Есть Кое-что о Переводе...(Something in the Translation...)

Когда меню на нашем обеденном столе на борту MS Nikolay Cheryshevsky предложило суп завтрака с сущностью и вход обеда с сущностью, мы думали, что кухня становилась еще более классной, чем это было.

Возбуждение..... What?

Oh, sorry. Let me repeat that in English.

We decided there was something in the translation. When the menu on our dining table aboard the MS Nikolay Cheryshevsky offered a luncheon soup with marrow and a dinner entree with marrow, we thought the cuisine was getting even more classy than it had been.

Exciting.

Funny how those things happen. Who knew that “marrow” would not be marrow from beef bones, but a summer squash? Of course, we had to dissect Tom’s vegetarian dinner that night to discover it. It reminded me of the home-hosted dinner and a couple matters of translation that I’ll tell you about.

Those home-hosted dinners are always frightening beforehand and thoroughly enjoyable during. Frightening because we’re meeting new people with a different culture, and, OMG, what are we going to talk about?!!! In New Zealand, the language thing wasn’t a problem, but a small village in Russia?

And that’s where we were, the small village of Uglich. We’d already been given a lesson in pronouncing Uglich. “It’s OOO-glitch. Not UGH-litch. Please do not call their town Ugly.” It certainly wasn’t Ugh-litch. It was a charming little village of some 40,000 people, but more about that another time. First, the home-hosted dinner.

At 6:30 p.m., we were (as instructed) on the promenade above the boat pier where a Russian woman who acted like she was in charge assigned eleven of us to a deluxe small bus. Another woman, maybe forty-ish, with curly dark brown hair and wearing an apricot and white striped blouse, beige skirt below the knees, and beige shoes, got on the bus last through the side door. She sat down across a small aisle beside me, but said not a word.

Her silence continued as the bus wound through the narrow streets of the village. I silently practiced my limited Russian words and phrases. Just as I turned to her to prove how little Russian I knew, she spoke to the driver, obviously giving him instructions. Then, silence again. This was getting ominous.

The driver steered the small bus into a pot-holed dirt road between two apartment buildings—the infamous Khruschev “slums,” pre-fabricated, poor quality buildings of four or five stories. We pulled up at an end unit. Ominous lady or not, I was suddenly delighted. I had been hoping to see the inside of these apartments.

We climbed out of the bus and suddenly the silent lady became a cheerful, outgoing hostess. She showed us into her apartment, down a short hallway, past a tiny bedroom, and into a narrow living room where a table was set for us. Eleven of us seated ourselves around a table maybe 40 inches wide and less than six feet long.

Natasha and Galina, our hostesses, behind Julia and Kathy

Then we looked around. A beautiful white embossed wallpaper brought lightness to the room, and lace curtains hung at the small window. A wooden hutch holding china and glassware was along one wall, and a sofa was pushed against the far wall. A small television set sat in one corner. Later, we put our heads together and figured the room was perhaps less than ten feet wide and less than 15 feet long. It was very cramped quarters for all of us, but scrupulously clean and homey.

Natasha, our hostess, introduced herself and her mama, Galina. Natasha said she was a schoolteacher and had a five year old boy, but it appeared that two women were the only ones in the apartment that evening.

On the table were two small bowls of coleslaw, two bowls of a carrot slaw that was seasoned but no dressing could be discerned, and two small plates of sliced dark bread.

The menu, said Natasha, also included cabbage soup, potatoes, and something that sounded like “piroshki” or “perogi.” We were expecting a meat and potato filled pastry.

Galina brought out a tureen of cabbage soup. It was a delicious clear broth with shredded cabbage, carrots, sliced celery and diced potato. The dark bread went with it, as did the dollop of sour cream in the soup. Then came a huge bowl of boiled potatoes. They were so tasty we decided they had to have been boiled in perhaps a chicken broth. We ate these with the coleslaw and carrot salad, and more bread. We also had bottled water.

Cabbage soup.

Several people remarked about the carrot salad, and an effort to get the recipe from Natasha ensued. We were not communicating in the right words, apparently. Finally, Kathy pointed to the salad and said, “Carrots and….?”

Natasha’s eyes lit up. “AH!” she said. “Supermarket.”

