Things in Boise

Boise has a lot going for it. It undoubtedly has all the usual problems of a city, but our experience of it is usually very pleasant. First of all, Suzine and Christian's neighborhood has a small town feel, and it is within easy walking distance of downtown Boise. It is a neighborhood of modest bungalows, and  it is quite nice to walk the dogs in it, which we do often, with S&C. There is also a lot going on in Boise, especially in the summertime. We could have been doing some fun thing constantly. We opted for some quiet time and some fun things.

Friday we met Margie, a member of Suzine's hospice singing group, for lunch at the Bombay Grill, an Indian restaurant in one of Boise's grand older buildings. After lunch we went to Pete Abernathy's home for a session of music-making. Pete loves to host these sessions, especially now that he is 80 and experiencing some limitations. He plays the viol de gamba, and Ellen, Suzine and Margie were all playing recorders in various registers. The Handel Rodrigo Suite (HWV 5) was particularly nice. We also did some madrigals, so I could sing. After that we came back to our loft to rest before going to supper and a country music concert at a very nice outdoor restaurant and brew pub. The group playing was the Random Canyon Growlers and they were good. Several couples joined us from the hospice singing group, ten of us in all. The beer, the food and the music were all good. 

                Walking the dogs - Fritz and Ella

                                         The Sockeye Brew Pub

 

                               The Random Canyon Growlers

Back to Boise

Yesterday was mainly a drive-all-day day. We left Salem at about 10:30a.m., stopped in Mill City (about 15 miles east of Salem) at Rosie's Coffee House for lattes, scones and muffins (all delish), noted the shocking effects of drought on the water level of Detroit Lake and the absence of snow on Mt. Washington, got gas in Sisters, picnic lunched at Ochoco Lake Park, east of Prineville, and otherwise just went along, Ellen driving all the way, me dozing some (can't help it), reading aloud from Wilder's Pioneer Girl, David Hildebrand's Dewey, or Arthur Ransome's Great Northern, listening to Teaching Company lectures on the rhetoric of Jefferson and Lincoln and the relation of language to American identity in Whitman and Melville, or just going along in silence taking in the incredible scenery. We followed the John Day River quite a while and learned that it is 268 miles long and is the third-longest unimpeded river in the lower 48. The Yellowstone is the longest such river. (Don't know what river is #2). We got to Boise at 10p.m., and because Boise is near the western edge of the mountain time zone, the last colors of a spectacular sunset were still glowing.  Susan and Christian greeted us (Christian playing the mandolin), and we fell into bed.

                                     Rosie's Coffee House

                               The scone and muffin case

Detroit Lake - normally, this is all under water. You can see the stumps of trees that were flooded when the dam was built 60 years ago.

 

Mt. Washington - normally snow-covered in July. There was no snow last winter. Many Oregon ski areas closed. 

This is what Mt. Washington looked like last year in July

           Picnic at Ochoco Lake (a bit of lake is visible through the trees).

      Eastern Oregon scene along the John Day River Canyon

The Blue Goat

Yesterday evening we went with Bonnie, Roger, and J.E. to Amity, OR to the Blue Goat Cafe. A great choice. The drive through the countryside, which took us past vineyards, wheat fields, orchards and most interestingly, fields of hops, was beautiful in the evening sun. The cafe had a very attractive ambiance, we had a table by the front window, so we could enjoy both the evening light and the interior decor, and the food was perfect in taste and presentation. The grilled salmon sandwich was a popular choice - three opted for it. I had a Reuben sandwich. Roger had fish tacos. The onion rings and grilled cherries and apricots were fab appetizers. And the chocolate hazelnut torte was to die for. And then we climaxed a lovely evening by taking the very short ferry ride back over the Willamette River in the dusky evening light. What a day!  Thanks to Bonnie, we have some photos.

The Blue Goat icon. We were told that the owners are jazz aficionados and that the name of the cafe is in part a pun on the Blue Note, a well-known jazz club in NYC.

