Lucky Thirteen

The good folks who own the Winchester mansion, in San Jose, California, have engaged in a clever bait-and-switch campaign. On the Internet, on half-hour TV shows on the paranormal, and on billboards all along Interstate-80, I-99 and I-5, the Winchester Mystery House is hyped as the monument of crazy widow Sarah Winchester, who listened to spirits and built staircases to nowhere.

After you park in the parking lot across Winchester Street from Santana Row and next to Century 21 Cinemas; after you enter the large and chock-full gift shop and purchase your tickets for the tour; after you wait in the tree-lined courtyard for your tour to be called; after you meet your guide and begin to see the house, you find out that there was a lot more to Sarah Pardee Winchester than séances and the number 13.

Sarah’s History

Sarah Pardee was about 22 years old in 1862, when she married William Wirt Winchester, son of the president of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Sarah was the daughter of a carriage manufacturer; an educated and cultured young woman who spoke four languages and played several musical instruments. William and Sarah had a daughter who died in infancy. William suffered from tuberculosis, and died several years later. Within a year of his death Sarah Winchester lost her mother-and-father-in-law as well.

This left Sarah with an extraordinary fortune and a broken heart. The rumor is that she visited a psychic in Boston and asked why her life had been filled with such misfortune. The psychic told her that she was being punished by the spirits of all those who had been killed by Winchester weapons. To make amends, Sarah was to move across the continent, find an unfinished house, and continue building it the rest of the days of her life. This would appease the spirits.

It is possible that this was the motivation for the widow’s move to San Jose. It might also have been that it was as far as she could get from the place that took her daughter, husband, and the whole Winchester side of the family.

The mansion was a work in progress her entire life. It has 160 rooms. Sarah Winchester did not draw plans, but she met with her head carpenter regularly to discuss what her next project or plan was. The amazing thing about the house is not the size; it is the quality and beauty of the workmanship. Sarah had what amounted to an unlimited fortune in those days and her annual income was about $365,000. She owned nearly one half of the Winchester stock, and all this was before the profit from the orchard she owned and managed. Our tour guide told us that she had $1,000/day income. To give that some context, Sarah paid her servants $3/day, and that was twice the going rate. To buy a rare and stunningly beautiful stained glass window, the most expensive window in the house, Sarah had to spend a day-and-a-half’s worth of money.

The front of the house with the post-Sarah Winchester-era formal gardens. Sarah had a taller hedge and a “wilder” look to her garden.

The Mansion Tour

Yes, there are doors that open onto walls, and, scarier, doors that open onto air. There are strange staircases, but frankly, the staircases are the most easily explained. We went through a  storage room that contains left over wall-paper (a type that was used on walls in the White House and on the Titanic, and is still made today—it cost $1.00/foot then, now it’s $200/foot) and many Tiffany stained glass windows that were never installed. The storage room was part of the original six-room farmhouse that Sarah bought and began remodeling. Our guide told us that we would be going to the remodeled hay loft, and, to get there, we would take “the crazy staircase.” The staircase has seven switchbacks, risers that are two-and-a-half inches high, and goes 110 linear feet to rise nine feet in the air. It’s like the strangest airport line you’ve ever shuffled through. The two-inch high stairs seem weird indeed until you remember that four-foot-ten inch tall Sarah suffered from severe and progressive arthritis. Suddenly the short, easy steps make sense, and so does the electric elevator Sarah had installed several years later.

There is a staircase that runs right into the ceiling. This looks more like a drawing or arithmetic error than any crazy-town spiritual design. If you know anyone who builds, they can tell you that staircases are not as simple as they seem, and that people frequently make mistakes on the geometry. If I were an educated, cultured woman who had messed up the basics on a staircase, I might blame the spirits too.

Winchester did like the number 13, and a web motif shows up in designs and stained glass throughout the house. Behind Sarah’s elegant second-floor bedroom is the “séance room,” to which Sarah allegedly repaired each night to commune with the spirits. Perhaps she did, but it is interesting to note that one window in the room looks down on the kitchen, at such an angle that tiny Sarah could see down, but someone looking up from the kitchen would not be able to see her, and another glass doorway looks down into the servant’s kitchen. Plainly that room served more than one purpose.

