A Professional Dilettante

Twelve days ago, June 14, 2015.

In which I run into an old friend, sort of. Or have one flow by me, at any rate.

My first order of the day was to go explore Kootenay National Park, one of the two parks of the contiguous four Canadian Rockies parks on the BC side of the Continental Divide.  So I went through the entrance gate, and paid for an annual pass (which came out to $50-something American), because it was more economical and convenient than buying eight days’ worth of daily passes, and there was no in between alternative. Not that I’m complaining. An American annual national parks pass costs $80, and I buy one of those every year because it always ends up paying for itself.

The road into the park leads up through a red rock canyon that had apparently been blasted out by navvies with dynamite back in the day, past the hot springs (which have been developed into swimming pools, etc., and aren’t in their natural state like the ones in Yellowstone), and up over a pass into the valley of the Kootenay River.

I used to live beside that Kootenay River when I lived in Montana. It flowed right through Libby, the town I lived in briefly. It was rather astonishing to look at a map that evening and discover that the Kootenay (named after a local Indian tribe) starts in Canada, drops briefly down into the U.S. by Libby, then heads back up to Canada where it eventually flows into the Columbia, which flows back into the U.S. and out into the Pacific Ocean. Rivers are very convoluted in this part of the world. Or maybe it’s just the national boundaries that make it seem that way.

I drove about an hour up into the park, through the valley lined with sheer mountains on either side. I saw a couple of deer, but that was it so far as wildlife was concerned unless you count the many, many chipmunks hanging around wherever I happened to stop the car. I kind of wonder if that’s the case because Kootenay is called the “highway” park, since the reason it exists in the first place is due to the highway, which the federal government built in return for the donation of the land to create the park. It’s a through road that connects southern BC with the Trans-Canada Highway — the speed limit is 90 kph (55 mph), and most drivers seem to treat it as a two-lane freeway rather than the kind of national park road I’m used to. I was passed frequently on the straightaways by people going considerably over 90 kph.

My destination that day was Marble Canyon, which was the first of several long, narrow slot canyons I saw on this trip. It’s not really marble, but dolomite (which I’d always thought was a kind of limestone, but the signs seemed to distinguish between it and limestone, so maybe not), and it’s pretty impressive, a stream at least a hundred feet below thundering and echoing off the vertical, sheer walls close enough together that if I was nuts I could probably leap to the other side.

Wildflowers everywhere, too, which surprised me as I thought I might be a bit too early in the season this far north. I suspect their abundance had something to do with fires that swept through this part of the park a few years ago, opening the forest and allowing plenty of sunlight.

On my way back, I stopped at the only commercial development inside the park, thinking I’d eat lunch at the little restaurant, but it was not quite ready for customers yet, so I picnicked, then drove back on down to Radium Hot Springs, where I stopped to photograph the red rock canyon, then crossed town to reach the north-flowing Columbia River and ponder just how long it would take for the water passing in front of me to end up in the ocean.

All in all, a very good day.

Mirrored from M.M. Justus -- adventures in the supernatural Old West.

Twelve days ago, Friday, June 12, 2015

I think it was about three months ago when it was pointed out to me that I’m no farther from the Canadian Rockies than I am from

Yellowstone (about a hundred miles closer, in fact) and I thought, you know, I’ve been to Yellowstone how many times in the 22 years since I moved to western Washington — why have the only trips I’ve made to Canada in that time been a couple of weekends via ferry to Victoria?

So I renewed my passport and started making plans for the trip as soon as the exhibit was finished. That this happened to coincide with the dates the U.S. Open golf tournament was held less than
fifteen miles from my house was just a bonus (I am told the traffic that week was pretty overwhelming).

Anyway. As is normal on any first day of a vacation like this, I spent most of it on the road. Northeast on SR 18, where I began my day with a hawk stooping at prey right beside the road as I drove by, then east on I-90, of course, to the town of Cle Elum, just over Snoqualmie Pass, where I picked up a back road for a few miles to U.S. 97, which stretches north to the Canadian border, and,
incidentally, allowed me to bypass driving up I-5 through the entire
Puget Sound conurbation, plus avoid one of the busiest border crossings between here and Detroit.

I did not, however, go straight up U.S. 97 to the border. I turned east at the little town of Tonasket, in the heart of the Okanogan country, to explore the northeastern part of Washington before I headed on. I’d always been curious about this area, but it was just a bit farther than I’d want to go for an overnight.

