Seattle So Far

We've been in Seattle a little over a week now, and I'd like to share some of the highlights of our time here so far. 

But first a very quick update on how we're doing.

Honestly, I'm feeling a little travel weary this week. Not enough to want to abort the trip or anything, I'm just tired. I've been daydreaming lately about how I would decorate a house if we had one. I'm sure that's to be expected two months in. I think it's going to feel really good to settle somewhere after our trip is done.

As for the rest of the family, everyone's doing pretty well. The Muse has been homesick off and on, but she's pouring herself into a novel she's writing, so that's cool. Dolittle had a bout of tonsillitis, but she's better now and happy as long as she has her stuffed animals. BoyWonder has been a little whinier than usual, but is really handling all of the constant change very well. Amongst the moppets, there has been a fair amount of bickering, as well as some sweet bonding. Havarti is pretty much just going with the flow. :)

So, other than a little travel weariness and small challenges (such as our condo having inadequate kitchen stuff, which just prompts more daydreams about having our own house), we're good. 

The weather in Seattle has been gorgeous, as it always is in July. Mid-70s and sunny. Perfect. Our condo is close to almost everything, which has been awesome. 

Here are a few of the things we've seen and done in Seattle:

Visiting the Fremont Troll. He lives under a bridge in an area of Seattle called Fremont. They're artsy-type folk over there. They're also apparently fond of nudity, but we'll get to that in a minute.

The kids and I went raspberry picking at Raising Cane Ranch. That was fabulous.

Some of the berries were HUGE. And so yummy. 

We may have gone a little overboard. 

6.5 pounds of raspberries. We actually would have picked way more, but there was no way we'd eat them all. They were only $4/lb, which is amazing for organic raspberries (or non-organic, for that matter). I do love me a good bargain.

Wow, you can really tell they're all biological siblings in this photo, can't you. 

We celebrated Dolittle's 9th birthday on the 12th. I have some photos from her little party we had with her great-grandmother (who lives five minutes from where we're staying), but they're on my phone and I'm too tired and lazy to upload them. (Just keepin' it real, folks.)

To make her day extra special, we decorated the dining area with animal decor I got on super sale at Michael's.

And she ate her breakfast cereal from her new doggie bowls, per her request. Don't judge. 

 After her admittedly somewhat abnormal breakfast, we went to the zoo.

Lion cubs!

Elephant!

More birds to feed! (We have fed a LOT of birds on this trip. Sheesh.)

My dear friend, Paula, hooked me up with her friend who works at Woodland Park Zoo, and he gave Dolittle a bunch of little stuffed animals, a birthday pin, and free carousel rides for the whole family. Sweet. :)

Yesterday, we went to the Seattle Center, where the Space Needle and a bunch of other attractions are. We took the Monorail, which was fun.

We took a peek at the Space Needle. We didn't go up it, because we're too cheap.

There's this amazing exhibit of a garden made entirely of glass right next to the Space Needle. Check this out.

All glass. There's a whole bunch more inside the exhibit, but we didn't go in because, as I said, we're cheap ($19 a piece!). So we agreed that I'll go back on my own and take lots of photos so the rest of the family can see what the other glass plants look like.

The kids were really excited to ride the rides. For as long as Havarti and I can remember, there have been amusement rides right by the monorail station at the Seattle Center. The kids caught wind of that, and kept begging us to go. The Muse even took a Dramamine before we left the house.

But alas, when we arrived we found out the rides are gone. In their place was this labyrinth, so at least the kids could meditate on how angry and disappointed they were that they didn't get to go on any rides.

 We did find some other things to do there, like this giant checkerboard.

 And some funhouse mirrors.

And there was a Polish festival going on, so there were some activities and performances and such for that. Oh, and a bouncy house, which made BoyWonder and Dolittle's day. (And ours, too, cuz it was FREE! Awesome.)

Also free and awesome was this fountain.

It's seriously the coolest fountain I have ever seen. It shoots water out of all these different holes, at different times, at different strengths, so it's like watching a fireworks show.

As you can see, BoyWonder found it very exciting.