This is an example of the web design that shows up in wood carvings, leaded glass and stained glass throughout the house. It’s possible that it has some spiritual significance; or maybe Sarah just liked it.

Sarah also designed counters in the kitchen with grooves that run down toward the sink. When servants were washing vegetables or dishes, less time was needed to wipe down the counters afterward. Between the kitchen and the glamorous Venetian dining room, Sarah built a pass-through, so that servants didn’t have to leave the kitchen to carry food all the way into the dining room. Sarah also had a hydraulic piston in the house. It has its own room, and it’s installed above ground, horizontally. This is very unusual; most pistons were installed vertically, in the ground. Sarah had lived through the 1906 earthquake; clearly the piston was more easily worked on or repaired aboveground. Sarah made this choice probably for the safety and convenience of her workers. She also paid her servants, groundskeepers and carpenters three dollars a day (in cash) which was twice the going rate, and allowed them to have their families at the house. She was probably difficult to work for, but she made it worthwhile.

(I did wonder if she lost a lot of servants — no, I mean literally, lost. I don’t know how long it would take someone to learn that house, and I imagine a new serving girl, lugging a now-cold pot of tea and some stale cookies on a tray, wandering helplessly for days until she stumbled across the sewing room, or something.)

For Anyone With a Steam-punk Sensibility

Sarah was the daughter of a highly successful carriage manufacturer, and married a man whose company’s repeating rifles changed the face of warfare. It isn’t surprising that she was interested in technology. She seemed to have a practical and technical mind, and was forward-looking in lots of ways. The house is set up for passive water-recycling (water from the plants in the conservatories fell onto the zinc floor, through the drain, and was recycled in the gardens; water from the hydraulic piston that lifted the freight elevator was also recycled.) She had a gas plant and gas lines to the house several years before it was common. Later she wired the house for electricity. Inside the house, Sarah had a call box in the servants’ quarters; a button pressed in any of the main rooms rang a bell and dropped a card in the servants’ rooms. Years before alternating current, this device ran on batteries.

The second elevator, an Otis, was electric-powered.

The Winchester mansion also had a garage with a built-in car wash, complete with a boiler and a hose suspended from the ceiling, much like self-service carwashes today… only this was built in 1910.

The boiler used to heat the water to wash that stubborn mud off the fenders of Sarah Winchester’s cars

Just like we use today. By the way, that’s Jim, our “behind the scenes” tour guide

I wish my garage were this neat.

The Winchester mansion is a place where the technology of the time was used practically and innovatively. Anyone who wants to write a steam-punk novel, and “push” Victorian era tech in some way, could use this house as a template.

Crazy as She Wants to Be

Sarah Winchester probably was mentally ill. It doesn’t seem like she was schizophrenic or paranoid; I think now we might consider the need to keep building more of an anxiety or impulse disorder – maybe a weird type of hoarding impulse. The old saying seems to be true — if you are mentally ill and wealthy, we tend to call it “eccentric.”

The estate also has stunning gardens and fountains. Pictures are coming!

Oscar, or “Oz” is a carnival magician. He is proficient but self-centered, more interested in seducing pretty women than anything else. The opening is set in Kansas, shot in sepia tones (not quite black and white), where he is visited by a woman he was attracted to when he came through town the last time. She wants him to know a neighbor, John Gale, (a bit of provenance here, clearly she is going to be Dorothy Gale’s mother) has asked her to marry him. Plainly she is giving Oz one last chance to sweep her off her feet; he doesn’t. He tells her she deserves a good man; he doesn’t want to be a good man — he wants to be a great man. Then he climbs aboard a hot-air balloon and gets swept away by a tornado.

