Meg Noble Peterson

And we have a couple of days of sunshine and warm weather before the Big Day, so I’m keeping my eyes open…and my camera at the ready.

New Years Resolutions are passé and apologies are boring, so I shall just try to catch up this week before wishing you all a 2012 of unlimited possibilities, good health, and prosperity. That about covers it all, unless you want me to throw in World Peace, which has been elusive to me ever since I turned 13. Ah, yes, but I’m still right up there with the hope that springs eternal…. 

Once, again, I’m playing catch up. I was still reeling from Hurricane Irene (remember her?), when along came a storm that flattened my bushes, tore off limbs front and back, and left branches and piles of debris lining the streets of this fair city. So I guess it”s not too out-of-step to write part four of my adventures in Washington last August. Everything else is topsy-turvey!

Before heading south with Jon Pollack to Walla Walla, I spent the evening with my new friend, the incomparable Betty Tisdale, who lives in Queen Anne’s, a lovely section of Seattle. That is, when she’s not traveling to Vietnam, Afghanistan, Indonesia, and a host of places in Asia where she has started orphanages. I’ve written about her before (be sure to check it out), and will, again. Her website, H.A.L.O. , stands for Helping and Loving Orphans.

It was a six-hour drive, south and east, to get to Walla Walla, a rather quaint city tucked into the wine country, and home to Whitman College. This is the first time I’d headed in this direction and I found the variety of landscape enticing. Rugged mountains were followed by an expanse of semi-arid land that reminded me of the Trans Karoo in South Africa. There were fewer and fewer trees, except for the pines along the banks of the Yakima River. It was so different from the lush hills and valleys of northern Washington.

As we approached Selah, however, the countryside began to change. Orchards, farms, and vineyards, perfectly symmetrical rows of plants, stretched for miles. Yes, this was the heart of wine and fruit country.

...stretching for miles and miles

We settled for a couple of nights at Fishhook State Park campground on the shores of Lake Sacajawea, which is really just a dammed up part of the Snake River. It was quite different from most of the campgrounds where we stay. More like a giant lawn sloping down to the lake, facing cliffs. This is the only place where I managed to get a swim.

On our way to visit my old friends, Mary and Jim Carlsen of Walla Walla, we stopped at the Whitman Museum, a national historic site commemorating the work of the Whitmans. This brave couple traveled by covered wagon from St. Louis and arrived in 1836 to set up a mission at Waiilatpu, (Cayuseland), which later became the Oregon territory. Their goal was to minister to the Indians, both in medicine and as Christian missionaries. Many of the Indians died of smallpox and measles, and eventually they blamed the white man, attacking the mission 11 years later…killing and burning. The Whitmans were among those killed. You are struck by the pervasive genocide perpetrated on the Native Americans during that period. You’re much more aware of it in the West than in the East. The killings ended the Protestant missions in the Oregon country and led to war against the Cayuse by a volunteer militia from the Willamette and lower Columbia valleys.

Symbolic covered wagon

Grave of massacred settlers

Jim and Mary Carlsen

Our next stop was Horsethief State Park, where we camped in near-hurricane conditions near the desert and Horsethief Bluff, which we climbed on our first day of exploring. We sat at sunset looking over the craggy rattlesnake-infested grassy area and marveled at the geological structure of the land…basalt melting into ancient glaciers, forming the Columbia River gorge. To use words like spectacular and indescribable are understatements for this whole region. But the pristine-looking lake rimming the campsite was anything but! Unfortunately, flocks of Canada geese had spoiled it, as is so true of many areas they infest. But they didn’t spoil the carefully maintained and beautifully constructed park. Thumbs up for this site.

Our campsite on the edge of the park was desolate and very, very windy!

Horsethief Butte from the campground

Grounds of campsite

A peaceful setting, but look who’s standing watch on the tree branch….

Sunset at the campsite

Starting up....

Close-up of rock clliff

Not an easy climb!

Almost there....

View from the other side

There she is at a distance....

Some of the many petroglyphs in the area

We visited our last historical site before heading to the Lewis River. This was the Maryhill Museum of Art, which houses a world-renowned art collection and was built by Sam Hill, the son of Quaker parents. In 1907 he acquired 7,000 acres in southeast Washington, planning to build a Quaker farming community. This never materialized, but his chateau-like home was turned into the Maryhill Museum in 1917. My favorites of all his collection were the Rodins.

Maryhill Museum of Art with Mt. Hood in the background

Hill was in Europe in WWI and was shattered by the death and destruction all around him. While in England he visited Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, where he was told that the structure was believed to have been constructed by Druids as a place of human sacrifice. He concluded that there was a similarity between the loss of life in this, the greatest of human wars, and the sacrifices of ancient Stonehenge. Therefore he decided to build a replica on the cliffs of the Columbia as a reminder of the “incredible folly of war.” It took from 1918 ‘til 1930 to complete the construction. He died a year later. His epitaph read: Samuel Hill: Amid nature’s great unrest, he sought rest.”

