Three Days on the Wildwood Trail

photo credit: Jule Gilfillan / OPB

    When I turned 40 a few years ago, I decided I needed a mid-life crisis goal. Living in Portland, OR, it's pretty easy to look around while driving and see Mt Hood. Summiting it seemed like an achievable challenge. I took a friend out to dinner who had been up it and routinely volunteered in mountain rescue. She gave me a list of trails to hike in order to train myself for the physical and mental exertion the mountain required. She also mentioned that the best time of year to go up was May and June. She said she'd be willing to climb it with me, but since it was already mid-March, this might not be the right year for it considering the gear and training I would need. 

    Starting that summer, I went out hiking every week, all year long. Sometimes it's difficult to find something nearby that I hadn't hiked recently and also within my comfort zone. 

    This last December, I decided I should walk all 30 miles of the Wildwood Trail in Forest Park. There are plenty of stories of people running it in one horrible day, but I found a blog post (here) describing a hike split into three legs. I knew I wouldn't be able to duplicate this timeline since I don't have three full days off in a row, but if I talked a friend into driving too, we could do it in heats as traverse hikes. Both drivers roll up to one trailhead, leave one car and get into the other, then drive together to the second trailhead. Once the hike is complete, they both get into the first car then drive back to the first trailhead, split up and drive home separately. This is how we used to tube rivers in the summer, so why couldn't it work for hiking?

    With my free time limited to one day a week, I decided we could do the three days over the course of several weeks during the month of December. I've done portions of the Wildwood before, but always found it a little boring compared to many of the hikes in the Columbia River Gorge or on the shoulders of Mt Hood. No waterfalls, no stunning panoramas, no dangerous river crossings, not even a talus slope to scramble across. What it does have is miles and miles of trails within a half-hour drive of the house. In the past I saved the Wildwood for those days when a high wind advisory or a blizzard made more interesting hikes unavailable. December would be perfect for this project since it's usually a rainy month in the Northwest. 

Day 1 - Wildwood Newberry trailhead to Springville Road trailhead (MI22.1) - 7.5 miles

Newberry Trailhead

    December 7, 2023: I roped my friend John into the first leg. My eldest and youngest daughters also came along. John and I used to drive the same mini-van, but of late his Sienna was moving towards retirement. When he showed up in his new Subaru, my daughters were afraid to get in, since they might get dirt on his floor mats. This might be a sort of window into what it's like growing up with me for a dad. Sometimes they'll ask permission to drink water in my car. Fault me if you think it fair, but you haven't seen the way they drink. Anyways, we parked my car at the trailhead down Springville Rd off Skyline Blvd, piled into John's new, clean, (white!) Forester and headed for the end of the line. I had decided to take the trail backwards since parking in Washington Park can be expensive, especially if you're there for six-plus hours. Once we arrived at the Newberry trailhead, the mile countdown began. It was overcast, and we had 15 minutes of pretty serious rain, but it was generally lovely weather for a vigorous walk. We weren't 200 feet down the trail before we started identifying mushrooms. First off was a tiny gash in root in the middle of the trail, full of scarlet elf cups.

Merry Christmas 2023

 

Elbow On Desk, Hand Rubbing Forehead

    During the winter, I'm frequently looking for places to walk that aren't under several inches of snow. This month, I've been trying to cover the entire Wildwood Trail in Forest Park, which is a little under 30 miles from end to end. We did the first leg last week, which ran from the end of the trail at Newberry Road to a side trail down Springville Rd, which was only about seven and a half miles on paper. By doing it in segments with more than one driver, the idea was to drop off a car at each end, so we don't have to double back. Yesterday, we had planned to do the second leg, probably from the trailhead off Springville to the Forest Lane trailhead. This would be about 11 miles, but easy enough as it looks pretty flat on the elevation change map. We were packing up to drop the kids off at school before heading out to the trail and my phone started ringing. No one calls this early. Caller ID showed Lake Oswego. I don't know anyone there. I didn't answer. It immediately started ringing again. The third time I answer. It was the Lake O police department. They said my car was running in the middle of a residential street and could I come pick it up? Nah, my car is parked right out in front of my...Fuck. I looked out the window. There was the car door handle sitting on the ground where I had parked the previous morning.

    So we dropped the very emotional kids off at school, then drove down to the address the police had given me. There she was, doors open, lights on, running strong. No door handle, paint a little scratched here and there, but otherwise externally OK. Inside were several pairs of shoes, one airpod in a case for two, a bottle of perfume, a couple bottles of water, and most of the stuff I had left in the car: a child booster seat, my sunglasses, the USB charger cable for my phone, a large Ka-Bar knife, the owner's manual, and the disassembled parts of my steering column. 

    Missing were the CDs. The Wipers - Over the Edge and a case of burned CDs that were all the mixtapes Racheous had made for me while we were dating. 

