List ev’ry object
Search high and low
Name, location, donor,
And all you need to know
List ev’ry object
Make sure your scheme
Will comply with Spectrum.
It’s like a bad dream.
A scheme that will list
All the stuff in the store.
It would not be so bad
If it weren’t such a bore.
List ev’ry object
Make sure your scheme
Will comply with Spectrum
It’s like a bad dream !
Insider or outsider? I’ve always felt that I am an outsider, but is that how I’m seen? Or am I really part of the museums establishment in Scotland? Though I never aimed to be or wanted to be, and though I can’t see myself as The Man, maybe that role is now mine. So we become by the passage of time not who we are but rather who we are perceived to be, and the perception becomes for everyone else the reality.
Same as it ever was - yesterday’s mouthy Young Turk is promoted to old fogey. Ah well, this is how the profession is renewed, and the young, as I remember well, must have something to rebel against, something to give a purpose to their professional existence.
So where does that leave people like me? Here doesn’t feel like the establishment - it’s always felt like the periphery. And I can’t deny I’m happy here, but nonetheless it seems I am indeed The Man - at least so Frank says. Of course, that could just have been the drink talking.
I’ve been extremely dilatory about this blog since April last year. The intervening months have been a bit weird to be honest. I went with my family to visit my brother in New Zealand again (and hang the expense!) last summer*. While I was there I had an interview for a job. Since then, I’ve been going through the immigration process, which is surprisingly expensive - though my prospective employer is picking up the tab for this. Now it’s crunch time - I’ve handed in my notice, indeed my post has just been advertised. Yes, the corpse isn’t even cold and they’re starting the fight over the spoils. In two weeks I’ll be off away from the UK to a new job in New Zealand. It’s both exhilarating and terrifying.
I’m leaving. After nearly fourteen years it’s surprisingly hard to write those words without a twinge of regret. Museums have been my passion and working here has been the largest chunk of my professional life. I will miss the place, the people, the collections, the things we have done and the exciting things we are planning to do. How could I not?
I’m leaving on a jet plane. Although I do know when I’ll be back again - in August, when I fly back to the UK to accompany the rest of my family back to New Zealand. And though I hate to leave, it’s also exciting: new job, new opportunities. One thing I have learned in my time here is that you have to grab opportunities when they present themselves - they may not recur. But as ever by doing one thing you close off the opportunity to do other things with the same resources of time or money. There’s no point worrying about what might have happened if other choices had been made. To quote CS Lewis in the Magician’s Nephew (and it’s not often that the Narnia books get quoted!):
Make your choice, adventurous stranger;
Strike the bell and bide the danger,
Or wonder, till it drives you mad,
What would have followed if you had
Still, I’ll be able to keep in touch. Scotland will be just a hyperlink away. Unlike Charn.
*Or winter, as I must now to learn to think of it.
I see that today’s (20th April 2007) featured article on Wikipedia is Yosemite National Park. So lots of morons are deleting the main article, seemingly unaware that being a wiki we can see the old versions anyway. Sigh.
The bus from Yosemite made good time and actually arrived at Merced Amtrak station early. The station itself is just a small building, and there’s no café - but you can buy drinks and unhealthy snacks from a machine, so I naturally made use of them. The train was perfectly on time, but I did enjoy the note of surprise in the automated announcement of its arrival.
The central valley of California is so flat that it almost makes Norfolk look like the Alps. I can still just make out the mountains in the distance, but it is a grey, misty, cold day and they look almost like far-off banks of cloud. So we roll past rusting barns and semi-derelict houses, scattered amongst vast fields of fruit or nut trees, all standing in immaculate rows, through small agricultural communities and acres of estates of new housing, while the locomotive’s horn repeatedly blasts out its warning for the many crossings.
Of course, as in the UK, the trains seem to travel through all the least attractive parts of any town - naturally, I suppose, since industry old and new has tended to cluster near the means of transport. Such places tend not to be the favoured places of abode of the better-off. They are rather the domain of trailer parks and run-down housing. It’s surprising though how often the train makes its way past the water treatment plants (or sewage works as we would call them).
