crocuses & daffodils, february 2011

playtime for taz

I've never promised you a daily dose of kitteh, O Gentle Reader(s), but I do think this is a little overdue. Plus this humble blog has been a bit heavy with vacation photos and incomprehensible modern art of late, so I figured I ought to change things up a bit. Also, the audience for cat photos is much wider than the audience for photos of the latest stainless steel whatzit on the bus mall. (I'm not actually convinced the latter audience is nonzero, but that's never stopped me before.)

And of course there's the fact that Taz is the world's awesomest cat ever, an inarguable fact agreed upon by all right-thinking people, and sharing photos of him is my way of improving the Internet and generally making the world a better place and whatnot.

thistle, glenn otto park

cast iron boneyard

Vintage decorative cast iron, presumably from long-vanished downtown buildings, now in storage around the east end of the Hawthorne Bridge. I'd read that ornamentation from old cast iron front buildings was often salvaged and put in storage when the buildings were demolished. I guess I just sort of assumed storage meant somewhere with walls and a roof, at the bare minimum. That seems to not be the case for at least some of the recovered materials. I'd guess most of this stuff is now too far gone to ever be usable again.

waikiki ultraviolet

A handful of ultraviolet photos from Hawaii. These were taken using a B+W 403 filter, which lets a bit of infrared through along with the ultraviolet, and the camera & lens are better at handling infrared. So you often end up with a mix of both sides just beyond the visible spectrum. Infrared shows up as red, and ultraviolet shows up as shades of blue and, well, violet. As you can see, most materials are good at reflecting one or the other, but not both.

cayenne

Some cayenne peppers I grew a few months ago. I never cease to be amazed when I manage to keep a plant alive, and it somehow produces something edible. That part always seems like magic.



Those of you out there who farm for a living, or routinely garden successfully, you can stop laughing at me now, please. Thanks.

Glenn Jackson Bridge

View Larger Map

The ongoing bridge project finally takes us to the Glenn Jackson Bridge, which carries Interstate 205 over the Columbia River. This one had been on my TODO list for quite a while, but it took a while for me to get around to it. I'd covered a few other bridges in the past on lunch breaks from the office (one advantage to working downtown), and others (the Interstate Bridge included) by getting an early start and visiting before work. The Glenn Jackson Bridge was just too far away and too long to make either of those work. I considered walking it on a weekend, but this is still just an idle and rather pointless project, and it was never a very high priority when it came time to decide what to do on the weekend. I do have a life, you know, and a reasonably normal one in fact, despite what the contents of this humble blog might lead you to believe. In any case, I finally managed to work it in when I took a staycation back in July, and even then it was competing against a long list of other things I thought I might like to do.

The first hurdle to get past is realizing the bridge is walkable in the first place. It's a big, long, wide freeway bridge, and it would not be at all unusual for such a bridge to have no pedestrian or bike facilities of any kind. That tends to be the rule rather than the exception. (See I-205 Clackamas River Bridge, I-84 Sandy River Bridges, Abernethy Bridge, Boone Bridge, etc.). The Glenn Jackson Bridge does have a pedestrian path, however, and a rather unique one at that. Rather than the usual configuration with north and southbound sidewalks on the edges of the bridge, there's a single walkway up the middle of the bridge.

The sheer length of the bridge is kind of a problem too. The bridge crosses a rather wide part of the river, plus Government Island in the middle, and it curves while doing so, so the bridge is over 7000 feet from bank to bank. Meaning that if you walk across and back, it's a nearly 3 mile round trip. Which is fine and all for anyone in reasonable shape; it just means it'll most likely take longer than you can get away with squeezing out of the start or middle of a work day. And besides the length, the bridge is also not flat. The Washington side of the river features high bluffs, and the bridge connects to the bluff top. So if you're heading north on the bridge, the main span from Government Island to the Washington shore is uphill the entire way, which is annoying.

Parking was kind of a problem too. I'd hoped there was a way to just ride a bus or MAX to somewhere near the bridge, then walk across one way, and catch another bus back across the river. But that just isn't possible. The Washington side is firmly in suburbia, and the Oregon side is semi-suburbia, and there just isn't a wealth of transit options out there. So I had to fall back to the old routine of driving to the bridge, finding somewhere to park, and then walking across and back. And unlike the Interstate Bridge there aren't city parks with parking lots on either end of the bridge. The Oregon side does have big box stores with huge parking lots, at least, which is the next best thing other than the small but nonzero possibility of being nabbed by one of the city's predatory towing companies if they figure out you aren't a customer. As I did with the North Portland Harbor bridge, I superstitiously appeased the retail gods by going in and buying something. The closest store is the Home Depot on Airport Way, so I picked up a couple of houseplants, which have already appeared on this humble blog at least once.