I don’t know if anyone familiar with eastern Washington who’s reading this is as surprised as I was to discover how mountainous the northeast corner of the state actually is. I mean, south of here it’s pretty much flat and seriously monotonous all the way from
Ellensburg to Spokane. But SR 20 climbs quickly up from the
Okanogan River valley and enters national forest land. I passed through the “town” (if there were half a dozen buildings, I’d be shocked) of Wauconda, crossed a 4500 foot pass, dropped down to the San Poil River valley at the town of Republic (which could be the twin of Libby, Montana, where I lived briefly a long time ago), then climbed steeply to Sherman Pass, elevation 5500 feet.

The Sherman Pass viewpoint looks out over one of those curvature-of-the-earth views, over mountains that had obviously been burned in the not-too-distant past. An exhibit board said that the fire had taken place in 1988, the same year as the Yellowstone fires, and the landscape looked similar to the park.

East of Sherman Pass were a couple of historic landmarks. The first one was the site of a CCC camp in the 1930s, with some fun
sculpture:

The second one was apparently about logging, but with no sign, it was kind of hard to tell. On the other hand, this is where I saw the first of many, many wild roses in bloom on this trip (photo at top).

I crossed the Columbia River, actually Lake Roosevelt above the Grand Coulee Dam, at the town of Kettle Falls, the namesake of which is now buried under the reservoir.

But it had an interesting little historical museum where I took a break from the road.

And then I drove the last few miles to the county seat of Colville (pronounced CALL-ville, not COAL-ville), where I spent my first night on the road!

Mirrored from M.M. Justus -- adventures in the supernatural Old West.

So, yesterday was the grand opening of the Lakewood Historical
Society’s latest temporary (there’s a new one every year) exhibit, created by yours truly and mounted last week, in my day job as a freelance museum curator. It was just fine when I arrived, in spite of my annual “everything’s fallen off the walls in the middle of the night” nightmare waking me up about five-thirty in the morning, and we had a good attendance.

The text reads as follows, since making the photos big enough for you to read directly from them would make them enormous:

The Lakes District began as a playground. As Tacoma grew, its residents began to search for an escape from the bustle and dirt of the city. The Lakes District, with its oak prairies and many lakes, and its spectacular view of nearby Mt. Tacoma, was ideal.
First came the Tacoma Country and Golf Club, the first of its kind in the West. A streetcar spur was built, creating easy access to it and to summer homes on many of the lakes, including American Lake, which later began hosting crew races.
The bustle of Tacoma came to Lakewood with the roaring of the racecars at the Tacoma Speedway. The Lakewood Ice Arena enabled many a figure skating champion.
And last but not least, Fort Steilacoom Park was created from the grounds of the old state insane asylum, becoming the center of
modern sport in Lakewood today.

Here’s a sampling of the rest of the exhibit, in case you live too far away to see it in person. If you’re not, however, the exhibit will be up for an indefinite time (months at the least — the date for the next exhibit opening hasn’t been set yet).

And the panel text again:

In 1894, four transplanted Scots leased a cow pasture in South
Tacoma to build the first golf course in the U.S. west of the Mississippi. They imported clubs and balls from Scotland, the customs inspector mistakenly labeling them as agricultural implements, saving the club some cash.
In 1904, the golfers partnered with the existing Tacoma Country Club, buying property along American Lake in what is now Lakewood, expanding the club’s offerings and selling building lots, at the newly-renamed Tacoma Country and Golf Club’s permanent home.
In spite of many setbacks – among other things, two club houses were lost to fire – the club prospered, hosting six national tournaments over the years. Most recently, the golf course won a renovation of the year award.
Sporting a new vintage feel, the course is now ready for another 120 years.

Here’s the text for the ice arena panel:

In 1936, due to his wife Mary’s interest in figure skating, Norton Clapp purchased the Oakes Ballroom on the shores of Lake Steilacoom to turn it into an ice arena.
Private at first, then open to the public, the arena became the home of the Lakewood Winter Club. Despite its drawbacks, including its non-regulation size and lack of a Zamboni, pro instructors John Johnsen, George and Leah Mueller, and Kathy Casey produced many nationally-known figure skaters including two-time Olympian Jimmy Grogan, two-time U.S. Sr. Men’s Champion Scott Davis, Women’s Jr. World Champion Jill Sawyer, and U.S. Pairs Champions Judi and Jerry Fotheringill. The club also put on an annual performance called the Ice Capers. Ice hockey and curling competitions took place here as well.
But by the mid-1970s, the arena’s condition had deteriorated to where it was no longer safe to skate there, and in 1982, its roof and one wall collapsed into Lake Steilacoom. The Lakewood Ice Arena was no more. But thanks to Mary Clapp and the Lakewood Winter Club, ice sports are still alive and well in Pierce County.

