June Lilacs

Lilacs in late June ~ brightly colored houses and pointed steel roofs ~ heavily-forested mountains, the northernmost of the Appalachians ~ water everywhere: rivers, lakes, one of the world's greatest estuaries, straits, and the Golfe de St. Laurent ~ lobster and cod ~ and BIRDS, BIRDS, BIRDS, enough to remind you of Alfred Hitchcock.


A quarter of a million of them live on the small Isle de Bonaventure in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, a couple of miles of Perce. That is at the very northeastern tip of the Gaspesie Peninsula, which forms the southern (right) bank of the Fleuve St. Laurent, Quebec's only fleuve. (As I learned in France, this is avery exalted designation, rather like three-star rstaurants. France has only four of them. All the rests are rivieres. A fleuve is a mighty stream that flows into the sea under its own name. All tribiutaries (and smaller rivers even if they DO get to the sea intact) are called rivier. Perce is south of the estuary, where the peninsula turns toward New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.

The bird island is really amazing. Many species of birs camp out there in the sumer (which is barely beginning here).

Tucson to Winslow & Grand Canyon

Bright Angel Canyon
Another ten days in Tucson, hanging our with friends. Maundy Thursday at St. Andrew's, where by friend Jeff Bailey is a deacon. Then I began my drive home, to Phoenix and then NE through Payson to Winslow. this is a spectacularly beautiful drive, especially at this time of year. Not long after I passed through, there was a huge landslide, which closed the road! Fortunately, it didn't effect me.

Unfortunately, I blew a gasket somewhere on the trip (on Good Friday). On Holy Saturday, I took the car in to Winslow Ford, for what would turn out to be a long stay. I rented a car from them and drove to Flagstaff, whcih I found to be a very nice town. About 80,000 people live here at the foot of the San Francisco Peaks. Mt. Humphries is the tallest mountain in AZ (over 12,000 feet). Flagstaff itself is over 7,000 feet above sea level. There is a major campus of the U of A here. It reminds me a little of St. Cloud. A very liveable place.

I attended the Great Vigil of Easter in a crowded Episcopal Church, whose Rector delivered an excellent sermon in heavy Appalachain accent. Several baptisms. Smoke and bells, I felt right at home.

Since I had time (little did I know how much time), I decided to check out the Grand Canyon which I hadn't seen for almost 60 years. It is much as I remember it, but extremely crowded on Easter. (Beautiful spring weather.) I spent the night at Bright Angel Lodge (one of their "historic cabins", actually). and took a helicopter ride over the canyon on Easter Monday.

I am very gload I did that. The views were amazing,k indescribable. Here are some pictures.

Colorado River from the helicopter

(Be sure to click on them to blow them up to dull size for full effect. I also took some videos, which may be seen at YouTube: teskatravelsgrandcanyon.
Aproaching North Rim in helicopter

Ajo and Organ Pipe

CLICK PICTURE FOR FULL-SCREEN

Volcanic tufa of Ajo Mountains in Organ Pipe National Monument

I decided not to go the Mexican route to Organ Pipe, so I just got on I-8 and turned south at Gila Bend. This town has to be one of the most unattractive in the country. Out in the middle of the desert, it has nothing but motels and tourist services, next to the freeway. There is one attraction: the Sonic Motel and Grill. This queer establishment was built just after we launched our first satellite, and the whole place has a strange, space-age theme. Space-age, that is, as conceived in 1960. Tail-fins and sputniks and bouffant hairdos. Very strange. I stayed there once. It turns out each room has photos of rockets or missiles. And there is a big one outside on the lawn, right in front of the office. One of the last of that vanishing American breed, the Roadside Attraction.

The fifty-mile drive between Gila Bend and Ajo is very lovely, if desolate. There is absolutely nothing between the two towns except gorgeous scenery ~ desert and mountains. This time of year of this particular year is glorious. There has been so much rain that everything is blooming. I got a room in one of Ajo’s cruddy little motels, and some Chinese take-out at the only restaurant that was open (they didn’t serve tofu!), and went to bed early.

