I’m still mentally processing our roadtrip/plane-trip in Canada last month. And generating a few more posts. Today’s post is about the totem poles we saw in Canada.

“Beak Totem,” oil on canvas, August, 2014, 16” x 20”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

Dig the beak on this totem god. I’m not sure what kind of bird he is. Eagle? I just finished painting him today. The background is drawn from a sunset view over Lac Desert, the place that I talked about in the previous post. If you want to buy “Beak Totem,” check out the price-list on my Paintings page.

While in Ottawa, we went to the Canadian Museum of History, all kinds of stuff in there. The place was formerly called the Museum of Civilization. We focused on the First Nations art, like masks and totem poles, some of them antique, some of them newer pieces made by Native Americans, mostly on the west coast of Canada.

I really liked this sculpture of a sinister beaver god, made by the Haida artist Jim Hart in 1993. The object is meant to be a stand on which to place a chief’s coffin.

A side note, we saw the first-ever Canadian stamp, and it has a beaver on it. The Algonquin man, Don, who was our fishing guide told up in Lac Desert, told us a funny beaver story. At certain times of the year, beavers travel, going across the land looking for a new pond or creek to make their own. Don saw a beaver in his backyard, looking over his spring for possible colonization. Don chased the beaver off by brandishing his Whipper Snipper weed cutter. The beaver slapped his tail (their method, in the water, of alerting fellow beavers to danger) and then banged his nose on the ground—in a frustrated attempt to dive. And then the beaver moved on.

I’m very big on crow masks. Those giant beaks! I love fairy tales about crows and ravens as well. If I was ever reincarnated my three top choices are: crow, brown pelican, and a Big Sur cow.

Carving of a fish.

The Canadian Museum of History has a really large hall on one side, with ceiling that’s several stories high. About thirty totem poles are on display here, most of them dating from the late 1800s, which was the heyday of totem-building in the Pacific Northwest. The heyday only lasted a for a few decades.

Before the traders arrived, the west coast Native Americans were carving stone or wooden figurines with primitive knives. But then – then the sailing ships came, and the strangers brought steel axes. And—wow! Huge totem poles, from Oregon to Alaska!

But the traders brought syphilis and smallpox. And the missionaries banned the natives’ religion. The world they knew by heart become someone else’s “New World.” And the white man carried the totem poles off to museums.

I’ve always wanted to write an SF story based on this scenario, and these days I’m working on such a story with Bruce Sterling—the quote above is taken from a draft. In the story, some aliens bring humanity some incredibly powerful tools, and we create amazing stuff, and then it ends with unexpected outcomes.

A view of that pole I painted. One of the totem poles in the museum had a note saying that they’d helpfully repaired the pole, moved it to the museum, and given the Native American village a reproduction of the pole—cast from plastic, I think.

I saw a giant salmon on one totem pole. You see beavers, frogs, wolves, crows, eagles and bears as well. Plus the legendary bird they call a thunderbird—the thunderbird is a little like Jove or Thor, he beats up storms with his wings and sends out lightning bolts.

As a side note, my brother’s wife Joanie has a few nice pieces of Inuit art in her cabin. Like this seal. I remember carving a wooden seal in shop in the eighth grade. I didn’t make mine curvy enough. I liked holding this stone Inuit seal. A power object. A little sculpture like this is in some sense like a phrase or an image or a paradoxical bit of logic—a tradition-polished thought that you can caress and ponder.

A nice curved ramp in some dusty recess of the Canadian Historical Museum.

And a great mural, Morning Star, on the ceiling of the big totem-pole hall, by native artist Alex Janvier. Here’s a video clip of the unveiling in 1993.

Kitwancool by Emily Carr. 1928. Oil on Canvas. About 32″ x 40″. At Vancouver Art Gallery.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the artist Emily Carr, working around Victoria in British Columbia, did some really wonderful paintings that included totem poles and First Nations art. On our way back home, we saw several of Emily Carr’s paintings in Vancouver Art Gallery, and in the past (on an earlier trip to the Northwest) we saw a bunch of them at the art museum on the island of Victoria.

