Crater Lake

You might think that the number one tourist attraction in Oregon would be Crater Lake and it should be, but it is not. (Actually, #1 is Spirit Mountain Casino.) I can understand why it is at least second or third and not first. It has nothing to do with majesty or beauty (CL has all that)...it has to do with accessibility. It is 75 miles from Medford and about 130 miles from Roseberg (both on I-5)...and it gets worse from there, but I have to say it is well worth the trip. About half a million make the trek to visit the national park in a year.

Until we moved here, I thought that CL was caused by a meteor strike, but like so many other old wives tales that is not how it began. Indulge me for a moment: 7,700 years ago a 12,000 foot Mt. Mazama existed there. It erupted...not through the top, but in several smaller vent holes that in effect encircled the mountain. Finally, it exploded and collapsed into a huge pool of magma creating an incredible crater. The eruption is thought to be the largest in North America. It took several thousand years, but snow and rain filled the crater to form a lake, about 5 miles in diameter and up to 1,900 feet deep. It reached equilibrium between evaporation and run off and new rain and snow.

The crater is approximately 3,500 feet deep filled with 1,200 to 1,900 feet of water. It is so deep that the reflected sunlight gives it an iridescent, deep blue the likes of which are not seen in many other places on earth. It is truly unique.

The rim is about 8,000 feet elevation, so the last 30 miles up to the lake you are climbing. It gets about 44 feet of snow a year (much like Gaylord :-) ) and when we went looking for a table to eat our picnic lunch, we had to make sure there was no snow around us. It was cold up there.

Interesting enough, there are fish in the lake having been stocked between 1888 and 1940. There are two species left (trout and salmon) and they allow unrestricted fishing there, but you cannot clean your fish around the lake. Today, they are trying to keep the lake as pure as possible (bacteria and plants only naturally introduced) to be sure it lasts for another 7,700 years.

You have to see it to believe it.

Book review "Haven"

I have never heard of Ruth Gruber. Turns out she is a significant journalist/writer who was active in our government during WWII. She is 97 today and still writing and lecturing.

A New York City resident, a Jew, a bright young woman who earned her PhD by the time she was 20, Gruber is someone to listen to. Her work centered around the plight of European refugees, principally Jews, but more broadly those who were caught up in Hitler's war machine as Europe was taken apart during the 1930s and early 1940s. Her story, "Haven", is about the (almost) 1000 refugees, the very few, who were rescued by the U.S. during the last year of the War in Europe.

It seems incredible to us, today, that the plight of refugees...mostly Jews...who were systematically murdered in Europe was not widely known by the rest of the world. How could you hide such a massacre? In reality it was not well enough hidden to make anyone today a bit ashamed of our leaders during the war. Doris Kerns Goodwin gave me a bit of an insight in her book about FDR (Uncommon Times)after 1940. What did he know and when did he know it? But more importantly, what did he do or not do about it (Holocaust)? Remember, this is the same FDR who permitted the 100K Japanese-Americans be interned in camps here in the Pacific Northwest. Today we all agree that it was inhuman and unnecessary.

Gruber was there and on the ground and behind the scenes in "Haven" as the one sent by the U.S. government to accompany the shipload of (about) 1000 to the United States and their internment in a refugee camp in Western New York (Ft. Oswego.) Of course, the stories are important in this age of Holocaust Deniers to remind us of the fact that this systematic murder took place over time and became so efficient.

However, the enlightening part is a reminder, first hand, how and why the country of Israel was settled and sanctioned by the U.N. in 1948. There has been strife in the Middle East ever since. This is important background information as we watch the new administration formulate its Middle East policy. (I think, for too long, we have just accepted the fact that Israel is our ally and that we need to support them without question.) Most Americans either did not know or do not realize how and why the State of Israel was formed. I know my knowledge of how goes back to the movie The Exodus, which was released in the late 1950s or early 1960s. Up until that time I was of the belief that ... well, just that the Jews were reclaiming their homeland that the Bible said they had been given (ahem).

