Jan and Steven and Ian travel to Idaho to visit Joe and Amy and Ethan and Abel. They drive Reddy and stop at Yosemite Valley, sleep over in Tuolumne Meadows, and pass bomb disposal site in Hawthorne NV. On the way back home they stop for lunch in Sacramento. Slideshow
May 27
Chute Lake’s placid surface mirrored clear skies on Tuesday morning. Behr and Robert drove off and the five men remaining headed down the trail whose surface was hard packed after days of rain. For the whole of the 30 km descent the slope remained steeper than anywhere on the ascent, increasing speed and ease of pedaling. Bleak burnt and logged-over landscape gave way to mature second growth forest carpeted with grass and wildflowers. A rushing stream crisscrossed the trail.
We stopped to explore Rock Ovens in the woods built to bake bread for the railroad work crews. The nurses whizzed past shouting instructions for us to bake bread for them. Lionel replied that their place was in the kitchen. Flush with downhill speed, we overtook the women slowed by their bike trailers, and stopped at an opening in the forest cover to take pictures of the sand cliffs, endlessly stretching lake, orchards, vineyards and small settlements in the Okanagon valley below. As soon as Andy broke out three beers remaining from yesterday, the nurses came barreling down behind us and screetched to a halt when we held out the bottles. After a shared toast, they passed around a mickey of powerful cinnamon liqueur, and we agreed to meet for lunch at a vineyard once we reached Naramata.
May 26
The morning remained rainy and foggy, the prospect of more pie and pool playing and of getting a tour of Doreen’s husband Gary’s museum made most of us want to lay over for a day, but Behr was eager to return to Vancouver and look after his mother. After extensive discussion a vote was taken and Behr decided to head back on his own. Murray didnt like the idea.
The remaining crew of five agreed to rent one of Doreen’s cabins, a log house fitted out with beds, kitchen, bathroom, and red curtains, none of which was unappealing after four nights in tents. Steven and Murray dove into the cold lake. Doreen joined us for Murray’s morning Pome reading.
Gary reminisced about his history as a lineman and union official during the violent conflicts with BC Hydro in the ‘50’s and then led us through his extensive museum of local antiquities, including his locked collection of electric line insulators, one of which he had sold for $11,000. Among thousands of intriguing items was a portent of the future: an electric lamp whose current flowed through a meter informing the user of real time energy cost.
May 25
John left on his mission early.
The diminished band of six packed leisurely and pedaled through the parking lot at the approach to Myra Canyon. At the end of curved cut in the rock a vast panorama unfolded. A huge gulf dropping to Lake level was scooped out of the high plateau to which we’d ascended for three days. A dozen or so side canyons covered with the charred remains of a burnt forest and numberless rockslides, opened into it. At the top of the canyon rose a single, wide, snow-covered peak. Volcanic eruption, landslide, holocaust: a display of nature’s power, demonic and sublime.
Next into view came a fine level line threading its way from where we stood, in and out of the side canyons, heading off towards the snowy summit and then back toward us on the other side of the abyss, supported across gaps narrow and wide by a delicate latticework of trestles.
After a lengthy stop to gaze, we crossed the first trestle on a surface of new planking that produced a clean hum from the tires.
It was a smooth thrill of a ride, created by a double human triumph over nature. The first was the original construction of the railroad, motivated by the desire to extract her wealth. The second was the recent reconstruction of the trail and trestles after decay and fire, motivated by the desire to provide pleasure to visitors. As we stopped again at the end of the first trestle, two kids and their parents on bikes came up behind us. “It’s just like Disneyland,” said one.
May 24
After two days of rain and overcast, the morning broke with sun over the lake. Steven went for a cold water swim and shave. Ian received a phone message that Rob was feeling better and would spend time touring the Kootenays by car before rejoining us back in Princeton.
Puddles on the trail deepened, but after Murray endured one wet spill we learned that in low gear bikes are navigable in water. At Summit Lake the uphill grade (never more than 1.9% on the long ascent) levels and we looked forward to the predicted grand scenery of Myra Canyon. Steven was pedaling as happily as a five year old on his first bike, when suddenly his left pedal and crank fell off and landed in the sand. He yelled in protest at this new reverse. The crew gathered round, and Ian, our official bike mechanic—he’d been a fisherman for 7 years—looked for the correct Allen wrench in the kit provided with the bike to tighten the bolt that had fallen out and released the crank. It was missing. The pliers of a Leatherman served as a provisional substitute to tighten the dropped bolt and those on Peter’s bike which had also loosened.