Before that happens though, he does his magic act and makes a pretty girl disappear. A crippled girl in the front row asks him to make her able to walk. Her impoverished parents offer him money, and the crowd turns on him when he won’t heal the girl. This makes no  sense at all. This isn’t a tent-revival, it’s a carnival. the vulnerable little girl might ask; her parents and the crowd certainly wouldn’t. The point of this, of course, is to show that Oz can’t work miracles. Apparently the screenplay can’t either, because this sequence makes no sense.

But then the balloon, etc… Oz lands in a world that slaps us across the face with color. The Oz-parts of the movie are stunningly beautiful,  with lush, high-contrast colors; flowers, trees, birds and butterflies. Oz crashes into a river and meets Theodora, fetchingly decked out in black riding pants, a red jacket and big floppy red hat. Theodora is delighted to meet him, especially when she finds out his name is Oz. The king of Oz, who was murdered, gave a prophecy that a wizard would come with the name of the land, and save the people from the wicked witch.

That’s a fine prophecy, with only one small problem… the king was poisoned by the wicked witch; and nobody knew she was wicked until she did that; including the king. So I guess this is a posthumous prophecy.

Oz smells an opportunity, so he charms Theodora, using a trick with a music box that we have seen earlier. Along the road to Oz he meets a flying monkey in a bellhop suit, rescues him from a lion, and takes him on as an assistant. Finnigan, the monkey, swears loyalty to Oz to his dying day; Oz then admits he’s not a real wizard (but only to Finnigan). In the Emerald City, which really is made of emeralds, he meets Theodora’s older sister Evanora, who explains that she is the royal advisor. Oz will be the new king… right after he kills the wicked witch. It’s easy; all he has to do is break her wand.

Evanora also cautions Theodora not to get too attached to the wizard. Plainly it’s too late; naive young Theodora has lost her heart to Oz, although frankly it’s hard to see why. He’d just not that cool. Oz sets off on his quest and meets a porcelain girl whose legs have been broken; her village (charmingly made of teapots) was destroyed by the witch’s flying baboons. Oz mends her legs with some glue from his bag of tricks; and this is the first emotionally affecting scene in the movie. (He lets her walk again! Get it?) China Girl is vulnerable and shy but wants to go with him to kill the witch, and after she throws a first-rate tantrum he agrees. The three of them go off to the dark forest to confront the Wicked Witch; who is blond, drop-dead gorgeous and not wicked at all. From there things go exactly as expected.

The big single problem is that the writers of this movie didn’t have a story. More accurately, they didn’t know whose story they wanted to tell. Oz could have a story; Oz wants to be Thomas Alva Edison. This could have played out with some character growth for him, but probably, then, would not end up with him being the Wizard of Oz, and this is a prequel. The most complete and tragic character arc is that of Theodora; but the back-story is too murky. Why is this powerful witch so sheltered that she would fall in love with the first man who asked her to dance? Does Theodora believe for one second that Glinda actually murdered the previous wizard king? Of course she doesn’t. Theordora has a great story, and a great version of that story is included in the musical Wicked.

The movie also doesn’t know if it believes in magic or not. Oz plans to defeat the witches using Yankee ingenuity, and putting on a great magic show (in short, doing what he will do in The Wizard of Oz); but behind the scenes there is a mano a mano magical duel. The witches, though, seems scared of Oz’s stage tricks. Well, which is it? Stage magic or real magic? Dude, pick a side and go with it.

Rachel Wiesz does the best she can do with an ungrateful part, but she does she get a great wardrobe out of the deal.

It’s a measure of how disengaged I was that I thought at least twice that they should have made the movie 10 years earlier and case Johnny Depp. It wouldn’t have helped. The movie needed a story, and a solid back-story, and some real characters.

But it shore is purty.

Sharon Yamoto and Ann Kaneko directed A Flicker in Eternity. This film is available on DVD and I recommend that you go buy it right now.