Replica of Stonehenge

The inevitable Cultural Update: The first concert of the year for the Plainfield Symphony featured Beethoven’s 5^th Symphony, Carl Maria von Weber’s Overture to Der Freischutz, and the stunning Shostakovich Piano Concerto #35. In December we finished the season with a Christmas concert at the Shiloh Baptist Church featuring a chorus that sang both the Quincy Jones rendition of the Hallelujah Chorus and the original Handel. It was, indeed, an inspiring afternoon!

Theater included the excellent Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett in the not-so-excellent new play by Katori Hall, The Mountaintop, about Martin Luther King’s last night on earth. I was also fortunate to see Bonnie & Clyde, a new musical that I felt was charming and homespun, despite its subject matter, and more like an operetta than a robust Broadway show. Bad reviews caused it to close early. Sometimes I’d like to strangle certain reviewers!

To complete the Christmas season of giving, I took daughter Martha and grandsons Thomas and Adam to see Billy Elliot, one of my favorite musicals. I really gave my theater addiction a good feeding this month, with two viewings in one week. Martha is a delightful partner in crime. Shame on me, but it was great. Sorry it’s closing.

I highly recommend Seminar, a new play by Theresa Rebeck, starring the inimitable Alan Rickman. You can’t beat this one! And I was also thrilled by the new production of Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa at the Irish Repertory Theater. When it comes to Irish plays, they are the greatest.

My only large social gathering this year was a superb reading by my dear friend, J. Carol Goodman of her latest book, Never Lie Down. (Check it out on Amazon.com) I think of it as my holiday party. Forty people crammed into my living and dining room, a fire in the fireplace, good food, good conversation, and good fellowship. It just doesn’t get any better!

In looking back over this varied year, which started in Sikkim at the foot of the Kangchenjunga mountain range, moving through southern India, back to the U.S. for the wedding of my only granddaughter, and on to California for a family reunion and a folk festival, I am filled with gratitude for my good fortune, my good health, my children, and my great family of friends. Thank you all!

I promise to finish this journey before the New Year. We still have the magnificent waterfalls and trails of the Lewis River to explore. Please stay with me. I resolve to be brief in the New Year…yeah!

I asked the young army officer who stopped me at an immigration checkpoint forty miles north of El Paso, Texas. He had just requested that I roll down the back windows so he could check the back seat, and as I fumbled with every lever on the door, fearing that I might eject myself before finding the correct one, I blurted out, “Sorry, officer, but this is a rental car, and I’m not familiar with….”

“Oh, you’re not from Texas,” he replied, which is when I asked him the question, nervously eyeing the large dog sniffing around my tires.  He laughed. “But you’re an American, aren’t you? New Jersey is still in the lower 48. Go on. Enjoy your day.”

If there’s one thing about Texas you can count on, it’s polite and friendly people. If you get lost on the highway, which I did with regularity, the police practically drive you back home. And they send you off with a tip of the hat and a “You stay safe, M’am, ya’hear?”

Why on earth was I in Texas? I promised in my last blog to relate the final three days of my climbing escapades in Washington State and, suddenly, I’m driving through the Guadalupe Mountains and the wide expanse of desert in the Lone Star State. Well, it’s called medical tourism and, if you’re in the over-60 set, find out about it. It can save you a bundle.

Long story short. I had a dental emergency, which was estimated to set me back about $7,800. I could envision selling my house and actually living in that yurt in Mongolia that I keep threatening to do. Several friends told me about Mexico and their excellent clinics just across the border. I went on line and found Rio Dental in Juarez. Unfortunately, I had to move fast, which meant giving up playing in our first Plainfield concert, but they’ve forgiven me. Frequent flyer miles got me to El Paso and a prepaid stay for six days at the airport Travelodge cost $238 (complete with breakfast and pool…what a deal!). Monday morning a van came for me, and several other Americans, and took us across the border to the clinic. On Thursday my crowns were ready to go and on Saturday I headed home, after a day of sunning myself by the pool. Cost was $980.

During my two free days I drove to New Mexico and enjoyed visiting two of America’s national parks. What an unexpected treat! I can thank my musician friend, Phyllis Bitow, who had just made a trip to New Mexico and gave me the details. Her picture is below.

The first park was at the northern end of the Chihuahuan Desert, where the mountain-ringed valley, the Tularosa Basin, gives rise to one of the world’s great natural wonders…the glistening White Sands National Monument. Great wave-like dunes of a rare form of gypsum sand engulf 275 square miles of desert and have created the largest gypsum dune field in the world. As is customary at this parks, there’s an informative film that covers the fascinating history of the undulating mountains of sand and the animals and plants that have adapted to life in the constantly changing environment. As I drove through the dune fields I felt as if I were navigating through snowfields. The roads were plowed where the sand banks flowed onto the road. I rented a flying saucer, just like the ones our children used in the snow, and careened down steep hills like the wind. Too bad my camera settings had been jolted and the pictures were so faded, but here are a few to give you an idea of the striking scenery.

White Sands Visitor Center, typical of New Mexico park architecture

Road leading to the dunes

The long walk up

T

My saucer at the ready….

Trail on which I slid down to the car

The trail from the bottom

Phyllis on top of a dune

Heading for Carlsbad Caverns

Outcroppings and mountains everywhere....