May 23
Coffee, oatmeal, gorp and dried fruit again launched us forward, but for Robert cycling was becoming a terrible ordeal. He needed to lie down and rest along the trail every kilometer or so, and it was clear that he was too sick to proceed despite his valiant efforts. At the Wilkenson Creek Bridge, we again split into subgroups, Andy remaining behind with Rob. A few kilometers further, the rest of us waited at a junction with a road in the middle of a logging slash. With time on our hands there was extended deliberation about how to rescue Rob and allow us to proceed. A flatbed truck on the road was flagged down and the long haired driver and two young passengers were told of our dilemma. They said they were looking for cedar higher up the mountain and would be passing back down in an hour and a half.
Robert finally arrived, ashen and exhausted. John reached Ty in Beaverdell by cell phone and managed to persuade him to drive up and take Rob to the Hotel. He located us at the Wilkenson Creek Road. Another hour passed and Ty didn’t show up but the truck fully loaded with cedar came back down the hill. More conversation revealed that we weren’t at Wilkenson Creek Road but at Rupert Road and that Ty was out on a wild goose chase. The guys in the truck agreed to take Rob and his bike down to the Beaverdell Hotel, and he welcomed the prospect of lying in a bed rather than alongside the road.
May 22
Breakfast was Murray’s gourmet coffee and instant oatmeal from packets enriched with a compote of white peaches and bing cherries made up from dried fruit Steven brought along from San Luis Obispo. Murray discovered that his wallet was missing from his fanny pack and a search of the campground yielded nothing. While we listened to Murray reading his Pome about yesterday’s events, readied for departure, a small hooded figure on a smaller bike drove up and and asked, “Did anybody lose a wallet?” We all cheered. She introduced herself as Gloria, Paul’s wife, at our service. The wallet had been found at the caboose and identified by George who had heard about its loss. She told us not to miss the beautiful cascade along the railroad a few kilometers north.
We set out on a side road, crossing another bridge, passing sheep in a pasture, and then rejoined the railroad trail, which followed the serpentine curves of the river into a canyon where it rushed wildly through two hairpin turns. The trail hugged the cliffs on a right of way blasted into the rock and supported by concrete buttresses at water level. John and Steven scrambled up an outcrop for views and pictures of the blended spectacle of natural splendor and human artifice.
May 20
Lionel’s condo on 8th St. in Vancouver was the first assembly point. Steven was picked up by Ian at the Airport’s South Terminal after his one day visit to Lund, Peter arrived from Sequim where he’d just moved his mother from New York City to a nursing home, Murray arrived by Ferry from Nanaimo and Rob drove in from Burnaby. Gear was packed into Rob’s Honda and Peters Tracker. The rainy Spring made the Fraser Valley vibrant green, swelled the muddy river and produced dozens of spectacular waterfalls. Along the Hope-Princeton highway through Manning Park trees were just coming into light green leaf. Steven and Peter stopped at an unnamed serpentine canyon to admire the cascade.
Two carloads reunited at the Cedars Motel in Princeton, where gear and food were distributed. A Greek Taverna in this unprepossessing town served up dinners and beer excellent by any standard. We were joined at the table by Gregory Archambault who was biking solo all the way across Canada during a five month leave from his transportation company in Quebec. After dinner our group agreed to start out at the eastern end of the preplanned route and head back toward Princeton.
May 21
At Backroads Bikeshop we rented bikes and panniers from Jim Harrison, as prearranged by Lionel, and met up with Andy, who’d driven from Edmonton in his red sportster, and with John, whose Mom drove him down from Kelowna. She brought us fresh grapes, wide smiles and grandmotherly blessings, and took our picture in front of the trailer being loaded by Neil Allison, our driver. On the way to our starting point through the beautiful Similkameen Valley, Neil was a bottomless source of local information. Steven recognized his name as that of the founder of Princeton, from whom he was directly descended by way of one native wife. We passed through exploding Osoyoos and its vast outlying subdivisions, a sign of the real estate boom in this border region, over a pass to the quiet Kettle Valley. Eager to get on the bikes, we decided to start at Rock Creek and Neil unloaded us at the Gold Pan café, where we paid him $50 each and ate borscht for lunch.