Ajo is a tiny town at the edge of the world. Phelps-Dodge still operates a mine there, which keeps the place going, I guess. There is a great old two-story adobe hotel “The Cornelia”, which is for sale for $2 mil., and a nice new plaza and spiffy RC Church, which looks like a miniature San Xavier (the great Mission south of Tucson).

Aside from the mine, there is nearby (30 miles) Organ Pipe National Monument. This is one of my favorite places. It is located just West of the Tohono O’Odham Reservation, which extends a hundred miles to the east, almost to Tucson. And west of Ajo and Organ Pipe is all military. Off limits. (I guess they run bus-tours now sometimes). The Luke Airforce Base and the Goldwater Missile Range (where they test the missiles). All the way to Yuma and the Colorado.

There is a border crossing, which has a motel, a general store, and a postoffice on the US side, a little town called Sonoita in Mexico. The Postal service calls the place “Lukeville”, but everybody else calls it Gringo Pass. Very remote. But the park is one of the best.. A highway runs North/South from Why?, AZ (I’m not making this up) to Gringo Pass, bisecting the Park, which has two long, one-way loop drives. The one to the west is now closed because of danger from coyotes (human smugglers). (A ranger was recently killed.) Meanwhile, they are building the “fence” right along the road that leads to Quitobaquito Springs. This is a real desert Oasis, with a little lake and lush vegetation ~ in the old days, the only natural water for a hundred miles in any direction.

The ranger said that they were thinking of running bus tours out there. I hope so. It’s way too bad to have it closed, because this section of the park includes the best stands of organ pipe cactus. (The Monument is the only place in the US where these plants grow wild.) It also contains the canyon that has elephant trees, which produce the aromatic gum (copal), which is a relative of frankincense. The motel lady in Ajo said that lots of undocumented Mexicans were coming to work on the “fence”! At $23/hour, it beats the shit out of wages at home, which as I learned in Puerto Vallarta were $.50/hour for unskilled labor. Another irony is that most of the structure is electronic ~ motion sensors ~ which we are assured can tell the difference between humans and deer and coyotes.

Fairy Duster

Brittle Bush
The other loop drive, to the east, winds up the side of the Ajo Mountains. I guess somebody thought they looked like garlic heads, because that’s what the word means. Well, they are kind of bulbous and whorly. They are volcanic, and the tufa rock they contain is quite spectacular. This year, they are covered with brilliant displays of brittlebush and Mexican poppies (yellow), lupine (lavender), desert asters (white), penstamen (red-violet), and more. From a distance, the mountainside looks gold, in some places.

I made a short video of the flowers around the visitor center. I think I have filled the commenary with disinformation: the "Mexican Poppies" are there (somewhere), but the brilliant yellow flowers on a bush are Brittlebush. And the "juvenile Palo Verde" is in fact an Acacia, I think. (They are more of a golden yellow than the Palo Verde, which isn't out yet.) This video

After another night in Ajo, I drove through the Reservation to Tucson. Almost the entire way, the road was flanked on both sides by ribbons of lupine, sometimes mixed with the yellow flowers. And from certain perspectives, the desert floor was carpeted as far as the eye could see. The famous “carpet of flowers.” In this case Mexican Poppies mixed with lupine .

Here is a video showing a magnificent stand of saguaros on the way up to the Ajo Mountains.

LA, Palm Springs, Salton Sea

Mt. San Jacinto

I left L.A. in a fairly easy trip to Cathedral City just east of Palm Springs in the Coachella Valley. The mountains there are spectacular, because the valley floor is relatively low, and there are no foothills. Mt. San Jacinto to the west has the longest direct vertical drop in the country. The San Bernardino Mountains that form the other side of the valley are even higher. My friend, Fr. David Burgdorf lives there, where he is director of the training program at the Betty Ford Center. I must get them in touch with Opora in Moscow ~ the outfit that trains chemical dependency counselors all over the former USSR.

After a very pleasant two days in the desert spring weather, I went on to the end of the valley, and down to the east side of the Salton Sea, which is an inland salt lake, about the size of Mille Lacs. Like the Dead Sea or the Great Salt Lake, it is formed by the water that flows down from the surrounding mountains with no outlet.