And the text for the park panel:

First, the land was part of Fort Steilacoom, the oldest fort on Puget Sound. Then it was part of the Washington Insane Asylum, now Western State Hospital, and used as a farm to help provide the inmates with food and useful labor, and as a space for a cemetery, which the group Grave Concerns maintains and improves to this day.
In 1970, the state of Washington leased 350 acres of the land to Pierce County for a park. The county built two rough ballfields, also used for growing hay, but made few other improvements. In 1996, the city of Lakewood was incorporated, and city government took an interest. A collaboration was formed. More playing fields were created and the existing ones improved. Walking trails were added, as well as a dog park and disc golf course. In 2006, the Lakewood Rotary Club and 2871 volunteers built a brand-new playground. And the Partners for Parks community group continues to raise funds to improve our grand park.

I hope you enjoyed this, and that if you can come see it in person, you will!

Mirrored from M.M. Justus -- adventures in the supernatural Old West.

I kept trying to post this on the LJ cross-stitch comm, but every time I went to the comm's page to post it, LJ kept logging me out. I don't know what its problem is this time. Anyway, here's my newest mandala:



My next project is this Heaven and Earth Designs pattern, which, when finished, will be about 2x4 feet (18 stitches per inch, no white space -- why yes, I'm insane, thank you for asking!). I may finish it in ten years or so (but I'm sure I'll be completing other projects in between):

http://heavenandearthdesigns.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=1987

In which I discover I’m not excited about hundred-plus foot dropoffs on single-lane roads with no guardrails, but find the view worth it, anyway.

One of the reasons I decided to visit the Palouse, especially in spring, was because I had hopes of wildflowers. If you read my blog, especially in the summertime, you’ll note that I have a Thing for wildflowers and also for identifying them.

An interesting geological feature of the Palouse is the occasional butte sticking up out of the deep, rolling loess landscape. Two of these buttes are enclosed in parks, and the wildflower book I carried with me said that they were good places to go see wildflowers in the spring because they’re just about the only part of the landscape that isn’t farmed intensely for wheat and lentils.

Kamiak Butte County Park is a few miles north of Pullman, and it was my first stop of the morning. The road into the park approaches the butte from the north, and I was surprised to discover how thickly wooded it was with pines. Not another soul was there at nine in the morning on a weekday, which made me a bit uncomfortable as a woman hiking alone, but I started out on the trail, anyway, and was immediately rewarded by fawn lilies and thimbleberry blossoms scattered thickly among the pine needles.

The trail went pretty much straight up the side of the butte, and I am sort of ashamed to say that I never made it out of the forest to the top before I got pretty winded. I have no trouble hiking the three miles at 6300 feet on the loop back around behind Sunrise on Mt. Rainier every summer, but this trail was just a bit much, for some reason, not just physically. It was also disconcerting to be the only person on the trail except for a runner who nearly mowed me down as I was coming back down the hill.

So on north I went to Steptoe Butte State Park, which, according to Wikipedia, is a protrusion of rock almost 25 times older than the land surrounding it. It’s such an archetype that this sort of geological formation is officially called a steptoe wherever it’s found (the word steptoe itself comes from the name of an army officer in the Indian Wars — Kamiak Butte was named after a local Indian chief, which seems only fair).

Steptoe Butte was similarly deserted, which was a good thing. There’s a road to the top, winding three times around the butte to get there. It’s barely wide enough for a compact car, there is no guard rail until you reach the top but a good many potholes, and the butte goes straight up on one side and drops to the base over 3600 feet below from the top on the other. I did not meet another car either going up or coming down, for which I am extremely grateful, because I’m not sure what I would have done if I had. But the views from the top were spectacular.

I was very pleased with the wildflowers I saw, too.

And a critter.

By the time I white-knuckled my way back down to the bottom, it was getting on towards noon, so reluctantly I started making my way west again.  I saw a huge piece of farm machinery plowing along the side of one of those voluptuous curves, which made me wonder if the operator had a hard time keeping it from tipping over.

While I was passing through the town of Colfax, I saw a sign for a quilt shop, and of course I could not resist. The shop, tucked into a turn-of-the-last-century building on the main drag, had some lovely fabric, and I came out with 3/4 of a yard of souvenir.

Then I topped off my gas tank and headed out on U.S. 26, which eventually took me all the way back to I-90 at Vantage and home, crossing the rest of the Palouse, the almost-manmade-looking dividing line between it and the channeled scablands, and the orchard country, before I headed over the mountains again.