I found it exciting, too. So exciting, in fact, that I slipped and bruised my tailbone. You can't tell from the photos very well, but the fountain is in a large concrete bowl, basically. So you have to walk down this steep slope to get down to it. I was walking down the slope taking some pictures when I slipped somehow. Landed right on my bum and my elbow. It hurts to fall down as a grown-up. Boo hoo.

Anyway, I was trying to get a shot of the coolest spurts. Every once in a while, the fountain shoots three or four shots of water WAY up in the air, like crazy high, and then immediately shoots air out underneath them. This creates an effect where the water hovers above the fountain in long cascades for a couple of seconds, and then it all comes crashing down on top of the dome. You'll just have to take my word for it - it is ridiculously cool. I could have watched that fountain all day. 

We also spent some time walking around downtown, in search of some gelato to rival our favorite place in Laguna Beach. We saw this amazing chalk artist on the way. Her name is Gabrielle Abbott. Very impressive work. The photo doesn't do it justice.

These blue trees made me happy, which is kind of weird, because the idea of someone painting trees blue kind of bugs me. But the effect is very cool.

We did end up finding gelato. And it was good, but no match for Gelato Paradiso in Laguna Beach. 

What we did find that was unique to this stretch of our trip was a group of naked bicyclists.

Yeah, you read that right.

We were just walking down the street, and out of the blue, dozens of nude cyclists went whizzing by. I've not yet determined whether they were part of the Fremont parade crashers (which is apparently an expected tradition) or the "less gas, more ass" folks, or a combo of the two, but they were right there cruising through downtown Seattle.

I'm sorry, but that cannot be very comfortable. Or sanitary. 

One thing we've enjoyed a lot in Seattle are the parks. Seattle has some lovely, lovely parks. And many of them have ziplines, which have become the kids' favorite things. 

You can tell by BoyWonder's air how exciting it is, even just watching his sisters.

So far, so good, Seattle.

Coming up this week:

- Mariners Game

- Apple iMovie Camp

- Camping at Mount Rainier 

- Trying not to swelter when it gets into the mid-80's with no air conditioning in the condo

Samantha, the Sacrificial Salmon

Years ago, when the girls were little, we got a couple of 25-cent goldfish for Naw-Ruz, the Baha'i new year. The girls named them Blackfin and Princess. Blackfin lasted all of two weeks. Princess defied the odds and thrived for two years, despite her owners sometimes neglecting to clean her fish bowl and occasionally forgetting to feed her.

That pretty much sums up my life experience with fish.

Quite frankly, I've always thought of fish as not all that interesting. I mean, I love to marvel the diversity of marine life at the aquarium, but other than that, and an occasional meal, I've generally never given fish much credit for . . . well, anything at all.

So learning about the life of salmon at the Chittenden Locks in Ballard this week was really eye-opening. I'm sure I learned about the salmon cycle before (like the last time we came to the locks a few years ago), but this time we had a passionate gentleman explain the whole thing to us, and it gave me a whole new appreciation for these amazing creatures.

Truly, an individual salmon's story is a fascinating tale of miraculous transformation, perilous adventure, enormous effort, and ultimate sacrifice.

Who knew?

To illustrate a bit of what we learned at the locks, I'm going to tell you about a salmon that may or may not have really lived. But it's a true story, nonetheless.

We'll call her Sam, for short.

Sam's story starts in the fresh waters of the Sammamish river, where she hatches under a bed of gravel, along with thousands of her siblings. The little salmon babies immediately head downstream, feeding on the nutrient-rich insect larvae that line the riverbed. They're headed for the Pacific Ocean.

After they've taken their time swimming down the length of the river, they arrive at Lake Washington, smack dab in the middle of Seattle. Lake Washington leads straight into Puget Sound, but the two bodies of water are separated by the Chittenden Locks. The main purposes of the locks are 1) to keep the freshwater and saltwater separate, so as not to mess with each ecosystem, 2) to keep the water level of Lake Washington stable at 20 to 22 feet above sea level, and 3) to move boats from one water level to the other.

This is where boats enter the lock.