It lies in the middle of the Imperial Valley, just east of San Diego and the Anza Borega Desert. Because of irrigation, this is a very large part of California’s agricultural industry.

I spent the night in a nice motel/restaurant in a town with the strange name of Calipatria. I was glad I did, because the restaurant walls were covered with the photographs of Dorothea Lange. It sems the great chronicler of Depression misery and the brave, desperate migrants we call “Okies” did all her work within five miles of Calipatria. As Woody Guthrie sang,

California’s a Garden of Eden,

A paradise to live in or see.

But, believe it or not,

You won’t find it so hot,

If you ain’t got the do-re-mi.

East of the Imperial Valley

Lever

In early May of 1999, I had just left the parish in St. Paul, and I was drinking heavily enough to alarm my old friends from the Yale Russian Chorus, whom I had joined for a weekend party on Capri. I spent ten days after that eating and drinking near the piazza Esquilino, just downhill from the apse of Santa Maria Maggiore, originally a Constantinian Basilica, and one of the four Major Basilicas of the Roman Catholic Church. The piazza is a lively little boulevard across the saddle of land between the Esquiline and Viminal hills. Just below the basilica, the Via Cavour crosses on its way from the railway station to the Coliseum. Down the block is a small sidewalk bar, where I spent every evening drinking Stavecchio and soda, reading the Herald Tribune, and watching the setting sun change the colors of the green and cream marble on the basilica.

One evening, there was a group of Americans at the next table. One of them was telling the rest about his travels with his motorcycle and photographic equipment. He was a large man. Not fat, but tall and well-built. He wore a beard and lots of rings and silver bracelets. A striking figure When I returned from the WC, he was alone, and I invited him to join me. (This is something almost unheard-of for me.) He told me his story.

His name was Lever, and he was planning to ride his motorcycle, Fulcrum, around the world. Since most of the trip would be through Russia, his native tongue would be useful. He explained that he and his mother emigrated to L.A. in the 70’s. His name was a sobriquet, made of his first name and initials, Lev, E, and R (Evgenievich Rukhin). I started speaking Russian to him. He had just ridden in from his girlfriend’s farm. He didn’t know where he was going in Rome. He saw the sidewalk café right next to a filling station, where he could keep an eye on Fulcrum from his table.

I asked him to tell me more about his background. Lever said that his father had been a well-known artist in the Soviet period, he had been an organizer of the infamous “bulldozer exhibit” in Moscow (an exhibition of avante garde painting in the Alexander Park outside the Kremlin, which had been officially permitted, and then destroyed by a bulldozer). Not long thereafter, Lever’s father died and he and his mother moved to the USA. I began to feel very creepy.

“What was your father’s name, again?” I asked.

“Evgenii Lvovich Rukhin.”

“Zhenia Rukhin”, I said.

“Yes.”

Whereupon I put my head in my hands and kept it there for a long time. When I looked up again, I told Lever than I knew his father. At which point, as I later learned, Lever got mad at me and thought I must be some kind of weird drunk. But I told him to sit still, I had a story to tell him.

In 1971, the year of his birth, I was received with the rest of rhe Yale Russian Chorus, at Zhenia’s ground-floor apartment on the Red Fleet Embankment overlooking the Neva. I remembered a grand piano and a harp. (This detail got Lever’s attention). We sang and drank, and Zhenia told me that he was planning to bring the newborn Lev to church to be baptized (a political statement in those days). Zhenia invited me to come back the next day.

I arrived at about 2:00 pm and everyone was already well into the vodka. Zhenia had had a meeting with the Minister of Culture (his boss, kind of, I guess), and he felt like getting drunk. We drank and talked and partied for about twelve hours. There were some others with us: a psychiatrist (Andrey) and the principal flautist of the Leningrad Philharmonic (Volodya) and a few more. We drank and sang and rode around on the water-taxis and ate chocolate and got stopped by the Militsia (at which point everyone else disappeared, and I was left to show my papers. I remember feeling that this was rather caddish behavior on their part, and told my friends so when they reappeared after the police left. Of course, I wasn’t thinking straight. I wasn’t in danger of getting into trouble, but they were.

