When I first met Michael, some twenty-odd years ago, he was a sailor. Or rather he owned a kayak with sails called a Klepper, a “fold boat” with a collapsible wooden frame and a waterproof skin. It fits neatly into four canvas bags and can be checked as baggage if you want to go, say, for a kayaking vacation in Belize. Or Mexico, where Michael took his several times. His boat looked much like this one in the watercolor below, but with larger, triangular sails.

He had told me about his prized possession years before I came to know it. Designed in 1907 by a German tailor, Joannes Klepper, Das boot zasammengegt  (the boat folded) was meant to appeal to new-century Germans eager to explore nature and carry their watercraft with them. Herr Klepper (photo, right) built a factory to produce his boats, which are still handcrafted in Rosenheim, Germany. In 1956, Dr. Hannes Lindemann sailed across the Atlantic in a Klepper, a story carried by Life Magazine that breathlessly reported: “never before had the ocean been crossed in so small a craft with no outside help of any kind.”

Such feats aside, I was not impressed. Having grown up in the high sagebrush desert of northwest Colorado, in a town with no swimming pool and a river I’d nearly drowned in as a teenager, I had little interest in being in, on or under the water, especially on a sailing kayak.

Heading into the wind for a high school reunion in Craig, Colorado

But then we moved to Oregon, and Michael was so excited to take me out in his Klepper than I couldn’t say no. On a camping trip to Ollalie Lake, I helped him put his boat together (“…assembly times can be as little as 8–10 minutes or can reach upwards of an an hour” – we were definitely at the upper end that day). It was sunny with a brisk wind when we put in. I sat in the bow, and once the wind filled the sails we were skimming along the surface at (to me) a terrifying rate – the jib flapping in my face and the boom swinging dangerously over my head. “Hey baby, we’re sailin!” Michael yelled joyously (or something like that) as the boat heeled and my nose was within six inches of the water. I was scared stiff. Once back on land, I told him I could never do that again.

(Olallie Lake but not my photo, nor our kayaks)

But as I settled into Oregon, got oriented to Portland’s ten bridges, started a job that required lots of driving and stopped bursting into tears as I found myself on the wrong side of the Willamette River with a drawbridge up and an appointment looming, AND learned to correctly pronounce “Willamette” (emphasis on the second syllable, as in Wil – LA – met), I began to appreciate that we were surrounded by water and it might be fun to be on it in a less scary way.

The Steel Bridge, one of Portland’s five drawbridges

So one spring weekend we rented a tandem kayak at REI and paddled around a local wetlands a few miles from town. We were alone and it was quiet. We saw an osprey, blue herons, a Western painted turtle, and maybe even an eagle. We had a picnic on a little island and watched a beaver at work. It felt wonderfully relaxed and safe. A couple of weeks later we rented again, and the REI sales guy told us we could deduct the cost of the rental from the purchase of a kayak. It was a big expense for us – $1200 with all the additional gear, if I remember – but we were in the midst of a high-tension house renovation, and we figured it was a good investment in our sanity and in our marriage. We bought an Old Town Loon kayak made of heavy polypropylene, with a rudder and a big broad beam.

Ah, this was more like it. I sat in the front and learned to say “port and starboard, bow and stern” (still not remembering which is which), and “floating log ahead at one o’clock.” Michael sat in the back – I mean the stern – and operated the rudder. In turned out that we harmonized right away as tandem paddlers, and we began to go out every chance we had. Within a few months I even wrote an article for our local Oregonian, “Starting Slowly, Novice Kayaker Learns Joys of Flatwater Outings.”  In other words, I was hooked, as long as there were no waves and we stayed within swimming sight of land.

Which is not to say we didn’t have some tense moments, as when we got caught in a low tide in a Columbia River slough and had to wait for the tide to come in.

Jump forward nearly twenty years. Every fall I block out a week for an annual kayaking trip. The past two years we’ve paddled the Willamette River and camped along its banks, using the wonderful Water Trail Guide that maps every mile, rapids, and hazard. We stopped for lunch in old logging towns that are gasping for life as tourist destinations, the old JC Penney stores now antique malls. It was a placid few days, our only contretemps an issue about where to pitch the tent. When Michael could see the evening would not go well on the ugly, gravely site he’d chosen to camp, he gallantly picked up the tent and carried it across the inlet to the the more scenic spot I preferred.