This is the gate opening to let a boat out into the lake after the lock has been filled. Imagine the gate being closed and the water on the other side of it down about 20 feet. That's what the lock is like before it's filled. Trust me, it's cool.

So, it's basically a dam, and the locks themselves are like holding tanks/elevators for ships going through the channel. The boat enters the lock, the gates close, and water is either pumped in or out of the lock (depending on whether the boat is going into Lake Washington, which is higher, or out to Puget Sound, which is lower) to the appropriate level. Then the gates open on the other side, and the boat moves on. It's pretty fun to watch the ships go up and down. Quite a feat of engineering.

But back to Samantha's story.

Sam arrives at the locks as a smolt (a little teenage salmon, basically). Miraculously, during her journey to the locks, her body has undergone an amazing transition called smoltification, in which she changes from a freshwater creature to a saltwater one. How bizarre and cool is that? (And how fun of a word is smoltification?)

Since the locks are blocking her way to the sound, Sam appears to be stuck in the lake at first. But no worries, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who built the locks took great care to make sure the salmon cycle wouldn't be disturbed. For the smolts heading to the sound, they have these super fun slides to ride.

Sam gets to the spillway and the slide shoots her and her smolt friends on through, tail first. No harm done. Whoosh! Welcome to Puget Sound, Sam!

Sam will swim through the sound and spend the next several years hanging out in the Pacific, growing larger and stronger and gathering up all the rich nutrients from the ocean's saltwater. She'll have a few narrow escapes with fishing nets and killer whales, but she'll survive.

Then suddenly, one day, she'll feel an overwhelming urge to return to the Sammamish river where she was hatched. This longing for home will lead her right back to the locks, where she will encounter another brilliant feat of engineering: The Fish Ladder.

Now let me tell you, Sam is an excellent jumper. She can fling herself a good ten feet out of the water, at least. But the 22 feet she'd need to jump to clear the dam would be pretty impossible. And the chances of her getting into a lock at just the right time is pretty small.

So the fish ladder gives her an easier (though certainly not easy) way to ascend to the waters of Lake Washington. Each of the 21 steps of the ladder goes up about a foot, and Sam can climb up at her own pace. Sometimes she'll wriggle her way up the small spill over the step, and sometimes she's jump right up out of the water from one step to another.

JUMP, SAM! [Just FYI, it is REALLY hard to get a photo of a salmon jumping out of the water. Quick little buggers.]

She swims and jumps upstream the whole way up the ladder. But that's okay. She'll have an upstream swim for the remaining months of her life. Not only that, she'll do it without food. She stopped eating shortly before arriving at the locks, and won't eat again. Ever. She has a singular goal - to get back to the riverbed to spawn her eggs. Nothing else matters.

So she climbs the ladder, making the difficult (and presumably somewhat uncomfortable) transition from saltwater to freshwater again. The lock engineers gave Sam and her friends an extra long step in the fish ladder just before they reach the lake, to give them time to make the transition more slowly. Wasn't that thoughtful?

Luckily, Sam makes it up the ladder and through Lake Washington without incident, and over the course of a few months, returns to her spawning place in the Sammamish River. She's one of the lucky ones. Only a small handful of her thousands of siblings have survived to this point.

Once she finds the perfect spot to spawn, she flips herself onto her side and slaps the gravel with her tail fin, creating a nest of sorts. Males fight, sometimes to the death, for the right to swim up beside her, hoping to be the one to fertilize her eggs with his sperm as they fall into the next. After her first batch of eggs is fertilized and laid, she goes upstream a bit and makes another nest. Then another. Then another. Why upstream? Because the stirring up of the riverbed helps to cover the previous nest, protecting the eggs in several inches of gravel. Brilliant! Sam's no dummy.

She's also no slacker mom. She has survived the past few months without food by cannibalizing herself, using her own body oils and nutrients to keep her alive long enough to spawn. Once she's finished spawning, her thousands of eggs safely tucked away in the gravel, she perishes. Her body, barely held together until now, breaks apart, and the rich nutrients she gathered in the Pacific - particularly nitrogen and phosphorous, which she alone sacrificially offers to the river's ecosystem - will feed the insect larvae that live there. And those larvae will ultimately feed her baby salmon when they hatch.