Anyway, we picked up some more vodka, and stopped by Volodya’s house. He presented me with two fabulous medieval lutes, one of which was thought to have been ripped off from the Berlin Museum after the War. V. didn’t know anyone who could restore them. I smuggled them out and gave them to my friend, Rod Belleville, who was in the stringed-instrument repair business at the time. Then we went back to Zhenia’s and sent out for more vodka.

I finally went back to the hotel at about 2 am. Andrey escorted me, but let me walk the last two blocks alone, so as not to be seen by the authorities.

I recounted all this to Lever, who was growing more and more amazed. I observed that Zhenia had died in a dacha fire, which some thought suspicious.

“You really did know my father.”

“I knew Zhenia Rukhin.”

Lever and I spent the rest of the evening together, dined at a nice little restaurant near my hotel, and I gave him the use of the extra bed in my room. I stayed in loose touch with him for the subsequent nine years, but we were never in L.A. at the same time until now.

It is really great to be back in contact, and I expect to be more regular about it now.

Lever is a gifted and successful photographer. The visual arts are in his genes, no doubt. His father’s paintings now go for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

San Francisco to Los Angeles

My goodness, it has been some time since my last entry! I am now in Ajo, AZ ~ which is to say, the middle of nowhere. But it is also in the middle of the Sonoran Desert at the height of the spring wildflower bloom. More on that later (with lots of pictures, I hope).

Earl and Giselle got home on Schedule on Feb. 24, and I had a nice visit with them. Also spent a couple of nights at Milan's vacant apartment in Noe Valley. I baptized Doug and April Young's baby on March 4.


Earlier in the day, we all went to a very chic restaurant called Momo's in SF, facing the Giants' ballpark. There follow several photos of the place and its food.

Momo's Interior

Shrimp Fili Gumbo

A satisfied customer, his host, and his oysters

Then I drove through the City to the sea and down to Santa Cruz, on one of the first certifiably spring says.
Santa Cruz Mountains, viewed from the southern shore of Monterrey Bay

My old friends from the Christic Institute, Danny Sheehan and Sara Nelson live at the beach, in a community of summer houses. I spent two very heady days learning about Danny's theory of paradigms, which I won't go into here, except to say they correspond to the chakras. I got to meet Danny and Sara's second son, Daeghan ~ who is a superb rapper ~ and Sara arranged a long conversation with their elder son, Danny Paul, who has a deep interest in theology. I sent him some books on Orthodoxy (of which he knew nothing), and I hope to see him next month in New York. Sara suggested that we all go to Israel together. Maybe next Christmas.

CA Route 1 is one of the world's great drives, Comparable to the Amalfi Coast or the Hudson or Lake Pepin. South of Big Sur is legendary:
South of Big Sur

Rundle (I think) along the coast road

View from motel lawn, near San Simeon

There are some beautiful little towns north of San Luis Obispo, which puts them about midway along the coast between SFand LA. A little touristy, but remote: Cambria and Cayucos (at right). Past San Luis Obispo and north of Santa Barbara is a place apparently founded by Danes, Solvang, CA. It is the home of the world-famous Jensen's Restaurant, "The Home of Split Pea Soup." The special happenned to be a bread-bowl of their famous pea-soup, which they ave been serving for 80 years. I first tried it 35 years ago, when my hippie-bus broke down and we had to wait a day or two for repairs.

On to Santa Barbara, still among my favorite American cities and down the Camino Real to the next Mission, named for Bonaventure (San Buenaventura). The (now suburban) town lost its "San" and is just "Ventura" now, but to make for it acquired a a whole boulevard (one of LA's major arteries, running east and west just at the northern foot of the Santa Monica Mountains. AND the freeway (US 101) is called at this point the "Ventura Freeway".

Directions of exquisite clarity brought me directly to the hotel booked for me by my friend Lever (see next post).

The Magic Castle Inn was right out of the movies. Sitting on the hill just below the Hollywood Bowl, the rooms surround a patio and pool. Lever had booked a suite as large as my apartment (more closet space, actually). It is right next to one of those exclusive nightclubs where you have to be vetted to get in, called the Magic Castle Club. The doorman looked like a Sumo wrestler. I think it was a set location in Devil in a Blue Dress.