Lil Tokyo Reporter is a period-piece, a gently fictionalized short film about Sei Fujii, a Japanese American in Los Angeles. Fujii, a real historical character, ran a Japanese language newspaper and radio broadcast in Little Tokyo. In this movie he confronts the gangsters who are running a “gentlemen’s club” and fleecing the Nissei farmers and growers of their hard-earned savings. The film is beautiful. In the Question and Answer section at the end, I was surprised to find out how much of the film was CGI. They could not find a neighborhood or a back lot anywhere that had the right look, and the director informed us that there wasn’t a single real car in the film. The costumes were beautiful. This film was directed by Jeffrey Chin.

The last film was a brief – 12 minute – homage to Keye Luke, famous for being Charlie Chan’s “Number One Son” but also for being the real first Kato in the 1940’s Green Hornet serial. Luke’s film career was long and huge; I was surprised to find out how many films he had done. Keye Luke, directed by Timothy Tau, was shot in sepia tones with period clothing and dialogue, but a contemporary sensibility and a bit of a nod and a wink to the modern audience. For a bio-pic, this was very refreshing.

Linda with the DisOrient Banner

Last weekend I saw 19 movies in two and a half days.

Before you do the arithmetic and tell me that this is highly unlikely, I should explain that several of those were short films. Two, in fact, were each just six minutes long.

DisOrient film Festival is held in Eugene, Oregon. The Festival’s mission is to present “honest portrayals of the diversity of the Asian American experience.” Asian, in this context, includes Pacific Islander, which is why I was at the event. I had come up to see my friend Linda Kane’s documentary Nona Beamer; a Legacy of Aloha.

If I say her film was great, you will think that I am biased. The movie played to a standing-room-only crowd, though, and the entire selection committee, and most of the volunteers, told Linda how much they liked the film. After it showed, a half dozen people came up to her to share their experiences with Nona Beamer, a well-known music and hula teacher in Hawaii.

Linda’s film, at 90 minutes, is a full-length feature. The festival offered three sets of short films, categorized by theme. Saturday morning’s theme was “Family Dramas.”

Basketball Meri Jaan, by Veena Hampapur, was the first 6-minute film. Yeshodhara immigrated from India to the US (Dallas?) thirty years ago, She talks about how isolated and alone she felt… until she discovered the LA Lakers. She and her grand-daughters watch the Lakers, and the three of them go to a home game. All three women discuss the way the love of the sport has bridged not only cultural, but generational divides. In six minutes, Basketball Meri Jaan touches your heart and gives you lots to think about.

Reiko’s Hina Dolls is a 15-minute fictional film about a Japanese family who has moved to Canada in the 1930s. They cherish a collection of Hina dolls. Together, they face devastating loss and the threat of internment after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The little girl who played Reiko made this short film come alive. Kamiko Matsui, the director, was available to answer questions after the films were over.

Paulina  follows a Cambodian teenager in Washington DC as she comes to grips with the realities of her father’s gambling lifestyle. Of the morning short features, Paulina, directed by Cayleen So, was the most polished and professional looking. I’m sure we will be seeing a full-length feature film from So pretty soon.

The Commitment, directed by Albert Chan, is about Robert and Ethan, a gay couple who are adopting an Asian-American baby (Robert is Asian American). A sudden obstacle to their plan forces them to re-examine their own relationship. I liked this one better when I learned that it was based on a read couple’s experiences.

My Mother’s Jade, by Irene Young, explores the tension between a rebellious teen-aged girl and her Chinese immigrant mother.  This was “inspired by actual events.” The dialogue was anachronistic; the girl refers to her white boyfriend’s cigarettes as “cancer sticks”– an expression I haven’t heard in 20 years. To prove that he is a complete sleaze, the boyfriend calls her “my little won-ton.”  The mother’s story about her jade bracelet, a piece she saved up and bought for herself, and the tales of the spiritual properties of jade, are wonderful, though. The movie seems to end on a cliff-hanger; will the girl choose tradition (her mother) or the sleazy white boyfriend? The choice never really seems in doubt to me, but the emotion between mother and daughter felt genuine throughout.

