poem that illustrates this idea, I’d choose Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867). Click here to read the entire poem (it’s only 37 lines long), or have a moment with its final two stanzas:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-winds, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confus’d alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Thanks to Bartleby.com for the online text of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” as it appears in:
Stedman, Edmund Clarence, ed. A Victorian Anthology, 1837–1895. Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1895; Bartleby.com, 2003. www.bartleby.com/246/.

On a recent trip to GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN (answer to previous post), I encountered more than my fair share of sexy city lines. As has been previously documented on Down and Out, my fascination with sexy lines ranges from those found in natural settings to those found in urban spaces. It might sound strange, but I’m especially a sucker for good chairs. Actually, I am currently writing this from a run-down West Vail laundromat, and the fact that I’m sitting in smooth-lined molded plastic chairs makes the wait more enjoyable. They’re the bright-blue-retro-cool kind, but these white rows of modern chairs inside an auditorium in Grand Rapids caught my eye. The butterfly style of the chairs (pictured below) became popular in the 1950s, when around five million chairs in this style alone were produced:

More sexy city chairs were to be found at the GRAM (Grand Rapids Art Museum). The GRAM has a great Sunday bunch, and these Philippe Starck chairs (below and above, right) were positioned by the coffee bar, much to my delight. Starck is an amazing designer, and you can click here to check out more of his work.

Finally, outside the GRAM, my friend Arika and I hung out around these lime green leaf-looking chairs. I might guess that this design came out of Japan, but they’re from Arper, an Italian design company.

Inside of the museum, of course, there were some sexy chairs on display, such as the Herman Miller lounge chairs designed by Charles and Ray Eames. But you couldn’t just jump the rope and take a rest on those. Sometimes you want to sit on art, and it was a good thing that the GRAM had other artfully designed chairs scattered around for that purpose.

Anyone out there want to guess what American city has been photographed here? I’ll try to give a few hints, as the photos are a bit nonspecific. Let’s see. This city is in a state that most people say is shaped like your right hand (when you look at it with your palm turned towards your eyes).

The state produces berries like crazy in the summer, and it can be wickedly cold and windy during the winter months. That narrows it down a tad. Now, this city is the second largest one in the state, and it is on the banks of a river. The river allowed the area’s first European inhabitants to trade fur and textiles, but the Ottawa Indians had already been establishing settlements along the river since around 1700 A.D.

Being a non-city person, I especially appreciated its open spaces and parks, such as this one in the downtown area:

And, of course, I had to make a trip to the city’s art museum, which currently has a fantastic Andy Warhol exhibit on display:

Most of Down and Out’s landscape posts focus on natural beauty in some way, and being in this city reminded me how cities, too, can be naturally beautiful. This photo is a detail of the waterfall outside at the art museum:

Any guesses what this city might be?? I’ll follow up with an answer in the next post.

“Where there is nothing, absolutely anything is possible, and this thrilled me. It gave me hope.”
-Augusten Burroughs in A Wolf at the Table

Augusten Burroughs’ newest book, A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father –St. Martin’s Press, 2008–is probably not the best book to give your dad this Father’s Day. But it may make you feel thankful if your father does not resemble the one in this story. In A Wolf at the Table, Burroughs tells yet another story of his family’s history, and in this one, his father takes center stage. A man whose offenses include starving a pet to death, being calculatingly cold, and skipping out on family vacations, Burroughs’ father is this book’s villain. This memoir will likely inspire more sympathy than rage in its readers, however, as they come to see the sadness that permeates Burroughs’ childhood and continues into his adult life. Burroughs may be best known for the tales of his darkly comic upbringing, as they are told in Running with Scissors (2002). Little of that comedy is found in his latest book; this one takes a deeper, darker turn into the subject matter that Burroughs has proven he already knows so well.

CLICK HERE for a link to my review of this book’s audio version on the About.com Contemporary Literature site.

It runs in the family: an affection for beauty that cities AND mountainous places have to offer. But my sister and I are like yin and yang in this regard. She makes NYC her home and travels in high style. I’ve tended to travel on a shoestring budget, been known to stay in the desert or the mountains until I run out of money. Sometimes we come together to travel, and rip-roaring adventures ensue.