We were all a little surprised when Natasha next came out with dessert—a cake covered in fruit glace. We had been told previously that all the groups from the boat would have the same menu, and that it was a typical Russian meal. The lack of protein surprised us, but none of us left hungry.

After dinner, while we were drinking tea, Natasha taught us two songs in Russian and then had us sing two songs in English. We chose America the Beautiful for one of them, and I don’t recall the other. I was deep in thought about this typical Russian meal.



Natasha with the Russian songs in hand.

Natasha was an entertaining hostess, warm and outgoing. It also was apparent that she did this often. She had the routine down pat, and gave us the high sign when it was time to get back to the boat before it sailed. We had been in her home an hour. As is customary, according to the books I've read, they did not sit with us to dine, but served us, even though we asked them to join us.

The carafe of Russian whiskey

There was one other thing on the table, though, that I want to tell you about. In a carafe in the center of the table was a golden Russian whiskey. Not vodka, but some sort of whiskey. Prior to beginning our meal, Natasha explained that we should pour some of the whiskey in a small shot glass, and that it was customary to make a toast and swallow the entire shot. It got your attention and warmed your tummy.

I had written a toast and had it translated into Russian. I stood, handed the translated writing to Natasha. She began to read it aloud, then stopped when she realized I was reciting it in English.

May the wind blow softly as it passes your home

May the roof of your house shelter you from the storm,

May love and happiness fill all of your days,

May our people and yours be friends always.

Those who were at the far end of the table next to Natasha told me later she had tears in her eyes as I spoke.

The sun was setting when we arrived back at the boat. People were strolling along the walkway that parallels the river, couples holding hands, folks walking dogs. Teenage girls smiled shyly at the boys that sauntered nonchalantly past them.

I stood on deck for a long time that evening, watching the sun set while I thought. I thought about the simple meal, so warmly and proudly served to us.

I thought about our expectations, how a simple translated word could lead to misunderstandings.

I thought about the lock tower I could see at the far side that closed off parts of this inland waterway from other parts and then opened those parts to allow passage, and how that could be a metaphor for our countries' relationships.

I thought about the Russian people I’d met so far, how they seemed just like us.

And, I thought about my toast, and how much I hoped something wasn’t lost in the translation.

Gullible and Natasha

Up Close to the Great One

(I've posted the pictures here in small format. Click on them to get the full jaw-dropping experience. Fasten your seat belts, please.)

That wonderful Ken Burns’ series on PBS about the National Parks managed to spur me in the guilt node with a piton. I’ve been meaning to tell you about the day a blue dragonfly led me around by the nose, but things like Hawaii and Russia keep getting in the way. Now’s as good a time as any, because I’m worn out from looking at 1580 photos of Russia, and trying to decide which ones to show you.

So….

It all began around the first of August when I was fleeing the smoky city of Fairbanks after attending a wedding reception. As yellow clouds of smoke from nearby wildfires began descending on Fairbanks in earnest, Pablo and I hooked up the travel trailer and left for cleaner air to the south.

The cloud-hidden mountain lies behind these.

We got as far as a state pull-out, where on a clear day you could see Denali, the king of all mountains on the North American continent, the sovereign of a National Park named after it, regardless of what the National Park Service calls it. Denali, at 20,320 feet high, is so massive it makes its own weather, and there’s not a thing the NPS can do about it.

Sunset on Denali's surroundings, but the Great One remains hidden.

Alaskans have a way of doing things they way they want to, and such was the case with this mountain. Established in 1917 as Mount McKinley National Park, not even the summit of the mountain was within the original boundaries. In 1980 the Alaska Board of Geographic Names returned the name of the mountain to the Native Alaskan one of Denali, meaning in Athabaskan “the Great One.” The National Board ignored the state board, and continues to call the mountain McKinley, after the former president who had never even been to Alaska.

Denali rises 18,000 feet from the lowlands at Wonder Lake, making its vertical relief even more than Mt. Everest’s, which rises 12,000 feet from the 17,000 foot Tibetan Plateau. The Park and Preserve encompass more than 6 million acres now. And, considering the wild antics of the North American and Pacific tectonic plates, Denali is growing about three feet a year.

The next morning, after a drumming downpour on my trailer’s roof, the Great One was peeking out from behind its guardian mountains.

From this point and farther down the highway, I took numerous shots of the mountain, as seeing it clear and open, with not a cloud around, is a rare sight.