The festival was held at the Bijou Theater in Eugene, on East 13th Street. It is staffed 100% by volunteers, and it seems like they should have been frazzled, but everyone was uniformly friendly, helpful, funny and always willing to go the extra mile. In one case that extra mile — or those miles — went all the way to Portland, when one film-maker got stranded because, due to the sequester, his flight was cancelled with little notice. A volunteer drove up and got him. At the end of the festival, another volunteer drove Linda back to the airport instead of just dropping her at the shuttle, which Linda had suggested. These people love their movies and their film-makers (and their audience).

Saturday afternoon’s theme was “Heroes and Icons.” There I saw the second-best film of the festival (Linda’s was the best, of course!) called A Flicker in Eternity.

One of my favorites is somewhere around 783. It’s called Henley Hornbrook. Henley Hornbrook sounds like the name of a derring-do hero in a melodrama.

Somewhere in Tehama County, there is an exit for Easy Street and Shamrock Avenue.

Before that, another favorite of mine is Mountain Gate Wonderland Avenue. It turns out that Mountain Gate is the name of small town, and Wonderland Avenue is an Avenue. Wouldn’t it be cool to live on Wonderland Avenue?

As some of you have observed, I’m on a crow kick — more accurately, a corvidae kick. With that curious synchronicity that seems to happen when you focus a lot of mental energy on a topic, two books on that very topic found their way to me lately. Well, one I had to go seek out, but still.

Wild Birds Unlimited is a Santa Rosa Store specializing in All Things Avian. They have seed mixes, suet and jam cakes, meal worms, feeders, houses, binoculars, spotting scopes, bird sculpture, bird jewelry, bird clothing and books on birds. I called them about two weeks ago to see if they had any books on the physiology of corvids. They did not.

By the way, books on the physicality of birds in general and corvids in particular are darned hard for me to find! People want to write books about corvids in mythology and folklore, and books about corvid behavior. Well, I want to read those books too, but right now I was curious about things like how a crow’s brain works, and what their resting heartbeat is (643 bpm)  and stuff like that.

“Nope,” the nice lady at Birds Unlimited said, “We don’ t have any books like that but we have a nice book called Bird Brains. It’s not about brains, exactly, but it’s about corvidae and how intelligent they are. It’s old though, it was written in 1995.”

Bird Brains was written by Candace Savage and published by the Sierra club, in 1995. Savage is an articulate writer who loves corvids, and the photographs in the book are outstanding. Savage includes folklore and folk tales about ravens, crows, magpies and jackdaws in sidebars on almost every page. Because of when she was writing it, Savage cannot back up her delightful anecdotes of the reasoning power, tool-making and innovation of crows with “hard science.”

Along came The Gifts of the Crow, by John Mazluff. This book was published in 2012. The way I found out about it was by talking to Brandy (another crow fan; hmm… crows and books, what’s up with that?) about my search. “Oh, a friend at Copperfield’s told me there a new book out about crows,” she said. “It’s on the non-fiction, New Arrivals table.”  On my break I went over, and there it was.

Science-tech has evolved since 1995 and many of the things that Savage opined upon in 1995 have now been proved, or in some cases disproved, by the use of infra-red cameras and brain scans on living birds. These techniques do not harm the birds.

Gifts of the Crow discusses key areas of corvidae behavior:

1. Language
2. Delinquency
3. Insight
4. Frolic
5. Risk-Taking
6. Awareness
7. Passion, Wrath and Grief

I am talking about The Gifts of the Crow before I’ve finished it, something I rarely do, but the chapter on brain development and neurology alone is worth the price of the book. And the gem of knowledge that they have lips is worth it again.

Both books have good bibliographies, which also helps.

Gifts, while it is filled with charming pen and pencil sketches by Paul Angell, does not have photos. This may have been a marketing choice; they want it considered a science book, not a coffee table book, but still, it’s a shame. However, if you have Bird Brains on the table next to you while you are reading it, you can browse those exquisite photos as you read about these startling birds.