This year we chose to kayak the coastal waterways, the rivers that meander their slow last miles on the way to the Pacific. The Oregon Coast has to be one of the most breathtaking and moody seashores in the U.S., with everything but good weather and warm water for swimming. The place names say it all: Cape Disappointment, Cape Foul Weather, Cape Perpetua (where supposedly Captain Cook took forever to land, waiting out bad storms).

Cape Perpetua

But this year we got lucky: two days of sun, two days of overcast, one day of rain, four nights camping, one night in the Ester Lee Motel. Three rivers, great fresh seafood, one good restaurant meal, and one stop at a classic coastal watering hole, Mad Dog Country Tavern, which made Michael very happy.

At our last campsite, near Yachats, we realized that our Volvo and kayak, both born in 1994, are growing old together. Our Old Town Loon is out of production, it’s sides and bottom abraded and dinged, its heavy polyethylene style left behind in the face of jazzier “Carbonlite, thermoformed” models.

And that’s a kayak paddle holding open the Volvo back door, which no longer stays up on its own. But like old friends everywhere, they stay faithful and dependable, support one another, give endless hours of pleasure, and still have lots of life left in them.

Last week I dusted off my twenty-year old mountain bike and took it in to Citybikes, a nearby worker-owned bike cooperative, to see what could be done. I want to sit straight up on my bike and survey the universe as I pedal around town, instead of crouching over the handlebars as though I’m streaking down Dog Mountain. Twenty years ago, when my sister Sherry and I bought our TREK bikes through a sure-to-get-a-discount contact at Nike, where she’d recently started working, we thought they were cool, or rather we thought WE were cool. AND ahead of our time, it seemed, when I learned from a billboard on our way to a movie the other day that Portland has become “America’s Bicycle Capital.”

While my bike was in retrofit mode for a few days, I kept an eye out for “bicycle lore” in my daily walks about town. A friend had recently told me about a new “peddling bar,” which I imagined as a sort of mobile cocktail affair that folks peddled as they drank. Then I came across it by chance the other day, sitting on a side street. The driver was taking a break so I didn’t disturb him with questions, but checked out the website, BrewCycleportland.com .

Turned out I wasn’t far off. The website opens with an invitation to “pre-sign your liability waver” before booking your BrewPub Crawl ($25 each). Up to 15 peddlers tool around town for two hours and stop at three brew pubs, and although it’s not explicit on the website, I think it’s clear by the arrangement of seats and bar in photo above that you definitely drink while crawling. And it’s a big success, judging by the graphic booking schedule – sold out this Saturday from 11:00 am to 9:30 PM, and most of Sunday. They’ve expanded their fleet too, they say, though there is no information on the site about who “they” are. But it’s a wonderful marriage of two of Portland’s signature obsessions: brew pubs and biking.

Speaking of marriage  (the above image grabbed off BikePortland website), so-called “low-car housing” is popping up everywhere in central Portland, mostly along bus and streetcar lines. Not three blocks from our southeast Buckman neighborhood, a new four-story, 71-unit apartment building has just been completed with not ONE parking space. And we just heard about another 40-unit, no-parking building to be built three blocks in the other direction from us. Bike advocates promote this as a partial solution to one of the biggest problems facing Portland, which has grown by over 10% in the last ten years: a chronic shortage of rental housing. On the other hand, developers tout their new buildings as environment and bike-friendly, but in fact they save a lot of money when they don’t have to provide parking spaces. The idea being that rents will be cheaper. We shall see.

But here’s a Portland bike project you can unequivocally love. Twice a week, Laura Moulton peddles her mobile library of donated books to a downtown square and sets up for a four-hour shift, serving people who live outside (previously called “homeless”). Men and women, some with kids and dogs, gather around to check out or bring back books using an old-fashioned, card-in-pocket system that we all remember from our early library days. No one has to show an ID or have an address, but patrons are asked to return the books when they are able. “Don’t worry about the due date; I’ll find you or you can find me,” she tells borrowers. A couple of years ago I spent a morning with some photography students, photographing and interviewing Laura and her patrons, (who can choose to be photographed with their books, or not). Laura has even produced a ‘zine how-to booklet for those who want to duplicate this wonderful project: http://www.streetbooks.org/

OK, I wanted to finish with to my own personal bike story, but I’m going to wait for something interesting to happy this Sunday, August 25, when the City of Portland will block off a 9-mile loop of traffic-free streets in our part of town. From 11:00 until 4:00 we can walk or bike or roll or run, stopping for activities in parks and neighborhoods along the way that include free belly dance or zumba classes, tai chi, climbing wall, bike repair, fresh fruit sampling, swingin’ country music or even a little Shakespeare.

