Ashland 12 October 2017

Ode to Autumn / Ashland 2017 edition

Maybe you've noticed I'm not taking many pictures, just borrowing (stealing) from OSF? Hunh?

Partly, it's because so much of this is familiar territory – you've been with here with us before, and one of its charms is, it hasn't changed much. This is a remarkably appealing little city, its only defects being, as far as I can tell, (1) it is a city, (2) it doesn't have an ocean, and (3) we don't have a house here. Caspar is still where we want to be. 

Executive Summary: nice place to visit; don't need to live here.

You will also have noticed, no food. Apart from one very good meal at Taroko, a Pan-Asian restaurant devoid of ambiance but possessed of tasty food, I have nothing new and exciting to report.

The context is important: something is very unsettling about the Sonoma and Napa County fires ...unsettling on the same order as the 9/11 attack felt from southern Spain. If we ask the question (as we have done) whether it's sensible to put a city where Houston is, or 3.5 million people in Puerto Rico, ought we also to be asking if it makes sense to put so much development and population anywhere in wooded Northern California? including Caspar, or, for that matter, Ashland, where the forest reaches right through the city to the riparian along Bear Creek – a forest, it must be added, that has been stressed by a decade of drought caused, we must presume, by the same Global Weirding that is causing the strength and frequency of the hurricanes.

So in some very real ways, we aren't entirely here right now.

The leaf peeping is as good here, and lasts longer, than what they present in New England (but don't tell 'em I said so!) and the walk along Lithia Creek remains one of the loveliest and most loved urban park walks I have ever taken. 

The once-beloved Oregon Rain Festival (January 1 - December 31) has held off, and the weather is crisp and crystalline. Rain is promised for tonight. (Note to Jupiter Pluvius: rain would be much appreciated 200 miles south.) 

Breakfast this morning at long-time favorite Morning Glory (good as ever, but the staff seemed disgruntled), and visits to the Ashland Coop and a local leather smith occupied us this morning.

Wired ourselves up at Noble Coffee, a sort of occult treasure in town – mostly known only to townies – where even I enjoy a cappuccino.

Ooops! Forgot to take the picture first.

Wired ourselves up at Noble Coffee, a sort of occult treasure in town – mostly known only to townies – where even I enjoy a cappuccino.

Ooops! Forgot to take the picture first.

Tonight, our fifth and last play. Looks kinda weird. News at 11.

 Well, I dunno.

Dinner was good, at Tot, a sorta post-modern place where we've eaten before. Good flavors, Caspar style.

That's a delicious chicken noodle dish, and asian style duck soup.

The play was ...original. And inscrutable. About a quarter in Korean. Kim Jong Il appeared (as a ghost, along with our protagonist/guides grandmother, also a ghost. We knew they were ghosts because they were performing on the back of the backdrop, which let itself down to rest at an angle away from the three-quarter thrust stage. Interesting.)

Mixed themes: the experience of being genetically Korean of Korean-born parents but raised without Korean, then going home. About losing one's American identity in Korea because "everyone looks alike," and so, about racism. About the foolishness of war, and the incredible short-sightedness of planting mines in a "demilitarized zone that, after 50 years, has become the last refuge of some endangered Asian macrofauna, like bears and tigers. Who get regularly blown up by the mines...

The strangeness of getting old in such a fractured society, and a hint at the different interpretation of suicide, East and West.

The play, written some years ago and so not intentionally topical, is intriguing to us, if only because it holds up a mirror to the craziness, now on both sides.

The audience didn't know what to think, and neither do I. But I enjoyed the bafflement.

Tomorrow to family in Silverton, with a good slug of obligatory I-5 from Grants Pass to Eugene. There may not be a lot of posting during the next three days.