My writer/reviewer friend Terry recently had a bully try to intimidate her on Facebook. Terry reviews for Fantasyliterature.com,and she contributes a weekly column called Magazine Monday. I am not going to include the name of the magazine or the editor in this post, but if you want to read Terry’s review, click here.

I am going to call the bully OSG, which is an acronym of something he calls himself. There will be no links to his blog because I don’t want to send people to this guy. You can probably find him if you have nothing better to do.

Terry always links from Facebook to her reviews. In the review, she said she found that this invitation-only hard SF magazine, edited by a low-midlist hard SF writer, felt like “an exercise in nostalgia.” In her comments on each story, she pointed out predictable plot lines with no twists or new ways of seeing things. Of the nine stories reviewed, she singled out three that she found highly successful and explained why. Generally, though, she concluded that this magazine, with its many reprints of stories that were not outstanding the first time around, not to be for her.

OSG pounced, immediately mischaracterizing what Terry had said. “The idea that good storytelling is an exercise in nostalgia strikes me as appalling,” is one example.Terry wrote nothing even close to that.  Another is, ” Clear, unadorned prose is an out-dated style?” Terry wrote nothing like that statement either. She did describe the prose in one story as clear and unadorned.

He probably didn’t know who he was dealing with. In addition to being astonishingly well-read, Terry, who brings the values and intellectual rigor of literary criticisms to her reviews, is also a practicing lawyer. She handled him tidily.  The exchange, with OSG hectoring and trying to put words in Terry’s mouth, and Terry calming correcting him, only went on as long as it did because Terry kept inviting him to debate the review on its merits, something he refused to do.

Back at the Brat-Cave

Like most bullies, as soon as he realized he did not have a compliant victim, OSG ran away. From the safely of his blog, though, he continued to whine, revealing at last his real problem with Terry’s review. Terry had noted that there was only one piece of work in the magazine that had been written by a woman.

Here was the true source of OSG’s rage. He described the comment as something from the crazy-old-feminist-with-something-up-her-pooper-category. (That is an exact quote and it’s his link to the review.) Here is the single most revealing quote in his post:

“You’re kind of damned if you do, damned if you don’t with some people, aren’t you? Can you imagine the froth, the rage she would have spewed if they hadn’t included any female authors?”

We’ll come back to that comment in a few minutes.

Is Terry a feminist? Hell, yes. Is she crazy? I’m not a clinician, but I can say with confidence that she is not any more crazy than anyone else I know… and far less crazy than some. Is she old? Terry referred to her age in the column. To OSG, she probably does seem old. She’s a year younger than me, so of course, to me she does not.

OSG could have engaged Terry on the specific points of her review. Why didn’t he? I don’t know, but three theories occur to me:

1. He can’t analyze. He’s a simple binary soul; he either likes it/doesn’t like it,and case closed.
2. He doesn’t want to elevate female Terry to the level of an equal in his mind by dignifying her review with a thoughtful response.
3. He can’t respond because, despite some artful bluffing, he hasn’t really read the magazine.

Personally, if I were a betting person, I’d put my money on #3.

The Briefcase Bomb

Now let’s, as the kids say, “unpack” that “Damned if you do…” statement.

What’s the subtext here? It’s pretty simple:

1. Women can’t write. Letting one in was a kindness. Be appropriately grateful.
2. Hard SF is our domain, the privilege of men. Keep up the attitude, honey, and we’ll see to it that none of you get in. Got it?

My comments here are not about the magazine at all. The editor obviously picked stories he liked or stories from authors he likes. If he is truly going to print a bimonthly magazine of reprinted hard SF, though, there are plenty of women who were and are highly skilled at the straightforward “hard” science fiction short story; Leigh Brackett; Kate Wilhelm; James Tiptree Jr; Marta Randall (although she was always New Wave), Connie Willis. I can name that many and I barely read short fiction.

OSG’s real problem is that about forty years ago the rigid gender roles started breaking down, and apparently he only just now got the text message. OSG is a gamer. It must just frost his tomatoes that women are entering gaming in droves, and writing games. Women successfully write military science fiction. Women are CEOs, scientists, astronauts, explorers. A woman runs the I Fucking Love Science page (another thing that must cause OSG great ire).