At table at the Blue Goat

A pan showing the ambiance

The popular grilled salmon sandwich

The amazing chocolate hazelnut torte

On the ferry

The Czech connection in Scio

There is a little town south of Salem called Scio, where 100 years ago there were 170 Czech farm families living. It was a thriving Czech community. Today, what remains is a cemetery where there are scores of graves of members of that community, and a lodge building that was once the center of community life.

J.E. has a strong interest in the Czech people, culture and language. She has worked in and visited the Czech Republic several times and hosted Czech visitors. Years ago, Ellen visited her in Prague. For a long time, she had wanted to visit Scio, but never did. Today we did it. We found the cemetery and the many Czech graves, and looked around Scio, which today has a large community of Mennonites, part of a small branch called Holdeman Mennonites. We stopped twice to ask directions to the cemetery, and both times were directed by a Mennonite mother, who was at home and outside with her children.

The cemetery was fascinating and was in a beautiful setting. All in all, it was a very interesting visit. Scio is also in "covered bridge country," which interests us as Vermonters. We went through a covered bridge near Scio. We had a picnic in a park across from the school and afterward got coffee at the Covered Bridge Coffee House, where the walls are covered with pictures of Oregon covered bridges. Then we went back to J.E.'s house, left her car there, and walked downtown to the Humane Society thrift shop, where Ellen found a trove of old picture post cards - her favorite thing to collect. More on the rest of the day later. 

View of the Franklin Butte Masonic Cemetery at Scio, home to many Czech graves. 

The grave of Vaclav Kruml (1880-1815), with the inscription in the Czech language.

The grave of John Chrz  (1857-1922 ) and his wife, Barbora (1861-1911)

     The Czech ZCBJ Lodge in Scio, OR.  ZCBJ = Zapadni Ceska Bratrska Jednota

                       (Western Bohemian Fraternal Organization) 

                                    J.E.'s house and garden in Salem

Full day in Salem

We had a full and delightful day in Salem yesterday. It started with a leisurely morning, blogging in bed, breakfast on J.E.'s back deck, and then meeting Bonnie and Roger Hull at the Minto Island Growers farm stand and food cart for lunch - one of our favorite places in Salem. The salads and tacos ingrediants all come from the farm, harvested that morning, prepared and presented beautifully.

Minto island growers farm stand - from their website

Their were a lot of people there because it was a beautiful day and it is a popular spot. My eye caught a family of children in sun bonnets among the flower beds - what a lovely sight:

After a lovely lunch, and just enjoying being with friends we hadn't seen for a year, we all went to the Hallie Ford Art  Museum at Willamette University, an institution Roger Hull, who was an art historian at Willamette for 40 years (now retired), had a great deal to do in creating.

The Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem, OR

The Hallie Ford is a wonderful museum. It specializes in the art of the Northwest, and in addition to its permanent collections, usually has special exhibits of Northwest artists. This time it had a very large exhibit of the work of Portland artist, Mel Katz, painter/sculptor. Photography was not allowed but here are some samples from the museum's web site, and Katz's website:

Some smaller sculptures by Mel Katz at the Hallie Ford

There is a whimsy in Katz's work. He described himself in a video at the exhibit as "seriously non-serious." A friend said to him, on viewing one of his sculptures, "that's totally absurd - it's wonderful," which he took as a compliment. He works in a variety of mediums: wood, metal, and even formica. In earlier years he painstakingly created his sculptures himself. Today he makes sketches which are then transformed (with his constant oversight) into very large sculptures by a remarkable team of computer experts and very high tech industrial equipment, which, e.g., can cut thin sheets of metal very exactingly with a highly pressurized stream of water!

Another exhibit at the Hallie Ford related to the part of eastern Oregon we had just traveled through. Two contemporary Oregon artists,  Christy Wykoff and Tom Prochaska, had set out to trace the journies that iconic Oregon artist, Charles Heaney (1897-1981) had made in eastern Oregon, locating the exact places where Heaney had created a drawing or painting, and then each creating their own rendition of it. It was absolutely fascinating to see artistic renditions and interpretations - each very different - of the very places I had just photographed the previous day, in a region of Oregon we love so much for its unique and stark beauty.

