JACK BERNARD'S TRAVELS

M and I heard an NPR feature on salmon spawning in the Cedar River on Thursday morning before we had to pick the kids up from school. It’s a long way to the Cedar River but the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks in Ballard has a fish ladder so we decided to make that our afternoon destination. We thought we might catch a glimpse of salmon passing through on their way to the spawning ground. Win or lose that bet, the Locks are a great place to take kids on a sunny afternoon.

We checked out the Locks:

We saw a tug with gravel heading for Lake Washington:

And pleasure boats heading for the Sound:

We eventually got to the fish ladder but the big salmon run had already passed through. This is what a salmon looks like before the journey upriver gets arduous:

And this is what the female looks like when she is at the spawning ground; with a swollen red body, protruding snout, and sharp teeth. The salmon ladder allows the fish to pass by the Locks heading for their spawning grounds in the rivers upstream. There the females dig shallow depressions in the gravel where they deposit their eggs. These spawning beds in the gravel are called redds. They use their tails to sweep away the gravel. You can see in this picture that the tail is white. That’s because she has scraped away all of the skin, leaving only bone, in the process of preparing her redd. She deposits her eggs in the redd and the male fertilizes them. She then covers the eggs by distributing gravel from the upstream side of the redd. Redds can be as long as 25 -30 feet and contain roughly 5000 eggs. She may make as many as 7 redds before she exhausts her supply of eggs. Next year I think we’ll take the kids to the Cedar River to see the real deal.

We had a really good day at the locks. We learned how boats get from the Lake to the Sound. We learned how the salmon get past the Locks and how they prepare their redds. And everyone got to burn off some kid energy.

On top of that it was a beautiful autumn afternoon.

More tomorrow…

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1970: Brela, on the Adriatic coast of what is now Croatia. That’s me on the right, Darryl Hart on the left and Abby Grosvenor in the middle.

There’s a lot of history packed in this picture. Darryl and I met in 1962 at law school in Berkeley. We shared a house with some other law student friends briefly, and often played guitars together though he was much better than I was. His rendition of the Theme from Black Orpheus was famous for bringing the sun up on Scenic Avenue in those days. We graduated together in 1965; worked at Loeb & Loeb together in Los Angeles; and quit L&L at the same time in 1967. He went to Washington DC to work on the staff of California Senator Thomas Kuchel and I went to NY to work for Pan Am. In 1970 I was on medical leave from Pan Am so Abby and I went to Europe. Darryl was between jobs so he joined us there for a couple of months. We drove and camped in our VW bus from Paris to St. Tropez to Brela and on up to Vienna where he left us for awhile. He rejoined us for Christmas/New Year at our rented house in St.Tropez and then he headed home. On the flight home he met Martha, his wife to be, and they have been married 40+ years now.

We don’t get to see much of each other these days, but last night he was in Seattle for some American Bar Association meetings and M and I met him for dinner at Loulay. I love catching up with him whenever we have a chance. Our lives have been so different but our friendship has endured for more than 50 years.

Loulay was an inspired choice for dinner. It’s the successor to Chef Thierry Rautureau’s iconic Rover’s, which closed in 2012. Thierry IS “The Chef in the Hat,” and we love The Chef in the Hat.

He’s a smart, charming, talented man who has been a major figure on the Seattle restaurant scene since 1987. That year on a visit to Seattle he discovered, while dining at Rover’s, that the small home-like restaurant in Madison Valley was for sale. He purchased it and the rest is history. Rover’s was the nationally acclaimed home of The Chef in the Hat and for many years it was the benchmark location for innovative Northwest cuisine with a French twist.

Rover’s closed in 2012 but not before Thierry had launched the next phase of his culinary career – Luc – a French bistro named for his father and – Loulay – a larger French restaurant named for the small town near the Loire Valley where he grew up. Both are booming successes thanks to the quality of the food, the service, and the personality of The Chef in the Hat.

M and I have a special connection and affection for the Chef in the Hat. When we decided to get married, after ten years together, we were living in Saigon. A friend who worked for the US Consulate in Saigon told us the red tape for getting married at the Consulate was onerous. He told us to go home and get a judge to do it. So that’s what we did, but we added a twist to it.

We asked M’s Seattle assistant, Beth, to find a judge in Bellevue and arrange a time late on a Friday afternoon for the formalities. It had to be Friday because Rover’s served lunch on Friday (and only on Friday). So, on the day we got married we had a champagne lunch at Rover’s and then drove to Bellevue with Beth and her husband. The judge, Janet Garrow, is a lovely woman. She made sure we knew what we were doing, read us our rights, and we drove home.

The wedding day lunch is only one of the reasons we have such affection for The Chef in the Hat and his food. His wife Kathy is equally charming. A year later lunch we were able to have our first anniversary at Rover’s, but alas it’s closed now. Nevertheless, we still have Luc and Loulay to choose from.

Over dinner Darryl and I reminisced while M took in all this information about our friendship. We talked about St Tropez, Berkeley, Brela, and a fishing trip we took 16 years ago to the Green River in Utah. He fished while I read on the bank, except for the day we floated the river with a guide in a drift boat. Darryl says that was his best fishing day ever. I had fun too. It’s part of our bond.

