Category Archives: america

At the Temple of Paul Bunyan

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Paul Bunyan

When we were driving through redwood country in northern California, we came across a colossal statue of Paul Bunyan and his companion, Babe the blue ox. Paul Bunyan is an American legend, a mythical, giant lumberjack. There are all kinds of stories about his adventures. This statue, which was in the parking lot of the Trees of Mystery attraction, had the voice of a man speaking to the tourists who approached the statue to take pictures. Paul Bunyan and I chatted about our trip. It was a neat trick.

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The Paul Bunyan stories mostly consist of him being very very very large and doing things with a huge impact. You could say that Paul Bunyan is kind of a deity. He’s larger than life, has unworldly powers. And there are statues of him all over the US where he is revered and honored.

The whole thing reminds me of Hindu shrines, especially the temples dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva and his bovine companion, Nandi. Notice how both of their right hands are raised in the position of a classic mudra.  They also both hold weapons.  Paul holds his trusty ax, while Shiva has his trident.  Paul is almost always portrayed in blue trousers.  And Shiva is usually depicted with blue skin.  Babe is also always blue.  While Nandi is white, there is a species of antelope in Northern India called a nilgai or blue bull.  There are so many of them that they’re considered pests.

Shiva and Paul Bunyan also share many similar adventures.  They’ve both subdued giant snakes, formed mountain ranges, created rivers or oceans, and generally go about their business with moral indifference.

Could there be some connection here between the Paul Bunyan legends and Indian cosmology?

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Always Coming Home: The Windiad no. 12

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blue series

This is the last installment of the Windiad, my epic journey back to the West Coast of the US, with thick references to Homer’s The Odyssey, another story about a man going home. To read the whole thing, all out of order but conveniently numbered for the linearly-minded, click on this sentence.

At the End of the World
It’s been a few weeks since we returned from the US. It took two weeks just to finish unpacking because I was so busy with work. And three weeks to write the rest of the Windiad. America already seems like a dream. Except when I follow the election and then it’s a bit of a nightmare.

I’m back among the busy, hard-working, sleep-deprived Japanese. The cicadas have already gone underground. Typhoon season has begun, with a huge monster of a storm coming this way.

The first week back, there were nonstop thunderstorms. Twice, the boom of thunder woke me up and I thought Tokyo was being attacked or there was a terrorist bomb that exploded nearby. It was apocalyptic. There’s no other way to describe it. If the world ends, that’s how it would go. It’s since calmed down and now the weather is balmy, cool. I feel like I can think again, without the weight of humidity pressed against my brain.

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Where is Ithaca?
I’ve been able to contemplate once again, what home is to me. Is it America? Most certainly. I felt comfortable and at ease. My family is there, most of my friends. Large swathes of my past.

And what part of America is my home? I haven’t been to my hometown in Southern California since 1999, and I haven’t lived there since 1988. I felt a disconnect in Eugene, where I lived for a decade. Aside from many good friends who still live there, the town was full of faces I vaguely recognized. Santa Cruz, where I attended university isn’t recognizable at all since it’s been rebuilt after the ’89 earthquake. And I’ve never lived in Portland, where I most felt at home.

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Now when people ask me where I’m from, I just say, The West Coast. It encompasses the Pacific Ocean, the Coast Mountain Range, the Cascades, the conifer forests, the oak hills, and Interstate Highway 5. It covers all the small college towns that I’ve lived in all up and down the coast. Most of my family and many of my friends are there. So the West Coast, that’ll do.

And what about Tokyo, my home for the last 3 years. Is this the Ithaca (Odysseus’ home) that I’ve been sailing to? Or is this just another of the many islands that I’ll be stopping at on the way back ‘home’? It certainly is home. I have a blast with T’s sizable big-hearted, fun-loving family. They really make it feel like home.

Odysseus criss-crossed across the Aegean Sea trying to get back to his kingdom and his wife, Penelope. But in my odyssey, my wife traveled with me. So in a way, I was already ‘home’, yet on my way home.



On My Way, Never Arriving
One of my favorite books, that’s almost impossible to find now, is Ursula K LeGuin’s ‘anthropology of the future’, Always Coming Home. This work of fiction imagined a future, post-industrial California. The title refers to a song sung by members, of this imagined culture, who are best described as the tribe’s adventurers and explorers. I was finally able to write down this song from the copy that I’ve kept at my parents’ home.

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The idea is that these explorers are always on their way back home, even if they are on their way to other lands. At the same time, wherever they are, they are at home. They are always coming home. I relate to this sense of never having arrived, never feeling like I’m home yet. But I have also always felt that wherever I was living at the moment, I could stay there for a long time. I felt both at home and not at home.