A little more than a hundred miles from Anchorage, I rounded a corner, and the mountain stared at me in my rear view mirror. This was too much, so I turned right at the fifteen mile long Spur Road that leads to Talkeetna,

Taunting, haunting, beckoning, summoning in my rear-view mirror.

The town was packed with tourists. I drove around, herding tourists before me with my truck and camper, looking for a place to park. Finally, I pulled into the parking lot of the post office (Sunday and it was closed), and parked adjacent to a tall stand of trees where Pablo the parrot would be in the shade.

Nagley's General Store on the left. The white building on the right is the Fairview Inn, a tavern of some repute.

After getting him settled in the trailer, I stepped down and my eye was drawn to something blue on the ground. Thinking I might have dropped something, I bent down for a closer look.

A blue dragonfly, the very thing that has been appearing prior to my best adventures. Well, I took the advice I got by osmosis from the dragonfly.

Not too long afterwards, I found myself staring at this:

And this:

This is what I was in:

The plane's on wheel-skis, allowing it to land at a paved or gravel airstrip, or on snow and ice.

So, as we flew over the Petersville mining district heading for the left side of the mountain where Mt. Foraker stands, I will leave you to enjoy the journey with minimal narration and no commercial interruptions. I’ll let you know when we’re going to land. You are now free to gape. There’s no walking about the cabin in small airplanes, nor is there a restroom facility.



Glaciers, rivers of densely compressed ice.




The dark stripe on this glacier is from a merging glacier, the dark being crushed rock.






















Clear sky and not even a breeze. A truly rare occasion. One last look from the plane:



Foraker (17,400 ft., sixth highest mountain in North America) on the left, Denali on the right. After we landed, the clouds began to move in, and soon the mountain was once again shrouded in gray.

Okay, ladies and gentlemen, we ask that you make sure your seat belts are fastened securely, your cameras safely out of your eyes, and your tongues back in your mouths. Prepare for landing on that little scrap of asphalt you see ahead of you.

Wow.

Remember what I told you about blue dragonflies.

Breathless Moments

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take,

But by the moments that take our breath away.

(Swans under a full moon at Tern Lake, Oct. 1, 2009, 8 p.m.)

The Gift

Several weeks ago my friend Beth Westmark went away, taking her Switched at Birth blog with her. She intimated, in an e-mail sent to cyber-friends, that she had decided to “get serious” about her writing and needed to devote her time to that in the hope that a book would be born.

With a saddened heart I removed the link to her blog from my own site. I sent her a message promising that if she didn’t come to Alaska on her book tour, I would drive to her home in northwestern Florida for an autographed copy. And then, she came back. Her blog is up and running, she visits my site and leaves forensic traces in the form of comments. She visits other places where we writer-wannabes linger.

As is my custom, I checked into my blog first thing this morning to see who’d left a comment, then went down the list of links to other blogs to see who’d updated theirs. Beth had a new one, and I went there.

She wrote of watching another episode of Ken Burn’s National Park series on PBS, and she and her husband talking about a road trip. “Wait,” I thought. “I could meet you somewhere along the line.” As with thousands of others who have been watching the program, I have been considering a road trip to all the National Parks, too.

Then she wrote of playing the piano before retiring for the night. Because she knows how to do such esoteric, technical stuff, she included a video. She set her recording device on the piano bench next to her, and all that were visible were a few keys on which her fingers occasionally alit, and a small reflection in the shiny ebony of the piano itself.

I clicked on the play button, and my slower-than-evolution DSL service sent the soft, sweet notes of a John Denver song a few notes at a time, drawing out the almost seven minutes of recording to more like fifteen. Usually this is disconcerting and annoying, but this time it gave me time to think, to remember my forays into the world of musical instruments. It also brought back a primal yearning, the desire to be able to express myself in music. Sometimes that yearning is so deep and emphatic, it feels akin to loss and grief.

The accordion came first. My mother had rented it for my younger brother to learn to play, along with a study-at-home course. My brother preferred to play outdoors. I conquered it in less than a week, the music I played sounding pretty good to my untrained ears. I reached the point where I could go no further with the small beginner’s accordion, and my mother wasn’t the least bit interested in purchasing a full-sized accordion for me. Neither was my brother interested, so that ended that. In retrospect, I wonder now if that’s where the seeds of my disdain for accordion music were sown.

