Best of the Bunch

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. Henry Grabar. Penguin, 2023.  

Thanks to my British colleague Peter Yates, I fell under the spell of Human Geography while teaching high school in Yemen in the 1980s. With our students, we climbed medieval mountain fortresses, crawled through ancient irrigation tunnels, and documented the life of villages on the Red Sea coast.  We were all co-learners getting the best education ever.  

Paving Paradise emerges from the black-and-white page as the best example of a human geography approach to a complex topic that I’ve encountered in a long while. While much has been written about Americans’ devotion to the automobile, there’s been scant attention to the amount of space accorded to the storage of vehicles at either end of every trip.  Grabar has done the sleuthing and spadework necessary to map out this complex and sad geography.  

In a blurb on the back cover, the number-crunching author of The High Cost of Free Parking – Donald Shoup – says this of his disciple’s work:  Like no one else before, Henry Grabar explains why mismanged parking is the greatest single cause of many urban ills. Everyone who wants to reduce traffic congestion, clean the air, support public transportation, encourage biking and walking, promote business, increase employment, improve public services, and slow global warming should read Paved Paradise and heed Grabar’s advice for solving the parking problem.

As we return to Port Townsend, City Council is considering the shape, funding, and management of a potential Transportation Benefit District.  It seems a good time to talk about the basics of space and land use, especially since parking remains the elephant in the room. Paved Paradise for next winter’s Community Read, anyone?

A Stranger in Your Own City:  Travels in the Middle East’s Long War.  Ghaith Abdel-Ahad. Knopf, 2023.  

I confess to having taken a two-decade-plus break from following Iraq. A series of essays I started about life and work in Baghdad are replete with joy and gratitude but when things fell apart, the writing became too painful. The US invasions of Kuwait, Iraq, and Syria destroyed the stasis of oppressive dictatorships which had allowed people to manage, be productive at work and school, enjoy relative safety and health, make plans, and have hope.

Born in 1975, Gaith Abdel-Ahad has been observing Iraq and the implications of the actions of American-led coalitions all his life.  After many years as an interpreter and journalist on the ground, he joined the staff of The Guardian and has continued to offer some of the best insider reporting on the Middle East.  In this clip from an interview with Christiane Amanpour, Abdel-Ahad cites Iraqis’ rejection of their current, corrupt government, their distaste for democracy, and their nostalgia for a strongman regime.  A Stranger in Your Own City explains why this is so.

In my wilder dreams, I see millions of my fellow citizens embarking on personal journeys of truth and reconciliation and then raising their voices in a final NEVER AGAIN!  Sitting down to read this book would be a way to start.

You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why it Matters. Kate Murphy, Celadon Books, 2019.  

In an early May interview with Shankar Vendantum of Hidden Brain, I got a wake-up call from Kate Murphy on how and why to listen, and the dire consequences of failing to do so. As for You’re not listening, Jack tells me that at least once a week. Thrift Books had a used copy on our front porch days before our departure. 

Murphy is a stunning speaker and enticing writer whose grasp of contemporary communication theory reaches into many fields, including social media, AI, and the speed of change in the ways information moves. Everything fits together. Listening is almost a lost art.  I’m hopeful You’re Not Listening will put me on a more productive path to knowledge and communication. 

How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures. Sabrina Imbler. Hachette Book Group, 2022.    

After hearing Sabrina Imbler recount “If You Flush a Goldfish” on (I think) This American Life, I downloaded How Far the Light Reaches from Audible.com and followed up with a hard copy for my summer reading. 

Here is a voice from a new generation of science journalists. The author pairs each account of marine critters with their personal stories and drawings. Imbler is an amazing writer. Start this book – or listen to the author reading it.  I suspect we will be learning from Imbler for years to come.

Cultures of the Coast

The Fisherman’s Frontier: People and Salmon in Southeast Alaska.  David F. Arnold.  University of Washington Press, 2007.  