I found the listing on the ECOSLO bulletin: Irish Hills Docent-Led Hike. A good location to see early flowers, and Jody a congenial leader. As directed, Jan and I drove to the end of Madonna Road and parked in the new subdivision bordering Costco and the Open Space. The houses are large and densely situated on the flat valley floor, stark, typical sprawl bedroom neighborhood, but promising a different atmosphere once the trees have grown enough to provide something of an urban forest. Jan noted that the park with basketball courts and baseball field that can be used by the residents of the projects across the street were required of the developer, Marshall, while she sat on the City Council. So was the preservation of the old farmhouse at the trailhead, which was sold to a private party who could only renovate and expand it in such a way as to preserve the look of the original building.
It was one of those mild spring mornings with a touch of cool brought on by the slight sea mist especially welcome as the group of about ten people mounted the winding trail. The perennial bunch grass was bright green, and several lilies were coming into leaf. The first bloom a white flower I cant identify.
Ascending the serpentine ridge, we gained larger views of the Los Osos Valley, shopping centers and new subdivisions creeping over the fields and hills in every direction.
But a large green patch in the middle of the sprawl remained where the decades-long struggle over the Dalidio property has left the land fertile and fallow. Adjoining it, is the “Gap” property situated along Prefumo Creek between automobile dealerships and the South Laguna residential neighborhood. This was the parcel before the planning commission last Thursday night that Citizens for Planning Responsibly urged be developed in accordance with the General Plan. Jan wrote a long and expert treatise that formed the basis of all the testimony and for which the Commissioners expressed gratitude, since the City Staff had not done the job.
Jody stopped on the way up at several places to fill us in on some of the details of procurement of the 700 acre patch of open space that serves as one part of the city’s future greenbelt. The Madonna family, which owned vast acreage both of the hill property and the fertile alluvial plain down below were required to deed some of it to Open Space in return for permission to develop their huge shopping center. The same was true of the developer who built the neighborhood we passed through, as well as of the owners of the adjoining Foster property, who ended up developing only two lots on their more than 200 acre parcel.
At the shoulder of the ridge, the trail levelled and headed west parallel to Froom creek below. As civilization disappeared behind us, its sounds were replaced by the rush of water. Ahead and up the creek the only sign of human impact was the gash of the road gouged in the canyon by the property owner, the late Alex Madonna, master of the D9 Caterpillar bulldozer, whose ostentatious signature is inscribed on mountainsides in every direction. Above the opposite bank rose a high wall of impenetrable looking scrub oak woodland. The trail was bordered by the first bloom of Ceanothus cuneatus, light purple, odiferous, exuberant.
We continued down into the canyon along a branch of Madonna’s road that the city along with conservation organizations has tried unsuccessfully to restore. The disfigured walls were neverthess beautiful in baring the browns, greens and whites of weathering serpentine. The surface of the road was carpeted by a strange red plant, apparantely chlorophil free, which I havent yet identified.
Walking upstream along the creek, we found the first California poppies of the season, dazzling two-toned goblets of orange and white with red tipped leaves and buds.
Further along we came upon a tributary creek surrounded by the leaves of rare and endemic local native, the San Luis Obispo bog thistle.
Following the tributary to some its sources, I discovered water seeping straight out of the porous serpentine rock.
After a snack break in the shade of oaks and bay laurels along the rushing creek, we headed back up to the ridge, passing banks of bush poppies whose leaves were dried but whose blooms shared in the festivity of an early California Spring.
Despite the sound of hammers and traffic, the world seems emptied out. It’s two days after winter graduation, three weeks to the end of the year. The sun so low it makes windows glitter all over the valley before me.
Why do I face the city and leave my back to the back country? Its not a friendly season, despite the quiet, the warming sun and cooling breeze. The ground I sit on is bare dirt. A scattering of small hard berries: deer pellets annealed by the fire that’s burned off the grass, blackened the rocks, trimmed the yuccas into globular bulbs topped with brown quills surrounding a few spared green ones. Their needled tips curve south clawing for light.
A few days ago I wandered through the restored ruins of Poly Canyon. Now I look down into it, shadowed by a warren of rising buildings flanked front and back by massive rectangular parking structures.