Gruber follows some of the stories well into the 1980s and beyond, but she has sparked in me an interest in her other books about refugees and "the west's" treatment of them. She was a first hand observer and had access to the early leaders of Israel (David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir) and tells some fascinating behind the scenes tales.

It is an easy read and tells some fascinating personal stories of how these folk survived being hunted down by the Nazis all over Europe.

I ordered two more of her books today at Amazon for $1 each plus shipping.

Happy July 4th

Wow...here it is 2009...half gone, the first decade of the 21st Century is almost history. I briefly watched a news talk segment yesterday when the three talking heads, all younger than I, said that sometime during the celebration of the 4th in their memory, someone read the Declaration of Independence. Well, I was never a part of any celebration that did that and my family was not unpatriotic, I don't think.

What we did do was gather for a meal, usually outside, or in later years (post 1957) sit at the long table on our screened in porch and eat and talk. Our porch, which is still in place after 52 years as witnessed this past May, became a haven and respite to the heat of the summer. I was on the south side of the old farm house, but was shaded by two giant maple trees. I was a cool place to be.

Usually, my dad made some exclamation about living in a free country and we darn well better count our blessings. Oh yes, we hung our flag out on the front porch...not from a pole, but flat against the house. I use that display technique today. Then at dusk we moved to the front porch and watched to the northeast to catch a glimpse of the fireworks that were set off in Volant some 8-10 miles away (not a close up view by any estimate.) We "did" sparklers, burned a few "snakes" and called it a night after obliterating a dozen or so lightening bugs.

The food was usually excellent...which ended with watermelon (kept cool in the spring water of the pump house) and depending on who was around, maybe homemade ice cream.

After spending the Fourth on the beach just outside of Athens, Greece in 1964 and reading the European edition of the New York Hearld Tribune and feeling flattened by the world and missing home...I don't have many other significant memories of the mid-summer holiday.

There...now you know what I am thinking at 5:30 a.m. (PDT) on July 4, 2009. Have a good one.

Aircraft carrier trivia

I chose to put a ship picture in the blog today because I ran into a new site that has some pictures of ships at the time, or close to it, that I was either on them or saw them. This is my ship, the FDR and was taken a few months after I got off in the fall of 1965. The FDR made a WestPac cruise in 1966, the only one she made during the Vietnam War. This picture comes from her WestPac cruise. She was an east coast carrier and spent years in the Mediterranean Sea, which is where I rode her in 1964 and 1965.

She had two sister ships, Midway and Coral Sea, which meant that when it came time to strip one ship to keep the other two going (after 30 years of service) the Navy stripped FDR and sold her for scrap in 1977. It kept the other two going for 15 more years.

There was speculation as to which of the three were the best even when I was on board. FDR was built at Brooklyn Navy Yard (technically New York Naval Shipyard) during WWII and they had a terrible reputation. The other two were built at Newport News, VA which had a stellar reputation. That is important because when they put ships in dry dock and do extensive maintenance on them, they tend to go to their "home yard." Reputation has to do with capability to do certain things well (or not) and, of course quality of workmanship. Although, I have to say, FDR underwent a major conversion in 1956 in Bremmerton Naval Ship Yard in WA. However, she just came out of NYNS after almost a year when I went on board in late 1963.

If you notice in the picture there is a curl of smoke coming out of the stacks. We always had trouble with smoke. Smoke is bad for a carrier because when planes land the smoke trails the ship and it makes it difficult for the pilot to see. "Smoke in the groove" was a common complaint we would get from the bridge. We put a "smoke watch" up near the stacks to tell us when it happened and which boiler (discernible from the stack...there were 12 of them) was causing the problem. "Two-charlie, clear your stack, you're smoking black," is how the smoke watch might report it. (There were three boilers for each engine, A, B, C and they used the phonetic alphabet.) Of course, the only carriers today are nuclear powered and they do not smoke!

I mention all this because, if the pilots do not like flying on the ship that creates obstacles for safe flying, you can imagine the reputation the ship gets.