“Do you have anything on the politics of fishing?” I ask the woman at Sing Lee Alley Books in Petersburg.  She walks me to a familiar shelf and thrusts this volume into my hands.  How did I miss this one over the years?

The Fisherman’s Frontier is a comprehensive history of Southeast fishing from the earliest millennia to the 21st century. It combines scholarship on the arrival of humans on the Pacific Coast, the evolution of salmonids, the development of fishing technologies, the structure of work at hundreds of 19th century canneries, the establishment of Indigenous rights, and tensions between corporations and independent fishermen, all in the context of the historiography of the American West.   

With 70 pages of notes, bibliography, and index, The Fishermen’s Frontier has the essential background for understanding recent decades of fish politics. It’s a keeper for the shipboard library.

Not on My Watch:  How a Renegade Whale Biologist Took on Government and Industry to Save Wild Salmon. Alexandra Morton. Random House Canada, 2021.  

If you’re an activist who wonders what it takes to bring about change, Alexandra Morton is for you.  She’d taken up residence on remote Gilford Island in the Broughton Archipeligo intending to study the natural behavior of killer whales, having worked with them in captivity. At one of Pierre Landry’s famous Echo Bay pig roasts we happened to take in, she likely was on the serving line.  A small non-idegnous community of off-gridders, fishermen, writers and researchers often helped out at these events for marina guests.

At the request of her neighbor, early settler, fisherman, and salmon activist Bill Proctor (who I have met), Morton started to look at the impact of the Atlantic salmon farms along the British Columbia coast. These are operated by global firms based in Norway or Chile to produce a source of protein to feed the world.  In reality, what is produced is an inferior fish that is vulnerable to sea lice and a variety of infections and can compromise the health of native Pacific salmon runs. 

Morton, a curious, perseverant scientist devoted years of her life to hands-on research into the science and politics of fish farming. In her small boat and often at night he surreptitiously sampled farm fish, examined them in her makeshift laboratory, counted sea lice, tested for other pathogens, reported the data to anyone who would listen, and raised the money to support her work. To determine the various runs of different families of salmon, she collaborated with scientists up and down the west coast. She examined Atlantic salmon sold in supermarkets – with color added – and found dangerous viruses.  She did this work for three decades. The feature documentary Salmon Confidential helped publicize her work. The United States’ federal action to outlaw fish farms in Washington State helped Canada’s environmental and First Nations activists to push for the decision to ban Atlantic salmon farms in British Columbia by 2025. 

Will it work? I don’t know. Aquaculture of various types holds promise for food security, expressed even by salmon historian Arnold (see above). While farms have disappeared from the Broughtons and Clayoquot Sound, interest in aquaculture among some First Nations combined with the federal funding now available through the Truth and Reconciliation process.  As for me, I’ll heed the bumper sticker:  Friends Don’t Let Friends Eat Farmed Salmon. 

St Michael’s Residential School: Lament & Legacy. Nancy Dyson & Dan Rubenstein.   Ronsdale Press, 2021.

In 2015, Jack and I visited Alert Bay, an experience that left a deep impression on us. on  It happened to be Indigenous People’s Day and no sooner had we stepped off the ferry from Port McNeill than we were invited to a celebratory salmon bake.  First, we went to the U’mista Cultural Centre to view the collection of ceremonial items that had been restored to the First Nations of Kwakwaka’wakw territory. The seizure of these potlatch treasures by British colonial authorities, we would learn that day, was only a small piece of the cultural genocide inflicted on the Indigenous people of this area of the Central British Columbia Coast.  More tragic and compelling was another exhibit at the Centre on British Columbia’s residential schools. These were operated by religious groups of various denominations, the majority Roman Catholic. The colonizers’ goal – enshrined in public policy – was to destroy everything Indian in their charges.  