Here’s the photo that I used as a model for my totem pole painting—I didn’t want to post this image right next to my painting, as the full-blown funky original blows me out of the water. This said, I’m happy with the way mine came out. I think I’ll do a bigger totem pole painting next week, drawing extra inspiration from Emily Carr on this next one.

We drove up to Vancouver and flew to Ottawa. Met my brother there and went up to a cottage on a lake called Lac Desert. Deserted, but no desert!

Nice to be so totally off the grid.

I played with the dogs and they got hyper. Love that crazed, rolling eye.

The only way to get to the cottages was by boat, and they had a generator for power—it went off around 9:30 at night.

“Dog UFO Gub” acrylic and oil on canvas, July, 2014, 40” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

Getting totally out of sequence for just a minute, here’s a painting that I almost finished in July, right before our trip, and which I just finalized today. I used a new technique for it—I made a squiggly abstract underpainting with quick-drying acrylic paint, then I covered that with a white haze/glaze of acryulic paint, and then put some free drawings on top with thick oil paint. The underlying subdimensional reality in the background. And in the embossed oily top world we see my dog Arf, a UFO, and the spotted gub who stars in my novel The Big Aha. Also an infinity sign in the sky. I find it pleasing to look at. More info on my Paintings page.

We saw a beetle with really long antennae. My brother’s new wife Joanie said these beetles bite, and they like to eat wood. I didn’t touch him with my bare fingers, instead used the ever-present all-purpose cloth hankie I carry in my pocket.

The cabin we were in belongs to Joanie’s family, she’s been coming there for seventy years. Love the slanting afternoon sun on the red doors under the bar.

She had three cool decoys, I think the local Algonquin Indians made them.

My brother Embry and I did a little fishing—this one went back in the water. On two days we went out with an Algonquin guide, a man whom Joanie had known for about fifty years.

I almost caught a pike, a really nice kind of big Canadian lake fish. The epic had four acts: (1) I hook him, about two feet long, get him close to the boat, he’s fighting and thrashing and twists free of the hook. Should have used a net, but we didn’t have one.

(2) Boat back to Embry and Joanie’s cottage, have lunch, rest, and return to this same beautiful little inlet off the intricate fractal river/lake waterways with a net. Our guide Don hooks a pike, maybe the very same one. I get the net, Don reels him in—after letting him run out the line three or four times, tiring him—I get the net half around the pike, the lure snags on the net, the pike twists free.

(3) The next morning Embry and the guide go out without me and return with… “A perch,” Sylvia tells me. “I think it was a big perch.” But, no, it’s a pike! Don cooks him for our dinner, breading him and frying him in chunks in bacon grease, it’s good to eat him.

(4) That evening I motor back to the special inlet with Embry and Don, and I use the same lure that Don used, but the original Magic Pike isn’t there.

The lake water wasn’t all that cold at Joanie’s, and the water had that limp, kind of jelly-like smoothness of fresh water. I went swimming every morning.

They had one antenna with a wireless connection, and we’d walk over to the little log building where it lived, the “temple of the internet” and get our fix. They had cool old junk hanging on the walls in there, just like at Dick Scheinman’s house on the Lost Coast.

Not that anything important was coming in. But at this point we’re so much in the habit of checking email, Twitter, Facebook, etc., that it feels like basic life support.

[This is a cast aluminum house-shaped sculpture we saw in Vancover in the harbor. More about Vancouver in a later post.]

While I was in Vancouver and on the plane to Ottawa, and at the lake, I read Roadside Picnic, the late 1970s Russian SF novel by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky—I’ve heard about it for years, but hadn’t read it, and now I’d picked up a new edition at Powell’s Books in Portland.

A really admirable book, starting with the great premise that some aliens stopped on Earth, as if for a roadside picnic, and left all sorts of debris in a “Zone” they polluted. And the stuff is, for us, incredibly useful and terminally incomprehensible. The Strugatsky boys (and their English translator) made up lots of cute names for the debris. Happy ghosts, empties, golden sphere, grinder, bug traps.

The book has an exhilirating, heart-breaking ending. It’s a masterpiece.