This goes a bit beyond a Facebook kerfluffle for me. Women, right now, are under as much assault as we were in the 1970s and 1980s. Women still earn less per hour than men, even when they do the same work. One entire political party has made rolling back the rights of women a key plank in its platform. Like the 1970s and 80s when derisive terms like “bra-burner” and “ball-breaker” were used to shame and ridicule women, men use the internet and social media to try very hard to silence women who dare express any opinion other than, “Yes, dear, you’re so smart,” or work in any area other than Pinterest or a knitting blog.

In Petaluma, California, this week, the girls at Kenilworth Middle School were called into an assembly with the superintendent, who told them they could no longer wear yoga pants, leggings  or skinny jeans, because tight clothing was “distracting the boys from their studies.” In 2013, adolescent girls are still being told by their educators that they are responsible for the behavior of boys. This makes me approach guys like OSG with a lot less humor.

There is certainly a contingent of young men, many of whom still live at home, who work out their own mommy issues by bullying or packing up on women in social networking arenas. OSG, based on the bio on his blog, seems a little too old to be one of these, but I can make no judgments about his emotional age. If his Mum still brings Marmite sandwiches down to his secret fort in the basement, that would certainly explain the “crazy old feminist” line.

From the safety of my blog, I picture OSG huddled in an old recliner, patched here and there with duct tape, clutching his remote as he cycles through endless loops of the original Star Trek. As Kirk smooches one mini-skirted female alien after another, he murmurs, “Why can’t it just be like that now?” And there I must leave him. I am a woman. I have work to do.

One of the benefits –joys — of a retreat is that you don’t have to worry about the details of everyday life. For instance, EarthRise offers three meals a day during a retreat or a workshop. The dining area is part of the Community Center, with meeting rooms, a patio, and a large and airy open place for meeting, eating, or meeting and eating.

(Did I take pictures of the wonderful food? No, I did not.)

Our retreat group got together at meals and Cathy did some kind of a check-in with us after we finished eating. Other than that, as I said, we were on our own.

The food line started here.

I was expecting good cafeteria food. Instead, I got great food. I would have been happy with any of these meals if they had been served in a moderately priced Marin County restaurant.

The art exhibits rotate.

Friday night we had salmon. Spouse and I are terribly spoiled about salmon; we either have fish that Spouse caught himself on his fishing vacations, or salmon from Dave the fishmonger at the farmers market.  This salmon was not as good as that; it was still darned good. It was served in a ginger soy sauce (you could get soy-free if you needed it). On the sideboard as well was butternut squash, cooked until just tender, with fresh herbs and dried cranberries. At every meal except breakfast, there was a huge salad of fresh spring mix (local, no doubt), dressed with tasty and light dressings, and bowls of toppings alongside; sheep’s milk feta crumbles, sunflower seeds, chopped nuts, raw veggies.

The downstairs area.

Saturday night we had purple and green broccoli and chicken, roasted red potatoes, an aoli sauce for the potatoes that I didn’t try, and a big old salad.

The chef came out from the kitchen and stood by the door, answering questions and asking some, each meal. Vegan portions were available,  gluten free was available also.

Desserts were simple and scrumptious. One night dessert was just a selection of home-made cookies; Saturday it was berry and apple crisp; Sunday lunch had baked apples for dessert. All yummy.

The center is flanked by an organic dairy and Tara Firma Farm, an organic farm about two miles northwest of the center. Marin prides itself on its local organic food (Sonoma County does it better, but don’t tell them that), and the center is clearly tapped into those sources.

Breakfast included oatmeal, homemade granola, berries and fruit, scrambled eggs with fresh spinach (great way to get those spinach nutrients!). Nothing elaborate; everything fresh, balanced and delicious.

The beverage station.

Coffee, tea and hot water was available all day and all evening (or until it ran out, I guess) at the first window in the dining area. Although there were no promises of snacks, every time I went tin there I found a bowl of fruit or a plate of cookies available the rest of the day.