That’s how I feel about Tokyo too. Our plan, my Penelope and I, is to stay a couple more years. But it doesn’t really matter where we go. Our home is wherever we are together. Maybe when people ask where I’m from, I should just say, “I don’t know quite where my home is, but I do know that I’m here.”

Initiation Song from the Finders Lodge by Ursula K LeGuin

Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be your mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well loved one,
walk mindfully, well loved one,
walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.

Frida’s Last Painting: The Windiad no. 10

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Circe
Odysseus was quite the player. Throughout his travels around the Aegean Sea, he was seduced by a number of divine women, or so he claims. After all, he was married so he’d have to claim that his acts of infidelity were coerced.

Yet there was one women with whom he stayed willingly and couldn’t cop any excuses about. That was Circe, another daughter of the sun god, Helios, and an oceanid, a kind of sea nymph. Her specialty was turning men into animals by tricking them into taking potions. As usual, Odysseus was able to avoid this fate, but his men were, again, less fortunate. They ate her food and turned into pigs. Odysseus stayed for a year, long after talking her into turning his men back into humans. She even gave birth to their son, then eventually gave him advice and directions on how to get back home.

Circe is often described as treacherous, but really she was just doing what all the other gods did, which was screw around with mortals for their entertainment. Otherwise, she was a generous hostess. Circe was Odysseus’ final dignified send-off back home. She was delicious bad luck, and slightly rancid good luck all rolled into one. And that’s really the best way to describe the end of my trip through the US.

Receding into the Background
The last two days in America were a blur of bad luck. We went down to Santa Cruz to visit my friend, Natascha, and hang out at my sister’s home. On the drive down we got a call that Natascha was in the emergency room.

The next day we decided to go to the Frida Kahlo exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. We were pleased as plums to get a sweet parking space right across the street from the museum, only to come out later to find that the car had been towed. We had to pay for the tow, the processing charge, as well as the parking ticket. You’d think that with all the money they make from parking violations, the great city of San Francisco could fix some of its pothole infested roads.

Later that evening we realized that we had lost one of our cameras and most of our pictures from the redwoods, as well as some sweet photos of us with some Stormtroopers and the Incredible Hulk. Dang.

It was a hell of a way to end the trip and I was truly bummed out. On the other hand, the small morsels of delightful moments tipped it all back into something good.

For instance, we got to spend more time with Natascha than we would have if we just had lunch. We hung out in the emergency room as we waited for test results, while a steady stream of cheerful nurses and down-to-earth doctors came and went. And finally, the tests showed that there was nothing life-threatening. As one of my oldest and dearest friends, this was one of my most favorite reunions.

Then while in Santa Cruz we got to spend more time with my sister’s family, going to my nephew’s swim lesson, eating at a swanky Mexican restaurant in a historic ballroom, perusing through a bookstore (I actually just stood in one place the whole time reading a book about how nature would take back the world after humans disappeared), and then watching a late night movie (the gloomy Dark Knight).

Then T, my sister, and I got to spend quality time in SFMOMA, looking at the works of Frida Kahlo. She was like Circe that kept us longer than we had planned and which led to the car being towed. She was also a reminder that her life was much more tragic than a towed car could ever be, and still she came out of it fabulously creative and radiant.

And if these last days were a Frida Kahlo painting, and I were an art critic, the symbolism would be interpreted thus:

The emergency room is like a healing process that requires connecting with friends.
The art exhibit narrates that every journey must end with art.
The towed car represents the end of car culture.
The lost camera challenges the viewer to create memories without photographs.
The bad luck seems to fade into the background, while the foreground is punctuated with bright colors and unexpected shapes.

laughter

Motels and Chinese Take-out: The Windiad no. 9

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art deco bridge

After we left Portland, it was the first time on the trip that T and I got to spend time with just ourselves. I had subjected her to all my friends and family and she was patient the whole time, even claiming that she was having a good time. Normally, we would be on a beach somewhere for our summer vacation, but instead we were careening through miles of dry oak shrubs. Instead of perusing colorful silks in Indochina, we were combing the aisles at Ross, Dress for Less. Plates of spicy green mangoes by the pool gave way to breakfast slams at Denny’s.

Yet it was all as exotically interesting to her as it was common to me.

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Before the trip, there were two things T wanted to experience that she considered archetypal American experiences. One was to stay at motels and the other was to eat out of those Chinese take-out boxes. Done and done.