Past Modesto on the way to Stockton we seem to be passing over a lot more irrigation canals. It makes me wonder how sustainable the sort of agriculture carried on here would be without irrigation. Would it all have to return to pasture? The amount of livestock in the fields to be seen from the train is pretty small, and on a very small scale. Perhaps it is different beyond what I can see, but so far it amounts to about a dozen sheep and maybe twenty cows, but millions upon million of trees in orchards.
Judging by the packing going on, we are now approaching Stockton. Nope, we’re just held up by a freight train ahead on the line. Still, it was only a short delay. I’m a bit disappointed that we haven’t passed one of those gigantic American goods (sorry, freight) trains yet today. They make UK goods trains seem such wimps. Ha! Hardly finished typing that and we passed one with over 100 cars. Now that would be hard to stop.
Eventually arrived in Stockton, which started me thinking about last year when I attended the John Muir Global Perspective Conference at the University of the Pacific there. Every time I told people from California at mw2006 that I was going on to California they would ask whereabouts. And when I said “Stockton” their faces took on this strange expression. “Oh”, they’d say. “Why Stockton?” I’m not sure my explanation ever convinced. I guess it’s the same look I would give Californians who announced they were going to Scotland, and then revealed their destination as Cumbernauld.
What is it about farms, that they accumulate great piles of rusting vehicles and equipment? Is it a reluctance to throw things away - sure that the bits may come in handy one day? Or is it that it’s not a proper farm until it has a share of rusting metal piled outside?
We’re here. Hope I can get a lift to my motel…
After two sunny days, today was more cloudy. Indeed it was snowing all day - just flurries, and nothing sticking. It didn’t seem to me to be cold enough for snow, but maybe I’m becoming acclimatised to Scotland. Certainly Yosemite Creek was full of slush formed from the spray from the fall, though with the water running underneath and occasionally bubbling to the surface.
I had a guided tour of the new displays in the Yosemite Visitor Centre from Tom and Vicky of the Park Service. The display only opened last Friday (13th - good choice!). Muir gets a section to himself, and there’s a bronze statue of him seated looking up at a reconstruction of his Yosemite ‘hang nest‘. Children climb all over him, and everyone (including me) gets photographed with him. Mind you, not everyone knows it’s John Muir. I overheard one visitor asking her companion, “Do you want to be photographed with Ansel Adams?”
After that I thought I’d take another walk. Plan A was to just walk to the bottom of Yosemite Falls. But despite the snow it was a nice day, so I thought I’d make the journey to Columbia Rock, a viewpoint on the Yosemite Falls trail that I had struggled to last year. This year though it only took me just over an hour to get there, so I decided to walk on to the viewpoint for the upper falls. I didn’t have the time (or to be honest the energy, and my knees were getting very sore) to go to the top of the falls.
Everything in Yosemite is uphill once you get away from the shuttle bus route and the valley floor - sometimes very steep. Although the paths and trails are well maintained, they are often still rough and full of granite rocks of sizes varying from pebbles to ones the size of a small house. Maybe next time.
As ever, it was much easier and quicker going down than up. I mentioned this to someone I met on the path, and they pointed out that there were many very quick ways to reach the valley floor. Indeed.
Today I took the well-travelled (by the at least slightly fit) trail to Vernal Fall and the onwards and upwards to Nevada Fall via a series of seemingly endless stairs. I now have a new mental image of the Stairs of Cirith Ungol. The path is called the Mist Trail, but to be honest a more accurate description would be the extremely heavy drizzle trail. Admittedly the wet bit is only around the base and side of Vernal Fall, but I got completely soaked. Fortunately it was a sunny day, so I quickly dried out at the top.
I think I was there at a particularly good time - the sun was at the right angle to give a double rainbow in the spray from the fall.
But those steps leading to the top of Vernal Fall - were they designed for basketball players or something? Who else would have legs long enough not to struggle? I suppose the exercise will do me some good.
I then made my way on to Nevada Fall, which is well worth the (short but occasionally steep) trek. The final ascent is up a more-recently-maintained path with more human-sized steps. There’s a viewpoint on one side of the fall where you can safely look over the edge, but in other places there’s nothing between you and oblivion - I’m sure if one of our health & safety people visited the park, they’d have a fit and want to close it down.