The smoke was caused by our air intake fans (blowers) not being strong enough to make sure the air/fuel mixture was proper. We burned up the bearings of our "forced draft blowers" many times in the two years I was on board FDR. The boiler room had a periscope-like apparatus in the exhaust, but it was hard to tell when there was just a little smoke. So among other things, BNSY got the blame for our smoke problem.

I suspect smoking and the fact that we had one boiler that had been flooded with sea water and never did work well after that meant the early demise of FDR as compared to Midway (now in San Diego as a museum) and Coral Sea (scrapped in the late 1980s to keep Midway going.

There is a bit of aircraft carrier trivia for you.

Low tide at Pacific City

One of the reasons we come to the coast is to explore the exposed rocks at low tide. We are always anxious to see what is new and what has changed and what has moved. At the end of our 5 day stay we hit the jackpot this morning.

For the unknowing, there is a low tide about every 12 hours. The problem is that low doesn't always mean lowest. Simply, the mathematically mean (average) low tide is said to be "0". Those that are not the lowest are known as plus (+) tides and those that are less than the average (mean) are minus (-) tides. In the local tide table booklet published by the Chamber of Commerce they show the minus tides in RED. Well, we had a red, minus low tide this morning; almost 2 feet below the average. That is one that guarantees a good look at what is going on beneath the ocean at beach level.

To see it, we were up at 6:00 a.m. and trekked out to the spot we go to by 7:40. In addition, the clouds parted and we had a strong east sun shining on the rocks. It was a beautiful sight and well worth the early get-up time. I have shown pictures in the past, and will likely post some on Flickr later in the day, but for now, you just have to take my word for it. A minus low tide at Pacific City is worth seeing.

What a difference a day makes

From the Pacific Coast...

True to PNW form, the soft rain moved in last night to change the way our vacation here goes on. When we walked this morning, we were the only ones. Yesterday the beach was busy and 15 boat trailers were parked in the sand. Today, nada. The wind was out of the west this morning and the ocean was somewhat angry. We walked anyway.

The ocean frequently churns up all kinds of "stuff" that it has within it. This week there is an abundance of crab; shells, claws, legs, everything, everywhere. The skeletons must have been here for a while because the gulls are not picking them. Funny, since we have not see so much crab around here before.

We experienced a first this morning. On our walk south we spotted the carcass of a duck-like foul just at the waterline. We did not turn it over but could see its webbed feet and white belly. Fifteen minutes later on our return north, there was a vulture doing its thing. Never have seen a vulture on the beach. Ah yes, nature doing its thing.

After our 40 min walk we went to the espresso place, Stimulus, and ordered up a sugar-free, non-fat latte. We sat outside and sipped it slowly. Life is good.

What the WSJ said about the Pens' victory

I loved this article in the Wall Street Journal today. We did not get much coverage out here on the West Coast and to see the Journal do neat piece on the Pens was satisfying.

By JASON GAY

The greatest song ever, "My Sharona," became a hit single. Cineastes everywhere flocked to see "The Jerk" and "Meatballs." "The Facts of Life" debuted on TV, provoking a national scourge of roller-skating private-school girls. Veteran Phillies pitcher Jamie Moyer, at 82 years of age currently the oldest player in the major leagues, turned a sprightly 52.

These were things that happened in 1979, the last time a visiting team won a Finals Game 7 in one of America's marquee sports -- baseball, basketball, hockey and professional parakeet racing. That team was the "We Are Family" Pittsburgh Pirates, who beat the Baltimore Orioles in Baltimore with help from Willie Stargell and one of the Couch's personal heroes, the submariner relief pitcher Kent Tekulve (we spent much of the summer of '79 destroying the backyard imitating Mr. Tekulve's crazy-armed motion.)

Now another Pittsburgh team has snapped the drought: the Pittsburgh Penguins, who beat the Detroit Red Wings in Detroit on Friday night 2-1 to hoist the NHL's Stanley Cup. If you missed this contest, choosing to spend quality time with family, all we can say is, big mistake. It was a turbulent, fast-paced, anxiety-producing evening. Yes, that's exactly like a Friday night with family, but still, you missed a classic.