St Michael’s of Alert Bay looms large in the history of residential schools. Dyson and Rubenstein were Vietnam refuseniks who escaped over the boarder and found work at St Michael’s in 1972. The young couple remained on the job only 4 months. Finding the children so traumatized and the lack of food and care so appalling, they spoke out and were fired.  With the start of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015, these Canadian activists were encouraged by Chief Robert Joseph to tell their story.  This they did to produce a raw slice of life at St.Michael’s that everyone should read.  I passed my copy on to Chris Woo, a City of Port McNeill official who kindly opened the local museum and gave me a private tour. 

Indigenous Relations: Insights, Tips and Suggestions to Make Reconciliation a Reality. Bob Joseph with Cynthia F. Joseph. Raincoast Books, 2019.

This volume was added to my onboard library when I spotted it the large collection of books sold at the Museum of Northern Columbia in Prince Rupert. Now staffed almost exclusively by members of Canada’s First Nations, it features a small but superb collection of historical and cultural objects, conducts educational programs for the area’s school children, and delights visitors. This museum is to be missed!  I hope that the offerings in its carefully curated shop will soon be available online. 

I recognize now that one of the authors of this well-researched and carefully-stated work in cross-cultural communication is the same Chief Robert Joseph who encouraged the authors of Saint Michael’s Residential School: Lament & Legacy. Both works are part and parcel of the ongoing Truth and Reconciliation process.  As noted in this summer’s cruise log, First Nations are now investing in enterprises such as marine services, fishing, and tourism, often purchasing existing businesses from white Canadian owners and sometimes in initial partnership with them.  Everyone who cruises the Inside Passage should have an onboard copy.  When we were in urgent need of engine repairs in the Heiltsuk First Nation outpost of Shearwater, which is across the water from their interesting home village of Bella Bella, it prepared us.  For example, when on day one after the long Canada Day weekend, we learned of a death of an elder in the village, we knew how to act and this stretched out patience.  Some things just can’t be hurried.  

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.  Robin Wall Kimmerer. Adapted for young adults by Monique Gray Smith with illustrations by Nicole Neidhardt.  Zest Books, 2022.

While Braiding Sweetgrass has little to say about the coastal areas we travel, it helped me better understand its cultures.  After hearing the bookmentioned by Holly Hughes and others, I gave it a try but the time and place hadn’t been right. Print books ask you to sit down. Since lovely anchorages invite you to do that, my onboard reading piles up before we cast off the lines. (On May 15th. Jack says having a departure date set weeks ahead prevents cruises from being compromised as things come up.)  In the last week of readying the boat, I stopped at the library to recycle copies of The New Yorker and Atlantic in the free box near the door.  

The library had selected Braiding Sweetgrass in its new young adult edition for last winter’s Port Townsend Community Read. This choice brought a large and diverse audience, with Indigenous voices and young people facing climate devastation joining the mix. I’d heard the interviews and discussions on KPTZ, our local station, and thanked a librarian, who thrust a leftover free copy of this beautiful edition into my hand. It has given me a profound appreciation of indigenous world views and of the non-human beings that make Nature whole and make Nature make sense. This book is a treasure. I will read it again on a rainy afternoon before the year runs out.

Working Boats: An Inside Look at Ten Amazing Watercraft.  Tom Crestodina. Sasquatch Books, 2022.  

The straits and channels of the Inside Passage provide a fascinating introduction to nautical transport.  The boats Jack and I see up close are the working boats Crestodina documents in this book.  

I’ve been long fascinated by Crestodina’s drawings depicting boats used in the various Alaska fisheries. They appear cross cut so you can see from the captain in the wheel to the engineer in the engine room and, on decks between, the bunks, salon, galley, and head. So having in hand the slim, colorful study, autographed by this artist, author, and fisherman brings great joy.