One thing I managed to do for the first time (though I still found it hard) was looking over the edge straight down. I know that from now on when I fall in dreams it will be at Yosemite. There are worse places to be in dreams.
I’m reminded of what Bill Bryson said of Yosemite in the Lost Continent (from memory): “When you arrive in Yosemite, your first thought is that you have died and gone to heaven. Your second thought is, that means you are going to spend eternity with a lot of fat Americans in Bermuda shorts.” But don’t despair - this is only true in the height of summer. When I was there at least the FAIBS contingent was far less in evidence, and indeed even when they are thronging the flat paths in the valley floor and packing out the shuttle buses, move more than 200m from a bus stop and they are already thin on the ground (nice that they can be thin somewhere). Climb more than 50m above the valley floor and they are nowhere to be seen.
It is the most improbable of landscapes, the most beautiful of places (wasn’t that the name of the pyramid complex of Unas?). No photographs can adequately capture the massive scale of the cliffs and falls - unless you could blow you photos up to 300m high. And even then they would still be small reproductions of the real thing.
I’m told that the average length of stay for a visitor to Yosemite is three hours. Which means that the vast majority stay for less than that - I was there for 86 hours. What can you see in such a short time? You can stare in awe at the cliffs and walk to the base of Yosemite Falls - then back to the car or the tour bus. Or you can follow the advice a Ranger offered to one such visitor, and just sit and weep. Three days, three months, three years would hardly be sufficient to explore the beauty of Yosemite. We all have so little time here it is too tempting to rush from one experience to another, just checking off the various famous sites from the list, eyes down, focused on the trail and forgetting to look around. But it is not a race. Perhaps the best part of being in Yosemite is when you just sit down and soak up the sights, the sounds, the peace and the beauty, trying to fix it in your mind forever.
[The title of this post is a quote from John Muir]
One day, perhaps, I shall arrive in Yosemite during daylight, and really experience the drive into the valley. This time, as last time, I arrived in darkness - seeing nothing beyond the road ahead picked out in the car’s headlights. Yet in some ways this is the ideal way to experience the valley - to simply awake the next day and find it’s just there, all around you, as if it had been constructed overnight for your benefit. To walk outside the door first thing in the morning, to be suddenly in the middle of it, surrounding by that overwhelming landscape, is a magical experience in itself. To be there at all is to feel yourself to be a supremely lucky person. But to be staying with someone who lives and works in the valley - well!
Last year I had only one morning free, so took a short walk to Columbia Rock. I say short, but it took me two-and-a-half hours to get there. But only just over half an hour to get back down to my meeting. This time I had more free time to explore, but I thought I would ease myself into things by first taking a look at the Yosemite Museum. Once again it was the time for the Yosemite Renaissance exhibition. Last year there were a couple of wonderful textile pieces by Bonnie Peterson - one of which won the first prize. This year, well, perhaps there is a theme emerging, as it was a large textile piece that won first prize again - and very nice it was too.
After that, and having prepared a lunch to take with me of almost Muirean sparseness - two small pieces of bread and butter and a flask of water - I took the trail round Mirror Lake. I will admit that as I walked the path I occasionally laughed out loud at the thought that my job could bring me to such a beautiful place. But don’t worry, I was punished later.
The Mirror Lake trail is pretty flat and just circles the lake (which was pretty low so much of the area was already in “summer meadow” mode), but it’s a pretty location in its own right. What makes it spectacular is its location under Half Dome. To lie down in the meadow in the warmth of a Spring sun and look up at that enormous lump of granite looming over you - who could ask for more?
If you’re wondering about the punishment - I left my black woolly hat at Shuttle Stop 17. I put it on the seat beside me, and when the bus came I got up and left it there. Unfortunately, it wasn’t there when I came back to look, nor was it handed in to ‘Lost and found’ (as Americans call “Lost Property”). Oh well. No great loss I suppose - but it was a hat I bought in New Zealand, so I was sentimentally attached to it. Rats.
OK, just half an hour or so before the session with my presentation starts. Am I afraid? Well, yes, I am a little apprehensive. But it’s too late to back out now! At least everything seems to work and I’ve run through it all severall times. Fingers crossed.
UPDATE: It all went fine. even using a laptop with an Italian-layout keyboard.