No matter which side you were on, you spent the last five minutes of this game yelling at the TV. Hockey gets a bad rap as a TV sport -- whiners moan they can't see the puck, and critics complain its ratings place somewhere between "Last Call with Carson Daly" and a board of assessors' meeting on public access. But NBC's coverage was enthusiastic (we've grown to love sideline -- sideice? -- reporter Pierre McGuire) and its camerawork was spectacular.

The behind-the-net video of Pittsburgh goalie Marc-Andre Fleury flopping around, holding off a furious last-minute Detroit charge made us feel like we were right there on the ice. Of course, if we were there, we would have let the goal in, cried, and surely blown the game in overtime.


When it was over and the Penguins tossed their gloves in the air, the good citizens of Pittsburgh got to do the two things they really wanted to do: celebrate their first Cup victory since 1992, and rub it in the faceshield of the traitorous Marian Hossa, who left the Penguins for Detroit over the off-season. It will be another long winter for Mr. Hossa, who is considering signing next year with the Atlanta Braves.

What made Game 7 especially stylish was that both Pittsburgh goals were scored by Maxime Talbot, the proud possessor of one of the all-time great playoff beards. Playoff beards were a personal matter for the Penguins: playoff MVP Evgeni Malkin shaved his off early in the postseason, and 21-year-old Pittsburgh captain Sidney Crosby isn't really old enough to go full-on lumberjack. Mr. Crosby began these playoffs resembling a Jonas Brother and ended it looking like a deejay on Ibiza.

Now Sid the Kid must decide if he wants to move out of the house of Penguin owner Mario Lemieux, where he resides during the season. "He can stay as long as he wants," Mr. Lemieux said to Mr. McGuire after the game. "He's 21 years old -- what is he going to do by himself?" Clearly, it's been a long time since Super Mario was 21 -- we can think of plenty of things Mr. Crosby could do -- but we're opposed to the young hockey hero moving out. In fact, we'd like him to freeload in Mr. Lemieux's house his entire career and hopefully play longer than Gordie Howe. How great would it be to have a creaky Crosby rumbling around Mr. Lemieux's house in padded slippers, demanding oatmeal and BenGay rubdowns?

So congratulations to Pittsburgh, America's latest Titletown, though that honor requires a small amount of latitude, since the city is also home to the 2009 Pittsburgh Pirates, who are spunky but as close to a title as Denise Richards is to an Oscar. Still, winning two big ones -- the Cup and the Super Bowl, won by the Steelers -- is worthy of civic pride. We'd suggest growing "Pirate Beards" with a vow not to shave until the Bucs win a World Series, but by then, all of Pittsburgh could wind up looking like ZZ Top.

Community Band

We attended the Community Band concert tonight on the campus of George Fox University. The auditorium is about five blocks from us and we were able to walk there (stopping at the rose garden for ten minutes on the way) which added to the mood of the evening.

I know what the image of Community Band conjures up...at least for me. Well, (and this is not the first concert we have attended of this group) for comparison, I had to remind myself of Nancy's Bell Choir in Mt. Lebanon. The Newberg band is quite large and is made up of professors, students, sales reps. and a self described Domestic Engineer. The director is our choir director who spent 40 years in public school education as...you guessed it.. Newberg's band director, now retired and teaching at GFU.

What we heard was an hour and a half of shear delight. What got me excited was their second number, Bugler's Holiday. I am sure it would be familiar to you. Sorry, I don't have a You Tube clip of it, but you would know it if you heard it. Anyway, when I was in high school band we had three trumpeters who played this number, first in concert, then for fun whenever they got together. Tonight's trumpeters were not teenagers, but bald and balding men and, oh yes, a teen girl. They were spectacular. It sounded just like I remembered it.

There were two ensembles, a brass group from the Friends Church and a clarinet trio from First United Methodist. Both groups were outstanding. The evening was filled with good symphonic band music and lots of memories.

Unfortunately, we will not be here for the summer concert on August 6. Too bad, because I will never think anything but good thoughts of Newberg's Community Band. Good job, group...and Dick.