The personal ramblings and adventures of Mike Altman

I would like to say that Bill Callahan’s new album Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle hit me like a slap to the face the first time I heard it, but I can’t. I was more intrigued than anything… So I listened again, and again, and yet again. I think that I played it around 4 times in succession after hearing it for the first time.

It’s not that it’s complex, but rather the opposite. The string arrangements sound like some that you could hold in your hand that could fly away in a strong breeze. Callahan’s lyrics are bold and clever. It reminds me of the first time that experienced The National. At first it sounds simple and easy to digest. But upon closer look, you can see the spark of genius keenly shroud in plain sight.

The album reaches an apex at track 5 – Too Many Birds. I think that John Darnielle does the song justice on his blog by simply pasting the lyrics along with the hyperbolic sentence: “Someday you will brag that you were around when stuff this good was being written.”

The last song Faith/Void takes what I would call a bold risk. Even in popular music, the issues of theology and modern day society seem taboo to discuss outright. Callahan repeats the line: “It’s time to put god away” over and over again. For some reason it doesn’t sound menacing or preachy as it does when read on a page. He sings/speaks the line as a mater-of-fact type instruction a parent would tell a child to put their toys away.

Though I only recently discovered Bill Callahan I was shocked to learn that he has been making music for almost two decades under the name Smog. I don’t know how I never came across his work before, but I now feel overwhelmed with a full discography to sort through. The tunnels of music appreciation are long and winding, and you never know where your heading or where you going to pop out.

This past weekend I made the long trek up to Lake Placid, NY in preparation for a 4 day (3 night) backpacking trip. There were four of us, two of which had never spent consecutive a nights in the woods before. We planned a 3 day trip that we could do without backtracking if the first day didn’t go well.

With our 25 lb backpacks filled with food, clothes, and equipment we started out from the Calkins Brook trail head.  The trail was a horse trail, so it was pretty flat and wide. We were able to cover about 11 miles the first day. Much more that I usually do, mainly because we figured we would be tired and want to take it easy the rest of the weekend. So we did a big chunk the first day in order take a big bite out of out total distance. It was cool to see how drastically the forest changes in the span of 11 miles. One minute it’s a mud bog, where each step is like walking in soup. The next thing you know, you look up and it’s all birch with blinding green leaves. This emerged as a trend throughout the trip, and never got old.
The wet sections were frog farms. It seemed as though every few feet the ground would jump away from under your boot. I hope we didn’t unknowingly squish any.

We got to our destination tired and sore from the day, with plenty of daylight left to enjoy. We stayed along Cold River that night in a well maintained lean-to. The first day had gone great! We had complete solitude. Not a human in sight since we left the car that morning. The night sky was clear and we sat out on rocks in the river for an immeasurable amount of time (part in due to none of us having any way to tell time) just star gazing. The night was becomingly cool and the swarms of bugs dissipated.

The next morning we took a short day hike leaving out packs at the lean-to in order to find Shattuck Clearing. We searched for it briefly the night before but found the river impassable on foot (as opposed to on horse I guess). This time we crossed a bridge a mile up river from where we tried the first time. There were trail markers for it, but we still couldn’t find it so we just gave up and headed out back on the trail to our next destination.

The trail was a section of the 100 mile Northville-Placid trail (which Noelle and I did some of a few years ago). We followed Cold River all day on the wet and rooty trail. It was painful in the morning. All of our hips were raw from the pack the day before. The soreness was negatively proportional to the weight that the packs lost as we ate our food throughout the trip.  We camped that night along the river. The bugs swarmed as soon as we stopped at our lean-to. The first order of business was to make a smokey fire and keep it going until we were ready for bed.