Only a half inch of rain was left by last week’s much heralded storm. The grassland has turned from green to gold to tan to a corpselike gray.
Much of the way up here, I followed a deer trail along the blank margin of the scrub. Ecotone. “Why do they choose this route,” I’ll ask the class on our hike in January after we read Mary Austin’s “Water Trails of the Ceriso.” They’ll answer, “to stay close to the cover.” Just like the birds and rodents who harvest the grass and seeds close to the edge. Below me a rustle breaks the silence and two rear ends bounce three times downward and out of sight.
Fire and drought.
A land dry, silent, withdrawn,
aching to soak up moisture,
to shine and swell,
to burst into flower and song.
7:15 Chet Baker singing and playing as I drink my coffee, thinking of return to Jan.
Time after Time
I tell myself that Im
so lucky to be loving you
so lucky to be
the one you run to see
in the evening
when the day is throughI only know what I know
the passing years will show
you’ve kept my love so young so new
and time after time
you’ll hear me say that Im
so lucky to be loving you.
Woke with a start at midnight from the sound of three sharp knocks on the door. No lights, no follow up. I sneaked around in the dark and locked all doors. Wake up at 5, achy as usual, take hot bath, go back to bed to feel the pleasure of warmed, relaxed muscles, meditate and sleep. Get up again at 7:00.
4:20 p.m. What’s happened to this day? After oatmeal breakfast, I write a guide to keeping warm and disposing of trash for visitors at Knoll House. Then split kindling to leave behind. Again enjoy feeling the aim improve as I tilt the axehead back over my head, bring it down on the quarter round, hear the crack of the fibres and the pop of the pieces shooting out in opposite directions. Pack the garbage to take to Lund, where I buy lamp oil, candles and matches for future power outages. An easy glide down, but a tough slog back up to Malaspina Road and then down to U. to give back one bike and pick up another. I make it all the way home on Peter B’s bike. Get back at 12:15, read for fifteen minutes and then start a cleanup that lasts four hours. After the morning’s splitting and bikeride, it’s hard work. The rain gets stronger and steadier, Savaryview fogged in.
Sad songs play on the computer. Now its time to pack my bag, lock up, and catch the little bus to Powell River.
How many vertical layers in Savaryview?
1. Deck surface
2. Railing
3. Close clearing with rocks
4. Path to bluff
5. Proscenium of trees
6. Lower fringe of trees in front of water
7. The passage between Mace and Hurtado points
8. Mace point
9. South beach and Savary trees
10. Georgia Strait
11. Comox peninsula
12. Comox Valley
13. Lower cloud layer
14. Front Range
15. Skyline Range
16. Distant sky
17. Overhead sky
What are the movements?
1. Sun, moon, star light: the time of day or night, the seasonal angle, the cloud covers
2. Skyscape: cloud density, color, shape, texture on horizontal and vertical axes
3. Wind: intensity, steadiness, direction, in sound, smells, effect on land, sky and seascapes
4. Tidal ebb and flow, shrinking and expanding the beach
5. Current in the channel
6. Snow cover on the mountains, expanding and receding
7. Wildlife: bugs, birds, mammals
The temperature drops a degree or two. Does the stove need a log? It’s been an hour. I go downstairs to check, feel warmth as I reach the bottom steps, hear the rippling flow of combustion, see the flicker in the window. Not at all. Instead of raising, I lower the damper. There’s a living being at work for my comfort down there that requires close tending. When I came home last night and the stove was cold, I worried that the jack pine was poor fuel, that Dick may have tricked me, that I’d have to order a load of fir for any visitors. But the fire lit easily, and when I woke up this morning, it was still going.
What are the planes of consciousness?
1. right now: the temperature, the stove, the view, the list, appetite
2. observing and recording right now
3. reading and revising right now’s entries
4. reading and revising yesterday’s entries
5. reflecting and commenting on yesterday’s entries right now
6. recalling: old stuff in the computer. Old stuff remembering earlier stuff…
A phone call. The College Dean wants to know if I’d be willing to moderate a round table discussion on Sustainability and the Liberal Arts with a distinguished visitor the day after I get back. Suddenly there’s homework.
I walk down to the bluff listening to the glocks of three ravens flying formation.
I encounter a squirrel cheeping loudly and take his picture and a film and sound recording.
