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"There and back again!"

The mountains could not come to Muhammad,
so Muhammad went to the mountains.

Daniel had just had an ear operation, and could not travel,
and Michael's business was too young to survive on its own,
so Mari and I flew to Portland, Oregon, and Tucson, Arizona,
to see them in their native habitats.  They are the yin and yang
of climate differences:  coastal moss and mountain desert.

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It was raining in Portland.  Of course.  And it was raining in Tucson, too.  It does that from time to time.  The difference is . . . the difference.  It is woodsmen's lore that, in a forest, one can tell north from the moss growing on the north side of the tree.  It is impossible to tell north in either Portland or Tucson, because in Portland the tree is ringed with moss, and in Tucson there are no trees, and no moss.

People do not live in Portland for the climate.  They live there for its civility, for its tightly packed neighborhoods, peppered with hundreds--certainly, thousands--of restaurants.  It is a university town, grown large, with boundaries.  There are more backpacks than cars in Portland, and there are more cars than bicycles, if you count carefully.

Recognize Mari?
You can walk to a dozen restaurants from where Daniel lives, and a hundred more, if you wear good shoes.  "Good shoes" in Portland are called "Wellingtons".

One of the best bookstores in the country co-exists very happily with all the electronics in those backpacks.  Powell's occupies a whole city block, four stories tall, with new and used books sitting side-by-side on the same shelves.

The second stop on our triangulated trip was Tucson, and for reasons I cannot comprehend while sober, we flew there on Alaskan Airlines, landing in Phoenix (for reasons we are still trying to remember).  The drive to Tucson on Interstate 10 is easy, if you are comfortable with train-sized semi trucks going 75 miles and hour, wobbling from side-to-side in the next lane.

Not only were we able to stay with Michael, but were delighted, one day, to have lunch with Kathy and Ivy, who took time off from pickling olives and harboring bobcats and hooting at backyard owls.


Ivy and Kathy are reminders that good cities are not simply good locations.  They are places where friends are to be make, and kept.  

In 1984, we first lived in Tucson, and on the first Christmas break of that year, we went with Michael and Daniel to picnic at Sabino Canyon.  Mari and I went to Sabino, again, to take the tram up to the top of the drive, to walk partway down to the small waterfall made possible by the previous day's rain, quite as had been the case 26 years earlier.  The occasional stream, collecting what the mountain could not absorb before the water tumbled off, still had not worn out the rocky stream bed, although even some of the larger rocks had been tumbled more, on their way to desert sand.  

Back on Christmas night, we saw that there was a new foot of snow, not discouragingly, but as evidence for more ways to be beautiful than one could imagine without having stumbled into it.  We stumble, occasionally, but usually keep our balance.


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