We had a nice range of motels we stayed at. There was the very new and well-kept Day’s Inn. And one was the prototypical motel you see in the movies, with the manager or owner wandering into the lobby with his shirt unbuttoned exposing a big pot belly. But he was kind and the room was clean and well-maintained. Two motels had pools. Three had a sauna or hot tub.

All the motels had free wireless internet. That combined with the fact that nearly all cafes in the Northwest have free wireless internet, it’s one of the best wired places in the world.

Wind’s Quick and Easy Deconstruction of the Socio-economic Division of Labor in the Hospitality Industry

Of course, I tried to deconstruct the experience. Throughout our motel stays, the socio-economic division of labor appeared to be race-based. Half the motels (of our sample size of 4) were owned by South Asians. They usually operated the front desk themselves or they hired white women in their 30’s. The other motels were owned by whites and they hired college kids to work the front. The housekeeping consisted of only Hispanic women.

The people who stayed at the motels were almost all white. Most appeared to be retired couples. There were few kids, even though it was the middle of summer vacation. Every now and then, I heard French or German or Swedish being spoken. T and I were a complete anomaly.

That is until we reached the last motel. As I was filling out the motel registration in the lobby, four intimidating men in typical LA gangbanger clothes filed in. My guard went up immediately. And my city instincts went into- appear as unintimidated as possible while not being so cocky that they try to start a fight mode.

As I coolly tried to check out the scene from the corner of my eyes, I noticed that something wasn’t quite right. First of all, no gang would have two middle-aged guys. And second, no gang that I know of consists of blacks, whites and Latinos. Except maybe the police. And eventually, I came to the conclusion that that’s what they were. It was confirmed when I checked out their car and it was an unmarked white Crown Victoria (the most common model for police cars) with official plates. They must have been undercover agents of some sort. Was some bust going down in Crescent City? Whatever it was, it probably already happened since they seemed pretty tired.

And Now Back to Wind’s Usual Semi-sarcastic Light-hearted Blog Banter

take-out

As for the Chinese take-out. We went to the only Chinese restaurant in town, chit-chatted with the pretty Chinese lady who took our order, and did our part to bring the Beijing Olympics experience, and the “typical” American experience, closer, all in one wax-lined box.

The Peaceful Giants: The Windiad no. 8

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among giants

The Laestrygonians (say that 5 times)
In the Odyssey, Odysseus and his men run into giants twice. The first time they stop off on the island of the Cyclops, and this story is always referred to. The lesser told tale is of the Laestrygonians. In the story, most of his ships sail into a harbor that was surrounded by tall cliffs, thus providing a unique protected area. Among his many phobias Odysseus had a fear of enclosed places. It could be called claustrophobia, except the harbor was quite large. A whole fleet could fit in there. It was more the fact that Odysseus had an uncanny ability to survive.

In the epic, his men are portrayed as over-eager and greedy. And once again they hastened to get off their boats and take a look around, devouring what provisions they could find. The truth was that Odysseus and his officers ate well and slept on mattresses that were dried daily.

The rest of the crew made do with moldy bread, rancid meat, and brackish water. Also, as I mentioned earlier, they were goat herders and farmers, who never could get used to sleeping on deck in rolling waters. Any excuse to feel the earth beneath their feet, get some fresh food and water, and they took it. Yes, the cliffs were a a little intimidating, but they craved land.

It was their undoing since a tribe of giants lived on the island and waited for such opportunities, to throw rocks off the cliffs and target ships for sport and spear men for food.

Odysseus, his ship safely outside the harbor, once again sailed off unscathed, out of the shadows of those giants and the cries of his men.

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Redwoods, the Silent Giants
The only giants we faced were the awesome giant forests of redwoods. Redwoods are the tallest trees in the world. Their trunks grow so massive that tunnels have been carved through them so roads could pass and thus attract tourists. Groves of trees thousands of years old still exist.

The secret of their success is the spongy bark that repels fire because of the moisture it holds and wards off pests because of the tannins it produces. Less than 5% of the original old-growth forests still exist. The rest of the redwood range which only grows along the Northern California coast, is filled with younger trees. Not so surprisingly, greedy logging companies still want to cut the rest of the these down but most are now protected.

We spent several nights in Crescent City, a ramshackle coastal city, near many state parks and national forests and parks. The biggest trees we saw had massive trunks that could easily encompass our Tokyo apartment. The best was a trail called Boy Scout Trail in the Jedediah Smith State Park. There were almost no people and you could fully appreciate the eerie silence, another advantage of the spongy bark which act as sound proofing.

In the groves of these giants, you can feel the fairies, sprites and other wood spirits watching you through the fog.