A few years ago, for example, we drove Iceland’s ring road together. I had the stopover in Iceland because I’d purchased the cheapest flight to London, and it was included. She, however, had been curious about Reykjavik and bought a ticket to join me. We camped at Eurotrash campsites along the road (my idea) and then stayed in a swanky city hotel and fine dined when we returned to civilization (her idea). After I left, she stayed another day to shop. It worked.

Last weekend, here in Vail, Colorado, we had another sisters’ weekend, this one motivated by my sister’s desire to climb Mont Blanc in August. Mont Blanc is Western Europe’s highest peak, but there is still enough snow up high on Vail mountain to provide a good training ground. So we set out in the morning sleet and walked up Golden Peak to do some ropework practice. Higher up, we strapped on the crampons and got out our ice axes to practice self-arresting in case of a fall on steep (or crevassed) terrain (click YouTube link below to view a brief dramatization).

Overall, it was a long day out that included around 3,000 feet of climbing, a fox sighting, some whimpering, and a big German dinner at Pepi’s when we returned to town.

“The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home.” -Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I can’t talk about creeks with nearly as much eloquence as Annie Dillard in her Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974). Even so, I know something about creeks. There’s one running through my back yard: Vail, Colorado’s Gore Creek. Just a few weeks ago, this creek was a nearly-frozen trickle. But now it looks like a dangerous beast, frothing and roaring as it runs down valley. The change took place last week in a mere forty-eight hours. Maybe this means that the snow is finally starting to melt, even though the sky spit out some snow just yesterday morning. The sound of rushing water has a rhythm to it, a certain beauty.

I open my window at night to hear the sound. I turn off the radio now when I write so that I can hear the water-music. I can’t explain how or why this sound has the ability to move me, but I agree with Annie Dillard, who says:

“Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.”

For more from “Down and Out” on Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, click here.  

I’ve got a book for you science buffs out there: Michio Kaku’s Physics of Impossibility: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel. Theoretical physicist Kaku’s latest book was published in March and recently spent a few weeks on The New York Times Bestseller list in the nonfiction category. Kaku is a media star, of sorts, and has written several other books including Hyperspace, Parallel Worlds, and Beyond Einstein. In Physics of Impossibility, Kaku considers the likelihood that today’s impossibilities may become possibilities within our lifetime. He explains the scientific basis behind technologies such as Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak, teleportation (as in, “Beam me up, Scotty!”), and phasers (hand-held ray guns, of course). If you have a general interest in science or a specific interest in science fiction, you will enjoy this book. Otherwise, if you have no interest at all in science, this book might just be the one to open up this subject area as a new realm of possibility for your future literary explorations.

To read my more formal, feature-length review of this book in Sacramento News & Review, click here.

As soon as it warms up, I keep saying, I will start on all of those projects that have been on hold all winter. Temps have been rising here in Vail, Colorado, but then it went and snowed four inches on Friday night. Will summer ever arrive?

If it does, in fact, stop snowing, my priority project is getting the Old Lady in better road condition. This vehicle, a 1970 VW van, has impressed me over these last few years. It chugs steadily over mountain passes and otherwise just gets me where I need to go. Of course, anything this old is way finicky and constantly threatening to explode, but I guess I’ve committed to it and am not willing to let it go, especially after all I went through in the fall:

I may have mentioned it then, but when I returned to the U.S. after a prolonged absence, the van was full of mice nests, and it basically smelled like crap. I freaked out about Hantavirus and cleaned the entire thing out with bleach.

My summer plan is to gut the interior, put a new floor down and build a sleeping platform with storage underneath. Currently, an unusable sink and some sort of cooler are inside, along with bench seats that fold out into a bed. Those have got to go.

Mechanically, things are looking pretty good. I just put in new air filters, but other than that, I trust most engine issues to real mechanics. Anyhow, now I’ve written down the plan, so it must be put into action. As soon as the snow melts.