Written for questioning observers of all ages, the book covers tugs, barges, ferries and a large NOAA research boat as well as fishing vessels. Crestodina manages to cram lots of technical information into the smaller images accompanying each watercraft to explain operations. There are many jobs on any boat and he makes who does what where clear.  With the maritime industry proffering so many jobs as older folks retire, this book is a boon for anyone seriously wanting to go to sea or to work on land building and maintaining these marvelous vessels.

The ships that pass us will always hold our wonder at their functional beauty, even more so now. It will be a permanent feature of the Morning Light library.

Pacific Seaweeds: A Guide to Common Seaweeds of the West Coast. Updated and Expanded Edition. Bridgette Clarkston & Louis Druehl, 2020.

You immediately appreciate the small, backpackable heft of this book, its brilliant photography, the color coding that makes use easy, essays on seaweed distribution, communities, conservation, and cultivation, a good glossary, and an index with species appearing under Latin and popular names. But what really got me was the section “Nutrition and Cooking” with beautiful recipes. Alas, I have yet to read it, so watch this space.

While at Shoal Bay in July, I had a spirited conversation with artist-potter Cynthia McDonald about books, entrepreneurship, and local foods. She lives a rich, centered, carless, boatless, off-grid existence on the sublime, underpopulated shores of British Columbia, where seaweed grows clean and profuse. She knows a lot about seaweed and is intrigued by the interest of her First Nation neighbors to invest in commercial foraging or cultivation and processing. As economic opportunity through the Truth and Reconciliation process coincides with the mandated closure of Atlantic salmon farming, local tribal leaders are considering the repurposing of the facility in Phillips Arm.

Cynthia hadn’t seen this volume so I gave her my copy, suggesting she pass it on to her neighbors when she’s done.

Americana

Black Ivory: A Revolt in Style. Jason Jules and Graham Marsh.  Reel Art Press, no date.  

This joint Mother’s and Father’s Day gift appeared on our doorstep days before departure. Daughter Selena Kyle has a knack for beautifully designed books about design and style.  On recent cruises, I’ve enjoyed books she’s sent on contemporary approaches in weaving and on knotting as a creative design.  

Black Ivy’s revolt refers to the sartorial choices of African American leaders from mid-century on. As the classic photos of the period when we came of age show, the button-down shirts, soft shoulder three-button jackets, and military repp ties were always there.  Now the authors infuse these conventional clothes with revolutionary new meaning in ways “you’ll never be able to see them in the same way again.”  True.

Documented by renowned photojournalists, the men are studying at Morehouse College, playing jazz in Manhattan clubs, speaking at the March on Washington, crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and taking the knee on sidewalks to swimming pools and eateries Jim Crow has closed to them.  Brief bios and commentaries on context make this volume a compelling overview of history and culture.

Of Bears and Ballots: An Alaskan Adventure in Small-Town Politics. Heather Lende. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2020. 

Nobody knows Haines, Alaska, population 1,905, more intimately than Lende, whose obituaries for the Chilkat Daily News give her profound insight into people and place.  In If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name, Lende divulges her process of writing obituaries and provides examples.  Her visits to each family to share their grief and time spent with friends of the deceased enable her to bring discreet gossip to a time-honored art form, which has disappeared save for the thorough, caring small-town newspapers that are still found in Alaska.  (An example from the Petersburg Pilot is “Whiskey Ted, 64” )

Of Bears and Ballots is another of Lende’s books whose real, nicely-drawn characters tell the story of small-town life and values, shared and not, changing or stuck. Of her run for the Haines Assembly in 2016, Lende writes: I was proud of myself for running, for channeling my frustration with the circus of national politics that has been distracting, really ever since Sarah Palin’s rise.  And now Trump seemed to be her successor in the “speak first, think later” category, prompting headlines with outrageous pronouncements and turning politics into a new kind of theater of the absurd. 

Once elected, she writes of the issues and the players with wit bordering on hilarity.  No policy wonk, she muses on the complexity of decisions, pulling variously on threads of economic development, land use, recreational opportunity, and the shadow of climate collapse that looms large in the higher latitudes.  In the end, it is Lende’s affection for democracy and for those with whom she disagrees weave the fabric of the book and its relevance to local governments everywhere.

Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease.  Edited by Holly J. Hughes, Foreword by Tess Gallagher, Kent State University Press, 2009.

Reading Tess Gallagher’s essay – the foreword to Beyond Forgetting – stopped me in my tracks. Knowing this was an important book, I put it aside for a time when I could give it the proper attention. But not before sending copies to two families to which our own is close. A family member’s dementia changes everyone in any family.

Beyond Forgetting landed in the onboard library for this summer’s cruise to Alaska. When we were finally becalmed in a string of wilderness anchorages, I found it an absolute page-turner! No, I didn’t rush it: each piece is a masterpiece. I read each twice, a convention of Urdu language poetry readings. Especially helpful is the context – ten to fifty words from the author – that follows each piece.

My gnawing quotidian takeaway: The years – five to eight? – between visible onset and death. Writers and cases seem to concur. An awful long transit of forgetting.

Beyond Forgetting owes its force to the gifts of editor Holly J. Hughes. She puts the awe back into awful. Her hundred-plus poets offer works from all over the world. This prescient volume is not so much read by you as shared with you. It can be imbibed poem by poem, chapter by chapter, over eight years or in a sitting. Its movement is heartbreaking, chronological, sweeping, timely. It deserves its honors, both awarded and yet to come.

As the Age Wave breaks over the mid-2020s, Alzheimer’s Disease affects hundreds of thousands more people (sticken, caregiving) than when this book appeared in 2009. Let’s hope that Hughes’ unending creativity as a writer and editor will not deter her from revisiting this matter.

Complicated Simplicity: Island Life in the Pacific Northwest. Joy Davis. Heritage House, 2019. 

Americana, Canadian style. I stumbled onto this title somewhere in my searches for off-grid living. We live in a rural country with a long tradition of off-grid living and precious little written about it. Same for the rest of the United States, The best documentation is of communities to the North. Notable is the work of Phillip Vannini and Jonathan Taggart; Off the Grid: Re-Assembling Domestic Life is their volume from Routledge that informs the 2023 documentary Life Off Grid.  

In the early 60s, when Joy Davis was 10, her parents bought an island off Gabriola Island. To attend school, Davis and her younger sister would cross Georgia Strait by skiff leaving before dawn and returning after dark, while her parents fully embraced off-grid living.  Such navigational chutzpah rivals that of the 19th century Women to Reckon With who sailed the treacherous waters around the Olympic Peninsula from Port Townsend and Sequim to settle in West Jefferson County.  

For this volume an adult Davis interviewed members of twenty full-time off grid households.  Their contemporary realities and recollections are a bit flat in comparison with Davis’ lived experiences from earlier years, The book is choppy and redundant since neither informants nor their stories are fully introduced. Instead their musings are introduced by themes, such as the construction of homes and docks, daily, weekly and seasonal calibrations of time, and the isolation on which some people thrive while others do not – a bit like taking a long cruise on your own boat.

One paragraph stands out, thanks to “Cherry Street,” a failed endeavor City Council approved on the recommendation of Port Townsend’s former City Manager.: 

According to Jim Connelly, (a Davis informant) who works with the house moving firm Nickel Brothers in Victoria, staff are always delighted to see houses make their way from urban settings to islands.  Barging an existing house to an island property has many benefits. Often older houses available for moving from urban neighborhoods are well-built, with charming features.  But it’s important to have the right site…The foundation must be pre-poured.

Integrating a free 8-unit apartment building into a cross-border community is more easily dreamed than executed. It can compromise confidence in local government decision-making, as the (now more attentive) citizens of Port Townsend found out. 

How to Shit in the Woods (4th Edition) Kathleen Meyer.  Ten Speed Press, 2020. 