What a perfect cycle! I hope you find it as fascinating as I did. Maybe you needed to have that enthusiastic guy there to really drive the coolness factor home. I think it's just fantastic.

Interestingly, scientists are really just figuring out how much of a vital role salmon play in the health of river ecosystems. They bring nutrients from the ocean that the river doesn't get anywhere else. They feed their babies with their dead bodies, yes, but they ultimately provide food and nutrients for countless other creatures as well.

Just more evidence that we truly are all connected. It's a good thing to remember.

"It is obvious that all created things are connected one to another by a linkage complete and perfect . . . " - 'Abdu'l-Baha 

Sorry, fishies, that I never gave you any credit. I promise I'll never underestimate you again.


*Disclaimer: I tried to relay the information about the salmon cycle as accurately as I remembered it, and I looked up things I wasn't sure about, but it's entirely possible that I was sure about some things that I shouldn't have been sure about. :) For some official information about the locks and the salmon cycle, go here:

The Hiram M. Chittenden Locks
The Salmon Cycle

I Was Wrong - THIS is Paradise

I've spent the past few days coming down off a spiritual and emotional high and trying to figure out how to describe our week at Sheltering Branch Baha'i School. I still haven't quite figured it out. But I have a policy to write about my life honestly and openly (it's not actually a policy, it's just what I do), so I'll just start writing and see what comes out.

Havarti and I met at Sheltering Branch when we were kids, maybe 7 or 8 years old. It's a week-long Baha'i family summer school that's been going for something like 40 years. It's held at a facility in the Blue Mountains, which includes rustic cabins with bunks, a log-cabin-style rec hall, a mess hall, an indoor pool, and some rarely-used tennis courts. The bathrooms have improved greatly since we were kids, though they're still nothing fancy. We both have many fond memories from here. It's as close to a "home" for us as any place. So there's that.

Every time we go, it's a different mix of people. There are staple families who go every year, some who go when they can (like us), and there are always plenty of newcomers as well. This year the numbers were a bit low, partially because of the horrible weather forecast, so it was cozy and family-like. (And there were no long lines in the mess hall, which I have to admit was nice.)

A long-timer from WA visiting with a newcomer from China. 

Speaking of the mess hall, the food is fantastic. They even accommodated everyone's gluten and dairy issues. Tad, the main kitchen guy, has been cooking and serving the food at Sheltering Branch ever since I can remember. I can't remember a day at camp without Tad asking, "Want some bacon?" at breakfast. I don't know how he does it. It's an enormous sacrifice, getting up early to make breakfast, missing most classes and devotions, constantly preparing food and cleaning up. Maybe it's because I hate to cook, but I admire the service those kitchen folk offer so much.

Everyone serves at camp in one way or another. Havarti and I taught a class of 4th-5th graders, and I can say without hesitation that it was the best group of kids I've ever taught. They were almost Stepford kids, except that they were totally awesome. There were eight of them, and they'd all gather together before the start bell even rang, playing some game like hot potato all on their own. During class, they were so engaged, asking questions, sharing thoughts - it was everything you'd want in a class as a teacher. And when the snack bell rang, they often kept right on doing their class activities. I just wanted to wrap them all up and take them home with me.

Our class focused on some of the main principles of the Baha'i Faith that 'Abdu'l-Baha shared with people when he came to the West in 1912. Here are some of the posters the kids made:

Investigate Truth for Yourself

Elimination of Prejudice (That's a racist man falling into a pit of lava. A bit brutal, but a clear visual symbol. :))

Oneness of God and Harmony of Science and Religion

Unity of Mankind and Equality of Men and Women

Here are some of them making Lego and clay symbols for each principle. They're so creative. :)

(I have to apologize for the quality of the photos. My camera is totally on the fritz, so I don't have many photos from camp at all. And what I do have are mostly from my phone. Sad.)