Stay tuned and I’ll get back to you next week…

Well, I’d no sooner published my last post on the contradictory relationship between President Correa’s new media law, cracking down on press freedoms while continuing to host Wikileaks’Julian Assange in Ecuador’s London embassy, when Edward Snowden popped up in Moscow, reportedly heading for Ecuador via Cuba. My favorite story of what happened next appeared in the Guardian, describing the two dozen journalists who bought seats on the Aeroflot flight to Havana, having heard that Snowden and his traveling companion, Sarah Harrison of WikiLeaks, had checked into seats 17A and 17 B. I love imagining how the media folks anticipated the long hours they’d have with a cornered Snowden as he was compelled to answer all their questions. But as the plane taxied away from the gate, the journalists discovered that Snowden was not onboard. Instead, they found themselves stuck with one another on the 12-hour flight to Cuba – on which no alcohol was served, “much to the chagrin of the reporters, many of whom aren’t used to going half a day without a stiff drink.”

Latest news from Ecuador is that Correa is cooling off on the idea of granting Snowden asylum, party because he’s pissed off at Assange for “trying to run the show” from the London embassy. (Two (too) big personalities on the same stage?) At a press conference on Friday, the president declared that Ecuador would not consider an asylum request unless Snowden reached Ecuadorian territory, highly unlikely given that he apparently remains in transit hell in the Moscow airport.

*  *  *  *  *

OK, enough of politics. Life moves by very fast when it’s lived in six-month segments. When I tell folks here I’m leaving Cañar in a week they say, “No es posible! You just got here!” When I let friends in Portland know we’re coming home, they say, “Really? It seems you just left!” I feel the same. In the end, our lives might go by in a flash but the landscape changes very little. Here is a lovely photo taken by a Peace Corps volunteer in 1970. In the background is Tayta Bueran, the flattop mountain that marks the continental divide. For the Canari it is a “cerro sacrado,” a sacred mountain.

And one of the same I took recently…

This is our eighth year of living in Cañar from January to July; and in Portland from July to December. Once here, I barely think about our Portland life until we get close to leaving; then I begin to anticipate with great pleasure everything that awaits in the north – friends, family, food, movies, home, garden, summer weather…. (It also usually begins to get very cold and windy here in June.) The same happens in Portland – I feel totally disconnected from our life in Canar. We don’t check in or want any news of problems (the house was broken into a few years ago, in September, and there was nothing we could do until we got here in January). But when it gets close to coming back to Ecuador, I get excited – the house, the views, climate, friends and projects, the no-car, no-TV, no-phone-calls life – and I can’t wait to get back.

Michael has his own emotional response to change, based on a profoundly domestic streak that binds him to place and routine wherever he is. “I don’t want to leave,” he said the other night to José María our compadre and caretaker. But then I hear him say the same in Portland, come December: “Let’s just stay here!”

One big difference in our two lives in how we take leave of our houses. In Portland we prepare it as if a guesthouse for a wonderful tenant who has come back at least five years now, clearing shelves, closets and personal tchotchkes, and giving our old Volvo a Cristo wrap in the driveway. In return, our tenant meticulously takes care of the house, replacing every broken cup, and leaving it just as we left it, with fresh linens on the beds.

In Cañar, we virtually strip the house of all belongings except furniture – wall art, rugs, linens, clothes, bedding, and pack everything away in two locked storerooms. I cover the bookcases, kitchen shelves and some of the better furniture with old sheets. On the last day, Michael shutters the windows and doors, leaving the house dark and closed up like a big box. Since the break-in, we have a 700-pound safe for my large camera and gear, and Michael has created an ingenious system for hiding his tools that I can’t divulge. José María and his family come once a week or so to water the plants in the patio. They also tend the surrounding yard of alfalfa and plant the field behind, so they are a consistent presence while we’re gone. We tell them they are not responsible if anything goes wrong, but of course they do feel responsible.

We leave Cañar next Wednesday, July 3, and I haven’t decided what to do about this blog for the next six months. Shall I suspend and take it up again next January, when we return to Ecuador? Or should I keep posting from Portland? Please let me know what you think.