Tom Prochaska's pen and ink drawing of a scene on Rte. 20 coming out of Juntura, Oregon. 

Christy Wyckoff's gouache and watercolor rendering of Muleshoe Mtn in eastern Oregon.

We ended the day with a wonderful meal on the Hull's back deck. Good food and drink, laughter, sharing of our lives and experiences - what a good day ! 

                             Bonnie, Ellen, J.E., and Roger

Eastern Oregon

Sunday morning, Ellen and I went to church at Star Valley United Church, but after church instead of going back to the house, we headed out on a week-long trip to visit friends in Boise, ID and Salem, OR.  Max is going to the Teton Science Camp this week, and it is located right across the road from where Paul is working in Jackson, so he can take him and pick him up. We are not needed to do that. So it is the best week to make our annual trip to Salem.

It was a lovely day and we had a very nice ride through Idaho along Route 20, stopping for lunch in Arco at Pickles Restaurant, and on to Boise, arriving at about 7 or so. We had a second church service in the car, listening to a tape from the Guilford Church, from Sunday, June 18, 1989, in which Lise Sparrow, our present pastor, was leading the service. 26 years ago! Father's Day. She was filling in while Shirley and I took a little break and went to Martha's Vineyard. And Tony Barrand sang a song that we had never heard before. A delightful service. Along the way, I read aloud from Pioneer Girl, Laura Ingalls Wilder's autobiography. I also dozed some. It felt like a short trip to Boise! We stayed overnight at Susan and Christian's home - their very nice loft guest suite - and took off again in the morning for Salem. We 'll return on Thursday eve to S&C's before going back to Alpine. 

The ride to Salem takes you through the amazing world of Eastern Oregon, a most austere and uninhabited desert region with its own special beauty. We noticed we needed gas and fortunately we came to an isolated gas station before entering a stretch where there is no town for a hundred miles or more. The attendant (no self-serve in Oregon!) said that his family, the Caldwell family, had run this little store and gas station for almost 90 years, and he was the last one. He had grown up and lived his whole life there in this isolated hamlet, and there would be no one to pass the store on to when he dies. He then said, "You're on the longest highway in the U.S. (Route 20). Do you know where it begins and ends?" Amazingly, I was able to tell him, because Ellen and I had just been fantasizing about making a coast-to-coast trip on Route 20! It begins in Boston and ends in Newport, OR at the Pacific Ocean. It is c. 3350 miles long, beating out Route 6 by about 150 miles. Route 6 goes from Provincetown, MA to a point in CA just over the line from Nevada, so it is not quite a coast-to-coast highway. 

Somewhere along Route 20 we came to a repaving project where we sat for quite a spell. So I got out and took some pictures of eastern Oregon scenery. 

                  The stark beauty of eastern Oregon

                     Putting in new surface

                 Very little vegetation on these hills! 

When we came to Burns, OR, we stopped at a city park where we had stopped last year, and once again had a picnic out of our food box.

                        Picnic in Burns, OR

But something was different. Last year, carved into the bench, was a quote from Emerson: 

"The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization."

This year, that carving was nowhere to be found! What happened to it? Did someone take exception to it and expunge it? A mystery.

We traveled on toward Salem, stopped in Sisters, OR for a snack, and got to Salem at about 8:30p.m. We're staying at J.E. Seibert's lovely home, and before we went to bed we heard all about her experience of hosting visitors from the Czech Republic last year and her upcoming trip to Slovenia in the fall. We got a very good night's sleep and look forward to a lovely day with friends!

Sudden shower

We were sitting out on the deck this evening enjoying our meal and talking, it was a lovely evening, with golden late sunlight, when suddenly there was a clap of thunder and it started raining! Where did that come from? We at least got a rainbow out of it:

        

Tomorrow we'll leave after church for Boise, and Monday, on to Salem, OR. Max has a Teton Science Camp which is located right across from where Paul is working, so we can take a few days off.