The next morning we awoke to rain. We waited it out in our sleeping bags under shelter. Once we set out, the black flys and mosquitoes descended. As soon as we would stop walking, we would get swarmed. We were barely able to stop for lunch. When we reached our intend destination for the night, we decided that trying to set up camp would be difficult with the onslaught of bloodsuckers. So… we trucked on. We did the next day’s hike with hardly a break. 13+ miles in a last ditch effort to get to the safety of my car. We made it bloodied, wet, and sore, just as the sun was setting. The second half of the day was not as fun as it should have been.

The next morning we woke up in Noelle’s family’s house in Lake Placid ready for a day hike to make up for the premature ending to out backpacking trip. We hiked a summit with no packs on. It felt good to cover some ground feeling while light as a feather. My ankle was bothering me from the previous day. The pressure from putting on a boot caused me to limp. I opted to wear a boot on my good foot and a croc on the bad one. The views were spectacular, and an almost perfect weekend came to a close (save for 6 hours of driving to get home to Boston).

You may be saying to yourself, well… that doesn’t sound like a “perfect weekend”. Lugging around heavy packs and getting eaten by bugs for three + days sounds horrible. The enjoyment part is something that I find difficulty putting in words. In fact, I hypothesize that this is something most people who enjoy this type of thing struggle to evangelize. The best I can do to express the fun and joy that overwhelms the misery is to show pictures. But this does not do it justice. Not even close. The only way to truly understand is to don a pack and just head out into the woods to experience the wonders of silence and nature.

Pictures can be seen in the Gallery

The pictures from my trip to WA are up in the gallery.

I have adopted a new rabbit from the MSPCA. She was a stray Dutch found in the city (apparently that happens a lot). I’ll try to get some pictures of her up at some point soon.

Her name is Skully. At first she was very shy, but after a week she is starting to come out of her shell and show some real personality. Skully is very gregarious and loves to explore the apartment and has an independent attitude. I image she learned to fend for herself well while as a stray.

I also signed a lease in the Porter Square area of Somerville. I get to wave Allston goodbye in September.

Yesterday we spend the day in Seattle. We drove in the city and found some parking half a mile from the Space Needle. We got there at 11:30 am and the city was a ghost town. Walking around the Space Needle was a little bit eerie. There is an old Midway style fair at the base of the tower. All of the rides looked like they were out of some sort of horror movie. They were running, but no people were around.

We explored the area a bit until we decided to wander into this cool building. It looked like a monument of bent metal, with awkward architecture. It looked very modern and similar to that MIT building (if you’ve seen it, you would know what I’m talking about). It turns out that it’s a music/science fiction museum. Jackpot! The music museum was mainly celebrating the history of Seattle music: Hendrix, Grunge, R&B, and… Sir Mix-a-Lot. It was well done, didn’t have that museum feel.

Next, we wandered into the Science Fiction Museum. There were lots of memorabilia from sci-fi movies and digital recreations of classics. It’s a guilty pleasure, what can I say.

How to hide that you’re a dork tip # (insert arbitrary number): If you overhear someone mistake Star Trek for Star Wars or vice versa, play it cool and don’t say anything. Trust me, you’re less likely to get laughed at behind your back or beat up in the locker room.

After geeking out for a few hours, it was time to see what else Seattle had to offer. Once we stepped outside of the museum, we noticed that the sun had come out along with people. We made the trek across town to see Pike Place Market. It’s the one stop every out-of-towner needs to make. It’s a flea market/farmer’s market/fish market. It seems that everyone within a twenty mile radius goes there on the weekend. There were heaps of cool stuff and people to see. Its sensory overload and is hard to describe. I imagine that this is what my family always jokes about when they talk about a Russian bazaar.

Once we got word that the Red Sox game was almost over, it was time to get off of our feet for a little bit and catch the rest of the game along with lunch. We found a quaint Irish pub to park ourselves while we watched our team slaughter NY once again.

We walked around downtown a bit after lunch. It’s a lot like New York City at times, just less people and they’re all nicer. We walked around until it was time for more food and met up with one of Julia’s co-workers for dinner. We probably covered over 20 miles on foot throughout the course of the day. Julia and I were beat.