In my current lost-in-the-woods state regarding my next novel, I naturally start thinking that I might learn some lessons from Roadside Picnic.

The miracles in the book are intriguing and staggering, but they’re kind of peripheral. The very fact that the miraculous alien tech isn’t spelled out makes it that much more alluring. The Strugatsky boys leave you the room in which to dream. Borges’s Tlön, Uqbar, Orbum Tertius was similarly sketchy and suggestive.

The emphasis is always on character—with a lot of repeating inner monologues. What I call wheenk. The wheenk is really the core of the book. I typically have a higher action/wheenk ratio than in Roadside Picnic. But perhaps readers like a lower ratio than the one I’m typically using.

And then I read a travel book in the cottage, Evelyn Waugh, A Bachelor Abroad: A Mediterranean Journal. Written in 1929, after Waugh’s novels Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies. Great fun. Love his style, his dry wit, his snobbery.

This is a classic found-in-a-summer-cabin book, a nice clean hardback first edition, inscribed by the original owner on December 25, 1933. Great to spend a week outside of time.

I’ve always been intrigued by the area of Northern California known as the Lost Coast. This is where the coastal mountains plunge so sharply into the sea that coastal Route 1 bends away from the shore, heads inland, meets Route 101, and expires.

Route 101 runs along north through the redwoods, inland, and eventually bends back to the coast at Eureka through the redwoods.

The zone between 101 and the coast is the Lost Coast, featuring only a few tiny hamlets such as Shelter Cove and Petrolia—these are towns with populations in the 100s, not the 1000s. Some of the land is undeveloped forests, and some of it is carved up into private ranches, quite a few of which are said to contain greenhoused pot farms, or “grows.” The South Humboldt wholesale pot trade centers on the Route 101 town of Garberville.

I’d thought Garberville would have a festive carnival atmosphere, but far from it. The place is gloomy and tattered. Grim. We were glad to turn off at Garberville and head into the true Lost Coast.

The Lost Coast roads are narrow and winding, and the citizens are highly independent. During our long drive to Petrolia, deep in the heart of the wilderness, we smelled the heavy pot fragrance from several of the solar-battery-powered grows—not that we could readily see them from the road, and not that we were going to nose in and look for them.

The journey led us to my old college friend Dr. Dick Scheinman, who, far from being a pot-grower, has been the resident physician of Petrolia, CA, for going on forty years. He’s an idealistic sort, a thoroughly admirable man. He came the the Lost Coast because he wanted to live somewhere away from civilization “in a place where they speak English and where the rivers aren’t full of parasites.”

After several tries, I’d managed to reach Dick on his landline phone, and he told me the landmark for finding his house would be “a truck and a tree.” This seemed a little vague—I didn’t initially grasp that the truck would be in the tree. Dick and his kids hoisted the thing up there some years ago, having removed the engine and transmission to lighten the payload. Why? Because they could. And, since it’s the Lost Coast, no pesky officials were likely to say no. The officials don’t get out that way very often.

Dick is so self-reliant that he built his own home.

And he farms his own cows—he grilled us hamburgers made from them. Did he use a propane-fueled Weber BBQ set up? Hardly. He propped an old refrigerator rack on rocks over a wood fire, broiled the burgers, roasted some of his garden-grown potatoes in the coals, and crisped up some green peppers Sylvia and I had in our car. Served the food with forks on home-made pottery plates. Delicious. Dick digs the clay for his pottery from the river and fires his creations in a wood-fired kiln he built. We’re talking serious D.I.Y. ethic here!

For city slickers like Sylvia and me, it was paradise to be so far off the grid. Dick took us swimming in a river a couple of hundred yards away. His house used to be next to the river, but the river moved. He and his neighbors have a provisional papala set up for shade.

And they do have some store-bought chairs. I like this particular photo, I feel like it captures a little bit of that calmness I felt while visiting our friend. No traffic sounds, no airplanes overhead, no wireless, no cellphone, no rush.

Dick’s friends and the neighborhood dogs were all very pleasant—no cracked, dangerous, types were in evidence. We picked a zillion blackberries off Dick’s monster rows of bushes.