Douglas squirrel Tamiasciurus douglasi …skull olive brown on the back and buff underneath, the two colours being separated by a black line. The bushy tail is also darker above…coniferous seeds from the mai pat of the squirrel’s food, supplemented by berries and mushrooms. …does not hibernate…stores large quantities of cones for winter use….active during the day, scolding and chattering as it tries to chase other animals from its home territory. Nature West Coast 205
Follow the trail to below the summit. See Cortes and Twin Island.
Walk back and hear chipping and see a little wren on the path back to the house. Winter Wren, Troglodytes, troglodytes
Repair gasket on woodstove.
Eat the last leftovers of Michael’s Snow White Chicken. The water chestnuts and baby bok choy and diagonally sliced asparagus and the local grown chicken, stewed in its own broth, whitened with the corn starch—along with the remains of a bottle of Okanagan Semillon Chardonnay.
Finish reading Prodigal Summer. Its happy ending makes me feel happy. A vulgar enjoyment. I will enjoy sharing it with students.
This is my last night here until April or May. I love this house, this land, this neighborhood, this province, this country.
Peter B. is back here at 6:30 in morning to pick me up for a hike up into the Coast Range. I have some difficulty getting going and packing what I need for the day. We drive two hours to the trailhead on logging roads where no old growth remains and the second growth is harvested with the haste of looters. But this grandiose landscape would be inaccessible without those roads.
We ascend through juvenile yellow cedars and wine-red blueberry twigs above Gamma and Alpha lakes till we come to the half-iced over Beta lake, at the base of the two Knucklehead peaks.
This is the easiest ascent of any of the high mountains in the area, and Peter’s plan is to make a loop between the two peaks and around the lake. But as we pull ourselves up by gripping the heather protruding through the iced-over snow, it becomes evident that the going will be rougher than expected. At times the snow is soft enough or the crust is thin enough for us to break through and gain traction. But in most places the surface is slick with hard ice.
At a little plateau where the vegetation gives way to pure rock and snow, Peter unpacks his single pair of crampons.
One goes on his left foot the other on my right. If you put any weight on the foot without the crampon, you are sure to fall, not something you want to do, given the slope and dropoffs. With the cramponed foot, you carve a rough, flat resting place for the useless foot but dont move it until you’ve stepped sideways and a little forward with the cramponed foot. Then you move the useless foot into its prepared spot and repeat the sequence. This is a lesson on the complexity of normal walking. It takes half an hour to make what would be a five minute traverse without the ice.
The weather is clear, the views spectacular and proceeding is not too strenuous or frightening if you slow down and pay very close attention.
We decide to stop for lunch at the saddle between the peaks, forgo both summits and head back the way we came.
The way down is easier because we have tracks to follow and the snow has softened a little. What a substance: hard, soft, appearing and disappearing–a solid almost as mercurial as liquid or gas.
Once returned to the lake, we split up to meditate, sitting on cushions of heather in the early lowering sun. Back by nightfall at Peter’s house, we’re served a salmon dinner by Margaret. A girl at the reserve sold her the fish, which, it turned out, was stolen from her grandmother’s freezer.
6:10 A.M.
Woke up at 5:30 this morning, eager to start the day probably from anticipation: dinner party tonight, Lucien coming to cut firewood—company. But also solitude: the sensation of the warm bath, reading, meditating, and returning to this journal. Researching granite and moss, liverworts and lichen. Photoshopping pictures of the rocks with the sequence I came upon yesterday: filter>artistic>cutout>4.4.1 and 4.10.1.
And searching for Knoll House journals in the computer.
Back to the day of the dead: excerpts from Court Evidence transcribed in the blog of two years ago: Glimpses of Kenneth.
A 1998 poem and reflection about Ellen’s coming death.
June 21 1998
Amazingly you’re back
And still “with no deficits.”
Each message feels like my last,
And yet there comes an answer.
This is what war was like:
Someone at home writing
To a soldier on the front.
Why is it that death interests me so? The only thing worth writing about. The only relationship really worth pursuing–with a woman who’s got one foot in the grave. “This is it,” she wrote in an email a year ago. This is it.
And a sonnet to her dated May 10 1964, my first year in grad school.
Indifference has only one cure that I know
The solution is obvious but hard to apply
Cold shoulders and hearts must be warmed up with snow
Not answering in kind will produce a reply.
The icier my silence, the sooner you thaw
But you freeze when my temperature rises.