I fumbled my way through more instruments, the annoying toots of a wooden recorder, a gut-stringed acoustic folk guitar, and finally, somewhat in despair, a lovely teardrop- shaped mountain dulcimer. The dulcimer, I’d heard, was an easy instrument to play.

Not.

Not for me, and I finally invented my own method, a cross between the finger-picking of folk guitar and the strumming taught in the how-to-play-the-dulcimer books. During my guitar years, I drove two hundred miles once a week to study folk guitar and music theory at the University in Anchorage.

Finally, I realized a truth. I had no natural musical ability, the ability I needed to go beyond what I could glean from basic how-to books, the ability that would allow my expressions to soar, to bring tears to eyes the way Beth’s stop-and-go piano music did to mine this morning. I played Spider Solitaire during her concert, sometimes barely able to see the cards through my tears.

When her mini-recital finished down-loading, a small window offered the opportunity to play it again. I did. This time there was no downloading pause between notes and measures. This time the whole song played smoothly and sweetly, Beth’s fingers occasionally in view as she lightly touched the ivory keys. She attributed her love for music to her sister, saying it was gift from her sibling. It’s the gift that keeps on giving, if you ask me. Beth is back, sharing her writing with us, and now her music.

It’s been a while since I’ve felt that yearning. Maybe I’ll see if I can figure out how to get that “easy-to-play” dulcimer in tune. In the meantime, Beth started my day by placing me in an introspective place. I could do anything I chose today, as I have no obligations. I chose to ponder and enjoy Beth’s writing and music.

Safe Haven

I dreamed last night of my late husband. He was at his rakish best, dressed in Carhartt coveralls, leaning against a Caterpillar tractor, one leg crossed in front of the other, his arms folded over his chest.

Under those light brown, well-worn coveralls was the body of a man who worked hard for a living, the muscles of his back, chest, arms, and hands well-developed and strong. On his face was a smile I had seen many times, the times before Alzheimer’s came and took him smile by smile, word by word, thought by thought.

There was humor and wit behind that smile, and something else, a something that made my heart and lungs pause for just an instant. There was a bit of the bad boy in that smile, that Marlon-Brando-come-to-town-on-a-motorcycle bad boy. That something said life with this guy wasn’t going to be a re-run of some genteel family sit-com. It wasn’t. It certainly wasn’t.

It was good to see him like that, good to see that smile again. His youngest daughter will say, when I tell her of this dream, that he came to tell us he’s okay now, two years after his death. I won’t dissuade her from that, because for all I know that’s exactly what happened. But, there’s more to his dreamtime appearance, because I had been having a nightmare, what I call a “stress dream.”

Once again—I have had an endless stream of dreams along this theme—I was cooking in the restaurant we used to own. This time it was breakfast and something was wrong with the eggs. I cracked one, and another egg was inside, and inside, and inside. Finally I reached an egg the size of a marble, and it was cooked. And purple. (I hope this isn’t related to the nesting dolls I brought home from Russia as gifts for the girls across the highway from me.)

The dining room was full, the order wheel bristling with tickets, and something was wrong with the eggs. Finally, we had to announce we had no eggs, and the dining room emptied. Then the lunch crowd came in and filled the dining room. This time it wasn’t an egg problem. This time, no one would order off the menu.

They ordered things like “nemesia.” They ordered other things I’d never heard of, and none of them sounded like food. Another announcement and again the dining room emptied. (Ironically, or not, I am halfway through reading Julie and Julia, the story of one woman’s cooking and blogging her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking.)

I hoped it was all a dream and fled out the back door of the restaurant’s kitchen. That’s when I saw him—my husband in his Carhartt coveralls, leaning against his tractor. And that smile. I ran to him and grabbed him, my face close to his and that smile.

“Tell me,” I begged, “tell me this is all a dream.” And he did, those strong arms circling me and holding me close to him.

Perhaps the youngest daughter is right. He’s okay now, he has his smile back. As for me, I think there’s another message here, a message about me. After all those years of watching his essence disappear, of being a caregiver, and the one who had to make all the horrific decisions, I’m seeing him whole once again and looking to him for one of the things couples should derive from marriage. I’m looking to him for emotional support, for safe harbor from the storms, for surcease from the anxiety of jumbled dreams.

And to see that smile again.