Dear Dearest and Loveliest Peeples,

I realize it's been a long while since I've written. Springtime came and went with nary a word from me, and now Summer is in full swing in Stumptown. Summer time here is one long string of festivals by the river, and each weekend a new set of stages and booths goes up, and large temporary structures like ferris wheels and the "slingshot," which is a large hydraulic press that flings you straight into the air, sorta the opposite of a bungee jump rig.

My bands are both taking some time off right now, to kick off again in September, but both have been pretty busy this summer.

With Lions of Batucada, we played a great gig opening for a Brazilian funk band known as Curumin. It was different from other shows, in that we played several songs with a cavaquinho player and a singer, and I will be starting to play cavaquinho (like a ukulele) with the band instead of surdo so we can continue in that format. I will miss hitting that big-ass drum tho.

With Takohachi, my Taiko group, we played a four-hour show for the Bridge Pedal, an annual festival where the city shuts down all of its bridges for a day and thousands of cyclists from all over the country ride zig-zagging back and forth across the Willamette. I was figuring we'd do it slow... play a song here, rest, play another... but the folks at Takohachi don't work like that, so we pretty much played a solid four-hour set, with one festival piece lasting half-an-hour and us getting soaked with sweat under the sun. Portland is actually pretty dry in the summer, the sun is powerful, and Portlanders soak up as much of it as they can, saving up vitamin D for the fall... which is just around the corner.

I have begun my second stint of work on Swan Island, a big strip of land that pokes into the Willamette River just North of downtown. Swan Island was Portland's first airport, dedicated by Charles Lindberg in 1927 and in use until 1941, when Henry J. Kaiser, the "father of American shipbuilding," turned the airport into a shipyard to build T-2 Tankers for WWII and make a little moolah. Kaiser was a Big Business bad-ass: he built roads in Cuba, he built Hoover dam on the Colorado river, Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams on the Columbia, and he started Kaiser-Permanente HMO to care for his growing army of workers. The City of Portland owned Swan Island when he got here, but after the war he sold it to them anyway for $23 millions, and galumphed away to play with cars. Now a super-fund site and ship repair yard, Swan Island is where you'll find me early most mornings, sitting atop a ream or two of legal paper as a booster seat. I am Charon, the ferryman porting paperwork back and forth from the US Navy to the banks of the private sector, in keeping with this island's great tradition.

Now despite the oily fumes that waft daily across the yard, this is a really neat place to hang out. Everything here is really big-- deceptively so-- and when it looks like an easy jaunt from one building to another in fact it might be a ten minute walk because everything is just so big. The huge Whirley cranes look like AT-AT walkers lumbering up and down the docks, and they're so strong I saw one employ its medium-sized hook to move a 65-foot crane. The biggest hook they've got says "120Lt," and it's the size and shape of Hulk Hogan flexing his 40-inch guns. Whenever they move things overhead there's a rigger who walks along blowing a bright orange whistle, and I get to wear a hard hat with my name on it and goggles everywhere I go. The ships they fix here are 700 feet long and eight stories high, and there's a ship here, a 5-stories-tall, shiny, aluminum catamaran (a double-hulled canoe) with giant jet-ski jets that, when complete, will hurl thousands of men and tons of equipment over the seas at 60-70 mph.

At the far end of the yard there lives a small flock of Canada geese that stay here year-round, and the men leave little piles of seeds scattered here and there so that I have to navigate a mind-field of Goose poops on my way to and from work each morning. Not the smartest of birds, Canada geese certainly are beautiful, their poops are bounteous, and their feet make a rubbery-leathery piff-paff sound when they walk. Last Spring some of these gooscouples hatched little clutches of lemony-gray fluffy fluff balls that would go for training swims in the water beneath our windows, and take naps where we park.

With love,

Kirin

Feel free to look at some pictures at my photoblog, Pics Knows. Be sure to check the older entries too.

--
Kirin Kapin

http://kirinkapin.com

"If the King loves music, it is well with the land."
~Mencius