Another 1970 photo: This one was taken just outside of Avignon. Wow! I had a lot of hair in those days.

Eagle – It was great to see you. Thanks for stopping by.

More tomorrow…

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These are the devices that run my life (including the blond and, indirectly, her mother) in the background:

• Two MacBook Pro’s
• One Thunderbolt monitor
• One iPad with aftermarket keyboard
• Two Kindles
• Two VOIP internet phones

These are the devices that display and distribute artistic content:

• One 42” flat screen TV
• One TiVo (digital video recorder) to record TV shows, access Netflix, Pandora, etc
• One DVD/VHS player for DVD’s and old VHS tapes
• One home network wireless receiver
• Not shown – 42” flat screen (in the bedroom)
• Not shown – DVD player (in the bedroom

These devices are for music:

• One AM/FM/CD amplifier
• One CD player
• Not shown – one Apple iPod
• Not shown – three guitars and a kazoo

And these are the devices that control those devices:

• Two Comcast remotes for cable
• One universal remote to control input sources
• One Samsung remote for the bedroom DVD
• One Samsung remote to control the other bedroom remote
• One TiVo remote
• One Hitachi remote for the DVD player
• One ROKU remote to source all kinds of content from Netflix to Hulu to ESPN. (I don’t understand this one yet. It’s brand new from our techie son and daughter in law)

And this is what we use to call Jonathan for help whenever any of the other devices fail to perform as needed:

• Two iPhone 4s’s

I’m old enough to remember when the family crowded around a big old maple covered Philco radio to listen to Jack Benny on Sunday night, when we went to the Roycroft Theater to see Hopalong Cassidy for the Saturday matinee, and when everyone used the neighborhood library and struggled with the Dewey Decimal System to find a morsel of information. Those really weren’t the good old days but they were definitely simpler.

More tomorrow…

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Book clubs are everywhere. They’ve been around since the days when monks were copying manuscripts. They got a big boost when Gutenberg made print more accessible, and they got another kick-start when Oprah Winfrey started one in the media age.

At the grass roots level friends and friends of friends organize them. Bookstores and libraries create them to promote reading and sales. Community centers use them to bring people together. There are online book clubs, church book clubs, and company book clubs. There are women’s groups (by far the majority), men’s groups, singles book clubs, gay and lesbian clubs and couple’s groups.

The big event in the recent growth of book clubs came in 1996 with the creation of Oprah’s Book Club. Big O made it easy. She picked a book every month, published online newsletters and interviews with the author, provided information on how to form a discussion group, and the advent of Book Club 2.0 in 2012 provided a space for online comment and sharing.

With Oprah leading, publishers discovered a gold mine and began including discussion outlines in the back of Oprah’s picks and later in other popular titles that were finding favor with book clubs. It’s common to find these outlines in the paperback editions of many literary bestsellers. Whatever you’re looking for it’s out there.

I’m not much of a joiner. I don’t hike, bike, or ski with groups, and I’m not comfortable at cocktail parties. I don’t belong to any alumni or sports clubs that have a social component. But… two years ago M and I decided to get together with three other couples to talk about books. I’m not sure what pushed me over the lip; I suspect it was the composition of the group. They are all brilliant conversationalists and I knew the level of discourse would be high. One of the men is a psychiatrist who also happens to be a violinist and whose wife is an emeritus professor of sociology at Columbia University. There’s a genome scientist and Shakespearean scholar from the UW whose wife is a sociologist, and there are two MD’s, one in family practice and one whose career was mostly in public health. M and I are the lightweights.

I have no discipline in a bookstore and the result is a chock full wall-length bookcase and an unread pile of books as tall as I am. I will never get to all of them, so why would I take on additional reading? The reason is that I know the group will challenge me by choosing books that I wouldn’t otherwise read. We meet at irregular intervals, because all of us travel and it’s not easy to coordinate schedules. Last night we met for the first of two meetings to talk about Shakespeare. Session 1 was centered on Hamlet and next month we are following up with Henry IV (Part 1) – a tragedy and a history/comedy. Heavy stuff, but the variety gives it freshness.

Shakespeare is just one example of reading that I wouldn’t be looking at without the prod of the book club. In the last two years we’ve read a biography of Catherine the Great, Ari Shavit’s book My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, Chinese Nobel Prize winner, Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum (almost unreadable), Sherwin Nuland’s How We Die, Aristotle’s Poetics, and Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. I haven’t loved them all but I have loved the discussions. That’s what book clubs are supposed to be about.

M is more social than I am but also a voracious reader who belonged to two book clubs in Saigon with women from all over the world. And, my former wife has been an active member of a serious book club for 30 years. There has been some turnover there, but most of the original members are still active. My daughter is also a member now. I think there is another 2^nd generation person in the group too, so the groundwork has been laid to keep it going for a long time. I hope it does. People who read restore my faith in a world that seems careening out of control.

More tomorrow…

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