Beyond these rugged mountains and broad plains is a world away from sunlight…the celebrated underground world of Carlsbad Caverns National Park, an incomparable realm of gigantic subterranean chambers and extraordinary cave formations. I started exploring the chambers from the natural entrance route, descending a mile into the earth and following steep and narrow trails through a tall trunk passage called the Main Corridor. Some of the highlights along the route include the Bat Cave,  Devil’s Spring, Green Lake Overlook, and the Boneyard, a complex maze of highly dissolved limestone rock reminiscent of Swiss cheese. The wonders continued unabated as I arrived at the 8.2 acre Big Room, another 1 1/2 mile eye-popping circular  walkway with every possible rock formation from stalactites, helictites, and stalagmites to “draperies,”  columns, “popcorn,” and “soda straws” (these are all laymen names of formations). I ended my four hours underground with a guided tour of the King’s and Queen’s Palaces and the Papoose Room. Exhausted, I took the elevator to the surface, another engineering feat from my point of view.

Here is just a sample of some of the natural wonders I experienced.

The natural entrance to the cave

Scenes along the way

Varieties of "draperies"

"popcorn"

Typical terrain outside the caves

One cultural footnote of the season. I was thrilled with the Metropolitan Opera’s first production of Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, starring the incomparable Russian soprano,  Anna Netrebko. If you get a chance to see it on HD do so.

I came back from my class reunion at Emma Willard School in Troy, NY, just in time to catch the Tony’s, my favorite award show. This year it was stupendous and I picked every winner. The only play I couldn’t get tickets for was Good People, which won a Tony for Frances McDormand, but that’s a pretty good track record.

Forgot to show you a photo of Scott Buck and me in front of the marquee of Million Dollar Quartet, which I mentioned in my May 14 blog. Dynamite show from last year’s picks.

M.P. and Scott Buck under the marquee

I was thrilled that my old neighbor, Norbert Leo Butz won for the best actor in the musical Catch Me If You Can, a must-see, which I saw with another old friend from Florida, Barry Hamilton. And nothing topped the revival of The Normal Heart, Larry Kramer’s watershed drama about AIDS, which I saw with my son, Christopher, in 1985. The play starred Ellen Barkin and John Benjamin Hickey, who won Tony’s, as well as a very moving, powerful Joe Mantello.

A week later I visited the Wyman-Kelly family in West Hartford, CT, and was treated for my birthday (you didn’t know I had a birthday? You certainly must have pegged me as a Gemini by now!) to an excellent revival of August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean at the Hartford Stage. This was one of my favorite venues when I lived in Sherman, CT 18 years ago.

The season came to an end for me with the revival of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, a play about the relationship between past and present, order and disorder, and the certainly of knowledge. It’s also a mystery. I suggest you read it before you see it. I finally did, having been mystified when I first saw it in 1993. Stoppard is my favorite English playwright. His use of word play and dialogue are unsurpassed, except, maybe, by Shakespeare.

I’m on my way to the Mt. Laural Autoharp Gathering  (MLAG) in Newport, PA, and then on to New Hampshire and my beloved Lake Winnipesaukee. A happy, “cool” summer to you all!

There are, indeed, some fabulous travel destinations right here in these United States. And one of them is the Sierra Mountains of northern California. At the end of May I participated in my first California Autoharp Gathering (CAG), which also included accomplished guitarists, fiddlers, dulcimer players, singers, dancers, and experts in the field of country and bluegrass music. Located in Dunlap, CA, an hour from Fresno, and held at beautiful St. Nicholas Ranch near an old mission church turned Greek Orthodox, this was a multiethnic experience, which included children from the Migrant Education Programs of Fresno County run by Mike Mueller.

I spent four days in the company of the greats of Autoharp playing and luthiers who have encouraged new ways of stringing the instrument since my husband, Glen R. Peterson, and I first took over Oscar Schmidt International in 1961. One of the many celebrations honored the members of the Autoharp Hall of Fame, most of whom are in this picture.

I'm in the front row between Bryan Bowers and Lindsey Haisley. Perfect location!

We had a great time reminiscing and answering questions from an audience eager to find new ways of playing and chording. In 1961 there were only 15 chords on the old A Model instrument. Now there are 21 and a plethora of choices and combinations of chords, giving the Autoharp a versatility unknown in the early days.

From an outstanding faculty numbering more than twenty-six, here are a few photographs, just the tip of the iceberg. I guess the most fun was the jamming, which occurred before and after workshops and late into the night. Music was everywhere!

Left to right: Ann Norris, John Massey, Drew Smith, Dave Rainwater

These next few photos were taken by Marc B. Blake, photographer extraordinaire. I’m sure you can find many more online and on  his website, including some exciting videos of the performances.

Bryan Bowers

Carey Dubbert

Yours truly and Mike Fenton, the English Autoharp maven

Bryan Bowers and Karen Mueller...what a combination!

A superb ensemble: Left to right: Ivan Stiles, Coleen & Neal Walters, Kathy Hollandsworth, Carey Dubbert

When I arrived home I knew spring had finally come. I was treated to my daughter Martha’s rhododendron….

…and my pyrocantha (or firethorn).