The dish room.

The dining area is also laid out with some real thought to the use of the space. That’s pretty rare.

As you already know there is always one (sometimes two) silent tables. People may want to read or journal; some folks are on personal retreats and want to have their meals without interacting with others.

Meals were a vital if subtle part of this overall wonderful experience. Thanks, EarthRise, for your great chef and kitchen staff!

We moved the salt and pepper, so they are out of order.

On Saturday night, after dinner, we gathered briefly and played part of a word game. Cathy gave us each nine pieces of paper. Well, really, she gave us nine business cards. Cathy was without staff support during the weekend, and she was doing triple duty. She is the Executive Director of EarthRise, and she was working as the ED part of the time; she was facilitating our retreat, and Saturday evening she had the on-call phone for the caretakers, who had to go to a memorial service out of town. That she managed all of this is testimony to her ability to focus.

Anyway, nine pieces of paper. Our instructions were to write a word or a phrase that we liked. There was no more direction than that. (And that direction, by the way, got me into some trouble.) We wrote out words and put then in the basket. Cathy mixed them up and then we each drew nine words.

Unfortunately, there the game ended. Cathy suggested that we could let the words inform our writing, if we wanted to. In other retreats, she’d been a bit more directive. Not with us, though.

This picture and the following have nothing to do with the post. I just like them.

A bit more did happen with the words when Silvia Nakaach joined us with one of her musical instruments. She played and sang some of our words with us. She tried to get us to sing, with limited success at first, but Silvia is a determined and patient teacher and soon we were singing along.

Labyrinth… structure… hmmm.

We did keep our words. Here are my nine:

• Surprise
• Polliwog
• Visionary
• Universe
• Tangent
• Snuggle
• Sweetie pie
• coordination
• lofty

“Universe” and “polliwog” were words that I contributed.

“Snuggle” had already appeared in the rough draft I wrote at the retreat, before we drew words; and a version of “lofty” had too. (I used “loft” as a verb;  ”the winds lofted her,” or something like that.)

“Tangent” forms a rhyme with a word I contributed, “plangent.”

I’m embarrassed to say that I found myself more drawn to the texture of the cards and the things I could build with them than the words themselves. The cards had all been folded in half so that we drew without seeing the words. This meant they would stand up. I built a mini-business-card Stonehenge with mine. I tried to build a house, but it kept falling over. Perhaps that’s a metaphor on my need for structure.

Friday night I walked the labyrinth before I went back to my room and wrote. Saturday morning, I got up shortly before sunrise and walked up to take some pictures at dawn. The center is so quiet that I could hear traffic noise from Highway 101. It was like white noise, not an annoyance. Two crows flapped across the sky and perched in one of the oak trees.

 Sunrise at EarthRise

The oak trees are in some distress. Some have succumbed to oak death. Cathy said that there has been a lot of discussion at the center about what to do. They have cut down a lot of the dead oaks and neatly piled the wood, but they are not using it as firewood. In fact, she said, when they had a sweat lodge a couple of weeks ago, they had to buy firewood. There is a lot of discussion about what to do for the trees. Cathy is an administrator and an astrologer, not an arborist, so she felt like some of the conversations had been too technical for her. One theory is that the bay laurel trees, which are also native, somehow contribute to the oak disease and that the bay should be removed. Others think that this might be a natural process and to leave everything alone. this discussion actually goes to the core values of IONS and EarthRise. Do we reflect on the consequences of our actions before we take them? Do we try to live on earth with some humility?

I went up to the labyrinth and took some sunrise pictures. At the labyrinth, the graded road/trail veers left and goes up the hill. The views were breath-taking. A bit farther up I found the trail to Guardian Rock. This trail curves back along the ridge, with green and silver vistas to west and east.

At each meal, there is a table with the “Silent Table” sign. It means what it says; you sit there if you don’t want to talk. the people I saw there mostly were reading or writing. After dinner, someone put the sign on the piano. It was too good to resist.