Curiously Named Locales: Matagorda, Texas

Photo credit: Matagorda Tourism

    I have a shower curtain with a map on it. Featuring most of North America, it focuses on lines formed by river channels instead of states. It's always worth investigating as I sit on my throne, doing what even the king must do for himself. One odd place name that caught my eye is Matagorda, Texas. My rudimentary knowledge of Spanish led me to a strange translation. Is this island/county really "Kill the Fat Girl"? A little research indicates that some confusion exists between the Texas State Historical Association, which translates the name as "thick brush", and the Matagorda Chamber of Commerce, which prefers "fat kill".

    According to Wikipedia,  the county is named for the canebrakes that once grew along the coast (matagorda is a Spanish word meaning "thick bush"). The Texas State Historical Association mentions that the county is crossed by the formerly flood-prone SE-bound Colorado River. 

    Per the Matagorda Chamber of Commerce, the city was named by Elias R Wightman, a surveyor who moved about 60 settlers into the area. The Chamber of Commerce mentions that the name, translated as "fat kill", refers to the abundant game and seafood, or possibly a "fat mott" which they define as a fat clump of trees. 

Sources:
Texas State Historical Association

Matagorda Chamber of Commerce

Wikipedia: Matagorda County, Texas

Curiously Named Locales: Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada

Photo credit: Brenda Carson

 The closest I've ever been to Medicine Hat was in the summer of 1996. I was traveling with a church group for boys called the Cadets and we were attending a Camporee somewhere in the province of Alberta. Our plane landed in Calgary and I distinctly remember not having enough money to buy a donut at the airport. Having no experience with tip-jars up to that point, but plenty with the Take-a-Penny, Leave-a-Penny trays, I reached into the nearby glass jar and pulled out enough change Canadienne to pay what was lacking. None of this has anything to do with the city of Medicine Hat, the sunniest place in Canada. Due to the extensive gas fields in the surrounding environs, it has earned the nickname of Gas City. When the city considered changing its name to Gasburg, no less than Rudyard Kipling wrote a letter to the local paper encouraging the people to maintain their unique identity: "This part of the country seems to have all hell for a basement, and the only trap door appears to be in Medicine Hat. And don't you ever think of changing the name of your town. It's all your own and the only hat of its kind on earth."

The origin of the city's name is an English interpretation of the Blackfoot tribes' word Saamis, which refers to the eagle tailfeather headdress worn by medicine men. This headdress was, depending on who you ask, either: 1) lost by a Cree medicine man in the South Saskatchewan River as he was fleeing from a battle between the Blackfoot and the Cree, or 2) the physical manifestation of mystical powers granted to a hunter in exchange for sacrificing his wife to the mythical merman river serpent, Soy-yee-daa-bee.  

Sources:
Wikipedia: Medicine Hat 
O Canada: Reasons to Love Medicine Hat

Halloween Pumpkin 2023 - Pumpkinception

 

That's Good Enough For Me by Jim Fusilli (transcript)

 That's Good Enough for Me

Cookie Monsters of death-metal music.

BY JIM FUSILLI

Wednesday, February 1, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

While the extreme branch of heavy-metal music known as death metal is defined in part by often-vile lyrics about violence, catastrophic destruction, nihilism, anarchy and paranoia, its singing style is associated with a beloved goggle-eyed, fuzzy blue puppet.

Death-metal vocalizing is also known as Cookie Monster singing, if not in tribute to, at least in acknowledgment of, the "Sesame Street" puppet that blurts in a guttural growl, his words discharged so rapidly that they tend to collide with each other.

All this was news to people at Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization behind "Sesame Street." "We have nothing to do with it," said Ellen Lewis, vice president of corporate communications. "What is it?"

"It's a whole new thing to me," said Frank Oz, who originated the voice of the Cookie Monster. "I've never heard of it."

Most death-metal vocalists don't seem to mind the term. "We think it's funny," said Angela Gussow, lead singer for the Swedish band Arch Enemy and one of the few female death-metal vocalists. "We take ourselves too seriously."

The term is considered derogatory by some metal fans, but it's an apt description. Issued like machine-gun fire, death-metal vocals are low, guttural and aggressive, with no subtlety, no melody and very little modulation. But unlike the garbled sound emanating from the lovable and occasionally frenetic Cookie Monster, death-metal vocals seem to come from a dark spot in a troubled soul, as if they were the narrator's voice on a tour of Dante's seventh circle of hell. Cute and funny they ain't.

It's not easy to determine where and how Cookie Monster singing actually began. Early death-metal bands such as Death and Morbid Angel that emerged from Florida in the mid-'80s helped create the musical template that characterized the blasting sound as well as that of its Satan- and occult-obsessed sibling, black metal: fast, relentless drumming often featuring two bass drums; grinding, rapid-fire chording on guitars; squealing guitar solos; muted electric bass; unexpected sudden tempo changes; and a sense of theatricality that's inevitably threatening--"a horror film put to music" is how Monte Conner, a vice president at Roadrunner Records, sees it.

But while the vocals in early death metal are low, raspy and aggressive, not unlike the vocals by, say, Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead, that extreme degree of Cookieness is missing.