The approach would be a lot simpler if you arrived on the I-205 bike path; the pathway on the bridge is just the logical continuation of the bike path further south. If you get on the path right at the foot of the bridge like I did, I suspect you're in an extremely small minority. Still, it's possible.

So assuming you found somewhere nearby to park in the vague area of the Home Depot store, you first want to find the stairs or ramp up to the bike path, since it's already elevated nearly to freeway level. Once you're up there, look around for an intersection. If you head straight north, the bike path dead ends at Marine Drive. If you turn west at the sign that cryptically says "WASH POINTS", you'll cross over a freeway ramp, and then under the northbound side of the freeway (an underpass that tends to be a bit garbage-strewn), and then you get to a sharp corner you can't see around. Around that corner you'll find a ramp leading up to the bridge walkway, in a sort of narrow canyon. While walking up the ramp, I looked behind me nervously a couple of times to see if any TIE Fighters were chasing me, but they must've had the day off too.

Once you're up the ramp, you're on the bridge, or at least on the way to the bridge. It's kind of weird having 3-4 lanes of freeway traffic zooming by on either side of you. Weird, and very noisy. You might want to bring earplugs, really, or a good pair of headphones. Or just deal, I mean, you probably aren't going to get permanent hearing loss or anything, it's just kind of annoying.

Anyway, it's a long slog just to get to the river, and then you cross to forbidden Government Island, where big signs instruct you to stay on the pedestrian path and not run across a bunch of lanes of freeway traffic and then tumble down a steep slope to get to the island. Similar signs warn drivers there's no access whatsoever to the island from the freeway. There are a couple of docks so boaters can set foot on the island, but even then you aren't supposed to venture inland. This is all quite peculiar. Government Island is technically a rather obscure Oregon state park, but the center of the island is either owned by or leased to someone who grazes cattle there. Or at least that's the cover story. It isn't hard to dream up conspiracy theories about the place. As I was walking along this part of the bridge I realized I was humming the theme to Jurassic Park. No joke. I mean, suuure they're raising cows, but only so the velociraptors have something to eat. Besides, with a name like "Government Island", you just know they're up to no good.

While you're walking this leg of the bridge, you might notice that planes taking off and landing at PDX often fly right over the bridge at a very low altitude. This is a big reason why the bridge doesn't have a great deal of aesthetic appeal when you drive or walk over it. Any type of bridge that featured towers or suspension cables would be considered a safety hazard and the FAA would veto it.

So after the island you still have to walk, and walk, and walk, and it's uphill all the way to the Vancouver side. And once you're there, there's another ramp down to street level. There, everything else is shaded by the bridge, but sunlight streams down from the ramp as if it belonged to an alien spaceship (as seen in the closing scenes of E.T. & Close Encounters of the Third Kind, for example). Before heading back, walk over to one side a few steps for a view of the bridge's titanic columns. It's all just a little otherworldly. Although you're still in the 'Couve, and mundane suburban traffic is whizzing past behind you as you wait for the aliens to descend.

Unless you have a ride arranged on the Vancouver side, you'll eventually have to retrace your steps: Up the ramp to the mothership, and then back past the velociraptors and under the jets, down the Death Star trench, and back to the mini-mall we go. At least this time it's downhill. On a bike I expect this would actually be kind of awesome. A mile and a half, paved, no cars to worry about, downhill basically the whole way -- where else in town are you going to find something like that? I counted about two dozen cyclists on the bridge on this little adventure, about 2/3 of them heading in the downhill direction. And zero other pedestrians.

We can't wrap this up without touching on the obligatory "not dying" angle, which as usual is a real stretch. Although it's incredibly noisy at times on the bridge, you're pretty safe from traffic unless there's an apocalyptic CHiPS-style mass car accident, with big explosions, semis hurtling through the air, that sort of thing. You could possibly die of old age while walking back and forth, so there's that. Also, you could mistake an actual alien mothership for the Vancouver bridge ramp, and walk up the wrong one, and end up in a bizarre alien lab where they're trying to learn about human mating behavior, and eventually die of exhaustion. So there's that too. Or the velociraptors escape and get you. Or maybe the pterodactyls. There's just no end to the bizarre imaginary dangers if you really put your mind to it.

The Seven Continents

A few photos of The Seven Continents, in front of the Vdara Hotel in Las Vegas. It's by well-known designer Karim Rashid, who also designed the adjacent Silk Road restaurant.

The restaurant (and the Vdara as a whole, really) are in kind of an obscure location that doesn't get a lot of foot traffic, and sadly it's going to be closing in early March. You would say "sadly" too if you'd ever tried their so-called "breakfast sliders", especially the one with the steak & quail egg on top. I had a dream about that one recently. I'm not kidding.