In real life, it is the world's only private club for magicians. Lever picked a good one.

After a shower, he called for me and took me to dinner at a great little restaurant with his wife, 17-month old daughter, and aunt Svetlana Mikhailkovna. There is quite a story behind this, q.v.: next post

Russian Cathedral

One of my favorite places in San Francisco is Holy Virgin Joy of All Who Sorrow Cathedral, out in the western part of the city (26th and Geary).

It is built in traditional Novgorod style, which means that it has five cupolas: a big central one and four smaller at each corner of the high, square box. I happened to have known the iconographer who covered its walls with stuinning fresci - the Archimandrite Kiprian of Jordanville. When I was eighteen, I spent part of a summer at Holy Trinity Monastery, where he was one of three founders, with the rank of archimandrite. He was the overseer of the farm work, and so I basically worked for him. He thought I was very industrious (obviously, Archimandrite Kiprian did not possess the charism of clairvoyance!), because he once caught me disking a field unbidden. He was overjoyed that someone my age would do something that needed doing on his own initiative. Little did he know that I just enjoyed driving the tractor.

Fr. Kiprian spent most of his time, however, painting icons. He was a master muralist, painting them right on the walls of the churches in fresco. The Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Jordanville (near Herkimer, NY) is a little-known jewel, as is the SF Cathedral. The style is I guess what you would call Russian National (borrowing that term from architecture). It is obviously new, but at the same time it is inspired by medieval Russian iconography (pre-18^th Century). There is a lot of gold and red. And the whole interior of the cathedral is covered with it. It is really quite stunning.

On Saturday night, I fulfilled my obligation “to worship God every Sunday in His Church" by attending the All-night Vigil there. The choir was very good. A high point for me was the Phos hilaron (sv'et'e tikhi) sung in Slavonic but with a dandy Georgian setting in the classic Gurian style, which is so atonal that it sounds 20th C., although it is nearly a thousand years old. Stravinsky said he was influenced by this kind of thing.

In addition to the murals, the interior of the church is a sumptuous as anything to be found in Russia. There are no pews, of course, but benches are provided at the back for the elderly and infirm (such as Yours Truly). Five enormous crystal chandeliers hang under the cupolas. They are turned on and off at various times during the Vigil to indicate cartain parts of the rite. The iconostas is completely gilded, and there are two side chapels ~ each an altar behind its own iconostas, which makes this church what the Russians call a collection or sobor. Many large churches have this feature, and they are all called sobori. This word is conventionally translated as cathedral, and so it is a bit confusing. Not every sobor is a cathedral, in the Western sense.

It is still pre-Lent in the Orthodox Church, and the clergy were arrayed in beautiful light-blue vestments. I got there early, in time for the endless akathist in honnor of the places great patron, St. John Wonderworker of San Francisco. That is Archbishop John Maximovich of Shanghai and San Francisco, who organized the building of the Cathedral. He was a small, apish man, about whom I remember hearing 45 years ago at Jordanville, where everyone already regarded him as a saint. He went around barefoot and carried heavy chains under his habit. As Bp. Kallistos (Ware) once observed, "he was very ascetic, and hardly ever slept, except at diocesan council meetings,." he was also famous for making everyone wait while he got down on the floor to play with the children. Now he rests under a fabulously carved, gilded canopy, in a golden glass-topped casket, where the faithful (and goyim like Yours Truly) may venerate his incorrupt remains. Only his hands are exposed to this adulation, his face is modestly covered with a chalice veil.

Saint John The Wonderworker

Speaking of Bp. Kallistos, he is doing a couple of lectures this weekend at the Greek Cathedral in Oakland, which I intend to attend. Timothy Ware, in the world, was an Oxford don who converted in the 60s and became a monk on Patmos, and then titular bishop of some tiny island now controlled by Turkey. I just learned from Wikipedia that Lord Kallistos is now a metropolitan, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople having elevated the diocese to the status of a metropolitanate.

Metr. Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia