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THE BLOGGER HAS BEEN OTHERWISE OCCUPIED

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Niagara Falls from Rainbow Bridge
Niagara Falls from Rainbow Bridge

The blogger has not been lazy. Really, he hasn’t. Rather he has been otherwise occupied. Since you last heard from him, he has spent a week divided between seeing to the needs of an older relative with a broken leg and preparing talks for a speaking engagement, another week traveling and delivering said talks, and a third week on vacation. All right, so he was being lazy for a third of the time—but only a third.

The speaking engagement was at the annual clergy conference of the Diocese of Ohio, held in the beautiful Lodge at Geneva on the Lake. I gave four talks focusing on challenges facing the ordained in today’s church and world. The basic theme was that the classical “theological virtues” of trust, hope, and love provide a key to understanding both the problems and how we need to grow in grace as we respond to them. A number of people asked if there might be a way to put the text online, but I don’t think they would work well transferred directly to this blog. They’re too long, for one thing. Still, it may be possible to present some of the material in this venue, and I’ll have a look at that over the coming weeks. Stay tuned.

My thanks to the Diocese of Ohio and to all the people who were there for the occasion. I had a very stimulating and encouraging time. Jon and I both enjoyed the company of those present. And I came away confirmed in my sense that the Episcopal Church is blessed with a dedicated and able body of ordained people–deacons, presbyters, and bishops.

Then there was vacation. Since we had both come down with colds, we spent more than our usual amount of time on holiday sleeping. But we still had quite a good trip through western New York. We were “off-season,” which made lodging easy to find, on the one hand, but also meant the weather was a bit on the cold side many days. Pluses and minuses.

Some years ago, we took a car trip up the West Coast which we came to think of as the “Volcanos and Vines Tour,” since practically every place we went was associated with at least one of those elements. This car trip could be called the “Water and Wine Tour.” The water aspect came in the form of cataracts (Niagara Falls, Honeoye Falls, Watkins Glen), lakes (Erie, Cayuga, Seneca), and canal (the Erie Canal at Lockport). The wine aspect was the Finger Lakes region.

Niagara Falls, of course, is the sort of place that nothing can quite prepare you for. The presence of the

Canadian Falls
Canadian Falls

falls makes itself felt not only visually and aurally, but in mist and, I think, in a kind of rumble that one doesn’t so much hear as feel. The best views were from the Canadian side, though the US side has wonders to offer, too. We also went down behind the falls on the Canadian side, where we got a stronger sense of its sheer power.

Returning from Canada proved interesting. We were met by a surly immigration officer (what’s your immediate mental image? large, imposing male? No, average-sized female) who seemed to resent having to let us back into our native land and made sure she took long enough over it that we would feel her authority. I feel sorry for visitors of other nationalities—and a bit embarrassed for our country. Our passage through Canadian immigration, by contrast, had been judicious, but not unfriendly.

Old weir at Honeoye Falls
Old weir at Honeoye Falls

Honeoye Falls, by contrast, is a cheerful, rushing mountain creek splashing over rapids and a mill weir. Sheer homeyness rather than sheer force. We wouldn’t have known to visit it except that Jon’s niece Kerri and her family arranged to meet us there for lunch. The stream and the town are both worth visiting. The cascades in Watkins Glen have a comparable amount of water, but are more about determination—the highly visible battle of water against stone that has cut this narrow chasm over thousands of years and is still working away at the task.

Watkins Glen
Watkins Glen

We visited Lockport out of a long fascination with the Erie Canal, that early triumph of engineering and daring in the young republic, and a curiosity about canal locks first evoked by one we had seen in operation at Seattle on the Volcanos and Vines Tour. It was definitely a good call. The canal cruise was a great way to get a sense of the working of the locks—and the challenges in building the whole complicated thing.

Locks at Lockport
Locks at Lockport

Wines were more of an afterthought on this trip. Not being partial to the grapes widely grown in upstate New York, we didn’t expect to find much of interest to us, and that held true for the first few wineries we stopped at. Then we happened into the Ryan William Vineyards, where we found an excellent pinot noir, and Highland Cellars, which makes an excellent Bordeaux-style red they call “Highland Glen.” Fear not, it doesn’t taste a bit like the single-malt the name suggests.

A few notes on food: we had an excellent dinner at Wine on Third in Niagara Falls, NY. The Rabbit Room in Honeoye Falls has excellent fare, served in one of the old grist mill buildings along the creek. In Lockport, we particularly liked Lock 34 (a bar and bistro) and Scripts (an inventive sandwich shop). And we will long remember the friendly welcome we received when we stopped into Groff’s—directly across from the splendid ruins (alas) of the old railroad station—for a beer.

SHOWING OFF THE BAY AREA

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Dan & Ginger dwarfed by redwoods
Dan & Ginger dwarfed by redwoods

Those of us who live in one of the world’s tourism areas commonly observe that we don’t visit the local attractions because, after all, they’re always there and we can do it some other day. Out-of-town visitors provide the principal impetus for us to break out of our rut and see more of where we live. A visit from brother Dan and his wife Ginger gave us just that opportunity this past week and provided us with the excuse for a vacation at home.

It’s not easy to narrow down the attractions of the Bay Area to six days, particularly if you don’t want to exhaust a group of people who are all over 60. So we got a list from them of their desiderata and put in a few of our own. Things started off on a Saturday afternoon with a car tour of Oakland, where we live, including Lake Merritt, of course, and one of our own favorites, Middle Harbor Park. This is a shoreline park with a great view of San Francisco wedged into the Port of Oakland. The port itself, with its huge cranes for handling container ships (said to be the inspiration for the giant walkers in Star Wars) looms at either end; but the park stretches far enough along the shore to have its own sense of open air and holiday within sight of the working world.

Jon treated our guests to a Sunday morning car tour of San Francisco, including a drive down the twisty part of Lombard Street. They also visited Bernard Maybeck’s great Palace of Fine Arts, Alamo Square with its “painted lady” Victorian houses, and the Presidio with its view of the Golden Gate. The afternoon we devoted to a walking tour of our neighborhood, which has several excellent restaurants and interesting shops.

On Monday, we braved the (welcome) showers to visit the two big San Francisco cathedrals that form such a contrast to each other. Both are impressive, but Grace is Episcopal and Gothic while St. Mary’s is Roman Catholic and ‘sixties modern. The architectural contrast is about more than simply design. The Gothic style is interested in detail and diversity, in out-of-the way nooks and crannies, in things that cannot quite be seen but only glimpsed and half-imagined. The modern style of the sixties is much more unitary. There is relatively little of individual interest, but rather a single centralized space dominated by its concrete canopy. Both style make an impression. My own taste votes for the quirkiness of the Gothic, at least for a sacred building. A late lunch at the Cliff House rounded out the morning. The sun had come out. There were a few surfers down below on Ocean Beach. And the food was good—in fact, a great deal better than one has any right to expect at such a spectacular location.

Tuesday was focused on Muir Woods, a place almost as impossible to describe as it is to photograph. There is hardly any way to convey the height of the ancient trees in a forest of coast redwoods. The place is damp and cool and relatively quiet, even with so many visitors. And there is no place else on earth quite like these forests, though the karri trees of Western Australia have a majesty that comes close.

Wednesday was Alcatraz day. The trip there requires advance planning, since tickets sell out quickly. A ferry takes you to the island, where you can then wander pretty much at will till the last ferry leaves for San Francisco in the late afternoon. The walk uphill to the penitentiary proper is good exercise. On the way, you pass the ruins of earlier incarnations of the place, beginning with its role as fortress defending the Golden Gate in the 1850s and prison for Confederate sympathizers in the 1860s.

Neither Jon nor I had been to Alcatraz before. I had read about the rehabilitation of the gardens, and they were indeed rewarding. Even in the quiet garden time of November, they were still interesting and attractive with their variety of succulents. And the views from the island are incomparable. Even the prison itself proved more interesting than we expected, given that neither of us is an aficionado of “true crime.”

Thursday, we all went to Napa, where my sister Wanda has a small vineyard called “Miller’s Pond” in the Coombsville AVA. The day included a drive to St. Helena and lunch at the wonderful Farmstead restaurant, where much of the food is grown onsite. We tasted wine at one winery on the way back from lunch while Dan, who prefers beer, waited patiently until that particular bit of the trip was done with. Then a visit to Whole Foods for the ingredients of a light supper at Wanda’s farm.

At that point Ginger announced that she had been able to check off everything on the list of what she had most wanted to see, which gave us Friday as a day devoted mostliy to rest and recovery—with lunch at Zachary’s Pizza, a Rockridge mainstay.

It was a vacation for us, I think, as much as for Dan and Ginger. It’s even taken us a couple of days to “re-enter” our routines, much as if we had been somewhere far away for that time.

SOME TRAVEL NOTES

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My apologies for a break in continuity occasioned by some time away. For readers who live in the Los Angeles area or may be heading there, here are a few notes:

The Getty Center has a superb traveling exhibit called “Power and Pathos,” a collection of Hellenistic bronze statues, gathered from many different museums, all of them showing the radical shift in classical art from the idealism of the earlier Hellenic style to the realism that was characteristic of the period between Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE and the transition to Late Antiquity in the third century AD. It’s extraordinary to stand as close to these works as people of antiquity would have stood and to see the fine detail of the craftsmanship. One also learns something of the technology that made these bronze sculptures possible. The show remains at the Getty until November 1 and then moves to the National Gallery in Washington, DC, where it is to open in mid-December.

We also saw a much smaller but equally intriguing exhibit on illuminated manuscripts and their manufacture. Alas! it has just ended its run.

We can also recommend a couple of restaurants in the Silver Lake area. One is a Middle-Eastern restaurant called, no doubt for reasons lost in the dim mists of the past, Bowery Bungalow. We took family and friends there for Sunday brunch. Jon and I shared a brunch plate for two that included all sorts of delicacies. The beer on tap is good, too. The other restaurant is Night and Market Song, specializing in Thai street food. We learned from them that an ear of corn that’s been slathered with coconut milk and grilled is a great treat.