Moving along, with hikes, swims, and languages

      It has been my great pleasure to be working this past week on two of my favorite 75x75 items: take 75 hikes (or skis – suggested by Marion Haddon, Phil Straffin, and Mike Kohn) and take 75 swims (Phil, Mike, and Bob Cook). I did three hikes this past week, two in the Emigrant Wilderness Area, just north of Yosemite National Park (see my blog post this Thursday on dianacoogle.blogspot.com for an account of the first of those trips), and one in the Red Buttes Wilderness Area, half an hour south of my house. While in the Emigrant Wilderness I hugged some trees, but the trees in the Red Buttes were not very huggable!

 I also got in a couple of good swims. Because of the smoke this summer, I haven't been able to swim as much as I might have otherwise, so I'm a little concerned about being behind in this item. I was glad to swim in beautiful Powell Lake in the Emigrant Wilderness Area,

in lily-pad rimmed but still deep and beautiful Grouse Lake in the same wilderness, 

You can see the path of my swim.

and in poor suffering Azalea Lake, which isn't nearly so inviting as it used to be, with its fire-scarred shores.

      My granddaughter's suggested 75s item was to learn to say "Hello," "Good-bye," and "What is your name?" in 75 languages. (Brian and Merri Stephens and Carol Lieberman also suggested learning "Hi" in 75 languages. I chose the three-forked approach.) So far I have learned to say "Hello," "Good-bye," and "What is your name?" in the 25 languages below, categorized for the sake of easier memorization rather than for any scholarly accuracy: 

      5 Nordic languages (Icelandic, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish)

      3 from the British Isles (English, Irish, and Welsh)

      3 from Spain (Spanish, Catalan, Basque)

      4 other Romance languages (French, Rumanian, Italian, Portuguese)

      3 other Germanic languages (German, Dutch, Yiddish)

      2 Slavic languages (Russian, Polish)

  3 other languages from eastern and Northern European countries (Estonian, Lithuanian,                          Hungarian)

      2 outliers (Greek and Hawaiian) 

So far I like to say Hawaiian best, with its mellifluous syllables. "What is your name?" is "O wai kou inoa?" It's a language that flows over the tongue like gentle surf on the beach.

       I also talked to some strangers, did some good deeds, gave some compliments, and hugged more trees. I'm doing pretty well.

Lovingly contemplating Powell Lake with a hemlock tree

Opportunities on the Oregon Coast

      Over the Labor Day weekend I went with Mike to the Oregon Coast near Newport to visit my friend Wallace Kaufman, who lives five miles down a gravel road on the Poole Slough – in the boonies, as they say. Wallace is the 17th of the 75 friends I intend to visit before July 20, and a wonderful visit it was with good conversation, good food and wine, and great kayaking on the slough and in the bay, with opportunities in abundance for adding birds and animals to my 75s lists.  
      Here, for instance, is one of many harbor seals that bobbed around our kayaks in the bay.
   
  I also saw a nutria, an otter-like animal, swimming in the slough and many birds: great blue herons fishing from posts and trees; kingfishers in straight-line upriver dashes and gorgeous wing-fluttering displays as they settled on perches; a red-tail hawk, soaring on the wind currents; swallows; cormorants; gray jays; and beautiful, graceful white egrets.

Photo by Wallace Kaufman

   




     New vocabulary words that came from the long weekend include, besides nutria, Procrustean (to enforce uniformity without attention to individual differences); nonuple, relating to groups of nine, as in parallel with triple, quadruple, and quintuplets (learned from a New York Times crossword puzzle); and gam, a meeting of two ships, especially whaling ships, for an exchange of information, news, etc., a word I learned from Moby Dick, which I'm reading to Mike.



 Here is a picture of Mike and me having a gam on an early-morning kayak paddle to the bay.

Photo by Wallace Kaufman