“Nothing from nothing,” declares the old saw
Yet here nothing claims all of the prizes.
Passionate pleadings and drunk declarations,
Whatever displays my feelings, my fire
The overwrought products of late lucubrations
Won’t further but frustrate my ardent desire.
Though I realize restraint would be much more effective
Still I’ll send you these lines and forsake my objective.
The song playing in the morning darkness: Eric Clapton’s “Drowning in a River of Tears.”
A poem to Jan written a month after we met, preserved in a 1992 Journal:
May 10, 1966
Reveille
This morning I awoke from sleep
And smiled although you weren’ there.
Exuberant with gratitude
That I’d returned from solitude
Back to a world we share.
The bed I lay in still was warm
With the languid memory of your breast
And sense with fancy subtly blent
The sweet trace of our mingled scent
The room itself was blessed.
A dumb indifferent world transformed
Into a friendly welcome place
Reminding me of last night’s kiss
And promising the next night’s bliss
Denying time and space.
The taking of the vitamin
Acquired a sacramental drift
My imitative ritual
That answers to the purple pill
Which served to pledge your gift.
And later in the day I found
The promise of the early hour
Fulfilled again when sight unseen
My ugly, lonely brown machine
Was changed into a flower.
Morning meditation: noisy but with a buzz. Sounds of rain hitting roof, hard to distinguish from sounds of fire and stovepipe. The inside temperature always changing. The outside world without color.
I’ve told the computer to index itself. According to Mac Help, every word in 315 000 files is being located and tallied. In the meantime I can keep working. [Two days later and one third of the way through, it gives up.]
I leave a second phone message to Ruth saying I could take the water taxi to Cortes and from there get to Vancouver on my way back to California.
Shore pine, Pinus contorta. Bundles of two needles. There’s lots around. Someone once told me it was worthless for firewood. I cut a stick out of a windfall with the handsaw and put it in the stove to find out. Seems to burn nicely. Check with Dick. He says, “Jack Pine, its great firewood.”
“Short to 20 m. bark moderately thick, scaly or deeply furrowed into plates, dark brown to blackish… Restricted to dry rocky areas with shallow soil, not because this habitat represents optimum growing conditions for it, but because it is intolerant of shade and connote compete with other conifer species in the more favorable habitats.”
1:50 off the phone after a twenty minute conversation with Ruth. She’s just returned to Cortes Island after a month’s trip and is heading out again next week. This isn’t a good time to get together, but it will happen in Spring or Summer. We want our spouses to meet. She’s been on my website, asked questions about my history, and thanked me for the Field Guide, which she hasn’t yet unpacked.
The sun is lighting up half the sky and droplets in the wire mesh on the deck railing.
Her call came after I’d finished two hours of cutting, splitting and loading wood into the shed with Lucien. It’s close to half full. We took down two trees. The top of one came within two feet of the house. The other bent his chain bar, but he was able to unbend most of the curve. Both mishaps resulted from following my advice.
Ruth moved to Cortes in 1997 with her husband, who’s a permaculturist, artist, and environmental restorationist. They are using the cabin on their land to create an institute to bring in people to run workshops on Cortes. They have an apartment in New York. I talked too much, but I wanted to do my part after having been enthralled with her novels, films and speeches.
She told me about an eminent psychiatrist having been googled at the border by US immigration and not allowed into the country because of his statement in a 1960’s research article that he had used psychotropic drugs. This is the cutting edge of the coming tyranny: anybody who acknowledges having smoked pot is an enemy of the state.
The conversation could have continued, but I felt it courtesy to be the one to end it.
Michael comes over at four and completes the dinner preparation he’s been working on since yesterday afternoon.
Company arrives soon after 5. Lucien brings a huge bag of Chanterelles he picked in a favorite spot after this afternoon’s woodcutting. Sophia loves Ethan’s toys and the slideshow on the computer. Don comes with Paula, the one person here who wasn’t yet family. Peter B. brings a packet from Margaret who’s on Savary with her woman’s group: a new signed copy of Sheila Munro’s biography of her mother—cost $19.50, not the $450 asked for by Amazon. Mara’s birthday adds festivity. She looks little changed from the Mushy who lived on the Funny Farm in 1971. While everyone delights in his dinner, Michael recites Robert W. Service poems with a professional actor’s presence and range.