The only thing I don't like about teaching a class is having to miss one of the adult classes. I love being a student. We have three class periods a day, two in the morning and one in the afternoon. This year one of our adult teachers was Bob Wilson. He happens to be Rainn Wilson's dad (you can probably see the resemblance) and is married to a woman who was like a second mom to Havarti growing up. So that was cool. Awesome guy. Great stories. So fun to get to know him a bit.



The other adult class we got to participate in was also really cool. We discussed the difference between certitude and certainty, which is pretty intriguing (especially for a word nerd like me, who positively lives for such distinctions). We also explored how people approach science and religion and how the two relate. Very, very interesting.

But the best part of camp is always the music. There's a rich sing-along tradition at Sheltering Branch, and every year I'm amazed at the talent of so many musicians.

BoyWonder with his songbook and awkward camera-smile.

We gather for devotions twice a day, and EVERYONE sings. The kids literally raced for the rec hall when the devotion bell rang. This year there was a group of boisterous male youth, and they would belt out the songs at the top of their lungs, even harmonizing certain parts (I'm telling you, talent!). So much singing. So much fun. So much joy and love. [Sigh]

The last two days of camp, I had a hard time keeping it together. Even writing about it now, I'm getting a little teary. Spending a week away from the distractions of daily living with people who share the same vision of one world, talking about how to build the Kingdom of God on Earth, consulting about ways to improve our communities and foster unity, all while sharing laughter and joy and prayer and stories and encouragement . . . there's just nothing like it. Nothing.

Okay, a quick photo break while I compose myself again:

Enjoying a little late afternoon shade, trying to recover from the heat of the day.

I think BoyWonder spent about 80% of his time in this kiddie pool.

The Muse's unbelievably fabulous junior youth teachers, Tom and Lynn. I got to hear their whole love story, which was completely awesome and actually has many similarities to mine and Havarti's story (which I shall share with you all in August for our 15th anniversary - stay tuned!). 

The young kids somehow got hold of a bunch of food boxes from the kitchen and a rope and worked together to build a train for Dolittle to pull like a sled dog. It didn't work (kids are too heavy), but man, was it fun watching them try. 

BoyWonder made some new friends, especially with the older girls at camp. It was so nice having some of the older kids to help keep him from wandering out in to the woods to be eaten by cougars or charged by a moose. 

BoyWonder with his cutie-patootie cousin. So fun to see my brother's kids, whom we haven't seen in a few years. My brother and his wife also met at this camp. And actually, my other brother and his wife also met at this camp. So did the couple in the picture with Havarti up there on the blanket. It's like a Baha'i matchmaking haven. :)

I've been to lots of Baha'i conferences and such, and I've had many amazing experiences at each of them, but this week of living in the woods is something else. It's like getting a glimpse of what a unified world would feel like. It's paradise in the truest sense. I talked a lot here in May about Dana Point being paradise, and on a surface level it really is. We've seen some breathtakingly beautiful places on this trip so far. But true paradise feels like true love. And this week was so full of love, it broke my heart to leave it. I'm sure many of you have had similar experiences in various settings. It's hard to describe. It's just so deeply beautiful.

My friend, Sarah, who is on the Sheltering Branch committee, told me about her first time coming to this camp twelve or so years ago. She came alone with her kids because her husband had to work. After the week was over, she went home and told him, "We are never not going to that camp. I'll take the kids by myself if I have to, but I am never not going." And they've gone every year since.

That's exactly how I feel this time. I never want to not go there again.

All I could think about before we went was how hot it was going to be, and now that part of it barely makes an impression. It did get hot. Ugly, nasty, icky, 100 degrees hot. But it cooled down considerably at night, so sleeping in the tent wasn't an issue at all. And the junior youth class made a service project out of bringing ice-cold washcloths and water bottles to the adult classes, which was GENIUS. Seriously. We owe those kids forever.

So, that's it. My heart and soul got all filled up to overflowing, and now coming back to normal everyday life (well, as normal and everyday as our life is right now) is odd and a bit disorienting. But it's okay. This is where we are. We're getting settled for now. It's all good.

And Seattle in July is VERY good. More to come on our new temporary home soon.