The 4th edition of this classic that first appeared in 1989, has sold over 3 million copies and counting. Longtime outdoor guide Meyer writes with wit, humor, and every scatological pun in the book. The next time there’s an open mic, I’ll be tempted to read the hilarious accounts on pages 97 and 98 of suddenly finding oneself without toilet paper, if only to break our cultural silence on everyday urination and defecation.  

I bought the book looking for information on how the regs have change since my backpacking days and environmentally sound gadgets and technologies on the market. “Packing it out” was well established in sensitive ecosystems before the biggest change with the 1993 EPA rule banning landfilling of fecal matter.  While not directed at the outdoor industry, this required guiding businesses to adopt disposal in a sewer or septic system. Individual hikers, climbers, and paddlers, however, remain free to “shit in the woods” according whatever guidelines apply to the area they’re in. Meyer is clear on these guidelines and backs them up with sound data from public and environmental health.  

As for commercial products marketed to both individuals and commercial outfitters, features, prices, and suppliers are listed for a limited number options in a market that has exploded post-pandemic with the popularity of both outdoor recreation and the van life. My fear is that dubious products lead buyers to think they are doing the right thing when they are not.

Interestingly, Meyer attempts to avoid using the word “wilderness” in her writing owing to an observation shared by Chief Standing Bear of the Oglala Sioux:  We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and the winding streams with tangled growth as “wild.” Only to the white man was nature a “wilderness”and only to him was the land “infested” with “wild” animals and “savage” people. To us it was tame. Earth was beautiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families we loved was it “wild” for us. When the very animals of the first began fleeing from his approach, then it was for us the “Wild West” began.

Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with American Hoboes. With new preface by authorTed Conover.  Vintage Books, 2081, 2001.  

Last winter Jack and I both found ourselves in the same new book. Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Griders at America’s Edge.  Reading on his Kindle, Jack was taken by author Ted Conover’s brand of journalism incorporating participation observation.  Listening on audible.com, my interest was low-cost housing.  In Colorado’s San Luis Valley, it is still possible to purchase a five-acre parcel of land for $5000 or less, as Conover himself did. 

All of Conover’s works look into the lives and motivations of Americans we may not meet: hoboes, prison guards, undocumented workers, and the celebrities and dreamers who live in Aspen.)  Published when he was twenty-four, Conover’s first book was originally given the subtitle “A Young Man’s Adventure Riding the Rails with American’s Hoboes,”   to which he took great exception. In the preface of the 2001 re-release, he writes I must admit, as I reread this first book of mine, that the description was accurate.  These are a young man’s adventures…this younger man, despite his pretensions of experience, seems a bit callow.  And so candid!  

Rolling Nowhere is a period piece.  Jumping freight trains – and the romance, danger, lore, and vocabulary that went with it have faded.  I did, however, appreciate Connover’s cold ride over the high desert and mountains of Oregon because in 2021 Jack and I took an Amtrak from San Francisco over those rails, which we hadn’t known existed!

Women to Reckon With: Untamed Women of the Olympic Wilderness.  Gary Peterson and Glynda Peterson Schaad, Posidon Peak Publishing, 2007.  

When in the course of our long cruise, things wouldn’t work or broke down completely, I relaxed with this lovely book.  Conceived by a brother-sister team whose debt to the archives of the Clallam County Historical Society is clear, the work introduces a dozen women using photos, news accounts, letters, diaries, inventories, and itineraries from the Victorian period and early 20th century interviews and documentation.  Maps, timelines, The women run the gamut from Russian Anna Petrovna, the first white woman on the Peninsula, who arrived in 1808, to Klallam leader Martha Elizabeth Irwin-Merchant-Maybury, who was abducted as a young girl from the Nanaimo tribe on Vancouver Island.  

While I found my used copy of Women to Reckon With in a PT thrift shop, I was delighted to later see new copies in the Jefferson County Historical Society shop in the lobby of the old City Hall.