This is apropos because The Seven Continents is not included in the official CityCenter Fine Art Collection brochure [pdf] or any of the other PR about all the expensive art they've installed around the area. I don't know if this was an oversight, or it was installed too late to be included, or simply that it's considered part of the restaurant decor and not a standalone artwork. There's a very broad definition of "art" that claims art is whatever artists do. By that definition I suppose design is whatever designers do, therefore this counts as design and not art. So maybe when the restaurant goes, it goes too. I mean, it's Las Vegas, even that fine art brochure never uses the word "permanent" anywhere. I'll have to check next time we're in the area & see if it's still there. Although that may lead to another round of dreams about quail eggs.

banyan, kapiolani park

A few photos of an enormous banyan tree in Honolulu's Kapiolani Park. I probably ought to have used the wide angle lens here, or at least taken a few photos from further away, since I never managed to fit the whole tree into a shot. I was more interested in the crazy vine-like details of the tree anyway, but it would have helped to have a sort of establishing shot to start with. Oh well. You can probably find photos of complete banyan trees somewhere on the interwebs, if you really need an establishing shot.



Until just now I had no idea banyan trees and strangler figs are one and the same thing. I vaguely remember reading some sort of "life in the jungle" nature book as a kid that went on about the strangler fig, presenting it as a sort of shadowy, sinister jungle plant. The author seemed especially incensed that the strangler fig tended to benefit from the hard work of honest upstanding trees, and generally lacked a proper Protestant work ethic. The book failed to mention the fact that it grows into an even bigger tree, one whose English name comes from the Gujarati word for "merchant" (as a large banyan provides enough shade that you can set up shop beneath it). You'd think that would have been a point in the tree's favor, but it would have been an inconvenient detail in the simple tale of good straight-n-tall trees vs. evil freeloading commie trees.



I kept thinking that the name "Banyan" had geek connotations too but I couldn't place it immediately. What I was thinking of was the old Banyan VINES network operating system from the mid 1980s & early 1990s, which apparently was a set of file & directory services running on top of a mutant flavor of SVR3 Unix (which you the customer weren't allowed to touch directly). I never saw it firsthand; conventional wisdom held that it was superior to whatever flavor of NetWare was current back then, but everyone bought NetWare anyway. It was supposed to be the "standard", and it was a lot easier to find & hire Novell CNEs than whatever the Banyan equivalent was. And then Windows NT and the interwebs came along and killed off the whole NOS market. So a little bit of obscure retrotech history here, with no relation to the rest of this post except for the name. FWIW. Mostly because I can't think of much of anything else to say about the actual tree.

pink (honolulu zoo)

traveller's tree

More tree photos from Hawaii, this time of what I'm fairly sure is the strangest tree I've ever seen. This is a Traveller's Tree (Ravenala madagascariensis), which hails from Madagascar. That's probably the only unsurprising thing about it; the only tree I know of that might top this one for sheer weirdness is the baobab, which also hails from Madagascar.

I haven't yet seen a convincing explanation for the odd foliage. An urban myth among gardeners suggests that these trees always orient themselves east to west, so they serve as a directional aid for travellers, hence the name. It sounds like something that could potentially be true, and it would be kind of cool if it was, but I found a couple of forum threads full of people pointing out that the trees in their yard do no such thing. So don't toss out that GPS unit just yet.



The most common hypothesis about the name is that rainwater supposedly collects in the foliage and the trees serve as a water source for travellers. Again, it sounds entirely possible, but I ran across one brief account of someone repeatedly trying and failing to actually do this, and he goes on to note that there is no shortage of available water in these trees' native environment anyway. Another account points out that the collected water tends to be full of dead insects and "other not so nice and smelly stuff". So maybe this story is true and maybe it isn't. Traveller's trees seem to be a natural, renewable source of mythology, if nothing else.



The reader will not be surprised to learn that the traveller's tree's main pollinator is not an insect, or a bat, or even a bird. Nope, these trees are pollinated by lemurs, specifically the Black and White Ruffed Lemur. There are other, less exotic, ways to propagate traveller's trees, so the home gardener is not required to keep a troop of lemurs around. You have to admit that would be kind of awesome, though.



One additional legend, as related here, is that wishes made in front of a traveller's tree are sure to come true. That sounds just as testable as the previous two notions, but I haven't found any accounts of anyone doing so. I'm fairly sure I didn't wish for anything when I was standing in front of this one. I was too busy taking photos and saying useless things like "Huh" and "Never seen anything like it".

ironwood

A couple of photos of Ironwood ( Casuarina equisetifolia ) trees in Honolulu. These tall and quite striking trees seem to be everywhere; several streets are lined with them in the area around Kapiolani Park, for example. So I was surprised to learn they're considered a highly invasive pest species that spreads easily and crowds out everything in its path, including threatened or endangered native species. The current status seems to be similar to that of English ivy in the Northwest: It's not actually illegal (yet) to plant or own ironwood trees, but many people vehemently wish you wouldn't.