Our kindly host.

I shot a lot of photos. I had my old heavy-duty Canon 5D SLR with me, and all around me were the kinds of things I like to look at. A ladder for picking peaches, a stairway to heaven.

The late afternoon colors reflected in an upstairs window, the glass surface rippled with the ambient gnarl.

The back steps you go down on your way to the outhouse.

Two hoses on the ground, so lovely.

A tree and a field. What more do you want? Okay, a shed and some kindling and a float.

The living yin/yang of the river’s edge.

The wonderful toolshed walls, bedecked with wonder. Seeing this, I thought of the famous “Pied Beauty,” written by Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1877.

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

And seeing this cow, I think of Peter Bruegel’s painting, Return of the Herd. Cows are wider than we tend to realize, and Bruegel knew to paint them that way. Scheinman hypotheses that, with all that cud fermenting inside their stomachs, cows all times have a bit of a buzz on. Calm and bovine. Dick likes his cows a lot, like pets, even though he eats them. It’s the wheel of life. He doesn’t actually make any profit on them, but it feels right to have them around.

On the way out, Sylvia and I took one last look at the dangling truck.

We hit the fiercely wild Lost Coast beach at the mouth of the Mattole River near Petrolia, then wound our way along the insanely scenic and bumpy Mattole road to RV-filled Route 101, hitting gorgeous Bandon, Ore, for a night, and then, feeling pressed for time, stemmed off along a two-laner beside the lovely Umqua River to reach the congested nightmare of Interstate I-5 North. Eeeek.

Near Seattle, we spent a night with my SF writer pal Marc Laidlaw. I always love talking to him. Marc and I don’t live like rugged pioneers, but we’ve turned out some good surfin’ SF stories over the years. Our latest extravganza, “Watergirl,” will be in Asimov’s SF magazine this fall, featuring our usual transreal surfin’ SF doubles, Zep and Del.

Seek ye the gnarl, dude.

A couple of weeks ago, my wife Sylvia and I set out for a drive along the coast from San Francisco to Vancouver.

We stuck to Route 1 most of the way, it’s a slow two-laner, but it’s great to be by the ocean. As opposed to being on a giant interstate like Rt. 5. This said, we did take Rt. 5 for most of the way home…two weeks later.

I’d always been curious about the Sea Ranch development on the coast north of SF, but it’s kind of boxy. Good cliffs, though. And a bathroom.

Further north in California we got to the redwood zone. Love those ferns and the greenness.

Later we stopped at a giant log that had been hollowed out to be a trailer home and dragged around the country in the 1940s. Checked out a tree we could drive our car through. And then what?

We saw a lot of big rocks in the ocean, they call them “seastacks.” A cute young couple climbed one of them and hugged.

In northern California, south of Eureka and Arcadia, Route 1 veers away from the ocean because the coast is too intensely rocky, and there’s an area called the Lost Coast where we visited our old college friend, Dick Scheinman. But I’ll save that for the next blog post.

For today let’s jump ahead into driving Rt. 1 along the Oregon coast. We started getting to really big seastacks up there. You feel like an ant among them, which is always a nice feeling.

The greatest seastacks were in a town called Bandon, Ore. You can remember it as Abandon without the A. We stayed at the inexpensive old Bandon Beach Motel near the Coquille Point, where there’s a serious buttload of seastacks.

Pan shot of the stairs down to the beach from the motel.

In the morning it was misty and the tide was low. I walked along the beach for an hour, getting some really nice pictures. It was like being in a painting by Yves Tanguy. You used to see a lot of book covers like this on SF novels in 1950s and early 1960s.

Exquisite reflections and patterns, and the little birds animating the scene.

I was totally, totally into it, natch.

I talked to an old guy who was digging for clams. He’d stick this tube into the sand to, like, chase them down as they were digging to get away from him. He wasn’t having a good day, he’d only bagged about four of them.

Intense wads of anemones as well.

Sylvia came down on the beach, too, and we found a piece of “driftwood” nearly the size of a house. Wonderful gnarl.

And the source code is pocks in the rocks.