Huntington Gardens

High on my list of places to go in Los Angeles was the Huntington. When I said this, I was thinking of the Library, with its permanent exhibit, including the Ellesmere manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Gutenberg Bible, double-elephant folio edition of Audubon’s Birds of America, and so on.   I had no idea that the Library’s dimly [...]

Read Full Post »

Haida Manga

        Thanks go to Sarah for bringing me Red: A Haida Manga.     What makes Red so cool, and so Haida, is that the panel borders on each page make up a single gigantic Haida-style lineform drawing that can be seen if you buy two copies of the book, unbind it, and arrange all of the pages [...]

Read Full Post »

Haines Library Totem

Now that I’ve found it, I’m loving the Chilkat Valley News.  C.P. didn’t mention the Library as we drove quickly through town, but check out this article about the recent unveiling of the Haines Library Totem, carved from an 800-year-old cedar tree, and featuring traditional figures such as a raven and an eagle, plus one of a woman [...]

Read Full Post »

Juneau: After the Twisted Fish

After my rafting trip on Mendenhall Lake and River, Mom and I reconnoitered and spent the afternoon on dry land in Juneau. (Well—they tell me it was dry land.  I could feel the earth moving under my feet after so much time on the Pacific Ocean.  And it rained hard enough to soak through the [...]

Read Full Post »

Ketchikan – Not a lot of cars but rush hour for salmon

When I got back from the canoeing excursion to Lake Harriet Hunt, I had only about an hour and a half available to walk around Ketchikan before I had to get back to the ship.  That was okay.  It wasn’t very big, and I didn’t want to spend any time in the rows of tourist-trap [...]

Read Full Post »

Librarian’s lake

  Our first Alaskan port was Ketchikan.  I was excited to arrive because I had convinced my mother to go on her very first paddling trip with me, somewhere in the Tongass National Forest (the cruise ship excursion description didn’t tell us where).   Knowing that we were going to the Tongass National Forest didn’t help [...]

Read Full Post »