It was a lovely two days, and exactly what I needed, even after a winter that wasn’t really a winter this year.

Mirrored from M.M. Justus -- adventures in the supernatural Old West.

In which I am asked what I think are some rather interesting questions:  http://www.niwawriters.net/m-m-justus.html

This is a great organization, by the way.  If you’re going to be at WorldCon in Spokane in August, stop by the NIWA table in the dealers’ room and say hello.

Mirrored from M.M. Justus -- adventures in the supernatural Old West.

I hope this makes some young Seattle Seahawks fan happier. This will be going to a group that gives quilts to kids going through a hard time.



And here's a closeup of the border quilting:



That's donation quilt #3 for this year. I just started quilting #4, and, as it turns out, am piecing #s 5, 6, and 7 sort of simultaneously by accident. I made too many blocks, so I'm arranging the blocks in two different ways to make two quilts instead of one, and #7 is actually going to be made of pieces I have to cut away to make the blocks for the first two quilts. No wasted fabric [g]. The goal is twelve quilts for the year.

Peggy Henderson, a fellow writer of Yellowstone, tagged me to talk about seven things in my writing life. That’s going to take some thinking.

1.  I’ve been writing a good chunk of my life. I started keeping my first journal on a trip to Alaska when I was fourteen, and I wrote my first fiction — an extremely bad case of Mary Sued fanfic of the shortlived 70s TV series Apple’s Way — not long after that. I kept voluminous journals (no longer in my possession, alas) in high school and college, wrote a lot of really bad poetry during the same time frame, and was only stopped dead in my tracks by the creative writing teacher from hell when I was twenty-one. I didn’t start writing again until my thirties, but have been ever since.

2.  It took me twelve years, off and on, from the time I first came up with the idea for Repeating History, until I actually had a published book in my hands. I wrote at least three other books (none of which have seen, or are likely to see, the light of day) during that time, too, though. And wasted a lot of time receiving rejection letters from tradpub and agents that said, in essence, “I really like this, but I can’t sell it,” during that time, too, before self-pubbing became a viable option.

3.  I’ve built two iterations of my own website, the first one hand-coded using Notepad and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Creating a Website (I still own my dogeared copy), and the second one using self-hosted WordPress, which was both orders of magnitude easier and much more professional-looking. I’m rather proud of that, and of the fact that I do all my own graphics work, too. That was a steep learning curve for me.

4.  I vastly prefer writing about fictional versions of real places, and preferably real places I have visited, or, in one case, lived in briefly. I also vastly prefer to write about ordinary people dumped into supernatural circumstances than to write about people who are supernatural themselves. I firmly believe there’s magic in the world, even if the only place we can write about it is in fiction.

5.  I use the “event horizon” method of plotting, as once described by Lois McMaster Bujold. While I do usually have a last line or scene that I’m aiming for, what I do is plot until I hit the event horizon (the point where I can’t figure out what happens next), then write up to that point, then plot to the next event horizon, and so forth and so on, till I get to the end.

6.  NOT a fan of marketing my books. I worked in advertising in a past life, and so have an extreme allergy to being marketed to, which means I don’t want to inflict that on anyone else. This makes life difficult. Also, unlike writing books, marketing them does not have a clear beginning, middle, and end. That’s very frustrating.

7.  Most of my book ideas come from odd things I find, or from historical events, or from natural disasters, of all things.

I hope you enjoyed this little venture into sharing my writing life with you.  If you have any questions, please be sure to ask!

Mirrored from M.M. Justus -- adventures in the supernatural Old West.

I know there are former Bujold listees on my FL, who might not have heard the good news, so here you go. Lois just posted the following to the Bujold list.

"Just posted this to my blog --

I am pleased to report that a new Cordelia Vorkosigan novel has been
sold to Baen Books for publication, tentatively, in February of 2016.

The title is _Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen_.

It is not a war story. It is about grownups.

And that is probably all I ought to say right now in a venue read by the
spoiler-sensitive. It is, after all, a long haul till next February.

2016 will also mark the 30th anniversary of my first publication by
Baen, which ought to be good for a little PR fun.

Ta, L."

This pattern is called Tropic of Cancer, and the color way is Humans, based off of a photo of a bunch people's arms, lined up together, from very, very dark gray brown, to about as light as I am (I think of my skin tone as an extremely pale salmon color). I don't have the photo anymore. In spite of what the photo looks like, the fabric is solid white [wry g].