Only in the USA!

Here, windblown and marveling at the well-intentioned but slightly ridiculous Stonehenge USA (see Wiki on Sam Hill for explanation), are TerriG and her partner Laurie. They took me out to lunch at Maryhill Museum today in an extended celebration of my birthday. It was a glorious sunny blustery summer day, and I am blessed in my friends.

Maryhill Museum was created by three marvelously nutty people: Sam Hill, a lumber baron and multi-millionaire; Loie Fuller, a dancer and lighting designer (and an early out lesbian) who created the serpentine dance*; and Queen Marie of Romania. The three of them sat around their favorite café in Paris and hatched the idea of putting together all their art collections in the middle of nowhere, in the Columbia River Gorge. They thought that if they built it, the world would come to see it. Their dream didn't quite come true, but the museum is still up and running and recently completed a beautiful addition cantilevered over the river. When they built their museum and their little concrete stonehenge replica, the Columbia was pristine. Now it's the most radioactive river in the world, absorbing seepage from the closed but environmentally vile Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

Those of us who live up here have held protests and demonstrations about Hanford, and we will continue to hold them, but the danger continues, and meanwhile when we have a day like this, we might as well enjoy it. The river looks gorge-ous, and people go boating, kiting, and paragliding on it. More pictures from today (and a few from 2009) here. As Laurie reminds me, the wind turbines that now stand around all the hillsides are a much better choice for energy production than the (now closed) nuclear plant.

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Romania.
--Dorothy Parker.

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* It may be that the youtube is not actually Loie Fuller. There is a brief video of Fuller at the museum, and this is very like it. This is somebody doing the Serpentine Dance which was created by Fuller.